Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 29th, '06

[JackSpratts]

"So now we are on the floor with a piece of legislation poorly thought out, with an abundance of surprises, which carries with it that curious smell of partisanship and panic, but which is not going to address the problems. This is a piece of legislation which is going to be notorious for its ineffectiveness and, of course, for its political benefits to some of the members hereabout." – Rep. John Dingell, D-MI


"While the award may seem like a vast pot of money, it will merely offset the millions we have invested - and will continue to invest - in fighting illegal pirate operations around the world and protecting the works that our artists create." – David Munns


"I’ll fight to the death for writers…[They] are emotionally scarred by the fact that something was stolen from them. It means a piece of yourself was stolen." – John A. Marder


"To say these lawsuits are somehow a cancer on creativity is hogwash. I don’t know a single writer driving a Mercedes because he or she unfairly held up a studio for stealing their intellectual property." – Pierce O’Donnell


"This is what kills me about current rock radio. Nothing but cliches and jargon and attitude. No actual relating to a listeners life. Who are they targeting? The kids left long ago to their iPods and the Web. Obviously for good reasons." – Mike Lyons


"We don’t envision developing or building a new film camera." – Robert L. Beitcher CEO, Panavision


"感谢 Skype! 让超过1亿的人享用了她的P2P语音网络，包括我们团队的成员。 但是这只是现状而已，最好的还没出现呢." – Skype hackers


























Too Little

I had AOL dial-up years ago and paid something like $23.00/mo. In 2000 when I got DSL I considered dropping it but switched instead to the $9.99 Bring Your Own Access plan. My g/f was on AOL so it made sense at the time to keep some kind of an account, if nothing else than for her convenience. I might still have it but they raised the price 50% for no apparent reason, at least they didn't give me one. I called and asked. They said it was "a good value." But you’re no longer providing me with a dedicated line and furthermore I countered, when I log in from a subscriber’s house you charge me even more. "It’s a good value" they said. Right, but now it’s less so isn’t it? I explained this would cause them to lose my business and hemorrhage millions of other subscribers as more and more homes went broadband. They offered no compelling response. I said "Cancel." AOL had 30 million subscribers. They now have 17 million.

It’s a fatal mistake, this raising of prices when market share drops. Yet in addition to this there is also some perverse paralysis swirling through the executive suites of Time Warner. When Warners had number one Atari they blew it utterly. They then blew the label. Now they’ve blown the biggest internet subscriber base in the world. In desperation they’re mulling over giving away AOL access for free yet such is the state of the product that what once would’ve been a marketing masterstroke is greeted with a shrug.

Too Late

No doubt they’ve been coveting all that advertising loot flowing into Yahoogle and I wish them well with their free, ad supported revenue experiment if that’s the way they go but I just can’t help wondering if the party will be over before they find their dance partner. Pre and post merger AOL made so many strategic blunders that their very corporate karma may have been damaged to the point of dysfunction. The days of people freezing in place for fear of losing an email addy are vanishing, and serverless open source IM’ing is here for the taking with portable accounts bound to nothing save one’s own identity. The paternalistic hand-holding that led to a great community and an even greater business model is now a somewhat embarrassing memory and as the number of noobs continues to dwindle salvation won’t be coming from that direction.

If AOL is to simply survive they’ll need to give users a whole new reason for eyeballing the site. Savvy surfers aren’t afraid of the big ol www anymore and all that hand holding that got them across the street just holds them back now. If the corporation hopes to thrive, and that is what investors demand after all, it will require nothing less than the reinvention of the company and with it the very concept of the portal, one that goes way beyond the old model of a safe but separate internet. With glaringly rare exception the one stop shop is obsolete. There are indeed those atypical cultural phenomena like MySpace, but as hot as it is now the yearly income running into that singular teen hangout probably couldn’t support AOL’s payroll for an afternoon.

This is a company at a precipice; it’s more than just at the end of an era. More than likely it’s the end of AOL, at least in any form that’s recognizable today. The new site won’t be your mommy’s AOL, but fee-based or free, unless it thoroughly reengineers itself inside and out and from top to bottom, it may not be your daughter’s either.













Enjoy,

Jack

















July 29th, '06






Control

Chat Rooms Could Face Expulsion
Declan McCullagh

Web sites like Amazon.com and MySpace.com may soon be inaccessible for many people using public terminals at American schools and libraries, thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives.

By a 410-15 vote on Thursday, politicians approved a bill that would effectively require that "chat rooms" and "social networking sites" be rendered inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the Internet's most ardent users. Adults can ask for permission to access the sites.

"Social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids," said Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and co-founder of the Congressional Victim's Rights Caucus. "This bill requires schools and libraries to establish (important) protections."

Even though politicians apparently meant to restrict access to MySpace, the definition of off-limits Web sites is so broad the bill would probably sweep in thousands of commercial Web sites that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow "communication among users." Details will be left up to the Federal Communications Commission.

The list could include Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon, which allows author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, many media companies, such as News.com publisher CNET Networks, permit users to create profiles of favorite games and music.

"While targeted at MySpace, the effects are far more wide-ranging than that, including sites like LinkedIn," said Mark Blafkin, a representative of the Association for Competitive Technology, which counts small- to medium-size technology companies as members. "Nearly any news site now permits these types of behaviors that the bill covers."

House Republicans have enlisted the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA, as part of a poll-driven effort to address topics that they view as important to suburban voters in advance of November's elections. Republican pollster John McLaughlin surveyed 22 suburban districts and presented his research at a retreat earlier this year. DOPA was part of the result.

Defining off-limits sites

DOPA does not define "chat rooms" or "social networking sites" and leaves that up to the Federal Communications Commission. It does offer the FCC some guidance on defining social networking sites (though not chat rooms):

"In determining the definition of a social networking Web site, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a Web site--

(i) is offered by a commercial entity;

(ii) permits registered users to create an online profile that includes detailed personal information;

(iii) permits registered users to create an online journal and share such a journal with other users;

(iv) elicits highly personalized information from users; and

(v) enables communication among users."

"Social networking sites, best known by the popular examples of MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, have literally exploded in popularity in just a few short years," said Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of DOPA's original sponsors. Now, he added, those Web sites "have become a haven for online sexual predators who have made these corners of the Web their own virtual hunting ground."

Fitzpatrick's re-election campaign is one reason why the Republican leadership, which is worried about retaining their slender House majority, arranged a vote on DOPA. Fitzpatrick, who represents a politically moderate district outside of Philadelphia, has found himself in a tight race against challenger Patrick Murphy, an Iraq War veteran and prosecutor.

Technology lobbying groups, which were taken by surprise by this week's speedy approval of DOPA in the House, are now scrambling to throw up roadblocks to the measure in the Senate. Some expect that the Senate leadership will hold a vote as early as next week. (Libraries also oppose the measure.)

"This bill is well-intentioned, but it is highly overbroad and would create big obstacles to accessing sites that pose no risk to children," said Jim Halpert, a partner at law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, who is the general counsel for the Internet Commerce Coalition.

In a statement earlier this month, a representative of MySpace--now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.--stressed that the company has taken steps this year to assuage concerns among parents and politicians. It has assigned some 100 employees, about one-third of its work force, to deal with security and customer care, and hired Hemanshu (Hemu) Nigam, a former Justice Department prosecutor, as its chief security officer.

DOPA has changed since an earlier version dated May 9. The version approved by the House (click here for PDF) does not define "chat rooms" and gives more leeway to the FCC in devising a category of verboten Web sites.

Both versions apply only to schools and libraries that accept federal funding, which the American Library Association estimates covers at least two-thirds of libraries. By slapping additional regulations on "e-rate" federal funding, DOPA effectively expands an earlier law called the Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires libraries to filter sexually explicit material and which the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional in 2003.

Opponents of DOPA said during the debate that it was rushed through the political process--it was, they said, rewritten on Wednesday night and had not even been approved by a congressional committee.

"So now we are on the floor with a piece of legislation poorly thought out, with an abundance of surprises, which carries with it that curious smell of partisanship and panic, but which is not going to address the problems," said Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat. "This is a piece of legislation which is going to be notorious for its ineffectiveness and, of course, for its political benefits to some of the members hereabout."
http://news.com.com/Chat+rooms+could...3-6099414.html





Time to let go?

United States Cedes Control Of The Internet - But What Now?

Review of an extraordinary meeting
Kieren McCarthy

In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.

Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organisation ICANN, making the organisation a more international body.

However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net's root zone file - at least in the medium-term.

"The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated: the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root," Kneuer explained following an afternoon of explicit statements from US-friendly organisations and individuals that it was no longer viable for one government to retain such power over the future of a global resource.

Despite the sentiments, however, it was apparent from the carefully selected panel and audience members that the internet - despite its global reach - remains an English-speaking possession. Not one of the 11 panel members, nor any of the 22 people that spoke during the meeting, had anything but English as their first language.

While talk centered on the future of the internet and its tremendous global influence, the people that sat there discussing it represented only a tiny minority of those that now use the internet every day. Reflections on the difficulty of expanding the current internet governance mechanisms to encompass the global audience inadvertently highlighted the very parochialism of those that currently form the ICANN in-crowd.

When historians come to review events in Washington on 26 July 2006, they will no doubt be reminded of discussions in previous centuries over why individual citizens should be given a vote. Or, perhaps, why landowners or the educated classes shouldn't be given more votes than the masses.

There was talk of voting rights, or what the point was of including more people in ICANN processes, and even how people could be educated sufficiently before they were allowed to interact with the existing processes.

Ironically, it was ICANN CEO Paul Twomey who most accurately put his finger on what had to be done. One of the most valuable realisations that ICANN has ever come to, he noted, was that when it revamped itself last time, it recognised it hadn't got it right. Even more importantly, Twomey noted, was the fact the organisation recognised that "it would never get it right. And so ICANN put a review mechanism into its bylaws".

The reason Twomey's observations are particularly noteworthy is that it is Paul Twomey himself who has consistently - and deliberately - failed to open ICANN up, keeping meetings secret, and refusing to release information about discussions either before a meeting and, in some cases, after the meeting.

A stark warning came from the Canadian government - the only government except for the US government invited to speak. Recent arrival, but highly knowledgeable representative, Bill Graham was extraordinarily clear. "It is time for ICANN to recognise that it is in many ways a quasi-judicial body and it must begin to behave that way," he said.

"The ICANN board needs to provide adequate minutes of all its meetings. There needs to be a notice of what issues will be considered, and the timeframe when a decision is made. A written document needs to be posted setting out the background and context of the issues. There needs to be an acknowledgment and a summary of the positions put forward by various interested parties; there needs to be an analysis of the issues; there needs to be an explanation of the decisions and the reasons for it; and ultimately there needs to be a mechanism for the board to be held accountable by its community."

Everyone recognised the meeting as an historic turning point in the future of the internet, causing a strange amount of one-upmanship among those taking part, most of it covering how long they had been involved with ICANN. Paul Twomey referred to the Berlin meeting (1999); an irregular ICANN contributor (on the panel thanks to US governmental influence) spoke of "being there before ICANN was even created". The swagger got so bad that several well-informed contributors were forced to apologise because they had only been to three ICANN meetings.

Ultimately, what came out of a gathering of the (English-speaking) great and the good regarding the internet was two things:

That the US government recognises it has to transition its role if it wants to keep the internet in one piece (and it then has to sell that decision to a mindlessly patriotic electorate)

That ICANN has to open up and allow more people to decide its course if it is going to be allowed to become the internet's main overseeing organisation

If you ignore the fact that the conversation only happened within a tiny subset of the people that actually use the internet, everyone can feel quite content in walking away feeling that at least people now understand their point of view.

As a rare non-US contributor, Emily Taylor, Nominet's lawyer, UK citizen, and a member of the IGF Advisory Group told us she felt that "the fact that the meeting took place was as valuable as anything that was discussed".

That much is certainly true. The US has recognised that it can no longer hope to control the internet. The next step is for everyone invited into the party this time to recognise that they too play only a small role in the global revolution that is this jumble of interconnected computer networks.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07...icann_meeting/





Not so fast pal

US to Continue Its Control Over ICANN
Eric Bangeman

Over the past couple of years, the issue of Internet governance has become a hot topic. Currently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for parceling out IP addresses and domain names. In turn, ICANN operates under the auspices of the US Commerce Department, an arrangement that doesn't sit too well with parts of Europe, the UN, and many developing nations.

Contrary to some reports, things are not about to change. After a meeting at the Commerce Department, Acting Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, John M.R. Kneuer, said that the existing arrangement was likely to continue, at least for another year. "There certainly are still strong arguments that there's more work to be done," said Kneuer.

When ICANN was created in 1998, the US government intended for it to be fully privatized by 2000. However, that has failed to happen for a couple of reasons, namely a reluctance on the part of the US to let go control and ICANN's inability to meet some performance benchmarks.

At last fall's World Summit on the Information Society, attendees called for international control of the Internet. What would constitute an ideal alternative to US control differs depending on who one asks. The European Union is on record as desiring a public-private partnership; nations such as Iran, China, and Cuba would like to see "anyone but the US"; and another bloc of countries prefer UN oversight, perhaps via the century-old International Telegraph Union.

Kneuer did reiterate the US government's commitment to ultimately relinquishing control over ICANN, saying that "that we're all gathered here today and we've undertaken this process is a clear indication that we are committed to this transition." That's a big change from last summer, when the Commerce Department declared that it would "retain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file" while reiterating its stance against interfering in how other countries handle their own top-level domains.

So for now, it looks as though the status quo wins out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7366.html





Topping off the RI/MPAA war chest

Makers of 'Kazaa' Settle Piracy Suits
Ted Bridis

The company behind software called "Kazaa," which made it simple for millions of computer users to download music and movies over the Internet, has agreed to pay more than $115 million to the entertainment industry to settle global piracy lawsuits, the industry said Thursday.

Sharman Networks Ltd., which produced and distributed the popular Kazaa software, also promised to "use all reasonable means" to discourage online piracy, including building into its software "robust and secure" ways to frustrate computer users who try to find and download copyrighted music and movies, court papers said.

The settlement included payment of $115 million to music companies and a lesser amount to the movie industry, said people familiar with those provisions. They agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because some provisions were included in secret agreements not disclosed in the public court papers. Sharman Networks has already paid nearly all the money to the entertainment industry, these people said.

"While the award may seem like a vast pot of money, it will merely offset the millions we have invested - and will continue to invest - in fighting illegal pirate operations around the world and protecting the works that our artists create," said the vice chairman for EMI Music, David Munns.

The settlement concludes legal battles against Sharman Networks around the world. Sharman Networks has boasted that its Kazaa software was downloaded more than 389 million times, and the company operated the underlying "Fast Track" file-sharing network that connected tens of millions of personal computers.

It was not immediately clear how or when Sharman Networks will impose filters to frustrate its customers from distributing copyrighted files illegally. Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" and Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" - two popular, modern hits - were available on Sharman's network without cost hours after the settlement was announced.

"Services based on theft are going legit or going under, and a legal marketplace is showing real promise," said Mitch Bainwol, head of the Washington-based Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest labels.

The head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Dan Glickman, called the settlement an important victory in a historic legal case.

Sharman Networks indicated it will negotiate licenses with entertainment companies to distribute music and movies lawfully over its Kazaa service, similar to Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service. The settlement does not prohibit Sharman Networks from legally distributing copyrighted files.

The chief executive of Sharman Networks, Nikki Hemming, said the settlement "marks the dawn of a new age of cooperation" between file-sharing services and the entertainment industry. "This settlement ensures that we will be working together with the content providers to the benefit of consumers, businesses and artists," she said.

The Supreme Court ruled last year the entertainment industry can file piracy lawsuits against technology companies caught encouraging customers to steal music and movies over the Internet. Earlier this month, in a related federal lawsuit, a U.S. judge said evidence was "overwhelming" against StreamCast Inc., which produced similar software called "Morpheus" for downloading music and movies.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-10-09-55





‘Crash’ Principals Still Await Payments for Their Work
Sharon Waxman

When a movie costs $7.5 million to make and takes in $180 million around the world, it seems logical to think that the people who created the film would have become very rich.

With “Crash,” this year’s Oscar winner for best picture and last year’s sleeper hit at the box office, that has not been the case.

The movie’s co-writer and director, Paul Haggis, has so far made less than $300,000 on the film, a pittance by Hollywood standards. The eight principal actors in “Crash,” including Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle, have been expecting large checks for months, after deferring their usual fees in exchange for a percentage of the film’s profits. Recently, their representatives say, they each received checks for $19,000.

The wheels of Hollywood’s money machine always turn too slowly for profit participants, players who agree to take a slice of a film’s revenues in lieu of large salaries up front.

But the pace of payments on “Crash” has especially disappointed those who deferred and reduced their salaries in 2004 to get the movie made.

The pressure has led Lionsgate, the domestic distributor of “Crash,” to try to broker a deal to advance payments to Mr. Cheadle and Mr. Haggis, in the interest of maintaining good relations.

That deal has so far faltered and is contributing to tensions between the cast, producers, writers and director of the film on one side, and Bob Yari, the producer and financier in charge of disbursing payments, on the other. In particular, representatives for Mr. Cheadle, a producer and leading actor on the film; Mr. Dillon; Mr. Haggis; and his co-writer Bobby Moresco have been pressing for explanations as to why payments are so slow in coming.

“We haven’t audited, so we can’t tell if it’s right or wrong,” said Peter Dekom, the lawyer for Mr. Haggis and Mark Harris, another producer, who said he had recently hired an accountant to conduct an audit. “But it’s always a big deal when you go out in the world, and you look at the video units sold, the $55 million of domestic box office, the fact that the movie’s doing well overseas, and then you look at the accounting statements, and it’s Hollywood accounting.”

Mr. Yari, a relative newcomer to Hollywood — “Crash” was his first major hit — said he was aware of the dissatisfaction, but that he was completely up to date on payments.

“They have been correctly paid,” he said in a recent interview. “They will be paid more. This is the process. We’ve done everything aboveboard. If we wanted to not pay people and have them sue us, we wouldn’t pay them at all.”

Mr. Yari said that monies collected from Lionsgate went into a fund before being disbursed, further delaying payment to profit participants, and that little money had come in from foreign distributors, though the film long ago ended most of its theatrical runs. He also said that Lionsgate, which has so far paid him slightly more than $10 million, owes him another $10 million. A Lionsgate executive said that a large sum was expected in the fall when the studio’s pay-television deal with Showtime yields revenues.

The rising tension is the latest knot in a tangle of strained relations over “Crash,” a movie about racial tension in the traffic-clogged sprawl of Los Angeles. Mr. Yari has sued two of his co-producers, Cathy Schulman and Tom Nunan, for breach of contract, while they have countersued for fraud and a similar breach. A lawyer for Ms. Schulman said she and Mr. Nunan have been paid no producer fees as yet.

“We certainly haven’t been paid on ‘Crash,’ we haven’t even seen a statement, and you’d think we’d see that,” said Melvin Avanzado, Ms. Schulman’s lawyer. “Everyone is chomping at the bit because the movie’s a success.”

A lawsuit filed by Mr. Yari against the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over their procedures for assigning producing credits was recently dismissed, though Mr. Yari has said that he intends to pursue the case further.

Mr. Yari is also in an accounting dispute with one of two central financiers of “Crash,” DEJ Productions, which is now owned by First Look Studios.

“We’ve amicably exchanged statements, and we believe we need to go to an audit,” said Henry Winterstern, the chief executive of First Look. He said that Mr. Yari owed him money from an earlier movie, “Matador.” Mr. Yari said he knew that DEJ was “unhappy.”

In Hollywood it is not unusual for squabbles to erupt over dividing the spoils when a small film becomes a very big hit. But part of what is creating bruised feelings with “Crash” is the sense among the starring cast members that their initial sacrifice has not been acknowledged with a gesture, whatever the precise state of collection accounts.

“You’d think that for a movie that won best picture, what you would do is write the actors a check against their profits, or you give them a car, or something,” said a representative for one of the leading actors, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his client had barred him from speaking on the record. “That would be the classy thing to do.” He added: “The money is dribbling in. It’s almost offensive how little money it is.”

The deal to advance money to Mr. Haggis and others has stalled because Mr. Yari declined to give a letter agreeing that payments be directed to the creative talent, according to a Lionsgate executive. Mr. Yari said he did not know Lionsgate required such a letter.

Documents show, and the principals’ representatives say, that so far none of the profit participants has received more than a low six-figure sum for their work. Moreover, Mr. Haggis and Mr. Moresco were both in dire financial straits when they made the movie in 2004, but deferred their salaries — about $94,000 and $47,000, respectively — to gain approval to move ahead on the film. The deferred salaries were paid in the middle of 2005, after the film broke even, and the money made its way through the accounting system.

But by the time the Academy Awards rolled around in early March, Mr. Moresco and his wife, Barbara, for example, were still short of cash, living in a rented house in Burbank, Calif. Mr. Moresco and Mr. Haggis both declined to comment for this article.

“Crash” has taken in $55 million at the domestic box office and $39 million in foreign box office sales. It has sold 5 million units — about $85 million worth — of DVD’s.

Mr. Yari raised a large part of the production budget from a German tax fund, the rest from banks and with guarantees for video distribution from DEJ. After seeing the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival in fall 2004, Lionsgate bought all domestic distribution rights for $3.3 million, with premiums added should “Crash” become a hit.

The principal players who deferred and reduced their salaries are due from 2 to 4 percent of Mr. Yari’s profit pool, according to people familiar with the deal. The percentages are tied to tiered benchmarks of the film’s revenues.

Mr. Yari said that payments had been slowed by the fact that the German tax fund had to approve them, which had added months to the process.

But Mr. Dekom, the lawyer for Mr. Haggis, said he believed that Mr. Yari had more money than had been paid out. “To the extent that Bob Yari is sitting on cash and not disbursing it to people who put their hearts and souls into the movie, that would be wrong,” he said. “At the very least they should accelerate payment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/movies/25movi.html





Lawyer Is Upping the Ante in Claims of Idea Theft in Hollywood
Allison Hope Weiner

In December the screenwriters Aaron and Matthew Benay filed a lawsuit here accusing Warner Brothers and others of stealing the idea for “The Last Samurai” from their screenplay of the same name. Three months later, another writer, Reed Martin, sued Focus Features and the director Jim Jarmusch, among others, saying they lifted “Broken Flowers” from his work. Shortly before that, yet another aggrieved writer, Maurice Fraser, filed suit against NBC Universal, saying it had taken the concept for its upcoming reality show “World Vision: An American Anthem” from his pitch “Battle of the States.”

What the three legal actions share — other than the writers’ not uncommon belief that someone in Hollywood has robbed them — is a connection to John A. Marder, a lawyer who has been quietly upping the ante when it comes to messy accusations of idea theft.
The latest in a long line of gadflies who contend that it’s their job to keep the studios honest, Mr. Marder has spent the last two years capitalizing on having won a federal appeals court decision that makes it easier for writers who pitch an idea or circulate a script to make a claim of theft stick.

The decision, in a case in 2004 called Jeff Grosso v. Miramax Film Corporation, held that studios, producers and anyone else who considers an idea offered for sale can’t rely on the federal Copyright Act in fighting claims that they have entered under an implied contract to buy it for fair value if it’s found acceptable. That ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California, gave writers a way to sidestep the difficulties of a copyright claim — and opened the door to a growing stack of suits that are keeping Hollywood’s legal machinery even busier than usual.

“It’s made things incrementally worse, but things were bad to begin with,” said George Hedges, a lawyer who represents Warner in the “Last Samurai” case.

As Mr. Hedges sees it, the Grosso ruling did not so much revolutionize entertainment law as give unfortunate encouragement to those who come out of the woodwork claiming theft after any major film release. “There’s nothing more bitter than a scorned writer,” he said. “They are so frustrated with the environment and their inability to get projects sold, and they have this desperate quality to them.”

For Mr. Marder and his colleagues at the Manning & Marder, Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez firm, however, the pursuit of claims based on the Grosso ruling is shaping up as something of a crusade on behalf of the perennially oppressed.

“I’ll fight to the death for writers, and I know this part of the law better than anybody,” Mr. Marder said during an interview at his firm’s Art Deco offices in downtown Los Angeles. About the bitterness, at least, he agreed with Mr. Hedges.

“The people I deal with are emotionally scarred by the fact that something was stolen from them,” Mr. Marder said. “It means a piece of yourself was stolen.”

Oddly enough, Miramax appears to have won the Grosso case when a state court judge earlier this month threw out a claim that a pair of writers had stolen the idea for the movie “Rounders” from the writer Jeff Grosso’s 1995 screenplay “The Shell Game.” But Mr. Marder said he expected to appeal that decision. And his earlier victory in the appeals court laid down a principle that has complicated an already tense relationship between those who write for the screen and those who buy their wares.

In an unsuccessful brief opposing the 2004 appellate decision, one lawyer went so far as to predict that studios might close the door to all but well-known insiders. “Companies engaged in the development of entertainment programs may well find it necessary to refuse all contact or submissions from unknown writers — chilling the exchange of ideas, limiting the career prospects of many aspiring authors and potentially depriving the public of the production of new programs,” wrote Kelly Sager on behalf of Viacom Inc., parent to Paramount Pictures and other entertainment operations.

“To say these lawsuits are somehow a cancer on creativity is hogwash,” countered Pierce O’Donnell, another gadfly lawyer who made his mark by successfully suing Paramount for having lifted the idea for its 1988 movie “Coming to America” from the columnist Art Buchwald. “I don’t know a single writer driving a Mercedes because he or she unfairly held up a studio for stealing their intellectual property.”

Mr. O’Donnell eventually wound up adding MGM and other studios to his client list — something Mr. Marder, who relishes his role as an industry outsider, said he would never do. “I don’t socialize with them, and I can’t be bought,” he said. “All these guys are saying that I’m not in their club, and they’re right.”

Mr. Marder, 46, was born in Massachusetts but grew up in Athens after his father was appointed the military attaché to the United States Embassy. “My dad’s predecessor had been assassinated by Greek terrorists, so we always had bodyguards in front of our house growing up,” Mr. Marder recalled of the 18 years he spent in Athens. Mr. Marder, who speaks fluent Greek, attended the American Community School, where he became lifelong friends with the actor Greg Kinnear.

Sixteen years ago, Mr. Marder began carving a niche among unhappy writers by representing Mr. Kinnear in his lawsuit against the American Broadcasting Company, alleging that the network had stolen the idea for the hit television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos” from him. “Greg is a very level guy, but I have never seen him more emotionally upset than by what happened with ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos,’ ” Mr. Marder said. “We eventually won on appeal. The case was similar to Grosso, but there wasn’t the same effect because it was never published.”

Some industry lawyers have recently tried to minimize the impact of what has become Mr. Marder’s signature case — and, indeed, the lawyer is almost certainly facing a long fight in the “Last Samurai,” “Broken Flowers” and “World Vision” suits, all of which are being vigorously opposed.

“I haven’t seen that it makes any practical difference,” said Lou Petrich, the lawyer for Miramax who got the Grosso case dismissed this month. “I acknowledge that after the Ninth Circuit decision there was a lot of talk that the sky was falling, but it hasn’t so far.”

But Mr. Marder believes otherwise, saying the number of claims speaks for itself. “There’s a problem with the system when every time the studios release a movie, they get a bunch of claims,” he said. “There can’t be that many crazy people in the country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/movies/27gadf.html





Shawn Hogan, Hero
David Goldenberg

Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.

Now he’s embroiled in a surprisingly rare situation – a drawn-out legal fight with the MPAA. The organization and its music cousin, the Recording Industry Association of America, have filed thousands of similar lawsuits between them, but largely because of the legal costs few have been contested and none have gone to trial. This has left several controversies unresolved, including the lawfulness of how the associations get access to ISP records and whether it’s possible to definitively tie a person to an IP address in the age of Wi-Fi.

Hogan, who coded his way to millions as the CEO of Digital Point Solutions, is determined to change this. Though he expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”

Of course, the MPAA isn’t backing down either. “I hear Mr. Hogan has said, ‘I’m absolutely going to go to trial,’ and that is his prerogative,” says John G. Malcolm, the MPAA’s head of antipiracy. “We look forward to addressing his issues in a court of law.” Look for a jury to weigh in by next summer.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/start.html?pg=3





Pirates of the European II: The Empire Strikes Back
Waldemar Ingdahl

May 31st has become a landmark date in the history of the intellectual property debate. On that day police in Stockholm raided the server of The Pirate Bay, an infamous source of pirated films, music, computer games, software and media. The site provided torrent files- merely pointers to sources of data but without copyright themselves -- a practice that, though disputed, is still legal in Sweden. The loophole had allowed the Pirate Bay to avoid the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) crackdown on torrent hubs in 2004. Sweden's current move was precipitated by a threat from the US State Department to bring the issue to the World Trade Organization.

The raid set off a major debate in Sweden, and it was well covered in other European countries, as Sweden has become the epicenter of ideological resistance to intellectual property in its present form.

Sweden's high proportion of Internet connected citizens, with 10 percent of the population participating in file sharing in the last quarter of 2005, according to Statistics Sweden (www.scb.se), proved fertile ground for the IP-critical movement. The Pirate Bay sparked the creation of a network of file-sharing supporters called the Pirate Bureau (Piratbyrån). The Pirate Bureau was formed as network, providing a place for discussion in which surprisingly often people from both the left and the right of the political spectrum found themselves united in criticism of intellectual property protections.

In January this year, the Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) was formed, with an aim of competing in this September's parliamentary elections. At first, it appeared it would be a small and obscure party that no one seriously would consider anything more than a student prank. The initial party program called for the complete abolition of all protection for patents and creative work, but the revised platform now calls for IP protection to last for a period of registration of 5 years.

The Pirate Party engaged in the public debate -- quite vociferously -- but gained little ground. The police raid changed all that.

Suddenly the PlayStation generation, considered completely apolitical by most pundits, took to the streets by the thousands in Stockholm and Gothenburg under the Jolly Roger. The Pirate Party's membership more than tripled in the course of a few weeks, from 2,200 to 7,400 today (outnumbering the membership of the Green Party, for instance). The sleepy election campaign, which everyone thought would be about minimal changes in Sweden's massive welfare state, suddenly shifted to a discussion regarding the very fabric of the information society.

Politicians in the established parties were terrified; a policy issue they had considered second-rate at best was mobilizing the public, and they lacked a proper platform of their own. In an opinion poll conducted by the newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, some 75 percent of all first-time voters said file-sharing is OK "even if illegal".

"Let us show that we are at current with our times," said the Conservative Party's leader Fredrik Reinfeldt in an interview on Swedish public service television. He added that "we cannot hunt down an entire generation of youths." The former communist party followed suit, with its leader Lars Ohly indicating that it never was the law's purpose to "hunt down regular people".

So, during June and July, the established parties gradually started to move their opinions in the Pirate Party's direction. Will it be a temporary flirtation with a seemingly pirate-friendly electorate? Won't this trend simply be reversed after Election Day? After all, Sweden isn't about to start flouting WTO rules.

Perhaps that's true, but some changes in official policy have already taken place. Sweden, together with Norway and Denmark, have already required Apple to make music downloaded via its proprietary iTunes program playable on competitors' hardware. Finland is also considering this demand.

Before the rise of the Pirate Party, the Swedish IP debate was conducted on two different levels: a legal-political level and a technical level. On the political level companies and governments dominated the discussions and instituted legislation without much involvement from other parties. On the technical level, the easy dissemination of content and the complexity of the Internet made it very difficult to uphold and enforce the laws. The result of these two parallel debates was the forming of a huge rift and an unfortunate imbalance between law and actual practice. In reality, legal and technical issues are intimately connected, and the key to successful policies is to use the expertise of both sides, especially as it is relatively easy to get technically inexperienced lawyers and legally inexperienced technicians to agree on issues they would never have considered if they had not collaborated. The problem for the content industry and for those understanding the value of IP is that the common ground for the two parties was anti-IP sentiments.

The crackdown on The Pirate Bay in Stockholm turned into a setback for the public image of IP. Aside from legal question marks being discussed about how the raid was conducted, it was not very efficient in shutting down The Pirate Bay's bittorrent activity, which is once again up and running.

The Pirate movement has been strengthened. Italy, Norway, Poland and recently the United States have also seen the formation of Pirate Parties, inspired by the Swedish predecessor's success. What happens in Sweden is now closely monitored by many in the anti-IP movement.

But the Pirate Party does not have to win elections to influence the political debate. For them it is enough to be the driving force and to propose solutions to the issues. Crackdowns on pirate servers do not foster legitimacy for IP in the long run. It is therefore of great importance to rekindle the debate on IP by communicating the values of the market economy, entrepreneurship and private property and to explain how it benefits society as a whole.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=072006B





Bar Finds Itself In Court Over Karaoke Songs
AP

Karaoke night sounded a sour note for a Syracuse bar that is being sued in federal court for using unlicensed songs.

"We're small potatoes," said Mark Bullis, one of the owners of the Bull & Bear Pub in Syracuse.

"This is unbelievable to me. It almost feels like extortion. We're being bullied into this, and it's just ridiculous. It's the little guy getting beat up by the big guy," he said.

In a lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers claimed that the bar violated copyright laws. ASCAP lawyer Michael Sciotti said the bar had plenty of warnings since it opened in 2002.

