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Old 28-03-07, 08:51 AM   #2
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Giant Hex-Nut Holding Saturn Together Slowly Loosening


Saturn’s South Pole. NASA imagery

Potentially "catastrophic" says space agency
Jackson Pratts, AFDNews

According to sources deep within NASA, there is a massive bolt running straight through the middle of the planet Saturn – and it’s unscrewing. The nut at the bottom holding Saturn’s two huge halves together is about 25,000 kilometers wide and began turning after undergoing multiple freeze-thaw cycles over several millennia. If it does work free it will spell doom for the gassy orb, which was quickly pulled together billions of years ago during a timesaving maneuver at the dawn of the Universe.

Experts say the preferable way to build planets like Saturn is by the slow agglomeration of tiny bits of frozen gas over eons, since this is the most stable method, but the mysterious Master’s Guild and their shadowy Genesis Group, whom some surmise are responsible for the Universe's physical design, have upon occasion skipped this important step. "If they're doing a quick build-out they'll use these colossal magnetic containers to get a solar system up fast, but it's a gamble," says Doctor Erich von Däniken, Jr., a Fellow at the Dutch Institute of Interplanetary Machinations (DIIM). The controversial researcher says it’s a timesaver albeit one that can lead to continuing maintenance issues. "Sure it’s fast but sometimes the planets can loosen and they have to go back and tighten them up," observed the DIIM professor, adding somewhat ominously that "It's such a pain they’ve been known to skip it."

Long Month

The problem now is the so-called "Summer Constant." It's basically mid-August in this part of the galaxy’s spiral arm, and local Guild Members are on vacation.

Physicists privately acknowledge long galactic months mean August vacations can last fifteen million Earth years or more, and with no indication Group workers are planning to come back early to avert a potential crisis the situation is becoming dire, and not just for Saturn. If the planet does unscrew it would probably mean disaster for its neighbors as well, including perhaps the Earth itself.

"Almost nobody wants to see a big gassy chunk of Saturn take out Belgium obviously so we're looking at some proposals," said the official. Since no one knows exactly when this endless-summer break ends, asking the Guild for help would be an obvious next move, but that is apparently out of the question. "These are very large, very powerful entities and you have no idea how intensely they party. They can get really pissy if their vacation is interrupted," admitted the source after insisting on anonymity. "Believe me nobody wants that."

Others are not so sure. "Trust me," said von Däniken, Jr., "They’re pulling out the stops to find these guys. In a sense the entire American space program has been a bid for their attention."

The NASA official did confirm that the space agency is pondering a fix of it’s own but conceded there were no easy answers. "Maybe a few billion gallons of loktite or something until the Guild comes back, who knows? We’re open to suggestions. We just don't have a torque wrench big enough for this job."

As to why they skimped on construction in the first place, most experts say it’s now become clear the Guild spares no expense for important planetary projects at the "good end" of a rotating spiral arm and just throws up some junk at the other end for balance.

"I guess you could say we’re the galaxy’s ballast,” sighed the official.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=255325





Spotting a Star in the Texas Night

The South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, is the best place for a band to build a buzz. Sylvie Simmons asked the tastemakers which acts caught their eye this year

Magik Markers

What are they like? Male-female, guitar-drums duo from Hartford, Connecticut.

Chosen by: Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and head of Ecstatic Peace records.

"Elisa Ambrogio, who sings and plays guitar, is my favourite guitar player right now. Her approach to the instrument is the complete opposite to traditional - she'll hold the guitar upside down with the neck touching the ground and claw at it. It's completely primal. Magik Markers say they have songs, but you wouldn't really know it, and the music is not really punk but it's completely punk at the same time - it's not referencing anything. Everybody at the gig was just stunned; it blew everybody's mind. They've done some CD-Rs and small-label things but they've never yet made a record that captures what they do on stage, which is either cathartic or it's nothing, it's a real roll of the dice what you're going to get, whether they're playing their most important show ever, or to five people in a squat. Really what they are is the anti-buzz, buzz band - they'll tell any of the other buzz bands to buzz off. They're what rock'n'roll is all about."

Where to hear them: The best place in the UK to buy the Magik Markers' back catalogue is Rough Trade shops (roughtrade.com). You can hear two songs at myspace.com/themagikmarkers

IAMX

What are they like? Dark UK synth-pop band fronted by former Sneaker Pimp Chris Corner, whose songs the Austin Chronicle described as "the best [Depeche Mode's] Martin Gore never penned."

Chosen by: Randy Haecker of Sony Legacy Recordings.

"IAMX is an altogether more immediate and aggressive vehicle for Chris Corner than Sneaker Pimps were. He's backed by an industrial trio that wouldn't look out of place alongside Marilyn Manson, and whose set sounded like a sleek, modernist upgrade of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Which is something that should serve them well among the goth and industrial dance set. Lots of dark, muscular dance tracks with pervy titles auch as Kiss and Swallow, with Cornell writhing through the fog of dry ice with the physicality of Prince, while looking more like a live-action version of Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Very dramatic."

Where to hear them: IAMX have two albums, Kiss and Swallow and The Alternative. You can hear four tracks at myspace.com/iamx

Elvis Perkins

What is he like? His dad was Psycho actor Anthony Perkins; his mum died in 9/11; his debut album Ash Wednesday was released on XL this February; and he's been touring with My Morning Jacket.

Chosen by: Robyn Hitchcock, psych-folk-rock musician

"He looks like Another Side of Bob Dylan-era Dylan - the button-down shirt, mouth-harp and the hair going up - crossed with Rolling Thunder-era Dylan 10 years later with the upright bass. But the mood of the music isn't Dylan-y at all; it's quite ramshackle and very direct, passionate but not self-conscious. He didn't appear to take himself too seriously. There's a very interesting story to his life but the music that came out of it wasn't what you'd expect. He's got quite a feisty band, with a bass player who looks like Chuck Norris and a drummer who looks as if he must know how frightening he looks. And what with having two names that come from the Million Dollar Quartet - as in Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins; it's like being called Roy Cash - he is, as we say, so a story. One to watch."

Where to hear him: Ash Wednesday is out now on XL. You can hear three tracks at myspace.com/elvisperkins

Pop Levi

What's he like? The new Marc Bolan meets weird folk. The Austin Chronicle says of this British artist: "This boy knows rock iconography."

Chosen by: Crispin Parr, SXSW's general manager for British underground and creative director for British music.

"I first saw Pop Levi by chance in New York and it absolutely blew my mind. The attitude, the style, the whole package, is fantastic. I was very early in seeing the Darkness when nobody had heard of them, and it's sort of the same thing, though the music is completely different. It has a very 50s/60s rock'n'roll resonance but it's also T.Rex, very glam, and yet it's also remarkably contemporary. The band are brilliant musicians. When I first saw them, they played one chord for about six minutes - very difficult to do with a band - and pulled it off magnificently. Levi himself is a really good mover and hugely charismatic. Entirely captivating."

Where to hear him: The album Return to Form Black Magick Party is out now on Counter. You can hear seven tracks at myspace.com/poplevi

The Goodnight Loving

Who are they? Milwaukee, Wisconsin band who categorise themselves as Americana/gothic/shoegaze.

Chosen by: Bob Mehr, music critic of the Memphis daily paper the Commercial Appeal. "A really striking band who put out their first record a few months ago on Dusty Medical, a small Milwaukee label that is ostensibly a garage imprint. They aren't strictly garage rock, though. Some of it is big, galloping Americana with singer-songwriter stuff thrown in the mix as well. Having a couple of singers with different personalities means it varies quite a bit, but it's all really exciting. One thing on their side is that their record was produced by Greg Cartwright of the Reigning Sound, who has just done the Mary Weiss record [Dangerous Game, the comeback album by the long-retired Shangri-Las singer]. Somehow he heard the band's tape and was so moved by it he decided to produce it, so undoubtedly others will be, too."

Mary Weiss

What's she like? She used to be the Leader of the Pack. Now she's back.

Chosen by: Chuck Prophet, musician and songwriter.

"I saw a few artist with great futures ahead of them and great futures behind them but really I'd like to give it up for Mary Weiss, playing to a packed house, lines around the block, at one in the morning. What a performance. Not just the voice, which she still has, or the attitude, which she definitely has - smoking a cigarette on stage in a no-smoking club and telling the crowd to do the same - but the new material. I had tears in my eyes. That was beautiful, as good as the old stuff."

Where to hear her: The comeback album Dangerous Game is out now on Norton. You can hear two tracks at myspace.com/maryweiss

Stephanie Dosen

What's she like? She's based in Nashville but has just signed with British label Bella Union.

Chosen by: Phil Alexander, editor of Mojo magazine.

"I'm picking Stephanie Dosen, an incredible singer-songwriter whose backing band had Simon Raymonde from Cocteau Twins on bass, Robert Gomez on guitar and McKenzie Smith from Midlake on drums, with a violinist and cellist thrown in for good measure. It was clearly the first time the band had ever played together and they were brilliant. She's kind of an ethereal singer but her storytelling between songs is brilliant - for instance, how she managed to nick a load of children's storybooks on the plane on her way over, from England, because the kids were annoying her, and managed to write things in their storybooks like 'Your daddy likes little boys' and things like that. A bit strange, but a lovely, lovely singer."

Where to hear her: Her debut album, A Lily for the Spectre, is released in May. You can hear three tracks at myspace.com/stephaniedosen

The Mother Truckers

What are they like? Alt.country/honky-tonk band with one album, Broke, Not Broken, and a lot of supporters.

Chosen by: Rob Bleestein, music director for radioio.com in California.

"They're a northern California band originally and they moved to Austin just about a year ago, but they've already made a name. They won best roots rock group and the talent is undeniable - excellent vocals by Teal Collins and incredible guitar playing and harmonies by Josh Zee, who used to be in the rock band Protein. The music is solid country-rock, but very irreverent country. There were several Americana industry people checking out their show, so it looks like they're in with a chance of breaking big."

Where to hear them: Their two US albums, Broke, Not Broken and Something Worth Dying For, are both available from Amazon. You can hear four tracks at myspace.com/themothertruckers
http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/sto...040171,00.html





Music Labels Spring Leaks – for Publicity

Indie record companies are using controlled (and sometimes uncontrolled) leaks of new music to generate buzz.
Judy Coleman

This year's most interesting Billboard successes have been staged by one very unlikely hit machine – the scrappy independent scene, once the province of self-professed rock geeks.

In recent weeks, albums from indie acts The Shins and Arcade Fire both recently debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, selling about 90,000 units each. The two bands soared past releases by entrenched mainstream artists such as Christina Aguilera and Nickelback. And this week, Modest Mouse, a longtime independent powerhouse – now signed to Sony – made a splash with "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank."

The commercial explosion is no accident. Indie labels may have finally found a way to harness the Internet's sizable community of tastemakers. These music labels are bringing bloggers who have a reputation for posting legal and illegal MP3 tracks into the fold by purposefully leaking albums ahead of the release.

Much as iTunes created a palatable model of digital downloading, these labels increasingly rely on carefully controlled – and sometimes uncontrolled – leaks of MP3 files to publicize upcoming records. Ever since the arrival of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Grokster, entertainment firms have grappled with the question of whether to crack down on the sharing of copyright material or find a way to harness its spread to boost music sales. Even as major entertainment firms mull similar questions relating to the spread of unauthorized clips on YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, they will be keeping close watch on the effectiveness of such "leak" strategies by small labels.

"We'll release an MP3 early into a campaign," says Sonya Kolowrat, a publicist at The Beggars Group, an indie label that's home to the Pixies and Blonde Redhead. The label will post tracks on a special page of its website and give music bloggers individual codes to access the page.

So far, bloggers have been willing to cooperate with labels in exchange for access to songs. "A lot of the labels have been easy to work with and have been very transparent about what they want," says David Greenwald, who posts tracks from coming indie albums on his blog The Rawking Refuses to Stop. "If the label says, 'We don't want you to leak this record,' that's not something I'm going to do," he adds.

The system that has developed strongly resembles the current rapport between radio stations and record labels – the blogs, like radio stations, receive early access to promotional singles as long as they agree not to play the entire album. Because most commercial radio stays away from rough-around-the-edges indie rock, the blogs may be the only outlets available.

The promotions firm Cornerstone, with clients such as Gnarls Barkley and Lily Allen, has an entire department devoted to working with music bloggers and Internet tastemakers. According to copresident Jon Cohen, the firm identifies an artist's existing fans among music bloggers and "empowers" them, as he puts it, by providing them with audio and video content, or tickets and prizes for contests. The firm tracks over 1,600 blogs.

Major labels frequently "watermark" promotional CDs sent to reviewers with a digital signature traceable to the recipient in case of an unauthorized leak. But some smaller labels may even be taking the next step and leaking entire albums themselves.

Kris Gillespie, who manages Domino Records, says leaking wasn't out of the question for his label, the home of the rockers Franz Ferdinand and indie buzzmakers the Arctic Monkeys.

"We were seriously considering leaking tracks," Gillespie says of the latest Franz Ferdinand album, "because the watermarks and copy protection were almost doing too good a job."

Gillespie says he checks peer-to-peer trading sites every day to see if the new Arctic Monkeys album has leaked, "but more out of curiosity than out of vigilance," he notes.

With the formation of this new Internet-industrial complex, the absence of music trading can signal serious problems. "If no one's bothered leaking the album the week before the release date, the fear would be that no one cares," says Brendan Bourke, of the music publicity firm TagTeam. "When you're getting within a few weeks of a release, you want people to start talking about it. It almost behooves you to leak."

The multimillion dollar question, of course, is whether leaks and free singles, for all their publicity payoff, can later hurt an artist's sales. No one can say for sure, but there is one point where the blogger, industry executive, and PR guru agree: In the recording industry, there may well be such a thing as bad publicity.

"A leak is only going to hurt album sales if the album itself is bad," says blogger Greenwald. For the major record labels, who are invested heavily in retail, he notes, the fear is that no one will buy the album. "That happens," he says, "because a lot of the bands are not very good."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0330/p11s03-almp.html





Hip-Hop Reverberates in a Silent World
Corey Kilgannon

Things are done differently at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens.

Basketball referees call fouls in sign language, cheerleaders cheer with their hands, and fans applaud by waving wildly. Students call home from hallway videophone booths and chat in an urban dialect of signing that resembles the exaggerated gestures of rappers.

School plays and musicals are also done differently. Last year, the students performed a version of “Peter and the Wolf” by having the orchestra perform onstage so actors could feel the music through the stage floor and more easily take visual cues from the conductor.

But many of the students come from neighborhoods where rap music and hip-hop dance are popular, and they had long wanted to perform a hip-hop musical. So recently the school hired a professional hip-hop dance troupe from the Bronx called Full Circle Productions, led by Gabriel Dionisio and his wife, Ana Garcia.

Ms. Garcia, also known as Rockafella, spent a month teaching the students break dancing and the kind of flashy synchronized group routines often seen in music videos.

The school, in Jackson Heights, also brought in Alina Bloomgarden, a longtime producer at Lincoln Center, to help create and direct a hip-hop production called “Breakin’ Thru 2,” a semi-fictional drama told through break dancing and hip-hop music and interspersed with film and video clips. Written by Ms. Bloomgarden, the story parallels the school’s effort to stage a break-dancing musical. Since the entire cast and crew was deaf — down to the technical director and costume designer — Ms. Bloomgarden’s instructions were relayed in sign language.

The nine dancers, seventh and eighth graders classified as “profoundly deaf,” relied on visual cues for their timing and felt the sound from the large bass speakers under a stage floor designed to conduct sound vibrations. This worked especially well with the heavy bass beats of hip-hop music.

“A lot of people can’t imagine dancing without music, but we do hear the music — through our feet,” said Matthew Bryant, 14, from Far Rockaway, Queens.

Sara Selzer, 13, from Brooklyn, said deaf children are unable to truly appreciate rap. “I always thought hip-hop dancing was cool, but I never knew how to do it,” she said.

The performance center at the school, which educates children from preschool through high school, was built to accommodate productions for and by the deaf, and there are large screens to display subtitles and other information. The place looks spiffy too. It was created with a large donation from the designer Ralph Lauren, who grew up with a former administrator at the school and who stipulated the royal blue color of the carpet and seat upholstery.

“Real dancing isn’t just about hearing the music, but about feeling it, and these kids can feel the energy of the music,” said Mr. Dionisio, who is also known as Kwikstep. “These kids are better at appreciating what they can do with their bodies. You can see the joy they have at just being able to move freely, the sheer joy of movement. They move better than a lot of dancers with perfect hearing.”

They rehearsed the show for a month and jabbered nervously in sign language in a room backstage before the two performances, one last Friday morning for the school and a second that night for family, friends and alumni. The students, dressed in flashy warm-up suits, were elated to be dancing for their family and peers. They stirred up the crowd with hand signals and the crowd responded with yelps and hand signals. They spoke their lines with their hands, all while displaying hip-hop gestures. An on-stage interpreter translated the musical into speech for the nondeaf audience. The students kicked off dance routines by counting down with their fingers as well as feeling the beats of two musicians hired to play congas and African drums onstage.

Ms. Garcia led the students through an African dance routine and then an impressive routine of hip-hop and break-dance moves known as body-rock and popping. Soon the students formed a circle and took turns throwing their bodies on the ground and spinning and stutter-stepping.

One by one, they stepped forward and signed their real names and then gave the signs for their characters’ nicknames. Sarah stepped out and signed her character’s nickname, “Steel,” and began spinning deftly on the stage.

Then Matthew danced out and signed his name and mimed the motion of a basketball jump shot to signal his nickname, “Sure Shot.” School officials said he had become withdrawn in school, but performing had given him a shot of confidence. There were no signs of a withdrawn boy onstage. He dropped to the stage and spun into a headstand, then cartwheeled out of the circle and began jumping in jubilation.

The audience — fellow students, friends and relatives — raised and shook their hands in silent but thundering applause.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/nyregion/29deaf.html





Coldwell Banker's Second Life

Don't think the Second Life land rush is over. Now a huge real estate firm is entering the 3D virtual world, as the service's headlong growth continues, reports
David Kirkpatrick.

Real estate deals may be slowing in the real world, but in the three-dimensional online one of Second Life the market remains hot. Now Coldwell Banker, one of the nation's largest real estate brokerage firms, is entering Second Life, aiming to help bring order to the chaotic world of virtual real estate.

Coldwell Banker will open a virtual sales office and start selling virtual land at 9 a.m. on Friday. The company released the information exclusively to Fortune.

It's more evidence that the Second Life naysayers are on the defensive. Despite skepticism, software and system troubles, and extraordinary hype, the three-dimensional virtual world juggernaut continues.

Coldwell Banker has bought extensive tracts of property on the central "mainland" of Second Life. (Most companies own "islands" scattered all over.) It subdivided this digital land into 520 individual houses and living units, half of which it will sell and half it will rent.
Second Life: It's not a game

Coldwell, which employs over 120,000 real-world sales agents in the United States and operates in a total of 45 countries, isn't in Second Life to make money, says Charlie Young, the company's senior vice president for marketing. "In the end this is about buying and selling homes in the real world," he says. "We're trying to figure out how to reach what we call the 'new consumer'." Executives insist that any profits will be reinvested in Second Life real estate.

"We didn't want to make a play in Second Life just as a pure advertiser," Young explains. Like a few other savvy companies (One example is iVillage, which conducts tours of fun spots of Second Life), Coldwell Banker tried to figure out how to participate in the Second Life community, and "provide real value," in Young's words.

"A small number of land barons mostly control real estate in Second Life," he says, "and we thought we could bring real estate to the masses."

It's true that Second Life real estate transactions are daunting and confusing. Paul Carr, whose book "The Unofficial Tourists' Guide to Second Life" will be published April 19 by St. Martin's Griffin Press, predicts that with Second Life populated almost entirely by casual and newly-arrived users, a trusted brand that stands behind virtual land transactions will be welcomed by many.

Carr says the danger is not so much land barons like Anshe Chung (who famously claimed she had amassed over U.S. $1 million in digital assets in Second Life) as it is "people who offer to sell you the Golden Gate Bridge. For every legitimate real estate broker there are a thousand scammers."

Unlike almost every other big company, Coldwell's offices in the virtual world will be staffed with real people (in the form of avatars of course). They will not only sell virtual real estate, but also answer questions about real world transactions.

The employees will help combat a big problem of Second Life - the loneliness that sets in when you are wandering anywhere other than the sex clubs and new-member gateways. Much of the impressive virtual world landscape, even sections constructed at considerable expense by major corporations, is eerily empty.

Visitors to Coldwell's sales office (in a community called Ranchero) will, if they choose, be flown by helicopter to view available properties. (Coldwell is also selling houses in the Second Life neighborhoods Crowfoot, Elboya, Gorbash and Scurfield.)

Coldwell has designed and built its own houses, which buyers will not be allowed to alter. They will sell for about $20 (U.S.) each, lower than the average for similar properties in Second Life, says Young.
Cars of Second Life

Author Carr cautions Coldwell and any other company that enters this unfamiliar world, though, to beware: "Second Life is a place of extreme reactions. Many feel there should be no commercialism there at all."

Coldwell's properties will appeal to those who want to live in a virtual world that looks like the most banal regions of the real one - suburban tracts filled with uninspired architecture. The one exception, in the Gorbash region, offers modern hillside homes with a view of a dirigible dock, a pirate ship docked in a nearby cove, and the "for sale" signs put up by real estate speculators that endlessly dot Second Life's landscape. And even the suburban tracts lie next to a casino. (Gambling is a hot Second Life activity.)

