Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – October 14th, '06

[JackSpratts]

"We understand now that piracy is a business model." – Anne Sweeney


"They say the law is intended to stop piracy, but I am not a pirate. I support artists with legally purchased works, but I do not want to be forced to use a particular device to play them." – Jérôme Martinez


"If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion. If you believe something else, maybe it’s not worth much at all." – Steven A. Ballmer


"Since it was the `people' that made YouTube, why aren't they being paid billions?" – winofiend


"We cannot assume what we know about bulk-size substances applies to the nanotechnology-size substances." – Philippe Martin


"I would fall over in shock if we were to get those nuts back. I would be throttled." – Farmer Phippen


"We had 10,000 or 13,000 books in the store. Now we have maybe 1,500." – Gary Kleiman


"If Superman had done twice what it did, the whole summer would have looked different." – Jeff Robinov


"If it was today, the headline in Variety would have been 'When Harry Met Disaster.'" – Alan F. Horn


"I figure we got one good sequel and one bad sequel to this movie left in us. The key is to keep stomping on this grapefruit until it stops producing grapefruitade." – Jack Black






































October 14th, '06






A Growing Free-for-All

By approving the merger between AT&T and BellSouth unconditionally, the Bush administration has again abdicated responsibility for protecting consumers when huge companies combine.

Fierce competition between private companies is at the core of the nation’s economic strength. But government still has an important role to play as referee, making sure that the rough-and-tumble game of capitalism doesn’t become perversely uncompetitive through significant concentrations of market power in the hands of a few companies.

From the very start, the Bush administration’s approach to antitrust and merger policy has been much more hands-off than its predecessors’. In an era of rapid consolidation and deregulation, the Justice Department hasn’t brought a single major monopoly case under the Sherman Antitrust Act since the Clinton administration went after Microsoft for illegally defending its monopoly for the Windows operating system. The department settled that case during President Bush’s first year in office.

That set the tone for a merger policy that often appears to be little more than “anything goes.” One gets the impression at times that the referee has left the playing field.

Perhaps the clearest example came earlier this year when the department cleared Whirlpool’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Maytag, which gave the combined company up to three-quarters of the market for some home appliances. As Stephen Labaton reported in The Times shortly thereafter, that decision actually demoralized career officials in the department’s antitrust division.

Not only has the government failed to bring many significant cases, it is opposing one brought and won by a third party. The Supreme Court will hear a case in which a jury found that Weyerhaeuser monopolized a market for logs in the Pacific Northwest. The Bush administration filed a brief asking the court to reverse the decision, already upheld on appeal.

A federal district judge is reviewing the antitrust settlements that previously allowed SBC Communications to acquire AT&T and Verizon to buy MCI. But by approving the AT&T-BellSouth merger without a single condition, the Justice Department has allowed this one to avoid judicial review.

That leaves the Federal Communications Commission. The commission has scheduled a meeting to discuss the merger today. It should take a long, hard look at the deal, and the overall trend toward consolidation in the telecommunications industry. There are strong arguments that competition with cable companies and Internet phone services have changed the playing field. But the commissioners should pursue the question thoroughly rather than wielding a rubber stamp as the Justice Department sometimes appears to. They must think first about protecting consumers, while bearing in mind that bigger is not always better.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/opinion/13fri1.html





Parallel Federal Political World of Environment and Copyright
Michael Geist

The environment has emerged as a mainstream political issue, and copyright is showing similar signs.

As the Conservatives prepare to roll out their policy plan for the environment, there is little doubt that environmental concerns have emerged as a major political issue. With polls consistently confirming public concern with environmental sustainability, each of Canada's major political parties is anxious to be known as the most environmentally friendly.

The focus on environmental issues is a relatively new phenomenon. A generation ago, if the environment was considered at all, it was viewed as a niche issue too complex to matter to the average voter. The complexity of environmental issues has not changed–most Canadians would be hard-pressed to explain carbon emissions, the details of climate change, or the substance of the Kyoto agreement–yet the essence of environmental policy as clean air, clean water, and sustainable natural resources is clearly understood.

The emergence of the environment as a mainstream political issue is worth noting because today there is another issue that shows similar signs of moving from the periphery to the mainstream–copyright.

The similarities start with language–environmental advocates speak of protecting the environment and sustainable resources, while copyright advocates focus on the need to protect the public domain and to sustain access to Canadian culture.

The two issues are also similarly complex. The average Canadian knows little about the intricacies of fair dealing or technological protection measures, yet the implications of copyright policies that hamper free speech, privacy, security, and consumer rights are far easier to appreciate. Indeed, recent developments both here and abroad suggest that the issue is beginning to garner increased attention from the general public.

Given the large number of vocal stakeholders, including copyright collectives, industry associations, broadcasters, as well as education and library groups, prior copyright reform initiatives were viewed as thorny political issues that attracted plenty of lobbyists. The reforms remained off the public's radar screen, however, generating limited public interest and enabling governments to broker compromises between a relatively small group of stakeholders.

The landscape began to change in the late 1990s, as millions of Canadians gravitated toward the Internet and began to purchase digital entertainment products such as CDs, DVDs, and video games. The changes in technology transformed millions of Canadians into creators who increasingly recognized that copyright could be used to limit their fundamental freedoms and to enjoy their consumer products. With the majority of Canadians now online, the public is now an active stakeholder and copyright has become one of their issues.

Moreover, copyright policy itself has begun to change. In recent years, the Supreme Court of Canada explicitly recognized the need for balance in copyright law, characterizing the law as a balance between creator and user rights. The substance of copyright policy also begun to shift away from its focus on creators toward distributors of copyright products, who seek legal protections for technologies that can be used to lock-down digital content.

It is those rules that have led to political repercussions in other jurisdictions. In the Nordic countries, officials are presently negotiating with Apple Computer about changes to its iPod and iTunes service following growing consumer unrest and complaints to elected officials.

In fact, Sweden is now home to the "Pirate Party," a political party focused primarily on copyright issues. Last month, the party garnered nearly 35,000 votes, enough to place tenth among 40 political parties running for a place in Swedish Parliament. While the total was less than one per cent of the national vote, the party's presence forced several larger parties to alter their positions on copyright.

Similar developments have occurred in France, where opposition parties have forced user-friendly copyright amendments through their Parliament. In Australia, the government has been struggling with its implementation of the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement in light of public concern over the copyright provisions.

In Canada, copyright has begun to attract voter attention. Thousands of Canadians have signed petitions on copyright that have been presented in the House of Commons and during the last election campaign copyright played a role in the defeat of Liberal incumbent Sarmite Bulte in Parkdale-High Park, following criticism over her ties to copyright lobby groups. Grassroots organizations focused on copyright representing the interests of artists, musicians, and consumers have formed in recent months and obtained meetings with ministers and opposition critics.

Not surprisingly, political parties have begun to take note of these developments. Both the NDP and Green Party have adopted more user-focused policy positions and the door is now open to the Liberal Party to do the same.

The parallels between the environment and copyright are particularly relevant given the persistent reports that the Conservative government plans to introduce copyright reform legislation this fall. If, as expected, a U.S.-style approach is introduced, Canada will be ripe for the same opposition evidenced elsewhere as Canadians gradually learn of the proposal's damaging effects on fundamental freedoms, personal privacy, and consumer rights and Canada's opposition parties line up to court the "copyright vote."
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/inde...r/9/geist/&c=1





Skype Founder: Kazaa, Napster Help Music
Sarah Andrews

Kazaa, Napster Inc. and other creators of file-sharing applications have been good for the music industry, Niklas Zennstrom, founder of the now-defunct Kazaa and CEO of Skype, said Monday.

"Kazaa came five years too early, but without that and Napster we would never have seen the transformation we're seeing in the music industry," said Zennstrom at a gathering of technology experts at the European Technology Roundtable Exhibition held this week in Barcelona. "Record companies are seeing that the Internet is good for their business, and we made that possible."

Zennstrom has led a similar market transformation with his communications company, Skype, which handles about 7 percent of the world's international calls and is signing on new users at a rate of 58 percent per quarter. The company, founded in 2003, was bought last year by eBay Inc. for US$2.6 billion (euro2.06 billion).
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-09-11-15-30





Disney Co-Chair Recognises 'Piracy is a Business Model'
Nicol Wistreich

Giving the Keynote address at Mipcom, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney has broken with studio convention and recognised piracy as a business model to compete with, as opposed to simply an illegal threat to be battled. Sweeney's pragmatic conversion came after seing - within 15 minutes of the ABC network premiere of Despearate Housewives - a high-quality, ad-free version that had appeared on P2P networks.

“We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood's most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We we don’t like the model but we realise it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

In the year since the iTunes deal was first done with Apple, Disney has sold 12.8 million episodes via iTunes and 51 of the 272 TV series available on the service are Disney products.

As reported on PaidContent.org, Sweeney's address also pointed out:

- Eighty-four percent of those that used the on-demand service said that it was a “good deal” to get a free episode in return for watching an ad and, significantly for advertisers, 87 percent of those could recall the advertiser that sponsored the programme.

- Sweeney outlined Disney’s strategy as: being primarily about content because it drives everything else; being about maximising new platforms for both content and advertisers; and sharpening its brands, because consumers choose brands they know and trust.

- Partnership, she said, is critical because Disney needs “compatible brands” to focus on its core aims of: a quality user experience; growth on delivering consumer value; content valuation and protection; and a commitment to market products and services.
- “The digital revolution has unleashed a consumer coup. We have to not only make in-demand content but make it on-demand. This power shift changes the way we think about our business, industry and our viewers. We have to build our businesses around their behaviour and their interests.”

- “The most powerful creativity comes in response to a challenge - as long as you know who you are and where you want to go.”

- “All of us have to continually renew our business in order to renew our brands because audiences have upper hand and show no sign of giving it back.”
http://www.bizofshowbiz.com/2006/10/...ts_attack.html





MusicNet, Napster Agree Digital Royalties Deal

Digital music service providers MusicNet and Napster have agreed a three-year deal on royalty rates to pay songwriters and music publishers for digital downloads in Britain.

Under the deal, the composers, writers and music publishers will receive 8 percent of gross revenue, excluding VAT, when their music is offered by MusicNet and Napster.

MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represent the composers, songwriters and music publishers, agreed the same deal at the end of September with Apple's iTunes and mobile operators Vodafone, O2, France Telecom's Orange and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile.

The alliance said in a statement that both parties welcomed the agreement and were committed to working together to drive the on-going growth in the legitimate digital music market.

MusicNet provides the technology to run services for other brand name digital music providers. Napster became a legal download site in 2003 after having been forced to close by a series of legal battles over copyright infringement.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061009/...4yBHNlYwNmYw--





Their Crime: Playing iTunes on Devices Not Named iPod
Thomas Crampton

It took more than 10 minutes to persuade the Paris police station’s highest-ranking officer that a crime might have taken place, but that did not deter Jérôme Martinez and his two companions.

After all, the three had marched halfway across the Latin Quarter one evening in late September, accompanied by about 40 fellow advocates, waving banners and handing out parking-ticket-style leaflets that claimed they had committed a number of offenses.

Among their crimes was listening to a song purchased from iTunes on a device not made by Apple Computer. The group, StopDRM, largely made up of young computer enthusiasts, was protesting the growing number of subtle restrictions used to limit the use of legally purchased songs and videos.

Protection measures, often called digital rights management, or DRM, are supposed to prevent piracy. But critics of the measures say they smack of Big Brother-style controls.

France, long concerned with expanding the diversity of global culture to make room for French offerings, has paid particular attention to digital controls. This summer, while updating copyright regulations, France enacted a law intended to force compatibility of digital music across all devices.

“France really pushed forward the debate over protection measures,” said Ted Shapiro, general counsel for Europe of the Motion Picture Association, the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America.

In the end, the French law strengthened the hand of studios and record labels by prohibiting a person’s ability to circumvent protection measures; it never required songs to be transferred from one format to the others.

Similar regulations were laid out in the United States by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

In mounting their protest, members of the group in Paris saw themselves as foot soldiers of the digital generation battling against ever-tighter controls over songs, film and all digitized culture.

Greeted at the police station by almost as many armed riot police officers as there were protesters, they explained their infractions to passers-by.

“Not only did I not use an iPod to listen to an iTunes song, but I transferred the film ‘Blade Runner’ onto my hand-held movie player,” Mr. Martinez, 28, said. “I am willing to face the consequences of what they consider an offense.”

By his own calculation, Mr. Martinez could face a fine of as much as 41,250 euros, or about $52,000, and six months in prison.

Mr. Martinez patiently laid out the case he built against himself, offering details about his infractions, which included switching music from one format to another and transferring the DVD’s to different players.

“They say the law is intended to stop piracy, but I am not a pirate,” Mr. Martinez said. “I support artists with legally purchased works, but I do not want to be forced to use a particular device to play them.”

The process of switching the music from the Apple or Microsoft formats to the MP3 format removes all copying restrictions. Transferring the DVD also requires bypassing protection measures.

Mr. Martinez figured he could face fines of 3,750 euros ($4,663) for each transfer and 30,000 euros ($37,809) plus as much as to six months in prison for telling others how to do the same thing.

At that point a policeman, dressed in plain clothes, came out from behind the line of riot police to escort the three inside the station, where they could register their offenses.

While the impact of the law’s push for compatibility across devices remains unclear, Mr. Shapiro argued against legislating technical standards. “The studios do not want to control culture,” he said. “They want to get a return on investment.”

More than a week later, Mr. Martinez said, he took the additional step of sending registered letters to Microsoft and Apple informing them of his actions, but he still did not know whether a prosecution would take place.

“It is a complicated and new issue, so I am not surprised at the slow reaction,” he said. “Or maybe the police realize that there are more important things for the government than forcing me to use an iPod when listening to ‘Les Lacs du Connemara.’ ”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/...ss/steal09.php





It’s a living

Jury Awards $11.3M Over Defamatory Internet Posts
Laura Parker

A Florida woman has been awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a "crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud."

Legal analysts say the Sept. 19 award by a jury in Broward County, Fla. — first reported Friday by the Daily Business Review — represents the largest such judgment over postings on an Internet blog or message board. Lyrissa Lidsky, a University of Florida law professor who specializes in free-speech issues, calls the award "astonishing."

BEWARE OF BLOGS: Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites

Lidsky says the case could represent a coming trend in court fights over online messages because the woman who won the damage award, Sue Scheff of Weston, Fla., pursued the case even though she knew the defendant, Carey Bock of Mandeville, La., has no hope of paying such an award. Bock, who had to leave her home for several months because of Hurricane Katrina, couldn't afford an attorney and didn't show up for the trial.

"What's interesting about this case is that (Scheff) was so vested in being vindicated, she was willing to pay court costs," Lidsky says. "They knew before trial that the defendant couldn't pay, so what's the point in going to the jury?"

Scheff says she wanted to make a point to those who unfairly criticize others on the Internet. "I'm sure (Bock) doesn't have $1 million, let alone $11 million, but the message is strong and clear," Scheff says. "People are using the Internet to destroy people they don't like, and you can't do that."

The dispute between the two women arose after Bock asked Scheff for help in withdrawing Bock's twin sons from a boarding school in Costa Rica. Bock had disagreed with her ex-husband over how to deal with the boys' behavior problems. Against Bock's wishes, he had sent the boys to the boarding school.

Scheff, who operates a referral service called Parents Universal Resource Experts, says she referred Bock to a consultant who helped Bock retrieve her sons. Afterward, Bock became critical of Scheff and posted negative messages about her on the Internet site Fornits.com, where parents with children in boarding schools for troubled teens confer with one another.

In 2003, Scheff sued Bock for defamation. Bock hired a lawyer, but he left the case when she no longer could afford to pay him.

When Katrina hit in August 2005, Bock's house was flooded and she moved temporarily to Texas before returning to Louisiana last June. Court papers that Scheff and her attorney David H. Pollack mailed to Bock were returned to Pollack's office in Miami.

After Bock didn't offer a defense, a Broward Circuit Court judge found in favor of Scheff. A jury then heard Scheff's arguments about damages. Pollack did not seek a specific amount for the harm he says Scheff's business suffered.

"Even with no opposing counsel and no defendant there, $11 million is a huge amount," says Pollack, adding that Scheff is considering whether to try to collect any money from Bock. "The jury determined this was a significant enough issue. It's not just somebody's feelings are hurt; it's somebody's reputation is ruined."

Bock says that when she moved back to her repaired house over the summer, she knew the trial was approaching but did not know the date. She says she doesn't have the money to pay the judgment or hire a lawyer to appeal it. She adds that if the goal of Scheff's lawsuit was to stifle what Bock says online, it worked.

"I don't feel like I can express my opinions," Bock says. "Only one side of the story was told in court. Nobody heard my side."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...ion-case_x.htm





RIAA Drops Wilke Case in Chicago

We have just learned that the RIAA has dropped the Wilke case in Chicago.

Stipulation of Dismissal with Prejudice*

This is the case in which Mr. Wilke moved for summary judgment, stating that:

1. He is not "Paule Wilke" which is the name he was sued under.
2. He has never possessed on his computer any of the songs listed in exhibit A [the list of songs the RIAA's investigator downloaded] He only had a few of the songs from exhibit B [the screenshot] on his computer, and those were from legally purchased CD's owned by Mr. Wilke.
3. He has never used any "online media distribution system" to download, distribute, or make available for distribution, any of plaintiffs' copyrighted recordings.

The RIAA's initial response to the summary judgment motion, prior to the dismissal, had been to cross-move for discovery, indicating that it did not have enough evidence with which to defeat Mr. Wilke's summary judgment motion.

Mr. Wilke was represented by Saper Law Offices of Chicago, Illinois.

In response to our question as to whether any money had changed hands in connection with the settlement, Mr. Wilke's attorneys responded: "Plaintiffs, the RIAA, and SBC worked cooperatively and amicably to resolve this dispute."
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...n-chicago.html





Who would’ve thought?

Report Says Nonprofits Sold Influence to Abramoff
James V. Grimaldi and Susan Schmidt

Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, "appear to have perpetrated a fraud" on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday.

The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients' positions.

Officers of the groups "were generally available to carry out Mr. Abramoff's requests for help with his clients in exchange for cash payments," said the report, issued by the Senate Finance Committee. The report was written by the Democratic staff after a yearlong investigation and authorized by the Republican chairman, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

Abramoff has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy and could go to prison as early as next month. Prosecution and defense lawyers jointly filed papers yesterday asking a judge to recommend that he be sent to a federal facility in Cumberland, Md., to make it easier for him to cooperate with the ongoing probe. The investigation has resulted in one conviction and seven guilty pleas -- including one from a lawmaker, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), who is to appear today before a federal judge in the District.

The Senate report released yesterday states that the nonprofit groups probably violated their tax-exempt status "by laundering payments and then disbursing funds at Mr. Abramoff's direction; taking payments in exchange for writing newspaper columns or press releases that put Mr. Abramoff's clients in a favorable light; introducing Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment; and agreeing to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."

The report bolstered earlier revelations that Abramoff laundered money through the nonprofits to pay for congressional trips and paid Norquist to arrange meetings for Abramoff's clients with government officials including White House senior adviser Karl Rove.

The groups named in the report are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became secretary of the interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based religious group founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

E-mails released by the committee show that Abramoff, often with the knowledge of the groups' leaders, exploited the tax-exempt status and leveraged the stature of the organizations to build support among conservatives for legislation or government action sought by clients including Microsoft Corp., mutual fund company DH2 Inc., Primedia Inc.'s Channel One Network, and Brown-Forman, maker of Jack Daniel's whiskey.

A spokesman for Norquist, John Kartch, called the report "political nonsense" pushed by Democrats close to the midterm elections.

Norquist's attorney, Cleta Mitchell, had told the Senate panel that, as long as Americans for Tax Reform spends funds in keeping with its general purpose, "there is no 'abuse' of ATR's tax status." Officials with the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy denied wrongdoing. Citizens Against Government Waste said the group did not abuse its tax status and always adhered to long-held positions.

Amy Ridenour of the National Center acknowledged in an interview with investigators that donations can have some sway with think tanks but denied that they were made in exchange for positions.

Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.), the Finance Committee's ranking Democrat, called on the IRS and the FBI to investigate. "These groups' dealings with Jack Abramoff certainly violated the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the laws that give charitable and social welfare organizations a break for the good work they're supposed to do," Baucus said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Grassley said the chairman did not co-write the report because he had hoped it would include a broader range of groups that he believes also breached their tax status. A Baucus aide said the Democratic staff did not object to a broader review.

The Abramoff scandal has bruised the image of Norquist, a friend of Abramoff's since their days in the College Republicans. Often consulted by Rove, Norquist for decades has convened a key Wednesday morning strategy session for conservative leaders, lobbyists and Republican lawmakers.

Abramoff traded on Norquist's cachet, at one point referring to him in an e-mail as a "hard-won asset" of his lobbying empire. In exchange for Norquist's opposition to taxes on Brown-Forman products, Norquist recommended that a $50,000 donation be made to Americans for Tax Reform, according to an Abramoff e-mail.

"What is most important, however, is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff wrote to a colleague at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement."

The e-mails show that Abramoff and Norquist explicitly discussed client donations to Norquist's group in exchange for Norquist's support. The group's advocacy "appears indistinguishable from lobbying undertaken by for-profit, taxable firms," the report said.

Among those who agreed to donate money for an opinion piece was DH2, which in 2004 pushed for tax breaks for its customers.

E-mails show that DH2 understood that Norquist's help came with a price tag. The tab was sent to DH2's managing director, Robert S. Rubin.

"I told Rubin he needs to round up some $$$ for ATR," wrote lobbyist Michael E. Williams to his boss, Abramoff.

"Get the money from Rubin in hand," Abramoff replied, "and then we'll call Grover."

How much, Williams asked.

"50K," Abramoff wrote.

Abramoff e-mailed Norquist on Feb. 10, 2004: "I have sent over a $50K contribution from DH2 (the mutual fund client). Any sense as to where we are on the op-ed placement?"

