[JackSpratts]

"I've got good news and bad news and good news. And the good news is that you [media] guys have managed to buy every major legislative body on the planet, and the courts are even with you. So you've done a great job there and you should congratulate yourself. But - the bad news is that you're up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you're dead. You're 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they're just smarter than you. So you're gonna lose that one. But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you've been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries....." – John Perry Barlow


"Yahoo is already handing over information about their customers – they cooperate with the Chinese on a regular basis." – Julien Pain


"The police and the prosecutors do not understand anything about what is going on, and after their 10 day crash course they will hardly understand any more. But at least they admit that they don't have any competence on this field today." – Rickard Olsson


"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." – Jon Callas


"Here's the point. For over a year, Microsoft has planted a program on every modern Windows-powered PC that reported home every day. They don't have an intelligent reason, never mind a good one, for this move. And, they never told anyone that they were doing this.

I guess it must do a darn good job of hiding itself from firewalls and network monitoring tools too since we've only now found out this daily checkup call after tens of millions of PCs have been phoning in for almost a year." – Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols


"We were shameless." – Steve Beeks


"You read all this empty trash to entertain your bored soul and then decide to get weepy? HA. That's funny." – gigi


"Google is like the Borg." – Milo Medin


"No one says the 'G' word. It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter." – Diane Sherwood


"What's the option? To live not fully? To be afraid of living? Because people like us - we need this." – Marta Empinotti-Pouchert


"Bill Gates redefined the software industry and redefined the computer industry. His retirement from a full-time role is a huge milestone, and it marks the end of this era." – Rob Glaser













Summer School

The blowback continues from this month's Pirate Bay raid. Directly from both Sweden and Holland, and in an ever growing political movement that promises to refocus the arguments surrounding peer-to-peer and copyrights, voices of users and prosecution victims alike are being added to the file-sharing debate for the first time in history.

The copyright cartels are claiming success in educating users about the alleged criminality of P2P, and it's certainly true that long before even the courts weighed in with their often contradictory decisions the media companies added the judgment "illegal" to nearly every story ever written about file-sharing, but now it's the lawmakers' turn to learn. They are beginning to hear from another side in this debate, and the message is clear: the entire structure of copyright law can be seen as an edifice of legalized theft created to take from artists and the public, diverting cultural resources from the people to a handful of corporations. The whole system is so patently unjust it won’t stand even the mildest scrutiny, and now that a light is being trained upon both the laws and the lawmakers, expect to see a rapid slate of superficial proposals that attempt little beyond the burnishing of legislators' abysmal reputations.

Most of these proposals will of course be obvious for what they are; self-serving clap-trap about empowerment and emancipation with little in the way of substance even remotely beneficial to citizens. They should be rigorously protested and rejected by the newly organized user movements. Eventually, against the inertia of intransigent legislatures and the extra-legal machinations of hostile lobbyists, progressive ideas will emerge and we will begin to see nuanced proposals making the rounds of Parliaments. It is at this point we must be at our most attentive.















Enjoy,

Jack.

















June 17th, ’06







U.S. Joins Industry in Piracy War

Nations Pressed On Copyrights
Frank Ahrens

The U.S. government has joined forces with the entertainment industry to stop the freewheeling global bazaar in pirated movies and music, pressuring foreign governments to crack down or risk incurring trade barriers.

Last year, for instance, the movie industry lobby suggested that Sweden change its laws to make it a crime to swap copyrighted movies and music for free over the Internet. Shortly after, the Swedish government complied. Last month, Swedish authorities briefly shut down an illegal file-sharing Web site after receiving a briefing on the site's activities from U.S. officials in April in Washington. The raid incited political and popular backlash in the Scandinavian nation.

In Russia, the government's inability, or reluctance, to shut down another unauthorized file-sharing site may prevent that nation's entrance into the World Trade Organization, as effective action against intellectual property theft tops the U.S. government's list of requirements for Russian WTO membership.

As more residents of more nations get high-speed Internet access -- making the downloading of movies and music fast and easy -- the stakes are higher than ever. The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates, who swap digital copies of "The DaVinci Code," Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free.

Such entertainment and other copyright exports -- worth about $626 billion annually, or 6 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product -- are as important to today's American economy as autos, steel and coal were to yesterday's.

More than a decade of hard lobbying by two powerful trade groups, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has convinced U.S. lawmakers and law enforcement officials that it's worth using America's muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad. Now, lawmakers are calling the trade groups, asking what else Congress and the government can do for the entertainment industry.

Efforts to stem piracy within the United States by targeting peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have produced mixed results. Kazaa -- once the most popular of them and a hard target of the music industry -- has half as many users as it did at its peak three years ago, thanks in part to the music industry's lawsuit and education campaign. At the same time, the total number of peer-to-peer users has grown in the past year, according to Internet traffic researchers.

Overseas, U.S. government officials say, it is in the national interest to work on behalf of Hollywood and other entertainment and intellectual property industries.

The United States does not offer specific dictates on how other nations handle their border controls, said Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Victoria Espinel, "but they need to have an effective intellectual property system for protecting our rights holders abroad."

The U.S. trade representative's office maintains a "priority watch list" of countries that, in its estimate, do not adequately protect intellectual property rights. China and Russia top the most recent list. Unlike the case with Sweden, U.S. government pressure has brought little change in China, home to perhaps the world's most prolific DVD and CD pirates.

An ongoing battle between Swedish authorities and an illegal file-sharing service called the Pirate Bay can be traced to an April meeting in Washington between the Swedes and the U.S. government.

Officials from the State Department, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. trade representative's office told visitors from the Swedish Ministry of Justice in April that Sweden was harboring one of the world's biggest Web sites for enabling the massive and unauthorized distribution of movies, music and games. It uses a file-swapping technology known as BitTorrent that is tougher to contain than earlier systems such as the original Napster, which the U.S. government shut down in 2001, and popular current peer-to-peer services, such as LimeWire.

A little more than a month later, Swedish police hit the headquarters of the Pirate Bay and closed the site. The MPAA crowed, saying it had helped the effort by filing a criminal complaint against the site.

The raid prompted a backlash of criticism in the Swedish press and from some members of government. Politicians and editorialists wanted to know why America was meddling in Swedish affairs.

Claes Hammar, Swedish minister for trade and economic affairs, said U.S. authorities noted that copyrighted Swedish material, as well as U.S. movies and music, was being stolen on the Pirate Bay.

"We don't like to be seen as negligent and losing out rather than cooperating with the U.S. and other markets," Hammar said.

In the aftermath of the raid, members of the Left and Moderate parties in Sweden have proposed scrapping last year's law that criminalized illegal file-sharing, reported the Local, an English-language newspaper in Sweden.

At the same time, hundreds of demonstrators have gathered in Stockholm and Goteborg in recent days, hoisting pirate flags and demanding that the government return the Pirate Bay's seized servers, according to reports.

Several attempts to reach Pirate Bay administrators through the Web site were unsuccessful. They did, however, post a defiant manifesto on a related Web site.

Shut down on May 31, the Pirate Bay moved to the Netherlands and was back up and running three days later, sporting a logo of a pirate ship sinking the word "Hollywood" with a fusillade of cannon fire and demonstrating how difficult it is to stop anything on the Internet.

Dan Glickman, president of the MPAA, confirmed that his group had asked Sweden to toughen its laws on intellectual property theft.

"What we do is look around the world to look if laws need to be improved, then we make suggestions," Glickman said. He emphasized that the MPAA respects the sovereign rights of foreign nations. As for the backlash, Glickman said, "Yes, I'm sure the pirates in Sweden are upset."

Russia's pirates may cost their country more than domestic unrest.

Entrance into the World Trade Organization would grant the country numerous trading benefits. Each of the WTO's 149 members has veto power over accession and each has key demands of applicants.

For the United States, the focus is on intellectual property. And the U.S. wants to make sure the mistake of China is not repeated.

"We let China in and China has not fully complied with the WTO requirements" for protecting intellectual property, Glickman said. The MPAA has an enforcement division in Hong Kong whose members accompany local law enforcement officials on raids. "The time to get action is now, rather than after they get in," Glickman said.

In Russia, CD and DVD pirates have established manufacturing plants on abandoned Soviet military bases, Glickman and RIAA President Mitch Bainwol said. A Web site called Allofmp3.com is selling millions of songs without authorization from copyright holders. The site looks as professional and legal as Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes online music store. It claims to be licensed by a Russian agency to sell music, but U.S. trade groups aren't satisfied. None of the revenue generated from the 10-cent song downloads on the site goes to the artists, Bainwol said.

Moscow began an investigation of Allofmp3.com, dropped it, then picked it back up again after U.S. pressure was applied, said RIAA Executive Vice President Neil Turkowitz, who has traveled several times to Russia and filed criminal complaints with prosecutors there about the site.

"The Russian government is aware of all really existing problems in the [intellectual property] sphere and makes active efforts to solve them step-by-step," the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade wrote in an April paper translated into English. "We will undertake a complex of additional measures in [the intellectual property] sphere in the nearest future with the intention to speed up the work in this sphere."

Two e-mails to the site administrator of Allofmp3.com went unanswered.

Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Espinel said shutting down Allofmp3.com "is right at the top of the agenda. This is a top-priority issue in terms of our discussion with Russia and the WTO."

As the bilateral talks with Russia continue, congressional leaders are bringing pressure to bear on President Bush, who has vowed to speed that nation's entry into the WTO. Working against Russia, the lawmakers say, are its plans to make intellectual property rights violators subject to civil, rather than criminal, penalties.

The U.S. government and the entertainment industry have a right to raise such issues with foreign nations, the RIAA's Turkowitz said. Movie and music piracy, he said, "is a problem that really doesn't know any borders."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061402071.html





Yahoo 'Strictest' Censor in China
Eli Milchman

Yahoo is stricter than any other search engine in China when enforcing censorship, said a journalism-advocacy group Thursday.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said their tests showed that Yahoo.cn blocked a higher percentage of politically sensitive results than Google.cn or the beta version of msn.cn.

The tests were performed using 10 politically-sensitive keywords like “press freedom” or “human rights” on the Chinese versions of Yahoo, Google and MSN, as well as a Chinese-based search engine, Baidu.

“We simply found out that Yahoo was even worse than its local competitors,” said Julien Pain, RSF Internet Freedom desk chief. “Google.cn is censored, but it’s far less than what Yahoo does.”

Although Yahoo.cn was sold to and is now operated by the Chinese company Alibaba, Yahoo remains a large shareholder.

The report also said Yahoo.cn blocked access to the search engine for an hour in half the cases after a search was conducted using the sensitive keywords. Baidu does the same thing, but the Chinese versions of Google and MSN do not restrict access.

RSF said that the level of censorship on Yahoo.cn also exceeds that of Baidu in terms of the number of Beijing-authorized sites returned in the search results.

“Yahoo has absolutely no respect for freedom of information,” Pain said.

The report follows the widespread blocking of Google.com by the Chinese government around the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and RSF’s subsequent lashing of Google for its compliance with Beijing in censoring Google.cn.

Last year, RSF accused Yahoo.cn of turning over e-mail account information to Chinese authorities that according to RSF resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a man on charges of subversion.

“Yahoo is already handing over information about their customers – they cooperate with the Chinese on a regular basis," Pain said. "Google has so far refused to do this."

Yahoo did not have an immediate comment.

RSF frequently reports on freedom of press issues and the treatment of journalists around the world and has been a steady critic of the Chinese government as well as the internet companies that comply with their censorship demands.

“It’s a huge market, and it’s kind of a turning point," Pain said. "In China you can see these moral dilemmas arising.

"If they do it in China, the battle will be lost – they’ll do it everywhere.”
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





Companies Sue Sweden Over Pirate Bay Raid
CET

Ten companies which had their servers confiscated during the police's raids against file-sharing site The Pirate Bay plan to demand compensation from the Swedish state.

The companies say they will hand in demands for between 10,000 and 200,000 kronor each to the Chancellor of Justice in Stockholm on Wednesday, amounts that they say correspond to their losses following the raids.

The companies demanding compensation had their servers hosted by PRQ, which also hosted the Pirate Bay. As well as taking the Pirate Bay's own servers police also took servers belonging to a diverse group of unconnected companies and organizations.

Police spokespeople and prosecutor Håkan Roswall have refused to say why they confiscated the other servers.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...010f17065ad769





Police Raid Doubles Pirate Bay's Popularity
CET

The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular websites for illegal downloading of movies, has doubled its number of visitors after Swedish police shut down the site for three days, according to an Internet monitoring site, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter said on Sunday.

Swedish authorities closed the site after several raids on May 31. The site reopened three days later using servers in The Netherlands.

Figures released by Alexa.com, a US-based Internet monitoring company, showed that traffic to the Pirate Bay had doubled since the site reopened, Dagens Nyheter said.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the site makes more than 157,000 illegal files available including recent releases such as "The Da Vinci Code", "Mission Impossible: III", and "Poseidon".
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...010f17065ad769





News From The North
The TankGirl Diaries





11.6.2006

Justice Ministery: "Legalizing Filesharing Would Conflict WIPO, UN and EU treaties." - Pirates: "So Be It."

Christoffer Démery from the Swedish Justice Department warns in Sydsvenska's interview that legalizing filesharing would lead Sweden into a legal conflict with WIPO intellectual property treaties, UN copyright conventions and EU directives. While the various international deals would leave some room for interpretation with downloading only (leeching), the conflict will be inevitable when it comes to uploading. Sweden can legalize filesharing nevertheless, which will make the situation legally unambiguous to the citizens; in this case Sweden will have to take whatever heat there is to come from WIPO, UN and EU through the various diplomatic channels.

The leading Swedish pirates are fully aware of this but they think it is worth doing anyway.

Rasmus Fleischer from Piratbyrån says: "I don't think that the Swedish opinion needs any formal legalizing. What we want most is a stop to the furious efforts to control what people are sending to each other over the Internet. The discussion about copyrights can take its time and be conducted internationally."

Richard Falkvinge, the leader of the Pirate Party, says: "The eventual penalties that Sweden will have to pay are much less than what we can win here." As for WTO, UN and EU he says: "There has to come a time when we start to change outdated laws. We will begin it in Sweden but we are also thinking about others at the European level. When Europe has changed, the rest of the world cannot ignore this anymore."

14.6.2006

Pirate Bay Operating From Sweden Since Saturday

Newspaper Aftonbladet reports that Pirate Bay has operated from servers located in Sweden since last Saturday. When Aftonbladet asked for a comment from Håkan Roswall, the prosecutor behind the May 31 raid, it turned out that Roswall was not yet aware of this development. Roswall was sceptical about the news and suspected it to be a 'propagandistic claim' by the filesharers.

"I thought he knew that we are back", says Fredrik Neij from Pirate Bay. "He is welcome to check if he wants." Neij tells that Pirate Bay decided to leave Netherlands after being pressured by the local Justice Department. Their server equipment is partially rented and partially donated by people who want to see the site to get back on its feet. According to Aftonbladet the site remains 20-30 % more popular than what it was before the May 31 raid.

Pirate Bay's IP address resolves presently to the defiant DNS name hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org. At some point after the raid also the DNS name same.tracker.same.place.come.get.me.roswall.thepiratebay.org was in use.

15.6.2006

Swedish Police to Propose New Actions Against Filesharers

Expressen reports Swedish police planning "more effective action" against filesharers. What that might imply is yet unclear. "We will present tomorrow some concrete proposals to make our work more effective", promises Stefan Eurenius from the Swedish Police. The request for new copyright law enforcement ideas comes from Justice Minister Thomas Bodström, the leading political figure behind the new stricter Swedish copyright law. The law has since last summer effectively criminalized 1.3 million Swedish filesharers, as estimated by SCB, the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics. Bodström has repeatedly demanded "tough measurers" against filesharers.

The last hardline action - a raid against world's largest torrent site Pirate Bay - turned into a huge political boost for the new Pirate Party, aiming to the Parliament in the coming September 18 election and now having 6891 members. The party is quickly approaching the size of Green Party (Miljöpartiet) that has presently 7862 members and is an already well-established political force in Sweden with its 17 parliamentary seats. The Pirates will need about 225,000 votes to make it to Riksdag, the 349-seat Parliament of Sweden.

Expensive Collateral Damage From The Pirate Bay Raid

Aftonbladet reports that already 15 of the approximately 200 innocent third-party businesses who were kicked offline in the Pirate Bay raid have contacted State officials demanding compensation for their downtime. Many of these businesses are small 1-3 person companies to whom even a week of downtime may prove costly or fatal. The individual demands vary between 1,000 USD and 20,000 USD; the total 'collateral damage' costs of the May 31 raid may rise to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"You could compare this to a situation where the police is trying to catch a given car from a parking hall but ends up confiscating and removing every car from the hall.", says Clarence Crafoord from the Centre for Justice whose lawyers are helping the affected businesses pro bono.

Swedish Police Proposal: Special P2P Prosecutors, P2P Investigator Teams

The Swedish Criminal Police and Prosecuting Authority left yesterday their proposal for more effective measures to fight illegal filesharing in Sweden, as requested by the Ministery of Justice earlier this spring. The main suggestions are to educate four special prosecutors to handle all filesharing cases and to have dedicated investigator staff to handle filesharing cases, reports newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

So far the filesharing cases have been assigned to whoever online crime investigators have been available in the scarce IT-trained staff investigating also crimes like online pedophilia and online fraud. Same with prosecutors - cases have been assigned to whoever prosecutors have been available. The training of the four special prosecutors (two from Stockholm, one from Göteborg and one from Malmö) is planned to be 10 days long. The p2p investigators will get a five week training to legal and technical issues.

Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån is happy that "the prosecutor understands the complexity of this type of crime and is willing to dedicate resources and get a better competence on it."

Rickard Olsson, one of the candidates of Pirate Party in the coming September 18 parliamentary election, says: "The police and the prosecutors do not understand anything about what is going on, and after their 10 day crash course they will hardly understand anymore. But at least they admit that they don't have any competence on this field today."
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...t=22742&page=2




BBC Closes Out Deal For Showing UK TV Over P2P
Faultline

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has renegotiated its terms with PACT, a UK trade organisation that represents the commercial interests of independent feature film, TV, and animation companies.

This means that it is legally able to go ahead with its Peer to Peer based iPlayer service due to be launched later this year, which will see programs only owned partly by the BBC shown on its service straight after they have been broadcast, and up to seven days later.

It is likely to mean that other companies can share the same terms, such as British Telecom, which wants to offer a similar service over a broadband line, in its BT Vision service.

The new deal is the first to be struck on new media rights by Pact and any major UK broadcaster and has been achieved within the 31 May deadline for agreement set by regulator Ofcom as part of its TV Production Sector Review.

Pact negotiates terms of trade with all public service broadcasters in the UK and helps out in negotiations with cable and satellite channels.

Previously, the window of opportunity for viewing broadcast works over the internet was too small, put in place to protect DVD and other later service revenues.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06...eal/print.html





CBS Offers Downloads of TV Shows On iTunes
AP

CBS Corp., which already sells episodes of its hit television shows "Survivor" and "CSI" on Google Inc.'s online video store, is now offering the downloads on Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store.

"We have all the top shows from all the major networks now," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of applications.

Apple's online store already carries other popular shows from ABC, NBC and Fox. Until Thursday, it offered some CBS programming, such as NCAA basketball, but not prime-time hits.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has sold more than 30 million videos since iTunes debuted TV shows and music videos in October.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





TV Teen Sex Orgy Complaints Came From People Who Never Saw The Show
Mark Frauenfelder

The FCC fined CBS $3 million for the teen sex orgy scene in Without a Trace. (View it, if you dare, here). Now CBS is saying the fine is invalid because the people who complained didn't even know what they were complaining about. They were just robotically following the orders of their cult leaders at the PTC and the American Family Association.

CBS says that 100% of the 4,211 complaints filed with the feds about this episode of "Without A Trace" came from web-based e-mail form letters originating from 2 right-wing christian groups (the PTC and the American Family Association). Only two complainers claimed to have seen the show, but made an inaccurate reference to another scene, thus blowing their cover.

But the brunt of the issue lies with a technicality in the indecency complaint process: the FCC can only consider complaints from viewers in the station's broadcast area. Therefore, CBS alleges, the PTC and AFA-initiated complaints against "Without A Trace" are invalid.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/14..._orgy_com.html





The Pornographers vs. The Pirates

Smut giants are showing mainstream Hollywood how to fight back

Jason Tucker is one of a new breed of pornographers. As president of Falcon Foto, he publishes such skin-baring magazines as Hometown Girls and Virgins. But his résumé hardly reads like that of a typical gold-chained smut king. A slight 33-year-old with spiked hair, Tucker came to the X-rated world after a failed Hollywood career that included a gig in film production and parts as a youngster on TV shows such as a Little House on the Prairie spin-off. Adult entertainment was a fallback for the self-described geek who bounced from Tinseltown to work as a consultant advising large tech companies about the skin trade's technology needs.

What worries Tucker these days isn't the possibility of a raid on Falcon's studio -- a 40-acre farm north of Los Angeles -- or a congressional hearing scrutinizing his industry. It's piracy. Falcon, which he runs with his former-model wife, Gail Harris, owns the rights to more than 2 million photos and 350 videos. At a recent Saturday morning shoot at the ranch -- where a petite 23-year-old wriggles out of her bikini under a waterfall -- Tucker is livid after learning that a Falcon-owned photo appeared in a magazine without authorization, having been downloaded from the Internet. "We're getting ripped off again," he fumes, swatting at a copy of the pirated photo. Seven lawyers on his payroll chase the pirates; he has half a dozen lawsuits going right now. He also recently hired a software engineering firm to design a program to scour the Net for other unauthorized uses. Says Tucker: "If we can't protect our content, we're dead."

Sound familiar? It's the rallying cry of any Hollywood mogul worth a corner seat at Mr. Chow. Nowadays, the pornography business, once relegated to a dark corner of the media world, has become a powerful, if unlikely, ally with mainstream Hollywood in the battle against digital piracy. But where mainstream companies fret endlessly before deciding how to proceed with new technologies and business models, the never-bashful porn industry is making some moves that may well show the way for Hollywood -- whether in thwarting pirates or adapting to digital realities. Representatives of the big studios declined to comment about what they might learn, but clearly they are keeping a close watch on the skin merchants' business decisions.

Case in point: Some producers of porn are starting to share revenues from online movies with the distributors of their DVDs, who might otherwise feel endangered by digital distribution online. Bolder yet, one large studio is allowing fans who buy movies online to burn them from their computers onto DVDs, with some protections included, of course.

Always a first mover on new distribution channels, adult entertainment has exploited technologies to create, by some estimates, what is today at least a $2 billion-a-year business. The downside, though, is that in producers' haste to post online, porn has become easy pickings for digital pirates with superfast modems. Even though the industry has hired security firms to sniff out pirates, illegal DVDs still flood cities from New York to Bucharest, and XXX movies show up for free on peer-to-peer sites. And just like Hollywood, the porn industry has no way of pinpointing its losses. "We lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, a year to pirates. We just don't know," laments Steven Hirsch, co-CEO of Vivid Entertainment Group. One of the industry's largest studios, with an estimated $100 million in revenues, Vivid boasts a stable of heavily marketed stars, including top-rated Jenna Jameson, whose videos Vivid distributes.

Sharing The Dough
With DVD sales for all movies now in the midst of a protracted slowdown, adult entertainment companies are more eager than ever to find new -- and safe -- technologies to spur business. Vivid offers downloads of movies from its company site to Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL ) iPods, albeit without help from Apple, and is the first studio to let users make their own DVDs. By contrast, Hollywood blocks viewers from moving flicks beyond PC hard drives. Vivid insists, however, that the download site, CinemaNow Inc., use newly upgraded software from a German firm to enhance protection, says CinemaNow President Bruce Eisen.

The adult entertainment industry isn't just playing defense, either. Having to protect movies with budgets of $100 million or more, Hollywood studios have held back early releases from the Net for fear of upsetting their lucrative partnerships with theater chains and DVD retailers. But some porn operators are prepared to recast old relationships, even if it means handing over some cash. Spain-based Private Media Group Inc. (PRVT ) is trying to appease European video chains by offering 40% of revenues from Net sales.

At the same time, adult entertainment companies, used to being underdogs, aren't shying away from skirmishes with the giants to protect their products. In February a Los Angeles federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Google Inc. (GOOG ) for showing "thumbnail" pictures that belonged to skin magazine Perfect 10 after the glossy sued. Perfect 10 hired lawyer Russ Frackman, who represented the music companies in the Napster Inc. (NAPS ) and Grokster Ltd. cases. Going after Google? Yet another reason for Hollywood to keep an eye on its X-rated brethren.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...gn_id=rss_tech





Say it ain’t so Harper

Unchecked Lobby Power Plays An Old Familiar Tune
Michael Geist

At 10:01 in the morning of Feb. 6, 2006, at the precise moment that a new Conservative Cabinet was being sworn into office at Rideau Hall, David Dyer, a senior consultant with the Capital Hill Group and a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, sent an email to Patricia Neri, the director general of Canadian Heritage's Copyright Policy Branch.

The email included a suggested outline for a March 2 event focused on copyright reform. It envisioned a meeting with the Canadian Heritage Deputy Minister Judith LaRoque, two hours of presentations from speakers sympathetic to CRIA's position, lunch with deputy ministers from Heritage, Industry, and International Trade, and a private meeting with the soon-to-be named Minister of Canadian Heritage.

