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Old 19-09-07, 11:44 AM   #2
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Winamp Goes Where iTunes Doesn’t Dare
Ryan Jarrett

Winamp, that staple of media players, will soon turn 10! And its not letting it pass without a bang. On the 10th of October at 10:10am, Winamp 5.5 (PC-only) will be released sporting two new and potentially controversial features: support for mp3 blogs and the ability to stream your music collection over the Internet (a Beta version is available here).

Cashing in on the growing popularity of mp3 blogs, and the lack of tools to take advantage of them, Winamp’s Media Monitor can be used in conjunction with the software’s built-in browser to access any mp3s linked to on a blog page, presented as a playlist or even downloaded to your library. Winamp also includes handy links to a dozen or so music blogs to get you started.

The second major new feature is the Winamp Remote. This acts like a local media server, cataloging your tracks and videos and then enabling you to access them from another device, including other PCs running Winamp or via a web browser, various mobile devices, and game consoles (Playstation 3, XBox 360 or Nintendo Wii).

However, unlike iTunes, sharing isn’t restricted to devices on the local network, and instead you can also share your music over the Internet. To make this relatively simple, Winamp prompts you to send an email (or SMS text message) to a friend to let them access your playlists from their computer (they’ll need to create a free account to verify their identity, but only once). In this regard, Winamp Remote makes iTunes’ network sharing features seem rather puny and inflexible.

Also new to version 5.5 is the “Bento” skin. This is a move away from Winamp’s traditional multi-windowed interface (the default skin), which can be confusing and cluttered at times. Instead, the new skin only has one window which is more in keeping with other media management software.

The rest of Winamp performs as you’d expect it. It is still a very good media player; responsive, highly customisable, able to cope with many formats and yet still has a low demand on system resources. It will synchronise with a number of portable media players, including iPods*, making it a potential replacement for iTunes or Windows Media Player. Obviously, its still a beta version so there are some niggles with the program — it locked the interface for the duration of one track, although it had worked fine previously, and there are a couple of error messages when you close the program.

Winamp continues to evolve, and the new and bold features are a worthy update in which to mark the application’s tenth anniversary.
http://www.last100.com/2007/09/17/wi...s-doesnt-dare/





Mozilla President Kicks Ballmer, Trashes DRM, Quotes Spiderman
Mike Butcher

INTERVIEW: Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, is a disarmingly casual guy, especially over a good lunch in a high-class London restaurant. But despite the relaxed delivery, he doesn’t pull his punches.

Nitot is co-founder (with Peter Van der Beken) and president of Mozilla Europe, a non-profit organization whose goal is to develop and promote its open source software and, increasingly, that of others. He previously worked on the Netscape project for more than seven years. He is also founder of OpenWebGroup initiative.

Nitot is passionate about what he sees as Microsoft’s opposition to the Internet’s development when it stopped development of the Internet Explorer browser for five years after 2001. He believes this acted as a serious barrier to the development of the Web in general, not just the open source movement.

“IE was getting more and more obsolete in development terms. The Internet was stalling because of this,” he says. It was technologies like Netscape’s Netcaster, which acted as the core of what became RSS that helped open up the Web again.

But Mozilla’s Firefox itself has come in for criticism. The next version of the Firefox browser will be 3.0. How does he react to criticisms that Firefox is slowly becoming bloated?

“No, Firefox is getting speedier and speedier. Developers ask for new applications inside Firefox all the time but the early Mozilla Suite of 2003 - which wrapped up a browser, email client, HMTL editor and IRC all in one - showed that it was often too complicated a proposition for the Internet user.”

He says Mozilla is working hard at finding a balance: “We don’t want to incorporate features for the sake of features - only where it makes sense for the user experience.”
How does he view Apple’s Safari (a strategy Apple came up with long before Mozilla had got its act together with Firefox)?

“My dream is that they eventually pick the Mozilla / Gecko / Webkit combination and give up Safari,” he says. “We see Safari and Firefox as allies in bringing diversity to the Web.”

Later he goes further: “We are not against Microsoft, but we are against Microsoft’s monopoly [of the browser market].”

So is Steve Ballmer a block on innovation at Microsoft? “Could be, yes,” says Nitot with a smile.

He relates his view - held by many - that Microsoft’s attack of the web is directly related to the threat the Web poses to its desktop applications, as evidenced in recent times by Zoho and Google’s apps.

But has he heard of the Blue Monster movement inside Microsoft to engage better with the open source community (also at Gaping Void)?

In a word, no. But Nitot does recognise the sentiment: “My perception is that at the lower levels of Microsoft, there are people who are just like me. They understand the Net and the power of Web standards. They understand that, as Spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility.”

Does he extend his belief in open source to the open sourcing of content as well as code? What does he think about DRM?

“I don’t think DRM has a future. Treating your customers like thieves is bad business practice. Today the customer is not ‘king’, they are considered thief first.”

He relates a story about his young son being visibly upset by a DRM-enabled music CD which would not play on his older model HiFi.
“It is stupid to think that the key to a DRM system won’t leak. So if it becomes more painful for a legitimate customer to use a product than it is for the pirates then that’s a problem,” he says.

And the future for Mozilla? Nitot believes there will be greater emphasis put on embedded Mozilla code into both mobile devices and ones for the developing world like the OLPC.

Nitot - replete with smile - will be appearing next at the Mozilla 24 event where Mozilla will hold a global conference via beaming in speakers and audiences globally.
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/09/13/...tes-spiderman/





I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft’s dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company is announcing the desktop software, called I.B.M. Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the I.B.M. Web site.

I.B.M.’s Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft’s mainstay Office programs — Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker.

In the 1990s, I.B.M. failed in an effort to compete head-on with Microsoft in personal computer software with its OS/2 operating system and its SmartSuite office productivity programs.

But I.B.M. is taking a different approach this time. Its offerings are versions of open-source software developed in a consortium called OpenOffice.org. The original code traces its origins to a German company, Star Division, which Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Sun later made the desktop software, now called StarOffice, an open-source project, in which work and code are freely shared.

I.B.M.’s engineers have been working with OpenOffice technology for some time. But last week, I.B.M. declared that it was formally joining the open-source group, had dedicated 35 full-time programmers to the project and would contribute code to the initiative.

Free office productivity software has long been available from OpenOffice.org, and the open-source alternative has not yet made much progress against Microsoft’s Office.

But I.B.M., analysts note, has such reach and stature with corporate customers that its endorsement could be significant.

“I.B.M. is jumping in with products that are backed by I.B.M., with the I.B.M. brand and I.B.M. service,” said Melissa Webster, an analyst for IDC, a research firm. “This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”

I.B.M. executives compare this move with the push it gave Linux, the open-source operating system, into corporate data centers. In 2000, I.B.M. declared that it would forcefully back Linux with its engineers, its marketing and its dollars. The support from I.B.M. helped make Linux a mainstream technology in corporations, where it competes with Microsoft’s Windows server software.

I.B.M. is also joining forces with Google, which offers the open-source desktop productivity programs as part of its Google Pack of software. Google supports the same document formats in its online word processor and spreadsheet service.

I.B.M. views its Symphony desktop offerings as part of a broader technology trend that will open the door to faster, more automated movement of information within and between organizations.

A crucial technical ingredient, they say, is the document format used in the open-source desktop software, called the OpenDocument Format. It makes digital information independent of the program, like a word processor or spreadsheet, that is used to create and edit a document. OpenDocument Format is based on an Internet-era protocol called XML, short for Extensible Markup Language, which enables automated machine-to-machine communication.

For example, an individual investor might create a spreadsheet with automated links to market information, and prices at which he or she wants to buy or sell shares in particular stocks. The person would get an alert by e-mail or cellphone message of price swings, and could create the document for a buy or sell order with a keystroke.

Or, in a doctor’s office, patient records could be linked to hospital, clinic and other databases and updated automatically.

Microsoft has the same vision of software automation, but it champions its own document format, called Office Open XML. Earlier this month, Microsoft failed in its initial effort to have Office Open XML ratified as a global technical standard by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva. The OpenDocument Format, backed by I.B.M., Google, Sun and others, was approved by the standards organization last year.

I.B.M. clearly regards its open-source desktop offerings as a strategic move in the document format battle. “There is nothing that advances a standard like a product that uses it,” said Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of I.B.M.’s software group.

The Lotus Symphony products will support the Microsoft Office formats as well as the OpenDocument Format. But analysts note that technical translators are not entirely foolproof; Symphony software may easily translate the words from a Microsoft Word document, but some of the fonts and formatting may be lost. For many users, that may not matter, they say, but for others it might.

Betsy Frost, a general manager in Microsoft’s Office business, said users valued “full compatibility” with previous versions of their Office documents as well as the ease of use and familiarity of Microsoft products. And she noted that there are 500 million Office users worldwide.

Any inroads I.B.M. and its allies make against Microsoft, analysts say, will not come easily. “Three major players — I.B.M., Google and Sun — are now solidly behind a potential competing standard to Office,” said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester Research. “But it’s a tough road. Office is very entrenched.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/te...gy/18blue.html





Free Software Made Mandatory: IT Practicals of SSLC Exam
Sabloo Thomas

T’PURAM: Free software has been made mandatory for IT practicals of SSLC examination slated for March, 2008.

The Director of Public Instruction (DPI) has issued orders making free software compulsory. It says Linux Operating System should be used for IT education in eighth, ninth and tenth standards.

Till last year, schools had the freedom to conduct the examinations either in free software or in Microsoft platform.

For the purpose, fully Linuxbased text books have been prepared for standard X and Linux-based supplementary text books have been prepared for standard VIII and standard IX.

Text books for the purpose have been prepared by SCERT and Free Software Foundation of India under the guidance of IT@school project.

The DPI has also decided to initiate various programmes for popularising free software.

As part of it, various programmes were arranged to observe International Software Freedom Day on Saturday.

A small introductory lecture will be delivered in the school assemblies across the state on Monday, followed by a pledge. An outline of the introductory lecture and the pledge have been circulated to the schools.

A digital painting competition for students of eighth standard will be conducted on the day using TUX paint, XPaint and GIMP software.

The topic of the painting competition will be ‘my school and surrounding.’

A presentation competition using Open Office Impress will be conducted for students of ninth and tenth standard in the topic ‘IT and its benefits to the common man.’

Both the competitions will be of one and half hour duration. The prize winning paintings will be compiled at the State -level and uploaded on the website www.education.kerala.gov.in.
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems...apuram&Topic=0





Snowed By SCO
Daniel Lyons

In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one.

For four years, I've been covering a lawsuit for Forbes.com, and my early predictions on this case have turned out to be so profoundly wrong that I am writing this mea culpa. What can I say? I grew up Roman Catholic. The habit stays with you.

The case is SCO Group v. IBM. In March 2003, SCO sued IBM claiming that IBM took code from Unix--for which SCO claimed to own copyrights--and put that code into Linux, which is distributed free. Last month a judge ruled that SCO does not, in fact, own the Unix copyrights. That blows SCO's case against IBM out of the water. SCO, of Lindon, Utah, is seeking bankruptcy protection.

In June 2003, a few months after SCO Group sued IBM over the Linux operating system, I wrote an article that bore the headline: "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets." The article contained some critical stuff about SCO but also warned that SCO stood a chance of winning the lawsuit. "SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. ... But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies," I wrote.

I wrote that because in the 1990s SCO's predecessor company, Caldera, ran a similar shakedown on Microsoft, making claims about the old DOS operating system. I was briefed by Caldera's lawyers on that case, but I never took them seriously. Then they won a settlement. Whoops.

This time, I figured I should at least give SCO the benefit of the doubt. I flew to Utah and interviewed their managers. I attended a SCO conference in Las Vegas and did more interviews. They told me all sorts of things, like they'd found a "smoking gun" that proved IBM was guilty, and that they were preparing to sue big Hollywood companies that use Linux server farms to make movies.

I reported what they said. Turns out I was getting played. They never produced a smoking gun. They never sued any Hollywood company.

Over time my SCO articles began to carry headlines like, "Dumb and Dumber," "Bumbling Bully" and "SCO gets TKO'd."

But I still thought it would be foolish to predict how this lawsuit (or any lawsuit) would play out. I even wrote an article called "Revenge of the Nerds," which poked fun at the pack of amateur sleuths who were following the case on a Web site called Groklaw and who claimed to know for sure that SCO was going to lose.

Turns out those amateur sleuths were right. Now some of them are writing to me asking how I'd like my crow cooked, and where I'd like it delivered.

Others in that highly partisan crowd have suggested that I wanted SCO to win, and even that I was paid off by SCO or Microsoft. Of course that's not true. I've told these folks it's not true. Hasn't stopped them.

The truth, as is often the case, is far less exciting than the conspiracy theorists would like to believe. It is simply this: I got it wrong. The nerds got it right.

SCO is road kill. Its lawsuit long ago ceased to represent any threat to Linux. That operating system has become far too successful to be dislodged. Someday soon the SCO lawsuits will go away, and I will never have to write another article about SCO ever again. I can't wait.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/19/sof...0919lyons.html





Oh, Everyone Knows That (Except You)
Abby Goodnough

IN this era of blogosphere gossip, viral e-mail and infinite YouTube video archives, the open secret — unacknowledged by its keeper, theoretically hush-hush but widely suspected or known — arguably should be a thing of the past in public life.

But the case of Larry E. Craig, the Idaho senator arrested when an undercover police officer said he made overtures to him for sex, suggests otherwise. Though rumors had long swirled around the conservative Republican senator, the mainstream news media pointedly overlooked them until last week, when Roll Call broke the news of his arrest in June.

Most notably, The Idaho Statesman investigated reports about Mr. Craig for months after a gay blogger published a claim last fall that the senator had had sex with men, but decided against running uncorroborated accusations that Mr. Craig denied and continues to deny. As much traffic as the speculation generated on blogs before Mr. Craig’s arrest, it gained currency — that is, it became a “story” suitable for national publication and broadcast — only when it was backed by an arrest report.

The same went for former Representative Mark Foley of Florida, who was long rumored to be gay but whose open secret was widely exposed only after his sexually explicit electronic messages to former Congressional pages surfaced last fall and forced his resignation. And for Jim McGreevey, the married New Jersey governor whose homosexuality was suspected for years in local circles, but was left pretty much untouched by the news media. Only after disclosing an affair with a man he had once appointed to a six-figure state job did he resign.

Old-fashioned as it seems, there are still tacit rules about when an open secret can remain in its own netherworld, without consequence to the politician who keeps it. But now that any whisper can become a global shout in an instant, how much longer can those rules apply? And should they, anyway?

“What fascinates me is the question of, if it didn’t get out for all this time, what does it mean?” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor who now blogs on media and politics on buzzmachine.com. “Does it mean journalists are doing a good job, or does it mean they are doing a bad job?”

Jack Bass, who is on the faculty at the College of Charleston and who co-wrote “Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond,” said that at one time, politicians whose open secrets were exposed could use the fact to their advantage, on the theory that they were too outrageous to be believed and reflected badly only on the rumormonger. When a small South Carolina paper declared during Mr. Thurmond’s 1972 re-election campaign that he had fathered a child with a black woman — a fact not confirmed until after his death in 2003 — Mr. Thurmond distributed copies of the provocative headline to sympathetic voters. He won the race.

In the mainstream media, the recent standard for pursuing open secrets has been murky, but generally guided by the notion that private behavior matters when it is at odds with public declarations. Mr. Foley’s bawdy flirtation with pages was fair game not least because he had sponsored legislation seeking to protect children from online predators. Mr. Craig supported a 2006 amendment to the Idaho Constitution barring gay marriage and civil unions and has voted in Congress against gay rights.

Other secrets remain just that, usually because the politician in question has not been perceived as crossing an obvious line into hypocrisy, or he denies the rumors and no one can substantiate them. Perhaps no one wants to. They may not even be true.

“Most so-called open secrets are things we don’t really know the truth about,” said Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine. Regardless, he said: “It’s human nature not to pry into dark corners if you don’t have to. Most people would rather just let things be.”

And so it happens that a lot of states have lawmakers widely known for heavy drinking or sleeping with aides, whether or not the supposition is proved. One state official has long been rumored to be gay, and newspapers have investigated tips on his relationships. But only bloggers have published details, with little traction.

Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant based in Florida who has worked for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and Katherine Harris, the former Florida congresswoman, among others, said that most states have their own expressions for the circumstances under which open secrets stay secret. In Florida, he said, it’s the “Three County Rule” — no girlfriends within three counties of your home district. In New York, it’s the “Bear Mountain Compact” — nobody talks about what politicians do with their free time once they’ve crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge en route to Albany from points south.

“There’s a similar phrase in every state I’ve worked in,” Mr. Wilson said. “In a lot of cases it’s because the principals involved are powerful, and a lot of the people who know are aides or staff or lobbyists or even reporters who rely on these people for access. So you end up with this feeling of, ‘It’s just business, it’s not affecting their work.’ Once it starts affecting their work, then the rules change.”

Given the power of the Internet, though, the standards could now easily shift with each new salacious rumor reported online. One of the Internet’s main assets, its supporters say, is that it is unfiltered — but that allows sewage leaks of sorts, too.

Mr. Jarvis said bloggers constantly had to hone their judgment about when to ignore a rumor, write their own piece on it or — often the best choice, he said — link to another blog’s report on it.

“I believe we should do what we do best and link to the rest,” he said. “A link is not necessarily an endorsement, but a way to say ‘you go judge for yourself.’ ”

Let the blogger beware, though, of “link bait” — provocative or downright outrageous postings that some bloggers write merely to lure traffic.

As an antidote, a growing number of bloggers make it their chief goal to debunk scurrilous rumors circulating on the Web. Take Snopes.com, which calls itself “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation.” Its section on politics has subcategories devoted to Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and President Bush.

“It’s not strong enough yet,” Mr. Jarvis said of the online debunking trend, “but it’s part of a new architecture of the Web that is necessary.”

Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the online magazine Slate, said he used to believe that journalism should have an “intermediate standard” for publishing rumors — one that did not require firm corroboration. At one point, he said, he even defended Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip, for saying that 80 percent of what he published was accurate.

He regrets that stance. “I argued at the time that the Internet was the right place for that,” he said. “But at this point, the Internet is the mainstream media, so I think it should be as accurate as possible.”

Mr. Kinsley said attitudes toward open secrets have changed since the 1980’s, when he covered a well-known Democrat’s early presidential bid and quit The New Republic when it wouldn’t publish what he said was a solidly reported piece he wrote about the candidate’s philandering.

“My argument back then was it was elitist censorship for journalists not to publish what they knew about politicians because they were worried voters wouldn’t handle the information with as much sophistication as they thought appropriate,” he said. “Now, it turns out the prudes tend to be the Washington establishment journalists and the people who take a more sophisticated view are the voters.”

As proof, he offered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which had little long-term effect on Mr. Clinton’s popularity.

Mr. Jarvis echoed that view, saying any expectation that politicians will be moral leaders is naïve. “There is always a taint of, if not corruption, then compromise about them,” he said. “This idea that they are moral leaders is moronic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/we...goodnough.html





In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic
Neil A. Lewis

Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (ushmm.org) that will be available this week. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like “monsters at play” or “killers at their leisure.” Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. “In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized,” she said.

Sarah J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.

The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum’s curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt apartment where he lived in 1946.

The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob, a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany, where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.

She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers aged 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.

Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Höcker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official.

He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker died in 2000 at 89.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/ar...n/19photo.html





The Mystery of Hitler’s Globe Goes Round and Round
Michael Kimmelman

Hitler’s globe is missing.

Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.

Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute across town, which first caught Mr. Pobanz’s eye 40-odd years ago when he was a student.

“We called it the Führer globe,” he remembered. It planted the seed of his fascination with the Columbus Globe for State and Industry Leaders, as this enormous model was called — a far cry from the inflatable version that Charlie Chaplin bounced around in “The Great Dictator,” which mocked Hitler’s megalomania and created the indelible vision of a fascist tyrant doing a pas de deux with the planet.

Manufactured in two limited editions in Berlin during the mid-1930s (the second edition changed Abyssinia to Italian East Africa), the real Columbus globe was nearly the size of a Volkswagen and, at the time, more expensive. A standard wood base was designed to support it, but custom furniture stands were made for Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Mr. Pobanz has been methodically tracking them down.

White-haired, large, jowly and bespectacled, an unstoppable St. Bernard of enthusiasm for all things globe-related, he came the other day to the Deutsches Historisches Museum with a stack of books and photocopied evidence in his satchel, happy to lay it all out.

“He’s a very serious man with a passion for this particular type of globe,” said the museum’s director, Hans Ottomeyer. Mr. Ottomeyer had mentioned Mr. Pobanz in passing during a conversation about Berliners with remarkable obsessions.

Mr. Pobanz’s full story turns out to be a mystery. Besides the globes in Berlin, he said, there are two Columbus globes in public collections in Munich. Fellow globe hunters, put on the scent by word of his pursuit, have turned up several more in private hands and elsewhere, outside Germany. None, however, is from Hitler’s office in the New Reich Chancellery, the globe that inspired Chaplin.

In Chaplin’s satiric film the globe is a balloon, an emblem of megalomania, which suddenly bursts in the fictional tyrant’s face. The image became a cinematic touchstone: art transformed into political symbol, shaping history.

Hitler, more than any modern tyrant, grasped the power of visual signs. He cooked up the Nazi Party uniform and the flag and hired Albert Speer to design the New Chancellery, where the giant Columbus globe, with a sharp-cornered, stepped wood base, was parked in Hitler’s quarters. Newsreels and still photographs from the time the building opened, in 1939, show visitors trekking down marbled passageways more than four football fields long to reach the Führer. It was Chaplin’s genius, in 1940, to exploit the symbolism of the globe.

“It has been a trait of megalomaniacs throughout history to use the arts to control thought, gain respectability, bolster their power and memorialize themselves,” Frederic Spotts, a historian of modern Germany, observes in his book “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.” But Hitler went “beyond the others,” he writes, and “defined and legitimized his rule in cultural terms.”

Chaplin’s sight gag, you might say, gained weight precisely by playing off Hitler’s use of visual symbols.

Funny thing is, “Hitler probably didn’t think anything about the globe,” Mr. Pobanz said. “There’s no picture of Hitler beside the globe. He controlled all photographs of himself. If the globe had actually meant anything special to Hitler, there would surely be a photograph.”

“For me this is not about Hitler, it’s about the correctness of the situation,” he insisted. When a Berlin newspaper last year called the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s globe “the Globe of the Mass Murderer,” he simply felt, as a scholar, that the record should be set straight. Whether he would be going to the same lengths to uncover the pedigree of a globe attributed to Konrad Adenauer or John Foster Dulles, he didn’t say.

Instead, he said, “I don’t know how many of these globes were made because the Columbus factory was destroyed in 1943, along with its archives.” Mr. Pobanz pulled out a photocopy of a drawing he had unearthed for a custom base, designed by the Munich studio of Paul Ludwig Troost. Troost was Hitler’s favorite architect during the early 1930s. “This base was made for Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry,” he said.

It was identical to the one for the globe at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. “So this globe could only have been made for Ribbentrop,” he said.

He did not pause to contemplate if the provenance made much difference, morally speaking. “The globes designed for the New Reich Chancellery had a more angular base,” he said, then unveiled a different photocopy.

About the two globes in Munich, he explained, one came from Hitler’s offices there (also with a bullet hole in it, American). So that is a Hitler globe, but it’s still not the model ordered by Speer for the New Reich Chancellery, which Chaplin immortalized. The second globe in Munich came from a Nazi administrative building. Both pedigrees are documented, Mr. Pobanz said.

He then leapt into a list of international globe organizations. Mr. Pobanz belongs, he explained, to the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes, through which “I’ve heard about a globe in Breslau, and another in Warsaw.” Meanwhile Globusfreund (Friend of the Globe) magazine, based in Vienna, he said, has been pressing him to publish his research. The unmistakable anxiety of a man contemplating a prospective deadline suddenly flashed across his face.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m still collecting evidence.”

