[JackSpratts]

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts. Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted." – Fred von Lohmann


"It's the negative connotations that DRM carries with it, the track record of privacy violation and integrity compromises, that prevents people from accepting it as the potential foundation for a legitimate business model." – Scott M. Fulton, III


"The fox is in the henhouse and it’s going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they’re history." – Gene DeWitt


"The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been. They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, 'Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this.' No visionaries." – Robert Altman


"Every generation runs its course, and they are expected to step aside for the next generation. My peers are going through it right now, and they feel they have much to contribute, but the opportunity is no longer there. They’re considered obsolete, and it’s just not true. This film is about how we still have something more to say." – Sylvester Stallone


"There are now several million active digital pirates. Many of them are ordinary families that have got into the habit of downloading the latest episodes of American TV hits. And they don't have any qualms about using file sharing networks to copy new movies without paying." – David Price


"Only Fox knows whether or not they did the right thing." – Scott Blumenthal




































November 25th, '06






U.S. Copyright Office Issues New Rights
Anick Jesdanun

Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.

Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making exemptions difficult to justify.

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted."
But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other portable players.

The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.

In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs.

Providers of prepaid phone services, in particular, have been trying to stop entrepreneurs from buying subsidized handsets to resell at a profit. But even customers of regular plans generally can't bring their phones to another carrier, even after their contracts run out.

Billington noted that at least one company has filed lawsuits claiming that breaking the software locks violates copyright law, which makes it illegal for people to circumvent copy-protection technologies without an exemption from the Copyright Office. He said the locks appeared in place not to protect the developer of the cell phone software but for third-party interests.

Officials with the industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association did not return phone calls for comment Wednesday.

The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.

The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes - for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under "fair use" provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.

Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.

"The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors," Billington wrote.

Billington also authorized the breaking of locks on electronic books so that blind people can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

He granted two exemptions dealing with computer obsolescence. For computer software and video games that require machines no longer available, copy-protection controls may be circumvented for archival purposes. Locks on computer programs also may be broken if they require dongles - small computer attachments - that are damaged and can't be replaced.

The final exemption lets researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities. Researchers had cited Sony BMG Music Entertainment's use of copy-protection systems that installed themselves on personal computers to limit copying. In doing so, critics say, Sony BMG exposed the computers to hacking, and the company has acknowledged problems with one of the technologies used on some 5.7 million CDs.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-19-24-23





On So-Called "Trusted Computing"

"In their zeal to stamp out piracy," Schneier told me last year, "the media companies might actually stamp out computing. They don't want you to have computers; they want you to have Internet entertainment platforms. To the extent that you have a fully programmable computer, that's a danger, because you could do things that are unauthorized by whoever wants to start giving out authorization."

New Seagate Digitally Restricted Media Hard Drives (full article is also near the end of section two).





Hollywood Reclaims Its Audience
Sharon Waxman

Maybe Hollywood tried harder. Or maybe it didn’t try quite so hard.

Whichever the strategy, the movie business climbed its way out of a dismal pattern of declining audience to more solid footing in 2006. With most of the year’s movie receipts counted, the box office is up 6.5 percent over last year, and attendance has risen nearly 5 percent.

This weekend was just the latest litmus test of Hollywood’s overall health. As young men and other gamers lined up to buy Sony’s PlayStation 3, the box-office pulse beat strong. Warner Brothers, despite having one of its roughest years in recent memory, scored with the animated penguin musical, “Happy Feet,” which took in an estimated $42.3 million at the domestic box office.

And “Casino Royale,” the overhauled James Bond franchise with the pug-faced Daniel Craig in the lead, took in an estimated $40.6 million at the box office for Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movie took in another $42 million in a handful of major markets abroad (including Britain), evidence that the studio’s big-budget bet on a grittier Bond would pay off.

“We’re fantastically happy,” said Jeff Blake, Sony’s vice chairman, noting that the movie would be even more successful overseas than in this country. “This is on track to be the biggest Bond ever worldwide, by far.”

Both of these films, with budgets of $100 million and $140 million respectively qualified as blockbusters in a year peppered with more modestly sized successes, from “Talladega Nights” to “Saw III” to the surprise mockumentary hit “Borat,” which has taken in $90.5 million so far and is even finding audiences overseas.

By contrast, this time last year — as attendance was nose-diving by 8 percent — “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” took in an eye-popping $102 million its first weekend.

That still wasn’t enough to reverse a trend of gloom and doom, and the realization that the movies had more competition than ever before from video games, online social networking and television.

“Last year people were looking to ‘King Kong’ and ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ to save the day,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which tallies the box office. There are no such films waiting around the corner in December, he noted, yet Hollywood will still finish the year on solid footing, buoyed by a broader array of films appealing to audiences that look beyond the young males who have been the most avid moviegoers.

Mr. Dergarabedian said, “This year we have to look to this collection of films to do well, and I think that will happen.”

Exhibitor Relations is projecting that the domestic box-office total will surpass $9 billion for the year, which it did not do in 2005. The international box office now adds up to even more than the domestic figure, but an overall figure for the year was not yet available.

To be sure 2006 had its share of blockbuster hits, but many of them did not fit the Hollywood formula of noisy explosions and computer magic.

Along with “Mission: Impossible III” and even Pixar’s “Cars,” neither of which performed to expectations, came “The Da Vinci Code,” an adult-audience blockbuster that did huge business overseas, along with a respectable box office in the United States, for a total of $755 million. Another film for grown-ups, “The Departed” by the director Martin Scorsese, has taken in $173 million at the box office around the world, though the film did cost $100 million to make.

And “The Devil Wears Prada,” starring a majestically mean Meryl Streep and no computer effects, was a surprise moneymaker by aiming for women and teenage girls. The movie cost $35 million to make, and has taken in $289 million worldwide.

“I think what it’s been is really a much better variety of pictures,” Mr. Blake said. “If we haven’t had, particularly in the fourth quarter, a blue chip sequel-blockbuster other than Bond, there certainly has been a lot of variety this year that has really added to the year. It hasn’t been the same audience that’s expected to show up. We’re not just chasing the young males and young females every week.”

Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony, observed that the studios placed their marketing dollars more carefully this year.

“These days the industry seems to be mixing it up more in the marketing, more innovation vis-à-vis the Internet, better integration of publicity and media, more interesting use of outdoor,” he said. “Whether this has made a difference or not, I’m not sure I can judge.”

Alan Horn, the president of Warner Brothers, acknowledged that his studio’s blockbuster bets did not pay off — “Poseidon” and “Lady in the Water” chief among the failures — while “Superman Returns” did not perform to expectations. But with numerous midsize films opening in December, he said, including “Blood Diamond,” a thriller set in Africa, and a football movie, “We Are Marshall,” his studio would still surpass $1 billion at the box office this year.

“I wish we had done better; I’m disappointed we didn’t do better,” he said, while noting that the industry overall improved. “But is the audience there? Do they want to see movies? The box office for the industry would suggest that they’re there as much as they’ve been in prior years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/movies/20roya.html





Retailers Prepare for Console Launches
May Wong

Retailers expect to be overwhelmed by demand during the impending video game console launches, but say they're working to keep the spirit festive while trying to prevent chaos and confusion.

Lines of anxious customers were growing at Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores across the country Wednesday as major retailers were getting confirmation of how many of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 consoles they would be getting for its Friday launch.

Stock of Nintendo Co.'s Wii will not be as constrained, but retailers are also expecting the inaugural batch to sell out quickly after they go on sale Sunday.

Major retailers refused to widely announce exactly how many units would be distributed to individual locations.

To curb overly high hopes and potential frustrations, many retailers were trying to make it clear that supplies would be limited. They posted notices in stores and warned on Web sites that PS3 supplies would be tight through the holidays. Store employees are also reiterating the message to customers who are lining up in designated areas outside stores.

Best Buy noted on the front page of its nationwide circular ads on Sunday that it would have a minimum of 20 60-gigabyte PS3 models and six 20-gigabyte models per store on Friday. How much each store would have in stock above that allotment was up for speculation.

Jose Mota, 26, of Hayward isn't worried. He was the first in the line of 33 people who had already camped outside of the Best Buy store in Union City since Tuesday.

The store manager told them to keep the place clean and left the light on for them overnight, he said. The group - now an ad-hoc community - also is conducting a roll call every four hours to make sure everyone still has their places. People are taking turns to go get food or grab a shower.

Keeping a safe environment for consumers is a top priority, but the process is still a balancing act, said Jill Hamburger, vice president of gaming at Best Buy Co. Inc.

Sony promises 400,000 PS3 machines for the U.S. market on the day of the launch and a U.S. total of about 1 million units by year's end - down sharply from its original projections of 4 million. Nintendo expects to have 4 million Wiis ready worldwide when the console hits store shelves, with the bulk going to North America.

Sony declined to detail its distribution strategy, but spokesman Dave Karraker said the company is roughly following a normal path but scaling it down proportionately to a retailers' typical share of Sony gaming products.

Sony plans to replenish inventories weekly, using air transport instead of ocean freighters, he said.

Though Sony could not speak for retailers, Karraker hinted that stores holding midnight sales events would likely hold more units in stock.

Best Buy will have midnight openings at 18 stores, including one in West Hollywood complete with celebrities. Target Corp. is throwing an all-night party at its Atlantic Terminal store in the New York City borough of Brooklyn so gamers can try out the PS3 and get a chance to win one. The Sony Style Store in Manhattan will celebrate with a midnight opening.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will have a midnight opening on Friday and a PlayStation trailer outfitted with video gaming stations through the weekend at its Orlando Fla. location.

On the eve of the Nintendo Wii launch, Toys R Us Inc. will host a block party at its Times Square store in New York, featuring music, bright lights, a countdown clock and an appearance by Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime.

"We expect our stores across the country to be busy on the launch dates," said Target spokeswoman Paula Thornton-Greear. "Our stores are prepared to manage crowds including a ticket system to ensure those in line first receive a ticket that ensures them a console based on our inventory."

At Wal-Mart stores, only customers in the designated waiting areas armed with tickets toward purchase will be invited into the stores to pick up their consoles.

Toys R Us conducted in-store pre-sales of the PS3 on Oct. 29 during which customers camped overnight to get a limited number of tickets. The retailer was relieved to recently learn it would be able to deliver on those pre-orders, but no other customers will immediately be able to get any PS3s that day, Kathleen Waugh, a Toys R Us spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

"That word is out there now, and we're making sure people know in advance so they're not waiting outside," Waugh said.

Some GameStop Corp. customers who snagged pre-orders of a PS3 last month may not be quite as lucky, as the nation's largest specialty game retailer warned earlier this week it would not be able to fulfill all of its pre-orders on launch day.

Others, such as Amazon.com, chose not to take any pre-orders of the PS3 to avoid the potential of confusion or disappointment.

Even online auctioneer eBay Inc. - where PS3s with retail prices of $500 and $600 were bidding Wednesday at an average of $1,500 and Wii machines were going for more than double its $250 retail price - is taking precautions. It imposed restrictions, including limiting sales to only established eBay vendors with minimum rating levels.

The days leading up to the console launches haven't been completely glitch-free.

Best Buy inadvertently posted on its Web site last weekend that it was taking pre-orders for the PS3. It was removed within a few hours but not before an undisclosed number of customers swarmed after the erroneous offer.

To Sony's credit, however, it is effectively avoiding a repeat of the public outcry from the shortages of the rival Microsoft Xbox 360 launch last year, said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

"Sony is managing this well. They are telling us the numbers are very small," Pachter said. "Nobody is thinking they're getting a PS3 for Christmas and those that do get it will be pleasantly surprised."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-02-55-35




Violence Mars Playstation 3 Launch
Peter Svensson

Two armed thugs tried to rob a line of people waiting for the new PlayStation 3 game system to go on sale early Friday and shot one man who refused to give up his money, authorities said.

In Sullivan, Ind., a man was in critical condition after emergency surgery for a stab wound after he and a friend tried to rob two men of consoles they waited 36 hours in line to buy, police said.

Nationwide, short supplies of the PS3 and strong demand led to long lines of buyers, some waiting for days outside stores. Once the doors opened Friday, they pushed and shoved their way to the shelves in several cities to get at the limited supply. Two people were arrested in Fresno, Calif., after a crowd trampled people in a parking lot.

It was about 3 a.m. when the two gunmen in Putnam, a town of about 9,000 residents in northeast Connecticut, confronted 15 to 20 people standing outside a Wal-Mart store and demanded money, said State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance.

"One of the patrons resisted. That patron was shot," Vance said.

Vance said the gunmen fled after shooting Michael Penkala, 21, of Webster, Mass., in the chest and shoulder. Penkala was in stable condition at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Mass., with injuries not believed to be life-threatening, Vance said.

Police were searching for the suspects, both believed to be in their teens, Vance said. He said one was wearing a ski mask and brandishing a handgun, and the other had what appeared to be a shotgun.

About 30 miles away, another shopper was beaten and robbed of his new PlayStation 3 just minutes after he bought it at a store in Manchester, police said.

The shopper told police five men surrounded and beat him as he left the Shoppes at Buckland Hills.

Police Sgt. Chris Davis said the attackers pushed one of their cohorts out of the car as they drove away. That man, a 17-year-old from Windsor, was charged with robbery, larceny, assault and breach of peace.

Four other teenagers were arrested, and more arrests were expected, police told WTNH-TV late Friday.

Andrew Templeton, 20, and David Wiggins, 28, of Sullivan, Ind., were assaulted by two teens after waiting for 36 hours at a Super Wal-Mart, police said.

They were unloading their PlayStation 3s from their car when two teens approached them carrying a chain and a tire iron and demanding their consoles, said Sullivan Police Chief David Story.

A fight broke out. Wiggins' nose was broken, and he stabbed one of the attackers, Dylan Moss, 19, police said. Moss was in critical condition after surgery, officials said.

Sullivan County Prosecutor Bob Springer said he plans to charge Moss and accomplice Dustin Fagg, 19, with felony robbery.

Elsewhere, two men wearing black ski masks and sunglasses made off with five consoles after holding two employees at gunpoint at an Englewood, Ohio, video game store Thursday night, police said.

A Pennsylvania teenager was also robbed of his new PlayStation by a man who tapped on his car window with a handgun in Allentown, police said.

In Lexington, Ky., someone fired BB pellets from a passing vehicle at people waiting outside a Best Buy store, according to WKYT, whose own reporter said she was among four people grazed while she interviewed buyers in line.

Police fired a talcum powder ball at the ground outside a Target store in Henrico, Va., to get the attention of an unruly crowd of about 350 people who were waiting to buy one of the shop's eight consoles, police said.

In McLean, Va., police fired pepper pellets Friday morning to subdue a rowdy crowd of about 200 people outside a Circuit City store at Tysons Corner Center mall. One person complained of shortness of breath after the pellets were fired and was taken to the hospital, authorities said.

A Best Buy store in Boston, aware it had only 140 of the consoles, got smart about the big sale - its employees gave out tickets to the first 140 people in line so everyone could go home until the store opened.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-18-06-19-05





Nintendo Hopes for Console Comeback
Yuri Kageyama

Nintendo brought the world the mustachioed plumber Super Mario and has sold nearly 200 million Game Boy handheld machines over the years. It's also been coaxing the elderly and other video-game novices to try out puzzles and virtual pets on its DS portables instead of the standard shoot-em-up and sports games. Now the Japanese pioneer of video games is about to embark on its biggest push in home consoles in years with a machine called Wii that puts simplicity above fancy graphics and computing horsepower.

Nintendo Co. is banking on the Wii's remote-controller wand that can be swung around like a tennis racket, fishing pole, drumstick or orchestra baton in easy-to-play games that are expected to appeal to a wider audience than young males. It goes on sale Sunday in the United States and Dec. 2 in Japan.

If all goes well, Nintendo could win back some of the market share it once had in the business with its original 1983 console Family Computer, or Famicom, which was sold in the U.S. as Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo is sticking with its historical fun-and-games roots as a toy maker in positioning itself against offerings from Microsoft Corp., a U.S. software company pushing Internet capabilities of its console, and Sony Corp., a Japanese electronics maker that has ruled the console gaming business since the mid-1990s.

Nintendo dates back to 1889, when it made Japanese-style "hanafuda" playing cards decorated with plum blossoms, pine trees and full moons, before moving on to Western style decks of cards and other modern toys.

After pioneering the video game business in the 1980s, Nintendo built up a host of powerful in-house game software offerings, including "The Legend of Zelda," "Kirby" and "Donkey Kong" series, as well as Super Mario and Pokemon - all offered only on Nintendo systems.

But that didn't stop Nintendo from being toppled as the industry leader in home consoles with the arrival of Sony's original PlayStation.

Sony's empire grew even bigger with the PlayStation 2, and Sony has sold more than 200 million PlayStation series machines over the years. It is estimated to control as much as 80 percent of the global home console market.

The successors to the Famicom and Super Famicom - Nintendo 64 and GameCube - couldn't keep up in part because rivals labeled them as machines for younger children. Nintendo shipped a cumulative 32.9 million Nintendo 64 machines, and 21.2 million Game Cubes worldwide.

But Nintendo branched out and scored success in portable game machines with its Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, and most recently with Nintendo DS that features a touch-panel screen. Nintendo has sold 26.8 million DS machines since late 2004 at a rate that's growing faster than any game machine ever.

The DS also broke new ground by offering different types of games, including ones that involved caring for a virtual pet, studying cooking recipes and tackling brain-teasing puzzles. Wii, Nintendo hopes, will continue that trend.

And some analysts are betting on Wii as a surprise winner during the year-end shopping season.

For one, it's defying past stereotypes of the young male geek audience in reaching out aggressively to older people, women and others who may be intimidated by the complex button-pushing required for most existing games.

Hiroshi Kamide, director of research at KBC Securities Japan, believes Wii will not only convert new gamers but also win over PlayStation and

Microsoft Xbox fans, who may buy Wii in addition to the latest upgrade PlayStation 3. The PS3 debuts in the U.S. on Friday.

"The Wii will expand the market pie and grow in that sense, but also actually be the second console of choice for all the core gamers," he said, adding that Wii's success will depend on how well it does on both counts.

"It will be very interesting to see how much the market pie grows because of the Wii. But it is still a game console at the end of the day," Kamide said.

Wii already has a pricing advantage at $250, or about half the price of the PlayStation 3 at about $500 or $600, depending on the model. The Xbox 360, which launched last year, sells for $300 to $400.

Nintendo also is preparing more machines. Company spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa said nearly 400,000 Wiis will be available for the Japan launch date, and likely more for the U.S. launch.

Sony had just 100,000 PS3s for the Japan launch, and 400,000 consoles in the U.S. for Friday's debut. (Its European launch has been pushed back until March because of production problems.)

Nomura Securities Co. analyst Yuta Sakurai believes PlayStation's domination in the industry will get watered down with the arrival of Wii, estimating Nintendo will sell 40 million machines compared with 70 million PlayStation 3 consoles in the next five years.

More critically, the profit is also likely to be better for Nintendo, as Sony is losing money for every PS3 console it sells until it gets a return on its massive investments, he said.

"It's nonsense to measure success by how many machines you sold," Sakurai said. "If it's failing as a business, then it's a failure. Nintendo is doing a fantastic job maintaining profitability."

Sony is expecting to rack up 200 billion yen ($1.7 billion) in red ink in its game unit for the fiscal year ending March 2007, much of it in startup costs for PlayStation 3. By contrast, Nintendo is forecasting profit of 100 billion yen ($845 million) for the fiscal year, as Wii buoys earnings in the second half.

Nintendo also creates most of its game software for its machines in-house, which contributes to hefty profit. Sony has outside companies making much of its game software.

Nintendo spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa says the company's name, which means "trusting in luck," believed to refer to hanafuda cards, is telling today in the gaming business.

"You do everything you can. Beyond that, it's luck," he said. "Winners and losers in entertainment aren't decided by reason alone. Trends come and go, and sometimes great things don't sell. It's all so whimsical."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-04-39-25





Nintendo Launches Wii, Challenging Sony
Peter Svensson

More than a thousand fans lined up in Times Square for the Sunday launch of Nintendo's entry into the holiday season's field of competing video game consoles, the cheap but innovative Wii.

Despite the throngs, the midnight launch event went smoothly. That contrasted with the launch of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 console just two days earlier, which forced police to disperse crowds at some stores around the country.

The first buyer, Isaiah Triforce Johnson, had been waiting in line outside the store for more than a week. He wore a Nintendo Power Glove, a wearable controller that came out in 1989, while shaking hands with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime after buying the first Wii. Johnson said he had legally changed his middle name to a reference in Nintendo's "Zelda" series of games.

Launching right after the much-vaunted and technically sophisticated PlayStation 3 is a brave move for Nintendo, which is playing catch-up after losing dominance of the home console market to Sony in the mid-90s.

The Wii itself is a daring design: It eschews the high-definition graphics that are the main selling points of the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, which came out a year ago. Instead, Nintendo hopes to attract a new generation of fans by changing the way games are played. The console comes with a motion-sensitive controller that acts as a tennis racket, baseball bat, steering wheel, gun or sword depending on the game.

Fils-Aime said the company made "some very tough choices" in designing the Wii.

"Tough choices about not including a DVD player at the start, tough choices about not including high-definition capability at the start. That's because we wanted a mass-market price, and we believe the market will validate those decisions come launch day on this Sunday," he said.

The Wii costs $250 and includes one game. The two PlayStation 3 models cost $500 and $600, with no included game. The two Xbox 360 models cost $300 and $400, with no game. Online, the prices are steeper: PlayStation 3s were selling for around $2,500 on eBay Saturday, while Wiis (listed by sellers who had pre-ordered from retailers and expected to get the units Sunday) were listed at around $500.

Sony had about 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores on Friday. Nintendo has said it would have "five to ten" times as many Wiis available at launch, and will have shipped 4 million units by the end of the year. It still expects consoles to sell out in stores.

The relative abundance of units, and a smaller fan base, should make Sunday a calmer shopping day than Friday. On Saturday evening, people were lining up at stores more to show their devotion to Nintendo and celebrate the occasion than because they were afraid of not getting a Wii.

At the Nintendo World store in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, 86 people were lined up for the morning opening. Anthony Eaton, dressed in green as the character Link from the "Zelda" series, looked chagrined when passing girls called him "Peter Pan."

Eaton, 18, didn't really need to be in line, since his friend had pre-ordered a Wii for him that would be available for pickup the next morning.

"It's all in the spirit of gaming. Wiis only get launched once, and we gotta do this right," said Eaton, who had traveled from Washington to go to the only U.S. store bearing the Nintendo name.

A few blocks away, there was no one in line at a Best Buy store that would start selling the console Sunday morning.

In the Los Angeles area, more than 500 people waited in line at the Game Stop at Universal City Walk. The store handed out numbered wristbands to avoid the crushes that were common at the PlayStation 3 openings.

The first to buy the system at midnight was Jonathan Mann, 24, who was dressed in red overalls and a cap like the Mario character from "Super Mario Bros."

"I'm a little delirious. I've been up for about 40 hours straight. But I've got it in my hands now and it feels good," said Mann, adding that he has written more than 40 songs about the console for his gaming Web site, gamejew.com. His song titles include "Wii Means You and Me" and "The Wind Whispers Wii."

In a somewhat unusual move for a Japanese company, the Wii was scheduled to go on sale in Japan two weeks after the U.S. launch, the opposite of Sony's launch order. Nintendo said it made the decision to get in on U.S. holiday shopping, which starts earlier than shopping in Japan.

Analyst John Broady at gaming Web site GameSpot.com sees the timing as David taunting Goliath.

"They obviously are confident that they can go head-to-head with Sony," Broady said. "It was a very, very gutsy move."

Broady said that judging by the gaming enthusiasts who visit GameSpot, the Wii has as much buzz behind it as the PlayStation 3. It's been well reviewed, and it's helped by interest in a new installment in the Zelda series, "Twilight Princess."

"The big question is, when you get past this set of people who are really into games, how deep does this buzz go in the general population?" Broady asked. "I think everybody in America yesterday knew that the PlayStation 3 was launching and knew what it was. In most homes around the country, I think most people wouldn't know what a Nintendo Wii was at this particular moment."

Nintendo's stated goal is to hook people with the lure of the wireless controllers, low price and a small, cute main unit that will fit easily in most entertainment centers.

Explaining to a mass audience the appeal of the controllers and what makes the console different is a challenge for the company, but one that will get easier, Broady predicted.

"I think as the Wii gets out in the marketplace, and people start seeing it, I think it will make a huge difference," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-06-28-43





Wii, Nemesis to PlayStation, Hits Market
Peter Svensson

Nintendo Co.'s entry into the game console wars, the Wii, went on sale Sunday, and quickly sold out in many stores despite stocks that far surpassed those of the rival PlayStation 3, which went on sale two days earlier.

"There were enough people in line to snap up almost all the units of the Nintendo Wii that we had in stock, so it was an instant sellout," said Circuit City spokesman Jim Babb. There were a few overnight campers, but most had lined up in the early morning.

Spot checks at New York stores turned up only one, the Toys R Us in Times Square, with Wiis in stock. The store hosted a midnight launch event that drew a crowd of more than a thousand people for the sale of the very first Wii.

The first buyer, Isaiah Triforce Johnson, had been waiting outside the store for more than a week. He wore a Nintendo Power Glove, a wearable controller that came out in 1989, while shaking hands with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. Johnson said he had legally changed his name to include a reference to Nintendo's "Zelda" series of games.

The launch apparently went smoothly, a contrast to the PlayStation 3 release, which forced police to disperse rowdy crowds at some stores around the country.

Sony had about 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores on Friday. Nintendo has said it would have "five to ten" times as many Wiis available at launch, and will have shipped 4 million units by the end of the year.

