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Old 01-06-06, 11:17 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 3rd, ’06

































"To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society." – Shawn Carlson


"That's not what we call Internet at all. That's what we call cable TV." – Sir Tim Berners-Lee


"This [Court’s] approach of course finds no support anywhere in our legal system, and was clearly erroneous." – Ray Beckerman


"We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace." – P.J. Rushing


"Whatever is given to trade secrets law is taken away from the freedom of speech. Where both cannot be accommodated, it is the statutory quasi-property right that must give way, not the deeply rooted constitutional right to share and acquire information." – P.J. Rushing


"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers. It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function." – Kurt Opsahl


"We didn't sit down and think, 'What's the best way to make money on the Internet?' This is very much a labor of love. When we started the company, there was no commercial use of the Internet." – Col Needham


"This is what the summer is all about. With `Da Vinci Code' doing better than anticipated ... we could not be in a better position." – Paul Dergarabedian


"People smoke when they drink, and people smoke when they fornicate. These smoking laws are going to drive women back onto the streets courtesy of the health minister." – William Albon


"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless." – Henry Gerbus






























An Angry Establishment Missteps

Popular torrent site operators at The Pirate Bay got a startling wake up call when 50 of Sweden's finest raided the feisty little group, seizing servers, arresting members at home and - open wide kids! - taking DNA samples. The good news is that Sweden's crime rate is now so low the cops have plenty of time on their hands. The bad news is that dozens of them are spending it by terrorizing tiny groups at the behest of U.S. interests. The MPAA crowed victorious about the raid but they'll be begging for the thorazine soon. The bold violation of these Swede's sovereign rights has sparked outrage over both the scope of police abuse and the growing power of international conglomerates that use extra-legal means to accomplish what they otherwise can't.

It is not so different here.

In the States the judge-musician who found the late ex-Beatle George Harrison guilty of plagiarism is now hearing an RIAA John Doe file-sharing case and has denied defense motions to quash a shaky subpoena, appearing, according to the defense both erroneous and ignorant of the law, not to mention having a possible conflict of interest. It is apparently Federal Judge Richard Owen's dangerous contention that the mere fact of possessing property suggests it's stolen. To the judge, having music on a computer means by definition it's probably ill-gotten and must be investigated, something I'm sure Apples' legions of paying iTunes customers would be startled to hear.

Clearly this judge was acting clueless, but he got away with it under the nose of defense attorney Ray Beckerman and maybe that's even worse. It's Beckerman's job to convince the court, by education if necessary, of the profound fallacy of such thinking. He should have insisted to the judge that the act of placing music on a hard drive must come with a presumption of innocence, that simply having a song on a computer cannot mean it is there illegally, because if it did then every single computer user in the United States is a presumptive felon because they all have files! That's the RIAA's circular reasoning in essence and I think the judge would've grasped the utter nonsense of it had it been explained in such a way, assuming he wasn't being deliberately obtuse. Then again as an aspiring opera composer the judge can be expected to have such compositions on his own hard drive so being obtuse, deliberately or otherwise might not be beyond the realm of possibility. The RIAA lawyer slipped by Beckerman, dizzying Owens with conspiratorial chaff about Kazaa share folders the judge wasn't making much of an effort to follow and weren't particularly relevant anyway. Motion denied!

We see this over and over again. Our cultural rights lost not only by lawmakers and jurists who don't get it, but by the very people hired to defend us who don't quite get it or can't explain it either.

Very unfortunate.

Contrast this with the appeals verdict last week on the Apple bloggers vs. the California Superior court. That court originally ruled against the bloggers, demanding their sources of leaked Apple marketing plans, but the appeals court decisively overturned the judgment on every count. For anyone interested in how a responsible court should work, with judges that actually take the time to grasp the issues, look no further. It's a well-reasoned, important legal decision.


Quote:
"It is often impossible to predict with confidence which technological changes will affect individual and collective life dramatically, and which will come and go without lasting effects. Any of them may revolutionize society in ways we can only guess at. The lawful acquisition of information necessary to anticipate and respond to such changes is the birthright of every human, formally enshrined for Americans in our state and federal constitutions. The publications at issue here fully implicated that birthright and the interests protected by those constitutional guarantees."
With language both common and lofty he focuses his argument,

Quote:
"We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace."
And arrives at the heart of the matter (emphasis mine),

Quote:
"This case involves not a purely private theft of secrets for venal advantage, but a journalistic disclosure to, in the trial court's words, 'an interested public.' In such a setting, whatever is given to trade secrets law is taken away from the freedom of speech. In the abstract, at least, it seems plain that where both cannot be accommodated, it is the statutory quasi-property right that must give way, not the deeply rooted constitutional right to share and acquire information."
As long as we have judges like this in office in the West, we will not totally abandon the hope that our constantly diminishing rights here both in America and Europe may be restored.

There were a few things I had planned for the holiday weekend, but one I didn't anticipate was reading a sixty-six page legal brief. Kudos to this court of appeals for writing one that was worth it.
















Enjoy,

Jack.


















June 3rd, ’06






Judge Says He Will Deny John Does' Motion to Vacate and Quash in Warner v. Does 1-149

Friday, May 19, 2006. In Warner v. Does 1-149 today, at the first major oral argument of a motion by "John Doe" defendants to (a) vacate the RIAA's ex parte discovery order, (b) quash the subpoena issued pursuant to the order, and (c) sever and dismiss the case as to all "John Does" other than Doe #1, Judge Richard Owen terminated the oral argument with an indication that he was denying the John Doe defendants' motion to vacate the ex parte discovery order and quash the subpoena issued to ISP Time Warner Cable. The judge did not indicate how he would rule on so much of the motion as sought to sever and dismiss as to John Does 2-149 for misjoinder.

Among the issues which had been put in issue by the motion papers were:

-whether the evidence the RIAA had submitted in support of the ex parte order sufficiently made out a prima facie case;

-whether the evidence the RIAA submitted was technically valid;

-whether merely 'making available' is a copyright infringement;

-whether the complaint in the action adequately pleads copyright infringement; and

-whether there was any basis for joining 149 different defendants in one case.

During the argument the Judge first indicated it was his understanding that plaintiffs had alleged that the exhibit A songs were downloaded by the defendants.

When the RIAA's lawyer conceded that the downloads were by the RIAA's own investigators, the Judge said the RIAA had the right to find out if in fact the defendants had downloaded them too.

When the defendants' lawyer -- the undersigned -- brought to the Court's attention that files on the defendants' computer might have been downloaded lawfully, the Judge cut off the defendants' lawyer's argument, and said that was the weakness in the defendants' case -- the word "might". The judge then indicated he was denying defendants' motion.

Earlier in the argument, when defendants' lawyer said that the plaintiffs' lawsuits were 'wrecking people's lives', the Judge asked where defendants' lawyer was getting that from, and indicated that in view of that statement he was inclined to disbelieve anything defendants' lawyer might say.

The proceedings were recorded, and a transcript will be posted when it becomes available.

Warner v. Does is the case where two Two "John Does", one from the Southwest, the other from the Greater New York area, joined forces in Manhattan to fight back against the RIAA.

As it did in Motown v. Does 1-99 , the RIAA hesitated to adopt the strategy it had employed in Atlantic v. Does 1-25, and refrained from introducing any evidence in opposition to the defendants' motion. In Atlantic it had introduced a second declaration by RIAA executive Jonathan Whitehead which contradicted his first declaration, in attempting to rebut the attack by computer programmer Zi Mei on the legitimacy of the RIAA's "investigation". In this case, as in Motown, it only introduced a memorandum of law by its counsel.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...john-does.html



'A Dark Moment For Our Country'
p2pnet

"All in all, this was a dark moment for our country."

That's New York lawyer Ray Beckerman's view on a decision by judge Richard Owen where two John Does, one from the Southwest the other from New York, teamed up in Manhattan to fight back against the Big Four Organized Music cartel's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

Beckerman represented both Does.

"I'm very disappointed in the proceedings," he told p2pnet. "I was hoping for a full and fair opportunity to air the landmark issues that were before the court. Instead, it seemed that the court wasn't familiar with the facts or the law, and placed a burden on the defendants to disprove the unsupported allegations the plaintiffs' counsel had irresponsibly made in their complaint and discovery application.

"This approach of course finds no support anywhere in our legal system, and was clearly erroneous.

"The judge first indicated it was his understanding that the plaintiffs had evidence that the defendants had made unauthorized downloads. When the RIAA's counsel - to his credit - admitted that the evidence showed only downloads by plaintiffs' own investigators, the judge then ruled that the RIAA is entitled to bring lawsuits to find out if the defendants had in fact downloaded the songs illegally, and cut off the oral argument.

"The judge also indicated that he was disinclined to believe anything I would say because I had said that the RIAA's lawsuits 'wreck people's lives'.

"I don't think that was an appropriate approach for a judge to take, especially on such important issues. If the Court's ruling were appealable, I'd file an appeal. Unfortunately it isn't. And it will never be subject to review by an appeals court, because the RIAA will - as it always does - discontinue the John Doe lawsuit."

During the argument, Owen first said he understood the labels had alleged songs were downloaded by the Does, says Beckerman, going on:

"When the RIAA's lawyer conceded that the downloads were by the RIAA's own investigators, the judge said the RIAA had the right to find out if in fact the defendants had downloaded them too.

"When, as the defendants' lawyer, I brought to the Court's attention that files on the defendants' computer might have been downloaded lawfully, the Judge cut off my argument, and said that was the weakness in the defendants' case - the word 'might'. The judge then indicated he was denying defendants' motion.

"Earlier in the argument, when I said that the plaintiffs' lawsuits were 'wrecking people's lives', the Judge asked where defendants' lawyer was getting that from, and indicated that in view of that statement he was inclined to disbelieve anything defendants' lawyer might say."

As it did in Motown v. Does 1-99 , the RIAA, "hesitated to adopt the strategy it had employed in Atlantic v. Does 1-25, and refrained from introducing any evidence in opposition to the defendants' motion," states Beckerman. In Atlantic, it introduced testimony by the RIAA's Jonathan Whitehead which contradicted his first statement when he'd tried to rebut the attack by computer programmer Zi Mei on the legitimacy of the RIAA's "investigation".

Here's an excerpt from transcript. 'Gabriel' is Holme Roberts & Owen lawyer Richard Gabriel.


THE COURT: You are skipping over one sentence, which it reads that: "Exhibit A identifies on a defendant-by-defendant basis that each defendant has, without the permission or consent of the plaintiffs, downloaded."

MR. GABRIEL: Distributed and --

THE COURT: But you don't need to go beyond "downloaded," do you?

MR. GABRIEL: I submit we don't. What the law requires, contrary to what Mr. Beckerman says, is we need to allege in a Complaint that we own a valid copyright, that we have registered the valid copyright, and that the plaintiffs had violated exclusive rights.

THE COURT: Isn't that the end of it?

MR. GABRIEL: And we have done that.

MR. BECKERMAN: Ask him to identify which songs the defendant downloaded.

THE COURT: He did. He does in Exhibit A.

MR. BECKERMAN: No, he does not.

THE COURT: Yes, he does.

MR. BECKERMAN: If he does, he misrepresents to the Court. Ask him what basis he has --

THE COURT: Counsel, look at Doe 37. The artist is named what, Linkin Park, "One Step Closer."

MR. BECKERMAN: Your Honor, Mr. Gabriel described to your Honor the investigation that he conducted. He said to you -- he represented to your Honor that the investigation consisted of his investigators at MediaSentry, using some proprietary software and techniques, went on and downloaded these songs, and that's what Exhibit A is. He's saying that the plaintiffs' agents downloaded those songs.

THE COURT: He said the defendants downloaded it. They allege the defendant downloaded.

MR. BECKERMAN: He has no basis for alleging that and he told your Honor what the basis was.

THE COURT: He said if you go to trial and it doesn't end up being proven, you have won your case.

MR. BECKERMAN: But he is here to admit to you that he has no evidence of anybody -- of the defendants having downloaded those songs. He has no clue as to how the defendants --

THE COURT: Counsel, would you tell me how you get, for example, to Doe 37? What I'm hearing here I'm having trouble putting in some frame of rationality.

MR. GABRIEL: Yes, your Honor.

THE COURT: Tell me, how do you get to the seven or eight songs for Doe 37?

MR. GABRIEL: We find these particular Doe share files, as a number of all the other Does. We then will take a picture of what is in their computer shared file.

THE COURT: Showing where it went?

MR. GABRIEL: It doesn't show a line. We know it got to their computer, and we believe that provides a sufficient Rule 11 basis for asserting downloading. Somehow it got to their shared drive, and we do take it and make -- we then download ourselves so we can confirm that it is our copyrighted recording by listening to it, by making sure this is our recording.

THE COURT: Run this by me again, please. You hav somebody go where?

MR. GABRIEL: Right into Kazaa, one of these programs like you or I could.

THE COURT: Right.

MR. GABRIEL: And then they will look for people's shared files who have a large number of music files.

THE COURT: How do you get, for example, to Mariah Carey's "One Sweet Day"?

MR. GABRIEL: By looking at the person's shared file.We get the whole shared file, and not everything --

THE COURT: But tell me, whose shared file?

MR. GABRIEL: We get the defendant's shared file, the shared file on the computer associated with the defendant.

THE COURT: With at this point only identified as 37?

MR. GABRIEL: That's correct. Actually, more specifically identified by this Internet protocol address that I referred to you.

THE COURT: I got you.

MR. GABRIEL: So we know the numbers --

THE COURT: You look in that person's shared file?

MR. GABRIEL: Right.

THE COURT: And you see that they've got Mariah Carey in there?

MR. GABRIEL: Right.

THE COURT: OK. And there is no authorization for that?

MR. GABRIEL: Right.

MR. BECKERMAN: Nope, your Honor, they have no knowledge of how that file got there. It might be completely lawful. It could be a lawful --

THE COURT: It might be, but you know, if the bank robber is running away from a bank in a car and he's got a bag with $5,000 in the back, he might say I took that out as a loan, and, therefore, you've got an issue of fact as between him and the bank as to whether this isn't the guy they gave $5,000 at the point of a gun. So that might be -- what you just said is in my opinion what kills your position here. They've got this and if it might be, and it is logical that it is and entirely possible that it could be, they want to know who it is and you want to depose him, right?

MR. BECKERMAN: No, they want to sue him.

THE COURT: Sue him, of course.

MR. BECKERMAN: Your Honor, the plaintiff has the burden of establishing that they have a case. If your Honor --

THE COURT: I find on these papers they have established that, and, therefore, your motion to suppress these subpoenas is denied.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8906





The Pirate Bay

SITE DOWN - WILL BE UP AND FULLY FUNCTIONAL WITHIN A DAY OR TWO

In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.

The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrĺn, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.

According to police officers simultaneously questioning the president of Rix|Port80, the purpose of the search warrant is to take down TPB in order to secure evidence of the allegations mentioned above.

The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.

The TPB can receive compensation from the Swedish state in case that the upcoming legal processes show that TPB is indeed legal.
http://thepiratebay.org/





Police Close File Sharing Site
James Savage

Police have closed down The Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based file sharing site and one of the most popular websites of its kind in the world.

Three people were taken in for questioning after police raids in Sweden on Wednesday. The trio, ages 22, 24 and 28, are suspected of violating property rights legislation, police spokesman Ulf Göranzon said.

Servers connected to the site have been impounded and the site was down on Wednesday afternoon, although the operators of The Pirate Bay have set up a temporary website to provide updates on the situation.

Some fifty policemen and women were involved in raids on ten homes and offices in Sweden.

The three men taken in by police were still being questioned on Wednesday afternoon. They all have links to The Pirate Bay. Prosecutors will decide whether to detain the men after they have been questioned.

"The suspects are not people who download files, but are people who have relations to the website," Ulf Göranzon told The Local.

He would not reveal anything more about the roles that the men played.

Police have been monitoring the website and the men behind it for some time. Computers were taken during raids on the men's homes and offices to secure evidence.

"We are now going to look at how the operation is structured," Göranzon said.

"At the moment we are talking to lots of people about this case. We are still at a very early stage in our investigations," he said.

He would not reveal whether police had their eyes on further suspects.

Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Antipiratbyrĺn (The Anti-Pirate Bureau) in Stockholm, welcomed the move to close down the site.

"It is good that the Swedish police are now prioritising this kind of crime. The copyright laws finance creativity within film, computer gaming, music and other culture," said Pontén.

"People who break copyright laws steal from the creators and movie-watching public of the future. The closure of The Pirate Bay is therefore good for all of us who enjoy new film and entertainment."

But Tobias Andersson at pressure group Piratbyrĺn (The Pirate Bureau), which founded The Pirate Bay, stressed that there was no copyright-protected material on the servers.

“The Anti-Pirate Bureau has clearly misled the police in this case, “ said Andersson.

“They appear to have persuaded police who are incompetent in IT that the servers in question are full of copyright-protected material. This is a gross misuse of taxpayers’ money.”

Andersson also condemned the fact that police had closed down a number of other websites, including The Pirate Bureau, which he says is no longer officially linked to the Pirate Bay.

“This is the greatest infringement. The Anti-Pirate Bureau has clearly fooled the police into closing down its antagonists, The Pirate Bureau.”

“We are very upset that the film industry doesn’t dare to have a debate , and chooses instead to trick politicians and the police into criminalizing their opponents and a large portion of the Swedish population.”

The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent tracker, which enables people to download large files such as movies from other users.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3955





YARR! Swedish Police Site Broadsided After Pirate Bay Raid
Eric Bangeman

It looks like the raid on The Pirate Bay and confiscation of its servers upset somebody. That's one conclusion to be drawn from the sudden unavailability of the web site of Sweden's national police. Beginning last night, the the site came under a widespread and intense denial of service attack, according to National Police Administration Director Lars Lindahl.

"Our homepage had to handle 500,000 visits per second and it's obviously not going to handle that. It's sort of like 10,000 people calling the same phone switch at once."

According to Lindahl, the attack began at 9:30pm local time. Judging by the time it's taking to load polisen.se, the attack seems to be still going on in full force, despite assurances that the site would be back up by now. The Swedish police are investigating the origin of the attack.

Warner Music and Sony's web sites were also attacked, but in this case, a single Turkish hacker is thought to be responsible. It's doubtful that the hack is related to the DoS broadside against the Swedish police, although the timing is interesting.

The Pirate Bay is arguably the largest and most popular torrent site in the world, and news of the raid was met with great dismay by fans of the site. Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party affiliated with a view on copyright very similar to The Pirate Bay, has called the raid illegal. They have also accused the Swedish government of responding to pressure from American media companies, a concern shared by others in the country.

"We want to find out whether pressure from the U.S. government was behind the action," Center Party spokesman Johan Linander said. "I think all of this smells of direct political influence and we want to reach clarity about who really did what."

Three people affiliated with the torrent site were taken into custody after the raid and have since been released. Swedish police say that despite their release, they still face possible criminal charges.

The Pirate Bay maintains that the raid was a violation of Swedish law and that the site will be back up "soon," operating from another country this time. In the meantime, Piratpariet and the Pirate Bureau are organizing "Pirate Demonstration Saturday," a protest in Stockholm beginning at 3pm local time.

"This is no longer about just a raid on the Pirate Bay, but has become a major justice scandal. We have contacted all Parliamentary parties and their youth organizations regarding a demonstration we are planning," says Pirate Bureau spokesman Marcin de Kaminski.

Let's be clear about one thing: taking a law enforcement site offline with a DoS attack is bad, m'kay? That said, it is apparent that the action against The Pirate Bay has struck a nerve with the public. It's doubtful that this marks the start of any widespread backlash against Hollywood, the MPAA, and the RIAA. But in Sweden, this looks to be turning into a major political scandal, as accusations of knuckling under to US influence are growing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060602-6969.html





Russian Download Site Is Popular and Possibly Illegal
Thomas Crampton

Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, except for one important detail: The site may well be illegal.

So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that American trade negotiators darkly warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.

Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3 offers a vast catalogue of music that includes artists who have not permitted their work to be sold online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction the cost of services like Apple Computer's iTunes service.

Sold by the megabyte instead of by the song, an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents per song on iTunes.

And unlike iTunes and other commercial services, songs purchased with AllofMP3's downloading software have no restrictions on copying.

It is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia, considered to be a hotbed of digital piracy and theft of intellectual property, courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.

Music industry officials say AllofMP3, which first came to their attention in 2004, is a large-scale commercial piracy site, and they dismiss its claims of legality. "It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, who is based in Washington.

People associated with AllofMP3, which lists no telephone contacts on its Web site, declined to comment for this article when tracked down by domain-name ownership records kept by Verisign. Those records show that Ivan Fedorov of Media Services in Moscow is the owner.

AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site features a wide selection of Russian music, but is written in English with prices listed in United States dollars.

AllofMP3 asserts its legality by citing a license issued by a collecting society, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.

In most countries, the collecting societies that receive royalty payments for the sale or use of artistic works need reciprocal agreements with overseas copyright holders, according to agencies that represent right holders.

According to Russia's 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. Collecting societies have thus been set up to gather royalties for foreign copyright holders without their authorization. Infringement cases have also affected foreign-produced software, films and books.

The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.

"These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists," said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation. "They play off a bizarre aspect of the Russian law that we are lobbying to change."

Consumers have been flocking to the site, particularly from Britain, where a survey in March ranked AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in popularity among self-described music enthusiasts surveyed by XTN Data.

Amazon.com's Web site rating service, Alexa, ranks AllofMP3 as having the 986th highest level of traffic of any site on the Web over the past three months.

Use in the United States reached 345,000 unique visitors in April, an increase of 57 percent over January, but a tiny fraction of the 19 million that used the iTunes software online, according to Comscore, a service that monitors the habits of Internet users.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...rmoney/mp3.php





Loading the iPod With Egalitarianism

French bills have firms singing blues
John Ward Anderson

PARIS -- All is not well in the French world of digital music, as Nicolas Paitre, a salesman at one of Paris's largest electronics stores, hears from customers every day.

Filing into Surcouf, a glitzy French electronics chain where Paitre specializes in digital music gadgets, they have the same bewildered looks and exasperated queries:

I can download digital songs from one company, but I can't play them on another company's machine?

My hard drive with all my music files crashed, and I can't transfer the songs from my handheld into a new computer?

Oui and oui again. The legal and technical issues of protecting music copyrights are so complex, Paitre said, that many music lovers "feel stuck in the middle" and eventually are forced into the business of trying to foil the protections on their own.

Now comes France's National Assembly to the rescue, or so claim lawmakers who have crafted legislation to force compatibility between digital songs and the different machines that play them. Under the proposed law, Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc. and other companies could have to reveal trade secrets of their software so that their songs can play on competitors' devices.

Laypeople call it the iPod bill, after Apple's hugely successful digital music player. The tiny device plays songs downloaded from Apple's online music store embedded with code that prevents them from being played on anything other than an iPod. Many American music lovers complain about this incompatibility, too, but haven't been able to get Congress behind them.

French lawmakers say their bill is enlightened consumerism for cutting-edge technology, an effort to force Apple and other companies to freely compete, rather than relying on techno-secrets to crush the competition.

"We oppose the idea that the seller of a song or any kind of work can impose on the consumer the way to read it, forever, and especially in the consumer's home," said Assembly member Christian Paul. "Can we allow a couple of vendors to establish monopolies tightly controlling their clients and excluding competition?"

After the bill first came to light, Apple denounced it as "state-sponsored piracy." Without encryption, the company argued, people would be able to digitally transfer music to one another for free, without paying royalties to the artists, and in violation of copyright laws. Industry analysts say the company might withdraw its music products from France rather than submit to the law. After its initial remarks, Apple has refused comment on the legislation.

The Assembly's proposal is "about ripping off technology from those who developed it and putting it in the public domain," said Francisco Mingorance, European policy director for the Business Software Alliance, which represents Apple, Dell, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other major companies.

"It's more than just Apple. What's been adopted is a broad, sweeping exception to intellectual property rights and patents and software under the flag of interoperability between an iPod and your Sony," he said. "Businesses in France are going to have to ask themselves a question: Is our continuing presence in the French market outweighed by the risks of disclosing our content to more piracy?"

In the midst of the debate, the French Senate passed a version of the bill with changes that consumer advocates say would gut it. According to Loic Dachary, vice president of the Free Software Foundation France, the Senate bill would leave computer companies with too much control over hardware and software.

"From a citizen's point of view, it's like having a policeman in your machine who has all the power," he said. "If Apple is allowed to keep its secrets, then no other programs can interact with their programs. This is not competition, this is software totalitarianism."

Both versions would decriminalize piracy and make it equivalent to a traffic infraction, with fines that computer companies say are so small they would offer no deterrence. Software companies complain that the law could hold them accountable for piracy that occurs with use of their products, even if that is not the purpose of the software.

The debate pits French egalitarianism and its tilt toward consumers and regulation against American capitalism and its tilt toward business and markets. Also in the mix is a dose of French nationalism and concern about the U.S. dominance of cyberspace.

"The idea in France is to protect consumers, but in the U.S., it would be seen as short-term protection, because if you are forced to share the technology you developed with others, that stifles the incentives to innovate and invest," said Andrea Renda, an economic and legal analyst at the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. "In France, there is a tendency to protect competitors, not just competition. It's very short-sighted."

Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute of International Relations, said that "in France, it is the state which is responsible for great technical innovations, and there is also an emphasis on what is called 'cultural diversity' -- the idea that you must have more than one source of national expertise, and that in particular, you should not let America monopolize the technologies of the future."

French President Jacques Chirac feels strongly about those issues, analysts said. Fearing that Internet search engines -- particularly Google and Yahoo -- are heavily biased toward British and American culture and sensibilities, he has proposed the development of a "European search engine" known as Quaero (Latin for "I seek"). The public-private venture could cost $1.2 billion or more.

Chirac is also a driving force behind the public-private development of a $300 million, 6 million-title European Digital Library as an alternative to Google's proposed digitization of 15 million books from collections at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.

France supports the European Union's efforts to strip the United States of its effective technical control of the Internet and turn over regulatory oversight to an international body, perhaps the United Nations. Chirac has also pushed for a state-funded, French-language alternative to CNN and the BBC that is scheduled to be launched later this year.

"In France, there are two distinct mentalities," said Christian Vanneste, the National Assembly sponsor of the iPod bill. "On one side is the backwards left, which is anti-American, and on the other is the right, which thinks that the U.S.A. shouldn't be the only one with good ideas, and who want to compete with them."

The two versions of the bill that have passed the National Assembly and Senate now await reconciliation in a conference committee.

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...?nav=rss_world





HONG KONG: War On Piracy Recruits 200,000 Youthful Spies

State anti-Internet piracy campaign launched, 200,000 youths enlisted to report illegal file transfers
Rickin Majithia

The government has recruited 200,000 members of youth groups to spy on internet activity and report illegal file transfers as part of an anti-internet piracy campaign launched yesterday.

Senior Superintendent Tam Yiu-Kueng, of Customs' Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said the involvement of youth groups provided his department with extra monitoring capabilities.

"Initially we used 700 cadets from the Civil Aid Service for a three-month period," he said. "In that time we received over 800 reports of people illegally uploading... We were then able to inform the copyright holder and subsequently ask the website to remove the illegal content. If only 700 youths brought us such good results in three months, I think we will be very successful when the full 200,000 start helping us on July 19."

The campaign, jointly organised by the Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau, the Customs and Excise Department and the Intellectual Property Department, includes two television and radio ads to encourage parents to monitor their children's internet activities.

Intellectual Property Department director Stephen Selby stressed the need for parental involvement. "We can't do this by ourselves, it is important for parents to watch what their kids are doing on the Net," he said.

At the launch, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology Joseph Wong Wing-Ping said the government is considering releasing a public consultation paper on internet privacy this year. The document would also cover copyright protection in the digital world, he told the launch ceremony.

"We will study how to facilitate copyright owners to take civil action against infringing activities on the internet as well as the role of internet service providers ... Because it involves privacy we must be very careful - but we will study the examples set by other countries first," he said.

"The important thing is that it is not just enforcement and prosecution which matter.

"The important thing is that we really need to continue to convey the message to members of the public, in particular to our younger generation, that it is wrong to commit such an act."

Customs will trial an intellectual property protection scheme, called the Fast Action Scheme, at an electronic products exhibition in October. It aims to protect companies at trade fairs by allowing them to register products and copyright in advance. If an infringement occurs, it is hoped customs officers will be able to identify the culprit by checking the product records.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=46920





µTorrent Spyware/Adware Claims Refuted
Thomas Mennecke

µTorrent began as a BitTorrent favorite. Its small memory and CPU consumption footprint, coupled with a total package size of less than 1 megabyte and near-full functionality, gave few people a reason to complain against this BitTorrent client.

The honeymoon came to a screeching halt on February 28, 2006, when PeerFactor and µTorrent announced a six month deal to distribute authorized content online. This drew the ire of the µTorrent community, who remember the days when PeerFactor was affiliated with French anti-piracy company RetSpan. The two companies separated in late 2005 however, and the newly formed PeerFactor SARL are now working on P2P distribution software rather than anti-piracy technology, (although their website is still linked from the RetSpan homepage.)

The controversy blew over, and µTorrent avoided a disaster.

Being the magnet link for controversy it is however, µTorrent is once against finding itself the center of attention. This time, reports of third party software (adware, spyware) have begun to shake some of the µTorrent faithful.

The latest version of µTorrent, version 1.5, contains an integrated search feature. The end user can opt to search several of the major search engines, such as Mininova, ThePirateBay, TorrentSpy, and isoHunt. Once the search is conducted, an independent browser window is opened. Instead of going to the Mininova.org domain however, the browser is directed to NanoTorrent.com. Once redirected, the browser displays a 728x90 UseNext ad, along with the queired torrent files. UseNext is a newsgroup portal that offers “anonymous, uncensored access to Usenet.”

But does µTorrent’s affiliation with UseNext advertising earn the label of being an adware or spyware client?

Definitely not. When the P2P curious download µTorrent, they only receive the µTorrent client and nothing else. No tracking cookies, no data miners, and no Bonzi Buddies.

“Nothing else than µTorrent is installed, like it always has been,” Ludvig Strigeus told Slyck.com.

Once the banner ad appears, one may question whether information is subsequently collected via data miners or some other clandestine method. Reassuringly, the ads are simple HTML delivered banners via Ludvig’s owned NanoTorrent.com website.

“Nothing is placed on the user's machine [when the NanoTorrent browser opens,]” Ludvid explains. “It's an advertisement inside the web browser only, the ad comes from a webserver owned by me, and it's removed when the window is closed. No cookies at all are installed, not even my own…The ads are generated by the script on the webserver. The µTorrent client as such does not contain any ads. They are generated by the webserver and shown through a php script to the webbrowser when the user searches.”

The arrangement is part of a standard affiliate program, where µTorrent benefits financially whenever a new user signs up for UseNext. Additional testing found no evidence of any third party or malicious software. By comparison, it’s little different than conducting Google search via FireFox’s plugin. µTorrent may use ads to support development, however Ludvig's creation is not an adware client.

µTorrent took considerable effort to avoid including third party software in their client; and opted to keep the ads dedicated on an independent domain. Not every file-sharing client does this, and speaks volumes on µTorrent’s commitment to keep the reputation of their client intact.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1199





BitTorrent: Shedding No Tiers
Adam Livingstone

Newsnight's ubergeek talks to BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and finds him distinctly equivocal about fears of a two speed internet.

So there's me driving up to Homebase to get some new wine glasses for my posh media chums to come round and watch the World Cup. And I get to within half a mile of the store and my car starts to slow down.

