[JackSpratts]

Governor Signs Textthreat Measure
Joe Kafka

A state law to be enacted July 1 will make ominous or annoying text messages illegal in South Dakota.

The statute will revise an existing law on threats and harassment to include not only traditional telephones but also cell and satellite phones, and computers hooked to the Internet by cable TV.

The law will make it a crime to use electronic devices to: Terrorize, intimidate, threaten, harass or annoy with lewd language.

Threaten physical injury or property damage.

Attempt to extort money or valuables.

Disturb repeatedly by anonymously contacting people.

Violations could bring up to one year in jail and $2,000 fines.
http://www.kxmb.com/News/218636.asp





Another Lawmaker Wants to Make Anonymous Internet Posting Illegal

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

Action News 36 asked people what they thought about the bill.

Some said they felt it was a violation of First Amendment rights. Others say it is a good tool toward eliminating online harassment.

Represntative Couch says enforcing this bill if it became law would be a challenge.
http://www.wtvq.com/content/midatlan...3-05-0011.html





Syria Expands "Iron Censorship" Over Internet
Khaled Yacoub Oweis

Syrian authorities have ordered Internet cafe users to reveal their identity, the latest measure in their "iron censorship" of cyberspace, a Syrian monitoring group said on Thursday.

Security officials ordered Internet cafe owners this week to take down the names and identification cards of their clients as well as the times they come and leave, Mazen Darwich, head of the Syrian Media Centre, told Reuters.

The records are to be presented regularly to the authorities, who targeted bloggers and Internet writers in recent months as part of a renewed campaign against dissent.

"These steps are designed to terrorise Internet users and spread fear and self censorship in violation of the right to privacy and free expression," Darwich said.

"The government has been methodical in extending the scope of its iron censorship," he said.

There was no comment from the government. Officials had said Internet controls were needed to guard against what they described as attempts to spread sectarian divisions and "penetration by Israel".

Several Internet cafes confirmed the new regulations.

Restrictions have also increased on surfing the World Wide Web and online publishing. An increasing number of Syrians who have voiced opinions on the Internet were being jailed, Darwich said.

The Syrian Media Centre, an independent body that tracks curbs on media, said at least 153 Internet sites are blocked in Syria with bans expanding over the past few weeks to Googleblog and the Arab Maktoobblog.

"Open forums have been used by thousands of Syrians to launch a counteroffensive against the government's curbs on public expression," Darwich said.

The forums also provide a way for users to share information on how to bypass government blocking of sites through what is known as Internet proxies, he said.

Facebook and YouTube are already banned as well as sites for Syrian opposition parties, Lebanese newspapers and Lebanese groups opposed to what they call Syrian interference in Lebanon. The site of the Saudi Asharq al-Awsat newspaper is blocked although the daily has a correspondent in Damascus.

The government last year ordered Internet sites based in Syria to provide the "clear identity and name" of those behind any article or comment they publish.

A poet is facing trial at a state security course for publishing articles on a civic society forum. Another writer spent a week in prison for an Internet piece about fuel and electricity shortages, Syrian human rights organisations said.

A teacher from the farming province of Reka is facing trial for criticising online what he described as patronage and nepotism in the state-run education system.

The Internet spread in Syria after President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his late farther, Hafez al-Assad in 2000. The country is ruled by the Baath Party, which took power in a coup in 1963, imposed emergency law and banned all opposition.

(Editing by Dominic Evans)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...38353620080313





Malaysia Opposition Win Shows Power of Cyberspace
Bill Tarrant

Malaysia's weak opposition was up against a hostile mainstream media and restrictive campaign rules, but it can chalk up much of its stunning success in Saturday's election to the power of cyberspace.

Voters exasperated with the unvarnished support of the mainstream media for the ruling National Front furiously clicked on YouTube and posted comments with popular bloggers about tales of sex, lies and videotapes in the run-up to Saturday's election.

Jeff Ooi, a 52-year-old former advertising copywriter who made his name writing a political blog, "Screenshots" (www.jeffooi.com) won a seat in northern Penang state for the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP).

Elizabeth Wong, a human rights activist and political consultant who runs a blog (http://elizabethwong.wordpress.com), won a state assembly seat in the central state of Selangor.

YouTube, the phenomenally popular video Web site, did as much damage as any opposition figure could hope to inflict, after netizens uploaded embarrassing videos of their politicians in action on hot-button issues.

One YouTube video in January showed ruling party MP Badruddin bin Amiruldin causing a ruckus in parliament over whether Malaysia was an Islamic state. "Malaysia is an Islamic state", he declared. "You don't like it, you get out of Malaysia!"

Muslim Malays form the majority in multi-racial Malaysia, but ethnic Chinese and Indians account for a third of the population and they deserted the ruling National Front in droves, partly in outrage over the religious debate.

Sex, Sleaze, Corruption

Another YouTube video that got wide distribution shows a rambling and incoherent Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin, in a live interview with al-Jazeera, excitedly defending a police crackdown against peaceful protesters calling for changes to the electoral process in November.

Zainuddin was one of several "big guns" in the National Front that fell to the opposition's onslaught.

Sex, sleaze and corruption were election issues and they all had video soap operas on Web sites.

Malaysia's health minister resigned in January after admitting he and a female friend were the couple in a secretly filmed sex video uploaded on YouTube. That cost some votes.

"We were concerned about the morality of our leaders," said Maisarah Zainal, a 26-year-old teacher in Kuala Lumpur. "It didn't help that Chua Soi Lek was involved in a sex video."

Loh Gwo Burne, who secretly videotaped a phone conversation, allegedly showing a high-profile lawyer trying to fix judicial appointments with Malaysia's former chief judge, was elected to a seat in parliament from a seat in suburban Kuala Lumpur.

The grainy video hit a nerve in Malaysia, whose judiciary has been under question since the late 1980s.

Malaysia's blogging community offer alternative views in a country where the government keeps a tight control on mainstream media. The government said last year it might compel bloggers to register with the authorities to curb the spread of malicious content on the Internet.

Government backers doubt whether bloggers turned opposition politicians could make their presence felt. "Beyond the major cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, there's not much the bloggers can really hope to accomplish," says Mohamad Norza Zakaria, a leader in Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's UMNO party ( www.umno-online.com )

The Chinese-backed DAP, by contrast, appointed blogger Ooi to head the party's "e-campaign".

Even a barely literate 89-year-old grandmother running for parliament with little money and only a bicycle to get around on, hopped the cyberspace bandwagon with a Facebook profile and her own blog, courtesy of some Internet savvy supporters. Mamin Yusuf, however, lost. It wasn't clear how many of her potential voters were hooked up to the Internet in northeastern Terengganu.

(Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200803...e-566e283.html





A Fading Sound Spreads Echo Far From Indonesia
Peter Gelling

BOGOR, Indonesia — Every day, a dozen grizzled men — shirtless, shoeless and with clove cigarettes dangling from their lips — hover over a pit of fire here in a tin-roofed shack, taking turns pounding glowing metal into the shape of a gong with the crudest of hammers.

The men are artisans, turning out the xylophones, gongs, drums and strings that make up this country’s traditional gamelan orchestras. All the workers are descendants of the laborers hired when this family-run business began making instruments in 1811.

Theirs is a dying art form. The business, the Gong Factory, is one of Indonesia’s few remaining gamelan workshops. Fifty years ago there were dozens of such tiny workshops in Bogor here on the island of Java alone.

The workshop in this small city 30 miles south of Jakarta has been one of the main suppliers of gamelan instruments in Java since the 1970s, when three of its competitors shut their doors because of a lack of demand.

For a time, the lack of competition increased the workshop’s orders. But over the past decade, orders have been steadily declining here, too, adding to worries over the rising cost of tin and copper and the decreasing supply of quality woods like teak and jackfruit, which are used to build the ornate stands that cradle the gongs, xylophones and drums.

“I try to make sure there is always work for them so they can earn money,” Sukarna, the factory’s sixth-generation owner, said of his workers, who earn about $2 a day. “But sometimes it is difficult.”

Gamelan, which is indigenous to Indonesia, has evolved over the centuries into a complex system of layered melodies and tuning, a system unfamiliar to the Western ear. (Fans of the television show “Battlestar Galactica” will recognize strains of gamelan from the show’s music.) Each orchestra is uniquely tuned and cannot use another’s instruments.

With no conductor, gamelan is a communal, and often delicate, negotiation among a dozen or more musicians where age and social status factor into the music’s evolution through a single performance.

Though gamelan music is still played throughout Indonesia — it can be heard at most traditional ceremonies and wafting out of Bali’s open-air meeting houses, where neighbors gather to discuss local issues or simply gossip — its popularity is dwindling among the younger generation of Indonesians, who are more easily lured by Western rock.

Sukarna, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, is 82 years old and worried for years that his two sons, who do not share his passion for gamelan, might abandon the family business.

He was relieved when his younger son, Krisna Hidayat, who is 28 and has a business degree, reluctantly agreed to take over as manager. Still, Mr. Hidayat said his favorite band was the American hard-rock spectacle Guns N’ Roses.

“My father still listens to gamelan at home,” he said. “I prefer rock ’n’ roll.”

Joan Suyenaga, an American who came to Java to indulge her fascination with its traditional performing arts and married a gamelan musician and instrument maker, said it had been dispiriting to witness decreasing local interest in an art form that had such a storied history. According to Javanese mythology, an ancient king invented the gong as a way to communicate with the gods.

“Our children play in rock bands and are immersed in emo, ska, pop and Western classical music,” she said. “There definitely are a few desperate attempts to preserve the gamelan tradition here in Java, but not nearly as much as there could be.”

But in a twist, as interest in gamelan has waned in its birthplace, foreign musicians have become enamored with its sound.

Bjork, the Icelandic pop star, has used gamelan instruments in a number of her songs, most famously in her 1993 recording “One Day,” and has performed with Balinese gamelan orchestras. Several contemporary composers have incorporated gamelan into their works, including Philip Glass and Lou Harrison, as did art-rock bands of the 70s like King Crimson, which adopted gamelan for Western instruments.

Perhaps more significantly, some schools in the United States and Europe now offer gamelan courses. Britain even includes it in its national music curriculum for primary and secondary schools, where children study and play gamelan.

“It is interesting and very sad that gamelan is used to teach basic musical concepts in Great Britain, whereas in Indonesian schools our children are exposed only to Western music and scales,” Ms. Suyenaga said.

Ms. Suyenaga’s disappointment aside, the uptick in Western interest in gamelan has had one very practical impact in Indonesia.

These days, it is orders from abroad that keep the Gong Factory, and other workshops like it, in business.

“Most orders come from America, but we also get many from Australia, France, Germany and England,” said Mr. Hidayat, the manager.

To fill those orders, he and his father wake up every weekday morning at 5 to begin the process of mixing the metals that is crucial to producing high-quality gongs. Only the two men know the exact mix of tin and copper the workshop uses.

“It’s like making dough: it can’t be too soft or too hard, it has to be perfect,” Mr. Hidayat said. “A lot of this process is instinctual.”

Once he and his father have found the right blend, workers take it to the shack, where the smoke from the fire mixes with the men’s cigarette smoke. The men begin their banging, sending sparks flying. Once they are satisfied with the shape, another laborer cradles the gong between his bare feet and carefully shaves it down, testing it often until he thinks the tone is right.

It often takes days to make a single gong.

Mr. Hidayat holds out at least some hope that Western interest in the music will jump start a resurgence of interest in gamelan music in Indonesia. But he acknowledges that he will not be uploading traditional songs to his iPod anytime soon.

Ms. Suyenaga is less optimistic.

“I cannot say the situation is improving or even healthy,” she said. “Probably the peak for us was 5 to 15 years ago.”

Retno Pratiwi contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/wo...10indo.html?hp





A D.I.Y. Approach to Making a Web Commercial
Bob Tedeschi

THE masses have flooded the Web with schlocky home movies. Big companies have added streams of more polished videos. But millions of businesses have sat out the revolution because they would rather not make fools of themselves trying to make their own commercials.

What they need is a crutch, and somebody is about to hand them one.

Online start-ups are percolating new methods to help companies create passable videos and commercials on the cheap, and distribute them across the Internet. For consumers, the trend promises a shopping experience more akin to QVC than eBay or Amazon.

“This won’t transform the online experience, but it can really add value for customers, so companies will be interested in this,” said Patti Freeman Evans, an online retail analyst with JupiterResearch. “And if they can get help from someone who’s learning how video works online, that can be a great advantage.”

That, Ms. Evans said, describes Matt Singer, a founder of The Talk Market (www.talkmarket.com) in New York, which bills itself as a sort of QVC for the masses. Mr. Singer helped clients sell “hundreds of thousands” of CDs on QVC from 2000 through 2007, he said, before deciding last year to take that expertise to smaller companies.

Merchants can sell huge quantities on QVC, Mr. Singer said, thanks largely to a highly personal sales approach where product designers or the channel’s sales staff create a story around an item. Only those willing to bet big on their products can play on television, however.

“I basically lived in fear that some big current event would cause people to turn to another channel at that moment,” he said, “and all those CDs would come back to me.”

Mr. Singer joined last year with Amanda Eilian, a former Baker scholar at Harvard Business School, to build The Talk Market, which helps businesspeople shoot, edit and post videos to the Web. The service costs nothing, although users share with The Talk Market a 5 percent commission whenever someone clicks on the “buy” button in the video window.

The Talk Market begins with an online tutorial on how to shoot product demonstration videos: light well, change camera angles, speak as if you are talking to a friend and look directly into the lens “as if you’re locking eyes with your audience.”

On their home computers, users splice together a clip, typically two minutes or less, relying on background music and animated graphics from The Talk Market to lead into key moments in the presentation (“here’s how I make it,” for instance).

Users then upload the completed file to The Talk Market, where it is posted according to the product category. They may also post the video on their own Web sites. In the future, fans of a particular designer will be able to post the videos on their own sites and collect a bounty for whatever sales they help generate.

According to Nina Valenti, owner of naturevsfuture, an apparel company based in Brooklyn, The Talk Market approach “helps me explain a garment like I would if someone was one-on-one with me.”

“I may not necessarily have TV charm, but I’m thorough,” Ms. Valenti added. “And I think I can get people excited about the product by telling them about the concept, and about my background, or why I chose this fabric.”

Mr. Singer and Ms. Eilian, who is also vice president of the Capitol Acquisition Corporation, a mergers and acquisitions company that raised roughly $262 million in a public offering late last year, said they were in the midst of seeking financing to market the service more aggressively this spring.

•

In the meantime, other companies are also taking aim at this category, with slightly different approaches. TurnHere, a company based in Emeryville, Calif., has an online network of about 3,500 freelance video producers who can shoot, produce and post videos of small businesses, typically for under $1,000, according to Bradley J. Inman, TurnHere’s chief executive.

Mr. Inman, who is the founder of Inman News, a real estate publisher, said the service, which had its debut in mid-2006, has produced roughly 3,500 of these minute-long “minidocumentaries” for clients. An increasing number of those clients are smaller companies.

“This can really capture the fabric of a small business, which has never been able to afford television advertising,” he said.

In some cases, companies like IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Citysearch unit will sell TurnHere’s service to its advertising clients and post the videos on Citysearch. TurnHere pays freelance producers market rates, Mr. Inman said, and earns a premium on fees it collects from clients.

That model helped the company attract $7.5 million in venture financing recently, from Hearst Interactive Media and Venrock, among others.

•

Online merchants, who have experimented with video for years, are also beginning to see the value of letting manufacturers and designers pitch products themselves, rather than posting runway shows or conventional commercials.

At eBags, the online bag and apparel site, Scott Roon, a young employee in the marketing department, suggested to management last year that they shoot short profiles of designers and post those online. They suggested he try it himself.

Mr. Roon now has about 60 videos completed, and a new job, flying around the country shooting and producing video profiles. Peter Cobb, an eBags founder, said he had been unable to determine how many additional sales the company has made from the videos.

“But there are absolutely huge benefits,” he said. “We’ve gotten great feedback from customers, and the brands love it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/te...gy/10ecom.html





Facebook Founder Heckled at Web Conference

A keynote talk with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg descended into chaos as the audience heckled the interviewer for failing to get to the point.

Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old billionaire, was the keynote speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy took the stage to question Zuckerberg, but the audience quickly grew tired of the topics she focused on, claiming that the real issues were being ignored.

"Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," claimed audience member, Jason Pontin, via Twitter.

Lacy finally allowed the crowd to take over, and Zuckerberg was subjected to an enthusiastic barrage of questions about the real issues facing the social networking site, such as privacy and data portability.

"The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did," said former Microsoft blogger, Robert Scoble, via his Twitter feed.

When asked about Facebook's Beacon advertising system, which he said last year was the beginning of a new era of advertising, Zuckerberg admitted that his claims may have been premature.

"We probably got a little bit ahead of ourselves. We came across as knowing more than we really knew... We have a lot of things we need to build before we get there," admitted Zuckerberg.

Questions about the possible emergence of a rumoured Facebook music download service, following talks with record labels, were met with denial. "What's going on there is we talk to a lot of companies all the time... there are [already] music applications on Facebook," Zuckerberg said. "As a company we are out building relationships, but at this point I can say we have nothing to talk about right
now."

Another popular topic from the audience was data portability and privacy. In recent months several scandals have emerged over security vulnerabilities in the site and the company's practices when dealing with users' personal information.

"Almost all of the mistakes we made, we didn't give people enough control. We need to give people complete control over their information," said Zuckerberg. "The more control and the more granular the control, the more info people will share and the more we will be able to achieve our goals."

Another revelation was that recent management changes at Facebook may have been due to a disagreement over a potential takeover bid from Yahoo. The company offered $1 billion for Facebook last year, but the deal was turned down, with most staff opposing the offer.

"We made some management changes," said Zuckerberg, when asked what happened to those that didn't.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/176130/f...onference.html





Oops

Cop's 8742 Child Porn Mistakes
Christine Kellett

A Queensland police officer caught with more than 8000 child porn images on his home computer has avoided spending any time in jail.

Thomas James Anthony Wilson, 25, pleaded guilty in Brisbane's District Court today to possessing the lewd material, including pictures of boys as young as 10 engaging in sex acts.

He was sentenced to 18 months' jail, but the term was wholly suspended after his lawyer successfully argued Wilson had downloaded the images by mistake.

The former policeman, who has since lost his job, was one of 1717 suspects identified as part of a 2003 child porn investigation by US Customs and FBI agents.

Police traced his credit card to a child porn website titled “Sunshine Boys”, where Wilson had paid a $35 access fee.

A March 28, 2006 raid on his Shorncliffe home on Brisbane’s northside uncovered a computer loaded with pornography.

In all, 8742 images were identified as depicting children aged between 10 and 18 posing nude, masturbating and engaging in sex acts.

Wilson's defence barrister Craig Eberhardt told the court his client had not purposefully sought out child abuse images when he downloaded pornography files from the internet.

He suggested Wilson may have viewed some of it as a way to deal with his own sexuality as a young man.

"(He is) not a pedophile, he does not have pedophilic tendencies," Mr Eberhardt said, citing medical evidence.

"His culpability comes from his failure to get rid of it once he knew it was there."

Judge Tony Rafter SC said a wholly suspended sentence was appropriate because Wilson posed no risk to children and was unlikely to reoffend.

But he said the actions of the disgraced policeman had nonetheless helped to feed an "evil and exploitative industry".

"You should have been accutely aware of the seriousness of the offence because you were a serving police officer at the time," Judge Rafter chastised.

"I accept that you did not actively seek child pornography and these images were accessed somewhat accidentally.

"I am also mindful that as a former police officer, a period of imprisonment would be harsher upon you."

Wilson left court supported by family.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news...126085158.html





Rate-My-Cop: New Website Has Police Furious

Police agencies from coast to coast are furious with a new website on the internet. RateMyCop.com has the names of thousands of officers, and many believe it is putting them in danger.

Officer Hector Basurto, the vice president of the Latino Police Officers Association, recently learned about the site. "I'd like to see it gone," he said.

"Having a website like this out there puts a lot of law enforcement in danger," he said. "It exposes us out there."

Kevin Martin, the vice president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, agrees. "Will they be able to access our home addresses, home phone numbers, marital status, whether or not we have children? That's always a big concern for us," he said.

Creators of the site say no personal information will be on the site. They gathered officers' names, which are public information, from more than 450 police agencies nationwide. Some listings also have badge numbers along with the officer's names.

Rebecca Costell says, in a statement, that the site helps people rate more than 130,000 officers by rating them on authority, fairness and satisfaction.

She adds, "Our website's purpose is to break the stereotype that people have that cops are all bad by having officers become responsible for their actions."

The site is so new that many Bay Area police agencies are not aware of it. San Francisco police say they have no connection with the site and would not take any of its comments seriously.

Police associations that represent more than 100,000 police and sheriffs in California are now seeking legislation to see if they can eliminate the site altogether. They say that officers who are rated face unfair maligning without any opportunity to defend themselves.

The CPCA will work with other law enforcement associations to pursue legislation to stop the website. Constitutional attorney and former San Francisco Police Commissioner Peter Keane said eliminating the site is difficult.

"Any kind of publication is protected as long as it's not publishing privileged information," he said.

The First Amendment would be the site's protection.
http://cbs13.com/local/rate.a.cop.2.673410.html





GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com
Kevin Poulsen

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, "Oops!!!", which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for "suspicious activity."

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?"

Police departments became uneasy about RateMyCop's plans to watch the watchers in January, when the Culver City, California, startup began issuing public information requests for lists of uniformed officers.

Then the site went live on February 28th. It stores the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of over 140,000 cops in as many as 500 police departments, and allows users to post comments about police they've interacted with, and rate them. The site garnered media interest this week as cops around the country complained that they'd be put at risk if their names were on the internet.

"Having a website like that puts a lot of law enforcement, in my eyes, in danger because it exposes us out there," Officer Hector Basurto, vice president of the Latino Police Officers Association, told ABC television affiliate KGO.

Since undercover officers aren't in the database, and the site has no personal information like home addresses, that fear seems unfounded. Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, voices what sounds like a more honest concern: that officers will face "unfair maligning" by the citizens they serve.

Sesto says police can post comments as well, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently. Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn't pass constitutional muster in any court in America.

Unfortunately for the startup, the company it chose for hosting is known to be quick to censor its customers. In January of last year, GoDaddy took down entire computer security website -- delisting it from DNS -- to get a single, archived mailing list post off the web.

On that occasion, at least, it gave the site's owner 60 seconds notice. GoDaddy notified Seto by posting its "Oops!" message to his public website.

"You put on my website for me to call you, when you have my phone number?," says Sesto.

A GoDaddy spokeswoman says the company can't comment on the RateMyCop takedown due to its privacy policy. Sesto says he's already arranged hosting elsewhere, and hopes to have the site online Tuesday night.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...y-silence.html





Stunning New Report on Domestic NSA Dragnet Spying Confirms ACLU Surveillance Warnings (3/12/2008)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 675-2312 or media@dcaclu.org


WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union responded today to a stunning new report that the NSA has effectively revived the Orwellian "Total Information Awareness" domestic-spying program that was banned by Congress in 2003. In response, the ACLU said that it was filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more information about the spying. And, the group announced that it was moving its "Surveillance Clock" one minute closer to midnight.