The Wii costs $250, including one game, half of what the cheaper PlayStation 3 model costs. The most common PlayStation 3 model costs $600, with no included game.

On the eBay auction site, Wiis were selling Sunday for twice the store price, indicating that supplies are still tight. The PlayStation 3, meanwhile, was selling for around $1,500, already down about $1,000 from Friday.

"The people we saw today were much more likely to take these games home and play them and love them rather than flip them on eBay," Babb said. Circuit City expects more Wiis in stock soon, but Babb could not say exactly when.

Launching right after the much-vaunted and technically sophisticated PlayStation 3 is a brave move for Nintendo, which lost the top spot in the market to Sony Corp. in the mid-90s. More recently, Microsoft Corp. has waded into the market as well.

The Wii takes a different tack than the competition, forgoing the high-definition graphics that Sony has spent billions to develop for the PlayStation 3.

Instead, Nintendo aims to draw gamers and non-gamers alike with intuitive game play. The Wii comes with a motion-sensitive controller that the gamer waves around in the air, using it as a tennis racket, golf club, steering wheel, gun or sword depending on the game.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-19-07-15





Wii to Allow Users to Surf the Internet
AP

For video game addicts facing the conundrum of how to balance hours of nonstop game playing with the occasional need to know what's going on in the outside world, Nintendo may have found a solution.

Nintendo Co.'s new Wii video game console will include ways for people with a high-speed Internet connection to surf the Web, share photos, check the weather and browse news headlines, the company said Thursday.

The company also plans an online store, accessible through the console, where people can download games or buy other items.

The Wii launches in the U.S. on Sunday and will cost $249.99. Several services, such as the weather and news offerings, are scheduled to debut in the months following the launch.

Nintendo is partnering with Weathernews for local weather, with The Associated Press for news content and with Opera Software ASA for a Web browser. The company said it's possible it will work with other companies to add more offerings down the road.

Nintendo isn't the only company hoping to offer more from its video game console via online connections. Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox scored an early hit with its Xbox Live online game play system, and has since begun offering more perks to Internet-connected users.

With the Wii, Nintendo is trying to attract people who may have been turned off in the past by the complexity of video games. It features a unique wand that can be swung around like a tennis racket, fishing pole, drumstick or orchestra baton to control games.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-18-39-54





Target Backs Off In Online Movies Feud
Gary Gentile

Discount retailer Target backed off plans to pull in-store promotions of products from Walt Disney after Disney threatened not to ship DVDs of hit movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a person familiar with the situation said Friday.

The companies are at odds over The Walt Disney Co.'s decision to sell movies online through Apple Computer Co.'s iTunes store for less than it charges Target and other retailers.

The dispute is part of a feud between a number of major retailers and Hollywood studios over online movie sales.

Target Corp. stores had removed signs promoting the DVD of the Disney-Pixar animated film "Cars" and other Disney products, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak for either company.

The two sides are discussing their differences after resolving the standoff, the person said.

A Disney spokeswoman declined comment. A call to Target for comment was not immediately returned. The situation was reported on the Disney Internet fan site JimHillmedia.com and in the Wall Street Journal.

Studios selling digital copies of films for less than the wholesale price of DVDs rankles retailers, who see Internet distribution of films as a threat to their business and have reminded studios that DVD sales provide the majority of profit for most films.

Studios counter that digital versions of films should be less expensive because they are lower quality and typically do not contain the kinds of extra features included on DVDs.

Last month, Target President Gregg Steinhafel sent a letter to every Hollywood studio warning them about undercutting the wholesale price of DVDs by giving online services a better deal on digital offerings.

"Target cannot be expected simply to accept that risk and continue to do business as usual," Steinhafel wrote.

"Our space, signing, promotional programs and the hundreds of millions of consumers in our stores annually should not be undervalued," he wrote.

Disney so far is the only studio offering films over iTunes, which sets its own price for all titles.

Disney and other studios also sell films through other online services, which allow the studios to set their own prices.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-17-19-32-45





Wal-Mart's Site Stalls on Black Friday
Anick Jesdanun

High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Web site for much of Friday, one of the year's busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity Friday, while Amazon.com Inc.'s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.

For much of Friday morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a "higher than anticipated traffic surge."

Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, marks one of the year's busiest days for retailers and the official start of the holiday shopping season.

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal mid-afternoon Friday, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

"People who wanted to purchase one of those plasma TVs, ... they probably went to a competitor potentially," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems Inc.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 4:30 a.m. EST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds, Rushlo said, and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Walmart.com is the 21st most popular site in the U.S., with 22.8 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Rushlo said retailers get better each year bracing for the volumes, but they also make their sites increasingly complex, adding 360-degree views of products and other features. Nonetheless, with the exception of Wal-Mart, online retailers were generally performing well.

"There were a few glitches here and there, minor problems," Rushlo said.

He said Amazon.com's troubles were relatively small.

The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 2 p.m. EST Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price.

"We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said Friday.

The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Berman said. Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes.

The home page of Disney's shopping site generally loaded fine, but troubles occurred "a couple of clicks into it," said Gary Foster, spokesman for DisneyShopping.com.

He said the site began to experience congestion at about 9 a.m. EST, following a record Thanksgiving Day of sales and Web traffic. He said Disney already was planning to run sales through Sunday night and expects customers to come back.

"I'm fairly certain we will make up for the loss today," he said.

Roughly 137 million people are expected to hit the mall from Friday to Sunday, according to the National Retail Federation, making it one of the most lucrative weekends for stores.

Millions of people are also expected to shop online starting this weekend. The Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as "Cyber Monday," is expected to be one of the year's biggest online holiday shopping days, as people return to work and shop online using their office computers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-24-18-49-46





Amazon Downed for 10 Minutes Due to Promotion

Amazon ran a special promotion this week but under-estimated the demand for the product from users with fast connections. At exactly 2pm EST, the offer was open (an Xbox core system at less than half-price). Unfortunately for Amazon, so many people were waiting for the promotion that the entire Amazon website - not just the promotion page - sank without a trace from just before 2pm, to at least 2:12pm. The home page, the product pages, everything, were unavailable.

While attracting a lot of traffic to the amazon pages at once sounds like a good idea we wonder how many amazon shoppers elsewhere in the site abandoned their purchases halfway through after they found their experience destroyed by the vote rush going on in the next room. Was the quid worth the quo? (some people got quite irate).

The poor performance of the amazon site during the giveaway also reflects badly on the Amazon "elastic compute cloud" offering (Amazon EC2) which is designed, supposedly, to offer instant capacity to companies which need to deal with exactly this kind of sudden rush.

On the other hand, this story could just be bad eggs because we didn't get one either.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79839





E-Looking but Little E-Buying on Monday
Louise Story and Michael Barbaro

Petco.com will offer 25 percent discounts, Barnesandnoble.com will give away a travel bag for every $75 purchase and Adidas.com will waive shipping fees on Monday, a day widely touted as the biggest of the year for online merchants.

But is it?

The aggressive marketing tactics — from deep one-day discounts to gifts with purchase — have touched off a lively debate in retailing on the significance of Cyber Monday, as industry boosters now call the Monday after Thanksgiving.

The data from 2005 tell two stories. More consumers visited online retail sites on Cyber Monday than on any other day during the last holiday season, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks online traffic.

But there was a catch: most were not ready to buy.

As a result, Cyber Monday was only the ninth biggest day for online holiday spending. The top day was Monday, Dec. 12, when consumers forked over $556 million, compared with just $484 million on Cyber Monday, according to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic and purchases.

“Cyber Monday is more hype than reality,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, a retail research firm.

And at least one major online retailer appears to agree, conspicuously sitting out Cyber Monday: Amazon.com, the nation’s biggest Web merchant, is offering no special discounts that day.

Even so, the debate has done little to diminish the industry’s obsession with Cyber Monday, so christened in 2005 by Shop.org, the online retail arm of the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

Shop.org leaders observed that online retailers recorded strong traffic on the Monday after Thanksgiving, when consumers returned to work — and high-speed Internet connections — and spent the day browsing shops online and making their wish lists.

In response, retailers began viewing the day as their best chance to hook online shoppers — an increasingly important slice of the retail industry — and keep them coming back throughout the season.

Only a handful of companies offered special Cyber Monday promotions last year, but dozens of online retailers are expected to participate this time around. “You are going to see a much larger surge this year,” said John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce at Petco.

Barnes & Noble is selling half-price DVDs, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Gilmore Girls.” Home Depot is knocking $50 off the price of a Polaroid 5.1 megapixel camera and MP3 player and $30 off Black & Decker blenders. HSN, the TV shopping network owned by IAC/Interactive, is offering free shipping on hundreds of items with purchases of more than $75.

“When this traffic comes, we don’t want it leaving without making a purchase,” said Jon Kapplow, vice president of multichannel marketing for HSN.com.

That was the problem in 2005. Retailers reported that their sites bustled with traffic as customers jumped online to avoid having to wait in lines. Nielsen NetRatings said at least 27.7 million Americans browsed shops online.

But scores of shoppers left the sites without buying anything.

“When it got named ‘Cyber Monday,’ somehow that got translated to mean the highest day,” said Gian M. Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks. “I think there’s been a little goosing of the importance of these days.”

The bulk of holiday spending, he said, occurs in December, not in the last few days of November, though retail analysts disagree about which day is the biggest. Coremetrics and MasterCard each recorded Dec. 5 as the biggest day for purchases. But comScore said it was Dec. 12, and NPD announced it was Dec. 19. The disagreement is caused in part by different policies on when a sale is recorded — when the purchase is made or when the goods are shipped.

Retailers acknowledge that Cyber Monday is as much about promoting merchandise as selling it. “From a P.R. standpoint, naming the day and creating some promotion around it, that helps,” said Greg Foglesong, director of multichannel marketing for Home Depot Direct.

Home Depot did not offer online promotions on Cyber Monday last year, but the retailer plans to do so this year. “We’ve recognized that there’s a buzz around the event, and we want to make sure that we are a destination on that very important day,” Mr. Foglesong said.

Merchants said that with or without their marketing, consumers were turning Cyber Monday into a major event in retailing.

HSN, for example, did not promote Cyber Monday last year. But its Web site saw a dramatic surge in traffic, with the Monday after Thanksgiving becoming the second-most-active day for the site of 2005, said Mr. Kapplow of HSN.

To create even more traffic, HSN will heavily promote its site this year. About a third of HSN.com’s home page will be filled with an ad about the site’s free shipping offer. HSN is also promoting free online shipping on its TV network, and the company is rolling out thousands of videos featuring its products on Google Video over the next several weeks.

Even companies that struggled to convince consumers to buy online last year are trying again in 2006. Danskin is offering free shipping and 25 percent off purchases of more than $100, up from 20 percent off in 2005.

“You don’t have to manage your way through the crowds, you don’t have to worry about finding that item you saw online,” said Eric Nadler, vice president of e-commerce for Danskin. “You can do it at your convenience.”

Meaning, of course, at work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/te...y/24cyber.html





Traffic Disrupts Wal-Mart, Disney, Amazon Web Sites
Anick Jesdanun

High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Web site for much of today, one of the year's busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity today, while Amazon.com Inc.'s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.

For much of this morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted in blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a "higher than anticipated traffic surge."

Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, marks one of the year's busiest days for retailers and the official start of the holiday shopping season.

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal by mid-afternoon today, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

"People who wanted to purchase one of those plasma TVs ... they probably went to a competitor potentially," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems Inc.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 3:30 a.m. CST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds, Rushlo said, and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Walmart.com is the 21st most popular site in the U.S., with 22.8 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Rushlo said retailers get better each year bracing for the volumes, but they also make their sites increasingly complex, adding 360-degree views of products and other features. Nonetheless, with the exception of Wal-Mart, online retailers were generally performing well.

"There were a few glitches here and there, minor problems," Rushlo said.

He said Amazon.com's troubles were relatively small.

The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 1 p.m. CST Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price.

"We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said today.

The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Berman said. Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes.

The home page of Disney's shopping site generally loaded fine, but troubles occurred "a couple of clicks into it," said Gary Foster, spokesman for DisneyShopping.com.

He said the site began to experience congestion at about 8 a.m. CST, after a record Thanksgiving Day of sales and Web traffic. He said Disney already was planning to run sales through Sunday night and expects customers to come back.

"I'm fairly certain we will make up for the loss today," he said.

Roughly 137 million people are expected to hit the mall from today to Sunday, according to the National Retail Federation, making it one of the most lucrative weekends for stores.

Millions of people also are expected to shop online starting this weekend. The Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as "Cyber Monday," is expected to be one of the year's biggest online holiday shopping days, as people return to work and shop online using their office computers.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4358356.html





Watch Cable TV on Your Cell Phone? Soon.
Bruce Meyerson

Embracing a technology that has unnerved media and telecommunications companies, a major European wireless provider will let customers watch their home cable TV on a cell phone if they also have a device called the Slingbox back at the house.

3 Group will launch the new service in Britain first, starting Dec. 1, followed by three more of its 11 markets in early 2007, the wireless company announced Thursday.

Two new handsets running on 3's next-generation wireless network will feature the Sling application, which customers can use to watch any channel available on their cable TV at home. The phones also can be used to control a digital video recorder at home, pausing and rewinding live television, playing previously recorded shows, or setting up the DVR to record a program.

The partnership with 3 is a watershed for Sling Media Inc., the first sign of official recognition from the industry "establishment" for a renegade device that the California-based company began selling a year ago. The Slingbox, hooked up simultaneously to a set-top cable box and a broadband connection, can stream live and recorded video over the Internet to any laptop or handheld equipped with SlingPlayer software.

The gadget is the latest in a line of devices that have reshaped the way people watch television over the past few decades.

Before the VCR, catching a TV show required viewers to conform to a schedule set by networks. More recently, digital video recorders such as the TiVo made it possible to skip commercials and even rewind a live program. Now devices and software like the Sling not only make it possible to watch TV anytime but also anywhere.

But much as TV networks and movie companies initially questioned the rights of viewers to record their content on a TiVo, they also have objected to the notion that monthly cable fees paid by subscribers entitle them to view cable programming in more than one location.

In the case of TiVo, however, cable companies quickly moved past their objections and began offering DVRs of their own to customers, generating new revenue.

Slingbox presents a potential problem not only for the media companies that own the content, but for phone and cable companies worried that streaming video and other high-bandwidth uses may clog their networks - while generating no extra revenue for them.
In the United States, for example, Verizon Wireless and other cellular companies put clauses in their contracts restricting the way subscribers can use their wireless Internet connections on phones and laptops.

3, a unit of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., plans to offer Sling access as part of a premium service called X-Services, though usage will not be unlimited. Details of the pricing and additional fees for extra bandwidth use were not immediately available.

The British version of the Slingbox sells for 180 pounds ($340). The first two 3 handsets loaded with the SlingPlayer software will be the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson w950i. Prices weren't disclosed.

3 also didn't say where it would offer Sling next. It has upgraded its wireless network with the required broadband technology in Italy, Australia, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, Israel and Ireland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-02-05-27





Phone vs. Cable: Turf Wars Escalate
Ken Belson and Vikas Bajaj

Bees swarmed around Dennis Pappas as he pried open the door to a telephone equipment box belonging to Qwest Communications at an apartment building here recently. Inside, the insects had built a small but seemingly busy hive.

The bees called the box home because workers from Cox Communications, a local cable provider, did not properly plug a hole in it when they switched customers in the building over to Cox’s phone service, said Mr. Pappas, a public policy chief at Qwest, the local phone company. As a result, Qwest had to bring in a contractor to undertake the risky task of removing the hive.

It may sound like a small thing, but Qwest says the infested box is just one of many pieces of equipment that Cox has damaged or misused. It says Cox has left wires exposed and improperly grounded cables, hazards that could disrupt phone service or hurt customers and workers. Qwest even argues that the damage is part of a plan to make it harder to sign up customers it lost to Cox.

Technicians who came to Qwest from Cox said “that their instructions were to make it as tough for Qwest to win back the customer as possible,” Mr. Pappas said.

Cox says Qwest is exaggerating the scope of the damage, and it says there are many explanations for the problems — including improper maintenance by Qwest’s own workers. Cox also insists it fixes any damage brought to its attention.

There has been an outbreak of this kind of finger-pointing across the country lately, a product of the increasingly bitter turf war between phone and cable companies. After decades of relative peace and separation, friction is growing as cable providers sell more phone lines and phone companies get into the video business.

For the most part, the sparring has been limited to advertising campaigns and promotional offers. But here in Phoenix, where Cox has stolen nearly a third of the residential phone business from Qwest, the rancor has escalated. In January, Qwest filed complaints with state regulators over the equipment problems, leading to a protracted legal standoff and public backbiting.

Given the disputes over who did what, and the lack of any central records, it is hard to say how much these incidents are actually hurting the cable and phone industries, or their customers. But complaints by the companies are clearly on the rise.

AT&T has fought with Cox in Oklahoma and Time Warner Cable in Texas. In Maryland, Verizon has accused Comcast of shoddy work and vice versa. BellSouth says problems have cropped up with Cox in Louisiana. Cable companies have as many complaints about the Bells.

In some cases, cable and phone companies accuse one another of ripping out equipment. In others, wires were reportedly left exposed and ungrounded.

Elsewhere, Verizon asserts that dozens of times this year, Comcast and other cable providers ran their wires down phone company pipes instead of installing separate conduits. Verizon said that in one case it sent a letter to Comcast asking that the practice be stopped, but that the paperwork and repairs that followed not only cost hundreds of dollars, but delayed installations for its customers.

“As we enter a more competitive world with them, we see these occur more often,” said Chris Creager, who oversees Verizon’s phone network in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. “It’s kind of the Wild West some days.”

A Comcast spokeswoman, Beth Bacha, said that inadvertently using another company’s conduits was “a fairly common and easy-to-correct, non-customer-impacting mistake,” and that Comcast had immediately addressed Verizon’s complaints. She added that Verizon had made thousands of cuts in Comcast’s cables, generating $1.4 million in damages.

In Phoenix, one of the country’s fastest-growing and most hotly contested markets, Cox says the accusations by Qwest are evidence of Qwest’s desperation. It says Qwest is so worried about the loss of tens of thousands of customers that it is throwing up legal smokescreens and ignoring that Cox has corrected problems brought to its attention.

“Clearly, we’ve been in business and been successful; we’ve won our J. D. Power awards,” said Douglas Garrett, Cox’s vice president for regulatory issues. J. D. Power, which measures customer satisfaction, ranked Cox as the best phone company in the northeast, southwest and west this year. It has nearly 950,000 cable customers in Arizona.

“The way we win customers is to provide good service.” Mr. Garrett said. “You can’t win customers by damaging competitors’ equipment.”

Cox also argues that some of the damage Qwest says is caused by its workers is often indistinguishable from the harm caused to equipment by vandals, bad weather and regular wear and tear.

Not to be outdone, Cox has built up its own collection of photos of equipment that it says Qwest damaged or misused. The problems include 39 instances of Qwest installers tapping into the plastic conduit through which Cox threads its cable wires. The practice appears to be a way for Qwest to avoid the time and cost of installing its own conduit, said Mark A. DiNunzio, a director of regulatory affairs for Cox in Phoenix.

“But we don’t run to the Arizona Corporation Commission when we discover it,” he said, referring to the state’s utility regulator. “We try to resolve it on a business-to-business basis.”

Qwest acknowledges that some of its contractors have improperly used Cox conduits and says it has corrected those transgressions. But Qwest officials say the problem is far smaller than the damage it says Cox is responsible for.

These kinds of spats are hardly new. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, upstart phone companies like Covad accused the Bells of blocking access to their switching stations, making it harder for rivals to sign up new customers. Decades earlier, phone and even telegraph companies butted heads over access to equipment and customers.

“This is an age-old problem,” said Richard Nespola, chief executive of the Management Network Group, a telecommunications consultant. “As long as people share facilities, the finger pointing will continue. It’s a competitive business and everyone accuses everyone.”

While workers certainly make mistakes, these are often isolated issues, and damage is rarely the result of malice, Mr. Nespola said. For most companies, equipment damage and misplaced wiring are often unavoidable in a market where rivals either share equipment or keep it side-by-side, he said. This is particularly true in apartment complexes and office towers that have hundreds if not thousands of phone lines.

What is different now is that the contest is a two-way slugfest between powerful and sophisticated companies with deep pockets and a lot more to lose. The start-ups that were born in the wake of regulatory changes have largely faded as a threat, particularly in the last year, as Bell companies bought their two biggest rivals, AT&T and MCI.

Now, the Bells’ chief competitors are Time Warner Cable, Comcast and other cable providers that have the technology, armies of installers and marketing budgets to lure away video and phone customers. By the end of the year, for instance, cable operators will have nearly nine million phone subscribers, up about 58 percent from 2005, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

Internet phone start-ups including Vonage and SunRocket have several million more customers, many of whom came from Verizon, AT&T and other Bell companies.

The Bell companies assert that their complaints are not just sour grapes. Instead, they are an effort to cut down on costly repairs and interruptions in customer service. In a filing with Arizona regulators in January, Qwest said that since 2004 its technicians had been dispatched more than 7,900 times to fix equipment damaged by Cox, repairs that cost nearly half a million dollars.

“Even though they’ve admitted to what they are doing, getting them to stop it and certify it has not been easy,” said R. Steven Davis, Qwest’s deputy general counsel. “When a company turns a blind eye to activity that is wrong, it becomes intentional.”

Qwest is also taking its case to the news media. Mr. Pappas spent two hours last month driving around Phoenix to show a reporter the damage to Qwest’s property. The telephone boxes he visited had a few exposed wires, small unsealed holes and what Mr. Pappas said was improper grounding of Cox electrical wires to Qwest equipment.

In many other cases, the companies resolve their differences on an ad hoc basis before they blow up into legal fights. In San Antonio, for instance, AT&T says it found instances where Time Warner Cable installers cut phone company wires when trying to install their own voice service.

AT&T technicians must repair the equipment, which costs about $200 a job, according to Randy Tomlin, senior vice president of network operations planning at AT&T.

“You’d have to have service in that house for multiple years to recover that money,” Mr. Tomlin said, adding that similar problems had cropped up in California, Illinois and Wisconsin. Though reports of damage are infrequent, “as competition continues, the opportunities for this to occur increase,” he said.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable, Mark Harrad, confirmed that there had been problems with cut wires in San Antonio, but he said they had been fixed. He added that at times, AT&T had damaged its equipment when installing its new U-Verse television service.

In Phoenix, Qwest and Cox are now arguing in front of regulators about how to determine the scope of the reported damage and how to repair it. If an independent audit is performed, it could take about a year to complete, after which regulators would have to decide whether there was any wrongdoing and set any compensation.

In the meantime, Cox and Qwest continue to battle for each other’s customers in more conventional ways.

Cox is offering customers in Phoenix a discounted package of digital cable, phone and high-speed Internet service for $99.95 a month, while Qwest is selling a comparable package, with the help of DirecTV, for about $92.97 a month. Which package consumers choose will likely have little to do with the companies’ disputes in the field.

“If this is not competition, then I don’t know what it is,” said Scott Simanson, vice president and general manager for Qwest’s operation in Arizona.

Ken Belson reported from New York and Vikas Bajaj from Phoenix.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/bu.../24damage.html





Ban on MP3 Transmitters is Lifted

Ofcom is legalising the use of FM transmitters that allow iPods and other MP3 players to play through car radios.

The use of devices, such as Griffin's "iTrip", was banned in the UK as their transmissions can interfere with broadcasts by legal radio stations.

However, the device and other similar accessories for MP3 players have been widely available online.

Now certain FM transmitters, which can be tuned to spare frequencies, will be legal from 8 December.

Ofcom will also remove the need for a licence to use Citizens' Band radio.

The regulator's move follows a public consultation exercise.

Stamp of approval

The devices fell foul of the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949, which forbids the use of radio equipment without a licence or an exemption.

But strong consumer demand for the devices led Ofcom to rethink the legislation

Liberal Democrat MPs were also prominent in asking for iTrips and similar devices to be legalised.

The new Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 mean that certain low-power transmitters will now be legal.

However, many devices currently on the market will remain illegal as they do not meet the legally required technical specifications and could interfere with radio broadcasts.

The new amendments will also reflect a European standard on the low-power transmitters.

All approved transmitters will carry a CE mark indicating approval for sale in the European Union.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...cs/6177820.stm





EU Probes Tax-Break Plan for Video Games
AP

European Union regulators said Wednesday they're investigating France's proposed tax break for video game makers to see if it's an illegal subsidy.

France wants to give a tax credit worth 20 percent of the cost of making video games with cultural value - saying these must satisfy a test that the games provide a quality and original contribution to "European cultural diversity and creativity."

French officials say video games can be as artful as cinema. But the European Commission said the standards were so broad they could include video games that are not strictly cultural.

"At this stage, it cannot be ruled out, for example, that simulation video games or video games based on motor car races might benefit from the measure," it said.
Regulators also said they needed to check if the tax break might give an unfair advantage to French companies over rivals in other EU countries.

The EU executive is responsible for upholding laws that prohibit governments from favoring one sector, or one company, over others in Europe. Subsidies to support art and culture are only allowed within a strict set of circumstances.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-15-43-02





Europe Telecoms Eye Internet Protocol TV
Toby Sterling

Dutchman Wart Fransen points a remote control at a little box atop his television and firmly presses down on the button to change the station.

There's a delay of about a half-second, and then the new channel comes on. The image is frozen in place for an instant before it begins to run smoothly.

Fransen is now watching TV over his telephone line, a technological marvel. But he's not that impressed.

