Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 10th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken." – Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.


"Rap fans aren't so much tired of listening to rap as they are tired of paying for it." – Jeff Stewart


"Domestically, boxoffice was up in 2006. Internationally, it was on a tear." – Gregg Kilday


"The rates are disastrous. I'm not aware of any Internet radio service that believes they can sustain a business at the rates set by this decision." – Joe Kennedy


"We are making the first steps in reading out what the specific contents of people's thoughts are." – John-Dylan Haynes


"It’s the most useful Google fringe benefit." – Wiltse Carpenter


"Looking forward to future business together." – RIAA






































March 10th, 2007






The Last Days of Internet Radio?

A decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to raise royalty fees could put some small online radio stations out of business
Olga Kharif

Kurt Hanson runs a Chicago-based online radio station that streams more than 300 channels of classical, jazz, oldies, and other music genres aimed at adults. The station, AccuRadio, lures more than 1 million visitors a month—not bad for a startup that's only been around since 2002. If a Mar. 5 decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) takes effect, AccuRadio may not be around much longer.

The decision, due to take effect sometime during the next two months, could raise royalty fees paid by some online radio stations more than tenfold—enough to put many smaller stations out of business, Hanson says. Currently, most small Webcasters have paid royalties calculated as a percentage of revenue. Under the new rule, those outfits will begin paying on a per-song, per-listener basis. "The more intensively an individual service is used and consequently the more the rights being licensed are used, the more the service pays, and in direct proportion to the usage," according to the 115-page ruling.

Here's what the change will mean for AccuRadio. The station employs six full-time staff members and records about $500,000 in annual sales, mostly from advertising. Of that, Hanson pays record labels about $50,000 in royalty fees. The rule change, which will impose fees retroactively, will jack up royalty fees to more than $600,000 for 2006. Other Webcasters will be in the same boat. "I don't think any of the operators would break even," Hanson says. "Internet radio is in danger of becoming extinct," shouts a headline posted on the company's Web site, urging listeners to sign a petition or send a message to Congress. "The rates are so high that they exceed 100% of most Webcasters' total revenues!"

Battle Royal

Hanson and his peers aren't getting much sympathy from music labels and SoundExchange, the company that collects royalties on behalf of the recording industry and urged the royalty fee change. The last time royalties were negotiated, in 2002, "we had the same exact response: that this is terrible, it's going to put everybody out of business," says SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson. "But the industry grew." Indeed, revenue from online streaming music radio has risen to $500 million from $49 million in 2003.

But that's thanks in part to Congress, which stepped in and decreed that smaller Webcasters would pay on a per-revenue basis. Larger Webcasters such as Time Warner's AOL Radio, Yahoo!'s online station, and Clear Channel's Online Music & Radio already pay on a per-listener, per-song basis—though their rates too would rise under the most recent set of changes.

Specifically, from 2006 to 2008, Web radio music royalty rates will double to 0.14¢ every time a song is streamed to a listener. For a Webcaster playing 14 songs an hour, that will come to 2¢ per listener per hour in 2008. For radio stations with thousands or millions of listeners, those pennies add up. "The rates are disastrous," says Joe Kennedy, chief executive of Pandora, which creates custom radio streams for users. "I'm not aware of any Internet radio service that believes they can sustain a business at the rates set by this decision." The board stipulates further double-digit royalty rate increases through 2010.

Bad for Business

Even large companies such as Yahoo Music may not be able to afford the new rates, says the Digital Media Assn. (DiMA), which counts Yahoo as a member. "DiMA companies are reevaluating the viability of the Internet radio business," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of DiMA, in a statement. As a result, some Webcasters may have difficulty raising money from venture capitalists and may have to shutter their business or seek to be acquired by large companies that can absorb the losses. "The rates have come on the high end of what's been expected, and valuations will be lower," says Rags Gupta, a former Live365 Internet Radio executive who now consults for venture capitalists and digital media companies.

Bummer for the growing slice of U.S. listeners flocking to Internet radio. As much as 19% of U.S. consumers 12 and older listen to Web-based radio stations, according to a survey of 3,000 Americans released by consultancy Bridge Ratings & Research on Feb. 21. That's up from 15% a year ago and indicates some 57 million weekly listeners of Internet radio programs. More people listen to online radio than to satellite radio, high-definition radio, podcasts, or cell-phone-based radio combined.

A "Sinking Ship"?

To cope, some broadcasters are already considering moving operations overseas, out of the CRB's reach. Others are looking into playing fewer songs and expanding talk shows. Some may run more ads. Trouble is, most listeners want mainly music. And increasing the frequency of ads or raising ad rates won't work for some smaller sites, where advertisers haven't exactly been knocking down the door. "We were just getting our foothold, now we have to start all over again," says Bryan Payne, CEO of Spacial Audio, a seller of software and services for Internet broadcasters. "We are all on the same sinking ship."

Unless the CRB decision can be reversed or renegotiated on appeal. Indeed, the decision itself states that it "does not mean that some revenue-based metric could not be successfully developed as a proxy for the usage-based metric at some time in the future by the parties." Many Webcasters are counting on DiMA and larger Webcasters to renegotiate the deal. On Mar. 7, when a subcommittee of the House committee on Energy & Commerce will hold a meeting on the future of radio, DiMA is expected to offer criticism of the decision. Some Webcasters hope Congress will get involved and establish different royalty rates for small broadcasters. The now-expired Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002 stipulated that certain noncommercial Web radio stations didn't need to pay royalties at all, while other small businesses only paid a percentage of their expenses or sales.

Jeff Bachmeier, president of Minneapolis-based Web radio station Club 977, says the recording industry benefits from the existence of small Webcasters and should be willing to be a party to renegotiated terms. "I don't think the labels want Internet radio to go away," he says. After all, people often discover songs on the radio and then buy the actual recordings. A DiMA survey of 1,008 online music radio listeners and music services subscribers published in January found that nearly half are spending more than $200 per year on music, and nearly 30% are spending more than $300. Before the Internet, an average consumer only bought about $100 worth of CDs a year.

Negotiations over fees could take months, however, while the impact on the Web radio industry is expected to kick in almost immediately. "It's just sad for Internet radio because it has such high potential," says Paul Palumbo, founder of consultancy AccuStream iMedia Research. "Wranglings over copyright will limit its growth," he says. "It's going to cause confusion, concern, and pulling back."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...07_534338.htm?





Proposed Net Radio Royalties to Exceed $2.3 Billion by 2008

If newly proposed rates for Internet radio broadcast royalties are ratified, annual fees for all station owners are projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2008, more than four times that of terrestrial radio broadcasters.

A recent article from BetaNews has analyed facts and figures on royalties currently paid by terrestrial radio stations to the three major performance royalty organizations (PROs) -- ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC -- and has determined that, under the new rates proposed last week by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), Internet radio stations operating in the U.S. would have to pay $2.3 billion in performance royalties annually, compared to $550 million for the more than 14,000 terrestrial radio stations combined.

The difference in annual cost per listener for Internet vs. terrestrial radio is even more astounding. According to the same figures, terrestrial radio stations paid $1.56 per listener on average in 2006. In contrast, under the newly proposed royalties, Internet radio stations will pay $8.91 per listener for the same year, and rising to $15.59 per listener -- ten times that of terrestrial stations -- by 2008.

Internet radio stations, like ClubNetRadio, and their millions of listeners currently are making their voices heard on this issue, and you can help. Please visit our home page to read more information on how you can support us in the fight against this decision that threatens the existence of the entire U.S. Internet radio community.
http://www.clubnetradio.com/news/Pro...neral/271.html





YouTube Builds Network of Content Providers
AFP

YouTube, the video social-networking website owned by Google, is building a vast network of content providers, a company spokesman told AFP.

YouTube has concluded "more than 1,000 partnerships" with content providers both big and small, YouTube spokesman David Song said late Friday, confirming a New York Times report.

He declined to comment further on the company's strategy of constructing a huge authorized library.

YouTube has run into legal disputes with companies such as Viacom, parent of MTV and Paramount Pictures. YouTube was forced to remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom television programs in February after a promised copyright protection system was not installed on the popular website.

On Friday the British Broadcasting Corporation announced it had agreed a deal with YouTube, joining the likes of US broadcasters NBC, CBS and Fox.

The BBC said it hoped to reach YouTube's monthly audience of over 70 million viewers and generate wider interest in its programs, its own website and eventually related content on its proposed BBC iPlayer commercial download service.

The British broadcaster will put on YouTube video clips from its programs and will set up three "networks," two devoted to entertainment and one featuring news.

Other new deals YouTube announced this week include an agreement with the National Basketball Association. That deal includes the creation of a new area on the website, the NBA Channel, where fans can access original NBA content and submit their own basketball video clips as well as rate those of other people in a program called "Post Up the NBA."

Google bought YouTube in November in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070304...Ws9IVKHTlk24cA





Microsoft to Blast Google Over Copyright Policy
Daisuke Wakabayashi

Microsoft Corp. is set to launch a blistering attack on rival Google Inc. on Tuesday for what the software giant argues is the Web search leader's "cavalier" approach to copyright protection.

In prepared remarks to be delivered to the Association of American Publishers, Microsoft Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin argues that Google's move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

The Microsoft attorney's comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five major book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.

"Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs," says Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade secret law at Microsoft.

"Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop," said Rubin, noting that Microsoft takes the position of seeking the copyright owner's consent before they copy.

Competition is heating up this year between Google, the world's dominant provider of Web search services, and software giant Microsoft, which recently entered the Web search market.

At the same time, Google has recently expanded into the business software market with a set of Web-based subscription services it sees as a major revenue generator which could chip away at Microsoft's 15-year dominance of computer software.

Rubin invokes criticism that Google has faced since its acquisition late last year of YouTube, which has come under fire from several major media companies for allowing widespread copyright infringement of professionally produced video.

"In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: 'Trust us - you're protected. We'll keep the digital copies secure, we'll only show snippets, we won't harm you, we'll promote you,'" Rubin argues in his speech.

"But Google's track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best," he said.

David Drummond, Google's senior vice president for corporate development and its chief legal officer, said in response that Google works with more than 10,000 publishing partners to make books searchable online and has recently added the BBC and NBA basketball league as YouTube video partners.

"We do this by complying with international copyright laws, and the result has been more exposure and in many cases more revenue for authors, publishers and producers of content."

Rubin cites anecdotal media reports that a handful of Google sales people were caught encouraging advertisers to capitalize on the demand for pirated software on the Web.

Rubin sides with publishers in criticizing Google's ambitious plan to scan millions of published works in the world's great libraries and make them available to consumers via its Google Book Search system. He said by scanning copies of published works without first seeking copyright holders' permission, Google opens the door to massive infringement.

The attorney also says Google's defense of 'fair use' is overly broad. "Concocting a novel "fair use" theory, Google bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books," Rubin argues.

Drummond replied: "The goal of search engines, and of products like Google Book Search and YouTube, is to help users find information from content producers of every size."

The publishers' lawsuit against Google, filed in October 2005 in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York, remains in the discovery process with no trial date set.

Microsoft's move bears parallels to an attack five years ago by the Redmond, Washington-based company on so-called "open source" software, which has emerged over the past decade as the biggest alternative to Microsoft's Windows software franchise.

Microsoft argued then that open source software jeopardized property rights and threatened to undermine the software industry as it argued in favor of "shared source" software that reinforced intellectual property rights.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33131320070306





Microsoft Exploits Google's Copyright Vulnerabilities
Cynthia Brumfield

Microsoft is publicly attacking Google for what the company contends is the search giant’s “cavalier” approach to copyright issues. In an orchestrated press campaign, Microsoft has released to top news outlets copy of a speech (speech now on Microsoft’s website) to be given today by Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting.

The speech is a no-holds-barred condemnation of Google, a phenomenally successful company that sticks in Microsoft’s craw. While holding out Microsoft’s own online book search efforts, Live Search Academic and Live Search Books, as morally and legally superior, Rubin blasts Google’s Book Search. Rubin’s main criticism is that Google’s book scanning efforts rely on the fair use doctrine rather than individual deals with book publishers.

In my view, Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. In doing so, it undermines critical incentives to create.

Rubin then goes on to conflate Google’s book project with YouTube’s problems surrounding uploaded videos that contain copyrighted content (which Mike at TechDirt points out, are two completely different issues).

In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: “Trust us - you’re protected. We’ll keep the digital copies secure, we’ll only show snippets, we won’t harm you, we’ll promote you.” But Google’s track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best. Anyone who visits YouTube, which Google purchased last year, will immediately recognize that it follows a similar cavalier approach to copyright. Since YouTube’s inception, television companies, movie studios and record labels have all complained that the site knowingly tolerates piracy. In the face of YouTube’s refusal to take any effective action, copyright owners have now been forced to resort to litigation. And Google has yet to come up with a plan to restrain the massive infringements on YouTube.

Rubin sticks the knife in even deeper by throwing in yet another, completely different intellectual property issue, that of Google’s past sale of keyword searches that linked to sites which offer pirated content.

Another example is equally distressing. Microsoft was surprised to learn recently that Google employees have actively encouraged advertisers to build advertising programs around key words referring to pirated software, including pirated Microsoft software.

Microsoft is clearly flinging the dung around, but why? Rubin answers this question in part in his speech. Google has been so successful, has built such a useful search business, that practically no other company can compete. Publishers and the public think only of Google when it comes to search, although Rubin weirdly tries to spin Google’s dominance as somehow a byproduct of its disrespect for copyrights. “From the perspective of your business, Google’s approach is troubling for another reason. It assumes, in effect, that Google is the only game in town.”

However, the real motivation for Microsoft’s bald bid to tarnish Google is simply this: Google is vulnerable right now on copyright matters because of the highly publicized difficulties the company has experienced in cutting video content deals for YouTube. Even though Google’s vulnerability is more a matter of PR and not law, Microsoft sees an opening to try to weaken what had until recently been an unshakeable rival.

Although Microsoft’s attempt to exploit Google’s YouTube problems is understandable, it’s also slightly repulsive and reeks of desperation. The software titan is hoping to build itself up by tearing Google down, never a good long-term strategy for success. Microsoft might damage Google’s reputation in the short-term, but it’s highly doubtful that Google’s incredible usefulness, not to mention its solid legal footing, will slip over time.

In the meanwhile, Microsoft will still be Microsoft, still playing distant second to Google. I would argue that Microsoft has damaged its own reputation with this lambast, showing to the world how it’s willing to tear down rivals instead of building itself up. That’s just not classy.
http://www.ipdemocracy.com/archives/...bilities.p hp





Searching for Michael Jordan? Microsoft Wants a Better Way
John Markoff

Internet searching was at the forefront of the technologies that Microsoft displayed on Tuesday at an event intended to showcase the company’s research prowess.

Despite a lack of visible progress in catching up with Google, the leader in Internet search engines, Microsoft says it still believes that it will eventually turn the tables by improving the quality of its search results and by changing the way computer users search.

It is all part of an arms race for search supremacy that has engaged top researchers at both companies.

During a morning session for more than 300 visitors at the Microsoft Conference Center, Lili Cheng, a user-interface designer for the Windows Vista operating system, showed off a new service called Mix that will allow Web surfers to organize search results and easily share them.

Ms. Cheng, a Microsoft researcher trained as an architect, has moved back and forth between research and product development positions at the company. She said Mix would be released in six to nine months.

A second tool demonstrated, called Web Assistant, is intended to improve the relevance of search results and help resolve ambiguities in results that, for example, would give a user sites for both Reggie Bush and George Bush.

“This is a prototype of a browser that aims to change the way we interact with information,” said Silviu Cucerzan, one of the researchers who designed the new tool.

So far, Microsoft has failed to gain ground against the dominant search provider Google. Data released by Nielsen/NetRatings last week showed Google fielding 53.7 percent of all search queries, while Microsoft had an 8.9 percent market share. Moreover, in the past year, the number of queries Google handled has risen by 40 percent, while Microsoft’s figure increased by only 2.5 percent.

“Microsoft people are really passionate about search, and we want to compete and to win,” said Dan Liebling, a member of the Microsoft Research staff working on techniques to improve the relevance of results in Microsoft’s Live Search service.

Among other things, the results can be refined based on records of earlier searches by thousands of others and the ways those users changed search terms when they did not get the results they were seeking.

Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, has built a tool to help determine relevance called Personalized Search. It pulls together several hundred results and then compares them with the index that Windows users can build of the documents on their hard drives, a feature called Desktop Search.

She demonstrated the effectiveness of the program by searching for Michael Jordan. By culling through local information on her hard drive, the program was able to discern that she was interested in finding the Michael Jordan who is the machine-learning expert at the University of California, Berkeley, not the basketball player.

Search in the future will look nothing like today’s simple search engine interfaces, she said, adding, “If in 10 years we are still using a rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.”

Microsoft researchers are exploring other ways to exploit clues about the context of a search as well as conversational-style interfaces that will be more powerful than the way users now enter and modify search terms, Ms. Dumais said.

The sessions on Tuesday opened a three-day event, Techfest, for reporters and business partners and for up to 7,000 of the company’s 70,000 employees. The projects shown on Tuesday were mostly ones that Microsoft may turn into products within a couple of years.

About half of Microsoft’s 750 researchers from around the world have come to take part in the event, according to Richard Rashid, a former Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who founded and leads Microsoft Research.

He acknowledged that he had originally opposed the idea of Techfest when it began six years ago, but was struck by how enthusiastically it was embraced by Microsoft employees.

“We realized we were clearly tapping an underserved community,” he said. Now the company uses the event to move technology from its research division into products.

That includes monitoring which employees visit which lectures and booths and looking for patterns, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/business/07soft.html





Wikipedia Looks to Conquer Search Next
Ed Oswald

The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.

At a news conference Thursday in Tokyo, Wikipedia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said Wikia -- the commercial face of Wikipedia -- plans to take as much as five percent of the search market.


Wales criticized search leaders Yahoo and Google for keeping their search technologies under wraps and not letting users have a say in the process. He claims that the constant improvement of the technology would also give it a leg up on the increasing problem of search result spam.

The software used by Wikipedia is made available freely to other sites as long as they provide a link back to the company, and Wikia could arguably be credited with spurring the explosion of the wiki as a Web-authoring medium.

If Wales is successful, the wiki-like search project could be serving about half the search queries of Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live, which accounts for 10 percent of the search market in most surveys.

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken," Wales says on a wiki devoted to the project. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Wiki...ext/1173376387





FAA May Ditch Microsoft's Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo

FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops.
Paul McDougall

March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft's public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google's new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware.

In an interview, FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops. Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. "It's a different sort of computing strategy," he said. "It takes the desktop out of the way so you're running a very thin client. From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages."

Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition last month at a price of $50 per user, per year. It features online e-mail, calendaring, messaging, and talk applications, as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet. The launch followed Google's introduction of a similar suite aimed at consumers in August. The new Premier Edition, however, offers enhancements, including 24x7 support, aimed squarely at corporate and government environments.

Bowen said he's in talks with the aviation safety agency's main hardware supplier, Dell Computer, to determine if it could deliver Linux-based computers capable of accessing Google Apps through a non-Microsoft browser once the FAA's XP-based computers pass their shelf life. "We have discussions going on with Dell," Bowen said. "We're trying to figure out what our roadmap will be after we're no longer able to acquire Windows XP."

Bowen, however, said he has not definitely ruled out an FAA-wide upgrade to Windows Vista and related software -- if Microsoft can satisfy his concerns over compatibility with the agency's existing applications and demonstrate why such a move would make financial sense given Google Apps's low price. "We have a trip to Microsoft scheduled for later this month," said Bowen.

Like the Department of Transportation, the FAA -- technically under DOT but managed separately -- has its own moratorium in place on upgrades to Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Microsoft Office 2007. Among other things, Bowen said the FAA's copies of IBM's Lotus Notes software don't work properly on test PCs running Windows Vista.

Bowen's compatibility concerns, combined with the potential cost of upgrading the FAA's 45,000 workers to Microsoft's next-generation desktop environment, could make the moratorium permanent. "We're considering the cost to deploy [Windows Vista] in our organization. But when you consider the incompatibilities, and the fact that we haven't seen much in the way of documented business value, we felt that we needed to do a lot more study," said Bowen.

Because of Google Apps' sudden entry into the desktop productivity market, what once would have been a routine decision at the FAA to eventually upgrade to Microsoft's latest software is now firmly up in the air. With similar debates doubtless playing out at other government agencies -- and in the private sector -- Microsoft is going to have to work a lot harder than in past years convincing customers to follow its well worn path of new releases and follow-on patches.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=197800480





Calif. School District Aims 5,000 Desktops at Linux
Chris Preimesberger

A school district technology director is making wholesale changes in her employer's IT system by migrating most of 5,000 Windows desktops to a new setup based primarily on Linux-powered desktop PCs and thin clients. The change aims to reduce annual costs, offer many more applications, and use less energy.

Windsor, Calif. School District IT administrator Heather Carver is migrating most of the district's 70 servers and most of its 5,000 desktop machines from a mostly-Windows environment that is quickly becoming obsolete to a new mixed environment that includes PCs running SUSE Linux, Wyse Linux thin-client terminals, and a smattering of Mac and Windows machines.

When all the phasing-in is completed sometime next year, the district will be operating about 2,000 SUSE Linux desktops, 50 SUSE Linux servers, 2,700 Linux thin clients, and a few hundred Mac and Windows machines for special purposes, Carver said.

Additionally, she expects to save thousands of dollars each year in hardware and software costs by doing it.

"One key to all this is that we're using Citrix (as the bridge) to run Windows apps on thin-client terminals -- which the adults are most used to -- on the new SUSE Linux 10.1 servers," Carver told DesktopLinux.com. "The kids, well, they adjust to new operating systems and applications very quickly, so a changeover to Linux is no big deal."

Citrix Presentation Server enables Windows applications, hosted on remote servers, to "run" on networked thin clients (or PCs) that need not themselves be Windows machines. Using Citrix, the thin clients act as remote consoles -- the applications run on the servers, while screen contents, keyboard entry, and mouse movements traverse the network between the servers and the thin clients. In this manner, Citrix can be used to run such standard-issue Windows-based education applications as KidPix, Reading Counts, and Type to Learn from the Linux servers with no problems, Carver explains.

"It's the adults that tend to stay with what they're familiar with," added Carver. "This way, they can run their Windows apps as usual on the Linux OS, and everybody is happy."

Following Easter break in a few weeks, about half of the 3,500 students and 250 teachers will be working on Linux-based thin clients running OpenOffice.org, and most of the district's servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

At this point, Carver said, she isn't sure exactly how many actual Linux desktops will be cohabiting along with Linux thin clients and Macs. "We'll end up with 2,500 to 3,000 thin clients, and will keep some Macs in the audio-visual departments," Carver said.

The rest of the 5,000 -- between 2,000 and 2,500 -- will be Linux-driven desktops with a small number of Windows machines mixed in, she said.

One major advantage to all this consolidation is that teachers and students alike will now have the advantage of a lot more applications to choose from -- Linux or Windows -- because both will run "seamlessly" on SUSE 10.1," Carver said.

A number of the servers have already been migrated to Linux, and Carver says she's already noticing a downward change in the district's electric bill.

"Thanks to the new thin-client Linux system, we've been able to shut off 36 machines -- and we've set it up so teachers can log into their school desktops from home to grade papers and do other work," Carver said. This has encouraged teachers to work from home more often, whereas in the past they would have had to come back onto campus and work from their offices, she said.

"I think we saved about $300 on last month's power bill already," Carver said. "I've been monitoring it."

When Carver arrived last August, she saw an IT system that would have needed upgrades in hardware and software that would have totaled about $100,000. No way the district could afford that, she said.

"I was looking at spending $100 per year for 30 Microsoft Office installations, and we just weren't going to go for that," Carver said. OpenOffice.org, with its similarity to Office and free cost, has been well accepted, she added.

Even so, Carver still looked for ways to to keep some Windows machines -- mostly for the teachers' and administrators' sakes.

Carver said it cost the district about $2,500 per school to migrate to Linux, compared with the estimated $100,000 it would have cost to upgrade their Windows infrastructure.

"The uptime benefit has been tremendous," Carver added. "We wanted people using the same apps anyway -- a system can't handle five email clients, etc. We've standardized on the key applications, and people aren't having the issues (security, installation, maintenance, etc.) they used to have with Windows, so that been's a real advantage."

So far, the migration from Windows to Linux has progressed smoothly, Carver told DesktopLinux.com. Next, she hopes to start branching out with her migration setup to other school districts.

"I've been talking to Cloverdale (a neighboring town and district). It makes sense for us to share resources and help each other," Carver concluded.
http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS4958455863.html





Schools Across Japan May Switch to Linux
Shioyama

Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce the open-source operating system Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future. According to an investigation conducted in the spring of last year, there are currently over 400,000 computers at schools in Japan running on either Windows 98 or Windows Me, systems no longer supported by the software manufacturer Microsoft. The prohibitive cost of replacing these machines with newer models, as well as the rising price of proprietary software, prompted school teachers and administrators to propose the possibility of switching to open-source software as an affordable alternative. A conference held in Tokyo on March 2-3, attended by around 2000 government officials, teachers and education board members from across the country, considered the idea of reclaiming these older computers by switching from unsupported and out-of-date versions of Windows to the operating-system Linux, which can be freely downloaded from the Internet. A teacher from a high-school in Fukuoka Prefecture explained: "Having to always install the latest software is costly, and it makes things very difficult for us. From now on, I want to actively move toward the use of free open-source software" [1].

The idea of switching to Linux has become an increasingly active topic of consideration over the past few years in Japan. Starting in late 2004, a trial study conducted at a handful of schools across the country, comprising a total of roughly a thousand students, experimented with using Linux-based systems in the classroom environment. Three hundred Linux-installed computers were distributed to these schools and subsequently used in a variety of classroom activities such as science experiments, report-writing, and internet-based research. While certain issues arose in the context of these activities related to dependencies on Windows-based software such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, the project on the whole was largely successful and students are reported to have enjoyed and benefited from working in the Linux environment [2].

Last week's conference in Tokyo, organized under the title of "E-squared Evolution", included numerous demonstrations and presentations, as well as panel discussions with researchers, teachers, and administrators. The conference was organized through the Center for Educational Computing (CEC), a group under the control of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), set up to promote the use of computers at schools within Japan [3]. Software on display included KNOPPIX, a version of Linux which can boot and run entirely from a CD, without the need to install anything on a hard disk, as such making minimal demands on computer architecture. A group of Japanese university researchers and teachers have developed a variant of this minimal system specifically designed for educational institutions, entitled Knoppix Edu. At the conference, a group from one school demonstrated the operation of a robot installed with a camera and wireless LAN, as well as a cross-platform suite of tools for 3D animation (Blender), entirely operated under the minimal KNOPPIX O/S [4,5]. Other open-source systems currently in use at schools in Japan include Turbolinux, Debian Linux, and the Java Desktop System R2 [6].

Under the title of the "Open School Platform (OSP) Portal", the CEC plans to follow-up the current phase of open-source educational integration, which completes its operations this month, with a new phase in which Linux software, documentation and packages will be made freely available at the group's website. From 2008 onwards, the project aims to move into a new phase in which the goal will be to install open-source systems on existing computers currently running outdated and unsupported Windows software [4].

The move toward open-source software within Japan mirrors similar transformations ongoing within educational institutions in numerous other countries around the world. An article late last month in Linux.com reported that "Linux and open source software are receiving increased interest within the educational sector as an alternative to Microsoft Windows Vista," noting that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), among others, warned of "lock-in" risks due to Microsoft's licensing programs. In Venezuela, the government has gone so far as to make it illegal ― by issue of a Presidential Decree ― to use proprietary software in public educational institutions, giving rise to several open-source movements [7]. Meanwhile, Chinese government officials reportedly now regard the open-source community as "a key to its software industry" and plans to invest more resources in Linux-based systems [8].

It remains to be seen to what degree the current drive for open-source software within Japan will succeed in its long-term goals. However, given the increasingly stringent financial constraints imposed on educational institutions and the heavy price tag demanded by proprietary software, it seems unlikely that the inroads the open-source community has forged thus far within Japanese educational settings will be easily reversed. Further progress will ultimately depend on the level of grassroots involvement in development and promotion of the open-source option, and on the degree of pressure exerted by monopolistic proprietary software manufacturers in response to this threat to the corporate profit margin.
http://gyaku.jp/en/index.php?cmd=contentview&pid=000112





The Road to Hardware Free From Restrictions: How Hardware Vendors Can Help the Free Software Community
Justin Baugh and Ward Vandewege

Introduction

The computer hardware market is steadily evolving towards a more standardized ecosystem based on unrestricted hardware. Already, smaller vendors are realizing increased sales by ensuring that their hardware works optimally with free software and that drivers are easy to develop and maintain. Industry leaders have already been realizing these benefits in the server market, but have yet to make the same commitment for consumer hardware.

Vendors who understand this evolution will reap the benefits of leveraging the free software community. Vendors who fail to realize this will be left behind in the marketplace by more nimble competitors.

Free software drivers

One of the biggest problems facing the free software community today is the lack of free software drivers for common hardware. Significant advances have been made in providing drivers for GNU/Linux systems, either by tacit support from manufacturers or by an arduous process of reverse engineering. Two citadels of binary-only drivers still remain: wireless network interfaces and video cards. There is wide community support for free software drivers for all hardware. (The Free Drivers Petition to hardware producers currently has over 5,000 signatures.)

Almost all current wireless cards and USB devices either require binary firmware loaded by a free software driver, or require the use of Windows drivers via a free software emulation layer (Ndiswrapper). Ndiswrapper is an inefficient use of processor cycles. The binary drivers it requires are often of poor quality, which can lead to stability problems and support headaches.

Most video cards won't perform at their full potential without binary drivers, especially in 3D applications.

The usual problems with proprietary software apply. Bugs in the proprietary drivers can result in a security vulnerability in the system itself that cannot be corrected without vendor intervention. Bugs noticed by the community can take months to be fixed—if they are fixed at all. Vendors regularly ignore the concerns of users who have already purchased their product. For instance, in the specific case of the binary NVidia drivers, there have been several high-profile security vulnerabilities that remained unpatched for far too long.

Hardware that requires binary firmware with a free software wrapper simply circumvents the issue by moving all intelligence into a black box that the user cannot open. This is merely smoke and mirrors—it creates the illusion that the hardware vendor respects freedom while the concerns of the community remain marginalized.

How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could require that full low-level technical documentation be made available for the hardware that goes into their products. This documentation should be made available in an unrestricted way, as used to be common practice.
Vendors could encourage the development of free software drivers for their hardware either by writing the drivers themselves or by supporting community development efforts.
Vendors could work with the community to get these drivers included in the standard version of the kernel, Linux. Doing this makes driver maintenance and upgrades much easier for developers as well as users.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

Hardware that is well-documented and supported by free software drivers will be significantly more useful to both the members of the free software community and the wider public. A reputation for hardware free of restrictions equates to positive product reviews, a stronger brand image and increased sales. (“In the survey of 1,800 young people, released by Cone Inc. and AMP Insights, two Boston marketing companies, 89 percent said they are likely to switch from one company's brand to another if the second brand is associated with a good cause.” Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2006.11.09, Peter Panepento.)

Respecting the users' freedom is a mark of an ethical company. (Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/.)

Proprietary BIOS locks

There are a number of serious issues with the proprietary BIOSes that are shipped commonly with consumer systems from the big vendors. Two particularly glaring problems are:

The lock on the use of minipci cards in laptops

Several major vendors use code in the BIOS to lock down their machines' otherwise completely standard minipci slots so that they only accept a couple of pre-approved extension cards. This is a major problem, particularly because the pre-approved cards are often manufactured by vendors that are hostile to free software, like Broadcom.

Disabling of the hardware virtualization functionality in modern CPUs

It has been reported that some machines with CPUs supporting hardware virtualization have those features disabled in the factory BIOS. One vendor claimed that virtualization had not been tested on its product, which is why the feature was disabled. (See “Business support forums - nw8440 - VT disabled in bios”.)

It is worth noting that no OEM motherboard manufacturer implements similar restrictions.
How hardware vendors can help

The vendor should not deliberately cripple hardware through BIOS locks or DRM in the BIOS.
How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

By removing artificial restrictions, users will be free to use their hardware to its maximum potential, including the freedom to combine hardware as they see fit. To a large tech-savvy community like the free software community, this freedom makes or breaks purchasing decisions.

Free BIOS support

There is a movement underway to replace proprietary BIOSes with a free BIOS. The major community effort is behind LinuxBIOS. (See http://linuxbios.org.)
How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could support the community by providing access under a permissive license to all the low-level hardware documentation necessary to port a free BIOS to their systems, and ideally offer engineering support.

Hardware vendors could ship hardware with a free BIOS instead of a proprietary BIOS. The free software community values hardware that can be run fully with free software from the BIOS up, and is willing to pay for it.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

It is in the hardware vendors' best interest to support a free BIOS, because it offers a number of advantages over proprietary BIOSes:

Most of the code is written in C, which is much easier to maintain than assembly code.
It runs almost entirely in 32-bit protected mode.
Rather than continuing design decisions made in the 1970s, it is based on modern architecture.
Revolutionary new features are possible, like embedding an entire kernel in the ROM chip.
Boot-up time is only a couple of seconds, which is a fraction of the time an average proprietary BIOS takes.
The vendor is not dependent on one proprietary BIOS vendor for any changes and fixes to the code.
Since it is licensed under the GPL, there are no patent or per-board royalties, or licensing fees.

The “Microsoft tax”

It is nearly impossible to purchase consumer hardware without a Microsoft operating system pre-installed. The vendors that do offer such systems usually discourage their purchase by hiding them. Vendors that pre-install GNU/Linux often only list the option for select systems. In neither case do vendors commonly provide a discount, even though they save money by not including an OEM Microsoft license.

How hardware vendors can help
Vendors could offer “no operating system” as an option on all their systems, including consumer systems, and particularly laptops.
When “no operating system” is selected, vendors should reduce the price of the system by the cost of the Microsoft OEM license.
Vendors could offer some GNU/Linux distributions as an option on systems, including consumer systems, and particularly laptops. These systems should be tested for subsystem functionality like ACPI.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

By selling and promoting more hardware without a pre-installed operating system, or with a GNU/Linux operating system, vendors will become less dependent on Microsoft. Millions of people are already using GNU/Linux systems. The free software community will undoubtedly support vendors that sell hardware without subjecting their customers to the “Microsoft tax.” Lower costs to the vendor mean lower prices and increased sales.

Digital Restrictions Management

The free software community opposes the imposition of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). As current software implementations of DRM have proved insecure, arduous and unmanageable, this anti-consumer technology is increasingly moving into hardware. Traditionally, hardware vendors have encouraged innovative uses of new technology and media, not restricted them. This culture of innovation is what the entire computer hardware industry is based on.

How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could resist pressure by the media companies to stifle this innovative culture, and actively lobby for laws that protect consumers' rights.
How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

The free software community will flock to any vendor that protects the rights of the consumer by delivering “hardware free from restrictions.” Vendors that sell equipment that is “defective by design” will see their sales and community support diminished.

By steering clear of DRM hardware, vendors would also remain free to innovate, rather than having to clear every new product with Big Media.

Conclusion

By making the recommended changes in any or all of these five areas (free software drivers, proprietary BIOS locks, free BIOS support, the “Microsoft Tax,” Digital Restrictions Management) hardware vendors will help establish a mutually beneficial relationship with the free software community. Vendors will realize increased sales, and the free software community will have hardware that meets its ethical requirements.

The Free Software Foundation is eager to assist hardware vendors interested in making the changes recommended in this paper. Vendors should not hesitate to take advantage of this largely unexplored opportunity.


Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/how_..._can_help.html





BIOS Emulation Toolkit For Windows Vista x86

Download link:
http://rapidshare.com/files/19283398/ParadoxVista.zip (Link removed. - Jack)

What's the purpose of this release?

Bypassing the product activation requirement of Microsoft Windows Vista x86.

How does it work?

Microsoft allows large hardware manufacturers (e.g. ASUS, HP, Dell) to ship their products containing a Windows Vista installation that does NOT require any kind of product activation as this might be considered an unnecessary inconvenience for the end-user.

Instead these so-called 'Royalty OEMs' are granted the right to embed certain license information into their hardware products, which can be validated by Windows Vista to make obtaining further activation information (online or by phone) obsolete.

This mechanism is commonly referred to as 'SLP 2.0' ('system-locked pre-installation 2.0') and consists of the following three key elements:

1. The OEM's hardware-embedded BIOS ACPI_SLIC information signed by Microsoft.

2. A certificate issued by Microsoft that corresponds to the specific ACPI_SLIC information.

The certificate is an XML file found on the OEM's installation/recovery media, ususally called something like 'oemname.xrm-ms'.

3. A special type of product key that corresponds to the installed edition of Windows Vista.

This key can usually be obtained from some installation script found on the OEM's installation/recovery media or directly from a pre-installed OEM system.

If all three elements match Windows Vista's licensing mechansim considers the given installation a valid system-locked pre-activated copy (that does not require any additional product activation procedures).

So the basic concept of the tool at hand is to present any given BIOS ACPI_SLIC information to Windows Vista's licensing mechanism by means of a device driver.

In combination with a matching product key and OEM certificate this allows for rendering any system practically indistinguishable from a legit pre-activated system shipped by the respective OEM.