"Congress shut down TIA because it represented a massive and unjustified governmental intrusion into the personal lives of Americans," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the Washington Legislative Office of the ACLU. "Now we find out that the security agencies are pushing ahead with the program anyway, despite that clear congressional prohibition. The program described by current and former intelligence officials in Monday's Wall Street Journal could be modeled on Orwell’s Big Brother."

The ACLU said the new report confirmed its past warnings that the NSA was engaging in extremely broad-based data mining that was violating the privacy of vast numbers of Americans.

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program was a mammoth data mining program that envisioned programming computers to trawl through an extensive list of databases containing personal information about Americans – including communications, medical, travel, education and financial data – in an attempt to detect supposedly "suspicious" patterns. Congress shut down the program amid bipartisan objections that it was the most far-reaching domestic surveillance proposal that had ever been offered.

"Year after year, we have warned that our great nation is turning into a surveillance society where our every move is tracked and monitored," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. "Now we have before us a program that appears to do that very thing. It brings together numerous programs that we and many others have fought for years, and it confirms what the ACLU has been saying the NSA is up to: mass surveillance of Americans."

Last year, the ACLU created its Surveillance Clock (www.aclu.org/clock) as a way to symbolize the nation’s rapid descent toward a surveillance society. Initially set to six minutes before midnight, the ACLU today moved it up to five minutes before midnight to highlight the greater threat to privacy Americans face in light of the NSA’s activities.

According to the new Journal report, the NSA was engaging in broad domestic spying operations that involve collecting and analyzing the personal information of Americans in ways that are "essentially the same" as TIA. The elements that reportedly make up the new spying encompass a variety of mass surveillance and data mining programs about which the ACLU has previously warned, including:

TIA and other data mining programs.

• The NSA’s illegal wiretapping program, the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP).
• The Patriot Act’s broadening of FBI power to collect third-party personal information without a subpoena through Section 215 searches and National Security Letters.
• The Treasury Department’s expanded surveillance of financial transactions through Cash Transaction Reporting and Suspicious Activity Reporting.
• The CIA’s illegitimate access to the SWIFT database to monitor international financial transactions.
• DHS’s efforts to increase collection and monitoring of airline passenger data.
• Partnerships between these government agencies and private sector entities to collect and monitor customers’ data and transactions.

The erosion of privacy through the judicial creation of a distinction between content and "transactional data" (such as the recipients of e-mails or phone calls and the times and dates of each communication) through the Patriot Act and prior developments.

"Congress needs to investigate immediately whether its will has been thwarted, and the media needs to give this program the attention it deserves as a radical departure from the privacy that Americans have always expected," said Fredrickson. "Just how many times is Congress going to sit back and watch this administration run roughshod over its prerogatives?"

The FOIA request the ACLU filed today is intended to gain information about the "role that the NSA plays as a hub for the collection, analysis and distribution" of "transactional information of Americans." It seeks information from the NSA as well as the FBI, CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Treasury, Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security.

In 2006, the ACLU published a summary of what it believed the NSA was doing, based on the various media reports citing current and former intelligence officials. In the piece, entitled "Eavesdropping 101," the ACLU warned that the NSA was not just carrying out warrantless wiretaps on selected individuals, but probably carrying out broader data dragnets that violated the privacy of millions of Americans. This prospect has not always remained in focus during the debates over the agency’s illegal spying.

"We now know that TIA lives," said Steinhardt. "The question is, does American privacy live? And does Congress’ will to defend it? This program will be a test case; may we prove worthy of the freedom we have inherited."

The ACLU white paper "Eavesdropping 101" is online at
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspyi...s20060131.html


Other information about NSA spying can be found at
www.aclu.org/nsa


Information about TIA can be found at
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/1...s20040116.html

To read the ACLU's FOIA request, go to:
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/gen/34443leg20080312.html





FBI Tried to Cover Patriot Act Abuses With Flawed, Retroactive Subpoenas, Audit Finds
Ryan Singel

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI's counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas "retroactively to justify the FBI's acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests," the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine's 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

The letters are related to still-secret contracts the FBI's Communication Analysis Unit has with AT&T, Verizon and MCI. The contracts pay the companies to store subscribers' phone records for longer periods of time and to provide faster service for FBI subpoenas. Those contracts began in May 2003, but the FBI refuses to release them.

At least one of the letters was signed by an assistant director and none were cleared with the FBI's general counsel.

FBI agents issue tens of thousands of National Security Letters annually to get phone records, portions of credit histories, and track down IP addresses without getting a judge's approval in cases involving suspected terrorism, computer crimes or espionage.

Additionally, some of those retroactive NSLs sought records that the FBI was not authorized to obtain, and failed to explain -- as required by policy -- what investigation the records pertained to. Fine found that all were "issued in violation of internal FBI policy."

In his 2007 report on the FBI's use of that Patriot Act power during 2003 to 2005, Fine disclosed that officials at the counter-terrorism division had issued more than 700 emergency requests for data to telephone companies -- so-called exigent letters -- most with false promises that a court order was in the works and would be delivered after the fact. Those letters prompted a further investigation of those letters, including a reported criminal probe of counter-terrorism officials, and Thursday's report says an in depth report on that office is forthcoming.

The report shows the need for Congress to narrow the FBI's powers and strengthen privacy laws, according to Mike German, a longtime FBI agent who now works for the ACLU, who says it's clear the FBI has been breaking the law.

"The FBI has flagrantly put aside the rule of law and its internal guidelines time and again," German said "This is the kind of abuse that is inevitable when we broaden the government's surveillance power and do not attempt to modernize privacy standards. Both the House and Senate have bills waiting to be marked up that will greatly limit this authority. Congress needs to act on this now.”

The 187-page report (.pdf) focused on NSL usage in 2006 and how the FBI attempted to correct the abuses brought to light by last year's report.

Fine said the FBI had made "significant progress in implementing our recommendations," but tempered that statement by concluding "it is too soon to definitively state whether the news systems and cohntrols developed by the FBI and the Department will eleiminate fully the problems with the use of NSLs."

The Justice Department issued a statement Thursday saying it was pleased with Fine's assessment of their efforts after his 2007 report and downplayed the report's revelations of abuses in 2006, saying it is "no surprise that this year’s report found problems similar to those identified in the first OIG report, which covered the period 2003 through 2005."

The Inspector General took issue with the FBI's inability to track where data is shared or if the data is used in criminal prosecutions by state and local law enforcement. The report also criticized the FBI's insistence that all data collected by the letters -- even phone records that cleared a suspect -- should be stored for decades in the FBI's massive Investigative Data Warehouse. That storehouse allows investigators to search for and comb through data from other investigations.

The FBI issued 49,425 NSLs in 2006, up slightly from 2005's 47,221 requests. Since NSLs can name more than one person, phone number or email address, it is not known how many persons were investigated through these requests. In a footnote, Fine reveals that in a 2004 investigation the FBI issued 9 NSLs that sought subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.

The report also shows that the FBI is increasingly targeting citizens and green card holders, with more than 11,517 requests in 2006 targeting U.S. persons, while Non U.S. persons were targeted with 8,605 requests.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ied-to-co.html





Wikileaks Publishes FBI VoIP Surveillance Docs
Anonymous

The folks on wikileaks have published a new interesting and shocking report: FBI Electronic Surveillance Needs for Carrier-Grade Voice over Packet (CGVoP) Service. The 88 paged document, which is part of the CALEA Implementation Plan was published in January 2003 and describes in detail all needs for surveillance of phone calls made via data services like the internet. Wikileaks has not published any analysis yet, so maybe some of the techies hanging around this end of the internet are interested in taking that one on.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/15/2021257.shtml





NSA Quietly Expands Domestic Spying Program, Even as Congress Balks

"The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed," The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman reports on Monday page ones. "But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks."

"According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records," Gorman adds. "The NSA receives this so-called 'transactional' data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected."

"The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light," he continues. "They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements."

Excerpts follow:

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

...

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.

...

Two current officials also said the NSA's current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals' data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.

...

NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI's Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn't know the number. "As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified," said FBI spokesman John Miller.

The budget for the NSA's data-sifting effort is classified, but one official estimated it surpasses $1 billion. The FBI is requesting to nearly double the budget for the Digital Collection System in 2009, compared with last year, requesting $42 million. "Not only do demands for information continue to increase, but also the requirement to facilitate information sharing does," says a budget justification document, noting an "expansion of electronic surveillance activity in frequency, sophistication, and linguistic needs."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/NSA_qu...gram_0310.html





New Camera Vastly Improves Surveillance

Revolutionary camera design could have far-reaching implications for the military, crime prevention, and enforcement as well as traffic analysis and emergency response support; design is based on an array of light sensitive chips placed at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system

Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville have developed a wide-angle camera which will be able to provide security forces with the ability to monitor large areas through high-resolution images taken from a satellite or an airborne craft, says researcher David Pollock. Pollock first discovered that if you point a large number of lenses toward a common point, and then make a small correction on each of the lenses, you provide a camera with capabilities that far surpass existing technologies. "If you look at high-resolution images taken by satellite or aircraft, the field-of-view in those photographs is tiny," he said. "This camera provides anyone with the ability to view the entire scene and, simultaneously, zoom in closely on a certain area with very high resolution at real time." Flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet, a developmental version of the camera can see a 21-kilometer diameter area with a resolution of 0.3 meters. As a comparison, most Google Earth imagery is one meter. The optics systems patent is shared by UA Huntsville and Sony.

Images from existing cameras have to be tiled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle before a full picture can be seen. This can create problems for security forces, such as Department of Defense, border or harbor patrol, or homeland security. For example, vehicles can end up appearing more than once if they move from one image to the next between exposures. These types of errors frequently exist in online mapping tools, such as Google Earth or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, according to Pollock. This is where researchers at UA Huntsville stepped in to configure an array of light sensitive chips -- each one recording small parts of a larger image -- and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The system has the structure of a common kitchen utensil, a colander. The camera would have one giga-pixel resolution, and be able to record images at five frames per second. Springfiled, Virginia-based ArguSight has signed a licensing agreement with the university and seeking venture capital to bring the product to the commercial marketplace. CEO Stuart Claggett compares the product to a popular TV product. "The complete camera system is like a ‘TIVO’ in the sky," he said. "It captures high-quality imagery and records all the data. A user can request numerous high-definition video windows of live data in real-time or you can review all of the video on demand on the ground when the aircraft lands."

Ultimately the camera can cover nearly a hemispherical field-of-view with uniform image quality and sensitivity. The initial camera design constraint was to obtain greater than 109 samples within a 10 x 10 km ground footprint. It was quickly realized that with 4 mega-samples (mega-pixel) per camera this would require 271 cameras. The constraint leads to significant, greater than 90 percent sample redundancy. Reducing the redundancy to less than 1 percent significantly expands the field-of-view, Pollock said. Further, because of the modular nature, the field-of-view can be configured to suit specific applications. For example, what one might call a Mohawk, an arc of cameras would sample a long, narrow strip. Also, a camera that can operate in other spectral regions, with a field-of-view configuration and a sample size to suit the application is feasible, according to Pollock. He states that software development to fully exploit the camera data capacity continues.

Pollock said the camera could have far-reaching implications for the military, crime prevention, and enforcement as well as traffic analysis and emergency response support. The giga-pixel camera will fit in a one-meter cube, could be flown on any type of vehicle – airplanes, helicopters, blimps or unmanned aerial vehicles.

UA Huntsville filed the patent for the large-format giga-pixel camera and shares that patent on a 50-50 basis with Sony Corp.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5745





But can it find my keys?

Researchers Show Principles of Mind-Reading Machine

Researchers have developed a more sophisticated way to extract visual stimuli from brain signals; they developed a computational model that uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to decode information from an individual's visual cortex; system may help in decoding dreams, and may offer a more humane interrogation technique

A device which reveals what a person sees by decoding their brain activity could soon be a reality, say researchers who have developed a more sophisticated way to extract visual stimuli from brain signals. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a computational model that uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to decode information from an individual's visual cortex -- the part of the brain responsible for processing visual stimuli. "Our research makes substantial advances towards being able to decode mental content from brain activity as measured using fMRI," Kendrick Kay, a coauthor of the study, told the New Scientist's James Urquhart. "In fact, our results suggest it may soon be possible to reconstruct our visual experiences from brain activity."

Previous research has shown that fMRI can pick out brain activity associated with viewing different images, but so far it has only been possible to identify very basic images, from fixed categories, such as a face or a house. The process also depends on prior knowledge of the associated brain activity.

Now the Berkeley team has shown that brain imaging can reveal much more complex and arbitrary images, without prior knowledge of brain activity. The team first used fMRI to measure visual cortex activity in people looking at more than a thousand photographs. This allowed them to develop a computational model and "train" their decoder to understand how each person's visual cortex processes information. Next, participants were shown a random set of just over 100 previously unseen photographs. Based on patterns identified in the first set of fMRIs, the team was able to accurately predict which image was being observed.

"It is going to be particularly powerful in the field of visual perception and possibly the field of decoding motor responses," says John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. The research also hints that scientists might one day be able to access dreams, memories, and imagery, says Haynes, providing the brain processes dreams in a way that is analogous to visual stimuli. "The difficulty is that that it's very hard to set up models for other types of complex thoughts, such as memories and intentions," Haynes says.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5713





House Democrats Refuse to Give Telecoms Immunity, Seek Warrantless Wiretapping Investigation
AP

Locked in a standoff with the White House, House Democrats on Tuesday maintained their refusal to shield from civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without a secret court's permission.

But they offered the companies an olive branch: the chance to use classified government documents to defend themselves in court.

House Democratic leaders unveiled a bill that they hoped would bridge the gap between the electronic surveillance bill passed by the Senate last month and a rival version the House approved last fall.

The House bill also would create a bipartisan commission, modeled after the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program.

The legislation drew swift criticism from congressional Republicans and from Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who said it fails to fix problems with the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress is trying to update. They also said any bill that does not provide telecom immunity is unacceptable to the Bush administration.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said the bill would impose "cumbersome" requirements on the intelligence agencies to conduct wiretaps. She also said the proposed investigative commission shows "House leaders are more interested in playing politics" than they are in preventing terrorist attacks.

House Democrats point out that Congress still does not know what the telecommunications companies did that requires legal immunity because the White House has only allowed Judiciary and Intelligence committee members to read the secret documents that underpin the program.

The 1978 FISA law dictates when the government needs court permission to conduct electronic eavesdropping inside the United States. The law has taken on particular importance in the global effort to thwart terrorists since the 2001 attacks on the United States.

The most contentious difference between the two bills is whether they grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap phone and computer lines after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks without first getting approval from the FISA court. Congress created that court 30 years ago to prevent government abuse of its surveillance powers.

The Senate bill would provide full immunity to the telecommunications companies. The House bill includes no such provision.

The compromise proposed Tuesday by House Democratic leaders is expected to be brought to the floor for a vote Thursday. It would allow the roughly 40 lawsuits that are pending against the companies for their participation in the secret wiretapping program to go forward.

"We are not going to cave in" on immunity, said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich.

The companies are hamstrung from defending themselves in court, however. The Bush administration is invoking the "state secrets" privilege to block the companies from revealing secret documents that might bolster their argument that the eavesdropping program was legal.

The House compromise bill would encourage the federal district judge hearing the telecommunications lawsuits to review those classified documents in secret to determine whether the companies acted legally.

Judges in criminal cases often hear classified evidence in secret, but judges in civil cases do not, said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

President Bush has vowed to veto any bill that does not grant the companies full retroactive immunity from lawsuits.

Democratic leaders say they are trying to strike a balance between protecting the country against terrorist attacks and protecting civil liberties.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8535518





House Dems Proposing Commission to Investigate Warrantless Spying, Still Reject Amnesty
Ryan Singel

Not only shouldn't companies that helped the government's warrantless spying on American citizens be given retroactive amnesty, the government should establish a national commission --- similar to the 9/11 Commission --to subpoena documents and testimony in order to find out -- and publish -- what exactly the nation's spies were up to during their five year warrantless, domestic surveillance program.

In other words, House Democrats aren't planning a compromise on telecom amnesty and are actually going on offense to find a way to learn more about President Bush's five-year secret "Total Information Awareness" program.

At least that's what's suggested by a 119-page draft bill being circulated by the leaders of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees as answer to the Administration-backed Senate spying bill.

The bill proposes a way for the government to issue blanket surveillance orders in order to force American telecom and internet providers to give the government a copy of every phone call, email or instant message that is believed to involve a foreigner. That mimics the Senate version and largely legalizes the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

However, the bill restates -- as the 30-year old spying law stated -- that the law is the only route for the government to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States. Bush opposes that language and says he has the power as Commander in Chief to spy inside America without any Congressional or court oversight.

The bill also requires two audits of the warrantless wiretapping program -- a bipartisan National Commission and an Inspector General review of the warrantless wiretapping program.

House Democrats are also seeking to block the administration from using the 'state secrets' privilege to block telecoms from showing federal judges -- even in chambers -- the letters given to them by the federal government about the legality of the program.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which the companies are being sued for violating, the companies could escape the lawsuits if they have a signed letter from the Attorney General, signed under oath, that the surveillance has "no substantial likelihood" of acquiring the content of a U.S. person's communication and the surveillance is targeted at communication means used exclusively by foreign powers (this is the foreign embassy exception).

The companies claim that they have no defenses against the suits filed against them because the government says the letters are too-classified for even federal judges to see. The groups suing the companies doubt the letters comply with the requirements of the nation's spying laws and say they would be fine with the telecoms showing those letters in court.

UPDATE - Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston -- who has been the San Francisco-based group's emissary to D.C. -- says he's very pleased with the proposal:

The house has apparently agreed with what we have been saying all along -- the only meaningful compromise is a solution to the state secrets problem The House has answered the telecoms' core complaint that they cannot defend themselves in court … and cleared the way for the litigation to proceed fairly and securely.

The Administration says the companies participated in good faith. Now the companies can do what we wanted them to do all along -- tell their story to a judge.

This bill also does not move the cases out of federal district court into the secret spying court, as has been championed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), and which many have speculated would be the compromise. Bush has threatened, however, to veto any bill that doesn't give total retroactive amnesty to the telecoms, even if that veto rejects spying powers he himself says are vital to national security.

THREAT LEVEL hasn't had time to parse the entire bill yet and could use help seeing what is and is not in the fine print.

The bill summary says:

FISA Amendments Act
Bill Summary
March 11, 2008

The revised House legislation to amend FISA grants new authorities for conducting electronic surveillance against foreign targets while preserving the requirement that the government obtain an individualized FISA court order, based on probable cause, when targeting Americans at home or abroad. The House bill also strongly enhances oversight of the Administration’s surveillance activities. Finally, the House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies but allows the courts to determine whether lawsuits should proceed.

Title 1: Surveillance Authorities

• Provides for surveillance of terrorist and other targets overseas who may be communicating with Americans.
• Requires the FISA court to approve targeting and minimization procedures – to ensure that Americans are not targeted and that their inadvertently intercepted communications are not disseminated. These procedures must be approved prior to surveillance beginning – except in an emergency, in which case the government may begin surveillance immediately, and the procedures must be approved by the court within 30 days. (This may be extended if the court determines it needs more time to decide the matter).
• Provides prospective liability protection for telecommunications companies that provide lawful assistance to the government.
• Requires a court order based on probable cause to conduct surveillance targeted at Americans, whether inside the United States or abroad.
• Requires an Inspector General report on the President’s warrantless surveillance program.
• Prohibits “reverse targeting” of Americans.
• Explicitly establishes FISA Exclusivity – that FISA is the exclusive way to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance inside the U.S. Any other means requires an express statutory authorization.
• Sunsets these authorities on December 31, 2009 (same as the PATRIOT Act sunset).

Title 2: Litigation Procedures for Telecommunication Company Liability

• Does not confer retroactive immunity on telecom companies alleged to have assisted in the President’s warrantless surveillance program.
• Provides telecom companies a way to present their defenses in secure proceedings in district court without the Administration using “state secrets” to block those defenses.

Title 3: National Commission on Warrantless Surveillance

• Establishes a bipartisan, National Commission – with subpoena power – to investigate and report to the American people on the Administration’s warrantless surveillance activities, and to recommend procedures and protections for the future.

Documents: 119-page draft FISA bill (.pdf), the bill's summary (.pdf), and a three-page chart (.pdf) comparing the original House bill (Restore Act), the Senate version and the new draft is here.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...dems-prop.html





House to Close its Doors for Spying Bill
Pamela Hess

House Democratic leaders agreed Thursday to a rare closed-door session — the first in 25 years — to debate surveillance legislation.
Republicans requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping bill that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.

The closed-door debate was scheduled for late Thursday night, after the House chamber could be cleared and swept by security personnel to make sure there are no listening devices.

The last private session in the House was in 1983 on U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Only five closed sessions have taken place in the House since 1825.

President Bush vowed to veto the House Democrats' version of the terrorist surveillance bill, saying it would undermine the nation's security.

House leaders said they would vote on the bill Friday, just before taking a two-week recess. The bill would then have to be approved by the Senate.

Bush opposes it in part because it doesn't provide full, retroactive legal protection to telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

About 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecommunications companies by people and organizations alleging they violated wiretapping and privacy laws. The lawsuits have been combined and are pending before a single federal judge in California.

The Democrats' measure would encourage the judge to review in private the secret government documents underpinning the program in order to decide whether the companies acted lawfully. If they did, the lawsuits would be dismissed.

The administration has prevented those documents from being revealed, even to a judge, by invoking the state secrets privilege. That puts the companies in a bind because it puts off limits evidence they might use to defend themselves.

It wasn't clear what information would be presented in the closed session. Just a fraction of Congress has been allowed to read secret documents underpinning the surveillance program, and those who have arrived at varying conclusions.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, after seeing classified material, said the companies acted on the good-faith belief that the wiretaps they allowed were lawful. Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees were unconvinced after being presented with the same material.

Rhode Island Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees. He said the documents lay out the Bush administration's rationale for why it was legal to sidestep a special secret court that normally authorizes wiretaps. Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 to prevent government abuse of wiretapping.

Whitehouse said the documents assert that the president has the power to determine what his constitutional powers are, particularly in a time of war.

The surveillance law is intended to help in the pursuit of suspected terrorists by making it easier to eavesdrop on foreign phone calls and e-mails that pass through the United States. A temporary law expired Feb. 16 before Congress was able to produce a replacement bill. Bush opposed an extension of the temporary law as a tactic to pressure Congress into accepting the Senate version of the surveillance legislation. The Senate's bill provides retroactive legal immunity for the telecommunications companies.
Bush said lawsuits against telecom companies would lead to the disclosure of state secrets. Further, he said lawsuits would undermine the willingness of the private sector to cooperate with the government in trying to track down terrorists.

Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said intelligence is already being lost.

"Each and every day our capabilities are eroding," he said.

Directing his message at the House, Bush said, "They should not leave for their Easter recess without getting the Senate bill to my desk."

Bush predicted the Senate would not pass the House version of the bill, and said even if it did, he would veto it.

At least one Senate Republican said the lawsuits should go forward to determine whether the wiretapping program was illegal. But Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter wants to substitute the government for the phone companies as the defendant in the court cases.

"The president can't have a blank check," Specter said in an interview. "If you close down the courts, there's no check and balance."

He added: "Wiretaps are important for national security. There's no doubt about that. Al-Qaida and terrorism continue to be a major threat to this country. It is my hope that the president will not find it necessary to veto the bill, that we'll be able to work it out."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Bush is misrepresenting the House bill, and suggested the fight is less about surveillance powers than it is that House Democrats are refusing to bend to Bush's wishes.

"Congress owes the American people more than blind obeisance to the executive branch," said Hoyer, D-Md.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080313/...lHyjEBOwqs0NUE





House OKs Democratic Surveillance Bill
AP

The House has passed by a narrow margin a Democratic surveillance bill that President Bush has vowed to veto if it reaches his desk.

The president objects to the bill because it does not protect from civil lawsuits the telecommunications companies that may have helped the government eavesdrop on American phone calls and e-mails without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

House Democrats say a federal judge should decide whether the wiretapping was legal. Bush favors a Senate version of the bill that does give the companies legal immunity, saying it is a matter of fairness to the companies. The White House had assured them no court order was needed for the wiretapping program.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1278893~Ho...ance_Bill.html





Navy to Focus Only on Open Systems
Peter Buxbaum

The Navy will acquire only systems based on open technologies and standards.

Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, broke the news March 5 to a Navy IT Day audience in Vienna, Va., sponsored by AFCEA International.

“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”

The Navy’s decision was informed by a combination of motivations, including the desire to provide the latest capabilities to warfighters and control the costs of its information technology operations, he added.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said. “In the civilian marketplace, it’s just the opposite. Some private-sector concerns are cutting their costs by 90 percent while expanding their performance.”
Edwards noted that the Navy has cut the number of databases and applications it maintains and has reduced its networks by 40 percent. “But it is not enough,” he added. “We would have to double our IT budget over the next several years just to run in place.”

By using an open network architecture, the Navy could rapidly upgrade its capabilities and handle increases for demand, Edwards said.

“Above all, we must break the stovepipes of data so that we can share information across domains,” he said.

The failure to lead in technology could have dire consequences, Edwards said.

“The situation is very similar to that of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War,” he said. “Because we put them in a position of always having to catch up, the mere threat of the Strategic Defense Initiative crippled the Soviet ability to continue the arms race and enabled our side to dictate terms. If we remain behind in technology, a future adversary will eventually bring terms to us.”
http://www.fcw.com/online/news/151858-1.html





Businesses Face Cut in Immigrant Work Force
Katie Zezima

For years, William Zammer Jr. has relied on 100 seasonal foreign employees to turn down beds, boil lobsters and serve cocktails at the restaurants, golf course and inn he owns on Cape Cod and in nearby Plymouth.

This summer, however, the foreign workers will not be returning, and Mr. Zammer, like other seasonal employers across the nation, is scrambling to find replacements.

“It’s a major crisis,” he said. “We’re very short on work force. We’ll be looking at opening a little later, closing a little earlier, looking at how we do our menus.”

Mr. Zammer is caught up in a Congressional standoff over immigration overhaul that is punishing employers who play by the rules and that, advocates of change say, could cost small companies billions in lost business.

In an effort to win support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and its allies have blocked voting on legislation that would allow employers to rehire foreign seasonal nonagricultural workers independent of a 1991 quota.

As a result, the government is limited to issuing the 66,000 seasonal work visas set when the visa program, known as H-2B, became law — 33,000 for winter workers and 33,000 for summer workers. Last year, more than 120,000 foreign workers entered the country on H-2B visas.

For Cape Cod, the impact has been devastating. Employers will receive only 15 of the 5,000 visas they had requested, according to the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s just ruthless for the Hispanic caucus to do this, use it as a bargaining chip,” said Mr. Zammer, whose foreign workers — mostly from Jamaica and Eastern Europe — normally make up 25 percent of his staff. “We’re working at finding new people. We have to. But it’s extremely difficult, because you end up stealing from other people who are also trying to get help.”

Returning workers became exempt from the cap in 2005, when Congress passed the Save our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act, and President Bush signed it into law. The act expired in 2007, and Congress passed a one-year extension that was attached to the National Defense Authorization Act. The extension expired on Sept. 30, 2007, the end of the 2007 fiscal year.

Employers say that unless Congress acts soon, they will have to scale back operations, because the labor pool in many resort areas is not deep enough to provide new workers, and many people do not want seasonal jobs.

Patti Ann Moskwa, owner of the Yankee Rebel Tavern on Mackinac Island, Mich., plans to cut back dinner hours because she will be understaffed this summer. She said the 15 foreign workers who cooked and cleared tables at her restaurant were more than employees.

“They’re like our family,” Ms. Moskwa said. “You don’t want to be the person to call these people and tell them the government won’t let them back. It’s a sad situation for us and the workers.”

Republicans in Congress have resisted immigration overhaul, insisting that the focus be first on enforcing current laws. The Hispanic Caucus contends that a broad overhaul is needed and that legislation exempting returning foreign workers from the cap on visas should be part of it.

“I recognize that H-2B visa fixes are an important part of the immigration crisis,” said Representative Joe Baca, Democrat of California and chairman of the Hispanic Caucus. “But that should be just another check mark in the column as to why this Congress must take real action on immigration reform.”

A bipartisan coalition of 182 members of Congress has co-sponsored measures sponsored by Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, and Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, that would allow returning workers back.

“The H-2B visa program is being held hostage,” said Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat who represents Cape Cod. “We’re talking about a stimulus package, and yet we’re putting at risk regional economies from the East Coast to the West Coast and many sections of the country in between.”

Representative Charles Boustany Jr., Republican of Louisiana, has introduced a measure that calls for immediate consideration of Mr. Stupak’s bill. Congressional aides involved in the negotiations over the measure said Democratic leaders were discussing a compromise measure with the Hispanic Caucus and others.

Some advocates for business owners argue that employers who go to the trouble of hiring legal employees are being unfairly punished.

“It’s kind of sad that those who have followed the law, paid an inordinate amount of money to follow the law by paying attorneys’ fees, prevailing wage and following the rules, are those who are getting hurt,” said Don Mooers, an immigration lawyer working with Save Small Businesses, a group of small business owners lobbying for the cap to be lifted.

“I get that question every day, ‘Why are we following the law when the guy down the street isn’t, and I’m the one who may face going out of business,’ ” Mr. Mooers said

Here on Cape Cod, the need for imported seasonal labor is especially acute, as 25 percent of residents are over 65 and high real estate prices have driven many blue-collar workers elsewhere.

“We have a very old population, twice the national average of people on Medicare and we’re losing population to other parts of the country because of our affordable housing problem,” said Wendy Northcross, chief executive of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. “We’re losing the population that could potentially take some of our seasonal jobs.”

D. J. Vander Silk, owner of D. J.’s Lawn Service in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he had planned to hire 30 workers from Mexico on temporary seasonal visas, but will not get any. “I feel like we’re right on the edge,” he said. “There’s a robber outside the house and we’re about to get hit in the head.”

Now Mr. Vander Silk and his 20 remaining employees are not accepting new clients and are trying to recruit workers from Florida and the local community. The homes he bought a few years ago to shelter the temporary workers will remain empty for the near future.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” he said.

Sandy Munley, executive director of the Ohio Landscape Association, said the industry employed about 3,000 H-2B workers in Ohio last year, and did not know how many would return. Many contractors are giving away jobs to businesses with adequate staffing, Ms. Munley said.

“This industry tends to be very supportive of each other,” she said, “but I don’t think anything’s ever come to this degree, where people are giving away work. Typically, contractors tend to get it done, but they all definitely say this is historic in a sad way.”

Jim Royal, who operates Kelly Miller Circuses, said he could not find employees to assemble big tops for his traveling circus. He usually relies on 25 H-2B workers from Mexico.

“It’s affecting virtually every circus in America,” Mr. Royal said. “We’re still on hold. We’ve applied and haven’t gotten anything. We’re trying desperately to recruit, but the artists will probably have to help out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/14visa.html?hp





Stories From a World in Motion
A. O. Scott

IT seems fair to say that in the world today there are not many stories bigger or more complicated than the movement of large groups of people from one country to another. And yet, perhaps because it is so vast and complex, it is a story that can be comprehended only in its fine-grained, human particulars. A timeworn piece of Hollywood wisdom (occasionally attributed to Dostoevsky, John Gardner or some other writer) holds that every narrative arises from one of two situations: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. The immigrant’s story, in its basic form, fulfills both of these archetypes. An individual or a family leaves a familiar world, by either choice, necessity or some perceived combination of the two, and arrives in a place that is as strange to the newcomers as they are to it.

In the United States, Western Europe and other relatively wealthy parts of the world, immigration is currently a subject of raw political contention. As such, it is a topic that tends to be discussed both heatedly and somewhat abstractly. The debate is heavy with numbers: the millions of new arrivals; the estimated costs and benefits of allowing them in or trying to keep them out; the changing demographic profiles of neighborhoods, cities and regions. Hovering above these calculations are cultural anxieties and ideological conundrums that are, if anything, even more abstract: questions of assimilation and diversity, of security and cultural identity, of human rights and social obligations, of economic globalization and national sovereignty.

Organizing all this argument and emotion into stories has become an especially acute and fruitful challenge. Of course, variations on the two-fold tale of departure and arrival have been a literary staple, especially in the United States, for more than a century. The wave of immigration, mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe, that began at the end of the 19th century and ended in 1925 has been, for subsequent generations, a wellspring of nostalgia, a way of connecting modern American lives with a more exotic history in the old country or the old neighborhood. And since 1965, when new immigration laws began to bring in large numbers of new arrivals from Asia, South America and elsewhere, there has been a revival of this tradition. Every publishing season brings novels and memoirs that offer fresh variations on the apparently inexhaustible themes of displacement and relocation.

But until recently these themes have never been quite as ubiquitous on movie screens. Though the American film industry was founded largely by enterprising immigrants and has been fed by successive streams of talented émigrés, Hollywood has generally preferred to depict an idealized, homogeneous America, where the nonwhite and the nonnative linger in the margins and the shadows. The exceptions have mainly been examples of the backward-looking, second-generation tradition, films like the “Godfather” cycle, an ambivalent epic of an Italian family’s incomplete Americanization, or “Fiddler on the Roof,” a sentimental journey back to the world of the Eastern European shtetl, from whence the grandparents and great-grandparents of so many American Jews had come. Knowing how the story ends — with Americans paging through their family albums, marveling at what their ancestors had been through — gives even the painful passages in stories like these a warm, soothing glow.

Retrospect also helped make the experience look simpler than it may really have been and certainly simpler than what confronts the world now. Those films, and others like them, traced the passage from a premodern, peasant way of life into a modern world of cities, factories and social mobility. “Golden Door,” a recent film by Emanuele Crialese, an Italian director, re-enacts this transition in an especially stark and powerful way, bringing an extended family from a poor, rural corner of southern Italy up to the edge of New York City and leaving the viewer to imagine what the new arrivals find when they cross the threshold. The voyagers themselves, having been seduced by doctored postcards showing giant chickens and coins growing on bushes, cannot imagine what they will encounter, and Mr. Crialese succeeds in conveying the intense strangeness of their impending arrival. He tries, with some success, to overcome the comforting artifice of costume drama, to infuse history with the uncertainty of the present tense.

Mr. Crialese also recalls an era when global communication relied on steamships and telegraphs and when differences of language and custom seemed more profound than they might today. “The Golden Door” uses the medium’s powers of empathy and estrangement — its capacity to bring about an intuitive recognition of an utterly alien human reality — to measure the enormous distance its characters travel.

But in the present, the distances have shrunk. Movies that deal with migration in the modern world tend to emphasize the often disconcerting connections that seem to web the Earth and link people whether they are aware of the links or not. Their stories are, perhaps as a consequence, less linear, shuttling between places and times rather than moving irreversibly from one to the other. And the camera too crosses borders, traveling, perhaps with deceptive ease, from one country to another without necessarily coming to rest anywhere.

In “La Misma Luna” (“Under the Same Moon”), a new film from the Mexican director Patricia Riggen, a young boy and his mother live on opposite sides of the United States-Mexico border, she in Los Angeles, he in the town she left when she moved North. In some ways, they live in different worlds, and Ms. Riggen takes note of the small, everyday details that distinguish one place from the other. But they are also connected by telecommunications and by the director’s narrative method, which cross-cuts between them as they move toward a possible reunion. Carlitos, the boy, sets out across the border, facing the hazards and hardships with disarming cheerfulness, while his mother, Rosario, contemplates a journey home, an escape from hard work and the constant fear of deportation as well as a chance to see Carlitos again.

“La Misma Luna,” which is rated PG and was recently shown in the New York International Children’s Film Festival (it is set to open Wednesday ), is a gentle and accessible movie. Rosario’s life is hard, and her son encounters some serious danger, but the tone is adventurous and mildly melodramatic rather than harsh or upsetting. But Ms. Riggen’s narrative strategy is, in some ways, a simplified version of the multistranded storytelling found in movies like “Babel” or “Fast Food Nation.”

Neither of those movies, both of which came out around the same time in 2006 (after having their premieres at that year’s Cannes Film Festival), is, strictly speaking, an immigrant tale, but both take the global flow of people and information as a theme and a plotline. And they, like “La Misma Luna,” take pains to point out that inequality and exploitation, along with isolation and estrangement, are features of the global economy. They offer an implicit critique of the optimistic, tolerant multiculturalism that has become a central feature of modern American ideology: a more fatalistic sense of contradiction and complication.

Something similar — a feeling that migration is the symptom of a large-scale social crisis rather than the individual solution to an economic or political problem — arises in many of the European films that focus on the experiences of immigrants. In Europe, mass immigration is both a newer phenomenon than it is in the United States and also a source of more pronounced political tension. In some cases, the presence of large foreign-born populations tests traditions of liberalism and openness; in others, it brings up unresolved legacies of colonialism or extreme nationalism. And the stories told by French, Italian and German filmmakers — some of them immigrants or the children of immigrants from North Africa or the Middle East — reflect this unsettlement.

But they also try to find within it a core of human reality, which may be the most complicating factor of all. A sense of stubborn individualism, which can’t be reduced to cultural identity or political abstraction, informs the films of the Tunisian-born French director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose three features so far (“La Faute à Voltaire,” “L’Esquive” and “La Graine et le Mulet”) are thick with idiosyncrasy and cultural complication. The same might be said of Fatih Akin, the German son of Turkish parents, whose films confound every imaginable cliché and assumption about Europe, Islam, community and desire. His new film, “The Edge of Heaven,” is a tale of crosshatched destinies in which the journey from Turkey to Germany is made and reversed several times. One of the characters is a professor of German literature who travels to Turkey, his father’s homeland but no longer really his own, and opens up a German bookstore. He is, perhaps, Mr. Akin’s surrogate in the film, but he is certainly its embodiment at once of cosmopolitanism and also of a pervasive cultural confusion — which may, in the end, be the same thing.

“The Edge of Heaven” never comes to rest: there is no point of arrival, of assimilation to a new home or return to an old one. And “La Misma Luna,” a very different kind of movie in most ways, concludes on an image of irresolution, or continued perpetual motion. It tells an old story — one of the oldest — but one that never ends, except in the discovery, once again, of a new world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/movies/16scot.html





For France, an All-Purpose Heartthrob
Kristin Hohenadel

PARIS

DURING his brief but eye-catching career, the 24-year-old actor Louis Garrel has been cast as a love interest for young girls, older women and teenage boys, not to mention his own onscreen mother (“Ma Mère”) and sister (“The Dreamers”).

“I’m a sexual object,” the tall, pale, dark-eyed Mr. Garrel said with a smile, taking a drag on his fifth Marlboro at a cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “It’s true that for me there’s something very sexual about the cinema. Not in the sense of the act, but of creating desire.”

In his new film, “Love Songs,” directed by Christophe Honoré, Mr. Garrel plays Ismaël, caught in a ménage à trois with his girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier) and colleague (Clotilde Hesme) as well as being the obsession of an ardent male student (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet). His third film with Mr. Honoré, “Love Songs” is a modern musical about love and loss in which the characters break into song to express their emotions. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it opens Friday in New York.

Mr. Garrel is the youngest member of an esteemed French cinema clan that includes his grandfather, the actor Maurice Garrel, and his father, the director Philippe Garrel (who cast him as a 5-year-old in the 1989 film “Emergency Kisses”). His mother is the actress Brigitte Sy, and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud is his godfather.

Despite his brief foray into child acting, Mr. Garrel said he didn’t decide to become an actor until he was 15, inspired by François Truffaut’s landmark films about the adolescent Antoine Doinel, played by Mr. Léaud. “I wanted to have a life that resembled his,” he said of Doinel. “Léaud didn’t obey any laws of acting. He sends signs that are recognizable but that we’ve never seen. And that’s what I think it means to be an actor.”

His first film role followed in Rodolphe Marconi’s “Ceci est mon corps” (“This Is My Body,” 2001) and he studied drama in Paris. But his recent work with Mr. Honoré has earned him a reputation as something of a 21st-century Doinel.

“A lot of directors have a moment when they believe in an actor and that actor could be the character in all of their films,” said Mr. Honoré, who first cast him as the son of an incestuous mother (Isabelle Huppert) in his 2004 film “Ma Mère.” “It was a dark role,” Mr. Honoré said. “Off-camera he was lighter and more joyful, but with a certain melancholy, and I wanted to offer him something that would better correspond to his personality.”

A gentler turn in “Dans Paris” followed in 2006, with “Love Songs” last year. “He has a very lyrical way of playing a role, like a character in a novel,” Mr. Honoré said, referring not just to his appealing singing style, demonstrated in “Love Songs.” “He seems to have escaped somehow from the 1960s but is totally of his time.”

Mr. Honoré is now editing their fourth collaboration, “La Belle Personne.” “Even in the editing room, I’m surprised by what he does,” Mr. Honoré said. “I have the impression that my films resemble me more and more because of Louis.”

Onscreen, Mr. Garrel bites his nails and smokes, charms and broods. On a gray afternoon in a Left Bank cafe, he seemed to have stepped straight off the screen.

“It’s true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character,” Mr. Garrel said. “And I feel it’s a limit. I’m always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp. Then again, an actor who gives a big performance, it’s always a little embarrassing, because he’s there saying, ‘Look at my performance.’ And that bothers me a lot.”

Playing Ismaël, Mr. Garrel said, he had in mind Yves Montand, as a man who befriends his rival for the same woman’s heart, in Claude Sautet’s 1972 film, “César et Rosalie.” “I’m crazy about Yves Montand,” he said. “You want to live like he does in the film, to be his friend. He has a certain rhythm — he’s always trying to cheer people up, to carry them along — and I thought Ismaël should be like that.”

While shooting “Love Songs,” Mr. Garrel said, he did his best to forge real relationships with fellow cast members. “That’s how mystery is created,” he said. “I want the camera to be a bit like a voyeur. I like to say to myself that the film is a residue of a larger life.” Ms. Sagnier, his “Love Songs” co-star, said: “Louis really likes to share his energy. That’s very rare for an actor. The only bad part is that he also shares his anguish.”

Mr. Honoré agreed that Mr. Garrel is “very inventive and spontaneous on set.”

“But he’s also very much an intellectual who wants to master everything.” he added. “It’s hard for him that he’s not the one choosing the takes. He often calls me up late at night full of anguish, but after the fact.”

Said Mr. Garrel: “I hope each day to have done 10 seconds of good work that they can use in the film. And I’m always afraid I didn’t get those 10 seconds.”

He finds it painful to wait while a film is finished without him. But he’s not one of those actors who refuses to see the final product. “ ‘Love Songs’ is a very tender film,” he said. “I wasn’t watching myself and my faults. And that’s my goal. I want to take pleasure in watching the film.”

Mr. Garrel won the French César for most promising male newcomer in 2006 for his role in “Regular Lovers,” his father’s film set during the May 1968 student protests in Paris, and has a taste for the ever more rarefied French cinéma d’auteur. It was the second time he’d participated in a movie about May 1968, after Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Dreamers,” his best-known film.

His striking looks are also the stuff of fashion shoots and fan sites, and he routinely turns down work in more commercial films. “I like to be able to understand the feeling of the director,” he said, “that a film corresponds to something in his life. Otherwise, it doesn’t interest me much.”

Mr. Garrel has recently completed a second film with his father, “La Frontière de l’Aube,” and is working on his own short film about a young man who feels that time is passing too quickly.

“I don’t know how long I’ll live,” he said when asked what his own future may hold. “But I’d like to make communist films with Ken Loach, libertine films with Almodóvar, esoteric films with Kaurismaki. That’s not bad for a start.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/movies/16hohe.html





Is Ben Stein the New Face of Creationism?
Roger Moore



How do you re-package that tried, untested and untestable faith-without-facts warhorse, "Creationism" after its nearly-annual beat-down by an increasingly exasperated scientific community?

After you've tried renaming it "Intelligent Design," I mean.

With comedy. Mock your "Darwinist" foes the way comics, thinkers, scientists and educated people everywhere have been mocking creationism since Scopes took that monkey off our back.

Tuck into them the way Michael Moore would, with a documentary hosted by a funny Don Quixote willing to tilt at science the way MM has gone after the gun culture, corporate cold-heartedness, George W. Bush and Big Health Care.

Get droll funnyman and ex-Nixon speech writer Ben Stein to host it, to be the on-camera jester-interviewer.

And re-cast this argument about what people chose to believe vs. what others can prove as fact as a fight for "Freedom."

That's the mnemonic device Stein came back to, time and again, last night in an Orlando screening of his new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It's a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts and mockery of hand-picked "weirdo" scientists to attack those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right's efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

He was showing the movie to what he and the producers hoped would be a friendly, receptive audience of conservative Christian ministers at a conference at the Northland mega-church next to the dog track up in Longwood. They're marketing this movie, which they had said, earlier, they'd open in Feb. (now April) the same way other studios pitched The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia, said Paul Lauer of Motive Entertainment, who introduced Stein.

In other words, a stealth campaign, out of the public eye, preaching to the choir to get the word out about the movie without anyone who isn't a true believer passing a discouraging judgment on it. Friendly words in the press only.

They postered the Orlando Sentinel with email invitations, then tried to withdraw the one they sent to me. No dice. They also passed out non-disclosure "statement of confidentiality" agreements for people to sign. I didn't.

What are they hiding from you? Straight propaganda, to be sure. But again, if Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald can do it, why not Ben Stein?

