Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 2nd, '06

[JackSpratts]

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy. I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy." – Ira Rothken


"People want to live vicariously through their kids, to rediscover music with them. They want to be more than a cog in the cultural wheel, and I salute them for it. If I ever stop being a kid with my kids, you can shoot me." – Tor Hyams


"Our generation, as much as we were once intuitive discoverers of music, we have lost that intuition. And now we need to be spoon fed." – Gary Borman


"Well, [Universal Music Group CEO Doug] Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player? [If so] then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests. The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one." – Andy Ihnatko


"I think best in foam." – Douglas Martin


"Those who misuse copyright should know that they can be sued for doing so. This settlement should send a message to those who want to use copyright law as a pretext for censorship." – Corynne McSherry


"We're proud to be Maryland. We're proud to be the prison industry for Maryland." – Jeff Beeson


"To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade. Most of what I like about computing now lives online." – Antonio Rodriguez


"Much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further. The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented." – François Charette


"Twenty-five percent of every black comic’s act is gay-bashing and none of you have done anything about that." – Jason Stuart





































December 2nd, '06







Say it ain’t so, Boris

Russia Agrees To US Request To Shut Down AllofMP3.com
Natali Del Conte

An official document posted to Digg today summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that “permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.”

The agreement is dated November 19 and posted to the Web site for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It summarizes the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue known to be centered in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia’s IPR regime,” states the document.

The document specifically names AllofMP3.com as an example of the types of Web sites that they will shut down. We contacted AllofMP3.com and the company sent us an official statement stating their legality. It says that the company has offered to remove illegal music at the copyright holders’ requests.

“For months, AllofMP3 has stated the company will comply with the request from any copyright holder to remove any music from the site. However, the company has not heard from the Russian Licensing Societies or the record labels. Perhaps, opt-out requests are not being made because the record labels can’t clear the rights.”

Still, the company is being made an example of for all to see. Russia is instructed to terminate leases for companies that facilitate online piracy, as well as inspect plants regularly, and take criminal action where there is evidence of commercial sale piracy. The government will be expected to begin complying by June 1, 2007.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/28...n-allofmp3com/





Maybe it ain’t

AllofMP3: We're Not Going Anywhere
Nate Anderson

After receiving years of press so bad that the US Trade Representative is now calling for its head by name, AllofMP3.com has launched a press offensive of sorts. After giving their first press conference earlier this year to counter the mounting criticism, AllofMP3 has given another one, this time to address the new bilateral trade agreement between the US and Russia that looks set to put them out of business.

John Kheit, an IP attorney for Chadbourne & Parke in New York, is representing AllofMP3, and he had one basic point to make in the wake of the trade agreement: AllofMP3 is legal, and it's not going anywhere. Although the agreement indicates quite clearly that the Russians have agreed to brand AllofMP3 an illicit site, Kheit points out that diplomats can talk as much as they want, but AllofMP3 isn't illegal until judges decide. "Legality is not decided by a legislative branch or an executive branch. It's decided by a court," he said in response to a question from Ars Technica. And no such ruling has been handed down.

The company also believes it is legal for US consumers to use, and has issued a lengthy statement outlining its position.

Kheit believes that AllofMP3 is currently legal under Russian copyright law, and he points to Article 39 of that law as proof. The article, headed "Use of a Published Phonogram for Commercial Purposes Without Consent from the Phonogram Producer and the Performer" in its English translation, appears to allow collection societies like ROMS to issue licenses for music, even when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder. That right only applies in three circumstances, though: public performance, broadcasting, and the "communication of the phonogram to the public by cable." It does not cover "the communication of the phonogram to the public." What does that mean, exactly? We'll leave it to Russian IP attorneys to work that out, but section 39 provides the legal basis for AllofMP3's claims of legitimacy.

The bilateral trade agreement specifies that Russia will change its laws by the middle of 2007 so that collection societies cannot act without the approval of copyright holders. A plain reading of this condition indicates that AllofMP3, whether legal now or not, will no longer be able to offer most of its music once the law is changed. Still, Kheit insists, the company will abide by the law and will adapt as conditions warrant.

Also of interest was the claim that AllofMP3 has not been as badly damaged by the inability to accept Visa and MasterCard payments as many would suspect. That's because most users have credit with the site and only use it over time. But as it grows increasingly difficult to add more money to one's account, the company will start to feel the squeeze in the months to come unless they can work out alternative payment systems that are as safe and easy as paying directly by credit card.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8330.html

Thanks Multi!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8330.html





Audible Magic has Anti-Piracy Technology
Alex Veiga

The maker of software to thwart unauthorized online file-sharing has obtained technology that can scan video files and block computer users from making copies.

Audible Magic Corp. said it plans to incorporate the technology it has licensed, dubbed Motional Media ID, into its suite of anti-piracy tools early next year.

The rise of video-sharing sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube has boosted demand for better ways to police online video. Apart from amateur video clips, often shot with video-capable digital cameras or mobile phones, YouTube and similar sites are rife with unauthorized clips from TV shows, movies and music videos.

Motional Media ID - created by a former technology executive with the Recording Industry Association of America - can scan any type of moving video image and identify its content in seconds, the Los Gatos-based company said.

To scan a video, the system looks for signature vectors - such as a unique digital fingerprint - and compares them with vectors stored in a database.

If the video turns out to be from a movie or other copyright material, the technology gives the film studio or video owner the ability to predetermine whether it can be copied.

Until now, Audible Magic has been scanning only the audio, even for video files.

"These capabilities will enable a new period of control for legitimate rights-holders in digital media," said Vance Ikezoye, Audible Magic's chief executive.

Audible Magic did not name any customers who will be using the system.

YouTube has said it is developing technology that will streamline the process by which copyright owners identify their content on the site and then determine whether they want to have it removed. The technology, expected to be in place by the end of this year, will scan only the audio and compare it against databases.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-18-29-24





MPAA Kills Anti-Pretexting Bill
Ryan Singel

A tough California bill that would have prohibited companies and individuals from using deceptive "pretexting" ruses to steal private information about consumers was killed after determined lobbying by the motion picture industry, Wired News has learned.

The bill, SB1666, was written by state Sen. Debra Bowen, and would have barred investigators from making "false, fictitious or fraudulent" statements or representations to obtain private information about an individual, including telephone calling records, Social Security numbers and financial information. Victims would have had the right to sue for damages.

The bill won approval in three committees and sailed through the state Senate with a 30-0 vote. Then, according to Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America.

"The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,'" Goldberg said.

Consequently, when the bill hit the assembly floor Aug. 23, it was voted down 33-27, just days before revelations about Hewlett-Packard's use of pretexting to spy on journalists and board members put the practice in the national spotlight.

Legislature records confirm that the MPAA's paid lobbyists worked on the measure. An aide to Bowen, who was forced out of the legislature by term limits and was elected Secretary of State, said the MPAA made its displeasure with the bill clear to lawmakers.

"The MPAA told some members the bill would interfere with piracy investigations," the aide said. The association "doesn't want to hamstring investigators."

The MPAA declined to comment for this story.

California went on to pass a much more narrow bill that bans the use of deceit to obtain telephone calling records, and nothing else. A similarly tailored bill languished in Congress this year, despite high-profile congressional grillings of senior HP employees.

Sean Walsh, past president of the Califonia Association of Licensed Investigators and an investigator for 27 years, said his group opposed SB1666 because it was too vague and would have tied the hands of investigators looking into insurance fraud, child support cases and missing children.

"There's a public reason and benefit for some of this information to be available to legitimate licensed investigators," Walsh said. "Should it be available to everyone out there? Probably not. There are people that have legitimate need for getting this information in terms of an investigation, enforcing a court order and helping to return a child. Those are all very legitimate reasons and by excluding that you do grave disservice to the average citizen and to large corporations."

Walsh also said groups like the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America hire investigators who use pretexting to ferret out copyright infringers, such as vendors on the street who are selling bootleg copies of CDs or DVDs. In that case, investigators may use some ruse to find out where the discs originated. (Records do not indicate that the RIAA had a position on the bill.)

Ira Rothken, a prominent technology lawyer defending download search engine TorrentSpy against a movie industry copyright suit, says he didn't know about the lobbying, but can guess why the MPAA got involved. Rothken is suing (.pdf) the MPAA for allegedly paying a hacker $15,000 to hack into TorrentSpy's e-mail accounts.

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy," Rothken said. "I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy."

For his part, private investigator Walsh, whose current firm specializes in protecting the privacy of corporate clients, said he hopes lawmakers in 2007 take their time.

"Everyone wants a quick fix, but they don't see the ripple effect until much later," Walsh said. "Our organization has been successful at educating legislators by saying, 'Wait a minute, but look at how it effects X, Y and Z.' They have to see those tangents so that if they are going to go ahead and pass legislation, they do it in a responsible and educated way."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





With Economics in Mind, City Takes Aim at Movie Piracy
Sewell Chan

Alarmed by New York City’s status as a global center of film and video piracy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has embraced a proposal that would criminalize unauthorized recording in movie theaters.

At first glance, the proposal, which is before the City Council, might seem unnecessary. A federal law signed by President Bush in April 2005 made recording a film with a video camera in a movie theater a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison for the first offense. And in Albany the Legislature is weighing bills, supported by Mr. Bloomberg, that would make recording a film inside a theater a crime statewide.

Nonetheless, powerful industry groups are pushing New York City to adopt its own anti-recording statute, hoping that such a law would spur the Police Department to crack down on piracy and minimize the economic damage it does.

“Piracy robs New York City of tax revenue, cheats trademark holders and undermines the creative community, which is a vital sector of our economy,” said John A. Feinblatt, the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator. “We have a responsibility to fight this crime at every level: city, state and federal.”

In November 2004 a report by City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. estimated that the counterfeit trade in the city totaled $23 billion a year and cost the city more than $1 billion a year in lost taxes: $380 million in sales taxes, $360 million in personal income taxes and $290 million in business income taxes.

At a Council hearing on Thursday, Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, testified that 43 percent of movies illegally recorded with camcorders in the United States last year were copied in New York City theaters.

Movies pirated in the city also made their way to 48 countries and 100 Internet sites, Mr. Stevenson said.

The bill before the Council would make unauthorized recording in a movie theater a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000, as well as a civil penalty up to $5,000.

Currently, under the state penal code, illegally recording a movie is only a violation, punishable by up to 15 days in jail or a fine of up to $250. (However, related crimes, like trademark counterfeiting and failing to disclose the origin of a recording, are felonies under state law.)

In Albany the State Senate has twice passed a bill that would make unauthorized recording in a movie theater a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony for subsequent offenses, but the Assembly has not acted on a companion bill. At least 39 states have laws against the use of recording devices in theaters, according to the motion picture association.

Mr. Stevenson said the city law would improve enforcement. “Right now an illegal recording in a theater has to occur in the presence of a police officer in a darkened theater,” he said. “If this legislation passes, just like shoplifters in retail stores, movie thieves can be observed and detained by theater employees until police officers arrive to make the arrest.”

Mr. Bloomberg said on Oct. 23 that his Office of Special Enforcement would use civil nuisance abatement laws to hold building owners liable for movie-piracy activities on their properties, a tactic that has been used successfully against counterfeiting in the apparel industry.

The Police Department, which created a Trademark Infringement Unit in 1994, is also preparing to crack down on film piracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/movies/02pira.html





Consolidations

EMI Says Gets Bid Approach, Shares Soar

British music company EMI Group Plc said on Tuesday it had received a bid approach, which one newspaper said could be worth 2.5 billion pounds ($4.8 billion) or more.

The Financial Times said Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs were believed to be among the potential bidders for EMI, which is home to artists including Robbie Williams and Coldplay.

"EMI announces that it has, this morning, received a preliminary approach for the company which may or may not lead to an offer," the group said in a statement.

EMI shares rose 10.3 percent to 289-1/2 pence by 1154 GMT, valuing the group at around 2.3 billion pounds.

EMI declined to named its suitors. KKR and Goldman Sachs could not immediately be reached to comment.

Earlier this year, EMI was locked in a $4.6-billion takeover battle with Warner Music, with each company trying to buy the other.

But hopes of a deal were quashed in June when a European court annulled approval of the 2004 merger of Sony Corp.'s Sony Music and Bertelsmann's BMG.

The ruling cast doubt on whether an EMI-Warner deal would get regulatory clearance, and the companies abandoned talks until there was more clarity from competition regulators. (additional reporting by Mathieu Robbins)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...R-UPDATE-2.XML





Finally

Plans for ABBA Museum Unveiled in Sweden
Mattias Karen

An ABBA museum dedicated to the music, clothing and history of the legendary Swedish pop group and its four members will open in Stockholm in 2008, organizers said Tuesday.

The interactive museum will feature original outfits and instruments used by the group, handwritten song lyrics, a display of different awards, and "all other things we can think of and find," said Ulf Westman, an event consultant who is spearheading the project with his wife Ewa Wigenheim-Westman.

The museum will also feature a studio where visitors can record their own ABBA songs, and an interactive experience that "will recreate the feeling of being at Wembley stadium and seeing ABBA live with 50,000 others," Westman said.

Organizers are still searching for a suitable location for the museum, but said it will open somewhere in central Stockholm during 2008.

Wigenheim-Westman said the idea was inspired by the Beatles museum in London, but that it took nearly two years to convince the former ABBA members _ Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Reuss _ that it was a good idea.

"It is nice that someone feels compelled to take on our musical history," the four members said in a joint statement. "We think this will be a fun and swinging museum to visit."

The band members will donate the material for the exhibits, but will otherwise not be involved in the project, which will be funded by company sponsors, Westman said.

Stockholm's mayor Kristina Axen Olin said the museum _ which is expected to draw 500,000 visitors a year _ will make the Swedish capital a more popular tourist attraction for the millions of ABBA fans around the world.

"As a Stockholmer, this is what you have been missing," Axen Ohlin said at a news conference to unveil the plan. "We are convinced that this is important both for Stockholm citizens and for marketing the city."

ABBA is one of the most successful bands in history, having sold more than 370 million albums. While the group has not performed together since 1982, it continues to sell nearly 3 million records a year and the musical "Mamma Mia!" _ written by Andersson and Ulvaeus and based on the group's hits _ has been seen by more than 27 million people around the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ertainmentnews





Google Suffers Setback in Copyright Case
AP

Yahoo Inc. has rebuffed Google Inc.'s attempt to learn more about its efforts to create digital copies of books, dealing the Internet search leader another setback as it prepares to fight against a copyright infringement suit.

In rejecting Google's request, Yahoo adopted the same stance taken last month by Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc.

Google believes it can defend its plans to provide online access to millions of library books by obtaining more details about similar projects involving some of its biggest rivals.

A group of publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google in a New York federal court last year, alleging the Mountain View-based company didn't get proper approval to make copies of books available to anyone with an Internet connection.

As its gathers evidence for its case, Google has subpoenaed Amazon.com, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp., among others.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft are part of a large alliance of businesses and libraries working together to create a digital database of books. Amazon.com has scanned a large number of books so consumers can read excerpts from books that they may want to buy.

Like Amazon.com, Yahoo lashed out at Google's request as a brazen attempt to pry into its trade secrets.

"There is simply no need for Google to be peering into the minds and computers of Yahoo employees," Yahoo's lawyer wrote in a 17-page list of objections delivered to Google last week.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo provided The Associated Press with a copy of its objections Wednesday. The objections eventually may become public record if Google asks a judge to force Yahoo to comply with its subpoena.

As of late Wednesday, Google hadn't responded to a request for comment about Yahoo's objections.

Microsoft declined to discuss its response to Google's subpoena.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-00-11-37





Hold Everything

Google: 'iPod Will Hold all the World's TV in 12 Years'

The future of music inspires the future of mobile
Jo Best

The idea of fitting your entire music collection into a single device the size of a packet of cigarettes might have seemed outlandish 15 years ago. But that was before the iPod. Now, one Google exec is predicting the iPod will lead a further media transformation of similar magnitude in the coming decade.

Speaking at the FT World Communications Conference, Nikesh Arora, Google's VP of European operations, told delegates that, in the coming years, the plummeting price of storage and its increasing volume-to-size ratio will give iPods almost unlimited potential to hold music and video.

Arora said, by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year's worth of video releases. Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially.

He said: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?" The Google exec said tech is now pursuing a price volume game - searching for the price point at which content will take off for the mainstream.

He added: "It's clearly begun happening," citing iTunes' 99¢ per song download model.

And, Arora believes, mobile is likely to follow the same path. "Mobile is not going to be a different thing," he added - and if the mobile industry is to capitalise on the growth of content, it would be wise to ape the development of the internet.

He said: "The mobile industry has to go through the same phases the internet has gone through... Mobile will have the same learning curve. It would be somewhat foolish to leapfrog the stages the internet went through.

"But before they get there, they will need to satisfy the basic things people are used to doing on the internet."

As a result, the Google VP believes, there will be greater convergence between mobile and internet, as consumers expect to be able to access traditional web content and services on the mobile platform.

Google has already begun to exploit the union by expanding its ad sales business to the world of mobile, after signing deals with operators in Asia and Europe.

The search giant's CEO believes advertising will eventually go on to play a greater role in the mobile industry: eventually doing away with subscriptions in favour of users agreeing to watch targeted advertising.
http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/...9164360,00.htm





Microsoft to Roll Out New Version of WGA
Eric Lai

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released a revamped version of its Windows Genuine Advantage tool that it hopes will reduce complaints arising from paid-up users of Windows XP caught in the dragnet of the controversial anti-piracy program.

The main change in WGA Notifications is a new category of results for PCs with Windows installations of questionable validity.

The change addresses a problem raised by the other half of Microsoft's anti-piracy program, WGA Validation, which was introduced in mid-2005. PCs that were scanned by WGA Validation and failed to prove to Microsoft’s satisfaction that they were running non-counterfeit copies of Windows XP were formerly labeled as "non-genuine" by Microsoft.

That caused WGA Validation to disallow access to certain Microsoft software, and WGA Notifications to send periodic messages asking users to reinstall XP or buy a legitimate license for it, leading to "nagware" complaints from some users.

Many users also claimed that WGA, due to technical glitches or other issues, mislabeled their genuine copies of Windows XP as pirated. Microsoft has maintained throughout that the rates of such "false positive" errors were very low.

At the same time, its online forum for WGA-related problems has registered nearly 20,000 postings from aggrieved users.

Yesterday’s change in WGA Notifications is aimed at addressing complaints from users who have yet to pass WGA by creating a new "indeterminate" category for copies of XP that failed to prove they were genuine yet did not use a license of XP known by Microsoft to be pirated.

Microsoft keeps a database of pirated XP licenses, most of which are stolen from corporations using a single volume license to install multiple Windows on multiple PCs.

Users with copies of XP labeled "indeterminate" are also provided with more information to troubleshoot the problem, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

The majority of Windows XP users, whose copies of XP have already passed Microsoft's WGA program, can safely ignore the updated tool.

Microsoft initially tested WGA Notifications this summer as a "high-priority" fix via Automatic Updates, a category typically reserved for security and bug fixes. Many users were surprised to get WGA Notifications downloaded automatically along with their security updates and complained, saying that Microsoft was acting no different than a purveyor of spyware.

Microsoft subsequently changed WGA Notifications to nag users less often and allowed them to uninstall it. But it was kept as a high-priority update.

According to David Lazar, director of Genuine Windows for Microsoft, the revamped WGA Notifications still remains a "high-priority" update, though users will be able to deselect it from being downloaded and installed. Users running copies of XP that Microsoft has already determined to rely on one of four pirated Windows license keys are now being asked to download the revamped tool. That will be gradually expanded to include other users over the "next several weeks and months," according to Lazar.

The new version of WGA Notifications will also not incorporate a "kill switch" that cripples PCs that fail to prove that they are running genuine copies of Windows XP. That more aggressive feature, called Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM), is being introduced in the upcoming Windows Vista OS.

The release also features a new installation wizard and will display validation results as soon as the tool has been installed. The software doesn't need to be rebooted after its installation, Microsoft said.

Microsoft plans to update the tool every 90 to 120 days, as a way to react to re-evaluation of the software and any changes in software piracy.

China Martens of IDG News Service contributed to this report.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9005498





Vista: No CableCARD Streaming to Other PCs
Nate Anderson

Vista + CableCARD = Digital Cable Goodness.

That's how the equation was supposed to go, but as more details about the Vista CableCARD implementation are revealed, more limitations become apparent. The newest one concerns streaming—Windows Vista will only allow CableCARD-decrypted video to be streamed to official Media Center Extenders.

Consumers who hoped to use their new Vista boxes to blast recorded TV content to other PCs on their home network or to a laptop while traveling (much like a SlingBox) will be disappointed, as Vista engineers bowed to the cable industry's demand for content protection by enabling streaming only to Media Center Extenders. The story first appeared at CE Pro, which learned of the limitations from some Microsoft folks in attendance at the recent Electronic House Expo. Ars Technica has been able to confirm this with sources in the know, but official public relations channels aren't commenting.

The limitation means that right now, only one device can pull down content recorded from digital cable broadcasts: an Xbox 360. Sources tell us that other Media Extenders will also support such content, including devices from D-Link, Linksys and others. Existing devices will need updates to support the latest DRM, however.

For many people, this won't be a huge deal, but it is another telling reminder of who's in control when it comes to using content (hint: it's not end users). The new revelation is only the latest in a long series of unpleasant truths about using CableCARDs that have emerged in the last year. Most egregiously, CableCARDs will only function in setups tested and certified by CableLabs, for instance, dealing a death blow to hopes of building a DIY media center PC with CableCARD support. CableLabs also holds all of the cards when it comes what can and cannot be streamed or moved from device to device.

And because CableCARDs still support only one-way access (and it's looking increasingly likely that two-way CableCARDs will be supplanted by a DCAS system), consumers won't be (legally) streaming pay-per-view or video-on-demand titles around the house, no matter what technology they're using.

If Vista makes it easy to synchronize digital cable recordings to a portable media player like the Zune (maybe) or the iPod (not likely), then CableCARD support could still be an attractive feature. But bloggers like Chris Lanier are already reporting that Vista will not allow CableCARD-decrypted content to be transferred to portable devices at all. It's hard to believe that Microsoft wouldn't enable this at least for the Zune (which currently has no way to transfer video back off the device, making it "safe" for content owners), but it's not clear exactly which parties are behind which restrictions. Lanier doesn't seem to know, either, or at least isn't saying. When we contacted Microsoft, a spokesperson simply told us that Zune does not currently support such transfers.

It has been said that the living room PC was dead on arrival, and while we don't entirely agree, we are happy to put a great deal of the blame for the current state of affairs on CableLabs. Thanks to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, cable companies had only to encrypt their data streams to give them almost complete control over what happens to content once it reaches the home, and CableLabs holds the reins.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061128-8300.html





Microsoft to Release Pro Vista Today
Brian Bergstein

For the first time in five years, Microsoft Corp. is finally unveiling a new system for operating personal computers. Now the company must persuade PC buyers that the launch really matters to them.

Beginning Thursday, businesses that buy Windows licenses in bulk have first crack at the new operating system, called Vista. Consumers can get Vista on home PCs beginning Jan. 30.

Microsoft and computer vendors contend that Vista will make Windows machines more secure, powerful and graphically dynamic, especially when combined with other products Microsoft is releasing simultaneously. Those include new back-end server software for businesses, as well as Office 2007, which brings sweeping changes to widely used programs such as Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.

Much is at stake for Microsoft. Most of its revenue and almost all of its profit comes from Windows and Office, funding the company's sexier ventures in video games and music players.

But even with all the touted improvements, analysts expect Vista to only gradually emerge, especially in big organizations where upgrading can be a costly, complicated affair. Gartner Dataquest predicts that it will be 2010 before Vista outnumbers the previous operating system, Windows XP, on business computers.

A company with 10,000 employees, for example, likely has 1,000 business applications, many of which need to be tested on Vista before a company can switch its PCs to the new operating system, said Gartner analyst Michael Silver. That process often takes 12 to 18 months and lots of labor by the technology staff. (In other words, for a large business to implement Vista right away would probably require it to have been an eager-beaver type that experimented with Vista during its "beta" phase that began in mid-2005).

In the meantime, the last operating system, Windows XP, works just fine for most companies - especially with a security-enhancing patch known as Service Pack 2 that Microsoft released in 2004.

PC makers say Vista will enable computers to do things that previously were difficult or costly. For example, Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's No. 3 PC maker, says Vista greatly enhances data-backup tools it builds into its machines.

"All those capabilities are going to be one step better with Vista," said Clain Anderson, Lenovo's director of software peripherals.

But many buyers want more dramatic reasons to change their PCs.

Kamal Anand, chief technology officer for TradeStone Software Inc., a Gloucester, Mass.-based provider of supply-chain software, examined test versions of Vista and Office and found "no compelling need" to upgrade his company's 100 PCs and laptops anytime soon. Instead, Anand expects Vista and Office to slowly permeate TradeStone as it buys new PCs for employees in coming years.

"Nobody wants to go through the extra time and effort and money to upgrade an existing, well-working system," he said.

The programs in Office 2007 have been overhauled in many ways. Generally they can make it easier for people to collaborate on documents and to manage information from multiple sources. Excel in particular packs a wallop, with vastly increased number-crunching abilities. The Outlook e-mail program performs noticeably faster searches for tidbits buried in messages.

Some Office programs also have scrapped their familiar menu structure in favor of a "ribbon" atop the screen that reorders how command choices are presented to the user. While that new interface unlocks many features that were hard to find in previous generations of Office software, it will require some time to get used to, which might give tech buyers pause.

Another potential drag for Office is that the world has changed considerably since the last major release in 2003. Inexpensive, open-source alternatives to Office have gained traction. And rivals such as Google Inc. are increasingly delivering spreadsheets, word processing and other tools for free over the Internet, an attractive choice for smaller companies.

At Tabblo Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that lets people assemble, print and share online photo collections, CEO Antonio Rodriguez expects to upgrade many, though not all, of the company's 25 PCs to Vista throughout 2007. Tabblo's staff expects Vista to make it easier to back up files and synch data over multiple computers. Rodriguez and crew also have energetically adopted Microsoft's latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 7.

But Office 2007 holds few such attractions for his company. Tabblo employees have largely abandoned Excel and Word for free programs on the Web, praising the flexibility that comes with having files stored online. Just about the only Office program Rodriguez still uses is PowerPoint for presentations.

"To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade," he said. "Most of what I like about computing now lives online."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-08-51-22





Will Vista make an impact?

Commentary: It's Just Not the Same as Earlier Windows Releases
John C. Dvorak

Investors want to know if there will be any effect on the market during the rollout of Microsoft's new operating system Vista. Will sales of computers jump? What about peripherals? Anything?

If you talk to the suppliers of components, manufactures and even the average geek, the answer is no, no and no. Worse the buzz surrounding Vista is nothing like the buzz that surrounded Microsoft's Windows 95, 98, Win NT and even Windows 2000 and XP.

It's possible that some buzz will evolve, but it's beginning to look like a pretty standard news story rather than anything like the marketing events we've seen in the past. I have to assume that the promoters who put on a worldwide show for Windows 95, for example, have long since left the company (MSFT : 29.49, -0.08, -0.3% ) .

It looks like the best Microsoft can do is provide us with an incredibly bland façade that seems more like something coming from General Electric during the announcement of a new afterburner technology for a jet engine. As an example of how peculiar this all is, can you look at the Microsoft Vista Web site and determine the message? See the Microsoft site.

The site, if you were uncertain as to the nature of the product, looks like an advertisement for an expensive prescription drug for constipation. Seriously, that's exactly what it looks like.

While there is no way that Vista will be a flop, since all new computers will come with Vista pre-installed, there seems to be no excitement level at all. And there does not seem to be any compelling reason for people to upgrade to Vista.

In fact, the observers I chat with who follow corporate licensing do not see any large installations of Windows-based computers upgrading anytime soon. The word I keep hearing is "stagnation."

Industry manufacturers are not too thrilled either. One CEO who supplies a critical component for all computers says he sees a normal fourth quarter then nothing special in the first quarter for the segment. Dullsville.

Apparently there is no increased demand, nobody is ramping up anything and it's expected that horrible bugs or some mediocre reviews will actually have a negative effect on the business until the second half of next year.

When will things perhaps perk up? Would you believe August?

Microsoft is not helping with its lack of enthusiasm. This is further complicated by a confusing array of Vista offerings. There is Vista Home Basic, Vista Starter, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

What is the point of so many editions? People will not know what to choose, so they'll skip it.

One of the interesting things I'm seeing is the relative ignorance of the computer-using public in general about the system requirements for Vista. Most obvious is the complete lack of knowledge regarding the next generation hard disk that is required to make Vista perform well.

These drives, called hybrid hard disks (or HHD) contain a few gigabytes of flash memory for instant-on and certain operating system enhancements. Vista talks to these special disk drives directly.

Knowledgeable folks who should know about these drives never heard of them except in some relation to laptop battery life which seems to be the only promotion done so far. The only reason I know so much about them was by an odd coincidence of moderating a panel that discussed the drives in great detail.

This secret seems to be a tip of a knowledge iceberg. Nobody seems to know anything about the operating system except some vague generalities coming from Microsoft and that miserable Web site.

Eventually this will settle down and we'll all be using Vista. But between now and then do not expect it to set the world on fire. From what I can tell there will be no major impact from this offering on any tech segment. Sorry.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...FF5%7D&siteId=





Apple Gains Control of Critical Digital Download Patent
Kasper Jade

A recent out-of-court settlement between Apple Computer and a Vermont-based inventor has landed Apple the rights to a prestigious software design patent that may allow the company to seek royalties on a broad spectrum of digital downloads.

Michael Starkweather, a lawyer and author of the 10-year old patent, issued a statement on Thursday calling it a "billion dollar patent" that will have affects on the future of the "cell phone, iPod and PDA" industries.

"I believe that, with this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos," he said.

Starkweather, who wrote the patent in 1996 for David Contois of Essex Junction, Vt.-based Contois Music Technology, said the inventor originally didn't show interest in patenting the idea nor did he understand its value.

The initial concept consisted of a desktop computer holding multiple songs with an interface that allowed a hotel guest to select three songs and play them on an electric grand piano.

Realizing that downloading movies was an obvious variation to downloading music, Starkweather broke the patent into three elements; remote music storage, selection of music to download and playing music on a music device.

"Sometimes it's easy to break an invention down to its key components," he said. "That's why patent writing is an art, not a science, and requires creativity."

In June of 2005, Contois asked a Vermont District Court to issue a preliminary and permanent injunction barring Apple from further distributing its iTunes software. In a 10-page complaint, which was first reported on AppleInsider, lawyers charged the Cupertino, Calif.-based iPod maker with "copying" and "willfully infringing" on Contois design patent in developing the digital jukebox software.

The suit stated that Contois conceived and developed a computer interface for playing music on an internal or external computer-responsive music device, which he then exhibited at the 1995 COMDEX trade show and the 1996 NAMM music industry trade show. According to the filing, people who were at the time employed by or later became employed by Apple were present at both trade shows and viewed Contois' software. The suit alleged Apple later "copied" the invention and used the design ideas in the interface for iTunes.

Specifically, the filing documented 19 interface aspects of the Apple software that it claimed were in direct violation of Contois' patent. The areas included iTunes' menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.

Following a 15-hour negotiating this September, Contois and Apple ended their dispute by reaching an out-of-court settlement. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2275





Supreme Court Weighs the Meaning of ‘Obvious’
Linda Greenhouse

To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be novel, useful and, according to the statute, not “obvious” to a person of “ordinary skill” in the field. While the meaning of the term “obvious” might appear to be obvious, a lively and surprisingly entertaining Supreme Court argument on Tuesday demonstrated that it is anything but.

The question was how patent examiners and judges should evaluate the obviousness of a new product that combines, albeit in a novel way, two or more existing products. Since most inventions use elements of what patent law calls “prior art,” this case presents the court with what is widely viewed as its most important patent case in years.

The patent in dispute is for an adjustable gas pedal, designed to work in vehicles equipped with electronic engine controls. In the past, gas pedals that could be adjusted for the driver’s comfort worked mechanically. The new version, produced by a Canadian company, the KSR International Company, under contract to General Motors, combined an adjustable pedal with an electronic sensor.

Claiming that it had already patented such a product, a rival company, Teleflex Inc., sued. KSR argued that Teleflex’s patent was invalid because the combination of the two elements was obvious. A federal district judge in Detroit agreed, and dismissed the infringement suit.

But the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, overturned that decision. It ordered the district court to reconsider the case under a test that makes obviousness harder to prove — and therefore makes patents easier to obtain and defend. It is the validity of that test that is at issue in the case, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., No. 04-1350.

The Federal Circuit’s test for obviousness is usually referred to as the teaching-suggestion-motivation test. Under the test, a patent cannot be rejected as obvious unless the party challenging it can show that at the time of the invention, there existed a “teaching, suggestion, or motivation” that would have led a person familiar with the field to put existing products together. Meeting that test often requires a jury trial, making patent litigation prolonged and expensive.

James W. Dabney, the lawyer representing KSR, told the justices that the Federal Circuit had improperly displaced “skill and ingenuity” as the benchmark for obtaining a patent and replaced it with what amounted to an “entitlement” to patent protection. But the Supreme Court itself “has rejected time and time again the notion that someone who was the first simply to take advantage of the known capability of technology was entitled to a patent,” he added.

The federal Patent and Trademark Office agrees with the critique and entered the case on the side of KSR. Thomas G. Hungar, a deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “as the sole means of proving obviousness, the teaching-suggestion-motivation test is contrary to the Patent Act, irreconcilable with this court’s precedents, and bad policy.”

Mr. Hungar added, “It asks the wrong question and, in cases like this one, it produces the wrong answer.”

But as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. pointed out, the Federal Circuit had a rationale for adding its distinctive gloss to the concept of obviousness. “They say obviousness is deceptive in hindsight,” the chief justice observed to Mr. Dabney. “In hindsight, everybody says, ‘I could have thought of that,’ ” he said, adding that in the Federal Circuit’s view, “if you don’t have the sort of constraint that their test imposes, it’s going to be too easy to say that everything was obvious.”

The chief justice’s comment came early in the argument; any implication that he was sympathetic to the appeals court proved premature. When it came time for the lawyer for Teleflex, Thomas C. Goldstein, to take the podium, Chief Justice Roberts made clear his disdain for the Federal Circuit’s approach.

The test “adds a layer of Federal Circuit jargon that lawyers can then bandy back and forth,” he said, adding, “It seems to me that it’s worse than meaningless because it complicates the inquiry rather than focusing on the statute.”

When Mr. Goldstein noted that “every single major patent bar association in the country has filed on our side,” the chief justice interjected: “Well, which way does that cut? That just indicates that this is profitable for the patent bar.” And when Mr. Goldstein referred to experts who had testified that the Teleflex patent was not obvious, the chief justice asked: “Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something’s not obvious? I mean, the least insightful person you can find?”

Chief Justice Roberts made the comments with a smile, and the courtroom audience responded with laughter. Mr. Goldstein, an experienced Supreme Court advocate, was unfazed at finding himself the straight man in a courtroom comedy. He kept returning to his theme, which was that the Federal Circuit’s test, properly understood, served the function of focusing the inquiry.

“Invention isn’t at the end when you put the two things together,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Invention is finding the problem, deciding what pieces of the prior art to use, and deciding how to put them together.” He warned that there would be “genuine, dramatic instability” if the court disavowed the approach the Federal Circuit has used nearly since its creation in 1982.

Congress created the centralized court for the purpose of reducing instability in the patent system. Underlying the legal arguments was the deeper question of how patent law has fared in the court’s hands — whether, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer put it, “they’ve leaned too far in the direction of never seeing a patent they didn’t like.” There was, Justice Breyer said, “a huge argument going on.” With that observation, Mr. Goldstein readily agreed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/bu...9bizcourt.html





RIAA Subpoenas Neighbor's Son, Calls His Employer
Zonk

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes
"To those who might think that I might be exaggerating when I describe the RIAA's litigation campaign as a 'reign of terror', how's this one: in UMG v. Lindor, the RIAA not only subpoenaed the computer of Ms. Lindor's son, who lives 4 miles away, but had their lawyer telephone the son's employer. See page 2, footnote 1."

From Ray's comments:

"You have a multi-billion dollar cartel suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations. And due to the adversary system of justice the RIAA will be successful in rewriting copyright law, if the world at large, and the technological community in particular, don't fight back and help these people fighting these fights."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/28/1549242





A.M.D. Receives Federal Subpoena
AP

Advanced Micro Devices said late Thursday that it had received a subpoena from the Justice Department regarding an investigation into possible antitrust violations in the graphics processor and card business.

A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is a leading maker of microprocessors that act as the calculating engines of personal computers. It entered the graphics chip market this summer, agreeing to acquire ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion.

That move was seen as a strategic blow to Intel, A.M.D.’s much larger rival, and one that would allow A.M.D. to broaden its product portfolio in a continuing attempt to banish an image as a small competitor that sold microprocessors and flash memory chips. The deal was completed in October.

A.M.D. said that the Justice Department had not made any specific accusations against it or ATI, and that it intended to cooperate with the investigation. A spokesman declined to comment further.

The scope of the Justice Department investigation was unclear. A call to a spokesman for the other leading maker of graphics chips, Nvidia, of Santa Clara, Calif., was not immediately returned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/te...y/01micro.html





Subpoenas and the Press
David Carr

Like the rest of us, Eve Burton, general counsel at the Hearst Corporation was itching to get out the door last Wednesday. Every Thanksgiving, she makes the journey to Chatham Center in upstate New York to make dinner for 10 bachelor farmers in the area, aged 84 and up. Instead, she was stuck at headquarters most of the day, performing what has become a chronic, grinding task: keeping Hearst reporters out of jail.

She and the rest of the legal team were finishing an appeal, to be filed this Friday, of a judge’s decision to sentence two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, to up to 18 months in jail for their refusal to reveal who leaked grand jury information in the Balco steroids case.

The underlying case is finished, but District Judge Jeffrey S. White said the reporters belonged in jail for refusing to comply with subpoenas. The appeal hearing will be held on Feb. 12 and the pair faces longer prison terms than any of the actual Balco defendants.

“The government is apparently willing to spend three years and millions of dollars putting two reporters in jail,” Ms. Burton said. “They won’t get the information they want. These guys made a promise and they are going to keep it.”

The view from her 42nd floor office at Hearst — Central Park and beyond — was breathtaking, but Ms. Burton, who has been working in First Amendment law for 20 years, sees nothing but trouble on the legal horizon. She has been to Seattle, Albany, Baltimore and, of course, San Francisco, putting out fires and defending the ability of journalists to work without being subject to subpoenas that dig into their reporting.

“This is what we do now,” she said. “The culture of the press as an independent body is now under attack and if this continues, will come to be seen as an investigative arm of the government.” (On Friday, attorneys for The New York Times asked the Supreme Court to bar a federal prosecutor from reviewing the phone records of two reporters — Judith Miller and Philip Shenon — in another effort to obtain the identities of their confidential sources.)

In the last 18 months, she says, her company has received 80 newsgathering subpoenas, for broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines. “But that was after the Judy Miller case,” she said, mentioning the case in which the former New York Times reporter went to jail to protect a source. “In the two years before that, we had maybe four or five subpoenas. We didn’t even keep track.”

In the Balco case, the two reporters uncovered information that suggested steroid use was rampant in baseball despite statements to the contrary, and which implicated big-name stars like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. President Bush praised their work at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2005, saying, “you’ve done a great service.”

The four defendants in the underlying case — two Balco executives, a track coach and a personal trainer — received light sentences or probation, with the most severe punishment, four months in prison, going to Victor Conte, president of Balco. But government prosecutors, in the name of protecting the sanctity of the grand jury process, are still trying to throw Mr. Williams and Mr. Fainaru-Wada in jail for 18 months.

Within the news business, there is a consensus that the roof is caving in on the legal protections for working journalists. But the general public does not hold the craft in much esteem lately. Years of journalistic mis- and malfeasance have left many people thinking the Fourth Estate could use a little oversight, regardless of where it comes from.

“It’s true there have been some changes in the way the law has been interpreted,” said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media at George Washington University. “But it has occurred in part because there is a political environment in which journalists are no longer viewed as heroes, as they were after Watergate, while now they are sometimes seen as villains.”

“The Bush administration views the media as one more special interest, as an elite,” he added. “And journalists have played into that in the way that they have framed the issues. The legal concept is called the ‘reporter’s privilege,’ not the ‘people’s privilege.’ It reinforces that sense of elitism.”

Ms. Burton knows first-hand that her indignation is not widely shared by the public.

“My 15-year-old is constantly reminding me that no one cares about this stuff but reporters, but I don’t think the public understands what is at stake here,” Ms. Burton said. “Everyone knows that what was revealed in that story about Major League Baseball and steroids was important, but I don’t think that they understand that they could lose that. That story could not be told today.”

In the appeal, the reporters’ lawyers will argue that courts have a duty to look at every case on its merits and that the federal effort is out of step with the state courts, including California, which guard reporters against fishing expeditions by prosecutors.

“This is the single biggest case I have ever been involved in,” she added. “In terms of the public’s right to know what the government does and doesn’t do, it is huge. If the government wins in this case, every reporter’s notebook will be available to the government for the asking.”

For years, Ms. Burton advised her reporters on how to stay out of jams in civil cases and defended those who ended up on the wrong end of libel suit.

Now, in between telling working reporters to avoid e-mail messages and any other records of their phone calls and reporting — all of which is readily available to a prosecutor with subpoena power — she is spending an enormous amount of time defending remaining press freedoms against an administration she believes has “a strong ideological view that the executive branch should be able to proceed mostly unimpeded.”

“It is not limited to the press,” she said. “If you look at the briefs they have filed all over the country, whether it is N.S.A. or wiretapping, or leaks to the press, everybody and everything that relates to the rights of the individual, they would like to have the right to make whatever decisions they want about whoever they want whenever they want.”

And because the same administration that makes the laws selects the judges, this shift represents more than just one swing of the pendulum. What will be lost, she believes, are the kind of investigations where confidential sources play a critical role.

“You won’t get the Watergate story, you won’t get the Pentagon Papers,” she said.

