[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Delicate Dance for Bush in Depicting Spy Program as Asset
Adam Nagourney

With a campaign of high-profile national security events set for the next three days, following Karl Rove's blistering speech to Republicans on Friday, the White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as an asset, a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year.

Whether the White House can succeed depends very much, members of both parties say, on its success in framing a complicated debate when the country is torn between its historic aversion to governmental intrusion and its recent fear of terrorist attacks at home.

Polls suggest that Americans are divided over whether Mr. Bush has the authority to order the searches without warrants that critics say violate the law and that the president says are legal and critical to the nation's security.

But as the White House and Democrats are well aware, the issue can draw very different reactions depending on how it is presented. These next few days could prove critical, as both Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats move aggressively to define what is at stake.

Americans may be willing to support extraordinary measures - perhaps extralegal ones - if they are posed in the starkest terms of protecting the nation from another calamitous attack. They are less likely to be supportive, members of both parties say, if the question is presented as a president breaking the law to spy on the nation's own citizens.

Viewed from the perspective of the battles over the Homeland Security Act or the USA Patriot Act, this White House holds a tactical edge; it has repeatedly proved highly effective in defining complicated debates against the Democratic Party. Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Rove's speech on Friday to the Republican National Committee was a classic example. "Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," Mr. Rove said. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Democrats - and, though Mr. Rove made no mention of this Friday, some Republicans, too - have indeed challenged the administration for eavesdropping without obtaining warrants. They argue, among other points, that the White House is bypassing legal mechanisms established in 1978 that already allow law enforcement agencies to move rapidly to monitor communications that might involve terrorists. Yet it is difficult to think of a Democrat who has actually argued that it is not "in our national security interest" to track Qaeda calls to the United States, as Mr. Rove contested; he did not offer any examples of whom he had in mind.

Beyond that tactical edge, the White House enjoys the advantage of its platform. The sheer crush of news media attention to a rare public speech by Mr. Rove could not have been lost on Democrats.

By contrast, there is no single Democrat who stands as the voice of opposition. That difference is likely to become particularly glaring this week, with a speech on Monday by Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency; a legal defense of the spying program on Tuesday by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and a visit by Mr. Bush to N.S.A. headquarters on Wednesday. This orchestrated campaign is the work of the same White House that initially offered a crouched, guarded response to the disclosure of the eavesdropping program last month.

Still, in many significant ways the task the White House faces now may prove more daunting than the battles it has waged on this terrain before.

A number of Republicans have joined Democrats in challenging the surveillance program, pointedly reminding the administration that precedents established today will be in place whenever a Democrat returns to power.

"A lot of Democrats?" said one prominent Republican supporter of Mr. Bush, who did not want to be identified while being critical of a White House that famously does not brook criticism. "Democrats, Karl? Republicans, too."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "A lot of conservatives are very skeptical about it. It is not as clean-cut a political win as the administration thinks that it is."

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is planning hearings on the surveillance program. And in an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said he did not think the president had the legal authority for this operation, adding that the White House should seek Congressional approval to alter the 1978 provisions if it thinks they are not working now.

Mr. McCain also came to the defense of Democrats in response to Mr. Rove's suggestion that they were not committed to the nation's security. "Do I think that the president's leadership has been worthy of support of our party and our leadership?" he said. "Yes. But there's too many good Democrats over there who are as concerned about national security and work just as hard as I do."

Beyond that, one Republican analyst who is skeptical about the White House strategy said Mr. Bush's position was hardly helped by the fact that his credibility numbers have dropped along with his popularity since his re-election. Mr. Bush may find that, as some Democrats have suggested, the invocations of Sept. 11 do not have the force they once had.

For their part, Democrats said they have learned from their repeated defeats by this White House. The Democratic presidential candidate of 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Rove and the White House were willfully distorting the Democratic position.

"He's playing an old game," Mr. Kerry said. "Every time they have a problem, they play the 9/11 card."

"We all support surveillance - that's where they are playing word games again," Mr. Kerry said. "You can protect the safety of the American people and you can protect the Constitution."

The political complexity of the issue was reflected in remarks by Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, who, like Mr. Kerry, is considering a run for president. Speaking by telephone on a trip to Iowa, Mr. Romney at first offered full support for the president's surveillance program.

"The eavesdropping is a big matter on the coasts for people who are inclined to dislike the president," Mr. Romney said. "The great majority of Americans think it is the president's first responsibility to protect the lives of the American citizens in an urgent setting where there is a threat of terrorism."

But Mr. Romney called back a few moments later to make clear that he would have a different view if the program were found to be unlawful.

"I would never suggest that the president should break the law," he said. "My guess is, my assumption is, he did not break the law. The president has a responsibility to follow the law, which I believe is likely to be found, but he also has a primary responsibility to protect the American people."

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/po... ner=homepage





Challenge to Hospitality: The ID Check in the Lobby
Joe Sharkey

DON'T try any funny business at the Alex Hotel in Manhattan, Karen Kelly, because they've got your number, sister.

It is 1507. That is the number the desk clerk jotted on the photocopy the hotel made of Ms. Kelly's passport. Ms. Kelly had to produce the passport one night last week when she came into the lobby of the hotel, which is at 205 East 45th Street, to meet an out-of-town business associate.

"My husband and I travel a lot, but that was the most bizarre experience I've ever had in a hotel lobby," said Ms. Kelly, a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

"I'm one of those New Yorkers who doesn't have a driver's license, so I carry my passport with me in case I do need to show a picture ID."

But because she was not checking into the hotel and not going anywhere but the lobby, she did not count on having to produce a government-issued photo ID just to have a clerk phone a guest room from the front desk.

"I was kind of dumbfounded," she said. She handed her passport to the clerk, who made the photocopy and jotted on it the file number, 1507, and the time and date. The clerk told her the copy would be "kept on file for a year," said Ms. Kelly, adding: "At that point, I was kind of irritated at myself. I mean, a hotel lobby is, like, a public place, right? They claim the right to demand ID just to come in?"

That's right, said Mary Lou Pollack, the general manager of the hotel, where a standard single room can cost $475 a night. In fact, she had no apologies at all about the security drill.

"It very difficult to secure a hotel," she said in an interview in a bar just off the lobby of the two-year-old hotel. "We do a lot of high-profile business. We're two blocks from the United Nations and we always have guests who could be targets, which also would make the hotel a target."

The vigilant front-desk scrutiny is not just because of fear of terrorists, she said.

"When we were new, I didn't want this hotel to be sucker punched and to get a bad reputation." At night, she said, nearby Lexington Avenue "is overrun with prostitutes."

"While we were gaining our basic reputation, a lot of our accounts were from very conservative corporations. I was afraid in our early stages that a bad element would take over the hotel," she added. So, she said, "we made the hotel as obviously unfriendly as possible to people who wanted to have no identity."

I dropped by the hotel unannounced, so the public relations squad was not on guard. Since I was inquiring about a reader's complaint, I expected the brush-off. Instead, Ms. Pollack answered my questions directly and spoke passionately about her determination to run a luxury hotel while maintaining security.

It was utterly clear, incidentally, that she was speaking in generalities and casting no personal aspersions on Ms. Kelly.

She even corrected something for the record. Ms. Kelly had been told the copy of her passport would be kept on file for a year. Actually, it is five years, Ms. Pollack said.

Incidentally, before I identified myself, I sat undisturbed for 10 minutes in the lobby. No one asked me for a photo ID. Granted, it was midafternoon and I am a middle- aged male.

I'm just saying, is all ....

This business of increasingly having to show your papers in this country is a can of worms for travelers, and we will return to it here on occasion, especially with regard to the delicate balances between security and privacy.

Let's leave the hotel on the East Side and go to the other extreme, philosophically and geographically. Let me introduce you to John Gilmore, a philanthropist who made his fortune as one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. I spoke with him last month at a coffee shop near his home in San Francisco.

Mr. Gilmore has literally made a federal case out of his refusal to show identification, even to get on a plane.

As a consequence, he has not flown domestically since July 4, 2002, when he was stopped from boarding a flight after declining to show an ID.

"I'm simply not willing to show a passport or an ID to travel in my own country," he said.

Mr. Gilmore has filed a lawsuit against the federal government arguing basically that travel is integral to the right to assembly and that demanding identification from an airline passenger who has been adequately screened for weapons is unconstitutional.

As I said, we will return to this. Meanwhile, the court papers and other background on the case are at www.papersplease.org/gilmore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/business/24road.html





Investigator: U.S. 'Outsourced' Torture
Jan Sliva

The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe said Tuesday that evidence pointed to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the United States, and that it was highly likely European governments were aware of it.

But Swiss Sen. Dick Marty said there was no tangible proof so far of the existence of clandestine centers in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, and complained of a lack of cooperation by EU governments.

His interim report, based partly on results of national investigations and recent press reports, did not break new ground and largely repeated his previous claims that U.S. policies in the war on terror contravene international law on human rights. Allegations that the CIA hid and interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported Nov. 2 in The Washington Post.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of "relocation" or "outsourcing" of torture," Marty said in the report to the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog on whose behalf he is investigating.

"Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," Marty said. He added that more than 100 suspects may have been transferred to countries where they faced torture or ill treatment in recent years.

"The entire continent is involved," Marty told the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, a body comprising several hundred national lawmakers. "It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware."

In his report, Marty analyzed the cases of an Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped from Milan, Italy, in 2003 by CIA agents and a German captured in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Citing an American lawyer, Marty also said six Bosnians were abducted by U.S. agents on Bosnian soil and taken to Guantanamo Bay, despite a Bosnian court ruling ordering their release.

Last week, Italy's justice minister formally asked the United States to allow Italian prosecutors to question 22 purported CIA operatives they accuse of kidnapping the Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in 2003 from a Milan street.

Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was seized Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors claim the cleric, who is also known as Abu Omar, was taken by the CIA to a joint U.S.-Italian air base, flown to Germany and then to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

Marty also said he would follow up on evidence gathered in the case of Khaled al Masri, a German of Lebanese origin reportedly kidnapped from Germany to Afghanistan, in the next stage of his investigation.

Marty, who is expected to issue another interim report in the next few months, complained there was enormous pressure on him to produce evidence of secret CIA prisons but there was not much help from the Council of Europe or governments.

"Not a single day passes without me being asked, 'Do you have any hard evidence, is there any proof?'" he said. "I am not a judicial authority, I have no means of investigation, the logistical support available to me is very limited."

The European Union's top justice official, Franco Frattini, called on all EU governments Tuesday to "fully cooperate" with the investigators.

The Council of Europe launched its probe after allegations surfaced in November that U.S. agents interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at clandestine prisons in eastern Europe and transported some suspects through Europe to other countries.

Human Rights Watch identified Romania and Poland as possible sites of secret U.S.- run detention facilities. Both countries have denied involvement. Clandestine detention centers would violate European human rights treaties.

Marty said there was no irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Romania, Poland or any other country.

"On the other hand, it has been proved that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and all rights and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture," he said. If eventually uncovered, the detention centers would likely be small cells that could be easily hidden, he added.

Marty has obtained flight logs archived by the Brussels-based air safety organization Eurocontrol and satellite images of air bases in Romania and Poland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





Experts: 'Decapitation' May Not End Terror
Charles J. Hanley

The Israeli assassins caught Abu Jihad in his study. They left the chief strategist of the Palestinian uprising with 170 bullets in his body. Over the next two decades, however, the movement only grew stronger, and Israel bled even more. It's called "decapitation," and a missile strike in Pakistan has raised the question anew: Would eliminating Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahri deal a mortal blow to the al-Qaida terror network?

"Decapitation just fuels the movement itself," says Jenna Jordan, a University of Chicago scholar who has closely studied the historical record of such antiterrorist tactics.

"I think that is the lesson of the Israeli efforts over the years," says Brian Jenkins, veteran terrorism analyst with the RAND Corp. research firm.

But, he quickly adds, "that doesn't mean you don't do it."

The Jan. 13 missile strike on a remote Pakistani border village showed again that the U.S. government is still trying to do it.

The early-morning attack, reportedly aimed at al- Zawahri, killed 13 villagers and possibly a few second-rank al-Qaida operatives - but not the bin Laden lieutenant. Its immediate impact could be seen in the streets of Pakistani cities, where thousands rallied, chanting "Death to America," in support of al-Qaida's "jihad," or holy war.

By Thursday, bin Laden's voice was being broadcast throughout the Muslim world, threatening a new terror strike against America.

"The Pakistan case, where you have all those people killed, that's the kind of `bad press' that keeps a movement going," said Jordan, whose 2004 study reviewed 72 international cases, stretching back almost a century, in which militant movements' leaders were targeted and killed.

In most cases, she found, the movements carried on - particularly if they were religion-based, like al- Qaida. Only one in five violent religious groups collapsed when their leaders were eliminated, she determined.

"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," said Richard A. Clarke, who was White House counterterrorism coordinator in 1998, when U.S. missiles were fired at suspected al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill its leaders.

"There's no iron law," Clarke told The Associated Press. "But the law enforcement side, the intelligence side, will always want to eliminate the leadership."

One of the most spectacular "eliminations" occurred in 1988, when Israeli commandos slipped into Tunisia and stormed the exile home of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, the PLO's No. 2 and architect of the uprising that had exploded five months earlier in Israeli-occupied territories.

Abu Jihad was killed, but the "intefadeh" went on, and by the 1990s still more Palestinian groups had joined in, followed by still more decapitations. With the latest tracking technologies, the Israelis have successfully targeted top leaders of the Hamas group in particular.

Some analysts believe this has contributed to a decline in suicide terror bombings since 2003. But the Islamic militant group's following has grown and bombings continue. After two successive Hamas chiefs were killed in 2004, the group vowed "100 reprisals."

"Usually these assassinated leaders are from the public, political wing, but there are many underground military commanders far from Israel's hands," said Islamist researcher Yasser al-Sirri, of London's Islamic Observation Center.

Jenkins noted that diversity in the Palestinian movement makes decapitation difficult. "When you're dealing with a disparate host of terrorist foes over time, as the Israelis have confronted, then it has less effect."

Examples of recent decapitations cited by Jordan and others:

- Shining Path, the Maoist insurgency that rocked Peru in the 1980s, has all but collapsed since the capture of founder Abimael Guzman in 1992. Such ideologically based movements are most affected when their leaders are removed, Jordan found.

- Turkey's Kurdish separatist group PKK declared a unilateral cease-fire in 1999 after leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured, but renounced it in 2004. Its attacks have increased in recent months.

- The entire leadership of Spain's Basque separatist group ETA was arrested in 1992, but ETA bombings and assassinations soon resumed. Territorially based nationalist groups like the Kurds and Basques tend to be resilient, Jordan observed.

When it comes to al-Qaida, which organized the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terror attacks, analysts underscore an important emerging characteristic of the group: It seems to be growing more diffuse and decentralized, as seen in the unending campaign of Iraq suicide bombings carried out in its name.

"Al-Qaida is not one group anymore, but rather an idea," al-Sirri said. "The jihad is not about individuals. If bin Laden is killed or captured, tens of new bin Ladens will be born."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...01-22-12-22-13





Future American Lawyers To Be Proud Of.

... and Alberto Gonzales.

via p2pconsortium

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.



To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.



Fortunately for him, it was a brief speech... followed by a panel discussion that basically ripped his argument a new asshole.

And, as one of the people on the panel said,

"When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough.

In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today."
- David Cole, Georgetown University Law Professor

It was a good day for dissent.
http://insomnia.livejournal.com/6523...c=2&style=mine


(Post a new comment)

Europe Salutes You
(Anonymous)

Here in the UK, the vast majority of us have been despairing of American domestic and foreign policy for some time, and the seeming lack of any kind of visible protest from the American people about the erosion of their civil liberties. Our UK politicians often blindly follow your precedents, so your country's continuing, and all but unhindered, stampede towards an unquestionable dictatorship is somewhat un-nerving for us.

This kind of civil disobedience against the worst kind of steamroller politics ('Say it loud enough and often enough and it becomes true') gives us hope that the tide could still turn.

They should all be VERY proud.
http://insomnia.livejournal.com/6523...c=2&style=mine





Burnoff: Part 1 - The Bad Guys Win
Tarmle

Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it's not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint activated lockers. This is where you must leave all of your electronics, your personal server and peripherals, even your watch, and you had better not be wearing smart spectacles or contacts. As you enter the security zone you're scanned for anything you may have forgotten. Cochlea and optical implants must be capable of responding with a coded RF identification signal to indicate their systems are secure and cannot record. People with older models, or models implanted abroad where such interrogation is illegal, are turned away. Perhaps they would like to see one of the older releases? Once through the scanner you must submit to a biometric ID test - this is where the known bloggers, hackers and spoilers are ejected. Finally there is the non-disclosure agreement to be signed - these days most moviegoers choose to sign via the MPAAs annual subscription, just trying to take some of the hassle out of visiting the cinema. Finally you get to see the film. In the auditorium the audience is constantly scanned by an AI looking for suspicious activity, so don't rummage in your pockets for too long. It's strange that all this effort to protect the movie industry has done so little to improve the movies.

You don't really own your home computer, or even the data you keep on it. Oh, you paid for it, just like you paid for the fibre-optic Internet connection that it can't function without, but now it squats under your TV using your electricity and does more work for the content industry than for you. The nightly security patches it downloads for itself don't secure your computer against attackers, they secure the system and software against you. TV-on-demand seemed like a dream come true when you first opted in and upgraded all your hardware, but the slowly encroaching charges are becoming a disincentive to turn on at all. Sometimes the last episode of a series makes up 50% of the cost of the whole season.

The Internet is not what it used to be. It's expanded, naturally, the technology giving everyone mobile PCs with vast ad- hoc networking capabilities, it's faster, more efficient, and more available, but it's also more restrictive. Since the ISPs were made responsible for the content they deliver their filtering has become neurotic. Anti-terror, piracy, plagiarism and libel filters search every request and response for signs of illegal activity, always erring on the side of caution. Wikipedia's index has been decimated. Popular blogs like Boing Boing now have more lawyers involved than contributors (the one's that have survived that is). Even if you managed to get something illegal through the filters your operating system's regularly updated self-check mechanisms would eventually root it out, or report you to the authorities, usually both.

These days it seems like every time you turn on one of your gadgets you have to fight with its DRM to get it to do what you want. The home movie of your daughter opening her birthday presents is ruined by a patch of grey fog that shifts with every movement of the camera, tracking sluggishly to keep the TV screen in the background obscured. From the codes embedded in TV's update pattern your camera had decided the show was not licensed for this form of reproduction and blocked it. You wish you had thought to turn it off at the time, but squinting into the camera's tiny screen it hadn't looked so bad.

Even once recorded, your own media is not safe. Everything is stored on your home PC, trapped in the solid-state drive's proprietary filing system. Once there, the only reasonable way to transfer it is to another trusted drive from the same vendor - the DRM won't recognise any other brand of mass storage device. In the meantime the PC constantly searches your files looking for illegal material. A recent security patch has destroyed the last video of your father. According to the email report you received that same morning the latest video and photographic scanning protocols had decided something seen in the footage resembled a new government building, the appearance of which is now classified. You know for sure that there is no such building in the footage, it was all filmed in the old man's living room. But there's no way for you to prove that with the offending shots turned to grey fog.

