[JackSpratts]

How-to

Convert iTunes AAC to Open MP3 In Seconds
Igorsk

NOTE: If you're having issues with QTFairUse6, check the JHymn FAQ first and then if that doesn't solve your problem post a message here or in Help.

A port of the original QTFairUse to iTunes 6 using the excellent pydbg package by Pedram Amini.

Current version: 2.5
QTFairUse6-2.5.zip (NOTE: Contains newest CFG file...no need to download it separately now!)
Source code:
QTFairUse6-2.5-src.zip
Latest CFG file (Included in the QTFairUse6-2.5.zip archive):
QTFairUse6-Cfg.zip
Beginners Guide (Included in the QTFairUse6-2.5.zip archive):
QTFU-Help.txt

For iTunes 7.1.1 support, download the latest CFG file and unzip to your QTFairUse6 directory and allow it to overwrite the existing CFG file.

Changes: Code:

2006-11-29 Version 2.5
GUI version and library conversion routines by ATOM_alac.
Support for iTunes 7.0.1 and 7.0.2.
Fast dumping for iTunes 7.x
Patch offsets are now specified in an external file. This should make it easier to add support for new iTunes versions.
Invalid m4a files which were sometimes produced by 2.4 are now detected and reconverted as needed.
More thread syncronization added to fix potential bugs.
List of protected files is now retrieved from the xml library file. This should speed things up somewhat for owners of huge libraries.



Previous version: 2.4
http://rapidshare.de/files/33076083/...6-2.4.zip.html
Source code:
http://rapidshare.de/files/33076084/...4-src.zip.html

All links at source, Jack

http://www.hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553





iTunes-Like Video Services Have no Future: Study
Kenneth Li

Online video sites that sell shows and movies such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes will likely peak this year as more programming is made available on free outlets supported by advertising, according to a study released on Monday.

Sales of movies and television shows are expected to almost triple to $279 million in 2007 from an estimated $98 million last year. But unless the average consumer begins paying for their online video en masse, growth in sales will likely peter out next year, according to Forrester Research.

"In the video space, iTunes is just a temporary flash while consumers wait for better ways to get video. They're already coming," said Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, the author of the study, who also called the paid download video market a "dead end."

Forrester estimated that sales growth is not likely to triple or even double in 2008 and beyond, after early adopters and media addicts have already started using the services.

Confusion over different video file formats, difficulties watching downloaded videos on television screens and other technical problems have kept average users from paying for shows online.

Efforts by traditional media distribution companies to make more of their shows available for free on the Internet -- including the Hollywood-backed film service MovieLink, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s service and Amazon.com Inc.'s Unbox service -- are also working against paid services.

Led by Walt Disney Co.'s ABC.com, TV networks including News Corp.'s Fox are offering some hit shows online for free.

News Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal also launched a joint venture to distribute a combined archive of shows over the Internet.

"Free is going to win," McQuivey said.

Cable TV service executives and set top box makers are also seeking to make online videos easier to watch on big TV screens

-- a major topic of discussion at last week's cable industry trade show in Las Vegas.

Earlier this year, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL struck a deal to make its videos available directly on Sony Corp. flat-panel televisions.

Currently, only about 9 percent of online adults have paid to download a program or a movie, the study said. These people spent an average of $14 each to buy videos last year and will likely spend more this year as new online outlets debut.

McQuivey advises media companies to make their content available on all distribution platforms, but pay more attention to those that let users share content within a home network.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...22387620070514





Shaping the Future
Charlie Stross

(One of the things that goes with being an SF writer is that people expect you to talk about, well, the future. Last week, engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting invited me to Munich to address one of their technology open days. Here's a transcript of my talk, which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies that you're probably already becoming familiar with. Note that this is a long blog entry — even by my verbose standards — so you'll need to hit on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.)

Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you're expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us, how far technology will go, how people will use the net, and whether big shoulder pads and food pills will be fashionable. Personally, I'm still waiting for my personal jet car — I've been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention this as a note of caution: while personal jet cars aren't obviously impossible, their non-appearance should give us some insights into how attempts to predict the future go wrong.

I'm a science fiction writer by trade, and people often think that means I spend a lot of time trying to predict possible futures. Actually, that's not the job of the SF writer at all — we're not professional futurologists, and we probably get things wrong as often as anybody else. But because we're not tied to a specific technical field we are at least supposed to keep our eyes open for surprises.

So I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects — global warming, bioengineering, the green revolution, the intellectual property wars — and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia. And I'm going to get us there the long way round ...

Speed

The big surprise in the 20th century — remember that personal jet car? — was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970.

Before 1800, human beings didn't travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was unpleasant, slow, and usually involved a lot of exercise — or the hazards of the seas. Then something odd happened; a constant that had held for all of human history — the upper limit on travel speed — turned into a variable. By 1980, the upper limit on travel speed had risen (for some lucky people on some routes) to just over Mach Two, and to just under Mach One on many other shorter routes. But from 1970 onwards, the change in the rate at which human beings travel ceased — to all intents and purposes, we aren't any faster today than we were when the Comet and Boeing 707 airliners first flew.

We can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it's a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970. Today, the fastest vehicle ever built, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto, is moving at approximately 21 kilometres per second — only twice as fast as an Apollo spacecraft from the late-1960s. Forty-five years to double the maximum velocity; back in the 1930s it was happening in less than a decade.

One side-effect of faster travel was that people traveled more. A brief google told me that in 1900, the average American traveled 210 miles per year by steam-traction railroad, and 130 miles by electric railways. Today, comparable travel figures are 16,000 miles by road and air — a fifty-fold increase in distance traveled. I'd like to note that the new transport technologies consume one-fifth the energy per passenger-kilometer, but overall energy consumption is much higher because of the distances involved. We probably don't spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we're doing so.

Information

Around 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed.

But as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense — punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.

We can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph.

It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.

Speaking of engineering practicalities, I'm sure everyone here has heard of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of Intel coined this one back in 1965 when he observed that the number of transistor count on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. This isn't just about the number of transistors on a chip, but the density of transistors. A similar law seems to govern storage density in bits per unit area for rotating media.

As a given circuit becomes physically smaller, the time taken for a signal to propagate across it decreases — and if it's printed on a material of a given resistivity, the amount of power dissipated in the process decreases. (I hope I've got that right: my basic physics is a little rusty.) So we get faster operation, or we get lower power operation, by going smaller.

We know that Moore's Law has some way to run before we run up against the irreducible limit to downsizing. However, it looks unlikely that we'll ever be able to build circuits where the component count exceeds the number of component atoms, so I'm going to draw a line in the sand and suggest that this exponential increase in component count isn't going to go on forever; it's going to stop around the time we wake up and discover we've hit the nanoscale limits.

The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

Bandwidth

I don't expect I need to lecture you about bandwidth. Let's just say that our communication bandwidth has been increasing in what should by now be a very familiar pattern since, oh, the eighteenth century, and the elaborate system of semaphore stations the French crown used for its own purposes.

Improvements in bandwidth are something we get from improvements in travel speed or information processing; you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of magnetic tapes driving cross-country (or an Airbus full of DVDs), and similarly, moving more data per unit time over fiber requires faster switches at each end.

Now, with little or no bandwidth, when it was expensive and scarce and modems were boxes the size of filing cabinets that could pump out a few hundred bits per second, computers weren't that interesting; they tended to be big, centralized sorting machines that very few people could get to and make use of, and they tended to be used for the kind of jobs that can be centralized, by large institutions. That's the past, where we've come from.

With lots of bandwidth, the picture is very different — but you don't get lots of bandwidth without also getting lots of cheap information processing, lots of small but dense circuitry, hordes of small computers spliced into everything around us. So the picture we've got today is of a world where there are nearly as many mobile phones in the EU as there are people, where each mobile phone is a small computer, and where the fast 3G, UMTS phones are moving up to a megabit or so of data per second over the air — and the next-generation 4G standards are looking to move 100 mbps of data. So that's where we are now. And this picture differs from the past in a very interesting way: because lots of people are interacting with them.

(That, incidentally, is what makes the world wide web possible; it's not the technology but the fact that millions of people are throwing random stuff into their computers and publishing on it. You can't do that without ubiquitous cheap bandwidth and cheap terminals to let people publish stuff. And there seems to be a critical threshold for it to work; any BBS or network system seems to require a certain size of user base before it begins to acquire a culture of its own.)

Which didn't happen before, with computers. It's like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.

Unintended Consequences

It typically takes at least a generation before the social impact of a ubiquitous new technology becomes obvious.

We are currently aware of the consequences of the switch to personal high-speed transportation — the car — and road freight distribution. It shapes our cities and towns, dictates where we live and work, and turns out to have disadvantages our ancestors were not aware of, from particulate air pollution to suburban sprawl and the decay of city centers in some countries.

We tend to be less aware of the social consequences, too. Compare that 1900-era figure of 360 miles per year traveled by rail, against the 16,000 miles of a typical modern American. It is no longer rare to live a long way from relatives, workplaces, and educational institutions. Countries look much more homogeneous on the large scale — the same shops in every high street — because community has become delocalized from geography. Often we don't know our neighbours as well as we know people who live hundreds of kilometers away. This is the effect of cheap, convenient high speed transport.

Now, we're still in the early stages of the uptake of mobile telephony, but some lessons are already becoming clear.

Traditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there.

Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.

This has interesting social effects. Sometimes it's benign; you never have to wonder if someone you're meeting is lost or unable to find the venue, you never lose track of people. On the other hand, it has bad effects, especially when combined with other technologies: bullying via mobile phone is rife in British schools, and "happy slapping" wouldn't be possible without them. (Assaulting people while an accomplice films it with a cameraphone, for the purpose of sending the movie footage around — often used for intimidation, sometimes used just for vicarious violent fun.)

Convergence

It's even harder to predict the second-order consequences of new technologies when they start merging at the edges, and hybridizing.

A modern cellphone is nothing like a late-1980s cellphone. Back then, the cellphone was basically a voice terminal. Today it's as likely as not to be a video and still camera, a GPS navigation unit, have a keyboard for texting, a screen for surfing the web, an MP3 player, and it may also be a full-blown business computer with word processing and spreadsheet applications aboard.

In future it may end up as a pocket computer that simply runs voice-over-IP software, using the cellular telephony network — or WiFi or WiMax or just about any other transport layer that comes to hand — to move speech packets back and forth with acceptable latency.

And it's got peripherals. GPS location, cameras, text input. What does it all mean?

Putting it all together

Let's look at our notional end-point where the bandwidth and information processing revolutions are taking us — as far ahead as we can see without positing real breakthroughs and new technologies, such as cheap quantum computing, pocket fusion reactors, and an artificial intelligence that is as flexible and unpredictable as ourselves. It's about 25-50 years away.

Firstly, storage. I like to look at the trailing edge; how much non-volatile solid-state storage can you buy for, say, ten euros? (I don't like rotating media; they tend to be fragile, slow, and subject to amnesia after a few years. So this isn't the cheapest storage you can buy — just the cheapest reasonably robust solid-state storage.)

Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that'll be 100Gb. Two decades and we'll be up to 10Tb.

10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I'm awake. All the time. It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it's actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)

Why would anyone want to do this?

I can think of several reasons. Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis.

Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?"

Think of it as google for real life.

We may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers — in many towns in the UK, it is impossible for shops to get insurance, a condition of doing business, without demonstrating that they have CCTV cameras in place. Having such a lifelog would certainly make things easier for teachers and social workers at risk of being maliciously accused by a student or client.

(There are also a whole bunch of very nasty drawbacks to this technology — I'll talk about some of them later, but right now I'd just like to note that it would fundamentally change our understanding of privacy, redefine the boundary between memory and public record, and be subject to new and excitingly unpleasant forms of abuse — but I suspect it's inevitable, and rather than asking whether this technology is avoidable, I think we need to be thinking about how we're going to live with it.)

Now, this might seem as if it's generating mountains of data — but really, it isn't. There are roughly 80 million people in Germany. Let's assume they all have lifelogs. They're generating something like 10Tb of data each, 1013 bits, per year, or 1021 bits for the entire nation every year. 1023 bits per century.

Is 1023 bits a huge number? No it isn't, when we pursue Moore's Law to the bitter end.

There's a model for long term high volume storage that I like to use as a reference point. Obviously, we want our storage to be as compact as possible — one bit per atom, ideally, if not more, but one bit per atom seems as if it might be achievable. We want it to be stable, too. (In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.)

My model of a long term high volume data storage medium is a synthetic diamond. Carbon occurs in a variety of isotopes, and the commonest stable ones are carbon-12 and carbon-13, occurring in roughly equal abundance. We can speculate that if molecular nanotechnology as described by, among others, Eric Drexler, is possible, we can build a device that will create a diamond, one layer at a time, atom by atom, by stacking individual atoms — and with enough discrimination to stack carbon-12 and carbon-13, we've got a tool for writing memory diamond. Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa.

It's hard, it's very stable, and it's very dense. How much data does it store, in practical terms?

The capacity of memory diamond storage is of the order of Avogadro's number of bits per two molar weights. For diamond, that works out at 6.022 x 1023 bits per 25 grams. So going back to my earlier figure for the combined lifelog data streams of everyone in Germany — twenty five grams of memory diamond would store six years' worth of data.

Six hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.

In more familiar terms: by the best estimate I can track down, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2500 petabytes — 2.5 x 1018 bytes — of data. That's almost ten milligrams. The Google cluster, as of mid-2006, was estimated to have 4 petabytes of RAM. In memory diamond, you'd need a microscope to see it.

So, it's reasonable to conclude that we're not going to run out of storage any time soon.

Now, capturing the data, indexing and searching the storage, and identifying relevance — that's another matter entirely, and it's going to be one that imprint the shape of our current century on those ahead, much as the great 19th century infrastructure projects (that gave our cities paved roads and sewers and railways) define that era for us.

I'd like to suggest that really fine-grained distributed processing is going to help; small processors embedded with every few hundred terabytes of storage. You want to know something, you broadcast a query: the local processors handle the problem of searching their respective chunks of the 128-bit address space, and when one of them finds something, it reports back. But this is actually boring. It's an implementation detail.

What I'd like to look at is the effect this sort of project is going to have on human civilization.

The Singularity reconsidered

Those of you who're familiar with my writing might expect me to spend some time talking about the singularity. It's an interesting term, coined by computer scientist and SF writer Vernor Vinge. Earlier, I was discussing the way in which new technological fields show a curve of accelerating progress — until it hits a plateau and slows down rapidly. It's the familiar sigmoid curve. Vinge asked, "what if there exist new technologies where the curve never flattens, but looks exponential?" The obvious example — to him — was Artificial Intelligence. It's still thirty years away today, just as it was in the 1950s, but the idea of building machines that think has been around for centuries, and more recently, the idea of understanding how the human brain processes information and coding some kind of procedural system in software for doing the same sort of thing has soaked up a lot of research.

