Why Opera?
Matthew Pennell
When we look at the web browsers available today, we are seeing an increasingly high level of web standards support (including some support for new and future standards such as CSS3 and HTML5), performance and available developer tools, and Opera are certainly no slouches in this regard. Their standards support is second to none, they produce some of the most compact and fastest browsers in the world, and their mobile and alternative device browsers (including the built-in Wii browser) provide for a great web experience, regardless of device, platform or taste.
we now have a very robust and extremely fast rendering engine, which we are very proud of—the newest version has much better standards compliance, and is more solid than before (we have fixed most of the bugs that got people’s backs up in the past). The new engine is being shipped in all modern and future versions of Opera, and probably features the most complete web standards support in the industry.
Digital Web grabbed a few words with Jan Standal, director of the Opera product management and developer relations team, and Chris Mills, Opera’s developer relationship manager, to talk about why designers and developers should consider choosing Opera, and spill the beans on what Opera has got coming up in the near future in terms of their next desktop browser and other exciting technologies.
Digital Web: So what makes Opera cool, in general, and different from other browsers?
Chris Mills: Where to start? I’ll look at the other major browsers available first. Safari is a great browser, and wonderfully integrated on the Mac platform (I’m a Mac user myself—you can’t fault it on many things) and now also on the PC too—if there was anything to criticize, then maybe it would be the slightly limited options available for customisation. Firefox is good in many ways, and obviously the darling of the web developer crowd because of the tools available for it. But it’s not without issues—its very open extension development policy does lead to security issues, and it does tend to be a sludgy memory hog when you’re trying to do a lot with it. And Internet Explorer is just Internet Explorer… let’s just say I’ve never been the biggest Microsoft fan, but IE7 is certainly better than what went before, and standards support will hopefully get even better, with IE8 promising to support Acid2 in the final release version.
Opera is cool for three main reasons. First, it’s got a very small footprint on your system, and runs faster than other browsers without eating your system memory. Second, it’s available for pretty much any device you’d care to browse on, whether it’s a Linux, PC or Mac box, any mobile phone (Opera Mini will run on any phone with a JVM available) or even games consoles! Third, it’s got great standards support, so developers can pretty much be assured of their current sites working in it, and also start to play with future technologies such as CSS3, HTML5 (including the <canvas> and <video> elements and web forms 2), and SVG 1.2.
And we’ve got major improvements on the horizon. Two main criticisms of Opera have always been the Mac version in general, and the lack of developer tools available. We’ve already improved the general Mac user experience, look and feel and general performance with our latest release (check out
beta 1 of Opera 9.5) and we’re currently working hard on a new range of developer tools that we think people will really be impressed with.
DW: Why should I test in Opera instead of Firefox? I need those plugins!
CM: Firefox possesses the hard-to-beat double whammy of Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar, but we have new tools on the way for early to mid 2008. Our developer tools will feature all the essential stuff that developers want when debugging, such as DOM and CSS inspectors, live CSS and JavaScript updating, JavaScript variable watchers, etc., but they will also let you debug content on a device if necessary—for instance a web application running in Opera on a mobile phone—and you can make sure it works in other non-desktop devices too, such as games consoles—this is how we distinguish ourselves.
Jan Standal: Opera is simply the most customizable browser available—you can set exactly the buttons you want to appear on your toolbar, apply user CSS and JS files to certain sites, and set custom searches and site-specific behaviours. Our end users love us for giving them this extreme degree of control.
In addition, we now have a very robust and extremely fast rendering engine, which we are very proud of—the newest version has much better standards compliance, and is more solid than before (we have fixed most of the bugs that got people’s backs up in the past). The new engine is being shipped in all modern and future versions of Opera, and probably features the most complete web standards support in the industry.
DW: So are there any existing plugins or add-ons?
CM: Our main add-ons are called widgets, and there are a whole host of them available from
widgets.opera.com. Our widgets benefit from an advanced security model (we have to approve them before they are published) and work basically just like other browsers’ extensions or add-ons do, although ours are mainly rendered outside the main browser window, so they do not clog up the interface any more than strictly necessary. In addition to widgets, we also have the ability to apply user-defined JavaScript to sites, to fix issues with those sites, and we also have some really cool ad-hoc peer-to-peer technology coming in the future, but you’ll have to wait for more info on that!
DW: Tell me a bit more about Opera’s mobile browsers.
CM: We have Opera Mobile, and Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is a pretty full-featured mobile browser, with the same standards support as the desktop browser (it is based on the same core code) and many of the same features, including widget support. Because of this, it needs a reasonably high spec phone to run, but it is very powerful. The next release (version 9) will blow people away—we think it will provide a better web user experience than the iPhone, and of course Opera can run on other handsets, so you’re not locked in.
Opera Mini on the other hand, is a very clever browser designed to run on pretty much any phone that can run a JVM. You install the teensy little client, and then when you make a request, it is sent to our bank of Opera Mini servers. Those servers then find the page you want, specially format it and compress it by about 80%, and send it to your phone for viewing. The result is a very small file size, saving you bandwidth and therefore money as well as time, and a page that you can view even on your low spec phones. It has some limitations (such as limited Ajax support—
see here for more on the exact nature of these limitations) because of the way the service works, but then again it should provide an impressive experience for any page on the web, as long as they are designed with best practices in mind, such as progressive enhancement.
DW: What was the motivation to build Opera in the first place?
JS: Opera is the longest standing web browser company in the world. It originated from an R&D activity in Telenor (a Norwegian telecom company) back in 1994 and the first public version was Opera 3, which shipped in 1997. The founders, Jon von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsoy, believed from the very beginning that the Internet of the future was going to be available for any device, and as such Opera has, since the very beginning, been designed to run on any hardware.
DW: Why should I use it for regular desktop browsing?
CM: Many reasons. Again, there’s the sheer speed that it renders pages with. And then there’s the many great features we have, such as speed dial to access your favorite sites with a single shortcut, mouse gestures to allow you to perform common browsing activities with a single mouse movement, session restoring so that if your OS crashes or you accidentally close the window, it will bring all your windows and tabs back up just the way they were, integrated mail and RSS clients to save you the trouble of having multiple programs open, a great ad blocking feature, instant searches right in the address bar (for example, type in “g apples” to search for apples in Google), and full text history search (so you can search for pages in your browsing history by all the text in the pages, not just by page title or URL). For even more great features, see
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/features/.
Some readers may be quick to point out that a lot of Opera’s best features are also available in other browsers. That’s fair enough, but remember that we were the innovators for a lot of these features—we invented many of the popular features you see in most browsers these days, such as tabbed browsing.
DW: Are there any cool tricks we should know?
JS: One of the most useful features for me is the “create search”. With this feature you can make any search engine into an integrated search in the browser. This is extremely useful for me and provides, for example, quick access to whitepages or our intranet.
DW: What do you see for the future with Opera? As an Opera developer, what is on your wish list?
JS: We are seeing more and more that people want to access their online data and services from all sorts of devices, so we are making this easier for people by focusing on convergence of these different devices. We work hard to ensure an equivalent user experience across all devices and platforms, and are starting to provide services such as
Opera Link, which allows you to store all your bookmarks and other settings on the web, and access them from any device. This is only the tip of the iceberg—more enhancements and new technologies will follow, allowing us to keep up our reputation as one of the most innovative browser companies.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/why_opera/
Radiohead Finds Sales, Even After Downloads
Jeff Leeds
In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.
The album, the first in four years from the closely watched British rock act, sold 122,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That represents a mixed result for the band. It’s a sharp drop compared with the debut of Radiohead’s previous album, 2003’s “Hail to the Thief,” but it’s far from a flop, considering the steep decline in music sales in the last four years and the typically weak sales in the post-Christmas period. “Thief” sold about 300,000 in its first week in 2003.
In any case the figures challenge the conventional wisdom that music fans no longer have an affinity for plastic. The sales of the album, which also snagged the top spot on the British weekly music chart, came despite the fact that “In Rainbows” — in the form of digital files — had been acquired by many fans after the band offered it in an unconventional pay-what-you-want offering through a Web site, inrainbows.com. The album was released on plastic CDs and vinyl LPs on Jan. 1, with the CD priced at $13.98, though it could be found for as little as $7.99 at outlets like Amazon.com.
Some retailers viewed the Radiohead figures as a sign of the continuing market for so-called physical products in the music business, where the popularity of iTunes, music blogs and other sites have made the digital file appear to be the coin of the realm. In particular they said even fans who received the digital files distributed by Radiohead may have decided to pay for the better audio quality versions on CD or LP.
“Having a physical, archival high-fidelity master recording that you can side-load into your MP3 player of choice for a similar price is significantly better than just purchasing zeros and ones,” said Eric Levin, owner of the independent record shop Criminal Records in Atlanta and founder of an 18-member alliance of independent retailers. “I feel like that’s what 75 percent of the people are saying.”
Mr. Levin said that at his store vinyl copies of “In Rainbows” outsold the CD by a wide margin. Demand for the album was such that some record shops put it on sale before the label’s planned “street date,” resulting in sales of about 9,000 copies the previous week.
But sales of the plastic and vinyl versions of the album also received a boost from digital services like iTunes, where the album sold about 28,000 copies. The iTunes service, which sells individual songs for 99 cents and albums typically for $9.99, had not carried any of the band’s previous albums, owing in part to Radiohead’s demand that its recordings be sold only as complete works.
But Bryce Edge, one of Radiohead’s managers, said the band decided to sell “In Rainbows” on iTunes because it expects that EMI, the British music giant that released the band’s first six albums, will soon post them for sale on the service, and it would be strange for the new album to be excluded. An EMI representative declined to comment.
The decision to release the music as a digital file so far in advance of the CD also allowed time for the music to circulate on free, unlicensed file-swapping networks. Big Champagne, a tracking service that studies file-sharing, estimates that the album was downloaded more than 100,000 times on free networks in the first 24 hours after Radiohead delivered it to fans who had preordered it from its Web site. But Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, said that by offering the music for as little as zero from their own site, Radiohead “stole market share” from pirate networks.
Mr. Edge said that sales of 100,000 copies of the album this week would be “almost certainly less than the number we would have achieved if we hadn’t” offered it as a digital download. But the band still came out ahead, he said, in part because it attracted so many fans to Radiohead’s Web site, where it collected e-mail addresses from fans looking to acquire the album.
The band has not said how many copies it distributed. Now that the CD is in shops, some fans who paid for the initial downloads may have been tempted to buy the album, in effect, for a second time. But Steve Gottlieb, chief of the independent label TVT Records, said he believed the sales mainly reflected fans who were acquiring the music for the first time.
