Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 30th, '06

[JackSpratts]

Have a great New Year!


















"We are no longer having a debate about whether net neutrality should be the law of the land. We are having a debate about how and when." – Ben Scott


"No one could ever do all the things Mr. Brown did. But here is what’s more impressive: musicians are still finding new ways to do some of them." – Kelefa Sanneh


"The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily." – Greg Gutfeld


"Television is just like making a hole in the wall. All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door." – Albert Borgmann


"Historically, we always go after the new technology. We always say that it will physically hurt you — it will hurt your eyes. There was research on whether computers cause miscarriage. Then the next wave of research is, 'Will it hurt children?' Then, 'Will it hurt society?' That’s the pattern of looking into a new technology." – Annie Lang


"I don’t see the Free Software Foundation handing out any Ferrari’s." – Long Zheng


"No one who is in a disputed election like this should get too comfortable in the House of Representatives." – U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.


"The level of surveillance in this country should shock people. It is infiltrating everything we do." – David Murakami Wood


"Nowhere else in the free world is this happening. The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable." – Helena Kennedy


"Humans must dictate our future, not machines." – Richard Thomas


"The best approach? Hammer time." – Jenna Wortham





































December 30th, '06






Why Piracy is Still More Common Than Legal Video Downloads
Ryan Paul

A recent study conducted by consumer and retail analysis group NPD claims that peer-to-peer (P2P) video downloads (which in the study are synonymous with illegal downloads) are outpacing purchases from legitimate video download services five to one (see last weeks WiR, - Jack). The study, which was performed with NPD's VideoWatch tracking software on "the home computers of more than 12,500 U.S. households," states that 8 percent of Internet-using households downloaded video content from P2P services, whereas 2 percent paid to download video content from legitimate providers. The study also indicates that nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult- film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content.

Avast, matey! Opt-in!

The opt-in methodology used by NPD could lead to significant under-reporting of P2P downloading since those who are voluntarily tracked by NPD's software are probably going to be less inclined to violate copyright law. Chances are that the ratio of "legal" to "illegal" downloading is further tipped in piracy's favor than NPD's study indicates. Nevertheless, assuming that NPD's study approximates reality, one could attribute the strength of piracy and the limited adoption of commercial and P2P-based video downloading to several factors.

First, legal movie download services are still relatively new, and the movie industry's trepidation has prevented a diverse body of content from becoming commercially available. I still don't know of any legal video download service that offers my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, for instance. If the new digital economy is all about the so-called "Long Tail," then online video stores are missing a major opportunity by not playing their cards and rapidly expanding their selection. This is doubly true since the "selection" of content available on the P2P networks is truly impressive. P2P wins the the selection category hands down. This is doubly true when you consider that NPD found that 60 percent of P2P downloads were pornographic in nature.

Another obvious factor is Content Restriction Annulment and Protection (CRAP) technologies, more commonly known as DRM. Consumers who pay for digital video downloads want to be able to play those videos with the software of their choice, without a lot of trouble or the imposition of additional limitations. Consumers also want to be able to convert legitimately downloaded content to other formats so that it can be played on mobile devices. Pervasive DRM and high prices make legal video downloading much less appealing to the average consumer.

Consider this one seemingly small molehill that is truly a mountain: burning to DVD. I have my TV connected to my main desktop computer, so getting content onto DVD isn't a big deal for me. Yet that's the exception, not the rule. If you want to be able to burn content to a disc, the P2P networks will serve you better because you can do anything you want with that content since it has no DRM. This means that if you want to burn a DVD or transform a video for use on a mobile device, legit options will leave you disappointed. P2P wins the freedom of use category.

Let's not forget about quality. Maybe Joe Public doesn't lust after HD content or high-bitrate audio, but the P2P world does. Experienced P2P users can find movies and audio whose quality blows away that which is offered online. P2P isn't a panacea in this regard, but when you're trying to convert people away from piracy, charging $11.99 for a low- quality DRM-laden movie when an HD version is a P2P network away, and free... well, are the statistics really that surprising? P2P wins in the quality category, because experienced users can almost always find what they want. There are some real duds out there on P2P, of course, but not enough that it seems to be driving people away from P2P.

Last but not least, there's the pricing. It's hard to compete with "free," but the rise of legitimate services show that people are willing to pay. P2P clearly gives you more bang for your buck, but of course, your usage might also be illegal. More important for this story is the fact that pricing is a moving target. Matters related to increased selection, quality, and the removal of DRM should all affect pricing. What's clear is that current offerings aren't exactly putting the P2P networks on the endangered species list. The download services need to take note, adjust features, and start experimenting with pricing.

STBs to the rescue?

Right now, the current leader in the video download market is Apple, which boasts nine out of every ten digital movies sold in the NPD study. I'm inclined to believe that the market for commercial video downloads will be pushed into the mainstream by set-top devices that provide integrated downloading services that go beyond current "on demand" services by carrying more selection and offering "download-to-own" videos. Such products insulate users from some of the frustrations of DRM while solving the problem of getting the content to a television screen. Apple's upcoming iTV product is a good example of set-top box (STB) hardware with an integrated video download service. Microsoft's increasingly popular Xbox Live Video service is also a great example. I'd like to see NPD perform a similar study in a year or two comparing adoption of set-top-based video downloads with computer-based video downloads so we can see how products like the Xbox 360 and the iTV impact the market.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061227-8500.html





Clients



Keep and Share

Free File Sharing for Groups
WebBlurb

Keep and Share file share and free file sharing is the ideal way to securely share files with your group. It's like a "private MySpace" - a free file sharing website that brings people together, but with all the security and privacy you want - where you always control exactly who can see what information.

With Keep and Share You'll Have:

1. A free file sharing site on the web
2. Selective sharing, secure for those you want to share with
3. Additional free features: share calendars, documents, photos, lists and more with complete security for your group, family, and friends

From the moment you create your account you will have an instant web presence for your group.

You'll be in your file sharing account in 30 seconds, guaranteed.

Your Own Free File Sharing Web Site

Your group's instantly available "share page" acts as a hub for others to access all shared information, shared files and lists. All they do is type in 'your-name.keepandshare.com' and they are at your site. You can even grant editing rights so others can create or update information. By keeping information in one place, everyone you share it with will always view the most recent and up-to-date version of your shared files. Your group members will always be automatically notified of new uploaded files of interest via their personal "dashboard" and email digests.
http://www.keepandshare.com/htm/file...hare_files.htm





Gnutella Turbo 6.6.4

Author Pro-Sharing.com
Licence Freeware
OS Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT 4.x, Windows2000, WinXP, Windows2003
Date Released December 21, 2006

WebBlurb

Gnutella Turbo utilizes a totally decentralized peer to peer network, and is the most advanced file sharing application around. Trade any type of file: MP3, video, images, software, etc. with anyone throughout the internet. Gnutella Turbo combines ease of use with reliability, and moreover, has the ability to resume interrupted downloads; limit bandwidth of both downloads and uploads, and use the filters. Most likely the fastest Gnutella client due to easy to use, lots of files, user friendly oriented, multi-source downloading, resume downloads, and you can multiple searches
http://www.bestsoftware4download.com...-lbwjhiym.html





Adesso Tubes

File Sharing Via Tubes

Adesso Tubes acts as a virtual pipe between you and your friends to share files; notes, music, apps, documents, emails, etc…

Firstly you have to download the software to send/receive files, then all you do is put files in a special desktop folder/icon, and these files will instantly distribute to who ever is on that list, to what ever device they use (as long as tubes is installed), good way to send stuff from work to home.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/200...ing-via-tubes/





Daisy

P2P plugin for Opera, FF, IE7 etc

WebBlurb

Meet your fellow website visitors

Share with them any folder on your PC

Leave a blog for those that come after you


Learn Dai.sy In 3 Easy Steps:

1. You and some friend (s) add the Dai.sy extension to your Firefox Browser
2. Choose a webpage or website for everyone to meet at
3. Click on the Dai.sy icon located on your main browser bar.

* To Change sites or pages, simply click on the "Change Site" icon located to the right of the Dai.sy logo

Now that you are together, here is how to:

> MEET

1. Enter any Nickname you wish to use for this session
2. Choose one of our pre-made avatars or use any image off your pc
3. Create a topic you wish to discuss (this is optional) Click on the "Enter Chat" button and that is all

> SHARE

1. Click the "Choose" button to browse your PC for any folder you wish to share with your fellow site visitors
2. Click on the "Open Shared Space" button to view to all the files the other site visitors are sharing. For easier browsing, you may Search and Sort the files
3. Double Click on the file you wish to download
4. Choose a Destination folder by clicking the blue folder Icon on the right.
5. Click the "Start" button. The progress of your downloads and uploads can are seen in the status windows.

> BLOG

1. Click on the "add new" button
2. Enter a Title, Author Name, Author e-mail and A Password so that only you may edit it in the future.
3. Blog Message: Choose a font type, color and size. Add any MEDIA (Image or Video) you wish by simply pasting the web address of your chosen media file.
http://dai.sy/





Rangboom
WebBlurb

Rangboom is a free service for securely sharing or accessing your files over the Internet. Please use the Sign Up form to request an account. Once you have signed up, download and install the Windows or the Linux client on your computers. See the FAQ for more information.

Friends and Family: Networking, Beyond Email Attachments

Rangboom lets you share your pictures, videos and other files with your family and friends. No need to trust your data to a central storage server or risk sending them as e-mail attachments. Rangboom gives you a private network. Your files stay on your disk and your trusted group can access them just like a local file, if they want to, when they want to.

Example: Bob and Carol Sanders need to share pictures, important documents and spreadsheets on their computers. Bob created a Rangboom group (sanders) and invited Carol to join the group. Through Rangboom, each can view the other's shared folders and files the same way as a local file on his or her computer.

Ad-hoc Networking: Simple, Secure, Virtual

With Rangboom you can create secure networks for collaboration and data sharing with anyone. With thousands of public WiFi networks at hotels, coffee shops and other public spaces, you can quickly establish an ad-hoc virtual network over which you can securely share files, collaborate or play.
http://www.rangboom.com/





FilePanda Beta
WebBlurb

Want to share files? We've got the answer.

Frustrated at not being able to email large files, I decided to spend a few evenings coding this little web app. Right now it's in beta, and it's pretty simple, but there's plenty of features planned for it!

Start Here

Select File (up to 100MB!):

Estimated Upload Times:
1MB - 40 seconds
10MB - 7 Minutes
20MB - 15 Minutes
40MB - 30 Minutes
80MB - 1 Hour

http://www.filepanda.com/





From October

Pando Moves Beyond Email File Sharing
Michael Arrington

New York based Pando has been breaking away from the P2P file sharing pack, which we reviewed in late August. They claim over 1.5 million downloads of their client software, and move up to 20 TB of data per day between users.

Pando is very easy to use. Once the PC or Mac software is installed, you simply drag a file or a folder (up to 1 GB) into the open window. Pando begins uploading that file to its servers immediately, and opens an email form. Simply type in the email address(es) that you would like to receive the file and hit send. When the recipient opens the email and clicks on the small .pando attachment, Pando begins delivering the file, using Bittorent, from the sender’s computer as well as Pando’s servers and any other people receiving the file. Transfer speeds are unreal - my testing shows minimum speeds of 500 kp/s and top speeds at double that. If the recipient has not installed Pando on their computer, they’ll be prompted to do so before the download begins.

Pando is completely free, and also has useful Outlook and Yahoo IM plugins

Today at 9 AM California time Pando is breaking out of the email paradigm and releasing a free new product that allows people to share files directly from a website. This can be done via an embed or link, and I’ve embedded a message from Pando CEO Robert Levitan below as an example. The same file can be accessed via a simple link as well.

For podcasters and videocasters who don’t have the bandwidth availability to serve files, this is going to be extremely useful. Publishers won’t even need to upload the file to their own server. They can simply drag the file into the Pando desktop software and get a link to add to a website. For others, simply adding a Pando link as an additional option to direct download will be attractive as well. We may add Pando links to our TalkCrunch podcasts as well as offering the file as an enclosure to the post. Listeners can simply choose which option they like, although if they choose Pando the download will be significantly faster and we won’t have to pay the bandwidth charges for their download.

Pando’s new product is so efficient that it will also invite abuse, particularly from users sharing copyrighted materials. Pando says it will passively monitor downloads and comply with any DMCA takedown notices they receive from rightsholders.

Pando has some existing competition in this space, notably silicon valley based RedSwoosh, which we wrote about in July. Both RedSwoosh and Pando have attractive offerings. Pando’s large installed base may give it an advantage in staking out its territory.

Pando has raised a total of $11 million over two rounds of financing. The most recent $7 million round was led by Intel Capital.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/26...-file-sharing/





BitTorrent May Go Mobile

With the announcement that BitTorrent Inc. bought the BitTorrent client µTorrent, creator Bram Cohen is looking towards more innovative ways of file-sharing. BitTorrent is a wildly popular peer-to-peer protocol that breaks files, such as movies, songs, into many small portions or blocks and it distributes them to other users as they are requested thus making your downloading experience faster and more reliable. If you are downloading material online, the client will search and intelligently shuffle that data and reassemble the portions together to get a finished product (i.e. song, file).

The creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, has suggested that BitTorrent may go mobile with many other platforms to follow. A simple Java program for all phones would be the perfect solution for cellphones if this is the plan. Downloading content on your phone, via mobile BitTorrent client and a 3G network sounds like a good idea to me. BitTorrent has a loyal following so it won't be long until mobile BitTorrent hits the masses.
http://www.slashphone.com/33/6155.html





Download 2000+ Music Albums for Free
Ernesto

Jamendo is a website with a revolutionary model that allows artists to promote and publish their music. Artist have the opportunity to show their creativity to a broader audience, and the public has a place to listen to, download, and share new music.

Jamendo recently passed the 2000 albums mark and currently indexes 2005 Creative Commons licensed albums. The site offers some great features that make it easy to share and discover new music. You can browse their album collection by genre, country, popularity or tags, for example.

If you find an album that you like, you can share it on your blog, write a review, or donate directly to the artist. Some artists will even include the list of people who donated in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. A great site for both artists and fans. Everybody wins, except for the big record labels of course.

The albums on Jamendo are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps), and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule.
http://torrentfreak.com/download-200...bums-for-free/





Fan Asks Hard Questions About Rap Music
Erik Eckholm

Byron Hurt takes pains to say that he is a fan of hip-hop, but over time, says Mr. Hurt, a 36-year-old filmmaker, dreadlocks hanging below his shoulders, “I began to become very conflicted about the music I love.”

A new documentary by Mr. Hurt, “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” questions the violence, degradation of women and homophobia in much of rap music.

Scheduled to go on the air in February as part of the PBS series Independent Lens, the documentary is being shown now at high schools, colleges and Boy’s Clubs, and in other forums, as part of an unusual public campaign sponsored by the Independent Television Service, which is based in San Francisco and helped finance the film.

The intended audiences include young fans, hip-hop artists and music industry executives — black and white — who profit from music and videos that glorify swagger and luxury, portray women as sex objects, and imply, critics say, that education and hard work are for suckers and sissies.

What concerns Mr. Hurt and many black scholars is the domination of the hip-hop market by more violent and sexually demeaning songs and videos — an ascendancy, the critics say, that has coincided with the growth of the white audience for rap and the growing role of large corporations in marketing the music.

Ronald F. Ferguson, a black economist and education expert at Harvard, said that the global success of hip-hop had had positive influences on the self-esteem of black youths but that children who became obsessed with it “may unconsciously adopt the themes in this music as their lens for viewing the world.”

With the commercial success of gangsta rap and music videos, which portray men as extravagant thugs and women as sex toys, debate has simmered among black parents, community leaders and scholars about the impact of rap and the surrounding hip-hop culture.

“There’s a conversation going on now; a lot more people are trying to figure out a way to intervene that’s productive,” said Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana studies at Brown University.

At one extreme are critics, both black and white, who put primary blame for the failures and isolation of urban black youth on a self-destructive subculture, exemplified by the worst of hip-hop. But many of those critics, Dr. Rose said, fail to acknowledge the deeper roots of the problems. At the other extreme are people who reflexively defend any artistic expression by young blacks, saying the focus must remain on the economic and political structures that hem in minorities.

“That’s the real catch,” Dr. Rose said. “The public conversation about hip-hop is pinned by two responses, neither of them productive.”

Among blacks, to criticize rap, especially in front of the wider society, is to risk being called disloyal, said William Jelani Cobb, a historian at Spelman College in Atlanta, at a recent screening of the film in Newark. But the exaggerated image of male aggression, said Dr. Cobb, who also speaks in the documentary, actually reflects male insecurity and longstanding powerlessness, while the image of women resembles that held by 19th century slave owners.

Chris Bennett, 36, took his daughters, ages 15 and 11, to see Mr. Hurt’s film in Chicago because he said he wanted them to think about the music. Mr. Bennett, a school security guard, said he saw the effects of gangsta rap in his job. “Everyone wants to be tough now,” he said. “Everyone wants to be hard, and education has taken the background.”

The event in Chicago drew some 250 people, including several high school groups. Many of the boys were skeptical about the supposed dire influences of rap. Jock Lucas, 16, hotly argued with female students about the prevalence of lyrics that denigrate women, asserting, as many of the boys did, that a girl who dressed provocatively deserved such labels and might even like them.

“I don’t think rap is a bad influence,” Jock said. “They’re just speaking about how it goes where they come from. If the people who listen go out and do these things, it’s their own fault.”

Another high school student at the Chicago event, Vasawa Robinson, 19, said rap showed “real life” and that “if you try to show a different picture, the kids won’t want to listen.” The more political, socially conscious rap, Vasawa said, was for an older generation.

Mr. Hurt’s film includes clips from a music video by the rapper 50 Cent, from his album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’, ” in which the singer re-enacts a drive-by shooting he survived and boasts in crude terms of his power and readiness to kill his enemies.

It also includes portions of the video “Tip Drill,” an extended fantasy of male sexual domination by the rap star Nelly, who has won praise by promoting literacy and bone marrow donations, but, as the film notes, also markets a drink called Pimp Juice.

Mr. Hurt, who grew up in a black neighborhood of Central Islip, N.Y., in modest circumstances, was quarterback of the Northeastern University football team and said he had been a fanatical “hip-hop head.”

“It was music created by people your age who looked like you , talked like you, dressed like you and weren’t apologetic about it,” he said.

His views changed, he said, when, after college, he worked in a program teaching male athletes about violence against women.

“Here’s the conflict,” Mr. Hurt said. “You still love hip-hop and you love to see the artists doing well, but then you ask, ‘What are they saying? What is the image of manhood?’ ”

White males may be major customers, Mr. Hurt said, “but it influences black kids the most.”

“They’re the ones who order their days around it,” he said, “who try to conform to the script.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/us...b&ei=5087%0 A





Disney Shows The Labels How to Make Hits
Jerry Del Colliano

The Disney Channel kids program "Hannah Montana" is a smash hit. And so is the music 14- year old Miley Cyrus sings as the fictional pop star Hannah Montana. She has sold over 1.6 million songs in about two months beating out the likes of Jay-Z, Sarah McLachlan, The Beatles Love album and a slew of others. It highlights the potential of the 8-14 year old market sometimes known as the "Tweens". These days the usual mojo from teens is not there in the record business. Teens and older Gen Y youths have found their way to music downloading. They're not such a hot record market anymore. But "Tweens", that's another story. Let's break it down.

Disney is looking to record clean, family music for its target age group. That leaves a lot of rappers out. Rap and Hip Hop may have been embraced by "older" young people, but the new record market could be kids -- really, kids -- looking for something the record labels could not know to offer them. That's because the major record labels have gotten into the habit of missing trends. They used to rely heavily on their gut. Now, gut has nothing to do with it. No doubt this "tween" market is not very hip -- and record labels try to be the epitome of hipness. But 1.6 million records -- an average of 100,000 a week since mid-autumn -- should serve as a wakeup call. Miley Cyrus who plays Miley Stewart on the "Hanna Montana" TV series is now getting ready to release an album under her own name. There's little doubt the kids know who she is. If they like her music, they will buy her songs.

I vividly remember putting on an Inside Radio Management Conference event on the campus of The University of Southern California before I sold the publication to Clear Channel and joined the USC faculty. My friend, Professor Ken Lopez, put together one of the hit panels with ordinary college students talking about what they liked and didn't like about terrestrial radio. Keep in mind that was five years ago and radio was actually sounding better to young people then than it does today. I will never forget the students talking about the things they liked in radio. No, these things didn't come from Clear Channel. Nor from CBS. Or any of the other big players. You see, the students waxed eloquent about Radio Disney. At first I actually thought they were putting us on. But their sincerity eventually won the day. These students liked the variety, the creativity, the production on Radio Disney even though they were clearly older than the Radio Disney target demographic. Most of the real world radio people attending heard this and promptly dismissed it. That would turn out to be a mistake. Just as it is a mistake for record labels to try to find the next teen idol when they are not willing to use their gut and gamble on something new. Britney Spears is so, well, 90's. Paris Hilton is so not going to be the one.

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has taken a lot of brickbats for his management style and his boardroom battles. But the very successful Eisner gave us all a hint even back then that he knew radio best. Eisner did not buy big radio stations when consolidation was approved by Congress. God knows Disney had the money to be a big player. I often wondered why and how they resisted buying even one major station once the floodgates opened. ABC Radio owned a lot of major market properties but not a lot of stations overall. When the consolidation buying spree ended ABC owned virtually the same number of stations. All of a sudden Clear Channel's 1,100 stations made ABC seem like a little fish and the little fish from San Antonio looked like the king fish. But Eisner methodically continued buying what some brokers called "shitty little properties" for a few million here and a few million there. He did it to have a place to air Radio Disney. You'll note ABC did a complicated deal (waiting completion) with Citadel to merge their stations. What you should also note is that current Disney CEO Bob Iger kept the "shitty" Radio Disney stations and did not sell them to Citadel or anyone else. Disney knew all along that as hip as we all are in radio and records that traditional radio's day was over, but kid's radio was a potential boom business. Along with theme parks and a cable channel, Disney is proving they were right.

This is all well and good but how does it bode for the future. I wouldn't be surprised to see more trouble ahead for the major labels as they chase their long tail in denial that the music changed. Or, has it? Maybe the labels changed. When radio stations full of hubris stopped programming to their local markets and went big time (as in big time media) perhaps the record labels did the same thing. They cut expenses, consolidated, overreacted to the online peer-to-peer downloading trend, started suing their customers and then declared themselves hip all over again in the digital age. Meanwhile they continue to under achieve.

The record buying public -- even the lost generation Y -- is tired of only rap and Hip Hop. Clean still sells especially with pre-teens. Pre-teens are putting on a record buying clinic for the labels as witnessed by Hannah Montana's success.

Is Disney the only company that listened to its gut? Was Eisner smarter than his unfavorable press led us to believe? Did he know something everyone else missed? I say yes -- and here it is -- when music media starts imitating itself it fails to innovate. Does that sound like an accurate description of both the radio industry and the record business right now?
http://insidemusicmedia.blogspot.com...make-hits.html





The Envelopes, Please, for an Unopened Year
Richard Siklos

SO what do you think? Two weeks ago we invited predictions on what 2007 would be “the year of” in media, and the user-generated responses were abundant and wiki-licious.

Roughly speaking, the predictions filling the in-box weighed heavily toward technological trends. The tone ranged from optimistic to apocalyptic. Not many people tackled such questions as whether “The Hobbit” will be greenlighted, whether the Tribune Company will be broken up or whether Judith Regan’s firing will be settled long before all the juicy details come tumbling out in court. (Um: no, yes, yes?)

For those who toil in the big media businesses, the word “media” itself refers to the big information industries — publishing, broadcasting, music, etc. — but some readers chose a refreshingly McLuhan-esque definition, in which a new media technology could be a pencil or a paper clip or just about anything else.

To wit, Pat Noble of Erie, Pa., predicted that “wristwatches are on their way out” because more people are using cellphones as timepieces. Nick Koscis, a writer from St. Catharines, Ontario, said he looked forward to “the year of the fast-food franchises converting to nutritionally correct dining,” adding: “Being major advertisers on media, I include them in the mix.”

And there were a couple of brief, curious outliers that, for all we know, are prescient:

“Night-vision technology will be adapted to cellphones so photos can be taken directly through people’s clothing,” wrote William Topp of Otisville, N.Y.

One that arrived without a name said that 2007 would “be the year of the child film auteur.” And one more said that it would be “the year of the mobile personal headset display.”

There were also plenty of other thoughtful but more mainstream bets. Echoing the prayer of all his brethren, one media executive — who chimed in on condition that he not be named — suggested that this would be the year of equalization: that media companies would figure out ways to make money from new digital distribution formats and the Internet without cannibalizing their existing businesses. In other words, hallelujah, they will finally make up on volume what they are losing on price.

Many media businesses — particularly AOL — reoriented themselves this year to grab a share of the growing online advertising honey pot. This led James Bedell of Queens to wonder whether we’ll see everyone run back to the other side of the room next year in pursuit of subscription dollars. “Banner ads are nice, membership fees are nicer,” Mr. Bedell wrote. “Look for the information superhighway to pick up a lot more tolls.”

Tony Trippe, an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, predicted a year of consolidation.

“We’re going to see organizations learn that their business model is not the end-all and be-all,” he wrote. “These organizations will try to salvage what they can from their pipe dreams, and that will lead to the buyouts, mergers and consolidations.”

A similar less-cheery view — if you’re a media executive — came from Fred Bothwell of Georgetown, Tex., who predicted the “continuing diminished significance of profit-based mainstream media as information sources.” They will wither, he predicted, as more people turn to Web-based purpose-driven services like Craigslist that are not looking to maximize profits, but to make the world a smiley place.

There were a few votes for Google to continue its rise and to extend its tentacles successfully into other forms of media, particularly video. That said, a couple of readers predicted that the Google juggernaut would run out of steam, possibly at the hands of a resurgent Yahoo.

Interesting days lie ahead for the studios. Doomsday forecasts of declining movie attendance went away when the figures reversed slightly this year, but it will be interesting to see what happens if a studio ( Walt Disney, anyone?) becomes the first to simultaneously release a major film on pay-per-view and at the multiplex.

Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital, issued a report last week arguing that 2007 would be the first year since the introduction of the DVD roughly a decade ago that consumer spending on the discs will decline, putting pressure on studios that rely heavily on them.

One reader predicted that with the bonanza in DVD growth ending, and big media companies desperate for a new growth engine, 2007 would be the year when “traditional media make a big bet on online gaming: they will buy up, invest in or launch massively multiplayer online gaming companies.”

Luke Luckett, a recent graduate of New York University, predicted that the digital divide between those who have ready access to broadband Internet and those who don’t would become more pronounced next year.

For the haves, the Web could become a much more useful and vibrant place as Web and media companies start stitching together their various services to provide versatile and detailed local information. Those services include maps, listings, reviews, advertising, news, traffic reports and all kinds of content from users, like the growing practice of “tagging,” the online equivalent of Post-it notes.

IN the column two weeks ago about “the year that wasn’t,” the inclusion of high-definition television attracted a chorus of viewers who, having their own personal Howard Beale moments, aren’t going to take it any more when it comes to their television viewing.

Betty Morgan of Sumter, S.C., echoed a dozen others when she wrote: “Why would I want to pay more for the same crummy TV programs? I use it to watch my old DVDs while I wait for them to kill one of the new formats. There are too many things to fix before the year of digital happens.”

As Rein Taul of Toronto put it: “I for one am sick and tired of hearing about the red herrings of piracy, lost ad revenue, new technology impacts, etc. The American auto industry is paying the piper for their lack of respect for their customers as manifest through poor product. How far behind can the entertainment industry be?”

Although such views are subjective by their very nature, it is worth noting that people still care passionately about professionally produced media in this do-it-yourself world of exploding choice and control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/bu.../24frenzy.html





The Digital Media Winners and Losers of 2006
Richard Menta

We thought that 2005 was the key year for digital media, because of the MGM v Grokster ruling. We thought, but are still not sure as the content industry's victory in that case did not achieve its primary goal, to stop file sharing. Not only does online trading continue to increase, but other technologies have since made their impact clear. Below are this year's success stories and not so successful stories in a continually turbulent online environment.

The judges are still out on several candidates, who we may see in next year's winners (or loser's) list. They include the DRM protestors, Patti Santangelo, Zune, HD Radio and others.
The 8GB Sansa e200 series is available on Amazon

2006 Winners

1. YouTube

Google purchased them for $1.65 billion. For a company less than two years old, not much more needs to be said. CBS has already credited YouTube for improved ratings on the Letterman show and the site brings US visibility to excellent overseas television programs. That's nice, but they still haven't figured out the best way to make money on all of this success. The site has to develop a stronger business model and do it under continued legal threats from some content holders. That's why the Google acquisition is important as it has the dollars to insulate the company from litigation until it can evolve into a high revenue generator.

2. Apple

Still controlling a hefty percentage of the player and paid download market. SanDisk is making inroads in the portable player arena, but Apple is selling more iPods than ever. iTunes market share is dominant too, though analysts have concerns about the short-term growth of paid music and movie downloads. The big question is where does Apple go from here? As there is early evidence to suggest SanDisk is selling strong among digital savvy consumers, the company will need something more than a minor refresh of the iPod line for 2007. We'll see in the spring what iTV, the present name of Apple's wireless set top box, will offer. Apple's recent deal with the airlines, which will cement the iPod dock (literally and figuratively) into the seats of commercial aircraft, will mean Apple's proprietary standards will dominate in jets for years. Disney arguable deserves to be on this list too. As the only studio that sells movies on iTunes it now dominates the tiny, but burgeoning, movie download market. Disney and Apple expect to generate $40 million in movie sales by year end.

3. MySpace

It is a top five site on the Net and probably the most influential destination for new music. Might it be the most influential for all music?

4. BitTorrent and Azureus

Several million dollars in seed investment followed by preliminary adoption by the movie industry has made Bram Cohen's vision a legitimate member of the content industry clique. For the most utilized protocol on the Net, this means large revenues and no lawsuits for its creator (at least in the immediate future). By cutting a deal with Hollywood Bram Cohen reduced the risk of litigation. This one fact is drawing significant VC activity into the technology. Not only did BitTorrent grab $20 million in latter round funding for itself, torrent client Azureus landed $12 million of its own. Even uTorrent made out as Cohen used some of his new found investment cash to acquire its technology. eDonkey and Morpheus had a commercial dream once. BitTorrent is achieving that dream.

5. Pirate Bay

Started by Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån, Pirate Bay grew into the world's largest BitTorrent tracker. This drew the content industry's ire and on May 31 they orchestrated a raid on the site with the help Swedish law enforcement. The raid confiscated all of Pirate Bay's servers and the press releases flew, heralding the Pirate Bay's elimination. It turned out the celebration was premature. Three days later Pirate Bay was back and, thanks to the press generated by the closure, became more popular than ever. The Pirate Party did not do so well in Swedish elections later in the year, but it has been influential. That influence carried over here to the states where Brent Allison and Alex English are launching a US Chapter with eyes on the 2008 election.

6. Brittany Chan

Brittany and he mother beat the RIAA in their file sharing lawsuits. That's the good news and enough to place her on this list. The bad news is the family had to endure the misery and expense of this trial in the first place. Didn't hear about the Chan victory? That's because while the original suit made front page news, the decision was mostly ignored by the mainstream press.

7. Creative

Took Apple for $100 million in its patent dispute and will now make iPod peripherals, where the company will probably make more money. Their own players are selling better this holiday season, so over all thing have improved for a company that has showed losses on the balance sheet recently. Will future Creative players adopt the iPod dock connector? Silly rabbit.....

8. DJ Danger Mouse

DJ Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) became the scourge of the industry back in 2004 when he released the Grey Album, a limited edition remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album. EMI attempted to stop its release resulting in Grey Day, one of the most successful Internet protests. That got DJ Danger Mouse on our 2004 winners list. This year Mouse is here as one half of the duo Gnarls Barkley, whose first single 'Crazy' is the first song to top the UK charts on download sales alone. It reached number 2 on the US chart. To date, Danger Mouse the most successful artist to ever to leverage the Internet to promote their career. It helped that Crazy was a great song.