One month later, virtually the identical scenario played itself out in Canadian Heritage's Gatineau offices and in the private dining room of a swank nearby restaurant.

The Harper government's Federal Accountability Act has served as the centrepiece for bringing greater accountability and transparency to the workings of the federal government. While that legislation may have an impact, new documents pertaining to the March 2 event, obtained under an Access to Information Act request, provide a compelling illustration of the power still wielded by lobby groups.

In the weeks following the Dyer email, CRIA worked closely with Canadian Heritage to develop the copyright policy event. An invitation, drafted with CRIA's assistance, was extended to seven different government departments and agencies. The invitation set the stage for the reform process by stating that "Canada's copyright law has been criticized by the Supreme Court and a range of stakeholders, for not having kept up with the challenges posed by new technologies." This characterization is subject to challenge since the Supreme Court of Canada has in fact repeatedly focused on the need for a balanced approach to copyright reform, one that recognizes the interests and rights of both creators and users.

Dyer also warned that CRIA would be coming to Ottawa with a financial request. The music lobby group was planning a study on the Canadian music industry and was seeking $50,000 in funding from Canadian Heritage to help support the project.

The speakers, described as guests of CRIA, included Barry Sookman, a well-regarded Toronto lawyer who is also a registered CRIA lobbyist, U.S. Registrar of Copyrights MaryBeth Peters, Mihaly Ficsor, one of the drafters of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties, Alain Strowel, a Belgian lawyer, and Michael Einhorn, an economist who recently released a paper critical of Canada's proposed copyright reforms.

Twenty government officials, representing Canadian Heritage, Industry, International Trade, Justice, the Competition Bureau, Copyright Board of Canada, and Privy Council Office, gathered in the boardroom of Deputy Minister Judith LaRocque for a two-hour presentation that criticized prior Canadian copyright reform efforts and urged the government to adopt laws similar to those enacted in the United States.

The presentations lamented the absence of criminal sanctions from Bill C-60 and dismissed privacy concerns that have been associated with U.S.-style copyright laws as unfounded (last month, four Canadian privacy commissioners as well as dozens of privacy groups and academics, including the author, issued public letters expressing misgivings about the privacy impact of potential copyright reform).

After the formal presentations, the speakers, CRIA executives Graham Henderson and Richard Pfohl, Dyer, and Assistant Deputy Ministers from Canadian Heritage, Industry, and International Trade enjoyed lunch and drinks at Canadian Heritage's expense in a private dining room at Le Panache restaurant. The speakers and CRIA personnel, joined by a photographer to commemorate the occasion, later returned to Canadian Heritage for a private meeting with Minister Bev Oda.

During the last federal election, former Canadian Heritage Parliamentary secretary Sarmite Bulte found herself in the eye of a political storm after it was revealed that the leaders of several copyright lobby groups, including CRIA, were hosting a fundraiser on her behalf just four days before voters were set to go to the polls. Given that controversy, it is astonishing to find that just days later the same lobby groups were back planning private events for government officials.

In recent weeks, several groups, including the Canadian Federation of Students, the newly-formed Canadian Music Creators Coalition, Appropriation Art: A Coalition of Arts Professionals, and the aforementioned privacy community, have stepped forward to publicly call for a balanced approach to copyright reform that puts the interests of Canadians and Canadian artists first. Lobbyist-backed closed door meetings and private lunches at taxpayers' expense do little to instill confidence that those calls are indeed being heard.
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/inde.../12/geist/&c=1





Whiney EFF and RIAA Knocked By Digital License Go Ahead
Andrew Orlowski

Comfort blanket

The US copyright office's proposal to simplify the nightmare of licensing digital music has been rubber stamped by a House committee - despite the objections of the RIAA and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The US copyright office agreed that services such as Napster and iTunes found mechanical copyright licensing a nightmare on a song-by-song basis, and proposed extending the blanket license to cover wholesale digital downloads and streams. Yesterday, the enabling legislation was officially introduced.

Both the Digital Media Association, DiMA, and the National Music Publishers’ Association welcomed the move.

"Fast and efficient music licensing will ensure that songwriters and music publishers are fairly compensated and that creativity in the music industry thrives," said NMPA president David Israelite in a statement. DiMA president Jonathan Potter said it would reduce both legal risk and transaction costs for his members, who include Apple, Napster and AOL.

The legislation also ensures that intermediary copies of digital media making their way down the pipe don't command a royalty.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America had raised deep objections to the proposal, as it sees blanket licenses destroying its distribution advantages.

Under a blanket (or 'compulsory' license) for consumer downloads, record labels fear they would lose control of their hard-fought grip on physical distribution channels, and lose control over pricing. In fact, they'd simply have to work harder to gain a bigger share of the pie, and innovate to find new outlets for their copyrighted material.

"SIRA removes record companies from the digital music value chain of which they've been a part since the beginning of recorded music and would prohibit them from selling a final product with all rights included," RIAA chief Cary Sherman told Congress last month, with typical hyperbole.

On the peer to peer networks the RIAA is trying to close down, and which are the real rival to the new digital services, it's hard to see where in the value chain the record companies sit.

But more bizarre was the objection from the EFF.

Of necessity, the blanket license covers "incidental reproductions" of digital media, such as cached copies on the Napster servers, so it can give them a zero royalty.

The EFF cried foul, and claimed that this eroded fair use for consumers.

"Just think of all the incidental copies that litter your computer today - do you have a license for every copy in your browser's cache?" asked EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann.

The EFF is only doing the job it should when it spies subtle and ominous precedents in pending legislation. Alas, this interpretation fails the basic digital literacy test. As DiMA points out today,

"The license is not available to consumers, does not obligate consumers to pay a royalty, and does not address in any way whether consumers can lawfully copy copyrighted works. In fact, SIRA includes a clause to ensure that it does not change fair use law in any way." [their emphasis].

It's also an opt-in arrangement, DiMA stresses. So it doesn't apply to ordinary surfers, and only applies to you, should you be a prospective Napster.

Lawyers are notorious for their literalism, and American lawyers particularly so. Unable to see the wood for the trees - or more precisely, the context for HR.5553 - the EFF has handed the RIAA an arsenal of legal arguments for opposing blanket licenses.

Which incidentally, is the EFF's preferred compensation model. Should a miracle occur, and the opposing parties in the P2P war sit down and adopt the EFF's "Voluntary Collective Licensing" proposal, then the enabling legislation would look a lot like HR.5553. Which suggests this isn't just a tactical goof, but a strategic error - the consequence of not thinking really hard about the future.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06...yright_reform/





Tiscali Pulls Juke Box Music Service

Blasts 'shortsighted' music industry
Tim Richardson

Tiscali says it has been forced to "turn off" its new Juke Box music service following a run-in with the European music industry.

Last month, the European ISP unveiled details of its new p2p music service backed by US outfit Mercora, which lets people legally search for millions of tracks and share them using streaming technology.

Crucially, the service also won the backing of SCF (Società Consortile Fonografici), the Italian rights collecting society acting on behalf of record producers, artists and performers, which granted Tiscali the licence to run the streaming service.

At its launch last month the service was hailed as another "step forward in legitimising the internet as an immense resource at the service of the music industry".

"SCF is in fact involved in promoting a dialogue between online music consumers and copyright owners and in seizing the many opportunities that are offered by the internet to the music industry," SCF president Gianluigi Chiodaroli said in a statement. "This experimental web casting agreement is valid in each European country that Tiscali will be interested in operating in and represents a new opportunity in preserving music digital contents."

Now though, Tiscali says it's been forced pull the service, claiming that it's "virtually impossible to work with [the European Recording Industry] in the promotion of legal music online".

In an open letter, Mario Mariani, senior VP at Tiscali, accuses the European Record Industry of "short-sightedness...in not making any effort to understand either the basic needs or habits of music fans that choose to consume music via the internet, or the acts directly benefiting from this promotion."

As Mariani explains: "The service has now been judged by the major recording labels in Europe to be 'too interactive' only because it allows users of the internet (the most interactive of mediums) to carry out searches by 'artist' in addition to genre.

"It should be explained to the readers that online music rights are subdivided into two main categories: 'non interactive rights', which can be negotiated with the collecting societies, and 'interactive rights' which must be negotiated with the individual recording labels.

"After signing an experimental one-year webcasting agreement based on the management of non-interactive rights, today, Tiscali has received a request by the recording labels to modify the service by eliminating the search by artist mode or, alternatively, to negotiate the so called interactive rights with the individual recording labels."

As a result of this demand, Tiscali has been forced to pull the Juke Box until the matter is resolved.

Mariani says that the changes imposed are "against the spirit of our initiative", which he says was to promote the legal distribution and sale of music. He's also puzzled that the European record industry has taken these steps now "despite the joint regular testing and fine-tuning phase carried out prior to the launch of the service".

"This is even more serious if one considers the fact that the same service with all the same functions disputed here, is being offered by Mercora in the United States and Canada, where it is deemed perfectly legal. We cannot ignore that the objections presented to Tiscali at this time represent, on the part of the recording industry, a clear attempt to discriminate between American and European music fans and internet users."

He went on: "Faced with this total lack of understanding and despite having put our best efforts into developing and testing the service in full transparency and co-operation with the recording industry, Tiscali today finds itself being forced to turn it off."

Launching a verbal broadside against the music industry, Mariani said: "It is important to underline that this affair not only has an impact on Tiscali Juke Box, but on the entire market for the legal online distribution of music. The industry's conservative attitude makes any collaboration for the promotion and marketing of any type of legal, innovative service very difficult. It is unfortunate that once again the industry has demonstrated the complete rejection of online legal music based on open systems, and is to the full advantage of the proliferation of music piracy services."

The SCF was asked to respond, but a spokeswoman for the rights collecting society said that it had "no comment to make at the moment".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06...cali_juke_box/





Detox Clinic Set For Video Game Addicts
Fia Curley

An addiction center is opening Europe's first detox clinic for video game addicts, offering in-house treatment for people who can't leave their joysticks alone.

Video games may look innocent, but they can be as addictive as gambling or drugs - and just as hard to kick, says Keith Bakker, director of Amsterdam-based Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants.

Bakker already has treated 20 video game addicts, aged 13 to 30, since January. Some show withdrawal symptoms, such as shaking and sweating, when they look at a computer console.

His detox program begins in July. It will run four to eight weeks, and will include therapy sessions, wilderness excursions, healthy lifestyle workshops and possibly medication.

Research into video gaming is still in its infancy, and researchers haven't agreed on how to define addiction. But many experts say it's clear many of the young people who show dependency on video games are in trouble.

"We have kids who don't know how to communicate with people face-to-face because they've spent the last three years talking to somebody in Korea through a computer," Bakker said. "Their social network has completely disappeared."

It can start with a Game Boy, perhaps given by parents hoping to keep their children occupied but away from the television. From there, it can progress to multilevel games that aren't made to be won.

Bakker said he has seen signs of addiction in children as young as 8.

About a dozen clinics already exist in the United States and Canada, and even one in China, as excessive gaming increasingly is being recognized worldwide as an ailment requiring treatment.

Elizabeth Woolley, who founded the Safe Haven halfway house for addicted gamers in Harrisburg, Pa., welcomed the idea that treating addicts is spreading to the Netherlands. "Thank God that somebody has finally recognized this is an issue," she said.

Jeroen Jansz, associate professor of communications research at the University of Amsterdam, estimates about 80 percent of boys aged 8 to 18 play some type of video game. Forty percent play at least 2 1/2 hours a day.

In a 2005 study, Jansz said gamers are overwhelmingly males, especially in violent games where adolescents find "a safe private laboratory where they can experience different emotions."

Hyke van der Heijden, 28, a graduate of the Amsterdam program, started playing video games 20 years ago. By the time he was in college he was gaming about 14 hours a day and using drugs to play longer.

"For me, one joint would never be enough, or five minutes of gaming would never be enough," he said. "I would just keep going until I crashed out."

Van der Heijden first went to Smith & Jones for drug addiction in October 2005, but realized the gaming was the real problem. Since undergoing treatment, he has distanced himself from his smoking and gaming friends. He says he has been drug- and game-free for eight months.

Like other addicts, Bakker said, gamers are often trying to escape personal problems. When they play, their brains produce endorphins, giving them a high similar to that experienced by gamblers or drug addicts. Gamers' responses to questions even mirror those of alcoholics and gamblers when asked about use.

"Many of these kids believe that when they sit down, they're going to play two games and then do their homework," he said.

However, unlike other addicts, most gamers received their first game from their parents. "Because it's so new, parents don't see that this is something that can be dangerous," Bakker said.

Tim, a gamer who is under treatment, agreed to discuss his addiction on condition that his last name not be used. He said he began playing video games three years ago at age 18. Soon, he would not leave his room for dinner. Later, he began taking drugs to stay awake and play longer. Finally, he sought help and picked up other hobbies to occupy his time.

Richard Wood, a professor of International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, is skeptical about viewing heavy gamers as addicts. Wood says that gaming may be a symptom of a problem, but should be seen as a problem itself "just because a person does the activity a lot."

Bakker, however, says symptoms of addiction are easy to spot. Parents should take notice if a child neglects usual activities, spends several hours at a time with the computer and has no social life.

Bakker said parents of game addicts frequently echo the words of partners of cocaine addicts: "'I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was.'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





You go girl

Teen Sneaks To Mideast To Meet MySpace Pal
AP

A 16-year-old girl who flew to the Middle East to see a man she met on MySpace.com was detained in Jordan and was headed home Friday, an FBI spokesman said.

U.S. officials persuaded Katherine Lester to take the return flight from Amman, FBI Special Agent Robert Beeckman said from the agency's Detroit office.

Katherine had disappeared from her home in Gilford, in eastern Michigan, on Monday and apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, said Tuscola County Undersheriff James Jashinske.

The sheriff's department contacted the FBI, which traced the teen to a flight from New York to Amman, Jashinske said. On Thursday night, her family received word from U.S. officials that she had been stopped as she arrived in Amman en route to Tel Aviv, Israel.

Katherine's mother, Shawn Lester, said her daughter had persuaded her in April to help her get a passport so she could go on a two-week vacation to Canada with a friend's family.

On Sunday, they drove to a bus station for that trip, but the family didn't show up. Shawn Lester said she called them, learned there was no trip and brought her daughter home. The next day, Katherine was gone.

Jashinske said it remained unclear whether any law had been violated. An online conversation with a 16-year-old is not illegal in Michigan, but solicitation for sex would be. He said deputies confiscated the family's home computer and were taking it to the FBI's Bay City office Friday for analysis.

FBI spokesman Brian Endrizal declined to provide any details and would not comment on the man's identity or background.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/09/mys....ap/index.html





Two Types of Net Neutrality: Good & Evil

Lawmakers can’t understand why net neutrality is a good thing, so their only recourse is to turn it into a bad thing. The latest bill: If large monopolistic broadband providers that limit your ISP choice are unable to control your Internet surfing, then all websites may be watched and potentially forced to be “neutral” via FCC regulation. Huh?

The comparison is preposterous in that the two scenarios are like apples and oranges. In the first case, you have broadband providers that would like to give preferential treatment to websites that pay for it. So, in effect, you’d have better browsing capabilities (faster speed) with large websites that have paid your broadband provider for improved performance over the competition. But if you’re interested in checking out a website that is in competition with your broadband provider’s affiliates, good luck. It’s akin to buying Pepsi at a movie theater wholly sponsored by Coke. Not going to happen…

In the second case, you have the millions of websites online competing for your business. For example, your loyalty to a search engine isn’t dictated by the lack of availability of other search engines. If you don’t like Google, you try Yahoo, if you don’t like Yahoo, try MSN, etc. Many of us have used dozens of search engines in our quest to find information. And this lack of loyalty (a.k.a. low switching cost) is a good thing in that it prevents barrier to entry in cyberspace thus causing search and other online services to be enhanced and refined through companies’ healthy competition one with another.

This healthy competition doesn’t really exist with broadband providers in that, in any give area of the United States, most Internet users can only receive high-speed Internet access from one or two providers. Thus, service is generally poor; innovation is low; and switching costs for consumers are high. But this barrier to entry doesn’t stop these duopolistic companies from feeling entitled to windfall profits that come with dictating what sites you can access based on which have paid them the most.

So now, as the big telcos and cable companies are under fire for trying to turn the Internet into cable TV (where they control the broadcasting), their only recourse is to turn “net neutrality” into a tainted term by taking it to the extreme: giving the FCC power to regulate content on the Internet to enforce neutrality. For example, the FCC could prevent Google from declining certain types of controversial or negative ads or it could force Google to run ads for its competition, all under the banner of Google needing to be “neutral.”

This would be an extreme amount of power given to a government body. Ironically, the original definition of net neutrality was focused around limiting “the man’s” power, not giving him more. Of course, broadband providers don’t necessarily want this newly defined net neutrality. They’re just hoping that any thought of it will stop the pleas for the original net neutrality.

But they miss the point: The Internet is a free and open land that should be available to anyone without government intervention or conglomerate controlled content. This is true Net Neutrality. Don’t be fooled by the tainted version involving a government body deciding what’s neutral. Neutral has already been happening without the FCC defining it, thank you very much.
http://www.computers.net/2006/06/two_types_of_ne.html





Network Neutrality Interests Senators And Moonie-Owned Newspapers Alike
Nate Anderson

The original draft of the Senate Commerce Committee's new telecommunications legislation contained no provisions for network neutrality, instead directing the FCC to produce a yearly report on the topic. Needless to say, yearly FCC reports were not what the proponents of network neutrality had hoped for; they wanted legislative action, and it looked like they would be disappointed.

In the month since, the Senate has discovered an interest in the topic, though, and Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) now believes that more can and should be done to ensure that consumers are able to access any web sites and services on the Internet without degradation.

"I think that's the one issue where we still have some work to do," Lisa Sutherland, chief of staff to Stevens, told reporters. "We're going to work as hard as we can this week on Net neutrality."

His initial proposal to simply study the issue further did not please several members of the committee, and Stevens now looks ready to consider some compromise plans that could be presented to the full Senate in as little as the week.

The debate over network neutrality has exploded beyond the boundaries of traditional geekdom in the last few months. It has played out in the halls of Congress and on the editorial pages of major American newspapers, the high level of interest signaling just how important Internet connections have become to people's lives. While both sides have important points to make about the inherent dangers of monopolies, the unintended consequences of government regulation, etc., the level of the debate isn't raised when people get their facts wrong.

Techdirt dissects some of the claims being made by DC newspapers this week and points out the holes in their editorial writing about the issue. Take the Washington Times, for example, the right-wing paper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (founder of the Moonies), which had this to say in a recent editorial on network neutrality:

"Essentially, the [failed House] amendment would have forced Internet service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) to offer the same speed to Internet companies regardless of content. So, for example, Comcast would have to charge Microsoft the same price to send broadband-consuming video content as the individual blogger who uses far less band space. The basis for this is the idea that the Internet should remain 'free' to all.
But nothing in life is free."

The obvious confusion that lies at the heart of this statement concerns the way that the Internet is funded. The passage assumes that when ISPs like Comcast pass Microsoft traffic along to consumers without receiving any money, they're being ripped off, exactly as if a consumer found some way to siphon a Comcast broadband connection without paying for it. This simply isn't true, though. Microsoft has already paid their own ISP for bandwidth (it's certainly not "free," and it's certainly not the same rate that a blogger pays for a low-bandwidth web site), and the reason that they don't need to pay Comcast a second fee is that Comcast's own network is funded by their own customers. People aren't dropping US$40 a month for an Internet fast lane that leads only to Sticksville, MO, they're paying for their connection because it allows them to connect to companies like Microsoft. No one just wants to access the "Internet cloud"; they want to access specific Internet sites. Without interesting Web properties to visit, no one would pay US$500 a year for the privilege of using a fat Internet pipe.

Part of the problem here is that it's not always clear what the ISPs have in mind for the Internet. People like AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre can bellyache about people using "my pipes for free" and talk about extracting money from Google and others, then turn around and claim that he has no plans to "do anything to affect the Internet." What exactly do firms like AT&T have in mind? Depending on what happens in the next several weeks, we'll know soon enough.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060613-7043.html





Constitutional Circumvention
James Boyle

In September last year, I wrote about a very bad proposal being debated in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The proposal was to extend the length of an existing set of intellectual property rights for broadcasters, and even apply them to webcasting. As I pointed out, there is no empirical evidence that these rights produce any social benefit. Indeed, the US has never had such a right and yet has a flourishing broadcast industry.

Extending the rights to webcasting, despite the manifest differences between the economic structure and global reach of the two media, was a jaw-dropping move with obviously bad consequences. We should be focusing on rules about conduct, not rights over content. If signal piracy and rebroadcasting is a problem, we should have a rule that narrowly focuses on that conduct, prohibiting unfair business practices by commercial competitors. The last thing we should do is create yet another set of long lasting property rights over the content.

Copyright offices around the world admit that there is a huge problem with “orphan works” – copyrighted material for which the copyright holder cannot be found. Given the absurdly long copyright term, it is quite possible that the majority of the cultural production of the twentieth century consists of orphan works. Because of the difficulty of clearing copyright, those works remain locked up in the library. Even though the copyright holder has long disappeared, or would not mind, it is impossible to show the old movie, adapt the old book, play the old song, put the old poem in an anthology. Many libraries simply refuse to allow screening of movies until the copyright term has expired; probably no one would object, but the legal risk is too great.

Now imagine creating an entirely new layer of rights over everything that is broadcast or webcast, on top of whatever copyrights already cover the work. You find a copy of a movie in the library and manage, at great expense, to work out that it is in the public domain, or to get the copyright holder’s permission. Perhaps the work is covered by a Creative Commons license, granting you permission to reproduce. Not so fast! Even after trudging through all the orphan works problems in copyright, you would have to prove that this copy had not been made from a broadcast or webcast. More clearance problems! More middle-men! More empirically ungrounded state-granted monopolies! Just what we wanted. There are even some serious free speech problems.

What if only Fox or CBS has the footage of a particular public event? Do we let the broadcaster eviscerate the ideas of fair use, prohibiting other networks from showing fragments so as to comment on the events, or criticise the original coverage? The proposed treaty text allows for fair use-like exceptions but does not require them. Once again, we harmonise upward property rights for powerful commercial entities, but leave to individual states the discretion whether and how to frame of the equally crucial public interest exceptions to those rights. Increased property rights for broadcasters are required. The public interest in education, access, and free speech is optional. (Among other things, most of the recent drafts would outlaw home recording of TV and radio unless a special exception was put into the law, state by state.)

This proposal was so bad, so empirically threadbare, so unbalanced, that I had cherished a faint hope that the members of WIPO would abandon it. At least, I hoped there might be a comparative study of the nations that had previously adopted the protection and those that had not, to see if there was any need for such a change? What was I thinking!!? Why do we need evidence? With remarkably little public attention, the Broadcasting Treaty train is chugging ahead strongly, with states providing new draft proposals over the next two months for a possible decision in September. The status of the webcasting provision is still unclear. But the webcasters are pressing hard. Expect another poorly reasoned proposal to rise from the ashes, with the US playing a key role. The press seems to have missed the story. Bizarrely, the proposal is getting more robust criticism from industry sources, who can see how it will affect competitiveness on the web, than from librarians and civil libertarians who ought to appreciate better than anyone its effect on speech and cultural heritage.

Of course, the casting treaty is a paradigmatic example of the dysfunctions in our international deliberations on these issues; we have the absence of evidence, the mandatory rights and optional exceptions, the industry-capture, the indifference to harm caused by rights-thickets. But the representatives of the United States, who have played an ignominious role as cheerleaders for this silly treaty, have a particular, indeed a constitutional, reason to be ashamed.

Unlike their descendants who now work the floor at WIPO, the framers of the US constitution had a principled, pro-competitive attitude to intellectual property. They knew rights might be necessary, but they worried about industry-capture and unnecessary monopoly and so they tied congress’s hands, restricting its power in multiple ways.

Rights have to be of limited duration. (Congress has managed to get around that one by repeatedly extending the limit: Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.) They can only cover original material, which must be fixed in some material form. No rights over inventions that are already known, or over unoriginal compilations of fact. Of course, if the material is not within the core domain of copyright and patent, congress may go further, as it has with trademarks.

But over the material covered by copyright, where we are dealing with fundamental constitutional limitations, these rules reign supreme and congress may not circumvent them by turning to another constitutional source of power. What does this mean in practice? That is a complicated question. There are pending legal disputes about “bootlegging statutes” and about foreign works that have been pulled out of the public domain as a consequence of the Uruguay Round of trade agreements.

In my view, the current drafts of the Broadcast Treaty would be unconstitutional if implemented in American law. They create new copyright-like rights over unoriginal material, indeed material that is frequently copyrighted by someone else. That violates a core restriction of the copyright clause of the constitution. They also ignore the fixation requirement.

But forget the attempt to predict what the Supreme Court would do if it heard the case. Are the US’s negotiators ignoring their constitutional responsibilities, and seeking to get a bad treaty passed with inadequate public debate of its desirability, constitutionality or consequences? About that there is no doubt at all. Shame on them. Jefferson and Madison would not approve. Should we?
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/fa07af4a-fa...0779e2340.html





Another Sky Press is a non-traditional publishing company located in Portland, Oregon. We operate under a progressive publishing and distribution paradigm that aims to directly benefit both artist and audience.