"There were 27 contacts before it got to me," he said. "We bend over backward to educate businesses and answer questions and most comply voluntarily. Thousands of businesses do it with no problem."

ASCAP lawyers filed the lawsuit after a private investigator hired by the organization attended a karaoke night at the bar and wrote down the names of songs the singers were performing. Any public performance of copyrighted songs requires the venue to have a license to use the tunes, the lawsuit said.

The investigator said the bar allowed at least five songs to be played that it didn't have a license to use.

Sciotti said the licensing fees would have cost a total of $3,500 for the past five years.

In the lawsuit, ASCAP requested that the pub stop hosting karaoke nights and pay from $750 to $30,000 for each violation.

"It does have to hurt a little bit," Sciotti said. "Otherwise, what's the incentive for bars to comply with copyright laws?"

Bullis said he feels his business was unfairly singled out. He said the pub will not offer karaoke again until this case is resolved. The lawsuit could drive him out of business, he said.

"Of the 60 songs they might sing - and probably poorly - only five were on their list?" Bullis said. "This is a shame."

A hearing is scheduled Oct. 26 before U.S. Magistrate Gustave DiBianco.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Napster Founder Enables Unprotected MP3s on MySpace
David Berlind

One week after Yahoo! started selling unencrypted, unprotected, and personalized (with your name) Jessica Simpson MP3s on its music site (flying in the face of DRM), Napster founder Sean Fanning is at it again, this time with his Snocap service which enables artists to sell similarly unprotected MP3s through sites like MySpace. Reported Reuters of the new service:

Snocap's Linx service is also designed to let online retailers sell music from the company's vast registry of songs. It has distribution deals with Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music, along with a number of independent labels….One band, The Format, is already selling music using Linx on its MySpace page.

Actually, it's the independents that will really benefit from MySpace as a sales channel (while the traditional labels go the iTunes, etc. route). While I don't believe were at a tipping point yet, the idea of commerce-enabling MySpace for music sales could position indies for an interesting offensive against the entertainment establishment. And, with no DRM, it's definitely a step in the right direction.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3388





Time Warner Board Mulls AOL Plan
Kenneth Li

Time Warner Inc.'s board of directors met on Thursday to hear a proposal to save its AOL online unit, and approved a plan to raise its cash dividend by 10 percent, or half a penny.

Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's chief operating officer, presented a new strategy for AOL to the board, but a decision has not been reached, said a source familiar with the proceedings.

Time Warner announced a higher cash dividend in a statement after the board meeting, but made no mention of AOL.

Sources have said AOL was considering offering its e-mail and other Web services for free as a way to retain subscribers it would have otherwise lost to rivals. The plan is considered risky as AOL depends on subscriptions for 80 percent of sales.

The world's largest media company has said it will present a new strategy for AOL to investors and the media on Aug. 2, after it reports its second quarter financial results.

Bewkes is widely viewed as the heir apparent to the top job at the company, now held by Chief Executive Richard Parsons.

Transforming AOL from a has-been on the Internet to a significant player against rival and partner Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. is viewed as a critical test for Bewkes.

The new strategy, along with other features such as a growing online video service, aims to boost online advertising sales. AOL executives were emboldened by a 26 percent rise in online advertising sales in the first quarter, sources have said.

E-mail has been one of the Internet's top traffic generators and was also one of the biggest reasons why subscribers continued to pay AOL for the privilege of keeping e-mail addresses they had owned for years.

The plan was presented by AOL CEO Jonathan Miller to Bewkes several weeks ago, sources have said.

Analysts and investors have said the key issue was whether the company could offset a sudden decline in revenue and profit with its new plan, which they expected could stabilize operating profit over the long term.

Time Warner said it will pay a 5.5 cents per share cash dividend on Sept. 15 to holders of record as of Aug. 31. "We're pleased that Time Warner's financial strength has enabled us to increase our dividend, reflecting our confidence in our future prospects and our ongoing commitment to return value directly to shareholders," Parsons said in the statement.
http://today.reuters.com/stocks/Quot...E-1.XML&rpc=66





U.S. Broadband Adoption Jumps 33 Percent in 2005

U.S. high-speed Internet subscriptions soared 33 percent last year to 50.2 million lines, according to the latest data released by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday.

More consumers signed up for digital subscriber line (DSL) service from telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon Communications than cable modem service from companies like Comcast and Time Warner, the FCC said.

DSL subscriptions jumped to 5.7 million lines versus cable companies' 4.2 million subscribers in 2005, according to the FCC. The cable industry's market share dropped 3.5 percentage points to 57.5 percent, while DSL gained 3.3 percentage points to reach 40.5, the agency said.

DSL is typically less expensive than cable Internet service but offers slower download speeds.

The United States is ranked 12th in the world for broadband subscribers behind countries including Iceland, South Korea and Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's most recent rankings.

U.S. officials have attributed the low ranking to other countries subsidizing the cost and because some of those nations have concentrated population centers that are easier to serve.

An estimated 42 percent of Americans had high-speed Internet access at home in March 2006, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That was up from 30 percent of Americans with high-speed access one year earlier, it said.

U.S. cable and telephone companies are engaged in a fierce battle to offer customers a package of communications services, including voice, data, wireless and subscription television.
http://news.com.com/U.S.+broadband+a...3-6098865.html





TiVo Is Watching When You Don’t Watch, and It Tattles
Saul Hansell

AS the advertising and television industries debate how to measure viewers of shows watched on digital video recorders, the pioneering maker of the recorders, TiVo, is getting into the argument. It is starting a research division to sell data about how its 4.4 million users watch commercials — or, more often, skip them.

The service is based on an analysis of the second-by-second viewing patterns of a nightly sample of 20,000 TiVo users, whose recorders report back to TiVo on what was watched and when.

On average, TiVo has found that its users spend nearly half of their television time watching programs recorded earlier. And viewers of those recorded shows skip about 70 percent of the commercials, said Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president for audience research.

But TiVo says that at a more detailed level there are wide variations in the numbers. The new research service, which is intended mainly for advertisers, could help them understand how to get more people to watch recorded commercials, like changing the content of ads or running them during certain kinds of programming.

For example, one study for a consumer packaged goods company, which Mr. Juenger declined to identify, found that commercials featuring animal characters, when shown on animal-related programs, were skipped less often than usual.

Some advertising executives said they were excited at the prospect of having access to data from TiVo recorders, which can offer some details that are not captured in the industry’s standard ratings by Nielsen Media Research.

“We are still in the early stages of what works and what doesn’t work with video recorders,” said Greg Johnson, executive director of the Interpublic Group’s emerging-media lab. “Getting better data will help marketers make better decisions.”

About 8 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s 110 million television households have digital video recorders, and the number is growing rapidly as cable and satellite companies offer the devices. TiVo, however, has found it hard to expand because people buying a TiVo recorder need to connect it to a cable or satellite box, which can be a complex process.

Indeed, TiVo’s limited user base makes some agencies turn up their noses at the new offering.

“TiVo doing a small thing here, or someone else doing a small thing there, doesn’t give us a better and more broad form of measurement,” said Andrew McLean, the chief operating officer of MediaEdge:CIA, a unit of the WPP Group.

The research service is part of an effort by Thomas S. Rogers, TiVo’s chief executive, to build revenue and also to try to repair relations with marketers, which have been angry about its role in helping viewers avoid advertising.

Mr. Rogers said he hoped that TiVo’s new research would help advertisers bargain for better deals from networks. “All this money has changed hands in the TV advertising business, when there has not been any data given by the rating agencies about the watching of advertisements,” he said.

For now, TiVo will not be able to tell advertisers anything about the demographics of the audience it measures. The privacy policy of the service allows it to gather data about viewing habits, but not any personal information. Mr. Juenger said TiVo hoped to find a way to change that by the end of the year.

Nielsen has started to measure how video recorders are used, but it has been caught in a fight between the networks and advertisers about how to classify the data it gathers.

Nielsen publishes three versions of its program ratings: how many people watched a program when it was originally broadcast, how many watched it within one day and how many within a week.

In the upfront negotiations over advertising rates this spring, major ad agencies refused to use these new measures as a basis for buying commercials, arguing that most recorded advertisements are skipped. So for the next season, Nielsen will measure the number of people who actually have their set on during the commercials. (Nielsen cannot measure whether viewers leave the room, just whether the commercials are played.)

At the insistence of the networks, the company will report the average audience for all of the commercials in a program. While some advertisers want audience information broken out second by second, the networks argue that this level of detail is unreliable using the Nielsen system, which largely relies on meters that detect audio tones embedded in shows.

In any case, the networks hope that these commercial ratings will help them get credit for the people who do see recorded commercials.

“Advertisers don’t want to count people in playback mode at all because they assume they are all fast-forwarding through the commercials,” said David F. Poltrack, executive vice president for research and planning at CBS. “We say that not everybody is fast-forwarding.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/te...gy/26adco.html





Catholic High School Sues Over Wikipedia Posting

Skutt Catholic High School has filed a lawsuit over an edit posting on Wikipedia, the online, publicly compiled encyclopedia.

School administrators take a dim view of these and other lines about the school:

"It's (sic) tuition is ridiculously high, too. Not to mention you get an awful education there. They put more emphasis on sports than they do education. No wonder almost all kids there are complete idiots."

That opinion showed up in June on http://www.wikipedia.org. And Skutt officials say there have been three other objectionable entries since February. They include sharp criticism of Skutt principal Patrick Slattery, obscene language and a note about drug use by students.

Since Wikipedia debuted in 2001, it has grown to 2 1/2 million entries in 10 languages.

Thousands of changes are made every hour to Wikipedia items, and contributors are charged with editing themselves and others. All viewers need do to change an entry is click "edit this page" and do so.

Skutt officials can't tell who posted the entries they've zeroed in on, so the Douglas County District Court suit names a John and Jane Doe.

The Internet addresses belong to Cox Communications, and a spokeswoman said the company intends to comply with a subpoena for the names of the posters.

Whether the Skutt lawsuit prevails is uncertain as the law sorts out the inherent conflict between free speech and damaging opinion in the usually anonymous realm of cyberspace.

"The law is a mixed bag right now," said John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "I can understand how anybody feels pain, but it's still a very difficult row to hoe."

Seigenthaler said it took months to get statements about him removed from a Wikipedia page.

The Skutt lawsuit says it has suffered general damages that would be determined at trial.

"These particular edits were really harmful and mean-spirited," said Patrick Flood, a lawyer for Skutt.

Once Skutt officials find out who posted the entries and why, they will proceed accordingly, he said.

Federal law protects online service providers.

"They are just the vehicle" for other people's information, said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Basically, the more control you have (over the information), the more risk you have."

On its site, Wikipedia tells users that "it is a valuable resource and provides a good reference point." But, it says, "unfamiliar information should be checked before relying upon it."

Inappropriate comments sometimes are removed, said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in an e-mail interview with the Omaha World-Herald.

He said such postings are rare, and wondered why Skutt officials hadn't contacted him.

Attempts to reach Skutt officials and their lawyer Saturday were unsuccessful.
http://www.fremontneb.com/articles/2.../d8j16tdo0.txt





Chinese Team Reverse Engineering Skype Issues Statement
Charlie Paglee

This morning I received a message from the CEO of the company in China I have been writing about saying “This is our statement in Chinese. You can put it on your Blog and add your own comments.” He used Skype to send this document to me. Here is my translation:

We are not interested in cracking or reverse engineering Skype’s software and merely creating a Skype compatible network is not our end purpose. We have obtained a great deal of enlightenment from Skype’s design framework, it is our goal to create an improved P2P platform and allow all kinds of groups in the community to share in the free (of cost), advanced and secure platform we create.

We are standing on the shoulders of giants, Skype being one of those giants. We have been in contact with Skype for quite some time. Last year one of our key engineers talked with one of Skypes senior engineers. Skype posses a P2P technology team that we admire.

The domain of P2P innovation is limitless. We are very honored to work side by side Skype to promote P2P technologies in the VOIP industry. Our team is composed of the most talented P2P engineers in the world. We are working day and night to build a superior quality P2P network.

Just as you see more and more rumors, amongst which some are saying whether we are right or wrong. But our endeavors are attracting the attention and support of more investors. We hope to gain the support of some powerful strategic investors, but we don’t want too many external interference to interfere with our engineering research. We are just a research team, not Big Brother superstars. (Attention translator: an American reality television show which shoots film of all life affairs including a trip to the bathroom.)

We sincerely thank Skype! They allow over 100 million users to use their network, including our team members, but this is only the present situation. The best is yet to come.

And here is the original in Chinese for those who are in doubt:

“我们对破解或者逆向Skype的软件没有兴趣，兼容Skype的网络也不是我们的目的。我们从Skype的设计架构那里获得了 很多启发，我们是想创造一个更好的P2P平台，使得各种社会团体都可以来共享这个免费、高效、安全的平台。

我们就如同站在巨人的肩上，Skype公司就是巨人之一。与Skype认识已经很久了。去年我们的一位主要工程师还与Skype 的高管工程师在中国洽谈过。Skype拥有一个令我们羡慕的优秀P2P技术团队。

在P2P领域的创新是无穷的。我们很荣幸能和Skype并肩工作来推广P2P技术在VOIP领域的应用。我们的团队由全球最优秀 的P2P工程师所组成。我们正夜以继日地创建一个更优秀品质的P2P网络。

正如你们看到了越来越多的谣言，其中一些是说我们的是非，但是我们的事业却吸引了更多投资者的关注和支持。我们希望有实力的战略 投资者加盟支持我们的事业，但我们不想过多的外界干扰影响我们的研究工作。我们只是一个研究的团队，而不是 Big Brother 的明星。 （译者注：英美一个电视节目，拍摄现实生活里除上厕所外所有的生活事件）

感谢Skype！让超过1亿的人享用了她的P2P语音网络，包括我们团队的成员。 但是这只是现状而已，最好的还没出现呢。”

My take on this is that they are definitely reverse engineering Skype because they called me using their software, but they don’t plan to stop there. They will go on to create an even better, more powerful and more secure network that will be free to use, like the present Skype network.

The members of this team are huge Skype fans and admire all the great engineers at Skype. They may even have an interest in joining Skype but the people they met from Skype in China have been very unfriendly toward them and have not explored that possibility. If somebody from eBay or Skype would like to contact them I will be happy to make an introduction.

This team is looking for “powerful strategic investors”. Part of the reason they released this statement was to address some of the distasteful criticisms directed their way. They believe Venture Capital investors will have no interest investing in a group ‘cracking’ Skype. They want to explain that they are doing much more than just reverse engineering. This was probably my fault, but the headline did gain some attention. This team is doing some incredible peer-to-peer research and these guys will create some incredible products. To any VCs that are interested in this field and would like to learn more about this group I will be happy to make an introduction.

I don’t really follow all of the nonsensical rumors out there because I have a business to run, but all the nonsense going on about ‘Chinese creating cheap rip-offs’ really needs to stop. Skype did not patent their protocol. Doing so would have required them to disclose their technology and disclosing their technology would have made it easier for third parties to detect and block Skype traffic. This would have precluded Skype’s spread to nations unfriendly toward VoIP which don’t want to allow open telecom access to protect their telephone monopolies.

For all the xenophobic hypocrites out there, how many of you are actually using an IBM PC? If you are using a Compaq/HP or Dell you are using a platform which was ‘stolen’ from Big Blue (and which is probably made in China by the way). If it were not for MCI and Sprint then AT&T would still control the USA telecom market and still be charging outrageous prices. If it were not for engineers at Compaq, Data General and Apple, everybody today would still be using IBM PCs and Apple IIs. If it were not for men like Horace Dodge, David Buick, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler we all would probably be driving broken down FORDs. Competition is good for any industry and Skype is no exception to this rule.

Without competition in engineering the industry giant becomes lazy and produces insecure mediocre products. Skype needs competition to keep them honest and to pressure them to innovate faster than anybody else. In the end, the name of the game is marketing. Apple’s Macintosh OS has always been better than Windows (which I use), but it was the Wintel marketing relationship (and unfair business practices) that has kept Apple in the number two spot OS wise.

Competition within the Skype network will bring better products and less expensive services for all the users out there, and I think that is an enormously cool thing.
http://www.voipwiki.com/blog/?p=31





Why Popular Antivirus Apps 'Do Not Work'
Munir Kotadia

Antivirus applications from Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro -- the three leading AV vendors in 2005 -- are far less likely to detect new viruses and Trojans than the least popular brands.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the software or how long it takes the respective firms to update their clients with signatures and other malware countermeasures.

AV companies continue to refine their products and most will tell you they stopped relying on purely signature-based systems many years ago. These days they use all sorts of clever methods to try and detect suspicious behaviour but the problem is that malware authors are also very clever. Very, very clever.

On Wednesday, the general manager of Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), Graham Ingram, described how the threat landscape has changed -- along with the skill of malware authors.

"We are getting code of a quality that is probably worthy of software engineers. Not application developers but software engineers," said Ingram.

However, the actual reason why the top selling antivirus applications don't work is because malware authors are specifically testing their Trojans and viruses to make sure they can bypass these applications before releasing them in the wild.

"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.

Although Ingram didn't mention any of the leading losers by name, Gartner's figures for 2005 show that Symantec is the clear leader with 53.6 percent of the market. McAfee and Trend own 18.8 percent and 13.8 percent of the market respectively.

One vendor Ingram did mention was Russian outfit Kaspersky, which in the same tests managed to block around 90 percent of new malware.

According to Gartner, Kaspersky's market share is a lowly 0.7 percent.

Most large firms already use more than one antivirus application but I wonder how many use two of the Symantec, McAfee and Trend trio?

If you do then I suggest investing in yet another -- but whatever you do, stay well away from the bestseller shelf.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/securi...9264249,00.htm





Metallica Ends iTunes Holdout

Metallica, one of the biggest acts yet to make its music available for sale via Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, has ended its holdout.

The enduring hard-rock outfit's work went on sale Tuesday via the U.S. and Canada editions of the digital store.

Metallica albums have previously been available for download via services such as MSN Music, but they have never been broken up for single-song purchase until now. At iTunes, the group's first four albums ("Kill 'Em All," "Ride the Lightning," "Master of Puppets" and "...And Justice for All") have been expanded with previously unreleased live tracks recorded in Seattle in 1989.

"We chose these four because, unlike the more recent releases, we were only capable of writing eight to nine songs for each of these albums," the band said on its Web site.

The iTunes rollout covers only the United States and Canada for now, due to a dispute with Metallica's overseas record label, Mercury Records. The company "doesn't seem to want to play ball with us on this at the moment," the band said. (Atlantic Records handles the band in North America.)

Among the other major artists who have yet to come to an agreement with iTunes are The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead and Garth Brooks.

In other Metallica news, the group will appear in animated form on the season premiere of "The Simpsons," which will air September 10 on Fox.
http://news.com.com/Metallica+ends+i...3-6098829.html





Microsoft Confirms Plan To Take On Apple's iPod

Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it plans to release a new music and entertainment player and accompanying software under the "Zune" brand this year, in a belated attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod player.

Microsoft confirmed the plans for an entertainment device and software in a statement after touting those products to record companies in recent months.

The world's largest software maker faces an uphill climb in closing the gap on Apple's iPod media player and iTunes Music Store, the runaway leaders in their respective areas.

The iPod holds more than half of the digital media player market, according to research company NPD, while iTunes accounts for over 70 percent of U.S. digital music sales.

"Creating a lifestyle device, Microsoft is clearly going to face a battle here," said Michael Gartenberg, research director at JupiterResearch. "It's going to be hard for them to create the same level of cachet that Apple has with the iPod."

Music industry sources told Reuters earlier this month that Microsoft disclosed plans to be in the market before Christmas with a media player that will allow users to download videos and music wirelessly.

It will also try to replicate Apple's simple approach to providing an integrated, seamless ecosystem for digital media is seen as the key to its success with iPod/iTunes, the sources said.

Microsoft sources said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, is working with J. Allard, vice president of its Xbox team, on the digital media player/software project.

Allard's involvement is seen as significant because he is one of the few executives at Microsoft with experience in launching a consumer electronic device from scratch with the X-Box gaming system. His involvement suggests that gaming might be part of the media player.

Microsoft said it did not have a spokesperson available for comment.
http://yahoo.reuters.com/news/articl...9-03_N21273248





Microsoft to Offer Software for Health Care Industry
Steve Lohr

Microsoft plans to offer software tailored for the health care industry, a change from its usual strategy of encouraging others to create industry-specific products using its operating system and programming tools.

The company’s first step, announced yesterday, is to purchase clinical health care software developed by doctors and researchers at a nonprofit hospital in Washington, D.C. Microsoft is also hiring two of the three doctors who created the software system, and 40 members of the development team at Washington Hospital Center.

The purchase price, which was not disclosed, was most likely small by Microsoft’s standards. But the company has larger ambitions in the fast-growing market for health care information technology. Hospitals, doctors and policy makers worldwide have high hopes for saving money and improving the quality of care by moving health care into the digital age, handling patient records and tracking treatments electronically.

“This represents a change in our strategy,” said Peter Neupert, Microsoft’s vice president for health strategy. “This is the start for Microsoft. We’re just getting started.”

The Microsoft model in the past has been to supply operating systems, database software and programming tools that outside companies use to make software packages for specific industries. The idea is that Microsoft provides the underlying technology platform, but then partners build programs for industries like health care and banking.

Mr. Neupert, 50, is leading Microsoft’s new strategy in health care. In 1998, after 11 years at Microsoft, he left to become chief executive of Drugstore.com, an online retailer of pharmacy and health products. From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Neupert served on President Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and helped run a subcommittee focused on technology in health care.

Mr. Neupert returned to Microsoft last September, after convincing Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, and Craig Mundie, a senior strategy executive, that Microsoft should be doing more in health care.

“I’ve had an opportunity to see how messed up the health care system was,” Mr. Neupert said. “And to really have an impact, you need a footprint like Microsoft’s.”

The software system Microsoft is buying, Azyxxi (pronounced ah-zik-see), is designed to retrieve and quickly display patient information from many sources, including scanned documents, E.K.G.’s, X-rays, M.R.I. scans, angiograms and ultrasound images. It was first used in Washington Hospital Center’s emergency department in 1996, and has since been adopted at six other hospitals, including the Georgetown University Hospital, that are part of the MedStar Health group, a nonprofit network in the Baltimore-Washington region.

The Azyxxi software, Mr. Neupert said, will be “our foundation,” adding, “You’ll find us expanding to a suite of health care solutions.”

The Microsoft plan, analysts say, could be risky. The software it is buying is a homegrown system that has not been used outside of a few hospitals. It has no installed base of customers, and there are already several established suppliers of clinical information technology systems, including Cerner, Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Eclipsys and others.

Most of the big health care software suppliers, analysts point out, are also big customers for Microsoft operating systems, databases and programming tools. “This puts Microsoft in the uncomfortable position of potentially competing against its major customers,” said Dr. Thomas J. Handler, a health technology analyst at Gartner.

Dr. Craig F. Feied, a principal designer of the software, describes Azyxxi as mainly a “data exploration engine” that typically works with existing clinical systems rather than replacing them.

Analysts and health care experts who have seen the software work in the Washington hospitals say it is impressive technology. Many hospitals and clinics, they say, have various kinds of patient information in electronic form, but the different computer systems and software programs cannot share the data. That is the principal problem the Azyxxi system addresses, analysts say.

The need to quickly collect, sort and display health information from many sources, they say, is a vital requirement in developing regional and national health information networks — a policy goal in the United States and dozens of other countries.

At Washington Hospital Center, the system has done its job, Dr. Feied said. In 1995, before the system was introduced, the emergency ward handled 37,000 patients a year, waits stretched up to nine hours, and there seemed to be an urgent need for more doctors and rooms, he recalled. Today, the emergency department handles nearly 80,000 patients a year and 70 percent of them get a diagnosis, are treated or are admitted in three hours or less. The staff has increased only 5 percent, and few rooms were added.

The problem, Dr. Feied said, was mostly that patients were waiting in rooms because doctors could not quickly find the patient records, treatment history and other information to treat them.

“We weren’t doctor-poor or bed-poor,” he said. “We were information-poor.”

Whether that experience can be widely repeated and be made commercially successful under Microsoft, however, is uncertain.

“This is extremely interesting as a signal of Microsoft’s intentions in health care, but we’ll have to see what comes next and how this plays out,” said Dr. Blackford Middleton, an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School and a health technology expert at Partners Healthcare, a nonprofit medical group that includes Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/te...gy/27soft.html





Microsoft Fails To Ease Investors Fears On Windows
Daisuke Wakabayashi and Eric Auchard

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday failed to quash fears that a new version of its Windows software system would be further delayed, stirring concerns that a new technology cycle tied to the upgrade could be put on hold.

This uncertainty over when Microsoft and the rest of hi-tech would benefit from the surge in revenue growth that typically accompanies a major Windows upgrade led Microsoft's shares to close down 2 percent at $23.87 on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

"We will ship Windows Vista when it is available," Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services unit, said at the company's annual financial analysts' meeting, adding that Microsoft would take the project "milestone by milestone".

Windows sits on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.

Windows Vista, already five years in the making, has been postponed by Microsoft several times. Quality assurance delays have put off the consumer version of Windows until early 2007 -- after the crucial holiday shopping season.

Vista is set to ship to corporate customers this November.

Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund said the cautious comments represent a delayed confirmation of his thesis that Microsoft would not begin to see revenue from the general availability of Windows Vista until March or April 2007.

"When they hesitate, that's confirmation we were right," he said. Microsoft has consistently been this cautious in the past, an acknowledgment of its history of slipping a few months beyond initial targets for major software releases, Sherlund said.

Greg Palmer, head of equity trading at Pacific Crest Securities, asked at the meeting: "Explain why I'm paying 20 times for a stock that is growing at 10 with a whole lot of investments that are not really going anywhere."

Technology stocks sold off, driving down the broader U.S. market, as further Windows delays could slowdown plans by businesses and consumers to upgrade computers and software.

Four Pillars Of Growth

The new Microsoft is being built on "four pillars," Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in opening comments at the meeting. Upgrades to the company's two core products -- the Windows operating system and Office applications suite -- should act as engines to drive growth and buy it time to erect two new pillars -- its Internet and Xbox game businesses.

Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said Microsoft was in "high investment mode" and very acquisitive over the past year, spending $649 million to acquire 23 companies. He said it acquired four companies in July.

Microsoft last week forecast revenue for the fiscal year ending in June 2007 to grow 12 percent to 14 percent, to between $49.7 billion and $50.7 billion.

Revenue from its Windows business is growing 8 percent to 10 percent, Johnson said on Thursday. Windows, nearly a third of Microsoft's total revenue, should generate between $14.3 billion and $14.5 billion in fiscal 2007, he said.

Microsoft forecast another year of losses at its mobile phone, games and devices business before turning a profit in the business year ending June 30, 2008.

Executives at the meeting said investments for the company's new "Zune" media player and another year of losses at its Xbox game unit would continue to weigh on the entertainment and devices unit's earnings this year. The division posted a loss last year.
"Fiscal 07 will be a loss. We think that turns to profit in 08," said Robbie Bach, president of the division.

The entertainment and devices division encompasses much of Microsoft's consumer-oriented products, such as Windows-based smartphones, the Xbox 360 game console and its upcoming "Zune" media player, but has not been a consistent earnings driver.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...chnologyNews-3





Anti-DRM Children's Book
Lev

Inspired by the entertainment industry's strategy of training children to accept their vision of a DRM'd future, a father in Victoria, Canada published "The Pig And The Box," a children's book all about how DRM is Defective By Design. The book is available as a freely downloadable PDF under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. I love that he's countering the actions of the entertainment industry by telling a story about DRM in the most literal way possible -- a children's book. As more and more of us tell a different story about DRM, our voices can drown out those who favor this insidious technology.

Read "The Pig and the Box" now...
http://defectivebydesign.org/node/392





News From The North



The TankGirl Diaries


27.7.2006

52 Days to The Election

There are only 52 days left to the Swedish parliamentary election. July is the traditional summer holiday month in Sweden (and in the rest of Scandinavia), and as the whole Europe has been sweating under a serious heat wave during July, the political activity has been naturally less intense than normally. But as the outdoor temperatures will gradually start to sink and the people return back home from their summer cottages, the political temperature is bound to rise again in Sweden.

The growth of the Swedish Pirate Party has settled down from the huge boost that followed the May 31 Pirate Bay raid but the party still keeps growing. The present membership is 7585, and the closest rival Green Party (Miljöpartiet) has 7862 members.

The present popularity of Pirate Party among voters is an enigma. Various polls have given so different figures that the popular support might theoretically be anything between 0 and 20 percent. With some 12.000 people already participated, demokrati.nu's online poll gives the party a promising 16.3% support, led only by the largest Swedish party Social Democrats (25.4%) and the country's second largest party Moderaterna (23.6%). The official membership suggests a popularity around 4.5 %, and this is also the estimate of the party leader Rick Falkvinge. The party will need 4 % of the votes in the September 17 election to get its representatives to the parliament.

27.7.2006

Helsingborgs Dagblad: "The Law Against Filesharing Toothless"

"The Swedes continue to share files online despite it being illegal already for a year now. The strike against Pirate Bay and a few sentences have not scared them", concludes newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad in its recent story on filesharing. The only consolation for the copyright industry seems to be that after a lot of public debate more people now know that filesharing is illegal - not that they would care about it.

"My feeling is that the law has had no effect on Swedish public's views on filesharing", says Håkan Selg, a researcher from the Royal Technical University. His comment gets support from the representatives of both active parties in the Swedish filesharing debate that has run hot since the May 31 Pirate Bay raid.

"The law has had no effect. Stopping filesharing would require real hard measures. People can not be prevented taking part in the culture without establishing a truly brutal police state", says Christian Engström, the vice chairman from Pirate Party, a new political force aiming to get parliamentary seats in the autumn election. Ludvig Werner, a representative of IFPI, the roof organization for the record industry, admits that the law has had little practical effect. He notes though that since the new copyright law (in force from last July) the number of people buying music online or to their mobile telephones has grown.

According to the newspaper, the number of active filesharers in Sweden has stayed at around 700.000 since 2003 when research on filesharing started. A total of 1.2 million Swedes tell that they download music from Internet, according to Mediavision that has conducted the studies.

When asked whether the new law is totally toothless, Christian Engström from Pirate Party said: "Yes, it is. But at the same time it means that over a million people, mainly young, now risk jail time just because they listen to music." Ludvig Werner from IFPI is still happy with the law. Even if it has not changed the filesharing habits of the Swedes, the issue of filesharing has gained publicity. He is happy that many more people now know filesharing being illegal, and he is also pleased about the debate that the law has generated. "These are the two main things that the law has brought about."

27.7.2006

A Minor Episode From Our Series "The Amazingly Stretching Ethics of the Press"...

To: Customer Service, Svenska Dagbladet
From: Fredrik Moberg, subscriber
Subject: Your View on Ethics

I have today had the questionable pleasure to observe the following:

1. Svenska Dagbladet publishes an article "Unethical messages in Piratbyrån's shop" on both its paper and online editions. The writer of the article tries to establish a connection between the thinktank Piratbyrån and a number of clothing items with a "gross sexist message" that are on sale in webshop Peer99. The only real connection between Piratbyrån and Peer99 is that Peer99 also sells Piratbyrån's clothes. Any connection between Piratbyrån and clothing with a "gross sexist message" does not, however, exist.

2. It is found that Svenska Dagbladet itself sells porn films on its own web shop.

3. The fact that Svenska Dagbladet sells porn films is being mentioned in the reader comments to the article.

4. The comments disappear without traces or explanations.

5. Steps 3-4 are being repeated several times during the day.

6. Category "Adult Films" disappears without trace or explanations from Svenska Dagbladet's web shop.

7. The original article remains available on the online edition of Svenska Dagbladet.

I would like to know which ethical principles Svenska Dagbladet is following when it:

1) Sells porn itself

2) In the next breath condemns the sexual messages printed on clothing that are on sale at Peer99 webshop as "unethical" or "grossly sexual"

3) Tries to indicate connections that do not exist

4) Censors comments that point out shortcomings in the newspaper's own conduct

5) Removes porn from its own web shop in secrecy, without explanations

6) Continues to keep the original article available on its website

Please publish this letter and your answer to it both in your paper and online editions to show that you take it seriously and that you welcome a debate on the topic of press ethics.

Kindly yours,
Fredrik Moberg
Your subscriber

28.7.2006

The Local: "Sweden’s Snoop Laws Are Worthy of Soviet Union"

"New laws proposed by Sweden’s government would require internet service providers to snoop on all of us", writes Pirate Party’s Björn Lindh in The Local, a Swedish online magazine for English-reading audiences. In his story he highlights the new threats to citizen privacy posed by the new EU-driven snooping legislation.

Swedish government minister Björn Rosengren once described Norway as "the last Soviet republic".

But new laws being introduced by Rosengren’s party colleagues in the Social Democrats, giving the state an unprecendented right to snoop on its citizens, mean that Sweden is now perhaps more deserving of this epithet.

The government wants to introduce a system which would require all internet service provides to record and save all e-mails you send and receive, all websites you visit and other such personal information. Even if you're not suspected of having committed any crime.