9. SanDisk

Released a 6GB player in the spring that sold well. Then at the end of the summer, before Apple could answer with a like capacity iPod, Sandisk released an 8GB version. NPD Group is reporting that SanDisk is drawing 18.4% of Christmas DAP sales. Meanwhile, early MP3 Newswire player data suggests that percentage is even higher among the digital savvy shoppers

10. EMusic

Emusic is the official number two paid download service (the real number two may be the very unofficial AllofMP3.com) and the service has sold 100 million downloads since new management took the company over in 2003. Furthermore, it sold those tracks on the musical virtues of independent artists, not major label artists like Napster and Rhapsody pay for. But there real reason EMusic is here is...well...it's here. Launched as Goodnoise in early 1998, the service is a survivor of the dot com era.

11.Tivo

Tivo won a big patent settlement against EchoStar. There were concerns the company wouldn't make it. Now it has some stability in the market.

Honorable Mention: Sling Media

Deals with mobile providers has this company and its technology on the upswing. Hollywood is rattling its sabres as usual, but its more because it wants to steal the "place shifting" TV market for itself. If Sling Media continues to grow it may become an acquisition target, possibly from one of the telcos like AT&T or Verizon who are investing heavily in IPTV.


2006 Losers

1. StreamCast

The last holdout from the MGM v Grokster case, that case created the new test of "Active Infringement". The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to define and apply the new test, which the folks at Streamcast were confident they never violated. The lower court ruled they clearly did.

2. EchoStar Communications

Parent company of the Dish Network lost a huge $90 million patent lawsuit to Tivo.

3. Sharman Networks

Crushed in Australian court. Has settled with the record industry for $100 million, but to date no commercial P2P app that has come to an agreement with the music industry is showing any ability to gain traction in the pay-per-song market. The fact that KaZaa has not been updated since its acquisition by Sharman proves the glory days are long gone.

4. AllofMP3.com

In September the major credit card companies blacklisted the Russian paid download service. Then AllofMP3.com became a pawn in US/Russian trade negotiations where it was used as a barganing chip in discussions over Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization. The Russians aggreed to shut down illegal sites, but AllofMP3.com is still online - with site traffic up according to Alexa. The RIAA has now announced it will sue AllofMP3.com for damages and its domain. Odd why such a suit is necessary if that site is supposed to disappear soon? Maybe, just maybe, there is more here. We originally wrote off AllofMP3.com, but now wonder if it could become... the comeback kid of 2007?

5. Captain Copyright

And his sidekick Lieutenant Lame...

6. OLGA - Online Guitar Tablature Archive

Shut down again. As far as the music publisers are concerned, if you can figure out the chord progressions of your favorite song - of which 95% of rock songs consist of nothing more than three common chords - you must pay them. If you put them online to save others the trouble you are a thief.

7. BLU-Ray and HD-DVD

Mass consumer adoption will not occur until the dust clears - which may take years. Beta and VHS all over again.

8. Amazon Unbox

Troubled functionality and dubious terms created a backlash in the press. Overall, many questioned the value it offered to consumers.

9. Sony BMG

Shelled out $1.4 million in settlement to the states of Texas and California for last winter's rootkit scandal. A few days before Christmas it spent several more million dollars to settle with 39 additional states. Worse for the company is that these lawsuits kept the scandal in the press for over a year, a scandal that taught users to fear the CD format.

10. Digital Rights Management

DRM is not going away soon, but to date it has not succeeded at doing what it was designed to do - stop file sharing. It has succeeded in annoying the consumer, though. Whether that might lead to mass consumer rejection is unclear at this point.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6...osers2006.html





The Lads Are Getting Picky
David Carr

One million used to be something of a magic number in magazine publishing. If you captured a million readers, advertisers took you seriously.

Now? Not so much. Earlier this month, the British publisher Emap unceremoniously pulled the plug on FHM, a so-called lad magazine with a circulation 1.25 million, and left the country. In the last year, its advertising became as skimpy as the wardrobe of some of its cover models, dropping 19.7 percent in the first 11 months of the year.

One million-plus readers or not, the trends were clear. What had been a white-hot niche in publishing has gone cold. Even Maxim, the circulation leader in the men’s category with a rate base of 2.5 million, is down 5 percent in advertising pages this year from the year before, and the lucrative newsstand sales are down more than 200,000 in the last three years.

Could it be that the lad magazine genre is keeling over on its way to middle age?

Once derided — then occasionally imitated — by mainstream men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ, the lad magazines landed with enough impact that they altered the culture to the point where they no longer stick out.

The heady mix of not-quite-naked women, bawdy humor and stunt journalism once represented a British insurgency against political correctness, but that war that has been all but won.

“Borat,” after all, is a lad with a bad accent, relentlessly pursuing Pamela Anderson, the reigning deity of the B-list universe that the lad magazines inhabit. Adam Sandler’s universal remote in “Click”? Right out of the pages of Maxim, including a mute button for your girlfriend. And you can’t watch a beer commercial without seeing memes from the men’s titles: Miller Lite Beer’s “Man Laws” are right out of the lad handbook.

But making lad magazines was tougher than it looked. Every editorial meeting would start with a blank slate with a few hardy perennials: What about Nazis? Midgets? Shark attacks? Could we have a Nazi saving a midget being attacked by a shark?

It fell to the brave cover models — most of them minor television stars — to sell magazines by wearing very little clothing that seemed about to fall off if one stared long enough. A few years ago, I asked Bob Guccione Jr., who was then publishing Gear, a lad magazine, why the models in his magazine were always tugging at their clothing.

“We’ve got a problem with sand on our photo shoots,” he deadpanned.

Those sands shifted, as they have for a lot of magazines. Computer magazines came and went, mostly, and dot-com business magazines that weighed several pounds soon became brochures. Even the teen niche, which seemed robust a few years ago, dealt with a contraction that included Teen People, YM and Elle Girl.

Magazine publishers tend to see a landing strip with exciting demographics, and then land en masse, a losing proposition in the long run. Publications that create new ways of thinking about old issues — O, the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Everyday with Rachael Ray, and even Dennis Publishing’s The Week — tend to prosper because they magically meet a consumer need that they did not know they had.

Dennis Publishing continues on and off to shop Maxim, along with the company’s other magazines, Stuff, Blender and The Week.

According to a person who was involved in trying to buy the magazine — he did not want to go on the record because he said that it would hurt his relationship with the sellers — the company may have found a strategic buyer in a deal that could close in January.

Stephen Colvin, the chief executive of Dennis Publishing U.S., would not respond to reports of a sale, saying he “doesn’t comment on rumors,” and he added that it is silly to suggest that FHM’s departure suggests that the category, or Maxim, is losing heat.

“Our first quarter is up double digits, and we finished the year very strong,” he said last week. “We are the leader in the men’s category and continue to add subscribers. Maxim entered and changed what had been deemed to be a mature category, and we continue to grow stronger all the time.”

He also said that the company’s early digital and mobile initiatives are paying dividends.

In part, the lad magazines got lapped by technology. YouTube looks like a lad contents page with full-motion video. TMZ has gone Defcon 4 in real-time over Britney’s pantygate. And, Heavy.com has America’s Suck Countdown, with a joke-a-second cadence that would be difficult for anybody to catch up with, let alone a magazine.

“It is tough to come up with something fresh in the category,” said Greg Gutfeld, a former editor of Stuff in the United States and Maxim in Britain. “The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily.”

In Britain, Dennis Publishing has taken to heart the message that humor wants to be free and fast, coming up with a digital product for e-mail called Monkey. The product is a magazine on the desktop, complete with a gee-whiz, page-turning technology, but it is really a portal, with lots of clickable videos and interactive features. You cannot only read about the latest Clap Your Hands CD, you can click through and download some of it.

Many of the ads are just as dynamic, and readers can vote on the next week’s cover model with a click of the mouse, the same device they can use to make some of that clothing fall off, if they wish. It is a very serious stab at funny, lewd content, a hybrid model that takes short-attention spans as a virtue.

Where does that leave the world of paper magazines? Finding a really good idea that captures consumer interest is a neat trick. Sustaining that interest issue after issue with long lead times is brutal. As Keith Blanchard, another former editor of Maxim, said, “It is hard to find the edge when the edge keeps moving.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...ia/25carr.html





Sizzling a Year Ago, but Now Pfffft ...
Bill Carter

The telenovela, the steamy low-budget soap opera genre that has become the staple of television programming in Spanish-speaking countries, lives on its sudden bursts of uncontrollable — and loudly acted — passion.

Maybe that was what was burning in the hearts of network executives in New York about this time last year when, seemingly out of the blue, many of them announced a rush to begin developing a new form of programming for the summer: the American telenovela.
“It’s right to characterize what we were all caught up in last year as telenovela fever,” said Katherine Pope, the executive vice president of NBC Entertainment.

The ardor has apparently cooled. In the 12 months since news reports revealed that CBS was working on as many as seven scripts for telenovelas, that ABC had invested in as many as 45 existing telenovela storylines, and NBC was jumping in to adapt telenovelas already produced by Telemundo, the Spanish-language network that NBC owns, not much more has been said — or done. Not a single telenovela project has been put into production by any of those networks.

The networks’ intense interest in the telenovela genre was sparked by the need to find alternative, inexpensive programming in the summer to replace the round of repeats. Telenovelas are made cheaply in Spanish-speaking countries, for only a fraction of the $2 million to $3 million an episode that network dramas cost.

Once into development, however, financial realities began to set in. The networks discovered they would only alienate their viewers if they tried to make the shows of distinctly lesser quality than their regular shows. They also discovered that the production schedules required to grind out so many episodes in such a short time would be daunting. Most telenovelas shoot as many as 40 pages of script in a day; the conventional network drama seldom does more than about 15 (each page equals about one minute of screen time).

“The economics still have to be figured out,” Ms. Pope conceded.

ABC, has of course, added a new hit prime-time series called “Ugly Betty,” which is based on one of the most popular telenovelas ever produced. But nobody, certainly not its executive producer, Ben Silverman, considers the American “Betty” a true telenovela as the genre is commonly understood — that is, a stylized short-run series with a definitive ending, about 13 weeks long, broadcast in several episodes a week.

“We originally conceived the show as a true telenovela,” Mr. Silverman said, “but it got shifted by ABC to a regular hourlong drama series.” He added that the expensive look of the “Betty” series, which is set in the glamorous world of New York couture magazines, could never have been fashioned on the budget of a real telenovela.

“We could never have shot in New York,” Mr. Silverman said. “We could never have gotten a star like America Ferrara,” he added, referring to the actress in the title role.

Though versions of “Ugly Betty” have played as straight telenovelas around the world, in countries as far flung as Germany, India and Israel, the ABC adaptation is a regular highly produced, episodic network series.

If you want to see what an American version of a telenovela looks like, you would have to have tuned in this fall to one of the stations on the mini-network called MyNetworkTV (MNT), a collection of television stations (including Channel 9 in New York), mainly owned by the News Corporation. The stations were orphaned last winter when their old network, UPN, combined with its competitor, the WB, to form the CW network.

Not that many people have tuned in. MNT has so far tried four telenovelas, including one, “Fashion House,” starring the former sirens Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild (complete with catfight between them), and another, the current “Wicked Wicked Games,” starring Tatum O’Neal.

Running two episodes at a time five nights a week, the network has thus far made little noise with any of its telenovelas. Ratings for MNT’s telenovelas in the 18- to 49-year-old audience, the primary market for most broadcasters, have been negligible. They have been scoring about half a national rating point — or less — which translates to about 650,000 viewers in that group (compared with 8 million to 10 million viewers for a hit show in the same period).

“Obviously we’re not pleased with the ratings,” said Paul Buccieri, senior vice president of Twentieth Television, the production studio that supplies programming to MNT. (The studio is mainly the syndication arm for the Fox Broadcasting Company.) But Mr. Buccieri emphasized that the ratings have not diminished that network’s conviction that telenovelas would work with American audiences.

“We’re still definitely enthusiastic about the genre,” he said.

MNT’s experience has contributed to the slackening of interest among the big networks. Program executives at one network confirmed that the low ratings for MNT’s telenovelas put a chill on their own plans. Mr. Buccieri said that MyNetworkTV has learned many lessons in trying to make the form work, including adding cost-saving techniques like hand-held cameras. MNT has two more telenovelas in production to fill the gap when the current ones leave off.

Longer term, there are questions about whether the network can stay committed to giving up all its prime-time hours to the genre if the ratings do not improve. Reality shows and game shows would be considerably cheaper.

Still, if MNT connects on even one telenovela, it may reinvigorate the passion for them among the major networks.

Executives at ABC, CBS and NBC all said they still have some telenovela projects in development. Mr. Silverman, who continues to option rights to telenovelas made in Latin America, remains a firm believer. “I think someone should give it a shot,” he said.
Ms. Pope said NBC would almost surely stay in the telenovela game, for several reasons, beginning with its association with Telemundo. NBC owns the rights to all the telenovelas that play on that network (and that is almost the only kind of programming Telemundo does). If NBC did commit to a telenovela, it would shoot it in Miami, where Telemundo is based, finding economies by using that network’s studio and sets.

And then there is the interest of Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal Television. Ms. Pope said, “I personally believe we will definitely make a telenovela. Jeff grew up in Miami, he’s seen the form and he’s very dedicated to it.”

She added that many advertisers have also expressed interest in the genre and had indicated a willingness to sponsor a telenovela if a network decided to produce one.

“Ultimately, we are the best-positioned network to get one done quickly,” Ms. Pope said.

But not very quickly. “I’m not sure when you’ll see one,” she said. “It’s really unlikely anyone will make one as soon as next summer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...elenovela.html





Forget L.C.D.; Go for Plasma, Says Maker of Both
Eric A. Taub

What kind of company takes out ads in daily newspapers attacking one of its own type of products? In the case of Panasonic, the answer is a company that has significant investments in a rival technology.

Panasonic, the consumer electronics company owned by Matsushita Electric Industrial, is the world’s biggest seller of plasma TVs. And it has long extolled the benefits of that technology compared with L.C.D., another flat-panel TV product. At the same time, the company sells a full line of L.C.D. sets.

But the company believes that plasma technology is under unfair attack from competitors making “desperate attempts” to denigrate what it sees as plasma’s superiority, according to Bob Greenberg, Panasonic’s vice president for brand marketing.

There is another issue as well, which is that the profit margins on L.C.D. TVs have fallen sharply because of competition.

To demonstrate plasma is better, the company has offered picture comparisons for journalists at electronics shows. And it has developed marketing materials that dispel some of the myths of plasma’s limitations, like how often to refill the plasma gas (never) and the problems with picture burn-in (none anymore).

This holiday, Panasonic went a step further, running an ad in newspapers around the country under the heading “Six facts you need to know before you buy a large flat-panel TV.” The ad points out plasma’s superior contrast, color rendition, crisp motion, viewing angle and durability when compared to L.C.D. TVs.

Not so fast, says Sony. The company, which exited the plasma TV market to concentrate on L.C.D. sets, is running its own series of sportslike newspaper and magazine ads that promote what it calls an HD challenge. Once consumers see reflections of fluorescent lighting in the plasma set, they will opt for L.C.D., the ad contends.

While most people do not have fluorescent lights in their living rooms, Sony believes its challenge shows how bright light bulbs and other reflections can spoil a picture.

“The showroom is the only place where a consumer can compare two TVs,” said Phil Abram, the company’s vice president of product marketing.

To help Panasonic maintain sales of both technologies, it sells plasma sets from 37 to 65 inches on the diagonal, while its L.C.D. TVs can only be purchased in sizes from 23 to 32 inches. Sony, Sharp and other manufacturers sell L.C.D. sets from 19 to 65 inches on the diagonal.

Panasonic also looks to segregate the market. The company argues that L.C.D. TVs, which look brighter in daylight, are the right choice for kitchens and other rooms that need smaller sizes. But in larger sizes and for fast-moving sports scenes, plasma is the right choice, said Mr. Greenberg. Since the ad campaign began, “field research shows that the dialogue is changing. Once you point out that the blacks in plasma are blacker than in L.C.D., it is like pointing out the rabbit in the painting.”

Both technologies are gaining market share at the expense of traditional tube sets, with L.C.D. sales this year overtaking picture tube sets for the first time.

According to data compiled by the NPD Group, L.C.D. TVs held 49 percent of the market in 2006, compared with 26 percent last year. Plasma’s market share increased to 10 percent from 5 percent. At the same time, sales of picture tube TVs dropped by more than half, to 21 percent this year from 46 percent in 2005.

Does Panasonic’s strong support of plasma technology mean that it will never sell a very large L.C.D. TV? Well, not exactly.

“Panasonic in Japan is studying L.C.D. in its larger formats,” Mr. Greenberg said. “If we introduce larger-sized L.C.D. TVs, we will have overcome the problems in that technology.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...gy/25flat.html





Rip Van Winkle Awakens to a Flat-Screen Life
William L. Hamilton

I’M what you’d call a late adopter. Very late.

Last month, after most of my adult life without one, I bought a television. Not just a television, but a 40-inch Sony Bravia XBR L.C.D. flat-panel high-definition, or HD, television. My only other set, which followed me to New York from college in 1974 and got lost, was 13 inches — smaller than my current laptop and more like a radio than the electronic billboard I live with now.

Caught by the great cresting wave of retail that is the holidays, I helped make 2006 the year of the big-screen, flat-panel television, when larger sizes and lower prices converged to make last year’s luxury item a new market commodity. Analysts project that 6.3 million flat-panel units, in sizes 40 inches and above, will be sold in the last quarter of 2006, more than a 100 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Everything else is television history.

My Bravia XBR arrived at my apartment with handlers, like a celebrity walk-in, or valet parking. Two employees from Best Buy in matching polo shirts installed it, hoisting it onto a table where I kept books, and showed me how to use the remote control, which has 47 buttons. A cable man activated a package of 150 channels, with a credit-card-like device he slipped in the back.

“Nice television,” he said as he left.

Then it was just us, newly engaged and alone. Evening fell awkwardly. Why not watch television, I thought. I picked up the remote, pressed the right corner, and we were on.

What is television like? I can tell you, because it’s likely that, after years of viewing, you can no longer see the forest for the trees.

A few quick observations.

Every other show is “CSI.”

Television sounds loud at any volume.

Karaoke is a cherished plot device.

PBS is even more serious in HD.

Last Thursday night, on “Smallville,” Clark Kent told an alien just landed on Earth, “Wherever you’re from, go back.” She replied, “I can’t.”

I know exactly how she felt.

“We should do a study on you,” said Robert Kubey, a psychologist and director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University, when I called, curious about the effect of introducing television into my life. Was it like a rash trip to the gym — could you sprain yourself psychologically, socially, culturally? Or after two decades of nonparticipation in the national discussion are you damaged goods? I missed all of “Seinfeld” and “Sex and the City,” faking it at the water cooler and at parties with a nod and a smile, like someone who can’t speak the language.

Dr. Kubey, and others, took the interest in me that they might have taken in an isolated tribe. I had no concept of a rerun.

“Television is just like making a hole in the wall,” said Albert Borgmann, a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana who studies technology’s impact. “All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door.”

And quickly. Though I surf the Web with high-speed Internet access, television, with 150 channels at 40 inches and powerful stereophonic sound, was like white-water rafting. Light flew out of the set like spray, as I gripped the remote and rode the river from CBS (2) to PBS (13), “Entertainment Tonight” to “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer.” Then I shot the rapids through the rest — Marvin Hamlisch (food tips), QVC (wrap tops, sold out in two colors), Queens Public Television (children praying), Spike (mixed martial-arts fights).

And prime time was still around the bend, sluiced by ratings and sheer with rock. At 8 o’clock, the season finale of “The Biggest Loser ” (the diet Oscars), “America’s Next Top Model” (a kind of reverse of a talent show) and “CSI: Miami.” At 9, Anna Deavere Smith and bikers against child abuse. By 10 o’clock, “CSI: NY.” Have I told you that every other show is “CSI”?

The most important, quantifiable effect on a person exposed to television, experts told me, is time shifting.

“You shift time to the television,” said Annie Lang, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. “If you start watching television, there’s something else you’re not doing. Who knows what you were doing before?” Reading, seeing friends, bonding with partners, theater, film, restaurants — toast.

(In an e-mail, Dr. Kubey from Rutgers told me I would begin eating meals in front of the television. I have. Over a bowl of spaghetti and a glass of red wine, I watched “Battlestar Galactica” until my neighbor complained about the noise — something that I marked proudly as a rite of passage, as he went back upstairs to begin anticipating the worst. It did bring us closer together.) Given the popularity of the personal computer, and worry about its use, I asked Ms. Lang if television was still Public Enemy No. 1 as far as studies of how a pervasive presence might become corrosive over time. “Historically, we always go after the new technology,” she said, explaining that the computer is only being demonized in its turn. “We always say that it will physically hurt you — it will hurt your eyes. There was research on whether computers cause miscarriage. Then the next wave of research is, ‘Will it hurt children?’ Then, ‘Will it hurt society?’ That’s the pattern of looking into a new technology.”

Computers and televisions are rapidly merging, though, into what could be a super-adversary (or friend), and screen size is the first frontier of that future, media experts agreed.

Because television is “new” again, reincarnated as large flat-panel television, content has to be new, too, to support the excitement, said Mr. Borgmann of the University of Montana.

“You have a mining of taboos and experiences that haven’t been tapped into before,” he said. “The two go together.”

A larger screen also demands more attention, or primary viewing — you sit and you watch it — and less “secondary” viewing, when you walk in and out of the room doing other things. You develop what experts call “attention inertia,” and it becomes difficult to disengage.

Last week, I watched an evening of television. I liked “30 Rock.” I now have an opinion about “Survivor.” And “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The O.C.” wish they were “CSI.” As I got ready to turn the crowd of voices off, stand up and go to bed, I skipped through a few quick channels (the remote has an incredibly light trigger), and decided to watch an episode of “Sex and the City” instead. It felt like reaching for the last beer in the fridge. In rerun, Carrie Bradshaw sounds like she’s imitating Sarah Jessica Parker, someone who became famous to me as Carrie Bradshaw, in a show I’d never seen.

Ms. Lang told me that my age may save my life as I knew it. My brain is too old to rewire.

“It’s lost its plasticity,” she said. That’s why they study children.

I could start getting out more. But my last great outing was shopping for a television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/we...4hamilton.html





Film Reviews | 'Children of Men'

Apocalypse Now, but in the Wasteland a Child Is Given
Manohla Dargis

The end is nigh in “Children of Men,” the superbly directed political thriller by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. It’s 2027, and the human race is approaching the terminus of its long goodbye. Cities across the globe are in flames, and the “siege of Seattle” has entered Day 1,000. In a permanent war zone called Britain, smoke pours into the air as illegal immigrants are swept into detainment camps. It’s apocalypse right here, right now — the end of the world as we knew and loved it, if not nearly enough.

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Merry Christmas! Seriously. “Children of Men” may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking. Like Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” another new film that holds up a mirror to these times, Mr. Cuarón’s speculative fiction is a gratifying sign that big studios are still occasionally in the business of making ambitious, intelligent work that speaks to adults. And much like Mr. Eastwood’s most recent war movie, much like the best genre films of Hollywood history, “Children of Men” doesn’t announce its themes from a bully pulpit, with a megaphone in hand and Oscar in mind, but through the beauty of its form.

It may seem strange, even misplaced to talk of beauty given the horror of the film’s explosive opening. For Theo, the emotionally, physically enervated employee of the Ministry of Energy played without a shred of actorly egotism by Clive Owen, the day begins with a cup of coffee, an ear-shattering explosion and a screaming woman holding her severed arm. The Mexican-born Mr. Cuarón, whose previous credits include the children’s films “A Little Princess” (1995) and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), as well as the supremely sexy road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001), has always had a dark streak. But nothing in his résumé prepares you for the shocking realism of this explosion, which proves all the more terrible because here it is also so very commonplace.

Britain, it emerges, is in permanent lockdown. As the specter of humanity’s end looms, the world has been torn apart by sectarian violence. Britain has closed its borders (the Chunnel too), turning illegal aliens into Public Enemy No. 1. Theo and the other gray men and women adrift in London don’t seem to notice much.

Everywhere there are signs and warnings, surveillance cameras and security patrols. “The world has collapsed,” a public service announcement trumpets, “only Britain soldiers on.” The verb choice is horribly apt, since heavily armed soldiers are ubiquitous. They flank the streets and train platforms, guarding the pervasive metal cages crammed with a veritable Babel of humanity, illegal immigrants who have fled to Britain from hot spots, becoming refugees or “fugees” for short.

Among the fugees is Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the linchpin of the story and its defiantly hopeful heart because she’s pregnant, the first woman on earth to carry a child after 18 barren years. Theo meets Kee through his former lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), the leader of an underground cadre, the Fishes (Chiwetel Ejiofior and Charlie Hunnam, among others), who, having renounced violence if not their heavy guns or lugubrious rhetoric, are fighting for immigrant rights.

Avowedly apolitical, Theo agrees to help the Fishes deliver Kee into the ministering care of a shadowy, perhaps apocryphal utopian group, the Human Project. En route, though, the plan goes violently awry, forcing Theo, Kee and a Fish member and former midwife, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to go on the run, first by car and then by foot.

Where they eventually land is in a hell that looks chillingly similar to the Iraqi combat areas of newspaper reportage, television news and mostly uncensored documentaries. There are several heart-gripping set pieces before then, including a hugely unsettling ambush scene shot almost entirely from inside a car crammed with passengers.

The action is swift, ferocious, spectacularly choreographed, with bodies careening wildly amid a fusillade of bullets and flying glass. Yet what lingers isn’t the technical virtuosity; it’s that after the car screeches off, Mr. Cuarón’s camera quietly lingers behind to show us two dead policemen, murdered in the name of an ideal and left like road kill. He forces us to look at the unspeakable and in doing so opens up a window onto the film’s moral landscape.

“Children of Men” has none of the hectoring qualities that tend to accompany good intentions in Hollywood. Most of the people doing the preaching turn out to be dreadfully, catastrophically misguided; everyone else seems to be holding on, like Theo’s friend Jasper (Michael Caine, wonderful), a former political cartoonist who bides his time with laughter and a lot of homegrown weed while listening to Beatles covers and rap. Still others, like Theo’s wealthy cousin, Nigel (Danny Huston, equally fine), who’s stashing away masterpieces like Michelangelo’s “David” for safekeeping in his private museum while Rome, New York and probably Guernica burn, can only smile as they swill another glass of wine. Hope isn’t the only thing that floats, as a song on the soundtrack reminds us.

The writer Kurt Andersen observed not long ago that we Americans are in an apocalyptic frame of mind. Mr. Andersen thinks that the latest in apocalypticism partly owes something to the aging baby boomers confronting their own impending doom, Sept. 11 and global warming notwithstanding. That’s one way to look at it, though the recent elections suggest that more than a few of those boomers are looking past their own reflection out at the world. Working with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Mr. Cuarón manufactures war zones of extraordinary plausibility in this film, but equally amazing is how, through a carbon-blue palette, handheld camerawork and the sag of a man’s shoulders, he conjures the hopelessness and the despair that I imagine many of us feel when we wake up to news of another fatal car bombing in Iraq.

There are, Mr. Cuarón suggests in “Children of Men,” different ways of waking up. You can either wake up and close your ears and eyes, or like Theo you can wake up until all your senses are roaring. Early in the film Theo and the restlessly moving camera seem very much apart, as Mr. Cuarón keeps a distance from the characters.

Every so often the camera pointedly drifts away from Theo, as it does with the dead policemen, to show us a weeping old woman locked in a cage or animals burning on pyres. In time, though, the camera comes closer to Theo as he opens his eyes — to a kitten crawling up his leg, to trees rustling in the wind — until, in one of the most astonishing scenes of battle I’ve ever seen on film, it is running alongside him, trying to keep pace with a man who has finally found a reason to keep going.

“Children of Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains extremely intense scenes of warfare.

CHILDREN OF MEN

Opens today in New York and other cities.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón; written by Mr. Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, based on the book by P. D. James; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Alex Rodríguez and Mr. Cuarón; music by John Tavener; production designers, Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland; produced by Hilary Shor, Marc Abraham, Tony Smith, Eric Newman and Iain Smith; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 100 minutes.

WITH: Clive Owen (Theo), Julianne Moore (Julian), Michael Caine (Jasper), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Luke), Charlie Hunnam (Patric), Danny Huston (Nigel), Clare-Hope Ashitey (Kee), Peter Mullan (Syd) and Pam Ferris (Miriam).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...es/25chil.html





Pan’s Labyrinth

In Gloom of War, a Child's Paradise
A.O. Scott

Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time — 1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was painfully starting to awaken — “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children’s story — with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication — illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?

The brilliance of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician. The director, Guillermo Del Toro, unapologetically and unpretentiously swears allegiance to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical technique and film history.

This Mexican-born filmmaker’s English-language, Hollywood genre movies — “Blade 2” (2002), “Hellboy” (2004) and the ill-starred but interesting “Mimic” (1997) — have a strangeness and intensity of feeling that sets them apart from others of their kind. In his recent Spanish-language films, “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001) and this new one, he uses the feverish inventiveness of a vulnerable child’s imagination as the basis for his own utterly original, seamlessly effective exploration of power, corruption and resistance.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is his finest achievement so far and a film that already, seven months after it was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival, has the feel of something permanent. Like his friend and colleague Alfonso Cuarón, whose astonishing “Children of Men” opened earlier this week, Mr. Del Toro is helping to make the boundary separating pop from art, always suspect, seem utterly obsolete.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects. A child could grasp its moral insights (though it is not a film I’d recommend for most children), while all but the most cynical of adults are likely to find themselves troubled to the point of heartbreak by its dark, rich and emphatic emotions.

The heroine is a girl named Ofelia, played by the uncannily talented Ivana Baquero, who was 11 when the film was made. Ofelia is the kind of child who eagerly reads stories about fairies, princesses and magic lands, longing to believe that what she reads is real. Mr. Del Toro obliges her wish by conjuring, just beyond the field of vision of the adults in Ofelia’s life, a grotesque, enchanted netherworld governed by the sometimes harsh rules of folk magic.

That realm, in which Ofelia is thought to be a long-lost princess, may exist only in her imagination. Or maybe not: its ambiguous status is crucial to the film’s coherence. Like the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, Mr. Del Toro is less interested in debunking or explaining away the existence of magic than in surveying the natural history of enchantment.

The forest around the old mill where Ofelia and her mother come to live is full of signs and portents: old carved stones and half-buried, crumbling structures that attest to a pre-modern, pre-Christian body of lore and belief. In much of the West that ancient magic survives in the form of bedtime stories and superstitions, and these in turn, as Mr. Del Toro evokes them, lead back through the maze of human psychology into the profound mysteries of nature.

Ofelia’s second reality — inhabited by a wide-browed faun, a man whose eyes are in the palms of his hands (both played by Doug Jones), a giant toad, some mantislike insects and many other curious creatures — can be a pretty scary place, and on her visits to it the girl is, like many a fairy-tale heroine, subjected to various challenges and ordeals. Still, this vivid world of fairies offers her an escape from the oppression of a day-to-day existence dominated by her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer in Franco’s army who seems to live by the maxim that fascism begins at home.

A patriarch both by temperament and ideology, the captain treats Ofelia’s mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), with chilly, humiliating decorum, making it clear that she is of value to him only because she is pregnant with his son. He takes pleasure in the exercise of authority and in the trappings of military discipline, addressing himself to the torture of captured resistance fighters with sadistic relish. He seems happiest when he is inflicting pain.

The partisans up in the hills — and their sympathizers in the captain’s own household, including the housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) and the doctor (Alex Angulo) who attends to Carmen — represent one of the film’s alternatives to the militarized, hierarchical society taking shape in post-civil war Spain. Their easy solidarity and ragged mufti stand in emphatic contrast to the crisp uniforms and exaggerated obeisances of Vidal and his men. At his dinner table the captain gloats that Franco and his followers have defeated the “mistaken” egalitarianism of their republican opponents.