Before I know it, I'm doing five miles an hour. What's more, half the other cars around me are doing the same. But the cars on the other side of the road are all fine. So I turn round and head home and suddenly it's all back to normal. "What on earth is going on?" as our man Paxman would say.

"It's simple" said the grease monkey at my local garage. "The people who made your car have done a deal with B&Q. They've fixed it so that if you ever drive towards Homebase, you'll start going at 5 miles an hour."

Network neutrality

Alert readers among you might observe that I'm talking rubbish, and, despite this being the BBC, I must admit I made the whole incident up. But imagine if such a thing were possible. How happy would you be if you were on the receiving end? Which brings us to the principle of network neutrality.

In a network neutral world, every piece of internet data is treated equally. Whether you're downloading porn from Japan or buying music from iTunes in California or reading a blog in Russian, the Internet doesn't care. It's all just data and it's all treated the same, all given the same priority on the information superhighway.

And if some big corporation were to start paying your internet service provider to start prioritising their offerings over their rivals, then that ISP would, arguably, be selling that internet connection twice, once to you and once to the corporation. That would be a violation of network neutrality.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee produced a draft bill to make network neutrality an explicit legal requirement in the US. This follows a big row where the infrastructure manufacturers like Cisco and 3M have been lobbying heavily against network neutrality while internet companies like Google and Microsoft have been calling for the opposite.

BitTorrent

Why? One reason, perhaps, is because if toll roads are to be allowed on the internet, then someone has to build them, and that means jobs for the hardware boys. But the internet companies may not fancy having to pay those tolls and dance attendance on a new gatekeeper.

At which point enter our old friend the BitTorrent. You'll recall that this protocol has lately spread across the internet like Japanese knotweed, gobbling up perhaps a third of internet capacity, so that many service providers have virtually banned it from their networks before they become choked up completely.

Technically that is perhaps a violation of network neutrality, but one born of practicality rather than any darker motive, they would argue if they were here. Anyway the main losers are pirates and they can look after themselves.

Bram Cohen, the 'ubergeek' who gave us BitTorrent, is right up there in the pantheon of Internet gods. But unlike such luminaries as Shawn Fanning and Tim Berners Lee, Bram still hopes to make money from the fruits of his intellect. To which end he's done a deal with Warner Brothers to help them to distribute their movies on BitTorrent.

One of the things that's hoped might sweeten the deal is a new kind of faster torrent which the makers hope will make the current version look like paint drying. At the same time it will also unblock those congested pipes, so that his invention can avoid getting banned from networks quite so often.

Massive acceleration

The new version is currently trialling as a collaboration between Bram, NTL and a company called Cachelogic here in Britain. Cachelogic are offering a series of data stores strategically placed around the Internet which the new BitTorrent system talks to. Whenever they see a commercially approved BitTorrent, they make a copy of the data.

The next time someone on the Internet requests that data, it comes not from the original sender but from the Cachelogic store, only this time massively accelerated.

You can see where this is going. The companies who subscribe to the service will see their data race down the toll roads much faster than everyone else's can travel. What then for network neutrality?

We asked Bram about network neutrality. He told me "I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there's actual censorship... however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don't result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can't drop spam or stop... (hacker) attacks. "

Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? "Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it," says Cohen.

And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?

"It depends really on the nature of the whole thing... I'm against net censorship. However when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved... (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it's just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs."

Taking its toll

He has a point. Big media corporations already pay a fortune for powerful internet capacities so that you can more easily read articles like this one. This would just be the logical next step - rather than merely improving their capacity to send data out the door, the companies upgrade your ability to receive it as well.

To go back to our analogy, it's not that your car will necessarily slow down when you head to Homebase. It's just that you'll suddenly start travelling at several hundred miles per hour if you go to the rival store. They're not doing anything to harm your surfing.

Objectively they're making it better. Even if you don't want to download their movies you might still benefit from the relief in congestion over the whole internet. And if capital wants to build something and people want to pay for it, well, chances are it's going to get built.

Which is exactly what you'd say about a toll road.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ht/5017542.stm





Cinequest Launches Download-And-Burn Indie Movie Service
Anders Bylund

Indie film festival Cinequest is trying to grow out of its festival breeches, and the latest move involves selling its catalog of arthouse films in download formats. Of course, they're doing it while trawling for new material at the Cannes Film Festival. Cinequest already has distribution deals in place with Netflix, Palm, and Intel Viiv, and has been selling physical DVDs alongside a few free downloads on its own site since launching its own DVD label last fall. The PlaysForSure-protected files are available with three-day rental licenses for US$1.99 per movie or $4.99 if you want to burn your own DVD, and are taking up a unique position in the non-pr0n movie industry of today:

"Other companies are working on it (the idea), but at the moment they are too expensive, and the rights protection is too strict. We are also building a community feature into the site, and I think we are going to be the first out of the gate," said Dave Le, Jaman's senior designer. Jens Michael Hussey, a company director, added: "This is a distribution platform which bypasses Hollywood. There are a lot of films that just don't get the audiences they deserve, and then I see all the crapola that's in the theatres and it's so unfair. This is a chance to take back control of what you see."

The founders are hoping to get its audience involved in some community action around its movies. Online chats linked to the movies you are currently holding a license for are intended to bring back a little piece of that oldtime "going to the movies" feel, even though you're sitting in your own living room:

"This is like a global movie theatre, like when you go to movies and come out and talk about what you've just seen. With home movies you are kinda disconnected from that. Here we are bringing your home into the cinema," said Jens Michael Hussey. Viewers will be able to chat on line, while they are watching the movie or afterwards, to discuss the film.

Cinequest's stated mission isn't to make a lot of money, but rather to help independent filmmakers reach a wider audience and hopefully even make a living. 30 percent of the download fees go directly to the filmmaker, and similar revenue-sharing agreements are in place for other media channels as well. "Some films will have theatrical releases and we definitely support that, but the majority of them won't," says Kathleen Powell, Cinequest President and Co-Founder. The new-media online distribution model seems like a perfect fit for independent film houses, and conversely, indies provide great guinea pig material for testing out new methods so the big studios can point to actual results when making their own decisions.

The new distribution model may not "do for the film industry what iTunes and MySpace have done for the world of pop music" as the backers are hoping, based on the fact that 400 arthouse movies does not equal the more than 3 million songs in iTMS, including major labels and artists. But it's a good idea, and every revolution has to start somewhere. Good luck, Cinequest!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526-6924.html





Disney To Sell Films To Own On CinemaNow
Gary Gentile

Disney films such as "Glory Road" and the animated "Chicken Little" will soon be available to own via computer download from the Internet-based movie site CinemaNow, but the movies can't be played on a standalone DVD player.

The companies were expected to announce Wednesday that CinemaNow will sell the films for $19.95 and in June will allow consumers to transfer films to a portable device running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media software.

In a deal similar to others announced in April, The Walt Disney Co. will sell its films online the same day they become available on DVD, thus closing the gap between DVD sales and video-on-demand by several months. The deal includes new releases plus some library titles.

Consumers will be able to watch their films on up to three devices and will be able to make a backup DVD copy that will only play on a computer.

CinemaNow will offer the option of transferring the film to a portable device later in June.

Major Hollywood studios have not yet allowed films to be burned onto a DVD that can be played on a standard DVD player, although adult entertainment company Vivid Entertainment has started doing just that through CinemaNow.

In April, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM began selling some first-run and older titles on Movielink, a PC-only download service jointly owned by five Hollywood studios.

Those films are priced between $20 and $30.

Sony and Lionsgate have also begun selling some films on CinemaNow, which is partly owned by Microsoft, Lionsgate, Cisco Systems Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.

CinemaNow said it is negotiating with other studios to offer films on the site. Announcements of similar deals could come as early as this week.

Portability is a key factor for studios such as Disney, whose films are watched as often by children riding in cars as college students on their computers. Disney's deal with CinemaNow is it's first foray into the download-to-own market, although it rents its films online.

Portability also makes it easier to transfer a movie from a computer in a den or bedroom to a large TV screen in the living room, where most people prefer to watch films.

Movielink does not yet offer transfer of films to portable devices, although the company said it hopes to have that feature within a year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Software to Look for Experts Among Your Friends
John Markoff

For anyone who has hesitated before making a purchase on a Web site, uncertain which brand is preferable, Tacit Software is preparing to introduce an online service that will make it simple to pick the brains of friends and colleagues for opinions and expertise.

Tacit plans to start testing the service, called Illumio, next month. The service allows the user to mine the data on the computers of friends, business associates and others with shared interests on any subjects.

However, Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like "Who knows John Smith?" and "Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?" to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are.

The system is intended to extend a growing category of software that helps groups collaborate and work together more efficiently. Efforts to create systems that augment the intellectual power of work groups go back to the earliest days of computing technology development. The widespread availability of networks and Web browsers, however, has made such technologies far more accessible in recent years.

"The collaboration space is big and busy," said David L. Gilmour, president and chief executive of Tacit. "We don't consider ourselves a collaboration environment, rather we are about communication and search."

Currently, the privately held Tacit, which was founded in 1997, sells similar technology, known as ActiveNet, to corporate customers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Sanofi-Aventis. The new Illumio version is intended to be used over the open Internet. It will be free for individual users and sold commercially to private groups, although the company has not announced pricing.

Software such as Illumio is representative of the rapid emergence of new markets for digital information, said Michael Schrage, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.

"This represents the eBayification of organizations," he said. "The reality is that organizations are run off of informal connections and tools such as this facilitate gray markets in information and interpersonal exchange."

Tacit's top achievement in its software for connecting people and expertise may be in a design that keeps personal information private.

"The biggest problem we had to solve was the privacy problem," Mr. Gilmour said.

Because the information used to determine if someone is an expert on a particular question stays on local computers, Tacit's executives said Illumio would avoid potentially troubling privacy questions. The Illumio software is installed on users' PC's, where it is connected through a software interface to either Microsoft or Google's desktop search programs that index local user content, including documents and electronic mail.

The anonymity offered by Illumio is a significant advantage over other social networking software services that place pressure on users to offer assistance.

The Illumio software uses a reverse auction model to restrict the answer to the best expert. In a reverse auction, sellers compete for the right to provide goods or services. For example, in response to the question, "Who knows John Smith?" each Illumio local system would independently determine who had the best relationship in the network based on parameters such as who had recently exchanged the most e-mail with John Smith.

If the local system found a strong relationship, the local Illumio client software would pop up a request on that user's screen asking whether the user wished to respond to the person asking the question. Initially only the strongest candidates would be notified locally of the query. If that user ignored the request, the reverse auction system would, in effect, lower the bar to ask the person with the next strongest relationship. Then, if there were no responses, the bar would be again lowered until an expert responded. It is possible that difficult questions would find no experts.

The system insures that experts remain anonymous until they agree to answer the query. When a user answers, the connection is made either through the Illumio system, by e-mail or by other channels such as instant messaging or telephone.

In addition to the keywords that make up the question, a user is permitted to send an accompanying message that will help people determine whether they have relevant information to a particular question.

Tacit hopes to market the service by providing Web masters with icons it calls "hot spots." For example, a person running a digital photography or similar Web site could place a hot spot on its home page and then anybody who wanted to join an Illumio network on digital photography could do so by simply clicking on the link.

If they already had the Illumio software, it would automatically add them to the group. If not, it would download and install both the indexing software and the Illumio client software. Illumio is currently available for Windows-based computers.

The potential of Illumio lies in its ability to help small groups of friends and associates tap expertise that they might otherwise not know existed, said Esther Dyson, publisher of Release 1.0, a computer industry newsletter and an Illumio investor. "This is searching your friends' heads as reflected in what's on their computers," Ms. Dyson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/te...29gilmour.html





StopBadware.org Adds To Its Hall Of Shame List

"Jessica Simpson Screensaver" one of the worst badware applications ever, says co-director
Ellen Messmer

StopBadware.org, the organisation dedicated to highlighting software that consumers might prefer to avoid, adds another round of software programs to its "Badware Watch List."

The latest inductees into this hall of software shame include four programs: FunCade, a gaming application that comes bundled with BullsEye and NaviSearch; Team Taylor Made's "Jessica Simpson Screensaver"; a scanner called "UnSpyPC"; and WinFixer 2005 and 2006. Each was cited by StopBadware.org for specific reasons that relate to deceptive installation, causing harm to other computers, modifying other software or transmitting user data, interfering with computer use or being difficult to uninstall completely.

These four software programs are the second round of selections for the Badware Watch List, following the first batch of "badware" announced last March, which included Kazaa, MediaPipe, SpyAxe and Waterfalls 3.

FunCade is named as spyware which when removed, does not uninstall bundled adware and spyware programs, according to StopBadware.org.

Team Taylor Made's "Jessica Simpson Screensaver" is said to bundle more than a dozen pieces of software, including undisclosed adware, a 'dialer' which automatically dials for pay-porn sites with a modem, and toolbars that modify the installer's browser.

John Palfrey, co-director of StopBadware.org and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, calls the Jessica Simpson Screensaver from Team Taylor Made "one of the worst badware applications we've ever seen," adding, "It's almost a textbook example of a small software vendor using deceptive means to fund a software business."

"UnSpyPC" is described as identifying legitimate software, such as VMWare, WinPatrol and Windows Defender as spyware. It's also said to add an UnSpyPC icon to Internet Explorer without notification.

In the case of WinFixer 2005 and 2006, StopBadware.org says both versions "deceptively attempt to get the user to purchase the full version of its software by making exaggerated claims about 'severe system threats' on the user's computer, while also making it difficult to opt out of purchasing the software altogether." WinFixer 2005 is said to install a rootkit, making the program difficult to detect and remove.

StopBadware.org, (originally called "The Stop Badware Coalition") is the group formed with Harvard University, Oxford University and Consumer Reports last January to identify unethical and harmful software programs through lab testing and legal reviews of end-user licenses and other documentation.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...2571790014227E





A Third Of Us Are TV Pirates: Survey
Dan Warne

Over a third of Australian broadband users are now regularly downloading pirated television episodes on their home internet connection, according to Whirlpool’s latest survey of over 16,000 of its members.

The results are hardly a surprise: as we wrote in a recent edition of APC, TV piracy is incredibly easy to do, and since Australian TV networks are often criticised for axing series halfway through, crudely editing episodes to fit ads and running one to two years behind US/UK TV, it’s easy to see why.

Meanwhile, US TV networks are facing up to the fact that they have no option but to sell online. TechCrunch has a good roundup of the options available in the US. The number of shows you can legally download now is quite staggering, but none of them are available to Australians, because of the way TV series distribution deals are sold by region.

In Australia, Channel 9 has been progressive in this respect though, recently unveiling a “catchup TV” download service for episodes of McLeod’s Daughters. Channel 9, is of course, part of the PBL, which is the media conglomerate that owns APC Magazine and is a stakeholder in NineMSN… but before you claim “Bias!”, I’m not spruiking for 9 just because they’re in the same group.

They’re also one of the only TV stations in Australia to make a free electronic program guide available online… if other TV stations would stop being obstinate, Windows Media Center wouldn’t have been such a dismal failure in Australia and people could easily watch TV when it suited them without having to subscribe to a third party EPG like IceTV.

I just think it’s encouraging to see an Australian TV station doing what it can — making locally produced drama available for download at a reasonable price of $1.95 per episode.

However, no doubt the 37 per cent of broadband users that pirate TV shows won’t actually be doing somersaults of joy at being able to download McLeod’s Daughters… they’ll still be combing the torrent sites, or Easynews.com, or whatever, for House M.D., The West Wing, South Park and other top international shows.

BigPond’s movie download service has a range of TV shows available, but the limited selection (and total reliance on Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player) is, unfortunately for them, no match for the vast selection available on pirate networks and DivX/Xvid compatibility with all platforms.

What is clear, though, is that the studios and networks had better work something out, and fast … that 37 per cent of broadband users taking advantage of pirated TV eps from overseas isn’t going to get any smaller, but it is certainly going to keep eroding free-to-air TV audiences.
http://www.apcstart.com/site/dwarne/...pirates-survey





China Sets State Secrets Trial for Times Researcher in June
David Lague

Chinese authorities have preliminarily fixed a June 8 trial date for a researcher for The New York Times who is accused of fraud and disclosing state secrets, his lawyer said Friday.

The decision to try the researcher, Zhao Yan, 44, who worked in the Beijing bureau of The Times, followed a move by prosecutors to revive the case against him after earlier dropping the indictment.

Mr. Zhao denies the charges.

In the Chinese legal system, fixing the date of a trial is often tantamount to a decision to convict. It is very rare that the accused is found not guilty in a trial, particularly when the charges involve disclosing state secrets or subversion.

The definition of state secrets in China is extremely broad, and can even include routine economic statistics compiled by the government.

The decision to bring Mr. Zhao to trial comes as the Chinese authorities continue one of the most sweeping crackdowns on the news media in decades. It is a campaign in which journalists and writers have been jailed, senior editors fired and news outlets reined in from covering issues the authorities have deemed a threat to political or social stability.

Mr. Zhao, a longtime journalist, has been in custody for 21 months without appearing before a judge.

He had worked for The Times for about four months before his arrest on Sept. 17, 2004.

The indictment confirmed that his arrest had been linked to an article in The Times reporting that a former president, Jiang Zemin, had offered to resign from his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission, the final top post he held in the government.

The Times also denies that Mr. Zhao disclosed state secrets.

Prosecutors have refused to discuss the case on the ground that they were restricted from commenting on cases involving state secrets.

When the charges against Mr. Zhao were dropped in March, his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, a veteran defense attorney, concluded that the authorities had decided to abandon the case.

However, optimism that his client would be released was dashed earlier this month, when prosecutors reintroduced what appeared to be the same indictment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/wo...a/27china.html





China Sets Fines For Net Piracy
Bloomberg News, The Associated Press

China said Monday that it would impose fines of as much as 100,000 yuan on distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the Internet, a move likely to put pressure on search engines like Baidu.com.

Internet service providers must give the authorities contact information for owners of sites that distribute pirated material, the State Council, China's cabinet, said in a statement dated May 18 and posted on its Web site Monday. The maximum fine is the equivalent of $12,500.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group and Universal Music Group sued Baidu, the most-used search engine in China, last year for allowing free downloads of their music. The company, based in Beijing, offers a service allowing users to find MP3 files and may be forced to cooperate with the authorities in cracking down on illegal music sites.

"Baidu will be under a lot of pressure to stop offering links to illegal MP3 files and may have to stop their MP3 search service," said Edward Yu, chief executive of the research company Analysys International, based in Beijing. The new rules could also cut the number of Baidu's users, he said.

Calls to a Baidu spokeswoman, Cynthia He, were not returned.

The government can fine individuals and companies selling equipment and technology designed to allow illegal copying, according to the rules. It can also confiscate equipment used for making and distributing pirated material.

Yu said that China had repeatedly promised to crack down on illegal copying. "China's piracy problem is an enforcement problem," he said. "There have always been piracy laws."

Wireless 'conspiracy' claim

The agency promoting a wireless encryption standard in China has accused a U.S. engineers' group of participating in a conspiracy that led the International Standards Organization to reject the Chinese system, The Associated Press reported from Beijing.

China made the accusation in its appeal against the organization's decision in March to reject its encryption system, WAPI, in favor of the widely used 802.11i encryption standard developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, the state- run Xinhua news agency said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...ss/chifine.php





Judge Orders Private Drafts Turned Over in Leak Case
Neil A. Lewis

The judge overseeing the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. ruled on Friday that Time magazine had to turn over drafts of articles so that Mr. Libby, the former White House aide, could defend himself.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton, of Federal District Court, said that because the interviews that Mr. Libby gave to some reporters were at the heart of the criminal case against him, news organizations had no privilege to withhold their confidential materials and drafts of articles from his lawyers.

Judge Walton said he had concluded that most of the documents sought from Time, part of Time Warner; NBC News; and The New York Times would not be relevant or help the defense.

He said lawyers for all the news media organizations had agreed to let him review the documents that were responsive to Mr. Libby's request. That allowed him, he said, to personally review those documents in reaching his decision.

Judge Walton called some of the defense requests nothing more than "a fishing expedition."

He took a different view of internal Time documents that he reviewed. Judge Walton said there were variations in the drafts of articles written by Matthew Cooper after he had testified before the grand jury that investigated and indicted Mr. Libby in the case involving the leaking of a C.I.A. operative's name.

"Upon reviewing the documents presented to it, the court discerns a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles which the defense could arguably use to impeach Cooper," the judge wrote.

Judge Walton said that he was quashing the subpoena for documents sought from NBC News and two of its journalists, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell, and that most documents sought from The Times did not have to be turned over.

But he said the court would hold some transcripts of interviews by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The Times, and the draft of an article that she wrote to see whether they should be turned over in the trial.

Mr. Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, faces charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over his testimony to a federal grand jury and to F.B.I. agents. A special prosecutor has charged that Mr. Libby lied when he said he did not disclose the identity of the operative, Valerie Wilson, in summer 2003 to Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper.

Judge Walton said some documents from The Times could be turned over to the defense lawyers at the trial if they proved useful in impeaching Ms. Miller's testimony.

The judge suggested that was unlikely because his review showed them to be consistent with Ms. Miller's account to a grand jury.

He reasoned that if her trial testimony, that Mr. Libby told her of Ms. Wilson's role, remained consistent, the documents would have no value for the defense lawyers.

Mr. Libby was indicted after he told a grand jury and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on two occasions that he did not disclose Ms. Wilson's identity to Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller. The reporters testified otherwise to the grand jury.

Administration critics have said disclosing Ms. Wilson's identity was part of a campaign to discredit assertions made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons.

Judge Walton repeated earlier rulings that nothing in the Constitution or law provided a privilege for reporters to refuse to provide information in a criminal case.

He said Mr. Libby's case provided a special reason for reporters to provide relevant testimony because they were not just reporting on events, but were also participants in the events that formed the basis of the criminal case.

"The reporters did not simply report on alleged criminal activity," he wrote, "but rather they were personally involved in the conversations with the defendant that form the predicate for several charges in the indictment."

The judge added, "Their testimony is crucial to the government's case, and challenging it will likely be critical for the defense."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/wa...rtner=homepage





Publicly Debating Privacy
Dan Mitchell

WIRED NEWS shook the blogosphere (though not the mainstream media) this week by publishing documents that appear to support accusations by a former AT&T employee that the company has helped the government monitor huge amounts of private Internet traffic (wired.com).

Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, had earlier submitted the documents as part of a lawsuit against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The United States District Court judge in the case had ordered the documents sealed while he considered contentions by the government and by AT&T that making them public could compromise national security.

Wired News decided to publish them because "we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy," wrote Evan Hansen, the site's editor. Ryan Singel, a reporter, obtained the documents from "an anonymous source close to the litigation," he added.

The documents are highly technical, detailing the methodology behind the AT&T program. But they also describe how the company set up a "secret room" for the operation in a San Francisco switching center. In an introductory note for the documents, Mr. Klein wrote he was "presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project."

The information has been described in previous media accounts, but releasing all 30 pages, along with some photos of the secret room, allows people to assess Mr. Klein's assertions for themselves.

And so they are. The denizens of Slashdot, a site dominated by network managers and programmers, have for the most part decided that Mr. Klein's accusations are true.

There is some disagreement, though, as to what it means. For instance, while Slashdotters are largely appalled at the notion of the National Security Agency's reading their e-mail messages, one anonymous poster called them "hypocrites" and pointed out that their own network policies were often similar. "It's everywhere; what's bothersome is knowing you are being monitored. If you are doing something illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid maybe the N.S.A.'s monitoring system will make you think twice about doing it."

Contested Space

Hollywood WireTap, a gossip site, revealed this week that several famous pornography stars are promoting themselves on MySpace, a community site that's popular among people of all ages — but especially teenagers.

As a result, Hollywood WireTap reported, Weight Watchers has withdrawn its advertisements and T-Mobile is talking to MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, about the situation. Both companies told the site that their contracts with MySpace, which takes in a reported $156 million in annual ad revenue, are intended to prevent their ads from appearing on pages that promote pornographic material.

The pages of sex-film stars like Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick show they have thousands of "friends" — other MySpace users who ask for full access to a user's page. Those pages, in turn, link to the stars' own homepages, which are often replete with pornographic images.

Their MySpace pages are "popular with the kids who are MySpace's mainstay," according to Hollywood WireTap. Some of the stars' "friends" are as young as 14. "Obviously parents, already concerned about the site's alleged pedophiles, won't be happy with this newest twist," the gossip site concludes.

The Wrong Guy

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Guy Goma — the man accidentally interviewed by the BBC last week in a case of mistaken identity — would become an Internet celebrity. The BBC hauled Mr. Goma onto its soundstage and started asking him about downloading music. He had no idea what was going on, but he answered well enough. The interviewer thought he was Guy Kewney, a technology journalist, but he was just a guy who was there looking for a job.

The video has been passed around the Internet, and is featured on a new site, guygoma.com, dedicated to the incident and to Mr. Goma's job search.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te.../27online.html





First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules
Laurie J. Flynn

A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.

In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."

The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California's shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources.

Apple had argued that Web sites publishing reports about Apple were not engaged in legitimate news gathering but rather were misappropriating trade secrets and violating copyrights. But in its ruling on Friday, the panel disagreed.

"Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners' enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law's protection," the ruling states.

If upheld, the ruling could have far-reaching impact in California courts on other writers who publish electronically, including bloggers who regularly publish news and opinion online without the backing of a mainstream news operation.

"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, who argued the case in front of the appeals court last month. "It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function."

Apple declined to comment Friday on the ruling or on a possible appeal.

Apple's close guarding of company secrets, particularly unannounced products, is legendary. Friday's ruling arose from a suit filed in December 2004 against the unknown individuals who Apple said had leaked information about unannounced Apple products to two sites devoted to news of the company, AppleInsider and PowerPage.org.

Both sites published reports in November 2004 describing secret Apple projects, including one known at Apple by the code name Asteroid.

Apple did not sue the sites directly but sought to subpoena their e-mail records. As part of the investigation, Apple subpoenaed the e-mail records of Nfox, the company that provided Internet service to Jason D. O'Grady, the publisher of PowerPage.

About the same time, Apple filed a trade-secret suit against Think Secret, another online news site that the company accused of publishing confidential data about its future products. That case is pending.

Friday's ruling is also significant because it addresses whether private e-mail is protected from subpoenas. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored e-mail from your service," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te...y/27apple.html





Give me an inch girl

Feds Put Squeeze On Internet Firms

Tracking pornography, terrorists sited as reasons for data retention
Kevin Bohn

During a meeting last week with some of the nation's leading Internet service companies, the attorney general and the FBI director asked a variety of customer information and other data be kept for two years, much longer than the companies do now, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

Companies have varying policies regarding what information is kept and for how long.

One thing the Justice Department wants is some type of subscriber information, such as the Internet address assigned to a person when logging on to a service provider, two sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.

The online industry is expected to strongly oppose any request to retain these types of records because of privacy concerns for their customers.

"It is a slippery slope," one of the sources said of the government's interest in the information. "It becomes a fishing expedition."

The Internet companies have said there are other ways to get the information without them having to hand it over and believe requests like this are burden to the industry, the sources said.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said government and private industry officials are continuing to discuss the privacy issues involved and some of the concerns raised by the companies at the meeting Friday at the Justice Department.

The meeting, first reported by CNET News.com, included representatives from Verizon, Comcast, AOL (which is owned by Time Warner, as is CNN.com), Microsoft, Google and the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, the sources told CNN. Companies involved refused to comment on the meeting.

The original request for the record retention came as part of the Justice Department's efforts to fight child pornography. During a speech last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he would press the CEOs of Internet service providers about retaining records.

During last week's meeting, though, the FBI "made clear they wanted [information on subscribers] for other reasons as well. ... Terrorism was mentioned," one of the sources said.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to secretly wiretapping e-mail and phone calls to track people linked to terrorist activity.

Earlier this month USA Today reported three telecommunications giants provided the NSA, the nation's super secret spy agency, with records from billions of domestic phone calls after 9/11.

Another meeting of government and industry representatives is scheduled for Friday, according to an official of the Internet Service Provider Association.

CNN's Terry Frieden contributed to this story.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne...rds/index.html





Pre-9/11 Records Help Flag Suspicious Calling
John Diamond and Leslie Cauley

Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the program.

The template, the officials say, was created from a secret database of phone call records collected by the spy agency. It has been used since 9/11 to identify calling patterns that indicate possible terrorist activity. Among the patterns examined: flurries of calls to U.S. numbers placed immediately after the domestic caller received a call from Pakistan or Afghanistan, the sources say.

USA TODAY disclosed this month that the NSA secretly collected call records of tens of millions of Americans with the help of three companies: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. The call records include information on calls made before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Verizon and BellSouth released statements last week denying they had contracts with the NSA to provide the call information. A Verizon spokesman said the company's statement did not include MCI, the long-distance company that Verizon acquired in January.

The "call detail records" are the electronic information that is logged automatically each time a call is initiated. For more than 20 years, local and long-distance companies have used call detail records to figure out how much to charge each other for handling calls and to determine problems with equipment.

In addition to the number from which a call is made, the detail records are packed with information. Also included: the number called; the route a call took to reach its final destination; the time, date and place where a call started and ended; and the duration of the call. The records also note whether the call was placed from a cellphone or from a traditional "land line."

"They see everything," says Sergio Nirenberg, director of systems engineering at Science Applications International Corp., a Fortune 500 research and engineering company that works with the federal government. Nirenberg said he does not have direct knowledge of the NSA database.

The disclosure of the call record database has raised concerns among lawmakers, such as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that the records give the government access to information about innocent Americans. President Bush has insisted that intelligence efforts are only "focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates."

The intelligence officials offered new insight into one way the database of calls is used to track terrorism suspects.

The officials, two current U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the program and two former U.S. intelligence officials, agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. The White House and the NSA refused to discuss the template or the program.

Using computer programs, the NSA searches through the database looking for suspicious calling patterns, the officials say. Because of the size of the database, virtually all the analysis is done by computer.

Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.

The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.

It is not clear how much terrorist activity, if any, the data collection has helped to find.

Not every call record contains the same level of detail. Depending upon how a business has its phone system set up, the call detail records might not register complete information on an outgoing call, Nirenberg says.

The records might note only the general number of the business, not the desk extension or, in the case of a hotel, the room extension. Incoming calls that don't go through the switchboard and are dialed directly would have complete call detail records, Nirenberg says.

Not all local calls generate a call detail record, Nirenberg says. But that's not to say that phone companies can't create a record for local calls.

"It's just a matter of whether they enable that function" that allows that to happen, he says. Cellphone calls, on the other hand, create call detail records in almost every case.

Toll calls — meaning those that aren't technically long-distance but still cost extra — also generate call detail records, he says. "If they charge you separately for it, they have a call detail record," Nirenberg says.

The current and former intelligence officials say that the point of the database is to create leads. The database enables intelligence analysts to focus on a manageable number of suspicious calling patterns, they say.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...template_x.htm





Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules

Now, the White House's top spymaster can cite national security to exempt businesses from reporting requirements
Dawn Kopecki

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.

FEW ANSWERS. White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said the timing of the May 5 Presidential memo had no significance. "There was nothing specific that prompted this memo," Perino said.

In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements. The White House wouldn't comment on whether Negroponte has granted such a waiver, and BusinessWeek so far hasn't identified any companies affected by the provision. Negroponte's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. "What you might hide is investments: You've spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq," which the government wants to keep secret. "That's the kind of scenario that would be plausible," Coffee said.

AUTHORITY GRANTED. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about."

The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title "Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence." In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: "I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."

