[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"[Intel] played another dirty trick [on the OLPC] in Peru. It’s a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program." – Nicholas Negroponte


"I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors. We really have no ability to understand and influence that process." – Jimmy Wales


"The problem is, of course, that as networks become less neutral our virtual household turns into a public space where police, advertisers and just about anyone strolls in arrogantly and takes a peak. It is a dangerous and aggressive attack on what has become a sort of de facto right to privacy online. The internet is vibrant mostly only insofar as it is partially anonymous." – Bill Armstrong


"Your thermostat and your water heater are day-trading for you." – Ron Ambrosio



































January 12th, 2008





Cable May Open Up Just a Bit
Saul Hansell

One tantalizing tidbit from C.E.S. was the revival of a technology from the cable industry that is meant to let any television or other device hook into cable systems without a set-top box. CableLabs, the industry technology consortium, has been talking about this technology, called OpenCable, for years. Today, it was renamed Tru2Way. Several manufacturers, including Panasonic, said they would deploy sets using the technology.

Tru2way is meant to fulfill the failed promise of CableCard, which does let some televisions and other devices receive cable stations, including premium networks like HBO. But the current CableCard systems can’t use the high-end features of digital cable — pay-per-view movies, free on-demand content, and electronic program guides.

This is especially annoying for people trying to hook up a device like a TiVo video recorder to their cable system. Current TiVos can use CableCards, but they can’t get all the programming that is available. And of course the sort of early adopter who wants to try this technology at first is exactly the sort who wants to make sure every button on the remote works as promised.

Tru2Way is based on an operating system called OpenCable Application Platform that can run programs, downloaded by the cable operator, that can enable all sorts of functions, including video on demand, program guides and various sorts of interactive content.

Many observers have felt the cable industry has dragged its feet on this initiative because it could lose control of whatever advantage it has from full control of the consumer experience. But CableLabs said that cable systems that serve the vast majority of households in the United States will deploy the technology.

The Associated Press quotes Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, saying that pressure from the Federal Communications Commission had finally forced the cable industry to make this move.

It also may help cable fight competition from phone company television systems and from Internet-delivered television. What remains to be seen is how open a platform this is.

Mike Schwartz, a spokesman for CableLabs, says that telephone companies or satellite TV providers can license the technology. Does it seem like too much of a dream to imagine that your one set, or one TiVo, could control video signals from any source?

What’s not open, here, are the applications. If you want to write a program that automatically draws a mustache on the face of your least favorite politician, you probably can’t. Mr. Schwartz said that cable operators must approve all applications that are connected to their systems. It may be a while, but we may start to get people hacking their cable-ready sets the way they have been hacking their iPhones.

For cable companies, and viewers, this might well be a very good sign.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...up-just-a-bit/





FCC to Probe Comcast Data Discrimination
Peter Svensson

The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.

A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.

"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," Martin told an audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

In an investigation last year, The Associated Press found that Comcast in some cases hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The findings, first reported Oct. 19, confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with other file-sharing applications.

Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged after the AP story that it was "delaying" some of the traffic between computers that share files. The company said the intervention was necessary to improve the surfing experience for the majority of its subscribers.

Peer-to-peer file sharing is a common way to illegally exchange copyright files, but companies are also rushing to utilize it for legal distribution of video and game content. If ISPs hinder or control that traffic, it makes them important gatekeepers of Internet content.

The FCC's response will be an important test of its willingness to enforce "Net Neutrality," the principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a broadly stated policy supporting the concept, but its position hasn't been tested in a real-world case.

The FCC's policy statement makes an exception for "reasonable traffic management." Comcast has said its practices fall under that exception.

"The question is going to arise: Are they reasonable network practices?" Martin said Tuesday. "When they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public."

Comcast subscribers who asked the company about interference on their connections before the AP story ran were met with flat denials.

A Comcast spokesman did not have an immediate comment.

Martin also said the commission was looking at complaints that wireless carriers denied text-messaging "short codes" to some applicants. The five-digit numbers are a popular way to sign up for updates on everything from sports to politics to entertainment news.

Verizon Wireless in late September denied a request by Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, to use its mobile network for a sign-up text messaging program.

The company reversed course just a day later, calling it a mistake and an "isolated incident."

Verizon Wireless has also denied a short code to a Swedish company, Rebtel Networks AB, that operates a service similar to a virtual calling card, allowing users to avoid paying the carrier's international rates on their cell-phone calls. Verizon Wireless has stuck to that denial, saying it does want to provide an advertising venue to a competitor.

"I tell the staff that they should act on all of those complaints and investigate all of them," Martin said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...Q5hpwD8U1UOFO0





AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter
Brad Stone

For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.

Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.

“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”

I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network.

“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.

After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ter/index.html

Comments
Bill Armstrong

ISP’s are probably going to be able to charge a lot for this service. I’m sure the music industry would pay just about anything to anyone who could give them even part of their business model back.

The problem is, of course, that as networks become less neutral our virtual household turns into a public space where police, advertisers and just about anyone strolls in arrogantly and takes a peak. This is something that everyone should be opposing. It is a dangerous and aggressive attack on what has become a sort of de facto right to privacy online. The internet is vibrant mostly only insofar as it is partially anonymous.

As a programmer, I would suggest that others begin to work on ways to obscure packet data at the personal computing level. This could then be decrypted by downloaders. In any case, let’s make some preemptive efforts to destroy the effectiveness of non-neutral networks.





WeStream: Streaming Music From A Torrent File
Ernesto

WeStream is a new applet that allows you to listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. The applet is developed by BitLet, has a great interface, and is compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.

WeStream works in a similar way to BitLet’s web based BitTorrent client. All you have to do is go to the WeStream page, enter a link to a .torrent file that links to music files and hit play. The applet will then scan the torrent for files that are suitable for streaming and provide you with a web interface to control playback and volume.

Currently, WeStream supports OGG and MP3 encoded audio files, but more file types will be included in the near future.

There are a few important conditions to achieve an optimal streaming experience. Most importantly, there should be enough seeds and peers to guarantee a decent download speed. Besides this, the playback time will depend on the filesize of the tracks - the higher the bitrate, the more bandwidth is needed.

From a technical viewpoint, WeStream prioritizes the bits at the beginning of each song, otherwise it will be impossible to stream anything before the entire track is downloaded. However, like most other BitTorrent clients, it also gives a high priority to rare pieces in order to guarantee an optimal swarm speed.

The applet seeds the torrents as long as you keep the browser window open. Daniele, the developer of both BitLet and the new WeStream feature told TorrentFreak: “It would have been easy to design the streaming client to be extremely selfish, and make it care only for its needs. Ideally, we tried to avoid it: Westream should behave as most torrent clients, with a slightly different piece choosing strategy.”

WeStream is a great tool for people who want to listen to some of the tracks before they download anything, or for people who want to let their friends listen to an album without having to send all the files over first. Above all, it is a great looking innovation from the BitLet team that shows how much is possible with BitTorrent. We might just see this implemented in some of the popular BitTorrent sites soon.
http://torrentfreak.com/streaming-mu...t-file-080108/





What This Gadget Can Do Is Up to You
Anne Eisenberg

“HACKERS, welcome! Here are detailed circuit diagrams of our products — modify them as you wish.”

That’s not an announcement you’ll find on the Web sites of most consumer electronics manufacturers, who tend to keep information on the innards of their machines as private as possible.

But Neuros Technology International, creator of a new video recorder, has decided to go in a different direction. The company, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or “hack” the device — and then pass along the improvements to others.

The OSD is a versatile recorder. Using a memory card or a U.S.B. storage device, it saves copies of DVDs, VHS tapes and television programs from satellite receivers, cable boxes, TVs and any other device with standard video output.

Because the OSD saves the recordings in the popular compressed video format MPEG-4 (pronounced EM-peg), the programs can be watched on a host of devices, including iPods and smartphones. The OSD is for sale at Fry’s, Micro Center, J&R Electronics and other locations for about $230.

The OSD’s capabilities will grow to suit changing times, said Joe Born, founder and chief executive of the company. “Digital video is a fast-moving space,” he said, and many consumers don’t want to buy a new piece of hardware every time a media company comes out with a new way to watch its shows. “The best way to address this problem was to make the product open source, allowing our smartest developers and users to modify it.”

The OSD has not only open hardware, but also open software: it is based on the Linux operating system. Neuros Technology encourages hacking of the device; it has contests with cash rewards for new applications for the OSD. One winner, for instance, designed a program that lets people use it to watch YouTube on their televisions.

Using the OSD for daily video recording demands no special technical background, and no PC is required. Setup is easy: Plug a U.S.B. hard drive or other memory device into one side of this lightweight unit, and plug the TV and, for example, the DVD player into the other side.

I recorded a show from a DVD this way and, to my delight, I was soon watching it on my iPod. Thank you, hackers!

The OSD does not have a display screen. Its menu is viewed on the television screen and navigated by using the remote control that comes with it. The device can also be connected to a computer or to a home network of computers.

People who are tired of stacks of DVDs and VHS tapes in the living room may find the Neuros an inexpensive way to tidy up: an entire library can be archived on a U.S.B. hard drive. Then you can stroll through your own personal video shop from the living room couch or, when traveling, plug the drive into a laptop to watch programs recorded from satellite or cable service at home.

But these are just the daily functions, designed for duffers like me. Gamers at their consoles can record their online contests, edit the videos and share them with friends. Brett Manners, a mechanical engineer and wind-surfing instructor in Perth, Australia, had another innovative use for the device. He rigged up a combination of the OSD and a video camera and used it to record his wind-surfing adventures directly to MPEG-4 format. (To watch some excerpts, see “Windsurfing With the Neuros OSD” on YouTube.)

Products like the OSD are a good example of a small but growing trend toward openness, said Jimmy Guterman, editor of Release 2.0, a technology and business newsletter published by O’Reilly Media of Sebastopol, Calif.

“The open source hardware movement parallels the earlier open source software movement that started off as a renegade thing 15 years ago,” he said. “Now it’s the center of I.T. at many major Web sites like Google.”

He hopes for the same openness in hardware, although he said that the issue was more complicated. “Companies may keep some aspects of their hardware closed, while opening others,” he said.

Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster, said openness was likely to apply to new products like the OSD, rather than to existing proprietary products. “It’s a lot easier to design future products with openness built into them,” he said, “than to open a closed product.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/business/06novel.html





Download and Listen to Free Music on the Web
Adam Pash

Hey, I know you. RIAA lawsuits have scared you off P2P, but the iTunes DRM is both too expensive and too restrictive for your tastes, right? Then it's time you head to the web. In the past year the number of web sites linking to free downloads and streaming music has exploded, meaning there are more ways than ever to get your music fix. Today I'll highlight the best web sites—and best search kung-fu—for finding free music online.

We covered this territory over two years ago, but believe me, a lot has changed in that time.

MP3 Search Engines and Streaming Sites

First I'm going to take a look at sites that make it easy to both stream and download music, starting with my favorite of the bunch: The Hype Machine.

The Hype Machine aggregates MP3s from the vast world of music blogs. Searching for an artist in The Hype Machine returns tons of results, and you can stream the songs inline in the results. The site itself provides links to buy music at Amazon or in iTunes if it's available, but you can also click through the read the original blog post containing the song and download music directly from that site. The handy player at the bottom of The Hype Machine's page creates a playlist of all the results on a page so listening to the results is easy. You can also choose favorites to build playlists. Most of the sites in the section are brand new, but Hype Machine has time on its side, having been around since 2005.

SeeqPod is a straight up MP3 search engine at first glance, but after you perform your first search you'll notice a fancy Flash app that makes it easy to create playlists in your browser via a simple drag-and-drop interface. SeeqPod doesn't have easy to find download links for the songs, but the URLs are readily available if you're willing to do the typing. Even cooler, though, SeeqPod has an iPhone/iPod touch-optimized interface for streaming any song directly in mobile Safari.

SkreemR is another simple, barebones MP3 search engine. Like Hype Machine, SkreemR pulls its content from across the internet and can stream any song in your browser. Unlike Hype Machine, SkreemR has simple download links for every file you listen to so you don't need to follow it to the source if you want to download it.

Thesixtyone has positioned itself to be a Digg-like community for music, which makes it a great place to discover new music (though it still handles search like the rest of them). Some songs on Thesixtyone include direct links for downloads, while others only provide links to buy the music on Amazon MP3.

Deezer is a well designed site with more of a focus on building playlists, rating songs, and other more advanced features for registered users (though you don't have to be registered to use the site). You can even view and listen to entire albums on Deezer. Like the others listed above, you'll find tons of great music there, but download links can be hard to come by.

BeeMP3 isn't really about streaming music or making playlists—it's more of a straight search and download site, providing details like bitrate, format, and frequency of the encoded music file. You can't preview music, but you can sure download it.

Most of the music you'll find on Songza consists of live recordings, which is excellent for finding rare songs or performances, but unfortunately Songza isn't much for providing download links—but at least their player embeds nicely (as you can see above). (Read more)

For those of you who want to make sure that you're not downloading any copyrighted material, CCHits aggregates Creative Commons-only music so you can download anything you want, guilt-free.

Tools to Streamline Your MP3 Downloads

Now that you know where to download all that music from your browser, you'll probably need a few tools to streamline the process.

If you're an iTunes user, might I recommend the Windows-only add-on Tunestor, which adds a "Download Directly to iTunes" option to you right-click context menu in both Firefox and Internet Explorer so that you don't have to go through the rigmarole of the save-and-move-to-iTunes process every time you find a new song you like.

