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Old 05-03-08, 08:14 AM   #2
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In Oscars, No Country for Hit Films
David Carr

At the Governor’s Ball, the gilded post-Oscar fete, many of the evening’s winners swanned about with statues in one hand and glasses of Champagne in the other, while the losers washed down what was left of the evening with stronger spirits.

The movie industry was in full frolic, but beneath the waves of froth and elation, all was not well.

Thirty-two million people watched the Oscar broadcast last week, fewer than tuned in for the debut of “American Idol” in January, which means that a network-confected competition starring people named Ramiele Malubay and Robbie Carrico trumped a show with eight decades of history and stars like George Clooney and Cate Blanchett for the ultimate achievement in entertainment.

That’s the Hollywood equivalent of an Ultimate Fighting Championship outdrawing the Super Bowl (just wait, that’s coming, too).

The shrugs from the audience might have something to do with the always-on supply of celebrity 411. Star sightings were rarer in the good old days. Now, why tune in to see Jessica Alba’s baby bump when you already know that she visited her obstetrician last week and that mother and baby are doing fine?

Part of the problem may be good taste. Back when the academy was reflexively pulling the lever for movies like “Titanic,” the Oscar viewers showed up in droves, with over 55 million tuning in. But the current academy panel is increasingly composed of people from the industry who were weaned on the cinematic revolution begotten by directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

This year, those voters found all manner of ambitious, dark cinema to recognize, including “No Country for Old Men,” which won three Oscars, including best picture, and “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic that earned a best actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis.

While there is much to be admired in the five best-picture nominees, all told, they have pulled in around $313 million so far at the box office, a few million less than “Transformers” did alone.

There was a feeling after this year’s Oscars, with low ratings and modest box office returns, that the version of Hollywood depicted in those myriad tributes is little more than nostalgia. Instead, the Oscars seemed one more discrete sandbox, where only a certain kind of movie can hope to play.

“Movies and television have both fractured into niches, and the Oscars are a television show about movies,” said Mark Harris, the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” a book about the nominees for best picture at the 1968 Oscars.

The Oscars’ transition to more refined fare began in the early 1990s when studios began hatching flanker brands, the so-called Indiewood specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classic (now Vantage), to help the parent companies come up with quality films aimed at adults, and by proxy, the academy.

Ten years ago Harvey Weinstein, then of Miramax, demonstrated that a combination of audacious producing choices (“The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love”), an English accent or two, and brute marketing dollars could help the academy find its inner film critic.

But the Oscar bounce has all but disappeared, in part because the awards have been moved up in the year and the window in which a nomination could be used to attract to a wider audience has become shorter. In his book, Mr. Harris recounts how “The Graduate,” one of the nominees he wrote about, had a two-year run, including before and after the Oscars. Nowadays, perfectly wonderful films like Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” are pushed out of theaters (and out of competition) within a few weeks to make room for other bets.

As a result, the so-called Oscar movie is a very precise business exercise: it must be reviewed ecstatically, be seen by loads of adults and receive love at the warm-up awards shows before the Oscars. These kind of films have no toy revenues, no prequels or sequels, and little penetration with youth audiences (give or take the occasional “Juno”). With that kind of math, it’s a little like playing nickel slots with half-dollar coins.

“You can lose a lot of money on a $10 million movie that you spend $30 million marketing as an Oscar picture,” said one person in the industry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is a Hollywood film executive and the subject was about losing money.

Four days after the downsized Oscars, the other shoe dropped. New Line Cinema, the very independent division of Time Warner with a 40-year legacy including the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which drew $2.9 billion, was subsumed into another unit, Warner Brothers Studios. The move brought to mind the Walt Disney Company’s takeover of Miramax, another mini-major whose big bets made the parent company unhappy.

Several executives I spoke to this week pointed out that Time Warner’s new chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, is not primarily a movie guy. As is the case with Robert A. Iger of Disney and Howard Stringer of Sony, Mr. Bewkes’s primary audience works on Wall Street and wears pinstripes, not sequins.

But with Time Warner’s stock languishing around $16 a share, Mr. Bewkes had become increasingly impatient with New Line’s sovereignty and the duplication in costs in studio infrastructure and distribution that went with it.

Last week, Mr. Bewkes said that he liked the glamour of the Oscars as much as the next guy, probably more. But still.

“Any real movie company needs to greenlight projects that get recognition for their quality and that attract the best talent in the business,” he said. But, he added, you have to find a way to meet the needs of a mass audience in a profitable way, year after year, to even get to the starting gate of the awards season.

New Line will continue as a brand, but many of its 600 employees will be cut, including the guys that built it, Robert K. Shaye and Michael Lynne. It was clear that changes were coming, but people were shocked to see two of the last entrepreneurs in the business get the gate.

It was only four years ago, after all, that they were the toast of the Oscars, with “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” receiving 11 awards, including best picture. So a week in which people in the movie business historically take victory laps and make grand plans became one of grim reckoning instead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/bu...ia/03carr.html





BitTorrent Throttling Company Sandvine Sees Sales Down 88%
enigmax

Sandvine, manufacturers of BitTorrent throttling technology has seen its first quarter sales drop 88% in a year. After achieving 42,000% growth in 5 years, the company - best known for providing the technology which put Comcast into the spotlight recently - has seen its value plummet 42% in a single day.

When Comcast introduced the Sandvine traffic shaping solution, it hoped it could quietly interfere with its customer’s BitTorrent activities without getting too much attention. Unfortunately for them, their actions didn’t go unnoticed, and during August last year we broke the news that this ISP does indeed mess with it’s customers internet connections.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Comcast, as their customers started to realize that this ISP wasn’t giving them what they paid for. As a result, Comcast are now being sued and annoyed users formed a coalition to challenge the company to try to claim compensation. All of this is on top of a FCC hearing which deemed that Comcast uses ‘hacker-techniques’ to interrupt BitTorrent traffic, techniques which are employed via the traffic management ’solution’ from Sandvine. Essentially, the Sandvine system allows Comcast to inject forged reset packets into BitTorrent transfers which makes seeding impossible - good news for ISPs who don’t want to give their customers the bandwidth they paid for, but bad news for BitTorrent, and even worse news for supporters of Internet neutrality.

However, it is the very fact that Sandvine allows ISPs like Comcast to disrupt their customer’s activities which prompted the recent Federal Communications Commission hearings. The FCC warned Comcast that it will not allow it to disrupt internet traffic, which is of course a major concern for other ISPs considering investing in the Sandvine system. According to a G&M report, it is this hesitancy over net neutrality issues, coupled with problems major telecoms companies are experiencing when trying to refinance their debts, that have hit Sandvine hard. A survey by financial services outfit Canaccord Adams suggest that the top 40 global communications companies are all currently extremely wary over capital expenditure.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-t...-value-080307/





Advocacy Groups Bash Comcast's "Technical-Sounding Nonsense"
Nate Anderson

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press, two of the biggest backers of the FCC's investigation into Comcast's traffic management practices, late last week filed reply comments with the Commission. The goal of both was to undermine the arguments trotted out by Comcast in defense of its BitTorrent "delaying" practices.

While the EFF turned in a dense and thoughtful discussion of the importance of corporate transparency, Free Press ranged much wider, seeking to undermine the whole edifice of "technical-sounding nonsense" coming from Comcast HQ. Taken together, both sets of comments make a strong case that Comcast's decision to block "pure seeding" during periods of network congestion was both poorly handled and is technically unnecessary.

"Spelunking in open FCC dockets"

The EFF decided to focus its comments not so much on what Comcast did (and does), but on how the company has gone about doing it. While acknowledging that "market forces should be preferred, whenever possible, to regulation," the group claims that markets will be stunted whenever the information asymmetry between service providers and users grows too great. When a company like Comcast refuses to admit what it is doing or to describe the effects of its network management decisions, it prevents many users from making an informed decision about purchasing service from Comcast (and the entire debate rests on the assumption that there is a robust competitive market, something that the EFF clearly has issues with).

When Comcast gives the impression that "it isn't using network management techniques that are designed to disrupt anyone's use of BitTorrent (or any other application)," as it did to the EFF back in September of 2007, it can be difficult for consumers to make an informed decision about ISP service.

Comcast does interfere with BitTorrent traffic under certain circumstances (when network traffic is high and a particular computer is uploading BitTorrent files but not downloading them), but the only way a user would know this with any certainty is by reading the company's recent FCC filing on the matter, the only place Comcast has spelled this out. As the EFF points out, "consumers should not be expected to resort to spelunking in open FCC dockets in order to find" these important details.

Without this information, many users will assume that any problems they see are simply a result of transient network connections, application peculiarities, or configuration issues on the user's own machine.

A lack of transparency also discourages innovation on the part of application authors, who will have less incentive to create new products if they remain unsure of how ISPs might treat those apps. If Internet software creators can no longer count on the "end-to-end" functionality of a network, and instead must guess at the effects that network management will have on their software's transmissions, they are no longer as free to innovate as they once were; the Internet has the potential to become a place where creativity needs permission.

"If ISPs are free to selectively deviate from established Internet standards in different ways," writes the EFF, "the resulting Balkanized patchwork would leave innovators with little choice but to obtain prior permission from major ISPs in order to guarantee that their applications will operate correctly."

