[JackSpratts]

FBI Hunts Down "24" Pirate

Follows trail of accused uploader
Andrew Wallenstein

A television show that dramatizes federal investigations is now finding itself at the center of a real-life FBI probe into copyright infringement.

The FBI filed a criminal complaint Friday against a Chicago man for allegedly uploading four episodes of the hit series "24" to LiveDigital.com, a video hosting site, before their primetime broadcast. If convicted on a felony count, Jorge Romero, 24, could face up to three years in prison.

The action represents a renewed aggressiveness to crack down on Internet bootleggers, particularly in the television industry, which has not been as vocal about anti-piracy activities as the music and movie businesses.

Romero is not suspected of stealing the "24" episodes from Fox; that individual is still at large, and neither Fox nor federal investigators has given up on trying to find the culprit.

20th Century Fox, which produces "24," issued a statement supporting the FBI investigation.

"We are grateful to the FBI and U.S. Attorney's offices in Los Angeles for aggressively pursuing this matter, and we hope it will serve as a powerful warning that uploading copyrighted TV shows and movies to the Internet can be a crime with significant penalties and will be prosecuted as such."

"The FBI makes this a different ball game," said Jay Cooper, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig who specializes in intellectual property issues. "The public doesn't seem to get that it's wrong, and maybe a message like this has to get out there so people realize there are criminal penalties."

The episodes in question were the first four episodes of the sixth season of "24," which aired over two consecutive days on Fox beginning Jan. 14. To give the season an additional marketing push, Fox also made the four episodes available via early DVD release on Jan. 16.

Sources indicate Fox execs were hoping that by finding the offender they could ultimately determine the source of the leak, which they suspected occurred somewhere along the distribution chain for the DVD release. Though the discs went to market only after the episodes aired in primetime, they had been shipped to retailers weeks before that airdate, which made them susceptible to bootleggers.

While the Internet is awash in pirated video content, it is rare for programs to find their way online before airdate. But eight days before the "24" TV premiere, Romero found the original file on a file-sharing service through Mininova.org, a bit torrent tracking site, according to the FBI affidavit.

Romero allegedly downloaded them from an illegal file-sharing service and subsequently uploaded them to LiveDigital, and also posted Web links to the pirated episodes on Digg.com.

Shortly after the episodes appeared on LiveDigital, Fox execs noticed the leak and moved to trace its origin. Both LiveDigital and YouTube were served subpoenas under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act demanding they disclose the identities of the users who uploaded the episodes, as well as past episodes of another Fox property, "The Simpsons." Both LiveDigital and YouTube complied with the subpoenas (HR, 1/25).

But as Fox pursued a civil action, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles reached out to the studio in March and asked for its cooperation in building a criminal case.

In April, FBI agents obtained a search warrant and arrived at Romero's home, where they seized his computer. During an interview conducted on the premises, Romero admitted to agents that he had uploaded the episodes to LiveDigital.

In addition to information from LiveDigital and YouTube, the FBI was able to track down Romero with cooperation from Digg.com, where Romero posted links to the offending material, as well as Comcast Corp. and AT&T, the Internet service providers Romero used to access the Internet.

A second search is still under way to find a second offender who uploaded the same episodes to YouTube, said sources, and who is identified in the affidavit by the name "ecototal." Though parent company Google complied with a subpoena to disclose the identity of that user, it has not led to an arrest.

Had the FBI not intervened, sources said Fox likely would have brought a civil action against Romero, and still has legal grounds to do so. Piracy has always been an utmost cause of concern to parent company News Corp. In 2004, Fox broke up a movie piracy ring that emanated from its own studio.

Romero is expected to surrender at the U.S. District Courthouse in Chicago on Tuesday, when arrangements will be made for his travel to Los Angeles, according to Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the Department of Justice.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...83c279b046f860





YouTube Signs Broad Licensing Pact with EMI

Google Inc.'s YouTube has agreed to a deal with major music label EMI Group Plc to give users of the video-sharing site broad access to music videos by EMI artists.

The companies said Thursday that YouTube users would be allowed not only to watch and play authorized videos and recordings from EMI artists including Coldplay, Norah Jones and David Bowie, but also to incorporate elements of the videos in YouTube users' own "user generated content."

"With this deal, all four of the world's major music companies are now official YouTube partners," Chad Hurley, chief executive and co-founder of YouTube, said in a statement.

Following news of the deal, Google's shares rose 1.5 percent to $506, the first time they have broken $500 in five months. EMI shares were little changed, down 0.09 percent at 275 pence.

The deal follows copyright lawsuits filed by media companies that accuse YouTube of allowing its users to pirate their programs on the popular video sharing site.

Though YouTube has had talks with media companies, they have not all been convinced by its claims that the site will be able to efficiently identify and remove illegally uploaded video clips by its users. In March, Viacom Inc. filed a $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

London-based EMI, the No. 3 music company, is the last of the four major record companies to sign a deal with YouTube. The statement from the two companies said EMI will use the YouTube content management system to help the music company track its content and pay its artists. No financial terms were disclosed.

Last year, Warner Music Group Corp., Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Entertainment each signed a content deal with YouTube. As part of the agreements each music company took a small stake in YouTube, prior to it being bought by Google, according to sources familiar with the talks.

(Additional reporting by Yinka Adegoke in New York)
http://www.reuters.com/article/indus...20053420070603





Entertaining TV Programs Make You Eat, Study Finds
Jennifer Kwan

People eat more when they are glued to the television, and the more entertaining the program, the more they eat, according to research presented on Saturday.

It seems that distracted brains do not notice what the mouth is doing, said Dr. Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.

Hirsch explored the impact of smell, taste and eating behaviors while watching TV by measuring potato chip consumption.

Forty-five volunteers ate as many chips as they wanted during five-minute intervals over three-week periods while they watched monologues by late-night talk show hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno.

They also were given chips to eat when the television was off.

Hirsch found people ate an average of 44 percent more chips while watching Letterman and 42 percent more while viewing Leno, than when they did not watch TV.

"If you can concentrate on how the food tastes you'll eat less because you'll feel full faster," Hirsch said in an interview at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in Toronto.

"So if that's the case, let's look at the opposite. What if you're distracted? If you're distracted, in theory, then you'd eat more."

Through his research at the foundation, Hirsch has helped people overcome the loss of sense and taste sensation, which typically results in weight gain because the brain does not know when it should stop eating.

The ventromedial nucleus in the hypothalamus, where the so-called satiety center is located, tells the body whether it is hungry or full. If it is inhibited or tricked, the result can be changes in eating patterns, he said.

"People who cook spaghetti all day don't fell like eating spaghetti at the end of the day," said Hirsch. "By being exposed to a smell all day long it's tricking the hypothalamus."

At each session, volunteers were asked to concentrate on the sensory characteristics of the food such as taste and smell. Researchers say these sensory clues, in addition to internal body changes, signal satiety.

But when distracted, a person does not pay attention to either the body's sensations of feeling full, or to the sensory characteristics of the food.

Many studies have linked obesity to watching television and that link is likely due to inactivity, Hirsch said. But perhaps entertaining shows are also contributing.

"If you want to lose weight, turn off the television or watch something boring," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...34343720070603





When Are Photos Like Penny Stocks? When They Sell.
Eric A. Taub

Earn big money taking photographs in your spare time!

It sounds like a late-night TV come-on for a phony get-rich-quick scheme. But in this case, it might just be true.

Thanks to the Internet and digital cameras, thousands of semiprofessional photographers are now selling their shots through so-called microstock Web sites to customers around the world. But it’s not like the old days of stock photography — before 2000: the price that each shot fetches is not enough to buy a cup of coffee. Microstock Web sites have turned the pricing structure for picture licensing on its head.

Traditional photographic stock companies charge several hundred to several thousand dollars per image. Microstock prices can be as low as 25 cents, and payments to photographers are even lower, often not much more than pennies per sale.

But some photographers are making significant incomes from their pictures, making up in volume what they have lost in per-shot commissions. And that, in turn, is affecting the business of some mainstream professional photographers.

For small-business owners or others needing images, microstock sites can be an alternative to conventional stock agencies, which base fees on the published size of an image, circulation and other factors.

Microstock sites charge far less, and, with few exceptions, buyers pay a flat fee, no matter how large the image is or where it is used.

“Maybe a $300 photo for a pamphlet distributed to 300 people is not worth $300,” said Jon Oringer, the founder of Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com), a four-year-old microstock agency.

Shutterstock customers, who pay a monthly subscription fee beginning at $199, can download up to 25 pictures a day of the site’s 1.8 million photos, at any resolution. For those who download the maximum, that amounts to 27 cents per shot. Shutterstock photographers are paid 25 cents for a purchased picture; the price rises to 30 cents once $500 worth of their work is bought.

In addition to Shutterstock, other microstock photo agencies include Big Stock Photo (bigstockphoto.com), Fotolia (fotolia.com), Dreamstime (dreamstime.com) and iStockphoto (istockphoto.com).

Each uses a different pricing and payment scheme; photographers have the option to upload the same pictures on multiple sites or, with some of the agencies, become an exclusive supplier for an increased commission. There is no fee to post photos on a microstock site.

Whether the varying approaches matter to customers and photographers is an open question. “The differences to consumers appear to be incremental,” said Bruce Livingstone, who founded an early microstock site, iStockphoto, in 2000.

Microstock sites do not accept all comers or all photographs. Each employs a team of inspectors who check every picture submitted for technical quality, as well as artistic and commercial merit.

Shots of dogs and cats are generally not welcome, while “lifestyle” photographs — pictures of people at work and play — are usually top sellers. Other subjects of interest include food, sports and fashion.

Getting photos accepted for a site is just one part of the battle. Potential buyers can find shots by browsing through a collection and its categories, or by searching using a keyword that describes what they want.

The photographer creates the keywords; most sites have no restrictions on how many, though Fotolia had to stop some photographers who were adding every keyword under the sun in the hopes that someone would stumble upon the shot.

Keeping one’s pictures confined to one site may not be a good idea, if the site attracts few customers, or becomes known for specializing in pictures of sheep while you are hoping to sell shots of toothpaste.

“We did not want to limit the ability of photographers to earn money,” said Tim Donahue, the founder of Big Stock Photo, which does not offer exclusivity.

Some photographers say exclusivity works. The same picture on multiple sites may have different prices. By being exclusive photographers can more easily trace those who might be misusing their work, either by using an image — on, say, a coffee mug — without buying rights to it or by stealing a concept they like, recreating a photograph and selling it as their own.

Those who are doing well selling their work on microstock sites have done their homework: they have figured out what type of photographs a site specializes in, what types of pictures sell and whether the commission is sufficient.

Lise Gagné of Quebec specializes in business shots, one of the most popular genres. Ms. Gagné, who has been shooting commercially for five years, earns more than $100,000 a year selling her work exclusively through iStockphoto.

“I like iStock’s sharing spirit,” Ms. Gagné said, referring to the extensive discussion groups and other client aides the site provides. “It’s a matter of being fair. You don’t have to go elsewhere.”

Because volume matters in microstock sales, a large number of shots must be uploaded. Ms. Gagné currently has 4,900 photographs available for sale on the site and adds 5 to 20 more each week.

Kelly Cline, a Seattle-based food photographer, has uploaded 1,363 images to iStockphoto, and her work has been bought 68,215 times. Significant payments began to arrive once she had 500 to 600 images in her portfolio, Ms. Cline said, adding, “If you upload more, it’s like shooting arrows in the air.”

Ms. Cline, a former food stylist, began shooting food four years ago. At first, she photographed her own work and then began uploading her material to iStockphoto.

Today, she said, she earns about $70,000 a year, 60 percent of her income, from microstock sales, and she remains an exclusive provider to iStockphoto.

But Stephen Coburn, a Web designer at Adobe Systems who began photography a few years ago as a hobby, said he would never use one microstock site exclusively. “I’d feel nervous about putting all my eggs in one basket,” he said.

Mr. Coburn supplies shots to five microstock sites, shooting people, objects and interiors. With 3,500 photos posted to the sites, he earns, on average, $6,000 per month.

Michael Shake, a tool-and-die maker in Toledo, Ohio, uploads pictures to 10 sites and earns $1,000 a month for his work. Specializing in shots of houses and new cars, he sells his work to real estate agents and car dealers looking for appropriate illustrations.

When a tire accessory manufacturer saw his work, he hired Mr. Shake to shoot an advertisement, shipping a tire to his home for the shot. “All I wanted was to earn enough money for new equipment,” Mr. Shake said. “It’s gone way past that.”

Not everyone is enamored with microstock Web sites. Professional photographers see the sites’ growth as diluting their own incomes.

“This is the death of beautiful photography,” said David Skernick, a professional photographer in Los Angeles who does not use the sites. Because of the low prices and large volumes of material, “now clients accept anything.”

Mr. Skernick has seen the value of his own work decrease, from a time when photographs were priced not just on their merit but on their intended use. He said he once sold a photograph that was used on a Brian Wilson album cover for $2,000. “Today I would get $2 for the same use,” he said.

Still, railing against the sites is about as useful as hoping cellphones will go away and phone booths will make a comeback.

“Every month, my income from microstock sales gets better,” Ms. Cline said. “You have to go with it or be left behind. Otherwise you’ll be saying, ‘Woe is me.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/te...syndicate.html





Flickr Not Even Flickering in China

Internet photo site says service is being blocked and hopes it's only temporary
Verne Kopytoff,

The popular Internet photo site Flickr said that its service is being blocked in China, although the Yahoo subsidiary did not directly blame the Beijing government, which aggressively censors the Internet of material it deems subversive.

The blocking, which began Thursday, is keeping Internet users across a large part of China from viewing photos on Flickr, home to millions of snapshots of everything from birthday parties to beach vacations to nudes.

The Web site also hosts a smattering of images that may be frowned upon by Chinese censors, including student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which includes the famous photo of a man blocking the progress of Chinese army tanks, and bodies of students who were killed in the streets as part of a government crackdown.

China's tight control over the Internet has become a high-profile issue in recent years as the online world makes increasing inroads with its vast population. Authorities routinely block access to online information about political opposition groups, Taiwanese independence and overseas Web sites such as BBC News, prompting outrage from human rights advocates.

U.S. Internet companies have been caught in the middle, forced to weigh free expression against building their businesses in a potentially lucrative market. Mountain View's Google and Sunnyvale's Yahoo have faced intense criticism for their positions, which have included censoring search results and providing information about dissidents to police.

In postings on its Web site Thursday, Flickr said it was experiencing no technical problems and that its service was in fact being blocked, without saying by whom. In an update Friday, co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote that the Web site's staff is checking on the issue periodically and that the blocking continues.

"We hope that this is a temporary issue, and we currently believe that it will be," he said in the posting. "In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives."

Telephone and e-mail messages left with Butterfield and a Yahoo spokesman were not returned.

Users from across China posted messages on Flickr describing difficulties accessing images on the Web site, voicing frustration and laying blame on the Chinese government. Access to the Flickr home page and comments area is still apparently possible in China.

Jain Hua Li, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said he hadn't heard of Flickr until told about it in a conversation with a Chronicle reporter, and then suggested that the blocking may be because Chinese authorities are trying to protect children from racy images.

Lucie Morillon, the U.S. representative for Reporters Without Borders, a French group that promotes free expression, said that the Beijing government often censors Web sites under the guise of protecting children or national security. She called the blocking of Flickr "one more blow against the free flow of information online by Chinese authorities" and added that it is particularly lamentable in light of promises by China to loosen restrictions before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...UG9VQC8QE1.DTL





Japan Picture Book, 3: Non-Commercial CC Licenses, But What Does It Mean?
Olivier Oosterbaan

When licensing-out content under a Creative Commons license, one of the options available is to only allow “Non-Commercial” (NC) use of your works under the CC license, the opposite being that you allow commercial use under the CC license. But what does Non-Commercial mean? Both when using Creative Commons Non-Commercial licensed content, as when releasing original content under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons license, it makes sense to stop a moment and think about what Non-Commercial might mean, for you as creator, and for the licensor or licensee. What “Non-Commercial” might exactly mean is a question that has been asked before.

In this month’s post, TLC will take a look at what Non-Commercial, as one of the possible options of CC licenses, might mean, and how we are likely to apply it when looking for open content to use in the Japan photography book project. After explaining a little as to why and how we are looking at this question, we’ll see that the Creative Commons license itself, although concise on this point of Non-Commercial, possibly leaves room for interpretation. Next month, so as not to make this post too long, we will explore how the explanations as given by Creative Commons, as the license stewards, and by others, although all very helpful, do not seem to completely eliminate the gray areas present. Finally, given that there is some amount of (legal) uncertainty as to what non-commercial might mean, we will briefly look at how parties deal with the ambiguity in the NC clause of CC licenses, namely by checking and asking, thereby adding to the transaction costs of using Creative Commons licensed material.

Why and When is This Question Relevant?

First, a few words on why TLC stops to look at the meaning of Non-Commercial, as used in Creative Commons licenses, in the context of the Japan photography book project. First, in the book, pictures sourced from third-party sources will likely be used in the background design, in true digital DIY fashion, even where my own pictures are the main focus. Second, I am likely to use a print-on-demand (PoD) service for production and distribution, which means that at one point the book will be available through a public Internet market place, although I will most likely not make any money of it. (One of the main reasons this project came about is that iPhoto books and similar services allow for limited design freedom and become expensive quickly when above the standard number of pages. All I wanted were some cheap and nice looking books to give away ^^.)

So, as I am looking to incorporate content from others into a work that is to be made publicly available at a fee, it becomes relevant whether I should look only to use pictures of which the Creative Commons license allows for commercial use, or whether, since I am not likely to make any money of the book and it is in fact not my purpose or intent to make money of the book, I can also use images that use a Non-Commercial Creative Commons license. Important to note here is that more works are licensed under NC clauses; perhaps because it is sometimes the default for content hosting services that offer the option of applying a CC license.

Thus, when making a book incorporating Creative Commons licensed works available via a public Internet store front, would I be allowed to use works licensed under Non-Commercial Creative Commons terms? (What also comes into play is that my intention was to offer the entire book design, and my own pictures in it under a NC license, in which case I had to make sure that I could also include NC licensed work from others. And, as I might be making derivative works, I might have to share the results alike if source material were license under a share-alike (SA) license; but that is another question.)

What the License Says: Intent and Direction

The human-readable, or short, explanation of the Non-Commercial attribute (in this case, as part of the BY-NC 3.0 license) that Creative Commons gives is:

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

The actual license, or the non-human/lawyer readable code, says under 4.b that you may use the licensed work:

[…] in any manner that is primarily intended [emph. added] for or directed toward commercial advantage [emph. added] or private monetary compensation [emph. added]. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

The explanation of Creative Commons, when picking a license, says:

The licensor permits others to copy, distribute and transmit the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes — unless they get the licensor’s permission.

And in the FAQ, under “Can I still make money from a work I make available under a Creative Commons license?“:

However, you, the creator of the work and/or licensor, may at any time decide to use it commercially. People who want to copy or adapt your work, “primarily for monetary compensation or financial gain” must get your separate permission first.

One thing to note on the noncommercial provision: under current U.S. law, file-sharing or the trading of works online is considered a commercial use — even if no money changes hands. Because we believe that file-sharing, used properly, is a powerful tool for distribution and education, all Creative Commons licenses contain a special exception for file-sharing. The trading of works online is not a commercial use, under our documents, provided it is not done for monetary gain.

That is it for the source material. Now what do people think this means?

Next Month: What the License Stewards and Others Say, and How To Apply It All in a Practical Manner

So as not to let this post run too long, next month we will take a look at what the CC license stewards, such as (former) Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick, had to say on the matter, whether or not others agree with their point of view, and how people are dealing with the existing uncertainty on this point in practice. We’ll see how, in part, the way to deal with the license ambiguity is to ask for explicit permission to use a work in a particular context. In my opinion, this takes away one of the main (intended) benefits) of CC license, namely semi-automated (and machine readable and possibly machine enforceable) licenses. Until next month!
http://tlc.oosterbaan.net/2007/japan...-does-it-mean/





Jack Valenti’s Memoir Suffers Without a Key Salesman
David M. Halbfinger

Jack Valenti’s death has created a marketing problem that would have challenged even him.

Mr. Valenti, a onetime Houston advertising man who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, for nearly four decades, Hollywood’s spokesman as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, died on April 26, just weeks before the release of his new memoir. Now his publisher, Harmony Books, and his survivors are struggling to ensure that the autobiography gets a modicum of the attention it would have received had Mr. Valenti, a singular raconteur, been around to talk it up himself.
Shaye Areheart, vice president and publisher of Harmony, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, said she last saw Mr. Valenti in February, when the two met to go over a second set of revisions and plans for promoting the book, “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood.”

“He was like a kid in a candy shop,” Ms. Areheart said of the 85-year-old Mr. Valenti. “We had so much lined up for him: the ‘Today’ show. Don Imus, before he fell from grace. Larry King. NPR. CBS and Fox News. Everyone was so drawn to Jack, and he had so many stories to tell.”

Mr. Valenti had arranged much of the publicity himself, Ms. Areheart said. “We mentioned ‘Regis and Kelly,’ and he said he’d call Regis Philbin. He said he’d contact Les Moonves, Bob Wright, Roger Ailes. He could make a phone call and get straight to the top.”

Mr. Valenti, the master networker, had also arranged to be celebrated by his friends among the rich and powerful at book parties in New York (given by Barry Diller), Washington (Dan Glickman, Mr. Valenti’s successor at the Motion Picture Association, and Franco Nuschese, owner of the Georgetown power spot Café Milano), and Los Angeles (Kirk Douglas, Mr. Valenti’s closest Hollywood friend, and Robert A. Day Jr., founder of Trust Company of the West).

But his death left Harmony in a costly, and awkward, bind. The book was the imprint’s lead summer title, with an initial printing of 100,000 copies, and Harmony had bought front-of-store display space in the major booksellers for the two weeks before Father’s Day. “We had an enormous investment in Jack,” Ms. Areheart said. She would not disclose what he had been paid, but called it a “significant advance.”

Harmony sought to capitalize on the coverage of Mr. Valenti’s death by shipping the book to retailers early, to go on sale May 15, three weeks before the scheduled on-sale date of June 5. Nielsen BookScan said only 1,000 copies had been sold through June 3 — a grim indication, since the first sales are often the strongest. (BookScan captures about 70 percent of book sales.) But confusion over the correct day to display the title could have made those early numbers less predictive, some industry executives speculated.

Many books are published posthumously of course, like David Halberstam’s book on the Korean War, due this fall. This is not the first time an author’s death has created a publisher’s nightmare: In 1992 Sam Walton, the billionaire founder of Wal-Mart, died after having signed a $4 million contract with Doubleday for his memoirs. And Virginia Clinton Kelley, President Clinton’s mother, died in 1994 four months before her memoir was to be published. Mr. Walton’s book, written with John Huey, became a best seller anyway; Ms. Kelley’s did not.

Mr. Valenti’s book recounts his bootstraps rise from modest means in Houston; his bombing runs as a World War II pilot; his place in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot; his close relationship with Johnson; and his tenure in Hollywood as a starry-eyed but fierce advocate. It includes little that is newsworthy — no salacious anecdotes or score-settling barbs, which comes as no surprise, given Mr. Valenti’s reputation for seldom speaking ill of anyone. What it had to grab attention, in a word, was him, and he’d promised to devote all of June and July to publicizing the book.

In his absence Ms. Areheart has been working with Mr. Valenti’s daughter, Courtenay, a movie executive at Warner Brothers, to line up surrogates from among her father’s friends in Washington and Hollywood, something she said was a welcome distraction from her own grieving. So far, a Harmony publicist said, “Today” has agreed to interview Ms. Valenti and her mother, Mary Margaret, and “Tavis Smiley” on PBS has invited Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman, to talk about Mr. Valenti, but no other spots have been confirmed.

“It’s awkward,” Ms. Valenti said. “For a lot of these different outlets, it’s harder for them to make the show interesting. We know that talking to us is not what people want.” She added that no celebrity or politician would be able to do justice to the full sweep of her father’s life. “We’re all dealing with the reality that the best salesperson for the book was Daddy.”

Ms. Valenti, meanwhile, was able to prevail upon one very famous friend of her father’s, Michael Douglas, to stand in for him in the audio version of “This Time, This Place.” (Mr. Valenti suffered a stroke a week before he was to begin recording the audio version in March.)

“I’m in the movie business, so I know what it is to ask somebody to do something like that, knowing how busy he is, and how long it takes to do,” Ms. Valenti said. It took Mr. Douglas three days. “But Michael, without batting an eye, said: ‘Don’t give it another thought. I’ll do it immediately.’ ”

Ms. Areheart said she regretted allowing Mr. Valenti to delay publication several times as he dredged up fond memories and thought up new chapters. “I kept saying, ‘Jack, let it go,’ ” she said. If she’d only stuck to a March date, she said, “he’d have been able to enjoy it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/books/07vale.html





Waxing Philosophical, Booksellers Face the Digital
Motoko Rich

John Updike would not be pleased.

A year ago that literary lion elicited a standing ovation in a banquet hall full of booksellers when he exhorted them to “defend your lonely forts” against a digital future of free book downloads and snippets of text. But this year, at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual convention that ended yesterday, the battering ram of technology was back.

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine who made his own splash last year with his book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,” returned to the convention to talk about the possibility of giving away online his next book — which he fittingly intends to title “Free” — to readers who were willing to read it with advertisements interspersed throughout its pages. (He still intends to sell the book traditionally to readers who’d rather get their text without the ads.)

Google and Microsoft both had large presences at the expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, where about 35,000 publishers, booksellers, authors, agents and librarians attended the four-day carnival of promotion for the all-important fall lineup of titles. A panel sponsored by MySpace.com, the social networking site, drew a standing-room-only crowd, as did another discussion on the influence of literary blogs. Vendors offering to digitize books proliferated.

There were also the usual flashy parties, giveaways and autograph signings at the convention, which is not open to the public. Celebrities sold out $35-a-head breakfasts and lunches (Stephen Colbert, Alan Alda and Rosie O’Donnell all had books to hawk), and impersonators stalked the exhibition hall. (Elton John, Borat and a twinkling star who could be mistaken for a banana with arms were all sighted.) And publishers and booksellers attempted to figure out the Next Great Book (popular galleys included Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke,” Alice Sebold’s “The Almost Moon” and “Loving Frank,” a debut novel by Nancy Horan.)

