[JackSpratts]

Steve Miller Band Celebrates 40 Years With DVD Set

As the Steve Miller Band marks the 40th anniversary of the release of its first two albums, it will release its first DVD, "Live From Chicago," a three-disc set due May 20.

The first disc contains live footage shot in July 2007 at Chicago's Ravinia Amphitheater during a two-day stand. Disc two takes viewers on a tour of Chicago by way of a first-person documentary that traces Steve Miller's Chicago blues roots, while the third disc provides bonus footage from the Ravinia gigs.

Portions of the DVD will be broadcast on PBS as part of its spring and summer fundraising drive.

Miller says he initially "wasn't very interested" in doing a concert DVD but was impressed by the previous work of director/producer Daniel E. Catullo III and producer Jack Gulick.

"I was really pleasantly surprised by them and how much work they put into it and what a great job they did," Miller says. "I think they really captured the kind of joy and fun and happiness we have at our concerts ... doing what we do without too much rock 'n' roll posing and that kind of bulls--t. It's a really good, straightforward representation of who the Steve Miller Band is and what we do, period."

Miller and his band are also hoping to release new, blues-oriented recordings shortly. Earlier this year, the group recorded more than three dozen blues tunes on the soundstage at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. The troupe was joined by Sonny Charles of the Checkmates, who's now a full-fledged Steve Miller Band member. Miller tells Billboard.com that he hopes to make the recordings available sooner rather than later.

"I think I'm probably just gonna put them on my Web site and sell it that way," says Miller, who's grouped the songs into three separate albums. "I haven't figured it out yet, but I'm not too worried about it. I'm just gonna make sure everybody that wants to get it can get it."

Miller started the project with about 5,000 songs that he kept on a hard drive and eventually whittled down to the final grouping. "It's such an amazing list of great material. It just makes me laugh every time we put it on," says Miller, adding that the vast majority of tracks are covers.

"There's a lot of Junior Parker tunes, 'Next Time You See Me,' a bunch of Howlin' Wolf tunes, 'Who's Been Talkin',' some Delta blues stuff, some John Lee Hooker things, some esoteric stuff, things that you haven't heard in a long time, some Bo Diddley things like 'You Pretty Thing' ... It's just incredible what we have here."

Miller says he plans to perform many of those songs during his group's annual summer tour, which kicks off May 24 in West Palm Beach, Florida, with Joe Cocker opening, and wraps August 17 in Murphys, California.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...39382920080511





Music Biz Hopes Device Upgrades Boost Mobile Sector

Perhaps no single device has had more impact on mobile music than Apple's iPhone.

While only 6.7 percent of overall mobile customers use their phone to listen to music, rising to 27.9 percent for smart-phone users, a full 74.1 percent of iPhone owners reported using the device as an MP3 player, according to M:Metrics.

The majority of this music, however, is transferred from the computer, rather than purchased through the phone and downloaded wirelessly. That may change this summer once Apple unveils what many expect will be a new version of the iconic device, featuring access to high-speed third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

The company has not made an official announcement, but signs point to an early June release. Apple has stopped restocking retailers with the current iPhone version, which analysts say is a sure sign that a new model is imminent. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is scheduled for June 9, and CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address.

Existing iPhone models connect to an older, slower wireless network but compensate with access to high-speed Wi-Fi Internet networks. Those using the iPhone to download music from iTunes, for instance, must use this Wi-Fi connection. While certainly faster than cellular networks, Wi-Fi does not offer nearly the same range of coverage.

Apple has sold more than 5 million iPhones worldwide, but many tech-savvy buyers, particularly in Europe, have been holding out for a 3G version. Upgrading the iPhone to 3G is considered crucial if Apple is to meet its stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year.

Smart Phones Get Smarter

Even if Apple manages to reach its goal, the iPhone would still represent only about 1 percent of all mobile phones available. For the music industry, as significant as the iPhone mobile music usage figures are, the greater significance is how they inspire other device manufacturers to reach for similar levels. The company with the most to lose from the iPhone's momentum is Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry.

In the United States, RIM leads the smart-phone market with a 40 percent share, but Apple is close behind at 28 percent, according to research group Canalys. Apple has begun incorporating support for Microsoft-based corporate e-mail applications into the iPhone, which is considered a direct attack on the BlackBerry.

So RIM is fighting back on the iPhone's turf -- entertainment. The two newest BlackBerry devices, the Pearl and the Curve, are aimed directly at the high-end consumer market. Available music applications include a MediaGuide service that identifies songs played on the radio; streaming XM Satellite Radio; a still-pending full-track downloads service from PureTracks; and a service called NuTsie from Melodeo that enables users to play their iTunes library on either device. It also plans to unveil a 3G version of the BlackBerry, expected later in August.

Verizon's Vision

But smart phones cover only a small part of the market. In the United States, there are only about 20 million smart phones, compared with 250 million mobile phones. What the music industry wants most is to turn every mobile phone into a music-playing device.

Which is why there are high hopes for Verizon Wireless and its plans with partner Rhapsody. Record labels are looking to Verizon -- with more than 67 million subscribers and a nationwide advertising campaign that heavily incorporates music -- as the standard-bearer for mobile music in the coming year.

When MTV Networks merged its Urge music service with Rhapsody in 2007, Verizon agreed to be the mobile platform for the service. The vision is that Rhapsody will become the default music service for Verizon Wireless, but exactly how that is implemented won't be clear until this summer.

Verizon Wireless and Rhapsody originally planned to launch the service in spring 2008, but RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser says the process is three months behind schedule because Verizon Wireless wanted to make the service available to the widest spectrum of phones possible.

The upshot is that the mobile music effort will receive a double shot in the arm -- a few iPhone and BlackBerry owners using their phones to access a lot of music, as well as a whole lot of Verizon subscribers using their phones to access just a little.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...51444620080512





In the studio

Cheap Thrills
Andrew Bird

I recently spent four days recording at the Wilco Loft — a gesture, most kind, extended to me by Jeff Tweedy, et al. The Loft is in my neighborhood in Chicago and has been the locus for Wilco’s recording and vintage gear collecting over the last decade. They have a cozy yet massive space with a great MCI sound board and tape machine, plus any guitar, bass, obscure amp or piece of percussion you could imagine (in perfect operating order). With Neal Jensen, our live sound engineer, behind the board, Mark Greenberg handling the digital realm, and Wilco’s loft manager Jason Tobias hosting, I brought Martin Dosh down to play drums on the tracks we recorded in Nashville and Jeremy Ylvisaker to play some bass. We also tracked the final two songs as a band. This was incredibly challenging. It should be simple, right? Put three musicians in a room, put up some microphones and press “record.”

Writing songs and performing live have with time become almost the same process for me. The improvisation and conversation with the audience from show to show keep the songs fluid and alive. On the other hand, making a record is like a show that gets drawn out over a year or more, but with no cathartic resolution. When I’m in the studio things can quickly unravel and that’s not surprising. The audience has disappeared and you are given the attractive, but dangerous option to control everything. This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics - voice and guitar - because it’s easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm. Knowing that the mostly unadorned Nashville songs sound great frees me up to indulge myself a bit. Sometimes you make the song better; more often than not things can get over-wrought.

Although I have a lot of excellent help, I’m producing my own record here, from microphone placement to deciding when to break for lunch. There’s a reason for the division of labor that was once the norm in the recording industry, where the producer took care of the details and delegation — even song choice — so that the musicians could just focus on performing. I’d love to be coddled and just walk on to a soundstage and do my job, but I’m afraid that relinquishing control would ultimately result in a limiting of imagination.

In the studio, a number of things can conspire to turn the natural act of making music into an awkward dance. First there is no audience, no one to impress. Second is the temptation to be too careful, to isolate every sound and not let it migle with other sounds. The third deals with the voice, the most personal and vulnerable instrument. Recording vocals can be fraught with aural illusions akin to the weirdness of hearing your own voice on your answering machine. ”That’s not me, is it?” You sing into a device that converts your voice into an electric current, which travels through wires and gadgets to a tape machine. You scrutinize that voice, make adjustments to your proximity to the microphone, switching between “head voice” and “chest voice.” When you belt it out it almost always sounds thin and small but when you sing quiet, close and intimate it sounds thick, warm and huge — but then it can lose gusto. Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.

There is also no guarantee that singing with emotional abandon that feels so right at that moment won’t sound totally wrong on playback. I have this intense aversion to canned emotion, yet that’s exactly what recording is: a reconstituted, canned facsimile of a performance. I am determined to subvert this and perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players — technology that still physically touches something else. Conversely, I regard computers as necessary but heretical and potentially corrupting collaborators.

I spent the entire first day in The Loft getting the perfect violin sound. We seem to have taken a “more is more” approach, employing three separate rigs — the violin sound coming from my bridge pick-up and going through two different looping pedals and other effects into three different amps. One amp is for the rhythmic pizzicato loops; another is for the arco/bowed sound which comes out of a spinning, two-headed Victrola-like horn. The third rig is for the solo violin.

One problem that we faced here was that the lead violin coming through all the amps overpowered the structural loops. To fix that we added a third channel, which I can switch to exclusively. This seems to have worked, though we spent a lot of time scratching our heads and starting sentences with “Wait, so…” and “What if ….” We also use two room microphones to pick up the acoustic violin sound and the sound of all these amps bouncing off the walls and making all of the strings on the guitars in the room (about 60 of them) resonate sympathetically. So all together there are some six channels devoted to violin. Like I said, more is more.

Martin arrived the next day and we ended up getting the best drum sound with my old RCA 44 ribbon microphone from the 1940s. (It’s the diamond shaped mic you see in old radio and TV broadcasts.) Martin played on three Nashville tunes: “Oh No,” “Nomenclature” and “Fitz and the Dizzyspells.”

We discuss a lot of things to help us get the songs just right — like not hitting cymbals because the crashes can be “cheap thrills.” Instead we favored the dark, walloping sound of the toms. Often times the choice becomes: Do you give the song what it wants? Or do you go against its demands? “Oh No” seemed to be asking for a 1970s Jackson Brown or Fleetwood Mac type of dead snare drum sound. That “everything’s gonna be just fine” sort of beat. The pitfall of approaching it like this is that your song can get hijacked by someone else’s record collection. I personally feel that the world has had its fill of 70s light rock. So we’re forced to be more creative. Not a bad alternative, though sometimes, you just say, “Why fight it? This just feels too good.”

Another technique we used was to run the tape machine twice as fast when recording the drums so when we play them back at normal speed they drop an octave and produce a huge, warbly sound. Cymbal crashes sound especially strange. They remind me of a John Cage tone poem for a 1940’s radio show.

I know this studio talk may be less interesting to some readers, but I do actually enjoy some of the studio geekery. I feel like it is a deliberate creative process to hear a sound in my head and then rummage around for the object that makes that sound. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the object itself gets assigned a mystical value and must be on a song, though I know most listeners could not care less whether we use a Telefunken mic or a 30-year-old calf skin drum head.

For me, it’s more about creating a ritual and knowing that every note is getting converted to an electric signal that passes through wires and is physically written on to analog tape. I like to stay connected to physical acts and processes, like my old wind-up Victrola’s thick needle being dragged through the valleys of an old 78 r.p.m. record, as opposed to filling hard drives with weightless bits. Though I admit this may be mostly psychological, I think the old equipment helps give some value to the notes. I like to think that at least our subconscious can tell the difference. CD’s — or mp3s I should say — sound more and more like karaoke or cheap, little music boxes to me.
http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytim...cheap-thrills/





Free Music Studio Means No More Excuses
Eliot Van Buskirk

Virtual instruments may be going the way of recorded music: free and online.

We've seen plenty of sites that let you make or mix music in a rudimentary way, but none that offer the deep feature set of Hobnox AudioTool. This free online electronic music studio lets you compose with two TB-303 Bass Line generators, Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and two banks of effects pedals including three delays, crusher, detune, flanger, reverb, a parametric equalizer and a compressor. By clicking the mouse button, you can drag virtual cables between any output and any input to customize the setup.

Composing music in this way is a bit tedious, because you need to add and shape each note individually. But this is exactly how many electronic musicians work, because it allows so much control over each element of the loops and allows you to create melodies and beats without playing them.

Testing AudioTool, I encountered no serious issues, and was able to create and edit beats in the same way that one would do with Reason or similar software. The only time I noticed a drop-out was when I messed with the length of a sequence as it was playing, which isn't something you really need to do anyway. The program loads with a demo song already in place, but you can start your own composition by clicking the Clear Pattern button on each synthesizer.

The site currently requires Java, although that could change soon. The developers at Hobnox who made AudioTool would prefer to use Flash entirely, but say its support for dynamic audio is lacking. They suggest that those who want to support online virtual instruments should join the Make Some Noise campaign, which hopes to convince Adobe to add sound manipulation features to Flash and to shore up one specific unstable audio feature, allowing Hobnox and other developers to push the envelope with more evolved online music tools.

As of right now, the only way to export a song from AudioTool is to record it as it plays using Total Recorder, Audio Hijack or similar software. Hobnox says it's working on a new version of the tool will allow users to save and load songs and will add new effects, a synthesizer, a drum computer, a sequencer and even a sample editor. In addition, the next version should support collaboration, so that groups of friends can work on the same song.

If you'd like to get started with Hobnox AudioTool but haven't programmed beats before, watch this simple tutorial.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/05/...usic-stud.html





Trailblazers, But Selling a Romantic Kind of Love
Stephen Holden

Has any pop song evoked a generation’s romantic self-infatuation more hauntingly than Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”?

Sheila Weller, in her book “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation” (Atria Books), which weaves the biographies of these singer-songwriters into a post-feminist history, writes: “It was the first line of the chorus — ‘We are stardust, we are golden’ ” — that “conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one.”

Stardust-sprinkled, golden children determined to save the world was one way of describing the youth culture’s heady self-image. The generational axiom that all you need is love persisted into the 1970s during the so-called cooling of America, when soft-rock singer-songwriters like Ms. Mitchell, Ms. King and Ms. Simon and male equivalents like James Taylor, Jackson Browne and John Denver personalized the communal conversation.

As Ms. Weller astutely emphasizes, the three singers in her biography belonged to the first generation of women to come of age with the pill. The belief in love as the answer coincided with the women’s liberation movement. An unvoiced question suggested by the book that has persisted through these women’s lives and their music is whether romantic love and promiscuity are compatible.

As fiercely as the rock counterculture rejected its parents’ tastes in music, all three women are revealed here as heavily indebted to traditional pop and its quasi-religious faith in romantic love. For Ms. Mitchell, an early epiphany was the swooningly beautiful 18th variation from Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which she discovered in the movie “The Story of Three Loves” and visited a record store to play repeatedly. Another early idol was Édith Piaf, the French voice of female suffering and resilience. The song choices and lush arrangements on some of Ms. Mitchell’s later records pay homage to her favorite Billie Holiday torch songs.

Ms. Simon grew up in a privileged household listening to classical music and to Richard Rodgers and the Gershwins. Her career-making hit, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” is an art song with a semiclassical melody in the style of Gabriel Fauré. But she had to wait until the early 1980s to begin recording popular standards with an orchestra.

Ms. King, who idolized Rodgers and Hammerstein, translated their aesthetic into a less flowery, Brill Building style of soul-flavored teenage pop with optimistic messages in the cheerleading spirit of Hammerstein. What is “You’ve Got a Friend” but a plainer, demystified echo of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”?

For years these women, consciously or not, suppressed their attachment to the supposedly square music of the past, the better to be current. They concentrated on folk-rock and light pop-gospel, styles that were deemed more authentic than anything to come from Broadway or Tin Pan Alley.

But if medical science allowed them to be sexual pioneers, they were still gripped by fairy-tale mythology. Even as they pursued serial relationships in and out of marriage, they embraced the credo expressed in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s quintessential postwar romantic sermon, “Some Enchanted Evening,” which imagined that true love could ignite in the eye contact of strangers across a crowded room.

In the early years of the sexual revolution, there was widespread belief by men and women alike that romantic sex was the most important thing in life, the key to happiness and a pathway to world peace. The dictum “Make love, not war” was taken seriously. It is also easy to forget that in the ’60s and ’70s, music was the rock generation’s primary mode of communication with itself, in much the same way that computers are today. In the communal, post-hippie fantasy that evaporated as the ’70s wore on, rock stars were exalted as a new hip aristocracy.

Drugs fortified the mystique. Marijuana and LSD were embraced as pathways toward a higher consciousness. Various forms of speed were easy to obtain and carried little stigma. At hip Hollywood parties jars of pills were passed around with scarcely a second thought, and cocaine became epidemic: anything to deny a steadily mounting realization that the imminent revolutions in human consciousness, politics and erotic pleasure were dreams that would not come true.

“Girls Like Us” chronicles the singer-songwriters’ lives from birth in the early and mid-1940s (born before 1946, they are technically not baby boomers, though their names are synonymous with boomer musical tastes) to the present. The pathway for personal true stories, performed by those who lived them, was paved by the established literary vogue for confessional poetry.

For those who are still curious, “Girls Like Us” is a gossipmonger’s feast that names many of the lovers and husbands referred to in the women’s lyrics. Of the three, only Ms. Simon talked to Ms. Weller. Information about Ms. Mitchell’s and Ms. King’s personal lives was compiled from extensive interviews with former husbands, close friends and relatives. The one man common to all three was James Taylor, a prince with a heroin habit (since kicked); he was Ms. King’s sometime musical partner (but not her lover), Ms. Mitchell’s lover and later Ms. Simon’s husband in a turbulent marriage that ended in divorce.