You just don't see physical media anymore. Too easily duplicated, their security too easily cracked, they've been dropped in favour of heavily encrypted and vendor-locked streaming media. You don't 'own' copies of any music or movies these days, instead your monthly subscriptions grant you only the right to temporarily buffer a few seconds of the distributor's authorised files while you watch or listen. Ultimately, that was the reason ad-hoc networking protocols and mobile PC technologies were pushed so hard, not because the customers wanted them but because the music and movie industries needed them to replace the vulnerable duplication method normally needed for such mobile media.

Physical bookshops are a novelty now; they only sell works that are in the public domain, and only to a few die-hard paper enthusiasts. Their prices rise steadily as demand drops and the printing and binding industry falters. Tightened regulation has made it illegal to sell second hand books that are still under copyright - the bookshops will sometimes give the customer a few cents for old books, part of a commission they receive for sending them off to be destroyed by the publishers. Public libraries have almost disappeared - unable to adapt to an environment where more and more books were only available in locked digital formats, they were forced to close all but the largest repositories - and even those are rapidly becoming obsolete. The last book you tried to download to you eReader turned out to be incompatible. The latest novels are now being streamed as well, one page at a time, and you'll have to buy a new reader that supports wireless quantum encryption. It seems odd that you're old enough to remember when photocopiers were still legal.

The only way writers can get their novels read, or musicians have their music heard, is by signing with a content provider who will claim the work as their own and charge people for access. It's nearly impossible for artists to make money anymore. The celebrities you read about, the millionaires who's contribution to the industry was actually rewarded, are a microscopic minority. But wasn't it always that way? There is nothing to stop an author from reading a work aloud in public, or a band from performing to a live audience, but few beyond that space will hear it. Hardly anyone has access to the technology that would let them record what they're hearing, at least not in any permanent form, and even fewer have the means to share it once they have. And god forbid the artists accidentally use a sentence or lyric already claimed by one of the corporations...

Somewhere out there, hackers and open-source software programmers are still working, beleaguered by diminishing supplies of usable hardware, ever tighter controls on imports and the furious unflinching eye of the authorities. They are constantly interrogated, their work searched for copyright and patent infringements, for any new technologies the content providers and national security services can't control. They can write competitive applications, they can make the systems work faster, more efficiently, if they weren't so fearful, they could make it free. What they can't do is tell anyone that needs to know.
http://tarmle.livejournal.com/80182.html





Confirming the Copyright Gap
Michael Geist

The Toronto Star today featured a lengthy article by Sam Bulte titled Closing the Copyright Gap which explains her views on copyright reform (unfortunately the article is not currently online). The article makes the arguments that observers of this issue would expect: WIPO ratification is good, Canadian digital businesses are being hurt by the current framework, downloading is a major problem, and opponents of WIPO treaties "employ hyperbole and ad hominem attacks to get their message out" (sort of like Bulte's comments in the all-candidates meetings or a release she posted last week that included a blatant lie from Margaret Atwood who criticizes "so-called newspaper columnists funded as lobbyists by foreign concerns", but I digress).

In my view, the article provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of what critics of Ms. Bulte's fundraiser have argued. Not that Bulte's copyright policies are not in the best interests of Canada (which they are not), but rather that she is too closely aligned with groups from whom she accepts campaign contributions. In this case, the Bulte article is little more than a rehash of claims made in an assortment of CRIA press releases, speeches, and editorials.

While it is too much to go through each paragraph, allow me to cite just a few examples. First, Bulte spends several paragraphs on the need to ratify WIPO and argues that the Supreme Court of Canada has lamented our failure to do so. This is nonsense - the Supreme Court has actually focused on the need for balance in copyright - but that didn't stop CRIA from making these same arguments in a July 2004 release.

Second, Bulte then argues that the absence of the treaties has hamstrung Canadian digital music services. Bulte says:

"While U.S. online music ventures, such as iTunes and Napsters, are prospering because of the certainty of modern copyright laws there, Canada's legal digital music services have suffered without similar legislation. On a per capita basis, Canadian legal downloads should be the equivalent of roughly 10 percent of U.S. sales. Given Canada's relatively higher broadband penetration, the figure could be even higher. However, lacking the same legal supports, Canadians have downloaded only two percent of the amount south of the border. Why? The OECD reported in June 2005 that Canada has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of unauthorized file sharing in the world."

If the comments sound familiar, consider what CRIA said in a September 5, 2005 release (for my rebuttal back in September see CRIA and Kazaa):

"In other countries, legal music downloading services are thriving, with legions of consumers attracted by the convenience, selection and high quality that are provided. By contrast, Canada's legal digital music sales continue to be hamstrung by antiquated copyright laws and widespread Internet piracy. Digital sales in this country run at one-half of one percent of US levels, but should be in the 12 to 15 percent range given relative broadband penetration in the two countries. An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report released in June of this year found that Canada has the highest per capita rate of unauthorized file-swapping in the world."

Third, Bulte then focuses on software piracy, arguing:

"Currently, 36 percent of all software used in this country pirated according to IDC, far greater than in the UK or the US (each at 27 percent). By not properly protecting copyright-related sectors, we place Canada's economic growth at risk. According to IDC, introducing tougher copyright legislation that resulted in a 10 percent cut to the piracy rate would create 14,000 new jobs, $8.1 billion in new economic growth"

This is what Graham Henderson, President of CRIA wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on January 9, 2006:

"Due to Canada's outdated copyright laws, theft of software is higher in this country (36 per cent of sales) than in our closest trading partners, such as the United Kingdom or the United States (both 27 per cent). Reducing theft by 10 percentage points would create 14,000 new jobs and yield $8.1 billion in economic growth"

Fourth, Bulte then searches for data on the importance of the copyright industries and states:

"In 2000, the gross domestic product (GDP) of our copyright-related sectors was $65.9 billion, accounting for 7.4 per cent of Canadian GDP. These sectors were growing at an average annual rate of 6.6 percent; double that of the rest of the Canadian economy."

In a speech to the National Press Club on September 29, 2005, Graham Henderson told an audience that included Ms. Bulte that:

"in 2000 the gross domestic product (GDP) of our copyright-related sectors was $65.9 billion, accounting for 7.4% of Canadian GDP. These sectors were growing at an average annual rate of 6.6%; double that of the rest of the Canadian economy."

Fifth, Bulte then cites the December 2005 CRIA-commissioned survey on Canadian views on copyright. That would be the same survey that the Ottawa Citizen ridiculed in an editorial, concluding that "we shouldn't take their surveys too seriously."

I could continue but I trust the point is clear. Citing a series of CRIA studies and editorials doesn't prove Bulte's case. It actually makes the point that critics have been raising for the past three weeks.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...k=view&id=1082





ASUI Creates File Sharing Ruckus
David Grunke

Students may soon have the option to download all the music and movies they can handle for free — and they’ll be able to do it legally.

ASUI is currently working out contractual details with Ruckus Network Inc., a digital entertainment service based in Virginia, to provide a legal file-sharing network for the university.

The University of Idaho, like many campuses across the nation, has been looking for a legitimate and inexpensive way to halt illegal file sharing via internal school networks. Growing pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America, which has asked UI to turn over information about students accused of illegal downloading, has forced universities to discourage students from using internal networks for peer-to-peer file sharing. The RIAA has targeted universities in particular, and said illegal file sharing has resulted in a 7 percent decline in annual record sales.

In 2003, 70 cases of illegal file sharing were reported at UI over the course of a few weeks. Since then, ITS has restricted access to peer-to-peer file sharing services such as Kazaa and Limewire, as well as discouraging sharing within the school network. Despite these attempts, the allure of free digital media remains strong.

“I think it’s pretty hard to prevent students from downloading,” said senior Scott Carter, a computer science major. “Offering a free downloading service that wouldn’t get students in legal troubles might be … a good way to solve this problem.”

ASUI is hoping to implement Ruckus as an easy alternative to these problems. The company said it provides access to 1.5 million songs along with 45 streaming movies that change weekly. It also advertises its service as a means for students to connect to one another by sharing files, photos and class information via the school network.

Students would require an on-campus IP address in order to access the service. They must also download a media player from Ruckus in order to play the downloaded material. The program would not be compatible with devices such as iPods, which have been growing in popularity among the college crowd.
Some students may find this to be a significant drawback.

“(We’re) starting to see a lot more iPods around campus,” Carter said. “Some people may find it frustrating they can’t take their downloaded music with them.”
A growing list of schools, including Arizona State University and Northern Illinois University, have contracted with Ruckus, and UI may soon find itself added to the list.

Costs for the service have been estimated to be $10,000 annually. ASUI is currently considering picking up the bill, allowing students access to the service without additional fees. ASUI President Berto Cerrillo said he will have more details worked out in the coming weeks.
http://www.argonaut.uidaho.edu/content/view/1019/48





Oxford University on Pirate-Whacking Campaign
Jon Newton

Oxford University is promoting iTunes on campus. One of its most famous colleges, Christ Church, admits it plans to act as a Big Four anti-P2P cop, with the cartel's British Phonographic Industry darkly "monitoring" the situation in the background.

In the United States, the Big Four music labels now routinely blackmail colleges and universities into peddling product via the likes of Napster and iTunes, with school staff working as unpaid public relations and marketing teams.

EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and Sony BMG wield the threat of lawsuits against students attending schools that fail to comply and no one sees anything remarkable in this -- least of all, state officials, administrators or parents.

Now, Oxford, one of Britain's most prestigious universities, has apparently joined the club by promoting iTunes on campus. Christ Church, one of its most famous colleges, admits it will act as a Big Four anti-P2P cop, with the cartel's British Phonographic Industry darkly "monitoring" the situation in the background.

Shining a Searchlight

More than 75 [Oxford] students were "detected illegally downloading copyright material in the past two years," according to an article in the campus newspaper, The Oxford Student.