Replied Norquist: "The Wash Times told me they were running the piece. . . . I will nudge again."

The Washington Times has published about 50 Norquist op-eds since 1993 but apparently none on mutual funds. Norquist did write a letter in April 2004 to a congressman praising him for sponsoring "legislation that would finally allow mutual fund shareholders to defer their capital gains tax" and pledging that his group "is committed to helping you pass this legislation."

Norquist wrote an op-ed piece, published in the Washington Times, as part of an extensive Abramoff campaign for Channel One, which broadcasts educational programming and advertising into public school classrooms. An Abramoff e-mail to Norquist offered him $1,500 for an op-ed, and another e-mail exchange suggested up to $3,000 to buy an "economic analysis."

The Council for Republican Environmental Advocacy, founded by Norquist and Norton, who resigned as interior secretary earlier this year, also appeared to have been used "as an extension of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying organization," the report said.

Abramoff directed his client Indian tribes to donate a total of about $500,000 to the group, telling them that the donation was a way to cultivate Norton at the Interior Department, which oversees the tribes and their casinos. E-mails show that Abramoff told the tribes that they would be CREA's "trustees" and that Norton would "host" a series of CREA dinners. Interior Department documents obtained by The Washington Post suggest that Norton was an invited guest at a CREA dinner, not a host.

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...200889_pf.html





My patch has a patch on it

Microsoft Releases 6 Patches for Flaws
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released six patches to fix software flaws that carry its highest threat rating, including three for defects that attackers were already trying to exploit.

The company said all six of the critical flaws could allow an attacker to obtain some access to other people's computers.

The Redmond software maker also released four other patches to fix vulnerabilities that the company deemed less severe.

Customers can download all the patches for free on Microsoft's security Web site and also can sign up to have them automatically delivered to their computers. The automatic update system went down for several hours Tuesday, but the problem was later resolved.

Microsoft said last month that it knew attackers were already trying to take advantage of defects in its Windows operating system, Microsoft Word software and PowerPoint presentation program.

Christopher Budd, a program manager with the Microsoft Security Resource Center, said that the company had seen limited attacks exploiting the flaws, but were nevertheless recommending that users apply those and other patches immediately.

Such vulnerabilities are rare. In most cases, security experts quietly provide Microsoft evidence of a security flaw, allowing the company to fix the problem in secret and release a patch before attackers can take advantage of it.

But recently, the company has been hit with a number of so-called "zero-day" attacks, in which flaws are targeted before Microsoft is aware of them or can release patches.

Such attacks have prompted some security researchers to release their own interim fixes. Microsoft also has occasionally taken the unusual step of releasing patches outside of its normal monthly fix schedule, so users can be safeguarded more quickly.

Budd said Microsoft isn't seeing any specific pattern to the burst of zero-day attacks. But he said the company is seeing more focus on attackers trying to infiltrate computers through applications - such as Word or PowerPoint - rather than the Windows operating system.

Microsoft software is a constant target of Internet attackers, in part because the company's products are so widely used.

Microsoft has yet to release a patch for one other publicly known flaw - one affecting the Internet Explorer browser that is part of its Windows operating system. Budd said the company was seeing very few attacks as a result of the flaw.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-18-53-27





YouTube Strikes Content Deals
Tony Avelar

YouTube Inc. struck deals with CBS and two major music labels Monday as the popular video-sharing Web site races to befriend content providers and avoid copyright-infringement lawsuits.

The separate agreements with CBS, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment come less than a month after YouTube reached a deal with Warner Music Group Corp. On Friday, Google Inc. was reported to be in talks to acquire the video site for $1.6 billion.

CBS Corp. said it will provide short-form video content for a CBS "brand channel" on YouTube's site starting this month. It will include news, sports, Showtime and prime-time programming. Among the offerings CBS said it plans to offer are short clips from top programs including "Survivor," as well as mini-previews for new fall shows.

YouTube and CBS will share revenue from advertising sponsorships of CBS Videos, CBS said.

"We're now able to offer select entertainment, news and sports programming to a new significant audience, get paid for it, and learn a few things along the way," said Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS.

CBS will also test new YouTube technology that will help the network find copyrighted content on YouTube and remove it. CBS will also be allowed to leave that content on the site, and share revenue from advertising that appears next to the copyrighted video.

Separately, Vivendi's Universal Music Group said Monday it agreed to give YouTube viewers access to thousands of music videos. The company said it and its artists will be compensated not just for the official videos, but also for user-generated content that incorporates Universal's music.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Universal Music Group said it will also use technology to filter out copyrighted content not authorized to appear on the YouTube site.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a joint venture between Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, also said Monday it will make video content available on YouTube - and will also let YouTube users include some catalog songs in their own amateur video uploads.

Sony BMG said it will share advertising revenue with YouTube for all music videos that incorporate audio or video works from the Sony BMG library.

"YouTube is committed to balancing the needs of the fan community with those of copyright holders," said Chad Hurley, chief executive of San Mateo, Calif.-based YouTube.

CBS shares fell 16 cents to $28.31 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and American Depositary Shares of Sony lost 26 cents at $37.52.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-09-10-33-45





Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube
Andrew Ross Sorkin

A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday.

Google, the online search behemoth, agreed yesterday to pay $1.65 billion in stock for the Web site that came out of that party — YouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon that is the darling of an Internet resurgence known as Web 2.0.

YouTube had been coveted by virtually every big media and technology company, as they seek to tap into a generation of consumers who are viewing 100 million short videos on the site every day. Google is expected to try to make money from YouTube by integrating the site with its search technology and search-based advertising program.

But the purchase price has also invited comparisons to the mind-boggling valuations that were once given to dozens of Silicon Valley companies a decade ago. Like YouTube, those companies were once the Next Big Thing, but some soon folded.

Google, with a market value of $132 billion, can clearly afford to take a gamble with YouTube, but the question remains: How to put a price tag on an unproven business?

“If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”

In a conference call to announce the transaction yesterday, there were eerie echoes of the late 1990’s boom time. There was no mention of what measures Google used to arrive at the price it agreed to pay. At one point, Google’s vice president, David Drummond, gave a cryptic explanation: “We modeled this on a more or less synergistic kind of model. You can imagine this would be hard to do on a stand-alone basis.”

The price tag Google paid may simply have been the cost of beating its rivals — Yahoo, Viacom and the News Corporation — to take control of the most sought-after Web site of the moment. It was also perhaps the only price that two YouTube founders, Chad Hurley, 29, and Steven Chen, 28, and their big venture capital backer, Sequoia Capital Partners, were willing to accept, given that they most likely could have continued as an independent company. A third YouTube founder, Jawed Karim, left the company to pursue an advanced degree at Stanford.

The deal came together in a matter of days. After rebuffing a series of other overtures, YouTube’s founders decided to have lunch on Wednesday with Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt. The idea of a deal had been broached a few days earlier. The setting was classic Silicon Valley start-up: a booth at Denny’s near YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. The Google executives threw out an offer of $1.6 billion and autonomy to continue running the business.

That set off a marathon of meetings and conference calls over the next two days, which kicked into even higher gear on Friday, when news of the talks began to circulate, putting pressure on Google to sign a deal before a rival bid emerged. In fact, the News Corporation sent a letter to YouTube seeking to start talks but never received a response.

“The Google-YouTube deal has to feel a little like the 1990’s, but it isn’t,” said Dmitry Shapiro, chief executive of Veoh, a YouTube competitor that is backed by Time Warner and Michael D. Eisner, the former chairman of Disney. Arguing that online video represents an entirely new medium, he said, “If you knew then what you know now and you had the chance to acquire Amazon or eBay — which weren’t making any money either — you would have bought them.”

Of course, YouTube has also been compared to Napster, whose music-sharing service was eventually shuttered after a series of lawsuits. While YouTube has made some deals with content providers, including one yesterday with CBS, its users have uploaded millions of copyrighted clips, leading some to question whether Google is inheriting a legal minefield. YouTube has said it is different from the old Napster service because it removes content when a copyright holder complains.

“There are some issues with YouTube,” Sumner M. Redstone, chairman of Viacom, said last week on “The Charlie Rose Show.” “They use other people’s products,” he said, alluding to pirated video. “The only way they avoid litigation now is they stop doing it if you call them.”

Mark Cuban, who founded Broadcast.com, an early audio and video site that was bought by Yahoo, is even more skeptical of Google’s legal position, writing on his blog: “I still think Google lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I don’t think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than Doan’s has pills to go with the pile-on copyright suits that follow.”

Yet the deal with Google was announced hours after YouTube disclosed deals with entertainment companies that appeared to reduce the risk that it would become mired in copyright disputes.

YouTube is Google’s first big acquisition after making a series of much smaller deals for companies, including Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger. Google now joins the Internet’s establishment — Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com, among others — which have all made giant acquisitions to expand their businesses beyond their traditional trade.

But those companies have had mixed results. Yahoo paid $3.6 billion in 1999 for Geocities, a company that allowed users to create their own Web sites; today, MySpace, a social networking site bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation last year for only $580 million, far eclipses it. EBay, on the other hand, acquired PayPal, a rapidly growing start-up that lets people make payments via e-mail, for $1.5 billion in 2002. It now represents more than a third of eBay’s revenue.

Rather than pursuing big acquisitions, Google has been known for plowing money into research and development, spending $483.98 million last year, an increase of more than 114 percent over the previous year.

The success of the YouTube acquisition will probably lie in embedding video advertising into the clips that millions of people watch everyday from their computers. So far, YouTube’s management has been reluctant to include advertising within clips, for fear of alienating users.

Yesterday, however, Mr. Hurley, one of YouTube’s founders, appeared more open to experimenting, saying that he was even considering testing what’s known as a pre-roll — a 15-second ad before a clip — something he had long derided as potentially ruining the user experience.

While more marketers have been eager to advertise against online video, some big consumer companies have been reluctant to fully embrace advertising against user-generated content because it is difficult to differentiate good content from offensive material. YouTube has created an assortment of tools for users and content creators to police its site.

YouTube said it had struck accords to license content from two of the four major music conglomerates — the Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment — and the CBS television network in exchange for a percentage of YouTube’s advertising revenue.

YouTube is also expected to use new technology to identify copyrighted material that users have uploaded to the site without permission, and to share ad revenue with media companies that own the video or music content. (YouTube made a similar pact with the Warner Music Group last month, and had a previous advertising deal with NBC in June).

The deals reflect how media companies are rethinking the distribution of their entertainment content online.

The deal with Universal, the world’s biggest music corporation, drew particular attention because the company had said it was contemplating a lawsuit against YouTube over copyright issues.

Phil Leigh, the president of Inside Digital Media, said the new arrangements represented “a strong endorsement that the major media companies are going to see YouTube as a legitimate business partner.”

Mr. Leigh said that also suggested a rethinking of the approach the companies took to Napster. “It shows that very important, erstwhile reluctant media companies have got religion,” he said.

The YouTube alliances also came the same day that Google announced separate deals to license music videos from Sony BMG and Warner.

Under the terms of the deal, YouTube, which has about 60 employees, will retain much of its identity and will keep its name and its office in San Bruno, more than 25 miles from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

The transaction was announced after the stock market closed. Earlier, Google shares rose 2 percent, to $429, after DealBook, a Web log published by nytimes.com, reported that a deal would be announced at the end of the market day.

Benjamin Schachter, a UBS analyst, wrote in a note to investors. “The price tag of about $1.6 billion is difficult to justify on a spreadsheet and may be somewhat of a throwback to the days of paying for eyeballs and page views, but this is a strategic bet that Google would be placing for a long-term objective: to be the technology and distribution partner for content owners and publishers.”

Jeff Leeds contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/te...gy/10deal.html





YouTube Community Worried By Google Deal
Jake Coyle

After landing a $1.65 billion deal to sell their video sharing Web site to Google Inc., the co-founders of YouTube did the obvious: They posted a goofy, unrehearsed video, thanking the YouTube community for its support.

But the cameraman poses a question to Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27, that goes unanswered: "What does (the deal) mean for the user community?"

That's what thousands of YouTubers are wondering. Will YouTube 2.0 still have room for the bedroom video makers that created the site's billion-dollar identity? Or will the little guy be crowded out by advertising and corporate involvement?

"We could have never built this without the community. That is what we're fiercely protecting," Julie Supan, the senior director of marketing at YouTube, said Wednesday.

The YouTube community is also very protective - including Richard Stern, better known as LazyDork, a rapping, dancing, opinion-spewing defender of the site's grass-roots nature.

"The Wild West feel of YouTube is already slipping away, and within a few weeks it likely will be gone altogether," says Stern.

YouTube isn't as lawless as the old West, but it has served as the gateway to a new online frontier. Since its start in February 2005, YouTube has become the pre-eminent site for Internet video, drawing a worldwide audience of 72.1 million in August.

Though enormously expansive, YouTube nevertheless has a distinct community of users who communicate by video and posted comments. This motley crew is made up of bloggers, vloggers and other users, many of whom bristled when stars like Paris Hilton and Diddy attempted to promote albums with YouTube video channels.

Now, some are expecting other, larger entities to shake up the YouTube democracy, where amateurs stand on equal footing with the professionals. The pros are growing in number: YouTube has recently reached agreements with CBS Corp., Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, NBC Universal and Warner Music Group Corp.

"What we've seen over the last year is, it doesn't matter if it's professional content or if it's user-generated content," says Supan. "What the community decides by is how entertaining is the content."

Hurley and Chen's thank-you video has been viewed by more than 1.3 million people and has a rating of 4 1/2 stars out of 5. It also has yielded the most discussion of any recent video by far. Many of the comments urge the founders well and congratulate them on their tremendous payday. Many, however, have voiced skepticism.

"Since it was the `people' that made YouTube, why aren't they being paid billions?" wrote a user named winofiend. "Good for you guys. Please don't let our community be destroyed!" wrote Pookieftw. "Preserve the freeness of this site. Please," wrote Poloinspace.

A frequent poster of videos named Renetto replied with sarcasm: "You actually learned how to post a video on your own Web site. This is breaking news."

Others have faith in Google, which is generally known for innovation and Internet savvy. A prominent figure of the YouTube community, boh3m3 said, "Come on, man. Google is good. If it had to be bought by any company, I have to say Google is a ... great choice."

"The community is very honest," says Supan, laughing at her understatement. "That's the beauty of the community - everyone has a voice."

As part of the deal, Hurley, Chen and the other 65 YouTube employees will continue to work independently at their new offices in San Bruno, Calif. Google is expected to give YouTube a considerable marketing boost, increasing the number of ads on the site.
Luke Barats, who with his comedy partner Joe Bereta has parlayed their popular YouTube sketch videos into a pilot deal with NBC, is happy for YouTube's creators. His concern, though, lies with increased advertising.

"If the advertising is kept as unobtrusive as possible, I doubt there will be much backlash from the YouTube community," says Barats. "The fact of the matter is that YouTube still offers a great product - a widely used embeddable player that works on both PC and Mac."

Stern fears an increase in advertising will take up precious space on YouTube's home page, which lists featured videos.

"In order to become widely popular on YouTube, it's almost imperative that you get featured on the front page," says Stern, 28. "YouTube has already begun selling off its top front page real estate to advertisers and Google, one of the top Internet advertising brokers, is not going to make matters any better."

Supan, though, says that pre-roll ads aren't going to be added to the front of videos, and notes that the video advertisement on YouTube's home page is participatory: you have to press play.

"(Advertisers) are very concerned with coming into this community in the right way," she says. "They don't want to come in and muck up the site. They want to do what fits with the environment."

The future of YouTube has been much speculated upon practically since its inception - and doomsayers have been a constant. In particular, Mark Cuban, the outspoken dot-com billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks pro basketball team, has blogged that copyright issues will eventually ruin YouTube just as they did Napster.

Legal experts generally dispute that view since YouTube has consistently relied on the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 as a shield against lawsuits. However, that doesn't mean individual users who post copyrighted material won't be sued. YouTube explicitly states that such users are liable.

"We may see fewer postings of copyrighted works, but only if the content providers start suing YouTube users," says Jennifer Rothman, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. "And I suspect they may do that because they're not going to be able to go after YouTube direct."

Juggling the wants and needs of its user community with YouTube's rapid growth - be it ads propelled by Google or copyright concerns from media companies - will likely remain an ongoing dance for YouTube.

Barats' partner, Bereta, recalls that the comedy duo were certain to include as part of their deal with NBC the continued freedom to post videos on YouTube.

Echoing the sentiment suggested in Hurley and Chen's bare-bones video, Barats explains, "It's kind of that whole don't-forget-where-you-came-from thing."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-18-56-40





The Google Test
William Jolitz

(Editor’s note: Entrepreneur William Jolitz posits a contrarian view on YouTube, praising its expensive use of bandwidth as a key to its sucess. Read on about how YouTube meets the “Google Test.”)

I was over at Buck’s recently catching up and comparing notes with some of my colleagues running the gauntlet pitching to local investment firms. Even though we all have completely different startups, we found we’ve been asked the same questions about business model - in short, what did we deliver?

So I dropped by my old friend and mentor Marty Tenenbaum of Commerce.net, who’d led in helping me to get my first start-up funded years back. We took a closer look at YouTube’s return on a “million a month” in bandwidth costs. It all came clear. They pass “The Google Test”.

So what’s “the Google Test”?

Google consumes a fantastic amount of bandwidth, efficiently translated into revenue over many years. Long before Google was a “Big IPO”, I was a senior exec at a managed service provider. Wayne Rosing, then Google’s VP Engineering, asked me to bid out the lowest cost way for Google to ship a massive database update between coasts. I hadn’t the heart to mention that Jim Gray of Microsoft maintained the best solution was to UPS overnight disk drives. They use bandwidth like nobody else, and it’s a long-standing problem.

Yet even as Google’s bandwidth costs have risen, their revenues, success and prestige have multiplied. Think about it.

Sequoia has a thing for companies that squirt gigabytes to make gigadollars. Even Bill Gates paid homage to this last year, both in his discussion of a “sea change” towards Internet services, and in Microsoft’s partnership with AP over video news.

So in looking at Google and now YouTube, maybe the question isn’t one of obsessing over bandwidth costs - great engineers like Wayne get there eventually. Instead we should ask how can we drive revenue sources by driving tons of content like Google and YouTube do? How much you displace in the ad space (Google) or TV (YouTube) is more important than what you displace it with.

Driving bandwidth costs up means stealing the percentage share of the total audience from others. The higher the costs, the fewer can compete. It’s a bold strategy not for the timid businessman or investor. Like the oil barons of another age (where do you think we got Stanford University), getting the corner on the market is mostly keeping everyone else out of it.

Customer created or repurposed content is the linchpin of a bandwidth driven business model. Older mainline publishers just can’t compete with the plethera of “free” media appearing on Internet portals and are struggling to maintain their mindshare - simultaneously feeding these self-same portals with expensively generated “journalistic” stories that make the high percentage of amateurish video and slashdot-like rants bearable.

As the rush to grab more consumer content surges, tools and services to make this material better, faster, cheaper become valuable. Rapid content generation services like blogs for text stories and services for video content accelerate and lower new content creation costs and time, supplying the pipe at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.

Do bandwidth-driven business models have the winning edge, displacing Moore’s law models as an investment strategy? We’re too early in the game to know, but it’s a provocative question. News and publishing are moving to center stage as print moves to the Internet, causing a major business model disruption. As print value collapses with the flood of cheap electronic media, it is washed out — driven off what print/broadcast publishers would consider an excessive bandwidth investment. Content value collapses, creating an entirely new group of media moguls. Those too frugal to invest in a bandwidth-driven business model, waiting for someone else to “double the speed”, may find too little, too late.

Google and their backers showed us how to seize a market boldly. YouTube is attempting the same strategy with video. As the new publishing magnates rewrite the industry with embedded targetted advertising that floats up in value as it outcompetes the moribund print side, old world industries take note: Take a hard look at your online business and see if you pass “The Google Test”.
http://www.venturebeat.com/contribut...e-google-test/





Google Offering Free Software Package
AP

Google Inc. is making its word processing and spreadsheet programs available for free to all comers on its Web site, marking the Internet search leader's latest effort to provide an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant software applications.

The software package, expected to be available Wednesday, combines a spreadsheet application that Google introduced in June with a word processing program called Writely that the Mountain View-based company bought for an undisclosed amount in March.

As part of the expansion, the Writely name will disappear. The new package will be called Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google also had been limiting usage of both the word processing and spreadsheet programs, but the company now expects to be able to accommodate anyone who signs up, said product manager Jonathan Rochelle.

Wednesday's move continues Google's attempt to assemble a suite of software applications that are tethered to an Internet connection instead of a single computer's hard drive. That makes it easier for people to work on the same document from different locations, a convenience that is also meant to encourage more sharing among users with common interests or goals.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-01-19-57





Singapore Plans Free Wireless Internet
AP

Singapore's government said it plans to cover most of the island with public wireless Internet access by next year and offer nearly 10,000 subsidized computers to low-income students to offer digital opportunities to all its citizens.

The government will increase the number of public wireless "hot spots" from 900 to 5,000 by next year as part of the plan, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told an audience late Tuesday evening while launching the Wireless@SG initiative marking 25 years of a drive to boost information technology in Singapore.

"We must create digital opportunities for all Singaporeans, and never allow a digital divide in our society," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told the audience.

Lee said about 10,000 needy households with school-going children will qualify for subsidized computers, and efforts will be made to help the elderly and disabled use the Internet. The Straits Times newspaper reported that families that earn less than 2,000 Singapore dollars ($125) a month can purchase a computer for S$285 ($179)

The plan will offer free 512 kilobits per second wireless access for at least two years through telecom operators SingTel, iCell and QMax at public wireless hot spots across the city, said a press release from the government's Infocomm Development Authority, which is running Wireless@SG.

SingTel will offer the service free for three years; the others for two years.

"The three operators will bump up the number of Wireless@SG 'hotzones' in high-traffic, public areas ... to make wireless broadband a ubiquitous access mode by September 2007," the statement said.