While transparency is essential, the EFF argues that it need not be an undue burden on ISPs and that being open about the effects of network management doesn't need to compromise security. For instance, ISPs should disclose to users that they filter spam and viruses from some e-mail (and only when consumers use the companies' e-mail services), but they don't need to describe specific Bayesian filtering algorithms or virus removal techniques. Only when consumers know in this broad sense how ISPs are acting can they make informed decisions about which services to pay for.

Cutting through the "nonsense"

While Free Press is a big fan of disclosure, it insists that "disclosure alone is not enough." It would prefer the FCC to say that certain forms of network management are out of bounds, that they don't fall under the heading of "reasonable network management."

To make its case, the group attempts to dispel the "technical-sounding nonsense" put forth by Comcast and its allies. If you've been following this debate at all, you already have a good sense of what Comcast's position is: upgrades are too expensive, BitTorrent traffic would instantly consume any upgraded bandwidth, and the only way to properly manage traffic is to discriminate against specific protocols.

Free Press has been one of the groups consistently pushing ISPs to invest more heavily in infrastructure rather than throttle traffic instead. As a policy matter, the group believes this is simply a better way to go and that the US is falling dangerously behind the network infrastructures of other countries. Free Press probably doesn't help its case when it resorts to hyperbolic rhetoric about "letting our networks remain third-world networks," but it does make a good point that cost is not the only issue here. If the government decides that it is imperative to the public interest for ISPs not to block or delay specific Internet protocols, then debates about what's cheapest to implement are irrelevant.

"As a matter of policy, it doesn't matter if investment is slightly more expensive than throttling traffic," is how Free Press puts it. "It doesn't matter that cars with airbags are more expensive than those without or drugs with child-proof tops are more expensive than those without. Consumer welfare and our global competitiveness requires open, high-capacity networks, and government encourages investment in such ends, not in tools that block and discriminate against innovation and competition."

In any event, Free Press doesn't believe that network upgrades are actually that expensive, and industry estimates to the contrary may be misleading. It points to Dave Burstein's analysis over at trade publication DSL Prime, where Burstein estimates the cost of building a fully neutral network at around a buck a month per subscriber, and also notes how ridiculous are the claims that traffic shaping is "necessary" to the ISP business. If that's so, he correctly points out, why don't Verizon and AT&T need to shape? Clearly, there are other ways of handling the issue of congestion.

Finally, Free Press takes aim at the common talking point about BitTorrent and other P2P protocols: they will consume any available bandwidth, no matter how much is thrown at them. If this idea is granted, throttling or degrading such protocols makes an obvious kind of sense; but what if the premise is wrong?

Free Press points out that BitTorrent is an app that runs over TCP, and TCP already contains congestion-control mechanisms. One network congestion is sensed, TCP streams automatically dial themselves back (other groups allege that P2P protocols don't properly do this, however).

The more important point, though, is that P2P protocols are limited in another key respect: an end user's cable modem will only pull down or transmit a limited amount of data. Even if P2P protocols grab "all the available bandwidth," they can't grab more bandwidth than the cable modem allows out over the wire.

Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer at BitTorrent, made this point at the recent FCC hearing on the Comcast case. He pointed out that his cable modem was limited to 384kbps of upload speed, "so no application that sits behind that cable modem could ever transmit more whether they were using BitTorrent or any other application."

Unfortunately, Comcast doesn't actually have 384kbps of upload speed to give out to every subscriber at every particular moment. Because 45 or 50 users are connected to each "node" in a cable system and share total bandwidth among themselves, a quick calculation shows that if each user maxes out his or her upload speed, the total amount of information far exceeds the capacity of the uplink. Essentially, Comcast is selling a product that it cannot fully support, though the company contends that no networks are built for 24/7 peak usage and that this is entirely appropriate.

If Comcast really were concerned about bandwidth, Free Press suggests that the company take a hard look in the mirror. While Comcast has several hundred 6MHz slots available on its cable lines, only a few of these are devoted to Internet access. The rest provide access to cable TV and to Comcast's own video on demand services, and most are transmitting data that isn't used by anyone (cable transmits all of its channels all of the time, even when they're not being watched). To solve the problem, Comcast could 1) migrate to DOCSIS 3.0 more quickly and 2) move to a switched digital video network that only transmits currently-requested channels down the line. Both measures would boost current capacity tremendously.

The precedent problem

Comcast, which has been accused of crowd-shaping along with traffic-shaping, has shown no signs of backing down from its position. But if Free Press is at all correct and Comcast isn't actually saving itself much money, what's the point of all the fighting?

Burstein thinks it's all about the precedent. "Traffic shaping just doesn't save enough money to go to war, perhaps 10¢ per month, per subscriber," he says. "Verizon just confirmed [they] don't shape traffic or expect to do so in the future. Everyone's fighting so hard because they are afraid of a bad precedent."

Whatever happens, though, the ISPs are likely to get at least something in the way of precedent. Even a staunch defender of network management like Cisco chimed in this week with comments suggesting that ISPs should provide more notice about traffic-shaping procedures. "This notice should provide clear and meaningful information for consumers, including what traffic can be affected, under what conditions, and for how long." Free Press may not succeed in convincing the FCC that Comcast is spouting "nonsense," but the EFF looks likely to win its battle on transparency. Comcast has already taken baby steps in this direction.

Now, as to making use of that information, let's talk about that "robustly competitive market" I've heard so much about...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...sense-fcc.html





Retooling for a Changing Telecom Landscape
Julia Werdigier

Competition is fierce in the European telecommunications industry, where companies are vying for customers by undercutting each other on prices for services like broadband while trying to keep up with new technologies.

Some phone companies, including Britain’s biggest, the BT Group, face an additional challenge in trying to replace some of the revenue they have lost as customers have dropped traditional fixed-line phone service. Some analysts say BT is in an especially difficult situation because it does not have a mobile phone business to help offset that decline.

But the chief executive, Ben Verwaayen, is betting that services like customized applications for corporate clients and advising companies on their networks can generate profit growth. As part of that plan, he has started to replace some of BT’s traditional fixed-line phone engineers with technology “wiz teams” and plans to invest more in training and hiring.

Mr. Verwaayen, 56, spoke recently about how he expects the industry to change from one that focuses on gadgets and hardware to services, the war for talent and acquisition plans. Here are excerpts from that conversation:

Q. The market is moving quickly, customers are becoming more demanding and competition is fierce. In an environment like that, how do you gain an advantage over your rivals?

A. What we sell now is very different from what we sold five years ago. We don’t sell telephony or sending faxes anymore. What we sell now is a collaboration of different services. We provide what we call experiences and not just sell the hardware. I believe the world is moving into the next phase, where customers will much less distinguish between fixed and mobile services but will look more for the most innovative service for any given application. That’s why we focus on services and providing a social networking capability.

Q. Your main engine for growth is your services business, where you currently generate more than a third of total sales. Where do you see the biggest challenge with that approach?

A. It’s innovation. The reason to buy products is more and more that little level of innovation you get offered on top of the machines or gadgets you buy. While for companies in the connectivity business the challenge is to cut costs and prices, for us the gamble is can I keep innovating?

Q. How do you make sure you do? Do you spend an increasing amount on research and development?

A. You don’t need to have a massive corporate innovation group but you need smaller groups scattered around the organization and very close to your customer base. About 50 percent of our revenue today is from things we didn’t sell four or five years ago. When making investments, it is important to make them as neutral to any specific application as possible.

Q. Like many other former phone monopolies, including Deutsche Telekom, BT needed to transform itself by moving away from the shrinking fixed-line business toward new products and services to remain competitive. How difficult is that?

A. The challenge is how, in a company where everybody was born with a screwdriver in their hands, do you now start distributing keyboards. The innovation and the changes all happen on the software layer. The hardware layer simply is too expensive and changes take too long.

Q. BT is currently in the middle of a cost-cutting program that includes reducing positions on the traditional hardware side of the businesses while hiring staff for the services operation. How does that make the people with the screwdrivers feel?

A. They have to prove their value again because their world is more than ever about productivity. The screwdriver is not gone, but while in the past the screwdriver world would decide, now the people with the keyboard have the prime seat at the table. But if you look at our costs, it’s the other way round. The bulk of it is still in the screwdriver world. So the key to any successful investment strategy is to understand talent.

Q. How difficult is it to attract that talent? In December you bought the Singapore-based Frontline Technologies for about $140 million to expand in Asia. Most of your larger rivals have identified Asia as an area for future growth. How fierce is the war for talent there?

A. Very, very fierce. Talent is the differentiator. It’s where we put our money and our resources. If you don’t open your mind and offer more than just good pay in that environment, you lose out. That is the biggest challenge to corporations, and we have to adapt to the talent’s needs by being flexible and offer schemes like working from home. The type of people you find in BT now is massively different than just some years ago.

Q. BT has made 27 small- to medium-size acquisitions in the last three years. Many recent ones were in the technology sector in the United States. Are you planning to continue that growth strategy?

A. You can expect us to continue with such acquisitions because we’ve not only found interesting applications through them but also talent pools. The whole debate that I’m seeing around the world today that the U.S. is losing out to the East is wrong. It is the talent that will win no matter where that talent is based. In India, where 26,000 people are working for us, it’s not lower costs that we are after but the fact that the market there has entrepreneurial people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/bu...interview.html





US Government Forces Military Secrets on Brit Webmaster

Sorry, we thought you were us
Dan Goodin

A website promoting the town of Mildenhall has been shut down after it unintentionally became the recipient of hundreds of classified emails, including messages detailing the planned flight path of President Bush.

