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Old 26-09-07, 08:35 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 29th, '07

Since 2002


































"No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them. Regardless of people's political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?" – Nancy Keenan


"I'm concerned about symbolism. This is not the type of message America needs to be sending to the world." – Dave vonKleist


"Sometimes we ask the driver to stop and get a sandwich, but mostly we eat whatever is backstage, a yogurt, a cookie. You know, whatever — a grape." – Janeta Samp


"I’m like, 'Sure, but what is he selling, the Magna Carta?'" – James Zemaitis


































September 29th, 2007





Demonoid Down

Demonoid is a BitTorrent tracker website. It was apparently set up by an anonymous Yugoslav known only as Deimos. The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. These torrents can then be searched and the content shared using the peer to peer BitTorrent protocol.

Demonoid is one of the largest BitTorrent trackers and its torrents are found on other BitTorrent search engines.

Demonoid has been down and the constant rumor is that Demonoid is out of business.
http://bu.bulicio.us/gadgets/demonoid-taken-down/





IsoHunt Takes Down BitTorrent Trackers in the US
Ernesto

Starting today, the Isohunt team will deny access to all US visitors on their TorrentBox and Podtropolis tracker. They are forced to take this action because of their involvement in a lawsuit initiated by the MPAA.

The IsoHunt crew released this statement today:

As of earlier today, we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers. This goes for ALL trackers (torrentbox, podtropolis) we run. This is due to the US’s hostility towards P2P technologies, and we feel with our current lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we can no longer ensure your security and privacy in the US. So, if you’re outside the US, you may notice less peers. We encourage you to add other public, unhampered trackers to torrents you post, in addition to Torrentbox and Podtropolis’s trackers.

IsoHunt is not alone in their battle with the MPAA. Last month TorrentSpy, another site named in the MPAA lawsuit blocked access to US users on their site. However, the takedown of IsoHunt’s trackers will have an even bigger effect on the BitTorrent community worldwide, especially because TorrentBox runs one of the biggest public BitTorrent trackers. As mentioned by the Isohunt team, this means that users outside the US will see less peers connected to their torrents which may result in slower download speeds.

The MPAA announced the lawsuit against Torrentspy, Torrentbox and Isohunt in February 2006. Isohunt owner Gary later told TorrentFreak that they will not bow down to the MPAA. Isohunt hired a top-notch lawyer, specialized in Internet copyrights. It now seems that this wasn’t enough to keep the trackers in the air. For now, the websites are still available to US visitors.

The MPAA argues that the sole purpose of these BitTorrent trackers and sites is to share copyrighted content. But they are wrong according to Gary, who said, “We process copyright takedown requests daily, and have done so for hundreds of requests in the past, if not thousands. We work with all copyright owners, and even the RIAA email us routinely. The MPAA is the only organization unwilling to cooperate with us.”

Luckily, quite a lot of torrents are tracked by more that one tracker these days. And if that doesn’t work there’s always DHT. You can read more about how to protect yourself from failing BitTorrent trackers in this article. Long live the hydra!
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-takes-d...entbox-070925/





Game over?

RIAA Changes Gears Just Before Hitting Brick Wall
Anders Bylund

Maybe you saw my diatribe against the Recording Industry Association of America earlier this week and shook your head at the assertion that the coalition has to change gears now. Well, the change is happening in Internet time, which is somewhere between "instantly" and "yesterday."

Today, Ray Beckerman's RIAA litigation blog noted that the attack lawyers' lawsuit boilerplate has changed dramatically, and no longer tries to pin a "making available" claim on the hapless defendant. In a nutshell, that claim used to be a central pillar in the RIAA strategy, because it's fairly easy to show that some files were made available for download from a given IP address. Easy money if the lawsuit were to go anywhere.

But few of them ever did, and many suits have been thrown out because it isn't actually illegal to have a pile of files ready for others to download. Someone actually has to download them, which is a much harder point to prove. Sony BMG, Warner Music, Vivendi's Universal Music, and EMI can't lean on that crutch anymore.

It's real. It's happening. There's no way the RIAA could afford to start many more lawsuits when the chances of winning dwindle to nothing.

Good riddance.

http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...-hitting-.aspx





MediaDefender’s Decoy Effectiveness on BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

MediaDefender’s email and anti piracy tool leaks gave the world an unique insight into the workings and the effectiveness of their BitTorrent decoy operations. So how effective were they? And which sites were best protected against these fake torrents? Let’s find out.

MediaDefender determines the effectiveness of their spoofs and decoys by analyzing the top search results for the file in question, mostly movies and music albums. If 2 out of 10 top search results are fake files spread by them, their effectiveness is 20% on that particular BitTorrent site. Their goals is of course to get as many fake files in there, hoping people will end up downloading useless data.

There is a lot of variance in the reported effectiveness between BitTorrent sites and the different decoy projects. We scanned through most of the reports and it seems that The Pirate Bay and Mininova were best protected against fake files whereas MediaDefender was more effective on sites like BiteNova and TorrentPortal.

Niek from Mininova, the toughest site to get onto according to MediaDefender, wrote a blog post in response to the leaked MediaDefender emails. He sums up some of the quotes that show how well protected Mininova is. Niek adds, “We can only be grateful for the many nice words from our friends at MediaDefender. All thanks go to our great moderating team, who did (and do) great work.”

The Pirate Bay always has been one of MediaDefender’s main targets because this site is often mentioned in the press. Unfortunately for MediaDefender The Pirate Bay is also one of the sites that is well protected against fake files.

In July, Brokep from The Pirate Bay already told us that they were doing all they can to block Media Defender from accessing their trackers. “We block them and some other torrent sites do as well.” he said.

This apparently annoyed MediaDefender, as we can see from one of their emails regarding the effectiveness of their decoys for Micheal Moore’s Sicko: “we still have no presence on Pirate bay which is a site they [Weinstein?] are likely watching as it was mentioned in the AdAge article they referenced.”

Here is an example of an effectiveness report for “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer” based on the top search results. Note that an effectiveness of 100% means that all the torrents that showed up in the search results (top 6/10/15) were fake.

BiteNova: 100%
Bittorrent.am 27%
Btjunkie 20%
Btmon 15%
BushTorrent 100%
ExtraTorrent 47%
Fenopy 100%
FlixFlux 23%
FullDLS 32%
IsoHunt 100%
Meganova 100%
Mininova 0%
Monova 35%
MyBittorrent 91%
NewTorrents 0%
Novatina 98%
PirateBay 0%
Snarf-it 74%
TorrentBox 32%
TorrentLocomotive 47%
TorrentPortal 100%
TorrentReactor 0%
TorrentSpy 4%
TorrentValley 77%
TorrentView 27%
Torrentz 22%
Underground 0%
WorldNova 97%
Yotoshi 92%


http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...-sites-070922/





BitTorrent Opens Subsidiary in Japan

BitTorrent Japan to be headquartered in Tokyo
Clement James

BitTorrent has established a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered in Tokyo.

The company said that BitTorrent Japan will address a growing demand for peer-assisted content delivery technology among Japanese content publishers and consumer electronics manufacturers.

Japan has some of the world's most advanced broadband and mobile networks, electronics devices and game consoles, as well as web services.

BitTorrent believes that there is high demand among content publishers and electronic software providers for BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA), a secure, managed peer-assisted networking platform that reduces bandwidth and content delivery costs.

BitTorrent DNA enables websites to provide a better end-user experience by adding speed, reliability and efficiency to their current content delivery infrastructure.

The company said that there is also high demand among Japanese hardware manufacturers to integrate BitTorrent's software development kit into next-generation consumer electronics devices.

BitTorrent is already working with Japanese device manufacturers such as Buffalo Technology and Planex Communications to integrate its technology into the latest network-attached storage devices, wireless routers and set-top boxes.

"We are intrigued by Japan's advanced broadband environment that exists as a result of innovation and competition among ISPs," said Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent.

"BitTorrent has the ability to leverage the capacity that exists within the Japanese internet to create great user experiences for online applications while dramatically reducing infrastructure costs for publishers."

The company believes that, although P2P technologies are still misunderstood as a result of being abused, BitTorrent's security, performance, efficiency and technical merits will become the leading peer-assisted delivery platform in Japan for on-demand video, software, and video games.

"Having a physical presence in Japan promises an unparalleled level of support to our Japanese partners and commitment to customer success," added Navin.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21...onichiwa-japan





"txtor" Tool Circumvents Basic Torrent Blockers
Jacqui Cheng

To the frustration of many students and other avid torrent downloaders, some universities and ISPs have been known to block the download of .torrent files in an effort to curb illegal file sharing. This quick and dirty method of filtering Internet content is usually done through the use of a proxy server that will look for a torrent mime-type in the file or, even simpler, the file extension itself. Although this method seems almost too simple to take seriously, enough admins have found it effective enough to justify its use.

That's why a group of developers launched txtor today, a site that makes it possible to download .torrent files as if they were text files. As the site explains, from the user perspective, the service functions very simply. Plug in the URL of a torrent file, and it's translated to a text file for you to download. For a moderately more technical explanation, the site merely takes the file and changes the mimetype and extension, then spits it back out at you as a text file in order to bypass proxy-level torrent file blocks. Then, all you need to do is change the file extension back from .txt to .torrent and open it up in your favorite torrent client. Based on our testing of txtor, we can say that the tool works exactly as advertised.

txtor does not, however, help to bypass more sophisticated methods of blocking torrents, such as deep packet inspection (DPI). Since DPI involves scanning the contents of a data stream (and not just file names or mime-types), an obvious sidestep such as txtor won't be able to elude it. Luckily for regular torrenters, most ISP haven't full deployed DPI gear just yet, save that required to fully comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

Because this "hack" is so basic, we wouldn't be surprised to see some equally basic torrent-blocking tools to catch up eventually. Simply blocking text files, however, certainly won't work (at least without irritating a large portion of an admin's user base), so it might prove to be a slightly bigger challenge than just blocking files with certain extensions. When it comes to P2P services though, it's safe to say that the cat-and-mouse game between clever developers and network admins won't be over anytime soon. If you're one of the unfortunate group behind a proxy server that blocks torrent files from being downloaded, txtor will probably do the job... for now, anyway.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-blockers.html





Copyright Lawyer Tells Universities to Resist "Copyright Bullies"
Nate Anderson

Wendy Seltzer, the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse and a former EFF staff attorney, gave a talk yesterday at Cornell (RealPlayer required) on "Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies." The bullies in question are the RIAA, and the issue is the recording industry's current campaign of both litigation and political pressure. Should universities assist the music industry in identifying the "pirates," or should they do everything in their power to resist?

The title of Seltzer's talk gives the game away. She believes that the mission of the university is to promote academic freedom, research, the testing of boundaries, and the learning of personal responsibility by students and researchers. An open network facilitates such things; one that is filtered and used to watch the activities of its users does not, in her view, produced the sorts of effects that universities want.

The campus has become the latest battleground in the war on file-sharing. The RIAA has taken its fight to the halls of Congress, where it recently failed to secure some legislation that would have required colleges and universities to implement content filtering solutions on their networks and would direct the government to produce a list of the top 25 infringing schools. "Why Congress should be getting into the business of naming names and pointing fingers is beyond me," Seltzer said.

The idea was shot down, but the RIAA has also embarked on an aggressive plan to sue thousands of college students into submission this year, and that plan continues to move forward. Universities, including Cornell, now routinely receive "pre-litigation" letters from the RIAA that contain only an IP address. The group wants universities to pass these letters on to students. The letters offer students the possibility of a several thousand dollars settlement or the more expensive alternative of going to court. If the letters don't produce a response, the RIAA then files a "John Doe" lawsuit and obtains a subpoena to force the university to turn over the student information (some of these subpoenas were recently quashed on technical grounds). Once that happens, a specific lawsuit is filed against the student.

Seltzer hopes to encourage universities to start challenging these tactics, especially challenging the subpoenas on the ground that they pose an "undue burden" to the university. While cost is certainly one factor here, the "burden" that Seltzer is primarily talking about is the effect that complying with the subpoenas has on the university's mission.

In her view, it makes universities take a stand as an adversary of students, since they are forced to turn over personal information shared with them only for reasons of education. It also curtails the openness of the university's network.

One questioner asked whether the issue wasn't complicated by the fact that students also live at the university; that is, the users of the network aren't simply doing academic research, and massive copyright infringement is no doubt going on at most universities. Seltzer responded by pointing out that universities already deal with legal and law enforcement issues on a regular basis, and they generally do so without tracking or monitoring their students. For instance, underage drinking can be a problem on most campuses, but few or no schools install cameras or other devices to detect underage drinkers. Part of letting students grow up, she said, was taking a step back.

Normally, that would also mean letting students pay the penalty for their mistakes, but Selzer doesn't believe that it is fair for a few students to be singled out for such draconian penalties while nothing happens to the vast majority of their peers. In addition to the severity of the statutory penalties for copyright infringement, there are the well-known evidentiary problems of linking an IP address to an individual.

It's an interesting talk for those on both sides of the debate, but especially for those in university administration across the country who have to confront these issues on a daily basis.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-bullies.html





P2P Services Slashed

During the 2007 China Internet Conference, a senior official from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) accused peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading of occupying too much of the Internet bandwidth, making it impossible to launch other new Internet services.

Han Xia, Deputy Director of Telecommunications Administration Bureau under MII, pointed out that many problems have appeared during the growth of Chinese internet industry. In Han's opinion, P2P downloading is one of the most serious problems.

Although the number of Chinese broad brand users is below the world's average level, the P2P fluxes in China are 3 to 4 times of those in the US. According to statistics from Chinese Internet service providers, P2P downloading accounts for 35 to 60 percent of the whole fluxes in the day and 50 to 90 percent during the night. For Chinese users, the Internet is used mainly for downloading movies and music.
http://www.china.org.cn/english/business/225782.htm





Did Music, Movie Labels Attack Pirate Site?

Swedish police are weighing charges for alleged efforts to disrupt Pirate Bay file-sharing site.
Jeremy Kirk

Swedish police are expected to decide later this week whether a criminal case is warranted against 10 major music and movie companies over their alleged efforts to disrupt the Pirate Bay, one of the largest file-sharing search engines.

If Swedish police decide to pursue a criminal complaint, the Pirate Bay will be spared the time and expense of pursuing its own civil suit against the companies, Peter Sunde, one of a small circle of volunteers in Sweden that runs the Web site, said on Tuesday.

The Pirate Bay, with an estimated two million daily users, is a search engine for torrents, or small files used to trade content between computers via a peer-to-peer (P-to-P) network. Media companies say the site is used mainly to enable the illegal trading of copyright files and have sought its closure.

But the Pirate Bay struck back last Friday, filing a criminal complaint in Sweden against content companies that hired MediaDefender Inc., a company that specializes in disrupting P-to-P networks. The Pirate Bay alleges that MediaDefender attacked its operations by distributing fake torrent files and other methods.

It is charging the media companies, which include the Swedish subsidiaries of Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, with infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks and other hacking and spamming offenses, according to its blog.

The complaint followed the damaging release of thousands of internal MediaDefender e-mails, which described in part how the company tries to foil file-sharing services. MediaDefender uses a software program that sets up fake user accounts and then distributes fake torrent files, which are designed to reduce the volume of copyright files being traded, Sunde said. The source code for that software, as well as the internal e-mails, are now being widely circulating on file-sharing networks.

The software can read "captchas," the strings of distorted numbers and letters designed to ensure that real people are using a Web site rather than an automated program.

The Pirate Bay says it matched IP (Internet protocol) addresses for some of the fake torrents to some of the internal e-mails, providing compelling evidence that MediaDefender was sending out fake torrents, according to Sunde.

The Pirate Bay blacklists IP addresses associated with fake torrents and also shares those lists with other torrent search engines, Sunde said. "We are very proactive when it comes to spam handling, but it's still a problem when they [MediaDefender] do it," he said.

Despite complaints from media and content companies, the Pirate Bay has continued to operate in Sweden. In May 2006, Swedish police seized at least 25 servers after a raid on five locations, but have yet to file charges. Swedish prosecutors have until Oct. 1 to file a criminal case, but Sunde said he expects the government attorneys to file for an extension.

Sunde maintains that the Pirate Bay is just a search engine and doesn't actually store any files, merely directing users to where files are located. "We are quite sure the Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden," said Sunde, who is based in Malmo, in the south of Sweden, and also runs a Web site consulting business.

As a precaution against future police action, Sunde said he knows the location of only one of the 40 or so servers currently powering the Pirate Bay. Some of those servers are now in countries outside of Sweden, he said.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...t/article.html





Majority of Films Watched Online are Not Through Video Sharing Site

9 billion films were watched online in July 2007 in the US alone, according to the latest figures from comScore Networks. The figure is up from around 7 billion in March, with 134 million people each watching an average of 181 minutes of video during the month.