"I use it now and again, definitely for soccer," he says of the service that came bundled with his 40-euro ($50) per month high-speed Internet connection. "The remote is really slow. But I think the image is better than cable."

European phone companies, like their American and Asian counterparts, are dreaming of a future in television using a technology known as Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV. Most of these companies are boosting the capacity of their copper phone wires with next-generation versions of DSL broadband technology, though some homes are getting IPTV service over new fiber-optic cables.

The foray into video is a counter-strike against the cable TV companies that have broken into the phone business using another IP technology known as Voice over IP, or VoIP, stealing customers and driving down prices. Yet despite the obvious business logic of returning fire with television, phone companies face a greater challenge, as IPTV and video over DSL are relatively unproven technologies as compared with VoIP.

Even so, while IPTV is just getting off the ground in the United States through AT&T Inc. and some rural phone companies, European and Asian carriers have already built a substantial base of television customers.

By the end of 2006, the number of IPTV subscribers in Europe is expected to reach 3.3 million, up from less than a million a year earlier, the Gartner Group estimates. The research company forecasts that number will double in 2007 and mushroom to 17 million by the end of 2010.

Hong Kong's PCCW Ltd. is the world's largest IPTV company with more than 650,000 customers. France has the most IPTV subscribers of any country with more than 1.6 million as of earlier this year, spread between France Telecom SA and startups like Iliad SA and Neuf Cegetel SA. Spain's Telefonica SA claims more than 300,000 users.

More recently, Swisscom AG launched subscription TV in Switzerland, while Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG introduced the service in Germany, France, Hungary and Croatia. Both Swisscom and DT, as well as AT&T, are using an IPTV platform from Microsoft Corp., confident they have resolved software and hardware glitches that slowed their deployments. Britain's BT Group PLC is expected to launch Microsoft-based IPTV services soon.

"A number of pieces are falling into place at the same time," Gartner analyst Adam Daum said, calling his firm's projections for the IPTV market "conservative."

As compared with the United States, where phone and cable companies are looking to reap $100 or more per month for a "triple-play" of phone, television and Internet service, most European telecoms are planning to charge just 30 euros to 50 euros ($38-$63) for the bundle.

Daum said the European companies see IPTV as a tool to lure cable customers and then generate new revenue later by selling premium services such as movies on demand and specialty sports packages.

"Many subscribers hate their cable companies, and at least 10-to-15 percent would be willing to leave immediately if they were offered a choice," he said.

IPTV breaks down a video stream into data packets, similar to those used for most other online traffic, from e-mail to Web pages and music downloads. The video packets are sent to a set-top box that acts as a decoder, the end result looking and feeling a lot like cable TV.

One European telecom frequently cited as an IPTV success story is Italy's FastWeb SpA, which has roughly 200,000 subscribers and forecasts it will turn a profit in 2007.

But any number of things could go wrong, as evidenced by VersaTel. The money-losing Dutch carrier failed to meet its targets and is now in the process of being acquired by Sweden's Tele2 AB, another alternative telecom.

VersaTel is controlled by tycoon John de Mol, creator of the "Big Brother" reality series. It began its IPTV rollout midway through 2005 after buying exclusive rights to broadcast Dutch soccer games for three seasons.

Sports are seen as the perfect fit for IPTV, since fans are prepared to pay to watch live games, and matches are not as vulnerable to pirating as movies: once the final score is known, nobody wants to see anything but the highlights.

But VersaTel only recently surpassed the 100,000-subscriber mark it had set as its goal for the end of 2005, suggesting the company may have overestimated the importance of sports.

Fransen, a VersaTel customer, says he bought his subscription simply because it was the fastest Internet connection available at that time. The co-founder of a Web site traffic measurement company called Opentracker.net, he frequently works from home and the soccer was "a nice bonus," he said.

But he also has kept his slower cable Internet connection as backup for 20 euros ($25) per month, and said he'd rather drop the IPTV service than pay more.

Meanwhile there's the problem of the remote controls, which got a highly publicized negative review from the Dutch Consumer Protection Agency.

VersaTel spokesman Remco Meerstra insisted its IPTV rollout was "going well," and complaints about the remote were misguided. "It's reacting fast, but it is slower than normal analogue," he said.

There are other potential pitfalls.

One is Microsoft, which despite devoting tremendous energy to IPTV also hopes its Windows Media Center software will enable computers to fill the same role as set top boxes, bypassing the telecom companies to watch video over the Internet.

Another threat comes from Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, both of which recently began selling movie downloads. The explosive growth of free video from YouTube and other Web sites may prove even more dangerous if consumers find different ways to route that media from computer to TV.

Rudy Roth, a strategist at Royal Philips Electronics NV, one of the world's largest television and set-top box makers, said some telcos will succeed with IPTV.

He argues that the video offered by the telecoms will be more reliable and of better quality than what's currently available on the Internet.

"Bandwidth isn't the only issue. You have to think about quality of service and ease of use," Roth said.

As cable operators do, AT&T and European phone companies are designing their networks to give preferential treatment to their own video traffic as a way to ensure quality.

Some critics have called for governments to adopt "Net Neutrality" rules that would restrict such practices so that consumers are free to choose providers without worries about quality.

But so far, officials in the United States and Europe haven't seen the need to impose new laws or regulations. In April, the European Commission said it would "closely monitor attempts to call into question the neutral character of the Internet."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-17-51-35





Report: Data Agency Broke Privacy Laws
Constant Brand

A report by an EU panel released Thursday said the bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terror investigations.

The Belgian-based company, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, "committed violations of data protection laws" by secretly transferring data to the United States, without properly informing Belgian authorities, the EU's data protection panel said.

The panel's report calls on SWIFT, financial institutions and EU authorities to "take the necessary measures" to end the transfer, which it said contradicts Belgian and EU data protection rules. SWIFT is still transferring data under U.S. subpoenas.

EU spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said the report was adopted unanimously by the 25-member panel which also chided the role of the European Central Bank in the affair. It demanded clarification from the ECB over its role in the affair. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet has acknowledged his bank knew of the transfers but could not prevent them.

"SWIFT is expected as well as financial institutions to take the necessary steps immediately to remedy the present illegal infringement," Ahrenkilde Hansen said, adding the group will monitor the implementation of the recommendation by SWIFT and the ECB and other national banks which sit on SWIFT's oversight board.

The data protection officers have been drafting their report since September and their conclusions come as no surprise following a similar finding by a Belgian commission, which was tasked by the Belgian government and the EU panel to investigate SWIFT's secret deal with the U.S. Treasury.

The European Commission, which could eventually launch a legal case against Belgium for failing to uphold EU data protection rules, has said it would await the final report of the EU data protection officers before deciding what action to take.

Ahrenkilde Hansen said the Commission would "ensure correct implementation" of EU data protection rules.

Belgian political leaders have already called on the EU to negotiate with the United States on fixing the apparent legal limbo SWIFT finds itself in.

The EU panel report echoes the Belgian report which said that while the company did all it could to live up to Belgian, EU and U.S. regulations to hand over the requested information, it finds itself in a legal black hole.

The company routes about 11 million financial transactions daily between 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries, recording customer names, account numbers and other identifying information.

SWIFT and top European bankers told a European Parliament committee last month it had no power to prevent the transfer of personal data to U.S. authorities.

The company and Trichet called for the EU to sit down with Washington and draft a new global deal to fix the legal quagmire which now exists over the transfer deal.

The transfer deal between the U.S. Treasury and SWIFT was launched by Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The SWIFT case compounds legal and political clashes between Europe and the United States over anti-terror measures and highlights divisions over what lengths governments should go to in order to prevent attacks.

SWIFT officials have argued that it had no choice but to abide by U.S. subpoenas for bank data, saying that if it refused to hand over the information, it would have faced fines and possible criminal penalties like jail time.

"It is disturbing that none of the involved parties is willing to take responsibility for the failure to protect the rights of EU citizens," said Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch Green member of the European Parliament. She called for a clarification of ECB and national bank rules in ensuring they report all violations of EU privacy laws.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-11-20-32





Britain Kills EU Attempt to Regulate Net Video Clips
Owen Gibson

The British government is set to fight off proposed European rules that would make it responsible for overseeing taste and decency in video clips on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Under a clause in the European media regulation directive TV Without Frontiers, national governments would be responsible for regulating the internet for the first time. Britain's media watchdog, Ofcom, backed by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, argued that the plan was unworkable and would stifle creativity and investment in new media across Europe.

Ofcom said internet users should be left to police themselves within the bounds of the law. Because internet technology does not respect borders, it argued, users would simply turn instead to websites in the US and elsewhere. In a statement of "general approach" before a vote in the EU assembly, the council of ministers yesterday bowed to pressure to limit government oversight to "TV-like" services on the web. That means Ofcom will regulate TV-style video downloads from major broadcasters, but not video clips on social networking websites.

When it first objected, Ofcom had the support of only a handful of other EU member states, but it has since won them over. "Today's outcome is testament to the substantial progress we have made in persuading our European partners to take our arguments on board," said the creative industries minister, Shaun Woodward. Britain also won majority support for its line on the "country of origin" principle, which makes national regulators responsible for broadcasters operating from within their borders.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...947176,00.html





New AOL Chairman Sees Parallels With TV
Anick Jesdanun

The incoming head of AOL said Tuesday he left a 31-year career at NBC for the chance to transform the online business into a formidable rival to television and other traditional media.

Randy Falco said he'll start Monday as AOL LLC's chairman and chief executive after being lured last week from NBC Universal Television Group, where he was president and chief operating officer.

"I'm fascinated by the Internet space," Falco told The Associated Press. "I see it as a very exciting environment to be in. It reminds me a lot about network television 30 years ago. It's a little bit like the Wild West. There aren't a lot of rules. That's what excites me about it."

He said online advertising should grow 20 percent to 30 percent a year industrywide, drawing dollars that might normally go to traditional media, including his former employer.

Falco, 52, replaces Jonathan Miller, who is leaving AOL following the surprise executive shuffle by AOL parent Time Warner Inc.

On Tuesday, Time Warner named its senior vice president of operations, Ron Grant, as AOL's president and chief operating officer, a new position. Grant, 40, also starts Monday.

Falco and Grant join AOL less than four months after Time Warner announced that following years of decline in AOL's core Internet access business, the company would give away AOL.com e-mail accounts, software and other features once reserved for paying customers in a more aggressive chase for advertising dollars.

Although Time Warner executives had been supportive of Miller's efforts to set AOL on a new course, they sought someone with operational experience to execute the plan.

Unlike Miller, who previously worked for a company that provided information and Internet services, Falco has no direct experience with an online company, having worked in television - specifically at NBC - since graduating from college in 1975.

But Falco, granting interviews to media organizations for the first time since his appointment, said "everybody in traditional media suddenly has online experience. If you don't you quickly get left behind."

At NBC, owned by General Electric Co., Falco said he helped create the network's Olympics site and forge a partnership between Yahoo Inc. and NBC's Spanish-language Telemundo.

Falco said he does not expect any major changes in personnel or strategy at AOL, adding that his initial duties will be to make sure the existing team at AOL is focused and on message.

AOL "employed the right strategy going forward ... (and) has nothing but upside," Falco said.

Time Warner shares rose 10 cents to close Tuesday at $20.68 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-48-21





China Court Rules for Baidu on Downloading

Chinese Internet search leader Baidu.com has been cleared of helping users to download music illegally in a case brought by some of the world's largest music companies, an industry group said on Friday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which estimates that about 85 percent of all music consumed in China is pirated, said it would appeal against the ruling and was confident it would be overturned.

"I am amazed by this inexplicable judgement that is totally out of step with Chinese law," IFPI chairman John Kennedy said in a statement.

An IFPI official said the No. 1 Intermediate Court of Beijing handed down the decision. Court officials and Baidu executives were unavailable for comment.

The IFPI, which represents the world's music companies, said the case against Baidu had been filed on behalf of EMI Group Plc., Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG.

The trade group has also blasted Yahoo China's search engine for providing links to Web sites that offer unlicensed music downloads.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/17112006/80...wnloading.html





Webroot Adding Parental-Control Software
AP

Webroot Software Inc., known for its anti-spyware program Spy Sweeper, is bringing back a product to help parents limit where and how long their children go online.

Child Safe joins Web filtering programs like Net Nanny, CYBERsitter and ContentProtect in the parental-control arena. The program is listed for $39.95 for a one-year subscription for use on up to three computers.

One of Webroot's early products was a similar program, but it was discontinued because demand at the time wasn't heavy. Amid concerns of online predators finding teens through social networking sites or chat rooms, the time is right to bring it out again, CEO David Moll said.

Child Safe allows parents to create profiles for each computer user, and then set what sites or types of sites each profile can visit and when. It also reports on computer users' activity.

The goal was to make a program a child couldn't disable but that was still easy to use.

"It's not for the savvy Internet user. It's a product for the savvy Internet user's parents," Webroot Chief Operating Officer Mike Irwin said.

Best Buy Co. is partnering with Webroot to sell Child Safe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-02-02-25





ACLU Sues Rural Libraries over Internet Filtering Policies
AP

A rural library district was sued Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union over its Internet filtering policy.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court here, seeks an order directing the North Central Regional Library District to provide unblocked access to the Internet when adults request it.

The ACLU of Washington brought suit on behalf of three individuals and the pro-gun Second Amendment Foundation over the library district's Internet filter on computers.

The lawsuit contends the library's policy of refusing to disable its Internet filters when requested for lawful purposes is unconstitutional and goes beyond what federal law requires.

"Libraries should not deny adults using publicly available computers the opportunity to view research material and other lawful information," ACLU Legal Director Sarah Dunne said in a release.

Dean Marney, director of the library district based in Wenatchee, said he was surprised by the lawsuit. He said the library recently changed its filtering software that allows sites to be unblocked. However, federal law does not require that requests to remove filters be granted, he said.

Doug Honig, an ACLU spokesman in Seattle, said new filtering software is "a step in the right direction," but does not change the underlying legal issue: whether libraries should act as gatekeepers of what adults do legally online.

Libraries that receive funds for Internet access under two specific federal programs are required to have the ability to block minors from seeing visual depictions of sexual activity.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult.

The plaintiffs include a Ferry County woman who wanted to do research on drugs and alcohol while studying at Eastern Washington University; a professional photographer blocked from researching art galleries and health issues; and an Okanogan man unable to access a Web log he maintains, as well information relating to gun use by hunters.

The Second Amendment Foundation is another plaintiff.

The Bellevue-based organization contends the library district blocked online access to Women & Guns, a magazine it sponsors covering topics such as self-defense, recreational shooting, new products and legal issues.

The district has 28 branch libraries in Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant and Okanogan counties.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...y_Filters.html





Lawyers Argue Validity of '98 Online Law
Maryclaire Dale

Justice Department attorneys, defending a law aimed at keeping online pornography from minors, argued that software filters often block valid sites - on gay rights or sexual health, for example - that teens might seek out.

"Filters are hindering minors from learning about the world around them. That's a huge problem," government lawyer Joel McElvain said Monday. "There may be reasons the teenagers have problems speaking to their parents about these (issues)."

Under the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers who fail to keep material "harmful to minors" away from children could face fines and even prison time. The law has never taken effect, because of a long-running legal challenge filed by Salon.com, the Philadelphia Gay News and other groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Closing arguments concluded Monday before Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., ending four weeks of testimony.

Justice attorneys evoked problems with the software filters even as they had defended their use in a 2000 law requiring schools and libraries to block porn if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

Opponents say the 1998 law is overly vague and would have a chilling effect on their work. They also say it would not apply to foreign Web operators or streaming video and audio. The ACLU argues that filters are more effective than legislation, because they let parents set limits based on their own values and their children's ages.

"If you're a parent who doesn't want sexually explicit material slipping through, then set it (the filter) strictly," ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen told the judge Monday.

The U.S. Supreme Court, indicating the government was unlikely to prevail, granted the ACLU a temporary injunction in 2004.

Technology experts not involved in the case have noted that many parents now have more pressing concerns about their children's use of the Internet, such as online predators and the popularity of social-networking sites.

The Justice Department raised eyebrows as it prepared for trial when it demanded reams of privately held information from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other Internet companies for a study on the prevalence of online pornography.

Google fought a subpoena to turn over 1 million sample queries and 1 million Web addresses in its database, citing trade secrets. A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena.

The resulting study, conducted by a University of California, Berkeley statistics professor, concluded that about 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft Corp. are sexually explicit and that about 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site.

Hansen said filters can be as much as 98 percent effective in blocking explicit material, even if the most stringent filters also "overblock" a large number of acceptable sites.

Congress first tried to regulate online pornography in 1996 with a law that was largely struck down by the Supreme Court the following year.

The 1998 law narrows the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defines objectionable material as obscene or that which offends "contemporary community standards."

The law, signed by then-President Clinton, requires Web site operators to prevent youngsters from seeing material harmful to children by demanding proof of age - such as a credit card number - from computer users. It would impose a $50,000 fine and six-month prison term on commercial Web site operators that allow minors to view such content.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-18-30-51





State High Court Upholds Internet Child-Sex Laws
Bill Kaczor

Two state laws designed to crack down on sexual predators who use the Internet to prey on children do not violate constitutional rights of free speech and interstate commerce, the Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The justices unanimously upheld statutes that make it a crime to use online services to lure or entice a child and transmit material harmful to a minor.

"The state has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors from harmful materials," Justice Peggy Quince wrote for the court.

The decision upheld the convictions of a Virginia man who pleaded no contest to violating both laws shortly after they were enacted in 2002 through e-mail exchanges with a Columbia County sheriff's deputy posing as a 13-year-old girl named "Sandi."

They met in an Internet chat room called "I like older men."

Michael John Simmons, 47, of Spotsylvania, Va., was charged with sending nude pictures of himself to the fictitious teen, asking "Sandi" for a pair of her panties and encouraging her to meet him for sexual activities.

Deputies arrested Simmons when he arrived at a Lake City motel to meet "Sandi." He reserved the right to appeal when he entered his pleas and was sentenced to five years on probation.

The 1st District Court of Appeal then upheld his convictions and the laws.

Simmons appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing both statutes infringe on the federal government's constitutional authority over interstate commerce. He also contended the transmission law violates free speech and due process rights of the state and federal constitutions.

The latter differs from a similar but broader federal law that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the state justices decided. They noted the Florida law is limited to electronic mail sent to a specific individual that a defendant knows or believes is a minor and thus does not affect adult-to-adult messages.

"The statute does not apply to Web sites or other materials posted on the Internet for general public viewing," Quince wrote.

It also covers only material that appeals to the "prurient, shameful or morbid interests of minors" that is "patently offensive" and "without serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors."

"Thus, a depiction of Michelangelo's David transmitted for an art history class would not meet the statutory definition," Quince wrote. "Nor would an illustration of human genitalia intended for a sex education or biology class."

The high court also rejected arguments the laws violate the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause because they are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest and apply only to "electronic mail" sent to specific minors in Florida.

The justices, though, interpreted that term to include instant message communications as well as e-mail.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...0521/-1/NEWS08





Tough Choice for CRTC in Hate Blocking Case
Michael Geist

More than a decade ago, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission declined to wade into this issue in a case that placed the spotlight on how Canada's Internet service providers treat illegal content that originates outside the country.

The person behind the case was Richard Warman, an Ottawa lawyer who is one of Canada's leading activists against Internet-based hate. Warman has filed numerous complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against Canadian-based hate sites, arguing that those sites violate the law. The Commission has sided with Warman on several occasions, most recently in a case against a London, Ontario man who was sentenced by a federal court judge to nine months in prison.

Reacting to the jail sentence, several U.S.-based sites directly targeted Warman, mounting death threats against him. Warman asked U.S. law enforcement authorities to take action against the sites, but when they failed to do so (those cases are under investigation), he filed his groundbreaking application with the CRTC.

Although several news organizations reported that Warman was asking the CRTC to order Canadian ISPs to block access to the offending sites, the application did not seek government-mandated censorship of foreign content. Instead, the CRTC was asked to authorize Canada's telecommunications carriers to voluntarily block the sites (the Telecommunications Act would ordinarily render such blocking unlawful). Therefore, even if the CRTC had issued the order, there was no guarantee that the carriers would have blocked the sites.

On Friday, the CRTC denied Warman's request, noting that the ISPs and the affected sites were not provided with advance notice nor the opportunity to present their views. While the CRTC was right to emphasize that all parties should be heard, the issue should remain on the public agenda as important procedural safeguards should not be used as an excuse to leave it unresolved.

Had it addressed the substantive questions, the case would have presented an enormously difficult choice. There is little doubt that the content in question is illegal and that Warman faces a serious threat. By directly targeting Warman, the foreign sites have arguably brought themselves within Canada's jurisdiction. Further, by merely asking the CRTC to issue a voluntary order, Warman avoided state-sanctioned censorship and placed the issue in the hands of ISPs.

Despite the good intentions behind the application, however, there remains some cause for concern. First, it is unlikely that the order would have proven to be effective given that the CRTC's jurisdiction is limited to the major telecommunications carriers, with many ISPs remaining outside of its regulatory mandate.

Second, blocking technologies are notoriously overbroad. For example, when Telus last year blocked Voices for Change, a website supportive of one of its labour unions, a university study found that hundreds of additional websites were inadvertently blocked in the process. Although blocking technology may have improved by targeting domain names rather than IP addresses, there is a real risk of blocking legitimate content.

Third, blocking foreign content establishes a dangerous precedent that can easily be misused. While child pornography can and should be blocked since merely viewing such content is illegal, the prospect of extending blocking to hate speech, defamation, or even copyright infringement complicates the analysis considerably.

Regardless of one's views on the CRTC's denial of the application, there is likely wide agreement that Canada must begin to grapple with the Internet challenge of balancing free speech rights with rules that outlaw certain forms of speech that have been judged harmful to our multicultural society.

A policy framework that addresses these competing goals would likely include complaints mechanisms, a presumption that the content is lawful and must be disproved by a high standard of evidence, an opportunity to challenge blocking requests, appropriate judicial oversight, and full transparency about blocking activities. The job is not the CRTC's alone - law enforcement and the judiciary must surely be involved in the process of determining what may constitute unlawful content and the remedies that follow - but the regulator can assist in the process.

Critics are quick to draw parallels to Internet censorship in countries such as China. However, those countries involve state-based content blocking, with no transparency or legal recourse. In fact, several democracies - most notably Australia - have established limited blocking rules, while British Telecom, the UK's largest ISP, voluntarily blocks child pornography as part of its CleanFeed program.

Even with various legal safeguards, many Canadians would undoubtedly find the blocking of any content distasteful. Yet to do nothing is to leave in place an equally unpalatable outcome that silences those would speak out against unlawful hate speech for fear of personal harm. While the Internet raises some difficult policy challenges, few are more difficult than the one that came before the CRTC last week.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1392/159/





Computer Program Picks Out Suspects
David Reid

Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.

In a recent letter to police chiefs throughout the state, RMV Registrar Anne L. Collins made the offer, which would allow local police to send digital images of suspects to the registry for identification.

Collins' letter said the software, which has been used successfully by the registry since May of this year, can compare locally-generated digital photos with the 9.5 million license images stored in the registry's data base. Advertisement

"I've already notified all my commanders, especially the detectives, that this is a nice tool for us to help catch criminals," Scott said.

The software, used by her agency in conjunction with State Police, has already helped to nab "several individuals who have fraudulently applied for multiple licenses or IDs," Collins wrote.

Local police throughout the state would be able to e-mail suspect photos, which would be run through the registry computers for a match using thousands of data points, such as eye color and size, hair patters and color, bone structure, blemishes, tattoos or other distinguishing marks.

Once a potential match is found, local police would be able to view the registry's photos on a state Web site.

Scott said his detectives could use the registry service to help identify suspects giving police false names or aliases.

Northampton Police Chief Russell J. Sienkiewicz said yesterday he also intends to make use of Collins' offer.

"Oh absolutely," said Sienkiewicz. Already, he said, his senior staff has begun to develop a policy on who and when the system would be used.

Both Scott and Sienkiewicz said the new identification tool will be used to augment other options they already employ, such as state and federal fingerprint identification systems accessible within minutes through computer links.

Collins said yesterday she has pitched the Facial Recognition System to state officials who investigate insurance fraud, which is a long-standing problem.

And she said the process has already borne fruit in efforts to stop identity theft, often used by impostors trying to obtain fake drivers' licenses. If the identity thieves' digital photos are already in the registry's system, Collins said, sharp-eyed registry employees can catch the rip-off before a new license is issued under the wrong name.

"If we can get (the impostor) under a different identity," she said, "we can spot him and stop him."
http://www.masslive.com/hampfrank/re...470.xml&coll=1





'Big Brother' Cameras Listen for Fights
Gemma Simpson

In U.K. public places, smarter closed-circuit TV cameras have been given the ability to listen for disturbances and also keep an eye on citizens.

The system has already been put into use in the Netherlands to listen for people speaking in aggressive tones, to try to counter violent attacks in Dutch streets, prisons and railways.

The aggression detector has been fitted to CCTV cameras on the streets of Groningen and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In the U.K., London police also are considering installing the system, said Derek van der Vorst, the director of Sound Intelligence, the company that created the technology.

The system works by putting microphones in CCTV cameras to continually analyze the sound in the surrounding area. If aggressive tones are picked up, an alarm signal is automatically sent to the police, who can zoom in the camera to the location of the suspect sound and investigate the situation.

"Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression," Van der Vorst said. "With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation."

The sound system also means fewer people can monitor more cameras in surveillance centers, Vorst added.