It's a movie that uses animation, archival documentary footage, interviews with outraged "people of science" who want ID on the table, and "atheists" (scientists) who see all this as a step backward, all freighted to back up the argument that it stifled "freedom" when you refuse to consider the work of a supernatural being in America's science classes.

It just isn't particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin's image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it's not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics. Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution by pitching this argument in terms of academic freedom. "Legitimate" learned scientists are being silenced by the Darwinian cabal of thought police. Says Stein.

He uses anecdotes from a few Fox-over-publicized cases of people who claim to have lost tenure/their jobs/their position in the scientific world for daring to suggest the hand of a supernatural being in the creation of life. He hasn't a scintilla of proof of, well, anything. Then he has the audacity to whine, "Where's the data" when questioning cellular biologists and other real scientists who build their lives around doubt, and finding testable, legitimate answers to those doubts. Where's YOUR data, Ben?
He uses "straw man" tactics to attack, mainly The Origin of the Species, as Darwin wrote it in 1859. That's like a music critic reviewing "the latest" by only referring to Edison's wax cylinders. He sets up false theses that "the other side" must hold (classic Limbaugh, putting lies in the other fellow's mouth, then calling him a liar) and knocks those straw men down. Citing scientific research as recent as 1953, he can't understand why no peer-reviewed scientist thinks his "fairytale" version of the emergence of life is worth his or her time. No, not having a definitive answer about the moment life began...YET...is damning enough for Ben.

Most despicably, Stein, a Jew, invokes the Holocaust, making the Hitler-was-a-Darwinist argument, this AFTER he's used the Holocaust denier's favorite trick, probabilities, "math," to show how remote the chances are that life was created by natural, not supernatural processes. There were plenty of reasons eugenics caught on as an idea among certain nationalist-conservative and even scientific circles in the early 20th century, and most of them have nothing to do with Darwin. It reminded me of the phony slump Michael Moore showed walking away from ambushing crusty old Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine.

Animation, similar to that used in Columbine, makes its mock points about how science comes to conclusions and how the culture is structured to accept them. Snippets of The Wizard of Oz, Inherit the Wind and other films (if this polished, credited, scored film is indeed "unfinished," it may be from unresolved rights-clearance issues) to make his points funny. Not really. The Stalin and Soviet and Nazi clips are used in a not-quite-subliminal seduction way to demonize the people who might hold a contrary view.

But all the creative editing in the world only appears to let Stein hold his own with noted British scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins, whose words can be twisted to suggest that "aliens" seeded life on Earth, or at least that's more likely than anything in the Bible being literally true about creation. That's still a more rational explanation than any Stein, being a veteran Republican persuader/operator, offers. Does he really believe the blather he tosses out here? Introducing the movie at the church screening I attended, he had to trot out some nonsense about living in Malibu but not among "the stars. The REAL stars are fighting and dying for our freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Ok. Know your audience, if you're a speech-writer (He used to work in the Nixon White House). Pander, baby, pander.

I remember stumbling across, at a bookstore, one of the more shrill and lunatic "Bill Clinton had people KILLED in Arkansas" books that came out during the 90s. I open it at the B. Dalton, and lo and behold, there's Ben Stein writing the foreward. I had no idea...

Before that, he was just the guy giving away money on Comedy Central, the ever-droning teacher of TV shows and movies ("Bueller. Bueller.").

The PBS NOVA series did a terrific piece on the court battle over intelligent design as fought in the courts in Pennsylvania, a lacerating film of finely honed facts and dagger-sharp arguments that should be shown in every school district with intel. design-dreamers running for the school board.

ID is "creation science" is "creationism" is "God dun it." Teaching that as something provable beyond faith in a science curriculum is a big reason future Nobel winners will pour out of China and India, and not Kansas. Or Florida. That's the reason a consensus of the world's scientists fret so much over the time they have to waste on this non-debate. Stein found a Pole and the infamous Discovery Institute to back up his attacks, even though they offer no counter theories that they can back up.

Expelled makes good points about academic freedom and the ways unpopular ideas are shouted down in academia, the press and the culture. But not offering evidence to back your side, where the burden of proof lies, makes the movie every bit as meaningless and silly as that transcendental metaphysical hooey of a couple of years back, What the Bleep Do We Know?

In Stein's case, you really do wonder what he knows, or what he's willing to claim he believes just to make a buck off the Scopes deniers.

Oh, and keeping your movie from the public because you're afraid of ridicule is just gutless. Put it out there, let people have time to chew on your arguments. Your fans will buy tickets. And plenty of folks will emerge to tear it apart. Even Michael Moore has the courage to do that.

Maybe Stein will repackage himself as the new face of creationism. The new face of cynicism is more like it. But as Nixon must've reminded him, there's a sucker born every minute. And a lot of them vote.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/ent...-stein-th.html





Ten Years Old: the World's First MP3 Player
Tony Smith

Forgotten Tech The MP3 player is ten years old this month. The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems and launched in March 1998.

The F10 contained 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. It measured 91 x 70 x 165.5mm. It connected to an old-style parallel port on the host PC from which songs could be copied to the player. There was a tiny LCD on the front to give an indication as to what you were listening to.

The device made its debut at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany. It was a prototype, but Saehan must have garnered enough interest to put the player into mass production, which it did in May 1998 before going on sale in the US and Europe through importers in the summer.

In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, which was priced at $200.

The PMP300 - widely but wrongly held to be the world's first commercial MP3 player - also had 32MB of storage fed through a parallel port. But it boasted a larger display than the F10 and also featured a Smart Media slot to allow users to increase the gadget's storage capacity.

The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. By that point, Rio had already teamed up with MP3.com to offer songs from the website.

The RIAA asked for a sales ban, and got one on a temporary basis on 16 October, only to have it withdrawn on 26 October. In December, Rio countersued the RIAA, claiming the organisations actions were an attempt to impede the growth of a market - digital music - which it didn't control.

It was later ruled that Diamond had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. The RIAA appealed against the verdict, but lost there too: the Court judged that the PMP300 was not a recording device and so did not fall within the boundaries of the Act.

The RIAA and Diamond would eventually settle their differences in August 1999, but by then Rio was a household name, especially among internet users busily sharing MP3 music on the internet using newly created peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software.

Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained through from the lawsuit. Saehan soon established MPMan as a sub-division, and as such it later appeared among the roster of members joining the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an cross-industry attempt to develop a universal digital rights management (DRM) technology.

SDMI ran out of steam in 2001, largely because of a highly publicised cracking of its encryption technology, leaving the way open for Microsoft's Windows Media DRM technology to fill the gap. And it might have done if Apple's release of the iPod in the October of that year hadn't proved ultimately so successful.

In the interim, MPMan had continued developing and offering MP3 players, but Apple's move to allow Windows PC owners to use the iPod, from April 2003, resulted in explosive growth. MPMan, Rio and other pioneers couldn't keep up.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03...st_mp3_player/





Intel Confirms 160GB Solid-State Drives Will be Unveiled Soon
Brian Fonseca

Intel Corp. today confirmed that it is close to unveiling a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs that will feature a storage capacity up to 160GB.

An Intel spokesman said that the chip maker will introduce 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. solid-state drives offering between 80GB and 160GB diskless storage during the second quarter of 2008. The spokesman declined to provide further details about the ship date or disclose the storage density of the drives.

Intel had demonstrated the high-performance solid-state drive prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. At the time, an Intel spokesman said the manufacturer had not decided whether to sell the drives directly to retailers or through laptop and PC makers.

The spokesman said in January that the solid-state technology would be shown again in April at the Intel Developer Forum, where some observers said it may be officially released.

Intel currently offers ultrasmall low-power solid-state storage offerings for mobile devices. These include the 2GB Z-P140 PATA and the 4GB Z-U130 USB offerings. The company has made no secret of its desire to significantly broaden its solid-state portfolio along with boosting flash performance for customers.

Last month IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture of Intel and Micron Technology Inc., unveiled a new high-speed NAND flash memory technology that it said offers data transfer speeds that are five times faster than conventional NAND technology.

An aggressive move into the laptop and PC notebook flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. that are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months. Samsung said it will ship a 2.5-in. 128 solid-state drive in Q2 while Toshiba Corp. has announced plans to produce solid-state drives ranging in capacity from 32GB to 128GB for notebook PCs by May.

Although analysts do expect that corporations will begin to seriously consider the benefits of solid-state drives during 2008, the high price tag for the technology may keep sales in check for a few years.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Ericsson Predicts Swift End for Wi-Fi Hotspots
Stuart Turton

The rapid growth of mobile broadband is set to make Wi-Fi hotspots irrelevant, according to an Ericsson executive.

"Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," claimed Ericsson's chief marketing officer Johan Bergendahl, speaking to delegates at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

"In Austria they are saying that mobile broadband will pass fixed broadband this year. It's already growing faster, and in Sweden, the most popular phone is a USB modem," Bergendahl claimed, according to ComputerWorld.

Bergendahl pointed to a couple of significant factors in the future growth of mobile broadband, including the price, which is as low as 20 euros per month in Austria, Denmark and Sweden.

He also highlighted the increasing tendency of manufacturers to build High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) into their laptops, pointing specifically to Lenovo, which uses Ericsson's HSPA technology.

However, he admitted challenges remain for mobile broadband. "Industry will have to solve the international roaming issue," he said. "Carriers need to work together. It can be as simple as paying 10 euros per day when you are abroad."

He also pointed to a lack of coverage as a potential hindrance to the growth of the technology.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/176220/e...-hotspots.html





Gates Urges U.S. to Free up More Spectrum for Wi-Fi
Peter Kaplan

Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates urged U.S. communications regulators on Thursday to free up more vacant television airwaves to be used for wireless services such as broadband Internet access.

During an appearance before a Northern Virginia technology group, Gates said the so-called "white space" spectrum between analog broadcast channels could be used to expand access of wireless broadband service using Wi-Fi technology.

"We're hopeful that that will be made available so that Wi-Fi can explode in terms of its usage, even out into some of these less dense areas (of the United States) where distance has been a big problem for Wi-Fi," Gates said in response to a question from the audience.

Microsoft is part of a coalition of technology companies that has been lobbying the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to allow unlicensed use of white space spectrum.

The group also includes Google Inc, Dell, Intel Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and the north American unit of Philips Electronics.

However, the idea is opposed by U.S. broadcasters and makers of wireless microphones, who fear the devices would cause interference.

"Broadband penetration could be drastically improved through a fixed, licensed service without interference to TV reception. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to push for an unlicensed technology that simply does not work," said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.

"TV viewers should not be inundated by the inevitable interference caused by such faulty devices," Wharton said.

A proposal being studied by the FCC would create two categories of users for the airwaves: one for low-power, personal, portable devices like Wi-Fi and a second group for fixed commercial operations.

The proposal would require that the devices include technology to identify unused spectrum and avoid interference.

The FCC currently is testing prototype devices to see if they can make use of the white space spectrum without interfering with TV broadcasts.

Also appearing with Gates was Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, who said a shortage of spectrum could hurt U.S. competitiveness. He said past decisions have not made enough spectrum available.

"White space activity today is sort of our last hope to get some good spectrum," Mundie said.

(Reporting by Peter Kaplan; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...32446720080313





Wireless Networks That Build Themselves

From traffic lights to mobile phones, small computers are all around us. Enabling these ‘embedded systems’ to create wireless communications networks automatically will have profound effects in areas from emergency management to healthcare and traffic control.

Networks of mobile sensors and other small electronic devices have huge potential. Applications include emergency management, security, helping vulnerable people to live independently, traffic control, warehouse management, and environmental monitoring.

One scenario investigated by European researchers was a road-tunnel fire. With fixed communications destroyed and the tunnel full of smoke, emergency crews would normally struggle to locate the seat of the blaze and people trapped in the tunnel.

Wireless sensors could cut through the chaos by providing the incident control room with information on visibility, temperatures, and the locations of vehicles and people. Firefighters inside the tunnel could then receive maps and instructions through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays.

For this vision to become reality, mobile devices have to be capable of forming self-organising wireless networks spanning a wide variety of communications technologies. Developing software tools to make this possible was the task of the RUNES project.

Intelligent networking

‘Ad-hoc’ mobile networks are very different from the wireless computer networks in homes and offices, explains Dr Lesley Hanna, a consultant and dissemination manager for RUNES. Without a human administrator, an ad-hoc network must assemble itself from any devices that happen to be nearby, and adapt as devices move in and out of wireless range. And where office networks use powerful computers with separate routers, the building blocks of ad-hoc mobile networks are low-power devices that must do their own wireless routing, forwarding signals from other devices that would otherwise be out of radio range.

A typical network could contain tens or even hundreds of these ‘embedded systems’, ranging from handheld computers down to ‘motes’: tiny units each equipped with a sensor, a microcontroller and a radio that can be scattered around an area to be monitored. Other devices could be mounted at fixed points, carried by robots, or worn as ‘smart clothing’ or ‘body area networks’.

Wireless standards are not the issue: most mobile devices use common protocols, such as GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. The real challenge, suggests Hanna, is to build self-managing networks that work reliably on a large scale, with a variety of operating systems and low-power consumption.

Middleware and more

The EU-funded RUNES (Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems) covered 21 partners in nine countries. Although RUNES was led by Ericsson, it had an academic bias, with twice as many universities as industrial partners, and most of the resulting software is publicly available.

RUNES set out to create middleware: software that bridges the gap between the operating systems used by the mobile sensor nodes, and high-level applications that make use of data from the sensors. RUNES middleware is modular and flexible, allowing programmers to create applications without having to know much about the detailed working of the network devices supplying the data. This also makes it easy to incorporate new kinds of mobile device, and to re-use applications.

Interoperability was a challenge, partly because embedded systems themselves are so varied. At one end of the spectrum are powerful environments, such as Java, while at the other are simple systems designed for wireless sensors. For devices with small memories, RUNES developed middleware modules that can be uploaded, used to carry out specific tasks, and then overwritten.

Project partners also worked on an operating system and a simulator. Contiki is an open-source operating system designed for networked, embedded systems with small amounts of memory. Simics, a simulator allowing large networks to be tested in ways that are impractical with real hardware, is commercially available from project partner Virtutech.

Taking the plunge

The tunnel fire scenario was valuable in demonstrating what networks of this kind can achieve. Using real sensor nodes, routers, gateways and robots developed during the project, a demonstration setup showed how, for instance, a robot router can manoeuvre itself to cover a gap in the network’s wireless coverage.

“A lot of people have been looking at embedded systems networking, but so far there has been a reluctance to take the plunge commercially,” says Hanna. “RUNES’ open-source model is an excellent way to stimulate progress, and it should generate plenty of consultancy work for the academic partners.”

Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0311200326.htm





IFPI Takes ISP to Court to Impose Music Piracy Filter
enigmax

The ‘Big Four’ record labels - EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner have started legal proceedings to force an ISP to end piracy on its network. The action, brought against Irish ISP, Eircom, is the first of its kind.

Eircom is the largest Irish ISP. Today, the Big Four record labels have started legal proceedings which they hope will force Eircom to effectively end music piracy on its network. According to the Ireland.com report, this action is the first against an ISP, rather than individual file-sharers.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly today admitted the proceedings at the court under the Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000. It appears the labels are trying to get an order to effectively force Eircom to take responsibility for their customer’s actions by saying that it’s the ISP that is doing the ‘making available’ to the public, by facilitating the infringement.

Eircom’s lawyers see if differently. They say that Eircom was “not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies”, adding that it was under no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network.

Willie Kavanagh, Managing Director of EMI records in Ireland said of Eircom: “with the greatest of respect” it was “well aware” that its customers used its networks to infringe copyrights “on a grand scale”.

Previously, Eircom has refused to use any filtering technology to interfere with file-sharers, something the labels wish to address in this case too.

It looks like the IFPI has shifted its focus from the individual filesharer to the ISPs. Last month, the IFPI won a court case in Denmark, and the ISP “Tele2″ was ordered to block all access to The Pirate Bay. Tele2 announced later that it will fight the decision.

Banning illegal filesharing from their network, voluntary or not, is in the best interest of ISPs according to the IFPI: “Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth,” they state.
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-isp-mus...piracy-080310/





‘IFPI Advertising’ Boosts Visitors To Blocked File-Sharing Site
enigmax

Last week a court ruled that Israel’s largest ISPs should block access to HttpShare, a BitTorrent and http hyperlink site. Thanks to what the owners call “IFPI advertising”, the site is now so busy they’ve had to upgrade their hardware. TorrentFreak caught up with them as they cracked open the champagne.

Haifa District Court Judge, Gideo Ginat: “I order the respondents, that is Israeli internet service providers, to systematically block access to the illicit site, HttpShare, so that surfers cannot enter this site and utilize it in in order to impede upon the claimants’ copyrights.”

In response, the site owners state: “According to Dutch law, sites providing external links allowing surfers to download movie, music, games and program are perfectly legal. Sites cannot store these illicit files on their internet servers, and that is precisely what we do not do. The site merely provides links to file sharing sites that host BitTorrent files or http downloads.”

This fact doesn’t seem to have influenced the judge when he ordered the blocking of the site.

Unfortunately for the IFPI, this block has achieved nothing other than boosting the popularity of the site - dozens of news outlets wrote about the block and the result so far is that visitors are now up to 70,000 a day. HTTPShare even had to get new hardware to cope with the demand - “Big Thanks to IFPI Advertising” says a note on the site.

TorrentFreak caught up with admin ‘Andre’ to hear more:

TF: Please tell us a little about the history leading directly to the creation of HTTPShare.

HTTP: Before HTTPSHARE there was a warez site back in 2003 called ELICOMP.CO.IL. The site’s owner was Eli Amar. Eli had to join the army and could not continue running the site, however he met me and I agreed to fund the site and keep it running. The site indexed HTTP links on all sorts of servers, then we grew in size and developed a crawler which job was to track fast speed .torrent files. The crawler was added to the the site which made it even more popular. We created the VIP zone in which users get fast and direct links (min. 500KB/s) to cover the servers and the programmers cost.

TF: When did your legal problems with the IFPI begin?

HTTP: About 9 months ago, Eli got a package with IFPI prosecution documents, including a court order to shut down the site. Eli didn’t know what to do so he mailed the files to me and I canceled the domain and opened a new one - HTTPSHARE.COM. Then 150K of emails were sent to previous members telling them about the new site and it wasn’t long before search engines like Google and Yahoo picked us up.

TF: Obviously changing the domain name and owner didn’t persuade the IFPI to leave you alone, so what happened next?

HTTP: The IFPI kept sending sending emails demanding us to shutdown the site. I never did so because the site is legal, we do not upload illegal stuff to our server [do not host any infringing media], and what we are doing is not against the law of the country in which we are hosted [Netherlands].

TF: How did the ISP block come about?

HTTP: After the IFPI understood that they are dealing with a new owner they asked the Israeli court to order the ISPs to block the “www.httpshare.com” domain. We all know that the legal system in Israel is corrupted and driven by money and power of the share holders. How can you accept such a ruling from a judge whose son was suspended from his job as a lawyer because of counterfeiting documents and money blackmail?

TF: Why do you think you became an IFPI target?

HTTP: We were a target of the IFPI and similar organizations even at the time of Elicomp. I think we were targeted because of the huge amount of bandwidth my site used while providing Direct external links. At that time the ISPs blocked us, but were then forced to unblock as a result of complaints from their subscribers.

TF: What actions have you taken to try to counter the block?

HTTP: For now we changed the IP of the server and released a program (browser) for the members that uses a server with 10 IP ranges so that it will be a lot more difficult to block it. Since we introduced the browser, the number of visitors has doubled. Also, thanks to the huge amount of publicity we got from the IFPI and sites like yours, we have added an English language forum to the site and translated the names of the forums to make the site easy to use.

TF: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Suing individual users doesn’t work, bullying site owners doesn’t appear to be effective and ISP bans simply create more traffic and popularity for the target site. All this on top of reduced funding for chasing copyright infringers. So where next for the IFPI?
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-adverti...raffic-080312/





Verizon Touts Smart P2P Software
Marguerite Reardon

A real-world Internet test reveals that "intelligent" routing of peer-to-peer traffic can drastically reduce network utilization and speed up downloads for subscribers, according to a new study.

Verizon Communications, which participated in the study headed by researchers at Yale University, plans to release the data on Friday at the Distributed Computing Industry Association's P2P Market Conference in New York City.

Using network topology data from Verizon and Telefonica, Yale University tested a software enhancement to the peer-to-peer protocol that it developed with software developer Pando Networks.

What the researchers discovered was that when using the so-called P4P software they were able to reduce the impact of peer-to-peer traffic on Verizon's network by more than 50 percent. This is significant because peer-to-peer traffic makes up roughly half of all traffic traveling over Verizon's network.

The P2P protocol, which is used to distribute large data files, works by requesting pieces of a single file from different hosts all over the Internet. The technology has become popular for distributing high-definition video.

But applications that use P2P eat up a lot of bandwidth, which some service providers say is a problem. Cable operator Comcast has slowed down certain kinds of peer-to-peer traffic in an effort to manage its network. And Time Warner Cable is experimenting with a tiered usage model to deter people from sharing P2P files.

Traditionally, the P2P protocol has requested bits and pieces of content randomly, without considering the physical location of the data. This often results in some pieces of the content traveling over long distances across the network. For example, a user in New Jersey downloading a movie might get some bits of the file from New York and others from China or California.

The P4P software enhancements add intelligence to this process so that the bits are served from local hosts.

Douglas Pasko is Verizon senior technologist and co-chair of the P4P Working Group, which was formed by Verizon, Pando Networks, and the university to develop P4P. He said that when the P4P software was used on the Verizon network it found that 58 percent of its peer-to-peer network traffic stayed local. Using regular P2P technology, only 6 percent of the traffic stayed local.

Reducing the number of hops is key

Pasko said that keeping the traffic local is important because every link that a bit passes through costs the operator something. This means that if a Fios subscriber in New Jersey can get bits of content from Verizon customers in New York City instead of getting them from Singapore or Taiwan, Verizon can save money.

The key is reducing the number of routers or hops the traffic has to go through to get to its destination. On average, Pasko said that regular P2P traffic makes 5.5 hops to get its destination. Using the P4P protocol, those same files took an average of 0.89 hops.

Reducing hops means that Verizon can cut its network costs. Exactly how much the company saves depends on the individual links, but Pasko said the savings are significant.

Verizon broadband subscribers also saw a benefit when the P4P protocol was used. Customers using Verizon's all-fiber network called Fios saw movies downloading on average twice as fast as when they used the traditional P2P software. Some customers saw as much as a 6x improvement in download speeds, Pasko said.

For customers on regular DSL service, the improvement in download speeds wasn't as great because these customers don't have high bandwidth connections anyway.

This real-world field trial validates the value of P2P content providers working closely with Internet service providers to provide the most efficient service for customers, Pasko said. There are already 50 members in the DCIA's P4P Working Group, including some cable operators, such as Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner, he said.

"We hope this shows that using P2P in an intelligent way can benefit everyone," he said. "It allows us to use fewer resources on our network and get better performance for our customers."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-989...l?tag=nefd.top





Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
Steve Lohr

Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting a lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say, would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.

