[JackSpratts]

PC For The Road
Jack

It’s not the first and it won’t be the last, but this new in-car computer pulls ahead of the pack with a touch screen display and some clever software designed to make a distracting surf to work a bit less dangerous.





Portable Satellite Radio? MP3 Player With News? All That, and a Recorder
John Biggs

Pioneer is best known for in-car stereos and speakers, but that doesn't mean it can't step out a bit.

The Pioneer Inno is a portable XM satellite radio and MP3 player that lets you listen to and even record XM content on the go.

The huge antenna can pick all of XM's 170 channels, and a gigabyte of built-in storage space allows you to record up to 50 hours of programming at any time.

The Inno has a full color 180-by-180-pixel display and weighs about 4.5 ounces.

The Inno also has an FM transmitter for playback on any radio, including a car stereo. Finally, there are sports and stock tickers for keeping abreast of the news while out and about.

Available in May at many retailers, the $399 Inno will require a monthly subscription to XM for $12.95. The Inno can also act as a stand-alone MP3 or Windows Media file player and is compatible with the Napster music service.

With satellite radio in your pocket, it may be time to turn in the portable FM radio.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/te.../20player.html





TiVo-lution

From Purpose-Built Systems
Jim Barton, TiVo

The challenges of delivering a reliable, easy-to-use DVR service to the masses

One of the greatest challenges of designing a computer system is in making sure the system itself is “invisible” to the user. The system should simply be a conduit to the desired result. There are many examples of such purpose-built systems, ranging from modern automobiles to mobile phones.

As these products are enhanced over time, however, they often stray from invisibility, imposing new burdens on the user. The two burdens that are probably most annoying to the user are a complex and difficult control interface and lack of reliability. Reliability is not just about whether a computer system functions or not. It encompasses expected behavior, lack of ambiguity, and recovery from unusual events, such as loss of power or network connectivity.

As we began implementation of the TiVo service, we kept these ideas in mind. Our goal was giving viewers a new level of control over their television viewing, while keeping within the context of consumer expectations of a television experience.

In this article I touch on many design facets of the iceberg that is the TiVo service, and the tip of that iceberg most people think of when they hear the name TiVo is the TiVo DVR (digital video recorder).
Background

Several trends in electronic and computer technology were under way in late 1997 that we thought would enable creation of a DVR service that could be provided at a reasonable price to consumers:

· Rapidly increasing amounts of hard-disk storage for the same (or lower) price. This was occurring because of brutal competition between hard-disk suppliers to the PC market. This meant that television viewers could have enormous amounts of video stored locally, creating their own, personal, video-on-demand systems.
· Rapidly increasing sophistication—and declining cost—of integrated chip components. For example, the first inexpensive realtime single-chip MPEG2 encoders were then just coming to market. This allowed our first products to address the largest market at the time, viewers of analog television programming.
· Availability of sufficient open source software components to construct an adequate platform for development of DVR-class software. This meant we could focus our engineering efforts on building the right television experience for the viewer, and thus shorten the development cycle.
· Inexpensive commodity (hardware and software) server technology allowing the deployment of an expansive distributed system architecture.
· Large-scale dial-up Internet access at affordable prices.

Interestingly, there was a great deal of resistance to the concept of a DVR service. Examples include:

· Television networks and other distributors were fearful of the impact the DVR would have on advertising revenues, since it would now be possible to skip through the commercials.
· Major cable television distributors, and industry pundits in general, were dismissive, claiming that video-on-demand would quickly make the DVR obsolete.
· Consumer equipment vendors and industry pundits were skeptical that a subscription service model would find traction with consumers.
· Program guide suppliers and those hoping to turn the program guide into the “front page to the living room” dismissed the idea that the grid-like program guide was suitable as the main interface for controlling television.
· Most consumers, long trained to watch appointment television and live with commercials, didn’t know they wanted a DVR service until they used it, making consumer education a significant challenge.

Why A Subscription Service?

A number of considerations led us to implement our technology as a subscription service rather than as a single-sale, stand-alone product. First, the DVR required constant updating with new program guide information to keep up with changing schedules and lineups. At that time, this had to be done via dial-up access, which has a number of inherent costs. The data itself had to be purchased on an ongoing basis and continuously processed into a form suitable for download. These ongoing costs had to be covered in some way, and a subscription fee seemed both simple and straightforward.

Second, despite our best design work, the DVR would be difficult to set up, and the complexity of television distribution meant that program guide accuracy issues could arise over time. We felt this was best addressed through a professional customer service organization that subscribers could contact as needed. Ongoing customer service became another benefit of the subscription fee.

Third, the subscription revenue stream would allow us to fund ongoing software updates and enhancements to the service.

Finally, a subscription model allowed us to subsidize the cost of the DVR hardware itself, bringing the service within the price range of a much broader audience.

Service Design Principles

We followed a number of core principles in the initial design of the TiVo service. “Simple,” “reliable,” “easy to use,” and other stock phrases are not specific enough to drive system architectural choices. Instead, we started with a set of more concrete philosophies in designing the overall system. These included the following:

It just works. This means that the product itself should always work as expected. No surprises. No ambiguity. Not “works most of the time.” Not “mostly works.” It just works. In the consumer experience, if something doesn’t work right the first use, it is usually abandoned. So you need to get it right the first time.

Remember, it’s television. Everybody knows how television works (even those who claim not to watch it). Television never stops, even when you turn off the TV set. Televisions never crash. You never need to reboot your television. Television always has perfect lip-sync.

The main interface to a television is the remote control. Especially with a DVR, the remote is something you use all the time. Part of the simplicity and usability of the product is a result of how easy it is to use the remote.

AC power is unreliable. There is no power switch on a TiVo receiver. The receiver must be able to survive the loss of power at any time without losing track of its state, so a power switch is superfluous.

Connectivity is unreliable. We can’t assume that we are able to connect to the service back-end at any given instant. Thus, the basic functionality of the DVR should work whether connected or not, transparently to the viewer. As a corollary, we could not build in a dependency on network bandwidth available to the DVR. All data transfer, including eventually video, would be handled through download.

We must control the cost per subscriber of the service. Addressing the average consumer means achieving an extremely low cost of entry to the service. The hardware platform must allow the software to approach 100 percent utilization of the hardware for a given set of functions, allowing for the lowest possible hardware cost. The service back-end must allow us to operationally manage utilization and marginal costs in the same way.

Privacy must be fundamental to the design. People are understandably concerned about their viewing habits being exposed to others or used in unexpected ways. On the other hand, anonymous viewing information can be used to measure general behavior and to improve programming. Therefore, the system must be designed to protect the viewer’s privacy while allowing for collection of relevant information.

Security must be fundamental to the design. TiVo provides a service to its subscribers through the TiVo receiver. Because TiVo takes no hardware margin, and in fact loses money on the hardware, it needs to ensure that it receives the subscription fee to cover costs. This makes it necessary to guard against theft of service and against the use of alternative service providers. It should also be possible, when necessary, to protect stored programming from arbitrary redistribution.

Platform Design Principles

Given these directives, TiVo embarked on the creation of the platform infrastructure that would deliver an embodiment of these ideals to the user. At the same time, we had to make choices that TiVo would live with for a very long time—possibly for the life of TiVo as a company.1

The Source Code

We wanted to avoid dependence on outside software suppliers at all times by having control of each and every line of source code. This would ensure that TiVo would have full control of product quality and development schedules. When the big bug hunt occured, as it always does, we needed the ability to follow every lead, understand every path, and track every problem down to its source.

As a corollary, we needed to specify every byte of software that is used in the production system. That meant being able to build the software in the way we wanted, whenever we wanted, over and over and over again.

This path led us to use open source software as a foundation for the system. There are trade-offs for this choice.

Open source software is neither the savior of software engineering nor the scourge of capitalism. Instead, it is a wide field of source-code options, ranging in quality from dismal to the finest kind, and ranging in copyright licensing terms from draconian to devil-may-care. Support is seldom dependable, build strategies vary, coding styles may be impenetrable, and changes can be fast and furious.

The main DVR application is implemented separately and kept proprietary to TiVo to maintain its competitive advantages. This means paying careful attention to the borders between open source and proprietary software and carefully evaluating licensing terms before incorporating open source packages.

The DVR Hardware

The software complexity needed to deliver the simplicity we were pursuing dictated the choice of a sophisticated operating-system approach. We were going to write a huge amount of software, and we needed to manage it, debug it, measure it, and so forth. We also wanted to have a great deal of flexibility for future upgrades, so choosing an embedded approach targeted to run in a fixed amount of nonvolatile memory was undesirable.

In fact, since a disk drive was necessary for the product, and was the most expensive component, we wanted to achieve maximum utilization of the drive. This meant we would be able to lower the hardware cost in another way. Instead of burdening the platform with a large amount of programmable or flash memory to hold the software, we stored the software on disk and provided only enough boot ROM to contain the self-tests and a disk boot loader.

This is in contrast to most other DVR implementations, which still operate in an old-style set-top mode, keeping all executable code in flash memory and treating the hard disk as simply an add-on module.

The Security Foundation

There are two aspects of managing security within the TiVo service. The first is authentication. Any individual DVR should be able to authenticate itself to the service back-end, while the service back-end should be able to authenticate itself to any DVR. Once authenticated, security policies and encryption can be reliably managed. A public-key encryption system is the obvious choice.

We wanted to make it as difficult as possible, within the economics of the DVR platform, to corrupt the security of any particular DVR. Specifically, even if an exploit is found, it should be equally difficult to perform the exploit on the next DVR, and so forth. Practically, this means that the security system should be based in hardware, and modification of the hardware using “expert” tools should be required to perform the exploit. Each TiVo DVR includes a secure microprocessor to which are delegated all public-key-based operations. This secure microprocessor contains a unique public/private key pair for each DVR, so that there are no global secrets for DVR authentication.

The second aspect of system security is establishing the “chain of trust” for software running in the DVR (i.e., ensuring that no software executes on the DVR except software that has been tested and certified by TiVo).

Starting with the TiVo Series2 DVR, this is accomplished by using a secure ROM for the boot code of the system. The boot code includes a copy of a public signing key held by the TiVo service. The boot code first verifies its own integrity and loads the operating system, which must be signed with the private signing key. Once the operating system is authenticated, it is started. The operating system contains signatures for all executable files (and certain other critical files) that it may execute; before starting any application, it checks that each file is unmodified. If so, then the application code can be loaded.

Network Connectivity

The obvious choice was to depend on standardized protocols within the Internet protocol suite. TCP/IP is the foundation for all communications, PPP for dial-up connection management, and so forth. This also allows us to take advantage of improving technology and the declining cost of IP-based equipment and networks, easing future scaling of the service.

Software tool chain

The tool chain used for building the software is critical, as it determines the productivity of the engineering team and many aspects of code quality and performance. GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) was our choice, running on a RedHat Linux distribution.

Operating system kernel

Here we chose to use Linux. Many readers may confuse the operating system kernel with the overall package of software that makes up an operating system; in this case we are referring only to the memory-resident kernel itself. Linux has many advantages for the TiVo DVR platform: virtual memory and paging support; integrated TCP/IP protocol support; support for many different microprocessor implementations and drivers for most common hardware components, allowing for a great deal of flexibility in hardware implementation; adequate realtime features for a DVR platform; and full source code with an acceptable license (GNU Public License, version 2).

System software

We use system software to refer to all other software that is not part of the TiVo proprietary application that is used in the system. Each of these components was specifically chosen based on requirements and licensing, and incorporated into the software build and deployment process. TiVo does not rely on any particular GNU/Linux distribution; instead, it handcrafts its own distribution with just those components required for the DVR platform.

Application Design Principles

When TiVo began, broadband penetration in the United States was limited. Yet, to provide a satisfying experience to TiVo subscribers, we needed to provide a large amount of data to each TiVo receiver about what television was available, preferably updated on a daily basis.

The obvious choice was downloading data over a phone line, but there were serious drawbacks to that approach. Most people do not have a phone jack near their televisions, and this was (and still is) a serious barrier to installing a TiVo DVR. From the TiVo service perspective, dial-up connections can also be costly.

Despite the drawbacks of dial-up networking, we chose this path. We also believed that eventually broadband and home networks would be available to most subscribers, which would simplify installation of the DVR. This led us to create a distributed application in which a central server facility synchronized information about available programming with each DVR, using a short, periodic dial-up connection. The DVR then used that data offline to make local decisions about what to record and when.

As we expected eventually to scale the number of receivers in use into the tens of millions, the server architecture had to be highly scalable. At the same time, it had to be incredibly efficient; since TiVo would pay for the phone calls, we needed to minimize the amount of data transferred and ensure that most calls were successful the first time. Even when broadband access is used, there are still overhead costs for bandwidth and equipment that must be managed.

Programming Abstractions

Aside from the disk drive, the best way to control hardware cost is to limit the amount of semiconductor memory needed in the system. This includes ROM, flash, and precious DRAM. For performance-critical software, which in TiVo means all software involved with user interaction and video recording or playback, minimizing memory use and processor cycles forces the choice of a low-level optimizing programming language.

We chose to use a subset of GNU C++. We did not use exception handling, which generates a great deal more code—code that should be rarely executed in a well-designed application. Exceptions can be thrown for many reasons, and the proper path for recovery from them is not always obvious at different abstraction levels. This makes designing a predictable application difficult.

Instead, all object methods that can fail for some reason must return a status code, and the caller must check this code and properly respond to it. A method returning a failure code must leave the object in a well-defined state, such that the caller can respond to the failure in a predictable way. Our testing framework includes ways to inject failure codes and to check for proper handling of them. In fact, we modified the C++ compiler to verify that callers actually do something with the status code.

Our fundamental abstraction layer is called the TMK (TiVo Media Kernel). This body of software provides for typical functionality: memory management, threading, synchronization, interprocess communication, etc. It also provides the fundamental object abstractions from which all other application software is derived; examples include templates for lists, arrays, and hashes.

Memory management is a particular focus of the TMK. Memory is the most important resource in the system and key to performance. Mismanagement of memory is also the most likely source of software failures. To minimize memory usage, using shared memory operated on by multiple threads is desirable whenever possible. This raises many issues, however, with synchronization, cleanup, allocation algorithms, etc.

Unbounded memory allocation is certainly possible in a virtual memory-with-paging environment such as Linux, but must be avoided; paging should be a rare event. TMK manages all memory within bounded allocation areas dedicated to various functions. TMK objects are reference-counted and managed with smart pointers, (i.e., template classes that behave as regular pointers, but incorporate reference counting). This relieves much of the memory management burden on the programmer.

These allocation areas are themselves objects and incorporate extensive debugging support and consistency checking, including shutdown checks that ensure no dangling objects are left behind. TMK applications are further required to start up and shut down in a regular and consistent manner. This allows incorporation of extensive automatic consistency checking and ensures that memory leaks are found very early in the development process.

Using the TMK abstraction, we ideally expect to be able to create application code that can run forever without crashes and without memory leaks. In practice, we continue to asymptotically approach this unobtainable ideal.

Remembering Things

The soul of a DVR is remembering things: when shows come on, what channels a user receives, how long shows should be kept around, and so on. Remembering has to occur reliably, even when the power can drop at any time and the receiver may be offline for days or weeks.

The number of things it needs to remember is enormous. A subscriber using a satellite receiver can potentially receive 1,000 channels; stretched over 24 hours a day for 14 days, this is a lot of program information. Obviously, this data could always be re-acquired from the service; however, that process would be expensive and time-consuming, and it would be visible to the subscriber.

It is also critical that the subscriber’s information—channel lists, recording queues, recordings on disk, and viewing preferences—be properly remembered as well.

The structure of the data we need to remember is naturally object oriented. For example, a particular program might appear on several different channels at various times. Popular series can exist as new episodes on major networks or live for years in syndication on local broadcast channels. It is also important that we have strict control over data versioning. A broadcaster at any time might update a show’s program information, such as the showing time or episode. We expect the database always to be functional and to run with constant updating as long as the receiver is in use. The database must reliably discard old information and never “lose” any storage capacity.

Because we knew the different object types and their characteristics and relationships in advance, our implementation approach could be optimized for size and speed. We chose to implement a simple object database with auto-generated C++ wrapper classes for every object. Support for simple transactions allows reliable updates of object collections; retrying failed transaction commits is the responsibility of application code. Garbage collection is used to ensure recovery of database memory. These choices give us complete control over functionality and performance, allowing us to create an optimal database implementation for the TiVo DVR.

Media Storage

Most of the capacity of the disk drive is dedicated to storing programming. Here, the constraints are very different from those for the database or application software, which typically deals with small transactions with the disk. The most extreme example is high-definition television signals, in which a single minute of video occupies more than 140 MB of storage. In the TiVo/DirecTV HDTV satellite receiver, the DVR must manage recording two HDTV signals at the same time it plays back a third from the disk. In the worst case, this must continue flawlessly in parallel with all other possible functions that the DVR may be performing (e.g., searching for programming using a program guide, downloading program information from the service, writing log files, and paging).

Media storage is managed through a simple file system design that is focused on efficient allocation and performance. The file system is application-managed, not part of the operating system. Special adaptations have been made to the operating system to support direct input and output to application buffers, bypassing any normal buffering. The disk driver was modified to incorporate hooks to allow the application to specify how disk operations should be prioritized and to allow the specification of deadlines for media storage operations. This way, the application can ensure that the most important operations happen when necessary, but the driver is allowed to interleave other operations so that forward progress is made on all aspects of the application.

User Interface

It was very important that the user interface to the TiVo DVR be both simple and powerful. Following our core principles, it also had to be a natural extension of a television viewing experience.

The first expression of this was the use of video loopsets as backgrounds to each navigation screen. A video loopset is simply a segment of video that is designed to be seamlessly repeated, giving the appearance of constant, smooth movement.

These loopsets are carefully rendered to be nonintrusive, yet give the impression of a system that is always active. The loopsets, and the overlaid informational graphics, are designed not to be abrasive or pushy; thus, the viewers could take as much time as they wanted to make choices.

The navigational model used throughout is based on a simple list, navigated with a four-direction control: up, down, left, and right. Up and down move a position indicator through the list, moving right provides additional information about the item selected, while moving left takes the viewer to higher-level or previous lists. Appurtenance icons are drawn on the screen, matching icons on the remote control, indicating what actions are available; we called these the whispering arrows.