A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with "generally accepted accounting principles."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12952860/





Federal Judge Allows Lawsuit Against NSA

A federal judge will go ahead with hearings in a legal challenge to a warrantless domestic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor also criticized the Justice Department for failing to respond to the legal challenge, The Detroit News reported Friday.

The NSA and the Justice Department declined immediate comment. The Bush administration has said that hearings would reveal state secrets that affect national security.

The American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed lawsuits against the program in January, saying it violates Americans' rights to free speech and to privacy.

In March, the plaintiffs asked the judge to declare the National Security Agency's program illegal. They said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that the spy agency go to a secret court in order to spy within the United States.

The government filed a motion saying that no court can consider the issues because of a privilege against revealing state secrets, if doing so harms national security. The judge said she will hear the government's motion only after proceeding with a June 12 hearing on the plaintiffs' motion to summarily declare the spying illegal.

"Although defendants have not responded to said motion they may, if they appear, argue against it," she said
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...+National+news





Gattaca, NY

NYC Mayor Advocates U.S. Worker Database
Sara Kugler

Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg thrust himself into the national immigration debate Wednesday, advocating a plan that would establish a DNA or fingerprint database to track and verify all legal U.S. workers.

The mayor also said elements of the legislation moving through Congress are ridiculous and said lawmakers who want to deport all illegal immigrants are living in a "fantasy."

In an editorial for The Wall Street Journal and two nationally televised interviews, the mayor reiterated his long-standing belief that the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States should be given the opportunity for citizenship, saying that deporting them is impossible and would devastate the economy.

Aides said Bloomberg believes his views are relevant because he has a rare perspective as a former businessman who ran a company for two decades before he became mayor, in charge of enforcing the laws in a city with an estimated half-million illegal immigrants. They said that the editorial was his idea and that CNN and Fox News approached him to discuss his views on the air.

In the article and on air, Bloomberg slammed lawmakers who want to deport all illegal immigrants, saying on Fox News that "they are living in a fantasy world."

Asked in that interview whether his opinions put him at odds with his political party, the mayor, a former Democrat, shot back: "With which party?

"I'm not a partisan guy," Bloomberg said. "I am a mayor who has to deal with 500,000 people who are integral to our economy but are undocumented."

Bloomberg compared his proposed federal identification database to the Social Security card, insisting that such a system would not violate citizens' privacy and was not a civil liberties issue.

"You don't have to work _ but if you want to work for a company you have to have a Social Security card," he said. "The difference is, in the day and age when everybody's got a PC on their desk with Photoshop that can replicate anything, it's become a joke."

The mayor said DNA and fingerprint technology could be used to create a worker ID database that will "uniquely identify the person" applying for a job, ensuring that cards are not illegally transferred or forged.

Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said a DNA or fingerprint database "doesn't sound like the free society we think we're living in."

"It will inevitably be used not just by employers but by law enforcement, government agencies, schools and all over the private sector," she said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/24/D8HQE6B80.html





Don't Try This at Home

Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.
Steve Silberman

The first startling thing Joy White saw out of her bedroom window was a man running toward her door with an M16. White’s husband, a physicist named Bob Lazar, was already outside, awakened by their barking dogs. Suddenly police officers and men in camouflage swarmed up the path, hoisting a battering ram. “Come out with your hands up immediately, Miss White!” one of them yelled through a megaphone, while another handcuffed the physicist in his underwear. Recalling that June morning in 2003, Lazar says, “If they were expecting to find Osama bin Laden, they brought along enough guys.”

The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple’s home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers, and law enforcement professionals. From the outside, company headquarters – at the end of a dirt road high in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque – looks like any other ranch house in New Mexico, with three dogs, a barbecue, and an SUV in the driveway. But not every suburban household boasts its own particle accelerator. A stroll through the backyard reveals what looks like a giant Van de Graaff generator with a pipe spiraling out of it, marked with CAUTION: RADIATION signs. A sticker on the SUV reads POWERED BY HYDROGEN, while another sign by the front gate warns, TRESPASSERS WILL BE USED FOR SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS.

Science experiments are United Nuclear’s business. The chemicals available on the company’s Web site range from ammonium dichromate (the main ingredient in the classic science-fair volcano) to zinc oxide powder (which absorbs UV light). Lazar and White also sell elements like sodium and mercury, radioactive minerals, and geeky curiosities like aerogel, an ultralightweight foam developed by NASA to capture comet dust. The Department of Homeland Security buys the company’s powerful infrared flashlights by the case; the Mythbusters guys on the Discovery Channel recently picked up 10 superstrong neodymium magnets. (These come with the sobering caveat: “Beware – you must think ahead when moving these magnets … Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances.”) Fire departments in Nevada and California send for United Nuclear’s Geiger counters and uranium ore to train hazmat crews.

A former employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the 47-year-old Lazar radiates a boyish enthusiasm for science and gadgets. White, 50, is a trim licensed aesthetician who does herbal facials for local housewives while helping her husband run the company. When the officers determined that Lazar and White posed no physical threat, they freed the couple from their handcuffs and produced a search warrant. United Nuclear’s computers and business records were carted off in a van.

The search was initiated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency best known for instigating recalls of faulty cribs and fire-prone space heaters. The CPSC’s concern with United Nuclear was not the uranium, the magnets, or the backyard accelerator. It was the chemicals – specifically sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum, all of which can be used to make illegal fireworks. The agency suspected that Lazar and White were selling what amounted to kits for making M-80s, cherry bombs, and other prohibited items; such kits are banned by the CPSC under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.

“We are not just a recall agency,” explains CPSC spokesperson Scott Wolfson. “We have turned our attention to the chemical components used in the manu-facture of illegal fireworks, which can cause amputations and death.” A 2004 study by the agency found that 2 percent of fireworks-related injuries that year were caused by homemade or altered fireworks; the majority involved the mishandling of commercial firecrackers, bottle rockets, and sparklers. Nonetheless, Wolfson says, “we’ve fostered a very close relationship with the Justice Department and we’re out there on the Internet looking to see who is promoting these core chemicals. Fireworks is one area where we’re putting people in prison.”

In the past several years, the CPSC has gone after a variety of online vendors, demanding the companies require customers to prove they have a license to manufacture explosives before they can purchase any chemical associated with making them. Many of these compounds, however, are also highly useful for conducting science experiments. Sulfur, for example, is an ingredient in hydrogen sulfide, an important tool for chemical analysis. Potassium perchlorate and potassium nitrate are widely used in labs as oxidizers.

The CPSC’s war on illegal fireworks is one of several forces producing a chilling effect on amateur research in chemistry. National security issues and laws aimed at thwarting the production of crystal meth are threatening to put an end to home laboratories. In schools, rising liability concerns are making teachers wary of allowing students to perform their own experiments. Some educators even speculate that a lack of chem lab experience is contributing to the declining interest in science careers among young people.

United Nuclear got its computers back a few days after they were hauled away, and three years passed before Lazar and White heard from the authorities again. This spring, the couple was charged with violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and shipping restricted chemicals across state lines. If convicted, Lazar and White each face a maximum penalty of 270 days in prison and a $15,000 fine.

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

Intel cofounder Gordon Moore set off his first boom in Silicon Valley two decades before pioneering the design of the integrated circuit. One afternoon in 1940, near the spot where Interstate 280 intersects Sand Hill Road today, the future father of the semiconductor industry knelt beside a cache of homemade dynamite and lit the fuse. He was 11 years old.

Moore’s pyrotechnic adventures grew out of his experiments with a neighbor’s chemistry set. He turned a shed beside the family house into a lab, stocking it with chemicals mail-ordered from San Francisco and filling an old dresser with beakers and funnels. Now retired, the 77-year-old Moore looks back on his days and nights in the shed as a time when he learned to think and work like a scientist. “The things I made, like nitroglycerin, took a fair amount of lab technique,” he recalls. “I specialized in explosives because they were fun, and I liked doing things that got results in a hurry.”

Many of Moore’s illustrious peers also first got interested in science by performing experiments at home. After reading a book called The Boy Scientist at age 10, Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”

Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray, who is one of United Nuclear’s regular customers, uses potassium perchlorate to demonstrate the abundance of energy stored in sugar and fat. He chops up Snickers bars, sprinkles in the snowy crystals, and ignites the mixture, which bursts into a tower of flame – the same rapid exothermic reaction that propels model rockets skyward. “Why is it that I can walk into Wal-Mart and buy boxes of bullets and black powder, but I can’t buy potassium perchlorate to do science because it can also be used to make explosives?” he asks. “How many people are injured each year doing extreme sports or playing high school football? But mention mixing up chemicals in your home lab, and people have a much lower index of acceptable risk.”
The push to restrict access to chemicals by those who have no academic or scientific credentials gained momentum in the mid-’90s following the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In the years since 9/11, the Defense Department, FBI, and other government agencies have strategized ways of tracking even small purchases of potentially dangerous chemicals. “The fact that there are amateurs and retired professors out there who need access to these chemicals is a valid problem,” acknowledges Rice University chemistry professor James Tour, who consulted with the Pentagon and the Justice Department, “but there aren’t many of those guys weighed against the possible dangers.”

A provision in the 2002 Homeland Security Act mandated background checks and licensing requirements for model-rocket enthusiasts on the grounds that ammonium perchlorate fuel is an explosive; the Justice Department argued that terrorists could deploy model rockets to shoot down commercial airliners. A bill pending in both houses of Congress would empower the Department of Homeland Security to regulate sales of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used to make the Oklahoma City bomb. “We finally have bipartisan support and encouragement from the chemical industry on this, which is important, because we’ve seen what can happen when these materials fall into the wrong hands,” says US representative Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), who is sponsoring the House bill. “As we move forward, we’re going to be taking a very close look at other chemicals that should be regulated.”

In the meantime, more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.

“To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society,” says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. “The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it – not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science.”

The increasingly strict regulatory climate has driven a wedge of paranoia between young chemists and their potential mentors. “I don’t tell anyone about what I do at home,” writes one anonymous high schooler on Sciencemadness.org, an online forum for amateur scientists. “A lot of ignorant people at my school will just spread rumors about me … The teacher will hear about them and I will get into legal trouble … I have so much glassware at my house, any excuse will not cut it. So I keep my mouth shut.”

Ironically, a shadow of suspicion is being cast over home chemistry at a time when the contributions of amateurs to the progress of science are highly regarded. In recent years, citizen scientists have discovered comets and supernovas and invented tools for gauging Earth’s magnetic field. Peer-reviewed journals like Nature now welcome papers coauthored by auto-didacts like Forrest Mims III, who studies solar storms and atmospheric conditions at his home observatory in Texas. Personal computers, digital cameras, and other consumer electronic devices are putting more accurate means of recording and measuring phenomena into the hands of home tinkerers than were available in high-end labs just a few years ago. The Internet is the ultimate enabling technology, allowing amateurs to collaborate with their counterparts at NASA and other organizations.

Porting the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world, magazines like Make and blogs like Boing Boing are making it cool for geeks to get their hands dirty again, offering how-tos on everything from building your own telescope to assembling an electronic insect army. DIY robotics-fests like Dorkbot (“people doing strange things with electricity,” according to the Web site) are taking off from Boston to Bangalore.

But the hands-on revival is leaving home chemists behind. While surplus lab equipment is available on eBay, chemicals are subject to the site’s filtering software, which tracks or blocks the sale of items tagged as hazardous by the US Postal Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are very few commercial supply houses willing to sell chemicals to amateurs anymore because of this fear that we’re all criminals and terrorists,” Carlson says. “Ordinary folks no longer have access to the things they need to make real discoveries in chemistry.”

The heyday of home experimentation in the US coincided with the rise of the Porter Chemical Company, makers of the legendary Chemcraft labs-in-a-box, which contained enough bottles and beakers to perform more than 800 experiments. At the height of its popularity in the 1950s, Porter awarded college scholarships, mined its own chemicals, and was the biggest user of test tubes in the US. The company produced more than a million chemistry sets before going out of business in the 1980s amid increasing liability concerns.

One kid whose interest in science was sparked by the gift of a chemistry set was Don Herbert, who grew up to host a popular TV show in the 1950s called Watch Mr. Wizard. With his eye-popping demonstrations and low-key midwestern manner, Mr. Wizard gave generations of future scientists and teachers the confidence to perform experiments at home. In 1999, Restoration Hardware founder Stephen Gordon teamed up with Renee Whitney, general manager of a toy company called Wild Goose, to try to re-create the chemistry set Herbert marketed almost 50 years ago. “Don was so sweet,” Whitney recalls. “He invited us to his home to have dinner with him and his wife. Then he pulled his old chemistry set out of the garage. It was amazing – a real metal cabinet, like a little closet, filled with dozens of light-resistant bottles.”

Gordon and Whitney soon learned that few of the items in Mr. Wizard’s cabinet could be included in the product. “Unfortunately, we found that more than half the chemicals were illegal to sell to children because they’re considered dangerous,” Whitney explains. By the time the Mr. Wizard Science Set appeared in stores, it came with balloons, clay, Super Balls, and just five chemicals, including laundry starch, which was tagged with an ominous warning: HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD.

“It wasn’t really something you could use to teach kids about chemistry,” acknowledges Thomas Nikosey, head of Mr. Wizard Studios, which handles licensing for the 88-year-old Herbert.

Kits that train kids how to do real chemistry have yielded to innocuous science-flavored toys. At the Web site Discover This, one typical product promises lessons in making “rock candy, superbubbles, and molding clay … without blowing up the house.”

One of the few companies still selling chemistry sets worthy of the name is a German-American venture called Thames & Kosmos, run by former Adobe software engineer Ted McGuire. The company’s top-of-the-line kit, the C3000, is equipped with a full complement of test tubes, beakers, pipettes, litmus paper, and more than two dozen useful compounds. But even the C3000, which retails for $200, comes with a shopping list of chemicals that must be purchased elsewhere to perform certain experiments. “A lot of retailers are scared to carry a real chemistry set now because of liability concerns,” McGuire explains. “The stuff under your kitchen sink is far more dangerous than the things in our kits, but put the word chemistry on something and people become terrified.”
The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”

“A lot of schools don’t have chemistry labs anymore,” explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.”

Many students are ill at ease when faced with actual compounds and lab equipment for the first time at school. A study of “chemistry anxiety” in the Journal of Chemical Education concluded in 2000 that “the presence of this anxiety in our students could be a contributing factor in the overall poor performance of high school students in science.” (Commonly reported fears included “lighting the Bunsen burner,” “fire,” and “getting chemicals on skin.”) Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is “a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,” says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE.

“The liability issues are a cop-out,” says Bassam Shakhashiri, the author of a four-volume guide to classroom chemistry who has taught for 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Kids are being robbed of the joy of discovering things for themselves.” Compared with students in previous generations, he says, undergraduates raised on hands-off science seem passive: “They want someone to do things for them. Even those who become chem majors and grad students are not as versatile in the lab, because their experiences in middle school and high school were so limited. This is a terrible shame. By working with real substances, you learn how to ask the right questions about the physical world, which is half the battle in science.”

Paradoxically, at a time when young people are particularly excited about technology, their enthusiasm for learning about the science behind it is waning. Thirty years ago, the US ranked third in the world in the number of science and engineering degrees awarded in the 18-to-24 age group. Now the country ranks 17th, according to the National Science Board. A 2004 report called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Education Study found that while fourth graders in the US rank sixth in basic science scores when measured against their peers worldwide, by the time they’re in eighth grade, they’ve slipped to ninth place. Prompted by concern that America is falling behind, President Bush proposed a $380 million “competitiveness initiative” this year that promises to train 70,000 new teachers of Advanced Placement science and math. By the time students have the opportunity to enroll in an AP course, however, many have already absorbed the message that science is best left to trained professionals.

“You have to capture kids’ imaginations very young or you lose them forever,” says Steve Spangler, a former protégé of Mr. Wizard who is now a science correspondent for the NBC affiliate in Denver. “But that’s hard when you have teachers required to check out vinegar and baking soda from the front office because something bad might happen in class. Slowly but surely the teaching tools are being taken away, so schools end up saying, ‘Let’s get a college professor to do this demonstration, and kids can watch the streaming video.’”

To Bill Nye, the “Science Guy” who hosted an Emmy award-winning series on PBS in the 1990s, unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large. “People who want to make meth will find ways to do it that don’t require an Erlenmeyer flask. But raising a generation of people who are technically incompetent is a recipe for disaster.”

To ensure that the tradition of home chemistry survives, self-proclaimed “mad scientists” are creating a research underground on Web sites like Sciencemadness, Readily Available Chemicals, and the International Order of Nitrogen. There, in comfortable anonymity, seasoned experimenters, novices, and connoisseurs of banned molecules share tips on finding alternative sources for chemicals and labware.

One key to working as a DIY chemist, says Matthew Ernst, the 25-year-old host of Sciencemadness, is realizing how many useful chemicals are still available as household products or items designed for specialized niches. Silver nitrate, for example, can be found at potters’ supply stores, where it lends raku glazes an uncanny luster. “Amateur chemists become compulsive label readers,” Ernst says. “Many compounds are available if the chemist is willing to split his shopping between the paint store, hardware store, ceramics supplier, gardening center, welding supplier, feed store, and metal recycler.”

Out-of-print texts like Julius B. Cohen’s 1910 Practical Organic Chemistry are being made available again in PDF form on file-sharing networks and the Internet Archive. To route around stigmatized chemical pathways, home experimenters are reviving 19th-century methods of synthesizing reagents from scratch. Shawn Carlson of the Society for Amateur Scientists calls this “embracing Grandpa’s chemistry.”

Carlson’s group acts as a virtual co-op for its nearly 2,000 members by facilitating small purchases of legal chemicals and equipment. The group is also launching an ambitious national program called Labrats to provide mentoring to the next generation of researchers by teaming students with working scientists.

The father of three young children, Carlson understands parental concerns about safety. But he believes that the exhilaration of risk has always been a powerful factor in engaging kids’ interest in science, and should be actively encouraged – while minimizing the physical hazards. “We can get rid of most of the actual dangers, but it’s important that we preserve the perception of danger in science,” he says. “When I do experiments with my own kids, I’m more than happy to let them believe that if they’re not careful, something could happen to them. It adds that extra element of ‘my fate is in my hands – but if I do this right, everything will be fine.’”

In March, Bob Lazar and Joy White were building a new two-story home for United Nuclear in a clearing behind their house, hiring three assistants, and weathering a nerve-wracking shortage of aerogel after Boing Boing posted a link. Then news of the Justice Department’s charges against them arrived, and they called their lawyer to begin planning their defense.

“Kids read about the great scientists and their discoveries throughout history, and marvel that people once did these things,” Lazar says. “But they marvel a little too much. Taking chemicals and lab equipment away from kids who love science is like taking crayons and paints away from a kid who may grow up to be an artist.”
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html





Symantec Denies 'Highly Severe' Antivirus Flaw
Ed Sutherland

Could Symantec’s antivirus software guarding company, as well as government computers include a backdoor allowing hackers access to corporate data?

A new security vulnerability rated as highly severe by a security research firm, "has everything required for a worm," according to Mike Puterbaugh, vice president of marketing for eEye Digital Security.

Symantec security protects more than 200 million computers, according to the company. Symantec has also recently argued its software -- not Microsoft's – should be trusted to keep computers safe.

The flaw could impact users of Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 and Symantec Client Security 3, according to eEye. The firm said the vulnerability can "compromise affected systems, allowing for the execution of malicious code with system level access."

Unlike some security glitches, which need a user to open an attachment, visit a Web site or click on something, the Symantec Antivirus flaw requires no user interaction, according to a security advisory posted on the eEye site.

In a posting to its Web site, Symantec described the reports as unverified.

"Symantec's Product Security team has confirmed that the reported vulnerability by eEye Digital does not affect its Norton brand," the company said, referring to its Norton line of security products such as firewalls and anti-virus updates.

Puterbaugh said eEye’s latest research confirms Norton products are not affected by the bug.

Promising "prompt mitigation solutions for any confirmed issues," Symantec added: "there is no known exploit code currently in the wild that takes advantage of this reported vulnerability."

Should enterprises be concerned? “No one is going to uninstall antivirus – nor should they,” Puterbaugh said. The flaw should encourage network administrators to re-evaluate their policies about mobile devices, he commented. While steps should be taken to be extra vigilant, "attack prevention cannot equal business disruption," according to the eEye exec.

While eEye has privately informed Symantec about the flaw, the company remained circumspect when talking publicly. “We’re not releasing details of the flaw,” Putersbaugh said. Providing too much information about the security hole could assist hackers, he said.

Putersbaugh said he was a "little surprised at the media spin on this." Initial public security reports include little detail with more explicit information shared only between the researcher and the affected company.

Although eEye has already provided a patch to customers of their "Blink" intrusion prevention service, the company couldn’t name when a publicly-available patch will be released.
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3609501





Buttoned Up
Jack

An interesting bit about customizing the Opera browser that not even many Opera users know is that often adding features is as easy as dragging them right up onto the toolbar. Pretty simple eh? I think dragging them around is fun, plus you can drop them exactly where you want them, but you can click to install them too.

I recently added click-to-launch Firefox/IE buttons. Now if I’m surfing a site in Opera and I want to see the page in another browser I just click the Opera toolbar icon for IE or Firefox and they launch to that page. I don't use it much but it's fast.

If you don't like something they uninstall w/a right click, and you can even make your own if you're so inclined. Here’s a bunch of Opera "Custom Buttons" for page commands etc.





From a Small Stream, a Gusher of Movie Facts
Richard Siklos

BRISTOL, England

THE closest that Col Needham gets to corporate life is the Dilbert calendar in his neat office — a converted bedroom in a quaint house in the ancient village of Stoke Gifford, a suburb of Bristol, the harbor city that is 90 minutes west of London by train.

As the founder and managing director of the Internet Movie Database, Mr. Needham might just be the archetype of the telecommuting Web-head. The site he founded and runs, www.imdb.com, ranks as the 10th-most-popular entertainment spot online, according to ComScore Media Metrix. It had 18.6 million unique visitors in April, a 67 percent surge from a year earlier.

In Stoke Gifford, Mr. Needham works solo — without even an assistant — but is in constant contact by instant message with other employees scattered across the globe and at the Seattle headquarters of Amazon.com, which acquired the business eight years ago. "Everybody assumes that we have a massive office complex on Wilshire Boulevard," Mr. Needham said with a grin. "I always say, 'We're headquartered on the Internet.' "

Mr. Needham, a boyish, closely-shorn 39-year-old walked to the kitchen, put on the kettle and made tea. Part of what makes him a curiosity — beyond his enviable work setup — is that Internet Movie Database, or Imdb for short, has become a classic example of a hobby that turns out to be a powerful media asset. For years, it has quietly gone about its business almost entirely separately from its parent, and only subtly does it encourage users to go to the Amazon site to buy videos.

"We didn't sit down and think, 'What's the best way to make money on the Internet?' " Mr. Needham said. "This is very much a labor of love. When we started the company, there was no commercial use of the Internet."

Even so, Imdb's convergence moment may soon be at hand, say studio executives who have worked with Amazon on developing a download service that could let people burn DVD's on their desktops. Though Amazon and Mr. Needham decline to talk about plans, Imdb could play a more prominent role in the retailer's media strategy. Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers are all involved in the project, executives close to the project have said.

Several weeks ago, one media executive who had been briefed on Amazon's strategy but did not want to be identified because it was still being formulated, pointed out one aspect of Imdb's popularity: if you use search engines to look for the title of virtually any past movie or television show, or the names of celebrities from those realms, Imdb often comes up as the first result.

In the retail business, that is the equivalent of excellent shelf frontage, or, in television, of having a single-digit channel number rather than being relegated to Channel 284 on the cable lineup.

There are glimpses of a grander media plan beyond Imdb. For instance, Amazon has quietly built up its own www.a9.com search engine, which places more emphasis on displaying results in multiple media formats than bigger rivals like Google and Yahoo. But even if Amazon's foray into downloading fizzles, Imdb holds its own. Its climb also provides some interesting lessons for burgeoning digital media barons.

Internet Movie Database began in 1990 as a bulletin board database of movie credits. It was started by Mr. Needham and some film-buff friends. At the time, Mr. Needham was working as an engineer in Bristol at Hewlett-Packard (or, as he says in his native Manchester lilt, "Hewlett Pa-Cod") and had only a rudimentary strategy for financing the site.

By 1998, the database had established itself as a favorite on the early Internet, and Mr. Needham was amused to receive a number of buyout approaches.

One was an invitation to a London hotel in January to meet with Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Mr. Bezos told Mr. Needham that he thought the movie database could help Amazon sell VHS cassettes and DVD's — Mr. Needham points out that it was in that order in those days — but also recognized that the site would need to be run separately to maintain its personality. Amazon, of course, could handle the technological end and pour resources into upgrades.

Today, Imdb makes money a variety of ways: from advertising, selling publicity photos, licensing its content, selling movie tickets through partners and offering a premium Imdb Pro service (started in 2002). For $99 a year, Imdb Pro subscribers get granular access to all kinds of industry data, like movie budgets and details about films in production. By chronicling everyone who ever worked on a film, the service has become a de facto directory of most everyone from key grips to producers, actors and directors.

Its most clever feature is probably the Starmeter and Movimeter ratings, which gauge the popularity of people and films, based on search topics. To no one's surprise, Audrey Tautou was No. 1 last week on the Starmeter, up from No. 215 early last year, when she joined the cast of "The Da Vinci Code."

Like the social networking sites that are now so popular in media, Imdb has found that much of its success is built on the participation of site visitors. Last year, Mr. Needham said, its users submitted information to the database 16 million times, adding minutiae like what commercials Hollywood actors have performed in abroad, or what video games they have done voice-overs for.

When its users are not adding information, they are perusing — or debating and challenging — material related to the 787,000 film, television and video game titles detailed on the site. One can learn, for example, that while Jennifer Grey played Jeanie in the film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), Jennifer Aniston played Jeanie in the TV series "Ferris Bueller" (1990).

Those submissions are then monitored — vetted is too strong a word — by a team of editors who take their entertainment geekdom seriously. Any factual mistakes they may not find on their own are usually brought to their attention by users, who also make frequent accusations that some Hollywood wannabes who submit their biographies to the site are padding their résumés.

In Mr. Needham's office, the only visible connection to Amazon is a separate laptop that has a secure feed to the company's internal server in Seattle. On the wall is a gift from Mr. Bezos: a framed original poster of "Vertigo," Mr. Needham's favorite film.

While Mr. Needham is thrilled to talk about the business, he is reticent about giving too many details. He does say that the company is profitable, that there are more than 50 employees and that they are in the United States, Britain, Switzerland and Germany. At Imdb, he says repeatedly that "the customer is the celebrity," and that the company is not.

AS for his own fortunes, a clue is found in the original announcement of Imdb's acquisition in April 1998. It said Imdb and two separate European businesses were bought mostly for Amazon shares then worth close to $55 million. Though it is impossible to know how the shares were divided among the three companies, the shares would be worth roughly $213 million now.

For his part, Mr. Needham dresses like a regular guy, and he drives a Toyota to take me to the train station. But it does turn out that the house in Stoke Gifford is actually just his former home; it now serves only as offices for him and his wife, although it retains all the furnishings, including his daughters' bunk beds.

The Needhams live in what he calls their "dream house" about 15 minutes away. It is there that Mr. Needham keeps his prized possession: an ever-growing collection of 7,500 films, mostly DVD's.

Asked whether someday it would all be digital, with his collection floating on a hard drive, Mr. Needham thought not: "I like to kick the tires of things I own."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu.../28frenzy.html





For Data Security, Sometimes Small Is Not Beautiful
Hubert B. Herring

It's wonderful, isn't it, that information can be packed into such an infinitesimal space that vital facts about millions of people can fit on a few little computer disks. Farewell, bulky file cabinets; hello, vast empty spaces that can be used, say, for meditating on the joys of miniaturization.

But any such meditation was rudely interrupted last week by yet another reminder that there is a hazardous flip side to all this. And the latest breach was a big one: Social Security numbers and other personal information on up to 26.5 million veterans were stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee.

All the more reason, then, to take note of a survey for the Cyber Security Industry Alliance that shows, among other things, that nearly half of likely voters may turn against any member of Congress who opposes swift action on data security. And that survey, of course, was taken before the loss of the veterans' data.

Suddenly those nice, bulky, hard-to-transport file cabinets don't look so bad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu...y/28count.html





Pull The Other One ... How iPods Took Over The World
Simon Caulkin

Like thousands of others, I got an iPod nano for Christmas. It's a gorgeous object. But in use the striking thing about Apple's iconic music player is neither its sexy looks nor even its playback performance - which is much the same as that of a dozen rivals. This tiny object does a lot more than play music: as part of a larger system with iTunes and the iTunes music store, it defines a new relationship between customer and producer and reshapes an industry. One day all products and services will be like this.

The first unexpected thing the iPod has done is make estranged customers like me music buyers again. I haven't bought music regularly for years - CDs aren't attractive in themselves, prices and reissuing policies are as cynical as ever, and the 'retail experience', hunting for what you want in the big record stores, is about as tempting as a visit to an emergency ward. (I don't need to add that today's bands are crap.)

But iTunes changes all that. Via the music store, I know when the Rolling Stones or Dr John have a new album out (what a giveaway). What's more, it's possible to buy on impulse: hearing something on a film soundtrack or radio show, you no longer have to go to HMV or Amazon (or more likely just forget about it), you download it straight away - instant gratification. The saviour of the industry is not 'Ł50 man' but '79p anyone with broadband'. No thanks to the record industry, but I'm enjoying being a customer again because it's on my own terms.

And that's the second thing about the iPod: it puts you, not them, in control. Basically, the record labels are devotees of the Henry Ford business model: 'You can have any music you want so long as it's what I want to give you.' But using the cyberspace jukebox, you're no longer at their mercy. You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album. You don't have to buy albums at all. You can put country next to classical, punk next to jazz, Barry Manilow next to Placido Domingo (wait, that's a joke).

And you can play them in the same way. Indeed, by plugging the iPod into a pair of speakers, many people are dispensing with a traditional home hi-fi set up altogether. The sound quality isn't as good (purists say), but it's good enough, and for many - perhaps most - of us the gain in control and simplicity easily outweighs the disadvantages. So the iPod signals the end of another, if less malign, producer tyranny - hi-fi manufacturers beware.

Understand that this is not a puff for Apple. The iPod is certainly not perfect. Incompatibility with other formats means that at one level it perpetrates its own version of Henry Fordism: 'You can have anything you like so long as it's Apple.' This is the more irritating because the music store's coverage is by no means universal.

Nevertheless, the things it has got right hold key lessons for companies trying to woo customers in any industry, whether product- or service-based.

One lesson is the importance of using the right medium, and executing it properly. The iPod is a textbook example of getting applications - for playing, organising and buying music - to work seamlessly together through the net without dropping you between the gaps. The second is simplicity. The more complicated the product, the harder it has to work to make you love it. A large part of the iPod's appeal is how easy it is to use - put another way, the fact that nothing gets between you and what you want from it.

This leads to the third, most important and least obvious of the iPod's trumps: the power of 'pull'. Most companies distribute their product by 'push'. They estimate demand, build according to the estimate and then sell ('push') what they have built. This is essentially business as central planning, and it works little better at company than at country level - hence the need for advertising and promotional price-cuts to reconcile sales with estimates, extra features to help sell the product and, finally, huge computer power to keep track of all the product variations, sales estimates and production plans.

When, as with iTunes, the product is 'pulled' by the customer, on the other hand, the engines required for 'push' are redundant. It's like using gravity instead of fighting against it. Pull inherently uses fewer resources; tells managers directly what consumers want; and above all delivers on customers' own terms.