“The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year.



Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.

That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets smarter.

“The 50 percent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.

The question of the problem’s severity is more than a technical one, since it will affect the shape and cost of the nation’s policy on broadband infrastructure, a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.

“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”

The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.

“When I mention my own service, people here shake their heads in disbelief,” said Mr. Baker, who is a board member of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that helps guide Internet standards and policy.

In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.

“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.

In the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, there was a glut of capacity — so-called dark fiber, strung around the world and then left dormant. Now demand is catching up with that supply. In its prediction of more than 100 percent annual growth, Nemertes, a telecommunications research firm, assumes brisk use of new innovations like high-end videoconferencing, known as telepresence, which corporations are beginning to embrace as an alternative to costly, time-consuming travel.

If this technology becomes a consumer product in the next few years, as some analysts predict, Internet traffic could spike even more sharply.

Slick video chats are something that William Bentley, a 13-year-old New Yorker, would like to see. He is fairly representative of the next generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament, and downloads music and videos.

Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, “It would be nice to have everybody always right there — just click and you could see them clearly and talk to them.”

That sort of service is certainly going to require more bandwidth and more investment, with higher costs across the spectrum of the Internet ecosystem that includes cable and telecommunications carriers, Internet companies, media Web sites and even consumers. AT&T, for one, said last week that it would spend $1 billion this year — double its 2006 expenditures — to expand its overseas infrastructure.

But even if investment lags behind, there will be no Internet blackout. Indeed, the Internet has survived predictions of collapse in the past, most notably by Robert M. Metcalfe, a networking pioneer and entrepreneur, who in a 1995 magazine column warned of a “catastrophic collapse” of the Internet in 1996. There were service problems, but nothing like Mr. Metcalfe predicted, and on stage at a conference in 1997 he ate his words.

“The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr. Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/te.../13net.html?hp





YouTube Makes Video Sharing Easier
Steve Johnson

In a move likely to broaden its reach globally, YouTube today unveiled an easier way for people to share with the world the videos they create.

The video-sharing subsidiary of Mountain View-based Google said it is providing free access to so-called Application Programmer Interfaces - or APIs as techies call them - that will let people greatly expand their use of YouTube on Web sites, cell phones and even video games.

Previously, people could place the YouTube player on their personal Web sites and view videos from the YouTube library. But they had little control over how the videos were displayed on their sites and were unable to play videos they created themselves or send comments back to YouTube about what they had watched.

Now, people will be able to customize the YouTube player, comment and send YouTube the videos they make - all from their own Web sites and cell phones.

Users even can share animated monsters they create on their personal computers.

Redwood City-based Electronic Arts has already incorporated the advanced YouTube feature into its upcoming video game Spore, in which players design their own horrific creatures. As a result, gamers will be able to share images of their ogres with YouTube users everywhere when it hits stores in September.

That ought to please Spore aficionados, according to Will Wright, an Electronic Arts vice president and designer.

"By allowing players to seamlessly broadcast their experiences on YouTube, we're giving the community even more tools to easily create and share their content," he said in prepared comments that YouTube has posted on its Web site.

The new service was offered in large part because many people want to put a personal touch on their video sharing, said Jim Patterson, YouTube's product manager.

"Ultimately, they want to make it their own," he said. "They want to use it in ways you couldn't imagine."

So how does YouTube benefit from the deal?

Aside from noting that the new service should make YouTube accessible to a vast new audience worldwide, Patterson demurred on that point.

"Trying to make money with the APIs now isn't our focus," he said. "We'll work that stuff out."

In fact, one feature of the new service allows people to customize the way the YouTube video player appears on their own Web sites so it fits more with their sites' designs. That allows people to remove some of the YouTube identifiers that normally appear on the player.

Still, a small company emblem will remain so everyone can tell it's YouTube's technology, Patterson said. Moreover, by letting people use the video-sharing service in ways they couldn't before, YouTube is likely to become much more widely used, he noted. As a result, "it does get the YouTube brand out there," he said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8549624





TiVo Expands its Reach with YouTube Videos
David Lieberman

TiVo (TIVO) and YouTube removed another brick from the wall separating computers and television sets on Wednesday with an agreement that will let consumers watch user-generated videos from the Google-owned (GOOG) website on their TVs.

The deal will provide TiVo with a vast reservoir of clips. YouTube accounts for about a third of all videos streamed on the Internet.

TiVo hopes that will enhance its drive to market itself as a premium digital video recorder service vs. the fast-growing and less-expensive alternatives offered by cable and satellite providers.

"TiVo's the only company that allows you to record (conventional) television and pull up broadband video with one menu and one search," says Tara Maitra, vice president of content services.

YouTube says that the agreement is one example of how it plans to expand its reach.

"This is part of a broader goal to bring YouTube everywhere," says Jim Patterson, YouTube product manager.

Although the companies wouldn't disclose financial details, YouTube says that no ads initially will appear in or next to its clips when they run on TiVo.

That makes it different from services such as Apple TV that send websites to televisions.

TiVo's Maitra says that "we never pay" to license programming.

Patterson says it's just a coincidence that the announcement of the plan to bring YouTube to televisions via TiVo came out the same day as the official launch of Hulu.com. That site, backed by NBC Universal and News Corp., brings TV shows to the Web.

Although the TiVo-YouTube agreement illustrates where television is headed, it will take awhile before it affects many viewers.

The DVR pioneer says it will offer YouTube "later this year." Maitra says it likely will be "closer to the middle than the end."

The service will be available only to TiVo subscribers who have broadband Internet connections to its high-definition digital video recorders. TiVo says that it took awhile to develop a process to handle YouTube videos, and technological problems still prevent it from offering the clips to most of its 3.9 million DVRs, most of which aren't high-def.

TiVo won't say how many customers initially will be able to use its YouTube service.

"Search was a cumbersome process to solve," Maitra says. The user interface will be "a combination of the TiVo aesthetic with the YouTube functionality."

Videos will be streamed, and users won't be able to record them on their DVRs.

The companies are developing plans to integrate YouTube with TiVo's KidZone service, which lets parents prevent children from watching violent or risqué shows.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/...e-videos_N.htm





BBC 'Opens Floodgates' to iPlayer Hackers
Bobbie Johnson

• Anti-piracy breach allows unrestricted downloads
• Corporation says it is working to close loophole

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC's anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation's iPlayer internet TV service.

The loophole potentially allows millions of people to download television shows on to their computers without any copyright protection.

The iPlayer system, which lets surfers watch BBC videos online in a similar way to websites such as YouTube, has proved massively popular since it launched late last year. Shows such as Top Gear and Doctor Who can be watched over the web or downloaded to a computer for viewing at a later point.

When developing the iPlayer, however, the BBC agreed to include anti-piracy measures in all programmes in order to appease TV production companies and broadcasting unions. The addition of so-called digital rights management (DRM) software means new shows disappear from the website after one week, and files downloaded on to a computer have a 30-day expiry date. After the limit is reached, the videos are no longer viewable.

However, the backdoor in the iPlayer allows users to completely bypass those protections and download unprotected versions of any show on the website.

One of the hackers responsible said it took him only 12 minutes to find the loophole and make it work - but that such a simple hack potentially opened up every programme on iPlayer for unlimited downloading.

"The BBC accidentally opened the floodgates and gave the world DRM-free downloads," said one hacker with knowledge of the breach. "If only it were down to something other than poor design, decisions and ineptitude."

The BBC said the system was still in its trial phase, known as "beta", and that it was already working to come up with a solution.

"This is not unusual or surprising," said a BBC spokeswoman. "We have made it clear the BBC iPlayer on iPhone and iTouch is currently in beta, which enables us to pick up on such issues and find a solution before we roll the service out in full in due course."

The iPlayer was launched last year at a cost of several million pounds, and initial reaction to the download service was modest. But the ability to watch online - which was added last Christmas - has proved highly successful: the most recent figures indicate that programmes were viewed more than 17m times between December 25 and mid-February.

However, the decision to incorporate anti-piracy protections has angered some campaigners, who believe that British citizens should have unprotected access to shows for which they have already paid with their TV licence fee.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...deo.television





Report: DVR Could Turn Apple TV Into Multi-Billion Dollar Business
Katie Marsal

By integrating digital video recording (DVR) features into Apple TV, Apple stands to transform it's niche media hub business into a serious growth driver worth over a billion dollars annually, according to one Wall Street analyst.

Reacting to a patent filing uncovered by AppleInsider on Thursday, American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu said he sees DVR features like those portrayed in the filing cropping up in a third or fourth revision to Apple TV, turning the device into a real business rather than just a "hobby."

"We estimate AppleTV to be a very minor contributor today at ~0.3-0.4 percent of revenue or $100-125 million annually," he wrote in a note to clients. "We believe adding the ability to watch and record live TV could turn this into a billion dollar, if not multi-billion dollar business."

Wu said the cost of hardware components needed to equip the media box with DVR features is almost negligible, or about $12-15 in incremental cost per unit.

"We (as well as many others) have been clamoring for DVR and/or TV tuner capabilities since the introduction of Apple TV 1.0 in January 2007 and even Apple TV 2.0 with movie rentals in January 2008," he added. "We are pleased to see Apple listening to customers similar to what it has done with iPhone, with adding native access to Exchange server."

The analyst, however, took pause in his report to note that there have been patent filings from Apple in the past that have not come to fruition "yet." One example, he said, is Bluetooth stereo headsets which have yet to ship but "will at some point as cost of components decline."

Separately, he cited his own sources as saying that Apple and Sony appear to be in the final negotiation stages of bringing Blu-ray to Macs.

"Thus while near-term trends look difficult with a looming recession and a slow-down in consumer spending, we continue to believe Apple is well-positioned to weather the storm better than most with its strong fundamentals," he wrote. "[We] reiterate [our] BUY rating and price target of $175."
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...us iness.html





Wal-Mart Ends Test Run for Linux Operating System Computers in Stores

Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows didn't attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores, a spokeswoman said Monday.

"This really wasn't what our customers were looking for," said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien.

To test demand for systems with the open-source operating system, Wal-Mart stocked the $199 "Green gPC," made by Everex of Taiwan, in about 600 stores starting late in October.

Walmart.com, the chain's e-commerce site, had sold Linux-based computers before and will continue selling the gPC.

This was the first time they appeared on retail shelves.

Paul Kim, brand manager for Everex, said selling the gPC online was "significantly more effective" than selling it in stores.

Wal-Mart sold out the in-store gPC inventory but decided not to restock, O'Brien said. The company does not reveal sales figures for individual items.

Walmart.com now carries an updated version, the gPC2, also for $199, without a monitor. The site also sells a tiny Linux-driven laptop, the Everex CloudBook, for $399.

Linux software is maintained and developed by individuals and companies around the world on an "open source" basis, meaning that everyone has access to the software's blueprints and can modify them.

There is no licensing fee for Linux, which helps keeps the cost of the Everex PC low. Manufacturers have to pay Microsoft to sell computers with Windows preloaded.

Linux is in widespread use in server computers, but it hasn't made a dent in the desktop market. Surveys usually put its share of that market around one per cent, far behind Windows and Apple Inc.'s OS X.

Smaller laptops like the CloudBook could provide an entree for Linux, since it runs well on systems with modest memory and hard drive capacity.
http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...C7J5MQLVJxp5HA





Testing Over, Hulu.com to Open Its TV and Film Offerings This Week
Brad Stone

Hulu.com, the long-gestating Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, emerges from limited testing on Wednesday to make its catalog of TV shows and video clips available to anyone on the Web.

The streaming-video site displays free, ad-supported shows and feature films from NBC, Fox and more than 50 media companies, including Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

On Wednesday, Hulu is also planning to announce that the Warner Brothers Television Group and Lionsgate will add content from their libraries. Hulu will also give sports fans highlights from N.B.A. and N.H.L. games, and full-length N.C.A.A. men’s basketball games from the last 25 years, the company said.

Hulu’s videos also appear on AOL, MSN, Comcast, MySpace and Yahoo. Over 5,000 Web sites have embedded clips from Hulu, the company said.

Hulu has so far failed to recruit two major television networks, ABC, a division of Walt Disney, and CBS. Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, said that he was still having regular conversations with executives at the two networks. But even without them, he said, the company has quadrupled the number of show titles in its library since testing began.

“We won’t stop until we have everything in terms of premium content. That is our mission,” he said. “I just think back to the fact that 24 months ago, there wasn’t anything online legally in terms of full TV episodes or films. In just 17 weeks, we have gone from nothing to over 200 premium titles.”

NBC Universal, a division of General Electric, and Fox, a division of the News Corporation, announced their joint venture to much fanfare nearly a year ago. The then-unnamed company was at first viewed skeptically by many in the industry as a desperate attempt to keep up with the Google’s YouTube, the dominant player in online video.

Recently, Hulu has received high marks from media and Web executives for creating an easy to use site with high-quality video and professional content attractive to advertisers.

Hulu has been in a password-protected testing period since October, but has slowly been inviting users to enter the site. Mr. Kilar said that more than five million viewers have watched Hulu videos in the last 30 days, and that 80 percent of the shows on the site are viewed at least once a week.

Hulu is experimenting with giving viewers a choice in advertising. During certain shows, viewers will be able to choose which commercial they want to watch — for example, whether they want to see an ad for Nissan’s Rogue S.U.V., Maxima sedan or Z sports car.

Some viewers will also be given the opportunity to watch a two-minute film preview before a TV show, and then skip all the other advertising breaks.

One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season.

“If those episodes keep disappearing, they are going to have trouble getting people to go back and recommend TV shows on Hulu to their friends,” said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst at JupiterResearch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/bu...ia/11hulu.html





Sony Joins We7 to Make Music Free

A new advertising-backed streaming service has signed its first major label
Richard Wray and Owen Gibson

We7, a free, advertising-supported online music service backed by Peter Gabriel, has become the first to claim the support of a major label, after Sony BMG, home to Mark Ronson, Bruce Springsteen and the Hoosiers, pledged to license its catalogue of more than 250,000 tracks to the company's new online music streaming service.

The news comes as digital media group 24-7 Entertainment, which has built more than 40 online and mobile music services including Tesco's download site and a music portal for 3, prepares to launch an innovative unlimited music download service for a Nordic mobile and broadband provider, rumoured to be Denmark's TDC. It is also understood to be in talks with a number of UK internet service and mobile phone providers about a similar service.

Meanwhile mobile phone operator O2, owned by Spain's Telefónica, will this week announce a deal with online music pioneer Napster. Vodafone is also understood to be in talks with the outfit.

These moves making it easier for consumers to listen to and legally download music are the latest steps towards persuading consumers to stop illegally sharing and downloading tracks. They come as governments in Britain and France have warned that they will introduce legislation that demands internet service providers (ISPs) monitor what their users are doing if the tide of illegal file-sharing cannot be turned.

The new service developed by 24-7, expected to launch next month, is a big step towards helping ISPs produce legal music services attractive enough for consumers that they will not resort to peer-to-peer sharing networks.

The service, developed under the codename UMAP or unlimited music across all portals, will allow all mobile and broadband customers of the company unlimited access to music for no extra cost. They will not have to pay any subscription or fee above what they are already paying for their mobile or broadband service.

Consumers will be able to download as many tracks as they want to their computers or mobile phones and keep them for as long as they remain a customer. The tracks are protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology, so they cannot be copied on to a CD or transferred to a standalone music device such as an iPod.

The service will have well over a million tracks at launch, with 24-7 understood to have signed up EMI. Other major labels, including Universal and Warner, are also in talks with the company.

"It will allow every customer of this company from day one to access music without any extra cost, whether they are a mobile or online customer," explained Frank Taubert, chief executive of 24-7 Entertainment. "It will be a major shift for the industry.

"The music market is still looking at illegal downloads and peer-to-peer sharing and we all have to think about how we are going to shift these people over to legal services," he added. "Why would anyone want to download illegal tracks again if they can get everything for free legitimately?"

For the company offering the service it provides another way of increasing customer loyalty and the amount it saves in consumer acquisition costs can be used to subsidise the "free" element of the service. The music companies get paid every time one of their tracks is downloaded.

The industry will be watching, however, to see whether offering music at no extra cost to the consumer hits sales of digital downloads. The hope is that people who have up until now heard tracks they liked on the radio, downloaded them illegally, listened to them a few times and then moved on, will instead use the free service to download them legitimately. It remains to be seen, however, whether when these consumers decide that they like a track and want to keep it, they will return to using illegal sharing networks or pay for the track.

Rather than rely upon an ISP or mobile company that already makes money from consumers to subsidise a free service, other digital music companies are looking to advertising to fund music.

We7 already offers free music downloads. It attaches targeted adverts to a song for 30 days before they are removed by DRM software. The tracks provided to We7 by Sony BMG will be made available through a new streaming service that will allow users to build up playlists of songs they want to hear while they remain online. The label hopes people will sample new music before clicking through to a download store to buy it.

Sony BMG UK chief executive Ged Doherty did not rule out also contributing tracks to We7's own download service but said the streaming service was a logical first step. The download service, which has deals with several independent labels, appends a short ad to the beginning of each song that remains in place when it is downloaded and transferred to a portable player.

Acknowledging that the troubled music industry had previously been too slow to experiment with new revenue models, Doherty said the move was part of its "do and build" strategy. Sony BMG is in talks with a range of other ad-funded services, he added.

We7, which launched last year, will initially offer the service to its existing members before rolling it out to new ones. It will pay royalties to Sony BMG for each song listened to.

Gabriel, who has consistently been in the vanguard of the digital music business and previously had a hand in launching early download business OD2, said: "The digital revolution has produced exciting and extraordinary opportunities in the music business, even though it has been largely written off by many. We7 is a model that will supply free music to the consumer and still provide a stream of revenue to musicians and content owners."

Chief executive Steve Purdham said the move was "a significant leap forward for We7 and the industry as a whole" and confirmed it was in talks with the other major labels. He dismissed concerns that an infinite jukebox of the kind envisaged by We7 would devalue music, saying it would become just one of several means of distributing music while ensuring artists and labels got paid.

Doherty added: "What appealed to us about We7 is that they've quietly got on with business rather than making big promises. It's easy and user-friendly."
A new model army: download and streaming devices

Though Apple's iTunes hogs the headlines, the music industry is working with a host of online and mobile companies to try and persuade consumers to stop stealing music by offering a range of download and streaming services.

All five of the UK's mobile phone networks have their own download stores and Vodafone has also signed up with UK-based MusicStation for an all-you-can-download subscription service, which costs £1.99 a week. Nokia has announced plans for a service called Comes With Music, to be launched this year, which will give users access to an unlimited number of music tracks that they get to keep forever, although only on their Nokia phones, according to reports.

A host of retailers are selling track and album downloads - from online brands such as Play.com and Amazon to "bricks and mortar" players such as Tesco and HMV. Some of these stores recently started offering tracks in the open MP3 format, so they can be played on any device.

Services such as Napster and Rhapsody, meanwhile, helped pioneer the subscription music model on the internet and Last.fm, which was snapped up last year by CBS, helped popularise streaming music services. Last.fm has agreed deals with the major labels to offer three free streams of any track before consumers have to buy it and US social-networking site Imeem also offers free streaming of any track.

We7 is one of several attempts to launch advertising-funded download services, but many of its rivals are still battling through the rights-clearance process. SpiralFrog has launched in the US, with major label Universal on board, but Qtrax, which this year promised 25m tracks via a legal peer-to-peer service, has still to launch its download offering.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology.../sony.netmusic





Apple Sued Over ITunes Technology
AP

Apple Inc. was sued Wednesday over allegations its iTunes online music store and iPod music players are illegally using a patented method for distributing digital media over the Internet.

Atlanta-based ZapMedia Services Inc. sued Apple in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing the Cupertino-based company of violating two ZapMedia patents.

ZapMedia wants royalties on Apple's sales of iPods and iTunes music, which reached nearly $11 billion last year. The success of iTunes has helped make Apple the No. 2 music retailer in the U.S. behind Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to market researcher NPD Group.

The patents in question cover a way of sending music and other digital content from servers to multiple media players, a broad description that could also apply to a wide swath of other companies selling digital media and the devices to play it.

ZapMedia applied for the patents in 1999. One was granted in March 2006, the other on Tuesday.

ZapMedia said it met with Apple to discuss licensing, but Apple rebuffed the offer.

"When someone takes our vision and our intellectual property without a license after several attempts, we have no option but to protect it through every means available to us," Robert Frohwein, ZapMedia's general counsel, said in a statement.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on pending lawsuits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031203513.html





Advertising Sent To Cellphones Opens New Front In War on Spam
Kim Hart

The spam messages that have long plagued e-mail inboxes are now finding victims through a much more personal route: the cellphone.

Text messages are the latest tool for advertisers and scammers to target consumers. But unlike junk e-mail that can be deleted with the click of a button, text-message spam costs money for the person who receives it and chips away at the mobile phone's aura of privacy.

"It's so annoying because I get charged every time I get one," said Ryan Williams, 27, of Falls Church, who receives half a dozen spam messages on a daily basis. They ask him to download ring tones, visit questionable sites over his phone's Internet connection or urge him to subscribe to horoscopes or sports-score updates.

Williams downloaded a program that was supposed to block texts from numbers not stored in his phone's contact list, but the junk messages still get through. Spammers even make the messages appear as if they're coming from his own number, so his wireless carrier cannot block them.

"Spam e-mail usually goes right into my spam filter, but the texts are there, on my phone, and they just keep coming," he said.

More than 1 billion text messages are sent every day in the United States. U.S. consumers are expected to receive about 1.5 billion spam text messages this year, up from 1.1 billion last year and 800 million in 2006, according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco market research firm. Those are conservative figures; some estimates are far higher. Verizon Wireless said it blocks more than 200 million spam text messages every month, and cellphone companies are ramping up efforts to shut them out by taking spammers to court and by using more sophisticated filters.

Compared with spam e-mail, junk text messages are seen as more invasive because the cellphone is more intimate and is used for one-on-one communication -- a quality marketers are trying to utilize. Political campaigns and banks use text messages to mobilize voters or send account balance updates. Travel site Orbitz.com offers text-message updates on flight status. Television shows such as "American Idol" ask viewers to vote or take polls via text messages, and social networking sites like Facebook often use such notes to update members about friends' activities.

Spam is often a nuisance, but more malicious messages can lead to a new form of fraud called smishing, a variation of a spam e-mail attack known as phishing. Smishing attacks, called such because text messages are also known as SMS messages, disguise themselves as legitimate messages from e-commerce or financial sites such as eBay, PayPal or banks, and seek to dupe consumers into giving up account numbers or passwords.

Lori Small, a massage therapist in Ellicott City, fell for such a come-on. Her bank sends her a text message every time a transaction occurs on her checking account. In November, a message informed her that her account was overdrawn and asked her to provide the last four digits of her Social Security number to verify her ownership of the account. She sent the four digits to the sender.