Especially in Ms. Mitchell’s songs through the late-’70s, almost every reference is explicitly autobiographical. Aside from a series of intense, tumultuous love affairs and a short-lived early marriage to a fellow folk singer, the central drama of her life, Ms. Weller says, was her early pregnancy and giving up of a baby daughter, with whom she reunited three decades later. The overriding subject of her songs through the ’70s is fervent erotic love. The passion is obsessive, tortured and combative and yields diminishing ecstatic returns as the years pass.

Ms. Simon’s notorious hit, “You’re So Vain,” Ms. Weller reports, reflected her “belle of the ball year and a half,” during which she “had belt-notched” Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger. Along with Mr. Taylor, they are the most famous names in a life of ceaseless erotic adventure pursued by a self-described romantic.

Many of Ms. King’s later songs evoke her headlong infatuations with two rugged cowboy-woodsmen who became her third and fourth husbands, for whom she forsook Los Angeles to live in the wilds of Idaho, milk goats and become an environmental advocate. Of the three, Ms. King gave up the most to live out her fantasies.

Only in retrospect is it clear that the ultimate demise of traditional pop romanticism actually began later than is commonly thought. Today’s erotic pop ethos of cold heat didn’t begin to coalesce until the emergence of Madonna. Desire without passion and celebration of the body as a machine engaged in sexual competition replaced rapturous surrender in love songs. As melody, the primary vehicle for love songs, has diminished in importance, so have the number and intensity of those songs.

Having lived out your fantasies until “the heyday in the blood is tame” (to quote Shakespeare), what remains? In Ms. Mitchell’s newest album, “Shine” (Hear Music), love is barely mentioned. The stardust has turned to ash, and the gold has tarnished. As she surveys the ravaged planet, this disenchanted, 60-something ex-romantic throws up her hands and declares, “If I had a heart, I’d cry.” Passion has curdled into bitterness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/ar...ic/13roma.html





100 Essential Jazz Albums
David Remnick

While finishing “Bird-Watcher,” a Profile of the jazz broadcaster and expert Phil Schaap, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector. First, I asked Schaap to assemble the list, but, after a couple of false starts, he balked. Such attempts, he said, have been going on for a long time, but “who remembers the lists and do they really succeed in driving people to the source?” Add to that, he said, “the dilemma of the current situation,” in which music is often bought and downloaded from dubious sources. Schaap bemoaned the loss of authoritative discographies and the “troubles” of the digital age, particularly the loss of informative aids like liner notes and booklets. In the end, he provided a few basic titles from Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, and other classics and admitted to a “pyrrhic victory.”

What follows is a list compiled with the help of my New Yorker colleague Richard Brody. These hundred titles are meant to provide a broad sampling of jazz classics and wonders across the music’s century-long history. Early New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, third stream, and fusion are all represented, though not equally. We have tried not to overdo it with expensive boxed sets and obscure imports; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. We have also tried to strike a balance between healthy samplings of the innovative giants (Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, etc.) and the greater range of talents and performances.

Since the nineteen-seventies, jazz has been branching out in so many directions that you would need to list at least another hundred recordings, by the likes of Steve Coleman, Stanley Jordan, Joe Lovano, Jacky Terrasson, John Zorn, David Murray, Avishai Cohen, Béla Fleck, Eliane Elias, Roy Hargrove, Dave Douglas, Matthew Shipp, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Fat Kid Wednesdays, and many, many others. There is a suggestion below of the dazzling scope of contemporary jazz, but the focus is on the classic jazz that is Schaap’s specialty.


1. Fats Waller, “Handful of Keys” (Proper, 2004; tracks recorded 1922-43).

2. King Oliver, “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: The Complete Set” (Challenge, 1997; tracks recorded 1923).

3. Louis Armstrong, “The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Sony, 2006; tracks recorded 1925-29).

4. Louis Armstrong, “The Complete RCA Victor Recordings” (RCA, 2001; tracks recorded 1932-33 and 1946-47).

5. Louis Armstrong, “Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy” (Columbia, 1954).

6. Fletcher Henderson, “Tidal Wave” (Verve, 1994; tracks recorded 1931-1934).

7. Bessie Smith, “The Essential Bessie Smith” (Sony, 1997; tracks recorded 1923-33).

8. Bix Beiderbecke, “The Bix Beiderbecke Story” (Proper, 2003; tracks recorded 1924-30).

9. Django Reinhardt, “The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order” (JSP, 2000; tracks recorded 1934-39).

10. Jelly Roll Morton, “Jelly Roll Morton: 1926-1930” (JSP, 2000).

11. Sidney Bechet, “The Sidney Bechet Story” (Proper, 2001; tracks recorded 1923-50).

12. Duke Ellington, “The OKeh Ellington” (Sony, 1991—tracks recorded 1927-31).

13. Duke Ellington, “Golden Greats” (Disky, 2002; tracks recorded 1927-48).

14. Duke Ellington, “Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band” (RCA, 2003; tracks recorded 1940-42).

15. Duke Ellington, “Ellington at Newport 1956” (Sony, 1999).

16. Duke Ellington, “Money Jungle” (Blue Note Records, 1962).

17. Coleman Hawkins, “The Essential Sides Remastered, 1929-39” (JSP, 2006).

18. Coleman Hawkins, “The Bebop Years” (Proper, 2001; tracks recorded 1939-49).

19. Billie Holiday, “Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles” (Sony, 2007; tracks recorded 1933-44).

20. Teddy Wilson, “The Noble Art of Teddy Wilson” (ASV Living Era, 2002; tracks recorded 1933-46).

21. Lester Young, “The Lester Young/Count Basie Sessions 1936-40” (Mosaic, 2008; available direct through Mosaic).

22. Lester Young, “Kansas City Swing” (Definitive, 2004; tracks recorded 1938-44).

23. Count Basie, “The Complete Decca Recordings” (Verve, 1992; tracks recorded 1937-39).

24. Count Basie, “The Complete Atomic Basie” (Blue Note, 1994; tracks recorded 1958).

25. Benny Goodman, “At Carnegie Hall—1938—Complete” (Columbia, 1999).

26. John Kirby Sextet, “Night Whispers: 1938-46” (Jazz Legends, 2005).

27. Chick Webb, “Stomping at the Savoy” (Proper, 2006; tracks recorded 1931-39).

28. Benny Carter, “3, 4, 5: The Verve Small Group Sessions” (Polygram, 1991; tracks recorded 1954).

29. Charlie Christian, “The Genius of the Electric Guitar” (Definitive, 2005; tracks recorded 1939-41).

30. James P. Johnson, “The Original James P. Johnson: 1942-1945 Piano Solos” (Smithsonian Folkways, 1996).

31. The Nat King Cole Trio, “The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio: The Vocal Classsics, Vol. 1, 1942-1946” (Blue Note, 1995).

32. Charlie Parker, “The Complete Savoy and Dial Sessions” (Uptown Jazz, 2005; tracks recorded 1944-48).

33. Charlie Parker, “Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve” (Polygram, 1988; tracks recorded 1946-54).

34. Charlie Parker, “Best of the Complete Live Performances on Savoy” (Savoy, 2002; tracks recorded 1948-49).

35. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, “Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945” (Uptown Jazz, 2005).

36. Dizzy Gillespie, “The Complete RCA Victor Recordings, 1947-49” (RCA, 1995).

37. Thelonious Monk, “Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1” (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1947).

38. Thelonious Monk, “Live at the It Club, 1964” (Sony, 1998).

39. Thelonious Monk, “Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane: The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings” (Riverside, 2006).

40. Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh, “Intuition” (Blue Note, 1996; tracks recorded 1949 and 1956).

41. Miles Davis, “The Complete Birth of the Cool” (Blue Note, 1998; tracks recorded 1948-50).

42. Miles Davis, “Bags’ Groove” (Prestige, 1954).

43. Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” (Sony, 1959).

44. Miles Davis, “Highlights from the Plugged Nickel” (Sony, 1995; tracks recorded 1965).

45. Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (Columbia, 1969).

46. Bud Powell, “The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1” (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1949-1951), Vol. 2 (Blue Note, 2001; tracks recorded 1953).

47. Gerry Mulligan, “The Original Quartet with Chet Baker” (Blue Note, 1998; tracks recorded 1952-53).

48. Modern Jazz Quartet, “Django” (Prestige, 1953).

49. Art Tatum, “The Best of the Pablo Solo Masterpieces” (Pablo, 2003; tracks recorded 1953-56).

50. Clifford Brown and Max Roach, “Clifford Brown & Max Roach” (EmArcy, 1954).

51. Sarah Vaughan, “Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown” (EmArcy, 1954).

52. Charles Mingus, “Mingus at the Bohemia (Debut, 1955).

53. Charles Mingus, “Mingus Ah Um” (Columbia, 1959).

54. Charles Mingus Sextet, “Cornell 1964” (Blue Note, 2007).

55. Ella Fitzgerald, “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook” (Verve, 1956).

56. Sonny Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus” (Prestige, 1956).

57. Sonny Rollins, “Night at the Village Vanguard” (Blue Note, 1957).

58. Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, “Sonny Meets Hawk!” (RCA, 1963).

59. Tito Puente, “King of Kings: The Very Best of Tito Puente” (RCA, 2002; tracks recorded 1956-60).

60. Sun Ra, “Greatest Hits—Easy Listening for Intergalactic Travel” (Evidence, 2000; tracks recorded 1956-73).

61. Abbey Lincoln, “That’s Him” (Riverside, 1957).

62. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, “Moanin’” (Blue Note, 1958).

63. Ahmad Jamal Trio, “Cross Country Tour: 1958-1961” (Verve, 1998).

64. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Time Out” (Sony, 1959).

65. Jimmy Witherspoon, “The ’Spoon Concerts” (Fantasy, 1989; tracks recorded 1959).

66. Ornette Coleman, “Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings” (Atlantic, 1993; tracks recorded 1959-61).

67. Ornette Coleman, “Dancing in Your Head” (Horizon, 1973).

68. Freddie Hubbard, “Open Sesame” (Blue Note, 1960).

69. Jimmy Smith, “Back at the Chicken Shack” (Blue Note, 2007; tracks recorded in 1960).

70. Dinah Washington, “First Issue: The Dinah Washington Story” (Polygram, 1993; tracks recorded 1943-61).

71. John Coltrane, “My Favorite Things” (Atlantic, 1960).

72. John Coltrane, “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” (GRP, 1997; tracks recorded 1961).

73. John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme” (Impulse!, 1964).

74. John Coltrane, “Ascension” (Impulse!, 1965).

75. Eric Dolphy, “Out There” (New Jazz, 1960).

76. Eric Dolphy, “Out to Lunch!” (Blue Note, 1964).

77. Bill Evans, “The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961” (Riverside, 2005).

78. Jackie McLean, “A Fickle Sonance” (Blue Note, 1961).

79. Stan Getz and João Gilberto, “Getz/Gilberto” (Verve, 1963).

80. Dexter Gordon, “Our Man in Paris” (Blue Note, 1963).

81. Andrew Hill, “Smokestack” (Blue Note, 1963).

82. Lee Morgan, “The Sidewinder” (Blue Note, 1963).

83. Albert Ayler, “Spiritual Unity” (ESP, 1964).

84. Archie Shepp, “Four for Trane” (Impulse!, 1964).

85. Horace Silver, “Song for My Father” (Blue Note, 1964).

86. Wes Montgomery, “Smokin’ at the Half Note” (Verve, 2005; tracks recorded 1965).

87. Cecil Taylor, “Conquistador!” (Blue Note, 1966).

88. Betty Carter, “Betty Carter’s Finest Hour” (Verve, 2003; tracks recorded 1958-92).

89. Frank Sinatra, “Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie & the Orchestra” (Reprise, 1966).

90. Frank Sinatra, “The Capitol Years” (Capitol, 1990; tracks recorded 1953-62).

91. Nina Simone, “Sugar in My Bowl: The Very Best of Nina Simone, 1967-1972” (RCA, 1998).

92. Pharoah Sanders, “Karma” (Impulse!, 1969).

93. Chick Corea, “Return to Forever” (ECM, 1972).

94. Keith Jarrett, “The Köln Concert, 1975” (ECM, 1999).

95. World Saxophone Quartet, “World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington” (Nonesuch, 1986).

96. Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, “Steal Away” (Polygram, 1995).

97. Joshua Redman Quartet, “Spirit of the Moment: Live at the Village Vanguard” (Warner Bros., 1995).

98. Cassandra Wilson, “Traveling Miles” (Blue Note, 1999).

99. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Live at the Village Vanguard” (Sony, 1999).

100. The Bill Charlap Trio, “Live at the Village Vanguard” (Blue Note, 2007).

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008...urrentPage=all





Music Rules: Top 10 Music Websites That Delivers Greatest Free Music
Nelson Doyle

If you're searching for the best free music sites on the Internet, well then these 10 deliver all that, and then some. Great music found here.

Music is truly the universal language to billions of screaming fans around the world and no matter what native language that you speak - music is music, so what's the need to translate the words.

The music websites that are presented in this article are listed from best to better, and from top to bottom of the page. Yes, in this author's opinion, these are the best free legal music websites on the Internet. So, enjoy the music and jam the day away.

Imeem
If you really dig your music, then you have come to the right place. Imeem is the biggest and most comprehensive music resource on the web to get great music. Join the Imeem community and share your music interests with others or watch
music videos if you are not too busy.

Last.fm
Last.fm offers more music than you can shake a stick at. Join the community and make new friends who share the same interests as you do. Last.fm members can play full tracks and customize your playlist according to your own unique tastes.

Pandora
Fall in love again, with the possibility of stumbling across a brand new artist, group or band that have been captured through Music Genome Project and overseen by Pandora, so that the flow of new musical talents don't go unnoticed. If you enjoy sampling the sounds of a creative crop of new and still probably new, undiscovered talented, then you will find a whole new world of sounds to delight your listening pleasures.

MOG
MOG's slogan says it best “Where Music Junkies Get Their Fix”. Listen to millions of full-length songs for free or share your music playlists and opinions with others in your community.

Macidol
Do your own an iPod and want to download new songs and Podcasts from your favorite artists for free? Macidol allows its members to download free music for your iPod legally. You name it - Macidol probably has it.

Music.com
Looking for the hottest popstars and rockstars on earth, then what are you waiting for, because music.com has it going on and a little of that, too. Watch music videos, listen or download the hottest music for free.

Jamendo
Open your ears to a whole new world of music talent at Jamendo. This site offers its members full free albums to download from the emerging new pool of artists and musicians from all four corners of the planet. Wanting something new to listen to, then Jamendo is the place for you.

Allmusic
Get to know your favorite recording artists better than ever before and listen or download some free music at Allmusic. Read the Allmusic blog or watch a music video, but by all means relax and have some fun.

Jango
Jango is a custom radio that plays the music you want for free. Create your own music playlists to store and play on your own radio channel or choose from the stations that Jango provide. Membership is required to participate.

Go Video [Codes]
Give your website, blog, MySpace or any sort of web-based page a booster shot and customize it to the max with free music videos from the hottest music talent in the world. Select the video that you want to retrieve the code for by artist or title, and then you are ready to cut and paste the video code onto your website or web-based page, so that all of your friends and fans can soon enjoy.
http://www.musicouch.com/Musicouching/Music-Rules-Top-10-Music-Websites-That-Delivers-Greatest-Free-Music.122475





Free Music: 22 Websites That Are Driving Daggers Into The Heart Of The RIAA

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the websites where you can find the music that you love for free. The market for these kind of websites is exploding so it’s definitely not a complete list but it should give you a good start.

1) BeeMP3.com
BeeMP3.com is a mp3 search engine. The BeeMP3 crawler searches through the Net and indexes all the brand new and popular songs. They claim to have over 800,000 mp3 files and are adding 10,000 mp3 files daily.

2) Blip
Blip is a quick way to tell your friends what song you’re into right this minute. You also find out what your favorite people are listening to in real-time — no need to refresh the page. TechCrunch called it “Twitter for music” and that seems like a good description.

3) Critical Metrics
Critical Metrics is a database of highly recommended songs. The site keeps track of awards, hot lists, must lists, 5-star reviews, artist picks, testimonials, select discographies, and other notable on-the-record expressions of love and enthusiasm.

4) Deezer
Based out of France, Deezer offers, free of charge and legally, all kinds of music, from rock to hip-hop, jazz, electro and world music.

5) Free Albums Galore
Free Albums Galore is a full-album “mp3 blog” for listeners of eclectic music. You won’t find a lot of popular artists here, but the site posts only complete albums, not individual or scattered tracks.

6) Free Music Zilla
Free Music Zilla is a tool specialized for social music downloading. It lets you download free music from almost all of the social music services, including many on this list. It is not available for Mac unfortunately.

7) GrooveShark Lite
Grooveshark gives you the ability to find and listen to any song and get personalized recommendations. It has an excellent, easy-to-use interface.

8) Hype Machine
The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.

9) Imeem
Imeem is a social network that offers access to a wide range of media including music, video and photos.

10) Internet Audio Archive
The Internet Audio Archive contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by its users.

11) Jango
Jango allows you to create a custom radio station just by typing in an artist’s name. You get the music you want, along with similar favorites of Jango users who share your taste. You can customize your station by adding more artists and rating songs that you want to play more or less.

12) Last.fm
Last.fm is one of the most popular custom radio sites. It also has social networking features and the ability to choose specific songs for a playlist. Unlike many sites on this list, Last.fm saves some of its best features for premium subscribers who pay a fee for the service.

13) Musicovery
Musicovery is a unique website that lets users choose which songs to play based on things like mood, genre, and musical era. It has a unorthodox interface that shows songs in relation to each other creating a kind of “music map.”

14) Music Search Online
Music Search Online is a mp3 search engine. Each result has a link to listen to the song or download the mp3 to your computer.