But in what has become another rite of the BookExpo in recent years, the industry continued to grapple with its evolving techno-future with a mixture of enthusiasm, anxiety and a whiff of desperation.

“I think there is going to be a lot of sturm and drang before we figure this out,” said Eamon Dolan, editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin. “There is a huge undertaking ahead. It is going to be rocky.”

Many of the independent booksellers, who have been buffeted by technological change for years, seemed quite philosophical about the need to move forward. Clark Kepler, president of Kepler’s Books and Magazines, an independent store in Menlo Park, Calif., visited a booth for a company that scans books and digitizes them, a technology that, on the face of it, would seem incompatible with a physical bookstore’s mission.

“In terms of the traditional bookstore it would not be good for us,” acknowledged Mr. Kepler, whose store closed its doors nearly two years ago because of financial problems set off in part by fierce competition from online retailers like Amazon.com. He was able to reopen shortly afterward when venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and other community members invested in the store. “But ultimately I think it is good for all of us as readers and seekers of knowledge to have that information available, so as a bookseller I need to rethink my position instead of saying, ‘I wish the world would stand still,’ ” he said.

In a pavilion outside the main exhibit hall Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House and the creator of the Anchor Books paperback imprint, and Dane Neller, founders of OnDemandBooks.com, demonstrated their Espresso Book Machine, which can print a small paperback book on site in less than five minutes. “This could replace the entire supply chain that has been in existence since Gutenberg,” Mr. Epstein said.

Chris Morrow, whose parents founded Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., three decades ago, said he would be installing one of the machines. He said he planned to print local histories and Northshire-brand titles from the public domain, like “Middlemarch” or “Moby-Dick.”

“There are lots of challenges in bricks-and-mortar book selling, and I see this as a way of expanding our business,” Mr. Morrow said.

The idea that technology could enlarge, rather than replace, existing sales intrigued David Shanks, chief executive of Penguin Group (USA). “There are millions of gadgets out there where we could sell a lot of product digitally,” said Mr. Shanks, before turning his attention to the keynote address by Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who appeared with his wife, the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, to promote Mr. Greenspan’s forthcoming memoir, “The Age of Turbulence.” (Penguin is hoping to sell a lot of copies of the book — in whatever form — to recover the $8.5 million advance it is paying Mr. Greenspan.)

Other uses of technology provoked unease. At a dinner party given by Alfred A. Knopf for some of its authors, Vivien Jennings, president of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan., railed against authors who link from their Web pages to Amazon.com or even sell autographed copies of their books directly to consumers. “We host a lot of book signings,” Ms. Jennings said. Authors who sell their own books “are particularly hurtful to us.”

Tina Brown, the former editor of both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who appeared at a lunch at the Modern to promote “The Diana Chronicles,” Ms. Brown’s book about Diana, Princess of Wales, was more concerned about the possibility that authors’ work could be offered free online.

“Giving an author’s book away for nothing on the Web as a way to market books seems a mirage to me,” Ms. Brown wrote in an e-mail message after the lunch. “All it does is feed the hungry angles of journalists and bloggers who plunder it without any of the author’s context or nuance and makes the reader feel there is nothing new to learn from the genuine article when it finally limps on its weary way to a book shop.” Although “The Diana Chronicles” will be excerpted in Vanity Fair, Ms. Brown pointed out that both the author and publisher are generally paid for such excerpts.

Back in the aisles of the exhibition floor Deal Safrit, a wiry bookseller from Salisbury, N.C., boasted of a well-worn method for coping with technological developments. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it,” he said. “We just do what we can do well. We are determined to sell books that we think people should read.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/books/04book1.html





Book Publisher Resorts To Cheap Stunts: Steals Google Laptops
Mike Masnick

Just as Google is making it even more obvious how their book scanning project is helping publishers by helping them sell more books, it appears that at least one publisher doesn't seem to understand the difference between helping more people find your books and theft. Apparently the CEO of Macmillan Publishers decided to swipe two Google laptops from Google's booth at BookExpo America, wait for Google employees to notice the missing laptops (took about an hour) and then claim that he was just giving Google "a taste of their own medicine." Let's see. One is taking an expensive scarce item. The other is building an index so more people can find books. If Macmillan's CEO really thinks that's the same medicine, than someone ought to check what medication he's taking.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070605/001005.shtml





Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come
Brent Staples

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

Dick was largely unknown to the general public at the time of his death in 1982. Most of his novels and short stories were out of print and seemed destined to stay that way. Things began to change after his favorite and best written novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” was introduced to the country in the form of the now classic movie “Blade Runner.”

The plot deals with enslaved androids — “replicants” — who revolt in an attempt to claim free, human lives. Dick wrote about androids again and again, but generally thought of them as spiritually defective, and hazards to the real humans they were intended to serve.

The film struck a number of chords in the real world. Its vision of the polyglot, environmentally ruined Los Angeles spawned the phrase “Blade Runnerization” among urban planners who recognized it as a frighteningly likely vision of things to come. In recent years, movies based on Dick’s work —“Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Next” — have become a cottage industry in Hollywood. Numerous other projects, including a film based on his life, are said to be in the works.

The movie craze carried over into the book world, where publishers have pushed more than 30 of Dick’s novels and scores of his short stories back into print, this time with book covers and promotional material designed to appeal to mainstream readers. The rehabilitation hit a literary high note earlier this month, when the Library of America issued “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s,” which placed him in the company of Henry James, Saul Bellow, Faulkner and other heavyweights.

Dick wrote his share of bad novels, which is hardly surprising given that he wrote stoked up on drugs and suffered no end of paranoid delusions. His best books distinguish themselves from ordinary science fiction by focusing not on technology, but on the toll that technological advances often take on human values — and on the soul itself.

Dick died before the onset of the Internet age and never saw a BlackBerry, an iPod or a modern-day cellphone. Even so, the characters he created are routinely shackled and brought low by technological innovations that were ostensibly created to improve human existence. Dick was fully engaged in the science of cybernetics — which supposes a similarity between machine and human functioning — and deeply alarmed about what he saw as the encroachment of programmable machinery into human life.

His writing was shaped by the legitimate worry that human beings were merging with the technology that was supposed to be serving them and becoming less human (which is to say, more machine-like) in the bargain.

Androids in much of science fiction are cast as entertaining house pets. Dick’s androids are sinister and potentially dangerous, because they lack the leavening spark of humanity. By creating them, he writes, we would produce a race of cold and detached beings who would share no more with their makers — or with other androids — than one coffee maker shares with another. Of these machines, he writes “their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile is the coldness of the grave.”

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology. As his work becomes more popular, readers who know him only from the movies will find it even darker and more disturbing — and quite relevant to the technologically obsessed present.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/opinion/08fri4.html





Shopper Used as 'Bait' in Upskirt Photo Sting Sues Store
AP

A woman who claims she was used as unknowing bait to catch a man taking photographs up women's skirts is suing retailer T.J. Maxx.

Svetlana Van Buren said store personnel surreptitiously videotaped a man taking photos up her skirt while she was shopping for coffee at the company's store in Watertown on June 14, 2006.

It was only after the man committed the crime that store personnel told her the photos had been taken and that the act was caught on tape, said Van Buren, a psychologist who was working at a state-run facility for youths at the time and now lives in Omaha, Neb. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the Jefferson County Clerk's office.

Officials at TJX Companies, Inc., of Framingham, Mass., which operates the T.J. Maxx chain, were not immediately available for comment.

The lawsuit contends that the store and law enforcement officials knew the man "secretly stalked" female customers for the purpose of taking upskirt photos, but did nothing to prevent it from happening to Van Buren.

T.J. Maxx should have used either a private female detective, a policewoman or a female employee who consented to being photographed to set a trap for the man, the lawsuit said.

Van Buren claims the incident has caused her physical and psychological pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. She said she has experienced sleeplessness, anxiety, depression and feelings of stress and violation, prompting her to seek professional help.

She blames T.J. Maxx for, among other things, making her the victim of a crime without her consent and violating her privacy rights. She claims the store failed to provide her with a safe environment and failed to stop a crime from being committed against her when it could have.

Her suit does not specify an amount in damages being sought.

The lawsuit does not name Jeremiah Williams, a Watertown man who was arrested outside T.J. Maxx the same day Van Buren was photographed. Williams was sentenced in February to two to four years in state prison for second-degree unlawful surveillance. Police accused Williams of taking more than 700 upskirt photos of women in public places with plans to start an Internet business with the shots.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





MySpace Seeks Advice in Sex Offender Investigation
Caroline McCarthy

MySpace.com filed a request Monday in a Pennsylvania state court asking for guidance as the social-networking service responds to demands for information about convicted sex offenders using the site.

In the request, which was filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Dauphin County, home to the state capital of Harrisburg, MySpace said it is actively seeking advice on how it can legally provide authorities with registered sex offenders' contact information.

MySpace came under fire last month when a group of state attorneys general, including Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, wrote an open letter to the social-networking site demanding that it turn over data pertaining to registered sex offenders who have profiles on the site. MySpace initially refused, citing federal and state privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, that the company said prevented it from releasing such information.

But two weeks ago, MySpace announced that it planned to comply with the request to provide the states with sex offender data, acknowledging that it would have to deal with varying legal requirements in each state. The request filed in Pennsylvania is part of that ongoing plan.

"We're very pleased with how this process is working but our desire to provide certain information, such as the content of e-mail messages, is proving complicated under applicable law," the social network's executive vice president and general counsel, Michael Angus, said in a statement on Monday.
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"Attorney General Corbett has requested we provide the content of e-mail messages of specific registered sex offenders identified by Sentinel Safe," Angus said, referring to the database that MySpace has developed through a partnership with identity verification firm Sentinel Tech Holding. "We want to provide those messages and today have filed a request with the state court in Pennsylvania, asking a judge for guidance on how best to provide the e-mail content without tainting any potential evidence that could help put a registered sex offender behind bars."

MySpace members can privately message each others' profiles through an e-mail system within the site.

According to MySpace, a federal court determined that the ECPA requires that a search warrant be issued before the social-networking service turns over the content of e-mail messages sent through the site, and that a positive identification through the Sentinel Safe database would not by itself suffice.
http://news.com.com/MySpace+seeks+ad...3-6188497.html





Child Porn Surfers Will go to Prison
Iain Thomson

British top cop vows to jail deliberate paedophile site users

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has pledged that those who deliberately view child pornography online will go to prison, but has suggested that non-custodial sentences may be suitable in some cases.

CEOP chief executive Jim Gamble said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the scale of the child abuse problem in Britain is such that not everyone who views an image could be sent to jail without a major prison building programme.

But he was clear that those who seek out such material will be jailed. "If someone deliberately goes to one of these sites and uses a credit card to buy child pornography, they should go to prison," he said. "It needs to act as a deterrent."

Ray Wyre, director of RWA, an independent child protection group that aims to help to rehabilitate sex offenders, said that not everyone who downloads child pornography is a paedophile because web page viewing can be inadvertent.

"They see a sentence under pictures that says 'three virgins', or something like that, and they get curious as to what that is, and they download it," he said. "It is that easy to have illegal images on your computer."

Wyre added that peer-to-peer services like Lime Wire are also catching people out with misnamed files.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...&src=site-marq





Local news

Judge Grants New Trial for Former Substitute Teacher in Porn Case

A judge granted a new trial today for a former Norwich substitute teacher convicted of allowing students to view pornography on a classroom computer.

Julie Amero, 40, of Windham, Connecticut was convicted in January of exposing students to pornography on her classroom computer. She faced up to 40 years in prison.

While prosecutors insisted she was guilty, some experts believe that the lewd images were caused by unseen spyware and adware programs, which critics call one of the top scourges of the Internet.

Her attorney, William F. Dow, filed the motion for a new trial Tuesday.

The motion claimed evidence gathered after Amero was convicted in January of four counts of risk of injury to a minor casts serious doubt on her guilt.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1055981





8-Year-Old Charged For Sexual Conduct With Sitter

A mother is upset after a 14-year-old babysitter engaged in sexual conduct with her eight-year-old boy, and the eight-year-old was charged with lewd conduct.

Prosecutors have since dropped the charges against the boy, but his mother is still concerned.

The sexual conduct occurred during a game of “truth or dare” while the boy was being watched by the babysitter.

Prosecutors say that, while the babysitter initiated the contact, the young boy was a willing participant.

“She dared my son to touch her breasts,” says Michelle Grosbeck, the boy’s mother.

After hiring the teenager to baby sit, Grosbeck got the feeling something was wrong.

“It was just that sense that something wasn’t quite right with this 14-year-old girl,” she said. She asked her son what had happened. “He just came right out as if nothing was awry, and just started talking about what had happened.”

Grosbeck went to police and child protection workers, and the case went to the district attorney, after which her son, age eight, had been charged with an act of lewdness with a minor.

Grosbeck says the Salt Lake County District Attorney told her both the child and teenager were equal participants. But Mrs. Grosbeck didn’t believe that.

“My son is eight, he’s a little boy. He does not have the ability to participate on the same level as a fourteen-year-old,” she said.

Although the charges against her son were dropped, she is concerned that the same thing could happen to other victims of sexual abuse.

“I don’t want parents to be afraid to go to the state agencies that are supposed to be protecting our children when things like this happen, out of fear that their children are going to be charged

The district attorney’s office confirmed the charges had been made, and that they had been dropped. Other than that, they wouldn’t comment. The Division of Child and Family Services also declined to comment.
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_210004013.html





Hustler Offers $1 Million for Sex Smut on Congress

Hustler magazine is looking for some scandalous sex in Washington again -- and willing to pay for it.

"Have you had a sexual encounter with a current member of the United States Congress or a high-ranking government official?" read a full-page advertisement taken out by Larry Flynt's pornographic magazine in Sunday's Washington Post.

It offered $1 million (500,000 pounds) for documented evidence of illicit intimate relations with a congressman, senator or other prominent officeholder. A toll-free number and e-mail address were provided.

The last time Flynt made such an offer was in October 1998 during the drive to impeach President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In the following months, the pornographic publishing mogul threatened to expose one or tow members of the Republican Congress pushing for the impeachment, according to media reports at the time.

That long-awaited expose, published months after Clinton's trial, dropped no bombshells, according to a 1999 Slate.com article, but Flynt's efforts played a role in the resignation of House-speaker designate Bob Livingston of Louisiana.

Flynt's target this time, if he has one, was not immediately known.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070603/...eCDFW5BvaA8 F





Palm to Sell Stake; Taps ex-iPod Chief
Franklin Paul

Smart-phone maker Palm Inc. said on Monday it will sell a 25 percent stake to private equity firm Elevation Partners for $325 million in a deal that brings in a former senior Apple Inc. executive as chairman.

Palm shares climbed 8.5 percent as investors hoped the cash infusion and the appointment of Jon Rubinstein, formerly senior vice president and general manager of Apple's iPod unit, as executive chairman will revive the Palm brand and perhaps develop a relationship with Apple.

Rubinstein's "role will be in strengthening and fine tuning our products engine," Palm Chief Executive Ed Colligan said on a conference call. "This is about allowing us to put a team in place to enable us to capture a leadership position."

The deal comes as Palm, which created the personal digital assistant, or PDA, in 1996, tries to regain its status as a top device maker amid stiff competition from the likes of much bigger phone rivals, such as Motorola Inc. and Nokia Oyj.

The announcement comes one week after Palm introduced a portable computer, Foleo, to lukewarm reviews.

Palm has long been viewed as an acquisition target, thanks to its well-known brand, operating system and its relationship with mobile-phone carriers.

Stock Upgraded

"While Palm has numerous near-term challenges, we are upgrading Palm shares ... in view of Palm's announcement that a private equity involvement by former Apple executives, as well as a valuation of around $17.50 (a share) for the Elevation Partners stake," Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff said in a note to clients.

Neff raised his rating to "peer perform" from "underperform," adding that he expects alliance talks between Palm and Apple to emerge.

Elevation co-founders Fred Anderson, Apple's former chief financial officer, and Roger McNamee will join Palm's board, replacing Palm Chairman Eric Benhamou and director D. Scott Mercer, who will both resign once the deal closes.

The board will increase to nine from eight, including Rubinstein, who left Apple in 2006.

Palm plans to pay $9 per share in cash to stockholders, and will use the new proceeds along with existing cash and $400 million in new debt to finance the cash payout.

Monday's stock rise recoups some of the value Palm lost after a rumored deal to sell the company failed to materialize in late March. At the time, phone makers Nokia and Motorola were seen as possible suitors.

Palm shipped some 2.3 million units of its popular Treo smart phone in its last fiscal year, but the sales are dwarfed by those of Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson.

Elevation's founders include veteran venture capitalists from Silver Lake and Blackstone Group, Anderson, and Bono, the lead singer of rock group U2. The Menlo Park, California-based firm raised a $1.9 billion private equity funds in 2005 that focuses on media and entertainment.

Elevation said this is its largest investment to date. One of the firm's founders, Roger McNamee, said the company does not intend to take a larger stake in Palm.

Private equity firms typically take controlling stakes in companies, restructure the businesses, and sell them later. The Palm deal is another example of Elevation taking a minority stake in a company, as it did with its roughly $200 million deal with Forbes magazine. Buyout firms usually hold on to their investments for three to five years.

Anderson, the formerly Apple CFO, reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April over backdated stock options at the company.

Anderson had said he relied on Apple CEO Steve Jobs in handling 2001 stock option grants that became the subject of an investigation and civil lawsuit.

Palm stock rose $1.36 to $17.45 on Nasdaq.
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...AS301020070604





Bottle Tech Aims to Foil Wine Pirates
AP

At Colgin Cellars, a kiss is not just a kiss.

For years, vintner Ann Colgin has sealed bottles of her sought-after wine headed for auction with a bright-red lipsticked kiss on the label, a charming, and undeniably personal, certificate of authenticity.

But with concerns growing about counterfeiters, she and other Napa Valley vintners are turning to high-tech fraud prevention so customers can feel confident they're taking home genuine wine.

Colgin, who hasn't yet had someone attempt to fake her wine and hopes to keep it that way, recently signed a deal with Eastman Kodak Co. on a system that employs invisible markers added to inks and other packaging components.

''Our wine is essentially a luxury good and I do believe that these rare and collectible luxury goods are targets,'' said Colgin, whose ultra-premium wines can fetch hundreds of dollars a bottle at auction.

With the new system, buyers at auctions and other secondary markets can ask the winery to scan their labels if they have any doubts, although the measures are primarily intended to put off counterfeiters.

It's hard to gauge how wide a problem counterfeits are in the U.S. wine industry, which according to a recent industry commissioned study pumps $162 billion a year into the economy, including grape-growing, tourism and other related impacts.

Wine Spectator magazine has reported that some experts believe as much as 5 percent of wines sold in secondary markets such as auctions may be counterfeit, although others consider that figure too high.

Unlike CD and DVD counterfeiting, wine piracy hasn't become a noticeable drain on the industry yet, so U.S. vintners are acting defensively.

There have been cases of counterfeit wines reported in Europe and China, and this spring there were reports that federal authorities in New York were investigating whether counterfeits were passed off as rare vintages, including some said to be part of Thomas Jefferson's collection. According to a lawsuit believed to have partly prompted the investigation, five bottles of wine -- including four said to be owned by Jefferson -- sold for $500,000.

Regardless of how many phony pinots are out there, it seems clear that interest in preventing fraud has spiked as new technology has become available, said Daniel Welty, marketing manager for Petaluma-based John Henry Packaging, which prints labels for wineries as well as other clients.

''It's more of a case the tools are becoming more available to combat the problem,'' he said.

Anti-fraud measures being explored include tamper-proof seals, radio-frequency identification chips sunk into corks and using inks that only show up under special lights.

The Kodak technology used by Colgin and three other high-end Napa wineries involves putting proprietary markers, which Kodak will describe only as a ''forensically undetectable material'' into things such as printing inks, varnishes, paper, etc., that can only be detected by a Kodak handheld reader, also proprietary, which incorporates laser technology.

The idea is to come up with something easy to use and hard to detect, meaning it's that much harder for counterfeiters to figure out and copy, said Steve Powell, general manager and director for Security Solutions, Kodak's Graphic Communications Group.

The John Henry packaging company is using technology developed by Hewlett-Packard Co. to develop multicolored codes or graphics into labels. Colors and character combinations can be constantly changed to thwart copycats, Welty said.

The codes can be microprinted, so they're visible only with magnification, or in type that can be easily read.

''It's really cool. It's really simple, and nobody can know what the next codes are,'' he said.

Fine wine can be expensive straight from the shelf, but when it comes to charity affairs, such as the Napa Valley annual wine auction going on this week, prices can go sky high.

Last year's high bid was $1.05 million for five large-format bottles of Staglin Family Vineyard Meritage blend, along with a trip to France.

Like Colgin, the Staglins haven't run across fakes so far, but they decided to take a preemptive step and use the Kodak system on large bottles that are likely to end up being traded, said Garen Staglin.

''We want to be sure that we can give our customers the assurance of the integrity of our brand and label after we spent so much time and effort to try to accomplish what we've done over the years,'' he said.

In San Francisco, Jerome Zech, CEO of WineBid.com, which had $22.5 million in sales last year, doesn't think wine fraud is prevalent.

But with some high-end wines starting at $500 a bottle for pre-release prices, he's all for the industry's move toward anti-counterfeiting measures. ''It'll help them and it'll help us as well.''

WineBid's officials authenticate wine by only dealing with people they trust and checking bottles against a vast database, Zech said. If something seems off, ''we just don't even question whether or not we would put it on our site. We would just reject the bottle.''

So when someone showed up with two bottles of a famous French wine -- and the glass was different for each bottle, ''We go, `Are you joking? Where did you get these things,'' Zech said. ''He had some story, and we just said, `Sorry.'''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...uine-Wine.html





When Fakery Turns Fatal
David Barboza

They might be called China’s renegade businessmen, small entrepreneurs who are experts at counterfeiting and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make a profit. But just how far out of the Chinese mainstream are they?

Here in Wudi in eastern China, a few companies tried to save money by slipping the industrial chemical melamine into pet food ingredients as a cheap protein enhancer, helping incite one of the largest pet food recalls ever.

In Taixing, a city far to the south, a small business cheated the system by substituting a cheap toxic chemical for pharmaceutical-grade syrup, leading to a mass poisoning in Panama. And in the eastern province of Anhui, a group of entrepreneurs concocted a fake baby-milk formula that eventually killed dozens of rural children.

The incidents are the latest indications that cutting corners or producing fake goods is not just a legacy of China’s initial rush toward the free market three decades ago but still woven into the fabric of the nation’s thriving industrial economy. It is driven by entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of a weak legal system, lax regulations and a business culture where bribery and corruption are rampant.

“This is cut-throat market capitalism,” said Wenran Jiang, a specialist in China who teaches at the University of Alberta. “But the question has to be asked: is this uniquely Chinese or is there simply a lack of regulation in the market?”

Counterfeiting, of course, is not new to China. Since this country’s economic reforms began to take root in the 1980s, businesses have engineered countless ways to produce everything from fake car parts, cosmetics and brand name bags to counterfeit electrical cables and phony Viagra. Counterfeiting rings are broken nearly every week; nonetheless, the government seems to be waging a losing battle against the operations.

Dozens of Chinese cities have risen to prominence over the last two decades by first specializing in fake goods, like Wenzhou, which was once known for selling counterfeit Procter & Gamble products, and Kaihua in Zhejiang province, which specialized in fake Philips light bulbs.

For a time, people even derided the entire province of Henan as the capital of substandard or fake goods, like medicines that could make you miraculously grow taller.

But the discovery of dangerous ingredients in foods and drugs has raised more serious questions.

One such operation is centered here in Wudi, about five hours southeast of Beijing. This is where the trail of the American pet food recall leads.

Regulators came to Wudi in early May and shut down one of the region’s biggest feed exporters, the Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Company. They also detained its manager, Tian Feng, after American officials identified Binzhou Futian as one of two Chinese companies responsible for shipping contaminated pet food ingredients to the United States.

Chinese authorities said that Binzhou Futian and a company in bordering Jiangsu province had intentionally doctored feed ingredients to generate bigger profits. Regulators in China called it an isolated incident.

But agricultural workers and experts in this region tell a different story. They say the practice of doctoring animal and fish feed with melamine and other ingredients is widespread in China. And Wudi, they say, has long been known as a center for such activity.

“Wudi became famous for fake fish powder almost 10 years ago,” said Chen Baojiang, a professor of animal nutrition at the Agricultural University of Hebei. (Fish powder is used as a protein additive to animal feed, including fish feed.)

“All kinds of fillers have been used. At the beginning it was vegetable protein, then urea. Now it’s feather powder.”

In small village workshops on the outskirts of Wudi, residents say hundreds of workers make animal feed doctored with fish scraps and cheap ingredients that are then packaged for sale to unsuspecting farmers and fish farms.

Much of the fish scrap comes from the nearby Bohai Bay area or imported from Peru and then blended with cheap fillers to bolster profits.

“About 90 percent of the fish powder on the market is fake,” said Xue Min, who works at the Feed Research Institute, a division of the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. “When it reaches the customer, he doesn’t know how many kinds of filler have been added.”

But recently, residents say more buyers have turned skeptical of Wudi’s fish powder. And that has forced some local manufacturers to switch to vegetable protein and search for new buyers.

“Customers are now suspicious about fish powder,” says Sun Hong Qiang, who operates a fish scrap supplier in Wudi. “Everyone knows there’s some fake fish powder out there.”

To reach bigger customers, feed producers from Wudi recently began calling themselves “technology” companies that sell protein powder. And they are using online trading Web sites like Alibaba.com to sell their goods.

But few companies here were as successful as Binzhou Futian, which in 2006 won contracts to ship pet food ingredients to major suppliers in the United States and South Africa.

The American and South African middlemen say that they found Binzhou Futian through online advertisements and commodity-trading Web sites. The companies did not bother to visit Binzhou’s factories or to investigate its background or its export record.

“I’m not sure of the introduction, but I think it was through Google search,” said Leon Ekermans, a marketing director at Bester Feed and Grain, a South African grain trader. “We were told by an intermediary that they were once a government company and made good feed.”

Asked whether Bester had researched the supplier’s record or visited China, Mr. Ekermans acknowledged that the answer was no. “We tested samples,” he said, “but it was very difficult to test for melamine.”

When investigators from the United States Food and Drug Administration visited China in early May, hoping to determine why melamine ended up in pet food ingredients, they saw little more than a shuttered Binzhou Futian factory.

“They’ve all been closed down, machinery dismantled, nothing to get access to,” said Walter Batts, an F.D.A. official.