The government says that the police only will have access to this database after a court order has been issued. But what guarantees are given that a hacker could not abuse the system and get all sorts of information stored in it about you?

What guarantees are given that the system cannot not used by the Security Service? What guarantees are said something negative about Göran Persson while chatting online?

Justice minister Thomas Bodström says that the changes will make crime prevention easier – but how given that this is not simply a cover for some kind of indexing of people, like under the Nazis over 60 years ago? The answer is that there are no such guarantees; we are left in the dark.

It may sound far-fetched, but can we be sure that one day a police officer won’t come knocking on our doors asking if we have do they really prevent crime? If the police cannot use the register until after a crime has been committed, what good is the system for crime prevention? By the time the police start checking your personal data, you have already committed a crime and you are already a prime suspect. Global supervision is not the solution to organized crime.

I would rather see the money this system would cost to create and run being used to fund more police officers or to improve the quality of our schools and hospitals. I would rather see this money being used to do good, rather than create a Big Brother society.

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...t=22742&page=4

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/





Place-Shifting: Challenges Present And Future Paint A Rough Picture For Innovation
Ken Fisher

Anytime, anyplace

In theory, "place-shifting" does for location what "time-shifting" has done for scheduling. A few cables here, a few networking adjustments there, and you can use a product like the Slingbox or the software-based Orb to watch your TV (or TiVo, or DVD player) from just about anywhere you can get a network connection, be it your office, your hotel room, or the other side of the planet. Yet what makes place-shifting devices so powerful also makes them appear very dangerous to established entertainment and media companies.

Consider recent comments from HBO's Bob Zitter that accuse the Slingbox's makers of violating HBO's own copyrights by "rebroadcasting" content across the Internet, or Major League Baseball's strong dislike for the way place-shifting affects their business model. Grumbles withstanding, there have been no lawsuits over place-shifting yet, but that could change in the blink of an eye. In the United States, the issues derive primarily from battles over what constitutes fair use. In Europe, the situation is more complicated because of the way television is regulated. A recent controversy surrounding the Slingbox demonstrates how place-shifting will ultimately bring about another round of disputes over fair use and the complex interrelationship between innovation and protecting the rights of both consumers and content producers.

Innovate or placate?

When Sling Media launched the Slingbox, the company knew that it would draw the attention of content producers. The device features the ability to stream video sources across the Internet (or your local TCP/IP network), and if you work in Hollywood, that alone might be enough to send you crawling up the walls.

When I spoke with Sling Media right after their product launched last year, they made two things clear to me. First, they stressed that using the Slingbox for anything other than personal use was a violation of the EULA. Second, they said that there was no approved way to capture the Sling Stream and save it to disk (you can't blame me for asking). I interpreted both decisions as attempts to placate rights holders. What Sling Media did not reveal to me at the time was their intention to also encrypt the video stream. This will become important in a moment.

The Slingbox lived in isolation for the first several months of its life, streaming video to users and making it possible for travelers to watch out-of-market sports while on the road. Several months went by before Applian Technologies showed up on the scene offering a product they dubbed "Replay SlingCorder"—an application that conveniently intercepts the Slingbox's video stream and records it. The application extended the usefulness of the Sling Box by allowing users to record TV that comes through the device, much like a DVR.

Sling Media responded by asking Applian to change the name of their product, apparently feeling as though the "Sling" in the title raised trademark implications. Within days, Sling Media also unveiled a new beta firmware that introduced encryption. Whatever its name, Applian's recording software was shut out. For its part, Sling Media insists that encryption has been planned since day one, and they also say that the inclusion of encryption in the newest beta firmware was a coincidence in terms of timing.

What's not a coincidence, however, is that fact that applications can no longer (legally) record the Sling Stream. Jeremy Toeman, vice president of market development for Sling Media, told Ars Technica that the company believes that content companies have a right to protect their content, while consumers have a right to, well, consume it. "We try to stay in that fair balance," Toeman said, adding that "content providers want to know that their content is secure." Adding encryption to the stream is one way to prevent unauthorized use of Sling Media's product—unauthorized use that could tip the balance of rights they're trying to achieve.

Sling Media is now taking heat for their decision from some customers, despite the fact that their recent firmware significantly improved their product's performance. In a series of posts on the the Sling Community site (not affiliated with Sling Media), Toeman explained that Applian had developed their product without contacting Sling Media, and that the whole mess really wasn't about punishing one company.

"Unfortunately, it's clear that the Applian At-Large Recorder has gotten caught in the middle of this. As a small company, we haven't had the resources to properly support third-party developers at present, although it is our goal to eventually have an API or SDK for third-parties to use. If you consider the numerous ongoing software developments we have at Sling (Windows, OSX, Windows Mobile, other platforms, etc), we have to pick and choose where our engineering efforts go extremely carefully, and while we have very ambitious goals, we still have a lot of realities to deal with!"

The "realities" Toeman referred to include the legal landscape. Timeshifting, for instance, has been upheld by the courts, and devices like TiVo have made it quite popular in recent years—much to the entertainment industry's chagrin. Place-shifting, on the other hand, has no Supreme Court decision to protect it. Any company looking to capitalize on the promises of place-shifting must contend with the possibility of finding place-shifting listed as Public Enemy #1 of the video entertainment business, and that could spell trouble. Any innovator working on a entertainment-based product will do everything it can to avoid catching the Napster bug, because once a product or service becomes synonymous with copyright infringement, the only money for the manufacturer to collect will be for legal fees.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...ceshifting.ars





Google Announces Hosting For Open Source Projects
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

Google is scheduled to announce hosting for open source projects on Google Code today during Greg Stein's talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Stein, an open source engineer with Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, will be disclosing the new service officially at his talk "A Google Service for the Open Source Community," scheduled for 1:45 p.m. PDT today.

I sat down yesterday with Stein and Google's open source program manager Chris DiBona, who describe the service as similar to SourceForge.net and other community hosting projects, but not designed to compete with those projects.

Stein says, "We really like SourceForge, and we don't want to hurt SourceForge" or take away projects. Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects.

DiBona says that it's a "direct result of Greg concentrating on what open source projects need. Most bugtrackers are informed by what corporations" and large projects need, whereas Google's offering is just about what open source developers need.

Stein says that Google's hosting has a "brand new look" at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says "nobody else out there is doing anything close to it." At the same time DiBona and Stein say that Google's hosting offering will not have some features present in SourceForge.net and other code repositories that open source projects and enterprise customers might want.

With the new service, Stein says Google was able to "cut out a lot of heavy structure" and apply Google's full text search to just the features that open source projects may need. "Rather than doing queries through that [heavy] structure, we can just full text search across it all. It provides a really powerful mechanism for issue tracking, but keeps it really simple."

The other main feature for Google Code hosting, according to Stein, is a "massively scalable Subversion repository." Stein says Google rebuilt Subversion to store data in Big Table, a massively scalable, highly available storage technology used in Google.
Stein says that the company will have all the Google projects on there, but they're not going out there to get projects to move. As a precaution, Stein also says that Google has a list of SourceForge.net projects, to ensure that new projects will not encroach on existing projects' namespaces.

For example, it won't be possible to set up a Gaim project on Google Code hosting, unless there's an approval from the project owner on SourceForge.net. This will prevent any confusion or deliberate attempts at impersonating SourceForge.net projects.

Not yet feature-complete

The initial public release will not be feature-complete, but users will be able to sign up right away without an invitation, unlike some of Google's other new service launches.

In particular, Stein says that Google Code is missing file download at the moment, but that it's a high priority to add that feature. Unlike SourceForge.net, Stein says that the service will not have, and Google has no plans to add, Web site hosting for projects.

To sign up for the service, a project needs to be licensed under one of seven approved licenses: Apache license, Artistic License, GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla License, BSD license, or MIT license. DiBona says that Google is trying to make a statement about license proliferation by offering only a narrow set of license for projects to choose from.

DiBona and Stein describe the project as ideal for smaller open source projects, rather than larger projects with more complex needs, such as Apache or GNOME. However, they also say that larger projects are welcome.

One of the most discussed topics at OSCON this year has been open data -- the ability for users to get their data out of a program or service and use it elsewhere. Stein says that Google understands the importance of being able to move data. "We don't have those [migration features] in there now, but that's something we intend to [have] ... we intend to do it soon after launch."
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?.../07/27/1833251





'Torture is bad!' OMG, did I actually post that!?

CIA Contractor Is Fired When Internal Post Crosses the Line

Top-secret world loses blogger
Dana Priest

Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, considered her blog a success within the select circle of people who could actually access it.

Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and -- in her most popular post -- bad food in the CIA cafeteria.

But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won't be joining her ever again.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.

As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that "postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do."

A BAE Systems spokesman declined to comment.

Axsmith, 42, said in an interview this week that she thinks of herself as the Erma Bombeck of the intel world, a "generalist" writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next. She said she first posted her classified blog in May and no one said a thing. When she asked, managers even agreed to give her the statistics on how many people were entering the site. Her column on food pulled in 890 readers, and people sent her reviews from other intelligence agency canteens.

The day of the last post, Axsmith said, after reading a newspaper report that the CIA would join the rest of the U.S. government in according Geneva Conventions rights to prisoners, she posted her views on the subject.

It started, she said, something like this: "Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong."

And it continued, she added, with something like this: "CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let's just say, European lives were not saved." (That was a jab at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to Europe late last year when she defended U.S. policy on secret detentions and interrogations.) A self-described "opinionated loudmouth with a knack for writing a catchy headline," Axsmith also wrote how it was important to "empower grunts and paper pushers" because, she explained in the interview, "I'm a big believer in educating people at the bottom, and that's how you strengthen an infrastructure."

In her job as a contractor at the CIA's software-development shop, Axsmith said, she conducted "performance and stress testing" on computer programs, and that as a computer engineer she had nothing to do with interrogations. She said she did read some interrogation-related reports while performing her job as a trainer in one counterterrorism office.

Her opinion, Axsmith added, was based on newspaper reports of torture and waterboarding as an interrogation method used to induce prisoners to cooperate.

"I thought it would be okay" to write about the Geneva Conventions, she said, "because it's the policy."

In recounting the events of her last day as an Intelink blogger, Axsmith said that she didn't hold up well when the corporate security officers grilled her, seized her badge and put her in a frigid conference room. "I'm shaking. I'm cold, staring at the wall," she recalled. "And worse, people are using the room as a shortcut, so I have no dignity in this crisis."

She said BAE officials told her that the blog implied a specific knowledge of interrogations and that it worried "the seventh floor" at CIA, where the offices of the director and his management team are.

She said she apologized right away and figured she would get reprimanded and her blog would be eliminated. She never dreamed she would be fired. Now, Axsmith said, "I'm scared, terrified really" of being criminally prosecuted for unauthorized use of a government computer system, something one of the security officers mentioned to her.

Axsmith said she's proud of having taken her views public -- well, sort of. "I know I hit the radar and it was amplified," she said. "I think I've had an impact."

In the meantime, she's been thinking about Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer who successfully challenged the constitutionality of military tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The National Law Journal named Swift one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country, but the Navy has so far passed him over for promotion. He told the Los Angeles Times then, "One thing that has been a great revelation for me is that you may love the military, but it doesn't necessarily love you."

"That's how I feel," Axsmith said, recalling what Swift said. "I love the CIA. I love the mission. I love the people. It's such a great place to work."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072001816.html





NBC revives 'Watching'

Net Will Also Fund Viral Videos With Skein's Characters
Josef Adalian

NBC is resurrecting "Nobody's Watching," the quirky 2005 WB comedy pilot that recently found new life on YouTube.com.

Peacock entertainment prexy Kevin Reilly is expected to announce today that he has ordered six scripts of the project following a meeting with "Watching" creators Bill Lawrence, Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan.

Project, about two young sitcom fans who end up in a reality show, is from NBC Universal Television Studio.

In a move that underscores NBC's desire to plunge into nontraditional comedy development, net has also agreed to fund a series of viral videos featuring the characters from "Watching." Producers began working on the videos even before the Peacock greenlight, and the first vignettes could hit the Internet by September.

"Part of our pitch for bringing back the show is that, for it to succeed, it needs to become more edgy and blur the lines between reality and fiction," said Lawrence, who still seemed amazed at the chain of events that brought "Watching" back from the dead.

If it goes to series, "Watching" is also expected to be produced for far less than a normal sitcom, with a budget well under $1 million per half-hour.

Decision to revive "Watching" comes barely a month after a copy of the pilot popped up on video-sharing service YouTube (Daily Variety, June 22).

NBC recently forged a programming alliance with YouTube.com, so it seems likely the net won't shy away from giving the service some credit for its decision to pick up "Watching." At the very least, Lawrence was able to generate media interest in a project that never had a high profile, even when it was set up at the WB.

Landing on YouTube.com, and the subsequent media coverage, also helped Lawrence break though the development clutter at the networks. It's rare that a rejected pilot from one network generates any interest from competing nets, none of whom want to seem as if they're picking up someone else's failure.

Lawrence credited NBC for being willing to take a risk on the show, in part because of demand from Webizens.

"If network TV doesn't embrace the Internet as both a place to launch and test shows but also as a place where shows can live, they're going to fall further and further behind," he said.

Toward that end, producers also plan to launch a "Watching" website where fans of the original pilots can give notes on what they liked and didn't like about the project.

NBC Universal TV is currently negotiating deals to bring back most of the pilot's original cast, including stars Paul Campbell and Tarran Killam.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...0?cs=1&s=h&p=0





HOPE NUMBER 6

Throngs Gather To Restore HOPE
Geeta Dayal

The sixth Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) hacking convention got to a rolling start Friday in New York. Thousands of mostly black-clad attendees thronged the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan for a three-day smorgasbord of workshops, panels, and lectures on network security, activism, DIY tech, and hacking in all its forms.

Several of the attendees were veterans of previous incarnations of the biannual HOPE, and of other popular hacker conventions such as DefCon in Las Vegas and ShmooCon in Washington, D.C. Several speakers, too, are conference stalwarts, such as long-imprisoned hacker Kevin Mitnick (whose social-engineering presentation was a highlight of the last HOPE, held in 2004), free-software pioneer Richard Stallman, and punk-rock provocateur Jello Biafra.

Friday was big on topics heavy with political overtones, such as "Building the Anti-Big Brother Databases" and "Bin Laden, National Intelligence, and More". More lighthearted events, such as a new version of the popular panel devoted to the art of lockpicking and an LED art-making workshop run by New York’s Graffiti Research Lab, helped keep the mood buoyant throughout the day.

The clear highlight of Friday's proceedings was an impassioned keynote address by Stallman, who lashed out against spyware and DRM, or digital rights management--which Stallman is fond of calling "digital restriction management," or "digital handcuffs."

"Lots of proprietary software has malicious features," Stallman said. "They put in spy features, features designed to restrict the user, and back doors. One proprietary program you may have heard of that spies on the user is Windows XP," he said to laughter and boisterous applause. He also criticized TiVo, which he said collects data on user preferences.

During a lull in his presentation, Stallman donned a black flowing robe and a red halo crafted out of a vintage computer disk, and reappeared on stage as his alter ego, "Saint IGNUsius of the Church of Emacs." "Install a holy free operating system and only install free software on top of that," he instructed the packed hall. If you make this vow and live by it you can be a saint."

Stallman preached the exclusive use of free software as an antidote to potential DRM issues. "All proprietary software is "just trust me" software, where you surrender to the blind faith of a developer who might not deserve it," he said. "The use of nonfree programs is a prisoner of his software." He also criticized the notion that in the future, most applications would be run online. "You simply can’t have control over what a program does unless you’re running your copy...if everyone’s running Google’s copy of a program, we can’t all have control over what Google’s copy does," he said.

A later panel titled "The Future of Wireless Pen Testing" came out swinging against holes in several methods for 802.11 wireless security. "Remember WEP?" Frank Thornton, an expert on wireless security and one of the speakers on the panel, said to peals of laughter from the audience. "Or even MD5?" The panelists discussed the urgent need for a more bulletproof way to secure wireless networks; the standard 64-bit and even 128-bit encryption provided by WEP has long been shown to have serious weaknesses, and newer schemes such as WPA, they said, have some flaws. A wireless security panel on Saturday's HOPE schedule is set to explore this further.

Later panels varied broadly in scope. A panel on the European hacking community, including representatives from Germany’s notorious Chaos Computer Club, discussed cultural differences between Europe and the U.S. An intriguing evening presentation on "Hacking the Mind," which drew eerie similarities between buffer overflows, shell code, and hypnotism, attracted crowds.

HOPE runs through the weekend. Live coverage including audio and video feeds is available on the conference wiki.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&taxonomyId=15


HOPE Speaker Arrested by the Feds
Brian Krebs

Security Fix just learned that Steven Rambam, the owner and CEO of Pallorium Inc., a company that bills itself as the largest privately held online investigative service in the United States, was arrested this afternoon by FBI agents just moments before he was to lead a panel discussion on privacy here at the HOPE hacker conference in New York City.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but Rambam's fellow panelists said four men clad in dark blue FBI jackets quietly entered the auditorium, asked Rambam if he had any weapons on him, and then escorted him out the door along with his laptop and other equipment that contained the PowerPoint slides that were to make up the bulk of his scheduled two-hour presentation.

"If you know Steve then you know he's very flamoyant, and at first I thought it was just PR, you know?" said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator from San Antonio who was to speak alongside Rambam. "So, they asked him to step out in the hallway, placed the handcuffs on him and started to lead him off."

Rambam was going to discuss how he dug up -- in just 4.5 hours of searching private and public databases -- more than 500 pages worth of data on HOPE attendee Rick Dakan, who agreed to be the guinea pig for the project.

"All I had given him was my e-mail and name. He knew everywhere I'd lived, every car I had driven, and even someone else in Alabama who was using my Social Security number since 1983," said Dakan, who said he is attending this conference for a book he is working on about hacker conferences. "He found all my friends, pictures of friends, knew about my brother's criminal history."

Conference founder Emmanuel Goldstein said organizers were trying to figure out where the FBI had taken Rambam, and were contacting his parents and his lawyer. "We're going to find out where Steve is and we'll keep you updated," Goldstein said.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...e_speaker.html


Hacking Windows and Hucking Throwies at HOPE

Here at the Hope Number Six conference in New York City, hacking windows is a popular pastime. But hackers who didn't bring their needle-nose pliers to the Hotel Pennsylvania may have had a harder time of it. You see, the windows in each room are tethered with a pair of wires on either side, preventing guests from opening the window more than a few inches.

Hackers tend not to like restrictions of any kind, which is probably why -- from the vantage point of my room on the 11th floor -- I saw so many people trying to hack their windows. But sometimes when you're hacking windows, unexpected things can happen. Like, sometime before dawn this morning, a huge crash jolted me awake: It seems someone's windows had crashed.

Not a whole lot going on here that's newsbreaking, but I am having a ton of fun meeting lots of smart hackers. I spent a few minutes at the table set up by the Graffiti Research Lab, which provided an assortment of tiny batteries, magnets and a colorful array of light emitting diodes (LEDs) for anyone who wanted to make their own "throwie," a non-destructive and eye-catching form of digital art.

GRL describes throwies as "an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials." More info and a cool video of what you can do with throwies is only here. Mine stuck beautifully to an air duct about 20 feet up from one of the conference room floors.

I caught an interesting and in-depth talk on lockpicking and then headed over to the lockpick village to test my skills. Picking locks is not that hard, though some locks prove more stubborn (re: challenging) than others. After that talk, oodles of people swarmed the table two guys had set up to sell lockpick sets. But I wonder how many people paid attention to the warning during the session that merely possessing a set of lockpicks (without being a bona fide locksmith) can get you in trouble in most states.

Stay tuned for more updates ...
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...ng_throwi.html





Students Face 1 Year In Jail For Hacking

Two students each face up to a year in jail for a prank that involved hacking into a professor's computer, giving grades to other students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor's home.

Lena Chen, 20, and Jennifer Ngan, 19, face misdemeanor charges of illegally accessing computers. The pair, both students of California State University, Northridge, are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21.

An investigation showed the professor's network account had been accessed without her permission and grades were assigned to nearly 300 students, prosecutor Robert Fratianne said.

The professor's campus e-mail was being forwarded to an account established by Chen and Ngan, investigators said.

Prosecutors also alleged Chen and Ngan used personal identifying information found on the university system to order food, magazine subscriptions and a shipment of blank CDs to the professor's home. The professor was billed for the purchases but was not required to pay.

The school would not release the professor's name.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-06-31-42





Famed Hacker Felled By Flu
Frank Bajak

This Andean highlands capital has twice felled famed hacker and security consultant Kevin Mitnick. "I'm looking forward to getting on the first plane to the United States," Mitnick said Wednesday from his hospital room.

Mitnick, 42, said he has been laid up for some three days with a nasty flu, with a fever reaching 104 degrees.

On a separate visit back in May, the author of "The Art of Intrusion" and "The Art of Deception" said, he had spent a day in the hospital for tests after experiencing chest pains and elevated blood pressure.

Bogota's 8,700-foot elevation and a prescription drug Mitnick was taking were blamed for the May troubles, he said.

This time it was simply a nasty flu, which has prevented Mitnick from attending a big weekend hacker's conference in New York City.

"I tried to get to the airport to get to the plane to New York and just couldn't make it," he said.

Mitnick, in Colombia on consulting work for a client he would not name, said doctors had treated him with antibiotics and morphine.

Mitnick spent more than five years in prison for antics that prosecutors said included stealing software and altering data, causing millions of dollars in damage to such companies as Motorola Inc., Novell Inc., Nokia Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Released in 2000, Mitnick was barred for three years from contact with computers. He has since parlayed his notoriety and skills into a successful business in security consulting, speaking and writing.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-26-20-41-58





Hollywood Clicks on the Work of Web Auteurs
John Clark

EVEN as David Lehre’s “MySpace: The Movie,” an 11-minute parody of the social-networking Web site, spawned a high-profile feeding frenzy, some of the Hollywood agents, managers and lawyers who were clamoring to represent him didn’t know much about who he was, what he did or what they would do if they got him. But they wanted him anyway.

“It’s their fear of not being a part of it,” said Scott Vener, Mr. Lehre’s manager, who first discovered him on the video-sharing Web site YouTube, where “MySpace” became an Internet phenomenon.

Their fears were justified in at least one respect. Calls about Mr. Lehre didn’t start really rolling in to Mr. Vener’s office at the Schiff Company in Beverly Hills until reports about “MySpace: The Movie” appeared in the old media, and talent agents aren’t going to get rich chasing artists who are already being widely celebrated. If Mr. Lehre proves to be a harbinger of things to come, talent agents will have to become Internet literate, or hire people who are.

Some people say that the film industry has more to fear than just being late to the party. If the Net begins spawning films — and not simply helping to market or deliver them, as has happened to date — studios’ grip on the business of putting pictures on screens may be challenged.

“Their nightmare is a direct feed from moviemaker to audience,” said Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to The New York Times who has been serializing his novel “The Unbinding” on www.slate.com and saw one of his other novels, “Thumbsucker,” adapted to the big screen. “Their only trump cards are that they are pools of capital for making expensive things. Otherwise they are cut out of the action.”

Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, said: “We are probably at a period of greater change than we have had in the past 50 years. The industry is scared about what they should make and how they should deliver it. What’s the next step? Where’s the development coming from?”

“MySpace: The Movie” first appeared on YouTube on Jan. 31 and since then has had millions of hits, enough viewers to rival big-budget films or TV shows. Mr. Lehre, who is 21 and lived at his parents’ home in Washington, Mich., when he created the video, shot it there with friends. He scored the music himself so he wouldn’t have to deal with copyright issues, designed the graphics and Googled any technical questions he had. This development and distribution process makes even independent films, with their retinue of maxed-out credit cards and frenzied film festivals, look positively mainstream in comparison.

The Net is particularly conducive to short-form comedy — skits, parodies, satires, even stand-up acts — because surfers tend to look at video in small increments. But so far television, especially cable, has been more receptive than the feature film world to these possibilities. Mr. Lehre signed with Fox and will produce a sketch-oriented television show that is set in his hometown and features his friends.

Recently, Carson Daly Productions signed Brooke Brodack, a 20-year-old receptionist who lives in Massachusetts, to a production deal after her video diaries, comic shorts and music parodies attracted a wide following on YouTube. Andy Milonakis, star of his own show on MTV2, got his start on the Net, as did Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, whose “Tom Goes to the Mayor” is on the Cartoon Network. Mike Rizzo, an agent at International Creative Management, which represents Mr. Lehre, said that established comedians are taking a hard look at what’s available on the Net.

And despite their youth and inexperience, some of these video bloggers, or vloggers, have already made the jump from TV to film. In addition to his television contract, Mr. Lehre has a film deal with Fox in the works, Mr. Vener said. Andy Samberg, a former member of the Net comedy troupe the Lonely Island, is a regular on “Saturday Night Live” and has signed to appear in Paramount’s film “Hot Rod.”

Whether the Internet will ever become a seed bed for full-length movies remains to be seen. The independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg (“Kissing on the Mouth,” “LOL”), who was hired by Nervevideo.com to create what he describes as an “indie soap opera for the Web” called “Young American Bodies,” said the Net is the wrong place to watch a conventional narrative of conventional length.

“I have a hard time focusing on the computer screen for 90 minutes,” Mr. Swanberg, 25, said. “A feature film isn’t interactive. I think a theater is still the best venue for that.”

Yet Web users have already shown that they can bend a movie to their tastes. The most obvious instance has been New Line Cinema’s coming film “Snakes on a Plane,” which was the subject of endless Internet interest, mostly spoofing the title and its self-evident premise. New Line decided to play to this audience by incorporating some of its ideas, requiring a week of reshoots and a change in ratings from PG-13 to R.

“We really got to service the fans,” said “Snakes” director David Ellis. “Decisions are usually made by guys 50, 60 years old. They only know during test screenings. If you can get it out early, you can deliver what they want.”

Still, to let the audience feel genuinely in charge of the phenomenon, Mr. Ellis and New Line had to sacrifice prerogatives that directors and movie companies normally hold dear. “The worst thing we can do is take it over,” New Line’s marketing chief, Russell Schwartz, said of trying to control the “Snakes” Web boom.

These new horizons are not to everyone’s liking. Pointing to the precedent of “American Idol,” Mr. Gilmore said, “If you were told a decade ago that a TV show would determine the next major pop star, would you believe it? I have a fear of the tyranny of mass taste.” Mr. Gilmore also wondered what sort of “filtering mechanisms” would evolve on the Internet, if any. Of course what makes the Web attractive is that there are no gatekeepers — managers, agents, studio executives, or film-festival programmers — to get past. But that’s also what makes finding truly satisfying entertainment difficult. On YouTube alone tens of thousands of videos are posted every day.

Another basic question is how many of the new Web-based talents will stay on the Internet exclusively. Mr. Swanberg, for one, said he doesn’t care where his work is shown. But he noted that his two feature films, which were screened at the South by Southwest festival, were seen by far fewer people than his “Young American Bodies.”

Mr. Kirn predicted that “all of the zoo animals are going to get out.” He continued, “The question is whether they will be paid,” because the Net so far has offered virtually unlimited freedom but very limited rewards.

As Hollywood scrambles to tap the Web’s creative energy, one obvious — and to some people ominous — possibility is that the film industry will find a way to co-opt its major outposts. The entertainment business tried to do that once before, toward the end of the dot-com boom, when Hollywood executives and talent tried to start Web sites like the ill-fated Pop.com, which found little success in its attempt to distribute short films over the Internet.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has already purchased MySpace in order to get in on the action, and other media entities are aligning themselves with popular Web sites. Mr. Rizzo said that these giants would dominate the Internet in much the same way they’ve taken over the cable business, though it isn’t clear that owning Web sites would position them to make blockbusters.

“Is buying MySpace the answer to that?” asked John Cooper, director of programming at Sundance. “Culture is content driven, not medium driven.”

Yet Mr. Kirn insisted that the medium would leave a deep imprint on any entertainment that it generates. “The Net is a self-consciously anti-authoritarian audience,” he said. “They are spit-ballers, defacers, vandals, skeptics. It’s a class without a teacher. The movies that will succeed on it will have those properties.”

“The Net is going to unleash a hybrid talent and a hybrid sensibility,” he said. “What it needs is an Orson Welles, an unclassifiable polymath. It will reward someone with that kind of talent. Whether Hollywood can contain and absorb and dominate those energies will decide its fate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/movies/23clar.html





High-Tech Cloning
Nic Fulton

Updated with comment from VeriChip spokesman:

With the debate over genetic cloning in full swing, hackers could not have cared less at a conference in New York City, where two presenters demonstrated the electronic equivalent of making a copy of an implanted RFID or radio frequency ID chip.

The point was to show just how easy it is to fool a detection device that purports to uniquely identify any individual.

Annalee Newitz (left) and Jonathan Westhues (right) presented their experimentations at the HOPE Number 6 conference in New York City in front of a crowd of hackers, tweakers and phone phreakers.

“This is the first time someone has cloned an human-implanted RFID chip,” Newitz said. “Since I have been chipped Jonathan refers to me as an implanted pet.”

Newitz said she has an RFID chip implanted in her right arm manufactured by VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital.

“Their Web site claims that it cannot be counterfeited — that is something that Jonathan and I have shown to be untrue.”

The pair demonstrated the cloning process: Westhues held a standard RFID reader against Newitz’s arm to register the chip’s unique identification number.

Next, Westhues used a home-built antenna connected to his laptop to read Newitz’s arm again and record the signal off her implanted chip.

Westhues then takes the standard RFID reader and waves it past his laptop’s antenna. The reader beeps, showing Newitz’s until then “unique” ID. “It actually has no security devices what-so-ever,” Newitz said of VeriChip’s claims that its RFID chips can not be counterfeited.

VeriChip spokesman John Procter said in a phone interview that he had read about Newitz and Westhues work, but the company had not been able to review the evidence. He had no specific comment regarding their “cloning” project.

“We can’t verify what they may or may not have done,” Procter said, adding that: “We haven’t seen any first-hand evidence other than what’s been reported in the media.”

“It’s very difficult to steal a VeriChip … it’ s much more secure than anything you’d carry around in your wallet,” he added.
http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/07/22/high-tech-cloning/





Laptops Pre-Loaded With Linux Getting Popular
Harichandan A. A.

By 2006, most serious players in the computers market expect two dominant operating systems — Microsoft Windows and Linux. Accordingly, computer makers such as IBM, Dell, HP and, of course, the Taiwanese computer exporter Acer are not really taking sides, happy to sell whatever the customer wants.

Indeed, with Linux consistently bettering market expectations, these large firms are offering more choice and lower prices, not just in the server market, but also on laptops. And laptops pre-loaded with Linux operating system are gaining in popularity among Indian customers as well.

Ever since they started slashing prices on laptops and offering cheaper entry level configurations, starting some two quarters ago, companies such as HP and Acer have continued to announce incremental variations on the laptops, with a corresponding price cuts.

The latest announcements come within a couple of days of each other, with companies offering `notebooks' at `sub-40k' prices. Acer now sells its TravelMate TM 244FX laptop, pre-loaded with Linux, at less than Rs. 40,000. S. Rajendran, general manager heading Acer India's Consumer Products Group, said, "We want to make notebooks more pervasive in the Indian market. We are looking at aggressively increasing penetration among small and medium enterprises, educational and finance verticals as there is tremendous potential in these markets. HP wants to pitch its Linux laptop to the same segments. Its sub-40K notebook Compaq Presario P2514 notebook "is specifically designed to cater to the needs of the small office home office, small and medium businesses, education and sales personnel, whose primary requirements are mobility and technology at an affordable price,''a company release said.

Rajiv Grover, HP India's country manager for `consumer portables,' said, "Lifestyles and business needs are changing. The market drivers for this new line will be people on the move. We have been extremely conscious of the technology offered while launching the sub-40K notebooks. Intel Celeron Processor 2.8Ghz and the 15-inch screen are just some of the features that we boast of.''

Mr. Grover told The Hindu that for the consumer who wants it, laptops with the Windows XP operating system and Intel Pentium 4 chips are very much on offer, with the corresponding increase in price, though.

The market for notebooks at the entry-level is increasing at a rapid pace. International Data Corp., an independent market research firm in the U.S., continues to be bullish on its figures for Linux and computers working on Linux. As to Linux, "between 20 and 22 per cent of our laptop business came from notebooks loaded with Linux,'' he said. So, even in absolute numbers, companies expect twice as many laptops loaded with Linux to be sold this year than last year.

A slightly more conservative figure comes from Ravi Swaminathan, Vice-President at HP India and head of its Personal Systems Group. "Notebooks are a high potential, market experiencing an average annual growth of between 75 and 80 per cent. While many factors can be credited to this resurgence in the notebook segment, the biggest driver is mobility, productivity and greater affordability.''
http://www.hindu.com/2004/06/16/stor...1606911800.htm





Blogger Ain’t Journalists
Nick Madigan

A wide-ranging study of bloggers, the chattering class of the Internet, concluded that a mere 5 percent of them use news as their primary topic—a figure at odds with perceptions that blogging is remaking journalism.

