[JackSpratts]

You Can’t Use That Tax Idea. It’s Patented.
Floyd Norris

As the American tax law gets more and more complicated, lawyers have come up with one more way to make life difficult for taxpayers: Now you may face a patent infringement suit if you use a tax strategy someone else thought of first.

“I can’t even imagine what it will be like in 5 or 10 years,” said Dennis B. Drapkin, a tax lawyer with Jones Day in Dallas, “if anytime a lawyer or accountant gives tax advice, they have to find out if there is a patent on this.” He notes that researching patents, and then licensing them, would just make tax compliance more costly.

Mr. Drapkin is chairman of a task force of the American Bar Association’s tax section that will discuss the issue today in Denver. He said that after one conference where tax strategies were discussed, participants got a letter warning that using one idea mentioned would be in violation of a patent.

Why would Congress pass a law allowing such a thing? The answer is that it did not. But a federal appeals court ruled in 1998 that business methods can be patented, and since then the Patent Office has issued 49 tax-strategy patents, with many more pending.

There is even one case pending in federal court in Connecticut, in which an organization called Tax Strategies Group complains that John W. Rowe, the former chief executive of Aetna, infringed on its patent by using a certain type of trust to minimize taxes on profits from stock options. The group wants Mr. Rowe to be barred from using that strategy unless he buys a license from them.

To patent lawyers, all this makes some sense. Others might see it as an example of judicial absurdity.

But if it is legal, the mind boggles at the possibilities. Could I get a patent on taking a deduction for dependents, so that every parent in America would have to pay a royalty to me to take advantage of the tax law passed by Congress?

I presume the patent office would find that obvious, and thus not patentable, but there are plenty of slightly more complicated strategies that might be patentable, particularly considering the fact that patent examiners may not be tax experts.

Indeed, Cheryl E. Hader, a partner at Ropes & Gray who represents Mr. Rowe, argues that the strategy he used was clearly authorized by the tax law and that no patent should have been granted.

One can imagine lawyers and accountants rushing to the patent office as soon as a new tax law is passed, seeking to claim credit for dreaming up ideas that were made possible by the new law. Lobbyists who get tax breaks inserted into such bills would be in a preferred position to win the race to patent them.

In an article in Legal Times this week, Paul Devinsky, John R. Fuisz and Thomas D. Sykes, three lawyers from McDermott, Will & Emery, suggested that a company might figure out a tax strategy that would save it a lot of money, and then patent it. Then the company could refuse to license the patent to its competitors, thus raising its rivals’ cost of doing business.

Tax patents, the lawyers wrote, amount to “government-issued barbed wire” to keep some taxpayers from getting equal treatment under the tax code.

In an ideal world, Congress might pass tax laws so simple that clever strategies would be impossible and tax lawyers would need to find other employment. But until that happens, it would seem obvious that Congress would want to assure that all taxpayers are treated equally.

After all, as Mr. Devinsky and his colleagues wrote, “The successful patenting of tax strategies now limits Congress’ ability to shape economic policy through legislation, and places that power in the hands of individual patent holders.”

But in Washington, such things are seldom simple. Asked what he thought Congress would do, Mr. Fuisz said action was possible, recalling that six years ago doctors got Congress to protect them from patent infringement suits over surgical techniques.

But, he added, it will be a battle of interests. “You will see the people making money off these patents lining up against those who dispense tax strategy advice,” he said.

So now we can have lobbying over whether all can benefit from what the lobbyists accomplished earlier.

Ain’t democracy great?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/20.../20norris.html





Symbian Forecasts the Death of the PC
David Meyer

The PC will be on its last legs within five years, if executives from the mobile platform company Symbian are to be believed.

In his keynote speech at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, the company's chief executive, Nigel Clifford, told delegates that the dawning era of the smart phone represents a shift "as profound as the Internet and PC were in the 1990s."

"Desktops PCs are effectively a flatlining commodity," Clifford said on Tuesday, while conceding that laptops were eliciting "perhaps a bit more" excitement.

Clifford suggested that the popularity of smart phones in the developed world and the "leapfrog economies" phenomenon in developing countries--in which expensive wired infrastructures are bypassed in favor of wireless--would create a situation where there was a "smart phone in every pocket."

Clifford cited the rates of technology adoption in India to back up his point. In India, the PC market is growing at 5 million units a year, while mobile phones were enjoying the same growth per month.

Symbian's head of propositions, John Forsyth, later argued that "in five years' time you'll wonder why you need a PC at all."

Speaking to ZDNet UK at the show, Forsyth said that "phones are beginning to eat into the space" that laptops were designed for.

"It will be a great relief to be liberated from the laptop," he added, citing poor laptop battery performance as a key reason.

Forsyth claimed the PC had stagnated and denied recent suggestions that phones would run out of new features over the next few years.

While conceding that there would be something of a shift from new hardware technology to new services, he pointed to "increased richness of both input and display technology" as an indicator of mobile technology's evolution.

"We see loads of keypad experimentation across vendors. That's a trend of innovation that will increase until people find solutions. It's clear that the numeric keypad has started to creak with the introduction of mobile e-mail," Forsyth said, describing the competition between various new input technologies--such as handwriting recognition and foldable keyboards--as "Darwinian."

In terms of screen capabilities, Forsyth noted that mobile phone screens were "going beyond just being personal" and were now considered by users to be suitable for sharing photos and content.

"The idea of sitting at a desk to view a Web page is inherently annoying. (Phone screens) are small but the size of the display relative to the phone size is growing and the resolution of screens is growing very rapidly," he added.

Another speaker at the event, Sony Ericsson's chief technology officer, Mats Lindoff, also predicted exciting advances in screen technology, and suggested that foldable or bendable displays would be available by 2012.

Lindoff pointed out that emerging devices contained memory equivalent to that of laptops of seven years ago, and suggested that phones would in the future contain as much as 64GB of memory.

However, he acknowledged that, while Moore's Law would bring greater processing power for handheld devices, battery power would struggle to keep up. The solution, said Lindoff, would be to develop applications that are less power-hungry.
http://news.com.com/Symbian+forecast...l?tag=nefd.top





Microsoft Plans to Give Away Software for Multiple Systems
Kevin J. O'Brien

BRUSSELS Microsoft accelerated its efforts to persuade European lawmakers that it was changing how it does business by announcing Tuesday that it would give away software to enable computers to run multiple operating systems at the same time.

The company, the largest software maker in the world, chose to make the global announcement at its new conference center not far from the European Commission headquarters as it continued to fight an eight-year-old antitrust lawsuit over its business methods.

Its announcement came only five days after Microsoft bowed to pressure from the European Commission and redesigned the upcoming Vista version of its Windows operating system to let it work smoothly with competitors' security, document and search programs.
"This is not only about working together with our friends but also about working together with our competitors," said Jason Matusow, a senior director of Microsoft's intellectual property licensing.

Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said he had not seen the details of Microsoft's giveaway but cautioned against assuming it was motivated only by pragmatism or a new spirit of cooperation.

"If Microsoft were doing this for altruistic reasons, it would be a first," Greve said. "I think they are probably trying to get more machines on the Windows platform, and they may also be trying to improve relations in Brussels."

Microsoft said it was relinquishing all license claims on its Virtual Hard Disk Image Format - new software that will allow computers running on rival products like Apple's OS X or Linux, its chief competitors in operating systems, to simultaneously run Windows.

Matusow said the decision was part of a Microsoft initiative begun in June to make more software available through so-called open source licenses, which enables independent designers to incorporate Microsoft products in their own software that they can then distribute for free.

As part of this effort, Microsoft plans to convene an advisory panel of 35 chief information officers from global companies to recommend how Microsoft can make more software compatible with rivals. The software released Tuesday would chiefly be used by businesses, which increasingly are constructing corporate computer networks using software that employs a range of standards and operating systems.

Matusow estimated that less than a quarter of all servers currently run multiple operating systems. But he said dual-system computer servers are becoming the rule as businesses look to save money on hardware costs.

According to the research firm International Data, there will be about 500,000 computers, mostly servers, running dual operating systems by the end of this year. That number is expected to explode to 1.5 billion by the end of 2009. Three Microsoft competitors - International Business Machines, Sun Microsystems and Apple - already sell similar software.

More Microsoft research

Microsoft will spend about $7.5 billion on research and development in its 2007 financial year, $1.3 billion more than previously committed, its chief executive, Steve Ballmer, said, Reuters reported from Madrid.

"I estimate off the top of my head that approximately half a billion of that will be spent in Europe," Ballmer said. In May, Ballmer had announced research spending of $6.2 billion, a figure that surprised the market.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/...money/msft.php





Is Windows Near End of Its Run?
Steve Lohr

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust rules in Europe.

Mr. Ballmer, 50, has been deeply involved in the discussions with the European competition authorities.

Windows Vista and Office 2007, according to industry analysts, may be the last time Microsoft can really cash in on these lucrative personal computer products, as software is increasingly distributed, developed and used on the Internet.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Vista would be shipped in late January and expressed confidence that it would pass regulatory scrutiny. [Page C3.]

In fast-growing consumer markets, Microsoft is playing catch-up. It trails well behind Google in Internet search. Next month, Microsoft will introduce its Zune music player, in an uphill effort to take on the Apple iPod.

At Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer must adjust to being alone at the top, as his friend and longtime partner, Bill Gates, eases out of his company duties to work full time on philanthropy.

In a meeting this week with editors and reporters of The New York Times, Mr. Ballmer answered questions about Microsoft, his job and the future of software. Following are excerpts:

Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.

A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.

Q. In the future, will the software model change? Will the Internet, for example, be the way most software is distributed?

A. That will happen. It’ll happen from us. It’ll happen from everybody.

Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much shorter, months instead of years?

A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms every month. It’s just not done.

Q. Is Vista the last operating system of this era? That is, the last operating system in the traditional sense of being this monolithic software product? Don’t these Internet changes open the door to Windows à la carte? After all, you have different versions of Windows now for personal computers, cellphones and hand-helds.

A. Windows is a little different because Windows manages the hardware. It’s got to come with the hardware and manage the hardware. For the thing called the PC — the thing we think of as having a big screen and a keyboard — there really is one infrastructure for supporting hardware, for supporting application development. It’s not 100 percent monolithic. But it’s almost 100 percent monolithic.

Q. Can we talk about Europe?

A. Beautiful place. I lived in Brussels for three years as a kid. I do love Brussels.

Q. I was thinking of what seems to be the continuing conflict — the disputes, penalties and fines — over how Microsoft designs Windows and what features you put in the operating system. Is there a way around that problem?

A. First of all, I wouldn’t call it conflict. We really have — no, I mean this genuinely — have been having a constructive dialogue. Now, no regulator, not in this country nor in Europe, is going to give you a gold star that says, I will attest that everything in Vista is OK. The Department of Justice is not going to do that, and the European Union is not going to do that. At the end of the day, we can get a lot of guidance. And then we have to make the call and we have to take the risk. We really just have to decide whether we think the thing is compliant. It’s not really their issue. It’s kind of our issue in an odd way.

A. With Bill Gates making the transition out of day-to-day involvement at Microsoft, what is the biggest challenge you have to overcome?

Q. Well, there are sort of two. First, it’s not like Bill’s written every line of code or designed every product or done anything like that for many, many years. But Bill’s been an incredible contributor. If Office 2007 is a great product, give Bill 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the credit. We have to make sure that — whether it’s 5 or 7 or 10 percent — we get those values someplace else. And second, with Bill people have understood that we’re committed to long-term innovation. Bill’s been emblematic of that. We’ve shared that vision all along the way. But I think I have to pick that up. Because people want to know that the buck-stops-here person is committed to continuing to invest and do things.

Q. Several of the areas Microsoft is betting on for future growth — Xbox, Zune and ad-supported Web software and services — are consumer markets. How do you think the consumer perceives Microsoft?

A. All our surveys will tell you consumers think the world of Microsoft. At the same time, you have to go win the consumer in each area. I’ll give you an example. When it came time to name Xbox, there was certainly a class of people who wanted to have Microsoft and/or Windows more prominent. They all lost. And it was a wise choice. Not because Microsoft is bad. But it wouldn’t have meant what it needed to mean to that audience. And Zune could have been Microsoft music system or Microsoft entertainment system or Xpod, I guess. But again, we thought the experience was different and it was worth giving its own identity. So I think we have a good seat with the consumer, but we have to prove ourselves every time as our competitors have to do, too, by the way. Google has a good brand. It didn’t help them a lick in video.

Q. What do you see as the most significant changes in how people use software?

A. I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community. That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people and it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of multiple people interacting on things — that will forever continue. That’s different today, and we’re going to see those differences build. You see it in a variety of ways now, in social networking sites, in the way people collaborate at work, and in ad hoc collaboration over the Internet. You see it in things like Xbox Live, the way we let people come together and have community entertainment experiences. And you’ll see that in TV and video. It’s not like the future of entertainment has been determined. But it’s a big deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/te...ss&oref=slogin





Vista on Track; Changes Per EU Guidance
Raf Casert

Microsoft Corp. is making several key changes to its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system in an attempt to soothe European antitrust worries, while keeping its worldwide distribution plans on schedule.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said Friday the company agreed to change how people can set their preferred search service if they upgrade to Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser. The Redmond, Wash., company also has tweaked Vista's security system to address concerns that the system was favoring Microsoft's products over competing security offerings.

In addition, the company plans to have an international standards organization review a controversial new file format that will be included in Windows and the company's Office business suite. He said that was a step toward making the format available for other companies to license.

Even with the changes, which will be included in all versions the company ships worldwide, Microsoft said it still plans deliver the long-delayed Vista to large businesses in November and consumers and small businesses in January.

The announcement follows many testy exchanges between Microsoft and European regulators, who are still embroiled in a long-running antitrust dispute over the current version of Windows.

But Smith told The Associated Press the changes announced Friday were the result of conversation, rather than litigation, between the two parties. EU antitrust chief Neelie Kroes and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, spoke by phone Thursday.

"When you have a constructive dialogue with people, you can actually figure out how to solve problems in a way that really wins for everybody," Smith said.

Still, he cautioned that the changes didn't guarantee the company would be free of antitrust concerns in Europe or elsewhere.

The EU antitrust office, which warned this spring it had concerns about the new Windows software, refused to back Microsoft's optimism that European concerns had been met.

"The jury is out," EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said. "It is up to Microsoft to shoulder its own responsibility to ensure full compliance with competition rules."

He said the Commission "will closely monitor the effects on the market and in particular examine any complaints."

Antitrust complaints often come up long after a product has been released, rather than in advance.

Microsoft also is hoping changes announced Friday will resolve trade worries with South Korea, where the Korea Fair Trade Commission said Microsoft abused its dominant market position by tying certain software to Windows.

The company said it will ship a version in Korea without the company's digital media player or instant messaging software, along with a full version that also will have links to competing products made by Korean vendors.

Microsoft also will ship a version of Windows in Europe without the media player.

Vista will be the first major upgrade to Microsoft's flagship operating system since Windows XP was released in 2001. It touts a sleeker look, improved security features, better protection against spyware and viruses and more intuitive search tools to help users find saved files.

The EU and Microsoft have fought for years over Windows XP, and the 25-nation bloc in 2004 levied a record $613 million fine and ordered Microsoft to hand over technical information to rivals, saying it had deliberately tried to cripple them as it won control of the market.

Over the summer, the EU fined Microsoft $357 million and threatened more penalties, saying the company failed to give rivals enough. Microsoft plans to appeal the fine.

The EU's executive Commission had already warned Microsoft it had to take care to avoid antitrust problems with Vista.

One potential area of strife is a Web search bar in Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser; some feared it would favor Microsoft's own search engine over rivals such as Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. In response, Smith said Microsoft had added an easier way for people upgrading from the previous version of Internet Explorer to choose what search engine they prefer. The choice applies to Windows XP machines, as Vista will already ship with Internet Explorer 7.

Another concern involved Microsoft's plan to release a format for saving documents that cannot be easily modified. Called XPS, the format would compete directly with Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF. Smith argued that submitting XPS to a standards body and allowing other companies to license it for little or no cost would reduce Microsoft's own competitive benefit from the format.

Security vendors Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. have accused Microsoft of abusing its monopoly in deciding which security products can run on Vista, arguing that Microsoft is deliberately withholding information needed to develop products that work on the new system.

Symantec said Friday it was heartened by the development but had not yet been contacted by Microsoft engineers with technical information the company was seeking.

"It's guarded optimism," Symantec spokesman Cris Paden said. "It looks like they're taking steps to allow customers to use whatever solutions they want, but the security industry now asks, 'When?'"

Microsoft said it had made commitments to give competing security firms a way to access more of the internal workings of Vista. The company also promised to ensure that a computer user will not have to deal with double security alerts if an alternative competing security console is installed on the computer.

Smith insisted Microsoft had specifically worked on security, the document reader and the search system to make it compatible with European law.

Todd left open whether Microsoft's Vista changes would help end years of acrimonious debate. "Quite honestly? Time will tell."

Microsoft shares rose 15 cents to close at $28.37 Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

---

AP Business Writers Allison Linn in Seattle and Jordan Robertson in San Jose contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-13-17-13-55





Microsoft to Release New IE Web Browser
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. is giving its Web browser software its first major upgrade in years, amid signs that Internet Explorer's market share is eroding.

The release late Wednesday brings Microsoft's browser more in line with competing products such as Opera Software ASA's Opera and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox. Internet Explorer 7, or IE7, adds features such as tabbed browsing, which lets people open several Web pages without cluttering their desktop with multiple open browser windows.

Microsoft has been heavily testing the new browser, releasing five beta versions over 14 months, and has periodically offered security updates for IE6, first released in 2001.

Still, a lag of more than five years between official releases has cost the company. Web analysis company WebSideStory estimates that Internet Explorer's U.S. market share is about 86 percent, while Firefox commands about 11 percent of the market and smaller offerings account for the rest. Two years ago, IE had about a 93 percent share.

Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer, acknowledged the company could have done more sooner, but he said the new version should address users' concerns.

"We did have active development," he said. "The question is whether it was enough."

Matt Rosoff, analyst with independent researchers Directions on Microsoft, said Internet Explorer is important to Microsoft's business because most people believe an operating system should include a way to immediately access the Web.

Still, he said, Microsoft may not have seen much reason to spend a lot of money upgrading sooner since most people continued to use the older version.

Rosoff said the new product includes enough improvements to lure back some users.

But Colin Teubner, an analyst with Forrester Research, said people already using Firefox and rival products might not immediately come back. That's partly because those users have soured on Microsoft, he said, and partly because IE7 doesn't break much new ground.

"A year ago Firefox was head and shoulders above Microsoft's current offering, and I think even with IE7 it's mostly playing catch up," Teubner said.

But he does recommend that IE6 users upgrade, and he believes Microsoft may surpass competitors with future improvements.

Besides tabbed browsing, Microsoft has improved security to help keep users from falling victim to things like malicious software attacks and phishing scams. Microsoft products are a near-constant target of Internet attackers, and some people have recommended switching browsers because a less high-profile product might be more secure.

The Redmond software maker also has added a box in the browser that lets people search the Internet without going to a separate Web page, much like competitors.

In a last-minute change, people who are upgrading from the previous version of the browser will now have a clearer way to choose whether they want to use Microsoft's search engine or a competing one from companies like Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. The change announced Friday was one of several aimed at soothing antitrust worries in Europe, where Microsoft faces a longrunning regulatory battle.

IE7 will be available as a free download beginning Wednesday evening. Next month, the company also will begin delivering it to Windows XP users who have signed up to automatically receive security fixes. Hachamovitch said that's because the product makes major security improvements.

Such distribution also will provide a powerful tool in countering competition from rival browsers.

Security updates typically download with little or no user intervention, but with IE7 people will get an extra opportunity to elect not to upgrade. Also, even people using automatic updates will have to agree to let Microsoft check whether their copy of Windows is pirated before they can get IE7.

Microsoft expects that it will take months to gradually release IE7 automatically. The browser also will be an integral part of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, due out for big businesses in November and for consumers in January.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-19-07-55-02





IE7 Vulnerability Discovered
CmdrTaco

"Not 24 hours after the release of IE7, Secunia reports Internet Explorer Arbitrary Content Disclosure Vulnerability. So much for the "you wanted it easier and more secure" slogan found on Microsoft's IE Website."
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/19/1326247.shtml





Businesses Embracing Firefox As The Other Browser

JupiterResearch has recorded a large jump in the number of businesses allowing Firefox and is predicting that the latest IE7 release might drive even more acceptance.
Antone Gonsalves

The number of businesses allowing employees to download the Firefox Web browser soared this year, and at least one analyst believes the recently released Internet Explorer 7 could boost use of Firefox in companies.

Fully, 44 percent of businesses with 250 employees or more allow workers to download Mozilla Corp.'s open-source browser at the office, according to a survey conducted this year by JupiterResearch. Last year, only 26 percent of such businesses were willing to do the same.

"That's a huge jump," Joe Wilcox, analyst for JupiterResearch said Friday. "It's an enormous embrace of Firefox in a very short period of time."

The increase is likely driven by employee demand for Firefox, which can be deployed without disruption to other desktop applications, Wilcox said. Workers apparently have found the browser's features, which include the popular tabbed browsing, more useful than the older Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft Corp.

The feature gap, however, has vanished with the release out of beta this week of Internet Explorer 7. But few businesses are expected to deploy the browser upgrade until they install Vista, Microsoft's major Windows upgrade that's set for release to businesses in November.

The reason for the delay is IE's tight integration with the operating system. Installing IE 7 on a Windows XP machine in an office would require a lot of testing first to determine the impact on business applications. Rather than test twice, companies are more likely to stick with IE6 until Vista, Wilcox said.

For many businesses, the move to Vista could take a year and a half or more, analysts say.

As a result, many people who get IE 7 at home through Microsoft's automatic update service will likely find IE6 lacking. Without the option of installing IE 7 at work, they are likely to turn to Firefox, Wilcox said.

"If you can't have one, then you'll use the other," the analyst said.

While Firefox is expected to get an up tick in business use, the browser is not expected to overtake IE, which dominates the corporate market. Numbers from Web metrics firms vary, but in October IE had from 82 percent to 86 percent of the market, while Firefox had 11.5 percent to 12.5 percent.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...Sfeed_IWK_News





Opera Says It Can Still Compete In Browser Battle

The company's CTO says Opera actually pioneered the tabbed-browser features later included in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Gregg Keizer

Even as Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 rolls out to users and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox 2.0 nears completion, rival Opera Software remains convinced it can compete, a company executive said Thursday.