"Alan Gay, deputy director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), told The Oxford Student media corporations have already notified the university on 16 occasions this academic year that students have been illegally sharing files such as MP3s and videos. Sixty were detected in the previous year," reads the piece.

"These 'cease and desist' requests are legal notices designed to force the university to stop its members using file-sharing software to exchange copyright material. Gay said: 'You get the impression that there's a big searchlight going round, and sometimes it focuses on us, and sometimes we go for a while without anything happening.'"

More Monitoring

The level of "monitoring and action by film and music companies" has increased, and Oxford apparently has imposed an official ban on the use of peer-to-peer software, charging colleges around 60 British pounds, or US$106, each time a complaint is received.

Oxford colleges pass this fine onto the student in question and reportedly often impose an additional charge. Christ Church was the first college to officially to warn students of the "consequences of file sharing," The Oxford Student says.

Students could face an additional penalty of 50 pounds, or around $89, if caught "illicitly downloading copyrighted material," warns an e-mail sent last week by the Oxford college St. Edmund Hall, otherwise known as "Teddy Hall."

"The illegal downloading of music, films, etc., via file-sharing software is strictly prohibited by the University and College," reads the e-mail, which claims that the dean, Dr. Alistair Borthwick, believes it is only a matter of time before the copyright infringements result in a court case. The e-mail also lets students know that Christ Church will begin a program to "actively scan all Internet traffic within the college."

Students have been warned that if the college detects any use of file-sharing software, other than Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes, offenders will have Internet access revoked.

Differing Approaches

ITunes is not, of course, P2P file-sharing software. It's a purpose-designed, hard-core sales- cum-iPod promotional application loaded with digital rights management technology to specifically prevent sharing.

Oxford's Magdalen College, while also following basic OUCS rules, takes a more relaxed approach to file sharing, according to the Oxford Student piece. The college does not issue additional fines, but it does expect undergraduates to pay the OUCS charge -- 50 pounds ($89) plus Value Added Tax, or VAT -- if a copyright infringement is detected. Keble College's IT department said students would face fines of 100 pounds ($178) to cover administration costs.

The number of notices Oxford receives is surprising, says Matt Phillips, Communications Manager for the British Phonographic Industry. "We know the majority of file sharing within institutions like universities occurs across networks rather than through peer-to-peer ... so we tend to limit our monitoring to communicating with heads of IT and alerting them to the dangers of illegal downloads," he notes.

The labels' previous campaigns at Oxford have not been successful.

In 2002, during an Oxford Union Debate, then Recording Industry Association of America spin-doctor-in-chief Hilary Rosen tried to carry the proposition, "This House believes that the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music."

She failed miserably, the final vote being 72 for and 256 against. So far, at least, free music continues to survive at Oxford.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/48443.html#





Students and Teachers, From K to 12, Hit the Podcasts
Jeffrey Selingo

THE subjects were typical for a seventh-grade classroom: a summary of a mealworm's metamorphosis, strategies on improving memory and making studying easier and a story about a classroom candy thief.

But the discussions last fall at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wis., were not taking place only for their classroom to hear. They were recorded as part of a series of podcasts the students produced and syndicated over Apple's iTunes music store.

"Their audience has moved to the entire world," said Jeanne Halderson, one of two seventh-grade teachers at Longfellow who supervise the podcasts. "The students find that exciting. It's a lot more motivating to write something that the whole world can hear, rather than just something for a teacher to put a grade on."

Podcasting - posting an audio recording online that can be heard through a computer or downloaded to a mobile device like an iPod - is following blogs and online classes as yet another interactive technology catching on as a teaching tool. Currently, iTunes lists more than 400 podcasts from kindergarten through 12th-grade classes, while Yahoo has nearly 900 education-related podcasts. Some are produced by teachers wanting to reach other educators with teaching tips, while many are created by students, like the La Crosse seventh graders with their podcast, at lacrosseschools.com/longfellow/sc/ck/index.htm.

"A podcast is like few other devices that a teacher can use in advancing a student's development," said Daniel J. Schmit, an instructional technology specialist in the college of education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the author of "KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom." "It teaches them to do research, to communicate in print, to speak effectively and grab attention with sound."

One reason podcasting is effective in the classroom, Mr. Schmit says, is that it can be used in every subject. Indeed, "Coulee Kids" is like a weekly variety show, running 7 to 14 minutes, with introductory music. The Nov. 18 podcast included discussions of photosynthesis, the difference between angiosperms and gymnosperms and a segment on adding integers. The Jan. 6 episode featured student interviews about bullying, a follow-up to a report on "20/20."

Of course, students have been producing audio programs for generations, typically using tape recorders or reel-to-reel machines. What makes podcasts better, educators say, is that they are easier to edit than splicing a tape because they are recorded digitally on a computer. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that podcasts are available to a worldwide audience, which can subscribe to them and have them automatically downloaded to their computers when a new installment is posted.

Like other classroom technologies, podcasting requires a learning curve. As a result, teachers already using podcasts in their classes tend to be early adopters of technology. Kathleen B. Schrock, administrator for technology at Nauset Public Schools in Orleans, Mass., said one goal of her podcasts is to persuade teachers "how easy it is to produce one." Ms. Schrock's podcasts (nausetschools.org/podcasts.htm) include short interviews with teachers and administrators about things like how they use technology in their classrooms. This spring, she plans workshops to show teachers in her district how to create a podcast.

"Just the word 'podcast' scares a lot of teachers away," Ms. Schrock said. "There are a lot of misconceptions."

One of the most common is that schools need iPods or other portable audio devices, like MP3 players, to create and listen to a podcast, said David Warlick, who sifts through education-related podcasts and lists good ones for teachers on his Web site, the Education Podcast Network (epnweb.org). "All you need is a computer, access to the Internet and a microphone that you can buy at Toys 'R' Us," Mr. Warlick said. "I listen to podcasts on my computer."

The sound can be edited, and music and other audio elements can be added easily, Mr. Warlick said, using software like Acid Music Studio, GarageBand or open- source Audacity. "Learning the software is the most difficult part," he said.

Ms. Halderson, the teacher at Longfellow Middle School, said she practiced using the podcast software in August, and her students produced their first show the second week of school. "We laugh at that one now," she said. To improve their show, the students listened to podcasts from other schools, including "Room 208" from Wells Elementary School in Wells, Me., and "Radio WillowWeb" from Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha.

Those shows motivated the Longfellow students to perfect their own podcasts, said Megan Wichelt, a seventh grader there. "It's better than learning out of a textbook because you're actually doing something with what you learn," she said. Moreover, the potential audience for a podcast, she added, is so much larger than just the teachers and parents who usually read her essays. "I know other people are listening, so it's very fun to do."

This month, Ms. Halderson got 14 new video iPods for her students, bought from donations and the sale of greeting cards, butterfly houses and birdhouses that were all made by the students.

While she and other educators agree that the technology will never replace a live teacher, there are exceptions. Ms. Schrock of Nauset Public Schools says that teachers could record lessons for absent students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/te...25podcast.html





Music Industry In A DreaM

Digital rights could spark a music revolution, says David Birch
Dave Birch

Suppose the Holy Grail of the content industry, the perfect digital rights management (DRM) technology, is just that: a legend that inspires people to take up an heroic quest, but ultimately a myth? What if that quest turns into another "war on drugs" in which billions of dollars make not the slightest impact on the problem?

The dream DRM, from a content owner's perspective, would be one that tracked, traced and monitored every use of content and ensured it could only be used according to defined rights (with associated payments). In other words, if I try and copy a track from the latest Madonna CD on to my MP3 player to listen to at the gym then the technology would let me, but charge me. Perhaps my PC would contact some kind of rights management centre before copying the track and charge £1 to my account. The MP3 player would only accept downloads after it had checked with the rights management centre to ensure I had paid. All the music in the world would be coded using encryption technology.

For this to work, every device (from televisions to PCs and hi-fis to mobile phones) would need a tamper-resistant chip inside to store and process the rights information (and to decrypt permitted content) and a connection to the DRM centre. Actually, one of these devices (the mobile phone) already has both of these, but let's put that to one side for the moment.

This approach might seem crazy, but it has its proponents: in the US, Hollywood is lobbying for a Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), which would require companies to include government-approved anti-copying technology in computers and electronic devices and would make it illegal for consumers to remove it.

The benefits of this dream DRM are obvious: artists, musicians, film producers etc, would have the full benefit of their labours and pirates wouldn't be able to rip them off. There are other less obvious benefits: the police would be able to ask the DRM centre who had played violent video games recently and the marketing department of a film distributor would know who had watched Terminator 2 before asking them what they would like to see in Terminator 3. Some governments might be interested in who had watched Newsnight (or their local equivalent) so they could target those viewers with advertising. Some governments might be interested in finding out who had watched non-state approved news or listened to subversive music.

Don't panic: for this dream DRM to be 100% effective, it needs an entirely new infrastructure for content management, distribution and access. And this isn't going to happen. Hollywood might think it a good idea, but everyone else thinks it's utterly unworkable. If you had to call up to re-register a couple of hundred CDs on your new CD player, then you wouldn't buy one: you'd just keep the old one. Hence, companies such as Sony (electronics revenues $40+ billion, music revenues $4+ billion) wouldn't sell very many new hi-fis, Walkmans or DVD players. Time for some more reasoned thinking.

DRM technology is a good way of helping people do something they want to do (eg, helping companies manage their software licences) but an ineffective way to prevent them doing things they want to(eg, copying CDs to MP3 players).

Would creative artists starve if the net makes any kind of copyright enforcement impossible? Unlikely. If copyright disappeared tomorrow, Madonna could still get a million dollars for appearing in a commercial. The real losers would be record companies, as almost every indus try observer has pointed out, but that doesn't mean society as a whole would lose out.