First interested in maps and globes because of their artistry and technical complexity, as a boy he made field trips in Germany and long bicycle tours across Europe. “Maps contain the imagination of the world,” he said. “You can’t go to all the places, but you can travel in your mind.”

He lives alone, he said. He has no family. Before tackling this Hitler globe mystery, he specialized in maps from the Soviet Union and East Germany, tracking down errors planted to throw off enemies from military sites. The suggestion that he’s a map detective seems to offend his sensibility.

He opened a blue folder of papers to a photocopy showing a group of Russian soldiers in the New Reich Chancellery in May 1945, crowded around Hitler’s globe. “I don’t know where it is,” he said, studying the image for a second.

“Maybe it’s in Moscow.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/arts/globe.phpl





Good, Bad or Ugly: A Legend Shrouded in Gunsmoke Remains Hazy
Manohla Dargis

Before a bullet shattered his skull in 1882, Jesse James cut a bloody swath through parts of the Midwest and the South, leaving a trail of corpses and favorable press notices in his wake. Bad man, poor man, bushwhacker, thief, James was as American as apple pie and the Confederate flag he wrapped himself in like an excuse. That bard of the great unwashed, Woody Guthrie, compared him to Robin Hood, and decades later Bruce Springsteen kept the fires burning, singing about a homespun legend as seductive as it is false.

The lachrymose new film “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” adds another gauzy chapter to the overtaxed James myth, if not much rhyme or reason, heart or soul. Topped by Brad Pitt wearing boot-black hair and a faraway stare, this is a portrait of the murderer as a middle-aged man as seen through the curious mirror of celebrity. At a well-seasoned 34, James lives in an ordinary house in an ordinary town, where he sits in his backyard smoking cigars and handling snakes, a devil playing at preacher. His days with Confederacy guerrillas are long gone, as are most of his crimes. Among his closest companions now is his greatest fan, Bob Ford, a gunslinger slyly played by Casey Affleck.

As its title announces, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is about a murder, the last violent chapter in a cruelly violent life. As such, it’s also about a celebrity stalker, a kind of Mark David Chapman in spurs who nurses an annihilating love for the object of his obsession. It’s an obsession fueled and fanned by the media, including the sympathetic newsmen who saw James as a heroic anti-Reconstructionist, and the fiction writers who memorialized and even exalted the brutal exploits of his gang. Like a schoolgirl with a crush, Bob Ford keeps his treasured Jesse James dime novels in a box under his bed. When he caresses the cover of one book, it’s as if he were tenderly stroking a lover’s cheek.

If there was more to Bob’s love, you won’t find it here, despite a coy bathtub scene that finds James luxuriating in milky water while the younger man hovers uncertainly nearby. “You want to be like me or do you want to be me?” asks James, casting his glance back at the man others would later brand Judas. In this nearly all-male world of camaraderie and gunsmoke, where little women bustle discreetly in the background (including Mary-Louise Parker as James’s wife, Zee), the ways of the flesh, of heaving, stinking, struggling humanity, have little place. For all their exploded bone and ravaged pulp, their trickles and rivulets of blood, the men in this film aren’t as much bodies as beautiful, empty signifiers.

In his last — and first — feature film, “Chopper” (2000), the New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik seemed on the same wavelength as his raucous, at times queasy, entertaining subject, the ultrabrutal criminal reprobate of the title, played by Eric Bana. Neither overtly sympathetic nor disapproving, the filmmaker presented his villain as a larger-than-life but unequivocally human grotesque. Using color like an Expressionist, he bleached the screen a sizzling white that turned blood red nearly black and splashed on hues of bilious green and urine yellow as if to suggest that Chopper’s fluids had leaked from his body to contaminate his surroundings. The colors sicken and beguile, as does the human riddle at their center.

There’s a different riddle in “The Assassination of Jesse James,” staring into a florid sunset, slashes of red cutting across the sky. Dressed in near-all black, the question mark known as Jesse James stands away from the camera, knee-deep in a golden, grassy field stirred by the wind or perhaps just an off-screen mechanical fan.

It’s a striking, pleasing image, whatever the case, pretty as a picture postcard, a vision of man and nature that brings to mind Thoreau at Walden Pond or more precisely Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” James is also facing West, of course, toward the last frontier, home to cowboys and Indians and prospectors of all types, including, soon enough, those who will wield movie cameras, not six-shooters.

If he had lived, James might have saddled up for the movies, and, indeed, his own son played him in the 1921 film “Jesse James Under the Black Flag.” When “The Assassination” opens in September 1881, shortly before his final train robbery and seven months before his death, James was already a star of sorts, a living if fast-aging legend, a favorite newspaper subject, a government target and the featured attraction in hundreds of dime novels with titles like “The James Boys and the Vigilantes.” Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.

It’s a curious performance, at once central and indistinct, but then, so too is the character. Based on the novel of the same title by Ron Hansen, the film introduces James at the beginning of his end. Hunkered down in some woods, surrounded by darkly dressed men and leafless birch trees, and framed by Roger Deakins’s impeccable, stark, high-contrast cinematography, he looks a vision. This isn’t just Jesse James — it’s also Jim Morrison at the Whisky in 1966 with a dash of Laurence Olivier, a touch of Warren Beatty and more than a hint of Ralph Lauren. It’s the beautiful bad man, knowing and doomed, awaiting his fate like some Greco-Hollywood hero, rather than the psychotic racist of historical record.

The movies have their truths, which rarely align with those of history. Taken on its own narrow, heavily aestheticized and poetic-realist terms, then, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” works. The cinematography may speak to Mr. Dominik’s yearning for meaning and importance more than it does of his outlaw, but the visuals often dazzle and enthrall. (The images that approximate the blurred distortions characteristic of pinhole photography are especially striking.) They also distract and, after a while, help weigh down the film, which sinks under the heaviness of images so painstakingly art directed, so fetishistically lighted and adorned, that there isn’t a drop of life left in them. Instead of daguerreotype, Mr. Dominik works in stone.

The question of whether the world or cinema needs another monument to an American gangster, a thug who lived by the gun and repeatedly killed in cold blood, remains unanswered by the film and its makers. And perhaps that isn’t a question worth asking. This is, after all, meant to be an evening’s entertainment, and its burdens should remain modest even if its goals are not. Its revelations, aside from Mr. Affleck’s performance, which manages to make the character seem dumb and the actor wily and smart, are nonexistent. The true story of Jesse James, despite all the dime novels and B movies, remains untold, perhaps because in its savagery it really is as American as apple pie and, as such, unspeakably hard to tell.


“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, rude language.


THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Directed by Andrew Dominik; written by Mr. Dominik, based on the novel by Ron Hansen; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Dylan Tichenor and Curtiss Clayton; music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Ridley Scott, Jules Daly and David Valdes; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 150 minutes.

WITH: Brad Pitt (Jesse James), Casey Affleck (Robert Ford), Sam Shepard (Frank James), Mary-Louise Parker (Zee James), Paul Schneider (Dick Liddil), Jeremy Renner (Wood Hite), Zooey Deschanel (Dorothy) and Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/movies/21assa.html





Out today

New DVDs
Dave Kehr

CRUISING

Controversial when it opened in 1980, William Friedkin’s “Cruising,” a thriller about the search for a serial killer in that era’s flourishing world of New York gay leather bars, generated only a murmur when it returned to theaters this month as a prelude to its DVD release today. The Village Voice, which led the protest against Mr. Friedkin’s film even as it was being shot in the West Village, greeted the rerelease with condescension colored by a certain nostalgia:

“Nothing at the orgy is as shocking as the smile on everyone’s face,” the critic Nathan Lee wrote, lamenting the post-AIDS decline of Mr. Friedkin’s vividly depicted Sin City.

A lot, of course, has changed for gays in America since “Cruising” made its debut. But times have also changed for serial killers: The shadowy figure that “Cruising” deploys as an embodiment of pure evil has become, thanks to “The Silence of the Lambs” and television shows like “Dexter,” a surreptitious figure of identification for the audience. Movies now invite us to react to the serial killer’s power and remorselessness not with revulsion, but with laughter and perhaps even envy. Hannibal Lecter is less a monster than he is a stand-up comedian, and snappy one-liners are not what interest Mr. Friedkin.

Instead, his enduring theme is the reality of evil and its uncomfortable proximity to sex, a theme the world embraced when he adapted William Peter Blatty’s theological best seller, “The Exorcist,” in 1973. But applying a similar gothic approach to “Cruising” — a film noir that turns into a horror movie — got Mr. Friedkin in trouble, and not only the political kind.

Al Pacino, still wreathed in the saintly idealism of “Serpico,” plays Steve Burns, a rookie cop who, in exchange for a fast-lane promotion, agrees to go undercover in the S&M bars of the meatpacking district in search of a psycho preying on gay men.

Like all good noir heroes, he finds himself drawn to the killer he is tracking, an effect registered by Mr. Friedkin’s deft use of tracking shots tied to Burns’s point of view. (“I like to watch,” he says at one point.) The bars are portrayed as a kind of hell, photographed in a near-monochromatic black-and-blue color scheme, with an emphasis on heat, humidity, human sweat and sulfuric cigarette smoke. Though some scenes were fogged up to avoid censorship for the initial release, they are now presented as Mr. Friedkin shot them.

The film seems to be moving toward a generalized guilt, proposing new suspects at every turn — a homophobic but secretly gay policeman (Joe Spinell), a police captain with a mysterious agenda (Paul Sorvino), the psychotically jealous roommate (James Remar) of a lovable theater queen (Don Scardino) and ultimately Burns himself — all contained in the faceless figure of a man in a leather mask who pops up at key moments.

“Cruising” only falters when it reverts from horror mode to the police beat and fingers a disappointingly trite perpetrator. In interviews Mr. Friedkin has suggested that he wanted the movie to be “nearly abstract,” with an ending that left the murders unsolved. But Hollywood was not ready for that in 1980, and is probably less ready now. (Warner Home Video, $19.97, R)

VINCENT PRICE


MGM Scream Legends Collection

MGM DVD, the current custodians of the American International library, have repackaged three out-of-print Vincent Price double-feature discs and added a terrific new transfer of Michael Reeves’s cult favorite “Witchfinder General” (1968) to create a tribute to this plummy-voiced stalwart of horror films. The films in this package belong to the later stage of Price’s career, when he had essentially become a comic actor, executing entertainingly campy pirouettes.

The boxed set includes “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” (1971) and its 1972 sequel, “Dr. Phibes Rises Again,” two very stylish mad-doctor romps filmed in colorful Art Nouveau interiors by the director Robert Fuest; a double feature of Douglas Hickox’s “Theater of Blood” (1973), with Price as a hammy Shakespearean avenging himself on the critics who disparaged his work, and Jim Clark’s “Madhouse” (1974), in which Price parodies himself as an aging horror star; and two anthology films, Roger Corman’s three-part “Tales of Terror” (1962), based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and Sidney Salkow’s “Twice-Told Tales” (1963).

“Tales of Terror” is still lots of fun; Price is paired with Peter Lorre for an adaptation of “The Black Cat” that veers almost immediately into “The Cask of Amontillado.” The transfers are old, and some are showing their age, but all are watchable.

In this context “Witchfinder General” stands out like Raymond Chandler’s proverbial tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. It was the third and final feature by Michael Reeves, a promising talent who was in his early 20s at the time of filming and who died in 1969 of barbiturate poisoning.

Along with George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” also released in 1968, “Witchfinder General” stood at the head of a new breed of politically minded horror films that would extend through the ’70s. (Several have recently been remade with their political subtexts stripped away.)

As violently anti-authoritarian as anything made by Jean-Luc Godard (“Weekend”) or Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Porcile”) in those turbulent times, the film locates its axis of evil firmly at the intersection of church and state. The setting is the English Civil War, and Price’s character, based on a historical figure, is an agent of the Protestant Parliamentarians who goes from village to village, extracting confessions from accused witches with the help of his enthusiastically sadistic partner (Robert Russell).

Not surprisingly, a large number of the suspects are young, female and helpless. There is no trace of campiness in Price’s performance, which, with that in “Edward Scissorhands,” remains his best work as an actor.

American International released “Witchfinder General” in the United States as “The Conqueror Worm,” the title of a Poe poem, in the hope of associating the film with its popular Poe cycle. The new anamorphic transfer replaces the title and eliminates a precredit sequence of Price reading the poem.

More important, it uncovers photographic values that weren’t apparent in American International’s notoriously cheap theatrical prints, and also restores an orchestral score by Paul Ferris that was eliminated for copyright reasons from previous United States video releases. For collectors who already own the other Price films in the boxed set, MGM has made “Witchfinder General” available as a stand-alone release. (MGM DVD, boxed set, $39.98; “Witchfinder,” $14.98, not rated)

ALSO OUT TODAY

DEATH PROOF The “extended and unrated” version of Quentin Tarantino’s half of the “Grindhouse” double feature; this formally brilliant little film plays much better on its own. (Genius Products, $29.95, unrated)

WE ARE MARSHALL The trials and triumphs of an underdog football team. The coach is played by Matthew McConaughey. McG directed. (Warner Home Video, $28.98, PG)

ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS Paul Mantee is the astronaut stranded on Mars with only a monkey for a companion in Byron Haskin’s enduring fantasy favorite of 1964. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/mo...deo/18dvd.html





Student Arrested, Tasered at Kerry Event

University of Florida Student Arrested, Tasered at Kerry Forum After Asking About Election
AP

University of Florida student Andrew Meyer struggles with University Police as officers try to remove him from a question and answer session with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in Gainesville, Fla. Meyer attempted to speak at the forum after the question and answer session had ended, university officials said.

A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum.

Videos of the incident posted on several Web sites show officers pulling Andrew Meyer, 21, away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

"He apparently asked several questions he went on for quite awhile then he was asked to stop," university spokesman Steve Orlando said. "He had used his allotted time. His microphone was cut off, then he became upset."

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., is heard to say, "That's alright, let me answer his question." Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles to escape for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room.

Meyer screams for help and asks "What did I do?" as he tries to break away from officers. He is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. Meyer says he will walk out if the officers let him go.

As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student's "very important question," Meyer struggles on the ground and yells at the officers to release him, crying out, "Don't Tase me, bro," just before he is Tasered. He is then led from the room, screaming, "What did I do?"

Meyer was charged with resisting an officer and disturbing the peace, according to Alachua County jail records. No bond had been set. Meyer was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday morning, a jail official said.

It was not known if Meyer had an attorney.

Orlando said university police would conduct an internal investigation.

"The police department does have a standard procedure for when they use force, including when they use a Taser," Orlando said. "That is what the internal investigation would address whether the proper procedures were followed, whether the officers acted appropriately."
http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3616977





Kerry Condemns Heckler Arrest

ABC News' Rick Klein Reports: Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday comdemned the arrest of a University of Florida student at one of his speeches, saying that he was engaged in a "good healthy discussion" with 21-year-old Andrew Meyer when he was Tasered and taken into custody.

"In 37 years of public appearances, through wars, protests and highly emotional events, I have never had a dialogue end this way," Kerry said in a statement. "I believe I could have handled the situation without interruption, but I do not know what warnings or other exchanges transpired between the young man and the police prior to his barging to the front of the line and their intervention. I asked the police to allow me to answer the question and was in the process of responding when he was taken into custody."

"I was not aware that a taser was used until after I left the building," he continued. "I hope that neither the student nor any of the police were injured. I regret enormously that a good healthy discussion was interrupted."

For politicians, hecklers come with the territory. But the arrest and detention of Meyer at Kerry speech on Monday stood out in at least two respects: Police acted aggressively in trying to silence Meyer, and the entire incident was captures on video -- making it an immediate Internet and TV sensation.

Videos show Meyer being pulled away from the microphone after as he sought to ask Kerry, D-Mass., a rambling series of questions that touch on allegations of voting improprieties in the 2004 election, possible impeachment of President Bush, Iran, and Kerry’s membership in Yale's secret Skull and Bones society.

Kerry sought to answer at least some of Meyer’s questions even as Meyer was dragged off by campus police -- and after police used a Taser to try to subdue him as he was being arrested.

"Help me! Help!" Meyer says. "What are you doing! Get off of me! Don't Taser me, bro! Oh my God! Oh my God!"

Meyer was jailed overnight on charges of disturbing the peace and resisting an officer. As word spread of his arrest, his friends used his Website as a clearinghouse for supporters to learn about the incident, and to organize a rally on his behalf on the University of Florida campus at noon ET today.

The University of Florida has scheduled a news conference to discuss the incident at 3 pm ET today.

University spokesman Steve Orlando defended the officers' actions in an interview with the Associated Press, but said an internal investigation would be conducted to make sure they acted appropriately.

"He apparently asked several questions -- he went on for quite awhile -- then he was asked to stop," Orlando said of Meyer. "He had used his allotted time. His microphone was cut off, then he became upset."

Typically, hecklers and aggressive questioners are handled informally at political events. Shouts of "boo" or political chants drown out someone who dominates a forum, and peer pressure normally is enough to regain order.

But sometimes, law-enforcement officials take a more aggressive tack.

During the 2004 campaign, protesters were occasionally ushered off of the premises by Secret Service officers assigned to protect President Bush. In one incident, in West Virginia in July 2004, two protesters at a Bush event say they were arrested for refusing to cover up their anti-Bush T-shirts.

In another, post-campaign incident that drew wide publicity, two people were ejected from a presidential event in March 2005 in Denver. In a lawsuit, they claim they were kicked out even before the president arrived because they drove up in a car with a bumper sticker that said, "No more blood for oil."

In this year's presidential race, security has been a major concern early on. One candidate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., gets Secret Service protection because of her status as a former first lady, while another, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has been assigned protection because of concerns over his safety.

Kerry, who was the Democrats’ nominee in 2004, is no longer assigned Secret Service protection, and does not bring his own security to events. That left University of Florida police in charge of security -- to notable results on Monday.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalra...ts-rally-.html





Colbert: Today's Kids Don't Know How to Help Except by Linking
Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane

Stephen Colbert added his own slant to the story of a University of Florida student tasered by campus police after he became obnoxious in asking questions following a John Kerry speech.

"Look at these guys in the back," Colbert said, highlighting one frame from the video of the event. "You don't need a Fox body language expert to tell you that kid in orange is bored. He's probably thinking something like, 'I wish they'd stop tasering this guy so I could go home and watch this guy getting tasered on YouTube.'"

"I don't know whether the tasered gentleman had a legitimate point to make or was just being an ass," continued Colbert. "One thing you can't argue is that his cause was joined by hordes of no one. ... Students used to be a rebellious bunch. ... Today's kids are so different."

"The kids in that auditorium who sat idly by as their fellow student was seized, thrown to the ground, and tasered didn't lack the courage to help," Colbert went on. "They're just so used to watching videos like 'Crazy guys thrown out of lecture hall' that they didn't know how to help other than to link to it. I'm sure that guy in the orange is going to spring into action as soon as he gets home and fires up his blog."

"And that's what's so great about this new kind of activism," Colbert concluded. "It's convenient. Just like masturbation. It's better than sex because it's on your own time. So ... make me proud, young people. Continue waging your protests from the polite distance of your home computers. Make 'the Man' wish he'd never visited your site. And if a fellow-student is denied the right to speak, remember, the best way to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him is by sitting alone in your seat."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Colber..._how_0920.html





Sieg Rupert

Fox Anchor: 'Officers Should be Commended' for Tasering Student
David Edwards and Jason Rhyne

Weighing in with his legal opinion regarding police officers' tasering of a University of Florida student, attorney and Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett said no excessive force was used during the incident.

"He is resisting. And the videotape really doesn't lie--it speaks volumes about what's going on," said Jarrett, referring to video of the event that is circulating around the internet. "The law doesn't allow you to resist police officers when they ask you to do something," he added.

The tasered student, Andrew Meyer, was wrestled to the ground by officers after asking Sen. John Kerry a question during a school forum.

"Now you may have a beef with them being there in the first place and trying to escort you out--you can argue that later--but when they ask you to do something, you have to do it. That's the law," Jarrett said.

Reviewing the videotape of the arrest, which played throughout the interview, Jarrett pointed to moments that he says show Meyer is clearly resisting arrest.

"There he is raising his arms," he said as he watched. "Yeah he may be saying 'I'm not doing anything,' but he is...he is repeatedly resisting."

Asked about an eyewitness report of the incident reported earlier in the segment, which indicated Meyer may have told officers he would cooperate if they let him stand up, Jarrett was incredulous.

"Why should they believe him?" the anchor asked. "He has already demonstrated in the previous minute that he is not going to do what he says he's going to do."

The tasering, according to Jarrett, was good police protocol."The taser device actually is a method by which you decrease the level of force by subduing somebody, not increasing the level of force...these police officers out to be commended for what it is they did."

Regarding the possibility of future lawsuit from Meyer, Jarrett said the student didn't have a case, adding that no jury would sympathize with him as he was being "utterly obnoxious."

Earlier in the program, witness Matthew Howland, who was on the scene during the scuffle, said at one point Meyer told officers he'd cooperate.

"Andrew said 'I'm not resisting. If you let me up, I'll walk out of here with you right now," Howland told Fox. " But they kept him on the ground and about 20 seconds later they tased him."

Howland later said that after the tasing, Meyer was taken to the lobby of the auditorium, where police asked for his name and other information--requests the student refused.

"He doesn't give up his information like his name because he says he's scared--he doesn't want to give them any more information."
http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Fox_a...nded_0918.html





Cheney Jumps Into Fray Over MoveOn Ad
Katharine Q. Seelye

The controversy over MoveOn.org’s ad in The New York Times entered its second week yesterday as Vice President Dick Cheney joined the fray.Mr. Cheney, defending Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq and the object of MoveOn’s ad, said:
“The attacks on him by MoveOn.org in ad space provided at subsidized rates in The New York Times last week were an outrage.”

Apart from condemning MoveOn, critics have accused The Times of showing a liberal bias by agreeing to run MoveOn’s ad, which asked: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” They have also said the paper gave MoveOn favored treatment by charging it a “discount” rate, even though it ran the ad on the day that MoveOn wanted, which should have cost it more, and by giving the ad top positioning.

Steph Jespersen, director of advertising acceptability at The Times, said that accepting an ad “does not in any way reflect the official position of The New York Times nor do we need to agree or endorse our advertiser’s message or opinion.” He said that the advertising department accepts ads from across the political spectrum and accepted the MoveOn ad, because it met the department’s standards. The group was charged the paper’s normal rate for stand-by ads.

“We only decline or alter an opinion ad when the message is clearly discriminatory, illegal, libelous or hate speech,” Mr. Jespersen said in an online conversation with Times readers.

He said in a telephone interview later that in the MoveOn ad, the phrase “betray us” was posed as a question and was therefore not perceived as libelous.

He also said in his online conversation that the advertising department accepted the ad “because it is our ongoing desire to keep our advertising columns as open as possible to the public, which we believe is a First Amendment responsibility.”

MoveOn has said it paid $65,000 for the ad. While The Times does not discuss its fees for specific ads, it has said it charges $65,000 for full-page, black-and-white “advocacy” ads that run on a seven-day “standby” basis. That means that while the client can express a preference that the ad run on a certain day, there is no guarantee that it will. If a client specifies the day, the cost is higher: $181,000 with an 8 percent discount for a full-page ad, or about $167,000.

“The lower cost of such ads reflects the flexibility that gives us,” Mr. Jespersen said of the seven-day window. “Any political or advocacy group calling up today to request a standby ad would be quoted the same rate that MoveOn.org paid.”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican presidential candidate who is among those who criticized the MoveOn ad, paid the same rate for his own advocacy ad that ran in the Friday editions of The Times.

The price is even less, about $51,000, if an advertiser will accept a 14-day window in which an ad might run. The Times offers about 30 different prices for ads, depending on their size, placement, color, timing and whether the advertiser is a high-volume customer. There are no “standby” rates for color ads because the presses cannot accommodate color on short notice.

Critics have said that the MoveOn ad, which ran last Monday, was not subject to “standby” rules because it used the word “today” in the text, suggesting advance knowledge that the ad would run on Monday, when General Petraeus began his testimony to Congress.