The service remains a juggernaut. Linden Lab, which operates it, shows higher numbers than ever. Almost 5 million individuals have registered for Second Life since the service began, more than double the number at the turn of the year. And when I went online Wednesday night, almost 29,000 people were in the service at the same time. That figure seldom exceeded 20,000 before January. This growth continued during the last few months even as Linden wrestled with balky software, overloaded servers and extensive system downtime - troubles it seems, at least for now, to have come to grips with.

Coldwell Banker executives were eager to be the first real estate firm in Second Life. They failed when a small Italian firm got there last week. But for better or worse, they will hardly be the last.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/22/tech...tune/index.htm





Many Americans See Little Point To Web: Survey

A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a new survey.

A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released Friday.

Park Associates, a Dallas-based technology market research firm, said 29 percent of U.S. households, or 31 million homes, do not have Internet access and do not intend to subscribe to an Internet service over the next 12 months.

The second annual National Technology Scan conducted by Park found the main reason potential customers say they do not subscribe to the Internet is because of the low value to their daily lives they perceive rather than concerns over cost.

Forty-four percent of these households say they are not interested in anything on the Internet, versus just 22 percent who say they cannot afford a computer or the cost of Internet service, the survey showed.

The answer "I'm not sure how to use the Internet" came from 17 percent of participants who do not subscribe. The response "I do all my e-commerce shopping and YouTube-watching at work" was cited by 14 percent of Internet-access refuseniks. Three percent said the Internet doesn't reach their homes.

The study found U.S. broadband adoption grew to 52 percent over 2006, up from 42 percent in 2005. Roughly half of new subscribers converted from slower-speed, dial-up Internet access while the other half of households had no prior access.

"The industry continues to chip away at the core of nonsubscribers, but has a ways to go," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates.

"Entertainment applications will be the key. If anything will pull in the holdouts, it's going to be applications that make the Internet more akin to pay TV," he predicted.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...23460320070323





Waiting to Show Model Behavior
Eric Wilson

The line of beauty, contrary to the 18th-century aesthetic theory of William Hogarth, does not undulate in nature along a serpentine curve, not when it is held up to the strict measurements of “America’s Next Top Model.”

Early Saturday morning the line was long and raggedy, erratic and agitated, littered with empty coffee cups and the sleepless faces, which creased in the sunlight, of beautiful women on a casting call for the show’s ninth season. The line started outside the Park Central hotel at Seventh Avenue and West 55th Street, turned the corner at Broadway and then doubled back onto West 56th Street. That very few of the 1,500 women standing there looked like models, in the very narrowly defined sense of high fashion, did not appear to be of importance. A contrapposto stance and the impatient tapping of high heels suggested that in each posing applicant there existed the confidence of an inner Naomi Campbell.

“I love Naomi because she is a diva,” said Bianca Golden, 18, who towered over the competition standing at 5 feet 11 inches, plus stilettos. Ms. Golden, with her hair up, wore a black cotton coat with tiny ruffled pleats at the waist, similar to the leather one worn by Ms. Campbell on Day 3 of her court-ordered community service last week for beaning an assistant with a cellphone. “After a while of being called fierce and everything, being a diva comes with the territory,” Ms. Golden said.

The depiction of models in popular culture increasingly emphasizes the stereotypical image of lucky, glamorous brats; their employers have tenuous moral codes. Their poor behavior has been nowhere more graphically and hypnotically displayed on television recently than in “The Agency,” the new VH-1 reality show about Wilhelmina Models, where the hung-over agents have no compunction about telling a prospective client that she looks too fat.

“America’s Next Top Model,” which began in 2003 and continues to rank well for the CW network with teenagers and young women, at least attempts to display some humanity in its casting and nurturing of contestants. The supermodel Tyra Banks, an executive producer of the show, serves as the voice of experience, often cushioning the all-too-harsh realities of the business in a motherly embrace, though she is also wont to scold a model brusquely for the cardinal sin — perhaps imperceptible to the layman viewer — of a cockeyed walk.

As the contest progresses each season, what usually begins with a message of friendship and sisterly support among young women of diverse backgrounds ultimately ends as a superficial blood sport. As one of the judges pointed out in favor of Yoanna House, the champion of Season 2, her features were “amazingly symmetrical.” Meanwhile the runner-up promises to the camera that she will rip Ms. House’s hair out.

Reality shows about modeling seem to have ennobled the profession in the eyes of many young women, despite recently exposed examples in the real modeling world of drug use, anger management problems and the issue of eating disorders that appear to be encouraged by the models’ agents and fashion designers.

Ms. Campbell’s choreographed fashion parade before the paparazzi, during what was supposed to be her punishment, may have underscored the fantasyland of what young people perceive to be the carefree life of a model today. How different that mindset of the constant performance would be if they were watching the earlier endeavors to capture the industry on film, like Frederick Wiseman’s 1980 documentary “Model,” which exposed how mind-numbingly boring the whole process of hair and makeup and sitting around waiting to take a photograph could be.

By coincidence that film happened to be playing Saturday afternoon at the Museum of the Moving Image at the same time that Michelle Mock-Falcon, the casting director for “Top Model,” was stationed at a conference table at the Park Central for the first look at aspiring contestants, a process that continues with auditions in 38 cities through April 21. About 100 women were allowed into the hotel at a time. They were numbered and corralled in a holding room, waiting to be called to meet with Ms. Mock-Falcon and to deliver a message to Ms. Banks on camera.

“There are girls who will do a song and dance for her, and there are girls who will cry, they can’t even get the words out,” Ms. Mock-Falcon said. “We’re looking for a look — if it’s different from the girls we’ve had in the past and if it’s unique in some way. We pretty much show Tyra everything.”

Ms. Mock-Falcon said that applicants are required to be at least 5 feet 7 inches and between the ages of 18 and 27, but many women standing outside in line did not fit that description. To listen to their stories and their melancholy yearning was sometimes sad or funny or delusional, but interviews with the women almost inevitably yielded the sort of narcissistic confession of Trisha Henson, a 25-year-old actress who could not reach 5 feet 7 inches on her tippy toes.

“It’s not so much about being a model as it is being on television,” Ms. Henson said. “I’m, like, accorded 15 minutes, and I want to take it while I still look hot.”

Geraldine Champion, from Tobyhanna, Pa., was waiting outside with a group of parents and friends of applicants for her daughter, Tanika, who was also under the height requirement but tried anyway.

“I drive a city bus,” Ms. Champion said. “It would be nice to see her plastered on the side of it.”

Pearl Testerman, 19 and 5 feet 9 inches, drove to New York with Natasha Latina, a co-worker from a Wilmington, Del., hair salon, who, “placed fifth in hair extensions at a competition last summer in Moscow that’s like the hairdresser Olympics,” Ms. Testerman said. “I was her model.”

Ms. Testerman, with wide-set eyes and glittery peach lipstick (actually eye shadow worn on her lips) had big plastic rollers in her hair, which she planned to remove at the last possible moment. “This is like a rush,” she said. “It’s a little high.” Like Ms. Campbell on Day 5 of her sentence, she carried a change of clothes, a little black dress in a big shopping bag.

“I want my hair to look great,” she said. “And I’ll change right here on the street if need be.”

The women were required to submit a lengthy application that included questions about their relationships with their parents and romantic partners, whether they have pets, their thoughts on religion and whether they had ever been to a nude beach. Asked to finish this sentence, “My life’s motto is ... ,” Rasheeda Jones, a 23-year-old from Newark, wrote on her application, “Live your life for you because no one else can.” Ms. Jones said she applied for the show two years ago, but when she reached the holding room with 80 other women, only three were allowed to audition that time. She argued with her mother Saturday morning about returning to the casting.

“She’s upset with me,” Ms. Jones said. “She wants me to go to college and all of that. But I like the attention of walking down a runway.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/ar...on/26mode.html





France Urges Care on Skinny Models But Rejects Ban
Anna Willard

France will not ban skinny models from Paris catwalks but will introduce a voluntary charter to make the fashion industry more aware of the health risks of being very thin, the Health Ministry said on Friday.

Designers, model agencies and others in the fashion industry have been widely attacked for promoting an emaciated look which critics say contributes to eating disorders in young women.

Countries like Spain, Italy, Brazil and India have taken steps to keep underweight models off their catwalks due to such concerns, which drew wide media attention following the deaths of two anorexic Latin American models in 2006.

The French Health Ministry official said a commission reviewing the issue would not recommend a blanket ban.

"We are very close to an agreement on a voluntary charter of engagement for the fashion industry, the media and advertising," he said.

"The idea of it is not regulation like the Spanish have done ... but to promote a strong campaign of awareness and information in the fashion industry," he added.

Fashion is big business in France. Luxury goods that are often advertised by young thin models who appear in posters and on catwalks, account for a large chunk of exports.

"It doesn't achieve anything to point fingers, blame or stigmatize the designers or model agencies," the official said.

The head of the French fashion federation had said in January that Paris would not take extra measures to ban ultra-thin models from catwalks because rules on their health were strict enough. However, concern remains.

"We must take a stand. When the girls weigh a kilo too much they are seen as failures," Paris town councilor Violette Baranda told Le Parisien newspaper. "There are some twisted designers who are making women thinner and thinner."

The Paris city council voted this week to pressure fashion show organizers to stop using skinny girls but the Health Ministry said it was symbolic and could not force fashion industry to change its habits.

Lebanese designer Elie Saab told Reuters in a recent interview he preferred women with curves.

But Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld defended his models last year. "They have skinny bones," he said.

The issue was back on front pages this week after Donatella Versace, who owns part of one of Italy's most famous fashion houses, said her daughter was suffering from the eating disorder anorexia.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...18421320070330





Schoolgirls Bullied Into Stripping Online
Natalie Armstrong

Bullies are no longer content to taunt their victims in the playground but are turning to cyberspace, according to Canadian researchers.

They are using e-mail, text messaging and social networking sites in new forms of victimization.

Cyber bullies are even forcing their girlfriends to undress in front of webcams and then sharing the images with others online.

"They're pressuring each other. This is particularly (true) for girls to send pictures of themselves with their tops off," said Professor Faye Mishna, of the University of Toronto, who has been researching the cyber abuse of children.

"Girls might send it to their boyfriend and she is pressured to do it thinking he's just going to see it. So she gives in and the next thing you know it's all over (the place)."

The images are even more likely to be passed on if the couple breaks up, said Mishna who headed a research team that held focus groups with 47 students in grades 5-12.

Preliminary results from the research show so-called computer geeks are becoming the new schoolyard bullies. Final results of the study, which will be completed in June, are expected to be published in the autumn.

"Traditional bullying is a power differential," Mishna said in an interview.

"The power before could have been age, size, smartness, popularity, ability. Now it's the perceived anonymous nature. We'd like to find out how anonymous it really is. The power now is you can put it all over (the place)."

The focus groups also revealed victims refuse to tell an adult about the abuse because they fear they will be punished in order to be protected.

"They're scared that their parents will take away their computer privileges," Mishna said.

Students also thought it was pointless to tell parents about cyber bullies because they could not identify the culprits.

"Friends are giving their passwords out to somebody who they think is a good friend," said Mishna. "Then they use it to bully somebody else."

Traditional bullying is still continuing on school grounds, but technology has enabled the abuse to continue at home.

"This hasn't replaced it, unfortunately," Mishna said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...41434120070328





Lights, Camera, Tirade! Hollywood’s Elite Seen Online
Maria Aspan

In the YouTube age, Hollywood celebrities might want to rethink whether to have temper tantrums — or, at least, have them far from the cameras on movie sets.

A video clip from the filming of “I Heart Huckabees,” the 2004 existential comedy directed by David O. Russell, surfaced on YouTube and several gossip blogs last week. The 2 1/2-minute video shows the actress Lily Tomlin expressing her frustration at Mr. Russell, who retaliates by sweeping papers off the desk in front of her, kicking a part of the set, and knocking a lamp to the floor. The tirade is so abusive that only one sentence — “Act like a grown-up; you’re not a baby” — is printable.

Another video clip that was posted online last week shows Ms. Tomlin losing her temper during a shoot and cursing at Mr. Russell and her fellow actors.

The set of “I Heart Huckabees” was notoriously fractious, with Ms. Tomlin and Mr. Russell clashing on several occasions. And Mr. Russell is well known for his violent conflict resolution: He was in a fistfight with the actor George Clooney on the set of the 1999 film “Three Kings,” and once resolved a casting dispute with the director Christopher Nolan by putting Mr. Nolan into a headlock at a Hollywood party.

Reports of the video’s existence first surfaced in a 2004 article in The New York Times about Mr. Russell and the movie’s filming, but last Monday marked the first time that either video was made available to the public. Almost as soon as they were posted, efforts were made to quash the leak. The original versions of the two videos, named “Screaming Huckabees” and “Screaming Huckabees 2,” were soon removed from YouTube, apparently by their original poster.

The videos were reposted and removed several times over the week, but by the weekend, they appeared to be firmly entrenched in the blogosphere. One version of Mr. Russell’s tantrum that was posted on YouTube on Tuesday had been played more than 150,000 times by Saturday, making it one of the week’s 50 most viewed videos.

Mr. Russell and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment on the clips. Neither did Ms. Tomlin’s representatives, although the actress addressed the matter in an interview published Thursday with The Miami New Times, an alternative newspaper.

“There was a lot of pressure in making the movie,” she said, adding that she was “not the least bit upset” about the leaks. “Adults have fights and go through stuff.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/te...huckabees.html





Cuban, EFF Lawyer Spar Over YouTube and the DMCA at EFF Pioneer Awards
Nate Anderson

Wearing jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read "I'd rather be fighting the man," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban last night defended his view that YouTube is eroding support for copyrights and that its actions should not qualify for "safe harbor" under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Calling it the "cockroach in the kitchen," Cuban argued forcefully that YouTube, like Napster before it, is training up an entire generation to think that "anything goes" in the realm of copyright, and that Google's recent purchase of the company only gives their actions more legitimacy.

The occasion for the remarks was the EFF's annual "Pioneer Awards," which were this year handed out at the ETech conference in San Diego, where I'm on location. Cuban squared off for a friendly debate with the EFF's Fred von Lohmann on the YouTube issue. von Lohmann made his own impassioned case for the importance of DMCA safe harbors to companies like YouTube, and said he worried that if the recent court case with Viacom goes against YouTube, the entire concept of the safe harbor could be weakened dramatically.

Cuban, who was involved in negotiations around the DMCA when it was first drafted, countered that the law was never meant to apply to a company like YouTube that offered anonymous access to its hosting. It was designed, he said, for ISPs that know their customers and don't derive large portions of their traffic from infringing content. Von Lohmann countered that anonymous Internet speech is an important principle; there's no reason to require a company like YouTube to require name and address information simply to let users participate. Besides, the DMCA already gives companies an easy way to address the problem—the takedown notice.

The debate then shifted to "red flag knowledge," or the level of knowledge that a company must have about infringing uses of its services before it is no longer liable for DMCA safe harbor protections. von Lohmann pointed out that "general knowledge" that infringement does occur simply cannot be the standard, or every Web company from Amazon to eBay would be in serious jeopardy. The question then becomes: how much infringement is too much? According to Cuban, "everyone knows" that YouTube is stuffed with infringing content, and that level of knowledge should be good enough to revoke their claimed DMCA exemption.

Should YouTube start filtering content before it goes up, Cuban claimed he would have no problem with the company, even if infringing material made it through the screen. "At least they would be trying," he said.

Cuban is an interesting spokesman for copyright concerns since he has a broad perspective; as the owner of HDNet, he worries about having his content given away for free without his consent, but he's also someone who has funded EFF campaigns in the past, especially when the group defended Grokster's claim to legality.

But it wasn't Cuban who was cutting the big checks this time around. Mitch Kapor, who made his money designing Lotus 1-2-3, was an EFF cofounder, and he has just agreed to endow the group with another million dollars out of his personal piggybank. That kind of money should keep the EFF litigating (and debating the DMCA) for decades to come.

One of the strangest aspects of the debate was seeing an EFF lawyer defend the DMCA, which usually comes in for a drubbing due to its anticircumvention provision. But von Lohmann told Ars Technica after the debate that the safe harbor section has actually allowed plenty of businesses to flourish that might otherwise have been mired in legal problems, and that it has generally worked well. If that protection is yanked away from YouTube, though, the scope of the safe harbor rules would be dramatically limited. With several cases against YouTube pending (and several of them due to be decided by the end of the summer), we may know sooner rather than later how the courts choose to interpret this section of the law, and that guidance will condition how tech companies behave.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...er-awards.html





Viacom Hates Open Source (and Small Children in the Third World)

Some of you may be visiting this blog to read about the OLPC running an NES emulator, something that was developed by a couple of us here at the OSU Open Source Lab (which, again, does NOT support piracy; those are legally owned cartridges). To accompany that article, Brad Morgan uploaded a video to YouTube to supplement our respective blog posts explaining how we accomplished this task. When you try to watch the video, however, you may be surprised to find that instead of a video you’re presented with the following message:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc.

Also, you may have noticed that Brad’s user account on YouTube (as he uploaded the video) no longer has any videos listed. I tried using YouTube’s search to see if the video was maybe lost or moved, but it seems to be completely removed from the website.

Quite honestly, this is ridiculous. YouTube just caved in to the request from Viacom without even investigating the completely bogus claim; but that’s not what’s the worst of it all. The worst is that Viacom International Inc. has no grounds, whatsoever, to request a removal of that video from YouTube. I seriously doubt Viacom International Inc. has the rights to Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros 3. You may notice the large Nintendo logo in the middle of the Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge. The video was shot in our quiet conference room with the lights off, and there isn’t anything in there that belongs to Viacom (and I know we weren’t playing Zoop on an SNES emulator — the laptop can barely handle a fullscreen NES emulator, even after hacking).

I’m quite sure Viacom International Inc. doesn’t have any rights to the OLPC, either. And even if they did, it’s quite obviously in the public eye and I seriously doubt that it’s illegal to record a video of one of your possessions (especially something in the public eye, like the OLPC). The OLPC is an open source project collaborating to help children in the third world, so I seriously doubt they would be mad at us posting a video in an educational post about the project.

On the note of the educational post, even if somehow Viacom has the rights to the content of the video it’s covered under fair use. I’m not an EFF lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that even if we were playing Zoop (which, again, we were not) we would be covered.

With all that said, this must mean that Viacom’s either attacking videos because YouTube will just blindly comply to any and all complaints, or perhaps they hate open source and small children in the third world.
http://staff.osuosl.org/~schonstal/?p=6





Broadcast Denied: It's Easier Than You Think (or Even Than it Ought to be) to Get Your Video Pulled from YouTube.
Robert X. Cringely

Old video never dies, it just comes back to haunt you. I experienced this myself when an interview I did with the BBC found its way into a very prominent position on the A&E Biography episode about Bill Gates. I said it, yes. It was true, yes. I just didn't expect THAT interview to play on A&E three years later. Silly me.

YouTube and similar video-sharing sites compound this effect by making these clips available essentially forever. That is unless they are taken down at the request of the copyright holder, which is what this column is about.

A reader with the screen name Bursting Squidoo last fall posted a couple clips taken from my show "Triumph of the Nerds" as part of a web site he created concerning the current legal battle between Apple and Burst.com. The legal part is an old story, of course. Apple and Burst are fighting over patents Apple says are invalid and Burst says are not only valid but Apple is infringing. The outcome of this case, which is still a year from trial, will have a huge impact on Internet media of all kinds.

Mr. Squidoo is on the side of Burst.com in this dispute. He's apparently a Burst investor and a member of the very active Yahoo Group of Burst investors and those interested in the company.

The video clips Squidoo posted to YouTube are probably among those Steve Jobs would like to forget, especially as the CEO of a company charged with patent infringement. Since the clips were challenged and withdrawn, I can't point you to them, but I CAN share with you the money quote, courtesy of the "Triumph of the Nerds" transcript available all along right here on pbs.org:

"Steve Jobs: Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

Not exactly the sort of statement you want your opposition to show to the jury in a patent infringement trial, is it?

Squidoo posted the clips on YouTube in October, where they lived until March 20, 2007, when suddenly they didn't. YouTube had removed them from its servers sending this message:

"Dear Member: This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by NBD Television Ltd. claiming that this material is infringing:

"Great Artists Steal - Triumph of the Nerds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeNumls8hcE

"Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

"If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Center to access the instructions. Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

"Sincerely,

"YouTube, Inc."

Don't you wish that notices like this one were signed by real people with real names? I do.

But no matter who signed it, there is a lot of interesting information presented in this notice. Before I tear it apart, please understand that while I wrote and hosted Triumph of the Nerds and wrote the book upon which the series was based, I do not own the copyright for the show (I do for the book, though). So whatever Squidoo has done here doesn't infringe any of MY rights.

Having said that, I think that he probably DID infringe the rights of the Triumph of the Nerds copyright holder. Squidoo is relying on fair use to give him the right to excerpt the show, but I don't think fair use normally covers clips that are five minutes long and extensively recut at that. Thirty seconds, maybe (plenty to get the money quote), but five minutes? I don't think so. Squidoo's error was in trying too hard to place that quote in the proper context. He went too far.

But Squidoo DIDN'T violate the copyright of NBD Television Ltd., because NBD -- a London-based distributor of films about music and musicians -- DOESN'T HOLD THE COPYRIGHT TO TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS. That copyright is owned by Oregon Public Broadcasting, which made the show.

I contacted Rebecca Morris, chief counsel at Oregon Public Broadcasting. She had not heard of NBD Television Ltd. and had never been contacted for permission to act on behalf of Oregon Public Broadcasting in this matter.

I contacted NBD Television Ltd. And they did not reply.