The hot spots will be concentrated at town centers, business districts and shopping belts.

The development authority will pay up to 30 million Singapore dollars ($18.9 million) of the expected S$100 million ($63 million) cost for the wireless networks.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-05-49-48





Nokia Expects to Sell WiMAX Cell Phones in 2008

Nokia expects to start selling cell phones using the new WiMAX Internet technology in 2008, the world's top handset maker said on Wednesday while unveiling network technology for WiMAX.

For now, a computer can connect to a WiMAX fast wireless Internet connection only when it is stationary, but a new mobile version of WiMAX will be available this year, which is expected to be a breakthrough for the technology.

Intel, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola all support the open-standard WiMAX as an alternative wireless broadband Internet connection alongside third generation mobile telephony networks, on which Internet access can get squeezed if networks fill up with voice callers.

"WiMAX-capable Nokia mobile devices are expected to be available in 2008," Nokia said in a statement.

Nokia said its WiMAX base stations will be commercially available for broadband operators in the 2.5 gigahertz band at the end of 2007 and for 3.5 gigahertz in the first quarter of 2008.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...chnologyNews-2





Skype Lands Deal for Wi-Fi Access in Europe
David Meyer

Skype's Internet calling service will soon be accessible at The Cloud's Wi-Fi hot spots across Europe, the two companies announced on Tuesday.

Although normal online access to Skype's voice over Internet Protocol services is free to those connecting via PC, access to The Cloud's Wi-Fi network will require the use of a Skype-enabled phone from SMC Networks and payment of a 6.99-pound monthly service fee (about $13).

"We are delighted to partner with SMC Networks and extend the service we provide today with Skype to Wi-Fi-enabled handsets," Niall Murphy, The Cloud's chief technology officer, said on Tuesday.

"This agreement delivers on our commitment to provide the widest range of Wi-Fi services to customers across Europe," Murphy continued, adding that the deal "marks the start of a real low-cost alternative to traditional telecoms services."

The service will launch in the U.K. in October and spread to other European countries by the end of the year. The Cloud operates more than 8,500 hot spots around Europe.

At the moment, the only handset capable of being used in the service is the SMCWSKP100 model, which costs 150 pounds (about $277), but a spokesperson for The Cloud confirmed to ZDNet UK that it was "actively working with handset and other types of device providers to ensure these products work well in the public Wi-Fi environment."

Wi-Fi hot spots are available in a range of retail outlets, hotels and airports. The Cloud has also started to deploy outdoor hot spots in nine cities across the U.K.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
http://news.com.com/Skype+lands+deal...3-6124655.html





DOJ Approves AT&T-BellSouth Deal

The Justice Department approved AT&T's buyout of BellSouth Corp. on Wednesday, clearing a major hurdle for reuniting two modernized parts of the old Ma Bell phone monopoly that the government broke up in 1984.

The decision leaves the Federal Communications Commission as the final hurdle for a $78.5 billion deal to create the nation's biggest provider of phone, wireless and broadband Internet services.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on the matter Thursday, though there's been speculation the agency may hold off because of political pressures from Congress about the deal's possible impact on market competition.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8KMFO1G0.htm





Classic Rock Driving Ringtone Growth
Antony Bruno

While hip-hop acts may rule today's ringtone charts, yesterday's stars are introducing the format to a broader audience and drive tomorrow's growth.

Only about 10 percent of wireless subscribers buy ringtones today, primarily young adults purchasing hip-hop and R and B-themed content. Record labels and wireless operators are keen to expand their market, particularly as the dominant format shifts from polyphonic ringtones to master recording clips. Exploiting the vast library of catalog music, they say, is emerging as a key strategy in that effort.

Acts like Devo, the B-52's, the Ramones, the Allman Brothers Band and Jimmy Buffett are generating healthy ringtone sales, and even Pink Floyd has found its way onto the mobile deck. Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" is one of the best-selling catalog ringtones of all time, with more than 1.2 million units sold, and became the first licensed track to appear in a mobile videogame.

Indeed, catalog-based ringtones are now the format's fastest-growing segment. Universal Music Group (UMG), for instance, says catalog ringtones sales are up 80% from last year and now represent 10 percent of all its ringtone sales.

"There is a growing audience that is interested in content that speaks to them, and it's not hip-hop," says David Dorn, senior VP of new-media strategy for Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment division. Carriers "have only featured hip-hop because that's all that sold. Well, that's because it's all they've featured. The only area of incremental growth for them is catalog. If all they do is focus on hip-hop, they just end up speaking to the same audience over and over."

Catalog music has been available in mobile form since ringtones first came onto the scene. But today labels and carriers are marketing catalog-based mobile content more aggressively.

Take Universal's September 26 deal with Verizon Wireless to bring the entire Jimi Hendrix catalog to mobile for the first time. Verizon won a short-term exclusive by agreeing to promote the Hendrix content heavily in print and online campaigns, as well as prominently feature the guitarist on its ringtone sales site.

It's the first time a wireless operator has applied a significant marketing push to a long-deceased catalog artist.

"Typically, operators have been focused on promoting Shakira, or Sean Paul, or Gwen Stefani or the Pussycat Dolls," says Rio Caraeff, GM of Universal Music Mobile. "Verizon felt (Hendrix) would help grow the marketplace and expose their service to more and different people than who would have seen it otherwise."

The Hendrix deal follows a yearlong music industry initiative, led by Rhino, to include a "Songs You Know" category featuring immediately recognizable classics from all major labels on carriers' ringtone sites. Sprint, Verizon, Cingular and Boost Mobile are among the carriers that now feature such a category.

Labels have responded by putting their own marketing dollars on the line. Rhino in the coming weeks will begin airing TV commercials supported by viral Internet ads promoting mobile content from the Doors -- currently its best-selling mobile catalog act -- as well as various '80s artists and old-school hip-hop tracks.

Dorn says new catalog content is making its way into mobile formats almost weekly. However, there are several challenges. First, labels are being more careful about which songs are selected to become ringtones or ringback tones from often massive catalogs.

"We have to identify what we feel are the best songs for mobile content," Dorn says. "This is not a Long Tail approach. That's how you approach iTunes -- you make really huge swaths of your catalog available and monazite those things that have been collecting dust. The business for ringtones is all about hits and instantly recognizable songs."

Second, and more significant, many major acts -- including Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, the Beatles, Radiohead, Prince, the Eagles, Van Halen, Black Sabbath and Frank Sinatra -- remain noticeably absent in the ringtone world.

In many cases the label doesn't own the digital rights to the artist's work. In other cases, it owns digital rights to sell full tracks, but there's a "no edit" clause that prohibits the label from condensing the song into a clip needed for a ringtone.

Labels say they are in active negotiations to bring many of these holdouts around, and are close to finalizing several deals. However, some artists and their management are demanding significant upfront advances in return, while others simply don't want their work converted into a ringtone, or any digital form.

"There are always sensitivities depending on the artist," Caraeff says. "There are always challenges. You're navigating through lots of approvals. But ultimately we work through it."

He points to pending deals for Elvis Costello and Guns N' Roses in the near future.

"It's stuff like the Jimi Hendrix deal that will hopefully open the eyes of the holdouts," Dorn says. "Sometimes they just wait to see what other artists do and then they go, 'Why aren't we doing this?'"
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...1_%5bFeed%5d-8





Retailers Pressure Studios on Web Deals
Gary Gentile

National retailers that control the lucrative DVD market are pressuring Hollywood studios to give them the same favorable deals being offered to Web-based download services such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes.

The latest expression of concern from retailers was a letter sent to studios by the president of Target Corp.

The letter warned that Target might have to reconsider the amount of shelf space allocated for movies if studios undercut the wholesale price of DVDs by giving online services a better deal on digital offerings, said a studio executive who saw the letter but asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to publicly discuss its contents.

Similar concerns have been expressed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers.

"Clearly there is some concern that there is some erosion by downloading," Judith McCourt, market research director at Home Media Retailing, said Monday.

Target declined to provide a copy of the letter sent last month.

In a prepared statement Monday, Target called for "equity between the alternative means of delivering movies to consumers."

"Target does not object to competition, but we do expect a level playing field upon which to compete with the online services," the company said.

At issue is the low price some studios charge for films downloaded through such fledgling services as MovieLink, CinemaNow and Amazon.com's recently launched Unbox video store.

Retailers have been talking to studios for a year about such concerns. The issue came to a head with the decision last month by The Walt Disney Co. to sell digital downloads through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store at a price that allows Apple to retail new releases for as low as $12.99.

The two-disc rerelease of Disney's "The Little Mermaid" now retails for $14.87 at Wal-Mart and $14.99 at Target. The movie can be bought for $12.99 on iTunes.

The iTunes version, however, does not include the special features contained on the second disc - one reason download services should be charged less for digital versions of films, studios have argued.

Disney is the only studio selling films on iTunes, and that could be the case for a while as other studios balk at Apple's inflexible pricing model and try to placate worried retailers.

The dispute comes amid strong DVD sales, most notably multi-disc packages of full TV seasons that command premium prices.

Overall DVD sales should grow in 2006, propelled by continuing demand for TV titles such as "Lost" and recent hit movies such as "X-Men: The Last Stand," according to Home Media Retailing magazine.

But sales could decline in 2007, according to industry analyst Richard Greenfield of Pali Research.

Online movie download services now account for less than 10 percent of movie sales, hardly a threat to retailers.

But retailers fear a shift in the future, when downloaded movies can be viewed on TVs as well as computer screens.

"I can see why Wal-Mart and Target are writing early on, but in terms of the immediacy of the threat, it's not there," McCourt said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-09-18-06-10





Report: Libya to Buy Laptops For Kids
AP

The government of Libya has reached an agreement with an American nonprofit group to provide inexpensive laptop computers for all of the nation's 1.2 million schoolchildren, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

With the project scheduled to be completed by June 2008, Libya could become the first nation in which all school-age children are connected to the Internet through educational computers, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, told the newspaper.

The $250 million deal, reached Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.

The One Laptop per Child project, which has the support of the United Nations Development Program, aims to provide laptops to school-aged children worldwide - for about $100 each. It has reached tentative purchase agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand.

Negroponte, a computer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he had met with Moammar Gadhafi and the project appealed to the Libyan leader's political agenda of creating a more open Libya and becoming an African leader.

The two men discussed the possibility that Libya would also pay for laptops for poorer African nations like Chad, Niger and Rwanda, said Negroponte, who is the brother of U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Gadhafi surprised the world in late 2003 when he swore off terrorism and announced plans to dismantle his country's weapons of mass destruction programs. Libya was eager to end the international isolation and economic hardships from United Nations and U.S. sanctions. The U.S. has since opened an embassy in Tripoli.

A telephone call to that capital seeking comment from Libyan government spokesman Hassan al-Shawish went unanswered Wednesday.

Test models of the computers will be distributed to the participating countries in November, and mass production is expected to begin by July 2007, Negroponte said. They are to be produced by Taiwanese computer maker Quanta Computer Inc.

The machines are to be equipped with hand cranks or foot pedals, so that children can use them when electricity is too costly or not available. Expected to initially cost $150 and then be reduced in price, they will have wireless network access and run on an open-source operating system, such as Linux.

The project was inspired by Negroponte's experience giving Internet-connected laptops to children in Cambodia. He said the first English word spoken by those children was "Google."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-08-14-12





How Do You Secure 100 Million Laptops?
Ryan Naraine

If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history.

Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture—millions of machines with hardware and software of identical design—OLPC foundation officials are seeking help from the world's best hackers to review the full specifications of the $100 laptop's security model.

"This is an enormous challenge for us," said Ivan Krstić, director of the security and information platform efforts for the OLPC project in Cambridge, Mass. "Security for these machines is hands down the hardest thing I've ever worked on."

One Laptop Per Child's CTO explains how new display developments are bringing the $100 laptop closer to reality. Click here to read more.

Krstić has spent a large portion of 2006 slipping into security conferences around the world, schmoozing with hackers, trying to recruit computer security experts to look at the design and threat model and provide useful feedback.

"We want hackers to get in touch, look at the documentation, play with the machine, and try to break into it. We run the risk of getting parts of this wrong and that's not something we can afford," Krstić said in an interview with eWEEK.

A former director of research at the Medical Informatics Laboratory at Zagreb Children's Hospital, in Croatia, Krstić said he is well aware of the dangers of the monoculture. "If this succeeds, we'll have created the largest monoculture in the computer industry. To answer whether that's scary or not is a nontrivial question. The security implications are deeply frightening," he said.

The overall design goals have already been released to OLPC's security panel for review, and Krstić plans to publicly release the specs to generate feedback from the open-source community.

Krstić's team has already pinned down the security policy and threat model for the BIOS, the built-in software that runs when the machine is turned on. The machine, he said, will feature a completely secure BIOS solution that allows fully automatic upgrades without user intervention and fully protects against phishing and automated worm attacks.

"Many of these kids will have never seen a computer before; they won't have a clue about computer security. That means that a lot of mechanisms in computers today just won't work for them," Krstić said, stressing that everything on the laptop will be open by design and will not rely on passwords for authentication.

Four countries commit to buy 4 million OLPC laptops. Click here to read more.

"One of the main goals is to provide unobtrusive security," he added. "We're doing security in a way that doesn't depend on the user reading or responding to a prompt on the screen."

The key design goal, Krstić explained, is to avoid irreversible damage to the machines. The laptops will force applications to run in a "walled garden" that isolates files from certain sensitive locations like the kernel. Even if the computer is damaged, the security model calls for a trivial reinstall of the operating system to put the machine back into full functionality.

Despite the security fears, Krstić is optimistic OLPC has a few aces up its sleeve. "We don't have backward compatibility on our list of concerns. That's a huge advantage," he said. Without having to worry about existing applications, Krstić said OLPC can actually define the security policy for every piece of software built for the machine.

"We can tell people, 'If you're developing software, this is the policy,'" he said. "We don't have to worry about thousands of apps that will retroactively break. It gives us an enormous level of control."

Still, there are crucial security decisions that are still up in the air. For example, the group is still brainstorming about whether to include automatic updates by default. Krstić is leaning toward implementing automatic updates, but, ideally, if the security model holds up, he expects OLPC to have a level of isolation between the operating system, applications and user data that will reduce the need to issue lots and lots of updates.

"If we discover vulnerabilities, the security model must hold up enough that even a machine that is unpatched won't be easily exploitable. This gives us a bit of diversity to avoid the monoculture trap," he said.

Next Page: Automatic updates a "tricky" issue.

The issue of automatic updates, he said, remains "tricky" because of the difficulty in making strong assumptions about connectivity. The $100 laptops will feature built-in wireless mesh networking—allowing each laptop to connect to other laptops and work as a wireless mesh router when it is powered down—but the absence of strong connectivity to pull down updates could be awkward.

The $100 laptops should teach vendors a lesson. Click here to read Jim Rapoza's column.

"The focus of my work is to make sure that dependence on updates is as minimal as possible," Krstić added.

Dave Aitel, an open-source advocate and vulnerability researcher at Immunity, in Miami, said fears of an OLPC monoculture presenting a major security risk may be a bit overblown. "Who wants to [hack] these children anyway? These laptops are not Windows 95, and, in many ways, they're more advanced than [Microsoft's] Vista," Aitel said in an interview.

"It's a monoculture of hard targets," Aitel said, noting that the laptops will use a modern implementation of Linux hardened with ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to handle code-scrambling diversity and Exec Shield, a security patch that flags data memory as nonexecutable and program memory as nonwritable.

Walter Bender, president of software and content at OLPC, said the foundation's long-term goal expressly encourages computing diversity and argued that the "monoculture" tab might be a bit strong.

"We're designing this machine as an open platform with the expectation that it's going to evolve," Bender said in an interview. "Even though we're launching a monoculture, experience has shown that these open platforms evolve and change. There's no reason to think this won't happen with these machines.

"We don't expect that a monoculture in the strict sense, where we're controlling everything, will last very long," he added.

Bender insists that the overall goal of OLPC is to encourage diversity. "In the short term, we're trying to launch something," he said. "We're a nonprofit, educational organization; we're not a laptop manufacturer. We're developing an ecosystem that people can expand and bring to kids. It's anything but a monoculture."

The OLPC foundation, which traces its roots to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is sponsored by a roster of big-name companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, eBay, Google, News Corp., Nortel Networks and Red Hat.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2028779,00.asp





McAfee Fires President; CEO Retires After Options Probe

Antivirus and security software provider McAfee Inc. on Wednesday said it fired President Kevin Weiss, and announced that CEO and Chairman George Samenuk will retire after a stock options investigation found accounting problems that will require financial restatements.

The company said board member Dale Fuller will serve as interim CEO and president in the wake of the management shakeup. Fuller joined McAfee's board in January and has previously served as president and CEO of Borland Software Corp.

Its shares rose 97 cents, or almost 4 percent, to $26.76 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange after the news.

McAfee said it determined it will need to restate certain financial results to record additional non-cash charges for stock-based compensation expense over a 10-year period. The charges are likely to range between $100 million and $150 million, the company said.

"I regret that some of the stock option problems identified by the special committee occurred on my watch," Samenuk said in a statement.

The company also named Charles J. Robel as non-executive chairman. Robel has been a board member since June.

McAfee said it has created a search subcommittee to find a permanent CEO and will look at both internal and external candidates.

Santa Clara-based McAfee disclosed in June that securities regulators had opened a formal investigation into the possible manipulation of the company's stock options

It is one of many companies to run into problems by backdating options to days when the company's stock price was lower, thus boosting executive payouts. At least 130 companies have disclosed SEC, Department of Justice or internal investigations into options practices, according to a review by The Associated Press.

Other top executives also have been ousted or left their positions as a result of the probes. Not long after McAfee announced its shakeup, San Francisco-based online publisher CNET Networks Inc. said Wednesday that co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Shelby Bonnie has resigned as chairman and CEO.

Mountain View, Calif.-based software maker Mercury Interactive Corp., one of the first companies to disclose problems with backdated options, last year dumped CEO Amnon Landan, as well as its chief financial officer and general counsel.

Perhaps the most famous executive caught up in the options scandal is Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, the fugitive former CEO of software company Comverse Technology Inc. He's in the southern African nation of Namibia, awaiting extradition to the United States to face charges of manipulating options.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...f055625D36.DTL





Thousands of Brits Fall Victim to Data Theft
Graeme Wearden

British law enforcement agents are trying to contact thousands of U.K. computer users who have fallen victim to a massive personal data heist.

The Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday that a computer seized in the U.S. had been found to contain personal information from around 2,300 PCs based in Britain. This included e-mail addresses, passwords, credit card numbers and details of online transactions.

According to the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit, the data was stolen via a piece of malicious software that was secretly installed on the victims' machines.

"The information has been harvested from the computers by a type of malicious code known as a 'backdoor,'" a detective from the Computer Crime Unit said in a statement. "It is too early to establish at this early stage how the computers have been infected. However, there are thousands of computer users worldwide who have had their computers compromised and data stolen."

The Metropolitan Police would not say whether the information has been used to defraud victims. The 2,300 people whose data was found are being contacted by the police via e-mail. However, it appears that the warnings are often being ignored.

"We're appealing for anyone who's had an e-mail from the Met officers who work in the Computer Crime Unit to get in touch. There's a security measure that people have to go through when they ring, but people are ignoring the e-mails because they think they're a hoax," a Metropolitan Police representative said.

The Metropolitan Police also declined to reveal the circumstances behind the seizure of the U.S. computer, as the investigation is ongoing. They also declined to say which Internet service providers and banks are being alerted.

Graeme Wearden and Tom Espiner reported for ZDNet UK from London.
http://news.com.com/Thousands+of+Bri...3-6124342.html





As Farmers Reap More Almonds, Thieves Do, Too
Jesse McKinley

For Scott Phippen, a third-generation almond man, the hole in his fence was the first sign of trouble. And sure enough, a quick once-over confirmed the worst: two of Mr. Phippen’s trucks were missing.

But the thieves were not after vehicles. They were after almonds. And at Mr. Phippen’s farm here in the Central Valley, they had hit the mother lode: 88,000 pounds of the nuts, with a street value of some $260,000.

“You don’t just put that in your garage,” Mr. Phippen, 52, said with a smile. “You don’t move that at the local flea market.”

Mr. Phippen had become just another victim of what farmers and the authorities say is a rash of almond heists, with the latest reported last Sunday, when a truck containing more than 40,000 pounds was stolen from a shipping yard in Fresno.

No arrests have been made, but farmers say they think they are dealing with a sophisticated network of almond thieves — they call them “nut-nappers” — who combine old-fashioned cover-of-darkness robbery with computer skills, precision-planned escapes and advance buyers for their stolen goods.

Farm officials estimate the losses from all the robberies at $1.5 million, far and away the costliest current case of crop larceny in a state where avocado bandits, cattle rustlers and even hay-jackers are regularly on the loose.

“Dollar-wise, it’s a very significant theft,” said Cliff Emery, an agricultural crime specialist for the Action Project, a rural anticrime task force started by the Tulare County District Attorney’s Office in 1999. “For growers, it could be a very large portion of the overall profit margin for the year.”

Driving the crime wave is the surging popularity of almonds, which are high in vitamin E and antioxidants and have been linked by some medical studies to lower cholesterol levels and a reduced risk of heart disease.

Over the last decade, that reputation has helped push almonds into the Top 5 of California crops, with $2.2 billion worth grown in the 2004-5 season. This fall, farmers are expecting a harvest of more than one billion pounds, to be sold wholesale for about $3 a pound and shipped around the world.

“The Mideast likes big almonds, the Japanese like midsize,” Mr. Phippen said. “And the Europeans don’t care. They’ll eat anything.”

Almonds have become such a cash cow, in fact, that some California farmers have switched to them from other crops like apricots, cotton, olives, peaches and prunes, according to the California Farm Bureau. In California, which produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds, the acreage devoted to them has increased by 13 percent over the last five years, with some 580,000 acres planted this year.