Not that her Thanksgiving guests care. “They just wanted to know why I was late,” she said. “One of them told me that stuff could wait — that the food on the back porch was going to freeze if I didn’t get it inside.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu...ia/27carr.html





The GinGrinch

Gingrich Raises Alarm at Event Honoring Those Who Stand Up for Freedom of Speech
Riley Yates

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

Gingrich spoke to about 400 state and local power brokers last night at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner, which fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech.

Gingrich sharply criticized campaign finance laws he charged were reducing free speech and doing little to fight attack advertising. He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens' ability to express themselves and their faith.

Last night's event, held at the Radisson Hotel-Center of New Hampshire, honored a Lakes Region newspaper and a former speaker of the House for work in favor of free expression.

The Citizen of Laconia was given the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award, which is named after the longtime President and Publisher of the Union Leader Corporation, owner of New Hampshire's statewide newspaper.

The Citizen scrutinized the Newfound Area School Board beginning last year over a series of e-mail discussions held before public meetings. It also used the right-to-know law to uncover costly decisions by the town of Tilton this year.

Executive Editor John Howe said the decision to pursue the stories led to at least one advertiser canceling its business with the paper.

"We try to practice what we preach, even if it costs us business," Howe said. "And it has and it will in the future.

Also honored was Marshall Cobleigh, former House speaker and a longtime aide to former Gov. Meldrim Thomson.

Cobleigh introduced an amendment to the state Constitution defending free speech. He also helped shepherd the state's 1967 right-to-know law through the Legislature.

Gingrich's speech focused on the First Amendment, but in an interview beforehand, he also hit upon wide-ranging topics.

• Gingrich said America has "failed" in Iraq over the past three years and urged a new approach to winning the conflict. The U.S. needs to engage Syria and Iran and increase investment to train the Iraqi army and a national police force, he said. "How does a defeat for America make us safer?" Gingrich said. "I would look at an entirely new strategy." He added: "We have clearly failed in the last three years to achieve the kind of outcome we want."

• Political parties in Presidential primary states should host events that invite candidates from both parties to discuss issues, said Gingrich, who criticized the sharpness of today's politics.

• Gingrich said voters unhappy with the war, the response to Hurricane Katrina and pork barrel spending were the main drive behind the GOP's rejection at the polls. But he argued Republicans would have retained the Senate and just narrowly lost the House if President Bush had announced the departure of embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before, instead of after, the election.

• Gingrich said he will not decide whether he is running for President until September 2007.

The event last night was sponsored by the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications. The school was founded in 1999 to promote journalism and other forms of communication.
http://www.unionleader.com/article.a...0-bbcd5baedd78





New Rules Compel Firms to Track e-Mails
AP

U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say.

The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial.

The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where. Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of "virtual shredding," said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

James Wright, director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co., said that large companies are likely to face higher costs from organizing their data to comply with the rules. In addition to e-mail, companies will need to know about things more difficult to track, like digital photos of work sites on employee cell phones and information on removable memory cards, he said.

Both federal and state courts have increasingly been requiring the production of relevant electronic documents during discovery, but the new rules codify the practice, legal experts said.

The rules also require that lawyers provide information about where their clients' electronic data is stored and how accessible it is much earlier in a lawsuit than was previously the case.

There are hundreds of "e-discovery vendors" and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006, Wright said. That figure could double in 2007, he added.

Another expense will likely stem from the additional time lawyers will have to spend reviewing electronic documents before turning them over to the other side. While the amount of data will be narrowed by electronic searches, some high-paid lawyers will still have to sift through casual e-mails about subjects like "office birthday parties in the pantry" in order to find information relevant to a particular case.

Martha Dawson, a partner at the Seattle-based law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP who specializes in electronic discovery, said the burden of the new rules won't be that great.

Companies will not have to alter how they retain their electronic documents, she said, but will have to do an "inventory of their IT system" in order to know better where the documents are.

The new rules also provide better guidance on how electronic evidence is to be handled in federal litigation, including guidelines on how companies can seek exemptions from providing data that isn't "reasonably accessible," she said. This could actually reduce the burden of electronic discovery, she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-06-25-13





Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor
Christopher Mason

Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.

“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others.”

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in restrictive countries.

“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr. Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring a handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored the Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now monitors more than 40 countries.

The program’s designers say existing anticensorship programs are too complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user’s computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

“Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of private proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by one,” said Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other Web sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other anticensorship programs. By requiring only login information and no installation, psiphon is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge because psiphon functions much the same as any typical browser.

“So far it’s been tech solutions for tech people,” said Dmitri Vitaliev, a human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries where the Internet is censored. “We have not had very good tools so everyone has been eagerly awaiting psiphon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...rssnyt&emc=rss





Pro-Peace Symbol Forces Win Battle in Colorado Town
Kirk Johnson



Peace is fighting back in Pagosa Springs.

Last week, a couple were threatened with fines of $25 a day by their homeowners’ association unless they removed a four-foot wreath shaped like a peace symbol from the front of their house.

The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to residents on Monday.

Two board members have disconnected their telephones, apparently to escape the waves of callers asking what the board could have been thinking, residents said. The third board member, with a working phone, did not return a call for comment.

In its original letter to the couple, Lisa Jensen and Bill Trimarco, the association said some neighbors had found the peace symbol politically “divisive.”

A board member later told a newspaper that he thought the familiar circle with angled lines was also, perhaps, a sign of the devil.

The peace symbol came to prominence in the late 1950s as the logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British antiwar group, according to the group’s Web site. It incorporates the semaphore flag images for the letters in the group’s name, a “D” atop an “N.”

Other people have said the upright line with arms angled down, commonplace in the United States in the Vietnam War, especially, has roots in the early Christian era, representing a twisted or broken cross.

Mr. Trimarco said he put up the wreath as a general symbol of peace on earth, not as a commentary on the Iraq war or another political statement.

In any case, there are now more peace symbols in Pagosa Springs, a town of 1,700 people 200 miles southwest of Denver, than probably ever in its history.

On Tuesday morning, 20 people marched through the center carrying peace signs and then stomped a giant peace sign in the snow perhaps 300 feet across on a soccer field, where it could be easily seen.

“There’s quite a few now in our subdivision in a show of support,” Mr. Trimarco said.

A former president of the Loma Linda community, where Mr. Trimarco lives, said Tuesday that he had stepped in to help form an interim homeowners’ association.

The former president, Farrell C. Trask, described himself in a telephone interview as a military veteran who would fight for anyone’s right to free speech, peace symbols included.

Town Manager Mark Garcia said Pagosa Springs was building its own peace wreath, too. Mr. Garcia said it would be finished by late Tuesday and installed on a bell tower in the center of town.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/us...5&ei=5087%0 A





BitTorrent Expands Movie, TV Downloads
Alex Veiga

BitTorrent Inc., developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, said Tuesday it has reached licensing deals that will boost the number of movies and TV shows it can offer as part of a video download service launching next year.

The privately held company said it signed agreements with Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Palm Pictures and Kadokawa Pictures USA.

The San Francisco-based BitTorrent also inked content deals with cable television networks G4 and Starz Media along with several Viacom-owned networks, including MTV Networks, VH1, SpikeTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Logo.

Financial terms of the licensing agreements were not disclosed.

Added to BitTorrent's lineup were films such as "X-Men The Last Stand," "Saw III" and "Mission: Impossible III," and TV shows "Star Trek," "Laguna Beach" and "South Park."

Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced content deals with Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Egami Media, Hart Sharp, Koch Entertainment and The Orchard.

Unlike other video-on-demand services, which distribute movies stored on their own servers directly to computer users, BitTorrent uses a peer-to-peer technology that assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet.

The technology makes the distribution of large files faster and less expensive.

BitTorrent plans to debut the commercial video service in February and expects to offer thousands of video titles in addition to music and software.

The company has yet to disclose a pricing scheme but has said individual TV shows could be priced as low as $1, and movies will be sold for about the price of a DVD.

TV shows and most films can be purchased and burned on a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to buy the original and not on standard DVD players.

Some films will only be available for viewing a limited number of times.

Last year, BitTorrent agreed to remove links to pirated versions of movies from its Web site and eliminate online links leading to unauthorized content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-42-51





Time-Warner Plans 'Download-to-Burn' Movies

Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, plans to offer services that let consumers download movies from the Internet that can be burned onto DVDs in 2007, its top executive said on Tuesday.

The company would likely make these movies available for such services, including one service with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., on the same day its DVDs go on sale.

"I expect we will be in a download-to-burn mode in 2007—It will be a part of next year's offerings," Richard Parsons, chief executive and chairman of Time Warner, said at the third annual Reuters Media Summit in New York.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2065121,00.asp





Latest Toe in the Movie Download Pond? Wal-Mart
Caroline McCarthy

Wal-Mart Stores has entered the fledgling but growing market of movie downloads with a new service that bundles a digital copy of a film with the purchase of a hard copy of the DVD.

The movie download program, announced Tuesday, begins with sales of the DVD of the Warner Bros. flick Superman Returns. Starting Tuesday, when customers purchase the disc from Wal-Mart, they will be able to choose from one of three options for a digital copy: $1.97 for a download formatted for portable devices, $2.97 for one that's compatible with computers, and $3.97 for one that works on both portable devices and PCs. Then, upon returning to their computers, buyers of the Superman Returns bundled DVD can enter a redemption code on Wal-Mart's beta video download site and obtain the digital version.

Wal-Mart hopes to eventually expand this service to more DVD-digital download packages, as well as to standalone downloads of movies and TV shows in the coming months.

As for compatibility, there is some fine print. The Wal-Mart downloads that are compatible with portable devices will be in Windows Media Player format, which means that they'll play on all devices that accept that format--including Microsoft's new Zune--but not Apple's iPods. And the PC-compatible downloads will require the Windows XP operating system and Windows Media Player 10. Mac and Linux users, at least for now, need not apply.

The market for digital video downloads is tempting but often volatile for even the sturdiest of retailers. For many of the new services, like AOL Video, it's really too early to gauge success, or lack thereof.

But some movie download services have already received distinctly negative reviews. The blogosphere didn't take kindly to Amazon's "Unbox" software. And less than a week ago, Microsoft's highly anticipated Video Marketplace feature of its Xbox Live service experienced a noticeably rocky launch.
http://news.com.com/Latest+toe+in+th...3-6138907.html





Blockbuster: High Def Will Slow Movie Downloads

Blockbuster is looking for partners in an online movie download service, but believes such services will not siphon off sales of high-definition DVDs until the speed and quality of downloads improve, Chief Executive John Antioco said on Tuesday.

"We think packaged media remains king for a long time," Antioco told the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Antioco said sales of movie downloads will reach about $1 billion by 2009, or less than half a percent of overall film industry revenue.

It is going to be difficult to develop a library of high-quality, high-definition download movies partly because the movie studios are locked in lucrative, long-term agreements that govern when movies can appear in pay-per-view, cable and DVD "windows," he said.

Still, the download market is not something the company can ignore: "We can't afford not to be in it," Antioco said.

He said he "wouldn't be surprised" if Blockbuster announced its own movie download service as early as 2007, either through its investment in online movie download company CinemaNow or in conjunction with a cable or satellite provider.

Rival Netflix has said it will release details of its upcoming download service in the first quarter of 2007.

Although he declined to give specifics about a Blockbuster download service, Antioco said he disagreed with conventional wisdom that dictates that consumers do not want to buy set-top boxes to download movies.

He said the company's new Total Access program, which allows Blockbuster Online subscribers to swap movies at the company's stores, reinvigorated discussions with potential partners in a download service.

"I think there are plenty of opportunities for discussion now," he said. "Total Access ... clearly provides an additional layer of value to a potential partner. Blockbuster can offer a partner ... essentially unlimited movies, many of which are in the home video (distribution) window that they really can't (air)."

Antioco said packaged DVD sales will remain the most profitable way for movie studios to reap revenue from releases and those profits will get more dramatic with the spread of high-definition offerings over the next five years.

By comparison, movie downloads will likely lag that growth largely due to the time it will take the average broadband user to download a high-definition movie, he said. It can take hours to download a high-definition film but most consumers do not have enough broadband capacity to even attempt it.

Despite the challenges to downloading high-definition content, Antioco said, "it's a business that we will need to be in both for competitive reasons and for consumer reasons, to have a full-service brand."

He reiterated the company's previous forecast of reaching 2 million subscribers by year's end for Blockbuster Online to become the nation's fastest-growing online DVD rental service--a title now claimed by Netflix, which has 5.7 million subscribers.

The company's store-based business will contract in the coming two years to 5,000 stores from 5,400, he said, while online rental takes up the slack.

"We probably closed more stores this year than we will close in future years based on some of the trends I see happening," Antioco said. "The advent of Total Access, the importance of the stores in that and the pressures that some of our competitors are under."
http://news.com.com/Blockbuster+High...3-6139041.html





As Many Software Choices as Languages to Learn
Jane L. Levere

DIANA ROHINI LaVIGNE of Foster City, Calif., edits a magazine for Indian-Americans and is married to a Hindi-speaking software architect, but until recently she could not speak Hindi herself.

Not knowing the language prevented her from communicating with her mother-in-law, who travels every year from Bhopal, India, to California to visit. “I can share more with her if I have the basics of her language,” Ms. LaVigne said. “She’s an expert cook, and she can’t teach me to cook if we can’t share her language.”

So this year, Ms. LaVigne bought a Hindi course from Rosetta Stone, a company that uses computer software to teach languages. She has been studying at least 30 minutes a day since late August, working from her laptop. Her husband, Vikramaditya Gupta, helps her if she has questions.

Ms. LaVigne is among a growing number of adults who are turning to language courses, many of which incorporate new technologies. Some buyers of these courses want to improve communication with family and friends, co-workers or other business contacts. Others want to achieve some language proficiency before traveling to a new country, either for pleasure or for business.

Sellers say demand is strong. Mike Ferrari, director of merchandising for language products at Barnes & Noble stores, says percentage sales growth for language-related items exceeded that for overall sales in the 2005 fiscal year.

Erick Vincent, manager of the software category in North America for Amazon.com, says sales of language products have been growing much faster than the software business in general in the last two years. “This growth has us very focused on this particular category,” he said.

Mr. Ferrari said Chinese and Korean courses had been generating the fastest-growing sales at Barnes & Noble, “driven by the reality of immigration patterns and commerce.” And he said Italian was outperforming other European languages, in terms of percentage gains, because Italy is such a popular vacation destination.

There is also a strong market for more obscure languages. Chuck McGonagle, senior vice president of Transparent Language, which offers software-related courses, says Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Irish, Hebrew, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Tagalog were each responsible for 1 per cent of its online sales this past September.

Consumers have a dizzying number of choices in teaching systems, technologies and levels of interactivity. Courses can be taught with old-fashioned workbooks, or on CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs and the Internet. From the Internet, they can be downloaded to a computer or personal players like iPods. One course, Playaway’s Learn Anywhere series, published by Penton Overseas, comes with its own portable digital player.

In shopping for courses, consumers should keep in mind why they want to study a language and what level of proficiency they want to achieve. The Internet can help: many companies, like Berlitz, Simon & Schuster and Rosetta Stone, allow people to sample their programs on their Web sites.

Transparent Language will let potential students download free versions of its Before You Know It series that teach some 150 words in more than 40 languages; the more advanced version is $49.95.

Audible.com, which sells products on its Web site and through iTunes.com, lets people sample all its language courses. Prices range from $5.95 to $146.95 and include most lines. Amazon.com sells both new and used courses, while Audible.com offers discounts to people who sign up for its various membership plans. These Web sites also contain user reviews, as do blogs and various online discussion groups.

For travelers who want a quick introduction to a language, an intensive language course that can cost hundreds of dollars may not be worth the expense. But courses specifically for travelers, and costing much less, are offered by many companies. They include the Penton Overseas Visual Passport Cultural Immersion Experience. It is offered in four languages, costs $39.95 and features learning and travelogue DVDs and vocabulary and music CDs. The Walk and Talk Audio Guides, at $19.98, from Gildan Audio, are offered in French and Italian and feature CDs with walking tours, maps and words and phrases, for visitors to Rome, Venice, Florence and Paris.

Berlitz’s Rush Hour series, which sells for $24.95 for each of five languages, comes with three CDs and a workbook. The Earworms Rapid Languages courses are $28.99 and come with a CD and a phonetics booklet. Both use songs to teach languages.

Courses for serious language students are more elaborate and expensive. The Rosetta Stone courses, which are available on CD-ROM or can be downloaded from the Internet, come in three levels of difficulty and range in price from $49.95 to $499.

Those overwhelmed by the newer choices may be comforted by the familiar name of Berlitz, which has been providing language courses since the late 19th century and has expanded into audio programs and computer-based courses. Simon & Schuster sells courses based on the well-established Pimsleur method, which encourages students to learn through conversation.

The Michel Thomas audio programs from McGraw-Hill teach students short phrases that they can string together into full sentences. Random House’s Living Language series and Barron’s Educational Series also offer courses in print and via computer.

People who have taken the more intensive courses say that it is wise to keep expectations realistic.

Woodie Neiss, chief financial officer of FlavoRx, a company in Bethesda, Md., that sells flavors for medicines, is a fan of the Rosetta Stone courses. But he says they have their limits. Mr. Neiss, 37, studied Japanese for five years when he was younger and spent a college year in Japan. He is now studying Brazilian Portuguese through Rosetta Stone to help FlavoRx enter the Brazilian market.

Although he feels that he can “communicate on a basic level in business, which builds rapport with the people I’m working with,” he also says the course will not make him fluent in Portuguese. “If you’re going to go for complete fluency, you need to immerse yourself in these countries and their cultures,” he said. “A course of CDs will not let you do it on your own.”

For those who have the time, a traditional classroom setting, with a teacher who can provide individual attention, is often the best way to learn a language.

Classroom courses are preferable for beginners who are serious about learning a language, said Mike Ledgerwood, director of the language learning and research center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “CD-ROM and technology-based courses work better if someone has had exposure” to languages previously, he said, adding, “If anyone has had a second language and progressed beyond the beginning level, the knowledge of how to learn a language should transfer to any other language studied.”

For people like Ms. LaVigne, a computer course has been a satisfying alternative to a class. The Rosetta Stone program has enabled Ms. LaVigne to speak with her mother-in-law by phone; she says it has also helped her at the magazine she edits for Indian-Americans.

“Hindi is a difficult language,” she said, “and I think the people at work really appreciate my effort.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bu...6language.html





Zuned out

Avoid the Loony Zune
Andy Ihnatko

Y es, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I've ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?"

But there it was, right on the Zune's tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning? That might not be Zune's fault. After about a year of operation, it's almost as if a Windows machine develops some sort of antibodies that prevent it from recognizing new hardware. But what's Microsoft's excuse for everything else?

Only the Zune software can sync music, video and pictures onto the device; Zune is incompatible with Windows Media Player, the familiar hub of the Windows desktop media experience.

The Zune app doesn't even have as many features as WMP. And why (for the love of God) doesn't it support podcasts? That's pure insanity.

It's incompatible with Microsoft's own PlaysForSure standard, too.

You'll have to buy all-new content from the new Zune Marketplace.

Oh, and the Zune Marketplace doesn't even take real money, proving that on the Zune Planet there's no operation so simple that it can't be turned into a confusing ordeal. The Marketplace only accepts Zune Points, with an individual track typically costing the equivalent of the iTunes-standard 99 cents.

By forcing users to buy blocks of Zune Points (with a $5 minimum), the Marketplace only has to pay one credit-card processing fee.

Zune Points will also make it easier for the Zune Marketplace to institute variable pricing. The music industry wants it desperately. The industry has been pressuring Apple to abandon its flat 99 cent pricing and start charging more for "hot" tracks.

Apple has stood firm against this, insisting that low, uniform prices keep sales high and discourage the iTunes Store's users from downloading music illegally.

I'm certain Microsoft will cave on this one. It has already given the music industry the other thing the industry has been demanding from Apple: a kickback on every player sold.

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. "So it's time to get paid for it."
Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?

Then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.

Take the Zune's one unique and potentially ginchy feature: Wi-Fi. You see this printed on the box and you immediately think "Cool. So I can sync files from my desktop library without having to plug in a USB cable, right? Maybe even download new content directly to the device from the Internet?"

Typical, selfish user: How does your convenience help make money for Universal? No wonder Doug despises you.

No, the Zune's sole wireless feature is "squirting" -- I know, I know, it's Microsoft's term, not mine -- music and pictures to any other Zune device within direct Wi-Fi range. Even if the track is inherently free (like a podcast) the Zune wraps it in a DRM scheme that causes the track to self-destruct after three days or three plays, whichever comes first.

After that, it's nothing more than a bookmark for purchasing the track in the Zune Marketplace. It amounts to nothing more than free advertising.

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba's Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune's limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

The iPod owns 85 percent of the market because it deserves to. Apple consistently makes decisions that benefit the company, the users and the media publishers -- and they continue to innovatively expand the device's capabilities without sacrificing its simplicity.

Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, "What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?"

Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.

Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/i...Andy23.article





Analysts: iPod Nothing to Fear From Slow-Starting Zune
Elizabeth Montalbano

Financial analysts watching the consumer electronics space report that early sales of Microsoft Corp.'s Zune player should give little reason for iPod loyalists and Apple Computer Inc. to fear this holiday season.

Since its retail debut on Nov. 15, customer interest in Zune has been lackluster, analysts report. Early reviews of the product have been less than stellar as well.

According to a research note published Tuesday by PiperJaffray senior research analyst Gene Munster, only 8 percent of 40 retailers surveyed by the firm recommend the Zune to customers, while 75 percent recommend Apple's iPod.

Moreover, some MP3 salespeople hadn't even heard of Zune, even though the players are being sold at their stores, he wrote in his report.

Quotes from retail clerks cited in Munster's report range from them claiming they don't know what the Zune is, to comments that Zune is a good option if a customer does not use Apple's iTunes software.

"To be honest, I don't really know much about the Zune," one clerk is quoted as saying in Munster's report. Another said, "I don't suggest the Zune because it is really heavy," according to the report.

Zune also did not fair well against other MP3 players and Apple's iPod even during its initial week of sales, when the hype surrounding the product was at its peak.

According to Munster's report, during its launch week on Nov. 16, Zune held the seventh spot on online retailer Amazon.com's top 10 best-selling MP3 players list, and it fell from that spot to 13 on the list only five days after launch, on Nov. 20.

"The buzz that Microsoft was able to generate for the Zune's launch clearly helped the player in its first week, but much of the publicity took the form of Zune/iPod comparisons," Munster wrote. He added that these comparisons show that Zune "failed to match up in the eyes of most reviewers" to the iPod, a fact that negatively affected sales of the device.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote Monday that the iPod continues to be a strong seller going into the busy holiday shopping season, and the 30G-byte video iPods -- with which Zune competes -- "appear to be immune to the Zune." He said both the 30G-byte video iPods and the new 4G-byte iPods nanos currently are popular with consumers.

A note about Apple's performance from financial firm UBS IT hardware analyst Ben Reitzes also said that Zune does not appear to be any threat to iPod at this time.

To be fair, Apple has a five-year head start in the music and video player market, and no one expected Microsoft's first entry would be comparable right away to the immensely popular iPod. Microsoft has said it plans to invest significantly in the Zune over the next several years, and the device is expected to become more competitive.

Microsoft's 30G-byte Zune costs US$249.99, the same as Apple's video iPod, but is different from the iPod in two key ways. Zune includes an FM tuner and wireless capability that allows users to share songs between devices.
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/5051/061...une/index.html





Don't Cry for the Zune Just Yet

Microsoft's challenger to the iPod takes second place in digital audio player market in first sales week, according to report.
David Ellis

Reports of lackluster sales of Microsoft's Zune that surfaced earlier this week might be a bit premature.

Microsoft's newest MP3 player, which launched just over two weeks ago, took second place in the portable digital player market in its first four days of sales, according to numbers generated by the market research firm NPD Group.
Microsoft's new Zune MP3 player did not fare as poorly as some predicted during its first week of sales.

"Considering it is a new brand, it's a very good first-week showing," said Ross Rubin, director of industry for NPD Group.

Microsoft's (up $0.15 to $29.54, Charts) Zune took 9 percent of digital player sales, according to NPD, edging out Sandisk (down $0.85 to $43.92, Charts), but behind Apple (down $1.09 to $90.72, Charts), whose iPod models have long dominated the MP3 player market.

Another research agency, Current Analysis, reported a somewhat similar sales reading during the same week. For the same week ending November 18, 2006, the Zune took 7 percent of the MP3 player market, falling behind both Apple and Sandisk.

Zune vs. iPod: the battle begins

While the two reports look strictly at sales at major U.S. electronics retailers, online sales of the Zune appear not to be as favorable.

As of midday Wednesday, Zune ranked as the 18th most popular MP3 players sold at Amazon.com (down $0.81 to $40.11, Charts), behind most models of the iPod.

Shawny Chen, a research analyst for Current Analysis, says that in order to become a serious contender against Apple, Microsoft will have to make further adjustments to the Zune, especially considering the number of unfavorable reviews the device has received so far.

"Microsoft will have to come out with an improved Zune that touches on the very features that people are disappointed with this model, such as the limited WiFi capability," said Chen.

Kathleen Maher, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, notes that even if the Zune is off to a slow start in the MP3 player market, Microsoft has had a lot of success launching a new product, tweaking it and ultimately satisfying consumers.

"It doesn't bug them to dump a bunch of money into an experiment and rejigger it along the way," said Maher, pointing at the success of the Xbox. "It's worked reasonably well."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/29/tech...zune/index.htm





Universal Music May Seek Royalty Deal With iPod

Universal Music Group Chief Executive Doug Morris said on Tuesday he may try to fashion an iPod royalty fee with Apple Computer Inc. in the next round of negotiations in early 2007.

Universal, the world's largest music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, was the first major record label to strike an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to receive a fee for every Zune digital media player sold.

"It would be a nice idea. We have a negotiation coming up not too far. I don't see why we wouldn't do that... but maybe not in the same way," he told the Reuters Media Summit, when asked if Universal would negotiate a royalty fee for the iPod that would be similar to Microsoft's Zune.

"The Zune (deal) was an amazingly interesting exercise, to end up with a piece of technology," he added.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...industryNews-1





A la mode

Apple releases OS X Security Update 2006-007
Jason D. O'Grady

Apple yesterday released Security Update 2006-007 for Mac OS X 10.3.9 through 10.4.8. The update, which is available in Software Update and from Apple Downloads, weighs in at 23.9 MB (for Intel) and is available in several flavors.

Despite Apple's policy that it "does not disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available," some pretty good information about the 2006-007 update is posted on the "About the security content" page.

According to CNet's Joris Evers the update repairs 31 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day Wi-Fi hijack flaw:

Other flaws addressed by the Apple update could let Macs be compromised through malicious sites, rigged compressed files or malicious font files, Apple said. The update also fixes four flaws in the Mac OS X Security Framework, the worst of which could crash Macs or display expired security certificates as still valid, Apple said.

Security Update 2006-007 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following components:

AirPort
ATS
CFNetwork
Finder
Font Book
Font Importer
Installer
OpenSSL
PHP
PPP
Samba
Security Framework
VPN
WebKit
gnuzip
perl

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/index.php?p=342





Bell Labs' History of Inventions
Linda A. Johnson

It's the birthplace of the transistor, the laser, the solar cell and the fax machine. Its researchers were the first to hear the echoes of the Big Bang. And now this American legend is part of a French company.

Bell Labs was founded in 1925 as the research arm of AT&T's national telephone business. Sixty years later, it was spun off as part of Lucent Technologies Inc., which on Thursday was acquired by Paris-based Alcatel SA.

Murray Hill-based Bell Labs employs about 9,000 researchers and engineers in seven countries, down from a peak of 24,000 in 1998 before Lucent drastically downsized.

Its scientists have collectively have won six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. Medals of Science, seven U.S. Medals of Technology, two Draper Prizes and a Grammy award, for many achievements in sound technology.

The lab has been granted 32,031 U.S. patents, 15,000 of which are still active.

A look at some key advances:

-1925: First demonstration of a facsimile machine sending pictures over telephone wires.

-1926: First synchronization system for sound movies.

-1927: First long-distance television transmission, sending live images of President Hoover from Washington, D.C., to New York.

-1937: First electronic speech synthesizer (re-created human speech).

-1939: First binary digital computer.

-1947: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invent the transistor, leading to the electronic-age of portable radios, touchtone phones, computer microchips and color and high-definition television; they share 1956 Nobel Prize.

-1951: Direct dialing of domestic long-distance calls.

-1954: Solar battery cell to convert sunlight into electricity.

-1956: First transatlantic telephone cable, handling up to 36 calls.

-1958: Arthur Schawlow and brother-in-law Charles Townes invent the laser (short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), now used in fiber-optic communications networks and as a cutting tool in surgery and industry. Each later won a Nobel related to the research.

-1962: Demonstrated cellular technology, tested the first paging system, produced the first orbiting communications satellite (Telstar I) and invented light-emitting diodes, now widely used in imaging systems.

-1965: Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson stumble upon cosmetic background radiation while using a highly sensitive "horn antenna" in radio astronomy experiments; they win 1978 Nobel Prize. The static noise they heard was the strongest evidence supporting the Edwin Hubble/George Lemaitre theory the universe was created in a "Big Bang" explosion.

-1969: UNIX operating system, software that made open computer systems possible and became the Internet's foundation.

-1979: Digital signal processor, enabling cellular phones and modems.

-1980: Digital cell phone technology.

-1988: First fiber-optic transatlantic cable, handling up to 40,000 phone calls at once.

-1992: Invented compression technology needed for digital radio.

-1995: First prototype system supporting wireless Internet.

-1998: First switch allowing Internet telephone traffic, faster Internet access.

-2005: First Internet Protocol transmission at 100 gigabits per second, 10 times the current speed and critical for future services such as IPTV.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-16-57-04





Google Reaches Deal in Belgian Dispute
AP

Google Inc. said Tuesday it has struck a content-sharing deal with two organizations to partly settle a dispute in Belgium over news articles available through the Internet search engine.

But Google still faces a bid by Belgian newspapers - spearheaded by copyright protection society Copiepresse - to get the company to pull the news content unless it paid the newspapers or received their permission. A judge for the Brussels-based Court of First Instance said she would deliver her verdict in early January.

France-based multimedia authors' rights group SCAM and Sofam, which represents Belgian photographers and visual artists, withdrew their support for Copiepresse's case before the Belgian judge heard arguments from both sides last week.

Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said the company was "pleased to see they would not pursue litigation," but insisted the deal was not new and was part of an ongoing dialogue with publishers and authors' rights groups.

"We won't go into the details," she said, refusing to say when the agreement was signed and what exactly it covered apart from allowing the search engine "extensive use of content" and "innovative new ways beyond what copyright allows without the permission of authors."

In September, the Belgian court ruled against Google after it failed to appear at an earlier hearing. That judgment forced the Mountain View, Calif., company to remove newspaper content from its news index, threatening daily fines of $1.3 million until it complied. The court later agreed to give Google another hearing to put its side.

Google's lawyers insist the company had not broken copyright law by showing headlines, a few lines of text and a link to the original story.

But Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing the country's French-language editors, argued that Google hurt the rights of authors because it effectively gave away for free older articles that they sell on a subscription basis.

Most Belgian newspapers offer fresh articles to readers for free but charge for access to their archives of stories.

This was not the first time Google's automatically generated news aggregation pages have irked content providers. The French news agency AFP is suing Google for at least $17.5 million in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Google service essentially replicates for free what AFP subscribers pay for.

Separately, Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for stories and photographs. Neither Google nor New York-based AP have disclosed financial terms or other details.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-00-20-26





2 Google Execs Probed Over Abuse Video
Colleen Barry

Italian authorities are targeting two Google executives over videos the site displayed showing a disabled youth being abused.

Although users post items on Google Inc.'s video service without the company's prior approval, Milan prosecutors are targeting the executives for failing to control content on their sites. The case comes despite European law, adopted by Italy in 2003, specifying that Internet providers are not responsible for controlling content published on their service.

The executives are not named, but are identified as the legal representatives for Google Italia Srl, the Mountain View, Calif., company's Italian arm.

The probe has prompted a proposal in Italy to limit Internet postings of images by youths under the age of 17, while others warn of stifling innovation.

"As far as I understand, the entire European Union has decided there is no responsibility for the Internet provider for content,"

"You can't blame the Internet for being a means of diffusing something whose causes lay somewhere else," said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, president of Assodigitale, a think-tank on digital technology. "You can't blame the manufacturer of paper because someone prints an insult on it."

Maffe said such problems create "a strong disincentive to invest in this country, to develop value-added services on the Internet or on the mobile."

The Milan investigation was sought by Vividown, an advocacy group for Downs Syndrome. Vividown was alerted to the pair of videos in early September by someone who had come across them on Google Italia's video site.

In one, an autistic youth is being mistreated, and someone puts in a mock telephone call to Vividown.

The video was shot in a classroom in the northern city of Turin, and four youths involved are the subject of a criminal investigation.

Vividown President Edoardo Cenzi said that although Google removed the content within 12 hours after they reported its existence to authorities, the group took further action because "we don't believe these videos should be circulated without controls."

Stefano Hesse, a spokesman for Google Italia, said Google was cooperating with authorities.

"From a legal point of view, there is a European law that says we are not responsible for content," Hesse said. "We don't want to hide behind laws. We want to do the best thing for our users."

Google is developing technologies to help identify illegal or offensive content, Hesse said, but said that at the moment the most effective filter are users who flag material they deem inappropriate.

"We have clear policies about content and we always remove what we think is illegal content and what our users flag as illegal content," Hesse said. But he acknowledged that sometimes what is deemed offensive varies by culture.

"It could be religious. It could be pornography. It depends on the culture or the way of thinking of the people looking at the video, since it is a worldwide platform," Hesse said.

He declined to comment further on the Milan investigation, saying he had not yet received the court documents or been formally informed of the identities of the executives being investigated. Hesse said he believes they are based at Google's headquarters in the United States.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-15-57-14





Verizon Wireless to Feature YouTube Videos
Bruce Meyerson

YouTube videos will be viewable on cell phones for the first time under a deal with Verizon Wireless, which will also allow users to upload videos shot with their camera phones.

The partnership to be announced Tuesday marks the first big distribution deal for YouTube since the young video-sharing Web site was acquired earlier this month by Google Inc. for $1.76 billion.

The mobile YouTube service, to be launched in early December, will be offered for no additional fee as part of Verizon's V Cast service, which costs subscribers $15 per month or $3 per day. The companies declined to provide an exact launch day, saying the technologies being employed are still being tested.

Like the rest of V Cast, but unlike YouTube's Web site, the mobile service will be ad-free. The companies declined to discuss any financial terms to the partnership except to say that Verizon Wireless will have exclusive U.S. rights to cellular distribution of YouTube videos for an undisclosed period.

Verizon Wireless will feature a YouTube channel in its V Cast application, which is available on 14 of the company's handset models. The channel will offer categories such as the most viewed or most discussed videos from the YouTube site, said Robin Chan, director for entertainment programming for Verizon Wireless.

To upload a video shot on a Verizon handset to the YouTube Web site, users will use the same function that's used to share pictures with friends, known as multimedia messaging service or MMS. Users will enter a short numeric code to send the video.

Notably, while YouTube executives stressed the appeal of watching videos on the go, Verizon Wireless sees the uploading feature as a significant draw.

"All things happen in real time in real world, and the mobile phone is a terminal where you can capture that on video, so it is a core device for user-generated content," said Chan, calling current modes of uploading videos to the Web cumbersome.

YouTube executives said the company will ensure that the clips offered will be screened to include only those that meet with Verizon Wireless content guidelines. Those guidelines forbid Verizon's partners from transmitting copyrighted material and "adult" content.

That's a key restriction, as YouTube's immense success has hinged on a combination of "homemade" user-generated content as well as volumes of copyrighted video.

Although YouTube has promptly removed pirated videos from its site whenever copyright owners complain, questions linger about the site's vulnerability to a barrage of potential law suits, especially now that it has Google's deep pockets behind it.

To lessen the risk, YouTube recently forged partnerships with Universal Music Group, CBS Corp., Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Inc. The truce with Universal was a significant breakthrough because the world's largest record company had threatened to sue for copyright infringement.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC of Britain.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-02-56-11





Verizon Adds Revver to User Videos

A day after saying it will bring YouTube videos to cell phones, Verizon Wireless is announcing a similar deal with Revver.com, a Web site that shares ad revenue with the people who upload the video clips.

The mobile Revver service to be announced Wednesday will be launched in early December. It will be available for no additional fee on Verizon's V Cast multimedia download service, which costs subscribers $15 per month or $3 per day.

Revver has tried to distinguish itself from YouTube by sharing with uploaders half of the ad revenue generated any time their clips are viewed.

Revver.com shows ads at the end of each video clip, but that won't be the case on V Cast. Instead, Revver said, uploaders whose videos are played will share in the licensing arrangement with Verizon.

The companies did not disclose any financial terms of the deal, which gives Verizon exclusive rights to show Revver content on cell phones in the United States.

"This is a breakthough for our creative base in that they will be paid 50 percent of all the revenue that's generated from this relationship with Verizon Wireless," said Steven Starr, founder and chief executive of Revver, which he said has 40,000 content contributors.

As with the YouTube deal announced Tuesday, the Revver channel will be featured under the "entertainment" category on V Cast, which is available on 14 Verizon handsets. The Revver channel will be broken down into five categories: editor's picks, viral video classics, laughs, animation and cute overdose.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-44-37





Nokia Cuts Operating Margin Targets
AP

Nokia Corp. on Tuesday cut its operating margin targets, blaming increased exposure to the network infrastructure business. It also predicted global sales of mobile phones would grow by 10 percent in 2007.

The world's largest cell phone maker said its closely watched operating margin will suffer from the start of the Nokia Siemens Networks operations, a joint venture that will combine Nokia's network business group and Siemens' carrier-related operations.

As a result, it lowered its target margin to 15 percent for the next one to two years, down from the 17 percent it set in December 2005.

Nokia also tightened targets for its mobile phone and multimedia division, saying it would aim for a 17 percent operating margin over the next two years rather than the 17 percent to 18 percent set out last December.

Nokia's American depositary shares fell 25 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $20.06 on the New York Stock Exchange.

At its Capital Markets day presentation in Amsterdam, the Finnish company also said industrywide shipments of mobile phones will be up 10 percent next year from the 970 million units it estimates will be sold in 2006.

Nokia also presented four new handsets.

The new phones will hit the market early next year and include three mid-range units that will cost $260 to $425. It also showed off a $99 phone aimed at customers in emerging markets, Nokia said.

The models include the half-inch thin 6300 camera phone, which features a slim design that's likely meant to compete with Motorola Inc.'s compact RAZR model. The 6290 handset, meanwhile, was billed by Nokia as its first midlevel 3G smart phone.

"To enjoy the full benefits of the continuing growth of the global device market that Nokia expects, we've made a number of important strategic moves and organizational changes, and have put our marketing and design efforts into a sharper focus," Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-10-16-27





1 in 5 Parents Say Kids Online Too Much
Anick Jesdanun

One in five American parents believe their kids are spending too much time on the Internet, though most say the online activities haven't affected grades either way.

In a study to be released Wednesday by the University of Southern California, 21 percent of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49 percent who complain their kids watch too much TV.

About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades haven't gone up or down since they got Internet access.

Forty-seven percent of the adults say they have withheld Internet use as a form of punishment. Banning television is still more popular, reported by 57 percent of adults surveyed.

The study, meanwhile, found that although only 27 percent of cell phone owners use them for text messaging, photo transmitting and other non-voice functions, the figure grows to 54 percent among those 18-24 and 45 percent among those under 18.

The study has been conducted most years since 2000. Over that time, researchers have seen Internet use grow to 78 percent, from 67 percent. Access at home increased to 68 percent, from 47 percent.

In one of the few surveys to look at why people are offline, the study found the lack of a working computer most often to blame. Of the 22 percent of Americans who do not currently use the Internet, more than a quarter are former users who dropped out.

"Almost nobody drops out out of dissatisfaction," said Jeffrey Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future. "The reason most people drop off is they change jobs or their computer breaks."

But more than half the former users have no intention of returning online, the most ever. Overall, 60 percent of non-users have no plans to go online within the next year.

Cole said the numbers raise the prospect of a permanent subclass of non-users.

"Internet penetration has largely plateaued," he said.

Americans 66 and over remain the most disconnected, with only 38 percent online. For all other age groups, at least 74 percent are online, with penetration hitting 99 percent for those 18 and under, likely because most U.S. schools now have some form of Internet access.

On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000.

Thirty-seven percent of home Internet users still have dial-up accounts, compared with 26 percent for high-speed cable modems and 24 percent for DSL. Eleven percent of Internet users go online through mobile devices - not necessarily exclusively - averaging two hours a week.

The study revealed little change in the effect on television. Thirty-six percent of home Internet users say they have spent less time watching TV since they started using the Internet, roughly the same as the 33 percent who said that in a 2001 survey.

Cole said the increased use of high-speed connections has a lot to do with that.

When people were on dial-up, they were accessing the Internet 20 or 30 minutes at a time - "generally time not spent watching television," Cole said. "Broadband changed all that. They are on 30, 40, 50 times a day for two or three minutes at a time. It's not a big bucket of time displacing television."

People may be paying less attention to television commercials, though, fitting in online use during program breaks, he said.

That said, 41 percent of veteran users - those online for more than nine years - say they have spent less time watching television, compared with only 23 percent among those who have joined the Internet within the year.

The study found nearly a quarter of online users - especially newcomers to the Internet - say they spend less time reading.

The telephone survey of 2,269 U.S. households was conducted in English and Spanish from February to April and included follow-up interviews with respondents to his previous studies. The study has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-42-03





Opera Updates Browser for Cell Phones
AP

Opera Software ASA released a new version of its mini browser for mobile phones Tuesday.

The free Opera Mini 3.0 makes it easier to post photos to Web journals from a handset and enhances security for banking and shopping by encrypting information, the company said. It also supports Really Simple Syndication, a technology that notifies users when Web sites are updated.