After getting suspicious, she called her bank, which told her it did not send the message and that it has a policy of not asking for account details via cellphone. She changed her cellphone number and now closely monitors her balance for any mysterious changes.

"I couldn't believe how sneaky it was," she said. "I mean, e-mail spam is one thing, but this is my personal phone number . . . and now someone out there has one more clue about who I am."

Spam messages and smishing attacks are more prevalent in Asia, where consumers often use phones to access the Internet and are more accustomed to receiving mobile advertisements, said Richi Jennings, an analyst who studies spam issues for Ferris Research.
Spammers use similar techniques to target people through text messages as they do through e-mail. They harvest phone numbers from databases or hack into the records of legitimate companies that have permission to send text messages, such as travel sites or online retailers. The guesswork involved in targeting cellphone numbers is easier than randomly selecting e-mail addresses; while an e-mail address has a unique sequence of characters and a variable length, phone numbers are 10 digits. Therefore, it is easier to blitz thousands of potential customers at once.

Most text messages are sent without any form of encryption, allowing tech-savvy spammers to intercept the messages and get access to personal information, said Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and security research firm.

As of 2005, federal agencies banned companies from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail and text messages to mobile phones. To receive promotional material or updates, consumers typically must text a message to a short code to opt in to the service.

But Simeon Coney, marketing director at anti-spam software maker AdaptiveMobile, said spammers are breaking the law, bombarding cellphone users with unwanted mail that could infect phones and BlackBerrys with viruses.

Consumer complaints about text-message spam have been sporadic, according to the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and Consumers Union. But Coney said his firm is starting to see "overall increases in mobile-spam traffic."

Last year, Verizon Wireless sued telemarketers it said inundated its networks with more than 12 million unsolicited commercial text messages. In its lawsuit, the wireless carrier said it was able to block all but 4,618. Customers were hit with unwanted charges and the spam slowed legitimate traffic, according to Verizon Wireless.

Individuals have also taken legal action against unwanted messages they perceive as spam. In October, Lindsey Abrams of Illinois filed a complaint against Facebook for sending "unauthorized text messages" to her wireless phone number, which had previously been assigned to another Facebook member. "These messages can come during all times of the day or night and, because the senders are often hard to identify, can be seen as intimidating or unsettling," Abrams said in the complaint.

In 2006, Lei Shen, also of Illinois, sued District-based mobile marketing company Distributive Networks for sending her unauthorized ads in the form of text messages.

Nearly a quarter of U.S. mobile subscribers say they've viewed a mobile advertisement in the last month, and more than half of them responded to it by sending a text message, clicking on it or calling a specific number, according to a report released last week by Nielsen Mobile.

A separate survey conducted by M:Metrics, a Seattle firm that tracks mobile trends, found that 28 percent of the people who get text-message ads did not give permission to receive them, up from 19.5 percent eight months ago.

The rise of spam could spoil trust in text messaging as a mode of communication, not to mention its potential for mobile advertising, according to Charles R. Taylor, a Villanova University marketing professor who has studied online and mobile ads. "Trust is crucial for an ad to be effective, and the minute you start clogging up cellphones and BlackBerrys, it's a real turn-off and an invasion of your personal space."

The revenue generated by data services, such as text messages, has grown along with the consumer demand. About 20 percent of wireless carriers' total revenue now comes from the delivery of text messages, said Roger Entner, senior vice president for the communications sector for IAG Research. Each text message typically costs between 10 and 20 cents, although the four largest U.S. carriers -- AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile -- are rolling out flat-rate plans for text messaging. The carriers said they have rigorous filters to block spam, and they allow customers to block messages from certain numbers. They also try to remove charges for unsolicited spam.

"We have every incentive to stop spam texts from getting through, since we end up footing the bill for a lot of it," said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. "The longer a service like text is out there, the bigger the bulls'-eye gets."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030902213.html





Paramount Making Movie Clips Available as Facebook Messages
Ryan Nakashima

Paramount Pictures will become the first major studio to make clips from thousands of its movies available for use on the Internet.

The unit of Viacom Inc. is teaming with Los Angeles-based developer FanRocket to launch the VooZoo application Monday on Facebook.

The service gives Facebook users access to footage from thousands of movies, ranging from "The Ten Commandments" to "Forrest Gump," to send to others on the popular social networking site.

"The short clips for a movie that you've already seen before helps you relive the moment," Paramount senior vice president of entertainment Derek Broes said.

The clips last from a few seconds to several minutes and cover the gamut from Eddie Murphy's guffaw in "Beverly Hills Cop" to Audrey Hepburn's pleas over her "no-name slob" cat in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

The studio will market DVDs of the movies through a button that appears after each clip is played. It eventually wants to use the application to virally market upcoming releases.

For example, VooZoo is withholding clips from the "Indiana Jones" series until it works out a way to market the May 22 release of the latest installment, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

FanRocket founder Danny Kastner said he is aiming to get a few hundred thousand users within two months and added that the company is in talks with other Hollywood studios to package their titles on VooZoo.

That could take time, however, since Paramount staffers needed more than a year to select clips from the archive and tag them with search terms.

Paramount said it has not set revenue goals for the new venture.

"My benchmark for success is that people are joining and sending," Broes said.
http://www.bostonherald.com/business...osition=recent





Latest Facebook Application Pays Users 10 Percent When Friends Buy on Their Recommendations
AP

Facebook Inc.'s popular online hangout so far has proven to be a better place for promoting fun and games than peddling products.

But a new application aims to inject more commerce into the social playground by paying Facebook members who help merchants sell to their friends.

The program, called Market Lodge, revolves around the notion that consumers are more likely to buy merchandise or services recommended by someone they know and trust.

Market Lodge, made by a startup called bSocial Networks Inc., will pay Facebook members a 10 percent commission on all sales made on their recommendations.

Facebook tried to capitalize on the bonds of friendship last year by introducing a marketing system that includes broadcasting product endorsements among people who know each other.

The strategy hasn't paid off yet, largely because many of Facebook's users rebelled against a feature called "Beacon" that tracked and shared information about their purchases and other actions made on other Web sites.

Spurred by the backlash, Palo Alto-based Facebook now allows its users to turn off Beacon.

Conifer, Colo.-based bSocial is betting that Facebook's roughly 67 million users will be more receptive to an approach that dangles a financial incentive for participating.

Facebook members who decide to use Market Lodge can customize their own stores, selecting from more than 1,200 products sold by about 50 different merchants.

Once the personal store is set up, Facebook users can then invite others in their network to check out the stuff they're recommending. Market Lodge users can make purchases from their own stores and still qualify for the 10 percent sales commission.

All the inventory, order processing and delivery arrangements are handled by the merchants -- just as they would be for any other sale.

"We think this could be very lucrative for Facebook's members," said bSocial co-founder Sue Spielman.

More than 100 people have signed up for Market Lodge since it quietly rolled out last week.

For now, Facebook won't receive a cut of the sales made through Market Lodge, but bSocial Networks eventually may consider sharing revenue with the social network or other Web sites that might be interested in the application, Spielman said.

Market Lodge is just one of more than 16,000 applications that have been designed for Facebook since the social network opened itself up to outside programs. Most of the applications, commonly called "widgets," provide Facebook users with new ways to play games or share photos or musical interests.

Although they are attracting big crowds, online social networks so far have had trouble reaping huge profits from advertising.

Even Google Inc., which runs the Internet's most lucrative advertising network, has acknowledged having trouble finding the right marketing mix in its business partnership with News Corp.'s MySpace.com, the only social network larger than Facebook.

The owner of White Swan, a Boulder, Colo.-based seller of recorded music, thinks paying Facebook members to drum up sales could be more effective than advertising, which can cost up to $15 for every $100 in sales.

"Right now when you do marketing, you are competing with so many voices that it's easy to get lost," said Parmita Pushman, White Swan's owner.

If Market Lodge bears fruit, Pushman said she will face a new problem: figuring out how to persuade more Facebook members to recommend her products in their personal stores.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,1571739.story





$40,000 for Man Tasered on YouTube
Mike Nizza

About two months went by after Jared Massey was tasered by a highway cop in Utah before he turned to YouTube. The video, footage filmed from within the police car, was an instant hit, rocketing up the charts and making him the latest internet celebrity. It’s been played more than 1.7 million times.

Like other YouTube tasings, waves of outrage over excessive force followed — fire the cop, ban Tasers — and the police started an investigation a week and a half later. But the initial results were discouraging for the critics: The cop was cleared of wrongdoing; Mr. Massey paid the speeding ticket that he protested before being shocked twice.

But a civil suit filed after has resulted in a settlement that will more than cover the ticket, and Mr. Massey’s lawyer suggested it covered everything else as well. ‘’They made what we consider to be a very fair offer of a significant amount of money,'’ Bob Sykes told The Associated Press.

To be exact: he was awarded $40,000, including attorney’s fees.

The deal was announced a week after a Utah prosecutor ruled the Mr. Massey did not commit any crimes in the traffic stop, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. His civil case focused on the fact proven in the video — that the officer did not seek to arrest him before drawing and firing the Taser.

While the video evidence would have surely been used in any case, YouTube couldn’t have hurt Mr. Massey’s campaign.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





Europe Approves Google’s Merger With DoubleClick
Stephen Castle and David Jolly

BRUSSELS — European regulators on Tuesday approved Google’s $3.1 billion takeover of the online advertising company DoubleClick, the final hurdle to a deal that would strengthen Google’s already powerful position on the Web.

The European Commission, the executive arm of European Union, said that its investigation, opened in November had concluded “that the transaction would be unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers, either in ad serving or in intermediation in online advertising markets.”

The merger had been opposed by rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, which had voiced concern about Google’s advertising clout, as well as by consumer groups, which feared that the combined company would have access to a large amount of data on individual Web-surfing habits.

Tuesday’s approval follows that of competition authorities in the United States.

“We are thrilled that our acquisition of DoubleClick has closed,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The deal with DoubleClick, Mr. Schmidt said, “will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies, while improving the relevance of advertising for users.”

Shares of Google rose $13.68, to $427.30 in New York mid-afternoon trading Tuesday.

The commission said Google and DoubleClick “were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other’s activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors,” and even if DoubleClick could become an effective rival in online intermediation services, “it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger.”

Microsoft and ATT had asked regulators to block the deal, arguing that a merged Google-DoubleClick would have too much power to set advertising rates.

The commission uses different, and slightly broader, criteria to assess mergers than the Federal Trade Commission, which approved the DoubleClick deal in December. However, there was never much expectation that the top European regulator, Neelie Kroes, would block the deal.

Ms. Kroes has shown a willingness to take on large companies — including, notably, Microsoft — but has been reluctant to intervene in mergers. Since she came into office in 2004, Ms. Kroes has blocked two mergers: a Portuguese power utility deal and the proposed takeover of the Aer Lingus by the budget carrier Ryanair.

Her predecessor, Mario Monti, suffered several setbacks when the courts overturned his efforts to block mergers. As a consequence, Ms. Kroes has concentrated on cartel-busting and on seeking to prevent companies like Microsoft from abusing their dominant market position.

Last month, the commission fined Microsoft 899 million euros, or $1.3 billion, for failing to comply with a 2004 judgment that the company had abused its market dominance. The fine was the largest ever imposed on an individual company. Microsoft’s battle with the commission has cost it 1.68 billion euros in fines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/te...nd-google.html





File-Sharers Should Get Ready to Pay, Say Experts
Greg Quill

Some of North America's leading experts in peer-to-peer file sharing on the Internet are convinced that sooner rather than later – maybe within a couple of years – we won't be downloading music, movies and TV shows for free.

In fact, the consensus at Thursday's key panel discussion – The Evolution of Peer-to-Peer Music: From Enemy to Business Partner – in a day-long round of seminars during Canadian Music Week was not dissimilar to a controversial idea advanced just last month by the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC).

SAC has proposed making it legal to share music on peer-to-peer networks in exchange for a monthly fee of $5 going to royalties for music's creators. But David Hughes, senior vice-president of the technology division of the Record Industry Association of America, suggests that business may find its own solution, with internet service providers charging some users an extra fee for their downloading habits. Downloading eats up precious bandwidth and slows down the network.

"Eighty-five per cent of available bandwidth is used for piracy," Hughes told a tightly packed crowd at Toronto's Fairmont Royal York.

"It's the ISPs who have to crack down, and they will, once they realize they can make money from the people who use the most bandwidth. The shift will be to subscription services costing (high bandwidth users) a fee, as much as $12 a month," Hughes predicts.

Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, the California-based media measurement company that monitors digital music activity on the Internet, added: "Maybe the ISPs will have to find the bandwidth hogs and charge them extra; making it more difficult and expensive for ordinary subscribers to acquire bandwidth isn't a good strategy. It doesn't serve the hunger. This is a beast and you have to feed it."

Eric DeFontenay, founder of the New York-based MusicDish e-journal, about online music by new and emerging artists, agrees that things should and will change.

"Radio was the first medium accused of ripping off music and musicians, till performing rights and (methods of) compensation were established. What's needed is compensation for artists that's transparent to consumers, something like the SAC proposal.

"If you want all-you-can-eat music, $60 a year is cheap," he said.

The analysts and experts at Thursday's discussion – including Washington-based Gary Greenstein, a specialist in the future financing of digital media space, and Chris Gillis, a business development manager at the California-based Mediadefender Internet piracy prevention company – offered different hypothetical solutions to the increasing use of the Internet by peer-to-peer file sharers, free music downloaders and the subsequent massive loss of revenue to music creators.

They generally agreed that the commercial music industry in the U.S. had erred in pursuing and penalizing peer-to-peer networks and those who used them. "Suing customers is not a good way to do business," DeFontenay said. "Music industry efforts to stop file sharing by litigation was a huge failure."

Hughes says there needs to be another way to raise obstacles for downloaders. "Raising awareness of the morality of free downloading doesn't work, nor does litigation," he says, adding, "If you make the hassle factor high enough, people will pay."

Greenstein warns, however, that customers won't go for extra fees.

"Only a fraction of music consumers in the U.S. use existing (legal) subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody (or Puretracks in Canada). They aren't going to buy into an ISP-based subscription . . . they'll go around it, find other ways to get their music for nothing.

"In the meantime, they're looking at an empty screen waiting for searches and downloads – that's a huge and untapped opportunity for advertisers. "

Trying to stop free music-file exchanges – in Canada there's no legal impediment – is a waste of time and effort, most of the panelists agreed.

"People don't care that they're using peer-to-peer," Garland said. "They use it without knowing or caring because it's easy, it's comfortable and it works. It's the very definition of the Internet. You can't stop people using the Internet for entertainment. The problem is getting them to pay for it."
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment...article/326536





Congress Dons Rubber Glove, Prepares Probe of FCC Chairman
Matthew Lasar

Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin has two weeks to deliver a truckload of written records to Congress related to over a dozen hot-button FCC issues and policies. They're being demanded by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell (D-MI), who sent Martin the request letter today, cosigned by Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Committee.

The missive warns Martin that Dingell's Committee is "investigating allegations from current and former FCC employees and other sources, which we have reason to believe are credible." The charges concern "management practices that may adversely affect the Commission's ability to both discharge effectively its statutory duties and to guard against waste, fraud, and abuse."

It's no secret that Martin and his subordinates are suspected of putting pressure on career FCC staff to emphasize data or produce studies that come to conclusions that the Chair likes. The biggest blowup concerns a 2003 study on television that suggested that locally owned TV stations produce more local news than nonlocally owned broadcasters—distasteful data for supporters of relaxing the agency's media ownership rules. When the FCC did not publish this document, Senator Barbara Boxer in 2006 accused the agency of "deep-sixing" the report. Eventually the Commission exonerated itself with an internal audit that a whistle blower in the case called "skewed in its judgments."

Now Dingell wants all e-mails, handwritten notes, phone conversation records, meeting schedules, and whatever else exists in paper or electronic form since January 2005 involving the audit's case file, plus all records related to:

• The FCC's decision to drop the conclusions of a 2004 study that concluded that "a la carte" video programming—in which consumers can pick and choose which channels to buy—will hurt cable networks attempting "innovative or untested formats." The agency Commissioned the work from Booz Allen, but revised its position the next year with a "Further Report" that criticized the Booz Allen study, questioning its assumptions and mathematical calculations. Martin is an outspoken advocate of a la carte programming, at one point publishing an op-ed piece with Senator John McCain on behalf of the concept.
• The Commission's conclusion in November of 2007 that the cable industry had reached the so-called "70/70" threshold. The Communications Act stipulates that when cable systems with 36 or more activated channels can be viewed by 70 percent of US households and when 70 percent of those households subscribe to them, the FCC can impose "additional rules necessary to promote diversity of information sources." Up until last year the agency had consistently concluded that while big cable had surpassed the first prong of the test, it had not reached the second. Dingell's letter specifically wants intel explaining why the FCC based its 2007 decision, which it eventually rescinded, entirely on Warren Communications company data and none other, including the information that the cable industry submits to the agency every year.
• The FCC's ten recently commissioned media ownership studies, and documents related to the agency's decision not to change any of the Commission's media ownership rules save the newspaper/TV cross-ownership ban.

And that's only for starters. Dingell and Barton want Martin to hand over any directives involving "limitations or restrictions imposed on FCC employees' ability to communicate with each other concerning official agency business"; records that illuminate the Commission's policies on "communications between FCC personnel and outside entities"; documents that explain how the agency decided who would go to the recent World Radiocommunication Conference in Switzerland; a list of all new FCC employee hires and reassignments from March 2005 to the present; and the individual meeting schedules of all Commissioners and all Bureau Chiefs and the FCC's Inspector General since January 2005.

This request has got to be turning the FCC completely upside down. Significantly, it appears to reflect a bipartisan discontent with Martin's performance. Democrats and some Republicans are upset over his recent move to relax one of the agency' key media ownership rules, as well as the rushed manner in which he handled the matter late last year. Other Republicans dislike what they see as Martin's persecution of the cable industry, especially Comcast. The letter may even reflect some Republican dismay that Martin did not go further in relaxing the Commission's broadcast ownership guidelines.

The question of Martin's perspective on cable will be explored in an upcoming Ars Technica feature—that is, if the FCC's chief survives this Congressional inquiry.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-chairman.html





House Judiciary Committee Logs On to Network-Neutrality Issue

Debate Continues Over Network-Management Practices
John Eggerton

The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony Tuesday on the anticompetitive implications of the network-neutrality issue.

A representative of the Christian Coalition argued that the group did not seek "burdensome regulations" and preferred less regulation but suggested that it might be necessary anyway because of actions taken by some broadband-network providers.

Michele Combs, vice president of communications for the Christian Coalition, cited Verizon Communications’ blocking of text messages, AT&T’s blocking of political speech (some anti-administration lyrics in a Pearl Jam concert), and the AP test of Comcast peer-to-peer network management in which the downloading of a King James Bible was blocked.

All those have been the subjects of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, which is currently considering what, if anything, to do about network management, including coming up with a better definition of what is off-limits.

Combs said faith-based groups are increasingly using the Internet, that networks must not be allowed to block political speech and that those networks appear to be using the same techniques as China has used to block the Christian Coalition.

Seconding that concern about so-called network neutrality was Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office. She blamed FCC inaction and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Brand X ruling for network "gatekeepers" increasingly controlling access to content.

The Supreme Court in 2005 upheld the FCC's decision that phone networks’ provision of Internet was not subject to the same mandatory access provisions as telephone common-carrier service. In the interests of regulatory parity, it said, the commission has since extended that to cable, satellite and other network providers.

Frederickson said those provisions, which had been applied to data services as far back as the late 1960s, allowed the Internet to flourish.

She added that nondiscrimination principles do not violate network operators' free speech. In fact, she said, network operators aren't speakers, per se, but provide wires in much the same way telephone companies do.

But the essential factor is free speech, she added, and that is the speech of users and content providers. Whether networks have to engage in network management is up to the technology people, she said. But if there must be such management, it must be equitable and not used as a "cover" for blocking certain types of content.

She called for legislation: “Congress should act to protect the rights of all Internet users to send and receive lawful content free of censorship from government or business,” she said. “Restoring meaningful rules that protect Internet users from corporate censorship is vital to the future of free speech on the Internet.”

Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, put in a plug for network management, saying that the real bottleneck is not networks but the illegal P2P file sharing that is killing the songwriting business.

He pointing out that his song publisher used to have one-dozen writers on staff and now has one. He is particularly concerned with legislation that would impede the ability of networks to manage traffic or that would prevent them from employing illegal file-detection technologies.

Carnes said 5% of Internet users are responsible for 70% of the P2P traffic and 90% of that traffic is illegal. He added that studies showed that the majority of pirates would stop if their network warned them or made them stop.

He called it odd that the problem of network congestion would be addressed by denying networks the ability to manage congestion, saying management was, instead, a case of the market dealing with the problem.

University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Christopher Yoo said networks and content providers are symbiotic. There is a small potential for anticompetitive behavior, but that should be looked at on a case-by-case basis rather than broad regulation, he added.

In a bit of serendipity, the live video of the hearing first froze and then was inaccessible for several minutes due to problems with the streaming, according to a committee spokesperson.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/art...dustryid=47174





Key House Democrat Opposes Network Neutrality Law
Dow Jones/AP

A senior House Democrat said Tuesday there was no need for Congress to consider regulating content that travels over the Internet, setting up a possible dispute with rival Democrats over the need to preserve so-called network neutrality.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the argument hadn't been made for Congress to consider passing laws governing the flow of traffic over the Web.

He said the only reason lawmakers should consider getting involved in legislating network neutrality was if there were concerns that telecommunications companies that run Internet networks were engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

Then, said Conyers, existing antitrust laws would suffice to ensure the market was working effectively.

"Unless we've clearly documented a specific incident" of violation of network neutrality, "I don't believe Congress should regulate," said Conyers.

Conyers made the comments at a hearing of the judiciary panel into the issue of network neutrality.

His view was endorsed by the several Republican members of the committee present at the hearing.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a former chair of the Judiciary Committee, said he was against the notion of the Federal Communications Commission introducing prescriptive regulation over the issue.

Conyers' position puts him at odds with Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, a strong proponent of legislation enshrining network neutrality.

Last month, Markey introduced legislation which would instruct the FCC to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the need for enhanced network neutrality regulations, and beef up fines for violators of these new rules.

Markey's bill has little chance of becoming law in a presidential election year, but he is hoping to line up sufficient backing for the legislation, and then reintroduce it in 2009.

The judiciary panel heard testimony from a number of witnesses, the majority of whom were in favor of legislation to bolster regulation of Internet network operators.

These included Damian Kulash, lead singer of the band OK Go, which has established a loyal fan base primarily using the Internet rather than more traditional channels.

Kulash urged the committee to take steps to preserve an open and free Internet.

The issue of network neutrality was a dominant one on Capitol Hill in 2006, the last time that an attempt to pass a law on the issue came close to fruition.

The FCC is currently investigating claims that Comcast Corp. violated network neutrality by degrading access of its broadband Internet network customers to a file-sharing software application.