Everyday mutterings are not detected by the system, though, Vorst said. "You cannot push a button to hear what people are saying," he said. "And even if you could, the microphones are 3 to 4 meters above the ground, so the words cannot be heard"

Pub brawls were cut by a quarter earlier this year in Yeovil, England, when a fingerprint-before-you-drink scheme was unveiled.
http://news.com.com/Big+Brother+came...3-6137888.html





The Beat With Head-Mounted Cameras
By Kablenet

Police officers in London have begun to use a camera mounted on their headgear in an effort to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Officers in the 19 safer neighbourhood teams in the Haringey area have been issued with eight cameras, each the size of an AA battery, that record video images to a special utility belt. They are activated by a switch on the belt.

The equipment, which costs around £1,800 per pack and is funded by Haringey Council's Safer Communities Partnership, will be used to gather images that could be used as evidence in future court proceedings, the Metropolitan Police (http://www.met.police.uk/) announced.

A spokesperson told GC News the standard camera can store up to 12 hours of video. An extra battery pack can extend this to up to 400 hours, although this makes the equipment much heavier.

Detective superintendent Richard Wood said: "The cameras will act as an excellent deterrent for any youngsters who are intent on causing trouble.

"Should anyone commit any offences the officers will instantly have the evidence to hand to help them apply for an ASBO or pursue criminal charges. If the cameras prove successful they will be deployed to other units within Haringey and could be used to assist police raids and officers working at football matches." ®

This article was originally published at Kablenet (http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Front...6?OpenDocument)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11...ras/print.html





Killings and Threats Rattle Journalists in Venezuela
Simon Romero

Nancy Cecilia Flores still trembles when she recalls how a gunman unloaded eight rounds into her father, Jesús Flores Rojas, a well-known journalist in this oil city.

It was 8:50 p.m. on Aug. 23. They had just returned from the pharmacy in her father’s prized possession, a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu. A young man approached as they entered their driveway, motioned for her to remain silent, then he did his work.

“He died immediately from the first bullet to enter his head,” Ms. Flores, 21, a soft-spoken chemistry major at a university here, said of her father. He was the third journalist killed in Venezuela this year, and the fifth since the beginning of 2002.

Though it is not clear that they were all related to the journalists’ work, human rights groups say, the killings and other aggression toward journalists point to a trend in which threats and intimidation have become all too common, even in what remains a flourishing free press under President Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Flores Rojas’s case has not been solved, and no evidence suggests the killing here and other incidents were orchestrated by Mr. Chávez’s government, whose political allies control this southeastern inland city. But the recent killings have heightened concern over the ability of journalists to do their jobs without retribution.

“The murder fits a pattern of falling within a gray zone in which the death of a journalist can seem as if it were a random crime,” said Ewald Scharfenberg, executive director of the Institute for Press and Society, an organization in Caracas that examines press freedom issues.

Opponents of the Venezuelan leader, particularly in the United States and the Bush administration, routinely criticize the state of press freedom under Mr. Chávez, who faces a presidential election on Dec. 3, with most polls showing him leading his opponents.

But the environment for the news media here remains exceptionally freewheeling and boisterous, even if somewhat tension filled. While the spate of killings this year has focused attention on the issue, killings of journalists in Venezuela trail those in Colombia and Mexico.

Tensions between the government and news organizations seem to have eased since the months after a short-lived coup in April 2002, which briefly removed Mr. Chávez and appeared to have had the blessing of some established news media groups and the Bush administration.

But Mr. Chávez and his policies are still pilloried daily on television, radio and in established daily newspapers in Caracas that are largely controlled by an elite at odds with his socialist-inspired policies. Meanwhile, pro-Chávez news organizations, many flush with government advertising, attack the political opposition with equal vehemence.

Beyond this vibrancy, however, is a pattern of confrontation that has become a defining feature of relations between the government and the news media in recent years. Mr. Chávez sometimes sets the tone, with senior officials repeating his assertions that his administration is under siege by entrenched media interests.

“Don’t be surprised if I say there are no more concessions to some TV channels,” Mr. Chávez said this month, signaling that his government could block some private television stations from renewing their broadcast licenses next year. His warning came after a private broadcaster showed a video of energy minister Rafael Ramírez calling on petroleum workers to support Mr. Chávez or face losing their jobs.

Cabinet ministers, meanwhile, point out that no journalists are in jail in Venezuela for criticizing the government, even though vaguely written legislation has increased penalties for defamation and extended the scope of laws relating to disrespect of public officials. Other legislation lets officials suspend broadcasting or revoke licenses if stations are deemed to condone or incite public disturbances.

“When taken together, these new rules have created an environment of self-censorship in Venezuela,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch in Washington.

Senior government officials respond angrily to groups who say press freedom is deteriorating in Venezuela. For instance, Communications Minister Willian Lara accused the Inter American Press Association of using “disinformation to attack the image of Venezuela” this year when the group expressed concern after the legislature of Bolívar State ordered the demolition of the offices of the newspaper Correo del Caroní. The newspaper, whose offices are still standing, had published articles critical of Gov. Francisco Rangel, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

Amid such tensions, the killings of journalists are unsettling to human rights groups and others here, particularly to other journalists, though it is not clear exactly what motivated many of the crimes. The number of homicides in Venezuela has surged 67 percent, to 9,962 in 2005, since Mr. Chávez took office, according to a study by Chacao, an opposition-led municipality in Caracas.

There are still questions, for instance, as to whether Jorge Aguirre, a photographer for the newspaper El Mundo, was killed because of his work. Mr. Aguirre was photographing a student demonstration in Caracas against violent crime in April when he was shot dead by a man on a motorcycle. A former police officer has been charged with the crime.

Another journalist, José Joaquín Tovar, director of the weekly newspaper Ahora, was killed in June, but apparently in circumstances involving a personal vendetta, Human Rights Watch said.

Then came the killing of Mr. Flores Rojas, a columnist for the anti-Chávez newspaper Región, based in Cumaná, a coastal city.

Mr. Flores Rojas, whose nickname was “Peacock,” a reference to his taste for fine clothing, would seem an unlikely target. A former public relations official for the opposition party Copei, at age 66 he was nearing the end of his journalistic career.

He rarely engaged in fierce criticism of regional officials, focusing instead on issues like an absence of traffic lights at a busy intersection in this dusty city of 130,000 surrounded by oil fields about 200 miles southeast of the capital. In one column, he questioned how a city councilman had acquired the money for a new Ford Focus.

Authorities have different views of the killing. Ernesto Paraqueima, the mayor of El Tigre and an official with Podemos, a party in Mr. Chávez’s coalition, said in a telephone interview that he viewed the incident as a “social crime that had been converted into a political crime.” Mr. Paraqueima emphasized that he doubted that any public official was behind the killing.

Lisandro Zapata, an official with the Criminal Investigations Police in Caracas who is in charge of the investigation, said his detectives were still poring over Mr. Flores Rojas’s work in search of leads. Mr. Zapata said he was almost certain that “an individual or a group of individuals” had planned the killing.

While the case remains unresolved, as if by coincidence, the gunman who is believed to be responsible for the killing, Luis Torres Pinto, was killed in a confrontation with the police several days later.

Ms. Flores said she identified the body of her father’s killer, but remained convinced he had been working for someone else. After killing Ms. Flores’s father, the gunman did not take any money or belongings or try to enter their home. He pointed his gun at Ms. Flores but did not shoot.

“The style of execution in this case and the subsequent elimination of the killer indicate that an intellectual author of the crime may remain at large,” said Mr. Scharfenberg, of the Institute for Press and Society.

Less than three months after her father was killed, Ms. Flores said she was disappointed that investigators had no further leads. Her mother, Nancy del Carmen Mota, 48, said in an interview: “I’ve given up hope of the real killer ever paying for this crime. That doesn’t happen in this country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/wo...venezuela.html





Egypt Arrests Another Blog Critic

Police in Cairo have detained a blogger whose posts have been critical of the Egyptian government.

Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night.

No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention. The other friends were released after being questioned.

Human rights groups have accused Egypt of eroding freedom of speech by arresting several bloggers recently.

BBC Arab Affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi says blogging in Egypt is closely associated with political activism in a culture where democratic freedoms are severely restricted.

In recent weeks, bloggers have been exposing what they say was the sexual harassment of women at night in downtown Cairo in full view of police who did not intervene.

Mr Siyam's host on Saturday night, Muhammad Sharqawi, was detained for several weeks earlier this year.

The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president.

Amnesty International says Mr Amer appeared to have been detained for expressing critical views about Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...st/6164798.stm





Open Source Databases '60 Per Cent Cheaper'

Inexpensive products put price squeeze on database giants
Tom Sanders

Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 per cent over proprietary products, according to data collected by Forrester Research.

Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester covering database management systems, estimated that average savings on the total cost of ownership are about 50 per cent. The data is based on surveys and customer interviews.

Open source databases such as Enterprise DB, Ingres and MySQL do not carry licence fees, and management tools tend to be less expensive than for proprietary databases from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Open source offerings especially outshine their proprietary competitors in low-end applications with databases of less than 200GB in size.

"Eighty per cent of the applications typically use only 30 per cent of the features found in commercial databases," Yuhanna told vnunet.com. "The open source databases deliver those features today."

But the open source databases generally lack the features for mission critical applications, trailing behind their proprietary peers in security, uptime, performance and features such as XML support.

Enterprise applications from Oracle and SAP also do not support open source databases today, but Yuhanna expects that to change "within a couple of years".

Open source database vendors typically do not position their products as low-cost alternatives.

Dave Dargo, chief technology officer at Ingres, said earlier this year in an interview with vnunet.com that the company is looking at new ways to deliver and deploy software rather than trying to compete with Oracle on price.

But customers still consider price as the primary benefit of open source, according to Yuhanna.

"The number one reason why any customer would choose an open source database is cost. That still holds true today," he said.

But the low price is also enabling companies to set up new projects that would previously have been too expensive, such as data mining of log files and setting up data repositories.

In an attempt to fend off the competition from low-cost open source databases, Oracle launched a free database last year that is essentially a scaled down version of its enterprise grade Oracle Database 10g.

The application targets test deployments for developers and students rather than enterprises.
www.vnunet.com/2168971





First Look at $100 Laptop Linux Interface
Mike Clendenin

While many analysts are busy tearing down Sony PS3's and Nintendo Wii's, a few insiders are taking a closer look at the first batch of $100 (eventually) laptops to roll off the production lines in Shanghai as part of the One Laptop Per Child program backed by Nicholas Negroponte and MIT's Media Lab.

In the latest display of YouTube's utility for the tech community, a user posted a 5:53 first look at the latest iteration of the OLPC user interface, based on Linux. (See links below)

Earlier postings around the Internet have also shown how the physical design of the laptop has changed, including the elimination of the much touted on-board hand crank that was supposed to power the cheap, lime green laptop. It's still there, reportedly, but has now been moved to the power adapter.

The OLPC's produced earlier this week in Shanghai still need to go through loads of testing, such as knocking them off desks and dropping them in mud, as kids are wont to do. They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world. "We have to test, test, test this machine under conditions of extreme cold, extreme heat, mud, dust, jungle and daily abuse by kids," said Negroponte, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune.

If they survive, the machines will be shipped off to places like Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand and Libya, where strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi signed a deal with Negroponte to supply the country's 1.2 million children with the machines and supporting infrastructure for $250 million.

That's $208.33 per laptop.

OLPC backers hope to get the effective cost of the laptops down to $100 somewhere between 2008 and 2010. Taiwan's Quanta Computer is the contract manufacturer.
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArtic...imes_ne wsRSS

YouTube demo of Linux interface





Eneco Details Revolutionary Power Chip
James Murray

Speaking in a hotel conference room near Tower Bridge late last week Dr Lew Brown, president and CEO of Eneco, is trying to convince a roomful of sceptical investors that its new chip technology will revolutionise the way we generate electricity. It has to be said that he is doing a pretty good job.

"This chip compares with the invention of the transistor, or the TV, or the first aircraft," he says. "It is a genuinely disruptive technology." Now if a claim like that won’t get investors' attention I'm not sure what will.

As reported last week, Eneco is a development stage company that claims to have invented and patented a "solid state energy conversion/generation chip" that will convert heat directly into electricity or alternatively refrigerate down to -200 degrees celsius when electricity is applied.

As one potential investor who has flown all the way from Scotland for the two hour presentation confides: "I had to come, it just sounded too good to be true."

He is not alone, interested parties have also traveled from Italy, Switzerland, Ireland and all over the UK to see if the miracle chip might deliver on its promises.

So is it too good to be true? Will it work?

Well, on first impressions it just might. And it could have a massive impact on how IT equipment, and in particular laptops and other mobile devices, are designed and powered.

The chip is based on the principles of thermionic energy conversion whereby the energy of a hot metal over comes the electrostatic forces holding electrons to its surface. These free electrons then pass across a vacuum to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge that can be harnessed.

The main difficulty with exploiting this process at a commercial level has been in creating the vacuum between the two metals. But Eneco has overcome the problem by replacing the vacuum with, what the brochure describes as, "a properly selected semiconductor thermoelectric that is thick enough to support a significant temperature differential between the emitter and the collector in order to achieve efficiencies of practical interest".

The result is a solid state energy conversion chip that can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees celcius and deliver absolute efficiencies in terms of how much heat energy is converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent.

If the energy conversion rate is impressive the potential list of practical applications proves equally exciting.

Initially Eneco plans to target the "low-hanging fruits" found in the existing thermoelectric market. The company says the technology would suit off-grid energy generation environments, such as pipeline monitoring stations and space craft, where its promises to outperform existing thermoelectric products. The company also expects to have its first order in this area from the US military soon.

The next potential market for Eneco lies in portable power, where it hopes the chips will ultimately replace high end lithium ion and polymer batteries used in laptops and other handheld devices.

The company says it is already in talks with both Dell and Apple about how the chips could be used in their devices. Initial talks have focused on integrating the heat conversion chips into the device so it can harness the heat generated by processors and turn it into electricity to power fans or other cooling technologies. By harnessing this power the devices, be they initially laptops and handhelds, or later even servers and PCs, should see improved energy efficiency, extended battery life and enhanced performance.

Brown also sees the chips ultimately replacing batteries altogether. He argues that by linking the modules to a microburner - a catalytic burner that produces between 275 and 600 degrees centigrade – you can heat the chips and generate enough power to run the device.

In theory this approach would be far cleaner as the burners that Eneco is planning to employ use Ethanol – a biofuel that is carbon neutral as the CO2 emitted when it burns is consumed as the original plant grows.

It is also more convenient than current battery systems, according to Brown, as it would prove lighter, less bulky, quieter and would not need recharging as "when the burner runs out you can instantly replace it by putting in a new fuel cassette".

The handheld device market represents a $5bn opportunity according to Eneco, but the real cash cow for the company appears will come from harnessing waste heat and turning it into power.

Currently we spend around $1,500bn a year globally on fossil fuels, but when they are burned around 50 percent of the energy is wasted. Eneco envisages a situation where integrating its chips onto the side of a furnace for example would help capture much of that wasted heat and turn it into useful energy.

This situation could be mirrored in any number of industrial environments where heat is created while on a smaller scale the chips could also replace alternators in cars.

Eneco claims all these scenarios are plausible even before you consider the chip's ability to act as a cheap and efficient cooling technology potentially deployed in air conditioning, refrigeration units, and, of course, IT equipment.

These theoretical deployments are all well and good but the big issue for investors is whether the technology works and how close Eneco is to realising these many applications. And, in fairness to Brown he has an answer to almost every question from the floor.

In response to questions about their durability he claims that current thermoelectric technologies used on NASA's spacecraft have a life of over twenty years with no degradation in performance and that the chips are expected to enjoy a similar lifespan. Meanwhile, the fact that there are no moving parts means there is no wear and therefore no maintenance requirements.

Questions about how easy it is to manufacture the chips are also batted away with Brown claiming it can be built using established microprocessor design practices, while he is equally adamant that 48 patents or patents pending mean there is no danger of the technology "being stolen from under us".

The main technical concern from the floor is around how you keep a temperature differential between two sides of a chip no thicker than a coin. But speaking to GBN after the presentation Brown explains that the design of modules incorporating multiple chips will resolve this issue.

"Within the module you have a top ceramic plate which makes heat distribution uniform, then you have the chips in between and another ceramic plate on the bottom that takes the heat away," he says. "These ceramic plates effectively act as insulation so the hot side will be significantly hotter than the cold side."

In theory this means you can stick the module on the side of a boiler, for example, and the external or cold side will still be very hot, but it'll be sufficiently cold compared to the side actually in contact with the boiler that there is a differential capable of generating a significant amount of electricity.

This makes sense but it does strike that the key issue for the chip when used practically will be in ensuring the insulation is good enough to make this differential sufficiently large so that enough energy is produced to make the deployment worthwhile.

So where is the fly in the ointment? Well, Brown does admit there are "issues" with the packaging. The chips are so small that packaging them together in a module is tricky and the focus of the development effort is currently in this area.

Eneco insists it is making good progress and its first products will be available by the end of next year or early 2008, but while this may be perfectly feasible in the thermoelectric market where the applications will be relatively simple getting the chips into other environments may prove trickier.

Talks with potential customers about how exactly the technology should be used are only at an early stage and even though firms such as Apple, Dell, Ford, BMW and Boeing are all interested there appear to be plenty of issues to iron out.

"We are talking to partners about what they need to do and what we need to do to get the first demonstration products built," admits Brown. "For example, we're not there yet [with Dell and Apple] on where [the chip will] sit on the motherboard. Though it is so small it could also be incorporated as part of the processor."

The lack of clarity on such fundamental design issues suggests it is likely to be some time before Eneco powered devices emerge. But if these issues can be overcome - and anyone with any experience of energy conversion technologies will tell you it remains a big if - the company does appear to have a truly disruptive technology that could deliver clean, cheap and efficient power to a raft of different industries.
http://green.itweek.co.uk/2006/11/eneco_details_r.html





Man Tries Wirelessly Boosting Batteries
Seth Borenstein

There may be hope - however distant - for recharging nearly drained cell phone, laptop and other batteries without plugging them into the wall, a scientist said.

Although he hasn't built a device yet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor Marin Soljacic said he has figured out how to wirelessly recharge batteries, much like the way people can surf the Web untethered.

In a presentation Tuesday at an American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco, Soljacic made the case for using specially tuned waves of electromagnetism that don't radiate like normal waves.

The idea is that the recharge device and the receiver would be on the same acoustic frequency, similar to how a radio picks up only one channel at a time, so that the energy would mostly go straight to the intended battery, Soljacic said.

Some of the electromagnetic energy would go elsewhere but Sojacic doesn't believe it would harm people, noting that humans can endure strong magnetic fields with magnetic resonance imaging machines.

Soljacic envisions a device with wiring loops mounted on the ceiling of a room. He even sees this as a way of recharging electric buses on the go if there's a large "pipe" with recharging energy above a highway.

The concept of wirelessly recharging batteries has been dismissed before, deemed way too inefficient with too much energy put out into the air and little where it's supposed to go. But Soljacic said using special resonating frequencies could theoretically cut energy loss to only half of the energy produced, making the technology usable.

Soljacic said he is about to start experiments on his theory, which he believes would take at least a year to prove.

"It's too early to tell people 'why don't you take your battery and throw it away,'" Soljacic said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-15-18-15-06





Wireless Technology Made Me Sick

Sufferers like Kate Figes say wi-fi leaves them feeling exhausted, nauseous and sleepless

It is the hi-tech tool that has revolutionised home and office alike - but a growing band of campaigners claim wi-fi is a major threat to health.

Sufferers say the electro-magnetic waves emitted by wireless computer networks - wi-fi - leave them feeling exhausted, nauseous and sleepless.

Author Kate Figes, spent hundreds of pounds installing wireless internet in her Stoke Newington home, then found it made her so ill she had to scrap it.

Ms Figes, 49, claims she is so sensitive to wi-fi's electro-magnetic waves she can instantly tell whether it is installed in a particular room.

This comes days after campaigners called for parents to remove the system from their homes to prevent harming their children's health.

Ms Figes said: "The day we installed wi-fi two years ago was the day I started to feel ill. At first I could not work out what the problem was. I had no idea why I felt so sick and run-down. But I knew that when I walked through the front door it felt like walking into a cloud of poison.

"Imagine being prodded all over your body by 1,000 fingers. That is what I felt when I walked into the house... Then I started to think it might be the wi-fi, so we scrapped it - and I felt better."

She added: "Most people I've spoken are really dismissive, but I don't think they've considered the long-term impact of this technology." The mother-of-two is just one of many people who contacted campaigning group ElectroSensitivityUK about their fears over the harmful effects of wi-fi.

A spokesman for the group said: "We've been inundated by calls from people who know this is affecting them, but in many cases are wary of speaking out. The telecommunications companies pour scorn, but none of them has been able to prove wi-fi is safe."

But Chris Guy, head of Reading University's School of Systems Engineering said: "The amount of power emitted by wi-fi devices is about a tenth of that given out by mobile phones. It is very, very unlikely that it is harmful because the power levels are so low. I just do not believe wi-fi is damaging people's health."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770





Health Fears Lead Schools to Dismantle Wireless Networks
Joanna Bale

• Radiation levels blamed for illnesses
• Teacher became too sick to work

Parents and teachers are forcing some schools to dismantle wireless computer networks amid fears that they could damage children’s health.
More schools are putting transmitters in classrooms to give pupils wireless access from laptops to the school computer network and the internet.

But many parents and some scientists fear that low levels of microwave radiation emitted by the transmitters could be harmful, causing loss of concentration, headaches, fatigue, memory and behavioural problems and possibly cancer in the long term. Scientific evidence is inconclusive, but some researchers think that children are vulnerable because of their thinner skulls and developing nervous systems.

At the Prebendal School, a prestigious preparatory in Chichester, West Sussex, a group of parents lobbied the headteacher, Tim Cannell, to remove the wireless network last month. Mr Cannell told The Times: “We listened to the parents’ views and they were obviously very concerned. We also did a lot of research. The authorities say it’s safe, but there have been no long-term studies to prove this.

“We had been having problems with the reliability of it anyway, so we decided to exchange it for a conventional cabled system.”

Vivienne Baron, who is bringing up Sebastian, her ten-year-old grandson, said: “I did not want Sebastian exposed to a wireless computer network at school. No real evidence has been produced to prove that this new technology is safe in the long term. Until it is, I think we should take a precautionary approach and use cabled systems.”

At Ysgol Pantycelyn, a comprehensive in Carmarthenshire, parents aired their concerns to the governors, who agreed to switch off its wireless network. Hywel Pugh, the head teacher, told The Times: “The county council and central government told us that wireless networks are perfectly safe, but as there were concerns we listened to them and decided that the concerns of the parents were of greater importance than our need to have a wireless network.”

Judith Davies, who has a daughter at the school, said: “Many people campaign against mobile phone masts near schools, but there is a great deal of ignorance about wireless computer networks. Yet they are like having a phone mast in the classroom and the transmitters are placed very close to the children.”

Stowe School, the Buckinghamshire public school, also removed part of its wireless network after a teacher became ill. Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach.

“I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom,” he said. “First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.”

Anthony Wallersteiner, the head teacher of Stowe School, said that he was planning to put cabled networks in all new classrooms and boarding houses.

Professor Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency, said that evidence of potentially harmful effects of microwave radiation had become more persuasive over the past five years. His report said that while there was a lack of hard information of damage to health, the approach should be precautionary.

A DfES spokesman said: “It’s up to individual schools to decide on this.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...461748,00.html





From 2004

Stealth Wallpaper Could Keep WLANs Secure

Keeps outsiders off your wireless network...
Ron Coates

UK defence contractor BAE Systems has developed a stealth wallpaper to beat electronic eavesdropping on company Wi-Fi networks.

The company has produced panels using the technology to produce a screen that will prevent outsiders from listening in on companies' Wi-Fi traffic but let other radio and mobile phone traffic get through.

The FSS (Frequency Selective Surface) panels are made in the same way as printed circuit boards - layers of copper on Kapton polymer - and used on stealth bombers and fighter jets. They come in two varieties: passive, which is effectively permanent, and active, where various areas can be switched on and off to enlarge or limit the area of the network.

The panels are 50 to100 microns thick and can be applied to most surfaces including glass. A company spokesman claimed that they also helped reduce "noise" in buildings where a number of companies operate their own separate LANs.

BAE Systems developed the new material with £145,000 of funding from the Radiocommunications Agency, which is now part of Ofcom. BAE says the material is cheap and it will be developing it commercially through BAE's corporate venture subsidiary.

There is no timescale for its commercial availability.
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,3...9121501,00.htm





'Evil Twin' Wi-Fi Hacks Target The Rich

Hackers after high net worth individuals in wireless scam
Iain Thomson

Locations popular with high net worth individuals are being targeted by hackers using phoney wireless access points to steal personal information.

So called 'evil twin' attacks involve putting a wireless access point near a commercial hotspot and giving it the same name.

When the unsuspecting user logs-on to the bogus hotspot their traffic is monitored, personal information can be gathered and in some cases the computer can be hacked remotely.

"We are not seeing these in Starbucks much, as there is not much value in a MySpace login," said Richard Rushing, chief science officer at Wi-Fi security firm AirDefense.

"Instead they are targeting the locations where the better-off are hanging out because they have something worth seeing."

Rushing explained that 'evil twins' had recently been found in the first class lounge of an international airport, and in garages that specialise in expensive cars that offered Wi-Fi while you wait. Train station lounges had also been targeted.

This form of attack uses social engineering and hacking, since a key part is lulling the suspect into a false sense of security but mimicking a legitimate service.

It also shows the extent to which hackers are having to deal with information overload from skimming too much information to process effectively.