In their book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin charge that the rising tide of consumer discontent amid material plenty is the result of companies failing to change along with their customers. People are no longer grateful for what companies give them; they want what they want, in the form they decide. Part of the iPod's phenomenal success is that as one of the first of a new breed of products to put customers on equal terms with producers, it begins to respond to this need.

That said, don't go thinking you don't have work to do, Apple. Some colleagues were grousing that you can't download sleeve notes from iTunes. It's ridiculously hard to transfer a track downloaded for one iPod to another. And why does the database still not contain LaVern Baker's 'Saved'?
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/busin...784548,00.html





Microsoft Defies iPod in Japan

Microsoft is developing portable music players with NTT DoCoMo, Toshiba and other Japanese companies to compete against Apple Computer's iPod.

Microsoft is working with eight companies in Japan to offer audio players and content that is compatible with the Windows Media Technology operating system, Microsoft said late Wednesday. Napster Japan, NTT Communications and Aoyama Capital will provide content and other services, the statement said.

The partnerships may challenge Apple's dominance in Japan's Ą34.3 billion, or $306 million, Internet music download market. Microsoft's link with DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone company in Japan, and the electronics maker Toshiba may give its music software and media business a bigger foothold in Japan, where more people access the Internet from mobile phones than from personal computers.

The value of music downloads in Japan rose to Ą10.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, up 58 percent from the beginning of the year, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan. Mobile phones accounted for 94.3 percent of all music downloads in the year.

Apple's iTunes is the world's most- used online music store, and the iPod is the most popular portable music player.

Microsoft said it had begun a two- month campaign this week at Japanese electronics retailers showcasing portable music players or mobile phones from DoCoMo, Toshiba, Victor Co. of Japan, iRiver Japan and Creative Technology. Users will be able to transfer music and video files from their computer to the portable gadgets and mobile phones.

Windows advances in China

The number of PCs sold in China containing legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating system doubled in the first quarter from the fourth, as major vendors joined a campaign to stamp out piracy, Reuters reported from Shanghai.

About 48 percent of PCs shipped in China in the three months through March came with legal copies of Windows already installed, compared with 25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, according to figures supplied from the data-tracking firm International Data Corp.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/01/business/ttk.php





Profiles

Howard Stringer, Sony's Road Warrior
Richard Siklos and Martin Fackler

SAY hello to George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor of the exchequer. Chat up the pop musicians Sir Bob Geldof and Peter Gabriel. Plant a quick kiss on the cheek of Tessa Jowell, Britain's secretary of state for culture, media and sport. It is a May evening, and Sir Howard Stringer, the Sony Corporation's avuncular chief executive, works the room at a party that the media scion James Murdoch holds for him at Aspinall's Club, a casino in the Mayfair district of London.

Mr. Murdoch, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, salutes a new partnership in which Sony is packaging high-definition broadcasting gear and televisions with BSkyB's latest digital HDTV service. He boasts that HDTV will allow viewers to see every blade of grass in the World Cup soccer tournament. Sir Howard thanks his host and, observing his surroundings, pokes fun at their alliance: "I thought you were trying to imply that the whole relationship with us is a crapshoot." He nods toward a new Sony Bravia television and tells partygoers that the set's crystalline display means that even "watching grass grow is fundamentally exciting."

Not that he would know. It is nearly a year since Sir Howard, 64, began his tenure as chief executive of Sony, the Japanese electronics and entertainment behemoth, declaring himself a "Sony warrior" committed to selling "champion products." He has spent much of that time crisscrossing the globe, trying to shake up the venerable but wayward company. He has traveled from corporate headquarters in Tokyo to his home in New York and to visit his wife and children, who live in the English countryside. And he has ventured to many points in between — last fall, for example, to a traditional spa in rural Japan where he and Ryoji Chubachi, the Sony president, bonded by bathing nude in warm spring water.

Sir Howard, the former head of Sony's American subsidiary, was an unconventional choice to revamp a Japanese corporate icon at risk of losing its relevance, market share and profits to more nimble and innovative competitors in the digital age. As his wife, Jennifer A. K. Patterson, observed at Mr. Murdoch's party, Sir Howard's new role is a potential "career breaker." The next several months promise to define the rest of Sir Howard's tenure at Sony as he tries to refocus this conglomerate's vast electronics business, shore up its film operations and jump-start its video game offerings, among a host of other challenges. If he fails to do so, more than just his résumé may be blotted. As Sir Howard is the first to acknowledge, Sony may find itself permanently stunted.

If he pulls it off, the upside is equally substantial. "Sony is as complicated as it gets," said William Drewry, an analyst at Credit Suisse who is bullish on the company. "Stringer's not taking anything for granted, but the risk of him not succeeding, in my mind, is less than it was when he took over 11 months ago."

Sir Howard has approached his duties with energy, enthusiasm and an alarm clock. The morning after Mr. Murdoch's party, he boarded a train to Cannes, France, with Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and various Sony Pictures executives to help them promote their much anticipated new film, "The Da Vinci Code." By the end of the same week, he traveled to Japan to handle his most urgent task: rallying Sony's top managers around the next phase of a revitalization strategy he announced last fall.

AS part of that plan he has set out to streamline and reorganize Sony's core electronics business, which accounts for 70 percent of the company's $64 billion in sales. More crucially, he is trying to overhaul Sony's culture to become more internally collaborative and much more software-savvy. And he is tackling these challenges at an enterprise that is so large and diverse that it simultaneously produces some of the coolest gizmos on the planet (like Sony's Location Free TV viewer or its latest CyberShot camera), yet appears lumbering and clueless in other aspects (think of the faded glories of the Walkman or the Sony Connect downloading service).

Even the American entertainment businesses that Sir Howard more closely oversaw in the past — Sony Pictures Entertainment and a half-interest in Sony-BMG Music Entertainment — have been roiled by notable flops and management clashes.

With Sony's stock up 24 percent in the last year, Sir Howard has the wind at his back — for now, at least. Part of the reason for that handsome stock surge is the overall buoyancy in the Japanese stock market. Japan's Topix index is up 44 percent over the last year, versus 7 percent for the Dow Jones industrial average. But Sony has also managed to beat analysts' earnings expectations in each of the last four quarters. Nonetheless, Sony's core electronics business continues to lose money. Most of its $1 billion earnings in the fiscal year ended March 31 came from big gains in its sprawling domestic financial services business, which owns a hefty portfolio of Japanese equities — hardly lines of business that electronics buffs have typically associated with the company.

So far, the reviews for Sir Howard's first year are better than those that have greeted "The Da Vinci Code." For one thing, the company's Bravia televisions — a result of a joint venture with Samsung— have given him bragging rights in a category in which Sony previously stumbled. He also gets credit for holding onto the financial services business rather than selling it as soon as he took over, a move that many analysts had erroneously predicted. "Stringer hasn't had such a big impact on earnings," said Yuji Fujimori, an analyst in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs. "But he's succeeded in changing the tone of the company."

In the near term, much is riding on the introduction of the PlayStation 3 — which was delayed by several months until this November and has cost more to produce than the company envisioned — and the success of Blu-ray, the high-definition DVD format that Sony pioneered. While PlayStation 3 runs the risk of being lapped by other platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox 360, Blu-ray faces its own hurdles in a looming format war with rival Toshiba's HD-DVD. These high-stakes products will hit the market at roughly the same time as "Casino Royale," the first James Bond film that Sony has produced since it led a consortium of investors in a purchase of MGM in 2004.

Cross-cultural friction also persists. Some critics say Sir Howard's arrival in the executive suite represents a further westernization of a business that would be better off selling its Hollywood assets and moving back to its Japanese roots — roots grounded in the creation and perfection of elegant electronic devices. Kazukuni Kobayashi, a former Sony employee who has written five books about the company's problems, including one called "Sony Sickness," is among those who think that the company should install a Japanese chief executive. "In Japan, Sony is an engineering company," Mr. Kobayashi said in an interview. "In America, it's a brand."

Takuma Miyazaki, a former Sony engineer who quit last year and wrote a book about the company called "Technological Hollowing," said: "Watching Sony now is like watching 'The Osbournes.' We see how pathetic our former hero has become."

Sir Howard faces internal pressures as well. When he approved a $2 billion cost-cutting plan announced last September, Sir Howard said some Japanese executives challenged him about why he was focusing on expenses rather than growth. For the most part, however, Sony's 61,000 Japanese employees appear to have embraced the first phase of Sir Howard's plan — called Sony United. In part, that is because the closure of 11 of 66 plants would result in the loss of 10,000 jobs, far less severe than the cutbacks Sir Howard had overseen at the American division. He and Mr. Chubachi appeared to quietly win points with the rank and file when, several weeks ago, they told 45 retired Sony executives who maintained comfortable offices as paid advisers that their services were no longer needed.

Sir Howard's good humor, pragmatic approach and openness have brought him some acceptance among the company's senior managers as well — even though he does not speak much Japanese. Unlike Sony's remote and enigmatic past leaders, he and Mr. Chubachi hold regular town-hall meetings at Sony plants and offices. On one such visit he made in November to a plant in central Japan, one female employee told him that it was her birthday and asked him, jokingly, to sing her a song. Sir Howard instantly broke into "Happy Birthday."

"For someone in that position to sprinkle in so many jokes is rare in Japan," Mr. Chubachi said. "Some employees had been resistant because of his image as a cost-cutter. But when employees actually met him, he gave them a totally different impression."

Of course, Sony's future and Sir Howard's legacy do not rest on his charm but on his stated goal of increasing the company's sluggish annual profit margins to 5 percent from last year's 2.6 percent by March 2008. By comparison, Samsung and Apple Computer rack up annual margins of 14 percent and 12 percent. Every percentage point that Sony adds to its margins could bolster its stock price by $8 a share, Mr. Drewry said. Sony's shares closed on Friday at $46.81.

How significantly Sir Howard can change Sony's culture will determine how the company fares in a world where most homes may someday be filled with closely networked devices linked to the Internet. "When you're transforming a company, and you're really trying to drive fundamental change, early success is both your best friend and your best enemy," said Louis V. Gerstner, the former I.B.M. chairman, whom Sir Howard persuaded to work as a consultant to Sony.

On the one hand, Mr. Gerstner said, quick improvement gives people confidence that they can make progress. On the other, it could lead Sony's notoriously insular legions of engineers to think that further change is unnecessary. Sony's "fundamental problem," he said, "frankly has nothing to do with margins in TV and the timing of a PlayStation 3."

"It's got everything to do with how Sony is going to compete against other companies like Microsoft and Apple and others that are coming into its traditional space with a different set of skills and a different sense of how to approach the marketplace and the consumers," Mr. Gerstner added.

On the morning of the premiere of "The Da Vinci Code" at Cannes, Sir Howard sat on the Eden Roc Hotel terrace in Cap d'Antibes and spoke about his current and future plans for Sony. He advocated his case for Sony while indulging a mischievous wit that has served him well over three decades in journalism and broadcasting. At one point, he doubled over laughing as he described internal trepidation at Sony about informing one imperious retiree that he would no longer have an office at the company.

Sir Howard's presence at the "Da Vinci Code" premiere stemmed from the fact that he recommended that Sony acquire rights to the book two years ago — well before it sold nearly 60 million copies globally. As the afternoon rolled around, Sir Howard would join Michael M. Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, for lunch aboard a yacht docked at Cannes.

WHILE the perks of Sir Howard's position are obvious, so are the burdens: after lunch, he would spend the afternoon in his room, phoning into a board meeting of Sony-BMG Music. That joint venture, created in 2004, is typical of the constant upheaval that has defined Sony in recent years. The partnership has been strained lately, because of a drought of new music hits from Sony as well as corporate jockeying by both sides. Andrew R. Lack, a former NBC News executive whom Sir Howard recruited, clashed with BMG and in February was forced to swap his position as Sony-BMG's chief executive with the BMG-appointed chairman. Now, Sony and BMG are in new talks about changing the terms of their partnership.

Sir Howard is no stranger to such abrupt changes, having already navigated the unpredictable paths of corporate life himself. The former Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei recruited him to the company's American subsidiary in 1997 after a 30-year career at CBS, where he rose from being a documentary producer and news executive to running the network for seven years. Mr. Idei charged him with rebuilding tattered bridges between the American entertainment businesses and Tokyo. He was soon overseeing all of Sony's United States assets, and by 2004 had put into effect a reorganization that reduced its United States work force by 9,000, or roughly one-third.

Mr. Idei offered Sony's top job to Sir Howard during the Oscars weekend last year. Sir Howard had never actively lobbied for the job, but Mr. Idei's own reorganization efforts had stalled and Sony's board was pushing him to make drastic changes. Once Sir Howard accepted, one of the first things he did was to enlist Mr. Gerstner. Sir Howard lured him out of retirement by turning up at his Florida home with a copy of Mr. Gerstner's book about reviving the stalled and once invulnerable computer giant. "I have scratched out the word I.B.M. and replaced it with the word Sony on almost every page of this book and its still reads well," Mr. Gerstner recalled Sir Howard telling him.

Inside the company, Sir Howard gave new or expanded duties to executives who previously worked closely with him, including Robert S. Wiesenthal, Sony's United States chief financial officer, and Nicole Seligman, now Sony's global general counsel. Sir Howard has also worked hard to forge relationships with executives he leapfrogged on his way to the top. One of the most important was Ken Kutaragi, the maverick behind PlayStation, who had been in the running for Mr. Idei's job but elected to stay with Sony after he was passed over. Another is Mr. Chubachi, who also heads the electronics division and previously ran the company's components business.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Sir Howard does not appear to have the power to rule Sony on his own. Mr. Chubachi was appointed Sony's president four months before Sir Howard became chairman and chief executive. Analysts say decision-making is by consensus under the new regime, and Mr. Chubachi, a member of a management committee that advises Sir Howard on major corporate decisions, said as much in an interview. "I make the final decisions when it comes to electronics," he added.

The two men, who did not know each other well before last year, have some things in common. They avoid pomposity, and Mr. Chubachi favors a blunt, homespun friendliness that reflects his rural origins in northern Japan.

Last fall, as the men were hashing out the final details of their reorganization, Mr. Chubachi and his wife invited Sir Howard to a hot springs resort at the foot of Mount Fuji — where the men took their naked dip together. Conversation was tough. Mr. Chubachi once ran a tape factory for Sony in Alabama and spoke English in a heavily accented Southern patois. At times, he found Sir Howard's British accent equally hard to follow. The two executives now prefer to use translators when they converse.

But by all accounts, the two men bonded in the mountain springs and they eventually agreed on a cost-cutting plan. Mr. Chubachi more recently pressed for the removal of the retired advisers as a gesture of fairness to other Sony employees. "There was a certain amount of indignation" from the advisers, Sir Howard said. The company also sold two corporate jets in Japan and put its Maxim's de Paris restaurant chain up for sale. Even Norio Ohga, a former chairman, is expected to lose his office at the company.

Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony's chief financial officer, said that the company would eliminate 600 of some 3,000 products it makes in order to focus on growth markets. It has punted such marquee offerings as its Aibo robot dogs and high-end Qualia electronics gadgets — both of which Mr. Idei looked upon as pet projects.

SIR HOWARD acknowledges that cutting some ventures raised concerns that Sony was losing its innovative edge. "We are aware of the perception, but we have to deal with reality," he said.

He is equally sensitive to the perception that Sony's changes have not gone far enough. Even with the recent bump in Sony's stock price, it still trades at less than one-third of the heights it hit in early 2000. That explains why Sir Howard's next stop after Cannes was Tokyo.

By the time he arrived last Sunday to prepare for an annual management conference of some 1,200 Sony executives, he looked jetlagged. But he bore good news. Despite its critical drubbing, "The Da Vinci Code" hauled in $77 million in North America the previous weekend — Sony's best showing other than the huge box office returns of its "Spider-Man" franchise. Overseas, "The Da Vinci Code" brought in an additional $154 million. That was the biggest opening ever for a Sony film outside of North America and currently ranks second to "Star Wars: Episode III" for the best overseas box office weekends in Hollywood history.

It was a welcome development for Sony, coming in the wake of a disappointing 2005 that included the much-touted but poorly received "Memoirs of a Geisha." Last Wednesday, Sir Howard laid out the second phase of what he cinematically calls "Sony United — Into The Future." His top managers gathered in a Tokyo conference hall for a surprise address from Steven Spielberg, whom Sir Howard invited to talk about creativity and his fondness for gadgetry.

Sony made a point of seating its top engineers in the front rows for the gathering. Sir Howard played to Sony's considerable corporate pride by flashing images on a screen of the company's well-known product line — the transistor radio that the Sony co-founder Akio Morita pioneered, the Trinitron television and the PlayStation. He also touted a new Walkman mobile phone — developed with Ericsson of Sweden — which is the company's latest effort to make inroads into a market dominated by Apple's popular iPod.

Sony's next and biggest priority, Sir Howard told his managers, is to create new software that will allow it to better link the content and hardware the company produces. "We take great pride in the power of Sony hardware," he said "However, when we think about Sony's software, we have to honestly admit that our capabilities remain quite modest."

He also noted that Sony has to start new digital downloading services — another area where it has fallen far behind. To jump-start that effort, Sony hired a senior Apple executive, Tim Schaaff, last fall to oversee its software development. Company executives said Mr. Schaaff would focus on Marlin, a consortium of Sony and other consumer electronics giants developing a way to securely share content among different media products.

Sony executives said it could take several years to transform the company. And one question is how long Sir Howard himself can maintain his relentless pace. He is undergoing treatment for a degeneration of his left eye, a condition that makes it difficult for him to indulge in one of his passions: collecting and reading rare books. Doctors have told him that his travel schedule does not affect the condition, but there is a 50 percent chance that it could spread to his other eye within five years. "It's not irreversible," he said, but added: "If it went into the other eye, that would be depressing."

Perhaps no one understands Sir Howard's thirst for work better than his brother, Rob Stringer, who heads a Sony-BMG unit in Europe. He recalled that his older sibling, born in Wales but now an American citizen, once had a plaque in his office quoting the belief of the broadcasting legend Edward R. Murrow that no non-American would ever head CBS News — a job Sir Howard eventually snared. Now he is the first gaijin to run Sony.

"I think he feels it's an honor to be given this job, and it is such an unusual set of circumstances that he feels duty-bound to get it right," Rob Stringer said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu...ey/28sony.html





2 Executives at Sony Music Step Down Amid a Shake-Up
Jeff Leeds

Sony BMG Music Entertainment yesterday announced the resignations of the top two executives at its Sony Music Label Group, less than four months after the company's owners appointed a new chief executive in a bid to resolve management discord.

The sudden departures of Don Ienner, chairman of the unit, and Michele Anthony, the president, ended the reign of two of music's most powerful executives — each known for an aggressive, bare-knuckled style — who in the last 17 years built the careers of artists like Destiny's Child, Pearl Jam and John Mayer.

The resignations came as Sony BMG's new chief executive, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, has been revamping the company, which ranks as the industry's second-largest behind Vivendi's Universal Music Group.

Sony BMG said Rob Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of the company's British unit, would take over as president of the Sony label unit in the United States effective Sept. 1. Until then, the unit will report to Tim Bowen, Sony BMG's chief operating officer. Mr. Stringer is the brother of Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer.

The shake-up is the latest jolt to hit the company since Sony and Bertelsmann formed it in 2004 by merging their worldwide music operations. Almost since the outset, the company has been plagued by infighting between executives from Sony Music Entertainment and Bertelsmann's BMG.

Since the creation of the venture, executives integrated many of Sony and BMG's international business units, but the two companies' American labels have continued to run essentially as separate companies. In the more than 18 months of the company's existence, executives have clashed over issues including executive pay, and marketing and promotion strategies.

Top executives on each side have remained fiercely protective of their operations.

The feud boiled over last year when Bertelsmann demanded the ouster of Andrew Lack, an executive from the Sony side who was the venture's first chief executive. In February, the companies reached a deal that resulted in Mr. Lack's switching jobs with Mr. Schmidt-Holtz, a Bertelsmann executive who had been the nonexecutive chairman of the venture.

After taking the reins, Mr. Schmidt-Holtz moved quickly to begin rearranging the organizational chart. In April, he scaled down Sony Music's Nashville division — which had reported to Mr. Ienner — and folded it into the bigger BMG unit there.

"The American recording industry has been built on fiefdoms," said one executive close to Sony BMG's management, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wished to avoid further damage to the relationship between the parties. "Those fiefdoms are irrelevant today."

Mr. Ienner had less than a year left on his employment contract, according to executives close to him.

Recently, Mr. Ienner — who shuffled the management at the Columbia and Epic labels of Sony late last year — had been planning to oust Columbia's president, Steve Greenberg, according to executives involved in Sony BMG's decision-making. Mr. Schmidt-Holtz had at first asked whether another role could be found at the company for Mr. Greenberg, who has been in the job for a little more than a year. Even with yesterday's moves, however, it remains doubtful whether Mr. Greenberg will stay.

Before becoming head of Sony's music operations, Mr. Ienner served as chairman of the company's Columbia Records label, which under his management cranked out a string of hits from artists like the Offspring and Bow Wow.

Ms. Anthony, a lawyer who once represented rock bands like Alice in Chains, has been one of Sony's top deal makers and legal advisers and has become one of the industry's most influential voices in shaping policies on battling piracy and other issues.

Both executives had been top lieutenants to Sony Music's former chairman, Thomas D. Mottola.

After an earlier shake-up resulted in Mr. Mottola's exit in early 2003, many industry insiders expected his successor to oust Mr. Ienner and Ms. Anthony. Instead, Sony Music's new chief, Mr. Lack, kept both of them. Since then, the company has moved to cut costs — but it has struggled to break through with new artists.

Sony's labels accounted for approximately 15.2 percent of sales of new releases at the end of 2002. Last year, the company's share of new releases was 12.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

This week, however, the company scored with a new album from the Dixie Chicks, which hit the national album sales chart at No. 1.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...iness/sony.php





Cutting Sony, a Corporate Octopus, Back to a Rational Size
Martin Fackler

When Kumiko Ishioka bought car insurance last year, she chose the company that offered the cheapest rate. It also helped that the company bore the same brand name as that on her life insurance policy, her favorite skin lotion and her television set — Sony.

"Sony is definitely a name you can trust," Ms. Ishioka, 38, the owner of a clothing boutique in this Tokyo suburb, said. "But it's not really an electronics company anymore.

In the United States, Sony is known as an aggressive electronics giant that expanded into music and Hollywood films, with mixed results. But at home in Japan, Sony is large and diffuse, a sprawling conglomerate that sells products as diverse as flashlight batteries, online banking services — even foie gras.

This presents a problem. Sony has expanded into so many business areas in Japan and abroad that it has blurred its original identity as an engineering innovator. Analysts say this murkier image threatens one of the company's most profitable assets: the so-called Sony premium, the higher prices long commanded by its electronics products, which still account for 64 percent of revenue, excluding sales between Sony divisions.

Restoring this premium, they say, is one of the most pressing challenges facing Sony's chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer, who took over nearly a year ago, as he tries to reinvigorate the company after years of lackluster products and disappointing profits. While earnings have begun recovering, analysts say, the premium is still shrinking.

Sony remains one of the world's best-known brands. But even in the United States, analysts say, it is as likely to be associated with the movie "The Da Vinci Code" as with portable music devices, a product category Sony invented in 1979 with the Walkman cassette player but which the Apple iPod now dominates.

"What is Sony?" asked Hitoshi Kuriyama, an analyst with Merrill Lynch. "We don't even know anymore. Consumers used to pay more because the brand meant something special."

While Sony has lost the most ground in Japan, analysts say the Sony premium has also shrunk in the United States, where the company has had to price newer products like high-definition television sets close to the level of rivals like Sharp, Panasonic and Samsung.

"Sony has to trim its premium," said Paul O'Donovan of the market research company Gartner. "The brand equity, although still high, is clearly on the decline in consumers' minds."

Sir Howard calls restoring Sony's image a priority, to prevent the problems in Japan from spreading overseas.

He has pledged to refocus the company on electronics, and on creating the sort of "champion products" that made Sony famous in the first place. In February, he announced plans to sell several noncore businesses based in Japan, including a cosmetics maker, a mail-order shopping company called the Sony Family Club and a chain of Parisian restaurants.

While Sir Howard has made progress, as was demonstrated in a recent upturn in earnings, analysts say he has a long way to go.

"We need to rebuild the brand seriously," he said in an interview, "in terms of energy and perception around the world."

Globally, the company has about 1,000 subsidiaries and affiliates, of which about a third are unrelated to its core electronics business. While many are in Japan, they include the likes of the Sony Metreon shopping mall in San Francisco.

In fact, the Sony group's most profitable line of business last year was not electronics or entertainment, but finance. The company has three financial units in Japan, whose low fees have made them popular: Sony Life Insurance; Sony Assurance, a nonlife insurer whose coverage includes auto policies; and Sony Bank, an online lender. These subsidiaries earned $1.7 billion in the fiscal year ended in March, though losses in electronics dragged Sony's overall profit down to $1.1 billion.

Sony's success as a cut-rate financial company seems to run counter to its desire to remain a top-end brand in electronics, analysts say. And nowhere is the loss of the Sony premium more apparent than in Japan, where it took in 20 percent of its electronics-related revenue last year.

Visit electronics stores in Tokyo, and Sony's new Bravia line of liquid-crystal-display television sits prominently in front, next to the rival Sharp and Panasonic. This is the work of the new chief executive of Sony's electronics division, Ryoji Chubachi, who regularly visits large retailers to offer incentives for making Sony products more visible — something his predecessors never deigned to do.

More important, Bravia TV's now cost about the same as rival sets, the result of price-cutting last fall as Sony tried to regain its position as the world's top-selling TV maker. It succeeded, replacing Sharp last quarter, according to an American market data company, Display Research. But this success came at the cost of Sony's ability to charge more than its competitors.

"The Sony premium keeps getting smaller," said Hiroshi Takada, an analyst in the Tokyo office of J. P. Morgan. "The top end of the TV market is much more crowded now."

Sony's slipping status is not lost on consumers here. "Buying a Sony TV used to be like buying a Mercedes-Benz," said Yoshihiro Ueda, 42, a bank employee shopping for liquid-crystal-display television sets at a discount retailer in central Tokyo. "It's still a good name, but Sony doesn't stand out anymore." Mr. Ueda said he was buying a Sharp TV instead.

This hazier image is also showing up in recent consumer surveys. Last month, BP Nikkei Consulting in Tokyo released a survey showing that Sony dropped to Japan's eighth-most admired brand, from the top position last year. The number of consumers saying that Sony showed "conspicuous individuality" dropped to about 25 percent, from about 40 percent the year before, BP Nikkei said.

For a generation of consumers in Japan and the United States, Sony was the company that transformed personal entertainment with its Trinitron color television sets, Walkman portable music players and compact disc players.

But Sony also showed early ambitions to reach beyond electronics and become a global conglomerate, as many companies aspired to do in the decades after World War II. Akio Morita, the company's co-founder, envisioned offering consumers not just television sets and stereos, but movies and songs to play on them and also the bank credit with which to buy them.

Sony made its first foray into finance, establishing a life insurance unit in 1979. The casualty insurer and bank were established in 1999 and 2001 respectively under Nobuyuki Idei, then chief executive, who shared Mr. Morita's penchant for empire-building.

It was also under Mr. Morita that Sony started a French restaurant chain in 1966, licensing the Maxim's de Paris name. He later led Sony into entertainment, acquiring record labels and then Columbia Pictures in 1989. Seen at the time as a symbol of Japan's rising economic might, the Columbia takeover ended up costing Sony billions as the Japanese struggled to understand Hollywood's culture.

Since he took Sony's helm last June, Sir Howard has promised to increase cooperation between the electronics and entertainment arms. He has also tried to prune the sprawling electronics business by shedding 600 of Sony's 3,000 product models, including the Qualia line of luxury electronics and Aibo the robot dog.

"Sony was just too diversified," said Iwao Nakatani, dean of Tama University in Tokyo, who was a member of Sony's board until last year. "Howard Stringer is doing what his predecessors were unable to do."

So far, Sir Howard has defied expectations that he would sell larger noncore businesses, particularly the three big finance units. Sony has flirted with selling parts of its financial units before, including talks with several American and European financial companies four years ago about selling a stake in Sony Life, the company said.

Many analysts and even Sony employees say Sir Howard could spin the finance units off as early as next year. One possibility, according to analysts, is to take them public while holding on to a controlling stake, a sale that could earn Sony billions of dollars.

But many Japanese are sad to see some Sony products go. Entire Web sites have sprung up on which owners of Aibo robot dogs fume about the product's demise.

Ms. Ishioka, the boutique owner, said she hoped nothing happened to the line of skin lotions and treatments bearing the Sony name and sold by Sony's cosmetics maker, B& C Laboratories. She said she first started using the products after hearing that Crown Princess Masako used Sony skin care products before her wedding in 1993. Ms. Ishioka said she also visited Sony's cosmetic outlets for beauty massages, a service popularly known here as the Sony Esthe.

"I want my Sony Esthe as much as my Sony TV," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/te...gy/29sony.html





Timing the Electronics Market for the Best Deal on a New PC
Damon Darlin

Lower prices are part of the natural order in the world of electronics. Sometimes, though, the slow but relentless drop in price turns into a torrent. That's happening now in personal computers.

Prices are falling fast on notebook computers, as much as 18.5 percent so far this year, according to statistics compiled by Current Analysis, a market research firm. The bulk of notebooks now sell for less than $1,000.

The lower-priced notebooks are pushing desktop prices down, too. "I would expect even more intense price competition," said Charles Smulders, an analyst with Gartner, another market research firm.

The pace of price cuts has accelerated because a price war has broken out that offers great benefits to anyone in the market for a PC. And that could be a pretty large market. Forrester Research estimates that 70 percent of PC's in use are more than two years old and 90 percent of second, third and fourth computers are even older. The wars started quietly a year ago this week when Acer, a PC maker in Taiwan, re-entered the American market. The strategy was to get into the top tier of PC vendors as quickly as possible, which meant it would grab market share by keeping prices low.

Acer and other makers took business from Dell, which began to look less like the growth company that its investors were accustomed to. Dell's response came earlier this year as it cut prices.

Intel, meanwhile, was losing a significant portion of the microprocessor market to Advanced Micro Devices. Intel's share dropped to 77.9 percent from 81.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner, while A.M.D.'s market share grew to 20.4 percent from 16.6 percent two years ago. Intel is fighting to win back share, which means PC makers use the rivalry to get a price break.

Apple switched its processor to an Intel chip. Apple also makes running Windows applications on a Mac very easy. Owners of iPods are beginning to notice that Apple does more than sell music.

At the same time, Microsoft has pushed back the release of Vista, its new operating system, from before Christmas to early next year. Normally that would slow PC sales. But Microsoft is considering whether to offer incentives for consumers to buy PC's before Vista's release.

Some analysts had expected coming into the year that prices would actually go up slightly. Instead, the average price of a notebook computer dropped to $963 in April, an 18.5 percent decrease from a year ago, according to Current Analysis, which is based in Sterling, Va.

When an electronic device breaks through the $1,000 psychological barrier, sales take off. Samir Bhavnani, director for research at Current Analysis, said 37 percent more notebooks have been sold so far this year. About 60 percent of all notebook computers sold last month were priced below $1,000. He credits Dell, saying, "They love getting down in the mud."

Dell is running a promotion, which it bills as a celebration of its 22nd anniversary, with a $400 discount on PC's, plus a free monitor and free shipping.

Another statistic will tell you just how good consumers have it. While the number of notebooks sold is up 37 percent, revenue growth in the period is up only 15.5 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Companies are making less money on each notebook. Desktop computers are literally being given away. Retailers sold 14.8 percent more of them in the first five months of the year, but revenue declined 4 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Half of the computers sold for less than $500.