I contacted YouTube. And they spent all day coming up with this statement: "We do not comment on individual DMCA notifications. However, we have a comprehensive copyright infringement notification and counter-notification system in place. More details are available at http://www.youtube.com/t/dmca_policy."

That YouTube statement is again not from a person but from a company.

Now here is what makes this little episode interesting. I spent about 20 minutes looking for Triumph of the Nerds video clips on YouTube and came up with 15. I am sure there are others. Eight of these are Steve Jobs explaining how Microsoft has no taste. Again from the show transcript:

"Steve Jobs: The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is -- I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. And you say why is that important -- well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea -- if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success -- I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products."

Why didn't NBD Television Ltd. ask YouTube to pull down those clips, which have been seen a total of several hundred thousand times? They are far more popular than Squidoo's Picasso quote.

Talk about copyright infringement, though. There's a guy named AppleRumorTracker on YouTube who recut much of "Triumph of the Nerds" into a pretty darned good five-part, 46-minute compilation of interviews with only the occasional question in my voice sneaking through. He removed me from my own show. AppleRumorTracker even changed the title of the show. Why didn't NBD Television Ltd. ask YouTube to pull down those clips, which suck vastly more value from the original project?

They only pulled the two video clips that were relevant to a high-profile lawsuit, though I hardly think Apple v. Burst.com is well known in London, or at least I wouldn't have expected it to be.

YouTube has a careful process here. They let people post pretty much anything, then count on copyright holders to protest, at which point YouTube automatically brings down the clips. There is a counter-notification system where a guy like Bursting Squidoo can claim that NBD Television Ltd. isn't the copyright holder and therefore isn't qualified to demand the clips be removed. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is quite specific about this -- I can't get YouTube to remove Triumph of the Nerds clips, either, only the actual copyright holder Oregon Public Broadcasting can do that.

The DMCA also has equal penalties for those who infringe and those who falsely claim copyright holder status -- something YouTube glosses over in its rush to avoid counter notifications. Making a false DMCA violation claim and making a false counterclaim are equally illegal, though maybe that doesn't have much bearing in the UK.

Of course this could all be quite innocent -- just a simple misunderstanding, but I find it suspicious. Why those two clips and none of the others? Could this be more "pretexting" like Hewlett Packard used last year to illegally gain the telephone records of reporters?

Probably not.

But I'll keep on this story until I know for sure. Count on that.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...29_001882.html





Our Case Against YouTube
Michael Fricklas

Viacom initiated litigation against YouTube and Google this month for their long-standing infringement of Viacom's copyrights. Our action has stirred discussion about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and quite a lot of confusion.

First, let's narrow the debate. YouTube defends itself from copyright infringement based on one narrow slice of the DMCA: protecting service providers who store copyrighted material solely and simply "at the direction of a user." This defense is available only to users who do not have "knowledge" of infringement or who "expeditiously" take down material when they find out they are infringing a copyright. The defense is not available to someone who "derives a financial benefit" from copyrighted material he stores if he has the "right and ability to control" it.

The DMCA strikes a logical compromise among competing interests and is one of many sound policies that have allowed the Web to develop and flourish. Under the act, Web hosting companies have been able to develop with no obligation to monitor every file loaded and downloaded by their users. E-mail operators have been able to safely maintain their facilities without reading every message that passes through their systems. File storage Web sites allow users to back up their hard drives without needing to patrol every file and without fear of copyright liability.

What the DMCA doesn't do is protect YouTube.

YouTube has described itself as the place to go for video. It is far more than the kind of passive Web host or e-mail service the DMCA protects -- it is an entertainment destination. The public at large is not attracted to YouTube's storage facility or technical functionality -- people are attracted to the entertainment value of what's on the site.

And YouTube reaps financial benefits from that attraction through selling the traffic to advertisers. While an e-mail provider is paid to facilitate and manage the exchange of e-mail traffic, and competes in that fashion, YouTube lures consumers and competes by having great content -- a resoundingly substantial part of which it did not create or pay for.

Does YouTube have "knowledge" of copyrighted material on its site? Does it have the "right and ability to control" the content? Yes and yes. If the public knows what's there, then YouTube's management surely does. YouTube's own terms of use give it clear rights, notably the right to take anything down. YouTube actively monitors its content. For example, its managers remove pornography and hate content and, as was recently reported, claim they can detect and remove "spam." Without knowledge and control, how could YouTube create "channels" and "featured videos" sections on its site? YouTube has even offered to find infringing content for copyright owners -- but only if they do a licensing deal first.

Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others' copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That's hardly a workable or equitable solution. And it would tend to disadvantage ventures such as the one recently announced by NBC Universal and News Corp. that are built on respect for copyright. Under the law, the obligation is right where it belongs: on the people who derive a benefit from the creative works and are in the position to keep infringement out of their businesses.

Will forcing Google and YouTube to obey the law stifle innovation? Quite the opposite. Intellectual property is worth $650 billion a year to the U.S. economy. Not only does intellectual property drive our exports, it's a key part of what distinguishes developed economies from developing ones. Protecting intellectual property spurs investment and thereby the creation of new technologies and creative entertainment. This creates jobs and benefits consumers. Google and YouTube wouldn't be here if not for investment in software and technologies spurred by patent and copyright laws. It's time they respected them.

The writer is general counsel of Viacom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032301451.html





An End Run on Copyright Law

In a March 24 op-ed, Viacom's general counsel, Michael Fricklas, defended his company's lawsuit against YouTube and Google. Resisting the urge to litigate this case in public, we still thought it useful to reply briefly.

Viacom's lawsuit is an attack on the way people communicate on the Web and on the platforms that allow people to make the Internet their own.

In the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress struck a careful balance between the rights of the copyright holder and the need to protect the Internet as an innovative communication frontier, not as another venue for litigation.

Content-hosting sites such as YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace that want to take advantage of the DMCA's safe harbors must promptly remove infringing content if the copyright owner so requests, giving owners a quick remedy that doesn't require going to court. Copyright owners, in return, have the responsibility to identify infringing material they want removed. Viacom's lawyers helped craft this law but apparently don't like it, after all. They want to shirk the responsibility Congress gave them.

Placing that burden on hosting platforms would turn the DMCA on its head.

Viacom is attempting to rewrite established copyright law through a baseless lawsuit. In February, after negotiations broke down, Viacom requested that YouTube take down more than 100,000 videos. We did so immediately, working through a weekend. Viacom later withdrew some of those requests, apparently realizing that those videos were not infringing, after all. Though Viacom seems unable to determine what constitutes infringing content, its lawyers believe that we should have the responsibility and ability to do it for them. Fortunately, the law is clear, and on our side.

Michael Kwun


Google, Managing Counsel, Litigation


Mountain View, Calif.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032802057.html





Crave Talk: Can the Me-Too Tubes Buy the Zeitgeist?
Chris Stevens

Money can't buy you love, said the Beatles, but maybe they didn't anticipate the financial daisy-cutter bomb that is a 21st-century multinational. With the news that News Corp and NBC plan to build a rival to YouTube, it's time to ask the big question: can big corporations buy the zeitgeist or will they inevitably screw up?

YouTube has every human on the planet with eyeballs and a first-world paycheck glued to it in office hours. Everyone is afraid of Google's new armament. 20th Century Fox can see the drones watching The Simpsons on YouTube, but it must give it quite some itch to know it's not reaming in more cash as they do.

The News Corp/NBC platform will offer free, full-length films and television shows, with the added bonus that the content is strictly legal. But is the YouTube audience really sat in their swivel chairs feeling slightly mournful that they may be infringing a copyright? Probably not. Will they react with feverish excitement at the thought of ad-supported content? Er, no.

So what is left for the Me-Too Tubes? How can a YouTube rival garner similar success? Well, option one would have been to buy YouTube, but Google already did that -- stuffing it gracelessly into its podgy little mouth and patting its grossly distended belly.

Option two is for NBC and News Corp to do what Microsoft did with the Zune and add extra features no one really wants to an existing successful product -- in the Zune's case, the iPod. Often this doesn't work -- it certainly didn't with the Zune. They could also follow Microsoft's lead, and pay mindless stooges to infiltrate university campuses extolling the brilliance of Me-Too Tube. Again, this method failed for Zune, presumably because the word-of-mouth theory doesn't work in university -- 90 per cent of the 'receivers' are too drunk to recall what was virally marketed at them.

They could try other approaches. Microsoft's assualt on the relatively 'cool' Netscape browser was surprisingly effective -- although it did have the small advantage of inextricably tying the browser to an operating system like an ugly barnacle. Me-Too Tube has the mastodonic weight of copyright law on its side, though -- it seems smart to set up a competitor to show willing and then go nuclear with the lawyers. Viacom doesn't exactly look like the aggrieved party in its mammoth suit against YouTube.

It's too early to tell whether Me-Too Tube has any chance of emulating the success of its nemesis. But there is something incredibly boring and sad about giant companies who constantly chase the fleeing tailcoats of the latest Internet trends. Like the kid who leant over and copied you in art class, News Corp/NBC are the archetypal corporation -- lumbering and so very uncool.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,3...9288772,00.htm





YouTube Awards the Top of Its Heap
Virginia Heffernan

Et tu, YouTube? The mellow Silicon Valley “video-sharing site,” once styled as nothing more than a converted loft space for oddball videos, is looking more Hollywood by the minute. Back in the day, say, six months ago, YouTube was still meant to be pure NoCal: no judgments, no hierarchies, big bandwidth and lots of freedom. YouTube videographers weren’t supposed to get stars on their doors from the powers that be.

But now we have the 2006 YouTube Video Awards, a product — so the intro on the awards page says — of “the YouTube community.” But given that the rushed and almost certainly screwy voting commenced only once the nominees were published by YouTube, this community project doesn’t seem quite organic. The dread idea of arts administration has come to YouTube. And in a real insult to the speedy Web world, this 2006 event has happened well into spring 2007, honoring bygone achievements. That seems very Internal Revenue Service, not to mention very Oscars.

So, oh, looky here in the winners’ circle. We’ve got the neato guys who dance on treadmills, Smosh, the Wine Kone and Ask a Ninja. If these names sounds fresh to you, well, then, YouTube’s done its job, and maybe you’ll stop by, hang out and find something that actually answers to your tastes.

To older hands, the award winners, announced yesterday, will be recognizable as YouTube veterans, and their selection here makes blindingly clear the site’s slacker aesthetic (Smosh, OK Go and the Wine Kone); its mush politics (the Free Hugs Campaign); and its chronic oscillation between absurdism (“Ask a Ninja”) and emo (“Say It’s Possible”).

This value system is not intrinsically worse than the one that determines prime-time television’s crisp, white-collar aesthetic; its mainstream politics; and its chronic oscillation between punchy and sappy. It’s just that YouTube’s not really supposed to have any aesthetic or ideological principles, is it? YouTube’s video superlatives might make you think that Google might one day hand out prizes for best or shadiest Web site. Or that Wikipedia might honor the most brilliant idea. YouTube, Google and Wikipedia should be low-key clearinghouses of shared information. Not prosceniums.

YouTube’s winners also reveal the site’s mystified attitude toward animation, in the form of the sweet but dull “Kiwi!” cartoon, which takes the most adorable video prize. Recently, humble animation has now become so refined and poignant in various high-end graduate programs that even cartoons about little birds now carry the slightly pretentious air of French film. (Animators often discuss credentials and technique in the prefaces to their videos on YouTube; video makers, on the contrary, want everything to look tossed off.)

The widespread animus toward “lonelygirl15,” the hit online series that got its start on YouTube but then seemed to grow too big for its britches, also seems to be alive and well at the YouTube Awards, where it was nominated for several awards but won nothing.

Hostility toward the project comes through instead in choices like “Ask a Ninja” and “The Wine Kone,” videos by two ubiquitous male soloists who have lampooned the series. The YouTube boys’ club is packed. The Wine Kone, a handsome guy with a steady gaze and a wheezy chortle, holds forth there on belly-button issues, while the Ninja plays older brother, offering advice and pushing Net neutrality, the so-called First Amendment of the Web.

Terra Naomi with her heartbreaking “Say It’s Possible” won best music video here. That’s a wonderful choice. The song has got a sustained ache to it, and the visual setup for the video — the singer at the guitar crowding the camera, before an unused keyboard — is painterly, in the tradition of the best YouTube bedroom guitar videos. (Unlike the funny OK Go guys on their treadmills; I like their pluck, but it’s too MTV for YouTube.) With the look of a young Keith Richards, Terra Naomi is the only girl cool enough to make the cut in the YouTube awards.

The pity of these awards is ultimately that they might be some people’s first contact with YouTube. That would be sad. My words of advice for people new to YouTube: Forget awards, and forget hip.

Instead, follow your pre-Internet interests to vintage film on YouTube, and that will lead you to video commentary, parodies and community. For starters, why not track down Ernest Hemingway with a man-size marlin, Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth, interviews with Sigmund Freud or color film from the Korean War?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/arts/27tube.html





'Casino Royale' Blu-Ray Breaks 100,000 Unit Milestone

It's official: Sony has announced that 'Casino Royale' on Blu-ray is the first high-def disc title to ship over 100,000 units.

'Royale' has been breaking records ever since its Blu-ray debut on March 13 -- as we've previously reported, it was the first high-def disc to crack the top ten on Amazon's overall DVD best sellers list, and it easily topped Nielsen VideoScan's Blu-ray chart its first week out.

And while the 100,000 figure for 'Casino Royale' has been rumored for several days now, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is now comfirming it in a press release, hitting the wires today.

The strong performance for 'Royale' is certainly a healthy sign for the nine month old Blu-ray format. Not only has Blu-ray hit the 100,000 unit mark faster than rival format HD DVD, it hits the milestone two months faster than standard-def DVD did back in 1998 (with 'Air Force One'), when DVD was eleven months old.

SPHE Worldwide President David Bishop praised the news as a demonstrative of Blu-ray's robust growth in the marketplace, adding that "Blu-ray has accounted for approximately 70 percent of the high-definition market since the first week in January, and as that market share continues to grow, we are dedicated to providing consumers with the content they crave."

And while it's too soon to tell whether 'Casino Royale' will be to Blu-ray what 'The Matrix' was to standard-def DVD (ie: the format's de facto showcase disc), one certainly gets the feeling that Sony isn't dissuading such comparisons. 'Royale' director Martin Campbell is quoted in the Sony release marveling at the disc's picture quality: "It's just unbelievable. Clearly, it's fantastic. The comparison between standard def DVD and Blu-ray is quite stunning and quite transparent to the master. It's precisely what would make me want to buy a copy."
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/news..._Milestone/544





Undeterred by Blu-Ray Hacks, Sony Unveils Yet Another Cipher for DRM
Jeremy Reimer

Sony announced late last week that they have invented a new encryption mechanism known as "CLEFIA," a block cipher algorithm designed to help content producers deliver "advanced copy protection" with their products. The name comes from a play on the French word clef, which means "key." We can't help but snicker, given that it has been key-sniffing that has been undoing DRM as of late.

CLEFIA is aimed at portable electronics and home entertainment products, and can be applied to music, images, or even video. The big claim from Sony is that CLEFIA has "sufficient immunity against known cryptanalytic attacks," yet it has relatively low hardware requirements. The company plans to formally present the CLEFIA algorithm at the Fast Software Encryption 2007 conference in Luxembourg.

Sony claims that the new algorithm is extremely efficient; when implemented in hardware, it can achieve a maximum throughput of 1.42 Gbps using a 0.09 micrometer CMOS standard cell library and gate size of 6.1K, which Sony says is a new record for hardware gate efficiency.

The idea is to make it possible to implement the protection as a relatively inexpensive hardware component for media playback devices. Software implementations are also possible, and Sony claims that they will achieve "high speed performance on a wide variety of processors," although the company declined to give specific figures.

Block ciphers are a common cryptographic tool used in many existing algorithms, including the US government encryption standard DES—a variant of which has been used to serve secure web pages—and its replacement, AES. Unlike simple ciphers that translate a character at a time, block ciphers encrypt entire blocks of text at once, using a secret key which can be of varying lengths. CLEFIA uses a block size of 128 bits, and can be configured to use keys of 128, 192, or 256 bits.

Theory versus praxis

So are Sony's claims of the cipher being "immune" to attacks real or just marketing? Block ciphers can be made resistant against garden variety brute-force attacks simply by using longer key lengths. The length of the key required to prevent these attacks continues to increase as CPUs get faster—key lengths of 80 bits were once considered completely secure, but today 128 bit keys are commonly used by applications such as web browsers for SSL.

Yet brute-force is rarely the method by which DRM schemes are cracked. Most approaches attempt to capture the keys directly, either by scanning a computer's memory while it is playing back the movie with a software player, or capturing it while it is transit from the optical drive to the computer by sniffing the data going through a USB cable. The AACS copy protection used on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, for example, has already been broken in this way, although the specification anticipated this occurring and allows for compromised keys to be revoked at a future date.

CLEFIA will not magically make future content protection "unhackable," although it may make it cheaper to add copy protection to more types of devices, which is really what Sony is going for here.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...r-for-drm.html





Microsoft to Release Souped-Up Xbox 360
Robert Gold

The Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite, which features a 120-gigabyte hard drive and a high-definition video connection, is scheduled to hit stores on April 29.

Let the games begin.

Microsoft Corp. announced this week it plans to sell an upgraded Xbox 360 video game system late next month.

Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii -- both heavy competition for Xbox 360 -- were released in November.

Microsoft focused on non-video game changes with the latest upgrade, including an amped-up hard drive so owners can watch more movies and store music.

The Xbox 360 Elite will sell for $480.

Jay Krochmal, a store service manager at Best Buy in Danbury, said only a couple of people have asked about the new models this week.

"It's been quiet," he said.

But Krochmal said Xbox's popularity means anticipation will grow. In November, shoppers camped outside the store waiting to buy the new $600 PlayStation 3. But its popularity steadily dropped as Nintendo's Wii became more popular, Krochmal said.

Xbox 360 outsold Sony's PlayStation 3 in January and February, according to market researcher NPD Group, while falling behind Nintendo's Wii.

Krochmal doesn't expect the same camping scene for an upgraded XBox -- but he wouldn't dismiss the possibility.

"Xbox has some hardcore fans," he said, adding it's the most popular video game device at the store.

The Xbox 360 Elite is expected to hit stores April 29.

The latest upgrades feature a 120-gigabyte hard drive, compared to the current 20-gigabyte system. Consumers with the current $400 device can buy the new hard drive for about $180.

The current hard drive filled up too quickly with music, movies, TV shows and games from the Xbox Live Marketplace online store, said Peter Moore, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Group.

Xbox 360 users can connect the console to their home network and then stream movies, music and other material from the computer to the Xbox and television.

Unlike Sony, Microsoft hasn't added a high-definition DVD player to its video game console. It sells external HD DVD players for the Xbox for $200.

Krochmal said an added high-definition video connection should also draw customers. That sends content from the console to a television without losing picture or sound quality.

Danbury resident Moises Olmos said he plans to buy the new Xbox 360.

"It's a gaming system everyone can play with," he said while playing an Xbox 360 game at Game Stop in the Danbury Fair mall.

Karen Koza, an associate professor at Western Connecticut State University's Ancell School of Business, said Microsoft was smart to build anticipation by unveiling the details a month early.

"They want that hype. They want that time for other channels (like the media) to grab onto it," she said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1040921





Retirees Discover Video Games
Seth Schiesel

For 133 years the School Sisters of Notre Dame have lived here in a thick forest just up the hill from the Tangipahoa River. In a modest but stately compound called St. Mary of the Pines, 52 retired members of this Roman Catholic order spend much of their time as the order’s members have since the 19th century. They read and garden, fish and sew. They pray five times a day.

But many also have a new hobby, one they credit for keeping their hands steady and minds sharp. They play video games. Every day residents go to the seven-terminal “Computer Cove” to click furiously on colorful, nonviolent, relatively simple games like Bejeweled, Bookworm and Chuzzle.

Though they live in a remote grove, the women of St. Mary are actually part of a vast and growing community of video-game-playing baby boomers and their parents, especially women.

Anxious about the mental cost of aging, older people are turning to games that rely on quick thinking to stimulate brain activity. A step slower than in their youth, they are using digital recreations of bowling, tennis and golf.

Spurred by the popularity of the Nintendo Wii game system among older players, Erickson Retirement Communities, based in Baltimore, which manages 18 campuses around the country with 19,000 total residents, is installing the consoles at each location.

[On Thursday Norwegian Cruise Line announced that it was installing Wii systems on all its ships.]

PopCap Games in Seattle, the maker of the diversions so popular at St. Mary, says its games have been downloaded more than 200 million times since the company was founded in 2000. A spokesman said that the company was stunned by results of a customer survey last year: 71 percent of its players were older than 40, 47 percent were older than 50, and 76 percent of PopCap players were women.

It turns out that older users not only play video games more often than their younger counterparts but also spend more time playing per session. Pogo.com is a Web site that offers “casual” games, easy to play and generally less complicated than the war, sports and strategy games favored by hard-core gamers. According to Electronic Arts, the game publisher that runs the site, people 50 and older were 28 percent of the visitors in February but accounted for more than 40 percent of total time spent on the site. On average women spent 35 percent longer on the site each day than men.

“Baby boomers and up are definitely our fastest-growing demographic, and it is because the fear factor is diminishing,” said Beatrice Spaine, the Pogo.com marketing director. “Women come for the games, but they stay for the community. Women like to chat, and these games online are a way to do that. It’s kind of a MySpace for seniors.”