Vernor came up with two postulates. Firstly, if we can design a true artificial intelligence, something that's cognitively our equal, then we can make it run faster by throwing more computing resources at it. (Yes, I know this is questionable — it begs the question of whether intelligence is parallelizeable, or what resources it takes.) And if you can make it run faster, you can make it run much faster — hundreds, millions, of times faster. Which means problems get solved fast. This is your basic weakly superhuman AI: the one you deploy if you want it to spend an afternoon and crack a problem that's been bugging everyone for a few centuries.

He also noted something else: we humans are pretty dumb. We can see most of the elements of our own success in other species, and individually, on average, we're not terribly smart. But we've got the ability to communicate, to bind time, and to plan, and we've got a theory of mind that lets us model the behaviour of other animals. What if there can exist other forms of intelligence, other types of consciousness, which are fundamentally better than ours at doing whatever it is that consciousness does? Just as a quicksort algorithm that sorts in O(n log n) comparisons is fundamentally better (except in very small sets) than a bubble sort that typically takes O(n2) comparisons.

If such higher types of intelligence can exist, and if a human-equivalent intelligence can build an AI that runs one of them, then it's going to appear very rapidly after the first weakly superhuman AI. And we're not going to be able to second guess it because it'll be as much smarter than us as we are than a frog.

Vernor's singularity is therefore usually presented as an artificial intelligence induced leap into the unknown: we can't predict where things are going on the other side of that event because it's simply unprecedented. It's as if the steadily steepening rate of improvement in transportation technologies that gave us the Apollo flights by the late 1960s kept on going, with a Jupiter mission in 1982, a fast relativistic flight to Alpha Centauri by 1990, a faster than light drive by 2000, and then a time machine so we could arrive before we set off. It makes a mockery of attempts to extrapolate from prior conditions.

Of course, aside from making it possible to write very interesting science fiction stories, the Singularity is a very controversial idea. For one thing, there's the whole question of whether a machine can think — although as the late, eminent professor Edsger Djikstra said, "the question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". A secondary pathway to the Singularity is the idea of augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence: we may not need machines that think, if we can come up with tools that help us think faster and more efficiently. The world wide web seems to be one example. The memory prostheses I've been muttering about are another.

And then there's a school of thought that holds that, even if AI is possible, the Singularity idea is hogwash — it just looks like an insuperable barrier or a permanent step change because we're too far away from it to see the fine-grained detail. Canadian SF writer Karl Schroeder has explored a different hypothesis: that there may be an end to progress. We may reach a point where the scientific enterprise is done — where all the outstanding questions have been answered and the unanswered ones are physically impossible for us to address. (He's also opined that the idea of an AI-induced Singularity is actually an example of erroneous thinking that makes the same mistake as the proponents of intelligent design (Creationism) — the assumption that complex systems cannot be produced by simple non-consciously directed processes.) An end to science is still a very long way away right now; for example, I've completely failed to talk about the real elephant in the living room, the recent explosion in our understanding of biological systems that started in the 1950s but only really began to gather pace in the 1990s. But what then?

Well, we're going to end up with — at the least — lifelogs, ubiquitous positioning and communication services, a civilization where every artifact more complicated than a spoon is on the internet and attentive to our moods and desires, cars that drive themselves, and a whole lot of other mind-bending consequences. All within the next two or three decades. So what can we expect of this collision between transportation, information processing, and bandwidth?

Drawing Conclusions

We're already living in a future nobody anticipated. We don't have personal jet cars, but we have ridiculously cheap intercontinental airline travel. (Holidays on the Moon? Not yet, but if you're a billionaire you can pay for a week in orbit.) On the other hand, we discovered that we do, in fact, require more than four computers for the entire planet (as Thomas Watson is alleged to have said). An increasing number of people don't have telephone lines any more — they rely on a radio network instead.

The flip side of Moore's Law, which we don't pay much attention to, is that the cost of electronic components is in deflationary free fall of a kind that would have given a Depression-era economist nightmares. When we hit the brick wall at the end of the road — when further miniaturization is impossible — things are going to get very bumpy indeed, much as the aerospace industry hit the buffers at the end of the 1960s in North America and elsewhere. This stuff isn't big and it doesn't have to be expensive, as the One Laptop Per Child project is attempting to demonstrate. Sooner or later there won't be a new model to upgrade to every year, the fab lines will have paid for themselves, and the bottom will fall out of the consumer electronics industry, just as it did for the steam locomotive workshops before them.

Before that happens, we're going to get used to some very disorienting social changes.

Hands up, anyone in the audience, who owns a slide rule? Or a set of trigonometric tables? Who's actually used them, for work, in the past year? Or decade?

I think I've made my point: the pocket calculator and the computer algebra program have effectively driven those tools into obsolescence. This happened some time between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Now we're about to see a whole bunch of similar and much weirder types of obsolescence.

Right now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map. And GPS is pretty crude — you need open line of sight on the satellites, and the signal's messed up. We can do better than this, and we will. In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.

Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.

We're also in some danger of losing the concepts of privacy, and warping history out of all recognition.

Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.

Now, in this age of rapid, transparent information retrieval, what happens if you've got a lifelog, registering your precise GPS coordinates and scanning everything around you? If you're updating your whereabouts via a lightweight protocol like Twitter and keeping in touch with friends and associates via a blog? It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this — kids who've grown up with little expectation of or understanding of privacy. Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms, but that's not our problem. Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.

You know something? Keeping track of those quaint old laws about personal privacy is going to be really important. Because in countries with no explicit right to privacy — I believe the US constitution is mostly silent on the subject — we're going to end up blurring the boundary between our Second Lives and the first life, the one we live from moment to moment. We're time-binding animals and nothing binds time tighter than a cradle to grave recording of our every moment.

The political hazards of lifelogging are, or should be, semi-obvious. In the short term, we're going to have to learn to do without a lot of bad laws. If it's an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a 'bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there's no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I'm asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? And everything they see is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing.

One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.

And then there's history.

History today is patchy. I never met either of my grandfathers — both of them died before I was born. One of them I recognize from three photographs; the other, from two photographs and about a minute of cine film. Silent, of course. Going back further, to their parents ... I know nothing of these people beyond names and dates. (They died thirty years before I was born.)

This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

Total history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet. I'm really not sure what its implications are, but then, I'm one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.

Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.

And yet, these trends are emergent from the current direction of the telecommunications industry, and are likely to become visible as major cultural changes within the next ten to thirty years. None of them require anything but a linear progression from where we are now, in a direction we're already going in. None of them take into account external technological synergies, stuff that's not obviously predictable like brain/computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, or magic wands. I've purposefully ignored discussion of nanotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, genomics, proteomics, the future of nuclear power, the future of environmentalism and religion, demographics, our environment, peak oil and our future energy economy, space exploration, and a host of other topics.

The wrap

As projections of a near future go, the one I've presented in this talk is pretty poor. In my defense, I'd like to say that the only thing I can be sure of is that I'm probably wrong, or at least missing something as big as the internet, or antibiotics.

(I know: driverless cars. They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles.

(Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi. If I was malicious, I'd suggest that the move to autonomous vehicles will kill the personal automobile market; but instead I'll assume that people will still want to own their own four-wheeled living room, even though their relationship with it will change fundamentally. But I digress ...)

Anyway, this is the future that some of you are building. It's not the future you thought you were building, any more than the rocket designers of the 1940s would have recognized a future in which GPS-equipped hobbyists go geocaching at weekends. But it's a future that's taking shape right now, and I'd like to urge you to think hard about what kind of future you'd like your descendants — or yourselves — to live in. Engineers and programmers are the often-anonymous architects of society, and what you do now could make a huge difference to the lives of millions, even billions, of people in decades to come.

Thank you, and good afternoon.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...he_future.html





DirecTV Ponders Broadband Over Power Lines

Satellite television provider DirecTV may test delivering high-speed Internet service through power lines in a major U.S. city in the next year, its chief executive said Monday.

DirecTV and others are talking to companies that specialize in providing broadband through the electrical grid, Chief Executive Chase Carey said at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.

"We're not the only ones talking to them," Carey said, in response to a question on whether DirecTV would consider a test in a major city. "I think you'll see some meaningful tests in this arena."

DirecTV would like to test delivering Internet access on power lines in a "top 50 city where you're covering at least half the city."

Testing the service on several hundred thousand people would provide the company with "challenges and positives," he said.

Delivering broadband access through power lines is something that companies have been testing for some years. Most U.S. residents get broadband service through their cable television or telephone companies.
http://news.com.com/DirecTV+ponders+...3-6183685.html





Global Net Censorship 'Growing'
BBC
The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.

Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.

Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said.

"In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.

Mr Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, added: "There has also been an increase in the scale, scope and sophistication of internet filtering."

ONI is made up of research groups at the universities of Toronto, Harvard Law School, Oxford and Cambridge.

It chose 41 countries for the survey in which testing could be done safely and where there was "the most to learn about government online surveillance".

A number of states in Europe and the US were not tested because the private sector rather than the government tends to carry out filtering, it said.

Countries which carry out the broadest range of filtering included Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, the study said.

The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the report: politics and power, security concerns and social norms.

The report said: "In a growing number of states around the world, internet filtering has huge implications for how connected citizens will be to the events unfolding around them, to their own cultures, and to other cultures and shared knowledge around the world."

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, said the organisation was also looking at the tools people used to circumvent filtering.

"It's hard to quantify how many people are doing this. As we go forward each year we want to see if some of these circumvention technologies become more like appliances and you just plug them in and they work," he added.

"Few states restrict their activities to one type of content," said Rafal Rohozinski, Research Fellow of the Cambridge Security Programme.

He added: "Once filtering is begun, it is applied to a broad range of content and can be used for expanding government control of cyberspace. It has become a strategic forum of competition between states, as well as between citizens and states."

Mr Palfrey said the report was an attempt to shine a spotlight on filtering to make it more transparent.

"What's regrettable about net filtering is that almost always this is happening in the shadows. There's no place you can get an answer as a citizen from your state about how they are filtering and what is being filtered."

The survey found evidence of filtering in the following countries:

Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6665945.stm





Pentagon Blocks MySpace and YouTube
Mike Nizza

The Defense Department has decided to make it impossible to reach 13 Web sites from its network, citing an overabundance of “recreational traffic.”

In the policy released today, General B.B. Bell, commander in South Korea, said use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.” The memo is available in pdf format.

A spokeswoman for the United States Strategic Command was more specific in framing the issue as a technical limitation. “We’ve got to have the networks open to do our mission. They have to be reliable, timely and secure,” Julie Ziegenhorn said in an interview with Stars & Stripes, an independent newspaper published for the American military.

The ban also includes Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, live365 and Photobucket.

Private internet connections still have access, but most troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are limited to Pentagon service, Stars and Stripes notes.

Today’s Web site ban and last month’s revision of military blogging policy were partly justified by operational security concerns. Both also prompted questions about whether leaders were trying to reduce the voices of individual soldiers by making it more difficult to publish their own material.

The ban also arrived as the American military started to increase its profile on YouTube, posting official footage that aimed “to show another side of operations in Iraq beyond news reports of ‘the car bomb of the day,’” the BBC said.

A writer for Wired Magazine told The Associated Press that individual soldiers were also helping to present a more positive picture of the situation in Iraq. “They are muzzling their best voices,” Noah Shachtman said.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...e-and-youtube/





US States Press MySpace to Give up Sex Offender Data
Dan Goodin

Attorneys general from eight states say they have information that thousands of sex offenders have profiles on MySpace. They are concerned that predators may be using the social networking site as a virtual meeting place with their underage victims and today they authored a letter calling on the company to disclose the exact number of offenders and identify each one.

The letter is the latest headache at MySpace, which by dint of its 177 million registered users and massive amount of web traffic has become a preferred target for spammers and scammers. Earlier today, we reported that a new wave of spam has turned one of the most popular groups on MySpace to a barren wasteland (http://www.theregister.com/2007/05/1...pam_blizzard/). Such problems show the powerful downside to Web 2.0's viral nature.

None of this has been lost on the more alert law enforcement officials. They astutely noted that in December MySpace hired Sentinel Tech Holding to help it track pedophiles who may be using its site. MySpace at the time was reeling from countless front-page stories detailing how convenient the site made it for unscrupulous adults to meet face-to-face with minors. (The most notable among those stories came from Wired News reporter Kevin Poulsen, who wrote a program that cross-indexed MySpace profiles (http://www.wired.com/science/discove.../2006/10/71948) with registered sex offenders. He was able to confirm 744.) So now, some six months later after the MySpace gesture, they are demanding the site come clean with what it's learned so far.

"As our states' chief legal officers, we are gravely concerned that sexual predators are using MySpace to lure children into face-to-face encounters and other dangerous activities," they write. "We remain concerned about the design of your site, the failure to require parental permission, and the lack of safeguards necessary to protect our children."

The letter seeks the exact number and identities of MySpace users who also appear in Sentinel's database of registered sex offenders, the number and identities of sex offenders who have ever been identified as MySpace users and what steps MySpace has taken to alert officials and end users of the danger posed by these users. It also seeks what steps MySpace has taken to remove predators from its user profiles. The letter requests MySpace officials provide the information by May 29.

In response, MySpace said in a statement it is "in the initial stages of cross referencing our membership against Sentinel's registered sex offender database and removing any confirmed matches". It didn't explain why it has taken so long or when the job might be completed. The statement went on to call for the passage of federal legislation requiring sex offenders to register their email address.

Evidence is ample that MySpace doesn't do as much as it could to protect its users from online threats. The company for years has been lax about the use of JavaScript that can be used in member profiles. That has made it possible for ne'er-do-wells to exact all kinds of mischief, such as exploiting security flaws in QuickTime (http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/1...e_exploit/)and other end user software to infect users.

MySpace has also been harshly criticized for not doing more to protect its large number of underage users from predators. In January a suit (http://www.theregister.com/2007/01/18/myspace_sued/) alleged MySpace didn't do enough to prevent several predators from using the site to meet teen users and then sexually assaulting them.

The attorneys general are from the states of Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and New Hampshire.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05...fender_demand/





Citing Privacy, MySpace Won't Give Names of Sex Offenders to AGs
Elizabeth Dunbar

Citing federal privacy law, MySpace.com said Tuesday it won't comply with a request by attorneys general from eight states, including Connecticut, to hand over the names of registered sex offenders who use the social networking Web site.

MySpace's chief security officer said the company regularly discloses information to law enforcement officials but said the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act says it can only do so when proper legal processes are followed.

"We're truly disheartened that the AGs chose to send out a letter ... when there was an existing legal process that could have been followed," the security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, said in an interview.

In a letter Monday, attorneys general from North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked MySpace to provide the number of registered sex offenders using the site and where they live.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Tuesday blasted MySpace for refusing to share the information and said no subpoena is needed for MySpace to tell the attorneys general how many registered sex offenders use the site "or other information relating to possible parole violations."

"I am deeply disappointed and troubled by this unreasonable and unfounded rejection of our request for critical information about convicted sex offenders whose profiles are on MySpace," Blumenthal said. "By refusing this information, MySpace is precluding effective enforcement of parole and probation restrictions that safeguard society."

