Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 15th, '06

[JackSpratts]

"The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won't be hackable." – Bruce Schneier


"Meth is one of the major things driving identity theft in Utah." – Pat Fleming


"If your brain can do it, we can tap into it" – John P. Donoghue


"The publishers have a brand name and that name sells textbooks. That’s why you have well-established authorities who put their names on the spine, but really have nothing to do with the actual writing process, which is all done in-house or by hired writers." – Gilbert T. Sewall


"I just wanted you to know that when I was young, I would run home from school, turn on the TV set, crawl underneath and try to look up your dress." – Noel Neill (Lois Lane) fan


"Maybe because popcorn explodes?" – Brian Lehman







































Letting it Ride

Without getting into exact dollar amounts let’s just say the penalty for sharing a copyrighted song can be extraordinarily high, on the order of some $150,000 per occurrence. If you swapped a couple of albums, and really what fun is downloading a mere single anyway, the tab could hit $4,000,000 or more! Obviously that’s a lot of cabbage. The thing is of course that copying isn’t stealing no matter what verbal gymnastics one employs, but most importantly it doesn’t lead to lost sales. The studies indicate copying and file-sharing lead to greater sales, not less! So talk about your victimless crime. There’s only upside lol. It’s not like you’re walking into Wal*Mart and taking a couple of $12.00 CDs off the shelf without paying. Now that’s a crime. The store paid for them and now they don’t have them and that’s not good. They lost the money they paid and the potential sales profit. The laws against stealing rightfully apply in cases like this. Do it enough times and somebody winds up hurt or out of business. Funny thing about that though. Turns out Wal*Mart doesn’t prosecute CD thefts anymore, or much of anything with a value of less than $25.00. Lots of reasons why I suppose, from freeing up floor staff to maintaining decent relations with local cops who lately have been spending so much time there they’ve had to hire extra officers to serve Wal*Mart’s old "Zero Tolerance" shoplifting policy. Well not anymore. The company has come to the self-interested conclusion that prosecuting minor thefts is more trouble than keeping the merchandise and letting the thief walk (or ride their bike) home, which brings us to this strange place where people who steal get off free, while those who share face felony imprisonment and fines approaching four million dollars, all because of an increasingly obscene relationship between Hollywood, lawmakers and the courts. It’s nothing less than perverse. If ever I needed a reminder to keep boycotting the RIAA it’s right here.

Squeeze the Sharman

Sharman Networks, owner of Kazaa, employer of Nikki Hemming and suer of P2PNet’s Jon Newton has just signaled a withdrawal of nearly all the recent and unfortunate libel actions against Newton, his hosting company and some anonymous posters at his site. Corporately Sharman’s out of it altogether. They dropped the whole thing against everybody. Hemming though is more nuanced. She dropped it against all but Newton and the host, leaving her the only one suing anybody. Without speculating as to why it’s usually the case that advice from counsel indicates a losing position. It’s true that PR factors sometimes intrude but this isn’t the case with Hemming still going forward, but Jon at least has a few less things to worry about this week than he did last, and that’s good. The fact is however he shouldn’t have to worry about this at all. It’s a suit that never should have happened, and with Hemming still going forward, and with her still the head and part owner of Sharman, it’s little more than symbolic that the corporate entity has dropped their action.

I would say that for executives at a company in the business of distributing information, which is one way of describing the activities of Kazaa, they have no business bringing suit against a reporter for expressing his opinion or for missing the detail bullseye, or in this case for having an anonymous poster leave a factually questionable comment. Most if not all information is subject to interpretation and those in the media business know more than most that if the rivers of information pouring through our culture are to carry as much knowledge as possible it is unavoidable that they occasionally overflow the banks. To insist otherwise is both naive and dangerous. A simple "Yo Jon, you got it wrong and here's why" would've have been more than enough to redress any alleged slights to Hemming’s already shredded reputation. The heavy-handed bludgeon of corporate lawsuits that were instead employed were totally uncalled for. For this reason I’m convinced the only proper response from the community of P2P users is a boycott of anything connected to Sharman Networks Limited and Nikki Hemming. I realize that at this time few users of any sophistication are still running Kazaa Media Desktop and a boycott will have little in the way of practical impact from them, but they are looked to for advice and direction by less knowledgeable users and it is for this community that I make my recommendation. Until such time as Ms. Hemming withdraws her suit, I will advance this boycott and direct potential users to programs and systems more in tune with the basic, open philosophy of P2P and those that encourage the free flowing, sometimes turbulent exchange of ideas and opinions.

Take a page from Wal*Mart’s playbook Nikki, they’ve done pretty well with it. Let it ride.


















Enjoy,

Jack





















July 15th, '06






British ISPs Urged to Lock Out File Sharers

The British music industry stepped up its campaign against illegal file sharing on Monday by demanding that two Internet service providers suspend 59 accounts it believes are being used to swap copyrighted songs.

The British Phonographic Industry trade group called on Cable & Wireless and Tiscali to join a crusade against consumer practices that have undermined music companies in recent years.

"We have said for months that it is unacceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to industrial-scale copyright infringement," BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said in a statement.

"We are providing Tiscali and Cable & Wireless with unequivocal evidence of copyright infringement via their services," he added. "It is now up to them to put their house in order and pull the plug on these people."

A C&W spokeswoman said policies for its ISP Bulldog covered such matters and "would normally mean that any accounts used for illegal file sharing are closed," though she declined to comment specifically about the evidence or customers cited by BPI.

"We will take whatever steps are necessary to put the matter right," she added.

Tiscali had no immediate comment.

The BPI, which has won court verdicts against consumers illegally uploading songs and settled with others in the past, said it gathered evidence against the accounts by using the file-sharing networks themselves.

It added that it had identified 42 C&W IP addresses and 17 from Tiscali that have been used to upload significant amounts of music under copyright. The BPI said it could identify the service being used but that only the ISPs know to whom the addresses belong.

"Both Tiscali and Cable & Wireless state in their terms of use for subscribers that Internet accounts should not be used for copyright infringement," BPI's general counsel Roz Groome said. "We now invite them to enforce their own terms of use."

The U.S. music industry tried to force telecoms companies to reveal the names of their customers allegedly using file-sharing networks to illegally share songs, but it lost a legal battle to do so in 2004.

Record companies must now first obtain court-approved subpoenas against the unknown holders of ISP addresses, which then can be served on ISPs, allowing consumers to challenge the claims before their names are disclosed.
http://news.com.com/British+ISPs+urg...3-6092034.html





UK ISP to British Recording Industry: Get Lost
Cory Doctorow

One of the ISPs that the British recording industry tried to strong-arm into terminating customers' accounts on accusation of file-sharing has refused. In a letter to the British Phonogram Industry, Tiscali's legal department lectures the BPI on how the law works and why the "overwhelming" evidence of wrongdoing was quite underwhelming.

Webuser has more details on this, including a complaint from Tiscali that the grandstanding BPI issued a press-release about its letter before it had been reviewed at Tiscali: "A Tiscali spokeswoman described the move as a 'media ambush'. She said the BPI had '[sent] their letter to the media before we even had a chance to read it and the information they went to press with was not strictly correct'."
You have sent us a spreadsheet setting out a list of 17 IP addresses you allege belong to Tiscali customers, whom you allege have infringed the copyright of your members, together with the dates and times and with which sound recording you allege that they have done so. You have also sent us extracts of screenshots of the shared drive of one of those customers. You state that such evidence is "overwhelming". However, you have provided no actual evidence in respect of 16 of the accounts. Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time.

Similar requests we have dealt with in the past, have included such information and, indeed, the bodies conducting those investigations have felt that a court would consider it necessary to see such evidence, supported by sworn statements, before being able to grant any order.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/11...ritish_re.html





RIAA Case Against Mother Dismissed With Prejudice; Court May Award Attorneys Fees Against RIAA
Ray Beckerman

In Capitol Records v. Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma, a case against a mother -- whose only connection to the alleged filesharing was that she was the person who paid for the internet access -- has been dismissed with prejudice.

Faced with the mother's motion for leave to file a summary judgment motion dismissing the case against her, and awarding her attorneys fees, the RIAA made its own motion for permission to withdraw its case.

The Court granted the motion and let the RIAA drop its case.

The Court went on to hold that the defendant, Ms. Foster, is the "prevailing party" under the Copyright Act and is therefore eligible for an award of attorneys fees.

The Court then indicated that it would decide the attorneys fees award question upon receipt of a motion for attorneys fees. July 13, 2006, Order Dismissing Case and Finding Defendant to be Eligible for Award of Attorneys Fees against Plaintiffs

The attorney for Ms. Foster is Marilyn D. Barringer-Thomson, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/





Why You Shouldn’t Run BitTorrent Over Tor
Chris Brunner

A note to Tor users:

If you didn't already know, Tor is a distributed anonymity network that allows anyone to use the Internet to both browse the web and publish information without giving away his or her identity. It's a wonderful step in the direction of privacy and it serves an increasingly important role in today's world. As far as usability goes, Tor clearly has more potential than any anonymity network that I've ever seen. Tor could very easily be the most powerful tool that we as everyday people have to combat the gradual removal of our personal rights and freedom.

However, as of right now its most likely cause of death is not an organization or government, but rather its own users who in some cases, perhaps out of ignorance, take advantage of privacy the Tor network affords them by hiding behind it to steal software, movies, and music. I'm not going to sit here and claim that I haven't pirated my fair share of all of the above; that's not what this is about. Before you use BitTorrent on Tor, please stop and consider the affect this has on the Tor network.

When you use BitTorrent on Tor, you're placing an incredible amount of burden on the network and sucking up the bandwidth that could have otherwise been used for the purpose of freely spreading information. You're discouraging people from donating their bandwidth to running the exit nodes that allow the Tor network to function. You're destroying everyone's ability to publish information without being persecuted by their government. You're destroying the privacy that so many people worked so hard to give us.

Besides, if you want to download files from a torrent, there are much more efficient and much faster ways of doing it. See this article for example. Using Tor for your BitTorrent download will undoubtedly take much longer than any other method around.

A note to Tor Exit Node administrators:

You have the power to prevent people from using your exit node to waste your bandwidth and destroy Tor. Simply add the following lines to your exit policy and restart your exit node. This will in no way impact people who are using Tor for legitamate reasons.

ExitPolicy reject *:1214
ExitPolicy reject *:4661-4666
ExitPolicy reject *:6346-6429
ExitPolicy reject *:6881-6999

A note to all BitTorrent users:

It is, in theory, possible to slow down the abuse of Tor by configuring your BitTorrent client to block traffic that's going to or from Tor exit nodes. This will in turn slow down torrent download for people using the Tor network and will discurage people from abusing Tor in that matter. This is something I'm currently researching. What I'd like to do is offer a BT client-compatible block list that auto-refreshes based on known Tor exit nodes. This would allow BitTorrent users to block all torrent traffic to Tor users. If anyone has a better idea on how to combat torrent-related Tor abuse, by all means, please let me know.

Let's all work together to preserve the wonderful privacy Tor and the EFF has allowed us to enjoy!

Thanks for listening.
http://www.chrisbrunner.com/?p=119





TorrentScrape Search System Combines Four Sites in One
Jack

Reducing Torrentspy, Isohunt, Mininova and the infamous Piratebay to one darkly minimalistic page, this new torrent aggregator leverages four already strong platforms into a powerful device that scans wide and deep. When room permits, return results from all sites are reproduced under separate banners in a single window.

Legal issues aside the immediate future of this project will be determined by donations but as of right now it's running and the beta page has just been updated.

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=247340





PirateBay, MiniNova Refute TargetPoint Rumors
Thomas Mennecke

Last week, reports recirculated that Empornium.us has been purchased by the online advertising company TargetPoint. While numerous articles purport that TargetPoint has purchased Empornium, evidence of this is virtually non-existent. Caught up in the rumor mill is ThePirateBay and MiniNova, two large BitTorrent indexing/tracking sites accused of selling a percentage of their ownership to TargetPoint.

On July 6, fans of the BitTorrent tracker/indexing site Empornium were greeted with a disturbing forum message. According to the forum post, Empornium was purchased by the Israeli advertising firm TargetPoint.

“A company, TargetPoint, has taken control of the site. They are charging new members to join, and it is thought by the general populace of the forum that they may, eventually, charge current members to retain their membership as well.”

The claim has erupted into a whirlwind of controversy that engulfed ThePirateBay.org and MiniNova.org. Reports circulated that TargetPoint also has a significant financial claim (37% ownership) of ThePirateBay.org and a “special relationship” with MiniNova.org. These reports were propagated by TorrentFreak and MegaNova articles.

It appears the allegations of TargetPoint’s interest in MegaNova, ThePirateBay, and MiniNova stem from a media broker named Daniel Oded. A representative of Random Media, Mr. Oded’s job is to mediate and help negotiate online sales. Mr. Oded is reported to be an employee of TargetPoint; however this is not the case. Mr. Oded provided free-lance assistance to TargetPoint approximately one year ago, for tenure of three months.

Mr. Oded flatly refuted the claim that he is in any way the new owner of Empornium. Additionally, he states his involvement has been exemplified to an inaccurate degree.

“I negotiated the deal between the owners of Empornium and the new owners, but I do not own the site.” Daniel Oded told Slyck.com.

Mr. Oded told Slyck.com that his mere negotiation of the sale has been interpreted as his own personal ownership. The identity of the new co-owners of Empornium is confidential, and Mr. Oded was not permitted to reveal this information to Slyck.com. Mr. Oded noted however, some members of the original ownership are still onboard. He emphasized the site was never intended to become a pay site; however financial difficulties stemming from escalating server costs and maintenance forced the change. The site will be free when registration is open, however when registration is closed a "donation" will be required to participate.

It should be noted that Daniel Oded's refutation is in response to ex-Empornium administrator and moderator's contention that he is indeed the new owner - a contention that is gathering steam in the ex-Empornium ranks.

Whoever the new owners are, TargetPoint also unilaterally denies any financial or ownership interest in not only Empornium, but any of the BitTorrent sites named in the controversy. TargetPoint was likely named as an owner because Daniel Oded at one point last year worked with the company as a freelancer for a period of three months.

“TargetPoint is an advertising network,” Ofer Eshed, the development manager of TargetPoint told Slyck.com. “We advertise with various sites most of them belong to the entertainment industry. TargetPoint does not own any commercial sites. For that matter, we do not own any of the following sites: Empornium.us, Puretna.com, ImageFap.com, ThePirateBay.org and MiniNova.org.”

TargetPoint also confirmed that Mr. Oded provided free-lance assistance approximately one year ago.

ThePirateBay, in its typical jockeying manner, found humor in the situation.

“Well, that was just funny as hell to read,” PirateBay representative “brokep” told Slyck.com in reference to the MegaNova blog.

“TargetPoint does not own any part at all of ThePirateBay,” Brokep continued. “ThePirateBay is owned by three individuals and that's it. We used to work with TargetPoint before, currently we do not. We might in the future again, I don't know. That's all when it comes to our relationship with TargetPoint.”

MiniNova.org’s administrator also was perplexed by the situation.

“I read the blog post, but I can only say this is the biggest bunch of lies I've ever seen in a single blog post. Mininova is not owned by TargetPoint, and we do not "steal" from Meganova in any way.”

Whoever is buying Empornium, it’s not TargetPoint, and they don't appear to have any ownership claim to ThePirateBay, MiniNova, or anyone else for that matter. Misinformation has its way of truly stirring the Internet, in ways that elevates personal rhetoric into the vernacular.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1241





BitTorrent Inks Licensing Deal With Studios
Greg Sandoval

BitTorrent is lining up entertainment companies as it prepares to sell downloads of feature films, TV shows and other video entertainment.

The San Francisco-based file-sharing company announced on Monday that it has signed licensing deals with four independent movie studios that will allow it to sell 1,600 video titles over the Internet.

The deal comes two months after BitTorrent announced a groundbreaking deal with Warner Bros. Entertainment Group, the first major entertainment company to embrace its controversial distribution system.

"This shows that BitTorrent is an aggregator of content outside the major movie studios," said Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's co-founder and president. "We'll be able to offer consumers a subscription service that will be comprehensive."

Once distrustful of peer-to-peer technologies, Hollywood studios appear more willing to partner with companies such as BitTorrent and video-sharing site Guba.com, which last month partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute movie titles. BitTorrent, widely used to both legally and illegally swap copies of copyright movies, has been aiming to turn its technology into a tool used for legal services.

Under the deal with the independent movie studios, the titles will be for sale as part of a subscription service. This differs from the pay-per-title service that BitTorrent plans to use with Warner Bros.

BitTorrent is building a video store from which customers can download movies at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, according to the company. The store is expected to launch sometime in the fall, company executives said.

The filmmakers that signed with BitTorrent are Hart Sharp Video, Egami Media (a subsidiary of Image Entertainment), Koch Entertainment and The Orchard. Videos offered include documentaries, feature-length and short films, live music concerts, comedy recordings and TV programming.
http://news.com.com/BitTorrent+inks+...3-6092296.html





Group hug

PrivateNets Now Connecting to Each Other

Cryptic6
Web copy

cryptic6 is an encrypted P2P protocol based on ideas from Virtual Private Networks and Stanly Milgrim's essays on 6 Degrees of Separation. VPNs, such as WASTE, though exceptionally secure, are missing the most popular feature of other P2P programs, that is connecting to people you don't personally know. cryptic6 would allow you to connect to untrusted nodes through mutually trusted nodes. Two parties would not usually separated by more than six degrees. The network would have some similarity to WASTE, using public key encryption to connect directly to all trusted nodes, but would have the advantage of connecting to the larger network by proxying though chains of nodes.

Currently we are writing it in Python, using GTK2 and the Twisted implementaion of ssh.
http://cryptic6.sourceforge.net/





Fans Pushing Back Against File-Sharing Suits
K.C. Jones

Music fans from Texas to Dusseldorf are organizing in an attempt to push back against the music industry's lawsuits over online piracy.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation is reviving its efforts to ignite a lobbying movement among music fans and recording artists. In addition to updating its page on file sharing, the group is urging its blog readers to sign petitions asking governments on both sides of the Atlantic to do away with lawsuits against music fans.

"There are over 60 million people in the United States who use file sharing - more than the number of people who voted for our current President," EFF states. "If we all band together and stand up for our rights, we can change the law."

Derek Slater characterized the Recording Industry Association of America's campaign against peer-to-peer file sharing "irrational" and urged Americans and Britons to sign petitions to develop constructive alternatives so artists can earn money, while listeners share music.

The latest push appears to be a response to BPI's file-sharing lawsuit.

While an American petition urging Congress to end the music sharing lawsuits has gained 80,000 signatures through EFF's Web site, the newer British one on Flowerburger.com appears to have less than 200 signatures from people scattered across the globe. The site claims to support musicians and their earnings but opposes suing the fans for payment.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/190...PCKHSCJUNN2JVN





Copyright Watchdog Steps Up The Fight Against Film Pirates

Fact is tackling increasing piracy with new technology and a cinema investigator.
Dave Friedlos

Last week’s appointment of a cinema investigator to tackle the illegal recording of films in cinemas comes at a time when piracy is soaring to record levels.

Advances in technology are making it easier than ever to copy films and distribute pirated material.

Gartner research vice president Mike McGuire says criminals are using a combination of new technology to copy material, which is the most significant contributor to the increase in film piracy.

‘It is the application of technology rather than the technology itself that is responsible for the rise,’ he said. ‘But over the past few years, new digital tools have made it easier to copy, burn, download and distribute films around the world.’

McGuire says the proliferation of broadband and increased download speeds have opened new avenues of distribution.

He says film distributors must now make use of the internet to counter growing levels of piracy.

‘Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology will become increasingly attractive to distributors because it is an efficient way to move big files,’ he said.

‘Maturity will take a while, but Warner Bros has already signed a deal with BitTorrent to download films legally.’

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), which has recruited the cinema investigator, says it is evaluating and evolving its use of technology continuously to counter piracy threats.

Fact spokesman Eddy Leviten says the rise of the internet has made it easier for pirated films to be distributed via auction sites and through P2P file sharing services. So the organisation is now monitoring web and auction sites for the sale of such illegal material.

‘As broadband penetration increases throughout the UK and speeds reach double or even quadruple what they were it will become easier to download movies, and the propensity to share files will increase,’ said Leviten.

‘We have increased our presence in this area and have tools that speed up and automate the search for illegal material.’

There is also growing concern about new technologies such as DVD burners that are getting faster, and tower systems that allow the copying of multiple DVDs simultaneously.

There is also the issue of camcorders that are used to copy films in cinemas.

‘There is no doubt that camcorders are getting smaller, easier to conceal and provide better-quality images for pirated DVDs,’ said Leviten.

But as technology makes the copying of films easier, it is also making it easier to catch those behind illegal copying and distribution operations.

Fact is reluctant to go into the technical details at the risk of alerting potential film pirates, but it says distributors now mark audio and video forensically.

‘Each distributor marks a film print in its own way, which includes adding discreet sounds or images,’ said Leviten.

‘Using this identification, a distributor can trace from which cinema the copy originated.’

Fact uses forensic examination tools, accredited to police intelligence standards, on material that it seizes.

‘This allows us to pick out information such as where the disc was manufactured, on what machine it was burned, and can track emails between criminals,’ said Leviten.

Cinema chains are joining the fight, with some using night vision goggles or CCTV to identify people attempting to use camcorders, particularly during premieres or early screenings.

And others are looking into technology methods such as altering the light modulation of prints to scramble digital recordings. A recent test in a US cinema emitted a white light to obscure recordings.

The Film Distributors’ Association chief executive Mark Batey says the UK is particularly prone to piracy because prints supplied to cinemas are in English, the biggest market for pirated DVDs.

‘Premieres are also usually held in the UK before the rest of Europe because it is the second biggest film market behind the US,’ he said.

Batey says increased film piracy is the unfortunate consequence of the recent boom in digital technology.

‘New technology, such as good quality digital camcorders, is now more affordable, and though that it is a good thing, it makes it easier for people to make copies and rip off consumers,’ he said.
http://www.pcmag.co.uk/actions/trackback/2160225





Europe Fines Microsoft $356 Million
Paul Meller

The European Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($356 million) today for failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust ruling. But the commission also signaled that the two-year cat-and-mouse game between regulators and Microsoft may be coming to an end.

Neelie Kroes, the European competition commissioner, went so far as to praise recent efforts by Microsoft to comply with an order to reveal certain technical details about its Windows operating system to rival software companies, and said she no longer believed the company was playing for time.

“They are making constructive efforts now,” Ms. Kroes said at a news conference today. “It’s a shame they didn’t do so two years ago.”

Even so, the commission chastised Microsoft for being the first company to incur punishment for failing to obey one of its antitrust decisions. To encourage Microsoft not to delay compliance in the future, the commission decided to increase the daily fines it imposed.

The 280.5 million-euro fine was calculated at 1.5 million euros ($1.9 million) a day, running from Dec. 16, 2005 to June 20, 2006, the day when the commission said Microsoft appeared to start to seriously comply with the ruling.

If the documents that Microsoft still must submit fail to satisfy the Commission, the daily fine will be raised to 3 million euros ($3.8 million).

Today’s fine follows a much larger one of 497 milion euros ($745 million), which was levied against Microsoft in the original antitrust ruling in 2004. Microsoft has appealed that ruling at the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg.

Microsoft said today that it would appeal the new fine as well, arguing that the 2004 order to reveal technical details about Windows was not clear enough. The commission “has to be specific and concrete about what it wants someone to do,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief lawyer, in a conference call with journalists today. “The decision did not do that,” he said.

“We will ask the European courts to determine whether our compliance efforts have been sufficient, and whether the Commission’s unprecedented fine is justified,” Mr. Smith added.

Microsoft’s allies were quick to rally around the firm. “Microsoft has provided more than enough information and support to create interoperability,”’ said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a trade group, referring to the commission’s requirement that competitors be allowed to design software that works with Windows as well as Microsoft’s own products do. “But the commission and Microsoft’s competitors really want the ability to clone Microsoft software,” Mr. Zuck said.

Microsoft has said from the beginning that it would honor the commission’s ruling. But Ms. Kroes said that until last month, documents that the company submitted to the European competition regulator “fell significantly short of what was required.”

The technical details about Windows that the commission seeks will, it says, help restore fair competition in the market for server operating systems. At present, servers using Microsoft’s system work better with personal computers running Windows than do servers made by companies like Sun Microsystems using rival systems.

Under European antitrust law, withholding the technical details amounts to an abuse of a dominant position, given that over 95 percent of the world’s P.C.’s run on Windows.

Ms. Kroes said that market share data in the so-called workgroup server market illustrated the problem. Between 2002 and 2005, Microsoft gained 12 percentage points in market share, while its rivals all lost ground, according to statistics compiled by the research company IDC.

“Microsoft dominates this market — none of its rivals have more than 10 percent market share,” Ms. Kroes said.

As long as the legal wrangling goes on, that situation continues, lawyers said. “Microsoft continues to profit from every new day of noncompliance,” said Thomas Vinje, a Brussels-based partner in the Clifford Chance law firm and the lead counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a trade group. “The commission has now made clear that open-ended noncompliance with the order will not be tolerated.”

At a hearing before the commission in March, Mr. Smith said that he finally understood what documentation the commission was seeking. Since then, Microsoft has been working closely with the commission and with Neil Barrett, the trustee responsible for monitoring Microsoft’s compliance with the antitrust order.

The company has now filed several batches of documents which, at first glance, appear to be in order, Ms. Kroes said.

A turning point came on June 20, when Mr. Barrett gave preliminary approval to the information the company submitted in April and May, covering half the technical issues that the commission was seeking information about, Ms. Kroes said.

“Now we must check if the specifications are correct,” Ms. Kroes said of the documents. “We’ll know in a couple of months.” The company said it would submit the rest of the requested information on July 18. If it all checks out, Ms. Kroes said, “we’ll be back to normal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/te...n er=homepage





Microsoft Releases Windows Security Fixes
AP

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released four security fixes to patch flaws in its Windows operating system. Two of the vulnerabilities carried the highest danger rating.

All of the patches are to fix weaknesses in Windows that could allow an attacker to take control of a person's computer.

In its monthly security bulletin, Microsoft also said that three patches for its Office business software suite are to fix vulnerabilities that carry the highest "critical" rating for people running products associated with the Office 2000 release.

The Redmond company said the vulnerabilities are less serious for those running newer versions of Office.

Separately, Microsoft said it would stop offering security fixes for three older versions of its dominant operating system: Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium Edition. Microsoft is hoping the lack of support will be one factor in prompting people to upgrade to newer Windows versions.

The most recent version of Windows, XP, has been out since late 2001. A new version of Windows, called Vista, is scheduled for consumer release in January of 2007.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-11-16-12-07





34 States to Sue Chip Makers, Charging Broad Price Fixing
Laurie J. Flynn

At least 34 states are expected to file a lawsuit on Friday against seven semiconductor makers, accusing the companies of overcharging their customers for computer memory chips.

Separately, Elliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit on Thursday to recover damages for consumers in the state.

The legal cases will open a new chapter in the four-year-old investigation that has already led to large fines for the companies and prison sentences for several executives.

The multistate suit, which is to be filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, accuses the chip makers of conspiring to fix prices and manipulate supply from 1998 to 2002.