But Mr. Jespersen said that the advertising department routinely notifies advertisers a day in advance that the ad will run in the next day’s paper. And at that point, he said, “the advertiser can make minor changes in the text.”

The Giuliani campaign was notified the day that it sought to place its ad that it would be running the next day.

Among the critics has been the American Spectator, which wrote: “The New York Times in the past has rejected ‘advocacy’ ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, as well as from the National Right to Life Committee, despite the fact that both would have qualified for the same ‘special advocacy, stand by’ rates.”

Mr. Jespersen said in the telephone interview that the advertising department had rejected a right-to-life ad because it contained an illustration that did not meet the paper’s standards of taste. “It had nothing to do with the message of the group,” he said.

As for the Swift Boat veterans group, which in the 2004 presidential campaign questioned Senator John Kerry’s military record, it never tried to place an ad with The New York Times, according to Mike Russell, communications director for the Swift Boat group.

“There was never an effort to mock up an ad for The New York Times and there was never any refusal for any ad copy because none was submitted,” Mr. Russell said.

Mr. Jespersen estimated that the advertising department turns down perhaps two or three percent of ads that are submitted each year. The department usually explains why the ad is rejected, he said, and the advertiser sometimes makes changes to meet the standards.

Critics have also complained that MoveOn received favored treatment because its ad was put in a “top spot” in the newspaper. The ad ran on page 25 of the A section; Mr. Giuliani’s ad ran on Page 9 of the A section.

Advertisers generally consider the front of a section or back of a section to be the most valuable spot in papers like The Times, which does not run ads on its front page. The next-most valuable spot is Page 3 of the A section, which is the first inside page that most readers see. In The Times, that spot has long been occupied by Tiffany.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp





Working hard in Washington

Senate Condemns Ad
Nick Juliano

The Senate voted by a wide margin Thursday to condemn a controversial anti-war advertisement accusing Gen. David Petraeus of betraying the country. Only 24 Democrats, including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, voted against the symbolic resolution.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), both of whom also are seeking their party's presidential nomination, joined Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) in declining to take a position for or against the MoveOn ad. Since last Monday, when the "General Petraus or General Betray Us?" ad ran on a full page of the New York Times, Republicans have launched relentless attacks on MoveOn and any Democrats who refused to outright condemn the ad's message.

"The focus of the United States Senate should be on ending this war, not on criticizing newspaper advertisements," Obama said. "This amendment was a stunt designed only to score cheap political points while what we should be doing is focusing on the deadly serious challenge we face in Iraq. It's precisely this kind of political game-playing that makes most Americans cynical about Washington's ability to solve America's problems. By not casting a vote, I registered my protest against this empty politics. I registered my views on the ad itself the day it appeared."

In a statement released Thursday Obama continued, "All of us respect the service of General Petraeus and all of our brave men and women in uniform. The way to honor that service is to give them a mission that is responsible, not to vote on amendments like the Cornyn amendment while we continue to pursue the wrong policy in Iraq."

President Bush entered the fray himself Thursday, calling the ad "disgusting" and an attack on the military.

Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican who favors a timetable for removing US troops from Iraq, blamed the MoveOn ad for keeping Republicans aligned with the White House in voting against measures to de-escalate the war.

"It was stupid on their part and disgraceful," the Oregon Republican told the Associated Press.

Thursday's Senate resolution was sponsored by conservative Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). who took time away from questioning Petraeus to condemn the ad as "reprehensible slander" during a Senate hearing last Tuesday.

Earlier Thursday Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced a resolution that would've condemned all attacks on troops and veterans, including those from MoveOn and conservative groups that disparaged former Sen Max Cleland and John Kerry in 2002 and 2004. That resolution fell nine short of the 60 votes needed to end debate on it. Obama voted in favor of that measure, an hour before the vote on Cornyn's bill he skipped.

In substantive votes Thursday, Democrats failed to attract enough Republican supporters to end a filibuster on Sen. Jim Webb's amendment to a defense spending bill that would have given US troops as much time at home as they are stationed in a warzone. Currently some troops are subject to 15-month tours of duty with only a year off in between.

Webb was among the Democrats who supported the measure condemning MoveOn.
http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Democ...veOn_0920.html





The President Of Hypocrisy
Logan Murphy

In light of President Bush’s disgraceful presser today, Keith Olbermann decided to make a Special Comment on tonight’s Countdown and wow, did he make the most of it. Olbermann blasts the president for his cowardly and un-American behavior of pimping General Petraeus as a political hack and hiding behind him to deflect criticism.

To say that Keith took the president to the woodshed would be an understatement:


So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we’d all interrupted him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria in condescending and infuriating fashion, produced a big-wow political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn’t already — the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway.

“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.

“And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.

“And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Move-On-Dot-Org — or **more** afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military.”

“That was a sorry deal.”


First off, it’s “Democrat-ic” party, sir.

You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.

Secondly, you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?

But most importantly… making that the last question?

So that there was no chance at a follow-up?

So nobody could point out — as Chris Matthews so incisively did, a week ago tonight — that you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!

Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman — and now you’re complaining about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?

Eleven months ago the President’s own party — the Republican National Committee — introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before the mid-term elections.

Bin Laden.

And Zawahiri’s rumored quote of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”

All set against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion… and the dire announcement:

“These are the stakes - vote, November 7th.”


That one was ok, Mr. Bush?

Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment from you?

The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleeland and lying about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?

But a shot at General Petraeus — about whom you conveniently ignore it is you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack — that merits this pissy juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?

Your hypocrisy is so vast, sir, that if we could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream — and keep us fighting there until the year 3000.

The line between the military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.

When Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General who history suggests had begun to lose his mind.

When George McClellan tried to make policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition - as he did… when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864 and nearly defeated our greatest president.

Even when the conduit flowed the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian and Defense Department structures — after four years of fearful servitude — rose up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.

The list is not endless — but it is instructive.

Air Force General LeMay — who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was retired.

Army General Edwin Anderson Walker — who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his soldiers.

Marine General Smedley Butler — who revealed to Congress the makings of a plot to remove FDR as President — and for merely being approached by the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.

These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is… not… to… be… crossed!

Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become your front man.

And he obviously should have refused that order and resigned rather than ruin his military career.

The upshot is — and contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement — he betrayed himself more than he did us.

But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage, some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.

But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That, sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General David Petraeus, sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today, sir, and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

It is a line — thankfully only the first of a series — that makes the military political, and the political, military.

It is a line which history shows is always the first one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a military junta.

Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our military.



Good night, and good luck.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/0...-of-hypocrisy/





Terrorist Leader Threatens to Behead Madonna, Britney Spears
TomZ

While Osama bin Laden is busy pushing back the release of his new video like it were Chinese Democracy, another terrorist leader is stepping up to the plate to fill the void of dickheaded threats.

Muhammed Abdel-Al has released a brand new book called -- and I swear I couldn't make this title up -- Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land Jihadists Reveal their Global Plans - to a Jew! Abdel-Al is spokesman and senior leader of The Popular Resistance Committees, a Palestinian terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip. It's really only one committee, but no one has the guts to tell him.

In his book, Abdel-Al calls Madonna and Britney Spears "prostitutes" and threatens to behead the pop singers.

Here is an excerpt (via NME):

If I meet these whores I will have the honor - I repeat, I will have the honor - to be the first one to cut the heads off Madonna and Britney Spears if they will keep spreading their satanic culture against Islam.

If these two prostitutes keep doing what they are doing, we of course will punish them.

Now, few people know this, but I'm actually a Palestinian terrorist leader in my spare time. It's a thankless job, but what can I say, my hot tub doesn't pay for itself. Anyway, I wanted to release the following statement as a follow-up to Abdel-Al's message:

As my colleague Muhammed Abdel-Al has so beautifully illustrated, pop stars like Madonna and Britney Spears are spreading the message of Satan to the unsuspecting masses. Because people have no choice over what they watch and listen to -- at least that's how it is within my organization, so I assume such is the case with the rest of the planet -- the population is being destroyed by the illicit, Satanic ways of Madge and Brit-Brit. Also, did you see the Video Music Awards? Britney looked soooo skanky in that outfit. I would love to have the great privilege of beheading these harlots, should our paths one day cross. And hopefully they will, cause I'm totally going to Britney's comeback tour. I mean, I can't afford the Ticketmaster surcharges (curses to those heathens as well, LOL!), but I'm hoping maybe I can finagle something off Stubhub. Anyhoo, where was I? Oh yeah, Britney's new single is mediocre at best... and death to invalids! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go strap a bomb to a six year old. Peace, playa!
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...itney_Spea rs





Britney Spears Calls Herself a 'Fat Pig'
TomZ

After her disasterous performance at the Video Music Awards this past Sunday night, Britney Spears took a lot of heat for looking out of shape. According to US Weekly, Britney herself may agree with this sentiment. US claims that, after completing her performance and walking offstage, Britney said, "Oh, my God, I looked like a fat pig! I looked like a fat pig!"

Britney's problems at the VMA's may be her own fault. Allegedly, Britney chose her own outfit, and yelled at her hairstylist, causing him to quit just 30 minutes before the VMA's started.

Also, it seems that Britney passed on the chance to share the VMA stage with Justin Timberlake. Producer and frequent Timberlake collaborator Timbaland told MTV that a Britney-Justin performance would have been "the best thing that ever happened" and would "help her out a whole lot."

He added:

It'll never happen. Nah. It could've, but it won't.

Timbaland went on to offer some career advice for Spears:

She needs a story. She has no comeback story. That's the problem. She has to have a team. She needs to come back with Justin doing records; [then we'd see headlines like,] 'She went back to her ex and she's making smashes.' [But instead she got] so big-headed and [was] like, 'Screw you, screw you, I don't need nobody.'

She should humble herself and make a phone call and say, 'I'm sorry.' She knows what she's sorry about. She needs to say, 'I was wrong,' and it'll definitely move forward. That's all she has to say.

This explains a lot. It looked like the VMA's were thrown together the night before. Hell, I've been to beer pong tournaments that were more well planned out. But perhaps it wasn't MTV's fault. Maybe they had a plan, but Spears refused to participate in that plan. Who knows? That would make sense, though. Spears recently fired her manager, and she's launching her "comeback" attempt when many people think she should take some time off. Now she's turning down Justin Timberlake collaborations and firing her hairstylist? It's highly possible that she just does whatever she wants, regardless of others' advice. When is the last time someone said "no" to her about anything? Someone needs to step up and say "listen bitch, you're embarrasing yourself, now shut up and follow the plan that your record label and management have laid out for you so you don't end up looking like a two-dollar stripper on Xanax on national TV again." OK, maybe they should phrase it differently, but you get the point.

As for the "fat" thing, I may be in the minority here, but I think Spears looked fine. Sure, she was thicker as compared to old Britney Spears (i.e., "The Snake"), but if you put her on the street with a random collection of girls, she still would have been 95th percentile. I would challenge any female from US Weekly or any other tabloid to put on those same clothes and dance around on stage, and we'll see how they look.

(This isn't to prove a point. I just want to see more girls dancing around in stripper clothes.)
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/Britney_Spears_Calls_Herself_a_'Fat_Pig'





25 Million People Register for Led Zeppelin Reunion Gig
DirtySouthMouth

Guess what? People love Led Zeppelin. NME.com says the group is so well loved that the website to register for reunion show tickets received 120 million hits yesterday after registering 25 million people for the ticket ballot. For the record, that's more than three times the population of London.

Tickets for the show will be randomly allocated using the ballot system.

Registration is open until Monday, September 17, at noon and there will be 20,000 tickets available beginning at around $250 a piece. Winning registrants will be informed after October 1.

As for the show, it is set for November 26, including sets from Pete Townshend, Foreigner and Paolo Nutini. Bill Wyman and The Rhythm Kings will back up all three of those acts and will play its own set.

The show is a tribute to late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun and money from the show will be for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, which pays for scholarships in the UK, US and Turkey.

Here's what Robert Plant had to say about Ertegun:

During the Zeppelin years, Ahmet Ertegun was a major foundation of solidarity and accord. For us he was Atlantic Records and remained a close friend and conspirator. His performance stands alone as our tribute to the work and the life of our long-standing friend.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...in_Reunion_Gig

May Add Second Show

If you didn't click your way into the registration process for those Led Zeppelin tickets, don't get too bent out of shape. Rumors are swirling that a second show might be in the works. Plus, isn't Jason Bonham kind of not as good as John Bonham?

According to some reports, the Led Zeppelin frontman is trying to convince the other members in the band to play a show in Belfast at Ulster Hall. The venue is looking for a band to christen its reopening on November 2008 and Plant would like to oblige.

The venue is known as the place the band debuted "Stairway To Heaven" in 1971, a debut that was celebrated at a 1996 25th anniversary party in the venue.

Ticket registration for the band's November 26 show at London's O2 Arena ended today, September 19, at noon BST. The registration was opened for an additional 48 hours after demand for tickets crashed the registration site. So, keep your fingers crossed and your browsers open for the Belfast show.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...d_Reunion_Show





Stars Join Forces to Salute (and Support) a Rock Legend


Robert Plant and Fats Domino

Nate Chinen

One Saturday night in May, Fats Domino took the stage before a full house at Tipitina’s, the club that has become, like him, a New Orleans institution. His half-hour set made headlines for a few reasons.

It was Mr. Domino’s first show since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. It was a benefit for the Tipitina’s Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to restoring the city’s musical culture and helping its musicians. Besides that, it was Fats Domino, and these days that’s more than reason enough.

Mr. Domino, 79, made many of the rhythm-and-blues hits that laid the groundwork for rock ’n’ roll. He’s also something of a recluse, and a perfectionist known to cancel appearances without warning or cause. Yet he is still a presence in the city he has always called home.

“For lack of a better way of putting it,” Irma Thomas, known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans, said recently, “he’s a living, walking legend among us in New Orleans. Between him and Louis Armstrong, they were the first big names to put us on the musical map.”

On Sept. 25, Vanguard Records will release “Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino,” making use of some other big names, including B. B. King, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and Norah Jones. They appear alongside New Orleans heroes like Dr. John and Allen Toussaint.

The foundation will dedicate a portion of the proceeds to the renovation of Mr. Domino’s publishing office, adjacent to his spacious house in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was severely damaged by the flooding after Katrina. He had to be rescued by helicopter from his home; he lost several pianos and most of his possessions, and looters stole most of his gold records from the 1950s.

Of course, even without the flood it would not have been hard to rally support for Mr. Domino. “He’s been around all this time, and I’ve never read or heard anything bad about him,” Mr. King said recently. “And as far as I’m concerned, he’s just a great musician, and a lovable person.”

“Goin’ Home” arrives roughly one year after “Alive and Kickin’,” Mr. Domino’s first album in more than a decade, which was also released as a benefit for the Tipitina’s Foundation. “He really wanted to put it out through our organization,” said Bill Taylor, the foundation’s executive director. “He was aware of what we were doing, and he reached out to us.”

Over a bowl of gumbo at Cochon, a Cajun restaurant in the warehouse district, Mr. Taylor described the process behind “Goin’ Home,” for which he receives credit as executive producer. “The first hurdle was that I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. “I had never done anything like this.”

But Mr. Taylor set his sights high from the start: his first request was to Yoko Ono, to use a version of “Ain’t That a Shame” that John Lennon recorded in 1973. “Within like a week, she gave us permission,” he said. “Then Elton John signed on next. And at that point there was enough star power behind it that the dominoes started falling pretty quick.” (His domino metaphor did not seem intended as a pun.)

With more than 30 tracks, recorded not just in New Orleans but in places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Kingston, Jamaica, the album presented some fearsome logistics. Further complicating matters was Mr. Taylor’s decision to feature New Orleans musicians. In the spirit of the tribute concerts that followed Katrina, “Goin’ Home” includes novel pairings like Joss Stone and Buddy Guy with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band; Mr. King with Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk; and Lenny Kravitz with the Rebirth Brass Band.

Mr. Taylor often paired songs with artists. Elton John is a natural on “Blueberry Hill,” as are Tom Petty on “I’m Walkin’ ” and Randy Newman on “Blue Monday.” Los Lobos offer a solid update of “The Fat Man,” one of the earliest rock ’n’ roll records. Mr. McCartney does his best Fats impression on “I Want to Walk You Home,” backed by Mr. Toussaint on piano.

More than a few of the album’s tracks came together serendipitously. Mr. Plant had agreed to record a track with the Cajun group Lil’ Band o’ Gold, but when he arrived in New Orleans the acclaimed Soweto Gospel Choir was headlining at Tipitina’s. A meeting was arranged, and Mr. Plant also recorded “Valley of Tears” with the choir, in a hushed style that calls Paul Simon’s “Graceland” to mind.

“So you have the Led Zeppelin guy with a South African gospel choir doing a Fats Domino song,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s an example of what happens here musically every day.”

On Sept. 29, some of the album’s local luminaries, including Ms. Thomas, Dumpstaphunk and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Mardi Gras Indians, will play at a release party at Tipitina’s. Like the album, the show will celebrate not just Mr. Domino’s legacy but also the remarkable songwriting partnership he enjoyed with the trumpeter Dave Bartholomew.

Mr. Domino, who now lives in Harvey, La., in a gated community on the west bank of the Mississippi River, rarely gives interviews, though he has said he was honored by “Goin’ Home.”

But in one of the chance coincidences that seem to happen often in New Orleans, a reporter on his way to the airport in a taxicab lucked into what passes for an interview with Mr. Domino.

The driver, Walter Miles, turned out to be Mr. Domino’s chauffeur. “I drive him all over,” he said. “We talk to each other two or three times a day.”

With that, Mr. Miles dialed a number on his cellphone and passed the phone to the back seat. There was Mr. Domino, with his unmistakable New Orleans drawl. What followed was less an interview than genial small talk.

“Where you from?” he asked, getting right to the heart of the matter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/ar...ic/22fats.html





Researchers Improve Ability to Write and Store Information on Electronic Devices

New research led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory physicist Matthias Bode provides a more thorough understanding of new mechanisms, which makes it possible to switch a magnetic nanoparticle without any magnetic field and may enable computers to more accurately write and store information.

Bode and four colleagues at the University of Hamburg used a special scanning tunneling microscope equipped with a magnetic probe tip to force a spin current through a small magnetic structure. The researchers were able to show that the structure's magnetization direction is not affected by a small current, but can be influenced if the spin current is sufficiently high.

Most computers today use dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, in which each piece of binary digital information, or bit, is stored in an individual capacitor in an integrated circuit. Bode's experiment focused on magneto-resistive random access memory, or MRAM, which stores data in magnetic storage elements consisting of two ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin non-magnetic spacer. While one of the two layers remains polarized in a constant direction, the other layer becomes polarized through the application of an external magnetic field either in the same direction as the top layer (for a "0") or in the opposite direction (for a "1").

Traditionally, MRAM are switched by magnetic fields. As the bit size has shrunk in each successive generation of computers in order to accommodate more memory in the same physical area, however, they have become more and more susceptible to "false writes" or "far-field" effects, Bode said. In this situation, the magnetic field may switch the magnetization not only of the target bit but of its neighbors as well. By using the tip of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), which has the potential to resolve structures down to a single atom, the scientists were able to eliminate that effect.

Bode and his colleagues were the first ones who did such work with an STM that generates high spatial-resolution data. "If you now push just a current through this bit, there's no current through the next structure over," Bode said. "This is a really local way of writing information."

The high resolution of the STM tip might enable scientists to look for small impurities in the magnetic storage structures and to investigate how they affect the magnet's polarization. This technique could lead to the discovery of a material or a method to make bit switching more efficient. "If you find that one impurity helps to switch the structure, you might be able to intentionally dope the magnet such that it switches at lower currents," Bode said.

Results of this research were published in the September 14 issue of Science and related research was published earlier this year in Nature.

Funding for this work was provided by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the European Union project ASPRINT. This work was conducted prior to Bode's arrival at Argonne. His research at Argonne will be predominately funded by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne National Laboratory brings the world's brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/533374/?sc=swtn





Intel Previews a New Family of Power-Saving Chips
Laurie J. Flynn

Intel gave the first public demonstration on Tuesday of a new generation of computer processors that significantly increase performance without consuming more power.

The company’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, told developers at its semiannual technology conference that Intel expected to finish the new family of chips in the second half of 2008, in keeping with its promise of a new chip architecture every other year. The new family of chips, code-named Nehalem, will use as many as eight processing cores and will offer better graphics and memory-control processing.

Intel had been late to respond to technological challenges in energy efficiency and heat consumption, and it has spent the better part of two years racing to catch up with its smaller but feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices.

A year ago, Intel announced a painful corporate overhaul, including a round of cost-cutting that reduced the work force by 10 percent and trimmed $5 billion in expenses. Since then, the company has begun to regain lost market share, and last week raised its sales forecast for this quarter.

As part of the corporate revamping, Intel executives last year outlined what they called a tick-tock strategy, referring to the development of a new chip architecture every other year and to a new manufacturing technology in the alternate years. Mr. Otellini said the strategy would accelerate the pace of innovation.

The manufacturing-technology innovation, a new silicon technology component, is almost ready. Intel’s Penryn family of processors, to be introduced on Nov. 12, will be the industry’s first high-volume 45-nanometer processors. (the current standard is 65 nanometers.)

Mr. Otellini said the company planned to introduce 15 new 45-nanometer processors by the end of the year and 20 more in the first quarter of 2008. A.M.D. has said it will move to 45-nanometer technology in mid-2008.

“We expect our Penryn processors to provide up to a 20 percent performance increase while improving energy efficiency,” Mr. Otellini said.

He said that 32-nanometer technology, which is on track to begin production in 2009, would offer even greater performance. The 32-nanometer chips use transistors so small that more than 4 million of them could fit on the head of a pin.

“Smaller is better, smaller is cheaper,” Mr. Otellini said.

The company also disclosed plans for a new graphics-oriented product, called Larrabee, which will compete with products from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia and Advanced Micro’s ATI graphics unit. Larrabee will include 12 cores, or computing brains.

On Monday, A.M.D. unveiled its own strategic change: a desktop chip with three cores, unusual in an industry that tends to grow in even numbers, routinely doubling performance. The announcement came as a surprise to analysts, as the company had promoted the advantages of four processors only last week.

A.M.D. executives, referring to a recent survey by Mercury Research, said that quad-core processors accounted for only 2 percent of all desktop computer systems, suggesting that they had been slower to catch on than expected.

It is hoping that its new three-core chip, called Phenom, will appeal to midrange customers who are looking for better performance than dual-core systems can provide, but do not see the need for quad-core systems. A corporate vice president, Robert Brewer, predicted that “it’s naturally going to resonate with customers,” who he said would appreciate having another choice.

But Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64, a consulting firm in Saratoga, Calif., said the triple-core chip could prove confusing to customers. It is due in the first quarter of 2008, the quarter after Advanced Micro is scheduled to release its quad-core chip. In some cases, the triple-core chip may actually perform faster than a quad core.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/te...gy/19chip.html





USB 3.0 Brings Optical Connection in 2008
Stephen Shankland

Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there's typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. A prototype shown at the speech is working now, and USB 3.0 will have optical and copper connections "from day one," he added.

The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second. Many devices don't need that much capacity, but some can use more, including hard drives, flash card readers and optical drives such as DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. The fastest flash card readers today use IEEE 1394 "FireWire" connections that top out at 800 megabits per second.

In addition, USB 3.0 will offer greater energy efficiency, Gelsinger said. It will be backward compatible, so current USB 2.0 devices will be able to plug into USB 3.0 ports.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780794-7.html





How Computers Transformed Baby Boomers

Computers once filled entire rooms. Now they fit in our pockets. How a generation formed our tech landscape.
Steven Levy

This summer I was talking to some young Google employees, and at one point the conversation somehow turned to the antediluvian document-creation processes of an older generation: mine. So I (born 1951) told these twentysomethings that there was a time when people wrote on machines called typewriters, beginning at the beginning and plowing through until the end, at which point they would mark up the manuscript with pen or pencil for the next run through the typewriter. If there was a need to recast a couple of sentences or even an entire paragraph, you would type on a new sheet of paper, cut the new text from the page with scissors and use Elmer's glue to paste it over the original not-so-hot lines. "Oh!" said one of the Googlers, of 1980s vintage. "So that's where 'cut-and-paste' came from!"

