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Old 23-05-07, 01:33 PM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 26th, '07

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"Best Buy used in-store kiosks to conceal lower online prices and renege on its price match guarantee. Consumers seeking bargains were led to believe that lower online prices had expired or never existed. Best Buy treated its customers like suckers, not patrons to be prized." – Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, D-CT


"With a couple of century-old autochromes in my car, I wasn’t going anywhere but directly back to the museum; and I was driving very, very carefully." – Anthony Bannon


"Consumers will own their own 3-D glasses in the same way they have sunglasses for going outside." – Jeffrey Katzenberg


"I need heavy-handed, baby. I like talking to an Italian." – Courtney Love


"I’m better off getting caught with needles in my arm, I really am." – Chris Rock


"I hear you're the guy behind .cm?" – Reporter





































May 26th, 2007







Swedish Company Offers New Passports for Computers to Surf the Web
Doreen Carvajal

Relakks, a tiny Web company based on the southern tip of Sweden, prides itself on its official "pirate" endorsements and its swashbuckling circumvention of online barriers erected by governments and corporations.

Not quite the stuff of Pirates of the Baltic Sea, perhaps, but the company has been a forceful proponent of a free and open Internet community. Relakks is planning its next move with a service - now in beta testing - that would allow computer users to shop online for national identity codes in a process known as "country shifting."

Relakks and other companies are part of a struggle pitting "hacktivists" against corporate interests that wall off Web sites to control territorial rights. These walls are meant to block people in Europe from downloading television fare from U.S. sites, for example, or bar Americans from viewing programs on sites in Europe.

This struggle is intensifying even as some get-tough European legislation - with the rather unglamorous name of the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive - is winding its way through Brussels. If adopted, the measure would criminalize the violation of copyrights "on a commercial scale" as well as "inciting such infringements." Violators would face fines of as much as €300,000, or $405,000, and maximum jails sentences of four years.

Tech-savvy government censors are also aggressively trying to stamp out so-called "anonymizers" that provide Web users with the tools to circumvent state-imposed Internet controls. The OpenNet Initiative, a consortium of four universities including Harvard and Oxford, issued an academic survey of 40 countries Friday that described an expanding global phenomenon with more than 25 governments filtering forbidden themes from politics and human rights to sexuality and religion.

For now, Jonas Birgersson, the chief executive of Relakks in Lund, Sweden, is taking a relaxed view of legislation and government restrictions. Sometime this month, he said, the company will start offering "country shifting" capabilities in a monthly subscription service that will cost about €4.

Country shifting allows an Internet user to effectively change a computer's "passport" and surf the Web under a new national identity, unrestricted by specific territorial barriers. Relakks plans to start its subscription service by employing American and Swedish codes. The addition of new country codes, Birgersson said, would be based on demand.

"Country shifting is not a proxy," Birgersson said. "It's an Internet connection on your Internet connection through an encrypted tunnel."

Relakks has earned the support of the Pirate Party, which fielded candidates in local legislative elections in Sweden last September under a banner of copyright reform. Although the party likes to promote the efforts made by Relakks, it has not invested in the company, according to Rickard Falkvinge, who founded the political party last year.

"We like it from a political standpoint," Falkvinge said. "Relakks is definitely cutting edge. But what's new about picking your ISP country is the simplicity of it. A lot of technology is taking shape for mass encryption for the masses, and Relakks is one such service. Some of these things are easy on a small scale, but what's hard to do is to create a mass product."

Until now, "there have been a lot of nerd-to-nerd solutions," Birgersson said.

The early waves of publicity for Relakks's debut last August were so successful that its system could not support the traffic of about 20 subscribers per minute, according to Birgersson, who said that those technical problems were overcome and that the company now has more than 50,000 subscribers. The Pirate Party endorsed Relakks's first effort to offer a commercial "darknet" service that permitted users to send and receive files through a heavily encrypted connection.

Birgersson declined to say whether he was a member of the Pirate Party, but he has clearly benefited from its support. The party has spread beyond Sweden's borders, and the various national chapters plan to hold their first international summit in Vienna next month, drawing participants from 16 countries including Sweden, Germany, France, Spain and the United States.

Andreas Leo Findeisen, an Austrian academic who describes himself as a media theoretician, is helping to organize the event. One aim of the conference is to develop a strategy to field Pirate Party candidates in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament.

Findeisen said that most of those who planned to attend the conference work in academic fields and share concerns about growing restrictions on the Web.

"Lobby interests are mostly reactive, and the community energy and resistance tends to die out after one or two weeks," he said. "We have this new phenomenon of lots of people swarming together, but it's very unstable. So we're trying to make a party out of MySpace members."

The Pirate Party attracted almost 35,000 votes in Sweden's last general election, emerging as the 10th-largest party in the country, although it failed to win enough votes to qualify for a seat in the Parliament.

Birgersson said opposition to increasing restrictions on the Internet would not go away.

"We've had a lot of people trying to get more control of the Internet, mostly coming from commercial interests and corporate lobbies or religious countries like Iran," he said. "They think they can take control of the Internet, but there's a lot of smart people out there that you don't want to have against you."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/20/news/net21.php





Channel 4's 4oD Hamstrung by UK ISPs
Nate Lanxon

Channel 4's new video on-demand service -- 4oD -- is a breakthrough service for the UK that allows you to freely catch up on the station's TV programming from the comfort of your desk or armchair. But it's being severly restricted by the UK's Internet service providers -- the companies who provide your broadband.

The service runs on VeriSign's Kontiki Broadband Delivery Service -- a peer-to-peer (P2P) technology identical to that which powers services such as BitTorrent and Limewire. ISPs are wise to how many people use P2P services and they're also aware that the vast majority of people use them to illegally download content such as music and movies.

In an attempt to restrict how much illegal sharing can be done on their network, ISPs use a technique called 'packet shaping'. Packet shaping examines what you're downloading -- or more specifically, how you're downloading -- and restricts your download speed by up to 500 per cent, which is sometimes little over what was possible on an old dial-up connection.

What does this mean for the millions of people who don't use BitTorrent? Basically, they're treated as criminals. BT, for example -- but it's not the only one -- will tell you that it uses packet shaping in order for it to benefit users who are not abusing its network. That sounds reasonable, but Channel 4's 4oD service uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute vast quantities of data over your broadband connection completely legally. This means that any user trying to download legal TV content is treated like a pirate and has their service stripped down to pitiful speeds.

So, if you're planning on using Channel 4's 4oD service to download your favourite shows while you travel home from work, make sure you're not on an ISP that treats you like dirty rotten thieving scum. Video on-demand is the way of the future, so it's important that legitimate, efficient technology can make it happen. Thought network neutrality was something dull for the Americans to worry over? This is what it's about.

Now, when we get better communications infrastructure here in the UK, packet shaping should cease to be necessary. Indeed, BT says that when its so-called 21st Century Network upgrade is complete, it can be network neutral. But 21CN is years away, due to be complete in 2011. In the meantime, make sure you choose a provider who isn't taking control of what you can do with the connection you pay for.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/televisions/...9290573,00.htm





Another ISP Throttles Bandwidth
Chris Williams

Pipex-owned ISP Nildram has joined the ranks of providers who are interfering with traffic to reduce the bandwidth burden from peer-to-peer networks and other "non-interactive" traffic.

The firm applied bandwidth throttling on Monday, restricting P2P and newsgroup traffic to as slow as a snail's pace 64Kbit/s. Customers, including business users, who contacted the Reg said they got no prior warning about the changes.

Ian Willmore, the firm's business and partner support manager, started a thread (http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...panded&sb=5&o=) on the broadband forum thinkbroadband.com. He has not responded publicly to any of the criticism, or questions over service issues such as latency, posted in response.

Nildram tech support told one irate user yesterday that they had themselves just got news about the policy, and that it would apply during business hours only. Our correspondent wrote: "We operate around a dozen Nildram business accounts (including SDSL) and use FTP [file transfer protocol] and NNTP [network news transfer protocol] to synch up between offices. [They] really screwed us badly as we had no warning at all to make alternate provision and move provider."

Nildram did update its FAQ (http://www.nildram.net/faqs/question...nagement-faqs/) to reflect the bandwidth throttling last week. It says:
This weighting allows us to preference interactive traffic such us HTTP (Web), VoIP and VPN over non-interactive traffic, such as P2P (peer to peer) and NNTP (Newsgroups). This provides an important quality of service improvement for these applications where delays have a very noticeable effect and we expect that Nildram customers will see improved performance from these applications.

Nildram last acted to discourage downloading two years ago (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03...roadband_hogs/) when it used the more crude method of a monthly GB limit, and applied it only to consumer customers.

Parent company Pipex introduced traffic shaping on its services in 2005 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10...ex_bandwidth/), and was among the first non-BT ISPs to do so. Recently, the takeover target (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04..._2006_results/) began cutting off punters who it thinks are abusing their connection, although it won't publish specific limits.

Without significant investment in network infrastructure, it seems customers will have to get used to traffic management. Nildram's speed limits seem particularly draconian, however, and the poor communication with users is inexcusable.

Update

Nildram sent us this statement:
Our website was updated on Thursday 17th May announcing the introduction of a new traffic management process which was enabled during the evening of Monday 21st May. We also posted an announcement on Think Broadband. This new process took on board feedback from our customers from an earlier change of traffic management in October 2006 which we backed out a few days later.

The comment concerning the limiting of a connection to 64K is unrelated and applies only to customers who exceed their quota limits; this has been in place since 2005.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05...th_throttling/





Sellers Running Scared: a Look Inside the World of AllOfMP3 Vouchers
Nate Anderson

Selling vouchers for AllOfMP3.com can be a dangerous game. One prominent seller was just arrested in the UK, and the event has others in the business running scared. If it was meant to send a message, then that message has been sent and received. We spoke with several voucher sellers—none of whom wanted to be identified by name—about why they got into the business and what they plan to do next. It turns out that chest-thumping bravado is in short supply.

One operator we spoke with already plans to shut his site down. "We made the decision after hearing news about an arrest that occurred in the UK," this person told Ars by e-mail. "We do not wish the same to occur to us."

"Until a few days ago, I had never heard of the IFPI [the international music trade group]," said another site operator from Europe. "But yes, I am concerned about them now. Although my attorney assures me that reselling gift certificates bought from AllOfMP3.com isn't breaking any laws, it isn't worth the possibility of engagement with their legal machine."

The "vouchers" in question are really just gift certificates; users in countries where credit card payments still work (many major credit cards no longer function on the site) buy up the vouchers, then resell them at a small markup to other users who have trouble replenishing their accounts. One of the people we spoke with decided to make a small business out of the practice after a friend agreed to pay him extra to secure a gift certificate.

"Because I had to buy them individually," the reseller told us," the extra work involved made it just barely worth it—but worth it nonetheless." He put up a web site, hoping to make a little money on the side after his "real" job was done for the day, but now plans to take the site down, saying that "I will be repurposing the web site in a few days."

A community representative from aom3.org tells Ars that he knows several resellers and that most are motivated by a desire to assist the AllOfMP3 community. "I do believe that people who sell vouchers are there to genuinely help others and not turn into a business. And that is what people need. People just want music, not to be ripped off or drowned in politics."

Those involved in the business not surprisingly believe that their work is legal and that AllOfMP3's service is legal as well. "It is not a file-sharing mechanism like Napster was, and it is not free," said one. "How are we supposed to know which file is legal and which isn't? And why do we assume that AllOfMP3 doesn't pay royalties to the respective artists? From my perspective, it is the same thing as being on vacation in St. Petersburg and buying a CD as a souvenir—a person wouldn't have to call the government to make sure the souvenir shop is complying with the laws, would they?"

Voucher reselling is a usually a small business, though the IFPI claims that the site they shuttered this week was a major operation that helped British consumers fill their AllOfMP3 accounts and sent the money back to Russian bank accounts operated by the site. The people we spoke with all deny having any official connection to AllOfMP3.com.

It's not clear that the recent police raid could be carried out in other countries. According to the IFPI, the raid was conducted under the UK's Fraud Act 2006, which came into effect only in January of this year and provides police more tools to attack online fraud. Selling unlicensed music in the UK is a criminal offense, though several of the site owners we spoke with are located on the Continent, making each legal situation different. Such is the fear of tangling with the police and the IFPI, though, that most have decided to shut down their sites and move on to other, less troublesome businesses.

AllOfMP3 may be running out of time. The Russian government last year agreed to change its laws in order to make the site's activity illegal, and it agreed to do so by June 1, 2007.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-vouchers.html





Emscher v0.4b the Anon P2P Client
toni66

Release Name: Emscher v0.4b

Notes:
Changes:
Emscher v0.4b

ADD: File Transfers(Chunk Request, Blocktransfer (Up/Down))
ADD: Now the File-Icons are Shown (Transfer/Searches Page)
ADD: Parts-Page in Fileinfo Dialog
ADD: "-password xy"-Commandline option, so the Password dialog will not be shown if used. Using xy as password for the keyfiles then.
ADD: Storing/Restoring Expanded-State of the Nodes on the Transfer and Search Page while Updating.
ADD: File can be deleted by hitting DEL now.
ADD: Invalid Checksums are logged now.
ADD: File-Data are stored every 30 Seconds to files.dat now (In case of a crash)
ADD: Advanced Search Rules (At least 3 Chars, no Point(.) at begin)
ADD: Chunkhashes are stored in the files.dat now (For later use)
CHANGE: Now Emscher-Addresses are 12Bytes long -> Changed Header-Processing Algorithms
CHANGE: Header-DataOffset changed to 60
CHANGE: Because there were many problems with the CRC32 Checksums, incorrect ones will be ignored in this release
CHANGE: Logs are stored in ./logs now.
CHANGE: New log format: Added Task -> Returned Value of TEmscher.EmscherAddressCheck()
CHANGE: Improved ID-Generator
CHANGE: emscherfiles.pas -> No usage of TFileStream in WriteBlock/Readblock etc. anymore (It caused many Errors), using BlockRead/BlockWrite instead
CHANGE: WebCacheThread.pas -> Every FHTTP.Post() has been put over try/except Blocks (This caused all these glitches when started with F9 and made the NOTHREADS-Stuff required)
REMOVE: HTTP-Referrer Setting
REMOVE: NOTHREADS Stuff
BUGFIX: Signals were not redirected correctly
BUGFIX: Some sent signals were not logged
BUGFIX: If only one hub was in the list, TEmscherConnections.GetRandomHub() falled into an infinite loop
BUGFIX: TEmscherConnections.ChangeNetworkID() changed the last two bytes to 0x00
BUGFIX: TEmscher.Create() -> On startup the new EmscherAddress was not processed correctly

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=162762
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=23966





Tribler: A Next Generation Bittorrent Client?
Ernesto

The latest version of the “social” BitTorrent client Tribler integrates BitTorrent with YouTube while offering the best of both worlds: ease of use, browsing with thumbnails, HDTV quality, and Video on Demand support. The client uses an Amazon.com-like recommendation system to suggest what you might enjoy.

After you’ve downloaded a few files the application should know if you are the Madonna type or more a Britney person. Moreover, it is the first P2P system which has merged online friends and a sense of community without using any central server. Tribler also runs on a Linux set-top box and is expected to hit the shops before the end of this year.

After a long weekend of testing we gave a thumbs-up and wish the development team many more releases. Not all BitTorrent users see the need for all these extra functionalities (I still prefer uTorrent), but those who do should definitely try Tribler.

Some of the features of Tribler which set it apart from other BitTorrent clients are:

• Easy downloading: Moves P2P beyond keyword search, YouTube grid of thumbnails
• Recommendation and Friends: See what other people like, related files, find person with the same taste
• Video on Demand: When the download is on its way, you can use the integrated video player to start watching ASAP
• Wealth of content: Search both BitTorrent, Youtube, and Liveleak for content

Yes, we are probably a little biased! This is made-in-Holland, which means a part of the tax money I paid went to Tribler because the project is state funded.

You can download download Tribler V4.0 here.
http://torrentfreak.com/tribler-a-ne...orrent-client/





New and Promising BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

BitTorrent is the most widely used P2P protocol. New BitTorrent sites emerge regularly and we at TorrentFreak often get requests from people to write about their BitTorrent startups. Because it is nearly impossible to showcase all the new sites here on TorrentFreak, we decided to post a selection of some promising and / or innovative BitTorrent sites.

A while ago we made a list of the top 20 less known BitTorrent sites, a post that was well received. Today, we made a list of some of the new BitTorrent sites, and this time we included a short description for every site.

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.
http://torrentfreak.com/new-and-prom...torrent-sites/





Well, almost

Download ANY File From ANY Site Using Safari

Listen up Mac users. You may already know this, but I didn’t until the other day, and it really comes in handy. Safari has a little tool called the Activity Window, which can be accessed by going to going to “Window > Activity” (shortcut: alt + apple + a). In here you can see every file that the website you are viewing is calling upon. The brilliant thing is that by double clicking any one of these files, it will download straight to your desktop.

Considering you would most likely want to download a file containing video or audio, look in the column on the right to see its size. By process of elimination you will see that the biggest file will be the one you want.

So if you happened to be on YouTube, you could download any video you wanted. Similarly, if you were on MySpace, and had no respect for copywrite law, you could download anything you wanted.

This, if you didn’t know it already, could save a lot of people a lot of time (and money).

You might also like 165 Vector Icons, 50 Ways to Become a Better Designer, 77 Vector Buttons


GoSquared does not endorse piracy. Please ensure that you use the mentioned functions of Safari as they were intended, and abide by any laws that apply to you.
http://www.gosquared.com/liquidicity/archives/133





Atlanta Web Radio Station Threatens Romanian Blogger With Lawsuit

They don't know that Windows Media Player shows the stream's URL with File -> Properties, so they threatened me with an Atlanta court for one of my previous posts that contained four (4) public URLs of their radio stream(s)!

Atlanta Blue Skye, LLC (yes, the company's name is with "e" in "Skye") wrote me this mail, unsigned:

X-Originating-IP: [209.86.89.64]
Return-Path: <jazzcolors@atlantabluesky.com>
Received: from 209.86.89.64 (EHLO elasmtp-curtail.atl.sa.earthlink.net)
(209.86.89.64)
by mta103.mail.re3.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 14 May 2007 05:09:00 -0700
Received: from [65.37.133.42] (helo=NewLaptop.eathlink.net)
by elasmtp-curtail.atl.sa.earthlink.net with asmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256)
(Exim 4.34) id 1HnZMJ-0001Gv-Hd for xxxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.ca;
Mon, 14 May 2007 08:08:59 -0400
Message-Id: <7.0.1.0.2.20070514080626.024a7fc8@atlantabluesky.com>
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 7.0.1.0
Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 08:08:58 -0400
From: "Jazz Colors" <jazzcolors@atlantabluesky.com>

Your Blog, which we have copied, has been turned over to our lawyers. You should plan on a response from them shortly and a visit to Atlanta to be present in court. I am not allowed to make any further statement regarding this matter at this time.


Of course they're rednecks, and they don't even sign the message, which is in response to this blog post: Atlanta Blue Sky is broken (but I've found a fix).

Facing such an ultimate proof of idiocy (DEFINITION: extreme mental deficiency commonly due to incomplete or abnormal development of the brain; NOTE: this use of the term is not an insult, but a quick and informal assessment on the intellectual development of the unknown person or automaton who sent me the mail; as long as it's not used in any authorized situation, no medical accreditations are needed; as long as the identity of the person or automaton whose mental status is assessed is unknown, one can't claim damages, because the sender is "Jazz Colors", which to me is a radio stream that has no legal personality), here's what I have sent them back for now:

I can only hope your lawyers are smarter that the person who wrote me back this answer and did not sign.

I am afraid what you meant to write is this: "I am not allowed to think rationally, and our lawyers told me I should threaten anyone".

For your knowledge, the URLs posted on my blog are PUBLIC URLs, and they are "REVEALED" by Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 when when clicking on File, Properties.

It is by no means "reverse engineering", "intellectual property violation", nor anything else your twisted mind might have thought of.

Now, if the recent U.S. legislation puts Internet Radios in danger because of the high fees they have to pay, I know of one Internet Radio who deserves to get bankrupt, because they don't have the minimum intelligence needed to stay in business. Too bad for the excellent music.

This is the most idiot lawsuit I have ever heard of — these people might come from the Stone Age, I assume; or maybe they don't know what a stream is and what an URL is, but they definitely know what a lawyer is.

I expect from Atlanta Blue Skye, LLC public apologies here, in this page.

P.S. They imagined that if they embed a media player in a web page, you can't right-click to find the URL that's currently played. They imagined there are no legitimate ways to find out your web traffic! I guess the website was designed by the first barber that got unemployed in Atlanta...

They thought that the following JavaScript would prevent the user to right-click:

<script type="JavaScript">
function click()
{if(event.button==2){
alert('The Right Mouse Button Is Disabled!')
}}
document.onmousedown=click//--->
</script>

They must be kidding! Even in MSIE 7.0, this can be rendered useless this way: while you right-click on Windows Media Player, keep the mouse button down, and hit ESC until the message box goes away. The contextual menu pops up. You only have to select Properties then. I believe that they should sue Microsoft for that.

I offered to help them redesign their website. Instead, what I get? A legal threat!

Definitely, America is producing more lawsuits than technology.
http://beranger.org/index.php?page=d...05/14/12/47/56





Judge Rejects RIAA Motion

Counterclaims stand
Ray Beckerman

In Lava v. Amurao, pending in the Southern District of New York, in White Plains, Judge Charles L. Brieant has entered an order denying the RIAA's motion to dismiss counterclaims for (a) declaratory judgment of non-infringement and (b) copyright misuse.

The Judge also granted the motion of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for leave to file an amicus curiae brief.

The copyright misuse counterclaim calls for the plaintiffs to forfeit their copyrights in the songs which form the basis for their suit, on the ground that they are "competitors in the business of recorded music.....[and] are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy, by litigating and settling all cases similar to this one together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in an identical manner and through common lawyers..... Such actions represent an attempt....to secure for themselves rights far exceeding those provided by copyright laws......Such acts constitute misuse of copyrights, and lead to a forfeiture of the exclusive rights.....".

Mr. Amurao is represented by Richard A. Altman of Manhattan.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...in-lava-v.html





Study: Illegal Download Falls Among Youths
FMQB

A new survey from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) found that illegal downloading by American youths has declined over the past three years. The BSA examined the downloading habits of Americans ages 8-18, and found that illegal downloading dropped by 24 percent since 2004. The first BSA survey in '04 found that 60 percent of those surveyed had downloaded music, movie, software or games without paying. In 2006, that percentage fell to 43 percent and in 2007, it hit just 36 percent.

What is causing them to back off from illegal downloading? The top response was fear of downloading viruses (62 percent), followed by legal repercussions (52 percent) and downloading spyware (51 percent). Getting in trouble with their parents ranked fourth.