In short, this means two things:

1. You can read everything we release for free online.
2. You can purchase the books we publish at a price you set.

More information on why we exist and what we stand for can be found throughout the site. If you’re interested in the theory behind the site, we suggest starting with this.
http://www.anothersky.org/





British Publishers Seek Exclusive Rights to Sell English-Language Books in Europe
Motoko Rich

When tourists, expatriates and other English speakers look for books in Continental Europe, they often get a choice between two editions: one produced by an American publisher and another by a British one, each with distinctive covers, paper stock and spellings.

But that choice, a longstanding tradition that allows both American and British publishers to compete for sales in Europe, could be imperiled as British publishers renew an old campaign to secure exclusive rights to sell English-language books in Europe.

The arcane trade issue, which was a subject of heated debate more than a decade ago, has returned as British publishers complain about what they see as a new threat on their home turf. They say that because of open borders between countries in the European Union, American editions of books sold in Europe are starting to appear either in British bookstores or on Web sites, in direct competition with British editions.

Not surprisingly, American publishers are resisting the move to give their British counterparts exclusive publishing rights in Europe. This week, the Americans are being joined by a group of five European booksellers and distributors who are sending an open letter to publishers in Britain and the United States opposing the latest British push.

Citing the importance of consumer choice, the threat of increased Internet sales and concerns that without competition British publishers will simply raise prices, the booksellers "urge all publishers involved to strongly reject any effort to restrict competition in the market."

The signers of the letter include booksellers and distributors in Lisbon, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. "In a global market, this would be an atavistic move," they write, "because it means a return to protectionism and an attack on cultural diversity."

If a book is originally published in Britain, its publisher already gets exclusive rights in Europe. Sales of British-published English-language editions in Continental Europe represent about $300 million in annual revenue, about 6 percent of total sales, said Tim Hely Hutchinson, chief executive of Hachette Livre UK, a publishing company that owns the Hodder Headline, Orion, Little Brown UK and Octopus imprints. In comparison, sales by British publishers totaled about $5.2 billion last year, according to the Publishers Association, a trade group.

"It's not a land grab for Europe as a territory," said Stephen Page, chief executive and publisher of Faber & Faber UK and president of the Publishers Association. "It's about defending the United Kingdom as a territory for British publishers."

Although Mr. Page could not cite specific figures on how many American editions had been showing up for sale in Britain, he said, "it's not the scale of what is happening, it's our anxiety of what could happen."

Jonathan Lloyd, group managing director of Curtis Brown UK, a literary agency in London, said that in one high-profile case last year, the United States hardcover edition of "Star of the Sea" by Joseph O'Connor, a historical novel published by Harcourt, became the No. 1 best seller in Ireland at the same time that Random House UK was publishing the paperback version of the book in Britain.

The American publishers dispute that British publishers are having trouble protecting their home market from American interlopers.

An open European market "is the way it has worked for years, and there has to be a big perceived benefit to change it," said Carolyn K. Reidy, president of adult publishing at Simon & Schuster in New York, which is owned by the CBS Corporation. She estimated that United States publishers sold about $250 million in books in Continental Europe each year, or 2 percent of sales.

Ms. Reidy argues that the ability to produce European editions also enables publishers to sell English-language versions in small export markets in Asia and Latin America, helping to increase an author's global exposure.

With so many publishing companies now owned by large corporations with divisions on both sides of the Atlantic, the debate is often an internal one. "We have talked quite rationally to the British part of our company but I don't think they are in total agreement with our global stance," said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers, the United States publishing unit of the News Corporation media conglomerate. Calls to Amanda Ridout, managing director of general books at HarperCollins UK, were not returned.

One global company that is siding with its British divisions is Hachette. "It is of vital importance that we maintain European exclusivity for U.K. publishers," said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group USA, which owns the Little, Brown and Warner Books imprints.

His counterpart in London, Mr. Hely Hutchinson, said that authors and publishers "are far better served where there is one publisher who can provide all the marketing and customer support for the book and do so without worrying about somebody else free-riding on all that publicity."

But American publishers do not want to give in on Europe because of the precedent it might set. "You want to protect as many of the rights suite as is available," said Jack Romanos, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. He pointed out that publishers once gave away film or audio rights and then had to fight to get them once movie and audiobook deals became more popular.

The dispute is mostly theoretical for now, as British publishers are still negotiating book by book for rights to publish in Europe. Agents in the United States say they have had a few requests from British publishers seeking exclusive rights in Europe, but by and large it has not become a deal-breaker.

Lost in the debate between publishers is the consumer's voice, booksellers argue. "My customers are extremely sensitive to the American or English paperbacks," said Odile Hellier, owner of Village Voice Bookshop in Paris and one of the signatories of the open letter to publishers. "Americans love to buy the U.K. editions here because they don't see them at home and vice versa. The U.K. people love to see American jackets. It's the diversity which is important."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/bu...s/14books.html





Hollywood and the Hackers
Adam Livingstone and Richard Taylor

Motion Picture Association President Dan Glickman locks horns with Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow over big media's war with the internet.

The biggest pirate movie site on the Internet was raided by police a few days ago. Within 48 hours it was up and running in a different country. It's just another week on the barricades of the information revolution.

Over and again we at geek central find ourselves reading about the latest skirmish between the copyright cops and the darknet without ever hearing that there might be a war going on.

The hackers want to break Hollywood on the wheel of their collective ingenuity and show the suits who is in charge.

Big media wants to make money from the internet like it does with every other outlet, or at the very least not have piracy forever draining away their profits.

And they have been hammering away at each other for years now.

Grateful Dead

But could there ever be peace between these two warring tribes? Have they got anything to teach one another, or will they spend yet another decade 'not getting' each other's point of view?

Newsnight decided to track down the two most powerful voices on either side of the divide and ask them about their own philosophies and what they thought of their opponent.

John Perry Barlow used to be the lyricist in the US supergroup 'The Grateful Dead.' He went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the pressure group that's placed itself front and centre in the fight to keep the tanks of government and corporation off the lawns of cyberspace.

Congressman Dan Glickman became US Secretary for Agriculture under Bill Clinton. Nowadays he's the President and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, the body that wields the collective political and legal muscle of the Hollywood studios.

Here's an edited highlight of what they have to say about one another:

John Perry Barlow : The entertainment industry is as it always has been. It's a rough bunch of people and a rough industry. I don't think that the movie industry is any more ready than any other part of the information industries to adapt itself to the information age. But it's going to go there one way or the other.

And whatever its cries of protest and growing pains, it'll make it eventually - it's just going to do everything it can, as the record industry has done, as the publishing industry has done, to stop progress in that direction until it gets its act together.

And I fear that it's done grave harm to itself and to the future in the process of trying to slow down progress, but it'll go there inevitably.

Dan Glickman : John Perry Barlow is the one who's doing a disservice to the consumers, because you see if you don't adequately compensate the artist, the director, the creator, the actor, they won't do it in the first place so people won't get movies.

So, yeah, we should be protecting our copyright but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking for new ways to get that content to people in modern ways - particularly young people who [understand] computers and electronic equipment and the internet very well.

JPB : These are aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don't have a question about who's going to win that one eventually.

There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends but because they want to stick it to the movie business. It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience. I mean I've made a fair amount of money over the years writing songs for 'The Grateful Dead' who allowed their fans to tape their concerts.

We were at one point the biggest grossing performing act in the United States, and most of our records went platinum sooner or later.

It's an economic model that has worked in my experience and I think it does work. It's just that it seems like it wouldn't. It seems counter-intuitive.

DK : It is ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature.

Would a clothing store give all their clothes for free? Would a car dealership give all its cars for free? Of course not. If they don't make a profit in this world they're out of business. That's just the laws of human nature.

JPB : If I were to encounter Dan Glickman on the street and we were to have a civilised conversation about this subject, which would be a long shot, I'd tell him to relax.

I'd tell him to spend less of the resources of his industry on fighting the inevitable and more on learning about the conditions that they find themselves in and recognising the opportunities, which I think are vast and very encouraging. But they can't get to those opportunities until they quit trying to stop progress.

DK : First of all I'd tell John Perry Barlow that I'm very relaxed and if we met each other we'd probably have a very good time. But all of us kind of need to chill out.

The fact of the matter is that people who create content for movies and television have to make a profit. If they don't you won't see all this wonderful stuff and listen to it.

But he is right to the extent that we need to be finding new and different ways to get our content to people, whether it's internet or whether it's iPod or whether it's remotely accessed in various parts of the world. If [we] don't the consumer will not be satisfied and in this business the consumer is king and queen. If you don't make them happy they won't buy your product.

JPB : I've got good news and bad news and good news. And the good news is that you guys have managed to buy every major legislative body on the planet, and the courts are even with you. So you've done a great job there and you should congratulate yourself.

But you know the problem is - the bad news is that you're up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you're dead. You're 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they're just smarter than you. So you're gonna lose that one.

But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you've been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries.....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ht/5064170.stm





Mitsubishi to Release HD DVD-R, BD-R in July
Nicholas Deleon

When in Japan, buy all the cool stuff that takes forever to reach these shores. Mitsubishi just announced that they’ll be selling HD DVD-R discs in Japan starting on July 5. Two versions will be released, a 15GB version (model number VR15T1) and a 30GB version (VR150T1). HD DVD-RW discs aren’t part of this disc announcement jubilee.

Not taking sides in the next generation DVD war, Mitsubishi will also be releasing Blu-ray writable and rewritable discs, also on July 5. These are single-sided, single-layer BD-R and BD-RE discs and can hold up 25GB of data. Mitsubishi expects to start selling dual-layer discs this fall.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/perip...uly-179291.php





As DVD Sales Slow, Hollywood Hunts for a New Cash Cow
Ken Belson

After more than half a decade as Hollywood's savior, the DVD is looking a little tired — and the movie studios, for once, are having trouble coming up with a sequel.

DVD sales represent more than half of the revenue studios generate from most of their movies. But those sales are expected to grow just 2 percent this year, a far cry from the double-digit growth the industry enjoyed just two years ago. High-definition DVD's were supposed to pick up the slack, but technical delays and a thorny format war between camps led by Sony and Toshiba have dampened expectations.

Studios are starting to beam digital movie files to consumers over the airwaves and send them through the Internet, but sales so far are minuscule. Rentals and video-on-demand, though growing, generate far smaller profits for the studios than store-bought DVD's.

This explains why executives who gathered here earlier this month for an industry conference expect, for better or worse, that the plain old DVD will remain their bread and butter for several more years. Meanwhile, they are trying everything they can in their quest for a new cash cow.

"The technology seems to change every Monday," said Bob Chapek, the president of Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of Disney, speaking on a panel of studio chiefs. "On the one hand, we're playing in the old-fashioned packaged goods business, and at the same time, we have to deal with new technologies."

For the studios, the clock is ticking: sales of standard discs are expected to fall by about 20 percent by 2010, according to Adams Media Research, an industry consultant based in Carmel, Calif.

With most movies and many television shows now on DVD, studios are running out of new material to throw at consumers, analysts say. Some studios have been repackaging older hits into anniversary box sets and other promotions, but consumers may be tiring of that tactic, as studio chiefs sheepishly acknowledge.

"We were shameless," said Steve Beeks, the president of Lions Gate Entertainment, which has issued several new versions of the Terminator movies. "We would release special editions as long as people would buy them."

Movie studios have also been issuing DVD's closer to movie release dates. This has led to larger spikes in sales right after DVD's come out, but steeper declines later and more turnover on store shelves. For movies that gross more than $100 million at the box office, 84 percent of DVD sales are in the first six weeks after their release, up from 81 percent in 2003, according to David Hoffman, an analyst for Nielsen VideoScan.

Some of the slowdown, though, is beyond the studios' control. A growing number of Americans with digital cable plans, for instance, are now watching movies on demand and buying or renting fewer DVD's.

Comcast, the country's largest cable company, lets its subscribers view 7,500 free movies and programs, and since 2004, they have watched them two billion times.

While this has made it easier for Americans to avoid driving to the mall to buy DVD's, they are still renting them. Netflix, a mail-order service that stocks about 60,000 DVD's of movies, TV shows and other fare, has about five million customers.

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, expects to have 20 million customers by 2012. He says his business is helped by the exclusive licensing deals that restrict the selection of movies available via Internet downloading and video-on-demand.

"DVD's will dominate for another decade," Mr. Hastings said.

Studios make money when Netflix and other companies rent out their movies. (Depending on the studio and movie, Netflix either buys the DVD's or licenses the use of them.) But the amount that studios make on rentals pales compared to how much they make when consumers buy discs. Studios earn $17.26 for each DVD they sell, but only $2.37 for movies on demand and $2.25 per DVD rented, according to Tom Adams, the president of Adams Media Research.

"It's a business model that can't be matched," he said.

That differential in profits means that the standard DVD will be around for a while, whatever the promise of those new technologies. Though sales are no longer growing at double-digit rates, consumers in the United States still buy about $16 billion worth of DVD's a year.

Part of the DVD's success is that the discs are easy to buy, easy to use and relatively inexpensive, thanks to the well-oiled system of getting them into consumers' hands. Take Technicolor's sprawling facilities in Camarillo, Calif., about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. Technicolor, a unit of Thomson that is one of the world's leading disc makers, ships about 150 million DVD's a year from its operations — about 9 percent of its global production — to stores throughout the western United States.

In one wing, robotic machines spit out new discs about every three seconds. The discs are wheeled into adjoining buildings, where they are fed into plastic cases that are wrapped for shipping. At another warehouse, the DVD's are packed into ready-made cardboard displays, plunked onto pallets and shipped on behalf of the studios to Best Buy, Costco and other retailers, arriving within days of being ordered.

Retailers love DVD's because they spur other sales, too. Customers who buy DVD's at Wal-Mart, which sells $4.7 billion worth of discs a year, spend twice as much on each store visit on average because they also buy popcorn, beer and other items to go with their movies, according to Mr. Hoffman of Nielsen VideoScan.

The money that DVD's spin off is a big reason the studios are pushing new high-definition DVD's, which are sold and used just like standard-definition discs.

Unfortunately, there's a hitch. The studios, electronics makers and technology companies that developed them came up with two formats: Blu-ray, backed by Sony, Dell, Disney and others; and HD-DVD, which is supported by Toshiba, Microsoft and Universal, among others.

The split could keep consumers on the sidelines, because they risk getting saddled with obsolete players and discs if one side ultimately backs down. Cost is another factor. Toshiba has introduced a $500 player that, at least for now, can only play movies from three major studios. Later this month, Samsung will release the first Blu-ray machine, which will be able to play more movies, but it is expected to cost about $1,000.

Technical hurdles were behind Pioneer's decision last week to delay the release of its Blu-ray player — which will cost about $1,500 — until September. Studios have released only a handful of movies thus far because so few players have been sold. Another complication is that consumers with older high-definition television sets may not get the best possible picture if studios activate certain copy protection software embedded on their DVD's.

"Both formats coming to market are early," said Craig Kornblau, the president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. "This is all a 1.0 release," referring to an early version of a product.

Proponents in both camps hope that video game players will popularize their formats. The PlayStation 3, due out in November, will play Blu-ray DVD's, and Microsoft is creating an accessory for its Xbox 360 console that will play HD-DVD discs. The studios also expect the boom in sales of high-definition television sets to heighten interest in high-definition DVD's, including older movies re-released in the new format.

"As people invest in LCD and flat-panel TV's, they are naturally going to want to invest in high-definition movies," said Benjamin S. Feingold, the president of worldwide home entertainment, digital distribution and acquisitions at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Even so, the companies backing both high-definition formats are likely to see only modest sales initially. Consumers will buy just $175 million worth of HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs this year; by 2010, high-definition DVD sales will still be only half those of standard-definition disc sales, according to Adams Media Research.

"While the go-go days are gone, it's going to take a lot for another category to supplant" DVD sales, said Mr. Hoffman of Nielsen. "The end is not here yet."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/te...gy/13disc.html





Pixar
James Rogers

Hollywood movie maker Pixar, famous for movies such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, has been wrestling with a massive data challenge during the production of its latest release, Cars, according to Greg Brandeau, Pixar's VP of technology.

During his keynote here today, Brandeau explained that Cars, which is slated for a June release, has put more strain on his internal systems than any other movie, swallowing up a colossal 2,300 CPU years over the course of the last five years. In other words, in Brandeau's view, a single CPU would have to run for 2,300 years in order to do all the number crunching for this movie.

"Cars is the most ambitious film we have ever made, the frames are way more complex. We used 300 times more compute power to make Cars than Toy Story," he explained.

Brandeau added that the rendering system used for animation was creaking under the strain of the new release, prompting a rethink of the firm's storage strategy. "We realized that our rendering time was taking too long. Frames were taking 10 hours [to render] that should have taken one hour."

According to Brandeau, it was not the rendering system, which is based on Dell servers, that was causing the slowdown. On closer inspection, an NFS file system feeding data to the Dell boxes was found to be the source of the problem. "Our central file system was getting hammered in a way it had never been hammered before. The NFS caches couldn't go fast enough -- they did not have enough RAM on them."

Although he did not reveal which vendor provided the NFS, Brandeau confirmed that it was woefully inadequate for the demands of the new movie. "A gigabyte of memory on our file server heads was nowhere near good enough," he said, adding that Pixar needed something in the region of 32 Gbytes.

Like many other users, Brandeau and his team found salvation in a SAN. Pixar eventually opted to replace the NFS with a SAN based on an EMC CX700 box, linked to Dell Linux servers running parallel file system software from startup Ibrix.

The new system, which was deployed last year, has helped cut Pixar's rendering times to their previous levels, while keeping hardware costs to a minimum. "We only have eight little Linux boxes that are serving up that data. We believe strongly that commodity hardware with lots of heads is the way to solve this problem."

This fits in nicely with Pixar's corporate ethos, according to the exec. "When we got started, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together. We never bought the big SGI boxes or InfiniBand -- we use basic Ethernet and standard Dell boxes."

This, apparently, was Ibrix's big selling point. "The idea they have is that instead of building special-purpose hardware, they solve the problem by using inexpensive, CPUs."

Pixar is not the only organization to go down this route. Last year the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa Internet all opted for commodity-hardware approaches to their file storage. (See NCSA Selects Ibrix, UT Deploys Ibrix , and Alexa Adopts Ibrix.)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=92075





Internet on film: A kludgy relationship

Why Hollywood Made Us Fear The Internet; Why The Internet Should Fear Us
Erik Lundegaard

The most dated aspect of “The Net,” the 1995 thriller in which freelance software engineer Sandra Bullock’s entire life is erased by malicious corporate hackers, is not the dial-up accounts, or the floppy discs sent via Fed-Ex, or the almost nostalgia-inducing TCP/IP status windows which tell us: “Router engaged... Establishing link... Connecting... DONE.” No, the most dated aspect is a verb. Trying to fathom how the bad guys discovered such personal information about her — favorite foods and movies and men — Angela Bennett (Bullock) suddenly has an epiphany. “They must have watched it on the Internet!” she cries.

Watched it on the Internet? As if the Internet were the new TV. “What are you doing tonight, honey?” “Oh, I think I’m just gonna stay home and watch some Internet.”

Press control/shift
“The Net” was one of two films that year which directly exploited the growing interest in and fear of this relatively new communications system — which means Hollywood became fascinated with the Internet about the same time Bill Gates did. Not bad.

New technologies generally provoke fear — everyone’s got a bit of a Luddite in them, and most of us assume that what we grew up on should be good enough for anyone — and the Internet, a publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks, couldn’t help but provoke fear and fascination. It’s a small step from “Wow, you mean I can be connected to anyone?” (think: Madonna) to “Crap, you mean anyone can be connected to me?” (think: Jeffrey Dahmer).

But “The Net” didn’t exploit this fear so much as a general fear of computers. If all of our information is on computers, its logic went, then that information can be erased, and thus our lives can be erased, just as Angela’s mom’s life has been erased by Alzheimer’s. The Internet simply made it easier to gain access to these computers. Of course the evil corporate forces could only do what they do because no one knows Angela. She’s a computer shut-in, and that may be the film’s greater fear: that even if we’re as attractive as Sandra Bullock, we’ll wind up lonely and dateless and waste our time in chatrooms with Iceman and Gandalf and Cyberbob, who chant, in homage to Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” that Angela is “One of us... one of us...”

This is the true terror the film exploits. The Internet? You get floppy discs in the mail which take you to Web pages which, if you click on a Pi icon while control/shifting, will make everything go haywire and on its own take you to top secret Web sites. Yeah, you don’t navigate there; you just kind of wind up there. Why be scared of the Internet? It’s a magical, magical fairyland.

Waka waka
The first time the New York Times used “Internet” in its modern usage was on Nov. 5, 1988, in an article about Robert T. Morris, Jr., the son of an N.S.A. computer security expert, who released a replicating program in the Department of Defense’s Arpanet that eventually infected 6,000 computers “or 10 percent of the systems linked through an international group of communications networks, the Internet.” Although Morris was a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student at the time (and is now a professor at M.I.T.), he became the inspiration for Dade Murphy, the 11-year-old Seattle boy who, going by the online moniker “Zero Cool,” crashes 1,507 computers nationwide in the beginning of 1995’s other big Internet movie, “Hackers.”

“Hackers” and “The Net” may have come out the same year but they are at opposite ends of the fear spectrum. The Internet doesn’t isolate us in “Hackers”; it brings us together into groups of elite geeks who hang in hip cyberclubs and play giant video games while rollerskating to a throbbing techno beat. Not sure which vision is scarier.

There are two kinds of hackers in this world: the adult kind, represented by “The Plague” (Fisher Stevens), who tries to dump oil tankers in the ocean to cover up his embezzlement schemes; and the youthful kind, represented by “Zero Cool/Crash Override” (Jonny Lee Miller) and “Acid Burn” (Angelina Jolie, sporting a Vulcan haircut), who prevent the oil tankers from spilling in the ocean. Sure, the youthful kind may play online pranks; but even when Crash Override hacks into a local TV network, he simply removes a Rush Limbaugh-like fascist from the airwaves and replaces him with a classic episode of “The Outer Limits.”

Of the two films, the high-tech language in “Hackers” is probably more accurate, but this merely demonstrates the problem of accuracy in computer movies. At one point the boys crash Acid Burn’s room and they’re all over her computer. “Check it out, guys!” one cries. “It’s insanely great. It’s got a 28.8 kbps modem!” Yesterday’s elite hardware is today’s Smithsonian artifact.

During the final hacker showdown, of course, all nods towards accuracy are lost in favor of gee-whiz graphics (an eyepatch-wearing Pac-Man) and layman’s language (“I’ll head ‘em off at the pass!”). I’ve never launched a virus personally but according to this you just access the “Virus Launch Panel” on your computer — with LAUNCH, INFECT and GROW options — and wait for Pirate Pac-Man to start eating someone else’s computer data. Waka waka. Waka waka. Yep: a magical, magical fairyland.

Job@Book of Job
“The Net,” released in July ’95, did OK business ($50 million) but “Hackers,” released in September, did not ($7.5 million), and Hollywood soon stopped making these kinds of movies. The Internet cache was short-lived, and anyway there’s nothing visually exciting about someone sitting at a computer — which is why you get all the gee-whiz graphics in the first place. A general rule with high-tech movies: the more exciting the graphics, the less exciting the protagonists.

But as the Internet became part of our lives it also became part of the lives of our movie characters, and began showing up, with all of our ambivalence about the medium intact, in small, supporting roles.

In “Copycat” (1995), agoraphobic psychologist Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) uses the Internet as a means of communicating with the outside world (that’s good); but then a serial killer sends her taunting messages and videos via e-mail (that’s bad). In “First Kid” (1996), the titular brat browses the “Kid Internet” and makes online friends in a “snake chatroom” (that’s...um...good, I guess); but the online friend turns out to be a wacko who wants to kidnap him (that’s bad). The fear of what can come through those phone lines and fiber-optic cables is best reflected in a horrible B-flick called “Ghost in the Machine” (1993), in which a computer-savvy serial killer is zapped into electricity and continues killing via the Internet.

Exaggerations in these movies, obvious 10 years hence, abound. Computer programs are invariably interrupted by a bar-shaped window with a flashing red message: INCOMING E-MAIL. E-mail messages are slid into envelopes and float away on wings. When necessary, computers talk. When pressed for time, passwords are easily decipherable. Hackers tend to be fatsos with long greasy hair or nerds with oversized glasses, but if they’re lead characters they suddenly morph into Angelina Jolie or Hugh Jackman. Nice trick.

Errors in these movies, obvious 19 years hence, also abound. The insufferable teen protagonist in “Ghost in the Machine” tells a friend, “I was just searching around on my computer? I found this great sex program!” That’s some magical computer. Did the sex program come bundled with the operating system or what?

In “Ransom” (1996), CEO Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson) receives a phone call from a subordinate telling him...he has an e-mail. Is that how CEOs worked back then? No wonder so many companies failed. The easiest error to spot is the f’ed up e-mail address. The James Bond thriller “Goldeneye” (1995) knew enough to give its hacker a proper suffix (.edu), but in “The Net” Sandy Bullock sends an e-mail to “jg@gms.wrld.” Even a year later the first “Mission: Impossible” (1996) hasn’t figured it out. At one point super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) creates the account “Job@Book of Job” and receives an e-mail from “Max@Job 3:14.”

A dot, Ethan. Dot something. We’re waiting on a dot.

Joshua
So did the collision of Hollywood and the Internet lead to the making of any good movies? Yes, but the movie was released before we or the New York Times even knew the term “Internet.” That may be key.