The Oslo-based company first released Opera Mini in January. Opera said about 8 million people downloaded the earlier versions in the first 10 months.

"I think the main reason for Mini's success is that it, for the first time, allows millions of people to use their mobile phones to access the same Web sites they do from their desktop," said company Chief Executive Jon von Tetzchner.

Opera's browser has won praise as being fast and compact, and has been gaining ground in mobile phones and handheld computers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-35-36





Store 256GB on an A4 Sheet
Chris Mellor

How much information can you store on an A4 sheet? Well, according to some new technology designed by an Indian engineering student, an extraordinary 256GB.

New "rainbow technology", devised by Sainul Abideen who has just completed an MCA degree in Kerala, data can be encoded into coloured geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed.

Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data. The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. By printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved.

Paper is, of course, bio-degradable, unlike CDs or DVDs. And sheets of paper also cost a fraction of the cost of a CD or DVD.

Abideen has demonstrated a 45-second video clip being encoded on paper, termed by him, a rainbow video disk - RVD - and then played back through a computer with an RVD scanner attached. In another demonstration he has shown 432 A4 pages of paper rainbow format-encoded and stored on a two-inch by two-inch square of paper.

He says that smaller scanners could fit inside laptop computers or mobile phones, and read SIM card-sized RVD's containing 5GB of data.

The recording media could be either paper or plastic sheets. Such media are making a comeback - witness yesterday's story about re-writable paper.
http://www.techworld.com/storage/new...fm?newsID=7424





Businesses Split on Patent Case
Christopher S. Rugaber

Some of the largest companies in the United States are facing off in a Supreme Court case over gas pedals, with one side hoping the justices will put the brakes on an out-of-control patent system.

The court is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday on what's obvious when older inventions are combined to create something new. The law says an invention that's "obvious" isn't patentable, but the definition isn't clear despite decades of litigation.

The ambiguity, critics say, has led to an explosion of patents as companies stake claims on everything in sight, from strategies for avoiding taxes to golf ball designs. The result has been extensive and costly legal wrangling as companies of all sizes fight over who's infringing what. In some cases, small companies acquire patents not to develop new products but to sue for a quick windfall.

Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and other New Economy companies have filed briefs calling for a change to the system.

But Johnson & Johnson, GE and DuPont, have filed their own brief arguing that major changes to the patent system would jeopardize billions of dollars invested in product innovation. They want to protect pharmaceutical and chemical products from generic manufacturers and counterfeiters, attorneys involved in the case said.

Patent law experts consider KSR International v. Teleflex Inc. one of the most important cases in years.

"It's extraordinarily likely that the case will be a landmark ruling," said Thomas Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and counsel to Teleflex.

The KSR case _ which has attracted an unusually high number of friend-of-the-court filings from corporations, the government and academia _ involves a dispute over a brake pedal designed for pickup trucks.

Canada-based KSR manufactures gas pedals for General Motors Corp. It made a pedal that can be adjusted for the height of the driver and uses electronic signals rather than a mechanical cable to accelerate when the pedal is pushed.

Both features were developed separately _ the adjustable pedal over 25 years ago _ but Teleflex, a manufacturer based in Limerick, Pa., sued KSR in 2002, claiming that KSR's combination of the two features infringed on a patent it was issued in May 2001.

KSR argued that the patent should be invalidated because the combination of the two features is obvious.

The question of "obviousness" has long been a contentious area of patent law because it is the most subjective, patent experts say. Many inventions can seem obvious in hindsight. For example, 3M Co.'s Post-It Notes "may seem to be obvious, but that is only because they have been nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives for 25 years," the GE and DuPont brief said. 3M also signed onto that brief, which supports the status quo.

"Upending nearly a quarter-century of jurisprudence at this point would throw into question the validity of millions of issued patents, cause the reassessment of patent licenses worth billions of dollars, make patent litigation more difficult to settle, and inevitably create more litigation for the courts," the brief said.

Gerald J. Mossinghoff, a former commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said 85 percent to 90 percent of the office's work focuses on determining obviousness. Yet the Supreme Court has not ruled on obviousness since 1976, adding to the importance of the case.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which was set up to consider patent cases in 1982, developed the "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" test in an effort to set an objective standard for determining whether an invention is obvious.

The test says that where existing elements are combined to create an invention _ such as combining an adjustable brake pedal with an electronic one to create an adjustable, electronic brake pedal _ there should be evidence that someone else might have come up with the same combination in order to determine that the invention is obvious and therefore not worthy of a patent.

For example, the evidence could be references in previous patents or written comments in a technical journal.

Critics of the Federal Circuit argue that this has made it too difficult to prove that a claimed invention is obvious and therefore too easy to obtain a patent, because if a potential invention is obvious then technical experts may not have written anything about it.

In addition, Microsoft and Cisco said in their brief that the Federal Circuit's test lowers patent standards and actually hinders innovation, rather than spurring it, as patents are intended to do.

The companies said the current system has led to "large numbers of obvious patents" that make "inadvertent infringement" more likely, and therefore patent infringement lawsuits more common.

This has spurred companies like Cisco to seek "hundreds of patents for defensive purposes," the brief said.

Patent litigation is expensive, industry observers say. Emery Simon, counselor to the Business Software Alliance, a trade group, said that patent cases typically cost $2 million to $4 million per year and can take several years to resolve.

These expenses can be passed onto consumers through higher product prices, the companies said.

"A network router, a golf club, a software program, a ribbon bow, a bra all become more expensive as more and more patent holders must be paid royalties, and unnecessarily so where these obvious patents contribute no innovation to the product being sold," Microsoft and Cisco's brief said.

But companies that support the Federal Circuit's test argue that it is effective in countering the problem of "hindsight bias."

John Duffy, a George Washington University professor who helped prepare KSR's Supreme Court filings, said that if the Supreme Court overturns the Federal Circuit's standard, it would make it easier for businesses to defend themselves against patent infringement suits by invalidating questionable patents. That could result in less patent litigation overall, he said.

Most legal experts expect the Supreme Court to modify the Federal Circuit's standard in some way. Goldstein said the court could even set a new standard for determining what's obvious.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112400736.html





China's Biggest Porn Site Operator Jailed for Life
AP

The creator of China's largest pornographic Web site was ordered imprisoned for life, state media reported this week.

Xinhua News Agency said judges at the Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court in Shanxi province gave the life sentence to Chen Hui and handed down terms of 13 months to 10 years to eight others after they were convicted of profiting from pornographic dissemination.

Mr. Chen, 28, and his accomplices started the Qingseliuyuetian (Pornographic Summer) Web site in 2004 and opened three other porn sites, attracting more than 600,000 users.

Xinhua reported the police said it was difficult to know the exact amount of profits the Web site earned. Police found about $25,000 in the bank accounts of the nine.

When the site was closed in October 2005, it contained more than 9 million pornographic images and articles, police said.

China has the world's second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 123 million people online.

The government encourages Internet use for education and business but strictly controls content and tries to block access to material deemed pornographic or subversive.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06328/740532-96.stm





Company Markets Products, Services to Airline Passengers
Susan Tuz

Thomas McClain, left, and Jeffrey McChesney has started Jetera, a media program for air passengers that recently won an avaiation award.

When Jeff McChesney and Tom McClain met, it was the meeting of like minds.

The two men, both Ridgefield residents, saw a future in providing one-on-one marketing to airline passengers and began brainstorming the idea.

The end result was creating a company called Jetera. In five years, they hope to see Jetera generating in excess of $2 billion profit annually. And improving income potential for airlines participating in the program.

"Since the moment we came up with the novel patent idea of One-to-One Media, I haven't slept," McChesney said. "My mind is going constantly with ideas."

Jetera will change the way airlines serve customers, in its creators' view. It will change the way passengers experience air travel and the way advertisers sell to prospective customers. It will also change the way businesses perform many tasks, McClain said.

Jetera will use its patent-pending "One-to-One Media" technology to market products to airline passengers.

It will target each passenger by gender, age, marital status and profession. Then, knowing who is flying when and where and in what seat on what plane through airline reservation information, Jetera will send an information and entertainment stream on the small screens found on airplane seats. The program will be geared to each individual passenger.

"We remain invisible, in the background," McClain explained. "We're like 'Intel Inside.' All transactions are in the name of the airline."

Jetera's creators see airport kiosks also carrying marketing information. When a passenger uses a kiosk to access his ticket, a message may come up asking him to go to an in-airport store and then take a survey on how he found service inside the store.

"That passenger would be offered, say $25, for participating in the survey," McClain said. "It could be in the form of a credit to his credit card, or as frequent flyer points or having a check sent to his home."

The media stream sent on these small screens during flights would offer the ability to read the top newspaper stories in the city the passenger was flying to -- or view articles from top magazines in the country on topics of interest to him. Best sellers, hobby articles and how-to tapes could be viewed.

McClain and McChesney see a myriad of possibilities.

"If you don't wish to be entertained on a flight, you can opt out," McClain said. "Just push the button at the bottom of the screen."

The possibilities seem endless, they said. For instance, discount coupons for kitchenware might be sent to the home address of a passenger who viewed a cooking segment on the small screen.

"Say you're flying from New York to Chicago, then changing planes to fly on to Seattle on the same airline," McChesney said. "You could start listening to a best seller on the first flight, change planes and pick up with the second half of the book on the second flight."

Jetera was developed from McChesney's company, e-JITI, created in 2003. That company delivers technical information to pilots in the cockpit, relieving them from carrying paperwork to the flight.

McChesney combined that technology's delivery system with McClain's idea to market individually to airline passengers.

McChesney and McClain's data indicates that 600 million domestic passengers will fly on the 17 largest U.S. airlines in 2006. It projects the number of domestic passengers in 2015 to be at 1 billion.

That equates into 105 billion pre-flight, in-flight and post-flight impressions that can be made on the domestic passenger market of the 17 major airlines annually, they said.

McClain brings marketing and advertising sales experience to Jetera. He was senior vice president at Reuben H. Donnelly, the company that produces yellow pages directories.

McChesney brings his background in aviation as a professional pilot and head of operations for an air cargo company, as well as pioneering digitized information delivery to pilots in airplane cockpits.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023497





What’s the frequency?

Lost in Transit No More

Sydney Airport is investigating high-tech tagging methods for baggage handling, which could greatly reduce the number of bags that go missing each year.

Industry experts say that baggage mishandling costs the industry globally $US1.7 ($2.17) billion each year, and that much of this cost is due to failures in the barcode-based tagging system that's currently in use at most airports worldwide.

A spokesman for Sydney Airport said it had sent staff to look at overseas airports already using the electronic tagging technology - dubbed "radio frequency identification" (RFID) - and that it would be commencing its own trials shortly.

"Sydney Airport is actively looking at RFID," said the spokesman.

"We have sent staff to visit the Hong Kong and Las Vegas airports that have the system at the moment, and are about to commence a series of trials here as well. The trials will establish the benefits of the new system in increasing the accuracy of the baggage sorting system."

Pending the results of its trial, Sydney Airport would release a "timetable to take Sydney Airport to RFID", the spokesman said.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which last year introduced a global standard for RFID baggage tags, said approximately 1 per cent of the 1.7 billion bags that passed through the system every year were mishandled, costing the industry on average $US100 for each instance.

IATA projects that, if its RFID standard is adopted on a global scale, the annual industry savings would be $US760 million.

The problem with the current barcode-based tagging method is that the laser barcode scanners, used to track the movements of baggage, are prone to failure.

This is because, if the barcode tag attached to a bag is dirty or wet, it won't be read by the scanner, which itself is also prone to dirt and dust.

According to IATA, the success rate of barcode-based tag reading is just 85 per cent, while an electronic RFID system would increase this read rate to between 95 and 99 per cent.

IATA said of the new tagging method: "RFID is a technology incorporated into a silicon chip that emits a radio signal which matches a user-defined serial number with an item, in this case a piece of baggage."

With RFID, Sydney Airport could constantly track the status of bags at a distance using an antenna, said IATA.

But while RFID would undoubtedly reduce mishandling costs, each RFID tag costs on average 21 US cents, which is up to ten times more than a printed barcode label.

A recent ABI Research report suggests that this factor will hinder the take-up of RFID by the airline industry.

"One of the barriers to adoption of RFID for airline baggage tagging has been the tag price," said research analyst Robert Foppiani.

"Because the tags must be disposable, they must be cheap."

IATA expects that continued investment in RFID technology will help drive RFID tag prices down in future.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...777706811.html





Boarding Pass Follies

Good News and Bad News
Christopher Soghoian

The Good.

One of my lawyers flew into Indianapolis on Nov 14th and we met with two FBI cybercrime agents, as well as an assistant US Attorney. The short version of things, is that they've stopped the investigation, due to a lack of evidence of criminal intent on my part. They've given me back my passports, my computers, and I'll be getting the rest of my stuff back shortly. Essentially, I'm a free man - with no charges filed. I've been represented by two amazing lawyers throughout this mess - Stephen Braga and Jennifer Granick. Without them - this would not have ended so quickly, or with such a fantastic outcome.

The Feds (at least those that I met) fundamentally disagree with me on many subjects - the role that researchers, academics, and common citizens take in studying, criticizing and pointing out the flaws in our security systems. I have been laying the groundwork for some Tor related research at Indiana University (pending approval from the University Counsel) - in fact, two of Tor's designers are visiting researchers at IU this year. It was made perfectly clear during the meeting that parts of the US government, at least the two represented at the meeting, strongly disapprove of Tor - and in particular, thought that research universities such as IU, MIT, Georgia Tech, Harvard and others have no business supporting such projects.

It is difficult for me to properly express how deep the divide was at this meeting - between the positions and opinions expressed by the feds, and of the "common values" shared by most researchers in my field and those taught to me in university settings. However, in spite of this, after talking for a few hours, they came to understand that although in my own way, I'm trying to work towards the same thing as them: A safer flying experience.

Also - my lawyers tell me that it's now OK to do interviews.

The Bad.

The forced take down of my website a few weeks ago has not improved airport security. The bigger and more interesting question, is if putting the site up in the first placed made airport security any more vulnerable.

There are currently multiple goals of the airport security system in the US.

1. Make sure there are no weapons/bombs on-board an airplane.
2. Make sure that the people who 'should not' be flying do not get on airplanes.

Goal number one is easy enough:

TSA representatives have stated multiple times since my boarding pass generator went live that passengers are not placed at any additional risk when fake boarding passes are used. This is true. As long as the TSA checkpoint staff do their jobs, then evil-doers should not be able to bring bad things on-board. Recent reports seem to indicate that TSA is having a bit of trouble with their screening process, but at least for this discussion, let us imagine a world where TSA is able to actually stop every single knife, gun, binary chemical explosive device and box cutter from being smuggled on-board.

Goal number two - the no-fly list - is problematic for a number of reasons.

1. Terrorists do not pre-register themselves before committing their crimes. There are no repeat offender suicide bombers - and thus it should not be too difficult for terrorist organizations to recruit people with clean criminal records.

2. Terrorists evolve to avoid detection. If ethnic profiling is used, they recruit from local mainstream, or less-suspected ethnic groups (for example, the Jamaician/British "shoe bomber" and then the use of British born, south Asian Muslims in the London attacks). When gender profiling is used, women are recruited (see: Palestine, Sri Lanka, Chechnya). If we rely upon a watch list to find terrorists, they'll conduct 'dry runs' before the real event, to figure out who will be forbidden from participating in the real attack itself. The futility of using ethnic profiling to detect terrorists has been discussed at length by researchers from MIT, where they prove that random searches are far more effective.

3. You can legally refuse to show ID at the airport. They will let you board the plane, without a single piece of ID.

4. The implementation of the no-fly and mandatory-selectee lists is flawed, secretive and in no way transparent. Senator Ted Kennedy was put on the list for a while, Cat Stevens, the wife of the Senator made famous for stating that the "Internet is a series of tubes" has been repeatedly delayed at airports, due to the fact that she shares a name with the now-Muslim singer, and any passenger named Robert Johnson or John Smith is severely inconvenienced when they fly. Yet, at the same time, the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom are dead, are still on the list, while the names of the London liquid bombers were not placed on the list - due to the chance a boarding denial at the airport could tip them off to the fact that they were under investigation.

What to do with the no-fly list?

We, as a nation, must decide a few things. If we want no-fly, and mandatory search lists, we have to decide how effective we want them to be.

If we want to bar those who are on the no-fly list from boarding a plane, we must institute checks of ID at the gate. Airport staff, or TSA agents with access to the airlines' computers, must be able to scan a boarding pass, look at the name on the computer, and see that it matches the name on the passenger's ID. Looking at the printed boarding pass is not enough - the name in the reservation system must be verified and matched. This, will, of course, cost money - as someone will have to be paid to perform this check.

If we want to bar those no-fly list passengers from boarding the plane and from getting into the 'secure' area past the TSA checkpoint, then the TSA must be able to match the boarding pass and ID to a computer reservation at the security checkpoint. This would require barcode scanners/ticket readers at the checkpoint. Furthermore, TSA would either need to find a way to interface with every airlines' computer systems, or the airlines would need to get together, publish the data, and agree upon a common, computer readable and verifiable standard for boarding passes (Hint: this is where a bit of government guidance/regulation could be useful).

Each of these two computer based boarding pass/ID checks would make impossible the current and widely reported airport security vulnerability, which has been documented at length on Senator Schumer's website.

Let us imagine that the government rolls out computer boarding pass checks at the TSA checkpoint. One problem remains: You can fly without ID. You can either refuse to show ID, citing a right affirmed by the US appeals court, or tell the TSA staff that you've forgotten your ID. Sure, you will be subjected to a more vigorous search - but if your aim is to bypass the no-fly list (and not to sneak a weapon past security), then you'll have succeeded in your goal.

The domestic no-fly list and the ability to fly without ID simply cannot co-exist. The former is made completely useless by the latter. If we want to have a no-fly list, we must require ID to be shown. Otherwise, a passenger simply purchases a ticket in a fake name, refuses to show ID at the checkpoint, and then can successfully board the plane.

As things stand right now, Checking ID at the security checkpoint does nothing to stop people who are on the no-fly list from actually flying. It merely inconveniences regular passengers who play by the rules. A security system that "keeps the honest honest" doesn't work when the attackers you're worried about are intelligent, well funded and willing to kill themselves to get the job done. The question of forcing passengers to show ID for domestic flights is one that is currently working its way up to the US Supreme Court. This issue, and a larger discussion surrounding the no-fly list should be publicly debated by Congress and in the newspapers. The ability, right now, to fly without ID creates a gigantic loophole in a no-fly list that arguably wasn't doing so well to begin with.

We need to figure out, as a nation where the majority of people do not support a national ID, if we want a no-fly list in the first place and if we are willing to be forced to present our papers when we want to fly/ride a train/get on a greyhound bus.

How many 4-year old children, and countless John Smiths and Robert Johnsons are we willing to let the government search and inconvenience in the name of "security".
http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/2...-bad-news.html





Government Rates Travelers for Terrorism
AP

For the past four years without public notice, federal agents have assigned millions of Americans and other international travelers computer-generated scores assessing the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. And the government intends to keep them on file for 40 years.

Earlier in November, the government disclosed the existence and details of the Automated Targeting System (ATS) for the first time in the Federal Register. Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought the ATS had been applied only to cargo.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meals they ordered.

The Homeland Security Department notice called it ''one of the most advanced targeting systems in the world'' and said U.S. ability to spot criminals and other security threats ''would be critically impaired without access to this data.''

Still, privacy advocates view ATS with alarm. ''It's probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected,'' David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues, said in an interview.

A similar DHS data-mining project for domestic air travelers -- now known as Secure Flight -- caused a furor two years ago in Congress, which has barred its implementation until it can pass 10 tests for accuracy and privacy protection.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...Screening.html





Play Again, Mr. Redstone?
Geraldine Fabrikant

Sumner Redstone, the 83-year-old media mogul, had always relished talking about his empire. But there is one investment that the billionaire will not comment about: his family’s holding of Midway Games, the ailing video game maker.

In what should be a golden time for video game makers, Midway’s stock had plummeted to $8.53 a share on Friday from a five-year high of $23.16 last December. (Currently, Mr. Redstone and entities controlled by his family hold 88 percent of the outstanding shares.) During the same time, shares in rivals like Electronic Arts and Activision have risen — by 11.6 and 23.2 percent respectively — in part because the next generation of video game consoles, the new Sony PlayStation and Wii from Nintendo, are just arriving in stores.

Midway’s continued slump is a cautionary tale for old-style media companies looking to cross-pollinate with new technology without fully understanding the underlying business. Mr. Redstone began gathering up Midway shares based on his firmly held belief in convergence between games and other media properties. And indeed, Midway has struck deals with Paramount Pictures and MTV, both divisions of Mr. Redstone’s Viacom empire.

But within the game industry itself, Midway has struggled. Its biggest hit, “Mortal Kombat,” a gory fighter game, is more than a dozen years old and the company has not been able to leverage it or another early success from the company’s arcade days, “Gauntlet,” to appeal to new generations of gamers.

Midway has largely avoided getting into license auctions for big movie or sports properties, a trait which indirectly led to one recent hit: “Blitz,” a violent football game that has not been approved by the National Football League. Other marquee projects, like a deal with the film director John Singleton and the rapper Snoop Dogg to develop a game set in South Central Los Angeles, have either been canceled or flopped.

If the company’s guidance is a useful measure, this year Midway games will generate $86 million in revenues, the highest revenue it has had since the fourth quarter of 1999. It will finally post a small profit — about $2 million — for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2004, according to guidance from the chief executive, David Zucker, who joined the company in May 2003.

How bad are things at Midway? Edward Williams, an analyst at Broadgate, points out that Midway’s stock, even at its depressed level, is still trading at five times sales, a premium over other game makers. But Ivan Feinseth, an analyst at Matrix Investment Research, had a less positive outlook. “Even if Midway reports an accounting profit, it is still earning less on its capital than the cost of that capital,” he said.

“I cannot understand Mr. Redstone’s focus on the company,” Mr. Feinseth said. “In the past year it has lost significant value.”

In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Zucker said the company was now poised for a turnaround as it prepared to introduce a number of new games, like one called “Stranglehold” from John Woo, the film director (“Face/Off” and “Mission: Impossible II”) and another called “The Wheelman,” which will be heavily promoted on MTV. “The games that we are making for the next generation of consoles are more ambitious: they have more driving, shooting,” Mr. Zucker said. “We will have fewer titles but the company has made a significant investment in them.”

So far this year, Midway has introduced “Mortal Kombat: Armageddon” and it is set to introduce “Happy Feet,” based on the new Warner Brothers movie. The company also has plans to use other Viacom properties under Mr. Redstone to help in cross-promotion. Shari Redstone, Sumner Redstone’s daughter, who is vice chairman of Midway and who also oversees the Redstone family’s movie theater business, said she planned to sell the “Happy Feet” video game at theaters.

“We are focusing on fewer and better games, and we have positioned ourselves very well for the next cycle,” she said.

But a number of analysts remain skeptical of Midway’s potential. Mr. Zucker has yet to prove he can revive the company, and his sale of shares just as the stock declined early this year attracted investor attention.

Last December, for example, Mr. Zucker sold 650,000 shares within a month just as the stock began to plunge.

To some corporate governance experts those sales raised timing questions. On Dec. 8, government records show, Mr. Zucker registered under a Securities Exchange Commission rule 1 that allows corporate insiders to sell shares in many situations where they would otherwise be prohibited from doing so by insider-trading rules.

At the time, Midway’s stock was near its five-year high of $22.41 a share, helped by the fact that Mr. Redstone had been buying shares aggressively in the fall and early winter. A week later, on Dec. 16, the company announced that it was laying off employees and taking a $20 million write-off. By the end of the year, Mr. Redstone stopped acquiring shares. Midway’s stock began a slide that brought the stock to a low of $6.06 a share on June 14.

Mr. Zucker declined to comment on the timing of his sales. Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant said: “When the timing is so compressed between creating the plan and selling, it often raises questions. If Mr. Zucker was going to sell anyway, why didn’t he create the plan earlier?”

Mr. Redstone’s holdings continue to provide support for the share price. That is one reason that Mr. Williams of Broadgate is neutral on Midway. “The main issue that I have with the company is that the valuation of the equity already discounts a significant level of success,” he said.

But Mr. Redstone is unlikely to keep buying shares. If his holdings were to exceed 90 percent of the stock, then owners of its convertible bonds would be entitled to additional equity with a value of about $6 million. Mr. Redstone has said in the past that he believes the importance of owning Midway was its appeal to young male audiences that used to watch TV. If he is right, the company will ultimately become very profitable. But at some of his other companies, Mr. Redstone seems to have grown increasingly impatient for results.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu.../27midway.html





More-Savvy Web Retailers Expect More Holiday Profits
Bob Tedeschi

NEARLY a decade into the e-commerce era, the growth in online holiday shopping has shown few signs of slowing down, executives and analysts said. Fueled by Web searches for iPods, Elmos, gift cards and video game consoles, among many others, online retailers are expecting sales to increase by about 20 percent this year, or about the same amount as in 2005.

This holiday season is likely to be punctuated by more aggressive online promotions, new refinements in Web merchandising and a continued migration of shoppers to online options. And because retailers are smarter about marketing their sites, analysts said, they could also emerge from this holiday season with more profits than in years past.

“Companies are getting much more efficient in how they use their ad budgets,” said John Aiken, an analyst with Majestic Research, a New York-based investment firm. “It should bode well for profits.”

In particular, Mr. Aiken said retailers were buying more ads on Google and Yahoo than in years past, catching consumers at the point where a growing number of them begin their shopping. But instead of bidding aggressively for the right to display an ad on Google whenever someone searched for something generic, like “toys” or “electronics,” Mr. Aiken said retailers were buying ads alongside results of more specific search terms, like “stuffed bears” or “brown Ugg boots,” which are more likely to result in a sale.

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with JupiterResearch, a technology consulting firm, said online sales this year would reach the $100 billion threshold for the first time. Online sales, she added, would probably constitute 6 percent of total holiday merchandise sales.

Some of that online growth comes from new shoppers. According to a recent Jupiter survey, 114 million online users planned to buy something online this holiday season, a 6 percent jump from last year. The National Retail Federation said 47 percent of consumers would make at least one holiday purchase online this year, up from 36 percent three years ago.

Free shipping promotions and aggressive price cuts on specific items are also part of the story. Two years ago, 64 percent of online retailers offered free shipping on at least some of their items, according to Shopzilla.com, a comparison shopping service. This year, 83 percent of retailers will do so.

Online retailers are taking a more coordinated approach to offering promotional sales. The National Retail Federation, and its Shop.org online division (which represents online retailers) last year dubbed the Monday after Thanksgiving “Cyber Monday,” in recognition of an increase in shopping traffic akin to what offline stores experience on Black Friday.

Despite all that online traffic, though, Cyber Monday sales lagged those of many other holiday-season days. To convert browsers to shoppers, 400 retailers have posted sales and shipping promotions on CyberMonday.com, which will feature deals throughout the holiday season.

Among other sites offering promotions this last weekend, Delias.com, which sells apparel and accessories, offered $25 off, plus free shipping on orders of more than $75 through Nov. 30, Amazon offered $25 off orders of more than $150 through Dec. 1, and Nascar’s shopping site, Store.Nascar.com, offered 10 percent discounts on orders of more than $100 through Nov. 30.

To make those sales, of course, the sites will have to remain accessible, a task not all online merchants were up to on Friday. According to Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet technology measurement firm, most e-commerce sites performed well over the last several days, but Walmart.com, Macys.com and Footlocker.com all shut down at least temporarily, either because of technology glitches or because the sites were overwhelmed by traffic.

Walmart.com’s problems peaked around midday Friday and the site was shut down after nine hours of extremely slow performance. A Walmart.com spokesman, Ravi Jariwala, attributed the problem to higher-than-expected traffic. Macy’s and Footlocker representatives did not immediately return phone calls Sunday seeking comment.

Even in the absence of sales, and occasional site glitches, consumers are growing more comfortable with online shopping, analysts said, as they spend more time online and as Internet merchants further refine their Web sites.

During the Internet boom, e-commerce sites made it easy on customers by following a standard method for presenting merchandise — namely, Amazon’s method — with distinct pathways to items, a brief description of the item and an easy checkout process.

Now, said Ms. Evans of Jupiter, online retailers are “creating different browsing experiences for different product categories.”

“They’re getting past the one-size-fits all philosophy,” she said.

Walmart.com, for one, recently updated its site to include more bundled product assortments in categories like toys, baby goods and furniture. Carter Cast, Walmart.com’s president, said the company had looked at purchase patterns among customers to find what items they naturally bought together, and had combined them on the site, often with discounts. “It just makes it easier for customers to buy,” he said.

Walmart.com is also showing more, and bigger, pictures of item combinations, the way department stores might display, say, a bedroom set. In previous versions of the site, Mr. Cast said, Walmart.com “did a lot more merchandising of separate items.”

“That’s still very important, but now we start off by telling a story and then getting into the items,” he said.

Meanwhile, on product pages for digital cameras and other electronic goods, Walmart.com provides much more information than for other kinds of items. Among other things, the company now provides product reviews and buying advice from CNet, an online publisher of technology-related information.

Ms. Evans of Jupiter said retailers were also refining their approaches in more subtle ways — for instance, offering customers the ability to buy items now and have them delivered on a day closer to Hanukkah or Christmas. “For anybody who’s worried about a package sitting in their garage or getting lost or opened too early, it’s great,” she said.

RedEnvelope.com, the online gifts retailer, offers the service, as does Build-A-Bear Workshop (Buildabear.com), which sells plush toys and accessories. Nancy Schwartz, Build-A-Bear’s director of advertising and direct marketing, said the feature was one of several the company has implemented to simplify the customer experience.

The company has also reduced the amount of text and graphics on the Web site’s home page, while also simplifying its drop-down menus. “We’ve gone to a cleaner, much more streamlined look than in the past,” Ms. Schwartz said. “We wanted to outline exactly where to go, so guests have the least amount of clicks possible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...gy/27ecom.html





Black Friday Turned Green at the Malls Before Dawn
Michael Barbaro

The clock struck midnight. Then the mall struck back.

Early openings, deep discounts and resurgent department stores appeared to give merchants at the mall an edge over discount retailers during the holiday weekend, a reversal of fortune from 2005.

ShopperTrak RCT, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based stores, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving rose 6 percent from last year, to $9 billion. On the same day last year, sales at stores monitored by ShopperTrak dropped 0.9 percent.

Discount chains, with their 5 a.m. openings and $70 portable DVD players, typically dominate the opening day of the holiday shopping season, known as Black Friday, because it was traditionally when retailers started turning a profit, or moved into the black.

But Wal-Mart, by far the nation’s biggest discount chain, threw cold water on that legacy this weekend, estimating that sales in November — including Black Friday — fell 0.1 percent, below its expectations.

Retail analysts and industry executives credited the strong performance of mall stores to an unusually aggressive posture this holiday season. Badly beaten in 2005, they stole a page from their discount rivals, pushing up their openings by as much as six hours, to 12 a.m., and offering bigger early-morning deals.

The tactics succeeded in drawing crowds but could come back to haunt the chains if consumers snatched up the bargains and skipped over the full-priced merchandise.

Gap offered 30 percent off purchases of $50 or more until noon Friday and the Limited Too promoted a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale.

Mall retailers “turned up the dial a full notch this year,” said John D. Morris, senior retail analyst a Wachovia Securities, who deployed aides across the country to track business at chains like Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch and Aéropostale.

Strong early-morning traffic, he said “did not drift off around noon. Stores were holding the attention of customer.”

An experiment with 12 a.m. openings bolstered mall traffic across the country. The crowds swelled to 15,000 at the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah; 20,000 at the Christiana Mall in Newark, Del.; and 50,000 at the Maine Mall in Portland, Me.

Wally Brewster, the head of marketing at General Growth Properties, which owns the three malls, said stores that opened at midnight reported “significantly higher sales” than those that waited until 6 a.m.

Sixty percent of the stores at malls like Fashion Place opened at midnight but, because of the turnout, stores that sat it out were already planning to participate next year, Mr. Brewster said.

Emily Spendlove, 35, drove 45 minutes to wait in line outside the Fashion Place Mall on Thursday night, skipping sleep “to be part of the excitement.” Once inside, she spent $120 at an athletic clothing store called Fanzz, buying four Chicago Bears football products — two helmets, a beach towel and a photo montage.

Ernest Speranza, the chief marketing officer at KB Toys, a mall-based chain, said customers showed up for the discounts but walked out with full-priced merchandise. KB marketed Barbie dolls at 30 percent off, yet thousands of customers still bought higher-priced Bratz dolls. “I think the customer is in the mood to spend,” he said. “They seem very up, very positive.”

Visa USA said preliminary data, culled from spending by its cardholders, supported its forecast that holiday sales would increase 7.5 percent this year, compared with an 8.3 percent increase last year. Wayne Best, senior vice president of economic analysis for the company, said the average amount spent on Visa-branded credit and debit cards Friday grew 9 percent, compared with the same day last year.

Unlike in years past, Visa did not divulge detailed data about spending, but it did report that electronics and home furnishings stores experienced the biggest growth over the weekend. “They really stole the show,” Mr. Best said.

As always, stores outside the mall, like Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target, drew large crowds by dangling deals like 42-inch flat-screen TVs for less than $1,000. But the November results from Wal-Mart have dampened the outlook for big-box retailers.

The chain’s troubles are, in part, unique. It has built hundreds of supercenters so close together that individual store sales have dropped and its plans to carry more fashionable clothing have hit a snag.

But analyst said the success of department stores, which have experienced a revival over the last six months, could not be discounted as a factor.

For the first time in years, they said, discounters faced stiff competition from the mall. In its Black Friday circular, J. C. Penney advertised 35 pages of “doorbuster” deals that expired at noon, and Macy’s put a $10 coupon on the front of its print advertisements.

J. C. Penney, in a statement, reported “brisk traffic” at its stores on Friday, while Terry J. Lundgren, the chief executive of Federated Department Stores, the owner of Macy’s, said “we are off to a strong start.”

Mr. Brewster, of General Growth Properties, predicted “it is going to be a very strong season for the mall.”

Martin Stolz contributed reporting from Murray, Utah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu... tner=homepage





Here’s My Number (for Today)
Anna Jane Grossman

THERE is no shortage of ways to reach Airin McClain, a singer who lives in Philadelphia. She has a Web site, an instant messenger account, a MySpace page, four e-mail addresses and two mobile phones.

Good luck getting one of those phone numbers, though. She would sooner tell you her weight.

“Why would I give out my cell?” said Ms. McClain, 23. “I don’t need a guy I met at a bar one night calling me every day for the next two weeks begging me to go out. I want to filter out the people I don’t need to have contact with.”

In an age of information oversharing, the mobile-phone number is one of the few pieces of personal information that people still choose to guard. Unwanted incoming calls are intrusive and time-consuming and can suck precious daytime cell-plan minutes. And the decision to give out a cell number can haunt you for years, as people now hold on to the numbers longer than their land-line numbers.

Some people have found a way to avoid compromising the sanctity of their cellphone without committing the modern sin of being unreachable. Instead of giving out her cell number, Ms. McClain has recently been dispersing what has become known as a “social phone number.”

This is a free number that is as disposable as a Hotmail address. A handful of Web sites are creating these mask numbers, which can be obtained in nearly every area code (users can either have a number in their own region, or make it look as if they have an office in New York City when they are actually operating out of rural Maine).

These sites buy numbers in bulk at a discount, then generate profit by displaying ads and getting users of the free service to upgrade to billable plans with features like call forwarding, call blocking and outbound calling.

For those who sign up, a recording prompts callers to leave a voice-mail message, and a text or e-mail message is then sent to the recipient to announce a new message, which can be picked up on the Web, by e-mail or by phone.

Matt Wisk, creator of the social phone number provider PrivatePhone.com (and chief marketing officer of the site’s parent company, United Online), said he got the idea to protect mobile numbers in 2005 when Paris Hilton’s cellphone was hacked into, spilling her contacts’ phone numbers all over the Internet.

“I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” he said.

PrivatePhone.com made its debut in May, with the paradoxical tagline “My number is so private, I can make it public.” AOL introduced a similar service around the same time. SimpleVoiceBox.com, J2.com, and K7.net are other sites that offer similar services free, albeit without the benefit of customizable area codes.

Mr. Wisk said a person’s cell number has become the most personal, “the last one you’d give out.”

“Now for so many people,” he said, “it’s the only number, and it corresponds to an object you have on you at all times. It can be a disruptive technology. Having a number that goes straight to voice mail is less intrusive.”

Before cellphones became so dominant, phone numbers were among the most public pieces of personal information. They are right there in that directory at home or in the office and on the business cards stacked on a desk.

People have always been so willing to share numbers that they would ink them on cocktail napkins or even scrawl them in the occasional bathroom stall. There was solace in the fact that if and when you moved, you would start fresh with a new number.

But cellphones are inherently more private because the numbers are not in the white pages. And industry data shows that we hold on to our cell numbers longer than our home numbers. This is particularly true for young people, who increasingly have no home phone at all.

The trend is borne out in research by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that in 2004 the number of cellphones in the United States surpassed the number of land lines.

The margin continues to grow rapidly as the generation that suckled on cells opts out of getting home phones in their dorms or first apartments. The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that five million adults under 25 live in cellphone-only households, and nearly 20 percent of non-homeowners of all ages in America use cellphones exclusively.

“People are keeping the same cellphone number from high school, through college, and then into their years in the work force,” said James Katz, chairman of the communication department at Rutgers and author of “Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life.”

“But it’s a number that many live to regret having given out. With e-mail or instant messaging, you can handle communication when you want to handle it, as opposed to being forced into a voice-to-voice situation. An incoming cellphone call can be an uncontrollable irritation.”

“What’s more,” he said, “you are paying for the minutes used up by someone you don’t want to speak to.”

And who wants to talk on the phone these days anyway? “Voice mails are an easy transfer of information,” said Todd Rice, a 39-year-old actor in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., who uses PrivatePhone.com. “The person doesn’t go on for 20 minutes. They don’t need to kibitz. It’s like a verbal text message, without the smiley faces.”

Of course, even if you use a social phone number, your hidden digits are likely to be announced through caller ID to anyone you deign worthy of calling back.

For that, a Web site called Jangl.com offers users the ability to create new, free numbers for every person they want to call. It works by giving the user and the person being called the same social number to call each other.

“Historically, phone numbers were assigned to a destination, like a home or work phone,” explained one of Jangl’s founders, Michael Cerda. “Then they were assigned to a device, like a cell. What we are doing is assigning numbers to specific relationships. We offer a shared, mutually anonymous number.”

Vincent Colombi, 29, is a San Francisco insurance broker who uses a Jangl number when meeting women on Match.com. “In online dating, the cellphone is like the holy grail of contact information,” he said. “It just feels aggressive to ask someone for it.”

Mr. Colombi has used his Jangl number effectively with several women he has met online. But sometimes, anonymity is a turnoff: Dating is a little like picking up a call from a restricted number; sometimes you just have to take that risk. “Last time,” Mr. Colombi said, “the woman was like, ‘Um, why can’t I just use a real number?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/fa...30numbers.html





The Air Is Free, and Sometimes So Are the Phone Calls That Borrow It
Matt Richtel

Gary Schaffer looked out his window here last week to discover a reporter standing on his lawn, pirating his wireless Internet access to test a new mobile phone.

The phone, made by Belkin, is one of several new mobile devices that allow users to make free or low-cost phone calls over the Internet. They are designed to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of wireless access points deployed in cafes, parks, businesses and, most important, homes.

The technology’s advocates say that as long as people are paying for high-speed Wi-Fi access in their homes, they should be able to use it as a conduit for inexpensive calls and an alternative to traditional phone service.

But, in a twist that raises some tricky ethical and legal questions, the phones can also be used on the go, piggybacking on whatever access points happen to be open and available, like that of Mr. Schaffer.

A retired business teacher, Mr. Schaffer seemed affably cautious about the idea of having his bandwidth borrowed.

“If you’re a friend, I’d say, let’s give it a try,” he said. “If you’re a stranger, probably not, unless you had to make an emergency call.”

The call made from Mr. Schaffer’s lawn went through but was quickly disconnected, apparently because of a weak signal. Mr. Schaffer did not seem to feel he owed any apology for the spotty coverage, though he did express concern for the person on the other end of the line.

“I know what it’s like to have a call dropped,” he said.

For all its limitations, the technology is starting to emerge commercially, with companies like Vonage, Skype (owned by eBay) and T-Mobile (a unit of Deutsche Telekom) now selling or supporting mobile devices that use Wi-Fi networks.

In some cases, the voice service is free. A Belkin phone that works with the Skype calling service costs about $180; calls to Skype users on computers are free, as are outgoing calls to domestic phone numbers, at least through the end of the year. Incoming calls from phones cost extra. Vonage charges $90 for a phone and $15 a month for 500 minutes of talk time.

One big hurdle is that the Wi-Fi radio frequency spectrum is unlicensed and not maintained by any one company, so call quality can be unreliable. Moving a few yards can require finding a new network to connect to. In other words, when you place free or low-cost calls — especially on a stranger’s network — you sometimes get what you pay for.

“There are a lot of dropped calls,” said Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum Research. But he said the new technology had at least one impressive ability: getting people to appreciate their old-fashioned cellular service.

“Everybody who tries a Wi-Fi phone will get down on their knees and thank the wireless phone people for the good job they’ve done on coverage,” he said.

Wi-Fi is also a power-hungry technology that can cause phone batteries to die quickly — in some cases, within an hour or two of talk time.

“When you turn on the Wi-Fi it does bring the battery life down,” said Mike Hendrick, director of product development for T-Mobile. But he said the technology was improving rapidly.

T-Mobile is letting customers in Seattle participate in a test of phones that can switch between its mobile network and Wi-Fi. The company is betting that this flexibility will come in handy if the customer is out of the network’s reach, offering another way to get online and stay connected.

More generally, the technology could threaten the dominance of traditional telecommunications networks by giving people an alternative pipe for their voice and data transmissions.

But some carriers are not convinced that the technology is ready for the market.