Last week, speaking at a function in California, Kevin Martin, the agency's Republican chairman, gave a clear sign that he planned to seek a ruling that the company did violate the commission's existing four principles on network neutrality.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8535517





BT Calls for Action on Net Speeds
Rory Cellan Jones

The UK's largest broadband supplier has called for the industry to be clearer about how it advertises net speeds.

BT Wholesale, which supplies eight million people, said many customers were disappointed by the mismatch between advertised and actual speeds.

An independent survey found that 15% of people who bought eight megabit per second packages actually got the speed.

The firm said regulators needed to agree rules about how broadband speeds could be sold to the public.

"The reality is we are all trying to push the technology," Guy Bradshaw of BT Wholesale told BBC News.

"The industry needs to join together with Ofcom to agree a set of principles as to how these messages should be communicated and advertised so that the understanding with the consumer is as accurate as it can be."

Traffic problems

BT said that, while its DSL Max product offers a range of speeds up to eight megabits per second (Mbps), it tells its customers - the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - that actual speeds will vary from user to user.

Cameron Rejali, Managing Director of Products at BT Wholesale, said it is up to the ISPs how they market broadband, "but if they are marketing it badly, the market will punish them."

BT said users need to know that there is a difference between the line speed - what the line between their home and the exchange can support - and what it describes as "throughput", a measure of the data coming down the line during an activity such as the downloading of a video.

Only 35% of BT's DSL Max customers are achieving an eight mbps line speed - the rest will see their speed cut by factors such as distance from the exchange, poor equipment, and interference from electrical appliances.

But none of these five million users will achieve eight mbps "throughput" because of internet congestion and other network issues.

"The reality is if you are very far from an exchange or there are environmental factors then your speed will come down and there is not much we can do in the short-term to address that problem," said Mr Bradshaw.

Ofcom is currently reviewing the way broadband is marketed to consumers.

A spokeswoman said: "Whilst there are technical reasons why a consumer may not get the full speed of the package to which they have signed up the key point is that consumers should be able to make an informed decision about what broadband package is best for them at the point of purchase."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7292932.stm





Sprint Phone First to Use Fast Network
AP

Sprint Nextel Corp. is upgrading one of its cell phone models so that it can connect to a faster data network, doubling its download speeds and boosting upload speeds by about eight times.

Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless operate so-called EV-DO Rev. A networks, but have used them only for laptop cards. Their fastest phones have used the older and slower EV-DO Rev. 0 network.

Sprint said Monday it was releasing a software update for the Mogul phone, made by HTC Corp. of Taiwan, that will enable the phone to connect at Rev. A speeds. Downloads speeds should be 600 kilobits per second to 1,400 kbps, up from a range of 400 kbps to 700 kbps with Rev. 0. It will be capable of uploads of 350 to 500 kbps, up from 50 kbps to 70 kbps.

Sprint said its broadband network now covers 234 million people, and the vast majority of it has been upgraded to EV-DO Rev. A, short for Evolution-Data Optimized Revision A.

The Mogul is a smart phone that runs Windows Mobile software and can be used as a modem for a laptop. It costs $199.99 with a two-year contract and went on sale in June. The software update will be available immediately from HTC's site.

Verizon Wireless has not announced a phone using Rev. A. Spokeswoman Brenda Raney said the main advantage of Rev. A is higher upload speeds, which is important to laptop users but less so for cell-phone users.

AT&T Inc. already sells phones that use its fastest network technology, known as HSDPA, for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access. Its listed download speed is the same as EV-DO Rev. A, with a slightly higher upload speed.
http://www.physorg.com/news124367657.html





P2P is for Piracy... and We're Going to Use it

Rick Cotton, NBC Universal's top lawyer, is sitting across the table from me at a Midtown restaurant only blocks from Cotton's base at Rockefeller Center. Apparently, media moguls do not breakfast on a diet of puppies and children, as some consumers seem to think; bagels, toast, and oatmeal are the order of the day. George Kliavkoff, NBC's first "Chief Digital Officer," has also joined us to talk policy.

"I'm curious if you necessarily equate peer-to-peer protocols like BitTorrent with piracy?" I ask after the orange juice arrives.

Cotton's opinion on that question matters. As general counsel for NBC Universal, he has been one of the strongest US backers of the idea that ISPs have some duty to start filtering the undeniably massive volume of illicit P2P traffic that passes through their networks. AT&T has already publicly committed to take up the challenge, and Cotton hopes to see more action from other ISPs.

"Well, I think the answer today is yes," he says. "It's obvious that peer-to-peer is capable, and in fact may in the future be a significant mode of efficient transport of legitimate content. But today, in terms of that consumption of bandwidth, it's overwhelmingly pirated content. There's probably a percentage of pornography mixed in, but one is not talking about legitimate content."

Cotton and Kliavkoff are affable, intelligent, and interesting to chat with—but they also inhabit a conflicted world, and it shows as we talk. Take our discussion of peer-to-peer, for instance, with its lack of "legitimate content."

I ask about the current FCC hearing on Comcast's BitTorrent "delaying," where a company called Vuze is in fact offering just such legitimate content using BitTorrent (to say nothing of BitTorrent, the company, which is doing the same thing).

"You have to start with the first proposition," Cotton says, "which is: should we collectively be concerned about the fact that 50 to 75 percent of the total bandwidth of broadband ISPs is today taken up by P2P traffic which is in fact overwhelmingly pirated? I have to tell you, I think the answer to that is yes."

He goes further; P2P protocols themselves disrupt the Internet by passing bandwidth costs from content owners onto ISPs. Cotton told the FCC in a recent filing, "P2P applications shift the costs of centralized storage and distribution to end users and their broadband network providers."

In addition, installing P2P apps "can slow down the processing speed of [consumers'] computers, open up the contents of their hard drives to third parties and expose them to potential copyright liability," the NBC filing noted. Worse, P2P protocols "exacerbate the congestion" that Comcast's RST packet solution attempts to solve.

Fair enough: P2P is a hotbed of piracy, it's bad for ISPs, it disrupts the Internet, it can bog down computers, and it harms corn farmers in Iowa. It seems safe to say that NBC won't be using BitTorrent any time soon.

So it comes as a complete surprise when, at the end of our wide-ranging conversation, Kliavkoff drops a casual bombshell.

"We're coming up on an announcement of using some peer-to-peer technology for distribution of some of our own content," he says. "We generally think that peer-to-peer technologies are very useful for distributing large files, they can significantly reduce bandwidth costs, and generally they are technologies today without a business model. We think the distribution of legitimate content using that technology saves us a lot of costs and we're happy to share some of that savings."

I beg your pardon?

NBC: Old media no longer

It's not that NBC is hypocritical, stupid, or worse; it's that the transition currently engulfing media businesses is both terrifying and the source of bold new opportunities. NBC hopes to transform itself from old media giant into a new media pioneer that makes its content available through MySpace, AOL, and Comcast, allows embedding and clipping, and fully supports the emerging world of widgets and web apps. With NBC's Hulu officially launching today, Kliavkoff estimates that its video content will reach more than 95 percent of the US Internet audience through its major portal partners.

It's a "groundbreaking thing for big, old, traditional media to do," he says, and he's right. Instead of ceding Internet video to distributors like YouTube, NBC and News Corp. have partnered on a bold plan to do the digital distribution themselves.

The site wasn't coded up over the weekend by a team of hackers slaving away in the basement, either; Hulu cost "tens of millions of dollars." Both Cotton and Kliavkoff face "a lot of concern reaching up to the board level that the material that's on Hulu is not available next door on a pirated basis," and it's easy to see why with that kind of money at stake.

This is the concern that drives Cotton's crusade against illicit file-swapping. He's convinced that the pirate problem is costing NBC Universal real revenue and that the scale of the problem is so vast as to discourage investment in the "carrots," positive solutions like Hulu.

"With all that pirated material available, it creates tremendous disincentives to content owners who need to invest in new content," Cotton says, "and that just hurts consumers over time." After all, if two video stores sit next to each other at the local mall and one charges for DVDs while the other hands free, illegal copies out without penalty, what incentive does the legitimate video owner have to invest any money in buying new DVDs?

It's a fair question, so I ask Cotton why NBC has, in fact, just invested millions in a service like Hulu. File-swapping, though rampant, is obviously not enough of a problem to stop this kind of investment yet, but Cotton suggests that if large projects like Hulu fail to show returns, there may not be many more attempts in the future. He fully recognizes the need to use both carrots and sticks, to "compete with free" while trying to shut down the illegal distribution channel, and he sees both efforts as complementary; "hand in glove," he calls them.

Which brings us to the stick: ISP filtering.

Bring on the filters

Back in June 2007, Cotton filed comments with the FCC that laid out NBC Universal's position quite clearly: ISPs have a role to play in protected copyrighted work, and if they won't play that role, the government should make them.

"The Commission should make unmistakably clear, as part of its regulations governing broadband industry practices, that broadband service providers have an obligation to use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content," he wrote at the time.

Loving and loathing P2P

These efforts would include notification of users (Cotton doesn't appear interested in some sort of "sue-'em-all!" strategy), possibly followed by curtailing Internet access. It's a plan that has been mooted in both the UK and France, but all of the solutions would be based on accurate identification of copyrighted work flowing through ISP pipes. That means one thing: ISP deep packet inspection of all P2P traffic, with attempted identification to follow.

When we talk, Cotton makes clear that he's not "a technology guy" and that he doesn't much care how the filtering is accomplished. He fully grants the importance of privacy and fair use, and he's concerned about casting a net too widely. But something, anything, needs to be done.

"In this conversation, we talked fairly cavalierly and easily about the notion of lots of people on the Internet accessing illegal content," he says at one point. "I mean, normally, if we translate that to the physical world and we were sitting here observing as a neutral social phenomenon that huge numbers of people were walking into stores and taking product off the shelf... I think the reason for that is that historically, the technology talks to people; certainly it talks to kids. And if it's totally easy, if the technology sends no message, I think the thought process of individuals and particularly kids is, 'If it's so easy, it can't be wrong.'"

This is technology as road sign rather than electric fence; it won't put a stop to piracy, but it will give people a clear warning when limits have been reached.

The same argument has been trotted out for years by DRM proponents when asked why they bothered to keep hassling paying customers when illegal copies were widely available online. DRM could be breached, was the usual response, but at least it let people know when they start doing something they shouldn't be doing. The problem with this answer was that the "signposts" erected by DRM conveyed information that went far beyond the limits imposed by law; it told people, for instance, "No, you can't put a copy of that DVD you own on your iPod."

At least Cotton's solution has the virtue of not necessarily encumbering a user's digital property with locks and restrictions, since all the intelligence and filtering takes place in the middle of the network. He knows it won't stop piracy, but he points out that any real-world lock can be picked and "that hasn't led people to stop locking their doors."

What's needed, in NBC's view, is for technologists to put more trust in their own technology.

Cotton appears exasperated by the tech community's general hostility to his idea. "The technology community and the blogosphere, who are enormously enamored of and respectful of the capabilities of technology in every other respect... there's just this underlying assumption that technology is completely incapable of addressing the challenge of reducing the among of pirated content that's accessed online, and I just think that's naïve or intentionally blind," he says.
Meet the obstructionists

In Cotton's view, privacy concerns and other problems raised by ISP filtering are real, and they need to be resolved. He and Kliavkoff are both cognizant of the need to tread carefully in this area, to avoid giving NBC Universal the slightly sinister reputation that now clings to the RIAA's name in much of the blogosphere.

"I do worry about it," he tells me when I ask about reputation, but he returns once more to the scope of the problem.

"Everyone wants to ignore the scale of the pirated material online," he says; "most of the concerns [about filtering] are really efforts to do nothing about it."

This approach to opponents pervades our discussion. I'm told that filtering has been attacked by people "with a vested interest in obstruction" who have put out a set of "bogeymen" that are, in reality, an attempt to avoid doing anything about the unfettered online trading of copyrighted work.

Cotton sees his position as eminently reasonable; after all, he supports privacy rights, he's not wedded to any particular technology, and he's far more concerned with the transmission of complete, verbatim TV shows and movies than any amount of "fair use" copying, sampling, or remixing. Surely, if everyone could just admit the scope of the problem and agree that it needs to be addressed, a solution could be found.

But so far it hasn't, due in part to the fact that the issue (like most interesting issues) is far more complicated than just filtering out complete copies of films.

Safe harbors

ISPs like Verizon and Comcast aren't generally "pro-pirate." As Cotton and Kliavkoff point out, ISPs have an interest in curtailing the huge bandwidth slurped up by P2P users, and if it were truly as simple as installing a few racks of gear and flipping a switch, piracy would have been blocked from the tubes years ago.

There's a reason why ISPs don't want to get involved in this sort of filtering, and it's more complicated than "obstructionism." Network operators like Verizon and Comcast are protected by "safe harbor" rules found in the DMCA that exempt them from liability for what passes over their networks, but only if they do not control or alter that traffic. Filter that traffic, and it's possible that your safe harbor drains away.

Only AT&T has publicly signed on to the filtering idea, and the move led Columbia's Tim Wu to ask in a recent Slate column (aptly titled "Has AT&T lost its mind?") what the company could possibly be thinking.

"Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network," Wu said, "while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world's largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits."

Cotton scoffs at the idea.

"I frankly don't think it's an issue," he says, saying that there's "no incentive for us to sue them" if ISPs start filtering.

But lawsuits against ISPs go much further than the legal department at NBC Universal, and ISPs certainly don't want to cut similar deals with every industry or activist group that doesn't like some subset of material passes through their networks. While AT&T has agreed to the plan in theory, it has yet to roll out any sort of filtering solution, making it too early to tell how the legal issues will develop. But by agreeing to be the first major ISP to filter, AT&T "deserves praise, not criticism," says Cotton.

Will such filtering even work? That's another huge unknown. Video filtering technology certainly works; YouTube has rolled out its own solution, while companies like MotionDSP offer commercial products. But deploying filters on user-generated content sites, where the site has a full, unencrypted copy of the video; well, that's one thing. Rolling this technology out on the Internet backbone, where P2P files are broken into bits, come out-of-order from dozens of different machines, and can be easily encrypted is another. Doing all of that in real time is daunting task, but AT&T apparently has confidence in a firm called Vobile.
NBC: the "pirate peacock"?

Despite the desire for ISP filtering of P2P content, Cotton and Kliavkoff see in P2P technology a way to save money. Sure, it will exacerbate Comcast's current problem with limited upload bandwidth, a problem largely caused by P2P seeding, but NBC Universal is willing to spread its cost savings around in such a way that everyone in the ecosystem will benefit.

Don't worry; he's just using NBC Direct

When NBC says that it doesn't hate P2P as a technology, it's serious, and the proof was on display late last week when the official announcement surfaced. NBC will start using P2P technology from Pando Networks to distribute its shows through NBC Direct. Using P2P allows the company to save on the massive bandwidth bills it would otherwise incur from distributing HD-quality video. Given the timing of the announcement, NBC's recent FCC filing is curious, since it sides with Comcast's right to block BitTorrent uploads during periods of network congestion (Pando's P2P component is based on BitTorrent).

The announcement raises all sorts of questions, among them: how would NBC avoid the very filters it's advocating? If the answer is that the shows are wrapped in DRM and encrypted, as they appear to be, then this only indicates how easily most packet inspection tools can be bypassed. If the answer is that NBC's content gets a pass from the filters, other P2P companies like Vuze will clamor for the same privilege, and groups like Free Press will complain that only large content owners get to avoid the communications dragnet while independent voices streaming Miro channels face a risk of being snagged, blocked, or delayed. We'll see how things shake out.

In the meantime, while enjoying your unfiltered 'Net access and Trent Reznor's new album (a copyrighted work conveniently and legally distributed through P2P), take a moment to say thanks to Cotton and Kliavkoff. Yes, they want to filter your Internet, but they (and the media moguls like them) are also legitimizing a promising technology that only a few years ago could reasonably be described as a pirate protocol.

Just this week, a House member of the subcommittee that deals with IP and Internet issues wrote an editorial in which he suggested that a total ban on P2P apps was a positive step for colleges to take. As major media companies become a part of the P2P ecosystem, though, suggestions like this will be harder to make and will soon become untenable. It's an odd thought, but P2P's one-time detractors, the content owners, have recognized the promise of the technology and could be the very group that fights to defend its legal uses.

Because of NBC and Vuze and Blizzard and Linux and Skype, P2P has quietly become ingrained in the computing landscape. And as the technology expands even further, it may force the world's largest ISPs to change the assumptions that underlie their network: servers in the middle pushing content downstream to users have given way to a model where upstream bandwidth is under severe pressure and ISPs are scrambling to keep up. Not bad for a one-time rogue technology.

Even Cotton, while convinced that illicit file-swapping is much like walking out of store with a DVD under your jacket, makes clear that he has no intention for pushing any sort of blanket ban on P2P protocols (though he'd still like you to stop swapping his TV shows). P2P is just too valuable for that, even to the Peacock Network.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...dia-moguls.ars





Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs
Frank Rose

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea's chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.

"It's monetizing the anarchy," says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager's Forum, who plans to join Griffin on the panel.

Griffin's idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers -- something like $5 per user per month -- and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels. A collecting agency would divvy up the money according to artists' popularity on P2P sites, just as ASCAP and BMI pay songwriters for broadcasts and live performances of their work.

The idea is controversial but -- as Griffin and Jenner point out -- hardly without precedent. The concept of collecting a fee for unauthorized use of music was developed in France in 1851 as a way of reimbursing composers whose work was being performed without their permission in cafes and the like.

The practice spread to the United States in 1914 and currently applies to radio airplay and webcasts in addition to live performances. In a 2004 white paper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for it to be applied to file sharing, but the Recording Industry Association of America immediately dismissed the proposal.

Things are different now. "The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge," says Jenner, who once managed Pink Floyd and the Clash, "because they're increasingly aware that their current model is broken." U.S. music sales, which peaked in 1999 at nearly $15 billion, dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006. Last year's figures are still being tallied, but with CD sales cratering and online sales overwhelmingly dominated by singles, the only question is how far they'll fall.

Meanwhile, the industry's antipiracy efforts appear more and more futile. Digital rights management, long touted as a solution, has been all but abandoned. And though the RIAA is said to have threatened or taken action against some 20,000 suspected file sharers, the market-research firm NPD Group reports that nearly 20 percent of U.S. internet users downloaded music illegally last year. The score to date: 0.02 million alleged P2P users down, 40.98 million to go.

At the music industry trade show MIDEM last year, John Kennedy, the head of IFPI -- the RIAA's international affiliate organization -- offered modest support for the kind of licensing fee Griffin and Jenner propose. "It's a model worth looking at," he said at a press conference. "If the ISPs want to come to us and look for a blanket license for an amount per month, let's engage in that discussion."

The tone at the January 2008 MIDEM in Cannes, France, was more combative. Longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness said in a widely reported speech that it was time to hold ISPs responsible for the file sharing deluge. McGuinness wants network operators to cut off those the industry deems offenders -- an approach France's Sarkozy government is already pushing in that country. "If ISPs do not cooperate voluntarily," McGuinness declared, "there will need to be legislation to force them to cooperate," McGuinness said.

Behind closed doors, however, MIDEM attendees discussed the prospect of collecting money from ISPs instead. An invitation-only meeting on the subject drew about 50 people, including representatives of IFPI, Sony BMG, T-Mobile, the giant European ISP and mobile-carrier Orange, and performing-rights organizations like BMI. The response, according to Jenner, "ranged from 'What do we do now?' to 'It sounds good, but can it possibly work?' A lot of people are like rabbits in the headlights: They're terrified they're going to lose their jobs. No one dares to feel that this might be the solution."

Even so, notes Shira Perlmutter, IFPI’s head of legal policy, “none of our members are ruling anything out. These companies are all very open to creative new ideas that would allow customers to do things they want -- including using file sharing technologies.”

Not everyone sees the two approaches as an either-or situation. "I love Paul McGuinness' idea," says another scheduled SXSW panelist, Dina LaPolt, a Los Angeles attorney who represents Mötley Crüe and the estate of Tupac Shakur. "And I love the idea of trying to make ISPs pay artists and make up for all the free crap that's going on. I support both, so long as artists are getting paid for their work."

Whether ISPs will be willing to ante up remains far from clear, especially since many users can be expected to protest the extra charge. One option would be to introduce different service tiers and impose the surcharge only on customers who buy enough bandwidth to make file sharing feasible. But for ISPs, other music-industry demands could be far more onerous.

In the weeks since MIDEM, antipiracy zealots have been using McGuinness's speech as a rallying cry. Last month the British media reported that a government white paper was about to call for legislation to force ISPs to move against suspected file sharers. As it turned out, the white paper merely included a vague call for "voluntary, preferably commercial solutions" by April 2009.

Just Monday, the four majors sued the largest ISP in Ireland in an attempt to force it to block illicit downloads. Attorneys for Eircom retorted that it was not legally obligated to monitor its network traffic.

AT&T has been looking into content-sniffing technology that could turn it into a spy agency for music labels and film studios, but most ISPs seem distinctly unenthusiastic about the idea. They have good reason to be.

Technology experts say it would be impossible to reliably inspect trillions of packets for pirated material, especially if file sharing networks resort to encryption mechanisms. Legal experts point out that any attempt by an ISP to monitor its traffic in this way would jeopardize its status as a common carrier. It could also leave the ISP open to lawsuits from subscribers who get cut off without good reason. And financial experts say it would cost a bundle to implement.

But the bottom line is, it simply won’t work. “Ultimately there is no real hope of eradicating copyright-infringing technology,” says another SXSW panelist, Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, which tracks the popularity of music online. “You can push piracy around, discourage people from doing it in this or that venue, but I don’t think in even the most Orwellian scenario you could reduce massive infringement in a comprehensive way.”

So, which will it be: A last-gasp assault on piracy, or a truce that would bring in money and benefit everyone except the lawyers?

At this point, the music industry seems too dazed to decide -- and several nights in Austin probably won't help. Though Jenner and McGuinness are on opposite sides of the debate, their good cop-bad cop routine could ultimately prove synergistic. Pay up, the music people are telling internet providers, or we'll sic Washington on you -- and London and Paris and anybody else we can find.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...urrentPage=all





Free Music? Only With a Fight
Dan Mitchell

LIKE most purveyors of media, music labels are flailing about for a new business model even as their old one is quickly becoming outmoded.

One proposed solution — giving music away online, supported by advertising — was the subject of a panel discussion this week at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Tex. “Of course a panel on online music-business models was going to degenerate into a food fight,” wrote Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org.

The stew boiled over when Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope/Geffen/A&M records, declared, “I need more marketing and promotion on the Internet like I need a root canal without anesthetic.”

He was responding to his fellow panelist, Peter Rojas, the founder of a new music blog, RCRD LBL (pronounced record label.) Mr. Rojas is one of many advocates of the idea that music shouldn’t really be “sold,” but rather used to promote other things, like advertised goods, with a portion of revenue going to artists.