15) MuxTape
MuxTape is a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes. Anyone who signs up for an account receives their own subdomain (ex. http://samplename.muxtape.com/) which makes it easy to share the collection with friends and family.

16) Pandora
One of the most popular music sites on the Internet, Pandora is great for finding new music. The site’s database has the Music Genome Project at its core which contains in-depth information on each song (up to 400 attributes, including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, and lyrics). You can create as many custom radio stations as you want, but you’re not able to play specific songs on demand.

17) SeeqPod
SeeqPod is a media search engine. It allows you to find, play, and enjoy the vast multitude of rich media files and applications available online, including video, audio, slideshows, Adobe Flash files, and more. The interface is somewhat cluttered however. It’s worth noting that SeeqPod’s database is used to power many other music sites, including several on this list.

18) SpiralFrog
SpiralFrog is an ad-supported Web site that offers over 700,000 songs for you to download.

19) Skreemr
SkreemR is a search engine for locating mp3 files on the web. They have a feature called AudioRank which helps suggest the version of each song with the highest quality.

20) Slacker
Slacker is a custom radio station site with an emphasis on letting people access their stations in many different places.

21) Songerize
Songerize is a simplified interface for the SeeqPod music search engine. The site describes itself as “SeeqPod’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button”, which is about right. You can get to the song you want to hear very quickly, all you need to do is enter the song title and the artist name.

22) Songza
Songza is a music search engine with the ability to create playlists and ranks results by quality. It has one of the best user interfaces of all the websites on this list.
http://www.tinydad.com/free-music-22-websites-driving-daggers-into-the-heart-of-the-riaa/





How Apple is Changing DRM

As more stores and record labels abandon digital rights management, Apple may have an alternative plan for subscription services, writes Tim Anderson

When Apple approached record companies about selling their music digitally five years ago, they "were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied", according to Steve Jobs's recollection of the process. That meant using digital rights management (DRM) - a software wrapper - to protect songs from unlimited copying. Jobs says it is crucial to the contract: "If our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store."

But what's the real effect of DRM? Last year, EMI began offering songs without it on iTunes. "The industry has finally been able to get some hard data about how removing DRM restrictions from legitimately purchased tracks affects piracy," says Bill Rosenplatt, DRM specialist and president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. "The statistics show that there's no effect on piracy."

No effect. The assertion is remarkable. If DRM does not in fact discourage piracy, then it is merely a nuisance for the user. Now the Guardian understands that most download stores will remove DRM on permanent music downloads. "We are going to be selling non-DRM music from the summer", says Dave Elston, HMV's digital content manager, adding that it would solve "obvious interoperability issues" - primarily compatibility with Apple's iPod. Amazon has announced that its DRM-free MP3 download store, already online in the US, will be rolled out internationally later this year. Napster in the US is moving to MP3 for non-subscription downloads, and sources close to the company implied that the UK service will follow suit. And Apple offers DRM-free downloads for an increasing number of tracks.

Ironically, the music companies are now abandoning DRM because it worked too well. Apple wouldn't license its version to rivals - so the best-selling iPod drove the iTunes store to its present position, where it is the third-largest music retailer in any form in the US. Rosenblatt says that record labels "have been desperate to find a viable competitor to Apple and iTunes". Industry sources suggest that Apple's iTunes store has more than 70% of the UK download market, and growing. "The record companies don't like dealing with Apple, because Apple is in a position where it can dictate the economic terms and dictate the business models," says Rosenblatt. "What's going to draw people away from iTunes? One answer is to get rid of DRM."

Licences revoked

In the meantime, some early adopters are suffering the consequences of DRM's failure. Last month, former customers of Microsoft's defunct MSN Music store in the US received an unwelcome email. "As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of licence keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," it said.

So what does that mean? Protected music files are encrypted and locked with a key. To play the file, the media player must acquire a digital licence that is specific to the PC or portable device on which it is played. The licence may permit music to be copied to other computers or devices, but each device must be individually authorised by an online licence server. Without such a server, former customers of MSN Music will not be able to play their DRM-protected music on any new PCs or portable players that they buy.

The problem is worse than it first appears, since a "new" device may actually be your existing PC. Some users habitually reinstall Windows to keep it running sweetly, but doing so removes its authorisation; even adding or changing a hardware component can also break the DRM, as Microsoft notes matter-of-factly in a support article. Worse still, the DRM component in Windows can get corrupted for no apparent reason.

This is a common problem for users installing the BBC's iPlayer software, for example, which also uses Microsoft DRM. The fix, described in detail on the iPlayer support pages, involves deleting all the files in the hidden DRM folder within Windows. A side effect is that existing licences are destroyed - so existing DRM-protected files could well no longer play. In other words, there are multiple scenarios in which customers who have bought music, supposedly for a lifetime, may need to re-authorise their purchases. If the licence server has been turned off, the music will never, ever play again. What if you back up your licences? This used to be possible through Windows Media Player. But Microsoft removed the option from version 11, introduced for Windows Vista. Microsoft's Adam Anderson told us that licence backup did not work properly anyway.

Getting your backup

"The ability to back up content was not granted by every service, leading to user confusion and frustration," he says. "Third-party digital content service providers are best positioned to meet the backup and restoration needs of their customers." So the trail leads back to the licence server - which Microsoft is turning off for its customers. Why is it doing that? According to Rob Bennett, who wrote the shock email, it was too complicated to support. "Every time there is an OS upgrade, you saw support issues. People would call in because they couldn't download licences. We had to write new code, new configurations each time," he told CNet.

There are a few mitigating factors. One is that purchased downloads usually include the right to burn CDs - thus removing the DRM, and allowing proper backup. Though it's not quite perfect: most download formats are compressed. The CD will sound the same as the download - but if it is ripped back to a PC in a lossy format (such as MP3), the recompressed file will not sound as good.

Customers outside the US are not directly affected by Microsoft's move. Although several download services in the UK use Microsoft DRM - including MSN Music (which is run by Nokia), Napster and HMV - these stores have their own licence servers. Still, if Microsoft itself has done this, and if DRM for this type of purchase is on the way out, then customers with an investment in downloaded music should be cautious. Best burn them to CD, just in case. Some, however, won't let you. Subscription services such as Napster To Go, which gives temporary access to around 5m songs, will keep using DRM. But so far the subscription concept has not taken off.

Yet Rosenblatt thinks that subscriptions may turn out to be Apple's answer to the DRM-free competition - because it has already laid the groundwork with films which expire a certain length of time after being downloaded or watched. "You can now rent a movie on your iPod. The functionality on the iPod that enables that to happen is part of the functionality that you would need to support music subscription services," Rosenblatt says.

Same old problems

And that could mean the record labels will face the same problem all over again. Just as they remove DRM from their products, Apple would re-impose it. Apple customers with a subscription would probably never buy from third-party services, even while the likes of Amazon could undercut iTunes and be iPod-compatible.

Mark Mulligan, digital music analyst at Jupiter Research, also expects Apple to change its approach. "It's highly likely Apple will get into the next-generation service game. That could be Apple selling iPods preinstalled with unlimited access to music, or with a bundle to a subscription offering," he says. Mulligan sees the market evolving into multiple tiers. At the top end, a minority will be willing to pay a premium for the best quality, DRM-free downloads. The middle tier will be "subsidised offerings like Nokia's Comes With Music, where you buy a device and the cost of the music is included subsidised"; while at the bottom will be advertising-supported services such as Qtrax, SpiralFrog and We7, where free music is paid for by embedded advertising.

That would leave Apple with the top-end iTunes downloads and a subscription business. But would Jobs back it? In January 2007, Reuters asked him if Apple would do so. "Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," Jobs said. "The subscription model has failed so far." Which hardly rules it out forever. DRM might not stop pirates, but it does rivals. And in business, the latter can be a greater threat than the former.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple





Sony BMG Releases More DRM-Free Music
Posted by Greg Sandoval

Sony BMG, one of the top four recording companies, is releasing more DRM-free songs through a partnership with Dada USA, a mobile-entertainment company based in Italy.

Songs from Sony BMG artists such as the Foo Fighters, Kelly Clarkson, and The Strokes, will be offered through a new music service, Dada Entertainment, where users can pay $9.99 to obtain 15 tokens. Each token can be redeemed for a music download or ringtone or other content such as games or wallpaper.

The unprotected MP3 files can be transferred to an iPod, mobile phone, or any other digital music-playing device, the companies said Tuesday. Over-the-air downloads aren't ready yet, but Dada said in a statement that it expects to launch that in coming months.

The problems are obvious with this one. Music subscription services such as Napster offer unlimited music for about $13 a month. And the subscription services don't restrict users to a song library exclusively of Sony BMG songs (a Dada representative said the company is trying to cut licensing deals with other labels).

The good news is the music found at Napster is laden with DRM. The songs from this jointly operated service aren't. They are also cheaper than the downloads at iTunes and most other online music stores.

Perhaps most importantly, this is another example of a major label experimenting with songs stripped of copy-protection software.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943023-7.html





Neil Young to Release Archive on Blu-Ray Discs

Rocker Neil Young plans to release his entire music archive on Blu-ray discs, a sign that the discs' capabilities are building appeal among musicians as well as movie studios.

Blu-ray discs hold much more data than DVDs, are easily updated over the Internet and offer better picture and sound quality.

Young revealed his plans Tuesday at a Sun Microsystems Inc. conference in San Francisco. Santa Clara-based Sun makes the Java technology that gives Blu-ray discs their interactive menus and ability to accept updates over an Internet connection.

The first installment of Young's archive will cover the years 1963 to 1972 and will be released as a 10-disc set this fall on Reprise/Warner Bros. Records.

Young said the archives will be released chronologically and include some previously unreleased songs, videos, handwritten manuscripts and other memorabilia, in addition to the high-resolution audio that Blu-ray technology is known for.

Fans can download more content like songs, photos and tour information directly to the Blu-ray discs as the content becomes available.

Blu-ray's rival format HD DVD effectively died with maker Toshiba Corp.'s announcement in February that it will no longer produce HD DVD players.

Most of the Blu-ray discs manufactured so far have been used for high-definition movies.

Musical artists such as AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and Destiny's Child released concert videos on Blu-ray discs, but Young's support of the technology for his ambitious archive project demonstrates more fully the capabilities of Blu-ray as a music medium.

Earlier technology didn't offer the ability to browse archive material while listening to songs in high-resolution audio, Young noted.

"Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises," he said in a statement. "I am glad we waited and got it right."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g7PU369D66DFPT3h6RDkR9s61AnQD90GAE0G0





Neil Young Gets New Honor - - His Own Spider

Iconic singer and songwriter Neil Young has had an honor bestowed upon him that is not received by many musicians -- his own spider.

An East Carolina University biologist, Jason Bond, discovered a new species of trapdoor spider and opted to call the arachnid after his favorite musician, Canadian Neil Young, naming it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.

"There are rather strict rules about how you name new species," Bond said in a statement.

"As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice."

Young, 62, is a veteran rock musician who rose to fame in the 1960s with the band Buffalo Springfield and later became a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, whose 1970 release "Deja Vu" has become a classic rock album.

The singer/songwriter, whose solo work ranges from older albums such as "Harvest" to newer CDs like "Living with War," has long been an activist for social and anti-war causes.

Bond discovered the new spider species in Jefferson County, Alabama, in 2007. He said spiders in the trapdoor genus, who tend to live in burrows and build trap doors to seal off their living quarters, are distinguished from one species to the next on the basis of differences in genitalia.

He confirmed through the spider's DNA that the Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi is an identifiable, separate species of spider within the trapdoor genus.

Young is not the first musician to have a creature named after him. A species of beetle that looks as if it is wearing a tuxedo -- the whirligig beetle, or Orectochilus orbisonorum -- was named earlier this year after the late rock 'n' roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara.
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSSP19797120080511





Model Train Maker Lionel Emerges from Bankruptcy

Legendary model train maker Lionel LLC has emerged from bankruptcy protection, the company's Web site and court documents show.

"After more than seven long years of legal warfare, a brutal financial restructuring, and a lot of corporate soul searching, Lionel has fully emerged from bankruptcy," Chief Executive Jerry Calabrese wrote in a note on the company's Web site, www.lionel.com.

Lionel, which has been in business since 1900, sought bankruptcy protection in 2004 after a trade-secrets dispute with MTH Electric Trains.

"Lionel's emergence from bankruptcy has been achieved by paying all of its creditors all of the money they were owed, in addition to interest for all the time during which the company was in bankruptcy," Calabrese wrote.

Rock musician Neil Young, who once had a 20-percent stake in Lionel, will still have a role at the company, Calabrese wrote in a separate statement on the Web site.

"As he has for the better part of the last two decades, Neil will be working with our engineers and product guys to make sure that Lionel continues to honor its pledge to make the best and most affordable model trains in the world." It was not clear if he still holds a stake in Lionel or what his specific role would be and the company did not return calls for comment.

Lionel, which sells its model trains at big-box retailers like Target Corp and hobby shops, and MTH settled their dispute last October, paving the way for Lionel to obtain financing to exit bankruptcy.

Documents filed with the U.S. bankruptcy court of the Southern district of New York show that Lionel emerged from bankruptcy on May 1.

Calabrese wrote that in addition to Young, pre-bankruptcy owners Luella Davis and Dick Kughn would remain involved with the company, along with Guggenheim Investment Management LLC, which provided much of the new financing for the company's exit from bankruptcy. (Reporting by Chelsea Emery, Editing by Toni Reinhold)
http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUSN0539524820080505





DriveSavers Breathes Life Into a Dead Drive
Joel Evans

In computer circles a well known statement when it comes to hard drives is that it’s not a matter of “if” a hard drive dies but “when”. Well, unfortunately for my brother-in-law that time came a couple of weeks ago for his external hard drive. He had stored all of his music and all of the photos that his family has taken of their two year old son on an external Maxtor. One day he turned it on, heard some musical tones and then a whirring sound, a clicking sound, and that was it. It wouldn’t show up on his computer and was presumed dead. Being the geek in the family, he asked if he could send it my way.

The first thing I did was plug it into power to hear the noises for myself. Sure enough, I heard the music tones and then the whirring and clicking. Some Google searches turned up pretty much nothing about the sounds, but having had an external drive before, I knew what the sounds meant: dead drive.

The next thing I did was hook it up to my PC. It actually started to get recognized but then wouldn’t show up in My Computer. I then plugged it into another computer, just to be sure, and found that it was recognized but again, not showing up in My Computer. Then I went into Device Manager and saw it there … but I still couldn’t access it. Thinking there might still be hope, I contacted Seagate/Maxtor tech support. Unfortunately, it was now too late to call so I sent them an e-mail describing the problem instead.

The next day I had yet to receive a reply, so I dialed them up. I spoke with a tech (who still couldn’t tell me what the musical tones meant), and then after seeing that I couldn’t browse to the drive he declared it dead. Since it was out of warranty he basically said that I was out of luck. Strangely enough, after I got off that call I received a response to my e-mail where the tech suggested I download Seagate’s SeaTools and test the drive. I did as instructed and he drive failed every test and in some cases wouldn’t even run the test.

Still not believing that it was time to throw in the towel, I remembered a company that specializes in recovering dead hard drives: DriveSavers. I dialed them up and after answering a series of questions, I was quoted a range with an estimated recovery price of $1500 and a turnaround time of 5-7 days. Once I agreed to the price I was e-mailed a PDF with instructions on how to get the drive to them. I overnighted the drive, wrapped in bubble wrap and extra cushioning to avoid any additional damage (they recommended a ziploc or anti-static bag). I also e-mailed customer service a description of the drive contents and what I believed might be the directory structure. They requested this information as it would serve as an indicator of whether or not they recovered the drive.

The next day I received an e-mail letting me know that the drive had been received and that the recovery process had begun.

Here’s a detailed account of what DriveSavers did to try to bring back the dead drive:

DriveSavers initiated the recovery process by taking my external drive to their Certified Class 100 cleanroom (think ER for hard drives). Here, the engineers wearing specialized, certified cleanroom garments (see pictures below) carefully perform surgery on dead drives.

My drive in particular suffered electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage to the platter surface and logical corruption to the file system. In other words, the drive failed in about every way you can imagine. Using an extensive supply of hard drive components, the cleanroom engineers utilized proprietary techniques to create a bit-for-bit image of the drive and placed the image onto a clean target drive.

“We did a combination of things to get the image,” said Michael Hall, Director of PC Engineering. “We had to replace the actuator assembly and components on the printed circuit board. By performing these actions, we were able to image about 25 percent of the drive.”

Unfortunately, the data I needed back was not on the image that they first acquired. At this point, they performed a full platter swap and were able to image all readable sectors that did not have physical media damage.

Next, the drive went to their Windows software engineering team to manually extract the critical files requested.

According to Michael Hall, “Although there was severe media corruption on this drive, DriveSavers engineers were able to successfully recover the majority of the critical data by utilizing our proprietary software and methodology.”

Again, my drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage. Seagate considered it dead, but I didn’t give up. It’s actually pretty amazing that they were able to recover nearly all of the data. Of course, they had to do some rebuilding, but that’s what you expect when you send it to the ER for hard drives.

So, how much did it end up costing? Pricing is determined by the drive capacity, complexity and completeness of the data recovery. The cost for recovering data from a drive with severe media damage, like mine, is about $1900. An average single drive data recovery costs about $1500.

In my case they restored approximately 80 percent of the drive and put it on a new external hard drive. Depending on the size of the data, it either goes to an external (you can supply one if you want) or DVDs. In addition to hard drives they can restore removable media, digital cameras, tape, and even iPods and MP3 players.