“We can totally understand that people want even more ubiquity from cellphones,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless. But Wi-Fi devices “aren’t where they need to be,” he said.

Mr. Hendrick of T-Mobile said the new phones were good enough to provide an alternative.

“If you can’t get access because you’re buried in the basement of a metal-encased building, you can go to an open wireless network,” he said. Or it could be useful “if you’re out in the suburbs, in the basement, and you have Wi-Fi in the house.”

But what if you’re just on somebody’s lawn? How do people feel about a passer-by using their bandwidth to place free phone calls?

For his part, Mr. Schaffer said he would mind only if it had an adverse effect on him — which in theory it could, if the voice data caused congestion on his network. There is no clear indication to a network’s owner that a phone call is taking place, so most will not have the chance to object.

Not everyone is so open to walk-by talkers. “I don’t like it,” Kevin Asbra, another San Franciscan, said. “It’s an abuse of the system. I pay my bills. Why should you call for free?”

His wife, Karen Seratti, begged to differ. A Web site usability tester, she says she regularly looks for open access points so she can check e-mail when she is traveling or away from the office.

“I walk around with my Mac all the time looking for access,” she said. “When you have to send an e-mail, you have to send an e-mail.”

Sometimes she must scavenge from within her own house, as when the family’s Internet connection goes down. She offered a neighborly tip: “Walk into the alley — you can find the network called Fido265.”

Finding an open access point might prove challenging in some places, but not in San Francisco, where the spread of Wi-Fi networks has outpaced even that of yoga studios and organic produce shops.

In a walk through the Inner Sunset district, a phone’s display showed that most wireless networks in range were protected, requiring a password for access.

There were, however, enough unsecured ones that it was possible to get online every half a block or so. Because the Wi-Fi phone looks like a standard cellphone, it is much less conspicuous than a laptop on the street. The proliferation of Wi-Fi laptops and, in turn, hunters of free Internet access has already raised questions about whether borrowers of bandwidth are breaking any laws.

“There’s a big debate going on right now,” said Jennifer S. Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Ms. Granick said some people believed that using a connection without permission constituted unauthorized access to computers, which is a crime, while others disagree.

Traditional analogies are hard to come by, she said, adding that she does not believe using Wi-Fi is the same as trespassing, since the signals travel beyond property limits. “People say that you can’t go inside somebody’s house; but I say, you can sit outside and listen to the radio,” Ms. Granick said.

She added that the situation was different when the owner of a wireless network chose to require a password. “If it’s secured, it’s marked as off-limits,” she said.

Alex Milowski, an executive at a technology start-up who was out for a walk last week with his infant son, Max, said that it was fine for Wi-Fi phone users to jump onto an open network. Would he teach Max that swiping bandwidth without permission was O.K.?

“By the time he’s worried about it, access will be free,” Mr. Milowski said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...gy/27wifi.html





The Socket Seekers
Christopher Elliott



Just when travelers thought they had run out of things to complain about at the airport, their fading laptops and cellphones have signaled yet another problem: a shortage of power outlets.

Airport concourses, particularly older ones, were never known for their abundance of electrical sockets. But a convergence of factors — including new wireless Internet access in terminals, stricter airport security measures and the proliferation of power-hungry gadgets — has added to the deficit of outlets. Airports are rushing to add new ones.

“You can’t help but notice business travelers hovering above the outlets at the airport, waiting for their turn,” said Joanne Paternoster, a former assistant director of customer service for the aviation department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and now a consultant for Maritz Research. “People are arriving earlier at the airport so that they have enough time to make it through security, and there are just not enough outlets to go around.”

Judy Bonghi, a human resources manager in Philadelphia, experienced the plug problem firsthand recently at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. She needed to recharge her DVD player on a stopover, but every outlet in the waiting area was occupied. “I ended up sitting on the floor at a gate — not my gate, since nothing was available there — to plug it in,” she recalled. “And I was sitting next to another person doing the same thing with his laptop.”

Atlanta’s airport, the nation’s busiest, is adding new outlets to accommodate customers like Ms. Bonghi. “With today’s technology, there’s definitely an increase in demand for outlets,” said Ashraf Demian, chief electrical engineer for Hartsfield-Jackson.

How many sockets are enough? Generally speaking, the number of outlets needs to be doubled, from one every 25 feet to one every 12 feet, according to Mr. Demian. But that can be costly. The price for each outlet in a renovated concourse — like Atlanta’s new international terminal, which is expected to open in four years — is $150 to $200. But in an existing structure, tearing out walls to add sockets can cost thousands per outlet, he said.

Atlanta is not the only airport to recognize the energy crisis. Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport recently converted some of its pay phones into free laptop recharging stations. Salt Lake City International Airport has installed new power outlets in its public seating areas and contracted with Smarte Carte of St. Paul to offer a recharging station for mobile phones and hand-held computers, at $3 a charge. And Eppley Airfield, near Omaha, just wired its snack bar in the north boarding area with new sockets.

But as in Atlanta, most of the new airport power outlets are being added gradually, as part of a renovation. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport recently remodeled its busy Terminal 4, creating several new areas where computer users can place their laptops on a shelf and plug into an outlet. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is currently renovating its A and B Concourses, and plans to add new outlets to the gate lounges.

Travelers are usually reluctant to complain about the scarcity of outlets. That is because they are unsure if they are allowed to use the sockets, which sometimes appear to be there for the exclusive use of airlines and cleaning crews. (At most airports, passengers are permitted to use the outlets, although they are rarely invited to do so.)

And while some domestic business and first-class seats have built-in power ports, most economy-class seats are powerless.

But for this year’s holiday travel period, as travelers arrive at the terminal even earlier to get through the security checkpoints, and with record numbers of passengers expected to use the nation’s airports, officials are anticipating a surge in complaints.

“When the terminal is full, and you have a weather delay, and everyone is trying to hook up their cellphones and laptop computers, that’s when you hear about it,” said Fredrick Piccolo, the chief executive of Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in Florida.

Airports are at least partly to blame for the outlet shortage. For the last several years, they have been busy adding wireless Internet hot spots to their terminals. In effect, these wireless access points have encouraged business travelers to use their laptops and data-enabled cellphones but have not given them the power needed to do so.

“Airport Wi-Fi has gotten a lot of attention from airports,” said Scott Wintner, a spokesman for Airports Council International-North America, an airport trade group. “But there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about power plugs,” even as Wi-Fi has created new demand for power in terminals.

Business travelers are not helping the situation, either. While it is true that more people are traveling with the latest devices, the real power hogs tend to be yesterday’s gadgets — aging laptops and batteries unable to hold a charge.

“My laptop will barely make it through boot-up before the battery is spent,” said George Armstrong, a sales engineer from Green Cove Springs, Fla., who frequently finds himself with a lifeless laptop at the airport. “I probably should get replacement batteries. Hopefully, road warrior requests will reach the powers that be in the airports, and they’ll accommodate us.”

Savvy air travelers rely on their instincts to sniff out the nearest power. “The easiest way to find a power outlet is to think like the cleaning lady,” said Robert Cowen, a frequent traveler who also publishes a Web site for travelers called InternetTravelTips.com. “Where do they plug in the vacuum cleaner? The answer to that is where you’ll find a power plug. Very often, it’s in a pillar or behind a row of seats on the wall.”

But finders are not necessarily keepers. Christina Zimmel, an education specialist for a hospital in Clawson, Mich., recently witnessed a dispute over a power outlet. “I actually saw one business traveler get in a shouting match with a maintenance worker who needed an outlet for the vacuum cleaner while he needed it for his laptop,” she said.

Edwin Kelley, an engineer from Los Angeles, may have the most sensible interim solution: an extension cord with three outlets and a readiness to ask other travelers to share. “I’ve never been refused,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/business/28plug.html





A Layered Look Reveals Ancient Greek Texts
Felicia R. Lee

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.

“This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece,” said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides “is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy.”

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at Christie’s for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the great Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes’ work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

The palimpsest is believed to have been created by Byzantine monks in the 13th century, probably in Constantinople. As was the practice then, the durable and valuable vellum pages of several older texts were washed and scraped, to remove their writing, and then used for a medieval prayer book. The pages of the older books became the sheaths of a newer one, thus a palimpsest (which is pronounced PAL-imp-sest and is Greek for “rubbed again”).

After the Christie’s sale the manuscript was left at the museum by the private collector for conservation and study. This year imagers at Stanford University used powerful X-ray fluorescence imaging to read its final pages, which are being interpreted, transcribed and translated by a group of scholars in the United States and Europe.

The new Hyperides revelations include two previously unknown speeches, effectively increasing this renowned orator’s body of work by 20 percent, said Judson Herrman, a 36-year-old professor of classics at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. He is one of a handful of classicists who have written doctoral dissertations on Hyperides.

Hyperides lived from 390 or 389 B.C. until 322 B.C. and was an orator who made speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly. A contemporary of Aristotle and Demosthenes, he wrote speeches for himself and for others and spoke at important political trials. In 322 B.C. Hyperides was executed by the Macedonians for participating in a failed rebellion.

“It’s a spotlight shining on an important moment in history,” said Mr. Herrman, currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Until the new leaves were found in the palimpsest, most scholars believed only fragments of Hyperides survived beyond the Classical period. The mystery of Archimedes’ treatise on combinatorics, the Stomachion, was solved in 2003 by deciphering the palimpsest. Now W. Robert Connor, the president of the Teagle Foundation, which provides education and financial resources for education, called the discovery of new Hyperides text a “tour de force of the first order.”

A combination of high-tech imagery and old-fashioned deciphering, sometimes letter by letter, was used to resurrect the older text, revealing a slice of Athenian history in the days after its devastating defeat by Philip II, king of Macedonia and the father of Alexander the Great, Mr. Connor said. “The number of times you get a new text is very small,” Mr. Connor, a former professor of classics at Princeton said. “It’s like hearing an old violin played at a superb level.”

Cecil Wooten, a professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who attended a Hyperides presentation by Mr. Herrman on Nov. 13, called the discovery “interesting and significant.”

“Although Hyperides is a very important fourth-century Greek orator, one of the canon of 10, we have very little of his speeches, and much of that is fragmentary,” Professor Wooten said in an e-mail message.

Michael Gargan, a professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Every bit we get is important.” Mr. Gargan, a major scholar on ancient Greek law, noted that Hyperides wrote many speeches and had a leading reputation in antiquity, but only about six of his speeches survive.

“This obviously will contribute a great deal more,” he said. “I eagerly await seeing the text.”

In one recently discovered speech, Hyperides talks about the number of boats (220) — a number not previously clear— belonging to the Greek side in the Salamis battle, Mr. Judson said. In another speech, after the Battle of Chaeronea, he argues that the tragic defeat was the result of chance, not bad policy. In a political case Hyperides supports the Demosthenes policy that led to the Athenian defeat.

“For we chose the noblest policy and we believed it necessary to free the Greeks by taking on the risks ourselves, just like before,” Hyperides argues in a passage translated by Mr. Herrman and transcribed by Natalie Tchernetska of Riga, Latvia, a project scholar and specialist in Greek palimpsests, whom Mr. Herrman credits with first identifying the material.

“One must assign the start and the suggestion of every risk to those who make the motion, but the outcome of these things is to be assigned to chance,” Hyperides argues in the speech. “Diondas proposes the opposite happen: not that Demosthenes be praised for his policy but that I give a defense because of chance.”

Professor Herrman said the material also gives new information about inheritance laws in Athens and suggests a different timing for the Demosthenes case.

Historians had always believed that the trial of Demosthenes took place before the battle of Chaeronea, which Athens lost to the Macedonians, but the newly discovered speech shows that it was after the battle, Mr. Herrman said. “We had no idea of what the content of the trial was,” he said. “Now we have an Athenian view of their own defeat.”

Mr. Herrman recently visited the Walters, where he was able to look at the small, barely legible pages of the palimpsest under a microscope. He also met with Mr. Noel; Abigail Quandt, the senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books; and specialists in imaging techniques. “Three weeks ago I discovered I can read things in person that I can’t get on the digital images,” Mr. Herrman said.

Ms. Quandt said she took almost four years to take the palimpsest apart. The day of Mr. Herrman’s visit, pages of the text were laid on a table where fiber optic lights on either side revealed aspects of the manuscript. Ultraviolet, strobe and tungsten lights were used to enhance the visibility of the text. After computer processing, the hypertext appeared red, and the prayer book text appeared black.

The palimpsest contains about 120 printed pages of Archimedes text, in addition to the Hyperides material, a philosophical commentary on Aristotle, a neo-Platonic philosophical text, pages from a liturgical book on the life of a saint and at least five pages so well-erased it is impossible to determine what they are, Mr. Noel said.

Most of the palimpsest has been translated, and it will probably be available to scholars by 2008, followed by an exhibition at the museum, Mr. Noel said. The entire list of scholars for the Archimedes Palimpsest project, as well as detailed reports on the finding, can be found at archimedespalimpsest.org.

“This book is the most important palimpsest in the world,” Mr. Noel said. “We’re learning about the nuts and bolts of ancient medieval history and gaining a new understanding of the early history of the calculus and of our understanding of ancient physics. The prayer book is made up of five other books. Another of these books seems to be an early Christian — second or third century — commentary on ancient views of the soul and why they were incorrect.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/arts/27greek.html





The Gore of Greece, Torn From a Comic
Robert Ito

THE story of “300” — the popular comic book mini-series and, soon, a film from Warner Brothers — began when Frank Miller, the series’s creator, was 6. The year was 1963, and “The 300 Spartans” was in theaters. In this telling of the battle of Thermopylae, Richard Egan played the Greek king Leonidas, who in 480 B.C. led 300 warriors in a doomed battle against the much larger Persian army, and David Farrar, regal in robes of purple and green, was the Persian king Xerxes. The film’s dialogue and staging may seem a bit quaint now. But the young Mr. Miller was stunned as he watched its climax, in which the few remaining Spartans are slaughtered in a hail of arrows.

“It was a shocker, because the heroes died,” Mr. Miller said in a recent telephone interview. “I was used to seeing Superman punch out planets. It was an epiphany to realize that the hero wasn’t necessarily the guy who won.”

As a young comic book artist and writer, Mr. Miller would return again and again to the concept of heroic, often seppuku-like sacrifice. In “The Dark Knight Returns,” which many credit with reinvigorating the Batman franchise, an aging Bruce Wayne goes out in a blaze of glory in an outmatched battle against his old pal Superman. In “Sin City” one hero shoots himself in the mouth to protect a loved one; another is executed by a corrupt system after ridding the world of not one but two cannibals.

“I tend to be drawn to characters who might die disgraced to the world, who technically lose whatever combat they’re in but win the moral victory,” Mr. Miller said.

Over the years the story of the famous confrontation at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. stuck in his mind. In the mid-’90s, Mr. Miller started work on what was to become “300.” He researched the battle, spoke with scholars and traveled to Greece, to the site of Leonidas’ last stand. He studied the armor and philosophies and fighting methods of the Spartans, and finally, working with the colorist Lynn Varley, created a series that in 1999 won three Eisners and two Harveys, awards considered among the comics industry’s most prestigious.

In delivering “300” to the screen in March, Warner Brothers will face the challenge of realizing Mr. Miller’s distinctive vision of the bloody battle while avoiding any sense that it is simply extending a series of Greek-theme epics that began with Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” and Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” both released in 2004.

Zack Snyder, the 40-year-old director who is now completing postproduction work on “300,” is only too aware of the danger that some viewers might find it hard to distinguish his movie from its more star-driven predecessors, neither of which had a spectacular run at the box office. “I could see Hollywood not wanting to do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do it.”

Sitting in his office in an editing facility in Burbank, Mr. Snyder was surrounded by Spartan helmets, a shield peppered with puncture holes and, as a reminder of the precedents, swords from “Alexander” and “Troy.” “We got them from the Warner Brothers prop department,” he said, grabbing one, feeling its heft. “The ones from ‘Troy’ were better.”

To judge from excerpts Mr. Snyder screened this day, he and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, have managed to evoke anything but a classic battle epic. The film’s high-flying acrobatics and over-the-top combat scenes remind one of Zhang Yimou’s “House of Flying Daggers”; its fantastical computer-generated beasts evoke the “Lord of the Rings” series or “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.” As for the Persians, no tired robes and goofy hats here. These warriors sport chrome Kabuki-style masks and gold rings in their brows, noses and nipples. And then there are the pitched battles, with spears ramming through eye sockets and innards, all played out against a perpetually overcast sky.

All of this is perhaps truer to Mr. Miller’s work than to history. Mr. Miller says that while he strove for historical accuracy whenever possible, art won out in certain areas. The real Spartans, for instance, wore heavy body armor, clunky stuff that weighed about half as much as they did: handy in a pitched battle, but hardly sexy or eye-grabbing, certainly not for an action comic.

“My first versions of the soldiers looked like beetles,” he said. “They looked like they couldn’t move faster than two miles an hour.”

So Mr. Miller ditched the armor in favor of a more natural look. In his series, Leonidas and his warriors wear red capes and little else; when in battle, they cover their privates in what appear to be leather Speedos. “When you look at the ancient Greek vase paintings, you’ll see that soldiers are drawn nude, for the same reason I did,” Mr. Miller said.

For his part, Mr. Snyder, an admirer of Mr. Miller’s work, went to great lengths to reproduce the look and texture of the comic books. He photocopied the series, cut out all the frames, then glued favorites into notebooks, one per page. He would then sketch what he thought might happen before each frame, and what might happen immediately after. Voilà: instant storyboard. He pulled out a notebook to show how it was done. “So this frame is the shot,” he said, revealing a picture of the Spartans pushing an army of Persians off the edge of a cliff. “So now I have to figure out, how do I get there? And what happens next?”

Mr. Snyder began his push to make “300” after releasing his remake of the cult horror film “Dawn of the Dead” in 2004. The next year he created a test shot for the proposed film. It was three minutes long, he said, with “lots of killing.”

Mr. Miller recalled that he was not thrilled initially about the idea of a film adaptation of “300,” which he called the “crown jewel” of his career. “ ‘300’ means an awful lot to me, so to see it homogenized into something like ‘Troy,’ which manages to turn the Iliad inside out, would betray it,” he said. Mr. Miller was wowed by the test shot, however, and, after repeated prodding by Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton, two of the film’s producers, Mr. Miller agreed to let the project proceed, while reserving the right to consult on the script.

Mr. Snyder remembers things a bit differently. “I think he gave it to us because he thought no one else was going to do it,” he said. “It seems unmakable, in some ways.” Whatever the reason, Mr. Snyder got the project, and preproduction began in the summer of 2005.

To mold his Spartans into fighting form Mr. Snyder enlisted Mark Twight, the author of “Extreme Alpinism” and founder of Gym Jones, an invitation-only workout center in Salt Lake City that is more torture chamber than Sports Club/L.A.: squats and dead lifts, not treadmill runs, supply the cardio. Under Mr. Twight’s tutelage, the actors and stunt people endured a two-and-a-half-month boot camp before the cameras rolled. The diet was brutal — meat, leaves and berries, Mr. Twight said — and the workouts even worse.

Vincent Regan, who plays a Spartan captain, dropped 40 pounds in 16 weeks; his dead lift jumped to 355 pounds from 205. In contrast to the relatively doughy physiques on display in “The 300 Spartans,” the warriors of “300” are ripped. “I told everyone, ‘You guys have got to be in crazy shape, in superhero shape,’ ” Mr. Snyder said. To inspire the troops, he had T-shirts made that read, “I died at Thermopylae.”

To recreate the appropriately gloomy backgrounds — Mr. Miller, it seems, never met an overcast day he didn’t like — he shot almost entirely against a blue screen, then added the settings and weather. To complete the vision of Mr. Miller’s shadowy world, digital effects people went for heavy contrast: the light areas really blown out, the dark areas very, very black.

Much of the zip in the action sequences was also achieved in postproduction: warriors leap and slash in slow motion, seemingly freeze in midair, then speedily dart away. The most visually stunning action sequences, however, had little to do with computer-generated images. Real actors staged the scenes of phalanx warfare, in which tightly formed troops lock shields, forming a nearly impenetrable wall. The Spartans would then thrust their spears out of the openings, or use their mass of shields to push back their enemies.

“It was row upon row of men pushing and shoving and slipping in the mud and stabbing with spears,” Mr. Miller said of the tactic. “It wasn’t one hero alone in a chaotic battle, swinging wildly. They were machines.”

In July Mr. Snyder went to San Diego to pitch his film at Comic-Con, the mecca of the comic book industry. The convention, which drew more than 100,000 fans this year, has become a bubbling cauldron of buzz: if you showcase something good, the news will spread to hundreds of blogs, chat rooms and fan sites the next day; anger the faithful, and you might as well slink back to the editing room.

Two of the film’s stars, Gerard Butler and David Wenham, attended the event, but the audiences really came to see the clips. Mr. Snyder created a special R-rated teaser for the event. Attendees saw scenes of mass carnage, a topless oracle and King Leonidas kicking a Persian emissary down a well. “All gore, all the time,” Mr. Snyder said. The crowd went nuts, compelling organizers to show the teaser three times.

Of course the big question is whether the film will attract an audience not already predisposed toward tales of brave warriors in capes. “The Frank Miller crowd, they’re there no matter what,” Mr. Snyder said. “The trick is getting the average moviegoer to go: ‘What the hell? That’s not normal. I’ve got to go see what that’s about.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/movies/26ito.html





To Web Fans, Peter Jackson Is the One True Director
Sharon Waxman

When it comes to power games, some in Hollywood are beginning to learn a basic lesson of digital politics: the Internet plays rough.

Such is the case with a growing spat between New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson, the A-list director of the “Lord of the Rings” movies and a savvy player when it comes to the power of the Web. Last week Mr. Jackson posted a letter on a fan Web site, theonering.net, explaining that he had been dumped by New Line from “The Hobbit,” a movie based on the book by J. R. R. Tolkien, and still in the planning stages.

“This outcome is not what we anticipated or wanted, but neither do we see any positive value in bitterness and rancor,” Mr. Jackson wrote with his producing partner and wife, Fran Walsh. “We now have no choice but to let the idea of a film of The Hobbit go and move forward with other projects.”

But to legions of avid Jackson and Tolkien fans, the news was a bombshell that went whizzing through cyberspace.

“This is a big blow to the LOTR community, I feel like there has been a death in the family,” wrote a Web master called Xoanon, referring to the “Lord of the Ring” trilogy by its initials. “Why couldn’t New Line come to an agreement with P J? Is there really a time option on the film rights for New Line? Who will they get to direct?”

Within hours thousands of other fans weighed in on lordotrings.com, onering.com and other sites, worrying about the future of the Tolkien enterprise and asking New Line, which has an option to produce the film until 2009, to back down. Theonering.net was among those calling for a boycott of any Hobbit film not made by Mr. Jackson.

“The fan community as a whole is up in arms about the way Peter Jackson has been treated,” said Chris Pirrotta, a founder of theonering.net site, which has faithfully followed Mr. Jackson for years, even posting his video diary during the making of last year’s “King Kong.” “Fans are very distraught to see someone who’s created something so wonderful being treated so poorly by the studio.”

On the heels of the protest, reporters and entertainment bloggers called the studio to ask about the film’s fate. In what was once an insular club of power brokers and back-stabbers, the voices of outsiders — dancing across the globe at the speed of a modem — have begun to penetrate.

New Line declined to comment on “The Hobbit,” but said in a statement to The Times that the situation was complicated by the lawsuit of Mr. Jackson’s company, Wingnut Films, against the studio over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings,” which New Line produced.

“We are in litigation with Wingnut Films, and have been unsuccessful despite a formal mediation, as well as discussions with Wingnut directly to settle the matter; therefore, we cannot comment at this point,” the studio said this week.

But anxiety continued to reverberate in cyberspace. Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Rings series, wrote on his Web site, mckellen.com: “I’m very sad as I should have relished revisiting middle Earth with Peter again as team-leader. It’s hard to imagine any other director matching his achievement in Tolkien country.”

And Saul Zaentz, the veteran producer who holds the underlying rights, was quoted on yet another Web site, this one in German, saying Mr. Jackson would indeed direct “The Hobbit,” which still has no script, no budget, no cast and no production date.

In an interview from Italy Mr. Zaentz said he was misquoted, but that Mr. Jackson should be the one to direct “The Hobbit.” “We would like to see it done, of course with Peter Jackson,” he said. “He’s a good film director. He’s the right guy. He knows it too. But it’s a hard thing to do, when you feel you didn’t get the money you were supposed to get.”

The contretemps over “The Hobbit,” those involved say, is really about the lawsuit over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings” series, which has taken in a staggering $2.9 billion in box office receipts alone.

In February 2005 Mr. Jackson sued New Line, saying he was owed money from the trilogy. Mr. Jackson has said he sued over profits from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” after he was unable to get New Line to submit to an independent audit of its books. The lawsuit, which was unsuccessfully mediated, still has no court date, and so far no audit has taken place. New Line executives have complained that Mr. Jackson has become vastly wealthy from the Tolkien trilogy and is unjustifiably portraying himself as a victim.

In his letter Mr. Jackson said New Line was holding the new movie hostage to his lawsuit, saying that Michael Lynne, the New Line co-president, told Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, “that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make the Hobbit, because ‘that’s how these things are done.’ ”

Mr. Jackson added: “Michael Lynne said we would stand to make much more money if we tied the lawsuit and the movie deal together and this may well be true, but it’s still the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.”

Neither Mr. Jackson nor the studio would comment publicly on the lawsuit.

The final straw in continuing tensions between the two sides came earlier this month, when Mr. Jackson declined to contribute a video salute to New Line for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of its founding, planned for next year, according to two people familiar with the matter. Days later a New Line executive called Mr. Kamins to say that the studio would be seeking another director for “The Hobbit.”

So while New Line accused Mr. Jackson of trying to negotiate the lawsuit through the Internet, Mr. Jackson’s camp accused the studio of brinksmanship in a fit of pique.

It was left to another studio entirely, MGM, which owns the distribution rights to “The Hobbit,” to step in and calm the raging waters — and the Web sites.

“We expect to partner with New Line in financing ‘The Hobbit,’ ” a spokesman for MGM said. “We support Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and believe that when the dust settles, he’ll be making the movie. We can’t imagine any other result.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/movies/29hobbit.html





Web Catalog Offers Prison-Made Products
David Dishneau

Internet shopping knows no boundaries, not even for products made behind bars. Maryland Correctional Enterprises, the manufacturing division of the state Division of Correction, has put its 182-page catalog online. Now anyone can see, if not buy, hundreds of items the agency offers for sale to government agencies and Maryland nonprofit organizations. The catalog is at http://www.dpscs.state.md.us/mcem .

The products include institutional clothing, bedding, clocks, signs - and lots of furniture. Nearly half the pages are filled with furniture, including the Slammer table, designed for correctional environments and named "because they put 'em in the slammer," said Jeff Beeson, executive director of Maryland Correctional Enterprises' board of directors.

Topping the furniture offerings is the Traditional Veneer Line, with prices up to $1,885 for a U-shaped desk.

There's pure Maryland pride in the Canton Collection. It features nearly three dozen pieces made from scratch - unlike some of the other lines that are merely assembled at the prisons. The pieces are designed by furniture plant manager Rusty Hyatt, who lives in - where else? - Canton.

The list of seating options reads like a Maryland geography lesson: Silver Spring, Chesapeake, Potomac, New Windsor, Frederick, Bel Air, Crisfield, Monkton, Hampstead, Ellicott, Allegany and Woodbine.

"We're proud to be Maryland. We're proud to be the prison industry for Maryland," Beeson said.

He said MCE employs about 1,600 inmates at nine prisons and in warehouse, delivery and photocopying jobs outside prison walls. They are paid a base rate of $1.10 to $2.60 a day, Beeson said.

The agency sold $42.8 million worth of goods last year, making it 10th among prison industries in sales in the United States.

Beeson said inmates who work in the plants tend to re-offend and return to prison at about half the rate of those who don't. Inmates must have a high-school diploma or GED to work for the agency, which can help with their schooling.

"We truly believe we're doing something good here," Beeson said.

Private furniture makers aren't as keen on prison industries. The Independent Office Products and Furniture Dealers Association, based in Arlington, Va., supports a bill passed in September by the U.S. House of Representatives that would require Federal Prison Industries Inc. to compete on a more even footing with the private sector for federal contracts. A 2004 law ended its monopoly on supplying office furniture and other items to federal agencies, but left it with some advantages, said Michael Ochs, the trade group's director of government affairs.

He said the association has concentrated on the federal, not the state level. But Ochs said state prison industries - and every state has such an agency - also cut into private industry sales.

"We would like to see open and fair competition where the industry can compete on an equal footing," Ochs said.

Maryland law requires state agencies to buy from Maryland Correctional Enterprises any goods or services it can provide at prices at or below the prevailing average market price.

Beeson said Maryland Correctional Enterprises tries to limit its negative economic impact on the private sector by producing things not made by Maryland companies.

"Every year we study it, and for the whole state of Maryland, we constitute less than 3 percent of anyone's business in any one category," he said.

One category in which the agency has no competition is license plates. It makes every tag sold in Maryland, accounting for $3.8 million in sales.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-25-17-30-53





Shorthand for a Holiday: Ralphie, the BB Gun and the Flagpole
Stuart Elliott

AS the holiday shopping season begins, Madison Avenue is paying tribute to a movie that has become a perennial for the generations that grew up after popular Christmas films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

The movie is “A Christmas Story,” in which the humorist Jean Shepherd offers a rueful look back at his boyhood, circa 1940. The film presents the comic misadventures of Ralphie Parker, whose most fervent wish — nay, obsession — is to receive an “official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle” as a Christmas gift from his parents.

“A Christmas Story” was no huge success when it came out in 1983. Some were put off by its wry, even sardonic tone, so at odds with traditional holiday fare.

But in the last decade, the film has become as much a part of Christmas as “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and jokes about fruitcake. A big reason is the annual marathon showing by the TBS cable network, which starts each Christmas Eve; in 24 hours, the movie is shown a dozen times in a row.

In 2003, Macy’s, which figures centrally in “Miracle on 34th Street,” saluted “A Christmas Story” in a holiday window of its flagship store in Herald Square. This year in particular, advertisers and agencies are demonstrating how much the movie inspires them.

A commercial for Cingular Wireless by the Atlanta office of BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, recreates the central narrative of the film in 30 seconds, replacing the BB gun that Ralphie desires with a cellphone.

Adults in the movie discourage Ralphie from insisting on the air rifle by declaring, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” In the commercial, the refrain becomes, “You’ll run the bill up.” A happy ending ensues when Ralphie’s parents buy him a prepaid Cingular cellphone, the GoPhone.

•

And among 20 whimsical holiday games that will be sponsored online by Office Max, the retail chain, one is called “Don’t Shoot Your Eye Out” (dontshootyoureyeout.com), featuring the “Red Wrangler authentic pump action saddle carbine” BB gun.

Another Office Max online game, “Stuck to a Pole” (stucktoapole.com), evokes a scene from “A Christmas Story” in which a classmate of Ralphie’s, Flick, gets his tongue stuck to a metal flagpole on a frigid day. The Office Max online games are created by a New York boutique agency, Toy.

The ads inspired by “A Christmas Story” are another example of the persistent interplay between advertising and popular culture. That interaction is becoming increasingly common as marketers seek to capture the attention of distracted consumers by infusing ads with entertainment value.

“We are always looking for ideas for holiday ads,” said Rich Wakefield, executive vice president and executive creative director at BBDO Atlanta, “and who in America hasn’t seen ‘A Christmas Story’?”

In creating the Cingular commercial, Mr. Wakefield said, BBDO Atlanta obtained rights from Time Warner, which owns “A Christmas Story,” and from the Shepherd estate. “It was one of the easiest shoots,” he said of the production of the spot. “We screened the movie and said, ‘Here’s the scene; let’s play it,’ and matched it shot for shot.”

Since the commercial began running on Nov. 14, “I’ve gotten a ton of great response,” Mr. Wakefield said, adding that the spot was scheduled to appear through the holidays.

The commercial for Cingular Wireless, a unit of AT&T and BellSouth, also seems popular with visitors to video-sharing Web sites. Comments on YouTube include presumably sincere remarks like “Best Christmas commercial this year” and “This is one funky parody.”

Bob Thacker, senior vice president for marketing and advertising at Office Max, recalled a popular promotional campaign some years ago when he worked at Target, centered on the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“For the ‘greatest generation,’ ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was their ‘Christmas Carol,’ ” Mr. Thacker said, referring to the veterans of World War II. “The zeitgeist has changed.”

“Fun is a big part of what our culture is,” Mr. Thacker said, contrasting the humor of “A Christmas Story” with the sentiment of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The humorous approach of the online games helps the company “connect in a more meaningful way” with consumers, he said.

The online games, presented under the rubric “Spread the cheer. Office Max,” are being promoted in grass-roots fashion. The Web addresses are appearing in Office Max holiday circulars and bag stuffers, said Anne Bologna, partner and president at Toy, and on banner ads on Web sites like AOL, MSN and Yahoo.

The “Stuck to a Pole” game will have a page on two social-networking Web sites, Facebook and MySpace, she added. That game and three others will be the subject of teaser video clips to be available on youtube.com.

“An office-supply store as a gift destination wasn’t exactly an easy leap,” said Ari Merkin, partner and executive creative director at Toy. “If we were going to ask people to get a gift at Office Max, we felt we would have to start by doing a little giving of our own.”

The other games satirize various seasonal mainstays like themed apparel (myholidaysweater.com), snow globes (shaketheglobe.com) and meal choices (roastaturkey.com).

Several games are inspired by the nonhuman characters that populate the holidays, including reindeer (everythingsareindeer.com, reindeerarmwrestling.com) and elves (yougotelfed.com, elfyourself.com and elfinterviews.com).

This year’s marathon of “A Christmas Story” will begin on TBS at 8 p.m. Dec. 24. It will be the 10th annual presentation, said Ken Schwab, senior vice president for programming at TBS in Atlanta, part of the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner.

•

The viewership during the marathon last year was the largest to date, Mr. Schwab said, as 45.4 million people tuned in during the 24 hours to watch all or part of the movie.

One reason TBS started the marathon, Mr. Schwab acknowledged, was that its parent owns the film. But a more compelling reason was that the movie has always “showed some recurring strength” in the ratings, he said. “We run thousands and thousands of movies, and usually ratings tend to drop off as they’re repeated,” Mr. Schwab said. “But the ninth time for ‘A Christmas Story’ was the most watched.”

He added that “it plays across all age groups,” because the older viewers appreciate the nostalgia and “the kids like a little bit of attitude.”

The marathon will be sponsored by the Weinstein Company, promoting the coming film “Arthur and the Invisibles.” Weinstein sponsored the 2005 marathon with commercials promoting the movie “Hoodwinked.”

Advertisers may like “A Christmas Story” because of all the brand names in the film. Besides Red Ryder, there are references to vintage products like Lifebuoy, Lux, Ovaltine, Palmolive and Tinker Toys.

And Ralphie’s traumatic confrontation with Santa Claus and his helpers takes place at Higbee’s, a department store that, alas, unlike Macy’s, is not around for Christmas 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu...a/27adcol.html





Online Shopping Season Begins With Deals
Anne D'Innocenzio

After jamming malls on Friday for discounted flat-screen TVs and toys, shoppers clicked onto their computers at work Monday as retailers ushered in the start of the online shopping season with bargains and marketing hype.

With an increasing number of online players trying to outdo each other, shoppers are being bombarded with even more generous discounts, free shipping offers and other enticements this holiday season.

For the Monday after Thanksgiving, coined Cyber Monday by the National Retail Federation, plenty of retailers like Circuit City Stores Inc. offered special one-day coupons. Meanwhile, Walmart.com began on Monday a five-day special on such online-only items as certain flat-screen TVs and cashmere scarves. And Barnesandnoble.com is wooing shoppers with a free tote bag if they spend $75 or more.

"It is a very promotional holiday shopping season," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation. "Many are using today as the platform to launch promotions." He noted that more retailers offered incentives starting as early as last week.

To fuel the hype surrounding Cyber Monday, NRF launched a new site last week called CyberMonday.com, which pulls together online discounts for both Cyber Monday and through the holiday season from nearly 400 retailers.

So far, the incentives seemed to be working, according to early reports.

Jewelry retailer ice.com reported a 60 percent increase in traffic and an 80 percent increase in sales through noon Monday, compared to the same period a year ago, according to Pinny Gniwisch, founder of ice.com. Walmart.com reported a 60 percent increase in traffic through noon Monday compared to a year ago.

While the first Monday after Thanksgiving kicks off the online holiday shopping season, it's not the busiest day for retailers. Internet research firm comScore Networks Inc. expects that honor to fall to either Dec. 11 or Dec. 12, making Cyber Monday either the ninth or tenth busiest online shopping day. Last year, the first Monday after Thanksgiving was the ninth busiest day.

Still, Cyber Monday marks the first big online shopping surge for many merchants for the season.

ComScore, which excludes travel, auctions and corporate purchases in its results, expects online sales to increase by at least 24 percent to $599 million, from $484 million a year ago. ComScore reported a better-than-expected 42 percent increase in sales to $434 million on the day after Thanksgiving, from the same day a year ago.

The online shopping surge Monday follows a strong start to the holiday shopping season for brick and mortar stores over the Thanksgiving weekend.

One exception was Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which announced Saturday that November's same-store sales would be more disappointing than expected. The glum outlook sent its stocks down on Monday, as investors worried about the strength of the retail sector.

Nevertheless, analysts are expecting a robust holiday season for stores and in cyberspace, though business will be slower than a year ago. The National Retail Federation expects total sales for the November and December period to be up 5 percent, but not as high as the robust 6.1 percent pace seen a year ago.

As for online holiday sales growth, JupiterResearch forecasts an 18 percent increase for online sales to $32 billion. That is slightly below the 23 percent pace in the previous year.

Analysts are carefully monitoring the rivalry between online-only stores and brick and mortar stores, which are overtaking the lead in the online market share wars. According to comScore, from 2003 to 2005, sales growth for brick and mortar stores' online divisions grew twice the rate of that of online-only merchants.

Stores that operate both e-commerce sites and physical stores are realizing they can "use the Internet to not only sell product but also drive traffic to their stores, " said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks.

Consumer electronics retailer Circuit City offered special coupons just for Monday, including additional savings of $100 on TV purchases of $1,700 and up, as well as an additional $50 savings on home audio systems purchases of $400 and up.

Throughout the holiday season, Circuit City is giving $24 gift cards to customers if their online order is not ready for pick up at the stores in 24 minutes.

Walmart.com, which redesigned its Web site earlier in November, unveiled Monday 50 online only specials offers, from cashere scarves to flat-panel plasma TVs, that will be available through Dec. 1. Carter Cast, CEO of walmart.com, said it will be replacing sold-out items with new offers this week.

Among the most popular items Monday on walmart.com were $289 GPS units by Garmin and 3 megapixel digital cameras by Philips.

The pure online players are fighting back with free shipping and other deals.

Online retailer Amazon.com pushed shoppers to get started early by holding an ongoing poll to select one steeply discounted gift item to be offered in limited supplies beginning on Thanksgiving day, on top of other deals.

Online jewelry retailer Bluenile.com is offering for the first time free overnight shipping to its best customers, a program that will run through Valentine's Day. It also sent out e-mails Monday offering 10 percent discounts to customers through Dec. 7.

Online closeout retailer Overstock.com for the first time offered free shipping offers, which started Thanksgiving Day and ends Tuesday, according to Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com.

"We're all competing on shipping promotions," Byrne said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-23-20-24





Apple: Cool Enough For Your Granny

Silver surfers biggest Mac owners
Jo Best

In its latest batch of adverts, Apple painted the Mac as the young, cool face of desktop computing. But now research has found it's the silver surfers who have a yen for Cupertino's goods - while the kids are opting for cheap Windows machines.

According to a report from industry watchers MetaFacts, nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older - that's almost double the share for average home-PC users.

For the digital youth, high-street box shifter Gateway is the brand of choice, taking the number-one slot among PC buyers aged between 18 and 25.

Dan Ness, principal at MetaFacts, said in a statement: "Apple can claim long-time loyalists but its future among the young technoliterati is an interesting dynamic."

Apple has in past ad campaigns hoped to trade on the cachet and cool of the iPod to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs, explicitly marketing the device as from the people behind the iPod.

The Mac maker is also reportedly investigating the true nature of the so-called iPod halo effect, where owning an iPod causes users to switch from PC to Mac. While the Mac's market share remains in single figures, Apple has said that it is seeing more first-time buyers picking up its kit.

The halo effect is given credence by MetaFacts' research, which reports that more than two-thirds of Macs in current use were bought since 2004. By comparison, when looking at all computers in current use, only half were bought since 2004. The iPod was first introduced in 2001.

The report did find Apple users are ahead of the curve in mobility, with a far higher percentage of users who prefer laptops to desktops. More than half of Apple households have laptops, compared to the 30 per cent of computer users as a whole who use a notebook as their primary computer.
http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops...9164472,00.htm





1987 Computer Serving a Site From Floppy!
SeBBBe

This old 286 computer running at 8 MHz, with 1 MiB ram and no hard drive (the OS, all software and the site is on a single floppy!) still serves a purpose by acting as a fully functional web server running DR-DOS. Also includes a description of how to build your own server on an 8088 or newer, and links to all software required!
http://www.digg.com/hardware/1987_co...te_from_floppy

Video





Early Astronomical ‘Computer’ Found to Be Technically Complex
John Noble Wilford

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone.

But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

The instrument, the Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers deciphered inscriptions and reconstructed the gear functions, revealing “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period,” it said.

The researchers, led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth and the astronomer Mike G. Edmunds, both of the University of Cardiff, Wales, are reporting their results today in the journal Nature.

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions, and the gears were a representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.

The Roman ship carrying the artifacts sank off the island of Antikythera about 65 B.C. Some evidence suggests it had sailed from Rhodes. The researchers said that Hipparchos, who lived on Rhodes, might have had a hand in designing the device.

In another Nature article, a scholar not involved in the research, François Charette of the University of Munich museum, in Germany, said the new interpretation of the mechanism “is highly seductive and convincing in all of its details.” It is not the last word, he said, “but it does provide a new standard, and a wealth of fresh data, for future research.”