In “WarGames” (1983), Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman owns a TRS-80 monitor. To connect to other computers he has to press his phone into a suction-cup modem. In an attempt to access Protovision, a computer game outfit, he creates a program in which his computer dials every phone number in Protovision’s area code and lets it run until it connects to another computer. When he needs to research a programmer, Dr. Stephen Falken, he actually researches: libraries, card files, microfiche, for God’s sake. This kind of research lent itself to a visual montage. These days he’d just Google “Falken,” which lends itself to nothing. Cue the gee-whiz graphics. Then cue you in the audience going, “That ain’t Google.”

“WarGames,” in other words, had a kind of patience the other Internet movies didn’t. More, its writers, Lawrence Laker and Walter F. Parkes, who would go on to help write 1992’s “Sneakers,” were interested in character. The flirtation between David and Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) is charming, not least because she’s the sexually aggressive one. The two teenagers feel real. Subtle things occur. She traps him between her legs and laughs at his confusion and/or her daring, but nothing comes of it.

After he realizes he hasn’t contacted a computer game company but the NORAD computer, and after the computer calls him back to “finish the game,” he not only takes the phone off the modem, he unplugs it completely and then cradles it in his arms. “WarGames” still works nearly 25 years later because it’s about people, not technology. A suction-cup modem is soon outdated; David Lightman is not.

Whose pipes are these anyway?
By 1998 more of us were online, and since less of the Internet was unknown there was that much less to fear. Which means, God help us, the Internet became safe for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail,” a two-hour-long commercial for AOL, Starbucks and — through example — Barnes & Noble. At least writer-director Nora Ephron managed to make writing and sending e-mail visually interesting (no mean feat), and she did show the fun of flirting via this new medium; but I’d still like to see the version where ny152@aol.com turns out to be the fat hacker with long greasy hair. Just to see Meg Ryan’s reaction.

But if we didn’t have as much to fear from the Internet as we originally thought, the Internet still has a lot to fear from us.

It was created in a spirit of cooperation and democracy which is now being threatened by businessmen like AT&T’s CEO Ed Whitacre, who, in an interview with BusinessWeek last November, implied that it’s not enough for consumers to pay for ISPs and it’s not enough for host servers to pay for more bandwidth; he now wants each individual Web site to pay for consumer access. He wants money coming and going and coming again, and in doing so he will create what the Internet has never had: a hierarchy. “We and the cable companies have made an investment,” he told BusinessWeek, “and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

I’m not a businessman. I’m not a computer geek either. When the Internet was in its early stages and money could be made from it, I wasn’t interested. Now that its origins are part of history, I’m fascinated. That’s how much of an idiot I am. Wherever money can’t be made, that’s where you’ll find me.

Ed Whitacre doesn’t have this problem. He reportedly made $17 million last year, with a pension of over $5 million-per-year waiting for him. AT&T reported a profit of over $4.7 billion in 2005. Now they want more.

Here’s the problem I have with these guys. There are people who create something and if they’re lucky they make money from it. Tim Berners-Lee, now a Sir, created the World Wide Web in 1989. I hope he made some money from this act of creation; he changed the world. Guys like Ed Whitacre, on the other hand, create little. They simply take an existing thing and try to squeeze more money out of it. It doesn’t matter if, in the act of squeezing, they ruin the thing, as long as money is extracted. The bankruptcy of our culture is embodied in the ascendancy of these guys.

So a fictional corporation tried to erase Sandra Bullock’s life. A fictional corporation tried to dump oil tankers in the ocean. If only real corporations thought that small.

Erik Lundegaard supports net neutrality. You can read more about it at: http://www.savetheinternet.com/.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13188891/





Pelé Joins the MPAA

The Football World Cup started yesterday in Germany. The MPAA has a great sense of timing and announced yesterday that they “hired” the footie legend Pelé, to score a goal against piracy.

Pelé, the Brazilian legend, worked with the MPAA before in 2004, when his very own movie “pele forever” was pirated and distributed among the less fortunate Latin American street children. Today, he found his friends again; ready to score a goal in the MPAA’s war against piracy.

Pelé, “embodies the notion of fair play,” says the MPAA

The MPAA press release goes on:

“We are honored to have a distinguished teammate in Pelé in our fight against film copyright theft,” said Chairman and CEO of the MPAA Dan Glickman. “Pelé has a reputation for fair play and in this public service announcement, he carries that message to people - urging them to do the right thing by renting, buying or downloading movies legally.”

In the meanwhile, the pirates have the ball, and you can use google for the latest results.
http://torrentfreak.com/pele-joins-the-mpaa/





4K framing, 8TB movies

James Bond 007: Licensed to Mac
Jonny Evans

Macs have been instrumental in breathing new life into classic English spy James Bond.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced the July 17 release of the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVD Collection - and this time the infamous secret service spy isn't just licensed to kill, he's also licensed to Mac.

Unseen footage, better quality with 5:1 surround

The collection - which took over two and a half years to put together - includes digitally enhanced versions of all the James Bond movies; sound and images look sharper and sound better than ever before thanks to new 5:1 surround sound.

All twenty James Bond movies are available as part of this collection, from 1962's 'Dr No' to 2002's 'Die Another Day'.

The videos also offer a vast range of meticulously researched archive material, including host of never-before-seen interviews and on-set footage.

There's even a rarely seen clip showing the riot that took place in Soho outside the premiere of the first ever film, during which a police officer was knocked through a glass window.

The bonus footage was assembled by Ian Fleming Foundation founder and world-renowned Bond expert John Cork, who explains: "We found interviews that have never been seen since they were first broadcast, of all five Bonds," adding: "We even found footage of Roger Moore playing Bond in a 1964 TV skit!"

Reliable Macs rule the roost

For Mac users, the story grows even more interesting, as the images and sound were remastered by DTS Digital Images (once Lowry Digital Images) using a huge installation of 600 Power Mac G5s.

The project needed that kind of horsepower, explained DTS Images vice president of strategy and marketing, Mike Inchalik, who stressed: "Certainly, the Mac is the only computer that's touched this project."

Inchalik, who used PCs extensively in his previous career at Eastman Kodak, stressed that his company is very happy with how reliable Macs are: "Historically, when I joined the company it had about 200 Power Mac G4s. It was refreshing how reliable they were," he explained.

Fan failure turned out to be the biggest technical problem in the G4's, he said, adding, "with the Power Mac G5 we have six fans. It's a different world, but we are still thrilled with how reliable they are."

Amazing stats

Reliability matters: DTS had to check an astonishing 42-miles of film as part of the project. The company had to digitally remove a mind-boggling 37 million pieces of dirt and 74,000 hairs before it even began to touch-up the colour, so that even the oldest Bond movies now look as fresh as if they had been made this year.

The company deployed 700 Terabytes of storage to support the project. Company founder John Lowry explained: "This is true frame-by-frame digital restoration. When you have 42 miles of film, there's a lot to clean up."

The project team also worked to a higher resolution than DVDs support, offering a route forward to release the digitised classics on other formats in future. The film was scanned at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, in contrast with the 720 x
576 pixel resolution of DVDs. This meant that each frame of each movie weighed in at 45MB.

How do they do it?

Lowry explained the laborious, time-intensive process: "We use information from many frames to create each new image. The grain noise is random from one image to the next, but we correlate the picture elements from frame to frame so we reduce the noise while extracting the finest detail from the images."

This reduces movie grain to a consistent level across the movie, making for a sharper image in the digitally restored film.

Inchalik (who led the team that designed Kodak's very first digital film scanner in the 1970s), explained why his company chose Macs - and cost of ownership is critical.

"Apple is our defacto solution," he said. "Costs of ownership include repair, power and heat demands. Power is a big issue for us, as we are based in South California. We basically look at how many gigaflops of computing performance we get per operating dollar."

Apple needs to remain focused on the same matter to retain these large-scale Mac deployments, he warned: "Power Mac G5s remain at the top of that heap, but it may not be easy for them to stay there," he said.

iPod enhancements are possible

He also hinted that the kind of technology DTS uses to enhance movies for better-quality DVDs and HD output could also be used to serve the emerging portable video industry.

"It's interesting. On the one hand the industry is looking at how it can ensure the highest quality viewing experience on new formats like HD, but it is also looking at delivering the best possible experience on small screens - iPods and mobile phones, for example, which is a whole different game," he observed.

"There are things we can do to make for a better quality viewing experience on iPods," he said.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14919





Inside Apple's iPod Factories
Macworld staff

Apple's iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 per month, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday.

The report, 'iPod City', isn't available online. It offers photographs taken from inside the factories that make Apple music players, situated in China and owned by Foxconn.

The Mail visited some of these factories and spoke with staff there. It reports that Foxconn's Longhua plant houses 200,000 workers, remarking: "This iPod City has a population bigger than Newcastle's."

The report claims Longhua's workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player, the report claims. They earn £27 per month. The report reveals that the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory (E3) that is secured by police officers.

Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 per month - but they must pay for their accommodation and food, "which takes up half their salaries", the report observes.

A security guard told the Mail reporters that the iPod shuffle production lines are staffed by women workers because "they are more honest than male workers".

The report also explains that the nano contains 400 parts, and that its flash memory is the most expensive component. The report looks at several salient components of the nano, and describes the product as a reflecting the global way business works today. This is because the iPod nano contains parts developed by technology companies from across the planet.

Apple is just one of thousands of companies that now use Chinese facilities to manufacture its products, the report observes. Low wages, long hours and China's industrial secrecy make the country attractive to business, particularly as increased competition and consumer expectations force companies to deliver products at attractive prices.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...S&NewsID=14915





Dispute Over Evidence in Pellicano Wiretap Case
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

The nearly four-year federal investigation of Anthony Pellicano, the Hollywood private eye accused of masterminding a sprawling eavesdropping operation, has turned up only a single recording in which two people were unknowingly wiretapped, prosecutors said in court on Monday.

Even code-crackers from unspecified government agencies have failed so far to decipher the passwords Mr. Pellicano may have used to stash away many more surreptitiously recorded phone calls in his computer drives, prosecutors said.

Defense lawyers, meanwhile, are questioning whether even the single wiretap the government claims to have discovered is really that, or something else entirely.

The government said its evidence included hundreds of recorded calls in which Mr. Pellicano can be heard boasting of his wiretaps, describing them in detail, and even playing back portions of them for his clients. The detective routinely recorded his own calls, and the government has not faced the same encryption problems with those.

The disclosures mean that, barring a last-minute break in the investigation, the government's case will be based far more on circumstantial evidence and witnesses' testimony than on direct evidence of illegal wiretapping.

The developments came in a contentious court hearing over evidence that defense lawyers have been waiting for since the indictments of Mr. Pellicano and seven other people on wiretapping and conspiracy charges in February. Defense lawyers complained Monday that prosecutors had turned over too little, too late, missing a Friday deadline and continuing to withhold a large amount of important evidence.

For example, prosecutors said they still would not turn over some 250 recorded phone calls and other evidence that remain the focus of the ongoing investigation. The lead prosecutor, Daniel A. Saunders, an assistant United States attorney, has said that more indictments are forthcoming.

Mr. Saunders and another prosecutor, Kevin M. Lally, said they had turned over some 22,000 pages of written evidence and would soon provide another 100,000 pages of case files from underlying legal matters that Mr. Pellicano was investigating. The government charges that Mr. Pellicano put his wiretapping to work on behalf of corrupt lawyers seeking an illegal and unfair advantage in litigation — much of it involving the entertainment industry, but also including divorces and criminal cases.

What has not been publicly disclosed are the details of the single recording in the government's possession that it says is an illegal wiretap. According to written summaries of F.B.I. interviews seen by The New York Times, the recording concerns events that led to the divorce of a Los Angeles billionaire, Alec E. Gores, from his wife, Lisa A. Gores, in 2001.

If the government fails to crack Mr. Pellicano's passwords and turn up other direct evidence of wiretaps, that means the prosecution's star witnesses could be forced to make their painful private drama public.

Mr. Gores, principal of the private equity firm Gores Technology Group, admitted hiring Mr. Pellicano in 2000 to investigate his suspicions that his wife was cheating on him with his younger brother, Thomas T. Gores, another billionaire investor, according to summaries of F.B.I. interviews with all three family members. (A third brother, Sam Gores, runs the Paradigm talent agency.)

Mr. Pellicano installed wiretaps on both Lisa and Tom Gores's telephones, the summaries show, and confirmed Alec Gores's suspicions that the two had become inappropriately involved. Alec Gores admitted to the F.B.I. that he listened to Mr. Pellicano's wiretaps on several occasions, the summaries show. Alec Gores has not been charged, and has been assured he is only a witness in the case, said his lawyer, Louis Miller, who is also known as Skip.

The sole recording the government says was a wiretap contains a conversation that occurred the evening of Jan. 8, 2001, as Lisa and Tom Gores spoke on the phone hours after they had met at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Last November, F.B.I. summaries show, Lisa Gores listened to the recording and confirmed for investigators that the voices on it were hers and Tom Gores's.

But defense lawyers dispute whether the recording is really a wiretap. "Just because they say it, doesn't mean it's true," said Steven F. Gruel, Mr. Pellicano's lawyer. "It could be anything."

Defense lawyers said that Mr. Pellicano routinely taped his own phone calls, and that he frequently played previously recorded conversations for his clients over the phone, rather than in person. Thus, they say, the recording of Lisa and Tom Gores could actually have been a second-generation recording, rather than an original wiretap.

"Pellicano's position has been, all along, there are no wiretaps," Mr. Gruel said.

With a trial set for Oct. 24 and the federal investigation far from complete, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the government's case were on full display Monday.

Beyond whether the Gores recording is an original wiretapped recording, for example, there is the question of how strong a witness Alec Gores will be, given his own admissions that he knew of Mr. Pellicano's illegal activity. In his F.B.I. interview, Alec Gores said he paid Mr. Pellicano at least $50,000, lent him at least $50,000 more that was never repaid, and paid for a Hawaii vacation for Mr. Pellicano's whole family as a bonus for his work. He said Mr. Pellicano had worked for him for five to six months. And he said that "on at least two occasions, and possibly a third, Pellicano played Gores recordings of Lisa and Tom Gores talking on the telephone."

Mr. Miller, Alec Gores's lawyer, insisted that his client "has done absolutely nothing wrong." Asked about the summaries of Mr. Gores's statements to the F.B.I., Mr. Miller said he wished he could "comment to correct and/or clarify some of the information" contained in them, but "since my client is a witness, I cannot do so."

Even without a single undisputed wiretap to play for a jury, Mr. Saunders and Mr. Lally argued in court that they had plenty of ammunition with which to convict Mr. Pellicano and his co-defendants. They said they had "dozens of witnesses" who listened to wiretaps or even helped implement them, and "hundreds of calls" in which Mr. Pellicano played previously wiretapped conversations. In many of those recordings, the prosecutors said, Mr. Pellicano boasted to clients of what he had heard on his wiretaps — often reporting that he had eavesdropped on their legal adversaries discussing their litigation strategy.

Defense lawyers on Monday made much of the government's failure thus far to break the password protection on many of Mr. Pellicano's audio files. Prosecutors said they could at least provide a breakdown of the call times, participants and subject matter, because Mr. Pellicano incorporated that information into his computer file names.

But defense lawyers complained to Judge Dale S. Fischer of United States District Court that Mr. Pellicano's still-encrypted files could contain vital exculpatory evidence. "We're just wandering in the fog right now, without much clarity," said Terree A. Bowers, who is defending Terry N. Christensen, the lead partner in a Century City law firm, who is charged with wiretapping and conspiracy.

Mr. Saunders retorted that "passwords don't change the content" of Mr. Pellicano's digital recordings. "They don't make Terry Christensen say, 'Oh, please wiretap her, when he said, 'No, please don't wiretap her,' " he said.

Mr. Bowers pleaded with the court to order the government to provide a breakdown of all the recordings prosecutors had not turned over, detailing what they contain and the government's reason for withholding them from the defense. Judge Fischer agreed, ordering that an outside referee be appointed to review the government's evidence and decide whether it should be turned over to the defense.

Mr. Bowers scolded the prosecutors, saying they had moved ahead with indictments while still unprepared for trial.

"We need to know what they're withholding and why they're withholding it," Mr. Bowers said of the government. "We urged the government not to go into this prematurely. Here we are still waiting for the tapes to be decoded."

Mr. Saunders, in response, said that if defense lawyers were so eager to crack the code, they could simply consult Mr. Pellicano, who sat opposite the government's table, in chains and a green jailhouse jacket. "The man with the passwords, your honor, is sitting right there across the courtroom," Mr. Saunders said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/bu...hollywood.html





Defense Seek Evidence In Wiretapping Case
Greg Risling

Defense attorneys for a private investigator accused of eavesdropping on Hollywood celebrities scolded federal prosecutors Monday for not turning over evidence.

"It's their obligation to provide us what we need to exonerate our clients," said attorney Terree Bowers, adding that the process has been "like pulling teeth."

Defense attorneys noted that the 112-count indictment against private investigator Anthony Pellicano was unsealed in February after a more than three-year investigation.

Prosecutors said part of the delay has come from difficulty in decrypting about 1,300 audio files Pellicano made of his phone conversations. More than 350 audio files have been given to defense attorneys, but others haven't because the material was irrelevant, said federal prosecutor Daniel Saunders.

Prosecutors accuse Pellicano of tapping the phones of Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone and paying two police officers to run names, including those of comedians Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon, through a government database. The alleged motive was to gain advantage in criminal and civil litigation.

A total of 14 people have been charged, including Pellicano. Six have pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and wiretapping. Pellicano's trial is scheduled for Oct. 24.

Prosecutors turned over some evidence before Monday's hearing. Defense attorney Chad Hummel said he plans to ask the judge to throw out any evidence they offer in the future. Prosecutors have promised more charges are coming.

The judge ordered the appointment of a special master to review the evidence and determine what defense attorneys will be allowed to see.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1535735





Appeals Court Backs Bush On Wiretaps
Pete Yost

A federal appeals court sided with the Bush administration Friday on an electronic surveillance issue, making it easier to tap into Internet phone calls and broadband transmissions.

The court ruled 2-1 in favor of the Federal Communications Commission, which says equipment using the new technologies must be able to accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA.

Judge David Sentelle called the agency's reading of the law a reasonable interpretation. In dissent, Judge Harry Edwards said the FCC gutted an exemption for information services that he said covered the Internet and broadband.

The FCC "apparently forgot to read the words of the statute," Edwards wrote.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin said the decision ensures that law enforcement's ability to conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance will keep pace with new technology.

Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, primary sponsor of CALEA, called the court's decision contrary to congressional intent, saying it stretches a law written for "the telephone system of 1994 to cover the Internet of 2006."

Education groups challenged the FCC rule because they said the requirements would impose burdensome new costs on private university networks. They argued that broadband Internet access is an information service beyond the reach of CALEA.

The American Council on Education said it was encouraged by part of the court's ruling that the law does not apply to private networks, which include many research institutions and corporations.

But more broadly, "we believe we had established a strong legal case that CALEA did not apply to providers of facilities-based Internet access or voice-over-IP," the education council said.

Challengers to the FCC rule focused on a Supreme Court case upholding the FCC's classification of broadband as an integrated information service under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Therefore, the education groups said, broadband providers must fall within the exemption for information services in CALEA.

But the appeals court said CALEA and the Telecom act are different laws and that the Supreme Court did not find that broadband Internet access was exclusively an information service.

The two laws reflect different objectives and the commission made a reasonable policy choice, wrote Sentelle, an appointee of President Reagan.

Jim Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a private group, said the decision "threatens the privacy rights of innocent Americans as well as the ability of technology companies to innovate freely."

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who sided with Sentelle, is an appointee of President George W. Bush. Edwards was appointed by President Carter
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Have @it: A History Of The @ Sign

A blue sky. The nature of love. A child's smile. The "@" symbol.

Some things are so common place that you scarcely notice them. But that doesn't make them any less fascinating. Take the humble "@" symbol, for instance.

It's something we use dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times a day. This little "a" with the curved tail is inextricably linked to the instantaneous communication that we, as a society, are dependent upon.

But where is @ from, exactly?

Let's go back to the 6th or 7th century. Latin scribes, rubbing their wrists with history's first twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome, tried to save a little effort by shortening the Latin word ad (at, to, or toward) by stretching the upstroke of "d" and curving it over the "a".

Italian researchers unearthed 14th-century documents, where the @ sign represented a measure of quantity. The symbol also appeared in a 15th-century Latin-Spanish dictionary, defined as a gauge of weight, and soon after—according to ancient letters—was referenced as an amphora, a standard-sized clay vessel used to carry wine and grain.

Over the next few hundred years our plucky @ sign was used in trade to mean "at the price of" before resting on the first Underwood typewriter keyboard in 1885, then later rubbing symbolic shoulders with QWERTY on modern keyboards in the 1940s.

Then, one day in late 1971, computer engineer Ray Tomlinson grappled with how to properly address what would be history's very first e-mail. After 30 seconds of intense thought, he decided to separate the name of his intended recipient and their location by using the "@" symbol. He needed something that wouldn't appear in anyone's name, and settled on the ubiquitous symbol, with the added bonus of the character representing the word "at," as in, hey_you@wherever_you_happen_to_work.com.

And while in the English language, we know it as the "at symbol," it goes by many other unusual pseudonyms throughout the world.

· In South Africa, it means "monkey's tail"
· In Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia it's the "Crazy"
· In the Czech Republic, it's "pickled herring"
· The Danish refer to it as "alpha-sign," "elephant's trunk," or "pig's tail."
· The French often refer to it as "little snail."
· In Greece, it's "little duck."
· In Hungary, it's called "maggot"
· In Mandarin Chinese, it's the "mouse sign."
· The Poles say "little cat" or "pig's ear."
· Russians often refer to it as "little dog."
· There's no official word for it in Thailand, but "wiggling worm-like character."
· The Turks lovingly describe it as "ear."

But an "@" by any other name is just as sweet. Online, it's at the heart of every user's identity. It represents the breathless urgency of our connected culture: clear, concise, typographical shorthand for lobbing our thoughts, needs, and ideas to nearly anyone else in the world. Instantly.

Its ubiquity and urgency has transcended the Latin alphabet of its origins to worm its way into other language groups, including Arabic and Japanese.

And that, web wanderers, is where it's @.
http://h30046.www3.hp.com/news_artic...toryofATSymbol





Anti-Trust Officials Cautious About iTunes Attack
David Lawsky

European competition officials are wary about proposals to crack open Apple Computer's <AAPL.O> iTunes Web store to other music players, despite concerns shown by consumer advocates.

The French parliament is debating a new copyright bill that would require Apple to permit iTunes music to play on devices other than its iPod.

Scandinavian ombudsmen have said they may act, and others in the European Union are also contemplating doing so.

But Philip Lowe, director general of competition at the European Commission, said that although some member states believed there should be open access to all Web sites, he wanted to wait.

"We wouldn't at this stage regard this as an instance of major concern until we've seen further market developments," Lowe told reporters this week.

He said Apple had obtained its strong market position in open competition with many similar players, including some with their own Web sites.

Protecting Future Consumers?

One of the most outspoken government advocates on the issue is Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon, who said he would act soon depending on how Apple responds to a letter the government had sent the company.

If Apple can require an iPod for songs via iTunes, then music, book and film companies might restrict their products to specific players too, he said.

"You will have a difficult situation for the consumer ... the consumer has to have four or five gadgets to have the availability of the content that he wants," Thon said in a telephone interview.

"We want to look at the question before it is too late."

Thon cited Norwegian consumer law as saying contracts must be "fair and balanced", adding that the approach taken by Apple violated "basic consumer principles".

"We believe that it could be questioned (as) an infringement of rights. I have the right to use whatever I bought to what I want to use it for," he said.

Thon is waiting to see what Apple says when it replies to a letter from his department by a deadline this summer. He said his office was reviewing its options, but could bring charges against Apple in Norway's market court.

However, the question of using proprietary standards to exclude competitors is usually handled by antitrust enforcers. Even in Norway, a top antitrust enforcer is cautioning against hasty action.

"The market for legally downloadable music files is emerging," said Knut Eggum Johansen, director general of Norway's competition agency.

"This may be an argument for competition authorities to have a somewhat more hands-off approach," he said. Johansen noted that many other firms produced portable music players, and music purchased via iTunes could be bought on CDs or other Web sites.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ogy+NewsNews-2





Microsoft Readying Apple iPod Rival: Sources

Software giant Microsoft Corp. is laying the groundwork to compete against Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod digital entertainment device and iTunes service, sources familiar with the discussions and plans said on Friday.

Microsoft has held licensing discussions with the music industry to create its own music service, the sources told Reuters.

The Redmond, Washington-based developer of software that runs most of the world's PCs is also demonstrating an entertainment device that plays videos and music, the sources said.

It is unclear when Microsoft plans to launch, they said.

Microsoft's software technology has provided the copyright framework for a handful of subscription music services globally. But these services have failed to topple Apple's dominance in music and device sales, despite well financed backers including Yahoo Inc..

Apple and Microsoft were not immediately reachable for comment.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ogy+NewsNews-2





Microsoft Set To Patch Word, ActiveX

On Tuesday the company plans to release a whopping twelve security patches for its products
Robert McMillan

Windows administrators are going to be busy next week, as Microsoft plans to release twelve security patches for its products. The updates will include a fix for a widely reported vulnerability in Microsoft Word, as well as changes to the way Internet Explorer (IE) handles ActiveX that might cause headaches for some.

Nine of the patches will address vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system, some of which Microsoft rates critical. There will also be one "Important" fix for Microsoft Exchange, and two patches for Microsoft Office, including software that repairs the Word bug.