Not everyone can afford to spend that amount on recovering data but it’s all about what the data means to you. In the case of this drive, it holds memories that would have been gone forever. So, it was a small price to pay.

Read more about them at DriveSavers.com. Be sure to check out their Museum of Disk Disasters, too.
http://www.geek.com/drivesavers-breathes-life-into-a-dead-drive/





End of Intel, AMD Duopoly Near? Via Readies Isaiah Chip
Brooke Crothers

Is the end of the Intel-AMD duopoly nigh? Via Technologies is hoping this may be the case when it announces the "Isaiah" processor later this month.

The company's first high-performance x86 chip will be targeted at the mainstream PC market--another first for the Taipei-based chip supplier. Via processors have historically appeared in ultrasmall mobile devices (such as the OQO), embedded computers, or thin-client computers.

"It puts us into the mainstream market for the first time," said Richard Brown, vice president, corporate marketing at Via.

Isaiah, like Via processors before it, will still hew to the lower-power line, however.

Correction: Isaiah's TDP (Thermal Design Power or power envelope) is not confirmed at this point. However, Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology (the company that designed Isaiah), has said publicly that Isaiah will consumer more power than Intel's Atom processor.

Other differences include: Atom uses a more simple "in-order execution" design compared to Isaiah's Superscalar, out-of-order design.

Because of this more sophisticated design, Isaiah may deliver higher performance than Atom, though independent benchmarking will be the final judge.

Via subsidiary Centaur Technology designed the processor. "Centaur has been working on this for the last three years. It's between two and four times the performance of C7 (Via's current processor). So, it' very, very close to (Intel's) Core 2. Core 2 solo (single core)," Brown said.

The Via C7 processor is currently being used in a design that may herald more Isaiah-based mainstream notebooks. The $398 Everex gBook is being sold at Wal-Mart with a 15-inch screen, a 1.5GHz Via C-7M processor, 512MB of DDR2 system memory, a 60 GB hard disk drive, optical drive, Ethernet, and wireless. It uses the gOS Version 2 operating system, a Linux distribution.

"We're in full agreement with the optimized PC concept," Brown said. An idea put forward by Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, it postulates that a consumer will get better PC price-performance by adding a $50 graphics card rather than a two or three hundred dollar quad-core processor. "You can have a processor like Isaiah matched with a better graphics card," Brown said. "There's opportunity in both desktops and notebooks."

Last month, Via and Nvidia announced a platform billed as the "The World's Most Affordable Vista Premium PC," the sub-$45 processing platform will combine Via's Isaiah processor with an integrated Nvidia graphics chipset.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9945568-7.html





Crown Copyright is Overdue for Retirement
Michael Geist

As Industry Minister Jim Prentice prepares to introduce new copyright legislation, Crown copyright is unlikely to be part of the reform package.

According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, there may be a disturbing reason behind the government's reluctance to address it – Crown copyright costs Canadians hundreds of thousands of dollars while being used as a tool to suppress public criticism of government programs.

Dating back to the 1700s, Crown copyright reflects a centuries-old perspective that the government ought to control the public's ability to use official documents.

Today Crown copyright extends for 50 years from creation and it requires anyone who wants to use or republish a government report, parliamentary hearing, or other protected work to first seek permission. While permission is often granted, it is not automatic.

The Canadian approach stands in sharp contrast to the situation in the U.S. where the federal government does not hold copyright over work created by an officer or employee as part of that person's official duties.

Government reports, court cases and congressional transcripts can be freely used and published.

The existence of Crown copyright affects both the print and audio-visual worlds and is increasingly viewed as a barrier to Canadian filmmaking, political advocacy and educational publishing.

For example, while U.S. governmental reports are freely available and often used for commercial purposes without the need for prior permission, Canadian publishers seeking to release a Canadian report as a commercial title would need approval from the government to do so.

To obtain permission, the publisher would be required to provide details on the intended use and format of the work, the precise website address if the work is to appear online, as well as the estimated number of hard copies if the work is to be reprinted.

If the work is to be sold commercially, the publisher would be required to disclose the estimated selling price.

Filmmakers and educational publishers face similar barriers. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they must budget for lengthy, expensive approval processes for the use of government clips in their films or documents in their textbooks.

Beyond the policy reasons for abandoning Crown copyright, internal government documents reveal other concerns. Financially, the federal Crown copyright system costs taxpayers a whopping sum every year.

Documents from Public Works and Government Services Canada, which administers the Crown copyright system, reveal that in the 2006-7 fiscal year, Crown copyright generated less than $7,000 in licensing revenue while costing more than $200,000 to administer.

In most instances, Canadians obtain little return for this investment: 95 per cent of Crown copyright applications are approved, with requests ranging from archival photos to copies of the Copyright Act.

More troubling are the 5 per cent of cases where permission is declined. While in some instances refusal stems from the fact that the government does not have rights to the requested work, government documents reveal that some requests are declined for what appear to be politically motivated reasons.

For example, an educational institution's request to reproduce a photo of a Snowbird airplane was denied on the grounds the photo was to be used in an article raising questions about the safety of the program.

Similarly, a request to reproduce a screen capture of the Nexus cross-border program with the U.S. was declined, since it was to be used in an article that would not portray the program in a favourable light.

Although it seems unlikely that Crown copyright authorization was needed to use these images, the government's decision to deny permission smacks of censorship and misuse of Canadian copyright law.

Given the significant costs associated with a program that does more harm than good and that appears susceptible to political manipulation, any new copyright reform should eliminate Crown copyright and adopt in its place a presumption that government materials belong to the public domain to be freely used without prior permission or compensation.
http://www.thestar.com/article/424333





The End Of Copyright
Ernest Adams

I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of a major era in world history. It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but the age of copyright is drawing to a close. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s inevitable. And I say this as the author of two books and over 75 columns like this one, all copyrighted.

Just 550 years ago this year, a guy named Johann Gutenberg figured out how to make large quantities of metal type in a hurry. He didn’t invent printing—the Chinese had been doing that with wooden blocks for centuries—but he did find a way to make it fast and efficient. Gutenberg changed the world and helped to bring on the Renaissance.

There were no copyright laws at that point. Before the printing press, books in Europe were copied by hand, and having someone go to the trouble of copying your book was about the highest praise an author could get. But with the printing press, the concept of intellectual property was born. Over the next two centuries or so, copying books went from being high praise to being a crime. As printing presses were large and heavy—i.e. difficult to conceal and difficult to move—it wasn’t all that hard to prosecute the offenders. The smaller and faster they got, though, the tougher it became.

I’m old enough to remember when photocopiers became commonplace. At first, there used to be signs in libraries, warning the users against duplicating copyrighted material—any copyrighted material, ever. But people did it anyway. They didn’t think they were doing any harm, and they weren’t planning to sell the copy, they just needed it for their own use.

When enough people feel that it’s OK to do a thing, that thing ceases to be wrong in their own cultural context. You can complain about moral relativism all you like, but the facts are inescapable: that’s how people behave. When the photocopier came along, people simply didn’t think it was wrong to copy a few pages out of a book, even though it was against the law and the authors would have preferred that they buy the whole book. So eventually, the Fair Use doctrine evolved with respect to copyright materials. The law changed. It’s now OK to photocopy parts of books for educational, non-commercial use. In effect, the authors and book publishers had to give some ground in the face of the overwhelming tide of public opinion.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

On June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court decided to hold companies that make file-sharing software responsible for copyright infringements perpetrated by the software’s users. Everyone expected that they would rule as they did when Universal City Studios sued Sony over the Betamax in 1984: there were legitimate uses of the technology, and it shouldn't be held responsible simply because it can be used unlawfully. Instead, however, they ruled that file-sharing software actively encourages piracy and the makers should be held accountable.

The Supreme Court's action has done the exact opposite of what MGM and the other content distributors who brought the suit hoped it would. File-sharing software will become open-source and public domain. File-sharing will continue to grow ever more popular, but now there will be no one to sue. The Supreme Court's ruling hasn't even delayed the inevitable; it has actually brought it closer.

There’s no intrinsic reason why someone should continue to get paid for something long, long after the labor they expended on it is complete. Architects don’t get paid every time someone steps into one of their buildings. They’re paid to design the building, and that’s that. The ostensible reason we have patent and copyright law is, as the US Constitution says, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” But travesties like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act don’t promote the progress of science; they actively discourage it. So do software and biotechnology patents. The patent system was intended to allow inventors to profit for a limited time on particular inventions, not to allow huge technology companies to put a stranglehold on innovation by patenting every tiny advance they make.

Right now, the music and movie industries are howling and beating their breasts and doing their best to go after anybody who violates their copyrights on a large scale. The fury with which they’re doing it is a measure of their desperation. The Sony rootkit debacle is a perfect example: in an effort to prevent piracy, they secretly installed dangerous spyware into people’s PCs, which itself may have been a criminal act. This was about the dumbest public-relations move since Take-Two lied about the Hot Coffee content, and as with Take-Two, it will cost them vastly more than they could hope to gain from it. Did they really think nobody would find out?

The lawsuits, the spyware, the DMCA: these are the death struggles of an outdated business model. It’s the modern-day equivalent of throwing the Christians to the lions in an effort to discourage Christianity. It didn’t work for the ancient Romans and it won’t work now.

Part of the issue is related to the question of how much money it took to create a copyrighted work in the first place. With books and music, the answer is simply, “not that much.” Forget notions of what their rights may be in law; the idea that a band or an author should be paid millions upon millions over the next several decades for something that it cost them at most a few thousand dollars to make, just feels silly to most people. You’ll notice that it’s the megastars who are fighting the hardest over this in music—Madonna, Metallica, and so on. They’re the ones who stand to lose the most. But the smaller, less well-known groups are embracing new business models for distributing their music. They’re like authors back before the printing press: “Copy my music and listen to it! Please!”

Movies and video games are more problematic. They take millions to make in the first place and a good many of them don’t earn back their investment, even with full copyright protection in place. If we’re going to go on making video games, the publishers have to find a way to make them pay for themselves. One approach is an advertising model, although I’m reluctant to say it because I hate the idea of ads in games. Another is to treat games as a service rather than a product. With broadband distribution, I think this is increasingly likely: you won’t ever have a durable copy of a game, you’ll download it every time you play it. Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you’ll have to download a new copy.

Yet another model is the donor model: somebody who is known for creating great work can collect up donations in advance; when he has collected enough to fund the work, he builds it, and releases the game copyright-free when it’s finished. The donors will have paid and everyone else gets it for nothing, but they get it first and perhaps some special recognition for their contribution. I’d be happy to put down $40 two years in advance for a new Sid Meier game, particularly if I knew it would be released copyright-free when it came out. And I bet a lot of other fans of Sid’s work would say the same.

The donors have to trust that the developer will finish it, of course; but this is effectively how freeware development works now. Somebody makes a name for themselves with a piece of freeware; they ask for donations; the donations help to fund further work on a new version. So far it has only been tried on a small scale, but—as the mobile and casual games are showing us—there’s still plenty of demand for small scale games in the world.

(A variant of this system, pioneered by cyberspace engineer Crosbie Fitch, is already in place for music, except that people give pledges rather than donations. When the musician releases the work, she collects all the pledges made towards it. See www.quidmusic.com for details. Credit where it’s due: I first heard about this whole idea from Crosbie.)

In short, there are a heck of a lot of ways to recover the development and marketing costs of video games besides trying to sell individual physical copies and prevent their duplication. That system is awkward, wasteful, and theft-prone. It supports too many middlemen and, like Prohibition, puts money in the pockets of some very nasty gangsters.

Of course, some alternative distribution models still rely on copyright, and publishers will still be trying to prevent people from redistributing their content. But sooner or later that model is doomed. The perceived value of a thing is inversely proportional to the ease with which it can be duplicated. If the public simply refuse to acknowledge that copying books or movies or software is wrong, then in a democracy, it will eventually cease to be wrong. People elect the legislators, and legislators make the laws.

Does the end of copyright mean that books or music or movies or games will die? Of course not. The urge to create is too strong in all of us, and consumers will always be willing to pay for novelty and for excellence. It may mean that nobody gets mega-wealthy any more. What it does mean for sure is that the giant dinosaurs that currently dominate the distribution channels had better learn to adapt or die. There are a lot of fast-moving little mammals in the underbrush eating the dinosaurs’ eggs.

And fifty years from now, kids will be asking, “What does that © symbol mean in this old book, Grandpa?”

From 2005

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051128/adams_01.shtml





Orphan Works Bill Clears Senate Committee, May Soon Find Home
Nate Anderson

Twitter: it's not just for telling friends about that burrito you had for lunch. Public Knowledge's Alex Curtis spent yesterday's Senate committee hearing on the orphan works bill "live twittering" the hot markup action to the world as the bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee with only minor changes. Despite making quick progress in both the House and the Senate, the bill has also started attracting attention from copyright holders who worry it could dilute the value of their work.

The US Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, did a great job of explaining what's at issue here in her testimony to Congress back in March.

"We heard from average citizens who wished to have old photographs retouched or repaired but were denied service by the photo shops," she said. "They ask the customer to produce evidence that the photographer has agreed to allow the reproduction of the photo (which will be necessary to retouch or repair the photo). But of course the customer has no idea who the photographer at his parents' wedding was, or quickly hits a brick wall when attempting to track that person down."

These are "orphan works," copyrighted materials that lack any obvious way to find the rightsholder. But just going ahead and using the material can be risky; if a rightsholder shows up after your museum exhibition, documentary, or parents' wedding photographer is in the wild, he or she can seek massive statutory damages.

Orphan works legislation attempts to remedy this problem by allowing people to use material after a "good faith" search for the owner; it also creates electronic databases to make searching for owners easier. Should a rightsholder emerge, that person would be owed money but not massive damages.

The whole procedure worries some copyright owners like Nick Anderson, who does editorial cartoons for the Houston Chronicle. Anderson drew a not-for-publication-in-the-Chronicle cartoon of copyright being flushed down the toilet by an orphan works law to protest what he sees as a move to weaken the value of his portfolio.

"The legislation imposes new and onerous burdens on the current holders of copyrights to protect their work, while severely curtailing their ability to collect damage," he wrote on his blog. "It devalues their work in the marketplace and will open up a Pandora's box of potential infringement scenarios, all while placing the burden for policing the marketplace on artists and authors."

Digital technology is in part responsible for the proliferation of sounds and images without apparent copyright information. As Peters put it, "Digital technology has made it easier for a work or part of a work (such as a sound recording or a 'sample') to become separated from ownership or permissions information, whether by accident or through deeds of bad faith actors."

But the bill is sailing through Congress, which appears bent on trying to pass it before it expires when Congress recesses (probably in September or early October, this being an election year). Both Public Knowledge and Marybeth Peters support the bill, which in itself is something of a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence, and Senate and House representatives seem to feel the same way.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...find-home.html





BBC Sends Legal Threat Over Fan's Dr Who Knitting Patterns
Glyn

Mazz has been posting knitting patterns to help other people re-create characters from the cult series using only two sticks and ball of wool. Impressive? The BBC, producers of the series, didn't think so. They sent Mazz a letter, which states:

"We note that you are supplying DR WHO items, and using trade marks and copyright owned by BBC. You have not been given permission to use the DR WHO brand and we ask that you remove from your site any designs connected with DR WHO. Please reply acknowledging receipt of this email, and confirm that you will remove the DR WHO items as requested."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/09...egal-thre.html





Closing the Door to Microsoft Vista

A number of companies are opting not to embrace Redmond's latest operating system and, like GM, are waiting for Windows 7 instead
Aaron Ricadela

General Motors (GM) may take a detour around Vista, the latest computer operating system from Microsoft (MSFT). The automaker has encountered so many speed bumps getting Vista to work on its machines that it may just wait for the next version of Windows, due in 2010 or 2011. "We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7," says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen.

Vista taxes all but the most modern PCs with hefty processing and memory requirements. Many of GM's PCs can't even run the system. "By the time we'd replace them, Windows 7 might be ready anyway," Killeen says. Then there are compatibility problems with all the software that needs to run on Windows. GM's software vendors still haven't ensured all their programs will run on Vista trouble-free. So the company is sticking with Windows XP for now. Killeen figures GM could install Windows 7 in three or four years.

Equal Parts Rejection and Acceptance

Many of Killeen's counterparts across Corporate America are finding themselves similarly vexed by Vista. The resulting delay or rejection of Microsoft's flagship product is stepping up pressure on the company to expand other areas of its business, including online software. Vista was first released in late 2006, but the dismay with it has come into sharper focus as slower-than-expected uptake affects Microsoft's bottom line, Google (GOOG) spiffs up its own free versions of competing software, and corporate tech managers move to put more Apple Macs on employee desks (BusinessWeek, 5/1/08).

Microsoft says it has sold 140 million copies of Vista as of Mar. 31, about the same percentage of all PCs as ran Windows XP at this point in its lifetime. The 140 million includes consumers who have to take the latest version when they buy a new PC as well as businesses that are entitled to Vista rights under licensing agreements, regardless of whether they end up using the system widely.

Among corporate users, it's nothing new for companies like GM to skip releases of Windows, says Mike Nash, a corporate vice-president at Microsoft. He points to customers including Continental Airlines (CAL), Bank of America (BAC), Cerner (CERN), and Royal Dutch Shell, which are installing Vista on thousands of machines, as evidence of the system's acceptance. For their part, consumers are warming to the improved performance and availability of popular software such as Apple's (AAPL) iTunes and Intuit's (INTU) QuickBooks on Vista PCs. "We're seeing tremendous transition to Vista, particularly in the consumer space," Nash says.