Technology historians say the instrument is technically more complex than any known for at least a millennium afterward. Earlier examinations of the instrument, mainly in the 1970s by Derek J. de Solla Price, a Yale historian who died in 1983, led to similar findings, but they were generally disputed or ignored.

The hand-operated mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers said. A pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth.

The numbers of teeth in the gears dictated the functions of the mechanism. The 53-tooth count of certain gears, the team said, was “powerful confirmation of our proposed model of Hipparchos’ lunar theory.” The detailed imaging revealed more than twice the inscriptions recognized earlier. Some of these appeared to relate to planetary and lunar motions. Perhaps, the team said, the mechanism also had gearings to predict the positions of known planets.

Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged. A few artifacts and some Arabic texts suggest that simpler geared calendrical devices had existed, particularly in Baghdad around A.D. 900.

It seems clear, he said, that “much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further.”

“The gear-wheel, in this case,” he added, “had to be reinvented.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/sc...rssnyt&emc=rss

[JackSpratts]

For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate
John Markoff

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as “a really wacky idea.”

Ms. Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight.

That advance and others have allowed the nonprofit project, One Laptop Per Child, to win over many skeptics over the last two and a half years. Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007.

The laptop does not come with a Microsoft Windows operating system or even a hard drive, and the screen is small. And the cost is now closer to $150 than $100. But the price tag, even compared with low-end $500 laptops now widely available, transforms the economic equation for developing countries.

That has not prevented the effort, conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, a prominent computer researcher, from becoming the focal point of a debate over the value of computers to both learning and economic development.

The detractors include two computer industry giants, Intel and Microsoft, pushing alternative approaches. Intel has developed a $400 laptop aimed at schools as well as an education program that focuses on teachers instead of students. And Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and a leading philanthropist for the third world, has questioned whether the concept is “just taking what we do in the rich world” and assuming that that is something good for the developing world, too.

Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, said he was amused by the attention his little machine was getting. It is not the first time he has been challenged for proclaiming technology’s promise.

“It’s as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” he said in an interview here. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”

Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and educator who is an adviser to the project, has argued that if young people are given computers and allowed to explore, they will “learn how to learn.” That, Mr. Papert argues, is a more valuable skill than traditional teaching strategies that focus on memorization and testing.

The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.

“We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.” As an example, she pointed to the backlight used by the laptop. Although it is designed to last five years, if it fails it can be replaced as simply as batteries are replaced in a flashlight. It is something a child can do, she said.

That philosophy, at the heart of the project’s world view, has stirred criticism for its focus on getting equipment to students rather than issues like teacher training and curriculum.

“I think it’s wonderful that the machines can be put in the hands of children and parents, and it will have an impact on their lives if they have access to electricity,” Larry Cuban, a Stanford University education professor, said in an interview. “However, if part of their rationale is that it will revolutionize education in various countries, I don’t think it will happen, and they are naïve and innocent about the reality of formal schooling.”

The debate is certain to enter a new phase when the machines go into full-scale production by Taiwan-based Quanta Computer, the world’s second-largest laptop maker. (The manufacturer, unlike the project itself, will make a profit.) Overnight, even though it will not be available to consumers, the laptop could become the best-selling portable computer in the world.

The project now has tentative commitments for three million computers and will begin large-scale manufacturing when it reaches five million with separate commitments from at least one country each in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Based on current negotiations, Mr. Negroponte says he expects that goal to be reached by mid-2007.

It got a significant boost on Nov. 15 when the Inter-American Development Bank signed an agreement to supply both loans and grants to buy the machines.

“Several years ago, I thought it was an illusion or a utopian idea,” said Juan José Daboub, managing director of the World Bank and an independent economic-development expert. “But this is now real and encouraging.”

Mr. Negroponte said the manufacturing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

“The soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops,” said Walter Bender, a computer researcher who served as director of the Media Laboratory after Mr. Negroponte and now heads software development for the laptop project.

Each machine will come with a simple mechanism for recharging itself when a standard power outlet is not available. The designers experimented with a crank, but eventually discarded that idea because it seemed too fragile. Now they have settled on several alternatives, including a foot pedal as well as a hand-pulled device that works like a salad spinner.

Ms. Jepsen’s display, which removes most of the color filters but can operate in either color or monochrome modes, has made it possible to build a computer that consumes just 2 watts of power, compared with the 25 to 45 watts consumed by a conventional laptop. The ultra-low-power operation is possible because of the lack of a hard drive (the laptop uses solid-state memory, which has no moving parts and has fallen sharply in cost) and because the Advanced Micro Devices microprocessor shuts down whenever the computer is not processing information.

The designers have also gambled in designing the laptop’s software, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system, a rival to Microsoft’s Windows. Dispensing with a traditional desktop display, the software substitutes an iconic interface intended to give students a simpler view of their programs and documents and a maplike view of other connected users nearby.

A video-camera lens sits just to the right of the display, for use in videoconferencing and taking digital still photos of reasonable quality. The computer comes with a stripped-down Web browser, a simple word processor and a number of learning programs. For e-mail, the designers intend to use Google’s Web-based Gmail service.

Only one program at a time can be viewed on the laptop because of its small 7.5-inch display.

Mr. Negroponte has been a globetrotting salesman for the project, winning Libya’s participation when he was summoned by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to a meeting in a desert tent on a sweltering August night. But there have also been setbacks. The Indian Education Ministry rejected a proposal to order a million computers, noting that the money could be better spent on primary and secondary education.

Mr. Negroponte said he had been re-energized by the recent arrival of the first 1,000 working prototypes. The prototypes, he said, will give him new ammunition to convince government leaders that his tiny machines can be a positive force for social development. [On a visit to Brazil on Nov. 24, Mr. Negroponte presented one of the prototypes to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.]

He said a program would be created to enable those in the developed world to underwrite a laptop for a child in a designated country and to correspond with the recipient by e-mail as a sort of “glorified pen-pal program.” But however attractive the idea of a $100 or $150 laptop, he said there were no plans to make it generally available to consumers.

“They should buy Dell’s $499 laptop for now,” he said. “Ours is really designed for developing nations — dusty, dirty, no or unreliable power and so on.”

In his two decades as director of the Media Laboratory, Mr. Negroponte often faced criticism because the institution’s impressive demonstrations of technology only occasionally led to commercial applications.

“He has spent his whole career being accused of being all icing and no cake,” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist and one of Mr. Negroponte’s former students. To that kind of scoffing, he said, the laptop’s success would be Mr. Negroponte’s best retort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/te...rtner=homepage





Casual Computer Games Go Upscale
Rachel Konrad

The programmers at PopCap Games Inc. used to think of themselves as the unloved stepchildren of the computer gaming industry.

Their humble word puzzles and math teasers were in a different league from games in which role-playing characters spray bullets, slay dragons and maim rivals in fantastic virtual worlds. Such hardcore games can cost $30 million or more to develop - as much as a Hollywood movie.

But the casual gaming niche, which includes hits like "Bejeweled," "Scrabble" and the low-budget classic "Tetris," is in the midst of a Cinderella-like transformation. Companies like PopCap are sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into casual games and demanding sophisticated graphics, more nuanced plots, even original music instead of bland electronica.

The sequel to one of PopCap's popular word puzzles, "Bookworm Adventures," is expected to be the most expensive title produced for the casual game genre. PopCap, which has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Ireland, spent $700,000 over 2 1/2 years developing the game. It's set to debut online Tuesday at $30 per download.

"A couple years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that it took three guys six months and $100,000 to make a casual game," said PopCap director John Vechey. "They used to be considered a low art form."

Casual games are simple, one-player puzzles that can be played on desktop computers, gaming consoles, cell phones or hand-held computers. It takes less than a minute to understand the rules, structure and plot. The games often revolve around spelling, trivia, arithmetic or geometry.

They're rarely gory or militaristic. If they include characters at all, they're almost never the stereotypical swashbuckling soldiers or stealthy kick boxers of hardcore games.

The protagonist of "Bookworm Adventures" is Lex, a brainy, bow tie-wearing invertebrate who bops evildoers on the noggin whenever the gamer spells a word from a random assortment of letters.

The original game blends features from crossword puzzles and The Jumble, and in the sequel Lex progresses through stages of richly stylized dragons, vampires and other foes. The sequel also has an original musical score.

Casual gamers play to relax - the same reason people play solitaire, dominoes or mahjong. The games can be played for 5 minutes - while the baby is sleeping or between office meetings - or for hours at a stretch in a Zen-like trance.

Big Fish Games Inc. released its most expensive title - "Travelogue 360: Paris" - earlier this month. The Seattle-based company spent $300,000, hired seasoned illustrators and photographers, and bought the rights to images of historic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. Players scour Paris for souvenirs as they're interviewed for an article in a travel magazine.

The casual-gaming segment, which didn't even have a name until the late 1990s, has grown exponentially in the past half-decade with the proliferation of cell phones and mobile devices.

Research group DFC Intelligence estimates that revenues from casual games worldwide will grow to $953 million this year, from $713 million last year. They were $228 million in 2002. Those numbers don't include casual games played on handheld devices.

"It used to be that these were commodity games," said Alexis Madrigal, analyst at San Diego-based DFC. "But now these companies are showing they can get a return on their investment."

Casual gamers differ sharply from the 20-something males who make up the hardcore gaming demographic.

According to an August study by Information Solutions Group, 89 percent of casual gamers are 30 or older, 72 percent are female, and 53 percent are married with kids. Nearly half are college graduates.

Many companies offer 60 minutes of free playtime, then charge anywhere from $5 to $30 for a download. Others charge monthly fees of $5 or less to access an online arcade, and some - particularly those with advertisements, either embedded or as pop-ups - are free.

Once a game becomes a hit, rogue programmers usually write knockoffs and distribute them for free. That's one reason the most successful companies, including Big Fish Games, launch new games as frequently as once a day.

The risk posed by copycat coders makes experts question the spend-more-money development approach. They also say dazzling visuals are less important than a clever plot: Like a novel, you can't spend more money to guarantee a best seller.

Some executives say the fancy graphics and original music may even detract from the games' appeal.

RealNetworks Inc., which launched a new version of its "Scrabble" download this month, tested background music on 15,000 gamers. Testers consistently liked techie tunes better than original music, said Senior Vice President Michael Schutzler.

"At the end of the day, people are playing these games for stress relief - it's less about how beautiful the game is," Schutzler said. "Those gizmo-y little sound effects aren't picked because they're cheap. They're picked because they work."

Paul Thelen, chief executive of Big Fish Games, said big budgets could backfire. If companies spend huge sums of money, they'll want to minimize risk - and they may only fund sequels to "Scrabble," "Zuma," "Bejeweled" and other established hits.

"You can only do so many clones of 'Bejeweled' before people become tired of that," Thelen said. "The game has to offer something fundamentally new to become a breakaway hit."

Katherine Franco, 25, has been gaming since 1989, when Nintendo Co. released "Tetris" on the Game Boy. She said high-budget graphics might distract her from "staying in the groove."

"If it doesn't play well, there's really no point, regardless of how pretty it is," said the South San Francisco massage therapist, who plays games on the bus. "Besides, I still find myself humming the music to 'Tetris.'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-26-21-53-00





A Wii Workout: When Videogames Hurt

Nintendo's new system forces players to move their bodies, causing aches for some couch potatoes; a case of 'Wii elbow'
Jamin Warren

A videogame maker has finally succeeded in getting kids off the couch and moving around. But the new approach is turning out to be more exercise than some players bargained for.

These surprisingly vigorous workouts are being triggered by Nintendo's new Wii videogames. The Wii game console, which went on sale last weekend, competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's new PlayStation 3. One of the Wii's distinguishing features is a motion-sensitive technology that requires players to act out their character's movements, wielding the game's controller like a sword or swinging it like a tennis racket.

The new console has been wildly successful, selling out at stores and winning high marks from critics and game buffs. But as players spend more time with the Wii, some are noticing that hours waving the game's controller around can add up to fairly intense exertion -- resulting in aches and pains common in more familiar forms of exercise. They're reporting aching backs, sore shoulders -- even something some have dubbed "Wii elbow."

"It's harder than playing basketball," says Kaitlin Franke, a 12-year-old from Louisville, Ky. She has been camped out in front of her family's TV, fine-tuning her bowling motion and practicing boxing footwork in two of the Wii's games. Almost immediately, she says, her right arm started to feel numb.

In Rochester, Minn., Jeremy Scherer and his wife spent three hours playing tennis and bowling, two of the games included with the Wii. Mr. Scherer says he managed to improve his scores -- at the cost of shoulders and back that were still aching the next day. "I was using muscles I hadn't used in a while," says Mr. Scherer, a computer programmer who describes himself as "not very active." Mr. Scherer is vowing nightly "Wii workouts" to get in better shape.VIDEO

Another hazard: collisions. All those flailing arms can sometimes inadvertently smack into lamps, furniture and even competing players. IGN.com, a popular site that reviews videogames, said one player testing the Wii lost her grip and sent the controller flying into a wall. Blaine Stuart of Rochester, N.Y., mistakenly whacked his fiancée, Shelly Haefele, while playing tennis and also accidentally hit his dog while bowling.

Nintendo itself warns players about this risk just before some of the games begin. A message flashes up on the screen saying: "Make sure there are no people or objects around you that you might bump into while playing." Some Wii games also have pop-up reminders every 15 minutes advising gamers to take a break.

Perrin Kaplan, a spokeswoman from Nintendo, says the company hasn't received complaints from any gamers about soreness. "It was not meant to be a Jenny Craig supplement," she says. "If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more." She says that while it might be more fun to play the games more aerobically, it's possible to play without leaving the couch.

The Wii's introduction is part of a critical holiday season for the videogame industry. Two big new players -- the Wii and the PS3 -- are getting their launch this year. Starting last week, shoppers have been lining up, but in many cases, stores are already sold out of both consoles. The Wii and the PS3 are now fetching more than $1,000 on some Web sites like eBay.

WII MEANS OUCH

Some of the Nintendo games that have players flailing their arms.

Wii Sports
Bundle of five games (bowling, boxing, golf, tennis and baseball). Players, among other things, throw jabs with a controller in each hand.

Rayman Raving Rabbids
To fend off an assault of rabbit-like creatures, players must shoot them with plungers and whack them on the head.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The latest in long-running series, protagonist Link is in a foreign land fighting an evil force. Includes fishing sound effects.

Excite Truck
A continuation of the Excitebike series, players tilt their arms to control their truck mid-jump and bump opponents off the racetrack.

Red Steel
Controllers double as a handgun in this shooting game set in modern-day Tokyo.

The Wii, which retails for $250, comes with a remote control-size device that communicates wirelessly with a sensor sitting on the TV. It also comes with a secondary device -- which attaches via a cable to the first device -- that can mimic a variety of objects, from fishing rods to samurai swords. With their purchase, gamers also get Wii Sports, a package of five games, including golf, bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball. More than two dozen games are available for about $50 each. In one of those games, "Rayman Raving Rabbids," players aggressively shake the controller; in the action game "Red Steel," players wield it as a handgun. Nintendo has marketed the Wii to non-gamers who might find activities like bowling or golf easy to pick up and play.

Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn't helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. "I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe -- I had to go take a shower," he says. And the next morning? "I had trouble putting my shirt on," says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

Some past games have involved physical exertion. The popular "Dance Dance Revolution" by Konami has players moving their feet to music across a pad on the floor. And RedOctane's "Guitar Hero" requires players to attempt air-guitar types of moves. Beyond those two individual games, Nintendo in the 1980s sold something called the Power Pad, a plastic mat that recorded players' movements as they ran or jumped. But the Wii is a far more ambitious attempt to integrate body movement into all games.

In the past, pain from videogames has more typically been associated with the small repetitive movements of thumbing a controller's buttons. In the 1980s, some players addicted to the game "Super Mario Brothers" came down with what was later called "Nintendo thumb."

Doctors advice: Stretch out and be sure to take care of any injuries afterwards. "It's just like athletic play," says Lana Kang, an orthopedic hand surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

Ms. Haefele, who along with her fiancé is also a gamer, has been heeding that advice. Last year, she suffered a tendonitis injury and started wearing an elbow brace. Now, she also wears it when she plays the Wii.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...main_tff_t op





The Financial Page

In Praise of Third Place
James Surowiecki

Fifteen years ago, the video-game industry was ruled by one player, Nintendo. The company had machines in a third of American homes, and it was Japan’s most profitable electronics company. The title of a 1993 book summed up the situation: “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World.” Then the Sony PlayStation arrived, and everything changed. Today, Sony is the dominant force, and its chief rival is not Nintendo but Microsoft, which makes the Xbox. Two weeks ago, the début of Sony’s PlayStation 3 was greeted by crowds of hysterical consumers anxious to get their hands on the new console, billed as the most powerful gaming machine ever. When Nintendo’s new console, the oddly named Wii, appeared, a few days later, there were excellent reviews and expectations of good sales, but no more talk about world conquest. If Sony and Microsoft are the major-party nominees, Nintendo is more like a cool third-party candidate.

You might expect, then, that Nintendo would be struggling to stay afloat. After all, the prevailing wisdom is that companies need to be market leaders, or face disaster. This approach was famously institutionalized by Jack Welch, who, when he took over as C.E.O. of G.E., laid down a rule that he described as a “central idea” of his tenure: the company would quit any business in which it was not No. 1 or No. 2. The lesson that people took away from this was clear—third place is for losers. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” Nintendo, though, has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived. It has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?

Sony and Microsoft are desperate to be the biggest players in a market that, in their vision, will encompass not just video games but “interactive entertainment” generally. That’s why the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are all-in-one machines, which allow users not just to play video games but also to do things like watch high-definition DVDs and stream digital music. Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.

Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games. For instance, the Wii features a motion sensor that allows you to, say, hit a tennis ball onscreen by swinging the controller like a tennis racquet. Nintendo’s handheld device, the DS, became astoundingly popular because of simple but brilliant games like Nintendogs, in which users raise virtual puppies. And because Nintendo sells many more of its own games than Sony and Microsoft do, its profit margins are higher, too. Arguably, Nintendo has thrived not despite its fall from the top but because of it.

Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.

The point is that business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else. Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations. Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely. Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit. Nintendo wouldn’t complain if that happened. But, in the meantime, third prize is looking a lot better than steak knives.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/conten...alk_surowiecki





Nintendo Wii Sales Top 600,000 in U.S.
AP

Nintendo Co. said consumers in the Americas snapped up more than 600,000 of its Wii video game systems in eight days, totaling about $190 million in sales, as it competes with Sony Corp.'s new PlayStation 3.

Sales of both long-awaited systems are not expected to meet demand until next year. The Wii launched Nov. 19; the PS3 made its U.S. debut Nov. 17.

Sony Corp. has said it will have about 1 million PS3 systems for North American stores by the end of the year. Nintendo said it will have shipped 4 million units.

"We've shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time - and we still sold out," Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-21-50-48





Sony Shifts Duties of the Leader of the PlayStation Unit
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

Sony’s video game unit said yesterday that Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation game console, would no longer run its day-to-day affairs. The move comes just weeks after Mr. Kutaragi’s latest creation, the PlayStation 3, hit the market following a year of delays and technical problems.

Mr. Kutaragi, who is a celebrity among consumers in Japan and has had a sometimes stormy relationship with his superiors at Sony, will remain chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment. He will also become chairman but will give up control of daily operations. Starting today, that job will belong to Kazuo Hirai, who has been running the game unit’s American division.

Mr. Hirai will have his hands full. Introduced last month, well behind schedule, the PlayStation 3 is now in a pitched battle with a new game console from Nintendo and the Xbox 360, made by Microsoft, which has closed the gap with Sony in the roughly $30 billion global game market.

It is too early to say whether Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo, which began selling the Wii last month, will win the fight for consumers’ imaginations and money. But some industry analysts said the timing of Sony’s management shake-up, so soon after the machine’s release, suggested a company unhappy with the slow start for its marquee product.

“There was a significant increase in the market share for Xbox because of the delay, and the PS3’s higher price will also have an impact,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, a $260 million venture capital firm focused on entertainment and technology. “You have to look at it and say Sony didn’t do themselves any favors, and usually they try to place the blame somewhere.”

Sony said the management shuffle would strengthen oversight of its video game operations, which it sees as critical to its recovery. The company has faced a series of problems lately, from expensive laptop battery recalls to sinking profits and a failure to win back the portable music market from Apple’s iPod.

Mr. Kutaragi will be responsible for strategic thinking at the game unit, Sony said, while Mr. Hirai will handle shorter-term issues.

For Sony, the importance of the PlayStation 3 extends beyond its battle against Microsoft. The consoles have come to symbolize a transition in the world of consumer electronics to a digital, Internet-centered world, one in which Microsoft has a strong position, and away from the stand-alone consumer electronics that made Sony into a giant.

Sony is marketing the PlayStation 3 not just as the future of gaming, but also as a digital entertainment system that plays high-definition movies and serves as a hub in the living room, connecting the Internet, stereo and television. And its fate is being seen as a test of the ability of Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman, to revitalize the company.

Much depends on whether Sony can get enough consoles into consumers’ hands. While the company says it expects to ship one million machines in North America by the end of the year, it may end up shipping only half that amount at best because of component shortages, according to Evan Wilson, an entertainment analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.

Inside Sony, Mr. Kutaragi has had a reputation as an inspired but volatile leader. In the early 1990s, he threatened to leave the company when he had trouble persuading Sony to get into the game console business.

At Japanese companies, where executives are less likely to be publicly blamed for problems than in the West, a promotion combined with removal from day-to-day control over a product or group can sometimes be a way to penalize an executive.

But some analysts said the move would give Mr. Kutaragi more time to focus on Sony’s broader strategy — and possibly prepare to succeed Mr. Stringer.

The management change is “either a Machiavellian scheme to get rid of Kutaragi or they’re grooming him to replace Sir Howard,” said Michael Pachter, a video game industry analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. “I think it’s the latter.”

Whatever Mr. Kutaragi’s role as chief executive, the promotion of Mr. Hirai may signal that Sony needs fresh energy to help it smooth out the manufacturing and distribution of its new console.

“They need as much management talent at Sony headquarters as possible,” Mr. Wilson said.

Mr. Hirai, 45, has been a vocal and enthusiastic cheerleader for the PlayStation 3. He joined the American game unit in 1995 and became its president in 1999.

He has not overseen manufacturing before, but because of his experience distributing the consoles in the United States, he understands what it takes to build the product, said David Karraker, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment of America.

“He has an intricate knowledge of what goes into the products, and how to get them into the various territories,” Mr. Karraker said. He said Mr. Hirai was not available to comment on his new appointment.

Jack Tretton, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American unit, will move into Mr. Hirai’s current role.

The PlayStation 3 thus far has left industry analysts and eager consumers wanting. A big reason for the slow release of the machine was that Sony was still developing the Blu-ray high-definition DVD player that is an important part of it, Mr. Wilson said.
As a result of that and other complex components, the PlayStation 3 is selling for as much as $600, about $200 more than the comparable version of the Xbox 360. At the same time, Microsoft has moved faster into the world of online gaming, getting a head start on a growing trend. This has helped the Xbox 360 overcome some of its technical shortcomings compared with the PlayStation 3, which some consider a more sophisticated machine.

“It’s been a very, very difficult launch,” said Mike Hickey, a video game industry analyst at Janco Partners, who characterized the management changes as “a heavy move,” particularly Mr. Kutaragi’s new job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/te...gy/01sony.html





Arrest Made in Playstation Shooting
AP

A 20-year-old Woodstock, Conn., man was arrested early Tuesday in the shooting of a Webster, Mass., man who was wounded in a robbery while he waited in line to buy a PlayStation 3 game console in Putnam, Conn..

State police arrested William J. Robertson shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday on several charges including attempted murder and robbery. He was being held on $1 million bond pending arraignment in Danielson Superior Court.

An arrest warrant has been prepared for a second suspect, 17-year-old Andrew Patnaude, whose last known address was in Putnam, state police said.

State police had searched an area in Putnam early Tuesday looking for Patnaude. The search by state police, Putnam police and police dogs turned up nothing.

Michael Penkala, 21, was shot by two gunmen who tried to steal his cash as he waited outside Wal-Mart in Putnam early Nov. 17.

Penkala said he dialed 911 on his cell phone when he saw the gunmen wearing bandanas over their faces, carrying guns.

The thieves ordered everyone in line to throw possessions and cash on the ground or put them into two bags the gunmen held.

Penkala held onto a wallet in his pocket that held more than $2,500 in cash. He refused to give up his money and was shot.

Penkala is still recovering from his injuries.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023598





Second Suspect Arraigned in PlayStation Shooting
AP

A Putnam, Conn., teen charged with shooting a Massachusetts man waiting to buy a new PlayStation 3 at Wal-Mart was arraigned Wednesday in Danielson Superior Court, authorities said.

Andrew Patnaude, 17, was ordered held on $1.5 million bond on charges of attempted murder, robbery, assault, threatening, larceny and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

His alleged accomplice, 21-year-old William Robertson of Woodstock, Conn., was arraigned Tuesday on the same charges and ordered held on $1 million bond.

The men are accused of attempting to rob a group of people waiting outside the Putnam Wal-Mart to purchase PlayStation 3 consoles Nov. 17, the first day they went on sale.

Patnaude is accused of striking Michael Penkala, 21, of Webster, Mass., in the chest and shoulder with a shotgun blast after Penkala refused to hand over the $2,500 in his wallet.

Robertson is accused of attempting to fire a pistol at Penkala, but authorities say it misfired and no bullet was discharged.

Penkala was hospitalized but is now recovering at home, police said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023678





Ban on Louisiana Video Game Law Made Permanent
Eric Bangeman

A federal judge has ruled that a controversial law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors in Louisiana is unconstitutional.

Coauthored by video game critic Jack Thompson and passed by the Louisiana State Legislature in June, Louisiana HB1381 criminalized the sale of some video games to those under 18. Shortly thereafter, the Entertainment Software Association filed a lawsuit, which resulted in a temporary injunction against its enforcement.

The Louisiana law took a novel approach to regulating the sale of video games in the hope that it would pass constitutional muster. Rep. Roy Burrell (R) and Jack Thompson had research that purported to show a causative link between playing violent video games and real-world violence entered into the legislative record in an attempt to buttress the legislation's shaky credentials. In addition, the law adapted the Miller obscenity test to the realm of violent video games, prohibiting their sale to minors if they:

1. Appealed to the minor's morbid interest in violence" according to "contemporary community standards,"
2. Depicted violence inappropriate to minors according to "prevailing standards" in the adult community, and
3. Lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

Judge James Brady found the efforts unconvincing. In issuing a temporary injunction against the law, the judge wrote that "the evidence that was submitted to the legislature in connection with the bill that became the statute is sparse and could hardly be called in any sense reliable." Judge Brady also called the studies' connections between video game and real-world violence "tenuous and speculative."

Thompson blamed the Louisiana Attorney General's office for the ruling, telling Ars that its effort to defend the law was "at best incompetent and at worst compromised."

This has not been a good week for video game legislation. Just yesterday, an US Appeals Court upheld a lower court's ruling that a similar Illinois law was unconstitutional.

With video game legislation on a long losing streak, it's time for politicians to stop pandering to their constituents by continuing to introduce and pass legislation restricting the sale of some video games. The courts have spoken clearly and unanimously: video games are protected by the First Amendment and singling them out for regulation violates the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061129-8320.html





Maryland Court to Launch Webcasting Plan
AP

Maryland's highest court is launching a project for live Webcasting of its sessions, hoping to be ready in time to broadcast arguments set for Dec. 4 in a high-profile case involving gay marriage.

The first Webcast is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, giving the court a little time to solve problems that might develop before the gay marriage case is argued next week. The state is asking the high court to overturn a circuit court ruling that the Maryland law defining marriage as between one man and one woman is unconstitutional.

"It's all part of this outreach thing," Chief Judge Robert M. Bell of the Court of Appeals told The (Baltimore) Sun. "Other courts have done it. I don't see why we shouldn't do it."

The Court of Appeals and the Court of Special Appeals, the state's second highest court, allow news organizations to record hearings and to take still and television photographs. State law prohibits cameras and recorders in lower courts in criminal cases, and allows them to be used in civil cases only with the approval of both parties.

Bell has been a proponent of opening up Maryland courts to make them more accessible to the public. About half of the appellate state courts in the nation allow coverage of hearings on the Web or on cable channels.

Proponents say allowing cameras and recorders in court rooms helps give citizens a better idea of how the legal system works.

"The Court of Appeals providing greater access to its proceedings is a good thing," Donald F. Norris, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said.

Marylanders who take the time to check out Webcasts will find less than scintillating viewing in what is usually a dry appellate process. The proceedings follow a rigid structure and are usually restricted to two hours or less. There are no witnesses. Opposing lawyers are given a set amount of time to make their arguments with flashing lights telling them when it is time to sit down.

Occasionally, the proceedings liven-up when the seven crimson-robed judges interrupt lawyers to probe perceived weaknesses in their arguments, but generally the cases involve dry discussions about legal precedents.

"I don't think it will ever break the Nielsen ratings," said Carmen M. Shepard, a former assistant attorney general now in private practice who has argued a dozen cases in the Court of Appeals. "But I think it says something positive about our legal system to say that the highest court in our state is inviting the public to see how it works and watch."

Opponents of televised court proceedings argue that some lawyers will want to grandstand for the cameras, but Bell said he does not think that will happen, noting cameras have not affected previous hearings where they were allowed in the courtroom.

Craig Waters, spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court, said an estimated 50 million people watched part or all of the arguments before that court in the 2000 dispute over the presidential outcome in Florida.

Maryland Court of Appeals cases involving issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty might attract an audience, although it's doubtful few people would want to watch arguments about whether a state agency followed its own regulations, said William Reynolds, who teaches Internet law at the University of Maryland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-18-44-48





Old-School Sponsorship From a Digital-Era Company
Stuart Elliott

MATCHMAKER, matchmaker, make me a match. So sang the daughters of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” For a TV comedy series that begins tonight — about a young woman’s dating life, appropriately enough — Madison Avenue is playing matchmaker, bringing together an advertiser and a network for an elaborate sponsorship deal.

The matchmaker is MediaHub from Mullen, the media planning and buying division of Mullen, an agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies. MediaHub is hooking up Match.com, the dating Web site operated by IAC/InterActiveCorp, with the TBS cable network for a season-long sponsorship of the new sitcom, called “My Boys.”

Under the agreement, estimated at $1 million to $2 million, Match.com will be featured in all 13 episodes of “My Boys,” which chronicles the adventures of a twentysomething who covers sports for a Chicago newspaper as she juggles her career and social life. The Web site will be featured prominently in two episodes and play cameo roles in the rest.

Other elements of the deal include identification of “My Boys” as “sponsored by Match.com” in a television, print, radio and online promotional campaign that TBS is creating for the series; the posting of a profile of a character from the series on Match.com; billboard-style ads for Match.com on a special “My Boys” Web site (tbs.com/shows/myboys/); and a discussion of “My Boys” and Match.com during an episode of another TBS show, “Movie and a Makeover.”

The sponsorship is another example of an advertising technique that is being revived, decades after fading from the media landscape. Known as branded entertainment, it recalls the days when announcers intoned at the start of TV and radio shows that they were being “brought to you by” some name-brand consumer product.

Branded entertainment is returning to television because of its ability to interweave product pitches into the story lines of the shows that consumers want to watch. The goal is to counter viewers’ increasing ability to ignore or avoid more interruptive advertising like traditional commercials.

Among other advertisers that are taking part in the revival of branded entertainment are Coca-Cola, General Motors, Philips Electronics North America, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

In some instances, they are even getting marquee billing in the names of the shows they are sponsoring, a throwback to the era of “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars” and “The United States Steel Hour.” For example, the AMC cable network announced yesterday the creation of an ad package to be called the “Lincoln Friday Night Feature,” sponsored by the Lincoln Mercury division of the Ford Motor Company.

“After two years of successful TV advertising, buying a lot of syndicated shows like ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends,’ this is, for us, stepping it up,” Jim Safka, chief executive at Match.com in Dallas, said of the agreement with TBS.

“It’s a fully integrated campaign that feels less like a sponsorship or advertisement and more like a part of the program,” he added.

In threading Match.com through the episodes of “My Boys,” Mr. Safka said, “it has to feel seamless and natural,” otherwise it could annoy or even alienate viewers.

Doing more than what the deal calls for “would be heavy-handed,” Mr. Safka said, “and it’s not how our brand fits into someone’s everyday life.”

“It’s taking some risk,” he added, “but we’ve had a good preview of the show and we think it’s going to deliver the goods.”

MediaHub made the deal for Match.com during the recent upfront market, where advertisers agree to spend money with networks before the start of the fall season.

John Moore, senior vice president and group media director at MediaHub in Wenham, Mass., said the agreement made sense because Match.com wanted to promote a brand identity as a Web site for “long-term relationships, not casual dating, and ‘My Boys’ is about a group of friends going through the trials and tribulations of trying to figure out long-term relationships.”

“The characters are a reflection of the people on Match.com,” he added. The creative agency for Match.com is Hanft Unlimited in New York.

This is the first time MediaHub has signed a season-long sponsorship for a client, Mr. Moore said, and the deal is not without its challenges.

“The ‘leap into the void,’ ” Mr. Moore said, “is this show has no track record,” unlike TBS shows like “Sex and the City,” which are reruns of series that proved successful on other networks.

“But we think the rewards outweigh the risks,” he added, because “TBS is giving ‘My Boys’ its most coveted time slot, after ‘Sex and the City,’ ” and because of the pedigree of the production team behind “My Boys.”

Among those involved in the production of “My Boys” are Jamie Tarses, the TV executive who is the basis for a character on the NBC series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and Betsy Thomas, who has worked on series like "My So-Called Life," "Then Came You" and "Run of the House."

TBS was “looking for a launch partner, if you will, for ‘My Boys’ that would be a like-minded brand,” said Linda Yaccarino, executive vice president for advertising sales and marketing at Turner Entertainment in New York, which like TBS is part of the Turner Broadcasting System unit of Time Warner.

Branded entertainment projects “are easier when it’s an organic fit,” Ms. Yaccarino said. “Otherwise you’re just going to turn off the viewer, and then all of your work was for naught.

“As long as we respect the creative process, and that takes the lead, that’ll keep the viewers watching.”

The deal is “the biggest co-branded effort that Turner has ever done,” Ms. Yaccarino said, “and I think you’ll definitely see more of this.”

Early reviews of “My Boys” are mixed to positive. In Touch magazine gave it two stars out of four, while a sibling magazine, Life & Style, gave it two and a half (“Worth a first date at least”). Life magazine called it “fresh” and the critic Matt Roush, in TV Guide, praised it as a “winner.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/bu...ia/28adco.html





Eyebrows Are Raised Over Passages in a Best Seller by Ian McEwan
Alan Cowell

LONDON, Nov. 27 — The scene: a London hospital during World War II. The character: a nurse who “dabs gentian violet on ringworm” and is told to wash blood off her face to avoid upsetting the patients. The inspiration? Well, that’s where the dispute starts.

In a literary imbroglio Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s best known and most lauded authors, has been accused in newspaper articles of copying phrases and sentences for his best-selling novel “Atonement” in 2001 from a memoir published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews, a former nurse and an acclaimed writer of romantic novels.

The dispute’s timing is almost as tantalizing, since it coincides with the filming of a movie version of “Atonement,” starring Keira Knightley.

The memoir, “No Time for Romance,” is out of print, and Ms. Andrews died last month, at 86. But Mr. McEwan’s debt to her has already been briefly acknowledged in a note at the conclusion of “Atonement,” which refers to Ms. Andrews’s autobiography, among several other works.

Mr. McEwan said on Monday that he had never sought to disguise the fact that he had used her book for research. Thus the issue was whether the close resemblance between some sentences and phrases should be classified as copying — a charge leveled against Mr. McEwan once before, with his debut novel, “The Cement Garden, ” in 1978 — or as a form of research. And if material had been borrowed, how grave an offense had been committed?

“I return to the position that it was discourteous from one author to another” for Mr. McEwan to have echoed Ms. Andrews’s wording so closely, her agent, Vanessa Holt, said in a telephone interview.

Julia Langdon, a British political journalist who compared the books for an article in The Mail on Sunday and traced broad similarities between them, said: “I’m not accusing McEwan of plagiarism. I was just making the point that he was discourteous not to have drawn her attention to this when she was alive.”

But Jenny Haddon, the chairwoman of Britain’s Romantic Novelists’ Association, who had known Ms. Andrews, said, “I think it’s quite clear that her response was ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”

Ms. Andrews, who died of cancer in October, was a prolific writer of 35 romantic novels, once described by The Guardian newspaper as “the brand leader of hospital fiction” for her work as a writer of books with medical themes and backdrops. Born in Suez, Egypt, she trained as a nurse, working in St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in World War II — just as Briony Tallis, a central figure of “Atonement,” also works in a wartime hospital.

In a lengthy article published in The Guardian on Monday, Mr. McEwan, 58, acknowledged that in researching “Atonement,” he came across a copy of Ms. Andrews’s autobiography, which helped him find authentic details of nursing and hospital conditions in wartime Britain.

“With painstaking accuracy, so it seemed to me, she rendered in the form of superb reportage an experience of the war that had been almost entirely neglected, and which I too wanted to bring to life through the eyes of my heroine,” Mr. McEwan wrote in The Guardian.

In the article Mr. McEwan continued: “I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author’s note at the end of ‘Atonement,’ and ever since on public platforms, where questions on research are almost as frequent as ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ ”
In a telephone interview on Monday, Mr. McEwan again acknowledged using the Andrews book as a source, as he had done, he said, with his father’s wartime memories. “What I did was to use whatever I could of eyewitness accounts and sift and embroider them into the minds of characters,” he said.

He said the uproar about similarities between some phrases and sentences was “quite a surprise for me.”

“I did use real events that Lucilla Andrews described,” he said. “As far as I know, my wording has been distinct from hers. My own mother used to read her books, so it was not as if I was plucking some obscure figure from the library shelves.”

But he strongly disputed the suggestion that he had copied Ms. Andrews’s work.

“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “I have used her account of certain things, certainly training” of nurses. His depiction of wartime, he added, however, had been “very much diffused through the anxieties and character of the young girl, Briony.”

Mr. McEwan said he did not believe Ms. Andrews would “have had a problem” with what he wrote. Indeed, he said, he paid her tribute in a radio broadcast and interviews. “The one thing I now do deeply regret is not being in touch with her,” he said. “She was quite a wonderful woman.”

In the case of “The Cement Garden,” Mr. McEwan’s first novel, critics had noted some plot similarities between it and a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag, “Our Mother’s House.” Mr. McEwan denied ever having read the other book.

Two British newspapers — The Mail on Sunday and The Times of London — have published excerpts that show close similarities between passages in “Atonement” and Ms. Andrews’s memoir. Mr. McEwan, for instance, wrote: “In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut and painted lead lotion on a bruise.” Ms. Andrews’s book has the lines: “Our ‘nursing’ seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violent on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains.”

The authenticity of the textual references has not been disputed by any of those involved, but the nature of the similarities has been explained in different ways.

Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times of London, said that Mr. McEwan seemed to have relied on the Andrews book purely for research. “There’s a close similarity in the wording, but it seems to me that he is mostly describing medical procedures,” she said in a telephone interview. There was no suggestion that the language had been taken from another novel, she said, drawing a distinction with nonfiction. Referring to the accusation that he had copied Ms. Andrews’s work, she said, “I don’t think that’s a valid complaint at all.”

The link between the works was initially drawn by Natasha Alden, a research student at Oxford, and the comparisons were made known to Ms. Andrews last year.

At that time, according to Ms. Haddon of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Ms. Andrews wrote in a note about a telephone conversation concerning the similarities, “I don’t give a damn.” The note was among papers left to the association by Ms. Andrews, who was awarded its prize for lifetime achievement last August.

“Although I can say that the nature of the borrowings is a bit startling, the overall impact of McEwan’s novel and Lucilla’s autobiography is very different,” Ms. Haddon said. She called the brouhaha over the similarities “nonsense.”

“Lucilla was a very ladylike person,” Ms. Haddon said in a telephone interview on Monday. “So I don’t think she would have gone to war with another author like that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/books/28aton.html





Crave Talk: Why do all our Gadgets Break?

Those among you suffering from seasonal affective disorder-induced nostalgia may find yourselves dragging old friends back into the dim winter light this month. For me it was an old IBM XT that has lain dormant in the garage for eleven years. A fox had urinated down the side of the chassis and there was a implausibly fat, dead tropical spider wedged in the 5¼-inch drive. But still, the machine started up without a hitch. This belching, staggering monster from times past still worked like a dream. Why is it, then, that my 11-month-old Motorola Razr V3 is all but dead?

Consumer electronics have largely reached a point where their top performance already far outreaches any demand the average user will put on them. Who is likely to tax a Core 2 Duo processor with a Word document? Who will blow the address book memory of a 64MB mobile phone -- even if they're friends with half of London? My V3 did everything I needed a phone to do. It stored contacts, it made calls, it was small enough to fit in a pocket, but not small enough to be inhaled. Nevertheless, it's falling apart because its delicate clamshell design made it too fragile for the real world.

The keypad emits a constant whining noise, like the shrill battle-cry of a wounded pheasant. The screen intermittently flickers on and off, and it occasionally dials random numbers. While the latter is an exciting way of regaining contact with friends you've neglected to call for months, it's not a great testament to the build quality of modern electronics.

Of course, we live in an upgrade culture, in which mobile phones, laptops and iPods are discarded for cosmetic reasons as much as technical. But there is a splinter cell whose members don't want to upgrade their current product, yet is forced to by the increasingly poor build quality of many modern consumer electronics.

Do owners of Rennie Mackintosh chairs seek to upgrade them each year because the legs have all gone wobbly? Do owners of original Marshall valve amplifiers throw them away because the speaker cones have fallen out? Clearly not. Yet millions of us are expected to discard our phones and our computers each year.