Binzhou Futian was run by Tian Feng, a small-town entrepreneur who started out producing fish powder but later moved into vegetable protein, according to local residents.

Mr. Tian’s company shared a building with the county government’s cereal and grains bureau, an indication of its close ties to the government.

“Futian didn’t have any actual factory here,” said a guard who works at the Binzhou headquarters. “They hung a banner here because they wanted to look good in front of visitors. They had countless suppliers from the countryside.”

A spokesman for the county cereal bureau, however, denied having any relationship with Binzhou Futian and Mr. Tian, who has been detained by the authorities. Mr. Tian has denied knowing anything about melamine or how it got into the feed he exported.

And while the government said that it had not found any other companies exporting melamine-tainted goods overseas, regulators shut dozens of fish feed producers near Wudi.

Investigators say Mr. Tian’s company engaged in fraud: it mislabeled its feed exports as nonfeed goods, possibly to avoid food inspection; it also exported tons of pet food ingredients labeled as corn gluten and rice protein concentrate. Actually, they say, it was low-protein wheat powder. Analysts say Binzhou’s case is not unusual. This is how the counterfeiting system often evolves, they say.

For decades, small entrepreneurs have started out counterfeiting in emerging industries in China, seeking an early advantage and their first pot of gold.

Often, they try to get around regulations, or simply believe small-time cheating that involves adding cheap substitutes or low-grade ingredients will not cause much harm.

“Basically, for entrepreneurs, if something is not explicitly banned — it’s not banned,” said Dali Yang, who teaches at the University of Chicago and has studied China’s food safety regulations. “As long as people are not sick or dying, it’s O.K.”

Experts say counterfeiters are now moving to outlying areas of the country, where it is easier to evade regulation. The counterfeiters are also moving into food and agriculture, which are difficult to monitor because they involve small farmers and entrepreneurs.

Small-time entrepreneurs have played the same game over and over with other products, experts say, adding cheap substitute chemicals to toothpaste; using lower-grade materials to produce car parts, batteries and cellphones; and creating factories that specialize in counterfeit goods.

Last year, for instance, pirates were caught faking an entire company, setting up a “branch” of the NEC Corporation of Japan, including 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan.

“We have to bear in mind they probably don’t think about the consequences at all,” said Steve Tsang, a China specialist who teaches at Oxford University. “They’re probably only thinking of making a fast buck.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/bu...s/05fakes.html





Anti - War Marine Blasts Military
AP

An Iraq War veteran accused the Marine Corps on Monday of causing a ''disgusting waste of government resources'' by holding a hearing about whether he should be punished for wearing his uniform during an anti-war protest.

Marine Corps officials argue they are enforcing military codes in the case of Cpl. Adam Kokesh.

Kokesh, 25, participated in an anti-war protest in Washington in March. When he was identified in a photo caption in The Washington Post, a superior officer sent him an e-mail saying he might have violated a rule prohibiting troops from wearing uniforms without authorization. Kokesh responded with a letter that contained an obscenity.

Kokesh is a member of the Individual Ready Reserve, which consists mainly of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations. His service is due to end June 18, but the Marine Corps is seeking to let him go two weeks early with a less-than-honorable discharge.

That could cut some of his health benefits and force him to repay about $10,800 he received to obtain his undergraduate degree on the GI Bill.

Kokesh's attorney, Lt. Jeremy Melaragno, said during an administrative separation board hearing that his client's free-speech rights are at stake.

''It has everything to do with freedom of speech,'' Melaragno said. ''Ask yourself, would we be here if he was advocating for the Bush administration?''

During a break in the hearing, Kokesh told reporters that the case appears to be punitive.

''More importantly, it's a case of fraud, waste and abuse and a disgusting waste of government resources,'' Kokesh said. ''While Marines are dying every day in Iraq, they are spending time investigating members of the individual ready reserves for political activity.''

Kokesh was honorably discharged following a combat tour in Iraq, but he remains part of the Individual Ready Reserve, comprised of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations.

His attorneys said Kokesh was not subject to military rules during the protest because he was not on active duty. They said the protest was a theatrical performance, which meant wearing a uniform was a not a violation of military rules. The military considered it a political event, at which personnel are not allowed to wear their uniforms without authorization.

The Marines' first witness, Maj. John R. Whyte, testified Monday he was the officers who wrote Kokesh the e-mail informing him the Marines were investigating the possible uniform violation.

On cross examination, the defense had Whyte read a memo he had written on how the Corps should respond to protests.

''There should be manpower assigned to search for and remediate misinformation by opposition groups and individuals,'' he read.

Whyte recommended Kokesh's discharge be ''other than honorable.''

Several Kokesh supporters turned out Monday at the Marine Corps Mobilization Command and stood in front of a bus painted with anti-war slogans.

Kokesh was a reservist in an artillery unit when he became disillusioned with the war during his first tour. He said he believes there is no way for Iraq to achieve rule of law with a foreign military imposing martial law.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...t-Hearing.html





As TV Coverage Feeds Protests, Musharraf Reacts
Griff Witte

Every day, Taj Mohammed Abbasi wheels his cart through dusty streets, selling the oranges, guavas and litchis that are the pride of this rural outpost in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills.

But what he's seen recently on television motivated him this weekend to take to the streets for a different reason: to join a movement with the audacious goal of ousting the military-led government and restoring democracy to Pakistan.

"Watching television, I have become very angry," said Abbasi, 33, swatting flies from his cart. "I am not a political person. I have not been to a lot of rallies. But this time, definitely, I am going."

Pakistan might be in the midst of its first televised revolution. For nearly three months, a handful of fledgling independent stations have been broadcasting minute-by-minute coverage of what at first seemed a relatively obscure issue: the suspension of Pakistan's chief judge by the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Since then, Pakistanis nationwide have been transfixed by live coverage of police beating lawyers, pro-Musharraf groups firing assault rifles at demonstrators and the chief justice speaking to ever-larger and more boisterous audiences about the dangers of autocratic rule.

As the cameras have rolled, opposition to Musharraf has surged, and he is considered more vulnerable now than at any time in his eight years in office. Even in rural areas where poverty is high, residents have gathered in hotels and barbershops around the few television sets available and watched the brewing crisis play out live.

Here in Haripur -- an hour's drive north of the capital, Islamabad, but a world away from its modern conveniences -- residents came out by the thousands on Saturday to demand that Musharraf step aside and allow elections to restore civilian rule.

Stung by the criticism, Musharraf has reacted by cracking down on what had been the government's signature defense against charges of authoritarianism: the independent television news networks.

The country's half-dozen networks all sprung up under his watch, and Musharraf has repeatedly bragged to the world about his efforts to free Pakistani television from state control and censorship for the first time in the country's history. But with his government teetering, Musharraf, a key U.S. ally, is threatening the networks' very existence.

"He allowed the genie out of the bottle. But he didn't realize how big it could become. Now he's trying to put it back," said Talat Hussain, director of news and current affairs for one of the channels, Aaj Television.

Aaj, along with others, has come under intense pressure in recent days to pull programming off the air and to cancel live coverage of opposition rallies. Aaj has continued to broadcast, but its transmission is being blocked throughout much of the country.
"I have no illusions about it," Hussain said. "They're going to shut us down."

Ayaz Amir, a political commentator who hosts a call-in program on rival channel ARY Oneworld, said his show was canceled this past week because of government pressure. "I've been branded as a person who's not favorably disposed to the government," he said.

Government officials deny they are censoring the news media. They say they are simply enforcing regulations that have been on the books for years but have often been ignored, including a requirement that stations get permission before they broadcast live.
"The independence of the media is something we take pride in," said Information Minister Mohammed Ali Durrani. "We'll take care of their independence."

Musharraf has made no secret of his displeasure with the way the controversy over the chief justice has been covered, and his top aides have accused the news media of exploiting the issue for ratings gains.

Last week, Durrani warned journalists against criticizing the army, an institution that has historically been revered in Pakistan but is increasingly attacked for denying the country a chance at civilian rule eight years after a military-led coup elevated Musharraf to power.

Durrani's remarks came after the independent channels broadcast marathon coverage of an anti-Musharraf rally at which demonstrators chanted slogans such as, "The generals are traitors" and "Save the country -- take Musharraf's skin off."

Since that rally, several of the channels have toned down their coverage of the crisis, and there is widespread speculation that they made deals with the government in order to continue broadcasting.

Until recent months, Musharraf had displayed an adeptness at using the media to his advantage -- giving occasional interviews and staging elaborate press events to showcase government accomplishments. The tactics worked: The president enjoyed widespread popularity and was considered virtually invincible.

But the chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, loomed as a potential obstacle because he was expected to rule on cases that could complicate Musharraf's plans to get himself elected for another five-year term by a lame-duck parliament.

On March 9, Musharraf invited cameramen to a meeting at which he expected Chaudhry to resign under pressure for alleged abuses of office. Instead, Chaudhry refused. The image of the judge moments before he stood up to the uniformed president became the first icon of the controversy.

The next came days later, when police raided Geo television's office in Islamabad as the station tried to film protesters demonstrating against Chaudhry's suspension. Tear gas filled the office, and police began beating journalists with batons, but the cameras continued to roll.

Two months later, in Karachi, Aaj's office came under attack as demonstrators clashed in the streets outside in violence that would ultimately claim more than 40 lives. During six hours of live coverage, Aaj's anchors repeatedly called for help from the police, to no avail, on a day when government security forces were widely blamed for standing by as the city burned.

A note on the Geo Web site Sunday said: "The government has blocked the transmission of the Geo News TV channel across the country due to the reasons best known to them. . . .

"The citizens, social and political circles have condemned the ban on transmission of Geo News and they have demanded of the government to immediately lift ban on the transmission of the Geo News and give complete freedom to media in the country," it said.

The chief justice and his supporters have used television to their advantage, staging exuberant, day-long parades from one city to the next, earning them hours of continuous coverage.

By contrast, political observers say, the government has tried to use force and intimidation to end the controversy, but has consistently misjudged how its efforts would play on television. As a result, Musharraf's problems have only intensified.

"What they did not take into account was that the crisis was going live to every bloody Pakistani household," said Aamer Ahmed Khan, Pakistan editor of the BBC World Service and a journalist here for more than two decades. "That is what is making them nervous now."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews





Reporter Arrested on Orders of Giuliani Press Secretary

Charged with criminal trespass despite protest of CNN staff and official event press credentials at GOP debate in New Hampshire
Aaron Dykes & Alex Jones

Freelance reporter Matt Lepacek, reporting for Infowars.com, was arrested for asking a question to one of Giuliani's staff members in a press conference. The press secretary identified the New York based reporter as having previously asked Giuliani about his prior knowledge of WTC building collapses and ordered New Hampshire state police to arrest him.

Jason Bermas, reporting for Infowars and America: Freedom to Fascism, confirmed Lepacek had official CNN press credentials for the Republican debate. However, his camera was seized by staff members who shut off the camera, according to Luke Rudkowski, also a freelance Infowars reporter on the scene. He said police physically assaulted both reporters after Rudkowski objected that they were official members of the press and that nothing illegal had taken place. Police reportedly damaged the Infowars-owned camera in the process.

Reporters were questioning Giuliani staff members on a variety of issues, including his apparent ignorance of the 9/11 Commission Report, according to Bermas. The staff members accused the reporters of Ron Paul partisanship, which press denied. It was at this point that Lepacek, who was streaming a live report, asked a staff member about Giuliani's statement to Peter Jennings that he was told beforehand that the WTC buildings would collapse.

Giuliani's press secretary then called over New Hampshire state police, fingering Lepacek.
http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/...ni_orders.html





Group Rips Microsoft Over Internet User Profiling Research
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft Corp. research on Internet user profiling could lead to tools that help repressive regimes identify anonymous dissidents, the Reporters Without Borders advocacy group warned last Friday.

In a paper presented at the International World Wide Web Conference last month in Calgary, Canada, four researchers at Microsoft's Beijing-based lab laid out work that predicted the age and gender ( PDF format) of unknown Web users based on the sites they visited. Their new algorithms correctly guessed the gender of a Web surfer 80% of the time, and his or her age 60% of the time.

"Demographic information is usually not easy to obtain," the researchers said. "Internet users are reluctant to expose this kind of personal data to public. The alternative way to predict users' demographic information is then of great interest." The Microsoft researchers said such predictions could be used to better personalize Web applications and fine-tune online advertising.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders objected not only to the research, but also to where it was conducted. "The technologies Microsoft is working on would allow it to gather information about Internet users without their knowledge," the group said in a statement. "These technologies could eventually lead to the creation of programs that could identify 'subversive' citizens. We believe it is unacceptable to carry out this kind of sensitive research in a country such as China where 50 people are currently in prison because of what they posted online."

American companies such as Yahoo Inc., Google, Inc., and Microsoft gather "fantastic" amounts of data about their Web visitors, Reporters Without Borders said, but "this kind of data accumulation obviously poses even more ethical problems in a country such as China which has absolutely no respect for the private lives of Internet users."

Microsoft's researchers said they would expand their work to other demographic attributes, such as occupation, educational degree and geographic location, which has Reporters Without Borders even more worried.

"In China, it is conceivable that this type of technology would be used to spot Internet users who regularly access such 'subversive' content as news and information websites critical of the regime," the group said.

The Chinese government has regularly locked down domestic access to sections of the Internet, and recently proposed a rule that would compel bloggers to register their real names, eliminating anonymity. A government-associated organization backed away from the mandate 10 days ago, however, and instead pitched the idea of bloggers exercising "self-discipline."

That same day, Erik Bratt, a Microsoft marketing communications manager, fired a preemptive salvo about the company's age- and gender-guessing research. Bratt first downplayed the research results, saying: "[The researchers] actually found that they could not, with a high degree of accuracy, predict age from Web browsing activity." He also swore the Redmond, Wash. developer off using the resulting algorithms. "Microsoft currently has no plans to use the capabilities found through this research in our products and services," Bratt said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9022918





"Unbreakable" Encryption Works in Real Time Over Long Distances, NIST Says
Submitted by News

In the internet age, when 120,000,000 smart people on Digg can see an article about your technology, it takes some real courage to use the term "unbreakable", but the guys at NIST are doing just that.

They say they have built a prototype high-speed quantum key distribution (QKD) system that can perform a theoretically unbreakable “one-time pad” encryption, transmission and decryption of a video signal in real-time over a distance of at least 10 kilometers.

Detection stage of the NIST prototype quantum key distribution system: Photons are "up-converted" from 1310 to 710 nm by one of the two NIST-designed converters at right, then sent to one of two commercial silicon avalanche photo diode units to the left. Credit: NIST

Key distribution — the problem of ensuring that both the sender and receiver of an encrypted message (and no one else) share the same long string of random digits (the so-called “key”) used to encode and decode the message — has always been one of the most important challenges in cryptography. Since the 1980’s it’s been recognized that the unique properties of quantum mechanics — the fact that certain measurements cannot be made without altering the thing measured — offered the possibility of a system that could transmit as long a key as desired between two people with no chance that it could be copied undetectably by a third party.

Since then the race has been on to build a fast, practical and reliable QKD system.

One important requirement for any candidate system is that it be compatible with existing fiber-optic telecom networks that transmit at wavelengths of either 1550 or 1310 nanometers (nm) to reach the greatest distance. Another requirement is a highly efficient photon detector that can detect single photons reliably without introducing significant amounts of “noise.” One of the best low-noise detectors, a silicon-based avalanche photo diode (Si-APD), does not function at the telecom wavelengths. Instead, it operates best at much shorter wavelengths around 700 nm. To take advantage of the Si-APD, the NIST group designed a sub-system to “up-convert” single photons from a transmission wavelength of 1310 nm to 710 nm for high-efficiency detection.

Their QKD system that incorporates this up-conversion technique, described in a recent paper,* generates and transmits secure keys at a rate of over half a million bits per second over 10 km of optical fiber, fast enough to encrypt streaming digital video using one-time pad in real time. The group also has transmitted secure keys at rates near 10 kilobits per second at five times that distance. The same team last year set a speed record for transmission of secure keys over a kilometer of fiber. This work improves the distance by at least 10 times.

Advantages of the new system, according to the research team, include high speed, high efficiency, low noise and convenience of operation. The fact that it uses a 1310 nm transmission wavelength somewhat limits the propagation distance but adds the advantage that the parallel “classical-quantum” communication, which is needed for a full QKD system, can be realized in a single fiber without significant interference. Details of NIST’s up-conversion QKD research are available at http://w3.antd.nist.gov/quin.shtml.

* H. Xu, L. Ma, A. Mink, B. Hershman and X. Tang. 1310-nm quantum key distribution system with up-conversion pump wavelength at 1550 nm. Optics Express, Vol. 15, Issue 12, pp. 7247-7260.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/ne...e s_nist_says





N.D. Bans Forced RFID Chipping
Judi McLeod

As expected, North Dakota has become the second state in the U.S. to ban the forced implanting of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in people.

The two-sentence bill, passed by the state legislature, was signed into law by Gov. John Hoeven last Wednesday. Essentially, it forbids anyone from compelling someone else to have an RFID chip injected into their skin. The state follows in the steps of Wisconsin, which passed similar legislation last year.

"We need to strike a balance as we continue to develop this technology between what it can do and our civil liberties, our right to privacy," Hoeven said in an interview. He emphasized that the law doesn't prohibit voluntary chipping. Military personnel who want an RFID chip injected so they can be more easily tracked will still be allowed to get a chip. There are also potential uses for the technology in corrections or in monitoring animals, he noted.

Marlin Schneider, the state legislator who sponsored the Wisconsin law, said he is glad to see an antichipping legislation trend. However, such statutes don't go far enough to curb the ability of private sector retailers and manufacturers to "implant these things into everything we buy."

Ultimately, with RFID tagging systems, corporations "will be able to monitor everything we buy, everywhere we go and, perhaps as these technologies develop, everything we say."

But Michael Shamos, a professor who specializes in security issues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, believes the law is too vague to do much good. For instance, it only addresses situations where a chip is injected, even though RFID tags can also be swallowed. And it doesn't clearly define what a forced implant really is; someone could make chipping a requirement for a financial reward.

"Suppose I offer to pay you $10,000 if you have an RFID [chip] implanted?" he asked. "Is that 'requiring' if it's totally voluntary on your part?"

The idea behind the law isn't bad, but "it looks hastily drawn and will have unpredictable consequences," said Shamos.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ntsrc=hm_topic





Thousands of Protesters Foil Some German Security Measures and Clash With the Police
Mark Landler



KÜHLUNGSBORN, Germany, June 6 — They lurked in the woods, 50 strong, wearing black hoods and bandannas, and wielding tree limbs. At a signal, they sprang forward and threw their debris across one of the bigger roads here, creating a barricade that brought traffic to a halt.

That little insurgency, and dozens like it, kept tensions high on the first day of the Group of 8 meeting in northern Germany on Wednesday. Several thousand protesters clashed with riot police officers, who used tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators blocking roads and railways leading to the site of the meeting.

Eight police officers were injured, and 15 demonstrators were detained, a police spokesman, Lüdger Behrens, told Reuters. He said the police used force after being pelted with stones.

While the protesters had little effect on the leaders of the top industrialized nations — who were flown by helicopter from Rostock to the meeting in the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm, several miles from here — they did manage to foil the elaborate security precautions of the police.

The police had erected a $17 million, 8-foot-high, 7.5-mile-long fence topped with barbed and razor wire, completely cutting off the resort, and banned protests within 200 yards of the fence. By midday, though, an estimated 10,000 demonstrators — many in clown makeup and tinted wigs — had penetrated the restricted zone and massed at the fence.

Evading checkpoints by crossing through farmers’ fields, protesters also blocked main roads leading from the Rostock airport to Heiligendamm. After numerous standoffs, some lasting several hours, riot police officers clad in helmets waded into the crowd, occasionally swinging truncheons.

Organizers of the protest complained that the police response was heavy-handed, perhaps because a demonstration on Saturday in Rostock had turned violent and resulted in at least 400 police injuries.

“It’s not just the demonstrators who are being aggressive,” said Monty Schädel, a local organizer of the protests. “It’s the police who are escalating the trouble with their own aggression.”

Mr. Schädel expressed regret for the violence in Rostock. The majority of anti-globalization protesters, he said, were peaceful. They come from a wide array of social activist groups, including Attac, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty.

But some of them, often those wearing the black hoods, are determined to disrupt the meeting, which they regard as illegitimate. At one point, the protesters forced the police to close all the entrances to Heiligendamm.

“I’m here because this so-called democratic meeting is not democratic,” said Lars, a 27-year-old German who declined to give his last name, for fear of arrest. “I didn’t want to just sit and do nothing about it.”

As a phalanx of riot police officers advanced toward Lars, he and his friends retreated. Earlier, they said, they had been in a clash in which several demonstrators were roughed up. In a nearby field, three protesters sat under the gaze of police officers, their hands cuffed behind their backs with plastic bands.

The German authorities expected trouble at this meeting, which has become an annual flash point for anti-globalization groups. The authorities spent more than $130 million on security, marshaling 16,000 police officers and 1,100 soldiers in what officials say is the most extensive such operation for a single event in Germany since World War II.

Last month, the police conducted a nationwide raid of the homes and offices of left-wing campaigners whom they suspected of planning to disrupt the meeting. At the time, the raid was sharply criticized by some opposition leaders, who said it was bullying and disproportionate.

Public sentiment has shifted, however, since the violence in Rostock. The police had talked about a strategy of “de-escalation,” which would defuse tensions between the police and the protesters. On Wednesday, a police spokesman said the de-escalation strategy had come to an end.

Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed sympathy for the police, saying to reporters that they “have my full support; it’s not an easy job.” She said meetings like the Group of 8 were “legitimate” exercises.

So far, the protests have mostly inconvenienced the news media. Journalists were forced to travel to Heiligendamm from the neighboring village of Kühlungsborn by boat, after the rail line was blocked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/wo...7protests.html





Secret CIA Jails Hosted by Poland, Romania: Watchdog
Jon Boyle

A European investigator said on Friday he had proof Poland and Romania hosted secret prisons for the Central Intelligence Agency in which it interrogated top al Qaeda suspects using methods akin to torture.

Swiss senator Dick Marty said Poland housed some of the CIA's most sensitive prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who says he masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that killed almost 3,000 people.

"There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003-2005, in particular in Poland and Romania," Marty said in a report for the Council of Europe human rights watchdog.

He said U.S. intelligence and other sources told him the two European Union members hosted the secret jails under a special CIA program, created by President George W. Bush's administration after 9/11 "to 'kill, capture and detain' terrorist suspects deemed of 'high value."'

Marty said the former president of Poland and the current and former presidents of Romania knew and approved of their countries' roles in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA detentions and transfers, known as extraordinary renditions.

He said the proof of his charges was confirmed in interviews with over 30 serving, retired or contract workers for U.S. or European intelligence services, but he had not seen the text of any U.S. agreement with Poland or Romania on secret prisons.

Germany and Italy had used "state secrecy" to obstruct investigations, said Marty. His report, after a 19-month probe, could embarrass European governments, which have criticized the detention without trial of suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Political Approval

Marty's report was issued as 26 Americans, mostly suspected CIA agents, went on trial in absentia in Italy for kidnapping a Muslim there in 2003 and flying him to Egypt as part of Washington's rendition policy.

The Council of Europe's evidence could be valid in some courts if rules allowed judges to accept it while guaranteeing the confidentiality of the source.

The report found Poland's then-president Aleksander Kwasniewski and three other named officials were aware of and could be held accountable for the CIA secret prisons in Poland.

Suspects were flown from Kabul and elsewhere to Szymany airport in northern Poland, with dummy flight logs submitted to disguise the destination, Marty said. They were met at the runway by teams of Americans in vans and driven through a pine forest to the alleged detention centre at nearby Stare Kiejkuty.

Marty said CIA sources confirmed to him that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another top al Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, were held in Poland and subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques," which he called a euphemism for torture.

The Polish Foreign Ministry said there were no such secret centers and former Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski, one of those named, told Reuters:

"Marty's work is pure political fiction...It is a waste of time and a waste of money."

Romanian President Traian Basescu, former president Ion Iliescu and former defense minister Ioan Mircea Pascu were among those who "knew about, authorized and stand accountable" for Romania's role in the CIA program, Marty said.

The Romanian Foreign Ministry said the report contained "no evidence to confirm these allegations, except for unnamed sources, whose credibility cannot be estimated."

The European Commission said it was "very concerned indeed" and urged Romania and Poland to hold independent investigations.

Marty said the facilities were run directly and exclusively by the CIA, which exploited NATO's granting of blanket overflight clearance and access to airfields to carry out clandestine operations in a broad range of countries.

Bush confirmed in September the CIA had run secret interrogation centers abroad but named no country.

A CIA spokesman said Europe had been the source of "grossly inaccurate allegations about the CIA."

Marty told reporters: "Hundreds and hundreds of people were kidnapped, tortured, detained illegally, some of them for year after year, then released without a word of apology, with no compensation."

"I find that indecent, I find that intolerable in a free and democratic society."

(Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London, Dave Graham in Berlin, Natalia Reiter in Warsaw, Luiza Ilie in Bucharest)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNe...70585420070608





The Tortured Lives of Interrogators

Veterans of Iraq, N. Ireland and Mideast Share Stark Memories
Laura Blumenfeld

The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why, he couldn't say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his throat was closing.

In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man's pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners' sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.

But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best friend hung out with him, watching reruns of "Hawaii Five-O." And yet he felt afraid.

"I tortured people," said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. "You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that."

Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture. At first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. In training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., instructors stressed the Geneva Conventions, he recalled, while classmates privately admired Israeli and British methods. "The British were tough," Lagouranis said. "They seemed like real interrogators."

But interrogators for countries that pride themselves on adhering to the rule of law, such as Britain, the United States and Israel, operate in a moral war zone. They are on the front lines in fighting terrorism, crucial for intelligence-gathering. Yet they use methods that conflict with their societies' values.

The border between coercion and torture is often in dispute, and the U.S. government is debating it now. The Bush administration is nearing completion of a new executive order setting secret rules for CIA interrogation that may ban waterboarding, a practice that simulates drowning. Last September, President Bush endorsed an "alternative set of procedures," which he described as "tough," for questioning high-level detainees. And in Iraq last month, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, warned troops that the military does not sanction "torture or other expedient methods to obtain information."