Consider the Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario desktop offered this week at Office Depot. For $300 you get a PC with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 100-gigabyte hard drive. Office Depot tossed in a 17-inch CRT monitor and a printer.

"The material cost, before the printer, was around $400," estimated Mark Hill, Acer's vice president for sales in the United States. "It's crazy." Not that he's complaining. Acer has gained one point of market share this year by artful pricing.

So how does a consumer play this? As always with electronics, it is worth waiting. Expect even better deals around the Christmas season. But if you need to get one now, you certainly won't suffer. Deals will abound during the back-to-school season, which starts in June just as the school year ends.

Many consumers will end up waiting for Vista, Microsoft's new operating system. Some analysts expect that to keep computer sales from flagging during the year-end holidays, manufacturers will pressure Microsoft to offer a free upgrade to Vista to anyone buying a new PC.

Decide on the particular features you want on the computer. A notebook with one gigabyte of random access memory and an 80-gigabyte hard drive is recommended. Don't worry about the processor. Unless you are using the computer for designing nuclear power plants or playing video games professionally, any one of them on the market will serve you well.

Why a notebook, rather than a desktop? Convenience, mostly. Desktop models are becoming a relic of a bygone era as the artificial price difference between notebooks and desktops collapse. Notebooks now outsell desktops in stores. IDC estimates that by the middle of next year, more than half of all PC's sold will be notebooks.

Decide on a size. The computers that weigh less than four pounds are considered ultra portables, the kind you take on business trips. Anything heavier is a desktop replacement, perfect for moving from room to room or on a jaunt to the coffee shop. Go to a store to test the heft.

Reflect on how much style you want. As this category matures, manufacturers differentiate their products by making some notebooks look prettier than others. They charge more for anything on the color wheel besides gray and anything that glows.

Then watch the prices at retailers and at the manufacturers' Web sites. The last time you bought a PC, the best deals were probably online. That's not necessarily true anymore. The best deals can be inside the stores because those retailers are using PC's and notebooks in particular as loss leaders to drive traffic.

Here is another business trend that is helping consumers. As the prices of PC's drop, even if retailers sell more units their year-on-year revenue comparisons may drop. Investors closely watch that figure. So stores need to bolster revenue by selling even more of them. They do that by offering even better deals on notebooks because notebook buyers tend to buy other gear like bags and home networking equipment.

The brand you pick will depend on which one gives you the most computer for the price. Current Analysis compiles a "competitive value index" that measures the price of PC's against the features offered. When it looks at computers sold in all channels, the top berths go to Acer, Gateway, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Columns providing advice on buying a computer usually have a paragraph or two where the writer pauses and briefly genuflects at Apple. Great computer, they'll say, but — there is always that but — they carry a premium of 20 percent to 30 percent over a similarly configured computer running Windows.

Here comes those paragraphs. However, that required "but" may soon be retired. Gene Munster, a senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, compared Mac notebooks with similarly equipped notebook computers running Windows and discovered that the premium for a Mac is now only about 10 percent. "I don't think consumers go through this exercise," he said. The premium shrank, not because Apple cut its prices, Mr. Munster said, but because Apple, in switching to an Intel processor, increased the performance of its Macs, and then didn't raise prices.

A few more consumers may notice. Apple's market share, which climbed as high as 2.5 percent last year before the switch to Intel, has grown from 1.8 percent. Macs compete at the high end of the PC market, where the machines costing more than $1,500 are loaded with multimedia features like TV tuners and bigger hard drives to store photos, videos and music. Some have special chips designed to enhance the performance of video games. Price cuts have not been as deep up there, which is one reason Mr. Munster thinks the premium won't go back to 30 percent.

He said that the media viewing and editing software that comes with the Mac compensates for much of the remaining premium. "Apples are always going to be at a premium," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te...y/27money.html





Just Give Me a Simple Phone
AP

Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.

"I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don't want to listen to music with it. I'm not a cyber-savvy guy."

But the wireless industry needs him to be comfortable with advanced features and actively use them. As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don't already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years.

Consumers last year paid $8.6 billion for so-called data applications on their phones, up 86 percent from the year before, according to wireless trade group CTIA.

But they've also shown a growing frustration with how confusing those added features can be. A J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.

That has providers working hard to make their devices easier to use -- fewer steps, brighter and less cluttered screens, different pricing strategies -- so consumers will not only use data functions more often but also be encouraged to buy additional ones.

For Sprint Nextel, the process begins in a suite of small rooms on its operations campus in suburban Kansas City.

On one recent day, a trio of researchers watched through one-way glass and overhead cameras as a volunteer navigated her way through a prototype program that lets parents set limits on their children's phone use.

The observers monitored how many steps it took for the woman to make the program work, how easily she made mistakes and how quickly she could get herself out of trouble. The results could be used to further tweak the program, said Robert Moritz, director of device development.

"If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design," Moritz said, adding that the lab typically tests devices and programs with up to 50 users over three to nine months. The company also uses focus groups to determine what people want from their phones and what they say needs fixing.

The results of those studies can sometimes push back the release of a product. For example, Michael Coffey, vice president of Sprint's user-experience design, said the company delayed releasing its walkie-talkie Ready Link service for about a year after testers said they didn't like the short delay between when the user pushes the button and the recipient answers.

Coffey said the testing is worth it because ease-of-use can be a competitive edge.

"IPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but once they figured it out (the user interface), they became the predominant one overnight," he said. "Whether you make it a marketing message or not, the public will discover that usability and choose your product over a competitor's."

So far, Sprint Nextel is doing something right as its subscribers spend the highest average amount for data services in the industry. "We believe there's a strong correlation between our standard of success and how usable the products are," Coffee said.

The other major wireless providers use similar techniques to improve their devices and programs.

Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest wireless provider, developed MEdia Net, which allows users to personalize their phones for using the internet, downloading ringtones or getting e-mail.

Verizon Wireless has V-Cast, a service that makes it easier to download music and video. The company has also pushed designs that allow users to accomplish many things with one button press.

"It's not fun to download a ringtone and have to figure out how to get that on your phone," said Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Ramey. "We do not shy away from testing. If the device or service doesn't work, it's a reflection on our network."

T-Mobile also has focused on a few key areas, introducing T-Zone to help customers find ringtones and screen wallpaper by subject and decreasing the number of steps to take and send photos, for example.

"Communication and personalization will continue to be the driver for phone use," said Michael Gallelli, director of product marketing at T-Mobile.

Industry experts say the companies understand the stakes involved in making sure their designs attract customers and keep them loyal.

"Five years ago, I wouldn't have seen a commercial from Cingular that you can customize your layout," said David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst for research firm In-Stat. "To think that they're putting this kind of effort into the interface is welcome news."

How well they're doing is a different matter.

Some analysts pointed to phones from niche providers, such as youth-oriented Amp'd Mobile and sports-centric ESPN Mobile, as good examples of intuitive design, marrying easy-to-understand menus with pared-down lists of content aimed at their particular markets.

But Roger Entner of the market research firm Ovum said none of the major carriers impresses him. He says most of them are trying to replicate how people use personal computers instead of coming up with a new approach.

"What do (customers) do best on the phone? They talk. What do they do worst? Type. Why is every user interface based on typing?" Entner said. "Right now, the software developers take advantage of every weakness a device has and none of the strengths."

Some wireless carriers and third-party companies are experimenting with voice-recognition technology. Kirkland, Washington-based VoiceBox Technologies, for instance, plans to release a product later this year that recognizes words and context in a customer's speech to immediately bring them content on their phones.

Charles Golvin of Forrester Research said a recent survey indicated few cellular customers choose a phone based on its usability, typically because they either don't think there's anything better or, like Bales in Kansas City, don't think they need those services.

But Golvin said for the market to truly grow, the programs and phones themselves are going to have to become more graceful and not just the purview of tech-junkies.

"Early adopters are less retarded by the user interface," he said. "As we're moving from the early adopters to the more mainstream customers, it will make a huge difference."
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservic...l?tw=rss.index





Is it Still Possible to Find a Pirates Gold?
R.J. Smith

Often in these times of corporations and modern warfare, we forget that some places in this world are still virtually untouched by our evil developmental hands. It has become hard to believe that there are still mysteries in this world. If you would have told me three years ago that a large stash of pirates gold still existed unfound I might have scoffed. That is, until I came across the tale of the Coco’s Island

This story is concerning 10 square miles of rain forest 500 clicks due west of Costa Rica. “Jurassic Park” and possibly “Treasure Island” were written with this tropical paradise in mind, while Jacque Cousteau called it “The most beautiful Island in the world.” The tip of a volcano, the island is surrounded by unfriendly cliffs protruding over the rocky shorelines. It is said to have two seasons, the wet season and the rainy season. The jungle surrounding Mt. Iglesias, the islands highest peak, is said to be scattered with waterfalls like something out of a movie. It is to date the largest uninhabited island in the world.

But the real story lies in the legends surrounding the tiny mass of land. It wasn’t always totally uninhabited.

The story begins in 1596, when a Spanish pilot by the name of Cabecas discovered the place. Sixteen years later, the French put it on a map and labeled it as lle de Coques, meaning roughly “Shell Island.” The Spanish misinterpreted that name and soon began to call it Isle Del Cocos, which proved to be fitting as early accounts of the island state that there was a large concentration of coconut trees present.

For the next century, the island became popular amongst the merry old jacking crews of back in the day. Yes, it is the fabled and legendary pirates I speak of. It was said that they had made the place into a sort of a bank, where they came to deposit their riches and would return later to retrieve them.

The trouble with being a pirate back in those days was that you did not always make it back to snag the booty. With all the pesky diseases and unsanitary conditions going around, plus the fact that someone was always looking to hang you, it tended to get a little hectic for those guys some days.

1820 was said to be the height of the treasure hiding. A couple of years before that, a British Naval Captain Bennet Graham took up a life of piracy and amassed a fortune of over 350 tons of gold from Spanish ships. He was eventually caught and executed. Years later, an old woman claimed to have witnessed the pirate bury his gold and also to know the location. She led an expedition to the island, however, by the time she had got there, decades had passed and it is said many of the landmarks she had once known were gone.

Another interesting story involves a pirate by the name of Benito “Bloody Sword” Benito. There could not be a more awesome name for a pirate anywhere, and around the same time as old Captain Graham was out robbing the Spanish blind, Mr. Bloody Sword was terrorizing everyone on the west coast of the Americas. He was said to have been one of the swash bucklers who used Cocos as his pirate bank. He was eventually snitched out by two right foul Englishmen and cut down at his hideout. However, the tattlers were killed before they could make it back to the island to retrieve the gold. To this day it is still not clear what happened to Benito’s stash of gold.

This brings us to the most famous of all the legends, and also the most sensational. During the same time there was a revolutionary army headed towards the Spanish stronghold of Lima. The Spanish, wanting to protect their treasures, put everything on a boat and gave it orders to sail around until the war had calmed down. The treasure was estimated at between 12 and 60 million dollars and included a life size, gem encrusted, and solid gold image of Mary the virgin.

A British sea captain named William Thompson was the man they entrusted with the task of keeping the loot safe. However, Thompson and his men had different ideas and cut the throats of the Spaniards on board and dumped their bodies into the ocean. They immediately made a beeline for the Cocos Island where they are said to have hidden the treasure. Not long after they left, the crew was picked up by a Spanish vessel, tried for piracy, convicted and hung. All except for Thompson and his first mate, providing they lead the Spanish back to their gold.

As soon as they stepped foot on the tropical island, the two made tracks into the jungle. There is no record of the Spanish treasure ever being recovered. It is said that the first mate died on the mainland of yellow fever; however, Mr. Thompson was never seen nor heard from again. There is no indication anywhere he ever returned to the island and retrieved the treasure.

Since the pirates disappeared, over 300 expeditions have traveled to the island in search of treasure. Nothing has been reported found except a few Spanish pieces-of-eight.

It is now one of the top scuba diving destinations in the world due to the huge number of hammerhead sharks that congregates off its coasts. If you are thinking about finding treasure there now you better break out your pirate flag because Costa Rica is no longer issuing permits to hunt for treasure on the island.

When you think about it, however, who better to find the loot than those flying the very same Jolly Roger as the men who put it there in the first place?
http://www.thesop.org/index.php?id=1153
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Tom & Jerry is a Disney Zionist Conspiracy Claims Iranian Ignoramus

The Doctor Is In…A Fugue State!
Jack

Nutty professor Hasan Bolkhari bamboozles his Iranian students with propagandistic nonsense that Tom & Jerry cartoons were a Zionist plot invented by the "Jewish" Walt Disney Company. Never mind the facts that Disney wasn’t Jewish – and he didn’t create Tom & Jerry! They were actually created by two U.S. animators, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who weren’t Jewish either, not that’s there’s anything wrong with that (they were Scottish-American and Italian-American respectively). Whew! The unfortunate thing is that this professor pontificates at the college level and the lies he spews are swallowed whole by an Iranian elite, seen taking copious notes in a televised address. Of course just a few moments of minor Internet fact checking would burst Bolkhari’s anti-Semitic balloons, if that is, the Iranian government didn’t block access to the web sites.





First Solar-Powered Recording Studio
Warren McLaren

According to Synthtopia, The Premises has just finished a three year long project to refurbish their suite of 14 recording studios in time for the business’s 21st birthday party (on June 30th). The one which piques our interest is Studio A. Apparently it’s the first fully professional solar powered recording studio in the UK. It was built using recycled materials where this was possible, and the electronics right down to the air conditioning is adapted to managing with a low energy demand. Studio Director Nathan Hale is reported as saying: “The idea of a solar powered studio has certainly raised a few eyebrows, but it works brilliantly. We’ve been doing dry runs with bands like Bloc Party and the audio quality is phenomenal. These days more and more music artists are thinking about their ‘carbon footprint’, so it was only a matter of time before a fully fledged eco-studio became a reality.” Maybe it's the sort of venue that treehugging vibe crafters like Kelley Stoltz, Shakira, Cloud Cult, ColdPlay, Sarah McLachlan, Jack Johnson, Joss Stone, and Moby would consider for their next album? ::The Premise Studios, via Synthtopia.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006..._solarpowe.php





Open Source Audio Applications Need To Learn From Listeners
Nathan Willis

Ask anyone what they use their computer for, and "listening to music" will no doubt be high on the list. Regrettably, there aren't any Linux applications designed let us do that. Sure, there are applications designed to accomplish data-centric tasks like "play and manage digital audio files" and "control an FM radio tuner card." These are two very different tasks from a programming standpoint, but interchangeable from the point of view of a user who just wants to listen to music.

Home and car stereos and portable devices all integrate disparate functions. No doubt it is a complex engineering problem for Blaupunkt and Sony, but by focusing on the user's tasks they create a far better product.

Only in software applications is this distinction made, and consequently we have to use separate apps to play music from different sources. And the problem is by no means limited to FM broadcasts and MP3 playback. How many of the mature open source audio players support basic CD playback? There are a few that support ripping CD audio directly within the app, but cannot play that audio directly off of the disc. Would anyone in their right mind buy a hardware device with that kind of limitation?

Building an application from a data-task perspective locks out the possibility of new features, yet history teaches us that there will constantly be new methods and approaches to delivering audio to listeners. CDs, audio files, streaming radio, DAAP sharing, FM, XM, podcasting -- the list goes on. How many new ones will be invented this year?

Nor is the problem strictly a matter of media delivery, in which each new medium has its own characteristic technical challenges.

Consider the interface to the music itself. Back in the WinAmp days, most media players utilized a dynamic playlist interface. Since the introduction of iTunes, most new apps have adopted its "library" browser approach.

But the majority of apps choose just one of these approaches and allow no other. Each approach has its pros and cons, but neither is right for all users, and certainly neither is right for all users all of the time. And unlike media delivery, restricting the way the end user can interface with his or her music collection is symptomatic solely of the developers' decision.

The underlying cause

There is no malice behind any of these shortcomings in the Linux audio player ecosystem. Rather, I think they are the unintended result of a philosophy that predates Linux, and may in this particular application space do more harm than good.

"Do one thing and do it well" is the first tenet of the Unix philosophy as expressed by Doug McIlroy. Its purpose is not to discourage programmers from building powerful applications, but rather to remind programmers to focus.

But "do one thing and do it well" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it focuses our attention on core tasks. On the other, it is a convenient excuse to ignore features, even important ones. And in some cases, it can cement into the design core problems that really ought to be cut out and replaced with no mercy. It is certainly part of the reason we still use separate applications for listening to digital audio files, CDs, DVDs, TV audio, and FM radio.
Links
"Doug McIlroy" - http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/
http://software.newsforge.com/articl.../05/16/1640221





Analysis

Apple Dealt Loss In Apple v. Does Trade Secret Case
Ryan Paul

A California appeals court judge has ruled in favor of a petition filed by the EFF that frustrates Apple's attempt to force rumor sites AppleInsider and Powerpage to reveal their sources. In 2004, web site AppleInsider published an "exclusive" account of a new Apple product alleged to be in development, a breakout box for GarageBand dubbed Asteroid (presumably because it allowed you to rock. Rimshot!).

The ruling concludes that trade secrets do not categorically transcend freedom of the press, that there is no relevant legal distinction between journalistic blogging and journalism with regards to the shield law, and that Apple's attempt to subpoena the e-mail service provider of one of the sites was a violation of the federal Stored Communications Act.

A brief history of Apple v. Does, and its significance

Following the unauthorized disclosure of alleged proprietary Apple trade secrets, Apple subpoenaed several web site publishers along with their e-mail providers in order to discover where they got their information about Asteroid. Challenging Apple's subpoenas, the EFF filed a petition for a protective order in Santa Clara Superior Court insisting that the site's and their works are entitled to protection under the shield law.

Then in March of 2005, Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg issued a decision in favor of Apple, asserting that the legal protections conferred upon journalists by the first amendment and the California shield law do not imbue reporters with the right to disseminate trade secrets divulged to them by others.

The EFF appealed the ruling, suggesting that coerced disclosure of journalistic sources would silence potential whistle-blowers by depriving them of the ability to remain anonymous. Pointing out that important information about dangerous products could be obscured from public scrutiny by the excessive application of trade secret laws, the EFF argued that Apple shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily silence journalists when the company had failed to pursue due diligence and internal investigation. Under the interpretation of the first amendment, subpoenas necessitating disclosure of a journalist's source are supposed to be used only when no other means of attaining the relevant information are available. The EFF hoped to demonstrate that Apple had not conducted their own investigation in good faith.

In September of 2005, additional evidence emerged to support the EFF's claim that Apple had failed to internally investigate the leak before initiating legal action, a distinctly ironic revelation in light of the fact that Apple had attempted to deflect examination of its internal investigatory policies by claiming that the procedures used in their investigations were themselves trade secrets.

During the appellate court proceedings, the judges vigorously examined Apple's claims, challenging the computer company's assertion that the information disclosed by the journalists constituted a trade secret, and questioning the adequacy of Apple's internal investigation.
Understanding California's shield law

In general, shield laws are designed to prevent journalists from being held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose a source. The California shield law specifically offers this protection to any "publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication or by a press association or wire service, or any person who has been so connected or so employed."

The law states that individuals that are eligible for protection cannot be compelled "to disclose, in any proceeding as defined in § 901, the source of any information procured while so connected or employed for publication in a newspaper, magazine or any other periodical publication or for refusing to disclose any unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public." Section b of the California shield law extends the same protections to radio and television news reporters.

The California shield law only has one major exception: shield protection is not applicable when the testimony of a journalist is required in order to ensure that a defendant in a criminal case receives the constitutional right to a fair trial.

In 2000, the California shield law was expanded to add some minor additional protections in order to prevent law enforcement agencies from exploiting loopholes in the legislation. When Assemblywoman Carol Midgen proposed the expansion, she also issued a legislative report that articulated with great clarity the importance of the shield law. The report contained the following tremendously cogent summary:

Journalists are professional investigators. The main purpose of the shield law is to prevent government from making journalists its investigative agents and to prevent a journalist who is trying to cover the story from becoming part of the story (which makes them wholly unable to cover it). Increasingly, when a criminal case is newsworthy, the first thing (not the last thing) defense attorneys do is subpoena any journalist who has covered the story.

In this case, Apple v. Does, applicability of the shield law is an important aspect. In a way, Apple is attempting to utilize the writers in question as its own investigators, trying to force them to reveal the source of Apple's leak so that the company wont have to fully pursue an internal investigation. Apple believes that it has the authority to force compliance with its demands in part because the company's legal representatives are convinced that bloggers are not entitled to shield law protection. Although the superior court sided with Apple, the appellate court sided with the bloggers.
The appellate court ruling

The decision issued by the California Court of Appeals in favor of the petitioners echoes many of the concerns articulated by the EFF. One of the most significant sections of the decision discusses the shield law and its applicability to the petitioners and this particular case. Apple argued that the petitioners intentionally engaged in "trade secret misappropriation," and that the goal of the petitioners' articles was not journalistic in nature. The appellate judges rejected the distinction, ruling that any effort to establish distinctions that address journalistic legitimacy is fundamentally antithetical to the function of the first amendment:

"We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace."

Now we get to Apple's claim that bloggers are not entitled to shield law protection. This is possibly the single most important issue associated with this case, because it deals directly with the question of whether or not bloggers have the same rights as professional journalists. Apple's assumption regarding applicability of the shield law to bloggers is based on two arguments: Apple says that the petitioners do not fall into any of the categories of individuals entitled to protection under the terms of the California shield law, and that the shield law does not recognize or address Internet publications.

Apple claims that bloggers "are not members of any professional community governed by ethical and professional standards," and that shield law protection could then lead to abuse and misconduct. (Ironically, if trade secrets were completely protected from journalistic disclosure as Apple desires, intellectual property law could also be be abused to conceal misconduct.) In the decision, the judges argue that Internet news publication by bloggers is functionally identical to professional journalism within the context of the shield law:

"[T]he open and deliberate publication on a news-oriented Web site of news gathered for that purpose by the site's operators ... appears conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently. Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners' enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law's protection."

With regards to Internet publications, the judges concluded that the term "periodical publication" is applicable to the Mac rumor sites, and that the petitioners are entitled to shield law protection as a result:

"[The legislature] must have intended that the statute protect publications like petitioners', which differ from traditional periodicals only in their tendency, which flows directly from the advanced technology they employ, to continuously update their content. We conclude that petitioners are entitled to the protection of the shield law, which precludes punishing as contempt a refusal by them to disclose unpublished information."

Although the judges do not state outright that bloggers are entitled to shield law protection (they explicitly avoid doing so because they feel that the term "blog" is too amorphous to be the subject of a legal precedent), they more or less imply that those who work on web based publications designed to provide news are entitled to shield law protection, and need not reveal their sources.

The judges also briefly addressed whether or not the petitioners are entitled to the constitutional right to freedom of the press. This issue receives only superficial attention, because the matter is simply not disputed by Apple. The judges state the obvious:

"[W]e can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media. It is established without contradiction that they gather, select, and prepare, for purposes of publication to a mass audience, information about current events of interest and concern to that audience."

In the subsection entitled Importance of Preserving Confidentiality, the judges examine the implications of Apple's claims and discuss the importance of protecting the identity of journalistic sources. The judges start off the section by analyzing Apple's argument that the public has no right to access corporate trade secrets. The appellate judges disagree with Judge Kleinberg, and argue that classifying a piece of information as a trade secret does not give it unlimited protection from journalistic disclosure:

Apple first contends that there is and can be no public interest in the disclosures here because "the public has no right to know a company's trade secrets." Surely this statement cannot stand as a categorical proposition. As recent history illustrates, business entities may adopt secret practices that threaten not only their own survival and the investments of their shareholders but the welfare of a whole industry, sector, or community. Labeling such matters "confidential" and "proprietary" cannot drain them of compelling public interest. Timely disclosure might avert the infliction of unmeasured harm on many thousands of individuals, following in the noblest traditions, and serving the highest functions, of a free and vigilant press. It therefore cannot be declared that publication of "trade secrets" is ipso facto outside the sphere of matters appropriately deemed of "great public importance."

Next, the judges approach the difficult issue of resolving conflicts between the rights of intellectual property holders and the rights of journalists. In the decision, the judges state that when intellectual property rights conflict directly with the journalistic function of disclosure in the name of public interest, freedom of expression necessarily takes priority:

This case involves not a purely private theft of secrets for venal advantage, but a journalistic disclosure to, in the trial court's words, "an interested public." In such a setting, whatever is given to trade secrets law is taken away from the freedom of speech. In the abstract, at least, it seems plain that where both cannot be accommodated, it is the statutory quasi-property right that must give way, not the deeply rooted constitutional right to share and acquire information.

The decision also addresses issues relating to the content and nature of the articles written by the petitioners. The judges point out that the "trade secrets" exposed by the Apple rumor sites didn't include any specific information regarding technological methods or innovations, and that the Asteroid device itself isn't particularly unique or innovative. The judges seem to feel that articles about the future release of a product carry more value as items of public interest than articles that disclose the secret methods and techniques used by a product:

Here, no proprietary technology was exposed or compromised. There is no suggestion that anything in petitioners' articles could help anyone to build a product competing with Asteroid. Indeed there is no indication that Asteroid embodied any new technology that could be compromised. ... The newsworthiness of petitioners' articles thus resided not in any technical disclosures about the product but in the fact that Apple was planning to release such a product, thereby moving into the market for home recording hardware. ... Such a secret plan may possess the legal attributes of a trade secret; that is a question we are not here required to decide. But it is of a different order than a secret recipe for a product. And more to the point, the fact of its impending release carries a legitimate interest to the public that a recipe is unlikely to possess.

The decision also addresses the intrinsic newsworthiness of the content in question. The appellate court judges challenge Judge Kleinberg's assumption that, although public interest is served by disclosure of safety hazards, it is not served by disclosure of an upcoming product release. The appellate judges argue that the release of new products, particularly technological products, can have a profound impact on society, and consequently constitute a subject of public interest:

"More generally, we believe courts must be extremely wary about declaring what information is worthy of publication and what information is not. At first glance it might seem that Asteroid is nothing more than a hobbyist's gadget with no ponderable bearing on the great issues of the day. But such an impression would be, in our view, erroneous. ... [Apple's entry into the audio production market] would inevitably contribute to blurring the line between professional and amateur audio production, and hence between professional and amateur composing and performing, in much the same way that the personal computer coupled with telecommunications technology has blurred the distinction between commercial and amateur publishing. The decentralization of expressive capacity represented by such developments is unquestionably one of the most significant cultural developments since the invention of the printing press."

Although I think the judges overstate the significance of Apple's product, the point they make is valid and very important. Product releases can have a profound impact on the technology industry, on consumers, and on the very nature of modern society. Although Asteroid itself may not be particularly significant, the availability of information about such products is essential to modern consumers, and the judges argue that unfettered access to such information is a fundamental right:

"It is often impossible to predict with confidence which technological changes will affect individual and collective life dramatically, and which will come and go without lasting effects. Any of them may revolutionize society in ways we can only guess at. The lawful acquisition of information necessary to anticipate and respond to such changes is the birthright of every human, formally enshrined for Americans in our state and federal constitutions. The publications at issue here fully implicated that birthright and the interests protected by those constitutional guarantees."

The ruling of the appellate court and the issues addressed in the written decision represent an enormous victory for free speech advocates and the entire independent press community. Assuming that the decision doesn't get overturned by a higher court, the precedent established by this case could potentially help to ensure that journalistic bloggers receive full protection under state shield laws. This case also affirms that intellectual property law doesn't universally take priority over freedom of speech. EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl comments:

"Today's decision is a victory for the rights of journalists, whether online or offline, and for the public at large," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl, who argued the case before the appeals court last month. "The court has upheld the strong protections for the free flow of information to the press, and from the press to the public."

As a journalist that specializes in technology, I have had countless opportunities over the years to witness the impact of emerging technologies and I can't help but agree with the assessment of the judges as a result. Access to information about emerging technologies and technological products is necessary for those that wish to live and thrive in the modern world. Without information about the latest technologies, we can't make informed purchasing decisions, and we will be unable to take advantage of the fruits of technological progress. As a result, the availability of such information (or sometimes, the lack thereof) has a profound impact on the quality of our lives. It is encouraging to see judges openly acknowledging the value and importance of independent Internet news sources, and actively trying to protect them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060527-6933.html





'X-Men' Has 4th-Biggest Opening In History
Christina Almeida

"X-Men: The Last Stand" stormed to an estimated $107 million three-day opening, the largest ever for Memorial Day weekend and the fourth-biggest in box office history.

Preliminary estimates were released Sunday for the third installment of the series featuring a cast of mutants with names like Storm (Halle Berry), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).

The 20th Century Fox film opened in 3,690 theaters and grossed a whopping $28,997 per theater.

"People had such a huge awareness of the movie that it just translated into these huge numbers," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

The film benefited from a huge base of fans who had seen the first two "X-Men" films, plus great marketing and solid reviews, Dergarabedian said.

"This is what the summer is all about," he said, adding the box office has rebounded well since last year's slump. "With `Da Vinci Code' doing better than anticipated ... we could not be in a better position."

Estimates for "The Da Vinci Code" over the start of the holiday weekend were not immediately available. That film, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, had a solid $77 million opener last weekend.

On the all-time list, "X-Men: The Last Stand" ranks behind only "Spider-Man," "Star Wars: Episode III" and "Shrek 2" for opening weekend gross. None of the other films opened on a holiday weekend, which usually gives movies a boost.

For Memorial Day openers, "X-Men" crushed the previous three-day high of $72 million, set by "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" in 1997.

Estimates for all films were expected Monday, with final figures scheduled for Tuesday.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself
Charles Solomon

IF the pre-show jitters are more than usually apparent in the bayside town Emeryville, Calif., it's because Pixar Animation Studios, the little movie factory that recently sold itself to the Walt Disney Company, stands on the verge of pushing its unbroken string of critical and box-office hits to seven. Its record is already unmatched in American animation history, even by Walt Disney himself.

"It's really scary for all of us," said Darla K. Anderson, producer of "Cars," the film that is reaching for that record with its release on June 9. As Ms. Anderson tells it, the filmmakers behind each Pixar hit — "Monsters, Inc.," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," et al. — have just made things tougher for the next in line.

"After each film's opening weekend, we pass the pressure on to the next director," she said. "Pete Docter did it to Andrew Stanton, Andrew did it to Brad Bird and Brad passed it to us. It's almost like we should deliberately put out something that isn't good, just to get it over with."

This time around, the director in the hot seat is none other than John Lasseter, who already has "A Bug's Life" and the "Toy Story" movies to his credit, and, with the merger, has been designated creative leader of both Pixar and Disney Feature Animation.
That Mr. Lasseter has chosen to stake the Pixar winning streak on animated automobiles owes something to a lifelong fascination. "I've always loved cars, and the idea of cars being alive came up during 'A Bug's Life,' " he said in a recent telephone interview from Emeryville, several weeks after showing "Cars" at a charity event at the studio there.

"One of my favorite Disney cartoons is 'Susie, the Little Blue Coupe,' " he added. But nostalgia of another sort played a part too. "I was at exactly the right age when Hot Wheels came out," explained Mr. Lasseter, 49, speaking of Mattel's toy cars. "I remember buying my first two Hot Wheels cars with my allowance, and I was hooked from then on."

"Cars" tells the story of Lightning McQueen (voice by Owen Wilson), an ambitious, arrogant young racing car out to win his first Piston Cup Championship, and the fame and endorsements that go with it. When he's accidentally stranded in the tiny town of Radiator Springs, he learns the importance of love, friendship and discipline from its eccentric inhabitants. His misfit teachers include Sally, a perky Porsche (Bonnie Hunt); Doc Hudson, a 1951 Hudson Hornet whose gruff demeanor conceals a surprising past (Paul Newman); and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), a ramshackle old tow truck who's clearly not the shiniest vehicle on the lot.