“They met and conspired to artificially increase prices, to reduce competition and to allocate market share,” Bill Lockyer, the attorney general of California, said. “The result was that consumers got overcharged, and equipment manufacturers got overcharged.”

Mr. Lockyer, who is taking a lead role in the multistate lawsuit, said the end users — the consumers — might have overpaid for the memory chips by hundreds of millions of dollars because of the price fixing. The case involves dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips, which are commonly used in personal computers, printers and electronics devices like cellphones and digital cameras.

The chip companies expected to be named in the multistate suit include Infineon Technologies, Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Mosel Vitelic, Nanya Technology, Elpida Memory and NEC Electronics America.

Samsung, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, was excluded from the suit to “foster a potential settlement,” Mr. Lockyer said.

Illinois is acting as a co-leader in the suit, which involves 34 states, including Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Mr. Schwartz said New York filed a separate suit in large part because the state and city governments were direct buyers of memory chips. He said it was possible the suits would be combined.

The computer makers that bought the chips include Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer, which merged with Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

The civil lawsuit grew out of criminal case brought by the Justice Department in 2002 charging Hynix, Samsung, Infineon and Elpida of conspiring to fix prices of DRAM chips. In that case, Micron agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for amnesty from criminal charges, while Samsung, Hynix, Infineon, Elpida and 12 chip company executives pleaded guilty to price fixing. Collectively, the companies and individuals paid more than $730 million in fines and several executives received prison sentences.

In November 2005, Samsung agreed to a $300 million fine and three executives pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

Dan Francisco, a spokesman for Micron in Boise, Idaho, said that while the company had not yet received a copy of the lawsuit, it had been cooperating with investigators for the states for some time.

A spokesman for Infineon said the company could not comment because executives had not seen the lawsuit.

A statement released Thursday by Mr. Lockyer’s office said the complaint detailed specific meetings between rival executives in which they had agreed to reduce chip supplies to artificially raise prices.

“The manufacturers did not limit this pricing coordination to isolated or occasional conversations,” a statement from Mr. Lockyer’s office says. “On the contrary, during a roughly four-year period, there were frequent pricing communications among the conspiring manufacturers,” many of them intensifying in the days just before the companies submitted bids to their customers, the PC makers.

“I’ve never seen a case where there was so widespread and so regular price fixing among competitors,” said Richard Schwartz, assistant attorney general for antitrust issues in the New York attorney general’s office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/business/14chip.html





Flash Drives Recalled In Fire Hazard

They can overheat

THE US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said that Lexar's Jump Drive storage devices have been recalled because of potential fire hazards.

According to the CPSC, Fremont firm Lexar is recalling the JumpDrive Firefly and Secure II products because they can overheat.

No injuries have been reported, but the high speed flash drives - of which 66,000 units have been sold in the USA, could cause problems.

The Firefly drives were sold at a number of web outlets and brick and mortar outlets between April and May this year. The JumpDrive Secure II 1GB drive was sold through Fry's.

People should stop using the recalled products immediately and get in touch with Lexar for a gratis replacement.

The CPSC advice page is here.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32868





Pants on fire

Syndicator to Review Allegations Ann Coulter Lifted Material

The syndicator of Ann Coulter's newspaper column is looking into allegations that the right-wing pundit has lifted material from other sources.

"We are reviewing the material and expect to have a response some time next week," Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for Universal Press Syndicate, told The Associated Press on Friday.

The New York Post and the Web sites Raw Story and the Rude Pundit have raised numerous questions about Coulter's columns, which appear in more than 100 newspapers, and her best-selling "Godless," already notorious for the author's calling four 9/11 widows, who supported Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, "harpies" thriving on their husbands' demise.

Kerr said that the press syndicate had not discussed the allegations with Coulter, who was not immediately available for comment Friday. The publisher of "Godless," the Crown Publishing Group, issued a statement saying it had reviewed the "the allegations of plagiarism" in her book and "found them to be as trivial and meritless as they are irresponsible."

"As an experienced author and attorney, Ms. Coulter knows when attribution is appropriate, as underscored by the 19 pages and hundreds of endnotes contained in 'Godless,'" Crown's senior vice president and publisher, Steve Ross, said in the statement.

In "Godless," Coulter writes:

"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."

An article that ran in 1999 in Maine's Portland-Press Herald contains the following passage:

"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct."

In a newspaper column that ran in 2005, Coulter wrote of Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter:

"As New Hampshire attorney general in 1977, Souter opposed the repeal of an 1848 state law that made abortion a crime even though Roe v. Wade had made it irrelevant, predicting that if the law were repealed, New Hampshire 'would become the abortion mill of the United States.'"

A Los Angeles Times article from 1990 noted: "In 1977, Souter as state attorney general spoke out against a proposed repeal of an 1848 state law that made abortion a crime _ even though the measure had been largely invalidated by the Supreme Court in Roe. vs. Wade ... 'Quite apart from the fact that I don't think unlimited abortions ought to be allowed ... I presume we would become the abortion mill of the United States(.)'"

Coulter's career has rarely suffered despite numerous questions about her accuracy and her pitiless remarks about political opponents, including an open wish for the bombing of The New York Times building. An exception was in 2001, soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Coulter was fired by the conservative National Review Online for writing about the hijackers: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Coulter's latest controversy includes a high-tech twist. The New York Post enlisted the Berkeley, Calif.-based iParadigms to run the author's material through its iThenticate software program, a web-based plagiarism detection system.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....annel=Regional





Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality
Diana Jean Schemo

This is how the 2005 edition of “A History of the United States,” a high school history textbook by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, relates the cataclysmic attacks of 9/11 for a new generation of young adults:

“In New York City, the impact of the fully fueled jets caused the twin towers to burst into flames. The fires led to the catastrophic collapse of both 110-story buildings as well as other buildings in the area. The numbers of people missing and presumed dead after this assault was estimated to be 2,750.”

The language is virtually identical to that in the 2005 edition of another textbook, “America: Pathways to the Present,” by different authors. The books use substantially identical language to cover other subjects as well, including the disputed presidential election of 2000, the Persian Gulf war, the war in Afghanistan and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.

As editions pass, the names on the spine of a book may have only a distant or dated relation to the words between the covers, diluted with each successive edition, people in the industry, and even authors, say.

In the case of the two history texts, the authors appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had nothing to do with the changes.

“They were not my words,” said Allan Winkler, a historian at Miami University of Ohio, who wrote the “Pathways” book with Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth I. Perry and Linda Reed. “It’s embarrassing. It’s inexcusable.”

Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Prentice Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, called the similarities “absolutely an aberration.”

She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her company, like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had already been revised and were lined up for printing so that the terror attacks could be accounted for. The material on the attacks, as well as on the other subjects, was added by in-house editors or outside writers, she said.

She added that it was “unfortunate” that the books had identical passages, but said that there were only “eight or nine” in volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.

Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a nonprofit group that monitors history textbooks, said he was not familiar with this particular incident. But Mr. Sewall said the publishing industry had a tendency to see authors’ names as marketing tools.

“The publishers have a brand name and that name sells textbooks,” he said. “That’s why you have well-established authorities who put their names on the spine, but really have nothing to do with the actual writing process, which is all done in-house or by hired writers.”

The industry is replete with examples of the phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history texts is “Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as “Rise of the American Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.

Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that the original authors had supplied the structure of the book that carries his name. But he said that as he revises the text, he adds new scholarship, themes and interpretations. He defended the disappearance of the original authors’ names from the book, saying it would be more misleading to carry their names when they had no say in current editions.

“Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad or Beowulf,” he added.

Richard Blake, a spokesman for Harcourt Education, a division of Holt, said none of the editors involved in the extended use of the Todd and Curti names were still with the company. But he said that now “all contributors and reviewers on each edition are listed in the front of the book,” and that naming new principal authors depended largely on the extent of their contributions.

The similarities in the Prentice Hall books were discovered by James W. Loewen, who is updating his 1995 best seller, “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.”

“Treatment of 9/11 and the two Iraq wars and the Florida election of 2000 are among the more important pieces of our past,” Mr. Loewen said. “I think that these authors should have actually written these passages they claim to write.”

But Ms. Spiegel defended the additions by other writers. “The authors who have their names on the books have written, reviewed and approved content that is submitted to them” she said. “Their level of participation is based on their particular interest or their contractual relationship with the publisher.”

Professor Winkler, one of the authors of “America: Pathways to the Present,” said he and his co-authors had written “every word” of the first edition, aiming to teach American history from a sociological perspective, from the grass roots up. But, he said, in updated editions, the authors reviewed passages written by freelancers or in-house writers or editors.

He said the authors collaborated on their last major revision before Sept. 11, 2001, working with editorial staff members in Boston. But he said that after the attacks, he was not asked to write updates and was not shown revisions.

“There was no reason in the world to think that we would not see material that was stuck in there at some point in the future,” Professor Winkler said. “Given the fact that similar material was used in another book, we are really profoundly upset and outraged.”

Ms. Spiegel said that the 9/11 revisions were made quickly and that authors were asked to update their texts after the attacks.

“In the deadline set before us, some authors elected to submit their copy for the coverage of those events; in other cases, a professional wrote those passages for the authors,” she said.

Mr. Boorstin, the former chief librarian at the Library of Congress and lead author of “A History of the United States,” died in 2004 as he was updating the book. Ms. Spiegel said his widow, Ruth Frankel Boorstin, had worked closely with him and had finished the revisions. Ms. Boorstin did not return several telephone calls to her residence.

Mr. Boorstin’s co-author, Mr. Kelley, said he was “outraged” by the identical passages, but he said he did not consider them plagiarism, because the authors never intended to lift another’s work.

“Frankly, many of these textbooks, unlike ours, were not written by the authors who were once involved with them,” he said.

“Years after some of the more famous textbook authors have died, they’re still coming out,” he added. “That is a long-term practice in publishing. I don’t know what to call that, but it’s certainly true.”

Susan Buckley, a longtime writer and editor of elementary and high school social studies textbooks who retired after 35 years in the business, said that “whole stables” of unnamed writers sometimes wrote the more important high school textbooks, although in other instances, named authors wrote the first editions. In elementary school textbooks, Ms. Buckley added, named authors almost never write their own text.

She said even if named authors did not write the text, they had an important role as scholars, shaping coverage and reviewing copy.

William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who wrote the American Historical Association’s statement on ethics, said textbooks were usually corporate-driven collaborative efforts, in which the publisher had extensive rights to hire additional writers, researchers and editors and to make major revisions without the authors’ final approval. The books typically synthesize hundreds of works without using footnotes to credit sources.

“This is really about an awkward and embarrassing situation these authors have been put in because they’ve got involved in textbook publishing,” Professor Cronon said.

Professor Winkler said he understood the editorial perils of textbook writing, but wanted to reach a wider audience. He said he was not motivated by money. Named authors share royalties, generally 10 to 15 percent of the net profits, on each printing of the text, whether they write it or not.

“I want the respect of my peers,” Professor Winkler said. “I’ve written monographs, biographies,” but these reach a limited audience. “I want to be able to tell that story to other people, and that’s what textbooks do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/bo...rtner=homepage





Amazon.com Unit Sells CBS News on DVDs
AP

An Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary has started selling DVDs of CBS News programs, one of the latest examples of how television content is increasingly being made available in more convenient, on-demand formats.

CustomFlix Labs Inc. lets customers choose content from "60 Minutes", the evening news and certain documentaries, which will then be sent to them on a DVD.

Amazon.com, the Seattle-based online retailer, began offering the service late Wednesday on its Web site.

The service costs $24.95 for up to 10 segments or 90 minutes of content, according to the Web site.

In April, CustomFlix started selling DVDs of other networks' archived shows, such as NBC's "Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show" and "Antiques Roadshow" from PBS.

Networks including CBS also have started offering television shows over the Internet, through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes and other venues.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-18-23-56





News Corp. Launches Online Safety Campaign
Anick Jesdanun

The parent company of MySpace.com and Fox is devoting millions of dollars in television air time and online ad space for a public service campaign on Internet safety.

Central to News Corp.'s campaign, announced Thursday, is a spot featuring Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer on the Fox action drama "24."

"On TV Jack Bauer has 24 hours to make the world safe. In real life it only takes a few minutes to do the same for our kids," Sutherland says. "To protect them you don't need the latest state-of-the-art technology. You just need a few simple tips: Don't let them run into trouble on the Internet - use common sense."

The 20-second ad then directs viewers to CommonSense.com, a site run by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors and reviews media and entertainment for parents. There, parents may download a guidebook and a tip card on Internet safety, including a recommendation that they become involved with what their kids do online.

The campaign comes as parents, schools and law-enforcement officials increasingly warn about the dangers of sexual predators at social-networking sites, which provide messaging and other tools to encourage users to expand their circles of friends.

MySpace has gotten the brunt of the attention given its position as the industry leader, with some 92 million registered users, about 20 percent of them minors.

In June, the mother of a Texas teenager who claims she was sexually assaulted by another MySpace user sued the social-networking site and News Corp., seeking $30 million in damages. The lawsuit claims MySpace is negligent in protecting teen users despite numerous warnings of the dangers.

Attorneys general from at least four states also have issued calls for MySpace to do more to protect teens.

Over the past several months, MySpace has responded to the concerns by hiring a safety chief and changing its privacy policies to try to make it more difficult for adults to contact younger teens.

MySpace and other News Corp. sites also had earlier run ads aimed at educating users about the dangers.

The new campaign is directed at educating parents and teens on what they can do.

"We can build the best technology features in the world and the best safety features, but unless we raise education and awareness around the use of those, it doesn't do anything," said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer.

James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, said the campaign will be especially important for parents and educators because "a lot of older folks have no idea about what their kids are doing on the Internet."

The spot is to run on several Fox cable stations, including FX, Fox Movie Channel and the National Geographic channel. Online video and banner ads will appear on MySpace.com, FoxSports.com, IGN.com, AmericanIdol.com and other Fox Interactive Media sites.

Nigam could not say how much News Corp. was committing, other than to say it was "millions and millions of dollars worth of time and space."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-13-00-38-40





Microsoft, Yahoo Test IM Partnership
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are beginning a limited test of plans to make their instant messaging systems work together.

The much-vaunted pairing comes a bit later than the two companies had originally hoped. The project was delayed because Microsoft wanted to make sure the systems would work well with both companies' millions of users, Microsoft executive Blake Irving said Wednesday.

"It's not the technical difficulty of the service itself. It's the technical difficulty of the scale that we're trying reach," said Irving, a corporate vice president for the Windows Live Platform.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans last October to let people using either company's instant messaging software send lightning-fast bits of text to each other. The system was supposed to be in place by June.

Right now, Microsoft, Yahoo and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL all have separate instant messaging systems that don't easily work together, creating hassles for people who want to communicate with friends or colleagues using other programs.

Microsoft does sell a product that lets business users send and receive messages from the competing systems, but that's not available for people who just have the company's free offering.

The pairing of Microsoft and Yahoo - who compete aggressively in other areas - has been seen as a way to better take on U.S. market leader AOL and perhaps even form a defense against mutual rival Google Inc. Although Google is still a minor player in instant messaging, the two companies have reason to fear the Internet search leader's ever-expanding reach.

The test of the companies' interoperability plans will initially be available only to limited numbers of people who have the latest version of either company's instant messaging products: Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger with Voice. The functionality is expected to be broadly available by the end of the year.

The development comes as instant messaging has expanded to include even more communications options, such as voice and video. That's made the increasingly sophisticated systems a more integral part of people's work and home lives.

For now, the Yahoo-Microsoft partnership will only work for sending text back and forth, although the companies said there are plans to eventually add voice capabilities.

"We want to get it right, not just get it out," said Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president. "We will be implementing voice. We don't have a date to share with you at this point."

The executives said there are no current plans to add video capabilities between the two systems, but it could be a possibility later on.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-37-31





Toshiba Delays Sale of 1st HD DVD Recorder
AP

Toshiba Corp. said Thursday it will postpone the sale of the world's first HD DVD recorder because of a production delay.

The new recorder, the RD-A1, had been slated to go on sale July 14, but the release will be pushed back to July 27, the Tokyo-based electronics maker said in a release.

The delay is due to problems in securing some parts for the recorder, and Toshiba will not have enough units ready for a nationwide release until the later date, according to company spokesman Keisuke Omori.

The new machine combines an HD DVD burner with a one-terabyte hard disk and can record and store up to 130 hours of high-definition broadcasts.

The product is a key element of Toshiba's battle against rival Sony Corp. to establish the standard for next-generation DVD technology. Sony and its allies are pushing an alternative technology called Blu-ray.

HD DVD players are already available, but the RD-A1 will be the first model that can record disks.

Toshiba has said the recorder will carry a suggested price tag of 398,000 yen (US$3,470; euro2,725). The electronics maker hopes to sell 10,000 recorders by the end of 2006, Omori said.

He said the company hadn't decided when the product will be launched overseas.

Sony has been selling Blu-ray recorders since 2003 in Japan, but prices have been high and uptake low.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray can deliver dazzling high-definition video and can store much more data than today's DVDs, but are incompatible.

Toshiba launched HD DVD players in Japan in March, and in the United States in April. Sony plans to begin selling personal computers equipped with Blu-ray drives later this month.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-13-00-59-30





Optical Device Could Help Read Most Disk Formats
Yoshiko Hara

Trying to bridge the gap between next-generation optical disk formats, Ricoh said it has developed an optical component that reads and writes all disk formats—Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, as well as DVD and CD—with one pickup and one objective lens.

Ricoh will show the optical device at the International Optoelectronics Exhibition '06 outside Tokyo on July 12-14. The company intends to offer the device to OEMs by year's end.

The component is a 3.5-mm diameter, 1-mm thick round diffraction plate with minute concentric groves on both sides which function as a diffraction grating.

The diffraction plate is placed between lasers and an objective lens. The diffraction grating is designed to adjust a light beam to an optimum incident ray relative to the objective lens so that light focuses on the proper position for each disk format.

The data layer of the Blu-ray Disc resides 0.1 mm from the disk's surface, while the HD-DVD data layer is 0.6-mm deep from the disk's surface, the same as DVD disks. CDs have a data layer depth of 1.1 mm from the disk surface.

Multiformat players and recorders can identify which format disk is loaded. Based on the disc information, Ricoh's optical diffraction component adjusts the laser beam with its diffraction grating for each format and passes it to the objective lens. The lens then forms a beam spot at the appropriate depth for each disk format.

"This diffraction device is the first one that is ready for four formats, including BD and HD-DVD," claimed a Ricoh spokesman. "It will make it possible to build players and recorders ready for all formats, which will benefit consumers," he added.

Although the diffraction device works for both reading and writing modes, Ricoh will initially offer the device for disk players only. Because some laser beam energy is lost at the grating, using the diffraction device for recording will require a blue laser with higher power than those used in conventional recorders.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=190300953





Man Claims Jackson Hired Him To Adopt Boys
Linda Deutsch

A former associate suing Michael Jackson for $1.6 million suddenly claimed on the witness stand Friday that he once was dispatched to help the pop star adopt boys in Brazil, but the singer's attorney denounced the story as a smear.

Even the lawyer for former Jackson associate F. Marc Schaffel said he was shocked when Schaffel blurted out the claim while being questioned about his background in the gay pornography business.

"It's not really relevant to this case," Schaffel's attorney Howard King said outside court. "I thought we were not going to go there. We've tried to be upstanding."

Jackson's lawyer, Thomas Mundell, said he had never heard the allegation during all the pretrial investigations.

"It was an effort to smear Mr. Jackson with a remark that could be interpreted to hurt him in light of the case against him last year," Mundell said. Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges last year in Santa Maria.

Schaffel is seeking $1.6 million from Jackson, down from the $3.8 million his lawsuit originally claimed he was owed for unpaid loans, royalties and other debts.

Schaffel was being questioned about his personal ties in Brazil when he denied that he had been on a trip to recruit talent for gay videos.

"No, I've not used any Latin models," Schaffel said.

Mundell then asked if he had an interest in a company known as Latinboys.

Schaffel bristled and said he did not, then blurted out, "The main purpose of my trip was Mr. Jackson wanted to adopt some boys."

He had testified earlier that Jackson sent him to Brazil in 2001 to deliver $300,000 to a "Mr. X" in Argentina and said he went to Brazil to withdraw the money from a personal account he had there.

But Schaffel never disclosed what the mission was about, and, in a videotaped deposition of Jackson that was played Friday, the pop star denied that he ever sent Schaffel to deliver money to Argentina.

He was asked, "Have you ever asked Mr. Schaffel to make payments to third parties that you didn't want anybody else in the world to know about?"

Jackson answered "No."

"Have you ever asked Mr. Schaffel to pay $300,000 to a family in Buenos Aires?" asked King.

Jackson, appearing taken aback, laughed and said, "No."

Also Friday, the singer's defense questioned entertainment attorney Raul Perez, who represented Schaffel to record companies in the effort to release Jackson's ill-fated charity recording "What More Can I Give."

He said he was in charge of obtaining releases for some 40 artists who participated in the record and a Spanish-language version. But he said Sony, which had to sign off on the release, balked at Schaffel's involvement.

"This was a major record, with every pop star at the time," Perez said. "I don't think Sony was happy that a person no one ever heard of named Marc Schaffel was the producer. ... There was always a sense of how the heck did Michael Jackson put this person in charge of this record?"

He indicated that once it was discovered that Schaffel's background was in pornography, the project was doomed.

Schaffel's suit claims expenses and an ownership interest in the record. But in a video deposition Jackson was adamant that Schaffel had no rights to the record because Jackson wrote the song and it was his creative product.

On the videotape Jackson also professed little memory of major financial transactions involving Schaffel and said he thought any money Schaffel gave him was his own, not Schaffel's.

"I would never ask him for his money," Jackson said. "That's ridiculous. I would never."

He also laughed when King suggested that Schaffel gave him $375,000 to go shopping.

"It sounds spoiled, but it doesn't sound like me," Jackson said. "Give me $300,000 to go shopping? That's not me."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Floating in the summer sky

Balloons Travel From Michigan To Sherman
Brian Saxton

One moment they were soaring up into the evening sky in Grand Rapids, Mich. Thirteen hours and 630 miles later, they floated down into the garden of a home in Sherman. The cluster of bright orange balloons Marcella Lourd found near her tennis court on Brinsmade Lane around 1 p.m. on Sunday remained a mystery until this week when Lourd tracked down the man who released them.

“There were about 16 or 17 of them,” said 80-year-old Lourd, a longtime Sherman resident. “At first, I thought they were part of a sales promotion or something, so I e-mailed the people whose name was attached on a card.”

Lourd’s e-mail reply confirmed that the sender was, in fact, Brian Buck, a 35-year-old, stay-at-home dad who released them around 10 o’clock the previous evening. Buck lives in Grand Rapids and works part-time at a local retail store that sells balloons.

“I was amazed,” said Lourd. “There’d been a lot of rain. They must have flown quite rapidly to have made the trip in 13 hours.”

On Friday, Buck said he got the idea from his 9-year-old daughter, Anna.

“We once saw a TV report about a balloon that was released on St. Valentine Day and ended up in France, so my daughter said we should try to do the same thing,” said Buck. “We have to get rid of the balloons every night anyway because the helium inside can affect the store’s security detection system.”

So, after the store had closed for the day, Buck took the balloons to a nearby parking lot, tied them together, attached his business card and then released them.
According to National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Heathfield,the temperature in Grand Rapids that night was 84 degrees. The sky was cloudy and the wind was blowing in from the south-west at 22 miles an hour.

Unofficial estimates indicate the balloons may have traveled around 38 miles an hour before their journey ended in Lourd’s backyard. Buck was amazed the balloons had traveled so far.

“It was all just a bit of fun, really,” said Buck. “I didn’t expect anyone to find them and I certainly didn’t expect them to reach Connecticut. A few more miles and they would have been in the Atlantic.”

Anna Buck was equally awe-struck.

“I was really surprised,” she said. “We sent some balloons up a couple of years ago, but we never found them again. I was so excited to hear they’d arrived in Connecticut. That’s a long way.”

Still inflated, the balloons have certainly found a welcoming home.

“They still have air in them so I think I’ll just keep them,” said Lourd. “They’ll make a nice little ornament.”
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....&channel=Local





Off the grid

Windmill Proposed To Power Adirondack Farmhouse
Michael Virtanen

The Adirondack Park Agency is set to consider a homeowner's request to power her 1840s farmhouse near North River with a windmill 111 feet high.

It would be the second tall wind-powered residential generator in the Adirondacks, where the proposal to build even larger commercial windmills by Barton Mines in nearby North Creek has drawn opposition from several environmentalists. They don't have the same problem with the smaller home version.

"The only spot that it looks like it will be visible from is a local roadway," said John Sheehan of the Adirondack Council. "Given our desire to see renewable energy employed in the park, this is not a bad a project."

The APA in the late 1990s approved another residential wind tower, now powering a couple's home in Vermontville, and has a preliminary application for a third one, spokesman Keith McKeever said. Agency staff are recommending the APA board on Thursday conditionally accept Julia West's plan to put a windmill and 10-kilowatt generator in a field on her 16.9-acre property about 75 miles north of Albany in the town of Johnsburg.

"They don't have the mass, and I think they can be lower than commercial wind towers," McKeever said. "There's a potential for them to be substantially invisible and blend into the surrounding area."

Inside the 6-million-acre Adirondack park, APA permits are required for towers taller than 40 feet. West's proposed hillside windmill would be 100 feet tall, with 22-foot-diameter turbine blades, a 12-inch diameter pole and four guy wires.

"I live in a valley that kind of runs east west. It really funnels the wind," West said. "And I want to do what I can for the environment and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel." She said it would take her many years to recover the investment.

APA staff went to the site, raised a balloon 111 feet, then went to nearby locations and reported they mostly couldn't see it. Proposed permit conditions include no lights, solar panel, TV or radio equipment on the tower, painting it dark gray with matte finish, and cutting only four to six trees 20- to 30-feet high. Electricity would be stored in batteries, and any excess could be sold back to the power grid.

David Gibson, executive director of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, said it would apparently have minimal effect on the landscape, and at an estimated cost of $38,000, it's unlikely residential windmills will pop up all over the park. "The cost is a major impediment to most people," he said.

"We feel fine about them as long as they're unobtrusive," said Peter Bauer, executive director of the Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks.

However Bauer's group is divided over the Barton proposal to put 400-foot commercial towers on Gore and Pete Gay mountains - which would be the first such windmills inside the Adirondack Park - to sell electricity back to the grid. The APA has allowed Barton to install one smaller monitoring tower on former mining land, and an application for a second monitoring tower is pending.

Barton, a maker of garnet abrasives, says its proposed Adirondack Wind Energy Park would produce up to 27 megawatts of clean, renewable energy for the Adirondack region, reducing smokestack pollution from burning fossil fuels.

"Basically the argument comes down to: Does the wilderness value of the park trump our societal need for alternative energy, or does need for alternative energy trump the wilderness value of the park," Bauer said.

According to the Adirondack Council's Sheehan, hydropower from New York's northern mountains already provides about 230 megawatts a year, more electricity than the park consumes, and the Adirondacks already pay a price for that in habitats and fisheries. There are better places with steadier winds, like the Tug Hill Plateau west of the park - where large windmills already stand and more are planned - and on the plains north of the Adirondacks, he said.