Alternately, iTunes lovers may also want to check out iTunes Folder Watch, a freeware Windows app that can monitor folders of your choosing (your Downloads folder, for example) and automatically add your new songs to your iTunes library.

If you just can't seem to find a download link but you'd kill to get a hold of the song that's streaming in your browser, stream rippers like StationRipper and Screamer Radio can easily do the dirty work for you.

Tools to Download and Listen to Your Music Over the Internet

Finally, they may require a bit more work on your part than the options above, but if you're willing to take a few minutes you can easily access your own music library anywhere with one of the following tools.

Anywhere.fm lets you upload your entire music library to their servers using their uploader application (for now it's free), stream, and manage it using a very iTunes-like browser-based Flash player. It also has a great social aspect that allows you to stream music from other users' libraries. Not too shabby.

If you'd rather not put the keys to your music in someone else's hands, Orb, a freeware, Windows-only application streams music from your home computer to any other computer through your web browser. It takes a little setting up, but we walk you through it here.

Googling You Free Muisc

No discussion about finding free music on the web would be complete without mentioning the classic Google search that can yield tons of results of directories full of downloadable MP3s. First, there's the straight-up Google search chock-full of operators to find those music files in open directories:
-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "artist|album|track|etc"

Just replace the "artist|album|track|etc" section with whatever you're searching for... like this one. You can also tweak the search to yield other search results, looking for other filetypes (it's looking for WMAs and MP3s above).

If you don't want to go through the hassle of remembering that long URL every time, turn it into a Firefox keyword bookmark.

Alternately, there's the free, open source application Google Hacks, which is designed specifically to do the dirty work of searching for whatever files (music, video, or otherwise) available in Google-land.
http://lifehacker.com/343095/downloa...sic-on-the-web





Online Radio Blocked from UK

Sales of cyanide and anti-depressants set to rise as Pandora closes its doors to the UK

As tears stain the keyboards in front of us we've managed to gain enough composure to deliver this shocking news: free US internet radio station Pandora will no longer be delivered to the airwaves of Britain.

Last summer (the one with all the rain) workhorses and boffs at the US-based station were told to block usage outside the states due to 'a lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries.'

Bit mean, you may think, but founder Tim Westergren, a former working musician, who has called the news 'nothing short of disastrous', and his crew threw themselves headlong into trying to work out a deal.

But alas, money-hungry record label reps and music publishers have demanded per track performance minima rates which are, in Tim's words, 'far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate'. For UK listeners, this equals bye-bye Pandora.

A distraught and it seems not-just-a-tad-peeved-off Tim states: "We know what an epicentre of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us."

It's going to take a lot of beer and/or eating ice-cream in our pyjamas (what?) to get over this one, but I'm sure we'll survive. Keep up the good fight Tim, fare thee well and come back soon.
http://www.t3.com/blogpost.html?blogId=17&id=5037





An Interface of One’s Own
Virginia Heffernan

Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.

Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line — and then harangued me with orders to save or reformat as you stall and splutter and assert points of ludicrous corporate chauvinism (“Invalid product key”! “Unrecognized database format”!).

And just when I need to be alone with my thoughts and my Mac, you detain me by emphasizing my utter dependence on you, melodramatically “recovering” documents lost in your recreational crashes.

After lo this lifetime of servitude, I intend to break free. I seek a writing program that understands me. Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?) and trinkety icons. Goodbye to glitches, bipolar paragraph breaks and 400 options for making overly colorful charts.

Goodbye, especially, to the mean, white and narrow page — which is hardly the intoxicating mental expanse Kerouac and Cather must have enjoyed. With Word, I always feel as if I’m taking an essay test.

So I have come to admire Steven Poole, author of books on video games and language, who trumpets a new radicalism on stevenpoole.net. He has purged his life of Word entirely, and he says he feels great. He had nothing to lose but his chains.

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.”

Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. But read on — and download the free trial — and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. They’re artists. They’re historians. With needs. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds — novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights — who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.”

That “whilst”! It alone makes me feel like writing.

Scrivener, then, is one of us, at home in the writer’s jumpy emotional and procedural universe. Consider its desktop icon. It greets you without Word’s back-slanted, subliterate “W” — speeding nervously to the finish line — but with an open-minded yin-yang adorned with quotation marks. Unlike so many twerpy little applications, the Scrivener icon eschews that ubiquitous Curaçao blue. Neither is it slightly rounded like some squishy teething toy. Instead, it shines and stands upright like a domino, which makes you think of a brisk “click” instead of a software “blurp.” It’s also black and white, like words on a page.

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

Full screen is not a Scrivener invention; Scrivener credits Ulysses, another excellent Word alternative for Mac. But full screen has been refined by Nisus Writer, which Michael Chabon used to write “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” as well as the seminal program CopyWrite. For PCs, programs like NewNovelist, StoryView and Liquid Story Binder get raves.

But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. Where Scrivener calls itself a “writer’s shed,” which suggests implements like duct tape and hoes, WriteRoom pitches itself as the way to “distraction-free writing” for “people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.” With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

Yes, with WriteRoom, your sentences unfurl in prehistoric murk. Yes, your green letters seem like civilization’s feeble stand against entropy. Yes, when you write, you have lighted a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Yes, you can and should also curse the darkness.

The new writing programs encourage a writerly restart. You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet, adjust your preference for long or short sentences, opt afresh for action over description. Renewal becomes heady: in WriteRoom’s gloom is man’s power to create something from nothing, to wrest form from formlessness. Let’s just say it: It’s biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?

SHAKE TO DELETE: The Etch A Sketch was the typewriter generation’s introduction to a screen that could make words simply vanish. The Web is filled with Etch A Sketch art, preserved as it could never be on the original shakable and protean palette. Find examples at gvetchedintime.com, etchasketchist.blogspot.com and ohioart.com/etch.

DON’T WRITE, SCRIVE!: Scrivener at literatureandlatte.com lets you keep your notes and ego while you write. Kick out the jams — and invigorate your style? — with other Word alternatives like WriteRoom, CopyWrite, Avenir, Jer’s Novel Writer and Ulysses.

LET THERE BE LIGHT: For fans of fanaticism, here’s an Internet pathology worth cultivating: flashaholism. Read dazzling disquisitions by connoisseurs of hand-held light on Flashlight News (flashlightnews.net/forum) and Candlepower Forums (candlepowerforums.com). Check out the paeans to palm-size LED beauties. It’s day-for-night at the flick of a switch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/ma...-medium-t.html





Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children
John Markoff

A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.

Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children.

But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort.

He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week.

The project has been a lightning rod for controversy largely because the world’s most powerful software and chip making companies — Microsoft and Intel — had long resisted the project, for fear, according to many industry executives, that it would compete in markets they hoped to develop.

As a result, One Laptop’s XO computer comes with a processor built by Intel’s rival Advanced Micro Devices and open-source software, rather than Microsoft’s Windows and Office software.

After several years of publicly attacking the XO, Intel reversed itself over the summer and joined the organization’s board, agreeing to make an $18 million contribution and begin developing an Intel-based version of the computer.

Although Intel made an initial $6 million payment to One Laptop, the partnership was troubled from the outset as Intel sales representatives in the field competed actively against the $200 One Laptop machine by trying to sell a rival computer, a more costly Classmate PC.

The Classmate sells for about $350 with an installed version of Microsoft Office, and Intel is selling the machine through an array of sales organizations outside the United States.

Even after Intel joined the One Laptop board, in country after country, the two organizations competed to make government sales, Mr. Negroponte said yesterday in a telephone interview. The relationship first frayed seriously in October, he said, when an Intel salesman gave a Mongolian government official a side-by-side comparison of the Classmate PC and the XO.

Mr. Negroponte said he was infuriated and threatened to throw Intel off the One Laptop board. In response, Intel’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, agreed to change Intel practices and he accelerated the development of the Intel prototype.

Sean Maloney, the company’s top sales and marketing executive, sent e-mail instructions to the sales team that were intended to end the practice of product comparisons.

Mr. Negroponte said eliminating the comparisons was required as part of a nondisparagement clause in the partnership agreement the two companies had signed.

In the field, according to Mr. Negroponte, nothing changed.

He complained, in particular, that Intel sales representatives were claiming that as a result of the company’s board position at One Laptop, Intel had information suggesting that the organization was in trouble.

Intel refused to respond to Mr. Negroponte’s specific account of the events that led to the end of the partnership.

Instead, Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman, reiterated the company’s statement that Intel had decided to leave the organization after it reached a stalemate over whether the chip maker could continue to promote the Classmate.

“Our position continues to be that at the core of this is a philosophical impasse about how the market gets served,” he said.

Mr. Negroponte said that an Intel representative did not attend a board meeting of the group in Miami last month, citing a potential conflict of interest.

At the meeting, the board agreed that Mr. Negroponte should make a final effort to end Intel’s efforts to disrupt One Laptop’s sales.

A rapprochement never happened, however.

“They played another dirty trick in Peru,” he said. “It’s a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program.”

In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students.

Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte and Seymour Papert, a member of the One Laptop team and an M.I.T. professor who developed the Logo computer programming language. The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials.

In a telephone interview Friday, Mr. Tresierra said that his government had asked Intel for a proposal for secondary-school machines, and it had responded with a proposal offering the Classmate PC for primary grades.

“We told them this is a final decision, we are running the primary-grade project with the XO,” he said. “She wasn’t very happy.”

He said the decision to purchase the XO had come after the government had run a pilot project with the computers. “We were very happy with the results,” he said.

Until Intel surprised him by quitting on Thursday, Mr. Negroponte said he had still held out some hope that the relationship could be saved. The Intel XO was supposed to be introduced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in keynote speeches to be made by Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Otellini, but the prototype will now be set aside.

Intel’s decision to leave was announced first in a series of phone calls made by a company spokesman to a small group of reporters. Some time later, D. Bruce Sewell, Intel’s senior vice president and general counsel, sent an e-mail message to Mr. Negroponte.

The note said that the statement, which had already been reported by wire services, was an inadvertent leak. He apologized for the way the announcement was handled.

For his part, Mr. Negroponte said he still hoped to sell two million to three million computers this year. He said that on Monday, if all goes well, he will announce a major order. Mr. Negroponte had originally hoped to sell up to five million computers.

The group did not get major orders; instead One Laptop has continued with a variety of smaller deals in countries including Uruguay, Peru and Mexico.

The group, based in Cambridge, Mass., announced Friday that its two-month “Give One, Get One” charitable promotion had generated $35 million and sold a total of 167,000 computers, half of them to be distributed in the developing world.

He said he still believed that the XO could have a big impact.

“If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/te.../05laptop.html





OLPC Blog Draws Fire for Failure to Disclose

The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop project headed up by Nicholas Negroponte.

The website in particular questions the project's educational merits: will children automatically become more educated if you provide them with notebook computers? The site's contributing authors tend to answer that question with a resounding "NO". They then listen to their own echo in the echo chamber, ignoring the project's educational goals to poke additional holes in the project's perceived strategy.

You can shrug your shoulders and simply ignore the blog, but Christopher Blizzard, one of the OLPC's contributors and an employee for Red Hat, looked a little bit further. It turns out that one of the site's authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops.

Intel has never liked the the $100 laptop. The notebooks will use AMD chips and Intel is developing a series of competing computer designs for the developing world.

So it doesn't take too much of a conspiracy theorist to believe that Intel is secretly bankrolling the OLPC-News website.

Adding insult to injury, OLPC-News is buying advertising on Google to attract visitors to its website.

OLPC News denies all the accusations, but fact is that the site has a huge conflict of interest that it conveniently failed to disclose.
http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2...log_draws.html





For My Consideration
Britt Leach

I HAVE BEEN SO VERY PROUD to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or AMPAS or the Oscar people for seventeen years. When I was accepted for membership I was given a certificate of membership and an Academy Card. I’ve lost the certificate, but each year I have been issued a new card.

I use my Academy Card to get into screenings at movie theaters or sometimes at the Academy itself, which is in Beverly Hills on Wilshire Boulevard. And each year when it’s time to submit nominations for the Academy Awards I receive what are called screeners, which are films that the studios want the members of the Academy to consider for Awards. “For your consideration” it will say on the cover of the screener. Now they are in the form of DVDs, but originally they were video tapes.

I’ve always been very happy to receive these screeners; they have made me feel very important. The Academy Awards! I would sit in front of our TV and play the tape or DVD and make notes on a legal pad; I would write the name of a film or actor that might deserve to be nominated. And then when the ballots came I would vote. There are two ballots: a nominating ballot and a final ballot for the Academy Awards themselves.

The Awards take place after that show on the red carpet, The Red Carpet Show. I took my responsibility very seriously, wrote my notes on a legal pad. I have received as many as seventy-five screeners during an Academy Awards season.

A FEW YEARS AGO the film studios’ organization, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) became concerned about piracy and losing revenue from films that had been copied from screeners and sold illegally, pirated, without the studios getting any money. With DVDs it had become easier to duplicate films I guess. So a legal document was sent out to members of the Academy that we all had to sign. By signing it we promised that we would never allow anybody to take possession of our screeners for any reason, and that we would be very careful with them. I think that the Academy sent it out or it could have been the MPAA or maybe it was sent jointly. Anyway, I signed it even though it made me feel strange, like a criminal or something. Like “Academy Member” equals “criminal.” It was insulting, but I signed it.

Not long after that document was sent out, a company came up with a special kind of DVD player that would play DVDs that were encoded to play only on uniquely identified machines; and I was sent my very own machine, without charge. There's a picture of the screen that comes on the TV when you turn the player on.