If it is impossible to charge for anything other than the first copy of a piece of content, then society will save a lot of money on DRM and all its side effects (lawyers, jails etc). But will artists be motivated to produce content? I think they would. Just as pharmaceutical companies are allowed to patent their inventions for a few years, so the content industry will be allowed to retain a form of restricted copyright that can be policed more effectively.

The average music buyer may be pretty unsympathetic to record companies but they would surely want music and musicians to continue. The record companies might then be transformed into relationship managers, selling the fans a relationship with their heroes that cannot be copied: if you want a ticket for the concert, you have to have bought the CD and that kind of thing. I'm not smart enough to figure out what kinds of things music fans might want from their new cyber-enhanced "one-to-one" relationship with talent, but I'm pretty sure other people are.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...383006,00.html





From September

Backpack Generates Its Own Electricity

New design may offer way for relief workers to power crucial equipment
Daniel B. Kane

In the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, radio and phone communication suffered, in part, when rechargeable batteries died and could not be recharged due to widespread power outages. A new backpack design may offer a way for first responders and disaster relief workers to generate their own electricity for communications devices, night vision goggles, water purifiers or other crucial, portable electronics.

All the person wearing the backpack has to do is walk — the backpack does the rest. The backpack captures energy from the up-and-down movements of its heavy contents and converts this energy to electricity.

The new research is published in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal Science published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

“I wrote the first draft of the Science paper during the relief effort following the 2004 tsunami. I was struck by continual reports of people not being able to communicate because satellite phone batteries went dead,” said backpack inventor Larry Rome.

In light of the power outages that are burdening relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it’s clear that disaster relief workers who can generate their own electricity would be more effective than relief workers without the ability to generate their own power, explained Rome, a biology professor from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

The backpack looks a lot like the metal framed packs people use to carry their gear during long trips. The backpack captures energy from this movement with a series of gears connected to an electric generator.

“The idea behind the suspended-load backpack isn’t complicated. It just took a person with the right background and a little creativity to put the pieces together,” said Rome.

Rome is an accidental backpack inventor. Much of his research is focused on the muscles that allow fish to swim and frogs to jump. He first envisioned a backpack as a sustainable way for humans to generate electricity from walking when he worked on a project aimed at making a submersible vehicle that swims like a fish.

Electrifying hip movement
The side-to-side sway of a person’s hips may be more familiar, but it’s the up-and-down movement of the hips that can power a gadget that feeds on electricity.

When you walk, you put one foot down and then your body vaults over that leg, causing the hip to move up and down by about five centimeters.

If you are carrying a heavy backpack when you walk, it takes extra energy to vault the backpack over your leg. The new backpack harvests this energy by separating the movement of the backpack’s heavy cargo from the movement of the frame.

The cargo compartment of the new backpack, which was filled to weigh between 20 and 38 kilograms (44 to 83 pounds) for a variety of trials, is suspended by springs and moves up and down with respect to the frame. It is this movement of the cargo compartment with respect to the frame that turns a gear connected to an electric generator that is mounted to the frame. Inside this generator, coils of wire within a magnetic field turn when you walk, leading to the production of electricity.

In one backpack “test drive,” the backpack consistently harvested about 7 watts. For comparison, cell phones, global positioning system receivers, and LED headlamps each use less than one watt. So, it appears that walking with the backpack could allow the wearer to run multiple devices at the same time. The generated electricity could also be used to charge batteries.

An 80 pound backpack worn by a disaster relief worker or field scientist often includes 20 pounds of replacement batteries, so the new backpack could allow people to carry fewer replacement batteries.

Power walking for real
There are many creative, though not always efficient, ways to generate electricity on a small scale. For example, a spinning hamster wheel generates enough energy to power a cell phone.

Efficiency is a critical issue for any energy harvesting technique. Clearly, carrying a hamster and all its supplies into the wilderness is much harder than carrying a cell phone replacement battery. Similarly, if carrying the new backpack burned huge numbers of calories, compared to a regular backpack of the same weight, then you would need to carry so much extra food that simply carrying extra batteries might be more efficient.

A series of treadmill tests measuring how much human energy it takes to walk with the backpack revealed that the backpack can serve as an efficient source of electricity. It’s true that you burn a few more calories when you walk with the backpack than a traditional backpack of the same weight. But, you are generating electricity at the same time, and the weight of the extra food that you must carry is far less than the weight of the batteries that would be required if you didn’t have an electricity-harvesting backpack, making this source of energy a “good deal.”

Leg vaulting
The backpack inventors are still in the process of figuring out why the new backpack lets you walk so efficiently. It appears that your leg muscles save energy during the transition between steps: when both feet are on the ground, your legs are bent and your leg muscles are working hard.

Also, each leg appears to supports a greater share of the weight of the pack than usual at the “top” of each step, when only one leg is on the ground. This leg is relatively straight. During this phase of each step, when the body is vaulting over the extended leg, adding extra weight doesn’t make much of a difference.

It is these subtle differences that could make this backpack more comfortable to wear and better for your back, said Arthur Kuo, an engineer from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. Kuo wrote a background article that accompanies the new Science research.

“The backpack’s suspension system might make it more comfortable to wear and the gain in comfort might be well worth it, even without the energy- harvesting capacity,” he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9245155/





A Monster Computer With a Monstrous Price (Liquid Coolant Included)
John Biggs

In this age of $500 laptops and $399 desktop PC's, a $4,329 computer had better inspire awe. Alienware, makers of high-end, U.F.O.-themed PC's, rises to the challenge with its ALX system.

The ALX is a monster. Inside is a gigabyte of ultrafast memory and an Advanced Micro Devices Athlon 64 FX-60+ processor, a special chip with two separate processing centers. This splits up many processor-intensive tasks that are mostly required while playing games, modifying graphics or playing video, and leads to a substantial increase in performance. While the processor's clock speed of 2.6 gigahertz is about average for a modern PC, A.M.D. says the chip is 34 percent more efficient at rendering 3-D graphics.

The ALX also has two graphics cards running in parallel, allowing all of the graphics processing to be handed off to two specialized chips. These cards alone have 512 megabytes of memory on board to handle 3-D games and video.

Within its futuristic heart, the ALX beats with liquid coolant, which is needed because its components can give off as much heat as 10 100-watt light bulbs.

A standard beige PC is fine for paying bills and surfing the Internet, but the ALX could come in handy when games and other important matters beckon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/te...s/19alien.html





Free Website To List Programs With Spyware
Paul Davidson

Here's a new way to attack spyware: embarrass its purveyors.

A free website (StopBadware.org) launching Wednesday plans to provide a list of programs that contain spyware and other malicious software. It will also identify companies that develop the programs and distribute them on the Internet.

Consumers can then decide if a program is safe to download.

"For too long, these companies have been able to hide in the shadows of the Internet," says John Palfrey, who heads the Berkman Center of Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is spearheading the project. "What we're after is a more accountable Internet."

The initiative is being run by Harvard and the Oxford Institute and is backed by high-tech heavyweights including Google and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports' WebWatch is serving as a special adviser.

Spyware invades PCs without users' knowledge when they download applications such as music file-sharing programs or screen savers, or visit certain websites. Often, spyware tracks Web-surfing habits and bombards victims with related pop-up ads. More nefarious versions monitor keystrokes to steal Social Security numbers or passwords for identity theft.

Also on the hit list of the StopBadware coalition are malicious "adware" programs that serve up onslaughts of pop-up ads or software that contains hidden viruses and worms.

At least 60% of home PCs are infected with one or more of these "badware" programs, says Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert.

The prevalence of the programs has spawned a booming industry of anti-spyware and anti-virus software. Internet providers such as America Online and EarthLink include the software free with service. But such programs typically can't identify all the rogue software on a PC and might not be able to eradicate a deeply embedded program even if they do, says Ferris Research analyst Fred Berlack.

By checking StopBadware.org, its organizers say, consumers can choose, in the first place, not to download a program containing the malicious software. The coalition is encouraging consumers to visit the website to log their experiences with harmful programs.

It will then use that information to compile reports on suspect programs, websites and companies that foist the software on consumers without getting their consent. The worst offenders will be spotlighted. It will take several months to gather a significant- size database, Palfrey says.

Some websites already provide information on spyware. Others identify suspect software for a fee. But the StopBadware group says it aims to be the biggest free clearinghouse.

Berlack is skeptical that many consumers will use the service. "I don't think the average Joe has the time or inclination to check every time he opens up a new website or downloads a program," he says.

But Te Smith of consultants FFW Partners, says, "Anything that helps people be more informed is useful. I applaud these companies for using their market presence and reach to try to educate consumers."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/co...e_x.htm?csp=34





Net loss on TV

UPN, WB Shows To Merge On One Channel Called CW
Marisa Guthrie

Hey "Smallville," meet "Everybody Hates Chris."

Come September, the WB and UPN networks will disappear and merge into a new network called the CW that will air locally on Channel 11.

That leaves the future of the Fox-owned Channel 9 - which currently airs UPN shows - unclear.

The new network will be co-owned by CBS Corp., which owns UPN, and Warner Bros. Entertainment, which oversees the WB.

The CW - with the "C" coming from CBS and the "W" from Warner Bros. - will target young, urban audiences. It will feature the best fare from both networks, including UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris" and "America's Next Top Model" and WB's "Smallville" and "Beauty and the Geek."

Other shows that will help launch CW include UPN's "Veronica Mars," "Girlfriends" and WWE's "Friday Night Smackdown," as well as WB's "Gilmore Girls," "Supernatural" and "Reba." "Kids' WB!" will survive also.

"This is an idea whose time has come," Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corp., said yesterday. "It's a scheduler's dream to have successful and critically acclaimed dramas ... comedies ... and reality series. We are going to have quite a schedule."