The attacks are a growing problem for security managers. While corporate Wi-Fi networks are increasingly being locked down on installation, it is the individual user who is now seen as the weakest link.
www.vnunet.com/2169400





Podcast: Tor Peer-To-Peer Privacy Could be Hacked
SearchSecurity.com Staff

Andrew Christensen, a researcher with FortConsult, explains how the Tor peer-to-peer network of routers, which keeps IP addresses private, can be hacked to reveal user data. Tor is used to make Web browsing, publishing and instant messaging anonymous. The developers say the aim is to "defend against traffic analysis," which can inhibit privacy. But the FortConsult report suggests that users of Tor aren't as anonymous as they may think.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...229376,00.html

MP3






Lights Out
Alex Mindlin

ONE evening late last month, Gary Dennis was striding around Movie Place, his video store on 105th Street near Broadway, with a cordless phone clamped to his ear. His graying hair was brushed back, and he spoke, as usual, out of the side of his mouth. “No, I’m not going to be in this industry anymore,” he told the caller. “The industry’s dying.” He waited a beat, then added, “I’m going to sell drugs to junior high schoolers.”

Movie Place, which occupies a pale yellow room in a second-floor storefront, has 24,000 titles, making it one of New York’s best-stocked video stores; the average Blockbuster carries only about 5,000 films. Movie Place’s holdings — sealed in binders, arranged in wooden crates, shelved high on every wall — include commercial hits but also the very obscure, from a 1984 self-help video starring Mr. T to a biopic of Karen Carpenter acted out with Barbie dolls.

Presiding over this treasure house is Mr. Dennis, a fierce-browed, loose-jointed 45-year-old who fills the air with a giddy mix of film trivia, sharp asides and ribbing. “He didn’t like ‘Arrested Development’!” he shouted, pointing at a customer in mock outrage. “Should we throw him out?”

Customers go to Movie Place to be part of this banter, but they will not be doing so for much longer. Faced with a large rent increase, Mr. Dennis plans to close his 22-year-old shop on Nov. 30.

Such closings are increasingly common in New York and around the country. Like the movie theaters that preceded them, video stores are fast becoming relics, and their signs may soon join those unlighted movie marquees (with a vestigial letter or two) that dot various neighborhoods and remind passers-by of what once was.

But the decline of the video store is more than a story of small merchants undone by technological change. Like movie theaters, and unlike delis or drugstores, video shops in a city as film-saturated and film-savvy as New York emerged as centers of neighborhood life.

Their selections mirror the people they serve, and their proprietors, like Mr. Dennis, can be beloved figures with a deep knowledge not only of local inhabitants’ film tastes, but also of other aspects of their lives.

“I came in here once, and I said, ‘My husband just got his teeth pulled,’ ” said Maxine McClintock, a longtime Movie Place customer. “‘What’s a good movie to watch when your teeth are pulled?’ ” Mr. Dennis recommended some screwball comedies, including “Libeled Lady,” a 1936 film with Spencer Tracy, William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Salvatore Ierardo, the liquidation director for Video One Liquidators, a Florida company that sells off video stores’ inventories on site, sees the deaths of these shops firsthand. The stores are like “the guy that used to deliver ice,” he said, adding, “He worked hard and everything, but the refrigerator was working while he was sleeping.” As for customers’ reaction to the demise, Mr. Ierardo said: “They know it’s inevitable, but they don’t feel comfortable. They know it’s been there a long time standing.”

Mom-and-Pops in Peril

The final scene in the story of Movie Place began last April, when its building was sold. Mr. Dennis had no lease, and his new landlord, Ralph Braha, offered him one at a monthly rent of $7,500, more than double what he was paying. Jay Litzman, a lawyer for Mr. Braha, said in an interview, “When you’re in a commercial setting and you don’t have a lease and someone takes over, you expect that the market will be reached.”

In the middle of last month, Mr. Dennis decided to fold his hand and close his store by Dec. 1. He does not plan to open a new one; business is too sluggish these days, he said, and his heart isn’t in it.

“Starting again would be like going back to an old girlfriend,” he said. “I’d always be second-guessing myself.”

Compared with some other video stores, Movie Place has not fared badly. For years, it resisted the forces that have been sweeping away many of the city’s other mom-and-pop video shops. Nationally, the number of privately owned video rental shops, as opposed to huge chains, fell to roughly 13,000 in 2005 from about 22,000 in 1996, according to Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, which tracks the entertainment industry.

The mom-and-pops were weakened by the rise of chains like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery, which together added almost 5,000 stores between 1996 and 2004, striking deals with the studios that gave them dozens of low-priced copies of hot new releases. Then the independents were buffeted by the arrival of cheap DVDs for sale, now a $16-billion-a-year business, along with the rise of Netflix and on-demand cable movies.

These trends have been especially harmful in New York, where rising rents are imperiling many small-margin businesses anyway. For New York, the list of casualties includes not only single-store video businesses but also small chains that have scaled back sharply or folded: Royal Video, Captain Video, Champagne Video.

Mr. Ierardo, the liquidation director, gets a knowing look from browsers when he is selling off a New York video store. “Some people walk in and go, ‘The rent, right?’ ” he said.

In any event, the decline of these shops has left New York’s many film lovers increasingly adrift. Until 2001, for example, the cognoscenti could hunt for Iranian or Bangladeshi films in the International Film and Video Center, an East Side store run by an Iranian film scholar. Until the mid-’90s, they could browse the sliding shelves at Video Shack, a pioneering sales-and-rental emporium near Times Square. Video Shack was such an early entrant to the business that it was selling videotapes before many customers knew what they were.

“People would come in one day, buy a video and then two days later, they’d bring it back because it didn’t fit in their television,” recalled the former owner, Arthur Morowitz. “We had actually out-marketed the VCR.”

The Corner Film Critic

The proprietors of many of the city’s video stores often became film critics of last resort. North Heights Video in Brooklyn Heights, a defunct outlet run by the wry, hyper-opinionated Martin Arno, had a vast selection of obscure and foreign films (anyone for “White Hell of Pitz Palu” a 1929 silent about German mountaineering?). Mr. Arno was known to favor Hitchcock over Bergman. “I watch a Bergman film,” he once said, “and I want to jump off a bridge.”

Mr. Dennis of Movie Place, who named his 7-year-old daughter, Ava, in honor of Ava Gardner, has probably never been asked a film-related question he cannot answer. Once, a woman who was leaving her husband at home for the weekend asked Mr. Dennis, “What are the movies he’d want to watch that I’d hate?” Mr. Dennis’s recommendations: “U-571,” a 2000 submarine thriller set during World War II, and “The Seven-Ups,” a 1973 police drama.

But the influence works both ways, with some shops coming to resemble their neighborhoods over the years, much as people and their pets are said to grow to look like each other.

World of Video, still operating on Greenwich Avenue in the still heavily gay West Village, is known for its gay and lesbian collection. At Cinémathèque in Park Slope, the large number of local writers had a hand in determining what was on the shelves. Paul Auster, the novelist, repeatedly requested “In a Lonely Place,” a 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie about a hot-tempered screenwriter. Eventually, he got his wish.

Channel Video, on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, was shaped by its neighborhood of upscale cinephiles, people with highbrow but not obscure tastes. “He had gathered a collection of art-house movies and Criterion DVDs and things the customers wanted,” Mr. Ierardo said of David Cohn, the proprietor. “They’d ask for something, he’d buy it.”

Video stores are woven into the local fabric in other ways. A couple once asked Mr. Dennis if they could get married in his store. (He said no.) Some couples, among them Mr. Dennis and his wife, first met in the aisles. And last June, Mr. Dennis persuaded the city to give the name Humphrey Bogart Place to the block of 103rd Street west of Broadway, because the actor spent his early years there.

“I don’t know how I’m going to live without it,” John Reaves, a Movie Place patron, said the other day as he signed a petition to keep the store open. The petition was drafted by a local family, the Telushkins. Mr. Dennis was dubious about the petition’s chances of success, but that did not keep Benjamin Telushkin, a 13-year-old Fellini fan, from sitting at a card table down the street with a giant oaktag sign and shouting, “Save Movie Place!”

The Frustrated 2,500

The Upper West Side is suffering through a spasm of late-stage gentrification, with many of its restaurants, shops and grocers replaced by bank branches and chain drugstores. Mr. Dennis himself drew loud applause at a meeting of Community Board 7 this month when he declared: “Our neighborhood is becoming a punch line. You walk down Broadway, and it’s a Flintstones background: Duane Reade, wireless place, Duane Reade, wireless place.”

Upper West Siders are particularly protective of all their institutions, but the demise of Movie Place seems to have touched a raw neighborhood nerve. With the help of his mother, Devorah, and sisters, Shira and Naomi, Benjamin Telushkin gathered 2,500 signatures on their petition.

Such local affection surfaced a few weeks ago when Matt Unger and Stephanie Ehrlich, the couple who had asked to be married at Movie Place, arrived at the store. They had just learned that it was closing.

Grimacing, Mr. Unger said, “That’s one of these things that make you not want to live in New York anymore.”

Ms. Ehrlich looked at her husband. “What’s Gary going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Unger replied. “He seems to only be good at one thing.”

In fact, Mr. Dennis is making plans to sell off his inventory, perhaps to an online service. The only movies he wants to keep are “Casablanca,” “A Night at the Opera” and “Orchestra Wives,” a Glenn Miller musical. As for the rest, he said: “Where are you going to keep it? My wife invented that phrase — ‘Oh, you’re going to buy it? Where are you going to keep it?’ New York’s different.” Besides, he added, “this stuff’ll show up on TV.”

He spends part of every day fielding condolence calls, at least two dozen on a recent Monday. “I’m available for parties and bar mitzvahs,” he told one caller. Then, more gravely, he added: “Don’t worry. I’m chained to this neighborhood. They’re going to bury me in Straus Park when the time comes.” After shutting the store, Mr. Dennis may set up a movie Web site or, fittingly, write a book about defunct movie theaters.

One of the store’s final visitors was Karen Young, an actress who plays an F.B.I. agent in “The Sopranos” and a romantic rival of Charlotte Rampling’s in the 2006 film “Heading South.” Ms. Young, who lives two blocks from the store, raised her two children on slapstick Laurel and Hardy rented from Mr. Dennis, and she was shocked to hear of the closing. “You know how hard those are to find?” she said of those ’30s comedies. “This is awful.”

“You can buy most of those on DVD now,” Mr. Dennis said in a kind voice. Then he paused for a second. “Not the shorts.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ny...ty/19vide.html





Your TV Would Like a Word With You
Lorne Manly

WHEN Gail Smith left for Guam in the late 1980s, to pursue a job as a computer teacher, the television-viewing experience she left behind in Florence, S.C., had barely budged since the medium’s beginnings. Save for the introduction of the remote and the VCR, the routine was essentially the same: turn on the set, plop down in the comfy chair and veg out.

Upon Ms. Smith’s return to the mainland 15 years later, the changes surrounding the once-dumb television set astounded her. “I feel like TV is soooo different,” she said recently. “It’s not like I’m sitting there being the couch potato.”

Like lots of other Americans, she rents a digital video recorder, which allows her to time-shift her favorite shows, and she can choose from hundreds of movies on demand. But in other regards Ms. Smith is ahead of the curve.

She is one of 160,000 Time Warner subscribers who, as part of a broad experiment, are living with what may well be the future of television: souped-up interactivity. As a result she gets to choose not just when she wants to watch certain programs, but to a greater or lesser extent what those programs look like on her screen — what news to magnify and what personalized information to call up, where to go deep and what to skip.

If she’s watching CNN or CNBC, she can select short video clips on the latest headlines or market news, just as she might while clicking her way around a Web site. When she can’t sleep, she can turn to the Weather Channel, click on an icon and dip into one of the network’s “Storm Stories,” the popular compendium of meteorological havoc.

This taste of control has left her wanting more. “I would like to do more fine-tuning,” said Ms. Smith, 55, who now works as a graphic designer. “And I think that day will come soon.”

She’s not alone. Grandiose promises of an interactive future circulated for decades, then seemingly died out a few years back. But today more than 25 million homes can engage with their television on something approaching their own terms. The omniscient television programmer symbolized by the opening of “The Outer Limits” — “For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear” — has been humbled.

Hard-core football fans with DirecTV can arrange for instant alerts about their favorite players. Dish Network subscribers in 12 states can wager on horse races without hauling themselves from their La-Z-Boys. And some Time Warner subscribers can vote for their favorite reality television contestant by simply pressing a button.

In the coming months, ESPN iZone will allow Dish Network subscribers to get sports news when they want, rather than waiting until “Sports Center” gets around to them. And the Disney Channel Game Zone will offer kids arcade and character-driven games.

Still, there are plenty of hurdles to clear before these new offerings become the norm. Some are technological. Some are habitual: for example, can multitasking viewers handle yet another task? And there’s the question of whether customers even want these newfangled options. Television may never have been just a boob tube, but it’s unclear just how smart people really want it to be.

IN its very crudest form, a kind of paleo-interactivity has been around since television’s early years. Fans of “Winky Dink and You,” a 1950s children’s show, could send away for a kit that included special crayons and a piece of vinyl plastic. When Winky found himself in a spot of trouble, kids were told to stick the “magic drawing screen” on the television and draw Winky’s salvation. Many just scribbled on the screen.

New York area children of the 1970s may remember WPIX’s call-in contests: lucky viewers got a call inviting them to play a video game on the air, by screaming “PIX!” into the phone every time they wanted to fire a pixelated missile. On the other end of the line a hapless station employee would carry out the command.

Eventually the quest for interactivity got more sophisticated. QUBE, rolled out in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, allowed viewers to order movies, cast mock votes on city council proposals, even bid in community auctions. In 1994 Time Warner’s Full Service Network arrived in Orlando, Fla., amid dazzling visions of movies on demand, video shopping and cool games.

But these later versions didn’t have much more impact than their crude forebears. And other prospectors — like Wink, WebTV, AOLTV and Tele-TV — came up empty-handed too.

As a result, consumers have grown justifiably wary of the promise that someday they and their televisions will speak to each other. But cultural theorists have grown just as skeptical of the notion that TV was ever a one-way conversation. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to question that model: “TV will not work as background,” he wrote in “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” “It engages you. You have to be with it.”

Television viewing comes in many forms, said Susan Murray, a professor of culture and communication at New York University and the author of “Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom.”

“We might be a ‘couch potato’ at times, which might involve watching television in such a way that lets us zone out, or we use it as background noise or company,” she said. “At other times we might become more actively engaged with a program as we pay close attention in order to work to figure out its cultural references, the nuances of its plot and character development, the way in which it might be in conversation with other programs, or the history or details of its production.”

Today’s more intricate shows, like “The Sopranos” or “Lost,” practically demand engaged, active viewing. “There’s a tolerance for complexity and paying attention that’s been bred in the audience,” said Steven Johnson, the author of “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.”

This “sleeper curve,” as Mr. Johnson refers to it in his book, began 25 years ago with “Hill Street Blues,” slowly training people to be more observant television watchers and follow more characters and plot lines.

Digital video recorders and DVD players have been a boon to those kinds of shows, which reward multiple viewings. Meanwhile audiences have gotten used to the participatory dynamic of the Web, where they can gratify almost any factual or visual craving, debate dramatic plot twists or craft “fan fiction” futures for their favorite characters.

“I think these largely marginal fan fiction obsessive sites are certainly destined to become more mainstream in the coming years, and that will make it increasingly essential for television shows to foster some kind of interactivity,” Mr. Johnson said. “Those fan sites are like the Dungeons and Dragons or dice baseball players 30 years ago. They looked like they were destined to be a sub-subculture, but in fact what they were doing eventually became the videogame industry, which is the dominant form of entertainment for 10- to 25-year-old boys now.

“You have this expectation of engagement that a whole generation is coming to television with.”

The new technological innovations might relocate some of those activities from the computer screen to the television screen. Some viewers of GSN game shows like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” who now play along through their computers will soon be able to do so through their remotes instead.

The new purveyors of interactive television insist they have learned from earlier missteps and have a better sense of exactly what people want to interact with.

For John Kelly, a computer technician for Adelphia high-speed cable in Wichita, Kan., that would be football. On top of the $249 he pays DirecTV for a season of its Sunday Ticket cavalcade of games, he ponies up another $99 for its Super Fan option. Now he can watch eight games at a time, all arrayed on his 54-inch television set, a trick that comes in handy when he and his brother watch football together. Mr. Kelly, 38, roots for the Green Bay Packers; his brother, Jackie, cheers on the Dallas Cowboys. And there’s no need to keep flipping channels.

Mr. Kelly can also customize the Sunday Ticket football package, to get immediate notices about the exploits of his favorite players and teams. Two Sundays ago, when a nurse friend had to work at the same time her beloved Tennessee Titans took the field, Mr. Kelly punched in some of their names. Whenever those Titans did something noteworthy on the field, an advisory would pop up on his television screen, and he’d fire off a text message to her.

“I would never have dreamed 20 years ago that I’d be able to do this on a TV in my lifetime,” added Mr. Kelly, who grew up in Maud, Okla., with a set that got only CBS. Now he doesn’t even like watching games at bars or at friends’ houses. Without his newfound powers, he says, “it feels like I have a hand cut off.”

This sort of passion explains why so many of these new bells and whistles involve sports. This summer, DirecTV subscribers could watch up to five live U.S. Open matches on the USA Network — at once. Dish Network subscribers could watch the Indianapolis 500 on six different camera feeds or zoom in on one of them. (More than half a million people gave it a try.) This past baseball season DirecTV viewers of the YES Network could pick the camera angle from which they wanted to watch the Yankees.

And why stop at real sports?

On a recent Sunday, as they do most weeks during the season, Eric Putnam and Adam Johnson settled in front of their 52-inch Toshiba rear-projection, high-definition television in an Upper West Side brownstone, to gorge on a day (and night) of football with beers in their hands (Budweiser for Mr. Putnam, Yuengling for Mr. Johnson).

While they have their sentimental favorites, their allegiances also extend to the men they’ve assembled for their fantasy squads. And that helps explain why they have laptops open in front of them: instantly to track how their fantasy teams are doing. Mr. Putnam, who competes with his fellow workers on the UBS Securities foreign exchange desk in Stamford, Conn., also often flits into his bedroom. There, his 25-inch Sharp Acquos LCD television has the player-tracker feature, which his big television doesn’t. Loaded with the names of some of the real players he and Mr. Johnson, who runs operations for the New York office of the Bonhams auction house, have drafted, it gives him updates of his players’ stats even faster than his computer does.

The experience has left these two virtual general managers wanting even more. “The interactive features, they’re nice to have, but that’s not the main reason I’m turning on the TV,” Mr. Putnam said. “Right now it’s more of a side dish. But I could see that changing down the road.”

Giving fantasy owners the ability to manage their teams right on the TV set, which some Time Warner Cable subscribers can already do, could make interactivity more central to the viewing experience. “This is the way you’re going to watch — and care about — football,” Mr. Putnam said.

Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks (which owns TBS, TNT, Court TV and Turner Classic Movies), said such “interactivity with consequences” provides a smart guiding philosophy for future developments. And it works just as well if viewers want to win a sports bet, place a vote or get specialized information.

On Bravo earlier this year, a third of “Top Chef” viewers in selected Time Warner markets registered their opinions on questions like “Which of these three contestants should go home right now?” The appeal: “Being in control of having their voice heard,” said Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo.

Randall Neighbour, a Dish Network subscriber in Houston, runs Touch Outreach Ministries, which helps churches set up small groups for activities like prayer and discussion. Because he travels a lot, he is partial to the weather offerings. Punching in a ZIP code, he can quickly learn the current conditions, get his fill of Doppler radar and check the five-day forecast for whatever locale he chooses. It’s a far cry from the offerings on the six channels Mr. Neighbour, 44, grew up with. If he timed it right, he got home from school in time for “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Love Lucy” repeats. But more often the good shows were on when he couldn’t watch them.

The arrival of the digital video recorder, and now interactive television, has made him “much more of a TV junkie than I’d like to be,” Mr. Neighbour said.

“I love my DVR,” he added with a laugh. “I’d marry it and have its children if I wasn’t already married.” Luckily the digital video recorder does not appear to be jealous of Mr. Neighbour’s wife. The couple will often get up early on Friday morning to watch “Grey’s Anatomy” at 6:30, lounging in bed with mugs of coffee.

Lately some dramas have begun experimenting with tiny doses of interactivity. The N’s “Degrassi: The Next Generation” invited viewers to weigh in on pressing topics like “Who looks hotter in a white tank top?”

But those kinds of add-ons can be a distraction from an absorbing story. Ms. Smith, the graphic designer in Florence, S.C., is a fan of shows like “Gilmore Girls” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” As much as she loves her television’s new interactive elements, she says she has no desire to, say, vote on future plot developments. “I want to see what the writers are going to do,” she said. “I like the surprise.”

And that, ultimately, may be the problem all these advances face, if interactive television is ever going to expand from its modest selection of sports, weather and reality shows, as well as advertising and home shopping. Some of the perceived limitations of TV — that it unfolds according to its own schedule, that writers and actors have more control than viewers do — are actually kind of fun. It’s exciting to imagine a day when viewers can decide how a series should end, but it may be more enjoyable to relax and let the experts decide.

It’s also not clear that anyone is willing to put aside the myriad distractions that have become such a deep part of the viewing experience. And all the maneuvering by the satellite and cable operators could be for naught if people continue to think of computers, not TV sets, as the place to interact with programming.

“Computers and the Net were designed from the ground up to be interactive,” said Mr. Johnson, the author. “I have to think that they will always offer more elaborate forms of interactivity than something the cable companies might stitch together.

“Ultimately are you trying to trick out the TV too much to do something that it isn’t really meant to do?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ar...on/19manl.html





Sunny and Gloomy Signs at a Web Crossroads
Robert D. Hershey Jr.

IN mid-October, Yahoo, the world’s biggest Internet portal, reported a sharp profit skid and warned of a further growth slowdown in two major lines of business — a performance that its unusually contrite chief executive said had failed to fully exploit the company’s strengths.

That was enough for Scott W. Devitt, an analyst based in Manassas, Va., who covers Yahoo for Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, the investment banking firm. Three days later, Mr. Devitt downgraded Yahoo shares — which at the turn of the century traded above $100 and were then about $23 — to a hold from a buy. Fidelity Investments has also soured on the stock, but declined to say why it sold 55.6 million Yahoo shares between midyear and Oct. 31.

But Justin Post, a Merrill Lynch analyst in San Francisco, had the opposite reaction to the grim news from Yahoo. Just before Halloween, Mr. Post, noting the stock’s sharp drop this year, saw “an attractive entry point” and raised his appraisal to buy from neutral.

So is Yahoo stock, which now trades at $26.91, down 31.3 percent this year, a bargain suitable for value investors? Or is the once highflying company — which in its heyday was regarded not unlike today’s Google — destined to bring further disappointment?
Despite contrasting opinions, analysts and stockholders of Yahoo generally agree on what ails it. And there is a consensus that if it remained an underachiever, it would be a candidate for takeover.

The main problem is that Yahoo has not been nearly as good as Google at reaping profits from the huge volume of search traffic it attracts. Yahoo’s search revenue in the third quarter was $191 million, versus $911 million for Google, Mr. Post’s report estimated.

“Yahoo touches one out of every two people on the Internet every month, which is unparalleled reach,” said Randy Befumo, co-director of research at Legg Mason, which holds some 40 million Yahoo shares in various accounts, including funds run by Bill Miller, Legg Mason’s marquee mutual fund manager. Despite the fact that Yahoo actually has more traffic than Google,” Mr. Befumo said, Google has more revenue. “So there definitely is a problem with Yahoo’s monetization.”

According to Mr. Post, who also points to this issue, each domestic search generates about 4 cents for Yahoo, compared with 11 cents a search at Google.

Some analysts see other sources of concern — questions that the market may not have recognized as fully as the lag in converting search traffic to cash. Prominent among these is the strength of challenges to Yahoo’s commanding position in the branded business of display advertising on the Web. Mr. Devitt calls this issue “the new surprise.”

He points to more aggressive investment by Microsoft in MSN.com, its Internet portal; AOL unbundling its business and making it available free; and the rapid emergence of fresh competition from social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

“That, as well as the traditional media moving on the Internet, has significantly increased the inventory for display advertising alternatives,” Mr. Devitt said. “It’s impacted the pricing pressure and the dominance that Yahoo had in that business.”

Mr. Post of Merrill Lynch acknowledges the drag on Yahoo’s business. The industry’s growth rate is catching up with Yahoo’s in this area, he said. “When someone’s growth rate is declining, it’s hard to know where the bottom is,” Mr. Post said. Still, he said, Wall Street’s worries about this seem overdone, creating a buying opportunity at the beginning of a traditionally strong holiday period for the Internet.

Then there is the problem of eroding revenue from Web sites that are increasingly choosing to link to Google, which can provide better monetization of traffic. “This is something that puts at risk Yahoo’s network business longer-term,” Mr. Devitt said.

Yahoo management, led by its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, is counting heavily on a technological upgrade of its search engine to enhance profits. The delayed upgrade, called Project Panama, is now scheduled for introduction in 2007, and analysts expect it to narrow Yahoo’s search gap with Google. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise revenue per search to around 5 cents in 2008, or as much as 7 cents if Panama proves a rousing success.

“Monetization is a hard thing; not too many people do it very well,” said Mr. Befumo at Legg Mason. But, he contended, Yahoo has some appealing alternatives.

“If you have a traffic problem, then you have a fundamental business problem because you have nothing to convert into revenue dollars,” he said. “But if you have a monetization problem, which is what Yahoo effectively has, you always have options.”

If Project Panama falls short, Mr. Befumo said, Yahoo could have Google or Microsoft do Web-searching for it in return for perhaps 5 or 10 percent of the revenue. “You could solve the monetization problem overnight” with such a contract, he said.