The study, released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, reported that 37 percent of those surveyed cited their own life and experiences as primary fodder for their blogs. Eleven percent of the respondents said they blog regularly about politics and government; 7 percent about entertainment; 6 percent about sports, and lesser fractions on business, technology and faith.

‘‘Blogs are as individual as the people who keep them, but this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression,’’ Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for the Internet project, said in a statement. ‘‘Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge or just keep in touch with friends and family.’’

That is how blogs began in the mid-1990s, with web surfers linking others to sites they found compelling. Some added remarks and commentaries to the links. By 1997, the expression ‘‘web log’’ emerged, later contracted to ‘‘blog.’’

The Pew survey, one of several conducted by the group, an arm of the Pew Research Center, in the last few years to determine citizen involvement in cyberspace, estimated that 12 million American adults, or about 8 percent of Internet users, keep a blog. About 39 percent of web users in the United States, or 57 million adults, read them. More than half of all bloggers, 54 percent, responded that they are under the age of 30, the survey said.

Pew researchers called 233 bloggers between July 2005 and February this year and undertook additional, larger-scale telephone surveys through April. These follow-up surveys yielded a sample of 7,012 adults, which included 4,753 Internet users, 8 percent of whom are bloggers. The margin of error was 6.7 percent.

Fifty-four percent of the bloggers said they have never been published anywhere other than on their own blogs, while 44 percent said their work has been seen elsewhere. More than three-quarters of bloggers, 77 percent, said they have posted something online that they created themselves, such as art, photographs or videos.

By comparison, only 26 percent of Internet users in general have done so. Forty-four percent of the bloggers have taken material they found online— such as songs, text or images—and remixed it or altered it into their own artistic creation, the survey said, whereas only 18 percent of all Internet users normally do that. Sixty-one percent of bloggers said they rarely or never get permission to use other people’s copyrighted material. Despite—or perhaps because of—the personal, even confessional nature of much of the blogosphere, 55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym, the study found.

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism; 65 percent disagreed. Just over a third of the bloggers said they often conduct journalistically appropriate tasks such as verifying facts and linking to source material. More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly, and 11 percent said they post corrections.

The survey found men and women have statistical parity in blogosphere, with men representing 54 percent of bloggers and women 46 percent. Susannah Fox, the Internet project’s associate director, said the attention devoted to bloggers has focused on ‘‘a small number of high-traffic, A-list bloggers.’’ By asking a wide range of bloggers what they do and why they do it, ‘‘we have found a different kind of story about the power of the Net to encourage creativity and community among all kinds of surfers,’’ she said.
http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/9074.html





'Pirates' Out - Earns Predecessor in 17 Days
AP

Johnny Depp and his pirate friends are keeping all the box-office treasure for themselves. Depp's ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'' remained the top movie for the third straight weekend, hauling in $35 million and lifting its total to $321.7 million after just 17 days, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Disney sequel passed the $305 million domestic total that its predecessor, 2003's ''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,'' rang up during its entire six-month run.

''Dead Man's Chest'' easily beat back a rush of new movies, which were led by Sony's family film ''Monster House,'' a spooky animated tale that debuted at No. 2 with $23 million. The movie follows the adventures of a group of children at a mysterious neighbor's scary home.

Opening in third was M. Night Shyamalan's ''Lady in the Water,'' an adult fairy tale from Warner Bros. that took in $18.2 million. Starring Paul Giamatti as an apartment manager who discovers a water nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) living beneath his complex's swimming pool, the movie was the weakest debut for writer-director Shyamalan in a string of wide releases since 1999 that included the blockbusters ''The Sixth Sense'' and ''Signs.''

Kevin Smith's ''Clerks II,'' a Weinstein Co. and MGM follow-up to his 1994 independent-film hit about two slackers on the job, premiered at No. 6 with $9.6 million.

Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson's ''My Super Ex-Girlfriend,'' a 20th Century Fox comedy about a superhero taking revenge against the boyfriend who jilted her, debuted at No. 7 with $8.7 million.

Overall movie business rose, with the top 12 movies taking in $143.2 million, up 11 percent from the same weekend last year, when ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' was the No. 1 movie with $28.3 million.

Hollywood continued its modest rebound after a 2005 slump in which movie attendance fell 8 percent from the previous year's. So far this year, attendance is up 3.8 percent compared to 2005, according to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Summer attendance had been running slightly behind 2005's but now is 4 percent ahead because of a surge the past three weekends.

''That's really attributable to the strength of `Pirates of the Caribbean,' because that's when the tide turned,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations.

On its 16th day of release Saturday, ''Dead Man's Chest'' became the fastest movie to cross the $300 million mark, beating the previous best pace of 17 days set last year by ''Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith.''

Within a week, ''Dead Man's Chest'' is expected to top the $339.7 million domestic take of ''Finding Nemo'' to become Disney's top-grossing movie.

''There are lots of plateaus for us to continue to strive for,'' said Chuck Viane, Disney's head of distribution.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest,'' $35 million.

2. ''Monster House,'' $23 million.

3. ''Lady in the Water,'' $18.2 million.

4. ''You, Me and Dupree,'' $12.8 million.

5. ''Little Man,'' $11 million.

6. ''Clerks II,'' $9.6 million.

7. ''My Super Ex-Girlfriend,'' $8.7 million.

8. ''Superman Returns,'' $7.46 million.

9. ''The Devil Wears Prada,'' $7.43 million.

10. ''Cars,'' $4.9 million.

------

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line, Warner Independent and Picturehouse are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Box-Office.html





Studios Shift to Digital Movies, but Not Without Resistance
Scott Kirsner

Every weekend through the summer, big-budget movies compete for dominance at the box office. On movie sets, a quieter sort of contest is taking place as a handful of companies are angling to have their digital movie cameras used to capture the action, supplanting the traditional 35-millimeter film camera.

Many of this summer’s most prominent releases have relied on digital movie cameras, including “Superman Returns” from Warner Brothers, “Click” from Sony Pictures and “Miami Vice,” a Universal Pictures offering that opens Friday.

But while the changeover to digital filmmaking has long been predicted, these companies are encountering an unusual degree of resistance from producers, directors and cinematographers. A majority of feature films are still shot with film cameras and some well-known directors, including Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan, have been vocal about their intention to continue shooting on film.

“People involved with big-budget features are usually risk-averse,” said Marker Karahadian, the president of Plus8 Digital, a company in Burbank, Calif., that rents digital cameras. “Delays are very costly when you’ve got stars on the set, and that means no trailblazing.” Mr. Karahadian’s company supplied six digital cameras made by Thomson Grass Valley for “Miami Vice.”

Unlike the market for consumer digital photography, the market for professional digital movie cameras is relatively small: the major American studios released only 194 films in 2005, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. And while Panavision and Thomson Grass Valley, both based in California, have an early edge, many new cameras are on the way, from established companies like the ARRI Group of Germany and a start-up, Red Digital Cinema.

Digital cinematography first appeared as a faint spot on Hollywood’s radar in 1999, when George Lucas announced his plan to shoot “Star Wars: Episode II” with a new kind of digital camera adapted from Sony Electronics’ television news cameras. The Lucas experiment, released in 2002, persuaded a few directors to dabble with digital cameras, but it was not until this year that the roster of movies using digital photography began to grow.

“We’ve reached what may be looked at, five years from now, as a tipping point in the use of digital cameras,” said Curtis Clark, a cinematographer who is chairman of the American Society of Cinematographers’ technology committee.

Manufacturers have promoted the potential cost savings of the new technology. Digital cameras eliminate the need to buy and develop film, and the need later to scan that film into a computer, add digital special effects or adjust the color. Robert L. Beitcher, Panavision’s chief executive, estimates that even though renting his company’s Genesis digital camera at a typical rate of about $3,000 a day is nearly twice as expensive as renting a film camera, they can help save about $600,000 on film costs and processing in a big-budget feature.

But producers and cinematographers say that cutting production budgets is not the main motivation for switching to digital moviemaking.

“It saves a little money, but that was not the driving force,” said Dean Devlin, the producer of “Flyboys,” a $60 million World War I picture being released in September, which used the Genesis camera.

Rather, Mr. Devlin said the main advantage was the ability to shoot for nearly an hour during airborne dogfight sequences, with the camera mounted on a replica biplane or a helicopter and linked to a digital tape deck. Tony Bill, the movie’s director, estimated that a film camera would have been limited to shooting takes perhaps five minutes long, before requiring a new load of film.

Others are gravitating toward the digital cameras because of their aesthetic qualities. Dion Beebe, the cinematographer for “Miami Vice,” said that he and the director, Michael Mann, chose a camera from Thomson Grass Valley called the Viper to create a particular look for the movie.

“We made use of the Viper’s amazing depth of field,” Mr. Beebe said. “You’re seeing clearly from two inches to infinity.”

But Mr. Beebe says that film cameras are still superior to their digital brethren for capturing bright sunlight in a more nuanced way, and other cinematographers acknowledge that digital cameras do not have the resolution found in film.

Dean Semler, who shot “Click” and “Apocalypto,” a Mayan historical adventure movie directed by Mel Gibson, said he was impressed by the Panavision camera’s sensitivity in low-light situations when he was in the Mexican jungle. Some cinematographers may hold out for higher-resolution digital cameras, Mr. Semler said, but then added: “I’m looking at my images, and it doesn’t matter. It looks fabulous on the screen to me.”

Still, executives at Panavision and Thomson Grass Valley are not expecting an abrupt fade-out for celluloid. The bulk of Panavision’s $233 million in 2005 revenue came from renting film cameras and accessories to movie and television producers. Panavision does not sell its cameras. (The company is controlled by the investor Ronald O. Perelman, who is in the midst of taking it private, Mr. Beitcher, the chief executive, said.)

“We’ve got 1,000 film cameras in our warehouse, and we expect to be renting them for a long time,” Mr. Beitcher said.

Thomson Grass Valley is a division of Thomson, the French-based media products and services company, and is a corporate sister to Technicolor, which develops film for motion pictures.

“It’s not our job to push the market,” said Mark Chiolis, senior marketing manager for Thomson Grass Valley. “It’s our job to provide tool sets for the market to select from. If you like the look of film, shoot film.” Thomson Grass Valley and Panavision also face a cattle call of new digital movie cameras, some being sold for much lower prices. Red Digital Cinema, founded by Jim Jannard, a billionaire who started the sunglasses company Oakley, is developing a higher-resolution digital camera that will sell for $17,500.

“For the cost of a few days’ rental of their products, you can own ours,” said Ted Schilowitz, a Red Digital executive.

Mr. Karahadian, the camera rental entrepreneur, has five cameras from Red Digital on order. Complicating the market for digital cameras, he said, is their quicker path to obsolescence, and the small size of the feature film and television market in Hollywood, which does not support the cost efficiencies of high-volume manufacturing .

But camera companies like Panavision, which was founded in 1953 and supplied lenses for films like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Ben-Hur,” may have no choice but to wade into the swift waters of digital competition.

“We don’t envision developing or building a new film camera,” Mr. Beitcher said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/te...24digital.html





As Podcasts Spread, Advertisers Sniff Money
Kim Hart

The podcast is heading for the mainstream.

A report released by Nielsen Analytics last week found that podcasts -- online broadcasts downloaded from the Internet for playback on portable devices -- are attracting a growing number of listeners, a shift that media companies and advertisers have noted.

According to the study, more than 9 million Internet users in the United States downloaded podcasts to computers and mobile devices last month. Ten percent of the study's 1,700 respondents said they download eight or more podcasts a week. And of the podcast users, 38 percent said they listen to the radio less because they're listening to podcasts.

More than 75 percent of all podcast listeners are male.

The number of podcast listeners is still small compared with the audiences of traditional media outlets, but technology analysts said the study illustrates the impact that podcasts might have.

"For a technology that's relatively new, it's a good number that indicates growth," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president of the market analysis firm Jupiter Research. "It's gone beyond something that's only of interest to technology enthusiasts."

The most popular podcasts -- mostly news and entertainment -- have prompted large media companies, including traditional radio stations, to experiment with online programming. "Advertisers go wherever there are ears and eyes, especially when you get people who are highly engaged like podcast users," said Larry Gerbrandt, senior vice president of Nielsen Analytics. "So many businesses are adopting it for different types of communications because it's an extremely adaptable format."

A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. found that one-quarter of online consumers are interested in podcasts because it allows them to listen to audio and video programs at any time and place. Internet radio stations, broadcast radio shows and radio news programs are the most popular types of podcast content.

The Forrester study predicts that radio station podcasts that complement over-the-air broadcasts will continue to develop, as will unique content that will create niche markets.

And the popularity of podcasts will continue grow as people become more familiar with the technology, said Tim Bourquin, chief executive of TNC New Media Inc., an online media company that produces several podcasts.

For commuters, the car stereo is the likely to be the first device replaced by podcasts, he said.

"We're going to start to see devices that bypass the computer entirely when pulling in podcasts, which will make them easier to get," Bourquin said. "When getting a podcast is as easy as tuning into your favorite FM station, that's when it's going to take off."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...av=hcmoduletmv





Analysts Seek Microsoft Spending Details
Allison Linn

The demand at Microsoft Corp.'s annual meeting of financial analysts next week won't be so much to "show me the money" as to "show me what you're doing with the money."

Cash-rich Microsoft surprised analysts several months ago by saying it would commit millions of dollars more for research, development and other costs, hampering its earnings potential through the 2007 fiscal year, which ends in June. Microsoft shares plummeted as analysts demanded more details about the company's vague - but pricey - plans.

Microsoft executives offered some relief Thursday during the software company's quarterly earnings call, when they broke down the general areas in which they plan to allocate about $2.7 billion in increased spending.

Still, analysts visiting Microsoft's Redmond campus next week want to learn more about where exactly the money is going - and what shareholders can expect in return.

"They rolled back the curtain a little bit on those expenses," said analyst Charlie Di Bona with Bernstein & Co.

But, he added, "There's an implicit promise that we're going to get more answers."

Microsoft's big spending plan was especially jarring because many analysts had been preparing for the company to start reaping the benefits of a wave of major product launches, including new versions of its Windows operating system and Office business software. Despite delays, both are due out this fiscal year.

Microsoft also has recently endured some major executive restructuring, including a decision by co-founder Bill Gates to step back from day-to-day duties by 2008. Aside from Gates' decision, much of the restructuring has been aimed at helping the company make decisions more quickly in response to fast-moving competitive threats.

Analysts are also counting on Microsoft to use its newly boosted budget to beat back the competition.

One big challenge for Microsoft is the growing market for software that is available, either free or via paid subscriptions, over the Internet. These products, which people are using for such tasks as checking e-mail and managing business relationships, could eventually threaten Microsoft's two cash cows, Windows and Office, which are primarily bound to desktop computers.

Microsoft said it expects to spend about $500 million more in the current fiscal year on improving its own Internet-based software offerings. The budget includes money for improving its search and online advertising technology - the key ways it hopes to battle Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Also during the fiscal year, Microsoft expects to spend about $450 million more on marketing, in part because of the launch of new versions of Windows and Office. Another $450 million will be spent on boosting its sales efforts.

Microsoft also said it will increase spending by $1 billion on products that could help reduce its traditional dependency on Windows and Office. These include security and more sophisticated communications technology.

The final $300 million will be for general spending increases and potential acquisitions.

Although analysts were caught by surprise by the big spending spree, many say they are glad Microsoft is more aggressively competing and expanding its business further as Office and Windows face an ever-more-saturated market.

"I would be much more concerned if Microsoft wasn't spending the money to make this bet," said Toan Tran, an equity strategist with research firm Morningstar.

Still, analysts want assurances that this new spending will pay off. After all, in recent years Microsoft has invested heavily in far-flung ventures such as software for watching and recording television.

So far none have come close to bringing in revenues like Office and Windows. For example, although Xbox 360 is considered a hit, the unit that includes the videogame console lost $414 million in the quarter that ended June 30.

"They've been talking now about these new businesses for five years and really saying, 'They're going to bear fruit. They're going to bear fruit.' And so far that hasn't happened," said analyst Matt Rosoff with independent research company Directions at Microsoft.

At some point, Rosoff said, analysts might start asking, "Do you abandon ship?"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-21-16-19-55





AMD to Buy Chip-Maker ATI for $5.4B
Dan Goodin

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Monday it will pay $5.4 billion to acquire top graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc., as Intel Corp.'s biggest rival in the market for personal-computer microprocessors attempts to expand its product portfolio.

The AMD-ATI marriage could shift the balance of power in the chip industry in significant ways. AMD's product portfolio - which has remained limited to the microprocessors that act as a PC's main calculating engine - would balloon overnight, as it folds in two major new chip categories.

Markham, Ontario-based ATI, which makes chipsets and graphics chips for PCs, also makes a host of semiconductors for consumer products, such high definition TVs and cell phones.

The new offerings would broaden AMD's package of products as it takes on Intel, the world's biggest chip maker that has long supplied a wider portfolio. In addition to supplying microprocessors, Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, sells so-called chipsets, which connect a microprocessor to a PC's other core components. It also sells graphics chips, which power images rendered by computer games and internet video.

Under terms approved unanimously by both companies' boards of directors, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD will pay $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million AMD shares to acquire all of ATI's outstanding stock, according to a news release.

Based on AMD's closing share price of $18.21 on Friday, the deal valued ATI's shares at $20.47, a premium of almost 24 percent compared with ATI's Friday's closing price of $16.56 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. ATI shares surged almost 17 percent to $19.32 in pre-market trading after the news. AMD shares fell more than 6 percent to $17.10.

AMD, which has been shelling out billions to add factory capacity so it can better compete with Intel Corp., will pay for the acquisition with the help of a $2.5 billion loan from Morgan Stanley.

AMD expects the deal to contribute "slightly" to earnings next year and add "meaningfully" to profit by 2008. The purchase will save the combined company about $75 million by the end of 2007.

An acquisition of ATI "would make AMD a bigger player with a more diversified portfolio," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with research firm Insight 64. It "would certainly put AMD on a more equal footing relative to Intel."

The deal also put competitive pressure on Nvidia Corp., the other dominant maker of graphics chips. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia has competed against Intel in selling chipsets and graphics chips while counting on AMD for sales of those products.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-24-08-47-44





Intel Counters AMD With Fast, Energy-Saving Chip
Aiko Hayashi and Scott Hillis

Intel Corp. took the wraps off fast new energy-saving computer chips on Thursday as the No. 1 chipmaker moves to take back the technology lead from smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

The new processors, known as the Core 2 Duo family, have two computing cores on a single chip, allowing users to run many data-intensive programs at the same time.

They are also built on a new microarchitecture -- a chip's basic blueprint -- that makes them consume less power than their predecessors, the flagship Pentium line.

That has been a key consideration among big customers, some of whom have tens of thousands of computers, as they look to trim their energy bills.

"This isn't just an incremental change in terms of performance, it's a revolutionary leap," Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said, adding the desktop chips deliver 40 percent faster performance while cutting power usage by 40 percent. The laptop chips will run 20 percent faster, he added.

Otellini was speaking at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, CA.

"Certainly as far as their previous products, it's a huge leap ahead," Jim McGregor, principal analyst with technology market research firm In-Stat, said of the new chips.

Core 2 Duo is the third of four major products Intel is launching this year. It has already unveiled two new server chips and a revamped processor for laptop computers is also expected soon.

Tsuyoshi Abe, an Intel sales and marketing general manager, expects a tough fight with AMD, but is confident of taking back market share with the new Core processors.

"The competition in the market will continue to heat up as every maker tries hard to improve its products, but I believe our new processors can help us beat our competitors," Abe said at a news conference.

Intel will start shipping a total of 10 new processors for desktop computers in early August and for laptops at the end of August, the company said. It has priced the desktop processors from 21,230 yen ($182.5) to 115,900 yen ($996.3)

The introduction of new products has been accompanied by steep price cuts on older Intel chips, many of which have been stuck in inventory as the company lost market share to AMD.

"You've got to give Intel credit, they've come back with a much more competitive architecture," McGregor said.

Intel is hoping the new chips will rekindle growth at the Silicon Valley stalwart, which has seen its share price hit by falling market share and profits.

AMD, invigorated by its recent success, has ambitious plans to more than quadruple output over the next few years in its quest to eventually take more than 30 percent of the market.

AMD is estimated to have nearly 20 percent of the market for desktop PCs and about 25 percent of the market for server computers running the chips made by it and Intel, known broadly as x86 processors.

But AMD is being forced to respond to Intel's price cuts and analysts say its average selling prices probably will not get a boost until it launches its own new products in the middle of next year.

"Just as Intel still has a few holes in their road map, their product lineup, AMD does as well. They still don't have a competitive low-power mobile architecture," McGregor added.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...chnologyNews-2





Report: Philips Chip Unit May Fetch $10B
AP

Shares of Royal Philips Electronics NV jumped Monday on a report that private equity firms may be willing to pay around 8 billion euros ($10.1 billion) for the company's semiconductor division.

Analysts had earlier estimated the unit's value at closer to 6 billion euros ($7.6 billion).

Shares in Philips, which is also Europe's largest consumer electronics company, were up 3.9 percent at 24.53 euros ($31.05) in Amsterdam trading.

Philips has vowed to either sell the division or spin it off by the end of the year with an initial public offering. The unit makes chips for mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and cars.

Citing "people involved in the bidding," The Wall Street Journal reported that there were three prospective buyers for the unit.

Philips, which could not immediately be reached for comment Monday, was the world's ninth largest semiconductor maker by sales in 2005 with chip sales of 4.62 billion euros ($5.84). Divisional operating profit was 307 million euros ($389 million).

According to the Journal, the three bidders are: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. of New York with Silver Lake Partners of Menlo Park, Calif.; a consortium of Permira Advisors of London, Texas Pacific Group of Fort Worth, Texas, and Blackstone Group of New York; and a group comprised of Bain Capital Inc. of Boston, Apax Partners Worldwide LLC of London, and Francisco Partners Management LLC of Menlo Park, Calif.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-24-06-15-43





Deal Reached In Patent Infringement Case
Mark Jewell

A company that provides cellular phone billing services on Friday reached an $87 million settlement of a patent infringement case that had threatened to send it into bankruptcy.

The settlement is far less than the $128 million a jury had ordered Boston Communications Group Inc. and its co-defendants to pay Freedom Wireless Inc., a small, privately held firm that had sued over patents.

BCGI's shares more than doubled in value on the late-afternoon announcement, closing up $2.09, or 109 percent, at $4.09 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The Bedford-based company said in a joint announcement with Freedom Wireless that they had reached a definitive settlement and a related agreement under which BCGI will pay $12.6 million in royalties to license technology used for prepaid cellular phone billing plans.

The $12.6 million is part of BCGI's total $55.3 million obligation to settle all outstanding claims from Phoenix-based Freedom, a tiny, privately held company that sought patent protection for its technologies in 1994.

The remaining $32 million from the overall $87 million settlement is due from BCGI's co-defendants - cellular carriers that have received billing services from BCGI, including Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, CMT Partners and Western Wireless. BCGI's previous obligation to indemnify its co-defendants from paying legal costs was dropped as part of the settlement.

E.Y. Snowden, BCGI's president and chief executive, said in a news release that the company was "thankful to be able to end this chapter in BCGI's history," calling the settlement a way to avoid prolonging a legal battle that began when Freedom Wireless sued in 2000. The case has recently been slowed by appeals.

Larry Day, Freedom Wireless' president, said in a phone interview that his company was "very happy for BCGI, and for the resolution between these parties." He declined to further comment.

Freedom Wireless' technology, developed by inventors Douglas Fougnies and Dan Harned, allows customers making prepaid calls to avoid dialing identification codes or calling toll-free numbers.

Last September, a Boston-based federal judge upheld a $128 million verdict that a jury reached on May 20, 2005, following a nearly two-month trial.

Boston Communications later warned it might not be able to continue operating or might seek bankruptcy protection if it failed to reverse the decision or couldn't reach a deal to license technology from Freedom Wireless.

The $128 million award exceeded the 400-employee company's total revenue last year by more than $20 million, and the company warned in a recent regulatory filing that damages combined with interest and court costs could total $165 million.

BCGI's stock traded around $10 a share in late 2004 but sank after the jury verdict. Over the past year, the stock has traded as low as 87 cents to as high as $2.99.

About 90 percent of BCGI's total revenue comes from its U.S. prepaid wireless services to customers including Verizon Wireless, Cingular and Nextel Communications.

Prepaid cellular customers pay for blocks of minutes and typically get standard features like voice mail and text messaging. But there are no credit checks and often no activation fees. Customers who use up their minutes can simply buy more or choose not to do so.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-21-18-04-06





New Washers, Dryers Send Messages to PCs
Greg Bluestein

The technology behind cleaning clothes has spun through more than a few cycles over the last century, from clunky hand-cranked machines to today's gleaming appliances that can detect a load's size and even how much grime is ground into the fabric.

Soon, those who delight in living the clean life could be awash in an even newer twist.

Washers and dryers that link wirelessly to Internet-connected home networks are being tested by consumers who are receiving updates on their dirty laundry via cell phones, computers and TV sets.

Messages not only indicate when a wash is complete but also can warn that a lint filter is clogged or a load is too large. Users can remotely command the machines to fluff dry clothes or start a load from a distance after being told - oops - they forgot to start the wash.

Peggy Spencer, a 57-year-old teacher whose family is involved in a trial of the system launched by the Internet Home Alliance, hopes to use it to monitor the wash from the comfort of a lounge chair - at her neighborhood pool.

The technology test, dubbed Laundry Time, recently began evaluating how three Atlanta families use the devices over six weeks.

"When you think about it, it's just laundry. It's not exciting. But this isn't about technology. It's about the emotional impact of the technology," said Tim Woods, an Internet Home Alliance vice president.

The project, which involves Whirlpool Corp., Panasonic and Microsoft Corp., relies on a wireless network, two TV tuners and Microsoft Media Server software to send the details to devices across the home network and beyond.

It could be at least a year from the marketplace, depending on how the pilot and other studies iron out. And company executives said they haven't yet discussed how they'd price such appliances if they actually release them. Whirlpool says modifying its latest models won't be tough if the company decides to offer the technology to the masses.

"It's really not rocket science," said Rich McCoy, Whirlpool's lead engineer. "But it's something new to our industry. We're slowly adopting things that make sense."

Even without the network capability, the latest washers and dryers are part of a wave of new household products that work more efficiently thanks to complex systems of electronic sensors.

The newest dishwashers, for instance, rely on dirt-sniffing electronics - not timers - to shut off. Vacuums can now determine how much soil and grime is on the floor so suction levels can be adjusted accordingly. State-of-the-art microwaves can detect the weight of popcorn and then apply the right amount of heat to get the perfect pop.

Companies have long envisioned a day when these appliances can be linked to the same home network that connects a family's computers, printers and other electronic devices.

But some observers are skeptical.

"I think this is a great example of people using new technology to solve a problem that doesn't exist," said Laura Champine, a home products analyst for Morgan Keegan. "I've done my own laundry for four decades and I've never been away from my home and wondered how it's doing. Until the cell phone can load the dryer, I don't know how this technology will work for me."

The system's backers disagree. In the realm of laundry alone, the technology could allow Laundromat operators to notify customers remotely when their loads are done, rather than forcing them to wait for the buzzer to sound.

A handful of college dorms have already warmed up to similar technology for students who no longer have mom nearby to wash their dirty clothes. At Georgia Tech, a program called LaundryView allows students to get cell phone calls and e-mails when their laundry's rinse cycle is done. They also can find out which washers and dryers are available through a Web site.

Laundry Time, though, would even allow folks to start an extra cycle even when they're on the road.

"The number one thing consumers say they want is a laundry robot. But Laundry Time gets them one step closer to not having to run up and down the stairs anymore," said Carol Priefert, a Whirlpool senior product development manager.

Spencer's washer and dryer are lodged in the bowels of her suburban Atlanta home, where the buzz at the end of each cycle is just a faint blip to the rest of the house.

"By the time I got down there, it'd be two or three hours later," she said. "Then it's a bag of wrinkles."

With the help of the new technology, she can control laundry cycles from her home's five computers and three TV sets. And she said the pop-up notices can have the added bonus of making laundry a more communal chore.

"If my husband sees a message," she said, "maybe one day he'll actually help out."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-22-23-52-32





Marine Corps Looking for MySpace Buddies
Audrey McAvoy

Teens looking to hook up with a friend on the popular Web community MySpace may bump into an unexpected buddy: the U.S. Marine Corps.

So far, over 12,000 Web surfers have signed on as friends of the Corps in response to the latest military recruiting tactic. Other military branches may follow.

MySpace.Com, the Internet's most popular social networking site with over 94 million registered users, has helped redefine the way a generation communicates. Users, many in their teens and 20s, post personal profiles and accumulate lists of friends and contacts with common interests.

The Marine Corps MySpace profile - featuring streaming video of barking drill sergeants, fresh recruits enduring boot camp and Marines storming beaches - underscores the growing importance of the Internet to advertisers as a medium for reaching America's youth.

"That's definitely the new wave," said Gunnery Sgt. Brian Lancioni at a Hawaii recruiting event. "Everything's technical with these kids, and the Internet is a great way to show what the Marine Corps has to offer."

Patrick Baldwin, an 18-year-old recruit from Saratoga, N.Y., who linked his profile to the Marines' site after hearing about it from a friend, said MySpace was a good place for interested teens to start learning more about the Marines.

"The more information you have the better off you are," said Baldwin, who left for boot camp a few weeks ago.

The Army, which originally balked at advertising on MySpace because of well-publicized incidents of child predators using the site to meet kids, plans to soon set up its own profile page.

"It is where prospects are," said Louise Eaton, media and Web chief for the U.S. Army Accession Command. "We go to where they are to try to inform them of the opportunities we offer."

Recruiters say MySpace is good for advertising, but they would never sign someone up to join the Marines unless they've met him or her in an old-fashioned, face-to-face meeting.

Web surfers who open the Marines' MySpace page can click on a tab titled "Contact a Recruiter." This directs them to the Marines.com site where they are prompted to fill out a form with their name, address and phone number so recruiters can arrange to meet them.

So far over 430 people have asked to contact a Marine recruiter through the site in the five months since the page went up, including some 170 who are considered "leads" or prospective Marine recruits.

The Marine Corps isn't the first to use MySpace profiles to reach the Web community's core audience of teenagers and twentysomethings.

Toyota Motor Corp. has a page to promote the Yaris, its new subcompact car. Verizon Wireless sponsored a contest on MySpace for the best single by an unsigned band.

MySpace has rapidly become the online social forum of choice for many who like how easy it is to make and communicate with friends via the site. But MySpace - and News Corp., its parent company - have had problems.

In Maine, a 27-year-old man was sentenced to three years in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he met on the site.

To boost the site's safety, MySpace recently imposed restrictions on how adults may contact younger users. Those who are 18 and over can no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's list of friends unless they already know either the youth's e-mail address or full name.

The Army initially posted ads on MySpace in January but withdrew them a month later when reports emerged about child predators approaching youths via the site. MySpace has since assured the Army it has better security protections in place.

As for other branches, the Air Force places regular advertisements on MySpace, but doesn't have a profile. The Navy hasn't used MySpace.

Steve Morse with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors is critical of recruiters using MySpace profiles. But Morse said they don't surprise him because the Iraq war has forced the military to search "under every bush" for recruits.

"It's kind of obnoxious of them to be using something that's sort of like a youth domain, to kind of come in and really sucker youth into something they're not really explaining fully," Morse said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-24-03-49-05





Wal-Mart's New Online Children's 'Hub' a Real Bomb

A poorly executed project with copy writing that makes us cringe
Bob Garfield

You think this job is easy?

Walk a mile in AdReview's shoes. Try to find something different to say week after week for 20 years. Try to be simultaneously serious and entertaining. Try to keep a level head. Try not to damage any careers along the way.

51-year-old man

Oh, and if you happen to be an incredibly macho and worldly 51-year-old man, try putting yourself into the head of the many demographic target cohorts to which we, strictly speaking, do not belong. Not only are we not in the bull's-eye-18 to 34 years-old -- we're also not a skateboarder/gamer, a soccer mom or, to the best of our knowledge, Japanese.

But depending on the ad at hand, we have to play one in front of the TV.

This week it's teenage and preadolescent girls and boys. And, we're like, that is soooo gay. This is totally the hardest thing ever.

And not just for us, it seems. It's also apparently so the hardest thing ever for Wal-Mart, which has created a website that aims to create a dialogue with precisely that audience. We have two thoughts on the subject:

It's a perfectly reasonable idea. If well-executed, such an effort might cultivate individual users, gather market intelligence on the group, destigmatize Wal-Mart as a declasse purveyor of unfashionable clothing and establish a beachhead on the web for the fast-approaching digital future.

Not well-executed

In fact, it's totally not well-executed. It's the most not-well-executed ever. The site -- schoolyourway.walmart.com -- is called The Hub. It's a hybrid of an ordinary webpage and a social-networking engine ... la MySpace.com. Little Tyler and Kayla can customize their own pages to declare their own styles and see what Justin and Madison are up to, too. Here's a sample Hub post from "Holly" -- who happens not to be a random Hubster, but a child actress with grown-up ghostwriters. Bad grown-up ghostwriters. (Warning: If you are squeamish seeing others embarrass themselves, this would be a good time to turn the page.)