On RCRD LBL, artists offer their music free, without restrictive digital rights management software. In return, the artists get a portion of the site’s ad revenue. Such blogs, he said, are “a huge force in music right now and in some ways more important than the labels because that is where bands are being broken.”

Mr. Mico disagreed. “Different people want different forms of access,” he allowed, but giving away music on blogs isn’t the answer.

Several people in the audience sided, loudly, with Mr. Mico, with some going so far as to accuse Mr. Rojas of ripping off the artists on his site. They had to be reminded that the artists are there by choice.

Mr. Mico said he believed that subscription services like Rhapsody may yet catch on. “It is clear that somebody at some point will crack the subscription nut,” he said. A subscription service, he said, “allows people to discover music without having to pay extra for it.”

It also tends to keep labels in control of the music-distribution chain. But even Mr. Mico had to admit that when it comes to subscription services, “the trouble is, nobody that hasn’t experienced it wants to experience it.”

Mr. Levy should know, because he lost his. After tearing his apartment apart and considering that the laptop might have been stolen, he remembered leaving it on the coffee table, where newspapers and magazines tend to pile up. “My wife,” he wrote, “whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall.”

As far as Mr. Levy can tell, that’s where his laptop ended up.

LITANY OF ERROR Record labels were making terrible missteps long before the advent of the digital age. Blender.com offers a list of what it considers the 20 worst. They include MCA Records’ decision in 1989 to pass on a Seattle upstart band called Nirvana while also betting big on “Leather Boyz With Electric Toyz,” the debut album of a hair-metal band called Pretty Boy Floyd.

The worst record-label mistake ever, according to Blender, was the labels decision to sue Napster out of existence. “Napster’s users didn’t just disappear,” the site reminds us. “They scattered to hundreds of alternative systems — and new technology has stayed three steps ahead of the music business ever since.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/bu.../15online.html





D’oh!

War Against Web Tops Music Biz "Screw-Ups" List
Dean Goodman

The talent scout who turned down the Beatles has long been credited with committing the music industry's biggest gaffe.

But Dick Rowe's billion-dollar boo-boo has been beaten to the top spot on Blender magazine's list of the "20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time" by the failure of record companies to capitalize on the Internet.

The major labels took top dishonors for driving file-sharing service Napster out of business in 2001, instead of figuring out a way to make money from its tens of millions of users. The downloaders merely scattered to hundreds of other sites, and the industry has been in a tailspin ever since.

"The labels' campaign to stop their music from being acquired for free across the Internet has been like trying to cork a hurricane -- upward of a billion files are swapped every month on peer-to-peer networks," Blender said in the report, which appears in its newly published April issue.

Rowe came in at No. 2 for politely passing on the Beatles after the unpolished combo performed a disastrous audition in 1962. Beatles manager Brian Epstein later claimed the Decca Records executive had told him that "groups with guitars are on their way out," a comment that Rowe denied making. He went on to sign the Rolling Stones.

Motown Records founder Berry Gordy was No. 3, because he sold the money-losing home of the Supremes and Marvin Gaye for about $60 million in 1988. The sum was dwarfed the following year when A&M Records sold for about $500 million. And in 1990, David Geffen got about $700 million for Geffen Records. (Gordy did retain ownership of the lucrative Motown copyrights.)

Geffen Records grabbed two spots on the list: No. 11 for suing Neil Young in the 1980s because it did not like his uncommercial musical direction; and No. 12, for pumping a reported $13 million into a Guns N' Roses album that still has not seen the light of day after more than a decade of work.

Other hall of shamers included Columbia Records at No. 10, for dumping Alicia Keys and rapper 50 Cent before they became famous; and Warner Bros. Records at No. 13 for signing rock band R.E.M. to a money-losing $80 million contract in 1996.

(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...24104520080312





A Fond Look at Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’
Allan Kozinn

If there’s one thing that May Pang has been fighting for the last 28 years, it’s the idea that John Lennon was depressed, isolated and out of control during the 18 months she lived with him, from the summer of 1973 to early 1975, when he reconciled with his second wife, Yoko Ono.

Lennon himself fostered that notion by referring to the time as his “Lost Weekend” in interviews he gave in 1980, when he released “Double Fantasy,” a joint album with Ms. Ono that was his return to music-making after five years’ silence. And lurid, oft-repeated tales of a drunken Lennon’s being evicted from the Troubadour, a nightclub in Los Angeles, seemed to support that image.

But to Ms. Pang, now 57, the “Lost Weekend” was a remarkably productive time, during which Lennon completed three albums — “Mind Games,” “Walls and Bridges” and “Rock ’n’ Roll” — produced albums for Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson, and recorded with David Bowie, Elton John and Mick Jagger. And having already detailed these experiences (along with the Troubadour expulsions and other dark moments) in “Loving John,” her 1983 memoir, Ms. Pang has returned with the photographic evidence.

Her new book, “Instamatic Karma” (St. Martin’s Press), is a 140-page collection of casual photos that Ms. Pang took during her time with Lennon. Apart from a handful included in “Loving John” — cropped and in black and white, but mostly printed in full and rich color here — she has kept them in a shoe box in her closet, occasionally pulling them out to show friends.

“I began to think about publishing them just in the last couple of years,” Ms. Pang said on Monday at her publisher’s office in the Flatiron Building. “A friend of mine kept saying, ‘You tell all these stories about John, and when you do, you say, “Wait a minute, I have a photo to go along with that!” How come we never see these photos in a book?’ So, I thought maybe it’s time to put them out. It would let people see John in that world, through my eyes. And it would get rid of that whole ‘Lost Weekend’ thing, where everyone says he was always down and looked terrible. I don’t think these photos appear that way.”

They don’t: in the pages of “Instamatic Karma” — the title is a play on Lennon’s song “Instant Karma” — Lennon looks relaxed and happy, and is seen spending time with his first son, Julian, as well as with some famous friends, among them Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Nilsson and Keith Moon. He is shown working in the recording studio, swimming in Long Island Sound, clowning around in Central Park and visiting Disney World.

“They are personal and unique and very touching,” said Cynthia Lennon, Lennon’s first wife, who flew to New York from her home in Mallorca, Spain, to be the host of Ms. Pang’s publication party at the Cutting Room on Tuesday. Ms. Lennon got to know Ms. Pang when she escorted her son, Julian, on two of his four trips to visit his father while he was living with Ms. Pang.

“It’s lovely for me to look back, especially with Julian in these photographs,” she said. “But I’m here just because May is a good friend of mine and has been since we met.”

Ms. Pang arranged her book by subject instead of chronologically, with four chapters labeled “At Home,” “At Play,” “At Work” and “Away.” To her regret, she did miss a few famous moments. The March 28, 1974, Los Angeles jam session that included Lennon, Nilsson, Mr. McCartney and Stevie Wonder, for example, was not documented.

But Ms. Pang did capture one momentous event: Lennon’s signing the agreement that dissolved the Beatles’ partnership on Dec. 29, 1974.

After four years’ negotiation, the Beatles had agreed — or appeared to have — on the terms governing their formal split, and a meeting had been arranged at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Dec. 19. George Harrison was performing at Madison Square Garden that night; Mr. McCartney had flown in from London; and Mr. Starr, having signed the document earlier, was on the telephone.

At the last minute, Lennon objected to a clause that he felt would create tax problems for him (as the only Beatle living in the United States), and decided not to attend. Harrison, furious, canceled plans for Lennon to join him onstage at Madison Square Garden, but Mr. McCartney turned up at the East 52nd Street apartment that Lennon and Ms. Pang shared to discuss the sticking point.

Ten days later, when Lennon, Julian and Ms. Pang were at Disney World, a lawyer bearing the revised contract turned up, and Lennon asked Ms. Pang to take out her camera. As Ms. Pang describes the scene in “Instamatic Karma,” Lennon had a last-minute telephone conference with his own lawyer

“When John hung up the phone,” she writes, “he looked wistfully out the window. I could almost see him replaying the entire Beatles experience.” Ms. Pang then photographed him signing just beneath the clearly legible signatures of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey (Mr. Starr’s real name), the shutter clicking between the “h” and “n” of his first name.

Given that Lennon had been particularly militant about leaving the Beatles in 1969, it might seem odd to learn that he did so wistfully. Not to Ms. Pang.

“Everybody changes,” she said. “With John things changed on a daily basis. It’s a question of time. Five years earlier was not the same situation. In 1974 he had just seen everyone. The friendship was still there. They were brothers. There was no animosity. And even though they all felt they had to break up to get to the next level of their musical careers, John had started this band that changed the world. It changed pop culture. It changed how we live and how we dress. And he knew that. So when he sat down to sign, he knew that this was it. His was the last signature. As he had started the group, he was the one to end it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/ar...12pang.html?hp





Justin Frankel Rocks On
Eliot Van Buskirk

When Justin Frankel quit America Online nearly three years ago, Rolling Stone dubbed him "the world's most dangerous geek."

The title seemed especially apt at the time. After selling his startup Nullsoft and the hit music application Winamp for $100 million to the world's then most powerful internet company, Frankel repaid his corporate handlers by developing unauthorized file-sharing applications, such as Gnutella and Waste, that set the music and media industries on their ear.

These days the spotlight may have moved on, but Frankel has lost nothing of his inventiveness -- or his subversiveness. Through his follow-up company, Cockos, he has developed a string of intriguing music applications over the past two years, including a networked collaboration tool called Ninjam that lets musicians play together simultaneously over the internet.

These projects all exemplify a radical, anti-business approach that Frankel dubs "sustainable software" -- a method he says is all about "carefully respecting relationships with users and always keeping product first over business interests the goal is to just build stuff and do it in such a way that it never gets compromised."

Sound familiar? It should. These factors still account for much of the allure of Winamp and Gnutella; and in fact, they sum up an approach that still seems to work best for online businesses that want to last, rather than just hitting consumers up for a quick profit. AOL now considers Winamp to be its "first open platform," and, of course, Gnutella (the foundation of LimeWire and other P2P programs) has proven remarkably difficult to compromise.

We caught up with Frankel to find out what he's up to now.

Wired News: So, what have you been up to since leaving AOL in January 2004?

Justin Frankel: I took a little time off, but found myself getting interested in making music, so a lot of work was done and sort of evolved around that. I didn't really decide, "Hey, this is what I want to do." It was more like just gradually getting into it.

WN: And thats your new software company, Cockos? Is there an etymology behind that?

Frankel: It sort of evolved out of mis-hearing a quote from the movie Office Space.... I dont want to get too much more into it other than that, but if people go watch that film....

We were playing around with making software for processing effects for guitars and other instruments (Jesusonic), and then my brother and I decided to do a project called Ninjam, which is something that lets people play music with other people in a very unusual fashion (see below), so we had a lot of fun with that. I realized that a lot of the work we were doing was similar to everything you do for making digital-audio work-station-type software. And at the same time, I had been recording a lot using other software, and was very dissatisfied with the functionality of it as well as the user experience.

WN: So that led to the development of Reaper, your digital-audio workstation software?

Frankel: Thats correct.

WN: What features are you proudest of in the Reaper program, that other audio recording programs don't do well enough?

Frankel: What I'm most proud of is the fact that it takes a lot of the best aspects of many other pieces of software and tries to do them all pretty well. If you need to edit audio, it's up there with Vegas (developed by Sonic Foundry, purchased by Sony), which is really good for that. If you need to do complex routing, it's as capable as any other software out there. It can pretty much compete with just about anything, and at the same time, it's very straightforward to use and there's not a ton of different ways of doing the same things. If they've used a similar kind of software, people can just drop in there and everything is pretty intuitive.

WN:I have a feeling I know the answer to this, but are you involved in Gnutella anymore, or does that have a life of its own?

Frankel: No, I havent been involved with it since the conception, basically.

WN: I once met with Gene Kan, the (late) Gnutella developer who testified in front of Congress on P2P. Did you guys know each other at all?

Frankel: Yeah, we actually had a mutual friend, and he was a pretty nice guy.... With Gnutella, I basically wrote it originally and released a version, and then he was one of a group of people who reverse-engineered it. Presumably, because I wasnt available as a figurehead, he became that.

WN: Right, because of your AOL relationship.

Frankel: Yeah, because at that point I was working for them and couldn't be talking to anyone about it....

WN: Speaking of your time at AOL, I was reading up on that Waste program, which is now an open-source thing for chat and file sharing.

Frankel: We opened-sourced it and then AOL did something which may or may not be, I don't know.... We released it then they said it wasn't authorized, so therefore the open-source license isn't valid. And, whether or not I was authorized, that would be something that would be questionable. So technically, the Waste software's out there, and people who use it could be violating AOL's intellectual property rights, but it doesnt seem to be a big deal.

WN: I noticed that Reaper, your multi-track recording program is un-crippled shareware just like Winamp was back in the day (and still pretty much is), with people sending you fees. How's that been working with Reaper so far?

Frankel: It's different in terms of scale, because Reaper has a much smaller audience and also because it's more expensive than Winamp was. It's a similar idea and it's enjoying some success.

WN: You're one of the originators of this whole digital music thing in my eyes. If you were magically in charge of digital music (like anybody could be) what do you think the answer is?

Frankel: Well, there's no easy answer. I like to draw an analogy to software and copy protection. This is something that is particularly interesting to me, because a lot of the other competing digital audio workstations and plug-ins -- all of these software companies actually use dongles and things like that to protect their software. And the terrible thing about it, and this is what just pisses me off to no end, is that the people who pay for the software ultimately have to deal with all of this. They have to deal with dongles and activation schemes, and the people who pirate it and get cracked versions, they don't have to do anything, they get the best experience. I understand why these companies do it, but I just don't think they're considering what they're making their users go through.

Or they just don't care, because it's really just all about money to them, and making their customers upgrade and whatnot. So to answer that question: DRM is similar. It's not a good solution for the consumer. I know plenty of people who don't want to buy encrypted, DRM-ed content because they want to be able to play it wherever they need to play it. I don't think DRM s the solution for anything. I think it's a step backward.

So, how does that pertain to artists? I think that as labels become less important, it's going to be less of an issue because people will have a closer relationship to their artists and will like to support their artists. Most artists are not worried about people stealing their music; they're just worried about people hearing their music. The people who are really concerned are the labels, because they're the ones who are really profiting from record sales.

At some point, hopefully, the label won't be relevant, and it'll get back to sort of a decent state. But there're a lot of problems with that because it's hard to find music when everybody's independent.

WN: Yeah, that'll be the next killer app, right?

Frankel: Well, yes and no. Yeah, maybe at some point.

WN: On your site, it looks like you're like putting out a song every couple of days and as somebody who makes music myself and never gets around to it ... what's your secret?

Frankel: Well, I do two different kinds of things: First, I have a group of friends and we all like to play together.... I'm also in a band with my brother and Kristoph who also works for Cockos, and we rehearse and occasionally play a show. On top of that, when I'm at home, I have a friend in Hoboken, who I'll send stuff, and he'll record some vocals over it and send it back (links on the first page of this story showcase some of these songs). And since I've been working on the digital-audio workstation software for the last year, a lot of what I do is just use it, and when I want to do something and it's not the way I want it to be, I'll go fix it. So it's a nice feedback loop between programming and making music as well.

The secret for making quantity of music is just lowering your standards. That's it. Play a lot and experiment and don't be afraid to post something that's bad, because there'll be good things about it too. And also, I always encourage people to collaborate -- even if it's online. Post some music you made and see if someone wants to rap on it. It can be great; people can come back and add things you would have never thought of, and amaze you.

WN: A collaboration, that's what Ninjam is about too, right?

Frankel: Ninjam is more about jamming with other people live. It delays everything by a certain amount. Actually synchronizing people would be very difficult because even with a Skype conversation, where you have 100 milliseconds latency -- for a voice conversation this is not a big deal. But for music, that's an eternity.

(Ninjam works by getting everyone) playing at 120 beats per minute with a click track, then delaying everybody else's track by two measures.

WN: I have one question that I hope isn't obnoxious. What is the most extravagant thing you've bought since you sold Nullsoft? Is your house looking like Cribs (the TV show) by now, or are you keeping it pretty low key?

Frankel: Nothing too crazy. I was into cars for a while, but I'm not so much anymore. But I didn't like go and get a Ferrari or anything, yet.

WN: Or a Hum-Vee.

Frankel: Yeah, or that. I bought a statue of a llama. It's made out of barbed wire and it weighs about 300 pounds and it's flexible, so whenever we move it, people get injured.

WN: What is up with the llama? Where did that come from? (Nullsoft's mascot is a llama.)

Frankel: I think it originally came from someone who e-mailed us saying "Winamp whips the llama's ass!" That was, I think, an homage to Wesley Willis. And then it just kind of went from there, but at some point along the way, I actually met some llamas, and llamas are awesome! They are so cool, and theyre very cute too.

WN: Isn't there a danger llama's spitting?

Frankel: I think it's only really when you piss them off.... Like, if you're nice to them, I don't think they really spit at you.

From October 2006 http://www.wired.com/politics/online.../2006/10/71876





1,700 Bands, Rocking as the CD Industry Reels
Jon Pareles

“I don’t want to feel like I don’t have a future,” sang the Shout Out Louds, one of more than 1,700 bands that have been performing day and night at Austin’s clubs, halls, meeting rooms, parking lots and street corners since Wednesday.

The Shout Out Louds, from Stockholm, were singing about a romance, but they could have been speaking for thousands of people attending the 22nd annual South by Southwest Music Festival. It is America’s most important music convention, particularly for rising bands, gathering a critical mass of musicians and their supporters and exploiters from the United States and across the world. While major labels have a low profile at this year’s gathering, other corporations are highly visible, using sponsorships to latch on to music as a draw and as a symbol of cool.

Southwest is a talent showcase and a schmoozathon, a citywide barbecue party and a brainstorming session for a business that has been radically shaken and stirred by the Internet. For established recording companies, the instantaneous and often unpaid distribution of music online is business hell; CD album sales are on an accelerating slide, and sales of downloads aren’t making up for the losses. But for listeners, as well as for musicians who mostly want a chance to be heard, the digital era is fan heaven. As major labels have shrunk in the 21st century, South by Southwest has nearly doubled in size, up to 12,500 people registered for this year’s convention, from 7,000 registered attendees in 2001, not including the band members performing. In an era of plummeting CD sales and short shelf lives even for current hit makers, the festival is full of people seeking ways to route their careers around what’s left of the major recording companies.

Sooner or later, public forums and private conversations at this year’s festival end up pondering how 21st-century musicians will be paid. For nearly all of them, it won’t be royalty checks rolling in from blockbuster albums. Musicians’ livelihoods will more likely be a crazy quilt of what their lawyers would call “alternative revenue streams”: touring, downloads, ringtones, T-shirts, sponsorships, Web site ads and song placements in soundtracks or commercials. Festival panels offer practical advice on all of them, for career-minded do-it-yourself-ers.

The key is to gain enough recognition to find an audience. Over its four days, SXSW, as the festival is called, is like MySpace moved to the physical realm: more music than anyone could possibly hear, freely available and clamoring to be heard.

Major labels used to help create stars through promotion and publicity, but their role has been shrinking. Multimillion-selling musicians who have fulfilled their major-label contracts — Radiohead, the Eagles, Nine Inch Nails — are deserting those companies, choosing to be free agents rather than assets for the system that made them famous.

Even a moderately well-known musician can reach fans without a middleman. Daniel Lanois, who has produced U2 and Bob Dylan and is also a guitarist and songwriter, noted during his set that he now sells his music directly online in high fidelity at the Web site redfloorrecords.com.

“We can record something at night, put it on the site for breakfast and have the money in the PayPal account by 5,” he said. “With all due respect for my very great friends who have come up in the record-company environment, it’s nice to see that technology has opened the doors to everybody.”

South by Southwest has insisted, ever since it started in 1987 as a gathering for independent and regional musicians, that major-label contracts have never been a musician’s only chance. Musicians who have had contracts are lucky if they recoup their advances through royalties. Lou Reed, who gave an onstage interview as a convention keynote, was terse about getting a label contract. “You have the Internet — what do you need it for?”

There’s never a shortage of eager musicians. Many bands drive cross-country by van or cross an ocean to perform an unpaid showcase at South By Southwest, and the most determined ones play not only their one festival slot but also half a dozen peripheral parties as well, hoping to be noticed. Sixth Street and Red River, two downtown streets lined with clubs, are mobbed with music-hopping pedestrians until last call.

Musicians make the trek even though discovering a local band from another town or another country is just a few clicks away. That spread of information opens new career paths, from tours stoked by blog buzz to recognition for a song tucked into a commercial or a soundtrack. South by Southwest draws like Ingrid Michaelson and Sia got big breaks through songs that appeared in television shows, while Yael Naim found an international audience through a MacBook Air commercial.

With music whizzing across the Internet, South by Southwest probably has fewer completely unknown so-called baby bands, but hundreds of more toddlers. They have unlikely allies now. If record labels can’t help them, corporations might. Few musicians worry about selling out to a sponsor; now it’s a career path. This year’s festival has brand-name sponsors everywhere, from Citigroup and Dell to wineries, social-networking Web sites and the chef Rachael Ray (who is the host of her own day party).

Governments subsidize bands from countries including Australia, Norway, Spain and Britain, which see new markets and trade value in music.

Radio stations are also active. Two well-established bands, R.E.M. and My Morning Jacket, played through their coming albums at packed South by Southwest shows that were broadcast live on National Public Radio and can be streamed at nprmusic.org/music — giving away new songs they know full well will soon be bootlegged. The logic is that fans who hear them will show up for concerts, pick up T-shirts and perhaps even buy the studio versions.

But for many of the performers at South by Southwest, the ambitions are on a smaller scale: just to be heard. Casey Dienel is the 23-year-old songwriter, pianist and wispy-voiced singer of White Hinterland; her gentle melodies carry tales of visionary transformations. She said she was at the festival just hoping that “if you put yourself out there authentically, you’re going to attract people who think like you.” Looking at her rapt audience of perhaps three dozen people, she smiled shyly. “There are so many of you!” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/ar...hp&oref=slogin





SXSW: Lou Reed, No Fan of MP3s
Jon Pareles

Lou Reed has been writing songs for at least four decades and counting. But in his keynote address at South by Southwest, a casual onstage interview with his producer Hal Willner, he said he still doesn’t know how. “I don’t know how it works or why it works or what it has to do with anything,” he said. “The thing I’ve got going for me is instinct. I can feel it; I try not to think. Thinking won’t get me where I want to go.”

He talked about his song “Rock Minuet,” which has a gruesome scenario of violence and kinky sex, saying people had asked, “Is this stuff real?” Mocking the idea that a songwriter needed “qualifications for lyrics,” he said, “I have a B.A. in dope.” He paused. “And a Ph.D. in soul.”

Mr. Reed, who has long been a perfectionist about sound quality, has no love for the ubiquitous mp3. “You have the world open to you now,” he said. “You can get almost any song in the world as an mp3. Then you can try and find a version of it that you can actually listen to if you like good sound.” He added, “The technology is taking us backwards. It’s making it easier to make things worse.”
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...o-fan-of-mp3s/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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