A couple of hours before heading to a harmonica concert recently, Sister Jean-Marie Smith, 61 and a retired teacher, paused her round of Bookworm (a digital take on the classic Scrabble word game) at the prodigious score of 34,765,180 to explain how she joined the gamer generation after moving to St. Mary last summer.

She has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, “and I just could not focus on anything,” she said. “I constantly have to find things to keep my attention. But the first time I played Bookworm, and that red tile hit the bottom and I lost, I stood up and said, ‘Me and this computer are going to have a talk.’ The fact that it’s interactive and also competitive really draws me in and helps me focus.”

Sister Marie Richard Eckerle, 72, who introduced the games at St. Mary, smiled and said: “I hear all the time from sisters when they first see the computer, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ And then they can do it. And they actually like it.”

The game industry has been pleasantly surprised to discover this growing audience that is more familiar with Little Richard than Ludacris, and some companies, particularly Nintendo and makers of easy-to-play casual games, have begun to cater specifically to older players. (Microsoft and Sony, two other big game companies, still focus mostly on young men.)

“We actually use something called the ‘Mom Test,’ ” said John Vechey, 28, a founder of PopCap. “When we were first making games like Bejeweled, we would sit our moms in front of the computers and just let them play, and that’s a big way how we would see what works in an accessible, casual game. The problem is that our moms have gotten a little too savvy, so we’re always looking for new moms to test on.”

Aside from casual PC games the other big spur to increased gaming by older players has been the recent introduction of two new game systems by Nintendo of Japan. The hand-held DS and the home Wii console (pronounced “we”) are specifically meant to buck the industry trend toward increasing complexity and instead provide a simple yet captivating experience for players of all ages and degrees of coordination. In many games, players need only swing and twist the Wii controller rather than have to master complicated combinations of buttons and triggers.

Dick Norwood, 61, a semi-retired businessman who lives in a community for residents 55 and older in Crest Hill, Ill., spotted the Wii in a mall in December. After playing Wii bowling with two other couples at home, he persuaded Giovan’s, a local Italian restaurant, to begin a “seniors only” Wii bowling league, where nine couples now show up every Thursday.

“When I started calling people about it, they had no idea what I was talking about, and they were laughing at me saying, ‘You want to start a bowling league on a video game in a bar?’ ” he said. “Well, we got there the first time, and we were there for six solid hours. In the past, I probably would have agreed that video games are just for kids. But I’ll tell you, at our age when you bowl for real, you wake up with aches and pains. Those balls aren’t light. But with this you’re getting good exercise, but you’re not aching the next day.”

There is no good evidence that video game playing can alter the course of dementia or cause lasting improvements in memory, but research is sparse. Most neuroscientists doubt that gaming can hurt, and some small studies are under way.

Jim Karle, a graduate student in the department of psychology, neuroscience and behavior at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, reported last year that preliminary experiments indicated that playing video games could have a beneficial effect on short-term memory. Mr. Karle has not applied his research directly to older subjects, he said, but he may not have to. He has witnessed the increased popularity of gaming among older players first-hand.

“The baby boom generation is definitely playing more video games,” Mr. Karle, 29, said. “My mom never played video games, and then I would try to call her last year and could never get through. It wasn’t that the line was busy. She just wasn’t answering. It turned out it was because she had gotten engrossed with a game called Zuma. She’s 60 years old, and suddenly she was totally into it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/arts/30seni.html





Google, Online Ad Giant, Looks at Radio and TV
Miguel Helft

If there were any doubts about the scope of Google’s ambitions in the advertising world, one of its recent job postings should dispel them: It seeks a “head of national TV sales” to help build “a world-class national TV advertising sales team.”

Then there is radio. Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said last year that the company would eventually have 1,000 employees dedicated to radio advertising alone.

Google may one day rock the television and radio advertising markets. But its TV plans have yet to take shape, and its other efforts to extend its dominance over online advertising into offline media like newspapers and radio are inching along. The early results are mixed, suggesting that Google’s successful transition from online kingpin to credible player in traditional media is far from assured.

In particular, Google’s effort to sell radio ads, the oldest and most advanced of its major offline advertising plans, has run into several hurdles, including radio stations that are wary of losing control over the sale and pricing of ads.

The promise Google offers old-line media markets is that it can replicate the formula that has worked so well for it online. It is a formula that relies heavily on technology to allow advertisers to buy their own ads, have them appear on relevant pages across a vast network of Web sites, and then track the results.

The system has attracted a myriad of advertisers, many of them new to the Web. That, in turn, turned into a bonanza for Web publishers who had been unable to effectively convert traffic on their sites into dollars. Older media, with their entrenched infrastructures devoted to buying and selling ads, are not crying out for that kind of innovation — at least not from an outsider. But that will not stop Google from trying.

“If you use some of the things that we understand about finding appropriate value and targeting, we might get folks who haven’t advertised on radio before to advertise now,” said Douglas Merrill, vice president of engineering at Google. “New advertisers appear at the party. With those advertisers comes new money; with those, rates rise.”

Google has had trouble starting that cycle. It has been unable to sign up enough major stations in major markets to become broadly attractive to advertisers. Even in the markets where it has a presence, much of the air time that stations have made available to Google is what the industry calls “remnant” inventory — ad spots sold at the last minute at low prices.

Many in the radio industry are determined to keep Google at arm’s length, suspicious that its technology-based approach will turn their business into a commodity and take away the relationships with advertisers that stations have spent years building.

“It is a different model for selling radio advertising and it is controversial within the industry,” said David Benjamin, president of Triad Broadcasting, which owns about 40 stations in six markets. “There are those who believe that it could commoditize the product, leading to lower rates.”

Mr. Benjamin is not one of those people. He agreed to try Google’s system at a few stations, and he said that it had worked well so far. But he added that he was not ready to give Google his full endorsement.

“Am I a 100 percent believer?” he asked. “No. I just don’t know.”

Google’s recent foray into newspaper advertising has received a somewhat warmer reception. The company was able to recruit major newspapers like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, and most major newspaper chains.

The newspaper ads work much the same way that radio ads do, with advertisers bidding for available space. The tests, which began in November, are limited to about 100 advertisers.

Google said the volume of ads sold through the system was double what it had projected. Some newspaper industry executives say early results have been promising.

“From our perspective the tests went very well,” said Steve Rossi, executive vice president and chief operating officer of MediaNews, which is testing the Google ads in papers like The San Jose Mercury News and The Salt Lake Tribune.

Representatives for Gannett and The Chicago Tribune said the tests were encouraging but too small to be conclusive.

Success in offline advertising is important to Google’s future. Investors have bid up Google’s shares, in part, on the expectation that it will grab a portion of the market for radio, television and print ads. Google would benefit from even a foothold in those large markets, which still dwarf the $16 billion Internet advertising market.

Television advertising could prove particularly fruitful for Google, because the company might be able to combine its technology with that of cable systems to show different ads to different viewers based on demographics or personal interests. The company has said it is conducting a small trial with a few partners.

But television may not be revolutionized so easily. There are signs that Google’s reception in the TV world may prove to be as chilly as it has been in some corners of the radio industry.

For instance, Google has approached the cable giant Comcast about selling TV ads for it, according to a person briefed on the matter. The companies would not comment on any discussions. But D’Arcy Rudnay, vice president of corporate communications at Comcast, said: “We have a very successful company, Comcast Spotlight, which has thousands of employees who have been selling television advertising for many years.”

Google’s foray into radio got a jump start early last year when it paid as much as $1.24 billion for dMarc Broadcasting, whose technology helps marketers place ads on radio stations. Google has integrated the technology with its online advertising system.

Advertisers submit their ads to the system in digital form and specify what cities or regions and what kind of audience they want to reach. The system automatically schedules the ads based on the available inventory, or blocks of advertising time, and plays them on the air. Everything else, from confirming that the ads were played to billing and payments, is handled automatically, replacing older systems used in many stations.

“It has been a good experiment,” said Rick Cummings, president of Emmis Broadcasting, one of the largest radio networks that is currently testing the Google system.

But even Mr. Cummings said the system’s promise remained just that. “I think the jury is still out,” he said.

Emmis, which has about two dozen stations, is testing Google’s ads in a handful of markets, including Los Angeles and Chicago, Mr. Cummings said. Google has brought some new advertisers to those stations.

“They are getting it at cheap rates, because it is last-minute inventory,” Mr. Cummings said.

Indeed, winning guaranteed access to prime-time spots in top stations in large markets may be Google’s biggest challenge, according to industry analysts. Most of those spots are controlled by major networks like CBS and Clear Channel. And even at smaller stations, premium inventory is expensive.

“This is about getting access to prime-time inventory,” said David Bank, a media analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “That is going to be achieved in a handful of major deals. We haven’t seen those major deals yet.”

Google and CBS were in talks late last year, according to news media and analyst reports, but no deal has been announced. CBS declined to comment, and Google would not comment on specific deals.

Google has been upbeat about the program, saying it has signed up about 900 stations in some 200 markets. “As we have more advertisers, we’ll be able to work with more publishers,” said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. “And as we get more publishers, we’ll be able to work with more advertisers. It is a process that will take time.”

Some advertisers are pleased. “We’ve tested them with about three of our clients,” said Mark Hodor, vice president of direct response at Carat Fusion, an advertising agency that is part of the Aegis Group. “It has been pretty successful for all of them.”
But a recent list of participating stations, which was obtained by The New York Times, shows that Google’s access to major markets is spotty.

For instance, the list included 10 stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, but most were in outlying areas like Sonoma and Santa Rosa and have low ratings. None of the stations were in San Francisco, and Google’s top station in the area is ranked 18th in terms of audience share, according to Arbitron. Its top station in New York is ranked 27th. Google may have added more stations since the list was created last month.

Competitors are moving quickly to grab a share of the market. Bid4Spots, which sells remnant inventory through an automated system, says it has 2,400 stations in its network. Another Google rival, SWMX, said its network reached 40 percent of the American broadcast audience. The company recently began testing TV ads.

One of SWMX’s advantages is that it is not Google, Mr. Bank said. “That’s a huge selling point in the industry. On the other hand, they don’t have the credibility of the Google brand.”

Mr. Cummings, of Emmis, and Mr. Benjamin, of Triad, both said that Google had talked to them about buying higher-quality inventory, but nothing had come of those talks yet.

“It’s tiny,” Mr. Cummings said about the revenue generated through Google. But he said he was hopeful that over time Google would bring new advertisers to prime-time radio. “If we thought this was going to be remnant inventory forever, I would stop that tomorrow,” he said.

Google has been building its own radio sales force, hiring away veteran sales representatives from stations. That has heightened fears in the industry that Google could take control over relationships with advertisers from them.

Ms. Wojcicki said Google had proved in the online world that it could work with Web publishers without undermining the relationships between publishers, advertisers and ad agencies. But the concerns persist.

Google “would not say that they are replacing the buyer-seller relationship,” said Jeff Lanctot, vice president and general manager at Avenue A/Razorfish, an interactive marketing agency. “But it is what they are doing. For a radio salesperson, it is a fox-in-the-henhouse scenario.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/te.../29google.html





Voting Device Pact at Issue

Firm sues over snub by state
Sean P. Murphy

Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the country's largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK , a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.

The contract is valued at about $9 million.

William M. Weisberg , a lawyer representing Diebold, said in an interview yesterday that the company wants a review of the internal records showing how Galvin's office came to select AutoMARK earlier this year.

"We compete against AutoMARK around the country all the time," Weisberg said. "Based on the criteria set out by the Commonwealth, we had a fair degree of confidence we'd come out on top, and nothing we heard during the process dissuaded us of that confidence."

Weisberg said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes "it's worth the time and money" of going to court to challenge the contract's award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

Galvin yesterday called the Diebold suit "frivolous" and unlikely to succeed. "My office made a very reasonable selection after a long, open process of evaluating the voting machines," Galvin said.

"We are entirely confident we will prevail," he said.

In court filings, Diebold has indicated it will ask a judge today to immediately halt further use or distribution of the AutoMARK machines to municipalities throughout the state. If a judge issues that order, Diehold will then present arguments over the coming weeks on why the process was flawed, Weisberg said.

"We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition," he said.

Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection.

The state's purchase of about 3,500 voting machines for use by disabled voters arises out of the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002. It mandates that states provide the machines for those disabled by the loss of a limb or the loss of vision, among other disabilities.

Galvin said AutoMARK machines have already been shipped to some of the state's 1,700 polling places for use in spring municipal elections.

The machines were used in a special election in Worcester last week and are scheduled to be used today for a town vote in Sudbury.

"I want to get the machines in use quickly in the municipal elections before larger statewide elections," Galvin said. "I see this suit as interfering in that."

The state invited bids from numerous manufacturers before narrowing the field to 14 companies, and then to three, Galvin said. While price was a key consideration, other criteria were considered, such as the quality of machine, security, and service.

Galvin said his office surveyed disabled groups and municipal election officials during the evaluation process after letting those groups test the competing machines.

He said there was a consensus in favor of the AutoMARK.

Galvin cited as an important factor in favor of AutoMARK its machine's use of one kind of paper ballot for disabled voters and others.

He said that gave extra privacy to disabled voters.

"If you happened to have only one disabled voter in a precinct, that person's ballot is easily identifiable," he said.

The challenge will be heard in the business litigation session of Suffolk Superior Court in Boston.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...pact_at_issue/





Wikipedia Rival Makes its Debut
Candace Lombardi

A new rival to Wikipedia launched its public beta Sunday.

Citizendium, a self-proclaimed "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge, works much like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information. This community encyclopedia, however, requires users to register with their real names, and its articles are governed by an editorial board.

The wiki encyclopedia was started by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, according to his own biography.

Citizendium seeks to improve on the wiki model by offering encyclopedic content with "gentle expert oversight," according to its main page.

The content, which has 1,100 articles as of this publication, includes imported Wikipedia articles that Citizendium volunteers and editors are in the process of "cleaning up" and outfitting with templates that track an article's status.

Sanger, who started private testing of Citizendium in November 2006, claims to now have gotten approximately 820 authors and 186 editors on board with the project. Authors can start or edit articles. Editors decide which version of an article is approved and which requires an academic background in a particular area of expertise.

Anyone who registers with their full name is free to contribute. But those contributions will be monitored by constables. A "CZ Constable" is a volunteer who is required to have a bachelor's degree and be "at least 25 years old." These constables (Sanger is one of them) will have the authority to ban inappropriate contributors.

Articles that have been vetted by Citizendium editors and constables are marked as "CZ Live."

This gives Citizendium control over what's posted and avoids some of the problems that have plagued Wikipedia.

Because of its free-form nature, Wikipedia has experienced some problems with defamation and vandalism, in addition to factually incorrect entries. Wikipedia banned comedian Stephen Colbert from its site after he encouraged fans to make funny edits to entries in order to illustrate the vulnerability of an open wiki encyclopedia.
http://news.com.com/Wikipedia+rival+...3-6170405.html





How to Save Newspapers

Tim O'Reilly: I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it." ("And if any other paper says they do, they're lying.") Tim's bottom lines:
We talk about creative destruction, and celebrate the rise of blogging as citizen journalism and Craigslist as self-service advertising, but there are times when something that seemed great in theory arrives in reality, and you understand the downsides. I have faith both in the future and in free markets as a way to get there, but sometimes the road is hard. If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?

Dave Winer answers:
First, reform journalism school. It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we're doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism.

Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy -- every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It's also important because it's how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the "grain" of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it.

Great suggestions. These enlarge on some of the points I made a few months back (specifically, #s 5 and 6 below), all which I'll repeat here, with a few very minor edits (to add linkage and make a couple of points current):

1) Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. (Dean Landsman was the first to call this a "fishwrap fee".) Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. (This point is proven by Santa Barbara vs. Fort Myers, both with papers called News-Press, one with contents behind a paywall and the other wide open.) Plus, you'll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I'll betcha you'll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let's not talk about Times Select. Your paper's not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.)

2) Start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will provide paths for search engine spiders to follow back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper's website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item.

3) Link outside the paper. Encourage reporters and editors to write linky text. This will encourage reciprocity on the part of readers and writers who appreciate the social gesture that a link also performs. Over time this will bring back enormous benefits through increased visits, higher respect, more authority and the rest of it.

4) Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You're not the only game in town anymore, and haven't been for some time. Instead you're the biggest fish in your pond's ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit.

5) Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What's Going On and What Matters Around Here. The blogosphere is thick with obsessives who write (often with more authority than anybody inside the paper) on topics like water quality, politics, road improvement, historical preservation, performing artisty and a zillion other topics. These people, these writers, are potentially huge resources for you. They are not competitors. The whole "bloggers vs. journalism" thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There's a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it's barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.

6) Start looking to citizen journalists (CJs) for coverage of hot breaking local news topics -- such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and so on. There are plenty of people with digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones and other devices that can prove mighty handy for following stories up close and personally. Great example: what Sig Solares and his crew did during Katrina.

7) Stop calling everything "content". It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial". Your job is journalism, not container cargo.

8) Uncomplicate your webistes. I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems. Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save all kinds of time and hassle.

9) Get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).

Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. It's also how you shed dead conceptual weight, get light and nimble, and show Wall Street how you're not just ahead of the curve, but laying pavement beyond everybody else's horizon. It's how your leverage the advantages of history, of incumbency, and of already being in a going business. (The hard part will be raising your paper's heartbeat from once a day to once a second. But you can do it. Your own heart sets a good example.)

10) publish Rivers of News for readers who use Blackberries or Treos or Nokia 770s, or other handheld Web browsers. Your current home page, and all your editorial pages, are torture to read with those things. See the example Dave Winer provides with a from the NY Times. See what David Sifry did for the Day Fire here in California. Don't try to monetize it right away. Trust me, you'll make a lot more money — and get a lot more respect from Wall Street — because you've got news rivers, than you'll make with those rivers.

* One more...
11) Remember the higher purpose behind the most informative writing — and therefore behind newspapers as well. To review,
I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I thnk of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers.
Informing is not the same as "delivering information". Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.
What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.
The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.)
Credit where due... That line, We are all authors of each other, first came up many years ago during a conversation between Tim O'Reilly and myself.
Tim's right that newspapers have a hard road. But there are a lot of good people out there who want newspapers to adapt and thrive in a Giant Zero world. More, I'm sure, than ever before.
They can only do it together.
http://doc.weblogs.com/2007/03/24





Got a pillow on your back?

You Can Get Hooked on 'Soft Addictions'
Julie Deardorff

"Soft addictions" to things like video games or mail order catalogs, or coffee, may not be deadly like hard addictions to chemical substances, but can cause disruptions in life.

When Rich and Gertrude Lyons first admitted they were powerless, television was the first thing to go. Then they weaned themselves from mail-order catalogs, electronic gadgets and sugar.

Today, the Chicago couple is still grappling with their "soft addictions," or ordinary behavior that, if overdone, can wreak havoc on your life. Unlike hard addictions, which are usually related to a chemical substance, you don't die from soft addictions.

"But you don't really live, either," said self-help guru Judith Wright, who labeled the phenomenon more than a decade ago.

People have always had ways to zone out, but experts such as Wright say soft or mild behavioral addictions are escalating, partly because there are so many new things to get addicted to, and many have the disposable income to do it. But identifying and treating a soft addiction are difficult. Because whether it's watching the NCAA tournament, checking e-mail, editing Wikipedia entries or walking into Starbucks, the activities are seemingly harmless behaviors. The problem is that when even healthy habits such as exercise are used too often or for the wrong reasons, they sap our time, money and energy and prevent us from living the life we want, according to Wright, founder of the Chicago-based Wright Institute, a personal development and training center and author of "The Soft Addiction Solution" (Jeremy P. Taracher/Penguin, $16.95).

Rich Lyons, 41, for example, habitually zoned out in front of the television at night, staying up far later than intended and waking up crabby the next day. That resulted in another soft addiction, he said, to a grumpy mood. His wife, Gertrude, 41, meanwhile, found she had a soft addiction to shopping for adorable but overpriced baby clothes that, ultimately, her children didn't want to wear. She also had a bad habit of paging through mail-order catalogs when she had better things to do.

"It wasn't an overspending issue as much as it was buying stuff you knew you didn't need," Gertrude said. "It was like buying something felt like it would make me feel better."

The affliction strikes men and women of all ages and races. A poll conducted for the Wright Institute, found that 91 percent of us have a soft addiction that keeps us from feeling satisfied. "And the other 9 percent of people are in denial," Wright said.
Procrastination, watching too much television and overworking are the top three. But a new study shows college undergraduates might be addicted to tanning under UV lights. The Internet, meanwhile, is being blamed for a host of compulsive behaviors.

In one recent high profile case, James Pacenza of New York, who was fired for visiting an adult chat room at work, is suing IBM for wrongful termination. Pacenza claims he has an addiction, a disorder that deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal.

Technology can cause addictive behavior "partly because each potential response required for a cell phone message or an e-mail doesn't always seem so large, so why not mow some of them down now?" said Jeff Davidson, author of "Breathing Space: Living & Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society" (BookSurge, $14.95). "The megalomaniac payoff of believing we can stay on top of it all can, intermittently, feel quite satisfying."

Though there is still controversy over whether compulsive Internet use and video-game playing merit a medical diagnosis, treatment centers have opened up around the world, including Korea, China and the Netherlands. The Priory Clinic in London is treating "texting addicts," or those who might spend up to seven hours a day writing and receiving text messages on their cell phones.

One of eight Americans exhibited at least one possible sign of problematic Internet use, a Stanford study showed. Psychological symptoms include an inability to stop using it, craving more time online, neglect of family and friends and feeling depressed and irritable when not at the computer. Physical signs can be carpal tunnel syndrome, sleep deprivation, backaches, eye strain and increased agitation.