Over more than a decade, www.mildenhall.com received emails detailing all kinds of secret military information that were intended for official Air Force personnel. One detailed where Air Force One could be found in the air during a planned visit to the region by President Bush. Others included battlefield strategy and passwords.

"I was being sent everything from banal chat and jokes, to videos up to 15mb in size," Gary Sinnott, owner of mildenhall.com, said in this article in EDP 24. "Some were classified, some were personal. A lot had some really sensitive information in them."

As owner of mildenhall.com, Sinnott received every email that had that domain name included in the address field. The site was set up to provide information about the town of Mildenhall, which is about a half-hour's drive north east of Cambridge.

Sinnott says he brought the SNAFU to the attention of Air Force officials but was never able to get the problem fixed. At first, they didn't seem to take the matter seriously, but eventually, they "went mental," he said. Officials advised Sinnott to block unrecognizable addresses from his domain and set up an auto-reply reminding people of the address for the official air force base.

But still, the official emails continued to flow in to Sinnott's site. And to make matters worse, some people got angry after Sinnott told them they were sending email to the wrong address and gave his address to spammers. Sinnott was receiving 30,000 pieces of email per day, most of which was junk mail.

So Sinnott pulled the plug on the website. Though he remains the owner of mildenhall.com, it may only be a matter of time before all those emails incorrectly addressed to Air Force personnel at mildenhall.com automatically begin to bounce. And that ought to make security conscious people everywhere breath a little easier.

Alas, according whois records, mildenhall.net and mildenhall.org are in the hands of non-military individuals and mildenhall.us is available to anyone with $35. Given what we now know about the boobs who send confidential information, that ought to give us pause.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03...nhall_website/




Dell Pointed Out Vista Mistakes, Internal Documents Show

Late changes, confusing marketing, doubting vendors contributed to Vista stumbles
Gregg Keizer

Last-minute changes to Windows Vista broke drivers, forcing key hardware vendors to "limp out with issues" when the OS launched last year, according to a presentation by Dell Corp. that was made public this week.

"Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues," said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.
The criticism was just one of many under the heading "What did not go well?" Others ranged from knocks against Vista's Windows Anytime Upgrade scheme, an in-place upgrade option, to several slams on "Windows Vista Capable," the marketing program that targeted PC buyers shopping for machines in the months leading up to Vista's debut.

Dell's postmortem, in fact, was one of several after-launch appraisals included in the 158 pages of e-mails and other documents unsealed Wednesday in a class-action lawsuit over Vista Capable.

"Stronger messaging regarding hardware requirements (the bar was set too low when Aero was dropped as a requirement for Vista Capable)," Dell's presentation noted in another slide.

That response wouldn't have come as a surprise to Microsoft. Dell had voiced its dissatisfaction with Microsoft's marketing plans a year and a half earlier. In August 2005, Gretchen Miller, Dell's director of mobile marketing responsible for the Texas company's laptop marketing gave feedback to Microsoft on its Vista programs.

"[The dual logo] adds another level of complexity to an already complex story, which in turn will create confusion for our customers, both corporate and consumer," said Miller in an e-mail. Although Dell advised Microsoft to scale back the logos, the software developer eventually went ahead with its plans for two stickers, once that announced a PC was "Vista Capable," the other advertising that the system was "Vista Premium Ready."

Dell also used the March 2007 presentation to call out other things it thought Microsoft got wrong in the push for Vista. "Windows Automatic Update was not what was advertised and has lead to a number of poor customer experiences," Dell charged. "Upgrade program needs a complete overhaul."

Microsoft's response to Dell's criticisms was not included in the documents revealed by U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman this week. A Microsoft OEM account manager who passed the Dell presentation to others at her company, however, said that she had told Dell that Microsoft would "have a more detailed postmortem discussion around capable and upgrade in the May [2007] timeframe."

Microsoft only just tweaked Windows Anytime Upgrade this month. As of Feb. 20, Microsoft started mailing DVDs equipped with a product activation code, rather than e-mailing the key and expecting the user to dig out the original Vista installation DVD.

Company managers and executives also did their own postmortems on Vista, the unsealed e-mails revealed. One that presumably carried more weight than others was written by Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development. In an e-mail to CEO Steve Ballmer written less than three weeks after he took over the post, Sinofsky spelled out his three reasons why Vista stumbled out the gate.

"No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006," Sinofsky said. "This led to the lack of availability [of device drivers]."

Next on his list: Changes to the operating systems' video and audio infrastructure. "Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM," he said. "This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver."

Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. "This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models."

According to the e-mails made public this week, Microsoft will apply the lessons it learned with Vista the next time around. "There is really nothing we can do in the short term," noted Joan Kalkman, the general manager of OEM and embedded worldwide marketing, in a message written a week after Sinofsky's. "In the long term we have worked hard to establish and have committed to an OEM Theme for Win[dows] 7 planning.

"This was rejected for Vista. Having this theme puts accountability and early thinking on programs like Capable/Ready so that we make the right decisions early on."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9065919





Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy
Motoko Rich

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers, Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first gun as a birthday present when she was 14. Ms. Seltzer told The Times last week, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

“There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative-writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.
In April 2005, Ms. Bender submitted about 100 pages to four publishers. Ms. McGrath, then at Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, agreed to a deal for what she said was less than $100,000. When Ms. McGrath moved to Riverhead in 2006, she moved Ms. Seltzer’s contract.

Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Seltzer’s sister, Ms. Hoffman, 47, said: “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” Referring to the publisher, she added: “I don’t know how they do business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east-central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

She said that although she returned to Campbell Hall, she remained in touch with people she met at Grant and then began working with groups that were trying to stop gang violence. She said that even after she moved to Oregon, she would often venture to South-Central Los Angeles to spend time with friends in the gang world.

In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.

Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said in an interview that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central, where “I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not.”

“I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I did not do it right. I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.” Ms. McGrath said that she had numerous conversations with Ms. Seltzer about being truthful. “She seems to be very, very naïve,” Ms. McGrath said. “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/bo...hp&oref=slogin





Tucker Carlson Unintentionally Reveals the Role of the American Press
Glenn Greenwald

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power's referring to Hillary Clinton as a "monster" -- one might say the only interesting part -- is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was "off the record." Here was Power's exact quote:

She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain's Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway -- as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be "off the record," and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

It's extremely likely, though, that had Power been speaking to a typical reporter from the American establishment media, her request to keep her comments a secret would have been honored. In one of the ultimate paradoxes, for American journalists -- whose role in theory is to expose the secrets of the powerful -- secrecy is actually their central religious tenet, especially when it comes to dealing with the most powerful. Protecting, rather than exposing, the secrets of the powerful is the fuel of American journalism. That's how they maintain their access to and good relations with those in power.

Illustrating that point as vividly as anything I can recall, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson had Peev on his show last night and angrily criticized her publication of Power's remarks. Carlson upbraided Peev for her lack of deference to someone as important as Power, and Peev retorted by pointing out exactly what that attitude reflects about Carlson and the American press generally (via LEXIS; h/t Mike Stark):

CARLSON: What -- she wanted it off the record. Typically, the arrangement is if someone you're interviewing wants a quote off the record, you give it to them off the record. Why didn't you do that?

PEEV: Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that's decided ahead of the interview. If a figure in public life.

CARLSON: Right.

PEEV: Someone who's ostensibly going to be an advisor to the man who could be the most powerful politician in the world, if she makes a comment and decides it's a bit too controversial and wants to withdraw it immediately after, unfortunately if the interview is on the record, it has to go ahead.

CARLSON: Right. Well, it's a little.

PEEV: I didn't set out in any way, shape.

CARLSON: Right. But I mean, since journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here, it's a little much being lectured on journalistic ethics by a reporter from the "Scotsman," but I wonder if you could just explain what you think the effect is on the relationship between the press and the powerful. People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did in this piece.

Don't you think that hurts the rest of us in our effort to get to the truth from the principals in these campaigns?

PEEV: If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren't doing a very good job of getting to the truth. Now I did not go out of my way in any way, shape or form to hurt Miss Power. I believe she's an intelligent and perfectly affable woman. In fact, she's -- she is incredibly intelligent so she -- who knows she may have known what she was doing.

She regretted it. She probably acted with integrity. It's not for me to decide one way or the other whether she did the right thing. But I did not go out and try to end her career.

Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to "the relationship between the press and the powerful." A journalist should never do anything that "hurts" the powerful, otherwise the powerful won't give access to the press any longer.

Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a "journalist" on TV so candidly describe their real function.

For anyone who wants to dismiss Carlson as some buffoon who is unrepresentative of journalists generally, I would refer them to the testimony at the Lewis Libby trial of the mighty, revered Tim Russert, Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News:

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission.

As The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin put it: "That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable."

Unlike Carlson, Tim Russert is the Big Guy of the American press corps. He's the one they all look up to and admire, the one they invariably point to as proof that tough, adversarial journalism is alive and well in the U.S. Yet that's the same Tim Russert who admitted under oath that -- even with no "off the record" agreement -- all of his conversations with government officials are presumptively confidential, and he never reports anything unless they give him explicit permission in advance to do so.