Shopping will be my number ONE hobby this fall. I am going to be the most fashionable teen at school! I'll be on the lookout for the latest fashions. From leggings to layers, to boots and flats, big belts and headbands! I'll be looking for it all! Layering is SO IN right now. Hobo bags are also in style. OH! And big sunglasses! WHOO!! I don't know where to stop! With all of the new clothes I'll be getting, the kids at school will be begging me for fashion tips!

Yeah. Sure they will.

Excruciatingly bad writing

Dude, is there anything more excruciating than some lametard adult trying to speak to teenagers in their own language? To see this stuff is to cringe, and to wonder -- if we're cringing -- what are actual children doing? Once again, we are handicapped by our age and staggering sophistication, but "snorting and laughing" is our best guess.

We have put ourselves in the head of the target audience, and we want to get out fast.

Furthermore, though The Hub looks like a social-networking site, it heavily restricts content and does not permit any actual social networking. You can't expect a chain that bans racy books, magazines and albums to let a free-for-all take place on its servers. But mimicking MySpace and delivering oursandoursalonepsace is just asking for derision.

In the FAQ section of The Hub, one of the supposedly frequent questions is "WHO'S BEHIND THIS GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?"

Whoo! In an attempt to damage nobody's career, we will not tell you the answer.

~ ~ ~ Review: one star
Ad: Wal-Mart
Agencies: GSD&M, Austin, Texas; Tribal DDB, Dallas; and @RadicalMedia, New York
http://adage.com/columns/article.php?article_id=110673





Pilobolus Suffers Bitter Breach Over Rights to Choreography
Daniel J. Wakin

The dangling dancers performing at the Joyce Theater were almost too apt a metaphor for the painful events at the Pilobolus Dance Theater in the last year.

Hanging by wrist straps from a Y-shaped cable, two bare-chested men pushed each other away into the air, embraced, seemed to fight, picked each other’s pockets, spun in consonance. Finally one broke away. He slid across the floor and found his own strap to hang from.

The piece is called “Ben’s Admonition,” and it was choreographed by Alison Chase.

Ms. Chase, who was one of the company’s four artistic directors and whose Dartmouth College dance class gave birth to the company 35 years ago, broke away last fall after a bitter exchange of letters by lawyers.

Ms. Chase said that she was cast out by a new, corporate-minded executive director and board after three decades of service, and was denied ownership of the dances she created. “It was artistic differences and sort of a mean-spirited power grab by the board,” Ms. Chase added.

The company’s management sees it differently. The executive director, Itamar Kubovy, said Ms. Chase was demanding to do larger-scale works that the company could not afford. She was offered access to her dances and a contract to stay on but declined, he said, and she was voted off the board after she suggested that she wanted to start a potentially rival company. (Ms. Chase denies wanting to start a new company.)

“There certainly was never a desire on the part of the company to drive Alison out,” Mr. Kubovy said. “We worked long and hard to keep Alison with us.”

Ms. Chase spoke out in several telephone interviews from her home in Brooksville, Me., just as Pilobolus was celebrating the 35th anniversary with its premier engagement: a four-week season at the Joyce where “Ben’s Admonition” is being performed through Aug. 12. She said that she wanted to make the point that artists own their work.

Despite the separation from Ms. Chase, Pilobolus — one of the world’s best-known modern-dance companies with its mingling of mime, dance, acrobatics and showmanship — said it was thriving financially and artistically, with expanded educational services, more touring and more commissions.

Ms. Chase choreographed five pieces, alone or in collaboration, appearing on this season’s Joyce programs. She said that she asked the company not to perform the works and to “dare to tell the world what you’ve done to the mother of Pilobolus.”

Mr. Kubovy declined. “She does not own that work,” he said, “nor does she have the right to decide whether or not we perform it.”

Ms. Chase’s departure, the latest chapter in the Pilobolus family saga, provides an unusual glimpse into behind-the-curtain politics at a collaborative dance company founded on utopian principles in the spirit of the 1960’s. The dispute has split current and former trustees and company members. But it is also connected to the sticky business of deciding who controls the rights to a piece of choreography.

The biggest recent example is the legal dispute over the rights to Martha Graham’s work. Ron Protas, her legal heir, has waged a long and unsuccessful battle to gain the rights, but courts have ruled that the Martha Graham Center owns most of the dances, because she either assigned it the rights or choreographed the dances as “works for hire.” In a different model, a trust controls the rights to George Balanchine’s works.

But Pilobolus is different from a company dominated by one towering personality.

Named after a fungus, it grew out of Ms. Chase’s dance class. Four men inspired by her instruction — Jonathan Wolken, Lee Harris, Moses Pendleton and Robby Barnett — formed a company in 1971, and Ms. Chase joined in 1973. Michael Tracy came aboard shortly after. The company set up shop in Washington Depot, Conn., in Litchfield County.

“We formed this company as a repository for our expression of the world,” Mr. Barnett said.

After personnel changes, four artistic directors remained: Mr. Wolken, Mr. Barnett, Ms. Chase and Mr. Tracy. Personality differences took their toll. A rift grew between the Mr. Wolken and Mr. Barnett on one side and Ms. Chase and Mr. Tracy on the other. Collaboration waned. The company was growing busier, and management became cumbersome. Financial problems mounted.

The collaborating artists and the board decided it was time to bring in an executive director. Mr. Kubovy arrived in January 2004. Ms. Chase said that she was enthusiastic at first. Soon, she said, Mr. Kubovy began imposing his will on artistic matters.

“He began dismantling the fabric that was the artistic soul of Pilobolus,” she said, and made himself the face of Pilobolus. “As this autocratic regime was being established, I realized this was stifling me creatively.”

Mr. Kubovy called that characterization “preposterous.”

Ms. Chase said that she had wanted to do larger-scale, more ambitious works. In January 2005 she asked permission to do outside pieces that would broaden her horizons. Four months later the company proposed that she reduce her role, but stay on as a for-hire choreographer. It rejected her claim that she owned her works, and it asked for written confirmation that Pilobolus had ownership but offered her access to her pieces.

“It’s like turning around and asking me to be a janitor,” she said. “As a working artist, I haven’t left my kids with babysitters and gone through all this work to have the board own it.”

Mr. Kubovy said that the dances had always been copyrighted by the company, and that there was never any doubt that it owned the work. Since they were joint creations, assigning ownership was impracticable, he said, and “would invite a wasps’ nest of complications.”

In interviews, Mr. Barnett and Mr. Wolken agreed that the company owned their work, saying that they had recently signed contracts to that effect. “The idea of individual ownership of our works remains antithetical to everything we founded the company on,” Mr. Barnett said.

Mr. Tracy, who did not respond to phone messages, had sent a long and passionate e-mail defense of Ms. Chase to the trustees before a special meeting last October to vote on her status. So did Peter Neill, a former board president. “Make no mistake,” Mr. Neill wrote, “she is being driven out.”

At that meeting, with negotiations stalled, the trustees voted to remove Ms. Chase from the board and to dismiss her unless she agreed to the reduced role outlined in the offer, according to board minutes. The vote came after a motion by a committee that included Mr. Kubovy and the board chairman, Edward J. Klaris, the minutes said. Ms. Chase choreographed her last piece for Pilobolus in November.

She accused Mr. Klaris of having worked in collusion with Mr. Kubovy to have her removed.

Mr. Klaris, who is married to Robin Pogrebin, a reporter for The New York Times, rejected any notion that he had waged a campaign against Ms. Chase. “My mission was purely to try to figure out what was best for this nonprofit institution,” he said. He said that Ms. Chase had stopped getting along with others in the company, obstructed decision making and neglected administrative duties.

Yet, he said, Ms. Chase’s talents were formidable, and he had spent hundreds of hours working to keep her. In the end, with no legal recourse, he added, Ms. Chase has gone to the news media with a misleading story to seek sympathy.

Mr. Kubovy said that, despite everything, he deplored Ms. Chase’s departure. “It’s sad for everyone,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/ar...ce/24pilo.html





Odd Bedfellows Align to Market Oliver Stone's Film About 9/11
David M. Halbfinger

Oliver Stone, that symbol of everything about Hollywood that conservatives love to hate, is getting help in marketing his newest movie from an unlikely ally: the publicity firm that helped devise the Swift boat campaign attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam record in the 2004 presidential race.

And so Mr. Stone, the director of the antiwar movies “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” now finds himself sharing something in common with a group of Vietnam veterans who insisted that their comrades who demonstrated against the war were misguided, misled or traitorous.

Mr. Stone said that he knew nothing of the firm’s political work until he was contacted by a reporter on Wednesday. The director’s “World Trade Center,” a largely factual drama about the rescue of two police officers from ground zero after the 9/11 attacks, is to be released on Aug. 9 by Paramount Pictures. But it is already drawing rave reviews in some unlikely quarters.

L. Brent Bozell III, president of the conservative Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council — best known for its campaigns against indecency on television and for stiffer penalties on broadcasters — called it “a masterpiece” and sent an e-mail message to 400,000 people saying, “Go see this film.”

Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, wrote last Thursday that it was “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”

(Mr. Stone, for his part, has insisted in the past that the film is “not a political movie,” while acknowledging in a recent interview that this “mantra” had been handed to him by his employers.)

To top it all off, a writer on The National Review’s Web site, Clifford D. May, actually wrote the words “God Bless Oliver Stone.”

This about a filmmaker whose conspiratorial tirades — not to mention his hyperviolent “Natural Born Killers,” polarizing political films “J. F. K.” and “Nixon,” and the lesser-known television documentary on Fidel Castro — have driven conservatives batty for decades. Only last year, The Washington Times, in an editorial, called the hiring of the “conspiracy-addled” Mr. Stone a “maliciously inspired choice” to direct “World Trade Center.”

Such glowing reviews for an Oliver Stone movie might have seemed blasphemous to many conservatives until recently, when Creative Response Concepts, on retainer for Paramount, began pitching “World Trade Center” to pundits who would not normally be considered part of Mr. Stone’s core audience.

A screening in Washington last week, for example, drew members of the Family Research Council, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the evangelical Wilberforce Forum, along with a producer for William Bennett’s radio show, writers for The Washington Times and a reporter for the Web site of Human Events, which first reported the event. Creative Response Concepts has played a prominent role in promoting conservative causes. Heading into the 2005 Supreme Court nomination battles, it advised members of the Federalist Society on how to handle television interviews and was active in promoting the nominations of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. When the AARP came out against President Bush’s plan to overhaul Social Security, the firm went to work for a conservative group that took on the AARP. And it promoted Newt Gingrich’s 1994 political strategy, Contract With America.

But it was in the 2004 campaign that Creative Response Concepts made its biggest mark on the political landscape, advising the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which assailed Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam record as a Navy officer and as a leader of the antiwar movement after he returned home. Its well-funded attacks were among the most damaging blows to the Kerry campaign.

The firm also played a major role that year in assailing CBS — then a corporate sister of Paramount at Viacom — for the “60 Minutes” report on President Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard that led to Dan Rather’s resignation as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”

Reached in Boston, Mr. Stone said he knew nothing of the public-relations firm’s background other than that it had helped to promote “The Chronicles of Narnia” last year for Walden Media and the Walt Disney Company. “Believe me, I didn’t cave,” he said. “They do it their way,” he said, referring to Paramount’s marketing executives.

Mr. Stone said that he condemned the “Swift-boating” of Mr. Kerry, but cautioned that he himself had “hired publicists in the past that had skeletons in their closet.” He added: “It’s not a holier-than-thou street here. It’s an impure market.”

In addition to Mr. Bozell’s two groups, clients of Creative Response Concepts have included the three national Republican campaign committees, the Christian Coalition, Manhattan Institute, Free Enterprise Foundation, National Taxpayers Union and Regnery Publishing, home to conservative authors like Tony Blankley and Michelle Malkin, who were also at last week’s screening.

But its clients also have included several Hollywood studios, according to the firm’s Web site. Neither the firm’s president, Greg Mueller, a former spokesman for Patrick J. Buchanan, nor Mike Thompson, an executive who arranged the screening, responded to several telephone messages.

Rob Moore, president of worldwide marketing, distribution and home entertainment for Paramount, said he would have hired the firm regardless of who had directed the movie, because of its strong elements of Christian faith and its depiction of men sacrificing themselves for one another: “the definition of patriotism,” he said.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Moore cited Creative Response Concepts’ connections in the evangelical and conservative movements, and its work promoting “Narnia.” “You need somebody who has credibility with those groups,” he said.

A Paramount spokesman said that the studio did not similarly pitch liberal groups in its multifront promotional campaign, reasoning that the entertainment press had covered that base. The spokesman said that Creative Response Concepts has also helped promote the 20th Century Fox movie “Because of Winn-Dixie” and the CW network’s show “Seventh Heaven.” It has already been hired to help promote “Charlotte’s Web,” which Paramount has scheduled for release in December.

As it happens, the strange bedfellows in this marketing relationship include Tom Freston, Viacom’s chief executive, who with his wife Kathy contributed at least $14,000 to help Mr. Kerry’s campaign in 2004, federal records show. (All told, Viacom executives gave more than $69,000 to Mr. Kerry, far more than to Mr. Bush, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

But Mr. Moore said that marketing a movie is, after all, strictly business. “When we walk in that door and put our Paramount business cards in our pockets, our job is to get as many people as possible to come see a movie,” he said. “When we walk out the door, I could be leading rallies for John Kerry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/movies/27stone.html





What Counts at the Box Office Is the Buzz
Alex Mindlin

The amount of Internet buzz a movie generates is a strong predictor of its box-office take. But it hardly matters whether that buzz is good or bad, according to a study by Yong Liu, an assistant professor of marketing at the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona.

The study, published in the July issue of Journal of Marketing, examines 12,136 messages posted to the Yahoo Movies message board during the summer of 2002, praising or panning movies like “Scooby-Doo” and “xXx.”

Dr. Liu found that movies that generated many messages in a given week tended to have high box-office receipts the week after, and movies with much prerelease buzz did well over all.

But whether most posters liked or hated the movies had little effect on the box office.

“Word of mouth mainly influences people by affecting their awareness, not their attitude,” Dr. Liu said. “You could tell me it’s a good movie, but I know we are very different people, and a movie you liked would not be a movie I like.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/te...y/24drill.html





This Isn’t Your Dad’s ‘Miami Vice’

New movie sheds pastels and pet alligators for gritty crime
David Germain

What’s "Miami Vice" without its percussive theme music? Without its pastel fashion sense, with no belts or socks? Without the slick patter of undercover cop Tubbs? Without the pet alligator aboard partner Crockett’s sailboat? Without even the sailboat?

It’s "Miami Vice," 2006-style, as envisioned by writer-director Michael Mann, the executive producer who shepherded the TV show as it became a 1980s pop-culture sensation for its clothes, music, MTV glitz and ambitious storytelling that brought big-screen flair to the small tube.

When it came time to upgrade "Miami Vice" to movie theaters, Mann was not interested in revisiting the past. Where movie adaptations such as "Starsky & Hutch" and "Charlie’s Angels" wove in familiar trappings from the old shows, Mann presents a darker, gutsier story with none of the old TV trademarks of "Miami Vice."

After all, this is the director who brought his sleek yet bleak wordview to cinematic crime classics such as "Heat" and "Thief."

"The whole idea was to do ‘Miami Vice’ for real and to do it now, and it would take place now. And if you’re going to do it for real, then the first question you have to ask yourself is: Do I have those points of connection to the show?" Mann told The Associated Press. "It’s nostalgia, and I find that passive and not interesting. ... If you’re going to do ‘Miami Vice’ for real, you’re not going to get into the cartoon stuff, and you’re not going to try to trigger recall of the show."

Farrell and Fox

As narcotics detectives going after a Latin American drug ring, Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are more subdued and somber than their TV counterparts, Don Johnson as good old boy Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas as smooth ex-New York cop Tubbs.

Mann sticks to a more nocturnal Miami, cutting a daylight speedboat race that originally was to open the film and instead plunging Crockett and Tubbs right into a nighttime undercover job.

And this is a far bloodier and sexier Miami, Mann trotting out colossal firepower in the R-rated film’s gunplay and showcasing some steamy love scenes.

Universal Pictures had considered holding the movie to a PG-13 rating to maximize audience appeal, but Mann convinced studio executives that a big-screen "Miami Vice" needed to take the gloves off.

"Who wants to go see another remake of a television show that has limited itself" to the same standards that applied to the series? Mann said. "Small screen, no overt sexuality, no language, no violence. Had all these kind of censorship rules attached to it. So who’d want to go see that? I wouldn’t want to make it."

Foxx – who co-starred in Mann’s two most recent films, "Ali" and "Collateral" – planted the seed for the movie four years ago during a birthday party for Muhammad Ali. The actor told Mann that audiences were ripe for a new take on "Miami Vice."

Though he had envisioned links to the TV show such as a hip new version of the theme music, Foxx said Mann made the right call in leaving the TV associations behind.

"High risk, hopefully big return," Foxx said. "High risk in absolutely departing from everything that ‘Miami Vice’ is about, because people will go in expecting it. But hopefully, you’ll catch them with a breath of fresh air in the summer time with a real film that sits down on you and challenges you."

‘Intense, even crazy’

Challenging films have been Mann’s passion, which explains his relatively modest output – nine films in the 25 years since he made his big-screen debut with the James Caan heist tale "Thief."

Mann, 63, chooses difficult subjects, often violent crime sagas such as "Collateral," and "Manhunter," the first adaptation about serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

Other Mann films include the French and Indian War epic "The Last of the Mohicans" and the tobacco-industry thriller "The Insider," which earned him Academy Awards nominations for best picture, director and screenplay.

"I’ve never met a director as intense or even crazy as Michael Mann," said Gong Li, co-starring in "Miami Vice" as a money launderer who strikes up a romance with Farrell’s Crockett. "He’s crazy about the movies, and he has – I don’t know if it’s some kind of special talent or innate ability or what – but he has a way of seeing things from a different angle or really finding new ways to do things."

Mann is a compulsive filmmaker, writing scripts, often operating the camera himself, and constantly experimenting with technology such as the high-definition digital photography he used on "Miami Vice."

He has a rare talent for mixing suspense and explosive action with meaningful stories and full-bodied characters. Aiming for character depth and authenticity, Mann put his actors through tough paces, sending his stars out on training exercises with real undercover agents and even requiring co-stars who never fired a weapon in "Miami Vice" to put in practice on the shooting range.

"We all know he can handle an action sequence," Farrell said. "But unless it’s backed up with some human drama, unless you have some kind of emotional investment in the characters, he understands that the validity of doing big-scale things isn’t there unless you really do care about the characters that you’re watching."

A long way from ‘Starsky and Hutch’

An English major in college, Chicago native Mann settled on a directing career after taking a film class. He studied at the London Film School and began writing for such TV series as "Police Story" and "Starsky and Hutch" in the 1970s.

Mann always was aiming for the big screen, though. He signed on as executive producer on "Miami Vice" amid the frustration of struggling to get movie projects off the ground. With a bold, cinematic script for the pilot by series creator Anthony Yerkovich, Mann discovered he could tell mini-movies each week that defied traditional TV restrictions.

"We just started making these wild shows in seven days," Mann said. "If there was something you weren’t supposed to be able to do, that was the big attraction. It’s episodic television. You can’t race boats down the inland waterway and then have one jump over a bridge. Yeah, who says you can’t? I even got Miles Davis to be a guest star, then Lee Iacocca, then Don King. We just did it all."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1006815





Gotuit Launches Broadband Video Portal
Richard MacManus

Gotuit Media, an established player in on-demand video, today announced the launch of its new broadband video portal - Gotuit.com. I got a sneak peak of the new portal and spoke with Mark Pascarella (president of Gotuit Media) and David Laubner (Director of Product Marketing) about the launch.

Gotuit.com is a free service. It offers instantaneous video delivery of a variety of professional media content - e.g. mainstream music and sports. The UI is slick and navigation between videos is pretty much seamless. But the most exciting part of Gotuit.com, for me, is its ability to search inside a video item. For example you can do a search for "Lance Armstrong" and it'll deliver a set of video snippets that feature the 7-time Tour de France winner. This is possible because Gotuit employees have indexed metadata for all videos on the service (more on this below). Users can also create playlists based on keywords - and share those with other people.

Gotuit was founded in 2000 and up till now has been mainly focused on the cable TV industry - competing with TV networks, like HBO and Showtime, that offer on-demand video. Apparently they are the number 1 VOD and music on demand provider in the US markets they are distributed. Now Gotuit is entering the broadband tv market, plus it has big plans for mobile tv later this year.

Why Gotuit is different

What differentiates Gotuit from the likes of YouTube and Google Video, is twofold:

1) Gotuit is strictly about professional content. It's partnering with mainstream media video producers - e.g. Universal Music, Warner Brothers, Reuters - to serve up content across 4 main categories: Music, Sports, News, and Entertainment. It has the latest music videos (ref: Nelly Furtado screenshot below), movie previews, short films, sports news and clips, and more.

Gotuit is also a platform for advertisers - I think its ability to target ads will be increasingly appealing as mainstream media moves online. Plus Gotuit will be announcing co-branded partnerships with mainstream content providers, whose online video will be powered by Gotuit.

2) The technology is more advanced than their Internet competition currently. Gotuit has instantaneous video delivery - it is streamed directly to the user's PC and so there's no buffering or download.

Also it has the 'search inside the video' feature I mentioned above. How is that done? Mark Pascarella told me that in the current broadband video market, there's a need for "a better, richer set of data for video search". So to meet that need, Gotuit has built a system which enables them to 'tag' specific points inside each video with appropriate metadata. Mark said this system is "a highly-automated process that involves human oversight for the creation of that data." So to be clear, the video metadata is not entirely automated - and indeed currently it is collected by Gotuit staff. However Mark told me that this metadata technology will be provided to content owners in the future.

Context: Broadband Video Market

The broadband video market is one that has a lot of activity right now, because a) video is seen as the next frontier on the Web; and b) many people see broadband video as the next generation of television. All the big Internet companies have a presence in this market - Yahoo, Google and MSN have fairly similar video search platforms. One company in particular is making big waves in broadband video - YouTube, which has grown like wildfire in 2006 and is (by far) the market leader now.

In many ways though, the current broadband tv market is primitive in nature. Few mainstream media companies have adopted online video content in a big way, except for relatively minor deals between old and new media. For example, NBC hooked up with YouTube - but really only to show tv promos on the upstart YouTube.

How Gotuit will fare in this market

I'm expecting Gotuit to make a big splash in broadband video. The technology they offer seems a big step up from the likes of YouTube and Yahoo Video. But having said that, in terms of the type of content it offers - it doesn't really compete with the incumbent Internet companies. YouTube and the big Internet companies are largely platforms for amateur video content, whereas Gotuit is squarely aimed at putting professional video content online.

Ultimately Gotuit is probably going to be competing against the big TV networks. So I suspect there is plenty of room right now for all the existing broadband video players, plus Gotuit.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...t_launches.php





Microsoft to Show 'Arrested Development'
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Microsoft Corp. will run free episodes of the quirky TV comedy "Arrested Development" through its MSN Video service later this year, making the show available online for the first time.

MSN, the software maker's Internet unit, said Wednesday it will run display and video ads instead of charging viewers to watch the critically lauded show that was a hit with a relatively small but fiercely loyal audience.

"On TV, 'Arrested Development' created an incredibly passionate and dedicated fan base, and we're thrilled to bring this series to the global MSN audience," Rob Bennett, MSN's general manager of entertainment and video services, said in a statement announcing the deal.

MSN will have exclusive portal rights to syndicate the show's 53 episodes for three years.

Making recent TV shows available online for free is rare.

Shows have generally gone on sale through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes and other services for $1.99 an episode, though those are for full downloads. MSN will stream "Arrested Development," meaning users will have to stay online while watching and possibly encounter pauses resulting from network congestion.

ABC experimented recently with making "Lost" and other programs free through its Web site. Time Warner Inc.'s AOL has a deal with sister company Warner Bros. to show older programs such as "Welcome Back Kotter" and "Growing Pains."

"Arrested Development" was canceled this year after three seasons.

Beside the MSN showing, HDNet will begin airing "Arrested Development" episodes in September on its high-definition network, which is offered on some cable and satellite systems. It will have exclusive HD television access to the series for three years.

Meanwhile, G4, a network that targets the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic, has acquired basic cable rights for the series for three years and will begin airing it in October.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-26-20-41-02





Yeah yeah big deal. It still needs a crank.

Powering the $100 Laptop

An efficient handheld generator could help bring computing to the world's poor.
Kevin Bullis

As the One Laptop per Child project, a nonprofit effort based in Cambridge, MA, nears the completion of its rugged and versatile laptop designed for school children in poor countries, a key component has fallen into place: an efficient, human-powered generator that could make the computer practical for children living in areas without reliable, affordable electricity.

The new generators, which will be field-tested beginning this October, abandon the bulky and inefficient hand-crank design featured on an early mock-up of the laptop in favor of a more compact off-laptop design that uses a pull string to spin a small generator. It was developed by Squid Labs, Emeryville, CA, a design and engineering group whose co-founders include several graduates of MIT's Media Lab, where the laptop project originated.

The $100 dollar laptop will include a 7.5-inch screen, a 500 megahertz processor, 500 megabytes of Flash memory, and wireless broadband for forming impromptu networks with other laptops. It will also be a multimedia workstation, supporting the playing and composing of music, for example.

The new generator will make the laptop much easier to power than it would be with a hand crank, in part, because the users will be able to operate the generator in a variety of ways, including holding the device (the size of two hockey pucks) in one hand and pulling the string with the other, or clamping the generator to a desk, attaching the string to one foot, and using leg power. "We wanted something that could take advantage of other muscle groups in the human body that can put out a lot more energy than the muscles that you get when you're just turning a crank," says Colin Bulthaup, a co-founder of Squid Labs.

To reach the project's goal of one minute of power generation for every ten minutes of laptop use, the generator would need to produce 20 watts (the laptop will require less than two watts in a primary application as an electronic textbook replacement). "With a hand-crank system, if you're gung-ho about it, you can get about five watts out of it. But you get tired after about a minute or so," says Geo Homsy, a partner and designer at Squid Labs. With the new system, generating 20 watts is comfortable, and it's possible to generate 10 watts for "as long as you want," the developers say.

The new generator is also quiet -- one of the key design requirements. "If you imagine an entire school room full of kids using this thing, it needs to be as quiet as possible. Otherwise it will drive everyone insane," Homsy says. Typical generators work best at high revolutions per minute, requiring noisy gears to step up the speed. The developers have done away with gears by custom-designing a generator that runs most efficiently at lower RPMs, a move that also makes possible a smaller device.

To customize the generator for children with varying strengths, or so that users can decide how hard they want to work, the design includes a computer chip that continuously adapts to how much resistance users feel. This electronic "variable motor loading" is like changing gears on a bicycle to go up a hill, Bulthaup says. "Each person pedals at the same speed, but a stronger person can push harder with each stroke. Our device automatically adjusts the loading to reach that optimum comfort/power point."

The device meets other key criteria, too, including durability and ease of use. If the string breaks, for instance, it can be easily replaced with a shoe string, or a similar object. And the generators should cost less than $10 apiece, Bulthaup says.

In an e-mail, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, says the device is the best-performing of the many they've looked at so far, and that they intend to use the design with their laptops -- if it continues to perform well in tests and another, better design does not appear. Other human-power options may also be used, however, depending on the situation, says Mark Foster, the project's vice president of engineering and chief architect.

The $100 laptop developers are also working with several firms on an ambitious, related project: developing a long-lasting battery system to be paired with the generator (or to charge off AC power). This battery system will include "custom chemistry, unique electronics, and complex charge and discharge monitoring algorithms to deliver 2,000 battery cycles -- four times more than normal PCs," Foster says. A long charging session in the morning, for instance, would allow kids to use the laptop throughout the day, with the batteries storing enough energy for eight hours of work -- with enough left over for the computer to serve as a wireless mesh network router for another 16 hours.

The $100 laptop, which the developers expect to start shipping to interested countries next year, will actually cost $135 to manufacture at first, before it drops to a projected $100 by 2008.

The project is making steady progress, moving forward on its integrated circuit, software, and industrial designs, Foster says. Once everything is ready, the group plans to conduct extensive testing: they've set aside 500 laptops to be tested until they're destroyed -- to make sure they're rugged enough for rough environments.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read...94&ch=infotech





No laptop for you!

HRD Trashes MIT's Laptop Scheme For Kids
Akshaya Mukul

The HRD ministry has rejected the idea of 'one-laptop-per-child' (OLPC) being aggressively marketed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Laboratory. "India must not allow itself to be used for experimentation with children in this area," the ministry has said.

The ministry's detailed objection based on technical, social and financial grounds was sent to the Planning Commission two weeks ago.

Negroponte had made a presentation on OLPC at Yojna Bhavan on April 7 seeking to sell one million laptops at the rate of $100 per unit for children, the cost to be borne by the government.

The idea has enough takers in the Plan panel. And despite HRD's strong disapproval, Negroponte is coming to Delhi again on July 3 to hardsell his version of digital empowerment.

HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.

It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.

It also finds it intriguing as to "why no developed country has been chosen" for MIT's OLPC experiment "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group".

The ministry says 6-12 is a highly "vulnerable age group to cover in an area of human technology interface which is so new and heavily debated".

"Both physical and psychological effects of children's intensive exposure to the computer implicit in OLPC are worrisome, to say the least.

Health problems of our rural children are well-known; personalised intensity of computer use could easily exacerbate some of these problems especially those related to eyesight and the back," the ministry said.

HRD also thinks there is a "conceptual vacuum in which the scheme is being propagated".

Arguing that the "implications of computer-based pedagogy for childhood have remained a grey zone of research", the ministry gives the example of the US where "the debate between those who believe computers to be good for children and those who have the opposite view has been quite polarised and shrill".
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a...03,curpg-1.cms





Today's Cell Phone System Argues For Retaining Network Neutrality
James Glass

For now, Internet service providers are prohibited from discriminating against connections to particular sites on the Internet: they are required to treat traffic to Google exactly the same as traffic to Yahoo! or MSN. This principle of equality is called "network neutrality." However, large telecommunication companies are lobbying congress to scrap the network neutrality rules that have been in place since the birth of the Internet. We don't have to look far to see why this is a bad idea.

Net neutrality proponents foretell a grim future for the Internet if net neutrality is scrapped: one where technology stagnates because of high entry barriers and one where a small oligarchy controls what consumers can and cannot experience. Those who want to eliminate neutrality dismiss this as alarmist, and claim that net neutrality would remove the incentive for broadband providers to build the next generation of Internet infrastructure, which all agree is sorely needed in the US.

With such wildly divergent ideas about the effects of a simple policy, wouldn't it be nice if history provided some guidance from which to evaluate these claims?

It turns out that we have a privately owned and controlled network all around us, one that closely mirrors the technical functionality of the Internet, but where there has never been a requirement for net neutrality: the US cellular phone network.

Almost all cell phones sold in the developed world have the ability to send and receive SMS (short message service) text messages. SMS is gaining popularity in the US, but only as a way to send quick messages to friends. So why aren't there a wealth of amazing and interactive services available for mobile devices? Why is there no MySpace, Craigslist, Amazon, Flikr, or eBay accessible through this network? Why are cell phone payment systems and email systems nearly nonexistent? Why haven't charities raised money or awareness of their causes through this system?

It's simple. Because the cell phone carriers control what services are allowed to use their networks. There is no net neutrality on the cell phone network.

Imagine you want to create a user-moderated news service like digg.com that operates on SMS. On the neutral Internet, you rent a Web server ($7-$100 per month to start), register your name, and start programming. Total time required: less then two hours in most cases. But getting a service on the non-neutral US cell phone network would be a little different:

The first step would be to contact a company known as an aggregator. This company manages your relationships with the cell phone carriers -- and that's carriers, plural, because making an agreement with just one carrier ensures that your service will fail because it cannot effectively spread via word of mouth. The first requirement from an aggregator is a service charge, which starts at $1,000 per month. Then, you must buy a shortcode (which kind of serves as your Web site name) for an additional $500-$1,000 per month. But you're not done.

The next step is satisfying the requirements of the cell phone companies. Many of these steps, such as requiring affirmative opt-in before a subscription can start, are not burdensome, and serve to protect the carriers' customers. Others, however, border on ludicrous. Requirements vary by carrier, but some prohibit operators from offering games or sweepstakes, or require that subscription periods can only be monthly: not daily, weekly, or yearly. Others require that content, such as ringtones, be locked so users can't forward them from their phones to their friends' phones.

Other requirements are outright offensive: as of this writing, Cingular, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon all prohibit charities from raising money though their Premium SMS services. Too bad for the United Way, Greenpeace, and the Red Cross.

Some carriers also have "decency" restrictions that are so silly and restrictive that they make the production code that governed movies between 1934 and 1967 seem quaint. Verizon is the worst offender in this case: It prohibits dating services, images that are suggestive (the same images would be acceptable if aired on prime-time network TV), and any use of "crude" words, including such shockers as "fornicate" and "genital."

After you make your application compliant to the carriers' requirements, you wait weeks or months for the carriers to approve it, and jump through more hoops if they reject your application, which they can do for any or no reason.