Computers and mobile phones that last a lifetime can already be built. Now that processors have reached a level where the average student has a laptop more powerful than a 1990s Pixar render farm, you have to wonder why the majority of us need to upgrade. Obviously, there will always be creative industries pushing the boundaries, and these groups will need more powerful machines. But my Razr was perfect for me, and now it's dead.

Engineers have built obsolescence into mass-produced technology since the 1920s. There are two kinds of planned deterioration in a product: one is technical, the other is stylistic. The fashion industry relies on your eagerness to keep up with changes in style to keep their new products selling, while the technology industry used to rely on the simple fact that computers were never quite fast enough for the average user.

Now computers are fast enough, mobile phones are small enough and digital music players have enough memory. Manufacturers now have a problem. How will they sell new products to consumers who are perfectly satisfied with their current electronics? My IBM XT, 20 years old, proves that we were capable of manufacturing durable technology decades ago -- now that the performance problem is also taken care of, presumably the majority of us (certainly the shops and offices of the world) can stop buying new computers?

The electronics industry has clearly spotted this problem, and has worked out a simple way to make you upgrade even if you're not a slave to fashion: your gadgets will simply break within the year. The evolution of the microchip to a point where the average consumer cannot tax it technically has ushered in The Age of the Flimsy -- delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39...9285619,00.htm





Need a Valid e-mail Address to Register But Don't Want the Spam? Try This Seam-Based Web App
Paul McNamara

Here's yet another way to dodge the irksome requirement of presenting a valid e-mail address to register for a Web site: 10 Minute Mail, a Seam-based Web application that fills the bill just long enough to get you onto the site … and then disappears. No fuss, no muss, and best of all, no spam.

Reminds me of Anonymizer Nyms, a somewhat controversial product that debuted at our DEMOfall 2006 conference. However, unlike that $20-a-year offering, 10 Minute Mail is free. It's also reminiscent of PrefPass, another Demo debut that aims to ease registration pains.

Here's what 10 Minute Mail developer Devon Hillard has to say about it on his Digital Sanctuary Tech blog.

"My first Web application built using Seam is now live. It is called 10MinuteMail and you can see it at www.10MinuteMail.com."

"It gives you a temporary e-mail address, and lets you receive and reply to e-mail sent to that address. The e-mail address expires in 10 minutes (or more, you can extend it as you need more time). Basically I created it to learn Seam, and to provide an easy way to avoid giving your real e-mail address to Web sites which require an e-mail from you to sign up. Think of it as spam avoidance."

The site has been an instant hit, too, with the help of bloggers -- which Hillard clearly digs.

"Anyhow, I’m proud," he writes. "Check it out, click on a Google ad or two if you would, and let me know what you think!"

Obviously, the utility here is extremely limited and the cloak-and-dagger crowd will have fun conjuring up all manner of nefarious uses for such a transient communications vehicle.

Bottom line, though, is I think I'll wind up using it.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/9381





Commerce OKs VeriSign `.com' Contract
Anick Jesdanun

VeriSign Inc. will run the key directories that keep track of ".com" domain names until at least 2012 as the U.S. Commerce Department approved a lucrative contract extension.

The government's clearance Thursday was the final one needed for VeriSign to extend its hold over the most popular suffix on the Internet, for which it now makes $6 per name each year, or some $350 million for the nearly 59 million names registered.

Shares of Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign jumped $1.82, or 7.5 percent, to close at $26.09 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

VeriSign reached a contract agreement earlier with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that oversees the Internet's domain-name policies. Commerce has veto power over ICANN decisions.

In approving the extension, Commerce said it would require VeriSign to obtain prior government approval for any further changes in the contract's pricing provisions or for any subsequent renewals - important because the government has indicated it was reducing its oversight over ICANN.

Critics had urged Commerce to reject the contract, complaining among other things that VeriSign would no longer be required to invest in the Domain Name System's infrastructure and that the company would get first dibs to renew the contract in the future.
Commerce sought to address that by stating that any renewals would be granted only if "the approval will serve the public interest."

In a statement, VeriSign said it was continuing to invest tens of millions of dollars in the infrastructure, even if the contract no longer specifies any minimums.
The directories in question are necessary for computers to know where to find Web sites and send e-mail with addresses ending in ".com." Millions of people around the world depend on them every day, but rarely know it.

VeriSign also runs the ".net" directories as well as the master computers that list the Internet's more than 250 suffixes.

Under the deal ICANN approved in February, VeriSign is allowed to raise its annual fee for domain names, which resellers may pass along to consumers. It is currently $6, and VeriSign will be allowed to increase it up to 7 percent a year for four of the next six years. The company may also raise fees during the other two years under limited conditions.

VeriSign initially had a contract through 2007, but agreed to an early rebidding in exchange for a more lucrative extension for ".com." With the contract extension approved, both sides are dropping lawsuits filed against each other over, among other things, the introduction by VeriSign of a controversial search service called Site Finder.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-16-23-49





EFF Accepts Barney's Surrender
Press Release

Purple Dinosaur Backs Off and Pays Up; Free Speech Rights Preserved

The corporate owners of the popular children's television character Barney the Purple Dinosaur have agreed to withdraw their baseless legal threats against a website publisher who parodied the character and to compensate him for fees expended in defending himself.

The agreement settles a suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in August on behalf of Dr. Stuart Frankel against Lyons Partnership, owners of the Barney character. Frankel received repeated, meritless cease-and-desist letters from Lyons, claiming his online parody violated copyright and trademark law. EFF's suit asked the court to declare that Frankel's parody was a noninfringing fair use protected by the First Amendment.

"We wish we hadn't had to file a lawsuit to finally get Barney's lawyers to stop harassing a man who was just expressing his opinion about a cultural phenomenon," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Hopefully Lyons Partnership has learned its lesson and will have more respect for fair use in the future."

This settlement is the latest development in EFF's ongoing campaign to protect online free speech from the chilling effects of bogus copyright claims. Earlier this month, EFF filed suit against Michael Crook -- a man who claimed copyright infringement in an effort to censor his online critics.

"Those who misuse copyright should know that they can be sued for doing so," said McSherry. "This settlement should send a message to those who want to use copyright law as a pretext for censorship."

EFF was assisted in this case by Elizabeth Rader, James d'Auguste, and Brian Carney, attorneys with the firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP, which is defending Dr. Frankel's free speech rights on a pro bono basis.
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_11.php#005024





TiVo Sets Ads on Programs to be Deleted

Before deleting that television show you just watched courtesy of TiVo, you'll be given the option to view a commercial, the latest in a series of enhancements the DVR pioneer will launch in an effort to profit from the proliferation of ad-skipping.

TiVo's newest initiative, called Program Placement, was announced Tuesday, just before a judge rejected a request by EchoStar Communications for a new trial in an ongoing patent dispute. The rejection means that TiVo and EchoStar will probably head to a federal appeals court.

Neither piece of positive news for TiVo impressed investors much Tuesday, when TiVo shares traded just 2 cents higher to $6.28.

TiVo said it has lined up several advertisers for Program Placement, which launches in two weeks, including Court TV, the Weather Channel and Burger King, each of which has chosen various TV shows to attach their commercials to in hopes that viewers will choose to watch them.

When TiVo customers hit their delete buttons, they will be given the standard two options of erasing a program or saving it, as well as a pitch from an advertiser to watch its commercial.

"It reaches the consumer who is watching in playback, where most fast-forwarding occurs," said Davina Kent, TiVo's vice-president national advertising sales.

Program Placement allows advertisers to choose types of programming to advertise across. For example, MasterCard is attaching its ads to several Christmas-themed shows.

"The key," Kent said, "is to target by genre, and not just a traditional 30-second ad but longer-form that is entertaining and informational."

She said most ads so far run about two minutes in length, but Kent expects that some future ones will run as long as 12 minutes.

Because TiVo is accepting only one advertiser per show, Kent envisions that bidding wars could drive prices for Program Placement higher over time.

TiVo, she said, is "selling ads on the TiVo users' interface and not touching the content," so there's no need to share ad revenue with the shows' rights holders.

The initiative is available to TiVo stand-alone subs who have Series 2 or Series 3 boxes, which is about 1.4 million of TiVo's 4.4 million total subscribers. DirecTV, which accounts for the bulk of TiVo subs, could add the service later.

TiVo is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings after the closing bell on Wall Street Wednesday, when it is expected to update its subscriber numbers.

Program Placement is TiVo's latest advertising solution, joining others like Product Watch, which lets users tell TiVo a category of advertising they'd like to receive. TiVo, and some bullish analysts, have been touting the company's Google-like ability to deliver advertising that's relevant to viewers and even desired, though so far TiVo management has not divulged how much revenue the company is taking in through its ad platforms.
http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/en...477805600.html





Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned, Paper Systems Should Be Included, Agency Says
Cameron W. Barr

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Voters in Maryland cast ballots on electronic machines that produce no paper record of each vote; in the District and Loudoun County, voters can choose between using such machines and optical-scan systems. Other Northern Virginia jurisdictions, and many counties across the state, use electronic voting systems exclusively.

NIST's recommendations are to be debated next week before the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, charged by Congress to develop standards for voting systems. To become effective, NIST's recommendations must then be adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress to promote changes in election systems after the 2000 debacle in Florida.

If the commission agrees with NIST, the practical impact may not be felt until 2009 or 2010, the soonest that new standards would be implemented. The standards that the Election Assistance Commission will adopt are voluntary, but most states require election officials to deploy voting systems that meet national or federal criteria.

State election officials in Maryland and Virginia declined to comment yesterday on the NIST report, which they were reviewing.

Alice P. Miller, executive director of the District's Board of Elections and Ethics, said through a spokesman that she would not comment because she is a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.

NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

Fears about rigging have animated critics for years, but there has been no conclusive evidence that such fraud has occurred. Electronic voting systems have had technical problems -- including unpredictable screen freezes -- leaving voters wondering whether their ballots were properly recorded.

Computer scientists and others have said that the security of electronic voting systems cannot be guaranteed and that election officials should adopt systems that produce a paper record of each vote in case of a recount. The NIST report embraces that critique, introducing the concept of "software independence" in voting systems.

NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but such paper trails have had their own problems.

Printers have jammed or otherwise failed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an improvement. Maryland state elections administrator Linda Lamone, in an undated video snippet that her critics have circulated on the Internet, says that voter verification is unnecessary. "I'm not going to put this paper on my machines -- it'll be over my dead body, because I just don't think it works. It really is a false sense of security," she said.

For critics of paperless electronic voting, the report is vindication. "I think I got it right," said Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who has long questioned the security and reliability of some electronic voting systems.

Linda Schade, a founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote, said, "These strong statements from a credible institution such as NIST add yet another voice to the consensus that paper electronic voting as used in states like MD is not secure. We hope that the [Election Assistance Commission] formally adopts these improved standards."

Even critics of paperless electronic voting have grown disenchanted with the practical problems of adding printers to electronic "touch-screen" voting machines.

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...113001637.html





Electronic Vote Distrusted in Venezuela
Fabiola Sanchez

Under pressure from opponents of President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's elections council has adopted safeguards for the country's electronic voting machines to prevent tampering in Sunday's election - conditions so strict that experts say they surpass some standards in the United States.

The opposition boycotted Venezuela's legislative elections a year ago, saying it couldn't trust that the electronic machines would be used fairly. But after thorough checks of hardware and software and some key concessions by electoral officials, presidential challenger Manuel Rosales says he's satisfied - as long as the agreed-upon rules are respected.

"The Venezuelan people and I hope that the electoral council doesn't step outside the rules, that it maintains impartiality," Rosales said Monday. "I'm going to defend the transparency and the results of this process, even if it's with my last breath."

Unlike with most U.S. electronic voting machines, Venezuelans will get paper receipts that verify their choices were properly recorded, and must deposit them into boxes before leaving the polls. After Sunday's vote, election officials monitored by representatives of each candidate will count millions of the paper receipts for comparison to the electronic totals.

Last month, they performed random hardware and software checks of 1 percent of the machines. Officials also will keep them disconnected from the network during the actual voting as an additional safeguard against tampering.

Digital thumbprint devices aimed at preventing the casting of multiple ballots will be used by about 40 percent of the voters in the most populous states and along Venezuela's borders, but in response to fears that thumbprints could be linked to voters' choices, the National Electoral Council says it has tweaked the software so that no record is kept of the sequence in which thumbprints are recorded.

In the United States, only some of the electronic machines used in this month's midterm elections provided voter-verified receipts. In general, the machines are considered proprietary, and vendors have restricted access to the hardware and software for independent review.

Thousands of citizens in dozens of states had problems voting, and some were left with little confidence that their choices were properly recorded.

Chavez's opponents have been suspicious of the machines made by Boca Raton, Florida-based Smartmatic Inc., which is primarily owned by three Venezuelans. Smartmatic bought one of the largest U.S. voting equipment companies, Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., which is now undergoing a Treasury Department review over what Sequoia calls baseless allegations of potential influence by Chavez over U.S. elections.

But even prominent electronic voting critics say Venezuela appears be doing the right things.

Avi Rubin, an electronic voting expert at Johns Hopkins University, has shown in his laboratory how automated voting systems can have glitches and weaknesses, and how someone could insert code to alter the results - for example by switching a certain number of votes for one candidate to his opponent.

However, Rubin said, "a lot of my criticisms of these systems go away when you look at the paper trail that's verified by the voters." If problems emerge, authorities can perform a full manual count.

The random audit of 54 percent of the boxes containing the paper slips is impressive, Rubin said. In the U.S., it's normal for about 2 percent of electronic ballots to be audited, he said.

Rosales' campaign also plans to have about 1 million witnesses at voting centers to ensure compliance, and at least one person from each of the Rosales and Chavez camps will join in the audits.

"We are very well-prepared," said Eliceo Fermin, Rosales' chief of electoral oversight. "We know the errors we committed in the past, we know our weaknesses and we are on alert."

The opposition boycott of last December's elections allowed Chavez allies to capture the entire National Assembly.

Now even the Venezuelan elections watchdog group Sumate acknowledges that the promised safeguards are significant, President Alejandro Plaz said.

It's a stark change from 2004, when Venezuelans first used the touch-screen machines in a recall referendum Chavez won by a wide margin. Observers said Chavez won cleanly and opponents didn't produce hard evidence of fraud, but some questioned the results nevertheless.

Some Venezuelans still have doubts.

"Technology can be manipulated, so I think it's good to recount the votes manually because it's safer," said Javier Gonzalez, a 22-year-old student, pausing to ask for help before using one of the machines in a test run organized by electoral officials.

An AP-Ipsos poll showing Chavez with a wide lead over Rosales also showed less than half of the 2,500 registered voters surveyed were very confident that Venezuelan ballots are counted accurately and votes kept secret.

But electoral officials insist the count will be precise, and that voting secrecy is assured. And Rosales urged voters not to worry, assuring them recently that "No one will know who you voted for."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-18-24





EU Clears Sale of AOL German Access Unit
AP

European Union regulators cleared on Tuesday an agreement by Telecom Italia SpA to buy AOL's German access business, saying the combined company still would face formidable competition.

Upon closing, Milan-based Telecom Italia will become the second-biggest provider of broadband Internet in Germany with 3.2 million customers, behind Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Online International. Telecom Italia has agreed to pay $856 million in cash to AOL parent Time Warner Inc. to gain a firm foothold in the German market.

The European Commission said overlaps between broadband and dial-up Internet access services were limited.

"The combined firm would continue to face a number of strong, effective competitors, notably the incumbent Deutsche Telekom," it said.

The deal will bring to more than 9 million the number of Telecom Italia subscribers in Italy, France and Germany. In Germany, the company operates Hansenet, which it acquired in 2003, and offers broadband under the "Alice" brand.

AOL Germany has 1.1 million broadband users and 1.3 million subscribers who use dial-up or ISDN to access the Internet.

AOL has been trying to shed its legacy access businesses to concentrate on growing its free, ad-supported Web sites. In the United States, it is giving away AOL.com e-mail accounts and software to keep people from defecting to rivals with free offerings. In Europe, it is selling its access operations, though holding on to its portals for the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

The changes are expected to cost 5,000 jobs at AOL, or a quarter of its global work force, although some would be hired by Telecom Italia and other buyers.

Under the deal, AOL will provide content and ads for its current users as well as Telecom Italia's existing customers in Germany.

Germany's broadband market is one of the largest in Europe, with more than 12 million subscribers as of the end of June. The number of users is expected to grow by 10 million through 2009 as faster access is introduced in the country of more than 82 million.

Time Warner has already closed on a deal with Neuf Cegetel for the French telecommunications network operator to buy AOL's French access business for about $365 million in cash.

Mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse Group PLC has agreed to buy AOL's U.K. access business for $688 million in cash.

The U.K. sale is slated to close Dec. 29, while the German sale is expected early next year, according to AOL.

Shares in Time Warner dropped 35 cents to close at $20.18 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-59-24





AOL to Give Away Free Movies Dec. 2
BetaNews Staff

AOL said Thursday that it would offer 30 movies to users of its AOL Video portal at no cost as a holiday gift. The titles, which would include recent releases like Spiderman 2 and holiday favorites like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation normally sell for $9.99 to $19.99 USD. Users would be limited to one movie download, and would have 24 hours beginning at 6:00am ET on December 2 to download it.

The movies would be delivered in Windows Media format, and require a Windows XP computer running Internet Explorer and Windows Media 10 in order to view them. Once downloaded, the user would be able to view the file offline, as well as on one other PC and two Windows Media-compatible portable devices.
http://www.betanews.com/article/AOL_...c_2/1164926509





Goodbye Razr, Hello Linux-Based Motofone

Motorola is shipping the first model in its Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones set to replace the ubiquitous Razr. The Motofone F3, available today in India, is an extremely low-end phone featuring an "electronic paper" display, breakthrough battery life, and usability features for the illiterate.

Motorola announced the Motofone back in July, as the first model in a new Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones. At the time, it positioned Scpl as a replacement for the Razr in the U.S. and European markets. Thus, the Razr line, which includes the Razr, Krazr, and RazrMaxx, is expected to be the last series of Motorola phones based on the company's aging, proprietary "P2K" OS.

To date, Motorola does not appear to have registered the Motofone or any other Scpl models with the FCC, a necessary precursor to U.S. distribution. However, BetaNews quotes Motorola officials as saying that the Motofone could sell for as little as $50 when it does eventually reach the U.S. -- "even without carrier subsidies."

Low end phone

The Motofone is targeted squarely at one of the fastest-growing sectors of the mobile phone market -- the low end. It aims to be simple and intuitive to use, even for those who have never used a computer or a phone before, and who may not even know how to read, according to Motorola.

Interestingly, with many mobile phone markets reaching saturation and relying on replacement business, low-end phones today represent "the major driver behind future subscriber and handset market growth," according to ABI. In a recent report, the research firm noted that Nokia and Motorola -- number one and two in the phone market -- have gained marketshare by dealing with mobile phone market segmentation better than smaller vendors.

The Motofone eschews fancy smartphone features such as video and MP3 playback, instead focusing on the basics -- making and receiving telephone calls. It does also include a text messaging client, and of course, the capability to download ringtones.

Due to its simplicity, the Motofone will offer "extended battery life," Motorola says. Some reports from around the Internet put the expected battery life at 400 hours (over two weeks) of standby, and 450 minutes of continuous talk time -- presumably figures for stationary use. Other reports suggest that the Motofone uses a very small, inexpensive battery that yeilds about 8 hours of talk time.

Additionally, MIT Technology Review says Motorola is developing a bicycle-powered dynamo that will be capable of giving the Motofone a full charge in two hours of leisurely riding.

E-paper display

In place of the power-hungry color TFT LCDs found in nearly all mobile phones today, the Motofone sports a monochromatic "electrophoretic" display (EPD) dubbed "ClearVision." Sometimes referred to as "electronic paper displays," EPDs feature sunlight readability comparable to newsprint, yet require no power to hold an image, once set.

According to BetaNews, the Motofone's ClearVision EPD is sourced from E-Ink, which offers a Linux-based EPD development kit (pictured at right). An E-Ink EPD display was previously used in a Linux-based ebook reader from iRex.

Motorola calls the Motofone's interface "innovative," in part thanks to its ability to deliver voice prompts in local languages. The prompts guide the user in navigating menus, placing calls, and sending text messages, the company says.

The Motofone's interface also features graphical icons that "visually demonstrate the menu features," along with battery life and network status. Previously, Motorola officials said the Motofone's interface would resemble the Linux/Java based "Chameleon" interface used in the Rokr E2.

As with Motorola's previous Linux-based interfaces, Chameleon is based on Trolltech's Qtopia Core (formerly "Qt/Embedded") UI framework and middleware.

Additional touted Motofone features include:

• Stylish thin design
• Durable housing for optimal performance despite dust and sun
• High-contrast screen using new ClearVision display
• Large font size for easy readability
• High-volume for call clarity in loud environments
• Automatic notification of current prepaid balance
• Embedded polyphonic ringtones in eight voices

A few additional details about the Motofone are available in a BetaNews story, here.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5567800205.html





The French Say Au Revoir to Microsoft Software
David Garrett

Currently, a number of French ministries and government bureaus run Linux, but only on servers. France's Senate and National Assembly will be the first to use Linux on workstations, although neither one has announced which flavor of Linux it plans to use instead of Microsoft's software next year.

The French parliament has said au revoir to Microsoft. Starting in June of next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, a free open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office software.

For day-to-day documents, French members of parliament and their staff will use OpenOffice.org, currently in version 2.0.4 and designed to compete directly with Microsoft's Office System.

With versions available in languages from Arabic to Welsh, OpenOffice.org includes several modules to compete with Microsoft Office: Writer, a word processor; Calc, a spreadsheet program; Impress, a presentation package; and Draw, a software package for designing graphics. OpenOffice.org also includes Base, a database tool that competes with Microsoft's Access.

Why the change? The French parliament, composed of an upper chamber (le Senat, or Senate) and a lower chamber (l'Assemblee Nationale, or National Assembly), believes it can save money using open-source software, despite the near-term costs of switching from Microsoft systems and retraining all employees.

But that is a matter of some debate.

Open Debate

"The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed," according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. "There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy the operating system."

Currently, a number of French ministries and government bureaus run Linux, but only on servers. The Senate and National Assembly will be the first to use Linux on workstations, although neither one has announced which flavor of Linux it plans to use. According to Swenson, that could make all the difference.

"If you buy your software from a Linux vendor like Red Hat, you obviously have to pay for licenses, support, and maintenance," he said, adding that finding and recruiting Linux experts to run enterprise I.T. systems can sometimes be harder than finding Microsoft specialists.

"The net net," said Swenson, is that "the average company or organization can probably save some money by switching to Linux, but deploying software from an established Linux vendor certainly isn't free."

Microsoft Worry?

Microsoft software runs the vast majority of U.S. computers, including laptops, desktops, and servers, at all levels of government, but in the U.S. House, members can use the software they like. "Microsoft is probably the most common," said Salley Collins, press secretary for the Committee on House Administration. "But that having been said, it's up to every individual office and committee to choose their own software."

Still, resistance to Microsoft is growing in small but devoted groups of open-source activists. Among the best-known is Peter Quinn, former CTO of Massachusetts, who resigned his position after his vocal support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) drew massive resistance and at times vocal critique.

Another notable is CPTech, The Consumer Project on Technology, an organization founded by consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader to examine the role of intellectual property and knowledge production in the tech world. CPTech's director, James Love, has called for the widespread adoption of ODF.

Should Microsoft worry? The Redmond giant is far from losing its grip on the world's desktops, and when CEO Steve Ballmer debuts the new versions of Office, Windows, and Exchange this week at an event in New York, Microsoft will trigger yet another upgrade cycle that will continue to boost its bottom line, if history is any guide.

But recent moves by Microsoft -- including a wide-ranging and widely debated deal with Novell, makers of SuSE Linux -- show that even Ballmer and Co. is keeping a close eye on open source.
http://www.newsfactor.com/news/The-F...d=13000CYN8S0K





In Depth

Birmingham City Council Claims Open-Source Success
Matthew Broersma

Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.

The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.

With Birmingham's trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact "significantly increase" its use of open-source software, Evans said. The trial also had other positive results, he claimed, such as demonstrating the ease with which Firefox and OpenOffice.org can be substituted for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

The trial was carried out with the government-backed Open Source Academy (OSA), and planned to install Linux on 330 desktops in the council's libraries service, split between staff PCs and public access terminals, in an effort to build up practical experience that could be drawn on by other public-sector bodies.

It ran from April 2005 to March 2006, but is still ongoing, with the council refining its Linux desktop image and planning further rollouts next year, according to Evans. "The project did not end when the element of original funding ended, because it is part of the Library Service strategy," he told Techworld. "This project is still very much ongoing, and now that a stable image... has been developed, we would expect significant movement forward."

Over-ambitious

He admitted the council's original plans were over-ambitious, with rollouts of Linux-based staff and public PCs originally scheduled during the one-year trial period. In reality, ongoing testing of the desktop configuration means no Linux desktops have yet been installed. Instead, 96 public desktops and 134 staff desktops are running open source applications such as the OpenOffice.org office suite and the Firefox browser.

The council does plan to begin migrating those desktops to its Suse Professional 9.3-based desktop OS, however, a plan that should go into action in the near future, according to Evans. He said that far from scrapping the Linux initiative, as has occurred in some other high-profile cases such as the London borough of Newham, Birmingham is planning to "significantly increase" the number of desktops involved with the project.

Evans' description of the project is a sharp contrast to the findings described in a case study authored by iMpower Consulting at the formal conclusion of the trial in March, which is available from the OSA's website [pdf]. The case study found that the council had failed to make a business case for its Linux desktops, largely because the half-a-million-pound cost of designing and implementing the system cost more than the estimated cost for a Windows XP installation.

The difference is largely down to high "team costs", including setting up the project, technical definition and design, development and testing and training, all of which amounted to roughly £100,000 more than the estimated team costs for a Windows installation. The total cost of the trial was £534,710, compared to an estimated £429,960 for Windows XP.

"The project showed that there are considerable costs incurred in decision-making, because of the huge range of open source options available," said iMpower in the case study. "The extra resources involved in decision making and project management mean that the cost of this first-time open source implementation for BCC was significantly higher than for a comparable proprietary upgrade, despite the minimal licence costs for open source software."

Frustrations

The case study also detailed the many frustrations involved in approaching an unfamiliar desktop technology, including the discovery that key applications wouldn't run on Linux and usability problems with the original Gnome interface. At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE. The new interface was up and running within a week.

But evaluating the project solely on what occurred during the original trial period is absurd, according to Evans. "There is no doubt that start-up costs for this project would be high due to the level of requirement, the level of Linux expertise within BCC and the complex requirements of the library service for the public desktop," he said. "The positives centre on future costs."

Birmingham's requirements involve "much more than purely tweaking a standard desktop image", according to Evans, including the need for particular security features, authenticated processes and the supply of specialised management information for performance monitoring requirements.

For instance, existing Windows 3.1 public terminals used a program called Deepfreeze that rebooted the system at the end of each session, something that had to be re-engineered for Linux. Another problem arose with the handling of removable media, which often wasn't recognised or caused errors on the desktop.

Staff also found that the OS was storing information about the contents of public users' removable media, and for privacy purposes had to develop a script to delete this information, which caused further delays in developing the final image.

Porting problems

Linux simply wasn't able to meet certain requirements, such as the ability to run Galaxy, the library management system. The council couldn't afford to pay Galaxy's developers to port it to Linux, and running it in emulation would have added yet another layer of complexity, so many staff PCs were simply migrated to Windows XP with OpenOffice and Firefox.

All this planning and configuration added to Birmingham's start-up costs, and meanwhile, the fact that Birmingham qualifies for Windows discounts further lowered the comparative cost of a Windows installation.

The council gets a steep discount on Windows licences through a broader Education SELECT licence arrangement, paying £58 for a Windows XP licence compared to roughly £100 for OEMs. "Accounting for corporate instead of Education SELECT licences would have added nearly £50,000 to a Windows upgrade project," iMpower found.

Despite this, however, the council feels that further down the line the investment in open source will pay off - for instance, Linux-based systems can be upgraded incrementally, avoiding large one-off license payments as would be the case with a Windows upgrade. Any number of further desktops can be added to the project without adding extra licence costs.

Vendor lock-in

Graham Taylor of Open Forum Europe (OFE) said one of the key concerns emerging out of the trial is the effect of vendor lock-in, with particular key applications dictating the choice of operating system. "For me this was the major issue emerging," Taylor said. "Our estimate is that up to 90 percent of UK public-sector organisations have this as their current position, and can no longer freely choose next steps in procurement."

OFE and OSA have developed a certification scheme called Certified Open, designed to encourage applications to certify on open source platforms, which will launch in the new year. While attempting to design and implement a Linux desktop system that could be used by staff and the general public with limited technical knowledge turned out to be an onerous and frustrating chore, by contrast, many of the open source applications themselves ran smoothly and went over well with users.

OpenOffice, for one, met little or no resistance with most users, many of whom said they didn't notice they'd been using a different application. (Power users did face some problems.) The public had no trouble using Firefox on public terminals and some said they preferred the open-source desktop to Windows. "It appears that OpenOffice provides a satisfactory equivalent to Microsoft products for those using basic or intermediate functionality," iMpower found.

Future impact

The trial's findings will be used by the OSA to give other public-sector bodies background when they consider using open source. The OSA has backed other, more unambiguously successful open source projects, such as Bristol's implementation of StarOffice, which saved it hundreds of thousands of pounds in one-off licence costs.

The UK has less than average usage of open source compared with other EU countries, according to a report by the University of Maastricht, with 32.1 percent of all UK local government users on open source compared to the 78.7 percent European average.

That lack of experience adds to the difficulty of public sector bodies getting involved with open source, iMpower found. One high-profile open source failure was the London borough of Newham's decision to scrap an open source trial in favour of upgrading to Windows XP in 2004. That came following Microsoft's offer to provide free consultancy to the council and a subsequent deal struck with Newham Council that remains undisclosed but which is widely assumed to offer a huge discount on Windows licences. Newham Council will be appearing alongside Microsoft today at the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

In October 2003, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) announced they would fund IBM to run nine proof-of-concept open source trials designed to mesure the cost-benefits of open source over proprietary software such as Windows. Participants were to include the OeE, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Powys CC, Newham and Ofwat, with Newham dropping out. None of the trials have led to further rollouts.
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...fm?newsid=7459





Internet Archive Helps Secure Exemption To The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Brewster

Thanks to the hard work of two great law school students of Peter Jaszi of American University, Jieun Kim and Doug Agopsowicz, the Internet Archive and other libraries may continue to preserve software and video game titles without fear of going to jail. This is a happy moment, but on the other hand this exception is so limited it leaves the overall draconian nature of the DMCA in effect. A total of more than $50,000 of pro-bono lawyer time has been spent to just affect this exemption and its continuation. We hope that Congress, and other governments, will pass more balanced copyright laws to allow at least libraries, archives, research and scholarship to flourish without the current dark clouds of litigation.

More formally, Internet Archive has successfully advocated for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). The DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological measures employed by or on behalf of copyright owners to protect their works (“access controls”). Specifically, 17 U.S.C. §1201(a)(1)(A) provides, in part, that “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” In order to ensure that the public will have continued ability to engage in noninfringing uses of copyrighted works, such as fair use, subparagraph (B) limits this prohibition. It provides that the prohibition against circumvention “shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding three-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title” as determined in a rulemaking proceeding.

On November 27, 2006, the Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, announced six classes of works which will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (the DMCA) through October 27, 2009. One of these six classes includes:

“computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.”

The group primarily responsible for requesting this second exemption is the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Long before the enactment of the DMCA, many works distributed in digital formats on physical media (such as floppy diskettes) were designed so that the original diskette must be inserted into the appropriate drive in the computer in order to enable access to the work (“original only” access controls). When the Internet Archive migrates the content of these works to digital archival systems, often times the “original only” access controls must be circumvented to verify the integrity of the reproduction. Such “original-only” technological measures qualify as access controls even though the primary purpose may be to prevent copying. Thus, by circumventing the “original-only” access controls to verify the integrity of reproductions, the Internet Archive could potentially face liability under the DMCA for its archival work. However, as a result of receiving this exemption, the Internet Archive may continue to circumvent these access control measures for preservation purposes.

This exemption marks the second successful DMCA exemption proposed by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive first received an exemption similar to the just-granted exemption back in 2003, thanks to pro-bono help of Alex Macgillivray, then of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. As a result of receiving this exemption, the Internet Archive can continue its important archival work of computer programs and video games for at least the next three years, free from liability under the DMCA.

To read the full recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, please visit: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/1...mmendation.pdf
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097





Awareness Of Mobile Music Options Strong Among Americans

Ipsos: Seventy Percent Of American Mobile Phone Owners Are Aware Of Full Song Mobile Downloading - But Only One-In-Twenty Have Yet Done So

Recent Findings From The Ongoing TEMPO Digital Music Tracking Study Reveal Mobile Music Consumption Poised For Growth
Press Release

Amid continued growth in portable MP3 player ownership and steady sales of PC-based individual song downloads, recently launched mobile music services offered by many of the major wireless carriers have given American music consumers yet another acquisition option to consider. Recent research released by global market research organization Ipsos in the quarterly digital music tracking program TEMPO reveal that while the mobile music category is still in its infancy, Americans are experimenting with this method of music acquisition in increasing numbers.

Recent findings include:

• Four percent of American mobile phone owners aged 12 and older have downloaded full digital music songs over-the-air in the past 30 days, doubling proportions seen in 2005.
• Males are twice as likely as females to have ever downloaded full songs (6% versus 3%). Teens are the most likely to have ever done so (11%), with younger adults 18 to 34 being the next most likely (8% among 18 to 24 year olds and 7% among those 25 to 34).
• Perhaps reflecting untapped opportunity associated with over-the-air music downloading, seventy-one percent of American mobile phone owners are aware of mobile/wireless phones that would allow them to download and play entire songs rather than just ringtones.
• 14% of American Mobile Phone Owners report that they have a mobile phone with full-song download and playback capability.
• When drilling down among mobile phone owners who have also downloaded digital music to their computers, the number of people with mobile music phones rises to one-third, and the number who have ever downloaded full songs more than doubles - to 10%.
• On average, these over-the-Air (OTA) mobile music downloaders have approximately six tracks stored on their mobile phones, which is similar to the number of ringtones stored.
• Among those with mobile phones, 27% have downloaded ringtones and 9% have done so in the past 30 days, returning to levels experienced in early 2005 after declines in recent quarters. Five percent have downloaded ringbacks – 3% in the past 30 days. This is a slight increase over recent quarters.
• When considering overall spending on mobile music, including ringtones, full songs and ringbacks, the average mobile music downloader spent roughly $7.00 in the past month. Younger over-the-Air (OTA) mobile music downloaders are likely to have spent more than older downloaders.

“In recent months we have witnessed the high profile launch of many mobile music services, and these findings suggest that Americans are indeed aware of these new services and have also begun to experiment with them - particularly teens and young adults ,” says Matt Kleinschmit, Vice President for Ipsos Insight and author of the TEMPO study. “This is encouraging as these groups have traditionally shied away from fee-based digital music behaviors, and thus mobile acquisition may represent a key opportunity for bringing these music enthusiasts back into the realm of the legitimate digital music marketplace.”

Digital Video Downloading Also Emerging As Over-The-Air Content Option

The growing popularity of digital video consumption; particularly that of user-supplied video clips and music videos has lead not only to a new PC-based digital market, but to a number of new over-the-air developments as well. In addition to current video download services offered by the major wireless carriers, pending deals could potentially link mobile phone handsets with video recording and playback capabilities directly to the popular YouTube video clip community - allowing users to download video clips and fully-licensed music videos directly to their mobile phones as well as upload content they may have recorded as well. Similar to mobile music, recent TEMPO research shows that mobile phone-based video downloading is still an emerging activity for many Americans as well:

• Three percent of American mobile phone owners have ever downloaded music videos to their mobile phone, and 2% have ever downloaded short video clips.
• Eighteen to 24 year olds are the most likely to have downloaded music videos (9%) and video clips (6%), with approximately twice as many doing so as teens and considerably more than those Americans ages 25 and older. Males are slightly more likely than females to have ever downloaded digital video content to a mobile phone.

‘While mobile video services are still in their infancy, similar to mobile music this category is in many respects also poised for strong growth”, continued Kleinschmit. “In both cases the key components of the consumer experience are impulse consumption and instant gratification. With music, over-the-air downloading is yet another digital innovation that will work to counter-balance losses created by shifts in consumer purchasing due to the ability to acquire music ‘song-by-song’ rather than via a traditional album purchase. With video, the possibilities for on-the-go access to important or entertaining content and emerging user-generated recordings are just emerging and truly intriguing. The promising common element to both is that they provide vast new opportunities for monetizing impulsive consumption across a wide range of multimedia content via an established wireless carrier billing relationship.”
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3286





Aerosmith’s Perry: 'Who Knows, This Might Be It'

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry seem to be unstoppable.
Wade Tatangelo

Aerosmith appears unstoppable these days. Singer Steven Tyler’s throat surgery, bassist Tom Hamilton’s bout with throat cancer, guitarist Joe Perry whacked in the head by a 2,000 pound camera boom — nothing seems capable of derailing “America’s Greatest Rock Band” from its current “Route of All Evil” tour with Motley Crue.

Aerosmith’s latest near fatal blow occurred Nov. 4 at the MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas. Three songs into the performance the band dug into its classic “Back in the Saddle” when a camera boom struck Perry in the head and face. He finished the 90-minute show but sustained a concussion and severe bruising to his face.

“I was so (ticked) off — really, really (ticked) off by the time show was over,” confessed Perry when he called from a tour stop in Arizona. “I was a mess by the next day and felt like (expletive).”

Perry said he didn’t remember finishing the show but is glad he did — surely the 15,000 in attendance were pleased, as well. Aerosmith’s “Route of All Evil” tour is earning the legendary rock band its strongest reviews in years, thanks to inspired performances that have favored 1970s rockers like “Toys in the Attic” over more recent ballads such as “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.” One can only conclude that recent health issues have prompted the musicians to take each show a little more seriously.

“That’s exactly it,” Perry said. “That feeling of wondering when you’re gonna play again is what does it. I gotta think there’s a sense of immediacy that all this stuff brings. When I play these cities I can’t help but think: Who knows, this might be it.”
The 56-year-old guitarist added: “It’s like that old saying, if you wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans. Be humble and play the show, that’s all I can do. If I had my head tilted a few more inches the other way I couldn’t have finished that show — or maybe ever played again. And then look at Tom (Hamilton), who’s never missed a show, and then something happens out of his control. Things like that really make you feel you gotta just live for the day.”

Hamilton is recovering from throat cancer and has been temporarily replaced by David Hull. However, Hamilton did find the strength to join the band in Boston last month to perform “Sweet Emotion.”

“That was pretty incredible,” Perry said. “Talking about it, I also saw him a couple weeks ago ... It was great he came out and played.”

The band had hoped to have completed a new record by now but Tyler’s and Hamilton’s health issues prevented that from happening. Perry said we should expect the album out by next summer.

What might we find on it?

“There will be the rock stuff that has that familiar sound and a couple of ballads,” Perry said.
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2...2889645166.txt





Rock of Ages
Jeff Leeds

AT 52, Martha Stinson is not quite sure where to turn when it comes to new music. The local Tower Records in Nashville, where Mrs. Stinson is an owner of a general contracting company, is going out of business, and she never did figure out how to load music onto the digital-music player she bought a couple of years ago.

But she may soon receive an overture from a source not known for its musical savvy: AARP. She is the kind of consumer that the association is targeting with a sweeping marketing campaign that it hopes will entice millions of new members, as the first kids weaned on rock ’n’ roll turn gray.

And if Mrs. Stinson is any indication, the group faces an uphill battle. She has repeatedly thrown out AARP membership solicitations, after all. “It’s going to be tough,” to market to those like her, she said. “Our generation has always been a little revolutionary. We feel like we’re in middle age. Were out bike riding, running businesses. Our kids are fully grown, and we’re kind of footloose and fancy free.”

Older consumers (along with children) represent one of the few reliable markets in the music business these days, and AARP, the organization for older Americans, is keen to capitalize on that. On Tuesday the group announced that for the first time it will sponsor a national concert tour, by Tony Bennett. And that’s just a start. Other sponsorships will follow, and from those, AARP hopes, many new members. With plans in the works for an alliance with a major retail chain, a Web-based music recommendation service with Pandora and even a music blog, AARP is looking to graduate from advocate of the shuffleboard set to the ranks of cultural concierge.

“I hope that we make this thing so relevant and so cool,” said Tena Clark, a music consultant helping to devise the group’s marketing strategy. “I would hope that one day in the future that my 20-year-old daughter would want to borrow my AARP card to get into a concert just like she tries to borrow her sister’s I.D.”

Consumers like Ms. Stinson may not be the only skeptics however. For musicians, a deal with AARP is a different matter than a deal with a hip coffee house or a fashion retailer. No matter how hard the group may try to change its image — even with the likes of Paul McCartney and Susan Sarandon on the cover of its magazine — some people still associate it with the Saturday-night-bingo set. And many musicians may want to keep their distance, even if it means sacrificing enormous sales.

“The problem is going to be getting the artists to allow, next to their name, those four feared initials,” said Jonny Podell, the longtime talent agent who books appearances for artists including the Allman Brothers Band, Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel. “I’m the agent for half a dozen acts they’re going to want,” Mr. Podell said, and “short of saying, ‘In addition to your normal fee we’re giving you $1 million in cash,’ I don’t think they’d have one taker.” For the artists, he said, “It’s about not admitting they’re old.” For his part Mr. Podell, who is 60, said he has been receiving AARP entreaties for years, and each time “I drop it like a hot potato.”

Jan Reisen, who along with her partner Peter Kooiker runs the Web site aginghipsters.com, said she plans to join AARP at some point to take advantage of financial benefits like discounts on insurance, rental cars and hotels. But as for recommending albums, “If I want to know about cool music, I’ll ask my 22-year-old.”

Whether AARP succeeds in its new venture, it’s on to something significant. Like Madison Avenue it is responding to the marketing challenge posed by the huge but fickle post-war generation, which for the last 60 years has driven cultural trends from hula hoops to the S.U.V. Consumers over 50 used to make marketers’ eyes glaze over. The assumption was that older buyers’ spending habits had solidified and their earning power had peaked. No longer.