"This study indicates that parents represent a growing and effective influence on the online practices of youth," said Diane Smiroldo, VP of public affairs for BSA. "But, while decreases in downloading are encouraging over recent years, youth are still taking too many risks online. We hope that parents continue to take seriously their role in helping their children make the right choices online."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=411050





Open Letter to Universities Whose Students Have Been Targeted by the RIAA

This is an historic opportunity for you to take steps to make the RIAA's litigation campaign more of a level playing field.

The way things are:

Once the RIAA has obtained whatever "settlement" money it can squeeze from students and parents willing and able to pay the money, and to agree to the other extortionate demands in the RIAA's standard nonnegotiable form 'settlement' agreement, it will bring a "John Doe" proceeding against the others. Contrary to the spirit of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, it will do everything it possibly can, in that proceeding, ex parte. It will file the complaint without notice to anyone, and submit the ex parte discovery order application without notice to anyone. Then, once it's gotten an ex parte order signed by the judge, it will give minimal notice to you with minimal notice to your students, of an order which has already been entered.

Typically, "John Doe" will receive only a copy of a subpoena and a copy of the order with a letter from you, and will have just a few days, or at most a couple of weeks, to respond before his or her personal confidential information will be divulged. Meanwhile, if the student were to confer with a lawyer the lawyer doesn't know what to say, because he or she has no copy of the underlying summons and complaint, no copy of the papers upon which the ex parte order is based, and no copy of the judge's rules, all of which a defendant normally does receive in any normal litigation.

What you should, at a minimum, do for your students.

What you can do is insist that the RIAA stipulate with you that (a) any motion for an order granting discovery of the students' identities will be on notice, both to you and the students, rather than ex parte, (b) that the RIAA must furnish to you, for each "John Doe", a copy of the summons and complaint and exhibits, a full set of the motion papers, and a full set of all other court documents which are required to be served on the defendant when an action is initiated... for you to distribute to the affected students, before -- not after -- the motion is to be heard.

If the RIAA refuses to so stipulate, you should go to Court yourself and get an order requiring them to comply with these fundamentals which are required by due process.

What you should also do.

The courts have held that in order for a claimant to get an order for discovery of confidential names and addresses of a John Doe in a copyright infringement case, it must make a prima facie evidentiary showing, based on admissible evidence, that it has a case for copyright infringement against each "John Doe". See authorities cited in our memoranda of law:
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...149_memooflaw*
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...149_replymemo*

Since the RIAA has been proceeding ex parte, however, and since they haven't been challenged by the ISP's, judges have signed off on the orders even though the applications were supported by conclusory, hearsay, opinion statements of suspect reliability which would never be considered admissible in any court in the United States. (Compare the courts of the Netherlands and Canada, where the ISP's challenged the application for "John Doe" information, and the Courts refused to grant the discovery orders, due to the unreliability of the RIAA's investigative "method").
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...UPC_Nederland*
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...v_Doe(Canada)*

The lack of reliability of the RIAA's "investigatory" technique is becoming more and more well documented. See, eg. the February 23, 2007, deposition of the RIAA's expert.
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...nT ranscript*
See also expert witness statement of Prof. Pouwelse and Dr. Sips:
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...decla ration*
and amicus curiae brief of the ACLU, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Association of Law Libraries, and ACLU Foundation of Oklahoma, in Capitol v. Foster decrying the RIAA's "driftnet" litigation strategy:
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...foster_amicus*

Other possible items of interest to include in your motion papers are (a) the in limine motion in UMG v. Lindor, which points out both that the RIAA has taken the position that MediaSentry will not testify as to the meaning of its "reports", and only the RIAA's "expert" can do that, and that the "expert's" testimony is inadmissible under Fed. R. Evid. 702 and Daubert, and (b) the report submitted to the USPTO in November 2006, and included as exhibit B to the answer in Atlantic v. DeMassi, which shows how most file sharers do not know if they are sharing files, and if so which files they are 'sharing'. http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...ter claimsExB

Accordingly, we believe you should oppose the RIAA's application for an order of discovery.

Likewise, if you learn of the RIAA obtaining such an order ex parte, you should move to vacate the order.

Typically, the RIAA joins a number of "John Does" in a single suit, in order to save itself money, even though under the Federal Rules such joinder is clearly improper. See, e.g. In re Cases Filed by Recording Companies, W.D. Texas, Austin Division (2004) http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAA_v_The...ance_order.pdf
In fact, the foregoing case specifically enjoined the RIAA to cease and desist from continuing its practice of joinder, an injunction which the RIAA has simply ignored. Opposing the RIAA's deliberate misjoinder of unrelated "John Doe" defendants is another thing you can do to assist your students and their families in achieving a more level playing field.

A third thing you can do is point out to the Court that there is no known cause of action for "making available", which is the basis of the RIAA's suits, in the Copyright Act. See Elektra v. Barker, argued January 26, 2007, and awaiting decision.

Sincerely yours,

-Ray Beckerman
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...ies-whose.html





Free Speech vs. Class Disruption

Court to decide if teen can be suspended over video of teacher
Paul Shukovsky and Nina Akhmeteli

Once upon a time, a student who wanted to poke fun at a teacher would have left graffiti on the blackboard. These days, it's a video clip on YouTube.com and MySpace.com.

It was a sophomoric online video criticizing the hygiene of a teacher that was at issue in U.S. District Court on Monday, when Gregory Requa, a senior at Kentridge High School, asked a judge to order the lifting of his 40-day school suspension for his supposed involvement in producing and posting the video.

Requa's lawyer, Jeannette Cohen, said the teen didn't produce the video -- taken in an English classroom at Kentridge. But even if he did, his suspension is a violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, she argued in court.

"What is at stake here is the school district message that if you post things we don't like," you will be punished, Cohen said.

Kent School District lawyer Charles Lind says the suspension had nothing to do with online criticism of the teacher. Rather, it was punishment for the disruption created by the students secreting a video camera into Joyce Mong's class and dancing in a mocking, disrespectful manner while her back was turned.

"It's quite clear that the district is talking about conduct in the classroom and not the videotape," Lind said.

It's not the first time YouTube users have run afoul of someone's rules. The U.S. military recently banned soldiers in Iraq from using YouTube, over security concerns. The Thai government blocked a video that it said was disrespectful of the country's monarch. And this spring Comedy Central said that a YouTube parody of its parody "The Colbert Report" wasn't funny and ought to be removed.

The Kent case came to light in February when KOMO / 4 news aired a segment about videos posted on YouTube that are critical of teachers and used as an example the Kentridge High School video dubbed "Mongzilla."

The video questions Mong's bathing habits, the clutter in her classroom and her supposed possessiveness for tissues. It is set to popular music and includes such familiar student pranks as someone making "rabbit ears" with two fingers behind the teacher's head.

Kentridge officials investigated the video, and a student identified in court documents only as S.W. admitted to shooting it.

According to Requa's filings with the court, S.W. named Requa, 18, as being involved because school officials pressured him by saying it would reduce his punishment if he identified those involved with him in the production of the video.

Requa says he didn't produce the video, but acknowledges that he, among others at the school, posted a link to the video on his MySpace page. He removed the link when he heard about the KOMO news report.

Cohen said her client has "no disciplinary record at school, and he is the model student" with a 2.97 grade-point average.

His suspension began May 8. His right to participate in a statewide school leadership competition was revoked, and he lost a chance to compete for scholarship money connected with the program.

The suspension is not expected to jeopardize his graduation.

U.S. District Judge Marsh Pechman's analysis of the case was short and to the point on Monday: "Was he involved or not?"

Pechman said she would determine that fact. And the judge seemed to take a dim view toward the school district's "conspiracy" theory that holds that although Requa may not have been present for the shooting of the video, he shares responsibility as much as if he were there.

He had to have been involved in the classroom part of the operation to be disciplined, Pechman said.

Lind asked the court not to end Requa's 40-day suspension by issuing a temporary restraining order. "If he escapes a penalty, it sends a very negative message," Lind said. "It is important for other students to see there is accountability for their behavior."

But Pechman asked Lind about the accountability of the Kent School Board for making a decision on punishing a student using unsigned, unsworn statements from anonymous students.

Pechman said she will decide on whether to end Requa's suspension by the close of business Tuesday.

Mong said Monday that that she never realized she had been videotaped. She called the video's criticism of her hygiene "totally fictitious."

Mong, now retired, said: "When I heard about this, it just made me sick because they don't represent the wonderful kids at the school."

VIDEO ONLINE

View the disputed video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIJMWr1Zy0.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...youtube22.html





EMI in Play, Accepts Bid From Terra Firma
Jack

EMI, the international music conglomerate with artists such as the Beatles, Robbie Williams and Norah Jones, has accepted a $4.7 billion takeover bid from the private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners.

Though EMI officials are recommending the board proceed with the deal it doesn't mean Terra Firma will wind up with the company. Outside analysts believe the recording and publishing giant is now in play and that higher bids may emerge, perhaps from different sources.

EMI was recently in the news when it made a deal with Apple to sell DRM-free music files.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=23968





New Bidder Makes A Play For EMI
FMQB

On Monday, EMI announced that its board of directors accepted an offer from private equity group Terra Firma to purchase the major label for $4.7 billion. The deal was worth 265 pence per share, or 2.4 billion pounds in total. But just 24 hours later another bidder emerged, as the New York Post reports that private equity firm Corvus Capital and former EMI chief executive Jim Fifield were preparing a bid of 278 pence per share yesterday. EMI's board will now have to consider the offer from Corvus or risk being sued by shareholders who may claim that the deal with Terra Firma undervalues their shares.

Corvus' bid is not only higher than Terra Firma's, but also significantly higher than what any other private equity group had offered during the auction process. The bid also might be higher than what longtime suitor Warner Music Group is willing to pony up. WMG executives are still considering whether to bid for EMI or wait to see how the current deal with Terra Firma plays out, according to the Post.

Meanwhile, sources said that Corvus has already lined up a buyer for EMI's music publishing business if its bid is accepted, and that Corvus plans to retain and run the recorded music side of the operation on a much smaller scale with less employees and less new music. However, that fact could work against Corvus despite its higher offer, because EMI reportedly chose Terra Firma over Warner Music because the firm would keep EMI intact, in addition to the fact that there would be few regulatory obstacles.

A source told Reuters on Monday, "Terra Firma sees significant opportunity on both sides of the business. It believes in the digital growth opportunity in the music market, in general, and so the expectation is that the business will be held together."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=411750





EU Approves Vivendi-Bertelsmann Deal

European regulators have approved the estimated $2.1 billion purchase by Vivendi of the Bertelsmann music publishing unit, a deal that will give Vivendi unmatched market power in determining how much performers and songwriters earn from their creations.

The acquisition of the unit, BMG Music Publishing, which is expected to close shortly, means that the Universal Music Group of Vivendi, already the world's biggest record company, will also become the biggest music publisher. That distinction previously belonged to the publishing division of the EMI Group. The purchase was approved Tuesday.

Universal already controls both recording and publishing rights for performers like U2 and 50 Cent. The new deal adds other performers, including Rammstein and Keane. Universal will also control publishing from acts under other labels, including Coldplay.

The regulators in Brussels expressed concern that the combined company would exert too much power, particularly as the industry sells more music through digital services and mobile phones.

To ward off regulatory opposition, Universal said it would shed certain publishing catalogs from Zomba Music and Rondor UK.

Independent record labels, led by the trade organization Impala, are objecting to the deal, saying it would enable collusion among the biggest companies and reduce competition.

Regulators are reconsidering their previous approval of the merger of record labels owned by Bertelsmann and Sony.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...ness/music.php





In depth

Learning as Easy as Pie

The "One Laptop Per Child" Project Enters its Critical Phase
Jürgen Rink

Once upon a time, a man set out to give away an exceptional laptop to millions of children. What sounds like a fairy tale is actually the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) project, which is already supplying interested governments with laptops. It expects to cross the one-million next year.

Originally called the 100 dollar laptop, its name is now XO, as is the one sent to c't magazine. The non-profit organization called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) developed the XO laptop, which was the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte. XO is not only an entry-level laptop, but also part of a comprehensive education project. Negroponte, cofounder of MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched One Laptop per Child in collaboration with other staff members at in July of 2005.

OPLC is based on the conviction that capacity building and the education of schoolchildren in developing and industrializing nations will make the world a bit more just and peaceful. The XO laptop provides users with a means of communications and access to content to promote this goal. The OLPC's goals are grand: millions of XOs are to be manufactured. In two years, the annual production is to reach around 100 million items, more than the current global annual production of all notebooks.

The organization is developing the hardware and software for the XO and pulls the strings for the manufacture and sale of the devices. It has already signed a contract for the production of the laptop with the world's largest notebook manufacturer Quanta, which will be manufacturing the laptops at its plant in the eastern Chinese town of Changshu. The first batch of 875 prototypes (code-named BTest-1) was delivered to developers at the end of last year; in February, Quanta shipped a four-digit number of the second prototype called BTest-2. This year, serial production of the first million XO laptops is to be completed, but developers still have their work cut out for them if they are going to reach that goal, as the list of errors for BTest-2 illustrates (wiki.laptop.org/go/BTest 2_Release_Notes).

Initially, OLPC planned to sell the laptop only to governments, not consumers or retailers. While selling the XO via conventional sales channels would help fund the project, possibly with an additional charge added on, the small staff at the OLPC says it does not have the capacity to go that route; it even does without a marketing team. After an analyst meeting in May, OLPC doesn't rule out shipping of XO Laptops to U.S. schools any more.

A comprehensive security concept and cooperation with United Nations staff are to ensure that the XO does not fall into the wrong hands once it has been delivered to government agencies. Furthermore, hardware is being selected to make the units unattractive for thieves. These steps are being taken to prevent a gray market from being created when millions of XO laptops are bestowed upon the world.

The UN and donations help

At present, nations like Argentina, Brazil, Libya, and Nigeria have already promised to order a total of almost 3 million laptops. Only Libya has already signed an agreement; it has agreed to provide each of its 1.2 million schoolchildren with one of the laptops. Time will tell what these declarations of intent are worth once the laptop has reached serial production, because then the OLPC plans to start signing purchase agreements.

The OLPC says that production will begin when governments have ordered a total of five to 10 million units. After recent difficulties in reaching this goal, OLPC set the order minimum to 3 million and plans to sell XO to U.S. schools.

To reach this goal, the OLPC's Chairman Negroponte is drumming up support on the world's political stage. In January of 2005, he announced the founding of the OLPC as an organization at the World Economic Summit in Davos, and in November of 2005 he presented the laptop along with Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary-General, at the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.

But handshakes at the highest political level are not the only way that the project is to be expanded to a large number of countries; rather, Negroponte and Kemal Dervis, head of the UN's Development Program (UNDP) signed an agreement at the World Economic Summit 2006 in which the UNDP promises to use its 166 offices in almost all nations to support the OLPC project from initial contact with education ministers all the way to logistics.

Such a large project requires sound financing. The start-up capital comes from sponsors: AMD, Brightstar, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES Global, and Red Hat. In May of 2006, Nortel Networks and eBay also got on board. By February of 2006, Negroponte had managed to collect 20 million dollars from the sponsors, which would not have been possible without his charisma and excellent contacts. The OLPC can not only cover all of its expenses with this funding, but also the costs for the development of the laptop. The OLPC consists of only 10 chief members and eight consultants, including Alan Kay and CTO Mary Lou Jepsen.

The sheer size of the project makes it interesting for major industry players. In addition, the large scale is necessary to keep the cost of the XO down. Naturally, all of the sponsors want to earn money from hardware and software in the production of the XO; while the companies are supporting the OLPC, they will be paying that money back to themselves once production of the XO starts. Quanta will be earning money from the manufacture, Red Hat from Fedora Linux, and CMO from the display. Marvell plans to sell the WLAN hardware at a profit, Google is providing cards, and eBay is chipping in with Skype and PayPal. In Libya, SES Astra will be setting up a satellite system.

For the first round XO laptops, the sales price has just risen from 150 to 175 US dollars; the XO will thus not to be a 100 dollar laptop at the outset. The laptop will cost around 160 US dollars, with the display and the CPU plus chipset being the two largest cost items at around 30 US dollars apiece. Quanta & Co. thus have a margin of 10 to 20 US dollars. After manufacture, the OLPC will make sure that the laptops reach governments. The governmental agencies involved will handle logistics on location, possibly with the assistance of the UNDP.

Even stripped-down x86 notebooks cost too much, and current operating systems are not suitable for children. Therefore, common AMD/Intel hardware is not being taken into consideration, nor are current operating systems and their user interfaces. The project had to start from scratch. In doing so, it came up with an XO that contains a lot of innovations because the project did not have to focus on the compatibility of hardware and software.

An entirely new laptop

The display is sensational, the envisioned power consumption record- breaking, and operation different from the ground up - not just intuitive, but playful in the ideal case. The OLPC is considering a mechanical generator to provide power where electricity from wall sockets is a luxury. c't received a prototype from the first batch for a test drive.

Design Continuum designed the original laptop, with Fuseproject taking up the design for the prototypes now available. The XO is an inch smaller than a 12-inch notebook and weighs around one kilogram with the battery. Because the mainboard is in the lid behind the display, the bottom part of the laptop containing the keyboard is very thin – ideal for children's hands. The keys are also specially designed for this target audience with a width of 13.3 millimeters, compared to the 19-millimeter keys used on notebook keyboards for adults.

The bottom half of the laptop extends behind the display when closed, exposing a stable handle. When the display is opened, the handle prevents the laptop from tipping over to the back due to its relatively heavy lid. The opened machine is expected to be robust against dirt and drops of water. The laptop's case thickness measures two millimeters, which also increases the robustness of the units.

The core of the mainboard is a 366 MHz Geode GX2-500 processor with a mere 32 KB of cache. The x86-compatible CPU is otherwise mainly found in embedded hardware. It contains an integrated graphics chip and Northbridge, but the Southbridge AMD CS5536 rides on its own chip with USB 2.0, audio, and an IDE connection with a data connection of 32 MHz. The system has its own memory controller because the one in the Geode system was too slow for the developers.

While the computing performance does not nearly match that of current notebooks, the Geode 500 also peaks at a consumption of 3.5 watts, with the chipset making do with less than one watt; Geode systems have been optimized for especially low power consumption. Since the mainboard can do without a fan and a cooling system completely in light of these values, it fits into the lid behind the display.

The laptop will have 256 MB of DDR 266 DRAM but no hard drive, storing data instead on 1024 MB of NAND flash memory (prototype BTest- 1 has 128 MB DDR and 512 NAND flash). The XO also does without an optical drive, meaning that it has no moving parts inside. Extensions can, however, be added via USB slots and a single SD card slot.

Data can be stored on a school computer via WLAN. The OLPC plans to provide such a server with 330 gigabytes of memory for roughly 100 US dollars. Unfortunately, the first such server has yet to be seen. Few schoolchildren live near their school; most live near other schoolchildren. So the developers came up with something clever for wireless connections between XOs via WLAN: the WLAN chips operate as a mesh, with each laptop passing on data for others. Less infrastructure is needed in such mesh networks; in extreme cases, all that is needed is a single WLAN base station to get all of the schoolchildren connected to the Internet.

As "mesh point portals", individual XOs keep in contact with the WLAN base station providing access to the Internet. Each one passes on data to the other mesh points. The entire mesh works from one and the same WLAN interface. The OLPC laptop is the first implementation of the IEEE's 802.11s standard for mesh networks.

Marvell's 88W8388 USB WLAN chip presented at the beginning of 2005 provides a connection to this network within the XO. The chip contains an ARM processor core in addition to a bit of RAM as firmware memory; it communicates in accordance with IEEE 802.11g. Thanks to its ARM core, the WLAN controller can even stay in contact when the XO is switched off. But you shouldn't expect to break any speed records with a WLAN mesh: the typical data rate across multiple nodes would be pretty slow for DSL at one to two megabits per second. But that would be enough to look something up in an online encyclopedia or to communicate by e-mail and chat. Above all, the mesh serves to network children without any external connections. In fact, the XO is even useful for video conferences via Skype or Telepathy thanks to the installed camera and microphone.

Breakthrough display

The XO's main selling point is its display. Only 7.5 inches across, the panel was developed completely anew by Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) and is easy to read both in full sunlight and indoors, surpassing all common laptop displays in this respect. The panel has two modes of operation. Behind the layer of fluid crystals is a sort of sieve whose broad lattices reflect and refract ambient light. Because the color filters are behind it and therefore do not play any role in creating images, you see a black and white image in bright light (mode of operation 1). Thanks to an incredible resolution of 200 dpi (1200 x 900 pixels), text appears razor-sharp; other notebook displays have a long way to go to match this performance. The BTest-1 prototype has a reflecting display, while the BTest-2 machine does not.

Once the LED backlight is switched on, light passes through the color filters from behind and penetrates the holes in the distribution sieve, creating a color image (mode of operation 2). Each of the 1200 x 900 pixels is then either red, green, or blue. As it takes one green, one red, and one blue subpixel to create a pixel, the resolution of color images is only around 800 x 600. The DCON display controller provides for automatic antialiasing to smooth out edges. In addition, it refreshes the image even when the rest of the computer is on standby. Luminous intensity is only 64 cd/m2, half that of a normal notebook panel, and contrast leaves something to be desired at 82:1. But that's enough indoors, and outdoors the ambient light helps, though the more ambient light there is, the less color you see.

A few keys are provided to set the brightness of the display. The XO will also have a back light sensor, though the prototype either did not have one or it simply didn't work. In our measurements, we determined power consumption of 1.5 watts for the display, but power consumption is to be reduced down to one watt. This value may also be a new world record; other displays consume at least four times as much power.
Ergonomics and ports

A capacitive touchpad is found below the keyboard; you can move the cursor with your finger as usual. But in addition, the entire surface to the left and right of the touchpad can also be used for input because a resistive layer is below it. You can use a stylus to write on it or draw pictures.

Of course, the XO is designed to promote reading. The display can therefore be turned on its axis and closed on top of the keyboard as is done with the tablet PCs called "convertibles". But unlike them, the XO does not have a touch-sensitive display. A few keys and a navigation knob on the margin of the display, however, allow the Sugar user interface to be operated without one. Field tests currently underway may reveal whether the link connecting the convertible display to the keyboard will withstand handling by children. It might turn out to be a weak point. The organization has already sent some of the B2 prototypes to a few countries, including several hundred XOs intended for Brazilian schoolchildren. In addition, around 100 XOs have also been delivered to a test school in Galadima, Nigeria. No results have been published yet for these tests.

Ports are hidden to the left and right at the top of the display behind flaps. On the right, there are two USB ports; to the left, an audio port and an additional USB connection. The audio port also has a mode in which it serves as an input as an A/D converter, which is useful for handicraft projects using photo sensors or measurement devices, for example. The two flaps not only protect the ports, but also serve as WLAN antennas.

Battery or wind-up

A nickel metal hydride battery consisting of five cells stores 22.8 Wh, around a half to a third of what is normally found in notebooks. Lithium-ion batteries have been deemed too dangerous by the developers, but new lithium batteries may mean that the XO will eventually not contain NiMH, which discharge quickly.