But not all the movie studios would support this special DVD player for some reason. So a possible solution to the piracy problem had been rejected; and the studios were still very worried, so worried that they began to put all kinds of threatening notices on their films, notices that cited the FBI and Interpol and detailed how the individual screeners were watermarked and how all their “industry colleagues” had better be careful or face severe penalties. They sent me letters of warning about what would happen to me if I ever ever let any of their screeners fall into the wrong hands. This is from the Sony Pictures letter:

Each of these screeners may be individually coded with an invisible unique watermark that identifies the screener and any copies of the screener, with you personally. If any unauthorized copies of the films are traced back to your screeners, you risk civil and criminal penalties. We are asking you to be especially careful in your handling of these screeners—please do not circulate, transfer, distribute, loan [sic], sell, reproduce, or give the screeners to anyone else.

And the letter made me very worried. So now we're all worried; the studios are worried and I'm worried. The studios made it very clear that screeners could be traced back to me. There, to the right, is a typical statement that appears on the screen before the film begins.

That was shown before I could watch “Michael Clayton,” a Warner Brothers film with George Clooney. In case that’s hard to read, here’s what it said. “You are personally responsible for this disc and its content. This screener is digitally watermarked to identify you, the member. Do not loan [sic], rent, sell give away or otherwise transfer to any third party for any reason.”

And those warnings from the FBI and Interpol were also shown on the screen before I could watch a film, and I couldn't fast-forward through them either. Try it and “N/A” shows up in the upper right hand corner. In red. That kind of thing makes you worried.

I mean what would happen to me and my family if one of my screeners got into the wrong hands and was duplicated and they were able to trace it back to me? Would Interpol, the FBI, come and get me? What about my wife? My cats? It made me very worried. I could go to prison.

I mean what if somebody broke into my apartment? Or what if somebody who happened to be working here one day decided to steal one of my screeners? I could go to prison.

SO I DECIDED that I just had to make my apartment more screener-secure so that no one could ever steal my valuable screeners; I began to explore security measures. Here’s a surveillance camera. It cost around $180.00. I thought about putting it above the étagère where I store my screeners. I would attach it to some kind of video recorder, the kind they have in convenience stores to record robberies.

But then I thought what if the power went out and the camera stopped working and a screener thief got in during the power blackout? So it came to me that in those situations I could really use a good guard dog. A really good German shepherd guard dog that is already trained and would kill or seriously maim a screener thief. Such a dog costs about $7000.00 (seven-thousand dollars). The dog itself isn’t that expensive but the training is, and to complicate things the dog understands only German. So I would have to learn German in order to communicate with my screener dog. That's even more expense—for the German lessons.

But then I thought that a dog can get sick or even poisoned or made very drowsy. I mean what if somebody who knew that I had screeners and knew also about my screener guard dog came to my apartment and broke a window and threw something in, piece of meat, with some dog sleeping stuff on it or even worse, poison? Put my screener guard dog to sleep or killed it, broke in and stole my screeners?

So in addition to the trained German Shepherd I thought about a full security system for my apartment. A company called ADT is very good I hear so I contacted them and found that their service cost $850.00 for starters. plus the safe they recommended for my screeners. Yes, I forgot to mention that ADT recommended that I buy a safe and keep my screeners in that safe until I wanted to watch one, return it immediately after watching. And a good screener-sized safe costs between five and seven-hundred dollars.
So that’s the cost of a surveillance camera, guard dog, German lessons,a safe, plus ADT, making a total of $8730.00 as an initial, screener-security investment plus my Academy dues of $250 per year. And who knows how much yearly maintenance of all that would cost. Dog food, vet bills.

That’s a lot of money for us, We live on my actor's pension and Social Security plus Cathy’s paycheck. So I was thinking that maybe I would need to get a job to support screener security and Academy membership. And it seemed that going back to acting might be a choice, but at my age the only parts open for me are for very sick people or cadavers. And there are already so many old character actors out there looking for those jobs that I don’t think that I could make enough money to support screener security and Academy membership, too much competition. So acting was out.

And anyway we only have one car and Cathy needs it to get to work so it wouldn’t be available to get me to interviews.

$9000.00 for starters plus yearly maintenance. I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. Even if we moved to a smaller apartment. Even if took a job managing an apartment building again; I just couldn’t figure how to do it.

And I have reluctantly come to a decision. So that I won't contribute to film piracy by inadvertently allowing one of my screeners to fall into the wrong hands, pirating hands, thereby costing the film industry millions of dollars (not to mention putting me in prison), I will not renew my membership in the Academy.

It makes me sad, but I’m also happy in a way. Because without those screeners being delivered to my vulnerable little home, with its multiple and human inefficiencies, I know that it will no longer be possible for me to harm the studios, my industry colleagues and the Academy. Yes, so by resigning from the Academy I will contribute to saving the film industry, and I have to be happy about that.
http://www.veritas-anydaynow.com/reconsideringscr.html





‘The Future Doesn’t Care About Your Bank Balance’… But the 1/1000 Do!

Raw numbers can’t convey the excitement of releasing STEAL THIS FILM II at the end of 2007, but here they are anyway: in the first 4 days there have been approximately 150,000 downloads (we haven’t checked how many views there have been on bittorrent.com, Stage6, Joox, YouTube, Google Video and everywhere else the film has been uploaded, hard since there are multiple copies on each) , around 5000 seeders at any one time on The Pirate Bay’s trackers; and approx. $5000 in donations.

That last figure is especially pleasing, not just because it represents cash in the bank for our next project, GHOST SHIFT, part one of the series THE OIL OF THE 21ST CENTURY, but because each of these people has personally chosen to support us completely voluntarily — and in most cases, donated significantly more than they would have had to pay for a DVD or a cinema ticket. While a rough calculation (the numbers are rough, we’re not statisticians!) suggests about one in a thousand people seeing the film choose to support us, we are seeing an overwhelming proportion of donations in the range $15-40.

The Few, The Generous Few

This means we have solved one of the ‘problems’ thrown up by STEAL THIS FILM I, in which we asked for donations of $1, and received thousands of them. PayPal took round about 30 cents of each of these, and after the cost of transferring to our bank account, that left not so much of the generous donations to work with in the real world.

We addressed this problem in STEAL THIS FILM II’s release by suggesting (but not requiring) donations of $5 or more, and incentivising the already-existing generosity of the P2P community by offering a ‘mystery gift’ for donations of $15 or more. (The mystery gift really is cool by the way.)

What we discovered is that (as one of my colleagues put it) people want that gift. Over 90% of people donating are deciding to go over the artificial $15 threshold we set. But I don’t think people literally ‘want that gift’; I think they want an excuse to be generous!

Some comments about this. In STEAL THIS FILM I, we envisioned millions of viewers of which a large-ish proportion would donate small amounts of money. What we actually got — and were delighted to get — was millions of viewers of which a small proportion donated a small amount of money. Even this early in the day, the STF II experience shows something that is obvious in retrospect: the people who are choosing to voluntarily support us are passionate about the STEAL THIS FILM project (not just about the documentary per se, clearly, but about the future it suggests). And quite naturally, those few people are prepared to go rather further than a $1 donation.

Steal This Film As Disease Vector

Who are the 1/1000: what characterises them and sets them apart from others? It’s difficult not to be reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s <em>http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.htmlt</em>:

Potterat […] once did an analysis of a gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, looking at
everyone who came to a public health clinic for treatment of the disease over the space of six months. He found that about half of all the cases came, essentially, from four neighborhoods representing about 6 percent of the geographic area of the city. Half of those in that 6 percent, in turn, were socializing in the same six bars. Potterat then interviewed 768 people in that tiny subgroup and found that 600 of them either didn’t give gonorrhea to anyone else or gave it to only one other person. These people he
called nontransmitters. The ones causing the epidemic to grow — the ones who were infecting two and three and four and five others with their disease — were the remaining 168. In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs — a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basi-cally frequenting the same six bars.

Who were those 168 people? They aren’t like you or
me. They are people who go out every night, people who have vastly more sexual partners than the norm, people whose lives and behavior are well outside of the ordinary.

Now, I’m not saying that STF II supporters are going around giving anyone gonorrhea; but I’m interested whether there’s any other relationship between the 1/1000 who donate and the 168/100,000 (basically the same ratio) who spread STDs in Colorado Springs. Perhaps it’s a proportion of people who just really, really like STEAL THIS FILM — but as much as that would be nice to believe, I’m more inclined to think it’s a group of edge-surfers trying to do what they can to help move things along.

Gimme Guanxi

Trying to understand more about the relationship between The League Of Noble Peers and the 1/1000, I came across the idea of Guanxi for the first time. From the wiki linked to the book Guanxi: The China Letter, this definition:

Guanxi is a Chinese term, generally translated as “networks” or “connections,”… a useful reminder that trust, understanding, and personal knowledge can be vital components of economic relationships. Most guanxi relationships are based on individuals’ having something in common… may be the fact of having attended or graduated from the same school, having the same place of employment, working in the same industry, or coming from the same village or region. In addition, guanxi relationships may sometimes be established through gift giving or personal favors…. Guanxi relationships often have a strong emotional element, something easily overlooked by outsiders.

The essence of guanxi is that each relationship carries with it a set of expectations and obligations for each participant.

Now, this isn’t the first time someone has noticed the relevance of Guanxi to network culture. In Guanxi: The Art of Relationships, Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead, ‘good’ Guanxi is defined as

trust (respect and knowledge of others), favor (loyalty and obligation), dependence (harmony and reciprocity, mutual benefit), and adaptation (patience and cultivation).

The fact that Guanxi is considered key to Gates’ ‘winning’ ‘the road ahead’ might make it a lot less attractive on the face of it, but I still think it’s an interesting way of understanding what is happening with our 1/1000. STEAL THIS FILM has helped to build what you might call an ‘affective bridge’ between ‘us’ (The League) and ‘them’ (the viewer), a reciprocal relationship that can express itself in a variety of ways: copying and redistributing, recommending personally, blogging, donating, hosting a screening, and so on.

Through the act of knowledge-sharing, ‘they’ are inspired to support ‘us’, trusting us to make more (or at least another!) film and release it in a similar way. What we learn from the (not infrequently moving) messages that come with the donations we’re receiving is that the 1/1000 are passionate about what they’re supporting. This is why it was a mistake to ask for $1: in fact, the 1/1000 were prepared donate far more to something they really cared about.

All In Together Now

One of the most important things to observe is that in the course of this interaction, the distinction between us and them breaks down to some extent. While there is a core group at the center of the STF project, people really become part of it when supporting it, whether they’re sharing it on Bittorrent or donating $10. That’s really how we’re looking at it. There is no STF without those promoting it, advertising it, and distributing it. In this sense, we’re already a million miles away from the distribution systems of the past, which never implied such a degree of intimacy, such a blurring of distinction, between what was once called ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’.

One of the questions that has been asked repeatedly since the filesharing ‘revolution’ is about how artists will get paid after the media-as-commodity model is done and dusted. In STEAL THIS FILM II we (roughly) claimed that ‘the future doesn’t care about your bank balance’, and in a couple of senses that’s true: what’s going to happen is going to happen regardless how it afflicts those who bank on the current status quo in media — and we don’t think that being able to answer a business case for a thing is the most important condition for doing it, at all. Some people act like it’s all that matters.

That said, we’ve been personally involved in thinking about ‘remuneration’ for some time. And what we think the STF II experience shows is that there is hope after filesharing. More than hope. It even seems possible at this point that STF II might go into profit.

There are caveats. We lost money on the third day of distribution because PayPal, pretty much the only game in town at the moment when it comes to accepting donations from users, unilaterally declared us to be ‘in violation’ of their ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ because we were ‘promoting illegal activity’. Of course STF II doesn’t do that and once we pointed out to them why, they restored our account. But we lost a few hundred dollars in the interim. The current state of taking online payments is just woefully unfit for purpose. The commissions are too high and the level of service too low. Someone needs to step into this arena with a new attitude, though whether that is possible in the laundering-obsessed post 9/11 world is another matter.

Secondly, while the 1/1000 are our future, and we’re infinitely grateful for their existence, we still think it’s possible for them to become the 1/500, the 1/200 or even the 1/100, given the right encouragement and cultural atmosophere. (If we were speaking of the 1/200 right now, we’d have already covered half what we spent on the film.) Fifty years ago, Everett M. Rogers developed a theory of ‘diffusion of innovations’, that is, how new things spread through a society. His 1962 book was based on Depression-era rural sociology, such as how Midwestern farmers adopted hardier corn.

Rogers found that 2.5 percent of people in society were what he called ‘innovators’ in their contexts: brave visionaries, pushing change forward, for whom trying something new requires little justification. This leads me to wonder if the 1/1000 we’re currently encountering is the ‘bleeding edge of the ‘innovator’ group in media. Of course, we can’t be sure that the model we propose is the one that will prevail in the future, and the problem is that until we have a critical mass, other new potential innovators will not join it. (Other documentarists, for example, still see the STEAL THIS FILM model as ‘idealist’ and ‘interesting’ but fundamentally impractical: they are still betting the farm on traditional distributors paying them to show their works.)

After a critical mass is achieved, the benefits of using this model are clear. As my friend and fellow Peer Alan Toner writes,

there are nearly 5,000 seeds for the three different files containing [our] film, providing an effective speed equal to that obtainable by any motion picture studio employing global server co-location like Akamai and local caching services like Google, not bad for a bunch of amateurs working from the grassroots!