To make "Cars," Mr. Lasseter used a combination of design and motion to turn full-size automobiles into characters with recognizable personalities but that still feel like heavy steel-and-glass machines. Traditional squash-and-stretch animation of the characters' faces and bodies made the autos look too rubbery, and the usual way of putting a face on a machine proved equally unsatisfactory.

"The natural eyes of a car are the headlights," he explained. "Moving the eyes to the windshield separates them from the front of the face; the hood becomes the nose and the mouth is down by the grille. Now the body of the car becomes the head of the character, and you can gesture with the front tires when he talks. That design gave the animators more opportunities for acting, because the movement of the chassis over the tires feels almost like a head moving in relation to the shoulders. But to make it really believable, we had to move the cars in ways that maintained their integrity. I kept telling the animators, they're going to look like real cars, so let's move them like they weigh 3,000 pounds."

Moving the car characters and adding realistic reflections and other details posed formidable problems. " 'Cars' was a really difficult film technically," said Ms. Anderson, the producer. "It's the most complex film we've ever made." Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster than the ones on "The Incredibles," each frame of "Cars" took an average of 17 hours to render.

As for the town of Radiator Springs, the quirky desert hamlet on Route 66, it provides a reminder of the less homogenized America Mr. Lasseter saw as a boy.

"For a lot of our vacations, my brother and sister and I would pile into the station wagon, and our parents would drive Route 66 from L.A.," he recalled. "When they started building the Interstate, my dad would drive it for parts of our journeys and say, 'Now we can really make time.' But the Interstate was so smooth, you'd lose track of where you were. When you drove Route 66, you really felt the land. You knew where it was hilly and where it was flat. On the Interstate it was all flat."

The melancholy images of the forgotten town balance the fast-paced racing scenes and broad comic sequences. Mr. Lasseter says his use of these moments was inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation director.

"In every one," he said, "there are beautiful quiet scenes. The drive in our early films was to trim out all the 'dead spots,' because the executives were always saying: 'I'm going for popcorn.' 'You're losing me.' After a while I realized I wasn't going to lose the audience. The executives were used to seeing the movie, but the audience wouldn't be. They'd be with us in those moments."

An early graduate of the character animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, Mr. Lasseter was trained at the Disney studio by members some of the legendary Nine Old Men, Walt Disney's celebrated cadre of animators. In addition to Mr. Miyazaki, Mr. Lasseter cites lessons he learned from his mentors Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and from the films they made for Disney, who maintained that a laugh should be balanced with a tear. Disney also believed that for an audience to be touched, the emotions had to be genuine, arising from the characters and their situations.

"Frank and Ollie always said the thing to strive to get into a film is heart, or pathos," Mr. Lasseter said. "To really get the audience to feel that heart, they have to discover the emotion for themselves. You can't tell them to feel sad."

Last August the cast and crew of "Cars" got their own dose of pathos when Joe Ranft, the film's co-director, was killed in a car accident. He provided the voices for Heimlich the caterpillar in "A Bug's Life" and Red the firetruck in "Cars," and was widely respected within the animation industry as one of the best story men of his generation. "Cars" is dedicated to Mr. Ranft's memory, and Mr. Lasseter's usually ebullient voice softens when he talks about his friend and collaborator. He sometimes still speaks of him in the present tense:

"Joe has been by my side on every movie I've made from the very beginning. He was such a big, lovable guy that no matter what mood I was in, he could make me laugh immediately. Joe's personal humor didn't come from funny lines or quips, but the characters he would become. The brilliance of his story work in each of our films lies in the strength and individuality of the characters he developed. His heart runs all the way through this picture."

Disney's $7.4 billion acquisition of Pixar was announced just as Mr. Lasseter was finishing "Cars," triggering widespread speculation, both inside and outside the animation world, about how he will juggle his life as a director while continuing to oversee Pixar and revitalizing Disney's feature animation studio.

"I've always worn two hats at Pixar: I'm the creative head of the studio and I'm a film director," he said. "I directed the first three movies at the studio, but it was important to build Pixar into a place where other directors could make their movies and I would help them.

"After 'Monsters,' 'Nemo' and 'Incredibles,' it was my turn again. Andrew Stanton, who's vice president of creative, oversaw the other projects while I was on 'Cars.' His next movie is kicking in now, so it's time for me to take the executive role. I'll be overseeing two studios — for a while anyway. But I love directing, and hope to direct again."

Dick Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Pictures, offered a reassuring message about Mr. Lasseter's future prospects as a filmmaker.

"I think initially John is going to have his hands full, but it's certainly our hope that once he has things going and feels comfortable, he'll direct a movie," Mr. Cook said. "John's got too many great stories to tell not to direct again. When he feels the time is right, and he has the right project, he'll step back in. It's too much a part of him not to. And I think it's to everyone's advantage for him to do so."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/movies/28solo.html





Brothels Ask Exemption From Smoking Ban
AP

Brothel owners in the southern state of Victoria have called for an exemption to a new ban on smoking in the workplace, saying customers like to light up after sex.

The Australian Adult Entertainment Industry has written to Victoria's health minister arguing that new laws banning smoking in bars and brothels could push prostitution back into the streets, according to a report in the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

"People smoke when they drink, and people smoke when they fornicate," association representative William Albon said. "These smoking laws are going to drive women back onto the streets courtesy of the health minister."

The association - which represents more than half of the 87 legal brothels operating in Victoria's capital city Melbourne - wants an exemption to the ban, which comes into effect in July 2007.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Why Redmond Feels So Threatened By ODF
Neil McAllister

Could any subject be less interesting than electronic document formats? Even programmers’ eyes start to glaze over when the conversation shifts to how an application stores its data. For software end users, the topic seldom even comes up.

How strange, then, that so much ink has been devoted in the past few months to the ODF (OpenDocument format). It’s just a file format! Various open source office productivity suites have incorporated code that allows them to save and load ODF documents, and that’s great. But nearly every application ever written saves and loads data in some file format or another. Why all the fuss about this one?

ODF first came to prominence last year, when the State of Massachusetts announced that it would adopt the format for public documents and abandon Microsoft’s proprietary Office format. What started as a seemingly simple, albeit significant, decision quickly erupted to near-scandalous proportions. Microsoft, naturally, decried the move. Almost immediately, companies and individuals on both sides of the fence let their opinions be known. Amid the ruckus, Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn, widely recognised as being responsible for the decision to use ODF, resigned.

Since those early days there’s been a steady trickle of news stories about OpenDocument: such-and-such company offers its support for ODF. An industry consortium forms to promote the format; OASIS (the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has chimed in, too. And another story had ISO adopting it as a formal standard. And so on.

The celebrity tabloids cover Angelina Jolie’s love life as extensively as the IT trade press tracks the progress of ODF. The question is: why? How did something so completely mundane and uninteresting as an office document file format get to be the subject of so much press coverage?

The answer, of course, is Microsoft. As ODF has progressed, Microsoft’s mouthpieces have been there each step of the way, to give the company’s own contrarian spin on the topic. The ODF camp should probably thank the folks in Redmond for helping to make OpenDocument a household word — assuming, that is, that they hold with the popular wisdom that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Because, if you’ve been paying attention, one fact becomes clear: Microsoft really has it in for ODF.

Why? It’s just a file format. Actually, Microsoft has never made any public statement disputing its merits. It’s not that ODF is no good, we are told; Microsoft merely prefers having two standards instead of one.

But if that’s true, then one easy way to squash this whole hullabaloo would be to build ODF support into Microsoft Office. Presumably, that would be the easiest way to demonstrate the superiority of Microsoft’s own XML-based file formats over ODF. What fool would go to the trouble of choosing ODF when there’s an obvious better option, selected by default in the Save As box?
It’s not as if it would be technically difficult to do, either. In fact, the OpenDocument Foundation went ahead and wrote a plugin on its own, without any input from Microsoft.

By now it should be clear where I’m going with this. It’s been said before, but it merits repeating: the reason Microsoft won’t write any code to support ODF, and the reason it wants to block OpenDocument, is because OpenDocument is a threat to Microsoft’s bottom line. Period. The revenue stream generated by locking customers into closely guarded proprietary file formats is the proverbial golden goose for Microsoft.

Think about it. Protecting those file formats must be worth countless millions, if not billions, of dollars to Microsoft. That’s why Microsoft is paying attention to ODF, and it’s why you should keep paying attention, too, even if digital file formats aren’t normally your thing. Because, if your business relies on office applications, that’s your money.

Interested now?
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717A001A0EC9





US Marshals Switching to Red Hat Linux
Michael Arnone

Federal agencies want uniform software platforms to run on varied hardware, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and lab director at IT consulting firm Atsec. "Linux is one of the few [operating systems] that can achieve that and provide the security they need."

The U.S. Marshals Service is switching the databases at all 94 of its district offices in the United States and its territories to Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux.

The Marshals expect to have as much as 80 percent of their production databases and all of their data running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the end of June, said John Campbell, an information technology specialist for the Marshals' Justice Detainee Information System. The move will include all databases for prisoner information, some financial databases and decision-support systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Server is cheaper and has better features than the Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) SCO Linux the Marshals have used for years, Campbell said. "It was a natural for us to consider Red Hat as an [operating system] to run on," he said.
Remote Patching and Monitoring

The federal government is following the lead of financial and other private-sector enterprises by simplifying its infrastructure, said Paul Smith, Red Hat's vice president of government sales operations.

Since starting the Red Hat government sales division in February 2005, the company has reported sales increases of 40 percent overall and 80 percent in the government sector. The company is doing a significant amount of business with the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.

"The whole IT community is really behind Red Hat," Campbell said. Application and database vendors are making more products to run on it, he said.

Because Red Hat provides open source software, it's easy to download a free evaluation copy, Campbell said. It also doesn't have to run on proprietary equipment like Sun products do, which lowers the total cost of ownership.

"Agencies don't have a ton of money to spend," Campbell said. The Marshals expect to save US$50,000 to $100,000 a year by using Red Hat.

Another benefit is that Red Hat Network allows the Marshals to patch and monitor servers remotely, Campbell said. That's important because the agency doesn't have IT staff in every office to update software manually, he said. "This makes our life so much easier," he added.

The Marshals are using Red Hat Enterprise Server Version 3.0 for most applications and are introducing Version 4.0 on some machines, Campbell said. When Red Hat releases Version 5.0, due in December, the Marshals will consider it, too.
Uniform Platform for Variety of Hardware

Red Hat supports other software the Marshals use and provides better technical support than other vendors, Campbell said, adding that Red Hat supports Enterprise Server 3.0 for eight years, while Sun only supports SCO for five.

Upgrading operating systems allows federal law enforcement agencies to migrate from the proprietary applications and hardware they have, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and lab director at Atsec, an IT consulting firm that evaluates products for Common Criteria certification.

The Marshals chose SCO Linux years ago because it was one of the first operating systems that ran on the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Pentium processors the agency has, Campbell said. Solaris and other operating systems now run on Intel machines, but the Marshals prefer Red Hat, he said.

Federal agencies want uniform software platforms to run on varied hardware, Kurth said. "Linux is one of the few [operating systems] that can achieve that and provide the security they need," he said.

"It was a natural for us to consider Red Hat" as an operating system.
Red Hat Linux Keeps Sensitive Info Under Its Hat

The U.S. Marshals Service and other law enforcement agencies use Red Hat Linux because it handles sensitive information securely, said Paul Smith, Red Hat's vice president of government sales operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 3.0 is at Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4 out of a possible 7 and is certified under Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) at EAL 3+.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is embracing security profiles that other commercial operating systems have not yet adopted, said Salvatore La Pietra, president and cofounder of atsec, an information technology consulting firm. These include CAPP, the Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP) and the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

LSPP and CAPP are important for the federal government because they specify software controls for the flow of information into different classification levels and who can access that information, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and Lab director at atsec. RBAC assigns access based on users' responsibilities and strengthens the weak points of the other two, he said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 is at EAL 4+ for CAPP, Smith said. Version 5.0, due in December, will have a higher EAL rating and wilL include the other two profiles, he said.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/50750.html#





Google Takes Half Of All US Searches, Nielsen says
Ben Ames

American web surfers continued to flock to Google in April, using the internet search site for 50% of their 5.3 billion queries, according to a research report.

That marked a rise from Google's year-ago market share of 47%, while second-place site Yahoo held steady at 22%, and Microsoft's MSN dropped from 12 to 11%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The trend mirrors an announcement that Dell has agreed to load as default on new consumer PCs certain Google software, such as its desktop search application and browser toolbar, at the expense of competing Microsoft products.

Google cannot sit on its lead for long, warns Michael Lanz, vice present of search industry solutions for Nielsen/NetRatings. The top search providers will continue to compete for customers' loyalty with new features, improved functionality and rewards programs.

In the past year alone, all three have succeeded in boosting their number of monthly searches. Google's search count rose 34%from 1.9 billion searches in April 2005 to 2.6 billion in April 2006. Yahoo rose 27% from 919 million to 1.1 billion, and MSN rose 10% from 515 million to 570 million.

Those numbers can translate into revenue as increased traffic allows each search company to charge a higher rate for more exposure of clients' advertisements.

That could be lucrative territory, since the top shopping terms entered on Google in April included retail giants like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, Sears and Best Buy. Of course, pure entertainment still rules the internet; the top overall Google search terms for the month included Nick Lachey, Denise Richards, Miss USA, Cinco de Mayo and Bettie Page.

This landscape could begin to change by the second half of 2006, says Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner.

Search providers are moving from a "straight search" method based on algorithms and page rankings to a "social search" method that incorporates human knowledge and other people's preferences.

Yahoo has made the most progress, with its Yahoo Answers site already running, while Google has lagged with its Google Co-op site still ramping up. Yahoo also has an advantage in worldwide traffic, with a greater web presence outside the US than Google does, Weiner says.

In the meantime, Google will rely on sheer numbers to preserve its advantage. "These three guys are like the three TV networks back in the old days, and right now, Google has the top ranking show. Until proven otherwise, they're the leader," he says.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717D0019A097





YouTube Thrashes Google, MSN, Yahoo In Web Video Market
Juan Carlos Perez

YouTube is the most visited video web site, attracting almost half of all visitors and towering over giants like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, according to Hitwise.

For the week ending May 20, YouTube, founded in January 2005, nabbed almost 43% of all visits to video web sites, while the video section of News' MySpace.com came in second with 24.2%, the market researcher says.

The video search engines of Yahoo (9.6%), MSN (9.2%), Google (6.5%) and AOL (4.3%) followed. Rounding out the top 10 were iFilm, Grouper Networks, Dailymotion.com and Custom One Media's vSocial.com.

Collectively, traffic to the top 10 video web sites increased 164%in the past three months, says New York-based Hitwise.

For many years, online video remained an unfulfilled promise, hampered by high broadband prices, inferior image quality and reluctance by TV networks and film companies to put their shows and movies on the web.

However, in the past year, video on the web has gained momentum, helped by a critical mass of users with broadband access, improved quality and an embrace by production companies to distribute their films and programs online.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717900132837





Yahoo Reprograms Online Video Service
Michael Liedtke

Yahoo Inc. is reprogramming its online video service so it's more like YouTube.com, an Internet upstart that has amassed a large audience during the past year with a free Web service that encourages people to post and share homemade clips.

Under the changes unveiled Thursday, Yahoo will store homemade videos on its own site for the first time as it attempts to build a platform for people to browse and rate the clips. The videos will be separated into different categories, including a section devoted to the most-watched selections.

Those features mirror YouTube, which has become the Web's most popular video channel since a pair of twentysomething technology whizzes started the San Mateo, Calif.-based company a year ago.

Now, Internet heavyweights like Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo are trying to chip away at YouTube's early lead as the rapidly growing number of high-speed Internet connections make it easier to transfer and watch online videos.

Just two weeks ago, Google Inc. retooled its video service so a special piece of software would no longer be required to upload clips to the online search engine leader. Meanwhile, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL is testing a service, called UnCut Video, that accepts clips.

Since launching its video service in late 2004, Yahoo has focused on indexing the clips available on other Web sites.

Although the company intends to continue indexing material from other sites, Yahoo is betting it will be able to lure more visitors and give them more reason to stick around longer by creating a unique video library through submissions from its 208 million registered users.

"We felt this was a necessary next step in our evolution," said Jeff Karnes, Yahoo's director of multimedia search.

Yahoo has been adding more attractions to its Web site to maintain its status as the Web's most trafficked destination and spur even more spending by advertisers - the main source of the company's revenue.

By accepting homemade videos, Yahoo risks showing material that infringes on copyrights or contains pornographic scenes. Both of those problems have cropped up on YouTube, despite restrictions prohibiting users from posting such content.

Like YouTube, Yahoo will depend on its own users and copyright holders to flag rule-breaking videos so they can be removed from the site. To minimize the chances of an offensive video appearing before a big audience, Yahoo editors will screen all the clips that are featured on the service's front page, said Jason Zajac, the company's general manager of social media.

Yahoo will have to make up a lot of ground to catch up with YouTube, which boasts of streaming more than 40 million videos per day.

In April, YouTube attracted 12.5 million U.S. visitors, well ahead of MSN Video's second place service at 9.5 million visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. Yahoo's video service attracted 2.6 million visitors, trailing rival offerings from MySpace.com, Google and AOL, as well as YouTube and MSN, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

Although it leads the rest of the video pack, YouTube still hasn't proven it can make money as it subsists on $11.5 million in venture capital. Yahoo, in contrast, earned $160 million during the first three months of this year and ended March with $1.4 billion in cash.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





VoIP And New Ways To Cut Out The Middle Man
Nancy Gohring

Voice over IP peering, which can, essentially, cut out the local telco and thus save costs, promises to be one of several hot topics at this year’s VON Europe conference in Stockholm.

Enterprise peering, where companies can connect their private IP networks directly to other companies they do business with, represents a significant shift in the way enterprises manage their networks. It is a subject leaders will likely discuss at the conference.

The process is, essentially, “in-sourcing telco spend,” says James Enck, European telco analyst at Daiwa Securities. As an example, he cites an announcement earlier this year that Royal Bank of Canada would convert fully to VoIP, directly connecting the IP networks of all its offices.

“Instead of paying Bell Canada for use of the PSTN [public switched telephone networks], they’re emigrating all of their internal traffic between offices onto their IT network, and the IT department will manage this,” he says.

A similar peering movement could help further reduce the cost of VoIP calls for other users. Speakers at a voice over cable panel session at VON are expected to touch on this subject. Some VoIP service providers, such as cable operators, are beginning to offer free calls to other VoIP customers — even those on different networks — as a way of competing against telcos. To make that offering efficient, the operators are finding ways to connect directly to each other, without involving the telcos.

Several cable operators in the Netherlands, for example, are using a third party, XConnect Global Networks, to handle call routing without relying on the PSTN, Enck says. XConnect helps cut costs for the cable operators so that they can offer free calling to end users.

“They lose some revenue but they want to get customers so that they can sell them TV or other services,” Enck says.

In the wireless domain, moves to similarly circumvent the operators are being met with resistance — another topic sure to spur debate at VON. T-Mobile UK says it forbids the use of VoIP for users subscribing to a new mobile data plan. While this move is related to customers using data cards on their PCs, it could worry third-party developers of VoIP clients for mobile phones.

“It’s a big discussion topic,” says Ross Brennan, chief executive officer of Cicero Networks, the developer of a VoIP client for converged wi-fi and cellular phones. He hasn’t seen many operators actually blocking such calls and also believes those that do might be met with legal challenges.

VoIP software client developers are already responding to the threat. In early May it emerged that Skype Technologies tweaked the most recent version of its software to be harder to detect and thus block.

Other VON topics include IMS deployment and triple and quadruple services.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...257176006199A2





Vonage Moves to Reassure Nervous Investors
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

Vonage, tarred by a disastrous initial public offering last week, is scrambling to reassure investors. The company, which provides Internet phone service, said yesterday that it would reimburse the bankers who handled the sale if any Vonage customers refused to pay for shares that were allotted to them.

Vonage gave its customers a chance to buy as much as 15 percent of the 31.25 million shares that were offered last week. About 10,000 of the company's 1.6 million customers ultimately received shares, which were sold at $17 each, according to a person briefed on the deal. Customers had until yesterday to open an account with a specified broker and pay for their shares.

Some customers who participated in the "directed share program" were reluctant to pay for their shares after the stock fell. The shares have lost more than 26 percent of their value since their debut last Wednesday. They fell 52 cents, to $12.50 yesterday.

Vonage said in a statement given to the "Squawk Box" program on CNBC: "While all avenues are available to us, we cannot imagine alienating our customers in that way." The company added that if some participants in the program did not pay, "we expect to repurchase the shares from the underwriters if necessary."

The company's assurances are consistent with regulatory filings it made earlier that said it would cover the bankers if necessary.

Brooke Schulz, a company spokeswoman, declined to say how many customers had not paid for their shares in the program.

A few investors posted angry notes on Vonage-related Web sites saying they were unwilling to pay for their shares. Some blamed the company and bankers for overvaluing the shares.

"There is no way I am paying for this and you are out of your minds if you do," read one posting from someone using the name "ipobust."

Vonage, which has racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses in part because of its aggressive marketing campaign, does not want to spend more to retain angry customers, analysts said.

"Clearly they've gotten a significant amount of bad press, and for a company spending a lot of marketing to get customers, they will have to spend even more to keep customers from defecting," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research. "It appears that management feels that the directed stock program could backfire and result in higher churn," or customer turnover, he added.

Mr. Greenfield, who has a sell rating on the stock, said the shares were fairly valued at $11.50.

However, Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research, said shares of Vonage could rise to $20 in 6 to 12 months because its cost of finding new customers was relatively low.

He added that the company could become a "tremendous acquisition target."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/te.../31vonage.html





Skype Accused of Patent Infringement
AP

Net2Phone Inc., which enables cable companies to provide residential phone service, has charged that Internet phone service provider Skype Technologies SA has infringed on its patent on point-to-point Internet calling.

Net2Phone sued Skype and its parent company, eBay Inc., charging that Net2Phone has lost an unspecified amount of money as a result. Net2Phone, a unit of Newark-based IDT Corp., sued Thursday in U.S. District Court in Newark.

Skype spokeswoman Alicia Divittorio said the company does not comment on litigation.

Luxembourg-based Skype was acquired last year by eBay Inc. for $2.6 billion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology




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http://www.atiz.com/letter.html





Mob Rule On China's Internet: The Keyboard As Weapon
Howard W. French

SHANGHAI It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

It was the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.

In recent cases, people have scrutinized husbands suspected of cheating on their wives, fraud on Internet auction sites, the secret lives of celebrities and unsolved crimes. One case that drew a huge following involved the poisoning of a Tsinghua University student - an event that dates to 1994, but was revived by curious strangers after word spread on the Internet that the only suspect in the case had been questioned and released.

Even a recent scandal involving a top Chinese computer scientist dismissed for copying an American processor design came to light in part because of Internet hunting, with scores of online commentators raising questions about the project and putting pressure on the scientist's sponsors to look into allegations about intellectual property theft.

While Internet wars can crop up anywhere, these cases have set off alarms in China, where this sort of crowd behavior has led to violence in the past. Many here draw disturbing parallels to the Cultural Revolution, whose 40th anniversary was in May. During that episode of Chinese history, mobs of students taunted and beat their professors and mass denunciations and show trials became common for a decade.

In recent years, the Chinese government has gradually tightened controls, requiring, for example, that customers at Internet cafés provide identification.

It also introduced an Internet policing system whose cartoon figure mascots show up on people's screens to remind them they are being monitored, and recently blocked access to the most popular blog search engine, the American company Technorati.

There has been recurrent talk by the government of registering all Internet users, and many here worry that a wave of online threats and vigilantism could serve as a pretext to impose new limits on users.

The affair of the cuckolded husband first came to public attention in mid- April, after the man, who goes by the Web name Freezing Blade, said he discovered online correspondence between his wife, Quiet Moon, and a college student, Bronze Mustache. Following an initial conversation, in which he forgave his wife, the man said he found messages on his wife's unattended computer that confirmed to him that the extramarital liaison was continuing. He then posted the letter denouncing Bronze Mustache by his real name, opening the floodgates.

The case exploded on April 20, when a bulletin board manifesto against Bronze Mustache was published by someone under the name Spring Azalea. "We call on every company, every establishment, every office, school, hospital, shopping mall and public street to reject him," it said. "Don't accept him, don't admit him, don't identify with him until he makes a satisfying and convincing repentance."

Impassioned people teamed up to uncover the student's address and telephone number, both of which were then posted online. Soon, people eager to denounce him showed up at his university and at his parents' house, forcing him to drop out of school and barricade himself with his family in their home.

Others denounced the university for not expelling him, with one poster saying it should be "bombed by Iranian missiles." Many others, meanwhile, said the student should be beaten or beheaded, or that he and the married woman should be put in a "pig cage" and drowned.

"Right from the beginning, every day there have been people calling and coming to our house, and we have all been very upset," said the student's father, who was interviewed by telephone but declined to provide his name.

"This is an awful thing, and the Internet companies should stop these attacks, but we haven't spoken with them. I wouldn't know whom to speak to."

In hopes of quieting the criticism, Bronze Mustache issued a six-minute online video denying any affair with Quiet Moon, whom he is said to have met at a gathering of enthusiasts of the online game "World of Warcraft." At the same time, Freezing Blade has twice asked people to call off the attacks, even joining in the denials of an affair - all to no avail.

At its height, the Bronze Mustache case accounted for huge traffic increases on China's Internet bulletin boards, including a nearly 10 percent increase in daily traffic on Tianya, the bulletin board with the most users.

In many countries, electronic bulletin boards hark back to the earliest days of the Internet, before Web browsers were common, and when text messages were posted in static fashion in stark black and white. In today's China, however, bulletin boards have been colorfully updated and remain at the heart of the country's Internet culture.

"Our Web site is a platform, not a court," said Zeng Lu, a Web master for Tianya, which boasts 40 million page visits daily and says it is the world's largest bulletin board. "We cannot judge who is a good or bad person by some moral standard, but we have our own bottom line. If it's a personal attack on someone, we delete it, but it is very difficult, given that we have 10 million users." Although concerned about online threats, advocates of free speech say that is no reason for the Chinese authorities to place further limits on the Internet.

"The Internet should be free, and I have always opposed the idea of registering users, because this is perhaps the only channel we have for free discussion," said Zhu Dake, a sociologist and cultural critic at Tongji University in Shanghai. "On the other hand, the Internet is being distorted. This creates a very difficult dilemma for us."

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism, also defended open discussion on the Internet.

"As freedom of expression is not well protected here, we have to choose the lighter of two evils," said Zhan, who teaches at China Youth University of Political Science, in Beijing. "The minority who are hurting other people in such cases should be prevented, but this behavior should not disturb the majority's freedom of expression."

But there are drawbacks to unfettered discussion, as the Bronze Mustache case illustrates. "What we Internet users are doing is fulfilling our social obligations," said one man who posted a lengthy attack on the college student and his alleged affair. "We cannot let our society fall into such a low state."

Asked how he would react if people began publishing online allegations about his private life, he answered, "I believe strongly in the traditional saying that if you've done nothing wrong, you don't fear the knock on your door at midnight."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...ess/chinet.php





China Begins Effort to Curb Piracy of Computer Software
David Lague

When Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, played host to President Hu Jintao of China in Seattle last month, he learned that he had a customer at the apex of the world's biggest market.

In a conversation with Mr. Gates, President Hu volunteered that the computer he used in his Beijing office was loaded with the Windows operating system, according to two senior Chinese-born Microsoft executives, Zhang Yaqin and Harry Shum, who escorted the Chinese leader during the visit.

"Bill said: 'If you need any advice using Windows, I would be happy to help,' " Mr. Zhang said in an interview in Beijing.

It is probably not every day that Mr. Gates offers Windows users personal technical support. However, with piracy rampant in China, Microsoft and other software companies have every incentive to seek the good will of the country's top leaders.

Their efforts appear to be having some effect. Responding to years of intensive international lobbying, the Chinese government recently introduced a range of measures that have the potential to curb widespread piracy and increase revenue for software companies.

The Business Software Alliance, a software industry lobby group based in Washington, estimates that more than 90 percent of the software used in China is unlicensed.

On March 31, Beijing announced that local computer makers must ship all their products with licensed operating systems pre-installed. The government has also started a drive to ensure that all computers in the country's sprawling bureaucracy are loaded with legitimate software.

"It is indeed good news, marking a clear step in the right direction to reverse the serious problem of software piracy that frustrates the development in China for both foreign and domestic vendors," said Gregory Shea, the Beijing-based president of the United States Industry Technology Office, which represents more than 6,000 technology companies.

Senior Chinese officials acknowledge that software piracy is widespread, though they argue that foreign critics, including the Business Software Alliance, vastly exaggerate the scale of the problem.

Washington intensified pressure on the Chinese government ahead of President Hu's visit to the United States to protect the property rights of software companies.

One of the complaints of the Bush administration is that intellectual property theft contributes to the soaring United States trade deficit with China. On a visit to Beijing in March, the American secretary of commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez, noted that China ranked second in the world for computer sales but only 25th for software.

"We believe that is an indication of the use of pirated software," he said.

After Beijing's decision to compel computer makers to install licensed operating system software, Microsoft signed licensing deals with the leading Chinese computer manufacturers Lenovo, the TCL Group, Tsinghua Tongfang and the Founder Technology Group.

Lenovo, the maker of personal computers, agreed to spend $1.2 billion on Windows software over the next 12 months.

Senior Microsoft executives described the licensing deals as a breakthrough in the company's 14-year presence in China, although analysts said it seemed that a significant amount of the licensing revenue would come from computers made for export.

In an April 17 statement announcing the agreement with Lenovo, Microsoft said the $1.2 billion in license fees would pay for software loaded in computers the Chinese company shipped to 65 countries and territories.

Lenovo made about a third of the almost 20 million personal computers sold in China last year, according to industry estimates. Sales figures compiled by industry research groups suggest it is on track to sell more than twice that amount to foreign customers this year.

Some experts doubt that the pre-installation requirement will lead to a sharp increase in legitimate software sales in China, a market where computer sales soared 29 percent in 2005, according to the technology research firm Gartner.

Those experts point out that China has made promises in the past to crack down on software piracy without any noticeable effect.

"There will still be piracy for a considerable period of time," said Michael Chen, the Beijing-based general manager for Red Hat, a leading supplier of open-source software. "People's buying behavior is slow to change."

Chen and other experts maintain that the relatively high prices charged for licensed software to Chinese customers, who have relatively low incomes by Western standards, are part of the reason for China's high piracy rates.

Before the new regulation, most personal computers sold in China were sold without any operating system or loaded with DOS, an early operating system that preceded Windows. Some were sold with versions of Linux open-source software pre-installed. Up to 90 percent of customers then loaded pirated copies of Windows that sell for about 10 yuan, or $1.23, according to computer industry analysts. A legitimate copy of Windows purchased separately costs about 600 yuan.

Industry experts estimate that Microsoft sells licensed copies of Windows XP to Chinese computer makers at a heavy discount, which would add up to 300 yuan to the cost of a 6,000-yuan desktop PC sold without an operating system.

Some analysts suggest that the new rules will simply swell the number of computers loaded with Linux. The Chinese government has strongly encouraged the use of this open-source software to minimize the country's dependence on expensive software supplied under license from companies like Microsoft.