“Radiohead is one of those really big groups that appeals to people outside the intensely pirating demographic of 16 to 29,” he said. “To the extent Radiohead still has a significant audience in its 30s and 40s, there’s a bigger audience of those people who will still pick up something at Best Buy or don’t want to bother with figuring out how to go to a Radiohead Web site and track it down.”
Still, Mr. Gottlieb said, the sales suggested that the band’s name-your-price offering, and fans’ subsequent free sharing of files, had taken a toll. “Clearly we can’t give it all away and expect to sell CDs,” he said.
But Radiohead will have yet more opportunities to gain fans. The band said yesterday that it planned to perform in more than 20 North American cities this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/ar...c/10radio.html
Songs From an Unrecorded Minstrel
Jon Pareles
“This is a new song,” Natalie Merchant announced onstage at the Hiro Ballroom on Friday night, at her first full New York City concert in four years. “Try to absorb it here, now, ’cause I don’t know when I’ll make a record.”
Ms. Merchant, who sold millions of albums in the 1990s, has an adoring audience and no record label behind her. She’s not alone. As contracts end, more and more well-known musicians are trying to reinvent their careers for the era of mass downloading and plunging album sales. At the Hiro Ballroom, when a voice in the crowd asked when Ms. Merchant would release a new album, she said with a smile that she was awaiting “a new paradigm for the recording industry.” Another fan called out, “Myth America,” the independent label Ms. Merchant formed in 2003 to release “The House Carpenter’s Daughter,” an album of rearranged folk songs. Ms. Merchant replied, “Myth America is bankrupt.”
So for the moment, Ms. Merchant is back to the age-old economic model of the troubadour. People who want to hear her latest songs will have to see her perform them. New songs filled her two-hour set at Hiro Ballroom, the first of six sold-out shows through Jan. 10. Although she has played some guest appearances and benefit shows during her hiatus, Ms. Merchant was slightly taken aback by current concert behavior: cellphones raised overhead to shoot photos and video. But she sang with thoughtful passion, traversing American music from folky fingerpicking to soul grooves to pop hymns.
Ms. Merchant, who had a daughter in 2003, has written songs around poetry by and for children. She also had new songs with her own lyrics and a setting of Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet, waltzing gently as she sang about “bare ruined choirs” and thoughts of lost love and mortality.
The new songs, like her catalog, offer sorrows, warnings and solace. A folky political parable described a “golden child” whose father did everything for him. A minor-key rocker held vows of “giving up everything” in a somber crescendo, with images of emptiness hinting at Buddhism. The children’s songs brought out Ms. Merchant’s playful side; she finds wonderful things in archives. She had a countryish setting for a Victorian poem about alternate plans “if no one ever marries me,” a vaudeville shuffle about falling in love with “the janitor’s boy” and a Gypsy-tinged waltz about riddles posed by “The Man in the Wilderness.”
As she unveiled her own new songs, Ms. Merchant let herself be as moved as her audience. In a gospel-soul song about trying to find the courage to push through troubles, which mentioned New Orleans, and in a waltz that contemplated war and human strife and wondered, “How can we have so far to go?,” she burst into tears. They were a troubadour’s live, spontaneous, here-and-now moments: nothing an album could contain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/ar...ic/07merc.html
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
Bernard Holland
Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How serious we look, and how absurd we are.
“Silence is not what we artists want,” Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in “After the Golden Age,” a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press. “We want applause.”
George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic’s hat, wrote that the silence at a London performance of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony represented not rapt attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements, although in Beethoven’s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.
I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr. Hamilton’s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of “La Campanella.”
Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age, yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the first-movement cadenza of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto regularly brought down the house, no matter that the movement wasn’t over.
In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout approval without making a sound.
In describing the hypocrisies of “golden age” pursuers and other nostalgia freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to original instruments and original performance practices, it has to acknowledge original audiences too.
Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power” offers the best metaphor for modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to do with Germanic art’s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata is like Wagner’s “Parsifal,” and listeners should get down on their knees.
Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes. Today’s listeners, still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the final cadences in Donizetti doesn’t make much difference. In “Parsifal” it is a disaster, and a frequent one.
Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical idea of “one man, one recital,” but musical events were usually variety shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players, quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.
Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his violin upside down and on one string.
Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein become lost in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” simply diddling idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.
No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of “Werktreue,” or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the 19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed audiences how hard the piece at hand was.
My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms’s playing his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play the right notes,” he wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.”
There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing the interpretation blow by blow.
Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing, and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It was the most profound concert experience of my life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/ar...ic/08audi.html
CES: BitMicro Preps 832GB Solid State Drive for Launch
Beta testing of 2.5-in. SATA flash drive starts this summer, availability set by year-end
Brian Fonseca
BitMicro Networks Inc. today will announce that it is putting the finishing touches on an 832GB version of its E-Disk Altima 2.5-in. Serial ATA flash solid-state drive.
Manufacturers can begin testing the new solid-state disk drive this summer, according to Fremont, Calif.-based Bit Micro. The device is slated to start shipping in volume by late-2008, the company added.
Bit Micro would not disclose pricing plans for the new drive.
The vendor was set to unveil the NAND flash storage drive Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show 2008 show in Las Vegas.
BitMicro's E-Disk Altima.
The new E-Disk Altima drive will provide sustained rates of up to 100MB/sec. and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second, BitMicro said. The device features a SATA 3Gbit/sec. interface and is built with multilevel cell NAND flash storage technology, the company said.
View more stories from 2008 International CES
Although exorbitant prices have thus far slowed corporate demand for diskless solid-state technology, storage experts predict that 2008 should see an upswing of flash memory adoption as a result of growing data center demands for better drive performance. Analysts say that benefits of solid-state drives over traditional spinning hard disks include lower power consumption and better durability, as well as better I/O performance.
Still, given that vendors such as BitMicro and Micron Technology Inc. have touted plans for new solid-state products and hard disk manufacturers, including Toshiba Corp., have announced intentions to enter the flash-based storage marketplace, analysts say that businesses will continue to exhibit extreme caution in adopting solid-state technology.
"[Businesses] don't need early [solid-state] failures. If you get a black eye, that's hard to overcome, so they're going to be very careful," adding flash-based storage, said Dave Reinsel, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top
Stealth MBR Rootkit
In 2005 Derek Soeder and Ryan Permeh, researchers from eEye Digital Security, presented eEye BootRoot. The technique used in their project wasn't new and had been popular in DOS times, but they first successfully used it in Windows NT Environment. The eEye Digital Security researchers skipped one part - BootRoot didn't hide the real content of affected sectors like old DOS Stealth MBR viruses, but it had only been created to show the possible way to compromise Windows NT OS.
Unfortunately, all the Windows NT family (including VISTA) still have the same security flaw - MBR can be modified from usermode. Nevertheless, MS blocked write-access to disk sectors from userland code on VISTA after the pagefile attack, however, the first sectors of disk are still unprotected !
Rootkit in the wild
At the end of 2007 stealth MBR rootkit was discovered by MR Team members (thanks to Tammy & MJ) and it looks like this way of affecting NT systems could be more common in near future if MBR stays unprotected.
"Good points" of being MBR rootkit:
• full control of machine boot process-code is executed before the OS starts
• rootkit does not need a file - code could exists in some sectors of the disk and it cannot be deleted as a usual file
• rootkit does not need any registry entry because it is loaded by MBR code
• to hide itself, rootkit needs to control only a few sectors of the disk
How MBR rootkit works :
• Installer
• MBR loader
• Kernel patcher
• Kernel driver loader
• Sectors hider/protector
• Kernel driver
• Detection
• Rootkit removal
Details
Mil-Spec
The Great Zero Challenge
THE CHALLENGE WILL BEGIN ON JANUARY 15th 2008.
Q. What is this?
A. A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional data recovery firm or any individual(s) or organization(s) can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. I used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. Three data recover companies were contacted. All three are listed on this page. Two companies declined to review the drive immediately upon hearing the phrase 'dd', the third declined to review the drive after I spoke to second level phone support. Here is their response... paraphrased from a phone conversation:
"According to our Unix team, there is less than a zero percent chance of data recovery after that dd command. The drive itself has been overwritten in a very fundamental manner. However, if for legal reasons you need to demonstrate that an effort is being made to recover some or all of the data, go ahead and send it in and we'll certainly make an effort, but again, from what you've told us, our engineers are certain that we cannot recover data from the drive. We'll email you a quote."
Q. Why are you doing this?
A. Because many people believe that in order to permanently delete data from a modern hard drive that multiple overwrites with random data, mechanical grinding, degaussing and incinerating must be used. They tell others this. Like chaos, it perpetuates itself until everyone believes it. Lots of good, reusable hard drives are ruined in the process.
Q. What exactly is the challenge?
A. You or your company or your organization or your group of researchers can have a crack at the drive. You don't actually have to recover any data to win the challenge, just tell me the name of one (1) of the two (2) files or the name of the one (1) folder that existed in this screen shot before the dd command was executed.
Q. What kind of hard drive is it? How much did it cost? Is it new? Does it work? How did you format it? Why did you buy this drive?
A. Western Digital (WD800JB) 80GB hard drive. I paid roughly $60 USD for the drive. It is new. Yes, it works. I did a default initialization and NTFS format from within Windows XP. It was the smallest and least expensive hard drive I could purchase new. It's also a very plain, common drive.
Q. May I enter the challenge?
A. Sure... here are the terms of the challenge: Send a self-addressed, postage-paid box you pay shipping both ways with packaging material to the address listed below along with a sixty $60 USD deposit United States Postal Service Money Order only and I will mail the drive to you.
When you receive the drive, you have three (3) consecutive days beginning on the day of receipt to analyze the drive. You must return the drive to me immediately on the end of the third day. The drive must be returned in the same condition that you received it in. Photos will be taken before shipment. It will be demonstrably functional before shipment. So, don't break it. If you damage the drive, then your deposit will not be returned. The challenge will last exactly one (1) year and will end immediately should someone win.THE CHALLENGE WILL BEGIN ON JANUARY 15th 2008.
You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive in any way. This is a working drive. Disassembling it will damage it and prevent others from taking the challenge. Fair enough? If you object to these terms, then don't participate or suggest changes.
Challenges are accepted in the order in which they are received at this address:
Brad Tilley
P.O. Box 356
Blacksburg, VA 24063
Q. How do I win the challenge?
A. You must identify the name of one (1) of the two (2) files or the name of the one (1) folder that existed in this screen shot before the dd command was executed. You do not have to actually recover any data from the drive, but you can if you are able to. You also must publicly disclose in a reproducible manner the method(s) used to win the challenge. Here is the
answer to the challenge. It's a TIF screen shot that shows the original contents of the root folder of the drive before the dd command was executed. It's PGP symmetrically encrypted using GnuPG. The key will be released at the end of the challenge or when someone wins. Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".
http://16systems.com/zero/index.html
Deleted but Not Erased: Photos Reborn
Bob Tedeschi
THANKS to digital cameras, memories are easier than ever to gather. But as Amy Sevigny learned, they can be more fragile as well.