Support Your Local Pirate

Combine this with direct donations in which none of the viewers’ contribution is lost in defunct, superfluous, wasteful, physical product and no middlemen (!) and you have an overwhelmingly positive picture likely to prove exceedingly attractive to second-wave pioneers. What may surprise those who think that ‘we pirates’ against artists making money is that we’re working on ways to make this economy work right now. My friend Peter Sunde (Brokep), from The Pirate Bay, has been hard at work with his development team on an offering he hopes to roll out at the end of January: it will make it much easier for people to give donations and (hopefully) take some of the power away from PayPal.

‘I think that people will pay if there’s a simple solution,’ Peter says. ‘The payment solutions of today are not built for the new, network economy — they’re built around the old one. As we move away from the old economy, we’re here without a new payment solution.’

Brokep sees this, then, as a question of ‘payment models catching up with the distribution models.’I couldn’t agree more. The League Of Noble Peers are also working on a parallel system, and after discussions with The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Bittorrent, we also think it will have some part to play in making it easier for us to support each other making cultural works. (Sorry to be so mysterious, but Peter doesn’t want to say more about their project pre-Beta and we won’t say more until we’re at least past the first phase of development.)

What is also necessary is a spreading of the ‘generosity virus’, not just for STEAL THIS FILM (although boy, could we use it!) but for all independent creators who’ve dispensed with the restrictive, punitive, retrograde commodity model and chosen to work with a new, more far-sighted paradigm. In these first days of distributing STF II, we have learned that by setting aside the artificial barriers of DVDs, cinema tickets and pay-per-download, the way is cleared to a new world of voluntary, supportive donations. The sooner we all stop moaning about how ‘no one is going to make any money’ after P2P, we can get on with encouraging each other to look after our cultural environments. No one is saying we’re there yet, but like the man said, we’re beginning to see the light.

Many ’small’ creators have protested that ‘we can’t all be STEAL THIS FILM’ — that is, we can’t all get sufficiently well-known to be able to garner enough donations to make a project financially viable. To an extent, this is true, although we suspect that a lot of creators make quite desultory attempts to market their works online. We can tell you that you can’t rely on Digg (only 1,500 hits from a front page article this time), Reddit (ignored us entirely), Slashdot (ditto) to alert people to your work — and in a sense, why should you? They’re just small interest communities that are artificially promoting stories into wider, temporary, public view. We have the feeling that these mechanisms are fairly brutal and subject to gaming, corruption and so on. ‘Preference formation’ — how we discover new stuff, stuff we like and will recommend to our friends, is incredibly important, because it precedes everything else, informs everything we may want to get involved with and support. Someone needs to get onto this now. As much as we need a better, (non-profit?) payment system, we need to think afresh about how to bring new material onto our personal and community horizons. No more Top 100s and Front Pages: these are just hangovers of mass media that needed massive numbers. We don’t: if we get only 1.8% of our current viewers (that is, those we have had in four days) to support us at the current average, we break even with STEAL THIS FILM. If we get Rogers’ 2.5% of ‘innovators’, we’ll actually be able to put something in the bank. And then it’s surely only a matter of time before others decide it’s time to bet their farms; and then we will all be winners, infinitely culturally better off than we have been able to imagine until now.
http://jamie.com/2008/01/03/the-futu...-the-11000-do/





News From The North



Political Breakthrough for Filesharers in Sweden
TankGirl

In last days and weeks there have been dramatic political developments around filesharing issues taking place in Sweden. Sweden has been known to be the international front line country when it comes to p2p politics, and the leading pirate figure on the political side has been Rick Falkvinge, the charismatic founder and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. But the key person to initiate the latest developments has been Karl Sigfrid, a parliament member from the liberal conservative Moderate Party which has been ruling Sweden with a center-right alliance since their landslide election win in September 2006.

During the election campaign 2006 the leader of the Moderate Party and the present Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, was under heavy political pressure from the newly founded Pirate Party who attracted young voters in thousands and threatened to enter the parliament with its radical copyright reform agenda. At the time, in a TV interview, Reinfeldt made a public promise not to criminalize the young Swedish generation for filesharing. After the election he conveniently forgot his promise and has been preparing new legislation that would toughen the punishments for filesharers and give new surveillance powers to the copyright industry. This is where Karl Sigfrid, his Moderate Party fellow, stepped in. In a strongly worded debate article in Expressen, one of the main newspapers of Sweden, he challenged the prime minister to keep his election promise and legalize filesharing instead of criminalizing it more. The prime minister did not respond in any way.

This did not stop Sigfrid from continuing with his demands. He kept writing high profile debate articles - getting strong support from the Pirate Party - and then in last October he made a parliamentary initiative for the legalization of filesharing in Sweden. He was no more alone: three other members from his own party and one from Center Party had joined him as signers of the initiative. It looked like a beginning of a parliamentary revolt, and that was precisely what it was about. The initiative itself was quickly buried into a committee treatment, as expected, but the warning signal of things to come had been given.

At the end of last year the public debate around filesharing started to heat up considerably. The Swedish Ministery of Justice had received a long-waited report about possible solutions for the filesharing problem, ordered by the previous social democratic Justice Minister Thomas Bodström. The report itself, work of an independent lawyer Cecilia Renfors, was more or less a wet dream for the copyright industry. Among the things Renfors suggested was a proposition to force the ISPs to act as copyright cops, watching that their customers do not download or upload any copyrighted works. Renfors also suggested a system where copyright infringers would have their internet connections cut off or seriously throttled. The copyright industry and the antipirates naturally praised the report but it got heavily criticized by many heavy league actors and officials including all ISPs, Attorney General, National Lawyer Association, Competition Office, Data Protection Office, National Postal Service and Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

In the heating debate, the representatives of old media and copyright industry started a public lobbying campaign in support of Renfors report and its suggestions. Among the notable figures of the campaign was Carl-Johan Bonnier, the head of the wealthy Bonnier family who owns half of the media companies in Scandinavia. He came up with typical antipirate arguments, characterizing Sweden as a retarded paradise of pirates, accusing file sharers of stealing intellectual property etc. What he did not expect was that the young editor of Expressen, Peter Magnus Nilsson, made a head on counter attack on the media mogul in his editorial. Nilsson reminded Bonnier that this is not the first time in history when new communication technology challenges old information monopolies and power structures. The situation was much the same in the 19th century when the liberal press with the help of new printing technology started a social revolution that turned out to be very beneficial for the whole society. "Copyright is not the same thing as property right", he argued. "If copyright law protects old distribution organizations rather than artists, if it is impossible to enforce and if it is not embraced by the majority of people, it can well be considered as a harmful construct for the society." This debate took place in mid-November, and Bonnier did not dare to continue it.

The Christmas time went quietly in the debate but on 3rd of January this year Karl Sigfrid hit again. Together with already six other parliament members from his party he published a new debate article where the copyright rebels declared that filesharing is a right, and that legalizing filesharing and forcing the market to adapt to free p2p was not only the best solution but the only realistic solution. The writers were highly critical of copyright industry and antipirates, telling that the antipirates who demanded new rights to violate the privacy of people's online communications would never be satisfied by any such measures as no measures would be enough to stop filesharing. "At the end of 1970s the copyright industry wanted to deny people from video recording TV programs. In 1998 record industry tried to ban mp3 players. We politicians have to take a clear stand on this issue and declare that we will not help in building such a technology hostile control state that would make the antipirates happy."

This major political statement caused a panic reaction on the side of the copyright industry. Only three days later the heads of six copyright industry and lobbying organizations, lead by the standing secretery of Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, responded with their own debate article where they accused the Moderate Party politicians of taking an exteremist position and attacking the foundations of propery rights and capitalism.

The counter attacks started immediately both in the press and in the Swedish blogosphere. Next day Rick Falkvinge, the leader of Pirate Party, crushed the arguments of copyright industry representatives in his own article. He emphasized that copyrights have legally and morally nothing to do with property rights and that they are rather a limitation of private property rights than an extension of them. Falkvinge told that the industry tries to ride with a 300 year old lie. In 1709 when the first copyright laws were being set in London, the publishers pretended that the laws would be for the benefit of authors when in fact they were for the benefit of publishers themselves. "The society has changed greatly since 1709; the copyright industry obviously hasn't.", Falkvinge concluded.

And next day came the biggest bombshell so far. Karl Sigfrid attacked the copyright industry with heavy verbal artillery - and sensationally the number of rebellious Moderate Party parliament members had grown from seven to thirteen in less than a week! These thirteen politicians gave a blistering bashing to the secretary of Swedish Academy and his copyright industry allies. They told how copyright industry with its demands to intrude into people's privacy in order to enforce their copyrights is acting against the best of the society.

"Of course we understand that the record industry opposes the present development because the industry will soon become obsolete", the politicians wrote. "There will always be forces that want to maintain the status quo profitable to them. When the markets change, these old industries scream the politicians to help them with draconic measures. Should the politicians have agreed to all past demands of the copyright industry we would today have a very poor media landscape with no video recorders, no mp3 players and no online TV. "

Something remarkable has happened in the political atmosphere of Sweden. Now the press and mainstream politicians are siding with the pirates, and the representatives of copyright industry are getting no public sympathy whatsoever. The pirate ideology is no more an underdog but rather the norm in the Swedish public debate. One does not need to be a clairvoyant to predict that Sweden will be the first country where the p2p revolution will make a political breakthrough and where the international tide will turn against the copyright lobby. In fact, this revolutionary breakthrough is happening in Sweden right now.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24395





Proposal to Make CD Copying Legal
Jim Pickard

Copying compact discs on to computers or iPods will become legal for the first time under government proposals to be published on Tuesday in a move that the music industry has warned could “open the floodgates” to further filesharing.

Millions of people already copy their favourite albums on to their MP3 players or computers without necessarily knowing that they are breaking the law. But this commonplace activity will no longer be illegal under the changes suggested by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Lord Triesman, minister for intellectual property, will begin a consultation process which will end on March 7.

The existing laws dated back 20 years to the time of cassette tapes and VHS, said a government source. Under this legislation it is illegal for consumers to shift their music from one media to another – or even back up CDs on a blank disc.

In theory, record companies can at present sue for damages although in practice this is not likely.

The consultation will look at the viability of legalising such recordings as long as they are for personal use.

The Association of Independent Music, the industry group, has warned that the exception could open the floodgates to “uncontrolled and unstoppable” private copying and sharing from person to person.

Alison Wenham, chairman and chief executive of the AIM, said that the move could set a dangerous precedent. CDs would largely be redundant in five years, she predicted, but the new legislation would still remain and could be misused.

But Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, another industry group, said he was broadly in favour of the changes because it would clarify the law for consumers. However, Mr Taylor said the government should ensure that the move would not “do harm to” the record industry.

The consultation will also look at wider intellectual property issues surrounding new media. These range from the legality of companies offering distance learning or online education to upload film or sound recordings. At present this is not easily done. The changes come at a time of upheaval in the industry where internet-based media are taking a growing share of the market from traditional providers of news, music and other entertainment.

The change of the rules regarding copying CDs does not necessarily mark a general retreat from a crackdown on bootlegging copyright material, however. It was one of the recommendations of the Gowers report into intellectual property laws by Andrew Gowers, former editor of the Financial Times.

But it was counterbalanced by Mr Gowers calling for harsher sentencing for online music and film pirates. One suggestion in his Treasury-commissioned report was that online piracy could be punished by prison sentences of up to 10 years instead of the current two-year maximum. This would bring the punishment into line with those convicted of trading in counterfeit CDs or DVDs.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f6527478-b...0779fd2ac.html





EFF Takes On RIAA "Making Available" Theory
NewYorkCountryLawyer

In Atlantic v. Howell, the Phoenix, Arizona, case in which a defendant who has no legal representation has been battling the RIAA over its theory that merely "making files available for distribution" is in and of itself a copyright infringement, Mr. Howell has received some help from an outside source. On the last day allowed for the filing of supplemental briefs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief agreeing with Mr. Howell, and refuting the RIAA's motion for summary judgment. The brief (PDF), which is recommended reading for anyone who wants to know what US copyright law really says, points out that "contrary to Plaintiffs' arguments, an infringement of the distribution right requires the unauthorized, actual dissemination of copies of a copyrighted work. " This is the same case in which the RIAA claimed that Mr. Howell's MP3s, copied from his CDs, were themselves unlawful.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/12/2126223





May consider new EU license

Apple Agrees to Cut iTunes Prices in Britain
Eric Pfanner

Apple said Wednesday that it had agreed to cut the prices on its iTunes digital music store in Britain to align them with those in Continental Europe, settling an antitrust case brought by European regulators.

The European Commission accused Apple last spring of unfairly charging British consumers more than their counterparts in the euro zone for tracks from iTunes, the dominant online music vendor. British consumers typically pay 79 pence, or $1.55, a song while iTunes stores in the euro zone charge 99 euro cents, or $1.46.

“In the U.K., we were being discriminated against, and now that is going to stop,” said Chris Warner, a lawyer at Which?, a London-based consumer group that brought the complaint against Apple nearly three years ago.

Apple said that within six months it would lower prices for British consumers to bring them into line with those elsewhere in Europe. But neither the company nor the commission provided details of the settlement.

One complication in setting prices for British iTunes customers is exchange rate fluctuations, as Britain has not adopted the euro. The commission’s statement that iTunes prices are 10 percent more expensive in Britain, for example, did not appear to take account of a recent slide in the value of the pound against the euro. At current exchange rates, the 79 pence price of a song in Britain is equal to about 1.06 euros.

Apple has restricted consumers in one European country from buying music from an iTunes site in another country by checking credit card details; British consumers, for example, must have a card issued by a bank in Britain, to a British address.