How do I use it?

Preliminary hint:

Most operations described below require elevated privileges, so disabling UAC (Run->MSCONFIG.EXE-> Tools->Disable UAC) for the time being is recommended, Of course, it can be safely re-enabled after all steps have been performed. Otherwise OEMTOOL.EXE and some SLMGR.VBS operations must be explicitly run with adminstrative privileges.

1. Install the Windows Vista x86 edition of your choice without entering any product key during setup. Basically any Windows Vista x86 installation media will do, regardless if it's MSDN/Retail/OEM/ETC

2. Install the emulation driver.
INSERT THIS FILE INTO THE C: SO THE FILE IS IN C:.XRM-MS E.G. C:ASUS.XRM-MS" if you chose to install the default driver Run OEMTOOL.EXE, select the OEM BIOS information to emulate (ASUS might be a good choice given the fact that it's the only OEM for which a complete set of product keys is provided ) and hit the '' button.

If prompted about whether to install an unsigned driver, allow it.

(For some odd reason Microsoft didn't wanna sign this one...)

3. Reboot your machine.

4. Install the OEM certificate matching your OEM selection during driver installation by running

SLMGR.VBS -ilc .XRM-MS

(e.g. "SLMGR.VBS -ilc C:ASUS.XRM-MS" if you chose to install the default driver and extracted the certificate file to C:)

Note that this operation might take quite a while depending on your system, so be patient.

5. Install an OEM product key matching the installed edition of Windows Vista x86 by running SLMGR.VBS -ipk

(e.g. "SLMGR.VBS -ipk 6F2D7-2PCG6-YQQTB-FWK9V-932CC" if you're running Windows Vista Ultimate using the default emulation driver)

Note that this operation might take quite a while depending on your system, so be patient.

See PKEYS.TXT for a list of OEM product keys published by different OEMs.
http://www.uploadcrap.com/?subaction...from=&u cat=&





Social Networking’s Next Phase
Brad Stone

Next week Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley heavyweight, plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site, according to people close to the companies’ discussions.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

The new social networking players, which include Cisco and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.

“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”

Social networks are sprouting on the Internet these days like wild mushrooms. In the last few months, organizations as dissimilar as the Portland Trailblazers, the University of South Carolina and Nike have gotten their own social Web sites up and running, with the help of companies that specialize in building social networks. Last month, Senator Barack Obama unveiled My.BarackObama.com, a social network created for his presidential campaign by the political consulting firm Blue State Digital.

Many of these new online communities cater to niche interests. Shelfari, a Seattle-based start-up, recently began a service to let book lovers share their opinions. This week it received an investment from Amazon.com.

Mr. Andreessen’s Ning, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is fashioning itself as a one-stop shop catering to this growing interest in social networks. Anyone can visit the site and set up a community on any topic, from the television show “Battlestar Galactica” to microbrew beers. Ning users choose the features they want to include, like videos, photos, discussion forums or blogs. Their sites can appear like MySpace, YouTube or the photo sharing site Flickr — or something singular.

Those setting up Ning communities can pay $20 a month if they want the site free of text advertisements delivered by Google. They also have the option of delivering their own advertising, as CBS does on Ning-based social networks for its shows “CSI” and “The Class.”

Mr. Andreessen said that even with its two acquisitions, Cisco might be underestimating the ease of combining technologies behind Tribe.net and its earlier acquisition, Five Across.

“The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches,” he said.

Tribe.net, which developed the technology that Cisco is now acquiring, almost led this new social networking phase. In 2004, the U2 singer Bono approached the company and asked it to create a separate network for his antipoverty campaign, One.org, according to several former employees. Tribe.net, founded by Mark Pincus, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor, decided to remain focused on building a destination site, like Friendster and MySpace.

Bono went on to create the One.org network with Yahoo. Mr. Pincus left Tribe.net in 2005 but repurchased the company from lenders last summer when it was nearly out of money. Today, Tribe.net is primarily used by artists who attend the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

Executives at Cisco and Utah Street Networks, Tribe.net’s parent company, declined to comment on their deal or its terms. But people close to the discussions said Tribe.net would remain an independent site, while its underlying technology would go to Cisco.

Several former employees have left Tribe.net to start their own firms offering social network tools. Alexander Mouldovan, who had been a product manager there, started a company called Crowd Factory to design social networks for large companies. He is now building services for several telecommunications customers and says the new model makes more sense for Internet users.

“If I’m into fly-fishing, that is where I’m going to spend my energy online,” he said. “I don’t think it is easy for MySpace and Facebook to adapt and bend to the needs of individual brands.”

One challenge is getting users to join new social networks when there are few other members. For example, Google helped Nike design its soccer community site, called Joga.com, but it does not appear to have significantly attracted users.

“I think this will work for certain kinds of brands, and other brands are just barking up the wrong tree,” said Paul Martino, a former Tribe.net chief technology officer who is now the chief executive of Aggregate Knowledge, a service that taps the online behavior of other users to provide shopping advice.

Another challenge is persuading users to enter their information over and over when they join new online communities. To solve the problem, several firms are pushing a standard called OpenID, which would let users sign on and easily transfer profile information among social sites.

Marc Canter, a former Tribe.net consultant who has created his own social networking firm, People Aggregator, was an early supporter of OpenID. “Humans are migratory beasts, and we do not want to re-enter our data every time we join a new site,” he said. “Users own their data and should be able to move it around freely.”

Cisco is positioning itself for the day when mainstream consumers are spending much of their time taking part in these online communities. With the acquisition of Tribe.net, it is also trying to further its quest to become a consumer-oriented company. In the last few years, it has purchased the wireless router company Linksys and the set-top-box maker Scientific Atlanta, giving it a significant presence in many American homes.

Dan Scheinman, the mergers and acquisition chief who led the Linksys and Scientific Atlanta purchases, now runs a new division at Cisco called the Media Solutions Group, which has been responsible for the deals for Five Across and Tribe.net.

After the Five Across acquisition, Mr. Scheinman said in an interview that Americans were quickly changing their media consumption habits. He said his new group would let Cisco help its media customers, like TV networks and cable companies, develop their sites and move more of their content onto the Web.

“Part of our job is to form a relationship with media companies and deliver technologies and services to them, so consumers can consume what they want online,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/te...8&ei=5087%0 A





Media Titans Clash and Audiences Lose
Eric Pfanner

For 3.3 million cable television viewers in Britain, "Lost" has disappeared. So have several other popular American series, including "24" and "The Simpsons."

The shows vanished from cable last week when British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite television company, pulled several of its channels, including those that broadcast the U.S. series from Virgin Media, the main cable provider in Britain.

The companies ostensibly ended their relationship because of a simple disagreement over the cost of carrying the channels on cable. But analysts say that the dispute boiled over publicly because the companies are fighting a broader battle over the British pay-TV market. This has turned the likes of Homer Simpson and the castaways of "Lost" into pawns for some far more powerful media figures: On one side, Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand; on the other, the Murdochs.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is the largest shareholder in Sky, and one of his sons, James, is the chief executive. Sky, with more than eight million subscribers, has long dominated pay-TV in Britain, relegating cable to also-ran status.

Suddenly, however, Sky faces a revitalized competitor in Virgin Media, the result of a recent merger between the two main cable providers, NTL and Telewest. Branson entered the picture when the combined company bought the British operations of Virgin Mobile, giving him a stake in the cable operator, which licensed the Virgin brand name from him.

Branson, who has climbed aboard airplanes, hot-air balloons and elephants for marketing stunts that helped build Virgin Atlantic Airways into a competitor to British Airways, wasted little time in trying to raise Virgin Media's profile.

Last autumn, Branson prodded Virgin Media to explore a bid for ITV, the largest commercial broadcaster in Britain. But that effort failed when Sky instead swooped in, buying a 17.9 percent stake in ITV — enough to foil Virgin Media's efforts to add a big content-creation and over-the-air broadcast business to its portfolio.

Virgin Media cried foul, protesting that Sky's move went against the spirit of British rules on concentration of media ownership, given that News Corp.'s British assets also include several newspapers — the Sun, the Times and the News of the World. British media laws state that Sky can own up to 20 percent of ITV, as long as it does not exert undue influence, but the government announced last week that it had asked the media regulator, Ofcom, to examine the deal.

Analysts say an Ofcom investigation, regardless of the outcome, was probably a political necessity, given a perception that News Corp.'s papers have been cozy with the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. That image was strengthened by widely published photos showing Rupert Murdoch seated next to Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer and the presumptive heir to Blair, at a panel discussion during the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January.

After Sky's ITV deal, Branson accused the government of being "scared stiff" of Rupert Murdoch. Branson said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he felt no personal hostility. "I like him, actually," Branson said. "If you asked him the same question about me, you would get the same answer."

Neither Rupert nor James Murdoch has commented publicly on the dispute with Virgin Media. A spokesman for Sky said accusations that the investment in ITV would weaken media choice in Britain "don't hold up," given that the satellite broadcaster offers a range of different news channels.

"Virgin is not a victim," the spokesman said. "Virgin is trying to use regulation as a commercial tool."

The Branson-Murdoch rivalry moved out of dealmakers' suites and regulatory offices and into viewers' living rooms with the decision by Sky to withhold its channels from Virgin Media.

Several weeks ago, Sky had already antagonized Virgin Media by running advertisements warning cable viewers that they might lose access to channels like Sky One, which shows "Lost," and Sky's 24-hour news channel. Virgin said it objected to Sky's attempt to raise the fees for running the channels on cable, despite the fact that viewership has fallen. Sky maintained that the price increases were justified because it was adding new channels to the package for Virgin Media, and because of additional investments in the existing ones.

The claims and counterclaims, detailed in a flurry of newspaper advertisements and press releases last week, grew more strident as the deadline for the negotiations approached last Wednesday, with each side accusing the other of acting in bad faith. At one point, Virgin and Sky even argued over who had initiated a telephone call between James Murdoch and Steve Burch, the Virgin Media chief executive.

Behind the seemingly petty aspects of the dispute are big changes in the competitive relationship between the two companies, Virgin Media said.

"This is not just about the carriage agreement," said Neil Burkett, chief operating officer of Virgin Media. "We now have a very viable proposition under the U.K.'s most loved and best- known brand."

Cable television has suffered from a reputation for bad customer service in Britain, analysts say. Burkett said Virgin Media was taking steps to improve that, along with making investments in video on demand and improved content offerings. The company is also trying to appeal to customers by marketing a "quad play" of telecommunications and media services — television, fixed-line and mobile phone calls and broadband — in one package.

Sky has responded to that challenge by rolling out its own broadband offering. Both sides, facing a threat from free digital television beamed over the airwaves, have also announced plans to add so-called digital terrestrial services.

Both Virgin Media and Sky may have to do a bit of damage-control in the meantime, analysts say. Virgin Media tried to make light of losing the Sky channels. On its electronic program guide, it briefly replaced the slot for Sky News on Thursday morning with a listing reading, "Sky Snooze, try BBC."

But Virgin Media later bowed to pressure from a consumer group, the National Consumer Council, announcing that it would allow customers to cancel their subscriptions with no penalty because of the loss of the Sky channels.

Burkett at Virgin said that he did not expect negotiations on the Sky channels to be reopened.

For its part, Sky has said that it stands to forfeit about £60 million, or $116 million, a year from the loss of channel carriage fees from Virgin Media, as well as from reduced advertising rates, because the channels will now reach 3.3 million fewer viewers.

Sky appeared to be gambling that it would make up some of that lost revenue by appealing to Virgin Media subscribers who cannot live without "Lost."

"There's only a certain amount of premium content," said James Healey, media analyst at Ernst & Young in London. "And if you've got that, you may not be willing to play nicely with the other children in the group."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ess/uktv05.php





The Karmazin Way: Build It, Sell It, Run It, Repeat
Richard Siklos

MEL KARMAZIN could sell microwavable ice to Eskimos. He started his career in ad sales at WCBS radio in New York four decades ago, quickly proved himself to be a master closer, and has been peddling his wares ever since.

“Mel is the singular best salesman I have ever met in my life,” said Joel Hollander, the chief executive of CBS Radio, who spent much of his career working for Mr. Karmazin. “He’s very aggressive, to say the least.”

The capping moment of Mr. Karmazin’s radio career came in 1997, when he sold Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS Radio), a vast collection of stations he and partners had built, to what was then the broadcast company CBS Inc.

Though he had little experience in television, Mr. Karmazin’s hero status on Wall Street and his zeal for growth catapulted him into the chief executive’s chair at CBS after only a couple of years. A mere nine months later, he pulled off another coup and sold CBS to Viacom, on the condition that he would run the combined media conglomerate as its president.

The Karmazin rocket finally ran out of fuel in 2001, when Viacom’s chief executive and controlling shareholder, Sumner M. Redstone, lost confidence in Mr. Karmazin’s relentless focus on costs and quarter-to-quarter results, coupled with an unpardonable failure to invite the billionaire to lunch. (Mr. Redstone went a step further last year by sort of undoing the deal and splitting off a new CBS Corporation, which he also controls.)

Anyway, gazing at Mr. Karmazin’s career, you start to get the picture behind what happens when you put him in the big chair: he is forever building and selling, even when it looks like he’s buying. And so, two years after he became the chief executive of Sirius Satellite Radio, it should come as no shock that he has struck a deal to merge the company with its only direct rival, XM Satellite Radio.

Not coincidentally, if the deal goes through, he will again end up running the combined entity.

Last week, Mr. Karmazin took his campaign to win over lawmakers and regulators to Washington with his pitch that a single satellite radio company would mean more choice and lower prices for consumers — rather than create a foreboding monopoly, as his former chums in the terrestrial radio business contend.

Speaking before an antitrust task force of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Karmazin said he was shocked by the very idea that anyone would see a monopoly as the logical result of merging the only two satellite radio broadcasters. “There is no monopoly or duopoly,” he told the hearing. “That’s the most bizarre thing I have ever heard.”

Mr. Karmazin’s essential message is that satellite radio is competing with all forms of audio entertainment and information — from commercial radio to iPod jacks in cars to Internet radio and maybe even people humming as they walk down the street.

On Feb. 19, the day the merger was announced, Mr. Karmazin had a similar message for me: that it was wrong to compare his proposed deal with the merger of the direct broadcast satellite companies DirecTV and EchoStar, which regulators turned down in 2004. “The only thing that you could even think of as similar between those companies and us is that they both use satellites,” he said. By Mr. Karmazin’s reasoning, the television business has an entirely different structure.

Whether this is conviction or sophistry, it is very hard to throw Mr. Karmazin off his message, even when he seems to be contradicting himself.

Early in his tenure at CBS, for example, he was dismissive of the Internet as a business. But he quickly changed tack and did some clever deals in which the company traded ad space on its TV network to Web start-up companies for equity, which it cashed in on shrewdly during the stock market bubble a few years ago.

Similarly, the pre-Sirius Mel was a satellite-radio skeptic. He later argued that what changed his mind was the defection of Howard Stern, whose career he had nurtured, from CBS/Infinity to Sirius for an estimated $500 million pay package. Mr. Karmazin said the potential of having the controversial but popular Mr. Stern anchoring Sirius helped entice him out of a brief post-Viacom retirement to join the company.

Sirius has certainly blossomed since Mr. Karmazin came on board in November 2004: it had just under 800,000 subscribers then but has more than six million now.

After chalking up billions of dollars in losses since its inception in the early 1990s, the company will begin generating positive cash flow this year, Mr. Karmazin says, and he contends that Sirius does not need to merge with XM and its eight million customers to survive.

But the costs of acquiring and keeping customers remain daunting. And what tears him up inside, he said, is Sirius’s stock price, which, at a closing price on Friday of $3.55, is 28 percent lower than the day before he joined the company. “It’s been a great two years,” he told me. “If there weren’t a Quotron in my office, it would have been the perfect job for me.” (A key to Mr. Karmazin’s legendary salesmanship is that he can be quite funny.)

One of the messages that Mr. Karmazin brought to Washington is that a combined satellite broadcaster is better for choice — Mr. Stern and major sports leagues would ultimately be available to subscribers of both services rather than one or the other.

Among the biggest hurdles he and XM face is persuading the regulators that merging would be better for consumers than the satellite radio rivals’ long-promised and long-delayed new receivers that would allow listeners to switch from one service to the other without having to pull one receiver out of their cars and install another.

As far as price is concerned, Mr. Karmazin made it plain to the House committee that he would be willing to agree to a price cap for the combined service to seal the deal. The pitch is that raising prices isn’t really feasible anyway because most of what satellite radio is competing with out there is free — particularly on the radio.

ONCE more, this seems slightly at odds with statements that Mr. Karmazin made only a few months ago, Jonathan A. Jacoby, a Banc of America Securities analyst, wrote last week in a report. At an investor conference in December, Mr. Jacoby said, Mr. Karmazin talked up the potential for raising prices beyond the $12.95 a month most people pay now.

Clearly, Mr. Karmazin and his counterparts at XM have their work cut out for them in getting their deal past regulators. But one thing you can take to the bank is that he will do whatever it takes to get the deal done. If he does pull it off, the question will be this: What company would the master pitchman want to sell the combined XM-Sirius to next?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/bu.../04frenzy.html





F.C.C. Chief Questioning Radio Deal
Stephen LaBaton

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has privately questioned recent Congressional testimony by the architect of a proposed merger of the nation’s two satellite radio companies that subscribers would both pay the same monthly rate and receive significantly more programming.

As he sought to sell the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio to Congress, and by extension to regulators like Mr. Martin, Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius, vowed last Wednesday that prices would not be raised and that listeners would benefit enormously by getting the best programming from both companies.

But in separate conversations with two people after Mr. Karmazin’s testimony to a House committee, Mr. Martin said that subscribers may be surprised to learn they may actually have to pay more than the current monthly rate of $12.95 if, for example, they want to receive all the games of Major League Baseball (now available only on XM) as well as all the professional football games (now only on Sirius).

Mr. Karmazin, reached on Tuesday, said his testimony was not misleading and that he meant to say two things: subscribers wanting to keep their existing service would not face a price increase, and listeners who wanted the best of both services would pay less than the combined rate of $25.90.

Mr. Martin, in an interview on Tuesday, suggested that the details had not been clear from the testimony. He emphasized that he was not questioning the motives or candor of Mr. Karmazin but that there was “a need for greater clarity” over what was being proposed for fees and programming.

“The commission will need to determine the benefits to consumers of this deal, and in doing that, we will need to carefully look at what price will be frozen and what consumers will be getting for that price,” Mr. Martin said, adding that the hearing left those issues unclear. “When they talk about freezing rates and lowering rates, are they talking about it in terms of the current rate of $12.95 for each service, or are they referring to the combined rate of $25.90?”

The two people who talked to Mr. Martin — one working to get the deal done and the other a critic — said they understood his comments to reflect his skepticism about both the deal and the way it was being sold in Washington as more beneficial to consumers than it might actually be. The two did not want to be identified because they said these were private conversations.

Mr. Martin said that the proposed deal had “not even been filed with the commission yet,” and that he would carefully consider the arguments of both the supporters and the opponents before reaching a decision.

The $13 billion proposed deal cannot be completed without the permission of antitrust lawyers at the Justice Department and a majority of the five commissioners at the F.C.C.

The commission gave the two companies spectrum licenses for the satellite radio services in the 1990s on the condition that they not merge, and it would have to waive that condition for the deal to go forward.

Mr. Martin has said that the companies have a high hurdle to conquer in persuading the commission that the deal would be in the public interest.

At last week’s hearing before the antitrust task force of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Karmazin insisted that subscribers could count on a significantly greater offering of programs and no increase in prices. That juxtaposition led some lawmakers to conclude that consumers who pay the same monthly fee for one service would be getting the benefits of the other.

“This merger will give people more choice than they have before and lower prices and, very importantly, less confusion,” Mr. Karmazin testified. “Our vision of the way it works is that if you are an XM subscriber, you have the Major League Baseball, you have whatever number of channels available to you now. But what we contemplate is that we would take some other content, and again we have to work with our content partners. But the hope would be that we would get Nascar to agree to be on XM as well. We’ll get the N.F.L. to agree to be on XM as well.”

At another point in the hearing, he said, “We are saying we are not going to raise our price, and we’re going to offer the consumer something that they have not had before.”

Critics said that the companies had not been candid about their intentions to offer more services for more than $12.95.

“It’s a sleight of hand going on here,” said Gene Kimmelman, vice president for federal affairs at Consumers Union, which opposes the merger. “They highlight the price freeze for the old package. They’re leaving the consumer with the impression of a price freeze. They say you will get the best of both services. But they never tell you what the rate will be for that.

“Regardless of what Mr. Karmazin intended,” Mr. Kimmelman went on, “he has left many consumers with the impression they will receive a combined package of Sirius and XM channels for $12.95, when in reality the price will probably be much higher.”

Mr. Karmazin is scheduled to appear before a second Congressional panel on Wednesday.

In the interview on Tuesday afternoon, he said he thought he had been clear that to get the best of both XM and Sirius, consumers would have to pay more than the monthly rate of $12.95, but less than the combined rate of $25.90. Consumers who just want to stay with their existing lineup would be guaranteed the same price, he said.

“If the merger is approved there will be lower prices and more choice,” Mr. Karmazin said. “If the merger is not approved, there is no discussion on price and there is no discussion about more choices.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/bu...a/07radio.html





He Runs That Mickey Mouse Outfit
Laura M. Holson

IT wasn’t the first time John Lasseter, the director of “Toy Story” and “Cars,” had sat through the screening of a not-quite-ready animated film. But when he saw an early cut of Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” last March, he watched it with a new eye. He wasn’t just a fellow director, and a founder of Pixar Animation Studios. This time he was the boss, the chief creative officer of animation for the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to acquire Pixar two months before.

As he sat in a dark theater on the first floor of Disney’s animation studio here, something bothered him about the villain. Almost all of Pixar’s animated movies had an evil foil. In “Toy Story” Buzz Lightyear and Woody escaped a cruel neighborhood bully. In “A Bug’s Life” an ant saved his colony from a menacing grasshopper and his thuggish crew. By contrast the lanky villain in “Robinsons,” the story of an orphan who builds a time machine in order to find his mother, was neither threatening enough nor scary.

After the screening Mr. Lasseter and his colleagues from Pixar and Disney met with the director, Stephen Anderson, and told him so. For six hours.

Ten months later Mr. Lasseter was back in the screening room, watching Mr. Anderson’s new version of “Meet the Robinsons,” which is set for release on March 30. Nearly 60 percent of the original film had been cut. A diabolical sidekick had been added. And in one thrilling scene the orphan, Lewis, is chased by an oversize dinosaur. Later, when asked about the movie’s ending, Mr. Lasseter’s rubbery smile turned upside down and he pretended to cry.

“The audience is going to be sobbing,” he said, dragging his index fingers down his cheeks. “It is really going to get them.”

A Hollywood outsider whose independent shop popularized computer animation, Mr. Lasseter, 50, might seem an odd fit for a studio built on old-school cartoons and the mythology of Snow White and Cinderella. But since Pixar was acquired, Mr. Lasseter has been heralded as a latter-day Walt Disney, a cultural arbiter who can rekindle the spirit of Disney’s famous animation at its theme parks, on store shelves and in a theater near you.

Since the days of the 1928 Mickey Mouse classic “Steamboat Willie,” animation was Disney’s undisputed long suit. But after a recent decade-long parade of disappointments, most famously the 2002 bomb “Treasure Planet,” the studio was desperate for a change of fortune. It abandoned its hand-drawn tradition in favor of computer-generated fare. In the process the keepers of the Magic Kingdom lost much of their cultural cachet.

Enter Mr. Lasseter who, along with a close team of handpicked animators had made Pixar this generation’s premier storyteller with an unbroken string of hits including “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” The first filmmaker to run Disney’s animation operations since Walt Disney died in 1966, he said he wants to reclaim the studio’s golden era.

Since those early days, though, almost everything has changed. On the Disney campus, the creative culture is tattered still from years of cost-cutting and political infighting. And in the world at large audiences have moved on. The sweet wholesome tales of Mickey Mouse and friends don’t have the same relevance for a generation raised on violent video games, distracted by 500 cable channels and preoccupied with Web diversions like MySpace.

“I’m not sure it’s a trivial challenge,” said Jim Morris, a Pixar producer who is working on the forthcoming “Wall-E.” “As charismatic as John is, he can’t do everything.”

Long-time colleagues say the force that will guide the coming changes — to the studio’s offices, to the films at the multiplex, to Christmas toys and rides that can make vacationing families queasy — is Mr. Lasseter’s own unique sensibility. He gets his inspiration from real life — his own. “Cars,” which lost the animated feature prize to “Happy Feet” at last Sunday’s Oscars, was the byproduct of a cross-country road trip he took with his wife and five sons. The idea for “Toy Story 2” was hatched when his children sought to play with toys he stored in boxes. And the die-cast collectibles he had issued for “Cars” were similar to the Hot Wheels he played with growing up in Whittier, Calif., in the 1960s.

That said, his greatest test may be getting Disney’s battle-worn animators to embrace the new culture he is trying to create while at the same time churning out a movie a year. “John doesn’t really change,” said Andrew Stanton, the director of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” who is a close friend and frequent collaborator. “People change around him.”

MR. LASSETER rarely sits still. His hands dance and wave in the air in front of him as he rattles off ideas, a sometimes artful stream of consciousness that can range from the shape of a tree he saw that morning to the laws governing wheelchair ramps under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Even during a lunch interview at Disney’s studios after several days of being shuttled between hourly meetings and nightly screenings, he is alert and focused.

How then, he was asked, did he plan to restore Disney animation’s cultural prominence?

He seemed almost dumbstruck by the question. He sat mute for a moment then turned to two attentive publicists sitting close by, searching their faces for an answer.

“I don’t know what to say,” he uttered, sounding mildly annoyed. “I don’t think like that. I trust in my instincts. I’m a product of what this company has created. I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me. I also love my toys. My Hot Wheels, my G.I. Joes.”

But of course he has a plan.

Mr. Lasseter and Edwin Catmull, a Pixar founder who was named president of the combined animation groups of Disney and Pixar and who oversees operations, have designs for a new headquarters in nearby Glendale. While the building will have Silicon Valley-style comfy couches, coffee stands and open spaces for animators to gather, it won’t be a replica of Pixar’s 16-acre campus in Emeryville, Calif., where artists play afternoon badminton games and executives zip between in-house meetings on scooters. “When we came to work here, we said Pixar is Pixar, Disney is Disney,” Mr. Lasseter said. “We did not want to come here and turn it into Pixar.”

Still, the cultural shift they are devising seems more like Pixar than not. For one thing, Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull are encouraging animators to experiment more with their craft. For another, they hope to reintroduce hand-drawn movies. Simply put, the two do not want to see the art form lost. “One of the things I find distressing is that when money gets tight, the money for drawing dries up,” Mr. Catmull said. “When people draw, they are learning to see.”

Since taking over, Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull have instituted a program to revive the hand-drawn animated short. “The whole purpose is to get these artists ready for feature films,” Mr. Lasseter said.

The day after he won a Golden Globe for “Cars,” Mr. Lasseter and 13 animation executives gathered in Story Room 1 on the second floor of the studio in Burbank to hear an art direction pitch for a new short film featuring Goofy titled “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.” On one wall were nine boards with images of Goofy drawn by Disney artists between 1942 and 1948. Looking at one image, Mr. Lasseter said: “What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it. That is something to make sure you have. Do the pupils have different shapes for expression?”

“Sometimes they change size,” answered Dale Baer, an animator.

“I like it when they are a little bigger,” Mr. Lasseter said.

“I love this stuff,” he said later, reflecting on the 60-year-old Goofy drawings and the animation division’s new logo, a short scene from “Steamboat Willie.” “We want to look back and look forward at the same time. This stuff lasts forever, every single movie. ‘Dumbo’ gets me every time. That moment when, at the same time, their trunks are touching? Long after I am gone they will make audiences cry.”

Mr. Lasseter talks a lot about making audiences cry. “John will go straight to as much emotion as possible,” said Lee Unkrich, the director of the recently announced “Toy Story 3” from Pixar. “It can become sappy.”

But as much as Buzz Lightyear had Woody, Mr. Lasseter has a creative foil in Andrew Stanton, whom Mr. Unkrich described as having “a more biting way.” Mr. Unkrich said, “You never felt them slip sliding into something emotionally shallow.” (Mr. Stanton has stepped into a leadership role at Pixar now that Mr. Lasseter spends two days a week in Burbank.)

“I am, by nature, an honest person,” Mr. Lasseter said. “I wear my emotions on my sleeve. There is no ‘behind closed doors’ with me. It’s the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear. We choose to be honest and open.”

So much so that Mr. Lasseter established a “story trust” at Disney, a mirror of the “brain trust” at Pixar where directors and story editors criticize a movie’s flaws more than any filmgoer might. “They are not back-patting sessions,” Mr. Catmull said. The six-hour meeting about “Meet the Robinsons” was one such session. Mr. Anderson later called it “one of the hardest days of my life.”

Harder still for those animators who don’t adapt. Chris Sanders, a longtime Disney animator who was a director and writer of the hit “Lilo and Stitch,” had developed a movie called “American Dog,” the tale of a Hollywood dog star who gets lost in the desert. Last year Mr. Lasseter and directors from both Pixar and Disney attended two screenings of the movie and gave Mr. Sanders notes on how he might improve the story, Mr. Unkrich said. Mr. Sanders resisted the suggestions, Mr. Lasseter said. So in January he was replaced by another director.

Asked about the episode, Mr. Lasseter abruptly interrupted an interview to confer with publicists, asking “What can I say here?”

After a brief discussion Mr. Lasseter explained that Pixar often added or replaced a director if a film needed help. “Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn’t take it to the place it had to be,” he said carefully.

Mr. Sanders, who is negotiating his exit from Disney, declined to comment. “John doesn’t force his solutions on you,” said Brad Bird, who directed “The Incredibles” and is close to Mr. Lasseter. “But that doesn’t mean he is going to go quietly.”

MR. LASSETER was born in Hollywood in 1957 and raised in nearby Whittier. His mother was an art teacher and his father a parts manager at a car dealership. After graduating from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts in 1979, Mr. Lasseter became a Disney animator for five years before joining Pixar in 1986. As a youth he was a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. It remains a favorite.

In the early 2000s Disney’s theme parks were derided for being shabbily maintained, and when Mr. Lasseter joined Disney, the chief executive, Robert Iger, made him a creative adviser to the theme parks, in part to oversee the quality of Disney’s attractions.

“No jokes today,” Mr. Lasseter said as he suppressed a smile halfway through a recent 8 a.m. meeting with a design team from Walt Disney Imagineering that was showing him a prototype of the new Toy Story Mania theme park ride based on “Toy Story.” “I want to play!”

Toy Story Mania is a video-game-style attraction designed by Disney in which riders seated in moving cars earn points when they shoot targets on a 3D screen. Mr. Lasseter climbed into a makeshift seat propped up on a plywood platform and hunkered down, ready for a test run. As the design team yelled, “Go! Go! Go!,” he concentrated, his tongue darting out the side of his mouth while his finger quickly grazed the trigger.

“I got a little confused as to which color was mine,” said Mr. Lasseter as he climbed out of his seat after earning 32,500 points, 1,700 more than his opponent. When one executive suggested rewarding high scorers by having a treat like an ice cream cone or a cookie show up onscreen, he said, “I have a diabetic son, and I don’t think we want to give food as a reward.”

But what concerned him more was when he was told that an outsider had been hired to animate some of the characters on the screen, including Woody.

“Are we making the right decision to have the characters animated by another company?” he asked the game’s designer, Sue Bryan. “I’m not comfortable with these people animating the characters, especially if we are dealing with Buzz Lightyear and that clear helmet and the reflection. We want to that to be right.”

“We’ve got the groundwork laid,” she replied.

Mr. Lasseter remained firm. He instructed a Pixar colleague, Roger Gould, to talk to the outside company. “I really want to control quality,” he said. “I don’t want outsiders rendering the characters.”

Mr. Lasseter has an executive from Disney’s consumer products division, Mary Beech, assigned to work with him on merchandising ideas.In addition to toys, he wants to expand Disney’s offerings for adults. Pixar’s coming film “Ratatouille” is about a rat named Remy who lives in a French restaurant and adores good food. That gave Mr. Lasseter an idea. “We had our people over to the kitchen of Thomas Keller at the French Laundry restaurant and we camcorded him cooking ratatouille,” he told Ms. Beech when she stopped by the Burbank office recently. “Thomas Keller went nuts for Hanley china,” he said, referring to the British china maker. “That got me thinking about the high end. It’s really elegant, but slightly cartoony. Maybe we could do the same idea for china.”

“Sur La Table is talking a real soup pot and ladle,” Ms. Beech said, referring to the upscale gourmet cooking store.

“One of our favorite gifts we’ve given out at Christmas is the cheese of the month club,” Mr. Lasseter said of himself and his wife, Nancy. “What if we used ‘Ratatouille’ to do that? What if we did with Costco the cheese of the month club? We could have Remy writing about cheeses. We could have an in-store display.”

Ms. Beech smiled as two onlookers in the office laughed. Mr. Lasseter’s notions about cheese and china sounded a little un-Disney-like.

But then again, maybe not. Disney recently announced a new line of wedding gowns inspired by Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella that sell for as much $2,900. And, as every wedding-goer knows, brides want new china too.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...tures/lass.php





An Aspiring Mogul’s Quick Rise and Fall
By Sharon Waxman

The journey of Henry Winterstern is a classic Hollywood tale: of this town’s irresistible lure, the particular hunger it breeds and the hubris that so often leads to a sudden demise. But this rapid rise and fall came with some trendy hedge-fund trimmings.

A gravel-voiced, Canadian-born investor with a flair for turning around ailing companies, Mr. Winterstern arrived two years ago, aiming to remake a tiny distributor, First Look Pictures, into a full-service independent studio that would rival the likes of Lionsgate. Backed by millions from a New York hedge fund and a blue-chip Wall Street investment bank, much like a new crop of other Hollywood ventures, he wasted little time building his mini-empire. He hired some well-known executives, and put into production or bought about a dozen films, including “The Dead Girl” with Toni Collette and Giovanni Ribisi, and this year moved his bulked-up staff of 140 to baronial new offices in Century City.

By last Friday he was gone, done in by a disastrous 2006 at the box office and a taste for spending, with little cash flow to show for it.

While neither First Look Studios nor Prentice Capital Management, the hedge fund that backed him, gave a reason for Mr. Winterstern’s resignation, the studio’s board issued a statement this week thanking him for his efforts. “First Look Studios is poised to become a major independent in the marketplace,” read the statement. “Henry provided this company with a foundation on which to do that.”

Mr. Winterstern said on Wednesday that the decision to resign was his own after the board rejected his bid to buy a production company, Nu Image/Millennium Films. “There was a divergence of opinion,” he said. “I wanted to build the company and make it larger, and the board wasn’t interested in going that way.”

The 49-year-old Mr. Winterstern, who has the craggy looks and hunched-over affect of a street fighter, never claimed to have much movie experience. But convinced that distribution was the place to make money, he planned to build a studio using his talents at raising money and strategic thinking that were successful in his turnaround of the Wet Seal, a maker of clothing for teenagers, in collaboration with Prentice Capital earlier this decade.

Prentice Capital invested $70 million with Mr. Winterstern to build the studio, in tandem with a credit line of $80 million from Merrill Lynch. Mr. Winterstern merged First Look Pictures, an indie distributor, with his own Capital Entertainment Group in 2005. (He remains its largest individual shareholder.) He gave the rechristened First Look Studios a rousing mission statement, saying in part: “First Look is a maverick. We are primarily accountable to ourselves. We want an audience looking at films from First Look to know — as Howard Hawks once said — just who made the picture.”

Mr. Winterstern hired industry veterans like Ruth Vitale, the former Fine Line and Paramount Classics executive, as president of First Look Pictures, and Stuart Ford, a former Miramax executive, to run the international distribution arm. And he quickly began to spend. In addition to expanding the company to several divisions — television, international, home entertainment — Mr. Winterstern acquired the video production and distribution arm of Blockbuster, DEJ Productions, for $25 million, and the video distributor Ventura Distribution for about $20 million, along with television syndication packages from Pinnacle Entertainment. He then started making movies in order to fill the distribution pipeline.

At Sundance this year and last Mr. Winterstern was a presence, leaping into the bidding wars. “He was there when we were negotiating all night,” said Celine Rattray, a producer of “Dedication,” a romantic comedy starring Billy Crudup and Mandy Moore, which sold in January for $3.5 million to First Look and the Weinstein Company.

But Mr. Winterstern’s first movie choices didn’t register with the public. Despite some good reviews, “The Dead Girl,” about a mysterious corpse, took in a paltry $19,000. “Wassup Rockers,” about a group of skater boys, written and directed by Larry Clark (“Kids”), took in just $620,000. The box office returns didn’t deter First Look from moving into the gleaming new building that was erected as headquarters for the Creative Artists Agency. Furnished at a cost of $4 million, the headquarters are “excellent, really fantastic, but you kind of go, ‘Wait, this isn’t Paramount, where you’re expecting to do a $70 million movie,’ ” said Gavin Polone, a producer who had meetings there recently and admired the cavernous entryway and zebra-stripe woodwork.