Like “The Devil’s Backbone,” which also took place in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, “Pan’s Labyrinth” is not overly concerned with moral subtlety. In Mr. López’s perversely charismatic performance, Vidal is a villain of the purest, ugliest kind. For Mr. Del Toro the opposite of evil is not holiness, but decency.

Ofelia serves as her stepfather’s foil not because of her absolute goodness or innocence but rather because she is skeptical, stubborn and independent-minded. Her rebellion is as much against Carmen’s passivity as it is against Vidal’s brutality, and she gravitates toward the brave Mercedes as a kind of surrogate mother.

Mercedes’s surreptitious visits to the rebels often coincide with Ofelia’s journeys into fairyland, and it may be that the film’s romantic view of the noble, vanquished Spanish Republic is itself something of a fairy tale. To note this is merely to identify a humanist, utopian strain in Mr. Del Toro’s vision, a generous, sorrowful view of the world that is not entirely alien to the history of horror movies. (Think of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” for example, a film linked to “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Victor Erice’s “Spirit of the Beehive,” one of the few masterpieces of Spanish cinema made before Franco’s death.)

Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console as well as terrify. What distinguishes “Pan’s Labyrinth,” what makes it art, is that it balances its own magical thinking with the knowledge that not everyone lives happily ever after.

The story has two endings, two final images that linger in haunting, unresolved tension. Here is a princess, smilingly restored to her throne, bathed in golden subterranean light. And here is a grown woman weeping inconsolably in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic violence and occasional obscene language.

PAN’S LABYRINTH

Opens today in New York.

Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Guillermo Del Toro; director of photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Bernat Vilaplana; music by Javier Navarrete; production designer, Eugenio Caballero; produced by Bertha Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and Álvaro Augustin; released by Picturehouse. Running time: 119 minutes.

WITH: Sergi López (Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Alex Angulo (Doctor) and Doug Jones (Pale Man).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...es/29laby.html





Not for the Faint of Heart or Lazy of Thought
Manohla Dargis

EACH year my favorite films shift depending on the day, the hour, the minute. Recently, fond memories of a few bite-size favorites were supplanted by fonder recollections of Guy Maddin’s nuttily wonderful “Brand Upon the Brain!,” which I watched in a 1913 movie palace while attending the Toronto International Film Festival. (It later played as part of the New York Film Festival.) Generational anomie of a very American independent sort had been pushed aside by Mr. Maddin’s homage to silent cinema with its live narration, full orchestra, three Foley artists and a castrato in a fur hat.

As delightful as “Brand Upon the Brain!” is, this was a disappointing year, partly because there was nothing as sublime as Terrence Malick’s “New World,” as thrilling as David Cronenberg’s “History of Violence.” The big studio offerings included the usual mixed bag of pricey schlock (“The Da Vinci Code”), deflated pop (“Superman Returns”) and garbage (“Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties”). The studio dependents seemed more timid than ever, with few, outside Sony Pictures Classics, even bothering to release foreign-language films. Though some smaller distributors stepped up with the goods (“Half Nelson”), not enough filmgoers bothered to go to the theater. It would be nice to think that the missing art-house audience will catch up with “Duck Season” on DVD, but I wonder.

If not for Clint Eastwood and Alfonso Cuarón, this drab holiday season would be a washout. Increasingly, film companies are cramming their best Oscar bets into December, a scenario that benefits no one, including the filmmakers and their audiences. It’s particularly instructive to watch the studios attempt to win favor with critics, whom they tend to treat with contempt the rest of the year. In Los Angeles, where I live, that contempt is in full evidence at press screenings where attendees are routinely wanded and their belongings searched. It’s not supposed to be personal, even when strangers order you to stand with your arms and legs outstretched so you can be wanded. Happily, I saw the best film of the year in New York:Originally released in France in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece, “Army of Shadows,” received its American theatrical release this year thanks to the invaluable programmer and distributor Bruce Goldstein, who makes Film Forum one of New York’s most important destinations. Mr. Melville based the film on Joseph Kessel’s 1943 French Resistance novel and on his own experience fighting in the Maquis, which probably explains why he painted the story a darker shade than did the original author. Writing during the war, Mr. Kessel needed hope. Many years later, Mr. Melville could afford to express his pessimism through an austere mise-en-scène in which Resistance fighters carry the shame of a nation on their squared shoulders, and a man’s fallen hat rocks on a cobblestone street, an allusion to the head that will soon roll.

Clint Eastwood’s "Letters From Iwo Jima” confirms his reputation as one of the greatest directors working today, and one of the few for whom filmmaking is a moral imperative. As dark in palette and heart as “Army of Shadows,” and as thoroughly and bracingly stripped of sentimentality, Mr. Eastwood’s film takes us inside the shadowy caves of Iwo Jima, where Japanese soldiers battle against the same American soldiers represented in the director’s “Flags of Our Fathers.” In “Iwo Jima,” Mr. Eastwood humanizes the Japanese without evading their barbarism; rather shockingly, neither does he flinch when it comes to the Americans. Here, historical enemies turn into human beings, and then they die and die and die and die, becoming yet another army of shadows.

David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” isn’t for the faint of heart or lazy of thought, notably those for whom moviegoing is simply a more socially acceptable version of sucking on a pacifier. Like the Austrian documentary “Our Daily Bread,” the film makes for harrowing, demanding, sometimes unpleasant and insistently engaged viewing, but it’s also mysterious and exciting to think about. It recalls what the filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas said in the early 1960s about avant-garde films he called Baudelairean: “It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.” That more or less says it all, superbly.

Admirers of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” will find much to appreciate in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s“Our Daily Bread.” Yet what makes this remarkable film about industrial food production among this year’s best isn’t its sometimes shocking subject matter, but its formal rigor. This year’s crop of nonfiction titles included PowerPoint presentations, cut-and-paste news reports and the usual exercises in dithering solipsism, precious few of which were well considered, shot and edited. The relative cheapness of digital video has been a boon to documentary film (really, video) makers, who can now shoot miles of badly composed imagery and, if the subject matter is zingy or exploitative enough, earn credit where none is due. “Our Daily Bread” is a vivid reminder that aesthetics are part of the documentary ethos, not added value.

Directed and written by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, “L’Enfant” keeps close watch as an amoral young thief becomes a man of conscience. The urgency of the filmmaking and the shocking setup — the thief sells his newborn son for money — give “L’Enfant” the feel of a thriller and the heft of a Bible story. Despite that heaviness and the seemingly unforgivable nature of the crime, the film moves fast and feels fleet, partly because the thief spends much of the story running from the cops, from his marks, from himself. There is much to cherish in the film, including the obvious fact that the Dardennes are not interested in right versus wrong; they are, rather, concerned with humanity, including their own.

The people over at Universal Pictures, who have decided to open “Children of Men” on Christmas Day, either have a seriously wicked sense of humor or (my guess) don’t think this story about the end of the world stands a chance among the other holiday offerings. That’s too bad. The film certainly sounds like a downer — with no more children being born, human beings are staring into the abyss of their own future — but so does “Blade Runner.” Brilliantly directed by Alfonso Cuarón, “Children of Men” won’t connect with those audiences who like their dystopian fictions to end with a family hug, but there’s lots to love and respect here, starting with the genius of Mr. Cuarón’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki.

In “Three Times,” which traces love across three different time frames, the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien recombines themes, textures and moods from several of his earlier features. The film’s first section, “A Time for Love,” which takes place in the mid-1960s and features the hypnotic repetition of the song “Rain and Tears,” is a masterwork in miniature. One of the pleasures of Mr. Hou’s visual style, the deliberation with which he moves the camera and cuts his scenes together, is that it allows you to really enter the story with the characters, so you can fall in love alongside them. The characters barely seem to be looking at each other, but Mr. Hou’s camera misses nothing.

Michael Mann doesn’t always receive the critical respect he deserves, partly because he likes to make genre films; maybe if he had hired Jack Nicholson to run around with Crockett and Tubbs he might have at least seduced the audience. Glorious entertainment, “Miami Vice” is a gorgeous, shimmering object, and it made me think more about how new technologies are irrevocably changing our sense of what movies look like than any film I’ve seen this year. Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.

Mr. Maddin’s “Brand Upon the Brain!” and Sacha Baron Cohen’s merciless “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” round out my list. Mr. Baron Cohen’s comedy has provoked some amusing huffing and puffing from detractors, along with a handful of lawsuits. One common complaint about the film is that it is mean. So it is; so are the Three Stooges. But unlike Larry, Curly and Moe. Mr. Baron Cohen mixes some savage political critique in with his high jinks and mischief. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter, who apparently needed to be dispatched from Kazakhstan to Austria to actually watch “Borat,” declared it “the film of the year” as well as “cruelly anti-American.” Cruel, but fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/movies/24darg.html





Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation)
Louis Uchitelle

AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here.

Import penetration, as it is called, worried economists and policymakers when it first became noticeable 20 years ago. Many considered factory production a crucial component of the nation’s wealth and power. As imports gained ground, however, that view changed; the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.

Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, put it: “We want people who can design iPods, not make them.”

But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.

“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,” said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.”

Mr. Cohen is a partisan. He was a co-author of the 1987 book “Manufacturing Matters,” one of the first to sound an alarm as imports began to displace domestic output. But even the National Association of Manufacturers, which is supportive of members like Whirlpool and General Electric who shift production abroad, agrees that sooner or later innovation and production must go hand in hand.

Franklin J. Vargo, the association’s vice president for international economic affairs, sounds even more concerned than Mr. Cohen. “If manufacturing production declines in the United States,” he said, “at some point we will go below critical mass and then the center of innovation will shift outside the country and that will really begin a decline in our living standards.”

As it is with global warming, the crisis is in the future. Manufacturing output is not likely to fall below critical mass, as Mr. Vargo puts it, in this generation — or perhaps for several generations. The United States is still a powerhouse in manufacturing, and the output of the nation’s factories continues to rise. The problem is that the craving for manufactured goods in this country is rising faster than output, and imports are filling the gap, particularly in crucial industries.

Measuring this growing shortfall is imprecise. The government does not do the calculation, and outsiders must put together numbers from more than one federal database to make estimates. Mr. Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com calculates that 20.5 percent of the manufactured goods bought in America last year were imported. That was up from 11.7 percent in 1992 and 20 percent in 2004. Only once since 1992 did the penetration rate slip — by four-tenths of a percentage point in 2001, a recession year.

The other big industrial nations — France, Germany, Japan, England, Canada — also find themselves importing more and more of what they consume. In this comparison, the United States is not even high on the list, reflecting its preglobalization starting point in the 1970s as a much more closed economy than the others.

But the country-to-country comparisons hide a disturbing trend. Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, argues that in this country, import penetration is rising faster in core industries like machine-tool building than it is in other countries. And these are the industries that are, or should be, centers of innovation and invention.

“If you keep some production here, that is O.K.,” Mr. Cohen said. “But a lot of companies are not doing that, or slowly ceasing to do so. It is a complicated mosaic.”

Mr. Tonelson’s efforts to document the exodus are part of his job. His organization represents small manufacturers who keep production at home much more than a General Electric or a Whirlpool. They suffer from import penetration more than the multinationals. The Business and Industry Council even favors tariffs as a protective measure — a red flag for many mainstream Democrats and Republicans, who shun any suggestion that they might be protectionist.

Still, Mr. Tonelson, using the same data and the same methodology as Mr. Zandi, but delving into individual industries, finds that the United States is importing more than 50 percent — and in some cases close to 90 percent — of the machine tools used in this country, the aircraft engines and engine parts, the parts that go into cars and trucks, the industrial valves, the printed circuits, the optical instruments and lenses, the telephone switching apparatus, the machines that mold plastics, the broadcasting equipment used for radio, television and wireless transmissions. The list goes on.

“It is hard to imagine,” Mr. Tonelson said, “how an international economy can remain successful if it jettisons its most technologically advanced components.”

HIS alarm is not widely shared. Most economists and policy analysts say America’s growing service sector and powerful financial sector will eventually offset deterioration in manufacturing. In the short run, these optimists count on a falling dollar, particularly vis-à-vis the Chinese yuan, to put a brake on imports by making them more expensive, and to encourage exports by making them less costly in foreign currency. Thus will America gradually reverse its still-ballooning trade deficit.

But implicit in this solution is the belief that industries gone, or nearly gone, will come quickly back to life, and that skills given up can be quickly reacquired.

“Economists assume that the factors of production respond very quickly,” Mr. Cohen said. “They don’t. If you were a chief executive, would you build an expensive factory here on the strength of a shift in the exchange rate?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/bu...ey/24view.html





Hewlett-Packard, Recasting Itself, Is Looking Beyond PCs and Printers
Damon Darlin

Hewlett-Packard is looking for a second act. Several of them, actually.

Its turnaround was confirmed this year when profits from PCs and corporate servers and storage devices nearly doubled from a year earlier. It sold more PCs than any other maker and claimed the title of the world’s largest technology company.

Now it has to sustain those gains. The $92 billion company has set a goal of growing 6 percent next year and the year after. That means it must add about $5.5 billion a year in new revenue, or about what Yahoo produces each year in total revenue. “Scale has enormous advantages,” Mark V. Hurd, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview. “One disadvantage is that billions of dollars of annual revenue growth may appear underwhelming expressed as a simple percentage figure.”

The Law of Big Numbers is the bane of any giant company. It decrees that a behemoth has a harder time growing as quickly as a small and nimble company. Hewlett-Packard is no exception.

It has cut 15,000 employees and plans to trim more of its $84 billion in expenses to become more efficient and deploy the savings for growth, but cost-cutting improves the bottom line faster than it does the top line. A debt-free company with an $11 billion cash hoard, H.P. could acquire other companies, but it has said it prefers not to make any major acquisitions. It still needs to add revenue by growing from within, and that will not be easy.

“H.P. could do both,” said Benjamin Reitzes, an analyst with UBS Investment Research. “A company with almost $100 billion in revenue should be doing both.”

It has some ideas. It is moving quickly to build printers for almost any application in which ink hits paper. Analysts say that is a slam dunk. Two other areas that the company has identified for growth, selling cost-efficient corporate data centers and consumer electronics, pose considerably more risk.

Mr. Reitzes is confident that Mr. Hurd can succeed. “He’s worked some magic before,” he said.

Printers are H.P.’s sure thing. It makes nearly half of all printers sold across the globe. The printer unit contributes half the company’s profits with enviable profit margins of 15 percent because of the ink and toner it sells for those printers.

So far, the company has avoided becoming complacent. It dominates the market for home printing, where 55 percent of all digital photographs are printed. As consumers have begun shifting to printing digital photographs at stores, it is following them to wherever they choose to print. It builds in-store printing kiosks, sells digital prints online through its Snapfish.com service and runs the online or backshop photo-printing operations for major retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Costco.

It is part of a shift in emphasis from printers to printing. “Anything that is printed is an opportunity for H.P.,” said Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president for the imaging and printing group.

So the company is now selling large digital presses to commercial printers who make billboards or in-store marketing materials. It recently sold color digital presses to Amazon.com, the online retailer, which uses them to print books on demand. The payoff is obvious. “When you talk about liters of ink rather than milliliters of ink, that is exciting for us,” said Mr. Joshi.

H.P.’s move to sell the data center of the future stems from its own perpetual drive to cut its overhead. As it consolidates its 85 United States data centers into 6, it is creating a showcase that its sales team can point to: a computer room that would cost significantly less to run because it would be energy efficient and run with few technicians.

“What we are recommending to our customers is huge,” Mr. Hurd said. “Every company wants to do what we are doing. We think everyone has to do it sooner or later.”

Air-conditioning units at its data center in its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters used to blow out air at 58 degrees to cool the racks of servers and storage devices. Now, because of sensors that monitor the temperature of the air circulating next to the devices, sufficient cooling can be achieved with a 66-degree setting. The result is a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption, the company says, representing enough electricity in that 100-server room to cool 116 homes.

An added benefit: The room is quieter. Not that it matters because the company’s plan is to automate every process so a technician need visit only when there is a error that software managing the center cannot solve. “We are about halfway to a 24/7 lights-out data center,” said Chandrakant Patel, an H.P. fellow and the research scientist with H.P. Labs who helped design the Dynamic Cooling software.

The technology is there. Whether it will succeed depends on how convincing the hundreds of sales representatives the company is now hiring can be.

The third goal is to move beyond the traditional PC. Hewlett-Packard is clearly benefiting from the shift in consumer preferences toward notebook PCs. As the entertainment-obsessed consumer shifts toward ever more mobile devices like hand-held video players and phones that can function as mini-PCs, the company wants to be ready with always-connected devices that may blur the differences between a PC and consumer electronic devices.

“It is an important part of the vision we have,” said Shane Robinson, H.P.’s chief technology officer.

These “managed home” products may be the toughest part of the company’s growth strategy to execute.

H.P. has been selling TVs for several years, even selling them in Best Buy, the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer. But it has not broken into the upper ranks of TV makers, where Sony, Samsung and Sharp hold court. The company’s products are in 28,000 stores, but it has been unable to use the considerable clout it has with retailers who sell its notebooks and printers to push its TVs and other consumer products, said A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein.

Hewlett-Packard’s hand-held devices are aimed at corporate users, a market that is collapsing, and most of the products are considered flops. The entire iPaq line of H.P. hand-helds is being overhauled this year to focus on wireless connectivity, said Todd Bradley, the executive vice president of the PC unit.

Stephen Baker, a technology analyst with the market consulting firm NPD, which sells data to H.P., said it was still too early to judge the company’s progress. “They haven’t had high expectations and went about it slowly and deliberately,” he said. “They don’t have the high numbers because they haven’t been ready.”

For his part, Mr. Hurd said: “The managed home will happen, but it may evolve at a slower pace than in enterprise. You can spend a lot on the managed home and not get a return.”

That time may be near. The company has three new but unheralded products that point in the direction it is headed. The Media Smart TV is a flat-panel 37-inch liquid-crystal-display TV that automatically pulls in content stored on a PC or other networked devices with a hard drive. It costs $2,000, a 50 percent premium over its regular 37-inch L.C.D. set.

The $570 iPaq Travel Companion is a hand-held device with a screen that lets users watch videos through a wireless connection to the Internet. And the Media Vault, a storage device, is attached to the home network to store music, movies and photos. It is priced at $350 to $500 depending on how much data it stores. “We are about a year ahead of anyone else,” Mr. Bradley said.

But the products are hard to find in the stores — in part, company executives concede, because they are pioneering a new category. “The retailers are adjusting to how to sell the products,” said Satjiv Chahil, the senior vice president for the PC division’s marketing. “When you are doing breakthrough products, the normal distribution doesn’t pick it up all the way,” he said.

That may change as Apple Computer pushes forward with its own connected TV, the iTV, and as other companies announce similar strategies at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “The Apple iTV? It’s a Media Smart wannabe,” Mr. Chahil said. “Steve Jobs is validating a behavioral change and an industry direction. The good news is that we were there a year in advance.”

“Consumers keep telling us they want something that is insanely simple,” Mr. Hurd said. He added that the company believes the new Media Smart TV to be “insanely simple.”

The problem for Hewlett-Packard is that to keep pace with market changes, the company that Mr. Hurd describes as “the world’s leading I.T. infrastructure company” may have to recast the PC part of itself as a consumer electronics company like Sony, Samsung or that other computer maker that has made the shift, Apple. And that will not be easy.

“If we want to be a great company, we can’t do one thing,” Mr. Hurd said. “We need to do multiple things at all times.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...25hewlett.html





Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights

A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations
Joseph E Stiglitz

At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of "intellectual property rights."

Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to "zero marginal costs" and "non-rivalrous consumption") when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.

We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year's treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; 170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version. Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.

Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way ... You can't expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale."

Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.

A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.

The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.

The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7582/1279





What Questions Would You Ask An RIAA 'Expert'?
NewYorkCountryLawyer asks:

"In UMG v. Lindor, the RIAA has submitted an 'expert' report and 26-page curriculum vitae, prepared by Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University who is the RIAA's expert witness in all of its cases against consumers, relating to alleged copyright infringement by means of a shared files folder on Kazaa, and supposed analysis of the hard drive of a computer in Ms. Lindor's apartment.

The RIAA's 'experts' have been shut down in the Netherlands and Canada, having been shown by Prof. Sips and Dr. Pouwelse of Delft University's Parallel and Distributed Systems research group to have failed to do their homework, but are still operating in the USA. The materials were submitted in connection with a motion to compel Ms. Lindor's son, who lives 4 miles away from her, to turn over his computer and music listening devices to the RIAA.

Both Ms. Lindor's attorney and Ms. Lindor's son's attorney have objected to the introduction of these materials, but Dr. Jacobson's document production and deposition are scheduled for January and February, and we would love to get the tech community's ideas for questions to ask, and in general your reactions, thoughts, opinions, information, and any other input you can share with us. (In case you haven't guessed, we are the attorneys for Ms. Lindor.)"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/28/0141221





No code for you!

Judge Rules Against Jennings, Democrats to Seat Buchanan
AP

A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race.

Circuit Judge William Gary ruled that Jennings' arguments about the possibility of lost votes were "conjecture," and didn't warrant overriding the trade secrets of the voting machine company.

Democrats in Congress meanwhile, said they'd allow Republican Vern Buchanan to take the seat next Thursday, but with a warning that the inquiry wasn't over and that his hold on it could be temporary.

The state has certified Buchanan the winner of the District 13 race by a scant 369 votes.

The ruling Friday from Judge Gary prevents for now the Jennings camp from being able to use the programming code to try to show voting machines used in Sarasota County malfunctioned. Jennings claims that an unusually large number of undervotes _ ballots that didn't show a vote _ recorded in the race implies the machines lost the votes.

"The judge has reaffirmed that there is no merit to Christine Jennings' baseless allegations that the voting machines malfunctioned," Buchanan spokeswoman Sally Tibbetts said in a statement released by his campaign. "As noted by the judge in today's ruling, two parallel tests conducted by the state revealed '100 percent accuracy of the equipment in reporting the vote selections.'"

Reggie Mitchell, a lawyer for People for the American Way, a group working with the Jennings campaign in challenging the election results, said the judge's decision would likely be appealed.

"We'd like to get (the code) and prove our case as opposed to listening to the state and (the voting machine company's) theories," Mitchell said.

Jennings still has a complaint filed before Congress, which is the ultimate arbiter of who will fill the seat. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Katherine Harris, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate.

"The House has the power to collect evidence and make a decision about who, if anyone, was duly elected to represent the people of the 13th district," U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., said Friday before the judge's ruling. Holt plans to make an official statement next week making it clear that by seating Buchanan, the House isn't forfeiting the right to reverse that decision later.

"No one who is in a disputed election like this should get too comfortable in the House of Representatives," Holt said in a news conference at the Capitol.

But that was before Gary put a dent in Jennings' plans with his ruling Friday, in which he said that testimony by experts for Jennings about how unlikely it was that voters would have chosen to simply skip the race was merely "conjecture."

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the judge's ruling Friday didn't change plans by the House to investigate the election, and also noted that the ruling isn't final because Jennings can appeal.

But Democrats have no plans to block Buchanan from taking the seat, deciding the people of the southwest Florida district should have representation while the contest is being decided, Hammill said.

"This is the best way to maintain representation for Florida District 13 while allowing the two appropriate challenges to run their course," said Hammill.

Jennings said she agreed.

"I think it's the right thing to do, to seat Vern Buchanan temporarily while we gather evidence," Jennings said before Gary's ruling. "But I am pursuing this and I do believe I will end up being the representative for the people of the 13th District."

Neither Jennings nor her lawyers could be immediately reached following Gary's ruling.

Holt said Democrats were sending a message that the winner of the seat should be decided deliberately.

"This is not going to be a Congress where procedural matters are determined by brute force," he said. But, he said he believed the evidence would show that the vote was marred and there was a good possibility Jennings would ultimately be seated.

The electronic touch-screen machines used in Sarasota County are at the center of the challenge.

Some 18,000 Sarasota County electronic ballots did not register a vote in the race, a much higher undervote rate _ nearly 15 percent _ than in others such as those for governor or U.S. Senate. Jennings contends the machines lost the votes. Buchanan backers and the company say that if there was an unusually large undervote it was likely because of bad ballot design.

The state found no evidence of malfunctions in the machines, which were made by Election Systems & Software.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...AKING/61229007





Linux is Equal to a Genuine Windows
Rick

While webdeveloping I heard I had a weird javascript quirck in on of my backends of burningCat in Internet Explorer. Although I am working on Ubuntu I installed IE6 (via ies4linux). After a short while debugging and restarting IE6, Internet Explorer gave me the option to upgrade to IE7. I know that you have to have a genuine copy of windows, however I gave it a try, because linux might just be better than a genuine copy of windows . The results was rather surprising......

First of all I had to select my Windows version. Well I had to lie a little since I don't have a Windows version, however not being a spoilsport I selected the XP variant. MS accepted my little lie and proceeded to the next page prompting "Validation required". I gave it a try and received a message that "due to security settings activeX controls were prohibited to be executed". Not a bad thing, since activeX is one of the major disadvantages in IE.

However MS offers also a different validation type via an executable. MS trusted my linux completely and gave me a code to enter for validation. I entered the code and proceeded to the next page. MS did think I own a Genuine copy of windows and offers me the option to download the new Internet Explorer.

However IE7 isn't that big to start developing for, therefore I decided not to 'upgrade' IE6, however there is a possibility to do so under linux.
http://www.internetschoon.nl/viewSin...ne-Windows.htm





Microsoft Ad Push is All About You
Aaron O. Patrick

Microsoft is making a global push to sell advertisements targeted at the interests and demographic of individual users on its popular Hotmail email service, msn.com news page and other Microsoft-owned sites.

Putting ads in front of people based on their Internet use, known as "behavioral targeting," is becoming more common as techniques to monitor Web use get more sophisticated. Microsoft is aiming to grab a bigger slice of the online advertising market, where it currently lags behind Google and Yahoo.

The Redmond, Wash., giant says it can take behavioral targeting to a higher level. It has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its free Hotmail email service -- the biggest in the world -- with information gained from monitoring their searches.

When people sign up to use Hotmail, they are asked for 13 pieces of personal information, including age, occupation and address -- though providing all the data isn't obligatory. If they use Live Search, Microsoft's rival to Google's search, the company can keep a record of which words people searched for and the results they clicked on.

For advertisers, combining these two sets of information could allow them to better target the ads they send to people's computers, and avoid wasting people's time with irrelevant ads, according to Chris Dobson, Microsoft's global head of advertising sales. Microsoft is using the information to sell ad space on Microsoft Web pages, including msn.com and Hotmail.

Microsoft executives say the system works anonymously and they won't pass on people's names or addresses to advertisers. Executives say they want to foster confidence in users to build a long-term business, and one that gives an incentive to not misuse personal details.

The system allows advertisers to send different ads to each person surfing the Web. For instance, if a 25-year-old financial analyst living in a big city were comparing prices of cars online, BMW could send an ad for a Mini Cooper. But it could send a 45-year-old suburban businessman with children an ad for the X5 SUV, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

Here's how it works: If someone types in "compare car prices" on Live Search, Microsoft's computers note that the person is probably considering buying a vehicle. The computers then check with the list of Hotmail accounts to see if they have any information on the person. If they do, and an auto maker has paid Microsoft to target this type of person, the computer will automatically send a car ad when she next looks at a Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should see more ads that are of interest to them. "We know what Web sites they have visited and what key words they used," says Mr. Dobson. "We can deduce what their interests are." Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76 percent.

Microsoft launched the system in the U.S. in September and plans to roll it out around the world, says Mr. Dobson. So far, Microsoft says it has signed up about 100 advertisers, although a spokeswoman declined to name any of them.

"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come," says Simon Andrews, chief digital strategy officer for WPP Group's MindShare, a large buyer of ad time. "There is a lot of potential to know if people have been looking at specific sites."

The company has sold ads on Hotmail and its other sites for many years. Previously, though, the system wasn't as specialized: Advertisers could tailor ads for individuals depending on what country they lived in, for instance, ensuring French ads didn't appear on U.S. Web sites. Microsoft has never before matched Hotmail users' personal information with what they're doing online.

The move is part of a push by Microsoft to grab a larger share of the rapidly growing Internet advertising market. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, Microsoft's online ad revenue rose 5 percent, though the company didn't disclose the amount. During the same period, ad revenue at Google jumped 70 percent to $2.69 billion; at Yahoo, it rose 18 percent to $1.16 billion.

In addition to Hotmail, Microsoft has recently launched other sites that rely on advertising, including Windows Live Spaces, a social-networking site that competes with News Corp.'s MySpace. It also has introduced advertising to existing sites, including Office Online, a Web site with updates for its Office software.

Mr. Dobson, a former executive with ad-buying agency ZenithOptimedia, a unit of Publicis Groupe, is in charge of all online ad sales for Microsoft. Last month, he succeeded Joanne Bradford, Microsoft's global ad-sales chief, who was promoted to run the MSN Web sites. Mr. Dobson, who is based in London, had been Ms. Bradford's deputy.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06361/749452-96.stm





Verizon to Allow Ads on Its Mobile Phones
Matt Richtel

VERIZON WIRELESS, among the nation’s most widely advertised brands, is poised to become the advertising medium itself.

Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said.

The development is a substantive and symbolic advance toward the widespread appearance of marketing messages on the smallest of screens. Advertisers have been increasing the amount they spent on mobile marketing, despite lingering questions about the effectiveness of ads on portable phones.

Verizon officials said their initial foray would be a cautious one — they will limit where ads can appear, and exclude certain kinds of video clips — and thus may invite greater demand to place ads then they can accommodate.

“We know we can make significant dollars in mobile Web advertising in 2007,” said John Harrobin, vice president of marketing and digital media for Verizon Wireless. “That said, we likely will not — we want to take it carefully and methodically, and enable the right experience.” More generally, he added, “Mobile advertising is going to take off in 2007.”

•

In absolute terms, the amount of money spent on advertising on mobile phones has been small but it has been growing rapidly. In 2005, advertisers spent $45 million on such messages, and should spend around $150 million this year, according to Ovum Research, which projects that such spending will reach $1.3 billion by 2010.

The interest of advertisers in the medium stems from a theory that ads placed on mobile phones could create a particularly intimate bond with consumers. The gadgets are ubiquitous, personal, and messages could theoretically be tailored to individuals based on demographics like age, gender and location.

Numerous factors have limited the growth of cellphone advertising. Chief among those factors has been the reticence of carriers to allow ads to appear alongside news, sports and other information that is provided by their official content partners. These partners, from ESPN to USA Today and dozens of others, appear on the content menus that subscribers see when they use their phones to search for information over the Internet.

Carriers have also been concerned about annoying cellphone users with obtrusive marketing messages.

In October, Sprint became the first major carrier to allow advertisements to appear with content that is listed on its menus, or as they are known in the industry, their official content “decks.” Cingular, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, declined to comment on whether it would allow advertising on its decks.

The participation of the carriers would greatly broaden the potential audience. Seventy to 80 percent of what people view on their cellphones derives from links on these decks. The rest of the content is viewed “off deck” — on innumerable content sites that wireless consumers are free to access over the Internet.

Lack of access to these cellphone screens “is one of the biggest considerations right now,” and has limited growth, said Angela Steele, a mobile marketing expert at Starcom USA, a media buying and planning firm whose clients include Kellogg, Nintendo, Oracle and Allstate.

Even without cooperation from carriers, advertisers have been able to reach consumers visiting off-deck sites, and such marketing has grown in size and in scope.

The first advertisers drawn to mobile phones tended to be quick-serve restaurants and hotels — businesses that people might want access to on the go. But increasingly, there is traditional brand marketing, said Jeff Janer, chief marketing officer for Third Screen Media, a mobile ad management company that pairs advertisers and agencies with providers of mobile content, like USA Today and the Weather Channel.