Groups like Which? have been calling for Apple to drop those restrictions, allowing consumers to buy from any iTunes site — thereby ending the price differential and allowing music fans access to tracks that might not be available in their country of residence.

Apple has argued that such a solution was impossible because of copyright agreements with music companies and royalty collection societies, which are typically arranged country by country. Apple also says it is charged more by the record companies at a wholesale level in Britain.

The commission apparently agreed that music licensing agreements had complicated matters for Apple.

“The commission is very much in favor of solutions which would allow consumers to buy off the iTunes online store without restrictions, but it is aware that some record companies, publishers and collecting societies still apply licensing practices which can make it difficult for iTunes to operate stores accessible for a European consumer anywhere in the EU,” the commission said in a statement.

But Warner said the six-month timetable for Apple to put a solution in place suggested that the company might try to renegotiate the licensing agreements in order to create a single, pan-European version of iTunes.

Apple suggested that this might be a desirable result of the settlement.

“This is an important step towards a pan-European marketplace for music,” Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/te...cnd-apple.html





Casualty of Porn

Is Chris Wilson facing jail over amateur smut or dead Iraqis?
David Kushner

Not long ago, Chris Wilson was just another anonymous geek making a modest living off amateur porn. Today he's the most notorious man online.

The twenty-eight-year-old founder of nowthatsfuckedup.com, a site where guys swap sexually explicit shots of their wives and girlfriends, was arrested in October at his Lakeland, Florida, home -- a raid in which Wilson was cuffed and his computer seized. Now he's out on bail and possibly facing life in prison after being hit with one of the stiffest obscenity charges in the history of the Net. But there's burgeoning doubt over which dirty pictures really landed him behind bars: the site's quotidian porn or its hundreds of graphic images, allegedly uploaded by U.S. soldiers, of dead Iraqis.

There's little question that the site is disturbing. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd calls it "so perverse and outrageous and unconscionable, I believe it would have shocked the conscience of the most liberal people in the United States." But who really engineered the arrest: local authorities or those in the highest reaches of government?

To many, this case, which some liken to 2003's "flag-draped coffin" controversy, raises serious questions about the public's perception of war and the future of free speech on the Internet. "It creates the possibility for censorship . . . based on the standards of the least tolerant community," says Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-rights group.

For Wilson, the saga started with credit-card problems. After launching the site, he began getting e-mails from soldiers who couldn't join because of bank-verification issues. So Wilson told them that if they could provide photographic proof that they were in Iraq, he'd let them on for free.

At first the photos he received were benign, such as soldiers posing by their tanks and barracks. But then came the gore. One picture shows a severed head floating in a bowl of blood. Another, a dismembered arm. A particularly gruesome photo shows a child with bloody pulp where his face used to be.

Though Wilson says he was shocked when he first saw the photos, he empathized with the soldiers' desire to show the realities of service. Rather than censoring the images, he created a separate forum for them, quoting a line from Life, when the magazine published war-dead photos during the Spanish Civil War: "Dead men have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them."

Wilson never requested photos of the dead, but news of the site soon broke with the "bodies-for-porn" sound bite. Likely fearing another Abu Ghraib, the Army launched an inquiry into whether the images constituted a felony. But the photos couldn't be verified, and Wilson fell outside military jurisdiction. Though the postings from soldiers could be a violation, says Army spokesman Paul Boyce, "we can't enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice on civilians." The military inquiry was done. But then the cops showed up.

Polk County has a history of being tough on porn, and local officials insist the pictures of war dead were not the reason for the arrest. "Our charges were not related to the notoriety brought to that Web site" by the war-dead photos, says Chip Thullberry of the local state attorney's office. But both Thullbery and Judd say that information from Wilson's arrest has been shared with the military. Given that the government took his computer, it could now identify -- and prosecute -- soldiers who e-mailed photos to the site. Boyce, however, denies knowing of a military connection to the case. "I'm not aware of any communications from [the prosecution]," he says.

Given the enormity and unique nature of the charges against Wilson (previous obscenity cases against porn masters have been ruled unconstitutional or dismissed), his attorney Lawrence Walters finds the dissociation hard to believe. "There may be a political undercurrent here," he says. "To what extent was this mandated by the military using the local state attorney as a pawn?"

He's not the only one raising this question. When news of the photos first broke, Arsalan Iftikhar of the Council on American-Islamic Relations sent a letter to Donald Rumsfeld demanding an investigation. Iftikhar now believes Wilson's arrest was a "politically motivated" solution. "It wouldn't surprise me," he says, "if the charges were there to deflect from the issue at hand: the violence suffered by the Iraqi people."

An anonymous source, claiming Pentagon access, went further: "Once the deputy chief of staff got word, a call was made to the Florida prosecutor and the governor, who of course is related to the president. A day later, [Wilson was] arrested."

Regardless of who was behind the arrest, a conviction would have a chilling effect. Obscenity, particularly online, is difficult to prove because it relies on the slippery criteria of community standards.

Wilson's site, which runs on computers in Europe with content from around the world, exists in the vast online community. If his case goes to trial, a jury of Polk County spinsters could effectively regulate content for the entire planet.

As Wilson awaits the outcome, the site is still up and running. A Freechris.org movement has launched in his support. And the photos of the war dead keep coming.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...sualty_of_porn





Watching Violence and Porn Could Reduce Violent Crime and Rape January 8th, 2008

It’s almost hard to believe such a statement, when it sounds so backwards. Researchers and economists have come out with some interesting correlations, stats and figures that will make you go “hmmm”.

Before we dive into the new research that states watching violence and porn can reduce real crime, let’s take a look at laboratory experiments stating the opposite. The basic conclusion of most laboratory experiments is that watching violent images and video, will in fact cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

Studies were done in a Columbia University Medical Center laboratory environment. When exposing participants to violent media their brains were monitored using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). To simplify the conclusions, it came down to two findings of interest. The first finding was that the brain was not stopping violent behaviors as much as it was before viewing violent media. The next finding was that the brain was more active in the area associated with planning behaviors. To get a more in depth view of this study you can find a great description here.

While the laboratory studies are hard to refute, other researchers from the University of California at San Diego and Berkely found other conclusions using real world data. A major difference between the two sets of data was that one set of conclusions was created in a laboratory while the other uses business and crime statistics.

What do you get when you combine movie attendance and violent crime statistics? Apparently, you get a wild correlation that says due to violent movies showing in theaters, you pull violent crime offenders off the streets and give them something better to do. Instead of committing the violent crimes that these potential offenders would be partaking in, they’re stuffing their faces with popcorn and drinking overpriced coke. The quick conclusion would probably be to assume that as soon as these movie patrons leave their violent movie showing, they’re back to the same old dirty tricks. In reality, up to 6 hours after the violent movie showing, crime is reduced even more than when they were in the movie!

The actual numbers explain more and paint a better picture about how these conclusions were drawn. The biggest time for movie showings is 6PM - 12AM, and it is at this magical time that every one million violent movie patrons seems to reduce crime during this time by 1.1 to 1.3 percent. After people leave the movie, the time-frame of 12AM to 6PM sees an even more drastic drop in violent crime. Interesting to note is that the actual violence isn’t the only thing being focused on that reduces violent crime but the lack of other extracurricular activities. It is said that while patrons are in a movie, they aren’t consuming alcohol thus fueling their violent behaviors. Basically, you’re throwing the dog a t-bone steak while you get a good look around the junkyard. The actual crimes that are said to be reduced during a weekend with a popular violent movie is estimated to be 1,000 violent crimes a weekend. That’s a reduction of 52,000 violent crimes a year, assuming Hollywood can crank out enough violent films to keep everyone occupied. If you want a more in depth look at the full study you can access the PDF version from Rochester University here.

Now that it’s been unveiled as to how crime is decreasing due to violent movies we can look at porn. Once again this research was not completed in a private laboratory but calculated using real world statistics. The statistics only provide a simple view as to what is really going on because correlation is strongly used. We all should know that correlation does not bring you to causation.

The research that was conducted in this project was done by former consultant to President Nixon’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. This consultant holds many titles such as Professor of Law at Northwestern University, J.D. Harvard 1961, Ph.D. Columbia 1968, Social Science Research Council Fellow in Advanced Statistics at University of Michigan, 1968. So for all the die hards focused on accolades, you can rest assured this information has been procured from the top of the pile.

Professor Antony D’Amato came to the following conclusions, which can be scoured more in depth in his guest column here. The first major statistic to take note of is the 85% decrease in sexual violence in 25 years. This statistic is released by none other than the U.S. Department of Justice. The exact figures state that there were 2.7 rapes for every 1,000 people in 1980. By the time 2004 rolled around, the same survey found rape had decreased to 0.4 per 1,000 people.

The interesting details of this study dive into Internet access by state and combine it with rape convictions on the books. The research breaks the states down into two groups of interest. The first group is the states with the lowest Internet Access and the second group is the states with the most Internet access. If you’re curious, the states with the lowest Internet access in 2001 were Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and West Virginia. On a more surprising note, the states with the highest Internet Access in 2001 were Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington. With all of these states, incidence of rape was tallied for 1980 and then again for the year 2000.

When everything is combined into a nice and easy to understand statistic you find that states that had least amount of Internet access statewide had an increase of rape over the 20 year period. The rape crimes in low Internet access states clock in at a 53% increase. Now looking at the states with the most Internet access statewide you find that they had a 27% decrease in rape cases. While it is hard to get all riled up about these statistic due to potential flaws it is an extremely interesting look at statistics going against common thought. Just because people have more Internet access doesn’t really say they are viewing more porn and satisfying the deeper desires. Nevertheless, you can see how interesting the world can be when looking at the true facts instead of hysteria.
http://businessshrink.biz/psychology...rime-and-rape/





Rape, Porn and Criminality: Political Truth on Trial

JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says that the correlation between a newly-documented drastic decline in sexual violence in the United States and a major increase in social access to pornography - most recently over the Internet - casts doubt on widely-accepted government findings on the causal connection between pornography and criminality and suggests that one impact of porn may actually be positive...

The headlines are shouting RAPE IN DECLINE![1] Official figures just released show a plunge in the number of rapes per capita in the United States since the 1970s. Even when measured in different ways, including police reports and survey interviews, the results are in agreement: there has been an 85% reduction in sexual violence in the past 25 years. The decline, steeper than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, is depicted in this chart prepared by the
United States Department of Justice:

Source: U.S. Department of Justice • Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey. The National Crime Victimization Survey. Includes both attempted and completed rapes.

As the chart shows, there were 2.7 rapes for every 1,000 people in 1980; by 2004, the same survey found the rate had decreased to 0.4 per 1000 people, a decline of 85%.

Official explanations for the unexpected decline include:

• less lawlessness associated with crack cocaine;
• women have been taught to avoid unsafe situations;
• more would-be rapists already in prison for other crimes;
• sex education classes telling boys that “no means no.”

But these minor factors cannot begin to explain such a sharp decline in the incidence of rape.

There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statistics. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It is like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the less crime.

The pornographic movie “Deep Throat” which started the flood of X-rated VHS and later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply increased in numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change: pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of internet porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.

“Deep Throat” has moved from the adult theatre to a laptop near you.

National trends are one thing; what do the figures for the states show? From data compiled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in 2001, the four states with the lowest per capita access to the internet were Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, and West Virginia. The four states with the highest internet access were Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington. (I would not have guessed this.)

Next I took the figures for forcible rape compiled by police reports by the Disaster Center for the years 1980 and 2000. The following two charts display the results:

TABLE 1. STATES WITH LOWEST INTERNET ACCESS [2]
STATE Internet 2001 Rape 1980 Rape 2000
Arkansas 36.9 26.7 31.7
Kentucky 40.2 19.2 27.4
Minnesota 36.1 23.2 45.5
W. Virginia 40.7 15.8 18.3

All figures are per capita.

TABLE 2. STATES WITH HIGHEST INTERNET ACCESS [3]
STATE Internet 2001 Rape 1980 Rape 2000
Alaska 64.1 56.8 70.3
Colorado 58.5 52.5 41.2
New Jersey 61.6 30.7 16.1
Washington 60.4 52.7 46.4

All figures are per capita.

While the nationwide incidence of rape was showing a drastic decline, the incidence of rape in the four states having the least access to the internet showed an actual increase in rape over the same time period. This result was almost too clear and convincing, so to check it I compiled figures for the four states having the most access to the internet. Three out of four of these states showed declines (in New Jersey, an almost 50% decline). Alaska was an anomaly: it increased both in internet access and incidence of rape. However, the population of Alaska is less than one-tenth that of the other three states in its category. To adjust for the disparity in population, I took the combined population of the four states in each table and calculated the percentage change in the rape statistics:

TABLE 3. COMBINED PER CAPITA PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN INCIDENCE OF RAPE.
Aggregate per capita increase or decline in rape.
Four states with lowest internet access Increase in rape of 53%
Four states with highest internet access Decrease in rape of 27%

I find these results to be statistically significant beyond the .95 confidence interval.

Yet proof of correlation is not the same thing as causation. If autumn regularly precedes winter, that doesn’t mean that autumn causes winter. When six years ago my former Northwestern colleague John Donohue, together with Steven Levitt [4, found that legalized abortion correlated with a reduction in crime, theirs would have only been an academically curious thesis if they had not identified a causal factor. But they did identify one: that prior to legalization there were many unwanted babies born due to the lack of a legal abortion alternative. Those unwanted children became the most likely group to turn to crime.

My own interest in the rape-pornography question began in 1970 when I served as a consultant to President Nixon’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The Commission concluded that there was no causal relationship between exposure to sexually explicit materials and delinquent or criminal behavior. The President was furious when he learned of the conclusion.