Yahoo shares, which have climbed about 11 percent in the past month, have been supported by company buybacks — over $1 billion worth in the third quarter, more than triple the purchases in the second quarter — and by what appears to be increased speculation that the company is a possible target for acquisition, perhaps in a private-equity deal or a leveraged buyout. Yahoo could also buy another company, and Facebook has been mentioned as a possibility.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said it did not comment on such speculation.

In his report upgrading the shares, Mr. Post wrote that “we think Yahoo’s assets would be compelling for Microsoft or a large media conglomerate looking to build a meaningful online presence.” He set a 12-month price goal of $32 but said that there was a risk they could fall to $22.

MR. POST came up with his $32 figure this way: he assigned a multiple of 25 to projected 2007 free cash flow of $1 — meaning that the stock would be worth $25 on the basis of that flow alone — then added $3 for the value of Yahoo Japan, $1 for the company’s Alibaba operation in China and $3 in cash.

Mr. Devitt, who is more skeptical about the stock, said that it “probably does have upside” potential if Yahoo can stabilize its branded graphic display advertising and derive some benefit from Project Panama next year. In the meantime, he said, the stock is likely to languish. At Legg Mason in Baltimore, Mr. Miller, portfolio manager of Legg Mason Value Trust, told investors in August that the intrinsic current value of Yahoo was perhaps double its market price then of about $27.

The firm’s optimism seems undiminished. Though it has pared its peak Yahoo position, Legg Mason Value Trust still held 19.2 million shares on Sept. 30. Yahoo’s stock decline this year is one reason that the fund may fail to beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index after outperforming it for 15 years in a row. So far, the fund is lagging behind the index by more than nine percentage points.

Mr. Befumo of Legg Mason said that Yahoo’s stock began to be “sort of crazy cheap” last month, and that other “classic value guys are actually starting to sniff around the name because, on a cash-flow basis, it’s particularly cheap.”

Mr. Miller was not available for comment, a spokeswoman said. Mr. Befumo contends that Yahoo’s intrinsic value is in the mid-$40s, pointing to the stepped-up buybacks as evidence that the company agrees. Although he said the stock could drop into the teens if it were ever evaluated like traditional media businesses, he also said that it could leap into the $60s in the perhaps equally unlikely event that it traded at parity with Google.

At the moment, though, the gap between the stock market’s valuations of Google and Yahoo is enormous. Yahoo’s market capitalization is about $36.6 billion, and its price-to-earnings ratio is 34.1, based on trailing earnings. By contrast, Google has a market cap of $152.7 billion and a trailing P/E of 63.3, according to numbers available on the Yahoo Finance site.

Students of Yahoo say that while the company may be acquired, no deal is likely before Project Panama begins to show results, one way or another. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise Yahoo’s revenue $250 million to $500 million in 2008 — and warned that investors could be “too late” if they waited to buy until Panama’s rollout risks had passed.

Ultimately, Mr. Befumo said, the search engine business will shake down to a natural worldwide duopoly. “We think that Google and someone else — we think the odds are Yahoo — will do this for a majority of the Internet,” he said. “Very few other people will be able to get the scale of traffic required to make it work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/bu...y/19yahoo.html





New Google Service Will Manipulate Caller-ID
Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. Google has made available a new "Click-to-Call" service that will automatically connect users to business phone listings found via Google search results.

In order for this feature to function, the user must provide their telephone number so that Google can bridge the free call between the business and the user (including long distance calls).

An obvious issue with such a service is that there is no reasonable way to validate the user phone number that is provided. Google says that they have mechanisms in place to try avoid repeated prank calls, but the potential for abuse is obvious.

Of even greater concern is that Google says that it will manipulate the caller-ID on the calls made to the user-provided number, to match that of the business being called. This is extremely problematic, since it could be used to try to convince a prank target that they were being called directly by the business in question, and so cause that target to direct their anger at the innocent business. In the case of targets who are on do-not-call lists, it is possible to imagine legal action being taken by callers upset that the business in question called them "illegally," though in fact the call had been made by the Google system.

Google's explanation for this caller-ID manipulation is that it would be handy to have the called business number in your caller-ID for future calls. That may be true, but the abuse potential is way too high. Caller-ID should never be falsified.

I've written many times about how caller-ID can be manipulated to display false or misleading information, why this should be prevented, and how the telcos have shown little interest in fixing caller-ID or informing their customers about the problem (caller-ID is a cash cow for the telcos whether it is accurate or not).

Up to now, the typical available avenue for manipulating caller-ID has been pay services that tended to limit the potential for largescale abuse since users are charged for access. Google, by providing a free service that will place calls and manipulate caller-ID, vastly increases the scope of the problem. Scale matters.

Google has not vetted this caller-ID feature sufficiently, and I urge its immediate reconsideration.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000200.html

Proposed Solution For Google's "Click-to-Call" Caller-ID Problem

Greetings. In a recent blog entry, I discussed my concerns about Google's new "Click-to-Call" service, especially key issues regarding Google's handling of caller-ID in this service.

Now I'd like to propose a specific solution.

I completely understand why Google likes their caller-ID feature. It's a cute hack (hack in the positive sense), and in the context of non-abusive use brings some value-added. But I really believe that this is one of those cases where somebody needed to get beyond the "gee-whiz isn't this nifty" factor and consider more carefully how it will be abused, particularly on the large free-access scale that Google provides. Even if the vast majority of the calls are legit, the absolute number of abuses is bound to be high, and it seems certain that innocents will be hurt in significant numbers -- there are a lot of jerks in the world who are going to take advantage of this service to get their jollies or take revenge on businesses that they have a gripe with, etc.
However, there is indeed a simple solution in this case. If the caller-ID delivered to both sides of the bridged calls is set to indicate the true source of the calls (i.e., Google) the problem goes away. In fact, caller-ID could be used to further enhance the service by providing a true full point of contact.

What I would do is set the caller-ID to display a Google phone number (ideally toll-free) that played a recorded announcement explaining that the call originated from Google Click-to-Call, and noting how to proceed (via a Web page, e-mail address, and/or specific phone number) if you felt that you were being targeted for abuse by a user of that system and wanted to file an associated report. This would be a win-win all around. Google would more rapidly get a handle on abusive users, and the service would be even more consumer friendly.

Sometimes there can be a happy ending!
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000201.html





Crypto MoJo

Translation of the article published by Le Monde

Better than BabelFish I hope.. human made, so prone to errors
jackjeff

====

The confidence users have in Internet and in the capacity of the system to secure data has always been relative. And it could collapse if the microprocessor manufacturers and cryptography software editors were to be unable to cope against a new type of attack, fearsomely efficient, discovered by the team directed by the German cryptographer Jean-Pierre Seifert (universities of Haifa and Innsbruck). Electronic commerce could be threatened, but also, more broadly, everything that enables the dematerialization of exchanges, which rely on asymmetrical cryptography applications, would it be ciphers, digital signatures or message integrity checks.

In the still confidential article, the researcher and his colleagues describe the procedure they used to, gather a nearly entire cipher key of 512 bits (a series of as many of 0s and 1s) in a single attempt, that's to say in a few milliseconds. For comparison, the greatest public key that has been broken so far is 640 bits long, and as announced in November 2005, the process involved the usage of 80 microprocessors running at 2.2 Ghz for 3 months.

Since the announcement made this summer, on the International Association of Cryptology Research (IACR), that such an attack was theoretically feasible, microprocessors producers were on their nerves: the chips of nearly all of the computers, world wide, are vulnerable. So much that the head of Intel security, the number 1 microprocessor manufacturer, when confronted with the issue declared that he would be "unavailable for a few weeks". This is because the usual fix against classical attacks on public key cryptography - to increase the size of the keys - will not work this time.

Jean-Pierre Seifert was in fact able to affect the systems from the ground up. As most of the security relies on the incapacity to mathematically deduce the private key, kept secret, from the public one, he chose to study how the microprocessors was reading these confidential data.

He found out that the mode of operation or the chip itself, optimized for calculation speed, was making it vulnerable. "Security was sacrificed for the sake of performance", estimated the researcher.

The attack principle can be summed up as such: to go faster and faster, the microprocessor parallelizes operations and uses a branch prediction system to predict the result of the current operation. If the prediction is good, the computation time is greatly decreased. If not, the processor must go back and start again the elementary operation. It is "sufficient" to measure the computation time when the processor goes through the line of 0s and 1s that constitute the cipher key to able able to deduce it.

This threat, called "Branch Prediction Analysis" (BPA) was already known. It was thought a lot of attempts was necessary to statistically deduce the cipher key, thus making the attack not-practicable. The technique discovered by Jean-Pierre Seifert make it possible to break the key in a single attempt. It relies on the fact that the prediction process, essential to increase the processor speed, is not protected.

A spyware could then be made to listen to the chip discreetly, and send back the key to hackers, foreign intelligence services or competitors.

"A MATTER OF WEEKS"

We are not yet there though. "We have not made a turn key application that would be available online" argues Jean-Pierre Seifert. But he estimates that once the method is made public, in early 2007 during the next RSA conference - RSA, being one of the most popular ciphers -, the making of such software would be "a matter of weeks".

Cryptography specialists confirm that the threat is serious. One of the best world wide public key experts anonymously sums up the situation: "The real solution is to review the conception of the microprocessors itself - a long and difficult process. A short term solution would be to forbid normal applications to run in parallel on sensitive ones, which is hard to achieve in a classical environment. What remains are partial remedies, but they imply to considerably slow down the PC."

Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium) remarks that the American military norms have been warning against computation time attacks for a long time. For him, the future is to dedicated processors for security features. "But we won't be there before a few years" he says.

"INTEL MUST BE DESPERATE"

"We well know that the cryptological operations run in a protected enclosure, server side, with a dedicated module are the only one that can be called "very secure", confirms Jacques Stern, director of the the Computer Research lab of l'Ecole normale supérieure, of Paris. A radical and impractical approach for the average net user.

David Naccache (University of Paris-III) acknowledges that "there is no open heart surgery possible": to temper with the prediction module would affect essential features.

On the front line, Intel tersely expresses that the next version of OpenSSL, a free software to secure data, will be up to the threat, by deactivating the prediction module if necessary. "Such an implementation would slow down by four the speed of the microprocessor" declares Jean-Pierre Seifert, "which proves that Intel must be desperate". A former collaborator of Intel and its competitor Infineon, before coming back to public research, Jean-
Pierre Seifert is now working on fixes against the breach he has found. But as these researches are relatively new, he cautions that "it may take a while before we can see clearly".

Certainly the attack he conceived is more difficult to exploit in practice than many of the other stratagems used by hackers, that oblige the editors to produce patches regularly. But in this case, a simple work around will not be enough.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s... &cid=16900432





On the Power of Simple Branch Prediction Analysis
Onur Aciicmez and Cetin Kaya Koc and Jean-Pierre Seifert

Abstract.

Very recently, a new software side-channel attack, called Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack, has been discovered and also demonstrated to be practically feasible on popular commodity PC platforms. While the above recent attack still had the flavor of a classical timing attack against RSA, where one uses many execution-time measurements under the same key in order to statistically amplify some small but key-dependent timing differences, we dramatically improve upon the former result. We prove that a carefully written spy-process running simultaneously with an RSA-process, is able to collect during one \emph{single} RSA signing execution almost all of the secret key bits. We call such an attack, analyzing the CPU's Branch Predictor states through spying on a single quasi-parallel computation process, a \emph{Simple Branch Prediction Analysis (SBPA)} attack --- sharply differentiating it from those one relying on statistical methods and requiring many computation measurements under the same key.

The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless. Additional to that very crucial security implication, targeted at such implementations which are assumed to be at least statistically secure, our successful SBPA attack also bears another equally critical security implication. Namely, in the context of simple side-channel attacks, it is widely believed that equally balancing the operations after branches is a secure countermeasure against such simple attacks. Unfortunately, this is not true, as even such ``balanced branch'' implementations can be completely broken by our SBPA attacks. Moreover, despite sophisticated hardware-assisted partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing or even virtualization, SBPA attacks empower an unprivileged process to successfully attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor. Thus, we conclude that SBPA attacks are much more dangerous than previously anticipated, as they obviously do not belong to the same category as pure timing attacks.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351





Chatterbox

Unsecure Computer - No Secrets. Big Deal !
Alsee

problematic for systems used by multiple people

And perhaps more signifigantly, it is problematic for idiots who think the definition of "secure/security" is using some DRM scheme hoping to "secure" a computer against its owner.

The owner of a computer can use the technique in this article to keep an eye on his own computer and track what his computer is doing for him, and to record the DRM-keys being used to "secure" his own data against him.


RSA Isn't Broken, And This Is Localhost Only
tqbf

Aciicmez et al are extending an attack they published a few months ago. It's real, but:

• It targets RSA implementations, not the algorithm, which is fine

• Attackers need to be on the same host as the victim

• This specific attack is tuned to the Pentium 4 architecture

This paper doesn't break SSL.

We wrote about the attack two months ago [matasano.com]. A quick, dumbed-down recap:

The CPU aggressively caches aspects of what programs do. It doesn't make an exception for RSA. You obviously can't just read key bits out of the cache.

But caches are finite, and way, way too small to accomodate everything every program does. So operations from one program are constantly evicting cached values from other programs. This makes the other program imperceptably but measurably slower. By writing a program that constantly and carefully measures those time differences, you can watch an RSA operation from another program leave footprints through the cache.

There are years-old attacks like this against the L1 and L2 caches, and extensions that use hyperthreading to improve the resolution. Some variants, which measure timing differences but don't track cache footprints, are remote attacks. These aren't. You run a "spy" process on the machine; it repeatedly executes a series of operations and measures timing differences. Aciicmez found an overlooked cache which makes Pentium branch prediction work (the BTB). They published back in August.

From what I can tell, this paper extends the attack; they figured out that the Pentium 4 architecture has two BTB caches, and their original attack wasn't hitting both of them. Their new attack does, and that creates much bigger timing differences, making RSA's footprints much easier to see.

This is really cool stuff, but from where I stand, they hit game-over back in August with the original BTB attack. This paper reads like a refined exploit for the same vulnerability.

Since this is localhost-only, and (unlike Bernstein's and Boneh's attacks) can't be extended remote, it's not going to impact SSL or (single-user) SSH. The classic victim of timing attacks is smart cards. For these attacks, another interesting possibility is DRM; these attacks say you can't trust crypto running on the same Pentium 4+ as an attacker.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/11/18/2030247.shtml





New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians
Press Release

The Internet Industry Association today warned that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Parliament risked making criminals out of everyday Australians.

Wednesday, 8 November 2006

New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians

The Internet Industry Association today warned that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Parliament risked making criminals out of everyday Australians.

The IIA which represents a broad range of internet businesses in Australia, in conjunction with the QUT Law Faculty Intellectual Property Research Program, has identified a number of scenarios which could trip up Australians in their everyday use of copyrighted materials.

Said IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos: “We can’t be sure if this is the government's intent, or whether there has been a terrible oversight in the drafting of this Bill. Either way, the consequences for the average Australian family could be devastating.”

“As an example,” said Mr Coroneos, “a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song. And if they go home and upload the clip to the internet where it can be accessed by others, they risk a further fine of up to $1320 for illegal distribution. All in all, possible fines of up to $3960 for this series of acts – and the new offences do not require knowledge or improper intent. Just the doing of the acts is enough to ground a legal liability under the new ‘strict liability’ offences.”

The IIA will next week release a series of ‘risk matrices’ showing how Australians could inadvertently risk heavy fines and even jail under the new copyright regime.

On Monday, the IIA will release a risk matrix showing how teenagers from the age of 14 years will risk crippling fines and damage to their employment prospects by engaging in activities which many would today regard as commonplace.

On Tuesday, the IIA will release a risk matrix which will exemplify how an average Australian family could sustain massive fines as a consequence of the operation of these laws.

On Wednesday, the IIA will show how a small business could inadvertently expose itself to substantial penalties by engaging in activities that to date have not attracted criminal penalties.

On Thursday, the IIA will demonstrate the risks to ISPs and the emerging digital economy in Australia and how the new laws will disadvantage us when compared to other ‘technology friendly’ nations.

“We have gone over and over our legal analysis, with the assistance of legal academics and regulatory experts. Not only can we see no justification for the severity of the penalties, but the complexity of the new laws will make it extremely difficult for everyday Australians to avoid a potential liability – and when the level of penalties which attach to the new offences is understood, the scenarios are pretty terrifying,” Mr Coroneos said.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, head of the School of Law at QUT added his concern: “We assume the new broad ranging laws will be enforced. If the Government intends that they are not, then we’d be wanting to know why the provisions have not been more carefully drafted to target commercial scale piracy rather than Australian families.”

“The fact that the Government is intent on pushing these amendments through so fast is very disturbing. The Bill passed the House of Representatives last week and is due to become law in mid December, with commencement on 1 January 2007,” Professor Fitzgerald said.

Mr Coroneos underlined the IIA’s position: “We fully understand the need to protect copyright - our submission to the Senate Committee begins with that proposition. The internet needs content and content creators need incentives to create. But these amendments are overkill and risk delivering a host of unintended consequences at a time when no other country in the world has criminal sanctions for non commercial scale infringements.”

“The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures. We at a total loss to understand how this policy has developed, who is behind it and why there is such haste in enacting it into law – with little if any public debate.”
http://www.iia.net.au/index.php?opti...=517&Itemid=32





Why Does the Fashion Industry Thrive in Spite of Rampant IP "Piracy"?
Jon Stokes

In a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper, entitled "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design," two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

The paper's authors, Kal Raustiala of the University of California, and Chris Sprigman, start by observing that the fashion industry has what they term a "low-IP equilibrium," in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others' work. In spite of the lack of IP protection for clothing designs—or rather, because of this lack, the authors argue—the fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, exhibiting none of the negative effects on creativity that advocates of strong intellectual property (IP) rights would predict in the absence of government-enforced monopolies on creative "content."

Part of the overall reason for undertaking this investigation of the fashion industry is to question the standard assumptions about the relationship between intellectual property laws and incentives to create that underly all of modern intellectual property law. The standard theory goes that if a creator's exclusive right to profit from the distribution of her work is not protected by law, then creators will lose the incentive to create, as "free riders" drive down the price of the work by filling the market with copies.

This theory may hold true for books (the original "intellectual property" of Renaissance IP debates), inventions, and music, but it's apparently a poor fit for the fashion industry. If it weren't for widespread copying of clothing and accessory designs, there would be no such thing as a "fashion trend." The fashion industry, it seems, has settled into a relatively stable state (an equilibrium) in which a large amount of intellectual property "piracy" effectively drives the market.

Note: I'm going to keep putting the word "piracy" in those annoying scare-quotes because it's a terrible term for IP infringement. If pirates hijack a shipload of cannonballs in the Mediterranean, then the owners of that shipment are now short a few tons of cannonballs. If I download a copy of a song from a P2P service, then the owner of that IP may be out some money (assuming I would otherwise have bought that track elsewhere), but they're still in possession of the IP for the song; I haven't taken anyone's property from them, and it's not even clear that I've cost them any money if I wouldn't otherwise have purchased the track. Infringement, though illegal and possibly costly to an IP owner, does not equal piracy or theft, and the misuse of the term in this paper is unfortunate.

Anyway, Raustiala and Sprigman locate the roots of the fashion industry's successful low-IP equilibrium in two factors: induced obsolescence and anchoring.
Induced obsolescence

Because clothing is closely tied to status, especially in the realm of fashion, every design eventually becomes obsolete (i.e. it goes out of style) when it loses its ability to confer status on the wearer. When is something well and truly out of style? When everybody is wearing it, and that's where the open nature of fashion copying helps drive the fashion market. The authors write:

As Miucci Prada put it recently, "We let others copy us. And when they do, we drop it." The fashion cycle is driven faster, in other words, by widespread design copying, because copying erodes the positional [ed: or "status-conferring"] qualities of fashion goods. Designers in turn respond to this obsolescence with new designs. In short, piracy paradoxically benefits designers by inducing more rapid turnover and additional sales... What was elite quickly becomes mass.

So rampant, unauthorized copying drives the fashion cycle, and in doing so it spurs designer creativity; this is the opposite of what the standard assumptions about the relationship between unauthorized copying and incentives to create would predict.

It's important to include the authors' caveat about the importance of trademark law in this scheme. A genuine Prada purse confers more status than a Prada knock-off, so designers must protect their trademarks aggressively, even if they don't protect the designs to which those marks are attached.
Anchoring

The second phenomenon that Raustiala and Sprigman identify at the root of the fashion industry's low-IP success is what they call anchoring. Anchoring describes the process by which the industry converges on a few major design themes, or trends, during a fashion season—whether skirts are fitted or flowing, or cuffs are wide or slim, and so on. Anchoring is also the mechanism by which the fashion industry signals to consumers that trends have changed, and it's time to update the wardrobe.

While the industry produces a wide variety of designs at any one time, readily discernible trends nonetheless emerge and come to define a particular season's style. These trends evolve through an undirected process of copying, referencing, receiving input from consultants, testing design themes via observation of rivals' designs at runway shows, communication with buyers for key retailers, and coverage and commentary in the press.

Copying helps to anchor the new season to a limited number of design themes, which are freely workable by all firms in the industry within the low-IP equilibrium. A regime of free appropriation helps emergent themes become full-blown trends; trendy consumers follow suit. Anchoring thus encourages consumption by conveying to consumers important information about the season's dominant styles: suits are slim, or roomy; skirts are tweedy, or bohemian; the hot handbag is small, rectangular, and made of white-stitched black leather, and so forth. Thus anchoring helps fashion-conscious consumers understand (1) when the mode has shifted, (2) what defines the new mode, and (3) what to buy to remain within it.

So unrestrained copying not only drives the production of new designs by making older designs obsolete, but it also helps shape the new designs around themes so that consumers can easily identify what looks are "in" or "out" at the moment.

What does this mean for Big Content's crusade against peer-to-peer copying?

Probably not much, at least in the near term. The two phenomena identified above are at the very least peculiar to markets involving "positional goods," and may well be peculiar to the fashion industry in particular. The models developed in the paper aren't really that generalizable to other IP regimes, and the authors acknowledge as much.

Nonetheless, the paper may be a good first step in moving beyond traditional, blanket assumptions about the relationship between copying and innovation, and it may spur legal scholars to develop more detailed models of intellectual property that fit specific industries. The paper also suggests that when technological and market conditions change dramatically, as they have in the wake of the P2P revolution, the relationship between unauthorized copying and incentives to create may change dramatically as well.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-8283.html





Yahoo to Team With Over 150 Newspapers
AP

Yahoo Inc. announced a deal with seven newspaper companies that will allow more than 150 papers to sell ads on the search engine's online classified service.

Monday's announcement comes just two weeks after Google said it had brokered a similar deal with 50 top newspapers to sell ads through its Web site. The moves could help the struggling newspaper industry increase lagging ad revenue.

The companies that have signed on with Yahoo include Cox Newspapers Inc., Belo Corp., Hearst Corp., the E.W. Scripps Co., MediaNews Group Inc., Lee Enterprises and the Journal Register Co. They publish newspapers in 38 states, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.

The partnership will start in December with Yahoo's HotJobs service. Yahoo also plans on working with the consortium to provide search, content and local applications across the participating newspapers' Web sites.

"Most local newspapers have done a pretty good job of generating local revenue into sites," said Leon Levitt, vice president for digital media for Cox Newspapers. "It's so much harder to generate national revenue because a lot of advertisers don't want to deal with 100 different newspapers. This will make it simple."

Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews, said the newspaper companies and Yahoo will share any extra revenue.

Under Google's deal, Google will not collect any revenue during a three-month test period, but when the system is formally introduced next year, it will take a cut.

The Yahoo program will enable advertisers who list jobs in any of the consortium's newspapers to post their jobs on Yahoo! HotJobs and throughout the Yahoo network. Advertisers will be able to use contextual, streaming and interactive media.

The newspapers' online career sections also will be powered by Yahoo! HotJobs and co-branded between Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and the local newspaper.

Hilary Schneider, senior vice president of marketplaces for Yahoo, said the arrangement provides "an enormous database of additional job listings" and gives local newspapers a wider audience.

Financial terms weren't released.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-08-56-10





Craigslist Not Liable for Housing Ads: Judge
Mike Hughlett

The popular Craigslist Web site is not legally liable for allegedly discriminatory housing ads posted by its users, a federal judge in Chicago ruled in a case pitting landmark internet and fair housing laws against each other.

The decision was a victory for online civil liberties supporters. It was a setback for housing civil rights advocates, though they still found some hope in the judge's ruling.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued San Francisco-based Craigslist in February, claiming that during a six-month period, the site published more than 100 housing ads in Chicago that violated the federal Fair Housing Act.

Those ads included such declarations as "Non-women of Color NEED NOT APPLY" and "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out."

The 1968 Fair Housing Act bars housing discrimination, and newspapers and other publishers of ads deemed discriminatory can be held liable for violating the law.

But the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), in an attempt to promote unfettered free expression online, shields web forums from liability for ads and opinions posted by their users.

That's what Craiglist argued in its defense in the Chicago case, and it was joined in friend-of-the-court filings by such Internet giants as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and AOL.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee has a heavyweight ally, too, though not through a formal court briefing. The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development has said the ban on discriminatory ads applies to Web postings like those on Craigslist.

The battle boils down to the definition of a publisher.

The CDA says that a provider of an "interactive computer service" can't be treated as a publisher of information it gets from others.