An innovative feature that has been especially popular is the addition of sound cues triggered by remote-control key presses. This affords another way that the viewers can be assured that their key presses are seen and provides instant feedback if a key press is not allowed or an action has been initiated.

We focused a great deal of attention on the design of the remote control.2 When watching television using a DVR, viewers naturally use the remote often, perhaps even holding it the whole time. It is important that viewers not have to take their eyes off their television screens, so the layout and feel of the keys has to be carefully structured to allow navigating the keys by feel. In fact, it should be possible to use the remote control easily in a darkened living room.

Another important aspect of the user interface is that it should be dynamic. For example, if the viewer is perusing the list of recorded programs, and a new recording begins, that should be immediately reflected in the interface. This is naturally achieved by implementing the user interface as a view into the object database. The user interface code is informed by the database when items in the current view change. It can then update the presentation for the viewer.

Home Networking And Broadband Extensions

Since 2003, TiVo has been integrating networking-based features into the TiVo service as part of a continual process of upgrading the subscriber experience. The central challenge we face is how to continue providing the best interface for accessing and controlling networked services while providing the “TiVo-like” reliability that the viewer expects.

This is especially difficult in a networked environment because of the complexity of home networks and broadband access. Ideally, the consumer should be able simply to plug the DVR into the home network and access available services through obvious extensions to the user interface. Wireless networking based on the IEEE 802.11 standard is an especially thorny issue; despite the impression given by equipment manufacturers and the news media, such networks are difficult for the consumer to get working properly and have a great deal of connectivity and bandwidth variability in the home environment. We again rely on Internet protocol standards for configuring the DVR to operate properly on the network, supporting Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) standards for IP address configuration and service discovery (http://www.zeroconf.org).

To lower the cost of the DVR hardware, we chose not to provide built-in networking interfaces in early generations of the Series2 DVR. Instead, we provide a low-cost USB interface. This is because we believed that the percentage of DVRs attached to networks would be modest and grow slowly over time. Instead of burdening every hardware platform with an expensive interface, those subscribers wishing to connect the DVR to a home network could buy inexpensive USB network adapters that match their network facilities. Broadband penetration has increased sufficiently that all future TiVo DVR platforms will include some form of built-in network interface.

Opening up to network-based services means opening up to network-based attacks on the DVR or the data flowing on the network. These threats can take several forms:
Attacks on services the DVR exposes to the network, subverting weak protocols or causing some form of DOS (denial of service). We handle this by carefully selecting which services we will expose and testing each extensively. We also implement a standard Linux firewall, with rules to limit DOS attacks.
Data-based attacks on the DVR—for example, using carefully selected MP3 streams or JPEG images that might cause a buffer overflow in the decoder, thus crashing the application and causing some form of service denial. Another familiar example is sending corrupted URLs or content metadata. Here, the best avoidance strategy is through rigorous testing and, when leveraging open source developments, choosing stable, widely used, and well-tested packages.
Network snooping of sensitive data, such as personal viewing information or passwords. We use SSL for access to most network services. Security certificates are distributed through the secure chain of trust from the service back-end.
DVR-to-DVR program transfers being snooped off the network. The transfers are encrypted, and the encryption keys are exchanged using the public keys of the DVRs involved, requiring use of the embedded security microprocessor to decrypt the keys.

Our ultimate goal is that the interfaces to network services should be as invisible and reliable as other functions of the TiVo service and integrate with the user interface in a clean and obvious way.

As part of implementing network services, we chose to provide to our subscribers a free PC-based application3 that makes the PC appear on the home network as a media server. The subscribers, in addition to services delivered directly over the Internet from TiVo, can publish their own content for playback on the DVR.

Network services implemented to date include: streaming of MP3 audio, display of images in various formats (i.e., digital photos), DVR-to-DVR transfers of recorded programs, Web-based scheduling of recordings, DVR-to-PC and PC-to-DVR transfers of recorded programs, and DVR-to-mobile device transfers using the PC as an agent.

A Work In Progress

TiVo has been successful, acquiring more than 4 million subscribers since the company was founded. The company has also been successful in another way: in proving that both a DVR platform and a subscriber business could be created. As a result, the company faces increasing competition from alternative suppliers, especially the digital television distributors such as cable and satellite operators.

The basic principles used in first developing the TiVo service are still sound. In fact, TiVo is creating a new implementation designed to work within the OCAP (Open Cable Application Platform), targeted at cable television distributors. Comcast has agreed to deploy this new TiVo service as an alternative to its own DVR service solution, an acknowledgment of the perceived quality and value of the technology.

TiVo continues to advance its original service platform with new software functionality. This includes further integration with PCs and mobile devices, new ways of selecting programming, and tighter integration with remote scheduling. The distributed design of the TiVo service has proven to be an effective vehicle for deploying these new services.
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?...owpage&pid=381





American Spam Slowing; Europe, Asia Taking Over
Anders Bylund

The most recent global spam study conducted by Sophos shows China closing in on the US when it comes to relaying spam, and the Asian markets together have put some distance between itself and former spam leader North America. In 2004, over half of all spam was sent through the US, but today, that number has dropped to just 23.1 percent according to the report. China relays 21.9 percent of the junk e-mail traffic, and South Korea rounds out the top three with 9.8 percent.

Asian spam adds up to 42.8 percent of the total, and North American runs neck-and-neck with Europe at 25.6 and 25 percent, respectively. A Sophos spokesman explains that the American drop in the rankings is due to the intensified efforts to find spammers within US borders and slap them with high fines. By contrast, some European countries such as Poland and Spain have seen their spam totals increase, presumably due to a lack of governmental effort to control the problem.

It's important to note that this study does not talk about where the spam messages were first conceived of, composed, and scheduled for delivery. It looks at the mail relay point, which can be quite different as spam kings try to cover their tracks. They often do this by operating through networks of virus-infected computers.

"It's imperative that computer users worldwide put better defences in place to prevent their computers from being converted into spam-spewing zombies," said the Sophos spokesman. "South Korea has a fantastic Internet structure with immensely fast connections, and so it is a goldmine for spammers wanting to create botnets. The top 10 viruses in the past 10 months are really old, which suggests the human race isn't winning the war against viruses and spam. Some people just simply aren't bothered, and they are the ones bombarding the rest of us."

That means a couple of things. First, high connectivity leads to high numbers of spambots on a per-capita basis. Second, old machines running less secure versions of Windows are more susceptible to virus infection, pushing the spam relay numbers higher.

Taking all of that into account, the former spam overlord that is the United States drop to fifth place among the 12 countries listed in the study reports with 0.17 percent of worldwide spam per million US Internet users. China, with less spam but still fewer 'Net denizens clocks in a #3 (0.22), the highly connected South Koreans secure second place (0.30), and the worst offender per online resident is—Poland! A combination of lax to nonexistent governmental spam control and a preponderance of old hardware and software lets 0.32 percent-per-million-netizens of all spam bounce through Polish machinery.

On the flip side of things, many countries seem to be doing a much better job of spam control than the US: Germany and the UK, for example, both have spam PPIM ratings of 0.06, but Japan might be the most impressive case of all. If high connectivity is a problem, Japan seems to have figured out how to control it. With 89 percent of its 127 million citizens reportedly connected to the Internet, Japan contributes just 2 percent of the spam for a microscopic rating of 0.02.

The spam study is an ongoing project, wherein Sophos collects spam via junk mail honeypots around the world and generates periodic reports from the data. With more than 13 billion pieces of spam sent daily, and with spambot networks providing incentives for virus writers to crank out new creations, spam has become more than a mere annoyance. If these numbers show us anything, it's that slowing the beast down will take a global effort. In other words, get your spam filters in order, because the problem won't go away anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060421-6648.html





Teens Say They Like Vinyl Records Over CDs
UPI

A Canadian scientist says teens who used to view CDs as superior to older vinyl records now consider vinyl superior to the newer format.

David Hayes of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto says the growing popularity of vinyl might be a form of resistance against the music industry's corporate taste-makers.

While conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation, Hayes was surprised to discover the young music enthusiasts he was interviewing were fans of vinyl.

"This made me wonder why they were interested in something that is, for all intents and purposes, a dead medium," he said, noting the teenagers had switched from buying CDs to collecting LPs, often seeking obscure recordings.

Hayes research subjects said they liked the visual appeal of LP jackets and the challenge of seeking hard-to-find releases.

In yet another turnaround, teens overwhelmingly insisted the sound quality of LPs was superior to that of modern formats. They characterized LPs and the LP artists of the past as more authentic than the barrage of youth-oriented music being aggressively marketed to them today.

Hayes detailed his research in the February issue of Popular Music and Society.
http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=64807495





File swapping is thirsty work

How To Hack A Soda Machine
Skatter Tech

Most modern soda machines have little computers in them. The tiny RED LCD usually displays the data. The computer can be controlled by using certain buttons on the soda machine in different combinations. This can be used to check the temperature, see the amount of money (load and dump), and dump certain sodas. Will usually only work on newer machines that look like the one on the right. They need to have an LCD and also need to have some type of message on it “ICE COLD SODAS” This tells you it is running something.

1) Accessing the Menu: Press the buttons [4][2][3][1] one after another. It will be left to right in some machines and up and down in some so try both methods. Once you press these keys you will be in the “debug menu.” It should display ERROR or something similar.

2) Once you are in, button [1] becomes the back/exit type of command. Button [2] becomes scroll up. Button [3] becomes scroll down. And Button [4] becomes select/enter. You can now scroll through the features.

3) As you scroll through the menus you will see items such as SALE, CASH, VER, ERROR, and RTN.

4) What each item means: Cash- displays the amount of money in the machine. You will also be able to find more info on what was purchased how much for each item and are arranged by slot #s. SALE- shows how many drinks have been sold and how many from each slot. (slots are in same order as buttons so if button 1 is coke then slot 1 is coke as well.) VER- the machine firmware version. (pointless) ERROR- COLJ (Column Jam), VEnd (Vend Mechanism), Door (Door Switch), Sels (Selection Switch), CHAR (Changer Errors), Acce (Acceptor Errors), Sts (Space 2 Sales), and bVal (Vill Validators). (can’t do anything w/ this either, except clear the errors!) RTN- Returns back to normal menus, you can also do this by pressing on the coin return button or the back button. Also by holding a coin at the tip of the coin slot it will display the current temperature of the inside of the soda machine.

5) There above are the options that are usually enabled, but most other options are usually disabled if the owner (or maintenance dude) is smart. But if they happen to be enabled here they are: CPO- Coin payment mode, which will dump coins out of the machine. You will be able to specify the type (dime, nickel, ect.) and the amount. tvFL- tube fill mode, which lets you fill the machine w/ coins. (retarded huh) PASS- allows you to change the default password from 4231 to something else. PrlC- change the price of a drink! (1 cent!) StOS change what each button links to (so if some1 presses coke you can make it go 2 sprite.) COn- are machine configuration settings too much to tell just experiment. TIME- Set TIME. LANG- change language.
http://www.skattertech.com/soda-machine-hack/





Apple's iTunes Pricing To Stay At 99 Cents
Marc Perton

Apple Computer's Steve Jobs has apparently won his long-running battle with the record industry over the pricing of songs in the iTunes Music Store. Jobs has long insisted that the store's 99-cents-per-song price point should stay in place, while record companies had argued for more flexible pricing, with newer songs going for a higher price, and catalog material selling for less. The record companies had also pushed for a subscription option similar to that followed by most other online music stores. Now, according to The New York Post, the record companies have largely thrown in the towel, and will allow Apple to keep pricing flat.

The victory is, however, somewhat Pyrrhic for Apple; the company makes very little money (proportionately) from iTMS, and uses the store largely as a way to lure customers into buying iPods and lock them into its FairPlay DRM, which we all know works only with one audio player. (Why do you think the French are giving them such a hard time?)

Keeping pricing simple is part of Jobs' strategy to avoid losing customers to competing platforms, which have access to music stores that offer unlimited download subscription packages for as little as $8 per month. Level pricing may help stanch defections -- but it's not likely to produce any increased revenue for Apple, which is apparently just how they like it.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/21/a...y-at-99-cents/





The Corporate Toll On The Internet

Telecom giant AT&T plans to charge online businesses to speed their services through its DSL lines. Critics say the scheme violates every principle of the Internet, favors deep-pocketed companies, and is bound to limit what we see and hear online.
Farhad Manjoo

To say that AT&T was once the nation's largest phone company is a bit like describing the Pentagon as America's leading purchaser of guns and bullets. Until its government-imposed dissolution in 1984, AT&T, which provided a dial tone to the vast majority of Americans, enjoyed a market dominance unlike that of any corporation in modern history, rivaling only state monopolies -- think of the Soviet airline or the British East India Tea Company -- in size and scope. In commercials, the company encouraged us to reach out and touch someone; the reality was that for much of the 20th century, you had no choice but to let AT&T touch your loved ones for you.

Now -- after a series of acquisitions and re-acquisitions so tangled it would take Herodotus to adequately chronicle them -- AT&T is back, it's big, and according to consumer advocates and some of the nation's largest technology companies, AT&T wants to take over the Internet.

The critics -- including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo -- point out that AT&T, along with Verizon and Comcast, its main rivals in the telecom business, will dominate the U.S. market for residential high-speed Internet service for the foreseeable future. Currently, that market is worth $20 billion, and according to the Federal Communications Commission, the major "incumbent" phone and cable companies -- such as AT&T -- control 98 percent of the business. Telecom industry critics say that these giants gained their power through years of deregulation and lax government oversight. Now many fear that the phone and cable firms, with their enormous market power, will hold enormous sway over what Americans do online.

Specifically, AT&T has hinted that it plans to charge Web companies a kind of toll to send data at the highest speeds down DSL lines into its subscribers' homes. The plan would make AT&T a gatekeeper of media in your home. Under the proposal, the tens of millions of people who get their Internet service from AT&T might only be able to access heavy-bandwidth applications -- such as audio, video and Internet phone service -- from the companies that have paid AT&T a fee. Meanwhile, firms that don't pay -- perhaps Google, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube, Salon, or anyone else -- would be forced to use a smaller and slower section of the AT&T network, what Internet pioneer Vint Cerf calls a "dirt road" on the Internet. AT&T's idea, its critics say, would shrink the vast playground of the Internet into something resembling the corporate strip mall of cable TV.

The fears have been deepened by AT&T's new heft. Early in March, AT&T announced that it will spend $67 billion to acquire BellSouth, the phone company that serves nine states in the Southeast. The merger will make AT&T the nation's largest telecom company, and the seventh-largest corporation of any kind. According to one study, the new AT&T will take in almost a quarter of all money American households spend on communications services. In addition to maintaining a near monopoly on local phone and DSL service in 22 states, the new AT&T would provide land-line long-distance service throughout the country; cellular coverage through its subsidiary Cingular, the nation's largest wireless carrier; and soon, even television broadcasts to millions of Americans.

The government is expected to approve the AT&T-BellSouth deal, but the merger has already prompted debate in Congress and at the FCC over how this new behemoth may control content online. Currently, there are few rules governing what broadband companies can do on their network lines; if AT&T wanted to, for instance, it could give you only slowed-down access to the iTunes store unless Apple paid it a cut of every song you buy.

To fight back, online companies like Apple and Amazon, along with Internet policy experts and engineers, are pushing the government to draw up a set of rules to ensure what they call "network neutrality." The rules, debated this past February in a Senate hearing, would force broadband companies to treat all data on the Internet equally, preventing them from charging content companies for priority delivery into your house. AT&T and other broadband companies oppose laws to restrict how they operate online -- the free market, they say, will ensure an even playing field. In 2005, phone companies poured nearly $30 million into lobbying to ensure that the telecom industry remains free of regulation.

The battle may sound wonky but its outcome could well determine the shape of tomorrow's media universe. Increasingly, we're all using the Internet for much more than surfing the Web; film, music, TV and phone companies are looking at the network as the primary channel for delivering media into our homes, and AT&T and other telecom firms are spending billions to deploy deliciously fast fiber-optic lines to handle the expected traffic. The regulatory tangle between broadband providers and Web companies over network neutrality reflects a more fundamental fight over precious communications real estate -- a battle for control of the lines that will serve as our main conduit for media in the future.

Each side predicts dire consequences if its opponents win. Jim Ciccone, AT&T's senior executive vice president for external affairs, says that if broadband service is regulated, AT&T won't be able to recoup its costs for building these new lines -- "and then we don't build the network." The Web firms say that if the big broadband companies are allowed to charge content firms for access to your house, we'll see the Internet go the way of other deregulated media -- just like TV and radio, where a small band of big companies used their wealth to swallow up consumer choice. If broadband companies get their way, says Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, the Internet will one day feature nothing much more exciting than "the digital equivalent of endless episodes of 'I Love Lucy.'"

In 2003, when Internet policy experts first began discussing network neutrality, their primary worry was that broadband providers would strike deals with certain Web sites to block people's access to competing sites or services online. For instance, what if Comcast worked with Barnes and Noble so that every time a Comcast Internet user pointed his browser to Amazon.com, he was instead redirected to BN.com? FCC officials have frowned upon the possibility of ISPs blocking certain Web sites, but they have not regulated against it; Paul Misener, the vice president for global public policy at Amazon.com, argues that "under current rules," a company like AT&T "would be able to block us without punishment."

Although such actions are theoretically possible, most experts concede that broadband firms wouldn't do something as brazen as blocking customers from going anywhere on the Web; such actions would probably prompt immediate regulation. Now Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo and others argue that broadband firms like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are looking to institute a more subtle kind of discrimination. They're looking to "prioritize content from some content companies over others," Misener says.

In fact, AT&T is not at all secret about its plans. In an interview with BusinessWeek magazine last year, Edward Whitacre, AT&T's CEO, took a hard line against Web companies that oppose paying for high-speed access to AT&T's customers. "What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," he said of Google and Microsoft. "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

The pipes Whitacre is referring to are those his company is building under a plan it calls Project Lightspeed, a multibillion-dollar initiative to install high-capacity fiber-optic Internet lines into thousands of residential neighborhoods across AT&T's service area. The company expects to serve about 18 million households with fiber-optic lines by 2008; Verizon has similar plans to roll out fiber lines. The new pipes will dramatically improve Internet speeds to home customers. Today a typical DSL line downloads data at about 1 or 2 Mbps, and cable modems run about double that rate. Advanced fiber-optic systems will see download speeds of at least 25 to 30 Mbps. Today's DSL can barely download a single standard-quality video stream in real time. In tests AT&T recently ran in San Antonio, Project Lightspeed lines carried three standard-quality streams and one high-definition stream down the line simultaneously.