Later President Reagan tried the same thing, except unlike his predecessor he packed the Commission with persons who passed his ideological litmus test. (Small wonder that I was not asked to participate.) This time, Reagan’s Commission on Pornography reached the approved result: that there does exist a causal relationship between pornography and violent sex crimes.

The drafter of the Commission’s report was Frederich Schauer, a prominent law professor. In a separate statement, he assured readers that neither he nor the other Commissioners were at all influenced by their personal moral values [5].

Professor Schauer’s disclaimer aroused my skepticism. If the commissioners were unbiased, how could the social facts have changed so drastically in the decade between the Nixon and Reagan reports as to turn non-causality into causality? My examination of the Commission’s evidence resulted in an article published by the William and Mary Law Review [6].

Although the Reagan Commission had at its disposal all the evidence gathered by psychology and social-science departments throughout the world on the question whether a student’s exposure to pornography increased his tendency to commit antisocial acts, I found that the Commission was unable to adduce a shred of evidence to support its affirmative conclusion. No scientist had ever found that pornography raised the probability of rape. However, the Commission was not seeking truth; rather, as I said in the title to my article, it sought political truth.

Neither Professor Schauer nor the other Commissioners ever responded to my William & Mary article. Now they can forget it. For if they had been right that exposure to pornography leads to an increase in social violence, then the vast exposure to pornography furnished by the internet would by now have resulted in scores of rapes per day on university campuses, hundreds of rapes daily in every town, and thousands of rapes per day in every city. Instead, the Commissioners were so incredibly wrong that the incidence of rape has actually declined by the astounding rate of 85%.

Correlations aside, could access to pornography actually cause a decline in rape? In my article I mentioned one possibility: that some people watching pornography may “get it out of their system” and thus have no further desire to go out and actually try it. Another possibility might be labeled the “Victorian effect”: the more that people covered up their bodies with clothes in those days, the greater the mystery of what they looked like in the nude. The sight of a woman’s ankle was considered shocking and erotic. But today, internet porn has thoroughly de-mystified sex. Times have changed so much that some high school teachers of sex education are beginning to show triple-X porn movies to their students in order to depict techniques of satisfactory intercourse.

I am sure there will be other explanations forthcoming as to why access to pornography is the most important causal factor in the decline of rape. Once one accepts the observation that there is a precise negative correlation between the two, the rest can safely be left to the imagination.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/20...-political.php





Free Sex at Prague Brothel Tests Taboo as Reality Romps Hit Web
Douglas Lytle and Yon Pulkrabek

If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you.

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

``Sex is no taboo,'' Nick says, though he asked that his last name not be used. ``You have to free your mind.''

Big Sister is marrying 21st-century technology with the world's oldest profession to profit from the public's appetite for ever-more graphic reality TV. Since 2005, more than 15,000 men have taken up the offer of free sex in return for 15 minutes, or less, of fame, according to the brothel. Big Sister is now expanding into the U.S. with a local version of its Web site.

Visitors to the virtual brothel pay 29.95 euros ($43.88) for a one-month subscription to a smorgasbord of sex listed by position, preference and number of people. Big Sister also produces cable TV shows that air on Sky Italia and the U.K.'s Television X, as well as DVDs such as ``Sex Hyenas'' and ``Voyeur's Eye.''

``Our goal is to attract as many people as possible to catch the first reality sex TV,'' says marketing manager Carl Borowitz, who goes by the name Carlos. ``This is National Geographic for adults. Everyone's curious to watch their neighbor.''

Reality Extremes

Visitors to Big Sister start at the electronic menu, which provides each woman's age, height, working name and the languages she speaks. After a customer makes his selection, a manager makes sure the client signs broadcast release forms, and then the intimate details are arranged with the partner for the evening.

After donning a burgundy terry-cloth robe and slippers in a carpeted locker room, each client heads downstairs where the action takes place. Every move is recorded by more than 50 video cameras mounted everywhere from the toilets to the bed posts.

Big Sister is the logical result of the reality TV craze, says Paul Levinson, chair of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York. The brothel's name is a play on ``Big Brother,'' a TV show seen in 70 countries. The two aren't related.

``It does seem people like all extremes of reality TV,'' says Levinson, who wasn't aware of Big Sister. ``As media gets more advanced it gets more real. As much as high-definition has replaced black-and-white, this advancement has also been seen in terms of content.''

`Monster' Potential

At Big Sister, about a dozen guests perform on camera each night, and the Web site gets 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day, Borowitz, 26, says.

``Big Sister could potentially be a monster,'' says Bob Rice, a San Diego-based co-owner of YNOT.com, which advises porn companies on how to use the Internet. ``I just think that their marketing isn't there yet. They're known in Amsterdam, perhaps, but not in the U.S.''

Big Sister is based in a renovated apartment building just outside the narrow, winding streets of Prague's Old Town. There are no laws against paid sex in the Czech Republic.

The club's Austrian owners, who also run a Prague bordello where sex costs about $150, spent 5 million euros to buy and fix up the Big Sister building. Borowitz says they've already recouped their money.

Big Sister is owned by a Swiss-based company that doesn't identify its investors, Borowitz says, declining to release further details. Bigsister.net is registered to IT Service Consulting AG in Switzerland. The corporate registry in the Swiss canton of Zug doesn't name the firm's owners.

Alpine or Igloo?

At the brothel, the Alpine Room is decorated like the backdrop to ``The Sound of Music'' with fake Styrofoam rocks and a forest. Other rooms include Heaven, decked out in white, and Hell, which resembles a dungeon. A giant stuffed polar bear watches over proceedings in the Igloo Room.

In a control room on the second floor, three computer operators choose the best angles. One screen shows a portly, tattooed visitor trying to reenact the Kama Sutra with a thin woman with long black hair. A sign on the wall dissuades them from thinking they're the next Ingmar Bergman: ``We do not film the air. We film people in a bordello having sex.''

Big Sister has a staff of 25 to 45 women, depending on the season, and 45 workers behind the scenes.

Three-quarters of the prostitutes come from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and they make 3,000 to 5,000 euros a month, Borowitz says. Average wages in the Czech Republic are about 800 euros a month. The women declined to comment when approached by a reporter.

Nick says he's on his fourth visit to Big Sister.

He comes for the free sex, good beer and women who are ``polite and very friendly,'' Nick says, at a table with a view of a glass swimming pool where one guest bobs naked. A pole- dancer in a white thong and bra gyrates with a grinning Slovak man holding a wine bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.

``It's a different concept,'' Nick says later, as he leaves his details so the brothel can mail him complimentary DVDs of his performance. ``It's what the people want, to see normal people.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=a6C0QuB5G6Ys





Porn Gets its Own Home Set-Top Box
Brian Bergstein

You could sum up the state of TV at the International Consumer Electronics Show this way: New delivery methods will let people watch pretty much anything, anytime, on gorgeous flat-panel displays.

At the adjoining Adult Entertainment Expo, which opened here Wednesday, the message is: We KNOW one thing people will choose.

Miami-based entrepreneur Estefano Isaias is using the adult expo to debut Fyre, which he is billing as the first set-top box to deliver DVD-quality adult movies on demand to home televisions. The Fyre simply has to be plugged into an Ethernet port in a broadband connection. Another plug goes into the TV, and voila.

If it's not your thing, consider at least the technical achievement. A mainstream service from Vudu Inc., which works in a similar way as Fyre, has about 5,000 movies available. Fyre has 20,000 and is still expanding.

The Fyre box (in beta now, officially debuting in April) will be free but require a subscription plan ranging from $10 to $100 a month. Fyre shares revenue with the adult film studios that supply the videos, which are protected from copying by "digital rights management" technology.

With so much content available on Fyre, Isaias is proudest of the service's search function. Customers can choose movies and individual scenes based on their stars, their locales, the sex acts depicted — you get the picture.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080110/...ojsm65b0tU.3QA





Broadcasters Gear Up for Cell-Phone TV
AP

U.S. TV broadcasters will be ready to start transmitting signals for portable electronics like cell phones next year, the developers of the technology, LG Electronics Inc. and Harris Corp., said Sunday.

The technology represents a chance for broadcasters to challenge cell-phone carriers, who are trying to sew up the market for mobile TV with their own transmissions.

"This is going to let broadcasters get back in the game," said Howard Lance, chairman and chief executive of Harris, which makes broadcasting equipment.

But it's doubtful that the Mobile Pedestrian Handheld, or MPH, receivers developed by LG will make it into cell phones in the U.S. market, which is tightly controlled by the carriers.

LG's president and chief technology officer, Woo Paik, said MPH is also suitable for other portable devices, like media players, navigation devices and laptops. The cost to build TV reception capabilities into these would be "minimal," Paik said at a news conference ahead of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Broadcasters "realize the great opportunity out there in reaching customers who are now more and more on the move," Lance said.

Harris has conducted field trials of MPH in Chicago and Washington. Expanded trials will be conducted this year, and broad coverage is planned for 2009, Lance said.

MPH uses an available part of the digital TV broadcast spectrum, and the necessary equipment is easily added to existing TV towers, LG and Harris said.

Competing technologies include MediaFLO, developed by Qualcomm Inc. and deployed by Verizon Wireless, and DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld), championed by Nokia Corp. and adopted overseas.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...TNCXQD8U0HK402





Monitoring Tools Help Cut Home Energy Use, Study Finds
Steve Lohr

Giving people the means to closely monitor and adjust their electricity use lowers their monthly bills and could significantly reduce the need to build new power plants, according to a yearlong government study.

The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

Over a 20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power plants and infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants, say scientists at the federal laboratory.

The demonstration project was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy — just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.

In the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, 112 homes were equipped with digital thermostats, and computer controllers were attached to water heaters and clothes dryers. These controls were connected to the Internet.

The homeowners could go to a Web site to set their ideal home temperature and how many degrees they were willing to have that temperature move above or below the target. They also indicated their level of tolerance for fluctuating electricity prices. In effect, the homeowners were asked to decide the trade-off they wanted to make between cost savings and comfort.

The households, it turned out, soon became active participants in managing the load on the utility grid and their own bills.

“I was astounded at times at the response we got from customers,” said Robert Pratt, a staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the program director for the demonstration project. “It shows that if you give people simple tools and an incentive, they will do this.”

“And each household,” Mr. Pratt added, “doesn’t have to do a lot, but if something like this can be scaled up, the savings in investments you don’t have to make will be huge, and consumers and the environment will benefit.”

After some testing with households, the scientists decided not to put a lot of numbers and constant pricing information in front of consumers. On the Web site, the consumers were presented with graphic icons to set and adjust.

“We gave them a knob,” Mr. Pratt said. “If you don’t like it, change the knob.”

Behind the fairly simple consumer settings was a sophisticated live marketplace, whose software and analytics were designed by I.B.M. Research. Every five minutes, the households and local utilities were buying and selling electricity, with prices constantly fluctuating by tiny amounts as supply and demand on the grid changed.

“Your thermostat and your water heater are day-trading for you,” said Ron Ambrosio, a senior researcher at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M.

The households in the demonstration project on average saved 10 percent on their monthly utility bills. Jerry Brous, a retiree who owns a three-bedroom house in Sequim, Wash., did a bit better, saving about 15 percent, which added up to $135 over a year.

Mr. Brous, 67, said that at first he was a real price hawk, allowing the household temperature to go 10 degrees above or below the target as the outside temperature changed. In the winter, he and his wife, Pat, decided the house was too cold at times, so they changed the range to five degrees.

The monetary savings were nice, but Mr. Brous said his main motivation for joining the project was to participate in research that might accelerate the spread of energy efficiency programs.

Shortly after the demonstration project ended last March, the digital thermostat and other equipment supplied by Invensys Controls were removed from Mr. Brous’s home. “I miss it a lot,” he said. “It was cool.”

The research project was done with an eye toward guiding policy on energy-saving programs. Efficiency programs promise to curb the nation’s fuel bill and reduce damage to the environment, if consumers can be persuaded to use energy more intelligently. Still, a big question among economists and energy experts is how to tailor incentives to prompt changes in energy consumption.

The market signals from household utility bills are not clear to people, some experts say. Conservation steps, they note, may bring savings of only a few percentage points, and even those may be obscured by seasonal swings in electricity use and pricing. Thus, they say, the only way to make real progress in household energy efficiency is with sizable subsidies and mandated product standards.

The federal laboratory’s project was instead a test of market incentives and up-to-the-minute information. But how quickly the kind of technology used in the project might be deployed across the country is uncertain. Many utilities are experimenting with this so-called smart-grid technology, but most are using it to upgrade their own networks, not to let households manage consumption.

One big hurdle is that in most states, utilities are still granted rates of return that depend mainly on the power plants and equipment they own and operate instead of how much energy they save.

“What they did in Washington is a great proof of concept, but you’re not likely to see this kind of technology widely used anytime soon,” said Rick Nicholson, an energy technology analyst at IDC, a research firm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/te.../10energy.html





Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching
Miguel Helft

When Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and called the site, which carried only a few articles then, a free encyclopedia, not many people took him seriously.

Nowadays, with more than two million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is an important, if not always reliable, digital reference for millions of Internet users.

Mr. Wales expects his new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public Monday at www.wikia.com, to follow a similar trajectory.

“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

Like other search engines and sites that rely on the so-called “wisdom of crowds,” the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to “block them, ban them, delete their stuff,” just as other wiki projects do.

Wikia, a for-profit company independent of the Wikiamedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, plans to make money selling ads. The company, which also runs wiki sites on thousands of topics, has received $14 million, $10 million of that from Amazon.