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper echoed the sentiment, saying "it's sad that MySpace is going to protect the privacy of sex offenders over the safety of children."

Nigam said MySpace is serious about identifying and removing sex offenders from its Web site and wants to work with the attorneys general.

"Everybody needs to get together and delete online predators," Nigam said, adding that MySpace supports state and federal legislation requiring sex offenders to register e-mail addresses. "The attorneys' general concerns and our concerns are exactly the same."

In December, MySpace announced it was partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build a database with information on sex offenders in the United States.

Software to identify and remove sex offenders from the site has been used for 12 days, and MySpace has "removed every registered sex offender that we identified out of our more than 175 million profiles," Nigam said.

It is also working with Sentinel to share the sex offender database and technology with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which works directly with law enforcement officials, Nigam said.

Christian Genetski, an attorney who has represented MySpace, said the Electronic Communications Privacy Act requires subpoenas, court orders or search warrants, depending on the information sought.

"It's a clearly defined law that most providers and prosecutors understand and work with on a daily basis," said Genetski, who covers information security and Internet enforcement at a firm in Washington, D.C. "My understanding is (the attorneys general) want the private personal information, and that's clearly the information the ECPA protects."

Blumenthal said will be aggressive in their pursuit of the information.

"We will take ...forceful action, including subpoenas if necessary to protect children," Blumenthal said.

MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., and other social networking sites allow users to create online profiles with photos, music and personal information, including hometowns and education. Users can send messages to one another and, in many cases, browse other profiles.

MySpace's policy prevents children under 14 from setting up profiles, but it relies on users to specify their ages.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...05-15-22-10-10





MySpace Gives Details of Its Plan to Reveal Known Sex Offenders
Louise Story

MySpace, an online social network popular with teenagers, said in two statements yesterday that it was prepared to work with state attorneys general who have requested the identities of MySpace members who are known sex offenders.

But the company said its cooperation hinges on whether the state officials follow the law and subpoena the names, a step that a leader of the state attorneys general said was not necessary.

In its first statement, MySpace said it was “doing everything short of breaking the law to ensure that the information about these predators gets to the proper authorities.”

MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, said it would release information about its members as long as it was able to comply with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. That law “prohibits us from disclosing the information they’re seeking without a subpoena,” the second statement said.

MySpace’s statement was interpreted as a rebuff by Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut and the co-chairman of a working group of 50 attorneys general.

“I do believe it is disingenuous and disappointing because much of the information that we have sought, specifically the numbers of convicted sex offenders on the site require no subpoena or any other compulsory process,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “We have a valid and viable need to know about convicted sexual offenders who may pose a threat to children.”

Mr. Blumenthal said that parole conditions for sex offenders ordinarily say that they cannot be in contact with children.

He said that Connecticut and other states do not require subpoenas for enforcing parole conditions. Mr. Blumenthal said he plans to convene a conference call in the next few days of the 50 attorneys general to decide how to respond to MySpace.

He said they would issue subpoenas, if need be.

Hemanshu Nigam MySpace’s chief security officer, said in an interview that the site had already taken down the profiles of thousands of sex offenders since the beginning of May when it began running its own database check.

“We’re hoping that we can work out the proper legal channel so we can provide this information to the attorneys general,” Mr. Nigam said. “The attorneys general have a particular goal, which is to try to do something against online predators, and we do too, which is to try to keep them off our site.”

Mr. Nigam said that the company had aggressively tried to crack down on sex offenders. Late last year, the company hired Sentinel Tech, a company in New York, to design a system to compare its 175 million member records with public sex offender records.

“In six months, we are the only company in the country that has stepped up in an area that faces the entire Internet industry,” Mr. Nigam said. “We did it with our own costs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/te...16myspace.html





Police Blotter: Imprisoned Sex Offenders Demand PCs
Declan McCullagh

Police Blotter is a weekly News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.

What: Sex offenders held in Minnesota facility say it was illegal for guards to confiscate personal computers used in their rooms.

When: Court of Appeals of Minnesota rules on May 8.

Outcome: Sex offenders have no right to possess PCs.

What happened, according to court documents:
The sleepy town of Moose Lake is home to one of Minnesota's sex offender programs, where "people who are committed by courts as a sexual psychopathic personality or a sexual dangerous person" are civilly committed. The unit goes by the generic name of "Therapeutic Concepts Unit."

Last April, four patients escaped from a second TCU location, which raised alarms in nearby communities. During their escape, the sex offenders removed metal bars and broke security glass in windows.

One of the men was a convicted rapist, who was identified and captured after appearing on America's Most Wanted a few weeks later. The other three were caught within hours of their escape.

That escape prompted Minnesota to immediately confiscate TCU patients' computers for security inspections. Rodger Robb, a TCU patient, believed that his computer would not be returned.

He sued, claiming a violation of his due process rights, and was joined by fellow patient Larry Schultz. Other reasons the administration gave for the confiscations include: The rooms are small and electrical outlets are limited.

"The point about this computer thing that is so angering to so many people is that they painted with this real broad brush," Robb said, according to CityPages.com. "I have never been accused of misusing my computer for anything. I have never misused my computer for anything."

The confiscation is part of a broader, planned crackdown on personal computers owned by TCU patients, with administrators arguing that the machines are used to store sexual images and ones in common areas should be used instead. That crackdown was put on hold until Robb's lawsuit was decided, though. (A previous Police Blotter article described how one TCU patient claimed to have a First Amendment right to have Playboy images on his PC.)

Robb and Schultz lost before a trial judge, who rejected their request for an injunction and ruled that the duo had "fallen far short" of demonstrating that they would suffer a violation of their rights.

So did a state appeals court, which said last week that administrators enjoy great latitude "to accommodate a growing patient population and provide a safe and secure facility for patients and staff."

Excerpts from the appeals court's opinion:
Appellants argue that the state infringed upon their due process rights under U.S. Const. amend. V and Minn. Const. art. I, Sec. 7 because they were deprived of property interests. Although the protocol does not allow personal computers in the patients' rooms, they have access to common-use computers and may transfer appropriate data from their personal computer hard drives to disks. Appellants speculate that the state intends to destroy Robb's computer and appellants' other property. Because he has copious amounts of saved material on his computer, Robb speculates that it would be impossible to put it onto disks.

Appellants cite no evidence to support these contentions. And it is important for the state to have the ability to adjust policies to further MSOP's safety goals. Gary Grimm, MSOP program director, specifically denies appellants' contentions in his affidavit, stating "if the patient does not send out his computer, (MSOP) will place it in storage. (MSOP) will not destroy or otherwise dispose of patients' computers." (Editor's note: MSOP stands for the Minnesota Sex Offender Program.)

The relationship between the parties is that appellants are committed in the TCU at MSOP, and respondents operate the treatment facility. The district court found that the statutory requirements allow the state "wide latitude" to develop programs and policies for the administration of the program, including disallowing contraband contained on computers. This is consistent with the articulated policy to maintain a "secure and orderly environment that is safe for persons in treatment and staff and supportive of the treatment program."

As the district court found, it would be a heavy administrative burden to require that the district court review each item of personal property to determine whether it complies with protocol. Absent a clear violation of the patients' rights, the state must exercise its professional judgment to accommodate a growing patient population and provide a safe and secure facility for patients and staff. On the current record, it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court, after considering each of the governing factors, to deny appellants' motion to temporarily enjoin the state from holding or confiscating appellants' personal property.
http://news.com.com/Police+Blotter+I...3-6184088.html





In Search of the Real Fake Steve Jobs

Who's behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs? The question riveting Silicon Valley as much as the satirical blog itself may be answered this week
Peter Burrows

Ask 10 folks in Silicon Valley for their favorite post from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, the satirical blog by an anonymous writer channeling Apple's chief executive, and you'll likely get 10 different answers.

There's the one about IBM (IBM) CEO Sam Palmisano's visit to Apple (AAPL) headquarters, which begins, "You may not know this if you're not in the industry but IBMers are a bit like Roman Catholic nuns. They never travel in groups of less than 20." It includes Palmisano's compliments on Apple's "iPod compact disc player" and his questions about whether the iPod Shuffle is a tie clip or mouse.

Then there's the post about a conversation with Apple director Al Gore, who supposedly tells Jobs he's suffering from depression, is "wacky as a dime watch," and has to step off the board so he can run for President again.

Or how about the classic about how Yoko Ono screwed up licensing talks to get the Beatles' music included on iTunes. "We're drinking green tea on the floor of her living room and she's insisting that when we put the music up on iTunes that the band must be called 'John Lennon and the Beatles' and she must be listed as a member of the group. Her big tactic is just to repeat things over and over in this monotone voice, to wear you down—it's a Japanese business tactic, they all do it … and for a while I'm agreeing and trying to be all Zen about it, and Yoko is giving me the Zen right back, and we're both working our Zen and trying to be more passive-aggressive and monotone and repetitive than the other one, and finally I just snapped … 'It's bad enough you broke up the greatest band of all time. Now you're gonna frig this up, too? … It's just a distribution deal!' She bows her head and says, in this voice that's barely more than a whisper, 'I will pray for your soul.'" It ends, well, badly for both Jobs and Ono.

Required Reading

Since Secret Diary was started last year, the daily stream of such entries has made Fake Steve Jobs, or FSJ for short, required reading in Silicon Valley and beyond. It has quickly become Jon Stewart's Daily Show for the tech set. FSJ not only manages to hit many of the topics of the day, but its unfiltered satirical voice lets techies revel in their never-ending fascination of their own industry, and be entertained at the same time. "It's amazingly well read, in part because everybody gets a laugh," says Roger Kay, founder of tech consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates. "If you're just a poor schnook, you get to laugh at what an egomaniac [Jobs] is, and at all his billionaire friends. But if you're in the game, you get to laugh at how well [Fake Steve] seems to know Jobs and his world."

FSJ has zealously guarded his (or her) identity since the blog was started. But now, as his popularity has soared, the guessing game over the author's true identity has grown almost as entertaining as The Secret Diary itself. It's a blend of the search for Watergate's Deep Throat with the speculation over the authorship of Primary Colors, the fictional-but-oh-so-accurate account of a Clintonesque White House in the early 1990s.

The guesses are all over the map. Tech journalists and former Apple marketing staffers are popular choices. More than one person has suggested the writer could be Jobs himself, as if he has the spare time. Then last week, the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag published a story intended to out FSJ, running through several possibilities before proclaiming on May 11 that the author is Leander Kahney, the 41-year-old editor of Wired News (wired.com). Only hours later, Valleywag reversed itself. After getting effusive praise in the blogosphere, Kahney, a longtime tech reporter and the author of two books on Apple, called Valleywag to say the site had gotten it wrong. "I didn't want to ruin it by fessing up," Kahney told BusinessWeek. "I was hoping to string it out over the weekend. But you can't take credit for someone else's work."

Book Deal on the Way?

The world may not have to wait much longer, however. According to one source, FSJ may unveil his identity as early as this week, possibly in connection with the announcement of a book deal. FSJ is represented by a literary agent, Emma Parry of Fletcher Parry in New York, say sources. "Early next week, he's going to be identified," says the source. Parry did not return calls seeking comment.

That certainly sets the stage for a public debut of, well, Jobsian dimensions. Kahney says he was as consumed with curiosity as anyone—maybe more. Earlier this year, before Wired News had signed a sponsorship deal with FSJ, he and a colleague went so far as to track the IP addresses when FSJ sent e-mails. But when his boss, Wired News Editor-in-Chief Evan Hansen, was about to reveal the identity to him, Kahney stopped him. "I didn't want to know."

The Secret Diary offers plenty of clues for those inclined to speculate. The author has an in-the-marrow sense of Silicon Valley's masters of the universe, an encyclopedic knowledge of Steve Jobs' history, and a been-there-done-that familiarity with the company's famously controlling public relations machine. Then there's the snarky and stylish writing style that seems to capture the ego Jobs would never give voice to. And there's a strange affection for British slang—like "chav"—that has many persuaded the writer is a Brit.

Those in the Know

The others who are suspected? The list is plenty long, but among those discussed is David Morgenstern of eWeek.com, Owen Thomas of Business 2.0, and Sarah Lacy, a BusinessWeek writer who left last year to write a book about Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Cathy Cook, who worked with Jobs at NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and is known for her devilish wit, has received a flood of calls in recent months asking whether she is Fake Steve, including one from a reporter on her cell phone on a Saturday morning earlier this year. "I just howl with laughter," she says, denying it is she. "I used to be nasty, but I'm not anymore. And it's way too clever to [have been written by] me." The real Steve Jobs did not return messages seeking comment, so it isn't known who he suspects—or even what he thinks of the blog.

In the end, FSJ does such a clever job channeling Jobs that it's hard to know how he actually feels about him. Sure, Jobs comes off as a self-righteous egomaniac—but only because FSJ truly is always right. "Can you tell whether he's sympathetic to Jobs or not? It's not that obvious," says Kay, of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "I think he's struck the right note all the way around. A lot of people at Apple think it's funny."

The question now, if in fact Fake Steve goes public soon, is what the future holds for The Secret Diary without its primary secret. Many regular readers and industry insiders are skeptical that the blog can maintain its buzz without the veil of anonymity. An identifiable author allows targets to take issue with slights or insults, and an FSJ who has to defend his postings may be more restrained. "I hope he doesn't get outed," says Kahney. "It will get watered down if he is."
http://www.businessweek.com//technol...n_id=rss_daily





A Producer and an Ex-Prosecutor in a Trial by TV
Alessandra Stanley

The most disturbing spectacle at the trial of Phil Spector isn’t the wizened and peculiar defendant slumped in the courtroom dressed in a 1970s-style leisure suit and blond pageboy wig. It’s the parade of attractive, mature women shown on Court TV testifying that not so long ago they too were willing, even eager, to spend time with the once-legendary record producer.

Four female witnesses have said that at one point Mr. Spector threatened them at gunpoint, and that is crucial to the prosecution, which seeks to convict Mr. Spector, 67, of killing Lana Clarkson, a 41-year-old struggling actress and nightclub hostess who was found shot dead in his house on Feb. 3, 2003.

But what resounds with viewers is the portrait of a downward Hollywood spiral painted by these smart, foolish witnesses, who like Ms. Clarkson thought that an association with Mr. Spector could improve their lives, and now consider themselves lucky merely to have stayed alive.

The Spector trial is a raw, brutal porthole into the inequities and humiliating alliances of show business. It calls out for a raw and brutal navigator — someone who will drive viewers to repeat to themselves, over and over, “There but for the Nancy Grace go I.”

Ms. Grace, the former Georgia prosecutor with the chain-gang-and-magnolia Southern drawl, announced last week that she was leaving “Nancy Grace: Closing Arguments” on Court TV after 10 years. She will still be seen on CNN Headline News in her usual evening slot, but discussion of celebrity trials on Court TV may never be the same.

It may very likely remain preposterous: Court TV has announced it has hired Star Jones Reynolds, formerly of “The View” — whose tabloid wedding extravagances and Sisyphean weight struggles long ago eclipsed her background as a prosecutor — to be the host of a daytime talk show.