Negroponte has a very optimistic target for the XO's power consumption: two watts. Compared to around 10 watts for even the thriftiest laptops, that would be an excellent performance, giving the machine of runtime of more than 10 hours despite the small battery capacity. The prototypes are nowhere near this performance because power management does not yet work. At present, the laptop runs for 2.5 hours with and 3.5 hours without display illumination, consuming 9.1 and 6.5 watts, respectively.

Low power consumption is important for areas without a connection to the grid or with only intermittent power supply. Power consumption has to be so low that the battery charge will cover most of the day and allow the small amount of power from a crank to charge it. Originally, the XO was designed with a crank inside the case. It turned out that the mechanical load was too great, so that this type of power supply has been taken off the drawing board. Now, a type of yo-yo is being discussed: the generator has a windup string and provides enough power for 10 minutes of XO operation from one minute of winding. The system has not, however, reached the prototype status yet.

Software for education

The user interface and applications are based on a didactic concept that relies on Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's later theories of constructive learning. Negroponte's ideas, which he has described in his bestseller "Being Digital", have also been implemented. Only open source software will be used on the XO both in terms of drivers and file formats. But the OLPC had to make one exception: the firmware for the WLAN controller is currently only available as a binary image. Otherwise, schoolchildren are to be allowed to change their system as much as possible. And that requires open code.

The BIOS is a LinuxBIOS with OpenFirmware. LinuxBIOS is licensed under the GNU GPL; the source code is therefore in principle open to everyone and can be edited. A streamlined version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux (kernel 2.6.19) is installed on the computers along with a graphical interface called Sugar developed especially for the OLPC. The language and fonts in the user interface and applications will be localized, as will the keyboard.

After booting, the project's X-shaped logo appears in the middle of Sugar. Once the mouse is moved towards the edge of the screen or a special key is pressed, a wide frame containing various symbols appears. At the top left, there is a circle with eight dots that stands for the group of all users currently in the mesh network. A circle with three dots symbolizes a group of people individually chosen. And if you click on a circle with only one dot, you can work alone with your own applications.

At the bottom left, the Sugar interface contains symbols that launch preinstalled programs. BTest-1 contains Mozilla as a browser, the drawing and experimenting environment called eToys, AbiWord for word processing, a type of memory game, and TamTam to experiment with sounds, melodies, and rhythms [2]. As soon as you have clicked on the image of a musical instrument, you can use the keyboard as though it were a piano to create sounds. This well designed music program also provides percussion accompaniment for your own compositions. In the future, the software package will also include a flash player and a multimedia/e-book reader.

The final version of the OLPC will probably also contain a variant of the Logo programming language developed by Seymour Papert. This concept is designed to allow young children to experiment and gather their first programming experience. The eToys environment is better for older pupils, while teenagers can work with Python.

EToys is closely linked to Squeak, a dialect of the object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk. Teachers, psychologists, and education theorists not only in the US, but in numerous projects in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria are looking into the possibilities that this open-source development environment offers in math and natural science classes. The name eToys, which is often used as synonymously with Squeak, designates an interface designed especially for children to allow elementary school pupils access to this programming language. It is very easy for them to animate objects they have drawn themselves and observe how the objects behave on the screen. In the process, they begin dealing with physics concepts of velocity and acceleration while they are playing.

Currently, the developers are working on a journal function they later want to integrate in AbiWord as an editor. Pupils would then be able to track their own steps in the journal. They would be able to find, for instance, a text they were working on yesterday morning by looking through their journal for that time. The journal would thereby make it unnecessary for users to select a folder for files to be stored in. Furthermore, the XO will also contain a chat and e-mail client.

The developers have uploaded numerous videos to such video stream websites as YouTube to present the look and feel of Sugar and the currently available applications. If you have VMware or QEMU on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computer, you can even test drive Sugar yourself. The developers also offer free images of the current stock of software including instruction manuals.

Definitely only for kids

To make it less attractive to steal individual laptops and, in particular, to prevent contaminants from spreading across networked XOs as quick as lightning, the OLPC's officer for security issues recently presented the security concept called Bitfrost [4]. The concept came too late for BTest-2 so that we could not have a look at it.

We do know that Bitfrost prevents the XO from being used until it is activated. The codes for activation are found on a USB stick provided to the school and used in the local OLPC server. Once the unit has been activated and booted for the first time, the system creates a key pair consisting of the name of the child and an image taken of it. The child then has a digital identity. Local anti-theft servers will then regularly query the laptops, and the OLPC will be able to shut down the XO if an improper ID is detected.

The software used on the XO is designed to allow children to change it to suit their needs. External backups and data recovery are therefore part of the security concept. Open systems are not supposed to have secret security protection; rather, users are to have as much control as possible – even if they cannot read. In other words, prompting the user with questions like "Do you really want to launch this program?" is not an option.

For administrators in the business world, allowing children to change program lines, see the code, and play around in Python would be a nightmare, but Bitfrost takes that into consideration by strictly controlling what an application is allowed to do every time the system performs an action. For instance, the kernel and the OS in the NAND flash memory remained unchanged. Some applications can only read, while others can only write and edit. Applications that are not essential for a current operation are only allotted 10 percent of the CPU. Documents that the user creates are not directly part of a file system; instead, a file memory service links to these documents.

Naturally, Bitfrost allows you to use your own software, but users are not allowed to change the preinstalled software. Users can sign their own programs with a "developer key." The official software updates will also consist only of signed applications.

Must-have or hype?

At present, not all of the software runs, the hardware still has the status of a prototype, and the XO has no security concept. In light of the shortcomings, the goal of having the laptop ready for serial production in 2007 seems very ambitious. After all, this would be the largest IT launch in history, and not even the staff at the OLPC expects it to run smoothly. On the other hand, even postponing the project by a few years would not be a catastrophe if the OLPC manages in the end to give millions of schoolchildren a chance to educate themselves in a way they could not before.

Since it was founded less than two years ago, the OLPC has gone further than many believed possible. Now, the project has reached a critical phase because the next few months will decide whether the XO is the real McCoy or just a bunch of hype. Once development of the XO is finished, interested countries will have to put their money where their mouths are and enter into purchase agreements for millions of XO laptops. The promises made by ministers up to now will be worth nothing then.

To make things worse, it is not clear whether Thailand is still willing to purchase a laptop after the elections in 2006. Similar question marks arise after the April-election in Nigeria. India also originally showed great interest in XO, but last year it dropped the project, saying that there were more efficient ways of promoting education than giving each pupil an OLPC laptop. India's withdrawal from the project was just as great a defeat as was China's. Negroponte's pressing-the-flesh at the highest political level is thus decisive for the rollout of the project, i.e. for the first round of deliveries.

In the midterm, the success of the OLPC will be measured in terms of whether the pilot project has gotten additional nations on board. If it is to succeed, the OLPC will have to show that any nation can afford the XO. As usual when it comes to costs, opinions differ. The OLPC estimates that it will cost some 30 US dollars to operate the laptop per annum, a price the organization says makes the laptop just as inexpensive for governments to operate as to purchase. That may even be true for Libya, but 175 million US dollars for a million laptops would leave a major hole in the budgets of Nigeria or Rwanda.

To make things worse, the OLPC has yet to officially explain what will happen with defective XO laptops in Africa, Asia, and South America – in other words, who will offer service and support and what additional costs the countries will incur. International financial service provider Merrill Lynch & Co. sees this area as one of the main weak points for the future of the project. The OLPC believes that the laptops will be used for five years, but if a large number of the notebooks are stacked up in the corner broken because of insufficient servicing, it will be hard to find additional countries to help the project reach its goal of 100 million XOs. And yet, Quanta's business plan is based on that figure. Merrill Lynch is more skeptical and has forecast only 40 million laptops by 2010.

In the long-term, the OLPC will have to prove that it can reach the education goals it has set for itself. Egypt has already shown how easy it is to run a program with good intentions into the wall. In 1994, Egypt's Education Ministry founded its Technology Development Center (TDC) to equip schools with computers, satellite television, and Internet connections. The project did not work because the technology was propped up on the current educational system. Access was regulated for pupils, and teachers could not cope with the videoconferencing system for training. A lot of money was invested in this IT project, but it did not do much good.

The OLPC has had a much more promising beginning because it focuses on children, not technology. Children can play with the available software and the system's open structure to learn at their own pace – dynamic learning instead of frontal instruction. In the OLPC project, teachers do not play such a key role as they did in Egypt. While the OLPC school server must be running for there to be Internet access and new e-books to be downloaded for use as textbooks, networking from one laptop to the other is possible without it. And as adults generally have a harder time learning new things than children do, this approach seems more promising. After all, teaching teachers how to work with computers is a challenge even in countries like Germany.

The project's critics argue that developing countries need other things more than laptops, which is certainly true for countries suffering from famine, war, and political turmoil. The XO laptop can only make a true contribution if there is a certain amount of infrastructure, a certain standard of living, and a willingness to fight corruption. The OLPC agrees, which is why the main parties interested in the project are from the G20 emerging countries. In addition, the OLPC does not believe it has a remedy for all of the world's problems; rather it sees itself as one of many nongovernmental organizations.

Competition

Even though it is an education project, the prospect of a market for 100 million laptops is drawing the attention of major players who have not yet gotten on board. Intel and Microsoft originally laughed about the project, with Bill Gates even commenting, "get a real laptop." But when Microsoft produced a revamped cell phone as its proposed alternative for countries that have ground to make up in the field of IT in schools and then recommended an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC), it was the critics of Microsoft who had the last laugh at the software vendor's knee-jerk reaction. After all, the UMPC has a short run time, is the very embodiment of poor ergonomics, and costs 1000 euros. It cannot compete with the XO.

As the OLPC project increasingly proved to be a success, people began to take it more seriously. Bill Gates himself jumped on the bandwagon in December when he announced that he wanted to have Windows on the XO. Negroponte was quick to respond winking that the SD slot had only been installed for Microsoft to begin with; after all, Windows needs more than a gigabyte of memory, whereas the XO only has 512 MB. Windows on the XO was dead on arrival.

In contrast, Intel is taking the matter seriously. The chip manufacturer has come up with its own education project it calls World Ahead. The project's notebook was named Eduwise but is now called Classmate and is expected to cost 400 US dollars. Classmate is somewhat smaller than the XO with a seven-inch display (800 x 480, 133 dpi), one gigabyte of flash memory instead of a hard drive, and a Celeron M (900 MHz). The laptop is expected to run for four hours from the battery. Windows XP Embedded is the operating system used, but Linux will also be possible. Among others, China, Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nigeria have showed interest. Brazil has a two-pronged strategy and is currently testing both XOs and classmate prototypes. Intel says that serial production has already begun.

Intel will be financing its World Ahead program with a total of one billion dollars over the next few years. The goal is to bring nations closer to current technology and high-speed Internet access as well as to provide training for teachers and schoolchildren. The company has not, however, explained how the money would be distributed specifically and what the nations will have to pay for themselves.

As the example of Intel shows, the OLPC is obviously motivating companies with great assets to help improve the lot of countries with insufficient IT infrastructure. These developments are positive as long as they are coupled to an educational program and are not merely intended to pour hardware over these countries as from a cornucopia. These projects cannot be compared to others like India's Simputer or China's Longmeng with Godson processors, which are currently not viable. They, too, wish to bring the digital world to areas not currently covered, but their focus is purely commercial.
Conclusions

Those behind One Laptop per Child, especially Nicholas Negroponte, are apparently pulling the right strings. This education project aims to provide as many schoolchildren as possible in developing and emerging nations with the most inexpensive laptops available. The project has gone an incredibly long way in a short time. Despite all the obstacles, criticism, and unanswered questions, the OLPC has the potential to bring a large number of people into contact with modern forms of communication and impart knowledge. The XO laptops already shipped out are a clear sign of what can be done when visionaries, global firms, and international political organizations work together.

When it comes to education, the OLPC has learned from the mistakes made in other projects, especially when new technology becomes the responsibility of teachers. OLPC board member Michail Bletsas recently stated in an interview on the Austrian radio during the 3GSM, "I believe it is a cost-efficient way of effecting change within the educational sector by getting children to teach themselves something instead of basing everything on the traditional approach of building schools and training teachers – which can take generations." For a purchase price of 175 US dollars, the OLPC has come up with a laptop and a user interface that schoolchildren in industrial countries would also benefit from. In addition, the little computer is full of innovations: the dual-mode display works indoors and in broad daylight, and no other notebook offers mesh networking.

The next few steps will determine the success of the project. The XO laptop and its software will have to be made ready for serial production, and purchase agreements will have to be signed with pilot states for millions of laptops. The discussions about running XO laptops with Windows and selling machines to U.S. schools have little to do with an educational project for developing countries. This shows the enormous difficulties OLPC has in getting sufficient orders. The project seems to be at a crucial point. The future only looks bright for OLPC if the organisation manages to maintain the pace ist has shown during the last two years. (translated by Craig Morris)
http://www.heise.de/mobil/artikel/88916





OLPC Seeks Educational Games for XO Laptop
Ben Ames

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop, continuing its push toward a September launch date.

OLPC on Thursday offered a laptop prize for software teams who create new games during a three-day "game jam" scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts.

By increasing the software available for the XO, OLPC hopes to encourage governments of developing countries to order more laptops, pushing the group to its sales goal of 3 million units by May 30. OLPC had collected 2.5 million orders by late April, but needed to boost sales enough to order bulk computer parts and stick to the manufacturing schedule.

An OLPC spokesman was sanguine about the goal, calling the date an arbitrary deadline that could also be affected by software and hardware changes as developers put the finishing touches on the beta version of the XO laptop, according to an e-mail from OLPC's public relations agency.

However, production has already slipped from an original date in July, and could be set back further by spiraling prices. Last month, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the price of the "hundred-dollar laptop" had risen to US$175.

Negroponte also says that his nonprofit effort is being hurt by well-funded competition from Intel Corp.'s Classmate PC, also a low-budget, power-efficient PC designed as an educational tool for children in developing countries.

The game-making contest marks a new effort by OLPC to increase momentum for the XO.

"The purpose of the game jam is getting people together to hack for a couple of days. Hopefully this will be the first of many," said SJ Klein, OLPC's director of content.

XO users already have their choice of certain games in a "Pygames" library of open-source applications written in the Python programming language, and the XO's eToys application that allows children to create their own basic media and games, he said.

But in the game jam, developers could create new types of games that rely on features of the XO's design such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming.

"There aren't too many games right now that take advantage of mesh style networking," said Klein, referring to the XO's ability to use Wi-Fi to communicate with other users up to a kilometer away, and display them as icons on its Sugar interface. "There are networked games, sure, but they aren't sensitive to the ability to display the presence of other users depending on where they are in relation to you, or to pop up on the screen when they are close enough."

Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC's development guidelines.

In keeping with the group's decision to use an open-source
Linux OS in the XO computer, OLPC will release all games created at the weekend-long event under the open-source GNU General Public License, and post them on the SourceForge site.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2007...5dMkM.WbojtBAF





'$100 Laptop' Sparks War of Words

Chip-maker Intel "should be ashamed of itself" for efforts to undermine the $100 laptop initiative, according to its founder Nicholas Negroponte.

He accused Intel of selling its own cut-price laptop - the Classmate - below cost to drive him out of markets.

Professor Negroponte, who aims to distribute millions of laptops to kids in developing countries, said Intel had hurt his mission "enormously".

Speaking to US broadcaster CBS, Intel's chairman denied the claims.

"We're not trying to drive him out of business," said Craig Barrett. "We're trying to bring capability to young people."

Mr Barrett has previously dismissed the $100 laptop as a "gadget".

Speaking to the BBC News website earlier this year Professor Negroponte said: "The concept has received a lot of criticism and yet after that criticism they are either copying it or doing things perfectly in line with the concept.

"Yes people laugh at it, then they criticise it, then they copy it."

Business practice

Both Intel and Professor Negroponte's not for profit organisation, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), have developed a low cost, robust laptop aimed specifically at school children in the developing world.

There are various differences in both the hardware and software, but Professor Negroponte believes the main problem is that his machine uses a processor designed by Intel's main competitor, AMD.

"Intel and AMD fight viciously," he told CBS. "We're just sort of caught in the middle."

Professor Negroponte says Intel has distributed marketing literature to governments with titles such as "the shortcomings of the One Laptop per Child approach", which outline the supposedly stronger points of the Classmate.

Mr Barrett told CBS: "Someone at Intel was comparing the Classmate PC with another device being offered in the marketplace. That's the way our business works."

He dismissed claims that Intel was trying to put OLPC out of business as "crazy".

"There are lots of opportunities for us to work together," he said.

Price drop

Professor Negroponte's project is currently in a critical phase.

Countries have until 31 May to place their orders for the first batch and will be able to purchase lots of 250,000.

They will initially cost $176 (£90) but the eventual aim is to sell the machine to governments of developing countries for $100 (£50).

Intel says it already has orders for "thousands" of Classmates, which currently cost over $200 (£100).

Like the OLPC machine, Intel expects the price to eventually fall.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6675833.stm





Five Days With the Classmate PC and Mandriva
Tina Gasperson

Some say the Classmate PC is Intel's answer to (or competition with) the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) effort. Intel is hawking the lilliputian laptop in "emerging markets" like Nigeria, India, and Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and secondary students. It's to be officially released and shipped en masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun.

The Classmate comes out of the box wrapped in a sky blue vinyl cover that extends out to a built-in handle with, interestingly, a magnetic closure. This is some tiny technology -- Classmate is about the size of a medium textbook and weighs only about 2 1/2 pounds. Intel says it is a "rugged learning device." With that in mind, I turned the Classmate over to my built-in target market, my eight-year-old daughter.

The Classmate PC

Mackenzie booted up the Classmate before I even had the box completely unpacked. She's a whiz at Windows, and she had no problem maneuvering through KDE and figuring out where OpenOffice.org resided. Mackenzie wants to be a writer when she grows up, so she spends lots of time on a computer composing works of fiction and transcribing from books and other printed material. Classmate and Mandriva handled this task with ease, as you might expect. Though my fingers cramped and I often hit the wrong keys, Mackenzie's hands didn't mind the very small keyboard, and if she noticed that there was only one set of Shift, Fn, Ctrl, and Alt keys, or that the +/= and "/' keys had been moved to save space, or that the space bar seemed to have been reduced to half its size, she didn't mention it. It seemed to me, however, that if kids learn to type with this keyboard, they're going to have to relearn a few things when they graduate to a full-sized computer.

Alas, typing stories won't keep Mackenzie's attention forever. Eventually she wants to get online and find games to play, send a few email messages to family and friends, and check actor Corbin Bleu's Web site for new pictures.

The Classmate is so adorably cozy it make you want to snuggle up on a comfy couch or lean back on some pillows on the floor while you surf. Good thing wireless is built right in. Too bad the typical Linux foibles apply. The first snag was having to log in as root to check the system configuration because the Classmate wouldn't log on to the network. Something tells me most elementary and high school teachers with nothing but Windows experience aren't going to get that. The second snag was that I did not know the root password. In fact, I had no login information whatsoever, and Mandriva had been configured to automatically log me in. I contacted Mandriva tech support, since Mandriva had provided the OS image to Intel, and got the root password later that day. Normally, Intel will provide end user tech support on Classmates.

I discovered there was a conflict between the wireless adapter and the X Window System that caused the Classmate to lock up hard every time we tried to connect. "I hope Intel has not changed the hardware in your sample," a Mandriva technician wrote. He said he would retrace the steps they used to get the wireless working and send them to me. Mandriva eventually sent an updated driver RPM with instructions and screenshots, which fixed the hardware conflict. Once we got connected, basic Web browsing posed no problems, except that the system's Flash plugin needed updating, which again required intervention from me for root login and knowledge of how to install software from an RPM.

Mackenzie also discovered and enjoyed playing with Tux Typing, which came preinstalled and worked perfectly. And over five days, that was the extent of her interest in Classmate, although she and her brothers used it often when they weren't allowed to use the "big computer." Once I saw them using Classmate and the "big computer" side by side as they played Club Penguin -- kind of a Second Life for kids.

Classmate with Mandriva comes with DansGuardian proxy and Web filtering software so that parents and teachers can restrict access to objectionable content online. You can enter keywords to filter or block sites by IP address or URL. I also noticed a user account dubbed "parental," but once again, neither Intel nor Mandriva sent me information about this, and there's nothing on their sites. Intel says it sends extra documentation and provides tech support for Classmates in the field.

On the hardware side, Classmate comes with a 900MHz Intel processor, 256MB DDR-II RAM, a 7-inch LCD 800x480 display, 1GB of flash storage, built-in speakers and microphone and a jack for external input, Ethernet jack connection and built-in 802.11b/g wireless, and two USB ports.

After five days with three active kids, the Classmate PC still works, and shows relatively few signs of wear -– just a little dirt and an unidentified food stain of some kind, probably ketchup, on the vinyl cover, which along with a thicker than usual plastic case provides extra protection from kids. The keyboard is not sealed, but we didn't need to clean it -- it wasn't that dirty. We ran through the battery three times, but Classmate was running most of the time we had it; the battery life was pretty good, lasting at least two hours at a time.

The Classmate seems durable and easy to use. I would recommend it for the same type of computer user I recommend desktop Linux to: a non-power user who does light-duty surfing, email, and word processing or spreadsheets, basic wired Internet, and no multimedia stuff. Anything more than that is going to require tech support. If the students in Mexico, India, and Nigeria stick to the basics, they'll fall in love with the Classmate loaded with Mandriva, like Mackenzie did.
http://enterprise.linux.com/article....27201&from=rss





The $85 Computer
Andy Greenberg

In its attempts to sell you ever-more expensive PCs, the computer industry is constantly producing faster, smaller and sexier machines. That's great for gamers, technophiles and Dell shareholders. But what about the rest of us? What do we get from all the bells and whistles piled into today's PCs?

Not enough to justify the $1,000 price tag the industry hopes we'll go for. The average consumer spends just $741 on a PC today, compared with $912 three years ago, according to the Consumer Electronics Association--even though advances in technology mean new machines have more processing power, memory and other features.

In fact, many consumers don't need to upgrade. A bare-bones computer suits them just fine--and these days, they can buy them for as little as $85.

That minuscule price is attached to Norhtec's Microclient JrSX, a desktop PC the size of a large novel. The Microclient is no Powerbook; it has only 128 megabytes of RAM and a 300-megahertz processor. And instead of a hard drive, it's designed to store data on flash cards. Thailand-based Norhtec's founder, Michael Barnes, says he's already sold thousands of the machines.

Most of those customers have been businesses: One group of McDonald's restaurants bought 1,200 to set up their wi-fi networks, he says, and a Canadian diamond-mining Arctic expedition installed the space-saving computers in its planes. But the low cost also appeals to consumers who are tired of paying for features they don't need. Shoppers can buy the machines directly from the company's Web site, Norhtec.com.

"Year after year, the entry-level computer costs around $495," Barnes says. "The newest computers always offer more speed and better graphics and are really made for game users. But the people who buy our computers want small, inexpensive machines that don't break down."

And as low, low-end PCs get even smaller and cheaper, Barnes predicts they'll become more popular. "We believe we'll see a real explosion when computers get down to below $80," he says.