Last April, Ms. Sevigny, a nurse living in southern Maine, lost both her father and her brother within the same week. Her father, John Turgeon, died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, and three days later, her brother, Craig Turgeon, died of cancer at 24. While planning the memorial services, Ms. Sevigny gave her camera to a friend and asked her to print the last photos she had taken of Craig with her 9-month-old son, Jack.
The friend returned ashen-faced: a photo technician at Rite Aid had mistakenly erased the disk. “I was completely devastated,” Ms. Sevigny said.
I heard about Ms. Sevigny’s problem several weeks later from a mutual friend. Mindful of the advances in digital forensics in the last decade, I looked into services for recovering the photos. I found that Ms. Sevigny’s experience is increasingly common, and not nearly as hopeless as she had initially believed.
Every year, thousands of people lose, destroy or mistakenly erase digital photos stored on their camera’s removable storage media. These devices typically come in three varieties: Memory Sticks, Compact Flash cards and Secure Digital, or SD, cards. Whatever the name, they can be prone to damage from rough handling, static electricity or a computer malfunction.
The biggest computer repair services, like Geek Squad, Gurus2Go and Nerds to Go, do not offer photo recovery. Thankfully, photo-recovery technologies have blossomed along with the growing digital camera market. These services can often produce stellar results as long as you are willing to spend some money, or engage in some careful do-it-yourself work.
A handful of software programs available online for about $30, including PhotoRescue and ImageRecall, will help users through the photo-recovery process at home. But experts say that depending on your technological skills, the type of damage involved and the sentimental value of the photos, you may wish to seek outside help.
“It’s better to ask someone who knows what they’re doing, because you don’t want to make things worse than they already are,” said Brian Karney, director for product management at Guidance Software, a company based in Pasadena, Calif., that makes digital forensics software for investigators.
Mr. Karney said consumers should ask important questions of the people to whom they want to entrust their memory cards. Chief among them, he said, is whether they understand “write blocking,” or data-handling techniques that prevent users from writing new data onto a storage device.
“If I plug your memory card into my laptop, the operating system will make changes to the device,” he said. “Every time you do that, you’re making it harder, if not impossible, to get the data back.”
To try out some of the photo-recovery services, I gave Ms. Sevigny’s SD card, in turn, to two data-recovery specialists and one computer technician with no such recovery experience. Jim Doyle, a senior director at Guidance Software who once supervised computer investigations for the New York Police Department, was the first to take on the job. Mr. Doyle used Guidance’s EnCase application, and retrieved 65 pictures.
The recovery was complicated, Mr. Doyle said, by a common problem. Ms. Sevigny had given up hope that the photos could be recovered, so she took 38 new pictures using the same SD card. If there were photos on the part of the card that had been overwritten, they were lost forever. Fortunately, the photos that were overwritten did not include six of Ms. Sevigny’s son and brother together.
Guidance does not offer data-recovery services for consumers, but some businesses that serve consumers, like Rolls-Royce and OfficeMax, use its EnCase software. “Most computer repair shops could probably deal with this kind of recovery,” Mr. Doyle said. “But you have to cross your fingers.”
In fact, while computer repair shops welcome the job of saving a glitchy hard drive, they often lack the expertise or willingness to work with digital photo storage, said Haim Sternberg, president of Cherry Systems, a data-recovery service in Marietta, Ga.
Mr. Sternberg said that although some of his customers mistakenly erase their photos, roughly 70 percent have lost them through physical damage to the storage device. That can include trying to force an SD card into its slot, or crushing the camera beneath a car tire. In those cases, he said, the company recovers the lost data more than 85 percent of the time.
“Often, the biggest hurdle is just getting the right part to reconstruct the piece,” Mr. Sternberg said. Once done, however, Cherry Systems can run the damaged card through its software.
Customers pay nothing if the process fails, and success or failure is measured by the company’s ability to retrieve the photos that the customer says are lost. If the company retrieves the photos, the customer pays $150.
After scanning Ms. Sevigny’s SD card, Cherry Systems recovered the same photos as those found by Mr. Doyle of Guidance Software. Mr. Sternberg said the company’s success rate in recovering erased photos is above 95 percent. “We know data loss is a very dramatic experience for people,” he said. “We equate it to a family loss.”
Mr. Sternberg said that lately, more downloadable software for such problems has come on the market. Among the more popular is PhotoRescue, from the software firm DataRescue, based in Belgium.
According to Pierre Vandevenne, the company’s chief executive, DataRescue has helped “hundreds of thousands” of customers in the United States recover lost photos since the program was introduced in 2001.
As with some other photo-recovery software available online, PhotoRescue quickly downloads a free trial version to users. Some recovery services will recover a sample — say, 10 percent — of the lost photos, and ask for a fee of about $30 for a full version of the software to recover the rest.
PhotoRescue instead recovers all of the available photos, but renders them in thumbnail size, so users can see which photos have been saved. For $29, users download a version of the software that will recover the full-size photos.
SD cards have a small tab that prevents the writing of new data to the card when set to “locked” mode, Mr. Vandevenne said. But, he said, customers cannot always be trusted to use write-blocking techniques. Still, consumers can save a lot of money and not compromise their results by using home-based software, Mr. Vandevenne said.
To test that point, I gave Ms. Sevigny’s card to Bruce Scranton, a computer specialist in Guilford, Conn., who had no experience with data recovery. Mr. Scranton downloaded PC Inspector Smart Recovery software from a German company called Convar. Within minutes, the program retrieved the same photos found by Cherry Systems and Guidance Software. Convar’s software is free, and the site asks for donations to support its offerings.
The results of all three had a profound impact on Ms. Sevigny. “I just started crying, because I wasn’t sure if it would really work,” she said. “I’m so excited, just because my son can know he got to meet Craig, and see how much he loved him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/te...sics.html?8dpc
USB Cables Back Movie Industry
Will not take Video without DRM
Nick Farrell
A USB FORUM has come up with a wizard wheeze to make sure that your computer does not carry pirated HD video content.
The USB Implementer's Forum is developing a cable that will not carry high-definition video data unless it has been given the nod by some sort of DRM program.
According to EETimes, the forum is trying to develop a flavour of USB that includes High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). This proprietary technology was developed by Intel to control Digital Visual Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), or Unified Display Interface (UDI) connection content.
Although the plan is that data is compressed as it goes down the wire, HDCP also allowed for it to be encrypted. So for hackers to get around the technology they have to come up with a method of mimicking the encryption or making the two devices think that they are running with legitimate cables.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...ovie-industry?
Clarkson Stung After Bank Prank
BBC
TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.
The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people's personal details on two computer discs.
He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.
But Clarkson admitted he was "wrong" after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.
Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.
"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing," he told readers.
But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.
"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said.
"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.
"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."
Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.
They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination - the National Audit Office.
The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.
Clarkson now says of the case: "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm
Comcast Plans to Offer a Huge Menu of Films
Tim Arango
Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television company, will outline an ambitious plan Tuesday to set up two new paradigms for how people will watch movies and television shows in their homes or on the road.
The plan, which Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of the Comcast Corporation, will describe in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at making a nearly limitless supply of movies and television shows available on television, where Comcast subscribers could view them on demand, and through the Internet, where anyone with Web access could watch them.
Although the television component is still at a nascent stage — Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer — the Web portion is further along.
Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.
Also on Tuesday, Comcast will show off a technology called wideband that significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to download a movie from the Internet. Mr. Roberts will take the stage with Ryan Seacrest, the television and radio host, to download the two-and-a-half-hour film “Batman Begins” in less than four minutes, rather than the six hours it would take using a standard broadband connection. Comcast plans to introduce wideband to millions of homes in select markets in 2008 before making it available in all of its areas.
Given the patchwork of systems now used to watch shows at home — from driving to a store to rent a video, to mailing DVDs back and forth, to video-on-demand and Internet downloads — Comcast seems to be trying to impose some order and suggest a direction for the future. So far, standard video-on-demand services on television have failed to take off, primarily because of the limited number of titles they offer. On the Internet side, movie downloads are also at a nascent stage, because of copyright issues, long download times and other complications.
Netflix, which has been trying to offer alternatives to its United States mail delivery system, seems to have a similar vision. Netflix permits some movie downloads on its Web site and is trying to make deals with electronics companies to send movies directly over the Internet to television sets. Last week it announced the first such deal, with LG Electronics, the South Korean manufacturer.
On the television side, Comcast has been working for months on a plan code-named Project Infinity, which at the moment is largely aspirational.
Comcast is already the world’s largest buyer of content, and it is spending about $4.5 billion a year to assemble content from around the world to offer on demand. Neither the television networks nor the movie studios have been approached yet about Project Infinity.
In an interview last week at Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, Mr. Roberts said his goal was “to give consumers the ability to watch any movie, television show, user-generated content or other video that a producer wants to make available on demand.”
At the same time, Mr. Roberts hopes the project gives a jolt to the cable industry, which has suffered as subscribers defect to services offered by satellite or telephone companies.
High-definition programming will be a big part of Project Infinity. Mr. Roberts says that Comcast will offer subscribers more than 1,000 high- definition choices this year, a combination of both movies and high-definition channels. Comcast currently offers 300 high-definition options, far more than most cable systems.
“We want to make it crystal clear that Comcast has the best TV product,” Mr. Roberts said. “Project Infinity is a real competitive edge for Comcast. We will deliver more HD content than our competitors with thousands of choices and, ultimately, 3,000 HD movies.”
On the Internet side, Fancast.com, which has been operating in beta mode, will also be unveiled on Tuesday. The site is available to anyone, not just Comcast subscribers. It offers free episodes of shows like “The Practice” and “CSI,” and also helps viewers manage their entertainment choices, showing them what is on and letting them personalize their viewing.
For people who are traveling and forget to set their device to record “Grey’s Anatomy,” for example, Fancast will help them take care of it. The site also wants to take on IMDB,, the popular database of Hollywood personalities, with its trove of information about actors and writers.
“In this age of interactive media, the number of entertainment choices can be overwhelming,” Mr. Roberts said. “In one place, Fancast helps consumers figure out where the content is, all the information they want about entertainment, and then watch it wherever and whenever they want, including on the Internet.”
All of this is a way for Comcast, which has 25 million video subscribers, to try to regain Wall Street’s confidence, showing that it can be innovative and offer products that are superior to its rivals in the satellite and telephone industries. Other cable companies, like Time Warner and Cablevision, whose stocks tend to move in tandem with Comcast, will be watching Mr. Roberts’s presentation closely.