In practical terms, you'd never get approval for your brand new peer-mediated news service. Even if you were able to set up filters to block images and bad words, you'd still be sunk: Verizon prohibits "un-moderated chatting, flirting and/or peer-to-peer communication services."

Even if you could slip your service past the censors, you would already have been set back eight weeks and many thousands of dollars -- and this is just the beginning. Next, the carrier will charge you a fee (a few cents, typically) for every message you send to your users, and charge your users to receive your messages -- and charge them to send you messages. Just imagine where craigslist.org would be if it had to pay a few cents every time someone browsed an ad, and you had to pay as well. It's no wonder SMS services are overpriced and haven't grown beyond a niche market for ringtones and horoscopes.

This sad state of affairs is what lies in wait if we let commercial interests take control of the Internet. Expect the same type of behavior from AT&T, Comcast, and the rest of the oligarchs. It doesn't take much imagination to imagine Verizon treating their Internet property just like their cell phone network -- short-sightedly milking it for all it's worth, at great expense to the public, and to the future.
http://business.newsforge.com/busine...?tid=138&tid=3





Navy Computers With Personal Data Stolen
Lolita C. Baldor

Two laptop computers with personal information on about 31,000 Navy recruiters and their prospective recruits were stolen from Navy offices in New Jersey in June and July, the Navy disclosed on Wednesday.

It was the third time in little more than a month that personal data on Navy personnel has been lost or unintentionally released publicly over the Internet.

"There have been no reports of illegal usage of personal data identified by these incidents," said Navy spokesman, Lt. Bashon W. Mann, adding that the Navy is identifying the affected individuals.

He said the information on the laptops was secured by several layers of password protection.

According to the Navy, one laptop was reported stolen from a recruiting station in Trenton, N.J., in early June, and the other was taken from a Jersey City, N.J., recruiting station in early July. While the thefts were initially reported to the police, the head of Naval personnel was not informed until mid-July.

Information on the computers included a list of applicants and recruiters as well as information from selective service and school lists. About 4,000 included Social Security numbers.

The police and the Navy Criminal Investigative Service are investigating.

In early July, Social Security numbers and other personal information on more than 100,000 Navy and Marine Corps aviators and aircrew were discovered on the Naval Safety Center's Web site. And in mid-June Social Security numbers and other data for 28,000 sailors and family members were found on a civilian Web site.

Individuals who believe they may have been affected by the thefts can contact the Navy or check the Web site: http://www.npc.navy.mil
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062601103.html





540,000 New Yorkers At Risk of ID Theft After Breach
Michael Gormley

The names, addresses and Social Security numbers of as many as 540,000 injured workers have been lost and the state and its contracted company are trying to protect the workers from identity theft.

The state-owned personal computer provided to the contractor, CS Stars, "cannot be located," according to a letter the company sent to the people whose personal information had been lost. CS Stars was using the computer to transition the data from the state to the company's computerized claim system, according to the letter obtained by The Associated Press.

It was the latest report of potential theft of government data on individuals ranging from a Nebraska social service office to the National Nuclear Security Administration.

In New York, company and state officials confirmed Monday that the data was on computer hardware that is missing from a secured facility of the company, Chicago-based CS Stars.

Most of the workers are New Yorkers from across the state who are in two special funds of the workers' compensation system. One group is workers who suffer a second injury and another is workers who have a past injury that creates new problems, said state Workers Compensation Board spokesman John Sullivan.

The FBI is investigating, said Mike Kachel, spokesman for CS Stars' New York City office. He declined to release most details that he said could hamper the investigation. But he confirmed that 540,000 letters were sent to people identified on the hardware.

"At this time, we have no indication that any of the data stored on the missing hardware has been used inappropriately," Kachel said. "That doesn't lessen our desire to do what is right."

The company is offering $25,000 of identity theft insurance for the people, 12 months of credit reports and access to fraud resolution specialists.

The people whose personal information could be compromised must act on the offers. They aren't automatic and must be activated within 90 days. All people effected by the loss should be contacted by mail by the end of this week.

"Consumers should be on the lookout from this letter and consider the offer very carefully," said Christine Pritchard, spokeswoman for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer who was notified the incident.

"We obviously feel terrible about it and are taking every appropriate step we can to protect people," Kachel said.

In a high-profile case of potential identity theft, as many as 26.5 million veterans were made vulnerable when a Veterans Affairs laptop was stolen containing social security numbers and birth dates. The FBI has said there was no evidence that anyone accessed the data.

In June, a computer hacker broke into the child-support computer system run by the Nebraska Treasurer's office and may have obtained names, Social Security numbers and other information of 300,000 people and 9,000 employers.

A week earlier, the U.S. Agriculture Department reported that a hacker broke into its computer system and may have obtained names, Social Security numbers and photos of 26,000 Washington-area employees and contractors.

Also in June, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department discovered that personal information for nearly 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries may have been compromised when an insurance company employee called up the data through a hotel computer and then failed to delete the file.

Last fall, the Social Security numbers and other information for nearly 1,500 people working for the National Nuclear Security Administration may have been compromised when a hacker gained entry to an Energy Department computer system.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





H.P. to Pay $4.5 Billion to Acquire Mercury
Damon Darlin

Hewlett-Packard, the computer and printer maker, said on Tuesday that it would pay $4.5 billion to acquire Mercury Interactive, a software company enmeshed in a scandal over the backdating of stock options.

H.P. said it would pay $52 a share for Mercury, a 33 percent premium over its Tuesday close of $39 a share.

The acquisition was H.P.’s first major deal since it merged with Compaq in September 2001 and the first big deal as chief executive for Mark V. Hurd, who took over in March 2005 after Carleton S. Fiorina was ousted.

Mr. Hurd said in a telephone interview that the acquisition was important for the company strategy of selling what it calls the data center of the future, which would be cheaper and more reliable. “It plays right into it,” he said.

The company has software that manages hardware in the data center. The acquisition will allow Hewlett-Packard to add software that manages the software in the centers.

While analysts said the deal had strategic importance, some questioned the price Mr. Hurd was paying. “Is it a must-have company? No,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, a senior research analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Is it an important contribution? They must believe it because they are paying pretty significantly.”

Hanging over the deal is the investigation into Mercury’s possible involvement in the backdating of options given to some employees.

Earlier this year, Mercury restated its financial results for 2002, 2003, and 2004, reporting about $566.7 million less income, to account for the options. The Securities and Exchange Commission said it would probably pursue civil charges against four people who were top officials at Mercury. Mercury was delisted by the Nasdaq because of issues relating to its restatement.

Amnon Landan, the chief executive; Douglas P. Smith, the chief financial officer; and Susan J. Skaer, Mercury’s general counsel, resigned in November after an internal inquiry showed that they “were each aware of and, to varying degrees, participated in the practices,’’ according to the summary of a regulatory report.

Mercury’s current chief, Anthony Zingale, took over in November. He said on Tuesday that he would remain with the combined companies “for the short term and medium term.”

Mr. Hurd said that he and his executives had examined the legal issues.

“We don’t view it as a distressed property,” he said, “especially from an operating standpoint.”

Robert P. Wayman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief financial officer, said, “We think we have our arms around it.” He said potential liability stemming from the litigation was built into H.P.’s financial assumptions for the deal.

While Hewlett-Packard has reported that revenue from its OpenView software, which manages a corporation’s servers, data storage and computer networks, has been growing about 20 percent year over year, the overall software unit has not been very profitable.

The Mercury acquisition could change that because it gives the combined companies more products to sell. It doubles the size of H.P.’s software business to more than $2 billion in annual revenue.

The company has forecast revenue growth of 10 percent to 15 percent from the combined companies’ software operations. It also said the merger could expand operating margin in the software unit to 20 percent of revenue in fiscal year 2008 from H.P.’s current margins for its software unit of less than 1 percent. Mercury’s operating profit margins were around 20 percent.

Mr. Hurd said the deal did not signal a more acquisitive company. “I don’t you should expect multiple multibillion acquisitions coming from H.P.,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/te...26hewlett.html





Hewlett-Packard Takes a New Tack: Being Cool
Eric Pfanner

FOR weeks, an unusual Web site linked to the World Cup soccer tournament kept visitors guessing: Could this be real?

The site, FingerSkilz.tv, shows what appear to be close-up videos of a man’s hand on a desk, using two fingers to perform soccer tricks with a wadded-up paper “ball.’’ The Brazilian-style handiwork attracted more than 180,000 unique visitors to the site, prompted widespread discussion on blogs and moved imitators to create their own “fingerball’’ videos and post them on the Web.

Last Thursday, the site, supposedly created by a bored young office worker, was revealed to be a “viral’’ advertisement from Hewlett-Packard, the leading edge of a new global campaign that aims to imbue H.P.’s machines with some of the coolness more commonly associated with Apple.

Hewlett-Packard started the campaign, the first global ad blitz on behalf of its personal systems group, in the United States a few weeks before the World Cup. Now that the tournament is over, with a better chance of drawing the rest of the world’s attention, the company is extending the campaign to other big markets.

H.P. executives say the new campaign, which includes television and print advertising in addition to a variety of edgier approaches, is aimed at shaking up perceptions of the company as slightly stodgy, an image that has been reinforced by conservative corporate brand campaigns with themes like “everything is possible.’’

The new strategy follows last year’s hiring of Satjiv Chahil, a former marketing executive at Palm, Sony and Apple, as head of marketing for the personal systems group, which includes the company’s PC’s and laptops. It emphasizes consumers, with all their quirky individualism, after many years in which manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell courted corporate customers first.

Instead of the stereotypical geeky, corporate PC users — the kind that are mocked in a new Apple campaign that juxtaposes them with supposedly cooler Mac users — people like Jay-Z, the rap artist, are featured in the H.P. spots. But not in the usual way. The Jay-Z ad shows him from the neck down, focusing on his hands as he sorts through the things he has stored on his hard drive, like “vacation photos you won’t see in the tabloids.’’

“We wanted to step away from selling computers as a commodity to telling a story in an autobiographical way,’’ said Steve Simpson, partner and creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which created the ad.

Goodby, based in San Francisco, is working on the Hewlett-Packard account with the global agency groups McCann Erickson, which is a unit of Interpublic, and Publicis; the media buying is being handled by ZenithOptimedia. An H.P. executive said the company spent $510 million on advertising in the United States last year. The new global campaign, the executive said, will cost several hundred million dollars.

The agencies are now looking for European and Asian personalities to supplement figures like Jay-Z and a snowboarder, Shaun White, who appear in the American ads.

The ads close with the tag line “the computer is personal again.’’ Print work in the campaign also prominently features images of hands, which “are seen as a powerful symbol of communication around the world,’’ said Luciana Broggi, vice president for marketing in the Hewlett-Packard personal system group for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

Like other marketers, the company is trying to reach consumers in new ways. It is sponsoring a television show on MTV called “Meet or Delete,’’ in which young people decide whether they want to date potential suitors based on the contents of their hard drives, including records of the Web sites they have visited and the videos they may have watched.

The show started in the United States in May with college students, and has been extended to a number of European, Asian and Latin American markets. In some cases, instead of dating, the format is tamer, with participants scouting out new drummers for their bands, for instance.

Hewlett-Packard says the success of the FingerSkilz site demonstrates the effectiveness of nontraditional marketing approaches. At one point, more than 20 percent of British visitors to a company site created as part of the new PC campaign came from FingerSkilz, which ran a banner ad for Hewlett-Packard.

Even before the company’s sponsorship of FingerSkilz was disclosed last week, the banner ad was a none-too-subtle hint that the site wasn’t quite what it appeared to be. Still, in owning up, the company left one other thing unsaid: The nifty tricks that the fingers perform were actually created through computer-generated imagery.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/bu...ia/25adco.html





Retro vox

Rolling Stones Phoning In Their Shows For Fans

Can't make it to Europe for the current tour by the Rolling Stones? No problem. Dial a toll-free number and listen to them perform all down the line in real time for $1.99 per seven minutes.

The British rockers are the first to use a new technology called Listen Live Now, which is backed by Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, tour promoter Live Nation, and veteran artist manager Marty Erlichman.

The technology will debut on Friday when the band takes the stage at the Stade de France in Paris from 3:45 to 5:45 p.m. EDT.

According to a statement, fans can buy in by calling 1-877-784-2777 (from overseas, 1-760-438-0100). At the six-minute mark, a voice will warn them that the time is almost up, which makes bootlegging the concerts a challenge. Additionally, the shows will not be taped, Erlichman told Reuters.

The deal with the Stones was signed after several months' of negotiations with their tour manager, Michael Cohl, and they will get an unspecified "piece of the action," Erlichman said. The arrangement lasts through the final stop on their European trek, at Horsens, Denmark on September 3.

"It's a great thing for the artists," Erlichman added. "It's passive income, and they're helping fans enjoy the experience without affecting ticket sales."

There are no other acts in the pipeline, although he expected there might be a deal if plans proceed for his client, Barbra Streisand, to hit the road in a Cohl-promoted tour later this year.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...tainmentNews-2

[JackSpratts]

The Gambling Is Virtual; the Money Is Real
Matt Richtel and Heather Timmons

Can the United States handcuff online wagering?

Glen Walker, a professional sports bettor in North Carolina who places up to 70 bets a week of $2,000 to $5,000 each during football season, does not think so. “They’re not going to stop the offshore sports books,” Mr. Walker said. A crackdown will “just force it back to the black market.”

Last week, one such wagering site, BetOnSports.com, a publicly traded company in Britain, became the focal point of an American crackdown on offshore casinos, where gamblers anywhere in the world can use the highly profitable sites to place wagers on sporting events. They can also play casino games like blackjack and poker from their personal computers.

Federal agents arrested the British chief executive of BetOnSports, David Carruthers, who was in the United States on a flight layover. He is in custody in Fort Worth; the betting site has temporarily suspended operations to satisfy a temporary restraining order that prohibits the company from taking bets from United States residents. Mr. Carruthers is awaiting a hearing on his detention.

In Washington, the House overwhelmingly approved legislation recently that would clamp down on Internet casinos in part by restricting the ability of American financial institutions to process wagers.

The legislative-prosecutorial one-two punch appears to be the most concerted effort yet by the federal government to undermine Internet gambling in an era of well-organized, publicly owned offshore casinos. For the first time, Washington has succeeded in temporarily shutting down a publicly owned site and its effort has gained the attention of the operators, whose share prices plummeted last week.

Still, few experts expect the crackdown to do anything more than dent the industry. Sebastian Sinclair, an analyst with Christiansen Capital Advisors, which tracks online gambling trends, said offshore gambling could be “curtailed but it cannot be stopped.”

Other experts see the recent moves as little more than an elaborate cat-and-mouse game serving only to benefit Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos, along with Indian gambling operations, rather than seriously protecting Americans from falling prey to excessive gambling.

Some eight million Americans like Mr. Walker wager $6 billion annually through the Internet, many making bets on their favorite sports team or the N.C.A.A. basketball pool. About half of all online wagers come from the United States.

Critics say that online gambling is the equivalent of putting a slot machine in every home, providing an easy chance to lose money with a few mouse clicks, all without the social controls at a bricks-and-mortar casino.

Mr. Walker disagrees. “We’re not doing anything immoral or illegal,’’ he insisted. “I just don’t see that I’m harming anyone.”

While prosecutors argue that Internet casinos violate the law, there is no federal prohibition against actually placing a bet. So how much success the federal push can have “is a very profound question,” said Representative Jim Leach, Republican of Iowa, the co-author of the legislation, who says the gambling is detrimental to families and the economy.

But even he concedes that Washington’s best efforts will lead only “to a reduction but not necessarily to an ending” of online gambling.

The question of further curbing Internet gambling has been a perennial issue in Congress in recent years. But people involved with the legislation say the reason for its success, at least in the House, is mainly explained by lawmakers wanting to distance themselves from the corruption scandal involving the convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his association with Indian casinos. Mr. Abramoff had lobbied vigorously against versions of the bill in the past. Still, some politicians in the House came out strongly against the bill, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who called it “cultural authoritarianism.”

Industry executives and analysts say similar bills have failed in the Senate, and many feel that it is unlikely to gain traction there. Analysts from Dresdner Kleinwort in London call the measure inconsistent and unenforceable.

Nevertheless, executives, lawyers and analysts say that Washington, depending on the resources it is willing to commit, can at least make life more miserable for the offshore casinos. They say the effort resembles attempts to restrict the sex and drug trades, an endless pursuit in which users and suppliers constantly develop new ways to skirt law enforcement.

Offshore casinos “are going to continue to thumb their noses at the Department of Justice,” Mr. Sinclair said. “The operators will say, ‘I’m sitting here in Costa Rica drinking a mai tai. What are you going to do?’ ”

And, he said, if the government succeeds in shutting some sites, others will pop up.

This is not the first time that the American government has taken on Internet gambling. In 2001, a federal court sentenced Jay Cohen, the operator of an Internet sports book in Costa Rica, to 21 months in prison for taking bets from Americans.

But there is a new intensity to this latest crackdown, particularly with the simultaneous attacks from Congress and law enforcement. Legislators and prosecutors said their efforts were not coordinated, but industry analysts view it as a powerful combination.

And by going after Mr. Carruthers, a British citizen who runs a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, Washington has upped the ante. “This is absolutely a legitimate business in the U.K.,” said Tim Evans, a lawyer representing Mr. Carruthers.

Mr. Carruthers, among the outspoken executives in the industry, has traveled frequently to the United States to meet with investors and media companies, and to debate the merits of online gambling. In April, he took part in a debate on the subject with Representative Leach.

Catherine L. Hanaway, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who brought the indictment against Mr. Carruthers, said the fact that the activity was legal in Britain and Costa Rica, where BetOnSports has major operations, “does not entitle them to do business in the United States.”

Asked if Mr. Carruthers’s British citizenship created a problem for the prosecutors, Ms. Hanaway said, “thus far, no.”

Mr. Evans said his client faced up to 20 years if convicted of conspiring to operate an illegal gambling operation.

Lawrence Walters, a lawyer who specializes in Internet gambling law, said prosecutors faced serious jurisdictional questions. One central question is whether any illegal activity is taking place on American soil; the bettors, he said, are not breaking the law, because placing a wager is legal.

Further, he said, there are legal questions about whether prosecutors can establish that offshore casinos have met the test for “minimum contact” in the United States, a standard needed for prosecutors to have jurisdiction.

“The government has to show that BetOnSports has sufficient ties and contacts with the U.S.,” he said. “That’s an open question — they have no offices or representatives here.’’

Many online gambling companies based outside Britain list on the London Stock Exchange because the British government made offshore gambling companies legal as part of a sweeping Gambling Act passed in 2005. The government’s intent is to regulate the industry and stop gambling proceeds from going to criminal interests.

The investors in the companies have included some of America’s largest investment houses, among them Goldman Sachs and the FMR Corporation, parent of Fidelity Investments, which bought shares for some of its mutual funds. Share prices of those funds plummeted after the arrest of Mr. Carruthers, but have recovered somewhat in recent trading.

The issue has fueled a political fire in Britain, where the United States recently extradited several white-collar suspects in an effort to prosecute them for actions that Britain did not consider illegal, or that British courts chose not to prosecute.

Opponents say that United States prosecutors are reaching outside their boundaries and the opponents are lobbying the British government to protect its own citizens.

But Mr. Walters said prosecutors might be able to mitigate the jurisdictional challenges because they also brought charges against BetOnSports’ founder, Gary Kaplan, and several of his relatives, who worked for the company and are American citizens.

The government could argue that the company has a fundamentally American origin and continuing ties, he said.

The case could dictate how much breadth and power prosecutors have to enforce gambling laws. It “could be a chance to clear up the gray area that’s always existed” as to the legality of offshore casinos, said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for BetOnSports.

Prosecutors argue that the Wire Act of 1961 prohibits not just Internet sports betting but also casino games, including online poker. Some industry executives, legal experts and analysts, even those without a vested interest, say it is not clear that the Wire Act was intended to cover those casino games.

The legislation approved by the House would make it explicit that the wire act covers these games. It also seeks to create a new enforcement mechanism by criminalizing the processing of payments for Internet gambling. It would prohibit banks, credit card companies and online payment processors, like PayPal, from transacting such business.

“For the first time, we have a methodology that has enforcement clout,” Mr. Leach said. “This legislation has a lot of teeth.”

Yet this is not the first effort to cut off payment methods. In November 2001, many major banks that issue credit cards began voluntarily refusing to process credit card payments for gambling. That gave rise to new overseas payment processors, like Neteller and FirePay, in which customers can deposit money to be forwarded to offshore casinos.

Having new overseas processors can spring up does present a problem, Mr. Leach said. But if the bill becomes law, it would also prohibit American financial institutions from transferring money to overseas payment processors known to do a lot of business with casinos. In turn, it could make people work harder to place bets.

“It could quite effectively reduce impulse betting,” Mr. Leach said. “It might be a slightly less-effective barrier to some of the poker kinds of games. I aspire to total curtailment. But I cannot guarantee that will occur.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/bu.../25gamble.html





BetOnSports PLC Removes CEO After Arrest

Online gambling company BetOnSports PLC said Tuesday it had fired its chief executive following his arrest in the United States on racketeering charges.

The sports-betting Web site operator said it was terminating the contract of David Carruthers and removing him as a director as a consequence of his detention.

"Clearly, while he remains in the custody of the U.S. government, he is unable to perform his duties," the company said in a statement.

Carruthers, 48, was arrested July 16 at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in Texas while trying to make a connecting flight from the United Kingdom to Costa Rica, where BetOnSports is based.

The company suspended trading of its shares two days later.

Carruthers and 10 others, including the founder of BetOnSports, were named in a 22-count indictment unsealed this week by federal prosecutors in St. Louis. The government says BetOnSports fraudulently took bets from U.S. residents by phone and the Internet, and failed to pay excise taxes.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-25-06-55-53





Army to Require Built-In Security
Cheryl Gerber

In the next few weeks, the Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command (Netcom) will announce that the Trusted Platform Module is a servicewide requirement for hardware-based security in all of its new computers, according to Army officials. TPM will take advantage of security features in Microsoft’s forthcoming Vista operating system.

Before Netcom publicly issued its TechCon guidelines, the Army Small Computer Program (ASCP) acted on the requirement in its solicitation and last buy in March. “We didn’t want to put computers into the Army inventory that will have to be replaced prematurely, so Netcom asked us to institute the requirement before the actual issuance of the TechCon,” said Micki LaForgia, ASCP project director.

The upcoming technical guidelines require TPM Version 1.2 as a standard Army configuration baseline for all of the service’s computers. The service will apply the standard configuration during a consolidated purchase next month.

Developed by the Trusted Computing Group, TPM is a dedicated security chip on the motherboard that conforms to the group’s standard specifications. Chipmakers have developed TPM versions of their chipsets, such as Intel’s LaGrande Technology and Advanced Micro Device’s Secure Execution Mode. IBM’s product has two TPM-compliant chips -- the Embedded Security Subsystem and ThinkVantage Technology. Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu and Winbond also offer TPM chips.

The Trusted Computing Group was founded in 2003 to develop vendor-neutral standard specifications for hardware and software security that works across multiple platforms. The group has 141 industry members, and many of those contributed to and instituted the standard specifications.
http://www.fcw.com/article95422-07-26-06-Web





Radio Rants

"They Sentenced Me To 20 Years Of Boredom. For Trying To Change The System From Within."
- Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan"

Well, new CBS news anchor Katie Couric dropped by the house this week to see what I think. Here's what I told her: CBS Radio laid off 115 people nationwide and afterwards President Joel Hollander said "this will blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Whatever. Mike Lyons

Meanwhile, here in Orlando this month, the CBS alternative WOCL, was busy trying to beat their format competitor, Clear Channels' WJRR, to be the first station to exclusively label their afternoon show, "B.S." First, WOCL's Program Director Bobby Smith hired former CC talk talent Savannah to be his afternoon on-air partner. Their show, then, would be known as the "B.S." show. Bobby & Savannah. That same Monday four weeks ago, WJRR started referencing their afternoon jock, Buckethead, as their afternoon-drive "B.S." show. The Buckethead Show.
Since both owners also have access to them, billboards touting each "B.S." show instantly erupted across the greater Orlando landscape.

Then, last Wednesday, WOCL shifted Savannah to their morning show and moved their talented music director Mel Taylor into the afternoon slot with PD Bobby. That same day, Clear Channel announced that Buckethead was moving over to Tampa to be the new morning host at Clear Channel's WXTB. No replacement has yet been named for Buckethead at WJRR.
The billboards remain up.
But the bullshit just goes on and on and on and on.

The only reason I bring you this story is because it is testament to how unbelievably lazy, lame and unconnected with the audience rock radio has become. Somebody in the respective offices of these companies obviously decided that the quick way to a half-share jump in the ratings was to invoke the abbreviation for "bullshit" onto their airwaves.
Might have been naughty and cute. In the 60's or 70's!
It might be easier to accept if any of the involved talent was remarkably good with, say, some market heritage. They're not.
Both B.S. shows are dominated by attitude sans material. 'So & so is recording a new album.' No shit.

That's what they do. 'They may be coming in concert and we'll let you know first.' Neither point out that Dashboard Confessional was at the House of Blues Friday night. This is what kills me about current rock radio. Nothing but cliches and jargon and attitude. No actual relating to a listeners life.
Who are they targeting? The kids left long ago to their iPods and the Web. Obviously for good reasons.

And here's another complaint. You know that song with the chorus, "She is the prom queen. I'm in the marching band." Catchy-as-hell pop. Driving rhythm. A girl sings it.
After four months and at least 70 listens on the Clear Channel Top-40 WXXL (Yes. I still listen to terrestrial radio. A lot), I've still never been told once who it is. And by now the song is in recurrent so it always comes up on the other side of sweepers. So I'll never know...
Is it any wonder today why people have dropped "listening to radio" way down their list of things to pay attention to?
Songs and appropriate lifestyle events don't get mentioned.
And two major radio station ownership groups spend an immense amount of time and money trying to acquire the exclusive claim on the use of an abbreviation of a (giggle) dirty word?
This is silly. Not just lame. Silly.
In today's world of compressed time and instant gratification, who can take seriously such nonsense?
"But surely AAA must be doing something that makes business sense" said Ms. Couric.
"Of course," I responded. "And by the way, great legs Kathleen."

I then told her that The University of Pennsylvania's WXPN has just signed up former PD Jim McGuinn of the late Philly alternative station Y100 for shows Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights after the World Cafe starting on August 31.
Katie gave me that world-class beaming smile as I added that the WXPN-Y100 streaming from the on-demand XPN web site would begin even earlier, on August 1, offering the sixth largest market in America both AAA and alternative radio of remarkable quality and depth.

Commercial free.
Both Katie and I locked our eyes as the wisdom of business guru Tom Peters filled our heads. Suddenly we both screamed in unison:
"Reducing expenses is not good business. Making a better product to attract more customers is!"
I advised her not to sing anything from on top of a piano when she starts in September.
Even if she is the prom-queen.

MOVIES: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest took in another $62.2 million to remain at the top of the weekend's box-office results. It passed Spiderman 2 as the fastest film to reach $200 million and has now taken in over $258 million in just ten days in theaters. The Wayans brothers' Little Man debuted in second place with $21.7 million beating out fellow newcomer You, Me and Dupree which took in $21.3 million for third place. Fourth was Superman Returns with $11.6 million. Still under-performing for WB but worldwide biz should put it into profit. In fifth place, The Devil Wears Prada continues to out-perform expectations with another $10.4 million. Two films on limited screens continued to play well as Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly took in $1.18 million for tenth place this weekend on only 216 screens while Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was in eleventh place with another $1.1 million on just 570 screens...Opening next weekend are Sony's animated Monster House and Warner Brother's poorly-reviewed Lady In The Water from M.Night Shyamalan. Consensus has it that his "gotcha" bag of trick endings may have run its course.

TV: This week's number one relief from television's summer re-run doldrums is coincidentally, a re-run.
This Wednesday at 10pm, Comedy Central will finally replay the controversial South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet," which deftly sends up Tom Cruise, Scientology and R. Kelly. The show originally was broadcast on November 16, 2005 but had it's subsequent re-run on March 22 abruptly cancelled in a move some interpreted as an attempt to appease Cruise, who allegedly threatened to not promote Mission Impossible 3 which was made for Paramount, which, like Comedy Central, is a division of Viacom. Perhaps the passage of time or MI3's lackluster box-office or more likely, South Park's Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animation Program last week made this re-run finally happen...Rescue Me has been on a terrific run this summer. Great acting and writing from creator Dennis Leary along with a killer cast has led to ratings FX wants to continue. They renewed Rescue Me for a fourth season this week...Leno has the guests this week including Ray Davies on Tuesday and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers both Thursday night and Friday night when Tina Fey also drops by...Pink is on Letterman Thursday...Conan welcomes Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs Tuesday, Los Lonely Boys Wednesday and The New York Dolls on Thursday...The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has Nuclear Showdown author Gordon Chang on Monday, director/actor M.Night Shyamalan on Tuesday, Impresario author James Maguire on Wednesday (Impresario is an Ed Sullivan bio by the way) and actor Paul Giamatti is Stewart's guest Thursday...Guests on the Colbert Report this week are molecular biologist Lee Silver on Monday, football player Dhani Jones on Tuesday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Wednesday and Tom Brokaw on Thursday.
Finally, on everybody's secret fave cable channel VH-1 Classic, there's a new Elvis Costello Decades Rock: Live show this Friday from 8-9:30pm.

FINALLY: You gotta love this. Last week, the European Court of First Instance sent Sony and BMG back to the drawing board to rework their previously approved merger. The Court called the European Union Commission's 2004 OK "an extremely cursory examination". In other words, a rubber stamp. The bottom line here is that it was a rubber stamp exam by the EU. Sony and BMG didn't even have to roll out their big gun legal defense i.e. the explosion of the digital music business as their competition.
Nevertheless, this applies only to Europe and in any case, those Sony, BMG, EMI and WMG attorneys can now be expected to earn their retainers. Everybody's seen this train coming down the tracks for awhile now.

The Court of First Instance?

Whoa. I'm just in the marching band.
http://triplearadio.com/the_forest/





Radio Execs Urge Delay In Music Vote
Brooks Boliek

A dozen of the nation's most powerful radio industry CEOs are urging leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee to postpone consideration of legislation that requires satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to pay fair market value for digitally transmitting music.

The leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee has been considering a committee vote Thursday (July 27) on the bill known as the Perform Act. While committee aides said Friday (July 21) that a decision on exactly what would come up during Thursday's bill-writing session had yet to be decided, broadcast and record label executives said the committee's leadership was considering bringing the bill up.

The legislation sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Senate Republican leader Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is being pushed by the RIAA, music publishers and musicians groups.

Broadcasters oppose the legislation because they fear it will force them to have to pay for music transmitted digitally over the Internet. The bill also would force services like XM2go to pay an additional royalty to rights holders when customers digitally record music using those services.

Broadcasters contend that moving the legislation would be "premature" given that there is little agreement between the industries affected by the legislation.

"After a number of meetings and discussions, the parties remain divided," the broadcasters wrote in a letter mailed Friday. "The lack off accord is largely due to the complex nature of the subject matter. Many within the various industries and congressional staff have questions that simply remain unanswered."

While passage of the legislation is far from assured, given the short time left in an election-year Congress, a vote by the committee on the legislation would put more pressure on broadcasters to make a deal.

Record industry executives say the broadcasters' are stonewalling the bill in an attempt to get Congress to do for them what the courts wouldn't. While broadcasters don't have to pay the record labels for music they air on terrestrial radio broadcasts, the federal appeals court in Philadelphia in 2003 upheld a lower court ruling that said radio stations have to pay royalties to the labels and recording artists when they stream their programming over the Internet.

"They took us to court in Philadelphia, and they lost," one record industry executive said. "They've made it clear to us that they do not want to let a Section 114 (the part of the copyright code that governs many music royalty payments) legislation move unless they can expand the exemption for over-the-air broadcasts to Internet streams."

The broadcasters told Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the panel's senior Democrat, that the panel should wait until after the lawsuit between XM and the record labels over the satellite radio company's digital recording service is completed.

"Final resolution of this lawsuit could well impact the interpretation of what constitutes fair use and thus how any digital audio protection system should be designed under copyright law," they wrote.

The record labels say the broadcasters are simply confusing the matter. The XM suit and broadcaster's royalty obligations are two different things, they argue.

"That's all B.S.," the industry executive said. "The XM suit doesn't have anything to do with what broadcasters are trying to do. They just don't want to pay us."

CEOs signing the letter include Clear Channel's Mark Mays, Cox Radio's Robert Neil, Emmis Communications' Jeff Smulyan and Entercom Communications' David Field.
http://billboardradiomonitor.com/rad..._id=1002878052





Return of the New York Dolls, What’s Left of Them
Will Hermes

AS frontman for the New York Dolls, a band credited with inspiring, if not inventing, punk rock, David Johansen, 56, seems to regard the movement as one might an upstart kid brother.

“A lot of punk was really whiny,” he said last month over lunch at T, a tea salon on East 20th Street in Manhattan. “I think of all the bands that came out of that alleged genre, the Clash was the best. That was a real rock ’n’ roll band.”