Interestingly, just 27% of clips watched were through Google/YouTube, which nevertheless far outstripped its rivals - Yahoo nabbed a distant second place, serving up 4.3 percent of the clips, while Fox Interactive Media (MySpace), came in third with 3.3 percent. Viacom (3.1 percent) and Disney (2 percent) rounded out the top five. Google also ranked first in July in unique video viewers with almost 68 million, followed by Fox Interactive (35.8 million), Yahoo (35.3 million), Time Warner Inc. (26.6 million) and Viacom (22.6 million), comScore said.

That means over 50% of films watched online on either very small video sharing/hosting sites or on people's own sites.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1278/182/





Ohio Federal Judge Strikes Down Net-Censorship Law
Declan McCullagh

It's no surprise that politicians are rarely conversant with the limits on their legislating found in the U.S. Constitution. But it is worth noting when federal judges have actually read the First Amendment and strike down a law accordingly.

That brings us to Ohio's constitutionally impaired legislature, which enacted two laws that were touted as ways to protect children on the Internet but in reality would become a new censorship regime.

An Ohio federal judge on Monday struck down (see PDF) the state's combined "harmful to minors" law on the grounds that it ran afoul of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

2709.31(A) of the law generally says "no person" shall "disseminate" or offer to disseminate to a "juvenile" any material that is "harmful to juveniles." Ohio's House Bill 490 amended it by defining electronic dissemination as having "reason to believe that the person receiving the information is a juvenile."

You can see where this is going. Let's say that one-sixth of the Internet's users are minors. That means that for almost any Web site, assuming the audience is representative, the operator has reason to believe that something like one-sixth of them are under 18 years old. (There's another section that tries to limit that requirement's sweep, but in practice it wouldn't amount to much.)

Fortunately, U.S. District Judge Walker Herbert Rice realized this. Rice said the definition of "harmful to juveniles" does not by itself violate the First Amendment and that it does not violate the Commerce Clause.

But he ruled that, in practice, applying that definition to the Internet is overly broad. In particular, he said, sexually explicit conversations in adults-only chat rooms (where a minor sneaks in) could be prosecuted. It would "act as a ban to that segment of speech between adults which is protected by the First Amendment."

This is consistent with other judges' rulings on "harmful to minors" or "harmful to juveniles" Internet statutes. The 2nd Circuit overturned Vermont's; the 10th Circuit overturned New Mexico's. In this case, Judge Rice granted a permanent injunction. He had, by the way, already granted an injunction in the case based on the earlier version of the law, but the proceedings essentially restarted after the law was changed around four years ago.

The plaintiffs include the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and the Association of American Publishers, and it was brought by their trade association called the Media Coalition.

If the appeals court upholds this ruling, the Media Coalition may be able to get attorneys' fees--which amounted to a requested $488,601 in a similar Internet censorship suit in Virginia. And that's not even counting proceedings before an appeals court, which has already happened (briefly) in the Ohio case but didn't in Virginia.

The problem is that when Ohio politicians enact unconstitutional laws, and subsequently lose in court, taxpayers end up footing the bill. It would be a far more just system if politicians were held personally responsible for paying their fair share of a half-million dollar fine for their constitutional ignorance. I'm sure Ohio politicos would have no objection--right?
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-978...tml?tag=repblg





Company Will Monitor Phone Calls to Tailor Ads
Louise Story

Companies like Google scan their e-mail users’ in-boxes to deliver ads related to those messages. Will people be as willing to let a company listen in on their phone conversations to do the same?

Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., is introducing an Internet phone service today that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.

A conversation about movies, for example, will elicit movie reviews and ads for new films that the caller will see during the conversation. Pudding Media is working on a way to e-mail the ads and other content to the person on the other end of the call, or to show it on that person’s cellphone screen.

“We saw that when people are speaking on the phone, typically they were doing something else,” said Ariel Maislos, chief executive of Pudding Media. “They had a lot of other action, either doodling or surfing or something else like that. So we said, ‘Let’s use that’ and actually present them with things that are relevant to the conversation while it’s happening.”

The company’s model, of course, raises questions about the line between target advertising and violation of privacy. Consumer-brand companies are increasingly trying to use data about people to deliver different ads to them based on their demographics and behavior online.

Pudding Media executives said that scanning the words used in phone calls was not substantially different from what Google does with e-mail.

Still, even some advertising executives were wary of the concept.

“We can never obtain too much information from the targets, and I would love to get my hands on that information,” said Jonathan Sackett, chief digital officer for Arnold Worldwide, a unit of the advertising company Havas. “Still, it makes me caution myself and caution all of us as marketers. We really have to look at the situation, because we’re getting more intrusive with each passing technology.”

Mr. Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself.

Besides, Mr. Maislos said, he thought that young people, the group his company is focusing on with the call service, are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.

“The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,” he said.

Mr. Maislos founded Pudding Media with his brother, Ruben. Each had spent several years doing intelligence work for the Israeli military. Before Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos ran a broadband company called Passave, which he sold in May 2006 to PMC-Sierra, a maker of computer chips for telecommunications equipment, for $300 million. Richard Purcell, a former chief privacy officer at Microsoft, is an adviser to Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos said.

To give the ads greater accuracy, Pudding Media asks users for their sex, age range, native language and ZIP code when they sign up. For now, the company is running ads that are sold by a third-party network, but Pudding Media plans to also sell its own ads in a few months.

Advertisers pay based on how often a user click on their ads, and a spokeswoman said the rates were similar to the cost-per-click prices in Google’s AdSense network. Pudding Media plans to add other payment models, like charging for each ad impression or by the number of calls an ad generates to the advertiser.

As the company’s software listens in on conversations, it filters out explicit words in determining which ads to select, so that content and ads will not be shown with those inappropriate words. Pudding Media would not elaborate, beyond saying that these were “keywords with profanity and things you wouldn’t want a 13-year-old to hear.”

While the calling service only works through computers for now, Mr. Maislos said he saw the potential to use it with cellphones. The company is offering the technology to cellphone carriers to allow their customers to enjoy free calls in exchange for simultaneously watching contextually relevant ads on their screens. Callers can try Pudding Media at www.thepudding.com, dialing any number in North America. Because the service has so far been in a quiet beta test, the company would not say how many people have tried it so far.

Pudding Media is also trying to sell the technology to Web publishers and media companies that would like to offer readers free calls and content related to those calls. A news site, for example, could show only its own articles and ads to people as they talked to friends.

Mr. Maislos said that during tests he noticed that the content had a tendency to determine conversations.

“The conversation was actually changing based on what was on the screen,” he said. “Our ability to influence the conversation was remarkable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bu...hp&oref=slogin





Tech Wonders on Homeland Security Horizon


The "Nano Air Vehicle," or NAV (R) is powered by a two-stage rocket thruster
and carries interchangeable payload modules.


Jim Wolf

Americans are facing a brave new world of post-September 11 technology marvels that could soon find their way into billions of dollars of projected homeland security spending.

Gee-whiz know-how -- from swarms of tiny airborne sensors to ever-sharper satellite imagery -- is being developed by companies chasing potentially lucrative federal, state and local deals to address 21st-century security threats.

Already in use are such things as infrared cameras with built-in brains that capture license plate images and match them in milliseconds to police records of vehicles of interest to the authorities.

Such license plate recognition systems, fixed and mobile, already are stopping criminals in cars in New York City, Washington D.C. and 23 states, according to Mark Windover, president of Remington ELSAG Law Enforcement Systems, which is marketing its product to 250 U.S. police agencies.

"Seventy percent of all criminal activity can be tied to a vehicle," he said. "Had to get there, had to go home."

Remington ELSAG says its algorithms -- which turn images into data in the blink of an eye -- could guard airports, military bases and other federal facilities as well as crack down on the drug trade, robberies and other crime hinging on stolen cars.

In other surveillance developments, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, is defending a plan to make broader use of eyes in the sky that, until now, have mostly fed military and scientific needs.

"The use of geospatial information from military intelligence satellites may turn out to be a valuable tool in protecting the homeland," Democrats on the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this month.

But they voiced privacy and civil liberties concerns about the scheduled October 1 launch of the National Applications Office, a clearing house for expanded output of imagery to police, border security and other law-enforcement outfits.

"We are so concerned that, as the department's authorizing committee, we are calling for a moratorium on the program until the many constitutional, legal and organizational questions it raises are answered," Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and colleagues wrote on September 6.

Satellites, Tiny Aerial Vehicles

DigitalGlobe, a potential beneficiary of stepped-up demand for such products, launched a satellite this week that can daily collect up to 750,000 square kilometers of imagery able to pick out suitcase-sized objects. The WorldView-1 satellite is part of a U.S. program, dubbed NextView, designed to give government customers priority access.

Many of the gizmos under development will be pitched first and foremost to the Pentagon, which is increasingly trying to keep tabs on foes in urban and other hard-to-monitor settings.

Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by contract value, is working on a keychain-sized, remote-controlled aerial vehicle designed to collect and transmit data with military and homeland security uses.

Resembling the seed of a silver maple tree, the single-winged device would pack a tiny two-stage rocket thruster along with telemetry, communications, navigation, imaging sensors and a power source.

The nano air vehicle, or NAV, is designed to carry interchangeable payload modules -- the size of an aspirin tablet. It could be used for chemical and biological detection or finding a "needle in a haystack," according to Ned Allen, chief scientist at Lockheed's fabled Skunk Works research arm.

Released in organized swarms to fly low over a disaster area, the NAV sensors could detect human body heat and signs of breathing, Allen said.

"The NAV swarm can pinpoint the location of survivors, send the data back to the first responders and help concentrate rescue operations where they are most likely to be successful," he said in an e-mail interview.

Meanwhile, Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) is leading the technology segment of a multiyear plan to secure U.S. borders that includes database and intelligence analysis systems.

Projected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials to cost as much as $8.8 billion over the next six years, the system also features ground-based and tower-mounted sensors, cameras and radar plus high-speed communications, command and control equipment and devices that detect tunnels.

Airport screening is another area that could be transformed within 10 years, using scanning wizardry to pinpoint a suspected security threat through biometrics -- based on one or more physical or behavioral traits.

"We can read fingerprints from about five meters .... all 10 prints," said Bruce Walker, vice president of homeland security for Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N: Quote, Profile, Research). "We can also do an iris scan at the same distance."

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...43732820070923





Agent Accused of Using Homeland Data to Stalk Girlfriend

A special agent with the Department of Commerce has been charged with unlawfully accessing a database within the Department of Homeland Security to stalk his former girlfriend and her family. Benjamin Robinson, 40, of Oakland, Calif., was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose Wednesday in connection with allegations that he accessed a government database known as the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) at least 163 times to track a woman's travel patterns. He is being charged with making a false statement to a government agency, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Robinson faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and a fine of US$500,000.
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=49330





Sex in the Park, and Its Sneaky Spectators
Philip Gefter

WHY are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

If the social phenomena captured in these photographs seem distinctly linked to Japanese culture, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s images of voyeurs reverberate well beyond it. Viewing his pictures means that you too are looking at activities not meant to be seen. We line up right behind the photographer, surreptitiously watching the peeping toms who are secretly watching the couples. Voyeurism is us.

The series, titled “The Park,” is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, the first time the photographs have been exhibited since 1979, when they were introduced at Komai Gallery in Tokyo. For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Mr. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. “I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time,” he has said.

The oversize prints were destroyed after the show, and the series was published in 1980 as a book, one now difficult to find. Last year Mr. Yoshiyuki made new editions of the prints in several sizes, which have brought renewed interest in his work. Since April images from the series have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. He noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping toward them, followed by another.

“I had my camera, but it was dark,” he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Mr. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the ’70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them.

“Before taking those pictures, I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them,” Mr. Yoshiyuki wrote recently by e-mail, through an interpreter. “I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”

Mr. Yoshiyuki’s photographic activity was undetected because of the darkness; the flash of the infrared bulbs has been likened to the lights of a passing car.

“The couples were not aware of the voyeurs in most cases,” he wrote. “The voyeurs try to look at the couple from a distance in the beginning, then slowly approach toward the couple behind the bushes, and from the blind spots of the couple they try to come as close as possible, and finally peep from a very close distance. But sometimes there are the voyeurs who try to touch the woman, and gradually escalating — then trouble would happen.”

Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures do not incite desire so much as document the act of lusting. The peeping toms are caught in the process of gawking, focused on their visual prey. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, suggested in a telephone interview that this phenomenon was not uncommon in Japan. She cited the voyeurism depicted in Ukiyo-e woodblock erotic prints from 18th- and 19th-century Japan, in which a viewer watches a couple engage in sexual activity. “It’s a consistent erotic motif in Japanese sexual imagery and in Japanese films like ‘In the Realm of the Senses,’ ” she said.

Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work is important because “it addresses photography’s unique capacity for observation and implication.” She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. Weegee, for example, rigged his camera to capture couples kissing in darkened New York movie theaters. Walker Evans covertly photographed fellow passengers on New York subways.

“Like the work of these artists,” Ms. Irvine said, “Yoshiyuki’s photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, an increasingly rare commodity. Ironically, we may reluctantly accommodate ourselves to being watched at the A.T.M., the airport, in stores, but our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances doesn’t seem to wane.”

Mr. Milo also noted a connection between Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work and surveillance photography. “The photographs are specifically of their time and place and reflect the social and economic spirit of the 1970s in Japan,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Yet the work is also very contemporary. With new technologies providing the means to spy on each other, a political atmosphere that raises issues about the right to privacy and a cultural climate obsessed with the personal lives of everyday people, themes of voyeurism and surveillance are extremely topical and important in the U.S. right now.”

Yet earlier artists also went to great lengths to capture transgressive behavior. In the 1920s Brassai photographed the prostitutes of Paris at night; his camera was conspicuously large, but his subjects were willing participants. More recently, in the early 1990s, Merry Alpern set up a camera in the window of one New York apartment and photographed the assignations of prostitutes through the window of another.

Susan Kismaric, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, agrees that Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work falls into a photographic tradition. “The impulse is the same,” she said. “To bring forth activity, especially of a sexual nature, that ‘we’ don’t normally see. It’s one of the primary impulses in making photographs — to make visible what is normally invisible.”

“The predatory, animalistic aspect of the people in Yoshiyuki’s work is particularly striking,” she continued. “The pictures are bizarre and shocking, not only because of the subject itself but also because of the way that they challenge our clichéd view of Japanese society as permeated by authority, propriety and discipline.”

Sandra S. Phillips is organizing an exhibition on surveillance imagery for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year. “A huge element of voyeuristic looking has informed photography and hasn’t been studied as it should be,” she said. “Voyeurism and surveillance are strangely and often uncomfortably allied. I think Yoshiyuki’s work is amazing, vital and very distinctive.

“It is also, I feel, strangely unerotic, which I find very interesting since that is the subject of the pictures. I would compare him to Weegee, one of the great photographers who was also interested in looking at socially unacceptable subjects, mainly the bloody and violent deaths of criminals.”

The raw graininess in Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures is similar to the look of surveillance images, but there is an immediacy suggesting something more personal: that here is a person making choices, not a stationary camera recording what passes before it. As Vince Aletti writes in the publication accompanying the current show, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures “recall cinéma vérité, vintage porn, frontline photojournalism and the hectic spontaneity of paparazzi shots stripped of all their glamour.”

Surveillance images, so far, do not have that signature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/ar...gn/23geft.html





China Bans "Sexual Sounds" on Airwaves

China has banned "sexually provocative sounds" on television and pulled the plug on a show reconstructing infamous crimes by women ahead of a major Communist Party meeting next month.

The order, issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, is the latest in a raft of measures which have included axing reality shows featuring sex changes and plastic surgery and banning talent contests during prime-time.

"Sexually suggestive advertisements and scenes showing how women are influenced into a life of crime are detrimental to society," it said in a statement posted on its Web site on Wednesday, referring to its decision to axe "Red Question Mark," a crime documentary.

"Commercials containing sexually provocative sounds or tantalizing language as well as vulgar advertisements for breast enhancement and female underwear are banned, effective immediately," said the SARFT notice.

The watchdog also ordered an end to programs with titles including the names of "sex-related drugs, products or medical institutions."

A total of 1,466 advertisements worth 2 billion yuan ($246 million) in revenues had been stripped from China's airways since August, SARFT said, citing department statistics.

Since launching a campaign to purify China's state-controlled airways earlier in the year, the media watchdog's edicts have gained fever pitch in recent weeks, ahead of a meeting of the 17th Party congress, a sensitive five-yearly meeting at which key government leaders are appointed and national policy set for the next few years.

It earlier urged the country's increasingly freewheeling broadcasters to forgo vulgarity and bad taste in the pursuit of ratings in favor of providing "inspiring" content for the masses imbued with "socialist" values.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...T7470320070926





Nan Goldin Photo Yanked from Exhibit
UPI

Police have removed a photograph taken by a U.S. artist and owned by Elton John from a British gallery on the grounds it may violate child pornography laws.

The Nan Goldin picture, which depicts two young girls -- one of whom is sitting down with her legs apart -- was seized the day before it was to go on display at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, The Daily Telegraph said Tuesday.