Last month hackers began e-mailing the Word malware to a handful of victims -- mostly within government agencies or contractors -- in a series of extremely targeted attacks, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute.

But as knowledge of the Word flaw has spread, researchers like Ullrich fear that it may be used in a more widespread attack. The vulnerability can be exploited to run unauthorized software on PCs, although users must first be first tricked into opening a maliciously encoded Word document.

Microsoft also plans to finalize changes to the way IE processes dynamic content using ActiveX. Microsoft is changing the way IE works in response to a 2003 patent lawsuit loss to the University of California and Eolas Technologies Inc.

The changes will force developers to reprogram parts of their Web sites and intranets. Otherwise, IE will force users to click on a pop-up "tool tip" dialog box before being able to interact with things like Flash or QuickTime.

Microsoft has actually been rolling these changes into IE for months, but has offered users a "compatibility patch" that allowed IE to work on Web sites that had not been reprogrammed. With Tuesday's updates, though, there will be no way to avoid the ActiveX changes.

The biggest headache, however, will come from the sheer number of updates being released Tuesday, said Susan Bradley, chief technology officer with Tamiyasu, Smith, Horn and Braun, Accountancy Corp.

Complicating matters is the fact that these patches will be released in the middle of Microsoft's Tech-Ed user conference. "I'll be at Tech-Ed in Boston and deciding if I remotely patch over the weekend or not," Bradley said via e-mail.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/...wordbug_1.html





Windows Gets Big Security Update
BBC

One of the biggest security updates for more than a year is being released by Microsoft to fix 12 software flaws.

Nine of the updates apply to the Windows operating system and one is deemed critical, a rating reserved for the most serious security problems.

At least one of the loopholes being patched is already being actively exploited by malicious hackers.

Windows users are being urged to download the patches as soon as they become available on Tuesday 13 June.

Support shift

Microsoft issues its security patches on the second Tuesday of every month and June's update will be the biggest for more than a year.

This is because Microsoft is not only tackling security problems but also the fallout of a legal case that the software giant lost.

We strongly recommend that those of you who are still running these older versions of Windows upgrade to a newer, more secure version, such as Windows XP SP2, as soon as possible - Microsoft advice

Microsoft gives advance notice of what is in its security patches to help companies plan how best to install the software and limit the impact on day-to-day business.

While most of the updates apply to Windows, two are for the Office suite of products and one for the Exchange e-mail server software.

One of the security problems being tackled in Office was found in Microsoft's Word software and the virus created to exploit it has been dubbed Backdoor.Ginwui. The virus and loophole were first discovered in mid-May.

The virus travels in an e-mail bearing a Word document that purports to summarise the results of a US-Asia summit.

Legal woes

Another of the updates has come about as a result of a courtroom clash between Microsoft and Eolas over technology in the Internet Explorer browser. The lawsuit ended with a $521m (£283m) judgement against Microsoft.

Microsoft had to re-engineer Internet Explorer to stop a technology known as ActiveX automatically starting when users visit some websites.

Before now, users could choose to apply this change to their browser, but this update makes it mandatory.

At the same time as information about the update was being released, Microsoft mentioned that it will not be able to patch Windows 98 and ME against a loophole discovered in April 2006.

Fixing this bug in the ageing software would require a major re-write of the Windows Explorer program used in these old copies of the operating system.

Microsoft is not prepared to undertake this work, given that all support for Windows 98 and ME ends on 11 July 2006.

On its security blog Microsoft wrote: "We strongly recommend that those of you who are still running these older versions of Windows upgrade to a newer, more secure version, such as Windows XP SP2, as soon as possible."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/5071656.stm





New Mathematical Method Provides Better Way To Analyze Noise

Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory system is the fastest of the five senses. Researchers credit this discrepancy to a series of lightning-fast calculations in the brain that translate minimal input into maximal understanding. And whatever those calculations are, they’re far more precise than any sound-analysis program that exists today.

In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a sound-analysis breakthrough, featuring a mathematical method or “algorithm” that’s far more nuanced at transforming sound into a visual representation than current methods. “This outperforms everything in the market as a general method of sound analysis,” Magnasco says. In fact, he notes, it may be the same type of method the brain actually uses.

Magnasco collaborated with Timothy Gardner, a former Rockefeller graduate student who is now a Burroughs Wellcome Fund fellow at MIT, to figure out how to get computers to process complex, rapidly changing sounds the same way the brain does. They struck upon a mathematical method that reassigned a sound’s rate and frequency data into a set of points that they could make into a histogram — a visual, two-dimensional map of how a sound’s individual frequencies move in time. When they tested their technique against other sound-analysis programs, they found that it gave them a much greater ability to tease out the sound they were interested in from the noise that surrounded it.

One fundamental observation enabled this vast improvement: They were able to visualize the areas in which there was no sound at all. The two researchers used white noise — hissing similar to what you might hear on an un-tuned FM radio — because it’s the most complex sound available, with exactly the same amount of energy at all frequency levels. When they plugged their algorithm into a computer, it reassigned each tone and plotted the data points on a graph in which the x-axis was time and the y-axis was frequency.

The resulting histograms showed thin, froth-like images, each “bubble” encircling a blue spot. Each blue spot indicated a zero, or a moment during which there was no sound at a particular frequency. “There is a theorem,” Magnasco says, “that tells us that we can know what the sound was by knowing when there was no sound.” In other words, their pictures were being determined not by where there was volume, but where there was silence.

“If you want to show that your analysis is a valid signal estimation method, you have to understand what a sound looks like when it’s embedded in noise,” Magnasco says. So he added a constant tone beneath the white noise. That tone appeared in their histograms as a thin yellow band, bubble edges converging in a horizontal line that cut straight through the center of the froth. This, he says, proves that their algorithm is a viable method of analysis, and one that may be related to how the mammalian brain parses sound.

“The applications are immense, and can be used in most fields of science and technology,” Magnasco says. And those applications aren’t limited to sound, either. It can be used for any kind of data in which a series of time points are juxtaposed with discrete frequencies that are important to pick up. Radar and sonar both depend on this kind of time-frequency analysis, as does speech-recognition software. Medical tests such as electroencephalograms (EEGs), which measure multiple, discrete brainwaves use it, too.

Geologists use time-frequency data to determine the composition of the ground under a surveyor’s feet, and an angler’s fishfinder uses the method to determine the water’s depth and locate schools of fish. But current methods are far from exact, so the algorithm has plenty of potential opportunities. “If we were able to do extremely high-resolution time-frequency analysis, we’d get unbelievable amounts of information from technologies like radar,” Magnasco says. “With radar now, for instance, you’d be able to tell there was a helicopter. With this algorithm, you’d be able to pick out each one of its blades.” With this algorithm, researchers could one day give computers the same acuity as human ears, and give cochlear implants the power of 8,000 hair cells.
http://www.physorg.com/news69001445.html





Pentagon Sets Its Sights On Social Networking Websites
Paul Marks

"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.

Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.

Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.

The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.

On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.

The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members (see Graph).

The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.

So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.

Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."

The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.

The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.

Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns.

But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says.

Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...mg19025556.200





BT Exec Pins Google As 'Our Biggest Threat'
David Meyer

Google is becoming BT's biggest competitor--that's the surprise assessment coming from the telecom giant's chief information officer.

Speaking at the Gigaworld IT conference here, CIO Al-Noor Ramji told delegates on Wednesday that U.K.-based BT needs to change to keep pace with fast-moving businesses such as Google.

"We see Google as our biggest threat," Ramji said. "They don't mean to...it's almost incidental." He acknowledged that Google comes from a "different world" but suggested that it had "morphed" into a different company and warned that Google could do anything BT could do in the consumer arena.

However, while conceding that he did not know the endgame, Ramji claimed that BT "can do anything Google can do" if it moves beyond its traditional role as a supplier of telecommunications services.

"I've learned that technology is the easiest thing to do. The transformation of the company is most important," he said.

Ramji also referred to the challenges that lay ahead in BT's expansion into Internet Protocol television (IPTV), with its BT Vision service.

Citing new online services such as YouTube, the CIO said BT's customers had "morphed into three different roles now: customer, supplier and competitor."

Analysts were quick to add a heavy note of caution to Ramji's statements.

"I think he's a little bit ahead of his time," said Lars Godell, principal analyst in Forrester's Telecom & Networks research team. "I give him credit for thinking ahead and being proactive about competitive threats. But on the other hand the question is, is the threat realistic? Google doesn't see BT as a competitor."

"I think consumers still need to pay for bandwidth. That's the business of a telco, and I don't see Google becoming a full service telco. I don't see Google owning an infrastructure," Godell told ZDNet UK.

Google has made some moves into the telecom space in recent months, with its involvement in the launch of free wireless services in California.

The search giant also sparked a wave of speculation in 2005 when it began showing interest in unused fiber networks. Analysts, though, suggested that Google was more likely to be looking at cutting the cost of connecting its data centers, rather than offering telecom services.

Referring to the services that BT plans to introduce later this year, Godell said: "It will take five to 10 years before those value-added services will become more important (than providing bandwidth) to a telco's revenue stream."

"I don't think it will be easy for BT or anyone else to move into content," Godell said, adding that "BT has been in IT services for 20 years--the skills that are needed to be successful in content are so different from those needed for telecoms."

He also suggested that the motivation for Ramji's statements may stem from a desire to fire up his IT team.

"Many executives like to talk about external threats--sometimes it's to energize their own organization, making sure they're not complacent, which is legitimate. They might exaggerate a little to get their attention and open up their minds a little bit--that's what he might have done."

The analyst also suggested that it could have been deliberate scaremongering by the BT executive.

"A lot of painful changes are taking place inside BT from an employee perspective," Godell said. "If you can use an external threat to justify internal changes, it's easier to sell internally."
http://news.com.com/BT+exec+pins+Goo...3-6081472.html





Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks an Expansion of Power
John Markoff and Saul Hansell

On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.

The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.

Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.

The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.

The fact that Google is behind the data center, referred to locally as Project 02, has been reported in the local press. But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year.

"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."

Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers that once came seeking the cheap power that flows from the dams holding back the powerful Columbia. The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year.

"We're trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they're trying to keep us all away," said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. "Our two cultures aren't matching very well."

Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the search engine war is being waged.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce.

Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion. Its center here, whose cost is undisclosed, shows what that money is meant to buy.

Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest academic research, that can process more data — faster and cheaper — than its rivals.

"Google wants to raise the barriers to entry by competitors by making the baseline service very expensive," said Brian Reid, a former Google executive who is now director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif.

The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years.

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users.

Microsoft's Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers, and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document.

Computer scientists and computer networking experts caution that it is impossible to compare the two companies' efforts directly. Yet it is the way in which Google has built its globally distributed network that illustrates the daunting task of its competitors in catching up.

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google."

Google's inclination to secrecy began in its days as a private company in an effort to keep its rivals from determining the profits it was making from Web search advertising. But its culture of secrecy has grown to pervade virtually all of its dealings with the news media and even its business partners.

In the end, of course, corporate secrets have a short shelf life in a search engine age. Entering "Dalles Google" as a Google query turns up plenty of revealing results. But Google Earth, the satellite mapping service, like its rivals, so far shows the 30-acre parcel here quite undeveloped.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/te...rtner=homepage





More BASE-Jumping Laws Unlikely In Idaho
John Miller

The jumpers leaping from the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls free-fall for three seconds before releasing their parachutes during a 486-foot descent.

The bridge is the only manmade location in the United States where so-called BASE jumpers - short for the buildings, antennae, spans and earth from which participants leap - aren't required to get a special permit for year-round jumps.

It also was the scene of four accidents in as many days last month, including one that killed a 34-year-old California woman. Still, officials say they don't have any plans to increase local regulation of the sport.

"We spend more time out on lost snowmobilers than we ever do on BASE jumping," said Nancy Howell, spokeswoman for the Twin Falls County Sheriff's Department. "We're not reassessing anything."

Unlike skydiving, where people jumping out of an airplane have several thousand feet to pull their parachutes, the margin for error in BASE jumping is much narrower. Once they jump, they have only a few seconds to deploy parachutes packed specially to fill with air quickly.

Shannon Carmel Dean of Alameda, Calif., became the third person to die since 2002 while jumping from the Perrine Bridge when she slammed into the Snake River on May 29 after her parachute failed to deploy.

Since 1981, there have been at least 99 BASE-jump fatalities around the world, according to the World BASE Fatality List, a Web site maintained by a BASE jumper.

Those risks haven't kept about 1,500 BASE jumpers around the world from making an estimated 40,000 jumps annually, said Martin Tilley, owner of Asylum Designs, an Auburn, Calif., company that makes equipment for BASE jumping.

"BASE jumping is never going to go away," he said. "You're never going to eliminate the desire for people to thrust themselves off fixed objects and float safely to earth with the aid of a parachute."

In Twin Falls, jumping already has resumed since Dean's death, said Tom Aiello, a BASE-jumping instructor.

"I wouldn't exactly say it's business as usual," Aiello said. "But things go on."

Twin Falls officials have quietly encouraged BASE jumping since it began there in the 1980s, in part because the estimated 5,000 jumps each year bring cash into the local economy.

But in most of the United States, jumpers often face arrest. The National Park Service doesn't permit BASE jumping, including from the monoliths of Yosemite National Park, where six people had died, including a woman who was protesting the ban. An 876-foot bridge over West Virginia's New River Gorge is open just once a year.

BASE jumping has been forbidden for years on 730-foot Foresthill Bridge in Auburn, Calif., where a stuntman in the Vin Diesel movie "XXX" used a stolen Corvette to start a memorable BASE jump. (The film crew had a permit. Diesel's character gets arrested.)

An estimated 50 people jump each year anyway. Park managers issue about three $250 citations annually.

"One guy bungee jumped, and as he got up to the top, he cut himself loose, and BASE jumped down," said Mike Lynch, the area's supervising ranger. "He was cited. Or as we like to say, given his 'certification' on the jump."

Officials are considering requests to loosen the restrictions. But Lynch said nothing is decided, and the existing ban will likely remain.

A new draft of National Park Service management policies released in October had proposed striking the provision banning BASE jumping. The final version is due out later this year, but officials in Washington, D.C., say it would still be up to park superintendents whether to issue permits. So far, no park officials have expressed interest in doing so.

"It would probably take a lot of courage for superintendents to propose allowing BASE jumping because it has had such a difficult history in the parks," said Chick Fagan, deputy chief in the NPS's office of policy.

Although leaping from bridges and other easily accessible sites is largely forbidden, jumpers can spring freely from remote cliffs on Bureau of Land Management territory, including hundreds of sites in the Utah desert.

Unlike the National Park Service, BLM officials say their mission is to promote "multiple use" of public land, including cattle grazing, hunting and BASE jumping. They do, however, encourage etiquette to reduce conflicts with others on the land.

"We don't like people to jump into campgrounds," said Maggie Wyatt, BLM field manager in Moab, Utah. "It tends to alarm the campers."

Marta Empinotti-Pouchert, 41, who teaches BASE jumping to experienced skydivers in Moab, was in Twin Falls the day Dean died.

"It's always devastating," Empinotti-Pouchert said. "But as a jumper, you think, 'What's the option?' To live not fully? To be afraid of living? Because people like us - we need this."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists
Grant Robertson

King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.

"I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."

It confuses me too Weird Al. I think you deserve at least an equal amount of compensation for each digital track sold as you would be entitled to for that same one track on CD.

As you said Al, "Go figure". I'm a big fan, you've given me a lot of fun music over the years, and I wanted to do what you said. So, I went and did the math.

Here's what I found out:

According to DownhillBattle, Apple pays the labels $0.65 (some say its as high as $0.80) of the $0.99 cents paid for your song.

So, for an album with the average 12 songs, like your current release "Poodle Hat" which has exactly 12, Apple takes in $11.88. Apple sends the label $7.80. That's $4.08 cents for the boys in Cupertino. And, it might be a pretty reasonable split if you then received the whole $7.80. Apple would take 35% of your work, for developing the infrastructure that makes you able to sell it to millions of people while you sleep, instead of selling it to 5 people out of your van in the parking lot of Stuckey's. That's what we call a value equation. Apple did work, and got paid for it. You did an arguably larger portion of the work, by creating something people wanted to buy in the first place, so Apple got a little money, and you got a good deal more.

Unfortunately, that's not how this version of the universe operates. So Apple sends the check to your record label.

The record label takes that $7.80. And, let's face it, they had something to do with your making the album. In some cases, you may have even been contractually required to make another album, whether you felt like it or not. So, you could say that without the record company, you'd not have made an album at all. They paid for the production, and some marketing, and now they should get paid right along side of you as the artist. You created the music, they recorded it and packaged it, marketed and distributed it. Right?

Well, not exactly. First, many artists can record fantastic music of very high quality in their own home studios. So, for some artists the record label is more marketing firm than recording technician(or, the guy who pays for one). But if the record label paid for your recording they will take 100% of sales until the recording costs are re-imbursed. They'll also keep taking money until paid back for promotional costs, packaging design and more.

If you manage to break even, here's where the money just starts rolling in. Right? The label got their money back (by taking $7.80 of every $7.80 that Apple paid them) so, now they're going to start sending you most of the $7.80 per record they are receiving.

Not so fast. According to widely circulated data from the coverage of The Alman Brothers suit against Sony BMG, you could expect something like $45 of each thousand songs sold to be paid to you in royalties. That's around 4% of the amount paid to Apple for your work, and around 5.7% of what was paid to the label. For The Almans', that works out to $24,000 when taking Nielsen SoundScan data of 538,000 Almans' songs sold as downloads since mid-2002. I don't have SoundScan data on your sales, but I'm sure you do. So the labels and Apple got 96% and you got %4. And as you said, there were no packaging, shipping or storage costs for your album sold though iTunes.

I went to Amazon.com and found that your album is selling for $14.98. That's $3.10 more than iTunes, but you get an actual CD, liner notes and a snazzy jewel case. And, you actually own the CD. You're really just kinda leasing the songs with iTunes, but we'll save that for another time. Suffice it to say that I think $14.98 is a totally reasonable price.

If your deal with your record company is like The Alman Brothers, then you're getting something like $315.50 for those same 1,000 songs (83.3 CDs worth). That works out to $0.31 cents per song, instead of the $0.045 on a digital download.

Ouch! It turns out you were being more than kind to that fan by telling him to buy either format he wanted, you're losing $0.265 cents per song! . If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you'd be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!

Eighty Five Percent! If they cut my income by 85%, I'd be making soup from old shoes down by the railroad tracks!

My advice is probably similar to what your accountant's would be. Tell your fans to buy a CD, your retirement income may depend on it.
http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2...-some-artists/





Ask the Law Geek

Install Kazaa... Get Fined $750 - The RIAA's Newest Plan of Attack?
Stewart Rutledge

I think the RIAA is on steroids.

Coming off some huge victories against P2P and thousands of dastardly downloading teenagers, the RIAA is trying to take the definition of copyright infringement a step further in a new case. If they win on their terms, then you're probably violating someone's copyright right now.

Read on to find out some of the newest tactics of those defenders of freedom at the RIAA, and feel free to post questions in the comments sections or send them to tips at lifehacker.com.
Question 1: Is it true that I can get in trouble for just having "Shared Folders" on my computer?

If the recording industry, the movie industry, the United States Attorney's Office and the Department of Justice have their way, then you could be punished for merely having Shared Folders on your computer. Get used to the name Elektra v. Barker. It's probably going to be huge.

Although the RIAA has filed thousands of complaints, in this one, it takes its complaint a step farther and alleges that by merely having Shared Folders on your computer, you are "making files available for distribution" thus you are liable for copyright infringement.

But get this, you could be found liable even if all the files in your Shared Folder were legally obtained. That is one small step in wording but one gigantic leap in potential liability. Forget intent. Forget notice. Even forget ignorance. If you share copyrighted files, you are a law-breaking copyright infringer... no questions asked. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. You have to read this stuff to believe it. (By the way, the defendant, Denise Barker, was sharing 611 MP3s through Kazaa; the RIAA described this as "copyright infringement on a massive scale." Hilarious.)

Fortunately, this case is brand new and only in the lower courts in New York. Of course, the EFF is on the case like a pack of wild dogs, and this could turn out to be the showdown that both technology and the government have been looking for. It actually could be just the thing the courts needed to see the potential effects of unlimited liability that the recording industry seems to desire.

So here's a roundup of electronic copyright infringement in US courts so far:

· Sony v. Universal: VCRs are OK for in-home "time-shifting" because they have a "substantial non-infringing use" and would have a small effect on the market.
· Napster: Everything you ever did was illegal. We (the court) wish you were never born.
· MGM v. Grokster: If evidence "shows statements or actions directed to promoting infringement," but beyond mere knowledge or potential for infringement, then the producer of that device may be held liable for copyright infringement, e.g. Morpheus.
· Elektra v. Barker: (Proposed) If your computer allows sharing of copyrighted materials, with or without your knowledge or intent to share those files, and even if those files are rightfully owned by you, you may be held liable for copyright infringement.

On the face of the Barker complaint, yes, this is just as crazy as it sounds. For now, it's in the hands of the Honorable Kenneth Karas.
Question 2: Is it illegal to rip my DVDs? What if I only rip it to my PC for my own personal viewing?

Thanks to people like Senator Orrin Hatch, unless you want to pay to rip your DVDs, then it's illegal. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to circumvent encryption measures intended to prevent copyright infringement.

You've all heard of DeCSS, and now you all know that it's illegal. But, many for-profit utilities employ content scrambling system (CSS) decoders licensed directly from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA).

So, you want to watch your DVDs on your PSP? All you have to do is decode CSS in a DVD CCA-licensed way staying clear of DeCSS, or you'll violate the DMCA. I think I just wrote a poem.

Seriously, the DMCA is very strict on circumventing content protection measures, and even hosting the DeCSS code is now against the law. Protesters have created a variety of methods to continue its distribution including everything from distributing DeCSS as a coded haiku to simply selling tshirts with the code printed on them. Results?

The guy that wrote the haiku... sued.

The guy that sold the tshirts... sued.

If you get caught using, hosting, or distributing DeCSS, you can expect a letter from Mr. Hemanshu Nigam, Director, Worldwide Internet Enforcement. I don't know why they didn't just have ole Heman legally change his name to Big Brother. It wouldn't sound quite so threatening.

By the way, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this very column could be interpreted to violate the terms of the DMCA. So sue me.
Question 3: But can't I just destroy my hard drive if I think I'm about to get busted for something?

Spoliation of evidence... it's not a good thing, and if the court finds that you willfully destroyed evidence then the court may automatically presume the evidence went against you. This can work out very badly for you in front of a jury. In addition to this, you may be subject to sanctions, separate lawsuits and other penalties just for destroying the evidence, even if all the hard drive contained were pictures of Bea Arthur.

It's all fun and games 'til someone loses an eye(pod)...

This is really getting out of hand. As bandwidth explodes, online storage increases exponentially, and downloading continues to pour in, those who make money off copyrights are quickly trying to put out the fire. But, instead of embracing this technology as an incentive to create and an opportunity to produce (after all, that is the point of copyright law), the RIAA, MPAA, the DoJ, USAtty, NWA, and several other powerful acronyms are doing everything they can to stifle this technological renaissance. But, they're trying to put out a forest fire with a broom; it'll never work. Outlaw sharing and only outlaws will share.

It's time for a new approach, one that re-embraces the real purpose of copyrights. This doesn't involve unlimited downloading or extermination of the internet. Whether those who are truly stealing music right now like it or not, I, for one, think it's going to arrive in the form of full-subscription computing. I've said this for years, but it can't be long now before these "rights" you own to your products are merely rights to use a remote copy. No more stealing; no more fighting. Just pay a reasonable fee that the market determines and use the product fairly.

Until that becomes a reality, don't steal, be honest with yourself, and sit back and enjoy the copyfights.

Before you go and firebomb the RIAA, remember that this column is not intended as legal advice; it's only opinion. These statements are nothing more than opinions of the author who is a law student but is not a lawyer. Don't make any legal decisions based on this opinion article. Talk to a real lawyer, and, if you're in this kind of trouble, talk to a really GOOD lawyer.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/a...ack-179336.php





The File Pirate’s Manifesto
Alan Dean Avery

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” - James Madison

Introduction

In the not so distant future, historians will look back on our era and categorize us (as they have categorized earlier civilizations) by the manufacture of our tools. Having moved beyond chipped stone and forged iron, our tools are cobbled together not of matter, but of thought. We live in the information age. One’s ability to master their own destiny is governed by their access to knowledge and its application. Those few vocations requiring no specialized knowledge are modern forms of indentured servitude, offering the ignorant and desperate only enough to survive for short periods – preventing these poor souls from finding independence from their wage masters. Those occupations providing a higher socio-economic station are little better. Even with the advantage of greater monetary wealth, the average upper middle class family would be reduced to insolvency in a few months without employment. In exchange for the ability to keep one’s head above the water, we will spend the bulk of our waking hours carrying out the will of a corporate master.

The tools of knowledge are familiar to us – Computers, the Internet, mass media, and less frequently, the printed word. Our ability to pass knowledge from one generation to the next has enabled us, as a species, to move beyond the crude methods of the past, and learn beyond the wisdom of those whose efforts removed us from the caves. It is not simply our ability to learn and invent which has accomplished this feat – It is our ability to share knowledge, and our ability to reinvent that sets us apart from the animals. This, coupled with our unique ability to record and store information sets us above them.