The machines have their drawbacks. The MicroClient JrSX is too small to fit a CD player, and forget about Apple's iTunes: The Microclient doesn't even offer audio. Nor will it play "Halo" or any other game that would overwhelm the machine's limited storage. And programs that use a lot of memory, like Adobe Photoshop, are probably too much for the tiny PC.

Norhtec's prices also don't include a keyboard, mouse or monitor, which will run at least $100. But not a lot more: Amazon.com, for instance, sells a Philips 107E71 15-inch monitor for $49.99, a Belkin mouse for $3.95 and a Logitech keyboard for $9.58. The site also sells an external CD-ROM drive from Procom for $9.85, and for those looking to soup up their storage capacity, Tigerdirect.com sells a refurbished 80-gigabyte Seagate hard drive for $54.97.

Almost all those components are included, however, in a machine being developed by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program, which promises a fully equipped laptop for a projected $176. OLPC claims that its machines will boast screens with four times the resolution of a normal laptop, a 12-hour battery life, a waterproof and fall-proof shell, and wi-fi reception that's 50% better than any computer on the market.

The OLPC laptop was designed for poor children in the developing world. But they are likely to end up in the U.S. as well, where the program plans to distribute them to youngsters in as many as 19 U.S. states. And while the project was created out of philanthropic impulses, the OLPC now sees a consumer market for their machines.

"The industry is going to have to change the way it does things," says Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software and content. "Computing doesn't have to be the way it's been defined. It can be a lot lighter, a lot friendlier and a lot less expensive."

The OLPC isn't the first group to make a small, cheap and rugged PC. Data Evolution's decTOP, a brick-sized, low-power-consuming desktop, offers 128 megabytes of RAM and a 10-gigabyte hard drive that will sell for between $150 and $180. Like the OLPC laptop, the decTOP's innovations come out of a drive to bring computers and the Internet to rural Africa and Asia: Data Evolution acquired the machine's hardware from Advanced Micro Devices, whose "50x15" program seeks to take 50% of the world's population online by 2015.

Data Evolution Chief Executive Robert Sowah shares that goal, but he also sees the opportunity to equip Americans with PCs that suit their needs, which he says are almost always overserved by expensive modern machines. He plans to sell the decTOP in major retail stores like Best Buy and Circuit City starting this summer.

"Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet and e-mail," Sowah says. "That's what 90% of people do with computers, and they don't need these massive chips with oodles of storage and memory."

One reason that a machine like the decTOP can meet the needs of so many users is that the basic functions that Sowah lists are increasingly rolled together into a single, online package. Web services like Google Apps, which allows users to edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations online, take the workload off an individual's machine and put it instead on Google's massive servers. Data is stored and numbers are crunched online; the user's machine need only be a window to the increasingly powerful Web.

Beyond that trend, Sowah says that the movement toward cheaper, more practical machines is about computing technology meeting the needs of people, instead of vice versa.

"In the past, it's always been technology pushing desire, and users asking, 'What can we do with this?'" he says. "Now, for once, desire is pushing technology."
http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/16/che...16cheappc.html





Local news

Blumenthal Sues Best Buy for 'Bait-And-Switch' Tactics
Dirk Perrefort

High-definition TVs are on display at a Best Buy store. Connecticut's attorney general announced a lawsuit Thursday against the nation‘s largest consumer electronics retailer of deceiving customers with in-store computer kiosks and overcharging them.

Some area residents who say they've been swindled by Best Buy said Thursday they will never shop at the electronics store again.

Carl Goulart of Danbury said he was angry Thursday when he returned an $800 laptop he purchased three months ago with an extended warranty that cost him $150.

The screen was no longer working, he said, but store officials said it wasn't covered.

"I couldn't believe it," he said. "They said they could fix the screen for $1,000, and that's more than I paid for the computer. I don't think I'm ever going to shop here again."

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced Thursday that he filed a lawsuit against the electronics store for "bait-and- switch" tactics concerning its Internet site.

Blumenthal said he has also received several complaints about Best Buy's extended warranties and is investigating the matter.

Jorge Osorio of Waterbury said he purchased an iPod from the store on International Road last year for $200, along with an extended service plan for $30. He returned the unit to the store Thursday because it stopped working, but store officials told him the warranty was void because there was a small scratch on the screen.

"I'm not buying anything from them again," he said. "The store should be shut down. I'm going to call the attorney general's office about this."

Blumenthal said the store, which offers an Internet lowest price guarantee, lured people into the store with low prices on its Internet site, then showed customers a Web site available at kiosks in the store that presented higher prices.

Sales clerks would then tell customers they must have misread the sales price they saw on the Internet or that the special price had expired.

"Best Buy used in-store kiosks to conceal lower online prices and renege on its price match guarantee," Blumenthal said. "Consumers seeking bargains were led to believe that lower online prices had expired or never existed. Best Buy treated its customers like suckers, not patrons to be prized."

The lawsuit seeks refunds for customers and civil penalties.

Katie Simonitsch of New Fairfield, who was shopping for a digital camera at Best Buy on Thursday, said she's happy state officials are looking into the matter.

"I would probably be the one to fall for something like that," she said. "I'm sure it's bad for business, especially considering that their competition, Circuit City, is right down the street. That's where I'm going next."

Despite numerous attempts, officials with Best Buy's public relations department could not be reached for comment Thursday.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1054621





"Data Storm" Blamed for Nuclear-Plant Shutdown
Robert Lemos

The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant.

During the incident, which happened last August at Unit 3 of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, operators manually shut down the reactor after two water recirculation pumps failed. The recirculation pumps control the flow of water through the reactor, and thus the power output of boiling-water reactors (BWRs) like Browns Ferry Unit 3. An investigation into the failure found that the controllers for the pumps locked up following a spike in data traffic -- referred to as a "data storm" in the NRC notice -- on the power plant's internal control system network. The deluge of data was apparently caused by a separate malfunctioning control device, known as a programmable logic controller (PLC).

In a letter dated May 14 but released to the public on Friday, the Committee on Homeland Security and the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology asked the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue to investigate the incident.

"Conversations between the Homeland Security Committee staff and the NRC representatives suggest that it is possible that this incident could have come from outside the plant," Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Subcommittee Chairman James R. Langevin (D-RI) stated in the letter. "Unless and until the cause of the excessive network load can be explained, there is no way for either the licensee (power company) or the NRC to know that this was not an external distributed denial-of-service attack."

The August 2006 incident is the latest network threat to affect the nation's power utilities. In January 2003, the Slammer worm disrupted systems of Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, but did not pose a safety risk because the plant had been offline since the prior year. However, the incident did prompt a notice from the NRC warning all power plant operators to take such risks into account.

In August 2003, nearly 50 million homes in the northeastern U.S. and neighboring Canadian provinces suffered from a loss of power after early warning systems failed to work properly, allowing a local outage to cascade across several power grids. A number of factors contributed to the failure, including a bug in a common energy management system and the MSBlast, or Blaster, worm which quickly spread among systems running Microsoft Windows, eventually claiming more than 25 million systems.

No digital contagion has been fingered in the latest incident, said Terry Johnson, spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the public power company that runs the Browns Ferry power plant.

"The integrated control system (ICS) network is not connected to the network outside the plant, but it is connected to a very large number of controllers and devices in the plant," Johnson said. "You can end up with a lot of information, and it appears to be more than it could handle."

The device responsible for flooding the network with data appears to be a programmable logic controller (PLC) connected to the plant's Ethernet network, according to an NRC information notice on the incident (PDF). The PLC controlled Unit 3's condensate demineralizer -- essentially a water softener for nuclear plants. The flood of data spewed out by the malfunctioning controller caused the variable frequency drive (VFD) controllers for the recirculation pumps to hang.

Such failures are common among PLC and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, because the manufacturers do not test the devices' handling of bad data, said Dale Peterson, CEO of industrial system security firm DigitalBond.

"What is happening in this marketplace is that vendors will build their own (network) stacks to make it cheaper," Peterson said. "And it works, but when (the device) gets anything that it didn't expect, it will gag."

In many cases, a simple vulnerability scan will even cause the devices to crash, Peterson said. During tests in an electrical substation, Nessus running in safe scan mode crashed devices, he said. In some cases, sending out broadcast data on the network will crash several of connected devices, he added.

"If you were to test any control systems that have any more than three or four different network-connected devices, they could be knocked over very easily," Peterson said.

The Browns Ferry nuclear power plant has had its share of difficulties. All three units of the plant were shutdown in 1985 due to performance and management problems, according to the NRC. Unit 2 was restarted in 1991, and Unit 3 started operating again in 1995. On Tuesday, the NRC gave the Tennessee Valley Authority permission to restart Unit 1.

The Committee on Homeland Security gave the NRC until June 14 to respond to its letter.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11465





Researchers: 307-Digit Key Crack Endangers 1024-bit RSA
Jacqui Cheng

A 307-digit composite Mersenne number has been broken down into primes, and 1024-bit RSA keys are next, according to encryption researchers. Researchers from the University of Lausanne, the University of Bonn, and NTT DoCoMo have broken a new record in discovering the prime factors of a "special" 307-digit number this month, which took 11 months and roughly 100 years of computer time. The number was cracked using the special number field sieve method developed by cryptology professor Arjen Lenstra in the 1980s.

The 307-digit number itself was not an RSA key—the number was 21039-1, a special-form number called a Mersenne number which permits an efficient variant of the factoring algorithm in question, the so called Special Number Field Sieve (SNFS) to be used. RSA keys are typically generated by multiplying together two very large prime numbers, each at around 150 digits apiece, and require more labor-intensive General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) to factor. But the project shows that given enough time and computer power, the 1024-bit encryption keys used on many e-commerce sites could also be cracked in the not-so-distant future.

"Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a nonspecial, hard-to-factor number," Lenstra said in a statement, referring to a 155-digit number that his team had broken previously. More recently, a 200-digit non-special number was factored in 18 months and roughly 50 years of computer time. This 307-digit crack took even less (human) time, which Lenstra credits to more powerful computers and improved code. "I will not make predictions [about the future of 1024-bit encryption], but let us just say that it might be a good idea to stay tuned."

Why does anyone care? While your average Joe or Jane on the street will not be able to crack a 1024-bit RSA key anytime soon, experienced attackers might not have such a hard time. Getting the computing power to crack a 1024-bit key could be as easy as employing a decent-sized botnet or two.

When asked whether 1024-bit RSA keys are dead, Lenstra said: "The answer to that question is an unqualified yes." Hopefully, my bank is paying attention to these developments.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...4-bit-rsa.html





Seeking a Tech-Savvy President
Katharine Q. Seelye

Is America ready for its first tech president? Tech-types here are calling for the presidential candidates to catch up with their global counterparts, both on the campaign trail and in their campaign platforms.

At the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York Friday, Andrew Rasiej, the founder, and Micah Sifry, the editor, issued a challenge to the presidential candidates to sign on to their tech-policy manifesto or propose a better one. Some of the things they are asking candidates to do:

* Declare the Internet a “public good,” in the way that public education, electricity and highways are perceived as vital public services.
* Vow to make wireless connectivity universal.
* Vow to provide online access to government hearings and data.
* Pledge to build a “national netguard” of technology experts who could be deployed in the event of a terrorist attack or a disaster like Katrina to rebuild communication networks and databases.

“We’re calling on the next inhabitant of the White House to articulate more clearly where they stand and what they will do to bring the United States into the 21st century,” Mr. Sifry said Friday at the conference. “The Internet is the dial tone of the 21st century. If you aren’t connected, it’s as if you don’t have a phone.”

The United States continues to fall behind the rest of the world in the number of per-capita broadband connections, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2001, the United States ranked 4th of 30 developed nations; six months ago it fell to 12th place and recently fell to 15th.

The study said that about 40 percent of American households subscribe to broadband services, compared with 67 percent of those in Denmark, which ranks first.

Some of the campaigns have expressed interest in the group’s proposals, but no one has yet signed on.

Mr. Rasiej and Mr. Sifry said that some of the candidates were at least starting to use the Web better in their campaigns, with rapid-response blogging teams and more video. But, they said, the candidates have yet to focus on the broad underlying importance of the Internet in improving education, health care and economic development.

As Mr. Rasiej put it: “They could all use a re-boot on this issue.”

For a tech-savvy leader, you might look to Britain. There, David Cameron, one of the candidates for prime minister, has trained a Web cam on himself, attempting to show voters his human side as he sits around the breakfast table and pops about the countryside.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...vvy-president/





A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?
Mark Helprin

Charlottesville, Va.

WHAT if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society ... to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the claim that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the heirs of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who, other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really), are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.

The answer is that the Constitution states unambiguously that Congress shall have the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (The italics are mine, the capitalization was likely James Madison’s.)

It is, then, for the public good. But it might also be for the public good were Congress to allow the enslavement of foreign captives and their descendants (this was tried); the seizure of Bill Gates’s bankbook; or the ruthless suppression of Alec Baldwin. You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge. But we don’t operate that way, mostly.

Furthermore, one should not envy the perpetrators of sensationalist trash, but rather admire them, in the hope that someday, somehow, without prostituting, debasing and degrading oneself while recklessly destroying what is left of the literary culture, one might enjoy a fraction of their wealth. They represent, however, only a small fraction of writers, and their good fortune is a poor excuse for seizing either their property or that of their leaner colleagues.

And Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers. Booksellers that publish their own titles benefit not from escaping the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights (limited, authors take note, to 35 years). “Freeing” a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, “The Garden Party,” while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

Absent the government’s decree, copyright holders would have no exclusivity of right at all. Does not then the government’s giveth support its taketh? By that logic, should other classes of property not subject to total confiscation therefore be denied the protection of regulatory agencies, courts, police and the law itself lest they be subject to expropriation as payment for the considerable and necessary protections they too enjoy? Should automobile manufacturers be nationalized after 70 years because they depend on publicly financed roads? Should Goldman Sachs be impounded because of the existence of the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Why would the framers, whose political genius has not been exceeded, have countenanced such an unfair exception? Jefferson objected that ideas are, “like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

But ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright. Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the “Soave sia il vento” and “Kentucky Woman.” We have different words for art and idea because they are two different things. The flow and proportion of the elements of a work of art, its subtle engineering, even its surface glosses, combine substance and style indistinguishably in a creation for which the right of property is natural and becoming.

And in Jefferson’s era 95 percent of the population drew its living from the land. Writers and inventors were largely those who obtained their sustenance from their patrimony or their mills; their writings or improvements to craft were secondary. No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy. Now they are, and it is no more rational to deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks and other forms of property in the 18th century.

Still, it is the express order of the Constitution, long imprinted without catastrophe upon the fabric of our history. But given the grace of the Constitution it is not surprising to find the remedy within it, in the very words that prohibit the holding of patents or copyrights in perpetuity: “for limited Times.”

The genius of the framers in making this provision is that it allows for infinite adjustment. Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

Mark Helprin, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, “Winter’s Tale.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/op...20helprin.html





Ahem
CoughDropAddict

Dear Mark,

Nice article. Here is an invoice for the Intellectual Property fees you owe to the descendents of the many works of art you appropriated.

- The descendents of James Madison, for your quotation of the Constitution
- The descendents of Thomas Jefferson, for the quotation attributed to him.
- The descendents of William Shakespeare, for using the title of his play "Winter's Tale"
- The descendents of Moses, for the phrase "Does not then the government's giveth support its taketh," which is clearly alluding to the book of Job in the bible ("the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away", Job 1:21).
- The Chicago University Press, which has appropriated the rights to the ellipsis, a glyph that has remained in Copyright since it was first introduced in 200BC.

We hope you will be able to secure agreeable licensing terms for all these works. In the case that you cannot, you will naturally need to remove the reference. We look forward to seeing more of your work, and thank you for helping to support a thriving intellectual property market.

--Intellectual Property Association, Inc.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/20/189233





Novell Signs on to EFF Patent Busting Project
Eric Bangeman

In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization.

EFF's Patent Busting project just turned three years old and has targeted patents ranging from Amazon's 1-Click shopping patent to Nintendo's handheld software emulation patent. So far, a live concert recording patent held by ClearChannel has been overturned, while a patent from Test.com for online test-taking is now being reexamined.

Beyond patent busting, the EFF and Novell will collaborate on patent lobbying efforts. Novell says that it holds over 500 patents, some of which are "fundamental to technologies in the market today." Novell has previously pledged to use its patent portfolio to defend open source against patent attacks and in November 2005 cofounded the Open Invention Network along with IBM, Sony, Red Hat, and Philips.

More recently, Novell has dealing with the ramifications of its cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft. As part of the agreement, Microsoft promised not to use its patent portfolio against Novell's SUSE Linux while continuing to assert that Linux infringes on some of the software giant's patents. Novell signaled its disagreement with Microsoft's stance and said that its agreement with Microsoft was "is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property."

Novell's agreement with Microsoft has been a source of contention within open-source circles, with one Red Hat executive accusing the company of appeasing Microsoft; others have accused Novell of violating the GPL with the agreement. Either way, signing the deal with Microsoft did a lot to sully Novell in the eyes of many Linux users, and Novell's decision to link up with the EFF on patents may have been made with an eye towards getting some of its street cred back with the OSS community.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...g-project.html





It Was 40 Years Ago Today

With 'Sgt. Pepper,' the Beatles indulged their whims -- and changed rock forever
Russ Smith

It's possible for two reasonable adults, probably older than 45, to argue for hours about the most significant pop music event of the 1960s. My own vote would be cast in favor of the Beatles' first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in February 1964, but a very close second is the release of their "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the majestic album that will be 40 years old in early June. It's not that "Sgt. Pepper" is my favorite record from that era -- Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" is -- but there's no denying the extraordinary influence that the Beatles' most famous achievement had not only in the music industry but this country's popular culture as well.

"Sgt. Pepper," the group's first album that wasn't supported by a world-wide tour, captured, to use a word that didn't become a cliché for years afterward, the "zeitgeist" then, impeccably in sync with the "Summer of Love," "flower power," psychedelia and the youthful lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. That the Beatles, weary of avoiding hordes of fans and tabloid reporters, abandoned live concerts was in itself a radical shift of gears, but spending more than four months in a recording studio on a single project, and a "concept" album at that, was unheard of. Revisionists today, when critiquing the Beatles' discography, aren't quite as rapturous about "Sgt. Pepper" as millions of fans were in 1967, but the immediate impact of the album can't be overstated.

When "Sgt. Pepper" appeared, it was as if a massive block party had appeared outside your window. I was nearly 12 years old at the time and when one of my four older brothers came home with the highly anticipated new Beatles record, we listened to it over and over, marveling at the sheer audacity of songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Doug, overwhelmed by enthusiasm and hyperbole, declared, matter-of-factly, "The band has changed its name forever and rock 'n' roll will never be the same."

And it wasn't just the music. The album cover itself was breathtaking, a puzzling and colorful collage by Peter Blake that showed the band, in gaudy mock-military costumes, presiding over the burial of the "old" Beatles, with scattered mug shots of high and low cultural icons hovering in the background. You'd go cross-eyed trying to figure out just how many notables were depicted -- a mass of pop art that included Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, Marlene Dietrich, Sonny Liston, Laurel and Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Marlon Brando, Leo Gorcey, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce and Mae West.

The presentation was a triumph of packaging, and included for the first time the printing of lyrics on the back cover. That the group had reached this point a mere three years after the first rush of "Beatlemania" was astonishing, and the songs simply ratcheted up the sense of momentousness provided by the record sleeve.

Relieved from the pressure of performing live, the Beatles were able to record songs that were, even in a relatively primitive studio, filled with overdubs, backward tape loops, snippets of orchestral crescendos, a cowbell here, a tin horn there, creating a sound and style that was quickly, for better or worse, aped by the band's peers and imitators. Aside from the technical innovations, the 13 songs ushered in yet another phase for the Beatles, one that was far more introspective, grandiose and certainly informed by their recreational use of drugs.

Forty years later, it's easy to dismiss such lyrically slight songs as Mr. McCartney's "When I'm Sixty-Four" or George Harrison's meandering, sitar-driven "Within You Without You," but the bulk of "Sgt. Pepper" stands the test of time. For example, John Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" is about an evening vaudeville romp where "Henry the Horse dances the waltz" and men leap through "a hogshead of real fire!" Another standout is Mr. McCartney's "Fixing a Hole," a dreamy and druggy meditation about fame and drudgery. He sings about "filling the cracks" in his door that "kept [his] mind from wandering," and chastises those who "disagree and never win and wonder why they don't get in my door."

It's not exactly T.S. Eliot, as some said at the time, but it's a long way from "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

On one point there is almost universal agreement: "A Day in the Life," a five-minute Lennon-McCartney collaboration that concludes "Sgt. Pepper," is the group's most accomplished song. Combining references to British current events and the narrator's utter boredom with urban routines, the song endorses the notion of dropping out of society, as Mr. Lennon sings, dreamily, "I'd love to turn you on."

Although "Sgt. Pepper" received almost unanimous raves when it was released, a significant dissident was Richard Goldstein, who panned the album in the June 18, 1967, New York Times. Mr. Goldstein, roundly pilloried after the review was published, complained the new release was "busy, hip and cluttered." He concludes: "We need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions. And they need us."

As was soon evident, however, the Beatles didn't "need us," and, in fact, didn't need each other. The group disbanded just three years later. Mr. Goldstein was partially correct in saying that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was "precious," but 40 years later I can't think of a single album that was more influential in changing the way that lyricists, producers and fans went about making and consuming popular music.

It's said that Mr. McCartney in particular was inspired by the Beach Boys' 1966 landmark album "Pet Sounds," in which leader Brian Wilson labored in the studio to create a unified set of songs that challenged the listener -- and his competitors -- with its musical complexity. But it was the Beatles, so popular and wealthy that their record label had to cater to what were considered "whims," who topped Mr. Wilson (artistically and commercially) with "Sgt. Pepper." It was no longer a given that a rock/pop group would dash off an album as quickly as possible to minimize cost, and talented young men began to exert more control over studio production, a process of increased sophistication. The release of "Sgt. Pepper" marked the shift of power in the music industry -- not all that dissimilar to the advent of free agency in Major League Baseball -- from the "suits" to the stars, and to this day the balance hasn't changed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117951917528607822.html





Welcome Back, Starshine
John Leland

THE Summer of Love, by most accounts, began on Jan. 14, 1967, with a gathering known as the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and ended on Oct. 6, with the Death of Hippie march, a mock funeral staged in Haight-Ashbury to tell aspiring flower children to stay home.

Forty years later the children are at it again, only older and more institutional this time. The Whitney Museum of American Art is noting the anniversary with “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” opening Thursday. The Public Theater, which formed that summer with “Hair,” is staging a hippie-friendly season of Shakespeare in the Park, with “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as well as a concert performance of “Hair” in September. Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands will renew the faith in July at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, where their younger selves performed at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.