"Job loss, financial loss and marital loss can all be associated with the disorder," said Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, who has seen everything from young children who withdrew from life for online gaming to couples who divorced because of online affairs.

But others say spending large amounts of time behind the computer doesn't necessarily constitute an addiction. "It's more of a process of control and losing control," said psychologist Chris Stout, an executive director at the Timberline Knolls, a Chicago-based women's residential treatment center. "It's easy to confuse an addiction with a compulsive behavior. An addiction involves deception, denial and dishonesty. A compulsive behavior is more apparent such as repetitive behaviors and is a way to cope with anxiety."

Unlike a bad habit, a soft addiction also has an identifiable cost of money, time, energy or intimacy associated with it, according to Wright. Feeling numb, high, buzzed or in a trance when you're doing an activity could mean you have a problem.

"If you can't remember what you did, ate, saw or bought, that's a sign," she said. "But if you're doing the activity and feel more alive and vital, and you're learning, growing, clear, grounded and present, that's a passion. We shouldn't confuse the two."
The first step to beating a soft addiction requires making a commitment to higher quality of life, said Wright, whose next "One Decision" weekend seminar begins April 13. Then you have to recognize the deeper need or hunger under the soft addiction. "Make the distinction between what you want and what you hunger for," Wright said. "You might want a new designer dress, but you're really hungry to feel good about yourself."

Finally, use what Wright calls the "Math of More." Instead of depriving yourself, add things to your life to crowd out the behavior you want to change.

Rob Johnson, 45, of Oak Park, Ill., found he was became too emotionally invested when he watched televised sporting events. But rather than cut sports out of his life altogether, he added more time with his wife and three sons and began coaching youth hockey teams, something he finds much more rewarding. Suddenly, he didn't have time to watch 15 hours of televised hockey a week.

"It took making a deeper inquiry into why I was watching so much," he said.

Rich Lyons, president of Lyons Consulting Group, realized that his trouble with electronic gadgets stemmed from his need to feel connected. But when he was lost in the world of technology, he didn't have any contact with his family.

The electronic connection, he realized, "is not nearly as nourishing as connecting with my wife and kids," he said. "If I can understand the underlying need, the computer won't do it. I need connection with human beings."

The bad news is that soft addictions never really go away. At one point, The Lyons family had ousted sugar, but it has crept back into their lives. Even 10-year-old Morgan Lyons is working with her parents to eliminate the addictive substance.

"You get rid of one and a new one creeps in," Gertrude Lyons sighed. "The best you can do is lessen them and put in systems to help cope."

Top 10 soft addictions

• Procrastination.
• Watching too much television.
• Overworking.
• Acting moody, such as being grumpy, cranky or overly happy.
• Overeating.
• Drinking too much coffee.
• Shopping impulsively.
• Daydreaming excessively.
• Complaining excessively.
• Surfing the Internet excessively.

Source: Harris Poll conducted for the Wright Institute.

How to tell if you're addicted

If you fear you Google yourself too often or can't stop checking your e-mail, here are some questions to determine your level of Internet addiction, according to cyber-psychologist Kimberly Young, director of the Center for Online Addiction and author of "Caught in the Net" (John Wiley & Sons, $34.95), which addresses Internet addiction. Young likens excessive Internet use to pathological gambling.

Rate your responses to the following questions on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 point for "rarely" to 5 points for "always." The higher the score -- more than 25 points is cause for concern -- the greater the problem your Internet use causes. For the full 20-question quiz and scoring details, go to www.netaddiction.com.

How often do you:

1. Stay online longer than you intended?

A. rarely B. occasionally C. frequently D. often E. always

2. Neglect household chores to spend more time online?

A B C D E

3. Prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?

A B C D E

4. Form new relationships with fellow online users?

A B C D E

5. Check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?

A B C D E

6. See your grades or schoolwork suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?

A B C D E

7. Hear others in your life complain about the amount of time you spend online?

A B C D E

8. Let your job performance or productivity suffer because of the Internet?

A B C D E

9. Become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?

A B C D E

10. Lose sleep due to late-night log-ins?

A B C D E

http://news.newstimes.com/news/story.php?id=1036573





Lawmakers May Ban Texting While Driving
Jon Hurdle

New Jersey drivers who insist on sending text messages on their cell phones or personal digital assistants may find themselves on the wrong side of the law if legislators approve a new bill.

The plan is in response to a recent Nationwide Insurance survey finding that one in five drivers are texting while driving, a figure that rises to about one in three among people aged 18 to 34, said Democratic Assemblyman Paul Moriarty.

"It's extremely dangerous," said Moriarty, one of three sponsors of the bill. "It requires you to completely take your eyes off the road. I see people driving down the street using both their thumbs to send a text message, and I can only imagine they are steering with their knees."

Drivers caught texting would be fined between $100 and $250. Similar measures are being considered by three other states, Moriarty said.

The measure would allow police to pull over any driver found texting while driving, a tougher approach than currently allowed under the state's ban on drivers using a mobile phone on the highway. Under that law police are only allowed to stop drivers if they are also committing another offense.

Critics have asked why the bill does not also seek to outlaw other sources of driver-distraction such as coffee or food, but Moriarty said such a bill would never pass the state legislature.

The bill, introduced last week, has 20 co-sponsors -- both Democrats and Republicans. It is expected to be debated in a committee during May or June and then pass to the full Assembly and the Senate whose leaders have indicated they are in favor, the assemblyman said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMos...22194620070327





Apple Should Pull the Plug on the iPhone
John C. Dvorak

The hype over the unreleased iPhone has actually increased over the past month despite the fact that nobody has seen or used the device. This, if nothing else, proves the power of branding and especially the power of brand loyalty.

It's the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market. And it's exactly the crowded-market aspect of this that analysts seem to be ignoring.

Apple Inc.'s past successes have been in markets that were emerging or moribund.

Its biggest hit has been the iPod. But let's examine what happened here.

First the MP3 player business was segmented and unfocused with numerous players making a lot of cheap junk and not doing much to market any of it.
Apple does what? Advertise. Gosh, what a concept.

Then there was the online music distribution business, again unfocused and out-of-control with little marketing and a lot of incompatible technologies. So Apple comes in with a reasonable solution, links it to the heavily promoted iPod and bingo. A winner.

It advertises on TV, on billboards and on the Internet. Within no time the company takes over the business that would probably still be languishing without Apple.
Thus Apple does what it does best. It produces a jazzy product and promotes it like any good business should do. And in the process manages to get a high margin.
This is nothing more than the fundamentals.

Now compare that effort and overlay the mobile handset business. This is not an emerging business. In fact it's gone so far that it's in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.

During this phase of a market margins are incredibly thin so that the small fry cannot compete without losing a lot of money.

As for advertising and expensive marketing this is nothing like Apple has ever stepped into. It's a buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies

The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.

There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.

And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes.
And note that the Microsoft Corp. versus Apple battles are laughable compared to the frenzied marketing mania in the handset business. Even Microsoft itself has troubles with its attempts to get into a small sub segment of the handset business with its operating system.

What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it's smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.
It should do that immediately before it's too late. Samsung Electronics Ltd. might be a candidate. Otherwise I'd advise you to cover your eyes. You're not going to like what you'll see.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...C1B480 D4A%7D





Hot Spectrum Draws Cash, and Ideals
John Markoff

It is referred to as the last beachfront property in the wireless world — a prized swath of spectrum that is about to be sold at federal auction. And it has touched off an intense lobbying effort pitting cellular companies against a variety of new players interested in the potential of a next-generation mobile Internet.

The Federal Communications Commission will set the rules for the auction, possibly as soon as next month. Depending on that ruling, the spectrum could be used for voice services for cellular carriers, new frequencies for emergency responders, or a commercial high-speed broadband multimedia network.

Among those trying to influence the outcome are three of the nation’s four largest cellular providers, rural and regional wireless carriers, cable and satellite television companies and a range of technology companies — including Google and Yahoo.

Along with other wireless technology proposals, the auction could reshape the debate over who controls access to the networks that deliver digital content to consumers. Opening the door to more network competition nationally could have a tremendous economic impact.

“This offers the potential for a real game changer in broadband spectrum,” said John M. R. Kneuer, assistant secretary for communications and information at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department. “It can both generate new innovation and lower prices.”

The airwaves in question are in the 700-megahertz band, a segment used until now for UHF television but freed up by the move to digital broadcasting. Unless Congress reverses itself, those frequencies are scheduled to be reclaimed by the government and reallocated for public safety and commercial broadband networks on Feb. 19, 2009.

Mr. Kneuer points out that because the new band is at a lower frequency than today’s cellular and digital wireless services, it has a far greater range as well as the ability to penetrate the walls of homes and office buildings more effectively.

That could enable a new entrant to build out a broadband service dedicated to mobile devices — a sector considered to have greater growth potential than conventional voice services. This could be done quickly and relatively inexpensively with just a few transmission towers and then filled in with additional capacity as new customers join the network.

“This is the realization of a truly national wireless Internet,” said Reed E. Hundt, a former F.C.C. chairman.

Last month Mr. Hundt launched a Washington-based organization called Frontline Wireless and filed a proposal with the F.C.C. to create an “open access” network intended to support both public safety services and the creation of a system to offer wholesale broadband network service.

Unlike the current practice of American cellular companies, which lock customers’ handsets to a particular carrier, Mr. Hundt’s network envisions a system that would let a consumer connect a device like an Apple iPhone or a Palm hand-held device upon purchasing the device at a store like Best Buy.

Mr. Hundt said Frontline had begun building an investor group to take part in the auction, which could begin as early as this summer. Significantly, the company’s first identified investor is K. Ram Shriram, an early Google investor and current board member, and managing partner of Sherpalo Ventures.

Earlier this month Google also helped create a lobbying group called Alliance for 4-G America, with partners including Yahoo, EchoStar Communications, DirecTV, Intel and Skype, in an effort to influence the F.C.C.’s rule-making for the auction.

Several industry executives and analysts said it was unlikely that Google or Yahoo would directly take part in bidding for the new wireless spectrum, for fear of antagonizing communications companies by competing directly with them. But both companies are intensely interested in persuading the F.C.C. not to give advantages to the wireless incumbents in the bidding process.

Google, Yahoo and other Internet companies are worried about the ability of large cable and telephone companies to restrict certain types of Internet traffic, or to give priority service to some content providers over others, possibly for a fee. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have responded that such measures might be necessary to protect their investments in broadband networks.

Industry executives have said that Verizon Wireless or other cellular companies might be willing to spend billions of dollars for the spectrum simply to block competitors, or possibly for voice applications intended to help the national cellular companies compete more effectively against smaller regional and local cellular firms.

Several analysts cautioned that upstart bidders might be hard pressed to compete against the incumbents, which have vast cash reserves.

“Silicon Valley bidders have deep pockets, but it would be very outside-the-box and high-risk for them,” said Kevin M. Roe, a telecommunications analyst at Roe Equity Research in New York. “Not only do you need the money to buy the spectrum, but you have to build a network — and that would be a gargantuan task that would take years with no guarantees they could catch up with the big four national operators.”

A Verizon spokesman said the company was interested in the potential offered by the 700-megahertz frequencies but had not yet committed to enter any auction for the spectrum. The company executive also noted that it was still possible that legislation might emerge from Congress that would again delay the digital television and set back an auction date.

But because the auction could generate as much as $10 billion to $30 billion for the United States Treasury, some policy analysts said they were concerned that the auction process might trump the broader impact that new wireless services or technologies might have on the economy.

“This spectrum could catalyze tremendous innovation,” said Kevin Werbach, assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. “However, if the auction process is focused on raising the most amount of money for the government, it might prove counterproductive for the larger economic interests of the country.”

That may be particularly true for a related proposal recently put forward by a separate coalition also including Google, as well as Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Royal Philips Electronics. Earlier this month, the group gave a prototype device to the F.C.C. that they said would be used to build a next-generation wireless network that would have greater range and better performance than the current generation of technology known as Wi-Fi.

The new service would fall within existing television bands, but would use smart radio techniques to avoid interfering with local television channels.

“We think this has the economic potential of the Wi-Fi industry or even more,” said Scott Blake Harris, a Washington lawyer who represents the group.

The regulatory situation is clouded by competing proposals for the use of the 700-megahertz band as well as a range of other frequencies. For example, Morgan O’Brien, a founder of Nextel, last year formed Cyren Call Communications, which petitioned the F.C.C. for an alternative use for that band for public safety services. While that proposal was rejected by the commission, Cyren Call is still trying to win Congressional support for the idea.

Separately, last May, Silicon Valley-based M2Z Networks petitioned the F.C.C. for spectrum to build a freely available nationwide broadband network at the higher frequency of 2.155 gigahertz.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/te...6spectrum.html




Intel Modifies Wi-Fi to Add Mileage
Michael Kanellos

Intel has come up with a form of Wi-Fi that would let a laptop in San Francisco connect to the Internet from a base station in San Jose, Calif.

And there would still be about 10 miles of wiggle room to spare.

Academics and researchers from the company's labs have created a system that lets Wi-Fi signals, which ordinarily carry a few hundred feet, instead travel 100 kilometers, or more than 60 miles, said Eric Brewer, director of Intel Research Berkeley, a lab owned by the company that cooperates on research projects with the University of California at Berkeley.

"It is regular Wi-Fi hardware but with modified software," he said.

To show it works, Intel has set up a link between its labs in the downtown section of this Bay Area city and the university's Space Science Lab, about 1,200 feet up and about 1.5 miles away on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. The receiver in the office consists of a directional antenna linked to a modified--but otherwise standard--wireless access point.

The system isn't designed for the U.S. or Europe. Instead, it is part of the chip giant's efforts to bring computing technologies to people in emerging markets. The communications infrastructure in most of these countries is fairly anemic and most of it is concentrated in cities. Villages, where a large portion of the population lives, are effectively cut off from the outside world except by car, bus or footpath.

These Wi-Fi antennas, say Brewer and others, could serve as important links in a chain. Villagers would connect to a Wi-Fi antenna in their town or region, which would then relay the signals through several other towers until it came to a fiber link that connected the villager to the Internet.

In a sense, these long-range Wi-Fi antennas would perform the same function as WiMax, a long-range wireless technology that many, including Intel, are experimenting with now. The difference is that a WiMax tower costs about $15,000 to $20,000. The long range Wi-Fi towers might only cost $700 to $800.

Additionally, long range Wi-Fi could spread faster, Brewer said. The radio spectrum employed by WiMax is regulated by local telecommunications authorities. Putting up towers or offering services can require getting governmental permission.

Wi-Fi operates in the unlicensed portion of the spectrum. Thus, villages could join a network incrementally. Some networks could also leverage both WiMax and Wi-Fi: Pakistan, among other emerging nations, is investing heavily in WiMax.

Intel is considering conducting a trial of this technology, or components of it, in Uganda later this year.

How it works
One of the big differences between standard Wi-Fi and Intel's long-range version lies in the fact that the long-range signals are directional: they are tuned to travel from one antenna to another one and nowhere else. A standard Wi-Fi antenna broadcasts its signal in a 360-degree circle.

Creating a direct signal isn't easy. The antennas need to be precisely aligned with one another, and physical objects that get between the two can interfere with the signal.

"It is hard to align them," said Alan Mainwaring, a scientist at Intel Research Berkeley. "The first thing that happens is that kids play on the tower."
To that end, the company has developed a "steerable" antenna. The physical antennas themselves aren't steered--instead, the signal between the towers is guided by an electrical signal. Electrical steering also has the advantage in that the physical antennas can also move out of alignment, or even be put into the ground slightly off-kilter, without destroying signal integrity.

The lab has made one system out of "L" brackets and wood, among other components, and will come out with a second generation of antennas in the relatively near future. (Some of the technology for the steerable antenna comes from professor Alexey Umnov of Nizhny Novgorod State University in Russia. Intel has research facilities in that city, too.)

Additionally, a lot of the protocols and procedures in ordinary Wi-Fi communication are eliminated. Handshaking, which allows a PC and a wireless router to link up in an ordinary Wi-Fi network, and collision detection are eliminated.
http://news.com.com/Intel+modifies+W...3-6170713.html





Wi-Fi Buses Drive Rural Web Use
Jason Margolis

Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.

In rural India and parts of Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay, the vehicles offer web content to computers with no internet connection.

The buses and a fleet of motorcycles update their pages in cities before visiting the hard-to-reach communities. As well as offering popular pages, the United Villages project also allows users to request specific information.

A small box, with an antenna, onboard the buses and motorcycles communicates with the rural computers.

Local business

In many parts of the developing world it is too expensive to lay the fibres and copper cable to deliver a standard internet connection. Wireless technologies also do not reach many remote places.

The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan said the company had been set up to give those people in these areas a slice of the web for a fee.

"There's only 0.003% percent of the web that rural India cares about," he told BBC News.

"They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."

The village computer was often in the local store, he added.

Every time the wi-fi bus rolled by the village - up to six times a day - the pages were updated, he said.

As well as this regular content users can make special requests for a few additional rupees.

For example, if there was no information about Britney Spears on the village computer, a fee could be paid to get hold of such information.

The bus would then go back to the city and communicate with an internet server.

The box on the bus would be updated with the requested information and, a few hours later, the bus would arrive back at the village to zap the Britney Spears pages to the computer.

The wi-fi vehicles also deliver and collect e-mails from the villagers.

Product catalogue

The system also made it easier for villagers to buy essential products such as fertilisers, pesticides, books and medicines, Mr Hassan added.

"We're bringing e-commerce to rural India."

"What we've done is created a catalogue of those products that they can order at the kiosk and get them delivered the next day via the bus," he said.

Because many people in rural communities cannot read, and because the majority of the web is in English, villagers often rely on the person who operates the local computer to help them.

Raj Kishor Swain, who runs the computer in the village of Satasankha, said he is now a popular man.

"Right now, more and more people are asking me about what can be done on the PC and internet," he said.

"My objective is to show to the village youth that having a PC with connectivity is a viable business so that more and more unemployed youth can take up this as a self-employment opportunity."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6506193.stm





Wireless LAN Security Myths That Won’t Die
George Ou

It's been two years since I wrote "The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN," and it's probably been one of my more successful blog entries ever, with two flashes on Digg. Since that time, I've written a free electronic book on enterprise wireless LAN security for anyone to use and download from TechRepublic. Since it has been two years, I'm going to update the information with more defined categories and better explain why they're so bad from an ROI (return on investment) and security perspective.

Waste of money, resources, time

• MAC filtering
• Disable DHCP and use Static IP addresses
• Signal suppression with expensive paint or antenna placement

Worse than no wireless security at all

• LEAP (adding EAP-FAST to the list)
• SSID Access Point beacon suppression (or "hiding")

Has nothing to do with security mechanisms

• Just use 802.11a or Bluetooth

The original blog has probably been read by more than a hundred thousand people, but I still can't kill these nasty urban legends because they are so engrained as "best practice." I was shocked and infuriated to find that even some security certifications, like the CISSP, and VISA payment processing compliance requirements, like PCI, are recommending most of these methods as "best practice."

Note that I recently attended the official CISSP boot camp training and in spite of this bad wireless LAN advice, I still recommend the CISSP certification and training. It really taught me how to better communicate to management and business people and align security and IT to the business. I have, however, asked them to fix their small section on wireless LAN best practices, and I hope they fix it.

The most common and misguided arguments I hear against my advice and in favor of implementing this nonsense are:

• What's the harm? It's a layered approach to security.
• It makes us harder to see and hack.
• We're a small company, and we can't afford real security.

The problem with these arguments is that they're based on some fundamentally wrong assumptions and an inadequate knowledge of how wireless LAN security works.

• These aren't layered approaches; they're more like buying overlapping warranty coverage, since any benefit against casual bandwidth thieves is already covered by real security measures. The harm is that people confuse these methods for the real thing, and they spend more money and resources on implementing the wrong security mechanisms and end up skimping on real security.
• They don't make you harder to hack. Kismet, which is a free utility, will reveal so-called hidden SSIDs, MAC addresses, and static IP schemes within seconds of scanning the airwaves, sending all that money and time spent on MAC address and static IP management down the toilet.
• If you have a limited budget with limited IT staff, it's all the more reason to use real wireless LAN security, because you certainly won't be able to afford the complexities of MAC filtering and static IP configuration. True wireless LAN security is far cheaper to implement and maintain.

Rock solid wireless LAN security for the home or small office can be summed up in a single paragraph. All you need to do is use WPA-PSK security with a random alpha-numeric pass-phrase that has a minimum of 10 characters. I estimated that a truly random alpha-numeric 10-character pass-phrase using modern single-core computers will take one thousand PCs working in parallel 500 years to crack. If your hardware doesn't support WPA mode, you can almost always get a free software/firmware upgrade to support it. If WPA mode absolutely can't be supported, you can run WEP (104 bit AKA 128) security, which might take a semi-skilled script kiddy using two PCs in an active attack configuration 10 minutes to break. WEP shouldn't ever be considered effective wireless LAN security, but it's hundreds of times harder to break than any of the myths. WEP can be considered an actual deterrent when nothing better like WPA is available, whereas these myths aren't even worthy of the deterrent title. The ROI for any of the first three wireless LAN security myths is essentially zero.