The world of the interrogator is largely closed. But three interrogators allowed a rare peek into their lives -- an American rookie who served with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion and two veteran interrogators from Britain and Israel. The veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor, indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears -- and with a clash of values.

That clash, said Darius Rejali, a political scientist who has studied torture and democracy, can torment interrogators: "Nothing is more toxic than guilt, which is typical with democratic interrogators. Nazis, on the other hand, don't have these problems."

For Lagouranis, problems include "a creeping anxiety" on the train, he said. The 45-minute ride to Chicago's O'Hare airport "kills me." He feels as if he can't get out "until they let me out." Lagouranis's voice was boyish, but his face was gray. The evening deepened his 5 o'clock shadow and the puffy smudges under his eyes.

Not long ago in Iraq, he felt "absolute power," he said, over men kept in cages. Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers with the tape of the self-help parody "Feel This Book: An Essential Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual Satisfaction," by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. ("They hated it," Lagouranis recalled. "Like, 'Please! Just stop that voice!' ")

Now Lagouranis's power had dissolved into a weakness so fearful it dampened his upper lip. Sometimes, on the train, he has to get up and pace. But he can't escape.

An Island in the Mediterranean

James, an amiable man with a red-to-white beard, shook his head when told of Lagouranis: "He's full of self-pity."

James, 65, was one of Britain's most experienced interrogators in Northern Ireland. Starting in 1971, James said, he worked for the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), interrogating Irish nationalists Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands and others whom the British government suspected of being terrorists. Peter Taylor, a leading historian of the conflict in Northern Ireland, said he believes that "James's account is entirely credible."

Late one night in 1993, three Irish Republican Army gunmen crept up to James's door. "They came to get me," James said. Given a 20-minute warning following a tip to the RUC, he and his wife escaped, ultimately to an island in the Mediterranean. James agreed to talk if his last name and location were withheld. "They haven't a clue I'm here."

Driving along winding, stony roads, past goats and grapevines, James had this advice for Lagouranis in Chicago: "You've got to get up and get on with it -- that's what we did."

James had had no training, but the 18-hour days that made his neck ache taught him what he needed: good rapport, good intelligence, great fear. "Yes, a bloke would get a cuff in the ear or he might brace against the wall. Yes, they had sleep deprivation," he said. "But we did not torture."

Once, IRA leader Brendan Hughes claimed that James had cocked a gun to his head. James does not deny it. "You fight fire with fire," he said, the memory igniting his blue eyes.

He noted that the sectarian killings dropped off: "If it's going to save lives, you're entitled to use whatever means you can." How do you fight bad guys and stay good? "You don't. You can't."

The only interrogation James regrets was of Patrick McGee, under arrest for IRA activity. McGee did not crack, which meant he would go free. As McGee walked out, "he just stared at you," James recalled. "Evil was hanging out of him." James spat in his face. "He never even blinked. It was not satisfying, it was humiliating. I lost my cool."

James stopped his car at the edge of the ocean. According to Greek mythology, a god frolicked on this beach. Vacationers drank iced coffee and oiled the air with coconut lotion. But James seemed to be somewhere else, cloudy and turbulent, in his head.

"My friend once saw a guy planting a bomb," he said. He laughed. "My friend tied a rope around the guy's ankle, and made him defuse it. Now t hat's how to deal with a ticking bomb."

Chicago, 8 p.m.

"All of Iraq was a ticking time bomb," Lagouranis said, downing his fourth of seven beers. He had joined the Army before 9/11 to learn Arabic. He didn't expect to go to war.

He was sitting on a night off at the California Clipper bar, where he works as a bouncer. The bartender joked that Lagouranis should be tougher on customers: "You should 'go Abu Ghraib.' "

At Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal, Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman's noose. "If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of them," Lagouranis said.

At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. "Then I get a prisoner who may have done it," he said. "What are you going to do? You just want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. 'Finally, I got you.' "

Lagouranis's tools included stress positions, a staged execution and hypothermia so extreme the detainees' lips turned purple. He has written an account of his experiences in a book, "Fear Up Harsh," which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell, who was Lagouranis's team leader and direct supervisor, said Lagouranis's assertions were "as true as true can get. It's all verifiable." John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis's claims about abuses and independently corroborated them.

"At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying," Lagouranis said. "Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it's thrilling."

In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called "the disco," with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps "like a car inspection at a parking garage." Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. "We had to hide the tortured guys," Lagouranis said.

Then a soldier's aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel's Holocaust memoir, "Man's Search for Meaning." Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

At that point, Lagouranis said, he moderated his techniques and submitted sworn statements to supervisors concerning prisoner abuse.

"I couldn't make sense of the moral system" in Iraq, he said. "I couldn't figure out what was right and wrong. There were no rules. They literally said, 'Be creative.' "

Lagouranis blames the Bush administration: "They say this is a different kind of war. Different rules for terrorists. Total crap."
Tel Aviv

"You have to play by different rules," the Israeli interrogator told an American visitor. "The terrorists want to use your own system to destroy you. What your president is doing is right."

The Israeli, who spoke on condition that he be identified by his code name, Sheriff, recently retired as chief of interrogations for Shin Bet, Israel's security service, which is responsible for questioning Palestinian terrorism suspects. The former head of the service, Avi Dichter, and the former chief terrorism prosecutor, Dvorah Chen, called Sheriff "the best."

"To persuade someone to confess feels better than beating him up," Sheriff said. "It's a mental orgasm."

Sheriff is short and chubby, with thin, reddish skin that turns yellow in the folds when he furrows his brow. He keeps an electric razor in his car so he can shave his head while driving. He wears a cap from the Kentucky Department of Homeland Security.

"Interrogation is a beautiful world," Sheriff said. When Sheriff's 2-year-old was sick and his wife couldn't be at home, he brought the toddler to work and laid him in an interrogation room, on a mattress on the floor: "I put the phone next to the baby and said, 'When you want Daddy, push this button.' "

Another interrogator walked in and exclaimed, "My suspect shrank!"

For Sheriff, interrogation was more psychological than physical. He used flattery on Palestinians who put bombs under playground benches: "You say, 'Hey! Wow! How did you connect these wires? Did you manufacture this explosive? This is good!' "

He played good cop, and bad: "One day I was good. Next day I was bad. The prisoner said, 'Yesterday you were good. What happened today?' I told him we were short on manpower."

Sheriff hugged his suspects, he said, poured them tea and kissed their cheeks. As his former boss, Dichter, put it: "You try to become friends with someone who murdered a baby. That's your job. It's the most difficult feeling." When he came home, Sheriff said, his wife would make him change. "You could smell the guy on your shirt."

But when the pressure mounted for intelligence, Sheriff said, the best method was "a very little violence." Enough to scare people but not so much that they'd collapse. Agents tried it on themselves. "Not torture."

Sometimes a prisoner would accuse Sheriff of torture. He tried to shift the moral burden by blaming the prisoner: "I would tell him this: 'I'm sorry. We prefer it the nice way. You leave us no choice.' "

Chicago, 10:15 p.m.

Lagouranis apologized to his prisoners, too.

"Two brothers, they could've died because we were inducing hypothermia," he said. As Lagouranis was leaving Abu Ghraib, he told one of the brothers: " 'I'm sorry. I'll always consider you a friend,' He gave me a look -- he probably wanted to kill my entire family. I spent a lot of time torturing him, but also talking."

"I could see you trying to comfort him," said Amy Johnson, Lagouranis's girlfriend, sitting at the bar. Johnson likes Lagouranis, she said, because he is gentle.

She was also attracted by the mystery of his job, although she'd never heard the details, until this night. The scars on his ankles from sand-flea bites were visible. Of the unseen scars, Johnson said, "I'm afraid to ask."

"That's the most confusing thing -- people don't hate me," he said.

"But you're trying to fight the bad guys," she said. She knows he is haunted. He got an honorable discharge after a diagnosis of "adjustment disorder." He startles awake, she said: "Last night you had a dream --"

"I never saw a ghost in Abu Ghraib," he said. "But I saw a ghost last night. It was me."

"Seeing innocent people being tortured is hard," she said.

"Not the things I saw, but the things I did. You keep saying 'torturing the innocent,' but the two brothers I tortured were guilty. It doesn't mean you should torture them."

Johnson said nothing. She twisted her hair up into a knot.

Lagouranis kept talking, this time about his Gerber knife with the black handle and five-inch blade: "I'd been interrogating this guy all night." But the prisoner, unafraid, looked Lagouranis in the eye. "I had this idea --"

"That he was guilty?" she said.

"No, at worst he smuggled a can of benzene. It was pure insanity. I wanted to take out my Gerber knife and chop off his fingers."

Johnson blanched, pressed her fingers against her lips.

"I don't know if I comprehend it," she said. "It's not a good place to go."

A Tel Aviv Suburb

The best place to go to unwind, Sheriff said, was the municipal garbage dump. After work, he'd set up a beach chair on top of the landfill, under the Israeli sun.

Now Sheriff was high up on the dump, safe from vindictive prisoners, boiling water on a portable gas burner to make some tea. "Sugar?" he offered. Sheriff stretched, relaxed. "I've got a clean conscience because I rarely use it."

Israeli society, however, has been conflicted. After more than a decade of debate in legal and security circles, the Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that torture is illegal.

Sheriff's concerns, however, aren't legal, they're mortal. He carries a Beretta. In cafes, he faces the door. He ran into a former subject -- "a bit scary" -- knocking on the window of his car.

For all his bravado, quips and denials, Sheriff is afraid to have his full name published.

"I would not like to die in pain."

An Island in the Mediterranean

Pain, for James -- the interrogator tucked away on a Mediterranean island -- was what made the attempt on his life so frightening. The IRA had shot his partner in the heart, he said, but when the gunmen came for him, they brought a sledgehammer.

"They would have tortured me and extracted information," James said.

Britain, like Israel, reformed its interrogation practices. In 1979, the British government acknowledged that Northern Ireland police had mistreated IRA suspects. It introduced restrictions.

"Every time they changed the rules, it was to benefit murdering terrorists," James said, grinding the word "terrorists" with his teeth. "We got no protection. Next we'll be tried as war criminals."

Even today, James bolts awake when the wind knocks over a plant. His wife said, "One night I woke up, and his hands were around my throat, shaking me. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'There are people in the house.' "

James misses his Irish garden. Give him a few brandies and he'll wistfully sing "The Fields of Athenry." His eyes turned red and watery as he said, "The people of Northern Ireland will never know how many lives were saved."

Worse yet, the people he interrogated "are now running the bloody country." They used to glare, with "venomous looks," and say in Gaelic, "Our day will come."

Chicago, 11:50 p.m.

Lagouranis stares at their faces when he cannot sleep. He stole a CD with pictures of the prisoners he interrogated in north Babil. He ponders the brown-skinned men with mustaches:

"This guy looted an American supply truck. He was waterboarded by a Marine."

Click.

"That guy was old as dirt. I don't know why he was there."

Click.

"This guy -- you can see the contusions around his head."

Click.

Alone in his apartment, awake most nights, he sits in rumpled jeans and desert combat boots, throwing his Gerber knife at his coffee table. Dirty clothes and beer cans litter the floor. His refrigerator is bare, but his footlocker is full of empty bottles of pills the military doctors prescribed for anxiety.

"It feels like fear. Of what? I'm not sure," Lagouranis said. "You know what I think it is? You don't know if you'll ever regain a sense of self. How could Amy love me? I used to have a strong sense of morals. I was on the side of good. I don't even understand the sides anymore."

Next to a mattress on the floor where he sleeps hang his dog tags. Beside it, in the closet, lies a thick brown rope. He has tied it into a noose.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hcmodule





Democrats May Subpoena N.S.A. Documents
James Risen

Senior House Democrats threatened Thursday to issue subpoenas to obtain secret legal opinions and other documents from the Justice Department related to the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program.

If the Democrats take that step, it would mark the most aggressive action yet by Congress in its oversight of the wiretapping program and could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.

The subpoena threat came after a senior Justice Department official told a House judiciary subcommittee on Thursday that the department would not turn over the documents because of their confidential nature. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, did not assert executive privilege during the hearing.

The potential confrontation over the documents comes in the wake of gripping Senate testimony last month by a former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey, who described a confrontation in March 2004 between Justice Department and White House officials over the wiretapping program that took place in the hospital room of John Ashcroft, then attorney general. Mr. Comey’s testimony, disclosing the sharp disagreements in the Bush administration over the legality of some N.S.A. activities, has increased Congressional interest in scrutinizing the program.

At the same time, the Bush administration is seeking new legislation to expand its wiretapping powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have argued that they do not want to vote on the issue without first seeing the administration’s legal opinions on the wiretapping program.

“How can we begin to consider FISA legislation when we don’t know what they are doing?” asked Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, who heads the subcommittee.

On May 17, after Mr. Comey’s testimony, Mr. Nadler and Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales requesting copies of Justice Department legal opinions used to support the N.S.A. wiretapping program, as well as later documents written by top Justice Department officials that raised questions about the program’s legality in 2004. The letter also asked Mr. Gonzales to provide his own description of the 2004 confrontation.

Mr. Conyers said he had not received a response from the Justice Department. “We’re going to give him two more weeks, and then, as somebody said, it’s about time process kicks in somewhere around here,” Mr. Conyers said.

In an interview after the subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Mr. Bradbury said his refusal to provide the documents was not the final word from the Justice Department on the matter.

But Mr. Nadler made it clear that he did not expect the administration to comply and said he thought he would soon have to push for subpoenas.

In January, the Bush administration announced that it was placing the program under FISA, meaning that it would no longer conduct domestic wiretapping operations without seeking court approval, and officials said they were ending eavesdropping without warrants.

Since then, the White House has said that the debate over the program is moot because it has been brought under court supervision, and the Democrats, focused on Iraq war policy, had done little to challenge such assertions. Mr. Bradbury even said Thursday that the N.S.A. program was “no longer operational.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/washington/08nsa.html





Bird on your wire

Eavesdropping Comes Naturally to Young Song Sparrows

Long before the National Security Agency began eavesdropping on the phone calls of Americans, young song sparrows were listening to and learning the tunes sung by their neighbors.

University of Washington researchers exploring how male song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) acquire their song repertoires have found the first evidence that young birds choose many of their songs by eavesdropping on the tuneful interactions between other sparrows.

In laboratory experiments, the young sparrows were exposed to two adult “tutors,” one of which they directly interacted with vocally and a second one that they only overheard singing with another young bird. Even though they learned from both tutors, the young birds acquired more than twice as many songs from the tutor on which they eavesdropped, said Michael Beecher, lead author of the study and a UW psychology and biology professor.

Scientists study song learning in songbirds in part because it has a number of parallels with human language learning, and Beecher thinks eavesdropping also could play a role in how infants learn language.

Sparrows in the wild are thought to learn their songs in two phases. The first phase occurs in their first summer, when they hear and memorize songs sung by adult birds. The following spring, when the young birds are establishing their own territory, they modify and prune their repertoire so their songs are more similar to their neighbors’. A song sparrow’s repertoire crystallizes at around 10 to 11 months of age and does not change.

Beecher and his colleagues earlier proposed that eavesdropping and interactive singing are critical in song learning. However, they could not determine if the young birds learned more by direct interaction with a tutor or by eavesdropping.

To answer that question, the researchers collected and raised eight baby sparrows for a two-part experiment. When they were about 15 days old, the birds were exposed to four adult sparrows for two months. Song sparrows typically have repertoires of about 10 songs, and the tutors in the study had no song types in common. That meant the young birds heard 40 different songs. The young birds were rotated between two rooms, each of which housed two of the adult tutors. The young sparrows, which had not begun to sing, were exposed to the tutor for four days and then rotated to the other room where they heard the songs of the other two tutors for four days. At the end of two months the young birds were isolated from hearing one another or the tutors.

The second phase of the study began when the birds were about 8 months old. This time only two of the adult tutors were used. Each young bird was paired up with an adult in a large chamber and their vocal interactions were recorded and played to a second young bird in a separate chamber. The next day, the second young bird was paired with a second tutor and the first young sparrow, now in a separate chamber by himself, overhead their interactions.

The songs of all of the young sparrows were recorded when they were nearly a year old, as were the songs of the tutors. Analysis showed that 51 percent of the young birds’ songs were learned from tutors they overheard interacting with another sparrow in the second phase of the study. Just 19 percent came from interacting directly with a tutor. The remaining 30 percent of songs were acquired when they were listening to tutors early in life.

Beecher thinks the young birds learn more by eavesdropping because it is less threatening than interacting face-to-face with an adult. In a parallel line of research, Beecher and his colleagues are tracking song sparrows by radio in the field. Preliminary analysis of the tracking data suggests that young birds don’t have many direct interactions with adults, and so are likely to be learning their songs by eavesdropping.

When it comes to research about how babies learn language, most work has focused on interactions between a parent and an infant, but infants may learn language in part by eavesdropping on conversations between their parents or a sibling, Beecher said.

“Do kids learn from parents talking to them or from other people talking and interacting? We don’t know. We do know that children’s comprehension is much farther ahead than their language production ability, certainly in the first couple of years of life. They can’t say very much, but they can understand a good deal,” he added.

Co-authors of the National Science Foundation funded study are John Burt and Adrian O’Loghlen; UW research scientists, Christopher Templeton, a UW biology doctoral student; and Elizabeth Campbell, a research technician. The on-line edition of the journal Animal Behaviour published the paper. It will appear in the June print issue of the journal.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/530405/?sc=swtn





Celebrity Justice Cuts Both Ways for Paris Hilton
Sharon Waxman

The national obsession with celebrity collided head-on with the more serious issue of the equal application of justice on Friday, as a judge sent the socialite Paris Hilton back to jail some 36 hours after she was released for an unspecified medical problem.

Judge Michael T. Sauer ordered Ms. Hilton to serve the rest of her sentence in a county lockup after the city attorney, whose office had prosecuted her, filed a petition asking that the sheriff’s department be held in contempt or explain why it had released her with an ankle monitor on Thursday, after she had served just five days.

Ms. Hilton had been sentenced to 45 days in jail for violating the terms of her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. With time off for good behavior, she had been expected to serve 23 days.

Ms. Hilton, 26, wearing no makeup and with her hair disheveled, sobbed and screamed, “Mom, this isn’t right,” as she was taken from the packed courtroom by deputies.

It was a rare moment in this star-filled city, where badly behaving celebrities can seemingly get away with anything — or at least D.U.I. But Ms. Hilton, for all her money and celebrity, seems to have been caught between battling arms of the justice system here, with prosecutors and Judge Sauer determined to make a point by incarcerating her, only to have the sheriff’s office let her go.

“She’s a pawn in a turf fight right now,” said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles. “It backfired against her because she’s a celebrity. She got a harsher sentence because she was a celebrity. And then when her lawyer found a way out of jail, there was too much public attention for it to sit well with the court.”

The struggle between the judge and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, incited indignation far beyond the attention normally paid to a minor criminal matter.

Judicial and police officials here said they were inundated with calls from outraged residents and curious news media outlets from around the country and beyond. The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, decried Ms. Hilton’s release as an example of “double standards,” saying consideration was given to a pampered rich girl that would never have been accorded an average inmate.

Even the presidential candidate John Edwards found himself drawn into the debate. When asked about Ms. Hilton’s release on Thursday he said, “Without regard to Paris Hilton, we have two Americas and I think what’s important is, it’s obvious that the problem exists.”

California has been struggling to comply with a federal order to ease crowding in its jails and prisons, and Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County has carried out a program of early release. But that has frustrated prosecutors who believe that early release undermines their efforts to punish those found to have broken the law.

At a news conference on Friday, Sheriff Baca said: “The special treatment appears to be her celebrity status. She got more time in jail.” Under the normal terms of the early release program, he said, Ms. Hilton would not have served “any time in our jail.”

The city attorney whose office prosecuted Ms. Hilton’s case, Rocky Delgadillo, said preferential treatment had led to her being sent home with an ankle bracelet. In the original order sentencing Ms. Hilton to jail, the judge had stated that Ms. Hilton would not be allowed a work furlough, work release or an electronic monitoring device in lieu of jail time. “We cannot tolerate a two-tiered jail system where the rich and powerful receive special treatment,” Mr. Delgadillo said after learning of the release.
In a news conference on Friday, Mr. Baca said Ms. Hilton “had a serious medical condition,” though he declined to say what it was.

In a scene that seemed a parody of O. J. Simpson’s low-speed chase more than a decade ago, news cameras on Friday followed a police cruiser containing a sobbing Ms. Hilton as it drove slowly down the Los Angeles highway to Superior Court from her home.

The issue became nonstop fodder for channels like CNN and Fox News, as legal experts debated how rare the decision was to release her, and whether doing so neutralized, negated or otherwise neutered the judge’s original order.

Amid the debate over serious questions of equal justice under the law came speculation over the nature of Ms. Hilton’s “medical situation,” which Mr. Baca cited as the reason for her release. On television, commentators questioned whether she was a suicide risk or if she was eating properly in jail.

Judge Sauer had ordered the hearing for 9 a.m. When Ms. Hilton did not appear, apparently believing that she could participate by telephone, he sent sheriff’s deputies to escort her from her home.

When she arrived and the hearing began, the judge said he had received a call on Wednesday from an undersheriff informing him that Ms. Hilton had a medical condition and that the sheriff’s office would submit papers to the judge to consider releasing her early. The judge said the papers describing a “psychological” problem had not arrived, and he interrupted Friday’s court session every few minutes to state the time and note that the papers had still not shown up.

In ordering her return to jail, Judge Sauer said there were adequate medical facilities within the system to deal with Ms. Hilton’s problems.

Ms. Hilton was not the only high-profile defendant whose celebrity prompted a raised eyebrow from a judge this week. Also on Friday, the judge who sentenced I. Lewis Libby Jr. to prison this week issued an order dripping with sarcasm after receiving a supporting brief from a dozen prominent legal scholars, including Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard and Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“The court trusts,” Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby “is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions.”

“The court,” he added, “will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries.”

Adam Liptak and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York, and Ana Facio Contreras from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09hilton.html?hp





School to Prison Pipeline
Bob Herbert

The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She’s in! She’s out! She’s — whatever.

Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

This is an aspect of the justice system that is seldom seen. But the consequences of ushering young people into the bowels of police precincts and jail cells without a good reason for doing so are profound.

Two months ago I wrote about a 6-year-old girl in Florida who was handcuffed by the police and taken off to the county jail after she threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class.

Police in Brooklyn recently arrested more than 30 young people, ages 13 to 22, as they walked toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered. No evidence has been presented that the grieving young people had misbehaved. No drugs or weapons were found. But they were accused by the police of gathering unlawfully and of disorderly conduct.

In March, police in Baltimore handcuffed a 7-year-old boy and took him into custody for riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The boy tearfully told The Baltimore Examiner, “They scared me.” Mayor Sheila Dixon later apologized for the arrest.

Children, including some who are emotionally disturbed, are often arrested for acting out. Some are arrested for carrying sharp instruments that they had planned to use in art classes, and for mouthing off.

This is a problem that has gotten out of control. Behavior that was once considered a normal part of growing up is now resulting in arrest and incarceration.

Kids who find themselves caught in this unnecessary tour of the criminal justice system very quickly develop malignant attitudes toward law enforcement. Many drop out — or are forced out — of school. In the worst cases, the experience serves as an introductory course in behavior that is, in fact, criminal.

There is a big difference between a child or teenager who brings a gun to school or commits some other serious offense and someone who swears at another student or gets into a wrestling match or a fistfight in the playground. Increasingly, especially as zero-tolerance policies proliferate, children are being treated like criminals for the most minor offenses.

There should be no obligation to call the police if a couple of kids get into a fight and teachers are able to bring it under control. But now, in many cases, youngsters caught fighting are arrested and charged with assault.

A 2006 report on disciplinary practices in Florida schools showed that a middle school student in Palm Beach County who was caught throwing rocks at a soda can was arrested and charged with a felony — hurling a “deadly missile.”

We need to get a grip.

The Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union has been studying this issue. “What we see routinely,” said Dennis Parker, the program’s director, “is that behavior that in my time would have resulted in a trip to the principal’s office is now resulting in a trip to the police station.”

He added that the evidence seems to show that white kids are significantly less likely to be arrested for minor infractions than black or Latino kids. The 6-year-old arrested in Florida was black. The 7-year-old arrested in Baltimore was black.

Shaquanda Cotton was black. She was the 14-year-old high school freshman in Paris, Tex., who was arrested for shoving a hall monitor. She was convicted in March 2006 of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced to a prison term of — hold your breath — up to seven years!

Shaquanda’s outraged family noted that the judge who sentenced her had, just three months earlier, sentenced a 14-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson for burning down her family’s home. The white girl was given probation.

Shaquanda was recently released after a public outcry over her case and the eruption of a scandal involving allegations of widespread sexual abuse of incarcerated juveniles in Texas.

This issue deserves much more attention. Sending young people into the criminal justice system unnecessarily is a brutal form of abuse with consequences, for the child and for society as a whole, that can last a lifetime.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/09...erbert.html?hp





Arrested
From the Mind of Charles

On April 18th, I was arrested. This normally wouldn’t be big news, but the situation arround which I was arrested brings up serious questions. I was arrested at Kutztown University, where I am a student, because I decided to try to liven the mood after the Life and Liberty Ministries began to upset students. They came on campus with signs that featured aborted fetuses, lists of people who will be going to hell, and catchy phrases such as “JESUS OR HELL”. I have friends who are gay, and these people who came onto Kutztown University’s campus without permission or prior notice were upsetting students all over campus.

I decided not to simply let them upset people, so I went to the bookstore and purchased a posterboard and sharpie marker and made my own sign. It said “Equal Rights for Robots”, a saying I thought no one would be able to take the wrong way. The protesters had been on campus for about two hours at this time, and the whole time the police were protecting them from the students. To my knowledge, the protesters at this time had not been asked to leave. With my sign in hand, I walked out and waved my sign in the air.

I had some small support from students around me, as most saw the attempt at humor to lighten a rough situation. However, within about two or three minutes a police officer came over to me and told me to come with him. I was dropped off at the police area, searched and taken to the local precinct where I was held for an hour and a half. One of the protesters was held there with me, but I do not know why he was arrested.

I was charged with Disorderly Conduct with intent to “alarm or annoy” and in the citation it says I was “warned repeatedly” to stop. Neither is true, and when I pointed this out to the officer who wrote it out for me he said something along the lines of I don’t care and made a comment along the lines of tell it to the judge. I plead not guilty and face a three hundred dollar fine or up to 90 days in jail if found guilty.