"We don't have to create that kind of industrial wind station in order to have a sensible energy policy for the park," said Gibson, whose group wants Barton to file its full application for eight to 10 large wind towers before the APA approves another monitoring tower.

Instead, Gibson says the APA should require all new construction in the Adirondacks as tighter "energy smart homes" that are 30 percent more energy efficient than the "bird cages" most of us live in.

James McAndrew, project manager, said Barton's monitoring tower is about 170 feet tall, and they want to erect a second one and collect wind data to help evaluate how many wind towers and the best locations.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





TV Standby Buttons Will Be Outlawed
Lewis Smith and Mark Henderson

THE Government is to outlaw standby switches on televisions and video and DVD players to cut the amount of electricity wasted in the home.

Refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers will have to become energy-efficient, and lightbulbs that burn too much energy will be phased out.

According to yesterday’s Energy Review, standby facilities use 8 per cent of all domestic electricity.

Lighting, set-top boxes, televisions, chargers, fridges, freezers, washing machines and computers were highlighted as wasteful products that must be redesigned to save power.

New homes, which are already four times more energy-efficient than the average household, are to face stringent regulations.

Businesses will have to phase out or reduce drastically the energy used by computers, printers and photocopiers left on standby.

By cutting wastage and making equipment more efficient, ministers hope to win a significant reduction in Britain’s energy requirements.

Energy efficiency is one of the main planks of the Government’s Energy Review, which is intended to lay out how Britain receives and uses its power for the next 20 years.

Ministers want to shift energy production away from traditional fossil fuel sources to improve security of supply.

The Government hopes that the measures in the review will reduce emissions by an additional 13 to 17 per cent by 2020, on top of the estimated 14 per cent already expected.

Power companies will be expected to play their part.

They will be offered incentives to reduce the electricity supplied to each home by encouraging customers to put in insulation or install solar panels.

Eventually power companies could switch from charging per unit used to being paid by how little energy they supply. The Energy Review hardens the Government’s commitment to ensuring that renewable sources provide 20 per cent of the nation’s energy by 2020. At present they supply 4 per cent.

Offshore wind farms and renewable technologies such as wave energy are to be offered more financial incentives.

The money is being transferred from incentives offered to onshore wind farms, which are now deemed to be at or close to the point of financial self-suffiency. Onshore wind farm developments will be assisted by changes in planning laws and the appointment of a planning inspector whose responsibility will be to make sure that proposals are saved from becoming bogged down in bureaucracy.

Microgeneration technology, such as solar panels and domestic wind turbines, is to be made all but exempt from planning regulations.

Power companies are being told to make sure that there are suitable and sufficient connections to allow electricity created by microgenerators to be channelled into the National Grid.

“If energy suppliers do not develop a system to acquire electricity from microgenerators, Government will intervene,” the review promised.

The Government is anxious to strengthen the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) by expanding it to include businesses such as banks and supermarket chains.

Such a move would see many more business sectors face a capping of their carbon emissions. Roads and aviation will also be brought into the ETS if the Government can persuade its European partners to include them.

This would leave motorists and air passenegers facing higher travel costs.

If roads are brought within ETS, the Government could bring in motorway tolls, higher road tax or pay-as-you-drive schemes.

Fuel supplies are to be made greener with the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation’s commitment to ensure 5 per cent is renewable by 2010 being extended to 10 per cent by 2015.

The Government also announced the creation of a carbon emissions regulator — the Office for Climate Change.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...6159_1,00.html

Thanks Multi!



Cracking the Secret Codes of Europe's Galileo Satellite
Press Release

Members of Cornell's Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe's first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codes secret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices -- including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles -- that need PRNs to listen to satellites.

The codes and the methods used to extract them were published in the June issue of GPS World.

The navigational satellite, GIOVE-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element-A), is a prototype for 30 satellites that by 2010 will compose Galileo, a $4 billion joint venture of the European Union, European Space Agency and private investors. Galileo is Europe's answer to the United States' GPS.

Because GPS satellites, which were put into orbit by the Department of Defense, are funded by U.S. taxpayers, the signal is free -- consumers need only purchase a receiver. Galileo, on the other hand, must make money to reimburse its investors -- presumably by charging a fee for PRN codes. Because Galileo and GPS will share frequency bandwidths, Europe and the United States signed an agreement whereby some of Galileo's PRN codes must be "open source." Nevertheless, after broadcasting its first signals on Jan. 12, 2006, none of GIOVE-A's codes had been made public.

In late January, Mark Psiaki, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and co-leader of Cornell's GPS Laboratory, requested the codes from Martin Unwin at Surrey Space Technologies Ltd., one of three privileged groups in the world with the PRN codes.

"In a very polite way, he said, 'Sorry, goodbye,'" recalled Psiaki. Next Psiaki contacted Oliver Montenbruck, a friend and colleague in Germany, and discovered that he also wanted the codes. "Even Europeans were being frustrated," said Psiaki. "Then it dawned on me: Maybe we can pull these things off the air, just with an antenna and lots of signal processing."

Within one week Psiaki's team developed a basic algorithm to extract the codes. Two weeks later they had their first signal from the satellite, but were thrown off track because the signal's repeat rate was twice that expected. By mid-March they derived their first estimates of the code, and -- with clever detective work and an important tip from Montenbruck -- published final versions on their Web site (<http://gps.ece.cornell.edu/galileo>) on April 1. The next day, NovAtel Inc., a Canadian-based major manufacturer of GPS receivers, downloaded the codes from the Web site and within 20 minutes began tracking GIOVE-A for the first time.

Galileo eventually published PRN codes in mid-April, but they weren't the codes currently used by the GIOVE-A satellite. Furthermore, the same publication labeled the open source codes as intellectual property, claiming a license is required for any commercial receiver. "That caught my eye right away," said Psiaki. "Apparently they were trying to make money on the open source code."

Afraid that cracking the code might have been copyright infringement, Psiaki's group consulted with Cornell's university counsel. "We were told that cracking the encryption of creative content, like music or a movie, is illegal, but the encryption used by a navigation signal is fair game," said Psiaki. The upshot: The Europeans cannot copyright basic data about the physical world, even if the data are coming from a satellite that they built.

"Imagine someone builds a lighthouse," argued Psiaki. "And I've gone by and see how often the light flashes and measured where the coordinates are. Can the owner charge me a licensing fee for looking at the light? … No. How is looking at the Galileo satellite any different?"

Other authors of the GPS World article are Paul Kintner, Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, graduate students Todd Humphreys, Shan Mohiuddin and Alessandro Cerruti, and engineer Steven Powell.

This story was written by graduate student Thomas Oberst, a writer intern at Cornell News Service.
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/521790/





Bush Asks Senate To Raise Science Spending
Jennifer Loven

President Bush on Saturday urged the Senate to back increased government spending on basic scientific research.

The proposal is part of Bush's initiative to boost U.S. competitiveness in the global marketplace through innovation. He also wants to train thousand of new science and math teachers and extend a popular tax credit businesses can receive for investing in research and development. The total price tag over 10 years would be $136 billion.

Some Democrats have expressed concern that Bush is increasing federal math and science education spending while cutting overall discretionary spending on education by trimming money in areas such as the arts, parent-resource centers and drug-free schools.
But Bush said in his weekly radio address that his proposals are vital for America to "remain an innovative nation that competes with confidence" and would help ensure that every U.S. child has the math and science skills needed for the jobs of the future.

The president devoted part of a two-day trip to Illinois to his American Competitiveness Initiative, visiting Cabot Microelectronics Corp., headquartered in Aurora, Ill., in Chicago's exurbs.

Donning protective eyewear and a white lab coat, Bush toured a laboratory of the supplier of products used in making semiconductors. Cabot is in the district of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who accompanied Bush to the facility.

"Cutting-edge firms like Cabot are creating good jobs for our workers and helping to keep America competitive in the global economy," Bush said in his radio remarks.

He said the Senate should follow the House's lead and approve full funding of the basic research component of his initiative, which would double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences.

The president also put a rosy spin on a new jobs report that showed U.S. employers added a disappointing 121,000 jobs last month.

The count of new jobs added to the economy in June did mark an improvement from the 92,000 new positions logged in May - the fewest in seven months. But it still fell short of economists' forecasts for an increase of around 175,000, and the Dow Jones industrials lost 134.63 points Friday to close at 11,090.67.

The April-to-June average of 108,000 jobs a month also was down from the average of 176,000 a month for the previous quarter. The moderation in job growth comes as companies cope with rising energy prices and interest rates and try to determine how much of a slowdown in overall economic activity the country is likely to encounter in the months ahead.

Still, Bush celebrated 34 straight months of job increases.

"Our economic expansion is lifting the lives of millions of Americans," he said.

Democrats focused on the tepid nature of the growth, noting it was smaller than needed to keep up with population increases.

"Instead of doing something to address sky-high gas prices, expensive loans and outsourced jobs, this president is holding photo ops touting his policies that are failing small businesses," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





How Much Does It Cost To Buy Congress?
Paladine

As most of you will know, I am pretty heavily involved in the debate regarding file sharing on the internet. One of things that has helped organisations such as the MPAA and RIAA to secure changes in legislation in order to impose stricter laws and influence on the global community is the size of their lobbying wallets.

To this end I compiled some interesting figures from 2000-2005 on exactly how much these organisations have reportedly spent selling their message to congress in the US.

The total cost of lobbying reported by the filers in the TV, Movies and Music Industry from 2000-2005 was as follows:

Total Reported by Filers from 2000-2005 : $232,280,633

Now granted that is for a lot of TV,Movie,Music organisations not just the MPAA/RIAA, but we can look at the individual amounts paid for by the MPAA and RIAA.

MPAA
2000: $1,340,000
2001: $1,060,000
2002: $720,000
2003: $980,000
2004: $1,009,220
2005: $650,000
Total: $5,759,220

RIAA
2000: $780,000
2001: $1,320,000
2002: $820,000
2003: $520,000
2004: $1,180,000
2005: $550,000
Total: $5,170,000

The above figures are listed as "Total Reported by Filer" but the numbers are somewhat confusing. For example, in 2005 the RIAA are reported as spending $1,020,000 under "Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer)" and in their most expensive year (2001) this figure was $1,950,000.

Similarly in 2005 the MPAA's total "Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer)" is $1,340,874 and for their most expensive year (2000) this figure is a mere $920,000.

This makes it difficult to intepret the data since there seems to be no clear correlation between the "Total Reported by Filer" and "Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer)".

Other interesting figures come from Sony Corp of America as follows:

2000
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $780,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment: $360,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $260,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $160,000

2001
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $680,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $280,000

2002
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $680,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $280,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment: $0

2003
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $930,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $340,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony BMG Music Entertainment: $190,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment: $0

2004
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $1,000,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $380,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony BMG Music Entertainment: $220,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment: $0

2005
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $710,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony BMG Music Entertainment: $255,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Electronics: $200,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment: $180,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment: $75,000

I haven't had the time to correlate the figures by year with changes in legislation that have proved to benefit the three organisations listed. However, if someone wants to take up that task and add the details in the comments section it could make even more interesting reading.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any figures for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I would need to find out their "Client Name" to give a comparison of how much they have spent on lobbying for the same period. If anyone can assist with this too, I will add the figures to this post.

I found this information really quite interesting, I hope the rest of you do.
http://users.livejournal.com/_paladine_/#item4601





Hard Questions For The Entertainment Industry
Nate Anderson

The entertainment industry and the EFF have been at each other for years, and the EFF has just launched the latest salvo in the war of words between the two groups. It's a list of "tough questions" to ask MPAA and RIAA reps, questions designed to force them to go on the record with unpopular opinions or explanations. As the EFF puts it, "Asking hard questions is a way of 'keeping honest people honest' and revealing when they're actually being deceptive."

What sort of things are on the list? Here's a sampling.

• The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing. Recently, an RIAA representative reportedly suggested that "students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford [P2P lawsuit] settlements." Do you stand by this advice? Is this really good advice for our children's futures?

• Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?

• The RIAA says that it doesn't mind if I rip CDs to my personal computer and put them on my iPod. Do I need your permission to do this or can I legally do it even if you object?

• The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios' bottom line in any significant way?

• In several lawsuits, the MPAA has repeatedly said that it's illegal to make a back-up of a DVD that I purchased. Why is this illegal?

• Is it ever legal for me to use software like DVD Shrink or Handbrake to rip a digital copy of a DVD I own onto a video iPod or my laptop? What if I want clips to use for a class report? Or if a teacher wants to include a clip in a PowerPoint slide?

• Is there anything illegal about copying TV shows I've recorded off the air onto my video iPod?

At bottom, the questions try raise one fundamental question: Can the entertainment industry actually prove that backing up DVDs, engaging in non-commercial file-swapping, and recording from digital radio are a threat to the bottom line? Past studies have found that file-swapping, the music industry's biggest concern, actually leads people to purchase more music and to spend more money. If this is a problem, it's the sort of problem most businesses would kill for. Limited evidence suggests that DRM actually hurts sales of CDs and aggravates customers, especially when that DRM is a rootkit.

The list of questions is solid, and they're well worth tossing out if you find yourself in a meeting with an entertainment industry rep. It's also an opportunity for the industry, should they care to take it. How so? By gathering the strongest criticisms against the entertainment business into one high-profile list, the EFF has given the RIAA and MPAA an excellent chance to talk candidly about some thorny questions. If the industry takes the opportunity and engages the EFF—really engages, as opposed to just labeling file-swappers "pirates" and ending the discussion—the conversation could be quite interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060712-7243.html





Some Leeway for the Small Shoplifter
Michael Barbaro

Wal-Mart refuses to carry smutty magazines. It will not sell compact discs with obscene lyrics. And when it catches customers shoplifting — even a pair of socks or a pack of cigarettes — it prosecutes them.

But now, in a rare display of limited permissiveness, Wal-Mart is letting thieves off the hook — at least in cases involving $25 or less.

According to internal documents, the company, the nation’s largest retailer and leading destination for shoplifting, will no longer prosecute first-time thieves unless they are between 18 and 65 and steal merchandise worth at least $25, putting the chain in line with the policies of many other retailers.

Under the new policy, a shoplifter caught trying to swipe, say, a DVD of the movie “Basic Instinct 2” ($16.87) would receive a warning, but one caught walking out of the store with “E.R. — The Complete Fifth Season” ($32.87) would face arrest.

Wal-Mart said the change would allow it to focus on theft by professional shoplifters and its own employees, who together steal the bulk of merchandise from the chain every year, rather than the teenager who occasionally takes a candy bar from the checkout counter.

It may also serve to placate small-town police departments across the country who have protested what the company has called its zero-tolerance policy on shoplifting. Employees summoned officers whether a customer stole a $5 toy or a $5,000 television set — anything over $3, the company said.

At some of the chain’s giant 24-hour stores, the police make up to six arrests a day prompting a handful of departments to hire an additional officer just to deal with the extra workload.

“I had one guy tied up at Wal-Mart every day,” said Don Zofchak, chief of police in South Strabane Township, Pa., which has 9,000 residents and 16 officers. He said the higher threshold for prosecution “would help every community to deal with this.”

J. P. Suarez, who is in charge of asset protection at Wal-Mart, said it was no longer efficient to prosecute petty shoplifters. “If I have somebody being paid $12 an hour processing a $5 theft, I have just lost money,” he said. “I have also lost the time to catch somebody stealing $100 or an organized group stealing $3,000.”

The changes in Wal-Mart’s theft policy are described in 30 pages of documents that were provided to The New York Times by WakeUpWalMart.com, a group backed by unions that have tried to organize Wal-Mart workers in the United States.

The group said it received the document from a former employee at the chain who is unhappy with the new policy.

In interviews, several current and former Wal-Mart employees said the new shoplifting policy undermines their work and would, over time, encourage more shoplifting at the chain.

But Wal-Mart said it would closely track shoplifters it did not have arrested, and would ask that they be prosecuted after a second incident. (Under the new policy, it will also seek the prosecution of all suspected shoplifters who threaten violence or fail to produce identification, no matter how much they are trying to steal. Not carrying identification is a popular tactic among professional shoplifters to avoid arrest.)

“There is not a lot of margin for success for those intent on making a living stealing from us,” Mr. Suarez said. “We will put them in jail just as we always have.”

Still, the new policy, which became effective in March, is in many ways a striking departure from Wal-Mart traditions. In the past, the company has proudly defended its aggressive prosecution of shoplifters, saying it helps hold down prices.

“Other retailers might offset the cost of shoplifting with higher prices,” a spokeswoman said in a 2004 interview. “But we don’t do that.”

Indeed, Wal-Mart’s zero-tolerance policy can be traced to its founder, Sam Walton, who tied employee bonuses to low theft rates at stores. Stolen merchandise, he wrote in his autobiography published in 1992, the year he died, “is one of the biggest enemies of profitability in the retail business.”

Over all, American retailers lose more than $30 billion a year to theft, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

In the book, “Sam Walton: Made in America,” Mr. Walton boasted that the amount of merchandise lost to theft at Wal-Mart was half that of the retailing industry’s average.

With the new policy, though, employees “are confused,” said a former Wal-Mart employee who worked in the loss prevention department at a store outside San Jose, Calif..

“They want to stop shoplifters,” she said. “They want to do what they are trained to do.”

But if the shoplifter is under 18 or steals less than $25 worth of products, “they can’t do anything,” said the former employee, who left the company shortly after the new shoplifting policy was put into effect and spoke on condition of anonymity because she said she feared retribution.

Chris Kofinis, director of communications at WakeUpWalMart.com, said the policy “is a head-in-the-sand strategy that is far different than what Sam Walton would ever have wanted, and it’s not clear this is the best strategy for Wal-Mart workers.”

Mr. Suarez, the Wal-Mart executive, said there was “overwhelming” employee support for the new policy because it would more effectively deter theft.

Wal-Mart is not alone in giving shoplifters some leeway. Its new policy “is consistent with guidelines many retailers use,” said Joseph J. LaRocca, vice president for loss prevention at the National Retail Federation.

Retailers, he said, have learned that prosecuting small shoplifting cases “does not warrant the store resources or the judicial resources required, given the dollar amount that was stolen.”

In some cases, loss prevention executives said, retailers will prosecute only shoplifters who steal at least $50 or $100 worth of merchandise. The legal costs required for prosecution, they said, are simply too high. Stores must hire a lawyer for employees who become witnesses in a trial, for example, and pay workers overtime to appear in court.

Until now, they said, Wal-Mart was the exception. “They would arrest somebody for stealing a pair of socks,” said Chief Zofchak in South Strabane Township. “I felt we were spending an inordinate amount of time just dealing with Wal-Mart.”

Since Wal-Mart enforced its new shoplifting policy, arrests have fallen at the store in Harrisville, Utah, according to authorities there. But the town’s chief of police, Maxwell Jackson, still prefers the original zero-tolerance rule.

“Once the word goes out that there is a dollar limit,” he said, “there will be more stealing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/bu...rtner=homepage





News From The North



The TankGirl Diaries


11.7.2006

Pirate Parties to Germany and Austria

Swedish style Pirate Parties have now been founded also in Germany and Austria. To be precise, both parties are presently organizing their activities and websites in preparation for an official party status and further political work. But as both initiatives are clearly serious and backed up by knowledgable activists, it can be safely concluded that the political pirate movement has now spread to these two countries. You can have a peek at Austrian Pirate Party's propaganda material here.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...348#post247348

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/

TankGirl is on vacation.



Sony Removes Dutch PSP Ads Seen As Racist
AP

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has removed billboards for the new white version of its PlayStation Portable video game player following complaints of racism, the company said. Sony also apologized.

The billboards, which went up in the first week of June only in the Netherlands, showed a white woman dressed in white threateningly grabbing the face of a frightened-looking black girl, with an attached catch copy saying, "PlayStation Portable White is coming."

The provocative image was one of several versions showing the two women in different poses, company spokesman Nanako Kato said Wednesday. They appeared exclusively in Amsterdam and several other major cities in that country.

Sony said the ads were intended only to emphasize the color contrast between the existing black PSP and the new ceramic white PSP.

"We only intended to make a sharp contrast between black and white, but never meant to discriminate against anyone," Kato said. "Even though the ad was perceived in an unexpected way, we'd like to apologize to the people who were offended by the ads."

She said the complaints have come mostly from outside the Netherlands.

The PSP, a portable version of the PlayStation, is a hot-seller for Sony. It went on sale in Japan in December 2004 and the United States earlier this year.

Last year, Sony sparked controversy in the United States with PSP ads disguised as graffiti.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-30-50





Sony BMG Merger Hits Hurdle in European Court
AP

An EU court overturned the European Commission's approval of the merger between the music units of Sony and Bertelsmann AG on Thursday, forcing the companies to request clearance for the deal again.

Both Sony and BMG said they would study the ruling and discuss next steps with the Commission, but did not believe the judgment undermined its business.

''Today's judgment does not affect the validity of the Sony BMG joint venture, which has been up and running since August 2004,'' Bertelsmann said in a statement.

The surprise ruling is the first time the courts have overturned a Commission decision to clear a deal.

The Court of First Instance -- the EU's second-highest court -- backed a challenge by the independent record label group Impala, which represents 2,500 independent music firms. The court said regulators did not properly show in 2004 that there was not a monopoly position before the deal or that there would not be one afterward.

Either one would be enough to strike down regulatory approval.

The European Commission had unconditionally approved the 50-50 joint venture between Japan's Sony Music Corp. and BMG, Bertelsmann's music unit in July 2004 after finding insufficient evidence the deal would harm consumers.

The deal, which reduced the number of major music companies from five to four, brought Sony artists like Aerosmith, George Michael and Barbra Streisand and BMG's Avril Lavigne and Elvis Presley under one roof. Sony and BMG argued they needed to join forces to deal with declining CD sales and the threat from illegal downloading on the Internet.

Regulators had assumed there was no record industry monopoly because there were a variety of products on the market and no open disputes between the five main companies.

But the court found that regulators did not properly support a theory that promotional discounts ultimately prevent a monopoly from occurring.

It also said regulators were wrong to rely on the absence of evidence that record companies had used retaliatory measures in the past. The court said that it found proof of ''effective deterrent mechanisms'' such as the possibility of hurting an errant record company by excluding it from compilations.

Sony and BMG must now resubmit their applications for antitrust clearance -- based on current market conditions -- within seven days, said EU spokesman Jonathan Todd.

''We will study the ruling carefully, but it is clear that we will have to re-examine the merger,'' he said.

The EU must carry out a new analysis of the deal, but will have to stick to deadlines used before it reformed merger rules in 2004 -- meaning they will have one month from Sony BMG's new filing to approve it or open an in-depth probe. This makes a late-August decision from regulators likely.

Todd said the Commission had two months to decide if it would appeal the court ruling.

What impact the case could have on other big music companies was not immediately clear.

EMI Group PLC, which has been trading takeover offers with Warner Music Group, said ''detailed study'' would be required before any wider conclusions about a deal could be made, but noted that the ruling was about the ''particular evidence'' presented in the Sony BMG case.

Warner and EMI scrapped a proposed hookup four years ago in the face of EU charges that fewer major music companies could reduce competition and lead to higher prices and less choice for consumers.

A combination of EMI and Warner Music would control about 25 percent of the recorded music market, surpassing Sony BMG in the rankings and moving into second place behind Universal, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Right now, Universal Music holds the top music spot in Europe, with Sony BMG pulling ahead in the United States. The rivals control about a quarter each of the $32 billion global music market.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...ne r=homepage





Deal Is Seen for Creating Urban Films
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Laura M. Holson

The Weinstein Company, the film studio started by the founders of Miramax, is near a deal to form a joint venture with Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, to create an urban entertainment company, according to people involved in the negotiations.

The joint venture could be announced as early as Thursday, these people said, though they cautioned that the deal could be delayed.

The joint venture is a first step toward creating a major force in minority entertainment, from producing films and television programming to new Internet programming, these people said. Initially, the venture will create low-cost films for the urban market, an audience that has often been ignored by the major studios but can be lucrative. Terms of the deal could not be learned.

The potential deal was the talk of Allen & Company’s annual conference, where the nation’s media moguls converge to socialize and often sow the seeds for major mergers like Walt Disney’s acquisition of ABC/Capital Cities in 1996. Among those attending this year’s conference are Mr. Johnson, who now runs a private equity firm called the RLJ Companies, and Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of the Weinstein Company. Both Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Johnson declined to comment.

Other Hollywood players in attendance are Robert A. Iger, chief executive of Disney; Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation; Brad A. Grey, chairman of Paramount Pictures. Agents attending include Jeffrey Berg, chairman and chief executive of International Creative Management; James Berkus, chairman of United Talent Agency; and Jim Wiatt, chairman of William Morris. That is in addition to the likes of Warren E. Buffett and Rupert Murdoch.

Mr. Weinstein’s attendance here has created a stir. Last year, he was not invited after he used Goldman Sachs, not Allen & Company, to help advise and raise money for his new studio, the Weinstein Company. He was originally not on the guest list this year as well, but after some last-minute pleading behind the scenes, he was offered a spot, people involved in the conference said.

A deal between Weinstein and Mr. Johnson would be consistent with what Mr. Johnson has done throughout his career. With $15,000 in 1980, Mr. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television, which in its early days thrived on programming music videos. The channel became a hip-hop force attracting both white and black audiences who liked the urban nature of its programming. The company was sold to Viacom two decades later for $3 billion.

Mr. Johnson’s other investments have included the Charlotte Bobcats basketball team and a music label. In 2005 he announced the formation of RLJ Companies, which he said he hoped would become a dominant black-owned financial services firm. One of his first acts was to secure the backing of the Carlyle Group to create a private equity fund. That fund is being started with Deutsche Asset Management and Urban Trust Bank, which Mr. Johnson owns.

Since Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob split from Disney last year, they have been trying to find a place in Hollywood in a post-Miramax era. Last year, the Weinsteins raised about $1 billion in financing and debt, or about the yearly budget of a movie studio like Warner Brothers Pictures.

The Weinsteins ambitions are big no matter how small the company — movies, books, television and the Internet — and they are mostly hoping to grow through joint ventures and partnerships with other companies.

Since the Weinsteins raised their financing, they have been busy. In March, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced several agreements to distribute movies made by outside producers and distributors, including the Weinstein Company. One of the first releases, “Lucky Number Slevin,” starring Josh Hartnett and Bruce Willis, got lackluster reviews and earned only $22.5 million at the domestic box office.

Two months later the Weinsteins invested in aSmallWorld, an online exclusive community which participants have to be asked to join.

Harvey Weinstein said in May that the Weinstein Company was attracted to aSmallWorld because of the community’s social networking and advertising opportunities.

Andrew Ross Sorkin reported from Sun Valley, Idaho,for this article and Laura M. Holson from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/bu.../13studio.html





Russians and U.S. Push Hard on Trade
Andrew E. Kramer and Steven R. Weisman

Russia and the United States are racing to reach a deal this week that would allow Moscow into the World Trade Organization, officials from both countries said on Tuesday.

Russia is by far the world’s largest economy still outside the W.T.O., a 149-nation group that sets the ground rules for global trade and investment. The United States has withheld its approval for letting the Russians into the organization, even after other countries signed off on membership.