Mr. Janer said an example of the evolution took place over the last few months as Unilever ran an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter campaign on mobile phones. The campaign, which Mr. Janer said cost $75,000 to $100,000, placed small banner ads on sites like the Weather Channel that urged consumers to click on a link to visit the “Kitchen of Love.” The link took them to a site featuring Fabio, the romance heartthrob, who is spokesman for the ad campaign.

“It’s the first consumer products group we’ve run on mobile,” Mr. Janer said.

Mr. Janer, echoing the sentiment of executives from traditional ad agencies, said that mobile phone ad budgets were growing. He said that a year ago, advertisers typically committed $25,000 for a campaign of four to six weeks. That figure is now $150,000 to $200,000, he said.

The ads have tended to involve simple banners or text messages, like those connected to the “American Idol” show, in which consumers are urged to send in a vote. Or they have offered digital coupons, like those that allow Dunkin’ Donut customers to show a coupon on their phone at the counter to get a 99 cent latte. Or they have involved sweepstakes offers.

Increasingly, driven by the growing capability and speed of wireless networks, they involve more intensive graphics, and, to a much lesser degree, video clips.

Despite these developments, advertisers continue to have serious questions about the effectiveness of mobile ads. While acknowledging there is potential for a particularly intimate relationship with phone users, advertisers say there is a dearth of data about whether the ads are motivating consumer behavior.

“There’s still a question of cost and value,” said David Cohen, executive vice president and United States director of digital communications for Universal McCann, an ad agency, whose clients include Microsoft, Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Wendy’s. The agency last week said it had signed a deal to use ad management software provided by Third Screen Media to deliver mobile ads and try to track their effectiveness.

Mr. Cohen said mobile advertising still appeared to be costly and inefficient. Because of a constrained supply of quality ad space, he said, the cost per thousand impressions is around $40, compared to $10 to $15 on the Internet.

•

David Goodrich, director of digital for the West Coast region for OMD, an ad agency, said he did not believe mobile advertising could be particularly effective until marketers could regularly and easily buy space for video clips.

Advertisers “are crazed to get information” onto the phones, Mr. Goodrich said. But the effectiveness “will be really limited until you’ve enabled site, sound and motion.”

That will not be happening anytime soon on Verizon, according to Mr. Harrobin. He said that during extensive tests the company did in determining whether to run ads, and how to run them, it determined that consumers find short, stand-alone video advertisements to be intrusive.

But Mr. Harrobin said that in the tests, consumers did seem to accept a single banner at the top of a page.

“What we don’t want to do is repeat the mistakes of the Internet — spam, interstitials, pop-ups,” Mr. Harrobin said. Bored, offended or inconvenienced consumers could quickly blame Verizon and leave for another service, hurting the wireless carrier’s core business and reducing its monthly subscription fees.

“We offer voice services,” he said of Verizon’s core business. Advertising “is tertiary on top of that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/bu...ia/26adco.html





Away From the Tour Group, an MP3 Player as Your Guide
Joe Sharkey

I AVOID guided tours in interesting cities because the tours are usually dumbed down to accommodate, say, the inquisitive dimwit who thinks Robespierre was a fashion designer in Paris.

So I usually go it alone when I have a few hours free to walk around an unfamiliar city. And that isn’t always efficient, even with a good guidebook.

I remember one drizzly afternoon several years ago in Berlin, trying to find the site of Hitler’s bunker and the long-gone Reich Chancellery. I finally found the spot with precise directions from a concierge at the Adlon Hotel. The site was a muddy, forlorn, unmarked lot opposite a block of ugly East German-era apartment buildings, though there was a man with a cart on the corner selling bratwurst.

“I heard the site is marked with a little plaque now,” said Elyse Weiner, a former network news producer and foreign correspondent who has figured out that there are a lot of people who like to take short walking tours in a strange city, and who do not relish the idea of doing so in a group, trotting along behind a tour guide with a flag.

Ms. Weiner is the founder of iJourneys (iJourneys.com), which produces narrated walking tours for use with personal MP3 players, including iPods.

She has not done Berlin yet, but her tours now consist of the Left Bank of Paris, Ancient Rome, Old Rome, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Vienna, Salzburg and Barcelona. Each costs $14.95 to download and includes a map. She has lately been wandering around Jerusalem with a recorder, making notes for her next digital narrative.

“Rome was one of my first inspirations,” she said. A friend going to Rome on a business trip had a few hours free and asked for advice. Knowing Rome well from her days in the news business, she wrote out a detailed three-page tour itinerary, an idiosyncratic 90-minute walk filled with historical and cultural information.

She added, “The same week I was in Miami, on one of those South Beach walking tours with a docent who was very boring, plus some old ladies on the tour kept complaining about not being able to go shopping. I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’ ”

Guidebooks are not especially practical for someone with very great interest and very limited time. Many audiotape tour guides tend to be broad, bland and overproduced, Ms. Weiner said, adding: “I thought, ‘I’m a newsgirl who’s traveled a lot. Why can’t I travel with someone like me?’ ”

The result is a series of focused recorded walking tours that play out in real time — in one long tracking shot, as it were. I listened to Ms. Weiner’s 75-minute Ancient Rome tour, which goes from Capitoline Hill to the Coliseum.

I’m familiar with that walk, but I was engrossed by her narrative. I could re-envision the landscape while picking up new information, like the workings of the elevators, pulleys and winches for Coliseum spectacles, and seeing the spot where Marc Antony delivered the eulogy for the assassinated Julius Caesar. (I’d always thought Caesar was assassinated in the Forum, but Ms. Weiner set me straight. On that particular Ides of March, the Senate was meeting elsewhere, at the Theater of Pompey.)

Producing a tour, Ms. Weiner does copious research and spends many weeks walking the same short route while talking into a digital recorder. Then, back home in New York, she records a final version. There is no musical soundtrack.

“I could have put that in but I deliberately did not because I figure you’re walking in a real city in real time, and you need to hear that Vespa coming up behind you,” said Ms. Weiner, who was in the network television and radio news business for 20 years.

Other producers in the podcast-guide business include Soundwalk.com and AudisseyGuides.com, which have walking tours, and Audible.com, which includes city tour guides in its large inventory of recorded books and other material. In addition, many museums and other places offer docks for downloading tours to digital players. The field is obviously set to grow.

Ms. Weiner insists on keeping it low-key, personal and irreverent, like a friend taking you for a stroll in a city she loves.

“Our Paris walk is only on the Left Bank, and it’s continuous, so if it takes a minute to walk from one end of a little block to the other, I still have to talk,” she said. “So I can point out, like, the site of the once-fleabag hotel where Oscar Wilde died, and tell you his final words, which were supposedly: ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/business/26road.html





Social Network Users Have Ruined Their Privacy, Forever
Steve Kerrison

Students at the University of Bristol have recently been warned of the dangers of posting to social networking websites. They aren't the first to hear these warnings, and they won't be the last.

Prof. Nigel Smart of the Computer Science Department at the University of Bristol has expressed his concern at the worrying trend of people giving up their privacy on the internet via social networking websites. He told HEXUS: "I am concerned that from some of the posts I have seen, by colleagues, students and others, that there is a deep societal problem emerging of people giving up their privacy without realising it".

There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.

Just about anyone can read what's posted onto social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook. 'Anyone' includes the intended audience of friends, but potentially relatives, teachers and employers too. And much of what is posted can never be deleted. I don't need to point out that Prof. Smart's fears are well-founded and that this is bad news, do I?
Anonymity down the drain

People have been posting stuff onto the web for years, though, so why is privacy suddenly a bigger problem for a larger number of people? Three or four years ago, it was all about chat rooms and forums. Both have a level of anonymity by default; you can choose your handle and only talk about what you want to, truth or lies... nobody will know.

Chat rooms are all but dead and buried now, amidst fear of sexual predators and other unsavoury types. However, forums continue, by virtue of their more topic-focused and moderated nature.
There's more to worry about on the web than predators and viruses. We're giving everyone access to our personal lives.

Then came what some people like to call 'Web 2.0'. On that wave of "let's pretend we've upgraded the Internet, LOL" came the social-networking websites... along with those terrible pages of drivel people like to call 'blogs'. It became cool to talk about mundane things and show other people what had been happening in your life. In essence, all the chat room goers had something to do once again.

So where's the problem in that? People treat users on their social-networking 'friends lists' just like their normal friends. They'll chat to them, share details from their lives, show them photos... do stuff friends do. People are comfortable with that. Problem is, they're too comfortable.

Bitching down the phone to someone about somebody else is a fairly common occurrence amongst friends, so socially, it's quite acceptable to do the very same with online friends, right? Yes, except unlike a phone call, it isn't private. Interestingly, you could probably get away with it in a chat room; they were essentially anonymous, but social networking is much more personal; the anonymity is all but gone. Fancy being sued for libel? How about initiating a police inquiry, or an investigation by the board of your educational establishment? It could happen, if you say or post the wrong things.
Irreversible damage

Once something appears on the Internet, it's almost impossible to remove. Within minutes, chances are a search engine will crawl it, then that search engine will cache it, so that even if the page changes, the original content will still be there, for a while, at least. Then there are archiving systems like the Way Back Machine. Once the page is on there, it doesn't matter what changes are made... it's archived. Of course, this assumes that pages are accessible by anyone, which isn't always the case, but that doesn't really matter.

It's easy to get an account with almost any social-networking site, and we've learned from chat rooms, it's easy to pose as somebody else. It's easy, then, to get added to a friend list (especially with the 'more friends the better' attitude of current social-networking sites). Suddenly, that 'friends only' stuff is pretty much public.

As these sites continue to grow in popularity, so too does the value of the information on them to parties other than those directly involved. Parents can see what their children really get up to at Uni'. Teachers can see what their pupils really think. Potential employers can profile applicants based on their online braggings and other shenanigans. While much of the content might be taken humorously amongst friends, other parties might not see it that way.

Profiling a person by their online activities need not be a long and arduous task entailing reading their boring blogs and examining all their FaceBook pictures, either. If somebody can write 1000 lines of code to scan MySpace for sexual predators, someone else can apply the same principals to profiling a single person.

Social networking users need to take a step back and think about just what they're posting onto the Internet. It'll probably be too late for a number of people, and it'll take a lot more 'victims' of the lack of privacy before most users actually start heeding these warnings. Just beware that anything posted online to your friends now, could very easily come back to haunt you in days, months, or even years to come.
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7499





George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move
Nick Allen

It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

``You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'' The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

``People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

Who's In Charge?

At a single road junction in the London borough of Hammersmith, there are 29 cameras run by police, government, private companies and transport agencies. Police officers are even trying out video cameras mounted on their heads.

``We've got to stand back and see where technology is taking us,'' said Thomas, whose job is to protect people's privacy. ``Humans must dictate our future, not machines.''

Blair said citizens have to sacrifice some freedoms to fight terrorism, illegal immigration and identity fraud.

``We have a modern world that we are living in, with new and different types of crime,'' Blair said Nov. 6 at a press conference in London. ``If we don't use technology in order to combat it, then we won't be fighting crime effectively.''

Constant Monitoring

In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.

Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.

By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.

``The level of surveillance in this country should shock people,'' said David Murakami Wood, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle who headed the study. ``It is infiltrating everything we do.''

Wood is also concerned about the U.K.'s growing DNA database. The files contain the genetic codes of more than 3.8 million people, or 5.2 percent of the population. By comparison, the U.S. has the DNA records of 0.5 percent of its residents.

DNA matches helped solve 45,000 crimes in the U.K. last year, including 422 murders, 645 rapes and 9,000 burglaries, according to the Home Office. But the database isn't foolproof.

Burglar Who Wasn't

Police who knocked on Raymond Easton's door in Swindon, England, in 1999 were certain he had committed burglary at a house 200 miles (300 kilometers) away. DNA found at the scene was a 37 million-to-1 match with Easton's sample, which had been taken three years earlier.

Easton, a former construction worker, had Parkinson's disease and could barely dress himself. He was still charged. Further tests proved he had never been to Bolton, where the burglary occurred, according to the Greater Manchester police.

``Britain's DNA database is spiraling out of control,'' said Helen Wallace, deputy director of GeneWatch U.K., which campaigns for responsible use of genetic science. ``It could allow an unprecedented level of government surveillance.''

Other government plans include loading the confidential medical records of 50 million patients in the state-run health system onto a central database without their consent.

Most controversial of all are Blair's biometric ID cards linked to a national register holding every citizen's fingerprints, iris or face scan. Starting in 2010, anyone renewing or applying for a passport will have to get one.

``Desperate for some sort of legacy, the prime minister has nothing to offer but Blair's Big Brother Britain,'' said Phil Booth, national coordinator of the anti-ID card group NO2ID.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=avL4PSqZrcj4





How To: Disable Your Passport's RFID Chip
Jenna Wortham

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful – tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison. Not to mention the “special” customs search, with rubber gloves. Bon voyage!

1) RFID-tagged passports have a distinctive logo on the front cover; the chip is embedded in the back.

2) Sorry, “accidentally” leaving your passport in the jeans you just put in the washer won’t work. You’re more likely to ruin the passport itself than the chip.

3) Forget about nuking it in the microwave – the chip could burst into flames, leaving telltale scorch marks. Besides, have you ever smelled burnt passport?

4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=9





Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears

Size and scope of the interagency investigative tool worry civil libertarians
Dan Eggen

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as "OneDOJ," already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation from the federal government.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.

The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access, officials said.

But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, U.S. attorneys and other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced that the program will be expanded immediately to 15 additional regions and that federal authorities will "accelerate . . . efforts to share information from both open and closed cases."

Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and often manually, with Justice's five main law enforcement agencies: the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Within three years, officials said, about 750 law enforcement agencies nationwide will have access.

In an interview last week, McNulty said the goal is to broaden the pool of data available to local and state investigators beyond systems such as the National Crime Information Center, the FBI-run repository of basic criminal records used by police and sheriff's deputies around the country.

By tapping into the details available in incident reports, interrogation summaries and other documents, investigators will dramatically improve their chances of closing cases, he said.

"The goal is that all of U.S. law enforcement will be able to look at each other's records to solve cases and protect U.S. citizens," McNulty said. "With OneDOJ, we will essentially hook them up to a pipe that will take them into its records."

McNulty and other Justice officials emphasize that the information available in the database already is held individually by the FBI and other federal agencies. Much information will be kept out of the system, including data about public corruption cases, classified or sensitive topics, confidential informants, administrative cases and civil rights probes involving allegations of wrongdoing by police, officials said.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates -- many of whom are already alarmed by the proliferation of federal databases -- warn that granting broad access to such a system is almost certain to invite abuse and lead to police mistakes.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the main problem is one of "garbage in, garbage out," because case files frequently include erroneous or unproved allegations.

"Raw police files or FBI reports can never be verified and can never be corrected," Steinhardt said. "That is a problem with even more formal and controlled systems. The idea that they're creating another whole system that is going to be full of inaccurate information is just chilling."

Steinhardt noted that in 2003, the FBI announced that it would no longer meet the Privacy Act's accuracy requirements for the National Crime Information Center, its main criminal-background-check database, which is used by 80,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

"I look at this system and imagine it will raise many of the same questions that the whole information-sharing approach is raising across the government," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based group that has criticized many of the government's data-gathering policies.

"Information that's collected in the law enforcement realm can find [its way] into other arenas and be abused very easily," Rotenberg said.

McNulty and other officials said the data compiled under OneDOJ would be subject to the same civil-liberties and privacy oversight as any other Justice Department database. A coordinating committee within Justice will oversee the database and other information-sharing initiatives, according to McNulty's memo.

Gene Voegtlin, legislative counsel for the Arlington-based International Association of Chiefs of Police, said his group welcomes any initiatives to share more data with local law enforcement agencies.

"The working partnership between the states and the feds has gotten much better than the pre-9/11 era," Voegtlin said. "But we're still overcoming a lot of issues, both functional and organizational . . . so we're happy to see DOJ taking positive steps in that area."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122500483.html





Feds: Homeland Security Project Didn't Protect Privacy
Declan McCullagh

A Department of Homeland Security program that linked details on millions of air travelers with profiles drawn from commercial databases was plagued by "privacy missteps" that misled the public, a new government report concludes.

The Transportation Security Agency, operating under the auspices of Homeland Security, had publicly pledged two years ago--in official notices describing the Secure Flight program--that it "will not receive" or have access to dossiers on American travelers compiled by a Beltway contractor.

That promise turned out to be untrue, according to a report published Friday by DHS' privacy office. The commercial data "made its way directly to TSA, contrary to the express statements in the fall privacy notices about the Secure Flight program," the report says. (Click on "Secure Flight Report" to view a PDF version.)

The report, and a second one critiquing a government database called Matrix, was released on the last business day before Christmas, a tactic that federal agencies and publicly traded companies sometimes use to avoid drawing attention to critical findings. Neither report appears on the DHS.gov or TSA.gov home pages, or even on the home page of the DHS privacy office, but rather was linked to from a subpage on the DHS privacy site.

Jim Harper, a policy analyst with the free-market Cato Institute who serves on a Homeland Security advisory panel, said the reports show that the department needs to pay far more attention to privacy. "They didn't think ahead. They didn't study. They didn't pay attention to the privacy issues," Harper said. "It may need to be hammered home many more times."

Secure Flight was born in September 2004 when DHS ordered airlines to hand over the complete records of all passengers who traveled on a domestic flight in the month of June--which were in turn linked with information on those passengers drawn from commercial databases. (Secure Flight, which was put on hold in February in large part because of privacy concerns, was the successor to DHS' Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System.)

The agency's Secure Flight contractor, a McLean, Va.-based company called EagleForce, bought databases with personal information on Americans from three data-mining firms: Acxiom, Insight America and Qsent. The data included U.S. citizens' names, gender, spouse's names, address, date of birth, and in some cases Social Security numbers.

The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were "not intentional," and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a "data flow map" to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act.

This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act.

In an interview with CNET News.com earlier this year, Peter Pietra, TSA's director of privacy policy, downplayed those concerns. Pietra said the agency disagrees with GAO's interpretation of the law.

A Matrix post-mortem
The second report released Friday represents a postmortem of a defunct project called the Matrix, or the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. Matrix ended in April 2005. (Click on "Matrix Report" for a PDF version.)

DHS provided most of the funding for Matrix, $8 million in 2003, with the Department of Justice tossing in $4 million. Operated by Seisint, which is now part of LexisNexis, the pilot project involved information sharing between state government, federal government, and commercial databases. At least 13 states participated, including California, Texas and New York.

Matrix quickly became controversial for a long list of reasons: It launched in July 2003 with no privacy policy in place. Few participating states ever conducted a self-audit to make sure abuse didn't happen. Neither the Justice Department nor DHS ever did. Privacy specialists weren't consulted until nearly three years after planning began. Even though Matrix was supposedly created as an antiterrorism network, only 2.6 percent of the cases investigated turned out to be terrorism-related.

Also raising questions was the unwillingness of LexisNexis and the participating governments to give a complete list of information accessible through Matrix. But a page captured by Archive.org from the former Matrix-at.org Web site lists records from criminal histories, driver's licenses and motor vehicle registrations, court documents, property ownership, professional licenses, and commercial databases including telephone directories. Other reports have said Social Security numbers, speeding tickets, and family members also are included.

The ACLU had been one of Matrix's most vocal critics. It charged that Matrix was "dangerous and Orwellian" and represented an intrusive data-mining program on innocent Americans.

DHS' privacy office said Friday that Matrix "was undermined, and ultimately halted, in large part because it did not have a comprehensive privacy policy from the outset to provide transparency about the project's purpose and practices and protect against mission creep or abuse."
http://news.com.com/Feds+Homeland+Se...3-6145796.html





Computer Warming a Privacy Risk
Quinn Norton

A security researcher has a devised a novel attack on online anonymity systems in which he literally takes a computer's temperature over the internet.

The attack uses a phenomenon called "clock skew" -- the tendency for the precise clocks in modern computers to drift off of the correct time at slightly different rates, which can be affected by heat.

"When a crystal is manufactured, it has a clock skew, and it's different for each crystal (throughout its) lifetime," explains Steven J. Murdoch, a Cambridge University researcher who discussed his work at the Chaos Communications Congress on Thursday.

Last year UCLA Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno showed that clock skew can be used to identify computers on the internet, by charting the timestamps in a machine's traffic. But the skew is a fairly weak identifier, providing at best 64 unique fingerprints. A network of a thousand computers would have 16 with an identical clock skew.

The research spawned a variety of theories on how clock skew could be used to attack anonymity online -- from detecting daytime hours at a server located in an unknown country, to counting the number of hosts behind a NAT firewall. Murdoch was the first to make an attack work.

His victim is the Onion Router, or "Tor" -- a sophisticated privacy system that lets users surf the web anonymously. Tor encrypts a user's traffic, and bounces it through multiple servers, so the final destination doesn't know where it came from.

Murdoch set up a Tor network at Cambridge to test his technique, which works like this: If an attacker wants to learn the IP address of a hidden server on the Tor network, he'll suddenly request something difficult or intensive from that server. The added load will cause it to warm up.

Because temperature affects how fast most electronics operate, warming up the machine causes microscopic changes in clock skew over time. Now the attacker queries computers on the public internet that he suspects of being the Tor server, looking for the shift in skew over the course of hours.

When he finds a computer that has guilty change in its timestamps, he has a match.

"It's actually quite hard to defend against," says Murdoch. "(You can) lock the timestamp, but even without explicate timestamps, it's conceivable."

That doesn't mean it's time to give up on online anonymity: Murdoch points out that other attacks on Tor are currently easier and quicker.

"Right now it's probably not the best attack, it's a guide to what could be done in the future."

Ironically it might be the most extremely hardened computers that would be most vulnerable to this style of attack. Murdoch theorizes that military computers with precise time reporting should be easier than more casual networks like Tor, in the long run.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...rss.technology





DOD Bars Use of HTML e-mail, Outlook Web Access
Bob Brewin

Due to an increased network threat condition, the Defense Department is blocking all HTML-based e-mail messages and has banned the use of Outlook Web Access e-mail applications, according to a spokesman for the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations.

An internal message available on the Internet from the Defense Security Service (DSS) states that JTF-GNO raised the network threat condition from Information Condition 5, which indicates normal operating conditions, to Infocon 4 “in the face of continuing and sophisticated threats” against Defense Department networks.

Infocon 4 usually indicates heightened vigilance in preparation for operations or exercises or increased monitoring of networks due to increased risk of attack.

The JTF-GNO mandated use of plain text e-mail because HTML messages pose a threat to DOD because HTML text can be infected with spyware and, in some
cases, executable code that could enable intruders to gain access to DOD networks, the JTF-GNO spokesman said.

In an e-mail to Federal Computer Week, a Navy user said that any HTML messages sent to his account are automatically converted to plain text.

The JTF-GNO spokesman declined to say why the command raised the threat level except to say that Infocon levels are adjusted to reflect worldwide social and political events and activities. He said the current threat level does not bar the use of attachments, including Power Point slides used for briefings.

He also declined to tell FCW what other restrictions on e-mail that JTF-GNO has imposed. But a December 2006 newsletter of the Colorado National Guard said that under Infocon 4, Guard members receiving e-mails from any unknown source, including “mail received from unrecognized Department of Defense accounts,” should be viewed as potentially harmful.

The Colorado Guard newsletter also alerted personnel to be vigilant against e-mail “phishing” attempts to gain personal information.

The ban on use of Outlook Web mail will hit thousands of users at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., according to an internal message available on the Internet. The ban on the use of Outlook Web Access “will significantly impact the way we presently conduct business,” due to the fact that that Web mail is the primary means of e-mail access for 4,500 employees at the base, according to the message.

Robins has developed a work-around for these users to access Outlook directly by logging on to government computers with their common access cards, the internal message said.

JTF-GNO raised the DOD network threat level to Infocon 4 in mid-November after an attack on the networks at the Naval War College (NWC) required NWC to take its systems offline. The JTF-GNO spokesman said at the time that the increase in threat conditions had no relation to the attack against NWC.
http://www.fcw.com/article97178-12-2...eb&printLayout





U.S. Gov't to Use Full Disk Encryption on All Computers
timothy

To address the issue of data leaks of the kind we've seen so often in the last year because of stolen or missing laptops, writes Saqib Ali, the Feds are planning to use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on all Government-owned computers.

"On June 23, 2006 a Presidential Mandate was put in place requiring all agency laptops to fully encrypt data on the HDD. The U.S. Government is currently conducting the largest single side-by-side comparison and competition for the selection of a Full Disk Encryption product. The selected product will be deployed on Millions of computers in the U.S. federal government space. This implementation will end up being the largest single implementation ever, and all of the information regarding the competition is in the public domain. The evaluation will come to an end in 90 days. You can view all the vendors competing and list of requirements."
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/28/154247





French Court Favors Personal Privacy Over Piracy Searches
Thomas Crampton

A French court has ruled that music companies and other copyright holders cannot conduct unrestrained Internet monitoring to find pirates.

The decision, which could leave record companies open to lawsuits in France for invasion of privacy, pits European Union-sanctioned data protection rules against aggressive tracing tactics used by the music and film industry.

"The judge's decision defends the privacy of individuals over the intrusion from record labels," said Aziz Ridouan, president of the Association of Audio Surfers, a group that defends people charged with illegal downloading. "This should send a strong message and hopefully affect every one of the hundreds of people defending themselves."

The case involved an Internet user in the Paris suburb of Bobigny whose internet provider address — a unique computer identifier — was traced while the user was on the peer-to-peer software Shareaza.

"The right-holders found the IP address of my client and reported it to the police," said Olivier Hugot, the defending lawyer, who declined to name his client. "The annulment of the case is important because it has direct impact on the tactics used by record companies in dozens of cases in France."

The organization responsible for tracing down Internet users, the Society of Music Authors, Composers and Publishers, played down the impact of the court decision and said that it would appeal.

"This is just an isolated decision amid the many cases that we have successfully pursued," said Sophie Duhamel, communications director for the organization. "That said, it is not so good to have the decision in the jurisprudence."

The ruling sends a strong message about privacy, said Mathias Moulin, a legal adviser at the French government watchdog that defends privacy on the Internet, the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberty.

"The rights-holders should now understand that they cannot set up a system to identify downloaders on the Internet without proper authorization from us," said Moulin, whose organization has the ability to grant such permission. "It is important to have these protections established by a court."

Invasion of privacy carries fines of up to €300,000, or $395,000, and five years in prison, Moulin added.

While it is up to the individuals to pursue such legal action, one government-supported organization is considering moves against monitors.

"We do not know how many families or individuals were monitored before they chose who to prosecute," said Jean- Pierre Quignaux, a representative of the government-supported National Union of Family Associations. "Given the judge's decision, we are considering action against those invading privacy to catch music downloaders."

French privacy law is based on a directive from the European Commission, but the ruling is not likely have an impact beyond France because of national laws.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ss/privacy.php

[JackSpratts]

LOL, Internet War
Sophren

On December 20th, 2006, an internet raid was conducted on the radio show of white supremacist Hal Turner, known for his support of violence against minorities. During the show, an unusually large amount of prank calls were made, loosely organized through internet forums and IRC.

The following is a summary of events as described from a (now deleted) post at the VNN forums, as recorded here.

..

Thursday, Mr. Turner decided to go through the caller ID list he gets from his phone provider, Vonage, and post the numbers he believed were the pranksters. Out of the 12 numbers posted, 8 were obvious caller ID spoofs, and 4 were actual minors who didn't use online telephones like Skype, or were too dumb to hit *67. So Hal decided to pursue this as revenge by posting the numbers on his site and going after the website that coordinated the radio prank by sending off e-mails to have material on that site deleted and the IP addresses of the posters revealed. However, Mr. Turner claimed his lawyers did the emailing, when actually the e-mail was so misdirected, it was obvious that Mr. Turner did it himself.

Friday night, Mr. Turner got an unwelcome surprise. The online pranksters purchased background information and solicited other online databases to find Mr. Turner's house number. Yes, his actual house number, and decided to call him up for extra laughs. Mrs. Turner answered the phone and she wasn't too excited to hear from these pranksters. She threatened to call the police after the caller failed to identify his name and phone number for Mr. Turner to call back. She started to get angry, threatened to post the caller's phone number on the Internet and claim Mr. Turner was not available to take the call, however Mr. Turner got on the phone after a few minutes. The caller told Mr. Turner to remove all information on his website regarding the pranksters, the caller ID lists, and the comments area or his personal information, including his house number, would be posted online. At first, Mr. Turner acted like he would not submit to their demands, and hung up, however after a flood of random phone calls from people on the Internet started, Mr. Turner gave into the harassment, removing all the information that the caller demanded.

Mr. Turner got on his website and submitted to these pranksters demands, removing all the information they requested and replaced it with MERRY CHRISTMAS.

..


On Christmas Eve, he reposted the caller information, pledging to "punish [the crank callers] with a fury [they] have never encountered." Claiming the continued prank calling resulted in threats to his family, Turner issued his own threats:

The ONLY thing any of you are accomplishing is raising the level of brutality I intend to use when I take revenge.

Here is how I will mete out justice according to the action committed:

1) Some of you are going to get the shit beaten out of you.

2) Others are going to be beaten to death, and finally;

3) Others are going to have firebombs thrown through the windows of their houses WHILE THEY ARE HOME and when they - and their families come out, their throats will be cut.

This is the price I will exact for :

1) Harassing my wife (who has nothing to do with my radio show)
2) Recording the harassment of my wife and putting it on the net and
3) Harassing my senior citizen mother.

I am so motivated to to physical violence to these people that I don't even care to state my intentions publicly. Neither cops, nor Prosecutors, nor Judges will be able to stop me.
..

Using the legal system to get their identities is one thing, payback is quite another.

I don't have to win in court, I only need to win out of court.

Street justice. Get it?

..

I meant every word and I absolutely will carry out every word. Nothing on earth can prevent it.

You dare say I put myself in this position? Fuck you. You guys called MY show. You guys Crank Called and threatened MY wife. You guys crank called and threatened my mother.

I didn't start this, but I will God Damned well finish it.

Laugh all you like. We'll see how hard you laugh when my hand is crushing your windpipe and you're drowning on your own blood.
http://turnerchan.blogspot.com/2006/...ernet-war.html





HD disk format wars are over

A Clear Victor Emerges
Charlie Demerjian

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, the better choice(TM).

Yes, in a year where Sony rootkitted it's customers, lied to my face about their actions (hi John, still have your number, kisses), and fell flat with anything related to Blu-Ray, things couldn't get worse right? Well, the other camp, HD-DVD is only slightly less nasty, but still unacceptable. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both failed in the market.

MS and the media companies sold you out hoping to reap more and more profits. Let me just say I held out no hope that they would behave in anything less than a socially irresponsible fashion, but the depths of their depravity did end up shocking me.

Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest in this camp. From my dealing with them last CES where they said 'we have to screw our customers, we were asked nicely to', to the blaming of people up and down the food chain from them, it is a comic scenario. Pathetic.

Then comes the chipmakers, AMD and Intel, and the respective platforms, Live and VIIV. What laughable efforts those are. A year and a half ago, I said that Intel sold you out, and they did. The DRM infested nightmares of consumer rights removal that are the media platforms have one thing in common, the content mafia is quite adamant that they are still too insecure. The strategy from Intel was to start at a middle ground and push to the consumer side of things as time went on.

Instead, they started out as MS's bitch and were beaten into submission like a redheaded stepchild. Now they have the glorious job of jumping at the every whim of the media companies, way to hold your head high Intel! I would say the same for AMD, but to this day, I am not sure what Live does, if it really exists.

Both companies will tout absolutely huge sales figures, and MS will point to incredible Media Center sales, up thousands of percent this year alone. Let me clue you in on something, MCE used to mean that you needed a tuner, you had to meet certain requirements for power, speed and functionality. These boxes flopped so badly it was laughable, selling more restrictions for more money is not a bright marketing strategy.

Now, MCE is sold instead of XP home. The requirements? None really, so basically all sales that were home are now MCE. I defy you to find any retail customer who actually uses it in that fashion, maybe 1% do.