There is a new caste system, a more insidious method of keeping the upper crust atop the huddled masses. Money is now the fruit, more than it is the tool of oppression. The foundation of the new hierarchy is simple: Maintain knowledge and inquiry as the domain of the wealthy, and encourage the general populace to strive for ignorance.

Even the public schools are geared to do everything possible to discourage, punish, and alienate those who would seek knowledge outside the bounds of the accepted curriculum. The focus of the publicly educated pupil is directed primarily towards conforming to arbitrary societal standards, and excluding – even despising – those who do not.

Consider the price of a decent education, by which I mean the sort of education that leads to presidency – Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Duke – Those schools with a history of success. The price of that kind of education is around 30,000 to 50,000+ per year. The cost of the most statistically effective erudition is beyond the means of the common man. Consider the costs of the various certifications for the information technology field. The training manuals alone will set you back as much as $150 each, and certification can run well into the thousands of dollars. That’s a lot of money for someone who struggles just to keep food on the table.

Wealth follows power, and power follows knowledge, which is why ‘Old Money’ makes information that is profitable or powerful too expensive for the average Joe.

There can be no real equality in a society where the common person is denied access to the total depth and breadth of information, knowledge, culture, and education.

The aristocracy does not control these things unimpeded. There are, among the citizenry, those who would strike back against federally mandated ignorance. There is a new weapon against intellectual oppression. There is a new revolution afoot. That weapon is filesharing, and we are the revolutionaries.

Already the wealthy have taken up legal arms against our ranks, causing the less courageous among us to flee. They know we pose a threat to their rule. Their mistake has thinned our numbers, but left us with only the most resolute, the most capable of prosecuting this information war. Our digital army is ever growing - we must take care to prepare and educate not just ourselves, but also the newest among us. It is to this end that I set these words to the page.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” -Thomas Jefferson

The Morality of Piracy

There is more at stake here than our ability to download music and movies for free. Without access to culture, one cannot hope to be a part of that culture. In his day, those who were interested could hear the works of Bach – often free of charge – in a number of venues. Apparently, we are meant to believe that the magnum opus of Britney Spears is of intrinsically greater value than the offerings of J.S. Bach. Somewhere, I suspect there is a coffin suffering the friction burns that can only be caused by a long dead German composer rolling over in his grave.

Art is ever erected upon a foundation of antecedent works. For an artist to create significant art, they must first have access to the media of the day. Without access to cultural influence, there is no reference from which to contribute, and seldom the inspiration to do so. Should inability to pay the usurious prices associated with culture bearing media (CDs, DVDs, et al.) disqualify one from the possibility of an artistic trade? Should even the poorest among us be excluded from the sphere of human creativity? Had this been the case in the past, we would never have known the works Johannes Brahms or Vincent van Gogh.

Somewhere deep down we know that sharing is right. Perhaps we don’t know how – but we are certain that we are doing the right thing when we open up those shares. We are rewarded with the feeling of a good deed well done. It’s hard to argue with that.

Most of us have tried to figure out how an illegal activity could possibly be ethically correct. A common argument is that copyright infringement is not really a crime. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines crime as “An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction.” Both sending and receiving copyrighted files breaks laws. People have at this point been convicted for this. those people have received punishment. Piracy thus fits the definition of crime.

In order to be righteous in the commission of a crime, it behooves us to qualify our inherent gut instinct. We must discern for ourselves what greater good is served in plundering the media vendors, and information brokers. Without this, we are on shaky ground when entering into debate. Without a solid, logically considered argument for our position, we can never gain victory over the media barons.
Already we have discussed combating socio-intellectual oppression. Tied closely with this concept is the idea of the free exchange and flow of information – the belief that all knowledge, wisdom, information, and culture should be freely and readily accessible to all people regardless of their station. The sum of human wisdom will increase exponentially when the right minds are given unrestricted admittance to the right knowledge at the right time.

Ultimately, it falls to the individual to discern for themself why filesharing is the right thing to do. Each person may have completely different answers, but it is important to know for yourself what these answers are. If you believe in the cause, you will argue it more effectively. When you can argue effectively, you will bring more to the cause.

The Code of the File Pirate

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am not trying to define what we are, because what we are isn't working. We are losing the struggle. Slowly and gradually in the manner of long standing bureaucracy we are being backed into a corner from which there will be no escape.

I am suggesting a course of action, the ultimate goal of which is the unconditional surrender of the copyright barons, and the legal acquiescence to our unacknowledged right to have unimpeded access to the depth and breadth of our society's culture, knowledge and information. If you would pay your oppressor while he seeks the means to see you imprisoned, that is certainly your right. Our opposition has great wealth, but we give them that wealth. They fight us with our own resources. We should seek to take that from them. Not for a day, as a demonstration of protest, but for the months and years ahead. I propose not a single shot fired in lame dissent, but a siege upon the fortress of media which we ourselves paid to build.

History has taught us that no liberty has ever been granted which was not first demanded, and finally taken by the populace. The code is by no means law, simply suggestion. It is upon you, the pirate, to decide what course of action best serves our goals. However, the more common ground we can find in our goals, the more effective we will be when we struggle together against the chains of tyranny.

_________________


1. The Pirate always shares the full extent of their stash.

2. The goal of the Pirate is to give more to the community than they take.

3. The Pirate doesn’t leech. Even if they’re stuck on dial-up. The Pirate doesn’t complain about those who do leech. their sterling example and generosity may someday cure their ignorance.

4. The Pirate never seeks remuneration, monetary or otherwise, for files, regardless of how they were acquired.

5. The Pirate shares with as many people as possible for as long as possible by keeping their shares open, round the clock.

6. The Pirate only buys CDs, and DVDs used and never goes to the theatre. The enemies of filesharing should never be strengthened with the pirate’s hard-earned wages.

7. The Pirate stays politically educated and votes.

8. The Pirate’s reward is in helping to create a more ideal world by serving as part of an egalitarian sharing structure.

9. The Pirate always seeks to stay ahead of the law. An errant law is an affront to justice. The Pirate exposes injustice to the media.

10. The Pirate abhors censorship – even censorship of the abhorrent.

http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=9588





What Happens When A Million Filesharers Come Out Of The Closet?
TankGirl

What happens when a nation like Sweden decides to allow filesharing for its citizens? No more fear of police or copyright cartels harassing you because of filesharing. Freedom to share as much as you want, to download as much as you want, as fast as your broadband connection can deliver. And should somebody dare to harass you because of what you are doing, he would be committing a crime.

What happens when the fear factor is removed from filesharing? Well, for starters, the filesharers will come out of the closet.

In this case a million of them. Or perhaps two, because nobody really knows. People don’t advertise these things in public. But now that it will be legal and acceptable, they will of course advertise it. And they will be proud of it. That’s what coming out of the closet does to people.

And then they can start doing some amazing things together.

Like building the world’s finest Library of Culture. Do the Swedish filesharers have the resources for it? Yes, they have a million computers, hundreds of petabytes of storage and world class broadband network. Do they have the skills to do it? Yes, they are the most advanced filesharing nation on the planet in a well-educated high-tech country. Do they have the motivation to do it? Oh yes - actually they have been doing it already for a long time. They just had to keep all their treasures in that closet of fear. But now, coming out of the closet, they can bring their treasures out as well, and the Library of Culture can open.

It will be a little messy and disorganized in the beginning. But the collection will be breathtaking anyway from the first day on. And it won’t take long until it all gets better organized and sorted out, and complete high-quality discographies and filmographies will start to show up. Expert collections of rarities will be available. And all the new popular items will of course be available right after their release in any required quantity as high-speed torrents. Sounds like God meant online libraries to be?

When the Swedes will have their Culture Library running, the world cannot avoid hearing about it. There will be many foreigners curious to visit the place. And the Swedes won’t mind, they will welcome the foreign visitors. But for you as a foreigner there might be one slight problem. It might be that your government has made it a crime for you to visit such a library. They might even have forced you to use your local mall instead to satisfy all your cultural needs.

So if there is a legal problem in your country about visiting fine foreign libraries, think twice before you go and have a curious peek at the Swedish one. You just might be tempted to commit a crime.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22774





Not Enron material

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé
Alan Finder

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company's president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.

At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate's Web page with this description of his interests: "smokin' blunts" (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.

"A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?" said the company's president, Brad Karsh. "Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?"

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

When viewed by corporate recruiters or admissions officials at graduate and professional schools, such pages can make students look immature and unprofessional, at best.

"It's a growing phenomenon," said Michael Sciola, director of the career resource center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There are lots of employers that Google. Now they've taken the next step."

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors that they were looking at the sites, said Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development.

"The term they've used over and over is red flags," Ms. Steinfeld said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

Facebook and MySpace are only two years old, but have attracted millions of avid young participants, who mingle online by sharing biographical and other information, often intended to show how funny, cool and even outrageous they are.

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers, with few restrictions on who can register. Facebook, though, has separate requirements for different categories of users; college students must have a college e-mail address to register. Personal pages on Facebook are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume that they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access to the information in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain their college e-mail addresses, which enables them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerns have already been raised about these and other Internet sites, from their potential misuse by stalkers to students exposing their own misbehavior, for example by posting photographs of hazing by college sports teams. Add to the list of unintended consequences the new hurdles for the job search.

Ana Homayoun runs Green Ivy Educational Consulting, a small firm that tutors and teaches organizational skills to high school students in the San Francisco area. Ms. Homayoun visited Duke University this spring for an alumni weekend and while there planned to interview a promising job applicant.

Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," Ms. Homayoun said. "When I saw that, I thought, 'O.K., so much for that.' "

Ms. Rose said a recruiter had told her he rejected an applicant after searching the name of the student, a chemical engineering major, on Google. Among the things the recruiter found, she said, was this remark: "I like to blow things up."

Occasionally students find evidence online that might explain why a job search is foundering. Tien Nguyen, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, signed up for interviews on campus with corporate recruiters, beginning last fall, but he was seldom invited.

A friend suggested in February that Mr. Nguyen research himself on Google. He found a link to a satirical essay, entitled "Lying Your Way to the Top," that he had published last summer on a Web site for college students. He asked that the essay be removed. Soon, he began to be invited to job interviews and has now received several offers.

"I never really considered that employers would do something like that," he said. "I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades."

Jennifer Floren is chief executive of Experience Inc., which provides online information about jobs and employers to students at 3,800 universities.

"This is really the first time that we've seen that stage of life captured in a kind of time capsule and in a public way," Ms. Floren said. "It has its place, but it's moving from a fraternity or sorority living room. It's now in a public arena, so it's a completely different ballgame."

Ms. Rose of the University of Pennsylvania said, "Students go on them a lot and, unfortunately, now employers go there."

Some companies, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Ernst & Young and Osram Sylvania, said they did not use the Internet to check on college job applicants.

"I'd rather not see that part of them," said Maureen Crawford Hentz, manager of talent acquisition at Osram Sylvania. "I don't think it's related to their bona fide occupational qualifications."

More than a half-dozen major corporations, including Morgan Stanley, Dell, Pfizer, L'Oréal and Goldman Sachs, turned down or did not respond to requests for interviews.

But other companies, particularly those involved in the digital world like Microsoft and Métier, a small software company in Washington, D.C., said researching students through social networking sites was now fairly typical.

"It's becoming very much a common tool," said Warren Ashton, group marketing manager at Microsoft. "For the first time ever, you suddenly have very public information about almost any candidate who is coming through the process."

At Microsoft, he said, recruiters are given broad latitude over how to work, and there is no formal policy about using the Internet to research applicants. "There are certain recruiters and certain companies that are probably more in tune with the new technologies than others are," Mr. Ashton said.

Microsoft and Osram Sylvania have also begun to use social networking sites in a different way, participating openly in online communities to get out their company's messages and to identify talented job candidates.

Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates.

Some college career executives are skeptical that many employers routinely check applicants online. "My observation is that it's more fiction than fact," said Tom Devlin, director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley.

At a conference in late May, Mr. Devlin said, he asked 40 employers if they researched students online and every one said no.

Many career counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites with fresh eyes, removing photographs or text that might be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors are also encouraging students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages.

Melanie Deitch, director of marketing at Facebook, agreed, saying students should take advantage of the site's privacy settings and should be smart about what they post.

But it is not clear whether many students are following the advice. "I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn't know about it," said Mark W. Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the adult world is starting to come in."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us...rtner=homepage





House Backs Telecom Bill Favoring Phone Companies
Stephen LaBaton

The House of Representatives approved the most extensive telecommunications legislation in a decade on Thursday, largely ratifying the policy agenda of the nation's largest telephone companies.

The bill passed by a lopsided vote of 321 to 101.

Supporters of the legislation said it would promote competition and lower costs by enabling the telephone companies to offer bundled packages of video, telephone, broadband, wireless and mobile phone services in new markets. They said the legislation was an important antidote to rapidly rising cable television subscription rates.

But even as the House took up the measure on Thursday, the political action had already swung to the Senate, which has been peppered by lobbyists and executives from many major telecommunications companies in recent days as it prepares to draft its own version. The prospects there are uncertain.

The House bill, sponsored by Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, would make it much easier and cheaper for the phone companies to offer video services across the country by pre-empting the regulatory authority of municipal franchise officials. The telephone companies have been waging an expensive and protracted town-by-town war with their cable rivals, to offer video services.

The legislation would replace the regulatory role of more than 30,000 local franchising authorities with a national system supervised by the Federal Communications Commission. The current process has significantly slowed the ability of companies like Verizon and AT&T (formerly SBC Communications) to challenge the cable and satellite television companies with their own version of video services.

In a concession to the telephone and cable companies, the legislation does nothing to prevent the phone and cable providers from charging Internet content providers a premium for carrying services like video offerings that could rival those of the telecom companies.

Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and a group of other Democrats sought to amend the legislation to prohibit such practices and thereby, they said, ensure the Internet's vitality. Support for the provision, which backers call "Net neutrality," brought together such competitors as Google and Microsoft.

But the amendment failed by a vote of 269 to 152.

The largest telephone companies did not get everything they sought, however. The legislation threatens to delay any effort by the Federal Communications Commission to require Internet telephone providers to make the investments needed to connect customers to 911 services.

Still, the House bill reflected the considerable clout of the telephone industry in the House, and in particular its ties to the Republican leadership there. Rivals of the phone companies, particularly the cable industry, appear for now to have more important allies in the Senate. And the Senate's rules and customs, unlike those in the House, make it easier for a smaller number of lawmakers to influence and delay legislation.

In the meantime, the flurry of activity is proving to be lucrative on K Street, as every major lobbying firm has been enlisted and campaign coffers are filling with millions of dollars from the telephone, cable, software and high-tech industries trying to shape the legislation. In recent days the phone companies began to run attack ads on television and in local newspapers against Google over its "Net neutrality" stand.

The legislative calendar leaves little time for the two chambers of Congress to reach a final agreement on a telecommunications bill as ambitious as the one considered by the House. But some executives predicted a narrower one could stand a better chance of final passage.

The White House issued a statement on Thursday supporting the House legislation, saying it would "promote competition in both video and voice markets."

Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who heads a telecommunications and Internet subcommittee and is a co-sponsor of the measure, said it would bring "deregulatory parity" and that "for the consumers that have these services, it probably will mean a reduction of about $30 to $40 a month."

House Democrats raised several objections to the legislation. They said the new national franchise rules would sharply reduce the amount of money that cable companies now give towns and cities for public, educational and government programs. They said the failure to include build-out requirements for the telephone companies for their new video services would mean that people living in less affluent neighborhoods would be unlikely to see the benefits of any new competition for broadband and subscription television services.

But most of the criticism was over the bill's failure to include a provision that would prevent the cable and phone companies from charging the content providers for offering premium, or faster, Internet services.

The critics say that such a provision is vital to protect the free-wheeling architecture of the Internet. They also say it is necessary to prevent the telephone and cable companies, which are increasingly going into the content business, from favoring their own products over those of others. If the telephone companies can charge more to particular content providers, the critics say, the telephone and cable companies will ultimately offer broadband services that more closely resemble television services, with more limited choices than those now available on the Internet.

"The imposition of additional fees for Internet content providers would unduly burden Web-based small businesses and start-ups," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader. "They would also hamper communications by noncommercial users, those using religious speech, promoting civic involvement and exercising First Amendment freedoms."

The legislation gives the Federal Communications Commission the authority to enforce a year-old broadband policy statement that provides consumers access to the lawful Internet content of their choice. Those favoring the Markey amendment said that the commission's antidiscrimination principle was inadequate to ensure that content providers would not, in effect, be blocked if the telephone companies begin to require companies like Google and their smaller rivals to pay for premium services.

The phone companies and their Congressional allies say that such restrictions are both unnecessary and would discourage investment in upgrading networks. They also say that the legislation goes far enough to protect consumers. And they say that as there is increasing competition for broadband services, it would be impossible for a phone or cable company to be competitive by blocking or limiting Internet choices.

"A free and open Internet is crucial to formulating an effective policy," said Representative Clifford B. Stearns, a Florida Republican who is a co-sponsor of the bill. "For now, strict strong enforcement provisions that are in the bill are a tough deterrent to discrimination."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/wa...09telecom.html





Gathering Highlights Power of the Blog
Adam Nagourney

If any more proof were needed of the rising influence of bloggers — at least for the Democratic Party — it could be found here on Friday on the Las Vegas Strip, where the old and new worlds of American politics engaged in a slightly awkward if mostly entertaining clash of a meeting.

There were the bloggers — nearly a thousand of them, many of them familiar names by now — emerging from the shadows of their computers for a three-day blur of workshops, panels and speeches about politics, the power of the Internet and the shortcomings of the Washington media. And right behind them was a parade of prospective Democratic presidential candidates and party leaders, their presence a tribute to just how much the often rowdy voices of the Web have been absorbed into the very political process they frequently disdain, much to the amazement, and perhaps discomfort, of some of the bloggers themselves.

"I see you guys as agents of advocacy — that's why I'm here," said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat and a prospective 2008 presidential candidate, who flew here at the last minute to attend the YearlyKos 2006 Convention. Bloggers, Mr. Richardson said later, "are a major voice in American politics."

They may think of themselves as rebels, separate from mainstream politics and media. But by the end of a day on which the convention halls were shoulder to shoulder with bloggers, Democratic operatives, candidates and Washington reporters, it seemed that bloggers were well on the way to becoming — dare we say it? — part of the American political establishment. Indeed, the convention, the first of what organizers said would become an annual event, seems on the way to becoming as much a part of the Democratic political circuit as the Iowa State Fair.

"It's 2006, and I think we have arrived," Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos and the man for whom the conference was named, announced after being greeted with the kind of reception Elvis, or at least Wayne Newton to a more traditional Las Vegas audience, might have received had he walked into the dowdy ballroom at the Riviera Hotel and Casino. (Mr. Moulitsas was accompanied by a media adviser and bloggers snapped his picture whenever they spotted him.)

"Both parties have failed us," Mr. Moulitsas said. "Republicans have failed us because they can't govern. Democrats have failed because they can't get elected. So now it's our turn."

The ceremony and self-celebration notwithstanding, the actual extent of the blogging community's power is still unclear. For one thing, it was hard to find a single Republican in the crowd here, though organizers insisted that a few had registered. For another, as the presidential campaign of Howard Dean demonstrated in 2004, the excitement and energy of the Web does not necessarily translate into winning at the polls.

"I do believe that each day, they have more impact," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, who will deliver the keynote speech to the group on Saturday night. "Now how far that will go, I don't think we know that yet."

But, Mr. Reid added: "One of the reasons I so admire them is they have the ability to spread the truth like no entities I've dealt with in recent years. We could never have won the battle to stop privatization of Social Security without them."

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, widely viewed as a leading candidate for her party's presidential nomination, declined an invitation to attend. Her spokeswoman, Lorraine Voles, said Mrs. Clinton had obligations in New York this weekend. Mrs. Clinton is highly unpopular with this crowd, in no small part because she supported going to war in Iraq.

"Oh my God, no way!" Mr. Moulitsas said when asked whether Mrs. Clinton was popular here.

Still, there was no shortage of Democratic luminaries on display. Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia and a likely candidate for president in 2008, invited everyone on hand to a reception at the Stratosphere Hotel Casino on Friday. He and Mr. Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, are scheduled to speak on Saturday.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who ran for president in 2004 and said he might run again in 2008, was spotted on Thursday night looking somewhat out of place as he roamed the halls in a pin-striped suit before heading to the Hard Rock Cafe to hold his own reception for bloggers. ("I just flew in from Washington from a business meeting," he explained, promising that the suit was old and tattered.)

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, another potential 2008 Democratic candidate, was on the way to participate in a forum on education.

And for whatever disdain that could be picked up toward mainstream politicians and news media, it seems fair to say that the bloggers and the people who love them were fascinated by their favorite targets. Jennifer Palmieri, a deputy White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, held a "pundit project training," where she told bloggers how to present themselves in television interviews — what to wear, how to sit and what to say.

And a well-known columnist from a major metropolitan newspaper — this one — was repeatedly stopped by bloggers requesting that she pose for photos with them, as they expressed admiration for her work. (That would be Maureen Dowd.)

As became clear from the rather large and diverse crowd here, the blogosphere has become for the left what talk radio has been for the right: a way of organizing and communicating to supporters. Blogging is nowhere near the force among Republicans as it is among Democrats, and talk radio is a much more effective tool for Republicans.

"We don't spend a lot of time in cars, but we do spend a lot of time on the Internet," said Jerome Armstrong, a blogging pioneer and a senior adviser to Mr. Warner, who has been the most aggressive among the prospective 2008 candidates in courting this community.

Their political opinions were, not surprisingly, hard to mistake. With little doubt, the most unpopular Democrat around was probably Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, scorned for his frequent support of President Bush's policies. Mr. Lieberman is facing a primary challenge from Ned Lamont, a cable television executive, that should offer a pretty good test of the political impact of this world. Lamont T-shirts and buttons were in abundance.

"Lieberman is going to lose this one," Mr. Moulitsas said.

This unlikely location for a bloggers' convention was chosen not because this crowd has any particular affinity for gambling, organizers said, but because rooms were cheap ($99). The floors were filled with people, laptops perched on their legs, typing away.

Mr. Richardson's visit was interesting in that he decided to come so late that his name did not appear on any programs; a hand-lettered sign announced a breakfast with him on Friday morning. Still, Mr. Richardson arched an eyebrow when asked whether he had suddenly decided to fly in after learning that many of his prospective rivals for 2008 were here and that Mr. Warner, in particular, was giving a major address on Saturday.

"Warner?" Mr. Richardson responded with a hint of a smile. "Is he here?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/10/us/10bloggers.html





A Mixed Bag of First Impressions by Democrats at Blog Rendezvous
Adam Nagourney

Mark R. Warner, the former governor of Virginia and potential Democratic presidential candidate, went before an unconventional political audience on Saturday — a bloggers' convention — and offered a fairly conventional presentation: the introductory campaign video, a few jokes, and 30 minutes of biography, criticism of the Bush administration and views of government.

Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, took a different approach, celebrating the bloggers as the future of American politics. "We have a whole new department at the D.N.C. — the Internet department," he said. "What they do is read you all day long so they know what's going on."

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a Democrat who also may run for president, praised blogs as an emerging power in American politics after appearing at a panel here, but assailed a major liberal blog, Daily Kos, for "banging away" with personal attacks on political leaders.

"I'm not the enemy — I'm a pretty decent guy, if I say so myself," Mr. Vilsack told reporters.

If there is an emerging consensus among much of the Democratic Party establishment, it is that blogs are an important, potentially crucial emerging power in American politics, as reflected by the turnout of Democratic leaders here this weekend. What is less clear is how mainstream politicians like Mr. Warner — or the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who gave an address Saturday night — will grapple with an audience that has defined itself in part by its dissatisfaction with mainstream politicians.

Indeed, there was evidence of a gulf in the way the two sides view their relationship. For the 1,000 or so bloggers at the YearlyKos Convention here, the mission is nothing short of trying to transform the way politics are done. For some of the political leaders who stopped off for a quick panel or reception, the visits seemed more along the lines of another constituent box to be checked on the campaign circuit, whose value does not extend beyond its checkbook or voter turnout operations.

Steve Soto, who writes The Left Coaster blog, said that the Democratic leaders running the campaigns to win the House and Senate "are still treating the blogs and some of the advice from them about message and focus as unwanted solicitations from crazy relatives."

Mr. Warner, in an interview, said: "Some consultants are still stuck in a 2004 mindset — they still think, 'Is this just a new way to raise some money over the Internet?' This community absolutely resents that. They absolutely see themselves as ideas, energy, and they want to be part of the debate."

This is, of course, awkward territory to all of the players who turned up for this unlikely meeting at the Riviera Hotel and Casino. Part of the reason for this is the cultural divisions that have been highlighted by the emergence of what Democrats have come to call the blogger community. And part of it is that no one is sure if bloggers will prove to be as important to American politics as they think they will be.

So it was that Mr. Reid, in an interview, said it was still too soon to measure how much sway bloggers will have in setting the agenda for Democrats. But he flew here to deliver the closing speech at the convention on Saturday, urging bloggers to help Democrats in Washington, and said he would have done that even if the convention had not been taking place in his home state.

"We don't have a bully pulpit, but we have you," he said in remarks prepared for delivery that night. "We need you to be our megaphone."

"There is an urban myth in Washington that Democrats don't stand for anything. Like all urban myths, it couldn't be further from the truth," Mr. Reid said. "This summer we need you to break it."