“They’re an independent, and they’ll come back and say, ‘Make it for less.’ And we’ll say, ‘The amount less you want us to spend to make the movie is what you spent on the receptionist station,’ ” he added.

Senior executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, said the company had $50 million in losses last year. Mr. Winterstern said the loss was not nearly that high but declined to be more specific.

The final straw, according to two senior executives, came in recent weeks, when, after persuading Prentice to give First Look an $8 million short-term loan in January, it became clear that First Look would be unable to repay it in April, as expected. (Mr. Winterstern said the company would have had the cash to repay the loan, but wanted to buy Nu Image/Millennium. “I had a growth-platform vision, and that required more capital,” he said.) Last Thursday he faced the board in New York. He resigned the following day.

The sudden change at First Look has created anxiety among producers of the seven films the studio plans to release this year, including “King of California,” starring Michael Douglas as a manic-depressive who believes there’s buried treasure in the San Fernando Valley. “Obviously we’re concerned about that,” said Michael London, one of the film’s producers, who added that he had received reassuring calls from Ms. Vitale. Michael Zimmerman, the chief executive of Prentice Capital, has told the First Look staff that the company will not fold. But it remains unclear who will lead it.

Up next is an animated adult comedy, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters,” based on the cult television series. Others include “An American Crime,” starring Catherine Keener as a mother of seven who imprisons a teenager in her basement; and “Smiley Face,” a comedy by the director Gregg Araki (“Mysterious Skin”), about the misadventures of a pot-smoking actress.

Mr. Winterstern is not the only comer who has found Hollywood an easy place to enter but a hard place to survive. Philippe Martinez came to Hollywood two years ago backed by capital from London, and has had disastrous results with films like “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj,” and has sparred with producers over money. Mr. Martinez recently downsized radically, and left his Century City offices to work out of a small space in Beverly Hills.

But Mr. Winterstern’s Hollywood adventure was shorter than most. “It was so quick,” said Ms. Rattray, the producer. “He burst onto the scene — he was so aggressive, and then gone so quickly.” And First Look may not have heard the last of Mr. Winterstern. Asked about a rumor that he might attempt to reacquire the studio, the deposed mogul laughed and said, “Absolutely not.” Then he called back to say, “It’s possible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/movies/08first.html





Mutiny At Take-Two Interactive

Investors launch a coup against the publisher's board; share price rises as a result of the proposals...
Jon Wilcox

A significant proportion of investors in publisher Take-Two Interactive have today launched a 'coup' against CEO Paul Eibeler, unveiling plans to replace him with Strauss Zelnick - former President of BMG Entertainment, the publisher acquired by Take-Two in 1998 that was subsequently re-branded Rockstar Games.

The group of investors, which have a 46% stake in the publisher, has also stated their intention to review the position of Karl Winters, Take-Two's Chief Financial Officer.

The dramatic move comes just days after the publisher released its financial results for the 2006 fiscal year, part of an agreement to retain Take-Two Interactive's position on the US-based NASDAQ stock exchange. The company has been pressure in recent months, and is one of a number of publishers investigated by the US Securities & Exchange Commission for irregular stock option practices.

Speaking to the BBC, JP Morgan analyst Dean Gianoukos said that the success of the investor's plans would be "a positive for the company, assuming key development personnel are retained." According to the BBC, shares in Take-Two rose by 18% as a result of the news.

Take-Two Interactive is yet to issue a statement on the investor's plans.
http://www.totalvideogames.com/news/..._11386_0_0.htm





"Micro-Networks" to Debut
Press Release

Next New Networks today unveiled its plans to launch 101 micro-networks over the next five years to create a new kind of media company specializing in targeting vibrant communities on the Internet. The company will add one to three networks per month in the months to come, and today it announced its first slate of six networks that begin to demonstrate the breadth of the company's offerings, which range from cars to fashion to ideas/viewpoints. The company also announced that Saban Capital Group and Benchmark Capital Europe are joining in its Series A investment being led by Spark Capital, and that Jonathan Miller, former AOL chairman and CEO, will join the company's board of directors.

Each micro-network from Next New Networks is its own unique entity, hosting its shows on a distinctly branded website. New and archived shows can also be found on iTunes and YouTube, and viewers are invited to contribute, share and distribute the network content. New episodes of each three to eight minute show will be regularly scheduled either daily or weekly.

The networks at launch are:

-- Channel Frederator (www.channelfrederator.com) -- a network packaging together some of the world's coolest and funniest cartoons as sent in by the viewers and served fresh each week.

-- Fast Lane Daily (www.fastlanedaily.com) -- a network featuring the day's latest news from the showrooms and design studios of the automotive world, as well as car communities and the blogosphere.

-- PulpSecret (www.pulpsecret.com) -- the world's first network devoted to comic book news and culture, featuring The PulpSecret Report produced by David P. Levin (TV Land Confidential).

-- Threadbanger (www.threadbanger.com) -- the first network for people who create their own fashion, featuring "Thread Heads," a weekly DIY fashion show.

-- VOD Cars (www.VODCars.com) -- the #1 online car network, featuring the very best clips for the speed-obsessed community at large.

-- Veracifier (coming soon) -- a network devoted to original reporting, ideas and commentary, featuring a daily show from the blog Talking Points Memo, by Joshua Micah Marshall.

"If television reaches broad audiences, and cable reaches niche audiences, our micro-networks are the next step, reaching precisely targeted communities," said Herb Scannell, co-founder and CEO, Next New Networks. "Ultimately, we are about serving audiences."

Scannell added, "We are thrilled to have such an impressive roster of investors to round out our funding. And having Jon join the board is not only very exciting, but also a strong validation of our model."

The company's series A round led by Spark Capital now includes investments from Saban Capital Group and Benchmark Capital Europe, as well as The Pilot Group, founded by Robert Pittman, former COO of AOL TimeWarner and CEO of MTV Networks, and About Change Ventures, founded by Christiane zu Salm, founder of the German interactive TV channel 9Live.

Jonathan Miller, who joins the Next New Network's board of directors, was responsible for setting the strategy and overseeing the businesses and operations of AOL, the world's leading interactive services company. Prior to AOL, Miller was president and CEO of USA Information and Services (USAIS). His experience also includes senior-level positions with USA Electronic Commerce Solutions, USA Broadcasting, Nickelodeon and the Paramount Comedy Channel in London.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/03/08/2401967.htm






Senators: Not so Fast on Broadcast Treaty
Eric Bangeman

For almost two years, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been hard at work drafting a broadcast treaty. Designed originally to limit signal theft from broadcasts, the scope of the treaty has at times narrowed and widened significantly throughout the process of drafting the treaty. The US Senate, which is tasked with the responsibility of approving treaties, has weighed in the Broadcast Treaty, encouraging the US delegation to work towards limiting the scope of the treaty.

Tech community split over WIPO broadcast treaty

In a letter sent to the Register of Copyrights and the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking Republican member of the Committee expressed their concerns about the scope of the treaty. "The Revised Draft Broadcasting Treaty appears to grant broadcasters extensive new, exclusive rights in their transmissions for a term of at least 20 years, regardless of whether they have a right in the content they are transmitting," read the letter.

The Copyright Register and Director of the USPTO make up the US delegation to the WIPO, and the senators want them to work towards a treaty that is "significantly narrower in scope," one that would provide no more protection than that necessary to protect the signals of broadcasters. Sens. Leahy and Specter want them to advocate for the position when the next meeting of the Standing Committee in June.

The WIPO Broadcast Treaty is a complex beast. Originally, the treaty was just meant to cover signal theft—cases where a broadcast is retransmitted without authorization. As treaty discussions continued, broadcasters began pushing towards a rights-based approach, one that would allow them to specifically authorize and deny the use of their signal to others. Over the months of discussions, the treaty has changed many times, but there have been some consistent areas of concern.

One of those is public domain material, which could potentially be locked up by broadcasters just by showing it. By doing so, they could gain exclusive rights over the content. At one point, the treaty contained no provision for fair use—another significant problem with the treaty. In the US, one of the biggest concerns is that the Broadcast Treaty would be unconstitutional, as IP rights in the US are restricted to creative works and not extended to broadcasters.

Last October, the WIPO dropped the rights-based approach for the time being. With Sens. Leahy and Specter expressing their concern with the treaty—saying that it "would needlessly create a new layer of rights that would disrupt United States copyright law"—it appears that the rights-based approach is truly dead.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...st-treaty.html





For Obscure DVDs, a Precarious Future
Bryan Reesman

AMONG the glories of the rising tide of DVD sales was the wave of discs that revived lost or overlooked works by filmmakers like David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Dario Argento, Jess Franco and Takashi Miike. Now some of the companies that brought those movies into homes are getting pulled under and may take future releases down with them.

The Digital Entertainment Group, a nonprofit trade consortium, reported for the first time in 2006 that overall DVD shipments were stuck at about 1.65 billion units, roughly the same as 2005, after years of rapid growth. According to the weekly DVD Release Report, combined DVD releases dropped to 12,887 in 2006 from 13,712 in 2005.

In effect the video market is glutted. For big studios that means more jousting over future formats that may restart sales. But for specialty companies that have traded otherwise unavailable horror, action, art-house and exploitation titles, the glut has meant a struggle to survive.

“I started in this business in 1992, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen the market,” said Don May Jr., president of Synapse Films, which has released “Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” and the controversial Leni Riefenstahl documentary “Triumph of the Will.” “We’re all drowning in a sea of DVDs. Five or six years ago maybe a hundred titles a week would come out. Now we’re fighting 200 or 300 titles every Tuesday.”

With the demise of Tower Records and various Musicland companies — including Sam Goody and Media Play — many smaller home video companies are feeling financially squeezed, as a result both of fewer outlets and of income owed from chain-store bankruptcies.

“Losing Tower Records and Musicland was a big blow,” said Norman Hill, founder of Subversive Cinema, home to cult titles like “Eraserhead” and the Jamaican documentary featuring Bob Marley, “Land of Look Behind.” “What I’m missing the most right now, even as a consumer, is being able to walk into a retail store and have a breadth of choice. When a major studio cannot get their catalog titles into the retail chains anymore, the independents are having an even worse time.”

Mass retailers like Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Target have limited shelf space, and Best Buy has become less diverse in its stock.

“The big-box stores are ruthless about returning if they don’t turn over enough,” said Gary Baddeley, president of the controversial, documentary-driven Disinformation Company, which has released “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.” “The DVD business is a returnable one. A sale is not always a sale.”

As independent retailers dwindle, larger chains focused more on mainstream titles seem to “control and set the arbitrary taste for the entire market,” said Matt Kennedy, former president of Panik House Entertainment, which specializes in international genre movies like “The Curse of the Crying Woman” and “The Pinky Violence Collection.” “Not getting a title into one of these stores can be the death of a small label, but so can getting one in. If you get an order for 40,000 titles and only sell 4,000 because it was left boxed in the back, misfiled by category or never entered into inventory, it can mean bankruptcy.”

The industry’s push toward new formats is also potentially problematic for the smaller players. The quality of mass-market digital downloads is debatable, and the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, which require substantial investment in new equipment, are already taking up shelf space that might have gone to specialty titles.

“I think high-definition is turning out to be the laser disc of the video business today,” said Bill Lustig, the director of “Maniac” and owner of Blue Underground, an eclectic company with titles including “My Brilliant Career” and “Tombs of the Blind Dead.” “It’s taking up a very, very small percentage of the market, and I don’t know if we will see it grow. Most people are happy with their standard-def DVDs and don’t want to replace their movies.”

The suppliers are trying to address the downward sales trend through different means: MPI through acquiring television and theatrical rights for DVD titles; Starz Home Entertainment (formerly Anchor Bay Entertainment) by expanding into nontraditional retail outlets like Kohl’s; Viz Media by taking its anime business into download-to-own with “Death Note”; and Allumination FilmWorks by branching into family and animation titles.

“You have to market more, advertise more and make customers aware of the alternatives to traditional retail,” said Greg Newman, vice president for acquisitions and development of MPI Media Group, which specializes in classic television on DVD, documentaries, music titles and horror films. MPI’s increasing online sales have become an important revenue stream, but as more money is spent on consumer awareness, less will be allocated to catalog acquisitions, and future selections “are going to be as safe as possible,” he said.

Lisa Nishimura-Seese, general manager of Palm Pictures, noted that the contraction and expansion in the independent world is cyclical and cited the importance of “mom and pop” outlets with personalized service that feed a growing interest in independent film. Regional chains like Newbury Comics and Hastings are also supportive of indie companies.

On the mass retail level Target, a sponsor of IFC’s “Cinema Red” programming block on Monday nights, now features an eclectic “IFC Indies” section that spotlights 48 movies a month. Evan Shapiro, general manager and executive vice president of IFC TV, said sales of Target’s existing indie titles have increased substantially as a result of the IFC-selected section, which was also helping smaller distributors like New Video and Genius Products break into the chain.

Most of February’s “IFC Indies,” however, came from major studios or high-profile independents with major distributors. Small indies cannot afford premium store placement and other distribution costs the way larger companies can.

Even for successful independent companies, “where you send consumers has become trickier,” said Dan Gurlitz, vice president for video of Koch Entertainment Distribution, purveyors of foreign and art-house films and British television. Book retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble are selling DVDs, he noted, while Internet shopping and mail order are still strong revenue-generators for many categories. But many consumers have yet to make the leap to regular online shopping, and the vital, serendipitous “impulse buy,” which has traditionally stimulated DVD sales, is less likely in an overcrowded virtual arena.

“If you’re a retailer and carry 100 titles, you’re still going to get 80 percent of your sales from 20 of those titles,” said Jay Douglas, a vice president at Ryko Filmworks, which distributes numerous indie labels including No Shame Films, Heretic Films, Severin Films, Discotek Media, Mondo Macabro and Grindhouse Releasing. “If you carry 10,000 titles, the 80/20 rule will still apply. The question is whether you want to devote that space to entertainment software or to something else?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/mo...eo/04rees.html





Burning for you

Download DVD Specification Gets Approval
Martyn Williams

A technology that allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs using the same content-protection system as commercial discs received official approval on Thursday.

CSS Managed Recording was approved at a meeting of the DVD Forum in Tokyo, according to a source close to the forum.

The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players, according to the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), which proposed the technology. The DVD CCA is responsible for licensing the CSS (Content Scrambling System) copy-protection system used on most commercial DVDs.

Despite Thursday's approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.

Such a system might offer commercial movies but could just as easily offer content that is unavailable on DVD today because the market for it is too small. With custom burning it could be profitable to offer such content.

If such professional applications are successful then further services that allow consumers to download and burn in their home "are likely to follow," the DVD CCA said.

The DVD Forum could not be reached for comment.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2007...IWn5XFSZEjtBAF





The Larynxes That Invaded Broadway
Andrew Adam Newman

CHRISTINE PEDI is describing Debbie, the 15-year-old she plays in the revival of Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio.” “She’s kind of scrawny, wears tank tops and too much eye makeup, and thinks she’s grown up,” Ms. Pedi explains in an interview. “She is too fond of Doritos. She’s calling from her pink bedroom, where she has stashed all her teen stuff — her cigarettes and birth control.”

The play’s set designer and prop master have not worried about any of those details, however, because Debbie is never seen. She is one of the play’s 30 callers, brought to life by Ms. Pedi and four other voice performers.

In their line of work, Broadway roles don’t come up every day, and for them “Talk Radio” feels like validation: the best voice-over actors can, with just a line or two of dialogue, make you see characters you can only hear, and juggle a range of accents more diverse than a Benetton catalog.

Though “Talk Radio,” which opens March 11 at the Longacre Theater, focuses on the shock-jock Barry Champlain (played by Liev Schreiber and originated Off Broadway by Mr. Bogosian), the callers “really are the heart and soul of the play,” said Robert Falls, the revival’s director, adding, “The play is about voices in the night.”

While the actors auditioned, Mr. Falls shut his eyes. Later he grilled them about what room in the house they were calling from and what it looked like. The mental images were useful for the actors too.

“I have a full biography of all my characters,” said Cornell Womack, who plays, among other callers, a Hispanic cat lover and an elderly African-American man. He added: “These characters have real needs, and these calls come out of real places and real experiences. They’re not caricatures. They’re not just funny voices.”

If you missed Mr. Womack in his small part in “On Golden Pond” on Broadway last year, or in his recurring role on the FX Network’s “Rescue Me,” you may have heard him in commercials for Hennessy V.S. Cognac or for the candy Creme Savers. (“I have the voice of a sucker,” he said, laughing.)

Ms. Pedi has appeared in “Forbidden Broadway” and does not always pretend to be on radio: She is a host of shows about Broadway on Sirius Satellite Radio. But like Mr. Womack she has a résumé of voice-overs, including a shared credit with another “Talk Radio” voice actor, Adam Sietz: In a recent commercial for Silk Soymilk, the two played talking cattle.

Mr. Sietz meanwhile can be heard in ads for Nestea, saying, “Ahhh.” He has recorded characters for video games and last year won Gamespy.com’s best character award for Khelgar Ironfist in Neverwinter Nights 2. Mr. Sietz also had a small role in last year’s revival of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.”

In “Talk Radio” his sole onstage appearance (the others have small onstage roles too) comes when the curtain rises. He is Sid Greenberg, the tax-adviser host of a show right before Barry Champlain’s. When the tax show ends, Mr. Sietz switches from a bellowing announcer voice to a conversational voice, as if he were speaking through a bullhorn that was suddenly switched off.

After his exit Mr. Sietz dashes to one of three soundproof booths — built directly under the stage in the basement of the Longacre — to play Mr. Schreiber’s first caller, a transvestite. Shrugging his shoulders and tilting his head in character, Mr. Sietz said, “He sounds a little like Harvey Fierstein,” sounding — equal parts gravel and honey — a little like Harvey Fierstein.

Audio acting has changed over the years. Harlan Hogan, author of “V.O.: Tales and Techniques of a Voice-Over Actor,” has delivered familiar lines like “Raid kills bugs fast, kills bugs dead,” “It’s the cereal even Mikey likes” and that Head and Shoulders chestnut, “Because that little itch should be telling you something.” When he started out in the early 1970s, “everyone had gigantic voices,” he recalled, adding: “I was only 25 years old. It scared the dickens out of me.” Today the most sought-after voices are not necessarily the most sonorous, but rather those that sound familiar and authentic. “It’s less sell, more tell,” he said.

What begins as side work for extra money can turn into a lucrative career, said Johnna Gottlieb, a former voice agent who now works as a consultant and teaches a voice-over class at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. “You can make $10,000 a year doing it, but there are people who make several million,” she said. “I’ve had clients do so well in voice-overs that they started turning down theater roles.”

Barbara Rosenblat has made a specialty of a kind of voice work that approximates acting. Ms. Rosenblat, whose characters in “Talk Radio” include an older Russian woman obsessed with people who don’t pick up after their “doggies,” is among the audio book industry’s most highly regarded narrators. Noting her knack for accents, the magazine AudioFile said Ms. Rosenblat “is to audiobooks what Meryl Streep is to movies.”

But while Ms. Streep nails one accent per performance, Ms. Rosenblat juggles many in a single page of a novel. “I remember one instance when Barbara was performing speakers from Thailand, Japan and China in a conversation, and she was able to make it very clear who was speaking,” said Claudia Howard, executive producer of the publisher Recorded Books.

Ms. Rosenblat last appeared on Broadway in “The Secret Garden.” That was in 1993. When she read about plans for a “Talk Radio” revival, Ms. Rosenblat hurried to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and parked herself in front of a monitor to watch a videotape of the original 1987 production. She was not watching quite so discriminatingly as she was listening. Then she had to get reacquainted with playing well with others.

“You are interacting with someone else,” Ms. Rosenblat said. “You don’t have the same level of control. We are all cogs in a larger wheel.”

One of those cogs is Marc Thompson, whose callers include a disabled man speaking almost exclusively in clichés like “When they give you lemons, make lemonade.” A married father of two, he was a minister for the New York City Church of Christ when he was laid off two years ago. The future appeared bleak. “I looked at selling life insurance,” he said.

Instead Mr. Thompson, who holds an acting degree from New York University, started going on auditions. He had been doing voice-over work on the side while preaching and soon found jobs on MTV’s “Daria” and the Cartoon Network’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” He may be most familiar for the Citibank identity theft commercial where two elderly women sitting on a sofa drinking tea have dubbed-in biker-dude voices. “I’m Thelma, the lady on the left,” he said.

When he received a callback for “Talk Radio,” he was elated, especially because he has limited stage experience. But then he realized he would probably have to reject any offer: the play is peppered with profanity, and Mr. Thompson, who still preaches on occasion, does not curse.

It turned out there were enough callers with mild language that he was cast anyway. “When they told me, I cried,” said Mr. Thompson, who, inevitably enough, ended up playing an evangelical Christian caller. “They’ve been really understanding and gracious. Two years ago I had nowhere to go. I feel blessed, and I think it’s a miracle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/theater/04newm.html





Voice of the Many, but Rarely Herself
Frank J. Prial

The role of Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Prof. Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady,” requires an actress capable of expressing hauteur, exasperation and motherly concern, sometimes all at once. What it does not require is a singing voice, as it is among that classic musical’s few roles without a song.

So who has been cast in the New York Philharmonic’s concert-style revival at Lincoln Center this week?

None other than Marni Nixon, perhaps the most famous singing-voice-without-a-face in the history of motion pictures.

“I’d love to have a song in the show,” Ms. Nixon said during an interview in her West End Avenue apartment in New York. “I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’s Lament?’ But it isn’t going to happen, of course.”

Among her unseen roles were the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in “The King and I,” Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Margaret O’Brien in “The Secret Garden” — as well as, most famously, Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning screen version of “My Fair Lady.”

Most recently, in 1998, she was the animated Grandmother Fa in Disney’s “Mulan.”

For her part, Ms. Nixon, 77, said she understood perfectly why the studio moguls chose to place famous faces in the starring roles and relegate her to the shadows.

“Hollywood wanted recognizable stars,” Ms. Nixon said. “And the fact that a lot of the stars couldn’t sing was only a minor inconvenience to the big producers.”

Her first dubbing job was for Miss O’Brien in “The Secret Garden” (1949). Miss O’Brien, 12 at the time, was one of Hollywood’s top child stars. Ms. Nixon was 19.

Her first major job, she said, was singing the role of Anna in “The King and I” (1956). “Deborah was tough to work with, but she was a complete professional,” Ms. Nixon said of Miss Kerr. “We worked on phrasing, we worked on interpretation, everything. It’s hard to believe now, but each number took a week.”

A dubber, Ms. Nixon explained, doesn’t simply substitute her voice for the actress’s voice. “The important thing is to sound as the actress would sound if she were doing the actual singing,” she said.

It being Hollywood, of course, sometimes the jobs verged on the ludicrous. Her work with Marilyn Monroe, for instance, in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), consisted of just one phrase in one song — perhaps the musical’s most famous, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The phrase: “These rocks don’t lose their shape.”

If the studio bosses had had their way, Ms. Nixon said, she would have done more. “Actually, the studio wanted her entire voice dubbed,” she said. “They thought her voice was silly. I thought her voice suited her persona beautifully.”

In 1964, when Ms. Nixon was tapped to sing Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor’s screen version of “My Fair Lady,” one of her chief concerns was how the choice would sit with Julie Andrews, who had had great success with the role onstage but was passed over by Hollywood for the established star: Hepburn.

“I did the job,” Ms. Nixon said, “but I felt uneasy,” especially when she and Ms. Andrews later worked together in “The Sound of Music.”

The story is now part of Hollywood lore: Ms. Andrews came out ahead by starring in Disney’s “Mary Poppins” and winning the Oscar for best actress in the same year that “My Fair Lady” was released.

Ms. Andrews seemed to harbor no grudges, Ms. Nixon said. When the two appeared in “The Sound of Music,” she said, Ms. Andrews made a point of seeking her out, shaking her hand and saying, “I like your work.” (Ms. Nixon played one of the nuns.)

When Ms. Nixon was cast as Eliza in a City Center revival of “My Fair Lady,” Ms. Andrews helped her overcome anxiety about handling the role.

Ms. Nixon received a modest reward for her highly praised dubbing work: stepping in front of the camera before millions of people as a presenter at the 1969 Academy Awards. The category? Best musical score.

Perhaps naturally, not all the people whose voices she dubbed were happy about it. When filming “West Side Story,” Wood refused to cooperate, and Ms. Nixon worked by herself on the musical numbers. It was not entirely Wood’s fault; the studio bosses were keeping her in the dark about Ms. Nixon’s true role.

“She thought I was there for backup and that she would be doing the entire picture,” Ms. Nixon said. “In fact, they didn’t like her singing, and, without telling her, proceeded to use my voice.”

And when Wood found out? “Well, she was enraged,” Ms. Nixon said.

Ms. Nixon will be surrounded by a high-wattage cast at this week’s Philharmonic staging of “My Fair Lady,” including Kelsey Grammer as Henry Higgins, Kelli O’Hara as Eliza Doolittle, Brian Dennehy as Alfred P. Doolittle and Charles Kimbrough as Col. Hugh Pickering. There will be four performances in Avery Fisher Hall, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Born in 1930 into a musical family in Southern California, Ms. Nixon started learning the violin at 4. Soon she had a singing act with her sisters. But young Marni had bigger plans. As a child she was an extra in dozens of films. As a teenager she joined the Roger Wagner Chorale (in which her best pal was another teenager, Marilyn Horne) and began to sing in local concerts. She won enough parts to make her solo debut at 17, in “Carmina Burana,” under Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though the dubbing work has drifted away, Ms. Nixon said, she keeps busy. “I still do a lot of singing,” she said. “The idea is to choose the things that are possible for me to do well and to be useful to the play at the same time. It’s just too bad people know how old I am because my voice sounds like I’m much younger.”

She was in the Broadway musical “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ ” with Christopher Walken, in 1999, and she has put together a one-woman show about herself, titled “The Voice of Hollywood.”

She describes her show as a stroll down memory lane. “I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life,” she said. “People always love to ask me questions. And why not? I’ve had a really fantastic life, I think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/theater/06marni.html





At Night, Farmer Trades His Tractor for the Blues
Erik Eckholm

Thursday is known as “family night” at Po’ Monkey’s juke joint here, but that doesn’t mean you should bring your kids to this patched-up sharecropper shack that has swayed with rhythms and blues for nearly 50 years.

The distinction here is with Monday, the only other night that Po’ Monkey né Willie Seaberry, 65 and a farmworker by day, opens his little club. On Mondays, the strippers make the two-hour drive from Memphis to work a raunchier crowd for tips.

Not that some Thursday patrons, mostly black men and women, middle-age and up, aren’t above a little dirty dancing themselves, although fully clothed. The D.J. stretches his definition of the blues, playing modern R&B that has every bottom shaking.

If there is a floor show on Thursdays at this club, one of the last old-style juke joints, the kind where the Delta blues once incubated, it is offered by Mr. Seaberry himself.

Around 9 p.m., as patrons begin to fill a room decorated with toy monkeys, beer posters and a silver disco ball, Mr. Seaberry emerges in a startling suit of red with white pinstripes and a snazzy white hat, and smoking a cheroot.

He works the crowd, which includes retired teachers, current and former farmworkers and a sheriff from Greenville, as he ferries $2 cans of beer.

An irrepressibly smiley man with a trimmed moustache, Mr. Seaberry grew up in a nearby shack, at the tail of the era when mechanization of cotton farming and the lure of Chicago depopulated the region.

But he has never let poverty stop him from strutting.

Later, he disappears to his bedroom at the back and re-emerges, now wearing a white suit; soon, he changes into a plaid suit with a red derby, and still later into dark pink.

“If I don’t get out there acting like a clown, people think there’s something wrong with me,” Mr. Seaberry explained. He said he owned more than 100 suits.

“A lot of folks wanted to get out, listen to the blues and fight and shoot,” he said of the onetime proliferation of such clubs, adding that his own has never seen much violence.

For much of the last century, juke joints were the main nightspots for rural blacks. Now, with the casinos of Greenville a half-hour away and younger blacks into hip-hop, Mr. Seaberry does not open his club on weekends.

The word “juke” is believed to be derived from the African-influenced Gullah dialect of the Southeast coast, in which “jook” means “disorderly” or “wicked.” In 1934, the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “Jook is a word for a Negro pleasure house,” often a “bawdy house” where black workers “dance, drink and gamble.”

In the Delta of northwest Mississippi, an alluvial plain where cotton and sharecropping long ruled, juke joints were condemned by preachers as the houses of the devil, but they offered welcome relief from drudgery. Touring these clubs in the early 20th century, men like Charlie Patton, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson pioneered the blues as an art form.

Just when did Mr. Seaberry start the club? His own memories can be vague.

“I don’t know exactly to a T,” he said. “Maybe 40 or 50 years ago.”

And what is the source of the name?

“Po’ Monkey is all anybody ever called me since I was little,” he said. “I don’t know why, except I was poor for sure.”

He doesn’t recall any blues stars ever playing at his club, which has live music on special occasions. The place doesn’t make much, he said — guests pay $5 to enter and can buy beer or bring their own liquor and buy mixers. The pool table costs 75 cents a game.

“I was going to get married once, even got a license,” he said, “but we started getting into it, and the preacher never did register that license.”

He has farmed all his life. Now, on the adjacent corporate farm, he spends these days in overalls on a tractor, preparing fields for soybean planting.

Alfred Kemp, 67, who was helping serve drinks, said, “I grew up here with Willie, chopping and picking cotton.” He thinks the club opened around 1961.

“When I was a boy, there was a juke joint every five miles,” he said. “Now this is the only one around.”

In earlier, tenser days, the local white people seldom ventured to Po’ Monkey’s, but in the last decade some have started dropping in.

Blues fans from Japan and Europe have also found their way down the unmarked gravel track off Highway 61, seeking an authentic juke joint experience as they tour Delta landmarks. But on the music front they may be disappointed. Although Mr. Seaberry said, “I love all music as long as it’s the blues,” the line drawn in his club is at hip-hop culture. Hand-lettered signs say “No Rap Music, Just Blues,” and ban baggy, falling-down pants.

The other night, the 38-year-old D.J. spun nary a B. B. King song, let alone the earlier blues that grew out of gospel, field chants and brilliant guitar innovations.

“Let’s hear some oldies,” the D.J. announced as he put on a Bobby Bland song from the 1960s and then a revved-up version of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” a 1970s hit.

“No one really wants to hear the old blues any more,” Mr. Kemp, Po’ Monkey’s boyhood friend, said.

But he added, “For almost 50 years, we’ve been having a good time here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/us...9&ei=508 7%0A





Hardware-Based Rootkit Detection Proven Unreliable
Ryan Naraine

For years, we've been convinced by companies like Komoku and BBN Technologies that hardware-based RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to sniff out the presence of a sophisticated rootkit on a compromised machine.

Not so fast, says Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher at COSEINC Malware Labs.

Rutkowska, an elite hacker who specializes in offensive rootkit research, has found several ways to manipulate the results given to hardware-based solutions (PCI cards or FireWire bus).

At this year's Black Hat DC conference, Rutkowska demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU.

Rutkowska's research, though purely theoretical, underscores the need for multiple solutions (hardware and software) to work in tandem during forensics. It also highlights just how scary the threat from sophisticated rootkits can be. If, as Rutkowska proved, forensic examiners cannot rely on images collected from RAM, then it's basically game over.

Jamie Butler, a rootkit guru who works with software- and hardware-based anti-rootkit tools, said he was "very impressed" with Rutkowska's presentation. "We already know that software isn't reliable and now we know that you really can't trust the hardware either. You really need to combine both and, even then, you just never know," Butler said.

"I really don't want to meet the attacker who is at that level," he said. "That is scary stuff," Butler said, referring to the techniques used during Rutkowska's presentation.

In three different scenarios, Rutkowska showed how an attacker can crash a machine during memory acquisition. In this case, it would be a denial-of-service against the forensics examiner looking to find traces of malware on a hijacked machine.

She also described a "covering attack" where the malware is programmed to present garbage data to the hardware trying to read physical memory.

A third scenario is what Rutkowska described as a "full replacing attack" where the malware author not only hides malicious code from the memory acquisition tool but actually provides arbitrary/fake content to the examiner.

The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said.

Rutkowska suggests that hardware vendors come up with a special "auditing" interface dedicated only to memory acquisition.

"I'm thinking about motherboard manufacturers adding a special port which would allow for *direct* (this time really "direct") access to RAM and potentially some other critical resources like e.g. CPU system registers and maybe even caches," she said.

Here are the slides from Rutkowska's presentation (PDF).
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=109





EMI Rejects Warner Music's $4.1 Billion Bid

Britain's EMI Group has rejected a 2.1-billion-pound ($4.1 billion) cash takeover proposal from Warner Music Group, saying on Friday that accepting such a deal would not be good for its shareholders.

"The board concluded that it is not in the best interests of EMI shareholders to entertain a preconditional offer which would entail prolonged regulatory uncertainty and unacceptable operational risk at a critical time for the company," EMI said in a statement.

The world's third-largest music company and home to Robbie Williams and Coldplay, EMI said it held a board meeting on Friday after receiving a nonbinding proposal from Warner, which indicated that it might be prepared to make a bid at 260 pence per share.

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, with artists ranging from Madonna to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, approached EMI about a possible bid at the end of January, despite uncertainty over whether it would win European regulatory approval.

Warner declined to comment.

EMI had said it would consider any bid, in terms of the price offered and whether it would be approved by European regulators.

Shares of EMI, which issued a profit warning in February, rose by as much as 8 percent after it rejected the proposal. The shares closed 4.45 percent higher at 246 pence ($4.82).
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6163844.html





RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online
NewYorkCountryLawyer

"The online community now has an opportunity to see the fruits of its labor. Back in December, the Slashdot ('What Questions Would You Ask an RIAA Expert?') and Groklaw ('Another Lawyer Would Like to Pick Your Brain, Please') communities were asked for their input on possible questions to pose to the RIAA's 'expert'. Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor's lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii).

Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor's attorneys, had this comment: 'We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers' responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people. The computer scientists among you will be astounded that the RIAA has been permitted to burden our court system with cases based upon such arrant and careless nonsense.'"
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/03/237211





Downloading and Record Sales-Not all Genres are Equal
Jeff Stewart

[NOTE: Some people seem to take this post as a sign that I support the RIAA, and their various attacks on consumers. Just because I think they're essentially right about downloading hurting CD sales doesn't mean I agree with their "solutions", such as lobbying to strike down Fair Use bills, or absurd lawsuits on little old ladies. I think the current situation calls for a change in their business model, such as a digital subscription service. ]

Music sales were down sharply this past year, reinforcing the RIAA's contention that illegal downloading is killing the industry. But some genres were hit harder than others. Once one of the biggest moneymakers in the American music industry, sales of Rap music dropped a staggering 21% last year, making 2006 the first time in 12 years that a rap album has not graced the top ten best-selling album list

In light of this, others have argued that rap music's lack of originality has finally caught up to it, and fans are beginning to realize it's the same thing over and over.

But 50 Cent's top album sold over 5 million copies of his last album in 2005, almost 200% more than the top rap album of 2006- that's an awfully fast realization on the part of rap fans, who have been driving big sales since for rap without complaint since the 1980's. The Oscar win of Three Six Mafia last year and rap's influence on mainstream pop acts such as Justin Timberlake (whose new album is produced by hip-hop producer Timbaland) shows that rap remains popular in the publics' consciousness.

I offer a third possibility- rap fans pirate, bootleg and download music more than fans of any other musical genre.

Looking at the health of rap music torrents on popular torrent downloading sites such as Pirate Bay and Mininova, rap fans aren't so much tired of listening to rap as they are tired of paying for it. And some of the hottest products in rap include mixtapes such as DJ Drama's "Gangsta Grillz" series, which the record labels don't make a dime off of. A good promotional strategy? Not if you look at the sales figures.

Other genres, such as country and pop, have been hit less hard because their fans download less, and the genres that suffer the least from downloading are thriving in today's climate. More resilient genres such as Country are less popular on torrent downloading sites. And increasingly, the most popular and healthy genres of music are the ones that see the least downloading of all.

Selling just under 4 million copies as of this writing, the bestselling album of 2006 was Disney's "High School Musical", which caters to a demographic of 9-14 year old children. In many cases, these albums are being bought for the kids by their parents.

And there actually is one genre of music that saw a sales increase last year- Christian music, by more than 5%. Who wants to bet that Christian music has the lowest rate of downloading and bootlegging of any genre?
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/5...by_Downloading


Editor’s note: A recently published peer-reviewed study found file-sharing had no negative effect on record sales. – Jack.





A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side
Noam Cohen

In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity.

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.

To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.

Mr. Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to protect himself from bad actors who might be angered by his administrative role at Wikipedia. (He did not respond to an e-mail message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.)

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud.

Mr. Jordan’s deception came to public attention last Monday when The New Yorker published a rare editors’ note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, “neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name,” and that it took Essjay’s credentials and life experience at face value.

In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine’s article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake, which “Essjay knew to be false.”

After the article appeared, a reader contacted The New Yorker about Essjay’s real identity, which Mr. Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.

In an e-mail message on Friday, The New Yorker’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: “We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

The New Yorker editors’ note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site’s growth. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said of Mr. Jordan’s alter ego.