It's the same exact subservient mindset Carlson expressed last night, just more formally and under oath. That's how the vast majority of them think and behave. As Peev asked in astonishment when Carlson insisted Power's comments should not have been published because doing "hurtful" things like that that makes the powerful dislike reporters: "Are you really that acquiescent in the United States?" See the Iraq War. Or the Bush administration. Or Tim Russert's operating rules.

I just had a very similar issue arise last week, and not for the first time. In response to media criticism I wrote, a well-known journalist emailed me out of the blue, unsolicited, with very petulant, whiny objections to what I had written. At the top of his email, he wrote "OFF THE RECORD," and he did the same with a subsequent exchange. I had never communicated with him before and never agreed to any such arrangement. But that's a common practice among journalists and many political figures; they think that they can unilaterally slap an "off the record" label on whatever they say and expect that it will be honored.

I ended up not publishing that exchange solely because the probative value was minimal and the primary effect from doing so would just have been to make him look foolish for being so petulant and thin-skinned. Publishing it would have been more vindictive and petty than instructive, so I didn't. But his unilateral "OFF THE RECORD" designation played no role in my decision.

I considered publishing it, and I am certain that had I done so, he would have accused me of acting improperly by publishing something he unilaterally decreed to be "OFF THE RECORD." Just as Russert and Carlson said, rampant secrecy is the coin of their realm, the fuel that greases their access. Nothing should ever be disclosed unless everyone agrees to disclosure and it doesn't "hurt" the person whose comments are being reported.

The number one rule of the standard establishment journalist is to avoid offending the powerful because the more offense they give, the fewer favors the powerful will do for the journalists. Conversely, and by logical necessity, the more journalists please the powerful, the more favors the powerful will do for them. As Carlson put it: "People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did." I can't think of any single dynamic that better explains what has happened the last eight years than that one.

* * * * *

As for Carlson's snide, self-loving claim that "journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here," just watch this relentlessly probing, adversarial interview by the BBC's Jeremy Paxman of John Bolton regarding the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, and ask yourself: how many American TV reporters would ever dare to conduct an interview of a high Bush official like this, especially when it's with a Serious Foreign Policy Expert regarding our being a Nation At War?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...son/index.html





Where Greek Ideals Meet New England Charm
Roger Mummert

A GROUP of first-time visitors to the Providence Athenaeum climbed the steep stones steps to the imposing front door. One pried open the door tentatively, peered inside and exclaimed, “Oh, this is what a library is supposed to look like!”

This scene was observed by Alison Maxell, executive director of the athenaeum, who said that time and again, she has seen this same reaction: curiosity followed by wonderment. “A lot of people tell us they weren’t sure if they were allowed in here,” she said.

They very much are.

The Providence Athenaeum, whose roots go back to 1753 and which moved to its present building in 1838, is one of about 20 historic membership libraries around the nation that continue to play a vibrant role in the cultural lives of their communities — and welcome the curious.

Some of these membership libraries, including institutions in Philadelphia; St. Johnsbury, Vt.; and La Jolla, Calif., bear the title athenaeum, a Greek term for a place of learning, culture and discourse that stems from Athena, the goddess of wisdom and the arts. In the first half of the 19th century, the athenaeum concept — a library that is also a center for edification in the arts and sciences — was popular in the United States. “From the time of our founding, this was a gathering place,” Ms. Maxell said.

(Some early athenaeums, like those in Nantucket and Pittsfield, Mass., have become public libraries, while the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford now operates primarily as an art museum.)

Today, the Providence Athenaeum attracts more than 50 members and guests for Friday night discussions on culture and history. “We started serving sherry, and we’re scouring antique stores for more sherry glasses,” Ms. Maxell said of the popular series.

As if tailor-made for a weekend getaway, a series of historic athenaeums lines up along a virtual Athenaeum Alley in New England. Open for visits are athenaeums in Newport and Providence, R.I.; in Boston and Salem, Mass.; and in Portsmouth, N.H.

Visiting these bookish sanctuaries, which are housed in historic buildings in a number of architectural styles, provides an opportunity to touch remnants of American history. Many of the same books, newspapers, maps and documents that were read in colonial times can be viewed, admired and (with some limitations to nonmembers) handled.

Visitors to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, the oldest lending library in America, can survey at close range the 755 titles in the library’s Original Collection. This is a selection of books that 46 educated Newport residents collectively purchased from England in 1748; they built the library to house the collection.

“These are some of the same books that residents of Newport carried around these streets in 1750,” said Cheryl Helms, the director, standing in the Harrison Room in the original part of the building, the first private Palladian-style structure built in the colonies.

Many volumes concern law and theology, while others describe science and practical matters (making beer and how to build a privy). Ms. Helms explained that while rare books of this era need to be viewed by arrangement, they are, indeed, there for the reading.

“This is not wallpaper,” she said. “These books are meant to be used, and they are.”

Last year, the Redwood had 18,000 visitors. Many wanted to view its collection of furniture, sculpture and painting (there are six signed Gilbert Stuart portraits and two other paintings attributed to him). Frequently, scholars make arrangements to delve into vast resources on local and colonial history.

THE New England athenaeums I visited on a recent trip maintain not only active memberships, but also some peculiar terminology. Members are commonly called proprietors; some athenaeums distinguish share-holding proprietors from a second tier of members, called subscribers. At the Portsmouth Athenaeum, the director is called the keeper.

Many athenaeums maintain lists of rules that spell out consequences for offenses like writing in books. Some prohibit pens and provide pencils for notation, as well as cotton gloves for handling aged materials. Large or old books often must be rested on wedge-shaped foam cradles to protect brittle spines.

Surprisingly, the Boston Athenaeum permits dogs — those that behave, a staff member was quick to add.

These athenaeums also provide, in those areas where talking aloud is encouraged, lively opportunities for exchanging ideas with other devotees of literature, arts and sciences.

“In addition to having access to our book stock, members find intellectual stimulation in our exhibitions and by being part of discussion groups,” said Richard Wendorf, director and librarian of the Boston Athenaeum and the editor of “America’s Membership Libraries” (Oak Knoll Press, 2007), which details histories of 16 of the largest membership libraries.

More than 150 events, from afternoon teas to lectures and concerts, are held there each year. Members also may participate in any of a dozen discussion groups (fiction, mystery novels or World War II history, for example). Visitors, Mr. Wendorf added, are welcome to enjoy art exhibits on the athenaeum’s first floor while experiencing a remarkable work of 19th-century architecture. Tours of the building are given Tuesdays and Thursdays by appointment.

(A note to those who visit: While “athenaeum” is commonly pronounced ath-eh-NEE-um, in New England ath-eh-NAY-um is acceptable.)

The Boston Athenaeum was established in 1807 and since 1849 has been housed in an elegantly appointed building just a penny toss from the State Capitol on Beacon Hill. It has more than 600,000 volumes in its collection, and its notable paintings and sculpture are displayed throughout the seven-story building.

There are 7,270 members, who pay annual fees of $115 for individuals to $290 for a family. Some of them are proprietors, who own shares in the library, in many cases inherited shares held in their families for generations. Among the members over the centuries were Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Quincy Adams.

The Boston Athenaeum has several special collections, among them much of the personal library of George Washington. From within the athenaeum’s hushed reading rooms one can look out the building’s rear windows to the Granary Burying Ground, where tourists huddle around the graves of Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere.

While roaming through stacks, one encounters books from completely different eras — from three or even four centuries — and this makes for random discoveries and often surprising associations. Whereas public libraries weed out books that are not checked out for five or 10 years, membership libraries tend to maintain and integrate books that bridge one century to another.

“We try to purchase books that we intend to keep,” said Mr. Wendorf, who emphasized that at the Boston Athenaeum any weeding is extremely selective.

He added that athenaeum methods of stacking books (by size or by several different or proprietary systems) also promote serendipitous discoveries.

“This is browsing at its very best,” he said, emphasizing that the entire book stock of the Boston Athenaeum, save for rare vaulted materials, is available for members to explore. “The physicality of books often is very important.”

In perusing the American history section in the Providence Athenaeum, one might glance through a recent book on Hurricane Katrina and find on the same shelf a century-old volume of “The Winning of the West” by Theodore Roosevelt.

Merely handling aged books often tends to degrade them, a problem that the Boston Athenaeum addresses in its conservation laboratory. There, in the building’s basement, conservators busily work in white lab coats, repairing spines and hand-stamping replacement bindings.

“Our goal is to allow members to handle books without damaging them,” explained James Reid-Cunningham, the chief conservator.

AT the Portsmouth Athenaeum, “We don’t turn our back on the past,” said Tom Hardiman, the keeper, adding that almost no book published before 1900 may be discarded by the library.

It was founded in 1817 and occupies an 1805 building on Market Square at the center of what once was a bustling port city.

Some of its rarest books, newspapers and documents, like a leather-bound accounts book from an 18th-century shipping merchant, are kept in a vault. Among the collections are 12,000 historic photographs, including once-popular 3-D stereoviews. About 4,000 photos and postcards have been scanned and placed on the athenaeum’s Web site.

The Portsmouth Athenaeum’s circulating collection fills a warren of rooms, united by small doors and winding staircases that list from the settling of the building over the centuries. Walls are covered with paintings of ships and with models used in the construction of many seaworthy vessels. Maritime buffs often go there to see the models, in particular, Mr. Hardiman added.