Once planted, an almond tree can produce sellable fruit within three years, said Marsha Venable, the communications coordinator for the Almond Board of California, a marketing organization under the supervision of the federal Department of Agriculture.

Mr. Emery said that no one knew exactly what was happening with the almonds — which are packed in cratelike, metric-ton containers — but that they were certainly being resold in bulk, not just nibbled on. “Whether they are sold and the buyer knows or the buyer has no clue, we don’t know,” he said. “The chances are — and again, this is speculation — is that they’ve gone overseas, at which point it’s much easier to cloud the origin of the almonds.”

About 70 percent of the California crop is bound for foreign soil, according to the almond board. Between soil and sale is an elaborate process, involving growing, harvesting (using machines that shake the trees), gathering, dehulling, sorting, processing, packing and, finally, shipping.

The recent crimes, Mr. Emery said, have occurred after the nuts were processed, packed and sold, but not yet delivered.

All of which has made the spate of robberies even more vexing. In August, a group of law enforcement officials met with representatives from the almond industry and several insurance groups to discuss the problem and ways of safeguarding the crops, including not leaving packaged crops in trucks, installing motion detectors or hiring security guards.

But some in the business say that with farmers’ small profit margins, those are extravagances they cannot afford.

Agricultural crime is a problem statewide, according to the Action Project, which estimates losses at more than $100 million a year. Nearly $11 million in total losses was reported in eight counties in the Central Valley alone in 2005, a nearly 30 percent increase from 2004. Most of the thefts go unreported, however, and can involve anything left unattended on the farm: diesel out of fuel tanks, dairy calves from cattle pens and peaches off the tree.

The crime is tough to fight because of the immense acreage involved in California agriculture — the Central Valley, the state’s top farming region, is 400 miles long — and the relatively limited resources of many rural counties.

“You might have 14 cops in 10 city blocks, but you only have five deputies for a whole county,” Mr. Emery said. “If you’ve got a fuel tank in the middle of your property, five miles from anything, the bad guys can come and go pretty easily.”

Mr. Phippen said that he had his own theories about who broke into his facility here on July 1, and that it was not a typical smash-and-grab.

“They didn’t go snooping around trying to open up buildings,” he said. “They had to have at least two drivers on hand, plus someone to get them here. They cut the padlock and closed the gate behind them. They used our truck tractors to get them down the road and then switched to a bigger truck. This wasn’t a bunch of guys looking to steal tools and gas. They were pros.”

Mr. Phippen said his suspicions focused on someone who might have access to a computer tracking system anywhere on the shipping and delivery route. A simple search of a company’s container records, he said, could show a potential thief where containers are, and most important, what is inside.

Mr. Emery agrees that the thieves know a lot about shipping times and buyers. “Is it what you call an inside job kind of thing, where people in the industry are involved? That’s very possible,” Mr. Emery said.

Mr. Phippen found the two trucks stolen off his yard at a truck stop about two miles away; the thieves had apparently shifted the two containers of almonds to the type of bigger trucks that the law requires for freight hauled on major highways. Though he was insured for his almonds, he did have a $10,000 deductible.

As for getting his products back, however, he said that seemed unlikely.

“I would fall over in shock if we were to get those nuts back,” he said. “I would be throttled.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/us...rtner=homepage





Shape-Shifters With Microchips Walk the Runway
Cathy Horyn

The other day before the Hussein Chalayan show, I skipped over to the Monoprix, which is France’s answer to Kmart, to buy a box of hair color (now only you and my hairdresser know for sure) when I saw my friend Sarah, a British journalist, buying some underwear. Two babes in the Monoprix getting hooked up. Two hours later, we were watching Mr. Chalayan make dresses change shape with microchip technology.

I’m beginning to hate the word real. What’s real? We want things to exist in a safe world, in a safe house. We want leaders to lead; we want our children to call; we want to believe, at least some of us, that fashion houses can have clear, comprehensible identities. But I think that’s not what is happening.

Clothes are changing shape.

The French spring collections have the strength and holy terror of a riptide; they are pulling us away from a familiar shore. There have been powerful shows dealing with the future from Mr. Chalayan and Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, and a dense, chaotic collection from Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy that suggested the provisional mentality of young people.

At the same time, merchants from Dallas to Tokyo want clothes that sell, and they, along with investors, are putting pressure on public fashion companies to perform like any other consumer brand, except with more sex appeal. For a versatile designer like Karl Lagerfeld, that’s no problem. His collection Friday for Chanel was sublimely effortless. And even if he didn’t work for a private company, he is too steeped in the convention of making wearable fashion to give his customers anything too extreme.

But other designers seem adrift, their methods of creative abstraction suddenly incompatible with the concrete demands of business. This change has happened so swiftly that you can scarcely process it, much less comment on it. Yet for that very reason the Paris shows have been exhilarating, by turns banal and visually compelling.

Mr. Chalayan’s collection was standout. As in the past, his idea was to make connections between past and present styles. There were lovely, soft dresses in geometric patterns with colors like moss and periwinkle, veiled in black. Some tops and dresses were attached to hats, which were a romantic blend of safari and Parisian couture.

The runway, though, was a crystal-pebbled moonscape, and for the finale, Mr. Chalayan created a series of dresses that changed shape when each model came to a halt. Mr. Chalayan said later that microchips were inserted in the corset or hat of each outfit and programmed to magically erase hems or lapels. The ribbon slats of one dress retracted like a Venetian blind and then dropped, transformed into mirrors. It took about seven seconds for a silk chemise to disappear into the rim of a picture hat, leaving the model naked. When the transformation was complete, a puff of steam rose from the crown of her hat.

“I’ve always been interested in the future,” Mr. Chalayan said. “But the challenge was to do something less predictable than Robocop that could be realized in fashion.” He made believers of his audience.

Since digital technology has given everyone a bird’s eye view of the cabine, or the model’s dressing area, Mr. Lagerfeld decided to make a game of it. He had a cabine built in the center of the Grand Palais with automated doors opening onto the runway. The effect was as charming as the clothes.

This season Mr. Lagerfeld went short and skimmy, with lightweight jackets over pale silk tops and spangled briefs (offered, I suppose, to suggest the shorter lengths). The collection was subtle, coherent and graphic, summed up by a trim black wool suit with stark white lapels and cuffs, and a wide multistrand chain belt. The bathing suits were also terrific — I mean, whoever notices the bathing suits? These were in creamy knits. Evening looks were mainly short, with panels or boleros of black sequins against matte-black georgette.

Maybe it was the Basque berets and smock-style dresses in Stefano Pilati’s show for Yves Saint Laurent, or the smell of earth from the violet-carpeted runway, but I kept of thinking of the movie version of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Beautiful Spanish people scrambling into the mountains.

Mr. Pilati seemed to be up to something else, though. The show was all mixed signals: terrific black gingham dresses, with jackets in red or purple twill, and then blossoming Turkish-style trousers and high-steppin’ fishnets. Mr. Pilati brings a lot of passion to Saint Laurent, as he should, and some of the sheer dresses were awfully pretty. But couldn’t things be simple, too? The models seemed tortured to have to keep their balance on a flower bed.

The strength of Riccardo Tisci is his exuberance and his collagelike approach to fashion; he sees wonderful, strange combinations, like spiraling rope and tiers of couture lace, and he goes for them. The weakness of Mr. Tisci is that he doesn’t know how to frame his creativity in a way that might do justice to it. He is all over the place. There were terrific sleeveless jackets with backs cut like a vest; paired with soft shorts and filmy tops, the look was briskly modern.

But then he does full-skirted black silk dresses with taut lace bodices and switches of glossy fringe. Or a total look, right down to the platform shoes in an African tribal print. It’s all interesting, but without some perspective the collection bleeds into a kind of diffuseness.

Driving from the Chalayan show to the Givenchy, I telephoned my son back in New York. I told him I had just seen a dress change shape on a runway.

“Really,” he said. “That’s incredible.”

He thought for a minute, then said: “I don’t know. Magic is really phony, and fashion is. ... ”

“Pretty borderline,” I said.

“Yeah. When are you coming home?”

“Soon,” said I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/fa...07FASHION.html





An Alternate Universe Where Beautiful People Have Repulsive Babies
Caryn James

WHEN word arrived that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were expecting a child — news that set off an inescapable frenzy of anticipation for what would certainly be the most beautiful child ever — didn’t you have a sneaking thought that some recessive ugly genes could produce a baby who was “a little goofy looking,” as the artist known as 14 put it on her Web site? Sacrilege in the hype-driven world of movie-star news, that idea was the inspiration for great satire on 14’s Gallery of the Absurd, the best of many sites that skewer celebrity culture. She created an image of Brangelina and Child as the Holy Family, turning them into icons in the original Byzantine sense, complete with halos but with a child who looks a bit too much like Gollum from “Lord of the Rings.”

Smart celebrity satires are flourishing online — rarely anywhere else — and they do more than deflate the self-importance of stars. They also mock the gushing media that glorify them, and demonstrate that while taking tired potshots at stars is common (see any Britney-bashing episode of “Saturday Night Live” or “Mad TV”) satirizing TomKat or Brangelina so effectively that you expose the inane soul of celebrity culture itself is an art. In the form of artists’ blogs, fake news stories and tongue-in-cheek analyses of fame, together these sites function like an underground movement, subverting the cult of celebrity even as they feed off it.

In the last year or so that movement has gained in sophistication and has grown rapidly online, thriving there for some of the usual reasons: the Web is fast, cheap and plays to short attention spans, so it can afford inconsistent wit. More specifically, Web satire can be rude, with the freedom to address the most ludicrous rumors, the kind that make magazine editors and television producers (sometimes even the tabloid kind) skittish.

The fake articles on Postcards From the Pug Bus, which does for celebrity what “The Daily Show” does for politics, sound so authentic that Tom Cruise’s lawyer once demanded a retraction; his letter (reproduced on the site) insisted it was “false and defamatory” to say that Mr. Cruise “had a previous life, that he is old beyond reckoning, that he took his present form because ‘Bingodulla elected him to spread the gospel of Scientology.’ ”

Beneath such lunacy, these sites provide trenchant criticism of celebrity culture by turning the mainstream approach inside out. More than ever, stars have become the touchstones of everyday life, which accounts for the media obsession with their marriages and families. The reverent approach of People, Us Weekly and television infotainment like “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight” depends on the illusion that the famous are Just Like Us (the title of a regular Us Weekly section, showing stars walking their dogs or eating ice cream cones).

Satirists recognize those starry images to be grotesque exaggerations of the ordinary. By making fun of the celebrities’ delusions, missteps and puffed-up attitudes (flying a Los Angeles obstetrician to Namibia?), they show how distant the famous are from everyday life.

The caricatures that 14 posts weekly on Gallery of the Absurd (galleryoftheabsurd.com) display the qualities that make celebrity satire work. Her inventive Tom Cruise valentine, which playfully attacks the star and his spin, exaggerates his love-besotted public displays, depicting him as a grinning little guy wearing silly platform shoes, surrounded by cute valentine hearts. And it exposes the distance between that calculated image and what so much of the public thinks by adding Devil’s horns and picking up on the widespread rumor of a TomKat legal agreement.

“BE MINE. ALL MINE!!!” the valentine reads, “But first you must sign this contract” (with a pen that has an alien’s head) and “become a Scientologist.” As the sardonic text accompanying the caricature reads, “Nothing says love like signing a $5 million contract agreement to pose as a loving companion to a tiny man with a very large ego.”

An artist in her late 30’s who uses her real name, Erin Norlin, in her day job as an illustrator, 14 started the site in May 2005. It now gets 17,000 to 20,000 hits a day, she says; a line of Gallery of the Absurd greeting cards, including the Cruise valentine, can be e-mailed from hipstercards.com. “When I look at Star magazine or at Us, it’s like looking at a comic book,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m interested in the characters that gossip turns these celebrities into.”

That attitude — rejecting even the illusion that these celebrity-figures are any more real than holograms — goes to the heart of why celebrity satire is trickier to pull off than political satire, which seems to be everywhere. Pug Bus (pugbus.net) began as a political satire blog after the 2004 election, said its founder, Phil Maggitti. A retired freelance writer and editor, at 63 he is as far from the typical Web demographic as you can get.

He stumbled into the celebrity niche after writing a fake news article about Brad Pitt. “I discovered that bashing the president didn’t get you as many hits,” he said. Although the site still has political satire, its traffic (5,500 visitors a day in September) is “almost entirely driven by celebrity,” he added.

Since it began, the site has expanded to include other writers, but its staff also includes several of Mr. Maggitti’s alter egos, like Biff Scuzzy and Chip Hilton (no relation to Paris). The mock-news articles begin close to reality, sometimes with facts themselves, then veer into territory so outlandish yet logical that the satire is both silly and scarily plausible.

“Anna Nicole Smith Selling Dead Son’s Personal Effects, Ashes,” reads the headline on a story that landed soon after Ms. Smith sold those hospital-bed photos of herself, her soon-to-be-dead 20-year-old son and her newborn baby to In Touch magazine and television. The story included an all-too-realistic fake quotation from an actual person, Howard K. Stern, Ms. Smith’s lawyer, who later announced on “Larry King Live” that he is the infant’s father. The fictional Stern asks the public “to respect Anna’s privacy at this difficult moment” as she decides on “a fair pricing structure for her son’s personal effects and remains.”

What the piece ultimately attacks is Ms. Smith’s icky complicity in her own media spectacle, a sophisticated criticism that sets Pug Bus apart from the plethora of sophomoric humor sites like Cracked (cracked.com) and College Humor (collegehumor.com).

Pug Bus and Gallery of the Absurd are also more consistently funny than the Onion (theonion.com), which, like many sites, is better at satirizing politics than celebrity. Addressing life-or-death stakes, political satire is often driven by anger and partisanship. Celebrity culture is more elusive. Its genuine appeal is that it offers the escapism of a demented fairy tale, playing to the public’s envy of wealth, beauty and fame, as well as to its schadenfreude about sham marriages, drug problems and other common blights of celebrity life.

Satire is even more difficult because celebrity news often arrives in the form of ready-made jokes. A celebrity news and gossip site like TMZ (tmz.com) can be funnier than any attempt at comic spin. “B-List Baby Pics — Who’s Cashing In?” read a droll headline on a story speculating about the amount that lesser celebrities like Sharon Stone and Heidi Klum might get paid if they chose to sell photos of their infants. The idea that there are B-list babies has the mad, slightly cruel plausibility of satire.

Celebrity culture’s built-in absurdity also explains why so many satiric Web sites are only intermittently clever. Among the wittier sites, Fametracker (fametracker.com) is an odd mix that at times wryly worships stars in a section called “Hey! It’s That Guy!” featuring minor actors whose faces are more familiar than their names. But at its irreverent best the site charts the stars’ fortunes in its Galaxy of Fame, where Harrison Ford is the sun, and the shifting cast of planets veers closer to or farther from his light.

Recently Adrien Brody became “Saturn — A Healthy Stroll” away from the center, as he wondered why every word written about his new film, “Hollywoodland,” had to mention Ben Affleck’s comeback. “What about my career?” the fake Brody asked. “I’ve done a lot to run it into the ground.” But weeks and months have elapsed between Galaxy updates; whole careers come and go faster.

The gentle tone of lesser sites also characterizes the television series devoted to celebrity satire, like “The Showbiz Show With David Spade,” just renewed for a third season on Comedy Central. Mr. Spade’s snarky persona is too grating and his humor too tired to endure for a half hour, even with features and interviews added to his signature fake celeb newscasts. In one typically lame joke he announced that Brangelina and family were coming home from Namibia, then whispered to the camera, “Let’s all pretend we didn’t even know they were gone.”

“Best Week Ever,” a weekly show on VH-1, may be even less creative, with comics making mocking comments after showing clips or photos of celebrity idiocy. That’s the definition of redundancy. The Best Week Ever Web site (bestweekever.tv) is just as obvious, although by trolling there you can find the occasional gem, like a video (originally from the television show) in which the real New York 1 reporter Pat Kiernan announces the breaking news that the police are searching for Matthew McConaughey’s missing shirt and displays a police artist’s rendering of the T-shirt; it’s the cleverest of many Web attempts to make fun of his constant display of abs.

Celebrity satire should work on television; when the creators of “South Park” go after Hollywood, they do it as fast and as brilliantly as anyone. There just hasn’t been the right alchemy — the mix of writers, sensibility and a star like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert — to make a brilliant celebrity satire series.

And there’s another major factor working against television satire: big money. The more expensive a form, the less it can afford to defy the mainstream. A glance at the Web reveals how easily an irreverent site can be co-opted. One of the funniest on-line celebrity satires is a video spoof on iFilm (ifilm.com) called “Mel Gibson’s Signs of Anti-Semitism.”

The video uses scenes of Mr. Gibson in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie “Signs,” but here the Gibson character finds Jews everywhere rather than extraterrestrials. He is horrified when he spots a Star of David in his field instead of alien crop circles. When he discovers an alien locked in a closet, what emerges is not a scary hand as in the film, but the sound of Adam Sandler singing his “Hanukkah Song.” Good luck finding anything else as clever on iFilm or YouTube (youtube.com), sites now loaded with movie trailers, clips from television shows and other big-business gambits.

There is no better reason that the little satiric Web sites have a value way out of proportion to their relatively tiny audiences. They prove that while celebrity culture is everywhere, it is not monolithic. Smart people pay attention too, if only to make the best jokes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/movies/08james.html





Jack Black Revisits the Glory Days Known as Tenacious D
Ross Johnson

JACK BLACK’S past is about to catch up with him in a big way. Mr. Black, the movie star known for films like “School of Rock,” “King Kong” and “Nacho Libre,” will meet Mr. Black, the would-be rock star and satirist of the duo Tenacious D. The convergence is set to occur in a film, “Tenacious D in ‘The Pick of Destiny,’ ” scheduled for release by New Line Cinema on Nov. 17. It will test Mr. Black’s ability to bridge past and present, while highlighting once again the risks, and potential rewards, of that Hollywood perennial, the passion project.

Occasionally a work of passion yields magnificent results. George Clooney’s devotion to “Good Night, and Good Luck” helped lead to a half-dozen Academy Award nominations, including two for Mr. Clooney as the film’s director and co-writer; Mel Gibson financed “The Passion of the Christ” and saw it draw more than $600 million worldwide. But many go awry, including John Travolta’s much-derided “Battlefield Earth” or Steve McQueen’s largely forgotten Ibsen turn in “An Enemy of the People.”

With the Tenacious D’ film, New Line is betting that Mr. Black’s celebrity and the cult following for his rock act will pay off for a relatively modest investment of less than $20 million in the film, and roughly twice that in marketing costs. For Mr. Black the risk lies in the difficulty of reviving the freshness of his pre-famous past now that he is, indeed, quite famous.

Mr. Black, 37, formed the musical comedy duo Tenacious D with Kyle Gass, 45, in 1994. Taking its name from the sportscaster Marv Albert’s description of strong defensive positioning on a basketball court — “They’re playing some tenacious dee” — the act quickly became a hit on the Los Angeles club circuit, portraying two hapless musicians trying to become the greatest band on earth, all the while creating sui generis music lampooning mystic metal groups like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden.

The D, as Mr. Black and Mr. Gass refer to their act, wrote songs that were incredibly raunchy, and backed them up with credible performances. Mr. Gass, an accomplished guitar player, played the straight man perfectly to the manic Mr. Black, who would belt out rock lyrics with a precise, and wider, vocal range than many of the singers he was lampooning. By 2001 the duo had a series on HBO and a rabid following on college radio; an album they released would eventually sell two million copies.

“I knew we were funny after our first gig,” said Mr. Black in a recent telephone interview. “We got spoiled by glory pretty fast.”

As Mr. Black’s acting career took off after his starring role in “Shallow Hal” in 2001, he and Mr. Gass, who is now touring with a faux-rock band Trainwreck, stepped away from Tenacious D, except for occasional benefit performances.

The new movie — which is scheduled to open the same weekend as “Casino Royale,” the MGM-Columbia Pictures film introducing Daniel Craig as James Bond — portrays Mr. Black and Mr. Glass as two still-unspoiled musicians trying to win a nightclub talent contest and spending a whole lot of quality time together in a tiny apartment in Venice Beach.

New Line is counting on at least some of the fans who have flocked to Mr. Black’s recent hits, though films like “School of Rock” and “Nacho Libre” had the advantage of a PG-13 rating; for “Tenacious D,” which preserves the duo’s raunch, an R is expected. Among other things, the movie depicts the band members’ reliance on marijuana for creative inspiration and includes the kind of swearing found around the third or fourth drained keg at a frat party.

“The one thing you cannot do is alienate the core audience for a film,” Toby Emmerich, New Line’s production president, said, noting that “Tenacious D” had nothing in common with “School of Rock” except that both films “have guitars in them.” He added: “We’d love for it to do ‘School of Rock’ numbers, but ‘Tenacious’ doesn’t have to, because this film only cost $19 million to make.”

A key to getting the film made was Mr. Black’s agreement to reduce his current acting fee of about $12 million a film to a $1 million upfront fee, which was equally split with Mr. Gass. Should the film do well enough to cover its production and marketing costs, the two men will share 10 percent of the gross revenues the distributor earns. Mr. Black bristled when asked about the financial arrangements. “Who cares how much money I make?” he said. “What’s important is we got a movie about the D made, and we got to make it the way we wanted.”

Such fee cuts are essential to the calculus of a passion project. In exchange for Mr. Black’s discounted rate, he was given total creative control. Mr. Black produced and co-wrote the film with Mr. Gass and its director, Liam Lynch, their longtime video collaborator.

The project had been in development at the British production company Working Title but was put into turnaround before New Line acquired it. Mr. Lynch said that a breakthrough came when he told the frustrated Mr. Black to stop listening to earlier writers who had been hired when the project was at Working Title.

“Nobody knew what the D fans liked better than Jack did,” Mr. Lynch said.