"It could open up a whole new area for companies supporting open-source software to make their technology known," Mr. Chen said.

Even with a sharp reduction in theft of operating systems, experts say the effect on overall piracy will be limited. They say the illegitimate copying of other software is estimated to account for the majority of piracy in China.

The Business Software Alliance, however, calculates that even a relatively small decline in piracy will deliver a windfall for China and the software industry. A joint study between the alliance and IDC, a market intelligence group, published late last year said that a drop of 10 percentage points in software piracy from 90 percent would increase the Chinese economy by $87 billion and lead to an extra 1.8 million jobs in information technology.

The study also said that a reduction of piracy on this scale would lift local industry revenue by $67 billion and allow the government to collect an extra $6.5 billion in tax. Some industry experts maintain that legitimate pre-installed software will be attractive to some Chinese computer buyers. Mr. Shea said he had received reports of increased sales from vendors offering computers with licensed operating systems.

"If the government is committed to buying legitimate software, it sets the tone for the country," said Arthur Kobler, a business consultant based in Hong Kong and a former president of AT&T in China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/te...gy/30soft.html





Hollywood Bypassing Critics And Print As Digital Gets Hotter
David Carr

The makers of "The Da Vinci Code" opened their film this month despite protests from a historically powerful institution, which labeled the Sony Pictures effort "a provocation" and "spirit-lowering tripe."

The institution was the news media, specifically the critics, who gave a C-plus to an A-list enterprise that included Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. Sony Pictures did not treat the press much better, making minimal accommodations for reviewers, skipping the usual advance screenings and requiring critics to wait for a screening in Cannes the night before the film was released.

Maybe the filmmakers knew what they were doing. "The Da Vinci Code" collected $231.8 million in opening-day ticket sales worldwide. The critics might have had some latent influence, too. Ticket sales for "The Da Vinci Code" fell 66 percent on Friday from a week earlier, the date it opened in the United States and many other countries, according to Box Office Guru. But some of that decline may have been a result of the opening Friday of "X-Men: The Last Stand."

"The Da Vinci Code," with more than 60 million copies of the book sold and a controversy all over the Web about the religious implications of its plot, did not lack publicity before its release.

But three recent movies that were the top openers in their respective weekends this year - "When a Stranger Calls," "Underworld: Evolution" and Tyler Perry's "Madea's Family Reunion" - were never even screened for reviewers, going directly to audiences without pausing for critics' opinion.

According to The Associated Press, 12 movies in the first three months of the year bypassed critics, compared with two last year. Since then, "Silent Hill" took the stealth route to a weekend box office victory, and last week, even though critics did not see "See No Evil," plenty of filmgoers did. Some movies have been labeled critic-proof, but vast swaths of the industry now seem interested in heading to the market without accommodating film reviewers.

The shrinking list of movies scheduled for review is just one more indication that the long marriage between print and film seems to have hit a midlife crisis. Historically, the movie business has supplied stars and stories for newspapers - not to mention almost $1 billion a year in advertising - and newspapers returned the favor by promoting and reviewing movies.

But the dialogue over films has increasingly gone digital. Long before a movie review comes out, young people are text-messaging friends during the first showing of a movie about how disappointing or how must-see it is. Even among adults, the time-honored practice of perusing large-print newspaper ads and then checking the fine print for listings has been replaced by clicking on the Web.

When he first took hold of the newly formed AOL Time Warner in 2000, Steve Case talked of the day when companies could open movies without buying significant print ads. That never came to pass, but now a new division of Fox Film Entertainment aimed at teenagers, Fox Atomic, will produce eight films a year without a print budget.

Of course, the embrace of the new has led to some hurt feelings on the part of Hollywood's old flame. After years of trying to rise above the clutter of releases by increasing print advertising, and enriching newspapers in the process, the industry cut back newspaper advertising last year. It fell $60 million compared with the previous year, its first decline in five years, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a market research firm.

In part, Hollywood is taking some hard lessons from the music industry, which saw the threat but not the opportunity that the Web presented. "Snakes on a Plane," a New Line Cinema movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and many reptiles, has become a cult classic on the Web months before its release in August. SnakesonaBlog.com, conceived by Brian Finkelstein, a Georgetown law student, has had 500,000 visitors and has become a maypole of kitsch and speculation about the movie.

"It is an Internet meme," Finkelstein said. "It is funny and very quickly understood, a simple joke with broad appeal."

The movie is benefiting from a huge no-cost push, and New Line is doing more than getting out of the way. It spent a seven-figure sum on an elaborate Web site of its own and, more unusually, shot new scenes integrating some of the suggestions ricocheting around the Web.

The sometimes rocky marriage of Hollywood and the press is not completely over. Particularly during awards season, the ego needs of big-time actors and directors are often sated by a certain size ad in a certain sort of newspaper. But newspapers, which increased rates for movie advertising as other categories fell apart after the dot-com bust, may be partly to blame for the prospect of a paperless movie industry.

"I know everyone is trying to make it come true because the cost of print ads could be considered extortion in some jurisdictions," said Mark Cuban, who founded 2929 Entertainment, which produces, distributes and exhibits a variety of films. "Every distributor wants to find the best promotional mix away from traditional media and get a far greater bang for their buck. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has found it yet. Whoever does will have Hollywood gold in their hands."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...iness/carr.php





The Seven-Terabyte Solution

The 500 Hours of 9/11
Glenn Collins

A brown fedora rests abandoned in ground zero dust: owner's fate, unknown. In images shot from space, a plume of smoke rises miles above the World Trade Center. Two workers cling to a scaffold that dangles from an office building beneath the inferno. A handheld video camera, pointing at a north tower in flames, shakily veers to show the second hijacked jet striking the other tower.

Those images, captured largely by amateurs, are moments from more than 500 hours of videos and films, the largest collection of raw visual data from what historians say is the best-documented catastrophe in history. About 1,700 clips from the collection have attracted more than a million hits in the three months since they were put on Google Video.

The 7,000-gigabyte archive was assembled by Steven Rosenbaum, a Manhattan-based documentary producer. In the days after the terrorist attacks, he put up posters and fliers and placed an ad in The Village Voice urgently requesting images that captured the attack, its aftermath and the mood of the city.

Now his collection is the largest asset of his dormant television production company, CameraPlanet, and Mr. Rosenbaum is working out an agreement with the Bank of America, the company's primary lender. He wants to structure a deal with a donor, buyer or partner that would keep the collection from being sold piecemeal, would repay the company's debt of more than $500,000 and would make the videos available to researchers, filmmakers and the public.

As the fifth anniversary of the attack approaches, Mr. Rosenbaum is hardly alone among 9/11 collectors in struggling with financing, and with the need to find a permanent home for a repository and provide greater access to it.

Beyond at least 260 major private and institutional collections, an estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

As yet, the logical repository for ground zero materials, the planned World Trade Center memorial and museum, has no place to store them, and it faces a budgetary and leadership crisis as well.

Beyond that, seeming to profit from 9/11 is still taboo. David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan, said his auction house has not been offered Sept. 11 collections to sell.

"Things from that day should be unsalable," he said, "and anything that is ghoulish is beyond the pale."

Among all the archives, Mr. Rosenbaum's video collection may be unique in that it can be sampled by anyone with access to the Web, at www.911archive.net/Google.

It is "an extraordinary compilation of perspectives, a very important archive to keep together," said Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Mr. Rosenbaum, 42, said that two appraisers had valued his archive in excess of $1 million.

"This collection is about five years of my life," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "It's not about money. We don't have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video."

Mr. Rosenbaum's Google video clips are low-resolution teasers of longer sequences, and some have been encoded so that they cannot be downloaded, allowing Mr. Rosenbaum alone to approve uses of the full high-resolution images.

Seventy-six people contributed to the collection, which is owned by Mr. Rosenbaum and his business partner and wife, Pamela Yoder.

The archive's value is greatly enhanced, they say, by videotaped interviews with those who provided their pictures, "because in 40 years everyone who shot this video will be gone, and we think the circumstances are as important as the videos," Ms. Yoder said.

A few of the clips have been used in documentaries, including a film produced and directed by Mr. Rosenbaum, "Seven Days in September." In a review in 2002, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it "an almost unbearably powerful documentary."

When another director of documentaries, Ric Burns, made a film about the trade center, he was also allowed to use some of Mr. Rosenbaum's images.

Archives like this, Mr. Burns said, are tremendous assets.

"What is lying in wait for historians of the future is daunting," he said. "How do you keep the videotapes and the digital computer archives of 300 million Americans, preserve them, sort them and evaluate them? What are the criteria? There aren't enough real-time years to sort it all."

Mr. Rosenbaum's collection may one day be used by historians as a template for coping with huge sets of historical data.

"We'd like to work with the collection to develop the kind of software that can be useful to search historical data," said Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science there.

In the past, historians often had to sift through meager records. "Scholars of the future will have an overwhelming task coping with e-mails, videos, newscasts, radio broadcasts and written accounts generated by historically important events like 9/11," Dr. Burton said.

If financing can be found, Dr. Burton and scientists at Urbana-Champaign, a leading supercomputing center, would like to work with Mr. Rosenbaum's collection "to store it, preserve it and develop the kind of software that can be useful to search this data," he said, "to develop tools that can take e-mails, newscasts and videos, index them and search them by topic and time, so they can be evaluated."

Mr. Rosenbaum hopes to make this possible by turning the collection over to an advisory board that would determine access, but that plan hinges on a deal with the bank, which said it does not comment on its customers.

Dozens of others, like Louis E. V. Nevaer, are also seeking homes for their collections. He is curator of an archive that contains 5,200 missing-persons fliers and related artifacts from the days after the attack in Lower Manhattan. An exhibition derived from it, "Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center," traveled for 18 months to 17 American cities, and to Mexico City and Milan.

"These fliers were going to be discarded as litter, and if we didn't save them, then they'd be lost," Dr. Nevaer said.

The flier collection has been catalogued and stored in climate-controlled warehouses in New York and Miami, "and we're negotiating with several museums," he said.

"We won't permit it to go to any institution that charges admission," Dr. Nevaer said. That rules out the 9/11 museum planned for ground zero.

Other spontaneous collections are housed by institutions and government agencies.

For example, more than 100 artifacts are located in the Jersey City police headquarters of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The items were donated in an outpouring of sympathy for families of the 37 Port Authority officers who died. They include handmade quilts, needlepoint messages, signed flags flown in Afghanistan in honor of the lost, cards from schoolchildren and a framed painting of Sirius, the bomb-sniffing golden Labrador retriever who died in the attack.

"These are all treasured possessions, and we'd like to keep them together," said Barbara Mahon, a retired detective who helps oversee the collection. "It may take some time, but we're going to find the right place for them."

The exact number of such collections is unknown, but "there must be more than 100,000 people of one sort or another who have these materials," said Althea Bernheim, a professional archivist who has been developing a database of major ones for the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, which has resources for collectors at www.nycarchivists.org/surveyintro.html.

So far, the Roundtable has identified more than 260 major repositories in a program financed by New York State's Documentary Heritage Program. Some archives have thousands of artifacts and documents.

Others are limited to just a few souvenirs of the trade center that were snatched — or rescued — from chaos. One collector "got a big letter T from one of the trade center towers," Ms. Bernheim said.

"There are individuals everywhere who have a few things and are wondering, 'Where do I store it and how do I preserve it?' " she said. "But with the fifth anniversary approaching, the danger is that a lot of materials will be discarded. People need their office space back."

Dr. Ramirez, the memorial foundation's curator, agreed that the anniversary — "a natural demarcation point" — is creating a sense of greater urgency.

The foundation has received more than 50 offers of donations of major collections and has a responsibility to act as a clearinghouse, she said.

"Some are looking to organize their collections, and some are ready to move on and want to deposit their collections," she said. "Many may be financially unable to support them anymore."

But the ground zero museum has yet to be built, costs are far greater than expected, fund-raising has lagged and the president of the memorial foundation, Gretchen Dykstra, resigned on Friday.

"We have to think carefully about the nature of the materials we take responsibility for — the cost of housing, maintaining and cataloguing them," Dr. Ramirez said.

She added that she was working to join with other institutions — including the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York and the New York State Museum in Albany — in a consortium to protect trade center materials in existing repositories.

Somebody has to protect them, said Mr. Rosenbaum, the keeper of the video archive, because it could take years "before we can comprehend the importance of all these collections."

He added: "They contain things that we don't know, right now, that we need to know. We don't know why these things need to be preserved. But we know they need to be."

In future, as collectors lose interest or die off, more and more ground zero materials are expected to become available — or to be put into the trash.

Ms. Bernheim said she is worried that valuable materials may be discarded. But she said: "Though only a few years ago it would have been blasphemy to say so, not everything needs to be saved. The question is, who gets to decide?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/ny...30archive.html





Dude, Here’s My Show
Rob Long

Right now, there are two kinds of people in the entertainment industry. Those who've heard of You Tube, and those who haven't. Which is to say that some of us are a little worried, and some of us aren't. Yet.

You Tube is a website, and yeah, for years people have been predicting that the web will eventually rewrite the rules -- and the economics -- of show business, but this time, maybe, it's really happening. You Tube is a little like Google Video, which is a little like a lot of other sites on the web, which are themselves a little like a mix of reality television, America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol, and tame soft-core pornography. You know: television as we know it.

I've seen some pretty clever things on You Tube lately. Someone somewhere recut a trailer for The Shining to make it seem like a heartwarming father-son tale. And someone else recut a trailer for Sleepless in Seattle to make it seem like a gripping Fatal Attraction-kind of thriller. And I think we've all seen the various trailer recuts of movies like Back to the Future or Top Gun with a strong Brokeback Mountain angle.

So a few weeks ago, on that lumbering occasionally funny warhorse, Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell made a short digital film parody of a rap video. It was called Lazy Sunday, and it was about two guys waking up late on Sunday and deciding to go see The Chronicles of Narnia, but set in the aggressive rap style. I'm not doing it justice, but it was pretty funny.

I didn't see it on the show, of course. I mean, Saturday Night Live is such a hit-or-miss thing -- I do what everybody does: I watch the first fifteen minutes and then turn it off. Right? After 11:45pm, the show just gets worse and worse -- it's been that way for 10 or 15 years -- so why bother?

I saw the clip on You Tube. Some kid somewhere took it off the TV and zapped it on the web, probably with the heading "This Was The Only Funny Thing on SNL Last Night" or something. So that's where I saw it. That's where a lot of people saw it, too, apparently, because it spawned a constellation of responses from all over the country -- people -- normal people, people NOT in the 212 or 310 area codes -- young men, mostly -- remember them? They're the ones who aren't watching TV anymore or going to the movies -- did their own versions of the sketch using the DV cam and the computer software they've been fiddling around with since Christmas...and it turns out that two guys from Indiana did one and zapped it up to You Tube and called it "Lazy Muncie" and it's pretty funny. I mean, funnier than anything that appears on Saturday Night Live after, say, 11:53pm. Funnier than the last Albert Brooks movie. Funnier than an episode of Joey.

So what does it say if you're Lorne Michaels -- the guy who runs Saturday Night Live -- or, for that matter, the head of comedy development for pretty much any network -- and it turns out there are two funny guys in Muncie who don't really need you to give them permission to make a funny little movie because You Tube is their network and You Tube doesn't have a vice president of comedy development to say, "Yeah, yeah, um, I just don't see where this goes. Can it be about people in their 30's juggling relationships and their careers?" And if there are two guys in Muncie, how many are there in Fort Wayne? Or South Bend? Or Indianapolis? And we haven't even left Indiana yet.

What does that say about that huge, packed auditorium at the Oscars, filled mostly with people who get paid to say yes. Or no. It means, I think, that in the future, a lot of them are going to be scrambling to get out of their pricey car leases. I mean, maybe I'm delusional, but it's just possible that what You Tube means is that sooner, rather than later, this privileged, pompous, overpaid class of gatekeepers -- studio executives, network executives, development executives -- is going to get squeezed pretty tight. Of course, that also means that the privileged, pompous, overpaid class of writers and actors is going to get squeezed tight, too. But I don't know: it sounds worth it.

After I saw the thing on You Tube that those two guys from Muncie did, I checked out real estate prices there. Not bad. Could be another Mar Vista situation, if you get my drift.
http://www.kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw....mplt_type=show





Technology and Easy Credit Give Identity Thieves an Edge
John Leland and Tom Zeller Jr.

In a Scottsdale police station last December, a 23-year-old methamphetamine user showed officers a new way to steal identities.

His arrest had been unremarkable. This metropolitan area, which includes Scottsdale and Phoenix, has the highest rate of identity theft complaints in the nation, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Even members of the Scottsdale police force have had their identities stolen.

But the suspect showed officers something they had not seen before. Browsing a government Web site, he pulled up a local divorce document listing the parties' names, addresses and bank account numbers, along with scans of their signatures. With a common software program and some check stationery, the document provided all he needed to print checks in his victims' names — and it was all made available, with some fanfare, by the county recorder's office. The site had thousands of them.

The data were not as rich as some found in stolen mail or trash bins. But for law enforcement officials here, this was another turn in a cat-and-mouse game in which criminals have outpaced most efforts to stop them.

"We're trying to keep up with the technology," said Lt. Craig Chrzanowski, who runs Scottsdale's property crimes division, including a computer crimes unit started two years ago. "But they're getting a lot better."

In an economy that runs increasingly on the instantaneous flow of information and credit — aggressively promoted by banks and credit card companies despite the risks — Phoenix and its surrounding area provide a window on one of the system's unintended consequences.

According to a Federal Trade Commission survey in 2003, about 10 million Americans — 1 in 30 — had their identities stolen in the previous year, with losses to the economy of $48 billion. Subsequent surveys, by Javelin Strategy and Research, a private research company, found that the number of victims had declined to nine million last year but that the losses had risen to $56.6 billion.

In Arizona, one in six adults had their identities stolen in the last five years, about twice the national rate, according to the Javelin survey.

Arizona officials have responded with a preventive mantra: shred all documents and avoid giving Social Security numbers or bank account numbers to strangers over the telephone or the Internet. The State Legislature has passed tougher penalties for people caught stealing or trafficking in stolen identities.

But the real problem, many officials and consumer advocates say, lies elsewhere. In recent years banks have campaigned energetically to extend more credit to more people with fewer hassles, and retailers and consumers have embraced instant, near-anonymous access to credit.

Last year a group of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and security executives from banks and credit card associations met to discuss ways of curbing identity theft. The group had plenty of ideas, including PIN numbers or fingerprint verification for all credit card purchases and a ban on mailings that include blank checks.

But all ran counter to the promotional campaigns of banks and, banks say, to the desires of consumers.

"There's a disconnect between corporate leadership at financial institutions and their security departments," said Brad H. Astrowsky, a former prosecutor who was part of the group. "Marketing people are ruling the day in banking. They can do things to fix the problem, but they have no incentive and motivation to do it. Preventing something from happening is a cost. What's the benefit? It's hard to quantify."

A Hot Spot for Thieves

Several factors converge to make Arizona a hot spot for identity theft. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, according to the Census Bureau, and its growth exaggerates trends that exist in many communities: a mobile population and high numbers of immigrants and retirees. It also has a heavy traffic in methamphetamine.

Methamphetamine users, whose binges keep them up for days in a row, have the time to sort through trash or old mail for Social Security numbers, bank account numbers or other identifying information, said Andrew P. Thomas, the county attorney. Dealers trade drugs for stolen identities that they use to launder their profits. Nearly half the identity theft cases in Mr. Thomas's office have a connection to methamphetamine, he said.

At the same time, he added, "More than half of the illegal immigrants entering the U.S. come through Arizona," creating a market for fraudulent Social Security numbers and driver's licenses.

Though Arizona passed the nation's first identity theft law in 1996, law officers say they are fighting a crime that is as swift and adaptive as the economy it exploits.

The newest wave of thefts here involves copying the magnetic strip from a victim's credit card onto the back of another. When thieves use the doctored cards, the transactions are charged to their victims' accounts. "Even if the cashier asks for my driver's license, the name on the front is going to match," said Todd C. Lawson, an assistant attorney general in Phoenix who specializes in identity theft prosecutions.

The machine to copy the magnetic strip, Mr. Lawson added, is the one nearly every hotel in America uses to recode room key cards.

And the county's Web site, which earned a place in the Smithsonian's permanent research collection on information technology innovation, has made Social Security numbers and other information, once viewable only by visiting the county recorder's office, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Police officers and prosecutors in Phoenix knew of just two cases involving public records, but most victims do not know how their identities are stolen.

For local law enforcement, pursuing even low-tech, small-time thieves is often complicated and expensive. The victim could be in Arizona, the thief in another state and the transactions spread all over the world. "If someone goes on the Internet and buys goods from Bangladesh, do you call witnesses from Bangladesh?" asked Barnett Lotstein, a special assistant county attorney.

Mr. Lawson said, "I don't think we prosecute 5 percent of it."

On a recent afternoon, Lt. Russ Skinner, who runs the county sheriff's computer crimes division, hefted three vinyl binders onto a wooden table. For the detectives in his unit, this is what the "crime of the 21st century" looks like: photographs of litter-strewn hotel rooms, and of a 33-year-old woman in various stages of methamphetamine-fueled decline.

When detectives caught up with her last August, after nearly three months of investigation, the woman was paying other users to steal mail for her — especially preapproved credit offers — and had parlayed those into credit cards or fraudulent accounts in 46 different names. She had secured housing, utilities and a series of small online loans in her victims' names.

"She wasn't the smartest or the most creative," Lieutenant Skinner said. "She just knew how to get it done."

A Connection to Drug Use

In the past, a drug user who needed money might go into a convenience store with a gun, Lieutenant Skinner said. "They're on the surveillance camera. They might get shot. They might get stopped in the parking lot for having a broken taillight," he said. "Now they can just sit at a computer, no one sees them and they can buy whatever they want."

Officials here began to notice a sharp rise in identity theft about five years ago, said Paul K. Charlton, United States attorney for the District of Arizona.

"The first tip-off was that we started to see a lot of mailbox break-ins by tweakers," Mr. Charlton said, referring to methamphetamine users.

When police officers raided home methamphetamine laboratories that were then proliferating on the outskirts of town, they found stacks of stolen mail or notebooks filled with credit card information. They also found thieves were using acetone, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, to "wash" the ink off checks, a simple means of identity fraud.

These small laboratories lend themselves to identity theft rings, said John C. Horton, a White House aide in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a laboratory, one or two people typically have some technical knowledge, and others specialize in procuring materials.

Identity theft rings follow the same pattern, with a handful of grunts stealing mail for one person who knows how to turn the information into credit cards or checks, Mr. Horton said. "It doesn't seem to happen with cocaine or heroin because we don't produce heroin and cocaine in this country," he said. "Meth production is to some degree a social activity in the same way as identity theft."

Though the Arizona police have closed many laboratories, the identity theft rings have survived or multiplied.

From its commercial downtown, Phoenix extends in a patchwork of satellite communities, some so new that the highway connecting them does not appear on the maps in the central post office. In the mid-1990's, as Phoenix's population boomed, the Postal Service created cluster mailboxes that served whole housing developments. Like other conveniences associated with the city's rapid growth, the boxes have proved a boon for identity thieves.

"You can jimmy one open and get everyone's mail at the same time," said Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor. After numerous break-ins, the Postal Service has spent $12 million on reinforced mailboxes, but many communities here still have the old ones.

Some thieves drive around neighborhoods with their laptops until they find a resident's unsecured wireless Internet connection. If the police investigate a fraudulent purchase, they will trace it to the customer with the connection, not to the thief who placed the order.

Since 1994, a Phoenix security officer named Bob Hartle, frustrated by his own experience with identity theft, has led an often lonely campaign for tighter controls on organizations that handle people's data, and curbs on the way credit card companies, banks and stores grant credit.

Data breaches in the last year have exposed the personal information of more than 80 million Americans, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that follows identity theft. On May 3, a thief stole computer disks holding the names, Social Security numbers and other information of 26.6 million veterans from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who had taken the data home without authorization. In most states, organizations are not required to tell consumers if their identities have been compromised.

"It's the sharing of data without necessary safeguards that enables this crime to grow as it has," said Torin Monahan, an assistant professor of justice and social inquiry at Arizona State University. "The response is always 'protect yourself, go to these workshops, get a shredder.' That diverts attention away from the extent to which these are systemic problems."

Seventeen states have passed "credit freeze" laws enabling consumers to prevent banks or credit agencies from issuing new accounts in their names.

But here, as in other states, businesses have successfully opposed such legislation.

"They're fighting us tooth and nail," said Mr. Hartle, who runs ID Theft Services Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides free help for victims.

"Banks, credit card companies, retailers want to make it easy to buy," Mr. Hartle said. "They write off identity theft as a cost of doing business. So whenever legislation comes up that's going to cost them money, they throw themselves against it."

Nessa E. Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association, said freezing credit could create problems for consumers, especially if they needed to get a new cellphone or change residences in a hurry.

"A credit freeze is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but people don't realize how often they need to use their credit report," Ms. Feddis said. "There's a balance between security and convenience."

She continued, "We all want fraud to go away, but we don't want to take 20 extra minutes every time we do online banking. We like buying airline tickets online, but there's a risk."

Though consumers worry about identity theft, Ms. Feddis said, banks absorb most of the losses.

Credit card companies point to new monitoring systems that have reduced loss from fraud as a percentage of overall transaction volume. At Visa, fraud accounted for 7 cents per $100 in transactions, down from 18 cents per $100 in 1990. "We could have a system reducing fraud to zero basis points, but it wouldn't meet what consumers are demanding," said Rosetta Jones, a Visa spokeswoman. "We need to deliver what consumers want in a way that is secure."

Fritz M. Elmendorf, a spokesman for the Consumer Bankers Association, described a chess match with identity criminals. For example, banks now protect prescreened credit card offers with address-matching technologies that make it harder for thieves to have cards sent to a drop address, Mr. Elmendorf said.

"There are more tools today than ever to ascertain the identity of a credit applicant," he said. "And the industry can point to a lot of things — some of which they won't talk about in detail — to validate people."

In the community of Chandler, southeast of Phoenix, Bobby Joe Harris questioned the efforts of businesses and banks to protect his identity.

Mr. Harris, 60, is a retired police chief. His wife, Judy, is a retired bank manager. Last December, Mrs. Harris was shopping at a Sam's Club store when a cashier said their membership had been canceled. When Mr. Harris tried to reactivate their membership in January, he learned that the store had issued a new credit card on their account to a woman who had said she was the couple's daughter.

"I don't have a daughter," Mr. Harris said. "I told the lady, 'I don't think so.' "

In two phone calls, possibly working with a store employee, the thief had raised the Harrises' credit limit to $10,000 from $3,500 and then to $15,000, and had run up charges of $11,093. No one had called them.

"It was only by luck that we found out," Mr. Harris said.

Seeking Protection

Though like most consumer victims the Harrises did not have to pay the bogus charges, they now pay $220 a year to LifeLock, a protective service that started last September in Phoenix.

The company's core service is simple: Whenever a bank or other business requests to look at a LifeLock subscriber's credit history, the company gets a fraud alert asking to confirm that the customer applied for credit. Federal law empowers consumers to get these alerts on their own, but they must reapply regularly to one of the three companies that issue credit reports.

Other companies offer different protections. None has had to prove that its services are effective.

When the Maricopa County recorder's office began posting records online in 1997, it was one of the first in the country to do so. Since then, legislatures in other states, including New York and Florida, have wrestled with whether — or how — to make their information available online.

A law in Florida requires that all Social Security and financial account numbers be stripped from online records by 2007, although new legislation may delay that another year.

In Phoenix, the county recorder's office posts 8,000 to 10,000 documents a day. Most are innocuous, but some, including divorce decrees and tax lien records, have sensitive information.

"I'm not insensitive to people's fear," said Helen Purcell, the county recorder. "I have the same fear. My information is out there, too." But it is far too late to start editing Social Security numbers or other data from the county Web site, she said. "We have 100 million documents out there now."

In the absence of full security, Arizonans cling to what protections they can. On a recent morning in Ventana Lakes, a development of older residents northwest of Phoenix, Lois Owen and Joan Schanks joined a small procession of neighbors to a community "shredathon" organized by the attorney general's office and AARP. Since the first shredathon last fall, residents around the state have carted 12 tons of paper to the mobile machines, in many cases supplementing the shredding they do at home.

"It's a big relief," Ms. Schanks said as she watched 20 pounds of old bank statements disappear. Yet even with the shredding, the residents here cannot begin to estimate how many people have their personal information, or how tempted any of those individuals may be to sell that information, Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor, said.

"You can take all the precautions you want," he said. "But everyone's exposed to a certain extent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/us/30identity.html





Couple's Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago

A year ago, Henry and Roma Gerbus took their computer to Best Buy in Springfield Township to have its hard drive replaced.

Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer's old hard drive -- loaded with personal information -- would be destroyed.

"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.

A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago.

"He said, 'My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,'" said Gerbus. "I thought my world was coming down."

Gerbus and his wife had good reason to worry.

A total stranger had access to the couple's personal information, including Social Security numbers, bank statements and investment records.

Through information listed on the hard drive, the man in Chicago was able to contact the couple.

"He said, 'Do you want me to wipe it clean or send it to you?' I told him to send it to me. I wanted it in my hands," said Gerbus.

Gerbus received the hard drive a few weeks later.

As a precaution, the couple alerted the major credit bureaus to protect their information.

"I'm not leaving myself open to identity theft," said Gerbus.

Target 5's Tom Sussi contacted Best Buy to figure out how the Gerbus' hard drive wound up at a flea market outside Chicago.

Best Buy issued the following statement to Target 5.

"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."

In the meantime, Gerbus said he hopes the couple's private information didn't fall into the wrong hands. "I don?t know if we're going to have a problem," said Gerbus. "I just don't know."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wlwt/20060601/lo_wlwt/9303216





A Privacy Upgrade

In today's terrorism-conscious world, personal privacy seems to be a diminishing luxury.

The StealthSurfer II ID Protect from Stealth Ideas, an upgrade of a previous product, combines several off-the-shelf programs to let a user navigate the Web anonymously and create e-mail that cannot be read by others.

The programs come loaded on a flash drive in capacities ranging from 256 megabytes ($99) to 2 gigabytes ($279).

Plug the flash drive into a PC's USB port, and all files that are created when surfing the Web are stored on it.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/...tgadgets27.php





High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights
Gina Holland

The Supreme Court scaled back protections for government workers who blow the whistle on official misconduct Tuesday, a 5-4 decision in which new Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote.

In a victory for the Bush administration, justices said the 20 million public employees do not have free-speech protections for what they say as part of their jobs.

Critics predicted the impact would be sweeping, from silencing police officers who fear retribution for reporting department corruption, to subduing federal employees who want to reveal problems with government hurricane preparedness or terrorist-related security.

Supporters said that it will protect governments from lawsuits filed by disgruntled workers pretending to be legitimate whistleblowers.

The ruling was perhaps the clearest sign yet of the Supreme Court's shift with the departure of moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the arrival of Alito.

A year ago, O'Connor authored a 5-4 decision that encouraged whistleblowers to report sex discrimination in schools. The current case was argued in October but not resolved before her retirement in late January.

A new argument session was held in March with Alito on the bench. He joined the court's other conservatives in Tuesday's decision, which split along traditional conservative-liberal lines.

Exposing government misconduct is important, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. "We reject, however, the notion that the First Amendment shields from discipline the expressions employees make pursuant to their professional duties," Kennedy said.

The ruling overturned an appeals court decision that said Los Angeles County prosecutor Richard Ceballos was constitutionally protected when he wrote a memo questioning whether a county sheriff's deputy had lied in a search warrant affidavit. Ceballos had filed a lawsuit claiming he was demoted and denied a promotion for trying to expose the lie.