Last year, cable fell out of favor on Wall Street for many reasons — mainly subscriber defections, but also the slowing housing market, which correlated to fewer cable sign-ups. In December, Comcast shares fell after the company said it would sign up 6 million new customers in 2007, rather than the 6.5 million projected earlier. Comcast shares, which closed Monday at $17, are near their 52-week low of $16.69.
Comcast became a giant in 2002 when it completed its acquisition of AT&T’s cable systems, but now it might not be able to grow, so it is looking to increase revenue by means other than acquisitions. A rule proposed in November by the Federal Communications Commission would cap the market share for cable operators, and Comcast is bumping up against the limit.
Craig E. Moffett, a cable analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said the wideband announcement would be the most significant part of the plan. Right now, because of technical limitations that the cable industry is working to solve, the typical cable system can offer only about 40 HD channels, he said; DirecTV, a satellite service, offers about 100 HD channels. Unlike many on Wall Street, Mr. Moffett is bullish on cable and has a buy rating on Comcast stock.
Some analysts do not accept the explanation that Comcast’s troubles are related to the economy. “Cable is fighting an all-out war on multiple fronts, putting operators in a position they have never faced before,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research, wrote in a note after Comcast reported earnings in December. “Comcast needs to go on the offensive, and soon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/te...y/08cable.html
Matsushita and Google in Internet TV Pact
Mariko Sanchanta
Matsushita Electric Industrial said it would start selling internet-connected televisions in the US that can access Google’s YouTube, marking the first partnership between a Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer and the world’s leading search engine.
The move is part of a broader push by Japan’s consumer goods manufacturers to “add value” to their products, in the face of stiff price competition from Asian and US rivals.
Sharp and Sony this week also made similar announcements regarding internet connectivity and content partnerships to their flat-panel TV, enabling consumers to download news and other information directly onto their TVs.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Yoshi Yamada, the chief executive of Panasonic Corp of North America, said: “As manufacturers we don’t like a commodity-only business. We need to add some value for consumers and anything content-related is adding value.”
Matsushita and Google have jointly developed equipment to show content from YouTube, an internet video clip website, clearly on large TV screens. The new Viera plasma TVs, which will debut in the spring in the US, will also include access to Picasa Web Albums, a free online photo-sharing service from Google.
Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of Panasonic AVC Networks, said: “This is the first time mainstream consumers will be able to easily enjoy YouTube videos from the living room with the enhanced quality of a fully integrated widescreen TV experience.” Panasonic declined to comment on the fee structure of the deal.
Matsushita is hoping the deal will bolster US sales of its plasma TVs, which have been losing market share to liquid-crystal display (LCD) rivals such as Sharp and Sony.
In the past, observers expected plasma TV technology to dominate larger screen sizes. But improvements and significant cost reductions in the LCD manufacturing process have given the technology an overwhelming lead in the US.
According to Toshiba, LCD TVs account for 84 per cent of the flat panel market. “Plasma growth is stagnant,” said Scott Ramirez, vice president of Toshiba’s TV market unit. “LCD outsells plasma at higher prices.”
Matsushita will consider selling the new plasma TVs in Japan or Europe if there is demand.
Earlier this week, Sony launched a $499 add-on module dubbed the “Internet Video Link” for its latest Bravia LCD family of HDTVs and announced a series of new content partnerships including an agreement with CBS.
This will enable Bravia owners with the internet module to watch internet-based CBS content including prime-time TV shows.
Sharp also unveiled a new service called “Aquos Net”, which provides its Aquos LCD TV users with customised web-based content through partnerships with content providers such as traffic.com and NBC.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/30a97a58-b...0779fd2ac.html
Paramount in HD DVD Blow
Matthew Garrahan and Mariko Sanchanta
Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.
Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.
However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.
Paramount is set to have a bumper 2008 with several likely blockbusters, including the latest instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Paramount joining the Blu-ray camp would leave HD DVD likely to suffer the same fate as Sony’s now obsolete Betamax video technology, which lost out to VHS in a similar format war in the 1980s.
Warners decision last week to throw its weight behind Blu-ray saw it join Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as backers of the Sony format.
The Warners move gives Blu-ray about 70 per cent of Hollywood’s output, although the format’s grip on film content will increase further when Paramount comes aboard.
It is unclear whether DreamWorks Animation has the same get-out clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp.
However, Paramount and DreamWorks have a close relationship, with Paramount distributing DreamWorks Animation films. The two companies also signed their HD DVD contracts at the same time. Meanwhile, Universal has declined to comment on its next-generation DVD plans since the Warners move.
Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, on Monday held out an olive branch, saying the company would be “open to dialogue” with the HD DVD camp to “grow the market”. The move came as new figures showed that Blu-ray had opened up a decisive lead over the rival home entertainment format.
Sir Howard said: “We are not going to push people around. We’ll talk to anyone ... we have a lot of work to do to grow the market. We’ll be systematic and open to dialogue at all times.”
He added that Sony still had “a lot of work” to do to get Blu-ray “widely accepted” among American consumers.
“With Warner’s support you saw billboards going up in different places and you saw television commercials getting more and more sophisticated and that’s what we’ll continue doing,” said Sir Howard.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dc409afa-b...0779fd2ac.html
TV Screen Makers Vie for Slimness
Paul Taylor
Thin is in – at least as far as flat panel high definition displays go at this year’s Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas.
As well as showing ever-larger HDTVs – Panasonic is showing a 150-inch Plasma display – manufacturers at CES led by Sony Electronics, JVC, Pioneer Electronics and Philips are launching thin, and in the case of Sony, ultra-thin TVs measuring just millimetres thick.
Sony, which has pioneered the commercial development of HDTVs based on a new ultra sharp and low power technology called OLED (organic light emitting diodes) recently began selling 11in (279mm) OLED displays measuring just 3mm-thick in the US for $2,500.
It used CES to demonstrate a prototype 27in display based on the technology on Monday.
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony chief executive, speaking on the eve of the CES show opening, claimed that Sony was “redefining TV” with the launch of OLED TVs, which, he said, Sony had spent 10 years developing.
He said he hoped that OLED TVs would be “the next blockbuster product category” for the Japanese electronics group.
Sony executives concede that at their current prices, OLED TVs will remain a niche product.
But they nevertheless believe that OLED technology will eventually replace the current LCD (liquid crystal display) and PDP (plasma display panel) sets that dominate the market as the technology of choice for flat panel high definition TVs.
In the meantime other TV makers are also working hard to build thinner and lighter flat panel displays.
Both JVC and Korea’s LG Electronics are showing super thin HDTV sets measuring just 1.5in and 1.7in thick respectively. Meanwhile, JVC, Panasonic, Hitachi and Sharp, are all showing prototype TV sets that are about 1.1in thick – about a quarter of the thickness of most current generation LCD and PDP flat panel displays.
The other key trend among HDTV makers is to connect them to the internet and enable consumers to download news, weather and other information directly to their TV sets without the need for a PC.
Some models also offer the ability to access and download internet-based movie and video content.
Sony has launched a $499 add-on module dubbed the “Internet Video Link” for its latest Bravia LCD family of HDTVs and announced a series of new content partnerships yesterday including an agreement with CBS.
This will enable Bravia owners with the internet module to watch internet-based CBS content including prime-time TV shows.
The module also enables consumers to access movies and other video content from Sony’s partners.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/736a6932-bd5...0779fd2ac.html
NY Times and CNBC Unite Against News Corp
Joshua Chaffin and Gerrit Wiesmann
CNBC, the cable business network, and the New York Times have joined forces to create an alliance against Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
The two companies announced a content-sharing agreement on Monday in which CNBC, which is owned by General Electric, will supply its video to NYTimes.com, while the Times will make available its business and technology coverage.
The alliance is a recognition of the way that the internet is sweeping aside traditional barriers between media companies, with newspapers increasingly featuring video on their websites and television networks rushing to offer editorial and analytical tools.
The move comes at a time when both companies have found themselves under threat from News Corp after the $5bn purchase of Dow Jones and its flagship Wall Street Journal.
Part of the rationale for that deal, which closed in December, was that the Journal would bolster the Fox Business Network, which News Corp launched in October in an ambitious attempt to knock CNBC from its perch as the leading cable business network. News Corp has also been training its focus on the Times. Mr Murdoch has indicated that he intends to add more political and general interest coverage to the Journal, which would allow it to compete more effectively with the Times. The News Corp-owned Journal is also expected to lower the subscription barrier for its WSJ.com website to expand its audience.
Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, touted the partnership as a way “to reach more business decision makers than any other financial website in the US”.
CNBC said it was hoping to expand the partnership in the future. It struck a similar content-sharing deal with Yahoo Finance last month.
As competitors were aligning against it on Monday News Corp underlined its focus on international expansion, paying €287m ($422m) for a 14.6 per cent stake in German pay-television group Premiere.
The deal marks News Corp’s return to Germany after selling free-TV station Vox in 2000, and is the first big move by James Murdoch since he took charge of international operations last month.
Rupert Murdoch said the media company saw “enormous potential for growth in Germany” and believed “the time is right” to invest in pay-television there.
News Corp’s investment raises the chances that Premiere could secure the rights to live broadcasts of German soccer in the 2010-2012 seasons: they come up for auction this year.
The company built its franchise on broadcasting live Bundesliga soccer but lost the rights for the 2006-2009 seasons.
News Corp paid €17.50 per share for its stake, a 37 per cent premium on Friday’s closing price of €12.74.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/878ba5d8-b...nclick_check=1
Karmazin: Satellite Merger "Ripe To Be Granted"
FMQB
Speaking at the Citigroup Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Phoenix on Tuesday, Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin told analysts that the deal for merging Sirius with XM "is ripe to be granted." While Karmazin feels it is "unlikely" that the merger will not be approved, he is growing impatient with the length of time government officials are taking to review the proposal, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Karmazin said that the numerous times he predicted the merger would be approved by the end of 2007 were optimistic because he was basing his estimation on a historically accurate 180-day approval process by the FCC. He lamented the fact that another important party in the decision, the DOJ, already has spoken to automakers, Sirius talent and everyone else involved but still has not reached a verdict. If the DOJ does try to block the merger, at least "we'd have our day in court," Karmazin said, according to the Reporter, but it would be unfair if government officials simply sit on the proposal and do nothing.
Many in the industry have argued that Sirius and XM should not be allowed to merge because it would create a satcaster monopoly, but Karmazin still contends that satellite radio competes with terrestrial radio, Internet radio and iPods. He backed up that argument by pointing out that the National Association of Broadcasters would not have spent millions of dollars trying to block the merger if it didn't view satellite radio as competition for terrestrial.