Negotiators say that talks have been held up by lingering disagreements over aircraft tariffs, banking regulations, movie and music piracy and rules for trade in the likes of frozen chicken.

In Washington, President Bush suggested that a deal was close. He is scheduled to meet on Friday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for talks before heads of state and government of the Group of 8 leading industrial nations meet this weekend in St. Petersburg. Russia will be the host of the G-8 summit meeting for the first time.

“Hopefully we can get it done,” Mr. Bush said on Monday. “I’m optimistic about it.” His remarks were released by the White House Tuesday evening. The United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, left for Moscow on Tuesday to hold meetings before the weekend, another sign that talks had reached an advanced stage.

Bush administration officials said Ms. Schwab’s trip was aimed at reaching agreement and clearing the way for a deal on trade with Russia to be announced in time for the St. Petersburg meetings. But they also said that while negotiators had narrowed their differences on several matters, there was no deal yet.

At a time of tensions with Russia on a range of issues, from Mr. Putin’s crackdown on dissent to disagreements on energy policy, the negotiators are working to achieve an accord on two-party trade that would improve the atmosphere for Mr. Bush’s visit and for the summit meeting generally.

The trade disagreements have been bitter in recent months, with Russia charging that the United States has held it to a higher standard on intellectual property and food safety than it has applied to other trading partners. The Bush administration says its standards are the same for all countries that want to join the World Trade Organization.

Russian officials have suggested that they would hold up possible bids by American-based energy companies like ConocoPhillips to drill for natural gas in the Shtokman fields in the Barents Sea if the trade talks did not make progress. The Bush administration rejects the idea that the two matters should be linked.

“W.T.O. accession is a serious business,” Ms. Schwab said last Friday at a news conference, “and I think Russia wants to do it right, and we’d like to have Russia do it right. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

She also said that Russia had made “real improvements” in protecting patents and other safeguards for intellectual property, but that “we’re not there yet” in getting a full-fledged agreement. Trade officials said the same was true of safeguards on health safety for trade in food.

From the Russian side, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr D. Zhukov said the negotiations could be concluded this week. “I hope that they will finish successfully,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Russia’s economy could get a lift from membership in the W.T.O., though the organization would not help Russia as much as it did China, which exports mainly manufactured goods that face higher tariffs if made by non-W.T.O. members. Russia’s largest exports are oil and gas, commodities in demand worldwide and not blocked by trade barriers.

For Western companies operating in Russia, W.T.O. protections on intellectual property rights could help the makers of goods as diverse as designer clothes and prescription drugs — these and many other items are routinely faked in Russia.

On the Internet, Russia still lacks a dispute procedure for Web addresses ending in “.ru”.

If the talks are successful, they could put to rest some long-festering disputes in Russian-American trade.

The United States held out for clear rules on frozen chicken exports, like the chicken first sent to Russia by Tyson Foods of Springdale, Ark., in the early 1990’s. The drumsticks became known as Bush Legs after the first President Bush, and were a staple for millions of Russians in lean times.

In 1998, Russian authorities banned the chicken on health grounds and in 2003 imposed quotas on poultry, prompting American negotiators to press the matter in W.T.O. talks. It is unclear what concessions, if any, Russia has offered on the frozen chicken dispute.

The United States has also kept on the books the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, which tied the trade status of the Soviet Union — and now Russia — to an annual review of whether Jews could freely emigrate. The law rankles Russia because it has allowed free emigration since the breakup of the Soviet Union, a point confirmed by most Jewish groups.

Any deal on Russia’s joining the W.T.O. would require Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which would otherwise put the United States in violation of the organization’s rules, Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, told journalists Tuesday.

At issue in the banking dispute is whether foreign banks could open branches in Russia, or would be required to operate through local subsidiaries regulated by the Russian central bank. The newspaper Kommersant reported Tuesday that the United States had softened its demands on banking.

The W.T.O. talks have become a forum for horse trading on business deals between Russia and the United States, and those may now go forward, Mr. Somers and others said.

Chevron and ConocoPhillips are bidding to join a consortium with Gazprom to develop the Shtokman gas deposits, a deal worth about $10 billion.

And Boeing is in a race with Airbus for sales of long-range jets to the Russian state carrier Aeroflot, a transaction for 22 or 23 planes worth about $3 billion.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Moscow for this article and Steven R. Weisman from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/bu...s/12trade.html





Down with freedom of information!

St. Mary's to Study Limits on Info Law
Melissa Ludwig

The Defense Department is sending St. Mary's University School of Law $1 million to help fight terrorism by studying ways to limit the scope of the Freedom of Information Act, a landmark open government law that celebrated its 40th anniversary Tuesday.

Jeffrey Addicott, who heads the school's Center for Terrorism Law, said the purpose of the yearlong project is to find ways to rewrite the law to prevent terrorists from getting sensitive information about water, sewer, electricity and transportation systems.

The project's end product will be a "model" statute that state governments or Congress can adopt, he said.

"The mission is to balance increase in security with civil liberties, which are precious," said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army Special Forces. But "in a time of war, balance goes toward security."

Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act on July 4, 1966. Through so-called sunshine laws, citizens can attend government meetings and get access to government records.

Addicott said the proposal originated with the Center for Terrorism Law, the first of its kind in the nation.

Congress passed the $1 million grant as part of this year's defense budget, and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., will administer the grant.

Bill Piatt, dean of St. Mary's Law School, said the center's work, while paid for by the government, is completely independent.

"What we are doing is not political," Piatt said. "We are not enacting the statutes; we are not lobbying politicians. We are doing academic research."

Some scholars, while intrigued, said they also are troubled.

"My first response is that this is a reasonable thing for any nation to do in the post-9-11 arena," said Char Miller, a history professor at Trinity University, referring to efforts to protect infrastructure. But "it does need to be very cautious. I would not want St. Mary's to be in a position where it is providing legal cover for an administration to act in a way that will actually diminish the civil rights of American citizens."

Since the 9-11 attacks, Congress and 41 states have blocked access to some records and meetings to keep information from terrorists. Addicott said his project aims to study each state's laws and consult with an array of scholars on whether they have gone too far or not far enough.

Paul McMasters, a public information expert at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., said reconciling discrepancies in law "is not a bad idea."

"But for this to be done at the direction of a federal agency where secrecy is paramount and where confusion is frequent gives one pause," he added.

Addicott frequently appears on cable news shows and writes articles backing the administration's anti-terrorism policies, such as military tribunals.

He also has criticized the administration over the indefinite detention of undocumented immigrants suspected of terror acts, calling it unconstitutional.

He said he believes it's only a matter of time before terrorists figure out how to hack into computers that run the nation's infrastructure.

So far, Addicott said, he doesn't know of any terrorists who have used freedom of information laws to get such information, but he believes it is inevitable that they will.

"They don't need bombs anymore," he said. "They can hack in and tell the Hoover Dam to release the water."

Randy Sanders, president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and retired editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, sharply criticized the project.

"It seems like we're just losing all our freedoms in the name of homeland security, and I just wonder where the real threat is," he said. "We're not going to keep terrorists from finding out about power plants and water supplies by tightening the Freedom of Information Act."

McMasters made a similar point, saying the best security often comes from public pressure to fix weaknesses once they are exposed.

"We are not restricting anything from those seeking to harm us," he said, "but we are keeping in the dark the citizenry who might generate pressure to reduce vulnerabilities."
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/edu...I.16f38e9.html





At AOL, a Plan for a Clean Break
Saul Hansell

Should AOL sacrifice its cash cow in hopes of finding a prosperous future?

In two weeks, the board of Time Warner Inc., which owns AOL, will hear a proposal from Jonathan Miller, AOL's chief executive, calling for a near halt in marketing for AOL's 17-year-old Internet access service, price cuts for existing customers and thousands of layoffs. His goal is to devote all of AOL's energy into building its free Web-based services.

Traditionally, when companies have profitable but shrinking businesses, like AOL's access service, they try to milk as much money as they can from them without investing new cash. Indeed, that is what Mr. Miller has tried to do for the last several years.
Mr. Miller will defend his unusually draconian plan by arguing that trying to wring every last dime from its dial-up subscribers is preventing AOL from being as aggressive as it can in competing with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on the Web, according to AOL executives involved in developing the proposal. With such powerful and fast-moving rivals, he wants to hasten the pain to speed the recovery.

This plan will require the board to accept lower profits at first until the advertising revenue grows further, the AOL executives said, although they declined to say how much profits would fall and at what rate. (The AOL executives spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not scheduled for public announcement until Aug. 2.)

Jessica Reif Cohen, an analyst with Merrill Lynch, estimates that this plan could well cut its revenue from domestic subscriptions (both dial-up and high speed) by 52 percent, or $2.1 billion at an annual rate. And AOL's operating profit could fall by $251 million, 14 percent of her estimate for this year.

"Things are going to get worse before they get better," she said. It is unclear, she said, how long it will take to see improvements.

"Every conversation we have is: what is the inflection point? When do the subscriber losses get offset by the growth in advertising? Nobody knows this."

Mr. Miller will most likely say that his plan will help build the company faster because it will eliminate the conflicts between preserving the past and building the future.

Until now, AOL has been trying to promote its free Web sites even as its television advertising has promoted its dial-up access service, which to many people is the way Grandma gets her e-mail. AOL's employees, moreover, are locked in a constant battle over whether each piece of software or bit of content should be used to retain subscribers or to lure new Web users.

Under the new plan, almost everything AOL offers — its content, software and AOL.com e-mail addresses — will be available to any Web user free. There may be some exceptions — some advanced virus protection and parental control software, for example. And telephone customer service will probably be reserved for paying users.

Mr. Miller also hopes this plan will help Time Warner's lagging stock price, even before AOL's fortunes turn around. Time Warner's shares closed at $16.84 a share on Friday, down more than 11 percent from its 52-week high. For the last few years, even as AOL urged investors to look at its growing advertising revenue, Wall Street has been fixated on its declining subscription revenue, which has more than offset the advertising gains. By killing off the subscription business line, he hopes, in effect, to end the death-watch mentality of investors.

As an analyst, Ms. Cohen says she is not appeased by this aspect of the plan. "It is always bad if you are doing something for the Street," she said. "They should be doing this for their business, and the stock will follow their performance."

The investors who have looked at AOL's advertising performance so far have not seen a clear picture of a turnaround. Last fall, the company started promoting the free AOL.com, which featured most of the content it had offered its paying subscribers. AOL says 35 million nonsubscribers have used the free site. But it has not replaced the traffic lost from subscriber defections, because subscribers view many more pages than nonsubscribers. And each page, of course, is an opportunity to display advertising.

In May 2006, 14.8 billion pages were viewed on AOL's branded service — by both paying users and others — down 27 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore MediaMetrix. In the same period, Yahoo's page views increased by 10 percent, to 38.1 billion.

In recent months, AOL says its overall page views have stabilized, and advertisers have started to notice that the freefall has stopped.

"It appears they are attracting more eyeballs to the service than they are losing from subscribers, but it is not significantly more," said David Cohen, a senior vice president at Universal McCann, a media buying agency. "It does not appear to be a home run, but it is directionally positive."

Despite the loss of audience, AOL's advertising revenue has grown. It is benefiting from rising advertising rates and technology from its Advertising.com subsidiary, which allows it to be more effective in how it places advertisements on each page. Still, AOL continues to lose advertising market share; even though its ad revenue increased 26 percent, to $392 million in the first quarter, Yahoo and Google grew far faster.

AOL executives say they believe they are poised to accelerate their advertising business. They have renovated their advertising technology and have also stabilized their relations with Madison Avenue, which have been stormy for half a decade.

"The relaunch of AOL.com has been the fresh start they needed," said Jeff Lanctot, a vice president with Avenue A Razorfish, an online advertising agency. "It caused the marketing community to give them a second chance after a number of years of being a frustrating, hard-to-work-with also-ran."

Moreover, the new strategy will let AOL keep its most attractive customers — those who have stuck with it for years — even as they move to high-speed service. AOL hopes to work out deals with cable and phone companies to make it easy for AOL members to switch to high-speed service and keep their AOL e-mail addresses. They will also be able to use AOL's software client, which some have gotten used to as a way to navigate online, without an additional fee.

This is important, AOL executives say, because people who use the AOL software view many more of its pages, and thus its ads, than those who use a regular Web browser.

AOL further hopes it will be able to lure back members who quit recently by offering them their old AOL.com e-mail addresses.

Mark R. Goldston, the chief executive of United Online, a low-priced dial-up Internet access service, said AOL might not be able to lure very many customers back.

"Once you've moved on and given everyone your new e-mail address, you've moved on," he said.

Mr. Goldston also noted that dial-up Internet access had become phenomenally profitable in recent years as the wholesale telecommunications costs to providers like AOL have fallen from 45 cents an hour to less than 6 cents an hour.

Still, he suggested that AOL is making the right choice to pull away from its position as a premium-priced provider. (AOL's list price is $25.90 a month, for either dial-up or high-speed access, although it has many less expensive plans.)

"If I were AOL, and I had all the incentives Time Warner has, I would do what they are doing," said Mr. Goldston.

But even as AOL backs out of the Internet access business, it is still unclear what the thrust of its Web marketing will be.

"AOL is a brand in search of a strategy," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Capital. "Ask any person what is AOL, and they are not sure anymore."

Some of AOL's highly promoted initiatives appear to have failed, he added, like a new version of its AOL Instant Messenger software that is slow and cumbersome. AOL has retreated and started to make its older, faster version available, too.

AOL has had more success with its new video-oriented sites, such as TMZ, a celebrity gossip site, and In2TV, a collection of TV reruns from Warner Brothers, its corporate sister. And it is developing a new video search service for later this summer.

"AOL is like Chicago after the Chicago fire," said Michael Zeman, the director of insights and analytics at Starcom MediaVest, a media buying agency. "They were so far behind the big guys, they are better positioned to come out with a broadband platform that is probably ahead of MSN or Yahoo."

AOL has other issues to confront. Over the last year, it has lost a number of top managers, including Michael Barrett, the head of advertising sales; James Riesenbach, who ran search; and David Gang, who was in charged of software development.

And Mr. Miller is now being supervised by Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president and chief operating officer of Time Warner, rather than by Donald Logan, who retired at the end of 2005. By all accounts, Mr. Bewkes, who is seen as the leading candidate to succeed Richard D. Parsons, Time Warner's chief executive, has taken a very active role in AOL and has grilled Mr. Miller extensively on this new plan.

As Mr. Miller makes his presentation to the board, its members may well recall earlier strategies he promoted. At first, he championed a plan for AOL to emphasize online shopping, such as ticket sales. Then he tried to sell a premium subscription service with exclusive content. More recently, he also had high hopes for the $25.90-a-month high-speed Internet access service, which has not taken the market by storm, as well as the free AOL.com site.

Ms. Cohen of Merrill Lynch said she had lost count of AOL's various revival plans.

"This one seems to make sense," she said, "but so did their other strategies."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/10/technology/10aol.html





Dell's Exploding Computer and Other Image Problems
Damon Darlin

A Dell notebook computer that burst into flames last month in Osaka, Japan, has damaged more than just the conference table where it sat smoldering. The incident, publicized in photos on the Internet, has also hurt Dell's recent attempts to improve its image.

The company said the incident got more publicity than such incidents usually do when they happen to other manufacturers. In part, that is because Dell's reputation for responsive customer service was already under attack after the company, the world's largest PC manufacturer, started to cut costs at its call centers last year. Dell, reacting to the savaging it has received on blogs and Web sites over the cuts, recently responded with a program to spend more than $100 million to improve service.

Photos of the flaming and smoking notebook were posted on a technology news Web site called the Inquirer on June 21 (www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article =32550). The story was passed around to other Web sites and blogs like Consumerist.com. It was also the subject of a brief article carried later that day on the Dow Jones Newswires.

Two days later, Cindy Shaw, a securities analyst with Moors & Cabot, notified her clients about the publicity. Last Thursday, citing reports of a second smoking laptop, this one in Pennsylvania, she advised them that "should this story also hit the mainstream press, we believe there is headline risk and potentially negative demand ramifications for Dell."

Bob Pearson, vice president for corporate group communications at Dell, called Ms. Shaw's reaction "somewhat irresponsible."

Ms. Shaw said neither she nor her firm had made any financial bets that the company's stock would fall. She does, however, recommend that clients sell the shares.

So far, though, Dell's stock price has been largely unaffected.

Dell said its engineers examined and tested what remained of the flaming notebook computer for several days to find the source of the problem. They concluded that the fire was caused by a faulty lithium ion battery cell, but that the problem was unrelated to a recall last year of notebook batteries by the company and several other computer makers.

"It's very, very rare to have a thermal incident," Mr. Pearson said.

Dell said that it found no pattern of battery failure and that the Pennsylvania incident publicized by the Inquirer Web site was caused by a chip problem and not batteries.

The company also directed reporters' attention to a statement by Norm England, chief executive of the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association, that said, "Based on the millions of lithium ion batteries in use today and the exceptionally small number of cases in which a battery malfunction has occurred, we believe these batteries are safe and reliable." He also said that more than two billion lithium ion cells would be manufactured in 2006.

For any company trying to repair its image, any bit of bad news hurts. Teresa Valdez Klein, who has commented on Dell's customer care troubles before on the Blog Business Summit Web site, compared Dell's public relations problems to those of Britney Spears. "The blogosphere latches onto the story and runs with it — drowning out anything good or redeeming that the company might say," she wrote.

Mr. Pearson said the customer with the melted notebook had been given a new one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/10/te...gy/10dell.html





Freescale Claims Magnetic Memory Breakthrough

MRAM, bam, thank you ma'am

CHIP FIRM Freescale reckons it's in a position to start selling magnetic memories any day now.

MRAM - magnetoresistive random access memory - holds the promise of fast access times and the ability to store data without needing juice almost indefinitely.

Freescale, according to reports, will sell MRAMs for $25 but there's a way to go before you can store your entire life on them. The first chips it will sell will store four megabits and are much more expensive than DRAM.

Nor will Freescale take on the mainstream DRAM and SRAM market with its magnetic memories, but instead will seek to sell them for industrial embedded purposes.

Periodically, memory firms herald the arrival of MRAM - see links below. But it seems Freescale is actually going to sell real products, real soon.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32913





Axing Sex, Swearing From Films Violates Copyright: Court

Deleting swearing, sex and violence from films on DVD or VHS violates copyright laws, a U.S. judge has ruled in a decision that could end controversial sanitizing done for some video-rental chains, cable services and the internet.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by 16 U.S. directors — including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorsese — against three Utah-based companies that "scrub" films.

Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an "illegitimate business."

The judge also praised the motives of the Hollywood studios and directors behind the suit, ordering the companies that provide the service to hand over their inventories.

"Their objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," the judge wrote. "There is a public interest in providing such protection."

The act of sanitizing films began in 1998 when one company, Sunrise Family Video, started deleting the scenes showing a nude Kate Winslet from the blockbuster Titanic.

Several other companies, mostly in Utah, quickly sprang up to follow its lead and there are currently an estimated 90 film scrubbing companies in the United States.

Directors applaud ruling against 'unauthorized editing'

Michael Apted, the president of the Directors Guild of America, said directors could feel vindicated by the decision.

"These films carry our name and reflect our reputations. So we have great passion about protecting our work ... against unauthorized editing," said Apted in a statement on the guild's website.

"Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor."

Scrubbing companies vow to continue fight

Matsch ordered the companies named in the suit — CleanFlicks, Play It clean Video and CleanFilms — to immediately stop producing, creating and renting out the scrubbed films.

"We're disappointed," said Ray Lines, the head of CleanFlicks. "This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We're going to continue to fight."
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/nationa...ng-ruling.html





Hilary Rosen: Singing a New Song?
Eliot Van Buskirk

For many, the name Hilary Rosen recalls a Recording Industry Association of America bogeywoman who brought the law down on Napster, the Diamond Rio, small-time internet radio and other fan favorites. Music and tech enthusiasts seemed to hold her personally accountable for the record labels' attempts to preserve an outmoded business in the new, digital age because she acted as the public face of Big Music.

Rosen left the RIAA two and a half years ago. Since then, she has become the interim director of the Human Rights Campaign, launched a political blog for The Huffington Post, and formed a consultancy with Jay Berman, another RIAA alum.

Among her current clients is XM Radio, which is embroiled in a lawsuit with the major record labels and the organization she formerly led over a feature that allows satellite radio customers to temporarily store copies of songs on devices for on-demand listening.

In her new role, the erstwhile copyright enforcer has found herself criticizing the lack of interoperability in digital music; questioning the efficacy of the RIAA's lawsuits against individual file-swappers (a tactic that began only after she'd left the organization); defending new portable audio devices from RIAA censure; and even voicing support for subversive "copyleft" ideas such as the Creative Commons.

It might please some of Rosen's critics to parse this as evidence of a change of heart or even recognition of the error of her ways. Not so fast. Some of her latest arguments obviously dovetail neatly with the interests of XM. But her views, honed over nearly two decades in the music industry, have always been more nuanced than her critics have generally assumed.

Wired News caught up recently with Rosen to talk about life after the RIAA -- lessons learned, XM and the future of music. (The interview that follows has been edited for clarity and length.)

Wired News: I read that you now think that the RIAA has made a mistake in suing individual file sharers as opposed to when you were at its helm, when the approach was more going after companies that are making money on infringement.

Rosen: I never said it was a mistake. … The main goal of enforcement is to promote legitimate distribution. So what I did say, and what I believe, is I think it's a fair thing to question the ongoing value of the individual lawsuits now when there's so much opportunity in the legitimate marketplace. I think it's a fair thing to question: Have the lawsuits outlived their usefulness?

WN: You seem to have said lately that DRM (digital rights management technology that prevents unauthorized copying) doesn't make sense to you anymore. What made you come to that realization?

Rosen: I have long been an advocate of interoperability. I mean, that was one of my original goals when we started the SDMI initiative in the '90s. I always thought that both security and interoperability were worthy goals, and I think people have really focused almost too much on the security part of it.

When I look at something like iTunes and the success of the iPod, I just think how much bigger the online music market could be if there were interoperability among the various services and the various devices.… You can eliminate the DRM and essentially have sort of unprotected content sold everywhere. I'm not a particular fan of MP3 -- I don't think it's as good audio quality -- but, let's say you did AAC or something else.

Obviously, Apple has a business strategy that says "proprietary" works for them. The record companies, I think, have tried to convince Apple to open up their system. I don't think that's been successful. The choice now is to either go unprotected so everybody has the same shot and the market expands, or to continue down what I think is an unfriendly path for consumers and the industry, because I don't think it's growing as fast as it can.

I understand there's a rabid philosophy on both sides of this to protect or not to protect … and I actually am not that black and white about it. I think if people want to protect their content, and want to have a DRM or a business model that limits its distribution, that's okay. If others don't want to, that's okay too. That's why I like Creative Commons. It's all about choice. What I have focused on is what will most dramatically expand the music market at a time when device choices feel so limited and the service side is so underutilized.

WN: In the XM situation, with the RIAA going after Sirius and XM for those songs cached on portable devices -- what do you make of all that?

Rosen: I've been working with XM for about six months. There's a current dispute about whether XM essentially has the right to have a home taping function on their newest devices, and I just think that that's an easy question.

Clearly consumers have the ability to record that way. If there were a search function that said I want Coldplay every time it plays on any XM channel, and I want my device to pull it down and establish a Coldplay library, then I think that would be crossing the line, but these devices don't do that. They allow you to save existing programming and make play lists out of the programming you have affirmatively saved, so I think this dispute will be resolved.

It's in the business sphere, although the RIAA has taken it into the political sphere to try and get legislation to regulate these recorders, and I just am optimistic that there will be a settlement. I think this doesn't rise to the level of court precedent and legal precedent and frankly, I think if the court case continued, the record companies would lose.

There's been a lot of bad information reported about this, both on what the device does and the business choices XM has made. People have said, well Sirius chose to pay additional monies for their devices but XM didn't. That's not true. XM did offer to pay additional monies, in fact, at greater levels than what Sirius is paying, but the record companies, I think, were just looking for a lawsuit on this one because they're hesitant about these devices going forward.

WN: Do you think that we'll ever see TiVo-style, preemptive search where you're looking for what you want to essentially download over satellite?

Rosen: Well, it is ironic, because you can do that with TiVo or a DVR quite easily and it's proven to simply expand the video market. I'll grant that audio might be different in terms of librarying, but I do think you'll see multiple business models with search and library functions going forward. But (regarding) the case before the court now, that's involved with (XM Radio's) Inno and Helix, (they) don't go that far. Therefore, I don't think they rise to the level of panic they seem to be instilling.

WN: Do you put any stock in the idea of taxing ISPs, sort of like what Canada has done? I believe they have a tax there on equipment that enables people to download from P2P with impunity because they've paid this tax, though they still can't upload. Do you see that as a viable approach or is that not enough choice?

Rosen: I'm not a big fan of the government taking over the licensing structure but I do think that the fact that we have very strong copyright owner rights in this country behooves all copyright owners to be as thoughtful about their distribution strategies as possible.

But people ascribe more evil motives to the record companies or copyright owners than they deserve. These people are not in business to lock up their content and make sure you never get it. Their business is only successful if you actually want their content and want to buy it and distribute it, so I think that there is probably extra rhetoric on both sides of that.

WN: The role of the labels seems to be changing in the digital era. What do you see as the next phase in this development, the record label of 2008?

Rosen: It's a hard question in that there are so many models. I do believe that the traditional role of a record company is important now and will continue to be important -- nurturing talent, investing in the marketing and promotion of that talent, and helping that artist with all the multiple distribution options.

In some respects, the people have thought, well, once an artist is established or they have a big name, they don't need the record company because after all, they can go directly to their fans. In fact, that hasn't proven to be true. What we've seen is that the bigger the artist, the more money they want invested in marketing and the bigger the investment in the promotion, etc., and they want the record company's help in doing that.

You see a lot more growth in those artists that can't get through the funnel of the old traditional record company system and they have a lot more opportunity and a lot more outlets…. In many ways, in the online world, what's happening now is what happened in the record industry in the '50s, '60s and '70s -- independent companies and independent artists would develop a following, create a new sound or a new niche, and they would essentially be bought up and expanded by a major label. Now, I think you see some of that in the online space. I think it's all good whichever way it ends up.

You can argue whether you like that taste or not, but there are 100,000 new releases every year, and having somebody filter and pick out those needles in the haystack is still a valuable role.

WN: What advice you would give to (current RIAA head) Jonathan Lamy?

Rosen: Well, I've learned … what I've always suspected -- that it's easier to talk about it than it is to do it.

Look, I think the business has evolved, sometimes not as quickly and not as aggressively as some of us would have liked, but I certainly think the folks at RIAA are doing a good job and doing the best they can do. People also ought to know, the RIAA doesn't call the policy shots. The record companies do.

One thing that was always clear to me was that people sort of blamed the RIAA for essentially being good at their job and that's certainly not a bandwagon I ever want to jump on.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...ory_page_next1





Taking on Apple the Creative Way

On Monday, Creative Technology and Apple Computer said they were not ruling out resolving their legal fight over patent infringements for the MP3 playaer. Creative was one year ahead of Apple when it came out with its Nomad player in 2000 yet it was Apple which went on to corner the market with the iPod. Why did it turn out this way?
Alfred Siew

AT THE launch of a new Creative Technology MP3 player last month, Singapore's most famous technopreneur Sim Wong Hoo hurled the gadget at a wall.