Experienced members of athenaeums often have strategies for locating good books from centuries past, with titles and authors long forgotten, according to Jean Marie Procious, director of the Salem Athenaeum, which was founded in 1810 and once counted Nathaniel Hawthorne as a member. Some of the athenaeum’s current members have a liking for 19th-century mystery novels, and there is a vast stock of such books in its stacks.

“Some members look for novels with the most-tattered covers,” Ms. Procious explained. “They figure these were the most widely read and must be the best.”

For all of the athenaeums’ efforts to be living centers for stimulating the intellect and delighting the artistic senses, they remain destinations of discovery, places where one can travel through time over a continuum of American history and literature.
M. T. Anderson, the author of “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” (Candlewick Press, 2006), made extensive use of his membership in the Boston Athenaeum in doing research for that book, a colonial-era tale of a young African-American who is trapped in a cruel experiment.

Mr. Anderson’s goal was to write the novel, which received the National Book Award for Young People in 2006, in an 18th-century voice. At the athenaeum, Mr. Anderson found an abundance of literature published before 1800. He immersed himself in these materials to recreate the language, grammar and syntax common to 18th-century Boston.

“The athenaeum was so helpful in my research,” Mr. Anderson said. To recreate accurate military details, he requested a book on tactical maneuvers that once was owned by George Washington, and which he viewed under supervision in the rare books room.

“I was quaking as I read it,” he said.

VISITOR INFORMATION

A selection of membership libraries in New England, and their current exhibits.

Redwood Library and Athenaeum, 50 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, R.I. (401-847-0292, www.redwoodlibrary.org); “The Harlem Renaissance: Poetry, Prose and Politics” and “The African American Photography of Carl Van Vechten: The Legacy Years,” both until May 22.

Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street, Providence, R.I. (401-421-6970; www.providenceathenaeum.org); “Robert Burns (1759-1796), the Charles Bradley Collection at the Providence Athenaeum,” through April 4.

Boston Athenaeum, 10 ½ Beacon Street, Boston (617-227-0270, www.bostonathenaeum.org); “All Shook Up,” Thomas Kellner photographs of the Boston Athenaeum, through April 19.

Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street, Salem, Mass. (978-744-2540, www.salemathenaeum.net); “Celebrating 100 Years at 337 Essex Street,” historic photos, blueprints and documents of the design by the architect William G. Rantoul, through March.

Portsmouth Athenaeum, 9 Market Square, Portsmouth, N.H.: (603-431-2538, www.portsmouthathenaeum.org); “The Preservation Movement Then and Now,” until May 3.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/03/07...athenaeum.html





How do the Three Leading Education-Orientated Ultraportable Notebooks Stack up? Take Our Visual Tour to Find Out.

Small and inexpensive notebooks designed primarily for schoolchildren — particularly in developing countries — have been a hot topic ever since Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project began in 2005. Production XO laptops (above, left) became available in November 2007.

OLPC is a not-for-profit organisation, whereas Intel, which notoriously joined and then exited the OLPC project, most definitely is not. Nevertheless, Intel's World Ahead program has the laudable aim of 'connecting the next billion people to uncompromised technology around the world', and part of that program is a low-cost notebook platform called Classmate (above, centre).

ASUS's Eee (above, right) has proven extremely popular since its mid-2007 launch. Designed in conjunction with Intel, the Eee has a broader remit than the OLPC and the Classmate in that it's less specifically targeted at developing countries and therefore less rugged. In the UK, the Eee is distributed by RM as the RM Asus miniBook.

In the following pages we take a comparative pictorial look at the OLPC XO, Intel Classmate and ASUS Eee.

The Intel Classmate (centre) is the bulkiest of the three notebooks, measuring 24.5cm wide by 19.6cm deep by 4.4cm high. The OLPC XO has the biggest footprint (24.2cm x 22.8cm), while the ASUS Eee is the baby of the bunch at 22.5cm by 16.5cm by 3.5cm. The Eee is also the lightest of the trio by some distance, weighing 920g, compared to 1.45kg for both the XO and the Classmate. In terms of overall stylishness the Eee is the winner, but the XO and the Classmate are both more rounded and rugged, and come with carrying handles.

The OLPC XO has the biggest screen, an innovative 7.5in. dual-mode transmissive/reflective LCD that can swivel from traditional clamshell mode to 'e-book' mode with the screen facing outwards, tablet-style (although it's not a touch-screen). The Classmate and Eee both have similar, rather cramped, 7in. TFT displays.

There are three different operating systems on view here: the XO runs a Red Hat Fedora 6-based version of Linux and the Sugar graphical user interface (GUI); the Classmate runs Windows XP (although some Linux distributions are also supported); and the Eee runs a Xandros-based Linux distribution (with Windows XP also now available).

The XO's keyboard is a waterproof membrane-style unit, while the Classmate and Eee have more traditional, if small, keyboards.

The left-hand sides of the three notebooks all carry a pair of audio jacks (mic/headphone) and a USB port; the Classmate and Eee add an RJ-45 Ethernet connector and a fan intake — features missing from the wireless-only, passive-cooled OLPC XO. The latter's ear-like antennas cater for 802.11s mesh networking as well as standard 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity (also supported in the Classmate and Eee).

The connector for the XO's 12V AC adapter is also on the left-hand side: the notebook is designed to work with off-grid power sources such as solar panels and car batteries; a human-powered 'yo-yo' pull-cord generator has also been designed, although this is not yet widely available.

Another unusual feature of the XO is its microphone input, which can also be used to measure voltage and resistance, allowing sensors to be plugged in and their output recorded by the included Measure application (or 'activity' in OLPC's terminology).

The ASUS Eee is the only notebook of this trio with a VGA connector for an external monitor. The right-hand side of the Eee also carries two USB 2.0 ports (making a total of three), an SD/MMC card slot and a Kensington lock slot. The Intel Classmate's right side has the power connector, a second USB port and a fan vent, while the OLPC XO has a pair of USB ports (again making three in all), one mounted horizontally, the other vertically.

Viewed from the front, the bulkiness of the 4.4cm-thick Intel Classmate (centre) is clear, as is the relative slimness of the ASUS Eee, which tapers from 3.5cm at the back to 2.15cm at the front

In this picture, we have removed the protective cover of the Intel Classmate (centre) to reveal the SD card slot at the back. The rear of the ASUS Eee is mostly taken up by the battery, the only other feature being the power connector. Meanwhile, the back of the OLPC XO is simply a carrying handle.

Although it's the smallest of the three notebooks, the ASUS Eee has the largest keyboard. The main keys measure 15mm by 13mm and have a positive action; adults with large fingers may struggle to touch-type on the Eee, but children should have no problems. The Eee's touchpad is also relatively small.

Like the Eee, the Classmate has a traditional-looking keyboard, although it feels more solid than the Eee's. However, the key-tops are slightly smaller and the position of one or two keys (notably the '+/=' key) may confuse at first. The Classmate's circular touchpad seems slightly gimmicky, but is reasonably usable.

The Eee's keyboard is not ruggedised in any way, while the Classmate's is described as 'water resistant'. The OLPC XO's keyboard is properly rugged, being a sealed membrane-type unit (see next page). The XO has a conventional two-button touchpad flanked by two areas that will accept stylus input, although there's no stylus provided as yet.

The keys on the OLPC keyboard are relatively small and the action takes some getting used to — for adults at any rate. However, children who tested our review sample had no complaints (in fact one commented that it was 'addictive, like popping bubble-wrap').

The OLPC XO (left) has the biggest screen, measuring 7.5in. across the diagonal; the Intel Classmate and ASUS Eee both have 7in. TFT screens with native resolutions of 800 by 480 pixels.

The XO's screen is an innovative dual-mode TFT that can operate in greyscale/reflective mode to save power, or in LED-backlit colour/transmissive mode (shown here) for maximum inage quality. In greyscale/reflective mode, the resolution is 1,200 by 900 pixels and power consumption is 0.1-0.2W; in colour/transmissive mode, resolution is approximately 800 by 600 pixels and power consumption 0.2-1W, according to OLPC.

The XO has a 0.3 megapixel digital camera to the right of the display; the Classmate has no camera, although there are plans to include one in the next version of the system; the entry-level 'Surf' version of the Eee (pictured here) has no camera, but slightly more expensive models have a 0.3 megapixel unit.

Here is the OLPC XO in e-book (greyscale) mode, with the screen rotated and folded flat, facing outwards. Flanking the screen are the speaker grilles, with the camera (right) and microphone (left) above them. Below the speakers are a quartet of game buttons on the right and a four-way directional pad on the left. Beneath these are the power button (right) and a screen rotation control (left). There are also LEDs for power and battery status on the right, and wireless acquisition and activity on the left.

The battery in our OLPC XO review sample was a 4-cell 3,100mAh LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) unit, although 5-cell nickel metal hydride batteries (NiMH) are also used. Among the advantages of lithium iron phosphate are the absence of heavy metals and the ability to support more charge/discharge cycles than conventional Li-ion cells (OLPC quotes 2,000 in this case). Battery life figures vary, but in our simple rundown tests we got around 3.5 hours with the screen backlight on (colour/transmissive mode) and 4.5 hours with the backlight off (greyscale/reflective mode).