Lastly, Karmazin said he "enthusiastically" looks forward to offering a la carte pricing for stations once Sirius and XM merge, which could reduce the cost of satellite radio for consumers. In related news, over at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin also was praising the a la carte pricing option for satcasters. He told Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro that while no decision on the merger has been made, he feels it is positive that both companies are suggesting alternative a la carte pricing plans that could help consumers take control of content and pricing.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=545042
Clear Channel Buy-Out Doubts Grow
Henny Sender and Joshua Chaffin
The $19.5bn leveraged buy-out of Clear Channel Communications, the US radio and outdoor advertising group, could be the next victim of the storm in the deal world.
Scepticism that Thomas H. Lee and Bain Capital will go through with their purchase on the original terms has been fed by the falling share prices of comparable companies.
Clear Channel’s stock traded on Monday at $35.06, a discount to the $39.20 price the buyers agreed in May 2007, which suggests that investors are betting against the deal.
The concerns are surfacing in the wake of last week’s collapse of an agreement by General Electric and Blackstone to buy PHH, a mortgage and vehicle leasing company. Unlike PHH, Clear Channel is hardly a sick company, which suggests that concerns about the overall economy are now threatening a wider range of leveraged buy-outs.
“It is susceptible to recession but that was built into the plan,” said one person familiar with the thinking of the buying group. “There is no good reason to walk.”
The purchase is expected to receive FCC approval as early as the end of this week. Bankers familiar with the transaction say the buyers are unlikely to do anything before regulators sign off on the deal, if only to keep their options open.
“I don’t see anything yet that indicates the deal won’t go through,” said one senior banker involved in the deal. “But there are a lot of undercurrents, including the fact that the returns for the sponsors are terrible and the break-up fee isn’t huge.”
If the private equity buyers walk away, they would be likely to have to pay a $500m break-up fee to the company.
Some of the banks providing the debt are also committed to coming up with some of the equity and would share in paying that fee. Banks have been trying to reduce financing commitments for buy-outs.
Even when the deal was first struck, in November 2006, competitors to Thomas H Lee and Bain Capital thought the terms aggressive.
Radio broadcasters have seen their revenue growth stall and their growth prospects fade in the face of fresh competition from internet and satellite radio companies and the popularity of Apple’s iPod.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe81dc7a-b...0779fd2ac.html
Congress Set To Begin FCC Investigation
FMQB
U.S. Congress has asked the FCC to preserve emails and other electronic records, as part of an upcoming investigation into the Commission. The leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee recently filed a letter with the FCC making the request. In December, the Committee said it would be investigating the fairness and transparency of FCC procedures.
"We expect to issue a comprehensive document request in the near future," stated the Congressional letter. "The committee believes that added steps should be taken to ensure the full cooperation of all FCC employees." The letter was signed by Committee chairman Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX).
The Committee asked FCC Chairman Kevin Martin "to immediately preserve all electronic records, including work e-mail and personal e-mail communications relating to official work of the commission, and calendars and schedules of all employees (and paper copies and versions of those records)."
In December, Martin responded to Dingell's questions of FCC procedures in an open letter. The Chairman essentially agreed with the lawmaker that "the Commission should conduct its affairs fairly, openly, and transparently to serve the public interest," though he also defended some of his more criticized actions, such as pushing for quick votes and calling meetings at the last minute.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=544942
Mass Hack Infects Tens of Thousands of Sites
Then they serve visitors multiple exploits, including October RealPlayer attack
Gregg Keizer
Tens of thousands of Web sites have been compromised by an automated SQL injection attack, and although some have been cleaned, others continue to serve visitors a malicious script that tries to hijack their PCs using multiple exploits, security experts said this weekend.
Roger Thompson, the chief research officer at Grisoft, pointed out that the hacked sites could be found via a simple Google search for the domain that hosted the malicious JavaScript. On Saturday, said Thompson, the number of sites that had fallen victim to the attack numbered more than 70,000. "This was a pretty good mass hack," said Thompson, in a post to his blog. "It wasn't just that they got into a server farm, as the victims were quite diverse, with presumably the only common point being whatever vulnerability they all shared."
Symantec cited reports by other researchers -- including one identified only as "websmithrob" -- that fingered a SQL vulnerability as the common thread. "The sites [were] hacked by hacking robot by means of a SQL injection attack, which executes an iterative SQL loop [that] finds every normal table in the database by looking in the sysobjects table and then appends every text column with the harmful script," said websmithrob in a blog post. "It's possible that only Microsoft SQL Server databases were hacked with this particular version of the robot since the script relies on the sysobjects table that this database contains."
According to websmithrob, the attack appends a JavaScript tag to every piece of text in the SQL database; the tag instructs any browser that reaches the site to execute the script hosted on the malicious server.
Hacked sites included both .edu and .gov domains, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) reported in a warning posted last Friday. The ISC also reported that several pages of security vendor CA's Web site had been infected.
Grisoft's Thompson said that his research had identified a 15-month-old vulnerability as one of those exploited by the attack code. The exploit, he said, targeted the MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) bug patched in April 2006 with the MS06-014 security update. "They went to the trouble of preparing a good Web site exploit, and a good mass hack but then used a moldy old client exploit. It's almost a dichotomy," said Thompson.
Other researchers, including websmithrob and Symantec, said that the JavaScript also launched an exploit targeting a much more recent vulnerability: a RealPlayer bug that first surfaced last October. The flaw was fixed several days later by RealNetworks.
Another surprise, Thompson said, was the speed of the hack's cleanup. Although a Google search still showed thousands of sites infected with the script on Saturday, Thompson claimed that Grisoft's LinkScanner Pro tool indicated that nearly all had actually been scrubbed. "I found that really surprising [that they were cleaned so quickly]," he said in an interview via instant messaging on Sunday. "They're all so disparate. If it was a big server farm, I could understand it being cleaned so quickly, but there doesn't seem to be anything common about them all."
The ISC updated its alert Sunday, saying another round of SQL injection attacks had infected sites with a script referring to a different malicious server. When asked to examine the second domain, Thompson confirmed that it was serving up the same malicious JavaScript as the first. However, many of those sites -- which as of this morning numbered more than 93,000, according to a quick Google search -- had not been cleaned.
"It looks like a bunch of these are still carrying the references to [the malicious domain] but not infectively," said Thompson. "In other words, they're still hacked, but the injection hasn't worked properly."
Microsoft was not immediately available for comment on the SQL Server vulnerability used by the mass hack.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;683627551
M Is Dead, But Watermarks Rise From Its Ashes
David Kravets
With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.
Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.
Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.
"It gives them the ability to put pressure on policy makers and ISPs to do filtering," said Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney.
Eric Garland, the chief executive officer of research group BigChampagne, said analyses of watermarked traffic can be done with "forensic precision," and that the results could give the music industry hard evidence of copyright music transiting specific internet providers' networks.
"Any empirical evidence that harm is being done to their legitimate business is a huge asset when it comes to their bargaining power with ISPs and third-party partners," said Garland.
Sony BMG on Thursday became the final of the Big Four music concerns to announce it would sell its downloads free of DRM. The others, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI, made similar announcements last year -- all in a bid to compete with Apple's iTunes music store, which controls about 80 percent of the digital-download market with mostly DRM-laden songs.
Watermarking codes are digitally woven into the fabric of a download and do not restrict listeners from making backup copies or sharing music with friends, as does DRM coding.
Microsoft is betting on watermarking's future, winning a patent for a "stealthy audio watermarking" scheme called El Dorado in September.
According to the patent, El Dorado is, among other things, "designed to survive all typical kinds of processing, including compression, equalization, D/A and A/D conversion, recording on analog tape and so forth. It is also designed to survive malicious attacks that attempt to remove or modify the watermark from the signal, including changes in time and frequency scales, pitch shifting and cut/paste editing."
Universal and Sony declined to discuss who developed their watermarks and what they would do with the information they cull from their analyses.
Art Brodsky, of Public Knowledge, was quick to provide an answer.
"They'll do anything they can to get ammunition, including submitting the information to Congress, publishing research and whatever, so long as they can blame everything on piracy," Brodsky said.
EFF's Von Lohmann speculated that watermarks could even enable ISPs to filter out peer-to-peer traffic when they detect a copyright work in transit.
It's no secret that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are working with ISPs toward the goal of network-wide piracy filters. Representatives from AT&T discussed that at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
But Von Lohmann added it's too soon to conclude that watermarks will be put to that kind of Orwellian use.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m.../01/sony_music
Sony BMG to Sell DRM-Free Music Downloads Through Stores
Users will be able to download just 37 albums DRM-free from Sony BMG starting Jan. 15 -- but first they must go to a retail store and buy the $12.99 Platinum MusicPass
Peter Sayer
Sony BMG Music Entertainment will crack open the door to its music vaults on Jan. 15, taking the DRM copy-prevention wrapper off a limited selection of downloadable tracks.
The tracks will be offered in MP3 format, without DRM (digital rights management), from Jan. 15 in the U.S. and from late January in Canada.
The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card's covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears' "Blackout" and Barry Manilow's "The Greatest Songs of the Seventies."
In contrast, online retailer Amazon.com offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks in MP3 format from the catalogs of EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and a host of independent record labels. Apple's iTunes Store has around 2 million DRM-free tracks in the AAC format supported by its iPod and many mobile phones. No store visit is necessary to download those tracks, and an album typically sells for $9.99 or less.
About 4,500 retail outlets in the U.S. will sell the Platinum MusicPass cards by the end of the month, including Best Buy, Target, Trans World, Fred's, and Winn-Dixie, according to Sony-BMG. In Canada, the cards will sell through Best Buy, CD Plus, and Wal-Mart, and later through record store HMV.
Online sales will "ultimately be part of the game plan" for at least one of those retail outlets, said a source familiar with the offering.
With Valentine's Day approaching, Sony-BMG is counting on demand for gift cards to boost sales of the downloads, as well as the collectible nature of the cards themselves, which feature images of the artists and information about the albums.
Sony-BMG will offer "expanded" versions of two of the initial offerings -- Celine Dion's "Taking Chances" and Kenny Chesney's "Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates." These will retail for around $19.99 and in addition to the Platinum version will also include an additional album from the artist's back catalog.
When they first considered online music sales, major record labels initially insisted that download services such as Apple's iTunes Store encrypt their tracks with DRM technology to prevent copying.
Smaller labels sold unprotected MP3 files through sites like eMusic.com, gambling that the increased sales and notoriety that would come with easier access to their music would outweigh sales lost through unauthorized copying.
That argument eventually won favor with Apple, which last May began offering tracks from EMI without DRM for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.
Amazon followed suit in September, selling unprotected MP3 files from EMI and Universal. Warner joined them on Dec. 28.
The record companies all say they hope the move will lead to greater online music sales.
Sony-BMG said it hopes its combined model, selling a download pass through a physical store, will lead to greater sales of physical and digital music.