But the wild cards are in places like Zieglersville, Pa., where a three-day Session Summer of Love beer celebration will feature a mini-firkin fest; or at the Palms Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Rain nightclub will hold a three-night rave event called Summer of Love, the Love-In, billed as an “all-out sensory assault.” If just thinking about these events leaves you tired, you can head to Starbucks for a 40th anniversary Monterey Pop CD set. (And if, like the squares of old, you need help with the lingo, a firkin is one sixth of a hogshead.)

The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon.

“Why are we fascinated now?” asked Jann Wenner, 61, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which will publish a Summer of Love double issue in June. “It’s our youth for a great number of people, especially those of us who now control things.”

In recent political campaigns, claim on the era’s legacy has swung largely to conservative debunkers, who hold up the Summer of Love as an exercise in liberal self-absorption and a touchstone of moral decline. Now, with the nation again in an unpopular war, utopian voices are coming out again, softer in their politics but no less determined in their exceptionalism.

“Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and narcissistic and grandiose,” said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon. “But it’s not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did.”

In contrast to the first time around, this summer’s activities will be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq grunts’ generation but of their parents’.

Which raises some questions: Is it possible to extract the Summer of Love from the distorting filter of narcissism? Or is that narcissism the essence of the brand, as revisionists and advertisers would have it? Economists use the term “survivorship bias” to describe the recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit. For the Summer of Love what has survived is the music and industry it created, the fascination with youth culture, the now generic images of gentle hippies and a swirl of pretty colors that has found its home in the language of advertising. Some of the less institutional elements, like the Haight’s Free Store, voluntary sweep-ins, free food-ins, the free health clinic and the Death of Hippie, have receded from the narrative.

Without these the Summer of Love has survived as a simple story: For a magical few months tens of thousands of young people left home for San Francisco, where they gave the nation new sounds, new pleasures and new styles. In went adolescent idealism and creative energy; out came a lifetime of ads for cars, Pepsi and retirement plans.

This story has endured so tenaciously because it played out in the media in real time, with a level of stage management that was as forward-looking as the music. To “drop out” in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.

From the start the season had an official governing body, the Council for the Summer of Love; a hit theme song, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written and produced by the organizers of the Monterey festival; and a television deal, when a young ABC executive named Barry Diller bought the rights to Monterey for a never-realized Movie of the Week. The council came up with the name Summer of Love to put a positive spin on events that were often portrayed negatively in the press. Almost as soon as the hippies hit Golden Gate Park, sightseeing companies offered guided bus tours of the Haight, providing tourists a look at the hairy new wrinkle in humanity. As a 1967 manifesto from the Death of Hippie proclaimed, “Media created the hippie with your hungry consent.”

In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins. Even if you sing along to “Good Morning Starshine” or crash on the sidewalk outside the Whitney, you’re still there to honor someone else’s show. It ends when you walk out the door. If the first Summer of Love was about the shared exploration of possibility, conducted in the public eye, the anniversary demonstrates the accrued authority of the institutions that make this watching possible.

These institutions have not always served the art, said Christoph Grunenberg, curator of the Whitney’s “Summer of Love” exhibition for the Tate Liverpool gallery, where it began in 2005. Instead, he said, they’ve enabled “a rather superficial consumption of a retro aesthetic, which doesn’t take into consideration the motives behind it, the desire for liberation.

“The utopian impulse of the period is missing,” he said.

The exhibition includes underground magazines, psychedelic light shows, album covers and posters and films of concerts, as well as paintings and sculptures from the ’60s and early ’70s. It’s “the first serious art-historical evaluation, as opposed to something that has been looked at as quote unquote just popular culture,” said Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator in charge of installing the exhibition.

Mr. Grunenberg, 44, said the art has been “a victim of its own success at the time and tainted by its association to drug culture, music culture, fashion and design.

“It was unusual in that it aspired to the level of mass culture,” he added, “and that’s the cause of the suspicion that comes to psychedelic art. Can the light shows at a Jimi Hendrix show be art?”

Yet there were other narratives within the Summer of Love. Once the masses started to arrive in the Haight, some pioneers left the city for greener pastures. By late summer LSD gave way to speed and utopian seekers to ill-prepared teenage runaways, children who could not take care of themselves. “Most people see the Summer of Love in very happy terms,” said Brad Abramson, vice president of production and programming for VH1 and an executive producer of the channel’s “Monterey 40,” a documentary about the 1967 pop festival that will be broadcast beginning June 16. “One thing that struck me was finding out what a mess it turns out to be. By the end of the summer speed freaks were catching and eating cats.”

Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone in San Francisco that fall, sees this narrative as a sideshow to the essence of the Summer of Love. For him the survivorship bias has allowed the substantive elements of the day to emerge from the confusion and hype. “I was skeptical of this invasion of the Haight-Ashbury, wear-flowers-in-your-hair stuff,” he said. “The grungy, sleeping-on-the-floor-in-a-sleeping-bag lifestyle was not for me. The drugs were, and the music was, and the peace and love was. But the grungy lifestyle, which was very limited to kids coming in from out of town, was not for me.”

The sunnier side will be on display at this year’s Monterey Summer of Love Festival, where tribute bands, dressed up like Jimi Hendrix or the Byrds, will share the stage with some performers from the original festival, a three-day charity concert that included Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others. Concertgoers this year will get Big Brother and the Holding Company without Joplin, and Carlton Poward performing as Hendrix: proof that nostalgia can conquer even death. But the commercial and canonical imperatives will be familiar.

A goal for the first Monterey festival was to prove that rock music was “an art form in the same way jazz was,” said the record producer Lou Adler, 73, one of the organizers. “It was still looked on as a trend, two and a half minutes and you’re out. So the idea was to do a festival in the same place that there was a jazz festival and a folk festival; that seemed to validate it.”

But from the start there was distrust between the organizers, who came from the Los Angeles music business, and the more underground groups, said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who helped organize the event. “There definitely was that feeling from the San Francisco musicians that the Los Angeles groups were the commercial groups, and they were the real heart and soul,” she said. “I think they were just jealous because we were making the money. The whole point, I thought, was to make hit records.”

In the end of course both sides won: the industry because it sold the ethos of the underground and the hip bands through the growth of the business. The ’60s culture blossomed not at the expense of its commercial tendencies but through them. The branding of the Summer of Love is not a corruption of the original moment but an impulse that was there all along.

Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became.

Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on the desire to forget, not to remember. “Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”

But he added that nostalgia could also have a “progressive aspect” that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to “remember that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn’t determine value, where competition wasn’t the nature of human relations.

“That imagination can be powerful,” he continued. “The dream is real. The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don’t want to do anything about it. That’s just narcissistic. That’s longing to feel important again. Baby boomers are very good at that.”

For Michael Hirschorn, 43, executive vice president for original programming and production at VH1, which has built a business on the synthesis of youth culture and branding, the first order of business is to recover the music from the trappings. The channel’s Monterey documentary, he promised, will be about that music, not peace and love. “The ’60s always felt hokey and lame to me, so smug and self-important,” he said. “Seeing this footage now, maybe the ’60s and the Summer of Love can be reclaimed from its own advocates.”

In the meantime issues of the underground magazine Oracle will be in the Whitney, and Quicksilver Messenger Service will be back at Monterey. And of course mini-firkins will be in Zieglersville. But this year’s pilgrims will find less reassessment, in the sense of discovering something new, than the impossible promise of recapturing the old.

And with luck they will find some good music and art, along with more kitsch than anyone seems to want to acknowledge. To celebrate that, there’s Stanley Donen’s 1967 classic “Bedazzled,” with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It’s newly out on DVD, and it’s a trip.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/arts/20lela.html





For Today's Female Singers, Sex Appeal is a Must
Nekesa Mumbi Moody

She was an "amazing talent," a young singer with a wonderful voice who wrote beautiful songs. But she was no beauty, plus flat-chested and overweight to boot.

Remembering the aspiring star, music executive Jody Gerson still feels terrible about thinking: "She's never going to get signed, even though she's fabulous."

Gerson might feel even worse after Wednesday night's exit of the matronly Melinda Doolittle from "American Idol." In today's music industry, Plain Janes need not apply. Sex appeal was once considered a bonus for a woman; now it's practically a requirement.

Doolittle and the heavyset, gap-toothed LaKisha Jones were widely considered this season's most talented "Idol" contestants. Yet both were eliminated from the final four in favor of Blake Lewis, who makes the teen girls swoon, and the long-locked, 17-year-old looker Jordin Sparks.

A quick check of the Billboard Top 40 turns up a list of candidates for "America's Top Model": Avril Lavigne, blonde stunner Carrie Underwood; tomboyish but sexy Ciara, fashionista Gwen Stefani and hip-swiveling Shakira (on a song featuring bootylicious Beyonce).

The only two in the Top 40 who might not be considered perfect 10s: Pink, who is still svelte and appealing; and multiplatinum Grammy-winner Kelly Clarkson, who got her break only through winning the democratically elected "American Idol."

When asked whether a female with so-so looks and sex appeal could get a record deal, Gretchen Wilson quickly replied: "They can't."

"I believe that very few will get through and they better be amazing," Wilson said in an interview. "The music is not about just music anymore, it's about the look, the 'it' factor if you will . . . it's marketing."

True, looks have always been a part of the music business: Diana Ross played a model in the movie "Mahogany," Marianne Faithfull was considered a beauty, Tina Turner's legs were part of her sex appeal, Olivia Newton-John was the lovely girl-next-door and Stevie Nicks rocked teenage boys with more than just her guitar.

But there also were stars like wild-haired, pudgy Janis Joplin and Barbra Streisand, who challenged beauty standards with her protruding nose. Even curvy Aretha Franklin was known mainly for her one-of-a-kind voice.

Today, it's hard to find a singer larger than a size 6 and without a sexy look -- all of which are played up with sensuous videos, modeling spreads and provocative magazine covers. Lavigne, who once scoffed at singers who stripped for the cameras, fronts the new issue of Blender topless save for a strategically placed banner that reads "Hell Yeah, I'm Hot!"

The hit reality show "Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll" is a striking example. In finding a replacement for current lead doll, stunner Nicole Scherzinger, the judging panel -- which included the cosmetically enhanced rapper Lil' Kim -- did talk about vocal qualities. But while a few contestants had strong voices, all were taut, toned and sexy, and the focus was more on their dancing and overall desirability. Which is to be expected from the group responsible for the anthem "Don't Cha" (as in, "don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?").

Even singers who are heralded for their talent are gorgeous, like Alicia Keys, Corinne Bailey Rae or Norah Jones. And while critically acclaimed Amy Winehouse may not win any beauty contests, her songs have a raw sexuality that give her that "it" factor.
Dolly Parton, whose buxom figure sometimes overshadowed her talent as a songwriter and singer, said being "a good looking woman certainly can't hurt you any if you're trying to make it."

"But I would like to believe that true and great and pure talent will rise above whatever else," the country legend said in an interview. "But certainly in music these days, the better you look, the more apt you're going to get a contract.

"It's a damn pity, though, that people have to judge real talent on looks."

Gerson says the way female artists look reflects our society, where women are constantly judged on their appearance and oversexualized. But she also says it reflects the way we listen to music these days -- or don't listen.

"They have to look hot and sexy in these videos," says Gerson, who is credited with helping discover Alicia Keys, among others, and is now executive vice president of the U.S. Creative division of EMI Music Publishing.

"In the days of Aretha Franklin, people saw Aretha maybe a couple of times a year," she said, "but you listened to a record without a visual. You didn't watch it. Everything today, you watch it."

Gerson also agrees with Wilson about the marketing factor. With dwindling profits and budgets, record labels try to maximize artist exposure with clothing deals, cosmetic contracts, movie roles and modeling gigs.

"How many endorsements does Beyonce have? Do you think it's because she's the most talented person on earth or do you think it's because she's gorgeous? I think she's talented but she's also gorgeous," Gerson says. "I think you need the whole package."

And that notion, according to Wilson, "totally sucks."

"My favorite singers in the world were Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, and Patsy was a large woman, and Loretta -- she was never some kind of a supermodel, but they were the greatest female voices in country music, and they changed lives and they made a difference," says Wilson, who, although considered sexy, feels she doesn't fit today's beauty standards.

Where are the Patsy Clines of today? More often than not on smaller, underground labels, which put more of a premium on talent. And with the devolution of today's music industry, Gerson says, small labels may be the best path to success for a woman who doesn't look like a mold of a Barbie doll.

So how would Gerson advise the flat-chested, overweight, amazingly talented singer to chase her dream? Put out her own music and promote herself on the Web.

"As far as we've come as women," Gerson asked, "where are we really?"
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1054065





Facing Death, Michael Brecker Provides Moving Coda on Final CD
AP

As the new year began, Michael Brecker's life was coming to an end.

But the tenor saxophonist, suffering from acute leukemia, was still thinking about his music. He went downstairs to his home studio to perform the last notes on an electronic wind instrument for what would be his final album. The 57-year-old died in a Manhattan hospital on Jan. 13, just four days after telling his manager that the record was ready for mixing.

That album, "Pilgrimage," has been released this week - an inspiring coda to the career of a quiet, gentle musician widely regarded as the most influential tenor saxophonist since John Coltrane, whether playing straight-ahead acoustic jazz or electronic jazz-rock in seminal fusion bands like The Brecker Brothers.

It's the first of the 800-plus albums the 13-time Grammy winner recorded as a leader and a sideman - with such pop icons as Paul Simon, James Taylor and Aerosmith - consisting solely of his original compositions.

Brecker's wife, Susan, considers it "a miracle" that her husband managed to record "Pilgrimage" - the title of the last track he ever recorded, a 10-minute musical journey with a deeply spiritual prelude that evokes memories of his main inspiration Coltrane.

"I believe it was his spirit, his wanting to complete the record ... that kept him alive a lot longer than really was humanly possible given his physical condition," she said, interviewed with his manager Darryl Pitt in a midtown Manhattan restaurant.

For nearly 2½ years Brecker had battled myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells, that eventually progressed into acute leukemia. He had to stop publicly performing in March 2005 and could not practice his saxophone more than five minutes at a time. But he used the time remaining to him to write the album's tunes at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, north of New York City, in between lengthy hospitalizations.

"What I would like people to take from this record is that it is one man's testament to the human spirit," said Susan Brecker, her voice choking with emotion. "This music is just one man's response to hearing he is going to die ... and there can be nothing more honest or more vibrant than that, nothing."

Just two weeks after Brecker died, his wife and children, manager and jazz musician friends gathered in a midtown Manhattan recording studio for the mixing of "Pilgrimage."

"Hearing Mike playing so vibrantly in the studio it was literally as if he were conjured back to life," said the album's executive producer Pitt, Brecker's close friend and manager for 20-plus years. "It was deeply moving and profoundly touching and sometimes deeply upsetting."

The 78-minute CD respects Brecker's wishes by including all nine original tunes he recorded with a jazz all-star lineup of guitarist Pat Metheny, pianists Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

"The compositions are among the best Mike had ever written," said Metheny, who appeared on Brecker's first solo album in 1987, in an e-mail response. "I have always contended that he was one of the best modern jazz composers of our time. He had a strong individual voice."

Pitt says the album would not have been possible were it not for Brecker's 18-year-old daughter Jessica. Brecker was close to dying in November 2005 when she volunteered as the half-match donor in an experimental clinical trial at a University of Minnesota hospital involving a new stem cell transplant procedure. The operation alleviated the pain by killing off large growths of leukemia cells, but the transplant failed to engraft, leaving the disease free to spread again.

Last June, Hancock, at Pitt's suggestion, coaxed a reluctant Brecker into making a surprise appearance at a JVC Jazz Festival concert at Carnegie Hall honoring the pianist. He received a standing ovation after performing the tune "One Finger Snap," his last public performance. The experience encouraged Brecker to go ahead with the recording session that had already been postponed twice.

"When he asked me to be on the record, I was really thrilled because I just didn't expect it to happen," said Hancock. "And when we actually started working on the record ... I said, `Wait a minute Michael, are you sure you're still sick?' ... What was exuding from him was so much power, conviction and enthusiasm to do this record, and it was just a joy to experience that."

During the August recording session at the Manhattan studio, Pitt and Brecker intentionally masked from the other musicians just how poorly Brecker felt in order to keep the focus on the music.

But none of that frailty is reflected in Brecker's performances, whether its his rapid-fire arpeggio runs on "Anagram" with its shifting tempos or his deeply emotional, soulful playing on the poignant ballad "When Can I Kiss You Again?" - a question asked by his son Sam during a hospital visit when physical contact was prohibited to avoid infection.

"No one would ever think when they listen to this recording that this guy's fighting for his life. ... You get the feeling of somebody who's at the top of their game," said Patitucci.

After the session, Brecker was optimistically planning for future albums. He took a family vacation in Florida and attended his son's Bar Mitzvah. He was diagnosed with acute leukemia in October, but kept working on the record.

It was bittersweet for those closest to Brecker when just days after the mixing session ended in early February, he won two Grammys for the CD "Some Skunk Funk," recorded in 2003 with older brother Randy on trumpet.

On Feb. 20, Brecker's family, fellow musicians and fans filled Manhattan's Town Hall for a memorial celebration. Hancock and Paul Simon performed "Still Crazy After All These Years," one of the many classic pop tunes with a memorable Brecker solo.

"His efforts to get this final message out to all of us (on "Pilgrimage") will go down as one of the great codas in modern music history," Metheny said in his eulogy.

Brecker's legacy also includes his efforts to encourage people to enroll in the national marrow donor registry. The introverted saxophonist went public about his illness after realizing how many thousands of people die every year waiting to find a genetically matched blood stem cell donor.

More than 30,000 people have been added to the registry since 2005 as the result of Brecker-sponsored events at jazz festivals, concerts and synagogues, said Pitt, who with Brecker's wife founded the Time Is of the Essence Fund, named after a Brecker album, to pay for blood tests for potential donors.

"Mike was a hero through the whole thing," said Hancock. "He used the challenge of a life-threatening disease to express his compassion for human beings and was able to express it with his music."
http://www.komotv.com/news/entertainment/7686087.html





Diddley Leaving Intensive Care After Stroke

A week after suffering a stroke following a gig in Council Bluffs, Iowa, rock legend Bo Diddley was being transferred on Monday from the intensive care unit to a regular room at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, Neb.

It is as yet unknown when Diddley will be well enough to return to his Gainesville, Fla., home, where he is expected to continue treatment at the Shands Medical Center at the University of Florida.

According to his publicist, Diddley is still having trouble speaking but appears to have suffered no long-term physical damage from the stroke.

"I was able to speak with him by phone this morning," his business manager, Faith Fusillo, said in a statement. "He wanted to know where his stuff was: his guitar and the money from the gig. I was so happy because this is the Bo that I know and love, and a real indication that Bo is on his way back."
http://www.reuters.com/article/peopl...35882520070522





Lordi to Rock Theaters With 'Dark Floors'

Finnish band will star in horror movie
Emma Gray Munthe

In an interview just after Finnish monster-rock band Lordi had won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest with "Hard Rock Halleluja," Mr. Lordi said that he wanted producer Markus Selin to contact him. He wanted to make a horror movie.

And, of course, a project based on the pitch "It's a horror film starring the Lordi guys" is hard to resist.

Since last year's contest triumph, a script has been written and shooting started on "Dark Floors" early this month. The film is skedded to preem in Finland on Dec. 21.

The project has a budget of about E4.2 million ($5.7 million) and stars the band: Mr. Lordi, Amen the Unstoppable Mummy, Awa the Vampire Countess, Ox the Hellbull and Kita the Alien Manbeast. They play the bad guys, naturally. Pic's directed by Pete Riski, who's shot all their videos.

"We were thinking about American and Japanese horror movies in general when we were writing the script and planning the style of the movie. It's not aimed especially at teens; we will try to make it really scary and not aim it at the broader popcorn audience," says Selin, whose Solar Films is one of the most successful producers in Finland.

"We are planning two versions of the film, because we know that a lot of Lordi's fans are young -- but there is also a following of older fans. So we're doing a PG-13 version and a hard-core R version.

"We want to focus on the European market, Japan and America. America will be very exciting for us because Lordi will be one of the three topliners on the Ozzfest tour."

The film will be shot entirely in English, with an English/American cast.

Swedish director-actor Rafael Edholm ("Baba's Cars") asked "if he could perhaps be eaten up or something in the film" when he first heard about the project, but instead Selin tapped him Swedish co-producer. "Dark Floors" also marks the first cooperation between Nordisk Film and Solar Films. "We are expecting very, very good things from this cooperation in the future," says Selin.

Given the band's take on music, a film in the lucratively resurgent horror genre seems a natural choice. "I don't believe in genre thinking, that this and this genre will be big now, this and that won't," says Selin. "I always think that if the script is good, that is always the thing to go for."

Of course, a romantic comedy starring the grotesque rockers probably would be a bad idea. But one never knows.

Lordi will be in Cannes through Saturday, and rumors have it they would also play a short gig. The monster rockers also planned to do "something special" during the Eurovision Song Contest, which took place May 12 in Helsinki.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117965181.html





"Shrek the Third" Breaks Records in First Weekend
Lisa Baertlein

DreamWorks Animation SKG's "Shrek the Third" shattered the opening weekend record for an animated film, signaling hot movie sales likely to carry over when Walt Disney Co.'s newest "Pirates of the Caribbean" sets sail next Friday.

The "Shrek" comedy starring a lovable green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) and his wise-cracking donkey friend (Eddie Murphy) brought in $122 million, crushing expectations and capturing the third-biggest opening for domestic films overall, DreamWorks said on Sunday.

"Shrek" was the No. 1 grossing film for the weekend, bumping last week's winner Sony Corp.'s "Spider-Man 3," which slipped to the No. 2 position after netting sales of $28.5 million.

"'Shrek' exceeded everyone's expectations, which has been happening a lot with all of these movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking firm Media By Numbers.

He was referring to "Spider-Man 3," which just two weeks ago bagged the biggest-ever domestic weekend box office debut with sales of $151.1 million.

"I think we could see more records being broken," he said.

When asked if she expects "Shrek" to regain its perch at the top of next weekend's box office chart, DreamWorks Chief Operating Officer Ann Daly said: "No. For certain. I'm sure 'Pirates' as a releasing movie will be the top movie of the weekend."

"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" opens during the long Memorial Day holiday weekend and industry analysts and executives expect the high-seas adventure starring Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow to rake in box office gold.

Last year's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" has claim on the second-biggest domestic weekend opening ever after capturing sales of $135.6 million.

Audiences Ignore Reviews

Analysts had expected "Shrek the Third," to gross between $80 million and $110 million and some analysts had not expected the film to top the $108 million opening of "Shrek 2," which had been the biggest first weekend for an animated film in box office history.

"We can't believe it. I'm thrilled," Daly said of the results, which also marked the best opening of all time for a film from distributor Paramount Pictures.

The "Shrek" series, at $1.4 billion in global ticket sales, is the top animated franchise of all time, and people of all ages flocked to "Shrek the Third" despite mixed reviews.

Media By Numbers' Dergarabedian said the industry's cautious bias is no longer justified.

"In the wake of the 2005 box office slump, we're a little gun shy about making these huge predictions about openings, but we really shouldn't be," he said.