Worse than no Wireless Security at All

I've added a second subcategory of "worse than no wireless security at all." For this category, I've listed Cisco's proprietary LEAP and EAP-FAST protocols, along with SSID beacon suppression. Not only are these mechanisms ineffective, they're even harmful. LEAP uses unencrypted hash-based authentication, which relies strictly on password complexity. The problem is that 99% of all human-generated passwords can be cracked within hours or days. That means once a hacker breaks into a wireless LAN network by cracking LEAP, they're not only inside your network but they've got your passwords to freely access your data. If a domain admin were to use LEAP, the keys to the kingdom are handed over to the attacker. Cisco co-created a superior authentication mechanism called PEAP, which is standardized. But still pushes its customers toward the proprietary EAP-FAST protocol, which was created as a direct replacement for LEAP as a way to lock you in to Cisco hardware. EAP-FAST is only slightly less dangerous than LEAP, but its default and most commonly used configuration is just as dangerous as LEAP because it relies on anonymous server certificates that anyone can spoof.

I've added SSID beacon suppression to the list of "worse than no wireless security at all" because it forces you to spew your wireless LAN configuration from your laptop everywhere you go. Security researcher Joshua Wright recently highlighted these dangers in this article. The problem with turning off SSID beaconing on your access point is that not only is it worthless, since the SSIDs are still easily detectible over the air, but it also forces your laptops to probe for the SSID. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. That means that all of your laptops will run around the world broadcasting your SSID, which opens them up to data seepage or even evil twin attacks. If you forget this nonsense about SSID beacon suppression on the access point, you can turn off SSID probing on your notebooks, making them safer to operate. You can do this with the latest Windows XP SP2 Wireless Client Update, and Windows Vista has this feature built in. You simply need to make sure that you don't enable "Connect even if the network is not broadcasting." The default behavior for SSID probing in Windows Vista is off, which is the safe setting.

As for using 802.11a or Bluetooth, there's nothing wrong with those technologies, except that they shouldn't be confused with security mechanisms. They're merely alternative data transport mechanisms, and you need to apply the same wireless LAN security principles. Bluetooth shouldn't even be considered a wireless LAN technology, and the only reason I mentioned it is that some so-called experts were touting it as such.

One other solution mentioned for wireless LAN security is the use of VPN, which is an outdated and cumbersome method. The use of VPN for wireless LAN security isn't fundamentally dangerous (if you avoid using PPTP), but it does leave the data link layer wide open, which lets a hacker do nasty things like DHCP poisoning or possibly other Layer 2 attacks. At the very least, it allows the attacker to be on the same subnet as your legit users, which means they get to probe for missing personal firewalls or holes. At worst, the attacker can try to MAC bomb the CAM table or try to do a denial of service attack with spanning tree protocol BPDU VLAN resets if the access point passes on these attacks. Most people just stick their access point right into their Cisco switches with no VTP domain password, along with automatic trunking turned on with no consideration for Layer 2 security. My recommendation is that organizations focus on data link layer solutions like WPA, which offer cheaper and more effective protection.

The bottom line is that these six security myths should be permanently labeled worthless at best or dangerous at worst. For businesses and organizations, I would highly recommend my ultimate guide to enterprise wireless LAN security. For small businesses and homes, all you need to do is use WPA-PSK security with a random alpha-numeric pass-phrase that's a minimum of 10 characters long. If WPA security isn't available to you, at least run WEP as a 10-minute deterrence mechanism.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=454





OLPC Manufacturer to Sell $200 Laptop in Developed Countries
Ryan Paul

Quanta, the company manufacturing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's XO laptops, plans to begin selling low-cost budget mobile computers for $200 later this year. According to Quanta president Michael Wang, the company plans to leverage the underlying technologies associated with OLPC's XO laptop to produce laptop computers that are significantly less expensive than conventional laptops.

The OLPC project, which hopes to bring inexpensive Linux-based laptops to the education market in developing countries, selected Quanta (the laptop manufacturing company that produces mobile computers for HP, Dell, and Acer) to produce the individual XO laptop units. OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte says that OLPC has no plans to make XO laptops, which are "designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world," available to ordinary consumers in developed countries. OLPC plans to sell the laptops in bulk to governments, which will then distribute the hardware to school children.
OLPC production begins, Thailand pulls out
AMD pulls plug on Personal Internet Communicator

Quanta's announcement will be welcomed by the throngs of technology enthusiasts in the US and elsewhere who have expressed interest in acquiring one of the OLPC's budget-friendly laptops for personal use. Quanta plans to create a new "emerging PC" business unit to focus on establishing a new global market for low-cost computers. Although few details are available at this time regarding the software that Quanta will ship with its own XO-like laptops, it is known that the company intends to use open source software. Since virtually every element of the OLPC platform (including the unique user interface) is available under various open source licenses, Quanta could easily ship its own computers with the exact same software used on the XO.

With luck, Quanta's increased involvement in the low-cost mobile computing market will allow the company to further decrease manufacturing costs and help the OLPC project reduce the XO's total cost per unit. This move by Quanta could also help make modern technology more accessible to underprivileged families around the world.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...countries.html





Samsung Announces 64 GB Solid State Drive

Samsung is upping the ante in the solid state drive market, announcing it plans to ship a 64 GB, 1.8-inch model in the second quarter of 2007.

The market for flash-based solid state disk drives which act as drop-in replacements for traditional hard drives used in mobile and portable devices is heating up: Samsung announced today that it plans to ship a 64 GB solid state drive in the second quarter of this year. The announcement comes on the heels of SanDisk announcing a 32 GB flash drive only a couple weeks ago, and Fujitsu announcing solid state drives as an option in selected LifeBook portable computers.

Not only does Samsung's new offering increase the capacity available in solid state drives, it increases the performance as well. Samsung claims the respective read and write performance on the drive have been increased by 20 and 60 percent: the 64 GB unit can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s, and consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle). In comparison, an 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and eats 1.5 Watts either operating or when idle.

Samsung plans to start mass production of the 64 GB solid state drive in the second quarter of 2007, although the company didn't release any estimates on the unit's price to OEMs or consumers.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/article12556.html





Using Steam to Cool Computers
Michael Kanellos

You can hold Celsia's new cooling component for about three seconds. Then your fingers start to feel as if they're getting burned.

It's part of a new line of components from the San Jose, Calif.-based company that it says will cool off torrid hotspots inside computers and light fixtures running light emitting diodes (LEDs) better than conventional heat pipes or fans.

Feeling is believing. In the corporate demonstration, a person stirs a cup of hot water with a stick of copper. It takes about five seconds or so to feel a gradual warming sensation. The human guinea pig then stirs with one of the company's heat spreaders: the rapid rise in temperature is noticeable before two seconds elapse. Holding the NanoSpreader for five seconds is nearly impossible.

The sudden rush of heat occurs because steam is being created inside the NanoSpreader, said George Meyer, director of development at the company, which was re-launched in 2006. The exterior of the device is a copper sleeve that absorbs heat from a processor or a hard drive.

The interior consists of a series of vacuum-sealed chambers and channels containing small amounts of water. The water turns to steam, which then conducts the heat from the source to another component, such as an aluminum heat sink, that can dissipate the heat into the ambient atmosphere.

"Steam conducts heat better than almost any substance out there," he said.

Testers often don't believe that. "There's got to be some sort of chemical in there," one observer said, though Meyer affirmed that the active ingredients are copper and water.

Heat is one of the primary obstacles for industrial designers and consumer electronics manufacturers these days. Consumers want small, quiet devices. Unfortunately, components like processors and hard drives generate a lot of heat and often require fans or heat pipes, tubes of metal that conduct heat away, to keep them cool.

"The digital video recorder is one of the most strenuous applications for a hard drive there is," said Meyer. Blade server manufacturers and makers of telecommunications equipment are also shopping for new components to remove heat.

The company is also targeting LED lights. Although LEDs can produce a significant amount of light per watt of power, LEDs also generate a significant amount of heat. Thus, LED arrays often need cooling components.

IBM and other companies have created water or oil-filled components for cooling internal computer components for years. But many of these devices contained relatively large amounts of water and are therefore physically large.

Shrinking the size of these components so they won't add bulk in smaller computers has been a bit of a challenge. Cooligy has developed a liquid cooling system, but it requires a mechanical pump. Other companies working on products in this market include Nanocoolers and Cool Chips. None of these companies has experienced broad adoption yet.

For its part, Celsia asserts that it has an advantage in that its components are fairly small, measuring only a few millimeters thick, and are made out of fairly basic materials. It has also teamed up with Taiwan's Yeh-Chiang Technology, one of the largest manufacturers of heat pipes.

Getting this far hasn't been easy. The company emerged from South Korea as iCurie in 2001. In 2005, a new management team was installed and an additional $20 million in funding was raised from various sources.

Celsia's components cost more than ordinary heat pipes or cooling technologies, but fewer cooling components are needed. In the end, the company says using its components versus ordinary ones should be cost-neutral.

The smaller number of components also frees up designers.

"If you are looking at an ultralight portable, you could build it without a fan," he said.
http://news.com.com/Using+steam+to+c...?tag=nefd.lede





IBM Doubles CPU Cooling Capabilities with Simple Manufacturing Change
Joel Hruska

According to a new paper released at the IEEE Semi-Therm conference, IBM has discovered a way to dramatically improve processor cooling. Unlike some other recent cooling breakthroughs, IBM's discovery appears to be one that should be relatively inexpensive to implement, and could have a significant impact on consumer microprocessors in the near future. Without fundamentally changing the approach to CPU cooling today and without the use of more advanced setups like water coolers, IBM says that they can double CPU cooling capacity while making it easier and safer to do so.

IBM's find addresses how thermal paste is typically spread between the face of a chip and the heat spreader that sits directly over the core. Overclockers already know how crucial it is to apply thermal paste the right way: too much, and it causes heat buildup. Too little, and it causes heat buildup. It has to be "just right," which is why IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount, and to make it significantly more efficient in the process.

A CPU's heatspreader is normally attached directly to the core by use of a paste or glue that has been enriched with micrometer-sized ceramic or metal particles. These particles then form heat-evacuation bridges between the core and the cooler, and it's these bridges that carry heat into the heatspreader.

In its current form, the process is quite inefficient: IBM's says that up to 40% of a CPU's total thermal budget (i.e., the cooling capacity available to draw heat away from the core) is consumed by these particles. This inefficiency is made worse because the particles aren't truly spread evenly throughout the paste. Instead, particles clump together, forming what IBM refers to as the "Magic Cross", as shown below at Figure 1. This thickened area is a non-homogeneous mixture of paste and particles that dramatically worsens total cooling efficiency across the core.

IBM's solution was to design a series of micrometer-length trenches into the copper cap that sits above the CPU core, as shown in the top diagram ("hierarchical branched channels"). These larger and smaller trenches allow for paste to be evenly distributed at precisely the points where it would normally pile up and form a Magic Cross-like structure. Utilizing IBM's new technology allowed researchers to spread thermal paste into a far more homogeneous and efficient pattern, as shown in Figure 2.

The results are quite impressive. Paste thickness could be reduced by a third, and the pressure required to properly fit a CPU cooler on top of a core was cut in half. All of this, and IBM says that cooling capabilities are effectively doubled.

Manufacturing tools to define the micrometer channels are already in development. IBM offers no specific details on when we might see chips using this new procedure in the wild, but they say that the new technology can be quickly integrated into current manufacturing plants at a low cost and using existing process technologies. Whether or not the AMDs or Intels of the world will buy in remains to be seen, but the potential is undeniable.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ng-change.html






Intel Plans Faster Chips That Also Save Power
John Markoff

Intel said Wednesday that it was on track or even ahead of schedule in developing a new generation of chips that would achieve a significant increase in performance without consuming more power.

The new processor families — Penryn, arriving this year, and Nehalam, due next year — will in some cases help Intel catch up technically with its archrival Advanced Micro Devices and in other areas will consolidate performance categories where Intel already leads.

The chips will have wires as short as 45 nanometers, a scale at which 2,000 transistors will fit in the width of a human hair. The resulting chips will have as many as 820 million transistors, making it possible for Intel’s designers to add parallel computing, energy management and graphics to the computing engines that are the mainstay of its business.

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the company’s digital enterprise group, referring to the pace of Intel’s development efforts, said, “The engine is working, and working well.”

Intel is in the midst of a major overhaul of its business strategy after losing ground to A.M.D. during the last two years. The company’s executives have acknowledged that Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, had been late to respond to challenges in energy efficiency and parallel computing and was racing to catch up.

In a briefing for reporters, Mr. Gelsinger said the Penryn chip family would arrive in the second half of this year. A.M.D. and I.B.M. have said they expect to introduce 45-nanometer chips by mid-2008.

A.M.D. has said it plans to introduce an improved chip code-named Barcelona based on its current 65-nanometer technology during the second half of this year, with four processing cores rather than the current two. On Wednesday, the company said it believed that Intel would not be able to catch up with A.M.D.’s existing designs until it introduced the Nehalem microprocessor generation in 2008.

Mr. Gelsinger described Intel’s approach as a “tick-tock” strategy in which it would make incremental changes with the Penryn processors and then more sweeping design changes with the Nehalam chips. The Nehalam chips will have as many as eight or more processing cores, as well as the potential for built-in graphics and memory control processing and networking.

“It will unlock the full capability of that generation,” he said, referring to the 45-nanometer manufacturing technology.

The technology will in principle allow Intel to create ultralow-power chips, but the company said it was first seeking to increase the speed of its processors without consuming more power than current chips.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/te...gy/29chip.html





Chemists Turn to Sugar to Fuel Batteries
Alpha Doggs

Hey, if you can knock back a Mountain Dew to give yourself a boost, why can't your electronic devices go for a sugar high to keep themselves cranking, too?

Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have cooked up biodegradable fuel cell batteries that they say can run on just about any sugar source and that can last three or four times longer per charge than typical lithium ion batteries. Commercial versions could be ready in three to five years, the researchers say.

The scientists presented their findings at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. A prototype of the stamp-sized battery runs a calculator, but future applications could include powering computers and recharging cellphones. Tree sap, soda and drink mixes have been used to power the batteries so far.

"This study shows that renewable fuels can be directly employed in batteries at room temperature to lead to more energy-efficient battery technology than metal-based approaches," said study leader Shelley Minteer, an electrochemist at Saint Louis University, in a statement. "It demonstrates that by bridging biology and chemistry, we can build a better battery that's also cleaner for the environment."

Like other fuel cells, the sugar battery contains enzymes that convert fuel - in this case, sugar - into electricity, leaving behind water as a main byproduct. But unlike other fuel cells, all of the materials used to build the sugar battery are biodegradable.

Funding for this study was provided by the U.S. Department of Defense.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/12886





GE, Konica Minolta Speed Development of New Lighting Products
AP

General Electric Co. and Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. are accelerating the development of more efficient and environmentally friendly lighting products, the two companies announced Tuesday.

Fairfield-based GE and Tokyo-based Konica Minolta said their goal is to bring Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) lighting to market in the next three years. OLEDs are thin, organic materials pressed between two electrodes that illuminate when an electrical charge is applied.

Developers say OLEDs will provide a different way to light homes and businesses and could increase efficiency and environmental performance.

"The alliance of KM, a world leader in imaging products, and GE, a global leader in lighting products, represents an extraordinary opportunity to make the commercialization of OLED lighting products a reality," said Michael Idelchik, vice president of advanced technology programs at GE Global Research.

In addition to increasing efficiency, GE has focused on developing plastic film, coatings and fabrication processes and equipment for the manufacturing needed to produce large-area OLED lighting.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-27-12-39-13





Uranium Ignites ‘Gold Rush’ in the West
Susan Moran and Anne Raup

LA SAL, Utah — Given its connotations, Pandora is an oddly inappropriate name for an uranium mine.

But that does not seem to bother Denison Mines, the company from Vancouver, British Columbia, that owns it. Denison recently reopened this mine about 30 miles southeast of Moab, along with several others in nearby western Colorado, after it lay dormant during the years when the nation shunned nuclear power.

The revival of uranium mining in the West, though, has less to do with the renewed interest in nuclear power as an alternative to greenhouse-gas-belching coal plants than to the convoluted economics and intense speculation surrounding the metal that has pushed up the price of uranium to levels not seen since the heyday of the industry in the mid-1970s.

“There’s a lot of staking going on,” said Mike Shumway, a 53-year-old Vietnam veteran who owns the contracting business that is working the Pandora mine. “It’s like the gold rush.”

Mr. Shumway has personally amassed some 100 uranium claims, including four dormant but potentially rich mines. Some of the claims he bought quietly after less tenacious prospectors could not afford to hold theirs during the long drought while uranium was out of favor. Mr. Shumway’s eyes light up and he cracks a grin as he ponders the fortune he now hopes to gain.

“There’s big money in it,” he said as he probed piles of waste ore at Pandora with a Geiger counter. “What other work do you know of where you can make millions in 30 days?”

Not many. Prices for processed uranium ore, also called U308, or yellowcake, are rising rapidly. Yellowcake is trading at $90 a pound, nearing the record high, adjusted for inflation, of about $120 in the mid-1970s. The price has more than doubled in the last six months alone. As recently as late 2002, it was below $10.

A string of natural disasters, notably flooding of large mines in Canada and Australia, has set off the most recent spike. Hedge funds and other institutional investors, who began buying up uranium in late 2004 to exploit the volatility in this relatively small market, have accelerated the price rally.

But the more fundamental causes of the uninterrupted ascendance of prices since 2003 can be traced to inventory constraints among power companies and a drying up of the excess supply of uranium from old Soviet-era nuclear weapons that was converted to use in power plants. Add in to those factors the expected surge in demand from China, India, Russia and a few other countries for new nuclear power plants to fuel their growing economies.

“I’d call it lucky timing,” said David Miller, a Wyoming legislator and president of the Strathmore Mineral Corporation, a uranium development firm. “Three relatively independent factors — dwindling supplies of inventory, low overall production from the handful of uranium miners that survived the 25-year drought and rising concerns about global warming — all have coincided to drive the current uranium price higher by more than 1,000 percent since 2001.”

Strathmore controls more than three million acres of exploration projects in Canada and previously discovered sources in the United States, primarily around Grants, N.M. In its heyday, the Grants “uranium belt” provided 340 million pounds of uranium, making New Mexico an even larger producer than Utah or Wyoming. Some politicians in the area hope there will be a new wave of mines, mills and jobs.

Strathmore, with a market capitalization of $300 million, is one of about 400 publicly traded uranium stock companies (most of them, like Strathmore, trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange). Many of the companies are much smaller. Some are essentially shells.

“There’s so much money pouring into this sector,” said Julie Ickes, editor and publisher of StockInterview.com, which tracks uranium prices and companies. “If you put ‘uranium’ in your company name, you can look like you’re looking for property,” he said. “It’s a lot of talk.”

The feverish trading in speculative uranium company shares harks back to the early 1950s, when some 500 stocks traded on the Salt Lake City Penny Stock Exchange. Moab called itself “the uranium capital of the world.”

“You could say there were more millionaires than people here in Moab,” said Sam Taylor, 73, who has been publisher of the local weekly, The Times-Independent, since he took it over from his father in 1956.

Sitting stooped over his wooden desk at the newspaper’s office downtown, Mr. Taylor recalls how he got “the scoop of the century” when a young, cocky geologist named Charlie Steen pulled up in his battered jeep asking if The Times-Independent would publish his six-page paper on his recent discovery of pitchblende, or high-grade uranium.

Not long after, Moab lost its quietude and anonymity to the ore trucks roaring through town almost around the clock to deliver uranium to a mill on the north edge of town.

Globally, 180 million pounds of processed uranium are consumed each year by nuclear power plants. Production worldwide from mines amounts to only 100 million pounds. Roughly 75 million pounds come out of utility company stockpiles. What is actually traded in the spot market is only about 35 million pounds.

Some industry watchers fear the uranium market is entering the bust phase of another boom-bust cycle.

“It’s like the tech bubble,” said James Finch, senior editor of StockInterview.com. “We’re waiting for the crash.”

But others see plenty of room for prices to climb. One is Bob Mitchell, founder of Adit Capital, a small hedge fund in Portland, Ore. In December of 2004, he became one of the first hedge fund managers to start buying uranium.

Since then other hedge funds and institutional investors have jumped into the market, some of them hoarding uranium while the price keeps rising. Even some established mining production companies are spinning off or becoming partners with hedge funds.

Uranium executives, investors and analysts alike agree that a major underlying cause of the current bull market is that mines are not generating enough uranium to meet growing demand. The supply constraints can be traced back to the end of the cold war when the United States and the former Soviet Union started converting enriched uranium from dismantled atomic weapons into nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes.

That program, and huge incentives offered to uranium companies by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, flooded the market with excess supply. At the same time, demand shrank. The price of uranium fell sharply.

As a result, most uranium producers scaled back or closed their mines. Some companies sold themselves to French, Canadian and British corporations, which now dominate the industry. Some companies with nuclear power operations sold some of their inventories when the price was low to avoid storage costs.

But by 2003 uranium inventories held by utilities in the United States were coming back into balance. Then a series of natural disasters — flooding of the world’s largest uranium mine, McArthur River in Canada, and more recently at other mines in Canada and Australia — further pinched supply. Power companies now find themselves competing with aggressive institutional investors for high-price uranium.

“For so long they’d been the buyer in a buyer’s market,” said Gene Clark, chief executive of TradeTech.com, a publisher of reports and data on the nuclear fuel market. “Now they’re like a wallflower. It’s hard on their egos.”

James Malone, vice president of nuclear fuels at the Exelon Corporation, the Chicago-based utility that owns 17 reactors at 10 sites, making it the largest nuclear operator in the country, said in a telephone interview that current market conditions were having a “small impact” on some of the company’s contracts that were pegged to the market price. He declined to elaborate.

The people staking claims and drilling underground are, in the meantime, happy to see the frothy market become frothier. So far this year, 2,700 new uranium claims have been filed with the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado alone. That is nearly half the claims filed in all of last year, and a big jump from the 104 claims for 2004.