Albums need a boost, as the number sold in the U.S. dropped again last year, even as the number of music purchases rose, market watcher Nielsen SoundScan reported last week.
U.S. music buyers made 1.4 billion music purchases in 2007, up from 1.2 billion a year earlier, Nielsen said.
Nielsen counts a purchase as an album, single, CD or online download. Within that figure, digital track sales rose from 582 million to 844 million as buyers cherry-picked the tracks they liked from albums available online, while physical album sales (whether sold in-store or over the Internet, but excluding downloads) fell to 451 million in 2007, from 556 million in 2006, it said.
But if U.S. consumers are making more music purchases, they may be spending less: Nielsen also counts something it calls track-equivalent album sales, in which it counts 10 track downloads as the equivalent of an album. By that measure, track-equivalent album sales fell 9.5 percent to 585 million in 2007, from 646 million in 2007.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...-stores_1.html
Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store
Brad Stone
Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month.
The move by Sony BMG, which represents artists like Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Santana and Justin Timberlake, further positions Amazon’s digital music store as a significant rival to the market leader, the iTunes store from Apple.
“This is such an exciting day for us and our customers,” said Bill Carr, vice president for digital music at Amazon. “All four major labels will be part of our service. It means our customers will really have access to all the biggest artists in the world.”
Sony’s embrace of the MP3 format is also the latest blow to the technology known as digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to prevent consumers from making unauthorized copies of digital material.
In an open letter to the music industry last February, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said his company would welcome the end of software antipiracy measures and a world where music from any online music store could be played on Apple devices.
Since then, one by one, major music industry figures like Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., Warner Music’s chairman, have supported the notion that D.R.M. was doing more harm than good in the evolving digital music market.
But Sony’s partnership with Amazon.com also underscores the music industry’s gathering effort to nurture an online rival to Apple, which has sold more than three billion songs through its iTunes store. Most music purchased on iTunes can be played only on Apple devices, and Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents. Amazon, which sells tracks for anywhere from 89 cents to over a dollar, offers the pricing variability the labels want.
“The major music companies feel that Apple’s foot is on their necks, and they would like to get it off,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm. “They are looking to destabilize Apple’s dominant share, and they see Amazon as their best shot.”
The Universal Music Group and EMI Group joined the Amazon MP3 music store when it was introduced in September. In December, the Warner Music Group announced that it would make its entire catalog available.
Nevertheless, the development is not necessarily a bad one for Apple, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital. “My guess is that Apple doesn’t care,” he said. “The reality is, everyone will now start downloading their songs more cheaply someplace else and using them on their iPods.”
Apple also sells digital music without copy protection, but so far only EMI has made its music available to iTunes in that format.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/te...gy/11sony.html
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
Fred Vogelstein
The demo was not going well.
Again.
It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."
The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," says someone who was in the meeting.
The ramifications were serious. The iPhone was to be the centerpiece of Apple's annual Macworld convention, set to take place in just a few months. Since his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs had used the event as a showcase to launch his biggest products, and Apple-watchers were expecting another dramatic announcement. Jobs had already admitted that Leopard — the new version of Apple's operating system — would be delayed. If the iPhone wasn't ready in time, Macworld would be a dud, Jobs' critics would pounce, and Apple's stock price could suffer.
This 4.8-ounce sliver of glass and aluminum is an explosive device that has forever changed the mobile-phone business, wresting power from carriers and giving it to manufacturers, developers, and consumers.
And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines.
For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
But by the end of the push, just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show to the suits at AT&T. In mid-December 2006, he met wireless boss Stan Sigman at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Las Vegas. He showed off the iPhone's brilliant screen, its powerful Web browser, its engaging user interface. Sigman, a taciturn Texan steeped in the conservative engineering traditions that permeate America's big phone companies, was uncharacteristically effusive, calling the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen." (Details of this and other key moments in the making of the iPhone were provided by people with knowledge of the events. Apple and AT&T would not discuss these meetings or the specific terms of the relationship.)
Six months later, on June 29, 2007, the iPhone went on sale. At press time, analysts were speculating that customers would snap up about 3 million units by the end of 2007, making it the fastest-selling smartphone of all time. It is also arguably Apple's most profitable device. The company nets an estimated $80 for every $399 iPhone it sells, and that's not counting the $240 it makes from every two-year AT&T contract an iPhone customer signs. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.
But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers' proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone — even a pricey one — can win customers and bring in revenue. Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of. "The iPhone is already changing the way carriers and manufacturers behave," says Michael Olson, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray.
In 2002, shortly after the first iPod was released, Jobs started thinking about developing a phone. He saw millions of Americans lugging separate phones, BlackBerrys, and — now — MP3 players; naturally, consumers would prefer just one device. He also saw a future in which cell phones and mobile email devices would amass ever more features, eventually challenging the iPod's dominance as a music player. To protect his new product line, Jobs knew he would eventually need to venture into the wireless world.
If the idea was obvious, so were the obstacles. Data networks were sluggish and not ready for a full-blown handheld Internet device. An iPhone would require Apple to create a completely new operating system; the iPod's OS wasn't sophisticated enough to manage complicated networking or graphics, and even a scaled-down version of OS X would be too much for a cell phone chip to handle. Apple would be facing strong competition, too: In 2003, consumers had flocked to the Palm Treo 600, which merged a phone, PDA, and BlackBerry into one slick package. That proved there was demand for a so-called convergence device, but it also raised the bar for Apple's engineers.
Then there were the wireless carriers. Jobs knew they dictated what to build and how to build it, and that they treated the hardware as little more than a vehicle to get users onto their networks. Jobs, a notorious control freak himself, wasn't about to let a group of suits — whom he would later call "orifices" — tell him how to design his phone.
By 2004 Apple's iPod business had become more important, and more vulnerable, than ever. The iPod accounted for 16 percent of company revenue, but with 3G phones gaining popularity, Wi-Fi phones coming soon, the price of storage plummeting, and rival music stores proliferating, its long-term position as the dominant music device seemed at risk.
So that summer, while he publicly denied he would build an Apple phone, Jobs was working on his entry into the mobile phone industry. In an effort to bypass the carriers, he approached Motorola. It seemed like an easy fix: The handset maker had released the wildly popular RAZR, and Jobs knew Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO at the time, from Zander's days as an executive at Sun Microsystems. A deal would allow Apple to concentrate on developing the music software, while Motorola and the carrier, Cingular, could hash out the complicated hardware details.
Of course, Jobs' plan assumed that Motorola would produce a successor worthy of the RAZR, but it soon became clear that wasn't going to happen. The three companies dickered over pretty much everything — how songs would get into the phone, how much music could be stored there, even how each company's name would be displayed. And when the first prototypes showed up at the end of 2004, there was another problem: The gadget itself was ugly.
Jobs unveiled the ROKR in September 2005 with his characteristic aplomb, describing it as "an iPod shuffle on your phone." But Jobs likely knew he had a dud on his hands; consumers, for their part, hated it. The ROKR — which couldn't download music directly and held only 100 songs — quickly came to represent everything that was wrong with the US wireless industry, the spawn of a mess of conflicting interests for whom the consumer was an afterthought. Wired summarized the disappointment on its November 2005 cover: "YOU CALL THIS THE PHONE OF THE FUTURE?"
The Apple Touch
Apple has created two music phones. The ROKR, made with Motorola in 2005, respected the traditional relationships between manufacturers and carriers. The iphone, released last summer, completely overturned them.
ROKR
• Won't hold more than 100 songs, even if there's memory left.
• iTunes Music Store purchases must be synced from a PC.
• Clunky interface is sluggish and hard to navigate.
• Design screams, "A committee made me."
iPhone
• Can hold about 1,500 songs — as much as its 8-GB drive allows.
• iTunes Music Store purchases download wirelessly, directly to the phone.
• Just tap and go; no user manual required.
• C'mon. Look at it. It's gorgeous.
Even as the ROKR went into production, Jobs was realizing he'd have to build his own phone. In February 2005, he got together with Cingular to discuss a Motorola-free partnership. At the top-secret meeting in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. (When AT&T acquired Cingular in December 2006, Sigman remained president of wireless.) Jobs delivered a three-part message to Cingular: Apple had the technology to build something truly revolutionary, "light-years ahead of anything else." Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
Jobs had reason to be confident. Apple's hardware engineers had spent about a year working on touchscreen technology for a tablet PC and had convinced him that they could build a similar interface for a phone. Plus, thanks to the release of the ARM11 chip, cell phone processors were finally fast and efficient enough to power a device that combined the functionality of a phone, a computer, and an iPod. And wireless minutes had become cheap enough that Apple could resell them to customers; companies like Virgin were already doing so.
Sigman and his team were immediately taken with the notion of the iPhone. Cingular's strategy, like that of the other carriers, called for consumers to use their mobile phones more and more for Web access. The voice business was fading; price wars had slashed margins. The iPhone, with its promised ability to download music and video and to surf the Internet at Wi-Fi speeds, could lead to an increase in the number of data customers. And data, not voice, was where profit margins were lush.
What's more, the Cingular team could see that the wireless business model had to change. The carriers had become accustomed to treating their networks as precious resources, and handsets as worthless commodities. This strategy had served them well. By subsidizing the purchase of cheap phones, carriers made it easier for new customers to sign up — and get roped into long-term contracts that ensured a reliable revenue stream. But wireless access was no longer a luxury; it had become a necessity. The greatest challenge facing the carriers wasn't finding brand-new consumers but stealing them from one another. Simply bribing customers with cheap handsets wasn't going to work. Sigman and his team wanted to offer must-have devices that weren't available on any other network. Who better to create one than Jobs?
For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen. But no carrier had ever given anyone the flexibility and control that Jobs wanted, and Sigman knew he'd have trouble persuading his fellow executives and board members to approve a deal like the one Jobs proposed.
Sigman was right. The negotiations would take more than a year, with Sigman and his team repeatedly wondering if they were ceding too much ground. At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down. It was hard to blame them. For years, carriers had charged customers and suppliers for using and selling services over their proprietary networks. By giving so much control to Jobs, Cingular risked turning its vaunted — and expensive — network into a "dumb pipe," a mere conduit for content rather than the source of that content. Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.
Jobs wouldn't wait for the finer points of the deal to be worked out. Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. And if the negotiations with Cingular were hairy, they were simple compared with the engineering and design challenges Apple faced. For starters, there was the question of what operating system to use. Since 2002, when the idea for an Apple phone was first hatched, mobile chips had grown more capable and could theoretically now support some version of the famous Macintosh OS. But it would need to be radically stripped down and rewritten; an iPhone OS should be only a few hundred megabytes, roughly a 10th the size of OS X.