Zombie thriller "28 Weeks Later," from News Corp.'s Fox Atomic fell one spot to No. 3 with sales of $5.2 million, rounding out the top three.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...26349420070521





An Action Hero Breaks Summer’s Fantasy Spell
Michael Cieply

When last seen, in 1995, the New York super-cop John McClane, alter ego of the actor Bruce Willis, was performing barehanded bomb disposal on a downtown train and parrying racist attitude from his partner, Samuel L. Jackson, as he put away a batch of Germanic baddies led by the distinctly British Jeremy Irons.

Next month Lieutenant McClane will try to hurdle a new kind of obstacle. He’s about to find out if the summer movie audience still has a taste for cinematic red meat.

“Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth installment of 20th Century Fox’s long-running “Die Hard” series, has emerged as the only straight-ahead, major studio action film set for the year’s prime moviegoing weeks. Not long ago the same period, from early May to mid-July, routinely brought flesh-and-bone hits like “The Bourne Identity” (2002), “The Fast and the Furious” (2001), “Con Air” (1997) and, of course, that last McClane romp, “Die Hard With a Vengeance.”

In late spring and early summer, studio schedules are now dominated by effects-driven fantasies (“Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”); comedies (“Knocked Up” and “Evan Almighty”); and the occasional caper (“Ocean’s Thirteen”).

Studios, for box office reasons, have pushed real-life action films, even when rated PG-13, toward late summer or fall and away from what is becoming a 10-week summertime fun zone. This year, for example, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” with Matt Damon as the amnesiac spy, is scheduled for release on August 3, while “The Brave One,” in which Jodie Foster does a vigilante turn, is set for Sept. 14.

Tom Rothman, a co-chairman of Fox, said the studio “consciously took advantage” of the summertime action-movie gap in its decision to release its fourth “Die Hard” on June 27, five days after Universal’s “Evan Almighty” and a week before “Transformers,” from Paramount and DreamWorks. A surfeit of “fantasy and computer-generated visual effects has left a hunger in the audience for real things,” Mr. Rothman added. Over the next few weeks Fox will tease that perceived appetite with a marketing campaign that promotes John McClane with the words: “No mask. No cape. No problem.”

Mr. Rothman’s studio isn’t alone in bringing part of its early summer slate back down to earth. Paramount Vantage has scheduled “A Mighty Heart,” in which Angelina Jolie plays the wife of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, for June 22. And MGM will open “Mr. Brooks,” a thriller starring Kevin Costner, on June 1. But “Live Free or Die Hard,” with a budget in the $100 million range, is the most ambitious attempt to challenge the summer drift to family-friendly fantasy and cartoons.

The new film’s screenwriter, Mark Bomback, says that McClane, in his latest incarnation, finds himself detailed to an anti-terror task force that works with the Department of Homeland Security. The twist adds a touch of political striation to a picture that will carry the decidedly neutral title “Die Hard 4.0” in foreign markets. But the writer and others say its deepest thinking involves McClane’s low-tech approach to high-tech cyber-terror. “He’s an analog guy faced with this digital problem,” Mr. Bomback said.

The movie’s makers also take pride in having used few computer-generated effects, choosing instead, for instance, to shoot a real car at a real helicopter. “The stitches Bruce Willis got in his head weren’t virtual,” Mr. Rothman said.

Mr. Willis is also an older guy. He was 33 when the first “Die Hard” was released in 1988, and is now 52. Still, a 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone revived a much older franchise when he pulled off a surprise hit with “Rocky Balboa” last year.

In the dozen years since the last “Die Hard” — which had $361 million in worldwide ticket sales, by far the best box office performance of the three — studio executives have tinkered with possible plots while wooing Mr. Willis. Ron Bass, best known for writing dramas like “The Joy Luck Club,” said he was surprised recently to find himself identified as an initial writer of “Live Free” in documents submitted by the studio to the Writers Guild of America, West. Years ago, Mr. Bass learned, Fox had considered turning a Latin American adventure he had written into the next McClane vehicle.

Eventually the company landed on a script that had been written by David Marconi as a follow-up to his 1998 action hit, “Enemy of the State.” That script, which had terrorists flying a jumbo jet into Manhattan by remote control, had been shelved after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Marconi now shares story credit with Mr. Bomback, who retooled the premise, working with Mr. Willis, who is a producer of the new film, and Len Wiseman (“Underworld”), its director.

By the time that work was done, however, hard action movies were fading from the big-ticket season. Studios have discovered that computer animation and effects can attract the widest number of moviegoers, even while fretting that too real on-screen violence might somehow narrow the audience.

“You could argue that we’re in a war, and people hate this kind of stuff,” suggested the film historian David Thomson, who nonetheless cautioned that patterns in film release schedules were often more apparent than real.

Studios have also clearly been reluctant to shut out young viewers with the restrictive R ratings that were traditional for action films, including all three in the “Die Hard” series. “Things seem to get by in visual effects films that do not get by in live action,” said Lawrence Gordon, who was a producer of the first two “Die Hard” films. This time around “Live Free or Die Hard” may yet come up with a PG-13 rating, much like the first two “Bourne” films and the latest James Bond adventure, “Casino Royale.”

To get that rating, the occasionally foul-mouthed McClane will have to watch his language. But he won’t be deprived of his signature line, if posters on the buses driving through Manhattan and elsewhere are any indication. “Yippee kai yay,” they begin, adding a couple of letters that suggest that things will get at least a bit gritty this summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/movies/23hard.html





Top Directors See the Future, and They Say It’s in 3-D
Sharon Waxman

If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing newfangled 3-D glasses.

Last week the next phase in the theatrical viewing experience took a significant leap forward, as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson signed on to direct and produce for Paramount’s DreamWorks Studios a trilogy of 3-D movies about the intrepid Belgian comic-book hero Tintin. And on Saturday nearly an hour of footage from the 3-D concert film of the Irish rock band U2 made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

As “U2 3D” demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories. The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono’s face, then soars over and down among the 60,000 concertgoers. And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses, they are not the old red-and-green variety but sleek black ones.

“This is a different experience; it’s much more voyeuristic,” said Jon Landau, the producer of “Avatar,” James Cameron’s ambitious and expensive movie about a battle between humans and aliens, which is currently being shot in 3-D using a combination of computer animation and motion-capture technology. “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”

That view, however, isn’t completely clear yet. So far digital projection has been installed in only about 2,300 of the 37,000 theaters in the United States, with 3-D projection in just 700 of those. Theater owners have been slow to upgrade to expensive digital projectors, and it is an open question whether many American moviegoers will pay an extra dollar or two for tickets to 3-D films.

The 3-D film first flourished in the early 1950s, when movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and Disney’s “Melody” introduced audiences to the delights and annoyances of donning special glasses. But because of a combination of technological complexities, eye fatigue and a lack of compelling feature-length movies, many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the filmmaking format on the fringes of the mainstream.

The emergence of Imax and the technological advances of the last few years, however, have piqued the interest of Hollywood’s top directors. Mr. Cameron, who made the 3-D Imax documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” in 2003, is using motion capture technology and computer graphics to create realistic characters and fantasy worlds for “Avatar.”

Twentieth Century Fox will release that film, with an estimated $200 million cost, in 2009, mainly in 3-D. (Mr. Landau said that Mr. Cameron wore 3-D glasses — the latest have plastic rims — to look at his daily footage.)

Audiences, which have had a taste of the future in 3-D versions of children’s fare like “Monster House” and “Chicken Little,” will get another early blast of the experience in Robert Zemeckis’s adventure-drama “Beowulf,” to be released, wherever possible in 3-D, by Paramount and Warner Brothers in November.

And DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that all of its future movies will be shot in 3-D, for release beginning in 2009.

“I believe that this is the single greatest opportunity for the moviegoing experience since the advent of color,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, said in an e-mail message. “It has been more than 60 years since there has been a significant enhancement or innovation to the moviegoing experience.”

He predicted that starting in 2009, “a significant percentage of the big mainstream films will be made and exhibited in this format.”

The widening embrace of 3-D by Hollywood’s leading directors and major studios comes at a critical moment for the movie industry, which faces expanding competition for leisure time from home theaters, the Internet and games. And it also solves, at least temporarily, the continuing pressures from the thriving trade in bootleg movies. A 3-D film cannot be recorded easily from a movie screen because the images are blurry to the naked eye. And so far there is no way to show a movie in 3-D on DVD.

The push to 3-D may also be the impetus needed to spur movie exhibitors to switch from film projectors to digital ones, say industry executives. A digital projector can cost around $100,000, a sum that has proved prohibitive to many exhibitors. Adding the 3-D component, including the silver coating of the screen, costs about $20,000 more, but the added benefit is immediately visible, said Michael V. Lewis, chairman of Real-D, which dominates the 3-D projection business.

There is already evidence of a box office payoff. “Meet the Robinsons,” an animated Disney film, was released in early April in 3,400 theaters, of which 600 (about 18 percent) were equipped with 3-D. The 3-D theaters brought in 30 percent of the box office revenue from the first weekend, according to Disney. And a 3-D version of “Polar Express” from 2004 has been released three years in a row in Imax theaters around the winter holidays, taking in $65 million.

Greg Foster, the chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, warned that not all films were suited to the format. “Three-D isn’t a panacea — it isn’t a magic pill,” he said. “It’s a spectacular thing if it fits three specific criteria: Does it take you somewhere? Is it made by a visionary filmmaker? And is the concept behind the film organic to 3-D?”

He added: “If you’re going to do 3-D because you need a gimmick to sell tickets, the audience is too smart for that.”

Among films that have not worked well in 3-D were “Chicken Little” and “Ant Bully,” which were also not successful at the box office.

The new projects aim to be more than mere gimmicks. Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson have been working on the “Adventures of Tintin” project for about a year with Mr. Jackson’s special effects company, Weta Digital.

Part of the decision-making process included a week of motion capture work on the “Avatar” set in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles last November. That visual information was sent to Weta in New Zealand. There it was married to a computer model of Tintin, the young, red-haired Belgian adventurer of comic-book fame, who is wildly popular in Europe though less so in this country. The results persuaded both directors to push forward with the trilogy.

Mr. Jackson is expected to direct the first film, Mr. Spielberg the second, with the director for the third undecided, according to a DreamWorks spokesman. There is as yet no start date for the first project.

Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson both declined to comment for this article. Stacey Snider, the co-chairwoman of DreamWorks, also declined.

Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, said the director had long been fascinated with 3-D but until now had not been swayed by the ability to create a full-length feature experience. “Based on various tests he’s seen, he believes in the future of 3-D,” he said. “This is really starting to create some interesting imagery that gives the filmmaker a lot more creative license to play with.”

To shoot the U2 concert film, the directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington placed about a dozen cameras throughout stadiums during the band’s concert tour in Latin America last year, and shot more than 100 hours of footage. The film, co-owned by the band and 3ality Digital, a 3-D movie production company, does not yet have a distributor, but the partners expect the film to reach theaters in the fall.

Sandy Climan, chief executive of 3ality Digital Holdings, said the improved 3-D format would entice moviegoers eager for something new.

Mr. Katzenberg agreed. He predicted that after 2009, “consumers will own their own 3-D glasses in the same way they have sunglasses for going outside, wear sneakers for running, own tennis rackets, golf clubs and bowling balls for those activities."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/.../dimension.php





In Court Files, Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

Just hours after a raft of articles suggesting the impending collapse of his business hit the papers on April 11, 2002, Michael S. Ovitz did what Hollywood moguls had done for a generation: He called Anthony Pellicano.

“I need to see you,” Mr. Ovitz said, asking for a private meeting at an out-of-the-way spot. “This is the single most complex situation imaginable.”

They all went to Mr. Pellicano when their situations seemed too complex, or the stakes too high, to leave anything to chance: executives and actors, studio bosses and their jilted spouses, the hottest and the has-been. In nearly 20 years in Los Angeles, he had made himself into the rightful owner of that breathless title, “Detective to the Stars,” the one man who would, and seemingly could, do anything to clean up any mess.

So when federal agents raided Mr. Pellicano’s office in November 2002, his case became a local obsession: who would be fingered next, people wondered anxiously, as investigators gathered evidence and listened to Mr. Pellicano’s wiretap tapes.

Perhaps the case has not lived up to its advance billing as the biggest Hollywood scandal in decades. More than a dozen people have been arrested, including a movie director, the head of a Century City law firm and a cast of minor characters.

Mr. Pellicano himself sits in jail, awaiting trial on charges that his vaunted detective prowess actually boiled down to an almost addict-like reliance on illegal wiretaps. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of wiretapping and conspiracy. Only one actual wiretap has been produced by prosecutors, and defense lawyers dispute its authenticity.

Still, the evidence so far — 150,000 pages of documents and hundreds of recordings Mr. Pellicano made of his own phone calls, many of which include discussions of wiretapping — is a rich sourcebook of show-business manners, mores and argot, a vicarious tour through the dysfunctional heart of Hollywood.

The case file, much of which was obtained by The New York Times, illustrates the economics of information in the place that values it most — a community devoted to the manufacture, control and perpetuation of image. And it explains why Mr. Pellicano, who trafficked in all manner of potentially damaging data, was so eagerly hired and his unmasking so direly feared.

The marketplace was filled with potential buyers, from the top of the town to the bottom of the D-list, in the movies, television, music, even the art and sports worlds. Stars might have had the most to lose if secrets were exposed. But entertainment executives — for whom job security is notoriously fleeting, and reputations as evanescent as last weekend’s box office — had ample reason to think others were plotting against them, or at least rooting for them to fail.

Back in the golden days of Hollywood, the studios had in-house detectives to erase the indiscretions of their bosses and stars. In the era of outsourcing, Mr. Pellicano set himself up as a fixer for hire, on a $25,000 nonrefundable retainer, creating a character to suit whatever his clients imagined him to be: old-time shamus or shady ex-spy, geeky technophile or mobbed-up muscle. His constant allusions to being “connected,” to his roots in Al Capone’s old stomping ground of Cicero, Ill., nurtured what, for some customers, was a captivating aura of violence.

From his suite on Sunset Boulevard, he maneuvered his way into the confidences of the powerful and fabulous, peddling information as ammunition or as protection from the unintended consequences of their lives.

A Penchant for Celebrities

He started out in Chicago in the 1960s tracking deadbeat customers for the Spiegel catalog, then hung out a shingle as a private investigator. From the beginning, he made celebrity clients his calling card. When the remains of Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, the producer Mike Todd, disappeared from a Chicago cemetery in 1978, Mr. Pellicano led the police, and news cameras, right to them.

He also acquired a mastery of audio technology, and was constantly quoted in Watergate-era articles about detecting wiretaps and electronic bugs. When a tape said to be of the exiled shah of Iran surfaced, The Times hired Mr. Pellicano, “one of the country’s top voice analysis” experts, to authenticate it.

For a private eye selling himself to celebrities, however, Chicago was not as target-rich as Los Angeles. Mr. Pellicano moved west to help John Z. DeLorean, the carmaker and playboy, fight cocaine charges, and the acquittal instantly established him in town.

As his business exploded, so did the range of services he offered. It was an open secret that the menu included wiretapping.

Eavesdropping was nothing new in Hollywood. As early as the 1950s, a small industry of security companies was kept busy sweeping for bugs in the homes and offices of studio executives and cheating husbands. But by the mid-1990s, Mr. Pellicano had revolutionized the practice, inventing a virtually undetectable wiretapping technique.

His wiretaps were installed not inside a target location but outside, in phone company junction boxes, and connected over telephone lines either directly to his office or to a laptop in a nearby apartment that recorded every call. Eventually, he devised a way to operate many wiretaps at once. By the late 1990s, to hear him tell it in conversations with clients, he was tapping phones all over town. (His lawyers did not respond to messages requesting comment.)

Mr. Pellicano’s association with Bert Fields, a litigator known for his confrontational style, gave him entree to a client list studded with stars like Tom Cruise and executives like Mr. Ovitz and the talent manager Brad Grey.

“I don’t care how you get information,” David Moriarty, a lawyer helping Mr. Fields defend Mr. Grey, told Mr. Pellicano in one recorded conversation.

“You’re my kind of man,” the private eye shot back.

(Asked for comment, Mr. Moriarty’s lawyer said that the quotation had been taken out of context, and that prosecutors had cleared his client of any wrongdoing.)

In fact, two cases involving Mr. Grey produced roughly three-quarters of the documents in the Pellicano file.

When the comedian Garry Shandling went up against Mr. Grey, his longtime manager, in 1998, Mr. Fields took Mr. Grey’s case, and before long, the detective was running what prosecutors say were illegal checks on witnesses like Mr. Shandling’s accountant, personal assistant and girlfriend.

Two years later, Vincent Zenga, an upstart screenwriter-producer known as Bo, sued Mr. Grey over credit and profits from the hit horror spoof “Scary Movie.” During a deposition, Mr. Grey squirmed in the witness chair as Mr. Zenga’s lawyer depicted him as an unethical exploiter of other people’s work.

After two grueling days, one of Mr. Grey’s lawyers e-mailed a colleague with a simple message: “Brad wants to hire Anthony Pellicano to investigate Zenga.” The lawyer added a request, to “see if we asked Zenga for his cellphone no. during his depo.”

Mr. Pellicano was quickly on the case, wiretapping Mr. Zenga. What Mr. Pellicano heard was helpful not only in defeating Mr. Zenga in court; it could also be used to stymie his career. When Mr. Pellicano mentioned that Mr. Zenga was doing deals with the Imagine and Miramax film companies, one of Mr. Grey’s lawyers responded, “We ought to be able to put a stop to that.”

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Grey said he believed that everyone on the legal team at Mr. Fields’s law firm, including Mr. Pellicano, “was acting properly, and I knew nothing of the improper activities now alleged against him.” Mr. Fields’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael S. Ovitz saw threats coming from every direction.

In his prime, as head of Creative Artists Agency, he had been considered “the most powerful man in Hollywood.” By April 2002, his new talent and production company was falling apart even as he tried to sell it; his old protégés at Creative Artists were picking off his clients one by one; and he believed that his enemies were using the news media to broadcast and speed his undoing.

On the day he mysteriously asked Mr. Pellicano for a 30-minute meeting — one mentioned nowhere in Mr. Ovitz’s detailed appointment calendars for 2002 — another round of articles had reported the defection of the comedian and actor Robin Williams back to Creative Artists.

Mr. Ovitz later told the F.B.I. that he asked Mr. Pellicano to learn what would be printed about him in the coming months and to uncover embarrassing information about his enemies that he could use against them, documents show. Mr. Ovitz’s lawyer declined to comment for this article.

John McTiernan, the director of blockbusters like “Die Hard” and “The Hunt for Red October,” hired Mr. Pellicano to wiretap his producer.

In the summer of 2000, filming an ill-fated remake of the 1970s cult film “Rollerball,” Mr. McTiernan became convinced that the producer, Charles Roven, was undermining him with the movie’s financiers and executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

“I sort of would like to know what he’s saying to the studio, and if there is any place where he’s clearly saying one thing to the studio and saying something else to others,” Mr. McTiernan said in a conversation recorded by Mr. Pellicano.

But the detective offered only generalities. “Jesus Christ,” he said, describing his first round of eavesdropping. “I mean, scheming. Wriggling. Lying. Hypocrisy. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

When Mr. Pellicano complained that the sheer volume of calls meant that finding the most valuable information would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack, Mr. McTiernan asked if his computer could listen for the juiciest stuff, specific words or names.

“No, no, no, no, no. That’s in the movies,” Mr. Pellicano said.

Balking at the expense, Mr. McTiernan told Mr. Pellicano to take down the wiretaps. But he asked Mr. Pellicano to save the tapes — just in case.

Mr. McTiernan, who declined to comment for this article, became the first movie-industry casualty of the federal investigation, when he pleaded guilty last year to falsely telling an F.B.I. agent that he had no knowledge of any wiretapping by Mr. Pellicano and had never discussed it with him.

The Perfect Hollywood Persona

Hollywood is sustained by its own peculiar system of mutual advantage. There are the boldface names, their lives often complicated by overlapping personal and professional conflicts, who believe that one call to the right person (and a lot of money) can solve any problem. And then there are the service providers — the agents, lawyers, publicists, assistants and countless others — who stroke the egos of the people paying the bills and get to have their own egos stroked according to their proximity to celebrity. Mr. Pellicano’s consigliere persona, reinforced by the Italian opera on his telephone system, was a perfect fit.

The singer and actress Courtney Love called in 2001. She was fighting to get out of her record contract, fighting the surviving Nirvana musicians over control of the estate of her late husband, Kurt Cobain, and supporting her producer and boyfriend, James Barber, in a child-custody fight. She also feared that a disgruntled former assistant who had hacked into her e-mail account might publish her correspondence with friends like Drew Barrymore, Russell Crowe and even her psychic.

Ms. Love complained to Mr. Pellicano that previous private eyes had turned out to be overpriced frauds, wimps or geeks. She wanted someone who could do it all, she told him, who would use whatever tools it took to get results — from refinement to “baseball bats.” “And I need them all under one roof,” she said.

“Listen, Courtney, if you come to me, that’s the end of that,” Mr. Pellicano said. “My clients are my family, and that’s it.”

Ms. Love indicated her approval.

“There is no other way around it,” he said. “I’m very heavy-handed, honey.”

“I need heavy-handed, baby,” Ms. Love said. “I like talking to an Italian.”

“Sicilian, honey,” he corrected.

“Well, that’s even better.”

The tapes do not tell what Mr. Pellicano ultimately did for Ms. Love, who declined to comment for this article. But for stars who lived and died on image, perhaps his most valuable service was making sure a private problem did not metastasize into a public spectacle. In one conversation in 2001, the comedian and actor Chris Rock showed how attuned he was to the levels of outrage evoked by different types of scandal.

A Stirring of Ambitions

Mr. Rock feared that his rising stardom was being threatened by an accusation that an adulterous one-night tryst two and a half years earlier had not been consensual.

“I’m better off getting caught with needles in my arm, I really am,” he fretted. “Needles with pictures: ‘Here’s Chris Rock shooting heroin.’ Much better blow to the career.”

“I’m not going to let it happen,” Mr. Pellicano assured him. “Just stick with me, baby. I’ll take care of it.”

Mr. Pellicano read from the woman’s police report, saying he was not supposed to have gotten a copy, and then confided that the police were not taking her seriously. (No charges were brought. Mr. Rock declined to comment for this article.)

He also offered some unsolicited career advice, asking about Mr. Rock’s latest movie, a romantic comedy called “Down to Earth,” and cautioning him not to “get too fluffy” in choosing parts. “Look what happened to Richard Pryor,” he said.

Inevitably, Mr. Pellicano’s life stirred his own Hollywood ambitions. In 1993, he collaborated with the director Michael Mann and the writer Cynthia Cidré on a screenplay about a private eye who squashes tabloid stories, wiretaps his prey and charges a $25,000 nonrefundable retainer. (“We’re living in a society where the rich and famous think they can pay for and get away with anything,” one character observes.)

That project stalled, but in early 2002, Mr. Pellicano put together a pitch for a TV series he described as a “Sopranos” for Los Angeles. He sold it to Brad Grey’s company, producer of “The Sopranos,” which took it to HBO.