It was his way of demonstrating how rugged the Zen V player was.

A Creative employee had earlier dropped it from standing height but Mr Sim obviously felt that was not dramatic enough.

So he took the player and flung it across the room. The Zen V player fell to the ground with nary a crack.

For people who have been following Creative's attempts in trying to unseat Apple Computer from its dominant position in the MP3 player market, Mr Sim's action was also an indirect attack on his competitor's product.

Apple's shiny iPods may have gained an iconic status in pop culture but consumers have complained that they scratch easily.

The rivalry between the two companies is common market knowledge. In one corner, you have a Fortune 500 company with close to US$14 billion (S$22 billion) in turnover and known for its savvy marketing.

In the other corner, you have a Singapore company which has a worldwide hit in the Sound Blaster, a sound card that gives computer gamers surround sound, but which has been struggling to win over the mass market with its MP3 players.

It is a classic David-versus-Goliath battle. Although Creative was a year ahead of Apple when it came out with a hard-drive MP3 player in 2000, it was the American company which went on to corner the market with the iPod.

In fighting for market share, Creative has offered more colours, longer battery life and more storage space on its Zen MP3 players over the past two years.

In May, it sued Apple in California, alleging patent infringement of its navigation technology and method of organising music on a player.

Creative also complained to the United States International Trade Commission, seeking to ban imports of Apple iPods, which are mostly made in China, to the US.

Apple promptly responded with a lawsuit in Wisconsin, alleging that Creative infringed not one but four of its patents for the display and interface of music devices.

It also filed another suit in Texas, claiming three of its patents were infringed.

In a clear tit-for-tat move, Apple also asked the trade commission to halt US imports of Creative's MP3 players.

When approached by The Sunday Times, Apple and Creative declined to comment, although both sides said in a joint report to the judge in Wisconsin on Monday that they were in talks about licensing and were 'open' to an agreement that would end their litigation battles.

Legal experts interviewed said a speedy resolution will benefit both parties because by the time the suits are resolved in court, the patents that the two companies are fighting over may not matter much, given how fast MP3 player technology changes.

Some lawyers have questioned Creative's decision to launch expensive lawsuits against a rival with deep pockets.

Apple turned in a US$410 million profit in the quarter ending April 1, shipping 8.5 million iPods worldwide.

In contrast, Creative racked up a loss of US$114.3 million for the quarter ended March 31, after a plunge in MP3 player prices forced it to write down the value of its inventory.

While Creative cannot be assured of victory in the courts, one thing is certain: If the case drags on, the legal costs would run into millions of dollars.

Of course it would be a different story if Creative wins its legal suit.

A victory would vindicate Creative's claim that it was the first in the market with the technology.

But it would still leave Creative with the task of winning over the mass market.

Things could have turned out very differently. Instead of slugging out in the courts, the two companies could have been business partners.

According to Creative's lawsuit, Apple's chief executive officer Steve Jobs had praised Creative's first MP3 player, called the Nomad Jukebox, at a January 2001 Macworld trade show.

The prototype was launched in 2000.

Creative said Apple wanted a smaller version of the hard disk-based Nomad Jukebox, which could store up to 1,000 songs. Its suit said that Apple made two proposals: that Creative either licenses its technology to Apple or spins off its portable player business into a new company in which Apple would invest.

Creative said that about eight months after it turned down Apple, the iPod hit the stores in October 2001.

Analyst Russell Tan from investment research firm NRA Capital said that Creative could have tapped on Apple's marketing savvy to corner the MP3 market together.

But he added: 'On hindsight, it is easy to say it's a mistake, but at that time, Creative probably felt it had a winner on its hands as it had with its Sound Blaster sound card.'

Indeed, when Apple courted Creative in 2001, it was not even in the MP3 player market. So it was understandable that Creative, being first in the market with a hard-drive portable player, would turn down Apple.

Mr Sim, who plays the harmonica, had placed great store on the excellent audio quality of his player. But as the Wall Street Journal reported last month, Creative made a critical mistake: It failed to recognise the power of marketing.

The iPod was an instant hit, wowing consumers with its design and hip quotient. Apple, known for its marketing savvy, signed up rock stars U2 to sell its player. By September 2003, about two years after launching the iPod, it was selling 336,000 players in a quarter - up by 140 per cent over the previous year.

In contrast, Mr Sim is reported to have told the Journal in 2004: 'I don't want to waste money on marketing. I'm very results-oriented.'

When he changed his mind and declared in November 2004 that he wanted to take on Apple with a US$100 million marketing blitz, it was too little too late.

Today, Apple has cornered 77 per cent of the MP3 market in the US, leaving Creative, Samsung, Sony and a motley group of Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies to fight over the remaining share.

The 1GB version of the iPod nano currently goes for $248 while the 1GB Creative Zen V costs $179.

Leaving Apple out of the picture, the other players in the market compete with one another on price. This puts the squeeze on Creative.

Analyst Claudio Checchia from research firm IDC said: 'Apple is running the race by itself because of its strong brand. Creative is competing with other vendors on price and features. But their devices are very similar.'

What can Creative do now?

One way is to differentiate itself by developing new products before MP3 players go out of fashion.

NRA's Mr Tan reckons that the window for healthy profits for standalone MP3 players - ones that play only music - will stay open for no more than two more years now that many users already own a player.

The way forward, he suggested, could be to come up with a cellphone that also plays music. Or an MP3 player that has enough memory to store and play full-length movies.

To be fair, Creative has been responsive to feedback. After hearing how its players lacked visual appeal, it came up with eye-catching designs such as the pager-size Zen V which sports a smooth, glossy finish.

This was the player that Mr Sim hurled across the room.

Creative may well learn from its rival. Apple did not build up its marketing savvy overnight with the iPod.

It did so over the years as illustrated with the candy colours of the iMac computer in 1998 and the sleek Mac mini computer launched last year that was no bigger than a small gift box.

All this came only after it learnt a painful lesson in the 1980s.

Despite pioneering the concept of a computer for personal use, Apple co-founder and current chief executive Steve Jobs saw his early Apple II computers, which had better technology, lose out to the cheaper and unglamorous Personal Computer from IBM.

Mr Checchia said: 'Apple learnt the hard way that having the technology first won't guarantee you success. You need to really win over users.'

Story





Apple Abandons Effort To Unmask Leaker
Declan McCullagh

Apple Computer has abandoned a high-profile legal effort to unmask whoever leaked details about a still-unreleased music accessory.

The company's deadline to continue a legal battle to find out who leaked the information to independent online journalists has passed, and Apple acknowledged in a brief court filing this week that it will not take its fight to the California Supreme Court.

On May 26, a state appeals court rejected Apple's attempt to send a subpoena to obtain records and archived e-mail from Jason O'Grady, creator of PowerPage.org, and Kasper Jade, the pseudonymous publisher and editor-in-chief of AppleInsider.

The three-judge panel rejected Apple's arguments that the independent reporters were not true journalists. "We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism,'" the court said, ruling that California's journalist shield law would protect the Web reporters.

The case, filed in the superior court of Santa Clara County, drew national attention not only because it involved unreleased products--but also because it was one of the first to set the rules of how the rights of uncredentialed online journalists should be balanced against the rights of trade secret holders.

By not appealing its loss, though, Apple has set a legal precedent that could embolden other journalists (and perhaps other leakers) in the future.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco that is defending the Web publishers, said this decision could prove influential.

"This issue is likely to come up in other jurisdictions," Opsahl said.

One source close to Apple did say that the company is not precluded from continuing its lawsuit before Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg.

Apple could, for instance, attempt a more aggressive internal investigation. Court documents show the company's investigators interviewed 29 employees who had access to a key confidential document--but Apple did not examine them under oath or examine their computers.

That's one reason, the appeals court said, to grant the online journalists the protective order they requested. "Apple has failed to establish that it adequately pursued other possible means to identify the source of the information in question," the judges said.

EFF's Opsahl said that while the case may continue, the decision reiterates that a company "just can't take a shortcut through a journalist" to identify a leaker.

A case management document (Click for PDF), filed Monday by Apple attorneys George Riley and David Eberhart from the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers, confirmed that their client has chosen not to appeal the May 26 decision. It also said that the ruling "has delayed Apple's ability to name the proper (John Doe) defendants."

But Apple did request a five-day jury trial; also, a conference before Judge Kleinberg is scheduled for July 25.

If the subpoena had not been rejected, it could have yielded details about who leaked information about a FireWire audio interface for GarageBand that has been codenamed "Asteroid."
http://news.com.com/Apple+abandons+e...3-6093593.html





Are You Reading The News?
Belle Dumé

If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted. That's the message from a team of statistical physicists who have analysed how people access information online. Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame in the US and colleagues in Hungary have calculated that the number of people who read news stories on the web decays with time in a power law, and not exponentially as commonly thought. Most news becomes old hat within a day and a half of being posted -- a finding that could help website designers or people trying to understand how information gets transferred in biological cells and social networks (Phys. Rev. E 73 066132).

The web portal

Physicists like Barabási are interested in studying the World Wide Web because it is an example of a "complex network", with a topology that changes as new documents and links are continually added. His team pictures a typical news web site as a series of circular blobs, or "nodes", each of which corresponds to an individual news story, with a line joining each node if the two stories are connected by a hyperlink (see figure). The area of each blob is proportional to the logarithm of the number of visits to each document.

Their model reveals that a typical news site has a relatively stable "skeleton" -- corresponding to the overall organization of the site -- along with nodes (that is, actual stories) that are only temporarily linked to the main structure before being deleted from the site or not linked any more. In this sense, the network resembles a biological cell's regulatory network, whose "wiring" can change rapidly during a cell cycle. It is also a bit like social networks: we each have a relatively stable core network of friends and acquaintances but the number of people we interact with can vary drastically from one day to the next.

To get a fuller understanding of such networks, Barabási and colleagues decided to study the visiting patterns on a popular Hungarian news and entertainment portal (origo.hu). Thanks to automatically assigned "cookies", the scientists were able to reconstruct the browsing history of about 250,000 visitors to the site over the course of a month.

The researchers found that the documents belonging to the skeleton of the website receive an approximately constant stream of visitors, which means that the cumulative number of visitors accessing these documents increases linearly in time. In contrast, the news documents receive the most hits directly after their release, and decrease with time. Thus, the cumulative numbers of visits here reach saturation after just a few days.

Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is.

The short life of a news item -- combined with random visiting patterns of readers -- implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily.

Although the average half-life varies for different types of sites, the decay laws identified are likely to be generic because they do not depend on content, but are manly determined by a user's visiting and browsing patterns.

"Such quantitative approaches to online media not only offer a better understanding of information access, but could have important commercial applications as well – from better portal design to understanding information diffusion, flow, and marketing in the online world," say the researchers.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/7/3/1

[JackSpratts]

Dude – where’s my fiber?

$200 Billion Broadband Scandal

This book documents the largest fraud case in American history

The case is simple: Do you have a 45 Mbps, bi-directional service to your home, paying around $40? Do you have 500+ channels and can choose any competitive service? You paid an estimated $2000 for this product even though you did not receive it and it may never be available. Do you want your money back and the companies held accountable?

Background: Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

The Commitment:

• By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
• Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
• Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
• Each State: By 2006, 75% of the state of New Jersey was to be wired, Pennsylvania was to have 50% of households by 2004, California to have 5 million households by 2000, Texas claimed all schools, libraries, hospitals.…Virtually every state had commitments.
• Massive Financial Incentives: In exchange for building these networks, the Bell companies ALL received changes in state laws that gave these them excessive profits, tax savings, and other perks to be used in building these networks.
• This was not DSL, which travels over the old copper wiring and did not require new regulations.
• This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC’s Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
• This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

The Harms and Outcome

• Costs to Customers — We estimate that $206 billion dollars in excess profits and tax deductions were collected — over $2000 per household. (This is the low estimate.)
• Cost to the Country — About $5 trillion dollars to the economy. America lost a decade of technological innovation and economic growth, about $500 billion annually.
• Cost to the Country — America is now 16th in the world in broadband. While Korea and Japan have 40-100 Mbps at cheap prices, America is still at kilobyte speeds.
• The New Digital Divide — The phone companies current plans are to pick and choose where and when they want to deploy fiber services, if at all.
• Competitor Close Out — SBC, BellSouth and Verizon now claim that they can control who uses the networks and at what price, impacting everything from VOIP and municipality roll outs to new services from Ebay and Google.

The Truth: This is a Fraud Case

• Fraud: There is a dark secret — the networks couldn't be built at the time the commitments were made and are still not available. If someone pays thousands of dollars for a service and doesn't get it, isn't that fraud?
• Collusion and Cover-up: TELE-TV and Americast, the Bell companies' fiber optic front groups, spent about $1 billion and were designed to make America believe these deployments were real in order to pass the Telecom Act of 1996 and enter long distance. How did every major phone company in America not know that these fiber-based services couldn't be built and were able to defraud over 40 states?
• The mergers killed fiber optic deployments in over 26 states and harmed competition. With every merger, the phone companies simply dropped all state commitments and harmed every state they merged with. Case in point: Verizon cut deployments to 13 states during the NYNEX-Bell Atlantic merger, not to mention GTE's 28 state deployments. SBC did the same in all 13 of its states, from California to Illinois. Worse, the mergers were based on the companies competing with each other and there is NO evidence they ever did any serious wireline residential competition.
• The Regulators Killed Competition and Broadband. Over the last 4 years, instead of continuing competition as ordered by the Telecom Act of 1996, the FCC has rewritten the laws close down Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that brought America to the Internet, as well as virtually all local competition. AT&T and MCI couldn't compete because they were regulated out of business and thus were sold off.
• Distortion of the Truth by the FCC. Virtually every piece of documentation presented in this work is missing from the FCC's Advanced Network Reports. The FCC defines broadband as 200 kilobytes per second in one direction — 225 times slower than what was promised in 1992.
• Cross-Subsidization — Instead of spending the money on these networks, the Bell companies used the money to enter long distance, rollout wireless and the inferior DSL services. The Bells also lost over $20 billion overseas and paid executives over a billion in stock options during the mergers.
• Bait and Switch — Customers paid for a fiber optic wire and got DSL over the old copper wiring — it's like ordering a Ferrari and getting a bicycle.

20 Year Analysis of Revenues, Profits, Expenditures: This book is based on a 20 year analysis of Bell-supplied data, Census Data and Business Week. Since 1984::

• Revenues are up 128%.
• Employees are down 65%, Construction is down 60%.
• $92.5 billion is missing in network upgrades.
• Profits based on failed fiber plans up 188% as compared to other utilities.

Teletruth has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, (FTC) to investigate the claims presented; the book is the data for our complaint.

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm





How Google Works
David F. Carr

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Others are starting to follow its lead. Here's why.

With his unruly hair dipping across his forehead, Douglas Merrill walks up to the lectern set up in a ballroom of the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, looking like a slightly rumpled university professor about to start a lecture. In fact, he is here on this April morning to talk about his work as director of internal technology for Google to a crowd of chief information officers gathered at a breakfast sponsored by local recruiting firm Phoenix Staffing.

Google, the secretive, extraordinarily successful $6.1 billion global search engine company, is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Yet it selectively discusses its innovative information management infrastructure—which is based on one of the largest distributed computing/grid systems in the world.

Merrill is about to give his audience a rare glimpse into the future according to Google, and explain the workings of the company and the computer systems behind it.

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google—everything from the press it gets for its bring-your-dog-to-work casual workplace, to its stock price, market share, dizzying array of beta product launches and its death-match competition with Microsoft—it must also solve more basic issues like billing, collection, reporting revenue, tracking projects, hiring contractors, recruiting and evaluating employees, and managing videoconferencing systems—in other words, common business problems.

But this does not mean that Google solves these problems in a conventional way, as Merrill is about to explain.

"We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," he says.

Among other things, that means that Google often doesn't deploy standard business applications on standard hardware. Instead, it may use the same text parsing technology that drives its search engine to extract application input from an e-mail, rather than a conventional user interface based on data entry forms. Instead of deploying an application to a conventional server, Merrill may deploy it to a proprietary server-clustering infrastructure that runs across its worldwide data centers.

Google runs on hundreds of thousands of servers—by one estimate, in excess of 450,000—racked up in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centers around the world. It has data centers in Dublin, Ireland; in Virginia; and in California, where it just acquired the million-square-foot headquarters it had been leasing. It recently opened a new center in Atlanta, and is currently building two football-field-sized centers in The Dalles, Ore.

By having its servers and data centers distributed geographically, Google delivers faster performance to its worldwide audience, because the speed of the connection between any two computers on the Internet is partly a factor of the speed of light, as well as delays caused by network switches and routers. And although search is still Google's big moneymaker, those servers are also running a fast-expanding family of other applications like Gmail, Blogger, and now even Web-based word processors and spreadsheets.

That's why there is so much speculation about Google the Microsoft-killer, the latest firm nominated to drive everything to the Web and make the Windows desktop irrelevant. Whether or not you believe that, it's certainly true that Google and Microsoft are banging heads. Microsoft expects to make about a $1.5 billion capital investment in server and data structure infrastructure this year. Google is likely to spend at least as much to maintain its lead, following a $838 million investment in 2005.

And at Google, large-scale systems technology is all-important. In 2005, it indexed 8 billion Web pages. Meanwhile, its market share continues to soar. According to a recent ComScore Networks qSearch survey, Google's market share for search among U.S. Internet users reached 43% in April, compared with 28% for Yahoo and 12.9% for The Microsoft Network (MSN).

And Google's market share is growing; a year ago, it was 36.5%. The same survey indicates that Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4% from the previous month. Google sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo sites (1.9 billion) and MSN-Microsoft (858 million).

This growth is driven by an abundance of scalable technology. As Google noted in its most recent annual report filing with the SEC: "Our business relies on our software and hardware infrastructure, which provides substantial computing resources at low cost. We currently use a combination of off-the-shelf and custom software running on clusters of commodity computers. Our considerable investment in developing this infrastructure has produced several key benefits. It simplifies the storage and processing of large amounts of data, eases the deployment and operation of large-scale global products and services, and automates much of the administration of large-scale clusters of computers."

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. "We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures," he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: "We're really building what we think of internally as supercomputers."

Because Google operates at such an extreme scale, it's a system worth studying, particularly if your organization is pursuing or evaluating the grid computing strategy, in which high-end computing tasks are performed by many low-cost computers working in tandem.

Despite boasting about this infrastructure, Google turned down requests for interviews with its designers, as well as for a follow-up interview with Merrill. Merrill did answer questions during his presentation in Phoenix, however, and the division of the company that sells the Google Search Appliance helped fill in a few blanks.

In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting. As a result, sources for this story included technical presentations available from the University of Washington Web site, as well as other technical conference presentations, and papers published by Google's research arm, Google Labs.
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/...1985040,00.asp





Matsushita to Sell 103-Inch Plasma TVs

Larger than a double-sized mattress, weighs 473 pounds

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., the maker of Panasonic brand electronics, said on Monday it planned to launch the world's largest plasma television by the end of the year.

Measuring 2.4 meters by 1.4 meters (94 by 55 in) and weighing 215 kg (473 lb.), the 103-inch (measured diagonally) panel is bigger than a double-sized mattress and almost as heavy as an upright piano.

The world's largest consumer electronics maker has yet to set the price, but Matsushita's 65-inch plasma TVs, its largest available now, sell for about $7,500 in Japan.

The plasma panel used in the Matsushita TV will be just one-inch larger measured diagonally than a 102-inch model developed by Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. The South Korean company has not launched the model commercially.

Matsushita is the world's largest plasma TV maker competing with smaller rivals such as South Korea's LG Electronics Inc.

As liquid crystal display TVs encroach on the market for 40-inch TVs and above -- which had previously seen as plasma TV's turf -- developing even larger-sized panels is important for plasma TV makers to remain competitive.

Matsushita also said it had started taking orders for the 103-inch panels in the United States for business use, such as studio monitors at broadcasting companies and electronic billboards, and planned to deliver them from this autumn.

Matsushita aims to sell 5,000 units of 103-inch panels a year, with TV demand accounting for little less than 20 percent, which can be calculated into annual sales of some 1,000 103-inch TVs.

The new panels will meet full high-definition specifications, meaning they can produce images at the highest standard of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels of resolution.

Osaka-based Matsushita controlled 21.6 percent of the global plasma TV market in the January-March quarter, followed by LG Electronics with 17.8 percent, according to DisplaySearch.

Shares of Matsushita closed up 1.5 percent at 2,390 yen, outstripping the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC, which gained 1.2 percent.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13798647/





New Soundtrack Service For Videographers

Company also licenses music for use in television shows, commercials
AP

Want a jazz riff to accompany your video of cat tricks? How about an interesting kazoo piece to go with your compilation of biking bloopers?

Pump Audio, a company that licenses the music of independent artists for use in television shows and commercials, will launch Monday a soundtrack-creation service aimed at the growing crop of amateur filmmakers pervading the Internet.

Users of the MyPump Soundtrack service could go online to check out its library of original music and digitally synchronize a tune to their videos — all with the permission of the copyright holders. Users could search the catalog by genre, mood or speed, then edit a song to match their video before dubbing it.

The concept could help budding auteurs head off copyright troubles as they display their work on a worldwide stage at popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Until recently, no one could make much money or get a wide audience for amateur videos, so obtaining copyright permission was less a concern if the videographer was using, say, part of a Rolling Stones song.

But now anyone with a camcorder can easily post their work online. As the delivery of videos over the Internet increases and accompanying revenue from advertising or other sources grows, so do the legal risks, analysts say.

"Content creators are scrambling to find legitimate audio that they can use in their videos to complete the story," said Allen Weiner, a digital media industry analyst for market researcher Gartner Inc. "This begins to solve the problem."

Pump Audio, a 5-year-old company based in Hudson Valley, N.Y., specializes in licensing music only from independent musicians.

Steve Ellis, the company's founder and chief executive, says television outlets such as NBC and MTV Networks, as well as major advertisers, frequently draw from its music catalog of about 65,000 pieces, ranging from classical instrumentals to indie rock bands.

Prices will vary for the consumer-oriented MyPump Soundtrack service, with basic licensing for the one-time use of a song starting at 99 cents.

Pump Audio is also looking to team up with video-sharing Web sites or video-editing providers, so the service could potentially be free for users if accessed through a company partner.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13798676/





Apple's Market Share Falls/Rises, Depending On Who You Ask
Conrad Quilty-Harper

AppleInsider writes about a new Gartner report that states overall Mac market share has decreased in the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year. However these findings conflict with an earlier news article by ZDNet based on earlier research by Gartner which suggested that worldwide Mac market share had actually increased slightly. MacRumors.com puts the numbers together:

U.S. Mac Market Share
1Q 2005: 3.8%
1Q 2006 (ZDNet): 3.5%
1Q 2006 (AI): 3.6%

Worldwide Mac Market Share
1Q 2005: 2.2%
1Q 2006 (ZDNet): 2.3%
1Q 2006 (AI): 2.0%

So depending on which report you believe, Apple could have gained or lost overall marketshare across the world. Both articles state that Apple has lost market share in the U.S. The only thing that's really clear is that Mac sales have obviously been lackluster in the first quarter when compared to the rest of the industry.

That's not entirely surprising considering that only Intel Mac that was available throughout the first quarter was the Intel iMac. The MacBook Pro didn't ship until mid-February, the Intel Mac mini wasn't released until late February and the MacBook was released just under three weeks ago. It's remarkable that the Mac market share has managed to stay as high as it is considering that half the Apple line-up hadn't made the transisition to Intel CPUs for much of the quarter. We've got to ask though, where did that 6.6% U.S. Mac marketshare that was reported last year go?
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/02/apple...ng-on-who-you/





Appeal Is Planned in 'Da Vinci Code' Case
Lawrence Van Gelder

Court officials say two historians who lost a plagiarism case against the British publishers of Dan Brown's best seller "The Da Vinci Code" plan to appeal the verdict, Reuters reported. The officials said the appeal could take place later this year, but no specific date has been set. Random House U.K., which won the copyright case earlier this year at the High Court in London, expressed disappointment at the decision by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," to appeal. "We have the utmost respect for the British legal system and acknowledge Baigent and Leigh's right to appeal the ruling," a Random House spokesman said. "We regret, however, that more time and money is being spent trying to establish a case that was so comprehensively defeated in the High Court."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/books/11davinci.html





We Aren't All Pirates

Anti-piracy proposals before Congress could limit innovation and legal uses of technology.

The Internet and digital technology have been both a blessing and a curse for the entertainment industry, opening new opportunities for selling music and video but also fueling rampant global piracy.

To attack the latter problem, industry lobbyists are pressing Congress to adopt at least five different proposals that would give them more control over their works as they flow through new digital pipelines into living rooms and portable devices. But these measures, like the technologies they would affect, have a hard time distinguishing between illicit actions and legitimate ones.

The bills would pressure device makers and service providers to limit or eliminate features from some products, such as the ability to record individual songs off satellite radio. In essence, tech companies would have to alter what they are selling to safeguard the entertainment industry's wares.

Protecting intellectual property is a legitimate goal for Congress — after all, the Constitution called on Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." The task has grown more urgent with the emergence of an Internet-fueled global information economy. But what the entertainment industry is seeking in this year's proposals isn't merely protection from piracy; it's after increased leverage to protect its business models.

That's why lawmakers must bear in mind the balance needed between copyright holders' interests and the public's, something Congress has not done well lately. In 1998, it gave copyright holders broad power to block legitimate uses of works, even those in the public domain, through the use of electronic locks that impede copying of digital products. And that same year, it prolonged the public domain's starvation diet by extending copyrights an additional 20 years, to 70 years beyond the death of the creator.
The movie and music industries have similar interests, but their agendas this year are distinct. The major studios want to alter digital TV receivers, recorders and home networks to stop shows from being redistributed indiscriminately online — a proposal that has won grudging support from some consumer-electronics and high-tech firms. They also want to redesign computers, set-top boxes and other products to ensure that the limits placed on digital videos are not removed when the data are converted from digital to analog. This approach could deter people from making a permanent copy of a pay-per-view movie, but it also could make it hard for digital movie buyers to create backup copies or transfer videos to portable players.

The music industry, meanwhile, is focusing its fire on satellite and digital radio services that make it easy for listeners to record and save individual songs. Those recorders don't fuel piracy, given that federal law already requires them to include a form of anti-piracy technology. Instead, a more immediate effect of the industry-backed proposals would be to give labels and music publishers more control over listeners' ability to record broadcasts, while helping them collect more money from XM, Sirius and other digital music businesses.

Clearly, the industry-backed proposals would do more than just defend copyrighted works from pirates. They also would impinge on devices that have legitimate uses and steer the development of technology, cutting off some innovation. As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...ent-editorials





U.S. Album Sales Off 4.2 Percent in '06; Downloads Up 77 Percent
Alex Veiga

U.S. album sales were down 4.2 percent in the first half of the year, but sales of music downloaded online soared 77 percent, according to figures released Friday.