But it is Ms. Grace who, for better and for worse, is the face of news media vigilantism. She is unlikely to leave the cable network before the Spector trial is over, and that is fortunate. In this sordid celebrity murder case, Ms. Grace serves as the arbiter of how far people can go to achieve fame.

Ms. Grace has always cast herself as the pit bull champion of the victim, with a vehemence that sometimes victimizes the victim. In this trial in particular, she seems to identify with Ms. Clarkson, showing a knowing sympathy for her choices, and even relief that she herself was spared a similar destiny.

She raised the question of why Ms. Clarkson would choose to go late at night to Mr. Spector’s house by answering it herself. “I’ve gone to offices and locations alone to meet male witnesses and male informants,” she said on Court TV last week. “And I, of all people, having been a prosecutor, you would think, ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ but you know you can’t go through your life always assuming something horrible is going to happen to you, you got to live, all right?”

She said she didn’t think badly of Ms. Clarkson, whose career high point was the lead in a Roger Corman B movie, “Barbarian Queen,” for going home with Mr. Spector. As Ms. Grace put it, “She was trying to make things happen.”

There is nothing new about a naïve actress losing her life in the quest to become a movie star, but what is poignant about Ms. Clarkson’s fate was that she was not a youngster just off the bus, but a woman in her 40s seemingly desperate to recapture the wisp of fame that curled around her for a moment in the 1980s and moved on. It’s her indefatigable optimism and forced good cheer that sting the most. Ms. Clarkson was working as a hostess at the House of Blues when she met Mr. Spector; in 2001 she starred in a friend’s play, “Lana’s Pupil: Every Woman’s Guide to Gold Digging.”

Ms. Grace is proof that women with a yen for the spotlight and a law degree can become rich and famous even after their youthful bloom has faded. Less-educated, less-pugnacious women with a hankering for movie star status often end up serving drinks in Los Angeles restaurants and nightclubs and feeling fortunate if they are asked out by an aged, perhaps even unhinged, former celebrity.

There isn’t much sympathy for these women in the courtroom. Bruce Cutler, one of Mr. Spector’s lawyers, once disparaged the witnesses as “sycophants and parasites.” Even the prosecutors who are relying on them to build the case against Mr. Spector sometimes express contempt.

Kathy Sullivan, a waitress who spent part of the evening of Feb. 2 bar hopping with Mr. Spector, said she was reluctant to give the last name of another woman who had been with them briefly that night, turning to the judge to say beseechingly, “Now she’s going to end up in the paper.”

The deputy district attorney, Alan Jackson, smirked. “Oh, nobody’s promising that.”

Court TV anchors love to pull away from the courtroom to put their own stamp on the proceedings. The infamously combative Ms. Grace has no patience with experts who try to interpret the defendants’ psyches. When a psychologist, Dr. Patricia Saunders, suggested that Mr. Spector’s wigs and shoes might be a sign of what she labeled “feminine identification,” Ms. Grace interrupted her at “Cuban heel.”

“I don’t know what a Cuban heel is. What is a Cuban heel?” she barked at her guest. “Please be specific.” When Dr. Saunders proved unable to describe it with sufficient precision, Ms. Grace reprimanded her with her customary prosecutorial gusto: “Cuban heel. You used a phrase with which you are unfamiliar.”

That kind of badgering has gotten her into trouble. In 2006, she taped a segment with Melinda Duckett, whose son was missing, demanding that Ms. Duckett account for her own whereabouts when he disappeared. Ms. Duckett killed herself the day after the interview. Few besides Ms. Duckett’s family argued that Ms. Grace drove the distraught woman to suicide (the mother has not been eliminated as a suspect in the still-unsolved case), but it didn’t help Ms. Grace’s reputation.

But Ms. Grace is neither a journalist nor an impartial legal expert. “Closing Arguments” is not about judicial process, it’s about summary judgment, a breaking-news version of pseudo-reality shows like “The People’s Court” and “Judge Judy.” Ms. Grace also breezes past due process and good manners to voice populist indignation.

Ms. Grace expressed bafflement that someone like Mr. Spector would feel the need to threaten women to make them stay. “He can have any woman he wants with all that money,” she said, adding, “Well, almost any woman he wants.”

But her point may be well taken. When Mr. Spector arrives at the Los Angeles courthouse, cameras tape him stepping out of a white S.U.V. on the arm of a tall, blond young woman, 26-year-old Rachelle Marie Short, a model and aspiring actress he reportedly wed in late 2006.

Defense lawyers usually instruct clients and their families to look sober as they enter the courthouse, but last week Ms. Short, preening a bit behind trendy sunglasses in front of paparazzi cameras, couldn’t suppress a delighted smile.

And that was the most troubling tableau of all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/ar...on/14watc.html





Report: Piracy Software Loses Continue to Rise
Ed Oswald

While the rate of piracy worldwide has stayed fairly stable, the cost of the problem to software developers continues to rise as the market continues to grow, the Business Software Alliance said on Tuesday.

An IDC study commissioned by the BSA found that for every $2 spent on legitimate software, a dollar is lost to piracy. Worldwide, around 35 percent of all software is pirated.

"The good news is we are making progress, however, we still have a lot of work to do to reduce unacceptable levels of piracy," said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman.

Global losses amounted to $40 billion in 2006, up 15 percent from the previous year. Some good news could be culled from the study: piracy rates dropped moderately in 62 countries, while increasing in only 13.

Progress was noted in places like China, whose piracy rates continued to drop. In 2006, 82 percent of software was pirated, down 10 points in three years. This amounted to an additional $864 million in revenue, the BSA said.

"This continued decline in China's software piracy rate is quite promising," Holleyman said. "BSA is encouraged by the commitment from the Chinese government to ensure legal software use.

Another problem area, Russia, also saw declines in the amount of pirated software during the same period, falling seven points to 87 percent in 2006.

Of all countries studied, the US had the lowest rate of piracy, yet the highest total losses at $7.3 billion. It was followed by China with losses of $5.4 billion, and France with $2.7 billion.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Repo...ise/1179247302





Rising Exports Putting Dent in Trade Gap
Jeremy W. Peters

Over half of the 9.1 million vehicles General Motors produced last year were sold in foreign countries. More KFC fast food restaurants are opening in China now than in the United States.

With the slumping housing market taking a toll on its business at home, Caterpillar is counting on sales of equipment and diesel engines in Europe, Asia and the Middle East to keep growing.

American companies have been doing business abroad for a long time, but never before has it been so important. This year, for the first time, Standard & Poor’s expects the 500 companies in its benchmark stock index to generate more than half of their sales in foreign countries.

Even as companies in the United States are gaining ground overseas, they are also sending more American-made products abroad. A weaker dollar is adding to their good fortunes, helping to make American goods and services more competitive in foreign markets.

As a result, it now looks as if the huge trade deficit, which swelled to a record $765.3 billion last year, could gradually decrease. The trade gap widened in March, mostly because of higher prices for imported oil, but the vast disparity between what Americans import and export is expected to narrow, which would allow trade to contribute to economic growth in the United States for the first time in more than a decade.

The shift to a more export-driven economy, if it continues, could add more jobs at home and help the United States bounce back from its slowest economic expansion in four years.

When the trade deficit shrinks, “home-grown demand is being fed by home-grown production instead of foreign production,” said Chris Varvares, the president of Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic research firm in St. Louis. “That requires more domestic employment, and that’s better for the domestic economy.”

Faster growth in Europe and Asia is helping to cushion the blow of a collapsing housing boom that has hampered domestic consumer spending, creating more demand from elsewhere for goods and services made in the United States.

Rather than hurting many American companies, a weak dollar is actually providing a strong lift. The exchange rate difference stokes profits from earnings generated abroad, countering the adverse effects on importers who must pay more and Americans traveling abroad with a less valuable currency in their wallets.

“The old notion that if the dollar’s bad, corporate profits have to go down is no longer correct,” said Howard Silverblatt, a senior analyst at Standard & Poor’s. “There’s a lot of growth going on in the rest of the world, and companies have to be there if they want to participate. There’s a lot to be sold.”

At the same time, a number of American workers have lost their jobs as companies moved more business overseas. And there is always the risk that the dollar could suddenly plunge and set off a global economic crisis.

But for now, the currency’s weakness is encouraging American manufacturers to keep more production at home and sell more goods abroad, and is aiding the turnaround in trade. That, in turn, could lead to a more balanced global economy less dependent on the United States as the main engine of growth, economists say. This year, growth in the United States is again expected to lag global growth.

Imports have been coming into the United States at a slower rate, and exports have accelerated. In the six months from October to March, the value of imports slowed in three months while the value of exports rose in all but one month, trade figures show.
Exports have been strongest for companies that make the tools needed to support the developing world: factory machinery, earth-moving equipment and the digital components used to build a modern telecommunications backbone.

As the value of the dollar has eroded, these goods have become more expensive to buy from European countries. A British pound now costs around $2, and the euro has been inching toward $1.40.

The dollar has not depreciated as much against the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan, so American exports remain at a competitive disadvantage there. A stronger yuan, in fact, has been one of the primary trade goals of the Bush administration, which has pressed China to allow its currency to rise in value.

“With the exchange rate being much more favorable for them to buy American products, it’s easier to get your foot in the door,” said Jason W. Speer, vice president at Quality Float Works in Schaumburg, Ill., a company that makes hollow metal spheres used to measure liquid levels and decorate the tops of flag poles. His foreign customers are “much more open than in previous years,” Mr. Speer said.

Mr. Speer oversees the company’s new exporting division, which did not start marketing to European countries until 2003. Then, exports outside North America accounted for only 3 percent of Quality Float Works’s sales. Last year — the company’s highest-grossing yet — they were 26 percent of its $2.2 million in sales. A weak dollar, Mr. Speer said, “certainly hasn’t hurt.”

At Caterpillar, which is typical of the big companies in the S.& P. 500-stock index, slightly more than a half of its worldwide sales of more than $41 billion came from outside the United States. It met that demand almost equally with overseas production and with American exports, which increased to $10.54 billion last year from $9.16 billion in 2005.

“As the dollar has been revalued, it means what we produce in the United States is more competitive,” said William C. Lane, Washington-based director for government affairs for Caterpillar, a maker of construction and mining equipment. Rapid economic growth in the rest of the world is helping. “The folks that sold the shovels did well,” he said. “We’re selling a lot of shovels.”

This year, the company said it expected its export business to keep increasing overall sales. The company estimated that its engine and machinery sales in North America would fall 11 percent this year. But the rise in the rest of the world — up 19 percent in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and 17 percent in Asia — will more than make up for the loss.

Caterpillar’s shift reflects a larger trend. For Citigroup, which is planning to eliminate 17,000 jobs and relocate 9,500 more, India has been the biggest driver of growth for its international operations.

Economists differ about how critical a weaker dollar is in stimulating trade and narrowing the trade deficit, but most agree that it has some effect.

“The weaker dollar is a smaller piece of the adjustment than underlying demand shifts,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former economist with the International Monetary Fund. “The driving factors are fast growth in Europe, slower growth in the United States.”

While international demand is a significant factor in reducing the trade deficit, C. Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said the dollar’s role was hard to play down. He estimated that for every 1 percent decline in the average exchange rate of the dollar, the trade gap eventually narrowed by about $20 billion a year.

But there is no disagreement that whatever the cause, the flow of orders from overseas to American producers is finally starting to decrease the trade deficit. As a result, net exports could add to growth in the United States this year rather than subtract from it. That has not happened since 1995.

Trade contributed to growth in the second and fourth quarters last year. In the government’s preliminary estimate for the first quarter of this year, trade was a slight drag on the economy.

Most economists, however, expect trade to improve for the rest of 2007. And when the level of trade is averaged out over the last four quarters, it faintly added to overall economic activity.

“The factors are in place for the trade deficit to fall,” said Mickey D. Levy, chief economist with the Bank of America. “We’re past the inflection point.”

In addition to exporting more, many American companies are enlarging their operations overseas. Motorola, for example, has been very aggressive in building cellphone factories in China and now counts itself among the country’s largest foreign companies. General Motors recently announced plans to more than double production in India and build a new assembly plant there.

This expansion, however, is not only taking place among manufacturers. Financial services companies like Ernst & Young are growing fastest in India and China. American investment banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch cannot seem to hire quickly enough to meet the needs of expanding Asian companies.

If the dollar keeps falling, though, it could have adverse implications for foreign economies. Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the world’s biggest exporter, could suffer if the euro continues to appreciate against the dollar, a recent report by Commerzbank Economic Research concluded. While a strong euro has so far had little negative effect on German exporters, a euro at $1.50 would pose a “serious obstacle,” the report said. Demand for some of Germany’s most popular goods — everything from auto parts to chemicals — would slow.

But for now, Germany is doing very well, helping to lift demand not just in Europe but also in the United States and elsewhere.

“It’s the global footprint that’s key here,” said Eugene M. Truett, vice president of investor relations for Harsco, an industrial services company outside Harrisburg, Pa., which provides personnel to steel mills and construction sites around the world.

Seventy percent of Harsco’s sales come from outside the United States, and Mr. Truett said that he expected the figure to increase. “What is clear is that even if the U.S. economy slows down, the rest of the world appears to be able to grow,” he said. “If you are able to sell to those parts of the world successfully, then you’re not tied down to one central bank, one economy.”

Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher in Hong Kong, G. Thomas Sims in Frankfurt, Heather Timmons in New Delhi and Eduardo Porter in New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/bu.../14dollar.html





Gonzales Pledges To Get Tougher On Content Pirates
John Eggerton

The Justice Department is pledging to get even tougher on copyright violators and other intellectual property thieves, saying it has already boosted convictions and lengthened prison sentences.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday he was sending a bill to Congress--the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007--that would toughen penalties for repeat offenders. He also said he would "hit criminals in their wallets" by boosting restitution and ensuring all ill-gotten gains are forfeited, as well as any property used to commit the crimes.

TV and film piracy has been a big issue in the conversion to digital, with Justice pledging to boost the number of attorneys trained to prosecute intellectual property (IP) crimes and to encourage more international cooperation in investigations.

Universal Chairman Bob Wright has argued that getting a handle on that piracy is not only critical to the digital TV conversion, but the whole U.S. and even global economy.

"These crimes, as we all know, also have a direct impact on our economy, costing victims millions of dollars and, if left unchecked, diminishing entrepreneurship," Gonzales said in announcing the bill.

Gonzales said there were currently 230 federal prosecutors who have been trained to handle IP cases, and that convictions in copyright and trademark cases were up 57% in 2006 over 2005, with prison terms of more than two years up 130% over the same period.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6441968.html





US DOJ Gets 50th Warez Conviction
Staff

The United States Department of Justice has announced the 50th felony conviction as part of its Operation FastLink crackdown on warez groups operating on the Internet to illegally share music, movies, games and software. Christopher Eaves, 31, of Iowa Park, Texas, faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release.