The picture was slated to appear along with some of Goldin’s other work, but police removed it for fear it violated the 1978 Protection of Children Act, the British newspaper said. The photo was being examined by lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service.
Officials at the gallery confirmed the police were involved, but declined to say who had decided the picture should be removed.

Well-known for her pictures of young, semi-clothed girls, Goldin has had her work taken off display before because critics thought it was obscene.

Elton John, a close friend of Goldin's, was not available for comment and a spokesman for the rock star referred The Telegraph's inquiries to the gallery.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta..._exhibit/5950/





Town Is Shaken After Prosecutor’s Arrest in a Child-Sex Sting
Abby Goodnough

To neighbors here, J. D. Roy Atchison was a deft federal prosecutor, an involved father and a devoted volunteer, coaching girls’ softball and basketball teams year in and year out.

His wife is a popular science teacher; his youngest daughter, an honors student who was on her high school homecoming court last year. Their house, with rocking chairs on the porch, oaks in the yard and a wrought-iron fence, is among the prettiest in town.

But in an instant last week, the community pillar became an object of community loathing. Mr. Atchison, 53, was arrested getting off a plane in Detroit on Sept. 16 and charged with the unthinkable. The authorities there said he was carrying a doll and petroleum jelly, and that he had arranged with an undercover agent to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.

Now Mr. Atchison is awaiting trial in a federal prison in Michigan, and the people of Gulf Breeze, an affluent bayside suburb in the Florida Panhandle, are outraged, baffled and repulsed.

“He had an excellent reputation,” said Barry Beroset, a criminal defense lawyer in Pensacola who has known Mr. Atchison for 15 years. “He was very businesslike and appeared to be a very good man, no question about it.”

Ronald Johnson, a defense lawyer in Pensacola who has worked with Mr. Atchison, described him as “fairly intellectual,” adding, “Sometimes he was a little eccentric, but nothing perverted or weird. Just a little different.”

Pressed, Mr. Johnson could not elaborate. In fact, no one could describe Mr. Atchison in a way that transcended generalities. In interviews around this town of 6,450, the phrase “nice guy” came up a lot. Edwin A. Eddy, the city manager, said he was “no more charismatic than anybody else” and “not any quieter or more gregarious than anyone else.”

Mr. Eddy said he had scoured his memory for any clue that Mr. Atchison, who he said seemed “as straight as they come,” was not.

“I constantly think about all the interactions I had with Mr. Atchison over the years,” said Mr. Eddy, who coached softball with him, “and I think, ‘Should I have been able to see something?’ ”

What the authorities saw in the Internet sting operation that led to Mr. Atchison’s arrest was a man who led a second life as “fldaddy04,” the moniker on a Yahoo profile traced to him. “I adore everything about young girls,” the profile says, “how they talk, think, act, walk, look.”

The police in Michigan said Mr. Atchison had been chatting online for two weeks with an undercover detective for the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department, who posed as a mother offering to let men have sex with her young daughter. When she expressed concern that sex could injure the girl, according to court documents, Mr. Atchison responded, “I’m always gentle and loving; not to worry; no damage ever; no rough stuff ever ever.”

He added, “I’ve done it plenty.”

People here found that statement especially chilling, though the Gulf Breeze Police Department said that so far, no one here has come forward with accusations of abuse.

“There’s so many unanswered questions,” said Deputy Police Chief Robert Randle. “So many people had children involved with him. But unless somebody steps forward and lodges a complaint, we have nothing to go on.”

Mr. Atchison has worked at the small United States Attorney’s Office in Pensacola since the 1980s, most recently handling asset forfeitures in criminal cases as an assistant United States attorney. In one high-profile case, Mr. Atchison oversaw the government seizure of a popular beach bar at the center of a cocaine-trafficking ring.

His is considered one of the most conservative United States attorney’s offices in the country, known for refusing plea agreements and seeking the stiffest sentences.

Mr. Johnson said Mr. Atchison was close with the other prosecutors in his office, going with some on an annual lobster-diving trip in the Florida Keys. A big white fishing boat sat in his otherwise-empty driveway this week. His interests, according to the Yahoo profile that the police said was his, include “surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls.”

The F.B.I., which is working with Macomb County in the investigation, said that in one of his last e-mail exchanges with the undercover agent, Mr. Atchison told her to tell her daughter that “you found her a sweet boyfriend who will bring her presents.”

Mr. Atchison has pleaded not guilty to charges of traveling across state lines to have sex with a child under 12, using the Internet to entice a minor and traveling to another state to engage in illicit sex. He could face life in prison if convicted.

He tried to hang himself with a bed sheet in his jail cell last week after assuring his lawyer and a judge that he would not harm himself.

The lawyer, James C. Thomas of Detroit, did not return a call seeking comment. The F.B.I. is continuing its investigation, and Mr. Atchison’s trial is scheduled to start Nov. 27.

One night this week, as evening fell on the broad playing fields at Shoreline Park, down the road from Mr. Atchison’s house, several parents expressed shock at Mr. Atchison’s arrest as their children kicked soccer balls, threw passes and learned cheerleading stunts. Richard McLeod, a father of two, said he had asked his 6-year-old daughter if she recognized Mr. Atchison’s photo to quell fears about her safety. She did not.

“They ought to torch this guy,” Mr. McLeod said.

Holly Cook, a homemaker who was watching her two sons, 3 and 1, at the park earlier in the day, wondered aloud whether the local sports association should psychologically screen coaching candidates from now on, but concluded it would be impractical.

“Coaches put in tons of time,” Ms. Cook said. “How can you ask them to take a psychological evaluation on top of that?”

Mr. Eddy said that while parents sometimes asked that their children not be assigned to certain coaches in the sports program, none had ever complained about Mr. Atchison, who was also president of the Gulf Breeze Athletic Association.

“Nobody ever had any negative comments,” Mr. Eddy said. “Nobody ever said, ‘Anybody but this guy.’ ”

Around town, praise flowed for Mr. Atchison’s wife, Barbara, who teaches anatomy at Gulf Breeze High School but took a leave of absence after his arrest. She won the town’s teacher-of-the-year award in 2004. Several people said she was as stunned as anyone by the news.

“She’s shell shocked,” said Deputy Chief Randle, who went with F.B.I. agents to execute a search warrant on the Atchison home, where they seized at least one computer. “She’s just floored.”

Randy Sansom, an accountant whose youngest child, like Mr. Atchison’s, is a senior at the high school, said townspeople were determined to support Mrs. Atchison and her three children, two of whom are away at college.

“We are here to be their friends and pray for them and know they had nothing to do with this,” Mr. Sansom said. “They are victims as well.”

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting from Miami, and Mari Krueger, from Gulf Breeze, Fla.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/us/29florida.html





Facebook Subpoenaed for Not Responding to Sex Predator Complaints
Michael Gormley

The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed Facebook after the company did not respond to "many" complaints by investigators who were solicited for sex while posing as teenagers on the social-networking site.

State investigators, who set up profiles as 12- to 14-year olds, said they were quickly contacted by other Facebook users with comments such as "u look too hot....... can i c u online," "do you like sex?" and "call me if u want to do sex with me."

Investigators said that when they wrote to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook about their experiences, the concerns were ignored "many" times.

"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. "Parents have a right to know what their children will encounter on a Web site that is aggressively marketed as safe."

On Monday, he publicly released a letter to Facebook about its safety claims. Those concerns are based on several "undercover tests" in recent weeks, he said.

The subpoenas seek complaints made to the company and copies of its policies. Cuomo said the investigation is still in its early stages.

Privately held Facebook did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_6985894





Microsoft Is Said to Consider a Stake in Facebook
Brad Stone and Andrew Ross Sorkin

Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three and a half years ago.

But Microsoft, Google and several funds are considering investments in the fast-growing site, according to people with knowledge of the talks, that could give the start-up a value of more than $10 billion.

While discussions were still in the early stage, these people said that Microsoft was considering an investment of $300 million to $500 million for a 5 percent stake of the company. Google is also said to be interested in an investment.

Facebook’s valuation could go even higher as the two rivals create the kind of competitive bidding situation that has recently driven the acquisition prices of other start-ups into the stratosphere.

Representatives from Facebook, Microsoft and Google all declined to comment on the talks.

The investment discussions by Facebook are part of its effort to raise an additional round of capital to further the company’s growth and build on its current momentum. The company has solicited interest not only from Internet companies but also from a handful of financial players including venture capitalists, hedge funds and private equity firms, according to people with knowledge of its plans.

Facebook is seeking a minimum valuation of $10 billion but interested bidders have expressed a willingness to value it as high as $13 billion, on the assumption that, in the future, Facebook will become a powerful player in the online world.

These numbers might have little basis in actual revenue or profit. Facebook is a private company and does not reveal its income. But earlier this year, a Pali Research analyst, Richard Greenfield, estimated that the company brought in $60 million to $96 million in annual revenue, with no real profit. Much of that revenue comes from a year-old advertising relationship with Microsoft, which places display advertisements on the site.

Mr. Greenfield said the investment price that Microsoft was considering might have more to do with keeping the prize out of the hands of its powerful rivals. “There may be competitive reasons to be connected to this asset beyond what the specific valuation is today,” he said. “You may be paying a premium to keep others out.”

The lack of a track record for Facebook might actually be driving the price up. “Trying to delineate a value today of what was a new industry five years ago is challenging right now,” Mr. Greenfield said.

Last September, Yahoo was in acquisition talks with Facebook. It reportedly offered $900 million to buy the site outright and was rebuffed by Mr. Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old chief executive, who has said that he was determined to keep the company independent and take it public through an initial public offering.

Google and Microsoft are jockeying for a stake in a social networking site that is said to be creating a new way for Internet users to meet people and interact with friends on the Web.

In May, Facebook redefined itself as a platform, allowing other companies to create features like games, photo-sharing tools and music players that run in Facebook.

That strategy, just four months old, has unleashed a flood of interest in the company, with thousands of independent software developers creating a range of programs for the service.

“We have this situation where every developer worth his salt here in Silicon Valley seems to be working on a Facebook application,” said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Facebook is full of activities, from the goofy, like “biting” friends with a virtual vampire, to the more utilitarian, like seeing what parties and events Facebook friends are attending. There are more than 4,000 third-party applications on Facebook, the company said.

The strategy has drawn plenty of attention and new users to the site. Facebook has more than 40 million members, up from 9 million last year.

There may be personal reasons that Facebook would align itself with Microsoft, according to a person with knowledge of the companies’ executives. Mr. Zuckerberg has a personal friendship with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect and one of the people stepping in for Bill Gates, the co-founder who is giving up his day-to-day responsibilities at the company.

Also, Jim Breyer, a managing partner at the venture capital firm of Accel Partners and one of three Facebook board members, was an investor in Groove Networks, Mr. Ozzie’s company, which Microsoft purchased in 2005.

The discussions between Microsoft and Facebook were first reported Monday on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/te...25soft.html?hp





100Mbps Symmetrical: $48.50

Did we mention you need to live in Hong Kong?
Karl

Hong Kong telco City Telecom’s broadband unit Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) just launched a new suite of fiber-to-the-home services in Hong Kong. Back in 2004, the company became the first to offer residential apartment customers 1Gbps symmetrical connectivity for $215 (bb1000). They've since expanded their suite of offerings if you're in the market for more modest broadband service:

HKBN has turned traditionally cost prohibitive FTTH technology into affordable mass-deployed residential service, at US$48.5 service fee for its 100Mbps access service. . . . Effective immediately, HKBN will offer residential FTTH broadband services ranging from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, namely, FiberHome100, FiberHome200 and FiberHome1000, at US$48.5, US$88.2 and US$215.4 respectively.

The company says they're phasing out their symmetrical 10Mbps service -- the slowest tier they offer now clocks in at a symmetrical 25Mbps. HKBN chairman Ricky Wong calls FTTH "a foreseeable inevitability."
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/1...cal-4850-87851





Where's My Free Wi-Fi?

Why municipal wireless networks have been such a flop.
Tim Wu

It's hard to dislike the idea of free municipal wireless Internet access. Imagine your town as an oversized Internet cafe, with invisible packets floating everywhere as free as the air we breathe. That fanciful vision inspired many cities to announce the creation of free wireless networks in recent years. This summer, reality hit—one city after another has either canceled deployments or offered a product that's hardly up to the hype. In Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, and even San Francisco, once-promising projects are in trouble. What happened—was the idea all wrong?

Not quite. The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven't thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won't be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they'll have to pay for it.

For the last 20 years or so, the thorniest economic issue in the telecommunications world has been the "last mile." Physically, the last mile consists of the wires that run from your home or business to the local phone or cable company. It's pricey and uses old technology, but almost everything depends on it and a few giant companies—like AT&T and Comcast—control it. The last mile is a bottleneck: The price and speed of the whole Internet depends on it. When people talk about the United States lagging behind the world in broadband speed and access, they're talking about the last-mile problem.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, dozens of companies were launched that had new ideas for busting through the last mile and getting the Internet into homes. I remember going to industry trade shows where grown men demonstrated robots designed to crawl through city sewers and deliver a fiber-optic cable to your toilet. (That firm, CityNet, received $375 million in funding and actually wired the sewers of Albuquerque, N.M.) Others proposed to fire laser beams at homes to bring Internet access through the proverbial bathroom window. And in 2004, the New York Times wrote that "Internet service over power lines is probably a year or more away from becoming widely available." Oh, really? While both the FCC and paid industry analysts have continually predicted an "explosion" in broadband over power lines, its current market share is approximately 0.008 percent.

Each of these ventures proved a dismal failure—with the exception of satellite service in rural areas, no competitor to DSL and cable has gotten far in the United States. The startups have run into the oldest problem in the regulated industries book: the barriers to entry created by sunk costs. The phone and cable companies have already recovered the initial billions they've spent over decades, making it possible to set prices at levels that cannot be matched. The competitors brought weak products that were not substantially different. Against that kind of competition, the newcomers never stood a chance.

So much for the market solution—how about government? The failures of other ventures made municipal Wi-Fi seem an ideal alternative. After all, cities provide their citizens with water and garbage pickup—why not the Internet, too? A few important points seemed to distinguish muni Wi-Fi from the toilet robots. First, wireless skipped the whole issue of feeding wires into people's homes, the stumbling block for so many ventures. And Wi-Fi routers, if not perfect, are a proven and cheap technology. They work great on college campuses. Even my mother has a Wi-Fi router.

In 2004, when Philadelphia announced it was considering deploying the first major citywide Wi-Fi system, many assumed it would be free, or near-free, just like when you get Internet access from a generous neighbor. But that kind of system, of course, would cost real public money. The city would have to pay for the deployment with no hope of return.

By 2005, it became clear that major cities didn't really want to build out Wi-Fi networks as public works projects. Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced "private/public" partnerships. That meant giving a private company the right to build a wireless network and try to make money off of it. Often, this simply meant giving a company like Earthlink the rights to install Wi-Fi devices on street lamps and charge citizens for access. The cities then washed their hands of the issue of success or failure.

The result, as this summer has made clear, has been telecom's Bay of Pigs—a project the government wanted to happen but left to underqualified private parties to deliver. Firms like Earthlink promised too much, and the cities have stood by and watched as the firms trying to build Wi-Fi systems have twisted and died on the beachhead. This summer, Earthlink fired half of its staff, including the head of the municipal Wi-Fi division. Major projects in Chicago and San Francisco have been stopped cold, and Houston has fined Earthlink for falling behind deadlines.

Some observers blame these failures on Wi-Fi's technical limits. Wi-Fi does have serious limitations, but wireless Internet technology has worked well even on large college campuses. The deeper problem is economics. When municipal Wi-Fi became a private service, it fell into the same economic trap as the toilet robots. Private municipal wireless networks have to compete against competitors with better infrastructure who paid off their capital investments years ago.

Setting up a large wireless network isn't as expensive as installing wires into people's homes, but it still costs a lot of money. Not billions, but still millions. To recover costs, the private "partner" has to charge for service. But if the customer already has a cable or telephone connection to his home, why switch to wireless unless it is dramatically cheaper or better? In typical configurations, municipal wireless connections are slower, not dramatically cheaper, and by their nature less reliable than existing Internet services. Those facts have put muni Wi-Fi in the same deathtrap that drowned every other company that peddled a new Net access scheme.

Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that's free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed.

The lesson here is an old one about the function of government. When it comes to communications, the United States relies on a privateer system: We depend on private companies to perform public callings. That works up to a point, but private industry will build only so much. Real public infrastructure costs real public money. We already know that, in the real world, if you're not willing to invest in infrastructure, you get what we have: crumbling airports, collapsing bridges, and broken levees. Why did we think that the wireless Internet would be any different?
http://www.slate.com/id/2174858/





Juicy

I've estimated the electricity consumption for the internet as follows:

US: 350 billion kWh per year

World: 868 billion kWh per year


These numbers represent 9.4% of total US electricity consumption, and 5.3% of global electricity consumption.