Kennedy said if the superiors thought the memo was inflammatory, they had the authority to punish him.

"Official communications have official consequences, creating a need for substantive consistency and clarity. Supervisors must ensure that their employees' official communications are accurate, demonstrate sound judgment, and promote the employer's mission," Kennedy wrote.

Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said: "The ruling is a victory for every crooked politician in the United States."

Justice David H. Souter's lengthy dissent sounded like it might have been the majority opinion if O'Connor were still on the court. "Private and public interests in addressing official wrongdoing and threats to health and safety can outweigh the government's stake in the efficient implementation of policy," he wrote.

Souter was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Stephen Breyer also supported Ceballos, but on different grounds.

The ruling upheld the position of the Bush administration, which had joined the district attorney's office in opposing absolute free-speech rights for whistleblowers. President Bush's two nominees, Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, signed onto Kennedy's opinion but did not write separately.

"It's a very frightening signal of dark times ahead," said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project.

Employment attorney Dan Westman said that Kennedy's ruling frees government managers to make necessary personnel actions, like negative performance reviews or demotions, without fear of frivolous lawsuits.

Ceballos said in a telephone interview that "it puts your average government employee in one heck of a predicament ... I think government employees will be more inclined to keep quiet."

Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley said in a statement that the ruling "allows public employers to conduct the people's business without undue disruption and without turning routine personnel decisions into federal cases."

The court's decision immediately prompted calls for Congress to strengthen protections for workers.

Kennedy said that government workers "retain the prospect of constitutional protection for their contributions to the civic discourse." They do not, Kennedy said, have "a right to perform their jobs however they see fit."

The case is Garcetti v. Ceballos, 04-473.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=politics





The End Of Internet Freedom
Max Fomitchev

Unless you have not heard, Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and other telecommunications giants are lobbying Congress to establish a legal basis for charging website owners for traffic with the help of two-tier Internet.

If telecommunication lobby succeeds it would mean the end of online freedom and higher prices for online goods and services for all of us.

So what do telecommunication companies want? Quite naturally, greedy corporations want more profit and they are keen to find a way to stuff their pockets even tighter.

Hold on there, telecom companies already charging us - the consumers - for broadband and cable access, right? But now they want to charge content providers too based on the amount of traffic their sites generate. Nonsense! Although telcos argue that they want to curb proliferation of online video and other types of data-hungry streaming that allegedly taxes their networks they think imposing traffic fees on content providers would be a fair solution.

But content providers already pay traffic charges to their hosting providers! So what telcos want is to charge content providers twice! Not only that, the whole premise of two-tier Internet puts high-dollar companies ahead of cash-strapped runner-ups effectively killing start ups and low-key businesses. With two tier you've got to cash-out to cable providers if you want to ride 'high-bandwidth' channel and make sure that your pages are served fast and clear, whereas if you are a cash-strapped nobody like most of us you would be stuck to an auxiliary channel choked with spam, porn and god knows what else.

But most troubling of all is that the introduction of two-tier Internet creates a unique opportunity for censorship and interferes with the free speech right so much treasured by online community. Indeed what a clever move! The bill does not prohibit free speech not it interferes with the free speech directly. Sure, you can say all you want and blog all you want about anything you want. But we just won't serve your pages!.. Unless you pay a hefty price... and even then we may choose not to serve them.

The two-tier Internet bill must be stopped. Activist groups already pressure US senate to abandon the bill. And even an opposing Net Neutrality bill was proposed by democratic senators. Net Neutrality bill requires all online content to be served without discrimination, which is a nice idea in theory, yet it is vigorously opposed by equipment manufacturers and ISPs due to fears of potential liability (arising presumably from bugs, outages and custom content filters).

While Net Neutrality bill sounds like overkill, two-tier Internet bill is ought to be stopped too. If it passes freedom of speech would be seriously hampered, startups and small businesses will take a hit and we will pay higher prices for online advertising as well as goods and services delivered or sold over Internet. Do we really want that? I think not.
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archi...eb_development





Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End
Adam Cohen

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.

This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by telecommunications and cable companies, and other Internet service providers, that want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites. Major corporate sites would be able to pay the new fees, while little-guy sites could be shut out.

Sir Tim, who keeps a low profile, has begun speaking out in favor of "net neutrality," rules requiring that all Web sites remain equal on the Web. Corporations that stand to make billions if they can push tiered pricing through have put together a slick lobbying and marketing campaign. But Sir Tim and other supporters of net neutrality are inspiring growing support from Internet users across the political spectrum who are demanding that Congress preserve the Web in its current form.

The Web, which Sir Tim invented as a scientist at CERN, the European nuclear physics institute, is often confused with the Internet. But like e-mail, the Web runs over the system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet. Sir Tim created the Web in a decentralized way that allowed anyone with a computer to connect to it and begin receiving and sending information.

That open architecture is what has allowed for the extraordinary growth of Internet commerce and communication. Pierre Omidyar, a small-time programmer working out of his home office, was able to set up an online auction site that anyone in the world could reach — which became eBay. The blogging phenomenon is possible because individuals can create Web sites with the World Wide Web prefix, www, that can be seen by anyone with Internet access.

Last year, the chief executive of what is now AT&T sent shock waves through cyberspace when he asked why Web sites should be able to "use my pipes free." Internet service providers would like to be able to charge Web sites for access to their customers. Web sites that could not pay the new fees would be accessible at a slower speed, or perhaps not be accessible at all.

A tiered Internet poses a threat at many levels. Service providers could, for example, shut out Web sites whose politics they dislike. Even if they did not discriminate on the basis of content, access fees would automatically marginalize smaller, poorer Web sites.

Consider online video, which depends on the availability of higher-speed connections. Internet users can now watch channels, like BBC World, that are not available on their own cable systems, and they have access to video blogs and Web sites like YouTube.com, where people upload videos of their own creation. Under tiered pricing, Internet users might be able to get videos only from major corporate channels.

Sir Tim expects that there are great Internet innovations yet to come, many involving video. He believes people at the scene of an accident — or a political protest — will one day be able to take pictures with their cellphones that could be pieced together to create a three-dimensional image of what happened. That sort of innovation could be blocked by fees for the high-speed connections required to relay video images.

The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan "hands off the Internet," that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.

But the other side of the debate has some large corporate backers, too, like Google and Microsoft, which could be hit by access fees since they depend on the Internet service providers to put their sites on the Web. It also has support from political groups of all persuasions. The president of the Christian Coalition, which is allied with Moveon.org on this issue, recently asked, "What if a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors decides that it doesn't like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities?"

Forces favoring a no-fee Web have been gaining strength. One group, Savetheinternet.com, says it has collected more than 700,000 signatures on a petition. Last week, a bipartisan bill favoring net neutrality, sponsored by James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, won a surprisingly lopsided vote in the House Judiciary Committee.

Sir Tim argues that service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing. The Internet's extraordinary growth has been fueled by the limitless vistas the Web offers surfers, bloggers and downloaders. Customers who are used to the robust, democratic Web may not pay for one that is restricted to wealthy corporate content providers.

"That's not what we call Internet at all," says Sir Tim. "That's what we call cable TV."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/op...=1&oref=slogin





Surveillance

Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball
Thomas Greene

The dingy hotel corridor was populated with suits, milling about and radiating airs of defensive hostility. They moved in close-knit groups, rounding a stranger or a rival group conspicuously, the way cats do. They spoke in whispers. They glanced nervously over their shoulders as they took calls on their cell phones, then darted swiftly into alcoves.

They were government officials, telephone company honchos, military officers, three-letter-agency spooks and cops, all brought together by salesmen dealing in the modern equipment of surveillance. It was my job to learn what they were up to.

They'd gathered for the ISS World Conference, a trade show featuring the latest in mass communications intercept gear, held in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Virginia. Situated conveniently between Reagan National Airport and the Pentagon, Crystal City is an artificial place dominated by conference centers and hotels, set up to accommodate the endless, and often secret, intercourse between the U.S. military and its myriad itinerant contractors, lobbyists, consultants and trainers. They rotate in and out, civilians using the airport, military personnel taking the subway from the Pentagon, with Crystal City as the intersection in a figure-eight circuit of constant activity.

Back in the narrow hotel corridor, vendors manned their booths, exhibiting the latest gadgets for mass electronic surveillance: machines capable of scouring the data streams of millions of subscribers -- industrial-strength kits for packet interception and analysis, RF interception, and voice and keyword recognition.

These devices are a bonanza for the communications hardware industry, vouchsafed by the U.S. Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or CALEA, which mandates that all new telephone company gear must be wiretap-friendly, or "CALEA compliant," according to the popular euphemism. This has led to a seller's market with equipment makers pushing their dual-use kits with exceptional confidence. The sales pitch has evolved beyond the traditional points of reliability, scalability, total cost of ownership and ease of deployment to exploit the hard-sell undercurrents of mass-scale commerce that's mandated by law and funded by taxpayers who are powerless to review the deals and evaluate their various costs and benefits to society.

While U.S. telephone companies are well accustomed to CALEA requirements (designed originally to make mobile phone networks as wiretap-friendly as land-line systems), the Federal Communications Commission has declared itself competent to expand the act to cover voice over internet protocol outfits and internet service providers as well. This expansion has been challenged in federal court, and the conflict has boiled down to a simple phrase in the law, exempting providers of "information services" (as opposed to communications services) from CALEA obligations. The Department of Justice, ever eager for opportunities to plug law enforcement into the internet at the most basic levels, claims that ISPs, like telephone companies, are communications services, on grounds that instant messaging, VOIP and e-mail constitute a significant replacement for traditional telecommunications.

The FCC is in complete agreement with the Justice Department, and has issued its demand for compliance by May 14, 2007. The case, currently on appeal, is pending in a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., where, comically, one judge characterized the FCC's legal arguments as "gobbledygook." Thus it's possible that only VOIP services that use the public switched telephone network will be covered by the CALEA, leaving peer-to-peer VOIP outfits and ISPs in the clear. A decision should arrive in a few months' time.

Despite this uncertainty, ISPs (and universities) have become new sales targets for the surveillance equipment industry -- fresh leads, so to speak -- and the hustle is uniform and loud: "CALEA is coming, and you'd better be ready."

In the conference rooms, salesmen pitched their solutions for "lawful interception." In attendance were the generally responsible representatives of North American and Western European government and law enforcement, but also numerous representatives of naked state control in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The phrase "lawful interception" might have meaning in the United States, Canada and Europe, but this was the ISS world conference, after all, with attendees from more than 30 countries.

Narus was there, maker of the kit fingered by Mark Klein and allegedly used with impunity by the National Security Agency at numerous AT&T facilities for mass, domestic internet surveillance, and, the company boasts, used by Shanghai Telecom "to block 'unauthorized' internet calls."

There were European heavyweights like Ericsson and Siemens, American giants like Raytheon and light-heavyweights like VeriSign and Agilent, along with a vast host of leaner, more specialized, surveillance outfits such as Verint, Narus and the like. They offered equipment and services capable of every manner of radio frequency and packet interception, with user interfaces and database structures designed to manage and deliver not just information but "actionable data," properly organized and formatted for easy prosecutions.

Certain conference sessions, according to the schedule, were "open to sworn law enforcement agents only." But there was no discrimination between the more punctilious law enforcement agencies of democratic nations and those hailing from quarters where darker practices are commonplace.

The last thing anyone involved wanted was publicity. Unfortunately, I had a job to do, although it would be difficult; the press had been strenuously dis-invited, and Wired News' efforts to get credentialed for the event firmly rebuffed. I spent my first day lurking in public areas of the hotel. In the lobby, two nattily dressed men with Caribbean accents were being hustled by an American salesman. The Caribbean fellows stiffened upon my approach, and warily lowered their voices. I buried my nose in the paper and listened.

I could hear little of what the two potential customers said, but the salesman, God bless him, was a loudmouth, and I was able to piece together parts of the conversation from his various announcements. It seemed elements of the deal that he was attempting to close were challenging. This may have had to do with his customers' qualifications to take delivery of surveillance equipment, perhaps because they weren't legitimate government representatives, or the government that employed them was subject to U.S. export restrictions. I never learned the exact problem with getting the equipment into the customers' hands, but it was obvious that there was one.

The salesman concluded with a hearty recap. "I'm glad we had the chance to meet in person; this is not a conversation I'd want to have on the phone, for obvious reasons," he roared. Everyone laughed heartily.

Later, at the bar, I sat beside three Americans: two cops and a civilian police employee. They bitched about how difficult RF interception is, how the equipment is complicated and its user interfaces mysterious, and the difficulty of getting adequate funds and properly trained personnel to carry out surveillance effectively.

Grant money is to be avoided, they agreed. It's got strings attached -- strings like performance milestones and complicated reporting demands. And on top of that, there's such an assload of damned frequencies, and it's such a trial just to get the kit dialed in. You can waste hours listening to TV instead of the subject's cell phone. But all the brass understands is hard evidence leading to arrests, they whined.

This was suggestive stuff, but it's not what I came for. On day two, it was time to make a move. I went to the registration booth and requested a pass and a press fee waiver. "The conference isn't open to the press," a receptionist explained with a fluty tone of voice and an android smile. A uniformed security guard took a step closer, for emphasis.

I withdrew, bloodied but unbowed.

In the bar that night, things got interesting. A group of men associated with the Pen-Link and Lincoln electronic surveillance systems came in. I exchanged small talk with them for a bit, then moved to their table. Although I had identified myself as a journalist, an enthusiastic reseller of the equipment decided to hold forth. We drank a great deal, so I won't name him.

"I'm not much concerned about wiretaps in America and Europe," I'd been saying to one of the Pen-Link engineers, "but I wonder if it bothers you to consider what this technology can do in the hands of repressive governments with no judicial oversight, no independent legislature."

Our man interrupted. "You need to educate yourself," he said with a sneer. "I mean, that's a classic journalist's question, but why are you hassling these guys? They're engineers. They make a product. They don't sell it. What the hell is it to them what anyone does with it?"

"Well, it's quite an issue," I said. "This is the equipment of totalitarianism, and the only things that can keep a population safe are decent law and proper oversight. I want to know what they think when they learn that China, or Syria, or Zimbabwe is getting their hands on it."

"You really need to educate yourself," he insisted. "Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

"Well, perhaps the Qataris are conscientious," I said, "and I'm prepared to take your word on that, but there are seriously oppressive governments out there itching to get hold of this stuff."

He sneered again. "Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He's got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He'll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you. So why are you bothering these guys?"

"It's a valid question," I insisted. "This is powerful stuff. In the wrong hands, it could ruin political opponents; it could make the state's power impossible to challenge. The state would know basically everything. People would be getting rounded up for thought crimes."

"You're not listening," he said. "The NSA is using this stuff. The DEA, the Secret Service, the CIA. Are you kidding me? They don't answer to you. They do whatever the hell they want with it. Are you really that naive? Now leave these guys alone; they make a product, that's all. It's nothing to them what happens afterward. You really need to educate yourself."

On day three, the last day of the conference, I had nothing left to gain from working the periphery, hence nothing to lose from being tossed out, so I strolled past the android and the uniformed guard. No one challenged me. I chatted with vendors. I grabbed brochures from their tables and handouts in the conference rooms. I hung out on the veranda and smoked with fellow tobacco addicts.

The best conversation I had was with Robert van Bosbeek of the Dutch National Police. I asked him if he was tempted to buy anything.

"Not really," he said with a laugh. "But it's always good to see what's on offer. Basically, we're three or four years ahead of all this."

He said that in the Netherlands, communications intercept capabilities are advanced and well established, and yet, in practice, less problematic than in many other countries. "Our legal system is more transparent," he said, "so we can do what we need to do without controversy. Transparency makes law enforcement easier, not more difficult."

By noon on day three, the conference had wound down. The final thing I needed was the forbidden packet, with its CD of the slides from the presentations. I would have it in spite of the android. Indeed, because of the android.

I waited in the lobby. A group of Koreans came down the stairs. I know this because they spoke Korean, and few outsiders speak it. It's not a popular language, like French or English.

As it happens, I can speak it a little. Most Koreans are charmed by foreigners who can mutter even a few words of their mother tongue, so I chatted for a bit, and asked if I might copy the conference CD onto my notebook computer. They were happy to oblige.

Naturally, this forbidden object contained nothing that could justify keeping it from a journalist. There were no stunning revelations about new intercept equipment designs, capabilities or techniques. Making it unavailable was just another expression of the conference director's small-minded attitude of hostility toward the press.

An attendee told me that during one presentation, a discussion arose about whether the press should be invited to future ISS conferences. Some of those present believed that secrecy only leads to speculation, which is usually worse for trade than the facts. Others believed that reporters are too ignorant to write competently about the secret intercourse between big business and law enforcement, and should be told as little as possible in hopes that they'll have nothing to write. Judging by my own experiences, it was clear that the second line of reasoning had prevailed.

But it's foolish to be secretive: A determined reporter can't be thwarted, and it's better that one should have more rather than less information to work with.

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability. While there was little or nothing at the conference worth keeping secret, the sense of paranoia was constant. The uniformed guard posted to the entrance was there to intimidate, not to protect. The restrictions on civilians attending the law enforcement agency sessions were, I gather, a cheap marketing gesture to justify their $6,500-per-head entrance fee with suggestions of secret information that the average network-savvy geek wouldn't have known.

In the end, all this surveillance gear and attendant hype becomes meaningless with simple precautions like encrypted VOIP, a good implementation of virtual private networks, and proxies and SSH for web surfing, IM, internet relay chat, webmail and the like. Skype's VOIP service is encrypted but closed-source. Still, there's SpeakFreely, a peer-to-peer, open-source VOIP app; Zfone, an open-source VOIP crypto plug-in from PGP honcho Phil Zimmermann; Invisible IRC, an open-source IRC proxy implementation that includes anonymization and encryption features, plus other dodges too numerous to mention.

The popular law enforcement myth is that crooks are getting ever more sophisticated in their use of modern technology, so the police have got to acquire more "sophisticated" point-and-drool equipment to catch them. We find versions of this incantation in virtually every Justice Department press release or speech related to CALEA. But these tools -- especially in the IP realm -- are not so much sophisticated as complicated and very expensive. They're a bad alternative to old-fashioned detective work involving the wearing down of shoes and dull stakeout sessions in uncomfortable quarters such as automobiles. The chief impulse behind this law enforcement gizmo fetish is laziness, and it's a bad trend: The more policemen we have fiddling with computer equipment, the fewer we have doing proper legwork.

The windup is that garden-variety crooks will remain those most susceptible to remote, electronic surveillance, while sophisticated, tech-savvy bad guys will continue operating below the radar. CALEA and its most potent technological offspring are inadequate to catch the people who most need catching. The project of "lawful interception" is huge, grotesquely expensive, controversial, infused with unnecessary secrecy and often useless against the most important suspects it purports to target.

It poses a tremendous threat to human rights and dignity in countries without adequate legal safeguards, and still invites occasional abuses in countries with them. Its costs are paid by citizens who are deliberately kept in the dark about how much they're paying for it, how effective it is in fighting crime and how susceptible it is to abuse. And that's the way the entire cast of characters involved wants to keep it.

Which, of course, is exactly why the public needs to know much more about it, even if it requires rude tactics like crashing the spooks' soire.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71022-0.html





European Court Bars Passing Data to U.S.

The European Union's highest court ruled Tuesday that the EU acted illegally when it struck a deal giving U.S. authorities personal details of airline passengers in a bid to fight terrorism.

Under an agreement reached in 2004, European airlines are compelled to turn over 34 pieces of information about each passenger -- including name, address and credit card details -- within 15 minutes of departure for the United States.

The United States says such measures are required to help fight terrorism. But the law has been heavily criticized in Europe as a violation of privacy.

The European Court of Justice said EU nations acted without the correct legal basis. It did not, however, take issue with specific measures of the law.

Lawyers have until Sept. 30 to address the concerns raised by the court. If they fail to fix legal technicalities by that date, airlines may have to change the way they collect and transfer data.

The European Parliament had asked the court to annul the deal which was reached with the Americans in May 2004 despite strenuous objections.

Washington has warned airlines face fines of up to $6,000 per passenger and the loss of landing rights if the relevant information is not passed on.

The European Commission said Tuesday it would work to find a solution within the 90-day deadline.

Airline representatives also expressed confidence that changes could be made to comply with the ruling without jeopardizing the substance of the agreement.

''It does not seem to alter the reality of the situation to any major extent,'' said David Henderson, a spokesman for the Association of European Airlines, which represents British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa and other top carriers. ''It's really a problem for the lawyers,'' he added.

During the negotiations, the EU won some concessions from the Americans such as shortening the time the information is stored and deleting sensitive data such as meal preference, which could indicate a passenger's religion or ethnicity.

The U.S. also said the information would be shared with other countries on a restricted basis only.

EU and U.S. officials say the data collected can only be used to fight terrorism and other serious crimes, including organized crime. Under the current terms, the information can be stored for up to 3 1/2 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/worl...n er=homepage





'Idol' Taylor Hicks Signs Record Deal
Kevork Djansezian

Taylor Hicks has taken step two on his "American Idol"-fueled career, signing the record contract that comes with winning the hit show.

The gray-haired crooner inked a pact with music mogul Clive Davis in conjunction with 19 Recordings Unlimited, the label managed by "AI" creator Simon Fuller, it was announced Wednesday.

The 29-year-old Alabama native's recording of two songs - "Do I Make You Proud," which he performed in the show's finale, and a soulful cover of the Doobie Brothers classic "Takin' It to the Streets" - will be released in stores and through digital outlets on June 13.

With Davis' guidance, Hicks is expected to release a full-length album later this year.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Davis, who has molded the careers of previous "Idol" winners, said he thinks Hicks has charisma and a unique singing style that will help him establish his pop audience.

"He definitely has his own sound," Davis told the AP. "He does have that gift, you know who it is when you hear him."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





PC's That Are a Lot Smaller Than a Breadbox
Peter Wayner

Chris DiBona's work as manager of open-source programs for Google takes him on the road, where laptops grow heavier with every gate he passes in the airport. So he has been experimenting with piecing together the ultimate lightweight PC.

At the core of his ensemble is the OQO-01, a full-featured PC running Windows XP that is not much bigger than a pack of 3-by-5 index cards. It's measured in ounces (14), not pounds.

"I use both this and my cellphone in the same manner," he said. "They're read-only devices. I can do cursory work." The OQO comes with a built-in keyboard that can be tapped by the thumbs.

When he wants to do more serious work, he unpacks a full-size, foldable keyboard from Think Outside that is scarcely bigger than the OQO when he packs it away. Mr. DiBona says he types as quickly with the folding keyboard as he does with a normal one. The 5.6-ounce keyboard connects with the OQO wirelessly with the Bluetooth standard.

Mr. DiBona is not the only one exploring replacing a laptop with a combination of cellphones, hand-helds and foldable keyboards. The folding keyboards have been around since the introduction of some of the first palmtops, but they are playing an increasingly viable role in laptop replacement as the combined elements become more and more capable.

Many of the latest palmtops will run all the software needed to browse the Web, exchange e-mail or even drive a projector to give a presentation. A Palm TX ($299, 5.25 ounces), for instance, can let you handle most basic editing chores with files created in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

These microsize versions can do many of the simple tasks of their bigger cousins, but are limited by the size of the screen. The tiny processors, after all, are as powerful as the desktop machines of a few years ago. The TX and competitors from companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell can do most of what a traveler could want except, perhaps, play the most sophisticated games. The thin slabs can even display low-resolution movies, albeit not from DVD disks.

To use more than a stylus or a thin thumb keyboard, a user must stitch together a fully functioning system out of parts that all speak the current lingua franca, Bluetooth. Regular keyboards cannot be connected. While full-size keyboards are the tools most commonly added to a cellphone or a hand-held, there are also mice, headphones, microphones, digital cameras and even satellite navigation receivers.

The advantage is that people can carry just the parts they need. On a short trip, the keyboard and mouse can stay home. The disadvantage is that each of these devices needs its own power system, potentially requiring a number of charging bricks.

Screens

The heart of these machines lives behind the screens of the cellphones or palmtops where the main processors, memory and wireless receiver can be found. Hand-helds like the Palm TX connect with the Internet with Wi-Fi connections common in coffee shops and homes, while higher-end tools like the Palm Treo 650 use cellular networks to fetch information. (Cingular sells the 6.3-ounce 650 for about $370 with a two-year service agreement priced at $105 a month.)

The latest Treo, the 700P, also includes the ability to connect with the emerging EV-DO networks from Verizon and Sprint, which offer download speeds that can exceed those of cable modems and digital subscriber lines.

Some of these devices include tiny keyboards while others use just a stylus and a few buttons. The OQO, Treos and BlackBerrys come with built-in keyboards best operated with thumbs, while others, like the Palm TX and the Nokia 770, are meant to be driven by a stylus.

The focus of the software also varies. While many palmtops keep track of appointments, phone numbers and notes, the eight-ounce Nokia 770 (about $400) is sold as a window to the Web and is labeled an "Internet tablet." It latches on to any local Wi-Fi connection to link into the Web. The screen has a higher resolution than most small devices, offering a grid of 800 by 480 pixels instead of the more standard 480 by 320 or 320 by 320.

These devices are designed to be a bit simpler and focused on the needs of the traveler. On the other hand, the OQO ($1,900 to $2,100 at www.oqo.com) behaves just like a desktop PC running Windows XP and offers 30 gigabytes of disk space.

The interest in the micro Windows PC is growing. Microsoft is pushing a standard called the Ultra-Mobile PC, running a stylus-enabled version of Windows in a larger package that weighs a bit more than two pounds. The first model, the Samsung Q1 ($1,100), has a 40-gigabyte hard drive and a seven-inch display.

Keyboards

While all of these cellphones, palmtops and tablets can operate by themselves, a full-size keyboard makes them much more efficient and useful. It may be simple to page through a list of phone numbers with a stylus, but for writing anything more than a disjointed, error-filled and uncapitalized text, a real keyboard is essential.

A number of keyboards are jostling for attention. Device makers like Palm often distribute customized keyboards, while companies like Think Outside (www.thinkoutside.com) and Freedom Input (www.freedominput.com) sell their own versions.

Freedom Input, for instance, sells full-size foldable keyboards for BlackBerrys (typically $112 to $131). If these keyboards are still too big, the company also makes a tiny thumb keyboard the size of a credit card for Bluetooth phones that have no built-in keyboard. A stand for the phone or palmtop is integrated on most, separate on some.

Palm sells a keyboard for $70 that connects using the infrared port on the Palm. And the Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard from Think Outside weighs 5.6 ounces, costs about $150, and comes with the cachet of being included in the Museum of Modern Art's design collection.

There is also a great deal of experimentation in this area. The FrogPad, for instance, comes from FrogPad Inc. (www.frogpad.com), a small Texas company devoted to building keyboards that can be operated with one hand. The most common letters require only one keystroke, while the least common are composed by pushing two or more of the 20 keys at once, in much the same way that a pianist strikes a chord. The small form and lack of hinges make the keyboards ideal for travelers, but they are also finding uses among the disabled and among graphic designers who like to keep one hand on the mouse.

The flashiest keyboard, literally, may be the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard from i.Tech (www.itechdynamic.com), a tiny device (1.38 by 3.6 by 1 inch) that draws the keyboard on the desk with a ruby laser and watches the movement of your fingers with a motion sensor. It weighs three ounces and costs about $180 from thinkgeek.com and others. There are no hinges or moving parts to jam, bend or break, but the only feedback is a click.

If your favored combination begins to look too complicated, laptop makers continue to make their offerings smaller and lighter. Dynamism.com, for instance, imports laptops from Japan not normally sold in the United States. The Panasonic R5 ($2,000 to $2,500) weighs only 2.2 pounds, a number almost small enough to quote in ounces — about 35.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/te.../01basics.html





Police Investigate Angry eBayer's Revenge Site

Met called in laptop dispute
Chris Williams

Police are investigating a disgruntled eBayer who took online revenge after paying Ł375 for a laptop which, he said, did not work.

The buyer recovered the hard drive from the malfunctioning notebook, finding it full of personal details, allegedly including access to email accounts, 90 voyeuristic leg shots taken on the London Underground and gay porn. He posted the material on a website, naming and shaming Barnet 19-year-old Amir Tofangsazan as the seller.

Clearly, someone doesn't see the funny side. A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said Barnet police are investigating a complaint made on 29 May at Fulham police station regarding improper use of a public electronic communications network. She added: "The allegation follows from a civil dispute. No arrests have been made and inquiries continue."

At time of writing the site had clocked up almost 950,000 hits. A dismayed Amir told the Daily Mail the website had made his life a "living hell", and that his family had received threats. He said: "The laptop wasn't even broken. It was in working order. The last few days have been a nightmare, some of my friends have seen it and my father is very angry."

Amir said he had not received any "polite requests" for a refund. On his revenge site the buyer counters: "This site is 100 per cent genuine, I swear I'm not making anything up."

Amir told the Daily Mail: "I will obviously be trying to get the website taken down as soon as possible." In the meantime, the site is available here.®
Bootnote

The buyer has been named as Thomas Sawyer, a 23-year-old student from Exeter. He offers to pull the site sown voluntarily in exchange for a refund.

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail reports that Amir allegedly pulled a similar scam on Newport Pagnell woman Debbie McInerney, who says she paid him Ł147 for an iPod which never arrived. Amir said: "The police are investigating the iPod case and I can't comment on it
http://www.theregister.com/2006/05/31/ebay_laptop_site/





Clerk Says Scanty Attire Was Distraction
AP

Well, she LOOKED 21 anyway, maybe older, and what's more the clerk at the small store in this Coos County town says he was much distracted by what he called the young lady's scanty attire. So distracted, he said, that he didn't see the "Minor until 2007" stamped on her driver's license. She got the six-pack, and store owner David Cardwell got a $1,320 fine. The clerk had to pay $750.

Cardwell is hollering "Entrapment," "Draconian" and more.

Rather than pay, Cardwell says, he will take the alternative and close the store for a week. He says it doesn't make than much in a week in any case.

His clerk had been stung by an Oregon Liquor Control Commission decoy sent to test for underage sales.

His two clerks will be jobless until June 7.

Cardwell is not denying his employee erred, but says it was hardly fair.

"This young woman was dressed in very provocative clothing more suited for the bedroom," Cardwell said in a letter to the OLCC. "I would not allow my daughter to leave the house dressed in such a way."

He says the law should target clerks and servers, not the owners.

"We feel we did everything right," Cardwell wrote. "We trained (our clerk) correctly. We tested him correctly."

But Gary Francis, the local OLCC agent who coordinates the stings and hires the decoys, isn't persuaded.

"Maybe he should have been looking at her driver's license," Francis said of the clerk. "It was a straight-up deal. By the numbers. No trickery at all."

He said the decoy was dressed in a tank top, attire many woman her age wear.

People who serve or sell alcohol in Oregon are required to card anyone who looks 26 years old or younger, Francis said. He wants the decoys to look like 18-, 19- or 20-year-olds, not a 40-year-old.

"We are out there to see who is doing their job and who is not," he said.

He said female decoys can't wear makeup or doctor their hair to look older.

"This guy wasn't paying attention," Francis said. "If he would have looked at that young lady's ID, he would have seen the big red box on her ID that said she was a minor until 2007.

"DMV makes it easy. But if you don't use the tools that the state provides, then you deserve to get caught."

Cardwell disagrees.

"They're baiting. They're disguising. They're camouflaging them. They are trying to create a situation and trying to induce someone into taking the bait."

The store had never been similarly fined before.

"There's a first time for everything," said Francis.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT



















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