Vista vs. Web-Delivered Software

Even as Vista catches on with some users, Microsoft recognizes the need to streamline Windows development as computer users increasingly turn to Web-delivered software, instead of regularly upgrading PCs to run the latest power-hungry programs. "The rush to get into a new product doesn't really exist like it used to," says Al Gillen, an analyst at market researcher IDC. "Killer applications that pull you forward are becoming fewer and further between."

Alaska Airlines (ALK) is among companies that see diminishing value in running the latest Microsoft desktop technology when so many applications are available via a Web browser. "There's no business value in us continuing to chase that upgrade cycle," says Senior Vice-President and CIO Bob Reeder. So as PCs need replacement, the airline buys Vista-equipped machines for its roughly 2,000 office workers from Dell (DELL), then exercises its right to downgrade the machines to XP. About 8,000 PCs used mostly by gate agents and airport crews run a variety of older Windows versions. Reeder says the company plans to skip Vista.

Waiting to Upgrade

Vista delivers security improvements over XP, but doesn't offer compelling features that users clamor for, analysts say. So as IT budgets stagnate or decline, the new operating system isn't winning the war for resources. "Vista doesn't look like a good expenditure of money," says an executive in charge of IT buying at a large engineering and construction firm, who wasn't authorized to speak about his company's purchasing. The IT department is concerned about the cost of new hardware that can run Vista, and the time it will take to move software.

Corporate technology managers and Vista users have pilloried the system for a host of other annoyances and incompatibilities (BusinessWeek, 1/23/08), and many are opting to put off Vista deployments—or forgo the software altogether. Just 7% to 8% of business PCs at clients of Gartner (IT) run the system, and many CIOs are asking for advice about how to skip it, according to the consulting company.

Transco Railway Products, a Chicago maker of railcar parts, may leapfrog Vista because it bought new computers just before the system's release, and probably won't replace them for another year and a half. "We'll probably wait for the next operating system," says Chris Kuersten, Transco's IT manager.

Vista and the Bottom Line

The lack of urgency for upgrading to Vista is starting to hurt Microsoft financially. After two quarters of strong growth, sales in the desktop Windows group, the company's most profitable, fell 2%, to $4.03 billion, during the fiscal third quarter, which ended Mar. 31, leading to an 11% drop in profits for the quarter (BusinessWeek.com, 4/25/08). Microsoft can't afford too many slips like that, since it uses Windows and Office profits to subsidize money-losing efforts including Internet advertising, where it lags Google. Microsoft will likely pour even more money into search engines, Web software, and online ad tools in the wake of its failed bid for Yahoo.

Brent Thill, software research director at Citigroup (C), says sales of Windows desktop products should increase 11%, to $4.2 billion, in the quarter that ends in June. But Vista adoption is still short of where Microsoft would like it to be—just 65% of Windows copies sold in the third quarter were Vista and about 35% were Windows XP. Microsoft wanted the number at 80%, according to Thill. "It's just not taking off," he says. Microsoft attributed the sales shortfall to a comparison with Vista's first quarter on the market, software piracy in China, and unsold PC inventory, but investors are looking for signs of deeper trouble. "Everyone's still scratching their heads, asking, 'Is there something else going on?'" he says.

A More-Modular Windows?

There's plenty afoot at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., where developers are hard at work on the next version of Windows. Executives aren't saying much about Windows 7, lest they risk being accused of overpromising and underdelivering again. However, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sworn the company would never again have a five-year gap between releases, like it did between XP and the oft-delayed Vista.

Chairman Bill Gates and others have hinted that Windows will become more modular (BusinessWeek.com, 1/30/07), letting Microsoft release portions of the product, including its Web browser, on a faster pace. And analysts say Microsoft will likely use virtual machine technology to run older programs, freeing Windows from the burden of having to support a slew of outmoded code, which could step up release dates.

There are other signs of change in Microsoft's approach to Windows. The company on Apr. 22 took its boldest step yet toward unifying its PC desktop franchise with the Web, announcing an online service called Live Mesh that lets users share files among their various PCs, and eventually mobile phones and Macs, within an online version of their desktop. The product, in test mode for now, illustrates Microsoft's strength at encouraging maverick groups—something it will need more of to take on Google and rewire Windows for the Web, says analyst Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group consultancy. "Live Mesh represents the company Microsoft is trying to become," Enderle says. "My hope is with Windows we'll see a lot more of the company they want to become."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...rss_topStories





Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children
Steve Lohr

After a years-long dispute, Microsoft and the computing and education project One Laptop Per Child said Thursday that they had reached an agreement to offer Windows on the organization’s computers.

Microsoft long resisted joining the ambitious project because its laptops used the Linux operating system, a freely distributed alternative to Windows.

The group’s small, sturdy laptops, designed for use by children in developing nations, have been hailed for their innovative design. But they are sold mainly to governments and education ministries, and initial sales were slow, partly because countries were reluctant to buy machines that did not run Windows, the dominant operating system.

Education ministries want low-cost computers to help further education, but many see familiarity with Windows-based computing as a marketable skill that can improve job prospects.

“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”

The XO laptop weighs 3.2 pounds and comes with a video camera, microphone, game-pad controller and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration. About 600,000 have been ordered since last fall, with Peru, Uruguay and Mexico making the largest commitments. The alliance between Microsoft and O.L.P.C. comes after long stretches of antagonism, punctuated by occasional talks, between them.

Mr. Negroponte, a former computer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a new-media pioneer, said he first talked to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, three years ago.

But at the time, Microsoft was fiercely opposed to anything that might promote the use of open-source software like Linux. Since then, Microsoft has become more comfortable in competing against Linux, at times running its products on the same machines in data centers, desktops and laptops, Mr. Negroponte noted.

Back then, he added, the nonprofit laptop project did not have a working machine.

Last year, Mr. Negroponte said, he contacted Mr. Gates again, and this time the Microsoft chairman was receptive. He instructed Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, to work out a deal with Mr. Negroponte. Those talks began in January in private meetings, when both men were attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“Customers have come to us and said they really like the XO laptop and they would like to see Windows on it,” said James Utzschneider, manager of Microsoft’s developing markets unit.

The first of the project’s child-friendly XO laptops running Windows XP will be tested next month in limited trials in four or five countries. Mr. Utzschneider declined to identify the countries, but he said XO laptops running Windows would be generally available by September.The pact with Microsoft is not an exclusive agreement. The Linux version will still be available, and the group will encourage outside software developers to create a version of the project’s educational software, called Sugar, that will run on Windows.

Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want models that can run both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said.

The laptops now cost about $200 each, and the project’s goal is to eventually bring the price down to about $100.

O.L.P.C. led the way in designing inexpensive laptops for children in poorer nations, but others have followed, notably Intel with its Classmate PC, which runs Windows and is $400 or less.

The project’s agreement with Microsoft involves no payment by the software giant, and Microsoft will not join One Laptop Per Child’s board. That contrasts with the approach of Intel, which joined the project last July, took a board seat and pledged an $18 million contribution — only to quit in January amid squabbling over Intel’s aggressive sales tactics with the Classmate PC.

Of the Microsoft arrangement, Mr. Negroponte said: “We’ve stayed very pure.”

But the alliance with Microsoft has created some turmoil within the project. Walter Bender, the president who oversaw software development, resigned last month. His departure, Mr. Negroponte said, was “a huge loss to O.L.P.C.”

Inside the project, there have been people who, Mr. Negroponte said, came to regard the use of open-source software as one of the project’s ends instead of its means.

“I think some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source,” Mr. Negroponte said.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Bender wrote that he left the project because he decided his efforts to develop and support the Sugar open-source learning software “would have more impact from outside of O.L.P.C. than from within.”

Outside the constraints of working on a single hardware platform, like the XO laptop, his work, he wrote, should “lead to a broader base, more options, and a better set of tools for children.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/te.../16laptop.html





'$100 Laptop' Platform Moves On
Jonathan Fildes

An independent effort to develop the software originally designed for the $100 laptop has been launched.

Sugar Labs will take the laptop's innovative interface, known as Sugar, to the "next level of usability and utility", according to its founders.

It is intended that the free software will be made available on other PCs, such as the popular Asus Eee.

The launch comes after the announcement that the group behind the $100 laptop has joined forces with Microsoft.

The deal means that One Laptop per Child (OLPC) will now offer the low cost laptops with Windows XP, as well as an open source alternative.

It will also continue to offer the Sugar educational interface that the new foundation intends to continue to develop.

"We will continue to work with OLPC but we will also work with other manufacturers," explained Sugar Labs founder Walter Bender.

"Hopefully it will mean that these ideas will get out there faster and to a broader community."

Divergent views

Until recently Mr Bender was second in command and the person who had been responsible for software and content on the XO, as the $100 laptop is known. He resigned in April.

"I didn't leave OLPC because of the Microsoft deal - it was a symptom rather than the cause," he told BBC News.

"I left OLPC because I think the most important thing it is doing is defining a learning ecosystem."

He said that over time his own views on how best to bring education to children in the developing world had diverged from those held by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte.

"One goal is to just maximise the number of laptops you get out to kids. And that is unequivocally Nicholas' goal."

But, he said, there was another approach.

"My approach is to demonstrate to the world a way to [deliver education] that is impactful and can scale but not be the one that necessarily does the delivering of the laptops.

"I felt that OLPC was moving very rapidly towards Nicholas' goal and my goal within the organisation was going to be more difficult to achieve."

Sweet work

Sugar is a user interface that allows children to collaborate even when working on different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together.

The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data.

"In order to provide a rich learning experience to as many of the world's children as possible, it is critical to not just provide computers to children, but to ensure that the software that runs on the computers maximizes the potential for engaging in activities that promote learning," said Mr Bender.

"By being independent of any specific hardware platform and by remaining dedicated to the principles of free and open source software, the Sugar platform ensures that others can develop diverse interfaces and applications for governments and schools to choose from."

Sugar Labs will work closely with developers from the open source community to develop the user interface for other computers and operating systems.

It has already been bundled with the most recent releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux operating systems.

OLPC has said it will also continue to develop Sugar through "third parties" and will develop a version for Windows XP, something that Mr Bender does not consider a priority.

"There's a lot of engineering and it is not clear that it's the best use of engineering resources at this moment," he explained.

However, he said, this did not mean that he did not support OLPC's activities.

"I want to make it clear that it is aligned with, rather than against, OLPC."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7405346.stm





Senators Ask FBI to Explain Flawed 'National Security Letter' to Internet Archive
Ryan Singel

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is asking FBI head Robert Mueller to explain why the feds sought records from the Internet Archive, a digital library, using a controversial administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which is intended for a communications service providers.

The Internet Archive, a digital library of the web and media, beat the November 26 NSL with the help of attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. In April, the FBI agreed to withdraw the request for records on a Internet Archive user and lift the gag order that typically attaches to such requests.

The six senators sent Mueller a letter Thursday, asking him to explain what happened and to find out if the FBI reported the incident to an oversight board as a possible violation of federal law.

The Internet Archive's case is only the third known legal challenge to NSLs, despite the fact that the the FBI issues tens of thousands a year -- more than 100,000 such letters were issued in 2004 and 2005 combined. But despite the lack of legal challenges from recipients at ISPs, telephone companies and credit bureaus, successive scathing reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General have found illegal letters and a willy-nilly culture within the bureau towards tracking their usage.

The tools are powerful because an FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can essentially self-issue the NSL to a credit bureau, ISP or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. Recipients may challenge the order in secret court proceedings, but are almost always barred for life from disclosing to anyone, including business partners and significant others, that they received such a letter.

Senator Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin), the only senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act that eased the usage of NSLs, signed the Thursday letter (.pdf), along with senators John Sununu (R-New Hampshire), Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) and Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska).

Specifically, they asked Mueller if the FBI actually believed that the Internet Archive was an communications service provider. If it were, FBI agents could get subscriber records using an NSL under the auspices of the Electronic Communications Protection Act. But if the Internet Archive is a library, that subpoena would be inapplicable and possibly illegal. That would mean that the NSL should be reported to the Intelligence Oversight Board as a possible violation of law.

The senators are asking Mueller if the Internet Archive subpoena actually was reported to the board.

That's a wise question to ask given that Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has reported that the FBI has been negligent and tardy in reporting possible violations of federal NSL power.

It also makes sense in light of an odd case of a withdrawn NSL to a university that was later used by Mueller to argue for expanded court-free subpoena powers. The FBI only reported that overreaching subpoena for medical records at the end of 2007 as the Inspector General was sniffing around the case.

THREAT LEVEL has its own sets of questions:

First -- In July 2007, FBI agents met with the Internet Archive's lawyers -- the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- to talk about getting information from the Archive. Some four months later, a seemingly totally deficient NSL was dropped on the Archive. It was signed not by the local Special Agent in Charge, but by Art Cummings, a top Justice Department counter-terrorism official.

Knowing that the Internet Archive is represented by lawyers who would jump at the chance to file a constitutional challenge to national security letters, wouldn't you think the FBI would take the four months between the initial meeting and the issuance of the letter to make sure the NSL complied with the law?

This seems especially odd given that in September 2007 -- two months prior -- the NSL statute had been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge because of the gag order -- a ruling that is currently under appeal by the feds.

Second, the NSL (.pdf) dropped on the Archive is now public, but curiously the boilerplate section of the letter that advises recipients on what kinds of things to search for and what counts as an electronic communication record is blacked out. The law isn't very clear on what that phrase means, but in other cases, is very specific about what is and is not covered under wiretapping rules. NSLs are not supposed to be used to get at the contents of a communication, though they can be used to get things like phone records.

Why does the FBI think that list of possible records should be secret? Does that list contain items that are actually content -- for instance, URLs visited by a person?

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Center for Democracy and Technology called today for new legislation to regulate National Security Letters, saying the FBI is clearly incapable of policing itself.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...rs-ask-fb.html





Air Force Aims for 'Full Control' of 'Any and All' Computers
Noah Shachtman

The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."

The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks. "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes. "Now, all you need is an Internet connection."

On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."

Unlike an Air Force colonel's proposal, to knock down enemy websites with military botnets, the Research Lab is encouraging a sneaky, "low and slow" approach. The preferred attack consists of lying quiet, and then "stealthily exfiltrat[ing] information" from adversaries' networks.

But, in the end, the Air Force wants to see all kinds of "techniques and technologies" to "Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, [or] Destroy" hostile systems. And "in addition to these main concepts," the Research Lab would like to see studies into "Proactive Botnet Defense Technology Development," the "reinvent[ion of] the network protocol stack" and new antennas, based on carbon nanotubes.

Traditionally, the military has been extremely reluctant to talk much about offensive operations online. Instead, the focus has normally been on protecting against electronic attacks. But in the last year or so, the tone has changed -- and become more bellicose. “Cyber, as a warfighting domain . . . like air, favors the offense,” said Lani Kass, a special assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff who previously headed up the service's Cyberspace Task Force. "If you’re defending in cyber, you’re already too late."

"We want to go in and knock them out in the first round," added Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, commander of the 8th Air Force, which focuses on network issues.

"An adversary needs to know that the U.S. possesses powerful hard and soft-kill (cyberwarfare) means for attacking adversary information and command and support systems at all levels," a recent Defense Department report notes. "Every potential adversary, from nation states to rogue individuals... should be compelled to consider... an attack on U.S. systems resulting in highly undesireable consequences to their own security."
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/0...rce-mater.html





NSA Attacks West Point! Relax, It's a Cyberwar Game
David Axe

Five hours into their assault on West Point, the hackers got serious.

The SQL [structured query language] inserts that came earlier were just pablum intended to lull the Army cadets into a false sense of security. But then the bad guys unleashed a stealthy kernel-level rootkit that burrowed into one workstation, started scraping data and "calling home."

It was a highly sophisticated attack, but this time the bad guys were really good guys in wolves' clothing.

For four days in late April, the National Security Agency -- the nation's most secretive repository of spooks, snoops and electronic eavesdroppers -- directed coordinated assaults on custom-built networks at seven of the nation's military academies, including West Point, the Army university 50 miles north of New York City.

It was all part of the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a training event for future military IT specialists. The exercise offered a rare window into the NSA's toolkit for infiltrating, corrupting or destroying computer networks.

The 34 Army cadets comprising the West Point IT team operated in a different kind of battlefield, but their combat skills and instincts need to be every bit as sharp. Like George Washington said: "There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy."

The SQL injections, targeting their Fedora Core 8 Web server, were a piece of cake for these IT combatants. Each injection tried to smuggle malicious code inside the seemingly harmless language used by the network’s MySQL software. The cadets handily defended with open source Apache web server modules, plus some manual tweaking of the SQL database to "avoid any surprises," in the words of Lt Col. Joe Adams, a West Point instructor who helped coach the team.

But the kernel-level rootkit was much more dangerous. This stealthy operating-system hijacker can open unseen "back doors" into even highly protected networks. When they detected the rootkit's "calls home" the cadets launched Sysinternal's security software to find the hijacker, then they manually scoured the workstation to find the unwelcome executable file.

Then they terminated it. With extreme prejudice.

"This was probably the most challenging part of the exercise, since it required them to use some advanced techniques to find the rootkit," Adams says. And rooting it out helped boost the West Point team to the top of the pile when, in the aftermath of the exercise, the referees rated all the universities' network defenses.

For the second year in a row, the Army placed first over the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and others, winning geek bragging rights and the privilege of holding onto a gaudy, 60-pound brass trophy festooned with bald eagles and American flags. Adams credits the team’s thorough preparation and their excellent teamwork despite the round-the-clock schedule.