What will customers do with all this broadband capacity? As the phone companies envision it, we'll use it to watch a lot of TV. Both Verizon and AT&T are betting heavily on a technology called IPTV, a service that delivers television signals into people's homes over the new fiber-optic Internet lines. According to the phone companies, IPTV will be a boon to consumers, delivering high-quality video and advanced services like TV shows "on demand," and providing much-needed competition to cable companies.

What's not clear, though, is what else -- besides watching TV -- customers will be allowed to do with the new lines. This is the heart of the fight over network neutrality. If you subscribe to AT&T's Project Lightspeed service, will you be able to use the 30 Mbps line coming into your house for, say, downloading high-definition movies from Apple, high-definition home videos from YouTube, or some other bandwidth-heavy application we haven't yet dreamed of? Or, instead, will AT&T reserve the line for its own TV service and for data from other companies that pay a fee -- thereby making AT&T the arbiter of content in your home?

At the moment, phone companies are cagey about their plans. What they will say is they're not going to stop their customers from getting to any site or service on the Internet. "Let me be clear: AT&T will not block anyone's access to the public Internet, nor will we degrade anyone's quality of service," Whitacre said in a speech to a trade conference in Las Vegas recently. "Period. End of story." But just because AT&T won't block people from accessing Google's videos doesn't mean it will give Google's videos the same status on the broadband pipe as other content -- meaning that while AT&T's TV service may come in at high-definition quality, those from competing firms might only run at standard-definition.

Indeed, AT&T and other network operators are building their networks in a way that would make it possible to split up network traffic into various lanes -- fast, slow, medium -- and then to decide what kind of data, and whose data, goes where, based on who's paid what. Broadband companies argue that engineering their networks in this way will benefit customers in two ways. First, they say, splitting up the Internet into several lanes will generally improve its efficiency -- the network will simply run better if it's more logically managed.

The phone companies' second argument concerns cost. If AT&T builds a blindingly fast new Internet line to your house but only allows some firms -- firms that pay -- to get the fastest service, it can significantly offset the costs of the build-out. And that's good for you, AT&T says, because if the company can charge the likes of Apple and Google to pay for the line, it doesn't have to charge you. "I think what we're saying is friendly to the consumer," Ciccone says. "If we're building the capacity, what we're doing is trying to defray some of the cost from consumers to the business end of this."

AT&T's critics don't buy this claim. They argue that by slicing up the Internet into different lanes, broadband companies are violating one of the basic network design principles responsible for the Internet's rise and amazing success. They add, too, that there's no proof that AT&T's plan would result in reduced broadband costs for home customers. Instead, consumers could lose out in a big way. If AT&T's plan comes to pass, the dynamic Internet, where innovation rules and where content companies rise and fall on their own merit, would shrivel. By exploiting the weaknesses in current laws, telecom firms would gain an extraordinarily lucrative stake in the new media universe. In the same way that a corporation like Clear Channel controls the radio airwaves, companies like AT&T could become kingmakers in the online world, granting priority to content from which they stand to profit most. Britney Spears, anyone?

To understand why critics worry about the future of the Internet in the absence of what they call network neutrality, it helps to look at the underlying philosophy of the ubiquitous network. Engineers are fond of describing the Internet as a "dumb network," a designation that's meant to be a compliment. Unlike other large communications systems -- phone or cable networks -- the Internet was designed without a specific application in mind. The engineers who built the network didn't really know what it would be used for, so they kept it profoundly simple, making sure that the network performed very few functions of its own. Where other networks use a kind of "intelligence" to define what is and what isn't allowed on a system, the various machines that make up the Internet don't usually examine or act upon data; they just push it where it needs to go.

The smallest meaningful bit of information on the Internet is called a "packet"; anything you send or receive on the network, from an e-mail to an iTunes song, is composed of many packets. On the Internet, all packets are equal. Any one packet hurtling over the pipe to my house is treated more or less the same way as any other packet, regardless of where it comes from or what kind of information -- video, voice or just text -- it represents. If I were to download a large Microsoft Word e-mail attachment at the same time that I were to stream a funny clip from Salon's Video Dog, the Internet won't make any effort to give the video clip more space on my line than the document, even if I may want it to. If the connection is too slow to accommodate both files at the same time, my video might slow down and sputter as the Word file hogs up the line -- to the network, bits are bits, and a video is no more important than a Word file.

The notion that the Internet shouldn't perform special functions on network data is known as the "end-to-end principle." The idea, first outlined by computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1984, is widely seen as a key to the network's success. It is precisely because the Internet doesn't have any intelligence of its own that it's been so useful for so many different kinds of things; the network works consistently and evenly for everyone, and, therefore, everyone is free to add their own brand of intelligence to it.

Today's largest broadband firms, though, aren't accustomed to running dumb networks built on the end-to-end principle. AT&T ran the phone network at its own behest -- and the company usually benefited from it. Historically, in the telecom industry, "there's been this instinct toward control," says Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and a co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?" At firms like AT&T and Verizon, both of which have roots in the monopolistic old AT&T, there's now an effort afoot to reengineer parts of the Internet by introducing more intelligence to manage and control data.

One firm that has been a vocal proponent of prioritizing data is Cisco, the giant network equipment company whose products currently power much of the Internet. "We think that as people use their broadband connections more intensively, the need to manage traffic is going to increase," says Jeff Campbell, director of government affairs at Cisco. The company has designed an array of products that allows service providers like AT&T and Verizon to scrutinize everything on their networks extremely closely. One Cisco brochure (PDF) touts a system called the Cisco Service Control Engine, which is described as "a deep packet inspection engine that helps enable service providers to identify, classify, monitor, and control traffic" on the network. "Deep packet inspection" refers to the practice of looking at each slice of data on the network and determining exactly what kind of information it is -- whether it's part of an e-mail message, or a bit of a video file you're trading over Bittorrent, or perhaps a New York Times news story on the Web.

After examining each packet and deciding which user asked for it, where it's coming from, and what application it's meant for, the Cisco system allows network operators to assign various network privileges to the data. During a time of network congestion, data that is "delay-sensitive" -- like part of a voice phone call or a streaming video -- can be moved along the network in a hurry, while packets that represent less urgent data -- peer-to-peer file transfers, or downloads of e-mail attachments -- might be put on a slow lane. In this sort of network, were I to download a video file and a Word file at the same time, the network would notice it, and may decide to slow down the Word file so that the video file plays smoothly.

Many Web entrepreneurs and network policy experts think that giving priority to some traffic is good for the Internet. In February, Mark Cuban, the billionaire media entrepreneur and sports-team owner, posted a rant on his blog decrying the current state of network traffic management, and calling on broadband firms to offer high-speed service for some kinds of data. "There are some basic facts about the Internet that remind me of driving on the 405 in Los Angeles," Cuban wrote. "Traffic jams happen. There is no end in sight for those traffic jams. The traffic jams are worse at certain times of the day. Whether it's the 405 or the Internet." If we use carpool lanes to allow some cars to bypass traffic on our freeways, Cuban asked, why not add HOV lanes to the Internet, so that media that needs fast service can get to its destination more quickly?

Cuban is a co-founder of HDNet, a high-definition cable and satellite TV network, and has a particular interest in seeing the Internet give special treatment to certain files. In fact, the new Internet schemes are specifically designed to boost audio and video on the network. If your Word file slows down for a half-second during download, you're not going to notice it; but if your Internet phone call has a half-second interruption, it would annoy you to no end.

Opponents of neutrality regulations say other applications currently being designed for the Internet will only work well if the network is improved. For instance, imagine if you were watching an Internet TV broadcast of a basketball game that allowed you to switch to different camera angles during the game. That program would be only useful, says Campbell of Cisco, if the camera angles appeared instantly, not seconds after you switched. Other advocates point to new medical diagnostic devices with which hospitals can monitor the status of patients at home; in that situation, it would seem obvious to give such traffic priority.

"I guess we could leave the Internet in the dark ages and leave everything as an unprioritized, unorganized mass where all bits are treated the same," says Campbell. "But we think good network management technology will improve overall performance and consumers will have a better experience in the long term."

Despite Cisco's position, there is fractious division among network engineers on whether prioritizing certain time-sensitive traffic would actually improve network performance. Introducing intelligence into the Internet also introduces complexity, and that can reduce how well the network works. Indeed, one of the main reasons scientists first espoused the end-to-end principle is to make networks efficient; it seemed obvious that analyzing each packet that passes over the Internet would add some computational demands to the system.

Gary Bachula, vice president for external affairs of Internet2, a nonprofit project by universities and corporations to build an extremely fast and large network, argues that managing online traffic just doesn't work very well. At the February Senate hearing, he testified that when Internet2 began setting up its large network, called Abilene, "our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to assure that they arrive without delay. As it developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment."

Today, Bachula continued, "our Abilene network does not give preferential treatment to anyone's bits, but our users routinely experiment with streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high-quality two-way videoconferences simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe without loss of packets."

Not only is adding intelligence to a network not very useful, Bachula pointed out, it's not very cheap. A system that splits data into various lanes of traffic requires expensive equipment, both within the network and at people's homes. Right now, broadband companies are spending a great deal on things like set-top boxes, phone routers and other equipment for their advanced services. "Simple is cheaper," Bachula said. "Complex is costly" -- a cost that may well be passed on to customers.

Expensive as they may be, the new network schemes will allow for myriad moneymaking opportunities. The new technology will allow AT&T and company to reserve the fast lane for the highest bidders. And AT&T says such a plan is perfectly fair. "It costs a lot to maintain and operate a network," says Ciccone of AT&T. "You don't pay for that by offering a raw pipe. We didn't build a copper line network a hundred years ago so people could do whatever they want on it. We offered a phone service. And you don't build networks so that somebody else can necessarily use them for free. We have the capability through dedicated lines of service for offering a high-quality product. There's a service there. We should be able to offer that in the market."

Ciccone is particularly galled by the fact that those who are the most opposed to AT&T's plans are enormous firms -- such as Google -- that want to make money by offering video services online. "This really is just coming from a couple companies who have plans to stream movies," he says. "They hide behind the guise of the innovator in the garage who's building the next big Google. That's a lot of hooey because the little guy is not streaming movies. This is about the companies that want to stream movies, and they want to not just compete with us but with cable companies in doing so. What disturbs them is that we're building network capacity to be able to accommodate ourselves with a very high-quality product, and the Googles won't be able to deliver the same quality."

Technology companies do say they fear AT&T's network won't provide a level playing field, and that AT&T's competitors won't be able to deliver videos that work as well as AT&T's content. Networks have finite space, and it is a fact of network engineering that when some data is given a priority on the network, other data will be pushed aside. At the Senate hearing, Stanford Law professor and Internet policy expert Lawrence Lessig argued that this will put companies or individuals that can't pay for high-quality service at an enormous disadvantage, "reducing application or content competition on the Internet." In the past year, streaming-video Web sites have proliferated on the Internet, and some of the most popular services have come from start-ups like YouTube. Under AT&T's plan, flush firms like Google would be able to pay for all the space on the line, leaving the smaller guys out of luck. The Internet has long been a meritocracy, where smart and creative companies can act quickly and beat out established players. That wouldn't be so on AT&T's Internet.

Broadband operators respond by declaring they will offer high-speed services to all companies, big or small, and anybody will be able to pay for a spot in the fast lane. "Generally companies shy away from doing exclusive deals," says AT&T's Ciccone. "You don't say I'm only going to provide telephone service to only one bank." But as Amazon's Misener points out, "This is a zero-sum game. If you prioritize anyone's content you necessarily degrade someone else's. That's how it works." When you convert one lane on a freeway into a toll lane, it's true that you make traffic better for cars that can pay. But you also make traffic worse for cars that cannot.

Indeed, that's what makes AT&T's plan so lucrative. The company can't offer fast service to everyone. If it did offer all companies access to the fast lane for a low fee, the lane would soon become congested and nobody would have an incentive to pay. To make the most money, the network operators may charge just a few firms huge sums to ride on the pipe. This means that one or two companies could lock in a preferred position on the network.

And AT&T's own services could benefit greatly from the new plan. For instance, AT&T offers a voice-over-the-Internet phone plan called CallVantage that competes with Skype, a free service owned by eBay. "Let's say there's a certain amount of revenue in voice services, maybe $125 billion in voice," explains Wu. If AT&T determines that letting Skype onto the fast lane will cause it to lose customers and, thus, revenue, it could decide to only let Skype ride the slow lanes. "If you're going to lose $10 billion to Skype by letting them on, why give them that money?" Wu says that under current regulations, this practice would be perfectly legal.

While such deals may be legal, AT&T says, they would be bad for business. If a broadband company didn't allow a popular service like Skype a spot in the fast lane, consumers would choose a different provider. "If you do make dumb decisions, your customers go somewhere else," Ciccone says. "Nobody wants to offer half a service with only special deals or arrangements for something of that nature. You're competing against other companies that may do it differently."

But if you don't like your Internet provider, would you really be able to go elsewhere? Cerf, who is now Google's chief Internet "evangelist," pointed out in the Senate hearing that only 53 percent of Americans now have a choice between cable modem and DSL high-speed Internet service at home. According to the FCC, 28 percent of Americans have only one of these options for broadband Internet access, and 19 percent have no option at all.

Moreover, phone and cable companies have been trying to reduce competition in the broadband business even further. They convinced the FCC to allow them to prohibit rival Internet service providers -- such as Earthlink -- from offering high-speed net access on phone- and cable-company-owned lines. (Phone and cable companies do lease their lines to independent ISPs like Earthlink, but under current rules they can decline to do so at any time.) AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have also pushed hard to stop cities across the country from launching free or low-cost municipal wireless Internet systems.

In this marketplace, if your DSL or cable modem provider begins to favor some content over others, you will have very little recourse. Even if you could choose another provider, doing so isn't easy. "It's not like there are two supermarkets in town and if you don't like one you can go to the other," Amazon's Misener says. He adds that "every economic theory we know suggests that when there's a duopoly" -- in this case between cable broadband and phone broadband -- "there will be tacit collusion in the market." So even if you could choose between broadband or cable service, eventually, like radio stations in any metro area, you will find they all sound the same. Or think about your cable lineup. When your provider doesn't carry the TV network you like, what choice do you have? Almost none.

At the moment, there are very few regulations that outline what broadband companies can and cannot do with content on their lines. So far, the FCC has only been willing to outline some principles to which firms should adhere. In a speech in Boulder, Colo., in February 2004, Michael Powell, the former FCC head, said that he didn't see the need for regulation. Instead, he set out a list of "Internet freedoms" that he "challenged the broadband network industry to preserve." Specifically, Powell called on high-speed network providers to allow their customers to access any legal content on the Internet, use any legal applications, and plug in any devices to their networks. The FCC later outlined these principles in a "policy statement," and imposed these conditions on Verizon and AT&T as temporary conditions of the mergers the companies underwent last year.

But while these "freedoms" allow customers access to any services, they don't outline whether AT&T can give some content priority on the network. In addition, there is a debate about whether Powell's "challenge" is enforceable at all. Last year, when one small North Carolina ISP began blocking Internet voice calls on its network, the FCC quickly stepped in and fined the firm. Telecom firms say the incident proves that the FCC has enough authority to block egregious behavior. But AT&T's Ciccone also acknowledges that adhering to the FCC's vision is a "voluntary commitment. It's not a rule or a regulation of the FCC. They laid out the broadband principles and our compliance is purely a voluntary act on our part."

Wu explains the issue this way: "Right now it's like the ghost of Michael Powell has his finger in the dike" protecting us against the worst behavior of big companies. But if you were starting a new service on the Internet, "do you want to bet your business on the ghost of Michael Powell?"

Today, as numerous proposals for reforming telecom law float around Congress, broadband firms are fighting hard against a neutral network, and apparently winning. (AT&T may certainly be on the government's good side, as it has been secretly allowing the National Security Agency to monitor its phone and Internet lines, according to a retired AT&T technician, as reported by Wired News.) In a party-line vote last week, Republicans on a House subcommittee defeated one neutrality proposal. According to many observers, another bill in the Senate, offered by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, faces similar dim prospects. In addition to lobbying, broadband firms have launched a campaign aimed at urging Americans to join their fight. Large telecom firms back a "coalition" called Hands Off the Internet, which argues that instituting network neutrality amounts to government "regulation" of the Internet. On its Web site, the group -- which is funded by, among other companies, AT&T, and is headed by former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry -- beseeches, "Join us and say NO to government regulation of the Internet!"

Opponents say that regulation is the only way to save the Internet from the likes of AT&T. "They would have the pipe split between the public Internet -- which might get 1 Mbps speeds -- and a toll lane on the rest of the 100 Mbps pipe they're laying," Tod Cohen, the director of government affairs at eBay, says of the AT&T's plans. By "public Internet," Cohen is referring to today's Internet, the Internet of Google, Blogger, Skype, YouTube and Flickr, services that came out of nowhere and are now indispensable. "They're saying, 'We'll leave the public Internet to be like the public-access station. But if you want to be on one of the fast channels, you have to pay.'"

Consumer advocate Chester sees a dark future for the Internet if big companies like AT&T gain unregulated control. "I think the public requires a serious national debate about what this means and what it's going to look like," he says. "There's a basic assumption that the Internet is going to remain forever open and diverse and affordable. I'm saying we should be cautious. We should really understand what these proposals mean for the kind of diverse voices we would want to see online."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/





Deface A Torrent Site: A Cool Howto!

Today we are going to show you how to deface any torrent site with minimal effort. The designers of a lot of torrent sites blindly trust the content of a torrent file. Reason being is because both Windows and Linux dont allow tags in filenames. But what if there was a program that allows you to manipulate the internal files in a .torrent file? Well I can tell you this: When a torrentsite does not clean the output (htmlentities) then they are fucked (snatch: proper fucked). I can also tell you that almost none of the big torrent site uses clean output when it comes to displaying a torrent’s internal files (ie” mininova).

So lets get started then, here’s what you need:

* A torrent editor (or a hex editor)
* Linux (or a hex editor)
* A torrent file (or more)

Open the torrent file with the program and locate the internal files, replace their names with something like this: matrix<h1>H@xor OwnZ y0 M0mM@</h1>.avi and save the torrent file. Next thing to do is upload the torrent to any torrentsite that has this vulnerability and your done. Next time someone opens that page they will see your message loud and clear. Think what you could do with javascript.
http://www.devnova.org/2006/04/22/de...-a-cool-howto/





RIAA Chan Case Dismissal
p2pnet

The Big Four Organized Music cartel's mis-named Recording Industry Association of America created a nasty mess for itself in Michigan.