Similarly, Mr. Dean, who was elected party leader in part because of his support in this world, was effusive in his praise of bloggers. "Thank you as a group for coming to my defense every time some politician stands up and says, 'We ought to do it the old way,' " he said. "You guys are the best. The Washington politicians are coming around."

Mr. Vilsack, who flew in to appear on an education panel, said what was taking place this weekend was the discovery by Democrats of the next technological wave in American politics, and he compared it to how Republicans spotted the power of direct mail in the early 1980's. But talking to reporters, he criticized blogs for making personal attacks, noting criticism of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, led by Mr. Vilsack.

"It's important for the focus to be on the policies and the politics, but not on the personalities," he said. "Daily Kos banging away at the D.L.C. — we don't need to do that."

With Mr. Warner, the audience here got a glimpse of something that many of them had presumably never seen before: a classic campaign stump speech, one that Mr. Warner, with some adjustments, might have given to any audience. There were some long periods of quiet as he spoke, but those ended as soon as he began attacking President Bush, and Mr. Warner won a standing ovation.

In the interview, Mr. Warner left little doubt of the potential he sees with bloggers, saying, "You're watching what potentially could be a major part of the future of American politics taking place right here."

Asked if he thought some of his prospective rivals — like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York — had made a mistake by not coming here (she cited a scheduling conflict), Mr. Warner paused before declining to answer. "Do I look like a fool?" he asked with a smile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11bloggers.html





Art Review

'Unknown Weegee,' on Photographer Who Made the Night Noir
Holland Cotter

WATCHMAN, what of the night?

"Whadda you kidding? It's a zoo out there. Two deli stickups at 12 on the dot; one of the perps getting plugged. I got the picture. Roulette joint bust on East 68th. Society types. You shoulda seen the penguins run. Three a.m.: Brooklyn. Car crash. Kids. Bad."

"Four a.m., bars close. Guys asleep in Bowery doorways. But just before dawn is the worst: despair city. The jumpers start, out the windows, off the roof. I can't even look. So that's the night, New York. Ain't it grand? What a life."

The imagined speaker is Arthur Fellig, better known, and very well known, as Weegee (1899-1968). From the 1930's into the 1950's, he was a photographer for New York tabloids, the kind of papers Ralph Kramden might have read. Tireless, loquacious, invasive, he cruised the wee hours. For him the city was a 24-hour emergency room, an amphetamine drip.

You'll find him these days at the International Center of Photography in a show called "Unknown Weegee." The center owns more than 18,000 of his pictures, and most of the 95 selected by Cynthia Young, the curator, are on view for the first time, at least in a museum. At the same time, the Weegee they reveal is pretty much the one we know, though toned down a bit, turned into a social worker, even.

His story is the story of a Jewish kid, son of a rabbi, who came with his family from Europe to New York City. Independent-minded, he noodled around, did the odd job, hit the flophouses. Then he discovered photography, and he became a man with a mission. Make that obsession. Scratch that: addiction.

A freelancer by temperament, he had long-term gigs with The Daily News, The Daily Mirror and the left-leaning daily PM. His beat was the inner city, and everything was raw material: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. He liked nights because he had the photographic turf to himself but also because the best bad things happen at night, under the cover of darkness. Vandals make their mark; hit men practice their trade; people get crazy.

Like a boy scout, he was always prepared. He prowled the streets in a car equipped with a police radio, a typewriter, developing equipment, a supply of cigars and a change of underwear. He was a one-man photo factory: he drove to a crime site; took pictures; developed the film, using the trunk as a darkroom; and delivered the prints.

He often finished a job before the cops had cleared the scene, in some cases before they even arrived. About certain things he was clairvoyant. (Weegee = Ouija, as in board. Get it?) He caught catastrophes in the making and filmed them unfolding. An opportunist? A sensationalist? A voyeur? You could call him all that. He wouldn't mind. "Just get the name right. Weegee the Famous."

He was in the right place at the right time. New York from the Depression through World War II was a rude, crude town. No heat in winter, way too much in the summer. Immigrants poured in; there was barely enough room to hold them. Native-born workers felt the competition for jobs and space, resented it. The melting pot was on a constant boil.

Weegee was aware of social problems. This is one of the points the show makes. A congenital, unradical leftist, he gave his work a deliberate political slant. He documented segregation and racial-bias attacks. In one 1951 photo, he shows a black woman holding aloft a piece of paper with a picture of a gun. The paper was actually a coupon to win free admission to a new Randolph Scott movie called "Colt 45." But at some point Weegee pinned a "Black Power" button to the print to give it a pointed meaning.

The politics that really made him tick, though, were populist. He knew what Americans wanted, because he wanted it too. Sentimentality: cops holding kittens, lost kids crying. Zaniness: people dressed up as Martians, things like that. He was drawn to glamour, though not the social register stuff. That he despised. He loved to embarrass the rich, make them look like freaks.

Hollywood was different. Its version of classiness was, in a way, available to all. Anybody can pass out autographs like a star and probably find some takers. And if Veronica Lake could get famous for a hairdo, so could you. (Weegee's 1945 book, "Naked City," was the basis for a Hollywood movie; he himself, quintessential New Yorker, appeared as an extra in films.)

Then there was the cosmopolitan, interracial realm of club life, with Calypso singers, cocktail-swillers, exotic dancers and 1950's couples, young and in love. This part of the show is cool. These couples represented a changing America, a hinge-generation: girls who were rethinking the "good girl" gambit; boys who had missed one war and would refuse to die in another.

Death was, of course, Weegee's daily bread. Mostly it was ghastly: a shoe under the car wheel, a body under the sheet. We linger over these pictures today the way tabloid readers did then, because they demand and reward inspection. In a 1941 photo of a Brooklyn ambulance attendant tagging a body, newspapers covering the corpse include a home section advertising "Brand New Collections of Summer Rayons." There's a War Bonds sign in a nearby shop window and under it, scratched on a wall, a swastika.

Weegee was fascinated by our fascination. Some of his most absorbing pictures are reaction shots, images of crowds witnessing death or its aftermath. Often the gawkers are children, yucking it up or staring, blank.

But Weegee also had a way of making adults — the pop-eyed gangster and the distraught murderess — look like children, pitiable and silly in their unguarded public emoting. Weegee's output isn't, in the end, a humanist essay; it's a B movie. With all the mortality and pain, there is no sense of tragedy, no grappling with evil.

He deals with evil the way Americans usually deal with it: as entertainment, a bad-guy cartoon. Because Americans don't know how to take evil, their own or anyone else's, seriously, they can't see its power shaping their world. Certain artists buck the trend. Warhol, who learned a lot from Weegee, understood the reality of badness beyond redemption. He didn't moralize; he just saw that it was there. That's one reason his art is still so forceful and useful.

But Weegee, no. When he's thoughtful he teeters on maudlin; when he probes he gets cruel. Most of the time, he's just excited. Always on deadline, he can't stay with any subject for long. His method of illumination is the flashbulb. Pow! Its light gives foreground subjects hard brilliance but doesn't sink in; it leaves the depths dark. So his pictures have no inner glow. They just freeze a long-gone now. Sometimes they look like art; they always look archival.

Yet he did one great, serious thing. He was the American photographer who first made night a symbol, an existential condition. He made night noir, and this is what binds all his work together. I wonder what, as night watchman of our American Babylon, he would have thought of the present Times Square, bright as day around the clock.

"Sheesh. So, light's the new dark? I can't put my finger on why, but it don't seem right."

"Unknown Weegee" remains through Aug. 27 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/ar...05d&ei=5087%0A





E-Newspapers Just Around The Corner. Really
Kenneth Li

The newspapers of the future - cheap digital screens that can be rolled up and stuffed into a back pocket - have been just around the corner for the last three decades.

But as early as this year, the future may finally arrive. Some of the world's top newspapers publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the Web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.

Flexible versions of these readers nay be available as early as 2007.

The handheld readers couldn't come a moment too soon for the newspaper industry, which has struggled to maintain its readership and advertising from online rivals.

Publishers Hearst Corp. in the U.S., Pearson Plc.'s Les Echos in Paris and Belgian financial paper De Tijd are planning a large-scale trials of the readers this year.

Earlier attempts by book publishers to sell digital readers failed due to high prices and a lack of downloadable books.

But a new generation of readers from Sony Corp. and iRex, a Philips Electronics spin-off, have impressed publishers with their sharp resolution and energy efficiency, galvanizing support for the idea again.

"This could be a real substitution for printed paper," Jochen Dieckow, head of the news media and research division of Ifra, a global newspaper association based in Germany, said.

It's easy to see why publishers are keen. Digital newspapers, so called e-newspapers, take advantage of two prevailing media trends -- the growth of online advertising and widespread use of portable devices like the iPod music player.

Nearly all papers run Web sites, but few readers relish pulling out laptops in transit or risk dropping one in the bathroom.

E-newspapers would cut production and delivery costs that account for some 75 percent of newspaper expenses.

Circulation in the $55 billion U.S. newspaper industry has slid steadily for nearly two decades as papers compete with Internet news for attention and advertising dollars.

Some publishers now see new devices as a way to help them snatch a bigger slice of online advertising and protect their franchise in reading away from home.

Ad spending on newspaper Web sites grew 32 percent in 2005 but only accounted for 4 percent of total ad spending in newspapers, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Still, little is known about demand for an e-paper. "The number of consumers who are interested in reading on the go as opposed to listening to music on the go is probably smaller in the U.S. today," NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin said.

Print Screens

Sony and iRex's new devices employ screen technology by E Ink, which originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Investors include Hearst, Philips, McClatchy Co., Motorola Inc. and Intel Corp..

The company produces energy-efficient ink sheets that contain tiny capsules showing either black or white depending on the electric current running through it.

Some of the latest devices apply E Ink's sheets to glass transistor boards, or back planes, which are rigid. But by 2007, companies such as U.K.-based Plastic Logic Ltd will manufacture screens on flexible plastic sheets, analysts say.

Separately, Xerox Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing methods to produce flexible back planes cheaply. Xerox, in particular, has created a working prototype of system that lets manufacturers create flexible transistor boards much like one would print a regular paper document.

Production costs are expected to be low enough soon for publishers to consider giving away such devices for free with an annual subscription. Data on subscribers could also help publishers better tailor ads.

Sony's reader will cost between $300 and $400. "If you can get one of these products to cost less than the cost of a year's subscription it could probably work," Kenneth Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media, said.

He declined to name which other groups plan testing, but said Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle will likely be among the first of its 12 daily papers to offer such devices to several hundred subscribers later this year.

In Europe, Ifra is discussing trials with 21 newspapers from 13 countries. The New York Times Co. is a member.

Sony is separately in discussions with some publishers to offer newspaper downloads in its e-bookstore due to launch this summer, although no decision has been made, said Lee Shirani, vice president of Sony's online content service, Sony Connect.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...corner._really





A Flash Drive That Holds Your Computer
David Pogue

YOUR digital life spins at 7,200 rotations a minute on your computer's hard drive. A delicate reading arm, hovering a fraction of an inch above the surface of the drive's spinning platters, dances across them at 60 miles an hour; one bump, and your files are toast. Your hard drive's likelihood of mechanical failure is 100 percent; it's just a matter of when.

And this is how society has chosen to preserve its future?

There may soon be an alternative: those tiny, shiny flash drives (also called thumb drives, jump drives, U.S.B. drives or keychain drives).

A flash drive has no moving parts. It's rugged. It's fast. And goodness knows, it's portable. Without any special installation or drivers, you can stick a flash drive into the U.S.B. jack of any computer — Mac, Windows, whatever. It shows up on the screen as if it were a hard drive, making all your documents available.

But if all you want to carry around is photos and Word files, you could just burn a CD. What if your flash drive also stored your programs, your settings — your entire computing universe?

That's the idea behind the Lexar PowerToGo software, which is itself a licensed version of something called Ceedo Personal. It's designed to turn a flash drive into a portable Windows XP ecosystem, meaning that you can jack into anybody's PC anywhere and find yourself — and your software tools — right at home.

Starting in July, Lexar will include PowerToGo on all of its Platinum series flash drives ($53 for a one-gigabyte model, $90 for a two-gig; a four-gig model is due in August). PowerToGo will also run on older Lexar drives (www.lexar.com/powertogo), although you'll have to pay $30 for it after a trial period. If you have some other brand of flash drive, you can download Ceedo Personal from www.ceedo.com; here again, a 30-day trial is free, and after that, you have to pay $40. Keep in mind, however, that faster flash drives provide a much zippier experience; Lexar claims that its Lightning models, for example, are two to six times as fast as typical flash drives.

Now, you're entitled to ask: "What's the big whoop? Why do I need some special software? Can't I put one of my programs onto a flash drive just by dragging its icon?"

You can, but it won't run. The installer for a Windows program does a lot more than add the program's name to your Start menu. Behind the scenes, it sprays all kinds of little support files into the four corners of the Windows archipelago, tucking them into special locations in your Windows folder, making changes to your registry (the master database of Windows software and settings) and so on. A program can't run without those files.

CEEDO isn't the first company to tackle this problem. A start-up called U3 already makes it possible to install programs directly onto flash drives. Trouble is, this stunt requires not only specially designed flash drives (bearing the U3 logo) but also specially modified programs, of which there are only 150 so far, most of which cost about $30. (U3 argues that this hardware-software solution offers greater security than Ceedo's — for example, you can protect your flash drive with a password.)

Ceedo's design, on the other hand, requires neither special programs nor special flash drives; in fact, it even runs on iPods and other portable drives (although Lexar's version runs only on Lexar flash drives). Ceedo-equipped drives trick software installers into spraying their pieces into its own duplicate of your Windows folder. There's even a portable, duplicate registry on board.

After installing your favorite programs, you're ready to sally forth into the world of Windows computers. When you plug your drive into any PC — at, say, a Kinko's, an airport waiting lounge or a friend's house — a dialogue box offers to run Ceedo Personal or PowerToGo, depending on which version you use.

If you click O.K., a neat miniature Start menu appears at the bottom of the screen. Here are all your programs, ready to run.

If you choose Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox from this Start menu, for example, that Web browser opens up, complete with all of your bookmarks and even your browser plug-ins. If you choose Outlook Express or Thunderbird, you get your familiar e-mail collection. (This flash-drive system is therefore one good way to keep a single e-mail collection as you shuttle between home and work.) In Skype (for making free Internet phone calls) or AOL Instant Messenger (for typed chat), your buddy list opens, ready and waiting. On a fast flash drive connected to a U.S.B. 2.0 jack, all of this runs quickly and slickly.

When you're finished and you eject the drive, not a shred of your presence is left behind. Even the behind-the-scenes Web browser junk that's ordinarily dumped onto your hard drive — cookies, temp files, browsing history and the like — are actually stored on the flash drive. The borrowed PC is left clean, including its clipboard, which was holding whatever you most recently copied.

If it all worked perfectly, it would hint at a future where we could abandon not only the heartache of hard-drive failure, but even the expense, frustration and obsolescence of PC ownership. It would suggest that in, say, 2025, we'll store our entire digital worlds onto cheap 160-gigabyte flash drives. We'd jack into public computer terminals everywhere we go — taxis, restaurants, airplane tray tables — and pick right up where we left off. We'd leave buying, maintaining and de-virusing the computers themselves to professionals.

Ceedo and Lexar point proudly to the list of 100 compatible programs listed on their Web sites. There's good, brand-name stuff here, including Skype, Google Talk, AIM, WinAmp, Picasa and WinZip — but all of them are either freebies or shareware.

Unfortunately, commercial productivity programs are another story. You can't install Microsoft Office, for example. Of course, as Lexar points out, most PC's you're likely to encounter already have Office installed. In those situations, Ceedo/Lexar does the right thing: it fires up the computer's copy, but using your own preference settings — toolbars, standard font and so on.

Quicken 2006, FileMaker Pro and Dreamweaver 8 install smoothly. Most others, though, conk out with cryptic error messages at the very end of the installation cycle, including Photoshop Elements, OpenOffice, Palm Desktop, MusicMatch, the Now Up-to-Date calendar and Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Some programs are too big to install practically; others apparently don't work because of copy protection or unusually complex installations.

Ceedo is working on fixes for some programs, including iTunes and Microsoft Outlook. That's fortunate, because your e-mail and music collections are great candidates for portability.

Figuring out how to install programs from their original CD's isn't obvious, however. You open up the drive's copy of Internet Explorer, type the drive letter of the software installer into the address bar (D:\ to see what's in your CD drive, for example), and then navigate three folders deep to the program's setup installer.

This situation will improve. Ceedo is working on a software installer called Install Anything that it says will make installing all kinds of programs much easier. (Lexar will charge $30 for this installer, even for people who get PowerToGo on new Lexar drives.) Unfortunately, even the not-quite-honestly named Install Anything won't be able to install every program on your flash drive.

Still, Ceedo/Lexar have already done the world a great favor with this software. Even without Install Anything, your flash drive can already store your e-mail program and e-mail, browser and bookmarks, chat program and contacts, essential utilities (FTP and zipping programs, for example), and the trappings of your Microsoft Office environment.

If that's not every last program you'll ever need, it's still the core of your computing existence. And having it dangling from your keychain at all times is a tempting prospect. It means that the next time you're caught without your computer, you can get at your software — in a flash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/te...y/15pogue.html





Data on Nuclear Agency Workers Hacked: Lawmaker
Chris Baltimore

A computer hacker got into the U.S. agency that guards the country's nuclear weapons stockpile and stole the personal records of at least 1,500 employees and contractors, a senior U.S. lawmaker said on Friday.

The target of the hacker, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, is the latest agency to reveal that sensitive private information about government workers was stolen.

The incident happened last September but top Energy Department officials were not told about it until this week, prompting the chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to demand the resignation of the head of the NNSA.

An NNSA spokesman was not available for comment.

The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department and also guards some of the U.S. military's nuclear secrets and responds to global nuclear and radiological emergencies.

Committee chairman Rep. Joe Barton said NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks should be "removed from your office as expeditiously as possible" because he did not quickly notify senior Energy Department officials of the breach.

"And I mean like 5 o'clock this afternoon if it's possible," Barton, a Texas Republican, said in a statement.

Earlier this week the Pentagon revealed that personal information on about 2.2 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops was stolen last month from a government employee's house.

That comes on top of the theft of data on 26.5 million U.S. military veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has said.

A spokesman for Energy Secretary Sam Bodman declined comment on the call for Brooks' resignation but said the secretary was "deeply disturbed about the way this was handled internally" and would make it a priority to notify workers about the lapse.

The "vast majority" of those workers were contractors, not direct government employees, said the spokesman Craig Stevens.

According to Barton, the NNSA chief knew about the incident soon after it happened in September but did not inform Energy Department officials, including Bodman, until Wednesday.

"I don't see how you could meet with (Bodman) every day the last seven or eight months and not inform him," Barton said.

He said Brooks cited "bureaucratic confusion" to explain the reporting lapse.

"It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side had made the appropriate notification," Brooks told the House energy panel's oversight and investigations subcommittee, according to a record provided by Barton's office.

"Just as the secretary just learned about this week, I learned this week that the secretary didn't know," Brooks said. "There are a number of us who in hindsight should have done things differently on informing."
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jh...oryID=12486344





Chipmakers Admit: Your Power May Vary
Tom Krazit

If there's one lesson to be learned from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices' weeklong spat over server power consumption, it's that test drives are important.

Assessing only pure performance is passe. The debate these days is about performance-per-watt, which seems like it should be a simple miles-per-gallon type of calculation. However, miles are miles, and gallons are gallons. There's no one simple way to measure processor performance, and measuring the amount of power output by today's chips is proving just as difficult.

"We do have industry-standard benchmarks for performance, however imperfect they may be," said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. "We do not have industry-standard benchmarks for performance-per-watt," he said, adding that it might be some time before those are developed.

Intel and AMD have taken to the PowerPoint slides over the past week, presenting different ideas of how much power is consumed by the other's platform. After AMD took the first shots last week during its analyst meeting, Intel countered with a briefing Friday morning with Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's server group.

Intel is getting set to release Woodcrest, a new server processor, on June 26, Skaugen announced Friday. Woodcrest will be a major boost to Intel's server division when it comes to performance, and Intel believes it will retake the lead in this new metric of performance per watt, he said. AMD, however, is unwilling to concede that point just yet, although its competitive marketing no longer cites the pure-performance benchmarks that have carried it through the last two years.

Processor and server vendors often point to several well-known benchmark tests when they want to measure processor performance in certain types of situations, such as the various TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) benchmarks for online transaction processing or Web serving, and the SPEC (Standards Performance Evaluation Corporation) tests for measuring integer and floating-point performance. But vendors spend millions tweaking their systems to produce favorable results on those tests, which means most customers insist on running test systems in their own environments before making a decision.

There's even less precedent for measuring power consumption. Traditionally, vendors have pointed to TDP (thermal design power), which is a specification provided to server and PC makers as a guideline for the cooling systems they must design into their products. TDP is measured by tracking a processor's thermal output when it is running at 100 percent utilization.

Parsing the differences
But TDP is somewhat unrealistic, in that servers and PCs aren't usually running anywhere near full bore for extended periods of time. "This is like going around your house and counting light bulbs to determine the monthly power bill," Skaugen said.

AMD measures its power consumption using a "max power" figure, which represents the single largest amount of power that the chip can possibly accommodate, said Brent Kirby, product manager for servers and workstations at AMD. "We're conservative," he said, noting that in 2003 when AMD was trying to break into the server market with Opteron it couldn't afford to have any thermal problems, so it rated its chips at the maximum number.

The trouble is that hitting that maximum power number is even more unrealistic than TDP, said Cory Roletto, a platform marketing engineer at Intel. For that reason, Intel uses TDP numbers to rate its chips. However, while AMD's TDP numbers are its maximum power numbers, Intel's TDP numbers are lower than its maximum power numbers. When it makes its comparisons, AMD uses the "max power" numbers that Intel publishes in its technical documents. This makes it look like there is more of a difference between the two companies in real-world situations, even though AMD's Kirby conceded that the maximum power number cited is virtually unattainable for almost any real-world workload.

Many ways to get results
Intel's argument in claiming performance-per-watt superiority is that Woodcrest represents a new performance lead, putting it so far ahead of AMD that Intel wins the performance-per-watt game as well. The company has released impressive benchmarking results based on preproduction systems. Those results would appear to give Woodcrest a clear lead over AMD systems.

But in the configuration information listed in the fine print, in some cases the Intel systems were using twice as much memory as the AMD systems, such as in the TPC-C, SAP and Lotus Domino tests. Intel claimed a 49 percent, 21 percent and 30 percent advantage, respectively, in those tests. To be fair, Intel also published the results of other tests in which the AMD system had twice as much memory and Intel still prevailed by a healthy margin.

The confusing result is that the numbers both companies are throwing around in presentations to financial analysts and the press are open to a fair amount of interpretation, depending on where your loyalties are. If there are multiple ways of measuring performance, and multiple ways of measuring power, then there are even more ways of measuring performance-per-watt.

So how does a server buyer make a decision? The old-fashioned way: Insist on a test system. The only way to be totally sure which particular system is best suited for a particular environment is to run that system in the environment, both Kirby and Roletto agreed. Buyers can test the performance of their application environment, and use power meters to test the power consumption of these systems "at the wall."

This is by far the best way to measure power consumption, said John Enck, an analyst with Gartner. Some IT managers Enck has spoken to are starting to measure kilowatts per rack, or how much energy it takes to keep a rack of servers up and running.

Of course, this hasn't stopped either company from spending lots of time and effort throwing around the numbers in an attempt to influence buyers. What would be nice is an energy rating, like those on refrigerators, that shows how much energy a server consumes compared with the range of available products, analysts said. AMD and server vendors have started to discuss these issues in a consortium called the Green Grid, but it will be hard to get everyone on the same page.

"Without naming any names, if Company A is lagging Company B in performance per watt, they are not going to be thrilled about signing up for some agreed-to industry-standard benchmark that puts them behind." Haff said.
http://news.com.com/Chipmakers+admit...3-6082352.html





Net Neutrality: Who voted for What?

NOTE: There was an error in this listing. It has been corrected! I apologize. It was an accidental typo! I have double checked this link and there should be no errors. If you do find an error please let me know! Thank you.

The largest telephone and cable companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner want to be able to decide which websites run fast, slow or not at all. They want to be able to charge extra money for fast service and if web sites don’t pay extra then they’ll be doomed to a slow connection.

Net Neutrality wants to ensure that all sites get equal treatment.

The supporters of Net Neutrality include leading high-tech companies such as Amazon.com, Earthlink, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Skype, Vonage and Yahoo. Prominent national figures such as Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and FCC Commissioner Michael Copps have called for stronger Net Neutrality protections.

For More Information check out the Net Neutrality FAQ

Yesterday the House of Representatives voted NO for Net Neutrality. The list below shows the people who voted. I have arranged them by state so you can easily see how your representative voted. If you are FOR Net Neutrality and your representative voted NO then don’t vote for him/her in the next elections.