Now they control too much disposable income — and live too long — to be ignored. And nowhere is the shift in attitudes more pronounced than in the beleaguered pop music business, which desperately needs their money (who do you think is buying all those $750 Barbra Streisand tickets?) and shares their aversion to illicit music downloads.

The graying of the music market crept up on America. Even during the ascent of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys in the late 1990s, when teen sensations were getting all the attention, consumers 45 and older were the industry’s biggest market, according to survey data compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America. The gap has only widened since then. Last year fans 45 and older accounted for 25.5 percent of sales, while older teenagers (a group more prone to music piracy) represented less than 12 percent. So it’s little wonder that Rod Stewart’s raspy remakes of pop standards emerged as a franchise, or that Bob Dylan in September captured the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for the first time in 30 years.

The trick is that conventional marketing techniques don’t always work with this group (if they work with anyone anymore). Older listeners don’t have much interest in traditional commercial radio, which targets children and young adults, as do TV channels like VH1 and MTV. And they don’t spend much time in traditional record stores.

So labels, publicists and marketers have had to learn new tricks to reach them. Older acts show up not on MTV’s “TRL” (Total Request Live) but on morning shows like “Today,” and hawk their wares in infomercials and TV mail-order ads. Instead of seeking Top 40 radio airplay, they look to National Public Radio and satellite radio. And to entice more casual consumers, artists now regularly guarantee exclusive recordings to mass retailers like Target or high-end chains that cater to grown-ups.

While Starbucks is the most prominent example, other chains are finding their own niche. James Taylor struck platinum with a CD that was initially sold only in Hallmark stores. Nordstrom has introduced music to its offerings, starting with a previously out-of-print Marvin Gaye release and an exclusive CD from the jazz-tinged singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum.

But perhaps the most surprising results have been online, where the over-50 set accounted for almost 24 percent of the industry’s Internet sales, according to NPD Group, a market-research company.

While these consumers didn’t grow up with the Internet, they have grown comfortable with using it, at least to order CDs if not download music in digital form. All of that helps account for why Amazon.com’s recent Top 10 included Mr. Bennett’s hit “Duets: An American Classic” CD, the new collaboration from J. J. Cale and Eric Clapton, and holiday albums from James Taylor and Bette Midler, while over at iTunes, the best sellers were rap hits from the Game, Akon and the pop-punk band Plus-44.

Overall, marketers say, older consumers need to be made comfortable. So House of Blues, the concert promoter, found that it could boost ticket sales for older artists by offering pre-show dinners or wine tastings. Sometimes they added seating in clubs that had required fans to stand.

AARP is heeding such lessons by developing the machinery of modern tastemaking. That means bulking up its Web site with music offerings, licensing the Pandora online radio and recommendation service, and negotiating for shelf space at a major retail chain, which would carry exclusive versions of certain CDs with discounts to AARP members. And of course it will advertise at Mr. Bennett’s concerts and perhaps sign up new members there too.

Thanks in part to Target and Starbucks, his “Duets” album has racked up the biggest sales of his career (almost 650,000 copies in its first seven weeks). Mr. Bennett’s son and manager, Danny Bennett, said the album is succeeding because it appeals not to older buyers specifically, but to a wide swatch of the audience. And that multi-generational appeal, the younger Mr. Bennett said, is what makes his father a perfect ally for AARP. “It’s not a matter of ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’ It’s ‘Let’s stay healthy so we can rock.’ Tony’s the poster child for AARP. He’s 80 years old. He’s young at heart.”

AARP seems intent on a more generation-specific approach, putting its stamp on albums individually chosen for older consumers.

As for the wary artists, in an era when record labels are cutting back on marketing expenses, AARP, with about 37 million members, could be a great, rich friend to have. The message is not lost on the labels. Jay Krugman, senior vice president for marketing at Columbia Records (which released Mr. Bennett’s CD) calls the group “like the golden chalice.”

Elton John performed at the association’s “Life @50+” convention in Anaheim, Calif., last month; officials said they have booked Rod Stewart and Earth, Wind & Fire for next year. James Taylor played two years ago, and the group’s magazine has named him as one of the hottest people over 50. (He was listed under the “babelicious baldies” category.)

His manager, Gary Borman, acknowledges that for artists who still compete for radio airplay and television exposure, “their reputation could be somewhat tainted” by an AARP affiliation. “On the other hand, for many, many of these artists, they’re no longer playing that radio and record game and they just want to serve their fans and keep them coming back.”

“Our generation,” he concluded, “as much as we were once intuitive discoverers of music, we have lost that intuition. And now we need to be spoon fed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/ar...html?ref=music





Market for Hipsters-in-Training
Tammy La Gorce

CASEY BONHAM LETO, age 5 months, wasn’t to blame. Neither were his parents. Right down to his rock ’n’ roll middle name — a tribute to Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham — everything had been done to bestow him with rock-kid credibility at the earliest possible age: On the floor of the puff-cheeked baby’s living room in Jersey City were toy guitars and a set of Metallica nesting dolls. On his powder-blue onesie pajamas, in gothic script, were the words “My crib rocks.”

Yet when his father recently unwrapped a new CD of ’80s British alternative rock reimagined expressly for babies, Casey was indifferent. As “Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of the Cure” played on the stereo, he kicked fitfully in his bouncy seat. He appeared not to recognize the wordless glockenspiel-and-vibraphone rendition of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Within seconds he spit up.

His parents, though, liked what they heard.

“This is hilarious,” said his mother, Pam Leto, a music publicist who works with bands like My Morning Jacket and Eagles of Death Metal.

“It’s actually really soothing,” said her husband, Dave Leto, the tattooed drummer for the indie rock band Rye Coalition.

It was the kind of reaction — hook the parents, never mind the kid — that Lisa Roth was looking for when she founded Baby Rock, the Los Angeles label behind the kiddie Cure album and lullaby tributes to Metallica, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, Tool and Coldplay released this year.

Almost the reaction, anyway.

“I’d love for the parents to say, ‘Wow, this is really funny,’ and for the baby to fall asleep,” said Ms. Roth, 48. “It would also be great if it was like Rock 101 between parent and baby. A steppingstone.”

To be a parent in 2006 — especially a coastal, well-heeled, contemporary-minded one — is to be blasted by possibilities for nurturing impeccable musical taste in one’s offspring. The commercial successes, like Disney’s “Baby Einstein” series of albums, have been widely noted on the Billboard charts and in Wal-Mart shopping carts. But they overshadow a hipper niche of kid music that is encouraging a curious form of parental connoisseurship, where “High Fidelity” meets high chairs.

That this ballooning genre is meant as much for the parents as the children, and probably more, is readily acknowledged by some of those producing and buying it.

“Parents are looking at music as a gift you give your children, as something you discover with them,” said Kevin Salem, a rock record producer in Woodstock, N.Y. “Sharing it is a way of making sure music stays in good hands.”

With his wife, Kate Hyman, Mr. Salem formed Little Monster Records in part to guarantee that their 4-year-old daughter, Emily, is exposed to what her parents consider to be good music, like the label’s “All Together Now,” a Beatles tribute featuring Steve Conte of the New York Dolls, the Bangles and others that is being sold exclusively through Barnes & Noble. Its placement in time for the holidays is so far paying off: “All Together Now” landed at No. 84 on Barnes & Noble’s list of top sellers the day of its release.

“Sesame Street” can probably be credited with (or blamed for) helping to create the modern idea of kids’ music as a socially loaded part of a parent’s developmental tool kit. Pop science too. “Baby Einstein,” begun in 1997, prompted new parents to engage infants musically in the name of healthy brain building; based largely on word of mouth, sales figures reached the multimillions by 2001, when Disney bought the company. Fueling the trend are mass-media tie-ins like this year’s “Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film ‘Curious George’ ” (Brushfire/Universal), the Jack Johnson project that made its debut at the top of the Billboard album chart.

According to executives with a rash of new indie labels and children’s music blogs like the Lovely Mrs. Davis (lovelydavis.blogspot.com), this kind of music really took off in 2002, when Dan Zanes, formerly of the roots-rock band the Del Fuegos, reimagined what worthwhile children’s music could sound like. His CD “Rocket Ship Beach” (Festival Five), recorded in his Brooklyn basement with friends like Suzanne Vega, sneaked up on parents with likable, sharable songs and a homespun sensibility. Mr. Zanes clearly struck the right chord, and has created a kiddie-entertainment empire that includes videos, concerts and even a partnership with Starbucks for this year’s “Catch That Train!” (Festival Five).

Mr. Zanes has a lot of company these days. Ralph Covert, of the grown-up band Bad Examples and the family-friendly Ralph’s World, has built a cottage industry to rival that of Mr. Zanes. Other artists who have dipped into kiddie rock include the country-punk singer Jason Ringenberg, the all-girl band Luscious Jackson and members of the Mekons, who tried on alter egos in the band Wee Hairy Beasties, whose album “Animal Crackers” (Bloodshot Records) came out in October.

It is doubtful that they will all equal the success of Mr. Zanes, whose grass-roots Internet marketing and local parental support have helped “Catch That Train!” sell 125,000 copies. But their market sense isn’t unfounded.

Christopher Noxon, author of “Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up” (Crown), identifies an emerging demographic of 30-plus, forever-young-minded Lucky Charms eaters aiming to reset the boundaries of adulthood. He says it’s little wonder their children are being turned into rock fans, at least in their parents’ eyes.

“Their parents encourage it,” Mr. Noxon said. “They think it’s funny and that it sets them apart. Plus, if you listen to that music now, like I do way too often, you realize it’s kids’ music: three chords dressed up with all this distortion.”

Such parents can take credit for the success of this summer’s Kidzapalooza, the two-year-old arm of the Chicago-based rock festival Lollapalooza, which lured a crowd of 160,000, up from 2,000 in 2005. The attractions included a “rock ’n’ roll petting zoo,” where children could get behind a professional drum kit while parents rocked out on guitar or bass, and a hip-hop workshop where children still in strollers burned rap CDs with professional disc jockeys. Among the performers were Patti Smith and Perry Farrell, the former frontman of Jane’s Addiction and the founder of Lollapalooza.

“People in their 30s and 40s aren’t really grown up, and they don’t want to grow up,” said David Agnew, a vice president of the Buena Vista Music Group and the force behind this year’s “Devo 2.0,” which repurposed old Devo songs for 4- to 10-year-olds and their parents. (Next year Mr. Agnew and the Disney Sound label plan to introduce the Po-Go’s, a kiddie tribute to the girl band the Go-Go’s.)

“Because parents can now listen to 30 seconds of every recording on earth at iTunes, they get turned on to more music,” he added.

That helps explain why parents — including the 3,000 who monitor the poll of children’s music at the Lovely Mrs. Davis site each week — expect something like an intergenerational custom fit from the music they buy for their offspring. Little Monster’s Ms. Hyman, a flop-haired, youngish 49-year-old, said she recognized a need “to be catered to musically” among fellow parents.

“I wouldn’t feed my daughter McDonald’s every day,” she said. “Why would I want her listening to something of that same standard?”

But taken too far, such catering can raise complicated issues. For one thing, some acts that appeal to both parents and children, like Jack Black’s Tenacious D, do so more slyly and can present a special challenge. “That’s an incredibly good record,” Mr. Noxon said, but it “spews” profanity on nearly every track.

Hip earnestness is another problem. Many new discs lack the irony-free goofiness that made classics out of the “Sesame Street” song “Rubber Duckie” and Raffi’s “Bananaphone.”

The producers of hipster baby discs seem aware that they may be a mere toddler step away from heavy-handedness. “We’re undergoing a change in what it means to be a traditional parent,” said Mr. Salem. “But I read somewhere that the fastest way to turn your kid into a Republican is to dress him up in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. That’s probably true.”

That last aphorism actually belongs to Mr. Noxon, and its message about musical backfires is probably not lost on the generation of parents who insisted in the 1980s, despite the fierce protestations of their children, that hip-hop was a fad.

Hip-hop, of course, has evolved far beyond the expectations of even the most broad-minded parents of the ’80s. And then some. This month Mathew Knowles, father of Beyoncé, released the CD “Kid’s Rap Radio” (Music World Entertainment), featuring 8-year-olds behind the mike rapping deraunchified hits like Busta Rhymes’s “Touch It.” “Because it’s been such an important part of their lives, parents have a need for their kids to experience hip-hop,” said Mr. Knowles, who explained that he was inspired by his 2-year-old grandson, Jewlz.

Field observations confirm that the new breed of coolness-bestowing parent takes its music seriously. At an all-ages “Baby Loves Jazz” concert at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan in September, the air was thick with grown-up longing. Parents swayed, clapped and whistled, while their 2-year-olds fidgeted with the salt shakers on the tables.

“You could just see that parents are dying to get that awe back, the childlike awe you lose when you start forming opinions about what’s cool,” said John Medeski, of Medeski Martin and Wood, who played keyboards alongside the soul singer Sharon Jones at the show, and whose trio recently recorded a Little Monster disc for release in 2007.

“There’s been a void,” Mr. Medeski added, referring to parents. “The music becomes like medicine.”

If so, the market may be headed for an overdose. The sales gap between the kind of CDs many hip-minded parents consider pablum — the consistently chart-topping “Kidz Bop” series especially — and the indie releases they champion has never been wider. Unless the music gets television exposure or is associated with a brand like Disney, selling more than 20,000 copies is rare.

The wave of music that prompted Amy Davis of Bowling Green, Ohio, to create the Lovely Mrs. Davis site last year has become barely navigable. She and her two sons, ages 6 and 19 months, are drowning in it, she said.

“Next year is going to be really telling,” she said. “We’ll see whether this kind of music takes off and people other than hip urban parents or Net-savvy parents discover it, or if the tide turns and people find something else to get interested in.”

Count Tor Hyams, Kidzapalooza’s 37-year-old co-founder and the father of an infant and a 7-year-old, among the true believers.

“People want to live vicariously through their kids, to rediscover music with them,” he said. “They want to be more than a cog in the cultural wheel, and I salute them for it. If I ever stop being a kid with my kids, you can shoot me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/ar...ic/26lago.html





String Theory

The harpist Joanna Newsom’s daring new album.
Sasha Frere-Jones

The cover of Joanna Newsom’s new album, “Ys,” is an oil painting by the California artist Benjamin Vierling. Newsom is depicted with plaited blond hair, wearing a billowing blouse and a garland of flowers. She is seated at a window on a thronelike chair, holding a sickle in her right hand and a tiny gilt-framed painting of a moth in her left. A blackbird perches on the windowsill, a cherry in its beak; beyond lie valleys and hills. A press release issued by Newsom’s record label, Drag City, says that Vierling “did the cover painting old-master style, with layers of egg-tempera and glazes. Strictly 16th-century processes, just like the recording of the album.”

The Renaissance references may be a joke, but a careful, almost precious husbandry of the past is characteristic of Newsom’s work. Newsom, who is twenty-four, is a classically trained harpist, and “Ys”—pronounced “eess”; it’s the name of an island in Breton mythology—is a series of complex, through-composed songs that have more in common with Kurt Weill’s long-form ballads than with contemporary pop music. Yet Newsom tends to perform in rock clubs, not concert halls, and many of her fans—including the novelist Dave Eggers, who praised her “bare and unflinching” music in Spin—are devotees of independent rock. Moreover, the songs on “Ys” feature lush, intricate orchestral arrangements by the pop composer Van Dyke Parks. (Parks, who was a child actor, worked on Rufus Wainwright’s 1998 début record and on “Smile,” the legendary album by the Beach Boys, which was begun in 1967 but not completed until 2004.)

Newsom is sometimes lumped with a group of acoustic musicians called “freak folk” or “free folk.” They include the bands Tower Recordings and Feathers and the warbling singer and songwriter Devendra Banhart, with whom Newsom shares a fearlessness and a deceptively childlike air. In essence, however, folk describes simple songs that are universally accessible and performed on cheap instruments, if any. (Rap easily qualifies as folk music.) Newsom uses antique words that many English speakers won’t recognize, and plays an expensive and heavy instrument that you couldn’t bring on a camping trip, and some of her recent songs are almost as long as American sitcoms (average length: twenty-two minutes, without commercials).

In 2002, Will Oldham, an eccentric singer and songwriter known as Bonnie Prince Billy, heard recordings that Newsom had made herself, and brought her on tour. In 2003, Drag City released Newsom’s first full-length album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender”: twelve songs about “funny things,” each one peppered with words like “grammerie” and “poetaster.” It is odd and wonderful music, as cheerful and melodically sure-footed as it is affected and fey. Newsom plays the harp with the utilitarian clarity of a piano player in a band, vigorously plucking bass notes with her left hand while exploring chords in the upper register with her right. (Mercifully, she avoids the cascading glissandi that in movies signal “childhood memory” or “medication taking hold.”) Her voice is an acquired taste: a wobbly mezzo-soprano that leaps into falsetto and breaks in a woody squeak. At first, she sounded to me like Lucille Ball reciting Edmund Spenser. She brought to mind a college student I knew who wore suspenders to show that she would not countenance this debased modern world.

I was won over by the strong arc of Newsom’s melodies and the bristling energy of her language. Her lyrics sound as though they were meant to be read, not sung; that she sings them so nimbly does not necessarily mean that anyone else could. She has a passionate appreciation for the musicality of words and the glow of a well-ordered line: “And the gathering floozies afford to be choosy and all sneezing darkly in the dimming divide” (from “Peach, Plum, Pear”). The animals that populate her songs—canaries, tadpoles, worms, turkeys, toads, larks, and a variety of shellfish—are pretty funny. “Even mollusks have weddings,” she sings on “Inflammatory Writ.”

Most musicians like to begin an album with a song that is rousing and short. “Emily,” which opens “Ys,” is twelve minutes long and slow, and it changes time signatures at least a dozen times. The lyrics roughly concern Newsom’s sister Emily, an astrophysicist, who sings background vocals. (Their distant cousin Gavin Newsom is the mayor of San Francisco.) Several minutes into the song, Newsom delivers a brief tutorial on celestial terminology: “The meteorite is the source of light, and the meteor’s just what we see; and the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.” Maybe I’m partial to pedantry, but I find this charming. The words before and after this verse give the song emotional heft. Newsom sings, “I sat by your side, by the water. You taught me the names of the stars overhead,” and, after a line or two about the Pleiades, she continues, “I promised you I’d set them to verse, so I’d always remember.” The lesson about meteors, then, is a shared intimacy, a metaphor for the relationship between sisters—an insight you might miss on the first (or tenth) listen. “Ys” is built from many such subtle moments, and sometimes Parks’s music—which ranges from small, darting passages to dense, movie-soundtrack swells—threatens to overwhelm the songs.

Earlier this month, at a sold-out show at New York’s Webster Hall, Newsom performed all of “Ys,” along with songs from “The Milk-Eyed Mender” and a Scottish folk ballad. A small, trim woman with waist-length brown hair, she wore a white scoop-neck shirt, tight black jeans, and, yes, suspenders. She took the stage with just five musicians—an implausibly small number, given Parks’s elaborate arrangements. But Newsom had reworked Parks’s music, creating simpler parts for bouzouki, banjo, accordion, and drums. The week in review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. This allowed her voice to become more prominent—it has more grain and tone than the recordings suggest. It was clear that the imagery on “Ys” changes quickly and often; the compositions have a narrative momentum that justifies their length.

Without seeing Newsom’s hands and feet, it is difficult to understand how hard she must work to pluck the strings and press the pedals while reciting by heart a small book’s worth of verse. I haven’t seen a performance of such sustained intensity all year. If Newsom recalls another musician, it is the singer and pianist Tori Amos, who shares her technical virtuosity, and who also seems to be immersed in a private world. The audience was silent during each song, waiting for the last note to fade away before erupting into extremely loud and loving applause. The crowd behaved as if it were at a classical concert, but it responded to Newsom as if she were a rock star.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/mus...1204crmu_music





String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design
Andrew C. Revkin

“I think best in foam,” Douglas Martin said as he sorted through a heap of pink violin-shaped slabs in the kitchen-cum-workshop of his snug colonial house in southern Maine.

Each piece of foam was a template for an experimental instrument he had built or was preparing to build, but none used the traditional spruce and maple favored through most of the hallowed 500-year history of the violin.

Mr. Martin, 63, whose day job is designing sleek rowing shells that slice through ocean surf, is consumed in spare moments by a similarly unorthodox pursuit: abandoning age-old norms of acoustic instrument design as he chases his conception of the ideal violin sound.

A dining table was strewn with rough-hewn violins built of balsa wood and graphite fibers, some with the standard instrument’s familiar curves and narrow waist, but others boxy and ribbed, as if they had been built inside out.

In art school in the 1960s, a professor once tossed one of Mr. Martin’s sketches on the floor and scuffed it up, urging him to abandon caution, and he clearly absorbed that notion.

When a violinist tried an instrument at a recent workshop and one of its blunt shoulders got in the way of his wrist, Mr. Martin summarily sawed off the corner and sealed the opening with a scrap.

He might be mistaken for an eccentric dabbler, except that he is far from alone. From Australia to Germany to Maui, there is something of an explosion under way in the use of science and new materials to test the limits of instrument making.

And the traditional violin-making and violin-playing world is taking note.

Last year, Mr. Martin passed around one prototype, Balsa 4, at an annual workshop on violin design at Oberlin College by the Violin Society of America, a group of builders. When it was played and run through an array of tests, the instrument’s responsiveness and punch startled the gathering, several participants said.

Joseph Curtin, a director of the workshop and a builder from Ann Arbor, Mich., who received a 2005 MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for his violin designs, wrote about Mr. Martin’s work in the society’s newsletter, saying “the traditional violin became obsolete in early July of 2005.”

In an interview, Mr. Curtin said that was only partly a playful exaggeration. It will be a long time before balsa and graphite become the materials of choice, he said. But he added that Mr. Martin and other experimenters were legitimately challenging longstanding notions of what makes a great acoustic instrument, and whether past masters’ work represents a sonic pinnacle or merely the best that could be achieved with traditional materials.

Some of the new designs are mass-produced, with companies (many founded by former aerospace engineers) turning out hundreds of synthetic weatherproof guitars and instruments in the fiddle family.

Others, like Mr. Martin’s, are one-off prototypes. (He has sold only three.)

In almost every case, a central goal, particularly in the resonating top or soundboard most responsible for an instrument’s voice, is a mix of stiffness and lightness.

This combination increases an instrument’s ability to turn the energy in a vibrated string into waves of appealing sound.

That is where unconventional materials come into play. Layered graphite fibers and carved balsa are very stiff but far less dense than the traditional choice of spruce.

“Wood reached the limits of its potential in the first half of the 18th century,” Martin Schleske, a leading violin maker from Munich, asserted in a recent lecture in Germany. “I have no doubt that if Stradivari were alive today with the same force of innovation, he would have already discovered the fascinating acoustic properties of graphite fibers and would have ushered us into a new golden age of violin making.”

This month, Ingolf Turban, a touring concert violinist, compared Mr. Schleske’s latest violin, which has a top made of a mix of spruce and graphite, with a 1721 Stradivarius by recording passages from Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D Major with each. He told Mr. Schleske he preferred the new one.

“I have never been playing any violin with such a singing E string,” Mr. Turban said in a testimonial. “It is no longer like playing violin but like singing.”

Some instrument makers and researchers are using science to deconstruct the dozens of kinds of vibrations and waves that interplay in a violin or guitar to create their distinctive sounds.

Working with Mr. Curtin and several other violin makers, George Bissinger, a physicist at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., is using medical-imaging gear, laser scanners, arrays of microphones and computers to measure and model how the parts of a violin react once energy is introduced by a bow, fingertip, pick or, in the laboratory, the repeated taps of a tiny hammer.

Depending on many interrelated variables, from the force exerted on the strings by the player to the stiffness, density and shape of an instrument’s parts, a layered field of sound emanates, sometimes containing dozens of distinctive overtones and harmonics.

Some sounds disperse in the air evenly in all directions, while others — especially high notes on a violin — push outward in a particular direction, funneled by the shape of the instrument.

Particularly important, Dr. Bissinger said, is determining which factors translate the side-to-side sawing of a bow on a string into vertical motions of the violin top. “Up and down is what matters,” he said.

Other vibrations travel in the body — at different speeds reflecting the orientation of wood grain — setting up all manner of ripples and bouncing waves and more ripples.

In instruments built entirely of meshed graphite fibers, the vibrations move uniformly, offering both challenges and opportunities to instrument makers.

Another important influence, particularly on low violin notes, is the movement of air in and out of the f-holes, Dr. Bissinger said. If the dimensions are right, the air sloshes forward and back like disturbed water in a bathtub (or air in an organ’s pipes) at rates that increase the instrument’s volume.

The materials in the body matter because they determine how much of the energy imparted to an instrument moves into the surrounding air as sound and how much is dissipated as heat within the matrix of molecules that make up the instrument’s body.

That damping effect is not all bad, guitar and violin makers say, and may be one of the characteristics that give a mellow tone to older instruments in contrast to the almost metallic brightness sometimes heard in new ones.

In September, Dr. Bissinger ran three days of tests on two violins built by Stradivari and one by Guarneri del Gesù — worth a combined $14 million or so — as well as instruments by Mr. Curtin and Sam Zygmuntowicz, a violin maker from Brooklyn.

By comparing the response of the legendary instruments to the new ones, and to data from a batch of bad student violins, Dr. Bissinger said, he is trying to develop an anatomical guide of sorts, revealing which features determine the qualities of which parts of a violin’s sound, from the lowest notes to the highest trills.

“I like the bad ones as much as the good,” he said. “How can you know beautiful if you don’t know ugly?”

Dr. Bissinger said that the experiments with balsa and carbon were clearly helping expand understanding of the boundaries of violin sound, but that they have “a tall hill to climb” to compete in the marketplace with traditional instruments, which have already shown their ability to last 300 years and hold up to the pounding of a Paganini solo.

At the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, another physicist, Joe Wolfe, has assembled a team that is testing whether an instrument’s age or the amount it has been played change its sound.

In interviews, instrument players and dealers expressed a conviction that vintage does matter, and several theories have been proposed for how aging changes the structure of wood in ways that affect sound.

But Dr. Wolfe and Ra Inta, another member of the Australian team, said that rigorous experimental evidence was scant, with a couple of recent studies, for example, offering conflicting findings.

They have a long-term study under way on two identical violins built by a local maker, Harry Vatiliotis, from the same 80-year-old slabs of spruce and maple. One is sitting nearly untouched in a museum and the other is in constant use in the hands of a concert violinist. But it will be many years before enough time has passed to determine if all those vibrations from continual bowing have altered the wood in substantive ways, the researchers said.

Such scientific analysis has produced some trepidation among traditionalists, Mr. Curtin said. “There’s a kind of a nervousness that the mystery will go out of it, the bubble will be pricked and it’ll all just be ordinary. It’ll be technology. There’s almost a cultural sense that the violin is the last repository of mystery. The fact that we don’t understand the violin adds to its allure.”

Mr. Curtin, who is also experimenting with balsa but is laminating a thin veneer of tougher spruce on top, said such fears were unfounded. “To me, understanding always makes things more interesting, not less. That’s been true for biology. I think it’s the same with acoustics.”

The work on new materials is driven variously by simple passion and curiosity, as in Mr. Martin’s case, and commerce, as companies hunt for ways to make better mass-produced instruments. (Student violins are notoriously hard to play, discouraging learners just when they should be inspired.)

Another goal propelling some builders toward synthetic materials is the prospect of creating fine-sounding instruments that can endure abuse and the vagaries of weather that can destroy an old wood model.

John A. Decker Jr., a physicist and aeronautical engineer, created his weatherproof and resonant RainSong line of all-graphite guitars after moving to Maui in 1981 to manage an Air Force observatory. He found that the extreme Hawaiian humidity and heat ravaged his classical instruments.

The top guitars, with nary a fleck of wood in sight, sell for more than $2,000 and have showed up in the hands of performers including two longtime rockers, Steve Miller and Daryl Hall. Dr. Decker said the most responsive possible guitar soundboard would be one with infinite stiffness and zero mass, so that the energy from the slightest tug of a finger on a string would translate most efficiently into moving air instead of diffusing as heat in the structure of the instrument.

Graphite fibers allow the top to be pared to the minimum mass and eliminate the need for supporting braces required in conventional wooden guitars, he said.

He said there were always trade-offs, and aesthetics is surely one. “Graphite is not a very romantic material,” said Dr. Decker, who builds wooden classical guitars in spare hours. “It doesn’t have grain and swirl and flame and all the things that koa and quilted mahogany do. On the other hand, you know what the thing is going to sound like, which from the musician’s point of view is better.”

For Mr. Martin, the experimentation is ultimately driven by his search for a sound: a soaring, enveloping sound he recalls vividly from childhood summer nights around a campfire in Cohasset, Mass., when a friend’s dad pulled out an old Italian violin.

“The sound of that instrument just burned in my brain,” Mr. Martin said.

As of last weekend, he was still in pursuit, having just started on Balsa 15, with no end in sight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/sc...d08&ei=5087%0A





Talk Softly but Carry a Big Woofer
Eric A. Taub

PLUMMETING prices for giant-size flat panel TVs are encouraging more people to dip into their pockets (or their credit line) to create a movie-theater experience at home.

But oddly, when it comes to replicating the pulse-pounding surround sound available in the cinema, out of sight truly seems to be out of mind.

“It is a great irony that people are willing to spend $3,000 on a flat-panel TV, but not very much on audio,” said David Carnoy, executive editor at CNet.com, a Web site that reviews consumer electronics.

While sound may remain an afterthought for home-theater neophytes, a room full of speakers can transform high-concept TV shows and action films from a flat experience into a three-dimensional one.

“Try watching a movie with the sound off,” said Jack Buser, worldwide technology evangelist for Dolby, creators of the Dolby Digital surround sound standard. “Sound is half the experience. It conveys motion and the power of the entertainment.”

Several years ago, complete systems that included speakers, a receiver and usually a DVD player, collectively known as a home theater in a box, were often underpowered entry-level products. But as with HDTVs, audio prices have dropped sharply, while quality has gone up.

Consumers can buy separate components, mixing and matching based on price and performance. But unless you are an audiophile, there is little reason to do so, especially if the sound system is used primarily to play the soundtracks from TV shows and movies.

Decent systems with sufficient power to fill most rooms are now available for a few hundred dollars. For example, this past holiday weekend, Best Buy was advertising Panasonic’s SC-HT740 unit, a home theater in a box that includes a five-disc DVD changer, for $300. At Circuit City, the Onkyo HTS790 system, XM satellite-ready and iPod compatible, was $400.

At the high end, Sony’s new STR-DA5200ES stand-alone receiver ($1,500) incorporates a new video chip to convert all video sources to 1080p, the highest HD resolution — a process known as upconverting. To avoid squinting at tiny graphics on the receiver itself, the unit transforms the TV into a giant control panel for easy adjustments.

The receiver could be paired with Panasonic’s new $3,000 SB-TP1000 surround speaker system. Recognizing that a speaker cannot be placed on top of a thin plasma TV, Panasonic utilizes two side speakers that give the illusion of sound emanating from the center.

Unlike TV images, sounds from loudspeakers are still created the way they have always been. What has changed is the cost of a high-quality system, the technologies used to mimic a natural sound environment, and the ease at setting up a surround system.

2.1 vs. 5.1 vs. 7.1

The standard surround-sound system found on most DVDs and HDTV broadcasts transmits through six speakers and is called Dolby Digital 5.1. The 5 refers to five full-spectrum speakers: one placed at the front, usually on top of the TV, for speech; two placed on either side of the TV; and two others placed to the left and right behind the viewer. The “.1” refers to the limited-range subwoofer, used to create the deep rumbling sound effects of explosives, airplanes and low-frequency music.

When rear speakers cannot be easily placed behind the viewer, a 2.1 system — with a left and a right speaker and a subwoofer — can be used instead, creating “virtual” rear channels that give the illusion that sound is emanating from behind.

While virtual rear speakers are never as good as the real thing, Philips believes that its $600 HTS6600 system, available in March, comes close.

Its Sonowave technology uses “steerable” rather than bounced sound beams to produce what it says is a more realistic virtual sound effect, giving a “very immersive experience,” according to Cesar Martinez, a Philips home entertainment vice president. The system includes a DVD player that will upconvert a standard-definition DVD to look close to HDTV in picture quality.

The more speakers surrounding the viewer, the more realistic the sense of direction of the sound. The new high-definition DVD formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, both incorporate 7.1 channel sound. To experience it, you will need two additional speakers directly behind the listener, and a new audio receiver capable of decoding the 7.1 track. Several are beginning to appear on the market, from companies including Denon, Yamaha and Pioneer. (If your couch is directly against the wall, then forget about 7.1.)

Dolby Digital vs. DTS

While Dolby Digital is the specified audio surround sound standard for DVDs, many movies also offer soundtracks recorded in the DTS format.

Most surround receivers can decode both formats; the advantage of DTS is that sounds are recorded at a higher bit rate, resulting in “a more real, dynamic, clearer sound,” according to Tom Dixon, a DTS director of strategic marketing.

But whether one can hear the difference between the two is an open question. “It is tough to say,” according to Mr. Dixon. The difference is “fairly subjective.”

Both Dolby and DTS are touting their next-generation technologies available on high-definition DVD players. Known as Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD, both use 7.1 channels of sound to play audio that is recorded using “lossless” compression schemes. The result is sound that is “bit by bit identical to the studio master,” Mr. Dixon said.

New Connections

New home-theater-in-a-box systems with surround sound often feature the 1080i upconversion circuitry that improves the picture quality.

To see the difference, the DVD player must be connected to an HDTV with an HDMI plug, which uses a new cable standard that combines audio and video signals into one wire.

One such system, Sony’s DAV-FX500, available on Amazon.com for $350 after rebate, includes a five-disc DVD changer, six speakers and an HDMI-capable audio receiver.

In addition to HDMI, units like Samsung’s $460 HT-TQ85 include a U.S.B. port, allowing an iPod or other music device to connect directly to the sound system for playback. The Samsung receiver is also XM radio-ready, and upconverts DVDs to 1080i quality.

Making a Choice

The more wattage an amplifier can put out, the better the sound quality at normal listening levels, and the higher the volume can be cranked up without distorting the sound. But not every environment demands the maximum.

“Two hundred watts per channel will not help in a New York City apartment,” said Jeff Goldstein, Sony’s vice president for marketing for home audio and video products. Nor will a booming subwoofer help forge good relations with your downstairs neighbors.

On the other hand, a large great room in a suburban house requires a receiver that can pump out sound at a higher level. Mr. Dixon of DTS recommends that for a typical home, consumers buy a system that produces at least 100 watts per channel. In addition, the subwoofer should receive its power separately, from a wall socket. “This takes some stress off the receiver so it can produce the high frequencies,” he said.

In addition, all speakers should be placed at the same height, which is ideally at ear level.

Once the system is home, speaker volumes can be calibrated by playing the receiver’s built-in test tone. Many models now come with calibration microphones; place the mike where you would normally sit, and the receiver will calibrate itself.

Above all, do not buy audio equipment on looks alone.

“You should absolutely take your favorite CD to a store to try out a system,” said Mark Kauffman, a senior product specialist at Klipsch, a speaker manufacturer. Still, a crowded store may not present the best listening environment — which is why, he said, “it is important to understand the store’s return policy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/te.../30basics.html





Analyst: 70-Inch LCDs 'The Right Size' In 2009

Move out that old armoire and clear off the living room wall—it will soon be time to make room for that new 70-inch LCD television.

With 42-inch flat-panel TVs flying off retailers' shelves this holiday season as prices dip below $1,000, brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note on Tuesday that 70-inch TVs could be the "right size" in 2009.

"We decided to investigate the optimal screen size for high definition viewing," wrote analyst Jeff Evenson in the note. "We conclude that 65 inch to 75 inch is the right size for a 10 foot viewing distance."

Evenson said LCD televisions are free of three barriers that limited the size of traditional TV screens—weight, thickness and cost—meaning large-sized LCDs could become more prevalent in homes.

While a 34-inch bulky tube TV could weigh roughly 200 pounds, Evenson said a 57-inch flat-panel LCD TV weighs only 125 pounds, making it more manageable.

An LCD TV is also not inhibited by a thickness that increases dramatically as the TV gets larger—like it does with a tube TV.

"We believe that a TV's depth creates a barrier to purchase in two ways: it decreases the effect distance viewers sit from the screen and thicker screens can not fit through small doorways and tight turns," he said.

If a tube TV was made as large as the larger LCDs, he said its depth without the shipping box would approach the width of some apartment doors—making them impossible to get inside.

Lastly, he said the cost of larger LCDs should continue to decrease, spurring their popularity.

"Affordability of large screens has and should continue to improve," Evenson wrote. "Our analysis indicates that 70 inch - 80 inch screens could cost around $3,000 in 2010."

With Samsung Corp expected to ramp 70 inch production and AU Optronics expected to ramp up 65 inch production in early 2007, he said TV size growth seems unlikely to slow.

This could be good news for Corning Inc., which manufactures glass substrates used in large flat-screen TVs.

"We believe the long-term valuation of Corning depends largely on demand for LCD substrate glass," he wrote. "We expect that LCD TV adoption will exceed consensus and that increasing screen diagonals ... will compound the substrate demand growth rates."

Bernstein has an "outperform" rating on Corning shares and a $28 price target.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2065122,00.asp





Hollywood and the Vatican See Eye to Eye for a Night
Peter Kiefer

They will almost certainly remain strange bedfellows, Hollywood and the Holy See, but the two had a rare encounter on Sunday when the Vatican was the host of the world premiere of the New Line Cinema film “The Nativity Story,” giving an unprecedented stamp of approval to an American studio production. And though Pope Benedict XVI was conspicuously absent from the event, a clutch of high-ranking cardinals joined the more than 7,000 people who attended.

Held in Paul VI Hall next to St. Peter’s Basilica, the premiere started late, in true Hollywood fashion. The film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke (“Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown”), and cast members were seated directly across from high-ranking church officials like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, who ranks second only to Pope Benedict in the Vatican hierarchy. “I kept trying to look over there to see if they liked it,” Ms. Hardwicke acknowledged after the premiere.

That, of course, was a foregone conclusion, as the pope himself had approved of the film well in advance.

“It is well done,” Cardinal Bertone said, as Reuters reported. “It reproposes this event which changed history with realism but also with a sense of great respect of the mystery of the Nativity.”

“The Nativity Story” is a dramatic recounting of the courtship between Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. It is one of a wave of religious-themed movies due from Hollywood studios, which awakened to the potential of an audience for these films with the success of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in 2004.

Sunday’s event marked the first time the Vatican was the host of the world premiere of a full-length feature film, though last year it helped stage the debut of a television movie about the life of Pope John Paul II, at which Pope Benedict XVI was present. The premiere was also in sharp contrast to the tensions between some Roman Catholic groups and Sony Pictures Entertainment over “The Da Vinci Code,” which was based on a popular novel that challenges church doctrine.

Both “The Nativity Story” and “The Passion” are biblical tales; both were partly shot in Matera in the south of Italy and were similarly budgeted at about $30 million. New Line even borrowed some techniques of Mr. Gibson’s, initiating a similar outreach campaign to some church leaders, who were invited to early screenings of the film and to visit the set.

But unlike “The Passion,” which was rated R for its graphic violence, “The Nativity Story” is rated G and is based on a script, by Mike Rich, that holds to a conventional telling of Jesus’ birth.

“It lacks controversy,” said Rolf Mittweg, New Line’s chief operating officer, in an interview here. “I think with ‘The Passion,’ people wanted to see how bloody and gory this movie was. They wanted to see how far one would go to depict that story. This movie isn’t political and doesn’t make a statement in that regard.”

The film will be released on Friday in the United States and in most other countries. Mr. Mittweg said he expected it to play well both domestically and abroad, especially in strongly Catholic countries like Spain and Italy.

“The cynical view is that controversy could help the film, but we never thought the film could be controversial,” said Toby Emmerich, New Line’s production president. “We never thought ‘The Nativity’ could be as controversial a chapter. Not as if controversy would be the worst thing in the world, either.”

Thanks to the British press, Mr. Emmerich almost got just that. A report in The Times of London last week speculated that the pope’s absence was meant to protest the fact that Keisha Castle-Hughes, the 16-year-old actress who plays the role of Mary in the film, was pregnant by her boyfriend. According to publicists working on the film, Ms. Castle-Hughes did not attend the screening because she is shooting her next movie and would not participate in the worldwide marketing campaign for “The Nativity Story.” The pope, according to the Vatican, was never to attend, and has a more pressing concern, they said: his trip to Turkey this week.

It is doubtful that the Vatican will make a habit of holding premieres, but New Line’s reach for the church’s support is in keeping with Hollywood’s intensifying search for new ways to sell its wares outside of conventional advertising vehicles like newspapers and network television.

“Filmmakers and studios are becoming very entrepreneurial about the way they market their properties, and oftentimes they are going beyond the normal channels and allowing them to become part of a broader conversation,” said Michael Feldman, a communications strategist for the Glover Park Group, which worked on the media campaigns for “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“But people go to the movies to be entertained,” he said, “and if the property is marketed in the context of the issue and doesn’t promote the entertainment value by its very nature, that could hurt it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/movies/28vati.html





Makin a list

10 Films the US Government Would Rather You Not See.

These are 10 films that I believe if watched by the majority of US citizens there would be demands of impeachment, a push to pull out of Iraq and a complete shift in thought or at the very least some questioning of the government.

It’s also amazing to me how few people have seen most of these these films even the “popular” ones.