Fronting for Vivendi Universal (France), EMI (Britain), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and the only American company, Warner Music, it went after the Chan family, there, trying various ploys in fruitless bids to pillory schoolgirl Britanny Chan, now 14, and her mother, Candy, as file sharing thieves.

With file sharing, nothing has been stolen and no one has been deprived of anything they own or owned, but for the Big Four, that's a minor detail, just as claiming they're being ruined by file sharing when in fact they're raking it in, is considered to be accepable PR.

They failed with Mrs Chan, represented by John Hermann, so they turned their attentions to her daughter Britanny, who was 13, at the time.

They wanted a Guardian Ad Litem appointed.

Why would they want that? Their reasons weren't clear but a guardian ad litem's fees could have reached many thousands of dollars. Given that the RIAA was also demanding an order to force Brittany's parents to pay for the guardianship, it may have amounted to yet another terror tactic.

But all to no avail. The RIAA, which has gone through three law firms to date, blew it there as well. It didn't bother to provide documents that had been asked for, despite efforts by the court, "to work with the Plaintiffs in advancing this case".

In that light, the RIAA's failure to do so was, " inexplicable," wrote judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff.

Below is the full March 27 court dismissal document from the link on Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs The People.


UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
SOUTHERN DIVISION
PRIORITY RECORDS L.L.C.,
ELEKTRA ENTERTAINMENT GROUP
INC., MOTOWN RECORDS COMPANY, L.P.,
WARNER BROS. RECORDS, INC., SONY
MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT INC., UMG
RECORDINGS, INC., and ARISTA
RECORDS, INC., CASE NO. 05-CV-73727-DT
HON. LAWRENCE P. ZATKOFF


Plaintiffs, vs. BRITTANY CHAN,


Defendant.


/


OPINION AND ORDER I. INTRODUCTION


This matter is before the Court on Plaintiffs’ Response to the Court’s Opinion and Order Regarding the Appointment and Payment of a Guardian Ad Litem for Defendant Brittany Chan (Docket #8). For the reasons that follow, Plaintiffs’ cause of action is DISMISSED.


II. BACKGROUND


This is the second cause of action that Plaintiffs have filed against members of the Chan family. The first cause of action was filed in late 2004 against Defendant’s mother, Candy Chan.


Plaintiffs eventually asked the Court to dismiss Candy Chan with prejudice, and in May 2005, the Court dismissed the case against Candy Chan, with prejudice.


Four months later, Plaintiffs filed the instant action against the current Defendant, Brittany Chan, who is now 15 or 16 years old. The Summons and Complaint (together with a motion to appoint guardian ad litem) were served on Brittany Chan c/o Candy Chan. To date, no answer to the Complaint nor any response to the instant motion has been filed by Brittany Chan or anyone on her behalf.


On January 5, 2006, the Court heard Plaintiffs’ arguments with respect to its Motion to Appoint Guardian Ad Litem. On February 13, 2006, the Court issued an Opinion and Order denying Plaintiffs’ request to have the Saginaw County Probate Court appoint a guardian ad litem from its alleged revolving list of guardian ad litems. In finding that it was not feasible to use a guardian ad litem appointed from Saginaw County Probate Court, and expressing the Court’s concern with how a guardian ad litem would be paid during the pendency of this action, the Court ordered “Plaintiffs to submit to the Court, in writing within 15 days of the date of this Order, a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Brittany Chan, as well as a manner of paying such guardian ad litem during the pendency of this action.” On March 13, 2006 (within the extension period subsequently granted by the Court), Plaintiffs filed their response.


III. ANALYSIS


In the course of Plaintiffs’ actions against the Chan family members, the Court has exercised great care to ensure that the rights and claims of all parties involved are respected. To that end, the Court held a hearing on Plaintiffs’ Motion for Appointment of Guardian Ad Litem in January 2006 and called the Saginaw County Probate Court to determine whether the appointment of a guardian from its revolving list was possible. In learning that it was not, the Court denied Plaintiffs’ motion without prejudice and ordered that Plaintiffs provide the Court with “a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Brittany Chan, as well as a manner of paying such guardian ad litem during the pendency of this action.” The purpose of doing so was to enable the case to proceed and assist the Plaintiffs in ensuring that it did so.


In its response, Plaintiffs respectfully declined the Court’s suggestion to have Plaintiffs pay into escrow Defendant’s guardian ad litem fees and asked the Court to look to the Defendant and her parents for payment first. In support of that argument, Plaintiffs argue:


(1) Plaintiffs have already been damaged as a result of Defendant’s conduct (the Court notes, however, that such conduct is alleged and not proven);


(2) Plaintiffs would be victimized a second time if they had to pay her fees now because if they did so, it might be tantamount to having them pay her fees at the end of the matter;


(3) Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits and thus not legally responsible for the costs of the guardian ad litem;


(4) There is no reason at this point to believe that Defendant could not pay the fees herself, as neither Defendant nor her parents have indicated that she lacks the resources to pay for the guardian ad litem;


(5) The parental responsibilities of Defendant’s parents for their daughter’s actions outweigh any responsibility to pay for her defense that Plaintiffs have and Defendant’s parents have the means to pay for such defense;


(6) In some states, parents that are financially able are required to reimburse the court for the cost of guardian ad litem services (interestingly, the only cases cited are those involving child custody or visitation cases where no third party is involved); and


(7) Although a guardian ad litem may provide desired advice and assistance to Defendant, it is ultimately a decision for Defendant and her parents as to whether she has that assistance.


The Court shall not address the merits of Plaintiffs’ argument regarding the payment of a guardian ad litem for Defendant, however, because Plaintiffs have failed to respond to the Court’s order to submit a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Defendant. In fact, other than in the caption of Plaintiffs’ response, the Plaintiffs have not even acknowledged that such an order was issued. The Court finds Plaintiffs’ failure to respond to the order inexplicable in light of the efforts of the Court to work with the Plaintiffs in advancing this case and the fact that Plaintiffs were ordered to provide a proposal. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs’ failure to comply with an order of the Court justifies the dismissal of Plaintiffs’ action.


IV. CONCLUSION


For the above reasons, the Court hereby ORDERS that the Plaintiffs’ cause of action against Defendant Brittany Chan be DISMISSED. Judgment shall be entered accordingly.

http://p2pnet.net/story/8603





Daewoo Electronics Uses LabVIEW FPGA and CompactRIO to Develop the World’s First Holographic Storage Device
Press Release - Byoungbok Kang, Daewoo Electronics

The Challenge:
Overcoming the technological limitations of traditional two-dimensional storage devices to achieve greater capacity and faster data retrieval.

The Solution:
Developing the world’s first servo motion control system for three-dimensional holographic digital data storage on continuous rotation disks using the National Instruments LabVIEW FPGA Module and National Instruments CompactRIO.

Daewoo Electronics has developed the world's first holographic storage device using LabVIEW FPGA and CompactRIO.

Holographic digital data storage (HDDS) technology is one of the most promising new technologies on the horizon for the optical storage industry. Traditional data storage technologies, which store individual bits of information as magnetic or optical variations on the surface of the medium, are approaching physical limits. However, holographic storage promises to accelerate data transfer rates to about one billion bits per second, reduce access times to just tens of microseconds, and increase storage densities toward a theoretical maximum of one trillion bits per cubic centimeter.

By encoding data throughout the three-dimensional volume of the storage medium and performing recording and retrieval using large parallel memory blocks called pages, holographic data storage overcomes the limitations of traditional two-dimensional technologies such as DVD.

Using CompactRIO to Prototype the Daewoo HDDS System

Our HDDS prototype consists of two main subsystems – an electro-optical motion control system based on the NI CompactRIO 3M gate FPGA series and a video decoding system based on an 8M gate Xilinx FPGA board. The CompactRIO system controls a linear motor, a stepper motor, a galvo mirror, and a CMOS camera. Each motion control loop requires precise control, so we use feedback signals to control and detect data. Unlike a traditional computing board, CompactRIO lets us customize pulse generator timing to the resolution of a single FPGA clock using the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module. To eliminate slipping, we developed complex motor control algorithms by creating custom mathematical functions for acceleration and deceleration. We separately produced and connected the drive circuitry for each of the three motor types to the CompactRIO I/O modules. In addition to motion control, CompactRIO communicates with the video decoding FPGA board developed with our own signal processing technology for video retrieval and CMOS camera control. CompactRIO also controls the data transfer rate by checking the quantity of data accumulated in the buffer in front of the MPEG decoder, which varies greatly with speed.

The system performed reliably during demonstrations at the 2005 Korea Electronics Show (KES), without any communication or operational errors among devices and boards, giving Daewoo a demonstrable technological edge in the emerging field of holographic digital data storage.

Reaping the Benefits of the HDDS Prototype System

Our prototype HDDS system is the first of its kind. Most of the system’s components required independent research and development, because no other such systems exist for reference or imitation. The cost estimate of our original option – using a DSP board – was in the tens of thousands of dollars, with many months required for development. Using flexible LabVIEW software, together with CompactRIO hardware, we developed our system for only a few thousand dollars without compromising performance. Furthermore, the development period was only one month, earning the system industry commendation at its first display at KES 2005.

Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars and many months of development to design a custom DSP board, our team was able to develop this groundbreaking HDDS system quickly and economically using NI CompactRIO, high-speed FPGA technology, and easy-to-use NI LabVIEW software. We were amazed that the project could be completed so quickly and efficiently.
http://sine.ni.com/csol/cds/item/vw/p/id/685/nid/124300





Radio

CBS Is Said to Be Seeking to Replace Stern's Replacement
Ben Sisario

CBS Radio and XM Satellite Radio are in talks to replace David Lee Roth, the morning host on seven CBS stations, with Opie and Anthony, the foulmouthed talk team that has been marquee talent on XM for the last 18 months, according to executives at both companies.

In an unusual arrangement that is being closely watched in the radio industry, the deal would split Opie and Anthony's show between satellite and terrestrial stations. For three hours each weekday, Opie and Anthony would do a cleaner version of their usual show — one acceptable under broadcast standards — for the CBS audience, produced in the Midtown Manhattan studios of WFNY (92.3 FM), a CBS station. That portion of the show would also be heard on XM.

After that show, the two hosts — whose real names are Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia — would travel to XM's studios nearby for two additional hours of the show, unrestrained. As part of the deal, Opie and Anthony would be allowed to use the end of the CBS show to plug their satellite program, said the executives, who were granted anonymity because the negotiations are still under way.

The deal, expected to be completed as early as next week, would provide a needed relief for CBS Radio for the critical morning-commute hours in seven big markets: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and West Palm Beach, Fla.

In January, after Mr. Stern moved to Sirius Satellite Radio, CBS introduced his replacements, who included Mr. Roth — the former lead singer of the rock band Van Halen — as well as the radio and television host Adam Carolla and assorted guy-talk teams in other cities.

But all of Mr. Stern's replacements have struggled with lower ratings, and Mr. Roth's tenure has been particularly rocky. He has complained on the air of scolding by CBS executives, and he said that he was ill prepared to take on the mantle of a major morning talk show. His program has featured conventional macho chat backed by a constant low-volume buzz of electronic dance music.

"In the radio industry, people that heard it just thought it was a train wreck," said Paul Heine, the executive editor of Billboard Radio Bulletin.

A full ratings report on Mr. Roth's time at WFNY will not be available until next week, but preliminary data from Arbitron, the radio ratings service, indicate that audiences have shrunk significantly since Mr. Stern left. In New York, the No. 1 radio market in the country, WFNY's ratings on weekday mornings dropped more than 40 percent from the fall of 2005 to the period of December through February.

Before going to satellite radio, Opie and Anthony had one of the most popular shows on WNEW-FM in New York. But they were canceled in August 2002 over complaints of indecency when they broadcast a live account, delivered via cellphone, of a couple who were said to be having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The news of the talks was first reported on the Web site for Inside Radio, a trade publication.

Some analysts saw the deal between XM and CBS as a possible harbinger of more content-sharing deals between terrestrial and satellite radio.

"From the beginning," said Sean Ross, a radio analyst with Edison Media Research, "there was always a long view that one day satellite radio could be not a competitor, but an extension."

Bill Carter contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/bu...a/21radio.html





U.S. Presses Payola Inquiry After Settlement Talks Stall
Jeff Leeds

The Federal Communications Commission intensified its investigation this week into accusations of pay-for-play practices at four of the nation's biggest radio station owners after settlement talks collapsed, agency officials said yesterday.

F.C.C. investigators issued requests for documents from the four companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Citadel Broadcasting and Entercom Communications, agency officials said. The F.C.C.'s enforcement unit is looking into accusations that broadcasters violated the law by accepting cash or other compensation in exchange for airplay of specific songs without telling listeners.

The information requests illustrate "that the chairman and all of us are fully committed to enforcing the law," an F.C.C. commissioner, Jonathan S. Adelstein, said.

Representatives of the radio companies declined to comment or were unavailable yesterday.

The requests for information indicate that the inquiry is moving to a more active stage, and it comes after negotiations with the radio companies broke down early this month over the question of penalties. Some broadcasters had offered to pay penalties in the $1 million range, but at least one F.C.C. commissioner was seeking fines as high as $10 million, according to people involved in the talks. Officials said a settlement remained possible.

The commission had been criticized by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who initiated an investigation of pay for play, or payola, in the recording industry in 2004. Mr. Spitzer's office has reached multimillion-dollar settlements with two of four major record companies, and had been seeking as much as $20 million from Entercom to resolve accusations of payola. After the talks with Entercom stalled, New York officials filed suit against the company last month. Entercom has denied the accusations and is seeking to have the case dismissed.

Kevin J. Martin, the F.C.C. chairman, asked investigators to look into the matter of payola in August, after Mr. Spitzer's office announced a settlement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

More recently, Mr. Spitzer, whose investigators had shared some evidence with F.C.C. officials, criticized the agency for entertaining settlements with the radio companies that amounted to nothing more than a slap on the wrist before investigating more thoroughly. In an interview yesterday, Mr. Spitzer, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, said he felt gratified by the F.C.C.'s latest action.

"Until we have determined the scope of the impropriety," he said, "it is impossible to understand the magnitude of the appropriate remedies that should be in place."

The last time the F.C.C. investigated payola accusations, in 2000, it fined two Clear Channel stations a total of $8,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/bu.../21payola.html





A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery
Kenneth Chang

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

The sculpture, titled "Kryptos," the Greek word for "hidden," includes an undulating sheet of copper with a message devised by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, and Edward M. Scheidt, a retired chairman of the C.I.A.'s cryptographic center.

The message is broken into four sections, and in 1999, a computer programmer named Jim Gillogly announced he had figured out the first three, which include poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the opening of King Tut's tomb. The C.I.A. then announced that one of its physicists, David Stein, had also deciphered the first three sections a year earlier.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Mr. Sanborn's admission was first reported Thursday by Wired News.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages online to Chris Hanson, the co-moderator of the "Kryptos" e-mail group. Within an hour, Ms. Dunin figured out what was wrong. The last eight characters of the second section, which describes something possibly hidden on C.I.A. grounds, had been decoded as "IDBYROWS" which people read as "I.D. by rows" or "I.D. by Row S."

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sanborn said he had never meant that at all. To give himself flexibility as he carved the letters into the copper sheet, he had marked certain letters that could be left out. In the second passage, he left out an X separator before these eight letters.

"It was purely an act of aesthetics on my part," he said.

He said he expected that the encryption method, which relies on the position of the letters, would transform that part of the message into gibberish, and that the solvers would know to go back and reinsert the missing separator. But "remarkably, when you used the same system, it said something that was intelligible," Mr. Sanborn said. He decided to let the code breakers know about the error because "they weren't getting the whole story," he said.

When Ms. Dunin reinserted the X, the eight characters became "LAYERTWO." She called Mr. Sanborn again, who confirmed that was the intended message. "It's a surprise, and it's exciting," Ms. Dunin said. That is the first real progress on "Kryptos" in more than six years. Now to figure out what it means.

In an e-mail interview, Mr. Gillogly said that the corrected text, "layer two," is "intriguing but scarcely definitive." He added, "Like much of the sculpture, it can be taken in many ways." Mr. Gillogly, who has not worked much on the puzzle in recent years, said he would go back to see if the answer was now apparent.

One possibility is that "layer two" is the crucial key for solving the rest of the puzzle. Or it could be a hint that the letters need to be layered atop one another. Mr. Sanborn and Mr. Scheidt have said that even when all of the text is unraveled, other puzzles will remain in "Kryptos."

"This new discovery could possibly make it easier to crack and possibly not make it easier to crack," Mr. Sanborn offered unhelpfully. "It may be a dead-end diversion I like to send people on, a primrose lane to nowhere."

Mr. Scheidt said it had taken only three or four months to devise a puzzle that has lasted nearly 16 years, adding that only he, Mr. Sanborn and "probably someone at C.I.A." know the answer.

For everyone else, the remaining 97 letters of the fourth section remain baffling (the slashes indicate line breaks):

?OBKR/UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO/TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP/VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22puzzle.html





A Battery-Powered Book That You Can Listen to as Often as You Like
John Biggs

In a world filled with complicated MP3 players and online audio stores, it's a wonder that anyone gets any listening done at all. Playaway hopes to change all that by making an audio book purchase as easy as plopping down a credit card at the airport gift shop.

Playaway's MP3 players, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, each contain one unabridged audio book. Titles include "The Da Vinci Code" and "Anansi Boys," with more on the way. The devices come with headphones and a triple-A battery. When you're ready to listen, simply pull a protective tab to get the battery going.

The Playaway cannot be loaded with a different book, but you can add it your library and listen to it again and again.

A small screen shows the elapsed time, and the device has buttons for fast-forwarding, rewinding, adding bookmarks and skipping chapters. There's even a Voice Speed button, which compresses the audio slightly, reducing the total playing time without sacrificing audio quality. The devices are available at bookshops, retail stores and online for $35 to $50.