For Mr. Wales, a founder of Wikia, the project is as much a business as a cause. As more people rely on search engines, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become the gatekeepers of the world’s information, Mr. Wales said. Yet little is known about how they select certain sites over others, he added.

“I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors,” he said. “We really have no ability to understand and influence that process.”

The Wikia search engine will be an open-source project, whose programming code and data will be available to anyone, he said.

Dozens of companies have tried to offer alternatives to the big search engines. None has managed to attract a sizable audience so far.

“We are only going to know after a certain period of time the power that Wikia can or cannot deliver,” said Gary Price, head of online information at Ask.com, the No. 4 search engine behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Wikia faces many tests, among them manipulation, he said, calling it “a real concern for Wikia.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/te...gy/07wiki.html





Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly
Tim Arango

In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary. Mr. Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Mr. Summers’s assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.

The pitch — “a YouTube for ideas” — appealed to Mr. Summers. “Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas,” Mr. Hopkins recalled recently. “He grilled me for two hours.” In the age of user-generated content, Mr. Summers did have one worry: “Let’s say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?”

It took awhile, but a year after that meeting, Mr. Summers decided to invest (“a few tens of thousands of dollars,” he said, adding “not something I’m hoping to retire on”) in the site, called Big Think, which officially makes its debut today after being tested for several months.

Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Mr. Hopkins said he would like the site to become a popular place for college students looking for original sources.

“I’ve had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content,” said Mr. Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. “I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw C.E.O.’s come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne.” (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).

A handful of other deep-pocketed investors also decided to chip in, including Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, the online payments site; Tom Scott, who struck it rich by founding, and selling, the juice company Nantucket Nectars and now owns Plum TV, a collection of local television stations in wealthy playgrounds like Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons; the television producer Gary David Goldberg, who was behind the hit shows “Spin City” and “Family Ties”; and David Frankel, a venture capitalist who was the lead investor in Big Think.

“I tend to follow my own curiosities, and I know millions of people are like me,” said Mr. Scott. “I’m into this kind of thing. I do think there is a market for this.”

Mr. Frankel, the lead investor, said, “The initial investors may put in more. I imagine we will go out and raise more money in the future.”

Mr. Hopkins and his partner, Victoria Brown, germinated the idea for Big Think while working together at PBS on the “Charlie Rose” show in 2006.

When they surveyed the landscape, Mr. Hopkins, 24, and Ms. Brown, 33, saw a vast array of celebrity and sophomoric video content (remember the clips of cats urinating in toilets that caused a sensation on YouTube?).

“Everyone says Americans are stupid — that’s what we generally heard from venture capitalists” when trying to raise money, Mr. Hopkins said. Obviously, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown felt differently, and the success of the business basically hinges on proving that Americans have an appetite for other kinds of content.

Of course, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown are not the first to see the Internet as an opportunity to further public discourse. It was invented largely by academics; numerous sites, like Arts & Letters Daily, an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Education, seek to serve intellectuals.

Big Think’s business model right now is rudimentary: attract enough viewers, then sell advertising. “We’re going to wait until it gets attention before going after advertisers,” Mr. Hopkins said.

So for the time being, money will be flowing one way at Big Think, out the door. Over the last several months, Big Think’s handful of producers, working from a pod of desks in a Manhattan office space, have amassed a library of about 180 interviews with leading thinkers, politicians and business leaders, like Mitt Romney, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Richard Branson and the co-founder of Blackstone, Pete Peterson. Many of the interviews were conducted in a closet-turned-studio in a back room off the office kitchen.

The interview style, which Big Think’s founders said was derived from a technique used by the filmmaker Errol Morris, places the interviewer in an even smaller closet, behind a shower curtain, hidden from the subject and making the person asking the questions almost an afterthought. The subject hears the questions from a closed-circuit monitor.

The finished product even eliminates the interviewer’s voice, and the questions appear as text on the screen. The goal is to not create a confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, or goad the subject into saying something provocative (but if it happens, that is a bonus.)

“The whole idea is really to take the interviewer out of the equation,” said Mr. Hopkins. “It allows people to be very candid. Pete Peterson went on about how his mother never loved him. It was like he was coming in for his last testament.”

When Mr. Peterson left his interview, he surveyed the makeshift studio and said, “You kids are really making lemonade out of lemons.”

Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, has shown little interest in publicly reflecting on his 2005 firing by Viacom Chairman Sumner M. Redstone. But he agreed to discuss it with Big Think, saying in an interview, “Say if you’re a C.E.O. of a public company, a lot of it you’re playing defense. You’re dealing with problems or crises. At the moment in the smaller life I have for myself, I’ve got a lot less of that, which is a good thing.”

Those videos stockpiled over the last months will be introduced piecemeal and used in a variety of ways. For example, the site may pose the question “are two parties enough?” and assemble clips from people like John McCain and Arlen Spector and Dennis Kucinich. Readers would then have an opportunity to submit their own views.

“The idea behind Big Think is that you do have to sit down for a few minutes and listen to people who know more than you do,” Mr. Hopkins said.

Mr. Hopkins knows his site will naturally appeal to secular East Coast intellectuals, but he wants to challenge their secularism with sections on faith and love and happiness. “There’s a ton of evangelicals,” said Mr. Hopkins, including an interview with Rick Warren, the pastor and best-selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life.”

“People, whether or not they believe in God, these issues really resonate,” said Mr. Hopkins. “Look at the success of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Purpose Driven Life.’”

He also hopes the site can transcend partisanship and become a destination for thinkers open to hearing opposing views.

“We live in this hyperpartisan world with really smart people on each side,” Mr. Hopkins said, invoking John Locke and John Stuart Mill, two enlightenment thinkers who believed in being open to hearing out the other side. “But there’s a lot of information not being exchanged because of these false barriers. People should expose themselves to the counterpoints.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/te...07summers.html





As Big Electronics Show Expands, Some Companies Scale Back
Brad Stone and Matt Richtel

People attending the Consumer Electronics Show, starting here on Monday, will encounter a crowded and noisy stage where technology companies from around the world unveil their latest wares.

They may well not see any of the big consumer electronics hits of 2008.

The convention, one of high-tech’s most important annual gatherings, has never been bigger. Roughly 140,000 attendees will trudge through 1.85 million square feet of exhibition space.

But despite its size, or perhaps because of it, the annual conference has become a challenging and sometimes ineffectual place to introduce new products.

The show, which started in 1967, was once a springboard for the industry’s biggest successes, like the VCR in 1970, the compact disc player in 1981 and the DVD in 1996.

Now, electronics makers and industry analysts say the show has become so loud, sprawling and preoccupied with technical esoterica that for many companies, it is as much a place to get lost as to get discovered.

Part of the problem is that technology has wormed its way into so many products over the years — from toys to kitchen appliances — that it is hard to say exactly what an electronics trade show should be about.

“Everything has morphed into it,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch, who is skipping the show after attending for four years. “You’ve got a 150-inch plasma screen and next to it some guy selling electronic toothbrushes.”

Technology companies now frequently introduce their products elsewhere, in an effort to reach consumers more directly. The Apple iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and other recent must-haves were not unveiled at C.E.S. One of the industry’s biggest hits in 2007 was the Flip Video camcorder, an easy-to-use pocket-size device that sells for $120.

Executives from Pure Digital Technologies, its maker, visited Las Vegas last year during the show but kept to their hotel suite at the Wynn, quietly briefing retailers on the device. The company introduced the camera in June with a television ad campaign, and stellar word of mouth landed it in the hands of an enthusiastic Oprah Winfrey on her show in October.

“Especially in the camcorder space, C.E.S. is about one-upping the competition with features — ‘My hard drive is bigger than yours,’” said Jonathan Kaplan, Pure Digital’s chief executive. “We would get lost in the noise at C.E.S. trying to talk to a consumer that is probably not even listening.”

Various colors and models of the Flip Video were the five best-selling camcorders on Amazon.com during December.

The show is still unmatched in its sheer number of product introductions, which collectively represent billions of dollars in annual sales. Major vendors from around the world will show off high-definition television sets, novel entertainment set-top boxes for living rooms, robots, electronic toys and an array of new Internet services. Some of those products may manage to rise above the noise and become a breakthrough consumer hit.

Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the show, said sales of recent hit products pale in comparison to the revenue from broad categories like high-definition televisions, which are a big part of the C.E.S. scene.

But many of the products introduced here, rather than representing quantum leaps, are incremental enhancements or important technical changes that may not register immediately with consumers.

That incremental approach is perhaps one reason that news from last year’s electronics show was definitively drowned out by a much smaller gathering: Macworld in San Francisco, where Apple introduced the iPhone.

“One of the reasons Apple stole C.E.S. last year was that its message was simple and succinct,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “C.E.S. does not have a crystal-clear message. There’s too much information, and it looks like you have to get a Ph.D. to get these things to work.”

Microsoft, one of the largest companies attending the show, has used Bill Gates’s introductory keynote at the show to make major product introductions, like the Xbox game console in 2001.

More recently, Microsoft’s biggest unveilings have not come at the show. The company introduced the Zune music player in the fall of 2006 and upgraded it last November to get the product in front of shoppers during the holiday season. It introduced Surface, a touch-screen tabletop computer, in June at another industry conference.

Microsoft says that in his keynote this year, Mr. Gates will discuss some new partnerships, including one with NBC to distribute coverage of the Olympics, and some new features in Ford Sync, a system that integrates cellphones, navigation and voice commands into automobile dashboards. Mr. Gates first talked about that product during his keynote at last year’s C.E.S.

Todd Thibodeaux, senior vice president for industry relations at the Consumer Electronics Association, said the big issues at this year’s show would revolve around the marriage of hardware and content. Consumer electronics makers, he said, will unveil and pursue partnerships with cable, satellite and phone providers, as well as media companies.

“It’s the biggest comparison-shopping floor in the world of consumer electronics,” Mr. Thibodeaux said. “In terms of major innovations, there are more than ever.”

But will the show produce a big hit product?

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to WiMax,” a new wide-scale wireless technology, Mr. Thibodeaux said. He added: “It could be the Sony Rolly robot. It’s a small media player that rolls around like a robot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/te...gy/07show.html





Fixated on TVs, and What’s on Them
Matt Richtel

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week was an unabashed display of high-technology gadgetry. Televisions, enormously wide and remarkably thin, were front and center, and overhead, and in the faces of all the visitors to the expansive show, which ends Thursday. Some advertised other new products, but most were there just to display images that were slightly crisper than those seen years before.

They also displayed the hope of the industry: televisions connected to the Internet and ready to receive new forms of entertainment on demand. The electronics show has always been the display place for hardware, but this year the software, information and entertainment content was edging toward center stage. A trio of reporters at the show got three different views of how the industry’s emphasis on content will affect the future of home electronics.

•

“We already all have beautiful HD televisions. How do you differentiate?” said Bob Scaglione, senior vice president for marketing of Sharp’s American arm. “One way to provide some really unique differentiation is to provide new content.”

“That’s why we’re fighting to find the right content providers.”

The world’s biggest television makers announced a series of partnerships with media companies that will allow delivery of Internet content like videos, news feeds, weather and sports directly to the TV, without the intervention of a PC to complicate matters and confuse consumers.

Sharp unveiled deals to provide weather, stock quotes and comic strips. Samsung Electronics has a deal with USA Today to provide news, weather and stock information straight to its TVs. Panasonic showed how its TVs will pull down YouTube videos and images stored on Google’s Picasa service.

The companies also announced a handful of new televisions capable of receiving Internet content — over Ethernet or wireless connections. But to the insiders here, the electronics show 2008 was less about the products than the partnerships.

The deals are just the beginning, the TV makers hope. They say they are a hint of what could become a new and intimate relationship between the heretofore isolationist hardware makers and upstart creators of Internet content.

In a small meeting with journalists, Toshihiro Sakamoto, president and senior managing director of Panasonic, the American brand name for Matsushita Electric Industrial’s home electronics, said the company must do a better job of working with content providers. “Without them, we can’t make a big TV,” he said.

In other words, his television sets, no matter how big (and Panasonic displayed a 150-inch monster), will not compete unless they are better integrated into the content food chain.

In the longer term, a more direct relationship with content providers could give them a little more strength in negotiating with cable companies that still are the main pipeline of premium content.

In the immediate term, it might give them a cut of revenue from the delivery of content. Jeffrey Cove, vice president for technology and alliances at Panasonic, declined to discuss the financial terms of the company’s deal with Google’s YouTube and Picasa. But he did say: “We’re the collectors. We are providing an outlet for eyeballs.”

MATT RICHTEL

•

Wedged between the towering glass televisions of the Samsung and Toshiba booths at the computer show was an unusual presence: a plain old media company, NBC Universal.

The peacock network staked out some prime show-floor real estate in the computer show’s well trafficked central hall, a first for a high-tech convention that focuses on screens big and small, rather than the actual images that go on those displays.

But NBC’s presence here was apt. Gadget companies are now rushing to hold hands with content companies, and vice versa.

“You can’t talk about consumer electronics without talking about content,” said Beth Comstock, president of NBC Universal Integrated Media, who oversees all of NBC’s digital initiatives. “That’s been a building theme at C.E.S. for the last couple of years and this year we felt we needed to be here in a bigger way.”

NBC’s booth demonstrated that an exhibitor does not have to wow with flashy hardware to snare a show-floor crowd. Maria Bartiromo of CNBC broadcast live from the booth on Tuesday afternoon. (“I can’t focus on anything but Maria,” one conferencegoer blared into his cellphone.) Brian Williams anchored the “NBC Nightly News” from the show floor on Wednesday afternoon. (CNBC announced an online content-sharing arrangement with The New York Times this week.)