===========================================================

The breakout of the data is as follows:


Annual Electricity Use for the Internet--US and World


Category..........................US Consumption.......World Consumption
.....................................Billion kWh........Billion kWh

(1) Data Centers (includes cooling)......45.................112.5


(2) PCs&Monitors........................235.................588


(3) Modems/routers/etc...................67.................167


(4) Phone network.......................0.4...................1.0


TOTAL ELECTRICITY DEMAND ~350 billion kWh ~868 billion
OF THE INTERNET ............................U.S.................World
http://uclue.com/index.php?xq=724





Photocopier Translates Japanese to English at Touch of Button

Specialist translators could soon be heading for job centers across the world if Fuji Xerox makes good on the technology it has developed for its latest prototype photocopy machine.

The device, currently on show only in Japan, can scan a printed sheet of Japanese text from a newspaper or magazine and churn out a translation of it in Chinese, English or Korean while retaining the original layout. Flip a switch and the linguistic parsing works in the opposite direction too.

Fuji Xerox’s secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.

While the concept of a one-touch translation machine is a wonderful idea for anyone who regularly works in multiple languages (guilty…), let’s hope the technology moves on from the current generation of machine-translation (MT) software that can be seen mangling sentences on sites like Babel Fish and Google Translate.
http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/ind...h_of_butto n/





What to Watch? How About a ‘Simpsons’ Episode From 1999?
Claire Atkinson

To get caught up with the ABC show “Grey’s Anatomy,” Joanna Palmer, who had never watched the two-year-old series, bought a DVD set of the entire first season and indulged in a marathon viewing session.

“I had the day off and watched it all day, from 10 a.m. until my husband got home at 5:30,” said Ms. Palmer, 34, a merchandising assistant at Victoria’s Secret who lives in Brooklyn. “It was awesome.” Now, she plans to watch all of the new season, which starts this week.

Ms. Palmer is in good company. Although DVD sales are down this year, television series on disc have fared better than other categories. Sales of complete seasons are a rare bright spot, registering actual growth. Some shows, like “Friends,” “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos,” have each sold more than $300 million in DVDs.

Those numbers are not staggering, and expectations for the format are limited by the growing number of alternatives, like Internet downloads to streaming video. Even so, the enduring appeal of the DVD and its ability to get time-pressed consumers hooked on shows are giving network executives renewed faith in the format and prompting some experimentation.

“The great thing about having a TV series is that new viewers discover the franchise every day, and they come through season one,” said Sofia Chang, vice president of marketing at HBO Video. “Even though ‘The Sopranos’ is eight years old, you still have new people coming to the franchise.”

HBO is not the only network looking to DVD sales to refresh its shows’ popularity. “Jericho,” a dark serial on CBS about a town cut off from the rest of the world, was canceled last year in its first season and then revived, in part because of fan pressure. To build momentum for “Jericho,” CBS Television Distribution is pointedly releasing the first season on DVD in October.

John Miller, chief marketing officer of NBC Universal Television Group, said that DVDs are not necessarily expected to generate profit for the network, but are considered valuable because of their power to turn casual viewers into loyal ones. [NBC said last week that it would start offering free ad-supported downloads of its popular shows on its Web site.]

To get discs into people’s hands, NBC Universal made a deal with Starbucks in July to sell a DVD with highlights from “Saturday Night Live” as well as an episode of “30 Rock.” Tina Fey, the star of “30 Rock,” is a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and the idea was that longtime “SNL” fans might be tempted to sample the newer show for the first time. The discs went on sale in late August, timed to whet demand for the fall season.

In a separate deal, NBC Universal worked with Wal-Mart to create a half-season pack of “Friday Night Lights” for $9.99, with promotions for a new show, “Bionic Woman,” thrown in.

“They’re doing it as a break-even,” Mr. Miller said. In the case of “Friday Night Lights,” NBC is even offering a money-back guarantee.

DVDs have also given life to many series beyond their small-screen run. Take, for example, “Babylon 5,” a science-fiction cult hit that ran from 1994 to 1998. In July, Warner Home Video began distributing “Babylon 5: The Lost Tales” on DVD, with fresh episodes of the defunct show.

J. Michael Straczynski, who created the series, said that going straight to DVD appealed to him more than reviving the show through a network. “The idea that such a venue could lead to considerable creative freedom was tremendously appealing,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Similarly, with “Battlestar Galactica” soon to end its run on the Sci-Fi Channel, Universal Media Studios is filming a separate spinoff alongside the final season. “Battlestar Galactica: Razor (Unrated Extended Edition)” will be out on DVD in December.

But even strong demand will not bring some shows to DVD, because of the high cost of securing music rights. Many shows were made before the DVD format was developed, and transferring the content to the newer format can require making fresh deals with the actors or musicians. The music rights on the “Happy Days” DVD, for instance, were reported to cost as much as $1 million.

For this reason, fans of the series “The Wonder Years,” which ran from 1988 to 1993, will most likely never be able to see the shows on DVD, and why fans of “WKRP in Cincinnati” sometimes express disappointment with the DVD version, which by necessity swapped out many of the original songs (substitutions that sometimes make the dialogue seem illogical).

Nostalgia clearly drives a lot of DVD sales. Among the 300,000 registered users of the Web site www.tvshowsondvd.com, “The Wonder Years” is the most in-demand unreleased show, followed by “Batman,” “Daria” and “Third Watch.” At Amazon.com, “The Muppet Show” is a regular top seller.

“As people enter adulthood, they want to go back and buy shows from their childhood,” said Dan Vancini, a movie editor at Amazon.

TVshowsondvd, which is backed by TV Guide magazine, tracks the release dates for various shows, a schedule that looks like an amalgam of different eras. For example, tomorrow is the scheduled release date for volume two of the first season of “The Streets of San Francisco” (from the early 1970s), lost episodes from “Davey and Goliath” (a religious animated show that ran from 1960 to 1977) and the best of “The Cosby Show” (1984-92), among others.

“At some companies, they have great synergy between the TV division and the DVD division,” said Gord Lacey, the founder of TVshowsondvd. “Sometimes they don’t talk. If you’re the guy doing the budget for a TV show and licensing the DVD rights to the music you want is going to add to your budget, why would you do that if you don’t get any benefit?”

But network executives have grown wise to the problem. “More and more, we are out obtaining DVD rights at the beginning of the licensing process in one all-encompassing rights package,” said Alexandra Patsavas, music supervisor on “Grey’s Anatomy.” “This ensures that the producer’s first choices for bands and songs are included on the DVDs and the audience sees the episodes intact with the original soundtrack.”

Ms. Patsavas, who has also worked on Fox’s “The O.C.” — another show known for its catchy tunes — says that in the late 1990s, bands were not that interested in working with television executives, fearing that they would be perceived as less than cool. But “the music business has changed, and TV licensing is now seen as both an artistic and marketing opportunity for both new and established artists,” she said.

October marks the start of the fourth quarter, the heaviest promotion period on the DVD sales calendar. So far this year, sales of complete seasons of TV shows on DVD are up 6 percent from the comparable period last year, according to Nielsen VideoScan (although growth has slowed from a 17 percent rise in 2006 over 2005). The figures are noteworthy given that total DVD sales are down 7 percent this year, with the overall television segment down only 1 percent.

Not all popular shows perform well on DVD. Highly rated procedural dramas like “C.S.I.” and “Law and Order” are not strong sellers, and reality shows do even worse. “American Idol, Seasons 1-4” ranked No. 14,672 on the Amazon charts on Sept. 10, and costs just $7.

Evan Shapiro, executive vice president and general manager at the Independent Film Channel, said that the poor performance of reality shows on DVD and other markets has helped spur demand for more scripted programming. Unlike at other networks, he said, at IFC, the television broadcast is viewed as a marketing platform for DVDs. For instance, IFC decided to reintroduce the former Fox sitcom “Greg the Bunny” on the basis of its strong DVD sales.

Despite the wide range of television viewing options provided by the likes of iTunes from Apple, executives say they are confident that the DVD format will endure; DVDs are portable and can be played on a variety of devices.

“As soon as I found out that ‘West Wing’ had been canceled, I went out and bought the whole collection,” said Lee Westerfield, a media analyst at BMO Capital Markets.

Steve Feldstein, a senior vice president at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, says he thinks that sales of complete series on DVD have remained buoyant simply because there are a lot of good shows around.

Pilot episodes that cost upward of $5 million are common, putting TV production values on par with movies.

Mr. Feldstein suggests that viewers were more likely to catch up on a single episode via iTunes or an Internet download, while still buying a collector’s boxed set. “Anyone who is a fan is going to want nice packaging with all the extras,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bu...dia/24dvd.html





New Series: Women Test Mettle, and Metal
Alessandra Stanley

When future anthropologists study prime-time television at the dawn of the 21st century, they will inevitably have to grapple with one gnawing question: What was so bad about Lindsay Wagner?

NBC has remade “The Bionic Woman” (and lost the article in the title) almost as a rebuke to the original 1970s show that starred Ms. Wagner as Jaime Sommers, a professional tennis player who, after a sky-diving accident, receives artificial body parts that give her superhuman abilities. The new $6 million woman — though the bionic program, like any other military project today, would be measured as a percentage of the total economy, and, adjusted for inflation and changes in the gross domestic product, come in at about $50 million — is played by Michelle Ryan as a sullen bartender turned cyborg. Jaime 2.0 wakes up from a car crash with new legs, a new arm, a new ear and a new eye and nary a scratch on her face, and is not the least bit grateful.

NBC’s show, which is more about fembot martial arts and slick “Matrix”-ish special effects than about character development, is oriented toward young male viewers. There is no such excuse for ABC’s “Private Practice,” a spinoff of “Grey’s Anatomy,” which is also on tonight and supposedly offers a postfeminist sensibility that is more playful and palatable than the overearnest women’s lib of the Lindsay Wagner generation.

Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery (Kate Walsh), a top-notch surgeon, has left Seattle to heal her broken heart in Los Angeles, where her best friend has founded a private wellness clinic. She is no longer surrounded by the kind of strong, tough, ambitious surgeons played by Sandra Oh and Chandra Wilson. Instead her new colleagues collectively offer one of the most depressing portrayals of the female condition since “The Bell Jar.”

Or worse: The premiere showcases seven different women, doctors and their patients, in various states of anger, insecurity and neediness. It’s like a Hogarth engraving of the seven stages of womanly despair, “A Surgeon’s Progress.”

Both shows suggest that the easiest way to make a female protagonist likable is to dumb her down with self-doubt. The heroine of “Bionic Woman” starts out as a single, pregnant bartender who doesn’t understand what her scientist boyfriend sees in her. On “Private Practice” Addison is a leading neonatal specialist who freaks out, in front of her patient’s father, when she has to perform an emergency Caesarean in a clinic, not a fully equipped hospital.

“Bionic Woman” is dark, not polyester bright, but it isn’t much better than the original at depicting running at superspeed. The new series is filmed in the sleek, washed-out palette that is currently so fashionable on shows like “Heroes” and “Prison Break.” “Bionic Woman” also follows the current fad for serialized confusion: There is a mysterious conspiracy surrounding the bio-military experiments at a research center that keeps the plot murky and drives characters to speak in terse, enigmatic undertones.

Jaime’s boyfriend, Will Anthros (Chris Bowers), is a bionics expert and surgeon who performs a top-secret experimental operation to save her life — without permission from his superiors, who include a stern taskmaster, Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer).

Jaime discovers that she is not the first female cyborg or even the most unpleasant. Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff), a pasty platinum blonde who looks a little like Courtney Love on steroids, was the earliest prototype, and designed to serve as a soldier. Sarah appears to have morphed into a rogue agent and lurks in the shadows, stalking and attacking people, including Jaime. Sarah should be dead but isn’t. When she isn’t trying to kill former associates, even she has a needy side: “Tell me you love me,” she repeatedly implores men.

All the women on “Private Practice” are looking for love, and they are all making a mess of it. Addison’s old friend Naomi Bennett (Audra McDonald) is a fertility specialist whose husband, a partner in the clinic, has moved out. Naomi can barely keep her rage under wraps at the office; at home she locks herself in the bathroom with an entire cake and tearfully scarfs it down.

Their other female colleague is a psychiatrist, Dr. Violet Turner (Amy Brenneman), who between patients stalks her former boyfriend, who is married to someone else. And so on. The fact that the men in the practice are heels isn’t much consolation.

Viewers don’t need to be feminists to yearn to turn the clock back 30 years to when Ms. magazine had half a million readers, the Equal Rights Amendment seemed on the brink of ratification, and Ms. Wagner played an accomplished professional who was courteous, well balanced and actually seemed to like herself.

PRIVATE PRACTICE

ABC, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Shonda Rhimes, creator and executive producer; Betsy Beers, Marti Noxon, Mark Gordon and Mark Tinker, executive producers. An ABC Studios production.

WITH: Kate Walsh (Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery), Tim Daly (Dr. Pete Wilder), Audra McDonald (Dr. Naomi Bennett), Paul Adelstein (Dr. Cooper Freedman), KaDee Strickland (Dr. Charlotte King), Chris Lowell (William Dell Parker), Taye Diggs (Dr. Sam Bennett) and Amy Brenneman (Dr. Violet Turner).

BIONIC WOMAN

NBC, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

David Eick and Jason Smilovic, executive producers. Produced by Universal Media Studios.

WITH: Lucy Hale (Becca Sommers), Michelle Ryan (Jaime Sommers), Chris Bowers (Will Anthros), Miguel Ferrer (Jonas Bledsoe), Will Yun Lee (Jae), Molly Price (Ruth), Mark Sheppard (Dr. Anthony Anthros).
http://nytimes.com/2007/09/26/arts/t...priv.html?8dpc





As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered
Wendy A. Lee

Kyra Sedgwick, star of “The Closer” on TNT, walks under a police tape and scans the screen with her flashlight. And every time she does, she makes Gretchen Corbin, a technical writer in Berkeley, Calif., irate.

The promotional ads for “The Closer” run in the bottom right of the screen during other TNT programs — a graphic called a snipe. But for Ms. Corbin, who sometimes watches movies that have subtitles, the tiny images block the dialogue.

“Some ad just took over the entire bottom of the screen so I missed what the characters said to each other,” said Ms. Corbin, describing a recent experience. “And it’s TV, so you can’t rewind.”

Snipes are just the latest effort by network executives to cram promotions onto television screens in the age of channel surfing, ad skipping and screen-based multitasking. At first, viewers may feel a slight jolt of pleasure at the sight of a new visual effect, they say, but over time the intrusions contribute to the sense that the screen is far more cluttered — not just with ads, but with news crawls and other streams of information.

For better or worse, viewers say, the additions are making the experience of watching television more closely mirror the feeling of using a computer.

That may be so, network executives say, but the extra content is here to stay. The snipes — not to be confused with bugs, those network logos that pop up in screen corners during shows — are important enough to the beleaguered television industry that the networks plan to tolerate the backlash.

This fall ABC is introducing the “ABC Start Here” campaign, which consists of a series of icons in the lower right of the screen that direct viewers to related content in other media, like books, DVDs and Web sites. At the end of “Ugly Betty,” for instance, a shopping icon could direct viewers to places where they could buy Betty’s shoes, or an iTunes icon could invite them to that site to buy episodes of the show. The point, said Marla Provencio, an ABC executive vice president of marketing, is “to accommodate viewers’ multimedia, multichannel habits and still lead them back to ABC.”

ABC tested the icons in July and will introduce them gradually this fall to get viewers familiar with the shorthand. To minimize complaints, ABC will keep the icons and all similar visuals silent.

“We do not want to invade in the viewers’ space so much that we intrude on their experience,” said Ms. Provencio.

Promotional content on what the industry calls the “lower third” of the television screen is “the way of the world these days,” Ms. Provencio said. ABC, she said, tries to make sure that the embedded ads do not interrupt, say, “a dramatic moment on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ ” but the network does want to remind people they are watching ABC.

Viewers say that snipes and bugs are degrading their experience of watching television. Even some performers seem to resent the assaults on their work’s integrity. At last week’s Emmy Awards, the comedian Lewis Black delivered a blow against screen clutter, yelling, “We don’t care about the next show. We’re watching this show.”

Network executives say that the trend toward busy screens is an attempt to cater to the tastes and habits of younger viewers, who reflexively toggle among screens, online and on cellphones.

David Grazian, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that television is simply borrowing a successful feature from the video game industry. “Screen clutter can be extremely eye catching, especially for the viewer who surfs between several channels,” he said.

Viewers of MTV, VH1 and sports channels have come to expect frenetic programming. At ESPN, there has been a conscious effort to pump up the visual excitement of the viewing experience, said Norby Williamson, executive vice president of programming. “The key word in television these days is engagement,” he said.

The network first introduced a crawling banner of sports scores to the bottom of the screen in 1985, has recently introduced more aggressive visuals, such as a Monday Night Football score box in the center of the screen that changes into other bugs and banners. Today’s viewers today are conditioned to have a lot going on at once, Mr. Williamson said, adding, “Everything is shifting. Television has to shift, too.”