At the network control room on the second floor of West Point’s 200-year-old engineering building (which once was an indoor horse corral and still smells like it in some remote corners, according to one instructor), the IT team set up cots and, just for the hell of it, camouflaged netting. They worked in shifts, with one team member always monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic. He or she would alert other cadets -- "router guys" -- to block any suspicious addresses. Meanwhile, off-shift cadets would make food and coffee runs to keep everyone fueled up and alert. Together, the team was "faster than anyone else," Adams says.

But the way the cadets designed their network was a big factor in their victory, too. The NSA dictated some terms: All networks had to be capable of e-mail, chat and other services and had to be up and running at all times despite any attacks or defensive measures. Beyond that, the teams were free to come up with their own designs.

West Point's took three weeks to build. The cadets settled on a fairly standard Linux and FreeBSD-based network with advanced routing techniques for steering incoming traffic in directions of the IT team's choosing.

The choices in software tools for responding to any attack really boiled down to "automatic" versus "custom," says Eric Dean, a civilian programmer and instructor. He adds that while automatic tools that do most of their own work are certainly easier, custom tools that allow more manual tweaking are more effective. "I expect one of the 'lessons learned' will be the use of custom tools instead of automatics."

Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones.

"One of the challenges was when they see a scan, deciding if this is it, or if it’s a cover," says Dean. Spotting "cover" attacks meant thinking like the NSA -- something Dean says the cadets did quite well. "I was surprised at their creativity."

Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network.

And despite the relative sophistication of the NSA's assaults, the agency told Wired.com that it had tailored its attacks to be just "a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones."

In other words, grasshopper, nice work -- but the NSA is capable of much craftier network take-downs.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...urrentPage=all





Estonian Cyber Defence Hub Set Up
BBC

Seven Nato nations have backed a new cyber defence centre in Estonia, which last year blamed Russia for weeks of attacks on its internet structure.

Germany, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy and Spain will staff and fund the hub in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

Estonia came under cyber attack in 2007 after its decision to remove the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from the centre of Tallinn.

Moscow denied involvement in the flood of data which crashed computers.

"We have seen in Estonia that a cyber attack can swiftly become an issue of national security," Nato spokesman James Appathurai said after a signing ceremony in Brussels.

"Cyber attacks can cripple societies."

The US will initially send an observer to the project, which will have some 30 staff when fully operational in August.

The centre will provide research, consultation and training on the development of cyber defences for participating national governments.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...pe/7401260.stm





Shape-Shifting Malware Hits the Web
Clement James

Security experts have warned that new developments in malware are allowing criminals to stay one step ahead of security software.

Marc Henauer, head of the cyber-crime division at the Swiss Justice and Police Department, said in an interview last week that viruses and other malware now have the capability to change their signature every few hours.

This means that the attackers are often one step ahead of protection software.

Geoff Sweeney, chief technology officer at Tier-3, a behavioural analysis IT security firm, echoed the remarks.

"Self-changing code designed to dynamically evade recognition is a fact of life," he said. "It automatically adapts to the anti-spam and anti-malware engines that it encounters."

Unfortunately the know-how and construction kits used to create this shape-shifting threat are now readily available and are unleashing a wave of malware based on social engineering techniques.

"Highly targeted emails containing personalised information and shape-shifting Trojan attachments are the latest development," said Sweeney.

"Each positive infection increases the 'hit rate' for the next wave of emails sent out by the self-learning automated engines used by sophisticated attackers."

Sweeney believes that a non rules-based monitoring process must be set up to defend all ingress and egress points covering SMTP, DNS, HTTP(s), IM etc.

"Once this is in place, defence against shape-shifting threats becomes possible as does the removal of any previously established covert data leakage channels that will be revealed and dealt with," he said.
http://itnews.com.au/News/76128,shap...s-the-web.aspx





RIPA Decryption Use Disclosed

The Home Office has disclosed police use of powers to demand the decryption of data or production of decryption keys. The powers, created as s53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), came into force on 1st October 2007. Since that date eight notices have been served, which with the following results:

• Compliance by recipient of notice, on two occasions;
• Refusal to comply and prosecution, on two occasions;
• Refusal to comply, and the authorities are still considering whether to prosecute, on two occasions;
• No information from the Home Office statement, the remaining two occasions.

None of these cases has yet come to court.

The Home Secretary stated that the four cases where the suspect refused to comply were in terrorism-related investigations; the Register reports that the other four cases were investigations for conspiracy to murder; withholding information in relation to conspiracy to murder; conspiracy to defraud; and making indecent images of children.
http://publicaffairs.linx.net/news/?p=756





Quantum Cryptography Not Yet Perfectly Secure, Researchers Say
Liz Tay

Quantum cryptography – commonly lauded as an absolutely secure avenue of data transfer – has been broken.

The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that state that quantum mechanical objects cannot be observed or manipulated without being disturbed.

In quantum cryptography, regular information is encrypted and decrypted with a quantum key. Any attempts to copy a quantum cryptographic key in transit will be noticeable as extra noise, and cause the communication to be aborted.

But a research team at Linköping University in Sweden claim that it is possible for an eavesdropper to extract the quantum cryptographic key without being discovered.

“We weren't expecting to find a problem in quantum cryptography, of course, but it is a really complicated system,” said Jan-Åke Larsson, an associate professor of Applied Mathematics at the University.

“The concern involves authentication, intended to secure that the message arriving is the same as the one that was sent,” he explained. “We have scrutinised the system as a whole and found that authentication does not work as intended.”

“The security of the current technology is not sufficient,” he said.

The currently-used Wegman-Carter authentication protocol requires users to share the key initially, before the quantum cryptographic channel is set up. This key is used to generate future quantum cryptographic keys.

By simultaneously manipulating the initial key and the regular message to be authenticated, an eavesdropper may compromise the security of quantum cryptographic authentication, the researchers suggest.

In a research paper, published in the International engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Larsson has proposed a change in the quantum cryptography process that he expects will restore the security of the technology.

The researchers propose an additional, non-quantum exchange of a small amount of random bits that are separate from the quantum key. The modification is not expected to produce noticeable degradations in the performance of a quantum cryptography system.

While the researchers note that it is difficult to exploit the recently-exposed security gap, Larsson recommends usage of the modification, or an equivalent extra security measure in quantum cryptography.

“With our alteration, quantum cryptography will be a secure technology,” he said.
http://itnews.com.au/News/75938,quan...chers-say.aspx





Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View
Stephen Shankland

Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.

Dealing with privacy--both legal requirements and social norms--is hard but necessary, Hanke said.

"It's a legitimate issue," he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, "It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out."

New jurisdictions, new rules

Street View poses other privacy issues besides just faces. Some people aren't eager to have their houses on display, for example. But much of the hubbub seems to have waned since Google launched Street View in May 2007, and indeed other companies such as Blue Dasher are working on similar technology.

Street View presents a view of dozens of United States cities from a driver's perspective (unless a plastic bag is stuck over the Street View camera). It appears Google has begun collecting imagery in Europe as well, along with detailed 3D maps, including Milan, Rome, and Paris.

A Pittsburg couple sued Google for allegedly photographing images on a private drive in April, but it's legal to take photos from public streets in the United States. However, standards vary.

"A just balance needs to be found between what can be publicized, in deference to the principles of freedom of expression and of information, and what has to be safeguarded from excessive public curiosity, so as to avoid infringing the individual's right to privacy and right to his or her picture," the French embassy observes.

Years of research

The face-blurring technology took a year to develop and is based on prior research that took several more years, Hanke said.

Face detection, which humans perform effortlessly with help from some dedicated neurons in the visual cortex, is a decades-old computer science problem. It's finally arriving in basic form in real-world applications, though, including digital cameras that use it to track and properly expose subjects or take a picture only when subjects are smiling.

There are some potential complications for Google Street View, though. False positives that blur billboards or works of art with faces could degrade Street View a bit, but missing some faces that are visible could pose privacy problems.

Google thinks its technology has struck the right technology balance in general.

"It does a good job of figuring that out. It uses a variety of technologies to filter," Hanke said, though it's "not perfect."

Many times computer algorithms struggle to recognize faces that aren't straightforward views. But that problem isn't as bad for Google: the faces that are obscured by hair, telephone poles, or oblique views are likely the ones identifiable already.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943140-7.html





Mormon Church Attempts to Gag Internet Over Handbook
WikiNews

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church or LDS Church. The infringement claim is in reference to a URL used as a source in a Wikinews article about Mormon Church documents leaked to the website Wikileaks, titled "Copy of handbook for leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obtained by Wikinews". The URL was originally cited as a link in the sources subsection of the article. The Wikimedia Foundation is a donor-supported non-profit organization which runs Wikipedia and Wikinews. This is the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim regarding an article published by Wikinews.

The Wikinews article, originally published on April 19, described material in the Church Handbook of Instructions. The work is a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. Wikinews obtained the Church Handbook of Instructions from Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because "...the book is strictly confidential among the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka LDS in short form) bishops and stake presidents and it reveals the procedure of handling confidential matters related to tithing payment, excommunication, baptism and doctrine teaching (indoctrination)."

The material was released on the Wikileaks website on April 16, and according to the site was first made available on the document sharing website Scribd. A message at Scribd now states: "This content was removed at the request of copyright agent B. S. Broadbent of the Intellectual Property Division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

On May 5, the Wikimedia Foundation received a copyright infringement claim from Intellectual Reserve, Inc., the legal entity that owns the intellectual property of the Mormon Church. The infringement claim is addressed to Jimmy Wales, the designated agent of the Wikimedia Foundation, and requests that access to the link to Wikileaks be removed. The link was removed from the article on May 5 by a Wikinews administrator, and the article remains available without the link. The infringement claim was sent by Berne S. Broadbent, president of Intellectual Reserve, Inc. and director of the Intellectual Property Division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to Mike Godwin, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the Mormon Church has not filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice with the foundation.

In 1999, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, prominent critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, released material from the Church Handbook of Instructions to the Internet through their organization Utah Lighthouse Ministry, without including the copyright notice of Intellectual Reserve, Inc. or obtaining permission from the church. The website of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry describes as its purpose: "...to document problems with the claims of Mormonism and compare LDS doctrines with Christianity." The Tanners had received a copy of the 1998 edition of Church Handbook of Instructions from an anonymous sender in October 1999. They published 17 pages of the 160-page handbook on the Utah Lighthouse Ministry website.

The church sent the Tanners a letter threatening a copyright infringement lawsuit if the material was not removed, and the Tanners removed the material from their site the same day, and posted the church's letter to their website. The website still contained links to other locations that had the material, and an article in the Salt Lake Tribune listed addresses of these links. The church sued the Tanners through its company Intellectual Reserve, in the 1999 case Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry.

The plaintiffs filed their complaint on October 13, 1999, and the United States district court issued a preliminary injunction on December 6, 1999 barring posting of the material by the defendants as well as posting links to other websites which contain the material. The New York Times and other news publications called the injunction a "chilling effect". In November 2002, the church dropped the lawsuit against Utah Lighthouse Ministry, on condition that the Tanners destroy all copies of the Church Handbook of Instructions, and not include more than 50 words at a time from the handbook in any of their future articles. ...

Wikileaks has received copyright infringement claims from organizations including the Church of Scientology's Religious Technology Center and the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, and the Chinese government attempts to censor every website with the word "wikileaks" in the web page address. Bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks after sending cease and desist letters in January 2008 which cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As a result of the lawsuit, the bank obtained an injunction preventing the site's domain name registrar from associating with Wikileaks, but this injunction was lifted in March 2008 and Bank Julius Baer dropped the case.

As of May 13 Wikileaks had not taken down the material on the Church Handbook of Instructions, and a second webpage at the site with a different version of the material was also still available. In a statement to Wikinews, a Wikileaks representative commented on the material hosted at the site: "WikiLeaks will not remove the handbooks, which are of substantial interest to current and former mormons [sic]. WikiLeaks will remain a place were [sic] people from around the world can safely reveal the truth."
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Mormon_Chu..._over_handbook





Most Chinese Say They Approve of Government Internet Control
Deborah Fallows

Many Americans assume that China's internet users are unhappy about their government's control of the internet, but a new survey finds most Chinese say they approve of internet regulation, especially by the government.

View PDF of Report

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/246...rt_display.asp





Chinese Internet Censorship: An Inside Look

Cisco, VPNs and other topics related to Internet access in China
Carolyn Duffy Marsan

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, has experienced "The Great Firewall of China" firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship, and he explained it in a recent article titled "The Connection Has Been Reset." We e-mailed Fallows questions about how the Chinese government controls Internet content available to its citizens, and here's what he had to say (Check out our slideshow on the 10 ways the Chinese Internet is different from yours).

You describe four blocking mechanisms that the Chinese government uses to prevent Internet users from viewing content considered harmful. How common is it for Chinese Internet users to experience these sorts of redirections, resets and time-out mechanisms? Can you describe your own Internet surfing experience in China?

If you work from a Chinese Internet cafe – which is still where the vast majority of Chinese Internet activity happens, since so few people have connected computers in their own homes – you experience all of these blocking mechanisms as a matter of course. In some places, like schools, the blocking can be much cruder and indiscriminate. For instance, I have been in several public schools where the "connected" Internet computers were prevented from using any search engine whatsoever. It can be surprisingly hard to get around the 'Net if you can't run any searches! In cafes and in most home connections, all the mechanisms I describe would prevail.

In some hotels and other buildings that cater to Western visitors, the controls may be somewhat relaxed. The authorities don't really care that much about what non-Chinese citizens are able to find. But from my apartments in first Shanghai and now Beijing, I was not able to reach a wide variety of sites – including, often, my own blog at the Atlantic – unless I connected through a VPN. As a matter of course I fire up my VPN at the start of any online session, not just for security but because otherwise I'll be blocked the first time I try a Wikipedia or Technorati link.

Your article says the Chinese Internet control system is constantly changing and that citizens don't know what is off-limits on any given day. Does that make the control system more or less effective in your opinion?

My friend Eamonn Fingleton, says in a new book about China (In the Jaws of the Dragon) that many kinds of government control in China are surprisingly effective precisely because they are so variable and unpredictable in the way they're enforced. Fingleton uses the term "selective enforcement" to describe this process; some Chinese people refer to it by a Chinese saying that boils down to, "One eye open, one eye shut." The idea is that if you're never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly.

When it comes to the Internet, this haziness about just what is and is not permissible has two implications. At a purely technical level, it makes it harder to reverse-engineer the firewall's filters. One day, you can reach all pages at the BBC. The next day they're blocked. If you're trying to game out the system, you're stymied. And at a social level, it makes it hard for people to be sure that they're ever operating in a truly safe zone, since the rules of enforcement might shift tomorrow.

Which is worse: the Chinese government's Internet control system or the censorship systems used by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Singapore? Why?

Well, I don't like to use terms like "worse" in this situation. I will say that China's approach is less transparent. According to Andrew Lih, whom I quote in the story, when filters in the UAE or Singapore block a transmission, they tell you that, right in your face. When you can't reach a site from a computer in China, you're never quite sure what's happened. Is the problem with your ISP? With the site itself? Or is the firewall? You never know for sure.

Are average Chinese Internet users afraid of the government's Internet control system?

No. To begin with, not that many of them are even aware of it. The government discourages upfront discussion of the Great Firewall's existence, what sites or search terms are forbidden, etc. Moreover, to the extent people are aware of it, indications are that they are hardly up in arms. My wife, Deborah Fallows, represents the Pew Internet project in China. In March of this year she released a study showing that a strong majority of Chinese Internet users welcomed the idea of controls over Web content and thought it was only natural that the government would do the controlling. This is a startling concept to many Westerners, but she explains the logic of it here.

Many U.S. organizations -- like libraries and schools -- use similar blocking methods as the Chinese government to prevent users from going to pornography, gambling or hate speech sites. For example, when a student at my daughter's school was arrested for having a gun in his car, her school blocked access to the media coverage of the incident from the school's computers. Why is the Chinese Internet control system so objectionable?

"Objectionable" is your word, not mine. The point I would make is that it is much more thorough-going. In all matters of expression and inquiry in the United States, the default assumption is that people should be able to read or write whatever they want. The exceptions requiring control, like those you mention, are just that: exceptions. For instance: schoolchildren are exceptional cases, for obvious reasons; and public libraries could also be exceptions, for reasons of public decorum. In China, there is no such default assumption about individuals' presumed right to see, read or say whatever they want. That's the difference.

You mention two exceptions to the Chinese Internet control system: VPNs and proxies. Obviously, the Chinese can't shut down the VPNs or foreign businesses wouldn't operate in the country. Why don't they shut down proxies?

There is a bigger point here, which I think would surprise most Westerners who have not spent time in China: As a rule, the Chinese Communist Party is surprisingly selective in the repression and control it exercises within the country. In certain areas – "splittist" discussions like those about Tibet or Taiwan, challenges to Communist Party legitimacy, a few others – it tolerates no deviation at all and cracks down immediately. But in many others it tries to be only as repressive as it has to be. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. That is, it has some awareness of not needlessly antagonizing the population. When it comes to the Internet, this principle also applies. If it absolutely shut down VPNs and proxies, it would probably create more problems for itself, a lot more backlash and trouble, than it would avoid. So as long as VPN and proxy use by ordinary Chinese people remains relatively low, it's not worth the bother to close them down.

Does the Chinese government's Internet censorship strategy work at keeping online information "wholesome?" For example, is there less pornography available online to Chinese Internet users than there is elsewhere?

The "wholesomeness" of what is on the Internet is a big issue in public discussions of 'Net policy. Concern about sexual predators -- and even more basically about "addiction" to online games – comes up in the papers and generally builds public support for controls on the Internet. I am sure people looking for pornography can find it here as anyplace else, but it's less obviously on display in China (online and real-world) than a lot of other places.