The moment neatly captured the gap between the world that boomers grew up in and the inescapably digital world of today. Those in the postwar generation once rolled their eyes when its parents or grandparents would spin Lincoln-esque coming-of-age anecdotes that hinged on the absence of television, interstates and air conditioning. But now they find themselves spanning perhaps the biggest technological divide in history. "There certainly were big earlier transformations like the automobile, radio and TV, so it would be hard to say the previous generation had a static environment," says Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. "But you can actually keep a straight face and say the amount of change in these last 30 years has been greater."

No, we don't have flying cars, we don't talk philosophy with robots and our meals do not consist of colored capsules containing all we need to survive. But we do have robots sweeping the floor and a chess machine that whupped the world's greatest human player. And we have Microsoft Office, instant messaging, DVDs, iPods, BlackBerrys, Amazon, eBay, Google and credit cards that pay for chewing gum by means of infrared waves. The big news is digital: an amazing amount of stuff that used to happen in the physical world can now be done virtually. Like cut-and-paste, many of the realities boomers grew up with are today's metaphors.

In fact, it can be argued that the best-known baby boomer of all is the computer itself. Like many boomers, the general-purpose computer was born in the years following World War II, grew up in a restrictive environment and went batty as a young adult. Now, like the generation it grew up alongside, the computer has assumed a leadership role, while still maintaining an unruly edge.

But it would be unfair to say that the computer has transformed the lives of boomers and leave it at that. The boomers themselves can take credit for shaping the course of this technology if not the entire direction of the digital revolution. Gates is among a cadre of industry pioneers now in their 50s. But several decades ago they were tech-savvy kids who seized the moment when their elders had no clue.

In the 1950s, computers were like ... the 1950s. They were giant monochrome machines tended by people wearing white shirts and black ties. They filled a room and were used for tasks like accounting, codebreaking and statistical calculations. Icons of the conformist age, there was nothing personal about them. They filled up a room and cost millions of dollars. They weren't hard to use—they were impossible to use. They were tended by a sort of priesthood who jealously limited access.

Even after huge breakthroughs in transistors and microprocessors in the early 1970s, those in charge of companies like IBM or Digital Equipment Corporation felt that nothing could be more absurd than a personal computer. Who could possibly want a computer of one's own? What would you use it for?

In the 1960s and early 1970s, many in the counterculture absolutely loathed computers and everything about them. They were seen as part of the Defense Department's War Machine, and also associated with depersonalization of a mass society.

But boomer math nerds, who figured out how to finagle computer time, didn't care. There was also a geographic exception to those political objections. In Northern California—home of the chip industry and lots of defense work—the idea arose that computers could empower people. Two texts proved to be crucial in pushing the vision toward action. The first was Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib," a messy manifesto urging enlightenment through computers. The other was the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which broke the news of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 (a primitive device that came in a kit and had no keyboard or monitor). Excitement about the Altair led political activist Fred Moore to organize a group called the Homebrew Computer Club, which first met in March 1975. It would generate dozens of companies, including Apple Computer.

What really led the boomers to become pioneers of the PC revolution was a sense of possibility. "They saw the technology as mind-expanding," says John Markoff, author of "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." "It was one of a series of quests going on, part of an attempt to break out of the confines of the suburban realities of the 1950s."

That was certainly the case for Steve Jobs (born 1955), raised in the suburban Valhalla of 1960s Silicon Valley where your next-door neighbor could, and did, bring you straight-from-the-fab microchips to play with. He attended Reed College, dropped out, went to India, and wound up back in Silicon Valley, where he reconnected with his high school buddy Steve Wozniak (born 1950). Woz, as he was called, was a classic tech geek, relatively unaffected by the counterculture. When he showed Jobs the device he was working on—a computer he built to dazzle the wireheads at the Homebrew Computer Club—Jobs became his partner. Then Jobs convinced a reluctant Woz, who was married, to quit his job at Hewlett-Packard to form Apple, a company Jobs named on a whim. Naturally, the values of their generation were reflected in their approach to designing products (notably the Apple II that became the first mass-market PC) and building their company. When Jobs orchestrated the release of Apple's groundbreaking 1984 Macintosh computer, he struck the cultural chords familiar to his generation, urging people to view it not as a product but a movement.

Even earlier in the game was Bill Gates (born 1955), who wasn't very political but with the help of his high school buddy Paul Allen (born 1953) put together the pieces and saw something big was about to happen. He was a Harvard sophomore in 1974 when Allen showed him that issue of Popular Electronics. "We said, 'Oh, my God, it is going to happen without us?' " and right then the two vowed to write software for the Altair. "We wrote our slogan—a very modest slogan—'a computer in every home and on every desktop—in 1975," says Gates. "We were kind of brash in a certain way." Very boomer-esque. Didn't he find it odd that people who actually ran computer companies couldn't see it that way? "There's some benefit to youth," he says. "It's a lot like physics—Einstein saw relativity, the others didn't—but then he didn't understand quantum dynamics, that next generation came along, and he became the old guard. There's something about these wild changes—a personal computer being software-centric and personal, and a software industry that was high volume and low cost—that are hard to see."

And is there a more canonical boomer's tale than that of Mitch Kapor (born 1950), who majored in psychology at Yale, was heavily involved in the campus radio station, and after graduation became ... a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. But ever since he'd come across a copy of "Computer Lib" in a Harvard Square bookstore, he was fascinated by computers, particularly the promise they had to empower ordinary people. He began designing software, and then, around the time the IBM PC was launched, came out with an idea to make spreadsheets more powerful. His product was Lotus 1-2-3, and when he sought funding for his company, in a long letter to venture capitalist Ben Rosen he presented his idealistic vision of a humanitarian company. There are things as important to me as profit, he wrote. Now, he says, "It was my equivalent of 'Don't Be Evil' " [the unofficial Google motto].

Google, is only one of the more recent high-tech companies to capture our attention, our imagination and our free time. Generations following the boomer pioneers founded Internet giants like Amazon and eBay, and now another Harvard dropout, Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984), heads Silicon Valley's new heartthrob, Facebook. All have adopted the grow-fast template of the boomer pioneers.

None of this would have happened if the technology itself had not ripened, and it was for the first time possible to build personal computers and write software for them. But the other element was the generational nature of its innovators. The magic was that those two factors came together, and as a result, the early lives of boomers will become as quaint to their grandchildren as the tales of the boomers' own forefathers were to them.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20789352/site/newsweek/





Misleading RCMP Data Undermines Counterfeiting Claims
Michael Geist

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) focuses on the growing attention paid to counterfeiting and the use of misleading data as part of the debate. The RCMP has been the single most prominent source for claims about the impact of counterfeiting in Canada since its 2005 Economic Crime Report pegged the counterfeiting cost at between $10 to 30 billion dollars annually. The $30 billion figure has assumed a life of its own with groups lobbying for tougher anti-counterfeiting measures regularly raising it as evidence of the dire need for Canadian action. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins cited the figure in a March 2007 speech critical of Canadian law, while the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Canada's leading anti-counterfeiting lobby, reported in April that the "RCMP estimates that the cost to the Canadian economy from counterfeiting and piracy is in the billions."

Yet despite the reliance on this figure - the Industry Committee referenced it in its final report - a closer examination reveals that the RCMP data is fatally flawed. Responding to an Access to Information Act request for the sources behind the $30 billion claim, Canada's national police force last week admitted that the figures were based on "open source documents found on the Internet." In other words, the RCMP did not conduct any independent research on the scope or impact of counterfeiting in Canada, but rather merely searched for news stories on the Internet and then stood silent while lobby groups trumpeted the figure before Parliament.

A careful examination of the documents relied upon by the RCMP reveal two sources in particular that appear responsible for the $30 billion claim. First, a March 2005 CTV news story reported unsubstantiated claims by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a global anti-counterfeiting lobby group made up predominantly of brand owners and law firms, that some of its members believe that 20 percent of the Canadian market is "pirate product." That 20 percent figure - raised without the support of any evidence whatsoever - appears to have been used by IACC to peg the cost of counterfeiting in Canada at $20 billion per year.

Second, a 2005 powerpoint presentation by Jayson Myers, then the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters, included a single bullet point that "estimated direct losses in Canada between $20 billion and $30 billion annually." The source for this claim? According to Mr. Myers, it is simply 3 to 4 percent of the value of Canada's two-way trade.

Indeed, unsubstantiated and inflated counterfeiting numbers appear to be nothing new. The International Chamber of Commerce has long maintained that counterfeiting represents 5 to 7 percent of global trade (those figures were also raised before the Canadian House of Commons committees). However, a recent study by the independent U.S. Government Accountability Office found that of 287,000 randomly inspected shipments from 2000 to 2005, counterfeiting violations were only found in 0.06 percent - less than one tenth of one percent. Moreover, the GAO noted that despite increases in counterfeiting seizures, the value of those seizures in 2005 represented only 0.02 percent of the total value of imports of goods in product categories that are likely to involve intellectual property protection.

Similarly, this year the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which counts most industrialized countries as members, issued a comprehensive report on counterfeiting that placed the global cost at $200 billion annually. That analysis, which makes suggestions that Canadian counterfeiting costs $30 billion each year even more implausible, was less than a third of what some business groups had previously claimed.

In fact, the OECD report concluded that while counterfeiting was an issue in all economies, it is most common in economies "where informal, open-air markets predominate." This suggests that far from being a hot-bed of counterfeiting, Canada is rarely the source of counterfeit products and it consumes far less than many other countries worldwide.

Before Ottawa embarks on further anti-counterfeiting legislative action, it first requires accurate, non-partisan data. Not only has such information been missing from the Canadian debate, but it is the RCMP that has astonishingly been a primary source of unreliable, unsubstantiated data. In doing so, it has undermined both its own credibility as well as that of the House of Commons committee counterfeiting reports.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2243/135/





Doesn’t own a computer

Copyright Office Chief: I'm a DMCA Supporter
Anne Broache

There's still a lot of hatred out there for a controversial law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but don't count the U.S. Copyright Office chief in that camp.

"I'm a supporter; I think it did what it was supposed to do," Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters said of the 1998 law at an appearance at the Future of Music Policy Summit here. "No law is ever perfect, but I remain a supporter."

The DMCA, among other things, dictates that "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device (or) component" that is primarily designed to bypass copy-protection technology. For that reason, it has long been unpopular among some hackers, programmers and open-source devotees--not to mention consumer groups that believe it unduly inhibits fair use rights.

"I'm not ready to dump the anticircumvention," Peters said in response to a question from an audience member who suggested as much. "I think that's a really important part of our copyright owners' quiver of arrows to defend themselves."

The law also requires that the Copyright Office meets periodically to decide whether it's necessary to specify narrow exemptions to the so-called anticircumvention rules. (Last year, the government decided it's lawful to unlock a cell phone's firmware for the purpose of switching carriers and to crack copy protection on audiovisual works to test for security flaws or vulnerabilities.)

Peters told summit attendees that at first she thought it was "stupid" to put the Copyright Office in the position of deciding whether certain locked content was problematic, but she eventually came around.

"It does bring attention to certain activities that maybe aren't so great," said the self-proclaimed "Luddite," who confessed she doesn't even have a computer at home. "In hindsight, maybe that's not such a bad thing."

Peters indicated she was less thrilled, however, about a portion of the DMCA that generally lets hosting companies off the hook for legal liability, as long as they don't turn a blind eye to copyright infringement and remove infringing material when notified. That's one of the major arguments Google is attempting to wield in fighting high-profile copyright lawsuits, including one brought by Viacom, against its YouTube subsidiary.

"Shouldn't you have to filter? Shouldn't you have to take reasonable steps to make sure illegal stuff that went up comes down?" she said. She added, without elaborating further, "I think there are some issues."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9779996-7.html





Hacker Finally Publishes Notorious Apple Wi-Fi Attack

Researcher David Maynor has published details of the controversial Apple Wi-Fi hack he disclosed at last year's Black Hat conference.
Robert McMillan

More than a year after claiming to have found a way to take over a Macintosh computer using a flaw in the system's wireless card, David Maynor has published details of his exploit.

The details were included in a paper published in the September issue of Uninformed.org, an online hacking magazine. The lengthy paper describes how to run unauthorized software on a Macintosh by taking advantage of a flaw in Apple's AirPort wireless drivers.

Apple patched the bug in September 21 without crediting Maynor for discovering the problem. Instead, Apple's engineers found the bug during an internal audit, the company said.

Maynor and researcher Jon Ellch first described this type of problem during an August 2006 presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. He was widely criticized by the Apple community for failing to back up his claims with technical details, and for presenting a video demonstration that used a third-party wireless card instead of the one that ships with the Mac.

On Tuesday, Maynor said that at the time of the Black Hat demonstration, he had found similar wireless bugs in a number of wireless cards, including Apple's AirPort and that he had been told to use the third-party card in the video because it was deemed "the least offensive to people."

So why publish the Mac hack now?

Maynor said that he had been under a nondisclosure agreement, which had previously prevented him from publishing details of the hack. The security researcher wouldn't say who his NDA was with, but that agreement is no longer in force, allowing him to talk about the exploit. "I published it now because I can publish it now," he said.

By going public with the information, Maynor hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility. "There's a lot of interesting information in the paper that, if you're doing vulnerability research on Apple, you'd find useful."

Maynor will soon publish a second paper on Uniformed.org explaining how to write software that will run on a compromised system, he said.

As for his detractors, who will say that this disclosure comes too late, Maynor says he just doesn't care what they think. "Let them tear me apart all they want but at the end of the day the technical merit of the paper will stand on its own."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...0;fp;4;fpid;16





Cyber-Threats Outpace Security Measures, Says McAfee CEO
Staff writers

McAfee CEO David DeWalt says cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide.

Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, new McAfee CEO David DeWalt said Tuesday.

In a keynote address at the InformationWeek 500 conference in Tucson, DeWalt said "it's amazing how low the awareness is of cyber-security threats" among both government officials and corporate executives. "As the world has flattened, we've seen a significant amount of emerging threats from increasingly sophisticated groups attacking organizations around the world."

Citing recent highly publicized corporate data breaches that have beset major companies like Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Bank of America, DeWalt said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide.

Last week Internet stock trading company TD Ameritrade Holding said that one of its databases had been hacked by a thief who obtained personal information on some of its customers. Yesterday, an attorney launching a class-action lawsuit against Ameritrade claimed the online brokerage knew that someone had compromised its database as early as one year ago. An Ameritrade spokeswoman told InformationWeek that all of the company's 6.3 million accounts opened before July 18 of this year were exposed.

Worldwide data losses now represent US$40 billion in losses to affected companies and individuals each year, DeWalt says. But law enforcement's ability to find, prosecute, and punish criminals in cyberspace has not kept up: "If you rob a 7-11 you'll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online," DeWal remarked. "The cross-border sophistication in tracking and arresting cyber-criminals is just not there."

Looking ahead to new forms of threat detection and enterprise data security, DeWalt outlined five major trends that will reshape the security industry and transform how companies secure their corporate and customer information in the next few years.

The first is industry consolidation, as the large number of small vendors become acquired or give way to larger companies.

"The security market will go through the same transition that other industries have," DeWalt said. "Right now you've got 50 or 60 vendors out there, and customers are faced with the questions of how do you integrate all those solutions, and create interoperability between them? It's not sustainable."

With vendor consolidation will come the transition from multiple security agents on desktops and laptops to what McAfee terms "unified threat management," with a "single pane of glass" that allows IT managers to monitor and manage systems and devices across the entire network through a single console or platform. Second, the increase in cyber-threats has fueled a rapid growth in compliance requirements as the federal government tries to mandate higher levels of security and protection of sensitive consumer and patient data.

"There's a lot of legislation around industries forcing them to comply with various standards for customer protection," said DeWalt, including payment-card industry regulations, Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements for public companies, and the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

In fact, along with many corporate executives in the U.S., DeWalt believes that "the pendulum has swung too far" toward increased government oversight of corporations and the customer data they control, causing American companies to lose their competitive edge to businesses in other countries with less-stringent compliance requirements, particularly in Asia.

The third important trend is the movement of security protection from the perimeter of corporate networks toward the data layer itself: "Traditional security has always been concentrated on the perimiter, on endpoint devices, particularly with firewalls," DeWalt noted. "The focus now is on thinking about data-oriented security" by classifying certain types of data so that it cannot leave the corporate network or company-owned devices.

That is especially important because some 70% of all data losses are caused by insiders of one sort or another.

Fourth, companies are facing new challenges as server virtualisation spreads across many industries and many types of industries.

"Virtualisation is an amazing juggernaut in terms of security risk," said DeWalt, listing non-compliant virtual machines, VM-aware threats that can subvert countermeasures, the propagation of infected virtualization images, and "hyperjacking," or the potential for a single breach to offer simultaneouos access to many machines across a virtualized environment as some of the emerging risks.

"Managing and protecting a single physical endpoint is much different than managing security virtually," DeWalt said.

Finally, the emergence of new platforms and devices presents cyber-criminals with new targets for hacks and phishing scams. Mobile devices such as smartphones and voice-over-IP systems are inherent more vulnerable than traditional clients and telephony services.

McAfee and its competitors are bringing out new products and technology to deal with these emerging threats, said DeWalt, but the advantage for the moment still lies with the evildoers in cyberspace.

"We're in inning two of a nine-inning game here," he concluded.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/61497,...cafee-ceo.aspx





Hacker Finds Serious Flaw in Adobe PDF

The security researcher said he would not release code that shows how a PDF attack works until Adobe provided a patch for the problem.
Robert McMillan

The hacker who discovered a recently patched QuickTime flaw affecting the Firefox browser says he has found an equally serious flaw in Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF file format.

"Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!!," wrote Petko Petkov, in a breathless Thursday blog posting. "All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."

Petkov said he had confirmed the issue on Adobe Reader 8.1 on Windows XP and that other versions may be affected.

The security researcher said he would not release code that shows how this attack works until Adobe provided a patch for the problem, but he has already sent other software developers scrambling for bug fixes over the past week.

On Sept. 12, Petkov reported that attackers could run unauthorized software on a Firefox user's PC by exploiting a flaw in Apple Inc.'s QuickTime media format. Mozilla Corp. offered a partial fix for this problem on Tuesday but said Apple would ultimately have to address the issue in its QuickTime media player.

And on Tuesday Petkov posted code showing how Windows Media Player files could be used to make Web surfers susceptible to Internet Explorer bugs, even if they were running another browser such as Firefox or Opera. Microsoft Corp. has said it is investigating this issue.

If Petkov's PDF claims are true, it could be bad news for business users, who are used to opening PDF attachments without thinking twice, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security Inc.

Though some attackers have crafted pdf attacks in recent years, Petkov's code could also be more effective than typical exploits, Storms added. "Historically, those other exploits have been targeted for specific versions of Adobe Reader," he said via instant message. "According to the information, this affects all versions. It's an inherent architectural problem in the way files are read."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...s/article.html





Internet Security Moving Toward "White List"

A sea change in how computers are guarded is on the way, with anti-virus vendors looking to reverse their protection philosophy
Peter Nowak

Internet security is headed toward a major reversal in philosophy, where a "white list" which allows only benevolent programs to run on a computer will replace the current "black list" system, which logs and blocks an ever-growing list of malevolent applications, internet security giant Symantec Corp. says.

The number of malicious software attacks, including viruses, Trojans, worms and spam, is rising exponentially, dwarfing the number of new benevolent programs being developed, making it increasingly difficult for security firms to keep up.

The solution, according to Symantec's Canadian vice-president and general manager, Michael Murphy, is to reverse how protection against such attacks is provided. Under the current system, a security firm discovers a new threat, adds it to its black-list database and updates its customers' anti-virus software to combat the problem. A "white list" would instead compile every known legitimate software program, including applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, and add new ones as they are developed. Every program not on the list would simply not be allowed to be function on a computer.

"This is the future of security technology," Murphy said at a presentation of the company's twice-yearly security report on Friday. The trick is to develop a "global seal of approval."

A white list would likely require co-operation and funding from a majority of players in the technology industry. Industry observers think it is a good idea, but it raises several issues. The oversight body would have to be neutral, mindful of open-source software — which is quickly and often modified — and speedy in its approval process.

"The bad guys are moving quickly and the good guys are moving quickly and the innovators are moving quickly. If the judges are taking months to judge things, then that's not fair to anybody," says Bill Munson, vice-president of the Information Technology Association of Canada. "That's not in the industry's or society's interest."

In its security report, Symantec said the incidence of malicious code was up drastically in the first six months of 2007. Symantec found more than 212,000 new malicious code threats, up 185 per cent from the last six months of 2006. Trojans, or programs that appear to perform one function in order to hide a malicious one, made up 54 per cent of the volume of the top 50 malicious code reports, up 45 per cent over the prior six months.

Trojans are particularly on the rise in North America, Murphy said, because Canadian and U.S. internet markets are more highly developed and thus protected from less-sophisticated and easy-to-identify attacks, such as spam and basic viruses.
Hackers beginning to steal from victims

The other big trend, Murphy said, is that hackers are no longer perpetrating attacks just for fun. Rather, these people are increasingly looking to extract money from their victims.

"This is a sea change," he said. ""It's not just a pimply-faced boy in his parents' basement. That certainly may be part of the situation, but now it's for profit."

Would-be hackers can buy software toolkits that allow them to create their own phishing attacks, where the criminal tricks a person into disclosing sensitive information such as a bank account number, for about $1,250. The black market for stolen information gleaned through such an attack can be lucrative, with an e-mail password selling for up to $350 US while a bank account number can fetch up to $400 US, Murphy said.

In the first six months of 2007, Symantec found 8,011 distinct credit cards being advertised for sale on the black market, but that number represented only a small portion of the total being sold. The advertised card numbers are used only to attract buyers, who then purchase numbers in bulk, which are not advertised.

Symantec said about 85 per cent of the stolen card numbers in circulation are American in origin, but did not disclose how many came from Canada.

Overall, Canada has fared well in combating malicious attacks, particularly spam. In the past, Canada has ranked as high as fifth in the world in terms of the volume of spam that is received, but internet service providers here have done an excellent job of attacking it, Murphy said, with the country dropping to 12th in the latest study. However, the bad news is that spam still accounts for 61 per cent of the world's e-mail, up from 59 per cent in the previous period.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/te...hite-list.html





FBI Boosts Servers for Faster Fingerprint, Identity Searches
Layer 8

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division today awarded Lockheed Martin a $16 million contract to upgrade its Hewlett Packard Superdome Unix servers.CJIS is the FBI's central repository for criminal justice information services; the CJIS division operates national-level crime data systems that furnish name checks, fingerprints, criminal history data and other information to law enforcement officials. Keeping its systems on the leading edge should help CJIS with its goal of delivering getting timely and relevant criminal justice information to the FBI and all others in the law enforcement community.

The new and upgraded servers will be part of the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAFIS maintains the largest biometric database in the world, containing the fingerprints and corresponding criminal history information for more than 47 million subjects in the Criminal Master File, according to the FBI Web site. The fingerprints and corresponding criminal history information are submitted voluntarily by state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies.With the contract announced today, Lockheed Martin's Enterprise Solutions and Services business unit will build on its existing contract with the CJIS program, by providing HP Uplift Kits for 15 Superdome servers and 1 Flatsdome server. Uplift kits will add additional processors and additional processor speed to the Superdomes that were originally installed in 2003 by Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin will also add a PA-8900 Superdome server to the Clarksburg, W. Va. facility as part of a project to modernize computer and communications technology at CJIS. CJIS is located on 986 acres of land in Clarksburg, W. Va.. The complex includes a 500,000-square foot main office building. Constructed in a modular design, this building is nearly the length of three football fields. It features a 600-seat cafeteria and a 100,000-square-foot computer center.