Oslo, Norway-based Opera, which develops the same-named browser for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other desktop platforms, as well as miniature browsers for mobile phones and devices, owns less than one percent of the global browser market, according to Web metrics vendors. But its low numbers doesn't faze the company's chief technology officer, Hakon Wium Lie.

"We want to increase our user base," said Lie, "and we think we can do it. We just need to educate people about Opera, and show them how Opera compares with the others, especially in security."

That security-centric approach has done wonders for rival Firefox, which has increased its market share from zero to 12.4 percent in two years. But Opera's share has struggled to climb much above the half-a-percentage-point figure in that same period.

It doesn't make sense to Lie. "IE 7 comes out and adds tabbed browsing, but Opera has had that for 10 years." He agreed that ideas should be shared -- in fact, said Lie, Opera cooperates with both Mozilla and Apple, which develops its own Safari browser -- but he'd like his company to get credit where credit is due.

"Credit is due Opera, and we'd like to see that reflected in market share," Lie said.

Lie was particularly critical of Microsoft's IE 7, which he said was "disappointing." The IE development team, said Lie, had been given the short end of the stick by Microsoft. "They haven't taken things seriously, and haven't given the necessary resources to IE 7. They could have built a new rendering engine, but instead they used [the engine that debuted with] IE 4.

"That's like taking an old car and giving it a new paint job," said Lie. Microsoft launched IE 7 for Windows XP late Wednesday.

The reality, however, is that Opera is a minor player in the desktop browser business. Lie acknowledged this as he emphasized the company's progress on the mobile front. "Usage numbers are very different on the mobile side. We're now on 40 to 50 handsets, as well as other devices, such as set-top boxes. Nintendo's new Wii [video game console] will have our browser in it.

"Mobile is a very important part of our business."

Although Lie kept future Opera development plans close to his vest, he did say that the company would explore areas that played to its strengths in cross-platform and cross-device support. "One thing in the future that we'll work on is the ability to take content with you across the range of devices. If you browse an article on the Web on your desktop, you want that article to follow you when you leave the house with your phone to take the bus," said Lie.

"All I can say is that we're passionate about browsers."

Earlier this week, Opera announced an addition that will keep it in step with its rivals. Johan Borg, a developer working on the browser, said Tuesday in a blog that the next edition, Opera 9.1, will include beefed up anti-phishing and anti-fraud features. Rather than simply indicate that a site is secure with a notation in the address bar, Opera 9.1 will also query Opera-owned servers for information on any site visited. Those that Opera has identifies as fraudulent will be automatically blocked by the browser.

The current edition of Opera is 9.02, which can be downloaded from here.
http://www.informationweek.com/indus...leID=193400746





Officer Suspended Over Graphic Web Site
AP

A police officer whose Web page on MySpace.com included images of dismembered women has been indefinitely suspended, authorities said.

Jeremiah Love's page on the social-networking site contained images and statements that could undermine public confidence in the police department, an internal affairs report said. Love, 26, was suspended Tuesday.

Julia Vasquez, an assistant city attorney, said Love espoused a fondness for violence on the Web page that would hurt his testimony in criminal cases.

"These are comments that would make it difficult if he was trying to defend himself against a complaint regarding excessive force as an officer," Vasquez said. "There may be no evidence of excessive force, but when someone looks at his site, the comments could be used against him in court."

She said Love had not faced disciplinary action in the past.

Love's attorney, Richard Carter, of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, said the officer would appeal the suspension on the grounds that the punishment is excessive. Carter said the appeal would be heard by an arbitrator.

The Web page, which has been removed from MySpace.com, was listed under the name Leatherface. Graphic images on the page included a woman with the word "loath" carved into her flesh. Love listed his occupation as "super hero/serial killer."

According to the internal affairs report, Love designed his site in the genre of horror movies. He told investigators the site was meant to be humorous, according to the report.

Bruce Martin, a defense lawyer, said he discovered Love's MySpace page shortly after Love arrested one of his clients last month. Martin, who said he alerted prosecutors to the Web site, said he has evidence Love used excessive force on his client.

"I think all of the arrests, all of the searches and all of the seizures he's made have come into question," Martin said. "In any case of abuse or alleged abuse perpetrated by Officer Love, this Web site can be used to test his credibility."

Police Chief Dennis Bachman wouldn't comment on Love's case but said the public "always tends to hold their officers and firemen to a higher standard whether right or wrong."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-13-12-20-51





People Find News in New Places
Eric Conrad

I pity Katie Couric. I pity her as much as one can considering she earns $15 million a year.

Still, I do, because she is destined to fail, to fall short of the massive hype that CBS built around its decision to hire her to replace Bob Schieffer, who replaced Dan Rather, as the lead anchor at CBS Evening News.

You see, network news is in such a steady and precipitous decline that no one person and no amount of format change can bring it back. If Walter Cronkite found the fountain of youth and became 40 again, he couldn't make a dent either.

And the worst may be yet to come.

Here are three facts you might find surprising:

Ratings for the big three network news shows -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- peaked in 1969. That's the same year the United States put the first man on the moon; that's 37 long years ago.

Since then, network TV ratings and total viewership have dropped consistently and annually. In 1980, 53 million Americans watched TV network news. Today, 28 million do (and the country's population is much greater).

By contrast, daily newspaper circulation nationally peaked much later, around 1991. While newspaper circulation also is dropping, it has a long way to go to reach the 59.6 percent ratings decline that network news shows have seen since 1969.

There are two key reasons behind what's happened to network news. The first is that longer work hours and tougher commutes mean many Americans aren't home and on the couch by anywhere near 6 p.m. If they are home, many "younger" adults are scrambling to fix dinner for their children or take their kids to all kinds of after-school events.

The bigger reason is that 24-hour cable television networks -- CNN and Fox, to name two leaders -- have surpassed network news broadcasts as the primary sources sought by Americans for breaking news. Why wait until 6 p.m. or 10 or 11 p.m. to follow the news when you can turn on Fox and practically watch a major event live (even if the reporters and anchors don't exactly know what's going on)?

There's an irony in all of this for newspaper journalists, seeing that during the 1960s network newscasts -- national and local -- replaced print journalism as the places Americans went first for their news.

But even CNN and Fox have a problem, and that's the onset of 24-hour, text-audio-and-video news available on the Internet -- including at local sites such as NewsTimesLive.com.

Every year, an organization called Journalism.org assesses "The State of the News Media." In last year's report, it stated the 2005 tsunami disaster in southeast Asia marked the first time more Americans went to Web sites and blogs for their up-to-the-minute news than went to cable TV.

"In the new millennium, a broadband-enabled, always-on Internet threatens to usurp cable news networks," the group's report said.

In another sweet irony, newspapers do quite well in this realm. USA Today, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are pre-eminent news brands that draw huge numbers of Internet news consumers. Here in northern Fairfield County, NewsTimesLive.com and The News-Times are tops for local news stories, photos and breaking-news updates (we do up to 20 a day now).

All of which leads me back to Katie Couric. CBS over-hyped her arrival, but also took an intelligent gamble in hoping the experienced, likeable, conversational Couric could draw viewers away from ABC and NBC. She's third in the ratings now but that could change in a year or two.

Just keep in mind that all three networks are vying for an increasingly small sliver of the pie.
http://news.newstimes.com/opinion/edit.php





Rise of Online Communication Means Decline of Mailbox
Richard Clough

Like the phone booth before it, the blue street-corner mailbox is rapidly becoming a casualty of the digital age.

As more people send e-mails and pay bills online, the decline in first-class mail is forcing the U.S. Postal Service to remove tens of thousands of underused mailboxes from city streets.

"People just don't write letters as often anymore," said Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service. "It's not a part of our culture anymore."

The removal of mailboxes, though, represents more than just a transition to the Internet age. To many, it means the decline of an American icon.

Seen and used by hundreds of millions of Americans for more than a century, the corner mailbox is one of the most recognized pieces of Americana, said Nancy Pope, a historian at the National Postal Museum in Washington.

"You recognize them in Chicago, you recognize them in D.C., you recognize them in Florida, you recognize them in Montana," Pope said. "It's a piece of American iconography that has a wonderful history behind it."

Initially small, green and attached to lampposts, mailboxes, which first appeared in America in the middle of the 19th century, were periodically redesigned until one model stuck. The rounded-top blue design has been the standard for mailboxes since 1971, when the Postal Reorganization Act took effect and overhauled the country's mail delivery sector. Over the past 35 years, that design has become "imprinted in our brains," Pope said.

The Postal Service owns a copyright on the box design.

Pope said producers of plays, television programs and films have solicited her help because when you want to create an outdoor scene that is distinctly American, "you put in a mailman, you put in a mailbox."

The National Postal Museum has two of the modern blue mailboxes in its collection; one is on display as part of a contemporary scene, which might become a scene of the past as the corner boxes become scarce.

Since 1999, the Postal Service has removed more than 42,000 collection boxes. As of last year, about 295,000 mailboxes remained in use.

Along with mailboxes, the Postal Service is facing a drop in jobs. In the past five years, it has reduced staff through attrition by more than 80,000 employees. The current postal work force stands at about 700,000.

The Postal Service's 2007 budget accounts for an expected reduction of about 3 billion pieces of first-class mail from 2006 levels. Last year, about 98 billion pieces of first-class mail were delivered.

The decline in mailboxes is not just because of decreases in first-class mail. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Postal Service, working with the Homeland Security Department, removed about 7,000 mailboxes around the country for security reasons. Among the cities that cut back were New York, which took out about 100 boxes near churches and mosques, and Chicago, which removed almost 200 boxes, mostly around the Sears Tower.

But disuse is the primary reason for box removal. Local post office branches conduct quarterly surveys of mailbox use, removing those that collect fewer than 25 pieces of mail per day. Citizens in communities across the country have circulated petitions to save mailboxes, and postal officials say they take such campaigns seriously.

Before any box is uprooted, officials will post a 30-day public notice on the mailbox, informing users of the nearest alternative drop points. And once a box is removed, some post offices will consider returning it if there is significant public outcry.

The post office tries to leave at least one mailbox per square mile in residential areas.

But while the post office is facing declines in several major areas, the news is not all bad.

"At the same time the Internet has led to a decline in first-class mail, it has also led to an increase in package services mail because of the trend of people using the Internet to do shopping and ordering products," Yoerger, the Postal Service spokeswoman, said.

In a speech last month, Postmaster General John Potter addressed recent post office cutbacks, but cited Internet retailer eBay and online DVD rental service Netflix as boons to the mail industry.

Potter said "we are only beginning to fully comprehend the power" of the Internet for the Postal Service.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technolo...tory?track=rss





Hic

US Internet Addicts 'As Ill As Alcoholics'

The US could be rife with "internet addicts" who are as clinically ill as alcoholics, according to psychiatrists involved in a nationwide study.

The study, carried out by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US, indicates that more than one in eight US residents show signs of "problematic internet use".

The Stanford researchers interviewed 2513 adults in a nationwide survey. Because internet addiction is not a clinically defined medical condition, the questions used were based on analysis of other addiction disorders.

Most disturbing, according to the study's lead author Elias Aboujaoude, is the discovery that some people hide their internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods – behaviour that mirrors the way alcoholics behave.

"In a sense, they're using the internet to self-medicate," Aboujaoude says. "And, obviously, something is wrong when people go out of their way to hide their internet activity."
Non-essential use

Nearly 14% of respondents said they found it difficult to stay away from the internet for several days and 12% admitted that they often remain online longer than expected.

More than 8% of those surveyed said they hid internet use from family, friends and employers, and the same percentage confessed to going online to flee from real-world problems. Approximately 6% also said their personal relationships had suffered as a result of excessive internet usage.

"Potential markers of problematic internet use are present in a sizeable portion of the population," the researchers note.
Compulsive drive

Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic, says an increasing number of people are seeking help from doctors because of unhealthy internet use.

He compares the compulsive drive to check email, make blog entries or visit websites to substance abuse – an irresistible urge to perform a temporarily pleasurable act.

"The issue is starting to be recognised as a legitimate object of clinical attention, as well as an economic problem, given that a great deal of non-essential internet use takes place at work," Aboujaoude says.

He adds that the problem is not confined to specific types of internet use. "Online pornography and, to some degree, online gambling, have received the most attention," he says, "but users are as likely to use other sites, including chat rooms, shopping venues and special-interest websites."

Previous research suggests that the majority of "internet addicts" are single, college-educated, white males in their 30s, who spend approximately 30 hours a week on non-essential computer use.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...lcoholics.html





Sprint Hikes Pay-As-You-Go Texting Rate
Bruce Meyerson

Sprint Nextel Corp. will now charge 15 cents per message - a 5 cent increase - for using text messaging without a monthly package.

There was no change in prices for subscription texting plans - $5 for a monthly allowance of 300 messages, $10 for 1,000 and $15 for unlimited usage. Going over those limits in any month will still cost 10 cents a message sent or received.

Cingular Wireless, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA each charge 10 cents per message sent or received without a texting plan.

Text messages, hugely popular overseas and rapidly catching on in the United States, are similar to e-mail except that they're sent to and from cell phone numbers rather than e-mail addresses. Most users type out messages by multi-tapping on a phone's number pad to choose letters, though many mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and Treo feature a full-blown mini-keyboard.

Sprint Nextel doesn't disclose how many of its 41.5 million subscribers use text messaging without a monthly plan, so it was unclear how many would be affected by the rate increase.

Cingular Wireless LLC is jointly owned by AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. T-Mobile is the U.S. subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-13-13-05-43





Joining the Party, Eager to Make Friends
Saul Hansell

To big-name marketers, the teeming mosh pits of social networking sites look like dangerous places for their precious brands. MySpace: Isn’t that full of dirty old men picking up teenage girls? Facebook: That’s where college students post pictures of bawdy frat parties. And YouTube: Pirated videos — and people making fun of our commercials.

But now these sites and dozens of smaller ones have something those marketers want: the attention of tens of millions of young people who increasingly avoid television commercials. So companies from Procter & Gamble to J. P. Morgan Chase, like so many lonely teenagers, are tricking out their online profiles and trying to make friends on the Web.

The sites are trying to move beyond banner ads and develop ways to integrate marketers into the fabric of their online communities. For example, marketers encourage the sites’ users to become “friends” with characters from their ads, and are experimenting with more elaborate campaigns that take advantage of the word-of-mouth effects of networking sites.

Big Internet companies are getting into the game, eager to profit from selling ads on these sites. Google agreed to pay the News Corporation $900 million over three and half years for the right to sell advertising on MySpace, the largest social networking site, where people create profile pages and receive messages from friends. And last week it agreed to buy YouTube, the fast-growing video-sharing site, for $1.65 billion.

Microsoft sells ads for Facebook, the second-largest networking site, and for Windows Live Spaces, its own blogging service.

“When blogs and Spaces first came out, people said no one would be willing to advertise on them,” said Joanne K. Bradford, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for advertising sales. “Consumers have voted. They said this is where I’m spending my time, and if you want to find me here, you have to get used to the fact that everything is not pretty and rosy here.”

In some ways, marketers on these sites are treated just like any other member. On MySpace they can have a profile page and a group of friends. Facebook allows marketers to use a feature that lets any member create a group that other members can join.

Advertisers can add features to their MySpace profiles and Facebook group pages like video clips, quizzes, downloadable goodies like ring tones, and, of course, links to their own Web sites.

These approaches run the risk of generating a sour reaction from the online community if site members feel marketers are going too far in trying to fit in.

But Danah Boyd, a sociologist who has studied MySpace, said its users did not reject commercialization out of hand.

“Teens have grown up with being barraged with advertising,” Ms. Boyd said. “They just want it to be relevant, but they expect it.”

The first companies to make the leap and advertise on these sites were movie studios, carmakers and others selling things of inherent interest to young people. Companies with more mundane products to pitch have had to work to create something that will get people talking online.

Unilever, for example, has turned its Axe deodorant into the No. 1 brand in less than four years by promising to help men attract more women. This spring it created a promotion around a group it called Gamekillers — people who get in the way of a seduction, like a guy with a British accent who gets all the attention. The pitch is that Axe helps men stay cool in the face of the Gamekillers.

The campaign included an hourlong program on MTV and a page on MySpace devoted to the topic, with message boards where people could trade complaints and tips about Gamekillers. Its online host was Christine Dolce, a busty model who was already a celebrity thanks to MySpace, where she has accumulated more than a million friends.

The campaign has lured more than 250,000 people to take the Gamekillers quiz on the MySpace page, and 74,000 people chose to designate the Gamekillers page as one of their “friends.”

“You have to be willing to let go,” said Kevin George, the vice president for deodorants at Unilever North America. “It worked for us.”

Companies have found that it is not easy to keep up with the online crowd. One of the first promotional tactics on MySpace was for marketers to create profile pages for people or fictional characters from their advertising campaigns. They then invited users to add those pages to their lists of friends.

Volkswagen created a profile page for Helga, the German character in some of its commercials, where users could see and comment on the commercials and download Helga ring tones, buddy icons and life-size images.

That approach is now looking a little tired, said Jeff Benjamin, interactive creative director for Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Volkswagen’s agency. “A year ago, everyone wanted to be Helga’s friend,” he said. “Today the reaction would be different. So many advertisers are doing it.”

As they start to build up advertising sales operations, the social networking sites are starting to develop offerings that let marketers take advantage of some of their features.

For example, Chase has a promotion on Facebook that implicitly uses a person’s friends to endorse its credit cards. When people join the Chase “+1” group on Facebook, they see a list of their other friends who have joined the group. The program gives members points when they do things like apply for a card and get others to sign up. Those points can be redeemed for prizes, donated to charity or given to other friends on Facebook.

“To be credible on Facebook, you can’t slap the Chase logo all over the site,” said Manning Field, the senior vice president for branding at Chase’s credit card unit. “We wanted a brand cue that said, ‘Wink, we get it. Facebook is about connectedness and social activity.’ ”

On Facebook, American Eagle created a group for its Aerie line of underwear with photos, discussion boards, a contest and clips of the television shows it sponsors.

Facebook also sees marketing opportunities in its new Newsfeed feature, which lets users see all the new information and photos added by their friends in one place. The feed tells your friends when you have joined a group, even one sponsored by an advertiser — another way Facebook is trying to use its network to amplify word-of-mouth advertising.

MySpace is even willing to change some of its standard features to help advertisers. For example, it normally lets members display photos of their top eight friends on their main profile pages. But people who added the movie “X-Men: The Last Stand” to their friends list were given the right to show 16 top friends.

Procter & Gamble is now trying to tap into a trend on Facebook where people try to see how many others they can get to join a group. It is running a contest for Crest Whitestrips that involves 20 different colleges and universities. The four schools that have the most students join the “Smile State” group will earn a free on-campus concert by an up-and-coming artist (only for members of the group, of course).

This same approach was used earlier, in a sneakier fashion. Last month a Facebook member using the name Brody Ruckus, who said he was a Virginia Tech student, created a group on Facebook and said that if 100,000 people joined it, his girlfriend would agree to have sex with him and another woman at the same time. The group soon attracted 430,000 members.

Some members became suspicious, however, and discovered that there was no Brody Ruckus registered at Virginia Tech. They traced the group to Ruckus Network, a college-oriented music service. Facebook shut down the group, citing its policy against commercial activities by members (unless, of course, they are paying advertisers).

Michael Bebel, the chief executive of Ruckus Networks in Herndon, Va., said the promotion was an experiment in guerrilla marketing that grew bigger than the company expected.

“The subject matter is a little polarizing,” Mr. Bebel said. “But,” he said, “the content isn’t any more extreme than what Charlie Sheen does in ‘Two and a Half Men,’ ” a sitcom involving a hip bachelor.

One of the biggest challenges for marketers is how to weave advertising into popular sites like YouTube that offer homemade videos.

YouTube has been experimenting with what are essentially on-demand commercials — ads on its home page with links to videos from sponsors. And it is allowing advertisers to create custom “channels,” collections of videos in any combination of soft or hard sell. A new one for Burger King features Diddy, the rap star, ordering a Whopper. It has also sold more elaborate promotions like the Cingular Underground, a music contest for the cellphone company.

Sometimes marketers find that in the end, the unplanned is what works best. Crispin Porter placed a new crop of Volkswagen commercials on YouTube and a handful of people watched them. Then a user uploaded a grainy version of one of the same commercials. It has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.

“You can’t explain this,” said Mr. Benjamin of Crispin Porter. “Someone passed it on to a friend, who passed it to others, until eventually it gets in the right people’s hands. You just can’t predict what will happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/te.../16social.html





Tamago Launches Peer-to-Peer eCommerce System
Press Release

Tamago launched peer-to-peer commerce system allowing people to sell every type of digital media directly from their computers to customers all over the world. People who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. earn royalties, while buyers earn commissions for distributing media to others.

"We believe everyone should make money," said Joel Floyd, CEO of Tamago. When someone buys a song, a picture, or other digital media, Tamago pays the members, whose computers deliver the data, directly to the buyer. This eliminates the need for central server farms. "In Tamago's new world, customers are not just consumers, but distributors also," said Gary Feierbach, COO of Tamago.

Tamago was built for both publisher and customer ease of use. When someone publishes their work they set the royalty amount they want to receive for each sale. In turn, buyers automatically become distributors and receive a commission on any media their own computer delivers. Tamago also protects an artists' name and copyright by preventing it from being re-published and stolen, while giving customers freedom to use the material for any personal use.

"This system will bring out the artist in everyone," Joel enthuses. "We charge nothing to publish and it takes less than 5 minutes. All the barriers are gone so everything from the popular to the very esoteric can find an audience."

Tamago requires a PC running Windows 2000 or XP or an Intel based Apple Computer running Parallels Desktop or Boot Camp from Apple Computer.
http://press.xtvworld.com/article14738.html





I’ll Trade You My ‘Titanic’ for Your ‘Spider-Man’
Bob Tedeschi

One of the world’s oldest forms of commerce has finally gotten a foothold in the newest commercial medium.