Craigslist is indeed an interactive computer service, a conduit of information provided by others, Judge Amy St. Eve said in a written opinion that effectively dismisses the case. Thus, under the 1996 communications law, Craigslist can't be treated as a publisher, she wrote in the decision, which was filed Tuesday and then circulated Wednesday by attorneys involved in the case.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee plans to appeal St. Eve's ruling, or to ask the judge to reconsider her decision.

In a statement, Craigslist said St. Eve's decision is "a win for the general public's ability to self-publish content such as free classified ads on the Internet." Craigslist noted, too, that it has "industry leading standards" in policing its site for offensive ads.

Internet law experts weren't surprised by St. Eve's decision, because judges have usually ruled in favor of web forums like Craigslist, citing the CDA's broad protection.

"It's very clear under these precedents that Craigslist shouldn't be held liable for ads provided by third parties," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology and civil liberties group.

The organization filed a friend-of-the-court briefing on behalf of Craigslist.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee took solace in parts of St. Eve's opinion.

Craigslist argued that the CDA grants it immunity from any sort of lawsuit stemming from its users' postings. Web outfits like Craigslist have commonly made such claims of "unlimited" immunity — and judges have usually agreed.

But not St. Eve. "We are heartened by fact that (St. Eve) forcefully rejected the unlimited immunity advocated by Craigslist," said Laurie Wardell, fair housing director for the Chicago Lawyers' Committee.

St. Eve wrote that online forums like Craigslist are immune from legal liability only if they are treated as publishers of third party content.

While that may sound like splitting hairs, Internet legal experts say it opens the door for creative lawyers. St. Eve's ruling implies that online forums can be liable for third-party postings for reasons other than being a publisher, though they could not cite a good example of another avenue of legal pursuit.

It's not easy to pursue a claim against a site like Craigslist without acknowledging publication, said Jim Speta, a communications law expert at Northwestern University's Law School. But it's probably possible, he said.

Opsahl said the concept of broad immunity will still hold sway nationally: It has been agreed upon by appellate judges in three court circuits.

However, if an appellate court upholds St. Eve's reasoning, there will effectively be two clashing standards, he said.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...ck=1&cset=true





Court to Hear Google-Newspaper Fight
Aoife White

A Belgian court on Friday will hear Google Inc.'s defense against local newspaper complaints that it stole content from their Web sites without paying them or asking their permission.

This will be the first time Google argues its case after the Brussels-based Court of First Instance ordered the California-based company to remove Belgian French-language newspaper content from its news index, threatening daily fines of 1 million euros ($1.28 million).

Google failed to appear at an earlier hearing that led up to that ruling and asked for another opportunity to defend itself against the charges made by Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing the country's French-language editors.

Copiepresse had claimed that Google ignored its original requests to remove content. It said it had a much happier experience with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Belgian site, entering talks to find a solution.

Google's French- and Dutch-language Belgian news pages are now empty of much local content, largely containing reports from news agencies, news Web sites and foreign newspapers.

Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said the company had complied with the ruling when it received it in mid-September, stripping out Belgian newspaper content from Google News and publishing the entire text of the judgment on its home page.

"We're glad to have the opportunity to argue the substance," she said. "We think that search engines are real benefit to publishers and drive valuable traffic to their Web sites."

The popular news site features small photos and excerpts from news reported elsewhere with links to entire articles hosted on news providers' own Web sites.

Google said its service is lawful and drives traffic to newspaper sites because people need to click through to the original publisher to read the full story. It now displays stories from news agencies, foreign newspapers and Internet sites belonging to local television stations.

Powell said the Internet search company strenuously tries to give newspapers the opportunity to be excluded from the site if they want, by telling the robots.txt information gatherer to avoid certain content and also by alerting Google directly if they want to keep their content off the site.

The company also tried to calm publishers' fears this month by releasing Sitemaps, a tool that aims to give Web sites more control over what content they do or don't want included in Google News. It is currently only available to English-language publishers.

Newspapers are working in a similar direction with the World Association of Newspapers launching a yearlong project to help Web sites decide what they want listed in search engines.

Google News, which debuted in 2002, scans thousands of news outlets and highlights the top stories under common categories such as world and sports. Many stories carry a small image, or thumbnail, along with the headline and the first sentence or two. Visitors can click on the headline to read the full story at the source Web site.

The French news agency AFP sued Google for at least $17.5 million (13.8 million euros) in damages in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Google service adds little value because its news site looks much like those of AFP subscribers, albeit one where software and not human editors determine the placement of stories on a page.

Separately, Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for stories and photographs. Neither Google nor New York-based AP have disclosed financial terms or other details because of a nondisclosure agreement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-12-30-25





Microsoft Makes Deadline on Windows Info
Aoife White

European Union regulators said Microsoft Corp. handed in on time to meet a Thursday deadline information about its Windows operating software that should help other software companies.

The data will now be tested to confirm that the company has finally complied with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

The European Commission, which fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357 million) in July for not providing the "complete and accurate" data to allow server software to interface with Windows, said the technical manual can now be reviewed by "potential licensees" - companies who compete with Microsoft in making software for workgroup servers, such as Sun Microsystems Inc., Novell Inc., International Business Machines Corp. among others.

"In parallel the monitoring trustee will test the documentation in order to verify its accuracy," it said.

"The commission will decide in due course whether or not Microsoft is in compliance with the obligation to provide complete and accurate technical documentation taking into account comments from the potential licensees and advice from the trustee."

EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said this would likely take "months rather than weeks."

Regulators threatened new fines of 3 million euros ($3.87 million) a day last week if Microsoft did not patch up "the remaining omissions and deficiencies." They said the company should have handed over a good set of documents explaining how server protocols work by an original July 2004 deadline.

The software maker was ordered to provide the information after the EU found it guilty of abusing its monopoly by deliberately withholding technical data from rivals, who alleged that Microsoft ended cooperation when it started making its own server software.

Microsoft challenged the immediate sanctions but a judge ordered it to comply in December 2004. It also said the commission's request was unclear and it only received a useful set of guidelines when independent monitor Neil Barrett set out a work program earlier this year.

The company said Thursday's decision was an important milestone.

"The trustee and Microsoft have now completed the technical review and edits to the more than 100 documents, totaling 8,500 pages, that we submitted in July of this year, in accordance with the deadline established by the commission," it said in a statement.

"We will continue to work closely with the commission and the trustee to ensure that we are in full compliance with every aspect of the commission's decision."

The EU fined Microsoft a record 497 million euros ($613 million) in March 2004 and told it both to share interoperability information with rivals and put on sale a copy of Windows without Media Player software.

These conditions will apply to all future versions of Windows - including the upcoming Vista operating system.

Regulators also highlighted other possible antitrust problems with Vista's wide range of functions, fueled by comments from other information technology companies, warning that Microsoft must take care not to abuse its dominant position by muscling into other markets.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-10-13-11





The Kid With All the News About the TV News
Julie Bosman

When people in the television news business want to find out what’s going on in their industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. But while the executives obsessively checking TVNewser are mostly high powered and highly paid, the person who creates it is not: he is Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University here, a few miles north of Baltimore.

“I’ve heard people joke that when TVNewser is dormant, the kid had a final or a big family dinner that he couldn’t get out of,” said Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor and a TVNewser devotee. “People from entry level to high and mighty check in on it.”

When his postings dropped off last month after his girlfriend dumped him, Mr. Stelter found himself fielding complaints from powerful network executives about when he was going to get over his romantic travails and get back on track. “I was dealing with drama,” he said.

Mr. Stelter’s blog (tvnewser.com), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry.

It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter.

“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”

In April Mr. Stelter attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as a guest of MSNBC.

“He was quite a celebrity,” said Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC. “Literally two tables over was George Clooney, and at our table was TVNewser, and people were waiting in line to see him.”

Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.

Or maybe it just worked out that way.

Mr. Stelter chronicles the gossipy New York-Hollywood television industry from the tiny, leafy campus at Towson, where he is a senior majoring in mass communication (he has a 3.5 grade-point average) and the editor of the student newspaper. He started the blog in 2004 on a whim during winter break, and not long after he was hired by a journalism Web site to keep it going. These days, by 9 a.m. he is awake and blogging, sometimes in class, courtesy of a campuswide Wi-Fi connection, as well as from his apartment, the student union and his cluttered desk in a corner of the newspaper office.

Mr. Stelter has earned the grudging trust of many of his readers, who e-mail him hundreds of tips a day that often translate into scoops, like the early warning that Peter Jennings, the former ABC News anchor, was near death or, more recently, the discovery of a Photoshopped publicity shot of Katie Couric, the “ CBS Evening News” anchor, that made her appear a dress size or two smaller.

How much does television care about Mr. Stelter’s little blog?

“The biggest TV executives, the men and women who run the top networks, look at this kid’s Web site all the time,” said Joe Scarborough, the host of the talk show “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC. “And the genius of it is that everybody thinks they own him. Everybody says: ‘Oh, I’ve got a great relationship with Brian. Let me leak it to him.’ ”

Mr. Klein, certainly one of the most powerful figures in the business, telephoned Mr. Stelter one Sunday during Hurricane Dennis in the summer of 2005 to make sure he was tuned in to a report by Rick Sanchez. “He was saying: ‘Are you watching this? Isn’t this great?’ ” Mr. Stelter said. (He promptly blogged about it, writing, “CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez may become the star of this storm.”)

One evening in March 2005 Mr. Klein interrupted a bedtime-story session with his children to give a quote to Mr. Stelter. But the two have also had the occasional clash. After Mr. Klein admonished employees during an editorial meeting last year for leaking stories — presumably to Mr. Stelter — notes of the meeting were promptly leaked to TVNewser.

The network publicists generally know his class schedule — afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays — and barrage him with material, which they often expect him to post within minutes. While recording a radio segment for one of his classes — Mass Communication 381 — he turned his cellphone off for 15 minutes, then turned it back on to find one nagging voice mail message from an ABC publicist and another from CNN.

Mr. Stelter originally started the blog under the name Cablenewser. He concealed his identity so that his growing audience would take him seriously. “People thought I was a bald, disgruntled 40-something executive,” he said. “I think I’m balding, but that’s it.”

In July 2004 he was hired by Mediabistro.com, a journalism Web site that runs a number of popular blogs. (Mr. Stelter declined to disclose his salary, but he has said before that it is more than enough to cover his college expenses.) Since then his audience has expanded substantially — the site had 821,000 page views in October 2006, up from 150,000 in July 2004. In September, thanks to Ms. Couric’s premiere at CBS, TVNewser had record traffic of 1.2 million page views.

Growing up in Damascus, Md., Mr. Stelter watched the news addictively. He recalls watching Mr. Williams, who was then at MSNBC, reporting on the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the revelation that President Bill Clinton was entangled with Monica Lewinsky. Meanwhile, Mr. Stelter practiced his “newscaster voice” and harbored anchor-size ambitions of his own.

“I always thought I would be the person who sat in the chair for 12 hours,” Mr. Stelter said. “Then I realized there are only three people who do that job.”

He finally got to meet Mr. Williams last year when he came to New York to attend a memorial service for Mr. Jennings. Mr. Williams invited him to sit in on his broadcast’s 2:30 p.m. editorial meeting, and the two talked privately for a half-hour.

“I’ve always regarded him as the De Niro character in ‘The King of Comedy,’ ” Mr. Williams said, invoking the 1983 film whose lead character, Rupert Pupkin, is a talentless comic who stalks his talk-show idol. “He has kind of a Rupert Pupkinesque double life.”

In the industry Mr. Stelter is generally thought of as a reliable reporter, despite his youth and inexperience. “He seems to be a trustworthy guy, a trustworthy source of information,” said Jeff Greenfield, a CNN commentator. “And the fact that he can barely vote and drink shouldn’t really bother anybody.”

Mr. Stelter’s relationship with the reporters who cover the industry is more strained. The Television Critics Association, an industry group, will not accept him as a member because he is a blogger. And there are some who feel his influence is out of proportion. “He kind of dominates the conversation in this business, just because he posts everything,” said Michael Learmonth, a reporter for Variety, a trade publication.

But before long Mr. Stelter may shed his label as boy blogger. Next spring he graduates from Towson, and his contract with Mediabistro, where he is considered a full-time employee, ends in May. While he said he hasn’t received any firm job offers in the industry, several television executives have urged him to call when he starts job hunting.

In the meantime, Mr. Stelter’s blogging schedule may hit some snags in the coming months. For one thing, he has a new girlfriend. And a planned trip to China in January is causing some distress. “I’m really worried about how I’m going to find an Internet connection,” he said.

But taking time off is unthinkable. “My audience won’t put up with that,” Mr. Stelter said. “TV news is always on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/bu...rtner=homepage





Mama Was a Riot Grrrl? Then Pick Up a Guitar and Play



Jessica Pressler

THE children whispering and fidgeting in front of the stage at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, looked like any kids awaiting, say, a storyteller. Then Zora Sicher and Hugo Orozco, the two 11-year-olds who make up the band Magnolia, climbed onstage and broke into a hard-driving original song called “Volume.” It was clear this was not quiet time.

“Wooooo!” a dreadlocked woman shouted from the back of the room, where a crowd of adults, many in vintage concert T-shirts and cardigans, looking like kids themselves, cheered and sipped bloody marys.

A clump of teenagers looked on appreciatively during the set, part of a showcase of all-kid bands on a Saturday afternoon this month at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York. When the Magnolia duo paused to adjust their instruments — Zora on guitar, Hugo on drums — a babe in arms wailed. “Are you crying because they stopped, honey?” Mom cooed.

For this set of performers and audience members, indie rock is as familiar as a lullaby. “We like punk, classic rock, metal, riot grrrl,” said Hugo, an elfin-face sixth grader from Brooklyn, who was given her first drum set at 7.

Magnolia, like other bands on the Union Hall bill — Care Bears on Fire, Tiny Masters of Today, Fiasco, Hysterics — is more than a novelty act. It is developing a following on New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,” said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. “It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.”

It makes sense: in this family-friendly part of Brooklyn every other brownstone seems to house creative professionals who urge their children to march to — or become — a different drummer.

Nearly every weekend 10- to 17-year-olds play shows in the afternoon at bars like Union Hall, the Liberty Heights Tap Room in Red Hook and Southpaw in Park Slope, which has begun a teenage rock series, the Young and the Restless. In Manhattan there are all-ages shows at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa, Arlene’s Grocery and afternoon Death Disco parties at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side.

“They could call it kid-core,” said Rich Egan, the owner of Vagrant records in Los Angeles, who signed the New Jersey-based band Senses Fail as teenagers and is wooing a younger band he first heard on MySpace.

Preteens and teenagers have found success in bands almost since the birth of rock. The Jackson 5, Hanson and New Kids on the Block were all big-selling acts, formed by parents or impresarios. But those acts recorded mainstream pop. The latest kid bands are emerging in the traditions of garage, hardcore and indie rock, a reflection of their hipster parents’ tastes and their 1980s and ’90s CD collections.

Hugo’s mother, Molly Gove, who said she was in a few riot grrrl bands herself in the ’90s, enrolled her daughter in the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York, where children 8 to 18 learn the playlist of bands like Bikini Kill and the Pixies.

Across the country kid-core acts have emerged, including a pair of brothers 8 and 11 in Detroit, who play with their father in the Jack White-produced band the Muldoons; sisters 12 and 14 who make up the Seattle-based duo Smoosh; and the Nashville-based band Be Your Own Pet, which toured with Sonic Youth in the summer.

Many teenage rockers connect through MySpace, where they post sample tracks, videos and announcements of gigs, as well as leave one another messages of support. In a message to Magnolia, Forrest Fire Gray, 14, whose father was the monologuist Spalding Gray and who is the frontman of Too Busy Being Bored, wrote, “Can’t wait to play with u guys.”

More than a few of New York’s baby-face rockers have famous parents in the entertainment business, who have encouraged their children’s artistic streaks and served as role models for professional success. Lucian Buscemi, 16, the son of the actor Steve Buscemi, along with Julian Bennett-Holmes and Jonathan Shea, both also 16, have become something like the kingpins of the Park Slope kid-rock scene, ever since their band, Fiasco — previously known as StunGun — became the first youth band to play the Liberty Heights Tap Room.

Pale and thin, with fluffy manes of rocker hair, Lucian and Julian are also partners in a record label, Beautiful Records, which has recorded Care Bears on Fire and Magnolia, using equipment that Lucian was given for his eighth-grade graduation, soon after a baby sitter introduced the two boys to ’80s punk.

“We were into, like, Rancid and Blink 182 at the time,” said Julian, cringing at his junior-high lack of cool. “That ended when we heard Minor Threat.”

Many kid-core bands cite that hardcore act from the ’80s as a big influence. The adults who attend kid-rock shows couldn’t be happier. This is the music they loved as teenagers. “This is the first generation of parents who have grown up listening to rock ’n’ roll, so they’re thrilled about it,” said Stephen Depulla, the owner of Liberty Heights Tap Room. Not least because it provides an opportunity for bonding.

Kathie Russo, Forrest Fire Gray’s mother, said she and her son swap music like friends. “I suggested he cover ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, and he introduced me to Modest Mouse and the Vines,” she said. “Last night we were in the car singing along to Audioslave. I can’t imagine that with my parents.”

She also probably can’t imagine her parents acting as roadies, which many of the young rockers’ moms and dads do.

The most prominent band on New York’s junior-varsity rock scene is Hysterics, a “psychedelic” quartet founded at the artsy St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. The week after performing at Union Hall at the CMJ Marathon, the band members gathered at the studio of Jeff Peretz, their manager. Mr. Peretz also guides the Tangents, whose bass guitarist, Miles Robbins, 12, is the son of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Members of Hysterics discussed their coming gig, a party for a new Valentino perfume, which was organized through a friend of the fashion photographer Pamela Hanson, whose son, Charlie Klarsfeld, 17, is the group’s guitarist. The evening, at 7 World Trade Center last Thursday, turned out to be a pileup of celebrity children with music careers, including the DJs Lola Schnabel and Mark Ronson.

“Are we going to get swag?” asked Josh Barocas, 17, the quiet bassist, whose enormous Afro speaks of a somewhat louder interior personality.

“What’s swag?” Charlie asked.

“It’s free stuff they give to famous people,” Mr. Peretz said.

“Every teen band in New York wants to be Hysterics,” he added. The group was discovered two years ago, when a science teacher at St. Ann’s posted one of its songs on his blog, and its cool factor rocketed after signing a record deal with independent v2. The company took the musicians for cookies and milk at the City Bakery. As high school juniors and seniors, they are old enough for the gesture to be ironic.

NOT so the Tiny Masters of Today. On a Friday evening in November, Ada, the bassist, 10, a slight girl with a heart-shape face, was reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at Piano’s, a Lower East Side bar, while waiting to go on with her brother, Ivan, 12, the lead guitarist. (Their father requested that the family name not appear in print to protect the children’s privacy.)

After the set, during which they performed, among other songs, Ada’s mournful “Pictures” — “It’s about my friends in second grade and how awful they were to me,” she said — an adult in the audience called the band “the new Raincoats,” a reference to an experimental British act of the late ’70s.

Ivan is familiar with their music, although he said he prefers louder stuff like the Stooges. “And I’m really into Apollo Sunshine right now,” he said, perched on a bar stool and chewing thoughtfully on a cocktail straw. “I go through phases.”

Their father has worked for the indie label Caroline and once pulled the kids out of school early to see the White Stripes. His children’s affection for indie rock, he said, is a reaction to mainstream tastes. “They’re rebelling against, like, Walt Disney.”

Or maybe Britney Spears. “Our parents had the Clash, the Who, Bowie,” said Alana Higgins, 17, the bassist for the band Modrocket. She was at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the East Village near the space where her band rehearses.

“The scenes back then were so much better. Rock music now — it’s upsetting. Our kids are going to look back at our music and it’s going to be like —— ”

“Kelly Clarkson,” interjected Alice Blythe, 17, Modrocket’s singer.

The kid-core sound is far less slick than the pop and R & B that animates “American Idol,” either because the musicians are just learning to play or because their musical influences trace to the DIY roots of garage rock.

Tiny Masters of Today was on the Oct. 11 cover of the British magazine Artrocker. “They’re making this kind of primitive, unprocessed, unfiltered music,” their father said.

It was that sound that attracted Russell Simins, the grown-up drummer in Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who found the Tiny Masters on MySpace last year. He now accompanies them on drums during live sets.

“They have this unadulterated way of saying things, ” Mr. Simins said, sipping a beer at Piano’s. “It’s perfectly not thought out. They don’t have angst. Or their angst is simpler: it’s about being precocious and being kids who want to have fun and eat ice cream or about being bored. They’re not asking why they’re bored,” he said with a laugh. “They don’t have, like, existential malaise.” When Mr. Simins plays with the group, his hulking 36-year-old frame is a perfect foil to the children’s Lemony Snicket-character bodies.

He insists that he is not actually in the band, even though he’ll be on their coming album, which will also feature guest appearances by Fred Schneider of the B-52s and the singer and songwriter Kimya Dawson.

And Mr. Simins occasionally practices with them at home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. “Sometimes I’ll stay over for dinner — you know, pizza or spaghetti or quesadillas or whatever,” he said. “Like I’m a kid.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/fashion/19teen.html





J.R.R. could’ve seen this coming

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk THE HOBBIT
Xoanon

Moments ago we received this email from Peter Jackson and his crew down in New Zealand, take a look...

Dear One Ringers,

As you know, there's been a lot of speculation about The Hobbit. We are often asked about when or if this film will ever be made. We have always responded that we would be very interested in making the film - if it were offered to us to make.

You may also be aware that Wingnut Films has bought a lawsuit against New Line, which resulted from an audit we undertook on part of the income of The Fellowship of the Ring. Our attitude with the lawsuit has always been that since it's largely based on differences of opinion about certain accounting practices, we would like an independent body - whether it be a judge, a jury, or a mediator, to look at the issues and make an unbiased ruling. We are happy to accept whatever that ruling is. In our minds, it's not much more complex than that and that's exactly why film contracts include right-to-audit clauses.

However, we have always said that we do not want to discuss The Hobbit with New Line until the lawsuit over New Line's accounting practices is resolved. This is simple common sense - you cannot be in a relationship with a film studio, making a complex, expensive movie and dealing with all the pressures and responsibilities that come with the job, while an unresolved lawsuit exists.

We have also said that we do not want to tie settlement of the lawsuit to making a film of The Hobbit. In other words, we would have to agree to make The Hobbit as a condition of New Line settling our lawsuit. In our minds this is not the right reason to make a film and if a film of The Hobbit went ahead on this basis, it would be doomed. Deciding to make a movie should come from the heart - it's not a matter of business convenience. When you agree to make a film, you're taking on a massive commitment and you need to be driven by an absolute passion to want to get the story on screen. It's that passion, and passion alone, that gives the movie its imagination and heart. To us it is not a cold-blooded business decision.

A couple of months ago there was a flurry of Hobbit news in the media. MGM, who own a portion of the film rights in The Hobbit, publicly stated they wanted to make the film with us. It was a little weird at the time because nobody from New Line had ever spoken to us about making a film of The Hobbit and the media had some fun with that. Within a week or two of those stories, our Manager Ken Kamins got a call from the co-president of New Line Cinema, Michael Lynne, who in essence told Ken that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make the Hobbit, because "that's how these things are done". Michael Lynne said we would stand to make much more money if we tied the lawsuit and the movie deal together and this may well be true, but it's still the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.

Several years ago, Mark Ordesky told us that New Line have rights to make not just The Hobbit but a second "LOTR prequel", covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR. Since then, we've always assumed that we would be asked to make The Hobbit and possibly this second film, back to back, as we did the original movies. We assumed that our lawsuit with the studio would come to a natural conclusion and we would then be free to discuss our ideas with the studio, get excited and jump on board. We've assumed that we would possibly get started on development and design next year, whilst filming The Lovely Bones. We even had a meeting planned with MGM executives to talk through our schedule.

However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.

Ordesky said that New Line has a limited time option on the film rights they have obtained from Saul Zaentz (this has never been conveyed to us before), and because we won't discuss making the movies until the lawsuit is resolved, the studio is going to have to hire another director.

Given that New Line are committed to this course of action, we felt at the very least, we owed you, the fans, a straightforward account of events as they have unfolded for us.

We have always had the greatest support from The Ringers and we are very sorry our involvement with The Hobbit has been ended in this way. Our journey into Tolkien's world started with a phone call from Ken Kamins to Harvey Weinstein in Nov 1995 and ended with a phone call from Mark Ordesky to Ken in Nov 2006. It has been a great 11 years.

This outcome is not what we anticipated or wanted, but neither do we see any positive value in bitterness and rancor. We now have no choice but to let the idea of a film of The Hobbit go and move forward with other projects.

We send our very best wishes to whomever has the privilege of making The Hobbit and look forward to seeing the film on the big screen.

Warmest regards to you all, and thanks for your incredible support over the years.

We got to go there - but not back again ...
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1163993546





State Takes Aim at ID Theft

Web site offers consumers tips for protecting their identity
Fred Lucas

The growing threat of stolen identities looms especially large during the holiday season, according to state and federal officials.

The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection announced the launch of a new Web page with information to help people avoid identity theft and tell them what to do if they become victims.

"Nearly every week we hear about data being lost or stolen from data files, so consumers need to take charge of safeguarding their information and their credit as much as possible," said Gov. M. Jodi Rell in a written statement. "If you notice unexplained charges or withdrawals, you should not assume that there's been a mistake and do nothing."

Rell encouraged residents to go to the state's Web site, www.ct.gov/dpc , and click on the identity theft information. This page has links to the Federal Trade Commission, a link to get a free credit report, and tips from the state and links to sites about avoiding identity theft.

"There are many different ways identity thieves can get a hold of your personally identifiable information during the holiday shopping season," said Jacqueline Dizdul, spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission.