Eaves was part of a group known as "Apocalypse Crew," and was responsible for providing copyrighted music online before its official release. “Digital piracy is a serious and growing global problem, and this 50th conviction represents a milestone never before achieved in any online piracy prosecution,” commented Assistant Attorney General Fisher. The DOJ's Operation FastLink has thus far resulted in more than 120 search warrants executed in 12 countries.
http://www.betanews.com/article/US_D...ion/1179179838





Inside Edge - IT News, Analysis and Opinion
Davey Winder

For the average user spam has always been an annoyance. For the average spammer it has always been about making money. For the criminal gangs that have muscled in on this lucrative industry during the last few years it is now about territory and control. Control, that is, of the botnets behind the malware distribution networks that they rent out to the spamming middle men to enable them to ply their trade in relative safety from the crippled arm of the law.

Leading AV researchers at Kaspersky have now identified three criminal gangs which are participating in an increasingly desperate battle of the botnets. This turf war is, as all turf wars have a habit of doing, turning nasty and it is the average computer who is getting caught ion the crossfire. No longer are the gangs happy to settle for a slice of the spam pie, they want it all. And that means control over as many compromised third party computers to create the biggest of mega zombie botnets. To accomplish this, the gangs behind the Bagle, Warezov and Zhelatin worms are turning their attention to ridding those compromised computers of rival gang malware infections in order to install their own and gain that control.

Spammers pay a lot of money to rent time on these mega botnets, and the bigger the botnet, the bigger its capacity to distribute spam, the more valuable a commodity it becomes.

Kaspersky Lab senior virus analyst Alexander Gostev writing in the latest Viruslist.com Malware Evolution report states that “war had been declared in cyberspace between the groups producing Warezov and Zhelatin. Taking into account the size of the botnets used by both groups, and their clear aim to conduct a large number of attacks, the situation was clear: this was threatening to become one of the most serious problems on the Internet in recent years.” Gostev identifies three groups from different countries who were all busy with the same thing, creating spam harvesting and distribution botnets. “This brought the three groups into conflict with each other, and they are willing to use everything at their disposal to gain an advantage” Gostev concludes.

The end result has been a huge increase in attacks on users, with an emphasis on developing new techniques to infect end users and evade detection by AV filters. If you need any evidence of this, 32% of all malicious code in email traffic during March 2007 was made up of Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bankfraud.ra according to Kaspersky, and indicating clearly that Bagle, Warezov and Zhelatin have created an epidemic.

Although there has been some success in dealing with high profile botnet related security incidents, including the 57 month prison term for Jeanson James Ancheta for infecting 400,000 computers for botnet use, this really is tip of the iceberg time. The really organised criminals will be using exactly the same techniques to evade capture and to protect the business of criminality as is seen in the drugs war. You can be sure that while sacrificial lambs get jail time, the gang bosses and the real botnet builders will continue to prosper. Until, that is, law enforcement, the judiciary and governments around the world start to take the spam problem as seriously as they do the drugs one. To be frank, I don’t see any evidence of that happening any time soon.
http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1464.html





Get offa my clouds

Stealing IS a Crime, Right?
Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

I have a LOT on my mind right now.. to be honest, i've rarely been so royally pissed off as i am today.
The photos shown above all have one thing in common (besides being rather lovely landscape photos):

They were all taken , without my permission, by the London based print-selling company Only-Dreemin. This company prides itself on offering its customers only the best quality canvas prints of the finest photos , by top artists.

What they fail to mention is that some of the photos they're selling prints of have been illegally obtained, and are being sold without the artists consent or knowledge.

In my case, a friend of mine came across their store on ebay and recognized one of my prints. (this was way back in january i think)
I looked into the matter and discovered 7 more of my photos being sold there. In the case of pictures 1, 2, 6 and 7, the image had been divided up into 3 vertical panels. ( Something i would never DREAM of doing myself. ) Furthermore, the images had been given new and exciting titles, like "Seraque II" and "Attica", "Dawn expander II" and " Joga" (barf)

I spent a good many days researching, going back thru their customer feedback, and was able to track back the sales of at LEAST 60 prints made from my images.
These prints sold for a total sum of 2450 british pounds (around 4840 US$ )

I gathered all the evidence , saved each webpage displaying my work , saved the list of customer feedback, printed all this stuff out and took it to a lawyer here in iceland.
She was confident that by sending them some well-phrased letters i'd be sure to get some damages out of them. After all, i had tons of incriminating evidence.
The letters did nothing other than make them take the images down from their site. Further letters got no response from them. My icelandic lawyer could do nothing else, so i was stuck with a bill and the infuriating fact that I, being only a non-wealthy art stutdent/ single mom in iceland, will have to accept that these people stole my work and made lots of money off it, and apparently are going to get away with it.

This is NOT OK BY ME.
I could think of little else to do than to at least tell people about this.
I have reason to believe that they've stolen images from other people, maybe other flickr users.
The reason i suspect this is quite simple. My photos were being sold under the bogus name of "Rebekka Sigrún" (the nerve of keeping the first name the same is somewhat amazing).
I saw a number of other photos being sold under that same artist name, and they werent mine. And obviously this Rebekka Sigrún doesnt exist.
Looking over the pictures i remember being sold under that name, it appears they've changed the artist name to "marco van eych". If anyone knows a landscape photographer by that name, let me know. i very much doubt he exists.

So i encourage everyone that has been displaying similar landscape photos on flickr to look at their site and see if they see something suspicious.
It would also be pretty cool if as many people as possible would send them angry letters, (address them to info@only-dreemin.com ) but that's just if you feel like it


ok. i've said my piece. Quite a load off my back.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebba/497746041/





Freedom of Expression?? Telling the Truth??
Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

not popular with flickr administration, apparently.

so, in case anyone is wondering where my post about my stolen photos , the long caption, and all 450+ comments went (some of them very well written and containing useful information for all flickr users and photographers and web-users in general), it was deleted by flickr.

this photo composite here, remember?:

The explanation?

“Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or
terminate your account.”

beautiful.

i find this more than a little depressing. to say the least.

and to think, just earlier today i was talking to a reporter from one of icelands main newspapers, saying what a great thing Flickr is and how its done so much for me and yada yada yada.

i don’t believe i was harrassing anyone. I was doing the only thing left for me to do when i had tried to seek legal assistance, after being victim to having my copyrighted work stolen and resold for profit by a dishonest company. I was told by my lawyer that i should just accept the fact and move on. Im not a big fan of giving up. I simply told the truth.

the fact that people sent harrassing letters to only-dreemin was a direct result of my post, but I myself wasnt harassing anyone. I was simply making it public that someone did wrong by me, and i think that’s a pretty far cry from harrassing some innocent party directly.

im extremely disappointed, to say the least.
http://rebekkagudleifs.com/blog/2007...ing-the-truth/





Canadians Overpay Millions on Private Copying Levy
Michael Geist

The Copyright Board of Canada issued its latest private copying decision [pdf] on Friday. The fourth major decision from the board on private copying, the decision addresses the levy for 2005 - 2007 (the Canadian Private Copying Collective attempt to extend the levy to iPods and SD cards would commence in 2008).

Interestingly, the levy will decrease slightly as a result of this decision, though the Copyright Board was actually inclined to increase the rate (note that all opposing parties dropped out of the proceedings, leaving only the CPCC to present evidence). The Board felt that 29 cents would be the appropriate levy for blank CDs, yet kept the levy at 21 cents since that is what the CPCC requested. At the same, it reduced the levy for other blank media - cassette tapes dropped by five cents to 24 cents per tape, while CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio, and MiniDiscs all dropped from 77 cents to 21 cents.

The reduction in the levy leaves a significant surplus with the Board estimating that the CPCC will need to return $2.5 million in overpayment for the past three years. The CPCC has expressed disappointment at this result and indicated that it will develop a plan to reimburse importers and manufacturers for the higher levies that were collected from 2005 - 2007. Of course, assuming that the price of the levy was passed along to consumers, it is not the importers and manufacturers that should receive the reimbursement - it is Canadian consumers. The Board absolves itself of this issue by stating that "it is not for us to determine who, in the supply chain leading to the final consumer, will be the ultimate beneficiary of these refunds." In other words, Canadians have overpaid millions of dollars over the past three years for the private copying levy, yet that money will go into the pockets of importers, manufacturers, and possibly retailers (sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen).

In addition to the overpayment issue, the decision contains several interesting revelations. First, the decision sheds some light on the CPCC's enforcement program. The collective has aggressively targeted those parties that do not pay the levy, with 21 claims over the past three years. In fact, the enforcement program has been so effective that the Board found that concerns about the emergence of a gray or black market for blank CDs has not materialized. Second, the Board indicated that it expects that revenues earned from the levy will steadily decrease in the coming years as the popularity of blank CDs gives way to other media. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Of course, the CPCC has sought to address that by expanding the levy to iPods and SD cards. Third, despite claims that the levy does not apply to computer hard drives, the decision reveals that the Canadian Association of Broadcasters struck a deal with the CPCC in which it agreed that it would not collect a levy on computer hard drives used by broadcasters primarily for broadcasting purposes. Finally, readers may recall a CPCC survey which purported to find that Canadians think the private copying levy is reasonable. The retailers objected to the survey, but the Board went out of its way to state that it took no account of the findings in reaching its decision.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1946/125/





Pouwelse: Witness in RIAA Case
p2pnet.net news

It's going to be interesting when Dr Doug Jacobson, a self-acclaimed expert in software used to monitor or block p2p file sharing applications, meets Dr Johan Pouwelse (right), a universally acknowledged expert in next-generation p2p technology.

Jacobson, based in the US, was hired by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG's RIAA to ferret around in a computer hard drive owned by Marie Lindor to show she is all the RIAA claims she is.

Aged 57, she's a criminal and a thief, someone who illegally distributed copyrighted music 'product' online, according to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

Pouwelse, based at the Delft University in Holland and a visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has now been hired by Mrs Lindor's lawyer, Ray Beckerman, to demonstrate conclusively why 'evidence' derived by Jacobson during his investigation, isn't worth a light.

The online desperado

A file shared online equals a sale lost, somehow, somewhere, the labels claim, saying that's exactly the same as walking into a store and stealing a CD. And RIAA disinformation specialists have been able to spin copyright infringement, a purely commercial matter, into a major crime on a level with rape and murder.

The 'files shared = sales lost' formula has never been proven by the RIAA, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, or anyone else. It has, however, been shot down in flames in a number of authoritative independent academic papers, the most recent being a study by Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf from the Harvard University Business School, University of Kansas, School of Business, respectively.

Their The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, published in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, states unequivocally:

Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

In truth, Mrs Lindor isn't an online desperado. She's a nurse's aide, a responsible position she's held for the last 20 years.

To her, a chip is a French fry and a computer a mystery, and she could no more "distribute" a digitized music file than she could fly to the moon.

But that doesn't play well in mainstream media stories or RIAA press releases and statements. So she's painted as an example of the "criminal" p2p file sharers who are "devastating" the Big 4, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US).

Mrs Lindor has a son, Woody Raymond, a paralegal by profession, and it's a near certainty the Big 4 labels were really after him, not his mother. But it's now Standard Operating Procedure for their RIAA to go after a parent or parents first, ultimately shifting their attention to their real targets, usually the children in the family. And indeed, Woody Raymond is also now an RIAA victim.

Inexpert 'expert' witnesses working for the corporate music industry repeatedly turn up in court cases, and Jacobson was to have plumbed the depths of Mrs Lindor's system to 'prove' her 'guilt'.

However, that didn't happen and Jacobson was shown to be a considerably less than perfect witness during detailed questioning by Beckerman at a deposition hearing.

Now Pouwelse, an invited speaker at the US Federal Trade Commission's p2p workshop a couple of years ago and who spent several months at Harvard Business School to study the economic impact of movie downloads on Hollywood, will drive the final nail into this particular RIAA coffin.

Nor will it be the first time he's shredded so-called expert testimony from an RIAA hireling.

Singularly and quotably unimpressed

A US firm called MediaSentry turns up over and again at Big 4 show-trials in North America and elsewhere. But its evidence often proves to be more damaging to the labels than to their victims.

It blew the game for the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) in 2004 when the latter demanded that a Canadian court order five ISPs to hand over the names of clients. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein was singularly and quotably unimpressed by MediaSentry 'evidence'.

Then the company blew it again in Holland when the District Court of Utrecht decided MediaSentry's investigation of p2p file sharing wasn't only flawed, it was "unlawful," ruling that Dutch ISPs didn't have to provide customer information to the CRIA's Netherlands counterparts.

Interestingly, Delft University of Technology's Johan Pouwelse and Henk Sips were expert witnesses in the Dutch case and the, "technical information provided by MediaSentry is limited and their measurement procedure is simplistic," said Henk and Pouwelse.
"MediaSentry did not conduct a thorough investigation ..."

The District Court of Utrecht agreed and ruled MediaSentry's investigation of p2p file sharing wasn't acceptable.

The chances of Jacobson surviving a meeting with Pouwelse aren't high, but the inevitable win will represent more than just another victory over the RIAA.

Pouwelse's evidence will be a landmark and it'll be re-employed by attorneys the length and breadth of America who are working to prove the innocence of their clients who, like Mrs Lindor, are falsely held up to be unprincipled, hard-core criminals and thieves.

Definitely stay tuned.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12224





RIAA’s IP Gathering Techniques About to be Busted
Ernesto

RIAA’s shoddy data gathering techniques are unlawful and shouldn’t be used as legal evidence. This is what a Dutch court concluded based on the expert witness statement from Dr Johan Pouwelse, who is about to testify in the UMG v. Lindor case in the US.

Dr. Pouwelse is hired by Ray Beckerman, Mrs Lindor’s lawyer, to give his expert opinion on the RIAA’s IP-harvesting techniques.

Among others, the RIAA hires the US based company MediaSentry to monitor file-sharing networks for infringements of their client’s media. MediaSentry’s job is to identify and trace IP addresses they claim are engaged in such activity.

MediaSentry’s effectiveness has been called into question by Dr. Pouwelse in Foundation v. UPC Nederland. It was concluded that the “shoddy” way MediaSentry collects and processes IP addresses has no lawful basis. When the US court reaches the same conclusions, this will have great implications for many other RIAA lawsuits.

As Jon from P2Pnet puts it; “Pouwelse’s evidence will be a landmark and it’ll be re-employed by attorneys the length and breadth of America who are working to prove the innocence of their clients who, like Mrs Lindor, are falsely held up to be unprincipled, hard-core criminals and thieves.”

Pouwelse is founding father of the Tribler BitTorrent client and currently employed as an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Stay “tuned”.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaas-ip-gat...-to-be-busted/





Sony Optimistic Despite Loss

Electronics maker forecasts operating profit of $3.7 billion for fiscal 2007, a six-fold gain from the prior year.

Sony reported a wider quarterly loss on Wednesday due to losses in its game unit, but it forecast a sharp rise in profit this year as it boosts sales of its PlayStation 3 video game machine and LCD TVs.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate was hit hard last year by massive costs to launch the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and the recall of 9.6 million units of its laptop PC batteries, which in rare cases could catch fire from overheating.