It is also home to National Crime Information Center, an electronic clearinghouse of criminal justice information that can be tapped into by a police officer in a squad car and by any of the 90,000 agencies now connected to the massive computerized database. The system handles an average of 5.5 million queries daily, with responses in fractions of a second, the FBI says.

Lockheed Martin is also the prime systems integrator for the FBI’s overarching $423 million advanced information management and sharing system Sentinel project. At the heart of the system is moving off two aging IBM mainframes and onto servers support Web applications. The four-phase project with contractor Lockheed Martin is scheduled to wrap up in 2011 at a total cost of about $305 million.

Not expected to be complete until 2001, The FBI says Sentinel will deliver an electronic information management system, automate workflow processes for the first time, and provide a user-friendly web-based interface to access and search across multiple databases. Sentinel will help the FBI manage information beyond the case-focus of the existing Automated Case Support (ACS), and will provide enhanced information sharing, search, and analysis capabilities. Sentinel will also facilitate information sharing with members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/19755





US Intelligence Chief Seeks More Changes in Eavesdropping Law
Pamela Hess

No Americans' telephones have been tapped without a court order since at least February, the top U.S. intelligence official told Congress Tuesday.

But National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell could not say how many Americans' phone conversations have been overheard because of U.S. wiretaps on foreign phone lines.

"I don't have the exact number ... considering there are billions of transactions every day," McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing on the law governing federal surveillance of phone calls and e-mails.

McConnell said he could only speak authoritatively about the seven months since he became DNI.

In a newspaper interview last month, he said the government had tapped fewer than 100 Americans' phones and e-mails under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants from a secret intelligence court.

McConnell is seeking additional changes to the law, which Congress hastily modified just before going on vacation in August based in part on the intelligence chief's warnings of a dire gap in U.S. intelligence.

The new law eased some of the restrictions on government eavesdropping contained in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to let the government more efficiently intercept foreign communications.

Under the new law, the government can eavesdrop, without a court order, on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation - so long as that American is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance.

Before McConnell can convince Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent - and agree to even more changes easing the provisions of FISA - he first has to allay concerns that the law passed so hastily earlier this year does not subject Americans to unwarranted government surveillance.

"The right to privacy is too important to be sacrificed in a last-minute rush before a congressional recess, which is what happened," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the panel's chairman.

Democrats worry that the law could be interpreted to open business records, library files, personal mail, and homes to searches by intelligence and law enforcement officers without a court order.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein said the new surveillance powers granted by the Protect America Act apply only when the assistance of a communications company is needed to conduct the surveillance. Therefore, he said, the government could not use the law to search homes, open mail or collect business records because no communications provider would be involved in such a transaction.

Many Democrats in Congress are now seeking to narrow what they consider to be overly broad language by rewriting the law. Wainstein warned that inserting specific prohibitions on government surveillance to protect civil liberties could have unintended consequences.

"Anytime you put in limiting language, you've got to make sure it doesn't have unintended limiting consequences," Wainstein said.

McConnell said that as long as his office can examine every word of the new language to scrub it for unintended consequences, he would be open to the changes.

However, Bush administration officials say concern about the new powers is unfounded. They contend the Protect America Act only allows the government to target foreigners for surveillance without a warrant, a change that was needed because of changes in communications technology.

Addressing the controversy over the law, the Justice Department and the White House Tuesday issued a "myth and facts" paper meant to ease the concerns of civil liberties advocates and privacy groups that believe it gives the government broader powers than intended.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, called the effort a troubling "charm offensive."

"Let's have some truth in advertising. The act gives the president almost unfettered power to spy without judicial approval - not only on foreigners but on Americans," Nadler said.

McConnell said the new eavesdropping powers are needed not just to spy on terrorists but also to defend against more traditional potential adversaries.

He told the panel that China and Russia are aggressively spying on sensitive U.S. facilities, intelligence systems and development projects, and that their efforts are approaching Cold War levels.

McConnell and Wainstein pushed for other changes in the law, including granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which may have helped the government conduct surveillance prior to January 2007 without a court order under the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. Wainstein said there are 40 to 50 lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that are pending in U.S. courts.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read
Ryan Singel

International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years.

Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore's choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he'd packed for the trip.

The breadth of the information obtained by the Gilmore-funded Identity Project (using a Privacy Act request) shows the government's screening program at the border is actually a "surveillance dragnet," according to the group's spokesman Bill Scannell.

"There is so much sensitive information in the documents that it is clear that Homeland Security is not playing straight with the American people," Scannell said.

The documents show a tiny slice of the massive airline-record collection stored by the government, as well as the screening records mined for the controversial Department of Homeland Security passenger-rating system that assigns terrorist scores to travelers entering and leaving the country, including U.S. citizens.

The so-called Automated Targeting System scrutinizes every airline passenger entering or leaving the country using classified rules that tell agents which passengers to give extra screening to and which to deny entry or exit from the country.

The system relies on data ranging from the government's 700,000-name terrorism watchlist to data included in airline-travel database entries, known as Passenger Name Records, which airlines are required to submit to the government.

According to government descriptions, ATS mines data from intelligence, law enforcement and regulatory databases, looking for linkages in order to identify "high-risk" targets who may not already be on terrorist watchlists.

ATS was started in the late 1990s, but was little known until the government issued a notice about the system last fall. The government has subsequently modified the proposed rules for the system, shortening the length of time data is collected and allowing individuals to request some information used by the scoring system.

The government stores the PNRs for years and typically includes destinations, phone and e-mail contact information, meal requests, special health requests, payment information and frequent-flier numbers.

The Identity Project filed Privacy Act requests for five individuals to see the data stored on them by the government.

The requests revealed that the PNRs also included information on one requester's race, the phone numbers of overseas family members given to the airlines as emergency contact information, and a record of a purely European flight that had been booked overseas separately from an international itinerary, according to snippets of the documents shown to Wired News.

The request also revealed the screening system includes inspection notes from earlier border inspections.

One report about Gilmore notes: "PAX (passenger) has many small flashlights with pot leaves on them. He had a book entitled 'Drugs and Your Rights.'" Gilmore is an advocate for marijuana legalization.

Another inspection entry noted that Gilmore had "attended computer conference in Berlin and then traveled around Europe and Asia to visit friends. 100% baggage exam negative.... PAX is self employed 'Entrepreneur' in computer software business."

"They are noting people's race and they are writing down what people read," Scannell said.

It doesn't matter that Gilmore was reading a book about drugs, rather than Catcher in the Rye, according to Scannell. "A book is a book," Scannell said. "This is just plain wrong."

The documents have also turned Scannell against the Department of Homeland Security's proposal for screening airline passengers inside the United States.

That project, known as Secure Flight, will take watchlist screening out of the hands of airlines, by having the airlines send PNR data to the government ahead of each flight. While earlier versions included plans to rate passenger's threat level using data purchased from private companies, DHS now proposes only to compare data in the PNR against names on the watchlist, which largely disarmed civil libertarians' opposition to the program.

That's changed for Scannell now, who sees Secure Flight as just another version of ATS.

"They want people to get permission to travel," Scannell said. "They already instituted it for leaving and entering the country and now they want to do it to visit your Aunt Patty in Cleveland."

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...light_tracking





Bush Calls for Expansion of Spy Law
David Jackson

Saying older surveillance laws were "dangerously out of date," President Bush pressed anew Wednesday for Congress to pass permanent legislation that allows intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless surveillance on all communications of a foreign terror suspect.

Legislation passed by Congress last month "has helped close a critical intelligence gap, allowing us to collect important foreign intelligence and information about terrorist plots," Bush said after he was briefed at the National Security Agency.

"The problem is the law expires on February 1 — that's 135 days from today. The threat from al-Qaeda is not going to expire in 135 days," Bush said.

Bush's comments come one day after the nation's intelligence chief told Congress that fewer than 100 Americans have become surveillance targets because they were initially overheard communicating with foreign terror suspects.

"How many Americans' phones have been tapped without a court order? The answer is none," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee.

The law that expires in February allows intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless surveillance on all communications of a foreign terror suspect, even if a U.S.-based person is on one end of the call.

Congressional Democrats say the new law's wording could promote warrantless spying on Americans. The law is written "so broadly and loosely that it permits the government to intercept … anyone even thought to be abroad," Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan said at Tuesday's hearing.

The House Intelligence Committee is expected to begin considering changes to the warrantless wiretapping law next month.

McConnell and the Bush administration also want the law expanded to include immunity from lawsuits for telecom companies that helped intelligence agencies carry out spying.

Democrats, including Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, want stricter rules covering surveillance of Americans.

"These restrictions would impede the flow of information that helps us protect our people," Bush said Wednesday. "These restrictions would reopen gaps in our intelligence that we had just closed."

At NSA, Bush received private briefings from intelligence officials and mingled with employees in the National Threat Operations Center. While cameras and reporters were in the room, the large video screens that lined the walls displayed unclassified information on computer crime and signal intelligence.

Along one wall at NSA is a sign that says, "We won't back down. We never have. We never will."

Contributing: Richard Willing; Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...dropping_N.htm





NSA to Defend Against Hackers

Privacy fears raised as spy agency turns to systems protection
Siobhan Gorman

In a major shift, the National Security Agency is drawing up plans for a new domestic assignment: helping protect government and private communications networks from cyberattacks and infiltration by terrorists and hackers, according to current and former intelligence officials.

From electricity grids to subways to nuclear power plants, the United States depends more than ever on Internet-based control systems that could be manipulated remotely in a terrorist attack, security specialists say.

The plan calls for the NSA to work with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to monitor such networks to prevent unauthorized intrusion, according to those with knowledge of what is known internally as the "Cyber Initiative." Details of the project are highly classified.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, a former NSA chief, is coordinating the initiative. It will be run by the Department of Homeland Security, which has primary responsibility for protecting domestic infrastructure, including the Internet, current and former officials said.

At the outset, up to 2,000 people -- from the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA and other agencies -- could be assigned to the initiative, said a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The NSA's new domestic role would require a revision of the agency's charter, the senior intelligence official said. Up to now, the NSA's cyberdefense arsenal has been used to guard the government's classified networks -- not the unclassified networks that now are the responsibility of other federal agencies.

NSA officials declined to discuss specific programs but said cybersecurity is a critical component of what they do.

"We have a strong history in information assurance and national security," said NSA spokeswoman Andrea Martino, who added that the agency will continue to play a role in cyberdefense.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said that "as the lead agency responsible for assuring the security, resiliency and reliability of the nation's information technology and communications infrastructure, our department is working to unify further and integrate the security framework for cyber operations throughout the federal government."

Since the existence of its warrantless domestic eavesdropping program was revealed in 2005, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been mired in a controversy over domestic intelligence activities. The Homeland Security Department recently came under fire amid Bush administration plans to broadly expand the use of satellite imagery to assist in federal, state and local law enforcement.

Current and former intelligence officials, including several NSA veterans, warned that the agency's venture into domestic computer and communications networks -- even if limited to protecting them -- could raise new privacy concerns. To protect a network, the government must constantly monitor it.

"This will create a major uproar," predicted Ira Winkler, a former NSA analyst who is now a cybersecurity consultant.

"If you're going to do cybersecurity, you have to spy on Americans to secure Americans," said a former government official familiar with NSA operations. "It would be a very major step."

A former senior NSA official said the difference between monitoring networks in order to defend them and monitoring them to collect intelligence is very small.

The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relationships with intelligence agencies.

Another former NSA official said that if the government wants to prevent cyberattacks, it makes sense to tap the agency's skills.

"I've got to be able to at least look at something to determine: Do I have a threat or don't I have a threat?" the former NSA official said. "It's important that you have the best thinkers with the deepest experience working these problems on behalf of the nation."

O. Sami Saydjari, a cybersecurity consultant, said the privacy concerns are real. He said intelligence agencies should be part of the solution, because they have the expertise needed to develop a national cybersecurity system, but that privacy advocates also should be part of the planning process.

Computer specialists have warned for years about cyberattacks. But experts say efforts to guard against them have not gained momentum at the national level, at least in part because the public envisions a cyberattack as nothing more than a big computer crash.

Those who monitor such threats said the danger has grown as control systems for potential terrorist targets have become increasingly connected to the Internet.

A cyberattack could cut access to power, banking and telecommunications systems across much of the country, said Saydjari, president of the Cyber Defense Agency, a consulting firm.

"The hostile groups have caught on to most of the things we're worried about," said Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute that advises the government and the private sector. "It's been remarkable in the last, really, two years how much all these things that people like me have been worried about have been bit by bit rediscovered and reinvented in the hacker world."

Potential cyberattacks are being discussed in chat rooms in languages that include English, Arabic, Russian and Punjabi, he said. Terrorists and others already know many of the country's vulnerabilities, Borg said, adding that he is extremely concerned about the ability to hack into computer systems controlling nuclear power plants.

A government task force issued a stark warning this year that the threat of a cyberattack to U.S. infrastructure, which can be launched from a computer anywhere in the world, is "very real and growing rapidly." In June, an alleged Chinese hacking effort shut down e-mail in Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates' office for several days.

Simulation exercises, such as one dubbed Dark Angel and sponsored by the group Professionals for Cyber Defense, showed in 2003 how a cyberattack could shut down most of the nation's power grid, Saydjari said.

There is growing interest among hackers in capturing information on "smart cards" that allow access to buildings and critical computer systems and using that information to gain access to the system, according to Borg.

Cybersecurity has long been an orphaned responsibility in the federal government, with various agencies having some part in it. The NSA has largely been left out, because its focus has been on protecting military networks. Proposals to break off the NSA's information security branch and assign it a broader role beyond the intelligence agencies fell flat, former NSA officials say.

Amit Yoran, the Homeland Security Department's first chief of cybersecurity, said in an interview that while the government has made progress, federal efforts have been "somewhat spotty" overall.

Among the main challenges, he said, is that the Homeland Security Department has been given responsibility for the problem but lacks the authority and expertise to compel other agencies and the private sector to follow its lead.

The new cybersecurity effort aims to build, in part, on an existing NSA program, code-named Turbulence, which has had a troubled start, the senior intelligence official said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nat...l_tab01_layout





Terror Watch: A Secret Lobbying Campaign

The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn't want you to know about
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

The nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the U.S. intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance programs.

The campaign—which involves some of Washington's most prominent lobbying and law firms—has taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a U.S. appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed.
If that happens, the telecom companies say, they may be forced to terminate their cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community—or risk potentially crippling damage awards for allegedly turning over personal information about their customers to the government without a judicial warrant.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say the U.S. intelligence community is in a near-panic about this,” said one communications industry lawyer familiar with the debate who asked not to be publicly identified because of the sensitivity surrounding the issue.

But critics say the language proposed by the White House—drafted in close cooperation with the industry officials—is so extraordinarily broad that it would provide retroactive immunity for all past telecom actions related to the surveillance program. Its practical effect, they argue, would be to shut down any independent judicial or state inquires into how the companies have assisted the government in eavesdropping on the telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

“It’s clear the goal is to kill our case," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy group that filed the main lawsuit against the telecoms after The New York Times first disclosed, in December 2005, that President Bush had approved a secret program to monitor the phone conversations of U.S. residents without first seeking judicial warrants. The White House subsequently confirmed that it had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct what it called a “terrorist surveillance program” aimed at communications between suspected terrorists overseas and individuals inside the United States. But the administration has also intervened, unsuccessfully so far, to try to block the lawsuit from proceeding and has consistently refused to discuss any details about the extent of the program—rebuffing repeated congressional requests for key legal memos about it.

"They are trying to completely immunize this [the surveillance program] from any kind of judicial review,” added Cohn. “I find it a little shocking that Congress would participate in the covering up of what has been going on."

But congressional staffers said this week that some version of the proposal is likely to pass—in part because of a high-pressure lobbying campaign warning of dire consequences if the lawsuits proceed. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell seemed to raise the stakes recently when he contended in an interview with the El Paso Times that the private lawsuits could “bankrupt these companies.”

Among those coordinating the industry’s effort are two well-connected capital players who both worked for President George H.W. Bush: Verizon general counsel William Barr, who served as attorney general under 41, and AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi, who was the elder Bush's deputy chief of staff.

Working with them are a battery of major D.C. lobbyists and lawyers who are providing "strategic advice" to the companies on the issue, according to sources familiar with the campaign who asked not to be identified talking about it. Among the players, these sources said: powerhouse Republican lobbyists Charlie Black and Wayne Berman (who represent AT&T and Verizon, respectively), former GOP senator and U.S. ambassador to Germany Dan Coats (a lawyer at King & Spaulding who is representing Sprint), former Democratic Party strategist and one-time assistant secretary of State Tom Donilon (who represents Verizon), former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick (whose law firm also represents Verizon) and Brad Berenson, a former assistant White House counsel under President George W. Bush who now represents AT&T.

Because of the extreme secrecy surrounding the warrantless surveillance program, few if any of the lobbyists and lawyers are prepared to speak publicly about their role. “My client requires me not to talk to the press,” said the normally loquacious Black when asked by NEWSWEEK about his lobbying for AT&T. Berman and Berenson also declined comment. Gorelick confirmed that she is providing "strategic advice," not lobbying for Verizon. Coats and Donilon did not respond to requests for comment.

But according to three industry sources, these and other players have been conferring with each other over legislative strategy and targeting key lawmakers and staffers, especially those on the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. The lobbyists have set up meetings and arranged conference calls, pressing the argument that failure to provide protection to the companies could interfere with the vital assistance they say the telecom industry has provided the intelligence community in monitoring the communications of Al Qaeda and other terrorist operations overseas.

The case for new legislation retroactively giving telecoms companies protection against private lawsuits—including lawsuits already pending—was outlined this week by Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security. At a House Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, Wainstein said that giving telecoms companies retroactive liability was a matter of "general fairness."

"I think it's sort of fundamentally unfair and just not right to—if a company allegedly assisted the government in its national-security efforts, in an effort to defend the country at a time of peril, that they then get turned around and face tremendously costly litigation and maybe even crushing liability for having helped the United States government at a time of need ... it's just not right," Wainstein testified.

Wainstein also claimed that "every time we have one of these lawsuits, very sensitive information gets discussed and gets leaked out, disseminated out in the public. And our adversaries are smart, both the terrorists who might be over in, you know, someplace in the Middle East are smart, and then the governments that might be our adversaries are tremendously sophisticated, and they're gleaning all this information that gets out." Wainstein also said that a telecom company's overseas assets could be threatened if its collaboration in U.S. espionage efforts were confirmed in a court case.

The campaign for industry protection was initially launched last summer when administration and industry officials first tried to get the immunity provision included in the Protect America Act—a measure passed by Congress and signed by President Bush on Aug. 5 that allowed the surveillance program to continue and temporarily gave the National Security Agency expanded eavesdropping powers. At the time, Democrats in Congress balked at including the kind of sweeping retroactive civil immunity protections that the industry sought.

But then, on Aug. 15, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard oral arguments in a Justice Department motion to block the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against AT&T. More than 40 other civil suits filed against the telecoms—many of them seeking billions of dollars in damages—had been consolidated with the EFF lawsuit. But the Justice Department had sought to block the lawsuits under the “state privilege” doctrine, which can require the dismissal of suits that might endanger national security.

The three-judge panel, made up entirely of Democratic appointees, seemed openly skeptical of the Justice Department’s arguments, prompting many court observers to conclude that the panel was likely to issue a ruling permitting the lawsuits to proceed. At one point in the proceedings, one of the judges, Harry Pregerson, a Jimmy Carter appointee, appeared annoyed with the Justice Department lawyer, Gregory Garre. The judge wanted Garre to provide direct answers to questions about the scope of the just-passed surveillance law, according to press reports. When Garre tried to explain that the law was complicated, Pregerson shot back: “Can’t be any more complicated than my phone bill.”

The administration is keeping up pressure on Congress for quick action on the new version of the surveillance law—including an immunity provision for telecoms—which will take effect when the Protect America Act expires early next year. Congressional staffers say that Democrats are likely to go along with some version of the proposal. But Democratic leaders, who say they were stampeded into passing the law last summer, are insisting on having more thorough hearings and forcing the administration to turn over documents on the surveillance program. If the telecoms want immunity, some Democrats say, the White House should at least say what it is they need immunity for.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20884696/site/newsweek/





Senate Fails on Habeas Corpus

Today the US Senate fell four votes short of restoring Habeas Corpus, the fundamental constitutional right of individuals to challenge government detention, which the Republican Congress revoked in last year's Military Commissions Act. Fifty-six senators supported a procedural move to tie the Habeas provision to legislation authorizing defense spending--a step that requires sixty votes. ADVERTISEMENT

The amendment was sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, Senator Arlen Specter, who voted for the legislation that the amendment attempts to reverse, and Senator Chris Dodd, who blasted today's vote. "Each of us in the Senate faced a decision either to cast a vote in favor of helping to restore America's reputation in the world, or to help dig deeper the hole of utter disrespect for the rule of law that the Bush Administration has created. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues chose the latter," he said.

Backers of the amendment and human rights organizers say they will continue to press for habeas restoration. Leah Adler, an organizer with Working Assets, wrote today that activists should focus on the U.S. House, which will "likely consider legislation to restore habeas corpus in the next few weeks."

Today's vote also suggests a new Senate majority for Habeas Corpus. (Last Congress, a similar amendment did not even break 50 votes.) And yes, it is a sad sign that we are reduced to counting votes for which members of Congress are upholding their oath to support the Constitution.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20...ation/15234404





Success

I am proud to announce that the baseless charges brought against me by the Brooklyn, Ohio Police Department were dropped this morning and the process of expunging my record has begun. Although I knew that this was a possible outcome for the last ten days, I didn’t acquire the certainty until late yesterday afternoon. I was not at liberty to make this announcement yesterday since the process had not formally been completed.

This brings to a formal conclusion my criminal defense which began when I was arrested on September 1st, 2007 at a Circuit City for refusing to provide a police officer with my driver’s license. The fact that my charges were dropped reaffirms the assertion which I’ve made since the beginning: US citizens are not and should not be required to provide paper identification when asked by law enforcement, in most circumstances. In Ohio this right is specifically protected by Ohio Revised Code 2921.29 which states that a person may not be arrested for refusing to provide a law enforcement officer with anything other than a verbal representation of their name, address and date of birth. In other words, if you are walking along a sidewalk and a police officer has reason to question you, you must verbally state your name, address and date of birth, but you can’t be arrested for refusing to show your driver’s license. (Or for that matter your fishing license, marriage license, liquor license, etc.)

Ten days ago I had a decision to make. I was presented with an offer to have my charges dropped in exchange for signing a document which asked the following of me:
» I would not file a Section 1983 civil suit against the Brooklyn police department for infringing on my civil rights.
» I would not make any disparaging remarks about the police department, with financial repercussions for doing so.
» I would not discuss the details of this agreement.

These conditions were completely unacceptable to me. I wanted to fight the charges in court and I wanted to win based on the merits of my case. I felt that it was important to set a legal precedent that would help others in the future. Although I was never interested in suing the police department, signing such a document went against my principles and against the very reasons I decided to take a stand in the first place. I was mad to say the least.

In the days that followed a few things changed. First, I learned that the prosecutor was more interested in protecting the city against a civil law suit than she was in silencing my speech. Prosecutor Hillary Goldberg was willing to drop my charges and expunge my record if I promised not to sue. Although this was welcome news I still wanted to fight the charges in court in order to set a legal precedent for others.

Then, I learned that Ohio already had two legal precedents that dealt with the very issue of whether or not refusing to provide a driver’s license is grounds for obstructing official business. (Google “State v. McCrone” and “Middletown v. Hollon” for more details.) The legal precedent created by a court victory would not have filled a needed legal gap.

At this point I was stuck between two choices. Behind Door #1 was an eight to twelve month legal battle, three or more separate hearings including a jury trial, potential legal fees in the dozens of thousands of dollars and a lot of duress for my best witnesses: my family. Behind Door #2 was the immediate drop of the matter in exchange for giving up the right to seek civil damages against the police department.