Online bartering, an idea with many proponents but few successes, is emerging as an e-commerce model, bolstered by a spate of new Web sites run by veterans of the e-commerce industry. And although these sites won’t soon challenge Amazon.com or eBay, they are carving out a significant niche in what could be a highly profitable business.

It sounds unlikely, but it’s true, according to Billy McNair, chief executive of Peerflix, a DVD trading service based in Palo Alto, Calif. The company’s 250,000 members post titles of DVD’s they are willing to trade on the Web site (peerflix.com), which then facilitates the swaps by giving members printable forms that include postage and the recipient’s address.

Trades are not directly between two people. For every DVD shipped from one’s library, the sender receives credit toward the acquisition of other titles available in the network. Peerflix also determines the relative value of a DVD, to prevent people from trading, say, “Halloween 5” for a restored version of “Citizen Kane.”

In exchange for this service, Peerflix charges users $1.50 for each title they receive. Of that, 51 cents goes to cover the company’s shipping and handling costs.

“The rest comes to us,” Mr. McNair said. “This is an extremely high-margin business.”

Mr. McNair, who introduced the company in 2004, said the Web site had made significant progress in the last year, with membership growing fivefold and the number of available DVD’s growing at nearly the same rate. The site offers roughly 37,000 DVD titles, and has a total inventory of 225,000 copies. By comparison, the DVD rental service Netflix offers about 65,000 titles. Users trade DVD’s about five times each month.

Even though digital distribution is presumed to be the future for media businesses, Mr. McNair says he believes that physical media will remain the bedrock of the industry and of his business for the foreseeable future. About 1.5 billion DVD’s are purchased annually in the United States, he said, or about 20 a household. “And our members say they purchase more DVD’s now because they know that after they watch the movie it’ll still have value,” he said.

Investors are apparently attracted by his logic. Mr. McNair said the company in late 2004 raised about $2 million from the venture firms 3I and BV Capital, a firm founded by former executives from AOL Germany. That cash would have been more than enough to last until mid-2006, Mr. McNair said, but Peerflix raised another $8 million in October 2005, primarily from Battery Ventures, the firm behind the early search engine Infoseek. More money is on the way.

“One of the key differentiators in this space will be who is best capitalized,” Mr. McNair said. “We have some announcements coming up that’ll be well reflective of that.”

As Peerflix ventures beyond movies and into other forms of media, as Mr. McNair says he hopes to do, it will face upstarts and established businesses at every turn. Bartering networks have sprung up, for example, around CD’s (LaLa.com), video games (www.GameSwap.com) and books (PaperBackSwap.com).

La La Media, which operates LaLa.com and is also based in Palo Alto, is another recent darling of the Silicon Valley venture capital community, having raised $9 million since the business formed in June 2005. According to Bill Nguyen, one of the company’s founders, the site has built an inventory of two million titles since its debut in March, and every day members add 30,000 copies to the collection.

“People are starting to realize this is a really great way of finding new music,” Mr. Nguyen said.

La La charges $1 a trade — about 75 cents for postage and handling costs. The company sets aside about 20 cents for musicians who perform on the disc. “We’re a little bit commie, a little bit co-op,” Mr. Nguyen said.

Like Peerflix, La La spends little on marketing, relying instead on its members to spread the word. The company, which has 23 employees, also spends little on customer service; members typically rely on the site’s online forums to guide each other through problems, and the site has a liberal credit policy for damaged discs. (Members merely send an e-mail to the site, reporting that the disc is damaged, and they are sent another.)

As promising as these businesses are, they represent no threat to big online companies like Netflix and Amazon, analysts said. “The mainstream audience, in my view, is not interested in barter, given how simple renting and purchasing have become,” said Safa Rashtchy, an Internet analyst with the investment firm Piper Jaffray. “Barter will be a small fraction of e-commerce activity.”

Run as they are by tiny teams of entrepreneurs, though, these companies embody the kind of asymmetric economic threat that has forced established businesses to at least take notice, if not entirely alter their business plans. Take books, for instance. PaperBackSwap’s members trade 30,000 books weekly for $1.59 apiece, according to Richard Pickering, one of the site’s founders. The company is now exploring ways to help members trade nonmedia items, possibly within distinct geographical areas.

“You’re going to see a lot more from online bartering in the future,” Mr. Pickering said. “This is just in its infancy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/te...gy/16ecom.html





End of a Punk-Rock Institution Whose Attitude Won't Die



Jon Pareles

Just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning, the last notes of live music rang from the stage of CBGB & OMFUG, the Bowery club where punk-rock invented itself. Patti Smith finished the club's final concert with her ballad "Elegie," growing teary-eyed as she read a list of dead punk-rock musicians and advocates. But just before it, she had worked up a galvanizing crescendo -- from poetry recitation to rock song to guitar-charged incantation -- in a medley of "Horses" and "Gloria," proclaiming with a triumphant rasp, "Jesus died for somebody's sins/But not for CBGB's."

The songs came from her debut album, "Horses," which was released in 1975, when Ms. Smith and CBGB were making each other famous. She was a poet turned rocker, tapping and then redoubling the energy she found in basic three-chord songs. The club -- its initials mean Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers -- was a hangout in a dire location. But its owner, Hilly Kristal, agreed to book artistically ambitious, high-concept, generally primitivist bands that defied the commercial imperatives of early-1970's rock. It was a neighborhood place in a low-rent neighborhood that happened to house artists and derelicts side by side, inspiring some hard-nosed art. During her set, Ms. Smith described CBGB as, "This place that Hilly so generously offered to us to create new ideas, to fail, to make mistakes, to reach new heights."

In some ways CBGB, which opened in December 1973, ended its life as it had started. It never moved from its initial location, which was originally under a Bowery flophouse, now a homeless shelter. It never changed its floor plan, with a long bar lit by neon beer signs on the way to an uneven floor, a peeling ceiling, a peculiarly angled stage and notorious bathrooms. Through the years, the sound system was improved until its clean roar could make any power chord sound explosive. Mostly, however, CBGB just grew more encrusted: with dust, with band posters stuck on every available surface, with bodily fluids from performers and patrons. Ms. Smith did some casual spitting of her own during her set.

But in a historical long shot, CBGB got lucky. The concepts of bands booked there turned out to be durable ones: Ms. Smith's blunt, visionary and primal songs; Talking Heads' nervously oblique funk, and especially the Ramones' terse, blaring, catchy rockers, which came to define punk-rock. Having nurtured bands like those--and later post-punk bands from Sonic Youth to Living Colour--CBGB became a rock landmark. Its reputation grew strong enough to coast on. Even as its regular bookings grew far less selective through the 1990's and 2000's, every now and then a big-name band would play there as a pilgrimage.

Yet CBGB remained a neighborhood joint. The club's last show wasn't some stage-managed, all-star sendoff destined to be a television special (although it was broadcast live on Sirius satellite radio.) It was just two sets by Ms. Smith with her band and two guests: Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Richard Lloyd, one of the two guitarists in Television, the band whose early gigs defined CBGB. Ms. Smith's sets included Television's "Marquee Moon," with Mr. Lloyd, and songs from other CBGB bands: Blondie's hit "The Tide is High," the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer" and a Ramones medley sung by her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, who changed the lyrics of "Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?" from "It's the end of the century" to "It's the end of CBGB." Ms. Smith was ignoring one of Mr. Kristal's early conditions for CBGB bands--that they only perform their own songs--but forgivably.



Punk-rock never promised that it was built to last. The songs always seemed ready to self-destruct; simple and brief, they were often just three chords and a burst of frustration or pugnacity or humor. Some of the musicians were self-destructive, too. Yet punk, as codified by the Ramones, has turned out to fulfill some perennial adolescent need, and it persisted. Bands kept coming along and embracing it, some lasting just long enough for a few local gigs--and possibly a set on one of CBGB's nightly septuple bills--and others becoming the first step for musicians who would go on to bigger things. Punk infiltrated a suburban underground in the 1980's, created its own do-it-yourself circuit, and eventually emerged as million-selling punk-pop in the 1990's. Improbably, CBGB persisted too: an institution built on music that originally sought to topple institutions.

It's a shame to lose any working club in New York City with so much history and, even rarer, such outstanding sound. The prospect of a recreated CBGB in Las Vegas, even with original artifacts, can't make up for it; Las Vegas isn't in the neighborhood. But CBGB did its job so well it created its own competition and heirs. Bands whose music is based on what came out of CBGB in the 1970's perform everywhere from the Mercury Lounge to Madison Square Garden. The closing of CBGB is the end of a lovable chunk of New York City real estate, but it's far from the end of an era. After a yearlong goodbye--since CBGB's disputes with its landlord, the nonprofit Bowery Residents' Committee, first surfaced in 2005--too much mourning is unnecessary.

"Kids, they'll find some other club," Ms. Smith insisted during her set. "You just got a place, just some crappy place, that nobody wants, and you got one guy who believes in you, and you just do your thing. And anybody can do that, anywhere in the world, any time."

After her set was over and the club had partly cleared out, Ms. Smith returned to the stage for a silent postcript. As fans held up outstretched hands, Ms. Smith reached into a bag and handed out little black pins. They read, "What remains is future."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/ar...rtner=homepage



CBGB Brings Down the Curtain With Nostalgia and One Last Night of Rock
Ben Sisario

She had played there many times over the last three decade, but last night, before making her last appearance there, Patti Smith made sure to snap a picture of CBGB.

“I’m sentimental,” she said as she stood on the Bowery and pointed an antique Polaroid toward the club’s ragged, soiled awning, and a mob of photographers and reporters gathered around her.

Last night was the last concert at CBGB, the famously crumbling rock club that has been in continuous, loud operation since December 1973, serving as the casual headquarters and dank incubator for some of New York’s most revered groups — Ms. Smith’s, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Sonic Youth — as well as thousands more whose blares left less of a mark on history but whose graffiti and concert fliers might still remain on its walls.

After a protracted real estate battle with its landlord, a nonprofit organization that aids the homeless, CBGB agreed late last year to leave its home at 313 and 315 Bowery at the end of this month. And Ms. Smith’s words outside the club, where her group was playing, encapsulated the feelings shared by fans around the city and around the world: CBGB is both the scrappy symbol of rock’s promise and a temple that no one wanted to see go.

“CBGB is a state of mind,” she said from the stage in a short preshow set for the news media whose highlight was a medley of Ramones songs.

“There’s new kids with new ideas all over the world,” she added. “They’ll make their own places — it doesn’t matter whether it’s here or wherever it is.”

Crowds had been lined up outside since early yesterday morning for a chance to see Ms. Smith and bid farewell to the club, in an event that was carefully orchestrated to maximize media coverage. Television news vans were parked on the Bowery as fans with pink hair, leather jackets and — the most popular fashion statement of the night — multicolored CBGB T-shirts (but not necessarily tickets) waited to be let in and Ms. Smith’s band played a short set for the assembled press.

Curiosity about the club’s last night was mingled with harsh feelings about its fate.

“It’s the cultural rape of New York City that this place is being pushed out,” said John Nikolai, a black-clad 36-year-old photographer from Staten Island whose tie read “I quit.”

Added Ms. Smith outside the club, “It’s a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city.”

Ms. Smith was CBGB’s last booking as well as one of its first. In the 1970’s, she was the oracular poet laureate of the punk scene, and her seven-week residency in 1975 is still regarded by connoisseurs as the club’s finest moment. With an open booking policy, its founder, Hilly Kristal, nurtured New York rock’s greatest generation, and in turn those groups made CBGB one of the few rock clubs known by name around the world.

“When we first started there was no place we could play, so we ended up on the Bowery,” said Tom Erdelyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, the group’s first drummer and only surviving original member. “It ended up a perfect match.”



It has been a long and painful denouement for CBGB. After settling in 2001 with its landlord, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, over more than $300,000 in back rent, Mr. Kristal, a plucky, gray-bearded 75-year-old, landed back in court last year. The committee, which has an annual budget of $32 million and operates 18 shelters and other facilities throughout the city, said the club owed an additional $75,000 in unpaid rent increases.

Celebrities including David Byrne of Talking Heads and Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and “The Sopranos” lined up to help mediate, but an agreement was never reached. Last December, three months after the club’s 12-year lease had expired, it agreed, at the prodding of Justice Carol R. Edmead of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, to finally close.

Muzzy Rosenblatt, the executive director of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, has said that a new tenant has been found for the space. Both Mr. Kristal and the committee also say that CBGB’s accounts have been settled and that there are no outstanding debts.

CBGB (its full name was CBGB & OMFUG, for Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) is the latest and highest-profile rock club to vanish from Lower Manhattan in recent years as rents and other expenses have continued to skyrocket. Last year the Bottom Line closed over a debt of $185,000 to its landlord, New York University, and Fez and the Luna Lounge shut down because of development. The Continental, another ragged temple of punk on Third Avenue in the East Village, quit live music last month. Other clubs have sprouted up in Manhattan, but the center of gravity of the city’s club scene has gradually been shifting to Brooklyn.

Mr. Kristal is looking as far as Las Vegas. With the help of the mayor’s office there, he has been inspecting spaces in that city’s Fremont East district, a zone that the city intends to make into “a walkable live entertainment area like Bourbon Street or Beale Street,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.

The office of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg helped find a new space in New York but the space it offered, on Essex Street on the Lower East Side, would have taken a prohibitive $5 million to prepare for use, Mr. Kristal said. Calls to the mayor’s office for comment were not returned late last week.

“I’d love to have the place here,” Mr. Kristal said. “If not here, then I’d love to have it in Vegas. I’m going to keep it active no matter what.”

The club’s interior — a narrow corridor with a bar to the right, the stage to the back, stalactites of grime dangling from the ceiling and miles of ancient posters and graffiti all around — is almost as cherished as its music.

“It’s like it’s grown its own barnacles,” said Lenny Kaye, Ms. Smith’s guitarist and a longtime rock critic and historian. “You couldn’t replicate the décor in a million years, and dismantling all those layers of archaeology of music in the club is a daunting task.”

The club’s architectural history stretches back much further than the Ramones era. Marci Reaven, the managing director of City Lore, a nonprofit arts group in Manhattan that studied CBGB in a joint project with the Municipal Arts Society, said it is a rare example of the Bowery’s long past as an entertainment mecca.

“When you get beyond the layers of interior decoration that is CBGB,” she said, “the architecture of the structure probably evokes the 19th and early 20th century years of the Bowery better than any other building on the strip that we know of.”

Mr. Kristal said he planned to preserve as much of the interior as possible and transport it to a new club, wherever that might be.

But CBGB’s symbolic legacy may far outweigh the value of its graffiti and its notorious urinals.

“When I go into a rock club in Helsinki or London or Des Moines, it feels like CBGB to me there,” Mr. Kaye said. “The message from this tiny little Bowery bar has gone around the world. It has authenticated the rock experience wherever it has landed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/ar...897&ei=5087%0A






Debate 2.0

Weighing the Merits of the New Webocracy

The Internet has become a wildly optimistic and democratic medium, rife with community-based sites that draw millions of fans and disrupt scores of industries.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook encourage community, friendship and sharing. News aggregators like Digg.com let readers choose the best stories of the day. Citizen journalists and bloggers pursue their own stories and disseminate them for free on the Internet, bypassing the mainstream media altogether.

Dubbed Web 2.0, among other things, this new Internet has captured the attention of Wall Street and Main Street alike, witnessed by the billions spent on companies such as MySpace and by the millions of users who visit those sites religiously. Just last week, the video sharing site YouTube was snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion, sparking talk of a new bubble.

How is this new environment affecting us? What is it doing to the flow of information? And the creation of art? How is it changing our culture? The Chronicle invited two of the Internet's sharpest thinkers to debate these questions. The following was edited for clarity and length.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail," an economic analysis of how technology is changing our world for the better. Andrew Keen, a Web entrepreneur and author of the book "The Cult of the Amateur," to be published in May, is not convinced that technology is bettering us or our society. He believes the new, freewheeling Internet is diluting our culture by celebrating mediocrity.

Join us for the conversation.

Q: What's being called Web 2.0 essentially champions the ideas of community and sharing and openness. It's an environment that champions the values of the crowd over the individual. Democracy over autocracy. How is this latest wave of technology impacting our culture?

Andrew Keen: I don't think technology is doing a great deal for culture. Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing. I'm not convinced that technology is actually doing a great deal for the world at the moment.

Q: Chris, you have a bit more optimistic view on the role technology can play in the world and our economy, as evidenced by your book, "The Long Tail." Do you care to counter what Andrew was just saying?

Chris Anderson: Technology is nothing other than an enabler of individual power. The tools once reserved for professionals are now in the hands of everybody. A lot of people just speak to each other directly without going through intermediaries and having messages diluted or distorted.

I broadly believe in democratic principles. I broadly believe in market principles. I think that the three most powerful forces of our time are evolution, democracy and capitalism, all three of which are very much individualistic, sort of enlightened self-interest and individual agents working autonomously.

History suggests that they are the least bad of the available models. They tend to reach more optimal, but not perfect, solutions. So, if you believe in democracy and if you believe in markets, then you believe in technologies that help them work more efficiently. That's very much what we are seeing today.

Q: That idea of democracy and open markets speaks to the wisdom of crowds -- the idea that mass philosophy or mass culture is somehow a greater good. The Web 2.0 movement is based on the idea that group-think is an improvement over individual thought. Andrew, is the crowd smarter than the individual?

Keen: Before I did all this Silicon Valley stuff, I used to teach political philosophy and I used to teach a class about the beginning of American history, the Federalist Papers.

Many of the arguments that came about then are playing themselves out all over again. I think perhaps the more pertinent issue is one of direct democracy versus representative democracy. What I think you are seeing in this "flattened" world that (New York Times columnist) Tom Friedman writes about, along with so many other pro-technology writers, is the idealization of direct democracy.

I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life.

Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Anderson: I think the fantastic thing about democracy and the open systems we are talking about today is that they define talent and expertise much more efficiently than the old models did.

Let's take cultural and political examples. The old model was that if you wanted to be a filmmaker, you had to go to the Hollywood studios. If you wanted to be a musician and get heard, you would go through the label system. If you wanted to be a published author, you needed to get signed by a publisher.

The new model is, "Just go and do it." Everyone can get out there directly without going through these gatekeepers, and most of what is created is junk, but some of it isn't.

A lot of people are doing things that maybe wouldn't have passed the threshold or the test of admittance. For instance, MySpace or YouTube are turning out to be tremendously popular, but they are not conventional.

I think that talent, expertise and wisdom is more broadly distributed than it was in our old models. That, I think, is a form of crowd behavior, but not the whole crowd acting together. But that crowd is very good at spotting merit and elevating it so that it can get the audience it deserves.

Q: In a way, Chris, the wisdom of crowds leads directly into your "long tail" economic theory. Can you give us a brief synopsis of that theory?

Anderson: The long tail is life after the blockbuster. Or more to the point, it is life after the monopoly of the blockbuster.

Our economy is shifting from mass markets to millions of niche markets. (Editor's note: The term "long tail" specifically refers to the endless x-axis of a classic sales/demand curve).

In the old model, markets have limited shelf space. You only have room to stock the things that are most popular. Now we have markets that have infinite shelf space that don't have to discriminate between the conventionally good or the things that predictably sell well. We can offer everything and then measure what's actually popular. As a result, you can access the whole curve, and what you find is that the long tail, or niche item, is a big and growing market.

Q: Andrew, does the new system do a better job at identifying talent and content?

Keen: I don't think that the old system did a bad job. One of the speeches that really changed my position was actually one made by (former Wired editor and author) Kevin Kelly a couple of years ago when he said that we have a moral obligation to develop technology in order to create the next generation of Hitchcocks, Mozarts and Van Goghs. That's a very interesting position. I don't think it's true.

The classic example would be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. They got through in the old system. That's obvious. Would they get through today if they were just another band on YouTube or MySpace? Would they have the marketing sophistication to actually make it in this world?

Q: You're saying people get lost in the shuffle on the long tail?

Keen: I'm saying that experts in the music business and experts in the movie business know what they're doing. I am a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. The guy came here in the early part of the 20th century and had already established himself as a big player in a small pond in the U.K. He came to Hollywood because of (producer David O.) Selznick, who picked him out as a genius. You need the Selznicks of the world. You need the Brian Epsteins (who managed the Beatles). Where is Epstein or Selznick in the long tail?

Anderson: Where do I start? We have plenty of bands who are now becoming popular -- for instance the Arctic Monkeys -- without going through the traditional label system, who are being identified because they're good. Many of them weren't actually terribly sophisticated about online marketing.

By the way, it doesn't take much to become good at online marketing. But, they were talented. Might they have been discovered by an (artist and repertoire) guy, some talent scout? Possibly. Did they need to be discovered by an A&R guy? No.

Increasingly, we have more and more of that. What I suggest is the talent guys are fantastic. The A&R guys are great. There is more talent out there than any one of them can find. I think the problem is that we just didn't know what we weren't finding before. We knew what we were finding and that was good and those guys will continue to do their work.

I believe that there was more talent out there than Hollywood discovered.

By the way, I should stop and point out that I am a Conde Nast editor. I am exactly the gatekeeper that I talk about. I decide what gets in the pages in my magazine. It's hard to do it. We're very discriminating. We try to guess at what's going to be popular. It's hard to get in the door, but once you're in the door you have extraordinary marketing power behind you.

I get that model. That model has fantastic benefits, but it's not the only model. I'm also a blogger and increasingly, as the years migrate, we're going to open our (editorial) doors to voices that weren't identified through the old model. Some of them were self-identified by being commentators or bloggers or participants in our site, and some of them will turn out to have important voices that wouldn't otherwise be heard.

Q: Let's talk about the economics of the long tail. Chris, you mentioned a band called the Arctic Monkeys. They've experienced some success, and they very well might become hugely popular. But do they have any hope of making the money the Rolling Stones and the Beatles did? And do any of your magazine's prospective new contributors, those culled from the blogosphere, are they going to make any money?

Anderson: The simple answer is that some will, most won't. One of the points I make, and I think it's an important point in this era of pure production, if you'll forgive the jargon, is that money is not the only measure of quality. Most bloggers do it for free. Most bands don't quit their day jobs. Most of the people who are uploading videos are doing it for free. There are other incentives that can encourage people to make things beyond money. You have reputation. You have expression. You have fun. In my 20s, I played music and sports for the reasons that most people do: because it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Q: But did you have dreams?