After it happened, I tried to contact the local news and the school newspaper. Only one newspaper bother to contact me, the others didn’t believe me.

The Morning Call - http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-...,2550072.story

WFMZ - http://www.wfmz.com/view/?id=86577

The Reading Eagle - It’s in the web archive, and you need to buy access to it.

The Keystone, the school newspaper was initially interested in running my side of the story, but then quickly backed down from it when the school decided not to support me. In fact, according to one student who spoke to school officials right after my arrest, the school had me arrested because “We didn’t want any jokers.” Now, I cannot verify that quote myself, but this student is one I would trust to tell me the truth.

This is what happened, and here are some pictures to verify the truth.





http://hngkong.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/arrested/





Laws Threaten Security Researchers
Kelly Jackson Higgins

What if a Web researcher found a bug on your Website today -- but was too afraid of the law to tell you?

The Computer Security Institute (CSI) recently formed a working group of Web researchers, computer crime law experts, and U.S. Department of Justice agents to explore the effects of laws that might hinder Web 2.0 vulnerability research. And the CSI group's first report -- which it will present on Monday at CSI's NetSec conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. -- has some chilling findings.

In the report, some Web researchers say that even if they find a bug accidentally on a site, they are hesitant to disclose it to the Website's owner for fear of prosecution. "This opinion grew stronger the more they learned during dialogue with working group members from the Department of Justice," the report says.

That revelation is unnerving to Jeremiah Grossman, CTO and founder of WhiteHat Security and a member of the working group. "That means only people that are on the side of the consumer are being silenced for fear of prosecution," and not the bad guys.

Unlike other security researchers -- who are mostly free to ferret out bugs in operating systems, device drivers, or other applications via their own machines -- Web researchers focus their efforts on live Web servers -- walking a tightrope of laws designed to prevent hackers from tampering with those machines.

"[Web] researchers are terrified about what they can and can't do, and whether they'll face jail or fines," says Sara Peters, CSI editor and author of the report. "Having the perspective of legal people and law enforcement has been incredibly valuable. [And] this is more complicated than we thought."

The group's goal is to air the legal, ethical, social, and technological issues, not to take a position per se. The CSI report looks at both sides of the issues.

Lee Tien, a member of the working group and a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Website vulnerabilities must be exposed so people's data and identities are secured. "The fewer vulnerabilities, the better."

The report discusses several methods of Web research, such as gathering information off-site about a Website or via social engineering; testing for cross-site scripting by sending HTML mail from the site to the researcher's own Webmail account; purposely causing errors on the site; and conducting port scans and vulnerability scans.

Interestingly, DOJ representatives say that using just one of these methods might not be enough for a solid case against a [good or bad] hacker. It would take several of these activities, as well as evidence that the researcher tried to "cover his tracks," they say. And other factors -- such as whether the researcher discloses a vulnerability, writes an exploit, or tries to sell the bug -- may factor in as well, according to the report.

Billy Hoffman, lead researcher for SPI Dynamics's labs and a member of the working group, says the laws cover the "means," not the intent, which makes this even more complicated: "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act deals with methods," he says.

Hoffman says in his research, he occasionally won't fill out a required Web form field to see how the application reacts. "At one point [in the working group discussions], one of the federal people said as soon as you knowingly start using a site the way it wasn't intended to be used, you've crossed the line into where you're doing something wrong."

That caught Hoffman by surprise. "It struck me that by not filling in required fields, I was knowingly doing something the site told me not to do... Is that illegal? I walked away with the impression it is." But in the end, it depends on whether the site operator wants to come after you or not, he says.

Hoffman suggests Web operators could amend their privacy policies, inviting researchers to notify them of bug discoveries. "I'd like to just try to raise awareness that there are Good Samaritan security researchers who want to try to help people who are developing Web apps. But we are not able to help them like the rest of the industry is able to help security vendors."

Meanwhile, researchers continue to worry about the legal ramifications of their activities. "Good and experienced researchers will seriously curtail their discovery and disclosure practices," WhiteHat's Grossman says. "And newcomers with little experience will get busted because they don't know any better. And bad guys will continue to 'game' the system at the expense of the consumer."

The CSI working group's next step is to explore disclosure policy guidelines and mirrored site, or honeypot, guidelines for Website owners. The group is also developing a matrix of Web vulnerability research methods so lawmakers and law enforcement can better understand the methods researchers use. Its next report will be released in November.
http://www.darkreading.com/document....WT.svl=news1_1





H0ly Sh17! Appeals Court: Says "Fleeting Expletives" Ok on Network TV
Eric Bangeman

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has overturned a Federal Communications Commission indecency ruling, sending the case back down to the FCC for further deliberation. At issue were an f-bomb dropped by pop diva Cher during the 2002 Billboard Music Awards along with a couple of choice expletives voiced by reality show star Nicole Ritchie during the 2003 show, both of which were televised live on Fox.

In November 2006, the FCC ruled that "fleeting expletives" during prime time violated the Commission's indecency and profanity prohibitions. Fox, with the support of the other broadcast networks, challenged the ruling, arguing that the FCC does not issue clear standards outlining acceptable content on TV and radio.

In a 2-1 ruling, the court found that the FCC's policy against fleeting expletives is "arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act for failing to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy." It cited the FCC's own history of distinguishing between material that "dwells" on indecent content vs. material that was "fleeting and isolated."

After U2 frontman Bono said "this is really, really, fucking brilliant. Really, really, great" during an acceptance speech during the 2003 Golden Globe Awards televised live on NBC, the FCC was hit with a complaints from the Parents Television Council. The FCC's Enforcement Bureau denied the complaints, saying that Bono's comments were "fleeting and isolated" and didn't describe "sexual or excretory organs or activities." The full Commission later overturned the Enforcement Bureau's decision, saying that f-bombs were "patently offensive under contemporary community standards."

The Court disagreed with the Commission's reasoning that allowing fleeting curse words would result in a 24-hour barrage of expletives, saying that the Commission was "divorced from reality." It is important to note that the Court's decision is limited to fleeting curse words, and should not be intepreted as a blanket license to allow swearing on TV.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is not happy with the Court's decision. "I completely disagree with the Court's ruling and am disappointed for American families," said Martin in a statement. "I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that 'shit' and 'fuck' are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience."

Martin also believes that the Court is the entity with a tenuous grip on the real world. "The court even says the Commission is 'divorced from reality,'" argues Martin. "It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word 'fuck' does not invoke a sexual connotation."

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee also weighed in on the ruling, saying that he hoped that the FCC appeals the case to the Supreme Court. "It is disappointing that a divided Second Circuit panel chose to invalidate the FCC's efforts to combat the gratuitous use of offensive language on broadcast television," said the senator.

Fox is quite pleased with the ruling, saying that it feels that "that government regulation of content serves no purpose other than to chill artistic expression in violation of the First Amendment."

The FCC has been on an indecency kick as of late, spurred in part by activist groups like the Parents Television Council. During the third quarter of 2006, the FCC saw a 40,000 percent increase in indecency complaints after a large-scale campaign to flood the FCC with complaints began. After singer Janet Jackson exposed herself during Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, the Parents Television Council was responsible for over 99 percent of the subsequent complaints.

The ruling comes as FCC is seeking authority to increase its regulatory power over both broadcast and cable TV. If it gets approval from Congress, the Commission would like to clamp down on TV violence, and Chairman Martin believes that regulating cable is necessary. "We can't just deal with the three or four broadcast channels," Martin said. "We have to be looking at what's on cable as well." Barring an act of Congress, Appeals Court's decision is likely to put the brakes on the FCC's regulatory urges when it comes to television—unless the Supreme Court overturns today's decision.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...etwork-tv.html





FCC Beefs Up Emergency Alert System

Commission ready to upgrade EAS with "next-generation" technology.
FMQB

The FCC has adopted an order that will strengthen the Emergency Alert System (EAS). The Commission plans to promote developing "fully digital Next Generation technologies and delivery systems" to better serve the American public.

The FCC order requires EAS participants to accept messages using Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), the groundwork for the next gen EAS delivery systems, no later than 180 days after FEMA announces its adoption of standards. The use of CAP is expected to ensure efficient and rapid transmission of EAS alerts via text, audio and video through broadcast, cable, satellite and other networks.

The EAS enhancements also will assist in access for the disabled and non-English speaking people. The FCC order also requires EAS participants to transmit state and local alerts originated by their governors.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=416504





Shot Clock Starts on XM - Sirius Merger
John Dunbar

After 3 1/2 months of industry lobbying, congressional hearings and intensive Wall Street analysis, the public will have a chance to weigh in on whether it thinks the proposed merger of the nation's only two satellite radio companies is a good idea.

The Federal Communications Commission issued a public notice Friday seeking comment on the proposed merger of licensees Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc.

The FCC will decide whether it is in the public interest for both licenses to be controlled by a single company.

The merger, valued at $4.7 billion when it was announced on Feb. 19, is also subject to approval by the Department of Justice, which will examine any competitive harm that may result from the combination.

The acceptance of the applications for filing starts an informal ''shot clock'' at the FCC, which tries to finish its review of mergers within 180 days. That would put a decision potentially sometime in December.

The merger faces some steep challenges.

To succeed, the Department of Justice will have to decide that the combination of the only two companies in the satellite radio business will somehow not be considered anticompetitive.

The FCC will have to decide whether to allow the companies to break a condition of the licenses that made the business possible 10 years ago.

The agency, at the time, said one licensee will ''not be permitted to acquire control'' of the other. The clause was inserted to ensure ''sufficient continuing competition'' in the new business.

Lawyers, lobbyists and executives for Sirius and XM have said the market has changed since 1997 -- that competition extends beyond satellite radio and includes all forms of ''audio entertainment,'' including Apple iPods, digital ''high definition'' radio and even cell phones.

''The combination of our companies will lead to more choices and better pricing for consumers, and result in a stronger competitor in the rapidly evolving audio entertainment market,'' Sirius and XM said in a statement late Friday.

Consumer groups have generally opposed the merger. Opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters has been relentless.

The FCC says that interested parties must file initial comments by July 9. Replies to comments are due by July 24. Comments may be filed via e-mail and should include docket number 07-57.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3804602.html





Big Ed

Humorous take on the ex-chief of SBC/ATT.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/...not-forgotten/





Selling City Halls on Wireless as a Utility
Candace Lombardi

At this week's MuniWireless New England conference, leaders in municipal broadband are extolling the benefits of their technology to urban officials. But is the pitch falling on deaf ears?

On Monday morning, "MuniWireless 101" panelists said that high-bandwidth broadband infrastructures become public safety tools for law enforcement and first responders, help alleviate costs for public schools, aid the rising population of telecommuters, back future entertainment for personal computers, and support public wireless networks.

The U.S. isn't exactly in the lead when it comes to building such infrastructures, though. Some at the two-day conference here pointed to Asian countries that compete economically with the U.S., such as India and Malaysia, as being far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to building high-bandwidth broadband infrastructure nationwide.

"Is it happening? Yes. Is it happening in the U.S.? No. I'm sorry to say it's a bloody mess," said Ken DiPietro, the chief technology officer of NextGen Communications.

Although public wireless networks are one of the benefits of high-bandwidth broadband, there are numerous others. DiPietro said that the popularity of the Joost video-on-demand program, for example, points to an inevitable switch to IPTV in lieu of traditional television and that such a change will put even more strain on broadband networks, unless they are built to be upgradeable every three to five years.

The rise of telecommuting and the increase in video conferencing on the part of companies are other reasons that panelists gave as a reason for municipalities to build, or beef-up their networks.

Cisco Systems is offering relatively inexpensive options for tele-presence, for example, "but you still need the continuous bandwidth to go with it," DiPietro said.

For cash-strapped municipalities, however, the main issue is price.

"I am from a town with 25,000 people. How can we do this for free without using any tax dollars?" asked one municipal leader.

The question provoked a visible smiles and audible sighs among the panelists--and chuckles from the audience. That's because the question embodied one of the issues that the industry is up against: convincing municipalities to invest.

"It comes down to: Do you consider it a service or a utility? I consider it a utility," said Ash Dyer, a researcher at MIT involved in program in Cambridge, Mass., to bring wireless to 95 percent of the city.

Dyer suggested that both companies and municipalities should look at past government models in this instance. He cited the U.S. highway infrastructure built under the Eisenhower administration as one example the federal government should consider adopting.

"They built stretches of highway in the middle of nowhere, between major areas and cities and then told them 'OK, you have to build your stretch if you want to be connected," Dyer said.
http://news.com.com/Selling+city+hal...3-6188539.html





Ex-Cisco Executive to Lead Joost, Internet TV Provider
Brad Stone

Michelangelo Volpi spent 5 of his 13 years at Cisco Systems selling networking equipment to the companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable that bring television into living rooms.

Now he is trying to do an end run around those same companies.

The high-profile Internet start-up Joost plans to announce today that it has hired Mr. Volpi, 40, as its new chief executive. Joost, which is based in London, is building a global television network of full-length TV shows and movies and sending it to viewers over the Internet.

Joost is still testing its technology with half a million viewers who can watch about 100 channels. The Joost player, which users must download to their PCs, now provides access to niche material like “The Martial Arts Channel,” as well as programs from better-known channels like CNN, MTV and the Cartoon Network that are properties of the media companies Time Warner and Viacom. Both were early investors in Joost.

The challenge for Mr. Volpi, who is known as Mike, will be to build the service into something that regular people will want to watch, and to make it available wherever they want to watch it — meaning places other than their computer screens.

“Traditional television as we know it is gradually going to go away,” Mr. Volpi said in his first interview as Joost’s chief executive. “We hope to capture the hearts and minds of users who have turned away from TV as a form of entertainment.”

Mr. Volpi said that Joost would ultimately be available in many places. “Joost is a piece of software and it can reside on a variety of platforms,” he said. “It could be on a television set-top box. Or potentially it could be imbedded in a TV set with an Ethernet connection, or on a mobile phone, or in some alternative device that might come out in the future. The flexibility is really high.”

Joost was founded last year by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, creators of the Internet telephone company Skype. Five years ago, as an executive at Cisco, Mr. Volpi flew to London to meet the young founders and was intrigued by the way Skype circumvented traditional phone companies. He joined the Skype board in the fall of 2004 and left after the company was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.

Last year, citing the spread of speedy broadband Internet service and the opportunity to build a global TV network, the pair from Skype started Joost, originally known as the Venice Project.

In an interview, Mr. Friis said that Mr. Volpi was the only candidate they considered to head their new company. “What you really want in these kinds of situations is someone you have had a good relationship with, who you’ve known for years, who you can trust and get along with,” he said.

Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive, which invested in Joost, said that Mr. Volpi is “pound for pound one of the best operators in Silicon Valley.” He added: “It is a huge win for Joost and a great tribute to them that they landed him.”

Mr. Volpi was born in Milan and grew up in Japan. As head of Cisco’s mergers and acquisitions team for seven years, he was responsible for the company’s first 70 acquisitions. Before he left Cisco this year, he was frequently mentioned as a possible successor to the chief executive, John Chambers.

His border-crossing résumé is appropriate for Joost, a service that aspires to weave together programs from around the globe. Joost carries shows from incongruous sources like the Bollywood network Saavn; the Brazilian Music Channel; Fútbol de Nicaragua, and the National Hockey League, and it lets users personalize their channel listings.

“People in China might want to watch ‘Survivor,’ ” Mr. Volpi said “People in Japan might be interested in the latest episodes of ‘C.S.I.’ We offer that capability in a much easier way than it has historically been offered,”.

Though his family is moving to London, Mr. Volpi said he would spend most of his time on a plane, shuttling among Joost’s offices in Amsterdam, London and New York. One challenge: trying to forge closer ties among Joost’s 100 employees, many of whom come from the disparate worlds of media and technology.

Another challenge Mr. Volpi will face is finding other major media companies to distribute their shows on Joost alongside those of Viacom and Time Warner.

“Eventually our hope is that other prime-time providers like NBC, Fox and Disney will come on board, because we are an attractive place given the numbers of users we have,” Mr. Volpi said. “Content owners don’t care where content is distributed so long as it reaches a larger number of users who can be monetized.”

Mr. Volpi said he expected Joost to remain in test mode for the rest of this year, growing to around a million viewers, and then to open its doors more broadly next year.

One focus for the company will be advertising. The company has signed partnerships with companies like United Airlines, Microsoft and Sony Electronics. In addition to showing 15- or 30-second ads during programs (the commercials cannot be skipped “for now,” Mr. Volpi said), Joost will focus on tailoring ads to individual users based partly on the information they provide when they sign up for the service.

The company will also try some creative experiments. For example, after a 15-second commercial for toothpaste, a small graphic called an “ad bug” will float in the corner of the screen reminding users of the brand that was just advertised. If users click on the graphic, a new browser window will open to the Web site of the product.

“From an advertising point of view, this is a paradigm shift,” Mr. Volpi said. “It is not a banner ad or a text ad or a 15-second spot that used to be shown on television. It’s a hybrid that allows you to target the ad to individual viewers and let them act on it.”

Mr. Volpi said he had other opportunities after leaving Cisco, but was drawn to the wide-open frontier of Internet television. “Television is a massive market, and when you put it together with the Internet, and to be on the ground floor of that, there weren’t many other opportunities to do something this big.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/te...y/05joost.html





How Big Will the iPhone Be?

The new must-have smartphone may be a $10 billion business—and could send Apple shares even higher
Peter Burrows

Few stocks trade on emotion the way Apple Inc. does. Its rip-roaring initial public offering in 1980 created the template for modern tech mania, while making Steve Jobs a gazillionaire. When the company fell on hard times in the mid-1990s, no amount of good news could pierce the cloud of doom hanging over investors. Now, with the launch of the hugely hyped iPhone in a few weeks, momentum investors are driving Apple (AAPL) shares to unexplored territory. The stock has doubled in the past year, to 122. Apple's market cap recently topped $100 billion for the first time.

Hard as it is to believe, all the excitement surrounding Jobs and his new toy may actually understate the impact of this device on Apple's fortunes. Beyond the hysteria surrounding its June 29 launch, the iPhone has the potential for adding a totally new, $10 billion-a-year business within just a few years. If Apple can expand so-called smartphones from a luxury carried by corporate road warriors into an everyday tool for the masses—combining the functions of a BlackBerry and an iPod—Apple could soon see a new growth tear.

Up, Up, and Away

That's the kind of thinking that has some analysts pegging Apple's stock price at 160 and up. They contend that the blazing success of Apple's Mac and iPod lines on their own justify much of Apple's current value. JMP Securities' Ingrid Ebeling used conservative price-earnings ratio projections for 2008 to calculate that the Mac business, with revenues of $11.7 billion and net margins of 11%, would be worth $42.70 on its own. The iPod, with $10.8 billion in revenues, 12% margins, and a slightly lower multiple given slowing growth, would be worth $38.87. Add in $6.36 for other music products, $6.76 for peripherals such as Apple TV, $5.91 for software, and $14.18 per share in cash. You're already at $114.78—with no help from iPhone.

What the iPhone adds is a chance to grab prime position in a much bigger, faster-evolving business. Apple is trying to use its design and software expertise to win consumers who mostly buy Plain Jane phone models from entrenched players. The success of the iPod has been remarkable, with 100 million sold since 2001. But more than 1 billion cell phones are sold each year.

If Apple's goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seemed ambitious to some back in January when Jobs first unwrapped his new baby, few doubt it now. Wall Street speculation has gone from how much market share it can steal, to how much it can expand the overall smartphone market, based on Apple's entry and the competitive response it will elicit from incumbents such as Nokia (NOK), Palm (PALM), and Research In Motion (RIMM).

Price Barrier

The answer may not come until 2009. By then, Apple should have begun creating lower-cost iPhone variants to reach consumers scared off by the introductory $499 price. It also will probably have moved into overseas markets and cut deals with more carriers to utilize higher-speed wireless networks. So while most analysts look for Apple to sell around 3 million units this year and 10 to 12 million in 2008, many figure that 20 million will move in 2009. Piper Jaffray Cos. (PJC) analyst Gene Munster thinks Apple could sell more than 40 million iPhones in 2009—enough to lift revenues more than 30% that year, and earnings by 40%.

Still, Apple will need to execute flawlessly. In units built and shipped, the iPhone launch will dwarf anything Apple has attempted. It plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29, two sources say. (Apple won't comment.) And with its touch-screen keyboard, powerful battery-sapping processors, and a panoply of new applications, the iPhone is far more complex than the iPod. Glitches could lead to costly recalls and returns if buyers find the phone buggy or confusing.

It's easy to forget that the iPod wasn't an immediate hit when it rolled out. Apple had years to ramp up production. Jobs did so expertly, often creating a sense of scarcity by running slightly short of demand. With all the buildup over the iPhone, pumping up demand will be the least of his concerns.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo..._ top+stories





Lawyer Altered Docs in Best Buy Case
Gene Johnson

A lawyer for Best Buy Co. has acknowledged that he falsified e-mails and a memo before turning them over to plaintiffs in a nationwide class-action lawsuit -- a development that could prompt the judge to find the company liable for tens of millions of dollars in damages.

King County Superior Court Judge Douglass A. North Jr. has previously scolded Best Buy for not being forthcoming with documents related to the case, so last month's revelations about the actions of Minneapolis attorney Timothy Block do not bode well for the company.

The lawsuit, filed in 2003, accuses Best Buy of signing up at least 100,000 customers for trial subscriptions to Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Internet service from 1999 to 2003, in many cases without their knowledge. Once the trial period ended, the customers began incurring credit card charges they had not approved.

Microsoft, which paid Best Buy for each customer it signed up, is accused of allowing Best Buy's practice to continue even after receiving complaints. The lawsuit aims to hold Best Buy, Microsoft or both financially liable; if the judge enters a default judgment against Best Buy, Microsoft would essentially be off the hook, said Beth Terrell, a Seattle-based attorney for the plaintiffs.

For now, the case has been stayed while Best Buy finds new outside counsel. Block's firm, the prominent Minneapolis firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi, asked to withdraw after he admitted May 23 to redacting or otherwise altering the documents. A hearing on the withdrawal motion is set for June 22.

"Mr. Block confirmed that no other person at RKMC, and no person at Best Buy, were aware that he had changed documents," the firm said in a court filing the next day. "RKMC has begun its investigation into the number of documents that were altered and is attempting to locate the original (pre-alteration) documents."

Block reported his wrongdoing to Minnesota's Board of Professional Responsibility as well as the three other states where he is licensed to practice, and is on medical leave for stress and depression, said his attorney, Richard Thomas.

The altered documents are limited to two e-mails and one memo, Thomas said. The documents have not been publicly released.

Asked why Block falsified the documents, Thomas said, "I don't know that even he can tell you that. ... I don't think he is going to claim his actions were motivated by Best Buy."

But given the extent of Best Buy's foot-dragging regarding document production in the case, Terrell and another attorney for the plaintiffs, Dan Girard of San Francisco, wondered aloud whether Block felt pressured by the company to withhold or redact documents that could prove damaging. A senior partner at Block's firm, Elliott Kaplan, is a director at Best Buy.

"Best Buy has been violating court orders willfully. This is sort of the last step," Terrell said.

Steven Schumeister, managing partner at Robins Kaplan, said it is clearly a case of individual wrongdoing by someone going through a difficult time. The firm remains concerned for Block and his family, he said.

"We and Best Buy have acted promptly and properly to make all of the required disclosures and to work to resolve this matter," Schumeister said.

Best Buy spokeswoman Dawn Bryant emphasized that the company "had absolutely no knowledge of the inappropriate and unethical actions the attorney took."

At a hearing in March, the judge scolded Best Buy and its lawyers for failing to follow orders directing them to turn over documents requested by the plaintiffs, and to identify and log any documents they believed were not subject to disclosure. North said he was hoping to avoid entering a default judgment against the company, but that he would have little choice if Best Buy didn't start playing ball.

"I don't know and I don't really care at this point whether it's you, some functionary in your firm, or your legal team, but I do know that somebody in your camp is interfering with discovery in this case," North said, according to a transcript.

In response, Block said Best Buy spent more than $250,000 to create an electronic system to search documents. He told North that he felt "great trepidation" and "almost a feeling of personal failure" that the judge still believed Best Buy was not cooperating.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8PIT9301.htm





New Zero-Day Bugs Crop up in IE, Firefox

Critical flaw in Internet Explorer and a major bug in Firefox
Gregg Keizer

A noted security researcher disclosed four new zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft and Mozilla's browsers, including a critical flaw in Internet Explorer (IE) and a major bug in Firefox.

Michael Zalewski, who regularly publishes browser flaw findings, posted details on the Full-disclosure mailing list for cookie-stealing, keystroke-snooping, malicious downloading and site-spoofing bugs.

The most serious of the four, said Zalewski, is an IE6 and IE7 flaw he rated "critical." Dubbing it a "bait-and-switch" vulnerability, he said that the Microsoft browser gives hackers a window of opportunity to run malicious Javascript to hijack the PC.

"The entire security model of the browser collapses like a house of cards and renders you vulnerable to a plethora of nasty attacks," Zalewski claimed in notes that accompanied a demonstration of the IE bug. Up-to-date IE6 and IE7 are both at risk, he said, although Firefox is not.

But Mozilla's browser also suffered at Zalewski's hands. A new IFrame vulnerability in Firefox 2.0 can let attackers plant keyloggers or drop malicious content into a legitimate web site. The flaw, rated as "major," is related to a similar bug discovered last year; although Mozilla patched that problem, Zalewski said the fix hadn't plugged all the holes.

Zalewski posted information about two other bugs, both rated "medium." A Firefox vulnerability could lead to unauthorised downloads, while IE6 is open to yet another address bar-spoofing flaw. "IE7 is not affected because of certain high-level changes in the browser," Zalewski said of the fourth vulnerability.

Mozilla is aware of both Firefox bugs — they have been posted to its Bugzilla management system — and a Microsoft spokeswoman said the company's security team is looking into Zalewski's claims. "Upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action, which may include issuing a security advisory or providing a security update," she added.

Microsoft also said it knows of no ongoing attacks using the vulnerabilities.
http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/n...2572F000834E7F





Competing as Software Goes to Web
John Markoff

Can two bitter rivals save the desktop operating system?

In the battle between Apple and Microsoft, Bertrand Serlet and Steven Sinofsky are the field generals in charge of competing efforts to ensure that the PC’s basic software stays relevant in an increasingly Web-centered world.

The two men are marshaling their software engineers for the next encounter, sometime in 2009, when a new generation of Macintosh and Windows operating systems is due. Their challenge will be to avoid refighting the last war — and to prevent finding themselves outflanked by new competitors.