The Intel Classmate's battery is not designed to be easily removed — you need to undo four screws to get the protective cover off and two more to release the battery itself. Having done this, you discover a bulky and relatively weighty 6-cell 4,000mAh Li-ion unit. Intel claims around four hours' usage for the Classmate on battery power: this seems optimistic in our experience, although we have yet to formally test this.

The Eee has the most compact battery pack, a 4-cell 4,400mAh Li-ion unit for which ASUS claims 2.8 hours' life, which seems reasonable in our (so far anecdotal) experience.
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/...9359143,00.htm





Coming to a Watering Hole Near You: OLPC's Mesh Networking

James Cameron on mesh networking, cow powered laptops and the OLPC
Andrew Hendry

Even in today's high-tech world of unified communications and wireless mobility, the idea of two kids with laptops sitting under a tree somewhere in Saharan Africa being able to exchange information without any kind of infrastructure or configuration, seems as wild an idea as the land they live in.

But with the OLPC project, this scenario is rapidly becoming a widespread reality.

James Cameron works for a computer company in support for enterprise Linux customers, and is deeply immersed in electronics, radio and software engineering. For the past two years Cameron has devoted his diverse technical talents to testing the wireless network component of the One Laptop Per Child project.

Cameron got involved with the project because he lives and works in the outback, in a small village called Tooraweenah, 58km from Coonabarabran (approx 500km northwest of Sydney).

There are few wireless access points and little noise in the radio spectrum there, making it the perfect location for testing the OLPC XO laptops as it mirrors the third world environments they are being deployed in.

"One of our test scenarios is two kids under a tree, in the middle of nowhere, who want to transfer a file between one laptop and another. At the moment with the software that we have, the hardware, and the mesh automation, they can open their laptops, transfer whatever it is they want and then walk off. They don't need any IP address configuration or anything special. It just works," he said.

Mesh networking increases the range of an access point. It is a type of wireless networking that uses redundant and distributed nodes to increase the reliability and range of the network. It is used to route information between OLPC XOs by turning the laptop and the child carrying it into the network infrastructure.

"Instead of the client PCs going to a single central point, what happens with a mesh network is they find their way to a selected point by working through all the other nodes in the mesh," Cameron said.

The mesh network is self-healing and autonomous, and meets the goals of the OLPC project by working without the need to hire electricians and radio specialists to make it work.

"The kids don't have to live within sight of the school to be able to use the school's repository of information, like its online library; they only have to be within radio sight of another kid who is within radio sight.

"They [schools] don't need to put in the infrastructure to cover the whole village - the kids carry it with them as they go home. It means you can deploy to more schools because you don't have to pay for the extra infrastructure," Cameron said.

Testing in the outback, Cameron discovered that the range of the XO could go up to 1.6km "quite easily" at 1.5m above ground.

But in the vast Australian outback, the Sahara or any other great rural expanse, 1.6km is still a very short distance.

"Imagine the kids are down at the waterhole after school, they will take their laptops there of course because they are on their way home, but they cant get to the school server without sending some of the kids back along the path to act as mesh nodes to get there. But if we've got a tall tree nearby, the school can organize to put a mesh node on top of that powered by a solar panel."

Cameron estimates a cost of about US$35 for a mesh node, a battery and a solar panel that can turn any tall tree, windmill, roof or rocky outcrop into a stand alone mesh node, ensuring coverage for the kids at an affordable cost.

"Assuming a range of 1.6km holds true, (the mathematical formula for area of a circle) Pi R squared tells us one well placed mesh node will cover up to eight square kilometres."

Cheap, conservable energy is also a big issue for the OLPC project, as many of the children who will use them wont have a way to charge their laptop at home, and will rely on their school to charge it for them.

"The school might have a generator or a solar panel, or in one school where we've got laptops deployed now we have two cows who walk around pushing a lever which rotates a generator that powers fifteen laptops for charging, so you get energy from wherever it's available," Cameron said.

The OLPC can also be powered by a hand crank, and can maintain an active wireless connection when it is hibernating.

Cameron isn't paid for his research and development work, but gets his rewards from being able to "play with some cool gear," and by knowing that his efforts are aiding an education revolution.

"I want to make a difference. I can't make a difference by creating some new fantastic computer for a company because all they will do is sell it. But on this we can change the way kids learn, we can improve education over the entire planet."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1228527977





No Need to Take Discs Along
Billie Cohen

JUST because you have two homes doesn’t mean you need to have two of everything else: cable or satellite TV subscriptions, DVRs, telephone systems, music libraries, Internet packages. Thanks to a little thing called technology, you can set up those services in your primary home and then access them while on vacation.

“When it comes to content, you sort of want it all to be in both places,” said Danny Briere, chief executive of TeleChoice, a consulting firm, and co-author of “Smart Homes for Dummies.” “You don’t want to say, ‘Darn, I left that video at home’ or ‘Shucks, I did not load that CD up here.’ What you want is to be able to synchronize your collections between the two places so that when you load a CD into one, it shows up on the other.”

The easiest way to do that is to have Internet access in both locations and then use the ether to shuttle entertainment back and forth between houses. A mobile router like the Kyocera KR1 (www.kyocera-wireless.com) uses a PC card to create a Wi-Fi hot spot for your phone or laptop. While it’s a good idea to check whether a router supports your Internet carrier and your PC card, Mr. Briere predicts that compatibility will become less of a concern as the industry moves to an open network, meaning that devices will be able to work across different carrier networks. Right now, that’s not the case.

The best example, he said, is that most phones you get from phone carriers have constraints on whether you can use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for other uses than they determine. “You can use Bluetooth to access your phone,” he said, “but they don’t want you to use that to let 10 people get on to your phone and access their broadband network.” Mr. Briere expects this, too, to change. Phones will come to serve as Wi-Fi hubs, “which means everybody in your ski condo can hop onto your broadband access.”

In the meantime, broadband Internet might be the one service worth investing in at both homes, because once that’s in place, you can pretty much use it to channel anything else. Want to listen to music? You don’t have to rely only on your iPod or MP3 player.

A company called ReQuest (www.request.com) has an Internet-based system that makes your music library available in your second home; when you add something to your home collection, that change is automatically reflected at your vacation pad.

Want to watch TV? You’re no longer limited to YouTube; broadcast and cable stations now offer much of their content free online. But if you’d rather watch regular television or access your home DVR from afar, that can be done, too.

An efficient option is a small device called a SlingBox (www.slingmedia.com, $129 to $229). Plug one end into your Internet connection and the other into your home TV’s cable box or DVR or both, and you can watch television and your recorded video library on a computer, cellphone or laptop. The new SlingCatcher (an add-on device, about $250) lets you view all that on an actual TV.

“The basic premise is that with a SlingBox, you have access to your living-room television no matter where you happen to be,” said Brian Jaquet, a Sling Media spokesman.

Control4, a higher-end home-automation system, also links audiovisual systems to multiple homes, but must be installed by a professional (www.control4.com). Or just stick with what you already have — if what you have is satellite TV. “The satellite TV service providers will allow you to treat your second-home TVs as if they were in your first home,” Mr. Briere said. “So for an extra $5 per month per TV, you can get your full subscription at your second home. It’s all aboveboard.”

The other big service second-home owners get stuck paying for twice is a phone line. Sure, you could use your cell as your main line while you’re away, but that can be difficult to share with the family. As a solution, Mr. Briere recommends VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol, a service offered by companies like Vonage, Optimum and Skype, that allows you to make and receive calls over the Internet (often with a normal telephone), using the same number all the time.

That way your friends and family can call you as if you were at home, and — with a little effort and a lot less money — you can feel as if you are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/tr...es/07your.html





Hack Into a Windows PC - No Password Needed
Asher Moses

A security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password.

Adam Boileau first demonstrated the hack, which affects Windows XP computers but has not yet been tested with Windows Vista, at a security conference in Sydney in 2006, but Microsoft has yet to develop a fix.

Interviewed in ITRadio's Risky Business podcast, Boileau said the tool, released to the public today, could "unlock locked Windows machines or login without a password ... merely by plugging in your Firewire cable and running a command".

Boileau, a consultant with Immunity Inc., said he did not release the tool publicly in 2006 because "Microsoft was a little cagey about exactly whether Firewire memory access was a real security issue or not and we didn't want to cause any real trouble".

But now that a couple of years have passed and the issue has not resolved, Boileau decided to release the tool on his website.

To use the tool, hackers must connect a Linux-based computer to a Firewire port on the target machine. The machine is then tricked into allowing the attacking computer to have read and write access to its memory.

With full access to the memory, the tool can then modify Windows' password protection code, which is stored there, and render it ineffective.

Older desktop computers do not come equipped with Firewire ports, which are needed for the hack to work, but many recent models do. Most laptops made in the last few years include Firewire ports.

Paul Ducklin, head of technology for security firm Sophos, said the security hole found by Boileau was not a vulnerability or bug in the traditional sense, because the ability to use the Firewire port to access a computer's memory was actually a feature of Firewire.

"If you have a Firewire port, disable it when you aren't using it," Ducklin said.

"That way, if someone does plug into your port unexpectedly, your side of the Firewire link is dead, so they can't interact with your PC, legitimately or otherwise."

Ducklin also advised people to be careful when giving others physical access to their computer.