“Our total attitude towards art,” he added, “was, like, get up and do something — quit sitting there whining. That’s what we stood for, that do-something spirit.”

For a band that effectively lasted three years, made two records and achieved but a dusting of fame, the Dolls’ do-something spirit left a huge, platform-booted imprint on rock history. In the early 1970’s their hooky primitivism offered a back-to-basics model amid the excesses of the progressive rock scene. And their lipsticked decadence suggested a stylistic alternative to headbands that would eventually be blamed for glam-metal. (More on that in a minute.)

Mr. Johansen, a wayward Catholic-school student from Staten Island, has spent a lot of time talking about his band’s legacy since deciding, to the surprise of many, to reunite with the surviving Dolls for a British music festival in 2004. That one-shot performance quickly sold out; a second was added. Then came a third, and a fourth. And now, what’s left of the East Village group that ignited the city’s rock scene in the 1970’s but imploded before cashing in on it has made its third studio album, 32 years after its second. It’s called “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This.” And most remarkable of all — as these sorts of latter-day reunions go — it’s very good.

The timing seems perfect. Catchy, punk-inflected shout-alongs that reflect the Dolls legacy is rock’s main toehold in the pop arena these days. And there is a general return to the Dolls’ dress-up-and-put-on-a-show approach in the preening style of bands like the Killers and My Chemical Romance; even Green Day is sporting mascara.

Wearing a tight ribbed white V-neck top, black jeans and a tangle of amulets around his neck, Mr. Johansen shows his taste in couture has clearly mellowed from the days when the Dolls were notorious for their transvestite fashion sense. He still has the unmistakable bearing of a rock star. Lithe and sinewy, his face deeply creased, he is a hometown bohemian: tossing off wisecracks in a phlegmy New Yawk baritone while discussing the ritual of performance or the “antidualistic” nature of Latin music, he comes off as a cross between a veteran street urchin and a matronly hipster-intellectual.

In their early days the Dolls were a spectacle: five scrappy young dudes looking like hard-luck prostitutes, they played loud, sloppy, three-minute songs when rock was increasingly about virtuoso drum solos and 20-minute jams. “Musically we wanted to bring back stuff with that Little Richard punch to it,” Mr. Johansen said. “You know, you’d see him play, he’d come on and in like two and a half minutes he’d wreck the place. It wasn’t like these guys with their backs to the audience, noodling on the guitar.”
The Dolls magic was erratic, though, and their shows could be disasters. The group landed a modest deal with Mercury and made two records that, while now considered classics, sold poorly. Their back-to-basics antics didn’t translate well at the time; they were misread as camp or comedy or sheer incompetence. When they appeared on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test” in 1973, the tut-tutting host memorably introduced them as being “to the Stones what the Monkees were to the Beatles, a pale and amusing derivative.”

Yet certain young fans who saw that performance on British television were more impressed. They included Mick Jones (of the Clash) and Stephen Morrissey (of the Smiths), two of many musicians who cite the Dolls as a primary influence. “I grew my hair like Johnny Thunders’s,” said Mr. Jones, recalling the shock-wig crop of the Dolls guitarist. The Clash, he admitted, “took a lot from the New York Dolls. A lot.”

Mr. Morrissey, a huge Dolls fan since he was 13, can be credited with the band’s reunion. He was given carte blanche to curate the 2004 Meltdown festival at Royal Festival Hall in London, and naturally a Dolls reunion was at the top of his list. So he called Mr. Johansen. But he wasn’t optimistic.

“I had met David previously,” Mr. Morrissey said in an interview after the festival, “and I’d known that historically he would always just pull the shutters down at the mention of the Dolls. I expected him to laugh at me and put the phone down.”

Mr. Johansen, sipping Irish breakfast tea with his pinky outstretched, recalled: “I hemmed and hawed. I remember saying, ‘Would you do it?’ ” referring to Mr. Morrissey’s famous unwillingness to reunite the Smiths. That British singer’s reply, which Mr. Johansen repeated in a mock English accent, was “absolutely not.” He laughed, then continued: “But I had this, like, mantra, that I decided to try to not be so dismissive of things, you know? I said I’d think about it. And I figured it’d be fun.”

Mr. Johansen’s fellow surviving Dolls — the guitarist Sylvain Mizrahi, a k a Sylvain Sylvain, and the bassist Arthur Kane, known as Killer — were easier to persuade. (The guitarist Johnny Genzale, a k a Johnny Thunders, and the drummer Jerry Nolan died in the early 1990’s; the original drummer, Billy Murcia, died while touring with the band in 1972.) Mr. Kane, in particular, had spent most of his hardscrabble post-Dolls life longing for a reunion, and literally praying for one: when his struggle with alcoholism and other demons left him at rock bottom, he joined the Mormon church. When he got word of the reunion, he was working in Los Angeles at the church’s Family History Center library.

As it happened, his prayer came true, but just briefly. After playing the two Meltdown festival shows, Mr. Kane returned to Los Angeles and, only weeks after his long-awaited comeback, became ill. He checked himself into a hospital, learned he had leukemia, and died hours later. Coincidentally, Greg Whiteley, a fellow Mormon who was captivated by Mr. Kane’s life story, had been making a film about his return to rock ’n’ roll. The documentary, “New York Doll,” had a much different ending from what Mr. Whitely first imagined, but it won a Grand Jury Prize nomination at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The timing of Mr. Kane’s death was in keeping with what Mr. Morrissey has called “probably the unluckiest band in the history of the world.” Mr. Murcia died in a drug-related mishap while the group was in England on its first big tour and on the brink of signing a record deal, a tragedy the band arguably never recovered from. He was replaced, but drugs and clashing egos soon hobbled the band. And despite the 11th-hour appearance of an enterprising young manager named Malcolm McLaren (who went on to manage the Sex Pistols), the group ground to a halt in Florida while touring in 1975.

Mr. Johansen found some success with various solo acts (most notably the lounge lizard alter ego Buster Poindexter) and the occasional film role; he recently became host of the well-regarded “Mansion of Fun Show” on Sirius satellite radio. Mr. Thunders and Mr. Nolan were recognized as punk forefathers when they formed the short-lived, heroin-plagued Heartbreakers; both died young. Mr. Mizrahi played a bit with other bands, drove a cab for a few years and raised a son as a single parent.

Meanwhile the next generation had stepped in. Fellow outer-borough rockers the Ramones tightened and further simplified the Dolls’ stripped-down sound (and rethought the wardrobe), and along with the heavily Dolls-influenced Sex Pistols, received full credit for giving birth to punk. Bands like Ratt, Poison and most famously Guns N’ Roses would become superstars with a Dolled-up hard rock style. Along with countless bootlegs, the two New York Dolls studio records have remained in print. But royalty payments from Mercury remain in dispute, making for a familiar industry story.

The new Dolls is, obviously, a new animal. In some ways “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This” feels as though it’s more about the New York Dolls than it is by them. Its brashly classic sound points to the band’s often-overlooked roots in blues and Brill Building pop. It is smartly written and well played (but, thankfully, not too well played) by Mr. Johansen, Mr. Mizrahi and a seasoned gang of New York-based rockers: the bassist Sami Yaffa (formerly of the Dolls-worshipping pop-metal act Hanoi Rocks), the guitarist Steve Conte, the keyboardist Brian Koonin, and the drummer Brian Delaney. Iggy Pop, a fellow punk forefather, adds backing vocals, as does R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, a longtime fan of the Dolls.

But what’s perhaps most striking about the new record is its tone. Alongside characteristic, happily debased romps like “Fishnets and Cigarettes” and “Rainbow Store” (in which the singer apparently gets swept off his feet by a tough girl at a lesbian boutique) is a wistfulness and a sort of wisdom, plus a quality you could almost call spiritual, a word that wouldn’t have been used to describe the old Dolls except in reference to alcohol.

“Feel excited from the divine

Me and these sad friends of mine

Just waitin’ down here, drinkin’ beer

And losin’ time”

Mr. Johansen sings on “Plenty Of Music,” which could almost be a Ronettes tune. Similarly, “Seventeen” sounds like an enlightened high school lament:

“Yet here we all stood

Confident in smug world view

That nothin’ higher will sweep

Out of the heavens anew.”

Mr. Johansen, who laughingly described himself as “a Catholic Taoist,” isn’t exactly born again. But his perspective has clearly broadened over the years. “I don’t know if it’s more spiritual,” he said of the new Dolls record. “But it’s more worldcentric, y’know what I mean? It’s not as colloquial as when we first came out. We were really just entertaining the neighborhood at that point. We were the band of the East Village that everybody danced to.”

The new record’s best song, “Dance Like a Monkey,” is a rock ’n’ roll answer to a timely theological question. Trying to woo a “pretty creationist,” the singer invites her onto the dance floor. “Evolution is so obsolete,” Mr. Johnansen shouts like a leering old bluesman. “Got to stomp your hands and clap your feet.”

The band’s new label, the hard-rock indie Roadrunner, hopes the song might be a breakout hit this summer. And it could be, with its driving Bo Diddley-flavored beats and Mr. Mizrahi’s heady falsetto “oooo-oooohs.” Either way it makes its case for rock ’n’ roll as a spiritual force in its own right, a valid enough reason for the Dolls’ return.

“It’s been so long since we had the other band,” Mr. Johansen concluded. “This just fell together, and then all the guys turned out to be great. I really love them, so what we do onstage is really genuine, there’s a lot of love in it, and hopefully that will affect the audience.”

“I mean, I have my ideas about music and rock ’n’ roll and all that kind of stuff,” he added. “I don’t know if it’s actually necessary for the species, but it sure makes life fun. It sure made my life fun. And I like to show other people that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/ar...ic/23herm.html





P2P Innovative Announces the Launch and Availability of the IP2P Network -- the Most Versatile and Robust Peer-to-Peer Network in the World
Press Release

P2P Innovative, the world leader in the design and implementation of advanced peer-to-peer technology, announces the launch and availability of the iP2P network.

The iP2P network was engineered from scratch to address the needs of the expanding world of distributing large media files and the fast growing P2P community. The iP2P network infuses our proprietary network technology with DHT and BitTorrent compatibility to create a fully decentralized, secure community that is highly scalable and efficient. iP2P was built to evolve seamlessly as new application layers and advanced protocols are added. The iP2P network will soon become the standard platform for the future of media distribution as well as community building and sharing.

P2P Innovative is now licensing the proprietary iP2P network to top Internet and media companies as a cost-effective solution for media distribution and live content streaming. P2P Innovative will also be engaging innovative joint venture projects using the power of the iP2P network.

P2P Innovative will continue to create exciting solutions for new P2P applications. We are looking for partners in the software and hardware industry who want to implement our P2P network or technology to create applications in areas such as below:
-- Efficient File Distribution
-- Worldwide Media Streaming
-- Voice Over IP
-- Live Events
-- Massive Multiplayer Gaming
-- Mobile Device P2P Networking
-- Shared CPU Processing
-- Community Building
-- Virtual BitTorrent Tracking
-- Video/Audio Submissions and Sharing

Current top non-exclusive licensees of P2P Innovative's technology are Warez.com and Warez P2P, the third largest decentralized, proprietary P2P file-sharing network in the world with 1.5 million simultaneous online users and over 25 million downloads to date. Warez P2P has chosen the iP2P network for its next generation peer-to-peer system in the upcoming version 3.0.

iPhox, the top VoIP alternative to Skype (http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...ease_id=113042), has licensed the iP2P network for its upcoming upgrade. P2P Innovative is helping with the integration of P2P media sharing, entertainment streaming, and advanced conferencing within the iPhox communication system.

P2P Innovative welcomes partners with exciting ideas and creative applications using P2P technology. We can tailor our P2P technology to create a private network for your unique application. Create your own user base or access our base of millions.

Contact us regarding your project to see if a joint venture or licensing our iP2P network is your optimal solution. Visit our site at www.p2pinnovative.com. Send emails to admin@ip2p.com.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...ease_id=147170





Mideast Conflict Unfiltered On The Web
David Bauder

The rapid development of video-sharing sites such as YouTube.com is giving computer users the chance to see unfiltered images of how the fighting between Israel and Lebanon is affecting people caught in the middle.

The short, broadband videos include simple reporting and pointed political statements, and are usually posted without identifying who's behind them.

Videos available on YouTube.com on Tuesday, for example, included slide shows of people hurt by Israeli bombing attacks in Lebanon. They have graphic images that are not usually seen in TV news reports - the mangled body of a child, a badly hurt baby in a hospital bed, a person on fire in a road during an attack.

One operator keeps his camera fixed on a horizon with smoke rising from a bombing, and the sound of airplanes overhead. "They're coming back," the narrator says.

On the other side, one video is shot from the roof of a home in Israel. Sirens wail in the background, followed by the boom of a missile hitting. Another video shows damage from a missile strike at a train station, while yet another features Israelis and American tourists passing the time in a bomb shelter by singing a song.

Filmed in his office study, a man identified as Reb Moshe describes how Israelis are coping. "We hear much more bombings than are listed on CNN," he said.

"They're getting an unfiltered experience," said J.D. Lasica, co-founder of the Web site Ourmedia.org. "We're used to the idea of neatly packaged presentations by traditional media and this is like the events are happening in your backyard."

But Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, said it's important to note the difference between some of what is posted by amateur videographers and the material gathered by professional journalists.

"There's a big gap between the two and it has to do with credibility, verification and context," she said.

TV networks have tended to keep this material at arm's length. CNN, for example, will occasionally air snippets of videos posted online during specific segments on what people are talking about online.

Several videos posted on YouTube, for example, use parts of news reports or interviews to make a certain point.

And Lasica said it's likely within a year someone will caught fabricating a story.

"It's exciting," Cochran said, "but it certainly isn't what you would rely on to tell you what is happening."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-25-17-48-49





Costs of Competition Send Amazon Profit Down 58%
Laurie J. Flynn

The online retailer Amazon.com reported a steep drop in its quarterly profit yesterday, while its sales continued to rise. The results showed the effects of higher expenses as Amazon offered free shipping and lower prices in response to heightened competition.

The report caused a sell-off of Amazon’s shares late in the day. The stock fell more than 12 percent, or $4.09, in after-hours trading, after declining 72 cents, to close at $33.59, before the report was released.

Profit at Amazon dropped 58 percent, to $22 million, or 5 cents a share, in the second quarter, down from $52 million, or 12 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. Analysts had forecast a profit of 7 cents a share.

“I think there’s a negative trend throughout the business right now,” said Steve Weinstein of Pacific Crest Securities. “And I don’t think they’ve hit bottom yet.”

Revenue rose 22 percent, to $2.14 billion, from $1.75 billion a year earlier — slightly higher than analysts’ average estimate of $2.10 billion, according to Thomson Financial.

Total operating expenses increased 34 percent, to $462 million from $346 million.

The company entered the grocery business during the second quarter, with more than 14,000 dry-goods products. It invested in new technology, hired technology employees, opened its own toy business and continued to offer promotions.

In a conference call with analysts yesterday, the chairman and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said that Amazon needed to spend heavily on new projects and promotional shipping programs. One of those programs, Amazon Prime, introduced in February 2005, gives subscribers unlimited two-day shipping for a fee of $79 a year. So far this year, the number of Amazon Prime subscribers has doubled, the company said.

Executives declined to say how much the program cost the company, although the chief financial officer, Thomas J. Szkutak, estimated that it had saved customers more than $500 million in shipping fees.

Mr. Bezos said programs like Amazon Prime led to higher sales because customers tended to make more purchases across different product categories.

“We see a lift in sales after they become Amazon Prime members,” he said. “While it certainly is an expensive investment, it builds what will be a bigger and more important company in the long run.”

Mr. Weinstein, the analyst, said he agreed that Amazon had little choice but to continue its spending, given the competitive online climate and an increasingly demanding consumer.

Amazon’s operating income declined to $47 million in the quarter from $104 million a year earlier, with the company citing the impact of a contract dispute with Toys ‘R’ Us.

This quarter, Amazon is forecasting sales of $2.17 billion to $2.33 billion, roughly in line with analysts’ expectations. The company raised its sales estimate for the full year to a range of $10.15 billion to $10.65 billion, up from a previous $9.95 billion to $10.50 billion, and surpassing Wall Street forecasts of $10.14 billion.

But Amazon forecast lower operating income for the year, a range of $310 million to $440 million, compared with its previous forecast of $390 million to $520 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/te.../26amazon.html





EMI Calls Off Efforts to Merge With Warner
Jeff Leeds and Jeremy W. Peters

The EMI Group, the British music giant, has decided to call off its efforts to merge with the Warner Music Group, ending for now the possibility that two of the music industry’s leading companies could combine.

The decision by EMI comes after each company rejected takeover offers from the other, and after a European court ruling raised doubts about whether a merger could win regulatory approval.

EMI said today that those two factors led it to abandon plans for a merger. Pointedly, however, EMI did not rule out bidding for Warner in the future.

“When the board of EMI put forward its proposals to acquire Warner Music, it believed, and continues to believe, that there are good arguments for regulatory approval of a combination,” EMI said in a statement.

Last month, Warner’s board rejected EMI’s latest offer of $31 a share, which valued Warner at about $4.6 billion, after a series of bids and counterbids that started in May.

For its part, Warner said today that it would stop trying to acquire EMI for now, citing the court ruling as its main reason. “WMG does not believe that it would be prudent to pursue a combination of WMG and EMI,” the company said in a statement. “Accordingly, WMG does not intend to make an offer for EMI at this time.”

The court, known as the European Court of First Instance and based in Luxembourg, issued its ruling two weeks ago, overturning a 2004 decision by European Union regulators approving a merger of the music units of Sony and Bertelsmann and plunging the industry into confusion. The ruling obliged regulators to re-examine the Sony-Bertelsmann venture, called Sony BMG Music Entertainment — a process that could take as long as a year — though analysts expect the regulators to ultimately allow the merger.

Still, the court issued a sharp critique of the regulators’ review process, prompting speculation that any new deals would face significantly tougher scrutiny.

EMI said immediately after the ruling that the court focused on the “particular evidence” of the Sony BMG case, and that EMI’s own offer for Warner remained sound.

Warner and EMI proposed a merger in 2000, but European regulators objected and the plan was dropped. Then EMI tried to buy Warner Music from its former parent, Time Warner, in 2003, but was outbid by a consortium of private investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr., the former Seagram chief executive. Mr. Bronfman’s team purchased Warner Music for $2.6 billion and later took it public.

Many analysts continue to believe Warner and EMI will eventually combine, because together they could cut costs by hundreds of millions of dollars by eliminating overlapping functions.

But for the moment, the court ruling and the abandonment of takeover attempts solidifies the industry’s current lineup of four major music companies. EMI ranks third and Warner fourth among the giants by market share; together, they would have eclipsed Sony BMG to move into second place behind Vivendi’s Universal Music Group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/bu... ner=homepage





For Apple, Europe Becoming A Tougher Customer
Thomas Crampton

The German duo Bodenständig 2000 works in a musical genre known as Bitpop, which transforms the beeps, squeaks and whistles of 1980s- era home computers into clubbing music. But despite a dedication to technology and thirst for stardom, the pair recently forced the removal of one of their songs from Apple's iTunes music store.

"We wanted to remove our song because everything sold on iTunes can only be played on an iPod," said Dragan Espenschied, whose preferred musical instrument is a 12-year-old computer operating with MS-DOS. "We do not create our songs to help sell iPods for Apple."

The withdrawal of Bodenständig 2000 from iTunes will have little financial impact on Apple or the group - iTunes sales of the song amounted to three or four singles, worth a total of about 40 euro cents - but it is one of many recent moves in Europe to rebel against Apple's online music sales methods.

The dominance by Apple has prompted a growing number of European governments and consumer rights organizations to demand that online music be playable on all digital devices.

Such "interoperability" would mean, for example, that music bought on Sony's music site would be playable on an iPod, and a song bought on the iTunes site would be playable on a Sony machine.

"While the U.S. inclination is to resist regulatory intervention, Europe has a lot of proposals now that could affect iTunes and others," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. "The very nature of a networked product means that changes in Europe could bring changes to the product in all markets."

Those who argue for interoperability say it will lead to a bigger, healthier market, much in the way that the decision by European governments to force cellphone companies to adopt the GSM standard meant that for many years, the European cellphone market was far healthier and grew faster than the fragmented U.S. market, which still has competing standards.

Apple, which has declined to comment on most attacks, issued a terse statement Friday regarding new legal proceedings announced last week by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations against the iTunes user terms.

"We are looking at the complaint," said Alan Hely, a spokesman based in London for Apple, "and look forward to resolving this matter."

"ITunes offers the right model for digital music downloads that consumers want," he said.

Those in the United States who are battling against controls placed on digital music have been following moves in Europe with envy.

"Europe has managed to shift the debate into a conflict between citizens and digital controls," said Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a group that opposes proprietary software. "This is great because the discussion has been limited to technology circles for too long."

Among the consequences of the European rebellion against competing digital controls could be government- enforced standardization of digital music formats, said Richard Owens, director of the copyright, e-commerce technology and management division at the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations.

"The lack of compatibility we are seeing grow in the wired world begs us to wonder what governments can do to encourage interoperability," Owens said. Any solution "could come down to the green-eyeshade people at standard-setting organizations who used to determine the dimensions of a screw," he said.

The charge against Apple in Europe has been led by French legislators who last month passed a law intended to stop the sale of music or video in formats that prevent users from playing on any digital device they choose.

The next challenge to Apple is coming from Scandinavia, where the government ombudsman of Norway, Bjorn Erik Thon, has objected to conditions set by the iTunes end-user agreement as well as the fact that iTunes cannot be played on other companies' music devices.

The ombudsmen in Sweden and Denmark - who have worked in concert on issues that affect citizens of all three countries - expressed solidarity with Norway's position.

Thon, whose role is to advocate consumer rights and who has the authority to impose fines, sent a letter to Apple describing the iTunes terms of service as "unclear and unbalanced." Apple has been given a deadline of Aug. 1 to respond.

He criticized Apple's assertion that it can unilaterally change the usage rights of a song that has already been purchased, its disclaimer of responsibility in case of loss due to hacking, viruses or hardware defects on the iPod and an assertion that English law governs Norwegian users. Regarding the impossibility of playing an iTunes-purchased song on music devices other than an iPod, Thon warned that such a business model would threaten the sharing of cultural material.

"The future availability of cultural digital content may be dependent on the good will of those who provide the technical platforms," Thon said in his letter to Apple. "If it is no longer profitable to make old cultural content compatible with new technical platforms, this cultural content may be lost."

In addition to pressing Apple in Scandinavia, Thon said he had sought support from consumer advocates in France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and Poland.

He also aims to place the issue high on the agenda at a gathering of consumer ombudsmen in the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network in October in Poland.

"I am trying to build an alliance with consumer organizations in other nations against iTunes because I have real problems with their contract terms and lack of interoperability," Thon said. "This is an important issue that we are not going to drop easily."

Others have already started taking action. In addition to the action in Germany, Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection said last week that it would press to make iTunes and other music services interoperable through an intellectual property law coming under discussion in Parliament.

In Britain, a report released last month by the All Parliamentary Internet Group, a forum of Parliament members focused on Internet issues, highlighted Apple's method of tying customers to the iPod.

"There is still an issue of being 'locked in' to particular technologies, even if other offerings are more attractive or less expensive," the report said, making a reference to how people still can circumvent iTunes limitations by burning songs into the unprotected MP3 format. "There are currently practical - albeit not necessarily lawful - ways of addressing this problem for iPods, but this may not be true for all formats."

The parliamentary group report concluded by recommending that the Office of Fair Trading enact label regulations that make the limits placed on song use "crystal clear" to consumers.

European Union regulators have not addressed the interoperability issue, but competition authorities in Brussels did open an investigation into pricing on the iTunes site following a request by Britain's Office of Fair Trading.

Users of the British iTunes site pay 79 pence, or $1.45, for most iTunes tracks, while French users pay 99 euro cents, or $1.25.

Looking to past technology standard clashes - the primacy of VHS over Betamax for videotapes being a prime example - it is difficult to say where Europe's rebellion against closed online business models like Apple's may lead, said Owens of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

"By the time governments might intervene with forced licensing, the technology will be out of date," Owens said. "In a few years, the questions we are asking today will seem irrelevant."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/...ey/music17.php





Judge Dismisses Phone Records Lawsuit
Mike Robinson

Citing national security, a federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Inc. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror.

"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.

A number of such lawsuits have been filed around the country in the wake of news media reports that AT&T and other phone companies had turned records over to the National Security Administration, which specializes in communications intercepts.

Kennelly's ruling was in sharp contrast to last week's decision from U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, who said media reports of the program were so widespread there was no danger of spilling secrets.

Kennelly ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who said their constitutional rights were violated because of an NSA program of gathering phone company records.

Justice Department attorneys had argued that it would violate the law against divulging state secrets for AT&T to say whether it had provided telephone records to the supersecret spy agency.

The ACLU argued that the practice was no longer secret, because numerous news reports had made it clear that phone records had been given to the agency.

But the judge said the news reports amounted to speculation and in no way constituted official confirmation that phone records had been turned over.

He also said Terkel and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which sought class-action status, had not shown that their own records had been provided to the government. As a result, they lacked standing to sue the government, he said.

ACLU legal director Harvey Grossman said in a statement that his group respectfully disagreed.

"A private company — AT&T — should not be able to escape accountability for violating a federal statute and the privacy of their customers on the basis that a program widely discussed in the public is secret," Grossman said.

The San Antonio-based company, known as SBC Communications Inc. until it acquired AT&T Corp. last year, is poised to become the nation's largest phone company later this year when it completes its proposed purchase of BellSouth Corp., announced in March.

In his ruling, Kennelly noted that he had received written statements from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte and NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander in his chambers, with ACLU lawyers not allowed to be present.

The statements were designed to reinforce with confidential material the government's argument for the need for secrecy.

Kennelly said that his public decision was not premised on the classified materials. But he added that he was issuing a separate memorandum discussing the points raised in the classified material.

It too, he said, would have to be classified and "unavailable for inspection by the public or any of the parties or counsel in this case other than counsel for the government."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060726/...tkBHNlYwM3MTg-





What Does the NSA Know About You?
Barry Levine

Americans are discovering that, in addition to nearly 3,000 fellow citizens who died, another casualty of September 11, 2001, might be privacy in the digital age.

While there have been many recent reports in the news media pointing to an erosion of privacy, the major stories have concerned the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA). Like an onion being peeled layer-by-layer, the NSA has been the subject of one revelation after another concerning a domestic-spying program that takes advantage of the world's dependence on high technology. After 9/11, the program moved into high gear in an all-out effort to find al-Qaeda operatives and other terrorists.

But as each new layer is revealed, some people fear that what is underneath might be enough to bring tears to any civil libertarian: a real-world 1984 in which one's every word and deed is monitored in the name of security.

The Most Intelligence in the World

You might picture the NSA as a small, top secret committee with a mix of ad hoc agents and high-tech equipment, like the mysterious governmental network in The X-Files TV series. Or perhaps you're thinking of the den of assassins in the movie Enemy of the State.

Regardless, the NSA has historically denied easy description. Dubbed "No Such Agency" by observers and "Never Say Anything" by its staff, it was the Area 51 of government agencies -- so secret that even its existence was barely acknowledged.

But today the NSA is coming into clearer focus. According to James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets, the NSA, established in 1952, is currently the world's largest and most powerful intelligence agency -- far bigger than its better-known cloak-and-dagger cousin, the CIA.

Bamford, who covered the same subject 25 years ago in his book Puzzle Palace, has written that the NSA has nearly 40,000 employees, a massive "Crypto City" of more than 60 buildings hidden in suburban Maryland, and the most powerful computers on the planet. NSA scientists, Bamford says, are secretly working to develop computers capable of more than 1 septillion operations per second -- that's a 1 followed by 24 zeroes.

The NSA breaks codes, operates listening posts around the world, takes information from spy satellites, taps into phone conversations, sifts through data transmissions for leads on cases, and creates and releases computer viruses to disrupt enemy systems.

But, like many other aspects of American life, the NSA's activities are divided by a bright line marked "9/11."

Before 9/11, the NSA's focus was outside the United States. It couldn't spy in the U.S. without permission granted under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In fact, the NSA's charter specifically prohibits it from "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons."

"What changed after 9/11," says John Pike, director of the public-policy and research organization GlobalSecurity.org, "was that they started to listening to everybody" -- inside and outside the country.

The First Few Layers

Late last year, The New York Times peeled off the first layer of the onion and revealed some of what the NSA has been doing since 9/11. Based on sources within the intelligence community, the Times reported that the NSA had been monitoring international calls and international e-mails that originated in the U.S., without court-approved warrants. The story reported that the calls might number in the hundreds, possibly thousands, but that they did not involve domestic-only communications.

In May, USA Today reported that the NSA was operating the world's largest database, keeping records (times, numbers called, durations, and so on) on all phone calls made through AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth -- domestic and international. This operation involved billions of calls, the paper reported, and, again, was done without warrants.

The fallout was immediate: Verizon and BellSouth have denied that they entered into any contract with the government to turn over data, and Qwest Communications, which says it was approached for information but did not hand any over, has suddenly become the network of choice for those who think the Bush administration overstepped its bounds.

For its part, AT&T is revising its privacy policy to explicitly declare that it owns customers' records and that it may use that information in combating "any threat," with or without legal orders. The policy had previously stated that the company would only turn over customer records as required by subpoenas or other legal orders.

After first denying the story, the White House claimed that no personal information was ever revealed. Some legal experts have suggested that warrants are not needed to look for patterns in the kind of anonymous data obtained by the government.

Since May, there have been other reports that phone conversations have been monitored, possibly including domestic-only calls. Seymour Hirsch of The New Yorker has reported that government sources told him that "tens of thousands of Americans" have had their calls monitored "in one way or the other."

In the uproar that followed this and later revelations, the Bush administration responded with the argument that presidential war powers give it the right to spy in the U.S. without FISA oversight.

For Frank Gaffney, president of The Center for Security Policy and a former assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, this makes sense. "We're in a war, and these communications we're trying to monitor are battlefield intercepts -- except the battlefield is here."

In such an environment, he says, the right to conduct warrantless eavesdropping is "inherent in the president's authority."

A Different Sort of Battlefield

But because this is a new kind of war, being waged in such a different environment than previous wars, the issues surrounding the NSA's activities are complex and fraught with controversy.

The surveillance is part of a war on terrorism, with an unseen enemy who might be anywhere. It takes place in the digital, networked environment of the early 21st Century, in which highly sophisticated, massive, across-the-board monitoring is possible. And, in the arguments it raises about preserving American liberties, it compels us to debate exactly what those liberties are.

Taking on an unseen enemy in modern America involves radically new approaches for two old intelligence objectives: targeting a known individual or a group, and looking around the general landscape for clues about individuals or groups not yet discovered.
The recently reported intelligence gathering of financial records, for example, appears to be a reflection of targeted searches. The U.S. Treasury has said that it is only gathering financial intelligence on those who are under investigation for suspected terrorist activity.

But it is the NSA's wholesale searching of phone records, Internet communications, and phone conversations that has alarmed critics. This kind of "data mining" is used in several industries to search for proverbial needles in the haystack, frequently without even knowing what the needles look like.

In an often-cited example, a major grocery chain might data-mine all customer purchases and eventually discover that beer and diapers are often bought together. Finding a nonintuitive pattern such as this might lead to new ways of marketing or product placement.

Similarly, identifying a pattern that links terrorists to a specific time or place might lead to the foiling of a dangerous plot. Whatever specific discoveries the NSA has made, however, remain secret. Given that the agency operates what is likely the world's largest and most-sophisticated data-mining operation, the layers that have been peeled back so far suggest a very big onion.

So how much of the total U.S. communications traffic is being watched?

"I think that it's a lot of it," says Christopher Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "because of where their taps are, right in the middle [of the main traffic switches]." The new model for surveillance, he says, is to grab as much information as you can and sift through it later.

GlobalSecurity.org's Pike says that there used to be a physical limit to what could be monitored, pointing to a time when many communications were on paper or analog media. But now, he says, thanks to rapidly increasing computer power and switches that sit on the main arteries of the communications networks, "They can monitor all of us, all the time."

And recently, two former AT&T workers told The New York Times that the company's facility in St. Louis had a separate room, protected by double doors and retinal/fingerprint scanners, where "a government agency" monitored network traffic.

Engaging Conversations

Experts disagree on whether the NSA's scrutiny is fixed only on text- and data-based communications, which computers can readily process, or on phone conversations as well.

According to Bamford, the NSA is listening only to a relatively small number of targeted conversations, even as it uses computers for massive scanning of text and data communications. "For every voice conversation," he says, "it takes at least one human being to listen." Using a voice-to-text program to streamline the process would be very limiting, he says, since many of the conversations in question involve heavy accents and do not translate accurately with current technology.

GlobalSecurity.org's Pike disagrees.

He believes that the NSA might be using highly advanced voice-to-text programs on powerful computers to scan heavily accented or foreign language conversations, possibly on a massive scale.