On Thursday, Mr. Wales, who is traveling in Asia with intermittent Internet connections, stuck by that view. In a statement relayed through Wikipedia’s public relations officer, he said that at that time, “Essjay apologized to me and to the community at large for any harm he may have caused, but he was acting in order to protect himself.

“I accepted his apology,” he continued, “because he is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.”

But the broad group of Wikipedia users was not so supportive. Mounting anger was expressed in public forums like the user pages of Mr. Wales and Essjay. Initially, a few people wrote to express support for Essjay, along the lines of WJBscribe, who left a message saying: “Just wanted to express my 100 percent support for everything you do around here. I think you were totally entitled to protect your identity. Don’t let all the fuss get you down!”

By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Mr. Jordan’s actions “plain and simple fraud.”

Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception by flaunting a fictional Ph.D. and professorship to influence the editing on the site.

“People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments,” said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for which he is covering the story. “Those will get looked at again.”

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term “imprimatur,” as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book “Catholicism for Dummies,” saying, “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”

Over time, Wikipedia users said, Essjay did less editing and writing and spent more time ensuring that the encyclopedia was as free of vandalism and drawn-out editing fights as possible.

By Saturday, Mr. Wales changed his mind about the episode. He cleared off the “talk” section of his own Wikipedia user page — usually cluttered with personal requests, policy debates and compliments — so that “this statement gets adequate attention” and announced that he had “asked Essjay to resign his positions of trust within the community.” He said “that my past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.”

Complicating matters for Mr. Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Mr. Wales helped to found in 2004. Mr. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.

Mr. Snow said the Essjay case “is about the community, the trust the community depends on in terms of being able to review the work we each do.”

“Even though you don’t necessarily know these people personally,” he added, “you see the work enough times and get to know that work.”

Mr. Jordan announced his resignation from Wikipedia on his Essjay user page on Saturday night. In a brief note below, he said simply, “It’s time to make a clean break.”

That page had been a model of industry, with tallies of the more than 20,000 articles he edited and statements of personal philosophy and Wikipedia policy. Where there had been the motto in Latin, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito” (“Yield not to misfortunes, but advance all the more boldly against them,” according to some translations), there is a stark rectangular black box with the word “retired” written in white capital letters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/te...ipedia.html?hp





Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web

Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks
Ellen Nakashima

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.

The law-school board, one of several message boards on AutoAdmit, bills itself as "the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world." It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets' dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google's powerful search engine.

The site's founder, Jarret Cohen, the insurance agent, said the site merely provides a forum for free speech. "I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have," Cohen said.

The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy. The chats are also a window into the character of a segment of students at leading law schools. Penn officials said they have known about the site and the complaints for two years but have no legal grounds to act against it. The site is not operated with school resources.

Nor is it the only forum for such discussions, but it may be the largest "and is certainly the highest profile," said David A. Hoffman, a Temple University law professor who has conducted research on AutoAdmit.

Employers, including law firms, frequently do Google searches as part of due diligence checks on prospective employees. According to a December survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization, roughly half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in vetting job applications. About one-third of the searches yielded content used to deny a job, the survey said. The legal hiring market is very competitive. What could tip the balance is the appearance that a candidate is a lightning rod for controversy, said Mark Rasch, a Washington lawyer and consultant who specializes in Internet issues.

The trend has even spawned a new service, ReputationDefender, whose mission is to search for damaging content online and destroy it on behalf of clients. Generally, the law exempts site operators from liability for the content posted by others, though it does not prevent them from removing offensive items.

"For many people the Internet has become a scarlet letter, an albatross," said Michael Fertik, ReputationDefender's chief executive. The company is launching a campaign to get AutoAdmit to cleanse its site and encourage law schools to adopt a professional conduct code for students.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and free speech advocacy group, said anonymous cyber-writers can be sued for defamation. A judge can require a Web site host or operator to disclose a user's identifying information. Also, he said, the Internet allows those who feel slandered to put forth their own point of view. "The cure to bad speech is more speech," he said.

The chats sometimes include photos taken from women's Facebook pages, and in the Yale student's case, one person threatened to sexually violate her. Another participant claimed to be the student, making it appear that she was taking part in the discussion.

"I didn't understand what I'd done to deserve it," said the student. "I also felt kind of scared because it was someone in my community who was threatening physical and sexual violence and I didn't know who."

The woman e-mailed the site's administrators and asked them to remove the material. She said she received no response. Then she tried contacting Google, which simply cited its policy that the Web site's administrator must remove the material to clear out the search results.

AutoAdmit.com, which also uses the domain name xoxohth.com and which hosts Google-served ads, was launched in 2004. Cohen and his partner, Anthony Ciolli, cite First Amendment ideals. "We are very strong believers in the freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas . . . and almost never censor content, no matter how abhorrent it may be," they wrote in a posting on someone else's blog. The vast majority of chat threads, they wrote, are school-related. "The only time you'll see 20 or so racist threads on the site is if you proactively search for them."

They said the success of the site's message boards -- they claim 800,000 to 1 million unique visitors a month -- owes to its free, anonymous exchange of ideas. "In fact, one finds overall a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored," they wrote.

One chat thread included a sexual joke about a female Holocaust victim.

In another comment, a user said a particular woman had no right to ask that the threads be removed. "If we want to objectify, criticize and [expletive] on [expletive] like her, we should be able to."

In another posting, a participant rejected the idea that photos be removed on moral grounds: "We're lawyers and lawyers-in-training, dude. Of course we follow the law, not morals."

"I definitely don't agree with a lot of the conduct on the board," Ciolli said in an interview. But, he said, only Cohen, who created the message board, has authority to have the comments removed. Cohen, in a separate interview, said he will not "selectively remove" offensive comments, and that when he has attempted to do so, he was threatened with litigation for "perceived inconsistencies."

Another Yale law student learned a month ago that her photographs were posted in an AutoAdmit chat that included her name and graphic discussion about her breasts. She was also featured in a separate contest site -- with links posted on AutoAdmit chats -- to select the "hottest" female law student at "Top 14" law schools, which nearly crashed because of heavy traffic. Eventually her photos and comments about her and other contestants were posted on more than a dozen chat threads, many of which were accessible through Google searches.

"I felt completely objectified," that woman said. It was, she said, "as if they're stealing part of my character from me." The woman, a Fulbright scholar who graduated summa cum laude, said she now fears going to the gym because people on the site encouraged classmates to take cellphone pictures of her.

Ciolli persuaded the contest site owner to let him shut down the "Top 14" for privacy concerns, Cohen said. "I think we deserve a golden star for what we did," Cohen said.

The two men said that some of the women who complain of being ridiculed on AutoAdmit invite attention by, for example, posting their photographs on other social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace.

Cohen said he no longer keeps identifying information on users because he does not want to encourage lawsuits and drive traffic away. Asked why posters could not use their real names, he said, "People would not have as much fun, frankly, if they had to worry about employers pulling up information on them."

One woman e-mailed the University of Pennsylvania Law School associate dean, Gary Clinton, in February to ask for his help in persuading Ciolli remove the offensive threads. Clinton told her that since he became aware of AutoAdmit two years ago, he has had "numerous conversations about it" with Penn officials. "I've learned that there appears to be little legal recourse that we have as an institution," he wrote. He said he has had several conversations with Ciolli and has "pointed out time and again how hurtful these ad hominem attacks can be to individuals, and have asked him to delete threads." The effort, he noted, "has been largely unsuccessful."

In a telephone interview, Clinton said the university's position has not changed. "We believe we don't have grounds under the university's code of conduct to proceed," he said.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030602705.html





University Bans BitTorrent Sites
enigmax

While students at universities in the US are pressured by the RIAA, Cardiff University citing pressure from increasing numbers of copyright infringement notices, has taken out a blunt instrument and banned it’s students from accessing some of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, regardless of the legitimate content they contain.

The Information Services department of Cardiff University in the UK has notified 25,000 students of its intention to protect the university from a rising tide of copyright infringement notices due to ‘inappropriate use’ of P2P. It will accomplish this by the wholesale banning of a whole range of BitTorrent search engines and trackers from the university network.

Dear All,

Following receipt of a number of copyright infringement notices, Information Services is taking steps to protect the University.

The principle source of these copyright infringements is inappropriate use of peer-to-peer file sharing, for example Bit Torrent.

A number of web sites have been identified which primarily provide access to a high proportion of copyrighted, pornographic or offensive material. Access to these sites, listed below, will be prohibited.

This policy is not aimed at restricting legitimate academic investigation. Should access be required please contact insrvAssist.

Sites with prohibited access:
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentscan.com/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://torrent-finder.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentreactor.to/
http://www.torrentportal.com/
http://www.mininova.org/
http://skflan.nl.tp
http://www.onlytorrents.com/
http://www.mybittorrent.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.torrentradar.org/
http://www.demonoid.com/
http://www.smaragdtorrent.org/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrents.to/
http://www.torrentvalley.com/
http://www.torrentshub.com/
http://fenopy.com/
http://extratorrent.com/
http://btjunkie.org/
http://www.bittorrent.am/
http://www.astatorrents.com/
http://www.meganova.org/
http://www.bitdig.com/
http://torrentattack.org/

Your insrvAssist contact for this message is XXX XXXXX.

Thank you,
Security Team

Previously, students using P2P applications Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella had been told: “IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent the application from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.”

Its quite obvious that this message did not stop students from continuing to share files and the banning of the above sites is unlikely to stop them either. New sites appear all the time and although the blocklist takes out some major torrent sources, there are many hundreds more - e.g TorrentReactor.to is blocked but not TorrentReactor.net.

The excellent Yotoshi gets no mention and even President Bush’s torrent site is unbanned and fully available. Interested students will find the Linux stuff here.
http://torrentfreak.com/university-b...torrent-sites/





Meet EZTV, The Leading TV-torrent Distribution Group
Ernesto

EZTV has been the leading TV-torrent distribution group for over a year now. They collect and distribute the TV-torrents, that find their way to millions of people every week. Time to have a chat with one of the EZTV crew members, to find out a little more about them.

For those who are not familiar with EZTV. They are the ones that do the initial seeding for the TV-torrents indexed by sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay. They also have their own site, with useful tools like a TV-calendar, an episode list, and a countdown list that shows how many days you will have to wait until your favorite TV-show returns.

We had the chance to do ask Boggibill, a member of the EZTV crew, some questions.

TorrentFreak: When was EZTV founded? and what was the main reason to start a TV-torrent distribution group?

Boggibill: EZTV was founded a short time after TVTorrents.tv and btchat went down (Spring 2005). Their disappearance left a void in the “market”, and someone decided to fill that void. That being said, we have no affiliation with these pre-EZTV era groups.

TorrentFreak: Do you think that distributing these (copyrighted) shows is morally wrong? That is, do you consider sharing shows to be the same as stealing?

Boggibill: In no way is this wrong. There is absolutely no way what we are doing would have any negative effect on the TV industry whatsoever - I’d refer you to an “old” Piracy Is Not A Crime article on TV torrents, but I’ll just give you the short version here. The Nielsen ratings system, from which all TV companies make their money, is based on so-called “Nielsen families” that have a special box attached to their TV sets. This box basically reports what they are viewing, and Nielsen then “blows up” the numbers to account for the whole population. It is an idiotic system, but IMO it works to our advantage (and the TV industry’s) - the chances of one of the Nielsen families being an active user on our site is *low*. This means that our download numbers will have absolutely no negative impact on the ratings.

TorrentFreak: Do you think that sharing TV-shows might have a positive impact on the TV industry?

Boggibill: Yes I do, the only possible impacts I can see are positive ones; free publicity, which may lead to higher ratings when people “discover” new shows and also larger numbers of DVD purchases - it is my understanding that many of the people that download TV shows from us are avid TV fans and will usually buy DVD boxsets of shows they like. Many of these are foreigners, that can’t view the shows normally. This is free money for the industry. I don’t understand why they would be upset with that. Moreover, the BitTorrent way of distributing material is the future, not only of filesharing, but of information distribution in general - be it television content, movies, games and other software. We firmly believe this to be true.

TorrentFreak: How many people are working with EZTV at the moment?

Boggibill: We have a small but dedicated team who works for EZTV. they are very good at what they are doing.

TorrentFreak: Where do you get the shows? And how many people seed these shows initially for EZTV?

Boggibill: We get our shows from “the scene”, a very secretive lot… and we have quite a few initial seeders. The amount varies from torrent to torrent, though. Also, we could always use more - come on IRC and talk with an op, if you have more than 5mbit upload bandwidth and want to help out!

TorrentFreak: What are the most popular shows distributed by EZTV?

Boggibill: We have tracker scrapes on our website, so this is easily accessible information. The most popular shows are obviously Heroes, a show that has gained a LOT of steam lately, btw), Lost, 24, Prison Break, Battlestar Galactica, Greys Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and the Stargates.

TorrentFreak: How many visitors does eztvefnet.org currently have? and did you ever expected that the site would be such a great success?

Boggibill: We recently peaked 210 000 unique visitors, and 600 000 page views per day. We didn’t really expect it to be as big as it is now, to be honest. At least not all of us did. We figured there’d be other groups that would show up and compete… if you can call it that, I guess the only thing we’re “competing” about are bragging rights and they’re not really worth much are they? Anyway, we soon realized that that wouldn’t really happen and began preparing for ever-increasing traffic… still working on that.

TorrentFreak: Are there any future plans or developments for eztvefnet.org you want to share with our readers?

Boggibill: We always have future plans, this is part of what makes us good I think. We always strive for perfection. What those are… well I can’t really say

TorrentFreak: What makes EZTV stand out compared to other distribution groups like VTV? Are you in contact with other groups?

Boggibill: We aren’t really in competition with VTV, we cooperate on many levels. Having too many overlapping releases would just be stupid, so there’s some coordination going on there. And what makes us good, I’d say dedication, organization and experience. We also have a good relationship with The Pirate Bay, they’ve been of great help many times - well, PRQ, really.

TorrentFreak: What do you think the future of TV, and TV-torrents will look like?

Boggibill: I think BitTorrent.com is on to something. Right now, their biggest issue - possibly the only significant one - is the DRM one. Of course, this is “the big one” isn’t it… but yes, I do believe we will see more “legal” alternatives in the future. The torrent model is the most efficient distribution model available, it is just a matter of time before the industry realize this. Another solution with a lot of potential is Joost, that one will be interesting to follow.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for this short Q&A, anything you want to add to this?

Boggibill: Keep fighting the good fight, TorrentFreak people
http://torrentfreak.com/meet-eztv-th...ibution-group/





Stations to Pay $12.5M in FCC Settlement
John Dunbar

Exasperated listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over on the radio may have something to cheer about: a pair of innovative deals that could shake up the music playlists of some of the nation's largest radio-station chains.

Four major radio broadcast companies have tentatively agreed to pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists in separate settlements aimed at curbing the persistent practice known as "payola," according to sources.

Payola - generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay - has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal following a series of scandals in the late 1950s.

Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

The settlement between the government and the four broadcasters was reached in conjunction with a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.

The American Association of Independent Music, a group of independent record labels, has received a commitment from the same four broadcasters for the free airtime, the sources said.

In addition to airplay, the broadcasters and the independent labels have also negotiated a set of "rules of engagement" that will guide how record company representatives and radio programmers interact.

The free airtime would be granted to companies not owned or controlled by one of the nation's four dominant music labels - Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Group.

The practice of payola, or "pay-for-play," has evolved over the years and become more difficult to track.

In recent years, "independent record promoters" have acted as middlemen to deliver payments to radio stations in exchange for airplay. Other forms of inducement include lavish prizes meant for listeners that wind up going to station employees; promises by record companies of concerts by well-known artists in exchange for airplay; and payments for promotional expenses and station equipment.

Under the FCC consent decree, broadcasters would agree to closer scrutiny in their dealings with record companies, including limits on gifts, a promise to keep a database of all items of value supplied by those companies, the employment of independent compliance officers to make sure stations are following the rules and even a new "payola hotline" for employees to report infractions.

Broadcasters admit to no wrongdoing under the three-year settlement, which has not yet been made public.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...ttlements.html





Bobby Brown Bails on Interview with Station that Freed Him

Almost as soon as he was sprung from jail by a radio station's money, Bobby Brown and Hot 99.5 FM bailed on the deal.

The R&B singer had spent three nights in a Massachusetts jail for failing to pay child support when the station on Thursday paid the $19,150 he owed on the condition that Brown appear on "The Kane Show" for a week. He was supposed to discuss the case and how he could turn his life around during studio appearances beginning Monday.

But Brown backed out of an on-air phone interview with the morning show Friday, insisting he had not agreed to be an employee of the station.

"That wasn't our deal," said Brown, who hung up after Kane pressed him.

"We thought we clearly communicated to Bobby our intentions, but once we had him on the air this morning it was clear that we were not on the same page," said Kane, who goes by one name.

The station and Brown's attorney mutually decided the deal was not in Brown's best interest and that Brown would return the money.

"We feel that there are better things we can do with the money locally," Kane said.

Brown was arrested while he was watching his daughter's cheerleading competition at Attleboro High School this week.

Phaedra Parks, Brown's attorney in Atlanta, had earlier said the singer has been struggling to meet monthly payments to Kim Ward, of Stoughton, Mass., the mother of his two teenage children. Brown and pop diva Whitney Houston are divorcing after 14 years.

It was the latest in a series of child support troubles for Brown, a Boston native best known for the solo hit "Don't Be Cruel." In 2004, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for missing three months of payments, but the sentence was suspended after he paid about $15,000. He also paid $11,000 in delinquent child support in October after being threatened with arrest.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...hat_freed_him/





Blackbeard’s Ship to be Excavated

Notorious pirate’s vessel ran aground off North Carolina’s coast in 1718
AP

A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of notorious pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years, officials working on the project said.

“That’s really our target,” Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist, said Friday while discussing 10 years of research that has been conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach.

The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was a French slave ship Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Several officials said historical data and coral-covered artifacts recovered from the site — including 25 cannons, which experts said was an uncommonly large number to find on a ship in the region in the early 18th century — remove any doubt the wreckage belonged to Blackbeard.

Three university professors, including two from East Carolina University, have challenged the findings. But officials working on the excavation said Friday that the more they find, the stronger their case becomes.

“Historians have really looked at it thoroughly and don’t feel that there’s any possibility anything else is in there that was not recorded,” said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Project. “And the artifacts continue to support it.”

Wilde-Ramsing said a coin weight recovered last fall bearing a likeness of Britain’s Queen Anne and a King George cup, both dated before the shipwreck, further bolster their position.

Recovered items eventually to go on public view
So far, about 15 percent of the shipwreck has been recovered including jewelry, dishes and thousands of other artifacts. The items are being preserved and studied at a lab at East Carolina University, and eventually more will become available for the public to view, Claggett said.

Nearly 2 million people have viewed shipwreck artifacts since 1998, including at a permanent exhibit at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort and at a maritime museum in Paris, project officials said.

Researchers shared some of their findings Friday at the North Carolina Museum of History. They said studying the artifacts will provide insight into the era’s naval technology, slave trade and pirate life.

Blackbeard, whose real name was widely believed to be Edward Teach or Edward Thatch, settled in Bath and received a governor’s pardon. Some experts believe he grew bored with land life and returned to piracy.

He was killed by volunteers from the Royal Navy in November 1718 — five months after the ship thought to be Queen Anne’s Revenge sank.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17434128/

[JackSpratts]

Internet Killed The Television Star
Josh Catone

Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More
Edited by Richard MacManus

Television is big business. No, let's not understate it: television is very big business. The global broadcast and cable television industry generates billions of dollars worldwide annually from subscription, equipment, advertising, and service fees; and is dominated by huge media conglomerates like General Electric, Viacom, News Corp., and Disney. The new kid on the block is Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), which sends television signals over the Internet - and the early forecasts are bright. Research firm iSupply predicts that IPTV will be a $26 billion industry in 2010, while Gartner says that 3 years from now IPTV will have the attention of 48 million pairs of eyeballs.

This post looks at 3 new IPTV startups (plus a couple of "sort of IPTV" websites) that have been gaining steam over the past few months. Analysts and pundits view these companies as competitors to the cable industry, far more so than video sharing sites like YouTube.

Joost

Joost, which is currently in closed beta and was initially known as The Venice Project, is the big new kid on the block. They got the most media coverage of all the startups profiled here (26,527 mentions on Technorati -- none of the other sites here crack 1,000) and they have deep pockets by virtue of their founders, Kazaa and Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.

Joost is a software product that uses peer-to-peer streaming technology to deliver data in encrypted packets, which are then cached the way your browser caches web content. The cached content is then sent along to other users. Joost differs from traditional TV in that its content is all 'on demand', meaning you can download and watch video whenever you want - not only when its 'on.'

Content

While the content on the Joost network right now isn't very extensive, content is one area where the product should excel. Friis and Zennstrom are aggressively pursuing content distribution deals with major media companies. In February, they announced a partnership with Viacom that will put content from MTV Networks, BET, and Paramount Pictures on Joost.

Currently, Joost's content is strong - but limited. Joost boasts 23 channels, including a lot of commercial content - although each channel only seems to have a handful of programs. They have a number of music channels, some dedicated to specific artists, such as, 'Green Day,' 'Red Hot Chili Peppers,' 'The Diddy Channel,' 'Atlantic Street,' and 'Warner Bros. Records.' These channels show mostly music videos, documentaries, and live performances. 'Fifth Gear' is a channel on automobiles and shows short clips about expensive cars, while 'Saturday Morning' shows old cartoons (mainly 'Rocky and Bullwinkle') and the 'World's Strongest Man' channel shows clips of events from the Met-RX World's Strongest Man competition.

The channels that held my attention longest were probably 'National Geographic' - which showed full documentaries from the National Geographic cable channel - and 'IndieFlix Premiere Hits', which showed full length independent films.

Features/UI

The user interface of Joost is non-traditional. When you start up Joost, it opens full screen. Controls appear when you hover your mouse over any edge of the screen. On the right edge is a button that allows you to open up the channel guide, on the left is a button for 'My Joost' - which accesses your widgets (more on them below). On the bottom of the screen are video controls.

The video controls are fairly standard: play, pause, skip to next/last program, and volume controls. You can also change channels, or skip ahead to a specific program (not just the next or last), and get info about a program or channel -- not unlike the controls found on digital cable and satellite services. The video control bar also includes a search box, that allows you to search by keyword for specific programs, or programs on a certain subject (although this is fairly limited, with such a small program catalog).

Joost's channel browser is easy to use. You scroll through channels with up and down arrows, and you can get a list of specific programs prior to committing - so you can select a specific program to download.

Joost also has a fairly extensive preferences screen, allowing you to fine tune the user interface by changing things - like the delay before the toolbars reappear when you hover your mouse near the edge of the screen, and whether or not you start in full-screen mode.

Widgets

Widgets are something that only Joost has and really sets them apart from the other IPTV providers. Widgets are extensions that add extra, non-television functionality to the Joost program. Right now, Joost's selection of widgets are: Notice Board (news about Joost), Instant Message (chat with Jabber or Gmail users from within Joost), Rate (rate programs), Channel Chat (chat with other users watching the program), News Ticker (an RSS reader that you can use to track outside feeds), and Clock (uh, it tells the time). The widgets are all very easy to use and work well.

Widgets are a very smart addition to Joost. They offer a social aspect to Joost that other startups don't have, allowing users to interact with the content and each other. Further, they minimize the time you are forced to leave Joost in order to get things done.

Babelgum

Joost may be the biggest fish in the pond, but Babel Gum is a very able-bodied competitor. Founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia (of FastWeb fame), Babelgum is another on demand IPTV software program that looks and feels remarkably like Joost. While they haven't gotten nearly as much press as Joost, they have offices in 4 countries, and they don't seem worried about Joost. "When I started work on this a year and a half ago I was afraid we'd end up with five [competing IPTV services]," founder Scaglia told the Financial Times in January. "The fact it's still two probably gives us a good lead." Babelgum is currently operating in closed beta mode.

Content

Content on Babelgum right now is extremely limited. There are only 9 channels available to users. These are mostly made up of amateur or independent content. Amongst others, there is a News channel that shows news from the Associated Press, a Cartoons channel (which has some pretty neat indie cartoon shorts), a Blogs channels that shows episodes of Rocketboom, and a Trailer channel that shows movie trailers.

Babelgum is trying to entice content owners with a pitch on their site. They call Babelgum "an ideal platform for content owners to serve directly the Long Tail of viewers’ interests not addressed by today’s broadcasting television networks." They don't charge anything to distribute content and promise payment of US$5 for each 1000 unique views, of any clip put on their network. This seems like it might be a good deal for amateur content producers, but it likely won't attract the mainstream media companies (which I'm not sure Babelgum is really trying to do anyway).

Features/UI

Babelgum's interface is very much like Joost's. Video controls are on the left side, but can be moved any way. The standard volume, play, pause, forward and back are there, but unlike with Joost there is no way to scroll through channels and find the program you want before switching. You also can't rewind programs the way you can in Joost (perhaps the content on Babelgum isn't being cached?). Rather disappointingly, Babelgum only comes in two sizes : full screen, and not full screen. While in not full screen mode, you can't resize the window.

The channel browser in Babelgum is easy enough to use. You access it by pressing the "TV" button along the bottom of the screen, or on the video control bar. The browser lists channels in grid format by default, or in a scrollable one-per-page view. This is easy enough when there are only 9 channels, but when there are more, I am not sure how well this format will scale. You can, however, create custom lists of your favorite channels -- rather useless at the moment, but could be helpful if there are ever hundreds of channels. In rather annoying fashion, clicking on a channel doesn't do anything -- you have to click the green 'play' button to load up the channel, or click 'more info' to get a listing of programs and description of the channel. Babelgum's channel browser is more visually pleasing than Joost's, however, and the channel and program descriptions are far more complete.

Babelgum doesn't really offer any more features to speak of. There is a button on each program page allowing you to save it to a "Video" section (sort of a favorites lists), which is something like TiVo for IPTV. But since everything is on demand, this may have limited usefulness. You can also rate programs from the channel browser.

Zattoo

Swiss startup Zattoo is taking a different tack towards IPTV than either Joost or Babelgum. Currently only available to users in Switzerland, Zattoo is a software product that streams actual broadcast and cable television networks, rather than operating an on demand service. Though Zattoo is only available in Switzerland, they are based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Content is where Zattoo really excels, offering over 40 channels to its Swiss users. They plan to expand into other countries as they sign content distribution deals with media companies that allow them to do so. The channels they offer are mainstream broadcast and cable stations - such as BBC World, CNN International, Canale 5, Viva, and Italia 1. Many of the channels are in German, French, and Italian, making them rather hard to understand for a unilingual American like myself (though I did enjoy watching episodes of 'The Nanny' in German and 'Step by Step' in Italian), but the quality of the programming on these channels is top notch.

The interface of Zattoo is very simple and more traditional, looking a lot more like a Windows or Mac program than the others. Because Zattoo is streaming actual TV stations, there is no need for video controls. Zattoo's interface is adorned with just volume and screen size controls. The channel browser loads on the side of the application and is, like the rest of the app, very simple and easy to use; it can be hidden with a click.

Since Zattoo is showing real streaming TV, it would be a very welcome addition if they added a channel guide showing what was on, and when.

ChooseAndWatch and Free Tube

ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube are nothing like the three programs previewed above, but nonetheless they warrant a brief mention in the conversation. They are sites that aggregate streaming video channels from around the web, from a mixture of mainstream TV channels like ESPN, ABC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC; to more amateur, independent networks. FreeTube claims to have 324 channels, while ChooseAndWatch boasts "more than 250." However, due to using ActiveX controls to launch the video applets, and a mish mash of formats (i.e. some channels use QuickTime while others use Windows Media Player) the sites both suffer from browser incompatibilities and channels that just plain don't work. From a content selection standpoint, however, if legal these sites beat Joost, Babelgum, and Zattoo hands down. A word of caution: both websites offer adult content areas.

Conclusion

It's too early to say who will come out on top in the IPTV battle. From a strictly technological standpoint, Joost's offering is the best out there right now. But Babelgum offers a solid product as well, so it will ultimately come down to content.

Zattoo currently leads the game on content, but being only available in Switzerland will obviously keep them from growing very fast. Also being a strictly live streaming service (not on demand), Zattoo may not be compelling enough to divorce people from their TVs.

The IPTV marketplace is heating up and these early startups have so far impressed. That all three software startups profiled above are finalists for the Red Herring 100 Europe 2007 award is proof enough of that.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...m_zattoo.ph p





That Film’s Real Message? It Could Be: ‘Buy a Ticket’
Michael Cieply

Three weeks ago a handful of reporters at an international press junket here for the Warner Brothers movie “300,” about the battle of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, cornered the director Zack Snyder with an unanticipated question.

“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.

The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone. More likely, another reporter chimed in, Mr. Bush was Leonidas, the Spartan king who would defend freedom at any cost.

Mr. Snyder, who said he intended neither analogy when he set out to adapt the graphic novel created by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley in 1998, suddenly knew he had the contemporary version of a water-cooler movie on his hands. And it has turned out to be one that could be construed as a thinly veiled polemic against the Bush administration, or be seen by others as slyly supporting it.

In the era of media clutter, film marketers increasingly welcome controversy as a way to get attention for their more provocative fare. The companies behind the Dixie Chicks documentary “Shut Up & Sing” and “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” for example, positively reveled in it.

But the dance can be more delicate when viewers find a potentially divisive message in big studio movies that were meant more to entertain than enlighten. The danger is that an accidental political overtone will alienate part of the potential audience for a film that needs broad appeal to succeed.

Spontaneous debate on the Internet and around the office can be a film’s best friend when, as with a picture like “The Passion of the Christ,” even potential negatives, like accusations of anti-Semitic undertones, feed curiosity.

“Whatever the question is, it’s wonderful for the movie,” said Peter Sealey, a former Columbia Pictures executive who is now an adjunct professor of marketing at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management.

Yet studios can be wary of seeming to foster it. Walt Disney largely sidestepped arguments about whether its Pixar-created animated film “The Incredibles” was quietly channeling Ayn Rand. “We feel that the longer we either refute or debate a subject like that, the more the story will live,” said Dennis Rice, senior vice president of marketing for Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures unit. “So we chose to do nothing.”

Executives at Warner, which is releasing “300” in the United States on Friday declined to discuss the studio’s approach in marketing the film. Billboards and trailers, seeming to mirror Disney’s tack with “The Incredibles,” have focused heavily on the picture’s battle action and visual flamboyance — “Prepare for Glory!” runs the most oft-repeated advertising line — while avoiding some deeper story elements that are stirring unexpectedly heated reactions, especially abroad.

Shortly after his press-junket grilling Mr. Snyder — an established commercials director, whose best-known previous credit was a remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” — ran into some surprising reactions at the Berlinale film festival in Germany. Some attendees walked out of a screening there, while others insisted on seeing its presentation of the Spartans’ defense of Western civilization in the face of a Persian horde as propaganda for America’s position vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran. (By contrast it drew applause at a Los Angeles screening last month.)

“Don’t you think it’s interesting that your movie was funded at this point?” Mr. Snyder recalled being asked in Berlin. “The implication was that funding came from the U.S. government.”

When a Feb. 22 report on Wired.com carried a brief mention of the question about Mr. Bush’s proper parallel in the film, Web commentators in the United States began to lock on its supposed political vibe. Yet attempts by both the left and the right to appropriate the lessons of Thermopylae clearly predated the movie.

Mr. Bush has been compared to Xerxes at least since his “axis of evil” speech in the wake of 9/11, for instance, while the Spartan cry “Molon labe,” or “Come and take them,” has long been a rallying call for supporters of the right to bear arms.

According to Deborah Snyder, Mr. Snyder’s wife and an executive producer of “300” (which has more than a dozen credited producers of various levels, including Mark Canton and Gianni Nunnari), some changes to Mr. Miller’s original story may have inadvertently amplified its political resonance.

In a key twist Mr. Snyder and his collaborators expanded the presence of Gorgo, the Spartan queen and Leonidas’s wife, including, among other things, a sequence in which she inspires a wavering populace and weak-willed council to resist the Eastern armies even at the cost of battle deaths. “Her story is that she is trying to rally the troops,” said Ms. Snyder, who dismissed as irrelevant a question about her and her husband’s personal political philosophies.

Mr. Snyder acknowledged that Mr. Miller — who declined to be interviewed for this article — had opened the door for contemporary comparisons with his passionate, if not entirely accurate, portrayal of the ancient Spartans as saviors of Western civilization. “He’d be on their side regardless of who they were fighting, because he just loves them,” Mr. Snyder said.

Thanks to computer-generated effects that contribute to “300’s” highly stylized look, the film’s cost, according to its makers, was considerably less than the outsized production budgets of “Troy,” which did relatively well for Warner, and “Alexander,” which did not. But Warner could use a hit after finishing last year behind several competitors at the domestic box office. (A success in the second half of 2006, like “Happy Feet,” could only do so much to make up for duds like “Poseidon.”)

And the enormous expense of making and marketing any major studio picture — the combined costs appear likely to exceed $100 million in the case of “300” — sharpens the risk in alienating a portion of the hoped-for audience.

In any case Mr. Snyder said he was pleased about the debate, though he never meant the movie to provoke it. “If that’s a by-product, that’s good,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/mo...5spartans.html





Movie Firms Working on Digital Film System
John Rogers

Tired of being turned away at the theater box office when a movie's sold out? Unhappy there's no art-house theater in your neighborhood to cater to your hoity-toity theatrical tastes?

Those days could be ending, say representatives of Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment and a company called Digital Cinema Implementation Partners.

The three are working on a new digital film delivery system that, if successful, could give theater operators the flexibility to put a popular movie on an extra screen as quickly as the demand for it arises. At the same time, theater operators could boot out a surprise stinker and even book in for a day or two an art-house film with a small but devoted audience.

"Our goal really is to have the easiest, fastest, most reliable, most cost-effective content delivery technique possible to the theaters we represent," said Travis Reid, Chief Executive of Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, which is working with Warner Bros. and Universal.

The process, still in the early stages of development, would use satellite and broadband delivery systems to beam digital films directly to theaters, rather than have them copied onto hard drives and delivered by hand, as for the most part they are now, said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros.' executive vice president for distribution and technology.

That kind of rapid delivery, Reid said, would allow theater operators the flexibility to economically market niche films that could be shown for just a day or two to a targeted audience. It would also allow operators to quickly find more screens for surprise hits.

"We believe that if we can make that a very efficient process, very fast, they'll be able to respond to audience demands more," he said.

Beaming an encrypted version of a digital film directly to the theater should also cut down on film piracy and bootlegging, Antonellis said, by eliminating the number of opportunities for people to get their hands on the movie as it is transit.

DCIP is owned equally by the Regal, AMC and Cinemark theater chains, which have 14,000 screens in North America. The new system would be available to those and other interested theater operators, Reid and Antonellis said. About 2,200 U.S. theater screens currently show digital films.

Officials with the venture wouldn't offer a date by which they hope to have the system in place or give a cost estimate.

"I think the latter part of this year we'll likely be doing some testing," said Antonellis. "Our hope is as things progress and ... as the projectors roll out there will be a lot more activity."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...tant-films.htm




2006 Box Office Up, But Costs Rose Too
Gregg Kilday

Domestically, boxoffice was up in 2006. Internationally, it was on a tear. But although marketing costs decreased slightly, production costs rose last year.

Delivering the MPAA's official report card on the state of the worldwide film business, chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said Tuesday: "I would state it was a bullish year for this business. Film audiences around the world reminded us that they love going to the movies, and we had a good slate of blockbusters, family movies, dramas and comedies."

The U.S. boxoffice recovered last year from its 2005 slump as it climbed to $9.49 billion in ticket sales -- a 5.5% increase over the previous year's level of $8.99 billion.

The domestic boxoffice also rebounded from a three-year decline in admissions. For 2006, according to the MPAA, admissions grew to 1.45 billion, up 3.3% from 2005's 1.4 billion. The rise in admissions combined with a slight rise in the cost of individual tickets to produce the boost in boxoffice revenue.

The average cost of a ticket rose from $6.41 in 2005 to $6.55 in 2006, or 2.2%, which the MPAA noted remained lower than the consumer price index's increase of 3.2% during the same period.

For all the upbeat news, though, there remains plenty of room for growth.

The 2006 domestic boxoffice figure was overshadowed by 2004's record $9.54 billion, while admissions remained well below the modern-day high of 1.64 billion achieved in 2002.

Noting a lineup of big-name sequels on tap for 2007, Glickman said, "The last time this happened in my memory was 2002, when there were a lot of sequels, and that was a pretty big year from a boxoffice perspective." Although declining to offer a specific prediction about how 2007's boxoffice will fare, Glickman added, "My judgment is that 2007 will be bigger than 2006, but that's just an educated guess."

On the worldwide stage, movies fared even better. Spurred by the growth of international markets in such countries as Brazil, France, Germany, Russia and South Korea, worldwide boxoffice grew to an all-time high of $25.8 billion. That represented an 11% increase over 2005's $23.27 million and topped the previous record-setting year of 2004 when worldwide boxoffice hit $25.19 billion.

Overall, costs remained relatively steady -- with a rise in production costs offset by a decline in marketing outlays.