Total sales of albums across different formats - CDs, digital albums, cassette and others - stood at 270.6 million between Jan. 2 and July 2, a decline of 4.2 percent compared to 282.6 million in the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The top-selling album so far this year is a soundtrack inspired by the Disney Channel movie "High School Musical," which has sold more than 2.6 million units.

Albums by Rascal Flatts, James Blunt, Mary J. Blige and Carrie Underwood round out the top five sellers.

The decline reflects in part a dearth of big hits compared to the same period in 2005, which saw Mariah Carey and rapper 50 Cent each release multi-platinum sellers.

The more than 23,000 new releases in 2006 accounted for 22 percent of all albums sold through July 2, compared to 39 percent in the same span last year, Nielsen said.

"Considering that you haven't had a 50 Cent to be the Pied Piper during the first half of the year or a Norah Jones the year before that, being behind 4 percent in album sales is really not that bad," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for music tracker Billboard.

The R&B genre accounted for the biggest slice of all albums sold so far this year with 53,806, but also represented the biggest percentage drop - 22.4 percent - in units sold by genre from the same period last year.

The country music genre saw 17.7 percent increase in sales over the first half of 2005, the highest percentage of all.

While the CD remains the dominant album format despite a sales decline in all but one of the last five years, music fans have been increasingly buying digital downloads of single tracks and full albums.

Nearly 281 million digital singles were purchased through July 2, compared to 158.8 million in time frame last year. More than 14 million full-album downloads were purchased in the first six months of this year, more than double the 6.5 million bought in the first half of 2005.

The growth of online music purchases is a mixed blessing for recording companies, however. Such sales often come at the expense of more profitable album sales as music fans opt to cherry pick a few songs online instead of purchasing a whole album that may not be worth the expense.

"Digital distribution is an answer to the consumer who's been throwing up that complaint," Mayfield said. "It's a changing dynamic that the industry still needs to get its arms around."

Despite rampant music piracy, overall sales of albums, singles, music videos and digital music totaled 564 million units, a 23 percent increase over the same six-month period last year.

Overall music purchases are expected to break $1 billion by the end of the year, Nielsen said.

Among the four major recording companies, Universal Music Group led the pack in the first half of 2006 with a market share of 31.66 percent. Sony BMG Music Entertainment was second with 26.25 percent market share, followed by Warner Music Group's 19.30 percent and Britain's EMI Music's 10 percent.

Warner Music's market share reflected a 2.65 percentage increase over the same period last year - the only major recording company to add market share.

Independent record labels accounted for 12.79 percent of market share.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/14990933.htm





Big Music Hope For The Future
p2p news

Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, under federal and state investigation in the US, continue to accuse their own customers of being thieves and criminals, using spurious lawsuits to try to terrify them into kick-starting the as-yet undeveloped corporate online music market.

The labels have had zero luck with their bizarre sue 'em all marketing campaigns, but a trend offering hope for the future is emerging in Britain.

And it harks back to the past.

Once upon a time 45s, those shiny, round vinyl things with big holes in the centre - 45s - were where it was at. They were called singles.

Corporate downloads barely make a blip in the graphs compared to what's happening in the real world of online music where indie sites and the p2p networks rule. However, digital downloads, “will regularly break the one-million- a-week barrier this year as music fans push sales of singles to their highest for six years,” says The Herald.

Yes, singles.

Stacked against the fact that this May, globally, the number of p2p users simultaneously logged on to the p2p networks at any given moment was 9,735,661, as p2p research firm Big Champagne told p2pnet, four million corporate downloads a month doesn't amount to a hill of beans. But it does amount to a start, albeit it a tiny one.

This “digital revolution,” as the Herald is somehow able to call it, and which it says is, “currently rejuvenating the music industry,” will result in 50 million-plus singles being downloaded this year.

But the interesting this is it's, “bolstered by the grey downloader, or the over-50s buyer, many of whom are replacing their vinyl collections,” says the story, going on:

“For the first time many more obscure singles are available since they were originally issued in the 1960s or 1970s as bands and individual artists as well as record companies broaden online back catalogues.

“A total of 16.7 million singles were downloaded or sold in shops in the second quarter of 2006, according to new figures yesterday from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

“It represents a lean back towards the single, sales of which dropped with the onset of internet file-sharing and CD-burning in the 1990s.”

David Belcher, Saga FM DJ and Herald writer, is quoted as saying:

"For the over-50s, the range is always growing. Whereas before you could only replace CDs of your old vinyl and those were essentially what the record companies had sold you already and you were only getting the big selling artists.

"Now you are getting the artists themselves. A lot of them have got the rights back to the material that the labels didn't want to reissue. Among those veteran musicians attracting the attention of the more mature internet users are the Rolling Stones ..."
http://p2pnet.net/story/9314





Cirque du Soleil: A Beatles Love-In From Las Vegas to Eternity
John Rockwell

The gala premiere of "Love," Cirque du Soleil's new Beatles show at the Mirage Hotel, has come and gone, and the extravaganza has now settled into the glitzily refurbished theater in which Siegfried and Roy and their pets disported themselves for 13 years. The Beatles have now joined Celine Dion, the ghost of Frank Sinatra, Rubens from the Hermitage and four other Cirque shows playing along the Strip as yet another competing attraction in the land of slot machines and neon flash.

"Love" tells us many things — about the evolution of the Beatles in the pantheon of cultural icons, about the clashing contentions of the preservationists and the evolutionists among Beatles fans, and perhaps above all, about the continuing transformation of the Cirque du Soleil format.

That format has been successful beyond what must have been the dizziest dreams of the Québécois street performers who founded this once-humble organization in 1984. Right now there are seven touring shows perambulating around the world, including "Corteo," which closed recently on Randalls Island in New York, plus one in Orlando, Fla., and the five here.

The first Las Vegas Cirque show, "Mystère," opened in 1993, to be followed by "O," KÀ "Zumanity," "KÀ" and now "Love." None have ever closed; they come as close to eternality as live show business has yet achieved. Even during the sweltering summer, when the average daytime temperature is well above 100 and overall attendance in Las Vegas drops sharply, the 2,000-seat "Love" theater looked full at the early show on Thursday, and on Friday the similarly scaled "KÀ" theater and the relatively modest 1,260-seat "cabaret" for "Zumanity" seemed nearly full.

"Love" has already been blessed in every conceivable way by the surviving Beatles. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and nearly every extant widow and ex-wife and child and close collaborator (Ravi Shankar!) were on hand for the gala opening on June 30. Apple, the Beatles organization, licensed the songs to the Cirque, and George Martin, the Beatles producer, and his son Giles reknitted and remixed those songs into the aural tapestry on display at the Mirage.

Unsurprisingly, the message of "Love" is that it's all you need. The music pouring forth from the 4,000 speakers — or is it 6,000? or 12,000? Statistics fall from Cirque-land like the confetti of little white apples and red-purple petals that flutter down from the ceiling — sounds great, if crystalline grandiosity counts as great.

I missed the effect of individual words emitted from speakers in my own individual, painfully narrow seat, but I'm sure they were there.

The show has been conceived by the core Cirque creative team. The wonderfully named Guy Laliberté, who founded the troupe and still runs the Cirque operation, is listed as "show concept creator" along with the wonderfully named Dominic Champagne, the director and writer. Mr. Champagne is also responsible for the egregious erotic parody, "Zumanity."

What they have created with "Love" is less a musical or a concert than a 90-minute visually live rock-video fantasy. (All Cirque shows here last 90 minutes on the nose, to fit in two performances a night.) It's visually live because the music is, of course, recorded.

Circus flash is minimized in favor of mimes and dancers and actors and ornate costumes and a dizzying onslaught of props — including, too predictably, two Volkswagen Beetles. Perhaps the paucity of circus excitement accounted for what seemed like a slightly muted response on Thursday. Or perhaps the audience was just blitzed with the scenic barrage.

The circus bits include daredevil in-line skaters zipping up, down and over half-pipelike structures; some trampolinists; and innumerable rope climbers, bungee jumpers and aerialists. They serve mostly to fill the huge vertical space and compete with the giant projections. There is a lot of dancing, or mass posing, since no one dancer has interesting moves or could stand out in the welter of activity. Two choreographers are credited, but three more apparently had a hand in the proceedings. The stage images are always ingenious and sometimes beautiful. But like a rock video, they constrain a listener's own imagination, too often in the service of Cirque clichés.

In the projections, there are Beatles silhouettes and documentary film and, at the end, big portraits of the lads. But this is ultimately a Cirque show more than a Beatles show. Nothing against mimes; I'm sure that in their private lives they love their pets and are perfectly nice, even talkative, people. But their presence in Francophone circuses has become an intrusive mannerism, down to the central mime figure in "Love," who clutches flowers to his various multihued jackets and serves as a, or the, representative of the flower-child, all-you-need-is-love moral that is meant to overcome protest and war and injustice. It's too painfully easy.

For the Beatles and their most obsessive fans, "Love" poses a dilemma. It will undoubtedly be a lucrative source of income for Apple and its owners for years to come, if not for all eternity. The music sounds terrific and will no doubt sound more human on home speakers on the soundtrack due in the fall.

There are those who will always resent any tinkering with the originals, although what is original varies from person to person. When I saw the Beatles live, the girlish squeals drowned out the music. For some, nostalgic pops and clicks on their well-worn LP's are now part of the authenticity. Those who believe that the senior Mr. Martin, with his orchestrations and sonic collages, lent a classical cachet to the primitive musical gropings of the foursome will welcome his chance to reshape this material even more elaborately.

Yet in the world of recordings, what's wrong with a little tinkering, as long as a listener knows what's going on? A Mozart score is open to endless interpretation, and Da Ponte's operatic stage directions are routinely ignored. Yet Mozart survives. The Beatles' original intentions will always be right there in their recordings, and anyone who wishes to stick solely with those is free to do so. Opening up this music to interpretation is just part of the process of their ascending into the cultural pantheon.

But what does "Love" tell us about Cirque du Soleil, which by now is a cultural phenomenon as symptomatic of our time as the Beatles were in theirs? "Mystère" is the only Las Vegas Cirque show I have not seen, but it was the first and, by all reports, the closest to Cirque roots: breathtaking circus acts, dazzling visuals, dorky New Age soundtracks with world-music flavorings.

Since then, concepts have infused the Cirque du Soleil mix as the team quite rightly strives for novelty. "O," the water show, was still a series of spectacular acts, but the set was so amazing that sheer bedazzlement overrode any lingering regrets about absent artistic profundity. By now, Cirque sets for the permanently installed show are built on an order of magnitude and technical sophistication that easily transcends the flashiest Broadway musicals, even "The Phantom of the Opera," now playing here, too, or opera, which for 400 years offered more awesome spectacle to audiences than anything else.

To sustain interest from show to show, however, you need more than just spectacle. "O" had water; "Zumanity" has sex, however silly; "KÀ" has an elaborate fairy tale of lost imperial twins in search of each other and enlightenment; and "Love" has the Beatles.

In the end, though, spectacle trumps concept; this is the era of the arena rock show and mass displays like those of the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. By now, stage directors who work in theater and opera have been lured to direct such events: Robert Lepage did a Peter Gabriel tour and La Fura dels Baus, the Barcelona rock-theatrical Surrealists, staged an Olympics opening spectacle in their home city.

"KÀ" is the best Cirque show because it was conceived and directed by Mr. Lepage. He is French Canadian, too, which must have made things easier with the Cirque team. "KÀ" has the same overblown musical formulas as most other Cirque shows. The story is pretty much an excuse for the visuals.

But the visuals are truly amazing, and like the best of the "cirque moderne" directors, Mr. Lepage uses traditional circus acts to dramatize his story: acrobatics as combat, aerialism as flight and escape. And his vision for spectacle is different enough from that of the Cirque team to enliven a format that threatened to go stale.

For an opera lover, "KÀ" hints at what Mr. Lepage may accomplish with the Metropolitan Opera's new "Ring" starting in 2010. When the Metropolitan Opera House was built 40 years go, it boasted about its stage machinery, though it must look pretty primitive next to a specially constructed Cirque theater, especially the huge rotating, floating platforms of "KÀ." At least at the Met, Mr. Lepage will have a real story and real music. One wonders what he'll do with Wagner, or what he might have done with the Beatles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/10/ar...32c&ei=5087%0A





Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd Co-Founder, Dies
AP

Syd Barrett, the troubled Pink Floyd co-founder who spent his last years in reclusive anonymity, has died, the band said Tuesday. He was 60.

A spokeswoman for the band said Barrett died several days ago, but she did not disclose the cause of death. Barrett had suffered from diabetes for years.

The surviving members of Pink Floyd -- David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright -- said they were ''very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett's death.''

''Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire,'' they said in a statement.

Barrett co-founded Pink Floyd in 1965 with Waters, Mason and Wright, and wrote many of the band's early songs. The group's jazz-infused rock and drug-laced, multimedia ''happenings'' made them darlings of the London psychedelic scene. The 1967 album ''The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'' -- largely written by Barrett, who also played guitar -- was a commercial and critical hit.

But Barrett suffered from mental instability, exacerbated by his use of LSD. His behavior grew increasingly erratic, and he left the group in 1968 -- five years before the release of Pink Floyd's most popular album, ''Dark Side of the Moon'' -- to be replaced by Gilmour.

Barrett released two solo albums -- ''The Madcap Laughs'' and ''Barrett'' -- but soon withdrew from the music business altogether. An album of previously unreleased material, ''Opel,'' was issued in 1988.

He reverted to his real name, Roger Barrett, and spent much of the rest of his life living quietly in his hometown of Cambridge, England. Moving into his mother's suburban house, he passed the time painting and tending the garden. His former bandmates made sure Barrett continued to receive royalties from his work with Pink Floyd.

He was a familiar figure to neighbors, often seen cycling or walking to the corner store, but rarely spoke to the fans and journalists who sought him out over the years.

Despite his brief career, Barrett's fragile, wistful songs influenced many musicians including David Bowie -- who covered the Barrett track ''See Emily Play.''

Bowie said in a statement posted on his Web site that Barrett had been a ''major inspiration.''

''His impact on my thinking was enormous,'' Bowie write. ''A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.''

The other members of Pink Floyd recorded the album ''Wish You Were Here'' as a tribute to their troubled bandmate.

It contained the song ''Shine On You Crazy Diamond'' -- ''Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.'' The band also dwelt on themes of mental illness on the albums ''Dark Side of the Moon'' and ''The Wall.''

The band spokeswoman said a small, private funeral would be held.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...rtner=homepage





Meth Users, Attuned to Detail, Add Another Habit: ID Theft
John Leland

Joe Morales, a prosecutor in Denver, can remember when crack came to his city in the 1980’s. Gangs set up on Colfax Avenue and in the Five Points neighborhood, and street crime — murders and holdups — grew.

When methamphetamine proliferated more recently, the police and prosecutors at first did not associate it with a rise in other crimes. There were break-ins at mailboxes and people stealing documents from garbage, Mr. Morales said, but those were handled by different parts of the Police Department.

But finally they connected the two. Meth users — awake for days at a time and able to fixate on small details — were looking for checks or credit card numbers, then converting the stolen identities to money, drugs or ingredients to make more methamphetamine. For these drug users, Mr. Morales said, identity theft was the perfect support system.

While public concern about identity theft has largely focused on elaborate computer schemes, for law enforcement officials in Denver and other Western areas, meth users have become the everyday face of identity theft. Like crack cocaine in the 1980’s, officials say, the rise of methamphetamine has been accompanied by a specific set of crimes and skills that are shared among users and dealers.

“The knowledge of how to violate the law comes contemporaneously with the meth epidemic,” said Sheriff Paul A. Pastor of Pierce County, Wash., who said the majority of identity theft cases his officers investigated involved methamphetamine.

Tammie Carroll, a mother of four in Denver who was indicted in 2003 in an identity theft ring, described her social circle succinctly.

“Anybody I knew that did meth was also doing fraud, identity theft or stealing mail,” Ms. Carroll said. “We helped each other out, whatever we needed to do that day. They all had their own little role.“

Mr. Morales, director of the Denver district attorney’s economic crime unit, said 60 percent to 70 percent of his office’s identity theft cases involved methamphetamine users or dealers, often in rings of 10 or more.

“Look at the states that have the highest rates of identity theft — Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas and Colorado,’’ Mr. Morales said. “The two things they all have in common are illegal immigration and meth.”

But identity thieves are difficult to generalize about because most crimes are never solved. The prevalence of meth use among identity theft suspects may say more about the state of law enforcement than about the habits of lawbreakers. In other words, meth users may simply be the easiest to catch.

In Denver, Mr. Morales said his office and the local police lacked the resources to pursue more sophisticated identity thieves who crossed jurisdictions or bought and sold identities over the Internet. On the other hand, he said, “it’s easy to get a meth addict to flip’’ and testify against others.

Nonetheless, prosecutors, police officers, drug treatment professionals, former identity thieves and recovering addicts describe a connection between meth use and identity theft that is fluid and complementary, involving the hours that addicts keep, the nature of a methamphetamine high and the social patterns of meth production and use, which differ from those of other illegal drugs.

For example, crack cocaine or heroin dealers usually set up in well-defined urban strips run by armed gangs, which stimulates gun traffic and crimes that are suited to densely populated neighborhoods, including mugging, prostitution, carjacking and robbery. Because cocaine creates a rapid craving for more, addicts commit crimes that pay off instantly, even at high risk.

Methamphetamine, by contrast, can be manufactured in small laboratories that move about suburban or rural areas, where addicts are more likely to steal mail from unlocked boxes. Small manufacturers, in turn, use stolen identities to buy ingredients or pay rent without arousing suspicion. And because the drug has a long high, addicts have patience and energy for crimes that take several steps to pay off.

In a survey of 500 county sheriffs, 27 percent said methamphetamine had contributed to a rise in identity theft in their areas. Even more — 62 percent and 68 percent, respectively — noted that it contributed to increases in domestic abuse or robberies and burglaries.

“I think identity theft is a big deal; there’s a lot of it going on,’’ said Terree Schmidt-Whelan, executive director of the Pierce County Alliance in Washington, which provides court-mandated drug treatment to addicts. “But I don’t think it’s going on to the extent we read about because we’re not seeing it to that extent here.’’

The circumstances of methamphetamine arrests, Dr. Schmidt-Whelan said, can exaggerate the connection with identity theft. “If a sheriff does a bust and there are 10 people in a room, are they all doing it?’’ she asked.

After law enforcement officers in Washington reported that high percentages of their identity theft cases involved methamphetamine, including 100 percent in Spokane County, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, proposed a bill to study the connection.

Richard Rawson, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying methamphetamine since the 1980’s, agrees that meth use is compatible with the kind of concentration needed to be an identity thief.

“Crack users and heroin users are so disorganized and get in these frantic binges, they’re not going to sit still and do anything in an organized way for very long,” Dr. Rawson said. “Meth users, on the other hand, that’s all they have, is time. The drug stimulates the part of the brain that perseverates on things. So you get people perseverating on things, and if you sit down at a computer terminal you can go for hours and hours.”

But Dr. Rawson said he had not seen a connection with identity theft in his research, and had not heard of one until law enforcement officials started bringing it up in conferences in the last year.

“If it is a major event, it’s a relatively new one,” he said. “How widespread it is, I don’t know.”

In Phoenix, which has the nation’s highest rate of identity theft complaints, officials first became aware of the connection when laboratory raids uncovered stolen mail and checks that had been washed with acetone, a chemical used to make methamphetamine.

“We thought for a while that that was the connection,” said Todd C. Lawson, a state prosecutor who specializes in identity theft. “But we learned there was much more to it.”

Often identity theft rings organize like meth labs, where one person has the technical skills and others gather the raw materials. In an identity theft ring, one person might work the computer and the others steal identities or use the fraudulent checks or credit cards to get cash.

In Minnesota, meth laboratories and users developed a barter economy of washed checks, stolen checkbooks, drugs, ingredients and equipment, said Carol Falkowski, a spokeswoman for Hazelden, a drug treatment center in Center City.

In rural parts of Salt Lake County, Utah, meth addicts take their stolen identities onto the Internet because it has more targets than the local area, said Pat Fleming, director of county substance abuse services. “Meth is one of the major things driving identity theft in Utah,” Mr. Fleming said.

Cocaine and heroin bypassed these areas because importers took the drugs directly to Salt Lake City, where addicts commit different crimes to pay for them.

For D., a 22-year-old woman in Missoula, Mont., meth and identity theft just came together.

“It’s always suggested if you’re around people that are high,” she said, agreeing to be identified only by her first initial because she said she was afraid of a past associate. “They know that this is an easy way to get money. That’s the only way we ever found out about it, here anyway.”

With advice from a fellow user, D. and her husband at the time stole a checkbook and wrote $5,600 worth of checks, using the money to buy drugs, gamble at Montana casinos and pay for hotel rooms, where she stayed up all night doing crossword puzzles. She never considered more traditional forms of crime, she said.

“Going and stealing money from people is too risky,” D. said. “With this, I was sitting in my car at a bank, I could drive away if I wanted to. That’s the only way I would have ever considered because I felt it was more safe. Now I think it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”

She was caught, finally, when she misspelled the signature of one of her victims.

For Ms. Carroll, the end came when one of her accomplices took an identity out of Ms. Carroll’s trash and tried to use it. Ms. Carroll discarded identities every few days to avoid detection. When the police arrested her, the accomplice pointed them to Ms. Carroll.

Ms. Carroll said she had not used methamphetamine since Jan. 7, 2003. She has also regained custody of her three children, who were placed in foster care after her arrest; a fourth, an infant at the time, was adopted.

Ms. Carroll said she planned to start college in August.

“I still see people put the little red flags up on their mailboxes when they’re mailing their bills,” she said. “It amazes me. They still put their checks in their own mailboxes, and that was one of the biggest things we did was watch for red flags on mailboxes. You’re sending your electricity bill, you have a check in there, that’s all the information we needed.”

People underestimate the resourcefulness of thieves, she said.

“Five days a week we did it,” Ms. Carroll said. “It was like a job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us...5e4&ei=5087%0A





e-Passports: Ready or Not Here They Come

The State Department expresses confidence in "e-Passports" while technologists fret about their security risks.
Christian Zappone

Imagine being overseas and your identity being available for the taking - your nationality, your name, your passport number. Everything.

That's the fear of privacy and security specialists now that the State Department plans to issue "e-Passports" to American travelers beginning in late August.

They'll have radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and are meant to cut down on human error of immigration officials, speed the processing of visitors and safeguard against counterfeit passports.

Yet critics are concerned that the security benefit of RFID technology, which combines silicon chips with antennas to make data accessible via radio waves, could be vastly outweighed by security threats to the passport holder.

"Basically, you've given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares 'Hey, I'm a foreigner,'" says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. "If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes."

RFID chips are used in security passes many companies issue to employees. They don't have to be touched to a reader-machine, only waved near it. Following initial objections by security and privacy experts, the State Department added several security precautions.

But experts still fear the data could be "skimmed," or read remotely without the bearer's knowledge.

Kidnappers, identity thieves and terrorists could all conceivably commit "contactless" crimes against victims who wouldn't know they've been violated until after the fact.

"The basic problem with RFID is surreptitious access to ID," said Bruce Schneier security technologist, author and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a technology security consultancy. "The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won't be hackable."

The State Department argues the concerns are overstated. "We wouldn't be issuing the passports to ourselves if we didn't think they're secure," said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services Frank Moss, who noted that RFID passports have already been issued to core State Department personnel, including himself. "We're our own test population."
How skimming works

The equipment needed to skim an RFID chip neither has to be large nor expensive. Nokia sells cell phones capable of reading RFID chips. Texas Instruments sells kits to do the same thing.

In May, researchers at the University of Tel Aviv created a skimmer from electronics hobbyist kits costing less than $110. The equipment was small enough to fit into a briefcase or be disguised in any manner of luggage or clothes that could hide the 15-inch copper tube antenna.

The antenna boosts the read-range from a few inches to a few feet. To extend the range of surreptitious access much further, a second piece of equipment is needed to fake the RFID reader into sending a "read" signal, which is then relayed via radio waves to the skimmer's reader near the targeted RFID chip.

In 2005, a researcher at Cambridge extended the range to about 160 feet while successfully accessing a contactless smart card's details.

ID thieves who figure out a way around the security precaution on RFID passports, which includes anti-skimming material in the cover, can use this method in a crowded airport terminal or hotel lobby to conceivably "borrow" someone's ID data and spoof it to another official reader, effectively cloaking themselves in another's persons ID.

Or they could learn a person's nationality, or confirm the identity of someone they were searching for to harm.

"It's a great way for unfriendly elements to set up their own RFID scanning systems and pick Americans right out of a crowd...If you put an RFID scanner in a doorway or maybe a lamp-post," said Sterling, "you can just sit there automatically counting the passing passports."

Even if the skimmed data is encrypted -- as e-Passport information would be -- skilled hackers could potentially save the information and crack it elsewhere.

Researchers at the Dutch security test lab Riscure cracked the encryption on a mocked up RFID passport in two hours using a PC in 2005.

U.S. passports are issued for ten years, which means the RFID chip technology of those passports, along with their vulnerabilities, will be floating around for a decade. Technology would have to "stop cold" Schneier of Counterpane says for improvements in skimming and hacking equipment not to occur.

Moss said the State Department "recognizes that technology will change during the 10 year life cycle of US passports" and that's why it's focusing on more than one technology to protect data.

Sterling, however, compares RFID passports to a "nice yellow armband" -- a big sign on your body announcing your identity. "Would you pay anything for that device?" Sterling asks. "Would you buy it in a travel store because you thought it made you feel safer? Or would you conclude that this technology existed so that you could be treated like a can on a grocery-food shelf?"

Schneier says there are a number of ways to improve the security of RFID passports but the best trick is to not create RFID passports at all. "Someone in the government got it in their head to make it RFID. Yes, its cool technology," said Schneier, "but don't do it because it's cool."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/13/pf/r...orts/index.htm





MSNBC’s Star Carves Anti-Fox Niche
Bill Carter

He is either the leading man of MSNBC or its leading agent provocateur, but Keith Olbermann has no problem embracing either role.

“You can’t spell momentum without Olbermann — or something like that,” he said in a telephone interview, with a typical sprinkle of wry in his voice.

The momentum reference related to MSNBC’s recent aggressive positioning of the program “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” as the centerpiece of this all-news cable network’s latest effort to become more competitive with Fox News Channel and CNN.

MSNBC revamped its prime-time schedule two weeks ago, shelving many of its prime-time hosts in favor of documentary-style programs but retaining “Countdown,” a program the network cites as its great growth story.

That growth, while coming from a base that Fox News would find disastrously puny, is demonstrable, especially among the group that is chiefly sold to news advertisers: people between the ages of 25 and 54. For the last quarter, Mr. Olbermann, who is 47, has seen his ratings in that group grow by more than 30 percent.

The growth has not been unfailingly steady, as competitors at Fox and CNN pointed out. They noted that Mr. Olbermann did better in February and March than he has since. Still, for the year, Mr. Olbermann has managed to climb past CNN into second place in the news channel competition at 8 p.m. among that 25-to-54 group. That qualifies as a feat for MSNBC, though Mr. Olbermann’s show remains little more than a dot in the rearview mirror of Fox News.

Even from that far back, he seems to have been able to honk his horn loud enough to raise hackles at Fox, which, Mr. Olbermann enthusiastically acknowledges, has been his precise intention as well as a useful marketing strategy.