But it is taking steps to cut production costs for the PS3 and is starting up an advanced liquid crystal display (LCD) panel plant with Samsung Electronics this year, which should help it make TVs more efficiently.

Sony (Charts), locked in a battle with Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) and Nintendo (Charts) for dominance in the $30 billion video game industry, forecast an operating profit of ¥440 billion ($3.66 billion) for the year to March 2008.

The estimate represents a six-fold gain on 2006/07 and beats the consensus of ¥377.8 billion in a poll of 20 analysts by Reuters Estimates, though it includes a ¥59 billion profit from a sale of land not likely reflected in the consensus.

Sony expects sales to grow 5.8 percent to ¥8.78 trillion.

"The forecast looks really good. It will be a matter of whether the company can actually achieve that goal," said Tomomi Yamashita, senior fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management.

"Investors think highly of Sony's efforts to turn around its struggling electronics business. Now its game business is underperforming, and whether it can fix that too will be closely watched."

For January to March, the fourth quarter of the past business year, Sony booked an operating loss of ¥113.4 billion, against a loss of ¥51.9 billion a year earlier and the consensus of a ¥94.5 billion loss according to five analysts.

Operating profit at Sony came to ¥71.75 billion in the year ended March 31, down from ¥226.42 billion a year earlier.

Sales rose 10.5 percent to ¥8.295 trillion while net profit rose 2.2 percent to ¥126.3 billion, boosted by the strong performance by Sony Ericsson, the world's fourth-largest mobile phone maker owned jointly by Sony and Ericsson.
Electronics recovery

Sony, which offers Bravia LCD TVs, Cyber-shot digital cameras and Vaio PCs, has packed its cutting-edge technology such as a Blu-ray high-definition DVD player into the PS3, enabling lifelike graphics but driving up its manufacturing costs.

The basic version of the PS3 is priced at twice as much as Nintendo's new console, the Wii, which has been outselling the Sony machine in Japan and the United States since the devices were launched late last year.

Sony said it would aim to nearly double shipments of the PS3 to 11 million units in 2007-08, but it warned that it would be difficult to bring its game division into the black following an operating loss of ¥232 billion in the past year.

It is banking on a better showing for the PlayStation Portable. Shipments of the handheld game player fell 41 percent in 2006-07 amid competition with Nintendo's popular DS device.

Howard Stringer, who became the company's first non-Japanese chief executive in 2005, has pledged to put Sony on the right track by selling non-core assets and pouring resources into its electronics segment that makes up two-thirds of overall sales.

The electronics unit improved to an operating profit of ¥157 billion in 2006-07 from a ¥7 billion profit in the prior year as it enjoyed robust demand for digital cameras, high-end camcorders and benefited from a weaker yen.
Motorola debuts new phones

Sony also more than doubled sales of LCD TVs to 6.3 million units and predicted a further surge to 10 million this year.

"We expect profits from TVs to get a boost this year, led by LCDs. We had a huge cost for the battery recall, but we won't have such expenses this year," Sony Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda told a news conference.

The upbeat forecast will likely underpin the perception among investors that Sony is on a recovery path, even if it is still playing catch-up with Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) in the portable music player market and faces cut-throat competition with Matsushita Electric in flat TVs.

Prior to the announcement, shares in Sony closed up 1.3 percent at ¥6,460, having gained about 27 percent since the start of the year. The stock is now up about 70 percent since Stringer took the helm in June 2005.

"I think investors will be positive about the results. It won't be a case of the stock taking off, but there should be some gains. It would not be strange to see Sony's stock go as high as ¥7,000," said Shigemi Nonaka, adviser at Polestar Investment Management.

The Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index, by comparison, is up 40 percent since June 2005.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/16/news...ion=2007051607





April Video Game Sales Rose 20 Percent
Scott Hillis

U.S. sales of video games and related hardware rose 20 percent in April from a year earlier, driven by strong demand for Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s Wii console and new Pokemon games for Nintendo's DS handheld.

Total sales of $839 million compared with $699 million in April 2006 but were down from $1.1 billion in March, in line with a seasonal pattern that sees sales taper off after the holiday season, according to data from market research firm NPD released on Thursday.

The Wii was the top-selling new console for the fourth month in a row, with Nintendo selling 360,000 units of the $250 machine with a unique motion-sensing controller.

"The demand has just blown the doors off. We're chugging along as fast as we can," said Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo's vice president of marketing.

Nintendo also had hits with its "Pokemon Diamond" and "Pokemon Pearl" titles for the DS. The latest pair of games in the popular franchise sold more than 1.7 million copies and spurred sales of 471,000 DS units.

"The 'Pokemon' titles drove hardware acquisitions," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

Sony Corp. sold 82,000 units of its PlayStation 3, down 37 percent from the previous month as a lack of compelling new games discouraged potential buyers of the powerful-but-expensive system.

"The PlayStation 3 was obviously a little bit flat during the month. We didn't have a lot of hardware drivers out during the month, we didn't have any first-party titles," said Sony spokesman Dave Karraker.

"But we've got a pretty robust library coming for the rest of this year ... so I think you're going to see a real pick-up as these games start coming out," Karraker said.

Microsoft Corp. sold 174,000 Xbox 360 machines, down 13 percent on the month, with sales supported by a new version with a bigger hard drive and black paint job that sells for $480.

"That's a very strong number for us in the month of April," said Molly O'Donnell, senior group manager for Microsoft's entertainment and devices division. "A lot of this growth we think is fueled by our new Elite console."

Microsoft launched the Xbox in November 2005 and has about 59 percent of the installed base of new consoles, which totaled 9.2 million at the end of April, NPD figures showed.

Nintendo and Sony, which launched their machines a year after Microsoft, have 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively, of the installed base. However, Nintendo accounted for 58 percent of April console sales, compared to 28 percent for Microsoft and 13 percent for Sony.

After the "Pokemon" games, the next two best-selling titles were also from Nintendo as "Super Paper Mario" for the Wii sold 352,000 copies and "Wii Play" moved 249,000 copies.

Activision Inc.'s "Guitar Hero II" sold 197,000 units for the Xbox 360 and 142,000 copies for PlayStation 2.

Activision's "Spider-Man 3" sold 117,000 copies for the Xbox 360 and 105,000 copies for the PS2. The other top-selling games were Sony titles for the PS2: action game "God of War II" and baseball title "MLB '07: The Show."
http://uk.reuters.com/article/techno...43226420070518





Modified Xbox 360 Consoles Now Banned From Xbox Live
Marcus Yam

Microsoft's Xbox 360 now able to sniff out illegitimate copies of games

More than a year has passed since the release of the Xbox 360 DVD-ROM firmware hack to allow the play of backup games and bootleg copies. Those with hacked firmware had the ability to play copied games, mostly burned onto dual-layer DVD recordable discs, even online Xbox Live.

For a while, it seemed that such firmware modifications were undetectable by Microsoft – but that appears to have all changed with the latest Xbox 360 system software released last week.

Word came from the Xbox 360 hacking community that the Spring Update may have the ability to detect those who were playing copied games. More specifically, the system software would be able to determine the legitimacy of the disc in the DVD drive, not necessarily targeting any specific method of modification.

As a pre-emptive measure, hackers released updated disc drive firmware introducing various features, such as disc jitter, in an effort to further the exploit. Such efforts, however, appear to be all for naught, as report on Xbox-Scene indicates that Microsoft is now banning from Xbox Live users with modified DVD-ROM drives, regardless of firmware version.

The banning measures appear to have started alongside the release of the Halo 3 beta, perhaps in what is best described as a crackdown on Crackdown bootlegged copies that contained Halo 3 beta access. Just as it did during the original Xbox days, Microsoft is permanently banning modified consoles from connecting to Xbox Live, but not the user account.

Microsoft acknowledges its new initiative with an entry in its Gamerscore Blog: “As part of our commitment to our members, we do not allow people that we have detected to have modified their console to connect to Live. This is an important part of our efforts to try and maintain a fair gaming environment for the large majority of gamers that play by the rules. This topic is more important than ever given the recent release of the Halo 3 beta.”

The blog continues, “As a result, some consumers that try to login to Live who we detect have illegally modified their console will get an error code (Status Code: Z: 8015 - 190D) when trying to connect to the service. These users will not have their account automatically banned from LIVE, but they will no longer be able to access the service from the console they modified. We have stated in the past that customers can only enjoy access to the Xbox LIVE community through the use of a genuine, unmodified, Xbox console and we will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of our service, the protection of our partners and the benefits of our users.”
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7339





Devices Featuring New Standard to Hit Later This Year
Dan Grabham

Forget cables; the way you'll connect devices to your PC will be wireless. That's according to new research from In-Stat which predicts that Wireless USB will become the way to connect kit to your PC by 2008.

The wireless variant works in exactly the same way as cabled USB, but uses a short wave radio technology. And it's about to explode.

Some devices already exist, but hubs and other connection kit will be available commercially later in the year. In-Stat reckons there's plenty of potential in the market. Over two billion wired USB devices shipped last year, and it expects Wireless USB to grow by over 10 per cent annually.

"Certified WUSB is designed to replace USB cables on the PC desktop, as well as to facilitate temporary connections between mobile and fixed devices, such as portable digital audio players and PCs, or digital still cameras and printers," says Brian O'Rourke an analyst at In-Stat.Advertisement

One of the first hubs became available in Japan back in March.
http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/upgr...leid=429362356





Napster Music to be Available on Motorola Phones

Napster Inc. said on Tuesday it agreed to make its music subscription service available on Motorola Inc.'s mobile phones.

Napster and Motorola will develop promotional efforts for North America, the United Kingdom and Germany designed to let consumers listen to Napster's music on many Motorola music-enabled handsets.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...EN812920070515





Trend Sees Cell Phone Only Use Growing
Alan Fram

More than a quarter of young adults have only cell phones, making them the leading edge of a strengthening move away from traditional landline telephones, a federal survey showed Monday.

Overall, the portion of adults with only cell phones grew by more than 2 percentage points in the latter half of last year to nearly 12 percent, an expansion rate that began in the first part of 2006 and was double earlier rates of growth.

One in four people aged 18 to 24 had only cell phones, as did 29 percent of those aged 25 to 29, the study showed. The percentages declined with age after that, with 2 percent of those 65 or over having only cell phones.

The trend away from landline phones affects the telephone industry, 911 emergency service providers, and government and private polling organizations, which rely heavily on random calls to households with wired telephones.

"All those wireless adults are missed" in those marketing and opinion surveys, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.

That's a potential problem because people with only cell phones tend to be disproportionately young and have lower incomes. Studies have so far concluded that cell-phone-only users are not a large or diverse enough group to affect the accuracy of broad polls that omit them.

The data, from the
CDC's National Health Interview Survey, also found:

_15 percent of Hispanic adults, 13 percent of black adults, 12 percent of Asians and 11 percent of whites had only cell phones;

_22 percent of the poorest adults had only cell phones, double the rate for those who are not poor;

_13 percent of males and 11 percent of females had cell phones only;

_Nearly 2 percent of adults had no phone at all.

The figures were based on interviews with people in 13,056 households from June through December last year.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070514/...tCDBz2Ei_MWM0F





Tracking Himself: The 'Orwell Project'
Jessica Dawson

Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government mistook Hasan Elahi for a terrorist. On a return trip from Europe, the Bangladesh-born, New York-raised artist was flagged at the airport and interrogated. To prove his whereabouts, Elahi showed them his Palm PDA, a device that yielded enough information -- from calendar notes of appointments and classes he teaches at Rutgers University -- to placate his interrogators.

But shaking off the feds would not be easy. In the months after the first round of questioning, the FBI subjected Elahi to more interviews and to a lie-detector test. Though he passed the test, his paranoia grew.

The artist hatched a plan. If Big Brother wanted proof of his coordinates, why not surveil himself? Recording his own moves could, theoretically, seal his alibi. And, when conceived of as art project, the action might satirize federal intelligence gathering.

From the day in 2002 when Elahi implanted a GPS-enabled device in his cellphone, art and life merged. Several times a day, the artist input his location into the phone and his computer recorded the data (he hopes to incorporate a live GPS tracker soon). He then created a Web site that allowed viewers to see where he is at any given time -- you can visit at http://www.trackingtransience.net-- and he began taking photographs with a digital camera as further proof of his whereabouts.

A documentary exhibition, "Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project," on view at Civilian Art Projects, grew from Elahi's promising scheme.

But as an exhibition, "Tracking Transience" loses its way. Elahi's premise is based on real-life evidence and the obsessive recording of events. In this area, his exhibition succeeds. He foists plenty of visual information on us, including grids and panels of photographs taken at airports and on aircraft, site plans of various airport terminals and videos based on his travels.

Yet precious few of the images here are presented with time or date stamps or any identifying information. It's as if the element of corroboration has gone missing. Even the artworks that show satellite coordinates -- a video screen flashes one satellite image per day for a year, showing where the artist was at noon each day -- invite doubt. The year isn't listed, only the month and day -- May 1, May 2, etc. How are we to know when Elahi was where he said he was? Or if it was indeed the artist's phone that registered these coordinates?

The questionable authenticity of images is as old as the history of photography. The digital age invites further doubt. But there's something missing here -- a strand of evidence that establishes the artist as a voice of authority, if only mock authority. As it stands, doubts hang at every turn.

The trouble comes in the grids of photos on view, shot inside airports and on airplanes to prove the artist's presence at the time he claims to have been there. Yet one particularly arresting grid of color photos depicting in-flight meals is arranged not in accordance with a particular chain of events or itinerary. Instead, as the artist told me, the photos fit together simply because they looked good.

Yes, the colors pop and the images' regularity and repetition captivate. Making aesthetically minded choices is any artist's prerogative. But here, in a show dedicated to documentation, such a choice runs counter to the larger project. "Tracking Transience" is about establishing a veneer of confidence and it loses us when it wavers.

Another photo grid, called "Interstate," assembles pictures of airports the artist has visited. For this piece, Elahi input parameters into his computer to select the pictures -- a certain span of time, airports where he'd spent a minimum number of hours, etc. Such choices establish a relationship between the images. Yet even these moves aren't apparent without asking the artist himself.

Other pictures show urinals, food courts and other airport sights. Each image prompts questions: What day? Which airport? Which moving walkway? To his credit, Elahi cross-references his data with records kept by people other than himself -- bank transactions, credit card swipes and cellphone call data. Yet none of that information is on display in the gallery. Without real-life documentation corroborating the artist's truth, "Tracking Transience" becomes an exercise in solipsism.

Young Chinese Photographers At Addison/Ripley

A lot of art has emerged from China in the past few years, much of it very bad. It might as well be 1985 all over again, what with the proliferation of large-scale works by a handful of anointed stars selling for big, big bucks. Witness the epic jump in price at auction: In 2004, Sotheby's and Christie's combined sold $22 million in Asian contemporary art. Two years later, they sold 8 1/2 times that.