In reading your article, it seems to me that the Chinese Internet control system is actually quite brilliant because it succeeds in making, as you point out, "the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother." Isn't it really up to the Chinese citizens themselves to care enough to get around the Internet control system? Do you see indications that they are trying to do that?

I agree that the system is quite impressive on its own terms. At least for now, it seems to have figured out the way to get maximum possible "benefits," in terms of limiting disruptive discussion or information, without having maximum oppressiveness or crudeness. Westerners do wonder why the Chinese public doesn't rise up to seek maximum freedom of information on its own. Part of the answers might be found in the Pew study, mentioned above. But at a more basic level, as one person I quoted in the article pointed out: Right now, even with the controls, more Chinese people have more access to more and freer information than has ever been true in the country's very long history. So for now it's understandable that more of them are thinking about what they can find than what they can't.

Cisco says it sold China the same mirroring routers that it makes available to any organization that needs to monitor Internet usage by its employees. If that's true, why should Cisco be criticized more than any other network vendor that sells gear to the Chinese?

This was a minor, passing point in my article, which reflected the fact that I had not done serious independent reporting on the question. What I can do is convey the prevailing view on the question among the Chinese net-cognoscenti. From this perspective, Cisco did a favor to the Chinese government several years ago by selling them the mirroring routers on which the Great Firewall is based, at a time when Chinese authorities could not easily have produced the systems on their own. The likely use of the routers was well understood – and it should be obvious why selling them to a government which intends to monitor its citizens is different from selling them to some company that wants to monitor its employees. But whatever the merits of the argument back then, the entire question is now moot. The Chinese authorities could buy the necessary routers from a variety of sources – notably from the homegrown firm Huawei. So, really few people here spend much time worrying about Cisco’s role anymore.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...-internet.html





Syrian Blogger Sentenced to Three Years in Jail
AP

A human rights group says a 24-year-old Syrian blogger has been convicted and sentenced to three years in prison on charges of undermining the prestige of the state and weakening national morale.

In a statement sent to The Associated Press on Wednesday, The National Organization for Human Rights in Syria condemned the verdict issued the day before as "outrageous" and called for Tarek Bayassi's immediate release.

The rights group says Bayassi's sentence was commuted to three years after an original sentence of six years. Bayassi was arrested last May in northwest Syria for surfing sites of Syrian opposition groups and posting comments online.

The Syrian government frequently arrests activists for posting comments critical of the government online.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...ia-Blogger.php





US Closes European Web Sites Promoting Tourism to Cuba

The U.S. government has closed down a number of Internet web sites operating from Spain, which belong to a British citizen resident in that country and are promoting tourism, as reported in the Madrid Público newspaper.

The measures were taken against Steve Marshall, a Briton resident in Tenerife since 1986 and the owner of a travel agency, for which he runs a number of web pages on culture and tourism in Cuba.

According to the report, last October Washington ordered the U.S. server eNom to close down those sites, using the laws of the blockade of Cuba in place for nearly 50 years.

It adds that the U.S. Treasury Department has stated that Marshall’s Internet addresses, in the main tourist guides, have been included on a blacklist for having commercial links with Cuba.

Marshall took his case to the relevant agencies of the European Union (EU), but they have stated that they are unable to do anything, despite him being a British citizen operating from a EU country with European clients.

The EU Commission justified its inability to act by using the argument that the company owning the webs is legally based in the British Virgin Islands, a territory outside of the EU’s remit.

Marshall has been advised by the EU to present a claim for damages via his Spanish company or to ask the UK government to intercede with Washington on his behalf so that he can transfer his web pages to a European server.
Translated by Granma International
http://www.periodico26.cu/english/co...ses051308.html





New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends
Vauhini Vara

If you are still relying on Google to snoop on your friends, you are behind the curve.

Armed with new and established Web sites, people are uncovering surprising details about colleagues, lovers and strangers that often don't turn up in a simple Internet search. Though none of these sites can reveal anything that isn't already available publicly, they can make it much easier to find. And most of them are free.

Zaba Inc.'s ZabaSearch.com turns up public records such as criminal history and birthdates. Spock Networks Inc.'s Spock.com and Wink Technologies Inc.'s Wink.com are "people-search engines" that specialize in digging up personal pages, such as social-networking profiles, buried deep in the Web. Spokeo.com is a search site operated by Spokeo Inc., a startup that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites. Zillow Inc.'s Zillow.com estimates the value of people's homes, while the Huffington Post's Fundrace feature tracks their campaign donations. Jigsaw Data Corp.'s Jigsaw.com, meanwhile, lets people share details with each other from business cards they've collected -- a sort of gray market for Rolodex data.

Some people have come across dirt on their loved ones without even looking for it. Doug Orlyk, a 42-year-old librarian in Bensenville, Ill., recently turned to ZabaSearch to find his new boyfriend's address so that he could send him a card. Instead, he found out that the boyfriend had been lying about his age -- he was 43 years old, not 35 as he had claimed to be on the dating site where Mr. Orlyk had met him. "I thought, 'You're a liar! You're older than I am!,'" Mr. Orlyk recalls. His new relationship ended soon thereafter.

Others rely on the Web to gather information on the job. Art Feagles, a technology specialist at the Cate School, a private high school in Carpinteria, Calif., runs the computer system for the alumni and development office. But his colleagues, who fund-raise for the school, keep tapping him for another tech skill: researching potential donors online.

Last year, for example, Mr. Feagles wanted to learn more about a potential donor by using the person's address. So he searched for it in Google Inc.'s Google Earth aerial-mapping program, and saw that the address was for a golf-course condominium. From that, he gathered that this was probably a second home, and therefore the person must be rich -- and a good prospect for a donation.

The Web sites, for their part, say they're merely trying to provide services that people will find useful and entertaining. Ray Chen, a cofounder of Spokeo, says he and his partners "don't want to stalk people." Instead, he says, "we're just trying to make something that's fun to use." Zaba CEO Nick Matzorkis says the dissemination of public information online is "a 21st century reality with or without ZabaSearch."

Larry Yu, a Google spokesman, says the use of Google Earth and Maps to glean personal information about others "is not the intent of the products." He touts their other uses, such as helping users visualize driving directions.

Many online sleuths start by signing up for an account on social-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and News Corp.'s MySpace, where they can search for individuals by name. (News Corp. is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.) An acquaintance's home address can be dug up using ZabaSearch or another public-records search engine; that can then be plugged into Google Maps, where the Street View feature might show an image of the address from the street, or Zillow, which can estimate the value of the home. Those trying to make a business contact might try Jigsaw, which invites users to provide phone numbers, email addresses, job titles and other information from business cards they've collected.

Some popular Web sites make certain content visible to the public by default -- for instance, photos stored on Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service Flickr, favorite online bookmarks on Yahoo's del.icio.us service and wish lists on Amazon.com. If you enter your email address and password into Spokeo.com, the site will build a list of the people on your email-contact lists. Then it tracks those contacts' activities on Web sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon, MySpace and online-radio service Pandora Media Inc., sometimes turning up surprising material, from family albums to embarrassing shopping lists.

The bad news, for those who find themselves targeted by snoops: There is no foolproof way to protect yourself from embarrassing personal-data leaks. But you can avoid many mishaps by going to the root of the leak -- that is, by keeping individual pieces of personal data from being made public in the first place. If you don't want people to find your address online, for example, don't list it in local phone books, which often provide data to online address-search services. If you don't want others to see your Amazon wish list or the photos you've stored on Flickr, visit those sites' privacy pages and adjust your settings accordingly.

Some sites use the ability to snoop as a selling point. The Huffington Post's Fundrace feature, which allows users to enter their addresses and see a map showing their neighbors' political donations, uses this come-on: "Want to know ... whether that new guy you're seeing is actually a Republican or just dresses like one?"

Other sites make it easy to accidentally expose embarrassing details about yourself. Amazon's wish-list feature, for example, lets people create public lists of items they want to buy. Says Amazon spokesman Craig Berman, "We make it really clear that these lists are public and searchable." But some people use the feature as a quasi-private things-to-buy-myself list.

Ruth Funabiki, a 57-year-old law librarian in Moscow, Idaho, recently discovered through Spokeo that a friend added something unusual to her wish list on Amazon.com: one of those disposable pads that protects mattresses from bedwetters. "There's a voyeuristic aspect to it," she says. "I'm embarrassed. I shouldn't be looking."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article....html?mod=blog





Almost Arrested for Taking Photos at Union Station
Andy Carvin

As some of you may know, I've been testing out a Gigapan panorama photo system over the last week, after I received a loaner of their robotic camera mount from Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab. I brought it in to NPR to demonstrate it to colleagues and go on a photo safari to photograph the architecture at Union Station. Apparently, as far as Union Station's security operations are concerned, that's a criminal offense, since we nearly got arrested.

Earlier in the day, I did a brief demo of the Gigapan on the NPR roof. My NPR colleague Wright Bryan expressed interest in watching it in action elsewhere, so I offered to join him for a trip to Union Station, since it has some of the most beautiful architecture in the city. (Our photo editor was going to join us as well, but changed her mind at the last minute.)

We arrived at Union Station just before 4:30pm, where we set up the tripod and the camera at the western end of the main hall. I set the Gigapan to take a 180-degree sweep facing east, which took about 15 minutes to complete. We stood around chatting with passers-by, and were eventually joined by a journalist colleague of Wright's, who was visiting DC for a few days.

About halfway into the panorama, a security guard approached us and asked if we were taking pictures. We said yes, we were, to which she responded "okay" and left. She expressed no concern about our activities and didn't communicate anything with us otherwise.

After the panorama was complete, we relocated to the center of the main hall and proceeded to start the process of taking a 360-degree panorama. Since this would involve around 200 separate photos, it meant we got to stand around for at least 20 minutes. Wright's friend took a few pictures of us posing with the Gigapan, as commuters went about their business, a few giving us quizzical smiles.

Then the security guard returned. She informed us that we would have to cease taking pictures immediately and leave. I asked what the problem was, and she said that this is a private space, and we didn't have permission from management to take pictures. I told her that we were testing equipment for potential use by NPR, showed them our press passes, and noted there were plenty of other people walking around with cameras. She seemed sympathetic to our position, but said she was relaying orders she'd received from someone higher up. I asked if we could speak with them, then twittered it:

Just got told by security to leave. Asked to speak with a supervisor to explain why we can't take pictures at union station.

Soon a second security guard arrived; he said he wasn't a supervisor. He reiterated that we had to stop taking pictures and leave, or we would face arrest. I said we wanted to speak with a supervisor before we would comply. Again, I twittered.

Being asked to leave union station. Still asking to see supervisor.

By now a third security guard arrived. He noticed that the camera was still taking pictures. Not only did he ask us to stop immediately, he told us to erase the pictures, particularly any photos that might include images of them. The first guard repeated his demand we erase the pictures. We refused. The twittering
continued.

Union Station security official saying we'll be arrested if we don't comply. Also told to erase pics of security guards.

Throughout the conversation, which I should point out was conducted in a cordial, but firm tone, we received mixed messages from the security guards. One told us the problem was that we were using a tripod, while another insisted it was because we had "that thing" on top of our tripod. They then changed the story again, and said that journalists couldn't take pictures without permission from management, and that Union Station is a private space run by a private company, not a public space. They never gave us an answer as to why we were first allowed to take photos in the first location, but could not do the same here.
Contradictory messages. First they say tripod is problem, then the gigapan. Either way, cease or be arrested.

I debated them, telling them the story of the security guards who tried to prevent someone from photographing downtown Silver Spring by arguing it was a private space controlled by a private corporation, but was eventually overruled by local officials after much public lambasting. Their reaction was that they were just following orders. I said I wouldn't leave the premise until someone would go on record as to why we were being stopped, and would supply their name as well.

Meanwhile, the Gigapan continued to take photos. They'd ruined the panorama, of course; the first guard got in front of the camera at one point and obstructed the view. They reiterated that we were going to be arrested, so I finally tried to shut off the camera. But the damn thing wouldn't stop taking pictures. It never occurred to me that I'd have to learn how to abort a panorama under pain of arrest, so I fumbled for about a minute as it kept shooting pictures. (I think I heard Wright laughing at this point.)

I managed to shut the camera, and started to disassemble the Gigapan from the tripod as a fourth security person arrived. He was dressed differently than the other three people, and had a former-marine-turned-middle-management air about him. I twittered as he spoke:
Official saying Union Station is a private space, no right to photograph without approval.

I asked for his business card and he handed it to me: Robert H. Mangiante, Assistant Director, IPC International Corporation. He then summed up the situation: pack up your gear and leave now, or we'll arrest you. It's our choice. Our gear was already packed up at this point, and Wright and his friend had an event at the National Press Club anyway, so that was that. The Gigapan went into my backpack, I folded the tripod and we went our separate ways.

I'm still trying to sort out the incident. While I have no doubt that Union Station is managed by a private company, I think it's hard for them to argue it's a private space, and that journalists cannot take photographs there without permission. Granted, it's not a public street like the Silver Spring incident, but the situation is otherwise similar. I also question their right to demand that we erase photos, and am puzzled by the capriciousness of their overall position, given how they first allowed us to take photos but then changed their minds, offering mixed messages as to why.

What do you think? Were we within our rights or not? -andy

PS - Take a close look at the high-res version of the picture. You can make out the first security guard standing in front of the camera at one point, as the second one approaches from behind her, just to her right.
http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2...os_at_uni.html





Jury Clears Photographer Who Refused to Stop Photographing an Arrest
Thomas Hawk

I was pleased today to see an article about photographer Nick Adams being cleared by a Galveston jury of misdemeanor charges of interfering with police while photographing an arrest at a Mardi Gras celebration in 2007.

While I'm amazed that any prosecutor would actually take this kind of a case to trial (in this case prosecutor April Powers), I'm pleased that a jury had the common sense to dismiss the charges.

In this case Galveston police charged that Adams had entered their roped off perimeter in order to get his shots which resulted in the arrest and charges.

Conveniently, and not surprising to me, police deleted some of Adam's photos while they had him in custody which would have proved he was outside the perimeter established by the police. According to Adams' defense attorney, the digital index from his camera showed that these photos were deleted.

Personally I'd like to see these cops punished for deleting someone's digital camera photos while he was in custody and for arresting him in the first place.

Police brutality is a fact of life. While I believe the overwhelming majority of cops are good cops and have many friends and family who are cops, history has shown that there are still plenty of bad apples out there.

In a world where Rodney King can be half beaten to death by police officers, our right to be able to document police activity is a fundamental protection against police brutality.

When cops, who are trusted with extraordinary powers of authority, try to silence photographers this is a terrible affront on a free press and a free society.

I hope at minimum that Adams files a civil suit against the Galveston Police Department and that they end up paying monetarily for the bad behavior of the officers in question. Police need to be sent a message that they cannot abuse photographers and get away with it.

Last month two brothers who sued Harris County were awarded almost $2 million after they were wrongfully arrested for videotaping a drug raid on a neighbors home. Their case also resulted in the resignation of former Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal when their suit brought forward racist and pornographic emails on his computer.
http://thomashawk.com/2008/05/jury-c...efused-to.html

Jury clears former Galveston photographer | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle





Popular Game Grand Theft Auto IV Hit By Hackers
Desire Athow

Computer hackers have targeted Grand Theft Auto IV to spread destructive viruses across the world wide web, a leading software security expert revealed today.

The cyber criminals are tempting fans by illegally offering free downloads for bogus versions of the hit game for their PCs.

One specialist detected “Trojan” viruses aimed at the game, which sold six million copies in its first week, within two minutes of logging on.

John Safa, chief technical officer of software security company DriveSentry, said: “People are exploiting the popularity of Grand Theft Auto IV in a way which could bring mayhem to the internet.

“The only thing that many gamers can think of at the moment is Grand Theft Auto IV and hackers are using that interest to try to generate chaos as quickly as they can.”

Enthusiasts are being offered free Grand Theft Auto IV downloads and plug-ins on so-called peer-to-peer networks, where computer users share information without having to go through a central server or website.

Safa, a former hacker, said many young people use these networks to access each other's computers to download files for free and avoid copyright laws.

He found evidence of Trojans – programs that gain backdoor access to a user’s system to steal personal data – just two minutes after logging onto the popular Limewire network.

He said: “Hackers are bombarding the internet with viruses on file-sharing networks.

“While surfing on Limewire, I found a file claiming to offer a program for the XBOX 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV that actually contained malware named Trojan Downloader.Win32.VB.dck.

“Such computer viruses have the potential to wipe out or steal sensitive information such as a user’s bank details or wipe out important files. Some of these links were offering free downloads for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV even though it is not available yet.

“I would urge anybody to tread very carefully around these links, as some links are designed to look official – or even better invest in a good anti-virus package that is capable of protection from the latest threats for their computer.”

Safa, whose antivirus and internet security company has just detected its one millionth computer virus, said that hackers were attempting to deliberately infect machines with similar tactics aimed at the last version of the game in 2005. Then, users were hit after scouring the internet for a program to find interactive sex scenes for the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas version.

He said: “Hackers are increasingly sophisticated in the way they disrupt the web. They will piggyback on anything popular to wreak havoc.”
http://www.security.itproportal.com/...v-hit-hackers/





Radio Tags Raise Concern About Personal ID Theft

Chip technology proliferating in everyday devices
Liz F. Kay

Don't take a hammer to your new U.S. passport. And don't drill a hole in that credit card or zap it in the microwave.

Experts say these measures - recommended on some Web sites as ways to safeguard privacy and security - aren't necessary for people concerned about the growing prevalence of radio frequency identification tags.

The tiny silicon chips are embedded in credit cards, passports and other everyday items and can transmit data about where you go, what you buy and even who you are.