At 2:00am one night I received a phone call from a family member which sealed the deal. For personal matters I can’t divulge who called or what was said, but I’ll simply state that a loved one told me something on the phone which left me with no choice. My family had become too entangled in my mess and I couldn’t put them through a lengthy and stressful legal process. My principles are important to me, but so is my family. Based on what I was told over the phone I immediately knew that I couldn’t put my family through a drawn out legal ordeal. On top of the emotional strain it was putting on my family, it would have forced my Sister to fly out from California on one or two occasions, and it would have forced my Father to cancel scheduled business trips to Europe. My family was caught in the crossfire.

I took a stand against Circuit City when I refused to show my receipt. I took a stand against Officer Arroyo when I refused to show my driver’s license. I wanted to take a stand against Prosecutor Goldberg in court, but it just wasn’t meant to be. In the end I forfeited my right to sue the police department in exchange for the matter being dropped. Considering that I never intended to sue the police department in the first place, this was a concession that I felt comfortable with.

Although he won’t publicly admit it, I’m sure that Officer Arroyo knows he made a mistake. For the record, I do not believe that Officer Arroyo is a bad person, and other than my arrest I have no reason to believe that he is a bad police officer. I think that Officer Arroyo was embarrassed and insulted when I refused to obey his unlawful command, and I think that he was not familiar enough with Ohio State law. Hopefully this incident will make him more knowledgeable about the law and more understanding of others in the future who choose to assert their rights. I think the same is true for Prosecutor Goldberg. She’s a smart woman who knows the law, and she clearly realizes that she had no case against me. However, her back was put against the wall by all of the media attention which the case received and I suspect that she felt that she had no choice but to either push forward with the charges or seek protection against a civil suit.

I wanted a verbal apology from the police department but quickly learned that this would never happen. Fortunately actions speak louder than words. Dropping my charges and expunging my record is perhaps the best form of an apology that I could receive, and it’s the apology that I’ve chosen to accept.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on my agreement with the prosecutor in today’s issue. When I read their take on what happened I was outraged. Michael Sangiacomo of the Plain Dealer claimed that I “agreed that a police officer did nothing wrong in arresting [me] after [i] refused to show [my] driver’s license.” This is an outright lie. I never said such a thing and would never say such a thing. In fact, I’ve never even spoken with Michael Sangiacomo. He emailed me looking for a quote and I referred him to my attorney. As far as I know Michael Sangiacomo hasn’t even seen the release that I signed with the prosecutor. I consider the outcome of my legal battle to be a victory, yet today’s paper portrays it as defeat.

Understandably I received a lot of hate mail today from people who read the Cleveland Plain Dealer article and were horrified to see that I “caved” under pressure. If I was a third party to the situation I think I would have given Michael Righi a piece of my mind as well.

The article is wholly unfair, and a complete misrepresentation of the release that I signed with the prosecutor. I uploaded a PDF version of the release and I encourage you to read it and decide for yourself. Although the police department did not admit guilt in the release, nowhere in it did I claim that they were justified in their actions.

Finally, I would like to address the donations which I accepted over the past few weeks. I received a total of $5,197.23 USD after PayPal expenses. I’m still a little unsure of what my total legal fees will be, but I expect that they will be in the $7,500-$10,000 range. (I’ve already paid $7,500 to one attorney, and I’m waiting for a bill from a second attorney for related legal assistance.)

I am extremely grateful to the people that donated money. The donations represented more than just money to me. They represented emotional support in a time when it was much needed, and I’d like to thank everybody again who donated. The smallest single donation was 1 penny (a symbolic gesture), and the largest single donation was $200. Every contribution made was a pat on the back and it really helped me get through a tough couple of weeks.

That said, I have received a lot of flak over the money. Some people have accused me, an “upper middle class 26 year old”, of asking for money in the first place. Some people have gone as far as to accuse me outright of running a scam. I agreed to accept donations via PayPal because a number of people emailed me wanting to know how they could help, and I wanted to give them an easy way in which they could make themselves involved. I said from the beginning that I would donate any excess money to the ACLU. As it turned out my legal expenses were at least $2,000 more than the money donated.

In the end, I have decided to donate the entire $5,197.23 to the ACLU of Ohio.

I am doing this for a few reasons. First, I would like to end the question of my intentions once and for all. This has never been about money or attention. I stood up for my rights because they are important to me and for no other reason. Second, even if my legal fees rise to $10,000 I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I can afford this. Although it’s unjust that anybody should have to pay a dime to exert their constitutional rights, $10,000 is still a small price to pay compared to what others have sacrificed in the past and are sacrificing today. Finally, I want to do something to help prevent injustices from happening against others in the future. Although I don’t support the ACLU in all of its endeavors, I do believe that they are the best organization fighting for civil rights in the United States today. Even though the ACLU wasn’t able to help me with my ordeal, I hope that the money I send them will allow them to help others in the future.

I’ve learned more in the last three weeks than I have in the last three years. This post has only just begun to scratch the surface of what unfolded since September 1st, 2007. I have funny stories, sad stories and outright infuriating stories from the last few weeks which I hope to eventually tell you more about. Until then, thanks for your support.

-Michael

http://www.michaelrighi.com/2007/09/20/success/





Australia 'Cracked Top-Secret US Jet Fighter Codes'
Don Woolford

KIM Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes while he was defence minister in the 1980s.

"We spied on them and we extracted the codes," Mr Beazley told Parliament during his valedictory speech today.

Mr Beazley, who was defence minister from 1984 to 1990, said that when he took over the job he soon learned that the radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region.

In other words, Australia's frontline fighter could not shoot down enemies in the region.

Mr Beazley said he was greatly tempted to "belt" the Liberals with this and lay to rest their claim to be best at managing defence.

"I shut up, I said nothing," Mr Beazley said.

"I went to the US and for five years, up hill and down dale, with one knock-down, drag-out after another, with Cap Weinberger, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, I tried to get the codes of that blasted radar out of them.

"In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves and we got another radar that could identify (enemy planes).

Mr Beazley said the Americans were Australia's most important ally.

"But they are a bunch of people you have to have a fight with every now and then to get what you actually need out of them," he said.

Mr Beazley said that the story of getting the Hornet codes was well known within Defence, but not beyond it.

He said the problem was that the old codes related to Warsaw Pact aircraft, rather than ones in Australia's region.

The Americans kept saying they'd provide the codes, but never did.

"So we tried to crack the codes so we could enhance them," Mr Beazley said.

"And we made a lot of progress."

Mr Beazley said the Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...478-2,00.html#





S.C. Mom Scoops al - Qaida With Its Videos
Sagar Meghani

Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video -- before al-Qaida had announced it.

''I realized, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here, I'm a fat 50-year-old mom and I've managed to scoop al-Qaida,'' said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

She sometimes spends 100 hours a week online, and she often finds items after word has begun spreading on the Arabic forums of an imminent release.

''It's really important to understand what the jihadists think and how they're planning on doing things,'' she said. ''They're very vocal. They tell us what they're going to do and then they go out and do it.''

Mansfield tips off her intelligence sources when she does find something new, part of an informal working relationship with the government.

''When I send them something, it's welcome,'' she said. ''They thank me.''

There have been times when an impending video release has kept her from a planned shopping trip with her daughter.

''It gets really challenging when you're trying to do that and cook spaghetti at the same time,'' she said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...SYO4HqWF4sPv4g





Leaked Media Defender E-Mails Reveal Secret Government Project
Ryan Paul

Peer-to-peer (P2P) poisoning company MediaDefender suffered an embarrassing leak this weekend, when almost 700MB of internal company e-mail was distributed on the Internet via BitTorrent. The e-mails reveal many aspects of MediaDefender's elaborate P2P disruption strategies, illuminate previously undisclosed details about the MiiVi scandal, and bring to light details regarding MediaDefender's collaboration with the New York Attorney General's office on a secret law enforcement project. We have been reviewing the data for days and will have multiple reports on the topic.

MediaDefender specializes in file-sharing mitigation—practices that disrupt and deter infringing uses of P2P file-sharing networks. Music labels and movie studios pay the company millions of dollars to temporarily impede the propagation of new releases in order to compel consumers to pursue legitimate commercial distribution channels. MediaDefender accomplishes this task by using its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.

The e-mail was leaked to the public by a group that calls itself MediaDefender-Defenders. In a text file distributed with the mail, the group explains how the e-mails were obtained and why they are being distributed. Apparently, MediaDefender employee Jay Mairs forwarded all of his company e-mails to a Gmail account, which was eventually infiltrated. "By releasing these e-mails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users," writes the group behind the disclosure. "So here it is; we hope this is enough to create a viable defense to the tactics used by these companies."

It's not surprising that MediaDefender was targeted in this manner. The company was accused of using shady tactics earlier this year when BitTorrent community site TorrentFreak revealed that the anti-piracy company was surreptitiously operating a video upload service called MiiVi that offered high speed downloads of copyright-protected content. Critics accused MediaDefender of using the site to perpetrate an entrapment scheme, an allegation that the company has vigorously denied. MediaDefender founder Randy Saaf personally assured Ars that MiiVi was an internal project that was never intended for public use. Back in July when we covered the MiiVi scandal, we knew Saaf's story didn't quite add up, and now the general public has evidence that blows holes in Saaf's claims.

The MediaDefender e-mails leaked this weekend confirm beyond doubt that the company intentionally attempted to draw traffic to MiiVi while obscuring its own affiliation with the site. The e-mails also show that MediaDefender immediately began to recreate the site under a different name and corporate identity soon after the original plan was exposed.

The rise of MiiVi

Shortly after the public launch of MiiVi in June, developer Ben Grodsky e-mailed Saaf and his colleagues to inform them that the site was beginning to receive traffic. "We have some success! 12 people have signed up on [the] page. 7 have installed [the] app," wrote Grodsky. "This is from about 3,000 uniques from limewire redirects." Grodksy sent another user count status update a week later revealing that the site had drawn 19,000 unique visitors from LimeWire redirects. He also informed Saaf that his team was "working on putting Google Analytics all over MiiVi" in order to "better track what people are doing on the site."

MediaDefender went to great lengths to obscure its affiliation with MiiVi. "I don't want MediaDefender anywhere in your e-mail replies to people contacting Miivi," Saaf instructed company employees. "Make sure MediaDefender can not be seen in any of the hidden email data crap that smart people can look in." Grodsky and Saaf also began discussing new ways to drive traffic to the MiiVi site. "If we want more users, Dylan's eDonkey messages would get us a lot of Europeans that are a little bit older crowd," Grodsky wrote. "I would like it if our pictures were indexed with goggle [sic]. We need to get as much search traffic as we can," Saaf replied.

Developer Dylan Douglas also suggested some Google ranking improvement strategies. "We should come up with a bunch of keywords and a description for the hidden metadata entries to increase traffic," Douglas told the MiiVi developers.

In late June, Grodsky began considering ways to leverage the MiiVi client application infrastructure. "Do you think it would break a lot and take more time than its [sic] worth for the MiiVi application/installer also to act like Serge's Proxy client and spoof on eMule?" Grodsky asked Saaf. "We don't want to do this at this time," Saaf replied. "Good idea, but we don't want to give it a spyware stigma."

The disclosure

Chaos ensued at the company when TorrentFreak disclosed MediaDefender's affiliation with MiiVi in early July. "Looks like the domain transfer screwed us over," Grodsky wrote in an e-mail which also contained a link to TorrentFreak's article. "What needs to happen?! Do you want the server pulled?" he asked Saaf. "This is really fucked," Saaf replied. "Let's pull miivi offline." Shortly after the server was shut down completely, Grodsky sent a follow-up e-mail noting that the story was beginning to spread. He dutifully requested "damage control" instructions from Saaf and discontinued the LimeWire redirect campaign.

MediaDefender's damage control program went into full swing shortly after that. When Douglas pointed out that information about MiiVi had been added to the MediaDefender Wikipedia page, Saaf decided that he wanted it taken down. "Can you please do what you can to eliminate the entry? Let me know if you have any success," Saaf wrote. "I will attempt to get all references to miivi removed from wiki," developer Ben Ebert replied. "We'll see if I can get rid of it."

After a statement Saaf sent to Digital Daily was included in a blog entry, Saaf sent an e-mail to a handful of MediaDefender employees asking if it would be a good idea to post it to the Digg.com news site. He also suggested possibly having MediaDefender employees post comments. Referring to the Digg community, MediaDefender co-founder Octavio Herrera replied, "They aren't going to believe you."

MediaDefender developers also discussed ways to downplay the story or spin it to dull the impact. "If the major news outlets aren't interested in the story, I would take that as an indication that the VAST majority of people don't give a shit about this story," Mairs wrote. "However, if they do think it's worth writing about, we definitely want to get our side of the story in the mainstream media, so I think Randy's plan of going to the big tech media outlets is a good one. So far the story has only been on techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us. If the story stays on these sites, we should let it die."

Saaf sent Mairs a private reply in response, expressing his personal opinion about the media backlash surrounding the spyware allegations. "Truth is I don't give a crap about most of this shit," Saaf wrote.

The resurrection

Despite the serious failure of MiiVi, MediaDefender decided to try again. "Looks like we'll just have to take 2-3 weeks of downtime and do some cosmetic work and relaunch," wrote MediaDefender employee Ty Heath in an e-mail to the MiiVi development team. "Plus creating another DBA (or better yet incorporating under a new name), getting a new domain, getting another Verisign certificate, getting a new IP range, etc.," Grosdky replied. In an e-mail titled "MiiVi redux," Grodsky asks Saaf if he wanted to "do the incorporating from scratch idea for the MiiVi replacement" instead of the doing-business-as arrangement used for MiiVi. "If so," wrote Grodsky, "I have no idea what the turn-around is on creating a complete corporate entity and we would need a name for the new corp."

Grodksy's first step was establishing a new mailing address using a mail service in Las Vegas. "I called the place (www.maillinkplus.com) and verified the name(s) on the box and the name(s) that receive the mail can be different from the name of the company that's paying by check. They also e-mail nightly if there's mail and someone on their staff inputs the FROM address on the envelope to a database that will show us when we login who we got mail from and then we can pick to have those article [sic] forwarded to us per item," wrote Grodsky. "Worst case scenario paranoia craziness, does anyone have objections with this mail box place being the foundation for all the materials that would have to do with the to-be-named MiiVi?"

One point that came up during MiiVi resurrection planning was the potential value of the traffic generated by the negative publicity. "We are leaning toward dumping the URL and just re-launching with a new URL? Are we being too hasty because you can't buy 1,000,000 pages linking to you in Google returns." Michael Potts, who works for MediaDefender parent company ARTISTDirect, suggested putting a link to the new site on a page at the MiiVi domain so that the new site benefits from MiiVi's high Google rank.
After an extensive naming discussion, MediaDefender finally decided to bring back MiiVi under the name Viide. In an e-mail to Potts, Grodsky wrote, "When you get a chance, we would love you to start taking a look at www.viide.com. That is the current home of our MiiVi site. We have totally locked-down the site, while we improve the look and feel from [what] the blogosphere saw."

The next step was purging Viide of all references to MiiVi before the official launch. "I'm not sure if you guys are planning on going live with the Viide domain name... but in case you are... you might want to remove all references of Miivi on the homepage of viide.com before it gets Googled or someone public comes across it," wrote former MediaDefender developer Tabish Hasan in an e-mail sent to the MiiVi development team. Development on Viide was ongoing in the most recent e-mails included in the leaked collection.

Providing data for use by law enforcement agencies

In the collection of leaked e-mails, there are several discussions with representatives of the New York Attorney General's office, including intelligence analyst Bradley J. Bartram and senior special investigator Michael G. McCartney. MediaDefender is in the process of devising a system that will enable the Attorney General's office to remotely access MediaDefender's data about P2P users. In an e-mail that McCartney sent to Mairs last month, the investigator explained that the matter was "being overseen by the highest members of [the] agency" and was considered somewhat urgent.

Although the full scope of the project cannot be extrapolated from the e-mails, the information available indicates that MediaDefender intends to provide the Attorney General's office with information about users accessing pornographic content. Other kinds of information could be involved as well. The e-mails clearly indicate that the data provided by MediaDefender was intended to be used for law enforcement purposes. In an e-mail to Mairs, Bartram says that the system must be specifically designed "to satisfy the legal and evidentiary requirements" before use.

"On your end, the peer-to-peer crawler will be identifying files matching the established search criteria from various hosts," wrote Bartram. "This data will then be collected, filtered for New York resident ip addresses (to the accuracy limits imposed by geo-query tech). The data will then be transferred to us where; on our end, a separate piece of software will use that data to connect into the network and download the file from a host and store it on our servers for evidence retention and further analysis."

It is not clear whether or not the project with the Attorney General's Office has any connection with the MiiVi project. At this time, we have not uncovered any substantial evidence to indicate that such a connection exists.

Some evidence in the e-mails indicates that the system devised by MediaDefender in collaboration with the Attorney General's Office was targeted by a hacker. "[A]n ip from, what appears to be sweden, connected to the server using your username, made two failed password entries and then disconnected 4 seconds after the initial connection," Bartram informed MediaDefender. "Considering the nature of the information being collected, I would like to restrict access as much as possible." McCartney followed up soon after with an e-mail to Grodsky and Mairs. "Is this one of your engineers? Because if not, this is very disturbing! Who ever [sic] this was obviously had the non standard port as well as your user name to attempt these logins," wrote McCartney. "This leads me to believe that your system is compromised and/or our communications were either sniffed or accessed providing this fella with much of the relevant information to attempt access. As of now, all out side [sic] access has been disabled until we can figure this out further."

It is possible that the individual who attempted to infiltrate the server is associated with the organization behind the MediaDefender e-mail leak. McCartney's concerns represent the only instance in the MediaDefender e-mails where anyone expresses suspicion that the messages are being intercepted and obtained by a third party.

Universal Music Group contract

One of the most informative documents included in the leaked e-mails is a draft of MediaDefender's confidential contract with Universal Music Group. The contract reveals exact details of MediaDefender's pricing structure and services and provides insight into which P2P networks the company is targeting. MediaDefender charges $4,000 for one month of protection for an album, and $2,000 for one month of protection for a track. Clients are also given access to MediaDefender's reports and statistical analysis. In the contract, the company claims that it "will perform Services against approximately twelve million" file-sharing users at any given time and will target the fifteen most popular P2P networks. Targeted networks include FastTrack, Gnutella, IRC, Usenet, DirectConnect, eDonkey, MP2P, Kademlia, Overnet, BitTorrent, SoulSeek, and Shareaza. The contract also provides detailed explanations of MediaDefender's efficacy testing practices.

Other odds and ends

There is simply too much information in the MediaDefender e-mails for us to cover in detail. We leave further analysis of the data as an exercise to the reader. We did encounter, however, a few other things worthy of note. There are detailed statistics that illuminate the efficacy of MediaDefender's file-sharing mitigation tactics and an extensive discussion of new techniques used by the company. The e-mails, unfortunately, also contain some highly sensitive financial information, including a spreadsheet with the salaries, Social Security numbers, and home addresses of individual MediaDefender software developers. There are also e-mails that discuss MediaDefender's competition intelligence activities, where they attempt to discover file-sharing mitigation tactics used by competitors like MediaSentry.

The e-mails contain information about the personal life of MediaDefender employees as well. One particularly ironic example can be found in an e-mail sent by Mairs, the MediaDefender employee whose technical ineptitude was ultimately responsible for the leak. "I was out of the office yesterday because my son stuck something up his nose and I had to take him to urgent care. I guess we know where he gets his smarts from " The NBC Universal representative who received that e-mail replied sympathetically, "Haha. I hope it wasn't a crayon."

Conclusion

The cold war being waged between MediaDefender and P2P copyright infringers is rife with mutual deception, but one fact shines through all of the layers of obfuscation: MediaDefender consistently underestimates the ingenuity, resourcefulness, and dedication of its adversaries. In this case, it could cost the company everything.

Internet users are beginning to demand a higher level of transparency and accountability from companies that operate within the Internet ecosystem. Companies like MediaDefender that rely on secrecy and discretion unintentionally invite scrutiny by attempting to hide.

Although many of MediaDefender's innermost secrets have been laid bare by this leak, there are many aspects of the company that remain shrouded in mystery. The ultimate purpose of the MiiVi site, for instance, is still an enigma. In some ways, the information in these e-mails raises more questions about MiiVi than it answers. It is likely that many additional details about MediaDefender's operations will be disclosed to the public as new secrets are uncovered in the e-mails. The rate at which these e-mails propagate across the Internet may also stand as a testament to the difficulty of trying to stand between consumers and their torrents.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-project.html





MediaDefender Anti-Piracy Tools Leaked
Ernesto

The MediaDefender-Defenders have released the source code for the “trapping” and decoy software that MediaDefender uses to spread fake files on P2P networks.

Similar to the previously released e-mails, tracking database and phone call this leak is also spread by the group that goes by the name “MediaDefender-Defenders“. In the .nfo that was posted with the torrent we read:

The source is complete for their operations regarding Kazaa, bittorrent, gnutella etc. This system is now released for the public in order to identify the decoys they set up. A special thanks to the MD employee that gave this to us.

It appears that this leak was not collected from the e-mails. The MD-Defenders themselves claim that a MD employee handed over the files to them, but this hasn’t be verified by other sources at this point.

This leak contains a wealth of information and seriously harm MediaDefender’s future operations. BitTorrent tracker owners and other admins who are involved in managing P2P networks can utilize the leaked information to brace themselves against companies like MediaDefender, who try to pollute their networks with fake files.

From the leak it seems that MediaDefender is active on virtually every P2P network, including Usenet.

Not surprisingly, most applications are dedicated to BitTorrent, which is probably their main target because of its popularity. Application names BTPoster, BTSeedInflator, BTDecoyClient and BTInterdictor make it quite obvious what they are supposed to do.
At this point it is still unclear who the MediaDefender-Defenders are and how they got their hands on all this information. MediaDefender has announced that the FBI will be investigating the source of the leaks.

To be continued?

Update: A list of leaked utilities is now available:

AresDataCollector, AresLauncher, AresProtector, AresSupernode, AresUDPDataCollector, AutoUpdater, AutoUpdaterSource, BTClient, BTDataCollector, BTDecoyClient, BTInflationDest, BTInterdictor, BTIPGatherer, BTPoster, BTRemover, BTScraper, BTScraperDLL, BTSearcher, BTSeedInflator, BTTorrentGenerator, BTTorrentSource, BTTracker, BTTrackerChecker, CVS, DCMaster, DCScanner, DCSupply, DistributedKazaaCollector, DllLoader, ED2KSupplyProcessor, EdonkeyIpBanner, FastTrackGift, FastTrackGiftDecoyer, GnutellaDecoyer, GnutellaFileDownloader, GnutellaProtector, GnutellaSupply, KademliaProtector, KazaaDBManager, KazaaLauncher, KazaaSupplyProcessor, KazaaSupplyTaker, KazaaSwarmerDest, KazaaSwarmerDistributedSource, KazaaSwarmerDownloader, KazaaSwarmerSource, MediaMaker, MediaSwarmerDest, MediaSwarmerSource, MetaMachine, MetaMachineHashSetCollector, MetaMachineSpoofer, MI-GnutellaSupply, MovieMaker, NameServer, NetworkMonitor, OverNetLauncher, OvernetProtector, OvernetSpoofer, P2PFileIndexer, PioletDC, PioletPoisoner, PioletSpoofer, SamplePlugIn, SLSKSpooferDLL, SoulSeekClient, StatusDest, StatusSource, SupernodeCollector, SupernodeController, SupernodeDistributer, SupplyProcessor, TKCom, TKFileTransfer, TKLauncher, TKProjectManager, TKSyncher, UsenetPoster, UsenetSearcher, WatchDogControllerDestination, WatchDogControllerSource, WinMxDC, WinMxLauncher, WinMxProtector, wma generator
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...leaked-070920/





P2P Sites Ridicule MediaDefender Takedown Notices in Wake of e-Mail Leak
Ryan Paul

Peer-to-peer (P2P) poisoning company MediaDefender has sent a flurry of takedown notices and legal threats to P2P web sites that are facilitating the propagation of a 700MB archive of internal MediaDefender e-mail that was leaked onto the Internet this week. The e-mails, which were obtained by a group that calls itself MediaDefender-Defenders, reveal that the company attempted to deceive the public after the disclosure of its affiliation with the MiiVi site and was providing information about file-sharing network users to the New York State Attorney General's office.