The average cost of making and marketing a movie for the MPAA member companies stood at $100.3 million in 2006, up 0.6% from 2005, though somewhat lower than the 2003 high of $105.8 million.

Production costs rose from $63.6 million in 2005 to $65.8 million.

Two caveats, however: Negative costs, as reported by the MPAA, represent the amount each studio invests in a film but do not include investments from non-MPAA sources and therefore do not reflect the full costs of production for the average MPAA film, which actually would be higher if the rising stream of outside investment money were factored in.

Also, because MGM is no longer a member of the MPAA, the trade group readjusted its data from previous years, so that the previous-year figures represent the six studios that currently are MPAA members.

Last year, the MPAA reported avenge production costs of $60 million and marketing expenditures of $36.2 million per film. But eliminating MGM's contribution, it revised the 2005 figures so that they now reflect production costs of $63.6 million and marketing costs of $36.1 million.

Using the revised figure, the MPAA reported that marketing costs declined from $36.1 million in 2005 to $34.5 million last year.

In part, that was because MPAA companies spent more of their marketing dollars on nontraditional media, allocating almost as much for Internet advertising per film as they did on movie trailers.

In terms of marketing dollars, 2006 saw increases in spending for spot TV, online and other media. Spending for newspapers, network TV and trailers saw decreases.

Those figures include the major studios and their specialty divisions. Breaking out just the specialty division films, it was clear that even while studios held down costs on big-budget movies, the specialty divisions were spending more per film themselves.

The average negative costs on a film from the specialty divisions rose from $23.5 million in 2005 to $30.3 million in 2006. Marketing costs also rose from an average of $15.2 million in 2005 to $17.2 million in 2006.

At the same time, 11% more movies were competing for entertainment dollars.

In 2006, the MPAA companies released 203 new films, or 34% of the year's total of 599 new releases. That represented a jump from 190 films out of a total pool of 535 films in 2005. Last year also saw eight rereleases, with just one coming from an MPAA company.

At the boxoffice, 12.5% more movies grossed more than $50 million. Sixty-three films hit that mark in 2006, compared with 56 in 2005.

At the top of the heap, Buena Vista's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" crossed the $400 million mark; no movie hit that rarefied level in 2005. But at the same time, more movies were clustered between $50 million-$99 million in 2006 than in 2005. Last year saw 45 films in that category, compared with 36 in 2005.

When it came to $100 million films, though, 2005 still had the edge. It saw 20 films climb above that milestone, compared with 18 last year.

Ratings-wise, the distribution of top-grossing films remained relatively stabile. In 2006, 85% of the 20 highest-grossing movies were rated PG or PG-13, just as they were in 2005. Both years also had one G-rated movie and two R-rated movies in the top 20.

To gauge moviegoers' attitudes, the MPAA turned to a Nielsen Entertainment/NPG survey, which found that 80% of moviegoers said their trip to the multiplex was time and money well spent. Only 16% reported they would have preferred to watch a DVD. Males and females younger than 25 were most enthusiastic about their preference for a movie theater over home viewing.

The survey also found that moviegoers who own or subscribe to four or more home technologies were actually more avid moviegoers, seeing an average of three more movies per year than the moviegoer who owned or subscribed to fewer than four.
http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_re..._id=1003554752





Ouch! What?

Scientists Say Nerves Use Sound, Not Electricity
CBC News

The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists.

The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.

"For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation," said Thomas Heimburg, an associate professor at the university's Niels Bohr Institute. "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced."

Heimburg, an expert in biophysics who received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, Germany — where biologists and physicists often work together in a rare arrangement — developed the theory with Copenhagen University's Andrew Jackson, an expert in theoretical physics.

According to the traditional explanation of molecular biology, an electrical pulse is sent from one end of the nerve to the other with the help of electrically charged salts that pass through ion channels and a membrane that sheathes the nerves. That membrane is made of lipids and proteins.

Heimburg and Jackson theorize that sound propagation is a much more likely explanation. Although sound waves usually weaken as they spread out, a medium with the right physical properties could create a special kind of sound pulse or "soliton" that can propagate without spreading or losing strength.

The physicists say because the nerve membrane is made of a material similar to olive oil that can change from liquid to solid through temperature variations, they can freeze and propagate the solitons.

The scientists, whose work is in the Biophysical Society's Biophysical Journal, suggested that anesthetics change the melting point of the membrane and make it impossible for their theorized sound pulses to propagate.

The researchers could not be immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...-20070309.html





Surveillance

Homeland Security Revives Supersnoop
Audrey Hudson

Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.

The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.

"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.

"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call for comment.

Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.

"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."

According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."

"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.

"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the government's increased capability to assemble information will result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual privacy," the report said.

ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.

The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.

The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.
http://washingtontimes.com/national/...4323-4382r.htm





The Pentagon Wants TiVo (to Watch You)
Noah Shachtman

I always love how the Pentagon, after spending billions of dollars on Rube Goldberg contraptions, suddenly discovers that useful things might actually exist in the commercial sector. And so yet another Pentagon advisory panel has picked up on this fact.

Reuters yesterday reported on a recently issued study on future technologies written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it:

William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.

"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone interview.

So, after reviewing the available technology, what specific types of things do they suggest the military needs? Well, one example, is the Pentagon wants TiVo, according the report (available as a PDF here):

To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed, to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and diversity. Furthermore, the ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.

Much of the report comes as little surprise: the science advisers want to move away from Cold War-era weapons and toward technologies that can be used in urban conflicts. Small sensors, finding better ways to use data, and an emphasis on increasingly popular "influence operations" all figure big.

-- Sharon Weinberger


UPDATE: Noah here. While a combat TiVo may sound a little crazy, there are several firms that are closer than you think to making it happen. I wrote about one of them last year for the New York Times.

UPDATE 2: Our pals at Inside Defense, in an unusually free-to-the-public article, have more on that Defense Science Board report. It's a doozy:

The DSB, defining technology broadly to include “tools enabled by the social sciences as well as the physical and life sciences,” came up with four critical capabilities...

...The first capability area, “human terrain preparation,” is seen by the science board as “perhaps most central.” The authors want the military to understand better how people and groups, societies and states behave -- and put this information to use to improve training and education, especially of junior leaders and small units.

In the second area, “ubiquitous observation and recording,” the board sees the potential to eliminate sanctuaries where adversaries can hide and gain support and emphasizes the ability to record huge amounts of data that can be rapidly analyzed and retrieved. Keys to this capability include day/night all-weather surveillance “in areas where it is not done well today (urban areas and under foliage),” among other sensor systems and related technology.

As for “contextual exploitation,” the report again focuses on the need to quickly extract meaningful information from massive amounts of data. Here the focus is on data management and the collaboration of human operators and computer systems.

Finally, “rapidly tailored effects” revolve around the first three capabilities...

But three key areas with ramifications for current operations and threats are not well-covered by today’s systems, the authors found: U.S. forces’ ability to “conduct non-kinetic operations aimed at influencing the local populace”; delivering “conventional strikes with great precision and timeliness from afar”; and “mitigating the effects of [weapons of mass destruction] attacks.”

Influencing local populations is “strategic communication at the operational and tactical levels,” the report states -- the soldier on the ground delivering the right message through both “words and deeds,” carrying out non-lethal and lethal missions.

From afar, the task force suggests directed energy, high-energy lasers, ballistic missiles, “scalable” warheads and “hypersonic flight of either transport or launch vehicle” should be considered for the future toolkit.

UPDATE 3: The DSB's idea, of a gaining "omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past" might sound far-fetched. But its a goal that the big thinkers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have been pursuing for quite a while. Darpa-funded engineers are developing a number of different sensors designed to provide what the agency calls "persistent surveillance" and military omniscience." For years, Darpa has also been pushing to develop "Combat Zones that See" -- citywide surveillance camera networks, meant to TiVo a whole town.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/0...ntagon_wa.html





U.S. Report to Fault F.B.I. on Subpoenas
David Johnston and Eric Lipton

The Justice Department’s inspector general has prepared a scathing report criticizing how the F.B.I. uses a form of administrative subpoena to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.

The report, expected to be issued on Friday, says that the bureau lacks sufficient controls to make sure the subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s prior approval, are properly issued and that it does not follow even some of the rules it does have.

Under the USA Patriot Act, the bureau each year has issued more than 20,000 of the national security letters, as the demands for information are known. The report is said to conclude that the program lacks effective management, monitoring and reporting procedures, officials who have been briefed on its contents said.

Details of the report emerged on Thursday as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials struggled to tamp down a Congressional uproar over another issue, the ousters of eight United States attorneys.

Mr. Gonzales told Democratic and Republican senators that the Justice Department would drop its opposition to a change in a one-year-old rule for replacing federal prosecutors, senators and Justice Department officials said.

Mr. Gonzales offered the concession at a private meeting on Capitol Hill with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Gonzales also agreed to let the panel question Justice Department officials involved in the removals, Congressional aides said. The officials would testify voluntarily without subpoena.

Mr. Gonzales’s willingness to give in to Senate demands appeared to underscore how the Justice Department had been put on the defensive by the criticism over the prosecutors’ ousters.

The use of national security letters since the September 2001 attacks has been a hotly debated domestic intelligence issue. They were once used only in espionage and terrorism cases, and then only against people suspected as agents of a foreign power.

With the passage of the Patriot Act, their use was greatly expanded and was allowed against Americans who were subjects of any investigation. The law also allowed other agencies like the Homeland Security Department to issue the letters.

The letters have proved contentious in part because unlike search warrants, they are issued without prior judicial approval and require only the approval of the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. A Supreme Court ruling in 2004 forced revisions of the Patriot Act to permit greater judicial review, without requiring advance authorization.

As problems for the Justice Department appeared to be piling up, criticism of Mr. Gonzales seemed to grow more biting as Republicans senators complained about Mr. Gonzales, some because of a letter in USA Today in which he said he had lost confidence in the ousted prosecutors and regarded the question an “overblown personnel matter.”

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, senior Republican on the judiciary panel, said in a telephone interview that those comments were “extraordinarily insensitive” and that the prosecutors were “professionals who are going to have a cloud over them which could last a lifetime.”

“I have been trying to hold down the rhetoric and try to deal with this on a factual and analytical basis, and his letter was volcanic,” Mr. Specter said. “We don’t need that,” he added.

Earlier at the Judiciary Committee business meeting, Mr. Specter also had harsh words for Mr. Gonzales, saying, “One day, there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later.”

Mr. Specter said later his remark did not indicate that Mr. Gonzales had any intention of stepping down.

Other Republican senators expressed strong criticism of the removals and handling by Mr. Gonzales’s aides. Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, was quoted by The Las Vegas Review-Journal as saying the prosecutors’ removals had “been completely mishandled.”

The United States attorney in Nevada, Daniel G. Bogden, was one of the eight dismissed without explanation until he was told by a senior Justice Department officials that he was being replaced to make room for other appointees. Mr. Ensign said the department fired Mr. Bogden over his objections. Mr. Ensign said last month that he was told that the change was for “performance reasons,” but said he was surprised when a Justice Department official testified at a House hearing on Tuesday that Mr. Bogden’s performance had no serious lapses.

Even staunch Republican defenders of the department expressed criticism. One ally was Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, where Paul K. Charlton was among those dismissed.

“Some people’s reputations are going to suffer needlessly,” Mr. Kyl said. “Hopefully, we can get to the point where we say, ‘These people did a great job.”’

The withdrawal of objections to changing the rules for the prosecutors appears to assure passage of a measure to restore rules changed last March, when the attorney general was given authority to appoint replacement United States attorneys indefinitely, several senators said.

“The administration has withdrawn its objections to my legislation,” the sponsor of the bill, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said. She was one of the senators who met with Mr. Gonzales. Others were Mr. Specter, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Ms. Feinstein said: “My concerns have been that the firing of people with strong performance reviews all at one time, a number of whom were involved in corruption cases, sends an adverse signal to the rest of the U.S. attorneys, as well as to the general public. They may be hired by the president, but they serve the people and they should not be subjected to political pressure.”

The bill would let the attorney general appoint a temporary replacement for 120 days. If the Senate confirms no one after that time, the appointment of an interim United States attorney would be left to a federal district judge.

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said Thursday night: “The department stands by the decision to remove the U.S. attorneys. As we have acknowledged in hindsight, we should have provided the U.S. attorneys with specific reasons that led to their dismissal that would have help to avoid the rampant misinformation and wild speculation that currently exits.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/wa...orneys.html?hp





Cybercrime Treaty: What it Means to You
Larry Downes

Cybercrime is getting cheaper all the time, as shady characters sell tools to help criminals spam, phish, hack and crash. And a new treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate could wind up passing the costs of combating cybercrime directly to American businesses.

From an economic standpoint, when the cost of crime goes down, frequency goes up. How does the legal system fight back? One way is to increase enforcement and catch more people. But when it comes to cybercrime, no one really expects law enforcement to keep up technologically with criminals—it's an arms race the criminals keep winning. An alternative is to raise the penalties, in hopes of deterring criminals who weigh the benefits of committing their crimes against the risk of getting caught.

In that vein, in August the Senate ratified the Convention on Cybercrime, drafted by the Council of Europe with considerable input from the United States. So far, 43 nations have signed on. The Convention includes many sensible provisions aimed at unifying global computer-crime laws, and closes loopholes that make it possible for criminals to escape prosecution by locating their activities offshore.

But civil libertarians, along with leading telecommunications companies, strongly oppose the treaty. Civil libertarians are especially concerned about the sweeping authority given to participating countries to seize information from private parties as they investigate cybercrimes, even when the activity being investigated isn't a crime in the country where the data is located. If France is investigating a sale of Nazi memorabilia on eBay, the U.S. must cooperate, even though such transactions are not illegal in the U.S.

Telecommunications companies object to provisions that require member countries to establish and enforce potent data-retention policies for network traffic, and require any operator of a computer network to respond to requests for information from any participating country without compensation of any kind.

These are potentially serious problems, especially given that the Convention is open to any country that wants to join. But there are more practical reasons U.S. businesses should be concerned. The provisions for data retention and production apply to any operator of a computer network, not just telecoms. Worse, Article 12 attaches liability to businesses for "lack of supervision or control" of employees who commit criminal offenses covered by the Convention. Businesses must worry about employee activities that may be legal here, but illegal elsewhere, risking administrative, civil, or even criminal penalties.

These investigative and supervision costs will invariably be imposed on businesses without any real controls. Worldwide law-enforcement agencies, in other words, may now avail themselves of the opportunity to outsource their most expensive problems to you.

The Convention may improve the cybercrime-and-punishment equation in favor of deterrence. But it's also added some new variables and possibly irrational numbers. Of the economic, not mathematical, kind.
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0...EMNL030607EOAD





'Big Brother' Surveillance Makes Waves in Sweden

A far-reaching wiretapping programme proposed by Sweden's government to defend against foreign threats, including monitoring emails and telephone calls, has stirred up a fiery debate in the past few weeks, with critics decrying the creation of a "big brother" state.

The new legislation, to be presented to parliament on Thursday, would enable the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to tap all Internet and telephone communication in and out of Sweden.

Under current law, FRA, which cracked Nazi codes during World War II and was Sweden's ear on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is only allowed to monitor military radio communications.

Defence Minister Mikael Odenberg insists that the new legislation is necessary in today's changed world, where communications are increasingly transmitted through fiberoptic cables and not through the ether.

"This is about collecting information for the country's foreign, security and defence policy and protecting Sweden from foreign threats," Odenberg told AFP.

"We want to be able to detect military threats at an early stage, and also map other foreign threats such as terrorism, IT (Internet technology) attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction ... as well as protect our troops involved in international operations," he said.

If adopted, the law would enter into force on July 1.

One of the fiercest critics of the proposed change is former justice minister Thomas Bodström.

"This is about giving permission to wiretap maybe millions of telephone calls, emails and text messages," he told the media after a draft of the bill was presented in January.

Unlike police, FRA would not be required to seek a court order to begin surveillance. A parliamentary committee on military intelligence affairs would however have to give the green light.

FRA would only be permitted to tap into communications through pattern analysis and key word searches, and would not be entitled to target specific individuals.

Among other critics are the Green and Left parties, as well as the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo.

Säpo's chief legal counsel Lars-Åke Johansson said the proposal was "completely foreign to our form of government".

"The government would have direct control over operations within areas that not even the police can follow since they are not criminal operations," he warned, adding that a broader mandate for military intelligence operations "may lead to drastic violations of personal integrity."

Another critic is Anne Ramberg, the head of the Swedish Bar Association.

"If the proposal is adopted, we are going to be among the most advanced in monitoring our citizens, the US included," she said.

Henrik von Sydow, a deputy from Odenberg's own Moderates Party, is also opposed to the proposal.

"We can't assume that those in power always mean well. It is risky to set up a system that can be used by another government, at another time, for completely other purposes than that for which it was intended," he said.

In a bid to soothe critics' fears, Thursday's proposal is expected to call for the creation within FRA of a special council to protect individuals' integrity.

Meanwhile, public opinion polls have presented varying results.

A poll commissioned by the governmental Swedish Integrity Protection Committee and published in January showed that four of five Swedes are in favour of increased surveillance of citizens, whether it be through wiretapping, DNA registers or surveillance cameras in public places.

But a Skop institute survey published in February also showed that 60 percent were opposed to authorities wiretapping all telephone and computer communication in and out of Sweden.

According to the National Post and Telecom Agency, the proposed surveillance would require an initial investment of between half a billion to a billion kronor, as well as
annual operating costs of 100 to 200 million kronor.

The bill would be footed by telecom operators, the agency said.
http://www.thelocal.se/6619/20070307/





UK Military Awaits Skynet Launch
Jonathan.Amos

The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite.

The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and "friendly" forces across the globe.

It is part of a multi-billion-pound project that will allow the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to pass much more data, faster between command centres.

The Skynet 5A platform lifts off from Kourou, French Guiana, on Saturday.

It will fly atop an Ariane 5-ECA launcher that is scheduled to leave Earth at 1925 local time (2225 GMT).

A second and third spacecraft will be added at a later date to complete the constellation.

"It's a groundbreaking military satellite system," explained Patrick Wood, who has led the development of the spacecraft for manufacturer EADS Astrium.

"It's going to provide five times the capacity that the previous system provided, and allow the military to do things they just haven't been able to do in the past," he told BBC News.

'Information warfare'

Skynet 5 matches the capability of the best modern satellite platforms - on which the world depends for much of its telephone, TV, and internet traffic - but has been specially prepared for military use.

Four steerable antennas give it the ability to focus bandwidth on to particular locations where it is most needed - where British forces are engaged in operations.

Its technologies have also been designed to resist any interference - attempts to disable or take control of the spacecraft - and any efforts to eavesdrop on sensitive communications.

An advanced receive antenna allows the spacecraft to selectively listen to signals and filter out attempts to "jam" it.

"As far as we know, this is the most sophisticated technology of its type - certainly in Europe," said Mr Wood. "It allows you to produce peaks of reception across the surface of the Earth, and to change that antenna pattern in extremely rapid time."

Skynet 5 replaces Skynet 4. The new spacecraft system is bigger and much more powerful. The high traffic rates are in both directions.

Analysts talk increasingly of the military's "network enabled capability" - the idea that information and fast access to it are paramount.

"Modern warfare is all about information," said Bill Sweetman, the technology and aerospace editor for Jane's Information Group. "Every piece of satellite bandwidth is valuable and the military is always hungry for more.

"The practice is to offload mundane traffic on to commercial satellites and then to use a complementary, secure proprietary system for the traffic that has to be protected.

"Take for example the capability of unmanned air vehicles. These generate a lot of imagery and that has to be passed over a secure communications link. Modern warfare involves passing around a lot of data, and that puts a premium on satellite capacity."

'Physical assurance'

The whole Skynet 5 constellation has been funded through the largest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) signed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The MoD does not own the hardware; it merely buys the services run over it.

Initially agreed in 2003, the PFI saw Paradigm Secure Communications, which is a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, take over and operate the UK's military satellite comms network.

As part of this £2.6bn deal, Paradigm agreed to loft new and more advanced spacecraft, and overhaul the ground systems needed to support them. This has included replacing and updating control centres, and major antennas and terminals on military ships, land vehicles and planes.

Paradigm gets an annual fee for providing this service. It can also earn money by selling excess bandwidth - expected to be about 50% on each spacecraft - to Nato and other friendly countries.

The cost to the British taxpayer of the PFI jumped by several hundred million pounds in 2005, principally because of a decision to go for the "physical assurance" of building a spare spacecraft rather than a straightforward insurance policy that would pay out in the event of a launch failure or breakdown in orbit.

Even so, the MoD says, the Paradigm contract should save many millions of pounds over the 18 years of the deal, compared with a more conventional procurement arrangement.

After launch, it will take about a week to put Skynet 5A in its final geostationary orbit.

The 5B platform will be launched towards the end of this year, with 5C due in orbit in 2008.

Skynet 5A has a co-passenger for Saturday's flight: the Indian TV satellite Insat 4B.


THE SKYNET 5 MILITARY SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM

· The satellites are 'hardened' against interference. A special receive antenna (1) can resist attempts at jamming
· Each spacecraft has four steerable antennas (2) that can concentrate bandwidth on to particular regions
· The system gives global coverage (3), providing five times the capacity afforded by the previous system
· Improved technologies, including a solar 'sail' (4), lengthen the platforms' operational lives to at least 15 years
· Each spacecraft (5) is a 2x2x2m box and weighs just under 5 tonnes; the solar wings once unfurled measure 34m tip to tip

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/6434773.stm





Scientists Claim First in Using Brain Scans to Predict Intentions
Maria Cheng

At a laboratory in Germany, volunteers slide into a donut-shaped MRI machine and perform simple tasks, such as deciding whether to add or subtract two numbers, or choosing which of two buttons to press.

They have no inkling that scientists in the next room are trying to read their minds _ using a brain scan to figure out their intention before it is turned into action.

In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting.

While still in its initial stages, the techniques may eventually have wide-ranging implications for everything from criminal interrogations to airline security checks. And that alarms some ethicists who fear the technology could one day be abused by authorities, marketers or employers.

Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old student in Leipzig who participated in the experiment, found it a bit spooky but wasn't overly concerned about the civil liberties implications.

"It's really weird," she said. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."

Researchers have long used MRI machines to identify different types of brain activity, and scientists in the United States have recently developed brain scans designed for lie detection.

But outside experts say the work led by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center is groundbreaking.

"The fact that we can determine what intention a person is holding in their mind pushes the level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level," said Dr. Paul Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not connected to the study.

The research, which began in July 2005, has been of limited scope: only 21 people have been tested. And the 71 percent accuracy rate is only about 20 percent more successful than random selection.

Still, the research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, about 90 miles southwest of Berlin, has generated strong interest in the scientific community.

"Haynes' experiment strikes at the heart of how good we will get at predicting behaviors," said Dr. Todd Braver, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Washington University, who also was not connected with the research.

"The barriers that we assumed existed in reading our minds keep getting breached."

In one study, participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a few seconds before the numbers were flashed on a screen. In the interim, a computer captured images of their brain waves to predict the subject's decision _ with one pattern suggesting addition, and another subtraction.

Haynes' team began its research by trying to identify which part of the mind was storing intentions. They discovered it was found in the prefrontal cortex region by scanning the brain to look for bursts of activity when subjects were given choices.

Then they studied which type of patterns were associated with different intentions.

"If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future," said Haynes.

For the moment, reading minds is a cumbersome process and there is no chance scientists could spy on decision-making surreptitiously. Haynes' studies focus on people who choose between just two alternatives, not the infinite number present in everyday life.

But scientists are making enough progress to make ethicists nervous, since the research already has progressed from identifying the regions of the brain where certain thoughts occur to identifying the very content of those thoughts.

"These technologies, for the first time, give us a real possibility of going straight to the source to see what somebody is thinking or feeling, without them having any ability to stop us," said Dr. Hank Greely, director of Stanford University's Center for Law and the Biosciences.

"The concept of keeping your thoughts private could be profoundly altered in the future," he said.

Civil libertarians are concerned that mind-reading technology may fit into a trend of pre-emptive security measures in which authorities could take action against individuals before they commit a crime _ a scenario explored in the 2002 science fiction film "Minority Report."

Britain is creating a national DNA database that would allow authorities to track people with violent predispositions. In addition, the government has floated the idea of locking up people with personality disorders that could lead to criminal behavior.

"We need to start thinking about how far we are going to allow these technologies to be used," said Wolpe.

Despite the fears, Haynes believes his research has more benign practical applications.

For example, he says it will contribute to the development of machines already in existence that respond to brain signals and allow the paralyzed to change TV channels, surf the Internet, and operate small robotic devices.

For now, the practical applications of Haynes' research are years if not decades away.

"We are making the first steps in reading out what the specific contents of people's thoughts are by trying to understand the language of the brain," Haynes said. "But it's not like we are going to have a machine tomorrow."
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/2277





Book Review: The Lie Detectors

The History of an American Obsession

By Ken Alder

334 pages. $27. Free Press.


William Grimes

Its inventor called it the cardio- pneumo-psychograph. To a clutch of coeds in Berkeley, California, in 1921, it was a newfangled magic box that was somehow going to look into their minds and find out who was pilfering cash and jewelry at their college boardinghouse. To the newspaper- reading public and future generations, it was the lie detector, a contraption with dubious scientific credentials, a shady ethical aura and, as it turned out, amazing longevity.

In "The Measure of All Things," Ken Alder, a professor of history and the humanities at Northwestern University, chronicled the quest of two French scientists to calibrate the meter. In "The Lie Detectors" he tells a similar tale of obsession and self-delusion.

In an era that gave birth to scientific industrial management, time-motion studies and the IQ test, a small group of American scientists, inventors and social reformers pursued the dream of a mechanical device that would separate truth from deception by recording involuntary bodily responses like blood pressure and pulse rate.

The lie detector would in theory replace traditional police interrogations and jury deliberations. It would allow private companies and the government to weed out thieves and spies. It would shine a high-intensity beam into the recesses of the psyche, advancing the work of psychologists and psychiatrists. That was the promise. But toward the end of his life, John Larson, inventor of the machine, despaired. He called his work "a Frankenstein's monster."

The lie detector and its strange, persistent grip on the American imagination offers rich material for Alder. How many stories require William James, Gertrude Stein and Dick Tracy for the telling, not to mention criminals like the Torso Murderer of Cleveland? Stir into the mix a mutually hostile coterie of inventors, scientific visionaries and outright hucksters, and you have the ingredients for a heady brew.

It is perhaps a little too potent. Alder never seems sure whether he is writing serious history or indulging in a pop cultural romp, with a pulp flavor. It's hard to blame him. The lie detector, in its infancy, offers a whirlwind tour of Jazz Age America, making stops at college sorority houses, prisons, Chicago police stations and the fledgling crime labs operated by reformers keen to put policing on a scientific footing.

August Vollmer, the moral center of Alder's story, saw the lie detector as yet another instrument in his campaign to clean up police corruption and create a professional police force that relied on scientific methods rather than brute force to fight crime. As Berkeley's police chief, he gave the green light to Larson and his invention in the early 1920s and assigned a young researcher, Leonarde Keeler, to make technical improvements to the machine.

Larson and Keeler would become Vollmer's delinquent sons, at each other's throats in a bitter struggle to control the future of the lie detector. The more reflective Larson saw the machine as an aid to scientific research and penal reform. Keeler saw it as a crime-fighting tool and promoted it accordingly.

He was not alone. Imitators entered the field. Orlando Scott, a doctor, promoted the "Thought-Wave Detector," a machine that, he claimed, tapped into the brain's electrical currents.

Despite charlatans like Scott, the lie detector made headway in its search for acceptance and respect. A landmark legal decision in 1923 barred lie- detector tests from being introduced as evidence in the courtroom, but elsewhere — in banks, factories and departments of government — the magic machine carved out a role for itself, offering a clean technological solution to messy human problems.

Amazingly the lie detector, largely spurned by the rest of the world, lives on in the United States, although new technologies have appeared on the horizon: machines that measure minute changes in facial expression, vocal pitch or heat around the eyes. None of them, Alder notes, address a central problem pointed out by Montaigne four centuries ago, the inconvenient fact that "the reverse side of the truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...es/bookmar.php




Payment for Lost Privacy
Thomas Crampton

I wrote today on Norwich Union’s cut-price insurance for drivers who agree to allow satellite tracking of their movements.

Intended for those who use their cars infrequently, the insurance is only charged for actual miles driven - and is ranked according to road dangers. (Interestingly, insurance charges for major highways are seven times lower than the rate per mile for small slow-speed roads) Click here for a graphic of the costs.

The concept - surrender privacy in exchange for a service - is an ongoing theme in our digitizing world.

Other examples:

- Gmail’s advertisements based on the content of emails.
- Mobile phone operators sending advertisements based on my location.

Given this trend, shouldn’t there be a consumer-focused business that figures out how to gather groups of people to auction off their privacy to the highest bidder? If we are all losing our privacy, the least we can do is maximize the financial return!

How much are a person’s private details worth?
http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/techno...etamedia/?p=50





How to Clone a Biometric Passport While it's Still in the Bag

Mail exposes the postal vulnerability
John Lettice

In an investigation for the Daily Mail, security consultant Adam Laurie has demonstrated how a new UK biometric passport can be cloned without even being removed from its delivery envelope.

The Mail exploit draws on previous work by Laurie and others, and puts together vulnerabilities in the chip technology, and in the chip security and logistics systems used by the Identity & Passport Service.

The data in the chip is essentially a digital version of what is printed inside the passport itself. The printed data can be read if the passport is presented and opened, and the chip's security system attempts to duplicate this process. The chip data can be read wirelessly, but it is encrypted, with the key printed inside the passport. So in theory, although the chip can be read without the passport (or indeed the delivery envelope) being opened, the data is meaningless without the key.

But the key in this first generation of biometric passport is relatively easy to identify/crack. It is not random, but consists of passport number, the passport holder's date of birth and the passport expiry date. The Mail found it relatively easy to identify the holder's date of birth, while the expiry date is 10 years from the issue date, which for a newly-delivered passport would clearly fall within a few days. The passport number consists of a number of predictable elements, including an identifier for the issuing office, so effectively a significant part of the key can be reconstructed from the envelope and its address label.

Laurie established the theory of this last year, but the Mail report puts it into practice. With the cooperation of the applicant, the newly-delivered passport envelope was rerouted, and a working key was identified within four hours. Once this has been done, a fraudster would have all of the information needed to copy the chip, and therefore would be some considerable distance closer to being able to produce an identical copy of the entire passport.

The Mail notes that no proof of identity was required when the passport was delivered, but the vulnerabilities exposed mean that the problem goes far beyond the occasional passport being cloned after its delivery has been intercepted. Because it's feasible to steal the data without detection, it's perfectly possible that insiders could intercept large numbers of the millions of new passports delivered every year.

If, that is, there is a point to doing so. At the moment the value of the data is limited because the chip can only be copied, not changed, so it can only be used as an aid in the forgery of a copy of an existing passport (although some possible exploits based on this are described here). Passport forgers would still have to produce a viable copy of the passport book itself, and the resulting document could only be used by someone of similar appearance to the original owner.

That, however, is the current state of play, not necessarily the end of the story. One of the primary reasons the chip is being introduced is because historically, passport forgers have been able to forge successive generations of book passports, with each new iteration of security eventually being matched by the bad guys.

Once biometric passports are commonplace the forgers will need to be able to deal with the chips in them, and if they want to stay in business they'll need to be able to change the data, not just copy it.

Without access to the digital signature used by the passport issuing authority to protect the integrity of the data, this can't be done. The forgers could therefore attempt to crack the signature for the passport variety of their choice, but simply gaining access to the key via corrupt officials or espionage could turn out to be a quicker route. With this in mind, it's worth noting that ICAO, which devised the system, anticipates that keys will be compromised, and puts forward steps that should be taken to protect the system when this happens.

If, however, this turns out to happen a lot (how many of the world's passport issuing authorities would you trust?), then chip security will quite possible turn out to be just one more increment in the passport forgery arms race.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/0...assport_clone/





France Bans Citizen Journalists From Reporting Violence
Peter Sayer

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.

Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03...eban/index.php





Journalists Face Increased Danger off the Battlefield
Doreen Carvajal

Murder has emerged as one of the most efficient tools for silencing journalists who face more dangers in peacetime than on the battlefield, according to a new global study tracking fatalities of journalists and press staff over the last 10 years.

The victims, overwhelmingly men, are more likely to be shot and killed while investigating local stories rather than covering war, according to a survey completed by the International News Safety Institute. They found that more than 1,000 people have died, the majority of them while covering local stories in their home countries.

Since 2000, the annual toll has steadily increased with 147 perishing in 2005, followed by a record number of 167 fatalities last year, with the three deadliest countries Iraq, Russia and Colombia where last month gunmen literally fired shots into the offices of a Cali-based magazine that was investigating local corruption.

In most cases, killers are never identified or punished, according to the INSI, which spent two years tracking the death statistics and holding hearings on the issue around the world to examine the trends.

"The figures show that killing a journalist is virtually risk free. Nine out of 10 murderers in the past decade have never been prosecuted," said Richard Sambrook, the chair of the special INSI inquiry and global news director for the BBC World.

Two years ago, the institute – a Brussels-based coalition of media organizations – decided to track the deaths to create a central authority for monitoring casualties. Other groups like the World Association of Newspapers and the International Federation of Journalists also track fatalities, but use different reporting methods and definitions for journalists.

INSI counts anyone involved in news gathering from journalists as well as support employees such as translators, drivers and office personnel.

Rodney Pinder, director of INSI, said that with the findings the group intends to begin pressuring international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to consider a country's record on the killings of journalists when evaluating aid grants.

"This report is only the begging of the process because we are going to continue tracking on a monthly basis," Pinder said. "Governments should be held to account. How can societies that give aid be pumping money into countries that are clamping down on freedom of expression by killing journalists."

The toll of killings, disappearances and suspicious deaths has continued to mount even as the INSI was preparing its final report. The latest to die Friday in Moscow was a Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, 51, a former officer in the armed forces who covered military affairs for the Kommersant newspaper. He was found dead after falling from the fifth floor of his apartment and prosecutors theorized that he committed suicide.

But newspaper colleagues remained deeply suspicious and planned their own investigation in country, which the INSI ranked as the number two deadliest country for journalists behind Iraq with almost 100 fatalities over the last 10 years.

Typically reporters who lost their lives in peacetime in Russia, Colombia or Mexico were working on stories about corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, according to the report, which noted that nearly a third of the dead were attacked near their home, office, or hotel.

For that reason, the group is also recommending that news organizations should take more responsibility to increase safety training for journalists so they can detect when they are being followed or possess the psychological tools to cope with ambush or kidnapping scenarios.

According to the report, an African radio reporter kidnapped in the Congo in 2005 said she was helped by behavior training she received earlier to avoid antagonizing kidnappers through passive behavior. Ultimately, her captors let their guard down, allowing her and others with her the opportunity to escape.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...306-journo.php





Anchor in a Desert War: Brian Williams, Reporting
Alessandra Stanley

There was no better illustration of the special difficulties network news anchors face in Iraq than Brian Williams standing alone earlier this week, surrounded by sandbags, describing the situation on the ground secondhand.

This NBC anchor is at a military base called Camp Victory in Baghdad this week to assess how the American-led occupation is faring. On Monday he toured what he described as “pockets of relative peace” at military outposts in Ramadi and Hit, unaware that elsewhere in Iraq, nine American soldiers had been killed by roadside bombs. The next night Mr. Williams described it as “the deadliest single day for Americans in a month’s time.”

Mr. Williams is the first network anchor to visit Iraq since Bob Woodruff of ABC was gravely injured by a roadside bomb in January 2006, but he couldn’t have picked a worse time to be there. The secretly planned trip came the week after ABC’s evening news beat NBC’s in the February sweeps for the first time since 1996, prodding some to accuse NBC of staging a ratings stunt (unfairly, since any anchor trip of this nature requires weeks of preparation).

Mr. Williams said he delayed his journey by a week to avoid diverting attention from Mr. Woodruff’s near-miraculous return to television — with a documentary and a memoir — after months of painful rehabilitation. Mr. Woodruff, who mixed his own experiences with reporting on the quality of care in local Veterans Administration hospitals, dovetailed his comeback with the growing scandal over neglect and mistreatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Even on NBC, that sizzling story somewhat overshadowed Mr. Williams’s bold sally into the world’s most dangerous war zone.

His reasons for going, despite all the risks, are legitimate: anchors can and arguably should put their personal stamps on the most important news stories of the times — if only to draw more time and public attention to those issues. And it would be understandable if Mr. Williams, who set a personal best with his on-the-spot reporting on Hurricane Katrina, would also want to make a mark in Iraq.

Mr. Williams was taken by Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno by helicopter to see signs of progress, but mostly they listened to American officers telling them that things were improving. “And this is what the general heard today about how warmly the locals now view the Americans,” Mr. Williams told his viewers before showing tape of a colonel telling the general, “They do not want us to leave.”

Later Mr. Williams described a scene that contradicted such optimistic reports, but he didn’t have any videotape to underscore the point. “We watched a gunnery sergeant wave at a group of children,” he said. “They turned their backs rather than wave back because that would show them as sympathizers in some way.”