Many technologists contend that the increasingly ponderous PC-bound operating systems that currently power 750 million computers, products like Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Apple’s soon-to-be-released Mac OS X Leopard, will fade in importance.

In this view, software will be a modular collection of Web-based services — accessible by an array of hand-held consumer devices and computers — and will be designed by companies like Google and Yahoo and quick-moving start-ups.

“The center of gravity and the center of innovation has moved to the Web, where it used to be the PC desktop,” said Nova Spivack, chief executive and founder of Radar Networks, which is developing a Web service for storing and organizing information.

Faced with that changing dynamic, Apple and Microsoft are expected to develop operating systems that will increasingly reflect the influence of the Web. And if their valuable turf can be preserved, it will largely reflect the work of Mr. Serlet and Mr. Sinofsky, veteran software engineers with similar challenges but contrasting management styles.

Their rivalry took a personal tone last summer when Mr. Serlet publicly poked fun at Windows Vista by highlighting features that seemed derivative of Apple’s OS X.

“We hung in the hallways of the conference a big banner that said, ‘Redmond, start your photocopiers,’ ” he said, recalling an event the year before. “It was all a joke, but they actually took us seriously.”

One software developer who has worked at both companies — and asked not to be identified because he still consults for Microsoft — compared the two men’s approaches to the difference between martial marching band music and jazz.

Mr. Sinofsky’s approach, he said, is meticulously planned out from the beginning, with a tight focus on meeting deadlines — a crucial objective after the delay-plagued Vista project — but with little room for flexibility. In contrast, the atmosphere inside Apple’s software engineering ranks has been much more improvisational.

Mr. Serlet, a French computer scientist who was drawn to Silicon Valley two decades ago, has developed a loyal following among Apple’s rank-and-file programmers. He has a quirky personality, according to several members of his team, and takes a certain amount of teasing inside the company.

“Bertrand Serlet likes the process to be a little chaotic,” said one Apple programmer, who insisted he not be identified because of company restrictions on public statements by employees. “There’s a strong dependence on people making the right judgment calls the first time.”

Mr. Serlet and Mr. Sinofsky said they were too busy to give interviews.

Mr. Sinofsky, 41, who joined Microsoft in 1989, is the senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live engineering group, a position he assumed a year ago after running the company’s Office team of programmers. Mr. Serlet, 46, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, left Xerox’s fabled Palo Alto Research Center to join Steven P. Jobs at Next Software in the late 1980s and has headed software development at Apple since 2003.

Both men are the best of a technical elite. “Bertrand is wicked smart,” said Dan’l Lewin, a Microsoft corporate vice president who worked with Mr. Serlet at Next. “He was one of the bright lights.”

Mr. Lewin now works with Mr. Sinofsky, who he said had brought needed discipline to the company’s largest development project. “His ability is in understanding the end-to-end process and architecture and knowing every nook — it’s amazing,” Mr. Lewin said.

People who know both men say that their contrasting management styles play out in the organization of the armies of software developers that are necessary to design complex operating systems.

“Under Sinofsky, the culture is, you plan and stick to the plan,” said Steven Capps, a former Apple and Microsoft programmer who has designed operating systems at both companies. “At Apple you see what you’ve got.”

The potential risk in the Microsoft approach, he said, is that “they’re like the test pilots who won’t pull up when they see the tarmac.”

As a technical assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, in 1994, Mr. Sinofsky was one of the Microsoft employees who alerted Mr. Gates to the Internet challenge, after seeing students using the Web at his alma mater, Cornell University.

Now in charge of the company’s most important development project, Mr. Sinofsky has proved to be far more secretive than his predecessor, Jim Allchin, who retired from Microsoft this year. Shortly after the consumer release of Vista in January, the company took the unusual step of issuing a statement saying that it had nothing to say about its plans for future operating systems.

After struggling for more than half a decade with Vista, its most ambitious development project ever, Microsoft has begun work on a reportedly less ambitious successor under Mr. Sinofsky’s leadership. The new operating system effort has in the past been referred to alternately as Vienna and Windows 7.

Microsoft is trying again to reconcile the PC operating system with the Internet. It calls the new strategy Windows Live, an effort to leverage its desktop monopoly onto the Web. That effort can be seen in Mr. Sinofsky’s dual role. He is in charge of development for both the next version of the Windows operating system and the new Internet services.

The company has hinted recently that Mr. Sinofsky’s team may be trying to keep the PC operating system relevant by redesigning it to take full advantage of next-generation processing chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices that will have dozens of internal processors.

The company’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, refers to the new approach as “integrated innovation.” But it is less clear yet whether Mr. Sinofsky will have the agility to respond to what is being called an era of “loosely coupled innovation” — an agility that has been the hallmark of nimble Web services developers.

Small groups of programmers have been using the Internet to introduce services far quicker than the slow-moving operating systems projects have been able to respond.

“The challenge for Steve is to get Windows in that mode,” said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor of management at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the future, he added, Windows will most likely be broken into “smaller pieces released more frequently or put up as a Web service.”

That will mean that the era of big software releases may have come to an end.

“I think that you won’t think about big new releases in the future,” said John Seely Brown, the former director of the Palo Alto Research Center. “You really want to be able to make lots of incremental improvements in ways that things just get better and better.”

The rise of the Web presents similar challenges for Apple. While the company has been extremely successful with iTunes, its online audio and video service, efforts like .Mac, a suite of Web-based applications that was intended to be an integrated part of the Mac OS X operating system, have lain fallow for several years.

Now Mr. Serlet’s programmers are planning to integrate Apple’s consumer products and its personal computers more closely with the Internet, according to several people briefed on the company’s plans. Indeed last week, at an industry conference, Mr. Jobs said that an infusion of Web services for Macintosh users was imminent.

Apple is expected to add a networking capability to its next-generation iPod music players. In addition, the software for its next big product, the iPhone, is based on the core of OS X, the operating system for the Macintosh. The approach further blurs the line between the computer and other devices — as well the distinction between the device and the Internet as the place where programs and data reside.

That shift is likely to be the distinctive feature of both companies’ operating- system efforts.

“It’s a very important, longer-term trend of incremental innovation,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Software will be “increasingly componentized and offered over the Web.”

Still, there are those in the industry who believe that the very nature of software will assure both Mr. Sinofsky and Mr. Serlet comfortable careers for the foreseeable future.

“Software is like the tax code,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a venture capitalist and a former Apple executive, who in the 1990s developed an operating system called Be. “You add lines, but you never take anything away.”

Daniel D. Turner contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/te...05compute.html





A Makeover at Ask.com: A New Look and More
Miguel Helft

Jim Lanzone, the chief executive of Ask.com, the fourth-most-used Internet search engine in the United States, believes that it is time to move beyond the 10 blue links — the standard way to display Web search results.

Starting today, Ask.com, which plans to spend close to $100 million this year to promote its service, will present answers to queries in a three-panel screen that includes standard links to search results but also lists of related searches and results from blogs, as well as video, photo, news and shopping sites.

The service, which the company calls Ask3D, is being described as a radical change to the presentation of answers by a major search engine. It is aimed at making it easier for users to find what they are looking for and comes amid a race by search engines to integrate new forms of online content into search results in an attempt to attract more users.

“There are a lot more types of content online than there were a few years ago,” Mr. Lanzone said. “But the search experience still looks like it did in 1996.”

In recent years, all major search engines, including those of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, have tried to bring new types of content into search results. Last month, for instance, Google unveiled a service it calls universal search that intersperses videos, photos, news and other content into traditional search results.

But while Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have introduced changes gradually and have largely stuck with the traditional presentations, Ask.com, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, is taking a different, if riskier, approach.

“It’s a pretty radical change,” said John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media, a blog ad network, and author of “The Search,” a book about Google. “Most of the big players have a lot to lose, so they don’t want to shock the system. Ask has less to lose.”

Ask.com’s novel approach begins as a user types in a query: the service suggests ways to refine it. Type “Bill Cl” and it will suggest “Bill Clinton Memoir,” “Bill Clinton Scandal,” “Bill Clinton Biography” and other alternatives.

But it is the results page that truly distinguishes Ask.com from others. In addition to the traditional search results, which are displayed in a central panel on about half the screen, the left quarter of the page is dedicated to suggestions on how to expand or narrow the search or for related searches.

The right quarter is reserved for different types of content depending on the query. A search for Bill Clinton, for example, will include photos, news photos, news articles, videos and even songs about him. A search for Buenos Aires will deliver photos along with the weather forecast and current time for that city, as well as a Wikipedia entry.

Mr. Lanzone hopes that the new service, which it has been testing on a site called AskX for several months, will lift the company’s share of all searches, which has been hovering at about 5 percent for much of the last year, according to comScore Inc., a Web measuring service. But, Mr. Lanzone said, to succeed, Ask.com does not necessarily have to take customers from Google or other search engines.

“The way we will grow is by increasing the frequency of use of the 30 million monthly users we already have in the U.S.,” Mr. Lanzone said, adding that on average, those users visit Ask.com three times a month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/technology/05ask.html





Navy CIO 'Recognizes the Importance of OSS to the Warfighter'
Joe Barr

John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, told Linux.com today that, effective immediately, the Department of the Navy has adopted a new policy which requires that open source software must be considered in every software acquisition the Navy makes.

Department of the Navy CIO Robert J. Carey signed a memorandum (pdf download) today entitled "DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE GUIDANCE" which first notes that misconceptions about whether or not open source software qualifies as COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) or GOTS (government off-the-shelf) software has hindered the Navy's ability to fully utilize open source software.

The new guidance memo unequivocally states that the Navy will now "treat OSS as COTS when it meets the definition of a commercial item" in an enclosure to the memorandum. The enclosure offers several definitions, the first of which follows:

(A) Any item, other than real property, which is of a type customarily used by the general public or by nongovernmental entities for purposes other than governmental purposes, and that

(i) has been sold, leased, or licensed to the general public; or
(ii) has been offered for sale, lease, or license to the general public.

Weathersby notes on the OSSI website that "The 'User Guidance Memorandum' is the first in a series of guidance documents to be developed by the DON (Department of the Navy) to address issues regarding 'Users' of open source software within all Navy IT systems." He added that "Future guidance memorandums will address 'development' and 'distribution' issues regarding open source within Navy IT environments."

The working group included representatives from the Navy, Marine Corps, the IT Industry, vendors, and the open source community. Weathersby was a part of that working group and said, “It was truly a group effort, but as a representative of the Open Source Community and commercial IT industry, I offer the men and women who worked on this project a sincere and heartfelt thanks and a special recognition for their vision, fortitude, and leadership.”

Bravo Zulu, DONCIO!

(Bravo Zulu is a Naval signal meaning "Well Done!)
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/06/06/0135204





Microsoft Trounces Pro-ODF Forces in State Battles Over Open Document Formats
Eric Lai and Gregg Keizer

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.
The proposed bills would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats. The legislation was heavily backed by supporters of ODF such as IBM, which uses the file format in its Notes 8 software, and Sun Microsystems Inc., which sells the ODF-compliant StarOffice desktop application suite.

But a bill introduced in Connecticut earlier this year met a quick death. And in Florida, Texas and Oregon, would-be laws were all killed off within the past month while being debated in legislative committees, following fierce opposition from Microsoft lobbyists and allies of the software vendor.

The most recent defeat occurred last Thursday in California, where a toned-down version of a bill in favor of open formats was declared to be stalled in the state assembly's Committee on Appropriations -- even though the bill's sponsor, Mark Leno a Democratic assemblyman for San Francisco, chairs the committee.

A spokesman for Leno declined to comment on the fate of the bill, which was introduced in February. But Microsoft also fought the proposal in California (download YouTube video).

The only recent victory for advocates of open formats was a Pyrrhic one. In Minnesota, a bill that would require state agencies to begin using an open, XML-based format by July 2008 was eventually transformed into a call for the state's IT department to study the issue. That language was attached to another bill that has been signed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, according to Don Betzold, a Democratic state senator who was the original sponsor of the open formats proposal.

Betzold said he got interested in the topic of ensuring long-term access to state documents after observing the difficulty of accessing old data stored in mainframes and on floppy disks.

Too much technology

But during the ensuing policy debate, Betzold and other politicians quickly felt overwhelmed by the technical jargon presented by each side. "I wouldn't know an open document format if it bit me on the butt," he said. "We're public policy experts. [Deciding technical standards] is not our job."

Microsoft didn't respond to requests for comment about the legislative results in the various states. But one of its close allies said they showed the unpopularity of technical mandates.

"The media stories you were reading [about the introduction of the bills] made it sound like there was some sort of revolution on the ODF front," said Melanie Wyne, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice in Washington. "But in each case, they were completely killed, stalled indefinitely or, in the case of Minnesota, turned from an outright mandate into a study bill."

Wyne's group is the lobbying arm of the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, which worked closely with Microsoft to fight the pro-ODF legislation.

Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.

"We had more bills than we ever anticipated," Marcich said. "In three years, we expect open document formats to be a requirement by most states, whether that arrives via legislation or by executive policy decision."

Massachusetts stands alone

National governments in countries such as Norway, Belgium, Denmark and France are all testing or have approved moves to open file formats. But in the U.S., the only state that currently has a policy requiring the use of open formats is Massachusetts. Its policy was developed by state executive branch officials and adopted in late 2005, via an order issued by then-CIO J. Peter Quinn.

Even in Massachusetts, though, technical and political realities have limited the impact of the open formats policy.

Microsoft lobbied heavily against the policy in the state legislature, and advocates for people with disabilities complained that ODF-compliant applications don't work with screen readers and other tools used by the blind as well as Office does. Last year, Massachusetts officials said the state planned to adopt plug-in software that would let its Office users create and save files in ODF, enabling agencies to continue using the Microsoft applications.

Microsoft has fought the various state bills even though the company is putting forward Office Open XML -- the file format used in its new Office 2007 software -- as an open standard in its own right.

The software vendor's hardball lobbying tactics also played a part in the outcome of the debate over the open formats bill that was proposed in Minnesota, Betzold said. But he added that neither side was innocent. "IBM had their own interest, and Microsoft had their own interest," he noted.

Both camps have tried to play up evidence of grass-roots support, from blogs on the pro-ODF side to letters written by small businesses against the proposed legislation -- letters that turned out to have been penned by Microsoft resellers and partners.

A heavyweight brawl

But, Wyne said, "this really is a battle among large commercial interests" -- a comment that was echoed by other people engaged in the political fighting.

In Texas, corporate lobbying was also behind both the creation and eventual demise of HB1794, a bill in favor of open formats. The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Marc Veasey, acknowledged that he became interested in the issue only after being approached by former political colleagues who now work for IBM.

But he insisted that the deciding factor in convincing him to propose the bill was a conversation with officials at the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) who told him they would welcome such legislation. The DIR officials "said that while there was nothing to prevent us from immediately going to open document formats, they would prefer, for a variety of reasons, for the legislature to say, 'We're going to this format,'" Veasey said.

That isn't the way it was recalled by Jonathan Mathers, though. Mathers is chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives and is in charge of researching bills for the committee, which considered and eventually quashed HB1794.

"The committee wanted a flat-out answer from the DIR," he said. "Was [moving to open document formats] something we should be doing right now? And did they need the backing of the committee to do it? The answer in both cases was no."

Keeping it private

The other problem, Mathers said, was the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly under oath. "Suddenly, nobody wanted to sign witness affirmation forms and testify," he said.

That undermined the credibility of each side, but it particularly damaged the position of ODF proponents. After Wyne testified publicly that in Massachusetts, only a handful of computers had thus far been converted over to using ODF. IBM declined to dispute her claims, Mathers said -- despite having earlier given "gleaming" reports on the progress of ODF in Massachusetts. "That's when I really started to question the whole bill," he said.

Veasey blamed other factors. For example, he claimed that the reform committee has a historical bias against government mandates. He also cited Microsoft's tactics. According to Veasey, the software vendor cooperated with him on initial drafts of the bill but then refused to sign off at the last moment. He said said Microsoft also hired a top local lobbying firm that went to the expense of bringing in witnesses from other states and countries.

All of that was unnecessary, Veasey said. The bill's language put Office Open XML on a level playing field with ODF, even though the former is still seeking the approval from the international standards organization ISO that the latter already has. "From my perspective, Open XML would have fit now," said Veasey, who added that he plans to continue pushing for open document formats when the Texas legislature meets for its next biennial session in 2009.

Bottled bills

Oregon's attempt to push state agencies toward open document formats -- officially known as House Bill 2920 -- met the same fate of dying in committee.

"There was heavy opposition from a certain large software company in Redmond, Wash.," a spokesman for Rep. Peter Buckley said Friday. "But we don't name names." Buckley, a Democrat, sponsored the bill in the state legislature.

His spokesman said Oregon's secretary of state also questioned the cost of converting to applications that support open formats. Buckley plans to reintroduce his bill in the next legislative session. But as in Texas, the earliest that could happen is January 2009.

In Florida, a bill that landed on the desk of Gov. Charlie Crist last Friday once included language that touted open document standards. But that section never made it out of the committee process. "It was added as an amendment but struck by the members in committee," confirmed Ray Wilson, staff director of the state senate's committee on governmental operations.

The amendment to Senate Bill 1974 would have required state agencies be able to receive documents in open formats but would not have automatically banned proprietary formats. Even so, Microsoft's reaction was swift.

According to a story posted in late April on the MarketWatch Web site, Rep. Ed Homan, the Republican legislator from Tampa who tried to amend the bill, said that Microsoft lobbyists pressured committee members to yank the addition. "They were here lickety-split," he told MarketWatch.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9022878





After Ubuntu, Windows Looks Increasingly Bad, Increasingly Archaic, Increasingly Unfriendly

The Changing Trajectory of Software
Paul Nowak

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a long-time Linux sys admin role puts me in a great position to assess Ubuntu. Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I've long hoped it would go - easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too but more on that later. It has some elegance to it - bet you never heard that about a Linux desktop before.

There are many night-and-day differences between Windows and Ubuntu and, for a guy that does 80% standard office tasks and the rest of the time I'm doing Linux admin tasks, it was nearly all in favor of Ubuntu after the first few weeks of the transition. Overall, my productivity and the scope of things I can do with Ubuntu far exceed what I could do with Windows and just as importantly Ubuntu (like any Linux would) lets me easily create my own productivity shortcuts of a variety of sorts.

One of the things that's become clear as I've gotten used to the appliance-like experience of Ubuntu is that the future of software in an open source-dominated world is going to be significantly different than the world dominated by Microsoft. So what distant point on the horizon has Ubuntu shone a light on for me? Simple. Software will increasingly compete on ease of use in the total software experience more than on features. The future will be more about being simple than about any other dimension.

Here are some recent use cases:

_ I needed to rebuild my T60 with a fresh OS. Which was easier? MS Windows with a factory install disk, separate disks for Office and for Virus protection and then a lot of hunt-and-peck downloading for various apps like Thunderbird, Firefox, SSH, and Calendar or....Ubuntu with one CD and an OS that includes an integrated, extensible, and slick software package manager where all the software is approved and tailored to the installation?

_ I needed to rebuild a T43. I tried to use the rebuild partition included on the HD but it was corrupt. So I tried to make factory-install disks but the corrupt partition prevented it. Next option? Call Lenovo and get disks sent for $51. That process took five days and eight CD-ROMs from start to finish. With Ubuntu, this process takes three hours max, not four days and there's no software keys or other things to track down. The labor involved is less than a fifth with Ubuntu and the delivered product is a lot more productive - for my use models anyway.

_ I needed to resubscribe to Symantec on a Windows machine. Again this is a 30-60 minute timeout from production AND a $49 charge AND a hassle with product keys and sending data about my machine and purchases around to companies that I'd choose not have it if I had a choice. But I didn't since Windows XP needs Symantec's products badly even though these scanning and cleaning products degrade machine performance badly - even with a gig of RAM.

_ And I now hear that Windows Vista renames the partition it's installed on what used to be the C: partition. I need to check out this story but the very idea of automatic partition renaming is insane to even contemplate.

So my machine sings with Ubuntu. Having no virus scanning alone unleashes a responsiveness that makes the power of the T60's Intel dual-core shine. And what am I noticing most about all of this?

Well, first off Ubuntu is good as a productivity platform. Without that, the rest wouldn't matter a bit. But since Ubuntu is not only good on features but reliability then at least some of us would crawl over broken glass to get it installed.

But, in fact, there's no broken glass in the picture. It's the opposite. Ubuntu's installation is so easy, and maintaining it once it's installed is so simple that Ubuntu nearly falls into your machine like a ying to the hardware's yang. Once there, Ubuntu happily makes a home in your head with hardly a blip. I think Ubuntu actually dropped my blood pressure. Not something you typically find when switching ALL your software for something that's about as alien to Windows as it possibly can be.

Once that major hurdle is cleared, then the other big issues come into focus. Ease of install, easy updates, easy software maintenance, easy data backups. After experiencing Ubuntu, the world of Windows looks increasingly bad, increasingly archaic, increasingly like a neighborhood that makes life hard. Why should I put up with what Windows makes me go through if I don't have to?

I've used rsync for backups for years. I back up my mail, my Thunderbird data, and "my document" directory (i.e., /home/xxxx/). One of these backup commands looks like this and sits in a single shell script and runs from cron once a day (I've already sent the ssh key to the backup target server so no need to manually login to the backup server for this command to run):

rsync -avgz /home/xxxx/.mozilla-thunderbird/ root@mycomcastipnumber:/hdb/ibmt60-ubuntu-mozilla-tbird/ >>
/home/xxxx/backup-.txt

That little command executes in a few seconds to a few minutes no matter where I am on the Internet and even if I've added some decently sized files to my computer. I've got my home router set up to pass the ssh port 22 through to a Linux server sitting in my attic. Quick and painless backups run without a hitch. It's a thing of beauty. I use the same solution for my servers so having a single platform from server to desktop has benefits and this is but one of them. I used to sweat about my Windows backups in the old days - if I did them every two weeks, I was happy. Ubuntu dropped my blood pressure on backups alone by 10% and now I have to decide how often is too often to do a backup. Also, I'm up on the MIRRA product but, trust me, you don't want to forget a password there.

Through a similar setup, I can also print to my home printer from any Internet connection. This is not a Windows- or Linux-specific feature but it's nice to have and I use it more than I expected. This is just good fun but it may also drop my blood pressure a point or two.

So far, none of this is news to those in the know about Ubuntu. It's not news but it is a big deal. A very big deal. Ubuntu is getting rave reviews: it's a productive platform, it's a reliable platform, it's a durable platform, it's an upgradeable platform, it's an easy-to-install platform, and adoption is through the roof.

What's changing in all this?

In my view, once you realize the platform is viable from a daily productivity standpoint (exceedingly so), the #1 thing that Ubuntu is then changing is ease of access to software. If I had decided to rebuild my PC with Windows XP - we won't even talk about Vista - this is what I was looking at:

1) Buy OEM Install disks from Lenovo because my rebuild partition was corrupt - $51.

2) Buy a Symantec subscription because I was done with the 90-day free trial - $49.

3) Buy an extra 512MB of RAM because XP couldn't run Firefox, Thunderbird, MS Word, MS Excel, and SSH all at once with 512MB of installed RAM - $104.

4) Install all of the above with product keys along the way - four hours? Maybe six? Maybe more because the tools for getting 2GB-3GB of mail data back into Thunderbird in Windows aren't nearly as good as the same tools in Linux.

That's $204 just to get me back to where I thought I was two months back - i.e., a machine with XP and Office on it. Symantec alone is going to want to pick my pocket again at some point.

Ubuntu releases me from these costs and from these long-term headaches:

1) Viruses - I no longer worry and I no longer need to check my PC - that's a relief. You can pick nits here about security but the bottom line is Ubuntu is orders of magnitude better.

2) Vulnerabilities - Windows is like Swiss cheese with so many vulnerabilities that it's sick - you can't connect XP to a public Internet connection (i.e., behind a router is OK but direct to the net isn't). Ubuntu? It's Linux - no worries.

3) Thanks to #1 and #2, I'm free from products like Symantec and Norton and the dollar expense, the complexity of administering them (those pop-ups are annoying and a productivity hit), and wondering when they expire next.

4) Software updates for the entire collection of software on the machine are simple in Ubuntu.

5) Backups are automatic.

That's batting for the cycle. Am I missing anything? Anything at all? Yes. Printing is easier in Ubuntu for older printers like the HP Laserjet 4 on a D-Link print server in the office and the HP 6L on an SMC print server in the home office. Multifunction printers are more of a challenge. A little care in printer purchases going forward takes this issue off the plate and I'm fine with the printer solution in place that has largely been stumbled upon.

The one bit of software that was Windows-related was a QuickBooks Timer. I haven't needed it because I began editing the output of that program in Excel six months ago because the QuickBooks Timer was too much of a clod interface to be productive. When I switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice on Windows XP, I continued not using the QuickBooks Timer. Doing the same manual editing of these QuickBooks Timer output files in OpenOffice Calc on Linux is a breeze. If there were a QuickBooks Timer for Linux, I wouldn't use it so I haven't checked for it.

In sum, what's changing about software? The installation, maintenance, and use of software in Windows have become a burden. A huge burden. And I don't think the average Windows user realizes how much out of their way they are going to keep their Windows PCs working. Windows challenges users and makes for a very expensive user experience in time and dollars if users follow the book and use the latest virus protection, keep that protection updated, and avoid the pitfalls that are squarely on the path that normal users use. In the best case, you end up with a machine that has a lot of crapware installed on it and is slow and clunky to use. In the more typical case, you end up with a machine that spirals to a grinding halt over six to 12 months - like the T43 I'm working on right now. A machine that has trouble opening an Excel file in three minutes because it has so much software competing for disk access and CPU cycles.

My experience with Linux on the server with its multi-hundred day uptimes broken by hardware upgrades, not software reboots, and with no performance degradation even at high disk utilizations tells me Ubuntu isn't taking me down with it. My blood pressure is truly low now.

I'm literally running out the door to get the word rolling on this changing dynamic. It's that big. And a word to IBM and Lenovo: if you're listening, Ubuntu as an OEM install on your Thinkpad T and X series would be a huge win for you and for the the OSS adoption curve. This is a classic case of experience changing perception and it's got me to thinking about a seamless platform from server to desktop to phone - think about it.
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/382946.htm





Microsoft Aims to Ignite Careers of New Artists
Ed Oswald

Microsoft is launching a new program that will give new music artists an opportunity to get discovered by 30 million Zune, MSN, and Xbox users through a program it calls "Ignition."