Anderson: It was crazy to have dreams. I wanted to play basketball, but I didn't have any dreams about becoming a pro basketball player because it was crazy. I also played music. Of course, I had no expectations of commercial success, partially because I knew I wasn't any good and partially because the odds are clearly stacked and always have been stacked against commercial success.

That didn't stop me. It doesn't stop people today. I don't feel like a failure or I don't feel cheated because I didn't get any more than beer money out of my music. I had a fantastic time and possibly some of the listeners did, too, although I wouldn't bet on it.

Q: If you take the economic incentive away from writers or musicians, what effect will that have on content and society?

Keen: Look at you guys. We're sitting here in a newspaper office and the newspaper business is in profound crisis. One of the major reasons is because of free content put out by bloggers. The same I think is true of music, where you've had this dramatic decline in sales. This revolution has actually commoditized culture to such an extent that everything becomes free.

In this world of amateur bands and amateur moviemakers on YouTube and amateur bloggers, I think that the consumer, if there is indeed a consumer left, is taking it for granted that everything should be free so that they won't pay for their newspaper, they won't pay for their TV, they won't pay to go to the movies.

I know that Chris is very strong on the economic front, but there has to be a correlation between this explosion of free content on the Internet and the decline in the traditional culture business.

Anderson: People misunderstand free. Most media is, in fact, already free. Television is free to air. Radio is free to air. Newspapers are basically free. What newspapers sell is advertising.

The nominal price we charge for products, which by the way you are losing money on, is simply to qualify the reader or someone who is inclined to read the advertising. So, we're essentially already in a world of free content.

Andrew suggests that music revenues are declining and actually that is not true. CD sales are in decline, but if you include digital singles sales including ring tones and then include ticket sales for live shows, the music business has been relatively flat and actually rising of late.

You have to see it in a much broader perspective of the business. Selling the product is only one way to make money. Selling around the product is a much better way to make money.

Keen: Other than a normal business model, how would you feel if advertisements were sold in your book?

Anderson: Online, fine. If it doesn't interrupt the flow, I have no problem with it.

Keen: I think one of the most pertinent things about what I consider to be a cultural golden age in the 20th century of mass media was that advertising was not packaged in movies. It was not packaged in music and only marginally packaged in newspapers.

I think what's happening is that increasingly you have this collapse of advertising in culture so that you have more and more product placement in movies. You have more sophisticated ways of tying brands into music so that ultimately, you're right. Obviously, there will be a music business. There will be a culture business, but advertising will be so central to it, that the value of culture is going to be profoundly undermined.

When you buy a piece of music, which in some sense is being paid for by Wal-Mart or McDonald's, then I think its core value is much less than if you buy a disc which simply contains music. I see with digital downloads this becoming an increasingly central part of the business model, because if you can't sell the thing, you have to figure out a way that advertising sells it.

Anderson: What does that mean? Buy music being paid for by Wal-Mart? What does that actually mean?

Keen: It means, for example, on YouTube there seems to be more and more sophisticated ways of building brand placement into cultural sales of one sort or another.

Anderson: Give me an example. I don't follow you.

Q: Smirnoff's "TeaPartay" ads on YouTube would be a good example. They're watched for comic value, but advertising is implicit.

Anderson: Do you have an objection to people watching Smirnoff ads on YouTube?

Keen: I don't have an objection to any of those things. What I would like to defend is cultural sales independent of advertising, which I think that the digital revolution is undermining.

Anderson: Are you against advertising?

Keen: I'm not against advertising. I'm against the collapse of advertising in context.

Anderson: Let's talk about the last 20 years. Your concern is that advertising is more pervasive in our culture in the last 20 years, something, by the way, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with.

Keen: Again, I'm not against clear advertising. What I'm against is content, whether it's music or movies, being sold as movies or music but really being financed somehow by a business looking to advertise.

Q: Maybe we can expand this conversation to consider the ideas of democratization, community and sharing -- all central tenets of Web 2.0. To do so, let's try some word association. When I say Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, what do you two think?

Anderson: I think it is an inspirational and remarkable phenomenon. It is perhaps the most powerful phenomenon of our time. It's wildly imperfect and also, in many ways, beautiful.

I think it's the best encyclopedia world in the world collectively. On the individual level, some of the entries are wrong, some of them are freakishly distorted. It suggests a different usage pattern of the encyclopedia. The old model of encyclopedia was the be-all and end-all of information. The new model of encyclopedia is a starting point for investigation.

Must it be approached with caution and a certain amount of skepticism? Absolutely. Is any single entry guaranteed to be right? No. Collectively, it's the best single place to start an investigation or a search for knowledge. I think it's the best in the world.

Keen: I wouldn't call it an encyclopedia. I think it's a dictionary. I think it's a hyper-democratic dictionary. My biggest concern is not so much mistakes, as Chris was saying, but its size. It's a very bloated, disorganized thing. It seems to me that many of the entries have no real ability to distinguish things which are important from things that aren't.

Q: Is it a lack of editing?

Keen: It depends upon how you define editing. There are just too many people who contribute. It's rather like talking to a technology enthusiast. They just go on and on and on. Sometimes, important entries say nothing at all about world historical figures, whereas you have these very long entries on things, it seems to me, that are not very important.

Q: Maybe now I can ask both of you to define what Web 2.0 means. What does that phrase mean to you?

Anderson: I don't think anybody can agree on a definition, and I tend not to use the term. Not that there isn't something going on. I just find the term too indistinct to use. I talk about peer production, otherwise known as user creation.

The funny thing is there is nothing going on here that we weren't talking about 10 years ago. It's just that it now works. It's all much easier to use. We had Web pages in the '90s, but blogs are much easier.

If Web 2.0 is anything, it's sort of the functional delivery of what we were talking about during Web 1.0. But it's fundamentally about individual empowerment -- letting regular people participate in what was previously the domain of the few.

Keen: Well, again it's this idea of regular people that I'm uncomfortable with. It opens everything up and everyone becomes a mini-Gutenberg. That, in itself, isn't a bad thing. But there is the issue of consequences, cultural and economic. Who wins and who loses? Again, I think that the problem is the way in which these things can be abused.

Q: Another core tenet of Web 2.0 has been "citizen journalism." Can the mainstream media be replaced, or supported, by citizen reporters gathering and disseminating information for free?

Anderson: I'm not sure I know what the word journalism means anymore. Let me give you an example.

My interaction with Microsoft has changed in recent years. I used to read the speeches and see the press releases from Bill (Gates) and Steve (Ballmer) and absorb the top-down messaging from the company. Now, as a consumer, I'm more likely to read the individual blogs of the engineers involved with various products I'm interested in.

I use Windows media center, and there is no level of detail about that product that I'm not interested in. I have a fantastic amount of interest in that, but virtually no interest in some of Microsoft's other products.

Those people, in sort of describing the product development, are doing what used to be the domain of the trade press. Clearly, they are not journalists. They're talking about themselves. In many ways, they are providing an information function that journalism used to do on its own.

Another example: My interest is very intense around my family, my community and my friends. And that sort of diminishes as you move outward. Obviously, traditional journalistic institutions don't scale down to the level of my kid's soccer game. And yet, there is a reporting function that still needs to be done. Is that journalism? I don't know what it is, but I do know that, increasingly, individuals are going to be doing it.

Then you scale all the way out to Iraq, and that's a situation where I'm very much in favor of working with professionals with experience, resources and special access to deliver the news.

Q: At what point does objectivity matter? You were talking about that level of scale. Do you really need an objective reporter at your kid's soccer game? Maybe not, but as you get closer to the PTA, I would imagine you definitely do.

Anderson: I take a somewhat unpopular view. I think the notion of objectivity has never really been attainable. I think it's an outgrowth of that era where there was one or two newspapers in any town and that was the only way a reader could get the information. There was an obligation to be evenhanded.

Increasingly, we have sort of an infinite number of places you can get information. There is less requirement at any one of them to have all sides of the story and be perfectly balanced. Let's face it: No media could ever be objective, and we have biases whether they're explicit or implicit.

In many other countries, you've done away with that notion. In the U.K., you have the left-wing press and the right. They're transparent about where they come from, and if you want two sides of the story, you read two newspapers. Increasingly, in an era of infinite sources, you see the importance of a strongly argued perspective. There is less and less expectation that any one place is going to be dispassionate and perfectly balanced.

Keen: I agree that there is no such thing as objective journalism, whatever that is. I think that Chris' point can actually be used to justify the professional media which we pay for.

I don't think it's any coincidence that on the New York Times Web site they give their news away for free, but you pay for (columnist) Maureen Dowd, you pay for Thomas Friedman, because those are the guys who have a voice. Those are the people who have many years of training as reporters and as columnists.

I think the acquisition of voice is perhaps the most difficult of all things. I agree that newspapers should be more opinionated. I come from the U.K. -- from that tradition. What concerns me is distinguishing between rants, which one finds on so many blogs, and quality opinion.

One of my heroes is Christopher Hitchens, the angry English columnist. No one would ever accuse him of being objective. To maintain that tradition of a Hitchens or a Friedman, I think people still need to buy newspapers, pay their columnists large amounts of money and be able to distinguish that kind of professional wise opinion.

Q: Is there too much noise in the world? Andrew, in a way, you are saying, "I want a handful of people who know what they are talking about to tell me what's going on in the world." Chris is saying, "I'm willing to filter a million voices myself and I'll find out what's important that way." Is that what we're talking about here?

Anderson: Fantastic. When you say I can filter a million voices myself, I am filtering a million voices, but not doing it myself. What I have is layers of filters. There are people out there who have more time than me, have more expertise than me or just find things that I haven't found. I have maybe 200 voices out there that I listen to, but collectively I'm filtering a million voices through all those layers. As a result, I get a richer, higher-quality diet of information better suited to me to pull from a wider pool and wider variety of sources. It's not that much trouble. It's much easier than it's ever been before.

Keen: Again, the thing that concerns me is we seem to be going on this very, very long, complicated journey to get back to where we started. Let me ask you this question: What do you know now that you wouldn't be able to know 15 or 20 years ago?

Anderson: I'm a little confused by the question.

Keen: These layers you are talking about -- give me a concrete example of what you can know through them that traditional mainstream media doesn't enable you to know, which you think is valuable.

Anderson: The Microsoft example I gave was one. The traditional media was not going to give me that level of resolution about my very narrow interest. Traditional media was not going to get scaled down to that level of interest because it's too small to be a commercial proposition. But, that's my interest. I have some very broad interests and I have some very narrow interests.

Q: I wanted to wrap things up by asking where are we going to be in 10 years and where is this movement taking us?

Anderson: I think that the genie is out of the bottle and is going to stay out of the bottle, that people given a voice won't give it up. The tools of the spoken text and video and music and democracy are only going to get more powerful and we're going to have more freedom to do so, and I suspect that more people will find a voice. That's a trend that's not going to stop.

How it changes our culture overall as we become less and less of a cultural lockstep of shared culture and more and more of a tribal culture where we have our niche interests? I think the jury is out as to what that's going to do to us.

Keen: I think we are seeing more fragmentation. I think we are seeing more anger. I think we are seeing this radicalization of culture and life. I think that technology seems to be almost coincidental and has exploded around this at the same time that Americans are very angry about many different things.

It has nothing to do with blogs or technology, but all these things are coming together in a way that concerns me and I think that if our traditional institutions of politics or culture or economics continue to be undermined by this personalization and radical individualization of things, then I think we will be in trouble.

I think that if the Internet becomes more and more of a soapbox to trash elected politicians and mainstream media figures and to conduct these witch hunts on anyone who ever makes a mistake, then I think that eventually we are going to find ourselves in a world where we're just going to be staring at a mirror.

It's going to result in what I call cultural and economic anarchy, and I don't think that is a good thing. I think it will result in less community, which is ironic given the fact that this thing is supposed to be about community.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech





Warning Over 'Broken Up' Internet
Darren Waters

The internet could one day be broken up into separate networks around the world, a leading light in the development of the net has warned.

Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), set up by the UN, warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation.

"People are concerned about whether the system we have now will also work five years from now," he said.

Mr Desai was speaking at a conference in London to discuss the net.

The conference was organised by Nominet, the UK body in charge of domain names ending .uk, ahead of the first-ever Internet Governance Forum, a global gathering of stakeholders in Athens later this month.

Mr Desai said there were tensions about the future regulation of the net and over specific issues such as international domain names.

"There are concerns over regulation as the internet, telephony and commerce come together," he said.

"If I look at the internet in five years from now there are going to be very, very, very more internet users in Asia than Europe or America.

"There will be more Chinese web pages than English pages.

"The types of uses for the internet in India and China are very different from western countries - they are not commerce or media; they are essentially public service applications."

The internet was increasingly being shaped by companies and organisations at the "edges" and not by government, public sector bodies and regulators, he said.

This was concerning some countries who wanted more involvement in the development of the net.

"These are the reasons these entities - government and private sector - feel they need to be reassured that the system they are relying on is secure, safe and reliable - that they cannot be suddenly thrown out of that system by some attack," said Mr Desai.

He said the Chinese government was concerned that users still had to type webpage addresses using Latin characters even when the pages were in Chinese.

"A large proportion of the internet users in China do not know the Latin alphabet.

"There are concerns about internationalised domain names in some countries who feel the debate is not moving fast enough."

He warned: "I think this is one of the key issues and if we don't address it with sufficient vigour we will get a Balkanisation of the net."

"There's a point at which the Chinese will say 'We have to have domain names in Chinese characters' and they will set up an independent system."

Other speakers at the conference felt that in some ways a "Balkanised" internet was inevitable.

Professor Howard Williams, who works with the World Bank, said the debate around future regulation of the web rested on the assumption there would be a single web in the future.

'Net neutrality'

"Why would the technology we have at the moment be the ubiquitous technology across the world in the future?"

Prof Williams said Balkanisation was "happening already".

"In the US the issue of net neutrality raises the prospect of a different sort of web," he said.

Earlier this year a US Senate committee approved a bill which lets internet service provides provide some customers with preferential services such as bandwidth and speed.

"Net neutrality" campaigners attacked the plan, saying there should be equal access for all web users.

Chinyelu Onwurah of UK super regulator Ofcom said the impact of Balkanisation would depend on the effect it had on consumer choice.

She said: "If Balkanisation refers to islands of connectivity that have no inter-connectivity between them then clearly that is a bad thing and limits the choice and reach for consumers.

"But if it refers to differentiation and different levels of protection, of functionality and speed, and relates to choice, then that is a positive thing."

David Harrington, of business group the Communications Management Association, said cultural differences would "inevitably Balkanise the net".

"That's been the case since the net was available commercially; it's a matter of degrees," he said.

Mr Desai said the IGF would be the opportunity to discuss many of these issues.

But he reminded delegates at the London conference that the IGF was not a "decision-making body".

He said: "No-one wants to duplicate a telecoms-type regulator on the internet. It's a multi-stakeholder exercise.

"For this reason the IGF has been created. The forum has no membership, it's an open door, a town hall, all views are welcome.

"But it's not a decision-making body. We have no members so we have no power to make decision."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6037345.stm





Is AMD Really f&$@£d?
James Morris

We’ve had a stormy relationship with AMD of late. But we’re hardly alone in our concern over the underdog CPU manufacturer’s ability to cope with Intel’s recent reinvigoration. Ever since news started filtering out about Conroe, the AMD fanboys have been deserting their old object of worship faster than it takes to cook an Athlon XP. It was a ‘no-brainer’: Conroe was turning the tables on the Athlon 64, and ‘ass mastering’ it at lower clock speeds – with faster versions already on the way.

There is no denying that Intel’s Core Microarchitecture has the upper hand in virtually every benchmark, and usually by a significant margin. As a result, most hardware enthusiasts have scratched the Athlon 64 FX off their shopping list and written in a Core 2 Duo instead – or even Core 2 Quad. Before jumping on the bandwagon express, though, it’s worth stepping back from the present a bit and putting the current situation in a little more context – both past and future.

Intel has clearly made a huge comeback, and intends to drive home its advantage still further with the Kentsfield quad-core part. From a business perspective, though, the bigger deal is the Xeon version of the Core Microarchitecture. For all the excitement over how much better an Athlon 64 was than a Pentium 4, even more significant was how much better a dual-core Opteron was than a single-core Xeon 800 (for there was no dual-core version until very recently). AMD’s advantage in the workstation and server market was really starting to turn into a whitewash. A few months ago, I tested five £5,000 workstations, and there wasn’t a Xeon in sight – every single one was based on a dual-core Opteron.

You might think that overnight all these manufacturers would be deserting AMD and returning to the new Xeons, which have a similar performance benefit compared to a dual-core Opteron as a Core 2 Duo does over a dual-core Athlon 64. Certainly, if I asked five manufacturers to send me £5,000 workstations now most of them probably would be the new Xeons.
Look ahead

But businesses don’t think quite so short term as this, and they also don’t just think about raw performance. This is particularly true when it comes to mass purchases for corporate use, which has traditionally been an area where Intel has been virtually impregnable. Whatever is happening regarding the performance crown, AMD is making inroads into the business market like never before.

Let’s take Dell for example – one of AMD’s big wins of the last year, and the one everyone is saying looks stupid now Intel is back. As a business customer, you can either buy the Dimension E521 for £499 + VAT (with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+), or the E520 for £50 more (with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300). They’re both dual-core, and the performance difference is essentially irrelevant to a business customer. But if you’re buying 100 of them, you’d save £5,000 by going for the E521. That’s a fairly easy decision for a financial director to make.

Even in the performance space, you’d be a bit silly to think that AMD’s current position in Intel’s rear-view mirror is for the foreseeable future. Sure, the 30 to 50 per cent lead is going to be hard to overtake. But the difference won’t be anywhere near so obvious this time next year, and the two companies could even be close to parity again. In fact, over the next six months or so AMD looks likely to claw back quite a few per cent already.

AMD has been showing off its 65nm wafers for a few months now, which means the Rev G core is on its way. Even if the DDR2 memory controller which arrived with the Rev F only had a small performance benefit, Rev G has a few more improvements than just the die shrink. The latter will enable higher clock speeds and a lower price, plus allow AMD to compete on an equal playing field to Intel, which has been manufacturing 65nm processors since the Pentium XE 955 at the end of 2005. Spyshots of the new processor revision also show it has some extra Level 2 circuitry, which allegedly includes redesigned branch predictors and prefetchers – one of the areas where the Core Microarchitecture improved over Netburst.

Although AMD processors are far less susceptible than Intel’s Pentium 4 to cache mis-hits, because they have much shorter pipelines, the Core Microarchitecture also has a shorter pipeline. So AMD no longer has this advantage. Reducing cache mis-hits further essentially squeezes more performance out of the processor for free, so it wastes less of its clock cycles. AMD could of course have thrown more cache at the problem, which Intel has also done with its 4MB SmartCache. But in terms of long-term manufacturing costs keeping the cache size smaller and using better prediction circuitry means cheaper processors. With AMD back to the value segment for the time being, this makes a lot of sense.
Quad core

There is also a lot of confusion over when exactly AMD will be releasing its quad-core parts. Most sources are still saying the middle of 2007, but an AMD representative recently mentioned to me something about Q1, and there are even some rumours of a November 3rd launch. However, the latter could be confused with the launch of 4x4, which appears to be two dual-core Opterons on Socket F rebranded as Athlon 64 FX and placed on a dual-socket motherboard.

Either way, it does look like AMD’s quad-core ‘Barcelona’ CPUs will be with us sooner than a lot of people expected – perhaps because this is a necessity for the company to have a hope of keeping up with Intel’s onslaught. AMD’s penchant for calling its quad-core parts ‘native’ in contrast to the dual-die approach found in Kentsfield seems a little snide. But the quad-core architecture is also likely to claw some of Intel’s lead back. The shared Level 3 cache will further reduce wasted clock cycles and keep the cores running at full pelt, plus all four cores can already access each-other’s Level 2 at core speed, as with the Athlon 64 X2.

The Barcelona will also allegedly include a HyperTransport 2 interface, which will give it a distinct advantage in multi-socket arrangements – like 4x4. Looking towards the end of next year, AMD also has HyperTransport 3 on the roadmap, and a new connection called Torrenza. This will allow peripherals (ATI graphics cards perchance?) to be connected directly to the processor via a bus with much more bandwidth than even PCI Express 2.

So although Intel is on top for now, AMD still has a few cards yet to play. These may not amount to the same kind of winning hand the company had for the last couple of years. But to say AMD is done for, and has failed to capitalise on the Athlon 64’s success, is simply short-sighted. The market moves in phases, and there are bigger gameplans than just having the fastest gaming chip around.
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7004





Stern Freebie Kicks off New Online Radio Service

Ten months after leaving the commercial airwaves for subscription-based Sirius Satellite Radio, shock jock Howard Stern is out to attract a broad new online audience with his first-ever free Internet broadcast.

Stern's four-hour-plus program will be made available live online at no charge for two days, October 25 and 26, to promote an Internet radio service Sirius is launching this week. A formal announcement was planned for Monday morning.

The new service offers more than 75 channels of CD-quality programming over the Internet--without the need to buy a Sirius satellite receiver--for a monthly subscription fee of $12.95, the company said in a press release.

The service can be accessed by logging on to the Sirius Web site.

The two-day free trial of "The Howard Stern Show" marks the first time he has been available to a nonpaying audience since he left terrestrial FM radio in December 2005.

After next week's promotion, fans will once again have to pay to hear the self-proclaimed "king of all media," either by subscribing to Sirius or its Internet service.

Stern's show and other Sirius programming had been available on the Internet before, but only to existing customers who had purchased a satellite receiver in addition to the $12.95 monthly radio subscription.

Under the new standalone Internet package, users anywhere in the world can subscribe and listen to Stern online without first having to buy satellite hardware, which is sold only in North America, a company spokesman said.

Sirius rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings offers its own standalone Internet service for $7.99 a month.

Stern, a pioneer of ribald radio comedy bits like "Lesbian Dial-a-Date" and "Stripper Jeopardy," stunned the broadcast industry in October 2004 when he announced he was leaving commercial radio for satellite.

After fulfilling the last 14 months on his contract at CBS, Stern debuted in January 2006 on Sirius under a five-year deal valued at $500 million and immediately became the marquee talent of the No. 2 satellite radio provider.