With the proliferation of MCE, both Live and VIIV stickers moved out into mainstream boxes. Damn those things sell like hotcakes, umm, what do they get me besides DRM infections again? No, really, I mean it, WTF do they do? Anyone? So, both Intel and AMD are jumping up and down over the 'successes' of their respective DRM for manufacturer kickback programs. Be still my beating heart.

Basically, what we have is a series of anti-consumer DRM infections masquerading as nothing in particular. They bring only net negatives to anyone dumb enough to pay money for them, and everything is better than these offerings. They sell in spite of the features they tout, not because of them. The manufacturers still have the balls to look you in the eye and say that they are selling because of the programs/features/DRM. Marketers, what a laugh riot.

In the end, every step in this chain of consumer woe that is Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Live, VIIV, HDCP, MCE and Vista is flopping. And that is where the better choice comes in. The consumers have voted with their dollars, and are staying away in droves. All the walls of the walled gardens are being built higher and higher, with the occasional brick landing on the head of someone who pulls out a credit card. Buy now, there is a brick with your name on it whistling down, operators are standing by.

In the mean time, Piracy, the better choice (tm) flourishes. If you take 10 minutes to look around, you will see that every HD movie is now available on P2P networks. I haven't bothered to get one, so I can't comment on the quality, but it sure looks like availability is there. What was an underground clique in the 1980s and 1990s has become mainstream and so vastly much easier to do that it is laughable. Before the technology hits 1% market penetration it is comprehensively cracked and better for the consumer than the legit versions.

The lawsuits, threats, purchased governance and stern speeches could not prevent the children of Warner Music from pirating, the less moneyed masses are a lost cause. (Funny how he wasn't sued though, kind of makes you wonder...) As of right now, anyone can get any music or movie they want, for free, much more easily than they can through legal DRM infected channels. Piracy, the better choice (tm).

If you try and purchase any of this content, you descend into a DRM nightmare of incompatibility and legal mires. Your monitor will not work with your Blu-Ray drive because your PC decided that a wobble bit was set wrong. You just pissed away $6K on a player, media center PC and HD TV for nothing, you lose. The Warner CEOs kids have a nice new car to play their pirated CDs in though.

On the other hand, if you downloaded that content, in HD no less, you save the $1000 on the Blu-Ray player, $30 on the movie, and it works seamlessly out of the box. The available content is much higher with piracy, and it is quite on-demand. You don't need to sign up, give them your details to be sold to marketers who call during dinner and spam you, you just get the content you want, when you want, how you want. There is no iTunes/Plays for (not) Sure incompatibility, it just works. Piracy, the better choice(tm).

On the down side, the RIAA/MPAA/PATSY/TOOLBOY have sued probably 10,000 people now, and each 'settlement' is, well lets just use $5000 for the sake of round numbers. Now, the conservative estimates of P2P usage was around 30 million people, but I am pretty damn sure that is far lower than the actual usage. Last time I saw anything serious, it was 35M and growing fast. Lets just assume that it is now 50M users.

10,000 * $5,000 = $50,000,000. The net cost to each P2P user, assuming everyone out there settles is $1. To look at it another way, if you look at it in the worst case light, you have a 1 in 5000 chance of getting nailed. A lot of people buy lottery tickets with far far worse odds than that, and spend more than $5000 doing so every few years. To be even more cynical, hands up everyone who personally knows someone who got sued by the RIAA. Now, hands up everyone who knows someone who downloaded music or movies. Any guesses which one is bigger? Piracy, the better choice (tm).

What do we end up with? A year or more where the CE industry pushed, pulled, legislated and litigated their way to obscurity. Along the way, they killed yet another promising consumer technology, well 5 or 6 actually, and made Intel and AMD their bitches. We all were on the verge of losing this format and DRM infection war until a dark horse champion emerged to snatch victory from the jaws of evil. Piracy, the better choice(tm).
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36574





Top 5 Reasons Blu Ray Will Never Be In My Home

If you google around, you will find lots of discussions on the Blue Ray format controversy. I decided to simply list my top 5 reasons (top 5 not all the reasons) why a Blue Ray DVD player will never enter my home.

1)Freedom and Spyware
I refuse, absolutely, and unconditionally, to be told when, where, how and in what type of machine I am permitted to watch a movie in my own home. Case closed, give it up. I could care less if you would pay me to have the player in my home, make me a movie star, whatever, no one, let alone a corporation, is going to tell me what to do. I also refuse to have my movie watching choices monitored (and potentially screened by who knows?), have my email sold to marketing companies who will them email me with $2.00 coupons for the latest $30 movie title it decided "You might like this". They can all swear up and down that "they take my privacy seriously", but I have the right not to believe them, and I don't. Not since a certain DRM inspired rootkit fiasco.

2)Internet Connection Required
The Blu-Ray FAQ
states that you don't need an internet connection for "basic playback"

Do I believe that, for now, maybe, however, the bait and switch will come. Otherwise, why bother with BD-Plus? BD-Plus allows vendors to download and update codes into your player? If an internet connection is NEVER required, BD-Plus is useless. At some point you will stick in a new Blu-Ray DVD and the machine will stop working and display on the screen "For your viewing pleasure, you will no longer be allowed to watch movies until server validation occurs" because the DVD uploaded the code telling the player you must phone home.

See, for YOUR sake and viewing pleasure, it must be PROVEN that you are behaving like a good little consumer, following their rules. Besides the implications in my first reason, it is impractical. Not everyone has broadband so is it required to install a second phone line, get local unlimited internet dialup access for the privilege of watching a movie. Once you connect once, will they NOW require you are always connected? Does the ISP cost get billed directly to the manufactuer? What if there is no access in the room you want to watch? Are you going to run phone wires through the walls, be forced to purchase a wireless router, etc. The list of problems with this requirement are simply too much to list, and they can change the rules at ANY time (Thanks to DRM)

3) Software Faults and Crackers
Ok, you have your friends over, you slide in the DVD (rented and unfortunately for you, scratched in a critical way causing confusion in the player) and all of a sudden you get a Message on your screen "This DVD can't be certified by our servers, you will NOT be allowed to watch this movie, we're sorry for the inconvenience. If you feel this message is being displayed in error...".

I believe, UNCONDITIONALLY, in your inability to create bug free software. Before you get upset at that, NO ONE, not just you, writes perfect software. As close as it may come is NASA where every line of code is reviewed by 3 people and they strive for 100% complete path testing. If you wanted to achieve that level of quality control, your DVD players would run in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They won't cost that much, you are not doing that much testing and there will be bugs that impact customers. I have 17 years professionally as a system test engineer, all telecom, and no matter how good it gets, ALL software has bugs.

This will be internet connected device, and is updateable through communication over the net to your servers. The software controls WILL be under attack by skilled crackers, your server(s) may well get compromised by skilled crackers, and when it does, and your server dutifully downloads all the wrong keys disabling thousands of machines, what will you do? After the first successful virus attack is made on Blue Ray devices will you provide, free of charge the anti-virus checker and subscriptions? How about a spyware checker, how about Trojan protection. And NONE of the above is done in ANY way to increase a users enjoyment of a movie.

4) Computer Compatibility
I use Linux. I have never used professionally anything other than UNIX or Linux, and at home, Linux only. 100% of my hardware purchases are made with Linux compatibility in mind. I will never use another OS, and since Blue Ray will ONLY work on a DRM infected operating system, it will never have a place in my computer. You aren't alone though, I will never use or own an IPOD, Download DRMed music from anywhere (I don't download any music actually) until and unless FULL Linux compatibility is available and I can listen to the music the way I want, when I want, on whatever player I decide. I threw this in so that you can see that personally, I am not just picking on Blue Ray out of the blue.

5) What do I get?
Seriously, I am not joking, what do I get. I currently have a DVI input big screen TV. You are going to cripple the full HD Effect to non HDMI inputs.

"Also, if this flag is activated, then the player must downgrade any signal that is leaving the device on an analog connection. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players honor this flag and will only output fvideo at 540p - and as we know 540p is not really high-definition. "

Does anyone reading this think that flag won't be set? I ALREADY get that quality from my upconvert DVD player. Why would I want to put up with #1 through #4 to get an experience I am already getting. Rich interactive experience you say, I say "Go Away". These are the 4 buttons I use when watching a movie. Start, Stop, Pause and Rewind. I have ZERO interest in joining an online discussion group to talk about the movie, or stream in interviews, or whatever other "rich experience" you might have in mind for me. I want to watch a movie, plain and simple.

Well, there you have the top 5. Notice how price isn't even a consideration? The technology makes it unsavory at ANY price. I never did get to the part where you can change the DRM rules as YOU PLEASE at any time and take away something a consumer COULD do in the past. I could make this a top ten, but why bother, isn't 5 reasons enough?

NOTE: HD-DVD is not much, but is a little better, than Blue Ray in my opinion, however, 4 and 5 apply to it, so I'll pass on that technology as well.

Happy Trails

Follow Up Story

TripleII

P.S. All this in a futile effort to eliminate piracy.

http://mostly-linux.blogspot.com/200...ver-be-in.html





AACS DRM Cracked by BackupHDDVD Tool?
Ryan Block

Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical (where you at, Jon?), as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well. Code and source posted in read link, let us know what you find!

Note: We're working on testing this ourselves, we'll report back with our findings asap.

[Thanks, Max and Adam]

Update: Well, it definitely does something. Click on for some pics and our experiences using the app.

So we have our Xbox 360 HD DVD plugged into our system with the Toshiba HD DVD / UFS 2.5 file system drivers going on, and are able to read the directory contents (drive G: ).

We pulled the TRAILER.EVO file down and named it encrypted_TRAILER.EVO. We then ran BackupHDDVD on the disc (Full Metal Jacket).

We quit after we hit TRAILER.EVO, since that's what we wanted to compare against.

We then ran a binary compare against the two. You'd think an unencrypted movie file would have more than just a few hex offsets changed by the unencryption process, but we haven't yet been able to test playing back the files, namely because WinDVD and PowerDVD both totally blow as demos. More shortly.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/a...kuphddvd-tool/





/.

BackupHDDVD FAQ
Black Acid

B a c k u p H D - D V D F A Q

-What is "Backup HDDVD" for?
It can do backup copies of HD DVD movies that YOU OWN! I don't want anyone to do piracy here! This software is a good way to protect your investment, because I have notice that this type of media seems very fragile, if it's scratched a little or dirty, it won't play. It seems less tolerent than DVD format. (Higher density!)

-What "Backup HDDVD" is doing exactly?
This is a java based command line utility that decrypt video files (.evo) from a HD DVD disk that you own, to your hard drive and you can play them back with a HD DVD player software.

-What are the system requirements to use "Backup HDDVD"
1 - A Windows based system
2 - A HDDVD disk drive
3 - A HDDVD player software (like PowerDVD)
4 - A HDDVD movie(s)
5 - Java rutime 1.5
6 - The possibility to access the content of the disk with a drive letter under windows.
(you may need UDF 2.5 file system driver for this)
7 - A lot of free hard disk space to backup your movies!

-Was your first HDDVD movie hard to decrypt?

It took me around a week to do. But I have wasted few days
trying to work on too complicated approach. In fact, it is very simple.

-How do you do that?

The program itself has nothing special. It simply implement the AACS decyption protocol. I have followed the freely available documents about AACS
Have a look at: www.aacsla.com The trick, is to find what they call the "Title keys". So I figure out how to extract them.

-How do you extract the "Title keys"?

I won't explain it in detail. Read the AACS doc first. You will understand. The title keys are located on the disk in encrypted form, but for a
content to be played, it has to be decrypted! So where is the decrypted version of the title key? Think about it...

-What kind of crypto algorithms are involved?
Standards algorithms:
ECC-160
AES-128
Look in the AACS doc for more details.

-What is the TKDB.cfg file?
This is the Title key Database file. It holds the decryption keys for the movies.

-What is the format of this file?
Field 1: SHA1 Hash of the VTKF000.AACS file on your HDDVD disk.
Next fields are pipe "|" delimited.
-Movie Title
-A variable number of Title key, pipe delimited
You have a key number followed by the key value like:
12-08A3DC61910280F2...

Key values are 128 bits long, so 16 bytes, or 32 hexadecimal characters long.

-The TKDB.cfg file provided with your program is empty or incomplete, what can I do?
Here is my TKDB.cfg:

CE6339246F34087AB355681DEB656D23DCD5BD86=Full Metal Jacket | 1-0000000000000000000000
0000000000
486198E3855B57CD40F6DC0C60645BDE8E1E9AC5=Van Helsing |19-0000000000000000000000
0000000000
3D357B0653A66176583C5218FD0149EAF8832FB0=The Last Samurai | 1-0000000000000000000000
0000000000

-What do you think of the technical aspects of AACS?

The design is not that bad, but it's too easy to have an insecure player implementation somewhere. And just one bad implementation is all it needs to get the keys! There will always be insecure implementations of a player somewhere! And the "Revocation system" is totaly useless if you use the Title key directly.

-Is there any known problems with the decryption?
Yes. I call this problem the "Nav chain" bug. I realize that I have a lot of frame skipping at playback after the decryption, so I hunted down the problem. To avoid the frame skipping, I patch the video file. This fix allows smooth playback of the movie, but there are some side effects.

-What are the side effects of the "Nav chain" bug fix?

You cannot do fast forward, or backward using the round dial, but you can still use the progress bar to navigate through the film. So it's not that bad... For some reason, the sub-titles don't seems to work anymore. It may be a side effect of the nav chain bug. But may be not...

-Why the "Nav chain" bug is called the "Nav chain" bug?

Well, it has something to do with the chaining of navigation pack. Look at some doc about standard DVD VOB file, you will see. If someone wants to help me with that bug, please do!

-Are you going to support Blu-Ray?

I don't own a Blu-Ray drive!

-Do you plan to do a user interface version?

No, other people will do. You have the source code, so enjoy it!

-Do you plan to do a Linux version?
See the previous answer.
I don't use any windows specific API and this is a java application!
A port to Linux will be easy.

-Can you send me some decryption keys? PLEASE!
No.

-I have a question for you, can I send you an e-mail?

If you have something like, a technical problem using the software, look in the forums talking about Backup HDDVD first. There will be a lot of information and everyone will help each other out. If there is a major flaw in the program, I will post another version, but honestly I realy want people to bring Backup HDDVD to a higher level without me!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comment... &cid=17385050





Trust is Hard to Gain, Easy to Lose
Blake Ross

Call me naive: I think you can make a lot of money, go public, even monopolize a market, and still retain a moral compass that points in the direction of Google’s stated top priority—users.

But Google lost me today:

Google is now displaying “tips” that point searchers to Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa for any search phrase that includes “calendar” (e.g. Yahoo calendar), “blog” and “photo sharing,” respectively. This is clearly bad for competitors, and it’s also a bad sign for Google. But I generally support anything that benefits users, including monopolistic packaging. I believe, for instance, that shipping Internet Explorer with Windows was a good move. So why are tips bad for users?

First, two notes. One, Yahoo and Ask already do this, but they didn’t build their businesses on the promise of being unconventionally trustworthy. And two, Google has been doing similar things for awhile. Search The Holiday and you’ll get a special box pointing to reviews of and tickets for the movie. The difference is that this is still a filter on the Web; the reviews link to their sources and the tickets link to Fandango. Google may share the Fandango revenue and certainly shuts out competitors, but as a user, I get better service than I would without the box.

The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class. If Google wants to make it faster and easier for users to manage events, create a blog or share photos, it could do what it does when you search GOOG: link to the best services. To prevent Google from being the gatekeeper, the company could identify the services algorithmically.

But if that sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because Google already works that way. After all, Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top. Search for “photo sharing” and you should already get the highest quality services. According to Google, Picasa is not one of them. These “tips,” then, can only be a tacit admission of failure: either the company does not believe in its own search technology, or it does not believe its products are good enough to rise to the top organically. I’d guess the latter. And if I were on the Calendar, Blogger or Picasa teams, I wouldn’t be celebrating the news that my employer has lost faith in me.

Implications for advertisers

Google has been advertising its own products through AdWords for some time, and I see nothing wrong with that. The protest that unjustifiably erupted three weeks ago questioned the positioning of these ads. As advertisers began making antitrust overtures, Walter H. from Google Marketing stepped in to sooth nerves (emphasis mine):
It’s important to note, however, that our ads are created and managed under the exact same guidelines, principles, practices and algorithms as the ads of any other advertiser…There are no algorithm changes to ’smooth the way’ for Google’s ads.

We’re quite proud of the advertising platform we’ve built and it simply makes sense for us to use it. At the same time, the trust of both our users and our advertisers is of paramount importance. We honor that responsibility, and work hard to earn and keep that trust.

What changed in three weeks?

While advertisers compete to be first in a string of lookalike ads that are often shunted to the side, Google now determines the precise position and appearance of ads tips that are not subject to any of the same rules. Its ads get icons while others don’t, and if you think that’s small potatoes, you are not an advertiser: images boost clickthrough. Google can make a Picasa ad say “Easier to use than Kodak,” but Kodak cannot create an ad that reads “Easier to use than Picasa.”1 And the kicker: neither the highest quality ads nor the highest quality search results can replace these tips.

In the end, would you rather be Blogger or TypePad on my screen?

A new kind of bundling

Google’s potential monopoly power is less threatening than Microsoft’s because changing operating systems is hard, while changing search engines is easy—so easy that every engine out there is desperately trying to stay in your face. And choosing an alternative to Microsoft’s bundled software used to be prohibitively complicated for the average person, not to mention time consuming—you had to go to a store and buy a boxed copy or spend the evening downloading it. Eventually everyone will be experienced enough to procure applications, and then word of mouth alone will bury the distribution advantages Google and Microsoft now enjoy.

But we’re not there yet, and in many ways, Google’s new age “bundling” is far worse than anything Microsoft did or even could do. Microsoft threw spaghetti at the wall and hoped it stuck, and likewise there’s nothing wrong with Google’s arbitrary front page ads. The difference here is that Google knows what users want and can discreetly recommend its products at the right time. Microsoft can’t easily hide a program packaged with Windows (and doing so would defeat the purpose), but competitors can only discover Google’s bundling, which might be transient or limited to certain regions, through trial and error searching.

Now let’s put away the tin foil hat and consider this: According to Nielsen NetRatings, the top ten search queries of 2006 were specific services like “Hotmail” (another view). So significant amounts of people, typically novices, use search engines as address bars. Three of the top ten were actual addresses like MySpace.com. If Google decided to show tips for “mail” or “space,” they would appear in these circumstances even though the user is usually en route to a particular destination (working example)2.

Would Google complain if Microsoft informed users about Live Search when they typed Google.com into Internet Explorer’s address bar? Don’t roll your eyes: it would just be another innocuous tip presented to a user en route to a destination. Google owns one of the Web’s command lines, and Microsoft owns the other.

Perhaps the most nefarious aspect of this feature is how it operates within our collective blind spots. Advertisers are happy that Google no longer invades the canonical Ad Results. Technology purists continue to see untainted Search Results. But does my mother make that distinction? How much does a result have to look like a Result to cross the line?

Google promised not to be the type of company that needs to ask.
http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/





Censorship

Genius Grant Please, or The NSFW HTML Attribute

Almost two years ago, in an attempt to combat the rising problem of comment spam, Google unveiled a new HTML attribute:

rel=”nofollow”

By including that attribute in hyperlinks, website administrators direct search engines not to give any credit to the linked content. The attribute is generally applied by most blog software to comment and trackback content before it is posted. This obviously minimizes the incentive for comment spamming as a means of improving a site’s PageRank status.

In the same spirit, I am now proposing a new attribute:

rel=”nsfw”

NSFW is an abbreviation often used to indicate that content is “not safe for work.” This new attribute should be applied to tags to indicate that the content is potentially “not safe for work.”

The attribute has several exciting implications for content creators and site visitors:

1. Content creators can now apply the attribute to hyperlinks. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to warn them, or stop them, before continuing on to URIs flagged with the attribute. Additionally, search engines will be able to use the proportion of flagged links to a URI as a better means of filtering results.
2. Content creators can now apply the attribute to image tags. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of images flagged with the attribute.
3. Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element.

This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.

So who wants to write the first Firefox extension?

We still need something more robust that will support other tags in some sensible way.
http://pj.doland.org/archives/041571.php





Court Not Buying FCC's Claims Over Indecency Fines
Contributed by Mike

As many of you are aware, the FCC in the last few years has spent an awful lot of time on television indecency issues -- though they seem to do so not because of any real offense, but because certain family groups flood the FCC with complaints, often long after a TV show actually aired. The FCC refuses to give TV broadcasters any guidelines or preview any content, noting that that would be "censorship." Instead, they give vague guidelines and will only fine you if you fail to meet the hidden standards.

The networks are fighting back in court, and it looks like the FCC isn't looking very good so far. In court hearings yesterday, the 3-judge panel blasted the FCC on a variety of points, noting that their hidden standards are really no different than censorship -- and, if anything, are worse, because it's just a game of "gotcha."

However, even more to the point, the judges questioned why the FCC feels the need to take over the parents' role in policing what children see on TV, noting that it's the parents' responsibility to monitor what their kids watch. Basically, they say that if parents are worried about what kids are watching in their bedrooms, the parents shouldn't allow TVs in kids' bedrooms.

In other words, it's the parents' responsibility to protect the children, not the government's. The judges also point out how silly it is to hold a separate standard for broadcast TV (the only thing the FCC really has the authority to regulate), when there's so much more on cable and satellite which the kids are probably watching anyway. While that could just open up the FCC to pushing for greater authority over cable and satellite TV (as some politicians would like), it's worth remembering that the FCC's mandate is only over public airwaves -- not private ones, and any change would face tremendous resistance.

While the case is still ongoing, it certainly looks like the court took a pretty hostile view to the FCC's usual reasons for fining broadcasters over indecency.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061221/153821.shtml





Book review

The Stories You Hid From Mom
John Leland

THE NEW BEDSIDE PLAYBOY
A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment

Edited by Hugh M. Hefner

Illustrated. 484 pages. Playboy Press. $19.95, paperback.

In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh M. Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” On first blush his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.

Yet the evidence presented in “The New Bedside Playboy: A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment” suggests a more ambitious grand plan. With its ribald jokes and cartoons, airbrushed “pictorials” and prose selections from America’s best-paid writers — all wrapped up into a glossy connoisseurship that Mr. Hefner called the “Playboy Philosophy” — the magazine can be seen as a mad plot: to create a race of men more boring and insecure than any before. As Mr. Hefner later proposed, “Playboy exists, in part, as a motivation for men to expend greater effort in their work, develop their capabilities further and climb higher on the ladder of success.”

The fix was in from the start. It held sway over American men until the arrival of a medium even more effective at replacing male curiosity with useless pudding: 24-hour sports television. Mr. Hefner introduces the current volume, which has no photographs of naked women, with the wisdom, attributed to an “anonymous sage,” that “most of man’s great pleasures can be found between a book’s covers and beneath a bed’s coverlet,” setting the appropriate tone for this silken time capsule.

Who cites anonymous sages these days? And who talks of coverlets? This collection, he promises, distills 53 years’ worth of “visual tonics,” “light fantastics,” “danses macabres” and “nostalgic frolicking in the snows of yesteryear.” By this he means mainly short stories, but there are also essays, reminiscences, four pages of “party jokes,” 21 mostly dirty cartoons and a long interview in which Saul Bellow is asked what he thought about the O. J. trial (“in California the whole justice system is in deep trouble”) and whether he has known any actors intimately (only Marilyn Monroe, and not in that sense).

Begun five years after the first Kinsey report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Playboy shifted performance anxiety into a realm guys could master, with a little help from a magazine: the right hi-fi gear, the right Bordeaux and the right literary references. It is with erotic aplomb that Mr. Hefner refers to his publication in “The New Bedside Playboy” as “America’s most sophisticated magazine.”

The mix of writers comprises a dream party guest list, albeit heavy on the Y chromosomes: Vladimir Nabokov, T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jimmy Breslin, Thom Jones, Norman Mailer, John Updike and dozens more boldface names. But if you have read any of these writers before, you have probably caught them in better form. No man who knows his way around a coverlet needs Nabokov to supply pickup lines like: “Yes, we Russians are sentimental eccentrics, but believe me, we can love with the passion of a Rasputin and the naïveté of a child. You are lonely and I am lonely. You are free and I am free. Who, then, can forbid us to spend several pleasant hours is a sheltered love nest?” A sheltered love nest? Tell me there’s not a plot afoot here.

In the 1950s and 1960s Cavalier, Nugget, Escapade and other euphemistically dubbed “men’s magazines” published some of the most adventurous new writing in the United States, jump-starting or sustaining the careers of Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, Jack Kerouac and others. The magazines could risk a little raunch, so they were in the right place for the earthier fiction emerging from the margins. The writers collected in “The New Bedside Playboy,” by contrast, are established brand names, apparently selling from the back of their files. One thing about the Playboy mystique: the paychecks were real. And it is good to know there is still a remunerative home for an Ian Fleming story that begins, “The stingray was about six feet from wing tip to wing tip and perhaps 10 feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail,” or a David Mamet rant that vents, in support of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association: “Well, then. We are not too far removed from the viciousness that follows curtailing freedom of the press; e.g., the Red scare of the Fifties and its attempts at rebirth. Neither are we too far removed from the terror that can visit itself on a disarmed populace: the Czechs of Prague Spring, the Jews of Europe under the Third Reich.” Without such diversions we’d have only the present.

Was there really a time when swingers imagined themselves in silk jammies chatting about Nabokov and Brubeck and the latest Cognac? No doubt. Ring-a-ding-ding. The right literary reference, the right hi-fi gear, and voilà: the freedom to go home alone, unswung, to a bit of light fiction, corny jokes and an airbrush that liberated the white-collar male from the uncomfortable burden of human curiosity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/books/28lela.html





Icy Reception
Angela Posada-Swafford

THE COMPUTER ROOM IN THE Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station still smells of fresh paint and new furniture. With its gray carpets, soft lighting, and a couple of artificial plants, it could be the lobby of a modestly prosperous law firm. But the brutal white reflection of an ice desert filtering through tiny tinted windows reminds me that I'm at the bottom of the globe, a long way from everywhere.

Even so, I click Send and an email message – with an ego shot of me standing at the metal post that marks the actual pole's location – flits off to the Internet. A year ago, it wouldn't have been so easy. Back then, messages downloaded at glacial speeds. (I know, I know. But that's what passes for humor down here.)

"Now we're transmitting 15 gigs per day, and every room has a data port with Ethernet service," says Pat Smith, manager of technology development for Antarctic infrastructures and logistics at the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the phones were upgraded to voice over IP. "It's been quite a ride. I mean, I was here in 1985 putting in the very first satellite links we had," Smith says. "Then we had a whopping 200 kilobytes a day." That's about 3 percent the size of an MP3 of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Like the rest of us, the 150 people who spend summers at the Pole always crave more bandwidth. They'd sure like to have BitTorrent to help endure winter's eternal night. But really, it's work that's pushing the scientists to build out connectivity at the station – a collection of facilities raised on hydraulic stilts that seems like the prototype for a Mars colony. By 2014, when a 33-foot-diameter submillimeter radio telescope, a neutrino detector, and other equipment come online, researchers expect to be generating a terabyte of data each day. "These telescope numbers are something that we would never have conceived of 10 years ago," Smith says, pointing at a chart of rapidly climbing red bars. "This is really driving what we're doing."

It's not an easy job. The Pole – aka 90 South – is 3,000 miles from the closest submarine cable connection in New Zealand. Amundsen-Scott relies on the aging Iridium communications constellation plus three miscellaneous satellites wobbling far enough out of their geosynchronous orbits to exchange signals with the station. For now, they provide high-speed service some 11 hours a day and low-speed connectivity the rest of the time. "People can check their bank accounts, pay bills, and buy stock over the Internet," says Erik Kawasaki, a network engineer. "In November, the satellite pass begins at around 3 am New Zealand time, so they have to wake up early to use it. That is about the only gripe."

After a three-hour plane ride back to McMurdo Station – the main US base in Antarctica – I settle in at one of 300 workstations to email yet another picture of me on the ice. The furniture at McMurdo is older, and the station is more crowded – less like Mars and more like a state university. But every so often, the same bone-chilling sense of distance seeps in. Clad in his Carhartt parka, laborer Edgardo Alfonso Vega leans over from the neighboring desk: "Once this season, we were cut off from the world for 27 hours. Something happened, and there was no off-continent connectivity. No phones, no Internet, no nothing," he says. "That's when we felt really, really isolated."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...osts.html?pg=2





Trying To Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic Will Backfire, Badly
Mike

Over the past couple of years, a bunch of ISPs have started (usually quietly) applying traffic shaping efforts to slow down your high bandwidth applications like BitTorrent. This is part of what the whole network neutrality debate is about, but this has more to do with the ISPs trying to keep out services that use up more bandwidth then they budgeted for. What it really represents is the inability of ISPs to recognize a simple fact: if you offer people bandwidth, they'll figure out ways to use it. The ISPs got into this big race with each other, and all promised unlimited bandwidth at cheap prices, making the calculation that the demand for bandwidth wouldn't increase very much, and most people wouldn't use very much at all. They were wrong. But, rather than admit that they made a mistake, they suddenly pretend that the "all you can eat" broadband they sold you is something different -- one where they can arbitrarily limit what you can do with that bandwidth. They sold you one thing, with the belief that you wouldn't actually use it, and now that you are, they're shoving in place temporary fixes to stop you from using what they sold you. Of course, there are many who believe the whole thing is simply a ruse to try to charge everyone more money, a concept that gained steam when a loose-lipped CTO from Qwest admitted that file sharing traffic isn't actually much of a burden for them, and he didn't understand other ISPs claiming it was such a problem.

The funny thing, though, is that whether or not it really is a burden, the idea of using traffic shaping is absolutely going to backfire. As we've already discussed, the more ISPs try to snoop on or "shape" your internet usage, the more that's going to be a great selling point for encryption. People are going to increasingly encrypt all of their internet usage, from regular surfing, to file sharing to VoIP -- as it makes it that much more difficult to figure out what kind of traffic is what and to do anything with it. Broadband Reports today is moderating something of a debate on whether or not encrypting BitTorrent is a good thing, with Wired taking the bad side and TorrentFreak (not surprisingly) taking the good side. Of course, it's really all a matter of perspective. It may be good for some people or bad for the others -- but what's most amusing, is that encrypting all of this traffic will simply add a lot of overhead for the ISPs to deal with. That means, for all their talk about how file sharing traffic was a burden on their network, by trying to slow it down with traffic shaping, they're only likely to increase the burden as everyone shifts to encrypted systems making it more difficult and more costly for them to do anything about it. Add to this that the traffic shaping hardware costs money that could have gone into simply upgrading their overall network, and it seems doubly problematic. They're left with an expensive solution that doesn't solve the issue and actually makes it worse, when they could have just spent more on upgrading their network to handle more capacity.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061226/100457.shtml





(A Fading Signal)
Miguel Helft

It may be the ultimate S O S — Morse Code is in distress.

The language of dots and dashes has been the lingua franca of amateur radio, a vibrant community of technology buffs and hobbyists who have provided a communications lifeline in emergencies and disasters.

But that community has been shaken by news that the government will no longer require Morse Code proficiency as a condition for an amateur license. It was deemed dispensable in part because other modes of communicating over ham radio, like voice, teletype and even video, have grown in popularity.

While the decision had been expected, some ham radio operators fear that their exclusive club has been opened to the unwashed masses — and that the very survival of Morse Code is in question.

“It’s part of the dumbing down of America,” said Nancy Kott, editor of World Radio magazine and a field representative for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Metamora, Mich. “We live in a society today that wants something for nothing.”

A woman in a mostly male world, Ms. Kott is one of about 660,000 licensed ham operators in the United States and is the American leader of Fists CW Club, an organization that calls itself the International Morse Preservation Society. (An “open fist” was the hand position typically used by telegraph operators when sending Morse, which is sometimes called Continuous Wave, or CW. And in ham radio slang, someone who sends fine code is said to have a good fist.)