The rest of NBC’s booth was less of a draw. Several “vending machines for video,” as the company called them, let attendees download shows to a U.S.B. drive, although they could get most of those same programs on NBC.com. A corner of the booth with two high-definition televisions indicated NBC Universal’s support for Toshiba’s HD-DVD format , which now appears about to lose the format battle to Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition DVDs.

In an interview, Ms. Comstock said the media company was eager to push its content to viewers in as many ways as possible — from live streams on NBC.com; on Hulu.com, a joint venture with Fox; or on NBC Direct, a new service which lets fans sign up to have free ad-supported shows downloaded to their computers for up to seven days after they are broadcast.

“We try every new technology that comes along,” she said. “We’ve been as aggressive in this space trying new digital platforms as anyone in the business.”

But NBC is notable for a few absences, too. Last fall, it withdrew programming from Apple’s iTunes service over a dispute about Apple’s fixed $1.99 price for TV shows. It also took its shows off YouTube in favor of the Hulu.com service. Ms. Comstock indicated that those industry disputes would not end anytime soon. “I don’t think long-term sustainable business models include a relationship where you don’t control wholesale price and can’t control your intellectual property,” she said.

BRAD STONE

•

Despite all the hoopla about content, hardware still seemed to matter at the show.

The focal point at Panasonic’s sprawling display was its Life Wall, a crowd-drawing technology demonstration that turns a white wall into a virtual fireplace or a vista of interchangeable outdoor views. Enter the room, and face recognition software alters the look to suit your predefined tastes.

With Life Wall, the argument over which size of TV to buy is over, because a virtual TV screen shrinks and grows depending on how close you are to the wall. And the virtual screen follows you as you move.

Of course, none of this is available today, and may never be. But the demonstration, first introduced at a Monday morning keynote address by Mr. Sakamoto had a more important underlying message: Panasonic is back.

Its 2007 news conference was widely seen as an embarrassing, and failed, attempt to present its plasma TV technology as a viable alternative to the stronger-selling liquid-crystal-display TVs.

But this year, the company fired back as Mr. Sakamoto showed off the world’s largest plasma display, the 150-inch model, as well as next-generation plasma versions that are less than one inch thick, weigh half as much as today’s screens and consume half the energy.

The company showed what it said was the world’s smallest and lightest — at 0.6 pound — high-definition camcorder; a 32-gigabyte flash memory card that can hold eight hours of video; and a portable DVR/DVD player, called AnyPlay. The device attaches to a Comcast set-top cable box to record a program, but then can be detached to watch on the road with its integrated screen.

“This is the best C.E.S. keynote address I’ve ever seen,” said Gary Merson, publisher of HDGuru.com, a Web site for HDTV devotees. “And everything worked.” ERIC A. TAUB
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/te...ectronics.html





Records Broken By the Perry Bible Fellowship?
Lou Cabron

"This is the reason paper was invented. Give him your money now."

Marvel comic book writer Mark Millar joined the stampede which placed the first Perry Bible Fellowship collection into the top 500 on Amazon— before the book was even released.

25-year-old cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch watched as the pre-order sales climbed past $300,000 for The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. Close to 27,000 copies were sold even before the collection of comic strips had its official release in November and crashed into Amazon's top 250. "It bounces off and on Amazon's best-seller lists all the time," Gurewitch told me, jokingly searching for an explanation. "Nifty cover? I'm not sure."

In December the cartoonist's site warned that only 3,000 copies remained, and now copies are "in short supply," Nick says. (The book's first printing had some errors which required a second printing to fully meet the demand, and Gurewitch confirms that "We are indeed gearing up for a third printing.") Publisher's Weekly reports that his publisher, Dark Horse Comics, received their biggest order ever from Britian's Diamond distributor.

"I think people respond to a packaged volume of comics much more than they connect with a computer screen," Gurewitch speculates about the response. "Seeing it on someone's coffee table, or seeing it in someone's hands, or on a high shelf, can affect us in ways far more grand than seeing it bookmarked on someone's computer."

In our interview, Nick shared even more surprising news. He's been building to this moment for two decades — sort of.

NICHOLAS GUREWITCH: My mom says I was doing cartoonist things at the age of 2, though that's hard to believe. But I was definitely story-oriented. She actually had us making little books around the age of 5 — me and my siblings.

LOU CABRON: Drawings and words?

NG: Early on, it was mostly pictures. And she would bind them with string.

LC: That's adorable.

NG: I think the idea of making a book was a really fun thing that was ever-present in my mind. I undertook a few on my own once I found a stapler.

LC: What was in the books you drew as a kid?

NG: The same stuff I'm doing now, I'm pretty sure. Lots of monsters, lots of robots, lots of dinosaurs...

I don't think I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. I've always just been a cartoonist. I've always just been making little stories.

LC: Colonel Sweeto shows a magical candy land where the reigning monarch practices some vicious realpolitik. When I contacted you, I almost wondered if you lived in a far-away fantasy castle of your own.

NG: I wonder if most people have that impression. I love castles. I plan to live in one some day. It's not wrong that you have that impression.

I wish it were true.

LC: I was picturing lots of monsters, lots of robots, and lots of dinosaurs all scattered throughout the PBF empire.

NG: It's a pretty quaint empire. My buddy Evan handles all the t-shirt stuff, and I had a friend helping me out with the prints. (They take in a lot more money than you expect, though I haven't checked my records in a while.)

Evan was actually my roommate in college when I first started the comic, and he's been writing a lot of the comics lately. He came up with the idea for Commander Crisp, as well as the one with The Masculator.

Earlier on Evan would come up with one out of four comics, and he's been doing that lately too. And my buddy Jordan is always really good about knowing how I should amplify an idea and he's come up with ideas on his own. We're all kind of on the same wavelength collaborating, and it's extremely easy.

LC: A writer for The Daily Show, Sam Means, described your comic strip as being almost psychedelic.

"The Perry Bible Fellowship is what Bil Keane, Jim Davis, and the guy who draws Marmaduke would see if they closed their eyes and rubbed them with their fists. It's absurdist, comic fireworks, and I can't get enough of it."

NG: I don't want to make judgments about my artwork, but a lot of people seem to think that it's good, and I chalk this up to the amount of time that I spend concentrating on it and enjoying it myself. If I enjoy it myself a lot, people tend to enjoy it a lot.

LC: Is that the secret reason why you use so many different styles? The strip about Finneas the heroic dog was drawn with acrylic paint, while The Throbblefoot Aquarium switched to the black-and-white style of Edward Gorey.

NG: I might be attracted to giving people the kind of response that makes them write in. That's always nice. I'm not terribly lonely, but its wonderful to hear when somebody recognizes that you've done something very subtle.

I like touching people on those levels. So it only makes sense to make references to childhood heroes and artists that I appreciate.

LC: You also told the Boston Phoenix. "There's something wonderful, and soon-to-be mythic, about the printed page... I'll always prefer it."

NG: I just have a feeling comics drawn on a napkin in 100 years will be far more appreciated than comics made on a computer. Don't you get the impression that we're getting bombarded by images that are digital? People often go straight to the digital format, which is unfortunate. I just really appreciate seeing evidence of hard work!

LC: Each of your strips always manages to startle me. For example, Hey Goat starts in the winter, but ends after the spring thaw, implying that there's been a horrible avalanche. You even told one interviewer "there's a lot to be said for chaos where order is making things very, very boring."

NG: I think I just always felt that it might be an aspect of my personality, that I think chaotic situations often reveal something about a scene or a person or an object that a still life wouldn't. It really squeezes out the nature of the characters.

Plus, chaos is just eye-catching. It's a necessary aspect of comedy and drama that there be some conflict.

LC: Does that mean you were a frustrated artist in school? Did you feel high school stifled your creativity?

NG: Or the spirits of the students, or the thinking of students.

I was an editor of an underground newspaper that we distributed in high school. We ruffled a lot of feathers. I think I have an FBI record because of it.

LC: How do you get an FBI record for an underground newspaper? Are you sure?

NG: Someone tells me I do, for certain.

A local pastor had seen the work that we were doing in the paper, and he must've thought we were more than the basic renegade kids because he wrote a letter to the FBI. This is right after Columbine, and he thought our paper displayed many warning signs for troubled youth.

He was probably right about that. We certainly were troubled youth. I just don't think we were the type of troubled youth that would express ourselves with guns.

LC: Well, wait — what was in this newspaper?

NG: We had a section where we presented fictionalized accounts of our teachers fighting each other, and how those fights would go. We'd show a big picture of them, and then a "versus," and then another teacher. It was really entertaining if you had these people as teachers. Lots of blood, lots of violence. Lets hope they never end up online.

We actually published the pastor's letter in the following issue. We also did a word search, and we hid the word "clitoris". It was a point at which we lost a lot of our audience.

LC: So you regret it?

NG: It's the type of thing I look back on and see as funny in retrospect. I think I get paid to make clitoris jokes now.

But I really enjoy having flexed my mind to the full extent at that tender age, because I think it's really helped me maintain a momentum. College was a little bland, but I think that's why I ended up starting the comic strip — because I was so hooked on my experience with the paper.

I noticed that the comics page at the college newspaper would get a heck of a lot of attention. It only took about a semester when I realized that's where I should be putting my attention, and not the articles about the dining hall.

LC: You were "discovered" when you won a comic strip contest in the Baltimore City Paper. When you entered that contest, where did you think it would lead?

NG: The Perry Bible Fellowship debuted in the New York Press the same week that it won, so there were parallel blessings. I had no prediction about where it was going. I just knew I appreciated the extra money while I was at school!

It was running in two papers when I graduated in 2004, so I gave myself a few weeks to see if I could call what I was doing a job. I sent out samples to ten more papers and heard back from about three. I figured that was just as good as trying to get a temporary job in New York City, so I ended up just staying home and doing the comic and operating from a studio space that I rented near my house.

The initial proliferation of the samples was the only time I sent out samples. Since then most papers have just emailed me — because of the web site, I assume.

I think the story ends right about now. Because I've still been doing it...
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/01/...le-fellowship/





Linux-Based PMP Features Head-Worn Display

A new Linux-based portable media player (PMP) is equipped with a 0.44-inch, head-mounted OLED microdisplay visor with 800 x 600 resolution. Dreamax's Indicube i-800 PMP offers an experience equivalent to sitting seven feet from a 54-inch screen, the vendor claims.

The Indicube combines a Linux-based PMP with an HMD (head-mounted display). On its website, the Korean company states, "Because it equipped with a Linux embedded system, Indicube not only offers a file managing system like a PC, but can decode most codecs sufficient to play HD videos easily."

The key attraction of the Indicube is an OLED (organic light emitting diode) microdisplay made by eMagin. The display offers the "world's smallest pixel pitch for a mobile virtual imaging product," according to eMagin. Other touted display features include analog and digital signal processing, and a high-density OLED-on-silicon display technology said to reduce requirements for extra circuitry. This enables reduced size, power consumption, and a weight of only three ounces.

The 3DS OLED-XL's 800 x 600-pixel array is designed with triads of vertical sub-pixels that comprise each 11.1 x 11.1-micrometer color pixel. Other touted features include pixel uniformity, improved color gamut, and an on-chip temperature sensor and compensation. Timing controls are said to accommodate a variety of video formats. The 3DS OLED-XL also boasts ergonomic enhancements such as a magnetic earphone station, frame adjustment with considerable range, and an adjustable nose clip.

Inside the Indicube

The Indicube is equipped with 12GB of storage plus an 8GB Flash card, with options to expand to up to 32GB of Flash. The company did not offer details on the processor, memory, or other internal details. The 2.3 x 4.8 x 0.9-inch PMP is said to offer full MP3 stereo sound via the 3DS OLED-XL's integrated earphones. It includes a USB interface as well as an NTSC/PAL auto-detect AV input, which together are said to enable video input from TVs, DVD players, iPOD Videos, PCs, PMPs, smartphones, and game player boxes such as the PS2 and Xbox.

Dreamax Indicube PMP with display

The Indicube's Linux-based GUI includes an icon-based file manager, games, and a photo-display application that offers the ability to play music files as MP3 player with sliding background pictures, says Dreamax. Firmware upgrades are said to be available via download.

Here are Dreamax's stated specifications for the Indicube:

• Storage – 16GB mini hard disk
• Flash -- 8GB SD Flash (can recognize up to 32GB)
• Display -- Active Matrix OLED 800 x 600 SVGA
• Optical view angle -- 38 degrees diagonal
• Image size -- 0.44 inches (equivalent of 54-inch screen from two meters away)
• Eye relief -- 22 mm
• Aspect Ratio -- 4 : 3
• Eyewear weight -- 0.18 lbs (85 grams, or 2.9 ounces)
• Codecs -- WMV, MPEG2, DivX, Xvid (video); WMA, MP3, AC3, AAC, OGG (audio)
• USB – 1 x USB 2.0 client and host
• NTSC/PAL interface – auto-detect AV input
• Battery -- 3500mAh rechargeable Li-Polymer with detachable pack
• DC power input -- 5V 2A DC
• Dimensions – 2.3 x 4.8 x 0.9 inches (59 x 122 x 22 mm)

Availability

Dreamax did not provides details on the pricing or availability of the Indicube, but more information may be available here. eMagin says its SVGA 3DS OLED-XL Microdisplay will ship in March. Both products are being demonstrated at this week's CES show.

EMagin is best known for its Z800 3DVisor, which provides 3D stereovision and head-tracking for PC gaming, training and simulation, immersion therapy, and other applications.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2593777857.html