He also recently ventured into the realm of video-on-demand television with an all-Stern channel available through several major cable operators.

Sirius ended the third quarter with 5.12 million subscribers, an audience that pales in comparison to the 12 million listeners who regularly tuned into Stern at the peak of his CBS career. XM posted nearly 7.2 million subscribers for the third quarter.
http://news.com.com/Stern+freebie+ki...l?tag=nefd.top





A Tell-All’s Tale: French Politicians Stray Early and Often
Elaine Sciolino

Did President Jacques Chirac have a child with a Japanese mistress? Did the Socialist politician and would-be presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn attend a sex soirée? Did former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing really have as many mistresses as the salons of Paris have claimed?

Sex and politics have intermingled in France for centuries, but the private lives of politicians have historically been kept secret.

This is, after all, the country in which President François Mitterrand concealed for years the existence of a daughter born out of wedlock. It was disclosed by the popular magazine Paris-Match in 1994, just months before he left office, and both of his families attended his funeral two years later.

Now, “Sexus Politicus,” a 390-page tell-all book on the subject, has catapulted to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists, a reflection of the erosion of privacy in French public life and the appetite for a gossipy read.

The authors, Christophe Dubois and Christophe Deloire, are veteran investigative reporters who have written books about the murder of the prefect of Corsica in 1998 and the rise of Islamic extremism in France.

About 150,000 copies are in print in France, a remarkable number here for a work of nonfiction.

“It’s a rather serious book based on interviews, not just hearsay,” said Patrick Jarreau, one of the editors of Le Monde, though the book does circulate old rumors that the authors say cannot be confirmed. “Sex and politics seven months ahead of a presidential election — that’s a pretty good recipe for success.”

The book’s central premise is that in France, a successful politician is also a seductive politician. Sex, the authors say, is a civic imperative. “Far from being a flaw, to cast yourself in the role of seducer is without doubt an important quality in our political life,” the book claims.

Certainly, power attracts. When Edgar Faure became prime minister in the 1950’s, he gained the lofty title of “president of the Council,” and that apparently made all the difference. “When I was a minister, some women resisted me,” he once was quoted as saying. “Once I became president, not even one.” (He died at age 79 in the bed of his half-clothed mistress).

De Gaulle was the only post-World War II French leader to maintain a strict military discipline over his personal life, the book asserts. More recently, it adds, Mr. Giscard d’Estaing, Mr. Mitterrand and Mr. Chirac juggled the demands of the state, their families and their extracurricular activities with aplomb.

They understood, according to the authors, a fundamental rule of French politics: Good politicians love and are loved.

“When I was president of the republic, I was in love with 17 million French women,” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said in an interview taped for the television show “Private Life, Public Life” to be broadcast Wednesday. He added, “When I saw them in the crowd, they felt it and then they voted for me.”

The authors speculate that one reason the Socialist former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was not a more attractive presidential candidate was that he “was too lacking” in seduction.

Mr. Chirac, by contrast, apparently had such power over women that his wife, Bernadette, confessed in a book in 2001 that she suffered from terrible jealousy. “The day Napoleon abandoned Josephine, he lost everything,” she warned him several times.

The book also quotes Mr. Chirac’s chauffeur for 25 years, Jean-Claude Laumond, as saying that Mrs. Chirac would ask, “But in short, Mr. Laumond, where is my husband tonight?”

Considerable space is devoted to the well-documented soap opera marriage of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading candidate for the presidential nomination for the governing UMP party, and his wife, Cécilia. The editor of Paris-Match was forced to resign after the magazine published a cover photo of Mrs. Sarkozy and her supposed lover looking at a New York apartment layout.

The book speculates that at first Mr. Sarkozy presented himself as lonely and long-suffering, but then thought better of it, letting it be known through supporters that he was happy.

“If I have a free evening, I know with whom I want to spend it,” the weekly magazine Le Point quoted Mr. Sarkozy as saying last fall. (He was reported to have been involved for several months with a prominent newspaper reporter.) He and his wife have since reconciled.

To avoid being prosecuted under France’s tough privacy and anti-defamation laws, the authors of the book withheld the names of some of the lovers, and made sure they kept ample ammunition in their files — from interviews and from police and intelligence reports. Sometimes the book knocks down rumors, but it also cites public reports the authors could not confirm. For instance, the unsubstantiated story about Mr. Chirac fathering a child with a Japanese mistress was told in a book by Guy Birenbaum in 2003.
“We haven’t been attacked because, to be really honest, often we knew more than we wrote,” Mr. Deloire said. “No politician wants to run the risk that more stories will come out in court.”

Instead of protesting, the subjects of the book are staying quiet. Spokesmen for Mr. Chirac, Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Giscard d’Estaing sent e-mail messages saying they would not comment. Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s office did not respond to several requests.

Unlike in the United States, where such a revelation would become the focus of a blanket media investigation, French journalists barely raised the issue.

Indeed, the reaction of the French people is starkly different from that in the United States, where a sex scandal can threaten to bring down a government.

A January poll by TNS Sofres for the newspaper Le Figaro found that most French voters wanted their next president to be around 50, multilingual, honest and willing to listen. Only 17 percent said they would not vote for those who had extramarital affairs.

That Ségolène Royal, the leading candidate for the Socialist nomination in next year’s presidential election, is not married to the father of their four children has not been an issue.

That said, the French tolerance — or even celebration — of sexual exploits may change if Ms. Royal becomes president.

“This French exception that makes power rhyme with sexual prowess — will it survive the feminization of politics?” Le Figaro asked. “This question has not escaped Ségolène Royal, who predicts the revenge of women if she assumes power.”

Maia de la Baume contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/wo.../17france.html





Orionid Meteors to Peak This Weekend
David Shiga

One of the year's best displays of meteors will occur this weekend. Called the Orionids, the meteors are bits of rocky debris shed from Halley's Comet that burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

The display will be visible for both northern and southern hemisphere observers and should produce 20 meteors per hour at its peak. Friday night and Saturday night should be best, especially very early in the morning.

Meteors in the Orionid family can appear anywhere in the sky, but their paths trace back to a spot in the constellation Orion, which gives them their name.

The best strategy is to lie down and stare at as large a patch of sky as possible, rather than focusing directly on Orion. Most of the meteors will be faint and most easily seen from a dark site far from city lights.

Halley's Comet passes through the inner solar system every 76 years, littering its orbit with bits of dust and rock as it goes. The Orionid meteors that we see today are due to debris that has built up along Halley's orbital path over thousands of years.
http://www.newscientistspace.com/art...s-weekend.html





A Cult of Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning
Patricia Leigh Brown

Wedge Oldham, a 49-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles, finds nothing sweeter than spending a fall weekend in the Black Rock desert, barking rocket launching commands like “Are we good to go?” into the hot dusty wind.

Nerves jangling, he awaits the moment when Carpe Diem, his homemade 18-foot-long rocket, hurls itself heavenward with 737 pounds of thrust, shockwaves — or “mach diamonds” — surging from its supersonic exhaust. With dazed exuberance he watches it recede into deep blue sky, and then, with the release of parachutes, gently drift four miles away, preserved for another flight.

At a cultural moment when billionaires like Paul G. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, and Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Atlantic chairman, are getting into the space business, the members of the Tripoli Rocketry Association are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers — backyard versions of Burt Rutan, the legendary engineer of the first privately financed manned rocket.

From Florham Park, N.J., and as far away as London, 100 launchers came — plumbers, paint contractors, firefighters, bankers and Silicon Valley techies united by their passion for building rockets capable of blasting 94,000 feet into the air, at nearly three-and-one-half times the speed of sound, as one record-setter did this weekend.

Members of a gonzo subculture, the hobbyists have been known to launch Weber grills, Port-A-Potties, bowling balls and pink flamingos. But once a year, on this bleak, 400-square-mile dry lake bed, they meet for the Indy 500 of rocketry, with waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration.

This year, the subculture itself is on the defensive, unsure whether it will soar or come crashing down in a “cato” — lingo for a catastrophic failure. Since Sept. 11, the rocketeers, about 6,000 nationwide, have had to contend with tougher restrictions from the federal government and local fire marshals, and are involved in a seven-year-old dispute with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives over their use of a propellant.

Bearing names like Questionable Mental Health and the Procrastinator, their rockets are usually restricted to low-altitude launchings from sorghum fields in Kansas, sod farms in South Carolina and frozen Lake Champlain in winter.

“A lot of guys close their eyes and see women. I close my eyes and see rockets,” said Ky Michaelson, 68, a junior high school drop-out from Bloomington, Minn., who has been called “the sultan of thrust” by Outside Magazine.

Mr. Michaelson shot the first amateur rocket into space, and his inventions include a rocket-powered sled that zooms uphill. His record-breaking launching was 72 miles up, at 3,420 miles per hour — factoids embroidered on his rocket-red satin shirt.

Like many of his brethren, Mr. Michaelson developed his passion early with a chemistry set he got for Christmas. He graduated to launching rocket cars in an alley in southern Minneapolis, and today he fills his home with space collectibles, including a hand-held toilet from the Russian space station Mir.

The talk in Nevada was technical minutiae — thrust ratios, fuel efficiency, altitudes. Even over a ravioli dinner at Bruno’s Country Club and Casino,the hobbyists were constantly gesturing in an upward trajectory, forks in hand.

The apogee of the weekend is when they push the button launching creations that teams have spent up to a year making at a cost of thousands of dollars.

“Every time I launch a rocket, a little of me goes up with it,” said Derek Stavenger, a 50-year-old painter from San Francisco. “It’s about escaping the bounds of our restrictive existence on the planet.”

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the extreme rocketeers have seen their ranks dwindle. In many parts of the country, rockets are prohibited. Local groups face a welter of ordinances and safety codes, as well as F.A.A. restrictions. Tripoli extreme rocketeers also need federal low-explosives permits. On Tuesday, lawyers representing Tripoli and the National Association of Rocketry and officials of the firearms bureau will head to Federal District Court in Washington to resolve the seven-year-old dispute over the hobbyists’ use of a flammable propellant, ammonium perchlorate composite, or APCP. The chemical is the main ingredient on the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

The firearms bureau classifies APCP as an explosive and, amid post-Sept. 11 security concerns, requires that anyone who uses more than two ounces of propellant undergo federal background checks.

“If I was an 18-year-old and told my mom I needed a low explosives permit and that an A.T.F. agent would come to my house, she’d say, Why don’t you just continue with your guitar lessons?” grumbled Ken Good, the president of Tripoli and a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland.

Rocketeers say the agency has no right to regulate the propellant because it does not explode but rather “deflagrates,” or burns intensely at a controlled rate, like a road flare.

The agency is also concerned that large rockets could be used as weapons. But weapons experts say it is doubtful that the rockets could be significant threats because they do not have guidance systems, which are prohibited by federal law.

“Designing a rocket to go straight up and down is hugely different than making it controllable to hit any kind of a target,” said John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Still, the unpredictable does happen. With a spectacular kaboom, an elegantly minimalist rocket designed by Alex McLaughlin, 29, a software engineer from Portland, Ore., broke apart at around 40,000 feet, the hobby rocket equivalent of the Death Zone on Mount Everest.

It is an unforgiving hobby, but it is arguably safer for participants than in the past. Like many of the Black Rock “rocket rats” — largely men of a certain age — Mike Mullane, 61, a retired space shuttle astronaut, recalled his boyhood rocketry experiments with black powder and other dangerous substances. Mr. Mullane said he was “reborn” the day Sputnik was launched in 1957. “It was the 9/11 of my childhood, a blow to the American ego,” he said.

The horizon was soon populated with rocket and moon clubs, with schools “passing out formulas for rocket fuel,” he said. Before the arrival of Estes rocket kits, “the only game in town was getting a steel tube, mixing hazardous material and lighting fuses in the desert,” an activity, he said, that was far riskier than three flights on the space shuttle.

On Oct. 20, 60 members of Tripoli will launch high-powered rockets at the first X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, N.M., in an expo that bills itself as “the world’s first space show.” The X Prize Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., richly rewards private space innovation. The rocketeers will try to launch an unmanned replica of the Mercury Redstone, which first transported Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into space.

With space entrepreneurship on the rise, including plans by Robert Bigelow, the owner of Budget Suites hotel chain, to invest $500 million in an inflatable space hotel for tourists, even members of this proletariat rocket nation are being tapped for real projects.

John Carmack, a member who is also the creator of the games Quake and Doom, recruited fellow hobbyists to help design a lunar landing vehicle for a competition sponsored by NASA and the X Prize Foundation.

“It’s more important to me to get people who are building, testing and flying things than an aerospace graduate who has never screwed two bolts together,” Mr. Carmack said.

David Reese, 19, a member of Tripoli since age 8, now works at the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at the University of Southern California, where he is helping to develop a carbon fiber vehicle designed to go to the edge of space. He ecstatically broke his own record at Black Rock, with a launching of 17,230 feet.

“The Sony Playstation motto is, ‘Leave your world here and play in ours,’ ” Mr. Reese said of a more ubiquitous teenage pastime. “But why leave this world when you can hang out with a bunch of nerds and play with rockets in the middle of the desert?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/science/14rocket.html





No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes
Sam Dillon

When the Internet was just beginning to shake up American education, a chemistry professor photographed thousands of test tubes holding molecular solutions and, working with video game designers, created a simulated laboratory that allowed students to mix chemicals in virtual beakers and watch the reactions.

In the years since, that virtual chemistry laboratory — as well as other simulations allowing students to dissect virtual animals or to peer into tidal pools in search of virtual anemone — has become a widely used science teaching tool. The virtual chemistry laboratory alone has some 150,000 students seated at computer terminals around the country to try experiments that would be too costly or dangerous to do at their local high schools. “Some kids figure out how to blow things up in half an hour,” said the professor, Brian F. Woodfield of Brigham Young University.

Now, however, a dispute with potentially far-reaching consequences has flared over how far the Internet can go in displacing the brick-and-mortar laboratory.Prompted by skeptical university professors, the College Board, one of the most powerful organizations in American education, is questioning whether Internet-based laboratories are an acceptable substitute for the hands-on culturing of gels and peering through microscopes that have long been essential ingredients of American laboratory science.

As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the board has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.

“Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they’d be concerned about giving credit to students who have never had any experience in a hands-on lab,” said Trevor Packer, the board’s executive director for Advanced Placement. “You could have students going straight into second-year college science courses without ever having used a Bunsen burner.”

Internet-based educators are seeking to convince the board, and the public, that their virtual laboratories are educationally sound, pointing out that their students earn high scores on the A.P. exams. They also say online laboratories are often the only way advanced science can be taught in isolated rural schools or impoverished urban ones. Online schooling, which was all but nonexistent at the elementary and secondary level a decade ago, is today one of the fastest-growing educational sectors, with some half-million course enrollments nationwide.

Twenty-five states operate public, Internet-based schools like the Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest, which has some 40,000 students. Virtual High School, a nonprofit school based in Maynard, Mass., has 7,600 students from 30 states and many countries. Susan Patrick, a former Department of Education official who is president of the North American Council for Online Learning, estimated that 60,000 public school students were enrolled in some online science course.

John Watson, an education consultant who wrote a report last year documenting virtual education’s growth, said online schools had faced lawsuits over financing and resistance by local school boards but nothing as daunting as the College Board.

“This challenge threatens the advance of online education at the national level in a way that I don’t think there are precedents for,” Mr. Watson said.

The board signaled a tough position this year.

“Members of the College Board insist that college-level laboratory science courses not be labeled ‘A.P.’ without a physical lab,” the board said in a letter sent to online schools in April. “Online science courses can only be labeled ‘A.P.’ if the online provider” can ensure “that students have a guided, hands-on (not virtual) laboratory experience.”

But after an outcry by online schools, the board issued an apology in June, acknowledging that “there may be new developments” in online learning that could merit its endorsement.

Mr. Packer of the College Board said in an interview that the board had set up three five-member panels composed of biology, chemistry and physics professors and online educators, which are to meet in New York next month to review the online laboratories offered by Internet-based schools for A.P. courses.

The board’s rulings will determine whether high schools can apply the A.P. designation to online science courses starting next fall on the transcripts of students applying to colleges, Mr. Packer said.

In recent conversations with college science professors, the board has encountered considerable skepticism that virtual laboratories can replace hands-on experience, he said.

But educators at several prominent online schools pointed to their students’ high scores on A.P. exams.

On the 2005 administration of the A.P. biology exam, for instance, 61 percent of students nationwide earned a qualifying score of three or above on the A.P.’s five-point system. Yet 71 percent of students who took A.P. biology online through the Florida Virtual School, and 80 percent of students who took it from the Virtual High School, earned a three or higher on that test.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said Pam Birtolo, chief learning officer at the Florida Virtual School.

Still, there is tremendous variety. A 2005 guidebook, “Finding an Online High School,” compiled by Vincent Kiernan, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, lists 113 Internet-based secondary schools, 32 of which offered at least one A.P. science course. Online curricula are anything but standardized, and new approaches to online laboratories are emerging at a dizzying pace, said Kemi Jona, a computer science professor at Northwestern University.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all landscape,” Dr. Jona said.

The science courses offered by some online high schools draw on multiple Internet sites that provide data, then lead students through an analysis. At one site, for instance, operated by the University of Arizona, students collect data from the cells of an onion root and use it to calculate the duration of each phase in the cells’ division.

Chemistry and other science courses at many Internet-based high schools include laboratories often characterized as “kitchen science,” in which students use household materials — ice, cooking oil, glass jars — to carry out experiments.

“ ‘Make sure we have potatoes in the house,’ my daughter told me before her last lab,” in which students studied osmosis, said Mayuri Shah, whose daughter Sonia is taking A.P. biology from the Florida Virtual School. Sonia, 16, enrolled in the online course because her high school in Lecanto, Fla., north of Tampa, does not offer it.

That is one of the most common reasons students sign up for online classes, said Ms. Patrick, the North American Council for Online Learning president.

“Thousands of schools in rural areas don’t have science labs, but they have kids who want to go to college and need that science inquiry experience,” she said. “Virtual science labs are their only option.”

ConVal High School in Peterborough, N.H., offers more than a dozen science courses, but zoology is not among them. So Katherine Lantz, a junior, is studying it online.

One recent evening she was at home, moving through a virtual pig dissection screen by screen. One image showed a pig kidney, outlined by pulsing yellow dots.

“Whoa, that’s kind of gross!” Katherine said. She clicked her mouse, causing a virtual scalpel to lay the pig’s kidney open, its internal regions highlighted by blinking labels.

“Its nice to have it enlarged because if we were dissecting this in my school lab this would be hard to see,” Katherine said. “I learn a lot online — as much as I would attending a physical class.”

But Earl W. Fleck, the biology professor who created the virtual pig dissection, believes otherwise. Dr. Fleck began working on the virtual dissection in 1997 to help his students at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., review for tests and to offer a substitute for those who, for ethical reasons, objected to working with once-living specimens.

Dr. Fleck, who is now provost at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, said students worldwide found the virtual dissection useful. But he called it “markedly inferior” to performing a real dissection.

“You don’t get the look and the feel and the smell,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/ed...rtner=homepage





Wireless USB Poised to Cut the Cable
Tom Krazit

The computer industry is still working on the paperless office, but new short-range wireless technologies on tap for next year could at last bring about the cable-free desktop.

The PC and consumer electronics industries have been talking up Certified Wireless USB (Universal Serial Bus) links as a replacement for those tried-and-true USB cables connecting the PC to everything from iPods to keyboards. Delays, unfortunately, have plagued more than a few companies trying to make this a reality.

But by the end of this year, the products that rid your desktop of that tangle of wires should finally start hitting the market.

It's happening now for a combination of reasons. The WiMedia Alliance is planning to make the technology known as "ultrawideband," or UWB, work among a wide variety of consumer electronics devices, from PCs and printers to external hard drives and MP3 players. The USB Implementers Forum, the 1394 Trade Association and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) have chosen the WiMedia Alliance's version of UWB technology as the foundation for their next-generation networking technology.

UWB technology can deliver data rates at up to 480 megabits per second at around 3 meters, with speeds dropping off as the range grows to a limit of about 10 meters. Real-world speeds will probably be a little slower, but this is as fast as the wired version of USB 2.0 and much faster than current Wi-Fi networks are capable of transmitting data.

"This stuff is plumbing," Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said of the newer-generation wireless technology. "It's important that it be there, it's going to be handy for getting rid of cables hanging around your desk."

However, like many future technologies, high-bandwidth short-range wireless has been a long time in the making. Progress has been delayed in part by a pitched battle between the WiMedia Alliance, led by Intel, and the UWB Forum, led by Freescale, to determine the industry-standard implementation for UWB technology. The WiMedia backers, which also include Sony, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung, are pushing forward with chips and devices under the Certified Wireless USB brand.

Hints of the future
Freescale and Belkin attracted attention at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show with the introduction of Belkin's CableFree USB Hub. But in April, Freescale left the UWB Forum to focus on developing its own cable-free USB products, killing much of the momentum behind the UWB Forum. Belkin was forced to change suppliers; as a result, the CableFree USB Hub has yet to make it onto store shelves.

The WiMedia Alliance also took longer than expected to deliver so-called Certified Wireless USB products--in part because it needed to improve how the technology dealt with shifting between environments, such as walking into an office full of wireless networks, said the WiMedia Alliance's Mark Fidler, also a senior engineer at Hewlett-Packard. But with those hurdles cleared, products are starting to appear that hint at the future of short-range networking.

At last month's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel, Kodak and UWB chipmaker Alereon demonstrated how the Certified Wireless USB version of the technology would work.

Pictures taken on a digital camera could be immediately downloaded to a PC with the push of a button. The first time the devices notice each other, the PC would ask the user if it should connect to that particular camera, hard drive or smart phone. With the PC user's authorization, the latest vacation photos start flowing on the desktop and the devices can be set to automatically recognize each other in the future. It's not hard to imagine these capabilities extending to other devices, such as high-definition televisions, said Eric Broockman, CEO of Alereon.

MP3 players are another potentially big market for this technology, Broockman said. Microsoft's Zune player is going to ship with a 802.11g Wi-Fi chip later this year, allowing two Zune users to share songs. But Certified Wireless USB is much faster and uses less power than Wi-Fi, he said.