“It’s pretty spectacular,” said Jesse Broskey, a land law adjudicator with the bureau. “It’s tripled our workload.”

But many people in the region, including leaders of the Navajo Nation, are not particularly excited to invite Pandora and other participants in the nuclear industry back into their communities. They say the mining and power companies poisoned workers and residents, in some cases fatally, with radon, silica and tainted groundwater.

More stringent federal oversight means that mines built or refurbished today provide much better ventilation, which minimizes the underground risks. Mine operators are required to take readings of radon levels and air flow in the mines, and to measure miners’ exposure doses.

Another red flag, for environmentalists and utilities alike, is the lack of a national storage site for radioactive waste. The proposed home, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has cost taxpayers billions over many years as it sits idly, waiting for a final decision.

That is one of several factors holding back the revival of nuclear power in the United States. “We won’t build a new plant knowing there’s nowhere to put the used fuel,” Mr. Malone of Exelon said. “We won’t build one without community support, and we won’t build until market conditions are in place where it makes sense.”

But that is not holding back Kyle Kimmerle, owner of the Kimmerle Funeral Home in Moab. Mr. Kimmerle, 30, spent summers during his childhood camping and working at several of his father’s mines in the area. In his spare time he has amassed more than 600 uranium claims throughout the once-productive Colorado Plateau.

“My guess is that next year my name won’t be on the sign of this funeral home anymore and I’ll be out at the mines,” he said.

He recently struck a deal with a company to lease 111 of his claims for development. The company, new to uranium mining, has pledged $500,000 a year for five years to improve the properties. Mr. Kimmerle will receive annual payments plus royalties for any uranium mined from the area.

“Everybody’s jumping in while the price is going up,” he said. “Sure, it’ll eventually go down. It’s not going to be in three years. But after 10 years I’d say all bets are off.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/bu...28uranium.html





New Effort to Tap Technology to Aid the Service Economy
Steve Lohr

A group of large technology companies, universities and professional associations are creating a new organization to support and promote research into ways that technology can increase productivity and innovation in the economy’s service sector.

The creation of the organization, the Service Research and Innovation Initiative, will be officially announced today. It represents the latest step by technology companies and some universities to promote an emerging field that is being called “service science.”

The early academic programs are a blend of computing, social sciences, engineering and management. The aim of service science is to try to improve productivity and accelerate the development of new offerings in services, which account for about 80 percent of the United States economy and similarly large shares of other Western economies.

In the last couple of years, more than three dozen universities in several countries have added service science courses, and the National Science Foundation has begun financing a few service research projects.

Among corporations, I.B.M. has been a leader in promoting service science programs in universities, and it has reoriented its own research laboratories to focus more on services.

“We need a professional organization to help promote service science,” said James C. Spohrer, director of service research at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. “It is one of the seed crystals around which the new discipline will form.”

I.B.M. and Oracle are founding corporate members of the Service Research and Innovation Initiative. Other company members of the organization’s advisory board include Accenture, Cisco, Computer Sciences, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Xerox.

Researchers from several universities are also members, including some from the University of California, Los Angeles; the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; and Arizona State University. The European Commission and a German research organization, the Fraunhofer Institute, are also members of the advisory committee.

The new initiative is backed by two professional societies, the Technology Professional Services Association and the Service and Support Professionals Association. The executive director of the new organization, Thomas W. Pridham, is the senior vice president for advanced programs of the service and support professionals group.

J. B. Wood, the chief executive of both the longstanding professional groups, said the purpose of the new effort was to have a neutral, nonprofit professional organization around which to build a community of common interest. “The investment in research by companies and the government has driven so much innovation on the hardware side of information technology,” Mr. Wood said. “We think there is a similar opportunity in services.”

The new organization, according to Mr. Pridham, will provide a forum for collaboration to help set research priorities, pool corporate funds to support academic programs, and advise the government on preferred targets of basic research. It will hold a symposium on service research on May 30 in Santa Clara, Calif.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/te...28service.html





New GPL Draft has Olive Branches, Thorns
Stephen Shankland

The latest draft of the dominant open-source license, the General Public License, has an accommodating approach to some significant objections, but it could throw a wrench into the works of a major open-source company, Novell.

When the Free Software Foundation released the previous draft eight months ago, it caused indigestion among some open-source software fans. Among them were Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux operating system kernel project, and Hewlett-Packard.

The third GPL 3 draft softens some positions in areas where those Torvalds and HP were concerned, but it raises the possibility of crippling Novell's budding Linux business. That would be a dramatic change, given that Novell is one of two major Linux sellers and that it's staked much of its future on the software.

The new draft reflects the difficulties in meeting ideological goals but not alienating a software industry that's only begun to embrace the 16-year-old GPL 2. "At some point you become so shrill that you lose the audience, who moves on to something that better fits the business needs," Steve Mills senior vice president of IBM's software group, said Wednesday while discussing the new GPL.

Through a patent partnership announced in October, Microsoft agreed not to sue Novell's Suse Linux customers for any infringement. The new GPL draft would ban such arrangements, but the foundation said it hasn't decided whether the ban would extend only to future deals.

If past deals aren't grandfathered in, the effect on Novell could be "catastrophic," said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with DLA Piper and member of a committee providing comment on the license. "If (the Microsoft deal) violates this, somebody could terminate their license to distribute Linux."

Microsoft and Novell have more optimistic interpretations. "The draft of the GPL 3 does not tear down the bridge Microsoft and Novell have built for their customers," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president if intellectual property and licensing, in a statement. And Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry added, "Nothing in this new draft of GPL 3 inhibits Novell's ability to include GPL 3 technologies in Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise, OpenSuse and other Novell open-source offerings, now and in the future."

Although the FSF left the door open for the Microsoft-Novell deal to survive, it's because it also crafted language to ensure all recipients get the benefits Novell customers get from Microsoft. Any company offering promises of patent safety to one audience automatically extends those promises to all recipients of the software involved, according to the new draft.

"We believe it is sufficient to ensure either the deal's voluntary modification by Microsoft or its reduction to comparative harmlessness," the foundation said in its 61-page explanation of the new license draft.

Torvalds mollified
Torvalds said he's "pleased" with changes in the new GPL draft, a significant change from his earlier strong objections.

"Whether it's actually a better license than the GPLv2, I'm still a bit skeptical, but at least it's now 'I'm skeptical' rather than 'Hell no!'" he said. Torvalds had frowned on earlier provisions that he believed could lead to incompatible versions of the GPL and that reached inappropriately into the domain of hardware designers.

Torvalds is noncommittal about whether he might try to move the Linux kernel to GPL 3--a change that would require the permission not just Torvalds but also of all other Linux kernel copyright holders. But he didn't rule it out.

"The current draft makes me think it's at least a possibility in theory, but whether it's practical and worth it is a totally different thing," he said. "Practically speaking, it would involve a lot of work to make sure everything relevant is GPLv3-compatible even if we decided that the GPL 3 is OK."

HP, which earlier was outspoken about a patent-related complaint, isn't commenting about its thoughts on the third draft. But the draft appears to have addressed at least one concern.

HP had objected to a provision that said any party that distributes GPL software agrees not to sue recipients for infringement of patents involved with the software. The new draft is more moderate, however. In it, a party agrees only to sue for patents related to software it contributes to an open-source project, not for software it distributes without modification.

Barriers to code sharing
Sun Microsystems picked the GPL to govern its Java software and OpenSparc processor design and is considering the GPL for its OpenSolaris operating system.

But there's one thing that Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, would still like to see in the new draft: more compatibility between different open-source licenses.

"The wider free and open-source community has really got to do something about license compatibility," Phipps said. "We've got lots of software (projects) around that's free software, yet we can't mix them. It's like friendly-fire casualties. We need to do something about that, but it seems clear that GPL 3 is not going to be the vehicle by which we do that."

Sun is considering GPL 3 for Solaris, but the Linux kernel is governed by GPL 2, and license incompatibilities could keep the two projects separate. In Phipps' opinion, though, that particular divide is technical, not legal.

"The main reason why we're not seeing intermingling is because the two are designed in radically different ways that makes intermingling impossible," Phipps said.

The issue also crops up in Java. Sun chose the GPL for that project, but much open-source Java work--including the Apache Harmony project to reproduce the Java's core components--is under the Apache License. The foundation had hoped for Apache License compatibility, but patent provisions got in the way, the foundation said in its GPL 3 draft explanation.

"We regret that we will not achieve compatibility of the Apache License, version 2.0, with GPL 3, despite what we had previously promised," the foundation said.

It's inevitable that not everybody will be happy with the new GPL, but there's still room for more adjustment. A penultimate "last-call" draft is due in 60 days, and the final version 30 days after that--June 26.

And the changes in the new draft released Wednesday show the foundation is willing to budge, Radcliffe said. "It shows the FSF has been listening to the various constituents and has been responding."
CNET News.com's Candace Lombardi contributed to this report.
http://news.com.com/New+GPL+draft+ha...3-6171539.html





US 'No Longer Technology King'

The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The US is now ranked seventh in the body's league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.

A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.

The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden.

Innovation

Countries were judged on the integration of technology in business, the infrastructure available, government policy favourable for fostering a culture of innovation and progress and leadership in promoting the usage of the latest information technology tools.

The Networked Readiness Index, the sixth of its kind published by the World Economic Forum with Insead, the Paris-based business school, scrutinised progress in 122 economies worldwide.

Despite losing its top position, the US still maintained a strong focus on innovation, driven by one of the world's best tertiary education systems and its high degree of co-operation with industry, the report said.

The country's efficient market environment, conducive to the availability of venture capital, and the sophistication of financial markets, was also given recognition.

Networked Readiness Index Rankings 2006 (2005)

1: Denmark (3)
2: Sweden (8)
3: Singapore (2)
4: Finland (5)
5: Switzerland (9)
6: Netherlands (12)
7: US (1)
8: Iceland (4)
9: UK (10)
10: Norway (13)
Source: WEF

Nordic crown

Denmark is now regarded as the world leader in technological advancement, with its Nordic neighbours Sweden, Finland and Norway claiming second, fourth and 10th place respectively.

"Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services," said Irene Mia, senior economist at World Economic Forum.

European countries to make the top 20 included Switzerland in fifth place, the Netherlands, one of the most improved in sixth, the UK (nine), Germany (16), Austria (17) and Estonia (20).

While countries from Asia and the Pacific continued to progress, the powerhouse economies of China and India both showed a downward trend.

India was four positions down on last year to 44th, suffering from weak infrastructure and a very low level of individual usage of personal computers and the internet.

China was knocked to 59th place, nine positions down, with information technology uptake in Chinese firms lagging.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6502725.stm





Movie Review | 'Headspace'

In a Trance Where Strobes Flash and the Techno Beat Pulses
Matt Zoller Seitz

If you’re looking for a documentary about the electronic music scene filled with historical lectures, performance clips and talking heads, “Headspace ... The Sound of Life ...” isn’t for you and doesn’t try to be.

Unlike previous documentaries about the topic, this feature by Jethro Senger tries to capture the essence of the music and the lifestyle associated with it. It’s experimental rather than expository, bargain-basement visionary work that deploys evocative filmmaking devices (slow dissolves, frame blurs, slow and fast motion, strobe-flash effects) to induce a 3-a.m.-on-the-dance-floor mindset, a feeling that time is suspended and that the only thing that matters is the beat (described by one interview subject as “fat kick always — boom, boom”).

Here and there, Mr. Senger throws a factual tidbit our way, pointing out, for instance, that the repetitive, trancelike rhythms of techno reflect a blurring of international boundaries and the sounds of urban and industrial life. But mostly the film avoids academic trappings, which means that it will be catnip to devotees but impenetrable to outsiders.

There’s no narrator, no recurring timeline and surprisingly few on-screen ID tags telling you who’s speaking at any given moment. “Headspace” is more interested in the patterns made by downcast laser beams cutting through smoky air.

Headspace ...

The Sound of Life ...

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by Jethro Senger; directors of photography, Mr. Senger, Brian Zahm and Roberto Ballesteros; edited by Mr. Zahm and Mr. Senger; released by Firelabs Inc. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 85 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/03/2...es/28head.html





Regal, DreamWorks CEOs see 3D Transforming Movies
Gina Keating

Three-dimensional film technology could transform the movie business, with viewers willing to pay a premium for it, the heads of the top U.S. movie theater chain and largest independent animation studio said on Wednesday.

Michael Campbell, chairman and CEO of Regal Entertainment Group, said box office results from the handful of 3D films released so far convinced him of the "potential advantages for theaters, not just studios" in switching to digital projection systems that support modern 3D technology.

Campbell told analysts at a Bank of America conference that audiences were willing to pay premium ticket prices for 3D films, and said they preferred them by a 2-to-1 margin.

Another deciding factor for Regal was a strong show of support for the new medium by Hollywood studios, among them the Walt Disney Co. and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., which announced this month that it will make all its movies in 3D, starting with "Monsters vs. Aliens" in 2009.

Disney is set to release its animated film, "Meet the Robinsons", on Friday to 701 digital 3D screens, the largest such release ever, and has set up a studio with director Robert Zemeckis to produce animated movies in the new format.

"What that is going to mean for our industry in a few years when we have thousands of 3D screens ... if we can sell 10 to 15 percent higher (priced) tickets, that is a needle mover," Campbell said.

DreamWorks Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg told analysts in a separate session that making animated films in 3D would add $10 million to $15 million to production costs, but he considered it a worthwhile expense.

"The audience actually feels in the (animated) world in a way that we have not really seen before. From a filmmaking standpoint, it is really exciting," Katzenberg said.

Katzenberg said nearly every major Hollywood studio plans to make "big event films" in 3D for release in 2009. He added that one day, "the mainstream of moviemaking is going to be the 3D experience ... and consumers will pay a premium."

The upcoming slate of 3D films from top directors, including Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, would hurry along the digital transition in theaters, which had been "slow to embrace" the new technology.

"If half their business is a premium business, that changes the whole economics of the business," he said. "The momentum is gathering. This is the most exciting thing that has happened in the business since I have been in the business."

Katzenberg said that if enough theaters have converted to digital 3D by the 2009 release of "Monsters vs. Aliens," he would consider releasing the film only in that format, and making a 2D version available only on DVD.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33841220070329





Retailer TJX Says 45 Million Card Numbers Stolen

Off-price retailer TJX Cos Inc. said that information from about 45.7 million credit and debit cards was stolen in a computer data security breach over an 18-month period.

The operator of the T.J. Maxx and Marshall's chains also said that personal information -- including names, addresses and personal ID numbers -- of about 451,000 people who returned merchandise without a receipt was stolen, adding to the 3,600 it had previously identified.

The company gave the numbers in a regulatory filing late on Wednesday, more than two months after first disclosing that its computer system had been compromised by hackers.

Data from about 75 percent of cards was either expired or had masked data, meaning that the card numbers were not readable, the company said in the filing.

The company said it believes its computer system was accessed by an unauthorized user in July 2005, then on subsequent dates in 2005 and from mid-May 2006 to mid-January 2007. It added that no customer data was stolen after Dec. 18, 2006.

Last week six people in the Miami, Florida area were arrested in connection with the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gift cards from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Sam's Club with credit and debit cards suspected of coming from the TJX security breach, according to media reports.

The stolen data covers transactions dating as far back as Dec. 2002, the company said in its annual 10K report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

"In terms of the damage that's created, i would say this (incident) is very significant because of the sheer number (of people involved)," said Terrence DeFranco, chief executive of Edentify Inc., a computer security company.

DeFranco said that capturing the suspects would be very helpful for investigators to learn more about their methods but that fraud is likely to persist.

"The bottom line is that these things will continue even though we are getting more educated, because the perpetrators become smarter and understand how to perpetrate these crimes more effectively."

TJX shares were up 25 cents, or 0.9 percent, at $26.75 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Article





Is Your Computer a Criminal?
Bob Sullivan

Your home computer may be committing a crime at this very moment. It might be sending out spam. It might be buying stock as part of a pump-and-dump scheme. Or it might be helping attack the Internet itself, silently and invisibly, as you read this story. And the odds your computer is a criminal are quickly rising.

The Web, some say, has been turned into an operating system for criminals. Computer viruses that hijack PCs and turn them into electronic robots, or “bots,” have become the killer app. The operation of networks of hijacked computers is so lucrative that hackers are actually fighting electronic wars over them, a story we will explore next week in part two of this series.

New hacker techniques make these virus attacks so subtle that there is no way you would know your computer is a criminal. And there is a growing sense among security experts that hackers have gained the upper hand in what was once a neck-and-neck arms race.

Bots can squirm their way onto home computers in myriad ways: a virus-laden e-mail or a booby-trapped Web site are the most common. But some viruses can attack your computer in the background, silently worming their way through networks via unprotected ports and porous firewalls, using vulnerabilities that software companies don't know about.

Earlier this year, Internet founding father Vint Cerf dramatically suggested that 150 million computers worldwide may have been hijacked by criminals. Most experts think that his estimate is high, but they still count infected computers in the millions, or tens of millions. And there is general consensus that the Internet is under assault from virus writers like never before.

Listen carefully to the words of those who are trying to help us keep our computers safe from Net criminals and you’ll get a creeping sense that the boat is leaking faster than they can bail out the water. There were two-and-a-half times as many viruses released in 2006 as in 2005, and the growth rate has continued through the first quarter of 2007, said Eugene Kaspersky, chief researcher for Kaspersky Labs.

Antivirus firms "may not be able to withstand the onslaught," he said at a recent computer security conference. "This is a competition where the antivirus companies, I fear, are not in a good position."

Another antivirus executive put it more bluntly in a private conversation. “I think we’ve failed,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Computer security firms often use hyperbole to help get attention for their products, but expressing helplessness is something new.

Serious crimes for serious money

The security firms’ helplessness means more home computers than ever are being hijacked by organized criminals. Those who control the computers, known as “bot herders,” have little interest in the kinds of pranks that hackers typically played with their viruses five or 10 years ago. They commit serious crimes for serious money.

How serious? Earlier this year, a bot army sent a torrent of Internet traffic at two of the Web's 13 critical domain name servers, directing the equivalent of millions of e-mails at them within a few minutes. The mysterious onslaught would have rendered the Web useless if it had succeeded in taking the domain name servers down, but after a few hours it stopped as quickly as it started.

Why would an attacker perform such a show of strength? It might have been a marketing ploy.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which helps run the domain name servers, speculated in a recent report that the attack was the work of a bot herder trying to close a sale by demonstrating the size and power of his army of hijacked computers.

These bot armies – often between 50,000 and 70,000 PCs strong -- are leased out for around $5,000 a day to spammers, said Howard Schmidt, former White House cyberczar. An attacker who might want to threaten a bank with denial of service and demand an extortion payment would probably have to pay more.

“These things are insidious,” he said.

And sometimes they are overwhelming. Ben Mayrides, a security guru for America Online, says the firm regularly sees bot armies – or “botnets” -- of 200,000 infected computers. In 2005, Dutch authorities announced they had arrested three youths who controlled a botnet of 1.5 million computers that they assembled using a single Trojan horse program.

Big money is stock scams

Individual bots operate in complete silence, but we all see their handiwork. At this point, almost every spam e-mail is sent from a hijacked computer, according to Uriel Maimon, a researcher at security firm RSA. That means every time you receive a spam, a hijacked computer is at the other end. For evidence of a bot epidemic, researchers point to the recent resurgence of spam, which has doubled in the past 12 months.

Forget Viagra sales: Spammers have largely graduated to manipulating stock markets. Most spam is image spam now, designed to pump up stock prices in thinly traded companies so someone can make a quick profit. In a recent e-mail apparently written by a stock spammer and examined by MSNBC.com, the author brags he can more than double a stock price within two to three weeks.

“We can increase the cost of your share and we can increase average day trading,” the e-mail says. “We can increase price up to 200-260 percent in 2-3 weeks and also increase range by 10 times each trading day. … Our payment for that is 10 percent.”

With increasing sophistication and deliberation, computer hackers are getting the most out of hacked computers, too. The computer crime du jour is a simple but effective stock pump-and-dump scheme that goes like this: Hackers buy a stock, then use hijacked computers and stolen brokerage accounts to buy the stock at inflated prices using other people's money. When the hackers sell their original shares, they make a killing.

In March, three Indian nationals were sued by the SEC for allegedly pocketing $121,000 after manipulating stocks and options on 14 firms, including Google and Sun Microsystems. They group managed to spend nearly $2 million in other people's money, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said. One victim had $180,000 in his brokerage account, left for a vacation, and returned to find his account had a negative $200,000 balance.

The SEC is aggressively pursuing stock spam criminals, said John Reed Stark, head of Internet enforcement for the agency. But the dangerous combination of hijacked computers and global securities trading offers riches far beyond the legitimate dreams of computer experts in developing economies. As a result, cybercrime has become wonderfully profitable, and fantastically popular.

How do you count the bots?

No one knows how many infected bots there are, but there is little argument that millions of computers have been herded. If your computer isn’t infected, security experts say, certainly someone on your block is part of a bot army.

No government agency counts bots; even law enforcement officials rely on private industry for estimates. Here’s a few:

MessageLabs, a company that counts spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it literally could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10 million a year ago. Symantec Corp. recently said it counted 6.7 million active bots during an Internet scan. Since all bots are not active at any given time, the number of infected computers is likely much higher. And Dave Dagon, who recently left Georgia Tech University to start a bot-fighting company named Damballa, pegs the number at closer to 30 million. The firm uses a “capture, mark, and release,” strategy borrowed from environmental science to study the movement of bot armies and estimate their size.