"I know people who'd think three times about asking passing strangers to take their photo in front of the Opera House in case they did a runner with the camera, yet who are much more casual with their laptop PC, as long as it's software-locked, even though the hardware alone is worth five times as much as the camera," he said.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/securi...402423638.html





It Came From Outer Space

Images of UFOs, purportedly videotaped in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, have Internet viewers watching and debating.
David Sarno

Second in a series of occasional Web Scout mysteries, in which we investigate some of the questions haunting the Web entertainment world. In this installment, we get to the bottom of the UFO videos currently raging on YouTube.

--

THOUGH the island in the Caribbean shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic was spared a direct hit from Hurricane Dean this week, it may be that other, stranger entities made landfall there.

Evidence "UFO Haiti" and "UFO Dominican Republic" -- two authentic-looking home videos recently posted on the "News and Politics" section of YouTube. The films, which were uploaded from two different anonymous accounts, both appear to record close-up sightings of Area 51-type craft hovering above the island's beaches at sunset. As the ships pass eerily over, wind whips through the palm trees, dogs bark and a woman gasps in disbelief. All very real seeming. The jerky, amateur camera work could easily be that of a panicked Caribbean tourist.

The videos hummed to the top of YouTube's "Most Viewed" list, and from there invaded discussion forums and news aggregator sites across the Web, where debate raged about their origin and authenticity. Skeptics pronounced the videos a computer-generated fraud, probably part of some viral marketing ploy. Microsoft's Halo 3 was coming out soon, wasn't it? Or maybe it was for Nicole Kidman's movie "Invasion" -- or even the secretive new J.J. Abrams project about some kind of monster attack on New York.

Still, with all the cries of fraud and corporate opportunism, even the most steadfast doubters couldn't find anything in the footage that was obviously bogus. No matter where you stood, you had to agree that the quality of the movies was surpassing. More than a few observers in either camp called them "the best UFO videos ever."

"Frankly I'm worried about this," wrote one observer on the conspiracy site AboveTopSecret.com. "If people feel it necessary to flood the Internet or the UFO community with increasingly more 'realistic' hoaxes, what will happen in the event of a true landing?"

They're fake, right? Right?!

With so many people scrutinizing every frame in the videos, it was not long before the first imperfections were spotted in the story's hull. For one thing, no one could find any reports of flying objects in the Haitian or Dominican press -- or anywhere else. Surely an extraterrestrial visitation would've at least merited a brief. Or, failing that, a blog entry?

And yes, after a few viewings, "UFO Haiti" began to feel a little too real. In spite of the camerawoman's shaky hand and trouble keeping focus, she still manages a cinematically perfect tracking shot of the ship as it flies directly over her head. Moreover, her gasp is rather glaringly mistimed. It comes after she's already aimed the camera at the UFOs -- seconds after she's first seen them.

But it was the trees that aroused the most suspicion.

Freeze-frame the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos side-to-side, critics found, and you will see a palm tree in both videos that appears to be almost the exact same shape.

Aha!

Wait.

Two palm trees on the same tropical island? And they look really similar? Have you ever seen two palm trees that don't look really similar? That was the best the Internet crowd could do?

Someone needed to look deeper. And perhaps that someone was named Web Scout.

False starts, red herrings
The key would be to find the source of the videos. But there was a complication. For one thing, the videos had been posted and re-posted across the Net, and it was not trivial to identify which ones were the originals.

By the time I got in the game, there were several videos entitled "UFO Haiti" that actually predated the version that was on the "Most-Viewed" list. The best idea, then, was to contact the posters of several of the earliest "UFO Haiti" videos, including barzolff814, whose 2.2 million-view video was listed as the fourth to be posted under that name.

Within an hour, I got a message back from a 17-year-old Irish girl named Heather. It read as follows:

"umm yeah. whatever. you people are stupid. find something better to do with your time. and get a life."

A closer look at Heather's "UFO Haiti" revealed that it was 10 seconds of a still photo of her kissing her boyfriend, followed by a short video clip of a scared-looking squirrel, with the word "Pervert!!" flashing repeatedly in white.

Heather was a hoaxster, all right. Just not the one I was looking for.

As I waited for other "Haiti" posters to respond, I decided to make another study of the clues. In the discussion of the controversial palm trees, the name Vue 6 kept coming up. Vue 6 was a program by E-on Software that animators use to generate sophisticated-looking natural environments. A promotional clip on E-on's website included several scenes of tropical islands -- covered in hundreds of identical windblown palm trees. Furthermore, one of the promos even showed a cartoonish flying saucer skimming over a field!

I immediately tried to reach E-on President Nicholas Phelps at his office in Paris. (Another video -- "UFO OVER PARIS" -- had been posted in April. It was nowhere near as convincing as "UFO Haiti," but still -- vaguely reminiscent.)

Phelps' receptionist said he was not available. Soon afterward, I received a message from Phelps asking if we could conduct the interview by e-mail. Despite my repeated attempts to get him on the phone, he was recalcitrant.

On the matter of the video, Phelps admitted that it appeared "very much like the movie was created with Vue 6" but denied E-on had anything to do with creating it. "Although I admit it would have been smart marketing, lol!"

With my main lead blown, I could find nothing to lol about.

Somebody up there . . .

It has been said that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But this is not always true. Sometimes you get lucky even if you barely work hard at all.

The next morning, with all the good leads exhausted and most hope lost, the telephone rang.

(Actually, the computer rang. The Scout uses Skype.)

It was a woman named Sam. From Corsica. "Hello," she said. "I am calling on behalf of barzolff814."

Barzolff814? Why, he was the person who had posted the No. 1 Haiti video!

Barzolff, Sam said, wished to remain anonymous, but he was prepared to share the full story of the videos. I agreed not to reveal his real name. Then I was all ears as Sam began parroting into the phone the words I could hear Barzolff saying in the background.

The 35-year-old Barzolff is a professional animator who attended one of the most prestigious art schools in France and has a decade of experience with computer graphics and commercial animation.

It took Barzolff a total of 17 hours to make both the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos. He did it all by himself using a MacBook Pro and a suite of commercially available 3-D animation programs, including Vue 6. The videos are 100% computer-generated.

The videos, he said, were intended as research for a feature film project he's been working on with Partizan, the France-based production company responsible for, among others, Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

When contacted to verify the story, "Eternal Sunshine" producer Georges Bermann said it was all true, and that Barzolff was "an absolute genius" who could "make anything look entirely real."

To prove that he was truly behind the videos, Barzolff agreed to provide the L.A. Times with a new spacecraft video. Called "Proof," the video depicts a small version of one of the spacecraft floating above a Paris street. As the camera pans over, the viewer sees two elderly women at a cafe, one of whom is holding a remote control device. Humorously, of course, this video makes use of computer graphics as well.

The movie Barzolff is working on for the big screen is about two guys who create a UFO hoax so realistic that it spirals out of their control. "For better or worse," said Barzolff, who cited being "overwhelmed" by the response to his video as one of the reasons he didn't want to go public with his name.

Barzolff stressed the videos were not intended as a viral marketing ploy. His movie is still in the idea phase, and he created the hoax strictly as a "sociological experiment" -- in other words, just to see what would happen.

What happened far exceeded his expectations.

After he finished producing the videos, he posted them and went to bed. "I thought they would reach perhaps 2,000 people," he said through Sam.

"When I woke up the next morning there were 70,000 views," on the Haiti video. "Twenty minutes later it was up to 130,000 views. It grew exponentially from there."

Barzolff called the results of his experiment "entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive, and a little scary."

The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, "many people refuse to believe it's a hoax."
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/t...,4026771.story





Iranian Internet Users Face Blockage During Coming Election

The Iranian government might block private access to the Internet for the general legislative election on March 14, two Iranian news outlets reported Monday.

But the two accounts appeared to differ on the rationale. "Shutting down the Internet service will depend on security plans and on the Ministry of Telecommunication," said Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the interior minister, according to Etemad Melli, a daily.

At the same time, a senior election official, Muhammad Javad Mahmoudi, said a shutdown would help ensure that the government had unimpeded Internet service for the election, even though the governments' Internet lines had been upgraded, according to ISNA.
Iran has placed many restrictions on the Internet, but it has never shut down the Internet on such a scale. Several million Iranians follow political news on the Internet, and political parties have their own active Web sites.

In 2006, the authorities banned download speeds on private computers faster than 128 kilobytes per second.

The government also uses sophisticated filtering equipment to block hundreds of Web sites and blogs that it considers religiously or politically inappropriate. Many bloggers have been jailed in the past years, and dozens of Web sites have been shut down.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/...ica/tehran.php





F.C.C. Ask TV Station to Explain Blackout in Alabama
Mike Nizza

Doubts about an Alabama TV station’s explanation of a blacked-out segment of “60 Minutes” have been reinforced by a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission who says it “needs to get to the bottom of this.”

In an appearance before the National Press Club today, Michael Copps confirmed that he had urged Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the F.C.C., to investigate a question raised by the extraordinary timing of the malfunction at the station: It began just as a highly anticipated report about a major political scandal in the state was to begin, and ended in time for the program’s next segment.

Remembering a 1955 case of a Mississippi TV station that blocked a network news program about desegregation and spuriously claimed that cable trouble was to blame, Mr. Copps said, “The F.C.C. now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here,” according to Reuters.