Sports commentators have always promoted their networks during broadcasts, but now they have extra reminders. Last month during CBS’s broadcast of the United States Open semifinals between Svetlana Kuznetsova and Anna Chakvetadze, a mini-trailer for “Survivor: China” ran on the bottom of the screen. Mary Carillo, who was providing commentary, promptly observed that Ms. Kuznetsova would likely “survive” the match (and she did).

The trend toward visual clutter has also reshaped television news broadcasts, where the familiar sight of a lone anchor talking to a camera has grown increasingly rare.

On CNN, the hyperactive pace of Wolf Blitzer’s nightly news show “The Situation Room” is so extreme that it was parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” With one glance at the screen, is it really possible to absorb the United States military strategy in Iraq, or that a thunderstorm is moving over the Midwest, the Standard & Poor’s index is up 16.95 points, and Sean Combs has separated from his girlfriend? “Our pixel footprint can get way out of control,” acknowledged Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN U.S., referring to the television industry in general.

Research suggests that packed screens can impede comprehension. Tom Grimes, a journalism professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, Tex., said that people who are looking for quick information like stock quotes or a weather update can handle a certain amount of clutter. But “if they’re trying to listen to a reporter describe a complicated series of events, it’s very difficult to absorb that information” with too great a visual barrage, he said.

With the Internet offering an increasingly sophisticated yet chaotic visual experience, television must decide how much it wants to mimic the computer, said Aslam Khader, vice president for marketing and strategy of Ensequence Inc., an interactive media company in Portland, Ore. “TV is having to reinvent itself,” he said.

The question remains how many self-promotions the networks can dish up without degrading the quality of their shows. Sherry Sklar, a writer in Phoenix, Ariz., said visual clutter on television “has gotten worse — more movement and more intrusive” in recent months.

During a drama, if a character from a different show suddenly walks across the bottom of the screen, “it’s a total disconnect and ruins your suspension of disbelief,” Ms. Sklar said, adding, “I mainly watch PBS and HBO, probably because they don’t do as much of this stuff.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bu...=1&oref=slogin





Preliminary 'total viewer figure' is 7.3 million

'The War' Has Strong Ratings Start
David Bauder

A handful of new series got the jump on the fall TV season, none as successfully as Ken Burns' epic miniseries about World War II. The first of the seven parts of "The War" attracted 15.5 million viewers to PBS on Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Add in a rerun that was telecast immediately after it was done, and an estimated 18.7 million people saw it on Sunday. (The noncommercial Public Broadcasting Service is not included in the weekly ratings.)

That outpaced everything on the commercial broadcast networks all week, except for Sunday night's telecast of the Dallas-Chicago National Football League game on NBC.

CBS' first telecast of the controversial reality show "Kid Nation" was seen by 9.4 million viewers. The Fox debut of the drama "K-Ville" landed just outside Nielsen's top 20 programs for last week with 8.9 million viewers.

They didn't quite match the viewership for the returns of old favorites like "Cold Case," "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons," however. The return "Survivor" — this one in China — did best of all, placing No. 2 right behind football.

A new TV season technically began Monday, with most of the new programming to follow.

CBS won the last week of the "old" season by averaging 8.9 million prime-time viewers (5.8 rating, 10 share). NBC had 7.6 million (5.0, 8), Fox 7.4 million (4.7, 8), ABC 5.7 million (3.8, 7), the CW 2.8 million (1.8, 3), My Network TV 900,000 (0.6, 1) and ION Television 540,000 (0.4, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision averaged 3.5 million viewers last week (1.9 rating, 3 share). Telemundo had 980,000 (0.5, 1), TeleFutura 590,000 (0.3, 1) and Azteca 120,000 (0.1, 0).

The evening news ratings race was essentially a dead heat, with ABC's "World News" averaging 7.69 million viewers (5.3 rating, 11 share) and NBC's "Nightly News" 7.66 million (5.3, 12). The "CBS Evening News" averaged 6.1 million (4.2, 9).

A ratings point represents 1,130,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 112.8 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Sept. 17-23, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: NFL Football: Dallas at Chicago, NBC, 19.05 million; "Survivor: China," CBS, 15.35 million; "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 14.07 million; "Sunday Night Pre-Kick Show," NBC, 13.86 million; "Cold Case," CBS, 12.75 million; "Deal or No Deal" (Monday), NBC, 11.72 million; "Shark," CBS, 11.42 million; "60 Minutes," CBS, 11.37 million; "Without a Trace," CBS, 11.28 million; "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 10.84 million.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...6c4AAbsfWDlvgA





New DVDs
Dave Kehr

THE 3 PENNY OPERA

Traditionally, G. W. Pabst’s 1931 film of “The 3 Penny Opera” was considered a disappointment, interesting mainly because it was the closest in time to the original stage production. The Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical opened in Berlin in 1928 and quickly became an international hit.

Pabst, known for social-psychological dramas like “The Joyless Street” (1925) and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), was an understandable choice by the producers, but not, as it turned out, a particularly happy one. Apparently uncomfortable with characters bursting into song, the sober-minded Pabst threw out several numbers and curtailed others, while forcing Brecht’s anti-realist, anti-theater into a conventional realist mode.

Or so it seemed, until the German-language version of the film was restored by the German film archive in 2005. Drawn from the original camera negative, this version is being released today by the Criterion Collection, and it’s a revelation. With the images restored to a digital approximation of their original clarity and depth, it seems quite a different movie.

The film takes place not in a real world but in an almost cubist approximation of one. A labyrinth of shop fronts, storehouses, narrow streets and crooked alleys, where the billboards are in English but the protest placards are in German, was built inside a mammoth studio. It represents the London waterfront where Weill and Brecht’s politically charged revision of John Gay’s 18th-century satire takes place.

Huge interior sets were a specialty of the Weimar cinema, exemplified by the grand hotel of F. W. Murnau’s “Last Laugh” (1924) and the Berlin boulevard of Joe May’s “Asphalt” (1929). But Pabst, working with the art director Andrej Andrejew and the cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, might have created the most detailed and expressive.

The mobile camera seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of this tall and curiously built environment, from the pier where the street singer (Ernst Busch) relates the tale of Mack the Knife, to the warehouse where Mackie marries Polly Peachum (Carola Neher) to the bordello that is home to Mackie’s spurned lover, Jenny (Lotte Lenya).

Mackie Messer is played by Rudolf Forster as a cold, solid block of a man, a pillar of malevolence who draws the innocent-seeming Polly to him with one magnetic look. Polly, of course, is no shrinking virgin but the daughter of London’s beggar king, Peachum, played by Weimar’s most creative interpreter of evil, Fritz Rasp.

As Tiger Brown, Mackie’s old buddy from the British Army and the current chief of the London police, Pabst cast Reinhold Schünzel, a writer-director whose 1933 “Viktor und Viktoria” was remade several times, most famously by Blake Edwards as “Victor Victoria” in 1982.

And yet it is Lenya, Weill’s wife and a member of the original stage cast, who most memorably embodies the piece’s bitterly cynical yet profoundly humanitarian spirit. Here she performs “Pirate Jenny,” that heart-wrenching ballad of lyrical revenge, standing motionless before a window as Pabst cuts in on her in three progressive close-ups, leaving her isolated and astonished by her own repressed cruelty.

The Criterion edition also includes the French-language version, “L’Opéra de Quat’Sous,” which Pabst filmed on the same sets, using largely the same shots but a French cast. The French version is not nearly as gripping, and not only because the music drifts toward operetta when sung in trained French voices. The casting of two conventionally attractive movie stars — Albert Préjean as Mackie, and Florelle as Polly Peachum — also strips away the hard, tawdry sexuality of the German version.

What’s missing, too, in this less well preserved, much softer and flatter print, is precisely the presence of Pabst’s imagined London. Detached from the more faintly registered backgrounds, unimplicated in the receding perspectives of Pabst’s compositions, these are simply actors standing in front of a set.

Here again is proof of what a fragile medium the movies are, and of how foolish it is for us to condescend to the perceived primitivism of a past that is largely a creation of our own neglect. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)

THE INTRUDER

The celebrated exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman used to boast that “The Intruder” was the only one of the 55 films he directed to lose money. But in an interview on the new DVD that Buena Vista is releasing today, he laughingly, if reluctantly, admits that thanks to a 2001 home video release, the picture has finally tipped into profit.

As well it deserves to. For a director best known for horror films (“The Masque of the Red Death”) and motorcycle movies (“The Wild Angels”), this black-and-white social drama from 1962 is a fascinating departure. It’s a “problem picture” close in spirit to the early wave of American indies (“One Potato, Two Potato”; “Nothing but a Man”) that were starting to appear around the same time.

A young William Shatner plays the title character, Adam Cramer, a man without a past who appears in a small Southern town where the white citizens are still reeling under the recent imposition of school integration.

Adam appears at first like one of the “outside agitators” accused at the time of stirring up racial hatred, and so he is, though he is working the opposite side of the street. He moves through the little town, befriending its powerful and seducing its daughters, stirring up resentment against the handful of black teenagers who will soon be attending the formerly all-white high school. His motives, in the fine script by Charles Beaumont (based on his novel), are pure: ideology doesn’t concern him. His only interest is power.

Somewhere between making “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) and “Creature From the Haunted Sea” (1961), Mr. Corman had become a skilled filmmaker. “The Intruder” is full of magnificently staged scenes: a midnight rally where Adam whips a crowd into a murderous frenzy, a confrontation in a hotel room between Adam and a traveling pitchman (Leo Gordon) whose wife Adam has seduced, all shot with a scientifically precise concern with framing and camera movement.

You wonder, then, why this new transfer is presented “open frame,” without the matting that would have been used at the time to narrow the image to the more rectangular screen proportions we still use today. Purists will need to adjust the zoom feature on their televisions to find the proper aspect ratio, but “The Intruder” remains a powerful film and a tantalizing turning point.

If this little movie had made money, the world would have known a very different Roger Corman, with a wider collection of Oscars on his mantelpiece. As for me, I’m very happy with the one we have. (Buena Vista Home Entertainment, $19.99, PG-13)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/mo...5dvd.html?8dpc





Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin
Cornelia Dean

A few months ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins received an e-mail message from a producer at Rampant Films inviting him to be interviewed for a documentary called “Crossroads.”

The film, with Ben Stein, the actor, economist and freelance columnist, as its host, is described on Rampant’s Web site as an examination of the intersection of science and religion. Dr. Dawkins was an obvious choice. An eminent scientist who teaches at Oxford University in England, he is also an outspoken atheist who has repeatedly likened religious faith to a mental defect.

But now, Dr. Dawkins and other scientists who agreed to be interviewed say they are surprised — and in some cases, angered — to find themselves not in “Crossroads” but in a film with a new name and one that makes the case for intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. The film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” also has a different producer, Premise Media.

The film is described in its online trailer as “a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.” According to its Web site, the film asserts that people in academia who see evidence of a supernatural intelligence in biological processes have unfairly lost their jobs, been denied tenure or suffered other penalties as part of a scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation’s laboratories and classrooms.

Mr. Stein appears in the film’s trailer, backed by the rock anthem “Bad to the Bone,” declaring that he wants to unmask “people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God.”

If he had known the film’s premise, Dr. Dawkins said in an e-mail message, he would never have appeared in it. “At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” he said.

Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist who heads the National Center for Science Education, said she agreed to be filmed after receiving what she described as a deceptive invitation.

“I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine,” Dr. Scott said, adding that she would have appeared in the film anyway. “I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.”

The growing furor over the movie, visible in blogs, on Web sites and in conversations among scientists, is the latest episode in the long-running conflict between science and advocates of intelligent design, who assert that the theory of evolution has obvious scientific flaws and that students should learn that intelligent design, a creationist idea, is an alternative approach.

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

Mr. Stein, a freelance columnist who writes Everybody’s Business for The New York Times, conducts the film’s on-camera interviews. The interviews were lined up for him by others, and he denied misleading anyone. “I don’t remember a single person asking me what the movie was about,” he said in a telephone interview.

Walt Ruloff, a producer and partner in Premise Media, also denied that there was any deception. Mr. Ruloff said in a telephone interview that Rampant Films was a Premise subsidiary, and that the movie’s title was changed on the advice of marketing experts, something he said was routine in filmmaking. He said the film would open in February and would not be available for previews until January.

Judging from material posted online and interviews with people who appear in the film, it cites several people as victims of persecution, including Richard Sternberg, a biologist and an unpaid research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, and Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist denied tenure at Iowa State University this year.

Dr. Sternberg was at the center of a controversy over a paper published in 2004 in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a peer-reviewed publication he edited at the time. The paper contended that an intelligent agent was a better explanation than evolution for the so-called Cambrian explosion, a great diversification of life forms that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.

The paper’s appearance in a peer-reviewed journal was a coup for intelligent design advocates, but the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, which publishes the journal, almost immediately repudiated it, saying it had appeared without adequate review.

Dr. Gonzalez is an astrophysicist and co-author of “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery” (Regnery, 2004). The book asserts that earth’s ability to support complex life is a result of supernatural intervention.

Dr. Gonzalez’s supporters say his views cost him tenure at Iowa State. University officials said their decision was based, among other things, on his record of scientific publications while he was at the university.

Mr. Stein, a prolific author who has acted in movies like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and appeared on television programs including “Win Ben Stein’s Money” on Comedy Central, said in a telephone interview that he accepted the producers’ invitation to participate in the film not because he disavows the theory of evolution — he said there was a “very high likelihood” that Darwin was on to something — but because he does not accept that evolution alone can explain life on earth.

He said he also believed the theory of evolution leads to racism and ultimately genocide, an idea common among creationist thinkers. If it were up to him, he said, the film would be called “From Darwin to Hitler.”

On a blog on the “Expelled” Web site, one writer praised Mr. Stein as “a public-intellectual-freedom-fighter” who was taking on “a tough topic with a bit of humor.” Others rejected the film’s arguments as “stupid,” “fallacious” or “moronic,” or described intelligent design as the equivalent of suggesting that the markets moved “at the whim of a monetary fairy.”

Mr. Ruloff, a Canadian who lives in British Columbia, said he turned to filmmaking after selling his software company in the 1990s. He said he decided to make “Expelled,” his first project, after he became interested in genomics and biotechnology but discovered “there are certain questions you are just not allowed to ask and certain approaches you are just not allowed to take.”

He said he knew researchers, whom he would not name, who had studied cellular mechanisms and made findings “riddled with metaphysical implications” and suggestive of an intelligent designer. But they are afraid to report them, he said.

Mr. Ruloff also cited Dr. Francis S. Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and whose book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), explains how he came to embrace his Christian faith. Dr. Collins separates his religious beliefs from his scientific work only because “he is toeing the party line,” Mr. Ruloff said.

That’s “just ludicrous,” Dr. Collins said in a telephone interview. While many of his scientific colleagues are not religious and some are “a bit puzzled” by his faith, he said, “they are generally very respectful.” He said that if the problem Mr. Ruloff describes existed, he is certain he would know about it.

Dr. Collins was not asked to participate in the film.

Another scientist who was, P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, said the film’s producers had misrepresented its purpose, but said he would have agreed to an interview anyway. But, he said in a posting on The Panda’s Thumb Web site, he would have made a “more aggressive” attack on the claims of the movie.

Dr. Scott, whose organization advocates for the teaching of evolution and against what it calls the intrusion of creationism and other religious doctrines in science classes, said the filmmakers were exploiting Americans’ sense of fairness as a way to sell their religious views. She said she feared the film would depict “the scientific community as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/sc...7expelled.html





Vitter Earmarked Federal Money for Creationist Group
Bill Walsh

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., earmarked $100,000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties.

The money is included in the labor, health and education financing bill for fiscal 2008 and specifies payment to the Louisiana Family Forum "to develop a plan to promote better science education."

The earmark appears to be the latest salvo in a decades-long battle over science education in Louisiana, in which some Christian groups have opposed the teaching of evolution and, more recently, have pushed to have it prominently labeled as a theory with other alternatives presented. Educators and others have decried the movement as a backdoor effort to inject religious teachings into the classroom.

The nonprofit Louisiana Family Forum, launched in Baton Rouge in 1999 by former state Rep. Tony Perkins, has in recent years taken the lead in promoting "origins science," which includes the possibility of divine intervention in the creation of the universe.

The group's stated mission is to "persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family through research, communication and networking." Until recently, its Web site contained a "battle plan to combat evolution," which called the theory a "dangerous" concept that "has no place in the classroom." The document was removed after a reporter's inquiry.

Vitter, Forum have ties

The group's tax-exempt status prohibits the Louisiana Family Forum from political activity, but Vitter has close ties to the group. Dan Richey, the group's grass-roots coordinator, was paid $17,250 as a consultant in Vitter's 2004 Senate race. Records also show that Vitter's campaign employed Beryl Amedee, the education resource council chairwoman for the Louisiana Family Forum.

The group has been an advocate for the senator, who was elected as a strong supporter of conservative social issues. When Vitter's use of a Washington, D.C., call-girl service drew comparisons last month to the arrest of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, in what an undercover officer said was a solicitation for sex in an airport men's room, Family Forum Executive Director Gene Mills came to Vitter's defense.