Early Certified Wireless USB setups are still going to involve a lot of cables, since the only way consumers will be able to wirelessly connect devices is with dongles. At an Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan on Monday, a contract manufacturer called Gemtech introduced a Certified Wireless USB dongle using chips from Intel and Alereon. In this scenario, a Wireless USB connection could be established by plugging a Gemtech dongle into a printer, and one into a PC, and then associating the two dongles.

This isn't the most elegant setup, however. By next year, Alereon hopes companies will start incorporating its chips into expansion cards that can plug into an ExpressCard slot similar to how many notebook users were introduced to Wi-Fi, Broockman said. Further down the road, Alereon and Intel say they believe PC companies will start incorporating the chips directly onto their motherboards.

One potential hurdle is making sure the technology is easy to use, Fidler said. Early implementations of Bluetooth were notoriously difficult for people who weren't tech-savvy, although things have improved quite a bit. USB cables, however, couldn't be much easier to use.

"The goal is to get (wireless USB technology) easy to use but at the same time we need to maintain security," he said. This will require additional authentication steps to ensure that only authorized devices can associate with a host device.
http://news.com.com/Wireless+USB+poi...3-6126452.html





Zombies Try to Blend in With the Crowd
Joris Evers

Hackers are trying harder to make their networks of hijacked computers go unnoticed.

Cybercrooks are moving to new Web-based techniques to control the machines they have commandeered, popularly referred to as "zombies." Before, they used to send orders via Internet chat services, but with that method, they ran the risk of inadvertently revealing the location of the zombies and themselves.

"All the good guys are being challenged here. (Hackers are) saying: 'You're spotting my traffic. I am going to try and hide it a little better,'" said Rob Fleischman, the chief technology officer at Simplicita, a Denver-based security start-up that helps Internet service providers deal with infected computers on their networks.

The change in tactics makes it harder to identify zombies on a network, and it becomes tougher for security professionals to use the hackers' own tools to spy on them. In addition, the switch to Web-based control increases the threat of zombies to enterprises and other organizations, as that method can't be blocked as easily as the previous technique.

"If you're a bad guy, this is pretty good news. If you're a good guy, I wouldn't say it is bad news, but it is a challenge," said Jose Nazario, a senior software engineer at Arbor Networks, which sells network analysis products. Nazario has done extensive research into zombies, the results of which he presented at last week's Virus Bulletin conference.

Life of a zombie
Hijacked computers have become one of the most serious security problems on the Internet. Malicious remote-control code turns a computer into a zombie via security holes in software, a worm, or a Trojan horse. It then runs silently in the background, letting an attacker send commands to the system, unbeknownst to its owner.

Zombies are the most prevalent threat to Windows PCs, according to a Microsoft report released earlier this year. A security tool downloaded alongside Microsoft's patches removed at least one version of malicious remote-control software from about 3.5 million PCs between January 2005 and March 2006, it said.

Criminals make money by networking their zombies into a "botnet". They put these networks to work mounting denial-of-service attacks against online businesses in extortion schemes; hosting faked Web sites used in phishing scams; and relaying spam. Attackers also often load adware and spyware onto compromised systems, earning a kickback from the makers of these programs or reselling the private data of their victims.

In fighting botnets, investigators found it was relatively easy to identify zombies because of how they communicate with their masters. Most botnets today are controlled via Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, a still-active chat network that is a relic of the early days of the Net.

IRC lets hackers control their bots in real time. As soon as a computer is infected, it connects to a specific chat server and channel, and awaits its commands. But the benefit for the good guys is that they can lurk in the chat rooms, spy on the hackers, and sometimes even identify them. Furthermore, IRC uses its own network protocol.

"IRC is not as common as other protocols," Fleischman said. "It does not blend in. It has a certain signature. You can use technologies to spot it."

Internet service providers already block traffic to the IRC servers used by zombies, and many organizations use network shields, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, to block IRC traffic altogether. This prevents a compromised PC on a specific network from contacting its command-and-control center.

These countermeasures have not gone unnoticed in hacker circles. In a classic game of cat and mouse, miscreants are moving command-and-control channels for their botnets away from IRC and onto the Web. There, the zombies will blend in with regular Web traffic, which can't simply be blocked.

"These bots look like people browsing the Web," Fleischman said. "The brilliance here--and I hate to compliment the botmasters--is that they know that there is a giant haystack of Web traffic, and if they hide their command-and-control there, it is harder to spot."

Instead of connecting to an IRC server, newly compromised PCs connect to one or more Web sites to check in with the hackers and get their commands. These Web sites are typically hosted on hacked servers or computers that have been online for a long time. Attackers upload the instructions for download by their bots.

As a result, protection mechanisms, such as blocking IRC traffic, will fail. This could mean that zombies, which so far have mostly been broadband-connected home computers, will be created using systems on business networks.

"The trend to Web-based command and control is really about protecting the command-and-control center and hiding traffic from network administrators," said Randy Abrams, director of technical education at Eset, a security software company. "Web traffic is ubiquitous. IRC channels are well-known and relatively easily located and shut down."

Nazario agreed. "Part of the motivation is the idea of deeper penetration into juicier networks that allow Web-based traffic relatively unfiltered, but don't allow IRC," he said.

At the same time, zombie fighters lose an important capability to identify and spy on botmasters. Security professionals have been able to track hackers by crafting software tools mimicking a bot, and by signing in to IRC networks used to control botnets. On those same networks, the miscreants often also talk to co-conspirators.

"It is like talking to your friends over instant message," Nazario said.

Additionally, botnet operators can sometimes be identified by their Internet Protocol, or IP, address when they sign on to their own IRC server, he said. In the past year or so, law enforcement agencies have been able to arrest several botmasters.

The morphed threat requires work on the part of security people, Nazario said. "We have to speak a whole different language now," he said. "We have to learn new command instructions and new communication mechanisms that each of these bot families uses."

Security providers have found some ways to find and fight the new-style zombies. ISPs and businesses could block the individual Web addresses used by the malicious programs. In the near future, blacklists of such addresses will likely be compiled, experts said.

"You certainly can't just block all outbound Web traffic," Nazario said. "But if you have identified a certain Web server and it is not used for something else, you can go and block just that IP address."

Honeypot lures
To track the activity of bot masters, security professionals have to rely more on their honeypots, which are computers set up for the purpose of being infected, Fleischman said. This gives them the malicious code to dissect and identify the control servers, he said.

Also, a honeypot computer might be used as a control server, which means the attacker can be monitored and possibly identified when logging in, Fleischman said. "Botmasters hate the honeypot technique. They have a thousand bots, and they don't know which one is owned by a good guy," he said.

Individual organizations could invest in technology to more closely monitor Web traffic and spot traffic patterns that indicate bot activity. "But a lot of people don't want to look through that haystack," Fleischman said. "There might be more of a financial investment to scan that. The infrastructure cost is going to be higher."

Arbor identifies about 600 new botnets each day. Only a small number of botnets today, less than 1 percent, according to Arbor, use Web-based command and control. However, that number is likely to increase, as developers for the underground perfect the technique.

While the zombie fighters have to adjust to the new tactics of their adversaries, the battle has not been lost.

"The first variants of Web bots may have thrown people for a loop," said Adam Meyers, a security expert at consulting firm SRA International. "As new command-and-control mediums emerge, the good guys will adapt their containment and investigatory techniques."

The defense industry is always reacting to the bad guys, Nazario agreed. "They always make the first move and we counteract," he said. "That said, the good guys control the infrastructure, so we ultimately have the last word. If we don't like what they're doing, we can shut them down."
http://news.com.com/Zombies+try+to+b...?tag=nefd.lede





Chertoff: Web Could be Terror Training Camp

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

"We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the Internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police.

"They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."

Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005, attacks on London's transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat.

To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into "intelligence fusion centers," where they would work with local police agencies.

By the end of the next fiscal year, he said the department aims to up that to 35 staffers.
http://news.com.com/Chertoff+Web+cou...3-6126510.html





Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth
Leander Kahney

Thanks to Apple Computer's penchant for CIA-like secrecy, there are several myths concerning the birth of the iPod.

One of these myths is that the iPod has a father -- one man who conceived and nurtured the iconic device. Steve Jobs, of course, is one candidate; but engineer Tony Fadell has also been named the father of the iPod, as has Jon Rubinstein, the former head of Apple's hardware division. While they all played key roles in the iPod's development, the iPod was truly a team effort.

Here's the story:

In 2000, Steve Jobs' candy-colored iMac was leading the charge for Apple's comeback, but to further spur sales, the company started asking, "What can we do to make more people buy Macintoshes?"

Music lovers were trading tunes like crazy on Napster. They were attaching speakers to their computers and ripping CDs. The rush to digital was especially marked in dorm rooms -- a big source of iMac sales -- but Apple had no jukebox software for managing digital music.

To catch up with this revolution, Apple licensed the SoundJam MP music player from a small company and hired its hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months retooling SoundJam into iTunes (mostly making it simpler). Jobs introduced it at the Macworld Expo in January 2001.

While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and Co. started looking for gadget opportunities. They found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed and sold well, but music players were a different matter.

"The products stank," Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod product marketing, told Newsweek.

Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MB, which stored only a few dozen songs -- not much better than a cheap portable CD player.

But a couple of the players were based on a new 2.5-inch hard drive from Fujitsu. The most popular was the Nomad Jukebox from Singapore-based Creative. About the size of a portable CD player but twice as heavy, the Nomad Jukebox showed the promise of storing thousands of songs on a (smallish) device. But it had some horrible flaws: It used Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful) and it often sucked batteries dry in just 45 minutes.

Here was Apple's opportunity.

"I don't know whose idea it was to do a music player, but Steve jumped on it pretty quick and he asked me to look into it," said Jon Rubinstein, the veteran Apple engineer who's been responsible for most of the company's hardware in the last 10 years.

Now retired, Rubinstein joined Apple in 1997. He'd previously worked at NeXT, where he'd been Steve Jobs' hardware guy. While at Apple, Rubinstein oversaw a string of groundbreaking machines, from the first Bondi-blue iMac to water-cooled workstations -- and, of course, the iPod. When Apple split into separate iPod and Macintosh divisions in 2004, Rubinstein was put in charge of the iPod side -- a testament to how important both he and the iPod were to Apple.

Apple's team knew it could solve most of the problems plagued by the Nomad. Its FireWire connector could quickly transfer songs from the computer to player -- an entire CD in a few seconds; a huge library of MP3s in minutes. And thanks to the rapidly growing cell phone industry, new batteries and displays were constantly coming to market.

In February 2001, during the Macworld show in Tokyo, Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple's supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter -- considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players -- but Toshiba didn't have any idea what it might be used for.

"They said they didn't know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook," Rubinstein recalled. "I went back to Steve and I said, 'I know how to do this. I've got all the parts.' He said, 'Go for it.'"

"Jon's very good at seeing a technology and very quickly assessing how good it is," Joswiak told Cornell Engineering Magazine. "The iPod's a great example of Jon seeing a piece of technology's potential: that very, very small form-factor hard drive."

Rubinstein didn't want to distract any of the engineers working on new Macs, so in February 2001 he hired a consultant -- engineer Fadell -- to hash out the details.

Fadell had a lot of experience making handheld devices: He'd developed popular gadgets for General Magic and Philips. A mutual acquaintance gave his number to Rubinstein.

"I called Tony," Rubinstein said. "He was on the ski slope at the time. I didn't tell him what he was going to work on. Until he walked in the door, he didn't know what he was going to be working on."

Jobs wanted a player in shops by fall, before the holiday shopping season.

Fadell was put in charge of a small team of engineers and designers, who put the device together quickly. The team took as many parts as possible off the shelf: the drive from Toshiba, a battery from Sony, some control chips from Texas Instruments.

The basic hardware blueprint was bought from Silicon Valley startup PortalPlayer, which was working on "reference designs" for several different digital players, including a full-size unit for the living room and a portable player about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

The team also drew heavily on Apple's in-house expertise.

"We didn't start from scratch," Rubinstein said. "We've got a hardware engineering group at our disposal. We need a power supply, we've got a power supply group. We need a display, we've got a display group. We used the architecture team. This was a highly leveraged product from the technologies we already had in place."

One of the biggest problems was battery life. If the drive was kept spinning while playing songs, it quickly drained the batteries. The solution was to load several songs into a bank of memory chips, which draw much less power. The drive could be put to sleep until it's called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-MB memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch 10 hours instead of two or three.

Given the device's parts, the iPod's final shape was obvious. All the pieces sandwiched naturally together into a thin box about the size of a pack of cards.

"Sometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times," said Rubinstein. "It was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together."

Nonetheless, Apple's design group, headed by Jonathan Ive, Apple's vice president of industrial design, made prototype after prototype.

''Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'' Ive told The New York Times. ''It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.''

Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn't sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. ''It's not serial,'' he told the Times. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.''

Robert Brunner, a partner at design firm Pentagram and former head of Apple's design group, said Apple's designers mimic the manufacturing process as they crank out prototypes.

"Apple's designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming," he said. "They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas."

To make them easy to debug, prototypes were built inside polycarbonate containers about the size of a large shoebox.

The iPod's basic software was also brought in -- from Pixo, which was working on an operating system for cell phones. On top of Pixo's low-level system, Apple built the iPod's celebrated user interface.

The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said quite definitively, "The wheel is the right user interface for this product."

Schiller also suggested that menus should scroll faster the longer the wheel is turned, a stroke of genius that distinguishes the iPod from the agony of competing players. Schiller's scroll wheel didn't come from the blue, however; scroll wheels are pretty common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones have an iPod-like dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls. Back in 1983, the Hewlett Packard 9836 workstation had a keyboard with a similar wheel for scrolling text.

The interface was mocked up by Tim Wasko, an interactive designer who came to Apple from NeXT, where he had worked with Jobs. Wasko had previously been responsible for the clean, simple interface in Apple's QuickTime player. Like the hardware designers, Wasko designed mockup after mockup, presenting the variations on large glossy printouts that could be spread over a conference table to be quickly sorted and discussed.

The output of a committee is a function of the quality of its members and how they're led. As the iPod came together, it garnered more and more attention from Jobs, whose insistence on excellence and high standards are stamped onto the gadget as indelibly as Apple's logo.

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Jobs insisted the iPod work seamlessly with iTunes, and that many functions should be automated, especially transferring songs. The model was Palm's HotSync software.

"Plug it in. Whirrrrrr. Done," Jobs told Fortune.

The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for "a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment," according to the filing.
"The name 'iPod' makes much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player," said Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California.

But Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable and, crucially, it doesn't describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device's function changes. He noted the "i" prefix has a double meaning: It can mean "internet," as in "iMac," or it can denote the first person: "I," as in me.

"They discovered in their tool chest of registered names they had 'iPod,'" he said. "If you think about the product, it doesn't really fit. But it doesn't matter. It's short and sweet."

On Oct. 23, 2001, about five weeks after 9/11, Jobs introduced the finished product at a special event at Apple's HQ.

"This is a major, major breakthrough," Jobs told the assembled reporters.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/cu...l?tw=rss.index





‘Good for the Soul’

With iPod’s fifth birthday around the corner, Steve Jobs discusses the MP3 player’s design, the cool factor and the impact on how we listen to music.
Steven Levy

Oct. 23 marks the fifth anniversary of Apple's iPod. CEO Steve Jobs reflected with NEWSWEEK's Steven Levy (author of "The Perfect Thing," a book about the iPod out this month) about the past, present and future of the device that changed Apple—and the world.

NEWSWEEK: During the iPod's development process did you get a sense of how big it would become?
Steve Jobs: The way you can tell that you're onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can't wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.

Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?
We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

What was the design lesson of the iPod?
Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.

Some people say that iPod might lose its cachet because it's too popular—how can it be cool when Dick Cheney and Queen Elizabeth have one?
That's like saying you don't want to kiss your lover's lips because everyone has lips. It doesn't make any sense. We don't strive to appear cool. We just try to make the best products we can. And if they are cool, well, that's great.

What products, maybe outside technology, do you consider cool?
I like things that do the job and kind of disappear into my life. Like Levis. They just kind of get faded and disappear, and you don't think about it much. If you look, you appreciate the design, but you feel something from them, too. A lot of quality is communicated through a feeling that people have. They don't understand exactly why, but they know that a lot of care and love was put into the designing of the product.

Let's talk about the iTunes store. How did you get the record labels, which had been resisting digital music, to sign up?
It was a process over 18 months. We got to know these folks and we made a series of predictions that a lot of things they were trying would fail. Then they went and tried them, and they all failed, for the reasons that we had predicted. We kept coming back to visit them every month or two, and they started to believe that we might actually have some insight into this, and our credibility grew with them to the point where they were willing to take a chance with us. Now, remember, it was initially just on the Mac, so one of the arguments that we used was, "If we're completely wrong and you completely screw up the entire music market for Mac owners, the sandbox is small enough that you really won't damage the overall music industry very much." That was one instance where Macintosh's [small] market share helped us. Then about six months later we were able to successfully persuade them to take down the barriers and let us move it out to the whole market.

Now people at some labels think that iTunes, with its dominant market share has too much power.
We've never once gone to them and asked them to lower their prices.

No, but you've asked them not to raise their prices, when some of them wanted to.
Our core initial strategy on the store was that if you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price. In essence, we would make a deal with people. If they would pay a fair price, we would give them a better product and they would stop being pirates. And it worked. If we go back now and we raise prices—this is what we told the record companies last year—we will be violating that implicit deal. Many [users] will say, "I knew it all along that the music companies were gonna screw me, and now they're screwing me." And they would never buy anything from iTunes again.

Do you think that it's fair to the customer that the songs they buy from Apple will only work on iTunes and the iPod?
Well, they knew that all along.

At one point you were saying, “When our customers demand it, that's when we'll consider interoperability.”
Nobody's ever demanded it. People know up front that when they buy music from the iTunes music store it plays on iPods, and so we're not trying to hide anything there.

Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

IPods now have video, games, audio books and podcasts. Will iPods always be about the music?
Who knows? But it's hard to imagine that music is not the epicenter of the iPod, for a long, long, long, long, long time. I was very lucky to grow up in a time when music really mattered. It wasn't just something in the background; it really mattered to a generation of kids growing up. It really changed the world. I think that music faded in importance for a while, and the iPod has helped to bring music back into people's lives in a really meaningful way. Music is so deep within all of us, but it's easy to go for a day or a week or a month or a year without really listening to music. And the iPod has changed that for tens of millions of people, and that makes me really happy, because I think music is good for the soul.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15262121/sit...hardware.co.uk





New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Woes
Ian Urbina

New electronic voting machines have arrived in Yolo County, Calif., but there is one hitch: the audio program for the visually impaired in some of them works only in Vietnamese.

“Talk about panic,” said Freddy Oakley, the county’s top election official. “I’ve got gray-haired ladies as poll workers standing around looking stunned.”

As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results.

In Maryland, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, a shortage of technicians has vendors for new machines soliciting applications for technical support workers on job Web sites like Monster.com. Ms. Oakley, who is also facing a shortage, raided the computer science department at the University of California, Davis, hiring 60 graduate students as troubleshooters.

Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states considered most likely to experience difficulties, according to voting experts who have been tracking the technology and other election changes.

“We’ve got new laws, new technology, heightened partisanship and a growing involvement of lawyers in the voting process,” said Tova Wang, who studies elections for the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. “We also have the greatest potential for problems in more places next month than in any voting season before.”

Election officials in many of the states are struggling with delays in the delivery of machines before the election as old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines are phased out. A chronic shortage of poll workers, many of them retirees uncomfortable with new technology, has worsened matters.

Wendy S. Noren, the top election official for Boone County, Mo., which includes Columbia, said delays in the delivery of new machines had left her county several weeks behind schedule and with 600 poll workers yet to be trained. Ms. Noren said she also had not yet been provided with the software coding she needed to print the training manuals.

“I think we will make it,” she said, “but my staff is already at the point of passing out, and the sprint is just starting.”

New computerized registration rolls and litigation over new voter identification laws in states like Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and Missouri have left many poll workers and voters unclear about the rules, including whether they are in effect, as the courts have blocked many of the new laws.

“We’re expecting arguments at the polls in these states that will slow everything down and probably cause large numbers of legitimate voters to be turned away or to be forced to vote on provisional ballots,” said Barbara Burt, an elections reform director for Common Cause.

Meanwhile, votes in about half of the 45 most competitive Congressional races, including contests in Florida, Georgia and Indiana, will be cast on electronic machines that provide no independent means of verification.

“In a close race, a machine error in one precinct could leave the results in doubt and the losing candidates won’t be able to get a recount,” said Warren Stewart, policy director for VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that has criticized electronic voting.

Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, was less inclined to sound the alarm. She said that since it was not a presidential election year and many states had encouraged voting by mail, fewer people would turn up at the polls than in 2004.

With computerized registration rolls, Ms. Markowitz said, there will be far fewer people incorrectly excluded from the new databases compared with when registration rolls were on paper.

“There will be isolated incidents, there is no doubt about that,” she said. “But over all the system will move faster and with fewer problems.”

Charles Stewart, head of the political science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a study this year indicating that from 2000 to 2004, new technology helped reduce the number of improperly marked ballots by about one million votes.

“If you think things are bad and worrisome now, they were much worse before 2000,” Mr. Stewart said, adding that breakdowns in the mechanics of voting are simply more highlighted, not more prevalent.

Still, this is a year of firsts for some local election officials. Cherie Poucher, elections director for Wake County, N.C., which includes Raleigh, said she expected 350,000 voters on Election Day, up from the 30,000 in the May primary. She worries that the county’s 218 optical scan machines may be unable to handle the increased load. During the primary, 12 of the new machines would not boot up and needed to be replaced.

“In the end, we were lucky,” Ms. Poucher said. The machines were replaced within hours, she said, and since her county uses optical scan machines rather than paperless machines, voters were able to deposit paper ballots into a ballot box until replacements arrived.

“I’m an optimist,” she said. “But if we have more failures than we have total machines, it could be really difficult even with the paper ballots.”

Ms. Burt of Common Cause said there was some disagreement about the likelihood of problems, and difficulty in predicting where problems might emerge, in part because there is little uniformity in how elections are conducted.

Except for rudimentary federal rules on voting age, federal financing for states and counties, and protections for minorities and the disabled, elections are shaped by a variety of local laws, conflicting court rulings and technological choices.