Participants in the offering will receive a month's worth of prominent placement on Zune Marketplace, Zune.net, MSN's entertainment Web site, and Xbox Live Marketplace. The first band to participate is UK based Maximo Park.

However, Microsoft has strict policies about what content it will use. The bands must agree to an exclusive contract with the Redmond company, and promise to provide exclusive content to Microsoft's entertainment properties.

"Consumers are looking for ways to find new music, and Ignition helps connect artists with potential new fans by giving them multiple opportunities to listen to, watch or read about the artist across Microsoft's online platforms," Zune music marketing head Christina Calio said.

For example, with Maximo Park, Microsoft will allow its users to download free music through Zune.net and the Marketplace, access videos on Xbox Live, and promotional streams and content through its entertainment Web sites.

More information on the band and the program can be found on the Zune Web site.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Micr...sts/1180981954





Lala.com to Send Songs Directly to iPods


Lala.com’s John Kuch

Agreement with Warner Music Group is first step
AP

Entrepreneurs behind Silicon Valley startup Lala.com hope to transform the CD-swapping site into a music portal where members can download songs directly to their iPods, bypassing the computer hard drives where most music is stored.

The Palo Alto-based company has an agreement in principle to sell nearly 200,000 songs from Warner Music Group Corp. for 99 cents each, starting Tuesday.

Members will also be able to play the Warner songs for free, and the company will pay Warner a penny each time someone listens to a song.

“This is a turning point for music companies and the entire industry,” said co-founder Bill Nguyen, 36, who founded six previous startups, including several that went public and one that sold for $850 million. “I have no idea if it will work — this is a bet.”

Most other sites that provide streaming music charge a subscription fee or stream 30-second samples. Napster Inc., which has 830,000 members, has subscription fees and advertisements.

Lala.com contains no advertisements; revenue comes from members who buy new CDs or swap used CDs with each other for a fee of $1 per disc. The site has about 300,000 members and is backed by venture firms Bain Capital and Ignition Partners.

Nguyen estimated the 23-person company would pay $140 million for licensing fees over the next two years if member numbers grow as projected. Executives are talking with the other big labels: Sony BMG, EMI and Universal.

“We’ll be reporting some crazy losses at first but we’re prepared to weather the storm,” said Nguyen, who sports a boyish grin and flip-flops.

Huge risk?
Analysts said Lala is taking a huge risk. As a full-service music site, it will compete not only against Apple Inc.’s iTunes, which sells 5 million songs a day, but e-commerce powerhouses Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc.

“It’s an audacious plan,” said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner Inc. “They’re not saying what a lot of new media companies say — ‘We want to leverage your content without taking on any of the cost or risk.’ They’re saying to the labels, ‘We’ll deal with you, we’ll license the content and we’ll pay for it.’ It’s an old school move.”

To download songs to an iPod, members must download a 3-megabyte plug-in that runs on all major browsers on Windows and Macintosh computers. Because the songs aren’t stored on the PC hard drive, the primary source for files pirated on peer-to-peer networks, Lala will dispense with traditional digital rights management, which controls which devices can play a song.

Founders were secretive about how the technology works, noting that they’ve filed for numerous patents. The technology worked well in demonstrations last week.

Susan Kevorkian, a consumer audio analyst with research firm IDC, said Lala could cut into iTunes’ base but would most likely be a windfall for Apple.

“ITunes has historically been about driving hardware sales,” she said. “If there’s another compelling source of music for the iPod, it makes the experience of owning an iPod that much more compelling.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19045703/





'Stubborn' PC Owner Takes on Gateway

El Dorado resident fights to avoid arbitration over a new computer he says is defective.
Hudson Sangree

As Grizzly Flats resident Dennis Sheehan tells his story, he has lived a computer buyer's worst nightmare after purchasing a defective PC from Gateway last year.

Gateway wouldn't fix the machine, replace it or refund his money, he alleges, so he filed a small claims case in El Dorado County against the multibillion-dollar corporation.

"I could've bought another computer, but I'm a little bit stubborn," said the 46-year-old Sheehan, who describes himself as a retired real estate investor.

As Gateway tells it in court filings, the company replaced Sheehan's computer a few months after he first complained, and he kept both machines.

The company's bigger concern, however, is that Sheehan sued in court and did not arbitrate the case, as required by Gateway's sales agreement.

In that regard, the case highlights a reality for today's consumers.

Arbitration clauses -- slipped into sales agreements and scroll-down boxes on computer screens -- require a dispute to be settled in private forums chosen by companies instead of in public courtrooms.

Often unaware, consumers agree to arbitration -- with the click of a mouse or even simply by using a product -- and give up their right to sue.

Corporations contend that private arbitration saves everyone time and money, allowing disputes to be decided in one session by a neutral arbiter and avoiding lengthy and costly litigation in far-flung locations.

But some critics say arbitration allows companies to avoid consumer lawsuits, including multimillion-dollar class actions. With the bottom line at stake, corporations such as Gateway will go to great lengths to defend those agreements, they say.

"We are at a point now where every large corporation that has the ability to say 'take it or leave it' is opting out of the civil justice system," said Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco trial lawyer and expert on arbitration agreements. "Some do it in a straightforward manner. Others do it in an underhanded manner."

According to court papers and interviews, Sheehan's story started in January 2006 when he ordered a Gateway desktop computer with a widescreen monitor, intending to use it to start a sign-making business.

Right out of the box, he says, the computer displayed scattered graphics and wouldn't work properly.

He says he called a Gateway salesman five times and sent him an e-mail to get an authorization number to send the computer back, but his phone calls and message were never returned.

Then, over the course of months, Sheehan said he called Gateway technical support dozens of times. Technicians kept telling him the problems could be fixed, but they never were, he says.

Eventually, Gateway refused to provide him with any more technical support, and despite his repeated demands, the company would not return his money or replace his computer, Sheehan contends.

So, Sheehan said he decided to file a case against Gateway in small claims court, where lawyers are banned and citizens can seek basic justice. A March trial was scheduled in Placerville.

Gateway responded with a Bay Area lawyer and a 2-inch thick stack of legal documents.

The company had the case moved to a higher court and then tried to compel private arbitration on its own terms.

Sheehan argued in a court filing that he had never accepted Gateway's arbitration agreement.

He didn't receive any paperwork with the computer that explained the agreement, he said. And the computer's graphics were so scattered that he says he couldn't read the box of terms and conditions or click the "accept" button.

A Gateway technician had him bypass the screen altogether, he said.

Gateway responded in court papers that its terms of sale and warranty are included with every shipment, and that it was impossible for Sheehan to use the computer without accepting its terms and conditions or to bypass the screen.

In a tentative ruling on May 24, El Dorado Superior Court Judge Daniel Proud sided with Sheehan and said the dispute should remain in small claims court.

"The court finds that based on the evidence submitted, the respondent has met his burden to prove there was no agreement to arbitrate the subject dispute," Proud wrote in his ruling.

Gateway's lawyers asked the judge to hear them again in the matter.

On Monday, Attorney William Portello, a partner in a Concord law firm, and Sheehan, a high-school dropout who has argued his own case, faced off in a Cameron Park courtroom.

Portello tried to persuade Proud to change his ruling and send the case to arbitration, where he said it belonged.

"This is no different from virtually every other software and computer company in America," Portello told the judge.

Sheehan again said he had never received the arbitration agreement via written materials or his computer screen, and told the judge he never received a replacement computer.

Gateway insisted to Proud that the company had delivered a new PC.

Proud, who urged the parties to settle their case, said he would take the matter under submission. He has 90 days to issue a final ruling.

Portello could not talk about the case outside of court, and David Hallisey, Gateway's director of communications, said the company does not discuss pending litigation.

Sheehan says he will continue to fight the case as long as Gateway refuses to give him justice.

"I started the battle," he said. "I don't want to be the one who walks away because they're muscling me."

Palefsky said that it is ultimately up to Gateway to show that a customer accepted their arbitration agreement.

"Gateway has the burden of proving the existence of a contract," he said.

If Sheehan continues to be successful in the trial court, Palefsky said, he can look forward to a protracted appeal process, with hundreds of pages of legal filings and years of delay.

At some point, he will likely be overwhelmed by the vast legal and financial resources of Gateway.

"This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway," Palefsky said. "By winning, he's lost."
http://www.sacbee.com/291/story/209144.html





P2P Defendant Settles With RIAA After Motion for Sanctions Backfires
Eric Bangeman

A federal judge in Texas has sanctioned the attorney of a defendant in one of the RIAA's countless file-sharing lawsuits after the attorney himself requested sanctions for the RIAA's counsel. Not long afterwards, the parties agreed to the settlement and the case will be dismissed.

Atlantic v. Heslep started like every other case, and after the defendant Diane Heslep decided not to avail herself of the record labels' settlement offer, the case went to court. Heslep denied infringement, choosing to fight against the RIAA's allegations. Unlike other cases we have reported on, the RIAA's case that Heslep had directly infringed the labels' copyrights was relatively strong.
The evidence

On January 6, 2005, the RIAA's investigative arm, MediaSentry, discovered an AOL user sharing files on Kazaa's network under the username "mke@KaZaA." One of the files in her shared directory was a Kazaa playlist file named Diane.kpl. AOL subsequently identified the user in question as Diane Heslep and confirmed that a screen name assigned to her was logged into AOL at the time that MediaSentry came across the shared files.

Heslep offered to let the RIAA examine her hard drive on a couple of conditions. First, the allegations of "continuing infringement" would have to be dropped from the lawsuit. She also demanded a $10,000 payment and dismissal of claims if a forensic investigation showed no evidence of infringement. The RIAA responded by dropping the continuing infringement claims—only alleging infringement at the time and date MediaSentry found the files along with "other occasions before January 6, 2006"—but declining her terms for a forensic inspection.

Heslep said that she was at work during the time of the alleged infringement, but her attorney declined to respond to the plaintiff's request for information on who else might have been using her account at the time. Her attorney also failed to turn over an e-mail from AOL confirming that her screen name was indeed in use under the IP address noted by MediaSentry.
The end game

Heslep then accused the RIAA's attorneys of violating Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, saying that they violated the prohibition against filing motions for the purposes of harassment and unnecessarily increasing the cost of litigation in a motion noticed by Declan McCullagh at Cnet. The court agreed that sanctions were appropriate, but against Heslep's attorney, not the RIAA's. "The Court also notes that it has already sanctioned [Heslep's attorney Thomas] Kimble for opposing discovery unreasonably, in bad faith, and in violation of Dondi Properties Corp. v. Commerce Savings & Loan Assoc." wrote Judge Terry R. Means in an order. "For this reason, frivolous motions for sanctions that harass the opposing party’s attorney, chill that attorney’s zealous representation of his client, and needlessly increase the cost of litigation cannot go unpunished. Accordingly, the Court concludes that sanctions are appropriate against Kimble."

The sanction against Kimble was apparently the death knell for Heslep's defense. Just nine days after the judge ruled on the motion of sanctions, the plaintiffs and defendant filed a Joint Notice of Settlement. Terms of the settlement are not known, other than the fact that Heslep will be permanently enjoined from infringing the record labels' copyrights in the future. Each party will be responsible for their own attorneys' fees except for those due to Heslep's request for sanctions; she will have to foot the bill there.

Atlantic v. Heslep shows that if there is strong indication of direct infringement by the defendant, it's going to be hard to convince a judge otherwise. Arguments that the damages sought by the RIAA are excessive, that making files available does not equal infringement, and that the music industry is barred from recovering further damages for infringement under the $115 million settlement with Kazaa may amount to nothing if there is compelling evidence that the RIAA does indeed have the right person in its legal cross-hairs.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...backfires.html





Suing Children, the Elderly and the Dead - A Brief History of Music & DRM
Kirsten DeHaan

Introduction

DRM can stand for a couple different things depending on how you feel about the subject. Those who believe DRM’s primary purpose is to protect the rights of copyright holders say it stands for “Digital Rights Management.” Those who believe DRM serves to restrict the rights of consumers refer to it as “Digital Restrictions Management.” The only real difference in the two terms is that one implies protection, while the other connotes restriction. And because DRM is an economic issue whose parties have varying levels of involvement, one could reason that both have some truth to them.

In the beginning…

DRM is the term used to describe the technologies used by publishers or copyright owners to control access or usage of digital data or hardware. It can also refer to restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work or device. The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized duplication of a copyright holder’s work to ensure a steady revenue stream.

But the issue has stretched beyond DRM, as parties on both sides are beginning to agree that DRM is an unreliable form of copyright protection/restriction at best. In order to understand why this is, one must look at what DRM had hoped to accomplish.

In the days before digital music, copying CDs, tapes or records required a certain amount of ambition to accomplish. There were issues of acquiring the equipment, choosing a medium on which to copy and usually a loss in quality as songs were transferred using analog technology.

The digital age changed everything. Suddenly, users could copy music with very little effort and expense without sacrificing quality. The music industry obviously realized the potential for copyright troubles and needed a method for controlling the distribution of music. Enter DRM. DRM was never intended to be the evil technology that many see it as today, but as you know, the path to technology hell is paved with good intentions.

On December 7, 1999, Napster sealed its fate as the catalyst for the creation of modern day DRM. The P2P network garnered the RIAA’s attention by allowing users to share music files in increasingly larger numbers. And instead of adjusting their business model to keep up with changes in technology, the RIAA viewed the program as a rogue threat and went into attack mode. Napster was methodically dismembered as the RIAA used its many media connections to drown out any hope for Napster to advance its position as a possible legitimate music distribution channel. The RIAA’s answer to any future attempts at illegal music distribution became DRM and judicial warfare.

RIAA

So what is the RIAA? The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is a trade group that represents the recording industry. Its members consist primarily of private organizations and corporate entities like record labels and distributors. It was founded in 1952, primarily to maintain the standard technical standards that were applied to vinyl records. Since then, they have expanded to become the ad hoc legal arm of the recording industry.

Ostensibly, the RIAA’s primary purpose is to collect and administer the distribution of music licenses and royalties. It certifies “gold” and “platinum” albums and generally ensures that the recording industry maintains a tight grip on its business model.
Unfortunately, in recent years DRM has been a hard wall that the RIAA has been unable to overcome. Since 2006, the RIAA has initiated over 20,000 lawsuits and has settled about 2,500 of them.

DRM & CDs

Their problems began in 2002 when Bertelsmann became the first corporation to use DRM on audio CDs. Although initially just installed on promotional CDs, all CDs from Bertelsmann labels would eventually include DRM software. The problem soon became apparent, as many consumers could no longer play the CDs in certain devices, including some car CD players. DRM had left mainstream music users, many of whom may or may not have had experience with digital music, with a bitter taste.

In 2005, Sony BMG found itself in hot water when its CDs were found to install DRM software to the user’s computer without notification. The software even included a rootkit, leaving consumers computers open to security vulnerabilities. The news led to a massive recall on Sony’s CDs, and once again left consumers disappointed in DRM.

In January of 2007, EMI became the last major publisher to stop publishing audio CDs with DRM. The publisher stated that the costs of DRM did not measure up to the results.

Fair Use

So what’s the big deal? Well, in the United States, Fair Use is the crux under which the opposition to DRM can be built. Fair use is a doctrine in copyright law that allows for a limited use of copyrighted material. Fair use is based on the free speech rights enumerated in the United States constitution and is exclusively found in the U.S. In other countries, a similar concept known as “fair dealing” is in place.

The short version is that to determine whether something is subject to fair use, one has to look at four factors that were codified by Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh.

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If it is found that the use of the copyrighted material does not detract from the owners copyright and does not unfairly benefit the user, then it is almost always within the rights of that user. For example, if you wanted to burn a copy of your favorite CD to be used in your CD player at home and in your car, as long as you made the initial purchase this is well within your rights as the CDs owner.

Other uses of Fair Use include: copying from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment on it; using a piece of copyrighted material in the teaching process; making derivative works from copyrighted material purely for personal use. But laws can be fuzzy. The RIAA has used this to launch a series of lawsuits against everyone ranging from small children to the dead.

Court Cases

The RIAA launched a massive crusade to seek out and prosecute individuals who it suspected had been involved in music piracy. By the time Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, New York, decided to take her case to trial in 2005, the RIAA had launched nearly 14,800 lawsuits. Up until Elektra v. Santangelo, the RIAA had been content with settling lawsuits in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. Santangelo claimed that a friend’s child was likely the one who actually downloaded the files and refused to settle. The RIAA disagreed, claiming that their methods for tracking illegal downloads were relatively error-free.

But the RIAA doesn’t have the track record to back up an error-free methodology for tracking copyright infringers. In 2003, the RIAA falsely accused Sarah Ward of illegally sharing music. The lawsuit claimed that the 66-year-old sculptor had illegally shared more than 2,000 songs through Kazaa and threatened to make her liable for up to $150,000 per song. It was found, among other things, that Ward used a Macintosh computer, and therefore could not run Kazaa, which was built to run on Windows based systems. The RIAA was forced to withdraw the lawsuit.

In another mistaken case, the RIAA filed a lawsuit in which 83-year-old Gertrude Walton was names as a defendant. Walton was accused of sharing over 700 songs on P2P networks. The only problem was that Mrs. Walton had passed away in December 2004. The RIAA concluded that Walton was most likely not the person they had been looking for and dismissed the case.

Opponents Of DRM

EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization that was founded in 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow. In recent history, it has come out strongly against DRM. It makes sense; their entire operation was created around the concept of protecting the First Amendment and preserving free speech. DRM, in some of its more crippling forms, destroys “fair use” and undermines property rights.

Historically, the EFF has had as its main goal to educate the press, policy makers and public at large about issues of technology and to act to defend civil liberties as they relate to the digital age.

The EFF opposes the way that the RIAA defends its copyrights, and has funded legal defenses for those who have been wrongfully litigated against for “illegal” downloads. Given that the RIAA has been known to sue children, the elderly and even the dead — the EFF is often successful in these cases.

Defective By Design

Unlike the EFF, which focuses on the entire gamut of digital policies, Defective by Design has as its focus on DRM (as they call, Digital Restrictions Management). Like their name implies, DBD believes that DRM as it is used today is by its nature flawed and wants to abolish its use. Their stated goals are to bring public awareness to DRM as an issue and to increase participation in the fight to rid the world of it.

Defective By Design sponsors protests against DRM, supports “tagging” campaigns on products that contain DRM, initiated the “Day Against DRM” outside of Apple stores in the US and abroad and is supported by the Free Software Foundation amongst others.

Free Software Foundation

Founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman, FSF is the organization primarily responsible for the GNU movement. The goal of the GNU project is to create a sufficient body of free software to allow a person to survive without any software that is not free. They are a major force behind many Linux projects, including GNOME.

Where do they fit into the DRM landscape? They are staunch opponents to it and have come out in support of organizations like Defective By Design.

DRM-free alternatives

As the digital music scene slowly comes to grips with the fact that people want to do what they please with the music they purchase, DRM-free alternatives are becoming more readily available. Each promises reasonable prices, a slick interface and tons of music, and each hopes to lead us into a world free from the shackles of DRM. Today, where the Googles, Myspaces and Facebooks reign supreme, which music service will take its place as leader of the digital music revolution?

To answer this, we must look at a few of the other sources of DRM-free music that are currently available. It appears Amie Street, eMusic, We7 and Grooveshark all fit this criteria, each providing its own solution to providing legal, yet reasonable music downloads.

Amie Street has a unique strategy in which songs start off free and rise in price depending on the number of times a song is downloaded. The more a song is downloaded, the more its price increases. The thought is that users will be more likely to explore music in hopes of discovering a song before it rises in price. Currently, the service is limited to independent music, which shouldn’t be a problem as I’m sure you’ll spend most of your time sifting through all those free songs anyway.

The eMusic download service is another alternative, providing users with the option to subscribe to a monthly plan in which users have a set number of downloads per month at a set price. Downfalls include a lack of mainstream music and no music streaming. Come to think of it, subscribing to a monthly plan in which users have a set number of downloads per month should probably be considered a downfall also.

We7 takes a balanced approach to music downloading. It takes something you love, DRM-free music, and combines it with something you hate, advertisements. And when I say combine, I mean literally. The company attaches advertisements to the front of downloaded songs. Don’t worry though. The advertisements are based on a consumer’s personal demographics such as age, location and gender, which I’m sure you’ll agree, ensures a quality listening experience.

That leaves us with Grooveshark. I’m not here to tell you Grooveshark is the end all, perfect DRM-free music downloading site, but that’s what it aspires to be. Grooveshark goes beyond creating a music downloading service and instead seeks to create a music-sharing community. It’s Facebook meets LimeWire without the poking and RIAA lawsuits. Users are not only encouraged, but rewarded for contributing to the community by being paid for the music they share. And with music ranging from trendy pop to Bambuco, Grooveshark is P2P the way it should be; music as varied as the people that comprise it.

Timeline

1952 – RIAA founded primarily to maintain the standard technical standards that were applied to vinyl records.

1985 – Free Software Foundation founded.

1990 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation founded with the goal to educate the press, policy makers and public at large about issues of technology and to act to defend civil liberties as they relate to the digital age.

1999 – Napster launches P2P music sharing network in June. RIAA sues Napster in for copyright infringement in December.

2001 – Judge ruled that Napster had to stop distributing copyrighted material through its network, effectively shutting it down.

2002 – Bertelsmann (BMG, Arista and RCA) becomes the first corporation to use DRM on audio CDs.

2003 – RIAA falsely accuses 66-year-old Sarah Ward of illegally sharing music.

2005 – Sony BMG added DRM technology on over 20 million CDs that automatically installed a software program on users’ computers. The software and End User Licensing Agreement severely limited users’ rights to fair use and leads to massive CD recall.

RIAA files lawsuit against deceased Grandmother, to no avail.

Elektra v. Santangelo goes to court after RIAA’s launch of nearly 14,800 lawsuits in the previous two years.

2006 – Defective By Design Campaign launched with anti-DRM protest at Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

2007 – EMI stopped using DRM on audio CDs, because “the costs of DRM do not measure up to the results.” Audio CDs containing DRM are no longer released by major publishers.
http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2007...-of-drm-music/





Does Digital Fingerprinting Work?: An Investigative Report
Liz Gannes

Audio and visual fingerprinting of copyrighted video is seen as the best way to combat infringement, but in NewTeeVee’s testing this week across multiple sites, it did not work. We were surprised to be able to upload multiple times the exact same copyrighted file, even after we explicitly told the hosting site and the fingerprinting provider about it and they took it down.

What follows is a description of our procedure, accompanied by the vehement disclaimer that we were doing this only for educational purposes.

Microsoft recently took its Soapbox user-contributed video site out of the public eye until it could implement filtering technology from Audible Magic. Last Friday, it relaunched, supposedly armed and ready to fend off copyrighted content. So we asked our intrepid reporter Craig Rubens to test how the system worked by uploading a Daily Show clip.

Surprise, surprise, the clip went up like a charm (screenshot). We called Microsoft to ask what was going on. You should talk to Audible Magic, they said; our system is only as good as their index. We called Audible Magic, who essentially blamed Microsoft, for only implementing the audio version of its software. The reps then set off to nail down statements from their companies, a process that took most of the week.

Only sometime last night did the clip finally get taken off Soapbox, replaced with a copyright violation notice. To see if the system had been corrected we uploaded it again today, and again it appeared about 40 minutes later. At this point, if all went as it was supposed to, the video should have been automatically added to the index of banned clips, and then rejected when we uploaded a duplicate. But again, we had no problem.

Concerns about whether digital fingerprinting is ready for action have persisted, and market leader YouTube has hesitated to deploy its “Claim Your Content” system while it is being perfected. However, confidence in fingerprinting has moved past the optimism stage. “This technology works,” says MPAA Vice-President Dean Garfield, as reported by BusinessWeek.

Audible Magic has bagged most every high profile deal in video filtering: MySpace, Dailymotion, Break.com, and GoFish/Bolt.

The Audible Magic representative insinuated the company’s technology was deployed in fuller form on MySpace — which recently launched its “Take Down Stay Down” and filtering system using AM’s system — so we also tried uploading the clip there. Interestingly, that also posed no problem. See it in action here.

Below is Craig’s description of the procedure he used to upload his clip to Soapbox. He says after about 50 minutes of “processing” the video went live and was playable. The MySpace experiment was even quicker, taking about five minutes.

1. Search for “Daily Show” on YouTube
2. Select first clip of actual Daily Show with Jon Stewart content and download it via KeepVid.com (selected video)
3. Convert the video to a Soapbox approved format (shockingly, Microsoft doesn’t like .flv)
4. Upload Daily Show clip to Soapbox
5. Allow time for Soapbox to process, convert, and (supposedly) scan for copyrighted material.

Here are the official statements Microsoft and Audible Magic sent yesterday after days of deliberation and phone calls about the issue.

“We are continuing to work with Audible Magic to fine tune our implementation of their proactive automatic filtering services to best meet the needs of our content partners. The fact that a clip of any unauthorized copyright material slipped through is unfortunate, but that’s why we also provide rich notice and takedown tools to content owners to automate and expedite the process of identifying and removing unauthorized content. We are committed to working in partnership with the industry to continue to evolve our technologies and solutions for customers and partners.” — Rob Bennett, general manager for Entertainment and Video Services at MSN

“Audible Magic’s technology has the ability to identify content such as ‘The Daily Show’ clip in question. We are working closely with Microsoft to customize our solution in order to meet the business needs of their Soapbox service.” — Vance Ikezoye, founder and CEO of Audible Magic

Though all these systems, as advertised, depend largely on identifying content once in order to block it future times, we made no bones about identifying our uploads as Daily Show clips. We also had no problem uploading the exact same file after we had informed the proper people about it and they had taken it down.

Of all the videos on the web, Comedy Central clips are a huge bone of contention, figuring into Viacom’s pending $1 billion-plus lawsuit against YouTube and its parent Google. Funnily enough, the original Daily Show video is still live on YouTube.
http://newteevee.com/2007/06/08/does...gative-report/





Why DRM Won't Ever Work
Jeremy Allison

Scotty the Engineer was always my favorite character in the original "Star Trek". Sure, Captain Kirk was the hero, he was at the heart of all the action, and got to romance all the green-skinned women, but if he wanted that amazing ship to actually do anything, he had to ask Scotty. He had to ask him nicely. If you think about it, Scotty had all the real power in that show. If he told Kirk the dilithium crystals were drained, there was never any real argument, the captain would cry like a whining child, but in the end he had to face reality and wait for Scotty to fix it.