In a video clip the group posted on the Internet site YouTube, Mills said the two senators' situations are far different. "Craig is denying the allegations," he said. "Vitter has repented of the allegations. He sought forgiveness, reconciliation and counseling."

Vitter's office said it is not surprising that people he employed would also do work for Louisiana Family Forum, which shares his philosophical outlook. He said the education earmark was meant to offer a broad array of views in the public schools.

"This program helps supplement and support educators and school systems that would like to offer all of the explanations in the study of controversial science topics such as global warming and the life sciences," Vitter said in a written statement.

The money in the earmark will pay for a report suggesting "improvements" in science education in Louisiana, the development and distribution of educational materials and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Ouachita Parish School Board's 2006 policy that opened the door to biblically inspired teachings in science classes.

"I believe it is an important program," Vitter said.

Critics said taxpayer money should not go to support a religion-based program.

"This is a misappropriation of public funds," said Charles Kincade, a civil rights lawyer in Monroe who has been involved in church-state cases. "It's a backdoor attempt to push a religious agenda in the public school system."

Group has history

Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., a Christian conservative defeated for re-election in 2004, attempted to open the door for such money when he inserted language into a report accompanying the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act enabling teachers to offer "the full range of scientific views" when "topics that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution)" are taught.

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a Louisiana law that would have required schools to teach creationist theories, which hold that God created the universe, whenever evolution was taught. In 2002, the Louisiana Family Forum unsuccessfully sought to persuade the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to insert a five-paragraph disclaimer in all of its science texts challenging the natural science view that life came about by accident and has evolved through the process of natural selection.

The group notched a victory last year when the Ouachita School Board adopted a policy that, without mentioning the Bible or creationism, gave teachers leeway to introduce other views besides those contained in traditional science texts.

"Many of our educators feel inadequate to address the controversies," said Mills, executive director of the Louisiana Family Forum.

Mills said that his group didn't request the money in the 2008 appropriations bill, and that Vitter's proposal "was a bit of a surprise."

Mills said his group is not attempting to push the teaching of evolution out of the schools, but wants to supplement it. Yet, some of the material posted on the Louisiana Family Forum's Web site suggests a more radical view.

Among other things, a "Louisiana Family Forum Fact Sheet" at one point included "A Battle Plan -- Practical Steps to Combat Evolution" by Kent Hovind, a controversial evangelist who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for tax offenses and obstruction of justice.

Hovind's paper stated, "Evolution is not a harmless theory but a dangerous religious belief" that underpinned the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Looking deeper urged

"I've got so much stuff on the Web site I don't know what's there," Mills said. "We think that in order to teach controversial topics successfully, you have to teach both sides."

The group's "Evolution Addendum for Public Schools," also posted on the Web site, offers a flavor of its concerns. The document rejects the evolutionary connection between apes and humans, questions the standard explanation of fossil formation and seeks to undercut the prevailing scientific view that life emerged from a series of chemical reactions.

"Under ideal conditions, the odds of that many amino acids coming together in the right order are approximately the same as winning the Power Ball Lotto every week for the next 640 years," it states. "How could this have happened accidentally?"

Kincade, the Monroe lawyer, said Vitter's and Louisiana Family Forum's motives are not benign.

"What you have to do is look below the surface," said Kincade, who holds an undergraduate degree in physics and has been active in legal cases in which religious groups challenge science instruction. "It frames the issue in a way that appeals to America's sense of fair play. The problem is, except for fringe people, evolution is an accepted fact of science. It is not a hotly contested issue. The general concept of natural selection and evolution is settled and beyond dispute. To suggest otherwise is misleading. They are trying to backdoor creationism."

Vitter's appropriation was contained in a database compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group seeking to reduce the number of earmarks in federal legislation. Earlier this year, Congress agreed for the first time to begin linking specially requested earmarks to the names of their sponsors. Taxpayers for Common Sense has compiled thousands of them into searchable databases.

Vitter said the financing request was submitted earlier this year and "was evaluated on its merit." But Steve Ellis, of the taxpayers' group, said most earmarks are not vetted by anyone except the member requesting it.

"Using an earmark to dictate that the Louisiana Family Forum receive the funding to develop a science education program ironically ignores a hallmark of scientific research, making decisions on the basis of competitive, empirical research," Ellis said.

The appropriations bill is awaiting Senate action.
http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/...ral_money.html





Teacher: I was Fired, said Bible Isn't Literal

The community college instructor says the school sided with students offended by his explanation of Adam and Eve.
Megan Hawkins

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school's Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman's employment status. The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.

"I can assure you that the college understands our employees' free-speech rights," she said. "There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment."

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion."

"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said. "I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class.

"I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here," he said. "From my point of view, what they're doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century."

Hector Avalos, an atheist religion professor at Iowa State University, said Bitterman's free-speech rights were violated if he was fired simply because he took an academic approach to a Bible story.

"I don't know the circumstances, but if he's teaching something about the Bible and says it is a myth, he shouldn't be fired for that because most academic scholars do believe this is a myth, the story of Adam and Eve," Avalos said.

"So it'd be no different than saying the world was not created in six days in science class.

"You don't fire professors for giving you a scientific answer."

Bitterman said Linda Wild, vice president of academic affairs at Southwest, fired him over the telephone.

Wild did not return telephone or e-mail messages Friday. Bitterman said that he can think of no other reason college officials would fire him and that Smith, the director of the campus, has previously sat in on his classes and complimented his work.

"As a taxpayer, I'd like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group," he said. "If it has ... then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know. What's next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?"
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/app...=2007709220333





'Net Neutrality' War Comes to Fore
Adam Liptak

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's cellular network available for a text-message program.

The other leading wireless carriers accepted the program, which allows people to ask to receive text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

Text messaging is a growing political force in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send updates to supporters.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide what messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of "net neutrality."

"This is right at the heart of the problem," said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan law school, referring to the treatment of text messages. "The fact that wireless companies can choose to discriminate is very troubling."

In turning down the program last week, Verizon told Naral that said it "does not accept issue-oriented (abortion, war, etc.) programs - only basic, general politician-related campaigns (Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, etc.)."

Naral provided a copies of its communications with Verizon to The New York Times.

Nancy Keenan, Naral's president, said Verizon's decision interferes with political speech and activism.

"No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them," Keenan said. "Regardless of people's political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?"

A spokesman for Verizon defended the decision.

"It is accurate to say that the organization and the content that they would like to distribute broadly does not fit our current content standards," said the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson. "We continue to review our content standards with an eye toward making more information available across ideological and political views."

Text messaging programs based on five and six-digit short codes are a popular way to receive updates on news, sports, weather and entertainment. Several of the leading Democratic candidates have used them, as have the Republican National Committee, Save Darfur and Amnesty International.

Texting has proven to be an extraordinarily effective political tool. According to a study released this month from researchers at Princeton and the University of Michigan, young people were 4.2 percent more likely to vote in the November 2006 elections after receiving a text-message reminder. The cost per vote generated, the study said, was much smaller than other sorts of get-out-the-vote efforts.

Around the world, the phenomenon is even bigger.

"Even as dramatic as the adoption of text messaging for political communication has been in the United States, we've been quite slow compared to the rest of the world," said James Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. "It's important in political campaigns and political protests, and it has affected the outcomes of elections."

Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it is possible to find analogies to Verizon's decision abroad.

"Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government," Wu said.

Jed Alpert, the chief executive officer of Mobile Commons, which says it is the largest provider of mobile services to political and advocacy groups, including Naral, said he had never seen a decision like Verizon's.

"This is something we haven't encountered before, that is very surprising and that we're concerned about," Alpert said.

Naral provided an example of a recent text message from another program: "End Bush's global gag rule against birth control for world's poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice."

Messages urging political action are generally thought to be at the heart of what the First Amendment protects, legal scholars said. But the First Amendment limits government power, not that of private companies like Verizon.

Some scholars said competition rather than government regulation is the appropriate response to concerns about limitations like the one imposed by Verizon.

"Instead of getting in the game of regulating who can carry what," said Christopher Yoo, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, "I would get in the game of promoting as many options as possible. You might find text-messaging companies competing on their openness policies."

In rejecting the Naral program, Verizon appeared to be acting against its economic interests. It would have received a small fee to set up the program and additional fees for messages sent and received.

Naral said it may have to cancel the program given that Verizon controls about a quarter of the market. "We had hoped to spend $135,000 investing in this new form of technology," Keenan said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/...ss/verizon.php





Verizon Wireless Ends Ban On Abortion-Rights Group
Kevin Kingsbury

Verizon Wireless has dropped its ban on text messages from a prominent abortion-rights group one day after getting a letter from the group about the ban.

Naral Pro-Choice America requested that Verizon Wireless and other carriers distribute its text messages that users sign up for by sending a message to a five- or six-digit number called a "short code." The program is used by many companies and other groups to distribute short text messages for marketing and other purposes.

Verizon Wireless - owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and the United Kingdom's Vodafone Group PLC - had rejected Naral's request, citing the carrier's "code of content," which prohibits "highly controversial" content.

In a statement Thursday, Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said, "The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident."

He added, "Upon learning about this situation, senior Verizon Wireless executives immediately reviewed the decision and determined it was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy."

Verizon Wireless said Thursday its policy had been developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters "adequately protected customers from unwanted messages." It was designed, the company said, to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.

Verizon Wireless's had ban sparked outrage from Naral and the company hinted on Wednesday it was near loosening its restrictions.

Major U.S. wireless carriers have strict decency standards for content. Many of the rules for content of partners such as providers of ring tones or mobile video go far beyond limits set by federal regulators for television and radio. A 2006 Verizon Wireless content-guideline document for its media partners, for example, lists restrictions for expletives and how much bare skin models can show and a ban on any derogatory references to Verizon Wireless.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1190...googlenews_wsj





Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books
Neela Banerjee

Facing pressure from religious groups, civil libertarians and members of Congress, the federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries because they were not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

The bureau had said it was prompted to remove the materials after a 2004 Department of Justice report mentioned that religious books that incite violence could infiltrate chapel libraries.

After the details of the removal became widely known this month, Republican lawmakers, liberal Christians and evangelical talk shows all criticized the government for creating a list of acceptable religious books.

The bureau has not abandoned the idea of creating such lists, Judi Simon Garrett, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. But rather than packing away everything while those lists were compiled, the religious materials will remain on the shelves, Ms. Garrett explained.

In an e-mail message Wednesday, the bureau said: “In response to concerns expressed by members of several religious communities, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to alter its planned course of action with respect to the Chapel Library Project.

“The bureau will begin immediately to return to chapel libraries materials that were removed in June 2007, with the exception of any publications that have been found to be inappropriate, such as material that could be radicalizing or incite violence. The review of all materials in chapel libraries will be completed by the end of January 2008.”

Only a week ago the bureau said it was not reconsidering the library policy. But critics of the bureau’s program said it appeared that the bureau had bowed to widespread outrage.

“Certainly putting the books back on the shelves is a major victory, and it shows the outcry from all over the country was heard,” said Moses Silverman, a lawyer for three prisoners who are suing the bureau over the program. “But regarding what they do after they put them back, I’m concerned.”

The bureau originally set out to take an inventory of all materials in its chapel libraries to weed out books that might incite violence. But the list grew to the tens of thousands, and the bureau decided instead to compile lists of acceptable materials in a plan called the Standardized Chapel Library Project. The plan identifies about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories.

In the spring, prison chaplains were told to remove all materials not on the lists. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year. Chaplains packed up libraries with thousands of books collected over decades. Unidentified religious experts helped the bureau shape the lists of acceptable materials, which independent scholars said omitted many important religious texts.

Bob Moore, director of prison policy oversight at Aleph, an advocacy group for Jews in prison, said the lack of detail and transparency about how the lists were determined troubled him.

“This is a positive step: it means they are not throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Mr. Moore said of keeping books on the shelves for now. “But our position is there should not be a list of what should be on the shelves, but what shouldn’t be.”

Mr. Silverman said the return of the books would “go a long way” to resolving the lawsuit. But he added, “I remain concerned that the criteria for returning the books will be constitutional and lawful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/wa.../27prison.html





Canadian Heritage Copyright Policy Rocked By Conflict of Interest Concerns
Michael Geist

The Hill Times is reporting that Patricia Neri, the Director General of Copyright Policy at Canadian Heritage has been removed from her position to become a special advisor to Assistant Deputy Minister Jean-Pierre Blais with "duties still to be determined." While people move all the time in government, this development is noteworthy - not just because it comes mere weeks before a copyright bill may be unveiled, but because there are mounting rumours that the move comes as a direct result of a conflict of interest concerns.

Personnel at the Copyright Policy branch were advised by email late last week that the move was for "personal reasons," though Neri apparently stopped coming into work soon after Labour Day. According to multiple sources, the personal reason involves a personal relationship with one of Canada’s leading copyright lobbyists.

While Neri’s personal life is no one’s business but her own, this does raise troubling questions about the quick passage of Bill C-59, the anti-camcording legislation, since Neri appeared as a witness before a Senate hearing on the bill with the lobbyist in the room. The Privy Council Office places particular responsibility on public servants that appear before a Parliamentary committee since they do so on behalf of the Minister.

Further, when was this known to senior officials at Canadian Heritage? If weeks ago, why does it appear that no one took action, particularly since this came at a time when Neri was briefing Josée Verner, the new Minister of Canadian Heritage, and the Prime Minister’s Office on copyright matters?

This is not an easy issue to raise, but if these reports are true, it surely creates at least a perceived conflict of interest contrary to Government Ethics Guidelines on a file that is very controversial and likely to grab the spotlight this fall. The Hill Times notes that Canadian Heritage has been slow to comment on the situation other than to confirm the move. Although it is important to protect the privacy of those affected, public confidence in the copyright process will be undermined if there is not a frank and full disclosure about who knew what and when.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2251/125/





Video Professor Sues Anonymous Griping Posters, Demands Their Identities
Greg Beck

Video Professor, a company that uses infomercials to sell computer-training lessons, sued 100 anonymous "John Doe" posters who expressed their opinions about the company on various online forums, including infomercialratings.com. The company's lawsuit claims that the griping posters violated federal trademark laws by saying negative things about the company, and committed defamation and several violations of state law. After filing suit, the company sent subpoenas to the operator of the websites, demanding the release of the posters' identifying information and the IP addresses from which they made the posts. Here's the complaint and the company's motion to subpoena the anonymous posters' identity. The challenged posts are here and here.

The Internet has become the preeminent forum for consumers to share information about products and services online. Courts have recognized that the First Amendment protects the right to post criticism anonymously, noting the risk that critical opinions would be chilled if the identity of anonymous critics could too easily be revealed. Indeed, Video Professor's own website advises consumers to search for customer reviews online:

[i]f you decide to use a lesser-known merchant, there are a few things you can do to check out the seller and make sure he’s legit. For one, you can visit the Federal Trade Commission’s Web site for links to consumer protection resources, including lists of complaints lodged against businesses. You also have the option of searching the business section of a major search engine, where you can view company profiles and customer reviews of that company’s products and services. Last but not least, you can request that a seller send you a catalog or other information about his or her company.

My colleague Paul Levy sent a letter to Video Professor today objecting to the subpoena (PDF).
http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/20...professor.html





Movie Director Sentenced for Lying About Detective
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

A federal judge on Monday sentenced John McTiernan, the director of action movies including “Die Hard” and “Predator,” to four months in prison for lying to an F.B.I. agent about hiring the private investigator Anthony Pellicano to wiretap the producer of one of his films.

Mr. McTiernan, 56, became the first Hollywood figure to receive prison time because of dealings with Mr. Pellicano, who is awaiting trial on charges of masterminding a long-running wiretapping conspiracy on behalf of stars, studio executives and others in the entertainment industry.

According to prosecutors, Mr. McTiernan paid Mr. Pellicano $50,000 to wiretap Charles Roven, a producer of his box-office flop “Rollerball,” in August 2000. But he denied having done so when an F.B.I. agent called to ask him about it in February 2006.

Two months later, Mr. McTiernan pleaded guilty to a false-statement charge and offered his cooperation to federal prosecutors digging into Mr. Pellicano’s electronic-eavesdropping operation. But after prosecutors made clear that they thought he was not being truthful and would seek a prison sentence, he hired new lawyers and sought to withdraw his guilty plea and take his chances at trial.

A federal district judge, Dale S. Fischer, quickly rejected that attempt on Monday.

In a withering rebuke from the bench, Judge Fischer appeared to treat Mr. McTiernan more harshly because of his Hollywood career, calling him a “world-famous director” who arrogantly considered himself “above the law” and had shown no remorse.

“If anything, Mr. McTiernan’s privileged background is an aggravating factor,” she said, imposing a $100,000 fine in addition to the prison sentence. Mr. McTiernan has until Jan. 15 to surrender. His new lead lawyer, Milton Grimes, said Mr. McTiernan would appeal the ruling.

Mr. McTiernan was also ordered to surrender his passport. It was unclear what his sentence would mean for a movie he was preparing to film in Argentina, “Run,” about an Interpol agent who uncovers a conspiracy while pursuing a murder suspect.