Mr. Lynch, the director of last year’s comedy concert film, “Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic,” and a creator of “The Sifl & Olly Show,” a sock-puppet series on MTV, said choices in “Tenacious D” that might look risky to an outsider were made for the sake of authenticity. When it was noted, for instance, that there were hardly any women in the film, much less a love interest, Mr. Lynch said, “The love story is between Kyle and Jack and their music.”

Referring to the many scenes of Mr. Black and Mr. Gass sitting in a small apartment fretting about their lack of a music career, Mr. Lynch said it was something to which many artists could relate. “Why would they leave their apartment?” he said, laughing. “They’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Mr. Black said he was aware that Tenacious D, previously a cult band, was facing drastically increased expectations with the release of a studio movie. But he said he was confident that the fan base, which will be treated to a soundtrack album to be released on Nov. 14 and a performance tour that begins on Nov. 18, will stay loyal.

“I figure we got one good sequel and one bad sequel to this movie left in us,” Mr. Black said. “The key is to keep stomping on this grapefruit until it stops producing grapefruitade.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/movies/08john.html





Dolan Family Offers $19 Billion in Bid to Take Cablevision Private
Andrew Ross Sorkin

One of New York’s most powerful families, the Dolans, made a $19.2 billion leveraged bid yesterday to buy out the public shareholders of its cable television empire, Cablevision Systems, which also includes Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers.

The offer comes a year and a half after the Dolan family, a sometimes fractious dynasty whose feuds have often spilled into public view and who have used their cable systems to fuel their political interests, proposed breaking the company in two. The family wanted to take over the lucrative cable systems but was forced to withdraw the plan when it met resistance from an independent committee of the company’s directors.

The Dolans’ latest bid — worth almost 15 percent more than the previous offer — comes amid a sweeping trend among some of the nation’s biggest family-controlled companies to take themselves private. In July, HCA, the hospital company, agreed to be sold for $33 billion to a group led by the family of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. And in August, Kinder Morgan, the gas pipeline company, agreed to be sold for $15 billion to a group led by Richard D. Kinder, the company’s founder.

The move to become private is being driven by Wall Street’s willingness to finance billions of dollars in debt that are needed to back these huge leveraged buyouts. The trend is also a reaction, in part, by management and boards to increasing scrutiny from investors to meet quarterly expectations and to pass frequent regulatory examinations.

Last month, for example, Cablevision suffered the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that it had granted stock options to a vice chairman after he had died while making it appear as if they were granted when he was still alive.

In a letter to Cablevision’s board proposing the family’s takeover bid, Charles F. Dolan, the company’s 79-year-old founder, and his son, James L. Dolan, the chief executive of Cablevision, wrote: “We continue to feel that succeeding in this fiercely competitive environment requires a long-term, entrepreneurial management perspective that is not constrained by the public markets’ constant focus on short-term results.”

They added, “We are convinced that private ownership is highly desirable, and we are willing to assume the risks of full ownership.”

Just last year, the Dolans were feuding with one another in the boardroom, with James Dolan voting against his father over the fate of a satellite business that was ultimately sold. Now it appears that the Dolans are in agreement over the future of the company.

Since the Dolans already control the properties involved, the proposed transaction probably would not be felt in any immediate way by Cablevision subscribers or by fans of the Knicks and the Rangers. Nor would it be likely to make much difference to the fate of Madison Square Garden, which developers want to tear down and rebuild one block west, on Ninth Avenue; the Dolans have supported that plan. If anything, cable subscribers or ticket-buyers could possibly be asked to pay higher prices to offset the copious amount of money that the Dolan family plans to raise for the transaction.

Despite the increasing trend in management-led buyouts, some investors have become skeptical of them, questioning whether management is representing themselves or shareholders. Indeed, virtually every recent management-led buyout this year has drawn a series of shareholder lawsuits, with the plaintiffs wondering why executives felt they could not adequately wring out costs and create efficiencies until they were no longer doing so on behalf of shareholders. If the Dolans are successful, their actions will no doubt be subject to similar scrutiny.

At Cablevision, based in Bethpage, N.Y., a special committee of independent directors is expected to be formed to review the bid. And if last year’s showdown between the family and the directors over its prior takeover proposal is any indication, the independent directors will probably press the family to raise its bid.

The current bid differs substantially from its proposal last year, which sought to buy out the shareholders in the cable systems and put all of its other entertainment assets — Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Knicks, the Rangers and several cable channels — into a separate public company. People close to Cablevision’s board said that the board had been uncomfortable with the valuations and complexities of the two proposed entities and had sought a higher offer before the family withdrew the plan.

Since the Dolans withdrew their offer, shares of Cablevision have rallied, as have the stocks of competitors. Cablevision’s board also paid a $10 a share dividend to shareholders.

Under the new offer, the Dolans would pay $27 a share, which represents about a 17 percent premium over the average trading price for the past 10 days and a 11.3 percent premium on the 52-week high closing price of the stock. Of the $19.2 billion purchase price, the Dolans would pay $7.9 billion in cash and assume the rest as debt.

The previous offer was $21 a share for the Cablevision cable systems company and $12.50 a share for a stake in Rainbow Media Holdings, its cable networks company that includes American Movie Classics, Independent Film Channel and Women’s Entertainment, for a total bid of $33.50 a share. Today’s bid of $27 has an implied value of $37 after factoring in the $10 premium.

It is possible that the Dolans’ proposal could put Cablevision in play. The company has long been viewed as a takeover target for Time Warner because of the natural fit with that company’s cable business in and around New York. At the time of the Dolans’ last offer for Cablevision, James S. Chanos, whose fund, Kynikos Associates, bets on companies’ stocks declining, said, “It was never a serious offer; it was an attempt to flush out another buyer.”

Still, the Dolans own 22.5 percent of Cablevision and have 74 percent voting power, so they would have to consent to any takeover. And they made it very clear yesterday that they were not putting the company up for sale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/bu...rtner=homepage





I.B.M. Division Moves to China

I.B.M. has moved its global procurement headquarters to southern China from the suburbs of New York City to “capitalize on emerging market opportunities.”

I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., spends 30 percent of its $40 billion annual procurement in Asia, the company said in a statement yesterday, confirming the move to Shenzhen that was first announced to suppliers in May. This is the first time that I.B.M., the world’s biggest computer services company, has moved the headquarters of one of its largest divisions to China.

Companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft are expanding in China to take advantage of lower costs and to gain market share in the world’s most populous nation.

The chief procurement officer for I.B.M., John Paterson, relocated from Somers, N.Y., and started work in Shenzhen yesterday, said Amanda Garland, an I.B.M. spokeswoman.

Demand for software and services across Asia is growing, and the company wants to develop new markets and suppliers to meet the demand, I.B.M. said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/te...gy/13blue.html





China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Labor Abuse
David Barboza

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.

Whether the foreign corporations will follow through on their warnings is unclear because of the many advantages of being in China — even with restrictions and higher costs that may stem from the new law. It could go into effect as early as next May.

It would apply to all companies in China, but its emphasis is on foreign-owned companies and the suppliers to those companies.

The conflict with the foreign corporations is significant partly because it comes at a time when labor, energy and land costs are rising in this country, all indications that doing business in China is likely to get much more expensive in the coming years.

But it is not clear how effectively such a new labor law would be carried out through this vast land because local officials have tended to ignore directives from the central government or seek ways around them.

China’s economy has become one of the most robust in the world since the emphasis on free markets in the 80’s encouraged millions of young workers to labor for low wages at companies that made cheap exports. As a result, foreign investment has poured into China.

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.

The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.

“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.

The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.

State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.

The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.

The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.

On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.

“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.”
China’s Labor Ministry declined to comment Thursday, saying the law is still in the drafting stages. Several American corporations also declined to comment on the case, saying it was a delicate matter and referring calls to the American Chamber of Commerce.

But Andreas Lauffs, a Hong Kong-based lawyer who runs the China employment-law practice at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, said some American companies considered the proposed rules too costly and restrictive.

Mr. Lauffs said the new rules would give unions collective-bargaining power and control over certain factory rules, and they would also make it difficult to fire employees for poor performance.

“You could hire a sales manager, give him a quota and he doesn’t sell anything, and you couldn’t get rid of him,” Mr. Lauffs said. “It’s not easy to get rid of someone now, but under these rules it would be impossible.”

It is not clear what the final law will look like, and only an updated draft is expected soon. But specialists say the trend suggests that there may be new challenges ahead for foreign companies doing business in this country.

Under China’s “iron rice bowl” system of the 1950’s and 60’s, all workers were protected by the government or by state-owned companies, which often supplied housing and local health coverage.

But by the 1980’s, when the old Maoist model had given way to economic restructuring and the beginning of an emphasis on market forces, China began eliminating many of those protections — giving rise to mass layoffs, unemployment, huge gaps in income and pervasive labor abuse.

The worst off have been migrant workers, most of them exiles from the poorest provinces who travel far from home to live in cramped company dormitories while working long hours under poor conditions.

Migrant workers in virtually every city complain about abuses like having their pay withheld or being forced to work without a contract.

“I don’t know about the labor law,” said Zhang Yin, an 18-year-old migrant who washes dishes in Shanghai. “During the three months I’ve been here, my boss has delayed the salary payment twice. I want to quit.”

Having grown increasingly concerned about the nation’s widening income gap and fearing social unrest, officials in Beijing now seem determined to improve worker protection. In recent years, more and more factory workers have gone to court or taken to the streets to protest poor working conditions and overdue pay.

“The government is concerned because social turmoil can happen at any moment,” says Liu Cheng, a professor of law at Shanghai Normal University and an adviser to the authorities on drafting the proposed law. “The government stresses social stability, so it needs to solve existing problems in the society.”

In a surprisingly democratic move, China asked for public comment on the draft law last spring and received more than 190,000 responses, mostly from labor activists. The American Chamber of Commerce sent in a lengthy response with objections to the proposals. The European Chamber of Commerce also responded.

The law would impose heavy fines on companies that do not comply. And the state-controlled union — the only legal union in China — would gain greater power through new collective-bargaining rights or pursuing worker grievances and establishing work rules. One provision in the proposed law reads, “Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc.”

If approved and strictly enforced, specialists say the new laws would strikingly alter the country’s vast labor market and significantly push up the wages of everyday workers.

“If you really abide by the Chinese labor laws,” said Anita Chan, an expert on labor issues in this country and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, “migrant-worker wages would go up by 50 percent or more.”

Until now, though, existing Chinese labor laws have gone largely unenforced, which has further complicated the debate here. Opponents of the proposed law argue that enforcing existing labor laws would be enough to solve the country’s nagging problems. Advocates respond that adopting new laws would set the stage for stricter enforcement.

Even lawyers working for multinational corporations seem to agree that there is an epidemic of cheating.

Mr. Liu, the Shanghai lawyer who advised the government on the draft proposal, says many companies avoid existing laws by using employment agencies to hire workers. He says the new law will do more to protect workers from such abuse by holding companies accountable.

“The principle is not to raise the labor standard dramatically,” he said, “but to raise the cost of violating the law. The current labor law is a paper tiger and is a disadvantage to those who obey it. If you don’t obey the law, you won’t be punished.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/bu...47e&ei=5087%0A

[JackSpratts]

Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete
David Pogue

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

Whoops.

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.

Not everybody, however. Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

E-books may have flopped the first time around, but you can’t deny that they offer some intriguing advantages. You can add dozens of them to your luggage without adding any more weight or bulk. You can adjust the type size. You can search the whole book in seconds, or insert an infinite number of bookmarks. No trees are destroyed to make e-books. And you can read during lunch without having to prop open your novel with a dangerously full can of soda.

If you’re sold on the idea, then you’ll find a lot to like in the Sony Reader — and a few things to dislike.

It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.

There’s no backlight, however; you can read only by ambient light. Sony would probably argue that this trait makes the Reader even more like a traditional book, but it also means that you can’t read in bed with the lights off, as you can with a laptop or palmtop.

On the other hand, once those microspheres have formed the image of a page, they stay put without consuming any power. Amazingly enough, that means that you don’t have to turn the Reader off, ever. When you’re done for the night, just lay it on your bedside table; the current page remains on the screen without draining any battery power. (According to Sony, one prototype Reader in Japan has been displaying the same page for three years on a single charge.) Every instinct in your body will scream against leaving your gadget turned on all the time, but you’ll get over it.

The only time the Reader uses electricity, in fact, is when you actually turn a page. One charge is good for 7,500 page turns. That’s enough power to get you through “The Da Vinci Code” 16 times (electrical power, anyway). You can recharge the battery either from its power cord or from a computer’s U.S.B. jack.

The Reader can also display digital photos — they look surprisingly good, considering they’re being depicted using only four shades of gray — and play music files (noncopy-protected MP3 or AAC format) through headphones. With a good deal of preparation, you could even read along as the same audio book plays.

There are two ways to load up the Reader. You can copy your texts, photos and music to a memory card (Memory Stick or SD), which goes into a slot on the left side. That’s also how you can expand the Reader’s built-in storage (64 megabytes, enough for 80 books).

The other option is to import files into a somewhat buggy Windows program called Sony Connect. It’s the home base for the Reader in much the way iTunes is the home base for the iPod, although Sony Connect requires you to drag files manually; it doesn’t offer automatic synchronizing with the Reader.

This software is also the gateway to the Reader’s online bookstore. The catalog includes more than 10,000 books from a variety of publishers. Some, like “Freakonomics,” are priced like hardcover editions ($16); others, like “The Devil Wears Prada,” are priced like the paperbacks ($8). If you buy a Reader before the end of the year, Sony will include a coupon for $50 worth of books.

These books are copy-protected, of course. You can read them on a total of six machines, counting Readers that you own and Windows computers. You can’t give away or sell a book when you’re done with it, much less return it to the store.

The Reader also accepts standard plain text files and Word documents (only basic formatting survives), which means that you can help yourself to the 19,000 free, out-of-copyright books at Gutenberg.org. The Windows software can also download Web news stories (RSS feeds), which you can copy to the reader for daily train reading. PDF documents open on the Reader, too, but most are too big for the Reader screen, so the text winds up shrunk down to illegibility.

That’s not the only fine print, though. The Sony Reader has a few kinks to be ironed out.

Like an Etch A Sketch, the Reader’s screen has to wipe away each page before drawing the next one. Unfortunately, the result is a one-second white-black-white blink that quickly becomes annoying.

Tapping the “size” button cycles through three font sizes; holding it down rotates the page 90 degrees. The largest type is soothing to over-40 eyes, but also means that you have to turn pages more often, enduring even more of those distracting double blinks.

Sony has dreamed up some fairly baffling controls, too — not an easy feat on what should be a very simple machine. For example, the next/previous page buttons are at 2 and 8 o’clock on a dime-size desk. A circular control might make sense if it had buttons at all four points of the compass — but only two?

There’s no search function, video or clickable links, either. So much for those key e-book advantages.

Still, Sony got the big stuff right: the feel of the machine, the pleasantness of reading, the clarity of type. It’s not the only company hoping to resurrect the dream of electronic books, either. A spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics, iRex Technologies, sells a “work in progress” called the iLiad, which uses the same E Ink technology but offers wireless networking, a bigger screen, 16 shades of gray and a touch screen for scribbling notes, for $700. And last month, bloggers discovered that Amazon.com is working on an e-book reader (and store) of its own. (Search Google for “Amazon Kindle.”)

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. It will make certain niche groups very happy: gadget freaks, lawyers with massive document stashes, doctors and pilots who check hefty reference texts, high school students with 35-pound backpacks and anyone who likes to read by the pool for 20 weeks at a time.

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/te...ogue.html?8dpc





Indie Bookstores Fight Chains, Internet
Don Babwin

Adam Brent knew his 11-year-run selling best sellers and new releases was over when mail carriers started walking into his building to deliver books from Amazon.com to the tenants upstairs.

"Literally, they didn't walk downstairs or take the time to make a phone call," Brent said of the neighbors of Brent Books & Cards in the city's business district.

Brent's experience is shared by scores of independent bookstores around the nation that have been knocked out of business by huge chains like Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc., massive retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and most recently Internet sites like Amazon.com.

But Brent is also part of a growing number of independent bookstore owners refusing to give up. He's closing his store this month but plans to reopen as a discount book store. Others are luring customers by putting in cafes or opening specialty shops that cater to a specific audience, like mystery lovers. Some are following the lead of public television and selling memberships. Or they're being saved by investors who can't bear the idea of losing these local institutions.

Not only that, but even as 200 to 300 independent book stores close a year, the number of independent book stores opening is creeping up.

"For a long time, from 1992 to 2002, you literally could count on two hands the number of openings," said Oren Teicher, chief operating officer of the American Booksellers Association. "In the last three years there are 60, 70, 80 stores opening" each year, he said.

That's welcome news for an association that's watched its membership plummet from 4,000 to about 1,800 since the early 1990s.

"There are a lot of ways to make money in the business," said Brent, whose father, Chicago bookseller Stuart Brent, closed the city's most famous bookstore after a half century in 1996.

Gary Kleiman, who owns BookBeat in the northern California community of Fairfax, decided the way to do it was to get rid of the clutter and make his store a gathering place.

"We had 10,000 or 13,000 books in the store," said Kleiman. "Now we have maybe 1,500."

Last fall, Kleiman gave all but a handful of his used books to charity. Then he tore down shelves and in their place put tables and chairs and a small stage for live performances. He started offering free wireless Internet access. And to help convince people to take advantage of it all he got a beer and wine license.

As for the books, most of the ones left are new and they're confined to the perimeter walls. While he's selling about the same number of books as he used to, new books are selling better. And his store has a lot more customers - eating, drinking and listening to music - than he did before. About 60 percent of the store's profits come from the cafe.

Kleiman's drastic move after six years of business is in large part the result two things he came to understand about the Internet.

The first was that there were just too many used books online and they were just too cheap - far cheaper than he could afford to sell them.

The second was that for all the talk about the speed of ordering books online, he could be faster.

"I can order today and they will be here tomorrow," he said - one reason customers choose him instead of the Internet.

Some bookstores have survived by giving their customers what they say chain stores often do not: Employees who know what they're talking about.

"You can discuss books with us. We are all readers," said Arlene Lynes, who opened Read Between the Lynes in Woodstock, Ill., in 2005. "To me, that's what's bringing people back."

Nowhere is the ability to discuss books more important than in mystery book stores. Jim Huang, who opened The Mystery Company in Carmel, Ind., said a key to the store's success since it opened about 3 1/2 years ago was recognizing that when it comes to mystery books, customers don't just want a place to buy them, they want a place to talk about them.

"We do everything we can think of to get readers to talk," said Huang, whose store has discussion groups, readings by authors and other events.

Huang also knows that when his customers find authors they like they want to read every one of their books - some of which have long since gone out of print.

That was obvious when he saw a beat up paperback copy of Kate Flora's "Chosen For Death," the first in a mystery series, going for $30 on the Internet.

Huang approached Flora about publishing the out-of-print book and now it is one of four fiction titles he publishes that are each the first in a series.

"That's where mystery readers want to start reading," he said.

Some bookstores have benefited from their ties to the community. Just this year, 14 investors got out their checkbooks and bought Brazos Bookstore in Houston, an institution for more than 30 years, after the owner announced that he would close it or sell it to take another job.

"There was an uprising of people in the community saying, 'We are not going to let this happen,'" said Jane Moser, the store's manager, who said that when news of the original 14 spread, 11 more joined them.

In Menlo Park, Calif., community members also came forward with funding when Kepler's Books closed in August of 2005. Kepler's reopened that October, thanks to more than $500,000 from 24 investors, and soon created a membership program.

About 2,000 people joined, pumping another $196,000 into the business, said Clark Kepler, whose father founded the store in 1955.

In the Bay Area, at least three other bookstores have implemented their own membership programs, said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Depending on the store and how much people give, they receive book bags, discount coupons, and invitations to members-only author receptions.

Landon makes it clear, though, that it's not gifts, coupons or special events that is prompting people to buy these memberships.

"It's like with the symphony or a theater company in town," he said. "You are joining but you are really donating. You are really doing it because you want that (store) to be part of the community."

Encouraged as they are by some success stories around the country, book store owners note that the brutal business has claimed some of the nation's most famous independent book stores, including Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Calif., and WordsWorth Books on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. Most recently, Coliseum Books, a famed New York bookstore, announced it was closing for the second time in its 30-year history - this time for good.

Even Kepler's, which is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its reopening, serves as a reminder that independent bookstores remain threatened.

While all the publicity helped prompt more people to buy books from the store, sales have fallen back to where they were before the store closed last year, Kepler said.

"We need to have our loyal shoppers shop more frequently with us," he said. "We need to learn how to fill a need and not just be a soft spot in people's hearts."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-08-18-44-36





Not your typical bug hunt

A Challenge for Exterminators
John Markoff

On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.

The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted in a 19th-century observation about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world’s largest-selling software packages.

As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.

The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual modernization and ease of use.

Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.

“It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical problem, and there was a turning point,” said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer scientist who is director of Windows program management. “We’ve confounded the analysts and the press.”

As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the product to be introduced on time. “The Vista development organization has made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista’s performance, reliability, and compatibility,” he said.

[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]

The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year, and to home users early next year.

This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.

The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software, generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000 employee computers are running test versions.

Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft.

Such data supplements the company’s own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name — Windows Test Technologies.)

This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors.

The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft’s director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr. Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he undertook for the nation’s telephone network.

“Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things,” he said. “When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to this.”

The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5 petabytes of information — the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000 home PC’s.

The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent months between Microsoft’s designers and its partners, who have been tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.

On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.

Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner company.

That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted directly to the testers’ computers over the Internet within four days — a vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.

Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects — which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers and testers here — there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.

“We’ve been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,” said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith said.

Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative, and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.

A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.

While Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his company abruptly in the mid-1990’s to respond to the challenge posed by Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar challenge to its dominance from Google.

Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.

Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut Microsoft’s software development model — using a proprietary software development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.

In an internal company memo titled “Don’t Bet Against the Internet,” he wrote recently, “Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on the Internet), most proprietary standards (I’m thinking of Exchange e-mail and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet.”

The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate degree in philosophy from Reed College.

Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard curve.

Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond teaching philosophy — with the possible exception of finding and killing bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.

“If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it’s very high,” he said. “There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they hate us, and we want to help.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/te...y/09vista.html





Vista to Take a Cue from Budget Windows
Dawn Kawamoto

Microsoft is sprinkling some features from Windows XP Starter Edition into Windows Vista, the next generation of its operating system.

The software maker plans to take the video help feature in XP Starter, which is geared to PC users in emerging markets, and put it into all versions of Vista, said Mike Wickstrand, a director for Windows Starter at Microsoft.

"This is 'trickle-up' innovation," Wickstrand said, noting that in most cases, technologies are geared toward early adopters and heavy users. Only later do they "trickle down" to beginning users, he said.

XP Starter is only available loaded onto a computer for purchase. The Vista Starter version is expected to be released early next year, when all versions of the long-awaited Vista update are supposed to hit the market.

The XP version, which debuted in November 2004 and has reached more than a million families in emerging markets, is offered in 25 languages. When Vista Starter is launched, that will be expanded to 79 languages.

"We wanted to reach deeper into markets that we previously didn't have the ability to touch," Wickstrand said.

Another addition to Vista Starter is the capability to open a limitless number of windows. In the XP version, people are restricted to only three windows at a time. However, both XP Starter and the update will continue to limit the number of programs that can run simultaneously to three.
http://news.com.com/Vista+to+take+a+...3-6123720.html





Lowdown: A Farewell to Gossip
David Carr

Psssst. Which New York gossip columnist, long rumored to be on the bubble, has penned his last item as of today?

Lloyd Grove has never been much for blind items. The man behind Lowdown, a five-day-a-week gossip column for The Daily News in New York, was sitting last week at a corner table at Pastis to confirm the rumor that started the day he got the job three years ago: the column has ended, along with his lucrative contract (an unnewspaperlike $300,000 a year, some said).

“Gossip columns are not federal judgeships,” he said. “I lasted three years and six weeks, which is a lot longer than many thought.”

A former writer of the Reliable Sources column in The Washington Post, Mr. Grove was hired by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, publisher of The Daily News, to countervail the dominance of Page Six, the New York Post’s 30-year-old corner on the tatty and tantalizing.

“I was a total impulse buy,” Mr. Grove said. “I was standing at the Miramax party at the Oscars and Mort was there with one of Michael Douglas’s ex-wives, and he pulled me aside and said, ‘Have you considered plying your trade in New York?’ ”

The answer was yes, and he began the column with much fanfare — his arrival was trumpeted in a Page 1 article in The New York Times — and a fair amount of Manhattan skepticism.

Many thought the trip from the relatively civilized environment of Washington whispers to the mosh pit of New York gossip would leave him bloodied. Before he started, one Page Six reporter said, “We will not rest until we send you back to Washington on a stretcher.” That was from Jared Paul Stern, who was carried off the field first after being accused of trying to blackmail Ronald W. Burkle. Mr. Grove at least outlasted him.

“This stuff is not for sissies, not for the faint of heart,” Mr. Grove said.

In New York, Mr. Grove stood out at parties, not just for his height (6 foot 3) but also for his abashed, embarrassed-to-be-here presence. He often conceded he did not know or care to learn the names of many of the A- and B-listers who are the mother’s milk of the industry. He worked his beat, but the juiciest bits of gossip go to the meat-eaters, the ones who are willing to fight for every scrap, true or not.

“My strong suit is not canoodling front,” he said. “I am for the most part completely incurious about Lindsay Lohan and her love life, although I’ve written my share about it.”

Mr. Grove did get his share of scoops, including the departure of Neal Shapiro, then president of NBC news, and a report on a novel commissioned by the drug industry to frighten people on the perils of taking cheap imported drugs. But he received more attention for announcing a ban on any mention of Paris Hilton in his column, which would be like The Times deciding one day not to cover the State Department.

“It was a craven play for attention and it worked; I got my only shot on the ‘Today’ show,” he said, but he could not resist a bit of self-mockery by adding: “It’s basically what I have been working toward for my whole life.”

Not one for regrets, he did allow that he had probably written more items on Foxy Brown than common sense would dictate. He knows that his absence will be most fondly felt not by those he afflicted — Mr. Grove generally had little appetite for drawing real blood — but by those he competed with.

“New York is not Washington, obviously,” he said. “There are about 20 different major industries that are headquartered here, and I am still on a New York learning curve. It takes time, learning about them, writing about them, so I am still on a learning curve, but it is not as steep as it once was.”

He mentions that he will remain on that curve.

“The end of my gossip column in The Daily News is not the end of my presence in New York,” he said. “I have discovered in the last few weeks, oddly enough, that I am still employable. I will be doing something that is multimedia, with components of Internet and television and print media.”

Mr. Grove suggested several times during our conversation that he was grateful to Mr. Zuckerman for the opportunity and pointed out that the publisher never once interfered with the content of his column, even if his friends were maimed in an item.

But he also suggested that Mr. Zuckerman’s throwdown with The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company, the News Corporation, represents a difficult, perhaps insurmountable challenge. The reporting period for circulation has just ended, and The Daily News’s claim to being the No. 1 tabloid in the city could come under additional pressure.

“The Daily News and U.S. News are extras for him. Very serious, very expensive hobbies for Mort. He is not a dilettante, but it’s not why he is a billionaire,” Mr. Grove said. “Murdoch has ink running through his veins. The guy is the king of all media. And he is happy to own a newspaper in New York that loses money hand over fist in a way that Mort would never tolerate.”

Like the newspaper he worked for, Mr. Grove often found himself in conflict with modern tabloid imperatives of aggression, point of view and the naked pursuit of the tawdriest aspects of human behavior. Raised in Greenwich, Conn., and educated at Yale, Mr. Grove seemed to subscribe to the Oscar Wilde school of scandal, which suggested that gossip had its charms, but “scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”

In fact, good gossips are a surprisingly moralistic bunch, tut-tutting about all manner of human foible and fakery. Mr. Grove never seemed good at feigning or generating moral outrage, while few at The New York Post seemed so conflicted about their mission. Mr. Grove’s strengths — he is a serious newsman and a droll writer — along with his sometimes indifferent relationship to his chosen subject, proved to be a handicap. It’s hard to write down salacious items when one of your hands is occupied with holding your nose.

He does think that one contribution to the fight, however, will linger.

“Ever since I banned Paris Hilton, I haven’t heard a thing about her,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/bu...ia/09carr.html





Apple’s Options Disclosures Fail to Resolve Questions
Laurie J. Flynn

Apple Computer moved last week to answer questions about its problems with stock options, but in the end it left plenty unanswered, including the role played by Fred D. Anderson, who resigned Wednesday from the company’s board.

Mr. Anderson resigned after a special committee of directors disclosed that it had found irregularities with stock option grants made between 1997 and 2002, a period when he served as chief financial officer. The company said only that Mr. Anderson believed that it was “in Apple’s best interests” that he leave the board.

Mr. Anderson was once a trusted adviser to Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, and played an important role in the company’s financial turnaround. Analysts said he appeared to be paying the price for the problems with Apple’s stock options grants even through his degree of control over the program was unclear.

“I would say that Jobs and the Apple board threw Fred under the bus to keep it from hitting them,” said Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission and a managing director at Glass, Lewis & Company, which advises institutional investors on corporate governance.

Mr. Anderson, who declined to be interviewed, is also a board member at eBay, and a managing director at Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that has raised nearly $2 billion for investments in media and entertainment companies.

Apple’s board began looking into options practices in June, joining more than 100 other companies, including many in the technology industry, that were investigating the backdating of stock options to inflate their value.

Apple said last week that Mr. Jobs knew of some instances of backdating of options, though he did not benefit from those grants. The committee cleared all current employees, including Mr. Jobs, of any impropriety.

The absence of details in the company’s announcement left it unclear how the instances of backdating occurred, or what role Mr. Anderson or the Apple board may have played. Some Wall Street analysts expressed confidence that the internal investigation would put an end to concerns that Mr. Jobs might be in jeopardy. But the announcement is not likely to be the last word on Apple’s options problems, analysts said.

Charles M. Elson, the director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said that the board’s conclusions, while interesting, held no real authority. “In the end, it will be up to the S.E.C. to decide,” he said.

Federal prosecutors were briefed last Tuesday on the Apple board’s findings by legal representatives for the company, according to a person who had been briefed on the situation. It is unclear who the prosecutors are focusing on, or whether Mr. Jobs is a member of that group.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., said its review found that backdated options were granted on 15 dates.

“You don’t know what the scope of the problem really is,” said Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant in White Plains. “They told you the number of grant dates, but not the number of grants. They told you that he was in the know on a few instances, but those could be a huge number of shares.”

The company reiterated that it expected to restate its financial results to account for the extra compensation expense related to the options. Mr. Foley questioned why the company had not yet quantified the potential impact for investors.

“After three months, you don’t know what the number is,” he said. “Come on.”

Apple said its investigation also “raised serious concerns” about the activities of two other former Apple officers, but a company statement released last week did not name them. An Apple spokesman declined to comment further on Friday.

Apple’s shares closed at $74.22 on Friday, down $1.16 from their closing price on Wednesday, before the news was announced.

In the backdating of stock options, a company typically selects a grant date when its stock price was lower, increasing the value of the options for employees who sell them later for a higher price.

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/te...y/09apple.html





After Big Flops, Warner Hopes for ‘Sleeper’ Hit in Smaller Films
Laura M. Holson

When the romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally” was released in July 1989, it made just $1.1 million during its opening weekend. But Alan F. Horn, whose film company produced the movie, was confident that, given time, it could be a hit.

He was right. The movie earned $93 million at the domestic box office that summer.

“If it was today, the headline in Variety would have been ‘When Harry Met Disaster,’ ” Mr. Horn said in an interview. “They would have killed us after that first weekend and I don’t think we would have had a chance to build that movie. In today’s climate it wouldn’t have had a chance to breathe.”

In 2006, Mr. Horn, who is now president of Warner Brothers Entertainment, may be finding it hard to breathe himself. Last year Warner was the No. 1 studio at the domestic box office, bringing in $1.38 billion by bankrolling big-budget blockbusters like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Batman Begins.” But the same strategy this summer resulted in a string of expensive duds, like “Lady in the Water,” “The Ant Bully” and a remake of the ocean liner disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure” that sank faster than the ship itself.

As a result, Mr. Horn must now hope that one of a cadre of smaller, riskier films, like “The Departed,” “Blood Diamond” and “The Fountain,” will prove to be a sleeper hit like “When Harry Met Sally” and help pull Warner out of its No. 6 spot for the year so far.

Warner’s recent tumble in the studio rankings is a cautionary tale for Hollywood. As the studios begin to shrink their slates and make fewer movies, they are increasing their reliance on the big, expensive extravaganzas. Sometimes they succeed, as “Batman Begins” and the “Harry Potter” movies have for Warner, or as “Pirates of the Caribbean” did for the Walt Disney Company.

But the lackluster results for Warner’s blockbusters this summer show that the large tentpole features, like “Poseidon,” which cost more than $150 million to make but brought in only $60 million domestically, are not sure things, after all. And when they fail, they put more pressure on smaller films to open big.

“A safe bet isn’t safe at all these days. When you saw ‘Poseidon’ on paper, it looked safe. It wasn’t safe at all,” Mr. Horn said. “Is ‘The Departed’ safe? It’s got a great cast. Is ‘Harry Potter’ safe? It’s safe until we blow a movie and then the public will be furious. Categorically, there is no safe movie anymore.”

So far, Mr. Horn said, the summer’s poor showing has not resulted in any additional pressure from Time Warner’s corporate headquarters in New York. The only inquiries he has gotten questioning the studio’s strategy, he said, were from reporters.

But that is not to say that changes are not afoot on the Warner lot. Legendary Pictures, Warner’s financial partner for some of the studio’s most noticeable summer duds, including “Lady in the Water” and the animated “The Ant Bully,” is flexing its might, pressuring Warner to cut marketing costs.

“Our attitude has been, ‘Are we asking ourselves as a group how far we can push the envelope?’ ” asked Thomas Tull, chief executive of Legendary, which has a five-year, $600 million deal with Warner to co-finance and co-produce movies. In particular Mr. Tull has questioned whether Warner should spend as much on billboard and newspaper advertising, particularly in Los Angeles, where ads are sometimes bought just to appease the vanity of movie stars.

“The first thing is acknowledging we should have a discussion,” said Mr. Tull. “It may seem like a paltry $2 million but this is money we need to make up.”

Dawn Taubin, president of domestic marketing for Warner Brothers Pictures, said she met twice monthly with Legendary executives to discuss coming campaigns. “Nobody said, ‘Cut your budget by 10 percent,’ ” she said, adding that all campaigns were scrutinized case by case. “Still, there is always a dialogue about ‘Can you spend less?’ ”

For Warner, the summer got off on the wrong foot, with the release of “Superman Returns.” Since becoming president of production in 2002, Jeff Robinov has successfully paired offbeat directors with mainstream projects. Tim Burton, for instance, was not an obvious choice to direct “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” nor was Johnny Depp an obvious star. Christopher Nolan had never directed a costly event film before “Batman Begins.” And Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican director of the very adult “Y Tu Mamá También” was a novel pick to direct the third “Harry Potter” released in 2004.

“They are all a little bit different,” Mr. Robinov said of the movies. “But the sensibilities are down the middle.”

By contrast, “Lady in the Water,” the spooky thriller directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the animated “The Ant Bully,” produced by Tom Hanks, appeared to be conventional choices. “Superman Returns,” too, seemed safe from the start.

The director, Bryan Singer, had already proved his mettle in the action comic book genre, having directed the first two “X-Men” movies. There was pent-up interest among fans. Even the film’s star, Brandon Routh, was a look-alike of Christopher Reeve, who embodied Clark Kent more than two decades ago.

But critics complained that the movie was too long and lacked the action necessary to attract its core young male audience. And at a gathering of comic book fans last summer, Mr. Singer complained about the movie’s marketing.

Studio executives say it will make a profit. But in bringing in only $389 million at the worldwide box office, “Superman Returns” failed to live up to prerelease expectations.

“If Superman had done twice what it did, the whole summer would have looked different,” said Mr. Robinov. “It’s as much about perception as reality. Even with the failure of a movie like ‘Poseidon,’ we’ve had much smaller movies we’ve lost as much on.”

Mr. Horn agreed. “I’ve seen movies that cost $15 million lose as much as $20 million,” he said. “But when event movies don’t perform well, it is very high profile.”

Mr. Horn said Warner Brothers had no plans to alter its strategy. Other studios have entered the franchise film business, he said, suggesting that Warner’s decision was a sound one. Still, Warner will make fewer movies in the future — between 18 and 22 films a year — and will focus even more on blockbusters with worldwide appeal. (Think more “Harry Potter,” less “Beerfest.”)

“This is an aircraft carrier, not a riverboat,” said Mr. Horn.

Still Mr. Horn is more than happy to leave the summer behind him. And, in a welcome twist, early Oscar buzz is already swirling around two Warner movies, “The Departed,” a crime boss thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, and “Blood Diamond,” also featuring Mr. DiCaprio.

“I don’t think they are obviously commercial films but I believe they are really good films,” said Mr. Robinov.

Some critics have called “The Departed” Mr. Scorsese’s best movie in years, outshining “Gangs of New York” and 2004’s “The Aviator.” “Blood Diamond,” a thriller about the diamond trade, set in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s, also is seen as promising, largely because of Mr. DiCaprio’s performance. Both, though, are blood-soaked and violent, which limits the audience.

Of Warner’s other Oscar hopefuls, it is hard to predict. George Clooney, usually a favorite with audiences, will star in “The Good German,” a black-and-white film directed by his former producing partner Steven Soderbergh. “The Fountain,” directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Hugh Jackman, is so far getting mixed reviews from those who have seen it.

The critical raves for “The Departed” have Mr. Horn cautiously optimistic. “Because it’s so unique it might get to a place where it as commercial as it can be,” said Mr. Horn.

“The Departed” brought in $27 million at the domestic box office this weekend, Mr. Scorsese’s best opening ever, and a good start. No doubt to Warner’s relief, it was better than the debut of “When Harry Met Sally.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/bu.../09warner.html





Hollywood Continues its Attack on Consumers
Gary Bourgeault

Hollywood is increasingly using one old technique that industries that can no longer compete do: they get laws passed to stifle the competition.

In this case I'm talking about TiVo's (TIVO) new Series3 HD model. It does have one strength that TV watchers will really like - the ability to record high definition programs.

Now the bad news: It won't come with TiVoToGo. For those of you that don't TiVo, TiVoToGo enables consumers to record programs and then transfer them to other devices or burn them to DVDs.

Concerning using the law, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress in 1998, it restricts companies from building products that receive digital content without DRM restrictions in place. A company must get permission to build it.

Guess who runs the so-called nonprofit organization that makes those decisions? The cable companies! The organization called Cable Research Laboratories, or CableLabs has the decision-making power to decide these issues.

Here's the bottom line in this: Hollywood can no longer compete.

Derek Slater, a rep for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that examines the digital rights of consumers, says, "Hollywood has continually tried to rein in consumer freedom through its support of more restrictive, less useful devices, I am sure that TiVo is working with CableLabs to get some sort of feature approved, but it will not be the TiVoToGo that consumers have known and loved."

CableLabs says that TiVo hasn't brought anything to them to look at. The point is that they shouldn't have to do it in the first place.

A spokesman for TiVo said, "...We are currently working with CableLabs on several technologies centered around moving content around the home environment."

With the consumer increasingly becoming the decider of what and how they want to consumer media, for Hollywood to continually stand in the way and restrict their wishes is a boot-in-the-face to people. If they can't offer the product and means of transmission that consumers want, then they need to step aside and get out of the way of those that do.
http://www.bizofshowbiz.com/2006/10/...ts_attack.html





Blu-Ray Disc Lurches to 50GB
The Hollywood Reporter

Consumers will have access to the first 50GB Blu-ray disc, which boasts twice the capacity of a regular disc, when Sony Pictures releases the Adam Sandler comedy "Click" on Tuesday.

The dual-layer disc promises to deliver the interactivity and extras that backers of the next-generation, high-definition optical-disc format had been promising since the first movies were released in the format in June. Sony made the announcement Friday at the High Def 101 Conference in Los Angeles.

"Click" is one of three 50GB Blu-ray discs in the studio's pipeline. The others are Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down," coming Nov. 14, and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," due Dec. 12.

Only two other studios have announced 50GB discs: 20th Century Fox is releasing "Kingdom of Heaven" on Nov. 14, and Lionsgate is preparing a dual-layer Blu-ray Disc of "The Descent" for a December release. Warner Bros. is expected to announce that its next wave of Blu-ray titles, hitting stores Oct. 31, will include one or more dual-layer discs.

Because of its greater capacity, the Blu-ray disc of "Click" will include all the bonus features from the DVD, in high-definition, as well as uncompressed PCM (pulse code modulation) audio.

Bonus features include an audio commentary with star Adam Sandler, director Frank Coraci, executive producer Tim Herlihy and writer Steve Koren; four deleted scenes; and seven short features, including a documentary on the film's special effects and a "Director's Take."

"Black Hawk" will be the first title to feature Sony's new "Blu-Wizard" playlist technology, which lets viewers customize the way they watch special features. Extras include an audio commentary with author Mark Bowden, screenwriter Ken Nolan, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Scott and U.S. Special Forces Veterans '93 as well as six making-of documentaries exploring various aspects of the movie's production.

"Talladega" comes with nine deleted and extended scenes, all in high-definition; an audio commentary with director Adam McKay and others; bonus race footage; a gag reel; three interviews; "Ricky & Cal" commercials and PSAs; a short feature on Will Ferrell returning to Talladega; and various other extras.

Meanwhile, Warner has slashed its projections for HD DVD and Blu-ray disc sales projections because of a slower-than-expected rollout of hardware and software.

As of Sept. 30, consumers had spent $25 million on the three HD players in the market--two HD DVD units from Toshiba, priced at $499 and $799, and one Blu-ray disc player, from Samsung, priced at $999--and $5 million on software, said Steve Nickerson, senior vice president of market management at Warner Home Video.

But with a second Blu-ray player from Panasonic now on the market and players from Philips, Sony and Pioneer expected within a month--as well as two next-generation HD-DVD players from Toshiba--spending should increase significantly, he said.

Warner projects that by year's end, consumers will have spent $750 million on hardware and $150 million on software for total spending of $900 million. Earlier in the year, the studio was projecting sales of $1.1 billion to $2.2 billion.

Still, Nickerson said, the studio believes the two high-definition disc formats will catch on with the public even faster than DVD because all three platforms for viewing--set-top, computer and video game console--are available in the first year. With DVD, the first computers equipped with DVD drives shipped in late 1998, more than a year after the format launched, while the first game console that could play DVDs was the PlayStation 2, which launched in November 2000.

By year's end, Nickerson said, WHV projects that there will be 1.7 million high-definition playback devices in consumer homes: 500,000 dedicated HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc set-top players, 1 million game consoles (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and 200,000 computers with high-definition disc drives.
http://news.com.com/Blu-ray+disc+lur...3-6123837.html





The Long Zoom
Steven Johnson

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in. To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences, starting with Charles and Ray Eames's proto-long-zoom “Powers of Ten” documentary of the 70’s, which took the viewer from the outer cosmos to the atoms spinning in the hand of a man lying by the lake in Chicago. But a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game.

The designer of the game happens to be both the most famous and most critically acclaimed designer in the young medium’s history: Will Wright, the 46-year-old creator of the blockbuster hits SimCity and the Sims. When I visited with Wright recently, he was sitting in a greenhouselike office on the roof of an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif., a few miles west of Oakland, where his studio is based. For the first few minutes of our meeting, Wright was having trouble with the atmosphere of the game, which is called Spore. He was trying to explain how some players will be able to create entire galaxies populated by artificial life forms when the game is introduced sometime late next year. He had pulled up the highest level of Spore — where the player gets to create and colonize a new planet — to demonstrate the way in which the game simulates the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs. But before he could colonize the planet, he had to cultivate an environment hospitable to life by heating up the surface or cooling it down and by adding moisture. Unfortunately, Spore’s planetary simulator —- like our own atmosphere — is vulnerable to the inconvenient truths of runaway feedback loops; as Wright added a little heat to his planet, it quickly spiraled into a molten fireball. And so our conversation lurched to a halt as Wright tried to get the right balance.