I always thought Scotty should have said "no" to the captain more often, especially when Kirk would ask for something completely outrageous that, more often than not, violated the laws of physics. But engineers don't like saying no to management, and poor Scotty would end up having to make the magic happen week after week, until even as a child I began to suspect that his skills had more to do with the scriptwriters than his deep understanding of the laws of the universe. Still, he did end up with a reputation as a miracle worker, which can't be so bad.

Trying to make Digital Rights Management (DRM) work in the real world is like asking engineers to do "Star Trek" style magic, rather than real engineering. DRM simply cannot work. For less technical readers who might be wondering what I'm going on about, DRM is the attempt to control copying on a digital file, or sometimes even to add a restriction on how many times such a file can be copied. It's usually applied to online music or movies, but it's never sold to the consumer for what it actually is, an added restriction on what can be done with something they've paid for. DRM is always explained as the "wonderful new technology that will help protect your medical records from thieves." The truth is, it can't even do that.

DRM is often spoken about in conjunction with encryption, which actually is a massively useful technology that can protect your medical records from thieves. DRM uses encryption, but encryption isn't the same thing as DRM. Encryption is based on secrets, usually known only to two communicating parties. People snooping encrypted traffic end up with what appears to be random noise, only the people who have the secret key can make sense of it. Decades of real scientific research goes into creating sophisticated encryption algorithms and methods such as public-key cryptography, on which almost all Internet commerce is based, which allows a secret key to be derived from publicly available information. But the point of all encryption is that the key is a secret. It has to be a secret, as it's the basis of the privacy between the two parties.

Now let's consider DRM. DRM is applied to digital data by one party, usually the vendor of a music or movie, and encrypts the data to be protected using an encryption algorithm and a key. The other party in the transaction, the consumer of the music or movie, is then given the encrypted data, knowledge of what algorithm is used to encrypt the data, and a copy of the encryption key used to encrypt the data. All of these things must be supplied to the consumer in order for them to be able to use the data; without them, there's no way the consumer can listen to or watch the data they've just bought. Yet DRM is supposed to be able to restrict what the customer can do with the data. How can this be done given the fundamental reality of the situation described above? The magic of dilithium crystals?

Sure, there's gobs and gobs of extra software in the process which is usually run at the consumer end of the deal, trying to obfuscate and hide the fact that the consumer possesses all the information needed to decrypt the file they've just been given. They have to have been given this, else they can't listen to the song or watch the movie. Claiming that this process can ever be made secure from the people you've just given all this information to is like believing you can create a secure bank vault by drawing chalk lines on the pavement, piling the money inside and asking customers to "respect these boundaries". The media industries are trying to sell what they consider to be valuable data without any means of prohibiting access to it. This is not a business model that is ever going to work.

The recent case of the release of the hidden encryption keys for high-definition format DVD's is the perfect illustration of this fantasy engineering approach to the realities of the Internet age. This new "super-secure" DRM system has now been broken twice. Ironically, the breaking of the DRM might be the push that causes the popular adoption of these new HD-DVD formats. Data formats that can't easily be copied to other devices tend to end up being unpopular, as the physical devices that store digital media are subject to wear and tear. One curious child with sharp fingernails could accidentally ruin an entire HD-DVD movie collection. The only DRM systems that don't end up ultimately being broken are the ones that don't have any content published in them that people want to watch. It really doesn't matter how clever the layers of software being added to the system are, it only takes one smart person with a debugger, or logic analyzer, to dig through them and discover the underlying truth that any version of DRM just doesn't have any secrets.

Engineers know that DRM doesn't work, that it can't possibly work. Yet just like Scotty when Captain Kirk calls from the bridge asking for the impossible, they can't seem to help producing ever more complicated versions of the same broken system. Companies keep trying to create and sell DRM systems to the content industry. Having lots of money thrown at them to do this probably helps, just like Scotty liked to be thought of as a miracle worker.

In a recent talk at Google, Cory Doctorow. the Electronic Freedom activist, science fiction author, and creator of the popular geek news aggregation site Boing Boing said that engineers should simply refuse to create DRM systems for customers. A request for a DRM system is a sign that the customer is in denial, and isn't dealing rationally with reality. They still believe in the businesses model of the "Underpants Gnomes" from the "South Park" TV show.

Step 1: Create a DRM system.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

Unfortunately, he also pointed out that the US government also seems to be living in this fantasy world -- and, to a lesser extent, the UK government. One of the most misguided things going on in the world at the moment is the attempt by the US government to force other countries to adopt what they call US-style "Intellectual Property Rights". The underlying economic theory for this appears to be that the US and UK can lose their industrial manufacturing base, outsourcing it to India or China, and still maintain their primary positions in the world by controlling the information used to design the products manufactured by this cheap labor, or by selling digital content to the newly affluent consumers in these countries. This comes down to a bet that in the future digital bits will be easier to control, and become harder to copy. In the age of the Internet, this is a bet against reality, as the whole history of digital computing is that bits always become easier to copy, and harder to control.

Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored plant with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.
http://news.zdnet.com/2102-9588_22-6189011.html





Our Letter

Dear BBC,

We are deeply concerned about the BBC's use of "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) to manage content delivered to users over the Internet. There are dozens of arguments against DRM, however we believe these are the most important and relevant to the BBC.

1. DRM simply doesn't work.

Producers of DRM technology tell copyright holders that DRM will protect their content from unauthorized copying and commercial piracy. This is completely false. All DRM systems, including new technologies like HD-DVD and Blu-ray, have been circumvented. DRM relies on users not knowing an encryption key that is widely distributed to devices that play content. Cracking DRM is then as simple as discovering the encryption key. In such a situation, the entire DRM system is circumvented and the argument to "protect copyrighted materials" is removed. In addition, many programs that may use DRM are already broadcast over-the-air and this content can easily be converted into unprotected digital format. Even if DRM worked it would not protect BBC content.

DRM's defectiveness, is part of the reason that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, called on the music industry to release DRM-free music. ("Thoughts on Music", February 6, 2007)

2. DRM strips consumers of their rights.

By using DRM, the BBC is telling users that they are criminals. DRM assumes that a user will use the content they are provided with to violate copyright law and in response strips users of their normal consumer rights. In the United Kingdom, the fair dealing privilege is meant to provide an exception to copyright for "private study and criticism and review and news reporting" (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s. 29, 30). DRM makes it illegal to extract portions of a work for criticism or review. Fair dealing is meant to allow, among other things, private copies for research purposes, or extraction of portions for a film review. DRM attempts to make both of these impossible, thereby depriving citizens of rights guaranteed to them by British law. Other countries, such as the United States, grant similar rights under other fair dealing or fair use doctrines. The BBC would also be similarly depriving citizens of those countries of their statutory rights.

Since the BBC is a public corporation, it should be acting in the interest of the general public. Any action that removes the rights of the general public is not acting in their interest.

3. DRM directly violates the BBC Royal Charter.

The BBC royal charter establishes a number of goals and operating conditions including "promoting education and learning", "stimulating creativity and cultural excellence", and "bringing the UK to the world". DRM runs contrary to all of these purposes. DRM limits education by restricting copying for public educational purposes, and even inhibits private study. It stifles creativity by trying to make even incidental remixing impossible. Finally, it arbitrarily limits the BBC's reach by forcing viewers to use particular proprietary software applications. DRM advances corporate interests over the public interest, which is in flagrant opposition to the charter.

4. DRM is a poor business decision.

If people are unable to take content they have purchased and use it for their own personal purposes, then they will choose other locations to receive that content. This is one of the reasons why EMI recently agreed to sell their music without DRM.

Additionally, the data is formatted to restrict access to Windows users. The BBC has decided to release content under the Windows Media Format. The Windows Media Format (WMF) is a proprietary system. As licenses for other operating systems are not available, users have to buy Microsoft Windows. This choice would restrict BBC content to a portion of the population, excluding users of operating systems such as GNU/Linux (which is powering the one laptop per child system). The BBC is also considering the use of REAL media, which has players for other operating systems. However, REAL is still unacceptable, because there are no libre/open source software that can play REAL media with DRM. This is an insurmountable problem common to all DRM systems. The BBC is a public corporation and its funding comes from public sources. If people pay for a service, they should only have to pay for it once. With WMF, REAL, and DRM, they are having to pay twice (once to have the content created and once to have it shown to them through WMF or REAL). In addition, since both systems require particular proprietary software applications, BBC is in effect subsidizing unrelated private enterprises.

5. The Industry has Ditched it

The media industry is already stopping the use of DRM. Apple iTunes, Amazon Music, PBS, C-SPAN, NPR, and many other large media outlets will soon offer DRM-free content or already offer it. Seeing as this is the way the industry is moving, it is an irresponsible use of public funds to force the use of a technology the industry is moving away from.

In conclusion, DRM is not the right path for the BBC to take. DRM violates the royal charter, attacks users, adds cost to production, subsidizes private enterprises, and simply does not work. We urge you to drop all plans to lock away content with DRM and to choose public interest instead. This is an issue of viewer's rights, free culture and the future of the BBC. Please respect the public interest, and your viewer interests, by not using DRM.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned
(See us on a map)

Ringo Kamens
Project Coordinator
Binary Freedom Boston(binaryfreedom.info)
Centennial, Colorado, USA
2600denver@gmail.com

Chris Fernandez
Binary Freedom Boston
Boston MA 02215
rek2@binaryfreedom.info

Neal McBurnett
Software Engineer
Boulder, CO, USA
neal at bcn.boulder.co.us
303-494-6493
The BBC should overturn the decision to adopt a Microsoft-only, DRM
approach, especially in light of recent decisions to drop DRM by
big players in the music industry. Their reasoning applies well
to the BBC's situation. Users don't like DRM, it takes away their
normal fair dealing protections, and ultimately it doesn't work.

This decision will simply diminish the role and reputation of the BBC.
Please revoke it.
Neal McBurnett http://mcburnett.org/neal/

Timothy Richard Musson
University student
New Zealand
trmusson at ihug.co.nz
The copyright system exists to encourage creativity and improve the
public's access to knowledge. "Digital Rights Management" technology
does the opposite.

Matthew Flaschen
Student
Wynnewood, PA, USA
matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu
610-574-8513
I strongly oppose the BBC's plans to provide content under a DRM scheme.
The BBC's programming is designed to serve the public trust, and DRM
clearly runs contrary to this mission.

Lam YongXian
Student
Singapore
adolf at adolflam dot com
+65-81270502
How could your users trust you when you don't even trust them?

Felix Ker
HR Manager
Singapore/Singapore
felix [at] ker.sg
+65-91456635
It's time to give the world more freedom.

Kevin Kane
Software Developer / Analyst
Portland,OR,USA
deviatornexus at yahoo dot com

Petr Břeň
Student
Brno, Czech Republic
bren at upcmail dot cz
I was listening to the BBC on the air from 2001 to 2005 when its frequencies in my country were sold to another radio station. I was hoping to continue listening to the BBC via the internet and so I was very disappointed to see that the content was only available in non-free formats. I mean, even the Czech public service radio station has been
offering content optionally in Ogg Vorbis for some time now. So hopefully the BBC, too, can choose a solution which will not be discriminatory against users of media players other than the ones made by Microsoft and RealNetworks.

Axel Stevens
Support Engineer for a Financial Newspaper - Macintosh,
Unix-Linux and Windows
Flierke 94 bus 15 2870, Puurs, Belgium
003238892187
I am a great admirer of the BBC especially the fact that the BBC, in Europe, is almost always at the forefront of technological innovation and mediabroadcast progress and techniques, including digital media content.The BBC could lead the way in Europe with the distribution of DRM-Free content and not lock people in in propriatry formats.I know from the past a similar discussion arose concerning the use of .ogg and the Theora codec(s) for audio.In my view it would not be a wise desicsion to choose DRM enabled content -) maybe it will work for some time...But, the viewer, the client ultimately will not like it.People
want to be able to play content that they have paid for and own on different players be it on a computer a dvd-player, ipod, mp3-player, you name it
I fully understand the BBC's concern for piracy and unauthorized use but in my opinion enforcing DRM on users (viewers) will not solve that issue, it will just inflame people - they will take their business elsewhere in the end.

Oisín Feeley
GNU/Linux systems administrator
Québec, Canada
oisinPeriodfeeleyDutchApenstaartgmailPeriodcom
I agree with the letter's two central assertions: 1)DRM is contrary to the philosophy of public broadcasting; 2)DRM has already failed as a business model.

Unfortunately the BBC is already using RealPlayer/WMP to deliver quite a bit of content (ontrary to Section4 of the letter: "The BBC is also considering the use of REAL media, which has players for other operating systems.") If you try to listen to some of the excellent archived radio content at the BBC7 "ListenAgain" page then those two formats are all that's on offer. This is rather disappointing. It is of course trivial for a motivated individual to capture the stream and convert it to e.g. Ogg Vorbis [1] or FLAC [2] for later playback, but it would be nicer if the BBC removed this pointless hurdle.

There is obviously a pool of technical talent at the BBC that understands the importance of non-patent encumbered codecs (see for example the creation of the "Dirac" video codec [3]) and the trial streaming of selected material in Ogg Vorbis. It would be nice to see the BBC leading the broadcast world again using the innovations of its own engineers instead of making foolish deals with US corporations.
[1] http://www.vorbis.com/

[2] http://flac.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/projects/dirac/

Iain Cheyne
Business Analyst
London, UK
iain at cheyne dot net
07941574338

Simon Whiteley
Wortley, Leeds
United Kingdom
I wish to sign the letter to the BBC about unethical DRM usage. I have sent two email complaints to the BBC in the past and have had no reply. I also sent a letter asking why they gave so much air time to Microsoft when there was so much free(libre) software available, still
no reply. Thanks for standing up for my rights as a licence payer. I also sent emails to the BBC complaining about this issue and received no acknowledgment, when I phoned them after signing this letter they said they had no trace of my email address in their database.

I remember sending the BBC an email congratulating them on releasing their content in ogg format a few years ago.

Mark William Darbyshire
High school student
Te Puke, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
http://markdarb.googlepages.com/
I generally regard the BBC as a respectable broadcaster of quality content. The BBC is without a doubt a world leader in broadcasting. The BBC should therefore lead the rest of the world in ethical distribution of content using DRM-free formats. A container format such as ogg is preferable because it can be played on virtually any operating system using free (as in freedom) software; no proprietary format can do so (or at least not legally
or easily). To force people to pay for and use particular software to be able to play content is unethical and wrong. The world's digital revolution needs to move away from its current proprietary nature, instead using open software and formats. I hope to see the BBC at the fore of such a movement.
Please!

Brian Rowe
Activist, Founder of Freedom for IP
Seattle, WA
Brian at freedomforip dot org
(206)335-8577
Locking the BBC's content behind DRM interferes with the greater social values of educating the public. Access to knowledge is essential for political freedom please open your content be providing it in a neutral form that does not take away peoples rights.

Matt Woodward
Software Engineer
6 Timberdene
Bristol
BS16 1TL
07786 674193
DRM is meant to be a way of preventing piracy. However, the pirates that actually harm sales figures are found in markets with stands full of dodgy DVDs. Those people need to be dealt with by the police, not a piece of software.
As it stands, DRM serves only to restrict what the general, non-copyright-infriging public can do. In my case, because I run a Linux based system, I am completely denied access to these restricted products. It is to say the least, deeply insulting to be treated like a criminal when I have never engaged in piracy.

Robert Barat
Student; Musician
New Rochelle, NY, 10804
rwbarat at gmail dot com
9146376262
DRM is bad for customers AND musicians

http://www.freethebbc.info/node/5





Other People's Porn

Watching my neighbors watch on-demand television.
Josh Levin

I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV—their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography.

My career as a TV freeloader began when I threw together an HDTV setup a few months ago. To pull in locally broadcast HD channels, I bought a Samsung HD tuner and a set of rabbit ears. This setup was unstable—breathing on the antenna made the picture vanish. My girlfriend suggested that I try plugging in the Comcast cable line. (I get Comcast service but I don't have a cable box.) I screwed the cable in, and after performing the tuner's "auto channel search," I got all the D.C. and Baltimore broadcast networks in super-sharp HD.

But that wasn't all. Further up the dial, past PBS and the CW, I found a big clump of hyphenated channels. Channel 86-4 delivered an episode of The Sopranos—odd considering that I don't subscribe to HBO. The Leonardo DiCaprio movie Blood Diamond appeared on 87-5. And on 89-11 ... whoa, is that a nipple? These "premium" shows tended to appear and disappear in a flash—that Sopranos episode on 86-4 stayed on for five minutes, then transmogrified into The Devil Wears Prada. These programs also sometimes fast-forwarded and rewound spontaneously, as if an invisible hand were operating the remote.

At first, I assumed our tuner had formed a mind meld with a cable box a few apartments over. My girlfriend regaled our visitors with tales of our TV-obsessed neighbor, a heterosexual male who loved large-chested women and Hollywood blockbusters. But even the most ravenous viewer couldn't have this kind of appetite—some evenings I was getting free movies and porn on 20 channels at once.

I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At tech-y sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. Apparently, I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner.

To explain how my tuner harvested a TV bonanza, I need to give a short primer on cable-television tech. Generally speaking, if you subscribe to basic-cable service—a $10 per month plan for around 20 channels, or a plan that gives you, say, channels 2 through 70—you receive nothing but analog signals. For more channels, you've got to go digital.

Depending on your cable company, "digital cable" service typically includes a mix of analog channels and channels sent digitally. QAM, or quadrature amplitude modulation, is the "modulation scheme" that cable companies use to transmit digital channels. Set-top boxes leased out by cable TV companies allow viewers to tune in to "QAM-ed" channels. The number of channels you receive depends on what level of service you've subscribed for and what switches they've thrown at the cableco for your account.

If you don't have a cable box but do subscribe to cable, you can usually receive some digital cable if your television or TV receiver has built-in QAM support. A standalone QAM tuner, however, will let you tune in only unencrypted digital channels.

Which digital channels are unencrypted? Most cable companies don't encrypt the digital signals that they pick up from local broadcasters. That explains why I get the HD versions of Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC, CW, and PBS. My tuner also fields unencrypted digital channels that aren't broadcast in HD, like the local NBC affiliate's 24-hour weather radar and a music-video channel called The Tube. Cable companies encrypt premium channels like HBO, ESPN-HD, and BBC America to prevent nonsubscribers from getting a free ride. The reason I can watch all that hot on-demand stuff is because Comcast doesn't encrypt it.

Here's how VOD works: If you want to watch an old Sopranos episode, you click a button that tells your set-top box to transmit a message to a server at the local cable facility. The box receives a message back from the server identifying the frequency—say, channel 86-4—where the stream will start playing. Only this particular cable box gets the message about the frequency, but the show itself still gets transmitted to other people in your service area. According to Comcast, each of its cable "nodes" serves roughly 450 houses. So, when Joe Blow dials up Episode 67 of The Sopranos, the signal goes to 449 of his neighbors. They could watch along if the cable company doesn't encrypt the show (which Comcast doesn't here in D.C.), they know what channel to flip to, and they have a QAM tuner. If someone in my node makes an on-demand request for The Sopranos, all I have to do is scroll around in the upper-80s region of my tuner, and I'll find it.

Here's a taste of what on-demand subscribers in my neighborhood watched during two recent one-hour sampling periods: an old episode of Scooby-Doo, several episodes of The Office, a Cinemax women-in-prison movie that was hard to follow plotwise thanks to the fast-forwarding, The Da Vinci Code, another soft-core movie (frequently fast-forwarded to the dirty parts) that focused on the salutary effects of bubble baths, an exercise show ("let's circle the rib cage up to the right"), a scare-movie channel called FEARnet, the Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Something's Gotta Give, Just Like Heaven, The Break-Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Children of Men, Borat, The Wicker Man (Nicolas Cage version), The Queen, The Good Shepherd, Deja Vu, Derailed, ATL, and episodes of the HBO series Big Love, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Real Time With Bill Maher, and Da Ali G Show.

Comcast insists that it scrambles all pay-per-view adult movies—that encompasses hard-core titles like Exxxtasy Island and Co-Ed Nymphos 31 (both cost $11.99 to order). According to a Comcast spokesperson, the company has "begun to scramble VOD channels and is working toward scrambling all of our content on VOD in the future." The company's spokespeople also want me to tell you that its customers' privacy is not under siege—that it's impossible for QAM users to identify who requested the VOD content they're watching. (I should make it clear that I don't mean to single out Comcast. They just happen to be my cable provider. An acquaintance of mine who gets Time Warner Cable filches on-demand movies, too. According to Internet forums, most cable companies occasionally provide unencrypted content that QAM users can grab.)

Why doesn't Comcast encrypt all of its VOD streams? Again according to a spokesperson, it's not that it's more technically challenging than encrypting a regular channel. Rather, it's an issue of volume: Comcast has 9,000 programs in its VOD system each month, and that's a lot of stuff to scramble. Encryption also can't be implemented by fiat from corporate headquarters—it has to be done market–by-market at each local cable facility.

Perhaps the main reason cable companies haven't bothered to close the QAM loophole is that so few people know or care about it. Ken Holsgrove, an audio/video consultant and the lead moderator of the HDTV sections on AVS Forum, says there are three barriers to entry for the wannabe on-demand swiper. First, you have to know what a QAM tuner is. (That eliminates roughly 100 percent of the U.S. population.) The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Second, you have to buy either a standalone QAM tuner (mine cost $170) or a TV with built-in QAM. Third, as cable companies add channels to their lineups, they tend to change QAM channel designations—the on-demand stream that appears on 86-4 today could be on a different channel tomorrow. In order to keep up with this movement, QAM users must rescan their channel lineup frequently. How many people have the patience to do that?

Besides, Holsgrove argues, it isn't that satisfying to watch secondhand on-demand. "The odds of you actually seeing a movie from beginning to end are virtually impossible to predict," he says. "That's stabbing an avid TV viewer right through the eyeball."
Other downsides: You can't control what's on. Not much of the content is in HD, which is unfortunate for those of us with HDTV setups. The show you're watching also might suddenly stop or fast-forward, like you've wandered inside someone else's TiVo. If your neighbor pauses Entourage to go to the bathroom, you'll just have to wait until he finishes. If he wants to skip the exposition and go right to the sex scenes, then you're going to the sex scenes, too. And if he stops watching Stranger Than Fiction with five minutes to go—well, you're just screwed.

But you can't beat the price (free), and sometimes it's fun to cede control. My friend who grabs on-demand stuff from Time Warner calls it "mystery cable"—it's fun to flip around the channels and hope you get lucky.

There is a science to watching other people's on-demand. If you want to catch the latest Sopranos or Entourage, start looking on Monday night—some of your neighbors will be catching up because they missed their shows on Sunday. Browsing during prime time will yield more programs than snooping in the middle of the day. If you start looking around 9 o'clock on a weeknight and 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, you'll generally find a well-stocked buffet of recent movies.

On-demand voyeurism works the best for guilty pleasures or movies that you've already seen. If you're dying to see The Queen, get the DVD. If you're in the mood for popcorn fare like Deja Vu or Derailed, you probably won't mind if the movie starts in the middle or if the action pauses for a few minutes. And don't worry: In my experience, only the porn viewers really lean on the fast-forward button. If you sit back on a Friday night to watch someone else's movie, there's a great chance you'll see it all the way through.

My magical box will eventually stop working. Comcast plans to scramble the VOD content from premium networks (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax) first and move on from there. In the meantime, I encourage the people of Washington, D.C., to continue to order on-demand movies. For one thing, I still haven't seen the beginning of Deja Vu. If someone could queue that up for me tonight, I'd appreciate it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2167389/





A Travesty Of Justice Averted

It was a remarkable occurrence in New London Superior Court Wednesday when a judge threw out the conviction of a 40-year-old Norwich woman who had allegedly exposed seventh-graders to pornography on a classroom computer.

This was a national news story, attracting attention from coast to coast, both when she was convicted, and again, when her case was overturned.

Substitute teacher Julie Amero had always professed her innocence, explaining that while students were working at the computer at the Kelly Middle School in Norwich in October 2004, pornographic images began to pop up and she was unable to prevent them.

Ms. Amero went to trial after refusing an offer of accelerated rehabilitation. She was steadfast in proclaiming her innocence. If she had taken the plea deal, she would have emerged with a clear criminal record after meeting certain conditions, including admitting criminal intent. But she preferred to make her case to a jury, which she and her legal counsel reasoned would understand the predicament she found herself in and find her innocent.

Instead, jurors bought the story of police and prosecutors, who seemed hell-bent on making an example of Ms. Amero. She was convicted as a felon, and was facing up to 40 years in prison Wednesday; one for each of the four counts of risk of injury to a minor of which she was convicted.

Then Wednesday Judge Hillary B. Strack-bein delivered a major surprise. She overturned the jury's conviction, citing new evidence presented belatedly by the state that suggested jurors received erroneous information. It was computer geeks who helped Ms. Amero.

Following her January conviction they petitioned Chief State's Attorney Kevin T. Kane and asked his office to take a second look at the information. They argued that a Norwich detective who testified that Ms. Amero intentionally accessed pornographic Web sites and failed to turn off the computer when the illicit images flashed on the screen, was wrong on both counts. She could not stop the pop-ups, and she had been told not to shut the computer down, and did as directed.

Furthermore, the computer experts argued that Ms. Amero, and other teachers, were not trained to deal with such circumstances, and therefore should not be held accountable.

Perhaps the most alarming finding in Judge Strackbein's ruling Wednesday was the disclosure that a forensic examination of the classroom computer conducted by the state after Ms. Amero's conviction revealed that the pornographic images observed in the classroom that day were indeed from pop-ups.

The state made its case against Ms. Amero based on false information and erroneous testimony. It never did a thorough investigation of the computer in question until after she was convicted. It nearly ignored the flood of experts who literally shouted that Ms. Amero was getting snookered.

Thank goodness that the computer experts came to her defense. And that new counsel brought the conflicting evidence to the court's attention. Those actions led to Wednesday's overturned conviction.

Ms. Amero has lived with this tragedy since 2004. Her reputation has been ruined and the anxiety of the thought of spending years in jail has likely weighed on her. That is a travesty.

If prosecutors are considering retrying the case, they would be advised to pay careful attention to details this time. What happened to Ms. Amero shouldn't happen to anyone — nor should it ever happen again.
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=27a...c-c4720a2fda2d


















Until next week,

- js.



















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