MediaDefender is now in damage control mode and hopes to slow the spread of the e-mails by intimidating P2P site operators. MediaDefender is represented by Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton (SMR&H), which is recognized one of the top law firms in the United States. The P2P sites are unimpressed with the empty threats.

Although MediaDefender president Randy Saaf was eager to tell us a fabricated cover story after the MiiVi incident, MediaDefender has not responded to our numerous requests for comment this week. Similarly, the New York General Attorney's office has declined to provide a response to our inquiries. MediaDefender has, however, contacted several popular P2P sites, including isoHunt, which provided us with a complete record.

"Despite security precautions by our client, a person or persons illegally accessed MediaDefender's email and other files," says a cease and desist notice sent to isoHunt and seen by Ars. In the notice—which cites various sections of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act—SMR&H attorney Robert S. Gerber requests that isoHunt "immediately and permanently cease and desist from posting, distributing or otherwise making available MediaDefender's trade secrets and confidential information."

The popular P2P site's formal response to SMR&H is filled with caustic wit and considerable legal expertise. "If Mr. Gerber is truly as experienced in IP law as his bio claims he is," asks the isoHunt administrator in his response, "why is it that he is incapable of composing a DMCA takedown notice as per USC Title 17 Section 512?" The isoHunt administrator explains that Gerber failed to adequately specify the allegedly infringing content as required by law. The administrator also helpfully provides a link to a valid sample complaint so that SMR&H will be less likely to send the improper information in their second attempt. The following is an excerpt of the isoHunt administrator's response:

"This e-mail serves as a counter notification under USC Title 17 Section 512 (c)(3)(A)(iii) that you have failed to properly identifying links to content that allegedly infringes your copyright/trademark/rights (or, in this case, has something to do with really embarrassing trade secrets *and* employee social security numbers) AND you have failed to address your e-mail to the appropriate agent, namely copyright@isohunt.com, so I invite you and your clients to take a long walk off a short pier, since you and/or your clients might actually manage to NOT get something that simple wrong."

In closing, the isoHunt administrator says that the he will comply with the request if it is properly submitted. "Despite us being located in Canada, if you do actually figure out how to compose a valid DMCA notice, we will honor it," he concedes, "just as soon as we're done laughing at you."

Torrent site Meganova received an identical letter from SMR&H, but responded publicly and with a bit less civility. "Dearest little asstunnels, Let me start off by thanking you for your pitiful attempt to have your e-mails removed from the entire internet," Meganova's response says. "In case you haven't noticed, this site is located in Europe (I hope you can point it out on a map) where your stupid copyright claims have no base. But fair is fair you guys did suffer over the past week so here's bit of advice to you guys: F*** you! F*** you again! F*** you again and again and again!" (I'm guessing that an "asstunnel" is what you get when a European whose first language isn't English tries to say "asshole." It seemed awkward when I first read the response, but the expression has since grown on me.)

A web site named after the organization behind the leak, MediaDefender-Defenders, has set up HTML archive that includes all of the e-mails, largely uncensored, but with minor modifications to protect MediaDefender employees from identity theft. The site also published an e-mail allegedly sent by Saaf himself. "I am the CEO of MediaDefender," the message says. "We have begun our civil and criminal investigations into the stolen e-mails from our company. We are meeting with the FBI on monday. Your IP address has been logged. I hope it was worth the thrill."

The site has been running intermittently since its launch, and the disruptions are thought to be the result of massive traffic coupled with a denial of service attack apparently launched by MediaDefender.

Attempting to stop the spread of the e-mails is an exercise in futility at this point. MediaDefender's entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats. In the past, we have seen attempts to stifle the dissemination of information on the Internet backfire and compel activists to promote broader distribution. Given that reality, MediaDefender might want to lay off of the threats for the time being.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...mail-leak.html





Interview with MediaDefender Defenders.com
Thomas Mennecke

Unless you've been residing under a rock of monumental proportions, it should come as little surprise that MediaDefender's very confidential and private internal emails were intentionally leaked online. The contents compose of approximately 700 megabytes of email correspondence, a phone conversation between a law enforcement official and employees of MediaDefender, a list of IP addresses MediaDefender uses, and decoy file statistics used against the Gnutella network.

MediaDefender, as many people are aware, is an organization that intentionally floods P2P networks with corrupt or false files. Music and movie studios hire MediaDefender with the intention of discouraging file-sharers from downloading unauthorized files. MediaDefender has existed for the better part of 7 years, with a success rate that is now called into deep question. In one segment of the leaked emails, a MediaDefender employee shares the humor when a music executive questions whether his label's music is showing a decline in sharing on college campuses. Additionally, MiniNova's latest blog entry demonstrates MediaDefender's frustration while attempting to corrupt their torrent index.

The security failure surrounding MediaDefender is one of the most damaging intelligence leaks in recent Internet history. While likely to be downplayed by some, the sheer amount of intelligence divulged is colossal. The information contained within the 700 megabyte mbox file contains strategy, IP addresses used by MediaDefender, and tactics used against certain P2P networks. It's true enough however, that those who downplay the blunder may actually be correct. eMule (eDonkey2000) and BitTorrent appear difficult to corrupt, thanks in large part to the comment and moderation system of those running indexing sites. In that respect, MediaDefender's already weak effectiveness is irrelevant of the leak.

The windfall of the massive leak is taking on a culture of its own. MediaDefender-Defenders, those behind the attack, are considered heroes among many in the Internet community. Their efforts against one of the more disliked anti-P2P organizations has had a galvanizing effect and given a substantial victory to the opposition in the online copyright wars. The attack has elevated the conflict, as it demonstrates that the music and movie industry's efforts and agents are not immune to counter-intelligence manipulation.

So who's part of this micro-culture surrounding MediaDefender-Defenders? There's MediaDefender-Defenders.com, a collaborative project by two individuals looking to effectively disseminate the leaked information. They are not in any way connected to the MediaDefender-Defenders, however they do seek to carry on their message by simplifying access to the leaked information. The site contains all the currently leaked information with a small twist. "Forrest F.", who works on content of the site, managed to convert the mbox file into an organized and simplified web based thread - allowing otherwise unknowledgeable users to read the leaked contents.

"[The mbox file is] just big, and very hard to read. So after Googleing a few things, I found this: http://www.mhonarc.org. It's a Perl Script that does the job, after some heavy tweaking, I started converting -- it was 8 hours before it was done. I pretty much had taken a book that all the pages where out of order and chaos, and turned it into something easy to read. Also, I was brave; I don't know what the FBI/lawyers could [have] done to me."

Forrest F.'s endeavor hasn't been without its fair share of hiccups so far. His original domain, jrwr.hopto.org, was forced offline by his ISP, leaving his hopes nearly abandoned. However, an unnamed individual donated the MediaDefender-Defenders.com domain, and Forrest F. found a new host in Norway. Even under his initial domain, Forrest F. realized his idea would be successful.

"After some reading I was like "The Public needs to know this!" So I put it on a slow server in my own home, it was up for 17 hours - 1.4 million hits!"

Additionally, MediaDefender-Defenders.com has received two legal threats - one from MediaDefender's legal consul, and one from an individual who claims to be the CEO of the embattled company, Randy Saaf. The legal threat, which appears legitimate, threatens civil and criminal action for posting the material online. However, Forrest F. doesn't appear concerned.

"Since the server is in Norway, We don't have to really worry."

Yet in a concerning development, MediaDefender-Defenders.com was knocked offline yesterday in a suspicious Denial of Service attack. Remedying this situation, Forrest F. and his crew found refuge with none other than The Pirate Bay, who is hosting the site with prq.se. Since the switch, the site has been stable and with much fewer problems. And with over 2 Gbps throughput capacity, the new host should be able to handle the increasing load.

In a style reminiscent of The Pirate Bay, MediaDefender-Defenders.com has a public reaction page to their legal threats. Although MediaDefender and their legal counsel are no doubt taking this breech very seriously, it appears that MediaDefender-Defenders.com is following The Pirate Bay's lead, as it too believes that it's safe in Scandinavia.
http://www.slyck.com/story1586_Inter...r_Defenderscom





The Pirate Bay Files Charges Against Media Companies

Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.

The companies that are being reported are the following:
Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
Emi Music Sweden AB
Universal Music Group Sweden AB
Universal Pictures Nordic AB
Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
Atari Nordic AB
Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
Ubisoft Sweden AB
Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Stay tuned for updates.
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/86





Google Plans New Undersea "Unity" Cable Across Pacific
Grahame Lynch

Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day has learned.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan in Sydney last week.

Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that "Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We're not commenting on any of these plans."

However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways - considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.

Communications Day cannot confirm the identity of the other carriers working with Google, although we have learned that both Asia Netcom and Telstra have discussed the concept with the California-based search and online advertising giant. One source suggested that the main player behind the planned Asia America Gateway cable - Telekom Malaysia - has not been invited to participate in talks. The same source speculated that at least half a dozen companies are party to the plans.

The exact route for the cable is not yet finally determined although there are plans for a configuration using two separate routes to provide network diversity. It would potentially also be able to service Australia via interconnect to new and existing cables in Guam and Hawaii.

The Unity name was first revealed in public in early September when Level 3 executive Mike Saunders listed it as one of several new cables planned across the Pacific in a Singapore conference presentation. Saunders' presentation warned of the potential for the new cables to create a new trans-Pacific capacity bubble, although he did not link Unity to Google. His presentation said Unity was planned for a service launch in 2009.

Google also hinted at its ambitions in job advertisements earlier this year. In one for a submarine cable negotiator, it specified a job description that said in part "These negotiators will work closely with vendors to identify highly cost-effective solutions under the most favorable commercial and technical terms possible. They will also be involved in new projects or investments in cable systems that Google may contemplate to extend or grow its backbone."

Google's infrastructure ambitions are no secret. The company has committed substantial expenditure on dark fibre and a network of data centres across the United States, and also recently indicated its interest in bidding for new 700MHz spectrum allocations there.

Communications Day reported on 8 February that Google had begun peering with ISPs, enabling them to reduce their reliance on transit services via Tier 1 non-peering major IP networks such as Level 3 and AT&T.

Asked to comment on its hire of submarine cable specialists, Google told Communications Day "It should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity. In some parts of the world, these people will work with submarine cables because there is a lot of ocean out there."

Another source said that Google's move could be disruptive to the capacity industry as it takes a major source of traffic - and revenue - out of the general market place.
http://www.commsday.com/node/186





A Hole in the Earth, a Hole in a Pocket



John Tagliabue

With all the tunnels that pierce them, the Swiss Alps have often been likened to an enormous Swiss cheese. That comparison was awakened in recent months when a 22-mile rail tunnel was opened near this Alpine town.

Costing $3.5 billion, the tunnel supplements a 19th-century tunnel through the Lötschberg, the mountain in whose shadow Frutigen lies. But the new one differs from older tunnels by piercing the base of the mountain, rather than its upper reaches. In addition to the main tunnel, for rail traffic, the mountain has been laced with 20 miles more of tunnel for maintenance and emergencies.

“You can say it’s a true Swiss cheese,” said Patrick Belloncle, a spokesman for BLS, the Swiss company that built and operates the tunnel, ferrying visitors in a van through service tunnels that flank the main railway tunnel.

But the Lötschberg tunnel is only part of an ambitious program to protect the Alps, a Swiss national heritage, from environmental damage.

The environmental problem arises because the Alps lie right between two of Europe’s most dynamic economic regions, northern Italy and southern Germany, which have threatened to overwhelm the mountains with truck traffic. So more than a decade ago, the Swiss voted to impose steep tariffs on trucks passing through their country. They also voted to ban the construction of four-lane highways in the Alps.

By last year Switzerland had collected more than $1.1 billion in tolls. The money has been used to improve older tunnels and build new ones to put freight on rails, either directly or by putting truck trailers onto flatbed rail cars.

But when the Swiss go, they go first class. When the tunnel is fully operational in December, it will accommodate not just 70 freight trains a day, but as many as 30 passenger trains, capable of going 120 miles per hour, cutting an hour off the trip from Basel, in northern Switzerland, to the south.

The Swiss are not finished, either. They are now busily digging an even more ambitious 35-mile tunnel under the St. Gotthard Pass to the east, to supplement two existing 19th-century tunnels, to be completed by 2016.

By 2009, the Swiss want to reduce the number of trucks that pass over the country’s north-south roads to 650,000 a year, from 1.4 million in 2000, which would continue a long decline in truck traffic. Since 1995, such traffic has swollen by 40 percent in the European Union, but has declined by 8 percent in Switzerland.

Of course, all of this digging was a boon for little Frutigen, whose squat wooden chalets, liberally sprinkled with geraniums, shelter hikers in summer and skiers in winter. “There was quite a bit of noise and dust,” said Peter Josi, 40, who works at the garden center and grocery store near Frutigen’s remodeled train station. “On the other hand, the workmen came and shopped here.”

Bert Wäfler, 23, who works out of a small wooden shop jammed with bicycles for sale and hire, recalled wistfully the busy days of construction, when the town was flooded with 1,200 or so workers, many of them employees of big Austrian contractors. “Lots of Austrians worked on the tunnel, and they needed bikes to get around,” he said. “On weekends they had free time, but couldn’t go home to Austria, so they rented bikes.”

“Now it’s quieter,” he said. “Only a few Austrians are here. It didn’t really bring us very much.”

Karl Klossner agrees that for some, the party is over. Mr. Klossner, 56, the part-time speaker of Frutigen’s town council, recalled how big contractors from abroad came and created jobs. “Not only in construction, in retail, too,” he said. “Construction workers shopped here, they ate in the restaurants, and in the evening they went out to drink a beer.” He added, “I think it’s fair to say that we lived above our means.”

But the tunnel brought some lasting benefits as well, and the town intends to exploit them, said Mr. Klossner, a civil engineer with the rank of colonel in the Swiss Army. The gash in the mountain to build the tunnel has freed up warm underground waters that the town wants to channel into a new center for raising warm-water fish, like sturgeon, and tropical fruit. When the $21 million center is finished, Mr. Klossner said, it could produce as much as six tons of Swiss caviar a year and 60 tons of tropical fruit.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/...ope/tunnel.php





World’s Languages Dying Off Rapidly
John Noble Wilford

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.

Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported today, has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The “hot spots” of imminent language extinctions are: Northern Australia, Central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, Eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and Southwest United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, an organization for the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of languages at risk. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic magazine and at www.languagehotspots.org.

At a teleconference with reporters today, K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the languages have no written form and are “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Dr. Harrison; Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society have traveled in recent years to many parts of the world, the beginning of what they expect to be a long-term series of projects to identify and record endangered languages.

The researchers interview and make recordings of the few remaining speakers of a threatened spoken language, and collected basic word lists.

The projects, some of which extend over three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of audio recordings, development of grammars and preparation of children’s readers in the subject language. The research has especially concentrated on preserving language families that are on their way out.

In Australia, where nearly all of the 231 spoken aboriginal tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon such tiny language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, in the Northern Territory, and the three Yawuru speakers, in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the sole living speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had already been declared extinct.

“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Amurdag speaker strained to recall words he had last heard from his late father.

Many of the 113 languages spoken in the Andes Mountains and Amazon basin are poorly known and are rapidly giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, to a more dominant indigenous language. In this region, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have their own secret tongue, used mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some of which were previously unknown to science.

“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said news release.

The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages of the Northwest Pacific plateau of North America, a region including British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. Only one person remains who speaks Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.

In Eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use national and regional languages, such as Russian or Sakha.

Forty Native American languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by indigenous tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations there, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threatened decline of many relatively obscure languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that speakers and writers of the 83 languages with “global” influence now account for 80 percent of the world population. Most of the thousands of other languages now face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/asia/talk.php





Arrrrr tichokes

Tomorrow You'll Pay a Buccaneer for Corn?
Paul Majendie

Put a parrot on your shoulder, strap on a peg leg, hit the rum and start bellowing "Shiver me Timbers" -- Wednesday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

"Pirates of the Caribbean" star Johnny Depp is not the only over-the-top buccaneer allowed to have fun.

September 19 is your once-a-year chance to don an eye patch, sport a ridiculously large hat and keep on saying "Arrrrr.

It all started back in the 1990s as a cult joke between two American friends -- John "Ol Chumbucket" Baur and Mark "Capn Slappy" Summers -- but really took off when syndicated columnist Dave Barry got to hear about their surreal festival.

"We tap into that need for whimsy in people's lives," Summers says of the 24-hour celebration of quirkiness when they urge all self-respecting swashbucklers to show "pirattitude."

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD), which adopted Treasure Island star Robert Newton as its patron saint, now attracts fans from as far afield as Britain and Australia and even boasts a special Wikipedia site on the Internet.

The day even has its own unofficial anthem -- American Tom Smith has written and recorded "Talk Like a Pirate Day" -- and Canadian sketch comedy troupe Loading Ready Run produced an educational video on how to swashbuckle with the best of them.

Ol Chumbucket and Capn Slappy are bombarded with requests for TLAPD interviews and proudly boast on their own website that they are even now being immortalized in computer games.

"That's fairly cool and geeky," Ol Chumbucket decided.

Pirate fans around the world have rallied round, showing that surreal silliness is alive and well.

An American soldier stationed in Iraq promised that "to celebrate, myself and others will wear an eye patch all day."

Sydney, Australia is staging a harbor cruise with "flagons of grog at pub prices and prizes to treasure for the dandiest of outfits."

A bar in Venice, Italy is holding an olive stone-spitting contest for would-be buccaneers.

A Brazilian fan even sent a letter of support in a bottle while one overjoyed Argentinian whose birthday falls on the same day said "It will be difficult to talk in Spanish like pirates but we will try."
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...88712020070918





Alex Wanted a Cracker, But Did He Want One?
George Johnson

IN “Oryx and Crake,” Margaret Atwood’s novel about humanity’s final days on earth, a boy named Jimmy becomes obsessed with Alex, an African gray parrot with extraordinary cognitive and linguistic skills. Hiding out in the library, Jimmy watches historical TV documentaries in which the bird deftly distinguishes between blue triangles and yellow squares and invents a perfect new word for almond: cork-nut.

But what Jimmy finds most endearing is Alex’s bad attitude. As bored with the experiments as Jimmy is with school, the parrot would abruptly squawk, “I’m going away now,” then refuse to cooperate further.

Except for the part about Jimmy and the imminent apocalypse (still, fingers crossed, a few decades away), all of the above is true. Until he was found dead 10 days ago in his cage at a Brandeis University psych lab, Alex was the subject of 30 years of experiments challenging the most basic assumptions about animal intelligence.

He is survived by his trainer, Irene Pepperberg, a prominent comparative psychologist, and a scientific community divided over whether creatures other than human are more than automatons, enjoying some kind of inner life.

Skeptics have long dismissed Dr. Pepperberg’s successes with Alex as a subtle form of conditioning — no deeper philosophically than teaching a pigeon to peck at a moving spot by bribing it with grain. But the radical behaviorists once said the same thing about people: that what we take for thinking, hoping, even theorizing, is all just stimulus and response.

Was Alex only parroting when he showed off for Alan Alda on “Scientific American Frontiers” (one of the PBS productions the fictional Jimmy might have seen)?

“What color smaller?” Dr. Pepperberg asked the parrot as she held up two keys. “Green,” he responded. Alex also seemed to understand concepts like “bigger,” “different” and “same.” Presented with a tray of colored cutouts — the numerals 1 to 6 — he could tell you which one was gray: “Four.”

Many linguists argue that only human brains have the ability to nest ideas within ideas to form the infinitely recursive architecture of thought: When you’re done eating breakfast would you look in the box at the back of the table for the yellow rubber glove with the middle finger turned inside out?

Alex could pull together a few simple concepts. Show him a group of objects and he could tell you, “What color is wood and four-corner?” or, “What shape is paper and purple?” Dr. Pepperberg was hoping to train Alex to spin his own recursions, informing her that the nut was “in the blue cup that’s on the tray” or “in the yellow box on the chair.”

“I wish we had gotten further,” Dr. Pepperberg wrote in an e-mail message. “We were just beginning to get him to designate things like ‘in’ and ‘on.’ ”

The deepest recursion is consciousness — knowing that you know and that you know that you know. In his recent book, “I Am a Strange Loop,” Douglas Hofstadter proposed that the richness of a creature’s mental representations be used to take the measure of its soul.

The unit Dr. Hofstadter whimsically proposed is the “huneker,” named for James Huneker, a music critic who wrote that Chopin’s 11th Étude, in A minor, (Op. 25) was so majestic that “small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.”

If your average person’s soulfulness weighs in at 100 hunekers with a hamster down near 10, Alex hovered somewhere above the halfway mark. But there were moments when he seemed to reach for the top.

In an talk on Edge.org, Dr. Pepperberg told of an effort to teach the parrot about phonemes using colored tokens marked with letter combinations like sh and ch.

“What sound is green?”

“Ssshh,” Alex answered correctly, and then demanded a nut. Instead he got another question.

“What sound is orange?”

“Ch.”

“Good bird!”

“Want a nut!” Alex demanded. The interview was over. “Want a nut!” he repeated. “Nnn ... uh ... tuh.”

Dr. Pepperberg was flabbergasted. “Not only could you imagine him thinking, ‘Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it for you?’ ” she said. “This was in a sense his way of saying to us, ‘I know where you’re headed! Let’s get on with it.’ ”

She is quick to concede the impossibility of proving that the bird was actually verbalizing its internal deliberations. Only Alex knew for sure.

Next to infinity, one of the hardest concepts to grasp is zero. Toward the end of his life Alex may have been coming close.

In a carnival shell game, an experimenter would put a nut under one of three cups and then shuffle them around. Alex would pick up the cup where the prize was supposed to be. If it wasn’t there he’d go a little berserk — a small step, maybe, toward understanding nothingness.

A bigger leap came in an experiment about numbers, in which the parrot was shown groups of two, three and six objects. The objects within each set were colored identically, and Alex was asked, “What color three?”

“Five,” he replied perversely (he was having a bad attitude day), repeating the answer until the experimenter finally asked, “O.K., Alex, tell me, ‘What color five?’ ”

“None,” the parrot said.

Bingo. There was no group of five on the tray. It was another of those high huneker moments. Alex had learned the word “none” years before in a different context. Now he seemed to be using it more abstractly.

Dr. Pepperberg reported the result with appropriate understatement: “That zero was represented in some way by a parrot, with a walnut-sized brain whose ancestral evolutionary history with humans likely dates from the dinosaurs, is striking.”

In a well-known essay, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about the elusiveness of subjectivity. What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/we...f=weekinreview





Following His Trail to Danger and Joy



A. O. Scott

There is plenty of sorrow to be found in “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer. The story begins with an unhappy family, proceeds through a series of encounters with the lonely and the lost, and ends in a senseless, premature death. But though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but. It is infused with an expansive, almost giddy sense of possibility, and it communicates a pure, unaffected delight in open spaces, fresh air and bright sunshine.

Some of this exuberance comes from Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young adventurer whose footloose life and gruesome fate were the subject of Mr. Krakauer’s book. As Mr. Penn understands him (and as he is portrayed, with unforced charm and brisk intelligence, by Emile Hirsch), Chris is at once a troubled, impulsive boy and a brave and dedicated spiritual pilgrim. He does not court danger but rather stumbles across it — thrillingly and then fatally — on the road to joy.

In letters to his friends, parts of which are scrawled across the screen in bright yellow capital letters, he revels in the simple beauty of the natural world. Adopting the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, rejecting material possessions and human attachments, he proclaims himself an “aesthetic voyager.”