Alabama

* Aderholt, Robert, Alabama, 4th NO

* Bachus, Spencer, Alabama, 6th NO

* Bonner, Jo, Alabama, 1st NO

* Cramer, Robert E. “Bud”, Alabama, 5th NO

* Davis, Artur, Alabama, 7th NO

* Everett, Terry, Alabama, 2nd NO

* Rogers, Mike, Alabama, 3rd NO

Alaska

* Young, Don, Alaska, At Large NO

Arizona

* Flake, Jeff , Arizona, 6th NO

* Franks, Trent, Arizona, 2nd NO

* Grijalva, Raul, Arizona, 7th YES

* Hayworth, J.D., Arizona, 5th NO

* Kolbe, Jim, Arizona, 8th NO

* Pastor, Ed , Arizona, 4th NO

* Renzi, Rick, Arizona, 1st NO

* Shadegg, John, Arizona, 3rd NO

Arkansas

* Berry, Marion, Arkansas, 1st NO

* Boozman, John, Arkansas, 3rd NO

* Ross, Mike, Arkansas, 4th YES

* Snyder, Vic, Arkansas, 2nd YES

California

* Baca, Joe, California, 43rd NO

* Becerra, Xavier, California, 31st YES

* Berman, Howard, California, 28th YES

* Bono, Mary, California, 45th FAILED TO VOTE

* Calvert, Ken, California, 44th NO

* Campbell, John, California, 48th NO

* Capps, Lois, California, 23rd YES

* Cardoza, Dennis, California, 18th NO

* Costa, Jim, California, 20th NO

* Cunningham, Randy “Duke”, California, 50th — Vacancy NO

* Davis, Susan, California, 53rd YES

* Doolittle, John, California, 4th NO

* Dreier, David, California, 26th NO

* Eshoo, Anna G., California, 14th YES

* Farr, Sam, California, 17th YES

* Filner, Bob, California, 51st YES

* Gallegly, Elton, California, 24th NO

* Harman, Jane, California, 36th YES

* Herger, Wally, California, 2nd NO

* Honda, Mike, California, 15th YES

* Hunter, Duncan, California, 52nd NO

* Issa, Darrell, California, 49th NO

* Lantos, Tom, California, 12th YES

* Lee, Barbara, California, 9th YES

* Lewis, Jerry, California, 41st YES

* Lofgren, Zoe, California, 16th YES

* Lungren, Daniel E., California, 3rd NO

* Matsui, Doris O., California, 5th YES

* McKeon, Buck, California, 25th NO

* Millender-McDonald, Juanita, California, 37th NO

* Miller, Gary, California, 42nd NO

* Miller, George, California, 7th YES

* Napolitano, Grace, California, 38Th YES

* Nunes, Devin, California, 21st NO

* Pelosi, Nancy, California, 8th YES

* Pombo, Richard, California, 11th NO

* Radanovich, George P., California, 19th NO

* Rohrabacher, Dana, California, 46th NO

* Roybal-Allard, Lucille, California, 34th YES

* Royce, Ed, California, 40th NO

* Sanchez, Linda, California, 39th YES

* Sanchez, Loretta, California, 47th NO

* Schiff, Adam, California, 29th YES

* Sherman, Brad, California, 27th YES

* Solis, Hilda, California, 32nd YES

* Stark, Fortney Pete, California, 13th YES

* Tauscher, Ellen, California, 10th YES

* Thomas, Bill, California, 22nd NO

* Thompson, Mike, California, 1st YES

* Waters, Maxine, California, 35th YES

* Watson, Diane E., California, 33rd YES

* Waxman, Henry, California, 30th YES

* Woolsey, Lynn, California, 6th YES

Colorado

* Beauprez, Bob, Colorado, 7th NO

* DeGette, Diana, Colorado, 1st YES

* Hefley, Joel, Colorado, 5th NO

* Musgrave, Marilyn, Colorado, 4th NO

* Salazar, John T., Colorado, 3rd YES

* Tancredo, Tom, Colorado, 6th NO

* Udall, Mark, Colorado, 2nd YES

Connecticut

* DeLauro, Rosa L., Connecticut, 3rd YES

* Johnson, Nancy L., Connecticut, 5th NO

* Larson, John B., Connecticut, 1st YES

* Shays, Christopher, Connecticut, 4th YES

* Simmons, Rob, Connecticut, 2nd NO

Delaware

* Castle, Michael N., Delaware, At Large NO

Florida

* Bilirakis, Michael, Florida, 9th NO

* Boyd, Allen, Florida, 2nd NO

* Brown, Corrine, Florida, 3rd NO

* Brown-Waite, Virginia, Florida, 5th NO

* Crenshaw, Ander, Florida, 4th NO

* Davis, Jim, Florida, 11th FAILED TO VOTE

* Diaz-Balart, Lincoln, Florida, 21st NO

* Diaz-Balart, Mario, Florida, 25th NO

* Feeney, Tom, Florida, 24th NO

* Foley, Mark, Florida, 16th NO

* Harris, Katherine, Florida, 13th NO

* Hastings, Alcee L., Florida, 23rd NO

* Keller, Ric, Florida, 8th NO

* Mack, Connie, Florida, 14th NO

* Meek, Kendrick, Florida, 17th NO

* Mica, John, Florida, 7th NO

* Miller, Jeff, Florida, 1st NO

* Putnam, Adam, Florida, 12th NO

* Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana, Florida, 18th NO

* Shaw Jr., E. Clay , Florida, 22nd NO

* Stearns, Cliff, Florida, 6th NO

* Wasserman Schultz, Debbie, Florida, 20th YES

* Weldon, Dave, Florida, 15th NO

* Wexler, Robert, Florida, 19th YES

* Young, C.W. Bill, Florida, 10th NO

Georgia

* Barrow, John, Georgia, 12th NO NO

* Bishop Jr., Sanford D., Georgia, 2nd NO

* Deal, Nathan, Georgia, 10th NO

* Gingrey, Phil, Georgia, 11th NO

* Kingston, Jack, Georgia, 1st FAILED TO VOTE

* Lewis, John, Georgia, 5th YES

* Linder, John, Georgia, 7th NO

* Marshall, Jim, Georgia, 3rd YES

* McKinney, Cynthia, Georgia, 4th YES

* Norwood, Charlie, Georgia, 9th NO

* Price, Tom, Georgia, 6th YES

* Scott, David, Georgia, 13th YES

* Westmoreland, Lynn A., Georgia, 8th NO

Hawaii

* Abercrombie, Neil, Hawaii, 1st YES

* Case, Ed, Hawaii, 2nd YES

Idaho

* Otter, Butch, Idaho, 1st NO

* Simpson, Mike, Idaho, 2nd NO

Illinois

* Bean, Melissa L., Illinois, 8th YES

* Biggert, Judy, Illinois, 13th NO

* Costello, Jerry, Illinois, 12th YES

* Davis, Danny K., Illinois, 7th NO

* Emanuel, Rahm, Illinois, 5th YES

* Evans, Lane, Illinois, 17th FAILED TO VOTE

* Gutierrez, Luis, Illinois, 4th YES

* Hastert, Denny, Illinois, 14th NO

* Hyde, Henry, Illinois, 6th NO

* Jackson Jr., Jesse L., Illinois, 2nd YES

* Johnson, Timothy V., Illinois, 15th NO

* Kirk, Mark, Illinois, 10th NO

* Lahood, Ray, Illinois, 18th NO

* Lipinski, Daniel, Illinois, 3rd YES

* Manzullo, Donald, Illinois, 16th FAILED TO VOTE

* Rush, Bobby L., Illinois, 1st NO

* Schakowsky, Jan, Illinois, 9th YES

* Shimkus, John, Illinois, 19th NO

* Weller, Jerry, Illinois, 11th NO

Indiana

* Burton, Dan, Indiana, 5th YES

* Buyer, Steve, Indiana, 4th NO

* Carson, Julia, Indiana, 7th YES

* Chocola, Chris, Indiana, 2nd NO

* Hostettler, John N., Indiana, 8th NO

* Pence, Mike, Indiana, 6th NO

* Sodrel, Michael E., Indiana, 9th NO

* Souder, Mark E., Indiana, 3rd NO

* Visclosky, Peter, Indiana, 1st YES

Iowa

* Boswell, Leonard, Iowa, 3rd NO

* King, Steve, Iowa, 5th NO

* Latham, Tom, Iowa, 4th NO

* Leach, Jim, Iowa, 2nd YES

* Nussle, Jim, Iowa, 1st FAILED TO VOTE

Kansas

* Moore, Dennis, Kansas, 3rd YES

* Moran, Jerry, Kansas, 1st YES

* Ryun, Jim, Kansas, 2nd NO

* Tiahrt, Todd, Kansas, 4th NO

Kentucky

* Chandler, Ben, Kentucky, 6th YES

* Davis, Geoff, Kentucky, 4th NO

* Lewis, Ron, Kentucky, 2nd NO

* Northup, Anne, Kentucky, 3rd NO

* Rogers, Harold, Kentucky, 5th NO

* Whitfield, Ed, Kentucky, 1st NO

Louisiana

* Alexander, Rodney, Louisiana, 5th NO NO

* Baker, Richard, Louisiana, 6th NO NO

* Boustany Jr., Charles W., Louisiana, 7th NO

* Jefferson, William J., Louisiana, 2nd NO

* Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, 1st NO

* McCrery, Jim, Louisiana, 4th NO

* Melancon, Charlie, Louisiana, 3rd NO

Maine

* Allen, Tom, Maine, 1st YES

* Michaud, Michael, Maine, 2nd NO

Maryland

* Bartlett, Roscoe, Maryland, 6th NO

* Cardin, Benjamin L., Maryland, 3rd YES

* Cummings, Elijah, Maryland, 7th NO

* Gilchrest, Wayne, Maryland, 1st NO

* Hoyer, Steny H., Maryland, 5th YES

* Ruppersberger, Dutch, Maryland, 2nd NO

* Van Hollen, Chris, Maryland, 8th YES

* Wynn, Albert, Maryland, 4th NO

Massachusetts

* Capuano, Michael E., Massachusetts, 8th YES

* Delahunt, William, Massachusetts, 10th YES

* Frank, Barney, Massachusetts, 4th YES

* Lynch, Stephen F., Massachusetts, 9th YES

* Markey, Ed, Massachusetts, 7th YES

* McGovern, James, Massachusetts, 3rd YES

* Meehan, Marty, Massachusetts, 5th YES

* Neal, Richard E., Massachusetts, 2nd YES

* Olver, John, Massachusetts, 1st YES

* Tierney, John, Massachusetts, 6th YES

Michigan

* Camp, Dave, Michigan, 4th NO

* Conyers Jr., John, Michigan, 14th YES

* Dingell, John, Michigan, 15th YES

* Ehlers, Vernon J., Michigan, 3rd NO

* Hoekstra, Pete, Michigan, 2nd NO

* Kildee, Dale, Michigan, 5th YES

* Kilpatrick, Carolyn, Michigan, 13th YES

* Knollenberg, Joseph , Michigan, 9th NO

* Levin, Sander, Michigan, 12th YES

* McCotter, Thaddeus, Michigan, 11th NO

* Miller, Candice, Michigan, 10th NO

* Rogers, Mike, Michigan, 8th NO

* Schwarz, John J.H. “Joe”, Michigan, 7th NO

* Stupak, Bart, Michigan, 1st YES

* Upton, Fred, Michigan, 6th NO

Minnesota

* Gutknecht, Gil, Minnesota, 1st NO

* Kennedy, Mark, Minnesota, 6th NO

* Kline, John, Minnesota, 2nd NO

* McCollum, Betty, Minnesota, 4th YES

* Oberstar, James L., Minnesota, 8th YES

* Peterson, Collin C., Minnesota, 7th YES

* Ramstad, Jim, Minnesota, 3rd NO

* Sabo, Martin Olav, Minnesota, 5th YES

Mississippi

* Pickering, Charles W. “Chip”, Mississippi, 3rd NO

* Taylor, Gene, Mississippi, 4th YES

* Thompson, Bennie G., Mississippi, 2nd YES

* Wicker, Roger, Mississippi, 1st NO

Missouri

* Akin, Todd, Missouri, 2nd NO NO

* Blunt, Roy, Missouri, 7th NO

* Carnahan, Russ, Missouri, 3rd NO

* Clay Jr., William “Lacy”, Missouri, 1st NO

* Cleaver, Emanuel, Missouri, 5th NO

* Emerson, Jo Ann, Missouri, 8th NO

* Graves, Sam, Missouri, 6th NO

* Hulshof, Kenny, Missouri, 9th NO

* Skelton, Ike, Missouri, 4th NO

Montana


* Rehberg, Dennis, Montana, At Large NO

Nebraska

* Fortenberry, Jeff, Nebraska, 1st NO

* Osborne, Tom, Nebraska, 3rd NO

* Terry, Lee, Nebraska, 2nd NO

Nevada

* Berkley, Shelley, Nevada, 1st YES

* Gibbons, Jim, Nevada, 2nd FAILED TO VOTE

* Porter, Jon, Nevada, 3rd NO

New Jersey

* Andrews, Robert E., New Jersey, 1st YES

* Ferguson, Michael, New Jersey, 7th NO

* Frelinghuysen, Rodney, New Jersey, 11th NO

* Garrett, Scott, New Jersey, 5th NO

* Holt, Rush, New Jersey, 12th YES

* LoBiondo, Frank, New Jersey, 2nd NO

* Menendez, Bob, New Jersey, 13th — Vacancy NO

* Pallone Jr., Frank, New Jersey, 6th YES

* Pascrell Jr., Bill, New Jersey, 8th YES

* Payne, Donald M., New Jersey, 10th YES

* Rothman, Steven, New Jersey, 9th YES

* Saxton, Jim, New Jersey, 3rd NO

* Smith, Chris, New Jersey, 4th NO

New Hampshire

* Bass, Charles, New Hampshire, 2nd NO

* Bradley, Jeb, New Hampshire, 1st NO

New Mexico

* Pearce, Steve, New Mexico, 2nd NO

* Udall, Tom, New Mexico, 3rd YES

* Wilson, Heather, New Mexico, 1st YES

New York

* Ackerman, Gary, New York, 5th NO NO

* Bishop, Timothy, New York, 1st YES

* Boehlert, Sherwood L., New York, 24th NO

* Crowley, Joseph, New York, 7th NO

* Engel, Eliot, New York, 17th YES

* Fossella, Vito, New York, 13th NO

* Higgins, Brian, New York, 27th YES

* Hinchey, Maurice, New York, 22nd YES

* Israel, Steve, New York, 2nd YES

* Kelly, Sue, New York, 19th NO

* King, Pete, New York, 3rd NO

* Kuhl Jr., John R. “Randy”, New York, 29th YES

* Lowey, Nita, New York, 18th YES

* Maloney, Carolyn, New York, 14th YES

* McCarthy, Carolyn, New York, 4th YES

* McHugh, John M., New York, 23rd FAILED TO VOTE

* McNulty, Michael R., New York, 21st YES

* Meeks, Gregory W., New York, 6th NO

* Nadler, Jerrold, New York, 8th YES

* Owens, Major, New York, 11th YES

* Rangel, Charles B., New York, 15th YES

* Reynolds, Thomas M., New York, 26th NO

* Serrano, José E., New York, 16th YES

* Slaughter, Louise, New York, 28th YES

* Sweeney, John E., New York, 20th NO

* Towns, Edolphus, New York, 10th NO

* Veláquez, Nydia M., New York, 12th YES

* Walsh, Jim, New York, 25th NO

* Weiner, Anthony D., New York, 9th YES

North Carolina

* Butterfield, G.K., North Carolina, 1st NO

* Coble, Howard, North Carolina, 6th NO

* Etheridge, Bob, North Carolina, 2nd NO

* Foxx, Virginia, North Carolina, 5th NO

* Hayes, Robin, North Carolina, 8th NO

* Jones, Walter B., North Carolina, 3rd YES

* McHenry, Patrick T., North Carolina, 10th NO

* McIntyre, Mike, North Carolina, 7th NO

* Miller, Brad, North Carolina, 13th YES

* Myrick, Sue, North Carolina, 9th NO

* Price, David, North Carolina, 4th YES

* Taylor, Charles H., North Carolina, 11th NO

* Watt, Mel, North Carolina, 12th YES

North Dakota

* Pomeroy, Earl, North Dakota, At Large YES

Ohio

* Boehner, John A., Ohio, 8th NO

* Brown, Sherrod, Ohio, 13th YES

* Chabot, Steve, Ohio, 1st NO

* Gillmor, Paul, Ohio, 5th NO

* Hobson, David, Ohio, 7th NO

* Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, Ohio, 11th YES

* Kaptur, Marcy, Ohio, 9th YES

* Kucinich, Dennis J., Ohio, 10th YES

* LaTourette, Steven C., Ohio, 14th NO

* Ney, Robert W., Ohio, 18th NO

* Oxley, Michael G., Ohio, 4th NO

* Pryce, Deborah, Ohio, 15th NO

* Regula, Ralph, Ohio, 16th YES

* Ryan, Tim, Ohio, 17th YES

* Schmidt, Jean, Ohio, 2nd NO

* Strickland, Ted, Ohio, 6th YES

* Tiberi, Pat, Ohio, 12th NO

* Turner, Michael, Ohio, 3rd NO

Oklahoma

* Boren, Dan, Oklahoma, 2nd NO

* Cole, Tom, Oklahoma, 4th NO

* Istook Jr., Ernest J., Oklahoma, 5th NO

* Lucas, Frank, Oklahoma, 3rd NO

* Sullivan, John, Oklahoma, 1st NO

Oregon

* Blumenauer, Earl, Oregon, 3rd YES

* DeFazio, Peter, Oregon, 4th YES

* Hooley, Darlene, Oregon, 5th YES

* Walden, Greg, Oregon, 2nd NO

* Wu, David, Oregon, 1st YES

Pennsylvania

* Brady, Robert, Pennsylvania, 1st NO

* Dent, Charles W., Pennsylvania, 15th NO

* Doyle, Mike, Pennsylvania, 14th YES

* English, Phil, Pennsylvania, 3rd NO

* Fattah, Chaka, Pennsylvania, 2nd NO

* Fitzpatrick, Michael G., Pennsylvania, 8th YES

* Gerlach, Jim, Pennsylvania, 6th NO

* Hart, Melissa, Pennsylvania, 4th NO

* Holden, Tim, Pennsylvania, 17th NO

* Kanjorski, Paul E., Pennsylvania, 11th YES

* Murphy, Tim, Pennsylvania, 18th NO

* Murtha, John, Pennsylvania, 12th YES

* Peterson, John E., Pennsylvania, 5th FAILED TO VOTE

* Pitts, Joseph R., Pennsylvania, 16th NO

* Platts, Todd, Pennsylvania, 19th NO

* Schwartz, Allyson Y., Pennsylvania, 13th NO

* Sherwood, Don, Pennsylvania, 10th NO

* Shuster, Bill, Pennsylvania, 9th NO

* Weldon, Curt, Pennsylvania, 7th NO

Rhode Island

* Kennedy, Patrick, Rhode Island, 1st YES

* Langevin, Jim, Rhode Island, 2nd YES

South Carolina

* Barrett, J.Gresham, South Carolina, 3rd NO NO

* Brown, Henry, South Carolina, 1st NO

* Clyburn, James E., South Carolina, 6th NO

* Inglis, Bob, South Carolina, 4th NO

* Spratt, John, South Carolina, 5th NO

* Wilson, Joe, South Carolina, 2nd NO

South Dakota

* Herseth, Stephanie, South Dakota, At Large YES

Tennessee

* Blackburn, Marsha, Tennessee, 7th NO

* Cooper, Jim, Tennessee, 5th YES

* Davis, Lincoln, Tennessee, 4th NO

* Duncan Jr., John J., Tennessee, 2nd NO

* Ford, Harold, Tennessee, 9th YES

* Gordon, Bart, Tennessee, 6th YES

* Jenkins, William L., Tennessee, 1st NO

* Tanner, John, Tennessee, 8th NO

* Wamp, Zach, Tennessee, 3rd NO

Texas

* Barton, Joe, Texas, 6th NO

* Bonilla, Henry, Texas, 23rd NO

* Brady, Kevin, Texas, 8th NO

* Burgess, Michael, Texas, 26th NO

* Carter, John, Texas, 31st NO

* Conaway, K. Michael, Texas, 11th NO

* Cuellar, Henry, Texas, 28th NO

* Culberson, John, Texas, 7th NO

* DeLay, Tom, Texas, 22nd FAILED TO VOTE

* Doggett, Lloyd, Texas, 25th YES

* Edwards, Chet, Texas, 17th NO

* Gohmert, Louie, Texas, 1st NO

* Gonzalez, Charlie A., Texas, 20th NO

* Granger, Kay, Texas, 12th NO

* Green, Al, Texas, 9th NO

* Green, Gene, Texas, 29th NO

* Hall, Ralph M., Texas, 4th NO

* Hensarling, Jeb, Texas, 5th NO

* Hinojosa, Rubén, Texas, 15th NO

* Jackson Lee, Sheila, Texas, 18th NO

* Johnson, Eddie Bernice, Texas, 30th NO

* Johnson, Sam, Texas, 3rd NO

* Marchant, Kenny, Texas, 24th NO

* McCaul, Michael T., Texas, 10th NO

* Neugebauer, Randy, Texas, 19th NO

* Ortiz, Solomon P., Texas, 27th NO

* Paul, Ron, Texas, 14th NO

* Poe, Ted, Texas, 2nd NO

* Reyes, Silvestre, Texas, 16th FAILED TO VOTE

* Sessions, Pete, Texas, 32nd NO

* Smith, Lamar, Texas, 21st NO

* Thornberry, Mac, Texas, 13th NO

Utah

* Bishop, Rob, Utah, 1st NO

* Cannon, Chris, Utah, 3rd NO

* Matheson, Jim, Utah, 2nd YES

Vermont

* Sanders, Bernie, Vermont, At Large YES

Virginia

* Boucher, Rick, Virginia, 9th YES

* Brown-Waite, Virginia, Florida, 5th NO

* Cantor, Eric, Virginia, 7th NO

* Capito, Shelley Moore, West Virginia, 2nd NO

* Davis, Jo Ann S., Virginia, 1st NO

* Davis, Tom, Virginia, 11th YES

* Drake, Thelma D., Virginia, 2nd NO

* Forbes, J. Randy, Virginia, 4th NO

* Foxx, Virginia, North Carolina, 5th NO

* Goode Jr., Virgil H., Virginia, 5th NO

* Goodlatte, Bob, Virginia, 6th NO

* Mollohan, Alan B., West Virginia, 1st NO

* Moran, Jim, Virginia, 8th NO

* Rahall, Nick, West Virginia, 3rd NO

* Scott, Robert C. “Bobby”, Virginia, 3rd YES

* Wolf, Frank, Virginia, 10th YES

Washington

* Baird, Brian, Washington, 3rd YES

* Dicks, Norman D., Washington, 6th YES

* Hastings, Doc, Washington, 4th NO

* Inslee, Jay, Washington, 1st YES

* Larsen, Rick, Washington, 2nd NO

* McDermott, Jim, Washington, 7th YES

* McMorris, Cathy, Washington, 5th NO

* Reichert, David G., Washington, 8th YES

* Smith, Adam, Washington, 9th YES

West Virginia

* Capito, Shelley Moore, West Virginia, 2nd NO

* Mollohan, Alan B., West Virginia, 1st NO

* Rahall, Nick, West Virginia, 3rd NO

Wisconsin

* Baldwin, Tammy, Wisconsin, 2nd YES

* Green, Mark, Wisconsin, 8th NO

* Kind, Ron, Wisconsin, 3rd YES

* Moore, Gwen, Wisconsin, 4th YES

* Obey, David R., Wisconsin, 7th YES

* Petri, Thomas, Wisconsin, 6th NO

* Ryan, Paul, Wisconsin, 1st NO

* Sensenbrenner, F. James, Wisconsin, 5th YES

Wyoming

* Cubin, Barbara, Wyoming, At Large NO

http://gargles.net/net-neutrality-who-voted-for-what/





The Don't-Bother-to-Knock Rule

The Supreme Court yesterday substantially diminished Americans' right to privacy in their own homes. The rule that police officers must "knock and announce" themselves before entering a private home is a venerable one, and a well-established part of Fourth Amendment law. But President Bush's two recent Supreme Court appointments have now provided the votes for a 5-4 decision eviscerating this rule.

This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.

The case arose out of the search of Booker T. Hudson's home in Detroit in 1998. The police announced themselves but did not knock, and after waiting a few seconds, entered his home and seized drugs and a gun. There is no dispute that the search violated the knock-and-announce rule.

The question in the case was what to do about it. Mr. Hudson wanted the evidence excluded at his trial. That is precisely what should have happened. Since 1914, the Supreme Court has held that, except in rare circumstances, evidence seized in violation of the Constitution cannot be used. The exclusionary rule has sometimes been criticized for allowing criminals to go free just because of police error. But as the court itself recognized in that 1914 case, if this type of evidence were admissible, the Fourth Amendment "might as well be stricken."

The court ruled yesterday that the evidence could be used against Mr. Hudson. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, argued that even if police officers did not have to fear losing a case if they disobeyed the knock-and-announce rule, the subjects of improper searches could still bring civil lawsuits to challenge them. But as the dissenters rightly pointed out, there is little chance that such suits would keep the police in line. Justice Scalia was also far too dismissive of the important privacy rights at stake, which he essentially reduced to "the right not to be intruded upon in one's nightclothes." Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent that even a century ago the court recognized that when the police barge into a house unannounced, it is an assault on "the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life."

If Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had stayed on the court, this case might well have come out the other way. For those who worry that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will take the court in a radically conservative direction, it is sobering how easily the majority tossed aside a principle that traces back to 13th-century Britain, and a legal doctrine that dates to 1914, to let the government invade people's homes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/16/opinion/16fri1.html