Owners of iPods may smirk at a one-book-only device, but Playaway may be the simplest and quickest way to get from the store to Chapter 1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/te...audiobook.html





Then it oughta be open source

Bush: Government Research Developed iPod
Marc Perton

Apple has long boasted of its culture of innovation, and how this led to such products as the original Mac and the iPod. However, it turns out that, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple had a hidden ally: the US government. During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

While we have to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of government agencies such as DARPA in some of the fields mentioned by the President, we also feel obligated to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, including IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba -- not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec, and codeveloped (with Sony, AT&T and others) the AAC format used by Apple in the iPod. Still, we have to bow down before his Steveness; we knew he was well-connected, but until now we had no idea of his level of influence in the area of government research.

Hey, Steve, while you're at it, why not get the government to resolve the display problems plaguing the next-gen video iPod? We're sure they'll get their best minds on it and fix it in no time.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/20/b...eveloped-ipod/





Microsoft to Reissue Problem Patch to Fix Lockup Glitches
Ryan Naraine

For some Windows users, there will be two Patch Tuesdays in April.

The Redmond, Wash. software maker plans to rerelease the problematic MS06-015 update on April 25 to correct an issue that has caused system hangs, Windows crashes and the appearance of strange dialog boxes after the original patch was installed.

"[We have] re-engineered the MS06-015 update to avoid the conflict altogether," said Stephen Toulouse, program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center.

The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem.

The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding.

This caused some applications to hang when conducting certain operations, like opening a file from the "File open" dialog in an application. Windows users deploying the critical MS06-015 update have also complained about problems accessing special folders like "My Documents" or "My Pictures."

Click here to read more about lockups and system crashes caused by the original MS06-015 patch.

In addition, the update is causing Microsoft Office applications to stop responding when Office files are saved or opened in the "My Documents" folder, system freezes when opening a file through an application's file/open menu, and lockups when typing a URL into IE.

"What the new [re-engineered] update essentially does is simply add the affected third-party software to an 'exception list' so that the problem does not occur. The revised update automates the manual registry key fix," Toulouse explained, referring to a workaround released in a knowledge base article earlier this week.

"I want to be real clear about that. When the update is rereleased, it's going to be very much targeted to people who are having the problem, or people who have not installed MS06-015 yet. That means if you have already installed MS06-015 and are not having the problem, there's no action here for you," he added.

Click here to read more Microsoft's struggles with the quality of security patches.

Separately, a Microsoft spokesman said the company is investigating new reports of patch-related glitches with the MS06-016 cumulative security update that fixes a remote code execution flaw in Outlook Express. He said the company will provide customer guidance once it figures out the reasons for the problems.

According to Kent Woerner, a network administrator responsible for managing 300 workstations, the Outlook Express patch caused major breakages. "The address book wouldn't function at all, and users couldn't read or send messages. After I uninstalled [the update], the systems all went right back to normal," he said in an e-mail exchange with eWEEK.

Users affected by the Outlook Express glitch have flocked to Microsoft's help and support discussion groups to complain about address book and other associated errors caused by the MS06-016 update.
http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/...=176364,00.asp





High-Speed P2P Via Proxyserver
p2pnet

A small revolution in file-sharing was announced about three years ago: Proxyshare was meant to store data on proxyservers of various ISPs.

Once uploaded, files should be available for multiple downloads. The attempts to realize the technique failed 2003 and 2004, now the project returns with completely rewritten code and public testing has started. A few test files are already shared via several proxies.

The developer behind the ambitious project have coded eMule-Mods (eg, Hardmule), but Proxyshare will be a standalone file sharing client whose main purpose is to reduce the upstream-bottleneck by using ISPs' fast proxyservers, which usually cache popular web sites, reducing lags and bandwidth usage.

gulli.com talked with the developers after they released Build 1.018 for Windows (actual build: 1.020, releases appear in quick sequence, usually several times a week). A linux version will follow soon.

gulli.com: Could you explain how Proxyshare works?

ProxyShare: I developed a p2p network from scratch. We achieve the maximum speed even with asynchronous DSL as T-DSL 6000, being very popular in Germany. We also reached maximum speed with faster DSL connections.

(Note: Asynchronous DSL ist the most popular broadband internet access in Germany, though its not well liked in filesharing networks, upload speed being typically much slower than download).

The goal was to combine the best of most filesharing networks:

1) Search as easy as on the eDonkey net
2) Download faster than BitTorrent
3) Very few connections necessary (<10)
4) Only one port necessary
5) Immunity against leechers
6) Security through asynchronous data transfers
7) Easy usage through Sancho GUI
8) Autoconfig of all preferences, assumed the eDonkey default port 4662 is open
9) Runs on WindowsXP and Linux
10) Separate Core and graphic user interface (GUI can be closed in order to save system resources)
11) Supported: Lan, WLAN, ISP-Proxy Transfer, Direct Transfer (Tier1, Tier2, Tier3)

Links are formed following the eDonkey-standard, though the eDonkey-network is not used.

We use all usable ISP-Proxies (viev the list http://www.proxyshare.com/page.php?1 here), and via our test page everyone can check his ISP after login whether he supports proxyshare or not.

gulli.com: Do you think the network will scale? How many uppers are needed for a properly working network? What about storage times on the proxies, do you think ISPs will take measures against the system?

ProxyShare: One upper per provider will do the trick. Our traffic is very ISP-friendly, because proxy-traffic usually doesn't need to be paid for, eg, upload/download in Europe doesn't make usage of fibre overseas to the US and vice versa.

gulli.com: At least for those having access to the proxyserver of the uploader. How is the file being copied to other proxies?

ProxyShare: When a user tries to download from a proxy, he's not directly connected; a copy of the files will be created on the proxy of the downloading user. Then all other users from the same ISP can download the file from this proxy at full speed. Upload or copy is necessary just once - afterwards the file is cached for all downloaders using the same ISP.

gulli.com: That's how download works when someones connected via AOL and the file upped is just available on, let's say, proxies from T-Online?

ProxyShare: The data transfer between ISPs is slowed down to tier3 speed, but this works without any problems, Yes.

gulli.com: What about security? There are some popular features integrated regarding security - local encryption of shared files, the announced stealth options. On the other hand, you recently said users were suspicious, wondering how the fast download actually work, suspecting legal enforcers behind the software. Are there security features like anonymous upload, and why should one trust your code while the sources are kept secret?

ProxyShare: Proxyshare uses Truecrypt, generating an encrypted virtual device on the users harddisk where shared files are stored. Shared and downloaded files are secure this way, allowing no third person to get access to these data in case your computer is seized. Security on the network is comparable to eMule or BitTorrent. Downloaders are not visible to the uploader. More security features are planned and will be implemented soon.

gulli.com: I don't see any ads integrated into the client. Do you plan advertisements, are there other reasons why you are developing this network?

ProxyShare: We're planning to integrade banner-ads in the future. But our main goal is to create the "perfect" file sharing system. I dislike any existing p2p for some reason. eDonkey is slow. Torrent usually only offers a small number of files. Freenet is unusuable.

gulli.com: As things are now, how do client and network perform?

ProxyShare: Actual disadvantage: we've just started. We haven't got many users, nor do we share many files. Yesterday, I loaded a testfile, 350 MB at an average speed of 510k, in 11 minutes - to give some numbers. It's a new feeling, using p2p, which can't be compared to eMule or torrent.

gulli.com: Well, thanks for the interview, and we wish you successful development and many beta testers.

This sounds quite promising - sources will be kept closed, though.

People were sceptical on the capability of the network to scale - more users means more data, and Proxyspace is limited.

Documentation is rare, as it is in most of the cases of beginning projects. Growing numbers of users should help each other with hints and tricks – using Proxyshare, the usual problems of file sharing occur: connection problems, firewalled ports, as discussed in the support forums on the Proxyshare homepage.


Actual version: Build 1.021 (download):
http://www.proxyshare.com/download.php


Support forum:
http://www.proxyshare.com/e107_plugi...iewforum.php?2


Extended version of this interview (German):
http://www.gulli.com/news/proxyshare...ed-2006-04-19/

http://p2pnet.net/story/8609





US Steps Up Fight On Child Porn

The Bush administration is pushing for tougher measures to combat child pornography online.

The proposals were announced by US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, who said that the net had created an "epidemic" of child pornography.

He said the internet encouraged paedophiles to create "new and increasingly vulgar material".

The comments were made in a speech at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia.

Mr Gonzales highlighted the problem of adults preying on children in chat rooms and networking sites with the purpose of making sexual contact.

He quoted a study that said one in every five children is solicited online.

"It is simply astonishing how many predators there are, and how aggressive they act," he said.

Out of control

In his speech, Mr Gonzales also detailed examples of graphic sexual and physical abuse investigated by the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

It included what he described as "molestation on demand", where a child is abused as others watch live through streaming video.

Some of the offences were committed abroad but viewed by people in the US.

New technology such as file-sharing meant that law enforcement agencies are no longer able to control child pornography.

"Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children," he said.

Legal action

In response, he announced proposed changes in the law under the Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006.

The proposals have been sent to Congress and include new laws that will require ISPs to report child pornography and bolster penalties for those companies that fail to do so.

Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.

"The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of internet service providers," he said.

"Unfortunately, the failure of some internet service providers to keep records has hampered our ability to conduct investigations in this area."

In the UK some ISP's have already taken the initiative on this issue.

Companies like BT already block access to sites it believes contain child pornography.

The telecoms giant says that its servers block 35,000 attempts to view child porn each day
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4929578.stm





Toon will get you 20

Man Sentenced To 20 Years for Child Porn Convictions
AP

A man who used a public computer at state offices to receive child pornography depicted in highly stylized cartoons will spend 20 years in prison.

Dwight Whorley, 52, was sentenced Friday.

He's the first person convicted under a 2003 federal law that criminalizes the production or distribution of drawings or cartoons showing the sexual abuse of children.

A court found Whorley guilty on November 30 of using a computer at a Virginia Employment Commission office in March 2004. Authorities say he received 20 Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted minors engaged in sex with adults.

Whorley's child pornography conviction was the first under the statute that was NOT based on actual photographs of children.

Whorley was convicted on 74 counts.
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0306/309600.html





New Chip Delivers Better Performance, Longer Battery Life For Cell Phones, WiFi, Wireless
Press Release

Anyone who uses a cell phone or a WiFi laptop knows the irritation of a dead-battery surprise. But now researchers at the University of Rochester have broken a barrier in wireless chip design that uses a tenth as much battery power as current designs and, better yet, will use much less in emerging wireless devices of the future.

Hui Wu, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, a pioneer in a circuit design called an "injection locked frequency divider," or ILFD, has solved the last hurdle to making the new method work. Wireless chip manufacturers have been aware of ILFD and its ability to ensure accurate data transfer using much less energy than traditional digital methods, but the technique had two fatal flaws: it could not handle a wide range of frequencies, and could not ensure a fine enough resolution within that range. Wu, together with Ali Hajimiri, associate professor of electrical engineering at California Institute of Technology, surmounted the first problem in 2001, and has now found a solution for the latter.

When a cell phone or a laptop using WiFi or Bluetooth communicates wirelessly, the data is transmitted at very specific frequencies. One person can talk on a cell phone at a frequency of 2.0001 gigahertz, and someone else nearby can talk at 2.0002 gigahertz, and neither one will pick up the other's conversation. In order to make sure it is both listening for and sending information on exactly the right frequency at all times, the phone must maintain a very accurate and stable clock, which is generated by a special circuit called "phase-locked loop." This circuit consumes a dramatic portion of the battery usage on wireless devices.

Wu's ILFD method uses less power than conventional digital methods because the tiny "ones" and "zeroes" that comprise digital information waste energy. Digital circuitry checks the frequency by counting each pulse of the clock one at a time. When a one is needed, the system sends electricity to the right node on a chip, and that node then represents a one. When the system then calls for a zero, that stored energy is simply released from the circuit as heat, and the node resets to a low-energy state. Do this several billion times a second, and quite a bit of energy in the form of those dissipated ones is simply wasted. An ILFD device, on the other hand, does not use a brute-force approach of counting each pulse. To gauge and stabilize the generated frequency, a phase-locked loop multiplies the pulse from a highly-stable reference clock, such as a quartz crystal oscillator, up to the desired frequency. To check if the output frequency is correct, a frequency divider essentially undoes the multiplying process, and the result can then be compared to the initial clock, with adjustments made as needed.

ILFDs use an analog method that requires less power, but the Achilles' heel of ILFDs has always been their inability to efficiently and reliably divide the frequency by anything but two--a serious drawback to achieve fine frequency resolution, which is a must for modern communication systems.

This is where Wu's new design makes the practical application of ILFDs possible. He introduced a new topology into this circuitry--instead of the old three-transistor design, his has five transistors--creating what he calls "differential mixing." The new circuitry topology allows the ILFD to divide by three as well as two.

This tiny change has huge ramifications. A circuit design that can divide by two or three can, for instance, divide 9,999 clock pulses by two, and the 10,000th by 3, giving an average of 2.0001, which could be the frequency at which the cell phone is trying to communicate. Should the phone need to communicate at 2.0002 gigahertz, the ILFD could divide 9,998 clock pulses by two, and the 9,999th and 10,000th by three, yielding an average of 2.0002. By varying how many clock pulses are divided by two or by three, any frequency can be selected, making the power-saving ILFD method viable for the first time.

Wu has demonstrated another benefit of his "Divide-by-Odd-Number ILFD." In an effort to move more data faster, wireless manufacturers are looking to move to ever-higher frequencies. A 900-megahertz cordless phone, for instance, was once considered state of the art, but soon cordless phones migrated to 2.4 gigahertz, and now 5.8 gigahertz. Likewise, WiFi and other wireless networking devices will soon be pushing into the proposed 60 gigahertz band. At such high frequencies, a digital frequency divider will be hard pressed to keep up such speed, and will demand ever-more power to do so, but Wu's ILFD will be much less demanding and will use proportionately less power as the frequency increases.

Wu's group has designed and fabricated several prototype chips, and the results successfully demonstrated his concepts. One of them, an 18 gigahertz divide-by-3 ILFD, was recently presented at this year's International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the premiere technical conference in semiconductor industries. Wu is also working on other power-saving aspects of chip design that he hopes can be used to stretch the battery life of wireless devices even further.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ncd041906.php





How Much Do You Google?
Joe Schmidt

Just about one year ago today, the Google personalized homepage started recording your Google search history while you were logged into their site. For some that might be a scary proposition but for this blog, eh, not so much. Here at JoeSchmidt.com we throw caution to the wind, I figure they've got enough data on me now between this blog, my gmail account, and Google Calendar why not throw a few more megabytes of data onto the pile.

Though I have to say, the Search History is a nice feature. Not only does it record what search terms you queried but it also keeps track of the links you clicked on (if any) in the results for each query. And of course it wouldn't be Google unless they made your entire history searchable, which makes it easy to go back in time to search for something from the past.

So, how much did I Google in one year's time?

6357 Google search queries in one year.

Yeah that's right. I used Google Six Thousand Three Hundred and Fifty Seven times last year. And that doesn't even account for the times I used Google while searching on someone else's computer or if I wasn't logged in to my Google homepage. So it's probably safe to say the actual number could be pushing close to 7000.

Let me break it down for you a little more.

That's an average of 17.4 unique searches a day. Every day. For an entire year.

If I had a nickel for every time I used Google last year I'd have $317.85. (not even enough money to buy one share of GOOG)

And to make matters worse, they give you a month-to-month graphical break down of how much you searched each day. So you can visually see how much time you wasted.

Hold on, there's more. They also give you Trends, which lists your top repeat search queries. Also, they provide a bar graph which shows the number of Google searches you performed by month, or by each hour of the day.

Who the hell uses Google at 4am? Apparently this blog does.


Well I guess it's that time. Let me stand up here and clear my throat.

*ahem* ... *cough*... *cough*

pffft, pffft.

Is this thing on?

Uhh, Hi. My name is Joe. And I'm a Googleholic.

http://www.joeschmidt.com/archives/2...uch_do_you.php





For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher.
Saul Hansell

ALMOST on a lark, Chris DeWolfe bought the Internet address MySpace.com in 2002, figuring that it might be useful someday. At first, he used the site to peddle a motorized contraption, made in China and called an E-scooter, for $99.

Selling products online comes naturally to him. Having jumped into the Internet business in the early days, Mr. DeWolfe had become a master of the aggressive forms of online marketing, including e-mail messages and pop-up advertising. After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.

Very quickly, however, Mr. DeWolfe's tactics for MySpace changed. He had noticed the popularity of Friendster, a rapidly growing Web site that let people communicate with their friends and meet the friends of their friends. What would happen, he wondered, if he combined this type of social networking with the sort of personal expression enabled by other sites for creating Web pages or online journals?

He convinced the executives of eUniverse, the company that had bought his own marketing firm, ResponseBase, to back his plan. As soon as the site was reintroduced, in the summer of 2003, Mr. DeWolfe saw it grow quickly with little marketing. And although his scrappy backer was hungry for cash, he resisted pressure to flood MySpace with advertising and to turn all of its members into money.

"Chris came from ResponseBase, and they knew all the direct marketing tactics to get money out of almost anything," said Brett C. Brewer, the former president of eUniverse, which was later renamed Intermix Media. "But I give him credit: from literally the first or second month, he realized MySpace could be something we really need to protect because user confidence in the site was paramount."

Now MySpace has a new owner — Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which bought MySpace and Intermix last year for $649 million — and the pressure on Mr. DeWolfe to find a way to make much more money from MySpace is far greater.

But the opportunity is greater, too. More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.

MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.

FOR now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year, estimated Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. That is less than one-twentieth of Yahoo's revenue.

In buying MySpace, Mr. Murdoch also bought a tantalizing problem: how to tame a vast sea of fickle and unruly teenagers and college students just enough to notice advertising or to buy things, yet not make the site so commercial that he scares off his audience. At the same time, he must address the real and growing concerns of parents and teachers who see MySpace as a den of youthful excess and, potentially, as a lure for sexual predators.

Mr. Murdoch's initial strategy seems to be to do nothing to interfere with whatever alchemy attracted so many young people to MySpace in the first place. So he has embraced Mr. DeWolfe, 40, and Tom Anderson, 30, the company's president and co-founder, and their close-knit management team. And he is providing them with the cash to reinforce MySpace's shaky computer system and to hire armies of sales representatives to bring in more money from the banner ads and sponsored pages that MySpace sells.

He also gave them multimillion-dollar bonus payments to smooth the feelings that were ruffled when Intermix was sold, dragging MySpace along with it against the will of its founders, who received only a small portion of the sale price.