Mr. Penn serves as both his biographer and his traveling companion. After graduating from Emory University in 1990, Mr. McCandless set off on a zigzagging two-year journey that took him from South Dakota to Southern California, from the Sea of Cortez to the Alaskan wilderness, where he perished, apparently from starvation, in August 1992. “Into the Wild,” which Mr. Penn wrote and directed, follows faithfully in his footsteps, and it illuminates the young man’s personality by showing us the world as he saw it.

What he mostly saw was the glory of the North American landscape west of the Mississippi: the ancient woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, the canyons and deserts farther south, the wheat fields of the northern prairie and Alaska, a place that Mr. McCandless seemed to regard with almost mystical reverence. Mr. Penn, who did some of the camera work, was aided by the director of photography, Eric Gautier, who previously turned his careful, voracious eye on the wilds of South America in Walter Salles’s “Motorcycle Diaries.” That movie, like “Into the Wild,” finds epic resonance in a tale of youthful wandering and proposes that a trek through mountains, rivers and forests can also be a voyage of self-discovery.

Mr. Salles’s film, in which Gael García Bernal played Che Guevara, found a political dimension in its hero’s journey. And while Chris’s fierce rejection of his parents’ middle-class, suburban life contains elements of ideological critique, Mr. Penn and Mr. Krakauer persuasively place him in a largely apolitical, homegrown tradition of radical, romantic individualism.

An enthusiastic reader (with a special affinity for Tolstoy and Jack London), Chris is in many ways the intellectual heir of 19th-century writer-naturalists like John Muir and especially Henry David Thoreau, whose uncompromising idealism — “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth” — he takes as a watchword. (Had he survived, Mr. McCandless might well have joined the ranks of latter-day nature writers like Edward Abbey and Bill McKibben.) His credo is perhaps most succinctly stated by Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advised that “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study Nature,’ become at last one maxim.”

One problem with this strain of American thought is that it sometimes finds expression in self-help nostrums and greeting-card sentiments. “If you want something in life, reach out and grab it,” Chris says to Tracy (Kristen Stewart), a teenage girl who develops a crush on him, collapsing Self-Reliance into something like an advertising slogan. But the movie’s theme, thankfully, is not so simple or so easily summed up in words.

Mr. Penn, even more than Mr. Krakauer, takes the Emersonian dimension of Chris McCandless’s project seriously, even as he understands the peril implicit in too close an identification with nature. The book took pains to defend its young protagonist against the suspicion that he was suicidal, unbalanced or an incompetent outdoorsman, gathering testimony from friends he had made in his last years as evidence of his kindness, his care and his integrity. The film, at some risk of sentimentalizing its hero, goes further, pushing him to the very brink of sainthood. After Chris offers wise, sympathetic counsel to Rainey (Brian Dierker), a middle-aged hippie he has befriended on the road, the older man looks at him with quiet amazement. “You’re not Jesus, are you?” he asks.

Well no, but it’s a comparison that Mr. Penn does not entirely discourage. (Note the final, man of sorrows image of Mr. Hirsch’s face and also an earlier shot of him floating naked in a stream, his arms extended in a familiar cruciform shape.) At the same time, though, “Into the Wild” resists the impulse to interpret Chris’s death as a kind of martyrdom or as the inevitable, logical terminus of his passionate desire for communion with nature.

Instead, with disarming sincerity, it emphasizes his capacity for love, the gift for fellowship that, somewhat paradoxically, accompanied his fierce need for solitude. Though he warns one of his friends against seeking happiness in human relationships — and also rails incoherently against the evils of “society” — Chris is a naturally sociable creature. And “Into the Wild” is populated with marvelous actors — including Mr. Dierker, a river guide and ski-shop owner making his first appearance in a film — who make its human landscape as fascinating and various as its topography.

The source of Chris’s wanderlust, and of the melancholy that tugs at the film’s happy-go-lucky spirit, is traced to his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), whose volatile marriage and regard for appearances begin to seem contemptible to their son. (His feelings for them are explained in voice-over by his younger sister, Carine, who is played by Jena Malone.)

Fleeing from his mother and father, Chris finds himself drawn, almost unwittingly, to parental surrogates: a rowdy grain dealer in South Dakota (Vince Vaughn), a retired military man in the California desert (Hal Holbrook) and Rainey’s companion, Jan (Catherine Keener), who seems both carefree and careworn.

Chris reminds some of these people of their own lost children, but all of them respond to something about him: an open, guileless quality, at once earnest and playful, that Mr. Hirsch conveys with intuitive grace. “You look like a loved kid,” Jan says, and “Into the Wild” bears that out in nearly every scene.

He is loved, not least, by Mr. Penn, who has shown himself, in three previous films (“The Indian Runner,” “The Crossing Guard” and “The Pledge”) to be a thoughtful and skilled director. He still is, but this story seems to have liberated him from the somber seriousness that has been his hallmark as a filmmaker until now. “Into the Wild” is a movie about the desire for freedom that feels, in itself, like the fulfillment of that desire.

Which is not to say that there is anything easy or naïve in what Mr. Penn has done. “Into the Wild” is, on the contrary, alive to the mysteries and difficulties of experience in a way that very few recent American movies have been. There are some awkward moments and infelicitous touches — a few too many Eddie Vedder songs on the soundtrack, for example, when Woody Guthrie, Aaron Copland or dead silence might have been more welcome — but the film’s imperfection, like its grandeur, arises from a passionate, generous impulse that is as hard to resist as the call of the open road.


“Into the Wild” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity, brief nudity and some violent or otherwise upsetting scenes.


INTO THE WILD

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Sean Penn; written by Mr. Penn, based on the book by Jon Krakauer; director of photography, Eric Gautier; edited by Jay Cassidy; score by Michael Brook with songs and additional music by Eddie Vedder and Kaki King; production designer, Derek R. Hill; produced by Mr. Penn, Art Linson and Bill Pohlad; released by Paramount Vantage. Running time: 140 minutes.

WITH: Emile Hirsch (Christopher McCandless), Marcia Gay Harden (Billie McCandless), William Hurt (Walt McCandless), Jena Malone (Carine), Brian Dierker (Rainey), Catherine Keener (Jan Burres), Vince Vaughn (Wayne Westerberg), Kristen Stewart (Tracy) and Hal Holbrook (Ron Franz).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/21...wild.html?8dpc





After Test Runs, an Armory Is Ready to Declare, ‘Artists, Start Your Engines’
Carol Vogel

As giant billows of smoke began filling the cavernous drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory one recent evening, there was no panic. Rather, there were shouts of exultation, along with what sounded like a chorus of foghorns.

“Look, it’s going in the right direction,” said Doreen Remen, a founder of the Art Production Fund, a nonprofit organization that presents unusual public art projects. With her co-founder, Yvonne Force Villareal, and the artist Aaron Young she gazed upward with relief as the smoke began filtering out the open windows along the rafters.

Four smoke machines had been brought in to simulate the conditions that could develop as 10 motorcycles ride around the 55,000-square-foot drill hall simultaneously. For Thursday evening’s test run the belching, thunderous machines had some competition: Wink 1100, a professional stunt rider who performed the trick sequences in the 2003 movie “Biker Boyz.” The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Wearing Tom Ford sunglasses, baggy blue jeans and a red-and-blue sweatshirt, he was enveloped in his own haze of smoke as he spun the wheels of his Honda CBR 954 on a designated patch of painted plywood.

It was the prelude to a turning point in the Seventh Regiment Armory’s 128-year history: the first performance art piece ever presented there, masterminded by Mr. Young. Tonight 10 motorcycle stunt riders wearing sunglasses will ride for seven minutes on 288 panels of painted plywood covering the drill hall floor as 500 invited guests, including members of Hells Angels, watch from the bleachers above.

With neon lights attached to the undersides of their bikes, the riders will follow synchronized movements choreographed by Mr. Young. The burnouts from their tires will yield colorful swirls, zigzags and snake patterns on the plywood panels, which have been coated in seven layers of fluorescent reds, pinks, oranges and yellows and then sealed with two coats of black acrylic.

Titled “Greeting Card,” after a 1944 Jackson Pollock painting that has its own tangle of spirals, the work is described as both a performance piece and an action painting. When the riders have finished, they will have created a giant fluorescent multicolored floor piece that will remain on public view through Sunday. A film of the performance will be shown on a plasma screen in the hall.

It is the first in a series of art exhibitions and performances planned for the building by a new nonprofit group, the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, which in December took over management of the crenellated red-brick behemoth on Park Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets from New York State. The group still plans to hold the art and antiques fairs that have attracted throngs for decades, but Rebecca Robertson, the conservancy’s president and chief executive, suggested that the armory could become even more of a cultural destination.

“The armory is neither a white-box gallery nor a proscenium stage,” she said. “Here you make it up. Luckily this space allows work that can’t be seen anywhere else in the city.”

For now, she said, the conservancy is in the research and development phase. Still, workers have been cleaning the neglected building, and air-conditioning has been installed in the drill hall for the first time, eliminating the need for the special trucks that once piped in cool air during art and antiques fairs. The $150,000 budget for “Greeting Card” is being covered by a group of sponsors that include Tom Ford, the fashion designer, and Sotheby’s.

Mr. Young, 35, a conceptual artist and sculptor, first began talking with the Art Production Fund about the piece last December at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair. “We didn’t think we could do this in New York,” Ms. Villareal said. “It required a large space with the audience watching the performance from above.”

But as soon as she and Ms. Remen heard that the armory was seeking art projects, they met with Ms. Robertson. “Her reaction was, ‘Bring it on,’ ” Ms. Villareal said.

Working at minimum wage, gallery assistants and students from Barnard and Columbia spent three days last week painting the panels. “It was like camp,” Ms. Remen said.

Thursday evening’s smoke experiment was one of many trials and rehearsals. To ensure that the smoke from the motorcycles will not endanger the audience, the glass has been removed from the 28 windows high in the rafters of the drill hall. Still, guests are warned in small letters on the bottom of the performance invitation: “A ventilation system has been installed to reduce the smoke and exhaust. Earplugs will be provided for the noise. If you are sensitive to either, please request a protected viewing space.” In addition to a glassed-in room for warier viewers, the Art Production Fund will furnish the audience with face masks.

Mr. Young said that given the challenges of the synchronization and the safety concerns, nothing had been left to chance. A month ago he did tests in an empty parking lot in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium.

To inspire the riders involved in “Greeting Card,” he gave each a photocopy of the Pollock painting. “The spiral motion is the template,” he said. The 10 bikers — five stunt riders from Team G Unit along with five friends — will each have a designated 23- by 43-foot area on which to perform zigzags, power slides and circles. The neon lights on the bottom of each bike will allow the audience to follow the movements through the smoky haze. “I want it lit like a boxing rink, very hard-edged,” Mr. Young said.
“Hopefully this will appeal to people who know nothing about motorcycles or about art,” he said as he examined shreds of tire rubber embedded in some of the wood panels, a byproduct of Wink’s brief motorcycle whirl.

Although Mr. Young does not ride himself, it is not his first artistic encounter with motorcycles. In 2000, as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, he created a piece called “High Performance,” enlisting a group of cyclists he met at a local motorcycle bar called the Zeitgeist. “I got them drunk until they said yes,” he recalled. The riders performed burnouts in a studio that was once used by Diego Rivera. The result was a 3 1/2-minute video that was eventually acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

When it is time for the 288 panels to leave the armory, Mr. Young plans to select about 20 of them to sell through the Art Production Fund. He and the fund will split the proceeds. Before the panels are sold, he plans to seal each one with a coat of clear resin.

“That way it will keep the hot melted rubber fixed,” he said. Even though the ride itself will last only seven minutes, he explained, the panels will be “archival.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/ar...gn/17armo.html





Local blues

Is It Art Yet? And Who Decides?
Roberta Smith

North Adams, Mass.

WHEN a museum behaves badly, it’s never pretty. But few examples top the depressing spectacle at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

I refer to Mass MoCA’s decision to exhibit “Training Ground for Democracy,” an immense but incomplete work of installation art, despite strenuous opposition from Christoph Büchel, the Swiss artist who conceived it and oversaw its construction until his relationship with the museum dissolved in acrimony early this year. By opening this show without his assent, the museum has broken faith with the artist, the public and art itself.

The legal principles at stake in this dispute will be argued on Friday when lawyers for the museum and Mr. Büchel face off in federal court in Springfield, Mass. Each side hopes for a summary judgment against the other.

The Büchel project was an inspired, nervy move for Mass MoCA, which has struggled to find its voice since it opened eight years ago in a rehabilitated mill complex in downtown North Adams. It was the first American museum to commission one of Mr. Büchel’s dense, fraught creations, which compress masses of material and objects into historically charged labyrinthine environments through which viewers walk, climb and crawl.

And the pairing made perfect sense, given that Mass MoCA has one of the largest galleries of any museum in the United States — known as Building 5 — and annually stages big installations there.

“Training Ground for Democracy” was to be assembled at the museum’s expense, with its staff members seeking out and installing items on a long list in collaboration with Mr. Büchel. His outsize list included a two-story Cape Cod cottage, a leaflet-bomb carousel, an old bar from a tavern, a vintage movie theater and various banged-up rolling stock (a trailer, a mobile home, a bus, a truck). Nine full-size shipping containers were requested. There was even to be a re-creation of Saddam Hussein’s spider hole. But things did not go smoothly. By the end of January, and well past the scheduled Dec. 16 opening date, Mr. Büchel had departed for good and begun accusing the museum of interference, unprofessionalism and wasting his time.

The museum said it had tried mightily to gather everything on Mr. Büchel’s wish list but balked at acquiring a burnt-out fuselage of a 737 airliner. It pointed out that it had spent more than double the show’s $160,000 budget; Mr. Büchel countered that an amount had never been agreed upon.

Mass MoCA argues that it has a responsibility to deliver a show to its public. “At some point the realities of our budget, resources and staff imposed themselves,” Joe Thompson, the museum’s director, told The New York Times.

Now the components of “Training for Democracy” loom as if in a desolate ghost town, surreally camouflaged by plastic tarps in Building 5. Mass MoCA says it shrouded the elements pending a court decision that it hopes will allow it to display the installation. Mass MoCA may have been a little naïve about what it was getting into with Mr. Büchel. Artists can be difficult and demanding, and the bigger the artwork, the greater the stress on all sides. And while Mr. Büchel’s environments are huge in scale, they are also often guided by a sense of horror vacui, and so obsessively detailed that they might best be described as panoramic collage.

They’re like bristling three-dimensional history paintings: messy offices, banal living rooms, sinister hideouts, piles of old appliances or towers of newspapers, with each space telling its own story. It is as if the detritus of dozens of sad lives has been warehoused yet remains in use. Everyone has just gone out to lunch, or has been arrested.

Occasionally there are moments of respite. In an installation that Mr. Büchel carved into Michelle Maccarone’s crumbling two-story gallery on the Lower East Side in 2001, for example, I spent a calm moment crouched in a child’s classroom chair while facing a blackboard that ran floor to ceiling — the room was only four feet high — wondering what on earth would come next.

Since Mr. Büchel walked off the Mass MoCA project in January, accusations have flown back and forth like poison arrows, and it’s hard to sort out who did or didn’t do what and when.

Mr. Thompson, director of Mass MoCA, said the museum had “clearly bent over backwards” for Mr. Büchel. Yet by opening the show, covered, last spring against Mr. Büchel’s wishes and now seeking a court’s go-ahead to remove the tarps, the museum renders all of that moot. If an artist who conceived a work says that it is unfinished and should not be exhibited, it isn’t — and shouldn’t be. End of story.

(His lawyer cites a federal law that says as much, the Visual Artist Rights Act. But Mass MoCA argues that the law applies only to finished works of art.)

It’s hard for a museum to recover when it forfeits the high ground. To this day the Corcoran Gallery of Art remains infamous for canceling its 1989 exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs after his work was denounced by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. To conservatives’ horror, the show had been partly financed by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The meltdown at Mass MOCA is sad for all concerned, yet is also a reflection of the changes wrought since the late 1960s, as installation art evolved from renegade form into an institutional staple of ever-bigger galleries and museums.

Although museums still focus most of their energy on finished works that they believe should be shown or collected, they now routinely function as patrons, using their budgets to help artists create works from scratch. They have happily become producers because these days installation artworks are often crowd pleasers, circuslike in their appeal. Viewers gasp at their scale or their sensational optical effects, as with “Sleepwalker,” the Doug Aitken video display on the Museum of Modern Art’s facades last winter.

Yet the experience can be very superficial. It’s strange to think that these big temporary installations may be the only contemporary art that some people know or enjoy. And there are dangers, including the possibility that in controlling the purse strings, a museum starts thinking of itself as a co-author who knows what the artist wants better than he or she does.

Yes, artists can be formidably difficult. The larger the artwork, the bigger the ego. Maybe Mr. Büchel was behaving like a diva. But what some call temper tantrums are often an artist’s last, furious stand for his or her art.

Initially I felt some sympathy for Mass MoCA. I was impressed that it had the courage to be the first American museum to take on Mr. Büchel, whose outsize ambition has anted up ideas implicit in Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau environments of the 1930s, Arman’s “Le Plein” of 1960 and Gordon Matta-Clark’s sliced buildings of the ’70s.

But when the museum became set on opening the unfinished piece over Mr. Büchel’s objections, my sympathy evaporated. And when I visited MassMoCA, my sentiments curdled.

The shrouded non-Büchel is a kind of museological car crash. You can’t stop looking, but tarps or no tarps, you also want to avert your eyes, especially if you are familiar with his previous work.

Mr. Büchel contends that the display damages his reputation. It will certainly give people unfamiliar with his obsessive, history-driven aesthetic an inaccurate sense of his art, and this is indeed a form of damage. But by opening this strange quasi display, MassMoCA does even more damage to itself and to its reputation as a steward of art and as a conduit between living artists and the public.

My first thought while walking among the tarps is that no one working at the museum had ever seen a finished Büchel, which would be pretty astonishing, especially since a very large Büchel installation was on view in London while things were unraveling in North Adams. Titled “Simply Botiful,” this 13,000-square-foot London piece was commissioned by the artist’s primary dealer, Hauser & Wirth, in its huge warehouse in the Coppermill neighborhood.

Interestingly, the gallery says it cost £80,000, or about $162,000, and was assembled by Mr. Büchel and 12 assistants and workers in three weeks. This might seem to suggest that when given full artistic control, Mr. Büchel delivers.

At Mass MoCA, meanwhile, there is a sense of something gone deeply awry. In one of two smaller galleries in Building 5, the museum has removed the bar that was part of the Büchel piece to make way for “Made at Mass MoCA,” a self-serving, slapped-together display of photographs of previous installations. It accomplishes little but to suggest the frequent vacuity of those projects and underscore the possibility that the Büchel was too big a reach for the museum. Beyond that and up a flight of stairs, things get stranger still.

Here you’ll find a wall covered with Mr. Büchel’s extensive wish list, which conceptually conveys something of the surface density, historical references and regional evocations he planned to incorporate. Requested are accouterments for Mass and Baptism; a hospital bed and related medical equipment; eight voting booths; hundreds of old tires; piles of old computers; 1,000 beverage cups from a race track; 1,000 feet of barbed wire; 12 grenades and 35 pounds of bullet casings; eight body bags and 75 white protective suits; four prosthetic legs; decorations and campaign buttons from election rallies; a concession stand, popcorn and popcorn buckets; Christmas lights; and 16 large bags of corn leaves and husks.

The list scrolls along in chapterlike clusters of related items, evoking recent events in or involving the United States, including the 2000 presidential election, Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. On the opposite wall newspaper articles and editorials about the controversy are pinned to the wall, although a scathing indictment of Mass MoCA by The Boston Globe’s art critic is absent.

The museum deserves to be scathed. Although there may be parts of the installation proper that Mr. Büchel considers finished, what is visible above and below the tarps today is barely the skeleton of a Büchel. It’s just a lot of stuff.

You are reminded of Hollywood, where directors (that is, artists) are routinely denied “final cut.” Of course, Renaissance popes often had final cut too. But I prefer to invoke the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg, who, when asked to contribute to a show of portraits of the Paris dealer Iris Clert in 1961, sent a telegram that read, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”

Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor toward artists. It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.

In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, “This is not a work of art unless I say so.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/ar...gn/16robe.html





Museum Can Show Disputed Artwork, Judge Rules
Randy Kennedy

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has the right to display an immense unfinished installation by Christoph Büchel, a Swiss artist whose relationship with the museum fell apart early this year, leading to a bitter public battle over control of the work and over artists’ rights in general.

The judge, Michael A. Ponsor, in Federal District Court in Springfield, Mass., said that the museum’s display of the work would not, as Mr. Büchel argued, violate the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which provides that an artist has the right to “prevent the use of his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work.”

In this case, one watched closely by the art world for the effect it might have on the relationship between museums and artists who create huge, complex works, Judge Ponsor said that the artist rights act did not apply, in essence because it has no provision to prohibit showing an unfinished work of art simply because it is unfinished.

As long as the museum, known as Mass MoCA, made clear to visitors that the work was not completely realized, there was no reason the installation could not be shown, the judge said.

Joseph C. Thompson, the director of the museum, which is in an old mill complex in North Adams, Mass., said in a telephone interview that he was happy with the decision. But he added that his institution would now think long and hard about what to do with the work inside its Building 5, which covers an area the size of a football field and includes such Büchel components as a wrecked police car, a carnival ride rigged with bomb casings, a dilapidated two-story house, a mobile home and a rusted oil tanker.

“We very much appreciate the fact that the court granted us the right to use our discretion and we’ll use it very carefully,” said Mr. Thompson, who added that he would consult with art scholars, people who helped work on the installation and many of the museum’s visitors before he decided whether to open the unfinished installation or dismantle it.

“It’s not a decision that we’ve reached yet,” he said, but added: “Our mission is to help make new work and we’re very anxious to move forward.”

In May, just after it went to court against Mr. Büchel, the museum opened a show it called “Made at Mass MoCA,” that allowed visitors to enter Building 5 but shielded Mr. Büchel’s work almost completely from view by hanging pieces of tarp in front of it.

Several art critics and scholars have been highly critical of the museum’s decision to go to court and allow access to the shielded work, contending that artists should have broad power over the disposition of their work. “In my view, under no circumstances should a work of art be shown to the public until the artist has determined that it is finished,” Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, wrote in an affidavit filed in the case.

Donn Zaretsky, Mr. Büchel’s lawyer, said in an e-mail message that he and his client were “obviously very disappointed in the judge’s ruling, and we’re exploring our options for appeal.”

Even in the ever more expensive and complicated world of large contemporary installations, the kind of fight that has been waged between Mr. Büchel and Mass MoCA is unusual.

Mr. Büchel has become well known for creating elaborate, politically provocative environments for viewers to wander, and sometimes to crawl, through. His conception for the work in Massachusetts, to be called “Training Ground for Democracy,” was that it would mimic and mock, in some ways, the kind of training that is used by the United States military to help soldiers adapt to situations in unfamiliar cultures. In one part of the installation, for example, a space appeared to be a dressing room to be shared by both rioters and riot police, as if they were all simply playing a part.

But after work began last fall on the installation, one of Mr. Büchel’s most ambitious, relations between the artist and the museum deteriorated and finally degenerated into an angry standoff. The artist contends that the museum badly mishandled the project and did not follow his instructions, allowing costs to climb. The museum contends that Mr. Büchel was difficult to work with almost from the start and made many demands and changes to the project as it was being built, causing an initial budget of $160,000 to more than double.

In e-mail exchanges made public as part of the case, Mr. Büchel referred to his time spent in North Adams working on the exhibition as an “acid bath” and called those he worked with there “jerks.” He argued in court papers that, after he left Massachusetts last December and stopped working on the project, the museum continued to work on it for four months without his supervision, causing “intentional and willful modification and distortion” to the installation.

Mr. Thompson asserted yesterday that even as relations with Mr. Büchel deteriorated and lawsuits were filed, the museum tried to respect the artist’s work. “We did not simply back up a dump truck and destroy these materials and partial constructions,” he said. “And we did not cavalierly fling open the doors to the gallery.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/ar...22moca.html?hp

















Until next week,

- js.



















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