"There is a lot more activity with credit cards, and it's easier for charges to slip through unnoticed," Dizdul continued. "When there are more people in stores, there could be more chances someone will grab your personal info."

While much attention is paid to thieves who obtain information electronically, old-fashioned stealing at shopping malls is still a big problem, Dizdul said.

"Consumers should safeguard their purse and wallet," Dizdul said. "Don't carry your Social Security card. Leave it in a secure place. Carry only the identification information and the credit and debit cards that you'll actually need when you go out."

The state Web page suggests people use passwords for bank accounts; refrain from providing personal information over the phone, mail or Internet; and even says, "It's no longer wise to put outgoing mail in your home mailbox for the postal carrier to take, especially if that mail contains payments that you are making to creditors."

Wachovia Banks throughout Connecticut last week identified a man who cashed phony checks from six Wachovia customers in Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia. From Aug. 14 to 18, he cashed checks at 12 Wachovia branches in Connecticut, including twice at the Danbury branch.

The state's Web page also suggests you may be a victim if you: fail to receive bills or other mail that might signal a thief has changed your account to his own address; receive credit cards for which you didn't apply; or if you're denied credit without reason.

Finally, people who believe they are victims should contact the police, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Post Office as soon as possible, the state says.

Also, the site advises victims to hold onto all their documents and to contact the three major credit bureaus.

Identity theft accounted for 39 percent of all consumer complaints to the FTC last year. The FBI estimates between 500,000 and 700,000 people annually become victims, making ID theft the fastest growing crime in the country.

Meanwhile, businesses lost $8 billion, while individuals lost $5 billion to identity theft, according to the FTC.

This year, Connecticut adopted a law that allows state residents to put a security freeze on their credit files to stop creditors and other parties from obtaining their credit report. The freeze could stop an identity thief from getting someone's Social Security number, address or other information to fraudulently obtain secure credit cards or loans in the victim's name.

New York, New Jersey and Vermont are among the 24 other states with such a law.

It is difficult to determine how the law has affected Connecticut residents, since ID theft itself isn't a crime, said Sgt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police.

"The law broken is not identity theft, but is larceny or theft," Vance said. "During the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, people forget to check their monthly statements, follow the path of their credit cards, and make sure numbers and documents that need to be obliterated are obliterated."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1022977





Web Sites Not Liable for Posts by Others
Jordan Robertson

Web sites that publish inflammatory information written by other parties cannot be sued for libel, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling in favor of free online expression was a victory for a San Diego woman who was sued by two doctors for posting an allegedly libelous e-mail on two Web sites.

Some of the Internet's biggest names, including Amazon.com, America Online Inc., eBay Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., took the defendant's side out of concern that a ruling against her would expose them to liability.

In reversing an appellate court's decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides broad immunity from defamation lawsuits for people who publish information on the Internet that was gathered from another source.

"The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications," Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion. "Nevertheless ... statutory immunity serves to protect online freedom of expression and to encourage self-regulation, as Congress intended."

Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled.

The case centers on an opinion piece sent via e-mail to Ilena Rosenthal, a woman's health advocate who runs various message boards and promotes alternative medicine.

The scathing missive, written by Tim Bolen, accused Dr. Terry Polevoy, of Canada, of stalking a Canadian radio producer and included various invectives directed at Polevoy and Dr. Stephen Barrett, of Pennsylvania. The two doctors operated Web sites devoted to exposing health frauds.

After Rosenthal posted the piece to two newsgroups, Polevoy and Barrett sued her, Bolen and others for libel. The lawsuit accuses Rosenthal of republishing the information after being warned it was false and defamatory.

The trial court ruled that Rosenthal's actions were protected, but an appeals court decided she was not shielded from liability as a distributor of the information. The state Supreme Court's ruling reversed that decision.

Legal experts said the ruling follows similar decisions in other states designed to protect free and open access to information.

"Even though the court recognizes that it could have unfortunate consequences, they're saying that Congress controls this area," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Christopher Grell, the lawyer for Polevoy and Barrett, said they have not decided whether to appeal the decision.

"What this decision does is, it basically promotes the distribution of offensive material, which I can't imagine Congress ever intended," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-21-08-18





Prince Charles Embraces Internet Age
AP

The heir to the British throne took a leap into the Internet age Monday, posting a day-in-the life video on his revamped personal Web site.

The short film follows Prince Charles through a typical day, showing him working at his London office, carrying out public engagements with his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and flying by helicopter to his country home for a reception.

The site also allows royal-watchers to sign up for e-mail updates on topics ranging from Charles' sons, Princes William and Harry, to his Duchy Originals brand of organic food products. There is also a section for children, with puzzles and games.

Future plans for the site include clips of the prince's speeches and interviews, his Clarence House office said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-12-38-57





In Web World, Rich Now Envy the Superrich
Katie Hafner

Almost anywhere else, Reid Hoffman would be considered a major success. As an early executive of PayPal, he was in the money when the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. These days, he runs a new start-up company of his own while investing in others.

But when greater fortunes are made — as happened recently to three former PayPal colleagues when YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion — Mr. Hoffman said he could not avoid a twinge of envy.

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” said Mr. Hoffman, 39, whose start-up, a business-oriented social-networking site called LinkedIn, is almost four years old. “You started a year or two earlier, and they start after you and then this thing zips right past you and gets the golden results.”

Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, where technical achievements are admired but financial payoffs are the ultimate form of recognition. And now that the YouTube purchase has amplified talk of a second dot-com boom, many high-tech entrepreneurs — successful and not so successful — are examining their lives as measured against upstarts who have made it bigger.

Mr. Hoffman, who made enough from PayPal to “retire to a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle,” said he felt no spite toward peers who later hit bigger jackpots. Still, he said, “there’s always components of, ‘Wow, you happened to pick the right time,’ and that will always lead to some kind of implicit envy.”

The envy is magnified by the fickleness of this latest wave of sudden wealth, creating some huge paydays but a small circle of winners. Partly that reflects more judicious investment of venture capital in new companies; the amount invested has risen slightly over the last year but is down 70 percent from the peak of $40 billion in 2000.

“This is still a place where YouTube is a real metaphor for what’s possible, just on a more selective scale,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto.

Seven or eight years ago, when it seemed that anyone with a business plan could get rich, the finger of fortune was generous — and democratic. By the time it occurred to people to be envious, it seemed, they were rich, too — at least on paper. It was in Silicon Valley, after all, that the term “sudden wealth syndrome” entered the clinical vocabulary.

In the end, of course, much of the paper wealth turned worthless. But now, in the wake of successes like YouTube and MySpace, which was sold last year to the News Corporation for $580 million, some people believe that the foundations for more solid success are now in place. For one thing, the viability of online advertising is no longer in doubt, as Google and others have proved.

And the success of a YouTube can produce not only envy but also serious motivation — in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“Over all, I think things like YouTube make people reconsider the possibilities,” said Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell. In 1999, at the tail end of the dot-com boom, Professor Selman had a start-up called Expertology, which used a Web-based system that tapped collective expertise to generate legal referrals. The business failed. “After the dot-com bust, people were thinking, ‘Maybe this is all just hype,’ ” he said.

Now, Professor Selman said, he has seen several start-ups, like Hoovers.com and LinkedIn, successfully pursuing ideas along the lines of Expertology’s mission. “But of course, timing is everything,” he said.

And while he says he thinks the YouTube deal was “a little insane,” Professor Selman, who has watched several colleagues become highly wealthy after joining Google, is considering trying his start-up luck again, with a variant on the Expertology idea.

“Maybe there’s more to the economic model than we realized five years ago,” he said. “Maybe the new wave is a little more solid.”

Professor Selman, 47, said that while he was careful not to “overhype” the new wave, he routinely tells his students that they have a good chance of starting the next Google or YouTube. “I believe there are still many opportunities out there that we cannot even conceive of at this point,” he said.

With rewards of that scale on the horizon, the pressure to make a fortune can be enormous, and people have different ways of coping with it. Some find inspiration in others’ success, while some spend tremendous amounts of psychic energy worrying about how rich their friends are.

Envy can even affect relationships among siblings.

When he was growing up in Winchester, Mass., Peter Pezaris told friends and family that he planned to become a millionaire by the age of 30 and a billionaire by 40.

“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, right,’ ” said Mr. Pezaris’s older brother, John, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard.

True to his word, in 1999, Peter Pezaris sold his two-year-old business, Commissioner.com, to CBS SportsLine for $46 million, three days after his 30th birthday. (The proceeds were shared among five partners; his brother was not among them.)

Peter Pezaris, 37, who is now based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he still believed that he had “plenty of time” to become a billionaire by age 40 with his new start-up, Multiply.com, a social networking site.

This time his brother is paying closer attention. John Pezaris had helped informally with the first business; now he programs for Multiply in his spare time and has a formal stake.

“I wanted to codify something for his second one,” said John Pezaris, who is 43. “So we came to an arrangement.”

Going for success a second time is an iffy proposition in any business and is especially unpredictable in the high-tech world. It still gnaws on Mr. Hoffman, the former PayPal executive, that he passed up the chance to invest in YouTube. When YouTube was founded, Mr. Hoffman was preparing to make an investment, he says, but a venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, edged him out by offering better terms. Sequoia could make nearly $500 million from the Google-YouTube deal.

“My only real regret is I didn’t go back and say, ‘Hey, let me in at least a little bit,’ ” he said.

And, of course, there is the retrospective rationalizing, which is another way to cope with envy. Mr. Hoffman now does this with his missed YouTube opportunity.

“It looked like a couple of guys who’d built the right kind of technology” for something that could grow, he said, “but it could also have been an early blip.”

Then again, Mr. Hoffman said, “It’s the big wins that keep everyone diving off the cliff.”

Indeed, among high-tech entrepreneurs in particular, for whom enormous wealth seems within reach, it is easy to lose perspective.

“It can seem like the only way to be respectable is to achieve as much as the founders of YouTube or Google,” said Alain de Botton, author of “Status Anxiety” (Random House, 2004).

Reference points only make matters worse, Mr. de Botton said. He pointed to research that has been done on attractive women who feel ugly when surrounded by images of more beautiful women. “Very often the problem isn’t so much what an individual happens to look like, but the extraordinary comparisons being made,” he said.

Yet one would-be entrepreneur’s inspiration is another’s sense of pressure. “Cynics would say you need this kind of pressure or people won’t achieve, that you only produce these great results if there’s this kind of tension in the air,” Mr. de Botton said.

But some find a way to opt out.

James Hong, a co-founder of Hotornot.com, a dating site, found that his $55,000 Porsche Boxster had come to symbolize the trap he often saw others in Silicon Valley fall into. Mr. Hong, 33, says Hotornot’s success allowed him “a very comfortable life without ever needing to get a job — freedom money, as they call it.” But he nonetheless saw himself succumbing to the envy malaise.

After all, his best friend, Max Levchin, was a founder of PayPal and has a net worth probably in the tens of millions.

So in a conspicuous move to get out of the game, Mr. Hong has decided to sell his sports car and has bought a Toyota Prius.

“I don’t want to live the life of a Boxster, because when you get a Boxster you wish you had a 911,” he said, referring to a much more expensive Porsche. “And you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”

Mr. Hong said his most effective coping mechanism for feeling outstripped by his friends’ wealth — beyond his choice of cars — is to try to put it out of his mind.

“The only way I’ve dealt with it over time is to consciously decide not to care,” he said. Still, he confesses: “Every now and then, when I hear they’re getting a certain valuation, I think, ‘I need that, too.’ There’s a little devil inside all of us that says, Why not you?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/te... tner=homepage





CBS Says YouTube is Helping Ratings
LostRemote

It’s been a month since CBS began its partnership with YouTube, and the network has uploaded 300 videos. Since that time, the clips have racked up a total of 29.2 million views for an average of 857,000 views a day. Many of the clips are from CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show, and the network says ratings have risen 5 and 7 percent respectively since the YouTube deal began. “Although the success of these shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in television ratings, both companies believe that YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast,” reads the press release, which follows below along with a list of the top 15 clips so far…

PRESS RELEASE — One month after launching the CBS Brand Channel on YouTube, CBS’s daily feed of news, sports and entertainment clips have become some of the most widely viewed content on the site.

CBS has uploaded more than 300 clips that have a total of 29.2 million views on YouTube, averaging 857,000 views per day, since the service launched on October 18. CBS has three of the top 25 most viewed videos this month (Nov.1–17), including clips from CBS’s Tuesday night hit drama “NCIS,” “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” and “The Early Show.” The CBS Brand Channel is also one of the most subscribed channels of all time with more than 20,000 users subscribing to CBS programming on YouTube since the channel launch last month.

“Above all the other good news, what’s most exciting here is the extent to which CBS is learning about its audience as never before,” said Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive. “YouTube users are clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they’re watching as evidenced by the sheer number of video views. Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers. We believe this inflection point is the precursor to many exciting developments as we continue to build bridges rather than construct walls.”

“CBS has done a phenomenal job at engaging and interacting with the YouTube community and we’re pleased that this has brought new viewers to their broadcasts. It’s been great watching our community respond so strongly and positively to their entertaining content,” said Kevin Donahue, Vice President of Content for YouTube. “We look forward to working with CBS to help them promote their quality programming while bringing timely video content to our user community.”

Ratings for the network’s late night programs, in particular, have shown notable increases. CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%) since the YouTube postings started. Although the success of these shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in television ratings, both companies believe that YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast.

Here are the Top 15 CBS videos watched this month (as of Nov. 17):

1. NCIS/Cat Fight 1,603,364
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DowFLyuHaeo

2. Letterman/ Borat Meets David Letterman 1,057,180
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQScRuZj9s

3. Early Show/ Borat Vs Harry Smith 969,391
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnbnaT8If0Q

4. Letterman/ Bush is drinking again 698,806
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irOFAjsnSg0

5. Letterman/ Message About February for Bush 524,697
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmX23l0ouo8

6. CBS Evening News/ Michael J Fox Talks to Katie Couric 465,563
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lsjfjgAA8

7. CSTV/USC Cheerleaders: The Song Girls 374,623
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KtR2oeXFqo

8. CSTV/ A Field of Dreams for Judy Coffman 358,572
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWERvnzVkYE

9. Letterman/George W. Bush Fakin’ It 357,213
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOj6iP_iVs

10. Letterman/ Dave and Bill O’Reilly 352,747
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nD_iNPalY

11. Letterman/The Guy Who Swears At Dave 316,258
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foyLyriak-Q

12. Ferguson/ Fun is Dangerous 314,093
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMfmXWlAGs

13. Letterman/Do Maggots Go With Scorpion 278,283
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjed2Xq0ImI

14. Ferguson/ Bush visits the Un-Late Late Show 221,462
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvqMF34iG4

15. Ferguson/Bad Kerry 219,556
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Bz_r5CZTk

CBS and YouTube launched the CBS Brand Channel in October, which included clips from “Late Show with Dave Letterman,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” “NCIS” and “CSI: Miami,” as well as archival sports footage such as great finishes and upsets from NCAA’s March Madness. CBS has also provided clips from “CBS News First Look with Katie Couric,” in which Couric offers a web-exclusive rundown of the stories being considered for coverage on that night’s “CBS Evening News.” “First Look” also offers some perspective on what is going on in the world that day.
http://www.lostremote.com/2006/11/21...lping-ratings/





Fox Stations Rebel Against Network’s Decision to Run O. J. Simpson Interview
Maria Aspan

Showing that attempts at corporate synergy can sometimes backfire, several affiliates of Fox Broadcasting said they would not show the network’s two-part interview with O. J. Simpson next week.

Pappas Telecasting Companies, which owns four Fox affiliate stations in Nebraska, Iowa and California, informed Fox on Friday morning that their stations would not be broadcasting the interview, according to Dennis J. Davis, the president of Pappas. Lin Broadcasting, which owns five Fox affiliates, also will not be showing the program, the New York Daily News reported on Saturday.

The heavily promoted interview, to be aired in two parts on Nov. 27 and 29, will coincide with the Nov. 30 release of Mr. Simpson’s book, “If I Did It.” According to Judith Regan, who is both publishing the book and conducting the interview, the book is Mr. Simpson’s confession to the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, for which he was acquitted in 1994.

Both Fox and Ms. Regan’s HarperCollins publishing imprint, ReganBooks, are owned by the News Corporation. The book’s subject matter, as well as Fox’s attempt to promote it with the interview, has been widely criticized since its release was announced last Tuesday.

Mr. Davis said Pappas made its decision after a weeklong discussion with the general managers of the four affiliate stations. “I think everyone’s struggling with the inappropriateness of this subject matter,” he said in a telephone interview. “Discussion of such a subject is just harmful and disrespectful, and we cannot understand the need for such content to be produced and broadcast.”

Fox responded to several phone calls and messages left on Friday with an email message saying that no one was available to comment.

Managers at other Fox affiliates noted that the announced interview has already elicited a large, and loud, viewer response. Mike Bullen, the program coordinator for the Fox-affiliated WUTV in Buffalo, where Mr. Simpson played most of his Hall of Fame pro football career, said his station had already received many angry phone calls and e-mail messages.

“We’re getting sworn at a lot by viewers,” he said. However, he added that his station would probably air the interview, and that the final decision would be made by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns WUTV and 18 other Fox affiliates. A spokesman from Sinclair said the company was still gathering information and would make a decision later this week.

The affiliates’ response is the latest development in an unusual internal backlash at Fox. Bill O’Reilly, the host on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” said on Wednesday that Fox’s decision to air the program is “simply indefensible and a low point in American culture.”

Mr. O’Reilly went a step further on Friday, claiming that he would boycott the book, the interview and any companies that advertise during the program. “I’m not going to watch the Simpson show or even look at the book,” he said. “If any company sponsors the TV program, I will not buy anything that company sells — ever.”

Of course, the chief sponsor of the program would be Fox Broadcasting, which like Fox News is owned by the same News Corporation that owns ReganBooks. “For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News channel,” Mr. O’Reilly had said on Wednesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/bu...pson.html?8dpc





Under Pressure, News Corp. Pulls Simpson Project
Bill Carter and Edward Wyatt

Bowing to intense pressure from both outside and inside the company, the News Corporation yesterday canceled its plans to publish a book and broadcast an interview with O. J. Simpson in which he was to give an account of how he might have murdered his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.

The company was responding to a week’s worth of ferocious criticism. Critics called for boycotts of advertisers who might sponsor the television broadcast on the Fox network; numerous broadcast stations announced that they would refuse to carry the program; television hosts like Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel — which, like Fox, is owned by the News Corporation — were vocal in their opposition to the telecast; and various bookstores said they might not stock the book, which was titled “If I Did It.” The book was to be published by ReganBooks, also owned by the News Corporation.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, issued a statement yesterday announcing that the interview would not be broadcast and the book not be published.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Mr. Murdoch said. “We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Any projects involving Mr. Simpson have met with public outrage in the 11 years since he was acquitted in a media-saturated murder trial. He was later found responsible for the deaths in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million in restitution to the victims’ families.

Mr. Simpson, a former football star and actor, moved from Los Angeles to Florida partly to protect his assets from that civil judgment. He has only occasionally appeared in public in recent years and has never stopped declaring himself innocent of the murder charges. A Florida lawyer representing Mr. Simpson could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Mr. Simpson told The Associated Press yesterday that he could not comment ”until I know legally where I stand.” He added, "’I would like nothing better than to straighten out some things that have been mischaracterized. But I think I’m legally muzzled at this point.”

The decision to cancel the twin Simpson projects was greeted with widespread expressions of relief. Michael Angelos, a vice president of Pappas Telecasting Companies, which told the network Friday that its four Fox-affiliated stations did not intend to broadcast the interview, released a statement calling the network’s decision “a victory for the people who spoke out.”

The statement concluded, “This special would have benefited only O. J. Simpson, who deserves nothing but contempt, and certainly no benefit.”

Numerous staff members at the News Corporation and the Fox network, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had been ordered not to comment about the Simpson deal, said they were thankful the company had abandoned the project. A News Corporation executive said that internally the project had been considered a disaster for the company.

Another executive said that the company had badly miscalculated the public’s tolerance for anything having to do with Mr. Simpson, thinking enough time had passed for the public to consider him less a pariah.

Neither of the two top News Corporation executives would comment beyond yesterday’s statement. Mr. Murdoch was said to be in Australia on business and not available. A company spokesman said Peter A. Chernin, the president and the executive with direct authority over the Fox network, had no comment.

No one at the company would discuss on the record the exact details of how the project had been accepted in the first place. But one executive involved in the negotiations about the book and the television special said Mr. Murdoch had been aware of both deals before they were announced publicly last week.

The executive said in a telephone interview that payments to representatives of Mr. Simpson would probably still have to be made for his participation in the book and the television interviews.

Standard publishing contracts call for a percentage of an author’s advance, usually up to 50 percent, to be paid when a contract is signed, and for the remainder to be paid when the finished book is accepted by the publisher. The executive said Mr. Simpson’s book was covered by a standard publishing contract.

In an interview last week, Judith Regan, the publisher, said ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, had signed a contract with “a manager who represents a third party” who owned the rights to Mr. Simpson’s account.

Because the News Corporation and ReganBooks decided on their own to cancel the book and the television special, that money is likely to still have to be paid.

A spokesman said Ms. Regan declined to comment yesterday on the book’s withdrawal.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said some books had already been shipped to stores. Those books will be recalled and destroyed, Ms. Crum said.

Last Friday, Borders announced that it would donate the net proceeds from sales of Mr. Simpson’s book to a nonprofit organization for victims of domestic violence.

Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders, said she received a call from HarperCollins yesterday afternoon notifying her that the book would be recalled. No explanation was offered for the decision.

“I think everybody knows why,” Ms. Binkley said.

The rights to the book could still be sold to another publisher, said the News Corporation executive involved in the negotiations.

There is precedent for a recalled book to be sold to another publisher and then to the public. In 1990, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, bought the rights to “American Psycho,” a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew from publishing it because of the novel’s graphically violent content.

As for the television interview, it could also be offered to other outlets, although at least two other networks, ABC and NBC, have reported that they turned it down before it was accepted by Fox. Ms. Regan, who conducted the on-camera interview with Mr. Simpson and is presumed to own the rights to it, could still seek a sale to either a cable channel or even a pay-per-view company.

The fact that the interview already exists on tape, executives at Fox and News Corporation said, means it is likely to turn up somewhere, perhaps on the Internet.

But it will not show up on the Fox network, and that pleased many of those who had opposed the broadcast.

Scott Blumenthal, an executive vice president of the Lin Television Corporation, which had announced it would not broadcast the interview on its five Fox affiliates, said in a phone interview from the company’s headquarters in Providence, R.I.: “Our actions spoke for themselves. At this point, the discussion is moot. We just felt the program was inappropriate for our markets.”

Asked if he supported the cancellation of the interview by Fox, Mr. Blumenthal said, “Only Fox knows whether or not they did the right thing.”

Jacques Steinberg and Julie Bosman contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/us... tner=homepage





OJ Confesses to Trying to Cash in on His Wife's Death
David Gardner

OJ Simpson has confessed he took "blood money" by trying to cash in on his notoriety over the gruesome murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

The unrepentant former American football star made no apologies for the aborted book and TV deal in which he described how he hypothetically would have carried out the killings.

But he launched an astonishing attack on the family of one of the victims, Ron Goldman, accusing them of being "professional victims" duping the US public.

"It's all blood money and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," Simpson, 59, said after tycoon Rupert Murdoch scrapped the media deal following a worldwide wave of revulsion.

Adding that he saw the book "If I Did It" and accompanying TV interview as a way to provide for his children, he claimed: "It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead. I've been pimped for 12 years. Everyone's made money on me."

Simpson said he deserved harsh criticism for his role in the project, but he complained that Rupert Murdoch escaped too lightly from the furore.

"I'm taking heat and I deserve it," he said. "But Murdoch should not be taking the high road either."

Although Simpson was controversially cleared by a criminal jury of murdering ex-wife Nicole and Goldman in 1994, he was ordered to pay more than £20 million to the victims’ families after being found liable for the deaths in a civil court the following year.

Simpson admitted he had already spent some of the reported £2 million fee on his tax bill. But none has gone to the Goldmans, who have publicly branded him a murderer and say they will pursue him "until his last day on this Earth."

Attacking the still grieving family yesterday, Simpson raged: "They have become professional victims. America, you're being duped by these people."

Simpson angrily denied committing the murders, disputed his own publisher's contention that the book amounts to a confession, insisted the title was not his idea, and said the hypothetical sections were written by his ghostwriter.

The Simpson book was shelved on Monday following the personal intervention of Rupert Murdoch, who owns publishers HarperCollins. The two-part interview on Murdoch’s Fox network in the US was also abandoned.

Andrew Butcher, spokesman for Murdoch’s parent company, News Corp., said £460,000 has already been paid to a third party in connection with the project and couldn’t be recouped because Simpson honoured his contract.

Of that amount, £52,000 supposedly went to the ghostwriter and the rest to Simpson’s children.

Trying to deflect continuing criticism for being in league with the disgraced star, he added: "Absolutely no money was ever given to OJ Simpson by us."

Simpson said he was convinced the book would have been a bestseller, adding that he desperately needs the cash because his retirement funds are dwindling.

Prepublication sales pushed "If I Did It" into the top ten on Amazon before it was cancelled. Now bids have reached as high as £40,000 a copy on eBay.

Simpson said he told publisher Judith Regan he wouldn’t allow publication if the book contained graphic descriptions of "cutting or stabbing."

He said he was not the killer. "I didn't do it. I made it clear I didn't do it. But I didn't doubt that Ms. Regan thought I did it," he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770