Before they could start designing the iPhone, Jobs and his top executives had to decide how to solve this problem. Engineers looked carefully at Linux, which had already been rewritten for use on mobile phones, but Jobs refused to use someone else's software. They built a prototype of a phone, embedded on an iPod, that used the clickwheel as a dialer, but it could only select and dial numbers — not surf the Net. So, in early 2006, just as Apple engineers were finishing their yearlong effort to revise OS X to work with Intel chips, Apple began the process of rewriting OS X again for the iPhone.
The conversation about which operating system to use was at least one that all of Apple's top executives were familiar with. They were less prepared to discuss the intricacies of the mobile phone world: things like antenna design, radio-frequency radiation, and network simulations. To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
Through it all, Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple's Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter. Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.
The hosannas greeting the iPhone were so overwhelming it was easy to ignore its imperfections. The initial price of $599 was too high (it has been lowered to $399). The phone runs on AT&T's poky EDGE network. Users can't perform email searches or record video. The browser won't run programs written in Java or Flash.
But none of that mattered. The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves. Consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. And, as with the advent of the PC, the iPhone is sparking a wave of development that will make it even more powerful. In February, Jobs will release a developer's kit so that anyone can write programs for the device.
Manufacturers, meanwhile, enjoy new bargaining power over the carriers they've done business with for decades. Carriers, who have seen AT&T eat into their customer bases, are scrambling to find a competitive device, and they appear willing to give up some authority to get it. Manufacturers will have more control over what they produce; users — not the usual cabal of complacent juggernauts — will have more influence over what gets built.
Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google's Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network. In time, it will give the wireless world some of the flexibility and functionality of the Internet.
It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone. According to Paul Roth, AT&T's president of marketing, the carrier is exploring new products and services — like mobile banking — that take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. "We're thinking about the market differently," Roth says. In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need. It took Steve Jobs to show them that.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireles...6-02/ff_iphone
E.P.A. Seeks New Life for Old Cellphones
Claudia H. Deutsch
The way the Environmental Protection Agency sees it, one discarded cellphone is like one vote: on its own, it cannot do much harm or good, but the cumulative effect can pack a wallop.
So on Tuesday, the E.P.A., in partnership with many retailers, manufacturers and service providers, will introduce a public education campaign aimed at getting consumers to recycle those phones.
By the agency’s reckoning, as many as 150 million cellphones are taken out of service each year. The phones contain metals, plastics, glass and chemicals, all of which require energy to mine and make, and many of which could be hazardous if they end up in landfills and leach into the ground. Moreover, many old cellphones still work and can be donated to charities or distributed to poor people.
“There are significant environmental and energy benefits to getting these phones back into the product stream,” the director of the agency’s office of solid waste, Matt Hale, said.
The $175,000 campaign — “Recycle Your Cellphone. It’s an Easy Call” — will rely heavily on public service announcements, particularly in lifestyle and technology magazines read by the 18- to 34-year-olds who trade up to new cellphones most often. The ads will stress environmental and social reasons for recycling. The agency also plans to release a podcast in which recycling specialists elaborate on their methodologies.
The E.P.A. said it would schedule several cellphone collections in 2008 and would post a searchable list of cellphone drop-off centers on Web sites, including epa.gov. It will also distribute posters with the “It’s an easy call” tagline to partners, to post over drop-off bins.
“Our key role is to get the message out, that recycling cellphones is easy and convenient,” said Mr. Hale, who estimates that 20 percent of unwanted cellphones are recycled or reused each year.
This is not the E.P.A.’s first stab at tackling electronic waste. In 2003 the agency inaugurated “Plug Into eCycling,” a program to encourage reuse and recycling of computers, television sets and other large electronic items.
Until recently cellphones, which contain smaller amounts of metals and chemicals than the larger items, seemed less troublesome. But now their sheer volume poses problems. According to Sprint Nextel, there are more than 240 million wireless subscribers in the United States alone.
Eleven companies — AT&T, Best Buy, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Office Depot, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Staples and T-Mobile — are partners in the campaign. Each has promised to collect phones and hold recycling events.
In fact, many already do so. Mark F. Buckley, vice president for environmental affairs at Staples, said the retailer recycled more than 31,600 cellphones and hand-held devices in 2006. That number was sure to rise, he said, as cellphones continued to supplant landlines, and as the E.P.A. continued to publicize recycling issues.
“Each partner will still have its own program,” Mr. Buckley said, “but E.P.A. is providing a standardized message to consumers.”
Sprint has two cellphone recycling programs. The Sprint Buyback Program lets customers swap old phones for a credit of up to $50 on their bills. Sprint Project Connect, a philanthropic program, accepts phones from customers of any carrier.
The phones that cannot be reused are stripped of parts, and the shells sold to a recycler who extracts metals. Sprint subtracts its costs and donates what is left to a program that promotes Internet safety for children.
According to Darren D. Beck, the Sprint manager who runs Project Connect, Sprint has recycled more than seven million phones since 2001, and it has donated more than $4.5 million to charity. Like Mr. Buckley, he expects that the E.P.A. campaign will increase those numbers.
“It adds awareness and convenience,” he said. “If the Verizon store is down the block, our customers will now know that they can drop phones off there.”
Environmental groups applaud the program, as far as it goes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they want the E.P.A. to regulate as well as cajole.
“Cellphones are just the tip of the electronic waste iceberg now, but they could become a massive environmental problem,” said Beth Trask, manager for corporate partnerships at Environmental Defense. “Voluntary action and education can help prevent that, but we need regulation too. We really need it all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/te...gy/08cell.html
Current Release
The current shimmer version is v0.1.0.
shimmer is a pair of small programs (a client and a server) that provide an alternative to port knocking program such as tumbler and are used to hide a valuable port (such as a hidden web server or SSH) on a public IP address.
shimmer works by cryptographically changing a set of 16 ports (one of which forwards to the real service, and 15 others that lead to a trap to blacklist attackers). The 16 ports change every minute frustrating an attacker, but a legimitate user with access to a secret shared between the client and server can determine the real port, avoid blacklisting, and get a connection.
Since both client and server must be time synchronized to the nearest minute shimmer actual holds 48 ports open at a time (16 for the previous minute, 16 for the current minute and 16 for the next minute) to avoid problems due to small amounts of clock drift.
Figure 1 shows a simplifed (8 port rather than 16 port) shimmerd set up. First the standard firewall blocks all ports except the range 10000 to 10999 chosen to work with shimmerd. Connections on those ports are forwarded.
Then shimmerd has selected 8 ports (for the current minute in time) of which 7 cause automatic blacklisting of the incoming connections and associated IP addresses (the IP addresses are recorded and banned from connections for 15 minutes, with the 15 minutes sliding each time a connection is attempted).
One port forwards through to the real SSH server running on the machine.
Using shimmer
shimmerd is the daemon program that managers the collections of ports (known as mirages) on a server. shimmerd is configured using a simple text-based configuration file. Here's a simple configuration that hides an SSH server residing on port 22 (which should be firewalled off from the outside world) behind a collection of ports in the range 10000 to 109999.
[common]
log = /var/log/shimmer.log
[mirage-ssh]
secret = password
port = 22
range = 10000-10999
The log setting in the [common] section tells shimmerd where to write its log file. After [common] come an arbitrary number of mirages each with a unique name. Here, just one named ssh is defined in the section [mirage-ssh].
The port setting tells shimmerd to forward a connection to the right mirage port to the local port 22 (where SSH normally resides). The range setting gives the range of ports over which shimmerd will choose ports to hide behind.
Finally, the secret setting is a shared secret between the shimmerd server and any user connecting with the shimmer client program.
Starting shimmerd is as simple as
$ shimmerd --config=shimmer.conf &
The shimmer client does one thing only: it outputs the current legitimate port for a specific mirage, range and secret combination. This output can then be used to configure another program (such as an SSH client) with the port to connect to.
Here's shimmer being used to connect to a hidden SSH server:
ssh
user@remote.host -p `./shimmer --open ssh:10000:10999 --secret password`
shimmer's --open gives the mirage name and range of ports configured. The secret can be passed on the command-line (with --secret) or entered interactively.
Cryptographically Constantly Changing Port Opening or C3PO
My original discussion of the underlying idea is here. Inside both shimmerd and shimmer is the same cryptographic choice of ports. The algorithm works as follows:
1. Get the current Unix epoch time to the nearest minute: minute
2. Get the name of the mirage being shimmered: name
3. Get the shared secret: secret
4. Calculate the SHA-256 hash of a combination of minute, name and secret to create a 256-bit Rijndael key that depends on time (changing every minute) and a shared secret: key.
5. Use key to AES encrypt the numbers 0 through 15 to obtain 16 seeds for port numbers: seeds.
6. Map each seed to a port number in the range specified for the mirage using a simple modulus operation to obtain a list of ports: ports.
7. The first port generated (corresponding to the first seed from encrypting 0) is the port that will be forwarded, the other 15 are traps.
Alpha Software
This is alpha software. It's an open source rewrite of code I actually run on my own server, there could be bugs, so please report them and I'll get fixing.
http://shimmer.sourceforge.net/
Hey, Isn't That . . .
People Are Doing Double-Takes, And Taking Action, As Web Snapshots Are Nabbed for Commercial Uses
Monica Hesse
The pug in the corner of the Saints-Eagles football telecast on Fox looked familiar to Tracey Gaughran-Perez.
Not in the slobber-smile way that all pugs look familiar, but in the who else but me would dress their pug up in a bleeping Santa suit kind of familiar.
Gaughran-Perez logged on to
http://www.sweetney.com, the personal blog where she'd uploaded a snapshot of her dog, then waited for the Fox pug -- a sort of "Merry Christmas" icon -- to appear again on TV.
Argh.
The pug was definitely Truman; the photo was definitely one she'd marked as "all rights reserved."
"It's not like the picture was some golden chalice of Internet wonder. It's a picture of a stupid dog," says the Baltimore mom. "But it's my dog and it's my photo!"
Supreme irony: "Every commercial break there would be a warning from Fox saying, 'This telecast may not be reproduced,' " she says. "I guess copyright pertains only to them."
Under the banner of "intellectual property," record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public.
But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it's the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.
* * *
The (literal) poster child for corporate photonapping: Dallas 15-year-old Alison Chang, who paused in the middle of a church-sponsored carwash last summer to flash a goofy grin and a peace sign to her friend Justin Ho-Wee Wong. Click! Wong posted his pictures from the event on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. A couple months later, the one of Alison resurfaced -- as part of a national ad campaign for Virgin Mobile in Australia. "Dump Your Pen Friend," the billboards read. "Free text virgin to virgin." Alison was the chump to dump.
The Chang family lawyered up.