The sentence was considered light compared with the many years Mr. Pellicano could face if convicted at his trial in February on racketeering and other charges. But it was severe given that federal prosecutors’ guidelines advise against charging people who merely deny their crimes without embellishing their denials with further lies.

In court on Monday, an assistant United States attorney, Daniel A. Saunders, asserted that Mr. McTiernan lied in insisting to prosecutors that Mr. Roven was the only person he had hired Mr. Pellicano to wiretap. Mr. Saunders expressed a belief that Mr. McTiernan had previously hired Mr. Pellicano to wiretap someone else, most likely his former wife, Donna Dubrow, during their 1997 divorce.

Mr. McTiernan, wearing brown cowboy boots and a blue blazer, did not speak when given the chance by the judge. His new lawyers argued that on the night he received the call from the F.B.I. agent, he was jet-lagged from a location-scouting trip to Thailand, had contracted typhoid and had stopped taking his antidepressant medication.

Asking for no prison time, the lawyers said that his Wyoming ranch, where he raises beefalo, a cross of cattle and bison, would suffer, and that his ranch hands could lose their jobs if he were absent for an extended time.

But Judge Fischer said she found their arguments “completely lacking in credibility.” Mr. McTiernan, she added, had taken two years to make the 1987 movie “Predator” and left Wyoming to work on other projects more recently, and yet the ranch had somehow managed to survive.

She also scolded Mr. McTiernan for saying in an e-mail message to his previous lawyer that he was “offended” at the idea he could be prosecuted because he had “refused to make movies in which F.B.I. agents are the bad guys,” and for complaining that his legal woes could get in the way of his making a “patriotic movie.”

The judge also noted that Mr. McTiernan had arranged to pay Mr. Pellicano by overpaying his own assistant by $50,000, thus involving another person in the wiretapping scheme “so it would not be traceable to him.”

Mr. Grimes, the new lawyer, said he was “gravely disappointed” by the sentence and took exception to the judge’s characterization of his client as someone who “lived a privileged life and simply wants to continue that.”

“He’s probably one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve met from Hollywood in my 30 years working here,” Mr. Grimes said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/bu...hollywood.html





Thieves Raid Argentine Home Of Francis Ford Coppola

Thieves broke into the Buenos Aires home of film director Francis Ford Coppola and made off with a laptop containing work on his new movie, an employee said on Thursday.

The Oscar-winning director of "The Godfather" movies was out when five thieves raided the house late on Wednesday, injuring a member of the production crew working on Coppola's next film, "Tetro," due to start shooting in February.

"Coppola is very sad and the only thing he's asked for is to get back his computer, which is essential for him and for his work," the employee, who was not identified, told a local television station.

She said the thieves took computers and other digital equipment including a camera.

Coppola, 68, is living in the Argentine capital during the making of "Tetro," which is expected to launch 2009. It is a story about an artistic Italian immigrant family in Buenos Aires and is said to be reminiscent of his life.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...32279120070927





Court to Consider Technology Patent Case
Christopher S. Rugaber

The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will consider a technology patent case that could have far-reaching ramifications for computer makers and other industries with global supply chains.

The case was brought by a group of Taiwanese computer makers, who have accused a South Korean rival of using its patents in an effort to "shake down the entire computer industry for several billion dollars in duplicative licensing fees."

At issue is whether a patent holder can seek royalties from multiple companies as a patented product works its way through the manufacturing process.

The Taiwanese firms, led by Quanta Computer Inc., are asking the justices to overturn a 2006 federal appeals court ruling that they say would open the door for patent holders to do just that.

Quanta and the other companies manufacture computers under contract for U.S. companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Gateway Inc. and Dell Inc.

The three U.S. corporations filed court papers in support of Quanta. They said the ruling, by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, "threatens to impose a huge financial and practical burden on manufacturers of technology products." The companies outsource much of the assembly of their computers to companies like Quanta, the world's largest contract manufacturer of laptop computers.

The case began in 2000 when the Taiwanese companies were sued by South Korea-based LG Electronics Inc. for allegedly infringing several patents LG holds on computer chip technology.

The case is Quanta Computer Inc. v. LG Electronics Inc., 06-937. Oral arguments haven't yet been scheduled.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092500609.html





EchoStar Mulls Asset Spinoff, Buys Sling Media

Satellite television operator EchoStar Communications Corp (DISH.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it may spin off its technology assets and announced plans to buy Sling Media, the maker of a device that relays TV programs to laptops and cell phones.

EchoStar shares rose as much as 9 percent in early trading, raising the possibility that the move could position either the technology unit or its pay-TV business Dish Network for an eventual sale.

"It is likely that the potential spin-off/restructuring will trigger renewed speculation about possible M&A transactions," Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett said in a note to clients, though he questioned whether a spinoff was necessary to selling either of EchoStar's businesses.

EchoStar said on Tuesday it asked the U.S. Internal Revenue Service whether it can split its technology and infrastructure properties into a new publicly-traded entity on a tax free basis to the company and shareholders.

Under the plan, EchoStar's consumer pay-TV business would continue to operate on its own as the Dish Network. Shareholders would have separate pro rata ownership interests in each company.

"Each company would be able to separately pursue the strategies that best suit its respective long-term interests," said EchoStar Chairman and Chief Executive Charlie Ergen in a statement. He added that a spin-off would allow the two companies to build more precise performance-based incentives for employees, as well as financing and expansion plans.

The Dish Network operations accounted for 98 percent of the company's overall revenue in the second quarter.

EchoStar, which competes with rival satellite provider DirecTV and U.S. cable operators, said late on Monday it would buy Sling Media in a deal that values the privately-held company at $380 million.

Sling Media is known for its Slingbox device that connects cable and satellite TV set-top boxes to the Internet, allowing a viewer to call up programs out of the home on mobile devices that have Web access.

EchoStar had previously made an investment in the company, but Sling officials would not disclose financial details.

Bernstein's Moffett said the Sling Media acquisition could help EchoStar differentiate its service from rival DirecTV and cable operators by offering subscribers television on the go.

But that strategy carries its own risks since Sling relies on high-speed Internet connections for its service to work properly, Moffett noted.

"Increasingly, those broadband connections are likely to belong to cable operators, or, in parts of the country, to (phone companies) offering their own video services," he wrote in a research note to clients.

Sling Media would be incorporated into EchoStar's technology and infrastructure segment, but remain a wholly owned subsidiary using its brand name.

EchoStar's asset spinoff would include its set-top box design and manufacturing business, its international operations and assets used to provide fixed satellite services to third parties. Ergen would continue to serve as Chairman and CEO of both Dish Network and the spun-off company.

It will sell hardware and services to the Dish Network, as well as market to other cable and satellite companies and directly to consumers, a Sling spokesman said.

The purchase is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Shares in EchoStar were up 7 percent, or $2.80, to $44.12 in early Nasdaq trading, after touching an intraday high of $45, its highest level since July.
http://www.reuters.com/article/merge...35404820070925





Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free
Steve Lohr

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month.

Orders, however, are slow. “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”

But Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, views the problem as a temporary one in the long-term pursuit of using technology as a new channel of learning and self-expression for children worldwide.

And he is reaching out to the public to try to give the laptop campaign a boost. The marketing program, to be announced today, is called “Give 1 Get 1,” in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399.

One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.

Just what Americans will do with the slender green-and-white laptops is uncertain. Some people may donate them to local schools or youth organizations, said Walter Bender, president of the laptop project, while others will keep them for their own family or their own use.

The machines have high-resolution screens, cameras and peer-to-peer technology so the laptops can communicate wirelessly with one another. The machine runs on free, open source software. “Everything in the machine is open to the hacker, so people can poke at it, change it and make it their own,” said Mr. Bender, a computer researcher. “Part of what we’re doing here is broadening the community of users, broadening the base of ideas and contributions, and that will be tremendously valuable.”

The machine, called the XO Laptop, was not engineered with affluent children in mind. It was intended to be inexpensive, with costs eventually approaching $100 a machine, and sturdy enough to withstand harsh conditions in rural villages. It is also extremely energy efficient, with power consumption that is 10 percent or less of a conventional laptop computer.

Staff members of the laptop project were concerned that American children might try the pared-down machines and find them lacking compared to their Apple, Hewlett-Packard or Dell laptops. Then, in this era of immediate global communications, they might post their criticisms on Web sites and blogs read around the world, damaging the reputation of the XO Laptop, the project staff worried.

So the laptop project sponsored focus-group research with American children, ages 7 to 11, at the end of August. The results were reassuringly positive. The focus-group subjects liked the fact that the machine was intended specifically for children, and appreciated features like the machine-to-machine wireless communication. “Completely beastly” was the verdict of one boy. Another environmentally conscious youngster noted that the laptop “prevents global warming.”

Still, the “Give 1 Get 1” initiative is mainly about the giving. “The real reason is to get this thing started,” Mr. Negroponte said.

He said that if, for example, donations reached $40 million, that would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000 machines to 20 countries to try out and get started.

“It could trigger a lot of things,” Mr. Negroponte said.

Late last year, Mr. Negroponte said he had hoped for orders for three million laptops, but those pledges have fallen short. Orders of a million each from populous Nigeria and Brazil did not materialize.

Still, the project has had successes. Peru, for example, will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas. Mexico and Uruguay, Mr. Negroponte noted, have made firm commitments. In a sponsorship program, the government of Italy has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.

Each country will have different ideas about how to use the machines. Alan Kay, a computer researcher and adviser to the laptop project, said he expects one popular use will be to load textbooks at 25 cents or so each on the laptops, which has a high-resolution screen for easy reading.

“It’s probably going to be mundane in the early stages,” said Mr. Kay, who heads a nonprofit education group, whose learning software will be on the XO Laptop. “I’m an optimist that this will eventually work out,” Mr. Kay said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bu.../24laptop.html





Why OLPC Mesh Wireless Networking Won’t Work
George Ou

One of the touted features of the $200 OLPC laptop is the peer-to-peer mesh topology networking feature that can theoretically bring an Internet infrastructure where there is no network infrastructure. The problem is that peer-to-peer wireless LAN mesh topology sounds better than it actually works and there’s a good reason it isn’t used commercially.

[UPDATE 3:00PM - I should clarify that OLPC mesh technology applies to the XO laptop shown on the left or to the Intel Classmate. Intel is also on the board of OLPC so it’s not OLPC versus Intel. Intel is also providing some help on technology based on the centralized Access Point and Bridge model. OLPCs can also work with centralized wireless LAN infrastructures and that is the point of this blog; that the two technologies work best together and that they’re not mutually exclusive. A $60 Linksys router running modified Linux and a $20 antenna can provide fast and reliable infrastructure for the entire school.]

The word “mesh” is traditionally highly regarded in the networking world because every IT student is taught in Computer Networking 101 that “mesh topology” is the most advanced form of networking. Mesh topology traditionally conjures up the image of multiple redundant links with high-performance distributed loads but that only applies to the wired networking world when multiple physical links are used to build the network. High-performance and load-distribution does not apply to wireless mesh topology especially when we’re talking about typical implementations that use a single radio and a single radio frequency. In fact, every wireless relay adds another hop and the relay action doubles the radio contention because the same data has to be retransmitted on the same radio frequency.

Even if we ignore the delay and contention problems of mesh topology wireless LANs, there’s an even more fundamental problem facing the peer-to-peer mesh technology being implemented in projects like the OLPC. The radios and antennas are so small that it would take hundreds of OLPC devices with perfect spacing to replace a single high-powered Access Point with high-gain antennas. Consider the illustration below where I compare OLPC laptops that are capable of transmitting up to 50 meters with their small 30mW radios and small antennas versus a centralized AP that’s capable of 400 meters range.

Note that I’m being very conservative with the 400 meter range with a 300mW Access Point because those things can easily go twice as far. But even with a mere 8:1 advantage in range, it would take more than a hundred OLPC laptops to cover the same area. If we’re talking about a more realistic 16:1 advantage in range, then it would take more than 400 OLPC laptops to cover the same area and they would all have to be spaced out perfectly. We also have the possibility of using 500mW radios and 16 dBi antennas for even longer range in rural areas. When we consider the fact that a single failure in one of the mesh nodes due to battery drainage, moving out of range, software hang will cause the entire mesh scheme to break, there simply is no way to get around the centralized architecture.

Last week at Intel’s IDF convention in San Francisco, Intel’s “World Ahead Program” was showing off some cheap commodity technology and blueprints that would empower schools with wireless networking and Internet access. These blueprints and part lists allow the schools to build their own wireless infrastructure with cheap off-the-shelf components. The all-in-one Wireless Access Point and Wireless Bridge box (dual radio) allows remote locations that lack wired Internet uplinks to bridge wirelessly to the central uplink. I came up a slightly modified version shown in the illustration below to show the flexibility of this architecture.

With a few of these “towers” with sufficient transmit power and high-gain omni-directional antennas for client access and directional antennas for the backhaul; we can reliably cover a very large campus.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=777





Fight Cyberbullies, Schools Told

Schools are being given guidance urging them to take firm action against pupils who use mobile phones and the internet to bully other children and teachers.

More than a third of 12 to 15-year-olds have faced some kind of cyberbullying, according to a government study.

Ministers are also launching an awareness campaign on the social networking sites used by many pupils.

Schools have been told they can confiscate mobile phones and how to get hurtful material pulled from websites.

'Happy slapping'

Schools Secretary Ed Balls said cyber bullying was "insidious" and had grown with technology and changes in society.

Schools needed to get to grips with newer forms of bullying, he said.

Examples cited include threats, intimidation, harassment or "cyber-stalking", unauthorised publication of private information or images, impersonation and so-called "happy slapping".

Mr Balls also called for action against anti-gay bullying -calling for schools to promote a "culture of respect" and saying that "homophobic insults should be viewed as seriously as racism".

Ed Balls said: "The vast majority of schools are safe environments to learn in. However, we know that behaviour, particularly bullying, is a key concern for parents and bullying of any kind is unacceptable.

"Cyberbullying is a particularly insidious type of bullying as it can follow young people wherever they go and the anonymity that it seemingly affords to the perpetrator can make it even more stressful for the victim.

"One message that I want to get across to young people is that bystanders can inadvertently become perpetrators - simply by passing on videos or images, they are playing a part in bullying.

TIPS TO AVOID CYBER BULLYING
Don't respond to malicious texts or e-mails
Save evidence
Report cyber bullying
Keep passwords safe
Don't give out personal details online

"We now have an advanced approach to cyber bullying, thanks in no small part to the co-operation with the industry, teaching unions and charities."

The guide being sent out to schools in England says cyberbullying can be an extension of face-to-face bullying, "with technology providing the bully with another route to harass their target".

But it says it differs in that it invades home and personal space and the perpetrator can use the cloak of anonymity.

Among the new guidance are tips for drawing up anti-bullying policies to cover cyber bullying, how to have offensive or malicious material removed from websites, and advice on confiscating equipment used in bullying, such as mobile phones.

Offensive weapons call

The new measures were developed in consultation with anti-bullying experts, mobile phone companies and websites including Bebo, MySpace and YouTube.

Teaching unions say children are not the only victims of cyberbullying and that school staff are increasingly falling victim to it.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, said teachers would be pleased that ministers had recognised the problem.

"Mobile phones capture videos and pictures of teachers at work," she said.

"The often distorted images are transferred to the phones of other pupils within the class, across the school or uploaded on to the internet. E-mails are used to abuse, harass and insult.

"Misuse of internet sites can destroy teachers' confidence and professional reputation and provide yet another vehicle for false allegations against staff."

The union is calling for pupils' mobile phones to be classed as potentially offensive weapons and for them to be banned during school sessions.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said: "Sadly, bullying is a negative feature of any society and will only be countered by strong action against bullies and a bullying culture.

"We would encourage all partners in the world of education to play a part in stamping out wanton actions that negatively affect the lives of others.

"Many schools harness the student voice, through student councils and other means, to counter bullying in the most effective way, because students are closer to the lives of their peers."

The ATL teachers' union also backed the need for action against homophobic bullying - saying that it remained a "pervasive" problem in schools.

A survey for the union found that 70% of teachers had heard children in their schools using homophobic language.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...on/7005389.stm





Artists Erect Giant Pink Bunny on Mountain


Wahge wabbit

An enormous pink bunny has been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will stay for the next 20 years.

The 200-foot-long toy rabbit lies on the side of the 5,000 foot high Colletto Fava mountain in northern Italy's Piedmont region.

Viennese art group Gelatin designed the giant soft toy and say it was "knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool".

Group member Wolfgang Gantner said: "It's supposed to make you feel small, like Gulliver. You walk around it and you can't help but smile."

And Gelatin members say the bunny is not just for walking around - they are expecting hikers to climb its 20 foot sides and relax on its belly.