“It’s like asking how many people are on the planet, you are wrong the second you give the answer. … But the number is in the tens of millions,” Dagon said. “Had you told me five years ago that organized crime would control 1 out of every 10 home machines on the Internet, I would have not have believed that. And yet we are in an era where this is something that is happening.”

That means the Internet is becoming a very rough neighborhood. So rough that many of those who fight computer crime think, in some ways, they are fighting to save cyberspace.

“This is not just a battle between manufacturers of security software and some Internet criminals. It is a war between good and evil,” F-Secure researcher Mikko Hypponen said at a recent European security conference:

Why now? 1. More sophisticated viruses

It used to be that infected computers would eventually stall from the hard work of crime, stumbling over an e-mail blast involving thousands of messages and tipping off the rightful owners. Now, the organized criminals who do this work have remote-control crime down to a science. Instead of using your computer to send 5,000 spam messages in an evening, it might only be instructed to send out five. The bot herders reach the volume they need by repeating that technique with the tens of thousands of computers at their disposal.

AOL’s Mayrides says he’s seen bots instructed to send out only one e-mail per day.

This puts security firms at a distinct disadvantage. A few years ago, Internet service providers would notice tens of thousands of e-mails being sent from a home computer, and could easily remove it from their network. But how can an Internet provider spot five rogue e-mails sent from your machine while you sleep?

“We have a very difficult needle-haystack problem here," Dagon said.

The Storm worm, which infected more than 1 million computers in January by promising information about the deadly winter weather hitting Europe, used a variation of this tactic. A Storm-infected PC observed by Symantec researchers sent out 1,800 e-mails in a five minute span, then simply went to sleep.

Consumers are unlikely to know their computer has been hijacked because there usually are no symptoms.

“People are not going to find out about the bot because it slows down their systems,” said Hypponen. “(Hackers) take great care in making sure it doesn't do anything that the users might notice. Especially with new machines with 2 gigs of RAM, people will not notice they are sending out spam while playing World of Warcraft. The computers are just powerful enough to handle that.”

Why now? 2. China

But improved software is only one reason criminals appear to have gained the upper hand. Another is the sheer the size of their armies. Part of the deluge of new viruses can be attributed to a new generation of hackers from Asia, where broadband has proliferated, and particularly China, where hackers are learning fast, Hypponen said.

Asia is also a grand playground for hackers worldwide, because many home users run pirated copies of Windows and can't load security patches, according to a January report by Florida-based security firm Prolexic. Since China now boasts more Internet users than any other country, it also has more infected computers.

Why now? 3. Volume

The sheer volume of new viruses has become overwhelming. Hypponen says there is so much new malware -- malicious software – submitted every day to his firm that it has abandoned its long-standing practice of having each one analyzed by its researchers. The viruses are processed by computers now and ranked by severity.

“It’s getting harder and harder for us just to keep up with the amount of new malware coming in,” he said. “Right now on a typical day we receive more than two (possible new viruses) a minute. There are thousands every day. The increase in three years has been tenfold. So our lab all the other labs are rebuilding the way we handle them. You can't do it with human power.”

Why now? 4. Perpetual ‘zero day’

The onslaught isn't just about volume, however. Hacker techniques have improved markedly, says Dagon. It used to be that exploiting vulnerable software usually took weeks, as hackers probed software for security flaws. When they published their results, software makers would race to fix the flaws. Simultaneously, criminals would take those flaws and turn them into attacks, often by attaching them to specially crafted e-mails.

On rare occasions, criminals had both the security hole, or exploit, and the delivery tool before the software maker had any notion a flaw existed. Called a "zero-day" attack, these circumstances gave criminals a small window to mercilessly hack defenseless computers.

But this entire cycle of finding and exploiting flaws has been reduced to a few hours, Dagon said. Hackers find flaws, use them to attack, and erase all evidence so fast that software firms never even know there’s a flaw. Dagon has a chilling name for this: "A perpetual zero day window."

Hackers also have learned to write viruses that mutate on their own. Because antivirus software usually catches only known viruses, mutating versions pose a major challenge for security firms. The Storm worm, for example, had 5,000 different variants within a few days of being launched.

Why now? 5. Better command and control

Hackers have more sophisticated tactics to command and control their massive bot armies – another sign that true professionals are in charge. Not long ago, remote-controlled bots used the old-fashioned Internet Relay Channel to communicate. Internet filters could pick out that traffic and disrupt their networks, at times even identifying the controlling computer and cutting off the "head" bot by removing it from the network.

Now, bot networks are increasingly peer-to-peer systems, designed to look like file and music swapping systems like eDonkey. This prevents Internet service providers from picking out bot communications from regular Web traffic. And it also means there is no head bot to cut off, so networks can only be dismantled one infected computer at a time.

Why now? 6. Competition for labor with crime rings

Adding to the challenge antivirus companies face in trying to keep up with cybercriminals is the intense competition for skilled labor. There is so much money being made in the underworld that legitimate firms have trouble recruiting.

“We are dealing more and more with a worldwide industry that employs thousands of people," Kaspersky, the researcher, told the Bangkok Post earlier this month. Said another executive with the firm, “These people are paying programmers the kind of salary that I could never afford."

What now?

For years, security experts have been repeating the same formula to consumers – update antivirus software frequently and use a firewall. But experts say that consumers can no longer trust a single antivirus product to protect them. Dagon points to a Web site named VirusTotal.com that scans potential viruses using 30 top antivirus products. The results are sobering.

On March 22, 9,408 virus-laden files were submitted. Only 28 were detected by all 30 antivirus products. Every other virus was capable of slipping past at least one of the antivirus products undetected, which means that even consumers who keep their security software up to date are at risk.

America Online deals with the problem by swarming its files and e-mail with antivirus products. Everything that’s sent through AOL is scanned by 13 or 14 different products, said Mayrides, the AOL security expert.

And still, viruses get through.

“It’s rough out there,” he said. “One (antivirus product) is not good enough. … There are too many attack vectors these days.”

So should consumers stop trusting the Internet? Yes, to a point, said F-Secure’s Hypponen.

“I don’t think end users should lose their trust, but they are trusting too much,” he said. For example, consumers still fall for phishing e-mails and hand over passwords to brokerage accounts despite years of warning. “We should make people lose their trust, break that trust.”

Experts advise computer users to scan their system with multiple antivirus products. It’s not necessary to pay for all the products. A number of free Web-based security services are available to consumers. No single scan is perfect, but doing one is a worthwhile check-up.

Users also can take the energy-saving step of shutting down their computers when they aren’t in use. That way, even if your machine is infected, the computer’s resources won’t be available to criminals all night and all day while you’re at work.
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/03/bots_story.html





In "Brief"

Model Letter for Lawyers Representing Defendants in RIAA Cases
Ray Beckerman

I recently came across this letter in my mailbox. It was written by California attorney Merl Ledford III, of Visalia, California, to the RIAA's lawyer. Thought my readers might enjoy it:
*****************************************

From: Merl Ledford III, Esq. [mailto:m.ledford3@ledfordlaw.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 1:11 AM
To: Thomas McCarten Kerr, Esq
Cc: Barry Merchant
Subject: Sony BMG et al. v. Merchant Eastern Dist of Cal. Sacramento Branch 2:07-CV-00340-DFL-DAD

Dear Mr. Kerr

Thank you for your letter of March 23, 2007 received in my office today. I did not receive a copy of the letter by PDF although that method of delivery was shown on the letter.

Incorrect Venue and Emotional Distress

The lawsuit filed by your office and your letter arrive at a particularly inappropriate time in Barry and Cathy Merchant's life. Mrs. Merchant left my office after our first meeting to attend to ill father in Colorado. She and Barry Merchant left my office today to attend his funeral. You should advise your clients that they are facing a "thin skull plaintiff" either on a Rule 11 sanctions motion or (upon favorable termination) in a malicious prosecution action. The emotional distress inflicted by your clients' litigation -- filed in Sacramento rather than the Fresno Branch of the Eastern District Court where my clients' live in violation of the Rules of Court -- has been extreme.

Your client should carefully consider whether it has probable cause to proceed at this point. Mr. Merchant's hard drive is available for immediate, carefully supervised inspection by your client; a carbon copy of the drive has been made by technicians to insure that the evidence is well backed-up.

At the time of inspection, we will expect your clients to be prepared to dismiss all claims with prejudice. The pleadings may be e-filed from my office the same day. Although dismissal will not avoid your clients' exposure to attorneys' fees under the Copyright Act, it will certainly mitigate damages to Mr. and Mrs. Merchant and the possibility of escalating the issues by counter-claim on federal grounds that have been successfully pleaded in other states as well as on pendant California claims that have, thus far, tempered your clients' California zeal for litigating in this state.

Selling a Settlement and the AOL Subpoena

I have evidence of one letter dated June 5, 2005 from an attorney in your firm who is not licensed to practice law in California to Mr. Merchant claiming copyright infringement and demanding settlement negotiations. There is no other record of any kind.

Please provide copies of other correspondence that your clients claim was received by Mr. Merchant (whether by AOL or others) demanding settlement. Is it the same AOL letter that your clients' represented was sent by AOL to a woman with MS who lives in the New York borough of Queens. See Elektra v. Schwartz, Cent Dist NY, 1:06-cv-03533-DGT-RML, Document 21). When the letter was finally produced, after objection and delay, it became clear that its contents had been misrepresented to the Court. (How anyone from the former Gray Cary firm ever pull such a stunt stuns me; it used to be such a fine office.)

Also, please provide my office with copies of all telephone records of contacts your clients claim to have had with Mr. or Mrs. Merchant, and (with respect to your discussion of the AOL subpoena), proofs of service of Notice of Opportunity to Appear and Oppose RIAA's subpoena, a copy of the subpoena, and all of the parties' pleadings in support and opposition to issuance of the subpoena. In the event the AOL litigation named Doe defendants in violation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and obtained any information regarding Mr. Merchant's long-standing without appropriate notice or in violation of California consumer privacy laws, I will request a preclusion order barring any use or derivative use of any information so obtained. See, e.g., Fonovisa v. Does 1-41, W.D. Texas, Austin Div. 04-CA-550 LY.

Independent Factual Investigation and Probable Cause to Sue: Background

Your office has a duty of good faith independent factual investigation and legal research sufficient to support a finding of probable cause to sue.

In Williams v. Coombs (1986) 179 Cal. App. 3d 626, the California Court of Appeal held that attorneys who participate in the filing or maintenance of litigation without probable cause are personally liable for malicious prosecution of a civil action.

In Sheldon Appel Co. v. Albert & Oliker (1989) 47 Cal. 3d 863, the California Supreme Court narrowed Williams, holding that a trial court may not delegate the ultimate determination of probable cause to the jury; it held that the question was one of law which must be resolved by the Court. Id. at 876. The Sheldon decision specifically disapproved of dicta from Tool Research & Engineering Corp. v. Henigson (1975) 46 Cal. App. 3d 675, at 683, that the attorney must have a "subjective belief" in the tenability of his or her client's claim in order to avoid malicious prosecution liability. Sheldon Appel Co. v. Albert & Oliker, supra, 47 Cal. 3d at 881. It nevertheless "strongly emphasized" that its conclusion "does not by any means suggest that an attorney who institutes an action which he does not believe is legally tenable is free from the risk of liability" because the lawyer's subjective belief "would clearly be relevant to the question of malice." Id. (emphasis supplied); see also Slater v. Durchfort (1995) 35 Cal. App. 4th 1718, 1724.

The Shelton Court also disapproved of Tool Research dicta suggesting that lack of probable cause may be proven "simply by showing that [the attorney] failed to perform reasonable legal research or factual investigation before filing a claim." Id. at 882. Rather, the Shelton Court held that such lack of diligence is relevant on the issue of malice. Id. The Shelton Court specifically disapproved of the Williams decision's apparent use of lack of investigation to prove lack of probable cause, although it fully endorsed the Williams analysis of the tort of malicious prosecution itself. Id. at 882-883 (footnote 9).

Although malicious prosecution was once characterized as a “disfavored action,” it has been somewhat expanded in recent years in apparent frustration with continued "shotgun" lawyering tactics by Plaintiff's counsel. In Crowley v. Katleman (1994) 8 Cal. 4th 666, the California Supreme Court upheld a malicious prosecution complaint where only five of six underlying causes of action were alleged to have been brought without probable cause. The court specifically rejected the defendant's claim that because one of the original causes of action was based on probable cause, the entire complaint was made immune from malicious prosecution liability. Id. at 694-695. Similarly, in Zamos v. Stroud (2004) 32 Cal.4th 1297b, the Court endorsed an action against an anti-SLAPP motion where a litigant’s counsel filed and maintained causes of action without probable cause.

Independent Factual Investigation and Probable Cause to Sue: Lack of Probable Cause

I know of no facts on which a good faith finding of probable cause by either your clients or your law firm could be based to support a claim for relief against Mr. Merchant.

It is well documented that your clients' reliance on MediaSecurity (an admitted "non-expert;" UMG v. Lidor, East Dist NY No. 1:05-cv-01095-DGT-RML) and its overall method of identifying P2P copyright infringers is wholly unreliable and inadequate. See, e.g., February 23, 2007, deposition of the RIAA's expert. http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp...onT ranscript. See also expert witness statement of Prof. Pouwelse and Dr. Sips: http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp filename=foundation_upcnederland_witnessdeclaration and amicus curiae brief of the ACLU, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Association of Law Libraries, and ACLU Foundation of Oklahoma, in Capitol v. Foster decrying the RIAA's "driftnet" litigation strategy: http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp..._foster_amicus.

Such facts were known or reasonably should have been known to you and your law firm before suit against Mr. Merchant was filed. Thus, unless you and your office undertook additional independent investigation to identify Mr. Merchant as a person who actually has engaged in copyright infringement by illegal downloading, good faith basis for a Rule 11-compliant probable cause finding consistent with the Williams line of cases cited above simply did not exist to file the action. . . and does not exist now for it to be maintained.

Your clients apparently argue that Mr. Merchant's failure to respond to "settlement" demands justifies their lawsuit without other basis on which a finding of probable cause to sue could be claimed. You devoted the bulk of your letter advocating that position. As you know, however, that posture is repugnant to both Rule 408, Fed.Rul.Evid. and California Evidence Code §§ 1152 and 1154.

The Evidence Code sections are quite clear: settlement negotiations of all kinds may not be used to prove the validity of any claim or defense. Mr. Merchant has and had no more duty to respond to attempts to "sell" him one of your clients' boilerplate, non-negotiable $3750 settlements than he has to return cold calls from pushy life insurance salespeople. If your client (and your law firm?) are seeking probable cause shelter in a settlement negotiations house of straw (as suggested by your March 23 letter), all of you should consider the prevailing winds of the Evidence Code before making yourselves too comfortable. Straw will burn.

Your client take the position that my middle-aged, conservative clients should speculate regarding the identity of persons your clients' claim used their AOL account to download pornographic-lyric gangsta rap tracks as predicate to possible case resolution. In an age of Wintel-virus created bot-farms, spoofs, and easily cracked WEP encrypted wireless home networks (among other easy hacks), the only tech-savvy response to such a request is, "You've got to be kidding." The extensive press that has been generated over computer security (and the insecurity of Windows XP and its predecessors) underscores the complete absence of facts on which probable cause to sue my clients could be established and your clients' willingness (even insistence) that others be implicated in Big Music's speculative, "driftnet" litigation tactics. Sorry: Mr. Merchant cannot and will not expose himself to still more litigation by speculating.

Settlement Option

It is not too late to correct your clients' (and your law firm's) mistakes.

Mr. and Mrs. Merchant's emotional condition puts a premium on immediate case resolution. Thus, although I generally do not make opening legitimate offers as defense counsel, the clients' non-monetary interests and their probability of recovering their fees and costs in this matter (at a minimum) suggest that a defense settlement offer would not be inappropriate. Therefore:

My clients are willing to accept dismissal of the litigation in exchange for

1. Payment of Mr. Merchant's reasonable fees and costs including retainer of $6,880.25. The payment represents good value considering what your own firm's billings will have been to date and use of those billing records as the loadstar rate for Mr. Merchant's award. See Capitol Record v. Foster, Western Dist. Okla No. 5:04-cv-1569-W, Docment 182 filed 3-15-07).

2. Apology on your firm's letterhead by your supervising partner for inappropriately filing and maintaining an action against Mr. Merchant without probable cause and for the emotional hardship that such litigation caused; and

3. Execution of a mutual general release of all claims in my office's usual form. The RIAA form of release I have seen will not be used. It is my practice in these kinds of cases to require that the plaintiffs indemnity my clients against claims by third parties as part of my general release language. (E.g., your clients sue a site for posting guitar tabs to copyrighted music; my client visits the site, read the tabs, plays them on his guitar, and get sued by way of cross-claim by the guitar tab site). My form of release also anticipates class action litigation that is in the works at several SoCal class-action offices on RICO, Unfair Practices Act (Bus & Prof. Code §§17200 et seq.) and other grounds against RIAA, MediaSentry, and all of your named clients in the Merchant action. My clients will agree to opt out of any such litigation; the release language is tailored to your clients are not giving up any defenses they might otherwise have to the class claims.

4. Confidentiality: It is my general practice to disfavor confidential settlements. Under the circumstances, and so long as your clients are prompt and candid in dealing with their mistaken, misplaced lawsuit, I would consider a reasonable confidentiality provision. Again, quick response, full payment, and immediate dismissal will allow confidentiality as an option.

The authorized settlement offer expressed in the preceding paragraphs of this email (and confirmed in staff-proofed letter format to be sent by fax and US Mail tomorrow; sorry for typos that are an unfortunate part of any quick-response email) may be accepted by signing a copy of this email and returning it to my office by fax no later than the close of business on Friday, March 30, 2007. It is intended to be presented to your clients as written in complete context of this email (and text-corrected letter to follow) in accordance with Rule 3-510, CRPC. It is the best offer that will be made in this litigation based on the facts and circumstances as they are known at this time. Substantial discovery, investigation, and exchange of information remains that could substantially alter the settlement position of the parties to the betterment of either side in ways that cannot now be responsibly predicted. The case settlement value will, however, trend upward the longer I have to work on it. And the emotional distress damages for willfully filing and thereafter maintaining claims for relief without probable cause will only increase as the matter drags on.

The offer is made pursuant to California Civil Code section 47 and in accordance with Rule 408, Fed.Rul.Evid. and California Evidence Code §§ 1152 and 1154 for the sole purpose of settling doubtful and disputed claims by and between the parties. Neither the fact that the offer was made, nor its acceptance, nor any statement made in the course of settlement negotiations shall be admissible to prove the strength or weakness of any claim, counter- or cross-claim, or defense raised or that could be raised by or between the parties regarding the subject matter of their dispute.

Procedural Issues

Your reminder about preservation of evidence, of course, cuts both ways. Since my client's hard drive completely exculpates him, functionally compels dismissal, and opens the door to substantial recovery, he is doing everything in his power to preserve and protect his evidence. In our part of the world, that is a mid-six to low seven figure piece of computer gear.

Procedurally, we need to address how best to move the case to the Fresno Branch so you can enjoy our new Courthouse and avoid Judge Levi's wrath for filing in the wrong court. (Senior Judge Bob Coyle was responsible for building both our new facility and the District Court building in Sacramento; and, although neither building is as grand as Judge Manny Real's showpiece in Santa Ana, the Fresno Court is not only nicer than Sacramento but also one of the top three court facilities ever I've enjoyed practicing in.) Handling the issue by stipulation and order would probably be the most simple way to move the file. We do that routinely in PACA litigation although I am open to suggestions if you prefer to handle it differently

Once the case is moved to the Fresno Branch, your clients should consider cleaning up their complaint. The FRCP and collateral estoppel from other RIAA law and motion matters require much greater specificity in pleading than your clients provided in the complaint I reviewed. Dates of the alleged downloads, which plaintiff (or affiliate) holds which copyright to which track, etc. must be specifically pleaded and proven. You are as familiar as I am with the results in other cases where RIAA's general allegations have been challenged. Let's get over that hurdle without unnecessary law and motion practice.

We should also discuss how quickly you can get your tech people here to do their hard drive inspection. Again, I would be happy to send the airplane to either Butler at SFO or Kaiser at Oakland for roundtrip convenience of you and your clients' tech people. (Oakland is usually faster for me from Civic Center; Kaiser has a shuttle from Bart that beats SFO by about 20 minutes each way most of the time.)

Because your techs will want to do a full data recovery scan to pick up any "negatives" left behind from erased files, I suggest we create a mirror image on an unformatted hard drive purchased commercially in everyone's presence for that purpose. Other RIAA cases have handled the issue by Stipulation and Order although hopefully we can agree on the procedure without that sort of formality.

Once your tech people have confirmed that none of the titles set forth in your clients' complaint (or any other infringements) are or ever were on the drive, you will have irrefutable confirmation of the information provided to you by my office. From there, it should be a short trip to dismissal even if it means getting our clients to mediate Mr. Merchant's positive claims in the absence of an appropriate settlement.

Concluding Remarks and

Thank you for your continued professional courtesy. It is no fun becoming a litigation target as the result of your clients' widely-discredited tactics. Although I have a client to represent, I will do everything I can to keep that aspect of the case at the lowest level possible. You have a hard-nosed client to represent too; and I completely respect that.

Merl Ledford III

An Email Transmission of
LEDFORD LAW CORPORATION
805 West Oak Avenue
Visalia CA 93291-6033
Vox 559.627.2710/Fax 559.627.0717
Web Site: LedfordLaw.net

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...resenting.html


Editor’s note: Upon receipt of this letter attorneys for the RIAA ceased their action against Mr. Merchant. – Jack


















Until next week,

- js.



















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