He continued, “Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?”

Other members of the commission, which is made up of a Republican chairman, two other Republicans and two Democrats, have been less vocal so far.

An unnamed source told Broadcasting & Cable that Jonathan Adelstein, a Democratic commissioner, “fully supports” an investigation of the incident. Another source told Reuters that Mr. Martin was mulling whether to send the station — WHNT in Huntsville, Ala. — an official letter of inquiry, according to Reuters. Deborah Taylor Tate and Robert McDowell, both Republicans, have yet to comment on the incident.

Back in Huntsville, the station’s news director was already aghast at all the negative attention. After spending two days answering viewer complaints, she spilled her guts on the WHNT blog, writing a post titled “8 Mysterious Missing Minutes, Countless Hours of HELL.”

“Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??,” Denise Vicker asked with the urgency of double question marks. “I can assure you no sane person would do this.”
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





Hollywood on Edge of Its Seats as Wiretapping Trial Is Set to Start
David M. Halbfinger

More than five years have gone by since a Hollywood reporter who had been menacingly warned off of a story learned that her phones had also been tapped. On Wednesday, Anthony Pellicano, the onetime sleuth-to-the-stars accused of that eavesdropping, will go on trial here on racketeering charges in a case that has alternately seized the entertainment industry’s attention and left it wondering what all the fuss was about.

Federal prosecutors have outlined a case including its share of familiar Hollywood names. Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures; Michael Ovitz, the deposed super-agent; and Bert Fields, the go-to lawyer for celebrities and moguls alike, have all acknowledged hiring Mr. Pellicano in business disputes in which the detective has since been accused of breaking the law.

But each has also denied knowing anything about Mr. Pellicano’s suspected wiretapping. And after five years of grand jury testimony, high-profile leaks and news articles examining the F.B.I.’s evidence, Mr. Grey, Mr. Ovitz and Mr. Fields have not been accused of anything.

Instead, those charged with conspiring with Mr. Pellicano include a former police detective, a retired telephone company repairman, a computer programmer and a litigious Israeli businessman; in Hollywood terms, a D-list of no-name defendants. Even Terry N. Christensen — no household name, but the founding partner of a top entertainment industry litigation firm — has had his portion of the case postponed and spun off into a separate trial.

The main witnesses, meanwhile, will include players in other industries, like a hedge fund manager and the billionaire head of a Los Angeles-based buyout firm; the former wives of the actor Keith Carradine and a real estate developer, Robert Maguire; and a parade of former employees and informants of Mr. Pellicano with firsthand knowledge of his activities. (It could at least get colorful: one ex-worker, Tarita Virtue, posed in lingerie for Maxim as “America’s hottest private eye,” before telling the F.B.I. that she had transcribed hundreds of Mr. Pellicano’s wiretaps.)

That said, the trial holds considerable interest in Hollywood. Big names might be called to testify, and revelations about the origins of the case may offer additional intrigue. Prosecutors have closely guarded the names of those they plan to call to the stand; they filed a witness list under seal late Tuesday. (A 244-name list, shown to prospective jurors to identify potential conflicts, has been widely misreported as a witness list.)

Mr. Grey and Mr. Ovitz, if not Mr. Fields, could easily find themselves taking the witness stand to answer extremely unwelcome questions. For Mr. Grey, who has steered Paramount’s comeback from sixth place to first at the box office among the big studios, it would mean having to revisit an unseemly lawsuit in which a screenwriter-producer, Bo Zenga, accused Mr. Grey, then the head of a talent management firm, of hogging the credit and profits from a movie.

For Mr. Ovitz, who has been trying to make a comeback in other businesses since being forced to sell his Artists Management Group in 2002, it would mean having to discuss publicly his talks with Mr. Pellicano about journalists whose coverage he disliked, among them the free-lance journalist Anita Busch, and Bernard Weinraub, then a reporter for The New York Times.

It is impossible to predict whether the most uncomfortable questions for Hollywood players will come from prosecutors or the defense, because Mr. Pellicano has chosen to represent himself. But then the most intriguing confrontation of all could come when Ms. Busch takes the stand and is cross-examined by Mr. Pellicano.

It was Ms. Busch, after all, who discovered a dead fish, a rose, what appeared to be a bullet hole, and a note saying “stop” on her car in June 2002 while she was pursuing stories about Mr. Ovitz and about organized crime. The F.B.I. was brought in and developed evidence it said linked Mr. Pellicano to the threat, but Ms. Busch learned only months later that her phones were being illegally tapped. (She has since accused Mr. Ovitz in a civil lawsuit of deploying Mr. Pellicano against her, which Mr. Ovitz denies.)

The trial, which begins with jury selection on Wednesday, is likely to be replete with technical details: how phone taps are installed, how Mr. Pellicano’s custom-made software analyzed intercepted conversations, how computers are searched and how encrypted files are decoded.

But jurors will probably find much to keep them awake, particularly when the tapes start to roll and they hear the coarse and misogynistic talk of a man who could hardly seem more unlike the softspoken, courtly, polite persona Mr. Pellicano has displayed in court.

The first example of that could come next week, when prosecutors call what they say will be their first witness other than F.B.I. computer experts: Matt Williams, a former third baseman for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who spoke with Mr. Pellicano in 2002 about a marital dispute.

An exhibit list filed late Tuesday teases other matters likely to surface at trial: disputes Mr. Pellicano worked on involving the actors Sylvester Stallone and Chris Rock, the Creative Artists agent Kevin Huvane, the Canadain media heiress Taylor Thomson and the music executive Freddy DeMann. There are also a number of exhibits involving people associated with Charles Roven, the producer of MGM’s “Rollerball,” when he was wiretapped on behalf of the film’s director, John McTiernan. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. While Mr. Pellicano has consistently vowed to refuse any deals and take his secrets to his grave, there remains a school of thought that he could drop the bravado if faced with a lengthy sentence and could cooperate in exchange for leniency. A more popular line of thinking, however, is that Mr. Pellicano — always the grandstander — is hankering for his moment in the sun.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/bu...pellicano.html





Should RIAA Investigators Have to Disclose Evidence?
NewYorkCountryLawyer

A technology battle is raging in UMG v. Lindor, a court case in Brooklyn. The issue at hand is whether the RIAA's investigator SafeNet now needs to disclose its digital files, validation methodology, testing procedures, failure rates, software manuals, protocols, packet logs, source code, and other materials, so that the validity of its methods can be evaluated by the defense. SafeNet and the RIAA say no, claiming that the information is "proprietary and confidential". Ms. Lindor says yes, if you're going to testify in federal court the other side has a right to test your evidence. A list of what is being sought is available online. MediaSentry has produced "none of the above". "Put up or shut up" says one commentator to SafeNet.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/04/2136230





EFF to Take RIAA On in Court Over "Making Available" Claim
Eric Bangeman

One of the contested P2P cases we've been following is Atlantic Records v. Jeffery Howell, which is being heard in a federal court in Phoenix. Howell and his wife have been representing themselves so far, but are going to get a bit of high-profile help tomorrow. EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann is going to appear at a hearing tomorrow to argue that the mere presence of music in a KaZaA share is not enough to constitute copyright infringement.

The Howells were originally sued in 2006. In their original response to the RIAA's complaint, they argued that KaZaA was "not set up to share" and that the files flagged by MediaSentry were "for private use" and "for transfer to portable devices, that is legal for 'fair use.'"

In August of last year, Judge Neil V. Wake granted the RIAA's motion for summary judgment, awarding the labels $40,500 in statutory damages and $350 in court costs. The Howells appealed the ruling, saying that they were "unaware" that their "personal files" were being shared over KaZaA, and in late September, Judge Wake vacated the summary judgment.

Von Lohmann's appearance in court tomorrow will be in support of a brief filed by the EFF in January. In the filing, the EFF argued that the mere fact that songs were made available for download in a shared folder does not constitute copyright infringement. The only downloading that anyone can demonstrate was done by MediaSentry with the RIAA's explicit authorization and permission, which the public interest group argues does not constitute copyright infringement.

The "making available" argument is one that keeps resurfacing in contested cases, and was one of the factors in the Jammie Thomas trial. The judge presiding over that case told the jury that the labels did not have to prove that anyone downloaded any files from Thomas—the mere fact that they were in a KaZaA share was sufficient to constitute copyright infringement.

Von Lohmann will argue against that reading of US copyright law in his appearance tomorrow. Since the Copyright Act specifically authorizes copyright owners to control copies distributed "to the public," there needs to be evidence that said distribution actually took place. "Where the only evidence of infringing distribution consists of distributions to authorized agents of the copyright owner, that evidence cannot, by itself, establish that other, unauthorized distributions have taken place," reads the EFF's brief.

The EFF has math on its side: with over 2.2 million KaZaA users online when MediaSentry downloaded the files, the group believes it's highly unlikely that anyone would have grabbed the 11 songs in question, as they were popular songs and available from thousands of other users on KaZaA.

The fact that Judge Wake is hearing arguments on this issue is significant. If he rules that the record labels have to show that someone aside from MediaSentry downloaded the files in order to prove infringement, it could prove to be a serious setback for the RIAA's legal campaign. At the very least, it would move Atlantic v. Howell further in the direction of a trial.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ble-claim.html





Geek Love
Adam Rogers

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.

You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.

Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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