He was especially able to redden the neck of the time period’s king, Bill O’Reilly, starting this winter, when the two men engaged in a widely discussed barb-filled feud.

Mr. Olbermann began frequently naming Mr. O’Reilly as the winner in a segment he calls “The Worst Person in the World,” tweaking cable news’s most popular host for such excesses (according to Mr. Olbermann) as his declaration last year (in jest, Mr. O’Reilly said) that a resolution passed in San Francisco to ban military recruitment in schools was so un-American that he was inviting Al Qaeda to blow up Coit Tower.

The worst-person citations eventually riled Mr. O’Reilly enough that he began a petition drive directed at Mr. Olbermann (though he did not mention him by name; he has apparently never mentioned Mr. Olbermann’s name), suggesting that he be replaced by a long-ago MSNBC host, Phil Donahue. Mr. Donahue’s ratings, Mr. O’Reilly said in February, eclipsed anything MSNBC had achieved since. By the next day, Mr. Olbermann was celebrating the petition and offering to sign it himself. Now he gleefully notes that Mr. O’Reilly (whose name he has no trouble uttering) only helped his cause by taking the bait and responding to the gibes.

“You don’t punch down,” Mr. Olbermann said. “If you’re in my position,” he added, referring to his initially microscopic ratings next to Mr. O’Reilly’s, “you punch upwards.”

Every time Mr. O’Reilly took umbrage at the slams, it seemed to add a bounce to Mr. Olbermann’s ratings — one reason, perhaps, that Mr. O’Reilly’s reactions seem to have tailed off more recently. Nobody at Fox News wants Mr. Olbermann to get any more of a draft from Mr. O’Reilly’s popularity.

Mr. Olbermann thinks he knows one reason behind his gains. He believes that Mr. O’Reilly’s audience, which is still huge, is aging. He noted that Mr. O’Reilly’s total viewer ratings are basically flat, while his numbers in the younger audience group have been dropping — down about 15 percent for the last quarter. “There is no other conclusion to draw than he is not adding younger viewers,” Mr. Olbermann said.

Of course, in terms of numbers of viewers in that younger age group, Mr. O’Reilly is still playing in another league, with about three times as many as Mr. Olbermann. But that does represent a small slice of the total audience for Mr. O’Reilly.

MSNBC’s research claims that the median age for Mr. O’Reilly’s audience is 71, while Mr. Olbermann’s is 59. (Fox and CNN both report that the only figures they get for median age of shows with older audiences is “65 plus,” and that Mr. O’Reilly’s audience falls into that category.)

The age discrepancy has led Mr. Olbermann to dish out even more mockery in his attacks. “It’s slipping away from you,” he said, addressing Mr. O’Reilly on a “Countdown” segment last month. “You don’t know what to do. You can’t even lie well any more. Seriously: I understand. It’s called panic.” He added, “You begin to see the audience dying off, and the creases deepening in your forehead.”

Lately Mr. O’Reilly has resisted giving Mr. Olbermann the satisfaction of more attention. Mr. O’Reilly was on vacation last week, so Fox responded through Irina Briganti, the spokeswoman for the channel. Her comments, matched with Mr. Olbermann’s biting remarks, reflected how corrosive the byplay has become.

“Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he’s worked,” Ms. Briganti said. “From lashing out at co-workers to personally attacking Bill O’Reilly and all things Fox, it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to happen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”

The references to personal demons and implosions touched on Mr. Olbermann’s résumé, which includes an array of positions over the last decade. At times he has been in public disputes with employers. More recently he landed in gossip columns after some nasty e-mail messages he sent were published. In one, he mocked the intelligence of the MSNBC host Rita Cosby; in others, he used vituperative language in responding to e-mail critics.

Mr. Olbermann apologized for the e-mail exchanges, saying he had been stupid and should have known better than to engage in such confrontations. He said he wouldn’t be e-mailing viewers again.

But the e-mail incidents offered an opening for critics like his antagonists at Fox to point to earlier evidence of a volatile nature. Certainly Mr. Olbermann has evoked a lot of strong reactions in his career.

He first came to the nation’s attention at ESPN, where his fast-paced commentary and sharp writing established a pattern: younger audiences liked Mr. Olbermann; traditionalists despised him.

Mr. Olbermann said, “People who didn’t like what I was doing would call and say: ‘Is this guy a jackass or what?’ You can tailor what you’re doing or saying to other people’s expectations, but you’re going to wind up acting.” He freely admitted, “The reaction of the audience has not been paramount with me.”

Still, Mr. Olbermann became a star at ESPN. His “Sports Center” work with his partner Dan Patrick became a trademark of the channel: sports delivered with irreverence and insouciance, like Mr. Olbermann’s home run call, “It’s deep, and I don’t think it’s playable.”

Mr. Olbermann acknowledged that his departure from ESPN in 1997 led to a “nuclear war.” The channel said he had abused the company’s rules; he said the company had a “corporate ‘all we have are the rules’ mentality.” At that point he began his first tenure at MSNBC, in a news show that mainly consisted of covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the Clinton administration.

“I did that for 218 straight days,” Mr. Olbermann said, recalling his rising frustration. From there it was back to sports for, of all organizations, Fox. When that ended after about two-and-a-half years, Mr. Olbermann landed at CNN briefly as an interim host.

Then, in 2003, MSNBC needed a temporary replacement for one of its hosts. “It was a three-day fill-in stint,” Mr. Olbermann said. “Thirty-nine days later I had a four-year contract.”

The “Countdown” show began as a prelude to the invasion of Iraq, but Mr. Olbermann decided it was an ideal format for him. He counted down the news stories of the day, in whatever order he pleased, adding his own spin and style.

Gradually, the show took on more of Mr. Olbermann’s persona, which meant stories were delivered with either mock outrage or ironic amusement. And unquestionably the chief target of the outrage was the Bush administration and its defenders.

Mr. Olbermann said he believed that the turn in public sentiment toward the administration clearly began to bring more viewers to his show. “We saw a certain cultural shift,” he said, adding that it was a “sea change, if that’s not too unfortunate a word, around the time of Hurricane Katrina.”

That a rabid audience can be built for a political discussion show from the left, as it has so effectively been done on talk radio and on some of Fox’s programs from the right, has not been demonstrated before, unless you count the fake news shows on Comedy Central. Mr. Olbermann said the administration had created enough disaffection to keep both his ratings and his outrage up.

“The country gave this president every imaginable benefit of the doubt,” he said, about the period following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “He abused it. You know what Lincoln said: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of time. But it looks like you can’t fool all of the viewers all of the time, endlessly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/ar...on/11keit.html





Nielsen to Offer Data on TV Commercials

Nielsen Media Research to offer data on how many people are tuned in during commercial breaks
Seth Sutel

Television advertisers have long wanted to know how many people actually watch their commercials, but until now ads have been sold based on the average viewership of a whole program.

That could be on the verge of changing, however, now that Nielsen Media Research is preparing to offer data for the first time on how many people are tuned in during the commercial breaks.

Jack Loftus, a spokesman for Nielsen, a unit of the privately held company VNU, says the major networks asked the research company several months ago to provide the new data, and Nielsen plans to begin doing so this fall on a test basis.

However, much negotiation remains to be done among advertisers and the networks over how the data will be used and in what form, Loftus said, adding that the earliest it could be adopted as an arbiter of value would be the advance ad-selling season for the fall 2007 season, called the "upfront."

"Obviously this is going to have a huge impact on next year's upfront," Loftus said, "but we don't know what."

The change came about as networks and advertisers tussled this year over whether to count shows that are played back on digital video recorders, or DVRs, as part of the viewership that advertisers get charged for.

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC network pressed particularly hard for those viewers to be counted, but yielded in the end after advertisers resisted.

The new data showing the viewership of commercials will also include those played back on a DVR device within seven days, something that is likely to favor highly rated shows that are more likely to be viewed on recorded playback such as "American Idol."

Network executives say the inclusion of played back viewership in the commercial ratings should render moot any concerns that advertisers may have over ad-skipping.

But Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, says the next challenge is getting all parties to agree on how to actually use the data. "We understand what Nielsen's trying to do, but there are many specific details that need to be ironed out," Wurtzel said.

Advertisers had resisted paying for viewership that was played back, partly because they're concerned that many people are skipping through the ads, and also because Nielsen's sample included fewer households with DVRs than the national average.

Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes said Nielsen's sample is now about 7 percent made up of homes that have DVRs, versus the national average of about 12 percent. Holmes says Nielsen expects its sample to catch up to the national average of DVR penetration by the end of the year.

Networks have long acknowledged that viewership dips during commercials. David Poltrack, the head of research for the CBS network, says that studies have found commercials consistently rate about 5 percent lower than regular programming.

What networks are eager to show, Poltrack says, is that not everyone actually skips through the ads when shows are being played back on a DVR, say if the remote is out of reach or the viewer is walking around the room or doesn't feel like skipping through the ads.

Poltrack says research suggests that somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of audiences do watch commercials on playback. Nielsen's Holmes said the company wasn't releasing any data on commercial viewership yet.

This could favor big shows like CBS's "CSI," Poltrack says, which go up against other popular shows like "Grey's Anatomy," which CSI viewers couldn't otherwise see since they're scheduled in the same time slot. "We know that a lot of people are going to watch one live and record the other one and watch it later," Poltrack says.

For advertisers, the new data represent a welcome means to measure the effectiveness of their ads, but also more work in figuring out how to agree on ways to value a new audience measure.

Advertisers are increasingly asking for clearer breakdowns of how many people see and act on ads, especially now that Internet advertising can provide great detail on how many people made a purchase after seeing and clicking through an ad online.

"This is a step in the right direction," said Brad Adgate, director of research for Horizon Media Inc., an advertising buying and planning agency. "This is one of the important things that buyers want."

Adgate added, however, that the data won't be a perfect solution _ not every single ad will be rated, just the average ratings for all ads in a given time period will be measured.

Jack Klues, chairman of Publicis Groupe Media, called the step long overdue, noting that advertising is sold in most other countries on the basis of ratings for commercials themselves, not the shows in which they appear. Klues's group oversees the global ad-buying activities of Publicis Groupe SA, a Paris-based advertising conglomerate.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...8IQ1PEO0.shtml





France to Offer Low-Cost PCs to Families
AP

Low-income French families will be equipped with a computer and an Internet connection for 1 euro ($1.27) a day under a new government proposal.

Families who sign up will receive a computer, a high-speed connection, software and a class on how to use the equipment, officials said Tuesday after an inter-ministerial meeting.

The program is expected to start early next year. Later this year, officials will announce which incomes qualify.

About half of French homes have a home computer - a figure that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin wants to boost to 68 percent in three years.

Families in the program will contribute financially for three years, the government said. The program will have both state and private funding, with the state guaranteeing bank loans for families, while Internet providers give sharp discounts for access.

Many details were still being worked out.

The project is in line with the government's "equal opportunity" plan for children from disadvantaged families. Boosting their prospects has been a main concern since riots swept through France late last year in troubled neighborhoods where many immigrants live with their French-born children.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-11-16-14-33





Ding dong, Big Brother calling

Agency Works On Emergency Alert System
Lara Jakes Jordan

We interrupt your cell phone call with this important announcement: The government will soon be sending warnings of national emergencies on wireless phones, Web sites and hand-held computers.

The new digital system will update the emergency alerts planned - but never used - during the Cold War in the event of a nuclear strike. More likely, these 21st-century technologies will carry warnings of natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

The Homeland Security Department, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, expects to have the system working by the end of next year. Though still in its pilot stages, the system is being demonstrated Wednesday at a public television station in suburban Virginia.

The Association of Public Television Stations is partnering with FEMA to transmit the alerts to receiving networks ranging from wireless devices, cable TV channels and satellite radio to traditional broadcast outlets.

"Anything that can receive a text message will receive the alert," Homeland Security Department spokesman Aaron Walker said Tuesday. "We find that the new digital system is more secure, it's faster and it enables us to reach a wide array of citizens and alert them to pending disasters."

In 1951, President Harry Truman created the nation's first alert system, which required radio stations to broadcast only on certain frequencies during emergencies. That evolved into the test on TV and radio stations that solemnly intoned: "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test."

Only the president can order a national emergency alert. The system was initially designed to warn Americans of a nuclear attack, but President Bush last month ordered Homeland Security to extend the alert "for situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster or other hazards to public safety and well-being."

The public TV stations have so far raised $1.1 billion - a third of it from the federal government - to convert antiquated technology at its 176 stations to digital systems that can transmit the alerts, APTS President John Lawson said.

Overall, the new warning system is expected to cost $5.5 million to test and deploy nationally, and $1 million annually to maintain, Walker said.

The government has been testing the system in the Washington area since October 2004, Lawson said, and earlier this year expanded its pilot program to 23 public television stations nationwide. It will be rolled out to the public and emergency responders in stages, beginning in Gulf Coast states that were heavily damaged by hurricanes last year, and later in major cities.

Peter P. Swire, chief privacy counselor during the Clinton administration and law professor at the Ohio State University, questioned whether the alerts might "be like spam or a telemarketing call" to people who don't want to receive the government warnings.

"Before the broadcast happens, people should likely have a choice whether to receive it," Swire said.

Walker said consumers will have a chance to opt out of the alerts.

Some glitches remain as telephone companies and other networks grapple with potentially trying to alert all of their customers at the same time without jamming their systems, Lawson said. But the alerts could be transmitted by text messages, audio recordings, video or graphics, he said, opening the possibility of sending out additional detailed information to specific sectors, like hospitals or emergency responders.

For alerting regular Americans, "we're hoping that your cell phone will go off saying something bad is happening, and you need to get to a TV or radio to find out what's going on," Lawson said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-04-39-53





Agency Recovers From Computer Break-Ins
Ted Bridis

The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned.

Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the widespread intrusions and the resulting investigation.

State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck said late Tuesday that officials continue to investigate the incident but that there was no indication any sensitive U.S. government information was compromised. Still, Beck said, the department changed passwords and modified some internal procedures to provide extra security.

"This case is a textbook example of our ability to detect and defeat threats before they can do any damage," Beck said.

The break-ins and the State Department's emergency response severely limited Internet access at many locations, including some headquarters offices in Washington, these officials said. Internet connections have been restored across nearly all the department since the break-ins were recognized in mid-June.

"The department did detect anomalies in network traffic, and we thought it prudent to ensure our system's integrity," department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said. Asked what information was stolen by the hackers, Cooper said, "Because the investigation is continuing, I don't think we even know."

Tracing the origin of such break-ins is difficult. But employees told AP the hackers appeared to hit computers especially hard at headquarters and inside the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, which coordinates diplomacy in countries including China, the Koreas and Japan. In the tense weeks preceding North Korea's missile tests, that bureau lost its Internet connectivity for several days.

The FBI declined to comment, saying it was "not appropriate for the FBI to discuss the existence of ongoing cases or lend speculation to media reports of alleged incidents."

China's government was considered by experts a chief suspect in computer break-ins at the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies disclosed last summer. But China also is home to a large number of insecure computers and networks that hackers in other countries could use to disguise their locations and launch attacks.

The Pentagon warned earlier this year that China's army is emphasizing hacking as an offensive weapon. It cited Chinese military exercises in 2005 that included hacking "primarily in first strikes against enemy networks."

After the State Department break-ins, many employees were instructed to change their passwords. The department also temporarily disabled a technology known as secure sockets layer, used to transmit encrypted information over the Internet. Hackers can exploit weaknesses in this technology to break into computers, and they can use the same technology to transmit stolen information covertly off a victim's network.

Many diplomats were unable to access their online bank accounts using government computers because most financial institutions require the security technology to be turned on. Cooper said the department has since fixed that problem.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-11-23-22-55





Feds taking back road to Routerville

Insecure By Design
David Sugar

CALEA (Computer Assistance Law Enforcement) is quietly in the background of current news again, because the FBI is pushing congress to mandate that all future routing equipment manufactured will include back doors for law enforcement. Like in CALEA mandates for telephone switching equipment, such back doors require no warrant to activate, and hence can be secretly enabled at will. Some vendors have already eagerly embraced CALEA inspired backdoors to internet routing equipment in anticipation of future intercept mandates, thereby already compromising the integrity and security their current and future customers. This approach of using backdoors on Internet connected systems, even more so than the original CALEA mandates for wiretapping backdoors in telephone switching centers, is a danger to both our infrastructure and our society.

CALEA has required that all telephone switching equipment manufactured since 1994 must include backdoors to enable wiretapping. While the need for lawful legal intercept is estimated to be in the range of 1000 or so wiretaps per year, and past practices have required not only warrants but also physical access to switching centers, these requirements were neither unduly burdensome, nor unduly expensive for the limited number of lawful investigations normally engaged in per year, whether back then or today. What these historic pre-CALEA limitations did assure is that the cost of mass privacy invasion would be far too expensive to ever effectively undertake.

By contrast, CALEA mandated backdoors allows one to activate wiretaps remotely on any scale desired, and to do so entirely in secret. Indeed, the NSA wiretapping scandal is an example of how CALEA can be misused. That the huge volume of information being collected, and the fact that most of the older telephone switching equipment does not normally support true network remote access, had forced the NSA to co-locate facilities in a number of switching centers to collect their data. Applying CALEA backdoors to distributed and even end-user deployed routing equipment that is already Internet connected of course eliminates the need to co-locate facilities, and hence would make it much harder to detect or determine the scope of any future illegal government activities, in regard to misusing Internet wiretapping.

While these mandates may be only originally intended for spying and use within North America, clearly, with proprietary telephone switching systems, such equipment was often also sold overseas. As the Greek prime minister discovered in 2004, when he and 100 other governmental officials were tapped for over a year by someone making use a CALEA mandated backdoor, “source secret by obscurity” backdoors often do not remain secret. Of course this is not the only incident where CALEA backdoors have been used for espionage purposes by others. Such systems are hence inherently insecure by design.

When one deliberately builds in government mandated backdoors that can be opened in secret and without notice, one is opening such systems to undetected access by anyone who can discover and operate them, including those who may be deemed even more undesirable than national governments spying on their own citizens. Even, as noted in the case of the Greek Government, the security of government facilities themselves may be compromised by outside parties. Such information may be used to blackmail individuals, to acquire identity information for theft, or to acquire passwords and information that could be used to compromise the underlying security of key infrastructures and safety systems, like for example power generation systems.

Personally I do not feel any “safer” in a state that requires the infrastructure for enabling or engages in mass surveillance of it's own citizens, or that practices guilt until proven innocent while claiming to do so in the name of my “protection” and safety. Indeed, I find that such a state is in fact a far greater danger to the safety of myself, my children, and the people as a whole, than the potential threats I am supposedly being protected against, whether real or imagined.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1671





End to Win98 Support May Boost Desktop Linux
Munir Kotadia

From today, Microsoft will no longer issue security updates or provide support for Windows 98 and Windows ME, which could lead users to trying alternative operating systems such as Linux.

Eight years after launching Windows 98, Microsoft will finally wash its hands of updating and plugging security gaps in its ageing operating system. The software giant originally planned to pull the plug in January 2004 but decided to extend support because of the increasing threat from Linux.

This time round, Microsoft is hoping that the remaining users of Windows 98 and Windows ME will upgrade to Windows XP, according to Peter Watson, chief security advisor, Microsoft Australia.

"Microsoft works closely with leading retailers to undertake promotions such as upgrade discounts to encourage users to upgrade to Windows XP," Watson told ZDNet Australia. "Just last month, you may have seen the price promotion activity Microsoft conducted with Harvey Norman, one of the largest computer software retailers in the country, to encourage Windows XP upgrades."

Analyst firms estimate that there are still between 50 million and 70 million computers running either Windows 95, 98 or ME.

Hardest hit by the cancellation of support will be home users and schools, according to Michael Silver, research vice president of client platforms at research group Gartner, who agrees that support has been extended to fight off the threat from Linux.

"Consumers and schools will be most affected by this announcement because they will no longer get security fixes," Silver told ZDNet Australia. "I suspect that Microsoft's original extension of the Windows 98 support date a couple of years ago was, in part, to make sure Linux was not brought in to replace these systems."

Silver believes that as far as the overall security landscape goes, millions of unsupported PCs is a "cause for concern". In addition, he said Microsoft may be pressured into creating a fix if there is a serious virus outbreak.

"Microsoft has not fixed every hole in Win9x, but I'm not sure they've been attacked, either. If Microsoft sees a Win9x attack in the wild in the next few months, we would not be surprised if they issued a fix -- wide scale outages are not good for their customers or for Microsoft -- but since there is no automatic update, users may not be able to get the fix in time," said Silver.

Silver still believes that some users may decide to switch to Linux instead of upgrading to XP but he said existing applications that require Windows are likely to stop a mass migration.

"School PCs are likely more at risk. Win9x PCs used regularly on the Internet need up to date security software. Some of these users -- companies, schools and governments -- may switch to Linux or Mac, but application issues often makes that an expensive option," said Silver.

Microsoft's Watson said consumers have the choice to use any version of Windows and dismissed any suggestion that Microsoft has a responsibility to secure older versions of its software.

"This issue is not unique to the IT Industry. For example, there are many people on the road who choose to drive the latest cars with the latest safety features such as ABS brakes and air-bags, but at the same time, there are many others who are happy driving their cars which may not have these features.

"It is not the 'responsibility' of automotive manufacturers to have their customers acquire the latest technology. This is the same issue for makers of mobile phones, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs fridges, radios, and so on," said Watson.

However, Watson said Microsoft would try to "encourage" users of Win9x systems to upgrade to XP.

"Microsoft encourages users to upgrade to Windows XP and provides information which helps educate users on the benefits of upgrading, but it is ultimately the customer's choice," he added.

Gartner's Silver said that although there are still millions of Windows 9x users, compared to alternative operating system vendors, Microsoft's support schedules are still "better than most".

"Most software vendors and hardware vendors are no longer developing Win9x drivers for their new products -- and have not been for some time now. Further, most free Linux distributions are supported for a year, some for two. Microsoft has supported Win98 for 8 years, 98SE for 7 years, and Windows ME for 6 years.

"These do not meet Microsoft's current enterprise standard of 10 years -- they shipped before the 10 year policy -- but they're better than most," added Silver.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...733t-10000002c





Microsoft Releases New OS For Old PCs
James Niccolai

Microsoft Corp. released a new version of its operating system for businesses this week that extends the life of older PCs by effectively turning them into thin-client computers.

Called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, the software is offered only to customers on Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing and maintenance program. It is not a full-featured operating system, but it improves the security and manageability of PCs for customers with systems that are too old for Windows XP and who aren't ready to upgrade their hardware, Microsoft said.

The company first discussed the software last September as one of a series of perks intended to improve the value of Software Assurance, which had been criticized by some customers. Fundamentals for Legacy PCs was originally targeted for release last month.

The operating system can run only a few programs locally, such as security tools, management tools and document viewers, so line-of-business and productivity applications will need to be run remotely on a server.

The trade-off is that the older PCs will be able to run the latest security and management tools, and the end user experience should be similar to that with Windows XP, according to Microsoft, making help desk calls easier to deal with. Customers will also have a fully supported operating system.

Among the other sweeteners offered to Software Assurance customers was exclusive access to a new, enterprise edition of Windows Vista due out in November. The operating system is expected to include a hardware-based encryption system to protect data if a laptop is lost or stolen, among other benefits, according to Microsoft.

It also allows customers to run four versions of the enterprise operating system on one PC using virtualization software. In line with that, Microsoft announced this week that Virtual PC 2007 for Windows Vista PCs and its current Virtual PC 2004 SP product are now available to customers for free.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...e =rss_news10





Microsoft to Release 1980s Games for Xbox
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 may exemplify the high-tech future of video game consoles, but the company is hoping some of its avid players still pine for the good old days of Pac-Man and Frogger.

Microsoft plans Wednesday to offer some additional updated versions of popular 1980s-era games through Xbox Live Arcade, an online service that lets people download free trial games and buy them for $5 to $15.

The company will offer a game every Wednesday for the next five weeks, including some retro games with higher-end graphics and new ways to play together. The first game on offer is the log-hopping, traffic-dodging classic, Frogger.

Greg Canessa, a group manager for Xbox Live Arcade, said the downloadable games service has been surprisingly successful for the company. About 5 million free trial games have been downloaded by Xbox 360 owners, he said, and 21.7 percent of those have been "converted," meaning a person decided to pay for the permanent version.

Many people initially thought the Xbox Live Arcade, with its focus on less complex games, would be a potential draw for children, women or older players who don't fit the young male demographic traditionally associated with Xbox 360 owners. But Canessa said they've found that even the so-called hardcore gamers are interested in the arcade games, and willing to pay for them.

Microsoft currently has 20 arcade games available for sale to people who own an Xbox 360, the second iteration of Microsoft's video game console. Canessa said they hope to have about 50 titles available by the end of the year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-03-26-16





In Atta Kim’s Long-Exposure Photographs, Real Time Is the Most Surreal of All
Holland Cotter

Every day, hundreds of tourists snap photographs of a crowd- and car-jammed Times Square. The average picture takes — what? — 15 seconds to shoot? The same picture of the same place takes the Korean photographer Atta Kim eight hours. And his Times Square ends up with only an eerie trace of a human presence, like a deserted movie set.

Other pictures by Mr. Kim, who is making an outstanding New York solo debut in a show titled “Atta Kim: On-Air” at the International Center of Photography, have required less time. A photograph of a soccer game: two hours. Of a couple having sex: one hour. Still others go way beyond the eight-hour mark. “Monologue of Ice,” with its mysterious lozenge of pollen-yellow light hovering in the dark, is the product of a marathon 25-hour shoot.

And what is that picture of? A block of ice melting. Mr. Kim put the ice in a room and left the lens of his camera open to record the process of physical change as a solid form returned to fluid. Naturally, the transformation was slow. But who would have guessed that it would be so spectacularly photogenic — molten-looking and radiant?

Many of the large-format photographs in Mr. Kim’s show were made over time. His is an art of duration and of simultaneity. When he leaves his lens open for an hour on a couple making love, every movement made in that hour is in the picture, though condensed into an explosive blur. His view of Times Square leaves all the stationary elements — buildings and such — in crisp focus, but reduces traffic to a shimmering haze, a ghost of motion. Other famous New York intersections get the same treatment.

This technique is old. Early-19th-century pioneers of photography experimented with it. So do contemporary artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, in his well-known shots of movie-house interiors taken while full-length films are in progress. What Mr. Kim brings to the tradition are new subjects — live-model Buddhist sculptures, for example — and dramatically extended temporal parameters, to create ever more complex compressions and layerings of time.

He has similarly pushed the boundaries in his extreme elaboration of a second traditional method of image-layering, one associated with double or multiple exposures. In several series of pictures Mr. Kim overlays different, semitransparent pictures of human figures, one on top of another, using digital editing. He piles up anywhere from a dozen to a hundred separate images to create a single composite picture, at once singular and multiple.

But while digitally savvy, Mr. Kim’s work is more distinctive for its ideas than for its technology. Born in South Korea in 1956, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but his interests were, and still are, literature and philosophy. He considers Heidegger’s speculations on time an important early influence, along with the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (which also shaped the work of the American photographer Minor White). Most important of all is Zen Buddhist thinking, although this thread has been fully apparent only in the last few years.