Still, change is coming. In Beverly Hills, nine miles and worlds away from MySpace's beachside office, the News Corporation is assembling its overarching online unit, Fox Interactive Media. Run by Ross Levinsohn, the longtime manager of FoxSports.com, Fox Interactive Media is stitching together several Web properties into a big Internet company focused on youth. The top priority is MySpace.

"We have some very aggressive goals on how to build this thing into a real contributor to News Corp. financially," Mr. Levinsohn said last month. Mr. Murdoch, he added, "is focused on that, and he rightfully holds my feet to the fire."

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial "friends" can even send them messages — ads, really, but of a whole new kind.

Mr. Levinsohn is also developing plans for MySpace to be paid by some of the bands and video producers whose songs and short films are woven into its gaudy profiles like so many electronic stickers on a high-school locker. And he sees a chance for MySpace to rival eBay and Craigslist as a place where nearly anything is bought and sold.

Mr. Greenfield, the Pali Capital analyst, says that these moves have potential — especially if MySpace can convince members to put clips from Fox movies, television programs and other youth-oriented "content" on their profile pages. "I don't know how big a business this can be, but it can clearly be a lot bigger than it is today," he said. "The question is: Can you take it to the next level by making a business that leverages all the consumers who are telling you what they want to do?"

Another question is this: Can the News Corporation achieve these goals if the executives in charge don't agree on how to do so, or even on whether they want to? Mr. Levinsohn, for example, said he saw opportunity in the one million bands that have established profiles on MySpace; he said MySpace could charge bands to promote concerts or to sell their songs directly through the site.

In an interview the next day, however, Mr. DeWolfe dismissed the idea. "Music brings a lot of traffic into MySpace," he said, "and it lets us sell very large sponsorships to those brands that want to reach consumers who are interested in music. We never thought charging bands was a viable business model."

Mr. Levinsohn brushed aside the discord, saying it was appropriate for the people running MySpace to be more concerned at this point about serving users than making money. And, for now, Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson say they are happy working for the News Corporation and Mr. Murdoch, its 75-year-old chairman and chief executive. "Rupert Murdoch blew me away," Mr. DeWolfe said. "He really understands what youth is doing today."

BY many accounts, the MySpace culture reflects the style of Mr. DeWolfe, who has a hard-nosed business approach under a laid-back exterior. "Chris is a very strong personality," said Geoff Yang, a partner in Redpoint Ventures, which invested in MySpace last year as part of an effort to separate it from Intermix; the News Corporation's acquisition of Intermix thwarted that effort. "He will listen to a lot of ideas, make up his mind and be laser-focused to get a few of them done."

Mr. DeWolfe, who focuses on business affairs, and Mr. Anderson, who designs features for the site, have deliberately kept MySpace rudimentary, with an almost homemade feeling, to give the most flexibility to users. In spirit, the site reflects its Southern Californian home with all of its idiosyncratic performers, designers, demicelebrities and other cultural hustlers, many of whom the founders recruited to be early members. Mr. DeWolfe, in particular, is a fan of Los Angeles nightlife and has become something of a public figure himself.

"Chris has become this living persona of MySpace," said Mr. Brewer, who recalled a trip to Aspen, Colo., with Mr. Anderson and Mr. DeWolfe last December. "Chris is wearing an awesome leather jacket, some sort of designer shirt, with his hair all over the place. He has this whole rock-star persona. And you hear people going: 'Psst, psst. That's the MySpace guy.' "

When he is not basking in the MySpace spotlight himself, Mr. DeWolfe has begun using it to promote music events around the country. MySpace members can become "friends" with a profile for "MySpace Secret Shows," for instance, and they will receive tips about free concerts — sponsored by companies like Tower Records — in their hometowns.

On a recent Friday in Manhattan, several hundred people trekked through drizzling rain to the Tower Records store in the East Village for free tickets to a concert by Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish postpunk band, at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Heather Candella, a college student from Sloatsburg, N.Y., was among those at the show. She said the shows were "a really good idea because it's kind of a secret kind of thing — it's not so commercial."

She added that MySpace had become a main way to stay in touch with her friends. While she does not use the site to meet people, it has become part of the dating ritual. "When you meet someone, the question is not 'What's your number?' " she said. "It's 'What's your MySpace?' "

By checking out a guy's profile, she said, "you can actually get a feeling for who they are."

MySpace users pepper their profiles with their own photographs, musings and poetry, and with their favorite music and video clips. That maximizes the individuality of each profile but turns the typical media-company business model upside down, which is one reason that it is so hard for the News Corporation to use the audience to sell ads or to promote its own programming. The best way to get, say, a television show in front of the MySpace audience is not to cut a deal with a programming czar at a Hollywood restaurant, but to win the hearts, one by one, of thousands of members who will display the show to all of their friends.

"We can't look at this as a media property," said Peter Chernin, the News Corporation's president. "This is a site programmed by its users."

For that reason, MySpace is only gingerly pushing users into other Fox properties. Right now, Fox's relationship to MySpace is not explicit, although Fox movies and television shows are frequent advertisers. Ultimately, the News Corporation will make it easy for MySpace members to put clips from its television programs and trailers for its movies on their profile pages. But there will be nothing to stop them from using material from other companies.

Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. "It's not about a central hub, because that's not where things are going," he said. "The under-30 set wants choice. It's not about one destination; it's about 65 million."

Indeed, rather than squeeze all its Internet ambitions into MySpace, Fox Interactive is assembling a network of Web sites, including IGN, a collection of sites focused on video games, and Scout, which runs Web sites for about 200 local sports teams. The News Corporation is also developing a portal devoted to entertainment, drawing from its Fox network programs, the Page Six gossip column of The New York Post and show-business reporters at the 35 local television stations it owns, Mr. Levinsohn said.

AT MySpace, the first challenge is to raise advertising rates. Because its supply of pages so greatly outstrips demand from advertisers, it has offered deep discounts. Indeed, the average rate paid for advertising is a bit over a dime for 1,000 impressions, Mr. Levinsohn said, far lower than rates at major competitors. "If we can raise that by 10 cents, think of the upside," he said.

One way to coax more money from advertisers is to build special sections — areas devoted to music and independent filmmakers — that provide a neutral home to advertisers that want MySpace's youthful audience but don't want their ads associated with the risqué content of some members' profiles.

A sign of that challenge is seen in Mr. Levinsohn's effort to expand the use of text ads — the rapidly growing format pioneered by search engines. He has been running tests with Yahoo, Google and several smaller ad providers and has sought proposals from them for longer-term deals.

The answer he received was a shock. Not one of them, not even the mighty Google, was sure that it could provide enough advertisements to fill all the pages that MySpace displays each day, Mr. Levinsohn said. The search companies did not want to dilute their networks with so many ads for MySpace users, whom they said were not the best prospects for most marketing because they use MySpace for socializing, not buying.

Mr. Levinsohn says he also hopes to raise ad rates by collecting more user data so advertisers can find the most promising prospects. To use the site, people need to provide their age, location and sex, and often volunteer their sexual orientation and personal interests. Some of that information is already being used to select ads to display. Soon, the site will track when users visit profile pages and other sections devoted to topics of interest to advertisers. People who put information about sports cars in their profiles or who frequent MySpace message boards about hot-rodding, for example, would be shown ads for car parts, even while reading messages from friends.

The bigger opportunity, however, is not so much selling banner ads, but finding ways to integrate advertisers into the site's web of relationships. Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, for example, created a profile for the animated square hamburger character from its television campaign. About 100,000 people signed up to be "friends" with the square.

Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses. A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said.

Yet here is another place that executives at Fox and MySpace don't see eye to eye. Mr. DeWolfe discounted the idea of people creating profile pages for small businesses. "If it was a really commercial profile — the gas station down the street — no one is going to sign up to be one of their friends," he said. "There is nothing interesting about it."

For now, Mr. DeWolfe said, he has more down-to-earth plans. With the News Corporation's help, he is opening an office in London to coordinate MySpace's expansion in Europe. He is cutting deals to let members connect to MySpace over cellphones.

The News Corporation, he said, is helping MySpace achieve his goals sooner than it could on its own. So far this year, MySpace has spent $20 million of the News Corporation's money, in part to nearly double its staff of 250. About one-third of its employees focus on customer service and, increasingly, on responding to parents' concerns about what teenagers do on the site and what else they can see there. In the last six months, there has been a torrent of letters from schools to parents — as well as newspaper articles — about the glorification of drinking, drug use and sex on many MySpace profiles.

MySpace has long had rules that forbid anyone under 14 to join and that ban pornographic images and hate speech. Beyond those, however, the site is very open to frank discussion, provocative images and links to all sorts of activities. It didn't stop Playboy magazine, for example, from creating a profile page on its site to recruit members to pose in the magazine. Nor does it object to Jenna Jameson, the pornographic film star, maintaining a profile with links to her hard-core Web site.

Ms. Jameson "is more than a porn star," Mr. Anderson said. "She is an author and a celebrity and has been on Oprah." He added that "if we had a site that was 'My name is so-and-so and this is my porn site,' we would delete that."

Mr. Levinsohn, Mr. DeWolfe and others at the News Corporation say the site has no more or fewer problems than any other community on the Internet, and their primary response to parents' concern is a campaign to educate users about safe surfing techniques. "There are a couple of basic safety tips that can make MySpace safe for anyone over 14," Mr. DeWolfe said. "Just like you tell kids not to get in the car with strangers and to look both ways before you cross the street."

A sign that MySpace can play a role in some of the most distressing experiences of growing up came last week, when five teenage boys were arrested in Riverton, Kan. Law enforcement and school officials there said that the group planned to go on a shooting spree at their high school but were stopped after one of them discussed the plot on MySpace.

IN some ways, MySpace has assumed the role America Online held a decade ago when it introduced e-mail services and Internet chat to the masses. But AOL's example is a cautionary one. For many reasons, largely its failure to keep up with trends, AOL lost its place in the social lives of young people.

Mr. DeWolfe argues that MySpace won't suffer that fate because, in just two years, it has already become so entrenched in so many lives. "People are truly invested in the site," he said. "All their friends are on it. They spent months building their profiles. And so the cost of switching is too high. If we keep building the features they want, they will stay on the site."

If he is right, MySpace will be more than just a trendy toy to be discarded like last year's E-scooter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/bu...23myspace.html





Committing MySpacecide
Momus

Briefly, on November 13th, 2005, I was a friend of Tom. I'm talking, of course, about Tom Anderson -- male, 30-years old, based in Santa Monica, California, and founder of MySpace. The man with $580 million and nearly 50 million "friends."

The iMomus MySpace page was online for just 48 minutes. Barely long enough to tell the world my relationship status, sexual orientation, body type, ethnicity, religion, zodiac sign, smoking and drinking habits, income and company affiliations. To receive a message telling me to "read the FAQ and give Tom a break." To upload the most flattering photo I could find. To notice that Tom had been added automatically as my first friend, and that Tom's favorite music included Billy Joel, Oasis, Guns & Roses and Whitney Houston ("particularly The Bodyguard soundtrack").

I don't know what made me delete it. It just looked ugly: the page layout, the blue writing. I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. Mostly, I just wondered why I needed to affirm tenuous affiliation with a new set of ghosts.

I didn't know at that point that just four months earlier, on July 19th, MySpace had been bought by Rupert Murdoch's News International. That's where Tom's $580 million came from. I think if I'd known that, the MySpace iMomus page wouldn't even have lasted 48 minutes. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, isn't my favorite guy.

I do have something in common with him, though. We both have spoof MySpace pages impersonating us. The Spoof Murdoch page says "I aspire to become the most powerful man in the world.... There are many important benefits to fascism."

The Spoof Momus page automatically loads a song I deleted from one of my albums, a song I've signed legal agreements never to play again.

The real Rupert Murdoch has presumably left his fake pages up to show that he supports freedom of speech. I've left mine up because I can't really do much about it.

But it is pretty annoying seeing all those people thanking "me" for adding them, or telling "me" how much they love my music, unaware that they're talking to someone merely pretending to be me. I can't even leave a message on the page telling people it's not mine; I'd have to join MySpace to tell MySpace users I'm not on MySpace. So the page stays, with a banner advertising Napster, a bad photo of me in a lilac shirt snapped at some ancient concert, and the lie that I'm based in Metropolitan France.

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with an old friend of mine, an early pioneer of multimedia who used to be a kind of digital exhibitionist. He once put online a highly provocative autobiography. After falling victim to identity theft, he's had a change of heart.

"The thing to be now is untraceable," he told me. "Wipe every reference to yourself off the internet. Make yourself ungoogleable. Why tell criminals, corporations or the government all that stuff about yourself? Why do the spies' job for them?"

A bit later, I heard about someone who'd committed "Friendstercide." He'd killed his Friendster page, announcing that from then on he'd only be contactable by phone and e-mail. So I guess you'd call what I did last November "committing MySpacecide."

It sounds radically self-destructive, but the opposite situation would be much worse. Imagine dying for real, dying physically, but lingering on as a digital ghost, a presence on a MySpace page collecting obituaries and tributes. It's already happened to quite a few MySpace users. A website called MyDeathSpace, for instance, collects dead MySpace users' pages. It has over a hundred, and adds more each day.

There are gaps in the MyDeathSpace collection. Indie rocker Nikki Sudden hasn't yet shown up there, despite dying recently after playing a show at New York's Knitting Factory. (His MySpace page lingers on, attracting digital tributes in the form of embedded YouTube video clips.)

Neither have the Seattle rave kids who died in the Capitol Hill massacre, whose MySpace pages collected a series of incongruously casual high fives and "peace outs." See you on the other side of the internet, dude!

The sad fact is that more and more of us, as we invest ourselves in the web, entrusting intimate personal information to garish pages, are destined to leave hastily-constructed, poorly-designed memorials online when we die, trivial shrines whose guest books and comments sections will continue to grow even as we rot, puffing up slowly with hackneyed, repetitive, ghoulish, unintentionally funny tributes.

Eventually, of course, these pages, too, will follow us into oblivion. Tribute activity will level off, some administrator or relative will delete us, the networking brand itself will fall out of favor, its elderly owner will also die, and even his satirists will stop maintaining their spoof page about him. Out of fashion, replaced by new technologies as yet unimagined on infrastructure as yet unbuilt, the network will change hands a few times and close.

Then, thank God, that wretched novelty song we threw up in a whimsical moment will stop loading. Then, finally, our digital ghosts will find peace, and escape the great cycle of humiliation.

There's a short cut to the same nirvana, though: You could make today the day you commit MySpacecide.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_4





Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost
Warren St. John

Like many other 23-year-olds, Deborah Lee Walker loved the beach, discovering bands, making new friends and keeping up with old ones, often through the social networking site MySpace.com, where she listed her heroes as "my family, and anyone serving in the military — thank you!"

So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming.

"Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!"

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.

Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.

The pages offer often wrenching views of young lives interrupted, and in the process have created a dilemma for bereaved parents, who find themselves torn between the comfort derived from having access to their children's private lives and staying in contact with their friends, and the unease of grieving in a public forum witnessed by anyone, including the ill-intentioned.

"The upside is definitely that we still have some connection with her and her friends," said Bob Shorkey, a graphic artist in North Carolina whose 24-year-old stepdaughter, Katie Knudson, was killed on Feb. 23 in a drive-by shooting in Fort Myers, Fla. "But because it's public, your life is opened up to everyone out there, and that's definitely the downside."

It's impossible to know how many people with pages on social networking sites have died; 74 million people have registered with MySpace alone, according to the company, which said it does not delete pages for inactivity. But a glib and sometimes macabre site called MyDeathSpace.com has documented at least 116 people with profiles on MySpace who have died. There are additions to the list nearly every day.

Last Thursday, for example, a 17-year-old from Vancouver, Wash., named Anna Svidersky was stabbed to death while working at a McDonald's there. As word of the crime spread among her extended network of friends on MySpace, her page was filled with posts from distraught friends and affected strangers. A separate page set up by Ms. Svidersky's friends after her death received about 1,200 comments in its first three days.

"Anna, you were a great girl and someone very special," one person wrote. "I enjoyed having you at our shows and running into you at the mall. You will be missed greatly ... rest in peace."

Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.

"MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.

Friends of MySpace users who have died said they had been comforted by the messages left by others and by the belief or hope that their dead friends might somehow be reading from another realm. And indeed many of the posts are written as though the recipient were still alive.

"I still believe that even though she's not the one on her MySpace page, that's a way I can reach out to her," said Jenna Finke, 23, a close friend of Ms. Walker, the young woman who died in Georgia. "Her really close friends go on there every day. It means a lot to know people aren't forgetting about her."

More formal online obituary services have been available for a number of years. An Illinois company called Legacy.com has deals with many newspapers, including The New York Times, to create online guest books for obituaries the papers publish on the Web, and offers multimedia memorials called Living Tributes starting at $29. But Web pages on social networking sites are more personal, the online equivalent of someone's room, and maintaining them has its complications. Some are frustratingly mundane.

Amanda Presswood, whose 23-year-old friend Michael Olsen was killed in a fire in Galesburg, Ill., on Jan. 23, said none of his friends or family members knew or could guess the password to his MySpace account, which he signed onto the day before he died. That made it impossible to accept some new messages.

"There's a lot of pictures on there that people haven't seen," Ms. Presswood said. "His parents have been coming to me for help because they know I know about the Internet. They even asked if I could hack it so I could keep the page going."

The Walkers correctly guessed the password to their daughter's page, and used it to alert her friends to details of her memorial service. They also used it to access photographs and stories about their daughter they had missed out on.

"It's a little weird to say as a parent, but the site has been a source for us to get to know her better," Mr. Walker said. "We didn't understand the breadth and scope of the network she had built as an individual, and we got to see that through MySpace. It helped us to understand the impact she's had on other people."

At the same time, Ms. Walker's mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned.

"The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don't need anyone else's on our shoulders," Mrs. Walker wrote.

Mr. Shorkey said he and his wife remained in touch with their daughter's friends through MySpace. And they visit her Web page daily.

"Some days it makes me feel she's still there," he said. "And some days it reminds me I can never have that contact again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...cPZ/tIYYvpWmbA





The Student Body
Jodi Rudoren

SCANNING proofs from a nude photo shoot, Charlotte Rutherfurd and her fellow student editors struggled to select a portrait for "Hot Girls Reading Books," a feature in the spring issue of their magazine, Vita Excolatur.