“O.K., now we’re finally cooling off,” he said, clicking furiously on his computer screen. “The temperature’s going down, so we can get more water in here. Oh, now we’ve got way too much atmosphere.” While adjusting the planet, he paused long enough to say: “It’s kind of like that labyrinth game where you’re rolling the ball around the maze, trying to drop it in the hole. Except we’ve got these inertial effects, where your planet starts heating up, and you’re trying to slow it down, but you get these runaway greenhouse effects.” He turned back to the screen. “O.K., our temperature’s pretty good; our atmosphere’s pretty good. Now let’s see if we can add water.”

This atmospheric balancing act is emblematic of Wright’s whole career: hitting that elusive sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility, between highbrow concepts and lowbrow diversion. If he can get the atmosphere-building tool to work, it could be both an addictive game-play element and, at the same time, a hands-on lesson in the dynamics of atmospheric systems. The challenge here is, ultimately, a smaller version of the larger challenge that faces Spore. No one doubts that the game will be the most ambitious work in the history of this new medium, whenever it is released. But for it to succeed as a game, it can’t just be complex. It also has to be fun.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s Will Wright. This is the guy who made the urban planning simulation SimCity into one of the all-time top-selling games in history. There is probably no one alive who has a comparable track record of combining arcane scientific theories and compulsively addictive entertainment.

But even Wright hasn’t tried to simulate an entire universe before.

I got a first glimpse of Spore six years ago, when I visited Wright to talk to him about the Sims Online, the networked version of the massive international hit, the Sims. We talked about the Sims Online and his general design philosophy for an hour or so, and then he cut off our conversation abruptly and said, “Let me show you something else that I’m really excited about — but you can’t write about it yet.” He then proceeded to show me a sequence of animations that looked, to my eyes at least, like the trip-out special-effects sequence at the end of “2001.” I had no idea what I was even looking at. It wasn’t at all clear where the game was or if it was a game at all.

Spore has progressed mightily over the past six years — an eternity in game-development time — though an official start date has yet to be set by its producer, Electronic Arts, the world’s largest game maker. “What you’re doing in Spore is layer by layer creating an entire world that at the end of the day is entirely yours: the creatures, the vehicles, the cities, the planets,” Wright explained. Those layers map onto different spatial scales that you advance through as you play: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization and space. (As in most traditional games, once you have completed a level, you can always go back to it. A skilled gamer might be able to reach the highest level after 30 hours of play, but like all of Wright’s creations, the game has no definite ending.) As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80’s like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough “DNA points” or “evolutionary credits,” you acquire the use of a feature called the “creature editor,” and things start to get really interesting. You assemble a new life form to represent yourself using an almost comically intuitive tool. If you have the technical chops to assemble a Mr. Potato Head, you can build a creature in Spore. You start with a basic body type wrapped around a standard skeleton, and then you can pretty much do whatever you want to it: stretch it out, condense it, add seven asymmetrical legs and one pincer, give it eyes on both sides of its head or wrap a polka-dot skin texture around it. I’ve seen creatures designed as exact replicas of the Care Bears, and I’ve seen creatures that look like H.R. Giger’s sketches for “Alien.”

Once you have assembled your creature, you deposit it in a functioning ecosystem, a computer-generated world populated by plants, food, water, weather, predators and prey. At first you guide a single creature, instructing it to forage, hunt, drink, sleep, mate; your strategy evolves depending on the needs of your creature and the opportunities and threats presented by the environment. As you struggle your way through this early stage, you earn more DNA points that allow you to add new attributes to your creature — like humanlike intelligence — and eventually graduate to the next level, where you control a group of creatures that form a primitive tribe, augmented by simple tools. (Wright showed me a tribe bonding around a campfire, playing drums and dancing, before heading out for a communal hunting expedition.) At this point, the player moves from questions of basic metabolism to social dynamics: Is your tribe a band of warriors or a peace-loving commune? Is it intent on exploiting new technologies? Or does it focus on low-tech social camaraderie?

When your tribe has reached a sufficient level of sophistication, it will begin to form cities, and the player shifts to issues of trade and commerce or constructing roads and buildings. All the while, decisions made at earlier stages of the game continue to shape the current stage: adopting a carnivorous lifestyle in the creature stage changes the activities available to your subsequent tribe; a tribe of warriors will have a harder time building alliances with other cities when it reaches that stage. Eventually, you ascend to a United Nations-like perspective as you try to unify an entire planet divided between rival civilizations. Once you successfully pass from the “clash of civilizations” stage to the “end of history,” the game grants you that ultimate in Hegelian rewards: a spaceship. And then you’re off terraforming other planets and exploring an entire universe teeming with Spore life.

The different levels of Spore call for radically different styles of game play, each a subtle tribute to a canonical game of the past that influenced Wright. There is an elegance to those allusions, but as a game design strategy, it’s a risky move; most games don’t force you to juggle different genres. “When I looked at each scale,” Wright said, “the game play just seemed kind of natural to me: at the cellular level, you’d be PacMan; at the city level, it’d be Populous. I was worried about that, because mixed-genre games don’t do that well. But eventually we just decided to break the rules, and the genres would just be a kind of landmark that the players would recognize.”

To date, Wright has publicly demonstrated Spore on four occasions. Three of them were major game-industry conferences, all of which have triggered a frenzy of online analysis and debate. (Video clips of those demos have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.) But for people who still think of game design as the province of nerds and arrested adolescents, Wright’s most striking public demo came earlier this summer in San Francisco during an onstage conversation with the musician and artist Brian Eno in front of a thousand rapt fans gathered at the Herbst Theater. The two men riffed comfortably onstage, talking about “generative” art that evolves in unpredictable ways, often determined by the audience and not the original creator. Eno played one or two examples of his generative compositions, and Wright showed off a few levels of Spore.

“We’ve both been working on similar lines,” Eno said recently on the phone from his Notting Hill studio when I asked him about the connections between his work and Wright’s, “and I suppose we’ve converged. Instead of making fixed definitive things that we put out into the world, I think we’ve both decided that it’s much more interesting to make things that even we can’t predict.”

One explanation for the widespread interest in Spore is the gaming industry’s recent troubles. Sales have been uneven, and the best-seller lists are stacked with franchise hits, games whose basic conventions were established years ago, like the Madden football series, the controversial Grand Theft Auto titles and Wright’s own Sims franchise, which has thus far spun off more than a dozen sequels and expansion packs. When you factor in the moral panics over violent gaming emanating from Washington, it makes for a somewhat depressing time to be a game developer. Spore promises an escape from this bleak present: the game itself is about as violent as a cartoon version of Animal Planet, which should come as welcome relief for an industry tired of public attacks on Grand Theft Auto as a corrupter of youth.

Another factor in the hype is Wright’s extraordinary track record. His original breakthrough game, SimCity, released in 1989, helped inaugurate an entire genre of gaming: the “god game,” in which the player supervises a bustling and multifaceted system, managing resources, juggling different objectives. Visit the racks at a game store and you’ll see dozens of titles that descend from Wright’s original design for SimCity, games that let you manage a railroad empire or an amusement park or a zoo. (There are at least three games currently on the market that let you recreate Ancient Rome.) The Sims — released in 2000 — narrowed the god-game vista to the realm of the living room and the neighborhood. It went on to become the best-selling PC game of all time, in part because it attracted an unusual number of female players. Instead of allowing you to create the civic infrastructure for a vast metropolis, the Sims let players explore the more quotidian decision-making of home economics: paying the bills, buying furniture and appliances, cooking dinner for the kids. It is one of the resounding paradoxes of the game industry that its all-time best seller consists largely of performing household chores.

The sales history for the Sims is, of course, part of the reason that so many people are following Spore so closely. Since its introduction, more than 70 million copies of the original game and its spinoffs have been sold, generating $1.6 billion in sales. (The biggest Hollywood moneymaker of all-time, “Titanic,” grossed $1.8 billion worldwide.)

But Spore — which will reportedly cost about $20 million to develop — promises to be more than just a blockbuster diversion. As Wright’s appearance with Eno suggests, the game perhaps deserves to be seen as a work of art first and foremost, a way of seeing and making sense of the world. If it succeeds, it may be in part because of the way its long-zoom perspective resonates with this particular moment in time. “I don’t know if we’re thinking about ‘powers of 10’ more, but we definitely bump into that perspective now in all kinds of cultural contexts,” says the game designer Ralph Koster, who wrote one of the best books to date about games and culture, “A Theory of Fun.” “But Will has definitely been thinking about it. There was always something powers-of-10-ish about SimCity. And way, way back in SimEarth” — Wright’s 1990 game — “there was a window that would pop up and say, ‘This key reserved for future expansion for putting your SimCity into your SimEarth.”’

“It’s funny how many people, average people who aren’t science buffs or hard-core gamers, get the elegance of the theme — the powers of 10 idea,” Wright told me in his Emeryville office, having finally given up on creating a viable atmosphere. “Everybody has a different take on it: for some people, it has a religious theme; for others, it’s awe at nature and science. But everybody seems to understand that it’s a valuable perspective, and it’s a perspective that they like to have. In a way, what I’m trying to do is connect the almost inconceivable universal scale to the deeply personal, because what you do in the game is deeply personal.”

The long-zoom perspective is one of the key ways in which Wright’s work dovetails with Eno’s. Their talk in San Francisco was sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, an organization created to facilitate thinking on immense temporal scales: a thousand years or beyond. (The “long now” is a coinage of Eno’s, and the group’s most famous project to date is the Clock of the Long Now, an engineering marvel designed to keep time for thousands of years.) “One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,” Eno told me, “is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this.”

And arguably the best way to come to terms with that feeling is to explore those different scales of experience directly, to move from the near-invisible realm of microbes to the vast distances of galaxies. Of all the forms of culture available to us today, games may well be the most effective at conveying that elusive perspective, precisely because they are so immersive and participatory and because their design can be so open-ended. “I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”

The idea of a video game’s tackling such complex subject matter may strike some readers as surprising, but in truth staggeringly complex games have long appeared prominently on the gaming best-seller lists. One of the most lucrative franchises in the history of computer games is the Civilization series, which lets players recreate the entire course of human economic and technological history, experimenting with different political and legal systems, exploring alternate time lines of scientific development. The collaborative worlds of hugely popular, networked online games like World of Warcraft have evolved entire economies and social systems that mimic the complexity of small nation-states in the real world. Spore may be more ambitious in scope than these games, but its two most important innovations lie elsewhere: in its system for generating user-created creatures and in the way it allows players to share their creations with others.

Conventional game development follows a predictable pattern: the game designers decide which objects and characters will inhabit the world of the game, and then animators create computer models for those objects and characters, which are then inserted into a game in a fixed state — an animation of Tiger Woods swinging a golf club or James Bond reaching for a gun or a character in the Sims taking out the trash. But Spore’s open-ended approach to creature design fundamentally broke that system. Before I met with Wright, Spore’s executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, gave me a tour of the Spore studio and introduced me to a barefoot, speed-talking “technology fellow” named Chris Hecker, who had helped develop Spore’s unique animation system. Hecker had a perfect one-liner for the technical hurdles the team faced: “The question is, How do you do animations for things you’ve never seen before?”

The solution Wright and his team hit upon revolves around something called “procedural animation,” a way for the game designer to model certain key behaviors — walk, run, grab, fight — without necessarily knowing anything about the basic body type of the creature itself. If you design a creature with five legs asymmetrically scattered around its body, the Spore animation engine will figure out how such a creature would walk. To demonstrate the adaptability of the system, Hecker pulled up a collection of a dozen Spore creatures on his monitor, each with a strikingly distinct body architecture. The initial image was comical enough: it looked as if the bizarre Cambrian-era fossils that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in “Wonderful Life” had been reassembled for a police lineup. Some looked like slugs, some like spiders, some like extras from “Where the Wild Things Are.”

And then Hecker hit a key, and they all, miraculously, did a back flip, each in its own decidedly idiosyncratic way.

But surely, I asked, given the open-ended, no-two-creatures-alike nature of the editor, there are going to be some creatures that have body types that won’t perform certain actions? Hecker and Bradshaw nodded emphatically. They know that a certain percentage of their users will be building creatures deliberately designed to foil the procedural animation system. Those creatures won’t likely be “fit” in a traditional evolutionary sense, in that they will be less skilled at collecting food or avoiding predators. But they will be perversely satisfying to players keen on exploring the boundaries of the Spore architecture. Hecker pulled up a new lineup to demonstrate a clapping animation that included a creature whose cranium is so inconveniently located that clapping forces him to slap both his hands against the side of his head. It looked like slapstick comedy of the highest order — vaudeville meets “Monsters, Inc. ”

“Our philosophy is,” Bradshaw said, “if it’s going to break, it should break funny.”

The procedural approach has another fringe benefit, one that helped bring about Spore’s other major innovation. Characters and objects can be compressed down to incredibly small files. An entire planet in Spore — teeming with plants, weather and creatures — takes up about 80K of memory. By comparison, a typical song on your iPod is about 50 times larger. You could download an entire galaxy of Spore planets before you could download all the tracks on “Dark Side of the Moon.”

That small file size is crucial to the way the game allows players to share their creations with other players in the Spore universe. As you work your way through the Spore levels, your creatures are automatically sent back to the central Spore file servers, where they are then used to populate the worlds of other players. This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson’s notion of Panspermia — the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic “spores” of life from other planets. (Dyson’s concept is also the origin of the game’s title.) When you land on a new planet in the game’s final stage, it may be teeming with multiple exotic species, all of whom have evolved separately on other computers around the world, guided by the tastes and imagination of complete strangers. But these creatures will, crucially, have lives of their own once they have found their ways onto your machine. They will not be controlled by other players as you interact with them on your screen. Once they have migrated to your computer, they will act autonomously, based on the procedural animation and artificial-intelligence algorithms of the Spore software. By the same token, the creatures that you have lovingly brought to life will spread throughout the alternate universes of other Spore players, struggling for existence on their own, independent from your direct control.

In this respect, Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games — like World of Warcraft — where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design — the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 — was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”

It remains an open question whether this model will take hold with today’s players, who are increasingly used to the social dimension of online play. “I’m obviously biased toward the online worlds,” Koster said, “but the fact that I’ll never encounter someone else’s galactic empire that actually has some human brain behind it depresses me a little, because that would be awfully cool — especially with the scope and scale we’re talking about with Spore.”

When you visit the Spore studio in Emeryville, the largest open room looks, at first glance, like a standard well-financed Bay Area software company: the double-height loft-ceilings, the bean-bag chairs slung around an oversize monitor, the barefoot employees. But the art strung up on the walls suggests that something different is being concocted here. There are beautiful renderings of imagined Spore planets that demonstrate the range of aesthetics possible in the game: a lush, organic world called Shittake Moon; a surreal globe called Crabclaw with landmasses shaped like giant crustaceans. Everyone’s desk is populated by plastic action figures of Spore creatures, manufactured in-house by Wright’s employees using a 3-D printer that can generate a physical toy in a matter of minutes from a computer model. (Electronic Arts is investigating the possibility of selling customized Spore critters in toy stores as a side business.)

As Bradshaw, the executive producer, gave me a tour of the office, I found myself being reminded of something, but for a few minutes I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then it hit me: the general feel of the place reminded me of my son’s kindergarten classroom, with its walls covered with renderings of imaginary worlds and creatures and its shelves filled with toys designed to teach and entertain at the same time.

When we finally made it up to his office, I asked Wright about the educational side of his game. “The big underlying theme is creativity,” he said. “We want to prove to the players that they can make these really cool things that they never thought they could make. It’s the computer as an amplifier of your imagination.” Like all of Wright’s games, Spore is likely to attract a broad range of age groups. A tech-savvy 7-year-old could easily obsess over the game, as could a mid-50’s reader of Jared Diamond or E.O. Wilson.

Of course, some of the content of Spore is fanciful. The “DNA points” that players accumulate have no real-world analogue, for instance, and thus far no one — that we know of — has been able to grow a life-sustaining environment on a lifeless planet. “I’ve had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution,” Wright said, “and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we’re teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I’ve even designed some of them — and it’s just not as fun.” But, of course, there’s one crucial way in which Spore breaks from intelligent design. The universe of the game is not dominated by a single, all-powerful creator. It’s a universe governed by a million intelligent designers, each unleashing his or her creations to be fruitful and multiply, to conquer and befriend, to fly spaceships and fashion planets.

Despite the fictions, many of the themes of Spore are immensely valuable ones, particularly in an age of environmental crisis: the fragility of life, the connection between micro- and macro- scales, the complex networks of ecosystems and food webs, the impact of new technology on social systems. Spore’s players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale — a single creature’s decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle — can end up having global repercussions. They will detect similarities between one level of the game and another, the complex balancing act of global trade mirroring the complex balancing act of building a sustainable environment. And traveling through a simulated universe, from cells to constellations, will, ideally, make them more curious about the real-world universe they already inhabit — and show them that they have the power to shape that universe as well.

“What’s very interesting about games,” Eno said, “is that they let you begin thinking about possibilities when you’re young enough to incorporate them into your life. So I think a game that says to people, You can make things that then have independent lives, that’s already quite an amazing idea. And then these things can interact with other people’s objects — that’s quite a grown-up idea.”

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry — you can piggyback everything on it.

“But my wife made a good point when I was talking about this the other day. She says it’s important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you’re set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren’t entertaining. So I think I’d have three days of Spore and two days of obligatory Latin.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html





FDA Gets Mixed Advice on Nanotechnology
Andrew Bridges

The government must balance close oversight of the fast-growing field of nanotechnology against the risk of stifling new development, a Food and Drug Administration conference was told Tuesday.

These contrasting views emerged from a host of experts that the agency brought together to how it should regulate products containing tiny particles, some as small as one-millionth the width of the head of a pin.

Increasingly, those submicroscopic particles are being incorporated in the thousands of products overseen by the FDA, including drugs, foods, cosmetics and medical devices.

Those products account for roughly 20 cents of every dollar spent each year by U.S. consumers, giving the FDA a key role in both safeguarding the public and guiding the future development of nanotechnology.

"The success of nanotechnology will rely in large part on how FDA plays its regulatory role," said Michael Taylor of the University of Maryland's School of Public Health.

The key is to use science to weigh both the benefits and the risks of nanotechnology, said Matthew Jaffe of the U.S. Council of International Business. That's a balance the FDA already seeks to strike in assessing other products.

"We believe the regulatory process that is in place is significant and adequate to address the issues before the FDA," Jaffe said.

Nanotechnology involves the manufacture and manipulation of materials at the molecular or atomic level. At that scale, materials are measured in nanometers or billionths of a meter. Nanoscale materials are generally less than 100 nanometers in diameter. A sheet of paper, in comparison, is 100,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

The FDA doesn't believe nanotechnology is inherently unsafe, but does acknowledge that materials at the nano scale can pose different safety issues than do things that are far larger.

The FDA wants to learn of new and emerging science issues related to nanotechnology, especially in regard to safety, said Randall Lutter, the agency's associate commissioner.

The topic vexes other countries as well.

"We cannot assume what we know about bulk-size substances applies to the nanotechnology-size substances," Philippe Martin, of the European Commission, told the meeting.

Martin cited the ring he wears: it's made of gold, is yellowish and inert. But take a gold nanoparticle one nanometer in size, and it turns both blue and mildly reactive. Bump the size up to three nanometers, and the gold turns a reddish hue and now acts like a catalyst.

"How do we assess such a tremendous difference in property?" said Delara Karkan, of Health Canada, in citing the same example.

Kathy Jo Wetter, of the civil society organization ETC Group, told the FDA it was understaffed, underfunded and ill-equipped to deal with nanotechnology. Wetter said hundreds of nano products have already crept onto the market with little scrutiny.

"Unfortunately, so far the U.S. government has acted as a cheerleader and not as a regulator," Wetter said.

Carolyn Cairns, a senior researcher at Consumers Union, told the FDA that nanomaterials should be regulated like any other new chemical substances and subjected to a full battery of tests before use.

Martin Philbert, a University of Michigan professor of toxicology, counseled the FDA to "avoid overregulation while remaining vigilant."

"The key is to manage the risk while deriving the maximum possible benefit from these materials," Philbert said.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has cataloged more than 320 nanotech consumer products, including vitamin sprays, bedsheets and anti-bacterial food-storage bags.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-10-13-55-50





ABC's Accidental Posting Enables Blogger to Find Foley's Message Partner
AP

ABC News' fleeting, inadvertent publishing of a computer screen name enabled a blogger to track down and make public the identity of a former congressional page who traded salacious messages with former Rep. Mark Foley.

In breaking the story of the now-burgeoning scandal, the network last Friday posted on its Web site a series of instant message exchanges between Foley and the teenager, Jordan Edmund, now 21. Edmund's name was not included.

But in one exchange the network inadvertently left his screen name on. It was quickly discovered and removed, replaced by a version with the name redacted. But a blogger was able to retrieve the deleted file, go on a computer detective mission and uncover the former page's identity.

Edmund, who now works on Republican Rep. Ernest Istook's campaign for Oklahoma governor, has not responded to requests for an interview.

Attorney Stephen Jones said he is representing Edmund in matters related to his work as a page and in reference to Foley.

In a news conference Thursday, Istook praised his employee, said the former page would cooperate with investigators and asked reporters to leave him alone.

``This is a young man who is bright,'' Istook said. ``He is hard working. He does not deserve the public embarrassment that he's facing right now.

``I believe there is no justification for putting this young man in the national media spotlight when what he needs and deserves is Christian compassion,'' he added.