Worried that the network would rob him of credit and money, Mr. Pellicano received a mollifying call from Mr. Grey.

“They said that they will not give me executive producer credit,” Mr. Pellicano complained.

“Well, I will take care of that. What’s the next thing?” Mr. Grey asked.

“I have to have story credit,” Mr. Pellicano said. After all, he said, he had written much of the pilot script.

When Mr. Grey promised to remedy the situation — and assured him that a $15,000-per-episode fee was respectable in the TV market — Mr. Pellicano regained his usual bravado.

“You’re my friend,” he told Mr. Grey. “If you said, ‘Anthony, I get $10 million, you get $10,000,’ that’s it.” He added: “You are my friend forever. And if you called me up and said, ‘Anthony, we’re passing,’ I’d say, ‘O.K., Brad, what else is going on?’ ”

Still, a moment later, Mr. Pellicano could not resist complaining again about his fee.

“When I did the consulting for the script for Fox with Michael Mann, I got $250,000,” he said.

But that was for a film, Mr. Grey said, adding, “That’s a better business.”

Mr. Pellicano never got his series. It was rejected by HBO sometime in 2002.

Mr. Grey himself left TV for the movie business in February 2005, when he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures. Last week, in his statement, he said: “When you talked with Anthony Pellicano, you immediately saw he was a colorful character, which made his HBO series a great idea then. Ironically, it may be an even better idea today.”

Indeed, Mr. Mann never gave up on making a film about a Hollywood detective, and this month he announced a new script, set on the old MGM lot in the 1930s. Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star, Variety reported, as “the kind of detective studios once relied on to clean up the scandals” of their stars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/bu...licano.html?hp





Page Six Covers Itself, a Bit Painfully
David Carr

If you were a member of the Bancroft family in the midst of deciding whether to sell Dow Jones & Company to Rupert Murdoch, reading Friday’s New York Post might have made you choke on your bagel.

Page Six ran an extraordinarily long item — at around 680 words, it’s the gossip column equivalent of “Remembrance of Things Past” — describing an affidavit from Ian Spiegelman, a former writer for Page Six who was fired three years ago.

Mr. Spiegelman alleged, among other things, that his old boss at Page Six, Richard Johnson, accepted money from a restaurateur after friendly coverage and enjoyed a $50,000 bachelor party in Mexico thrown for him by Joe Francis, who brought the world the “Girls Gone Wild” videos.

Mr. Spiegelman also alleged that Col Allan, The Post’s pit-bull editor in chief, accepted some free hospitality at the local strip club Scores. (Whew: at The New York Times, our idea of living on the edge is a second trip to the afternoon coffee cart.)

The affidavit also renewed allegations that Post coverage has been manipulated to protect the business interests of its owner. An item on a Chinese diplomat was spiked, according to the affidavit, which further alleged that Page Six went easy on the Clintons after they had reached a truce with Mr. Murdoch.

Nobody likes waking up and seeing their name plastered all over Page Six, but for Mr. Murdoch, the much chattered-about item is remarkably ill-timed. He is in the midst of a public makeover from ruthless mogul to reverent steward of the news because he wants to buy The Wall Street Journal. So while there’s fun to be had with the allegations of payoffs and lap dances, it should be pointed out that the paper’s alleged behavior raises serious implications for Mr. Murdoch’s plans to buy The Journal.

But there’s plenty of time for that later.

Mr. Spiegelman’s allegations surfaced because Jared Paul Stern, another former reporter for Page Six, is seeking a settlement with The Post, which had suspended him after it was alleged that he tried to blackmail the grocery magnate Ronald W. Burkle. (Federal prosecutors declined to charge Mr. Stern). As part of the settlement negotiations, Mr. Stern sent along Mr. Spiegelman’s affidavit.

In some legal circles that would be known as setting the gun on the table. But then The Post reached across the table, grabbed the gun and promptly shot itself right between the eyes.

Under a herald of trumpets, “Lies & Smears Aimed at Post,” the newspaper then made some stunning admissions. The Post acknowledged that Mr. Johnson did accept money from a restaurant in 1997, $1,000 was used to pay for a big day of drinking by the staff.
The big party for Mr. Johnson held by a sex-entertainment entrepreneur was wanly defended by a spokesman, who said Mr. Johnson had paid for his own flight. The item also quoted Mr. Allan saying that, while he had gone to Scores, his behavior had been “beyond reproach” (which somehow defeats the point).

More important, the allegations that coverage in The Post was finessed to the advantage of the paper’s owner were not denied beyond a blanket characterization of the affidavit as “a tissue of lies” from a disgruntled ex-employee.

The Post had been in negotiations with Mr. Stern’s lawyer, Larry Klayman, about the possibility of a settlement, and it became clear they were not going to meet Mr. Stern’s terms, which included some kind of return for him to the paper. Mr. Allan, Gary L. Ginsberg, a high-ranking official at the News Corporation, and Howard J. Rubenstein, a longtime spokesman for the paper, decided that the affidavit would inevitably show up somewhere and decided to pull the trigger themselves.

There is some logic to The Post’s decision.

“The Post wanted to break their own story so their denial would not be relegated to the last paragraph of a story in some other newspaper where all they would get to say is, ‘We didn’t do it.’ ” Mr. Rubenstein said. “They wanted to portray what they claim are false accusations — well, mostly false — and control the context in which they appeared.”

Just as likely, Mr. Allan, a ferociously competitive journalist, could not stand to have such a grand scoop appear elsewhere, especially in The Daily News, which has giddily covered every step of the imbroglio thus far.

“We thought it was appropriate to read the charges in their totality and reach the appropriate conclusions,” Mr. Allan said.

But one of the conclusions might be that the attentions of Mr. Johnson, an important franchise for The Post, can be bought, or at least rented.

“Well, if I were to hire only people that had never made a mistake, I would be working in an empty room,” Mr. Allan said, pointed out that Mr. Johnson had been reprimanded, whatever that means.

Mr. Allan also made clear that he was not about to sign off on any kind of arrangement that suggested he had endorsed kickbacks as a way of life at the newspaper or personally received favors, sexual or otherwise, allegations he flatly denies.

It may be entirely predictable that The Post would want to break the news first, but there’s something paradoxical here as well. In an effort to blunt charges that newspaper coverage is slanted to defend Mr. Murdoch’s business interests, The Post used its signature column to do exactly that. The item was a weird act of journalistic jujitsu, even in the greasy, payback-rich environment of New York media gossip.

“They say that there is no culture of vindictiveness or no culture of using the paper to business ends,” said Mr. Spiegelman. “But then again, that is exactly what they did on Friday.”

Here’s the part where the story walks back to Mr. Murdoch. Everything is a misdemeanor in the context of gossip world, but at a certain point, the conduct of Page Six begins to reflect on its newspaper host and its corporate owner.

It has been written here and elsewhere that Mr. Murdoch will eventually crack the Bancroft family’s hold on Dow Jones. And if an owner were of a mind to use control of media to advance his own interests, that company would be a pretty nifty item to have in the tool belt.

Sure, when most people read the item on Friday, they probably just shrugged and said, “It’s The New York Post. Whaddaya expect?” What would they say if it appeared in The Wall Street Journal?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/bu...ia/21carr.html





Meet the Murdochs
Richard Siklos

Last August, a management conference for senior executives of the News Corporation in Pebble Beach, Calif., featured a range of attention-getting speakers, like Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President Bill Clinton and the rocker-humanitarian Bono.

Less noticed was the presence of all six children of Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation’s billionaire chairman and chief executive.

A year earlier, Lachlan Murdoch, the oldest son, left his executive role at his father’s company and moved back to Australia. Around the same time, a dispute over its future control surfaced as Rupert Murdoch tried to have his two young children with his third wife, Wendi Deng, added as equal partners to the Harris Trust, the entity through which the family controls around 30 percent of the company’s shares.

The reunion of the far-flung Murdoch clan that weekend was an unspoken sign that a rift in the usually tight-knit family was on the mend. In addition to dining privately one night as a family, Mr. Murdoch’s four grown children, all of whom have children of their own, mingled at a tea party for Grace, 5, and Chloe, 3.

“We have come through some tough tests,” Rupert’s second daughter, Elisabeth Murdoch, said in an interview last week. “Not only have we come through it intact, we have actually solidified our position as a family — both on a professional level and a private level.”

The family’s cohesion has been under new scrutiny in the three weeks since the senior Mr. Murdoch, 76, offered $5 billion to buy Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Murdoch has long wanted to add the newspaper, America’s second largest behind USA Today, to his global assemblage of publishing, film, television, satellite and Internet businesses.

He has been making his pitch in a series of letters to members of the Bancroft family, who control 64 percent of Dow Jones voting stock and who have been stewards of the paper for nearly a century. One of his arguments is purely economic — a hard-to-beat 67 percent premium to where Dow Jones stock had traded.

But it may take more of Mr. Murdoch’s considerable powers of persuasion to convince the Bancroft family that one of the most important institutions in journalism will be in the good hands of another media family for years to come.

“We’ve got journalism in the blood,” Mr. Murdoch said in a recent interview. “I’ve tried very hard to imbue my own children with the same thing. It carries special responsibilities.”

His hope is that the Bancrofts will at least agree to hear him out, and possibly meet him and his grown children. Mr. Murdoch is in frequent contact with his children — just as he seems to be with each outpost of his business — and has discussed his ambitions for Dow Jones with them.

Current and former company executives have speculated that if the News Corporation is successful in acquiring Dow Jones, it could set the stage for either Lachlan, 35, or his brother James, 34, (or both) to return to the company in senior roles — a new wrinkle in the continuing parlor game.

After Lachlan left, Mr. Murdoch said he hoped he would return to the company one day. A person close to the News Corporation said Rupert mentioned the possibility of bringing James back to headquarters when laying the groundwork for a Dow Jones bid last year. Two people close to James, however, said he was committed to running the British pay-television service BSkyB and had no immediate plans to move to the United States.

Neil Chenoweth, a journalist with The Australian Financial Review who wrote a biography of Mr. Murdoch in 2002, said, “The children have always been very close to each other and to their father.”

There’s no question that for Mr. Murdoch’s children, particularly the three from his second marriage — Elisabeth, Lachlan and James — media is all in the family. Elisabeth and Lachlan both worked for their father but left the company after clashing with other executives and yearning to strike out on their own.

Elisabeth, 38, who is known as Liz, owns a burgeoning television production business in London and is credited with urging her father to buy the United States rights to the show that became “American Idol” — which is broadcast on the News Corporation’s Fox network and is the most popular program on television. Lachlan, who grew up at the company’s Australian newspaper arm, is on its board and has begun investing in his own media ventures. And James, chief executive of BSkyB, is considered by people in and outside the company as the most likely Murdoch to succeed their father atop News Corporation, a $26 billion conglomerate.

Others in the family also play roles. Prudence, 48, Mr. Murdoch’s oldest daughter from his first marriage, is married to a senior executive in the company’s Australian newspaper business. And Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, who was born in China, has taken an interest in its ventures there and helped negotiate the introduction of the company’s MySpace Web business with Chinese partners.

Elisabeth Murdoch seconded her father’s characterization of how family members were brought up, saying that as children they would read the newspapers around the kitchen table and discuss issues and ideas with him.

“It’s about what media can do in terms of empowering individuals and being aspirational and democratizing — that’s what’s always motivated my dad,” she said, adding that criticism that he has taken serious papers like The Times of London down-market after buying them are untrue.

“I think it’s nonsense about this dumbing down. He has respected media assets across the board and imbued life into them.”

So far, beyond an initial statement on May 1 that family members controlling 52 percent of Dow Jones voting stock opposed Mr. Murdoch’s offer, the Bancrofts have been quietly mulling their intentions. Mr. Murdoch made his offer in the belief that some of the three dozen family members who own a stake in the controlling block can be persuaded to come over to his side — particularly since the family has not played a hands-on role in running the company for decades and professional managers have struggled to translate its world-class journalism into a world-class business.

What the News Corporation might look like once Mr. Murdoch is no longer at the helm is unknown, but Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children are bound by a trust to keep the company together for decades, according to people familiar with its terms.

“It’s easy for the kids to be united right now,” Mr. Chenoweth said, “but give it 10 to 20 years as their interests diverge and the reality of shared power becomes more restricting.”

Mr. Murdoch has said he would eventually like one of his children to succeed him atop the company, though he has not designated a successor and says he will leave such a decision to the board. It is a subject Mr. Murdoch was reluctant to discuss for awhile — after Lachlan resigned in July 2005.

Lachlan Murdoch said publicly that he wanted to return to Australia — where he had run the company’s original newspaper business a grandfather, Keith Murdoch, had first built — to strike out on his own.

But with his departure, company officials also acknowledged that Lachlan had come to feel undermined by his father in making decisions.

His departure was not altogether different from Elisabeth’s resignation from a role at overseeing BSkyB’s programming in London in 2000. “For Lachlan and I, we had to do our own things,” she said.

James, she noted, had already done things on his own before joining the company, including starting a music label after dropping out of Harvard. And James seemed determined to be as autonomous within the company as he could, first by running its Star television businesses in Asia while based in Hong Kong and, since 2003, taking the top post at BSkyB, in which the News Corporation holds a major stake. James Murdoch declined to comment for this article, and Lachlan did not respond to requests for an interview.

When Lachlan left the company, word emerged that relations among all the grown children and their father had become strained by Mr. Murdoch’s efforts to have Grace and Chloe added to the Harris Trust. (The family’s 30 percent stake is expected to increase to 38 percent when the News Corporation soon completes a transaction to sell DirecTV to Liberty Media, giving Mr. Murdoch the most solid grip on the company’s control in years.)

As a consequence of his divorce in 1999 from second wife, Anna Murdoch-Mann, Mr. Murdoch’s four grown children were given clear and equal eventual control over the Harris Trust. While they were willing to grant their father’s wish that their new half-sisters be equal financial partners in the trust, the children and Mrs. Mann did not want to concede any decision-making control — or dilute their interests in the trust if Mr. Murdoch had any more children.

After several chilly months, the family quietly settled the dispute without lawyers or another intermediary. As part of the resolution, each of the Murdoch children were granted $100 million worth of News Corporation stock from the trust for their personal use — a distribution that occurred earlier this year.

As billionaire dynasties go, the grown Murdoch children have never acted particularly entitled. Elisabeth has pursued acquisitions and the kinds of envelope-pushing moves her father is often associated with to build her television production company, Shine, into one of the largest independent producers in Britain with some $250 million in revenue.

James has proved something of a chip off the old block, amid skepticism about nepotism, to increase the price of BSkyB’s stock by 24 percent since taking over in November 2004. He resigned from the News Corporation board over his father’s objections to try to demonstrate that he would be his own man at BSkyB.

The most technologically oriented of the Murdochs, he diversified that company’s video service into broadband and telephone, and has engaged in a corporate feud with Richard Branson of the Virgin Group. James also helped in getting his father to champion environmental issues and to announce that the News Corporation’s global operations would become carbon-neutral.

Lachlan has maintained low visibility since returning to Australia. He is said to be quite happy and to remain close to his father. A company he started, Illyria, is run from the head office of the News Corporation’s newspaper subsidiary in Sydney, and he is frequently seen coming and going. He recently took a stake in an Indian company that manages actors and athletes there.

One place the family is planning to see one another all together is at 100th-birthday festivities in two years that are being planned for Rupert’s mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who lives in Australia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/bu...21murdoch.html





Facebook Expands Into MySpace’s Territory
Brad Stone

With an ambitious strategy for expansion, Facebook is getting in MySpace’s face.

Facebook, the Internet’s second-largest social network, was originally popular on college campuses, but over the last year it has opened its dorm-room doors to all, and its membership rolls have exploded at triple-digit growth rates.

Now Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is inviting thousands of technology companies and programmers to contribute features to its service. They can even make money from the site’s users by doing so, and, at least for now, Facebook will not take a cut.

Some of the new features, demonstrated by software developers at a Facebook event here on Thursday, will allow members to recommend and listen to music, insert Amazon book reviews onto their pages, play games and join charity drives, all without leaving the site.

The result is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook’s 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events.

The move could foster some of the chaotic creativity that is more closely associated with MySpace, its larger competitor. It could also open the door to hazards like spam, and make Facebook’s identity less clear.

But Facebook is thinking big. In the parlance of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the company is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet. It wants to sit at the center of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC — while improving its own prospects for a lucrative acquisition or an eventual public offering.

“This may be the most important development since the company got started,” said Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook and one of its three board members. “But the company is taking a massive gamble. There are lots of things that can go wrong with this.”

Facebook, which is largely supported by advertising, has gained significant momentum over the last year. Since the site opened up to nonstudents eight months ago, its membership has doubled to 24 million, according to the research firm ComScore. Users now spend an average of 14 minutes on the site every time they visit, up from eight minutes last September, according to Hitwise, a traffic measuring service.

MySpace remains nearly three times the size of Facebook, with 67 million active members — up from 48 million a year ago — who spend an average of 30 minutes on the site each time they visit. It has recently focused on entering new markets like Japan and China.

The two social networks have carved out contrasting, though shifting, reputations. MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, has fostered an anarchic aura with few restrictions on creativity, while allowing users to integrate tools from other companies into their pages, like slide show displays. Recently, however, the company has blocked the efforts of several companies to advertise to MySpace users or otherwise make money through those tools.

Facebook, on the other hand, has kept its members in something of a creative straitjacket. Users could not customize their pages or add tools created by other companies.

Those restrictions helped preserve Facebook’s clean, uniform appearance and reinforced its emphasis on offering practical ways to communicate online with friends.

It has also made Facebook appealing to some groups beyond its student base. For example, Facebook is in vogue in Silicon Valley tech circles. David Belden, a 32-year-old technology worker from San Francisco, says he checks Facebook several times a day but hardly touches his MySpace account. “MySpace is so messy and there’s so much spam. It’s not worth it,” he said.

Facebook wants to keep those faithful while turbocharging its growth by harnessing some of the magic of MySpace’s openness. It is also going one step further by allowing companies that contribute features to make money on Facebook through their own advertising or commissions on sales.

“You can build a real advertising business on Facebook,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on Thursday during his speech to more than 700 developers and journalists. “If you don’t want to run ads, you can sell something. We encourage you to do both.”

In its new effort, which was to be unveiled on the site Thursday night, Facebook will be relying on the work of entrepreneurs like Ali Partovi, the chief executive of iLike, a company in Seattle that gives users the opportunity to hear and buy the music their friends are listening to.

Facebook does not have a music feature, but iLike, which along with Amazon and Microsoft was one of 65 companies that appeared at Facebook’s event, is one of several that plans to make music-related tools available on the site.

If users choose to add iLike to their Facebook pages, the software will automatically see where they live and what bands and songs they say they enjoy. It will then recommend songs and local concerts.

ILike will get a commission if the user acts on either recommendation, and it will also show its own ads. “We are truly building an entire business within Facebook,” Mr. Partovi said.

The companies now working with Facebook assert that it is facilitating a deeper level of integration in the social network than MySpace currently allows.

PicksPal, another company that will work with Facebook, lets users predict the winners in sporting events and awards them points for being correct. The points can be cashed in for prizes. If Facebook users add PicksPal to their pages, their “bets” will be sent as a short message (“George has picked Cleveland over Pittsburgh”) to everyone in their network via Facebook’s news feed, which keeps users constantly updated on their friends’ activities.

“It’s exciting to build something that works so well in their world and to really engage in what was heretofore an off-limits, walled garden,” said PicksPal’s chief executive, Tom Jessiman.

Facebook hopes that thousands of outside companies will eventually build features for its site. One inevitable drawback is that Facebook pages will no longer all look the same. To preserve some of its uniformity, the company is asking developers to stay within certain lines — for example, preventing images from blinking or music from automatically playing on a Facebook page unless clicked on.

There are other potential pitfalls for Facebook as well. Spammers and other online miscreants might crack Facebook in the same way they have infiltrated MySpace, where many profiles do not represent real people and entreaties from attractive women mask advertisements for pornographic Web sites.

Facebook might also inadvertently turn itself into a launching pad for other companies that could eclipse it — in the same way that YouTube rose to prominence because MySpace users found it an easy way to add video to their MySpace pages.

MySpace continues to face that challenge and is now acquiring the photo-sharing site PhotoBucket for $300 million, according to two people familiar with the ongoing negotiations, because so many of its users have come to rely on it to store images for their MySpace pages.

When asked about Facebook’s plans, MySpace painted them as nothing new. “From MySpace’s first day, our members have had the freedom to create the experiences they want,” the company said in a statement. “We have always offered our users a blank canvas for their creativity and self-expression.”

Nevertheless, Facebook clearly has Silicon Valley-size ambitions that are pushing it to take big risks. Last year, according to published reports, Facebook turned down a $900 million acquisition offer from Yahoo.

“Although a lot of companies continue to approach us, we are not for sale,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who invested in Facebook and is a board member.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...25facebook.php





Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains
Noam Cohen

IF the open-source software movement were an upstart political campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers — the young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors, putting up signs.

In 2004, Mr. Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean, Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Mr. Dean, the people behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens — and what is owed to volunteer contributors — when an open-source project starts to become successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word.



In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of techies like Mr. Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate supporters for Mr. Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Mr. Messina, ran on Dec. 16, 2004.

“It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to — I don’t know what the highest was,” he said. “It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean campaign.”

The Firefox campaign has been very successful, according to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that directs the project.

“The best we can figure, 75 to 100 million people are using Firefox,” she said. “Those people did not get it in a box. That is 75 million decisions, somewhere around the world to put this piece of software on someone’s machine.”

According to outside estimates, Firefox has about 15 percent of the market, Internet Explorer has more than 78 percent, and Apple’s Safari a little less than 5 percent. Mozilla has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing. But a windfall came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. In the last two years, the deal has brought in more than $100 million. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

So far, no one has figured out how to balance keeping an open-source or collaborative project fully financed while remaining independent and noncommercial. Wikipedia, for example, holds occasional fund-raisers, while its leaders debate if it should take steps toward some sort of sponsorship or advertising.

Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year. The foundation plans to increase its work force, and to add some engineering capability. In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, also led by Ms. Baker, mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract. (The foundation’s 2006 tax return has not yet been made public, but Ms. Baker said the Google revenue will remain about the same.)

She described the decision to align with Google as an organic one that predates the official release of Firefox. “We had Google in a beta version for a long time, so we approached them first,” she said.

Mitch Kapor, who is on the Mozilla board, said that accepting a deal with Google was a no-brainer. “Always on my mind, in all my involvement is, how is it going to be sustainable?” he said. “I am a big believer that begging is not the right business model. When it began to become clear there was a business opportunity, in monetizing search in the browser, I saw this as a great opportunity.”



But with opportunities came changes. By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of “its arrangement and agreements,” Mr. Kapor said. (Google declined to comment for this article.)

Because transparency is one of the principles of the so-called Mozilla manifesto released in February, Mr. Kapor said, there was “some tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.”