One pose seemed more sleepy than sexy, with the model, a public policy major, splayed on her back under an open paperback. Another caught hardly any cleavage above "The Craft of Research." The student looked washed out. She looked scared. She looked, well, not particularly hot.

Such is the challenge — and, to some extent, the point — of publishing an X-rated magazine at the University of Chicago, a campus renowned for intellectual rigor rather than raw libido, and where, according to a popular T-shirt, "fun comes to die." "We're the ugly campus, and damn it, we're hot too!" declared Ms. Rutherfurd, 21, a junior and Vita's editor in chief. "It's distinctly U. of C. There's no Miss January. There's a hot girl — and she's reading a book!"

Vita Excolatur, Latin for, loosely, "life enriched," is the rare smut rag with extensive footnotes. Yet alongside dense treatises on interracial relationships and asexuality are riffs on what music should accompany a menu of lewd activities.

Straddling the boundary between pornography and art, Vita is one of a spate of sex magazines to emerge on elite campuses since Squirm, at Vassar College, broke the buff barrier in 1999. The newest made its debut on Valentine's Day and takes its name from Sex Week at Yale, a biennial assortment of panels and parties. H Bomb, at Harvard, also carries the occasional footnote but shows much more skin than Vita and Sex Week at Yale: The Magazine.

Then there's Boink, which was started by a Boston University student with a professional photographer. Boink is proud of being pornographic as it builds a brisk business online as "the college guide to carnal knowledge."

"We're not trying to be very highbrow about it," said Christopher Anderson, 39, the photographer. "I think it's kind of silly that there are elements in society that want to position sex as something that's taboo or dirty. What our publication does is put out the message that it's all good."

SINCE its inaugural issue in October 2004, Vita has been a constant challenge for a university trying to balance ideals of academic freedom and its role in loco parentis. The magazine, which runs mainly on student activities fees (about $6,000 a year), can show full-frontal nudity but not an erection or intercourse, according to an agreement with the administration. Its pages are reviewed three times by administrators before publication, and student models must sign releases before they shed their clothes and again on seeing the photos, when many balk. Editors selling copies on campus are supposed to check identification to make sure readers are at least 18. And Ms. Rutherfurd is desperate to start a Web site to expand the magazine's reach — and purse — but so far has been stymied by the university.

"We've been working with them to be sure that they, and we as a university, are being thoughtful on any concerns we have about student safety," explained William Michel, the University of Chicago's assistant vice president for student life. "If a student chooses to have photos printed like this, depending on future career choices and other activities they want to engage in, it may have some implications there."

Squirm and H Bomb have also received money from their student governments, but their respective institutions, Vassar and Harvard, take a hands-off approach, with no censorship or requirements for releases. Judith Kidd, Harvard's associate dean for student life and activities, said that the hubbub generated by H Bomb's emergence did lead her to change procedures for establishing student organizations so the faculty has more time to review applications.

Boink has encountered more aggressive opposition: B.U. doesn't give it any money, doesn't recognize it as a student group and has blocked sales at a bookstore near campus. Alecia Oleyourryk, who graduated from B.U. in 2005 and is Boink's editor, said that when the magazine started about half the staff and models were students but that it's now more like a third.

Before the magazine's unveiling in February 2005, Kenneth Elmore, dean of students, released this statement: "The university does not endorse, nor welcome, the prospective publication Boink, nor view its publication as a positive for the university community, because of our concern for the treatment of serious sexual health, relationship and related issues."

With how-tos on oral sex, advice columns on hiding condoms at home during spring break and essays about summer jobs as erotic dancers, the magazines are not always highlighted on student résumés or sent home to mom and dad.

"My mother said, 'I'm so proud of you' and my dad threw it out," Ms. Rutherfurd said. "My mother said 'I'm so proud of you' kind of awkwardly."

Ming Vandenberg, a Harvard junior who is president of H Bomb, said her parents "always want to encourage me to do whatever I want to do," but quickly added, "They're happy as long as I'm not in it."

The parent factor helped guide the content of Yale's new magazine, which is underwritten by a company that sells sex-enhancing products. Its most explicit photo is the cover shot of a student in nothing but red Yale panties, her back to the camera so barely a hint of breast shows. "If we can justify it to our moms every step of the way then we know that we're in good shape," said Dain Lewis, a junior who is director of Sex Week. But what the magazine lacks in nudity it makes up for in risqué articles on choosing the right condom and taming a wild date. "I wouldn't be entirely comfortable with my mom reading it," Mr. Lewis allowed.

There have been no complaints from parents at Harvard or the University of Chicago, officials said. Then again, Tynan Kelly, an 18-year-old freshman at Chicago who was featured on the cover of Vita's fall issue, did not tell his parents about his modeling experiment, though, he said, "I made sure all my friends would get it." Mr. Kelly and other models, who do not get paid, said posing for Vita had given them a kind of sexual cachet on campus. And Ms. Rutherfurd said she rarely had trouble recruiting for photo shoots.

But Emma Bernstein, a photographer for Vita and other campus publications, said she got a lot of strange looks after shooting a spread on sadomasochism. "I had to keep explaining myself to people at parties," she said. "People saw my name associated with that, and their entire perception of me changed." Ms. Bernstein, a junior, said she liked working for Vita because it is the "most widely read, most creative, most fun" and has the "most artistic freedom."

STUDENT editors, administrators and experts on adolescent sexuality see the explicit magazines as the inevitable outgrowth of a sex-crazed media culture in which many feminists are adopting a "sex-positive" approach that views pornography as expression, not exploitation. A few years ago, sex columnists sprung up in scores of college newspapers, from Yale to the University of Kansas to the University of California, Berkeley, tackling previously taboo topics like fake orgasms and favorite positions. The new publications take things more than a few steps further, and bear warnings on the covers that the material is inappropriate for underage readers.

Said Dean Kidd of Harvard: "They're far more open about sexuality. I would not say they're more sophisticated about it than anybody has been, but they seem to be more casual about it, and they talk about it more."

Today's students were weaned on Jimmy Smits's exposed backside on "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and scantily clad dancers on MTV. Mainstream magazines like Maxim show ever more everything, while junior-high-schoolers bare their souls and more on MySpace.com, and the shirt-lifting gimmick of "Girls Gone Wild" videos seems a rather tame spring-break stunt.

"To me it's like the floodgates have been opened," said Natalie Krinsky, who wrote the Sex in the Elm City column in The Yale Daily News before graduating in 2004, and has recently moved to Los Angeles to adapt her book, "Chloe Does Yale," for the screen. "When you're 18, you're always going to want to push the envelope a little bit more, see what you can get away with."

Robin Sawyer, who has been teaching human sexuality courses at the University of Maryland for two decades, described a pendulum swing from the political correctness of the 1990's and the repression it caused. Pamela Paul, author of the 2005 book "Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families," said the sex magazines represented a 180-degree shift in college women's attitudes toward pornography in just the 15 years since she attended Brown University.

"Porn is cool, porn is hip, porn is not something to get upset about on college campuses today," Ms. Paul said. "College women have really bought into both the pornography industry's way of spinning porn — this is hip, sexy, harmless entertainment and women should really get in on it — and the new academic perspective on pornography — as long as we own our sexuality and it's our choice, then, great, more power to us."

She describes the trend as "pathetic."

Dean Kidd imagines what would happen if an H Bomb model "was running for governor of California" someday. "Students as a whole don't tend to think about what the impact of what they do now is going to have on what they do later," she said.

Dean Kidd, of course, is not the target audience (though she flips through it with fellow administrators to see which students they know).

Readers are the least of the magazines' worries.

Boink sells 20,000 copies at $7.95 a pop, most far from the Boston campus. H Bomb prints 10,000; 2,500 are distributed free to students, the rest sold for $5 each. Even Vita's tiny circulation of 700 (at $2 a copy) makes it the most widely read student publication on campus. And 25,000 copies of Sex Week at Yale were distributed, free, on 18 campuses across the country.

Boink, which also sells hats, T-shirts and monthly pinups, signed a deal this year for a book, expected in September 2007. H Bomb may soon follow suit. Given the campus newspaper's 1999 book of successful Harvard application essays, "we thought it'd be funny to publish a book of Harvard undergrads about how they lost their virginity," said Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg, 22, a senior and H Bomb's editor. The working title, she added, is "The Hardest Part Is Getting In."

AT the University of Chicago, a Vita idea session blended the academic and the erotic. Someone proposed a film noir theme with the detective and the girl on the office table.

Mr. Kelly, the freshman model, offered "Robert Mapplethorpe meets International Male." "Just something really gay," he said. "A lot of bodies, not a lot of faces. Really hot, too."

Ms. Bernstein, the photographer, suggested "the sexuality of redheads," inspired by late-19th-century Victorian Britain. "Something in Jackson Park, before the leaves come up," she said. "Redheads — pale, almost sickly. Almost dead, but I swear it will be sexy."

The current issue features an online student poll — more than one of four respondents said they had cheated on a significant other, and those surveyed claimed an average of four partners since losing their virginity at an average age of 17 — accompanied by a series of photographs, "Classroom Fantasies," showing students stuck in their books while classmates have sex around them. One of the models is wearing the signature University of Chicago death-of-fun T-shirt. Others were really doing homework during the shoot. Really, Ms. Bernstein said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/ed...MAGAZINES.html





Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional
Dinitia Smith

Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel, acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious."

The book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.

In an e-mail message yesterday afternoon, Ms. Viswanathan, 19, said that in high school she had read the two books she is accused of borrowing from, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," and that they "spoke to me in a way few other books did."

"Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel, 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,' and passages in these books," she said.

Calling herself a "huge fan" of Ms. McCafferty's work, Ms. Viswanathan added, "I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She also apologized to Ms. McCafferty and said that future printings of the novel would be revised to "eliminate any inappropriate similarities."

Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said that Ms. Viswanathan planned to add an acknowledgment to Ms. McCafferty in future printings of the book.

In her e-mail message, Ms. Viswanathan said that "the central stories of my book and hers are completely different." But Ms. McCafferty's books, published by Crown, a division of Random House, are, like Ms. Viswanathan's, about a young woman from New Jersey trying to get into an Ivy League college — in her case, Columbia. (Ms. Viswanathan's character has her sights set on Harvard.) Like the heroine of "Opal," Ms. McCafferty's character, Jessica Darling, visits the campus, strives to earn good grades to get in and makes a triumphant high school graduation speech.

And the borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar.

At one point in "Sloppy Firsts," Ms. McCafferty's heroine unexpectedly encounters her love interest. Ms. McCafferty writes:

"Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b).

" 'Uh, yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha.'

"I turned around and saw that Marcus was smiling at me."

Similarly, Ms. Viswanathan's heroine, Opal, bumps into her love interest, and the two of them spy on one of the school's popular girls.

Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him.

" 'Flatirons,' he said. 'At least seven flatirons for that hair.'

" 'Ha, yeah. Uh, ha. Ha.' I looked at the floor and managed a pathetic combination of laughter and monosyllables, then remembered that the object of our mockery was his former best friend.

"I looked up and saw that Sean was grinning."

In a profile published in The New York Times earlier this month, Ms. Viswanathan said that while she was in high school, her parents hired Katherine Cohen, founder of IvyWise, a private counseling service, to help with the college application process. After reading some of Ms. Viswanathan's writing, Ms. Cohen put her in touch with the William Morris Agency, and Ms. Viswanathan eventually signed with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an agent there.

Ms. Walsh said that she put Ms. Viswanathan in touch with a book packaging company, 17th Street Productions (now Alloy Entertainment), but that the plot and writing of "Opal" were "1,000 percent hers."

Alloy, which referred questions to Little, Brown, holds the copyright to "Opal" with Ms. Viswanathan.

In the Times profile, Ms. Viswanathan said the idea for "Opal" came from her own experiences in high school "surrounded by the stereotype of high-pressure Asian and Indian families trying to get their children into Ivy League schools."

Tina Constable, a spokeswoman for Crown, said a reader had noticed the similarities between the books. That person, she said, "told Megan. Megan alerted us. We've alerted the Little, Brown legal department. We are waiting to hear from them."

It was unclear whether Harvard would take any action against Ms. Viswanathan. "Our policies apply to work submitted to courses," said Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. "Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times."

Ms. Walsh, the agent, said: "Knowing what a fine person Kaavya is, I believe any similarities were unintentional. Teenagers tend to adopt each other's language."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html





Aggrieved Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology
Dinitia Smith

A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous."

On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious."

But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act."

He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books."

Mr. Ross called it "nothing less than an act of literary identity theft."

On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan and her publisher, Little, Brown, had said that future printings of the novel would be revised to "eliminate any inappropriate similarities" and that an acknowledgment to Ms. McCafferty would be added.

But Mr. Ross, in an interview, questioned how quickly that could be accomplished. The planned revisions, he said, would take several months, and "during those intervening months this original edition would still be in bookstores. That's one of the issues that is of great concern to us." Ms. McCafferty has a new book, "Charmed Thirds," in stores now, and Mr. Ross called the incident "an enormous distraction and disruption."

Mr. Ross added that Crown had not ruled out legal action. "Right now this is in the hands of our lawyers," he said. "We're waiting to see what their recommendations are."

Ms. McCafferty's agent, Joanna Pulcini, also reacted to Ms. Viswanathan's apology. "It is understandably difficult for us to accept that Ms. Viswanathan's plagiarism was 'unintentional and unconscious,' as she has claimed," she said in a statement.

Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said in response to Mr. Ross's statement, that the company was looking forward to "a speedy and amicable" solution. He added, however, he had not yet seen the 40 similarities that Mr. Ross has said existed between the books. "We look forward to hearing from the author and from Random House and to resolving this."

The Harvard Crimson first reported the plagiarism charges on Saturday.

Meanwhile Harvard would not say what, if any, disciplinary action it might take against Ms. Viswanathan. Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in an interview, "We would not discuss any individual situation that might or might not come before the administrative board."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/bo... tner=homepage





Publisher to Recall Harvard Student's Novel
Motoko Rich and Dinitia Smith

Just a day after saying it would not withdraw "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer's books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves.

In a statement issued last night, Michael Pietsch, senior vice president and publisher of Little, Brown, said that in an agreement with Ms. Viswanathan, the company had "sent a notice to retail and wholesale accounts asking them to stop selling copies of the book and to return unsold inventory to the publisher for full credit."

The publisher had announced an initial print run of 100,000 and had shipped 55,000 copies to stores. Ms. Viswanathan, 19, a Harvard sophomore, has been under scrutiny since The Harvard Crimson revealed on Sunday that she had plagiarized numerous passages from "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," two novels by the young-adult writer Megan McCafferty.

"We are pleased that this matter has been resolved in an appropriate and timely fashion," said Crown Publishers, which publishes Ms. McCafferty's books, in a statement. "We are extremely proud of our author, Megan McCafferty, and her grace under pressure throughout this ordeal."

Ms. McCafferty, who until now has remained silent, also issued a statement last night.

"In the case of Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarizing of my novels 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings,' " she said, "I wish to inform all of the parties involved that I am not seeking restitution in any form.

"The past few weeks have been very difficult, and I am most grateful to my readers for offering continual support, and for reminding me what Jessica Darling means to both them and to me. In my career, I am, first and foremost, a writer. So I look forward to getting back to work and moving on, and hope Ms. Viswanathan can, too."

Ms. Viswanathan, reached last night, declined to comment.

The similarities between "Opal" and Ms. McCafferty's books were striking in some cases, with many passages in Ms. Viswanathan's novel — Crown cited more than 40 — echoing Ms. McCafferty's works almost exactly.

Nevertheless, Ms. Viswanathan maintained throughout the week that her copying of the passages was "unintentional and unconscious." She said she was a fan of McCafferty's novels and had read them several times, but not while writing her own book.

Ms. Viswanathan worked with Alloy Entertainment in developing the concept for the book and its first four chapters. But she said Alloy was not responsible for any of the copying. Alloy has declined to comment.

Little, Brown published Ms. Viswanathan's book recently to widespread publicity. It had been part of a two-book deal with the publishing house.

This Sunday, it will be No. 32 on the online extended New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list.

Little, Brown and Ms. Viswanathan had said that she would revise the book to remove the copied passages and that they would reissue it.

The extent of the plagiarism in "Opal" recalls some previous, notorious cases, including Jacob Epstein's "Wild Oats," a debut novel, that was published in 1979 and was later found to have been extensively copied from Martin Amis's "The Rachel Papers." Mr. Epstein's book was also published by Little, Brown.

This will not be the first time that a book has been recalled because of controversy. In 1999, the publishers of a biography by a Scottish author withdrew and destroyed all copies of the book after a historian called it a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism."

Grove/Atlantic, which was scheduled to publish the book in the United States, junked 7,500 copies of the book before they even went on sale.

That same year, St. Martin's Press shredded or burned thousands of copies of a biography of George W. Bush that included anonymous claims that Mr. Bush, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, had been arrested on cocaine possession charges in 1972.

In that case the publisher discovered that the author had concealed a criminal conviction and was no longer trustworthy. Also that year, the publishers of an award- winning memoir by a man claiming to be a Latvian Jewish orphan who had survived two concentration camps recalled the book when it discovered that the author was Swiss-born.

The withdrawal of Ms. Viswanathan's book could make it easier for Ms. McCafferty to begin promoting her third novel, "Charmed Thirds," published by Crown earlier this month. On May 7, it will appear on the online extended New York Times Hard Cover Fiction Best Seller list at No. 30.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/books/28author.html





First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author.
Motoko Rich and Dinitia Smith

The books' spines bear names like Cecily von Ziegesar, Ann Brashares and, most controversially, since plagiarism charges were leveled against her on Sunday, Kaavya Viswanathan. But on the copyright page — and the contracts — there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment.

Nobody associated with the plagiarism accusations is pointing fingers at Alloy, a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing. Ms. Viswanathan says that she alone is responsible for borrowing portions of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." But at the very least, the incident opens a window onto a powerful company with lucrative, if tangled, relationships within the publishing industry that might take fans of series like "The It Girl" by surprise.

In many cases, editors at Alloy — known as a "book packager" — craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers).

The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty's books and Ms. Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Ms. Gabel had been an editorial assistant at Crown Publishing Group, then moved to Alloy, where she helped develop the idea for Ms. Viswanathan's book. She has recently become an editor at Knopf Delacorte Dell Young Readers Group, a sister imprint to Crown.

Ms. Gabel did not return calls for comment. But Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, the publishing company that owns Crown, said Ms. Gabel, who worked at Alloy from the spring of 2003 until last November, had left the company "before the editorial work was completed" on Ms. Viswanathan's book.