Exactly what Channel 9 will offer in the fall is unknown, because station officials and those at its owner, News Corp., didn't learn of the merger until yesterday. The Rupert Murdoch-run company also runs New York's Channel 5, Fox's flagship station

"Every change presents an opportunity," said News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher. "We'll announce our opportunity when the time's appropriate. We've only just found out about this."

The merger gives CW a spot on TVs in 48% of the country, including 20 of the top 25 markets, with Tribune stations and CBS' UPN affiliates agreeing to 10-year deals to carry CW.

Starting Sept. 6, the new network will air 30 hours of programming, seven days a week, including five hours of children's programming on Saturday mornings.

Dawn Ostroff, current president of UPN, will take over as entertainment chief at the new network, with WB CEO John Maatta stepping into the CEO post.

Both UPN and WB have struggled to turn a profit since their inceptions more than 11 years ago.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...p-327233c.html





Free Software Award Winner Announced
Press Release

Boston Massachusetts, USA - Wednesday January 25, 2006. At the ceremony for the 2005 Free Software Awards, Richard Stallman presented Andrew Tridgell with the award for the advancement of free software.

Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell was recognized for his work as originator and developer of the Samba project. Samba reverse-engineered Microsoft's version of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is used for file-sharing and print services. This software enables free operating systems to fit into Microsoft-based environments, encouraging greater use and adoption of free software. Samba has been implemented on millions of servers throughout the world. Tridge also released rsync, a highly respected remote file-distribution system, and contributed code to the Linux kernel.

During 2005, Tridge wrote a free software client to interoperate with BitKeeper, a proprietary revision control system used at the time by the Linux kernel developers. His reverse-engineering efforts led BitMover Inc. to remove permission for the use of BitKeeper, paving the way for a free software replacement. The Linux kernel is now being developed using a revision control system called Git, begun by Linus Torvalds and licensed under the GPL.

Every year, three finalists are nominated for the award by the free software community. This year's other two finalists were Harmut Pilch, recognized as founder of Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and for his leadership during the fight against the Software Patent Directive in Europe, and Theodore T'so, recognized for his work on file systems and the Linux kernel.

Previous winners of the Free Software Award

2004 Theo de Raadt
2003 Alan Cox
2002 Lawrence Lessig
2001 Guido van Rossum
2000 Brian Paul
1999 Miguel de Icaza
1998 Larry Wall

http://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-awards-2005





IBM Strives For "Superhuman" Speech Tech
Robyn Peterson

IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology on Tuesday that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs.

Historically, speech technology required the user to limit his speech to a fixed set of phrases in order to interact with a device. With IBM's Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 software package, introduced on Tuesday, the company hopes to allow users to speak commands using phrasing that is natural to them.

In a demonstration today at IBM's headquarters here, for example, users changed a simulated radio station, by speaking any of the following phrases: "Play 92.3," "Tune to 92.3," or "Tune the radio to 92.3."

Though speech recognition is already built into products like Microsoft's OfficeXP, many users still prefer to use their keyboards. Speech recognition can be trained to recognize a particular user's voice. But interpreting sounds from a variety of speakers can be even more challenging, unless a limited library of sounds, or phonemes, is used. Still, though speech recognition by a computer is still far from perfect, the future is bright, according to David Nahamoo, a manager in the human language technologies department at IBM Research.

"At IBM, we have this superhuman speech recognition [initiative in which] the goal is to get performance comparable to humans in the next five years," Nahamoo said.

Want an in-depth lesson on how speech recognition works? Then click here to read this ExtremeTech primer.

Understanding more than speech

Translating a command such as "Play 92.3" requires the device to understand the basic context of the command, a feature known in Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 as Free-Form Command. For Free-Form Command to work successfully, the system must recognize two things: first, that the user is referring to the radio, even if he doesn't use the actual term "radio". Secondly, the software has to be programmed to understand that the term "play" also is a command to tune the radio to the desired station.

But IBM can also make the process simpler by limiting the context of the speech to something relatively simple, such as the command, nouns and phrases associated with just a car's dashboard, according to Nahamoo. By limiting the domain, the system can make assumptions or inferences about what the user would like to accomplish, he said.

IBM partner VoiceBox Technologies implemented ViaVoice in its VoiceBox Navigation system, found in Scion automobiles. With this system, the driver can control XM Satellite Radio via conversational speech. Specifically, the driver can change stations, increase or decrease volume, as well as control other basic functionality.

The user can also search XM content by speaking phrases such as "Who is this artist?" Mike Kennewick, chief executive of VoiceBox, explained. The system must then determine the context dynamically, not only recognizing that a particular song is playing, but that the driver wants to know the artist who recorded the song.

"Algorithms exist that can determine this context on the fly, so you don't have to use predetermined sentence structure," Kennewick explained. "[It's accomplished by] tying speech content to some contextual cues by using environmental information," such as a particular song playing on the XM receiver, he said.

The Free-Form Command functionality was also demonstrated on a simulated GPS navigation system where the user could interact with the GPS navigation system using speech rather than by navigating menus by touch -- a boon to drivers who prefer to keep their eyes focused on the road.

From English to Mandarin Chinese, on the fly

Speech technology can be used to control computers and devices, but it can also be used to communicate with their flesh-and-blood counterparts, too.

MASTOR, the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator application, another IBM research project demonstrated today, dynamically translates English speech to Mandarin Chinese speech. For example, the user can speak English into a microphone, and the system will translate the sentence into Mandarin Chinese, and reply out loud.

The goal of the system, according to Nahamoo, is for someone to be able to "have a conversation with someone who is Chinese, [even if] I don't know Chinese and he doesn't know English."

MASTOR's translations are based on statistical analysis of the language, where the source sentence is first decompiled into a set of conceptual ideas. Then, the translated sentence is constructed in the target language, based upon these conceptual ideas.

IBM's current MASTOR prototype is a PC application that runs on Windows XP and Windows CE, which also means it can be run on a PDA. The software development kit (SDK) is available now, but no final products exist yet for consumers to purchase. A product will probably not be available to consumers for at least another 6 months, an IBM representative said.

Translating television

Want a real-time perspective on the Middle East, from someone who lives and understands the native culture? As globalization continues across the world, it's become a virtual necessity to be up-to-date on news reported in other countries. Tales, another project demonstrated by IBM, hopes to accomplish that goal.

Tales is a server-based system that perpetually monitors Arabic television stations, dynamically transcribing and translating any words spoken into English subtitles. That means that a user can watch Al Jazeera, an Arabic news station, with subtitles dynamically created by the Tales system displayed below the video, IBM officials explained. Videos can then also be viewed via a web browser, with all transcriptions indexed and searchable.

According to Salim Roukos, the project lead for Tales, translations of speech require quite a bit of processing time, meaning that real-time translations are impossible. For now, all video processed through Tales is delayed by about four minutes, with an accuracy rate of between 60 and 70 percent.

The accuracy rate could be increased to 80 percent, Roukos added, if the delay were also increased. However most users of the system felt timeliness was more important than accuracy, especially considering the subject matter was breaking news. By comparison, a human translator can achieve a 95 percent translation rate, he estimated.

Tales is up and running, and users can subscribe to the "Iraq" package, which includes Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language news stations, for an undisclosed price. Don't expect to tune it in during lunchtime, however; Roukos hinted that the price will to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Computers to rival a human

In addition to improvements in accuracy, Nahamoo explained that IBM will work diligently to index and make searchable other forms of content besides text. The Tales project is a tangible step in this direction. "We search on text today, but how about searching on speech and visual content?" Nahamoo said.

If the accuracy of speech recognition nears that of human performance, then will we inevitably encounter more interactive voice response systems, such automated voice mail? People may cringe at the thought, Nahamoo acknowledged, but there's an upside.

"Machines are not judgmental," Nahamoo said. "Some people feel like they are being judged when they phone call centers. That doesn't happen with a machine."
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/...=169923,00.asp





Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Mars, in Glorious 3-D
David M. Halbfinger

A dozen years ago, when they were just what-iffing how to build remote-controlled vehicles for exploring the surface of Mars, Steve Squyres and Jim Bell, scientists at Cornell University, already knew they wanted their rovers to have cameras worthy of an Imax screen.

What they never imagined was that those photographs would actually reach an Imax audience. And without a relative's connections to the movie industry, a documentary maker's connections in Washington, a college student's computer-animating talents and a team of rocket scientists' ability to stitch hundreds of one-megapixel pictures into a seamless high-resolution tapestry, they never would have.

Earlier missions had taken less sophisticated photos of Mars's surface, the kind only an astronomer could love. But when Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell were jotting ideas on a blank sheet of paper, they resolved to give their robots 20-20 vision.

"One of our big goals was to make this an experience like you were there," Dr. Bell said. "The impression we wanted to create was, you step out of your little capsule, you feel a dusty breeze through your hair, and you're seeing this alien landscape for the first time."

The dusty breeze may be a bit of a stretch. But starting Friday in 25 Imax theaters across North America, audiences will be able to behold, for the first time in all their side-of-a-barn-size glory, the visual harvest of the rovers and their more than two years of plowing over the red planet's rocky terrain after traveling hundreds of millions of miles.

The 40-minute movie, "Roving Mars," which was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and is being released by the Walt Disney Company, tells the story of the mission team's mad dash to ready the rovers for launching in 2003, of the tense moments waiting for them to communicate after landing on Mars, and of the eye-opening discoveries the rovers have made since then.

The rovers Dr. Squyres's team designed, Spirit and Opportunity, were expected to last for 90 days or so before succumbing to the harsh Martian landscape and minus- 110-degree nights. They proved unexpectedly hardy, and are sending data and pictures home to NASA to this day.