If highly efficient voice-to-text software was not now available at the NSA, Pike said, "It would be a scandal." His reasoning is that text-to-text translation software, such as Babblefish, and optical-character recognition software were operational at U.S. spy agencies 15 to 20 years earlier than the consumer versions. Since general-market voice-to-text software is now available -- decent but not industrial-strength -- the NSA must have technology that is at least a decade or more advanced, Pike says.

Even if bulk processing of voice-to-text is not yet available at the NSA, he says, the agency is still capable of searching conversations on a broad scale. Seymour Hirsch has, in fact, reported that computerized keyword-searching of actual conversations is taking place.

How Effective Has It Been?

Some observers point out that, since the anthrax attacks in the immediate weeks following 9/11, there have been no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

According to the Bush administration, the NSA program has helped to prevent attacks. The White House cited a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches, an operation it says was disrupted because of NSA eavesdropping. A plot to use fertilizer-based bombs in Great Britain has also been uncovered in part through this program, according to the administration.

But in a recent report in The New York Times, FBI sources maintained that the NSA leads were a waste of time, at least when it came to following terrorism cases inside U.S. borders. Because the NSA is not an enforcement agency, it hands off the information it collects to the FBI for domestic enforcement and to the CIA or other agencies for foreign enforcement. Much of the information provided by the NSA has led to dead ends or to targets already under surveillance, FBI sources told the Times.

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Gaffney disputes the significance of that assertion, saying the FBI's standards are not necessarily the standards for intelligence. "What do you expect? The FBI has been trained to prosecute cases. But the NSA is looking for a needle in a haystack, not prosecutable evidence."

For the ACLU's Calabrese, the issue of whether the eavesdropping works to deter terrorism should be secondary. "The first question is, whether it is legal."

The ACLU has never had a problem, he says, with using a warrant to obtain information, assuming the warrant itself is the result of lawfully obtained leads. The ALCU is currently suing the feds on the grounds that the government is listening to phone conversations without warrants.

The basic problem, says Bamford, is that nobody really knows the scale or the effectiveness of the NSA program, because the mechanism that was meant to guarantee checks and balances -- FISA -- has now been bypassed.

"You now literally have a rogue agency," he says.

The Shadow of FISA

In 1978, following revelations of illegal spying on U.S. citizens by American intelligence agencies, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed. The law attempted to regulate intelligence by balancing security needs with civil liberties.
Established as the "exclusive means" for domestic electronic surveillance, FISA allows for quick-response electronic surveillance in several ways.

For example, during the first 15 days of a declared war, electronic surveillance may be conducted without a warrant. The stated Congressional intent at the time was to allow for immediate wiretapping after an attack, and to allow 15 days for Congress to amend the law to provide for further warrantless spying if needed.

FISA also allows eavesdropping for up to 72 hours, as long as a warrant is retroactively obtained. An emergency warrant can be obtained within hours, and it has been rare when any judge has denied a warrant.

The Bush administration, through the Department of Justice (DOJ), has acknowledged that it did not comply with FISA. It contends it doesn't need to.

DOJ has said that the NSA is authorized to conduct warrantless wiretapping because of Congress' Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaeda, which was passed the week after 9/11. Justice has also said that Bush, as the commander in chief, has the unlimited authority to collect "signals intelligence" on the enemy.

Many legal scholars have weighed in on the subject, with a fair number coming down against the Bush administration's interpretation of its powers. One group that included a former deputy U.S. attorney general, the former deans of the Yale and Stanford law schools, a former counsel to the president, and a former director of the FBI, declared that the warrantless NSA spying "fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance."

Essentially, Bamford says, the NSA has now taken the power to authorize its eavesdropping in the U.S. away from a FISA judge and "given it to a shift supervisor." Bamford echoes the ACLU in contending that no one is saying that the NSA should be denied the ability to eavesdrop inside the U.S. to prevent terrorism. "But when it's done," he adds, "it has to be legal."

Living in America 2.0

For GlobalSecurity.org's Pike, the rules have vanished. The Bush administration's position -- which Pike summarized as "We can do whatever we want to, and we don't have to tell you what we're doing" -- has led to confusion winning the day.

"If the NSA can do it electronically, without rules, then the CIA is permitted to infiltrate Lord knows what," Pike says. He argues that the next iteration could be cameras on street corners with industrial-strength face-recognition software, installed and operated without warrants. According to Pike, there's no real difference between data mining on the street and data mining through warrantless eavesdropping. Such surveillance, he says, would lead to a very different kind of United States. "It would definitely be America 2.0."

But do we need FISA 2.0? This question arises when looking at how to obtain a warrant without knowing the pattern or the person you're looking for.

One solution might be putting wholesale data collection in a black bag, so that agents can only look for patterns, not people. ACLU's Calabrese suggests that data miners could encrypt information going in and leads coming out. Then, when there is a pattern, "You could get a warrant to remove the anonymity."

But Kim Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, says the problem is FISA.

"FISA is broken," he argues. His view is that it does not provide a way to take advantage of state-of-the-art surveillance methods, such as using automated means at the wiretap itself to look for patterns. He also points out that, in an age of proxy servers and packet-based communications, it may not even be possible to determine if a particular communication takes place in the U.S.

There needs to be some process to accommodate this new world, Taipale says. "But it's dangerous to say FISA is all we have and let's just apply it."

Up until a decade or so ago, before the Internet and before all transmitted communications became digital, paper and analog were still major players. Paper letters were commonly written, newspapers were printed daily, political rallies and rock concerts were publicized with leaflets. Electronic communication was analog, and processing it efficiently, on a massive scale, was impractical.

Now, we are networked and digital. Home videos, soccer schedules, phone conversations, bank and credit card records, instant messages, online calendars, business e-mails, even the records of which movies you rent -- all have become digital media. When was the last time you actually wrote and mailed a paper letter?

"We've gone from a world, years ago, with a tremendous amount of privacy, for business, for love letters, whatever," Bamford says. "But there's been a tremendous loss of privacy in the last few years. Our final bit of privacy is gone if neither Congress nor people do anything about it."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060724/bs_nf/44218





From October 2004

The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
Chris Anderson

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

The main problem, if that's the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment.

The first is the need to find local audiences. An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. It's not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California.

There is plenty of great entertainment with potentially large, even rapturous, national audiences that cannot clear that bar. For instance, The Triplets of Belleville, a critically acclaimed film that was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, opened on just six screens nationwide. An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India's film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon's Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.

The past century of entertainment has offered an easy solution to these constraints. Hits fill theaters, fly off shelves, and keep listeners and viewers from touching their dials and remotes. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, sociologists will tell you that hits are hardwired into human psychology, the combinatorial effect of conformity and word of mouth. And to be sure, a healthy share of hits earn their place: Great songs, movies, and books attract big, broad audiences.

But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adiba, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?"

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We've been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto's principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the right answer, says Vann-Adiba, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

People get Vann-Adiba's question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We're stuck in a hit-driven mindset - we think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adiba, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isn't carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best.

But as egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the 60,000 people who would like to buy the latest Fountains of Wayne or Crystal Method album, or any other nonmainstream fare? They have to go somewhere else. Bookstores, the megaplex, radio, and network TV can be equally demanding. We equate mass market with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising, and broad if somewhat shallow appeal. What do we really want? We're only just discovering, but it clearly starts with more.

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.

This is the power of the Long Tail. The companies at the vanguard of it are showing the way with three big lessons. Call them the new rules for the new entertainment economy.

Rule 1: Make everything available

If you love documentaries, Blockbuster is not for you. Nor is any other video store - there are too many documentaries, and they sell too poorly to justify stocking more than a few dozen of them on physical shelves. Instead, you'll want to join Netflix, which offers more than a thousand documentaries - because it can. Such profligacy is giving a boost to the documentary business; last year, Netflix accounted for half of all US rental revenue for Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a family destroyed by allegations of pedophilia.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who's something of a documentary buff, took this newfound clout to PBS, which had produced Daughter From Danang, a documentary about the children of US soldiers and Vietnamese women. In 2002, the film was nominated for an Oscar and was named best documentary at Sundance, but PBS had no plans to release it on DVD. Hastings offered to handle the manufacturing and distribution if PBS would make it available as a Netflix exclusive. Now Daughter From Danang consistently ranks in the top 15 on Netflix documentary charts. That amounts to a market of tens of thousands of documentary renters that did not otherwise exist.

There are any number of equally attractive genres and subgenres neglected by the traditional DVD channels: foreign films, anime, independent movies, British television dramas, old American TV sitcoms. These underserved markets make up a big chunk of Netflix rentals. Bollywood alone accounts for nearly 100,000 rentals each month. The availability of offbeat content drives new customers to Netflix - and anything that cuts the cost of customer acquisition is gold for a subscription business. Thus the company's first lesson: Embrace niches.

Netflix has made a good business out of what's unprofitable fare in movie theaters and video rental shops because it can aggregate dispersed audiences. It doesn't matter if the several thousand people who rent Doctor Who episodes each month are in one city or spread, one per town, across the country - the economics are the same to Netflix. It has, in short, broken the tyranny of physical space. What matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere.

As a result, almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer. This is the opposite of the way the entertainment industry now thinks. Today, the decision about whether or when to release an old film on DVD is based on estimates of demand, availability of extras such as commentary and additional material, and marketing opportunities such as anniversaries, awards, and generational windows (Disney briefly rereleases its classics every 10 years or so as a new wave of kids come of age). It's a high bar, which is why only a fraction of movies ever made are available on DVD.

That model may make sense for the true classics, but it's way too much fuss for everything else. The Long Tail approach, by contrast, is to simply dump huge chunks of the archive onto bare-bones DVDs, without any extras or marketing. Call it the Silver Series and charge half the price. Same for independent films. This year, nearly 6,000 movies were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. Of those, 255 were accepted, and just two dozen have been picked up for distribution; to see the others, you had to be there. Why not release all 255 on DVD each year as part of a discount Sundance Series?In a Long Tail economy, it's more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it!

The same is true for the music industry. It should be securing the rights to release all the titles in all the back catalogs as quickly as it can - thoughtlessly, automatically, and at industrial scale. (This is one of those rare moments where the world needs more lawyers, not fewer.) So too for videogames. Retro gaming, including simulators of classic game consoles that run on modern PCs, is a growing phenomenon driven by the nostalgia of the first joystick generation. Game publishers could release every title as a 99-cent download three years after its release - no support, no guarantees, no packaging.

All this, of course, applies equally to books. Already, we're seeing a blurring of the line between in and out of print. Amazon and other networks of used booksellers have made it almost as easy to find and buy a second-hand book as it is a new one. By divorcing bookselling from geography, these networks create a liquid market at low volume, dramatically increasing both their own business and the overall demand for used books. Combine that with the rapidly dropping costs of print-on-demand technologies and it's clear why any book should always be available. Indeed, it is a fair bet that children today will grow up never knowing the meaning of out of print.

Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.

Thanks to the success of Apple's iTunes, we now have a standard price for a downloaded track: 99 cents. But is it the right one?

Ask the labels and they'll tell you it's too low: Even though 99 cents per track works out to about the same price as a CD, most consumers just buy a track or two from an album online, rather than the full CD. In effect, online music has seen a return to the singles-driven business of the 1950s. So from a label perspective, consumers should pay more for the privilege of purchasing a la carte to compensate for the lost album revenue.

Ask consumers, on the other hand, and they'll tell you that 99 cents is too high. It is, for starters, 99 cents more than Kazaa. But piracy aside, 99 cents violates our innate sense of economic justice: If it clearly costs less for a record label to deliver a song online, with no packaging, manufacturing, distribution, or shelf space overheads, why shouldn't the price be less, too?

Surprisingly enough, there's been little good economic analysis on what the right price for online music should be. The main reason for this is that pricing isn't set by the market today but by the record label demi-cartel. Record companies charge a wholesale price of around 65 cents per track, leaving little room for price experimentation by the retailers.

That wholesale price is set to roughly match the price of CDs, to avoid dreaded "channel conflict." The labels fear that if they price online music lower, their CD retailers (still the vast majority of the business) will revolt or, more likely, go out of business even more quickly than they already are. In either case, it would be a serious disruption of the status quo, which terrifies the already spooked record companies. No wonder they're doing price calculations with an eye on the downsides in their traditional CD business rather than the upside in their new online business.

But what if the record labels stopped playing defense? A brave new look at the economics of music would calculate what it really costs to simply put a song on an iTunes server and adjust pricing accordingly. The results are surprising.

Take away the unnecessary costs of the retail channel - CD manufacturing, distribution, and retail overheads. That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do. For a popular album that sells 300,000 copies, the creative costs work out to about $7.50 per disc, or around 60 cents a track. Add to that the actual cost of delivering music online, which is mostly the cost of building and maintaining the online service rather than the negligible storage and bandwidth costs. Current price tag: around 17 cents a track. By this calculation, hit music is overpriced by 25 percent online - it should cost just 79 cents a track, reflecting the savings of digital delivery.

Putting channel conflict aside for the moment, if the incremental cost of making content that was originally produced for physical distribution available online is low, the price should be, too. Price according to digital costs, not physical ones.

All this good news for consumers doesn't have to hurt the industry. When you lower prices, people tend to buy more. Last year, Rhapsody did an experiment in elastic demand that suggested it could be a lot more. For a brief period, the service offered tracks at 99 cents, 79 cents, and 49 cents. Although the 49-cent tracks were only half the price of the 99-cent tracks, Rhapsody sold three times as many of them.

Since the record companies still charged 65 cents a track - and Rhapsody paid another 8 cents per track to the copyright-holding publishers - Rhapsody lost money on that experiment (but, as the old joke goes, made it up in volume). Yet much of the content on the Long Tail is older material that has already made back its money (or been written off for failing to do so): music from bands that had little record company investment and was thus cheap to make, or live recordings, remixes, and other material that came at low cost.

Such "misses" cost less to make available than hits, so why not charge even less for them? Imagine if prices declined the further you went down the Tail, with popularity (the market) effectively dictating pricing. All it would take is for the labels to lower the wholesale price for the vast majority of their content not in heavy rotation; even a two- or three-tiered pricing structure could work wonders. And because so much of that content is not available in record stores, the risk of channel conflict is greatly diminished. The lesson: Pull consumers down the tail with lower prices.

How low should the labels go? The answer comes by examining the psychology of the music consumer. The choice facing fans is not how many songs to buy from iTunes and Rhapsody, but how many songs to buy rather than download for free from Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks. Intuitively, consumers know that free music is not really free: Aside from any legal risks, it's a time-consuming hassle to build a collection that way. Labeling is inconsistent, quality varies, and an estimated 30 percent of tracks are defective in one way or another. As Steve Jobs put it at the iTunes Music Store launch, you may save a little money downloading from Kazaa, but "you're working for under minimum wage." And what's true for music is doubly true for movies and games, where the quality of pirated products can be even more dismal, viruses are a risk, and downloads take so much longer.

So free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. This is the "not worth it" moment where the wallet opens. The exact amount is an impossible calculus involving the bank balance of the average college student multiplied by their available free time. But imagine that for music, at least, it's around 20 cents a track. That, in effect, is the dividing line between the commercial world of the Long Tail and the underground. Both worlds will continue to exist in parallel, but it's crucial for Long Tail thinkers to exploit the opportunities between 20 and 99 cents to maximize their share. By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.

Perhaps the best way to do that is to stop charging for individual tracks at all. Danny Stein, whose private equity firm owns eMusic, thinks the future of the business is to move away from the ownership model entirely. With ubiquitous broadband, both wired and wireless, more consumers will turn to the celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand. Some of those tracks will be free to listeners and advertising-supported, like radio. Others, like eMusic and Rhapsody, will be subscription services. Today, digital music economics are dominated by the iPod, with its notion of a paid-up library of personal tracks. But as the networks improve, the comparative economic advantages of unlimited streamed music, either financed by advertising or a flat fee (infinite choice for $9.99 a month), may shift the market that way. And drive another nail in the coffin of the retail music model.

Rule 3: Help me find it

In 1997, an entrepreneur named Michael Robertson started what looked like a classic Long Tail business. Called MP3.com, it let anyone upload music files that would be available to all. The idea was the service would bypass the record labels, allowing artists to connect directly to listeners. MP3.com would make its money in fees paid by bands to have their music promoted on the site. The tyranny of the labels would be broken, and a thousand flowers would bloom.

Putting aside the fact that many people actually used the service to illegally upload and share commercial tracks, leading the labels to sue MP3.com, the model failed at its intended purpose, too. Struggling bands did not, as a rule, find new audiences, and independent music was not transformed. Indeed, MP3.com got a reputation for being exactly what it was: an undifferentiated mass of mostly bad music that deserved its obscurity.

The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn't have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin.

Offering only hits is no better. Think of the struggling video-on-demand services of the cable companies. Or think of Movielink, the feeble video download service run by the studios. Due to overcontrolling providers and high costs, they suffer from limited content: in most cases just a few hundred recent releases. There's not enough choice to change consumer behavior, to become a real force in the entertainment economy.

By contrast, the success of Netflix, Amazon, and the commercial music services shows that you need both ends of the curve. Their huge libraries of less-mainstream fare set them apart, but hits still matter in attracting consumers in the first place. Great Long Tail businesses can then guide consumers further afield by following the contours of their likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown.

For instance, the front screen of Rhapsody features Britney Spears, unsurprisingly. Next to the listings of her work is a box of "similar artists." Among them is Pink. If you click on that and are pleased with what you hear, you may do the same for Pink's similar artists, which include No Doubt. And on No Doubt's page, the list includes a few "followers" and "influencers," the last of which includes the Selecter, a 1980s ska band from Coventry, England. In three clicks, Rhapsody may have enticed a Britney Spears fan to try an album that can hardly be found in a record store.

Rhapsody does this with a combination of human editors and genre guides. But Netflix, where 60 percent of rentals come from recommendations, and Amazon do this with collaborative filtering, which uses the browsing and purchasing patterns of users to guide those who follow them ("Customers who bought this also bought ..."). In each, the aim is the same: Use recommendations to drive demand down the Long Tail.

This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.

The advantages are spread widely. For the entertainment industry itself, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, allowing smaller films and less-mainstream music to find an audience. For consumers, the improved signal-to-noise ratio that comes from following a good recommendation encourages exploration and can reawaken a passion for music and film, potentially creating a far larger entertainment market overall. (The average Netflix customer rents seven DVDs a month, three times the rate at brick-and-mortar stores.) And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.

Such is the power of the Long Tail. Its time has come.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html





It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web
Lee Gomes

Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson's hot, new best seller, "The Long Tail," is causing a sensation with its eye-opening claims about the way the Web is rewriting the rules of commerce. But I've looked at some of the same data, and some more of my own, and I don't think things are changing as much as he does.

The book argues that while traditional companies are limited by shelf space to offering only a relatively small number of "hits," on the Web, they can carry a vastly bigger number of slower-selling items. These "misses," which make up the "tail" of the title, can, he says, add up to a big number -- maybe even bigger than sales of the hits.

That would be very different from the business world we know today; no wonder the book's cover promises "The New Economics of Culture and Commerce."

Let's start this discussion where Mr. Anderson starts his book, with his discovery of what he calls a paradigm-changing statistic. In the introduction, he tells how he learns from Ecast, a music-streaming company, that 98% of its catalog gets played at least once a quarter -- much more than most would predict.

This "98 Percent Rule," as Mr. Anderson names it, suggests the remarkable prospect that no matter how much inventory you put online, someone, somewhere will show up to buy it. He writes, "Everywhere I looked the story was the same. ... The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal."

Except it's not. Ecast told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays.

Mr. Anderson told me in an email that he only mentioned the 98 Percent Rule to show how he first got interested in the book's overall subject, adding, "I have no idea how broadly it applies today."

In the book's main sections, Mr. Anderson writes that as things move online, sales of misses will increase -- so much so that they can equal or exceed the sales of hits. The latter is the book's showstopper proposition; it's mentioned twice on the book's jacket.

I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples of this actually occurring. At Netflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won't outsell hits for at least another decade, he said. None of these qualifications are in the book.

Mr. Anderson told me the lack of an example of misses outselling hits doesn't diminish his basic point, which he said is simply that the role of the tail "is big and getting bigger."

By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive.

Another theme of the book is that "hits are starting to rule less." But when I looked online, I was surprised to see what seemed like the opposite. Ecast says 10% of its songs account for roughly 90% of its streams; monthly data from Rhapsody showed the top 10% songs getting 86% of streams.

Bloglines, the widely used blog-reading tool, lists 1.2 million blogs; real ones, not computer-generated "spam blogs." The top 10% of feeds grab 88% of all subscriptions. And 35% have no current subscribers at all -- there's clearly no 98 Percent Rule in the blogosphere.

At Apple's iTunes, one person who has seen the data -- which Apple doesn't disclose -- said sales "closely track Billboard. It's a hits business. The data tend to refute 'The Long Tail.' "

Other economists, of course, are looking into these same questions, though some seem to be reaching far more restrained conclusions. Harvard's Anita Elberse, whom Mr. Anderson said was a consultant during his two-year research project, studies the video sales market, both online and off.

She said in an email that her work to date shows a "slight shift" toward the tail. But she also noted "a rapidly increasing number of titles that never, or very rarely, sell," which suggests "it is difficult for content providers to profit from the 'tail.' "

It would be wonderful if the world as Mr. Anderson describes it were true: one where "healthy niche products" and even "outright misses" collectively could stand their ground with the culture's increasingly soulless "hits."

But while every singer-songwriter dreams from his bedroom of making a living off iTunes, few actually do, mostly because so many others have the very same idea. And to the extent that Apple is making money off iTunes, thanks go to Nelly Furtado and other hitmakers. Indeed, you can make the case that the Internet is amplifying the role of hits, even in relation to misses, not diminishing them.

So maybe Mr. Anderson really has unlocked the sort of new business rules the cover promises. I say we wait before ripping up any business plans. Let's see how the tail shakes out.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





The Backlash, Chapter 1
Chris Anderson

I'll take it as a compliment that I now warrant a proper Wall Street Journal takedown for crimes of...well, I'm not quite sure what the crimes are. But Lee Gomes has tried mightily to find flaws with the Long Tail theory and deserves a response of some sort. I have no doubt that there are many parts of my analysis and data that could be improved. Unfortunately, Gomes, in his haste to find them, stumbles over statistics and more, and in the end simply makes a muddle of what might have been an interesting debate over the magnitude of the Long Tail effect.

He writes:

In the book's main sections, Mr. Anderson writes that as things move online, sales of misses will increase -- so much so that they can equal or exceed the sales of hits. The latter is the book's showstopper proposition; it's mentioned twice on the book's jacket.

I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples of this actually occurring.

First, the book doesn't claim that there are any cases where sales of products not available in the dominant bricks-and-mortar retailer in a sector (my definition of "tail") are larger than the sales of products that are available in that retailer ("head").

What it does say is that the current data at Rhapsody, Netflix and Amazon show that the tail amounts to between 21% and 40% of the market, with the head accounting for the rest. Although I don't discuss this in detail in the book, in the case of Rhapsody, the trend data suggests that the tail (as defined above) actually will equal the head within five years. Which is why the language Gomes cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future conditional tense ("What happens when the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of a few items that sell millions each?"). I asked him to quote the jacket copy in full context, but it apparently wasn't convenient to his thesis to do so, so he didn't.

Gomes continues:

Mr. Anderson told me the lack of an example of misses outselling hits doesn't diminish his basic point, which he said is simply that the role of the tail "is big and getting bigger."

By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive.

Sigh. Gomes was determined to make this point, even after I and others pointed out the statistical fallacy at the core of it. As I wrote in this post, trying to define "head" and "tail" in percentage terms is meaningless in a market with unlimited inventory, because the denominator can grow infinitely large. Let me give you an example of why this doesn't work:

Let's say you have 1,000 items and the top 100 (10%) account for 50% of the sales. Then you add another 99,000 items to the catalog, and the sales of that top 100 fall to just 25% of the total, while it takes another 900 items to make up the next 25%. I would say that demand has shifted down the tail, because those top 100 items have dropped from half the market to just a quarter of it and the rest of the demand is spread over more items.

But by Gomes' math, we've gone from a market where 10% of products make 50% of the revenues to one where 1% of the products make 50% of the revenues--in other words, it's become more hit-centric. I think this is simply a misunderstanding of basic statistics, and I'm disappointed that Gomes, despite many emails from me and at least one economist to him on this point, chose to simply say that I don't agree with that approach (but not why).

Finally, a very annoying point. Gomes writes:

Other economists, of course, are looking into these same questions, though some seem to be reaching far more restrained conclusions. Harvard's Anita Elberse, whom Mr. Anderson said was a consultant during his two-year research project, studies the video sales market, both online and off.

She said in an email that her work to date shows a "slight shift" toward the tail. But she also noted "a rapidly increasing number of titles that never, or very rarely, sell," which suggests "it is difficult for content providers to profit from the 'tail.' "

As Professor Elberse told Gomes, she was only describing Nielsen VideoScan data, which is almost entirely taken from bricks-and-mortar sources. The Netflix data, which was the basis of the Long Tail analysis that she and I worked on together, tells a very different story (Elberse's terms of data access don't allow her to share that data; my terms allowed me to share what I published in the book). We both urged Gomes to make clear that the "slight shift" measured didn't refer to the Netflix data that was at the core of the book's conclusions. But he chose to make the point he wanted to make.

I'm actually quite an admirer of Gomes' work and he certainly did do a lot of research for this piece. But he started off with the wrong end of the stick (looking at the market in percentage terms, which doesn't work because the definition of "head" keeps changing) and sadly wouldn't let it go. As an editor, I've seen this happen before and we try to watch out for it. But sometimes the lure of the gotcha is too much to resist.
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tai...ecking_my.html





Watch Your Back When Someone at Fox News Channel Wishes You Well

It's something like a kiss from a Mafia don.
David Bauder

If someone at Fox News Channel wishes you well, watch your back.

The seemingly benign sentiment is a creative signature of Fox's public relations, usually accompanied by a kneecapping. It's something like a kiss from a Mafia don.

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann was the latest to visit the wishing well. When The New York Times recently asked Fox its opinion of Olbermann, who has repeatedly used Bill O'Reilly as a pinata on his nightly news countdown, spokeswoman Irena Briganti replied:
"Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he's worked. 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."

Have a nice day, Keith!

Plainly, public relations is a contact sport at Fox News Channel _ with, as Fox PR chief Brian Lewis explains, a sense of mischief sprinkled in.

"Has there ever been a more disingenuous phrase in the corporate handbook, or the PR handbook, than `we wish him well'?" asked Lewis. "`Earnings have fallen in the last eight quarters and we wish Joe well as he leaves the company to pursue other interests.' We know what they mean, so we just thought we'd have some fun and point out the hypocrisy of the term."

The list of people to get Fox News Channel's best wishes in print lengthens all the time. Here are some others:

-- Ted Turner. The CNN founder called Fox a "propaganda voice" of the Bush administration and compared its popularity to Adolf Hitler's rise in Germany before World War II. Briganti: "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind. We wish him well."

-- Tim Russert. A journalist asked the NBC Washington bureau chief whether Fox would get better treatment from the White House with Tony Snow as press secretary and he replied, "no more than they get right now." Fox's Paul Schur shot back: "Tim's sour grapes are obvious here, but at least he's not using his father as a prop to sell books this time around. That said, we wish him well on his latest self-promotion tour."

-- George Clooney. Fox News branched out to Hollywood after the actor criticized O'Reilly. "We are disappointed that George has chosen to hurt Mr. O'Reilly's family in order to promote his movie," Schur said. "But it's obvious he needs publicity considering his recent string of failures. We wish him well in his struggle to regain relevancy."

-- MSNBC correspondent David Shuster. After leaving a job at Fox, Shuster said that critical reporting on the Bush administration wouldn't have been welcomed at his former employer. Briganti came back with: "We can understand David's disappointment in being let go by Fox News Channel, but he's too young to be so bitter. We wish him well in getting his career back on track."

-- Jonathan Klein. On the day the CNN U.S. president was hired, Briganti offered: "We wish CNN well in their annual executive shuffle." She later stuck the knife in further with: "We wish Jon well in his battle for second place with MSNBC."

Fox has essentially changed the language in the TV industry with its wishing well, turning a pleasantry into "take a hike."

Or worse.

The wishing well opened at Fox in the late 1990s. Look further back in the archives and you'll find examples of where the network wished someone well and actually appeared to mean it.

Whatever name is attached to it, a wish-well is generally a team effort by Fox's PR staff, Lewis said. Fox News chief Roger Ailes even contributed the memorable "his mind" line to the Turner kiss-off.

Each line is a counter-punch, Lewis noted. Fox doesn't "go nuclear" unless provoked. And he doesn't want the lines to lose impact by overdoing it.

"Not every attack on us deserves a response," he said. "It could be no response. That's a strategy. It could be mild, medium or spicy, depending on what our needs are."

Olbermann doesn't find the whole thing particularly amusing. He may be the most frequent target, and he enshrined Briganti in his "worst person in the world" feature for the latest attack.

"I've heard it all before and each time she's said it the ratings go up 25 percent in the ensuing year, so I'm encouraging her to say it as much as possible," Olbermann said. "They're just without humor and without understanding of the impact of their words. It's like O'Reilly. Every time he opens his mouth, I get more viewers."

He believes more people are laughing at Fox than with them.

"If they're going to come out and say these things, I'd much prefer the old muskrat line, whatever they said about Paula, then these attempts to sugarcoat these things," he said.

It was a raccoon, actually.

The reference is to one of Ailes' most famous quotes after Paula Zahn left Fox for CNN. He dismissed Zahn's ratings increases while at Fox as a reflection of the network's overall growth by saying, "I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and got a better rating than last year."

"We know (Olbermann) has thin skin," Lewis said. "Why else would he make a PR person one of the worst people in the world? Come on, we get that. What he's trying to do to O'Reilly, we're doing to him. It's obviously getting to him."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1006648





AOL Co-Founder Offers Merger Apology
AP

AOL co-founder Steve Case has offered a qualified apology for his role in architecting the online company's disastrous combination with Time Warner Inc. "Yes, I'm sorry I did it," Case said on PBS's "The Charlie Rose Show" last Friday.

But Case also reiterated his belief that it was a good idea at the time.

"It has been a disappointment, but you know, it goes back to the question, `Was it a good idea?'" Case said, according to a transcript provided by the show. "I think it was a good idea. I'm disappointed and frustrated that it hasn't developed in the way that that we all hoped at the time it could."

Time Warner's agreement to be bought by AOL at the height of the Internet bubble in early 2000 resulted in years of turmoil, including shareholder lawsuits, regulatory investigations into AOL's accounting practices, a plunge in the company's share price and a management purge. Since then, Time Warner has changed its name from AOL Time Warner Inc. to just Time Warner Inc.

AOL's fortunes are on the upswing thanks to its recent strategy of shifting to an advertising-driven business instead of providing Internet access. But Time Warner stock prices are now hovering near its 52-week low as the company, and Time Warner is considering making even more of AOL's services free to boost advertising.

Case resigned from Time Warner's board in October and relinquished his role as chairman two years ago.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-06-32-31





Steely Dan Demands Apology From Owen Wilson

70s rockers says they're doing it for the fans
Solvej Schou

Paging Owen Wilson. Steely Dan wants an apology.

The veteran group behind such jazz-rock hits as "Rikki Don’t Lose that Number" says Wilson ripped off its Grammy-winning tune "Cousin Dupree" for his title role as a slacker in the new comedy "You, Me and Dupree."

In a 10-paragraph letter posted July 17 on Steely Dan’s Web site, and addressed to Wilson’s brother Luke, band leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen asked Owen Wilson to appear at a show in Irvine, Calif., to apologize to the band’s fans.

Wilson, in return, would get Steely Dan merchandise and a chance to party with the group.

"He would have to cop to the fact that what he and his Hollywood gangster pals did was wrong and that he wishes he had never agreed to get involved with this turkey in the first place," says the pair.

Becker and Fagen claim that "some hack writer or producer" heard Steely Dan’s "Cousin Dupree," about a hormonal houseguest, and "when it came time to change the character’s name or whatever so people wouldn’t know what a rip the whole thing was, they didn’t even bother to think up a new (expletive) name for the guy!"

They go on to trash the movie (a "summer stinkbomb") and Wilson.

"Instant karma is a fact, Jack," the pair writes.

If karma doesn’t get the actor, they say, then an apparent tough guy they know might.

"One time we saw this guy, with his bare hands, do something so unspeakable, that – but, hey man, let’s not even let it get that way, you know?" say Becker and Fagen.

Larry Solters, a spokesman for the band’s management company, declined to comment on any details beyond the letter, including whether Wilson showed up to the July 19 concert or if legal action would be taken.

In 2001, "Cousin Dupree" landed a Grammy for best pop performance by a duo or group from Steely Dan’s album "Two Against Nature," which also snagged album of the year.

The group, known for a string of ‘70s hits, has been on tour since July 7 with Michael McDonald.

"You, Me and Dupree" co-stars Kate Hudson and Matt Dillon as a newlywed couple annoyed by Wilson’s Dupree, a partier who crashes out on their couch.

Owen Wilson’s publicist Ina Treciokas and Luke Wilson’s publicist Mara Buxbaum both declined to comment.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1006879

















Until next week,

- js.



















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