Mr. Kim’s earliest photographs were of patients in a Korean psychiatric hospital whom he shot during long, immersive, interactive sessions in the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s he created a series of cinematic performance-based pictures of nude models lying, as if asleep or dead, in desolate landscapes. The scenes looked like the aftermath of a catastrophe, but the bodies were meant to signify dormant new life.

His first New York appearance was in 2002 in the large group show “Translated Acts: Body and Performance Art From East Asia,” at the Queens Museum of Art. There he showed selections from “The Museum Project” (1995-2002), which remains his best-known body of work. (Excerpts from it are on view at Yossi Milo Gallery, 525 West 25th Street, Chelsea, through Aug. 25.)

That series centered on a single visual motif: one or more figures encased, as if on display, within a museum-style plexiglass vitrine. In the earliest pictures the figures were nude, often crouched in fetal position. Some of the vitrines were actually placed and shot in museums, others in natural settings or on city streets and in public buildings at off hours. The pictures that resulted were effective: quiet, miminalist, mildly surreal. They placed bare bodies where they would not otherwise be found, but also made the bodies as untouchably inorganic as antique sculptures in a gallery or expensive machines in a showroom.

Mr. Kim varied his basic format in several subseries to create what he referred to as his own private museum of cultural and emotional subjects. One series offered a compendium of Korean “types”: families, artists, workers and so on. Another was composed of erotic couples.

More interesting were a group of portraits of maimed and wounded Korean War veterans, and a “Holocaust Series” in which models lay in heaps or hung from racks like slaughtered animals. Then, in a radical shift in tone, came the “Nirvana Series,” shot largely in Buddhist temples or in outdoor settings with nude models, including young priests and nuns, posed as bodhisattvas and tantric deities.

“The Museum Project” was an ambitious venture. Parts of it were strikingly successful, though certain images bordered, intentionally or otherwise, on kitsch. This was especially true of the “Jesus Series” (2002), which had punkish young models chained to plexiglass crosses and wired with intravenous drips. I surmised that AIDS was a possible subject but wondered where Mr. Kim’s unsettled work might be heading.

As “On-Air” demonstrates, it was headed in a direction far less obviously theatrical. In the work in this New York solo show, organized by Christopher Phillips, narrative and overt symbolism are played down. Where “The Museum Project” often graphically illustrated ideas — of preservation and decay, corporality and spirituality — the new pictures subtly embody them.

And although Mr. Kim is careful to assert that he is not a practicing Buddhist, core Buddhist concepts shape the new work. One is the notion that change, or transience, is the only concrete reality, and that time as a quantifiable, linear entity is a mirage. All time and no time are the same. A couple making love for an hour is a cloud of luminosity.

Then there is the Buddhist belief in cosmic interconnection, that all things are linked to, are part of, all other things. In a series titled “Self-Portrait” Mr. Kim layers head shots of 100 Korean men to create one “Korean” face.

In a studio-made re-enactment of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” the figures of 13 different models, each holding the appropriate pose, are combined to form the 13 figures in the scene. Thus, by implication, Jesus is also Judas.

Again, Mr. Kim’s use of such photographic techniques is not in itself novel, but the philosophical shape of his work is. And it is clearest in his most straightforward pictures. His “Portrait of Mao” (2006) series involves no layering or time compression, but consists of a sequence of still shots. In the first we see a lifelike bust of the Chinese leader carved in ice. In the second the bust has grown abstract through melting. In the third it is as smooth, attenuated and abstract as a Brancusi sculpture.

And in a similar series, “Portrait of Atta,” not in the New York show, the artist records his own features carved in ice undergoing a similar transformation. The sequence is a perfect, step-by-step Buddhist image of time passing and an ego disappearing, a process that some of Mr. Kim’s other recent pictures turn into mandalas of layered light.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/ar...gn/12atta.html





Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts
Andrew Pollack

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.

The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain.

A former high school football star in Weymouth, Mass., Mr. Nagle was paralyzed below the shoulders after being stabbed in the neck during a melee at a beach in July 2001. He said he was not involved in starting the brawl and didn’t even know what sparked it. The man who stabbed him is now serving ten years in prison, he said.

There have been some tests of a simpler sensor implant in people, as well as tests of systems using electrodes outside the scalp. And Mr. Nagle has spoken about his experiences before.

But the paper in Nature is the first peer-reviewed publication of an experiment using a more sophisticated implant in a human.

The paper helps “shift the notion of such ‘implantable neuromotor prosthetics’ from science fiction towards reality,’’ Stephen H. Scott of Queen’s University in Canada wrote in a commentary in the journal.

The implant system, known as the BrainGate, is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems of Foxborough, Mass. The company is now testing the system in three other people whose names have not been released — one with a spinal cord injury, one who had a brain-stem stroke and one with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Timothy R. Surgenor, the president of the company, said Cyberkinetics hoped to have an implant approved for use as early as 2008 or 2009. Mr. Donoghue of Brown is a cofounder of the company and its chief scientist. Some of the authors of the research paper work for the company, while others work at Massachusetts General Hospital and other medical or academic institutions.

The sensor measures 4 millimeters — about one sixth of an inch — on a side and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex that is responsible for arm movement, and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.

When the device was to be used, technicians connected the pedestal to a computer with a cable. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.

Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets, as technicians calibrated the machine, a process that took about half an hour each time. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by nearby neurons as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.

Scientists said the study was important because it showed that the neurons in Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex were still active, years after they had any role to play in physically moving his arms.

Cursor control was not very smooth. In a task where the goal was to guide the cursor from the center of the screen to a target on the perimeter, Mr. Nagle hit the target about 73 to 95 percent of the time. When he did, it took an average of 2.5 seconds, though sometimes much longer. The second patient tested with the implant had worse control than Mr. Nagle, the paper said.

By contrast, healthy people moving the cursor by hand can hit the target almost every time and in only one second.

Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, a researcher at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, said the BrainGate performance did not appear to be substantially better than a non-invasive system he is developing using electroencephalography, in which electrodes are placed outside the scalp.

“If you are going to have something implanted into your brain, you’d probably want it to be a lot better,’’ he said.

Dr. Donoghue and other proponents of the implants say they have the potential to be a lot better, because they are much closer to the relevant neurons. The scalp electrodes get signals from millions of neurons all over the brain.

One way to improve implant performance was suggested by another paper in the same edition of Nature. In a study involving monkeys, Krishna V. Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University eavesdropped not on the neurons controlling arm movement but on those expressing the intention to move.

“Instead of sliding the cursor out to the target, we can just predict which target would be hit, and the cursor simply leaps there,’’ said Mr. Shenoy, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and neurosciences.

He said a patient using the system could do the equivalent of typing 15 words a minute, about four times the speed of the other devices.

Other obstacles must be overcome before brain implants become practical. The ability of the electrodes to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons that are not fully understood. Also, ideally, the implant would transmit signals out of the brain wirelessly, doing away with the permanent hole in the head and the accompanying risk of infection.

Mr. Nagle, meanwhile, had his implant removed after a bit more than a year, so he could undergo another operation that allowed him to breathe without a ventilator. He can control a computer with voice commands, so he does not really need the brain implant. But he said he was happy he volunteered for the experiment.

“It gave a lot of people hope,’’ he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/sc...rtner=homepage





Breakup and makeup

Wired Magazine Regains Web Sites

Wired magazine, the publication that helped popularize the Internet during the 1990’s, is poised to recover the online business it lost when the company was divided eight years ago.

Lycos Inc. said Tuesday that it had agreed to sell its Wired News online properties for $25 million to Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine, the print publication that is equal parts technology-culture trend-spotter and glossy product catalog.
Lycos acquired Wired News for a reported $83 million as part of the Wired Digital acquisition that closed in June 1999. The deal came a year after Advance Publications, owner of Condé Nast, paid $75 million to buy Wired from Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, the co-founders, and other investors. The sale followed two failed efforts at an initial public offering.

The current transaction includes the sale of the Wired.com domain name and Wired News assets. Lycos will retain other original Wired online properties including Hotbot, Hotwired and Webmonkey.

While one of the earliest and most insistent promoters of the notion that digital technology and the Web would transform business, Wired magazine’s efforts to live up to its own mantra have been hamstrung by the loss of its online domain.

Upon completion of the deal, the assets of Wired News will be operated as part of CondéNet, the Web division of Condé Nast.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/bu...a/12wired.html





Web Site Comparing Shipping Rates Launches
Brian Bergstein

The inspiration struck Bill Van Wyck while he drove around one day trying to find a good deal on a package he was sending to Australia: What if a Web site could offer side-by-side comparisons of shipping rates, just like travel sites do with airfares?

Van Wyck gathered about $5 million from investors and turned the idea into RedRoller.com, a site that debuted last month.

Enter your address, the weight of a package and its destination, and the site displays a grid with the prices various couriers would charge to send the item, depending on the delivery time. With a few clicks, you can print a shipping label and schedule a pickup, or find the nearest drop-off center.

"Instead of being designed to ship people, it was designed to ship packages," Van Wyck said.

Targeted at small businesses and shipping-intensive consumers such as eBay sellers, RedRoller is free to use. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company expects to make money from advertising and supplemental businesses such as sales of shipping supplies and integration of RedRoller's service with outside sites.

The site connects to FedEx, DHL, the U.S. Postal Service and some regional couriers, but there's a conspicuous absence: UPS, which refused to open its systems to RedRoller.

UPS spokesman Steve Holmes said the company generally lets third parties deal with its customers only when UPS can maintain some control over the process.

Even if UPS were to change course, shipping industry analyst Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting Group Inc. suggests RedRoller will be lucky to survive. Jindel said similar ideas have failed, partly because there are key differences between shipping and the airline industry, with its inscrutable pricing schemes.

"If they are able to make a great success of it," Jindel said, "I will say they are truly geniuses."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-26-31





Zidane's Head-Butt The Rage on The Web
Jocelyn Noveck

The head-butt: It's the new butt of Internet jokes. As swiftly as a speeding shot on goal, riffs on Zinedine Zidane's infamous moment of soccer rage have invaded cyberspace. Though fans across the world are clearly divided on whether the French star deserves condemnation or sympathy for head-butting an Italian opponent in the World Cup final, the Web has been typically merciless.

Some jokes take the form of interactive games.

Wondering, for example, how many Marco Materazzis YOU could knock down with a single butt to the chest? AddictingGames.com gives you the chance: Just a left click of the mouse, and the Zidane figure goes to work against a sea of Italian defenders. The game gives you a red-card score at the end.

On Wednesday afternoon, the most viewed video on YouTube.com, the popular site for user-posted videos, was "A New Way to Solve Problems," from Austria, in which a succession of a dozen or so innocent street encounters culminate in - you guessed it, the head-butt.

Example: a tourist with a map asks a bicyclist for directions. The bicyclist gets off to help, but can't. "You don't know?" the suddenly angry tourist exclaims. THWAK! A header to the chest.

Just under 600,000 people had viewed the video by late Wednesday, and many added comments supportive of Zidane. So did the video's makers: "We are not against Zidane, he is still the best. ok!!"

Also on the site: a video where instead of simply collapsing after the head-butt, Materazzi erupts in flames, too.

Zidane made his first public comments about the head-butt felt 'round the world in an interview Wednesday on French TV. He offered repeated apologies - especially to children who watched it - but not regrets, saying Materazzi had made cruel insults to his mother and sister.

It might be some comfort to Zidane fans that the French star isn't the only one being mocked.

Another video circulating widely the past few days is actually from 2004. In an ad for Britain's Guardian newspaper, a fictitious soccer team - dubbed Italy's, by the various users who've posted it to YouTube - is practicing for the Euro 2004 championships. But what are they practicing? Tumbling to the ground in exaggerated agony, clutching themselves and gesturing for the referee to take notice.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-34-14





A Visionary Seeking to Connect the World, Wirelessly
Robin Finn

GEEKSTER-HOOD is powerful. And visionary. And necessary. At least it is in the worldview of Marshall Brown, the Internet impresario who is making good on a personal vision this summer by staking New Yorkers — and city visitors prescient enough to pack laptops or other paraphernalia critical to mobile connectivity — to free wireless Web access at 18 locales in 10 city parks. Hard to imagine how we ever dallied in those parks without him and Wi-Fi Salon.

Mr. Brown, sharing his tale of start-up ingenuity while sitting on a bench in the art gallery of the landmark Arsenal in Central Park at East 54th Street, sure can’t. “Probably a million people come to Central Park on a sunny summer day, and if even 1 percent of them come with wireless-capable devices, that’s a thousand people who can be connecting with our service,” he fantasizes, fidgeting with his wedding band as he speaks. If Mr. Brown seems a tad nervous, and he does, perhaps it stems from having switched off both of his cellular phones for politeness’s sake. To a gadget addict of his caliber, being out of the digital loop must be akin to finding himself in public without his clothes on.

A mild-mannered, latter-day Walter Mitty from Sayville on Long Island who says he came up with a conceptualization for an MP3-style music device during a 1991 brainstorming session with his father, an engineer (“Too bad we didn’t act on it,” he says), he lately dreams of the wireless bubble on a grandiose scale. “The first end of Internet expansion was about globalization,” he lectures — yes, he spent five years as a teaching fellow at Harvard — “but this second phase of wireless Internet is going to be about the Internet made local.” His niche: for example, “What we’re going to enable by installing our portals in the parks is for people to get more in touch with where they happen to be.” Cool.

He foresees a universe where “the end point is that all the major cities are covered by the Internet umbrella, there is world-pervasive computerization, and people get all content all the time.” Yikes. And, to paraphrase a Carpenters tune from the last century (sorry), he’s only just begun.

“The challenge is to get from where we are now to that point; it’s as much a cause as a company,” he says of Wi-Fi Salon, the tiny company he formed in 2003 on, not by coincidence, Sept. 11.

HE selected the starting date in deference to the ‘What can a software-centric guy like me possibly do to help?’ epiphany he had had two years earlier as a husband of one year (he took his vows on Sept. 17, 2000, at Windows on the World) with a 3-month-old son. Who says entrepreneurs can’t be sentimental as well as ambitious?

Once Mr. Brown had read and digested “Organizing Genius,” a primer for progressive types who see innovations like eBay as business templates — “Beautiful” and “genius” are his words for eBay — he was on his way.

“When you go from being a lone entrepreneur into this kind of very public space you know your work is going to get reviews — good, bad, or indifferent, well, probably not indifferent,” says Mr. Brown, whose mission elicits the protest “Inappropriate!” from Luddites.

“The toughest thing in the world is to scale beyond yourself,” he says of his effort to help obliterate the digital divide in New York City, a place, he notes, that ought to be the wireless capital of the world but is not even in the running.

Mr. Brown’s attempt to plug into what he calls “neighborhood hot spots” has unfolded in fits, starts and setbacks since the city awarded him the parks contract in October 2004 after Verizon withdrew from the project.

Mr. Brown and the team of consultants who comprise Wi-Fi Salon — “I love technology, but I know this much about myself: I’m not detail-oriented enough to be a coder or an engineer” — are resigned to running “in the red” for the first half of what is essentially a three-year, $90,000 contract. Meaning, Wi-Fi is paying the city for the right to serve as its wireless conduit, with all 18 locations expected to be functional by the end of August. He admits it helps that his wife, Pauline, “is a high-powered corporate executive” at Avon. She supports his wireless dream so long as he doesn’t bring his gadgets along on vacations. Still, the arrangement with the city was in danger of falling apart after Wi-Fi’s initial sponsor reneged; a pact with Nokia, a Finnish manufacturer, salvaged the situation.

This month Wi-Fi Salon activated the first of its wireless “hot spots” in Battery Park, and Mr. Brown says the portal there will offer a historical slide show, a tour of the Dutch gardens, and a video-cam hookup to the Statue of Liberty. In Mr. Brown’s wireless neighborhoods, connectivity is accompanied by educational content.

“People ask me, ‘Why the heck are you doing this? There’s no business model for it,’ and I tell them, ‘That’s exactly why,’ ” he says. “We’re very much at the ‘Gee whiz’ phase of this technology.” But he predicts that by 2007, 100 million WiFi devices will be in use.

He does not apologize for interposing modern technology into classic parks: “I think we should pat everyone down for cellphones before they go into the park,” he jokes. “But we don’t. Technology is the new reality.” Which reminds him: high time to check his e-mail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/nyregion/14lives.html





U.S. Terror Targets: Petting Zoo and Flea Market?
Eric Lipton

It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.

“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”

But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.”

“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says.

In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”

Even people connected to some of those businesses or events are baffled at their inclusion as possible terrorist targets.

“Seems like someone has gone overboard,” said Larry Buss, who helps organize the Apple and Pork Festival in Clinton, Ill. “Their time could be spent better doing other things, like providing security for the country.”

Angela McNabb, manager of the Sweetwater Flea Market, which is 50 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., said: “I don’t know where they get their information. We are talking about a flea market here.”

New York City officials, who have questioned the rationale for the reduction in this year’s antiterrorism grants, were similarly blunt.

“Now we know why the Homeland Security grant formula came out as wacky as it was,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Tuesday. “This report is the smoking gun that thoroughly indicts the system.”

The source of the problems, the audit said, appears to be insufficient definitions or standards for inclusion provided to the states, which submit lists of locations for the database.

New York, for example, lists only 2 percent of the nation’s banking and finance sector assets, which ranks it between North Dakota and Missouri. Washington State lists nearly twice as many national monuments and icons as the District of Columbia.

Montana, one of the least populous states in the nation, turned up with far more assets than big-population states including Massachusetts, North Carolina and New Jersey.

The inspector general questions whether many of the sites listed in whole categories — like the 1,305 casinos, 163 water parks, 159 cruise ships, 244 jails, 3,773 malls, 718 mortuaries and 571 nursing homes — should even be included in the tally.

But the report also notes that the list “may have too few assets in essential areas.” It apparently does not include many major business and finance operations or critical national telecommunications hubs.

The department does not release the list of 77,069 sites, but the report said that as of January it included 17,327 commercial properties like office buildings, malls and shopping centers, 12,019 government facilities, 8,402 public health buildings, 7,889 power plants and 2,963 sites with chemical or hazardous materials.

George W. Foresman, the department’s under secretary for preparedness, said the audit misunderstood the purpose of the database, as it was an inventory or catalog of national assets, not a prioritized list of the most critical sites.The database is just one of many sources consulted in deciding antiterrorism grants.

The inspector general recommends that the department review the list and determine which of the “extremely insignificant” assets that have been included should remain and provide better guidance to states on what to submit in the future.

Mr. Agen, the Homeland Security Department spokesman, said that he agreed that his agency should provide better directions for the states and that it would do so in the future.

One business owner who learned from a reporter that a company named Amish Country Popcorn was on the list was at first puzzled. The businessman, Brian Lehman, said he owned the only operation in the country with that name.

“I am out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Lehman, whose business in Berne, Ind., has five employees and grows and distributes popcorn. “We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care.”

But on second thought, he came up with an explanation: “Maybe because popcorn explodes?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/wa.../12assets.html





Crow Believed to Be Oldest in World Dies
AP

There's no way to prove Tata was the world's oldest crow when he died Sunday at age 59. But an expert on crows says it's possible.

Tata's tale began in 1947 when a thunderstorm blew the fledgling out of his nest in a Long Island cemetery, a mishap that likely led to his long life. Injured and unable to fly, the bird was scooped up by a cemetery caretaker and brought to a local family with a reputation for taking care of animals, Tata's most recent owner, Kristine Flones, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston.

"He was never able to fly, so he became their family pet," said Flones, a wildlife rehabilitator in the Woodstock, N.Y., hamlet of Bearsville, 95 miles north of New York City.

The Manetta family took care of Tata for more than half a century but gave the bird to Flones in 2001 because of their own health problems.

Blinded by cataracts and 54 years old when she got him, Tata was still a wonderful pet, Flones said.

"When you came around him, his energy was very beautiful," she told the newspaper. "It was as if he were exuding or giving off a loving energy."

"It's an incredibly old bird," said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University who has studied crows for more than 20 years. "They don't live that old in the wild."

McGowan said the oldest living crow he has documented in the wild is a bird he banded as a fledgling and has tracked for 15 years. There is an unsubstantiated claim of a 29- or 30-year-old crow in the wild, but he knows of no older crows, tame or otherwise.

While claims of animal longevity are tough to verify, McGowan said, "This one sounded pretty reasonable to me."

In an environment without predators, communicable disease or the likelihood of a fatal accident, a crow could grow as old as Tata, he said.

Flones said Tata was still active and alert in his later years, to the point each spring that he called out from inside the house to crows outside, often loudly and beginning at 5 a.m.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2165981





The Continuing Adventures and Movie Cameos of Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane
Joe Rhodes


Jack Larson and Noel Neill

The flickering attention span of Hollywood, barely able to sustain itself from one big opening weekend to the next, has already moved on. All the prerelease debates about the cultural significance of “Superman Returns,” the first summer blockbuster of the year, about whether Superman might be gay, whether he’s a messiah figure, about what he represents in a post-9/11 world, are being replaced. Now there are conversations about Caribbean pirates and, soon enough, about the new James Bond, the new “Miami Vice,” the metaphysical implications of “Snakes on a Plane” and what there is to be learned from “Clerks II.”

Jack Larson and Noel Neill have been through this before, often enough over the last 50 years not to take it too seriously, infrequently enough to enjoy it when it comes. As the most lasting video incarnations of Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, Superman’s pal and gal, Mr. Larson, now 74, and Ms. Neill, 85, have inevitably been swept up in the buzz surrounding every new version of the Man of Steel. This has been happening since their 1950’s-epitomizing “truth, justice and the American way” television series, “The Adventures of Superman,” went off the air in 1958, its six-year run abruptly halted by the shooting death of its star, George Reeves, eventually ruled a suicide.

“Our George,” as Ms. Neill referred to him. “He will always be Superman to us.”

When that series ended, both Ms. Neill and Mr. Larson retreated from their acting careers for very different reasons, lured back into the spotlight only on those rare occasions when the producers of new “Superman” adaptations — films in the late 1970’s and early 80’s; cartoons; television versions like “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” and “Smallville” in the 90’s — would seek them out. They make cameo appearances in “Superman Returns,” directed by Bryan Singer, Ms. Neill as a wealthy widow whose deathbed scene is the opening act of the film, and Mr. Larson as a bow-tie-wearing bartender serving drinks to Jimmy Olsen (played this time by Sam Huntington) and Clark Kent.

“Bryan Singer has shown great respect for the entire Superman legend, for our television show, for Noel and for me,” Mr. Larson said, occasionally grasping Ms. Neill’s hand as they sat together recently in Patrick’s Roadhouse, a weathered, memorabilia-cluttered diner alongside the traffic-jammed Pacific Coast Highway, where Ms. Neill, who lives nearby, is a regular. “I was enormously moved and gratified by that.”

Mr. Singer offered casting invitations in person to Mr. Larson and Ms. Neill before “Superman Returns” began filming last year in Australia.

Ms. Neill, the daughter of a Minneapolis newspaper editor, was a little-known Paramount contract player on loan to Columbia in 1948 when she first played Lois Lane opposite Kirk Alyn in a 15-episode “Superman” serial and its 1950 sequel, “Atom Man Versus Superman.” Another actress (Phyllis Coates) played Lois in the first year of the television series, with Ms. Neill reclaiming the part in 1953. Ever since, she has been identified with the role, which she has embraced, frequently appearing at comic-book conventions and fan gatherings. In 2003 she was the subject of an authorized biography, “Truth, Justice and the American Way: The Life and Times of Noel Neill, the Original Lois Lane.”

Except for the occasional cameo (a brief scene in the 1978 “Superman” film, a 1991 appearance with Mr. Larson in the syndicated “Superboy” television series), Ms. Neill stopped acting after “The Adventures of Superman” ended.

“I just figured I’d worked enough, I didn’t have any great ambition,” she said, when asked why she’d walked away. “Basically, I’m a beach bum. I was married, we lived near the beach, that was enough for me.”

For Mr. Larson, it was more complicated. With dreams of being a playwright and Broadway actor, he had misgivings about even taking the Jimmy Olsen role. But, only 18, needing the money and convinced that the show would never take off, he signed on for 26 episodes, receiving at most $350 a show. A year later he was living in New York when the episodes began to be broadcast. His worst fears suddenly came true.

“To me, it was a nightmare,” he said. “Everywhere I went, it was, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy! Hey, Jimmy, where’s Superman?’ Suddenly, I couldn’t take the bus or the subway anymore. It absolutely freaked me out.”

Feeling as if he couldn’t be taken seriously in New York, Mr. Larson returned to Los Angeles and, thinking that he had no other options, to “The Adventures of Superman.” “I always loved doing the show, I loved the work,” he said. “I just didn’t love what it did to my career.”

After a particularly humiliating encounter with the producer Mervyn LeRoy in 1961 — “He started castigating the casting director right in front of me, saying, “I can’t have him in my film! He’s Jimmy Olsen!’ ” — Mr. Larson sought advice from his onetime lover, the actor Montgomery Clift. He remembers the meeting at the Bel Air Hotel.

“Monty said, ‘This is going to continue,’ ” Mr. Larson recalled. “ ‘Don’t put yourself in these situations anymore. You need to leave this behind.’ And that’s when I decided to quit acting.”

He focused instead on his writing, becoming an award-winning playwright and librettist, receiving the first Rockefeller Foundation grant ever awarded to a playwright. He collaborated with composers including Virgil Thomson, Irving Fine and Ned Rorem, and his rhymed verse plays were performed all over the world. He was also a producer on films like “The Paper Chase,” “Urban Cowboy” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” often working with his domestic partner, the director James Bridges, with whom he lived for 35 years before Mr. Bridges’s death in 1993.

It wasn’t until the late 1970’s that Mr. Larson became confident and relaxed enough to talk about the part that made him famous, to take pride in the work he had done.

He still doesn’t work the fan-club circuit in the way that Ms. Neill does. He would rather relax in his Brentwood, Calif., house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, than travel to face screaming admirers. He still can’t get over a visit to Cleveland in 1988 for the 50th anniversary of Superman’s comic book debut and “the thousands of people coming at us with pictures to autograph and Sharpie pens.”

“And I had this beautiful white linen suit from Venice, made at the Piazza San Marco,” Mr. Larson said. “The best cleaners in Brentwood couldn’t get the ink stains out of that suit.”

Ms. Neill laughed at his stories and told him he should join her on the road more often, even as she recounted the tale of the fan who came up to her at a convention and said, “Are you Lois Lane?”

“I sure hope so,” she told him. “That’s why I’m here.

“I just wanted you to know that when I was young, I would run home from school, turn on the TV set, crawl underneath and try to look up your dress.”

Mr. Larson said, “See, those are die-hard fans.”

They spent the better part of the afternoon together, he in his gold-and-white striped seersucker jacket, she with her silver hair flowing onto the shoulders of her bright yellow jacket, getting constant refills of sugary iced tea. They’ve been running into each other here before Patrick’s even existed, when the site was just a hamburger joint across from the beach where he used to surf and where she played volleyball and lounged. That was more than 50 years and a dozen Superman versions ago.

“People love the characters, they love the movies, they love seeing us,” Ms. Neill said. “So we must have done something right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/movies/13supe.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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