“People might refer to it as a national election system but in truth there is no such thing,” Ms. Burt said.

Justin Levitt, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that on election night his organization will be keeping particularly close watch on North Carolina, Florida and South Dakota, because of new voter registration databases there.

Under the federal Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, election officials were required to create computerized statewide voter registration rolls. These databases were intended to help streamline registration and decrease fraud, and they help political parties track potentially supportive voters. In some states, however, the databases have blocked large numbers of eligible voters from joining registration lists.

North Carolina, for example, requires that information provided by voters for registration forms match information in the motor vehicle or Social Security databases.

“If someone is listed with their maiden name in one list and their married name in another list, that voter will be blocked from the eligible voter roll,” said Mr. Levitt, adding that these voters may show up in large numbers and not realize that there is a problem.

“I certainly don’t see a disaster, but frankly I’m very concerned,” said Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Fla., which includes Tallahassee. He said Florida has tried three times to create databases of eligible and ineligible voters but each system has had widespread inaccuracies.

“This is our fourth attempt and I’m worried that voters who have been voting for the last decade will show up at the polls and they won’t be listed anywhere,” Mr. Sancho said.

A report released last Thursday by the Century Foundation, Common Cause and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights cited concerns that most states have only vague, if any, standards for voting machine distribution.

There is no federal minimum for the ratio of voters to machines and there is wide variation in state standards.

In Wisconsin, the law requires at least one machine for every 200 registered voters. In Michigan, that ratio is 1:600, the report said. Election officials in Ohio, which had some of the longest lines in 2004, passed a law this year setting the ratio at 1:175, the report said. But the law does not take effect until 2013.

Keith A. Cunningham, director of the Allen County board of elections in Ohio and former president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, said most counties were close to the ratio required by the law.

“I don’t believe it is going to be as bad as everyone is predicting,” Mr. Cunningham said.

Whether there are problems or not, post-election litigation is likely. A study released this year by the Washington and Lee Law Review found that the number of court cases challenging elections has risen in recent years. In 2004, the number was 361, up from 104 cases in 1998.

Jonah Goldman, a lawyer and elections expert with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said his organization is prepared for the worst. With the N.A.A.C.P. and the People for the American Way Foundation, the lawyers group will have about 500 people fielding calls to a national hot line (1-866-OUR-VOTE) about problems and providing information to voters and poll workers.

In 2004, a similar hot line fielded more than 200,000 calls and created a database of about 40,000 reported problems. The coalition is dispatching lawyers in a dozen states to address reports of voter intimidation or to see if litigation is needed to extend hours at polling stations.

“We’re not sure what we will be handling,” Mr. Goldman said. “But we’re pretty confident that there will be no shortage of work that night.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/us...rtner=homepage





Building a Better Voting Machine
Kim Zetter

It's been six years since the Florida presidential fiasco launched a flurry of spending around the country to replace antiquated punch-card and lever voting machines with expensive new electronic touch-screen machines. Yet new controversies over the security of e-voting machines continue to crop up, making it clear that the new machines are just as problematic as the ones they replaced.

Why can't the voting machine companies get it right?

With election season upon us, Wired News spoke with two of the top computer scientists in the field, UC Berkeley's David Wagner and Princeton's Ed Felten, and came up with a wish list of features we would include in a voting machine, if we were asked to create one.

These recommendations can't guarantee clean results on their own. Voting machines, no matter how secure, are no remedy for poor election procedures and ill-conceived election laws. So our system would include thorough auditing and verification capabilities and require faithful adherence to good election practices, as wells as topnotch usability and security features.

Here, then, is our nomination for the best voting machine for 2008. Use the comments tool below to tell us how your perfect voting machine would look.
Hardware

Combine the best features of touch-screen and optical-scan machines in a single device. Touch-screens are easy to use and are flexible enough to accommodate disabled voters and multiple languages. Optical-scan devices provide reliable paper trails.

We recommend a third alternative that combines the best attributes of both -- a ballot marking machine, such as one made by Election Systems and Software.

These devices let voters make their choices on a touch-screen. But instead of directly recording the votes digitally onto a memory card, the machine prints the votes onto a full-size paper ballot. Voters or election officials then place the completed ballots onto an optical-scan reader (.pdf), where the votes are recorded digitally.

This system provides the same level of accessibility to disabled voters as touch-screen machines, while producing digital votes that can be counted quickly.

The full-size paper ballot serves as a voter-verified paper audit trail that's far superior to the paper record currently produced by touch-screen machines outfitted with printers. That's because most touch-screen printers use thermal paper -- the kind used in many cash registers -- which produces poor-quality records that tend to curl and tear easily. The printers also jam and can run out of paper, forcing poll workers to replace them in mid-election -- problems that are absent with ballot-marking systems.

Eliminate removable memory cards. Removable memory cards pose an unacceptable security risk for voting machines and we should do away with them, advises UC Berkeley's Wagner.

Current systems require election staff or poll workers to install memory cards into a slot in the voting machine to record the votes. To prevent someone from tampering with the cards, workers are supposed to place tamper-evident tape over the memory-card compartment. But workers often forget to install the tape or take proper action when they discover that the tape over a compartment has been broken.

Recently, Princeton's Felten showed how it's possible to open locks on some voting machines using a standard issue hotel minibar key. Eliminating removable memory cards and compartments would help minimize risks from physical break-ins.

Barring that, Wagner is also looking at viable ways to store election data on a voting machine memory card so it can't be deleted or changed once it's written to the card.
Software

Simplify voting machine software to use minimal lines of code. UC Berkeley's Wagner says current electronic voting systems are more complex than they need to be and contain much more code than is needed to conduct elections. This makes it difficult for certification labs to thoroughly review the code for defects and security vulnerabilities.

"If you've got 50,000 lines of code, that's approaching the complexity of the U.S. tax code," Wagner says.

The problem stems from the origin of most voting systems -- they weren't built from scratch for the specific and narrow purpose of voting but were built from general-purpose computing systems and software libraries modified for elections. As such, they have a lot of dormant features necessary for general-purpose machines, but not for voting. All that extra code in the software provides camouflage in which to hide malicious code.

Wagner and his graduate students are looking at ways to edit the systems to bare essentials. "What we're trying to do is pare this stuff down to the absolute, minimum capabilities so that it's easy to review and certify the machines," Wagner says.

Make self-policing software. Princeton University's Felten says an ideal voting machine would prevent someone from loading software onto the machines that differs from the version of voting software that was certified, as Diebold Election Systems was found to have done in California.

Felten recently made headlines when he and his students hacked a Diebold voting system in a few minutes and installed malicious code on it. He says a machine that would recognize the hash of a software program could prevent a program from running on the machine if its hash doesn't match the approved one. "That is one thing you would want to attend to in the design of the machine -- something in the architecture of the machine," Felten says. Or he would design a machine that could tell officials reliably what program was running on the system so they would know if unauthorized software patches or a different software program altogether had been introduced.

Create transparent code. Once the voting machine code is created, we would follow Australia's example and make the code transparent and available to the public so anyone who wanted to read it could see what was in the system.

In addition, code used in any specific machine would, by law, be made available for inspection on request if the integrity of an election were questioned after the fact. In current circumstances, courts have refused to force voting-machine makers to let parties disputing an election examine their software code.

"To me this is a basic principle," Felten says, "that the process by which elections are conducted and votes are counted should be transparent to voters."
Processes and Procedures

Employ mandatory audits. Poor processes and procedures can undo even the most secure voting system. Therefore, a trustworthy election requires good systems for tracking the chain of custody of election equipment and voting data. Given that election processes and procedures are prone to human error and negligence, voting machine audits should be required under law in every jurisdiction. Such audits would include the following:

Random spot checks: Experts agree that parallel monitoring of machines on election day is essential to make sure the machines are operating properly and the software hasn't been subverted. This involves taking a random number of machines out of commission just before polls open on election morning to run a sample election on them to make sure the machines are recording and counting votes accurately.

Post-election hand audits: In addition to parallel monitoring, manual audits after an election ensure that the digital votes were recorded and calculated correctly. This involves hand counting the paper ballots from a random sampling of precincts and comparing the tally to the digital count from those precincts. Officials also need to compare the total number of votes cast at those precincts to the number of voters who signed in at the polls to determine if the machines lost any ballots or if voters cast more than a ballot each.

Post-election voter verification: At the end of an election, all that really matters is that a voter's choices were included in the final tally and counted accurately. Election officials can use the most secure and transparent voting machines with paper ballots and even do parallel monitoring and hand audits and still lose votes between the time they collect the votes from machines and issue the final results. So how does a voter know with certainty at the end of the day that his or her vote was among those counted in the election results? According to Felten and Wagner, this is a problem for which there is still no easy solution.

Cryptographer David Chaum has proposed one solution (.pdf) that involves voters receiving encrypted receipts that they would compare to final results posted on a website after the election. But the scheme is too technical for election officials to understand and follow, say Felten and Wagner, and too burdensome for voters to bother with.

"We're moving slowly toward understanding that problem of 'Was my vote counted?'" says Felten. "I think someday we may get to the point where we can provide that kind of verifiability but it will take time."

In the meantime, he says, all we can do is take steps to "reduce the window of vulnerability (with elections) -- not to zero, but to far below where it is now."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/evote/1,71957-0.html





100 Megs a second

Gigbit DSL: Yes, It Will Happen
Om Malik

Copper is the cockroach of the telecom world – it just doesn’t go away. And if telecom technologists have their way, it could soon be carrying data at speed of gigabit per second. Last week, ECI Telecom and a bunch of other companies announced a new consortium that would work on a technology called the Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM). The Chief Scientist Office of the Israeli Government has financed the consortium with a grant of about $10 million. DSM is widely viewed as the next evolutionary step after VDSL2. DSM, when commercialized could help provide fiber optic like speeds over copper, the consortium says. DSM addresses one of the biggest issues with the DSL technology – interference also known as crosstalk.

“The main obstacle for the advancement of DSL technology is the interference (”crosstalk”) generated from different DSL lines that share the same telephone cable binder,” said Professor John Cioffi, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, a pioneer of DSM research, who is also recognized as the inventor of the DMT line code. “DSM is a promising technology for the future evolution of broadband access networks using existing copper infrastructure.”

People should pay attention to what Cioffi says.

He was recently awarded the Marconi Prize (and is the 2006 Marconi Fellow.) He is a soothsayer when it comes to all things DSL. According to DSL Prime, in 1990 he predicted that DSL could deliver between 5-to-10 megabits per second. Then in 2002 he predicted 100 megabits per second over copper. That happened. By 2004 companies like Ikanos and Metalink were showing off chips that could do 100 mega up and down. So now lets take what he is saying very seriously.

“Phone lines are big antennas that radiate into one another,” Cioffi says. “They are their own worst enemies when they are all bundled together. Any kind of [electromagnetic] noise from AM radios, fluorescent lights or your vacuum cleaner can get into these things and cause problems.” (via Stanford Report.)

Back in the 1990s his solution was to transmit data between two modems – say one at home and one at the telco central office – and connect them with each other via 256 different 4 kilobit per second channels. The traffic would flow over the less congested channels, and interference would be overcome.

With DSM, Cioffi is taking copper to the next level. DSM packs more channels and also uses the higher frequency bands that have not been useable because of extreme interference. He is betting that DSM is going to be big, and has decided to start a new company, Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment (ASSIA) Inc. (more details to follow!)
http://gigaom.com/2006/10/16/gigabit...t-will-happen/





HP Passes Dell in World PC Shipments
Michael Liedtke

Hewlett-Packard Co. supplanted Dell Inc. as the world leader in personal computer shipments during the third quarter, returning the bragging rights to Silicon Valley for the first time in nearly three years, according to figures released Wednesday by two influential research firms.

Both Gartner Inc. and IDC pegged the overall third-quarter growth of the global PC market at just under 7 percent, but that trend was overshadowed by the industry's new pecking order.

The changing of the guard occurred after HP's shipments climbed by 15 percent from a year ago while Dell's edged up by less than 4 percent.

By Gartner's measure, Palo Alto-based HP shipped 110,000 more PCs than Dell to give it a 16.3 percent share of the global market compared to 16.1 percent for its Round Rock, Texas-based rival.

It marks the first time since 2003's final quarter that HP - now the world's largest technology company - has held the top spot. HP expanded its PC business in 2002 with its $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. - a deal engineered by HP's former chief executive, Carly Fiorina, who is now touting her accomplishments in a new memoir.

IDC calculated things differently, but also agreed HP holds a narrow lead in the global market. Although HP shipped 28,000 more PCs than Dell during the quarter, IDC pegged both companies market share of the worldwide market at roughly 17 percent.

Dell retained a substantial lead in the U.S. market, where its dominance of the corporate market gives its a major advantage, analysts said.

Nevertheless, HP also narrowed the gap in the United States, where its market share stood somewhere between 22 and 23 percent. Dell's hovered between 31 and 32 percent, according to the research firms.

Both PC makers recently have been battling image problems brought on by embarrassing incidents.

HP has been rocked by revelations of the shady tactics that investigators deployed in a cloak-and-dagger operation designed to plug a boardroom leak. The subterfuge included obtaining personal phone records under false pretenses - a scheme that culminated in congressional hearings and criminal charges against five people, including HP's former chairwoman.

The scandal, which erupted in early September, apparently didn't deter the sales momentum that HP has been building since Mark Hurd became chief executive during the spring of 2005.

"HP continues execute well by taking advantage of the high-growth markets, particularly the consumer market," said Charles Smulders, a Gartner vice president.

In August, Dell recalled 4.1 million notebook computer batteries made by Sony Corp. because they can overheat and catch fire. That recall probably wasn't a major factor in Dell's lackluster third quarter because desktop computer shipments accounted for most of the weakness, analysts said.

All the other major PC makers also picked up market share at Dell's expense in the third quarter. China's Lenovo Group Ltd. remained third in the worldwide PC market with a roughly 8 percent share, followed by Taiwan-based Acer Inc. at 6 percent and Japan's Toshiba Corp. at 4 percent.

In the United States, Apple Computer Inc.'s shipments rose by more than 30 percent from last year, reflecting strong back-to-school demands for its notebooks. The Cupertino-based company, which has become better known for its ubiquitous iPods, ended the quarter with a 6 percent share of the U.S. market.

Dragged down by Dell, overall PC shipments fell by roughly 1 to 2 percent in the United States, according to Gartner and IDC. It was the first time since the second quarter of 2002 that U.S. PC shipments fell.

The PC industry's outlook for the crucial holiday shopping season remains muddy because Microsoft Corp.'s new operating system, the widely anticipated Vista, won't be sold to consumers until January.

Loren Loverde, director of IDC's worldwide quarterly PC tracker, won't necessarily discourage consumers from buying new computers during the fourth quarter because retailers are expected to slash prices to clear their shelves for the arrival of the new Vista-powered systems.

"Consumers who don't mind buying a computer with Windows XP are going to get some very good deals," Smulders agreed.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-18-19-36-51





Holiday Outlook Healthy for Gadgets
May Wong

Portable music players, cell phones and digital cameras are poised to be in hot demand this holiday season, according to a market survey that also projects a 27 percent boost in spending on electronics gifts.

Digital cameras topped the list as the most popular gizmo consumers intend to give this year, followed by a DVD player or recorder. But for the second year in a row, the most wished-for gadget - among adults and teens - was a portable digital music player.

The Consumer Electronics Association was to announce its annual holiday survey Monday.

With the healthy outlook, the trade group said it expects U.S. electronics industry revenues to reach $140 billion for all of 2006, up more than 9 percent from the $128 billion attained in 2005. For the holiday season, the survey indicates Americans intend to spend about $22 billion in electronics gifts, compared with $17 billion last year.

"We're seeing greater consumer spending across the board and what's benefiting in particular is consumer electronics," said Sean Wargo, the association's director of industry analysis.

After digital cameras and DVD devices, the top electronics gifts were a cell phone, portable music player, a video game system, a portable CD player, a carrying case for laptops or audio players, a television, a cordless phone, additional memory for a digital camera, a notebook computer, and a clock or tabletop radio.

Consumers said they intend to spend an average $804 per household on all holiday gifts - about a quarter, or $195, for electronics. But consumers might be underestimating their electronics spending in responding to the survey.

Apple Computer Inc.'s best-selling iPod player, the Nano, ranges in price from $150 to $250. For video games, Nintendo Co.'s upcoming Wii console will cost $250, while Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 will be $500 or $600, depending on the model. Though some digital cameras cost about $150, many mainstream models ring up to twice that or higher.

Buying just one item could eat up or surpass that $195 figure. Consider also that households were planning to buy nine items apiece on average, up from eight last year.

The 28 percent of survey respondents who said they expected to lower their electronics gifts spending this year might prove themselves wrong, Wargo said.

In any case, there's no harm in wishing.

Among the most-wanted electronics gifts for this holiday season were first, the mobile music player, followed by a digital camera, computer, television, video game system, DVD player or recorder, cell phone and camcorder.

The Consumer Electronics Association holiday survey, in its 13th year, was based on phone interviews with 1,019 adult U.S. households in September. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-13-18-35-16





Review: Apple Offers Value in New iPods
Dan Scheraga

Fans of Apple Computer Inc.'s portable music players will find the new, video-capable models of the iPod and its miniature counterpart, the Nano, clearly worth the wait.

As with previous iPods, the Nano now comes in a variety of storage capacities and colors, not just silver and black. There's green, blue, pink and - starting last week - red, each holding 4 gigabytes of music, or roughly 1,000 songs. Silver is available in 2 GB and 4 GB configurations, and the black model holds 8 GB.

The first thing I noticed is that the new Nano is tiny. Very tiny. It's so discreet, slim and light, at 1.4 ounces, that you'll want to check your pants pockets for it twice before putting them in the laundry; I sadly learned the hard way.

Owners of first-generation Nanos will be happy to see that Apple has done away with the device's shiny metal backing, which was notorious for scratching up almost as soon as it was out of the box. Now an elegant, seamless aluminum enclosure wraps around the Nano.

The battery life of the Nano is impressive. Apple rates it at 24 hours, and my own testing of an 8 GB model supported that. It charges quickly, too, powering up to 80 percent capacity in 90 minutes while hooked up to your computer using the included USB cable. A travel adapter for computer-less charging is sold separately.

The Nano's display is 40 percent brighter than the first-generation models. Song and album titles are easy to read. You can also view photos and album covers on it, but the screen is small, so don't expect to be able to see every nuance.

Priced at $149, $199 and $249, respectively, for 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB models, the new Nano models pack a lot of punch into a small package at a small price.

I wish I could say the same for the new iPods.

Obviously, the big draw here is the iPod's video capability, something not available in Nanos. The display, though rather small at 2.5 inches diagonally, is beautiful, crisp and 60 percent brighter than its predecessor. However, video images tend to pixelize in areas of low contrast, probably because of the data compression necessary to squeeze video down to iPod size.

Videos - such as television episodes of "Lost" and movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" - can be purchased from Apple's iTunes store. Consumers also can convert their own video into the iPod format using iTunes, though I sometimes lost audio when I put my personal video clips on the iPod.

The iPod I tested exhibited other strange behaviors, once freezing my entire computer as I tried to sync it with my music library. It even seemed once to confuse audio with video. When I asked it to play one album, it rapidly cycled through a series of movie images instead.

Apple also revealed this week that a virus had infected a small number of the new video iPods.

No doubt Apple will be quick to smooth these kinks out of new iPods rolling off the assembly line, but it was disappointing to encounter them at all.

The new iPod's battery life is respectable, at 14 hours for music and 6.5 hours for video on the 30 GB model (it is longer for the 80 GB model). That's still greater than the first video iPods, allowing you to watch more shows and movies.

The iPods are reasonably priced at $249 for the 30 GB model and $349 for the 80 GB model, though the value is not quite as compelling as it is for the Nano.

The new Nanos and iPods share a few new features, including the ability to search for songs, artists and albums by letter - helpful when you've got 80 GB of music to browse through. Another addition is gapless playback: no more jarring silence between tracks of albums like "Dark Side of the Moon" where the songs are meant to blend into each other.

Other features were held over from earlier iterations. Both the Nano and the iPod come with the same four dull games included on earlier models, but better games for the video iPod are available for purchase on iTunes. (Sorry Nano users, you're out of luck.)

And as with all iPod flavors, you can buy music from iTunes - and only iTunes. Copy-protected tunes from rival music services generally won't work. You can also play files ripped from your CDs using Apple's free iTunes software for Windows and Mac computers. Synching your music library is as simple as plugging in the USB cord.

Some of my favorite features are the simplest: The playback automatically pauses when the earphones are removed from the jack, so you don't miss a moment of music. The clock can keep track of multiple time zones.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of all is in the earphones. Usually a cheap freebie with other portable audio devices, Apple resisted the temptation to pinch pennies here and instead gave them a complete reengineering with the new models.

The result is probably the most comfortable set of earphones I've worn, and they seem never to fall out. The sound quality is great, too, ratcheting up to teeth-rattling volume with almost no distortion. One small disappointment with the earphones: They are still available only in white.

But that complaint is eclipsed by the many things to like about Apple's new iPods. Consumers can feel comfortable laying down their credit card for either one.

Another option is the new iPod Shuffle, which Apple is introducing this month. Barely larger than a cufflink, the Shuffle is designed to be worn, with a clip that fastens onto your clothes.

It holds only 1 GB of music and has no display, making song selection difficult. But at $79, it's attractive for people who intend to use the iPod while jogging or working out.

For my money, though, the Nano is the best bet. I went out and bought my own after my review unit's untimely end in the washing machine.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-19-08-59-50





Portable Media Players Aim for the Masses
Michel Marriott

SEDUCTIVELY lighted music players may be hogging retail shelf space, but their overshadowed cousin, the portable media player, is looking increasingly attractive.

A new generation of portable media players — primarily designed to play video but, in some instances, to record it — is arriving in stores and on the Web. Many of the players are svelte, easy to use and less expensive than their predecessors. They can hold music videos or full-length movies, as well as play music and display digital photos. And more consumers are taking notice.

EchoStar Communications, the parent company of the satellite television service Dish Network, has done more than take notice. This fall, Dish Network is promoting a line of media players that customers can use to record or transfer television programs and movies for portable viewing. The devices, which the company is calling PocketDish players, are priced from $150 to $400.