Within 48 hours after the Federal Communication Commission’s move this month to drop the Morse requirement, a discussion on www.eham.net ran more than 380 messages and 57,000 words long, the equivalent of a short novel. The postings were divided roughly evenly between those lamenting and praising the commission’s decision.

“CW is just another mode and should not be afforded any special priority over others,” wrote K4UUG, who like many radio aficionados identified himself online using his radio call sign. “Proficiency should not be required for those who do not wish to use the mode.”

As part of its decision to eliminate the Morse requirement, the commission made essentially the same point.

Inside a hilltop trailer above Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., a couple of veteran coders seemed to be taking the commission’s decision in stride earlier this week. In a room cluttered with electronic equipment, they translated the dits and dahs that beeped in the background at dizzying speed, the chatter between someone in Canada, VE6NL to be precise, and someone off the coast of Antarctica, VP8CMH.

“It’s a bit like a foreign language,” said W6LD, whose real name is John Fore, a securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a prominent Silicon Valley firm. “You learn it and it’s fun to use it.”

With thumb and forefinger barely touching the two metal ends of a Morse paddle, W6NL, a k a David B. Leeson, unleashed his own stream of dits and dahs with the ease of a virtuoso, joining the global conversation. “I fell head over heels for amateur radio when I was 4 or 5 years old and heard Morse Code signals from afar at the station of a 14-year-old,” said Mr. Leeson, 69, a consulting professor of engineering at Stanford. “I still remember the thrill.”

The thrill turned into a hobby, and the hobby turned into a career in technology. In 1968, Mr. Leeson founded California Microwave, once a thriving telecommunications equipment company but now defunct. Now radio and Morse are just for fun, said Mr. Lesson, who is faculty adviser to the Stanford Amateur Radio Club, which once counted William R. Hewlett and David Packard as members.

Mr. Leeson and Mr. Fore are both active in radio contests, 48-hour competitions in which hams try to contact as many other hams as possible, often using Morse. Mr. Leeson has a station in the Galapagos Islands, where he goes several times a year with his wife, Barbara (K6BL), for contests. They once contacted as many as 17,000 other hams in a weekend. Mr. Fore, who is 50, and got his first license when he was 10, has a station in Aruba.

They embody the kind of utility-free passion for Morse that the futurist Paul Saffo said would ensure its survival.

“Freed from all pretense of practical relevance in an age of digital communications, Morse will now become the object of loving passion by radioheads, much as another ‘dead’ language, Latin, is kept alive today by Latin-speaking enthusiasts around the world,” Mr. Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote in his blog.

Morse Code was first devised in the 1830s for use with the telegraph. It later became an essential part of civilian, maritime and military radio communications. But the military has largely abandoned its use in favor of newer technologies, and the Coast Guard stopped listening for Morse S O S signals at sea during the 1990s.

The F.C.C. first lifted the Morse Code requirement for entry-level licenses in 1991. It later dropped proficiency requirements for higher-level licenses to five words a minute, from 20. And after international regulations stopped mandating knowledge of it in 2003, it was only a matter of time until Morse Code was no longer required in the United States. The requirement will formally be phased out sometime next year.

The demise of the Morse requirement, however, could be a boon for ham radio itself. After the F.C.C.’s decision, the American Radio Relay League, an organization representing ham radio operators, said demand for information about radio licenses surged from about 200 in a typical weekend to about 500.

“We are very pleased to see that,” said David Sumner (K1ZZ), the league’s chief executive.

That is no consolation for the most avid defenders of Morse.

“There is something magical about being able to put two wires together and start going dit-dit-dit dit-dit,” said Ms. Kott, or WZ8C. “We are just going to have to get on the air and do what we do and hope for the best.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/business/27morse.html





To Send a Page, Press #, Then Hope It Still Works
James Barron

Arkadiy Shats was gentle, examining the old patient and deciding he had no choice but to operate. The surgery went fast: no more than 10 seconds of juggling a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers.

The patient was a pager.

Remember pagers? They were the razzle-dazzle innovation that kept doctors tethered to patients, drug dealers tethered to customers, government officials tethered to underlings, reporters tethered to editors. In the 1980s and early 1990s, everybody carried them. They beeped. They chirped. Or, in what their manufacturers called their “silent” mode, they vibrated in pockets and purses, or clipped to belts.

Now try to find someone who has one. Beepers have become technological fossils, on the way to extinction in the world’s rush to cellphones and all-in-one devices that can handle e-mail messages and browse the Web. Beepers are a leftover from the days when a cellphone was a novelty the size of a brick with a battery that lasted minutes, not days. Cellphones were geeky, not glamorous.

Mr. Shats, 52, rode the wave of pager technology up, and now he is riding it down. He has spent the last 19 years in a cluttered room with a meat-locker door and shiny metal walls that are covered in takeout menus and schematic circuit diagrams. His job is to repair pagers, to bring these relics of the early digital age back to life for the few who cling to them.

He works for a company in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, called CPR Technology. The three letters once stood for Certified Pager Repair. Now the pager business is all but on life support, and the company makes more money retailing accessories for Nextel phones online and importing equipment that manufacturers can use to test electronics products before shipping them from the factory.

But CPR Technology still repairs pagers, one of only a few companies in the New York metropolitan region to still do so.

“There are a lot of people who will be using this until the end of time,” said the president of CPR Technology, Charlie Tepper, 46.

Still, the numbers show that the end of time may not be far off. About 45 million pagers were in use nationwide in 1999.

Now, the total is 7.4 million, down from 8.2 million a year ago, according to Brad Dye, a wireless messaging consultant who is editor and publisher of three newsletters including The Paging Information Resource.

He says the average monthly paging bill is about $9, while CTIA — the Wireless Association, a trade group that represents cellular companies, says the comparable figure for a cellphone is $49.30. CTIA says there are 219.4 million cellphone subscribers.

“It isn’t that people didn’t like pagers,” Mr. Dye said. “It’s just that it was hard for the paging industry to compete with cellphones.”

Once, pagers were a status symbol that demanded attention, their little screens displaying strings of numerals (although some pagers could also transmit letters). Was that a telephone number, or the primitive slang from the days before text messaging? Only the recipient knew whether a message was the code for “I love you” from a girlfriend or “the cops are coming” from a drug dealer’s lookout.

Now pagers are a punch line on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock,” which featured a character who described himself as the “beeper king” after working his way to the top of a pager business. Another character said he could not give up his beeper because he was expecting a call from 1985.

It is enough to make real-life beeper kings wince. But Robert G. Daigle, a vice president of Evalueserve, a research company that tracks communications trends, has a word for what has happened to pagers.

“They’ve been disintermediated,” he said. “It’s a big fancy business term you use to talk about people who are no longer needed in business.”

Nowadays the nation’s largest pager company is USA Mobility, which was born in 2004 in the merger of two smaller companies that had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001. A spokesman said USA Mobility now provides service to 4.2 million pagers nationwide.

Hospitals continue to use pagers, in part because, unlike cellphones, pager signals reach into buildings without causing concern about interfering with medical equipment. Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, for example, provides more than 3,000 pagers to doctors, residents and interns. But Mount Sinai knows it will have to come up with an alternative before too long.

“I think they will be a thing of the past in a couple of years,” said Eunice Davis, assistant director of telecommunications for Mount Sinai. “Not many companies make pagers.”

Motorola, which dominated the market for pagers in its heyday, stopped making them in 2001. But that created opportunities for technicians like Mr. Shats and engineering entrepreneurs like Mr. Tepper.

As Mr. Dye of The Paging Information Resource said: “The 40 million pagers that people quit using, they didn’t throw them all in the trash. A lot of those have been refurbished.”

Which is what happens inside Mr. Shats’s little room, where patterns dance across his oscilloscope as he connects probes to troubleshoot an ailing pager. The metal walls keep out electronic interference, including pager signals, Mr. Shats explained.

How old was the patient he was working on? His boss, Mr. Tepper, reached into a file and pulled out the manual for that model. “Copyright 1989,” he read.

Some of the repair equipment Mr. Shats uses is older than that. Just outside the room is a row of computers that can be used to reconfigure the electronic code that gives a pager its identity. The computers are so old that they run MS-DOS, not Windows. Mr. Tepper talked about the days when he ran a company, MetroPage, which marketed Nynex paging equipment through retail stores.

“The main clients were doctors, drug dealers and businessmen,” Mr. Tepper said. “We were behind a thick piece of plexiglass and had two dogs, a Rottweiler and a German shepherd.”

There were threats, which Mr. Tepper remembers as “if my pager isn’t on by the end of today, something’s going to happen.”

Since then, he has diversified.

“We would not be able to survive if we were only repairing pagers,” Mr. Tepper said. “Wouldn’t be possible. In our heyday, we had around eight or nine people working on double shifts,” Mr. Tepper said. “At one point, we had three delivery cars, drivers with two-way radios. We’d be running around, picking up pagers to be repaired and connected. We’d be here till midnight, making sure these things were fixed and out the door the next day.”

In the ’90s, Mr. Tepper and Mr. Shats took pagers apart and “reverse-engineered” their liquid-crystal displays, the windows that display the messages, so they could produce their own. Then Mr. Tepper found a factory in China to manufacture them.

For several years, CPR Technology sold 300,000 to 400,000 such displays to other pager repairers, Mr. Tepper said. That branch of his business has fallen by 90 percent in the last couple of years, he said. But he became an importer for a South Korean company that makes equipment used to test newfangled devices like Treo 650 cellphones.

These days he mostly leaves the repairs to Mr. Shats, who is not living the lonely life of a Maytag repairman. But things are not as exciting as, say, the time he opened a pager and discovered that it had become home to dozens of cockroaches.

“I closed very fast,” he said, “and put tape around it to keep them from getting out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/ny.../27beeper.html





Electronics Help Amazon Post Record-Setting Holiday Orders
AP

The Web retailer Amazon.com’s 2006 holiday season peaked with more than four million orders placed on Dec. 11, the company said Tuesday. That broke last year’s single-day record of more than 3.6 million orders, set on Dec. 12.

In its 12th holiday season, Amazon.com said that it again had its “best ever” sales and that it shipped more than 99 percent of orders in time to meet deadlines worldwide. As many as 3.4 million units went out in a single day.

The company said it sold 1,000 Microsoft Xbox 360 game consoles in 29 seconds as part of a promotion that cut the regular retail price by two-thirds. Demand for the discounted machines was so high that Amazon.com’s site bogged down briefly on Thanksgiving Day, generating complaints from shoppers. Amazon.com changed procedures for subsequent promotions.

Among the company’s best-selling consumer electronics items were Apple Computer iPods, Canon PowerShot Digital Elph cameras and Garmin navigational devices using global positioning system technology. Amazon.com also sold one of the most expensive digital music player to date, for $19,999.

Among the top-selling DVD titles was “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” starring Johnny Depp. Best-selling books included “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” by Senator Barack Obama, and “You: On a Diet” by Mehmet C. Oz and Michael F. Roizen.

On Tuesday, shares of Amazon.com dipped 44 cents, to $39.80.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/te.../27amazon.html





AT&T Offers Concessions on BellSouth Buyout
John Dunbar

AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company's $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp.

Approval by the full commission could happen as soon as Friday.

AT&T filed a letter of commitment with the agency Thursday night that adds a number of new conditions to the deal, including a promise to observe "network neutrality" principles, an offer of affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service and divestment of some wireless spectrum.

Final approval still requires a vote of the commissioners, which can happen at any time via computer. The proposed deal is the largest telecommunications merger in U.S. history.

AT&T offered the concessions after a little more than a week of marathon negotiations with lawyers who work for the two Democrats on the commission, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, documents show.

Consumer advocates are praising the compromise. Gene Kimmelman, vice president of federal and international affairs for Consumers Union, who has worked closely with the Democrats, said AT&T's new concessions are "an enormous improvement from where we were a month ago."

Commissioners Adelstein and Copps and representatives of AT&T were not immediately available for comment Thursday evening.

The agreement came together 10 days after Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell announced that he would not vote on the deal, despite being authorized to do so by the FCC's general counsel.

McDowell, a Republican, had decided not to participate in the negotiations because of his former position as a lobbyist for Comptel, a trade organization that opposes the merger.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who supported approval of the merger without conditions, was betting that McDowell would vote in favor of the deal following the legal opinion and break a 2-2 partisan deadlock.

But with McDowell's firm declaration that he would not vote, the pressure shifted to AT&T, which had hoped to close the transaction by the end of the year, a development that put the two Democrats in a much stronger position.

Pressure was added by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who, in a veiled warning to Democrats, said negotiations should proceed "fairly and openly and in a way that avoids imposing burdens that have nothing to do with the transaction."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4431728.html





AT&T Bends, Wins Deal OK

FCC approves BellSouth buyout after giant agrees to maintain `net neutrality' for 2 years
Jon Van

A compromise proposed by AT&T Inc. to win federal approval of its $85 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. signals how much the impending takeover of Congress by Democrats has shifted telecom's regulatory landscape.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition Friday upon reviewing the proposal submitted Thursday night by AT&T. The companies closed the deal Friday after winning the FCC's OK.

After opposing restrictions on its ability to prioritize Internet traffic it carries, AT&T agreed to "maintain neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service" for two years.

The concept of preserving "net neutrality" has been the paramount telecom issue for consumer advocates all year.

While specific Internet traffic abuses have been rare, activists fear that the economic interests of big telecom and cable companies that own Internet infrastructure will compel them to discriminate against smaller competitors whose Internet-based voice and video services undermine the cash cows operated by the giants.

For their part, large telecom carriers contend that they need flexibility to manage the trillions of bits and bytes that flow across their lines daily. Government restrictions intended to ward off potential anti-competitive moves could stifle technologic innovation, say executives at big telecom concerns.

AT&T's concessions sparked year-end celebrations Friday among consumer advocates who had been stymied through most of 2006 in their efforts to pass network neutrality laws in the Republican-controlled Congress.

"We are no longer having a debate about whether net neutrality should be the law of the land," said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group. "We are having a debate about how and when."

Another aspect of AT&T's compromise proposal would put a cap of $20 a month on its basic digital subscriber line high-speed Internet service for 30 months. At present consumers who want to buy DSL without also getting an AT&T phone line must pay a minimum of about $45 a month.

Gene Kimmelman, vice president of Consumers Union, said that customers who cannot afford AT&T's prices today should soon be able to "get fast connections to the Internet at a reasonable price."

The phone giant also agreed to freeze some rates it offers to customers who buy bulk service, to sell wireless spectrum licenses held by BellSouth and to "repatriate" some 3,000 jobs outsourced abroad by BellSouth.

AT&T's BellSouth takeover had received approval from state regulators and the Justice Department but was hung up by two Democratic members of the FCC who wanted consumer-friendly concessions.

The three Republican FCC members could not override the two Democrats because one of them, Robert McDowell, had served as a telecom industry lobbyist before his federal appointment, and recused himself for ethical reasons.

Several Democratic House members slated to take leadership positions in the coming Congress had warned the FCC against approving the takeover without some concessions.

While the symbolic significance of AT&T's compromise is considerable, some observers said the substance may be less so.

David Burstein, who operates the DSLPrime.com telecom newsletter, said that buried in AT&T's proposal is a sentence that exempts its own Internet-based television service from network neutrality restrictions.

"In a seemingly innocuous sentence, AT&T opened a huge loophole for itself," said Burstein. "In the future, they can take anything they want, call it IPTV, and have no restrictions. If someone objects, they'll tie it up in court for longer than their two-year neutrality commitment."

Most consumer advocates chose to focus on the positive aspects of AT&T's proposal rather than speculate on future neutrality evasions.

"This will be a win for the public," said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...i-business-hed





AT& T Completes BellSouth Takeover
Alan Sipress and Sara Kehaulani Goo

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday overcame a seven-month deadlock and approved AT&T's $85 billion purchase of BellSouth, creating a new corporate giant that will stand astride the telecommunications industry like none other in the generation since the old AT&T empire was broken up in 1984.

The acquisition, which closed yesterday, reunites large parts of AT&T's former domain by folding BellSouth's nine-state territory into AT&T's existing operations spanning the Midwest, Southwest and West Coast. It gives AT&T complete control of Cingular Wireless, the country's largest mobile-telephone provider, at a time when wireless is the newest frontier for reaching the Internet. Cingular is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth.

Unequaled in capital and geographic reach, the new AT&T could be a tough adversary for cable companies by offering television service over the Internet, possibly lowering rates for customers in its service area. Several conditions imposed on the acquisition to protect consumers could encourage the availability of affordable broadband. AT&T agreed to offer high-speed Internet for $19.95 a month over the next 30 months without requiring customers to purchase phone service from the company.

AT&T's size could also give it more power to set prices for telephone and other services -- although it agreed temporarily not to impose new charges on Web companies that use its lines -- and to influence political debate over telecommunications well beyond its service area. In the Washington area, where Verizon Communications is the primary phone company, the immediate impact of the merger is likely to be limited, FCC officials said.

"AT&T will be an engine for innovation, competition, and growth for our customers at home and abroad," chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr. said in a written statement. "In the Southeast, we will build on BellSouth's excellent record of serving customers and communities. And we are ready to lead the way in a new era of integrated wireless services nationwide."

The FCC had long been deadlocked over AT&T's purchase of BellSouth as Republican and Democratic commissioners sparred over what conditions to impose on the deal. But in the past 10 days, AT&T redoubled its efforts to break the impasse, pressing for a resolution before the end of the year. On Thursday, the company offered significant concessions to protect consumers and ensure competition and, with only minutes remaining before the close of the year's business, the board's two Democrats set aside their objections to join with two Republicans to approve the acquisition.

Kevin J. Martin, the FCC chairman and the deal's principal advocate on the commission, said it would help realize his goal of extending broadband Internet service across the nation by fostering competition. "This deployment is critical to our nation's competitiveness in the global economy and to our national security," Martin and fellow Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate said in a joint statement. "All consumers should expect to benefit from this technology."

AT&T's last-minute commitments include a two-year pledge to abide by "net neutrality" -- agreeing not to discriminate against Web companies in pricing or in access to lines. That was an about-face for the company, which has argued that it should be allowed to give priority to Internet firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft if they pay for it. Whitacre said last year that anyone expecting to use the phone lines free was "nuts."

Besides offering to sell stand-alone Internet service for $19.95 a month, AT&T also agreed to give up some wireless licenses suitable for high-speed Internet so that other companies could compete. The company also said it would freeze the rates for "special access" lines that serve some large businesses and move 3,000 BellSouth jobs to the United States from overseas.

"A historic merger warrants historic conditions," said Jonathan S. Adelstein, a Democrat on the commission who had refused to support the deal without consumer protections. "We won far more concessions to benefit the public than anyone predicted when this deal was announced."

With a market capitalization of $225 billion, the new AT&T will vastly outgun its leading competitor, Verizon, which was born six years ago in a $52 billion merger between GTE and Bell Atlantic.

But while the merger creates a new AT&T behemoth, the combined company is far different from the one that reigned for 70 years as a government-regulated monopoly and architect of the world's most advanced, comprehensive and affordable telephone system. That corporation, at the time the largest in the United States, had so cornered the market on communications that many Americans referred to it simply as the phone company.

Even as the new AT&T faces limited competition from other telephone operators, it is challenged by cable and computer companies playing in a far larger, more complicated marketplace encompassing television, broadband and wireless, as well as local and long-distance land-line telephone service. In recent years, cable companies have been more successful at poaching the phone business -- bundling it with TV and broadband and selling it to subscribers -- than traditional telephone operators have been in crossing over to television.

Earlier this month, a divided FCC approved a measure aimed at helping telephone companies move into cable television markets by significantly limiting what local officials can demand in return for franchises.

Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a Bethesda research firm, said AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth "reflects a natural oligopoly." In the early days, "public utilities were a natural monopoly. In our digital era today, competition is now not between the Bell companies, but between Bell and cable operators and some wireless [companies] in there."

Gigi B. Sohn, president of the Public Knowledge advocacy group, praised the FCC for approving the merger with strong conditions, especially on net neutrality, and urged the commission make sure that AT&T complies. In particular, she said the company might try to evade part of its net-neutrality commitment by claiming that the television service it provides over the Internet is akin to cable television and thus not subject to the condition.

Though the merger represents a landmark in U.S. telecommunications, it would be misleading to cast the corporate takeover as an epic tale of AT&T reconstituting itself from the wreckage of the 1984 breakup and its disastrous business decisions. The decline began with the divestiture, when AT&T gambled that it would be more lucrative to keep its long-distance business and cut loose the regional phone companies. But that meant jettisoning the huge number of employees and customers who gave the company political clout. In 1996, the regional companies and others won the right in Washington to compete for long-distance and the tide started turning against AT&T.

As intense competition forced prices for long-distance to fall, AT&T struggled to find a new calling and looked to cable. It again splintered six years ago, into four separately traded companies for broadband, wireless, business services and consumer services.

AT&T today is an utterly different corporation than the old Ma Bell, sharing little more than the name. The company that now flies the AT&T flag was until last year known as SBC Communications Inc. SBC, one of the original Baby Bells, gobbled up the relatively meager, sickly remains of the old AT&T, then took its venerated name before turning its appetite earlier this year to BellSouth.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...8.html?nav=trm





Local news

AT&T Launches TV Service in Danbury
AP

AT&T launched television service in Connecticut on Wednesday, using its phone lines to compete with cable TV companies in a battle for viewers that's being fought in federal court.

Neighborhoods in nine towns and cities, including Cheshire, Danbury, Newington, Stamford and Wethersfield, can subscribe to AT&T's "U-verse" that offers hundreds of channels. U-verse is a form of Internet protocol television, or IPTV, that provides programming over phone lines.

AT&T, which would not disclose how many customers are able to subscribe to the service, sees Connecticut as a wealthy market with customers who want an alternative to increasingly costly cable TV bills.

"We have to get people to realize AT&T is not just a phone company anymore," said Chad Townes, the company's vice president and general manager for Connecticut.

U-verse offers digital TV and high-speed Internet access, with the basic TV service starting at about $44. U-verse offers more than 300 channels.

Cable companies are fighting AT&T, accusing state regulators of establishing separate systems for AT&T and cable TV. AT&T does not face requirements such as a gross receipts tax and requirements to provide public access and service for all customers in its sales area.

Comcast, Cox Communications and others have previously had exclusive rights to provide television using cable. Satellite TV companies provide the sole competition.

Cable TV providers say the differences between their systems and AT&T's gives the competition an unfair advantage.

"All we are saying is we have to play by the same rules," said Paul Cianelli, president of the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents traditional cable providers.

AT&T has said it will pay local property and state sales taxes and $5 per subscriber to support public access operations. And it has said it will provide "nondiscriminatory access" to video services that will be available to low-income households in markets where it is building its network.

The state Office of Consumer Counsel, which represents cable customers, has joined the cable companies, saying the state Department of Public Utility Control erred by giving AT&T an advantage that could hamper the development of genuine competition and deprive poor neighborhoods of service.

The agency has sued AT&T and state regulators in state and federal courts. The litigation is pending.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1027014





Milestones

James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ Dies at 73
Jon Pareles

James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died early yesterday in Atlanta. He was 73 and lived in Beech Island, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga.

Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas.

Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.

Mr. Copsidas said that Mr. Brown had participated in an annual Christmas toy giveaway in Augusta on Friday but had been hospitalized on Saturday. After canceling performances planned for midweek, Mr. Brown on Sunday night got his doctor’s approval to perform on Saturday in New Jersey and on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s nightclub in New York.

Mr. Copsidas said Mr. Brown used one of his best-known slogans to convey his dedication to his fans: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.”

Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.

His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.

“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.

The funk Mr. Brown introduced in his 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” was both deeply rooted in Africa and thoroughly American. Songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Cold Sweat,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Hot Pants” found the percussive side of every instrument and meshed sharply syncopated patterns into kinetic polyrhythms that made people dance.

Mr. Brown’s innovations reverberated through the soul and rhythm-and-blues of the 1970s and the hip-hop of the next three decades. The beat of a 1970 instrumental “Funky Drummer” may well be the most widely sampled rhythm in hip-hop.

Mr. Brown’s stage moves — the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits — were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not. Mr. Brown was a political force, especially during the 1960s; his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” changed America’s racial vocabulary. He was never politically predictable; in 1972 he endorsed the re-election of Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Brown led a turbulent life, and served prison time as both a teenager and an adult. He was a stern taskmaster who fined his band members for missed notes or imperfect shoeshines. He was an entrepreneur who, at the end of the 1960s, owned his own publishing company, three radio stations and a Learjet (which he would later sell to pay back taxes). And he performed constantly: as many as 51 weeks a year in his prime.

Mr. Brown was born May 3, 1933, in a one-room shack in Barnwell, S.C. As he would later tell it, midwives thought he was stillborn, but his body stayed warm, and he was revived. When his parents separated four years later, he was left in the care of his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel in Augusta, Ga. As a boy he earned pennies buck-dancing for soldiers; he also picked cotton and shined shoes. He was dismissed from school because his clothes were too ragged.

He was imprisoned for petty theft in 1949 after breaking into a car, and paroled three years later. While in prison he sang in a gospel group. After he was released, he joined a group led by Bobby Byrd, which eventually called itself the Flames. At first, Mr. Brown played drums with the group and traded off lead vocals with other members. But with his powerful voice and frenzied, acrobatic dancing, he soon emerged as the frontman.

In 1955 the Flames recorded “Please Please Please” in the basement studio of a radio station in Macon, Ga. A talent scout heard it on local radio and signed the Flames to a recording contract with King Records. A second version, recorded in Cincinnati in 1956, became a million-selling single.

Nine follow-up singles were flops until, in 1958 a gospel-rooted ballad, “Try Me,” went to No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues chart. Mr. Brown followed up with more ballads, although the Flames’ stage shows would turn them into long, frenzied crescendos. His trademark routine of collapsing onstage, having a cape thrown over him and tossing it away for one more reprise, again and again, would leave audiences shouting for more.

In 1960 Mr. Brown’s version of “Think” put a choppy, Latin-flavored beat — hinting at the funk to come — behind a sustained vocal and pushed him back into the R&B Top 10 and the pop Top 40.

Mr. Brown had his first Top 20 pop hit in 1963 with “Prisoner of Love,” a ballad backed by an orchestra. But before those sessions he had done a series of shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the one on Oct. 24, 1962, was recorded. His label had not wanted to record the shows; Mr. Brown insisted. Released in 1963, “Live at the Apollo” — with screaming fans and galvanizing crescendos — revealed what the rhythm-and-blues circuit already knew, and became the No. 2 album nationwide.

James Brown and the Famous Flames toured nonstop through the 1960s. They were filmed in California for the “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released in 1965, which shows Mick Jagger trying to pick up Mr. Brown’s dance moves.

By the mid-1960s Mr. Brown was producing his own recording sessions. In February 1965, with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” he decided to shift the beat of his band: from the one-two-three-four backbeat to one-two-three-four. “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat,” Mr. Brown said in 1990. “Simple as that, really.”

Actually it wasn’t that simple; drums, rhythm guitar and horns all kicked the beat around from different angles. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” won a Grammy Award as best rhythm-and-blues song, and it was only the beginning of Mr. Brown’s rhythmic breakthroughs. Through the 1960s and into the ’70s, Mr. Brown would make his funk ever more complex while stripping harmony to a bare minimum in songs like “Cold Sweat.” He didn’t immediately abandon ballads; songs like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1966, mixed aching, bluesy lines with wrenching screams.

Amid the civil rights ferment of the 1960s Mr. Brown used his fame and music for social messages. He released “Don’t Be a Dropout” in 1966 and met with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to promote a stay-in-school initiative. Two years later “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” insisted, “We won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Mr. Brown was due to perform in Boston. Instead of canceling his show, he had it televised. Boston was spared the riots that took place in other cities. “Don’t just react in a way that’s going to destroy your community,” he urged.

By the late 1960s Mr. Brown’s funk was part of pop, R&B and jazz: in his own hits, in songs by the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, and in the music of Miles Davis. It was also creating a sensation in Africa, where it would shape the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, the juju of King Sunny Ade and the mbalax of Youssou N’Dour.

Musicians who left Mr. Brown’s bands would also have a direct role in 1970s and 1980s funk; the saxophonist Maceo Parker, the trombonist Fred Wesley and the bassist Bootsy Collins were part of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and Mr. Parker also worked with Prince.

Through the early 1970s Mr. Brown’s songs filled dance floors. His self-described “super heavy funk” gave him No. 1 R&B hits and Top 20 pop hits with “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and “Mother Popcorn” in 1969, “Super Bad Pts. 1 & 2” in 1970, “Hot Pants” and “Make It Funky” in 1971, “Get on the Good Foot Pt. 1” in 1972 and “The Payback Pt. 1” in 1974. He provided soundtracks for blaxploitation movies like “Black Caesar” and “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off,” and performed at the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.

The rise of disco — a much simplified version of Mr. Brown’s funk — knocked him out of the Top 40 in the late 1970s. But an appearance in “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 started a career resurgence, and in 1985 Mr. Brown had a pop hit, peaking at No. 4, with “Living in America,” the song he performed in the movie “Rocky IV.” It won him his second Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. That year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of its first members.

Meanwhile hip-hop had arrived, with Mr. Brown’s music often providing the beat. LL Cool J, Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys are among the more than 100 acts that have sampled Clyde Stubblefield’s drumming on “Funky Drummer” alone. In 1984 Mr. Brown collaborated with the influential rapper Afrika Bambaataa on the single “Unity.” He kept recording into the 21st century, including a 2002 studio album, “The Next Step.”

Mr. Brown maintained a nearly constant touring schedule despite a tumultuous personal life. During the 1970s the Internal Revenue Service demanded $4.5 million in unpaid taxes; the jet and radio stations were sold. His oldest son, Teddy, died in a car accident in 1973.

In 1988, intoxicated on PCP, he burst into an insurance seminar adjoining his own office in Augusta, then led police on a car chase across the South Carolina border. He was sentenced to prison for carrying a deadly weapon at a public gathering, attempting to flee a police officer and driving under the influence of drugs, and was released in 1991.

In 1998 after discharging a rifle and another car chase, he was sentenced to a 90-day drug rehabilitation program. He was officially pardoned by South Carolina in 2003, but arrested again in 2004 on charges of domestic violence against his fourth wife, Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer. “I would never hurt my wife,” he said in a statement at the time. “I love her very much.”

She survives him, along with their son, James Brown II, and at least five other children.

In 1999, Mr. Brown made a deal to receive more than $25 million in bonds against advance publishing royalties. This year, however, he sought to refinance the bonds with a new loan. The banker who had made the original deal, David Pullman, objected to the terms, and Mr. Brown filed a lawsuit against him in July.

But Mr. Brown’s status as an American archetype had long since been assured. A definitive collection, “Star Time” (Universal), was released in 1991. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, the same year that Michael Jackson presented him with a BET Award for lifetime achievement. In a 1990 interview with The New York Times, he said, “I was always 25 years ahead of my time.”

John O’Neil contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/ar...5ZburNwtV+K0GQ





Godfather of Soul, and C.E.O. of His Band
Kelefa Sanneh

What did James Brown do?

Even now, half a century after the release of his first single, “Please Please Please,” and days after his death of congestive heart failure, at 73, early on Christmas morning, that’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

He was a singer, of course, though he was perhaps better known for his grunts and his patter. “I wanna get up and do my thing. (Yeah!) Can I get into it? (Yeah!) Like a ... (What?) Like a ... (What?)” With an introduction like that, who cares if the song never starts?

He was a dancer, too, though that seemed less like the cause of his appeal and more like an effect of it. He moved as if he simply couldn’t help himself, and he toured that way too. His scheduled New Year’s Eve concert in New York was to be just one more date on his latest tour; tonight, for example, he had been scheduled for a concert in Waterbury, Conn. (Now that’s dedication.)

Most of all, he was an old-fashioned, hard-driving bandleader — which is to say, an anomaly. In an era of rock stars he often seemed like the second coming of Cab Calloway; the old big band had gotten smaller, but the man in front had only grown.