The blogger -- known as ``Wild Bill'' from the ``Passionate America'' site -- who discovered the former page's identity describes the computer detective mission in detail on his Web site. ABC has taken additional steps to make sure no one can access the deleted messages, a spokesman said.

``To be clear, no one visiting our Web site would have simply stumbled on the old version,'' ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/15695895.htm





YouTube Blocked Video Mocking Clinton Administration

Limits imposed on access to clip critical of Albright-run North Korea policy

The popular video-sharing YouTube site, which is being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion, limited access to a political ad that mocks the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea, but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable.

The company announced a "flagging" policy change just this week, about the time that a controversial spoof by Republican filmmaker David Zucker depicting former Secretary of State Madeline Albright as a cheerleader for Islamic terrorists started appearing with a warning page in front, requiring verification that a viewer is 18 before the video will appear.

The short film by Zucker, who worked with "Scary Movie 4," "Airplane!" and other comedies, reportedly had been offered to the Republican Party for use as an ad, but it was declined. Then it appeared on the Drudge Report and also on YouTube.

However, after a brief period of accessibility, the verification page started appearing on YouTube. It asked that: "This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up." Today the verification page on the spoof was removed.

Some other YouTube videos on stripping or other explicit activities have similar advisories; some don't. But the campaign video doesn't contain any of those typically objectionable items.

It contains depictions and references to Albright and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, with Albright presenting the dictator with a basketball and later singing Kum Ba Yah. At the same time, terrorists are sneaking past in the background or foreground.

The audio tells that, "Making nice to our enemies will not make them nice to us," and, "Some people think terrorists will change their ways if we only show them our good intentions."

The video continues, "But evil exists. History teaches that evil needs to be confronted. Evil dictators will be evil dictators no matter what we do.

"The security of the U.S. is not a game. Can we afford a party that treats it like one?" is how the video concludes.

YouTube's newest posting about such "flagging" came just a few days ago, as the political ad was making the rounds.

Maryrose, of The YouTube Team, said if any video viewer flags a video as inappropriate, it is forwarded to a queue for the company's customer support team to review.

"Videos are NEVER automatically removed simply because they've been flagged," Maryrose said. "Every single flagged video is reviewed by someone at YouTube who then determines if the video contains material that is against our terms of use."

If videos are flagged, viewers must sign in to watch.

And, the company said, sometimes flagged videos follow the companies guidelines, but "are not quite appropriate for all YouTube users. This could be due to a number of things – profanity, violence, adult content etc."

However, the political video contained none of those ingredients, unless satire also could be considered objectionable.

"The closest thing to an explicit image in the ad is a scene in which 'Albright' bends over and her skirt tears a bit in the seat, hardly the stuff that sets FCC commissioners' hearts aflutter," said a comment from Matthew Sheffield on the weblog Newbusters.org.

The commentator noted YouTube has "dismembered conservative and politically incorrect speech" in the past, pulling videos critical of Islam and even banning popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who is also a WND columnist.

Sexually suggestive videos were found on the site unblocked, as were entire episodes of television shows. So was a clip from a movie depicting the assassination of President Bush, "Death of a President."

"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."

Google has come under its own criticism for holding an anti-conservative or anti-Republican agenda. It has been criticized in the past, according to a WND report for hosting "Paiderastia: The Boy Love Revival" site on its weblog.

It has in the past censored various Christian-themed ads, but allowed porn ads. In the past it has produced "President Bush" when searchers hunt for "miserable failure."

And a Google search for "liar" produced as the top choice a site for a biography for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a close ally with President Bush in the war on terror.

Sheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"

jdhawk noted in the Newsbusters dialogue that Rush Limbaugh has been doing acerbic lampoons of "the Defeatocrats" for some time. "They are not only hilarious, but get right to the point. Of course, one can only visualize a scene when listening to one of his barbed zingers. Zucker has done to video what Rush has been doing to the audio genre. It can only be hoped that the RNC sees its way to release Zucker's work to a wider audience."

Bloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."

The New York Times even was critical of the censorship of Malkin's piece, titled "First They Came," which talked of authors, politicians and filmmakers who had been made targets by Islamists.

"This is not to suggest that Ms. Malkin's video would not be particularly offensive to some people. There is little that Ms. Malkin says or does that is not. But it is hard to imagine what YouTube hopes to gain by punting such content, or what sort of uphill rhetoric battle it is setting itself up for when it does so," the Times report said.

One discussion board contributor responded: "Michelle Malkin offends people who spend every waking minute, and probably a significant portion of their dreams, scouring the universe for reasons to be offended. You only get the big target on your back from the MSM when you're conservative and you're scoring points on them with impunity. Go Michelle!"
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/articl...TICLE_ID=52405


Re:Subjective "Reporting"
enrevanche

subjective, let's see a quote from a blogger

"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."

let's see this quote from the article

Sheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"

and another gem of reporting

Bloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."

This article is an opinion piece, it looks nothing like a factual article. It uses quotes form unknown bloggers as evidence. It presents only one side of the story. It does not try for even a second to be objective. For a factual article, it does not know when the movie was posted, how long it was freely availble, how long it was restricted and when it came unrestricted again. It makes a big deal out of nothing because youtubes policy is to investigate after someone marks a video as objectionable. These idiots would be all over youtube if they ran a different policy because children could be potentially exposed to nudity.

This article is about a censorship that is not even a censorship but the normal processes at google. This article simply attempts to resell the story to the American public that the media has liberal bias.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/10/13/1257215.shtml





Campus News

Generation Y Demands Privacy
Emelin Sosa

Generation Y is finally getting an overdue reality check on Internet security and realizing that Big Brother is online - just a mouse click away and going nowhere.

According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 90 percent of American 18 to 29 year olds are online. Unfortunately, spyware and unwanted programs being secretly loaded onto computers are also serious threats online. About 93 million American adults have experienced at least one computer problem in the past year that is consistent with problems caused by spyware or viruses. Nine out of 10 Internet users say they had to adjust their online behavior out of fear of falling victim to software intrusions, according to Pew Internet and American Life.

When the CAN-SPAM Act, which made it a misdemeanor to send spam with falsified header information, became law in 2003, many anti-spam activists greeted the new law with disappointment. The activists stated the Act would not prevent any spam but it seemed to give Federal approval to the practice and it was feared that spam would increase as a result of the law.

More than half of all Internet users complain that spam is a big problem and 53 percent of e-mail users say spam has made them less trusting of e-mail, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Over the summer the University Information Technology Services (UITS) sent e-mails to all students announcing the implementation of new spam filtering devices. The new appliances would identify over 95 percent of the spam coming onto campus, as opposed to the two percent currently identified. The spam would carry the tag {SPAM} in front of the e-mail subject.

"I get less spam now than before," said Megan Madariaga, a 7th-semester biomedical engineering major.

UITS also upgraded the university firewall to block some common file sharing programs through which viruses might try to infect computers. According to the UITS help center, information is collected for every Internet session to help performance issues. This information includes IP address of the local and remote host, port number, traffic amount and a date/time stamp. The information is kept for about 100 days.

Viruses, spyware and spam are not the only things Internet users have to worry about, online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace have moved to the frontlines on the fight to regain online privacy.

Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and losing only to the popular iPod according to a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey based LLC specializing in research concerning the college student market.

When Facebook announced it would become an open network, last month and anybody with an e-mail address would be able to join, a simultaneous uproar was heard in many schools across the country. Suddenly, a generation who did not see sharing music as stealing felt their privacy was been violated.

"I don't think the issue is privacy but control over who can see my profile," said Jessy Amiri, a 3rd-semester psychology and chemistry double major.

Even when the privacy settings are used people can still see profile pictures and a person status, Amiri said.

According to the Associated Press, from large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, incoming college students are getting lectured on the risks of Internet postings, particularly on social networks such as Facebook because potential employers might be looking at these sites.

"Employers have to realize that a student's social life and work should be kept separate," Amiri said.

Students should not be judged by employers solely based on their online profiles, Amiri said.

The double-edged sword of placing information on the Internet to share with others also means that prospective employers will be able to gain easy access to it, said Michael H. Kerntke, Chief Information Officer.

"I would question the wisdom of placing information on a `public' web site that I would not want my employer to become privy to," he said.

"The Internet is a very public place and anything you put on there is your responsibility," said Carolina Aguila, a 7th-semester ecology and evolutionary biology major.
http://www.dailycampus.com/media/sto...lycamp us.com





NPR’s News Chief Resigns After 9 Months
Katharine Q. Seelye

William K. Marimow, the top news executive at National Public Radio and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, has resigned after nine months in the job, the broadcasting network announced today. He agreed to become the ombudsman for the network.

The move is one of several changes within the network’s news division and signals a period of instability as many jobs are being filled hastily on an interim basis until permanent replacements can be found.

As part of its restructuring, the network is creating a new managing editor position to supervise shows and newscasts and has temporarily hired Richard Harris, who spent nine years as senior producer of ABC’s “Nightline” and “This Week” and was a former executive producer for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Some NPR employees who attended a staff meeting this morning when the changes were announced described it as harsh and even “nasty.” They also said that some of their colleagues praised Mr. Marimow for raising the network’s level of journalism.

Mr. Marimow, the former editor of The Baltimore Sun and an investigative reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won his Pulitzers, was hired in 2004 to help strengthen and expand the news division after NPR received a bequest of $235 million from the late Joan B. Kroc, widow of Ray A. Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. Since 1999, NPR’s weekly audience has doubled to almost 26 million listeners.

The network produces and distributes 150 hours of programming a week in conjunction with 815 public radio stations.

Mr. Marimow oversaw all activities of the news division, including approximately 350 employees and 36 bureaus around the world and such award-winning programs as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” As ombudsman, he will serve as the listeners’ representative, with no news responsibilities.

In a memo to the staff, Jay Kernis, the head of programming, cited three goals for the next few months: to replace Mr. Marimow, “maintain continuity in the division and advance our news growth projects, including creation of the digital newsroom.” He said the network had retained the Sucherman Consulting Group to conduct a national search for a replacement for Mr. Marimow and would also use an internal search committee.

Ellen Weiss, the national desk editor, is taking Mr. Marimow’s duties temporarily.

Colleagues said that Mr. Marimow, a long-time print journalist and investigative reporter, was perceived as having failed to adapt quickly enough to radio, particularly as radio converges with the Internet. They also said that he was on the wrong side of an internal power struggle.

He becomes the first major casualty of the two-week-old tenure of Ken Stern, NPR’s new chief executive, who replaced Kevin Klose, the chief executive who had hired Mr. Marimow from the Baltimore Sun. Mr. Klose remains at NPR as president. In promoting Mr. Marimow to vice president of news in February, Mr. Klose had overruled an internal search committee that included Mr. Stern and Mr. Kernis and had not recommended Mr. Marimow.

In announcing Mr. Marimow’s promotion back then, Mr. Kernis had said: “Bill is a dedicated journalist who has already demonstrated ability to make a difference at NPR News, both in our newsgathering and in the ways we translate it to emerging platforms that are critical to the expansion of our public service.”

In his memo today, Mr. Kernis said: “Bill leaves a newsroom that is stronger in its investigations, research and daily reporting. Bill’s skills also make him a great fit for the ombudsman role, which demands an appreciation for powerful journalism and how NPR delivers it day in, day out.”

In his own memo to the staff, Mr. Marimow said that during his tenure, he had created new beats, expanded the news division’s contribution to the network’s Web site, NPR.org, and had produced “a steady stream of solid investigative projects.”

He said that working at NPR had been “a revelation and an inspiration,” adding: “A revelation because I’ve learned about the beauty and the impact of the world of sound on the human heart and mind; an inspiration, because the work you do makes NPR a bastion of great journalism in a world in which great journalism is in short supply.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/bu...rtner=homepage





EU Rejects Spam Maker's Trademark Bid
AP

The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.'s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word "spam" in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name.

The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food, said that "the most evident meaning of the term SPAM for the consumers ... will certainly be unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail, rather than a designation for canned spicy ham."

The word Spam - short for "Spiced Ham" - was coined by Hormel in 1937 as part of a marketing campaign so successful the word became virtually synonymous with canned meat.

Its use to describe unwanted electronic communication is a reference to the popular 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy sketch in which Vikings in a diner repeatedly drown out conversation with the chant "Spam! Spam! Spam!"

While Hormel has embraced the pop culture reference - even helping to market "Spamalot," the musical comedy based on Monty Python's work - it has taken less kindly to attempts by businesses to incorporate the word into their product names. The company has been embroiled in a string of trademark disputes over the matter in the United States and elsewhere, fighting product names such as SpamBop, Spam Arrest, and Spam Cube.

"We do not object to use of this slang term to describe (unsolicited commercial e-mail)," the company said on its Web site, "although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term."

"Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-18-48-16





Venture Firm Shares a Jackpot
Miguel Helft and Matt Richtel

Even in Silicon Valley, it is rare for so much money to be made so fast — and by so few.

The biggest winners in the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube by Google are YouTube’s founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have parlayed their stakes in the 19-month-old start-up into Google shares that are probably worth tens of millions. YouTube’s roughly 60 employees are no doubt celebrating as well.

But only one venture capital firm — Sequoia Capital — got in on what has turned out to be one of the hottest Internet deals since Google went public in 2004.

Sequoia, which is among the most successful venture firms in Silicon Valley, invested a total of $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006. It may be walking away with more than 43 times that amount. Its stake in YouTube has been estimated at roughly 30 percent, which would give it a value of $495 million.

That kind of payday, especially for an investment that is less than 12 months old, is unusual even in Silicon Valley. But it is not likely to rank among Sequoia’s biggest. The firm, which was founded in 1972, has backed a roster of technology superstars including Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Yahoo and Google itself.

Sequoia’s go-it-alone investment in YouTube represents the kind of aggressive move for which Sequoia is known. A more traditional and safer approach would have been to share the risk and rewards with other investors. That is especially true with an early-stage investment in a company that since its inception has faced the prospect of costly lawsuits over the copyrighted material that peppers the site.

“They had an absurdly high level of confidence with what they were doing,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed.

Sequoia did not return calls seeking comment.

The connection between Sequoia and YouTube can be traced back to Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Hurley’s days at PayPal. After PayPal was bought by eBay, the two men were looking for a new company to start. They hit upon the idea of a site that would help users exchange video files.

In the summer of 2005, the pair showed their site to another PayPal alumnus, Roelof Botha. Mr. Botha, who had been chief financial officer at PayPal, was by then a partner at Sequoia. In November 2005, he agreed to invest $3.5 million in YouTube. Five months later, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the site.

“It wouldn’t be surprising if they owned 30 percent,” said Michael Kwatinetz, a founding general partner at Azure Capital Partners.

The fact that the man who is perhaps Sequoia’s best-known partner, Michael Moritz, sits on the board of Google could have given the search giant more insights into the legal risks associated with YouTube, and therefore more confidence in pursuing a deal, Mr. Kedrosky said.

The deal by firms that share an investor is right out of the playbook of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture firm that imported from Japan the notion of a keiretsu, or network of companies with interlocking relationships, Mr. Kedrosky said.

“The whole idea of the keiretsu was friends selling to friends,” he said. “The model worked gangbusters for Kleiner Perkins.”

Venture firms like Sequoia typically raise funds from large institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments. They then invest those funds in promising start-ups, although they often end up with more misses than hits. At successful venture firms — and Sequoia ranks among the most successful — hits on the scale of YouTube more than make up for the misses.

A venture firm makes money only when the start-ups it has financed are sold or go public. It then splits profits among its investors after taking a share, which can be 20 to 25 percent.

The YouTube deal was the first major acquisition in the booming Internet video sector. In a conference call, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, called it “one of many investments that Google will be making to make sure that video has its proper place in people’s online lifestyle on the Internet worldwide.”

A Google spokesman said Mr. Schmidt was not necessarily talking about more acquisitions. But the prospect of more deals still has other venture capitalists and entrepreneurs salivating.

“It’s good to hope,” said Peter Clemente, chief marketing officer of ManiaTV, a Denver company that produces live video programming for the Internet. ManiaTV is backed by Benchmark Capital, Intel Capital and Centennial Partners.

Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners in Boston, said, “This is obviously the talk of the sector.” Polaris has invested $11 million in Heavy.com, an Internet video site founded in 1999 that aims at men ages 18 to 34. Mr. Hirshland called the deal the “first major venture-level return for an online video company, a sector that’s probably the most-watched and commented-on sector around the Internet.” He added: “It’s certainly the most hyped.”

The possibility of hype is leading some to worry about a bubble.

“It certainly starts to heat up the space a little bit,” said Mr. Kwatinetz, warning that Internet video might follow the same trajectory as, say, reality television, which was ignited by the success of “Survivor,” a show that was followed by a long list of imitators.

Indeed, the success of YouTube, as well as MySpace, the No. 2 video site on the Internet, has spawned a generation of competitors focused on the creation and sharing of videos, said Josh Felser, president of Grouper, a video sharing site purchased this year by Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65 million.

“There are hundreds,” Mr. Felser said. Some companies have already risen above the fray. In March, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital announced it had invested an undisclosed sum in vMix, a site that lets people upload videos and slide shows.

In April, Veoh Networks, which lets people share and watch videos, received $12.5 million from Spark Capital, Time Warner, and the Tornante Company, which is controlled by the former Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner.

Also in April, Revver, a video sharing site, received $8.7 million from the venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners, among others. The company has since received more funding from Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner New Media Investments.

Joe Lazlo, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, said the companies that are attracting funding are ones that are finding ways to differentiate themselves. He said one creative concept was that of Break.com, which allows people to post videos, then buys the more popular ones and runs ads with them.

But so far at least, Break.com is not biting at venture capital offers. Keith Richman, its chief executive, said the company had declined financing a number of times as it tried to build the business on its own.

Mr. Felser, the president of Grouper, said there was a limit to how much a video creation and sharing company can hope to grow independently, because of the expense of bandwidth and advertising infrastructure.

Katie Hafner contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/te.../10payday.html





With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again
Miguel Helft

For Jawed Karim, the $100,000 or so he would have to spend on a master’s degree at Stanford was never daunting. He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, the online payment company he had joined early on, was bought by eBay.

On Monday, still early in his studies for the fall term, he got lucky again. This time he may have hit the Internet equivalent of the multistate PowerBall.

Mr. Karim is the third of the three founders of the video site YouTube, which Google has agreed to buy for $1.65 billion. He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas about a Web site where users could share video. But academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business.

So while his partners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen built the company and went on to become Internet and media celebrities, he quietly went back to class, working toward a degree in computer science.

Mr. Karim, who is 27, became visibly uncomfortable when the subject turned to money, and he would not say what he stands to make when Google’s purchase of YouTube is completed. He said only that he is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, though he owns less of the company than his two partners, whose stakes in the company are likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some estimates. The deal was so enormous, he says, that his share was still plenty big.

“The sheer size of the acquisition almost makes the details irrelevant,” Mr. Karim said.

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet — something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching.

“There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. But his chosen path will not preclude another stint at a start-up. “If I see another opportunity like YouTube, I can always do that,” he said.

David L. Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford, said Mr. Karim’s choice was unusual.

“I’m impressed that given his success in business he decided to do the master’s program here,” Mr. Dill said. “The tradition here has been in the other direction,” he said, pointing to the founders of Google and Yahoo, who left Stanford for the business world.

Mr. Karim met Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen when all three of them worked at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, netting Mr. Karim a few million dollars, they often talked about starting another company.

By early 2005, all three had left PayPal. They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions at Max’s Opera Café, near Stanford, Mr. Karim said. Sometimes they met at Mr. Hurley’s place in Menlo Park or Mr. Karim’s apartment on Sand Hill Road, down the street from Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that would become YouTube’s financial backer.

Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential in turning his raw idea into what eventually became YouTube.

A YouTube spokeswoman said that the genesis of YouTube involved efforts by all three founders.

As early as February 2005, when the site was introduced, Mr. Karim said he and his partners had agreed that he would not become an employee, but rather an informal adviser to YouTube. He did not take a salary, benefits or even a formal title. “I was focused on school,” he said.

The decision meant that his stake in the company would be reduced, Mr. Karim said. “We negotiated something that we thought was fair.”

Roelof Botha, the Sequoia partner who led the investment in YouTube, said he would have preferred if Mr. Karim had stayed.

“I wish we could have kept him as part of the company,” Mr. Botha said. “He was very, very creative. We were doing everything we could to convince him to defer.”

Mr. Karim was born in East Germany in 1972. The family moved to West Germany a year later and to St. Paul, Minn., in 1992. His father, Naimul Karim, is a researcher at 3M and his mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.

“To develop new things and be aware of new things, this is our life,” Ms. Karim said, explaining her son’s interest in technology and learning.

After graduating from high school, Jawed Karim chose to go to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in part because it was the school that the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, and others who gave birth to the first popular Web browser attended.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to be the next Marc Andreessen, but it would be cool to be in the same place,” Mr. Karim said. In 2000, during his junior year, he dropped out to head to Silicon Valley, where he joined PayPal. He later finished his undergraduate degree by taking some courses online and some at Santa Clara University.

Armed with a video camera, Mr. Karim documented much of YouTube’s early life, including the meetings when the three discussed financing strategies and the brainstorming sessions in Mr. Hurley’s garage, where the company was hatched.

In his studio apartment in a residence hall for graduate students, he showed one of them, which he said was filmed in April 2005. In it, Mr. Chen talked about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50 or 60 videos on the YouTube site. Also, he said, “there’s not that many videos I’d want to watch.” The camera then turns to Mr. Hurley, who grins and says “Videos like these,” referring to the one Mr. Karim is filming.

Mr. Karim, who has remained in frequent contact with the other co-founders, said he was first informed of the talks with Google last week. On Monday, he was called in to the Palo Alto law offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to sign acquisition papers, and he briefly got to congratulate Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, he said.

Asked what he thought of the acquisition price, Mr. Karim said: “It sounded good to me.” When a reporter looked puzzled, he raised his eyebrows and added: “I was amazed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/te... tner=homepage



















Until next week,

- js.



















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