The devices include "smart" car keys, the no-swipe credit card on your key ring, the E-ZPass transponder on your windshield, the prescription bottle in your medicine cabinet, the shirt you buy at the mall and even the soles of your shoes.

The technology - originally designed to track cattle - now speeds up retail transactions, helps authorities confiscate pirated merchandise, identifies company employees, opens electronic locks and tracks shipments of goods through warehouses and stores.

Analysts estimate that RFID tag sales will reach more than $2.3 billion this year - mostly in automotive, security and financial applications.

Potential for abuse

But as RFID technology spreads and grows less expensive, critics say the tags and the signals they emit are likely to be abused by people who would spy on your movements, steal your identity or even target you in a terrorist attack.

The concern has led to some paranoia - and Web sites full of bizarre advice on avoiding RFID snoops. But authorities are beginning to listen to RFID's serious critics.

The U.S. State Department, for example, incorporated metal shielding into the covers of new passports after critics demonstrated how information from the RFID tags embedded in the documents could be read clandestinely from a distance.

Last year, California legislators enacted a law prohibiting employers from requiring employees to implant RFID tags in their bodies.

They and lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states were spurred into action by an Ohio company that tagged employees who worked with confidential documents - voluntarily, according to news reports.

But the real problem, critics say, is that RFID tracking is virtually invisible and undetectable by its subjects.

"A lot of this is done not only without the consumer's knowledge - it's beyond the grasp of most consumers how it works. Non-technical people don't know what the risks are. They just want to buy things and have their privacy and credit card numbers protected," said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor who worked with Massachusetts researchers to crack the encryption scheme of the Exxon Mobil Speedpass in 2005.

Although he and many other computer security specialists say they don't believe the tags pose a serious threat today, they are concerned about the future.

"You can look at this at two different levels - whether it's worthwhile for you as an individual to fuss with wrapping your cards in some sort of sleeve, or looking at the systemic issue: how we got to a point where these cards do make this information available remotely," said Edward W. Felton, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, whose graduate students became famous for penetrating the security of electronic voting machines.

RFID chips are encoded with digital information that could, for example, be the inventory number for a pair of jeans, a credit card number, an employee ID or driver's license data, medical records or passport information.

Counter-RFID industry

When an RFID reader sends out an electromagnetic query, the RFID chip transmits the information. While the industry is selling RFID applications as diverse as radio dog collars and fitness monitors, the technology also has spawned a tiny counter-industry of companies that produce metal-lined wallets, passport sleeves and other devices to shield RFID-enabled documents and credit cards.

There are Web sites that hawk anti-RFID T-shirts and other paraphernalia.

Even vocal RFID critics say the problem hasn't reached a crisis level.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, said people who raise the alarm realize how it would have felt to warn the public about air pollution the day the Model T was introduced.

The EFF has opposed use of the technology on several fronts. And as a parent, Tien spoke against a proposal for an enhanced California driver's license that could broadcast the name, address, height and weight of drivers - such as his 16-year-old daughter.

But he doesn't oppose the technology itself. "I would honestly have no problem using RFID devices if I knew I could control who was going to read them," Tien said.

Dan Mullen, president of AIM Global, a trade association representing RFID and other data collection technology manufacturers, says that most RFID tags don't contain personal information.

Even if they do, he said, personal data might be safer there than on a retailer's computer systems - given highly publicized breaches of those servers during the past few years.

"If somebody is looking to steal personal information, there are probably richer sources" than RFID tags, he said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring
Gretel C. Kovach

Jaime Pacheco rolled out of bed at dawn last week to the blaring chorus of two alarms. Then Jaime, a 15-year-old high school freshman, smoothed his striped comforter, dumped two scoops of kibble for the dogs out back and strapped a G.P.S. monitor to his belt.

By 7:15, Jaime was in the passenger seat of his grandmother’s sport-utility vehicle, holding the little black monitor out the window for the satellite to register. A few miles down the road, at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas, he got out of the car, said goodbye to his grandmother and paused to press a button on the unit three times. A green light flashed, and then Jaime headed for the cafeteria with plenty of time before the morning bell.

It was not always like this. Jaime used to snooze until 2 p.m. before strolling into school. He fell so far behind that he is failing most of his classes and school officials sent him to truancy court.

Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global Positioning System unit April 1, he has had perfect attendance.

“I’m just glad they didn’t take him to jail,” said Jaime’s grandmother Diana Mendez, who raised him. “He’s a good kid. He was just on a crooked path.”

Educators are struggling to meet stricter state and federal mandates, including those of the No Child Left Behind Act, on attendance and graduation rates. The Dallas school system, which, like other large districts, has found it difficult to manage the large numbers of truant students, is among the first in the nation to experiment with the electronic monitoring.

“Ten years ago the issue of truancy just slid by,” said Jay Smink, executive director of the National Dropout Prevention Center. “Now the regulations are forcing them to adhere to the policies.”

Nearly one-third of American students drop out of school, and Dallas has the seventh-worst graduation rate among large school districts, according to a study released in April by America’s Promise Alliance, founded by Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.

At Bryan Adams, 9 of the more than 300 students sent to truancy court this year are enrolled in the six-week pilot program. The effort is financed by a $26,000 grant from Bruce Leadbetter, an equity investor who supports the program’s goals. The bulk of the money pays the salary of a full-time case manager, who monitors the students and works with parents and teachers.

“I can’t do anything with them if they don’t come to school,” said Cynthia Goodsell, the principal at Bryan Adams.

Kyle Ross, who runs the in-school suspension program at Bryan Adams, was skeptical of the electronic monitoring until he saw that it worked. “We’re always yearning for something tangible to use as tools to teach self-efficacy,” Mr. Ross said. “Everyone’s so overwhelmed. We’ll try anything.”

Dallas’s experiments in tracking truancy started three years ago. Last year, case managers used a G.P.S. system to locate a truant student on the verge of overdosing on drugs, and they discovered that a student had skipped school because he was contemplating suicide.

Ricardo Pacheco, 18, who is no relation to Jaime, said electronic monitoring had helped him get on track last year, despite advice from his friends to “just yank it off.”

“It was easier to come to school each day, stay out of the streets and be home every night,” said Mr. Pacheco, a father of two young children and a former gang leader. Now he is about to become the first male from his father’s side of the family to graduate.

“They all dropped out or are in jail,” Mr. Pacheco said.

Paul Pottinger, the chief executive of the company marketing the truancy monitoring system being tested in Dallas, said, “With location verification, they can’t sneak through it, they can’t game it like they can game their parents and game their teachers and game their friends.”

Across the state, in Midland, county justice officials started using electronic ankle monitors last summer to track about 14 of the most chronically truant students. The officials hope to double the number of students monitored next year.

Truancy experts say the results in Texas are promising.

“It’s far better than locking a kid up,” and is cheaper, said Joanna Heilbrunn, a senior researcher for the National Center for School Engagement.

But the future of the Dallas program is uncertain. Mr. Pottinger’s company, the Center for Criminal Justice Solutions, is seeking $365,000 from the county to expand the program beyond Bryan Adams. But the effort has met with political opposition after a state senator complained that ankle cuffs used in an earlier version were reminiscent of slave chains.

Dave Leis, a spokesman for NovaTracker, which makes the system used in Dallas, said electronic monitoring did not have to be punitive. “You can paint this thing as either Big Brother, or this is a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate.”

Jaime said he did not mind carrying the tracker.

“I’m actually happy about it, that I get another chance to do my work and catch up,” he said. “I never saw myself getting held back a grade.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/ed.../12dallas.html





Woman Indicted in Missouri MySpace Suicide Case
Linda Deutsch

A Missouri woman was indicted Thursday for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis, who allegedly helped create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn't exist to convince Megan Meier she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, was charged with conspiracy and fraudulently gaining access to someone else's computer.

Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006, allegedly after receiving a dozen or more cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

"The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses," Hernandez said. "Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.

Her attorney, Jim Briscoe, did not immediately return messages seeking comment on Thursday.

A man who opened the door at the Drew family home in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., on Thursday said the family had no comment.

Megan's mother, Tina Meier, told The Associated Press she believed media reports and public outrage helped move the case forward for prosecution.

"I'm thrilled that this woman is going to face charges that she has needed to face since the day we found out what was going on, and since the day she decided to be a part of this entire ridiculous stunt," she said.

Megan's father, Ron Meier, 38, said he began to cry "tears of joy" when he heard of the indictment. The parents are now separated, which Tina Meier has said stemmed from the circumstances of their daughter's death.

Tina Meier has acknowledged Megan was too young to have a MySpace account under the Web site's guidelines, but she said she had been able to closely monitor the account. Meier's family has also acknowledged that Megan was also sending mean messages before her death.

Megan was being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression, her family has said. Meier has said Drew knew Megan was on medication.

MySpace issued a statement saying it "does not tolerate cyberbullying" and was cooperating fully with the U.S. attorney.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.

"This was a tragedy that did not have to happen," O'Brien said at a Los Angeles press conference.

Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.

MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp. The indictment noted that MySpace computer servers are located in Los Angeles County.

Due to juvenile privacy rules, the U.S. attorney's office said, the indictment refers to the girl as M.T.M.

FBI agents in St. Louis and Los Angeles investigated the case, Hernandez said.

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

The indictment says MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information they know to be false or misleading; soliciting personal information from anyone under age 18 and not using information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse or harm other people."

Drew and others who were not named conspired to violate the service terms from about September 2006 to mid-October that year, according to the indictment. It alleges they registered as a MySpace member under a phony name and used the account to obtain information on the girl.

Drew and her coconspirators "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member," the indictment charged.

The indictment contends they committed or aided in a dozen "overt acts" that were illegal, including using a photograph of a boy that was posted without his knowledge or permission.

They used "Josh" to flirt with Megan, telling her she was "sexi," the indictment charged.

Around Oct., 7, 2006, Megan was told "Josh" was moving away, prompting the girl to write: "aww sexi josh ur so sweet if u moved back u could see me up close and personal lol."

Several days later, "Josh" urged the girl to call and added: "i love you so much."

But on or about Oct. 16, "Josh" wrote to the girl and told her "in substance, that the world would be a better place without M.T.M. in it," according to the indictment.

The girl hanged herself the same day, and Drew and the others deleted the information in the account, the indictment said.

Last month, an employee of Drew, 19-year-old Ashley Grills, told ABC's "Good Morning America" she created the false MySpace profile but Drew wrote some of the messages to Megan.

Grills said Drew suggested talking to Megan via the Internet to find out what Megan was saying about Drew's daughter, who was a former friend.

Grills also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. The message was supposed to end the online relationship with "Josh" because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.

"I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace," Grills told the morning show.

Megan's death was investigated by Missouri authorities, but no state charges were filed because no laws appeared to apply to the case.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9270538





Routine Conduct at Risk with MySpace Suicide Case
Anick Jesdanun

Think twice before you sign up for an online service using a fake name or e-mail address. You could be committing a federal crime.

Federal prosecutors turned to a novel interpretation of computer hacking law to indict a Missouri mother on charges connected to the suicide of a 13-year-old MySpace user.

Prosecutors alleged that by helping create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn't exist, Lori Drew, 49, violated the News Corp.-owned site's terms of service and thus illegally accessed protected computers.

Legal experts warned Friday that such an interpretation could criminalize routine behavior on the Internet. After all, people regularly create accounts or post information under aliases for many legitimate reasons, including parody, spam avoidance and a desire to maintain their anonymity or privacy online or that of a child.

This new interpretation also gives a business contract the force of a law: Violations of a Web site's user agreement could now lead to criminal sanction, not just civil lawsuits or ejection from a site.

"I think the danger of applying a statute in this way is that it could have unintended consequences," said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who leads a MySpace-convened task force on Internet safety. "An application of a general statute like this might result in chilling a great deal of online speech and other freedom."

Drew, of O'Fallon, Mo., was indicted Thursday on charges of perpetrating a hoax on the popular online hangout MySpace. Prosecutors say Drew helped create a fake MySpace account to convince Megan Meier she was chatting with a nonexistent 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006, allegedly after receiving a dozen or more cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Drew, who has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Prosecutors argue that to access MySpace's servers, Drew first had to sign up for the service, which meant providing her name and date of birth and agreeing to abide by the site's terms of service. Those terms bar false registration information, solicitation of personal information from anyone under 18 and use of any information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse, or harm another person."

By using a fictitious name, among other things, Drew violated MySpace's terms and thus had no authority to access the MySpace service, prosecutors charged.

"Clearly the facts surrounding this matter are awful and very upsetting, and I certainly understand the instinct of wanting justice to be served," Palfrey said. "On the other hand, this complaint is certainly unusual."

Drew's lawyer, Dean Steward, said Thursday a legal challenge to the charges is planned. Missouri authorities said they investigated Megan's death but filed no charges because no state laws appeared to apply to the case.

Andrew DeVore, a former federal prosecutor who co-founded a regional computer crime unit in New York, said Friday the interpretation raises constitutional issues related to speech and due process — in the latter case, because it doesn't allow for adequate notice of when using an alias online is criminal.

Because corporations would end up setting criminal standards, a completely legal act at one site could be illegal at another, said DeVore, who has no direct involvement in the case.

"What clearly is going on is they couldn't find a way to charge it under traditional criminal law statutes," DeVore said. "The conduct that she engaged in they correctly concluded wouldn't satisfy the statute. Clearly they were looking for some other way to bring a charge."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...fbW6wD90MTFLG0





NY Seeks Internet Violence Law
AP

A proposal in New York would make a felony of committing violent acts for display on Internet video sites.

The state Senate's Republican majority on Tuesday is expected to introduce a bill that would make a felony of violent acts like the brutal beating of a girl in Florida and subsequent attack of a 12-year-old in Indiana.

The measure is also aimed at animal attacks and "bum hunts" in which homeless people are attacked or paid to fight each other on video.

Florida authorities believe the March 30 attack on a girl by several other girls was done so a video could be made posted on YouTube.com.

New York's measure would create crimes of violence intended for play on the Internet and make felony conspiracy apply to anyone who persuaded another to commit the violence.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...echnology/home





Connecticut Man Says Cops Broke Into His Home and Ripped Out His Catheter

A man alleges that police entered his home illegally and ripped a catheter from his body during a child pornography investigation that led to the arrest of two neighbors.

Andrew Glover, 60, of New Britain filed a notice with the city Thursday that he intends to pursue a federal civil rights lawsuit. He accused the officers of inflicting severe injuries as he was recovering from intestinal surgery in February.

Glover's lawyer, Paul Spinella, said police entered Glover's apartment Jan. 30 and Feb. 28. Glover wasn't involved in child pornography, has not been charged and has no criminal record, Spinella said.

"The poor guy," Spinella said. "They ripped the catheter off his person. They assaulted the guy. He's got major problems as a result of this. He's a mess now."

Lt. James Wardwell, a police spokesman, said Friday that the department had not received the intent-to-sue notice and would not comment. A message was left for the city's corporation counsel.

Glover has two years to file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court.

Spinella said officers "tossed" Glover's apartment during a search Jan. 30. In February, he said, Glover returned home from the hospital after his surgery to find officers searching his apartment again. That's when they assaulted Glover and left him alone in the apartment without calling for medical help, Spinella said.

The police didn't have search warrants, Spinella said.

Glover's neighbors — Harold Spurling and Jeffrey Brisson — were charged Jan. 30 with sexual assault and other crimes. They are accused of molesting children, including a 3-month-old girl found in their apartment, and making movies involving child pornography.

Both men have pleaded not guilty and are being held in lieu of bail.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354837,00.html





Connecticut School Students Sharing Nude Pictures
AP

Westport school officials say middle and high school students have been sharing nude pictures of themselves electronically.

In a letter and e-mail, Superintendent Elliott Landon said the video and still images show students engaging in inappropriate acts while nude in their homes. He said the images have been forwarded to numerous people.

Landon says the behavior is potentially dangerous to the students who are sending the images of themselves.

Landon's letter advised parents to monitor their children's Internet and cell phone use, keep computers in a common space at home and talk to teenagers about the risks of transmitting sexual materials.

Officials in Ohio said last month that some teens were using their cell phones to flirt and send nude pictures of themselves. The messages often spread quickly and sometimes find their way to Web sites.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_9290293





13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers

A 13 year old boy from Texas is convicted of fraud after using his Father's credit cards to hire escorts.

A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad's credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.

Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing "Halo" on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.

The credit card company involved said it was regular practice to send extra credit cards out as long as all security questions are answered.

The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.

Police said they were alerted to the motel by a concerned delivery clerk, whom after delivering supplies of Dr Pepper, Fritos and Oreos had been asked by the kids where they could score some chicks and were willing to pay. They explained they had just made a big score at a "World of Warcraft" tournament and wanted to get some relaxation. On noting the boys age the delivery clerk informed the authorities.

When police arrived at the motel they found $3,000 in cash, numerous electronic gadgets, an Xbox video console with numerous games, and the two local escort girls.

Ralph had reportedly told police that his father wouldn't mind, as it was his birthday last week and he had forgot to get him a present. The father, a lawyer said he had been too busy, but would take him on a surprise trip to Disneyland instead.

Asked why he ordered two escorts, Ralph said he thought it was the thing to do when you win a "World of Warcraft" tournament. They told the suspicious working girls they were people of restricted growth working with a traveling circus, and as State law does not allow those with disabilities to be discriminated against they had no right to refuse them.

The $1,000 a night girls sensing something up played "Halo" on the Xbox with the kids, instead of selling their sexual services.

Ralph's ambition is to one day become a politician.
http://www.money.co.uk/article/10003...m?article=true
















Until next week,

- js.



















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