While Wong had agreed to make his snapshots available through Creative Commons, a nonprofit that licenses photos for Flickr, he didn't anticipate commercial use, says Ryan Zehl, the attorney and spokesman for both the Chang family and Wong. Additionally, Zehl says, the license had required Wong to be attributed by name, which he was not. He and Alison, now 16, learned what had happened only when another Flickr user forwarded Wong a picture of the ad.
They're all suing Virgin Mobile Australia -- the Changs claiming Alison's violation of privacy and Wong claiming the company's failure to credit him properly.
Understanding cases such as the Changs' requires a crash course in copyright law:
Photographers (even amateur ones) automatically own the rights to their own work (even online). That means others can't use a photo without permission.
But sometimes, through "fair use," it actually is okay to use a photo without permission. Fair use can include scholarship or parody, and is determined by a number of criteria.
Further: sometimes, individuals such as Wong can decide to give away just part of their control. For example, permitting use of a photograph as long as the source is credited.
It's all doubly muddled online, where images can be thoughtlessly taken with one mouse click, such as when thousands of boys made screensavers out of high school track star Allison Stokke's photo and never once asked, "Legal?"
Clearly, the only way to really make sure your photos on the Internet don't get splashed around is not to put them up there to begin with.
In some ways the more interesting question for this corporate breed of photonapping isn't "Is it legal?" but rather, "Why does it sting so badly?"
For Niall Kennedy, the issue was hypocrisy -- the casual smugness with which corporations seemed to say, Copyright? What copyright? Kennedy had snapped photographs at a technology convention in late 2005 only to see one suddenly appear, without proper crediting, on a Microsoft-run blog.
"I've had audits where Microsoft has sent people to verify that I have copyrights for the software running on each employer's computer," says Kennedy, who once worked for Microsoft and now runs a Web technology firm. "This is a company that goes after copyright violators with the assumption of guilty until proven innocent."
The original blogger later posted an online mea culpa: "I forgot to include an attribution, which I had fully intended to do, but for which I apologise [sic] to him." Microsoft did not return calls seeking further comment.
Says Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford legal scholar who created Creative Commons, when asked about the issue of corporations borrowing photos: "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur."
Brandon Stone, a Web designer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was as flattered as he was peeved when he saw his photographs of a dirty alley appear as background in a "Real Time With Bill Maher" skit on HBO.
Still, the amateur photographer didn't want to undersell himself, and solicited advice online. While still debating a course of action, he received a call from an apologetic show producer who had been forwarded Stone's advice request.
They negotiated a price of $500 for the images used, "plus a little more for pain and suffering," Stone says. "They know the business. They have to be held to a higher standard. The average Joe doesn't have a team of lawyers telling him what's legal and what's not."
The producer's explanation? An intern, a lowly intern who didn't know any better, had grabbed the screen shots for the last-minute sketch.
Low-level employees were also the forces cited when stay-at-home dad Jim Griffioen's daughter appeared on Babble, an online parenting magazine. The story, about lead paint, featured a photo from Flickr of Juniper playing in front of a paint-peeling wall.
"It implied that I expose my daughter to all kinds of evils," says Griffioen, who hadn't agreed to licensing. "I'm just glad it wasn't an article about smoking pot [in front of] your kids," the subject of another Babble story.
Griffioen, as it happens, was once an intellectual property lawyer. When he unleashed his legalese, he says, staffers removed the photo.
Griffioen accepted their untrained-employee explanation -- until, he says, he started hearing from other bloggers who said they'd been wronged by the site. One woman said a photo of hers was improperly used for the magazine's inaugural issue. When she complained, the editor blamed . . . an intern.
"That is one very active intern," says Griffioen.
Babble, for its part, immediately admits wrongdoing, but says that the cases were not nearly as widespread as Griffioen implies. "There was a period of a few weeks where it happened as a pattern," says Rufus Griscom, Babble publisher. He says that one photo assistant did not understand permissible use, but that when the problem came to light, the offending photos were immediately removed and replaced with stock photography or with images from Flickr that Babble had permission to use. The photo assistant was fired, and the magazine reviewed all of its published images to make sure it had the photo rights.
What's noteworthy in each of these cases, Lessig says, "is that bloggers, a community typically associated with piracy, are rallying in support of copyright."
He says average individuals are increasingly thinking of themselves as artists, whose work has value -- or at least deserves respect. Lessig predicts that as the average Joes have their own material appropriated, it will eventually result in better behavior from both individuals and corporations.
Or, in total anarchy?
* * *
When news broke of the Alison Chang story earlier this fall, Virgin Mobile Australia released a statement (and has subsequently declined all interview requests, including one requested for this article). In part: the campaign "was part of an approach designed to reject cliched 'advertising' imagery in favour of more genuine and spontaneous shots."
Griscom, of Babble, similarly explained the magazine's decision to use Flickr, calling the images found there "more original, less generic."
It's easy to get so caught up debating the fairness of photonapping that we miss the other question: Why would big name corporations even want our point-and-click photographs?
The answer seems to be less "Because we can" and more "Because we need to."
"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."
It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."
Most of Flickr looks genuine. Type in "nerdy teen" and the current first hit is not some stylized nerd with braces and suspenders and mismatched socks. What you get instead is an image more subtle -- an old yearbook photograph of a smiling brunette, glasses not quite right, hair not quite right.
The image is more "right" than the Steve Urkel an ad firm would have concocted.
And the ad firms get that. So we get videos like Burger King's "Freakout" campaign in which real people are told the Whopper has been discontinued. They do their best to replicate real.
Viewers can spot a professional pug model from across the living room.
It all gets very meta.
And none of it is comforting to the people who have had their images grabbed online.
So while these issues of authenticity and fairness and legality are all being sorted out, amateur photographers who find themselves more famous than they would like may consider taking advice from Niall Kennedy.
When his initial e-mails to the Microsoft blog asking it to remove links to his photo didn't immediately work, Kennedy replaced the image with one of a man engaging in an activity best described as "extreme mooning." Visitors to the Microsoft blog who clicked on the innocent-looking link were guided to the new photo.
Says Kennedy, "They pulled down the link within 15 minutes."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...804626_pf.html
The Comeback Continent
Paul Krugman
Today I’d like to talk about a much-derided contender making a surprising comeback, a comeback that calls into question much of the conventional wisdom of American politics. No, I’m not talking about a politician. I’m talking about an economy — specifically, the European economy, which many Americans assume is tired and spent but has lately been showing surprising vitality.
Why should Americans care about Europe’s economy? Well, for one thing, it’s big. The G.D.P. of the European Union is roughly comparable to that of the United States; the euro is almost as important a global currency as the dollar; and the governance of the world financial system is, for practical purposes, equally shared by the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve.
But there’s another thing: it’s important to get the facts about Europe’s economy right because the alleged woes of that economy play an important role in American political discourse, usually as an excuse for the insecurities and injustices of our own society.
For example, does Hillary Clinton have a plan to cover the millions of Americans who lack health insurance? “She takes her inspiration from European bureaucracies,” sneers Mitt Romney.
Or are top U.S. executives grossly overpaid? According to a Times report, Michael Jensen, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business whose theories helped pave the way for gigantic paychecks, considers executive excess “an acceptable price to pay for an American economy that he believes has outstripped Japan and Europe in growth and prosperity.”
In fact, however, tales of a moribund Europe are greatly exaggerated.
It’s true that Europe has had a lot of economic troubles over the past generation. In the mid-1970s the Continent entered a prolonged era of sluggish job creation, which contrasted with vigorous employment growth in the United States.
And in the 1990s, Europe lagged behind America in the adoption of new technology. For example, in 1997 fewer than 15 percent of French homes contained personal computers and fewer than 1 percent were connected to the Internet.
But that was then.
Since 2000, employment has actually grown a bit faster in Europe than in the United States — and since Europe has a lower rate of population growth, this has translated into a substantial rise in the percentage of working-age Europeans with jobs, even as America’s employment-population ratio has declined.
In particular, in the prime working years, from 25 to 54, the big gap between European and U.S. employment rates that existed a decade ago has been largely eliminated. If you think Europe is a place where lots of able-bodied adults just sit at home collecting welfare checks, think again.
Meanwhile, Europe’s Internet lag is a thing of the past. The dial-up Internet of the 1990s was dominated by the United States. But as dial-up has given way to broadband, Europe has more than kept up. The number of broadband connections per 100 people in the 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged in 2004, is slightly higher than in the U.S. — and Europe’s connections are both substantially faster and substantially cheaper than ours.
I don’t want to exaggerate the good news. Europe continues to have many economic problems. But who doesn’t? The fact is that Europe’s economy looks a lot better now — both in absolute terms and compared with our economy — than it did a decade ago.
What’s behind Europe’s comeback? It’s a complicated story, probably involving a combination of deregulation (which has expanded job opportunities) and smart regulation. One of the keys to Europe’s broadband success is that unlike U.S. regulators, many European governments have promoted competition, preventing phone and cable companies from monopolizing broadband access.
What European countries definitely haven’t done is dismantle their strong social safety nets. Universal health care is a given. So are a variety of programs that support families in trouble, helping protect Europeans from the extreme poverty all too common in this country. All of this costs money — even though European countries spend far less on health care than we do — and European taxes are very high by U.S. standards.
In short, Europe continues to be a big-government sort of place. And that’s why it’s important to get the real story of the European economy out there.
According to the anti-government ideology that dominates much U.S. political discussion, low taxes and a weak social safety net are essential to prosperity. Try to make the lives of Americans even slightly more secure, we’re told, and the economy will shrivel up — the same way it supposedly has in Europe.
But the next time a politician tries to scare you with the European bogeyman, bear this in mind: Europe’s economy is actually doing O.K. these days, despite a level of taxing and spending beyond the wildest ambitions of American progressives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/op...11krugman.html
From 2005
The Turks Haven't Learned the British Way of Denying Past Atrocities
It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?
George Monbiot
In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/...674478,00.html
Taser Toting, Without Missing a Beat
Mike Nizza
If the world were divided into neat groups — say, between users of Tasers and MP3 players — perhaps TASER International would have no reason to unveil their latest invention. But it’s not, and they do.
Ladies and Gentlemen (but mostly ladies), the “TASER C2 Holster Hard Case w/1GB MP3 Player,” or as Stuart F. dubbed it in the comments, the “iTaze: ”
The features of the music player were not available, but the earphones in the picture suggest that it is an iPod or a clone of one. In any case, it costs $72.99.
“These new products are a result of listening to our customers,” explained Rick Smith, the company’s founder. “Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable.”
The other new product? A shock-shooter in leopard print, the latest in a line aimed at expanding the business from professional security to safety-concerned women.
The announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which our siblog Bits is covering from 150-inch plasma TV sets to Vudu boxes.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp
Until next week,
-
js.
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