And while his rock ’n’ roll counterparts chafed at the idea of being mere entertainers, Mr. Brown never stopped bragging about being “the hardest-working man in show business.”

He was black and proud, he was a sex machine, but he was also a brilliant conductor, known for coaxing great performances out of the singers and musicians behind him. That, most of all, is what Mr. Brown did.

So celebrating the James Brown sound also means celebrating the musicians who created it. When he delayed the fourth and final beat of a measure, the drummer Clyde Stubblefield warped time in a way that helped inspire a whole constellation of rhythm-obsessed genres. Bobby Byrd (he of the famous “Yeah!” and “What?”), Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson: to love James Brown is to love them too. And not enough has been written about Jimmy Nolen, the visionary guitarist whose spidery licks helped inspire two generations of post-punk bands. (When people talk about “angular” guitars, they often mean “Jimmy-Nolen-ish.”)

In this sense the bandleader was also a brand leader: in the 1970s, especially, “James Brown” was not just a star, but an executive, a producer, a franchise. His name (sometimes his face too) on the record label meant you were getting a James-Brown-approved product. And if you went to see the J.B.’s, the backing band that morphed into a terrific stand-alone group, you were also seeing a reflection of Mr. Brown, even if he was nowhere near the building.

Bandleaders have always (of necessity) been businessmen too, but Mr. Brown was wise enough to be unembarrassed by the echo. There was a hint of corporate precision in the way he led those musicians onstage: each wiggle of the hip or flicker of the hand was an urgent memo from top management; each post-show conversation was a performance evaluation. Even his political program reflected this obsession; his vision of black power was in large part a vision of black spending power, and he saw no reason why a black nationalist shouldn’t also be an eager (and successful) black capitalist.

The musician as executive: this is the not-quite-new notion that defines the current musical era. Pop stars flaunt their corporate ties; rappers brag about their business acumen (real or, more often, imaginary); rock bands cheerfully acknowledge that they are brands on the run. And while some listeners may be nostalgic for a time when pop music was untainted by corporate chic, Mr. Brown’s career is a reminder that the old-fashioned bandleader and new-fangled pop-star C.E.O. really aren’t so far apart. When he called himself “the hardest-working man in show business,” the emphasis was on “working” and “business.”

If James Brown, the musician, has also been influential and enduring, it’s not just because of his evergreen hits, which still sound vigorous, even though they have been reissued and covered and sampled ad nauseam. And it’s not just because of all the styles he helped inspire, from Nigerian Afro-beat to Brazilian funk-rap.

It’s also because, decades before the rise of computer music, he proved that some virtuosos do their best work with no instruments at all. In that sense his true heirs today are producers like Timbaland: knob-twiddling masterminds who program sounds instead of conducting them, beat-obsessed visionaries who keep reinventing Mr. Brown’s propulsive templates, serial collaborators who understand the business of pop music.

No one could ever do all the things Mr. Brown did. But here is what’s more impressive: musicians are still finding new ways to do some of them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/ar...sann.html?8dpc





Asia Quakes Damage Cables; Internet, Banks Affected

Telecommunications around Asia were severely disrupted on Wednesday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged undersea cables, slowing Internet services and hindering financial transactions, particularly in the currency market.

Banks and businesses across the region reported problems with communications, with some telephone lines cut and Internet access slowing to a crawl.

South Korea's top fixed-line and broadband service provider, KT Corp, said in a statement that six submarine cables were knocked out by Tuesday night's earthquakes.

``Twenty-seven of our customers were hit, including banks and churches,'' a KT spokesman said. ``It is not known yet when we can fully restore the services.''

Banks in Seoul said foreign exchange trading had been affected.

``Trading of the Korean won has mostly halted due to the communication problem,'' said a dealer at one domestic bank.

Some disruption was also reported in the important Tokyo currency market but the EBS system that handles much dollar/yen trading appeared to be working.

Global information company Reuters Group Plc said all users of its services in Japan and South Korea had been affected.

One Tokyo foreign exchange trader said: ``There are many currencies in which market-making is being conducted via Reuters and such currencies such as the Australian dollar and the British pound are in a very tenuous situation now.''

State Secret

In China, trading in currencies and copper appeared to be normal and both the Shanghai stock market and money market were working.

But China Telecommunications Group, the country's biggest fixed-line telephone operator and parent of China Telecom Corp., said the earthquakes had affected lines ``from the Chinese mainland to places including the Taiwan area, the United States and Europe, and many have been cut.''

``Internet connections have been seriously affected, and phone links and dedicated business lines have also been affected to some degree,'' it said.

Officials declined to give further details. ``Undersea communications cables fall in the area of state secrets,'' said a ministry of communications official in Beijing.

The main quake, measured by Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau at magnitude 6.7 and at magnitude 7.1 by the U.S. Geological Survey, struck off Taiwan's southern coast at 1226 GMT on Tuesday. Two people were killed.

Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said two of four major undersea cables out of Taiwan had been affected. Voice circuits had been reduced to 40 per cent of capacity to the United States and just 2 per cent to most parts of Southeast Asia.

KDDI Corp., Japan's second-largest telecoms company, said communications along submarine cables out of Japan went through Taiwan before reaching Southeast Asian countries, which was leading to disruption.

But it said communications were unlikely to break down completely since there were alternative lines.

PCCW, Hong Kong's main fixed-line telecoms provider, said several undersea cables it part-owned had been damaged. ``Data transfer is down by half,'' a spokeswoman said.

Both Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), Southeast Asia's top phone company, and local rival StarHub Ltd., said customers were suffering slow access to Internet pages.

But SingTel said traffic was being diverted and repair work was in progress, adding: ``Our submarine cables linking to Europe and the U.S. are not affected.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world...rnet-asia.html





China Internet Users Fake Identity Numbers
UPI

Chinese officials say Internet users in the country are using false identity card numbers to mask their identities while accessing Web sites and games.

An official from the National Citizen Identity Information Center said software that generates fake identity information can be downloaded off the Internet for use in registering online game or Web site accounts, Xinhua, China's official government-run news agency, reported Tuesday.

"Chinese game companies and most of the Web sites that require personal information on registration do not check anything. Their 'real name registration systems' are simply no match for the identity card number generators," the official said.

"Even children can now access games and Web sites that contain unsuitable content using the identity card number generator," he said.

Huang Chenqing, secretary-general of the Internet Society of China, said: "A lot of Internet users just don't want to register under their real names for fear that they cannot do and say what they want on the 'Net as freely as before. What's more, some Internet users don't trust game companies and Web sites with their personal information."
http://www.playfuls.com/news_05632_C...y_Numbers.html





Stultification: How Sweet It Is
Mike Albo

WHENEVER someone asks where I’ll be for the holidays, I always do the same thing: roll my eyes and say, exasperatedly: “I guess I’m going home for Christmas. Hope I don’t go insane!”

It’s been part of my conversational repertory since my early 20s, the time when you start having to prove to yourself that you are a self-governing adult, but before you realize that adulthood basically involves complex and enervating tasks like Internet dating, shopping for jeans, trying to remember your 15 various log-on codes and passwords, and deciphering your Verizon bill.

Now I am 37 years old and I can’t wait to go insane at Christmas in that comfortable padded cell known as “home.” Instead of being tedious, going home has become an indulgent retreat from my fried-out issue-driven city life. It is a place where I line my mind and body with the fatty lard of my suburban youth and experience not one moment of regret.

For a brief week, I get to be as ugly and out of it as Americans are always accused of being, and no one has to see it.

I have almost no choice. Every year I arrive at my parents’ house in Springfield, Va., armed with my healthy self-edifying projects — big leafy Penguin classics, Chomsky-explains-it-all books and a backlog of fortifying magazines. And every year I think I am going to actually read a paragraph of one of these things. But then I walk in the front door, say ‘hi’ to my mom and dad, stand at the kitchen counter and start eating cheese.

That’s not all that’s in the house. In case there is a terrorist attack at the Price Club, my mother has stocked up on boxed food, durable bags of meatballs, bins of croutons, an entire spectrum of cereal, jug wine and other pleasures that would never be reviewed in food and wine supplements.

After inhaling some combination of sustenance entirely made of carbohydrates and trans fats, I will go upstairs and change into an infantilizing outfit of fleece sweat pants and an old high school T-shirt that says “Go Spartans!” on it.

Then I go back downstairs and begin to watch television. In this consumer Green Zone, I can finally, really, watch TV. I am unfettered, and free of my ironic eye, op-ed anger and Web site snark, I can enjoy TV the way it was meant to be enjoyed — sitting there with my mouth open, too lazy to get up and go to the bathroom.

There are no Whole Foods here, no Bikram yoga, no concerns about my personal carbon emissions. I lose touch, for once, with my online pals, bloggy buddies, Netflix friends and MySpace chums. Finally I am logged off from the incessant broadband stream of information of my daily life. I don’t have to eat properly, act locally, think globally, sync up, detoxify or Move On.

I don’t have to check the label of my carefully selected non-animal-tested facial scrub to make sure that there are no secret traces of benzene. I don’t have to take only two minutes of my time to provide a free mammogram to another low-income woman by simply signing an online petition.

Instead, I simply sit there, eating Edy’s ice cream and watching a marathon of lesbian "Next" episodes on MTV. For once, I have zero concern for the homeless, global warming, my future and Darfur. It’s like my brain has been deprived of vital nonnutrients. I sit there on the couch in the living room drinking up the lack of intellectual stimuli like a steamy hammam of nothing important.

Under my bed is a suitcase that contains my old diaries. There are entries from when I was a 19-year-old member of Queer Nation and Act Up, and I would come to the dinner table filled with a defiant anger, quoting Annie Sprinkle, the self-described post-porn modernist sex activist, while saying grace.

If that 19-year-old saw me now, he would roll his eyes. He would think I had been padded and stupefied by the entertainment-industrial complex. He would say that the American consumer machine has swallowed me up in its accommodating mouth.

But I seem to remember that 19-year-old needed this week to relax his white-knuckle grip on reality, too. He would creep down the stairs at 3 a.m., grab a stack of windmill cookies, and channel-surf through the late-night infomercials beaming from the screen like a soothing strobe light.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/fashion/24Home.html





Where "Check Please" is Your Call

At a new breed of "Robin Hood" restaurants, diners pay what they can afford -- and what they think the meal is worth
Peta Owens-Liston

Deciding between the spicy peanut stew and the pesto chicken, or the squash soup and the avocado, chicken, lime soup, are not the only decisions tempting patrons at the One World Café in Salt Lake City and the SAME (So All Might Eat) Café in Denver. They must also decide what the meal is worth.

These pay-as-you-can cafes have missions that are unapologetically altruistic—call it serving up fare Robin Hood style. "Our philosophy is that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves the chance to eat healthy, organic food while being treated with dignity," explains Brad Birky, who opened SAME with his wife, Libby, in October. Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service — sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden — for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give. "We're a hand up, not a hand out," says One World owner Denise Cerreta, who prides herself on the fact that everyone can afford a meal at her café.

An epiphany scribbled out on a cocktail napkin on a plane ride gave birth to SAME café (www.soallmayeat.org). Both Brad and Libby had been searching for a meaningful way to give back while making a living. Admitted volunteer junkies, they had been serving and eating with homeless shelter residents for the past eight years. "We loved the service aspect of giving to the community and attacking the issue of hunger," says Brad. "Plus we both love to cook." When they found out about One World, they flew to Salt Lake City to learn how it was run. Cerreta, in turn, spent a month helping the Birkys prepare for opening. One World has had more than 25 inquiries from others around the country interested in starting a similar café. Recently, the café formed a nonprofit www.oneworldeverybodyeats.comaimed at helping others replicate such a venture.

The cafes' clientele is as diverse as the from-scratch buffet-style dishes. Attorneys and CEOs, students, seniors and soccer moms, as well as those down on their luck are among the 150-200 customers that dine daily at One World. Sniffling from a cold, Mike Dega, an environmental engineer, came in looking for comfort food. "I feel like I'm getting a whole new set of nutrients here as opposed to processed food—plus all the spices and flavors here are a real turn-on."

The cafés' business models have won fans among the city's well-to-do residents, many of whom regularly dine there. At One World, patrons have given Cerreta a car, bought new dishes, arranged to professionally clean her carpets, supplied new tile for the restaurant bathrooms, and donated property for an organic garden and funded a new irrigation system for it. Last week, a gentleman left a $50 bill next to an empty bowl of soup at SAME. Since opening, one man has regularly come in and left money on the counter without eating, stating "I was blessed today so I though I'd pass it on." He's homeless.

Because customers decide on their portion sizes and the fact that most of the food is fresh (as opposed to stocked), very little food is wasted. At the end of the day at One World, only one garbage can needs to be emptied. "I can come in here and eat a ton after a (construction) shift for lunch and pay what I can, and then my mom, who eats a lot less, can just get the amount she wants and pay what she feels is fair," says regular Justin Wood, 25, who is sipping coffee and eating dessert with his mother on a Friday afternoon.

Paying the check by honor system has its risks; there are always those who will exploit the opportunity and eat for free — perhaps more so in big cities. At Babu, an Indian restaurant in New York City, the pay-what-you-feel-is-fair method resulted in too many people getting a free meal. One Friday night, a rowdy group of 10 young Indians walked in and took over the restaurant's large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; not even a tip for the wait staff. Babu now states their prices. Birky at SAME has yet to notice anyone not paying. And Cerreta has had to approach only a few people, including one group of diners that paid nothing over several visits. She pointed out that by not paying they were stealing from her. They ended up contributing.

Deciding what to pay can give some diners indigestion. So Birky suggests they consider three things: How much did you eat? How much would you pay for that elsewhere? And what is fair to your own budget?

Once you're satisfied with the prices, the brie, cranberry and chicken pizza will taste even better.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/printo...572805,00.html





Liberating & Restricting C-SPAN's Floor Footage
bigmammoth writes

"C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions."

"If C-SPAN succeeds, reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all already 'liberated' committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of 'dignity and decorum' and will be denying C-SPANS request."
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.../12/27/0333256





Cellphones for the Music Fan
Roy Furchgott

AT a tree-trimming party at his Chicago co-op apartment, Eric Spanitz supplied seasonal music, a mix of Bing Crosby and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which issued from a certain well-known compact portable electronic device — a mobile phone.

About a year ago Mr. Spanitz, a professor of management at Lake Forest University in Illinois and a business consultant, finally decided to buy a phone and a music player, but he didn’t want to carry two devices. Instead he bought a Sony- Ericsson W800i Walkman phone that combines both.

“I use it more often than I expected,” he said of the music function, with which he listens to tunes on plane trips and in his hotel room, and even uses his selection of 60s rock, jazz, classical and German electronica to serve as a D.J. at impromptu gatherings. “The constant reaction is, ‘Where are you hiding the speakers? That sound can’t come from the phone,’ ” he said.

Speculation that Apple Computer will announce a combination iPod and phone at the Macworld convention in San Francisco next month has fueled interest among people who, like Mr. Spanitz, don’t want to carry multiple devices — even though most phones already have multimedia players that handle music.

The problem seems to be that few multimedia phones, if any, are as easy to use as an iPod. Of course, most people pick phones primarily for the phone features or service plan, but for those who put high importance on music, there is a subset of media phones designed with the music fan in mind. A few can give an iPod a run for the money.

At the top of the list is the Motorola iTunes phone from Cingular ($200 after $50 rebate with a two-year contract). The handset is a modified Motorola RAZR, called the V3i, with a music note button that takes you right to your songs. The V3i uses the same menu system as the iPod. The phone lacks the iPod click wheel, so an up/down/left/right button substitutes.

The phone screen displays not only the basic song information, but also a picture of the CD cover — if you have downloaded the image into your iTunes file. Plugged into a computer with iTunes software, the V3i practically sets itself up. With a few button clicks it randomly fills with songs. Like an iPod, the phone can recharge from its U.S.B. connection or from a wall socket and works equally well with Mac or PC.

The sound quality is Pod-worthy, but the V3i does have its limitations. For one, it can hold only 100 songs (6.9 hours of music, its maker says.), and the memory cannot be expanded, as is true for most music phones. Because Cingular does not sell music over its network (just ring tones), you can’t buy songs and have them instantly transmitted into your phone.

Another Cingular music phone, the Sony-Ericsson Walkman W810i (the newer version of Mr. Spanitz’s phone is $99 after a $100 rebate with a two-year contract), offers a memory slot to store a heap of music, but uses only Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick cards, which are frequently more expensive than generic memory.

A “candy bar”-style phone, it has an adapter for other brands of headsets, although the Sony in-ear headphones that are included are decent — crisp sounding, if lacking in bass. Setting the built-in equalizer to “bass” helps.

Loading songs should be easy but proved initially glitchy in a reporter’s test. Plugging the phone into a U.S.B. port sets it up as a drive; then you can drag and drop songs. The W810i should recognize music and store it properly, but it didn’t work in the test. When music was dropped directly into the folder labeled MP3 on the card and the phone restarted, it worked perfectly.

The Sony does pump out a lot of sound through its three tiny speakers. While it is loud enough for small gatherings like Mr. Spanitz’s, fidelity is the quality of a 1960s transistor radio.

The Walkman phone offers 50 streaming radio stations through MobiRadio for $8.99 a month. Channels range from rap to classical, but the tinny sound quality and signal drop-outs will disappoint hi-fi fans. The built-in FM tuner (found under the Entertainment tab, not Music) sounds far better at no extra charge.

From Verizon Wireless, the LG VX8500 Chocolate phone ($99 after $50 rebate with a two-year contract) has plenty of cool factor, but how much you like it depends on your regard for the buttonless, touch-sensitive control pad. The red backlight glow will attract admiring glances, but it takes practice to develop the right touch to operate the pad.

The slider phone has a hot button to take you right to your music, and loading songs, while not flawless, worked with some persistence. Sound quality was a bit thin but acceptable.

The display while music is playing shows the album cover in a larger size than others, a nice graphic touch.

Browsing Verizon’s V-Cast music store on the Chocolate displays only three artists at a time, making shopping laborious. If you already know what you want, it’s easier. Downloads direct to the phone from the V-Cast store are $1.99 and you get two copies, one to the phone and a higher-quality copy for your computer. You can also use your computer to buy a single copy from the V-Cast store for 99 cents, which can be loaded onto the phone’s SD card by U.S.B.

Sprint’s most tune-oriented phone is the Fusic ($30 after a $50 rebate with a two-year contract, through Dec. 31). But Sprint tries to appeal to the music fan not so much with the phone as with its service, producing exclusive live music and phonecast TV shows for its customers.

Many of the special features and much of the exclusive content, however, are geared toward selling music through Sprint. Shopping screens are neatly laid out showing an artist’s most popular downloads as well as a comprehensive list of tunes. The downloads are remarkably fast, but the cost of that convenience is a steep $2.50 per song — plus the minutes spent downloading. As with Verizon, you get two copies of the song, one direct to the phone and one for your computer, but you can’t save money by buying direct through your computer.

While you can download on an economy plan, the per-kilobyte charge makes it expensive. Frequent downloaders may save over all using the more expensive Power Vision plan, which includes some data downloads. Other add-ons also add to the price, like 20 channels of Sirius radio, which cost $6.95 a month plus tax.

In a test of the Fusic, loading songs through the U.S.B. connection was stymied by a card-reader problem that the company said was being addressed, but was easily accomplished by putting the micro SD card in a reader and dragging unprotected MP3 files to the card’s MP3 folder.

Sound quality was better with MP3s than with the streaming radio, but was greatly improved in both cases by other brands of earbuds.

One novel feature of the Fusic is its FM transmitter, which lets you send the music from your phone to an FM radio receiver.

Then you can use the phone not only like a D.J., as Mr. Spanitz does; you can go him one better at your next party and be an in-house dance club D.J. over your radio.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/te.../28basics.html





Chatterbox

use oink's pink palace
hansblix

it's not public and has almost everything you need.

i rarely have to search elsewhere for a torrent.


[reply]
by tim507

that place scares me,..

http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Torren..._Thoughtpolice





Music Denied -- Shoppers Overwhelm iTunes

•Apple's iTunes struggles to handle post holiday crush
•Users get error messages, long slowdowns, denied access
•Analyst: 'Traffic was so great it blew up the site'

Swarms of online shoppers armed with new iPods and iTunes gift cards apparently overwhelmed Apple's iTunes music store over the holiday, prompting error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads of a single song.

Frazzled users began posting urgent help messages Monday and Tuesday on Apple's technical forum for iTunes, complaining they were either not allowed into the store or were told the system couldn't process their request to download songs and videos.

It was not immediately clear how many people were affected by the slowdowns, and Apple Computer Inc. would not immediately comment Wednesday on what caused the slowdown and whether it had been fixed.

Analysts said the problems likely were the result of too many people with holiday iPods and iTunes gift cards trying to access the site at once.

Traffic indeed was heavy over the holiday, with more than four times as many people visiting the iTunes Web site on Christmas than at the same time last year, online market researcher Hitwise said Wednesday.

Some financial analysts said the interruption could be viewed as a sign that sales dramatically exceeded the Cupertino-based company's own forecasts.

"It's actually created more positive buzz among analysts -- traffic was so great it blew up the site," said Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. "If anything it could be a positive -- demand was better than they were expecting."

Apple commands about 75 percent of the market for downloaded music, but could lose as much as 5 percent of that market share in 2007 because of increased competition from rival services, according to Piper Jaffray.

Dan Frakes, a senior editor at Macworld magazine and playlistmag.com, a Web site focused on digital music, said he and some colleagues were unable to access the iTunes store or received error messages when they tried to download songs early this week.

However, others breezed through the process hassle-free, and Frakes successfully downloaded songs again on Wednesday. He said the problem likely was not as widespread as the frustrated discussion group chatter might indicate.

"The store itself was working, there was just too much traffic," he said. "It's a good bet that most people were able to get through."

Analysts said they didn't anticipate a rash of iPod returns because of the delays.

"What you're seeing is the tremendous success of the iPod," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director with JupiterResearch. "No doubt it was a very, very popular gift, and no matter how well you plan on the server side of the equation, there are always times when you get caught short."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne....ap/index.html





Steve Jobs' Best Year Ever
Leander Kahney

What a blockbuster year Steve Jobs had.

Not only did he manage Apple's seamless switch to Intel, he probably made the company the most money in its 30-year history. (I say probably, because the only dark spot -- a stock options backdating scandal -- may yet prompt a restatement of earnings.)

Financial scandal or no, Apple's comeback is a solid validation of Jobs' business chops. Jobs is too much of a liberal iconoclast to be taken seriously by the corporate world, but 2006 showed he's up there with the greats.

Here are the highlights:

January
At Macworld, Jobs releases the first Macs with Intel chips: the iMac and 15-inch MacBook Pro (Apple's top-selling machines, not coincidentally). They're six months ahead of schedule. Apple shares soar to a record high.

February
New Mac minis -- but no TV/DVR features as rumor sites had predicted. Jobs is not yet ready to take on the living room.

March
Apple celebrates its 30th birthday -- with a press release. Jobs doesn't like to look back.

April
Hell freezes over: Jobs announces Boot Camp, which allows his new Intel Macs to boot into Windows.

May
The Beatles lose their lawsuit over the Apple name for music sales. Jobs reportedly uses the defeat to negotiate an exclusive deal to sell the Beatles' catalog online.

The 13-inch MacBook is released, completing the laptop line's move to Intel.

Apple and Nike collaborate on the Nike+iPod -- a wireless iPod pedometer and matching sneakers.

June
The stock option scandal grows. A terse statement says an internal probe has uncovered "irregularities," including a grant to Jobs. But Apple says Jobs didn't benefit financially and is working with the SEC. Dozens of other companies are conducting their own backdating investigations.

July
The iPod craze is far from over. Customers snap up 8.1 million iPods in the July quarter, boosting profits by a hefty 50 percent. New Intel Macs sales aren't too shabby, either: 1.3 million Macs are sold, up 12 percent.

August
Jobs gives a weird tag-team keynote at Apple's annual developers conference, prompting speculation about his health following a cancer scare last year. He gives a preview of Leopard, the next major revision of Mac OS X. There are bells and whistles, but the biggest rumored change -- a major UI overhaul to compete with Microsoft's Vista -- is left out.

September
For perhaps the first time ever, Jobs gives a public sneak peek at an unannounced Apple product: the iTV -- a wireless router for beaming video from a computer to a TV. He also unveils iTunes' first feature-length movies. The movie shelf is initially bare, but more are expected next year.

October
The stock options scandal claims a victim. Fred Anderson, Apple's long-time chief financial officer, falls on his sword and resigns from Apple's board. A statement says Jobs knew of irregularities but not their import. It's a strategic mea culpa that's allowed him to skate -- so far.

November
IPhone mania grips the nation. There's nary a week when the iPhone isn't a major story. The speculation is fueled by patent filings and a lot of wishful thinking.

Apple's stock reaches a new high at $93.

December
The iPhone becomes a slam dunk, even if Apple has never officially admitted it's working on it. Wall Street starts issuing iPhone investor advisories.

But as Jobs himself says: "Looking forward, 2007 is likely to be one of the most exciting new product years in Apple's history."
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72344-0.html





Apple Computer Shares Go on Roller-Coaster Ride After Reports of Forged Documents Probe
AP

Apple Computer Inc.'s stock option troubles underwent extreme twists following reports of a federal probe into the possible forgery of documents to bolster executives' profits and that CEO Steve Jobs received 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without proper board approval.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the British newspaper Financial Times reported late Wednesday that federal investigators were looking into evidence of the falsification of records that purported Jobs' options were approved by a full board.

In October, Apple said its own internal probe had found no misconduct by any current officers and largely exonerated Jobs of any wrongdoing. But financial analysts, along with Wall Street, have shrugged off the story, seeing little impact as long as Jobs, Apple's iconic and charismatic executive, remained unscathed.

The media reports Wednesday revealed new details of the situation.

Earlier in the day, a legal publication that detailed the possible forgery also reported that Jobs has hired his own attorneys outside of the company's legal team to represent him in the investigation.

That report sent shares of the iPod and Macintosh computer maker on a roller-coaster ride in trading Wednesday, falling almost 5 percent before rebounding to close at $81.52, up a penny, on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1027015





Apple Says Options Probe Clears Execs
May Wong

Apple Computer Inc. restated past earnings Friday and acknowledged the backdating of thousands of stock option grants. But the company cleared current management and Chief Executive Steve Jobs of misconduct, saying it has "complete confidence" in the executive team.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing its probe of stock-options practices, Apple said Jobs was aware of the selection of some favorable grant dates but did not benefit financially from them.

Its options mishandling will result in an additional noncash charge of $84 million, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said. In its full-year financial report filed with the SEC, which was delayed due to the options probe, Apple said earnings for fiscal years 2006, 2005 and 2004 will be lowered by $4 million, $7 million, and $10 million respectively.

Apple shares rose about 4 percent to $84.12 in early trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market after the news.

The three-month probe identified a number of instances in which option grant dates were intentionally selected in order to obtain favorable exercise prices, the company said.

"The special committee, its independent counsel and forensic accountants have performed an exhaustive investigation of Apple's stock option granting practices," former Vice President Al Gore, chair of the special committee, and Jerome York, chair of Apple's Audit and Finance Committee, said in a joint statement. "The board of directors is confident that the company has corrected the problems that led to the restatement, and it has complete confidence in Steve Jobs and the senior management team."

The maker of the iPod music player and Macintosh computers is one of the most prominent among some 200 companies that have come under scrutiny for backdating stock options. It's a widespread practice, especially in Silicon Valley, that involves pegging stock options to favorable grant dates in the past to boost the recipients' award.

The manipulation itself isn't necessarily illegal, but securities laws require companies to properly disclose the practice in its accounting and settle any charges that may result.

Dozens of companies have been forced to restate their earnings, erasing some of their earlier recorded profits, after their stock option shenanigans came to light.

Apple initiated its own stock options probe in June and delayed its quarterly report for the period ending July 1 and its annual report for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 as a result.

Apple said its investigation reviewed 42,077 stock option grants made on 259 dates between October 1996 and January 2003. Of those, 6,428 grants on 42 dates did not have the proper measurement dates, Apple said.

Of two option grants awarded to Jobs, one was improperly dated Oct. 19, 2001, with an exercise price of $18.03, instead of the correct date on Dec. 18, when Apple shares were trading at $21.01. That stock-option grant was for 7.5 million shares. Jobs later surrendered those options without exercising them and realized no financial benefit.

The special board meeting that was pegged to the Oct. 19 grant never occurred, the company said. "There was no evidence, however, that any current member of management was aware of this irregularity," Apple stated.

Though the probe exonerated current management, it did raise "serious concerns" with the stock-options accounting actions of two former officers.

Apple did not identify those officers. Speculation and media reports citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, however, have pointed to former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson and former general counsel Nancy Heinen.

Anderson retired as Apple's CFO in 2004 yet remained a board member until he resigned in October after the internal inquiry. Heinen left Apple for unknown reasons in May, before Apple initiated its stock options probe.

Apple said it has provided the results of its internal review and independent investigation to the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California and has responded to their "informal requests" for documents and additional information.

The details of the findings Friday appeared to ease investor concerns that the options scandal would threaten Jobs. Shares of Apple went on a roller-coaster ride earlier in the week following media reports that federal investigators were looking into the falsification of documents and that Jobs had received an award of stock options in 2001 without proper board approval.

The nationwide stock options scandal has already led to criminal indictments and resignations of several executives.

But none is considered as well known or tied to their company's success and identity as Jobs. Wall Street analysts have largely shrugged off the impact of the scandal on Apple as long as the company's iconic co-founder and CEO was to remain unscathed.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8MAIF6G0.htm





Apple Report Fails to End Stock-Option Controvesy

CEO Jobs is cleared, but questions remain about his role in backdating grants.
Martin Zimmerman

Apple Computer Inc. on Friday cleared Chief Executive Steve Jobs of wrongdoing regarding its improper handling of stock options, but new details from an internal investigation only fueled controversy.

The company revealed that Jobs "was aware or recommended" the selection of favorable dates for stock options awarded to other executives, although he didn't personally profit or "appreciate the accounting implications" of the practice, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Previously, the Cupertino, Calif.-based technology giant said only that Jobs had been aware of the backdating but didn't personally benefit from it.

Apple also disclosed that a special board meeting in which directors were said to have approved an improperly dated option grant to Jobs never took place.

The disclosures could mean that questions regarding the backdating of options at Apple and Jobs' role in it won't go away any time soon, despite the company's effort to put the matter to rest, an industry expert said.

"The company is desperately trying to make us believe that just because [Jobs] wasn't self-dealing directly and because they've come clean and done a thorough investigation, that this is OK," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, a Hawthorne-based financial research firm.

"The problem is that it might not be. We don't know how the SEC or other authorities are going to react to these disclosures."

In the filing, Apple held to its previous claim that the three-month probe by a special board committee had found no wrongdoing by Jobs or other members of its current management.

"The board of directors is confident that the company has corrected the problems that led to the restatement, and it has complete confidence in Steve Jobs and the senior management team," former Vice President Al Gore, chairman of the committee, and Jerome York, chairman of Apple's audit and finance committee, said in a joint statement.

The current scandal over option backdating has ensnared more than 180 U.S. companies and claimed the jobs of several high-level executives, including Bruce Karatz, then head of Los Angeles home builder KB Home.

Investors have fretted that the issue could potentially unseat Jobs, who is credited with reviving Apple's fortunes with such popular products as the iPod music player.

But Wall Street appeared reassured by the board's strong support for Jobs and the news that correcting the option backdating would require it to reduce its previously reported earnings by $84 million — a relatively small amount for a company that earned almost $2 billion in its fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Apple's stock, which had dropped almost 12% in the last month as concerns about the option issue grew, jumped almost 5% on Friday. Several stock analysts and portfolio managers expressed hope that the company would now be able to put questions behind it.

Options are rights to buy stock at a set price within a certain time period. The price of stock to be bought using an option is generally the stock's market price on the day the option is granted by the company's board.