He made a point of trying to convey the sense of duty and commitment of front-line troops, whom he called “mission-focused.” That could also have been partly a response to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who has lately accused NBC of undermining troop morale by using an analyst he says is biased. (Those digs, however, could be prompted by Mr. O’Reilly’s desire to undermine the network that employs his archenemy, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.)

To Mr. Williams’s credit, once he hit the ground, he did not take reckless risks, swan around or showboat. Of his far-from-safe helicopter ride with General Odierno, Mr. Williams said, “If you are looking, as we were, for the safest possible passage into a dangerous place in a dangerous country, this is it.”

He was also generous in sharing the spotlight with his young Baghdad-based colleague Richard Engel. “U.S. commanders have said, ‘We’re at a turning point,’ in the past,” Mr. Engel told Mr. Williams in a live stand-up on Tuesday. “And unfortunately, it hasn’t been the case.

On “Today” on Tuesday, Meredith Vieira somewhat tactlessly asked Mr. Williams via satellite, “Have you spoken to any Iraqi people yourself?” Mr. Williams explained why not.

“The notion of dismounting, getting out of an armored vehicle and walking around and talking to Iraqis is still more or less a dangerous business,” he said. “Our veteran combat correspondents, like Richard Engel, who’s lived in Baghdad each year since this conflict began, can get out a little more easily, especially with his command of Arabic, and mix with local people. But for us, that’s proven a little bit more difficult.”

Mr. Williams has shown grace as well as courage in Iraq, but if there is a lesson in the sudden ratings rise of Charles Gibson at ABC, it is that in the post-Rather/Jennings/Brokaw era, all three networks overestimate what viewers expect from an anchor.

CBS gambled on personality, hoping that Katie Couric’s sparkle would attract women and younger viewers, but the “CBS Evening News” remains in third place. NBC stuck with polish, grooming the precociously poised Mr. Williams for years before Tom Brokaw retired.

And ABC stumbled on Mr. Gibson by default. At first the network sought to outflank its rivals with youth and beauty, pairing Mr. Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as co-anchors. After Mr. Woodruff was incapacitated, ABC settled on Mr. Gibson, the co-anchor of “Good Morning America,” who, in the pantheon of network superstars, seemed like a likable, reliable also-ran.

Mr. Gibson hasn’t exactly overexerted himself in his new job. He covered the State of the Union address from his desk in New York, and also stayed put when tornadoes devastated Florida in early February. This week, while Mr. Williams is in Iraq, Mr. Gibson is on vacation.

It doesn’t seem to matter. Viewers apparently trust his seniority, rumpled air of competence and low-key style; they are content to have him read the news, not live it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/ar...on/08watc.html





CBS Makes Change at Struggling Newscast
David Bauder

CBS News on Thursday is expected to fire the executive producer of Katie Couric's struggling "CBS Evening News" broadcast and appoint former CNN and MSNBC president Rick Kaplan to the job.

Kaplan will replace Rome Hartman, who has been doing the job since before Couric began at CBS last September, according to sources with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A spokeswoman for CBS News declined comment on Wednesday evening. Kaplan, reached at home, also declined to comment.

The newscast has been a distant third in the ratings behind ABC and NBC. During last month's pivotal ratings "sweeps" period, Couric's average of 7.6 million viewers was 6 percent down from what Bob Schieffer recorded in February 2006.

More troubling to many who watched it was the newscast's apparent confusion in direction, driving viewers away from an anchor given a multi-million dollar commitment to jump from NBC's "Today" show.

CBS' shift comes less than a week after NBC News announced that the executive producer of "Nightly News," John Reiss, was leaving. Longtime ratings leader NBC and anchor Brian Williams have been sliding in the ratings as ABC's "World News" with Charles Gibson has won for three of the past four weeks.

Before moving into senior management, Kaplan won 34 Emmy Awards as a producer at ABC News. He worked there with Paul Friedman, currently a key deputy to CBS News President Sean McManus. A large, opinionated man with a booming voice, Kaplan was also a good friend of President Clinton.

He led CNN's domestic operations from 1997 to 2000 as the cable network began to lose audience to the growing Fox News Channel. After teaching at Harvard and briefly returning to ABC, he ran MSNBC from 2004 until leaving last summer, sharpening its programming and setting the stage for modest ratings gains.

Couric took over from Schieffer shortly after Labor Day last year and came in with a mandate to try and shake up an evening news format that differs only slightly among the three networks and hasn't changed dramatically in years. For her first two weeks, Couric led in the ratings. But she hasn't returned there since.

At first, the broadcast emphasized longer, prepared pieces with less focus on breaking news; Hartman came to the evening news from "60 Minutes." Couric's talent as an interviewer was showcased and a regular feature, "Free Speech," invited outside commentary from well-known people like Rush Limbaugh as well as average Americans.

But the commentary bombed and was shelved after two months. Couric's interviews have also been de-emphasized after some were criticized for running too long.

The show has gradually shifted more toward a traditional breaking newscast, but critics say it would often miss stories. Many in the industry believed too many people were offering input and there wasn't a clear sense of who was in charge.

"The lesson of the last six months is that it's very difficult to reinvent the wheel," said Andrew Tyndall, a consultant who monitors the content of broadcast evening newscasts.

CBS News is owned by CBS Corp.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ertainmentnews





After Libby Trial, New Era for Government and Press
Adam Liptak

The investigation and trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, will have many legacies and lessons — for government officials, for supporters and critics of special prosecutors and for historians of the events leading to the war in Iraq.

But the institution most transformed by the prosecution, and the one that took the most collateral damage from Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s relentless pursuit of obstruction and perjury charges against Mr. Libby, may have been the press, forced in the end to play a major role in his trial.

After Mr. Libby’s conviction Tuesday, it is possible to start assessing that damage to the legal protections available to the news organizations, to relationships between journalists and their sources and to the informal but longstanding understanding in Washington, now shattered, that leak investigations should be pressed only so hard.

Ten out of 19 of the witnesses in Mr. Libby’s trial were journalists, a spectacle that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Even more unusual, three of them played a central role in securing the conviction of Mr. Libby, their former source, by testifying about conversations they had once fought to keep secret by invoking the majesty of the First Amendment and the crucial role that confidential informers play in informing citizens in a free society.

“Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a media lawyer who represented Time magazine and one of its reporters in their unsuccessful efforts to fight subpoenas from Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Libby case.

Others say that sort of talk is alarmism tinged with self-importance. Mr. Fitzgerald’s subpoenas to reporters were appropriate, based on settled legal principles and in the service of a significant investigation, said Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at American and George Washington Universities.

“It doesn’t strike me as pathbreaking,” Mr. Eliason said of the Libby case. “This is a case where the leak itself was the potential crime. In those cases, you don’t have a lot of choices but to talk to the reporters involved.”

But others say that Mr. Fitzgerald, who was initially asked to look into the disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency operative’s identity, introduced new tools, tactics and pressures against the press.

In the 35 years since the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters have no right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions from a grand jury, press protections against Justice Department subpoenas have existed largely as a matter of prosecutorial grace. That is over.

“We had this truce for a generation since Branzburg,” said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University. “Nobody really pushed it. The virginity is lost now.”

A decision of the federal appeals court in Washington in 2005 that ordered two reporters jailed for refusing to cooperate with Mr. Fitzgerald destroyed the fragile peace between the government and the press.

Since then, federal prosecutors have pursued two reporters for The San Francisco Chronicle for a source who provided them with information about steroid use in baseball. That case recently ended when the source was uncovered without help from the reporters.

A freelance videographer, on the other hand, has spent some six months in prison for refusing to turn over videotapes of a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco.

Other prosecutors have learned from Mr. Fitzgerald, said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“They’re seeing that Pat Fitzgerald’s tactics seem to work,” Ms. Dalglish said. “They’re going to use these cases sort of as a guide about how to put these reporters on the stand.”

Mr. Fitzgerald, for his part, cautioned against that.

“Resorting to questioning reporters should be a last resort in the very unusual case,” Mr. Fitzgerald said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The Libby case also split the united front that news organizations had long presented. Some news organizations hired criminal lawyers and made quiet deals with Mr. Fitzgerald. Others, notably The New York Times, relied on their longtime First Amendment counsel and waged a public war against Mr. Fitzgerald’s subpoenas, one ending in defeat at the United States Supreme Court. A reporter for The Times, Judith Miller, spent 85 days in jail before she agreed to testify to a grand jury about her interviews with Mr. Libby, with his permission. She has since left The Times.

An earlier generation of reporters had maintained that there were no circumstances under which they would testify against their sources and that the flow of important information to the public could only be guaranteed by taking an absolutist position.

What the public learned from the Libby trial, said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, is that the modern journalist is not nearly as tough.

“Under sufficient pressure,” Professor Kirtley said, “journalists will testify for the prosecution against their source. I don’t think that was a given before all of this began. Maybe the time has come when reporters should be giving their sources Miranda warnings.”

Earl Caldwell, a reporter for The Times who was involved in the Branzburg case, would not cooperate even after the Supreme Court’s decision, and the government never pressed the point. In 1978, another Times reporter, Myron Farber, spent 40 days in jail rather than identify his source.

“I wonder,” Professor Kirtley said, “if part of it is that Caldwell and Farber were proudly outsiders.” By contrast, the journalists who testified at the Libby trial were Washington insiders, and they gave the public a master class in access journalism. It was not always a pretty sight.

“They’re not fearless advocates,” Professor Feldstein said of the reporters involved, “but supplicants, willing and even eager to be manipulated.”

Charles D. Tobin, a Washington lawyer who often represents news organizations, saw a silver lining. The jury had, he said, generally credited the reporters’ testimony over Mr. Libby’s statements.

“This can only help the credibility of journalists in the face of an administration that is doing everything it can to paint journalists as liars,” Mr. Tobin said.

But saying that the jury believed the reporters is small comfort, Ms. Dalglish said. “Reporters are supposed to be believable,” she said. “We’ve come to the point that it’s a surprise.”

Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation introduced a new tool to pressure journalists. Prosecutors asked possible sources for reporters to sign waivers instructing journalists to disregard confidentiality deals, and most of the sources did, perhaps in earnest and perhaps in fear of the consequences of refusing.

The journalists involved in the Libby case mostly said they had not relied solely on such waivers in deciding to testify, as they were wary of potential coercion. But in the end, on one rationale or another, journalists ended up testifying nonetheless.

“This is a calamity,” said Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington and Lee University. “It’s a high-profile prosecution that would never have happened if not for the willingness of some of the most respected journalists in the country to wriggle free of confidentiality agreements.”

Walter Pincus, a reporter for The Washington Post who testified at the Libby trial, disagreed.

“I didn’t testify until my source came forward,” Mr. Pincus said, referring to Ari Fleischer, the former White House spokesman. “You can still protect your sources.”

It is hard to know, though, precisely what the practical impact of Mr. Libby’s conviction will be on other sources’ willingness to confide in the press. Mr. Fitzgerald told reporters on Tuesday that his prosecution was unusual in that Mr. Libby’s motives were not pure. “The reporters involved here were not just people who got whistle-blowing tips,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

But Professor Feldstein said nothing would turn on that distinction.

“We can debate about the motives of these sources,” Professor Feldstein said, “but the chill is as real for the idealistic whistle-blower as it is for the vindictive or malicious political operative.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/wa...itzgerald.html





We Have Put-Back: Super Bowl Warnings Back Online
Wendy

At least in this case, YouTube seems to be following the DMCA's notice-takedown-counter-repost dance. Fourteen business days (512(g)'s outer limit) from my counter-notification, I received this email from YouTube:

Dear Wendy,

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we've completed processing your counter-notification regarding your video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4uC2H10uIo. This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized. For technical reasons, it may take a day for the video to be available again.

The NFL has apparently chosen not to sue to keep the video offline. Once again, therefore, viewers can see the NFL's copyright threats in all their glory.

I'm left wondering how many other fair users have gone through this process. On Chilling Effects we see many DMCA takedowns, some right and some wrong, but very few counter-notifications. Part of the problem is that the counter-notifier has to swear to much more than the original notifier. While NFL merely had to affirm that it was or was authorized to act on behalf of a rights-holder to take-down, I had to affirm in response that I had "good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled." A non-lawyer might be chilled from making that statement, under penalty of perjury, even with a strong good faith belief.
http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archiv...ck_online.html





Turkey Blocks YouTube
FM Reader writes

After a controversial mock-up video reportedly submitted by a Greek member about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, Turkish courts ordered the national ISPs to ban the online video service, YouTube. YouTube hostnames are currently redirected at the DNS level to a page that announces the court order.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/07/1417237





P2P-Zone unblocked

The Great Firewall of China

You there! Yes you. Do you take your freedom to surf the web for granted? I’m sure we all do and I’m sure most of us have tasted what it is to be blocked when viewing innocent web sites at work. It’s sort of sour with a bitter after taste.

Well then you can imagine what it must be like for Internet savvy surfers in China; a country notorious for censoring the Internet. Touted as having some of the most sophisticated firewalls in the world, greatfirewallofchina.org lets you check if you can pass China’s strict IP monitors. Apparently Next Lust is blocked. Yes, we here are nothing but hordes of anti-socialistic tech journalists with a hidden anti-red agenda.

What about your site? Are you blocked? Sound off!
http://nextlust.com/the-great-firewall-of-china





A People's Sexual Revolution in China
David Barboza


A Chinese edition of Esquire magazine. The censors aren't as zealous as they used to be.

WHEN Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue hit the newsstands last week in China for the first time, with the sexy singer Beyoncé on the cover, the competition was fierce.

Readers here had already seen the February issue of For Him Magazine, which features a Chinese singer named A Duo on its cover wearing a white V-neck leotard that reveals every other inch of her rather substantial figure.

Inside, A Duo poses like a dominatrix, clutching her breasts, wrapping her naked body in celluloid and bending, sweat-drenched, over a submissive man.

The racy For Him Magazine also offers tips on "how to do it in five minutes" (because a "sex break is the same as a coffee break") and features stories with titles like "The Dangerous Sex Journey of QiQi."

The images and text would hardly be shocking to American or European readers. And the magazine's photographs are tame compared with what appears in magazines in Japan and other parts of Asia.

But in China, where sex is still a taboo subject and pornography is outlawed by the ruling Communist Party, the images are not only highly provocative but perhaps the latest sign that sex and sexuality are infiltrating the mainstream media.

And this powerful burst of sexual energy seems both a symbol of how rapidly China's transformation is unfolding and, to some, a harbinger of the troubles ahead for a nation that will inevitably struggle to absorb its newfound freedoms. "There is a fine line between the open mind and sexual indulgence," said Xie Xialing, a professor of sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Even five years ago, Chinese books and magazines were censored or banned from showing pictures of scantily clad models or publishing content that was deemed offensive or morally corrupt. The only sexual content to be found was in sex education pamphlets or books of nude Chinese women sold as "art works" at big city airports.

Today, however, with China's economy booming and the government loosening its hold on the personal lives of everyday citizens, magazines are beginning to publish soft-core pornographic photographs, sexual fantasies, even clues about where to pick up call girls.

Popular Chinese Web sites are going further, posting erotic videos and creating forums for women eager to market their sex appeal and post their photographs on the Internet: images of traveling with friends, undressing at home, even striking erotic poses.

"This is a kind of grass-roots sexual revolution," said Annie Wang, author of "The People's Republic of Desire," a satirical novel about the country's mad race to modernization.

The government announces periodic crackdowns on pornography and often censors sexual content in magazines and on the Web. But since about 2000, the censors have started to look the other way. Political activism is still a no-no in New China. Entertainment is a different matter. Even the Web site of Xinhua, the state-run news agency, offers slide shows of the "10 Hottest Babes of 2006" and "Rarely Seen Photos of Sexy Men."

Many say the trend is being driven by the market, and by entrepreneurs eager to cash in on the country's freer lifestyles.

"The market is the No. 1 driving force behind the boom of such magazines," said Pan Suiming, a professor of sociology at Renmin University in Beijing.Western luxury brands entering the Chinese market want to advertise in popular magazines and on Web sites that draw consumers. And in China right now, pictures of sex kittens draw.

For Him Magazine is one of the success stories of this genre, with a circulation of about 480,000. (It probably helps that the magazine is published by a government agency, the National Tourism Administration, an indication of official interest in investing in the phenomenon.) Jacky Jin, the editor in chief, says he wanted to affirm a new kind of lifestyle for readers that he calls China's new metrosexuals, guys who love cars, gadgets and girls.

"We're opening a new window for Chinese men," he says, noting that he's been criticized by government censors on several occasions.

A decade ago, the private lives of people in China were still quite restricted. Whom you married, where you lived and what was considered permissible were tightly controlled or closely monitored by the government, employers and parental authorities.

But urbanization, greater mobility and the power of the World Wide Web have challenged all that.

Now, experts say, China is going through a period of enormous personal and sexual freedom. Young people — most of whom grew up without siblings under the country's one-child policy — are wearing more hip and provocative clothing. And they're growing addicted to entertainment online, where they can also search for love and indulge their lust.

Professor Pan said he thought one reason for the cultural change was a change in women's attitudes.

"Today's women, especially young women in the cities, no longer think it's a bad thing to expose their bodies," he said. "Five or six years ago, when some women started to wear clothes that exposed their midriff, most people couldn't understand why belly buttons should be regarded as beautiful and deserve public exposure. Today, young women think it is natural to bare their midriff."

Zha Jianying, a Beijing writer and author of "China Pop," says the growing openness is actually a good thing.

"This trend of being more open about sex is definitely healthy, coming after all those years of puritanism and Maoist suppression," Ms. Zha says. "Now, maybe we're seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction."

But Professor Xie at Fudan University says things have gone too far.

"In certain periods in history, such as the decadent Ming Dynasty, sex was not a taboo and even intellectuals would talk about their sex skills casually over tea," he said. "Today's society is still better than that. But I do find that people care less about dignity."

He went on to call for limits on how much skin can be shown publicly, and said: "Human beings should have a sense of shame." Other critics say the new freedoms have brought degeneracy, a boom in prostitution, and what Ms. Wang, the author, called "the concubine mentality." Hard-core pornography, of course, is under assault by the government, which can exact heavy fines on trespassers. One pornography kingpin was recently sentenced to life in prison.

And censors are wary of influences from the West, like "Sex and the City," which has a huge following here, mostly on pirated DVDs. Even "The Vagina Monologues" show was canceled here recently, apparently because of the title.

But in a country that also happens to be the largest manufacturer of sex toys, being naughty is catching on.

In November a man here in Shanghai was selling condoms in packages bearing the likeness of Chairman Mao.

His shop was closed, of course, for selling condoms in "inappropriate packages."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...304barboza.php





Schoolgirls Suspended for Using Word 'Vagina' During Reading of Feminist Play
AP

A public high school has suspended three girls who disobeyed officials by saying the word "vagina" during a reading from a well-known feminist play.

The students, Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson, included the word during their reading of "The Vagina Monologues" because, "It wasn't crude and it wasn't inappropriate and it was very real and very pure," Reback said.

Their defiant stand is being applauded by the play's author, who said Tuesday that the school should be celebrating, rather than punishing, the three juniors.

"Don't we want our children to resist authority when it's not appropriate and wise?" said Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues."

The excerpt from "Monologues" was read Friday night, among various readings at an event sponsored by the literary magazine at John Jay High School in Cross River, a New York City suburb. Among the other readings was a student's original work and the football coach quoting Shakespeare.

The girls took turns reading the excerpt until they came to the word, then said it together.

"My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army," they read. "I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

The play, presented as various women's thoughts about sexual subjects, has become a phenomenon since its Off-Broadway opening in 1996. All-star readings are common, and on "V-Day" each year — usually Feb. 14_ it is often performed by volunteers and college students to battle violence against women.

The suspension outraged some parents, who circulated an e-mail calling the punishment a "blatant attempt at censorship."

But Principal Richard Leprine said Tuesday that the girls were punished because they disobeyed orders, not because of what they said.

The event was open to the community, including children, and the word was not appropriate, Leprine said in a statement. He said the girls had been told when they auditioned that they could not use the word.

The school "recognizes and respects student freedom of expression," Leprine said. "That right, however, is not unfettered."

"When a student is told by faculty members not to present specified material because of the composition of the audience and they agree to do so, it is expected that the commitment will be honored and the directive will be followed," he said. "When a student chooses not to follow the directive, consequences follow."

Bob Lichtenfeld, superintendent of the Katonah-Lewisboro school district, which includes John Jay, said that had the teens, who are in their third year of high school, wanted to perform the play, they would probably not have encountered opposition.

"As long as the intended audience knows what to expect, we don't have a problem with it."

Reback told The Journal News, "I think almost everyone can agree it's important to uphold the integrity of literature and not change or alter it." Ensler said the girls were right for "standing up for art and against censorship."

"The school's position is absurd, a throwback to the Dark Ages," she said. "So what, if children were to hear the word? Would that be terrible? We're not talking about plutonium here, or acid rain, a word that destroys lives. It's a body part!"

"Monologue" performances occasionally provoke controversy.

Conservative Catholics criticized the University of Notre Dame's decision to allow a performance on campus last April. This year, student planners could not get an academic sponsor.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...-Suspended.php





Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.
Michael Arrington

I’ve been writing about the Amie Street music site since their launch last July. Their model has the potential to disrupt the music industry from the bottom up: Bands and labels upload music, which is downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format. The price always starts at free, and as more people download the song, the price starts to rise, eventually hitting $.98. Higher priced songs are by definition more popular, and I’ve found that anything over $.50 or so is pretty good music. 70% of proceeds go to the band/label, and Amie Street keeps the rest.

The service is now starting to make real progress with labels, too. They’ve signed a deal with Nettwerk Music Group, which will be uploading their entire library to Amie Street over the next few months. The first music to go up on the site is the new Barenaked Ladies album, Barenaked Ladies Are Men. All sixteen songs from the album are available here.

The songs will only be free through the first few downloads, and will start to rise after that. But even at full price, listeners are getting quality music, DRM-free. Let’s hope other labels follow Nettwerk shortly. Market driven prices and no DRM = Music Nirvana.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/05...ee-no-drm-now/





Macrovision Licenses DRM to Online Video Stores
Ed Oswald

Macrovision said Tuesday that it had signed agreements with several online providers to employ the company's Analog Copy Protection (ACP) system in Internet movie and video distribution.

Deals have been struck with Netflix, BitTorrent, Movielink, and Instant Media. Macrovision claims the DRM technology will actually give consumers more choices in how, when, and where they can view content.

For example, Netflix plans to use the technology to help expand its list of films and television shows that are available for immediate viewing online. Instant Media says the deal would also make it easier for the services to collaborate with studios to protect their content.

"Macrovision's technology is a foundation for the growth of digital distribution in an open market," Macrovision president and CEO Fred Amoroso said.

"By making media content protection easier to integrate in the distribution channel, we're enabling the distributors to execute innovative business models and respond to consumer demand for more access to their favorite content online," he continued.

According to data by Parks Associates, revenues from the sales of Internet video will reach $7 billion by 2010, with downloads and rentals making up 40 percent of that total.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...res/1173220108





WGA Reports Back To MS Even If You Choose Not To Install
Aviran Mordo

Heise online reports on a very interesting action Microsoft is taking during the installation of WGA.

When you start WGA setup and get to the license agreement page but decided NOT to install the highly controversial WGA component and cancel the installation, the setup program will send your info and the fact that you choose not to install WGA back to their servers.

In addition to that it seems that the setup program send some information stored in your registry to http://genuine.microsoft.com/. While it does not specifically identify the user, it looks like it does send some identification of your computer and Windows version (see picture) to Microsoft servers.
http://www.aviransplace.com/2007/03/...ot-to-install/





Lead Singer Of Boston Dies
AP

Delp Was 55

Brad Delp, the lead singer for the band Boston, was found dead Friday in his home in southern New Hampshire. He was 55.

Atkinson police responded to a call for help at 1:20 p.m. and found Delp dead. Police Lt. William Baldwin said in a statement the death was "untimely" and that there was no indication of foul play.

Delp apparently was alone at the time of his death, Baldwin said.

The cause of his death remained under investigation by the Atkinson police and the New Hampshire Medical Examiner's office. Police said an incident report would not be available until Monday.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/ente...s=bos&psp=news





Music's New Gatekeeper

From their Silicon Valley cubicles, Apple staffers have become music's unlikely power brokers. Our reporters on the horse-trading that can turn unknowns into stars.
Nick Wingfield and Ethan Smith

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying -- out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular.

How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site -- or whether Nickelback gets no mention?

Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.

Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes.

The decisions by the small group of Silicon Valley and music-industry veterans running iTunes can help put an unknown band on the map, adding millions of dollars in sales, while relegating others to the obscurity of the site's virtual back bins.

Push for Exclusives

Apple's muscle-flexing has begun to rub some artists and music companies the wrong way. During a recent radio interview, outspoken British pop singer Lily Allen accused iTunes of "bullying" artists into supplying exclusive content. There's a further worry among music executives that the few spots available to promote artists on iTunes are dwindling as Apple remakes the store into a broader entertainment destination for TV shows, movies and games.

But so far, most labels comply because of the site's ability to drive sales. During a week when an album is featured on the iTunes home page it can sell about five times more copies on average through the site than it does in the three to five weeks that follow, when the album isn't featured, says one industry executive.

"The way MTV used to be the place where you had to have a video playing as one of the key legs of the stool, iTunes is now one of the key legs of the stool," says Chris Douridas, an influential deejay at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and a former consultant to iTunes.

Not only does securing a spot on the iTunes home page require concessions by music companies -- it also depends on having material that resonates with the tastes of iTunes staffers. Three months before Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment was gearing up to promote a handful of older Prince titles, timed to coincide with the musician's recent performance at the Super Bowl halftime show, the label entered into talks with iTunes. The result: Four albums, including "Purple Rain," received prominent positions in the store and were priced at $7.99 -- $2 less than Apple's standard album price.

"They said, 'We'd like to be able to offer it at a special price,'" says David Dorn, Rhino's senior vice president for digital strategy. "I said, 'We'd like to get in the New Music Tuesdays newsletter and home-page placement.' I gave a little, they gave a little. But no cash changed hands."

After the prime display, digital sales of "Purple Rain" rose fivefold, according to SoundScan, while sales of "The Very Best of Prince" more than doubled. Three less-known albums in the promotion saw modest increases.

In January, iTunes executives approached several record labels to set up a promotion in which they would slash the prices of 20 greatest-hits albums to $7.99, and Apple in turn would flag the entire group on the home page. The first album that came up, Queen's 34-song "Greatest Hits 1 & 2," originally released by Walt Disney's Hollywood Records in the mid 1990s and normally sold on iTunes for nearly $34, zoomed to No. 1 on the site's album-sales chart. It stayed in the top 10 for the entire 10 days of the promotion.

Groups like Gnarls Barkley have enjoyed significant boosts from iTunes. Last year, the alternative-soul duo's "Crazy" became the first song to hit No. 1 on the British pop charts based solely on digital sales. When the Shins' third album, "Wincing the Night Away," made its debut in January at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album-sales chart, nearly 30% of the first-week sales were made online -- most on iTunes.

For consumers, Apple's growing influence means exposure to a wider range of music. Apple has told some recording companies that music from independent labels accounts for about 15% of iTunes sales, compared with about 5% for physical retailers.

Mike Schiller, a management consultant in Cleveland, says the iTunes home page, along with Apple's New Music Tuesday newsletter, has frequently introduced him to music and movies that he later purchased, including an album by a British act called Guillemots and a Mark Wahlberg football movie called "Invincible." "It's pretty powerful," says Mr. Schiller, 48 years old, who worked as a record-store clerk while a teenager in Omaha, Neb. "It will give you exposure to stuff that you don't normally see."

Rare Growth Story

ITunes is housed at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in a cluster of nondescript cubicles that could easily be confused with a software-development group but for a smattering of music posters on the walls, according to people who have visited or worked there.

The iTunes staff includes people with music pedigrees, including Alex Luke, a longtime deejay who is the director of music programming and label relations. (Mr. Luke still sits in occasionally for stations like Los Angeles's Indie 103.1 FM.) Bruno Ybarra, who co-founded a house-music record label, manages relationships with independent music companies. Denzyl Feigelson, a South African who was a manager for singer Paul Simon's "Graceland" tour, is a music editor for iTunes in London. In all, dozens of iTunes editors and label-relations staffers collaborate in meetings and discussions throughout the week to determine what the home page of the iTunes Store will look like when it is refreshed every Tuesday.

Apple is a rare growth story in the music business. It nearly monopolizes digital-music sales, just about the only growth area for the beleaguered industry, which saw CD sales fall for seven years running. ITunes sold 1.2 billion songs last year compared with 30 million in 2003, its first year in operation, Apple says. The company says it passed Amazon.com last year to become the fourth-largest music retailer in the U.S., behind Wal-Mart Stores, Target and Best Buy, a claim that isn't disputed by music companies. At the end of last year, Apple was selling five million songs a day at 99 cents each.

Its growing clout has transformed Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs -- who kick-started online music sales several years ago with a set of breakthrough song-licensing deals with major recording companies -- into a figure music executives alternately admire and grouse about. Mr. Jobs recently caused a kerfuffle by urging music executives to consider dropping their insistence on digital copy-protection software on songs, which Mr. Jobs believes is holding back Internet music sales.

Label executives say that since Apple began selling TV shows and movies in the past year, they must begin discussions with Apple three to six months before a major music release if they want a shot at home-page promotion. In physical stores, such prime real estate is typically for sale. To secure prominent "end-cap" placement on CD racks near the ends of aisles at national retail chains, major music labels can pay as much as $5 per disc displayed in the form of discounts, "cooperative advertising" payments and other fees, according to executives. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars for a major promotion involving 5,000 discs or more. Such hefty payments can effectively erase any profit on the CDs on display in an end-cap.

Apple says it shunned pay-for-placement -- as have online rivals including RealNetworks' Rhapsody -- to provide unbiased music recommendations. Eddy Cue, the Apple vice president who oversees iTunes, says the company hopes to recapture some of the spirit of independent record stores, when clerks would give uncompromised tips on promising performers. "That for us was kind of gone in the new retail environment," Mr. Cue says. Customers used to believe that advice on music "was coming from someone who really liked it versus someone who was paid to say they liked it."

Apple isn't under as much pressure to squeeze profits from iTunes because of the money it makes on iPods. In fact, it earns little from iTunes after paying fees for the music and credit-card processing. ITunes typically pays major labels about 72 cents a track, while it pays most independent labels around 62 cents.

Exclusive material greatly increases the likelihood that iTunes will turn up its promotion machine. In some cases, that involves getting artists such as Sting or Willie Nelson to record interviews and performances that Apple sells as a package. The company recently struck up a relationship with the Las Vegas casino the Palms to record live concerts by artists such as John Legend, for which it pays production costs.

The Orchard, an online distributor of music from independent labels, recently agreed to let Apple have an album of material by the artist G. Love one week before other Internet retailers got it. Apple ran a promotion on the front page of iTunes and the album reached No. 17 on the site's album charts, says Greg Scholl, the distributor's CEO.

Yet Ms. Allen, the young British singer behind the hit "Smile," complained during the recent radio interview about Apple's tactics. "They won't advertise your album unless you give them extra material," Ms. Allen said. She said iTunes pushed her to quickly turn out a version of a song, so she planned to give them a "rubbish remix." Ms. Allen said she would offer a better version free on her MySpace page. Apple declined to comment on Ms. Allen's remarks, and a spokeswoman for her label, EMI Group's Capitol Records, said the singer and her manager weren't available to elaborate.

And while Apple has made it a practice to seek out new artists, iTunes still has glaring gaps in its inventory. The best known is the absence of anything by the Beatles and much of the band members' subsequent solo recordings -- a situation that stemmed partially from a trademark dispute between Apple and the band's Apple Corps Ltd. record label. (Apple has said it's hopeful it will get the Beatles on iTunes following a recent settlement between the company and Apple Corps.) Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Radiohead, too, haven't licensed their music to the service. And due to licensing issues, some albums are sold minus one or more songs. Elvis Costello's "Spike," from 1989, is missing one track, while only three songs from the J. Geils Band's 1972 "Full House 'Live'" are available on iTunes.

Still, Apple is being fawned over by much of the music industry. Digital Music Group, a Sacramento, Calif., company that handles online distribution for independent labels, has four people on staff who spend most of their time chatting up iTunes editors and sending them CDs of bands in an attempt to get promotion on the site. Tuhin Roy, the distributor's chief strategy officer, is impressed by the knowledge of the Apple staffers. "Clearly, they know the music they're dealing with," he says.

Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, went so far as to bring urban artist Kevin Michael to Cupertino to perform for iTunes staffers. Apparently impressed, iTunes executives committed to releasing an Apple-only collection of tracks next month, in advance of Mr. Michael's debut album. While some music executives are frustrated about what it takes to woo Apple, "The flip side is, when they do step out on a new artist, it's that much more meaningful," Mr. Deutsch says.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





How MP3 Was Born

Karlheinz Brandenburg often is cited as the inventor of the music format. But he credits many for a discovery that has upended the music business
Jack Ewing

Karlheinz Brandenburg doesn't like being labeled the "inventor" of MP3. He points out that the most popular format for digital music on the Internet is the work of at least a half-dozen core developers and many others who made important contributions. Even folk-rock singer Suzanne Vega inadvertently played a walk-on role in the creation of MP3. "I know on whose shoulders I stand and who else contributed a lot," says Brandenburg, now director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany.

Still, there's no doubt Brandenburg was one of the crucial contributors to the technology that upended the music business and paved the way for Apple's (AAPL) immensely popular iPod media players and iTunes download service (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/26/07, "Apple's International iTunes Controversy"). In a recent interview, Brandenburg, 52, recalled how MP3 came into being. The story offers a lesson in the innovation process and a warning about how tricky it can be to sort out the intellectual property rights behind inventions that involve numerous organizations and people.

In February, a jury at the U.S. District Court in San Diego awarded Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) $1.5 billion in damages from Microsoft (MSFT) for use of some MP3 patents. Those patents stem from work done at Bell Labs, which belonged to a corporate forebear of the French-American telco-equipment maker.
"Terrible Distortion"

Brandenburg's involvement in digital music compression began in the early 1980s when he was a doctoral student at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. A professor urged Brandenburg to work on the problem of how to transmit music over a digital ISDN phone line. It wasn't just a computer coding problem. Brandenburg had to immerse himself in the science behind how people perceive music.

That was where Suzanne Vega came in. Her song Tom's Diner, though seemingly a simple ditty, proved devilishly difficult to reproduce without annoying background noise. "Suzanne Vega was a catastrophe. Terrible distortion," Brandenburg recalls. "The a cappella version of Tom's Diner was more difficult to compress without compromising on audio quality than anything else."

When MP3 developers refined the technology to the point where Tom's Diner sounded true to the original, they had made a major breakthrough. "I've listened to this 20 seconds [of Tom's Diner] a thousand times. I still like the music," says Brandenburg, who met Vega years later when both attended an event in Cannes to mark the creation of MP3.

Fierce Competition

Brandenburg continued working on MP3—which wasn't known by that name until later—after finishing his doctoral work in 1989 and becoming an assistant professor at Erlangen-Nuremberg. He worked closely with scientists at the Fraunhofer Society, one of Germany's premiere research institutions, and joined the staff of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen in 1993 (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/12/07, "An Idea Incubator Tries to Grow Cash").

The Fraunhofer team was by no means the only group trying to solve the problem of transmitting music over the Internet. Groups at several other German universities as well as in other countries were racing to develop a standard. Researchers knew that figuring out a way to send high-fidelity sound over telecommunications lines could be important, though few suspected how immense the impact would be. "It became much bigger than we thought at the time," Brandenburg says.

Competition was fierce, and it was sometimes political as well as technical. Numerous teams lobbied for approval of the International Standards Organization, whose Motion Picture Experts Group, or MPEG, would determine which formats became industry norms. In 1993, after lengthy debate that led to consolidation of some of the competing standards, MPEG chose several formats.

Instant Fascination

MP3, based largely on the work of Fraunhofer and private partners including French electronics maker Thomson (TMS), proved to be the most efficient and popular. (Another standard to which the Fraunhofer contributed, known as Advanced Audio Coding or AAC, is the native technology used by the iPod, which also supports MP3 encoding.)

MP3 began to take off in the late 1990s when college computer geeks, aided by faster PCs, began using the format to create music files. Brandenburg says he had an inkling of the disruptive effects of the technology when he read a newspaper article about efforts by the Recording Industry Association of America to shut down student Web sites stocked with MP3 files. In 1997, Microsoft incorporated MP3 support into its Windows Media Player, and in 1998 the first portable MP3 players began appearing.

Brandenburg recalls showing an early Korean-made MP3 device to acquaintances. Even people who weren't gadget freaks were fascinated. "A lot of people said, 'I want to have it, how much does it cost?' This was when you had to pay a couple of hundred dollars for 15 to 30 minutes of music."

May We Suggest?

Since then, MP3 patents have generated tens of millions in royalty payments for the nonprofit Fraunhofer, including $143 million in 2005, when the number of companies buying MP3 licenses peaked. A Fraunhofer official says the institution was unpleasantly surprised by the San Diego court ruling against Microsoft. But a Thomson spokeswoman says the patents that generate royalties for Fraunhofer and Thomson are not affected.