Washington hasn't felt the boom. A Federal Reserve Board show last year brought some Chinese art stars to town, confirming that price doesn't equal quality. At Addison/Ripley, three young Beijing-based photographers represent the more moderate end of the spectrum. Their prices range from a modest $6,000 to a demure $1,800, in part because photography is always cheaper than painting. Chosen with the help of a Beijing-based curator, the works on view represent three distinct styles -- landscape, surrealism and documentary-style social critique.

But this show isn't about the art. It's about how art is marketed. Remember that, aside from a few exceptional expatriates, Chinese contemporary artists haven't been readily accessible to us. For these three artists there are likely 300 or 3,000 more awaiting a big break. What makes these artists better than their peers? Art, like money, is a confidence game. Belief in the gallery that's backing them and trust in the curator that chose them are as important -- if not more so -- than their skills.

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project at Civilian Art Projects, 406 Seventh St. NW. Wednesday-Saturday noon-6 p.m., to June 9. Call 202-607-3804 or visit http://www.civilianartprojects.com.

Three at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., to May 19. Call 202-338-2341 or visit http://www.addisonripleyfineart.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology





Gonzales Pressed Ailing Ashcroft on Spy Plan, Aide Says
David Stout

On the night of March 10, 2004, a high-ranking Justice Department official rushed to a Washington hospital to prevent two White House aides from taking advantage of the critically ill Attorney General, John Ashcroft, the official testified today.

One of those aides was Alberto R. Gonzales, who was then White House counsel and eventually succeeded Mr. Ashcroft as Attorney General.

“I was very upset,” said James B. Comey, who was deputy Attorney General at the time, in his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”

The hospital visit by Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff, has been disclosed before, but never in such dramatic, personal detail. Mr. Comey’s account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room — in short, elements of a potboiler paperback novel.

Mr. Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dismissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.

Although Mr. Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Mr. Gonzales to the bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in George Washington Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency’s secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Mr. Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time.

Since the existence of the program was disclosed by The New York Times in late 2005, it has been reported that it was the subject of a tense debate at the highest levels of the Bush administration, with some officials concerned that the program was not adequately supervised, and others having more fundamental worries.

Around the time of the hospital incident, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and imposed tougher requirements on the National Security Agency on how the program was to be used.Mr. Comey told the committee today that when Mr. Ashcroft was ill and he was in charge at the Justice Department, he told the White House he would not certify the program again “as to its legality.”

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Mr. Ashcroft’s wife, Janet.

Although Mrs. Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband’s hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Mr. Comey testified. “I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure,” Mr. Comey said.

He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mr. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: “He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the hospital right now,’ ” Mr. Comey testified.

When he got to the hospital, Mr. Comey recalled, “I got out of the car and ran up — literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

“What was your concern?” asked Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of today’s committee session.

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Mr. Comey replied.

Mr. Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Mr. Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Mr. Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Mr. Comey’s security detail by phone “not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances,” Mr. Comey testified.

Minutes later, he said, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card entered the room, with Mr. Gonzales carrying an envelope. “And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter,” Mr. Comey related.

“And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me,” Mr. Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Mr. Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

When Mr. Mueller arrived, “he had a brief, a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general, and then we went outside in the hallway,” Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card departed, but after a while, Mr. Card telephoned Mr. Comey and “demanded that I come to the White House immediately,” Mr. Comey said.

“After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States,” Mr. Comey said he told Mr. Card.

Whereupon, Mr. Comey said, he contacted the solicitor general, Theodore B. Olson, who was at a dinner party, and arranged to go with him to the White House. At first, Mr. Card would not let Mr. Olson enter his office, Mr. Comey said; he then had a considerably calmer private chat with Mr. Card for a quarter-hour, after which Mr. Olson entered the room and took part in the conversation.

“Mr. Card was concerned that he had heard reports that there were to be a large number of resignations at the Department of Justice,” Mr. Comey recalled.

Mr. Ashcroft had such serious reservations about the program that he considered resigning then, Mr. Comey testified. Instead, he stayed on until November 2004.

Mr. Mueller, too, considered resigning, Mr. Comey said.

“You had conversations with him about it?” Mr. Schumer asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Comey replied.The surveillance program was reauthorized on March 11, 2004, without a signature from the Department of Justice “attesting to its legality,” Mr. Comey testified.

Mr. Comey said today that he intended to resign the next day, March 12. But on that day, terrorists carried out deadly train bombings in Madrid, and he put his plans on hold and remained on the job until August 2005.

Even before Mr. Comey’s testimony, Mr. Schumer and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel’s ranking Republican, reiterated their low opinion of Mr. Gonzales as attorney general.

“He’s presided over a Justice Department where being a, quote, loyal Bushie seems to be more important than being a seasoned professional, where what the White House wants is more important than what the law requires or what prudence dictates,” Mr. Schumer said.

“It is the decision of Mr. Gonzales as to whether he stays or goes, but it is hard to see how the Department of Justice can function and perform its important duties with Mr. Gonzales remaining where he is,” Mr Specter said. “And beyond Mr. Gonzales’ decision, it’s a matter for the president as to whether the president will retain the attorney general or not.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/wa...orneys.html?hp





GOP Senator Predicts Gonzales Will Quit
Laurie Kellman

The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee predicted Thursday that the probe of firings of federal prosecutors would lead to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The Justice Department, according to veteran Sen. Arlen Specter, can't properly protect the nation from terrorism or oversee President Bush's no-warrant eavesdropping program with Gonzales at the helm.

"I have a sense that when we finish our investigation, we may have the conclusion of the tenure of the attorney general," Specter, R-Pa., said during a committee hearing. "I think when our investigation is concluded, it'll be clear even to the attorney general and the president that we're looking at a dysfunctional department which is vital to the national welfare."

His comment echoed new criticism of the attorney general this week. Former deputy attorney general James Comey testified that Gonzales tried to get his predecessor as attorney general, John Ashcroft, to approve Bush's eavesdropping program as Ashcroft lay in intensive care.

Asked twice during a news conference Thursday if he personally ordered Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft's hospital room, Bush refused to answer.

"There's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen. I'm not going to talk about it," Bush said.

The tale inspired Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to become the fourth Republican senator to call for Gonzales' resignation. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., joined in the criticism.

"When you have to spend more time up here on Capitol Hill instead of running the Justice Department, maybe you ought to think about it," Roberts told The Associated Press.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, who has not called for Gonzales' resignation, agreed.

"I have absolutely no confidence in the attorney general or his leadership," said Leahy, D-Vt.

Bush has stood by his longtime friend and adviser, the key to Gonzales' hold on his job.

But just when some predicted that Gonzales had survived the furors over the firings, Comey's testimony helped broaden the Democrat-led probe into whether the attorney general politicized the Justice department at the White House's behest - and inspired new calls for his resignation.

Gonzales has said only eight U.S. attorneys were targeted for dismissal. But the Justice Department, over nearly two years, listed as many as 26 prosecutors after concerns were raised about their performances, a senior government official familiar with the process said Thursday.

The Justice Department said it fully supports all of its current U.S. attorneys. The list of 26 names was first reported Thursday by The Washington Post (nyse: WPO - news - people ).

Many of the names on various and changing lists of prosecutors under scrutiny "clearly did not represent the final actions or views of the department's leadership or the attorney general," said Justice spokesman Dean Boyd. He said the lists "reflect Kyle Sampson's thoughts for discussion during the consultation process."

Sampson, Gonzales' former chief of staff, oversaw the review that drove the firings. He resigned in March as a result of the department's botched handling of the dismissals.

The developments came as Democrats sought more testimony from current and former Justice Department officials. House Democrats announced that Gonzales' former White House liaison, Monica Goodling, would testify next week under a grant of immunity.

Across the Capitol, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday postponed consideration of a subpoena for Bradley Schlozman, a former senior civil rights attorney and U.S. attorney who replaced Todd Graves in Missouri. Graves also was ordered to resign.

At issue is whether the department, at the White House's urging, tried to cause problems for Democrats by facilitating voter fraud cases and others involving corruption.

Republicans, unhappy with Gonzales for months, have largely refrained from outright calls for his sacking. But they issued more criticism Wednesday, driven by Comey's testimony this week.

According to Comey, Gonzales in 2004 pressured Attorney General John Ashcroft to certify the legality of Bush's no-warrant eavesdropping program. The conversation took place at Ashcroft's hospital bedside as the attorney general recuperated from pancreatitis.

Ashcroft rebuffed Gonzales, but the White House certified the program's legality anyway. Faced with the resignations of Ashcroft, Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller, Bush ordered the program be changed to accommodate Justice's objections.

Democrats said his testimony appeared to contradict Gonzales' account in February 2006, when he told two congressional panels that there had "not been any serious disagreement about the program."

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman said Gonzales' testimony "was and remains accurate."

Joining Hagel in demanding Gonzales' resignation are GOP Sens. John Sununu of New Hampshire, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John McCain of Arizona, who is a presidential candidate. House Republican Conference Chair Adam Putman of Florida also has called for a new attorney general.


Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3732596.html





The Secret Iraq Documents My 8-Year-Old Found

With a couple of keystrokes, you too can read the hidden history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, America's late, unlamented occupation government in Iraq.

Editor's note: The document discussed in this story can be viewed here, both with and without its hidden text.

Pete Moore

I'm a political scientist, and I've spent many hours rooting through documents to study the bureaucracies that once, not so long ago, ran various British colonial outposts in the Middle East. Back in the days when occupation governments dealt in paper, there was always a chance that you'd find a surprise in these cobwebbed mountains of folders, ledgers and official reports. There were sometimes notes scribbled in pencil in the margins of books, and it was not unheard of to open a dusty old volume and have a personal letter fall out. Through such fortunate mistakes researchers could piece together the unofficial, off-the-record history of empire.

When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn't think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA's virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin "Long live the new Iraq!"

But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of Microsoft Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the "View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up" option. If you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on, hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name "Administrator's Weekly Economic Report" suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author's paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I'd downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I'd stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn't done anything wrong.

Posting sloppily edited documents on an official Web site pales in comparison to some of the CPA's other mistakes. Its worst miscalculation was probably dissolving the Iraqi military on May 16, 2003, which jump-started the insurgency by sending 400,000 trained soldiers into the streets without jobs. In one of the best deconstructions of the CPA yet written, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran's describes the enchanted, ideologically blinkered world of the CPA workers in the Green Zone, and recounts how their bubble began to deflate as the insurgency mounted and as the harsh reality outside the high walls of the Zone began to intrude. A close look at the deletions in just one of the improperly redacted Word documents from the waning days of the CPA reveals how the enchanted mind-set worked, just before the spell wore off.

The document that my son accidentally undeleted, Administrator's Weekly Economic Report, was dated March 28, 2004. Its content is dry and unremarkable -- it charts the value of the new Iraqi dinar, for example, and summarizes public-sector economic reforms. The only truly interesting parts of it, in fact, are the deletions, which are on another topic altogether.

Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)

Microsoft Word's "Mark up" feature shows the time and date of the deletion and the identity of the person doing the deleting, but it doesn't give the original author of the passage or when it was written. The title and hints in the text point to a memo written by one person in December 2003 or January 2004, when daily attacks on coalition forces in Anbar, the heavily Sunni province west of Baghdad that is the heartland of the insurgency, were the lowest in many months. These were the CPA's salad days. Prior to the al-Sadr uprising and the Abu Ghraib scandal and the failed siege of Fallujah later in 2004, the CPA believed that it was succeeding in reshaping Iraq. In his book "The Assassins' Gate," George Packer depicts late 2003 and early 2004 as the last phase of quiet isolation for the CPA, before the facts on the ground began to impinge on its Green Zone idyll. "Why Are the Attacks Down" shows the CPA on the cusp, as the author gives a half-dozen different theories for the short-term decline in violence.

One explanation given for the downturn is called "Rounding Up the Bums." It suggests that the U.S. military might have successfully quelled the insurgency. Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack, who commanded the 82nd Airborne in Iraq until May 2004, was well known for using aggressive tactics. The memo describes Swannack and other generals as believing that American raids on suspected insurgents were driving the bad guys "underground." The memo acknowledges collateral damage, but is blithely unaware of the implications. "Most raids also leave in their wake a number of innocents who were either rounded up and detained or had their houses busted up ... But there appears to be sufficient care in how the attacks are carried out, adequate information in the community about the mild reality of detention, and sufficient civil affairs clean up afterwards that this has not been a major factor." By April 2004, the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures had begun to surface, visual evidence of how the military had been alienating the Iraqi civilian population.

A second explanation hinges explicitly on an old ethnic stereotype about how Arabs only understand force. The "Crossed the Line" argument insists that violence is intrinsic to Arab culture: "[It] is a form of political discourse as well as being culturally acceptable for settling disputes and scores." The memo then argues that the violence in Anbar was quelled once the Americans proved they could be more violent. The Americans brought out a bigger stick, namely Gen. Abizaid's threat to "some 70 Sheikhs and community leaders" in Anbar "to unleash hell," twinned with the U.S. Air Force dropping some timely Joint Direct Action Munitions on the province.

A third explanation, "Occupation Ending," says that the insurgents are backing off because they think the U.S. is about to depart. "What they" -- meaning the Iraqis -- "have gotten wrong," says the memo's author, "is the idea that the military will be leaving Iraq in June, which one individual said he was sure was a major factor in the diminishing attacks. Oh well, this is one time it might be best that folks don't fully understand things." Supposedly, the CPA's June 2004 deadline for handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis was misread by some locals as implying the withdrawal of American troops, and thus caused the number of insurgent attacks to decrease. (Four years later, the Bush administration often says any deadline for troop withdrawal would increase attacks.)

A fourth argument, "Project Money Flowing," embraces an enduring pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Economic development and free trade, according to the money theory, would solve political disputes. American cash was coming to Anbar, and violence was abating. "While the amounts of money are still modest, especially in Fallujah, there are a number of visible projects ongoing that have employed some people and given the appearance that help is on the way." If the violence was going down in Iraq, according to this theory, it must have been because the CPA's various development projects were paying off. In 2007, few would argue that there are many signs of economic development anywhere in Iraq, or that billions in U.S. aid has mitigated opposition to the American presence.

A fifth theory, "Engagement," says that Iraqis have begun to have hope thanks to sustained contact with Americans. "We'll take some credit here. We have been engaging widely with ... ex-Baathists, ex-Army. While many are tiring of the refrain that if you stay with us things will get better, for some they actually have improved and that many have given hope to entire groups." The author calls these people "the various groups of losers in the New Iraq."

A final argument for the downturn in attacks offers what briefly looks like a flash of reality. The "Operational Pause" theory surmises that reduced attacks may be a statistical blip. They may increase again as "terrorists" regroup for future fights against the Americans and "other Iraqis." But then the author calls this "a boring theory," and notes, "There are very few persons we have met who subscribe to this."