"Roving Mars" was itself launched in 2000, when George Butler, the director of "The Endurance," a documentary on Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914, was cutting an Imax version of that film. His editor was Tim Squyres, brother of Steve, who has edited many of Ang Lee's films and whose work on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" that year earned him an Oscar nomination.

At one point that June, Mr. Butler said, Tim Squyres was on the phone with his brother, talking about the Mars project, when Mr. Butler heard him mention Imax-quality cameras - "the magic line," he said. He was instantly hooked.

A month later, Mr. Butler screened the Shackleton film in Washington for members of Congress and other officials, including Sean O'Keefe, who was then the NASA administrator. When Mr. Butler told Mr. O'Keefe he had designs on a Mars movie, he said, Mr. O'Keefe offered to help in any way.

Mr. O'Keefe opened doors in the space program, but Mr. Butler said he encountered more resistance, oddly enough, among Imax film production companies, none of which were interested in his idea. "They said that space had been done," he said.

His project finally got moving, Mr. Butler said, when he approached the producer Frank Marshall, who had wanted to distribute the Shackleton movie and loved the Mars idea. Mr. Marshall took it to Disney, where a deal was struck - but only after Dr. Squyres had satisfied studio skeptics that Imax-caliber images could truly be transmitted all the way from Mars.

Indeed, the cameras that Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell had installed on the rovers - somewhere shy of the state of the art even when the rovers were designed - could capture only one megapixel at a time, about the equivalent of a cellphone camera. That would mean stitching about 250 images together seamlessly to create a panoramic picture big enough to fill an Imax screen - a task that takes one to three days on Mars, where the solar-powered rovers can function for only a few hours around noon.

Worse, the distance from Earth restricts the bandwidth of data transmissions to that of an old 128-kilobyte dial-up modem, meaning that it can take up to a week to send a panoramic picture back. (All told, the rovers have put together a portfolio of about two dozen big panoramas, according to Dr. Bell, who is writing a coffee-table book that will include many of them.)

Mr. Butler began filming two months before the launching date, and overcame resistance from NASA engineers who did not want his camera crew, intruding into their sterile assembly rooms, to slow them down. But Dr. Squyres said Mr. Butler's stroke of genius was in renting an Imax theater near Cape Canaveral to screen a few minutes for the entire mission team, just days before the launching of the Spirit rover.

"It was glorious," Dr. Squyres said. "You could just feel this chill go through the audience. That was the moment when we realized the power of the Imax format for telling what is actually a very visual and cinematic story. After that, George pretty much had access to whatever he wanted."

That included about 400 hours of high-definition film of the entire mission over three years, Mr. Butler said - a trove that he said might otherwise have gone untapped for a wide audience.

"Is there anything better that Americans are doing these days than that mission to Mars?" he said. "Here's a space program done for a very low budget, 600 to 800 million dollars. Ten years ago it would have cost a billion dollars. This was a cut-rate mission to Mars. And there was no one to tell the story of what happened."

It was a young Cornell student, Dan Maas, who added the movie's final major ingredient: double-take-inducing computer animations of the rovers' trips to Mars and landings on the planet's surface, and animated images of the rovers that Mr. Maas digitally inserted into the panoramic pictures the rovers had shot.

The intent was to show the rovers going about their tasks, but taking actual pictures of the rovers was impossible, given that each was on a different side of the planet. So Mr. Maas, who is now 24, applied the skills he had learned as an intern at two different Hollywood special-effects houses, this time in the service of accuracy.

"In many cases, we'd take the actual images from the rover and work them a little bit to give you an outside point of view," Mr. Maas said. "We'd build some 3-D geometry, and move the camera off to the side. But the reason that the animated images look so much like the rover's images is that they're made of the real rover images."

In the film, it can be hard to distinguish between the rovers' panoramas - which are still photographs, not video - and 3-D pictures rendered by computer as if seen by someone traversing the surface of Mars, on land or in the air.

"We took great pains to make all of the terrain accurate," Mr. Maas said. "The layperson isn't going to know this, but for somebody who's familiar with the mission, it's all based on 3-D data that was sent back. Every little scrap of rock - it's actually there on Mars."

Dr. Squyres, who said his hope for the mission had been to "show people Mars as it really is," said the movie had matched his own imagination - and exceeded what NASA could do on its own.

"I was finally seeing the Mars that I've had in my head all these months," he said. "We have good computer graphics, but the display capability falls far short of what Imax can do. This is the best look at our data I've ever had. It's the best reconstruction of the landing I've ever seen."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html





Flagging It Up – Learning The Lessons Of File Sharing

In the late 1990s when file sharing websites first emerged, the music industry was caught cold. Record labels were completely unprepared for the hugely popular practice of downloading songs from the internet. Efforts to close down the sites or prosecute individuals met with only limited success in the courts, leaving the record labels to warn that new talent would be stifled and that consumers would end up losing out in the long-run.

But while CD sales declined again last year, the music industry has avoided a meltdown by embracing the technology that threatened to destroy it. After watching anxiously from the wings, record labels have finally taken the plunge and started licensing their music for legal download.

This, combined with the massive popularity of MP3 players like the iPod, has meant that digital music is now a multi-million dollar industry. Music fans, it seems, are quite prepared to pay for downloads.

Now, attention is switching to film and television programmes. Some file sharing sites still enable subscribers to download this type of content but it was never as popular as music. Major films and television shows are now available in a range of digital formats. In the last 12 months alone we have seen the launch of the video iPod and the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which enable users to view media content on the move.

Major studios are keen to have a presence on these new and exciting platforms, which is perhaps a lesson they have learnt from the music industry. But they are also keen to protect their content. Record labels may be winning the battle against unlicensed download sites, but many still use content protection to stop users copying music from CDs to portable devices. Some CDs in fact, will not even play on a PC to prevent misuse.

In the US this week, the Senate has been debating new legislation that would enable broadcasters to protect their content. The proposals would compel product manufacturers to ensure that their devices recognised a flag in the content that would prevent it from being illegally recorded and distributed.

Content providers are adamant that unless they get adequate protection they will be forced to restrict the availability of their material. Opponents to the flag system warn that it could restrict the user's ability to watch films or play music on different devices.

Neither content providers nor lawmakers appear interested in preventing individuals from purchasing a film and being able to watch it at home on their television or on the move using a portable device. The concern is how easy it is to then distribute that content to other users.

In 2003 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a flag system but the ruling was overturned in the Senate. Whatever the result of the current round of deliberations in the US, there are likely to be ramifications for other leading markets around the world.

It is clear that film studios and television production companies will need to protect their revenue streams, but at the same time will be desperate not to get left behind in the way the record labels did.
http://www.avinfo.co.uk/index.php?ma...ry&id=15141664





File-Sharing 'Not Cut By Courts'

Global court action against music file-sharers has not reduced illegal downloading, an industry report says.

The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it was "containing" the problem and more people were connecting to broadband.

The global music industry trade body said sales of legal downloads were worth more than $1bn (£570m) in 2005.

That is up from $380m (£215m) in 2004, with "significant further growth" predicted this year.


DIGITAL MUSIC: STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Legal download sales pass $1bn a year
A library of two million songs legally available
420 million singles downloaded in 2005
19,400 people sued for illegal song-swapping to date
335 legal online music services available
35% of illegal file-sharers have cut back*
14% of illegal file sharers have increased activity*
One in three illegal file-sharers buy less music*
*Jupiter survey of 3,000 people in UK, Germany and Spain

Download stores now offer two million songs - double the number available a year ago - and the total number of legal downloads shot up to 420 million in 2005.

IFPI chairman John Kennedy said the industry was "winning the war but we haven't won the war" against piracy.

The fact that illegal song-swapping had not increased should be regarded as a success, he told the BBC News website.

"I would love to be sitting here telling you that it had gone down," he said.

"As broadband rolls out and as there's an explosion in many countries of broadband, file-sharing is being contained."

But the industry was finding it difficult to persuade existing song-swappers to use legal download services such as iTunes instead, he said.

"Those who've got into the habit of consuming their music for free are very difficult to shift.

More court cases

"And frankly it's an argument for increasing the scale of court cases because at the moment, people still don't think it's going to be them."

There are currently about 870 million song files available to download illegally over the internet, according to the IFPI.

Mr Kennedy also warned that the music industry could sue internet service providers (ISPs) if they do not crack down on their customers who flout copyright rules.

Music piracy could be "dramatically reduced within a very short period of time" if ISPs took action against their law-breaking customers, Mr Kennedy said.

The IFPI's Digital Music Report also revealed that music downloaded onto mobile phones was now worth $400m (£227m) per year - 40% of the digital music business.

'Misunderstood'

And Mr Kennedy backed the continuing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which controls what consumers can do with their music once it has been purchased - either online or on CD.

DRM remains controversial, with some critics arguing it does little to prevent piracy but instead limits what consumers fairly should be able to do with their music.

Earlier this week, the National Consumer Council complained that DRM was eroding established rights to digital media.

Mr Kennedy, writing in the report, said DRM "helps get music to consumers in new and flexible ways".

He said DRM was a "sometimes misunderstood element of the digital music business".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4627368.stm





ISPs 'Should Deny Access'

Last year saw big advances and key legal victories in the record industry's fight against massive illegal internet peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, the head of the world recording industry association, the IFPI, said on Sunday.

Speaking in Cannes John Kennedy called on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who give users access to the internet, to start policing it by denying access to persistent illegal file sharers.

And he condemned the French government's recent move to enable users to download unlimited digital music and films for personal use.

The judgments by four courts in three continents, including Australia, Korea and the United States, represented "a real sea change worldwide" and one that will help the budding digital music business grow, Kennedy told reporters on the opening day of the world's Midem music trade fair.

"We believe we are containing the problem," Kennedy said, describing as misleading recent press reports that the court cases were not stemming the haemorrhaging caused by the enormous online piracy around the world.