Brandenburg hasn't become a dot-com zillionaire from his work on MP3, but he received a substantial cut of the royalty payments under a German law that entitles researchers to a share of the profits from their inventions. (He won't say how much.)

As director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user's tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist. Brandenburg is also involved in research to deliver more realistic, true-to-life media than anything now available. Perhaps he'll even help touch off another revolution.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...05_707122.htm?





Companies Mine Growth of MP3 Homework
Madlen Read

Lindleigh Whetstone wears headphones as she shoves clothes into the washing machine. Her classmate, Stepheno Zollos, wears them as he shops for groceries. An onlooker might assume the teens are listening to the latest top 40 hit, but they're really learning Spanish.

Whetstone, 18, and Zollos, 17, are students in Kathy O'Connor's class at Tidewater Community College in Southeastern Virginia. O'Connor got an $11,000 grant from the school to lend her students iPods so they can practice their Spanish conversations anywhere -- not just sitting in front of a computer.

"I get a lot more listening in than I did before," said Whetstone, who estimates that it's increased from about 30 minutes a week to 4 or 5 hours.

Students are using MP3 players more to listen to downloaded books, textbook study guides and language labs on-the-go. Books and personal stereos have always been portable, of course, but audio books are easier to carry around in MP3 form. A typical 300-page novel might take up 12 CDs, but only a tiny portion of an MP3 player's memory and prices for audiobook downloads are mostly comparable to audio CDs.

The percentages are still small, according to a recent study by market research firm Harrison Group Inc. that surveyed 1,000 teens in September 2006 using a 45-minute Internet questionnaire. Music listening made up about 85 percent of MP3 use among teens, video was about 10 percent, and podcasts and audio texts fell under the remaining 5 percent.

But the actual numbers are growing, and companies that make educational materials are banking on them climbing higher.

Over half of teens owned a portable MP3 player in mid-2006, according to TEMPO, a study of digital music behavior conducted by market research firm Ipsos that surveyed over 1,000 Americans aged 12 and up.

"Students are more mobile today. Their expectations of being able to get digital content is certainly much higher than it has been in the past," said Scott Criswell, product manager of online delivery systems for the higher education unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., one of the three biggest textbook publishers. Criswell said the company now offers more than 800 digital products, most with audio, and that figure has increased by 50 percent over the past four years.

Teachers, especially at the college level, are increasingly making resources available in MP3 form: Michael Barrett, a cardiologist at Temple University, even put recordings of heart murmurs online so his medical students could download and listen to them, instead of squeezing in time with a patient.

"The iPod becomes a simulated patient, really," Barrett said.

Schools including Stanford University and University of Wisconsin-Madison now belong to iTunes U, a service launched a year ago by Apple Inc. that lets professors post lectures and students download them for free. Meanwhile, some libraries, including Swem Library at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, are lending out MP3 players to students. And for its summer assignment to incoming freshmen last year, Seton Hall University chose to assign listening, not reading: a piece by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

In response, new products have been popping up.

Audible Inc., the biggest audio book seller, and Pearson Education, the biggest textbook publisher, teamed up last summer to launch VangoNotes, textbook chapter summaries and reviews in MP3 form. The companies declined to give specific sales figures, but said thousands of students have downloaded the more than 100 titles, which should grow to 200 titles by fall.

"Right now it's a small part of our business, but we believe it's going to be a growing part of our overall strategy," said Sandi Kirshner, chief marketing officer of Pearson's higher education unit.

It's not just college students; grade schoolers are starting to do their reading with earphones, too.

One type of audio player called Playaway -- a two-ounce flashplayer pre-loaded with an audio book made by Follett Corp. and Findaway World -- was sold to school districts starting about 6 months ago. The players are now on loan at roughly 1,500 libraries, 15 percent of which are school libraries.

Belinda Jacks, who oversees 38 school libraries in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, recently ordered Playaways for her libraries, and said they've become "shockingly" popular.

She added that, contrary to some parents' concerns, listening to books encourages reading. This expands on reading out loud to kids, which studies show boosts literacy, Jacks said.

When you compare traditional books to audiobooks, however, there's a big difference in price. A new paperback copy of Charlotte's Web costs $8 on Amazon, whereas the Playaway version costs $30, and an iTunes download of it costs $17 (many other iTunes book downloads cost more -- for example, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice costs $26, and the more recent Harry Potter books cost $50.) And that doesn't even count the cost of an MP3 player, for those students who don't have them.

The key is getting schools to help out with the costs, said O'Connor, the Spanish instructor at Tidewater Community College. Of the 16 students in O'Connor's class this semester, only two had their own MP3 players at the outset.

Marketing experts point out that the audiobook industry is already one of the fastest-growing parts of publishing. And given the new technologies that will merge phones and Internet browsers with MP3 players, the market could grow even more quickly, said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of Harrison Group, which conducted the study on teen technology trends.

"It's interestingly changing the way in which people are educated. You just need to ask intelligent questions, and you can get answers anytime, anywhere, in real time," Taylor said. "Education becomes no longer a fact-based learning process, it's search-based, cognitive. It's kind of like what happened to math skills with the calculator."

But just like radio and television before, new gadgets are unlikely to replace the book as we know it. More people are buying books than ever before.

"It's like radio," Taylor said. "Radio is bigger than it ever was. It's just different."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...D8N4D5E84.htm?





MIT Puts Entire Curriculum at Disposal of e-Learners
Kim Thomas

The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by
the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.

By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare programme will transform the e-learning landscape.

MIT initiated the programme in 2001 and material from 1,550 MIT courses is already available. Anne Margulies, executive director of Open CourseWare, said that in January alone, the site had had 1.5 million visits, and the figure rose to two million if visits to language translated sites were included. Overseas visitors– from China and India in particular – dominate usage traffic, with 60% of visits originating outside the US.

Margulies said that MIT had seen little potential for making money from putting materials online and had decided to give them away. She said that about half of the Open CourseWare users were teaching themselves with the materials, 35% were students at other institutions, and 15% were teachers.

“MIT is eager for the material to be re-used, as long as it is for noncommercial purposes, and whoever re-uses it gives proper citation to the original MIT author as well as to MIT,” Margulies said.

An international consortium of open courseware providers has been formed ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ). It has 120 members, half of whom are already providing open courseware.

http://ocw.mit.edu

http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-wor...ire-curriculum





Tamil Nadu Gets Dual-Boot Win-Linux Desktops

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has finalized a tender for 40,000 Lenovo desktops which can be installed with both Novell's Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition.
Aaron Tan

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has finalized a tender for 40,000 Lenovo desktops which can be installed with both Novell's Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition.

According to C. Umashankar, managing director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot), the desktops will be deployed across schools and government departments in the state. Elcot is Tamil Nadu's state-owned IT supplier.

Umashankar said the desktops will be installed with either Suse Linux or dual-boot Windows XP Starter Edition/Suse Linux configurations, depending on the needs of the organization.

For instance, schools will be provided with Suse Linux desktops, while government employees who still require Windows in their work will get dual-boot machines, he told ZDNet Asia.

Dual-boot machines will cost 22,000 rupees (US$497) each, though this was not the initial price point quoted by the vendors, Umakshankar said, adding that Chennai-based IT company Origin Infosys will supply the Lenovo desktops.

He said that Elcot was originally quoted 21,800 rupees (US$492) for each Lenovo system, whether the preloaded OS was Suse Linux or Windows XP Starter Edition. After some negotiation, Elcot secured the final price of 22,000 rupees (US$497) for dual-boot systems, Umashankar said.

Suse Linux is a full-fledged OS with no restrictions on how the platform is used, while Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition does not allow users to run more than three software applications at one time.

According to Umashankar, users will be "encouraged" to use Suse Linux as far as possible.

Earlier this year, Tamil Nadu announced plans for all government agencies across the state to switch from Microsoft Windows desktop to Linux and the OpenOffice productivity suite. The move is expected to slash the local government's IT cost by 15 to 25 percent.
http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/softw...es/172654.html





AMD Warns on Revenue

Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 microprocessor maker, warned that it will likely miss its quarterly revenue target as it loses market share among computer resellers, a traditional bulwark of its business.

It was the second quarter in a row AMD has shown signs of trouble as it wages a bruising price war with Intel, a fight that has eroded profits at both main rivals in the $30 billion processor industry.

The two Silicon Valley combatants said they expected competitive pricing to continue this year, with Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini hinting he is ready to dig in his heels to stop AMD's overall recent market share gains.

"I've always been a market share guy," Otellini said in remarks Webcast from a Morgan Stanley investment conference. "In order to generate the scale at which we operate our business, having a very significant market share is critical."

Intel's total market share among desktop, laptop and server computers fell to 74.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006, while AMD's rose to a record 25 percent, according to market research firm Mercury Research.

However, AMD said on Monday that its first-quarter revenue would fall short of the $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion target it gave in January. Wall Street, on average, was expecting revenue of $1.65 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz, also speaking at the Morgan Stanley conference, said direct sales to PC makers had grown dramatically in a short time, but faulted his company for failing to focus on its traditional customers, the computer resellers -- smaller retailers and PC assemblers the industry refers to as "the channel."

"We let down our channel partners by not being able to support them as much as they wanted," Ruiz said. "I think going into second quarter that we can regain the position we had before."

Last quarter, AMD posted a surprise net loss as the price war with Intel took a heavier toll than expected.

Ruiz sounded a bullish tone on the long-term prospects for the processor industry, saying the spread of computing into the entertainment, education and health industries meant demand could grow by 20 percent a year or more.

AMD shares closed down 23 cents, or 1.6 percent, at $13.95 on the New York Stock Exchange, after falling as low as $13.53 following the revenue warning. Intel shares fell 0.6 percent to end at $19.11 on the Nasdaq.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Cody Acree said the drop in AMD's share price may have been tempered by the fact that many investors already had low expectations.

"I think it's a continuation of share loss back to Intel and aggressive pricing in an effort to maintain share," Acree said. "I don't think anybody was expecting strength from AMD."

Also on Monday, the Semiconductor Industry Association said sales of all kinds of microchips rose more than 9 percent from a year earlier, data Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung cited as some evidence that the industry is set for a rebound.

Yeung said PC processor prices rose 4.6 percent in January, as calculated on a three-month moving average, while sales of processors rose half a percent, compared to a 5-year average decline of nearly 3 percent.

"While mix remains a main wild card, price trends we have observed do not portend a major price war," Yeung said.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2100491,00.asp




More on the Copyright Royalty Board Decision on Internet Radio Music Royalties

As we wrote on Friday, the Copyright Royalty Board released to the parties their decision setting the sound recording music royalties for Internet radio for the years 2006-2010 - and the rates will be increasing significantly (absent success on appeal or in settlement discussions). The rates and appeal process are set out in our post on Friday. The parties have until Monday, March 5 at noon, to request that the Board keep portions of the decision that contain confidential proprietary information out of the public record. Thus, the text of the decision is not yet public. Nevertheless, many parties are asking for more specific information about the decision and its impact. Certainly, when the decision is public, everyone will want to make their own judgments. But, until that time (which should be soon as the Board was careful to avoid using any significant amount of confidential information), I offer some observations about the decision (from my vantage point as a party who represented some of the webcasters involved in the proceeding), as well as thoughts on some of the questions that I have seen posted on various discussion boards this weekend.

First, it is essential to understand exactly what this decision covers. The Board’s decision covers only non-interactive webcasters operating pursuant to the statutory license. Our memo, here, discusses the statutory licensing scheme, and what a webcasting service must do to qualify to pay the royalties due under this statutory license. Essentially, a webcaster covered by this decision is one which operates like a radio station – where no listener can dictate which artists or songs he or she will hear (some limited degree of consumer influence is permitted, but a webcaster must comply with the restrictions set out in our memo). Also, the webcaster cannot notify their listeners when any specific song will play. The decision does cover the Internet transmissions of the over-the-air content of most broadcast stations.

The royalties are paid to SoundExchange – a nonprofit corporation with a Board made up of representatives of artists and the record companies. The royalties go to the copyright holders in Sound Recordings and the performers on those recordings ( the copyright holder is usually the record label. Royalties are split 50/50 – and the artist royalties are further divided 45% to the featured artist and 5% to any background musicians featured on the recording).

The decision by the Board was the result of a long proceeding – which began in 2005. A summary of the proceeding can be found in our posting, here. Satellite radio also has to pay similar royalties, as do services that provide background music to businesses ("business establishment services"). Separate proceedings are underway to determine rates for these services.

With that background – here are some more thoughts on the decision – obviously in very summary form. The Board is charged with determining the royalty rates that would be determined by a willing buyer and a willing seller in a marketplace transaction. The Board was clear in the decision that it would look simply for evidence of what such a deal would be – it would not look at policy reasons why certain groups of webcasters (including small commercial webcasters or noncommercial webcasters should get some special rate).

In setting the rate, the Board looked to proposed benchmarks by which it could determine what a hypothetical buyer and seller would agree to in the marketplace. It rejected the proposals advanced by the commercial webcasters that the appropriate benchmark was what was paid by the services for the underlying composition (i.e. the fees paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC). Instead, the Board adopted a benchmark rate derived by one of SoundExchange’s expert witnesses by taking the rate paid by certain interactive webcast services (ones which do not qualify for the statutory license and which thus must negotiate private deals with the record labels for use of their music), and adjusting those rates to take into account the differences in the statutory services (including the lesser value to consumers as they do not have the ability to select songs when using a service subject to the statutory license). The Board concluded that the rapidly escalating rate was justified as it brought the statutory services closer to the interactive services as the advertising market grows over the next few years.

The reliance on this benchmark lead to the numbers that we reported on Friday. In its decision, the Board also set out terms for payments. The terms are essentially those that are now in place for large webcasters, with a few changes. The Board approved an increase in the late fee on monthly payments - to a fee of 1.5% of the unpaid royalty per month. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The late fee would also be imposed on late filings of Statements of Account - the monthly reports as to how much a service owes and the computations used to reach that conclusion. The Board also concluded that copyright holders and artist could review the statements of account filed by services that played their music, though such information could not be revealed to the public.

So what does this all mean? Immediately, it creates issues for webcasters who were paying under the provisions of the Small Webcasters Settlement Act. While the law is very confusing as the effective date of the decision, one reading is that the rates go into effect immediately, even while an appeal is pending. Thus, services would be obligated to begin to pay at the rate decided by the Board (though past due amounts for 2006 and the first two months of 2007 would appear to not be due until the appeal is resolved). But, as these new fees will exceed the total revenues of many smaller webcasters (see the report in the Radio and Internet Newsletter, here), this would impose an incredible hardship - probably an impossible burden - on these services.

Larger noncommercial webcasters, who exceed the usage limitation covered by the flat $500 fee, would also face huge new royalties, as all overages would be at more than four times the rate that they pay for such overages now.

For all these services, a new obligation to track performances - how many listeners heard each and every song played by a service - is one that many small services will find difficult to meet. While some technical companies may be able to track that information, many smaller webcasters do not use services provided by those companies. And, as many Internet radio operators have been paying their royalties for 2006 and thus far in 2007 on a percentage of revenue or on Aggregate Tuning Hour basis, will they have any basis to determine their obligations for the fees that are retroactive to January 1, 2006?

The other type of service that could be hard hit by the decision would be the services that generate individual streams for each listener, or services that have many individual streams or channels. As the decision places a $500 minimum fee on each station or channel, and does not clearly define what is meant by a "channel" or "station," an argument could be made that services that generate an individual stream for each listener would have a $500 obligation for each stream they generate - even if that stream played just one song.

There are many other issues that will arise once the decision is released and reviewed by the public. But this decision is sure to have impact far beyond the streaming world. In the recently proposed XM/Sirius merger, about which we wrote here, the satellite radio services were arguing that competition from Internet Radio lessened any anticompetitive threat from the anticipated combination of the companies. Similarly, broadcasters have argued that webcasters provided competition that justified a relaxation of the multiple ownership rules. If many Internet radio stations disappear after this decision, these two proceedings may well be affected. Also, if the Internet does not provide an outlet for new broadcast entrants, will there be a greater clamor for more Low Power FM stations? These issues and other ramifications of the decision are sure to follow.

We will have more on the decision as questions arise and once the full text is made public.
http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/arch...royalties.html





The View from Paradise

Internet Radio, RIAA
Bill Goldsmith

I’m Bill Goldsmith, and my wife Rebecca and I have spent the last seven years of our lives pouring our hearts, minds, and financial resources into Radio Paradise. We are now faced with the very real possibility that all of our efforts will have been in vain, and that the thousands of people who are devoted listeners to our station will have it snatched out of their lives.

I have been in love with radio all of my life, and spent 30-odd years dealing with the conflict between my vision of radio as an art form and my FM-station employers’ vision of radio as a conduit for advertising. I have watched the medium that I love turn from an essential part of the process of connecting those who love making music with those whose lives are touched by it into a mindless background hum of advertising and disposable musical sludge.

With the advent of the Internet, we were finally able to bring to life the radio station I had always wanted to work for (and listen to): commercial-free, passionate, and embracing a wide universe of musical treasures, from the classic rock artists I grew up with to the latest indie discoveries, with a liberal sprinkling of world music, electronica, jazz, even classical. We have slowly built up a loyal audience and have been able to support ourselves while living our dream.

An Exciting - But Fragile - New Era for Radio

The Internet has changed radio in a profound way. Instead of a business that required investments so huge (millions of dollars for even a small-market FM station) that a programming focus on the lowest common denominator and an extreme aversion to risk or experimentation was an unavoidable consequence, a radio station with a global reach was now within the grasp of anyone with the talent and determination to make it happen.

Every day we hear from listeners who are profoundly touched by our efforts - by the music we play, by the way we assemble the songs into meaningful sequences that are more than the sum of their parts, by our passion for what we are doing, and our commitment to never contaminating the music with advertising. And our station is but one of many who have attracted that kind of passionate following, and provided that kind of outlet for radio artists like myself.

The Internet’s paradigm-shifting gift to radio programmers and music lovers - at least those in the US - is now in danger of being taken away by the misguided actions of the US Copyright Board. The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others.

The facts and figures of the new rates are detailed in Kurt Hanson’s newsletter for 3/2/07. Kurt’s analysis of the financial impact of the new rates is entirely accurate, and chilling.

The Artificial Analog vs. Digital Divide

There has been much discussion about how unfair these rates are, but our listeners find one fact particularly apalling: while Internet stations like ours are being told they must pay royalty fees that exceed their income, sometimes by several times over, FM stations - including those owned by media conglomerates like Clear Channel - pay nothing at all!

Yes, both FM stations and Internet stations pay royalties to songwriters and/or music publishers. But the royalties in question are owed to the owners of performance copyrights, which means, in most cases, record companies - and to them, FM stations pay nothing at all.

How is it possible for such a massive disparity to exist? For the answer to that we need to go back to the 1990s, when music industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to include wording in two pieces of legislation (the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998) that drew a sharp division between analog and digital broadcasts. Their reasoning was that a digital radio transmission was not a radio broadcast at all, but a sequence of perfect digital copies of music performances provided to the user, who could then copy them rather than paying to own a CD.

This is a profoundly flawed piece of reasoning, but members of Congress (who at that time had no idea how this whole digital thing worked) accepted it at face value, and agreed that it was only fair that digital broadcasts be subject to additional copyright fees, to be determined by an impartial (in theory…) ruling by the Copyright Office.

Let’s Get Real About This

Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners - indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working - knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.

As for the recording angle, I would challenge any random group of RIAA lawyers, copyright judges, or members of Congress to listen to a digital recording of our radio station and a high-quality cassette recording of an analog FM station and tell which was which. I guarantee that they could not. The differences in quality are too subtle for all but the most discerning listener to notice.

The quality jump between AM and FM broadcasts was an order of magnitude more significant, yet the music industry managed to thrive their way through that transition. The advent of decent-quality cassette recorders in the 70s, coupled with stereo FM broadcasting, made it possible for anyone who wanted to to make copies of their favorite songs from the radio, with a quality not too different from the analog LPs sold at the time. Did that spell a death-knell for the music industry? Not hardly. The 70s and 80s saw a phenominal growth in the sales of LPs and, later, CDs.

Ah, but the music industry thought that home music recording would destroy their sales, and lobbied unsuccessfully in the 1970s to cripple that technology. The same fear-based and misguided reasoning popped up again in the 90s, with the advent of digital recording and broadcasting, and this time the industry - flush with dollars earned after their earlier fears were proved groundless - succeeded in this attempt to preserve their bottom line at the expense of, well, pretty much every one else.

A Grave Disservice to The Public

Crippling an exciting, groundbreaking industry like Internet radio is certainly not in the best interests of the public, nor that of musical artists, and not even - if history is any judge - of the music industry itself. Just as they were unable to see how the advent of home music taping actually spurred the sale of LPs and CDs, they are unable to tell exactly what impact Internet radio and other forms of digital media will have on the future of their industry - and to behave as if they do know, and for Congress to go along with them, is a grave error, and public disservice, that needs to be recognized and corrected.

So, if we are building a business - even a non-commercial business like Radio Paradise - by the use of copyrighted material, isn’t it fair that we pay for its use? Perhaps it is. But the fact remains that what we are doing does not differ in any substantive way from what a company like Clear Channel is doing, and to move forward under the fiction that such a distinction exists is neither fair nor rational.

Perhaps the most equitable solution is for all broadcasters - analog or digital, terrestrial, satellite, or Internet - to pay such royalties equally, just as they all pay more or less equally for the use of music compositions. This is the situation in many other places in the world, including most of Europe. The fact that the US broadcasting lobby has successfully out-spent and out-manuevered the music industry on this issue should not be “balanced” by Internet radio royalty rates so high that they cripple that entire industry.

That kind of reform will take some time - time that people like my wife and myself just don’t have. We are hoping that we can, along with a small group of other independent webcasters, negotiate a separate settlement with the RIAA, similar to the one we negotiated in 2002. That agreement allowed us to operate by paying a royalty equal to 10% - 12% of our gross income in performance royalties. That has been enough of a burden for a struggling “mom & pop” operation like ours, but it has allowed us to survive since that point. However, that agreement has expired, and we are now liable for royalties, retroactive to the beginning of 2006, that are equal to aproximately 125% of our income.

Trust me, it has been difficult to write those checks knowing that the foundation that the entire royalty structure is based on is a lie. Perhaps we will succeed in negotiating a new deal with them. If we do, it will probably be at a significantly higher rate - creating even more of a burden on small businesses like ours.

My question is this: why should we continue to be penalized for the mistakes made by Congress back in the 1990s?

What’s The Solution

The truly fair solution is a moratorium on the collection of any fees and the imposition of any penalties until Congress has had the opportunity to revisit the decisions they made a decade ago, and see if there is not in truth a profound wrong that deserves to be righted.

We are at a fork in the road. Down one path is a radio universe populated entirely by large corporations, who can either afford the legal firepower necessary to negotiate a reasonable settlement with the music industry (such as the satellite radio companies have done) or can afford to offer Internet radio as a “loss leader” (as Yahoo and AOL do).

Down the other fork we are presented with a universe of choices, freely available to all, produced by people who truly love and value what they are doing - including user-programmed channels such as those offered by lala.com, “discovery” channels such as those available at Pandora, and who knows what else in the coming years. None of those choices are viable under the new rate structure, and that would be a tremendous loss for all involved.
http://www.saveourinternetradio.com/...from-paradise/





Skype Reveals P2P Service Downloaded 500m Times

VoIP provider Skype has revealed that its peer-to-peer service has been downloaded over 500m times by users around the world.

The figure was reached in slightly over 42 months time, counting from the first beta launch of Skype in August 2003.

Skype's services now include free voice, video, conference calling and instant messaging, as well as Skype's paid-for communication products including Skype Pro.
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/32218/...00m+times.html





Study: Abandoning Net Neutrality Discourages Improvements in Service

Charging online content providers such as Yahoo! and Google for preferential access to the customers of Internet service providers might not be in the best interest of the millions of Americans, despite claims to the contrary, a new University of Florida study finds.

“The conventional wisdom is that Internet service providers would have greater incentive to expand their service capabilities if they were allowed to charge,” said Kenneth Cheng, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences. Cheng and his co-authors are scheduled to present the findings at the International Conference on Information, Technology and Management in New Delhi, India, next week. “That was completely the opposite of what we found.”

The research discovered that cable and telephone companies providing broadband to deliver the content of companies such as Google and Yahoo! are more likely to expand their infrastructure — resulting in quicker loading and response in a customer’s personal computer — if they don’t charge these companies for preferential treatment, Cheng said.

The findings are timely because of industry pressure on Congress to consider legislation that would allow broadband service providers to give preferential Internet service to online content providers willing to pay a fee. That would, in effect, end the current practice of “net neutrality,” he said.

“Abandoning net neutrality has far-reaching and rippling effects when you consider how the Internet has become part of our daily life experience,” said Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences, who did the study with Cheng. “If the broadband service providers are allowed to charge the content providers and my favorite content provider does not happen to pay my local broadband service provider, would I have to switch favorites in order to have a faster Internet experience?”

The UF researchers, who took no position on the issue, developed an analytical model based on game theory to determine the winners and losers if net neutrality were abandoned, as well as whether the practice’s demise would give broadband service providers greater incentive to expand capacity.

Not surprisingly, they found that broadband service providers were the ones to gain the most from ending net neutrality because they could collect fees from content providers. The content providers such as Yahoo! and Google, in turn, would be the biggest losers.

Consumers will “win” if their favorite online provider is the one paying a fee to the telephone or cable company because it comes with a guarantee that its site would have the opportunity to load faster than its competitors, Cheng said. But those consumers who prefer a content provider that paid no such fee will “lose” in having to endure slower service, he said.

More important, the researchers found that the incentive for broadband service providers to expand and upgrade their service actually declines if net neutrality ends. Improving the infrastructure reduces the need for online content providers to pay for preferential treatment, Bandyopadhyay said.

“The whole purpose of charging for preferential treatment to content providers is that one content provider gains some edge over the other,” he said. “But when the capacity is expanded, this advantage becomes negligible.”

He gave the analogy of the expansion of a two-lane highway where drivers willing to pay a toll to subsidize road improvements are rewarded with exclusive use of a faster lane.

“If the road is upgraded from two to four lanes, with one express lane, these drivers might say ‘Three lanes are good enough for me. I don’t want to have to pay a toll any longer,’” he said. “So the desire to pay a toll when the road is expanded gets lesser.”

The experience of other countries also suggests that better service – up to three times faster – results when there is greater competition, Cheng said.

“In Japan and Korea, where there is net neutrality and much greater competition among broadband providers than in the United States, there are also higher broadband speeds,” he said.”

Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who is credited with popularizing the term ‘network neutrality,’ praised the study. “Kenneth Cheng is doing important research on a topic that is vital to the future of networking,” he said.
http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/





The Killing of Wi-Fi

The phone companies have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The same cannot be said for us.
John C. Dvorak

There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We've seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone–service companies are no dummies.

The always-entertaining Pew Internet & American Life Project ran a survey, and the results show that 34 percent of Internet users have gone online with a Wi-Fi connection or one of those newly popular and overpriced cell-phone services. Two years ago, this number was 22 percent. Another factoid from the survey: 19 percent of all users have Wi-Fi in the home. This number was a mere 10 percent just one year ago. The last tidbit from the survey worth noting is that only 56 percent of the people who have PDAs that hook to the Internet have actually gone on the Net via their PDA. The same goes for the people who have cell phones with Internet capability; not much more than half have actually used it.

Let's go over a few unproven, albeit obvious, facts. A good portion of the public has cell phones that can go on the Net, but these people have no clue how to do so. When asked, they will likely say their cell phone doesn't have the capability, even though it does. A good portion of the public with cell phones that can access the Net cannot grasp the concept in their brain, since going on the Net usually means sitting at a keyboard, looking at a big screen, and typing stuff.

What's more, a good portion of the public has been told that their phone can go on the Internet, and they think they are on the Internet when making calls. These folks would likely answer yes to a query about the Internet even if their phone had no Internet access whatsoever.

Heck, let's cut to the chase. A good portion of the public doesn't really know what wireless means. If a Comcast wire is coming into the house, then it's wired and that's that.

The point is that there just aren't that many people out there who have any idea what they are doing. All you have to do is sit at the airport when two people begin to discuss the Internet. Someone will have an EV-DO card and call it Wi-Fi and say how neat it will be when San Francisco goes all Wi-Fi and he can use the card for free access instead of having to pay Sprint when he boots to the network. "Won't that be great!?"

Of course, this has been made all the more confusing since the introduction of those newer EDGE and EV-DO network cards that people are using at an exorbitant price to get an e-mail connection with their laptop.

Cut to my favorite commercial. Two jokers are on a park bench with their laptops. One has a slow cell-network card, and the other has a faster network card from Sprint. One guy uploads a file and says good-bye to his hapless friend, who is left to become an ornament for pigeons. Why did the one guy leave his pal? What are these two jerks doing outside with laptops downloading and uploading files? If they are that busy, then shouldn't they still be in the office finishing up on a high-speed network?

It's all too mysterious for me. In fact, the sudden emergence of the whole cell network as your Internet connection is to show the public that there is plenty of wireless connectivity already and, golly, stop the idea of doing free Wi-Fi in municipalities.

It's not about the technology. It's about the threat of Wi-Fi overall. And I mean free Wi-Fi in particular. If you take a city the size of San Francisco and give the entire population free high-speed Wi-Fi, think of the applications that will fall into place. That includes VoIP calls galore. Move over, cell phone; hello, Wi-Fi phone.

It's no coincidence that these commercials for EV-DO and others for plug-in cell phone network cards cropped up just at the same time the market got hit with a slew of Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi/cell combo phones. Wi-Fi needs to die! These phone companies are going to do everything they can to trash 802.11, especially 802.11n, which may eventually be as fast as 600 megabits per second.

Here's the value proposition. Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky. These are the speeds we were playing with 10 years ago, but now they're some sort of breakthrough. Yes, it's a kind of breakthrough, considering the phone companies' old 115-Kbps GPRS clunker technologies.

For these speeds—which are capped, mind you, so you cannot actually use what you are sold—you pay $50, $60, maybe $70 a month. And for that money, you get to send files from a park bench a couple of times a week or maybe once a month from the airport. Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?

Probably not when the extremes are that broad, but you can be sure that the local politicians will cave on this, and we can forget free municipal Wi-Fi and Skype phones. Free is, by definition, communist! And it hurts free enterprise!

Who needs progress when you have profits?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759...079TX1K0000585





Meraki Also Plans a SF Wi-Fi Network
Katie Fehrenbacher

Tired of waiting for the San Francisco Wi-Fi network proposed by Earthlink and Google? San Francisco residents in some select neighborhoods will have another option, courtesy of Meraki, the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up that recently raised money from Sequoia Capital and Google.

Meraki will build a one-square-mile free Wi-Fi network that will span a few select San Francisco neighborhoods. The network will be built with Meraki wireless mesh gear and will cost around $50,000. The company will also pay for DSL connections to power the network. Check out the planned coverage area.

Meraki’s CEO and founder Sanjit Biswas calls the plan an experiment and a showcase of what the company’s low cost Wi-Fi equipment can do. It’s also a savvy marketing play and if the network is successful it’ll show that community-backed wide-area Wi-Fi using the right equipment doesn’t need to be a bureaucratic hassle.

The network itself has nothing to do with the current Earthlink/Google Wi-Fi deal, and on the pace of that negotiation, Biswas says “we’re frustrated . . .everyone has been frustrated.”

Remember Google is also a Meraki investor, but Biswas says Google is interested in getting behind broadband access in whatever form.

Unlike some larger Wi-Fi deployments that have to lease city spaces to put up hardware, Meraki’s network entails signing up volunteers who will place Meraki repeaters in windows and some who can host an Internet connection.

The company says because Wi-Fi sharing isn’t always kosher with service providers the company will be using sharing-friendly ISP Speakeasy for its DSL lines. Though, the signup page also asks if volunteers have an Internet connection they want to share, so it sounds like the network could possibly include already in-use connections.

On this Biswas says: “We’ll find out what they have, since this is likely to be a sensitive issue. That question is really intended to gauge what fraction of people are interested in sharing within a community. I think we’ll be able to setup enough Meraki-provided DSLs in any case, but this helps us understand what consumers are thinking.”

If a free Wi-Fi network with a certain amount of effort and tech interest involved will be successful anywhere, it’ll likely happen in that part of San Francisco. If you’re interested go sign up on Meraki’s page.
http://gigaom.com/2007/03/04/meraki-sf-wifi/





What Starbucks Can Learn From the Movie Palace
Randall Stross

WI-FI service is quickly becoming the air-conditioning of the Internet age, enticing customers into restaurants and other public spaces in the same way that cold “advertising air” deliberately blasted out the open doors of air-conditioned theaters in the early 20th century to help sell tickets.

Today, hotspots are the new cold spots.

Starbucks became the most visible Wi-Fi-equipped national chain when it began offering the service in 2002. Now, at more than 5,100 stores, Starbucks offers Internet access “from the comfort of your favorite cozy chair.”

Before you pop open your laptop, however, you need to pull out your credit card. Starbucks and its partner, T-Mobile, charge $6 an hour for the “pay as you go” plan. Day passes or monthly subscriptions are available but can be used only at Starbucks stores and other T-Mobile partners like Borders bookstores.

McDonald’s offers Wi-Fi in more than 8,000 of its 13,700 stores in the United States, giving it wider reach than even Starbucks, and it also charges for access. McDonald’s doesn’t charge as much: it asks $2.95 for two hours. You can’t apply your T-Mobile subscription there, however, because McDonald’s works with other partners.

Metering and charging for a service, of course, is the prerogative of any business owner in a free market. One will always find entrepreneurs willing to try new ways to profit by erecting tollbooths in front of facilities that had been freely accessible.

In the past, this took the form of coin-operated locks on bathroom stalls. (You may have first encountered these at a moment when you were least ready to praise the inventor’s ingenuity.)

Today, the outer frontier of pricing innovation can be found at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where some electrical outlets are accompanied by a small sign: “To Activate Pay $2 at Kiosk.” This is an experimental service, “Power Up My Portable,” which provides chairs and outlets for laptops; $2 buys 20 minutes of juice.

But what about the many other wall outlets scattered around the terminals and originally installed for vacuum cleaners? Zenola Campbell, the airport vice president who oversees concessions, demurred last week when asked whether travelers could always count on having free access to those outlets. “I can’t tell you where we’re going to be in the future,” she said.

When Starbucks and McDonald’s decided to exact a toll from their customers as they set up their in-store Wi-Fi networks, they created a confusion of conflicting signals: how welcome can one feel when staring at a meter that is running?

The restaurants’ predecessors, the movie theater owners of almost a century ago, understood that not every amenity, every service, every offering must have a separate price tag attached. The owners and the architects sought to give theatergoers an environment that was pleasing in all aspects. Marcus Loew, the head of a nationwide chain, once said, “We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.”

Panera Bread, which has more than 900 Wi-Fi-equipped sandwich and bakery stores, has set itself apart from its contemporaries by upholding the old-fashioned spirit of those bygone theater owners who never stinted in their efforts to make public space inviting.

The grand movie palaces did not have to show the revenue-enhancing potential of an ornamental gold cornice or plaster pilaster. So, too, at Panera Bread, where its fireplaces do not have to demonstrate a monetary payback to justify their place in the stores.

Neither does Wi-Fi. Neil Yanofsky, Panera’s president, said that no cost accounting had been done on its service, which is free. The rationale relates to ambience: “We want our customers to stay and linger.”

A Panera cafe does half of its business at lunchtime — there is little lingering then. But before and after the lunch rush, the restaurant addresses what it refers to internally as “the chill-out business,” which constitutes a not-insignificant 15 to 20 percent of its revenue.

Panera has no interest in rushing these customers out — the longer they stay, the greater the likelihood that resistance to the aroma of freshly baked muffins will crumble. Free, unmetered Wi-Fi is one way the restaurant sends an unambiguous signal: Stay as long as you like.

Of course, Mr. Yanofsky is the first to point out that he is in a position to be much more welcoming than the competition across the street at Starbucks. The average Panera store has 120 seats and does about two and a half times as much business as the average Starbucks store.

Mr. Yanofsky said he could not see why Starbucks, given its more limited seating, would drop access charges so that it could match Panera’s Wi-Fi offering. “Why make it free?” he said. “They’re already full.”

Each Panera cafe averages 220 connect hours a week; Starbucks and McDonald’s declined to provide similar information about the use of their services.

In the 1920s, when air-conditioning began to be installed in movie theaters, owners had to spend a sizable sum — $50,000 (roughly equivalent to $570,000 today) — to transform the property into a “cold spot.” But it was worth it. Before the “refrigeratory process” came along, theaters could not draw customers during the summer because of the unbearable heat in confined space. With air-conditioning, patronage increased so sharply that even the largest investments were quickly repaid.

Wi-Fi does not address a similar problem of seasonal attendance. Nor will it produce a multifold increase in patronage. But, then again, it’s not nearly as costly to introduce as the cooling plants of the 1920s.

The access charges assessed at Starbucks and McDonald’s suggest that behind the scenes, their service providers have had to make huge infrastructure investments and carry burdensome operational costs. But if the stores already have business-class broadband connections for their own operations, the addition of a Wi-Fi access point is trivial.