Nowhere in any of these theories, including the "boring" one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which "bums" or "losers" are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the most remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while explaining why American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. "It is nothing personal," the Iraqi says. "I like you and believe you could be bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who attack the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by foreign military forces." In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one American glosses over this Iraqi's prophetic words, and then another tries -- unsuccessfully, as it turns out -- to delete them.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...cpa_documents/





Full Body Scans Take Off at Amsterdam Airport

Amsterdam's Schiphol airport began using new body-scanning machines at security checkpoints on Tuesday, becoming the first major airport to use the technology to find metals and explosives hidden under clothing.

The "security scan" system, which uses harmless radio waves to display head-to-toe images of people, is also being used by other airports on a trial basis, but Schiphol is the only one to deploy the technology for regular use at its checkpoints.

Going through the scanner takes about three seconds, allowing users to avoid metal detectors or body searches. For privacy, the digital images are viewed by security personnel in another room and deleted after they are seen.

Schiphol, Europe's fourth busiest hub, handles about 160,000 passengers per day at peak times and. So far the security scan is voluntary but officials are hoping to expand it to include all passengers, crew and personnel.

Schiphol is one of the world's most modern airports, with flat-panel screens, airport-wide Web access and iris scanners already on offer to those who want to bypass passport lines.

Some people object to the machines because they are concerned about the radio waves, rather than privacy, said Schiphol's Chief Operations Officer Ad Rutten.

But the alternative, being hand-frisked, is "never a happy story," Rutten adds.
http://news.com.com/Full+body+scans+...3-6184022.html





Japan Looking to Establish Wireless Island
Darren Murph

Honestly, we're a bit freaked out right here in the US of A with all the RFID tags floating around in various forms, but Japan is planning to take tagging to the extreme by creating an island where there's just no escapin' it. The nation is looking to set up an "experimental landmass" where a smorgasbord of sensors will "allow doctors to remotely monitor the health of the elderly," and in another instance, "monitor the movement of pedestrians and notify nearby drivers." Additionally, IC tags could be implanted into produce in order to divulge information such as where it was grown to a shopper's mobile phone. Reportedly, the government is talking with local telecom carriers, electronics manufacturers, automakers, and several "other companies" as it attempts to assemble the pieces, and while no specific test site has been nailed down just yet, "the northern island of Hokkaido or southern island chain of Okinawa" are currently the most likely candidates.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/15/j...reless-island/





Russia Accused of Unleashing Cyberwar to Disable Estonia
Ian Traynor

• Parliament, ministries, banks, media targeted
• Nato experts sent in to strengthen defences

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.

While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.

"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.

While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.

If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.

Relations between the Kremlin and the west are at their worst for years, with Russia engaged in bitter disputes not only with Estonia, but with Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Georgia - all former parts of the Soviet Union or ex-members of the Warsaw Pact. The electronic offensive is making matters much worse.

"Frankly it is clear that what happened in Estonia in the cyber-attacks is not acceptable and a very serious disturbance," said a senior EU official.

Estonia's president, foreign minister, and defence minister have all raised the emergency with their counterparts in Europe and with Nato.

"At present, Nato does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words collective self-defence, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country," said the Estonian defence minister, Jaak Aaviksoo.

"Not a single Nato defence minister would define a cyber-attack as a clear military action at present. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."

Estonia, a country of 1.4 million people, including a large ethnic Russian minority, is one of the most wired societies in Europe and a pioneer in the development of "e-government". Being highly dependent on computers, it is also highly vulnerable to cyber-attack.

The main targets have been the websites of:

• the Estonian presidency and its parliament

• almost all of the country's government ministries

• political parties

• three of the country's six big news organisations

• two of the biggest banks; and firms specializing in communications

It is not clear how great the damage has been.

With their reputation for electronic prowess, the Estonians have been quick to marshal their defences, mainly by closing down the sites under attack to foreign internet addresses, in order to try to keep them accessible to domestic users.

The cyber-attacks were clearly prompted by the Estonians' relocation of the Soviet second world war memorial on April 27.

Ethnic Russians staged protests against the removal, during which 1,300 people were arrested, 100 people were injured, and one person was killed.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.

"The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week. It was still unavailable last night.

"If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it's a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere," Russia's ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, said in reply to a question from the Guardian. He added: "I don't support such behaviour, but one has to look at where they [the attacks] came from and why."

Without naming Russia, the Nato official said: "I won't point fingers. But these were not things done by a few individuals.

"This clearly bore the hallmarks of something concerted. The Estonians are not alone with this problem. It really is a serious issue for the alliance as a whole."

Mr Chizhov went on to accuse the EU of hypocrisy in its support for Estonia, an EU and Nato member. "There is a smell of double standards."

He also accused Poland of holding the EU hostage in its dealings with Russia, and further accused Estonia and other east European countries previously in Russia's orbit of being in thrall to "phantom pains of the past, historic grievances against the Soviet union and the Russian empire of the 19th century." In Tallinn, Ms Kopli said: "This is the first time this has happened, and it is very important that we've had this type of attack. We've been able to learn from it."

"We have been lucky to survive this," said Mikko Maddis, Estonia's defence ministry spokesman. "People started to fight a cyber-war against it right away. Ways were found to eliminate the attacker."

The attacks have come in three waves: from April 27, when the Bronze Soldier riots erupted, peaking around May 3; then on May 8 and 9 - a couple of the most celebrated dates in the Russian calendar, when the country marks Victory Day over Nazi Germany, and when President Vladimir Putin delivered another hostile speech attacking Estonia and indirectly likening the Bush administration to the Hitler regime; and again this week.

Estonian officials say that one of the masterminds of the cyber-campaign, identified from his online name, is connected to the Russian security service. A 19-year-old was arrested in Tallinn at the weekend for his alleged involvement.

Expert opinion is divided on whether the identity of the cyber-warriors can be ascertained properly.

Experts from Nato member states and from the alliance's NCSA unit - "Nato's first line of defence against cyber-terrorism", set up five years ago - were meeting in Seattle in the US when the crisis erupted. A couple of them were rushed to Tallinn.

Another Nato official familiar with the experts' work said it was easy for them, with other organisations and internet providers, to track, trace, and identify the attackers.

But Mikko Hyppoenen, a Finnish expert, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that it would be difficult to prove the Russian state's responsibility, and that the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/art...081438,00.html





Shhhh! A Secret Google Search URL That Removes Adsense Ads
Amit Agarwal

Google makes most of their money from AdSense ads.

While it is technically possible to block Google ads on web pages through Firefox extensions or by modifying the hosts file, these hiding methods are mostly implemented by tech-savvy users and may not have that big an effect on Google's revenue.

However, here's a secret trick - if you append the parameter "output=googleabout" to Google Web Search URL, the search results page will not carry any AdSense ads that are otherwise seen on the top and right sections of the page.

Here's a direct URL to search Google minus ads:

google.com/search?output=googleabout

Not sure why this parameter is in place but this could have an impact on their bottom line since it allows users to search Google sans advertisements without installing any geeky hacks. Thanks Vedrashko.

The following lines, when added to the Windows HOSTS file, will block Google from serving ads on your computer and won't track your visits on sites that use Google Analytics.

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com #[Google AdWords]
127.0.0.1 adservices.google.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com #[urchinTracker]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com #[Google Analytics]
127.0.0.1 imageads.googleadservices.com #[Ewido.TrackingCookie.Googleadservices]
127.0.0.1 imageads1.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads2.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads3.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads4.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads5.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads6.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads7.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads8.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 imageads9.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 apps5.oingo.com #[Microsoft.Typo-Patrol]
127.0.0.1 www.appliedsemantics.com
127.0.0.1 service.urchin.com #[Urchin Tracking Module]

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/s...t-removes.html





Clean Technology Bigger Than Internet: Software Guru
Gerard Wynn

A global response to climate change will spur a business revolution bigger than the internet, said co-founder of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy.

"This is a much larger opportunity," he told Reuters, pointing to the scale of the problem and the profits to be made from simple steps like a more careful use of energy.

"It's profitable to be more efficient, it has a negative cost and a competitive disadvantage if you don't do it."

"You can sensibly adopt old technology, not drive a truck, or insulate your house," he said, speaking on the fringes of the Cleantech investor conference in Frankfurt.

Joy made his name creating and developing computer operating systems and microprocessors, for example helping to design the Java programming language.

Most scientists agree that climate change is being caused by mankind's emissions of greenhouse gases, especially the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil.

Using the example of the car industry, Joy saw the response in three parts: first using old technologies like smaller, more efficient cars; second adopting emerging technologies like "hybrid", part-electric cars; and third researching breakthroughs such as transport fuels derived from farm waste.

Climate change would spur innovation and California's Silicon Valley, which originally served the semiconductor industry, was well placed to benefit, he said.

"Solar cells are semiconductors, heat to electricity is semiconductors, software to manage systems comes out of Silicon Valley," said Joy, who is now a partner at venture capital investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).

A global race is on to be first to commercialize breakthrough technologies which could make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Research into safer, rechargeable lithium batteries is taking place mainly in the United States and Canada, but innovation in small electric cars is centered in Asia and Europe, he said.

"Smart people are everywhere."

Future breakthroughs will include more efficient solar cells that convert waste heat to electricity, and manipulation of catalysts at the ultra-tiny, or nano, scale to cut costs.

Climate change will create business losers, too: for example among U.S. car manufacturers which have resisted fuel efficiency standards, Joy reckoned.

"They lobbied Washington against innovation. The industry is now really in trouble, the car companies didn't innovate. Everyone's basically driving a truck."
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...63539220070515





Retroshare Release (v0.3.0pre10)
toni66

Quote:Posted By: drbob7
Date: 2007-05-15 04:34

Summary: Retroshare Release (v0.3.0pre10)

The new Windows Beta for Retroshare. (v0.3.0pre10) is now available from sourceforge.net

Retroshare is a cross-platform private sharing platform. This latest release enables private chat and easy certificate sharing.

Retroshare Features:

* F2F communication network
* Web-Of-Trust Authentication.
* Private and Secured by OpenSSL.
* Private and Group Chat.
* Secure Messages (like Email)
* Simple File-Sharing.
* Automaticly Resumed Downloads.
* Easy Exchange of Certificates.

It is available for download from http://www.sf.net/projects/retroshare

join the growing retroshare network.

DrBob.

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=23943





Threat To Free, Legal Guitar Tablature Online

Recently Hal Leonard Corporation, the world's largest songbook publisher, sent an email to the music publishing and copyright community urging them not to license guitar tablature for free, advertising-supported use online. The email includes a number of factual errors and was potentially very damaging to the potential for a free, legal, and licensed destination for guitar tab online. Musicnotes and MXTabs have posted the full letter along with their response.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/2149224





It’s alive

U.K. Music Label Creates a Vinyl-MP3 Hybrid
Charlie Sorrel

While the copyright fight rages between big record companies and their customers, some smaller, independent labels are moving in with innovation instead of litigation.

First Word Records, a U.K. label based in Leeds, has one new idea -- vinyl records that include downloadable MP3s.

First Word's primary customers are DJs, an often challenging market for record labels. DJs embrace new technology or repurpose old (think scratching), but at the same time scour old stores and markets for rare, used vinyl. First Word is attempting to address both these needs with DigiWax.

The records are beautifully packaged, double-weight vinyl discs that come with a unique code. With the code, buyers can download an unprotected, 320Kbps MP3 version of the music, to use however they like.

First Word is not the only label offering an LP-plus-MP3 combination. Saddle Creek, which puts out Bright Eyes records, also includes a download code with some of its LPs.

The double-headed approach makes sense for several reasons. DJs and audiophiles will always want the top end of quality, so they will buy physical media, but for convenience you can't beat a digital file.

First Word cofounder Andy H is a DJ and knows the difficulties and dangers of traveling with rare discs. "The sheer weight and size of vinyl meant that I had to be very selective of what I took abroad to DJ," he says. By contrast, digital files weigh nothing, and if you have a backup, they are impossible to lose.

Publishing MP3s without the technology for digital-rights management was a deliberate choice. First Word cofounder Aly Gillani explains the DRM-free approach in terms that echo those of consumer advocate. "Once a customer has paid for the track they should be free to play it in any player," he says. "Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

Perhaps even more importantly, DRM also makes tracks unplayable in software used by many DJs, such as Serato.

First Word also sells its music on iTunes, Napster, Clickgroove and DJ Download. The company sees DigiWax as an extension of this choice. "This is just a little something extra for the true vinyl fans and collectors," says Andy H.

So, will vinyl ever go away? Probably not, if you ask First Word. "The sound of vinyl is still warm, rich, and -- if mastered properly -- sounds amazing in a club," says Andy H "Even the crackles before the record starts sound good."

Additional reporting by Eliot Van Buskirk.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscell...007/05/digiwax





Latest AACS Revision Defeated a Week Before Release
Ryan Paul

Despite the best efforts of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Administration (AACS LA), content pirates remain one step ahead. A new volume key used by high-def films scheduled for release next week has already been cracked. The previous AACS volume key was invalidated by AACS LA after it was exposed and broadly disseminated earlier this month. The latest beta release of SlySoft's AnyDVD HD program can apparently be used to rip HD DVD discs that use AACS version 3. Although these won't hit store shelves until May 22, pirates have already successfully tested SlySoft's program with early release previews of the Matrix trilogy.

AACS LA's attempts to stifle dissemination of AACS keys and prevent hackers from compromising new keys are obviously meeting with extremely limited success. The hacker collective continues to adapt to AACS revisions and is demonstrating a capacity to assimilate new volume keys at a rate which truly reveals the futility of resistance. If keys can be compromised before HD DVDs bearing those keys are even released into the wild, one has to question the viability of the entire key revocation model.

After the last AACS key spread far and wide across the breadth of the Internet, AACS LA chairman Michael Ayers stated that the organization planned to continue clamping down on key dissemination, despite the fact that attempts to do so only encouraged further dissemination. In a monument to comedic irony, the AACS LA has elected to put out the fire by pouring on more gasoline.

AACS clearly has yet to stop those determined to break the DRM scheme from copying movies, but its key revocation model does create additional burdens for device makers, software developers, and end users. As the futility of trying to prevent copying continues to become more apparent and the costs of maintaining DRM schemes escalate, content providers will be faced with a difficult choice of whether to make their content more or less accessible to consumers.

We are already seeing the music industry beginning to abandon DRM, but it doesn't look like the movie industry is ready to take the same logical step. Instead, the MPAA wants to have the best of both worlds by making DRM interoperable and designing it in a manner that, according to MPAA head Dan Glickman, will permit legal DVD ripping "in a protected way." Although the MPAA's plans for DRM reform could reduce the incentives for hacking AACS, the war between hackers and DRM purveyors will continue for the foreseeable future.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...e-release.html





Crazy kids



MIT Hacks XKCD Talk With AACS Key

Reader Hanji alerts us to a hack pulled off when Randall Munroe, author of the popular webcomic XKCD, spoke at MIT by invitation of the Lab for Computer Science. MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from hatches in the ceiling. The labels bore XKCD's logo as well as the recently discovered 16-byte AACS processing key.

At another point in Munroe's talk he was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors; but fortunately he had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/2327248




















Until next week,

- js.



















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May 12th, May 5th, April 28th, April 21st, April 14th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S..


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