In their current probes of option practices, regulators are focusing on so-called backdating, whereby option grant dates are changed by weeks or months to coincide with the stock's lowest price in a particular period. Doing so could give the executives instant paper gains on their options. It could also cause a company's financial results to understate compensation costs and overstate earnings.

Backdating isn't necessarily illegal, but failing to disclose the practice in a timely manner is.

In its most detailed account yet of its option practices, Apple said its internal investigation uncovered dating irregularities with 6,428 option awards to various Apple employees on 42 dates between October 1996 and January 2003.

Of two option grants made to Jobs during that period, the company's probe found that an award of options to buy 7.5 million shares was dated Oct. 19, 2001, when the exercise price was $18.30 a share, instead of the correct date of Dec. 18, 2001, when the price was $21.01. The difference could have meant an extra $20 million for Jobs.

That grant, along with one awarded in January 2000 for 10 million shares, was canceled in 2003, when Jobs was given 5 million shares of restricted stock, the company said.

The filing also reported that approval of the 2001 grant to Jobs "was improperly recorded as occurring at a special board meeting on October 19, 2001. Such a special board meeting did not occur."

The filing did not elaborate on the meeting that didn't take place, and an Apple spokesman declined to provide additional details. "Apple's most recent filing creates more questions than it answers," said Christopher Bebel, a former federal prosecutor and SEC counsel. "And many of the assertions serve as a launching pad for 20 Questions.

"It seems clear that the board is trying to whitewash these problems. But in reality, it's wishful thinking. This problem is growing larger with each denial, because the denials are so suspect."

The company's insistence that Jobs was unaware of the accounting ramifications of the backdated option grants given to fellow Apple employees also raised eyebrows.

Apple "has a lot of explaining to do," said former federal prosecutor Jan Handzlik. "This is not a matter of esoteric accounting principles applied to very imaginative and aggressive transactions. This is pretty straightforward."

In its SEC filing, Apple again sought to place responsibility for its option backdating on two departed executives. The company hasn't identified the two, but they are understood to be former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson, who resigned from the board four days before Apple announced the results of the internal probe Oct. 4, and former General Counsel Nancy Heinen, who left the company in the spring.

Anderson was not a member of Apple's compensation committee at the time of the 2001 grant to Jobs and "had no knowledge of any impropriety relating to this option grant," Anderson's attorney, Jerome Roth, said in a statement.

Heinen couldn't be reached for comment. She has denied any wrongdoing in the matter.

The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which is conducting a broad probe of option backdating, and the SEC declined to comment on Apple's filing.

At least 11 shareholder lawsuits have been filed against Apple alleging improper option dating. The suits have been consolidated into a single case in federal court in San Jose.

In conducting its inquiry, Apple said, the panel analyzed 42,077 option grants made on 259 dates, examining more than 1 million paper and electronic documents and interviewing more than 40 current and former employees, board members and advisors.

Apple's shares closed Friday at $84.84, up $3.97.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...home-headlines





JS Item of Interest

Bid Request
Tembel

I am designing an information sharing site and I need a set of professional Icons for the following actions:

1. Counter - showing the number of times a certain item has been viewed,
2. Rank - ranking a site/comment/whatever,
3. Comments - Comments by users about an article (=Discussion Forum)
4. File Sharing - Share Documents / Programs / Music / Video,
5. Related Information - Link to related information on the web,
6. Online Store - Buy a related product.

For each one of these I need all size Icons (16x16,32x32,64x64,128x128,256x256) + Disabled, Enabled, Hot.

Icon format must be supported by flash v6 and above. I also require the source (Photoshop - if that's what you're using, or whatever).

Please don't bid if you can't post high quality samples of your work for me to review.

Looking forward for your bids.

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder...questId=594173





Another Day, Another Vista Activation Crack

It was just a week ago that Microsoft's Jim Allchin was talking about Windows Vista security and how the operating system would fend off attacks from malicious code and hackers. Allchin made no mention, however, of the recent successful attempts at cracking Windows Vista's activation scheme.

Earlier this month, pirates found a way to spoof Microsoft's Key Management Service (KMS) server using a VMware image. The software hack allowed pirates to run copies of Windows Vista Business and Enterprise for up to 180 days.

The folks over at Engadget have come across another exploit that allows users to permanently activate Windows Vista using crack files and some registry trickery. The TimeStop Vista cracks only works on 32-bit versions of Windows Vista, so those looking to crack 64-bit versions of the operating system may be out of luck.

The crack effectively stops the countdown times to mandatory Vista activation and freezes the countdown timer at 43,200 minutes (30 days). The countdown timer will not reduce any lower than 30 days.

The makers of the crack note at the bottom of their "instruction manual" that "This article is for educational and informational purpose only." Microsoft likely isn't taking too kindly to this latest activation breach and likely already has a team working to patch up the exploit.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to shut down this latest exploit, it does leave us wondering just how secure this new operating system if it can be poked at and prodded this early after release.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5470





Flaws Are Detected in Microsoft’s Vista
John Markoff

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month.

On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. And over the weekend a Silicon Valley computer security firm said it had notified Microsoft that it had also found that flaw, as well as five other vulnerabilities, including one serious error in the software code underlying the company’s new Internet Explorer 7 browser.

The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site. That would make it possible for an attacker to inject rogue software into the Vista-based computer, according to executives at Determina, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that sells software intended to protect against operating system and other vulnerabilities.

Determina is part of a small industry of companies that routinely pore over the technical details of software applications and operating systems looking for flaws. When flaws in Microsoft products are found they are reported to the software maker, which then produces fixes called patches. Microsoft has built technology into its recent operating systems that makes it possible for the company to fix its software automatically via the Internet.

Despite Microsoft assertions about the improved reliability of Vista, many in the industry are taking a wait-and-see approach. Microsoft’s previous operating system, Windows XP, required two “service packs” issued over a number of years to substantially improve security, and new flaws are still routinely discovered by outside researchers.

On Friday, a Microsoft executive posted a comment on a company security information Web site stating the company was “closely monitoring” the vulnerability described by the Russian Web site. It permits the privileges of a standard user account in Vista and other versions of Windows to be increased, permitting control of all of the operations of the computer. In Unix and modern Windows systems, users are restricted in the functions they can perform, and complete power is restricted to certain administrative accounts.

“Currently we have not observed any public exploitation or attack activity regarding this issue,” wrote Mike Reavey, operations manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center. “While I know this is a vulnerability that impacts Windows Vista, I still have every confidence that Windows Vista is our most secure platform to date.”

On Saturday, Nicole Miller, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said the company was also investigating the reported browser flaw and that it was not aware of any attacks attempting to use the vulnerability.

Microsoft has spent millions branding the Vista operating system as the most secure product it has produced, and it is counting on Vista to help turn the tide against a wave of software attacks now plaguing Windows-based computers.

Vista is critical to Microsoft’s reputation. Despite an almost four-and-half-year campaign on the part of the company, and the best efforts of the computer security industry, the threat from harmful computer software continues to grow. Criminal attacks now range from programs that steal information from home and corporate PCs to growing armies of slave computers that are wreaking havoc on the commercial Internet.

Although Vista, which will be available on consumer PCs early next year, has been extensively tested, it is only now being exposed to the challenges of the open Internet.

“I don’t think people should become complacent,” said Nand Mulchandani, a vice president at Determina. “When vendors say a program has been completely rewritten, it doesn’t mean that it’s more secure from the get-go. My expectation is we will see a whole rash of Vista bugs show up in six months or a year.”

The Determina executives said that by itself, the browser flaw that was reported to Microsoft could permit damage like the theft of password information and the attack of other computers.

However, one of the principal security advances of Internet Explorer 7 is a software “sandbox” that is intended to limit damage even if a malicious program is able to subvert the operation of the browser. That should limit the ability of any attacker to reach other parts of the Vista operating system, or to overwrite files.

However, when coupled with the ability of the first flaw that permits the change in account privileges, it might then be possible to circumvent the sandbox controls, said Alexander Sotirov, a Determina security researcher. In that case it would make it possible to alter files and potentially permanently infect a target computer. This kind of attack has yet to be proved, he acknowledged.

The Determina researchers said they had notified Microsoft of four other flaws they had discovered, including a bug that would make it possible for an attacker to repeatedly disable a Microsoft Exchange mail server simply by sending the program an infected e-mail message.

Last week, the chief technology officer of Trend Micro, a computer security firm in Tokyo, told several computer news Web sites that he had discovered an offer on an underground computer discussion forum to sell information about a security flaw in Windows Vista for $50,000. Over the weekend a spokesman for Trend Micro said that the company had not obtained the information, and as a result could not confirm the authenticity of the offer.

Many computer security companies say that there is a lively underground market for information that would permit attackers to break in to systems via the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...rtner=homepage





Vista Security Spec 'Longest Suicide Note in History'
Andrew Thomas

NZ boffin's claim

VISTA'S CONTENT PROTECTION specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history, claims a new and detailed report from the University of Auckland in New Zealand (see last weeks WiR, - Jack).

"Peter Gutmann's report describes the pernicious DRM built into Vista and required by MS for approval of hardware and drivers," said INQ reader Brad Steffler, MD, who brought the report to our attention. "As a physician who uses PCs for image review before I perform surgery, this situation is intolerable. It is also intolerable for me as a medical school professor as I will have to switch to a MAC or a Linux PC. These draconian dicta just might kill the PC as we know it."

But this isn't just a typical anti-Microsoft rant. Gutmann's report runs to 6,000 words and contains hardly any FSF-style juvenile invective.

"Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost," says Gutmann on his homepage.

"These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry."

He also claims that Vista's content protection will 'have to violate the laws of physics if it is to work'.

I'm not going to comment on the details of the report and its implications but merely suggest that you read it for yourselves and come to your own conclusions. I'd also venture to suggest that Microsoft might want to comment on Gutmann's work.

L'INQ
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36570





Microsoft Hands out Ferrari’s to Bloggers
Long Zheng

Microsoft together with AMD gave out some really nice Christmas presents to a bunch of bloggers this year. Brandon LeBlanc got one, Scott Beale got one, Barb Bowman got one, Mauricio Freitas got one, Mitch Denny got one, Zen.Heavengames got one, plus many other bloggers who did not even write about it (shame on them). They seem to have covered everyone from A-list to Z-list, a first in the industry with such a valuable gift, kudos for thinking about the little guys.

Update: Some people got Ferrari 1000s, others got 5000s. The following specs are from the 5000.

The machine looks just as good as it specs. As part of Acer’s Ferrari designer computing range, the carbon-fiber case is styled with a slick threaded finish with genuine Ferrari badging and color strips. Just like the racing counterpart, this machine has grunt. It sports an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera. Full specifications available at the Acer website.

Assuming it doesn’t use Sony batteries, this laptop blows everything out of the water. It retails for a hot $2,299. But if you write about Microsoft, they might even give you one for free. Is it ethical? Probably not. Is it worth something to hard-working sweat and tears bloggers? Hell yeah.

I don’t see the Free Software Foundation handing out any Ferrari’s.

Update: Robert Scoble also picked up the story, comparing this to PayPerPost. Although I think PayPerPost is about profiting, whilst this is about rewarding. Even though the outcome might be the same.

Update 2: Dan Warne from APCMag has a different perspective on this issue, he thinks this is highly inappropriate and immoral. Could this act of generosity turn upside-down into a PR disaster?

Update 3: Just something for everyone to keep in mind. Remember bloggers are given a choice which includes giving the machine back when they’re done with it. Keeping the unit is a decision made solely by the bloggers receiving the computers.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/200...-free-ferrari/





Wall St. Bonuses: So Much Money, Too Few Ferraris
Jenny Anderson

It’s a brisk Wednesday morning in the windy caverns of Wall Street and Sarah Clark’s toes are cold.

Dressed in a purple flight attendant outfit, Ms. Clark, a 26-year-old model, is trying to entice recent bonus recipients at Goldman Sachs into using a charter plane service, handing out $1,000 discount coupons to people in front of the investment bank’s Broad Street headquarters.

“Where am I going?” asks one man, heading toward the Goldman building. “It’s your own private jet,” says Ms. Clark with a smile. “You can go wherever you like.”

For Wall Street’s elite, the sky may well be the limit.

In recent weeks, immense riches have been rained upon the top bankers and traders. After a year of record profits, investment houses like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley are awarding bonuses as high as $60 million. And a select group of hedge fund managers and private equity executives may be taking home even more.

That is serious money. And the serious luxury goods markets are feeling the impact.

Miller Motorcars, in Greenwich, Conn., is fielding more requests for the $250,000 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano than it can possibly fill. One real estate broker laments a dearth of listings for two clients trying to spend $20 million on Manhattan properties. Financiers already comfortably settled in multimillion-dollar apartments and town houses are buying $5 million apartments for their children. Vacation homes, usually bought and sold in the spring, are now hot this winter, including ones in private resorts like the Yellowstone Club in Montana near Yellowstone National Park.

“Last year, everybody bought Ducatis,” said one investment banker, referring to the Italian motorcycle. “This year it’s vacations. I’m on my way to St. Barts,” he said, en route to the airport. Like most bankers, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified, because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter by his company.

The 2006 bonus gold rush has re-energized some luxury markets. The Manhattan real estate market, for example, had softened; sales of apartments fell 17 percent in the third quarter this year compared with a year ago, according to the Corcoran Group.

Then came bonus day. Last week, Michele Kleier, president of Gumley Haft Kleier, received a call from a hedge fund manager in his late 30s. He had spent $6 million on an apartment two years ago and, with his bonus, wanted to upgrade. His new price range? “Not more than $20 million.”

Ed Petrie, a broker at Sotheby’s in East Hampton, N.Y., is now fielding two bids for $8 million to $10 million properties in exclusive Georgica Pond — properties that have been on the market since the spring. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. “The fall was relatively slow and then suddenly, with news on bonuses, there has been quite a bit of activity,” he said.

Many brokers noticed not just the bonus effect, but the bonus-anticipation effect. Buyers who sat on the sidelines in 2006, waiting for real estate prices to come down, saw news of outsized bonuses and started signing deals to pre-empt any price increase driven by new Wall Street payouts.

“Part of our recent increase in sales activity has been buyers not in financial services trying to beat the bonus rush,” said James Lansill, senior managing director at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group.

Once the bonus rush started, Mr. Lansill witnessed a trend he had never seen in his 14 years in the business: people who had signed contracts for apartments under construction 5 to 6 months ago were doubling the size of the properties they were purchasing.

In the last three weeks, the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing group sold the last four apartments in the Richard Meier apartments at 165 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. The last one to go: a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with 2,350 square feet that sold for just under $7 million.

Patricia Warburg Cliff, senior vice president and director for European sales at the Corcoran Group, said that until recently, 2006 had been characterized by calmer, more informed buyers. “Now there’s a feeling, ‘I need to sign because I don’t want it snatched away,’ ” she said.

Adding to the spending spree is a rash of young hedge fund analysts, first big bonus checks in hand, scooping up the $2 million to $3 million starter apartments (most popular features: glass walls, marble bathrooms and kitchens — likely to go unused — with top-flight appliances).

“We love hedge funds, they are our favorite people” Ms. Kleier said. “They don’t feel like the money is real and they don’t mind spending it — they don’t mind going up by $500,000 or $1 million increments.”

Hedge fund analysts are not the only ones celebrating bonus season. Private equity firms like the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts helped fuel a record deal-making year.

Private equity’s deal-making has trickled down to Wall Street in two ways. For one, the banks served as advisers on the deals and financed them, raking in enormous fees. (Kohlberg Kravis is said to pay more than $700 million a year in fees to the Street.)

But bankers also see a pay effect: top executives insist they must pay up because of the danger that their best dealmakers could leave for higher-paying private equity firms or other hedge funds considered more flexible and fun.

Those young, single hedge fund managers are bringing holiday cheer to car dealerships as well. This year, drama surrounds the very limited production of the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, a car with 612 horsepower that can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 3.6 seconds. “It is the most sought-after car ever made,” said Richard Koppelman, president of Miller Motorcars. With a waiting list of 50, Mr. Koppelman expects to get only one.

Who will be the lucky customer? “It’s very difficult,” he said. “We try to take care of our best clients.”

Private planes, or shares of them, are also on the rise, with demand for charter planes at one company up 40 percent to 50 percent among financial services executives. “There is a noticeable difference this year compared to the past, especially in the financial sector,” said Jeffrey Menaged, founder and head of Chief Executive Air, the company that hired Ms. Clark for the day. A typical price for a charter flight is $30,000.

Sales of “jet cards,” a sort of debit card for private flying, increase during bonus season, Mr. Menaged said, as executives lock in last year’s gains with guaranteed comfort for the new year.

Exotic destinations are also being pitched to the Wall Street ultrarich. Unlimited Speed started Victory Lane in November, a 3,000-acre development in Georgia for motor racing aficionados. Along with a 4.5 mile racetrack, the development also has a 1,600-acre nature preserve, equestrian facilities, a golf course and spa. It already has 27 reservations, a quarter of them coming from Wall Street, said Andrew Goggin, president of Unlimited Speed.

Not everyone on Wall Street is getting multimillion-dollar bonuses. The average managing director — who stands at the top of Wall Street’s hierarchical food chain, but far from rock-star status — will be getting $1 million to $3 million, which will likely be stashed in savings as memories of the 2001 bear market remain fresh.

“I’m putting it in the bank because I know next year I could be out of a job,” said one managing director at a leading bank.

For hedge fund traders and managers, markets were rough in the spring and summer, and some did not make gains until stocks rallied this fall.

“It was a terrible year,” said one young hedge fund professional. “I am going to the movies with my bonus. By myself."

At cocktail parties, comparisons to 1999 abound. That year marked the height of the technology boom and the eve of a painful crash. “It feels a little bit like the top,” said another banker.

The morning Goldman Sachs announced record fourth-quarter and 2006 earnings, Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive, implored his employees — many whom would directly benefit from the bountiful earnings — to avoid excess.

“As stewards of the firm’s reputation, I ask each of you to remember that our actions — inside and outside of the office — reflect on Goldman Sachs. Even a perception of arrogance hurts all of us,” he said in a voice mail sent to the entire firm.

Back handing out vouchers in front of Goldman, Ms. Clark wondered why there weren’t more people coming to work during the early hours.

Then, at 7:30 a.m., a black Mercedes pulled up, depositing Mr. Blankfein in front of Ms. Clark. The night before, he had been awarded a $53.4 million bonus.

She offered him a voucher. “How are you?” he said, smiling quickly but refusing the voucher.

“I guess he didn’t want it,” she lamented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...rtner=homepage





US Music Publishers Sue AllofMP3 for $1.65 Trillion USD
Scott M. Fulton

In a move curious only due to its relatively late timing, the major record production labels in the US have filed suit in federal court against Russian online music distributor AllofMP3.com, seeking $150,000 USD for each single violation of copyright infringement for tracks the site posted without authorization.

The lawsuit, brought by Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group - the "big four" - along with Arista Records and Capitol Records, estimates at least 11 million individual intellectual property violations. Thus the publishers are collectively seeking damages equaling the gross national product of many countries.

Their action comes five months after music publishers in Britain sued AllofMP3 in High Court there, and two months after a court in Denmark ordered ISPs in that country to block customer access to AllofMP3.

Last month, special delegates from the US Government met with their Russian counterparts to discuss measures that country must take in order to meet compliance standards for entry into the World Trade Organization. An agreement between the two nations last month specifically mentioned AllofMP3.com as one site that the Russian government must make an effort to keep under control.

In a statement last September before the US Chamber of Commerce, US trade representative Susan Schwab pointed to AllofMP3 as one of a mere handful of principal obstacles Russia must clear if it is to formally join the global economy.

"So far, the Russian authorities have allowed this site to operate with impunity," said Schwab. "We have made clear to Russia that improved protection for intellectual property is critical to its joining the WTO and we have specifically raised our concerns with allofmp3.com, the drafting of a new section of the Civil Code, and other key issues. We are very supportive of our industries' concerns in Russia and we are working to achieve better IPR protection and enforcement there."

For its part, Russia has pledged to pass laws by June of next year that would render AllofMP3's activities officially illegal.

Unlike P2P proprietors, which have defended themselves by saying they're only responsible for the networks their technology facilitates, and not the traffic that passes over them, AllofMP3.com charges subscription fees and/or a la carte costs per album (as opposed to per song), and hosts allegedly unauthorized tracks through its conventional, centralized server. In recent days, however, customers worldwide have found it difficult to pay, with Visa and MasterCard having disqualified AllofMP3 from payment service. The site's director general, Vadim Mamotin, has blasted the credit card services for their disqualification action, calling them "arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory," and adding they "lack the authority to adjudicate the legality of Allofmp3's activities."

While the site has been taken offline for days at a time throughout this year, its parent company, Mediaservices, appears to be enjoying the publicity and is spoiling for a good fight. In recent statements, it has claimed its service abides by current Russian law. It claims to pay royalties to ROMS, the copyright holder service sanctioned by the Russian Parliament, and to FAIR (Rights holders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively). Under Russian law, as long as a distributor of music pays 15% of its collection fees to ROMS, it's a legal service.

Yet the Recording Industry Association of America has stated it doesn't recognize ROMS as a legitimate royalties collector, nor do its affiliated labels actually receive allotments from either party. No agreement with record labels outside of Russia has apparently been negotiated with these agencies. Until that time, the Russian government itself could be the direct recipient of AllofMP3's purported royalties.

So the problem that US regulators, diplomats, and US-based music publishers now face is whether any rulings or threats they make - even if the publishers win their case here - will have any bearing upon lawmakers' decisions in Russia, where isolationism has recently one again reared its ugly head. Since 2003, the IFPI - which represents the recording industry worldwide - has been drawing attention to repeated postponements by the Russian Parliament and Russian courts to take any action toward hardening software piracy laws and enforcement.

That spotlight may have unintentionally created a kind of virtual petrie dish for unauthorized distributors such as AllofMP3 to have a base of support from individuals who see the site's very existence as a kind of crusade against organized music. With Russian senior officials acting of late as if they've been missing the Cold War, the kind of "line in the sand" that US officials have been drawing on this issue may not be taken as an invitation of friendship.
http://www.betanews.com/article/US_M...USD/1166739613





AllofMP3: RIAA Lawsuit is "Unjustified"
Nate Anderson

After being sued in US federal court last week by the RIAA, AllofMP3 has made clear that it has no intention of buckling under the mounting international pressure. In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the company said, "This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3.com does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3.com operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3.com plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws."

The statement still doesn't answer the important question of whether AllofMP3 and its parent company Mediaservices have decided to commit their resources to a full-scale US court battle. Such a move could run to millions of dollars, but failure to appear could lead to a default judgment against them, as Spamhaus recently learned.

Should AllofMP3 show up in court, the case is unlikely to turn on the issue of the service's legality in Russia. Though the AllofMP3 statement made it sound like that was the key issue, it was not raised by the RIAA court filing. The trade group appears to have abandoned its efforts to use the Russian legal system to shut down AllofMP3, instead opting for pressure in the form of trade agreements and federal lawsuits back in the US, where it has more leverage.

The RIAA actually claims that the service is illegal in the US and that AllofMP3 has made a deliberate attempt to target its service at the American market, not the Russian one. The situation is analagous to that of offshore or British-based gambling sites that actually make most of their money from US punters. Though the services are legal in their own localities, the operators have routinely faced arrest if they set foot in the US, and the government has tried to restrict their revenues from leaving the US.

For now, AllofMP3 execs might want to stay out of New York.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061228-8515.html





Music and the People Unfit To Share It

For several years, record companies have received a lot of negative passion from the file sharing community, but to follow up my post from a week ago, I’d like to give some of that love to the artists. As a musician, especially one without a record label, I would think your main objective would be to have as many people as possible hear your band, but this isn’t always the case. For example purposes I am going to use the Alex Kadet Band, a group of students I attended high school with.

As I’ve always thought Alex was a talented individual, I decided to see if he had a MySpace account, and to my delight, he does. So I listened to some of the songs, which in my opinion, weren’t too excruciating. But once I went to download one of these songs so I could possibly play a role in sharing this music or god for bid include some on my iPod’s playlist, I could not.

A band whose reach is limited to what MySpace provides, should be encouraging people to share their music rather than prohibiting them from doing so. Consequently, the Alex Kadet Band, and others like them, will not succeed in the information age.
http://kleduc.wordpress.com/2006/12/...t-to-share-it/





Downloading a New Economy at the Pirate Bay
Kent Scott

Although they’re probably not as good looking as Johnny Depp and their names don’t carry the same historical weight as Blackbeard, the people at peer to peer file sharing networks such as the Pirate Bay might be in the vanguard of a much stronger threat to international trade than the Barbary Pirates were even on their best day. The crisis of copyright and intellectual property protection in the face of digital technology is a relatively new issue and one which people and political parties are sometimes reluctant to address. The minutia of international copyright laws is daunting, the technology isn’t something that everyone understands or uses yet, the problem pits consumers, artists and art marketers against each other and it’s basically just not a sexy issue. However, at the heart of this nerdy misunderstood issue some people see a poison pill that might symbolize the end of the market economy as we know it.

Copyright laws have a long and complex history, but I like to imagine that these laws are a lot like baseball’s infield fly rule: an inelegant but seemingly necessary intrusion that attempts to smooth over a flaw in the game. Defenders in baseball try to catch the ball that’s hit by the offense. However in certain situations (an infield fly ball), it actually makes more sense for the defender to drop the ball. It seems stupid to most fans that a defender would be rewarded for dropping the ball, so there came into the game a rule stating that even in situations where it makes sense to drop the ball a defender should catch it. Not everyone likes the rule, but it does a fairly good job of covering up this strange quirk in the game.

Intellectual property is to the market economy much as an infield fly is to baseball. Just to refresh half remembered high school economics, our markets teeter-totter on the see-saw of scarcity. When a product is scarce its prices rise and producers are tempted into making more, until they reach the point where the product becomes abundant, fewer people buy it and prices fall again. Abundance is seen as a problem by market economists and it can lead to strange behavior. For example, as the European Union was forming Sweden was forced to artificially raise its unemployment level. It was feared that an abundance of jobs would lead to increased salaries from companies needing to keep workers and decision makers saw that as a bad thing. A labor market demands low wages and for that it’s necessary to have a scarcity of jobs and a certain amount of unemployment. More recently and closer to home, agricultural co-ops in Aichi prefecture and other places around Japan have been destroying cabbages, daikon and other winter crops made abundant by warm temperatures this fall. Having such a good crop has led to low prices which farmers are trying to artificially raise by burning tons and tons of edible food, increasing scarcity. The food market demands high food prices through product scarcity and a certain amount of hunger and starvation.

Intellectual property brings out this market strangeness in spades because it’s even more abundant than daikon in Japan this year. In fact, it’s infinitely abundant. While only one person can eat a particular daikon everyone in the world can listen to the same song (someone’s intellectual property) and there would still be an infinite amount of that song left over for other people to hear. It actually stretches grammatical credulity to talk about intellectual property in terms of scarcity. So why doesn’t the infinite abundance of intellectual property make it worthless? That’s where copyright comes in. Copyrights create an artificial scarcity by declaring that only the copyright holder is able to distribute the intellectual property. Naturally the holders demand compensation for distribution and that creates value in the property. This commodification of the infinite is under serious threat however.

Peer to peer file sharing networks like The Pirate Bay have made it very easy to freely distribute copyrighted digital property such as music, movies, books and software. There’s no doubt that it’s illegal to do so, but some controversy over whether or not it’s immoral. Copyright holders are fighting an uphill battle to convince people that sharing is bad, and copyright infringers can’t make adequate excuses for denying content creators the ability to profit from their work. Regardless of the ethics, file sharing has made the markets poor ability to deal with abundance very clear to anyone observing.

For now the increasing un-workability of copyright laws doesn’t seem to be much of a threat to capitalism as the problems are mostly confined to the entertainment industry. The decisions being made now about how to deal with the abundance of digitized information will be used as precedents in future problems that arise from a lack of scarcity in a given industry. There are many areas where a future lack of scarcity might be a problem. Many researchers believe that economic fear of abundance has been holding back alternative energy and agriculture technology, digital property has recently become popular and will probably become much more so, while more fancifully robotics and molecular manipulation at the nano level could mean abundance of labor and just about everything else.

Rather than try to convert anyone to a position or opinion, I would like point everyone to a very wide open and interesting debate that’s occurring at places like Re-Public and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Economies and markets are being theorized and built on foundations much different that the hoarding of scarce property. A digital commons, peer production and property and other alternative value systems are proposed and debated daily while slowly action moves forward. Opinions are still flexible, positions aren’t carved in stone yet. It’s a debate that can still be shaped by anyone with an interest and some good ideas.
http://dajwebnews.blogspot.com/2006/...irate-bay.html





The Ethics of File Sharing (2)
Peter

File sharing is considered by many to be an ethical grey area. It clearly isn’t theft, as theft involves depriving someone of property (although the record companies are doing their best to redefine the word it would seem). The only argument against file sharing that needs to really be taken seriously (in regards to its ethical, not legal, status) is whether causing the record companies to lose sales, hence reducing their profits, is ethically wrong.

In other places I have argued that how an action impacts society should guide our ethical judgments about it. Thus we regard theft as wrong because if we as a society condoned theft then ownership would be meaningless. And without ownership people aren’t motivated to create the infrastructure and developments that give us the high quality of life we enjoy now. File sharing too can be analyzed in this fashion, we simply have to ask whether a society in which file sharing was allowed would be better or worse than one without it.

It should be obvious that, by these standards, protecting someone’s sales is, in general, not an ethical obligation. In fact allowing someone’s actions to reduce the profits of another is the foundation of capitalism. If you own the only source of diamonds then you can like a monopoly, selling a small amount of your product at high prices. You will make a lot of money, but your business won’t operate at the level that is optimal for society. But if I open a diamond mine then we will be in competition. Your sales will be reduced as a result, and your profits even more so (since you can no longer price your product as if you were a monopoly), but in the end there is a net benefit to society (this is a well established fact).

So what we really need to consider is if file sharing, as an individual case, is good or bad for society, since we have seen that in at least some cases causing a company to lose sales, and reduce its profits, is good for society. It is not clear to me that if file sharing was accepted that the record companies would go under, after all some people would still want to buy CDs and other band merchandise. Someone might even set up a CD rental business like Netflix, which would give people the convenience of having the physical CD, but at a fraction of the cost*. But let us consider the “worst” case, in which the record companies do go under. Is this a bad or a good thing?

Certainly for the people who lose their jobs it would be a bad thing, but I would expect that most of them wouldn’t have too many problems finding new ones; unemployment simply isn’t that high, and most of the people working for the record labels are well educated. Besides that the only possible harm to society that I think might result would be a reduction in new music being produced. Certainly the record labels portray themselves as being integral to the production of music (by funding it), and I will assume that music, like artistic endeavors in general, has value to society.

Certainly a world without Mozart or Bach would be a poor world to live in. But wait, Mozart and Bach made their music without the support (or even existence) of any kind of record company! Like the painters and sculptors of their time, they were supported by wealthy patrons. I suppose that in this modern era it might be possible that such a system wouldn’t work, but our modern painters and sculptors seem to get along just fine (ok, well most of them have to supplement their income with other jobs, but they still are able to produce great art). So if the record companies collapsed I suspect that music would simply go back to being made in this way. That means that there would certainly be far fewer musicians than there are today, but quantity doesn’t always mean quality. Maybe we would only have one pop band. In fact I think that such a system might even encourage higher quality music, since the musicians would have to fight harder to get patrons.

Thus I conclude that file sharing can’t be considered ethically wrong. In fact the collapse of the music industry (if that is really the consequence of file sharing) might even be a good thing, turning art back into art instead of a commodity. Of course file sharing is still against the law, at least in some places, and so for legal reasons I can’t encourage you to engage in such behavior. And you might have an ethical obligation to follow the law, even if the law doesn’t have an ethical basis (a discussion which I won’t enter into here).

* If you are inspired by this to start such a service it is only fair to give me some stock.
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/20...ile-sharing-2/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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