"Claudia told us she did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing at any point in any drafts," said Mr. Applebaum, who added that Ms. Gabel was one of several people who worked on the project in its conceptual stage.

Leslie Morgenstein, president of Alloy, declined to comment. In an e-mail message, he wrote: "We're still trying to get clarity on the allegations. We're not prepared to comment until we have more information about the ongoing situation."

Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them. This Sunday, books created by Alloy will be ranked at Nos. 1, 5 and 9 on The New York Times's children's paperback best-seller list.

"In a way it's kind of like working on a television show," said Cindy Eagan, editorial director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, a sister imprint of Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, and the publisher of the "Clique," "A-List" and "Gossip Girl" series. "We all work together in shaping each novel."

Depending on the series, some writers have more freedom to develop plot and characters than others. Ms. von Ziegesar, who created the concept, plots and characters for the "Gossip Girl" books while an editor at Alloy, went on to write the first eight books of the series. She said that while at Alloy she crafted carefully plotted packages for other series and recruited writers who were told to follow her directions closely. But other writers on different series received very broad-stroke outlines.

Ms. Viswanathan was, in some ways, an unusual Alloy author. She was not recruited by the packager, but rather, was introduced to it by William Morris, the agent. In an interview yesterday Ms. Viswanathan said that after an initial meeting with the book packager, "They asked about my life, who I was." She added, "Basically, it was like, 'Send us an e-mail writing about yourself that seems most natural.' "

Ms. Viswanathan said that she wrote about not having a boyfriend, about the pressure her friends were feeling to get into good colleges and about being an Indian-American girl.

"They liked that," Ms. Viswanathan said.

Alloy then worked with her on the book's first four chapters, making what Ms. Viswanathan described as very minor suggestions.

Once Little, Brown decided to buy the book, Ms. Viswanathan said that she worked almost exclusively with Asya Muchnick, an editor there.

But the publishing contract Little, Brown signed is actually with Alloy, which holds the copyright to "Opal" together with Ms. Viswanathan. Neither Little, Brown nor Alloy would comment on how much of the advance or the royalties — standard contracts give 15 percent of the cover price to the author — Ms. Viswanathan is to collect.

The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory.

Alloy works for many of the biggest publishing houses. The "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series has generated three best sellers for Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, while Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishes Alloy's "Au Pairs" and "Private" series.

Packagers have been around for decades, dating at least as far back as the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series. Today, packagers work not just in the teenage market, but on all kinds of titles, from illustrated coffee-table books and toddler series to self-help tomes and graphic novels.

But the market for young-adult fiction is undeniably hot for book packaging. The financial stakes are much higher: Carolyn Keene, the pen name for the writers of the Nancy Drew books, never earned a $500,000 advance, which Ms. Viswanathan received, The Boston Globe and others have reported. (Little, Brown said the amount was less than that.)

For publishers, the appeal is that the packagers will take care of jobs like copy-editing and designing book covers.

Despite the books' assembly-line production, their authors are still held to many of the same standards as more traditional authors. Ms. von Ziegesar said that her contract with Alloy stipulates that she "give them my own original material." She added, "In the end it really is the writer's responsibility."

That the rampant copying in Ms. Viswanathan's manuscript — more than 40 instances have been cited by Crown — went unnoticed seems surprising to outsiders. But within the genre "there are certainly similarities across the board," said Bethany Buck, a vice president and editorial director at Simon Pulse. "The teenage experience is fairly universal."

Little, Brown, for one, was not blaming Alloy. "Our understanding is that Kaavya wrote the book herself, so any problems are entirely the result of her writing and not the result of the packager's involvement in the book," said Michael Pietsch, the publisher.

Even officials at Random House, the parent company of Ms. McCafferty's publisher, said they did not consider Alloy responsible. "Most relationships with packagers and book producers have been relatively free of the kinds of problems cited in the coverage of this story," said Mr. Applebaum, the spokesman, "and beneficial for all concerned."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/bo... tner=homepage





Artist's Family Asks Google To Take Down 'Painted' Logo
Elise Ackerman

After angering authors last fall with a wide-ranging book-copying project, Google may now be alienating some visual artists as well by allegedly reproducing famous works in drawings on the search giant's home page.

Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google's logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site.

The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, had asked Google to remove the image early this morning.

``There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights,'' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society.

In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

``From time to time we create special logos to celebrate people we admire,'' the statement said. ``Joan Miro made an extraordinary contribution to the world with his art andwe want to pay tribute to that.''

Google has changed the logo on its homepage to commemorate events such as the Olympics or Albert Einstein's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Miro's birth in 1893. He died in 1983.

In September, the Authors Guild sued Google for reproducing works in its ``library project'' that were still under the protection of copyright. In a news release, Authors Guild president Nick Taylor called the project ``a plain and brazen'' violation of copyright law.

``It's not up to Google or anyone other than authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied,'' Taylor said.

According to the company's Web site, the library project aims to create a virtual card catalog for ``all books in all languages'' while ``carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights.''

Feder said the society had raised the issue of copyright violation with Google at least once before when the Mountain View-based company incorporated work by Salvador Dali into its logo in May 2002.

Feder said Google removed the Dali images soon after it was contacted by the society. As of mid-afternoon today, however, he had yet to receive a response from the company.

``It's a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,'' Feder said.

Google's logo allegedly incorporated images from Miro's ``The Escape Ladder,'' 1940, ``Nocture,'' 1940, and ``The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,'' 1941.

Feder said the society receives hundreds of requests each day from media organizations who are interested in reproducing a copyrighted work in some form. He said the authorization process is simple: all Google needed to do was send an e-mail asking permission to use the images.

``We would have asked the estate or the family, and they would have said yes or no,'' he said.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/14389478.htm





The Bottom Line on E-Textbooks
Edward Wyatt

REMEMBER the paperless society? That was the world that would emerge once there was a computer on every desktop. Well, there are computers in every dorm room and laptops in every lecture hall, but even at the front lines of the digital revolution, the printed textbook still rules.

Few students have warmed to electronic textbooks, despite their increasing flexibility and much cheaper price — typically 40 percent less than a new textbook and 20 percent less than a used one.

In one of the largest pushes to date, electronic versions of assigned textbooks are being made widely available for the first time, right next to their print counterparts at campus bookstores (before, you mostly found them through online specialty stores or directly through publishers, if at all). MBS Direct, which sells some 700 college textbooks in digital form, started the program at 10 campuses last fall and 31 this spring. Interest has been modest — about 5 percent of the total sales for a given text — but that's encouraging enough to expand to more than 300 campuses next semester, says Dennis Flanagan, chief executive of MBS Direct.

The electronic versions are easy to locate and operate. Instead of picking a book off the shelf, the student picks up a card that is scanned at the register, alerting MBS that the digital book has been bought. The card contains a scratch-off section with a registration number that the user types into a personal computer for access to the book, which can be downloaded.

So what are the roadblocks?

Some of the biggest complaints registered by early users have already been addressed. Students wanted to keep texts as reference material, but most e-books expired after a year. Six of the seven publishers that supply books to MBS responded by eliminating expiration dates; now most buyers have permanent access to the books they buy.

Students can also make margin notes and highlight text, making them more like their print cousins. Even better, the text contains search functions, hypertext links from the index and can be used with programs that read the text aloud — allowing students to listen to a book while ironing their shirts or exercising.

There are limits, however. Only 100 pages can be printed a week, a restriction meant to prevent copying and sharing with classmates. And while a digital book can be saved onto a disk, that copy can only be transferred to a computer registered to the same user via Microsoft's Passport Network. Students do like to share. According to a 2005 national survey by a college bookstore trade group, 47 percent don't buy all their assigned texts, and more than half of them borrow books to do the work.

E-textbooks may also be lagging because the economics, on closer inspection, make less sense. About half of textbooks are sold back to stores or to other students, the trade group reports, but electronic textbooks can't be resold. A student who sells back a print textbook can expect to get 50 percent of the cover price. For a new $60 book, that's a net cost of $30 at the end of the semester. For a used book, which might sell for $45 (75 percent of the price when it was new), the net cost is $15 if sold back. An electronic version would cost $36.

Given that students who get money for books from their parents might "forget" to return those end-of-semester refunds, an e-textbook user faces a far bigger potential loss of pocket money. Until that problem is solved, the future of digital textbooks could well be dim.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/ed.../innovate.html





Plugged In: Filesharing Is No Longer About Snatching A Few Songs Off The Internet. It's The Business Model Of The Future.
Chris French and Chris Megerian

You may not realize it, but for years you lived at the mercy of entertainment corporations. You watched their movies and listened to their music, when and where they wanted you to. For movies, you were a prisoner to the schedule of your local theater or cable channel. And there was no way to get a certain song off that hot new CD without driving to your local music store and dropping $15 on the entire disc.

Well, no more. You now control your entertainment. You download the music you want when you want it. You watch "24" on your iPod instead of having to sit in front of your TV at 9 p.m. on Mondays.

You have entered the on-demand world of content distribution. This is no small change. It hasn't been since the arrival of television sets in living rooms in the 1950s that the entertainment industry has been so profoundly impacted by technology.

Many college students' first encounter with filesharing was the music downloading service Napster, which went online in 1999. Since then, a variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - in which files are transferred between two parties electronically - have capitalized on high-speed broadband connectivity. In the digital world, anything can be copied an infinite number of times with no loss of quality, allowing for the easy proliferation of entertainment content.

For many people, filesharing has become almost synonymous with music - and rightfully so. The introduction of CD burners and MP3s sent music companies around the world scrambling to adapt to the changing market.

But as filesharing has matured, savvy entertainment businesses have introduced legal alternatives. Movies didn't enter the digital realm until 15 years after music, so the film industry had time to prepare for the shift. Movie companies are rolling with the punches, utilizing filesharing as a new means of content distribution instead of holding on to archaic business practices.

But filesharing is about more than entertainment - it's a mode of changing education, communication and business. Apple Computer's new service, iTunes U, allows individual universities to upload lectures, student productions and academic material. And the service may soon be coming to Emory.Teachers have been using programs like Blackboard for some time, but now the classroom is going online in a big way.

Welcome to the world of filesharing.

Illegal filesharing has expanded into film, but the original entertainment-based purpose of the technology was the distribution of music. According to Nielson SoundScan, an information system that tracks the sales of music and videos across the United States and Canada, physical CD sales fell 8 percent from 2004 to 2005. But digital music sales rose dramatically, and track downloads were up 150 percent. Digital album downloads went up 194 percent.

Total music purchases, including all tangible and online sales, went up 22.7 percent. But is this a good thing for the industry?

Not really. Booming digital sales still lead to a decline in overall profit. According to Nielson SoundScan, each downloaded track yields no more than one-tenth of the revenue of a physical CD.

The music industry has been hit hard by illegal filesharing and has been firing right back. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been making examples out of illegal downloaders with thousands of lawsuits. As of June 2005, the RIAA had filed a total of 11,050 lawsuits against people suspected of illegally downloading music. The 2,484 suits that were settled out of court fetched an average of $3,000 to $4,000 per pirate, according to Rolling Stone.

And the RIAA continues to target downloaders with litigation, filing 750 different lawsuits in February of this year. Although the association refuses to give up its right to protect material, some artists and listeners have voiced their disapproval of the RIAA's legal actions.

"First of all, [the suits] are not really going to change anything," says Dennis Lyxzén, vocalist for the punk band The (International) Noise Conspiracy. "The RIAA is just doing what people in authoritarian position have always done - they are using the scare tactic. Logically, there is no possible way to put in the resources to get all the filesharers, even though they make an example of a couple of them."

While the RIAA continues to use litigation as a primary weapon against illegal filesharers, the online filesharing network itself may remedy the problem through legal alternatives.

Mike Shea, founder of Alternative Press magazine, says filesharing has given rise to positive programs like pureVOLUME, MySpace and iTunes. "It has actually improved music and improved the potential careers of bands, because ... it has forced technology to take the lead in how music will be distributed and listened to," he says.

Furthermore, Shea insists that filesharing is bringing about the end of corporations' monopoly over bands and their music. Instead of being told what to listen to via the radio, individuals can choose what music is best suited for them through the Internet. Shea says this is increasing consumer satisfaction and popularizing small-time artists.

It's taken several years of setbacks for the music industry to realize the on-demand market is not worth fighting. But those in the movie business began taking a more proactive approach much more quickly. On April 4, "Brokeback Mountain" became the first movie released simultaneously on DVD and for download at movielink.com. The online service allows the "renting" (the file disappears from your hard drive after 24 hours) or purchase of hundreds of movies.

So why is the industry embracing filesharing? The movie business has also suffered staggering losses from illegal downloading. A 2005 study by Smith Barney, a global investment banking firm, showed that the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) had lost approximately $1.9 billion because of illegal filesharing via the Internet.

Coincidentally, U.S. box office revenue was down $550 million, and actual theater admission rates have decreased 8.7 percent since 2004. While eight films grossed more than $200 million in 2005, setting a record high, only 60 percent of these movies were able to recoup their production costs, which often rise above $100 million.

While the loss of these millions - maybe billions - of dollars cannot be solely blamed on illegal filesharing, its impact has been enough for the MPAA to establish a multifaceted plan for stopping the theft of intellectual property.

Like the RIAA, the movie industry also files lawsuits against illegal downloaders with the aim of "educating" potential digital thieves.

"We use [individual lawsuits] as well as an education effort whenever we file suits in different towns or different court districts," Gayle Osterberg, vice president of corporate communication for the MPAA, says. "We will send out news releases to the local media in an effort to have stories written about them, so that that one individual suit will raise awareness to a broader degree to the fact that there are consequences for illegally downloading movies."

Warner Brothers Entertainment, which is responsible for such blockbusters as the "Matrix" trilogy and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has implemented a similar plan to dealing with illegal downloading. The most important aspect of the plan is the pursuit of legal alternatives, says Yotam Ben-Ami, vice president of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations at Warner Brothers Entertainment in the United States. "Competing with pirates on their own turf," Ben-Ami says. "For example, in the case of online piracy, this consists of offering video-on-demand services, building a legitimate alternative to piracy."

Such a preventative measure is an example of using filesharing technology to combat illegal filesharing. "We want people to see our movies," Osterberg says. "We invest a lot of money into making them, and we want people to be able to see them in a range of different ways. ... Whether you are talking about ABC and its partnership with iPod, or CBS that's providing programming to Google Video; Sony providing movies to PlayStation Portable - they're all exploring these new delivery channels."

NBC Universal signed a deal with peer-to-peer downloading service Wurld Media in November of 2005 to allow the online distribution of certain movies. Like the Movielink service, each movie can be "rented" for 24 hours.

Warner Brothers is hopping on the technology bandwagon as well, affirming its desire to embrace new advancements as a way to promote legal means of viewing films.

"The digital world has opened a lot of possibilities for us - it's not something that we are trying to catch up to, it's something that we've been embracing," says Craig Hoffman, director of Worldwide Anti-piracy Corporate Communications for Warner Brothers Entertainment. "We just want to be able to use it in a way that's safe and fair." Ben-Ami pointed to Warner Brothers' partnerships with America Online and Arvato Mobile in Germany as an indication of the corporation's desire to seek new forms of content delivery. Both of these companies will begin hosting P2P networking for those interested in swapping legal movie files.

And what does all of this mean for you, the consumer? More content, when you want it.

College campuses have started to utilize filesharing as well. Currently, schools like the University of Rochester, George Washington University and Cornell University offer Napster to students. When Pennsylvania State University signed on with Napster in the spring of 2004, 10,000 students joined in six weeks. For $2 a month, each student can download an unlimited number of songs. But they can only store them in a maximum of three hard drives and the songs disappear from their hard drives once they end their subscription.

For more than a year, Emory junior Kevin Rosenbaum discussed with administrators the prospect of bringing a music downloading service to campus. The idea was pitched as a way to make Emory more enjoyable for students and as a means of keeping the University from being held liable for how students use its network. "We'd like to help keep our students out of trouble and help keep Emory out of trouble," says Senior Vice President and Dean for Campus Life John Ford.

But after winter break, Director of Academic Technology Services at Emory Alan Cattier suggested to Ford that filesharing could bring more than just music to Emory. Cattier is responsible for examining ways technology can be used to further academic programs at Emory, and he sees iTunes U as a door to a world of electronic opportunity. The question is, he says, "How can filesharing be used legitimately for an academic purpose?"

iTunes U was released late in 2005, starting out at Stanford University and the University of Michigan Dental School. Since early March of this year, Apple has begun accepting applications from other schools to expand the service.

Essentially, iTunes U allows each school to manage its own free music store. It functions differently than just a prettier version of Blackboard. Anybody can upload audio, video or text files to specific "containers." Containers can be created by professors for their classes, by student musicians for their music, or by campus groups to share files. Imagine Emory's undergraduate e-mail system, LearnLink, Ford says, "But multiply that by sound, video, information of all different types. The mind boggles."

By dragging the file into a drop box, material can be uploaded to the massive Apple server, which has enough hard drive space to hold up to 2,500 hours of video. An Emory staff person would approve all content to make sure it isn't copyrighted or inappropriate.

For Ford and Cattier, filesharing has become a community-building tool. "The radical thing is what we enable for the campus," Cattier says. "You see the opportunity for the campus to better communicate some of the things they're involved in."

For now, the pursuit of a regular music downloading sevice at Emory has been put on hold. The iTunes U proposal is currently in the evaluation phase, says Cattier, as he gauges faculty and student interest. He hopes to bring it to a vote in the Information Technology Governance Committee before the summer.

Cattier says some faculty could be wary that too much technology may hurt the traditional in-class experience. But that's not the case for Carol Herron, director of Emory's Language Center.

A large part of teaching a language is immersing a student in it, she says, and making language files available through iTunes U would be another step in that direction. "Anything you do to make education materials accessible to students is positive," she says. Language files now kept on a Web site could be stored on a student's iPod and listened to anywhere the student wanted.

Ford says the idea's benefits far outweigh any potential negatives. "This idea is so exciting to me, I can't see anyone standing in the way of it," he says.

Much like filesharing has revolutionized the entertainment industry, it could play a large role in redefining higher education. It's not a stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the physical essence of a college community is placed online.

As Ford says, "If you really push the idea, it could change a lot of traditional perceptions of what a university is."
http://media.www.emorywheel.com/medi...epublisher.com