The giant rabbit is expected to remain on the mountain side until 2025.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1541732.html





My Business Failure – AnywhereCD
Michael Robertson

My newest business, AnywhereCD, is unfortunately on its last flicker of light before it officially flames out in a few days (my contract expires at midnight on September 30th so check out the close-out sale here where you can get a CD and instant delivery of 192k MP3s for only $7). It's a real shame because I think it was a solid business idea and in an effort to get some value from it, I want to tell you about it so you can learn from my mistakes.

I believe that if you give people real value (music or anything else) they are happy to pay. The AnywhereCD concept was quite simple: create an online store where customers could get the immediacy of digital files along with the permanence and familiarity of a physical CD. For one purchase price they would get the best of both worlds, with no need to take any extra steps just to get a MP3 file to play on their player. Sounds great in theory, but I wasn't able to pull it off.

With CD sales slumping sharply, I thought it would be a good time to approach the record labels with a new idea to spur sales. Obviously $1 song sales on iTunes are ongoing, but losing a $15 CD sale means a $14 net loss for the music business. I thought the labels would be receptive to the proposition of reinventing the CD by making it Internet friendly. In our web-savvy world, people expect everything immediately -- we want to bank, shop and communicate in real time. While we can buy a CD on the web immediately, we can't listen to it immediately -- instead we have to wait for the postman to show up with the plastic. It's no wonder that fewer and fewer people are buying CDs.

But what if anyone could buy a CD and immediately get the corresponding MP3 tracks to play anywhere? I assumed the labels wouldn't be too excited about users getting MP3 tracks, but CDs are perfect digital copies anyway so customers wouldn't be getting anything they couldn't already have. To entice the labels my strategy was to pay the wholesale price for CDs plus give them $2 for the digital tracks.

I met with all of the major labels (Universal, EMI, Sony, and Warner Music) and they seemed open minded to new ideas. One had a cautious 'wait and see' type of attitude. Another wanted millions of dollars up front. One insanely asked me if I would embed the purchaser's credit card number in the song files they bought. (I pointed out as politely as I could that no one would shop at Barnes and Noble if they printed your credit card number on every page of every book you bought. And, um, oh yeah, I'd be breaking a variety of federal and state laws!)

AnywhereCD eventually launched with the inventory from only one major label -- Warner Music. Of course, I wanted to launch with all the labels since most people don't have a clue what label any particular artist is on -- but we decided to open AnywhereCD with just Warner Music titles in the hopes that other labels would see the light.

After signing the contract we invested months of labor and resources into building the technology to amass the digital inventory, creating the web site, constructing the e-commerce system and testing the process. While we were working on this, Apple announced that they had entered into a deal to sell EMI tracks in MP3 format. That definitely stole some of AnywhereCD's thunder even though Apple's was just a pre-announce and wouldn't have music available for weeks. Days later we launched AnywhereCD.

Sadly, few press outlets covered our grand opening. Looking back I suspect there were probably many contributing factors. Maybe the price for the CD+MP3 bundle was too high? Thanks to iTunes the world thinks albums are worth $9.99 and many of the CDs on AnywhereCD were more expensive. Maybe nobody cares about CDs anymore? Clearly they are becoming less relevant as people adapt to a digital-only world. Maybe having just a fraction of the major label music made for a disappointing consumer experience? Warner Music represents roughly 20% of the major label titles -- so we were missing 80%. Maybe I didn't give the leading off-line publications enough notice to compete with the bloggers? Maybe the press is Apple-fixated? Maybe I didn't do a good job explaining the system to Warner Music who could have helped to educate a confused press? The answer is probably a combination of all these factors.

AnywhereCD will close-up shop shortly and surely be forgotten in digital music history. In spite of its ultimate demise I do think AnywhereCD helped push the world towards MP3. I was able to make a case -- that record labels will make more money if they utilize MP3 as part of their offerings. This is something I did once before when I started MP3.com in 1998, but they nearly threw me out of their offices. This time they listened intently to my proposal and responded promptly. I think record labels are becoming more comfortable with the fact that selling MP3 files can have a positive impact on their business. Since my campaigning, EMI is selling their entire catalog in MP3. Universal just recently kicked off a significant test with several major retailers vending MP3 tracks. This week, Warner Music is selling the new James Blunt CD with digital tracks that you can load into an iPod for $9.99.

Although AnywhereCD was an expensive experience for me and not my proudest business accomplishment, I hope you get some value from my experience. And even if you don't give a rip about the business experience, but you like music, you can benefit right now! In its final week of existence, AnywhereCD will be selling most of its CD inventory for a mere $7. For that 7 bucks you will get a new CD plus high quality 192k MP3 tracks that you can immediately download, stream and sync with your iPod. And hey, I'd rather take a loss, see music fans get great music at great prices and empower their music freedom.
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/arch...?minute_id=245





Starbucks to Give Away Music as New Service Starts

Starbucks on Monday said it will give away millions of songs via downloads starting next month, as it launches a wireless music service with Apple. From October 2 to November 7 at more than 10,000 U.S. Starbucks locations, customers can receive "Song of the Day" cards redeemable on Apple's iTunes store for a complimentary song hand-selected by Starbucks Entertainment, the company said.

Starbucks said it will give away 1.5 million downloads per day for a total of more than 50 million free songs. Customers will have until the end of the year to redeem the song on iTunes. Earlier this month, Apple and Starbucks said they had reached a deal to allow people to buy songs wirelessly from Apple's iTunes music store in Starbucks coffee shops without paying Wi-Fi connection fees. The service is to debut at more than 600 Starbucks stores in New York and Seattle on October 2, and will be expanded to other major U.S. cities later this year and next.
http://www.news.com/Starbucks-to-giv...3-6209620.html





Virgin Digital Can't Reach Escape Velocity, to be Grounded Permanently
Jacqui Cheng

Virgin Digital, the online presence of the UK-based Virgin Group that owns Virgin Megastores, has announced that it has begun closing its doors in stages, beginning last week. According to a message on the site, the online music store has already shut its doors to new customers as of last Friday, and as of this coming Friday, it will cease selling individual tracks to current customers. Only subscribing members will have access to the site until their next payment is due or October 19, whichever comes first. After that, the site will cease to operate for both US and UK customers. "I don't really know what else to say, it's not our decision to go," writes MikeCK on the Virgin Digital Big Mouth Blog. "It's the powers that be who have decided they don't want us anymore."

Virgin launched Virgin Digital in 2004 with both subscription and per-track pricing available to its users. As with most subscription services, Virgin's allowed users to listen to an unlimited number of tracks per month that they could access as long as they continued to pay their $7.99 monthly subscription fee. Individual tracks could also be purchased for 99¢ apiece, which allowed users to burn them to CD and access the songs for as long as they wanted. All tracks used Windows Media DRM, and therefore were only playable under Windows and on WMA-compatible devices.

The site now advises its customers who have purchased tracks to back them up, as they will not be able to download them again once Virgin Digital has closed. It's unclear whether the purchasers of individual tracks will be able to access their songs without burning them to CD and reimporting them as MP3s, but it's better to be safe than sorry if you're one of those customers. And naturally, subscribing members will lose access altogether once their subscriptions lapse. Song credits on the site must be used up before the service shuts down, too, or else they'll be lost. Fortunately, US users of the service will be able to transfer any remaining song credits to Napster's music service, although UK users will be out of luck if they don't use their song credits now.

Outside of the iTunes Store, online music stores like Virgin Digital haven't exactly been making home runs in terms of popularity or sales. The subscription model for music hasn't been received well by the general population, and heavy DRM restrictions have left many potential customers giving these services the cold shoulder. The shuttering of Virgin's digital doors is only the most recent example of this—MTV recently ditched Microsoft in its partnership over URGE, likely signaling the service's imminent demise. Also, Virgin Digital users might want to use up their credits quickly even if they can transfer them to Napster—everyone's favorite P2P-turned-legit service has had monetary problems of its own for several years now. And let's not forget that Sony Connect closed its doors less than a month ago, too.

When it comes to digital music sales, DRM-free is the new hotness and almost everything else is old and busted. Several online music stores have begun to sell DRM-free tracks, with labels like EMI, Nettwerk Music Group, and even music giant Universal testing the waters. EMI even claims that its early numbers indicate that DRM-free tracks are selling pretty darn well. We can only hope that this trend continues and that the labels take notice, because until they decide to loosen DRM restrictions or (better yet) ditch DRM altogether, we're likely to continue hearing stories like this.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...rmanently.html





Amazon Launches DRM-Free "Amazon MP3" Music Downloads
Joshua Topolsky

If you're into DRM-free music, you have a reason to get pretty excited today. As speculated, Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels, all without the painful and annoying restrictions of DRM. The press release claims that the site, which will include EMI and Universal tracks (take that, Jobs), will make separate songs available for $.89 or $.99, and boasts that all of the "top 100" tracks will be priced at the former, lower amount. Albums will range in cost from $5.99 to $9.99, with the best selling albums coming in at $8.99. Of course, since there's no DRM, users are free to throw the 256Kbps MP3s on any player they like, as well as burn CDs, copy to MiniDisc, and dump to 8-track.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/25/a...sic-downloads/





DRM Advocates Getting Nervous About Consumer Backlash
Ken Fisher

You all know the slogan: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." At the Digital Rights Strategies conference in New York City, a similar message could be heard: "DRM doesn't anger consumers, content owners abusing DRM anger consumers."

Few, of course, would argue that the mere existence of DRM is a bad thing. Locked away in a vault somewhere or trapped in one of those nifty mirrors featured in Superman, DRM can do little harm. Such assertions are merely academic, of course. Tools are designed to be used, and DRM is being used to do what it was designed to do: control how consumers interact with content.

But the growing backlash against DRM is causing dissension in the pro-DRM ranks. Paul Sweeting's excellent report on the DRS conference records the frustrations of the DRM community at the tactics of the content industry. They apparently feel that an overzealous content industry is abusing DRM; this is a bit like Smith & Wesson complaining that bullets can kill.

When DRM proponents start pointing fingers and attempting to separate the theory (really, the ideology) from the practice, we have to stop and ask: what's going on here? It appears that players in the DRM ecosystem know the tide is turning against them because DRM is punishing the wrong people, namely the folks who are buying DRM-laden content. This is bad for their business, because a DRM backlash could harm DRM peddlers.

Then, of course, there's the hypocrisy. At a conference convened by the overlords of DRM, Sony vice president Scott Smyers admits that he circumvents the copy protection on DVDs (CSS) in order to make backups for personal use. Apparently Mr. Smyers doesn't agree with Hollywood or the Register of Copyrights, both of which argue that "backups" can readily be had in the form of new copies you can buy at the store. The corporate hypocrisy is obvious: what the corporate parent demands (DRM that prevents DVD copying), even its own employee disregards. We can't blame him.

Among DRM peddlers, there's also a bit of jealously because some DRM systems are "successful." Take the comments made by Talal Shamoon, CEO of InterTrust (a company working on interoperable DRM schemes, among other things): "Apple is using encryption to try to do what Ma Bell used to do with the phone network: wall people in," he said. "It frustrates consumers and ultimately feeds piracy."

Such views are nonsense, of course, when you're trying to pin them on just one proponent of DRM. Re-read that quote, and replace "Apple" with "DRM." It's every bit as true.

While proponents of universal or interoperable DRM schemes might say that they don't want to wall people in around any given manufacturer's products, the "Cask of Amontillado" aspects remain: interested consumers can only utilize DRM'd products on devices that support that DRM system (interoperable or not). Take the widest, most universal DRM implementation to date: CSS for DVDs. A properly equipped computer still cannot legally play DVDs in countries like the US if it runs an operating system or carries components not blessed by the "powers that be" (in this case, the DVD-CCA and friends). Then look at the next-gen version of CSS, known as AACS. The implementation requirements for AACS are even more stringent, even more exclusive. If you don't have a team of engineers available to make your new product work with AACS, then you're out of luck.

The consumer electronics world is well aware of the devastating effects of DRM on innovation. Take the comments of Jim Helman, CTO of Hollywood-backed MovieLabs. Helman says that if he were in the hardware business, he'd be focusing his attention on building a DVD-ripping movie jukebox. Yet this is something that is currently illegal and scares the DVD-CCA to death. The same activity that gave birth to the MP3 player and revolutionized the music industry is anathema to the content owners in Hollywood. MPAA VP Fritz Attaway even suggested that without DRM in place, Hollywood wouldn't have any other option than to simply not release its movies. DRM-free is apparently unthinkable at the MPAA, despite an acknowledgment from Attaway that current implementations cause problems for fair use! The message is, essentially: yes, we know this CSS stuff stomps on fair use, but better that than we release products without encryption.

The DRM backlash is indeed coming, and kudos to these industry players for realizing it. Heck, the backlash is already here and has been for years. Now that major players like Apple and even labels like EMI and Universal are starting to realize it, it's only a matter of time before it turns into a full-scale revolt. Whether or not there will be a revival of interoperable DRM cure-all theories remains to be seen, but backers have at least figured one thing out: when DRM does what it is designed to do—namely inconvenience and control end user behavior—users bite back.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-backlash.html





Vivendi Calls Apple iTunes Contract Terms "Indecent"
Astrid Wendlandt

Vivendi condemned as "indecent" the contract terms between its Universal Music Group (UMG) unit and Apple Inc, the computer maker whose iTunes online store dominates the digital music market.

Vivendi is one of many large media companies that are trying to challenge Apple's grip on the digital entertainment market and obtain more control over pricing. It said it was in talks with rival distributors.

"The split between Apple and (music) producers is indecent ... Our contracts give too good a share to Apple," Vivendi Chief Executive Jean-Bernard Levy told reporters at a gathering on Monday organized by the association of media journalists in France.

At present, UMG, the world's largest record company, gets 0.70 euro ($0.99) out of the 0.99 euro retail price charged by iTunes, Vivendi said.

Among other things, Levy called for the remuneration of a new release to be higher than for a 30-year-old classic. "We should have a differentiated price system," he said.

UMG renews its music distribution contracts with Apple every month after having failed to agree a longer-term arrangement earlier this year.

The music publisher can end its contract with Apple at one month's notice, but Levy declined to say whether UMG was ready to bypass Apple altogether.

"We are in a phase during which many different actors are talking to each other ... We are trying to put in place several projects to ensure that music is better remunerated ... We are not just talking to Apple," he said.

In August, NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, decided against renewing its contract to sell television shows on iTunes and this month reached a deal to sell TV downloads to online retailer Amazon.

Artist's Image

Commenting on the outlook for revenues at UMG, Levy said: "At constant exchange rates, we should probably be stable again in 2007."

Fleshing out UMG's strategy, Levy said it planned to focus on better exploiting the "monetization of an artist's image" which included branded clothes and TV shows.

"This is what we hope will revive our business," Levy said. "People indulge in piracy but spend a lot of money on many other things that are linked to an artist."

Levy forecast that "in the not so distant future", traditional music products such as DVDs and CDs would make up less than 50 percent of music publishing revenues.

At the half-year stage, digital music sales made up 15 percent of UMG's total music revenue.

Separately, Levy said Vivendi expects the profitability of its pay-TV group Canal Plus to improve in 2007, excluding restructuring costs.

"We hope to generate, excluding restructuring costs, an EBIT margin of above 7 percent this year" at Canal Plus, Levy said.

In 2006, Canal Plus's earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) reached between 4 and 5 percent of revenue, on a comparable basis excluding restructuring costs.

Levy said Canal Plus aimed to reach an operating margin of 20 percent by 2010, matching the level of British rivals and narrowing the gap with U.S. peers with margins near 30 percent.

"To get there, we need savings and particularly in (TV) content," Levy said, adding that Canal Plus planned to cut 200 to 250 million euros in TV content costs, which now hovered around 2 billion euros annually.

But Levy acknowledged that competition for good TV content such as film or sports rights remained high, particularly against new entrants such as France Telecom which he described as a "semi-public company" with deep pockets.

Vivendi shares closed down 1.2 percent at 29.74 euros.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...88079220070924





Apple Sends Takedown Notice to iPod Hacker's ISP
Mike Schramm

Yesterday, Erica posted in her state of the iPod touch jailbreak that a hacker named "Martyn" had obtained a broken iPod touch, and was planning to dive in and download every bit of code on it in the increasingly complicated effort to put 3rd party applications on the iPod touch. He didn't plan to release the code to the public, but he did plan to upload the code to a secured area of his site in order to let the other touch hackers have a crack at it.

But even before his upload finished, we're told, his ISP showed up, with a takedown notice in hand. Apple had somehow found his site, had contacted his ISP, and let them know that it would be against copyright law for him to upload that code to the Internet. Martyn isn't interested in breaking the law (and it would be illegal to share that code), so he pulled the page off. But what's amazing here is how fast Apple moved on this-- either they've got someone listening in on the development wiki, or they're taking cues
from us on how things are going over there (hi, Apple!).

Despite what we've heard before, clearly they are very, very interested in making sure the iPod touch doesn't get hacked. Martyn tells me, as has Erica, that Apple has clearly gone out of their way to keep hackers out of their latest iPod. We're also told that progress continues despite all that, but Apple is apparently bending over backwards to do everything they can to keep the iPod touch closed.
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/25/apple...d-hackers-isp/
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