Another complication for Mozilla, some critics say, is that it could be perceived as acting as an extension of Google. For example, they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

The exact nature of Mozilla’s relationship with Google has been good fodder for bloggers. When Mr. Messina recently posted a 50-minute video of his thoughts about Firefox development, the comments included a back and forth between Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation, and a commentator on the blog named Corey.

When Corey wrote that “it seems like half” of the top contributors to Mozilla “work directly for Google,” Mr. Dotzler responded harshly, dismissing the claim outright: “No one who has looked at the actual development of Firefox recently could say with a straight face that Google employees are top contributors to Mozilla.”

Finally, there is the problem of what Mozilla should do with the money, at least the portion that isn’t being reinvested in the Firefox. Throwing money around among volunteers can backfire, Ms. Baker said, though the foundation has been quietly assisting contributors who are hampered by poor equipment.

Instead, Mozilla’s solution is to put money into what Mr. Kapor calls “community purposes.” To that end, the foundation is looking for a new executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. “We go out and ask,” Ms. Baker said, “and even the community is not actually clear where large amounts of money should go.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/te...gy/21link.html





A Splash of Photo History Comes to Light
Randy Kennedy

At first glance the two pictures seem to be gorgeous anachronisms, full-color blasts from the black-and-white world of 1908, the year Ford introduced the Model T and Theodore Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term.

But they are genuine products of their time, rare ones, among the few surviving masterpieces from the earliest days of color photography, made using a process developed by the Lumière brothers in France and imported to the United States by the photographer Edward Steichen a century ago this year. They were taken by Steichen, probably in Buffalo, and are thought to be portraits of Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student who became his luminous subject for the portraits, which resemble pointillist miniatures on glass.

Almost as intriguing as the pictures themselves, however, is the story of how they recently made their way from a house in Buffalo, where they apparently sat unseen for decades, to the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the world’s leading photography museums, where they will be exhibited for the first time this fall.

Eastman House has a substantial collection of Steichen works, including 22 of the same kind of color photographs, known as autochromes. But when Anthony Bannon, the museum’s director, received a call last summer from a Buffalo lawyer, who said his client, Charlotte Albright, a 96-year-old painter, wanted to donate three examples of what were probably antique glass-plate negatives, Mr. Bannon assumed they were the works of her mother, Charlotte Spaulding.

That would have been an important find in itself. Spaulding had a brief career as a photographer and member of the influential scene known as the Photo Secession, led by Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. Then she put down her camera for good in 1910 after marrying Langdon Albright, the son of a prominent Buffalo industrialist, John J. Albright, an early benefactor of what is now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

In August Mr. Bannon drove to Buffalo to meet the lawyer, Robert J. Plache. Because of the two men’s erratic schedules, they arranged on the fly to meet in the parking lot of an ice cream parlor in a Buffalo suburb, where Mr. Plache emerged from his car with a plastic-wrapped package.

Upon opening it, Mr. Bannon saw that one item inside was a Spaulding glass-plate negative. Then, almost immediately, he realized that the other two 5-by-7-inch pieces of glass, portraits of a beautiful young woman in an Edwardian gown and pearls, were not.

They were Steichens, one of them signed.

“And I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ ” Mr. Bannon recalled dryly in a recent interview.

Steichen was hugely influential during his lifetime, serving for almost two decades as the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Although his reputation dimmed after his death in 1973, it has surged back. In February 2006 one of his platinum prints, “The Pond — Moonlight,” made in 1904, set an auction record for a photograph, selling for almost $3 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

“It is so rare that one has a chance to add imagery to an artist’s oeuvre, never mind one of the stature of Steichen,” Mr. Bannon said. “You think the ground has been pretty well covered, and then you find something like this.”

Mr. Plache, speaking on behalf of Mrs. Albright, said that she was unable to conduct an interview about the photographs, which probably came into her possession after her mother’s death in 1939. But as far as anyone associated with Mrs. Albright knows, she never displayed them and they were kept in a cupboard or closet in her house for decades. It is unclear whether she knew that two of the plates were Steichen photographs and not works by her mother.

Mr. Bannon said that because the photographs had sat for so long out of the light, their colors remained particularly vivid. “They’re in just as perfect a shape as you could expect from something from almost a century ago,” he said.

Autochromes are positive images, meaning they are unique and not negatives that can be used to create prints. They were made using a complex process in which tiny dyed grains of potato starch were spread across a piece of glass and light was passed through them to a photo-sensitive plate.

The three colors of the starch grains — bright blue-violet, bright orange-red and Kelly green — worked together to produce a wide range of realistic-looking colors, in the same way that combinations of red, blue and green dots produce a color-television picture.

“If you did it right, you had the basic colors you were looking at when you took the picture,” said Mark Osterman, the photographic-process historian at Eastman House.

Unlike most other antique prints, autochromes are usually displayed with a light source behind them, allowing their colors, which are dim in regular light, to shine through the semi-transparent glass or to reflect onto a mirror. But prolonged exposure to light can wash out the images. After Eastman House displays the pictures they will be returned to storage. (The pictures will be exhibited on a light table sometime in October, although a date has not been set.)

Mr. Bannon said it was hard to estimate what the market value of the pictures might have been had Mrs. Albright put them up for auction, but he believed that each probably would have generated six figures. The only other known example of a Steichen portrait like them, perhaps from the same session with Spaulding, is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mr. Bannon said.

Hans P. Kraus Jr., a Manhattan photo dealer who just mounted an exhibition of antique autochromes by Stieglitz and other Photo-Secession artists, said that Steichen autochromes rarely appeared on the market. The last one he remembered seeing, years ago, was a portrait of J. P. Morgan.

As Mr. Bannon recounted the handoff of the autochromes, he was asked whether he went into the ice-cream parlor for a celebratory cone after he knew exactly what he had in his possession. He said it didn’t even cross his mind.

“With a couple of century-old autochromes in my car, I wasn’t going anywhere but directly back to the museum,” he said. “And I was driving very, very carefully.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/ar...gn/21stei.html





Venezuela Court Orders Troops to Take TV Station

Venezuela's top court on Friday ordered the Defense Ministry to take control of installations of an opposition television station amid a show of military force before the station's controversial closure.

President Hugo Chavez's decision to close the RCTV television channel, which he accuses of backing a 2002 coup against him, has prompted international condemnation and several demonstrations.

Venezuela's Supreme Court ordered the military to "guard, control and monitor" some of the station's installations and equipment including transmission equipment and antennas throughout the country.

An RCTV source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said staff at the station believed troops would take over the station's Caracas headquarters.

The court determined that the government must take RCTV's broadcast equipment to ensure a smooth handover to a state channel that will replace RCTV with broadcasts promoting the values of Chavez's socialist revolution.

A Defense Ministry official said he had not seen the court decision. An RCTV lawyer declined to comment on the issue.

The decision came hours after a convoy of troop carriers, motorcycles and armored anti-riot vehicles patrolled the highways of Caracas in what authorities called an effort to deter any disturbances by opposition demonstrators.

Chavez, clad in military fatigues at the inaugural flight of Sukhoi fighter jets bought from Russia, said the country was ready for any attack by "the oligarchy," a rich, pro-U.S. elite which he says RCTV epitomizes.

"We will be on alert, we are always on alert. Whatever flares up, we will snuff it out," he said.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution against the "transgression of freedom of thought and expression" in Venezuela. A protest in Caracas on Saturday attracted tens of thousands of people.

Chavez's critics say he has sought to build a Cuban-style system in Venezuela, accusing him of politicizing the military, judiciary and oil industry of the OPEC member country.

Political analysts have often identified Venezuela's critical media as the main obstacle to Chavez following the model of his mentor -- Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

The government has repeatedly warned that opposition demonstrators are preparing a "destabilization campaign" to spark street violence as RCTV loses its license.

"Minority groups cannot go against the will of the majority of the Venezuelan people to create uncertainty in the case of RCTV's license," Defense Minister Raul Baduel told state news agency ABN on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Rondon)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...052502468.html





Journalists Quit Over Censorship
Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Kate Connolly in Berlin

A group of journalists at a state-controlled broadcast news agency in Russia have resigned en masse in one of the few open rebellions in recent years against censorship imposed by the Kremlin.

Eight reporters from the Russian News Service said they could not work under new rules that required them not to interview or mention opposition leaders such as Garry Kasparov and to ensure 50% coverage of "positive news".

In an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag yesterday, Mr Kasparov praised the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for being the first European leader to confront Vladimir Putin when she complained at last week's EU-Russia summit that opposition leaders had been prevented from travelling to the Volga city of Samara for a demonstration coinciding with the summit.

"This was the first time that a European leader delivered such a serious reprimand to Putin and with that she put Putin in an extremely awkward position," he said. "After all, he's not used to being so blatantly criticised. Merkel was very right to confront him about the human rights situation in Russia."

He added: "Samara was a turning point ... [it] is the heartland of Russia. It was here that she delivered her verdict."

With the exception of one vibrant radio station, Ekho Moskvy, Russia's broadcast media has largely been transformed into a propaganda machine since Mr Putin came to power in 2000.

Yesterday, about 300 demonstrators gathered in Moscow to protest against the increasing censorship.

Artyom Khan, one of the reporters who resigned, said restrictions were introduced when new management was imported last month from Channel One, the state television station that documents Mr Putin's every move.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/art...084226,00.html





Catholics Say Blog Spreads ‘Slander’

Paper lashes out at documentary alleging Church cover-up of sex abuse

Italy’s leading Roman Catholic newspaper lashed out at bloggers on Saturday for spreading “slander” by posting a BBC documentary that alleged a Church cover-up of child sexual abuse.

The documentary aired on the BBC in October, but never in Italy. The bloggers translated it and it now ranks as Google Video Italia’s most popular item.

“We did the patient work of translating and subtitling it to fill this shameful gap,” they wrote at http://www.bispensiero.it/.

Newspaper Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian Conference of Roman Catholic bishops, slammed the web version in a front-page editorial headlined “Infamous Slander Via Internet.”

The BBC documentary examined what it described as a secret document written in 1962 that set out a procedure for dealing with child sexual abuse within the Church.

It imposed an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest and any witness, a policy the BBC documentary said was meant to protect the priest’s reputation during the investigation but “can offer a blueprint for cover-up.”

Avvenire called the documentary “a potpourri of affirmations and pseudo-testimony that were at the time publicly repudiated” for being false and misleading.

The Roman Catholic Church has been hit in several countries, including the United States and Ireland, by lawsuits and allegations of sex abuse by priests.

British bishops last year criticized the BBC, saying it should be “ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict.”

Before being elected pope in 2005, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department that enforces doctrine.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, writing on behalf of the British bishops, has said the original document in question was concerned not directly with child abuse but with the abuse of the confessional by a priest to silence his victim.

The document was revised in 2001 to deal more specifically with sex abuse cases but still remained secret, Nichols said. He added Pope Benedict had worked to punish offenders.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18756623/





Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs
Edward Rothstein

The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.

But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.

Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.

There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin’s theory — which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species but also cultures (which is why “primitive” cultures were long part of its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.

The Creation Museum has a similar interest in dramatizing origins, but sees natural history as divine history. And now that many museums have also become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old and was created in six days?

Mark Looy, a founder of Answers in Genesis with its president, Ken Ham, said the ministry expected perhaps 250,000 visitors during the museum’s first year. In preparation Mr. Ham for 13 years has been overseeing 350 seminars annually about the truths of Genesis, which have been drawing thousands of acolytes. The organization’s magazine has 50,000 subscribers. The museum also says that it has 9,000 charter members and international contributors who have left the institution free of debt.

But for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden’s dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but “to ‘talk’ to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.”

Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming offers “silent testimony to God’s worldwide judgment,” not because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished — somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah’s flood. Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.

The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.

The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

But given the museum’s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?

In the museum’s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?

But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.

The Creation Museum opens Monday at 2800 Bullittsburg Church Road, Petersburg, Ky.; (888) 582-4253.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/ar...hp&oref=slogin





Nearly complete

India Works to Shield Traditional Knowledge from Modern Copyrights
PBS

A new digital library in India is safeguarding ancient knowledge from patents, which can force royalty payments for knowledge that is common in that part of the world. NewsHour correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from New Delhi.

RAY SUAREZ: Now, safeguarding ancient knowledge in a digital library in India. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from New Delhi.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, NewsHour Correspondent: The healing art of yoga goes back thousands of years in India. But over the past three decades, it's become a billion-dollar industry in the U.S. Yoga guru Balmukund Singh is proud of the Indian export, but when he hears that some asanas, or postures, have been copy-written by Indians who have moved to the U.S., Singh gets, well, forgive me, tied up in knots.

BALMUKUND SINGH, Yoga Guru (through translator): This is our cultural heritage. It's ours. How can anybody else patent this? If they invent it, they can patent it. But this is originally an Indian thing. Our sages long ago developed and demonstrated it.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It's not just yoga. In 1997, a Texas company got a patent on basmati rice, which meant that it would get a royalty payment when anyone else sold rice by that name. The Indian government filed 50,000 pages of evidence to show that basmati rice grown in India for centuries was essentially the same stuff. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finally revoked the basmati patent in 2001.

India's markets are filled with herbs and plants that, over the centuries, have been concocted into remedies for almost every ailment. It's a medicine chest that Dr. V.K. Gupta says is raided all the time by companies and individuals in the West.

Elements of Indian culture

V.K. GUPTA, Director, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library: Every year, at least 2,000 wrong patents are getting awarded on India's system of knowledge, like turmeric for wound healing, which should not get granted.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The turmeric refers to is a mainstay of Indian cooking, but for centuries turmeric has also been used for medicinal purposes, applied to skin rashes and wounds.

In the '90s, two Indian-American university researchers got a U.S. patent for turmeric, saying they've discovered its wound-healing properties. Once again, India's government fought to have the claim invalidated.

Dr. Gupta says the problem is patent offices depend on accessible, understandable documentation to check on the validity of a claim. And that's just what India's government, under his leadership, aims to provide.

It's called TKDL, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. The ambitious project began in 2002 and is transferring 5,000 years of ancient texts onto a digital database in Hindi, English and eventually French, Spanish and Japanese.

Dozens of scholars spend their day pouring over photocopies of ancient manuscripts. They'll eventually catalog architecture, music and the arts, but the first task is formidable enough: medical knowledge. There are three main healing traditions reflecting India's varied history and geography.

There is Unani, a system begun in ancient Greece, developed later by Arabs, and brought to India by traders and rulers. Unani texts can be in Persian, Urdu, or Arabic, all sharing the same script.

Nearby are desks for Siddha, a medical science developed in south India. These texts are in Tamil. On the other side is Ayurveda, in the ancient language of Sanskrit. Tens of thousands of drug formulations, or ingredients, are buried in verse, says Dr. Jaya Saklani Kala.

Archiving 30 million pages

DR. JAYA SAKLANI KALA, Ayurvedic Physician: Earlier, what the teachers, arajayas, used to do was, they used to transfer the knowledge orally.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: So it was put into verse form so that the students could read them?

DR. JAYA SAKLANI KALA: Easily memorize them. Later on, it was penned down.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Some 30 million pages will eventually go from pen to hard drive. If a patent office in the West gets an application, they'll be able to check this new library for existing knowledge, or prior art, before granting a patent.

V.K. GUPTA: Through the route of TKDL, now we are giving access to the patent offices, several patent offices we are in dialogue with -- instead of stealing, we want to have a system when both collaborate with each other.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Not everyone is that optimistic. There's worry that putting the knowledge in one place will make it easier for those looking to steal ideas. And when there is a false patent claim, poor countries simply won't have the means to challenge it, says Devinder Sharma, an activist on biotechnology issues.
Preventing exploitation

DEVINDER SHARMA, Trade Policy Activist: Thousands of patents are being drawn every week in America on plant-based remedies and plant-based products. What happens is that, when the company draws a patent, you know, and somebody challenges it, then you have to go on building up a huge battery of, you know, not only lawyers with them, but also a whole lot of research to challenge those cases in America.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For his part, Dr. Gupta says patent offices will be better able to police false patent claims themselves by using the new library.

V.K. GUPTA: No patent examiner would ever like to grant a wrong patent. It is not in his interest.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: At the same time, he says access to the library will be strictly limited and regulated to prevent unscrupulous exploitation.

V.K. GUPTA: We will draw experts from all disciplines. Our view is for every country who is the holder of such resources must designate a national competent authority of experts and that authority must negotiate with the user of that knowledge so there is some level playing field.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ultimately, Dr. Gupta hopes joint projects with drug and biotechnology companies can revitalize research in India's traditional systems, which languished under British colonial rule. In time, he says, the marriage of ancient plant-based remedies, the library will catalog at least 150,000 of them with modern biotechnology, and create effective new drugs for the world and an economic bonanza for India.

Step one in all of this: The library on traditional medical knowledge, including yoga, is expected to be complete by the end of this year.

For an mp3 of this report, click here. – Jack





Google to Scan 800,000 Manuscripts, Books From Indian University
Nate Anderson

Need to dig up some information from a centuries-old text on ayurvedic medicine? Soon you'll be able to do so from the comfort of your living room. Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

"Written in both papers and palm leaves, there are around 100,000 manuscripts in our library, some dating back to the eighth century," said the vice chancellor of Mysore. "The effort is to restore and preserve this cultural heritage for effective dissemination of knowledge." He also added, cryptically, that the University plans to "patent them before making them available on public domain."

Google has been aggressively expanding its Book Search program to include non-English library materials. It recently announced a deal with the University of Lausanne to scan a large collection of French-language works, and the new partnership with Mysore will digitize works in Sanskrit and Kannada. These schools lack the fear of Google displayed by the French government, which has so far introduced projects like Gallica and Quaero to challenge the search giant without any apparent success.

India has become increasingly important to Google in the last few years. The company opened a billion-dollar data center in Andhra Pradesh, and it recently announced the availability of Google News in Hindi. But how will the might of Google's technology fare when confronted with handwritten Sanskrit?
How steady is your hand?

Making an archive like this useful to scholars will involve using optical character recognition to translate the handwritten texts into searchable characters—and it's a tough task. Our own Jon Stokes has done extensive research in this area and says, "The hard part about doing a project like this lies not so much in the actual digitization of the page images, but in doing OCR on a handwritten script. OCR can work quite well on handwritten manuscript pages, if the handwriting is regular enough. Researchers doing this stuff with Greek manuscripts have gotten some good results, but again only on regular hands."

Google has developed open-source tools like OCRopus to address these problems. The new project is built on Tesseract, the company's open-source OCR engine, and it adds a handwriting recognizer and "novel high-performance layout analysis methods." The research is clearly of more than academic interest to Google. As it expands its digitization efforts, OCR is the only feasible way to convert handwriting into text on such a massive scale. But the problems go beyond the actual character recognition—storage and markup of the data is also a problem.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was founded in 1987 with the aim of providing SGML-compliant, machine-readable texts for humanities scholars and social scientists. The organization's "P3" text encoding guidelines have been in use since 1994 in a range of digital library and manuscript encoding projects, but marking up documents into a TEI-compliant format is a challenge.

If Google is using the OCRopus project to do the handwriting recognition, then the engine is probably going to generate text encoded in the HTML format. "HTML is fine if you're making the texts directly available online," Jon says, "but the Holy Grail is really to do automated capture of handwritten texts into some TEI-compliant flavor of SGML. Once the text is marked up with TEI tags, you can output to HTML or any other format from that. You can also let scholars come behind the OCR engine and do things to make the marked-up version more useful, like tagging proper names, changes in hand or ink color, supralinear and marginal corrections, and so on."

Until that Holy Grail is found, hand-coding of handwriting remains the only solution.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...niversity.html





Indian Dealers are Squealers Over Microsoft Piracy Raids
Austin Modine

Computer dealers in Gujarat, India held a one-day strike to protest ongoing anti-piracy raids from Microsoft.

India news portals itVARnews and CIOL report about 350 dealers joined in a statewide bandh (that's a general strike) initiated by Surat-based South Gujarat Information Technologists Association (SITA).

This month, six PC dealers in Gujarat received notices from Microsoft for selling pirated copies of Windows. Microsoft demanding a payment of 200,000 Rupee ($4,955) and a fine of 1,600,000 Rupee ($39,638) if the vendor continued to sell pirated copies of the OS.

Microsoft conducted the raids by sending a dummy customer into the stores asking for a copy of Windows be installed on their PC.

The resellers are demanding an end to Microsoft's OS offensive.

"We are not against piracy but against the way Microsoft is working to stop it," SITA president Bharat Randheri told itVARnews. "Moreover, if they want to do business in India then they should change their prices and policies according to the Indian market. We are the one who are promoting their products in the market and if they will behave in such a rash manner with us then we will stop business with them.”

One retailer told CIOL that they are just doing a service to the customer by installing illegitimate copies of the OS.

"Since we are are not charging anything extra for installing the software, it means that we are actually not trading in pirated software. For us this is just a sewa (selfless act) that we are offering to our customers. Besides, the pricing of their operating systems is way too high for the Indian markets."

The resellers have also planned boycotts against Microsoft. Those participating in the strike agreed to stop all purchases of Microsoft products for this quarter.

Brian Campbell of Microsoft India sees the raids as a firm, but loving hand; guiding the vendors to the world of IP Shangri-La.

"Microsoft, though its own efforts in partnership with other industry groups, is committed to increasing the understanding and appreciate for intellectual property rights and original software," he told CIOL. "Further, Microsoft is committed to working with the channel to help them understand the benefits of original software. We expect our channel partners to support us in further spreading the message of the value of original software among the end-consumers, and we will continue to support all initiatives to do so."
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200...est_microsoft/





Sprint Opens Pandora's Music Box
May Wong

Sprint Nextel has teamed with Pandora Media, a popular online music service, to deliver personalized streaming radio to its mobile phone users.

Pandora is a free Internet-based radio service that lets people create stations based on their favorite artists and other songs it finds that match in style.

The music service has attracted 6.9 million users since launching in November 2005 and was recently banned, along with a dozen other popular media Web sites, such as YouTube and MySpace , from the Defense Department's computer system because of network bandwidth concerns.

Making It Mobile
Pandora's Internet radio service now will be available beyond computers -- on Sprint beginning Wednesday. It will be free for the first 30 days of use but will cost an additional US$2.99 per month with a Sprint data plan.

The service will work initially on five phone models but will expand to all high-speed data phones sold by Sprint by the end of June, the company said.

Sprint is the first mobile carrier to offer Pandora, the companies said. However, if the Oakland, Calif.-based startup has its way, other cellular networks will follow suit.

"We knew that if we wanted to be radio with a capital 'R,' we have to be everywhere, and not just on the Internet," said Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "We knew we had to make it mobile."

Facing Royalty Fees
Pandora is expanding to other devices as well. Also starting Wednesday, its music streams can be directly tapped from Sonos' home digital music system.

Pandora, however, faces a potentially life-threatening expense of music royalty fees that a panel of copyright judges recently approved for Internet radio providers. The new royalty rates are set to kick in July 15 but are being contested by a coalition of companies, including Pandora, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) .

"If those rates don't change, business doesn't make sense for us anymore," Westergren said.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/57515.html
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