“The key to this is the on-the-go lifestyle, people on trains, commuting, on planes, families with a digital video recorder but no time to sit and watch the programs on television,” said Cory Jo Vasquez, an EchoStar spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, broadening lines of media players are available at national outlets like Wal-Mart and RadioShack. Executives at Archos, the French company widely credited with creating the category in 2002, said that the number of retail outlets for its products in the United States had increased to 7,000 this fall, from 1,600 in July.

Part of the allure, consumers and retailers say, is that the category is maturing, offering more features at lower prices. Media players start as low as $100 and generally cost no more than $500 for full-featured models with large, bright screens, high storage capacity and recording options.

“The notion of viewing video on portable devices started to be a lot more popular after Apple introduced that functionality on the iPod,” said Ross Rubin, a consumer electronics analyst, referring to the fifth-generation iPod introduced last fall.

But Mr. Rubin, the director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, noted that the video-enabled iPod uses a smallish liquid-crystal-display screen (2.5 inches) for playback, as do other music players that also play video, including the Microsoft Zune, scheduled for release next month.

Dedicated media players with larger screens have tended to be bulky and overly complicated, critics have noted. They also have generally cost much more than music players that double as video players, Mr. Rubin said. For example, an entry-level iPod that plays video costs about $250. Last year, large-screen video players could easily cost twice that; now they are typically priced at $300 to $400.

“Those are still not high-volume products within the portable media player category,” Mr. Rubin said of the larger, feature-laden video players. “They are not a mainstream phenomenon yet.”

But Larry Smith, chief operating officer for Archos, said consumers had made it clear this year that what they wanted were portable devices that could richly and easily deliver video entertainment. “We think that is a validation of what we have been developing over the last four to five years.”

Mr. Smith noted that not only had media player technologies greatly improved this year, so had the means for getting content for the players, whether recording it directly on the players, dragging and dropping video files from computers, or transferring video from digital recorders like TiVo and on-demand services like AOL Video.

Archos’s products include the new 404 ($300, or $350 for a model that records video in DVD quality) and the 504 (which comes in 40-, 80- and 160-gigabyte versions that cost $350, $400 and $600). At the top of the line is the Archos 604, a full-featured player that the company says is the thinnest wide-screen device on the market, at 0.6 inches.

The 604 ($350) has a bright, high-resolution 4.3-inch screen and a 30-gigabyte hard drive that Archos representatives say can store up to 85 movies, 300,000 pictures or 15,000 songs. The 604 can read all standard video formats with DVD resolution; the absence of that ability has hindered many other media players, analysts said.

A standout feature of the new Archos media players is the introduction of the DVR station. It is a separate dock that houses the players’ video recording capacity and a collection of audiovisual input, output and data ports. Mr. Smith said that moving the recording function to the accessory (which costs $100, or $80 when purchased with a player) allowed the players to be smaller and less expensive, yet have larger screens.

The docking station can schedule recording from most sources, including televisions, cable and satellite set-top boxes, DVD players and videocassette recorders, Mr. Smith said. The station can also play content on television at DVD quality and in 5.1 surround sound. Later this fall, Mr. Smith said, the 604 will come in a Wi-Fi version ($450) that can receive content wirelessly.

The new Zen Vision W by Creative, like the 604, features a wide-screen, 4.3-inch display. It ships with a 30-gigabyte hard drive, but is also available in a 60-gigabyte model that can store up to 240 hours of video.

The Zen Vision W, priced at $300 to $500, reads many of the leading video formats; it includes an FM tuner and voice recorder, but does not record video. Generally, content is transferred from a computer by a U.S.B. 2.0 line.

The PMP7040 by Coby ($330) offers a whopping seven-inch screen. Like the Zen Vision W, it does not directly record video, but it plays video in various formats. It also plays digital music.

Doghouse Electronics, a start-up company in Birmingham, Ala., has recently introduced its first products, the 3.5-inch ($300) and 4-inch ($350) RoverTV portable media players. While both pocket-size devices can play many video formats, they also record from television sets, digital video recorders, DVD players and other sources.

The players use flash memory, and each comes with a 2-gigabyte memory card that can store up to four hours of high-quality video and 2,800 songs, said the company’s founder and chairman, Jim Howard. The players include FM tuners.

Other new media players that store their contents in flash memory — but do not record video — include the K-Pex by Kingston Technology, which starts at $130 and is hardly larger than a candy bar. It has a two-inch screen and one gigabyte of memory built in as well as an expansion slot for a miniSD card. Content, including music, pictures and text, can be transferred by a high-speed U.S.B. connection.

And in a nod to pre-teenagers, Tiger Electronics released last month the Massively Mini media player ($80), a child’s palm-size video and music player with an FM radio and a color screen about the size of a postage stamp. The player has 128 megabytes of built-in storage. It, too, uses a U.S.B. connection to transfer content, including pictures.

For videos, the shiny little player comes with video conversion software. Content suitable for children, including short clips from Cartoon Network and interviews with youth stars like Hilary Duff, can also be downloaded free from www.Tigertube.com. And for adults, the media players seem to have bridged an important divide.

“Typically, I would have said that this would be more geared toward early adopters and men,” said Ms. Vasquez, the EchoStar spokeswoman. “But what we’re finding in doing our research is that women are taking more of a front row in adopting these technologies these days.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/te.../19basics.html





A New Gadget on Campus. Who’s It for?
David Pogue

There’s nothing quite as embarrassing as a grown-up trying too hard to look young and hip. A youthful attitude is one thing, but some haircuts, dance moves and jeans sizes just aren’t well suited for middle-age paunches and hairlines.

It’s not much better watching adult corporations try to attract young, hip consumers by pretending to be one of them. Take Sony, for example; this month, it joins a long line of buttoned-up corporations that eye the MySpace/iPod generation with dollar signs in their eyes.

Exhibit A: the new Mylo, a $350 wireless pocket communicator, measuring 4.8 by 0.9 by 2.5 inches, intended for the college crowd. It’s a cool-looking device, available in black or white, that could be the first cousin of the T-Mobile Sidekick. (The name is supposedly derived from “My Life Online,” although there’s a certain inconsistency to the harvesting of initials. Is Sony taking the first letter of each word? Then it should be MLO. Is it taking two letters? Then it would be MyLiOn, which sounds like a stuffed animal.)

The Mylo is not a phone. It doesn’t connect to the cellular networks and doesn’t cost anything to use. Instead, it requires a wireless Internet signal, like the Wi-Fi hot spots that blanket many college campuses. The Mylo’s rounded right end glows blue whenever it detects a signal.

Once it’s online, the Mylo fun begins. Its first and best trick is making voice calls using Skype, the free computer-to-computer chat program that’s become a beloved accessory for 113 million Mac and PC owners around the world.

The Mylo eliminates the computer

on your end. In other words, you can call your Skype buddies just by holding the Mylo up to your head (or using the included earbuds/microphone) as you dash around campus, rather than sitting in front of your PC wearing a headset like a nerd. Call quality is very good, although a one-second audio delay is typical.

The Mylo can also call actual telephone numbers, which increases its usefulness several millionfold. This feature, called SkypeOut, generally costs about 2 cents a minute, but it’s free for calls to the United States and Canada until the end of the year.
That twist alone would make the Mylo a noteworthy gizmo, but that’s just the beginning of its feature list.

For example, the bright, vivid 2.4-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) slides up to reveal a cramped, BlackBerry-style nano-keyboard. Using it, you can conduct typed chats on any of three networks: Skype, Gmail or Yahoo. These are fairly full-featured instant-messaging programs, with smileys, file transfers (Skype only), chat histories, detailed privacy settings, status messages (“be right back”) and an auto-complete feature that saves typing of long words.

The elephant in the chat room, however, is the weird selection of networks. Why Gmail, for example, and not MSN or AOL Instant Messenger, the single most popular chat network in the world?

There’s also a Web browser, suitable for reading articles or checking Web-based e-mail accounts. Now, as you know, the typical Web page is a lot bigger than a cellphone-size screen. So Sony has provided two different viewing modes, both deeply flawed.

First, the basic browser (no Flash, streaming audio or video) can’t show you the entire Web page at actual size. So you spend an awful lot of energy just scrolling around, both horizontally and vertically.

That might not be so bad if the Mylo had a scroll wheel or a trackball. But all you get is four directional arrow buttons. To scroll, you tap or hold them down with one thumb while pressing a tiny function key with the other. It’s slow, imprecise work.

Alternatively, you can shrink the page to fit the screen. That works great, as long as you have no particular interest in reading the page. The type shrinks down to the size of subatomic particles.

But wait, there’s more. The Mylo can even play your music collection — or at least the part of it that’s in the MP3, WMA or ATRAC formats and not copy protected. That’s right: you can’t play songs from iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody or similar online stores. The toggle switch that controls playback works well enough; you even get to see album cover art, and the music can keep playing while you work in other programs. It pauses when you’re on a Skype call.

There’s even a music networking feature: the bafflingly named Ad Hoc mode. The idea is that once all your friends have Mylos (in Sony’s dreams), you can form a wireless connection with one especially hip friend who’s within 150 feet of you. At that point, you can listen to the music on his Mylo, streamed wirelessly to yours.

Of course, you could also just walk over to your pal and listen the old-fashioned way. But the advantage of the wireless sharing, Sony says, is that when a nearby freeloader is listening to the songs you’ve designated for sharing, you can continue to work on your Mylo — and, if you like, listen to a different set of songs.

You can put photos on your Mylo, too, and give little slideshows to your buddies. Works great, as long as both of you have no classes that day; photos can take forever to appear, about 20 seconds apiece. No matter how cute your campus crush is, that’s too much time for each picture.

The Mylo does a much better job of playing videos. There’s a catch here, too, though: it understands one file format, an MPEG-4 variant in PlayStation Video format. Too bad you need Sony’s Windows-only software ($20) to produce this kind of file.

The Mylo’s battery life is great for music playback (45 hours, says Sony), O.K. for video (8 hours) and so-so for Skype voice calls (3.5 hours).

Now, there’s a lot of good stuff on the Mylo. You can expand its one gigabyte of memory with a memory card (the expensive Memory Stick Pro Duo format). The software offers copy and paste, a note-taking mode, plentiful keyboard shortcuts and a straightforward navigation system including dedicated Back and Home buttons. You can use any graphic as a screen backdrop, and the Mylo thoughtfully memorizes frequently used hot spots, buddy lists and sign-in passwords. The gadget contains a built-in directory of hot spots for major United States cities (courtesy of JiWire.com), and T-Mobile has thrown in a year’s worth of free access at its wireless hot spots.

But that’s like admiring the wrought-iron legs of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Which young people, exactly, does Sony expect to pay $350 for a wireless gadget that doesn’t have a camera, can’t download e-mail, omits AOL Instant Messenger and can’t play music bought online?

There are other depressing signs that Sony isn’t as plugged in to college culture as it thinks. To market the Mylo, Sony has created a Web site called Rushmylo.com, a simulation of fraternity rush week.

You get your first blast of Sony’s sense of humor in the first “room,” where you meet your fellow pledges, apparently tapped for their anatomically and scatologically derived names. (Just how vulgar are they? Let’s put it this way: Grandpa Pus Bucket is one of the few that can be printed in this paper.)

Not sold on the Mylo yet? Well, just wait till you find the big-screen TV in the lounge. There, you get to watch — and even download, for repeated viewing — short videos that really showcase Sony’s classy taste. The comic highlight of one scene is flatulence in a hot tub; in another, it’s an unhappy pledge vomiting after binge drinking, as buddies cheer him on.

Sony may be the first company ever to depict throwing up as a way to sell electronics. “I’m sad that this is what corporations think of my generation,” a member of that generation told me.

The Mylo is far more interesting than the text-only kiddie pagers that bombed before it (like the AT&T Ogo). Wireless hot spots are everywhere these days; why should laptops have all the fun? And that part about free phone calls over Skype is a masterstroke.

Unfortunately, the Mylo can’t replace a cellphone, an iPod or a camera. Sony, in other words, is assuming its collegiate customers are prepared to carry around four gadgets. If Sony had even the slightest understanding of its target audience, it would realize that that’s not going to happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/te...xl5o9Y990hZGWw





Cars to Automatically Detect Speed Limit
AP

Sorry, Smokey. Speeding tickets might become yesterday's headache for drivers who use an automatic speed-limit detection system in the works from German electronics giant Siemens AG.

The system, expected to debut in as-yet-undisclosed cars in 2008, includes an onboard camera that reads speed limit signs. After it spots a sign, the system uses the car's navigation system to check whether the number it detected is plausible: Should the speed limit really be 55 in this urban zone?

Once the limit is established, the system can alert drivers in a display beamed onto the windshield that they're going too fast. Motorists also can let the system tap into the car's cruise control and automatically reduce the speed to the posted limit.

The system won't, however, automatically raise a car's speed to match a suddenly higher limit.

Does this get us closer to a car that can be put entirely on autopilot?

Siemens spokesman Enno Pflug doubts it. In the clear blue sky, putting a plane in a computer's hands is a pretty safe endeavor. Training a machine to adapt to the weaving, halting congestion of life on the road is another matter.

Not to mention that few drivers likely want to just sit there.

"Our aim is more comfort for the driver," Pflug says, "who also likes to drive."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-18-19-06-40





A Virtual World but Real Money
Richard Siklos

It has a population of a million. The “people” there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and do a lot of other familiar things. They even have their own currency, convertible into American dollars.

But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look beautiful, or like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything — or anyone — they wish.

This parallel universe, an online service called Second Life that allows computer users to create a new and improved digital version of themselves, began in 1999 as a kind of online video game.

But now, the budding fake world is not only attracting a lot more people, it is taking on a real world twist: big business interests are intruding on digital utopia. The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels.

The sudden rush of real companies into so-called virtual worlds mirrors the evolution of the Internet itself, which moved beyond an educational and research network in the 1990’s to become a commercial proposition — but not without complaints from some quarters that the medium’s purity would be lost.

Already, the Internet is the fastest-growing advertising medium, as traditional forms of marketing like television commercials and print advertising slow. For businesses, these early forays into virtual worlds could be the next frontier in the blurring of advertising and entertainment.

Unlike other popular online video games like World of Warcraft that are competitive fantasy games, these sites meld elements of the most popular forms of new media: chat rooms, video games, online stores, user-generated content sites like YouTube.com and social networking sites like MySpace.com.

Philip Rosedale, the chief executive of Linden Labs, the San Francisco company that operates Second Life, said that until a few months ago only one or two real world companies had dipped their toes in the synthetic water. Now, more than 30 companies are working on projects there, and dozens more are considering them. “It’s taken off in a way that is kind of surreal,” Mr. Rosedale said, with no trace of irony.

Beginning a promotional venture in a virtual world is still a relatively inexpensive proposition compared with the millions spent on other media. In Second Life, a company like Nissan or its advertising agency could buy an “island” for a one-time fee of $1,250 and a monthly rate of $195 a month. For its new campaign built around its Sentra car, the company then needed to hire some computer programmers to create a gigantic driving course and design digital cars that people “in world” could actually drive, as well as some billboards and other promotional spots throughout the virtual world that would encourage people to visit Nissan Island.

Virtual world proponents — including a roster of Linden Labs investors that includes Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com; Mitchell D. Kapor, the software pioneer; and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay co-founder — say that the entire Internet is moving toward being a three-dimensional experience that will become more realistic as computing technology advances.

Entering Second Life, people’s digital alter-egos — known as avatars — are able to move around and do everything they do in the physical world, but without such bothers as the laws of physics. “When you are at Amazon.com you are actually there with 10,000 concurrent other people, but you cannot see them or talk to them,” Mr. Rosedale said. “At Second Life, everything you experience is inherently experienced with others.”

Second Life is the largest and best known of several virtual worlds created to attract a crowd. The cable TV network MTV, for example, just began Virtual Laguna Beach, where fans of its show, “Laguna Beach: The Real O.C.,” can fashion themselves after the show’s characters and hang out in their faux settings.

Unlike Second Life, which emphasizes a hands-off approach and has little say over who sets up shop inside its simulated world, MTV’s approach is to bring in advertisers as partners.

In Second Life, retailers like Reebok, Nike, Amazon and American Apparel have all set up shops to sell digital as well as real world versions of their products. Last week, Sun Microsystems unveiled a new pavilion promoting its products, and I.B.M. alumni held a virtual world reunion.

This week, the performer Ben Folds is to promote a new album with two virtual appearances. At one, he will play the opening party for Aloft, an elaborate digital prototype for a new chain of hotels planned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The same day, Mr. Folds will also “appear” at a new facility his music label’s parent company, Sony BMG, is opening at a complex called Media Island.

Meanwhile, Nissan is introducing its Nissan promotion, featuring a gigantic vending machine dispensing cars people can “drive” around.

And some of this is likely to be covered for the outside world by such business news outlets as CNet and Reuters, which now have reporters embedded full-time in the virtual realm.

All this attention has some Second Lifers concerned that their digital paradise will never be the same, like a Wal-Mart coming to town or a Starbucks opening in the neighborhood. “The phase it is in now is just using it as a hype and marketing thing,” said Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, 50, a member of Second Life who in the real world is a Russian translator in Manhattan.

In her second life, Ms. Fitzpatrick’s digital alter-ego is a figure well-known to other participants called Prokofy Neva, who runs a business renting “real estate” to other players. “The next phase,” she said, “will be they try to compete with other domestic products — the people who made sneakers in the world are now in danger of being crushed by Adidas.”

Mr. Rosedale says such concerns are overstated, because there are no advantages from economies of scale for big corporations in Second Life, and people can avoid places like Nissan Island as easily as they can avoid going to Nissan’s Web site. There is no limit to what can be built in Second Life, just as there is no limit to how many Web sites populate the Internet.

Linden Labs makes most of its money leasing “land” to tenants, Mr. Rosedale said, at an average of roughly $20 per month per “acre” or $195 a month for a private “island.” The land mass of Second Life is growing about 8 percent a month, a spokeswoman said, and now totals “60,000 acres,” the equivalent of about 95 square miles in the physical world. Linden Labs, a private company, does not disclose its revenue.

Despite the surge of outside business activity in Second Life, Linden Labs said corporate interests still owned less than 5 percent of the virtual world’s real estate.

As many as 10,000 people are in the virtual world at a time, and they are engaged in a gamut of ventures: everything from holding charity fund-raisers to selling virtual helicopters to operating sex clubs. Linden also makes money on exchanging United States dollars for what it calls Linden dollars for around 400 Linden dollars for $1 (people can load up on them with a credit card). A typical article of clothing — say a shirt — would cost around 200 Linden dollars, or 50 cents. As evidence of the growth of its “economy,” Second Life’s Web site tracks how much money changes hands each day. It recently reached as much as $500,000 a day and is growing as much as 15 percent a month.

On Tuesday, a Congressional committee said it was investigating whether virtual assets and incomes should be taxed.

But many inhabitants simply hang out for free. For advertisers worried about the effectiveness of the 30-second TV spot and the clutter of real world billboards and Internet pop-up ads, Second Life is appealing because it is a place where people literally immerse themselves in their products.

Steve F. Kerho, director of interactive marketing and media for Nissan USA, said the Second Life campaign was part of a growing interest in online video games. “We’re just trying to follow our consumer, that’s where they’re spending their time,” Mr. Kerho said. “But there has to be something in it for them — it’s got to be fun; it’s got to be playful.”

Projects like the Aloft hotel, an offshoot of Starwood’s W Hotels brand, are designed to promote the venture but also to give its designers feedback from prospective guests before the first real hotel opens in 2008.

The new Sony BMG building has rooms devoted to popular musicians like Justin Timberlake and DMX, allowing fans to mingle, listen to tunes or watch videos. Sony BMG is also toying with renting residences in the complex, as well as selling music downloads that people can listen to throughout the simulated world.

Sibley Verbeck, chief executive of the Electric Sheep Company, a consultancy that designed the Aloft and Sony BMG projects, said the flurry of corporate interest stemmed from the 10 to 20 percent growth in the number of people who had gone into virtual worlds each month for the last three years. Though exact numbers are difficult to come by, the figure should top a few million by next year, he said.

The spread of these worlds, however, is limited by access to high-speed Internet connections and, in Second Life’s case, software that is challenging to master and only runs on certain models of computers.

“If it doesn’t crash and burn then it will become real,” he said. “So now’s the time to start experimenting and learning ahead of your competition.”

As part of that process, businesses are learning that different rules apply when they venture into an arena where audiences are in control. “Users are the content — that’s the thing that everybody has a hard time getting over,” said Michael Wilson, the chief executive of Makena Technologies, which operates the virtual world There.com and helped build Virtual Laguna Beach.

For example, Sun Microsystems kicked off the opening of its Second Life venue with a press conference online hosted by executives and Mr. Rosedale of Linden Labs. But by the time the event was in full swing, several members of the audience had either walked or flown onto the stage, where they were running roughshod over the proceedings.

Even Mr. Rosedale got in on the act: he conjured a pair of sunglasses that he superimposed on a video image of a Sun representative talking on a screen behind the stage. (In virtual world lingo, such high jinks are known as “griefing.”)

Some corporate events have been met with protests by placard-waving avatars. And there is even a group called the Second Life Liberation Army that has staged faux “attacks” on Reebok and American Apparel stores. (The S.L.L.A. says it is fighting for voting rights for avatars — as well as stock in Linden Labs.)

Companies in this new environment have to get used to the idea that they may never know exactly who they are dealing with. Most of those in Second Life have chosen their names from a whimsical menu of supplied surnames, resulting in monikers like Snoopybrown Zamboni and Bitmason Pimpernel; males posing as female avatars and vice versa are not uncommon.

Another issue companies have to contend with is that their brands may already be in these virtual worlds, but illegally. Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, said one Second Life habitué created a virtual reproduction of the Ikea catalog to help people decorate their digital pads.

Mr. Verbeck of Electric Sheep said copyright infringement was rampant. His company runs an online boutique where Second Life residents sell each other pixelized creations of everything from body parts to home furnishings to roller skates — many of them unauthorized knockoffs.

So far, the boutique has not had many requests to stop selling fake products. But “we did have a request from the Salvador Dali Museum — which was great,” Mr. Verbeck said. “Second Life is so surreal that it was perfect.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/te...19virtual.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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