He argued that the industry's decision to instigate some 20 000 lawsuits against individuals who illegally share music over file-sharing networks across 17 countries "are changing consumers' attitudes".

Legal downloads of single music tracks more than doubled in 2005 to 240 million, helping the music industry to achieve a three-fold increase in global revenues to $1.1bn, the IFPI reported.

'That's pillage'

But these revenues would have been even larger if it had not been for illegal file sharing, which continues to be widespread around the globe.

Of the one billion songs downloaded from the internet in France last year alone, just 20 million were bought legally, EMI Europe chief executive officer Jean- Francois Cecillon said.

"That's not even theft, that's pillage," Cecillon said.

The real problem is not the new internet downloaders, who on the whole pay for their music, but the seasoned P2P users who are proving very difficult to wean away, Kennedy said.

As for the situation in France, Kennedy said he was optimistic that France would not go through with its proposals, which would legalise web piracy.

Such a measure would kill France's own music industry and "I can't believe that at the end of the day, the French government will want this," he said.

But internet piracy aside, Kennedy remained optimistic about the emerging market for digital music.

He said he believed that digital music revenues will rise steadily over the next few years and should account for 25% of total music revenues in 2010.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...867542,00.html





Court Tells ISPs To Reveal Identities Of Filesharers
Jonathan Cheng

An unprecedented court order will force Hong Kong's four largest Internet service providers to reveal the names, addresses and identity card numbers of 22 alleged music uploaders, clearing the way for record companies to file lawsuits against them.

The record industry hailed Thursday's High Court decision and promised to use it to expand the battle against illegal filesharing.

Ricky Fung, the recording industry's top representative in Hong Kong, said the decision cleared up a number of legal ambiguities surrounding the sharing of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks.

"We'll deal with these 22 first and, with that experience, we'll know how to proceed," he said.

The seven record labels seeking the order - which included local subsidiaries of multinational giants Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music - are expected to proceed with lawsuits against the 22 alleged offenders after the Lunar New Year.

Meanwhile, i-Cable Webserve - the only one of the four service providers to resist the order - announced Thursday it would not appeal the decision. "We respect the court's decision and will carry out its instructions accordingly," said i-Cable spokesman Danny Lo. The other three ISPs targeted in the case - Hong Kong Broadband Network, Hutchison Global Communication and PCCW-IMS - agreed during court hearings earlier this month not to contest any court order.

Judge Jeremy Poon agreed with the recording industry's claim that "massive online infringement" had helped to put record labels' existence "very much at stake."

Hong Kong laws protecting an individual's private information "cannot be absolute" in cases where "public interest or competing private rights and interests may require such protections to be removed," Poon wrote.

A refusal to grant the court order would "give the clearest indication to the copyright infringers that they can infringe with impunity behind the cloak of anonymity afforded by the Internet technology," he added.

"The court can and will, upon a successful application, pull back the cloak and expose their true identity. It is not an intrusion into their privacy."

Fung estimated Thursday the local recording industry had already spent HK$1.5 million on this round of legal action, but would not comment on how much money the labels will seek against the uploaders.

"We can't know what the court will decide is reasonable," Fung said. He pointed to parallel cases in the US which carried penalties of about US$3,000 (HK$23,400) against offenders.

"It is not a matter of money," Fung said. "It is a matter of life and death for the recording industry."

Fung said the recording industry will be willing to settle the cases out of court, but suggested that more warning letters and lawsuits will be on the way.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which Fung represents, claims that two million music files are copied among filesharers every day.

It blames illegal online filesharing for pushing down sales of music CDs in Hong Kong by 32 percent between 2000 and 2004, from HK$926 million to HK$629 million.

"Our purpose is to educate our online friends that you cannot hide on the Internet, and that, morally speaking, this is something that is wrong and comes with a punishment," Fung said.

He hoped the decision will kickstart the legal downloading of music, which the IFPI said last year tripled to 6 percent of worldwide music sales. Fung said lawsuits against illegal file sharers in the US helped "give life to new consumer behavior [there]."

The decision, Fung said, removed a key obstacle for the recording industry should it seek action against other offenders.

"Now that this case has set the precedent, we don't expect it to be difficult in the future," he said.

Fung dismissed fears that the court order may represent a setback for online civil liberties.

"It's not about Internet freedom," he said. "It's about setting a precedent that it's illegal to share files without the authorization of copyright owners."

In a separate statement Thursday, Roderick Woo, Hong Kong's privacy commissioner for personal data, said the court's decision will help clarify the limits and terms of Hong Kong's privacy ordinance.

Fung said that each of the 22 alleged offenders - who were caught during a three-day sweep by the IFPI in November 2005 - were targeted because they were major filesharers, and had shared at least 300 songs each through the now-defunct peer-to- peer filesharing program WinMX.

Initially identified only by the unique IP addresses of their computers, the court order will now force the service providers to reveal their names and other data.

Fung vowed to fight new cases and new technologies as they arose.

"How many steps will we take? We can't say right now," he said. "We still have a lot to do."
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...5&con_type= 1





Walked the plank

Racine Teen Apologizes For Downloading Movies
AP

A 13-year-old boy has publicly apologized for downloading four movies via the Internet and warned others not to swap movies and music illegally.

Ben Rangel of Racine appeared Wednesday before more than 100 seventh- and eight-grade students at Maple Dale School in this northern Milwaukee suburb.

"Sooner or later, my grandpa got in a lot of trouble, and it was because of me. .... I am here to say it wasn't worth it," Rangel said.

The Motion Picture Association of America filed suit against the teen's grandfather, Fred Lawrence, 67, of Racine, last month in U.S. District court, seeking as much as $600,000
in damages, after he initially ignored a letter offering to settle the matter out of court.

Rangel, who was then 12, admitted downloading "The Incredibles," "I, Robot," "The Grudge" and "The Forgotten" over a peer-to-peer electronic file-sharing network in December 2004, not knowing it was illegal.

His appearance at the school was part of an out-of-court settlement Lawrence reached with the film studios last month that included paying them an undisclosed amount.

Rangel was joined at the school by MPAA representatives and Parry Aftab, executive director of Wired Kids, an organization devoted to educating children about online legal and safety issues.

Aftab gave a presentation about Internet piracy.

"You may get it for free, but it will cost you," he said of downloaded movies. "It will cost you losing your computer and being grounded forever. You might get sued. ... That free movie isn't so free when you start looking at all those things."

Lawrence said he was glad to get the matter behind him.

"I understand much better now where these people are coming from. If anybody can do it, then obviously eventually they are going to lose money," Lawrence said.

MPAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said the association was placing an emphasis on education to prevent further litigation,.

"We're not trying to take money out of people's pockets. We're not trying to scare people. What we're trying to do is educate people and empower them with the knowledge of what is wrong and what is right," Duckworth said.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/du...s/13717603.htm





Great Irony Here: New York Pirates Rebroadcasting Howard Stern Free
Brad Kava

Pirate broadcasters in Brooklyn and Queens are rebroadcasting Howard Stern's satellite radio show on conventional FM frequencies, and the irony on this one is sweet.

Will the FCC, which chased Stern off the public airwaves, now crack down on the pirates? The agency needs a complaint to begin an investigation. Will Stern or Sirius be the complainer?

Stern's Sirius may have started a revolution it hadn't planned on.

For those unfamiliar with pirate radio, here are the basics: The airwaves are regulated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Agency, which was created to apportion and license spots on the radio dial, making sure signals didn't bleed over.

The licenses are now worth fortunes, $20 million to more than $100 million, for a good signal. But there are still small holes on the dial, which pirates fill using transmitters that can be bought for as little as a few hundred dollars.

The so-called pirates, who call themselves "free" broadcasters, and see themselves as freedom fighters, have often come up with programming that is ignored by conventional broadcasters.

For example, in San Jose, you can hear a number of good heavy metal pirate stations (sorry I can't reveal the frequencies here, but hunt around, it's not hard). Why? Because commercial radio broadcasters decided it wasn't in the interests of its advertisers, or lucrative enough for them, to program for people who want rock or metal.

So, kids in their bedrooms, or older people with some ingenuity, are broadcasting metal, punk and noncommercial music, sometimes for years, before the FCC gets wind of it and breaks down their doors.

The FCC will only begin an investigation if someone complains. Usually the complainers are commercial broadcasters who claim the signal is causing interference. Sometimes cheapo transmitters can cause problems. Usually, though, the biggest interference is one of cash flow. The broadcasters are threatened by the idea that someone would listen to something that they don't get advertising revenue from.

The radio dial, with impossibly high prices, is basically a government-controlled monopoly, filling the pockets of the large corporations who are the only ones that can afford a signal.

In Chicago there are celebrated pirates in slums, who are giving local news, issues, health programs, and programming content that is absolutely ignored by the corporations who market to the rich. In the Bay Area stations will no longer play music for the young or old, because they aren't in the more lucrative advertising demographic, adults 25-54.

Rebroadcasting Stern's show is especially egregious because it is filled with swear words and because it is a pay service. These pirates are like Napster, and we know how long that lasted before the record companies shut it down.

But they show a form of radio Darwinism. When people want to hear something and the corporations don't provide it, they will find a way to pirate it for the community.

Sirius has been marketing itself as the radio revolution, which it is. It is a true alternative to the stale, limited programming on the conventional dial.

But these pirates are the real revolutionaries. They are giving it away free. What would happen if pirates all over the country started broadcasting Howard's show? A real revolution would begin.

If Stern tries to shut them down, he'll end up in the same position that Metallica was in when it worked to close down Napster. My guess is Sirius will complain, but use proxies to file the complaints, the same way religious groups used shills to complain to the FCC about Stern's vulgarities when he was on commercial radio.

There's a hell of a battle shaping up and it will make for radio history before our eyes.
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/200...irony_her.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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