1) Why We Fight
Genre: Documentary / History
Tagline: It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.
Plot Outline: Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki’s shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/

2) The Fog of War
Genre: Documentary / Biography
Plot Outline: A film about the former US Secretary of Defence and the various difficult lessons he learned about the nature and conduct of modern war.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/

3) The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream
Genre: Documentary
Tagline: We’re literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up
Plot Summary: Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space…
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/

4) America: From Freedom to Fascism
Genre: Documentary
Plot Outline: A documentary that explores the connection between income tax collection and the erosion of civil liberties in America.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0772153/
Watch/Download at Google Video

5) Loose Change
Genre: Documentary (more)
Plot Outline: An exploration of the viewpoint that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned by the United States government.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831315/
Watch/Download at Google Video

6) 1984
Genre: Drama / Romance / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Tagline: George Orwell’s Terrifying Vision Comes To The Screen.
Plot Outline: George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087803/

7) V for Vendetta
Genre: Action / Drama / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Tagline: Remember, remember the 5th of November.
Plot Outline: A shadowy freedom fighter known only as “V” uses terrorist tactics to fight against his totalitarian society. Upon rescuing a girl from the secret police, he also finds his best chance at having an ally.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/

8) An An Inconvenient Truth
Genre: Documentary (more)
Tagline: A Global Warning (more)
Plot Outline: A documentary on Al Gore’s campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116

9) Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
Genre: Documentary
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815181/

10) The Corporation
Genre: Documentary / History
Plot Outline: Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

Download/Watch at Google Video
Share and Enjoy

http://skeletonproject.com/2006/11/2...ple-not-watch/





Ugly Americans, Young, Attractive and Tormented
Manohla Dargis

If stupidity were a crime, the nitwits in the cheap horror flick “Turistas” would be doing time in Attica. A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick: a group of hotties stumble into the lair of a madman. Carnage ensues. Here the hapless, clueless and braless are the English-speaking tourists of the film’s title who, having gone abroad to party hearty, end up being batted about by a wacky cat with very sharp claws and a seriously sick sense of social justice.

Although his heart clearly isn’t in the more unsavory aspects of the job, namely slicing and dicing, the director, John Stockwell, does make a faint, early effort to infuse the proceedings with a smidgen of humor. The opening scene of a Brazilian bus careering wildly on a twisty rural road while the sweaty, swarthy bus driver rummages inside his nostrils (and wrestles a shift stick adorned with a pentagram), does manage to squeeze some dubious humor from the image of the freaked-out white tourist. The only problem is that in this case those fears turn out to be entirely justified, since it isn’t long before the bus is sliding down a mountain, taking that initial flicker of amused reflexivity with it.

What follows is the old splatter and scream as the interchangeable pretty girls and hard-body boys are lined up like ducks to be shot down or, in the case of one turista, gutted while still conscious. (The actors playing the ducks are similarly interchangeable; you can find their names in the accompanying credit box.) This operation, which isn’t any more disgusting than the medical surgeries that crop up on television — though it’s considerably less well-lighted — is as laughable as it is repulsive. That’s especially true when the evil doctor, Zamora (Miguel Lunardi, eyeballs popping), places one victim’s internal organs next to her fetching naked breast, a gesture that neatly encapsulates the sexual panic and misogyny that characterize the stupidest examples of extreme horror.

Apologists for vivisectionist entertainment trot out all sorts of rationales to justify the spectacle of human torture instead of just admitting that such spectacles turn them on. In this respect the horror audience, in its enthusiasm for go-go gore, is far more honest than those who hide behind the fig leaf of radical politics. Like “Hostel” (a critique of American arrogance, don’tcha know), which seems the most direct inspiration for “Turistas,” this film involves first-world tourists who are violently punished for traveling into a third-world (or third-world-like) country. “Turistas” plays this political angle more openly than does “Hostel,” since Zamora defends his blood lust by donating “gringo” organs to his country’s poor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Jason and Freddy donate regularly to their local blood banks.

Advancements in special effects have made it easier than ever to make fictional disembowelments and the like look super-realistic. And on a fundamental level, the charnel-house aesthetics of films like “Hostel,” “Cabin Fever” and the remake of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” are not any different from the graphic passages in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Flags of Our Fathers.” The goals of these war movies are certainly far loftier than those of a run-of-the-mill horror divertissement, but in the end they all traffic — in part or in whole — in convincing images of extreme human suffering. Some films do it for art; others for amusement. For better and at times for worse, though, the cinema of death now appears inescapable.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...es/01turi.html





Comedy on the Hot Seat
Allen Salkin

COMEDY,” Steve Martin famously said, “is not pretty.”

That was never more in evidence than on Sunset Boulevard last week, where Paul Rodriguez, a comedian, was loudly debating a homeless pedestrian outside the Laugh Factory about a certain racial epithet.

“Calling it ‘the “n” word,’ that’s childish, Romper Room,” said Mr. Rodriguez, bristling at the radio hosts, politicians and newly chastened comedians who have reduced the noxious epithet to its first letter when discussing it.

“N-this, n-that, I don’t care if you use it or not,” shouted the passer-by, an African-American dressed in a hooded sweatshirt who declined to give his name but said he was 36 years old. “This is about you and me getting the same bank loan as him,” he said, while pointing at a white bystander. “I want justice. I don’t want to be sleeping on the street.”

It was more than a week after the infamous Nov. 17 meltdown by Michael Richards during what was supposed to be a comedy act at the Laugh Factory. Mr. Richards, the former “Seinfeld” co-star, repeatedly shouted the epithet at a black heckler, and his tirade was caught on a video cellphone and quickly disseminated across the Internet.

The impromptu and passionate street debate in front of the club last week seemed suddenly normal in Los Angeles, where most anywhere that comedians have gathered, a kind of town hall discussion has spontaneously broken out. From spotlighted stages to sidewalks, the comedy world is debating Mr. Richards’s rant, even as the episode moves slowly to the periphery of the public’s attention.

Judy Carter, a teacher of stand-up comics, said she was discussing plans for the annual California Comedy Conference in Palm Springs this weekend with another comedian, Alex House, when they asked themselves how they might have responded in Mr. Richards’s position. “We did some soul-searching on it,” Ms. Carter said. “That’s what comics are doing now. Would I do that? Have I done that? If I were pushed into a corner would I say something so horrible?”

The answer was no, Ms. Carter said, and she was planning a workshop at the comedy conference called “Don’t Pull a Michael Richards.”

“You never hit a heckler harder than they hit you,” she said, explaining a basic rule of comedy.

For many comics, the meaning of Mr. Richards’s outburst is about more than bad comedy technique. Jamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, and Paul Mooney, a black comedian who used to write for Richard Pryor, have joined politicians and activists including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, in calling for an end to the use of what they call “the ‘n’ word” by everyone, including blacks.

Mr. Mooney, who has used the word for years in his act, said Mr. Richards shocked him into realizing it had an ugly power that was no longer worth wielding.

“I am a recovering ‘n’-word-aholic,” he said on Nov. 27 during a news conference at the Laugh Factory. Mr. Masada, concerned that his 28-year-old club would be branded as racist for merely being the site of Mr. Richards’s tirade, announced a ban on the word. Henceforth any comic who uses it on stage will be barred for four to six months and possibly fined.

But the Laugh Factory’s ban is not sitting well with all comics, including the groundbreaking comedian Dick Gregory, who was set to perform with Mr. Mooney last night) at the Lincoln Theater in Washington.

“Calling it ‘the “n” word’ is an insult,” said Mr. Gregory, whose 1964 memoir was titled “Nigger.” “It should be just as much an insult to Jews if they started changing concentration camp to ‘the “c” word’ and swastika to ‘the “s” word.’ You just destroyed history.”

He will not be joining Mr. Mooney’s boycott. “I’m going to walk out on stage,” Mr. Gregory, 75, said, “and hand my book to a white woman in the front and say, ‘Here, madam, take this “Nigger” to bed with you.’ ”

Mr. Gregory and many others are asking why stop at just one word, if purifying the comedy discourse is the goal. Why stop at protecting one aggrieved group?

In the lobby of the Laugh Factory after the news conference, Jason Stuart, a gay comedian, buttonholed Najee Ali, a civil rights activist, and said, “Twenty-five percent of every black comic’s act is gay-bashing and none of you have done anything about that.”

Earlier, Mr. Ali had shouldered his way to the microphones to tell the cameras that what Mr. Richards said showed that many white people harbor deep racism. In the lobby, he said he opposes the ban, and he responded to Mr. Stuart. “It wasn’t so much what he said,” Mr. Ali said. “We’ve heard the word used by many comedians. It was the rage, the hatred, the anger.”

Calls to stamp out the epithet were the latest chapter in a contemporary debate over the word since its has become common, as a quasi-endearment, in the very public language of hip-hop. But in attempting to censor a word, activists seemed to be slightly shifting the conversation from whether Mr. Richards is a racist, to whether a given epithet is racist.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” said that when he heard Mr. Mooney say he wanted to “destroy” the epithet, a few questions sprung to mind. “Does that mean he wants the owners of record stores to throw out his comedy albums or Richard Pryor’s ‘That Nigger’s Crazy’? ” Professor Kennedy said. “What does he want done with my book? Does he want to cover them up?”

In Mr. Richards’s crack-up, on a Friday night, he shouted at a member of the audience, “Shut up! Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down,” and he went on to unleash a stream of murderous vitriol. In an apology on “The Late Show With David Letterman” the following Monday, Mr. Richards tried to explain himself in part by saying: “I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free association.”

Mr. Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, confirmed that Mr. Richards’s act does indeed involve a lot of free association, adding, “He gets rage from all the things he talks about.”

Mr. Richards, who appeared as Cosmo Kramer on “Seinfeld” for its nine seasons through 1998, had only recently ventured back into standup, Mr. Masada said. He did not want his name on the Laugh Factory marquee and for a time asked to be introduced as “Zosa.” “He didn’t want people coming to see Michael Richards or Kramer because he didn’t think his act had been perfected enough,” Mr. Masada said.

At the club on the night before last Monday’s news conference, a mostly African-American audience attended the long-running weekly show Chocolate Sundaes, mainly featuring black comedians. Mr. Richards was much on people’s minds. Pookey Wigington , the executive producer, told the crowd that he and the host, Chris Spencer, had been getting “hundreds and hundreds of e-mails and phone calls,” and what was most important was “how the Laugh Factory handled the situation.”

“Yeah, what about that?” an audience member shouted.

Another person called out, “Why did they let him come back?”

It was a reference to Mr. Richards’s appearance at the club on Nov. 18, the night after his rant but before the video had spread across the Internet. Mr. Wigington said Mr. Richards had told the club he would apologize from the stage, and when he did not he was asked to leave the club.

It was not a humorous way to open a comedy night, but the Chocolate Sundaes crowd seemed satisfied. Every comedian who took the stage tried to spin at least one joke about Mr. Richards.

“Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton don’t do it for me,” said Dannon Green, naming the two black leaders from whom Mr. Richards had sought counsel. “The brother he should have called was Clinton. If he had called Clinton, I would have said ‘O.K., he’s all right.’ ”

That same night, there was a late show at the Improv nearby called “Whiteboy Comedy.” A larger-than-life poster of Mr. Richards was still hanging on the rear wall along with those featuring other comic luminaries like Chris Rock and Ray Romano. None of the comedians onstage made any reference to Mr. Richards.

Four nights later, the Richards poster was gone. After serving as host of an 8 p.m. show, a benefit for a gay and lesbian center, the comedian Sarah Silverman said that she had not made a joke about Mr. Richards because she had not yet thought of a good one.

The whole incident, she said, reminded her of Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade in Malibu earlier this year. In a good way. “When I heard Mel Gibson had said that stuff, I was happy,” Ms. Silverman said. “Jews love real anti-Semitism because it’s something you can point to to show it’s real. It’s not just gas in the air.”

The best advice Ms. Silverman said she had heard for Mr. Richards was a reader comment on ESPN.com. It was suggested that Mr. Richards could redeem himself by going on a comedy stage and saying just two words with gusto: “The Aristocrats!”

That was the title of a documentary about a famously offensive joke that starts in a talent agent’s office, digresses into raunchy improvisation and ends with the punch line “The Aristocrats.” The idea expressed in the film is that no matter how gross the improvisation, everything is excused by a punch line, even a meaningless one.

But Mr. Richards is not seeking rehabilitation through comedy. On Friday he issued a statement through a spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, saying that he would apologize in person to the man he had attacked from the stage, Kyle Doss, at a meeting in the presence of a retired judge. Mr. Rubenstein said it was likely the two sides would discuss financial compensation.

At a news conference later that day in Los Angeles, Mr. Doss, a 26-year-old student, and two other African-Americans who were with him at the Laugh Factory, appeared at the office of their lawyer, Gloria Allred. Ms. Allred said that characterizing her clients as hecklers, as most news accounts have done, is wrong because they were part of a large group celebrating a surprise birthday party, and what first drew Mr. Kramer’s ire was the noise of them ordering drinks.

For some, the most important lesson, one which may show some progress toward racial tolerance, is that it is the man who first hurled the racial insult who appears more damaged this time, not the target of his epithet. Mr. Gregory said his son told him a joke the other day: “What is worse than a white man calling a black man a nigger?” Mr. Gregory said, quoting his son. “Calling a white man Michael Richards.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/fashion/03comedy.html





Google to Abandon Answer Service
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. doesn't have all the answers - a fact underscored by the Internet search leader's decision to abandon a 4-year-old service that hired researchers to field questions on everything from school homework to sports trivia.

The retreat, announced in a notice posted on Google's Web site late Tuesday night, represents a rare victory for rival Yahoo Inc.

It also may signal Google's intention to refocus on its core search engine, a moneymaking machine that generates virtually all its profits. Google executives have recently expressed worries about having too many disjointed products scattered across its Web site.

Despite those distractions, Google still holds a large lead over Yahoo in basic Internet search. Google has parlayed that advantage into more rapid profit growth that has lifted its stock price to new heights while Yahoo shares have slumped badly for most of the year.

But Yahoo appears to have outsmarted Google with a free online answer service that has grown rapidly since its introduction less than a year ago.

Unlike Google's offering, Yahoo's service doesn't charge money. Instead, Yahoo appeals to the vanity of smart people to ferret out the answers to esoteric questions like "What has Alexander Graham Bell invented other than the telephone?"

Google's service required its users to pay a researcher anywhere from $2 to $200 to chase down the answers to minutiae like "How many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline?"

The Mountain View-based company collected a 50-cent commission on each question, with the remainder going to one of the roughly 800 researchers who have responded to questions since Google co-founder Larry Page conceived the service in 2002.

Microsoft Corp. and several specialty Web sites like Keen.com, Answers.com and Answerbag.com also compete against Yahoo and Google in this highly specialized niche of Internet search.

Although it started later, Yahoo's answer service quickly eclipsed Google's. By October, the market share of Yahoo Answers was about 24 times greater than Google's service, estimated Hitwise, a research company that tracks Internet traffic patterns.

Yahoo's users are becoming so adept at answering questions that their responses sometimes even appear on the first results page of Google's own search engine. In its first 11 months, Yahoo's service has accumulated about 160 million answers, according to the Sunnyvale-based company.

Google didn't elaborate on the reasons for dropping its service, which will stop accepting questions later this week. The answers to previously asked questions will remain available.

"Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," software engineers Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher wrote in the closure notice. "We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-21-13-02





We Love Our Internet friends, Really.
Jacqui Cheng

Online friends are just as important to people as their offline friends, according to the results of a recent survey. The sixth-annual report from University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for the Digital Future is part of a six-year study that tracks changes in Internet usage and attitudes in the United States. The survey found that, over a decade after the public was introduced to the web, "we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become," according to the Center for the Digital Future's director, Jeffrey I. Cole.

The survey included 2,000 households in the US and defined an online community as "a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only." Perhaps unsurprisingly (especially to Ars Technica's loyal readers and discussion participants), well over half of those participating in online communities reported doing so at least once a day. 70.4 percent "sometimes or always" interact with other members while logged in.

The report also found that as Internet users increasingly use the web to socialize, they also translate those online social connections to real-life activities. 20.3 percent of those who participate in online communities also participate in offline activities related to the online community at least once a year. Members of The Lounge can certainly attest that, in any given week of the year, it's almost guaranteed that there is an "Arsmeet" happening somewhere around the world. Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents reported being more involved in social activism since they began to participate in online communities, with two thirds of those involved with social causes saying that they are now involved in activities because of the Internet.

What might be a surprise, though, is that all of this online interaction is apparently not detracting from interaction with close friends and family offline. While 37.7 percent of respondents said that the Internet helps them communicate more with family and friends, "almost all" users reported that increased Internet interaction has no effect on the amount of time spent with those people in real life.

Internet users also report that the Internet helps them make new friends, both online and off. Internet users, on average, have just under five contacts online who they consider to be "friends" but have never met in real life, and almost two friends in real life that they originally met online. Those numbers may seem low to those of us who frequent events like Arsmeets on a regular basis, but the report claims that the number of offline friends that originated online has more than doubled since the project began six years ago. Tipping the scales on the high end, I think it's fairly safe to say that well over 80% of all of my real life friends and acquaintances originated from the Internet in some way—that's well over just two people.

Most importantly, the report says that 43 percent of those who participate in online communities feel "as strongly" about their online buddies as those offline. What this shows is that—due to the proliferation of chat rooms, blogs, sites like MySpace, forums, games, virtual worlds, and other communities online—Internet users are reaching out to more people, not less, as technology critics have feared. So, anyone want to go grab a cup of coffee?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8326.html





Missing

CNET Editor James Kim, Family Missing
Leslie Katz

CNET senior editor and Crave blogger James Kim and his family are missing.

The 35-year-old Kim, his 30-year-old wife Kati and daughters Penelope (4 years) and Sabine (7 months) left their home in San Francisco last week on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They were last seen on Saturday, November 25, in Portland, Ore., according to the San Francisco Police Department, which has opened a missing persons' investigation. They were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with the personalized California license plate "DOESF."

Those with information about the Kim family's whereabouts are asked to contact San Francisco police immediately at 415-558-5508 during normal business hours and at 415-553-1071 after-hours. The Pacific Northwest call center for the case can be reached at 1-800-452-7888.

Update: Investigators said Friday that the National Guard, CHP, Oregon State Police and Coast Guard are currently coordinating a land search. As of 1:30 p.m. PST, helicopters were in the air, according to the SFPD, and the weather was said to be clear.
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9666094-1.html?tag=#4





FBI Taps Cell Phone Mic as Eavesdropping Tool
Declan McCullagh

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

While the Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the technique has been discussed in security circles for years.

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. "They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time," he said. "You can do that without having physical access to the phone."

Because modern handsets are miniature computers, downloaded software could modify the usual interface that always displays when a call is in progress. The spyware could then place a call to the FBI and activate the microphone--all without the owner knowing it happened. (The FBI declined to comment on Friday.)

"If a phone has in fact been modified to act as a bug, the only way to counteract that is to either have a bugsweeper follow you around 24-7, which is not practical, or to peel the battery off the phone," Atkinson said. Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell phones, he added.

FBI's physical bugs discovered

The FBI's Joint Organized Crime Task Force, which includes members of the New York police department, had little luck with conventional surveillance of the Genovese family. They did have a confidential source who reported the suspects met at restaurants including Brunello Trattoria in New Rochelle, N.Y., which the FBI then bugged.

But in July 2003, Ardito and his crew discovered bugs in three restaurants, and the FBI quietly removed the rest. Conversations recounted in FBI affidavits show the men were also highly suspicious of being tailed by police and avoided conversations on cell phones whenever possible.

That led the FBI to resort to "roving bugs," first of Ardito's Nextel handset and then of Peluso's. U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones approved them in a series of orders in 2003 and 2004, and said she expected to "be advised of the locations" of the suspects when their conversations were recorded.

Details of how the Nextel bugs worked are sketchy. Court documents, including an affidavit (p1) and (p2) prepared by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kolodner in September 2003, refer to them as a "listening device placed in the cellular telephone." That phrase could refer to software or hardware.

One private investigator interviewed by CNET News.com, Skipp Porteous of Sherlock Investigations in New York, said he believed the FBI planted a physical bug somewhere in the Nextel handset and did not remotely activate the microphone.

"They had to have physical possession of the phone to do it," Porteous said. "There are several ways that they could have gotten physical possession. Then they monitored the bug from fairly near by."

But other experts thought microphone activation is the more likely scenario, mostly because the battery in a tiny bug would not have lasted a year and because court documents say the bug works anywhere "within the United States"--in other words, outside the range of a nearby FBI agent armed with a radio receiver.

In addition, a paranoid Mafioso likely would be suspicious of any ploy to get him to hand over a cell phone so a bug could be planted. And Kolodner's affidavit seeking a court order lists Ardito's phone number, his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and lists Nextel Communications as the service provider, all of which would be unnecessary if a physical bug were being planted.

A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."

For its part, Nextel said through spokesman Travis Sowders: "We're not aware of this investigation, and we weren't asked to participate."

Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible."

A Motorola representative said that "your best source in this case would be the FBI itself." Cingular, T-Mobile, and the CTIA trade association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mobsters: The surveillance vanguard

This isn't the first time the federal government has pushed at the limits of electronic surveillance when investigating reputed mobsters.

In one case involving Nicodemo S. Scarfo, the alleged mastermind of a loan shark operation in New Jersey, the FBI found itself thwarted when Scarfo used Pretty Good Privacy software (PGP) to encode confidential business data.

So with a judge's approval, FBI agents repeatedly snuck into Scarfo's business to plant a keystroke logger and monitor its output.

Like Ardito's lawyers, Scarfo's defense attorneys argued that the then-novel technique was not legal and that the information gleaned through it could not be used. Also like Ardito, Scarfo's lawyers lost when a judge ruled in January 2002 that the evidence was admissible.

This week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that the "roving bugs" were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and alternatives probably wouldn't work.

The FBI's "applications made a sufficient case for electronic surveillance," Kaplan wrote. "They indicated that alternative methods of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance."

Bill Stollhans, president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia, said such a technique would be legally reserved for police armed with court orders, not private investigators.

There is "no law that would allow me as a private investigator to use that type of technique," he said. "That is exclusively for law enforcement. It is not allowable or not legal in the private sector. No client of mine can ask me to overhear telephone or strictly oral conversations."

Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations.

When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored.

Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings.
http://news.com.com/FBI+taps+cell+ph...3-6140191.html





Devices That Tell On You: The Nike+iPod Sport Kit

T. Scott Saponas, Jonathan Lester, Carl Hartung, and Tadayoshi Kohno.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington.

Overview

Key industry players are incorporating wireless radio communications capabilities into many new personal consumer products. For example, the new Nike+iPod Sport Kit from Apple consists of two components -- a sensor and a receiver -- that communicate using a wireless radio protocol. Unfortunately, there can be negative side-effects associated with equipping these gadgets with wireless communications capabilities.

In the case of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, our research shows that the wireless capabilities in this new gadget can negatively impact a consumer's personal privacy and safety. As part of our research, we built a number of surveillance tools that malicious individuals could use to track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners. Our tools can track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners while they our working out, as well as when they are just casually walking around town, a parking lot, or a college campus. The tracked individuals don't even need to have their iPods with them.

Our research also shows that there exist simple cryptographic techniques that the Nike+iPod Sport Kit designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod kit.

Our work underscores the need for a broad public discussion about and further research on the privacy-preserving properties of new wireless personal gadgets.

We stress, however, that there is no evidence that Apple or Nike intended for these devices to be used in any malicious manner. Additionally, neither Apple nor Nike endorsed this study.


FAQ

Q: What is the Nike+iPod kit and how does it work?

A: The Nike+iPod kit consists of a sensor which is placed in the sole of your left Nike+ shoe and a receiver which plugs into the bottom of the iPod Nano. The sensor in your shoe detects when you take steps (while walking or jogging) and transmits this information to the receiver.

When you start a workout session with the iPod, software on the iPod collects the data from the sensor and keeps track of the distance you've walked and the pace at which you're walking at. During a workout the iPod can provide audio feedback about the time, distance, pace, or calories burned.

Once a workout is completed users can sync their iPod's with iTunes and upload their data to the Nike+ website which contains software to track your workouts, challenge other users to competitions, and set personal goals for you to accomplish.

Q: How much does the Nike+iPod kit cost, and is it popular?

A: As for Nov 24, 2006, one can buy the Nike+iPod kit from the Apple online store for $29 (USD). Apple has sold over 450,000 Nike+iPod kits, there are currently 12 versions of the Nike+ shoe, and runners have logged almost 3 million miles on the Nike+ website.

Q: Does the Nike+iPod kit reveal private information about a user?

A: Yes. When you walk or run the Nike+iPod sensor in your shoe will transmit messages using a wireless radio. These messages contain a unique identifier that can be detected from 60 feet away. This information is potentially private because it can reveal where you are, even when you'd prefer for a bad person to not know your location.

Q: Why is it a problem if my Nike+iPod kit sensor transmits a unique identifier when I walk or run?

A: The unique identifier can reveal your presence to nearby receivers. Since the unique identifier doesn't change over time, someone could use the sensor's broadcast messages to track which locations you visit, and when you visit them. A bad person could use this information to compromise your personal privacy and safety. We describe specific example scenarios, like stalking, in our paper.

Q: Would it be hard to track someone?

A: No. It is easy to track someone who has a active Nike+iPod kit sensor in their shoe.

We have built several mechanisms for detecting and tracking Nike+iPod shoe sensors.

Windows XP-based surveillance devices:

We developed a mechanism for attaching a Nike+iPod receiver to a Windows XP laptop via a USB port. When someone wearing an active Nike+iPod sensor walks near one of our laptops, the laptop's attached Nike+iPod receiver will detect the sensor's broadcast messages and will relay information about those messages to the laptop. The laptop will then display the sensor's unique identifier on the screen. The laptop will also use WiFi to upload information about the observed sensor to a back-end database. This latter step allows our Windows XP machines to serve as participating nodes in a larger surveillance system.

Gumstix-based surveillance devices:

We also made a cheap and small Nike+iPod surveillance device from commercially available miniature gumstix computers. Our gumstix surveillance devices also use WiFi to upload real-time surveillance data to a back-end database, thereby allowing the gumstixs to serve as participating nodes in a larger surveillance system.

The gumstix-based surveillance device is small enough to hide in the environment, such as in the bushes near a running trail or under someone's desk, and can detect nearby Nike+iPod sensors up to 60 feet away.

It would also be easy for anyone else to build their own gumstix-based surveillance device, and the total cost for a full, WiFi-enabled gumstix surveillance node is under $250 (USD). The node would be cheaper if one prefers not to use the WiFi capabilities.

Second-generation Intel Mote and Microsoft SPOT Watch:

We also built a Nike+iPod surveillance device using a second-generation Intel Mote (iMote2) and the receiver that comes with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. We also wrote companion software for a Microsoft SPOT Watch.

Not only is the iMote2 another small surveillance device, but, because of the SPOT Watch, our system will allow an adversary to obtain real-time surveillance data on his or her wrist watch.

Using and iPod as a surveillance device:

We also show how to convert a third-generation iPod into a surveillance device. Such iPods are often available on eBay for around $100. Our iPod surveillance device runs iPod Linux and our software, and has an attached Nike+iPod receiver.

GoogleMaps web application:

Recall that our Windows XP- and gumstix-based surveillance devices can upload surveillance information to a back-end server in real-time. To demonstrate what an adversary might do with that data, we created a GoogleMaps-based tracking web application. This web application can overlay surveillance data on a map in real-time, and can also display historical tracking data on the map. Our back-end system can also email and SMS text message tracking information to the adversary.

Q: How much would it cost for someone to implement your surveillance devices?

A: It depends on what that someone would like to do. Our gumstix prototype shows that a bad person could build a full-featured, WiFi-enabled Nike+iPod surveillance device for under $250. Adversaries desiring less functionality could reduce the price of each surveillance device. Adversaries could also significantly reduce the price of each surveillance node by custom building nodes in bulk.

Q: Would it be hard for someone to build their own surveillance system?

A: No, it would be neither hard nor expensive. Any hobbyist, including a technically savvy teenager, could build their own surveillance device, assuming that someone posted detailed instructions and the corresponding software on the Internet (we currently do not plan to release our software). This person would also need to perform a minimal amount of soldering (for our gumstix-based surveillance device, this simply means soldering four wires).

Q: How far away can you detect a Nike+iPod kit sensor?

A: 60 feet.

Q: Can you detect my Nike+iPod sensor when I'm not working out?

A: Yes. As long as wearing an active Nike+iPod kit sensor and are walking or jogging.

Q: Can you detect my Nike+iPod sensor even if I do not have my iPod with me.

A: Yes. As long as wearing an active Nike+iPod kit sensor and are walking or jogging.

Q: Can't I just turn off the sensor when I'm not using it?

A: The sensor has an "on-off" button, but the Nike+iPod Sport Kit online documentation says that "[m]ost Nike+iPod runners and walkers can just drop the sensor in their Nike+ shoes and forget about it," and we believe this to be the common case in practice.

Q: Can't I just remove the sensor when I'm not using it?

A: Yes, the sensor can be removed from your shoe when you do not want to workout. Additionally you can place the sensor under your front shoe laces to make removal easier (or use a third party sensor holder to hold the sensor on your shoe laces).

Q: What can I do to improve my privacy if I want to use the Nike+iPod kit?

A: We strongly suggest turning off your Nike+iPod sensor when you are not actively working out. Unfortunately, this suggestion will only help you when you're not working out. If you want to workout with the Nike+iPod kit, then we are unaware of any way to improve your location privacy during your workout.

Q: Could Apple have designed their system in a more privacy-preserving way?

A: Yes, there are simple cryptographic technique that the Nike+iPod designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. But, as with any technical change, there will be some associated tradeoffs, like sensor battery life, manufacturing costs, and use experience. See Section 6 of the technical report below for more information.

Q: Will you be releasing your software?

A: We currently do not plan to release our software.


Technical Report: PDF.

Video: MOV (Quicktime Movie ~200mb).
http://www.cs.washington.edu/researc...s/privacy.html





Top 10: The Best, Worst... and Craziest Uses of RFID

They've put a chip where?
Gemma Simpson and Jo Best

Children:
Japanese authorities decided to start chipping schoolchildren in one primary school in Osaka a couple of years ago. The kids' clothes and bags were fitted with RFID tags with readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the minors' movements.

Legoland also introduced a similar scheme to stop children going astray by issuing RFID bracelets for the tots.

Pub tables:
Thirsty students can escape the busy bar and still get a pint thanks to RFID tables that deliver orders remotely.

The high-tech bar is fitted with touchscreens so students can get a round in, order a taxi or even chat-up someone at the next table. See snaps of the RFID bar here.

Fulham Football Club:
Fulham FC has started issuing RFID-enabled smartcards to fans to cut queues at the turnstiles and increase safety around the stadium.

Around 20,000 of the smartcards have been issued to mainly season ticket holders and club members and contain data on matches each cardholder has paid for. See shots of the technology around the stadium here.

Air passengers:
It was also suggested by boffins at University College London that air passengers should be RFID-tagged as they mingle in the departure lounge to improve airport security.

silicon.com's audience called the idea, amongst other things, Orwellian, intrusive and detrimental to airport security. Click here to see the Best of Reader Comments on the story.

Tanks:
RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents.

Last year Nato's Operation Urgent Quest exercise tested the potential of a number of combat identity systems under battlefield conditions. See photos of RFID in action here.

Hospital in-patients:
In an effort to trim clinical errors, hospitals in New York and Germany have been tagging their patients. Visitors to the hospitals are given RFID-chipped wristbands to wear which are scanned by medical personnel to bring up their records and make sure the patients are given the correct dosages of drugs.

Blood:
The same clinic which tags its patients is also tagging blood. No vampire-pleasing effort this, rather the Klinikum Saarbruecken is using the tags to make sure the right blood reaches the right patient. Nurses will be able to scan the tags using reader-equipped PDAs or tablet PCs and check that the blood data matches the information held on an RFID-tagged bracelet worn by the patient.

The National Patient Safety Agency in the UK is also considering a similar move.

Suits:
Marks and Spencer has long been associated with being at the forefront of flogging ladies' undies. It's also now at the forefront of item-level tagging, having chipped some of its men's clothes. The retailer has avoided questions of privacy protection by attaching the tag to a label on the suit that can be cut off.

M&S has now extended the trials nationwide.

Passports:
One of the more controversial applications is soon-to-be mandatory use of RFID in passports. The US is leading the way in deployments and the UK isn't far behind.

As well as the obvious privacy fears that surround such rollouts, experts have questioned how secure the passports are with some claiming to have cracked and cloned them already.

Books:
The first item-level rollout in Europe has already taken place in Dutch book store BGN. Each of the books in BGN's Almere store is chipped and a second store, in Maastricht, will soon go the same way, allowing the retailer to track each book from its central warehouse to the shop floor.
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,3...9164446,00.htm





Police Decry Web Site on Informants
Matt Apuzzo

Police and prosecutors are worried that a Web site claiming to identify more than 4,000 informants and undercover agents will cripple investigations and hang targets on witnesses.

The Web site, WhosaRat.com, first caught the attention of authorities after a Massachusetts man put it online and named a few dozen people as turncoats in 2004. Since then, it has grown into a clearinghouse for mug shots, court papers and rumors.

Federal prosecutors say the site was set up to encourage violence, and federal judges around the country were recently warned that witnesses in their courtrooms may be profiled online.

"My concern is making sure cooperators are adequately protected from retaliation," said Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, who alerted other judges in Washington's federal courthouse. He said he learned about the site from a federal judge in Maine.

The Web site is the latest unabashedly public effort to identify witnesses or discourage helping police. "Stop Snitching" T-shirts have been sold in cities around the country and popular hip-hop lyrics disparage or threaten people who help police.

In 2004, NBA star Carmelo Anthony appeared in an underground Baltimore DVD that warned people they could be killed for cooperating with police. Anthony has said he was not aware of the DVD's message.

Such threats hinder criminal investigations, said Ronald Teachman, police chief in New Bedford, Mass., where murder cases have been stymied by witness silence and "Stop Snitching" T-shirts were recently for sale.

"Every shooting we have to treat like homicide. The victim's alive but he's not cooperative," Teachman said. "These kids have the idea that the worst offense they can commit is to cooperate with the police."

Sean Bucci, a former Boston-area disc jockey, set up WhosaRat.com after federal prosecutors charged him with selling marijuana in bulk from his house. Bucci is under house arrest awaiting trial and could not be reached, but a WhosaRat spokesman identifying himself as Anthony Capone said the site is a resource for criminal defendants and does not condone violence.

"If people got hurt or killed, it's kind of on them. They knew the dangers of becoming an informant," Capone said. "We'd feel bad, don't get me wrong, but things happen to people. If they decide to become an informant, with or without the Web site, that's a possibility."

The site offers biographical information about people whom users identify as witnesses or undercover agents. Users can post court documents, comments and pictures.

Some of those listed are well known, such as former Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, who served 10 months in prison before testifying in a public corruption case. But many never made headlines and were identified as having helped investigators in drug cases.

For two years, anyone with an Internet connection could search the site. On Thursday, a day after it was discussed at a courthouse conference in Washington, the site became a subscription-only service. The site has also disabled the ability to post photos of undercover agents, Capone said, because administrators of the Web site do not want officers to be hurt.

Authorities disagree. In documents filed in Bucci's court case last month, federal prosecutors said they have information that Bucci set up the Web site to help intimidate and harm witnesses.

"Such information not only compromises pending or future government investigations, but places informants and undercover agents in potentially grave danger," Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter K. Levitt wrote.

While prosecutors haven't pointed to a case where a witness or officer was harmed because of the Web site, it has been used to shatter an undercover agent's anonymity. After Hawaiian doctor Kachun Yeung was charged with distributing narcotic painkillers this spring, a surveillance picture of an undercover Drug Enforcement Agent was posted on the site.

Federal prosecutors said they traced the posting to the University of Hawaii newspaper's photo department, where the doctor's son was a photo editor. The posting identified the names of three agents and described one as "a known liar and a dirty agent. He is an absolute disgrace to the American justice system."

Prosecutors in Boston have discussed whether WhosaRat is protected as free speech but have not moved to shut it down. In 2004, an Alabama federal judge ruled that a defendant had the right to run a Web site that included witness information in the form of "wanted" posters.

Earlier this month, federal judges from Minnesota and Utah urged their colleagues to be careful about how much information about witnesses is released in public files, noting that they could end up on WhosaRat.

Steve Bunnell, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said the rules of evidence already require authorities to identity witnesses to the people most likely to harm them: the defendants. Most of the documents labeled "top secret" on the site are really public court records or information copied from other Web sites, he said.

His concern is that the site disparages the reputation of people who come forward to help solve crimes.

"We don't make those high-level gang and drug organization cases without somebody on the inside telling us what's going on," Bunnell said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-20-28-31





Indicted: Romanian Hacked U.S. Computers
AP

A Romanian national was indicted on charges of hacking into more than 150 U.S. government computers, causing disruptions that cost NASA, the Energy Department and the Navy nearly $1.5 million.

The federal indictment charges Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania with nine counts of computer intrusion and one count of conspiracy. He faces up to 54 years in prison if convicted of all counts, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Faur was being prosecuted by authorities in Romania on separate computer hacking charges, Mrozek said Thursday, and will be brought to Los Angeles upon resolution of that case. It was not known whether Faur had retained a lawyer in the United States.

The U.S. government alleges Faur was the leader of a hacking group called "WhiteHat Team," whose main goal was to break into U.S. government computers because they are some of the securest in the world.

After hacking into and taking control of the computers, Faur programmed them to operate as chat rooms so he could communicate with other WhiteHat members, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Hoffstadt said.

During the break-ins, Faur searched for passwords that WhiteHat members could use to gain unauthorized access to other computers, Hoffstadt said.

The compromised computers were used to collect, store and analyze scientific data - including data from spacecraft in orbit and deep space - and to evaluate new technologies. The machines were located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.; and the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-10-07-09





U.S. Reports Unconfirmed Cyber Threat
AP

The government warned on Thursday of a possible Internet attack on U.S. stock market and banking Web sites from a radical Muslim group, but officials said the threat was unconfirmed and seemed to pose no immediate danger.

The notice was issued to the U.S. cybersecurity industry after officials saw a posting on a "Jihadist Web site" calling for an attack on U.S. Internet-based stock market and banking sites in December, said Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke.

There is no information corroborating the threat, Knocke said, adding that the alert was issued "as a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution. There is no immediate threat to our homeland at this time."

Another government official said the threat had appeared on a Web site that called for Muslims to destroy American economic sites. The attacks were to be retaliation for the holding of Muslims at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which houses prisoners accused of ties to terrorist groups.

The attacks were to be conducted in December, "until the infidel new year," the site said, according to a U.S. government translation. It called for attackers to use viruses that can penetrate Internet sites and destroy data stored there.

The alert was issued by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. The team, a partnership between private industry and a number of government agencies, is based at the Homeland Security Department and warns Web sites about virus outbreaks and other Internet attacks.

Spokespeople for the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq declined to comment on the cyber-terror threat.

Stock exchanges and financial institutions strengthened physical security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and joined forces to enhance protection of data and information technology. The collapse of the World Trade Center initially severed communication between Wall Street firms and their data centers.

The Securities Industry Automation Corp., a data technology subsidiary of the NYSE and American Stock Exchange, immediately went to work in trying to shore up Wall Street's vulnerability. The company formed SFTI, known in the industry as "safety," which acts almost as a traffic cop for data streams in case the system is overloaded.

SFTI currently protects data transferred by all the major U.S. stock markets. Each stock market also has its own firewalls, many of which were beefed up after the attacks.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-01-53-21





Report: Pentagon Investigates YouTube Video of U.S. Troops

The U.S. Department of Defense is investigating at least two video clips that appear to show American soldiers in an unfavorable light during contacts with Iraqi children, according to a report in the British newspaper, the Metro.

A clip found on YouTube titled "Iraqi Kid Runs For Water" appears to show U.S. soldiers amusing themselves by watching children chase their truck in the hope the soldiers will make good on their offer of a water bottle.

"You want some water? Keep running," shouts a soldier, who laughs at the scampering boys. He asks, presumably whoever is taping the scene "Are you getting this?"

Another video features a soldier complaining about orders forbidding him from using deadly force against rock-throwing youngsters.

The Internet has spread uncensored images of war to the public like never before. Donald Rumsfeld, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense, has suggested the U.S. military is not well prepared to fight a propaganda war in the Internet age.

Perhaps the most famous example of how images circulated on the Internet has hurt the U.S. mission in Iraq are the photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison. The pictures of naked men being led around on leashes and stacked up on top of each other like cordwood was denounced by even the closest U.S. allies.

To be sure, none of the videos that have cropped up in the past couple of months on video-sharing sites indicate any wrongdoing on the level of Abu Gharaib.

The video of the truck-chasing children shows them racing to keep up with the soldiers until one by one they begin to give up. A single child continues the pursuit and appears to be rewarded when the soldier tosses the bottle out.

The water, however, is snatched away at the last second by another group of children who happen to be standing nearby.

In the YouTube clip of the truck driver, titled "U.S. military pelted by rocks" a truck convoy is traveling in Iraq while children throw rocks at the vehicles.

"Here is the corner where little (expletive) like to throw rocks at us," says a voice on the profanity-laced video. "According to our first sergeant, we're not allowed to engage these little (expletive). So I'm not going to have my weapon out the window. We're just going to videotape these little (expletive) basically destroying our vehicles."
http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-613..._3-0&subj=news





Police Track Reckless Driver on YouTube
Doug Mellgren

Police took up pursuit in cyberspace after a young Norwegian posted on the Internet video of his wild car driving. Following an electronic trail that he left online, police caught him and slapped him with real-life fine $1,300.

The Norwegian, identified only as a man in his early 20s, posted the video called "Driving in Norway" on Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube. The recording showed the car's speedometer hitting up to 150 miles - 240 kilometers - per hour on a public highway near Oslo.

"We're touching 240," a voice could be heard saying. "We know it will do it. This is a little nice."

The video was removed from the Web site after it made national news in Norway last week.

Police said they could prove only that the man had driven an average of 86 miles per hour and based the fine, which the motorist accepted, on that speed. Norway's speed limit is as high as 62 miles per hour, though lower on most roads.

"It is disturbing that young people test high speeds on highways like that, and then, on top of it, use the Net to boast about the misdeed afterward," said Morten Hassel of the district police's traffic unit.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-18-19-33


















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

November 25th, November 18th, November 11th, November 4th, October 28th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S.. Voicemails cannot be returned.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black