Schlotzsky’s Deli, which offers free Wi-Fi in 82 of its restaurants, uses Internet connections that were already in place, just as Panera Bread did. And Val King, Schlotzsky’s director of information technology, said the technical demands of remotely overseeing a wireless network were minimal. “It doesn’t take rocket science to run these things,” he said.

Customers need feel no shame, however, if they need help configuring their laptops, and sandwich makers and baristas are not necessarily the ones who can solve their technical problems quickly.

A Starbucks spokeswoman, Sonja Gould, explained that her company’s Wi-Fi customers receive, in exchange for their access fees, “excellent customer service help from T-Mobile.” It should be added that businesses offering free Wi-Fi also contract with tech-support companies to help customers. One such company, HotPoint Wireless, says its network now handles five times as many sessions originating from businesses offering free access as those that charge fees.

Getting connected is one thing, but keeping one’s e-mail private is another. Wi-Fi signals, by their nature, are notoriously susceptible to electronic eavesdropping. Wi-Fi services you pay for are no better protected than free services. As T-Mobile informs customers on its support Web page, all wireless service is “inherently insecure.”

Its recommendation should be heeded by users of Wi-Fi hotspots everywhere: use a virtual private network, which provides secure industrial-strength encryption. If your employer does not provide a V.P.N. server, consider using a commercial service, like JiWire, which charges $30 a year for a V.P.N., personal firewall and other services, including a hotspot directory that can be used offline.

STARBUCKS, which has rolled out a plenitude of stores, follows the same design concept that is behind the modern multiplex: for interior space, small is beautiful. It’s unfortunate that the grand architecture of early movie theaters no longer exists to put today’s microscale retail architecture to shame.

Gail Cooper, a professor of history at Lehigh University who has written about the introduction of air-conditioning, said: “In the movie palaces, one-third of the space was devoted to the lobby so people could come and ‘promenade’ — today we would say ‘hang out.’ Welcome was built into the space, and air-conditioning was one part.”

The movie palaces are long gone, and so, too, is the novelty of air-conditioning. We now step into public space less to be chilled than to chill. The palace’s spiritual successor is the cafe that sends out a welcoming blast of free, unlimited Wi-Fi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/bu...ey/04digi.html





Publicly Owned Networks are the Key to Universal Access and Healthy Competition

A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance argues that a publicly owned information infrastructure is the key to healthy competition, universal access, and non-discriminatory networks.

“Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem” notes that high speed broadband is becoming ever more widespread. But, it argues, the way in which that broadband is introduced may be as important as whether it is introduced.

Many telecommunications companies are offering to build a citywide wireless or even wired network at little or no upfront cost to the city. That arrangement is especially attractive to local elected officials who fear that government lacks the expertise to manage a high tech network and who worry about the possible impact on their budget. “This is an excellent time to remember to look that gift horse in the mouth,” maintains Becca Vargo Daggett, the report’s author and the director of the Institute’s Telecommunication as Commons Project.

“Even deals framed as coming at no cost to the city require the public sector to enter into extended contracts to pay millions for their own services over the new privately owned network. Cities owe it to themselves and their citizens to carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of public ownership.”

Ms. Vargo Daggett also notes that cities that own infrastructure like roads and water pipelines should not fear owning the physical information network. “Concerns about obsolescence are overstated. Fiber optics is the gold standard, with essentially unlimited capacity and a lifespan measured in decades. Wireless technology is rapidly evolving, but its price is low and the payback period is short.”

Moreover, unlike investments in traditional infrastructure, an investment in information networks can generate a significant return. “The investment will not only pay for itself, but can generate revenue that can pay for other important municipal services.”
http://www.newrules.org/info/5ways.html





Where Artists and Inventors Plot to Save the World
Saul Hansell

“It’s starting to feel like Christmas and the family is coming in,” Chris Anderson said, in his almost whispering voice.

It’s quite a family, as it includes Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate in physics; Paul Simon, the songwriter; Richard Branson, the Virgin Group magnate; and the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The occasion is the annual TED conference, named for the convergence of technology, entertainment and design— with a dash of social activism thrown in recently as well. It is expected to draw 1,200 people to Monterey, Calif., starting Wednesday.

Mr. Anderson, a former magazine publisher, took over the TED conference from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who presided over the stage like a vaudeville showman. He called it the “dinner party I always wanted to have but couldn’t.” He filled the program with a collection of stars from various fields, like the musician Herbie Hancock, the architect Frank Gehry and the software tycoon Bill Gates.

Mr. Anderson (not the editor of Wired of the same name who wrote the book “The Long Tail”) is as introverted and nerdy as Mr. Wurman is boisterous.

Mr. Anderson, 50, has changed TED from being a party to something blending a graduate seminar and a revival meeting. Mr. Wurman’s passions have been infused with a sense of social purpose. The art being discussed is likely to be photography of genocide victims; the architecture, environmentally sustainable AIDS clinics; and the technology, water-purification systems.

And the centerpiece of the program is now the TED Prize — an invention of Mr. Anderson’s that is designed to motivate the conference’s well-heeled audience to do something socially useful. Three winners will each reveal a “world-changing wish” and challenge those attending to help fulfill it. This year’s winners are E. O. Wilson, the Harvard evolutionary biologist; James Nachtwey, a war photographer for Time magazine; and former President Bill Clinton.

Now Mr. Anderson is taking even more risks with the TED franchise. He has started making videos of the TED sessions available to watch or download on the Web free. And he has started a biennial TED Global conference that will be held in June at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

At first some of the longtime attendees were unsure that Mr. Anderson could recreate Mr. Wurman’s magic.

“Chris does not have the same stage personality as Wurman had,” said Doug Rowan, the former chief executive of Corbis, a photo archive owned by Bill Gates. “That works to his disadvantage.” Mr. Rowan plans to attend next year’s conference, after skipping the previous last two.

Nonetheless, TED has flourished. Last month, 1,000 tickets for next year’s conference went on sale at $6,000 each, up from $4,400 this year. They sold out in a week.

“Chris absolutely, completely, totally believes that those three days at TED can change the world,” said Steve Rosenbaum, a longtime TED participant and the chief executive of Magnify Media, a Web video company. “It is quite intoxicating.”

The elite clientele and the increasing focus on development issues evoke the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But people who have attended both events say they are very different. Unlike Davos, TED attracts few politicians. And most of the action is in the conference, not in the parties and meeting rooms nearby.

“At Davos the general sessions are nice but very superficial,” said Jay S. Walker, the founder of Priceline.com and chief executive of Walker Digital. “It allows the Arabs and the Israelis to meet quietly in a room somewhere. You’re not going to meet a Ph.D. in string theory or hear a talk about playing the lute at Davos the way you do at TED.”

If there is something evangelical about Chris Anderson, there may well be a reason. His parents were medical missionaries who performed eye surgery in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

Mr. Anderson wanted to be a doctor as a youth, but after attending Oxford, he wound up as a journalist, starting magazines about computers at age 28. In 1995, he sold his first publishing company, Future Network, which was based in Bath, England. He started a second company, Imagine Media, in San Francisco and then bought back Future. Merging it with Imagine, he took the whole thing public, all while starting Business 2.0, the Internet-age business magazine.

“We were pumping hot air into the bubble,” Mr. Anderson recalled. “We wrote about the new rules of the Internet. We believed in it. I still do.”

On the side, Mr. Anderson also dabbled in dot-coms, helping to start Snowball, which was meant to be an online community for youth.

The Internet crash hit Mr. Anderson and Imagine hard. “Firing 1,000 people over six months was no fun at all,” he said.

But all was not lost. Business 2.0 was sold in 2001 to Time Inc., helping to stabilize Future. Snowball, renamed IGN, was sold last year to the News Corporation and is now a site mainly for video-game enthusiasts.

Mr. Anderson ended up wealthy.

The TED conference could have been a casualty of all that turmoil. Mr. Anderson bought it from Mr. Wurman in 2000, ostensibly to pair it with Business 2.0, but actually because he had started going to the conference and fell in love with it.

“I remember watching Aimee Mullins, the paraplegic athlete, roll up her pants and unscrew her legs,” he recalled. “The way she did that gave me and the audience what I think has happened so many times at TED: a sense of possibility, that people can reach beyond where they are and do things that are surprising.”

At the end of 2001, Future sold the conference to the Sapling Foundation, a charity that Mr. Anderson had set up with proceeds from selling his first publishing company.

After an overlap with Mr. Wurman, Mr. Anderson became the host of TED in 2003. That first year, he concedes now, was “too preachy.” One session had three presentations on Africa in a row.

“A few people thought I had ruined something very beautiful, and got very grumpy,” he said.

He apologized and has worked to mix lighter and heavier subjects.

Still, Mr. Anderson said he wanted to find a way to get the audience to do more than simply watch. That is what led to the idea of the TED Prize.

Last year’s winners included Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity, which helps design housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and for those in poor countries. His wish was to create a database of public-domain designs for use by anyone in need. With support from Sun Microsystems and others, the Open Architecture Network will be demonstrated at the conference this week.

Even more ambitious is Mr. Anderson’s plan to turn TED into a sort of nonprofit media company. In 2005, he hired June Cohen, the former editor of the Web news site HotWired, to try to develop a television program based on the conference. She found no networks that would show it.

“When the BBC told me that it was too intellectual for them, I decided to shift strategies,” Ms. Cohen said.

So last summer, TED began making TED Talks — edited highlights from the conference presentations — available to watch online or to download. BMW signed up as a sponsor.

So far the talks have been viewed 5.5 million times by 2 million people, Ms. Cohen said.

“On the face of it, taped lectures should be boring,” Mr. Anderson said. “That’s why the TV stations reacted the way they did. But these talks can be compelling and hold the audience.”

Now Mr. Anderson and Ms. Cohen are looking to expand the TED Talks site. They want more content, like talks uploaded by TED attendees, and lectures from other events. And they are creating a social networking system that will seek to be a sort of MySpace for the change-the-world crowd. (One area will be open to anyone, and a more private section will be open only to TED attendees.)

“My foundation is all about levering the power of ideas to make a difference in the world,” Mr. Anderson said. “Suddenly we can use technology to bring some of the world’s greatest teachers eyeball to eyeball with a global audience in the millions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05ted.html





Physicists Remember When Superconductors Were Hot
Kenneth Chang

Like the musical Woodstock, the legend of the “Woodstock of Physics” grows year after year.

Twenty years ago this month, nearly 2,000 physicists crammed into a New York Hilton ballroom to hear about a breakthrough class of materials called high-temperature superconductors, which promised amazing new technologies like magnetically levitated trains.

“It was an electrifying event,” said Philip F. Schewe, a science writer at the American Institute of Physics who runs the news conferences at the physics meetings, then and now. “You wished you were there.”

Many of the participants from the 1987 session reconvened yesterday at an American Physical Society meeting in Denver, partly to reminisce and partly to take stock of what has happened since then and what has not.

Superconductors, discovered in 1911, carry electricity with no resistance. Most work at temperatures below minus-420 degrees Fahrenheit, and by the 1970s, physicists had generally concluded that that was just a chilly limit of how nature works.

But K. Alex Müller and J. Georg Bednorz at the Zurich laboratory of I.B.M. believed that a ceramic material might be able to superconduct at warmer temperatures. In January 1986, Dr. Bednorz took measurements on one sample, and as it cooled to minus-440 degrees, its electrical resistance plunged by half, a sign that it had turned part-superconductor. “I celebrated this with one or two beers,” Dr. Bednorz said.

With tweaking, they pushed the transition temperature closer to minus-400 degrees, a sizeable jump over earlier superconductors. Dr. Müller and Dr. Bednorz published their findings in April 1986 in a German physics journal to little fanfare. Only in the fall, after a few other groups confirmed the findings and pushed the temperature up a few more degrees, did the wider physics community become intrigued.

In February 1987, a team led by Paul Chu of the University of Houston submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters describing a minus-300-degree superconductor. “That was supposed to be confidential,” said Brian B. Schwartz, who at the time worked for the American Physical Society, which publishes the journal. “It leaked out immediately.”

By then, everyone, it seemed, was experimenting with high-temperature superconductors, which are easy to make. The physical society was besieged by requests to present research findings at its March meeting — but the deadline had passed.

The society added to the meeting agenda a last-minute session, which would start at 7:30 p.m. A few key scientists like Dr. Müller and Dr. Chu got 10 minutes to present their research. Everyone else would have five minutes each.

“I remember there was a crowd of 2,000 people outside the doors,” Dr. Schwartz said. “When the doors opened, it was a riot.”

The seats filled. So did the floor space in the aisles. Others watched video monitors set up around the hotel. Each speaker tried to wow the crowd with yet another discovery. “It was like the Texas chili cook-off or the Iowa State Fair apple pie bake-off,” Dr. Schewe said. “What’s your secret ingredient? That’s what it seemed like.”

Fifty-one talks later, the session ended at 3:15 a.m. People lingered in the halls until almost sunrise. The session quickly became known as the “Woodstock of Physics.”

The following year, a flood of papers on high-temperature superconductivity were presented at the meeting. But today the heady early promises have not yet been fully filled. High-temperature superconductors can be found in some trial high-capacity power cables, but they have not made any trains levitate. The rise in transition temperatures has stalled again, well below room temperature. Theorists have yet to find a convincing explanation for why high-temperature superconductors superconduct at all.

Still, for those few days in 1987, physicists were excited, and the excitement spilled out of the Hilton into the rest of New York City.

“The stores and the bars were all ‘Physicists welcome,’ ” said Paul M. Grant, who headed the superconductivity research at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose. He recalled a discotheque in Chelsea with a long line of people waiting to get in.

“The bouncers took anybody that had a physical society badge on to the front,” Dr. Grant recalled, “and we got in gratis. Can you imagine what a culture shift? We had a hell of a good time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/science/06supe.html





Billions and Billions of Gigabytes Served
Clint Boulton

Several reports talk about how the explosion of digital information is creating new challenges for companies trying to rein in IT costs. Others tell us how to cope with these challenges. But none tells us just how big the information glut will be in the next few years. Until now.

Researcher IDC today released a report, sponsored by information management vendor EMC, forecasting that as much as 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created in 2010, a six-fold increase from 2006.

Last year, 161 exabytes (exabyte is a billion gigabytes) of digital information were created, representing roughly 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. Or, if you prefer, the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 92 million miles from the earth to the sun.

Whoa.

From now until 2010, IDC said it expects information will sport a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent to hit the 988 exabyte mark.

While IDC isn't pushing any panic buttons yet, Chief Research Officer John Gantz said all companies, from Wal-Mart to AT&T to the bicycle shop down the street, will eventually need to employ more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the information.

"The diversity of information, from very small packets of info from RFID to very large video surveillance files, is different among different constituencies in an organization," Gantz told internetnews.com.

"You can't treat all data, all packets, and all bytes the same. That's where you get into interesting situations of classifying data and determining what you save and what you don't.

Whether it's putting more bytes per platter or moving direct-attached storage to storage area networks, Gantz said vendors have to keep advancing information management technology because the "digital universe" is not going to stop growing.

Thanks to the Internet, that digital universe is thriving.

Only 48 million people routinely logged onto the Internet in 1996. Last year, there were 1.1 billion users on the Internet. IDC expects another 500 million users to come online by 2010.

Those users aren't just surfing Web sites to find out whether the Yankees or Red Sox won. They're creating scores of unstructured data, including images and e-mails, and exchanging them.

Pictures are the leading usurpers of gigabytes. People love taking and sending them. IDC said images taken from digital cameras, camera phones, medical scanners and security cameras will absorb the largest number of bytes, topping 500 billion by 2010.

No surprise when you consider images captured on consumer digital cameras in 2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide, while the number of images captured on cell phones hit almost 100 billion.

And there have been, and will continue to be, a lot of e-mail.

From 1998 to 2006, the number of e-mail mailboxes grew from 253 million to nearly 1.6 billion. During the same period, the number of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.

Instant messaging? IDC predicts 250 million IM accounts by 2010.

What are we to make of this digital information bounty? You can say people are hungry for information, that they are gluttonous consumers for knowledge, be it trivial or profound.

But these consumers are actually also information creators, and that will only snowball with the current explosion in wikis and blogs, which provide avenues on which information travel.

IDC said that while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by a business.

Information will traverse telephones, Internet switches, hosting sites, storage sites, networks or datacenters, and enterprises will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of 85 percent of the information.
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3663641





So Much Data, Relatively Little Space
Brian Bergstein

A new study that estimates how much digital information the world is generating (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff.

The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content zipping around. The researchers also assumed that on average, each digital file gets replicated three times.

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year.

Oh, the equivalents! That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003.

But that report followed a different trail. It included non-electronic information, such as analog radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And it counted original data only, not all the times things got copied.

In comparison, the IDC numbers were made much higher by including content as it was created and as it was reproduced - for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.

Still, even the 2003 figure of 5 exabytes is enormous - it was said at the time to be 37,000 Libraries of Congress - so why does it matter how much more enormous the number is now?

For one thing, said IDC analyst John Gantz, it's important to understand the effects of the factors behind the information explosion - such as the profusion of surveillance cameras and regulatory rules for corporate data retention.

In fact, the supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it.

IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.

"If you had a run on the bank, you'd be in trouble," Gantz said. "If everybody stored every digital bit, there wouldn't be enough room."

Fortunately, storage space is not actually scarce and continues to get cheaper. That's because not everything gets warehoused. Not only do e-mails get deleted, but some digital signals are not made to linger, like the contents of phone calls. (Although, who's to say those conversations don't get catalogued someplace, perhaps the National Security Agency? The IDC researchers assumed the answer was no. "I don't want men in black coming to look for me," Gantz joked.)

But even if the IDC findings don't raise the prospect that disk drives will be virtually bursting at the seams, the study has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data.

Chuck Hollis, vice president of technology alliances at EMC Corp. (nyse: EMC - news - people ), the data-management company that sponsored the IDC research and contributed to the earlier Berkeley studies, said the new report made him wonder whether enough is being done to save the digital data for posterity.

"Someone has to make a decision about what to store and what not," Hollis said. "How do we preserve our heritage? Who's responsible for keeping all of this stuff around so our kids can look at it, so historians can look at it? It's not clear."

Two researchers who were not involved in the study said that because IDC used many of its own internal market analyses, the work will be hard to replicate and confirm. Those researchers, James Short and Roger Bohn of the University of California, San Diego, plan to follow the Berkeley methods in a follow-up report.

Bohn said it would be wise to take IDC's figures "with a certain grain of salt," but he added: "I don't think the numbers are going to turn out to be wildly off target."
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3486881.html





The Hard Drive as Eye Candy
Damon Darlin

THE hard drive, like all the parts inside a computer, is a commodity. While there may be some quality differences between the makers’ products, manufacturers generally compete on little more than price. All hard drives do pretty much the same thing: store and retrieve data.

Take the hard drive outside of the computer and it becomes a different story. The drives still do pretty much the same thing, but now the makers have to convince you of their distinctions. How? By adding a little style to these gray boxes.

Once relegated to a back shelf in the electronics store, back by the notebook bags and blank DVDs and CDs, external hard drives will soon don brushed aluminum cases, decorator colors and glowing blue or amber lights that ensure that the devices can grab attention when in public view.

LaCie has a new drive, the d2, with an aluminum alloy case designed by Neil Poulton, a Scotsman who has also created a line of Artemide lamps. Seagate will be selling Dave, a sleek 20-gigabyte drive that connects wirelessly to cellphones for carrying photos, music and video. It is no larger than a small cellphone itself.

Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.

The need to back up all the songs, photos, videos and movies Americans hold is, of course, driving the demand. The inevitable falling prices of the hard drive compels the manufacturers to gussy up the drives in order to command a premium price, much as Apple does with its PCs or iPods.

“Hard drives are the classic tech commodity product that follows the classic tech price curve,” said Stephen Baker, vice president for industry analysis at NPD. The average price for an external hard drive fell to $141 last year, from $197 in 2003, while the amount of storage space on the drives doubled.

Another way to look at it: In 2003, the retail price for a gigabyte of hard-drive storage was $2.04, according to NPD. Last year, it was 77 cents.

The emphasis on design is also a reflection that the external drive is no longer one more gadget for the tech-obsessed, but a necessary accessory for anyone with a computer. The storage device is the point at which the consumer electronics world is colliding with the information technology world, and the aesthetics of the consumer electronics world are winning in the clash.

Nowhere is the shift more apparent than at Hewlett-Packard, a company renowned for its engineers. Last year the company introduced the MediaVault, an external hard drive that connects to a home network so data on any PC in the network can be easily stored there. Its case resembles the gray and black case of a desktop PC tower.

This year, however, Hewlett-Packard will be selling a new storage device called the MediaSmart home server. The engineers added many more features. It connects to the home network to back up data on all the computers on the network automatically, and people can access data from off premises through a secure Internet connection. It can also hold up to four terabytes of storage.

But the important thing is what the engineers did not do: design the look of the drives. This device is a black lacquer box with four horizontal blue lights. It matches the finish of the black bezel that usually surrounds a big-screen high-definition TV in the living room rather than that of the old putty-colored computer in the den.

It wasn’t just about letting the H.P. engineers loosen their hold. “We gave design an equal position at the table with the marketing people,” said Satjiv Chahil, Hewlett-Packard’s senior vice president for global marketing.

Design does make a difference in sales. Western Digital sold almost 40 percent of all external hard drives last year, according to data from Current Analysis, a market research firm, thanks to its My Book device. The glossy bluish-black case resembled a dictionary-size book. Two concentric circles of blue light that glow from the binding side display the amount of storage used.

As Western Digital knocked Maxtor from its perch as the best seller in the consumer market, Maxtor and its new parent company, Seagate, took action.

The look of Seagate drives, created by Frog Design, is supposed to help remind people of the emotional ties they have to what is stored on the magnetic platters. (Maxtor’s rubbery ridged box is expected to be overhauled this year.) “When you lose your files, you lose a piece of yourself,” said James Druckrey, the senior vice president in charge of Seagate’s branding efforts.

Seagate’s new FreeAgent Go drive has a brushed anodized aluminum exterior in a color executives call “deep cappuccino,” a homey phrase that seems out of place in an industry that has been more comfortable with terms like “perpendicular magnetic recording,” “spindle speeds” and “SATA interfaces.”

Consumers should not need to know any of those terms, Mr. Druckrey said. The FreeAgent packing box, a key part of the overall Seagate product redesigns, soft-pedals any specifications. The white box, with a plastic handle on top, says that it has the capacity to store 120 “glorious gigabytes.” It is covered with comments one might utter while looking at stuff stored on a drive, like “is this obsessive” or “you promised not to laugh.”

Opening the box reveals a message printed on each flap: “It loves me,” reads the first, then “It loves me not,” and finally, “It loves me and goes wherever I go.”

Seagate is hoping its distinctive white cardboard boxes stand out among the jumble of drives on the retailers’ shelves. Everyone in the industry concedes that it is hard to sort out the external drives from the internal drives or the network-attached device from those connecting directly to a PC.

“It’s a mess,” said Philippe Spruch, the chief executive of LaCie, another hard-drive vendor. He thinks that by Christmas, volume will be high enough that retailers will have an incentive to display the drives more attractively.

But noted designers are not all they are cracked up to be with the crowd that buys hard drives, Mr. Spruch said. He should know, since the company he founded pioneered the trend almost 15 years ago with drives designed to go with Apple’s high-design Mac computers.

LaCie drives, which account for 7 percent of the external drive market, have been conceptualized by designers like Mr. Poulton, Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, Ora Ïto and Porsche Design, known for their work on lamps, chairs and other household objects. “We’ve shipped four million hard drives, and only a small minority of the buyers know these designers,” Mr. Spruch said.

Not everyone is going for the designer look. Buffalo, which makes hard drives for the most hard-core tech enthusiast, now has a consumer line, the Tera Station Live. But Brian Verenkoff, product marketing manager, said it still looked as if it belonged in a data center. “Stylistically it is not the perfect match for the home,” he said.

Mr. Spruch is nevertheless convinced that design matters. “Design is a translation of a well-done product, and people want to feel safe about their storage,” he said. “It’s not just about the product being trendy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/te...y/08drive.html





Industry Closes Anti-Coal Website

THE mining industry has used copyright laws to close an anti-mining website launched by a small protest group in Newcastle.

The NSW Minerals Council has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a TV, print and billboard advertising campaign and launched a website extolling the virtues of mining. The campaign's slogan is "Life: brought to you by mining".

The anti-coal group Rising Tide created its own website sending up the campaign with comments such as "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining".

The website's hosts were forced to remove it within 24 hours of its launch, after the Minerals Council issued a notice under the Copyright Regulations 1969 complaining the content and layout infringed copyright.

Rising Tide remade the website, using its own photographs and layout. However, the council lodged a second complaint.

"They are trying to silence us," said a Rising Tide member, Steve Phillips. "We have issued a counter-notice rejecting the Minerals Council's spurious claims. [It] now has 10 days in which to take the matter [to court]."

There is growing public concern about coal's contribution to climate change, and mining's threat to underground and above-ground water supplies.

The council's chief executive, Nikki Williams, said its complaint was not an attempt to silence Rising Tide. "They have to abide by the [copyright] laws," she said. However, she admitted she had not seen the revised website, and did not know if the council would take the matter to court.

Dr Williams disputed claims by Rising Tide that the council was running the campaign to counter growing concern about coal.

"It is a community awareness campaign … it is about establishing a fair voice for the mining industry; it is simply a matter of the facts," she said, referring to the benefits flowing from the industry such as jobs, cheap electricity and export revenue.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...943275688.html





Connecticut Defends Threatened Author

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is backing up a Westport, Conn., resident who was threatened with a lawsuit for preparing an article detailing the health risks of wood boilers.

Blumenthal said Central Boiler of Greenbush, Minn., threatened David Brown with a lawsuit if he failed to retract an article or change the article outlining the severe health dangers of outdoor wood boilers.

Brown’s article was published in the February issue of "Human and Ecological Risk Assessment."

Brown is associated with the firm Health Risk Consultants Inc.

Blumenthal said his Conn. office will intervene in any lawsuit filed against Brown because of the article, and he will encourage attorneys general in other states to also intervene.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033370





Connecticut to Crack Down on MySpace

Bill requires parental consent, age verification
Dirk Perrefort

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal unveiled legislation Wednesday that would require age verification and parental consent before minors could post profiles on MySpace and other social networking sites.

Blumenthal announced the legislation during a press conference in the Legislative Office Building. The plan would require that social networking Web sites comply or face fines up to $5,000 per violation.

Blumenthal is leading a coalition of attorney generals from 44 states looking at similar proposals.

"These sites must verify ages and give parents the power to keep their children off these sites," Blumenthal said.

Parental permission is needed for anyone under 18 years old.

"Failing to verify age means that children are exposed to sexual predators who may be older men lying to seem younger. There is no excuse in technology or cost for refusing age verification," Blumenthal said.

The announcement came on the heels of a New Jersey man being sentenced to 14 years in prison for using MySpace to contact an 11-year-old Connecticut girl he later molested.

Sonny Szeto, 23, of Jersey City, pleaded guilty last year to using the Internet to persuade a minor to have sex and was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport.

Emily Carney, a 15-year-old student at Danbury High School, said she doesn't like Blumenthal's proposal, but "If I were a parent I would probably think it's a good idea."

"There are a lot of predators out there," she said. "Guys have asked me to be their friend but I always deny them. I try to be cautious."

Nicole Haferl, 16, said she had a profile on MySpace for several years but stopped using the Web site because "it was boring" and her parents didn't want her to be on it.

"My parents don't like it because of all the news reports about girls getting raped," she said. "I guess it would be a good idea to require parental consent. There are girls as young as 9 who are using the site.

"Some girls even put their addresses and phone numbers in their profile. They're just asking for trouble."

Laurie Haferl, the teenager's mother, applauded the effort.

"Most teenagers aren't trying to do something wrong, they are doing it to socialize with their friends," she said. "But they don't realize that there are a lot of strange people out there and anyone can view their profile."

Lonjohnana Luna, a 16-year-old student at Danbury High School, said her parents routinely monitor the comments and photographs posted on her MySpace account. She added that kids who don't want their profile viewed by the public at large can mark it as private.

"If they require parental consent, a lot of people will stop using it," she said. "There's probably a lot of kids who have MySpace profiles and their parents don't even know about it."

While access to the Web site is banned in the high school, Vice Principal Dan Donovan said arguments that begin online often spill out into the classroom.

"Requiring parental consent would help us deal with a lot of the disciplinary problems that result from the Web site," he said. "Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing on MySpace. They would be shocked at some of the content."

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace, released a statement in response to Blumenthal's proposal, saying it was well-intentioned but not "the answer."

"The most effective means to protect teens online is through a combined approach involving features and tools to make our site safer, educating our users and their parents, and working collaboratively with online-safety organizations and companies," he said.

An informational session on the proposed legislation will be held this morning at 11:30 in the Legislative Office Building.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033579





Man Who Used MySpace to Meet Underage Girl Sentenced to 14 Years
John Christoffersen

A man who used the Web site MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old girl was sentenced Tuesday to 14 years in prison in one of the first federal sex cases involving the popular networking site.

Sonny Szeto, now 23, pleaded guilty last year to using the Internet to persuade a minor to have sex and possessing child pornography.

In sentencing Szeto, U.S. District Judge Janet Hall said she was disturbed by his actions and worried that he would commit similar crimes.

Szeto traveled from Jersey City, N.J., to Connecticut in October 2005 and molested the girl in her playroom while her parents slept upstairs, according to an FBI affidavit.

"My daughter remains traumatized by the crime," the girl's father said with a shaky voice in court Tuesday. "Knowing he is in jail will help her recover."

The father also said Szeto went so far as to call his daughter at her school, pretending to be her brother and claiming there was a family emergency.

"It made her feel no place was safe," he said.

He also criticized Szeto for not taking responsibility for his actions and blaming others.

Szeto, formerly of Nashua, N.H., and Queens, N.Y., did not speak at the hearing. His lawyer, Roger Lee Stavis, urged the judge to impose the mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence.

Stavis said Szeto grew up in an abusive home and was exposed to alcoholism and suicide attempts.

"It took its toll on Mr. Szeto," he said.

Stavis also cited a psychologist's report that said Szeto suffered from depression and a personality disorder. He said Szeto was remorseful for what happened.

In arguing for a lower prison sentence, Stavis noted that the girl had made some of the calls to Szeto, but insisted he wasn't blaming the victim.

"This particular young victim is perhaps more precocious (than others)," Stavis said.

Prosecutor James Filan questioned the psychologist's report, saying it was based only on Szeto's statements and there was no effort to corroborate his claims.

MySpace, a division of News Corp., allows its 54 million users to find online friends by searching for their school or their interests. The site prohibits minors 13 and under from joining, discourages users from posting personal information and provides special protections for those 14 and 15.

Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace.

MySpace has responded by expanding educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. It also adopted new restrictions on how adults may contact the site's younger users and has helped design tools for identifying profiles created by convicted sex offenders.

While Internet safety advocates say the site has a good reputation for working to prevent illegal activity, they say children often lie about their age to get around those restrictions. Many profiles include suggestive photographs and lots of personal information.

MySpace.com has been developing software designed to give parents the bare-bones of what their kids are doing on the site, including whether the listed age is truthful.

Authorities have said MySpace wasn't at fault but rather is being exploited by pedophiles.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-06-18-45-06





Computer Profs Urge Independent Investigator in Teacher Porn Case
AP

Nearly 30 Connecticut computer science professors have signed a letter urging an independent investigation in the case of a Norwich substitute teacher convicted of exposing her students to pornography on a classroom computer.

The professors from eight Connecticut colleges and universities took out an ad in Tuesday's Hartford Courant. They wrote on behalf of Julie Amero, a 40-year-old Windham resident with no prior criminal record convicted in January of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.

She faces up to 40 years in prison when she is sentenced March 29th.

While prosecutors insist she is guilty, some experts believe that the lewd images were caused by unseen spyware and adware programs, which critics call one of the top scourges of the Internet.

The 28 professors who signed the letter want an independent investigator brought in to look at the case, and they want Amero's sentencing delayed until that investigation is complete. Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane won't say whether that's a possibility.
http://www.wtnh.com/global/story.asp?s=6187353





The Tale of Harry Potter and the Naked Role
Sarah Lyall

It was a little weird at first, Erin Tobin said, seeing Harry Potter right there on the stage without his pants, or indeed any of his clothes.

Not actually Harry Potter, of course, since he is fictional, but the next best thing: Daniel Radcliffe, who plays him in the movies. Now 17, Mr. Radcliffe has cast off his wand, his broomstick and everything else to appear in the West End revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus.” He stars as Alan Strang, a disturbed young man who, in a distinctly un-Harry-Potterish moment of frenzied psychosexual madness, blinds six horses with a hoof pick.

“We’re all kind of freaked out about seeing his — well, him naked,” Ms. Tobin, 20, said after a recent performance. “I still think of him as an 11-year-old boy.”

To make it clear what audiences are in for, at least in part, photographs of Mr. Radcliffe’s buff torso, stripped almost to the groin, have been used to advertise the production. It is as jarring as if, say, Anne Hathaway suddenly announced that instead of playing sweet-natured princesses and fashion-world ingénues, she wanted to appear onstage as a nude, murderous prostitute.

“Equus” opened last week, and the consensus so far is that Mr. Radcliffe has successfully extricated himself from his cinematic alter ego. Considering that playing Harry Potter is practically all he has done in his career, this is no small achievement.

“I think he’s a really good actor, and I sort of forgot about Harry Potter,” said Ophelia Oates, 14, who saw the play over the weekend. “Anyway, you can’t be Harry Potter forever.”

In The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer said that “Daniel Radcliffe brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected depth and range.”

Mr. Radcliffe told The Telegraph that “I thought it would be a bad idea to wait till the Potter films were all finished to do something else.” There are still a few to go. The fifth, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” is scheduled for release on July 13, and Mr. Radcliffe has signed on for the final two installments as well. (Meanwhile, the seventh and last book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will hit stores on July 21.)

Harry and Alan could not be more dissimilar as characters, even if both “come from quite weird backgrounds,” as 13-year-old Ella Pitt, another recent theatergoer, put it. (And no, she declared, she was not too young for all the nakedness, swearing and sexuality.) Both characters have unresolved issues relating to their parents: Harry, because his are dead, and Alan, because his have driven him insane.

But when it comes to romance, for instance, the celluloid Harry has yet to kiss a girl; the big moment comes in the forthcoming film. Meanwhile, Alan in “Equus” not only engages in some serious equi-erotic nuzzling with an actor playing a horse, but is also onstage, fully nude, for 10 minutes, during which he nearly has sex with an equally naked young woman.

“Equus,” which also stars Richard Griffiths as the unconventional psychiatrist who helps untangle Alan’s ecstatic madness and tortured imagination, is playing to sellout audiences at the Gielgud Theater here, and there is talk of transferring the production to Broadway, perhaps next season. Some people are drawn by interest in the play itself, which won the Tony Award for best play in 1975. Some come to see Mr. Griffiths, a seasoned actor who himself won a Tony Award last year for his role in “The History Boys.”

Then there are the Radcliffe fans, who have watched the actor negotiate the rocky path of adolescence right before their eyes. They have watched his Harry Potter fly through the air, forget to do his homework, talk to snakes, smite people with his magic wand, stay up past his bedtime and suffer any number of traumatic near-death experiences. Try as they might during the performance, they cannot completely de-Potter their minds.

“I was, like, ‘I don’t want to see him poke the eyes out of horses,’ ” said Marie Aveni, 22.

Emily Bunch, 21, remarked, “I thought, ‘Harry Potter! Where are your glasses?’ ” Wendy Krekeler, 20, described her first glimpse of the shirtless Mr. Radcliffe this way: “I thought, ‘Wow, he must have been working out.’ ”

But, his admirers say, it is clear that Mr. Radcliffe is not a one-trick actor, fated to end his career playing elderly magicians in “Harry Potter” rip-offs.

“I wanted to see if he could play both a wizard boy and a psycho patient,” said Ashley Lucas, 21, “and I think he did an excellent job.”

Mr. Radcliffe’s star presence in “Equus” does not appear to have traumatized innocent “Harry Potter” aficionados, although not everyone knows what to expect. At one performance, Karoline Nordmo, an admirer from Sweden, said she was hoping to buy tickets for herself and her 12-year-old sister, Lorentine.

“We know that it has something to do with horses, and that he’s in it,” she explained.

Katelyn Gill, 20, a student from California who saw “Equus” with several friends, said the experience had not ruined the “Harry Potter” films for her; it only changed her perception of its star.

“After we saw the play, we were like, ‘Oh, my God — we’ll never be able to see Harry Potter in the same way again,’ ” she said. “We saw him naked!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/theater/07pott.html





'Her and Heather are Not Bandits'
AP

The mother of a 19-year-old arrested in a bank theft scheme said Monday that her daughter isn’t a bandit, she just fell in with the wrong crowd and made a bad choice.

Ashley Miller and Heather Johnston, both 19, were videotaped wearing sunglasses and laughing as they appeared to rob a Bank of America in upscale Acworth on
Feb. 27. Police also arrested a bank teller and another man in connection with the theft, saying the heist appeared to be an inside job. Miller and Johnston remained jailed Monday morning.

"I want (people) to know that her and Heather both are not bandits," Joy Miller told ABC’s "Good Morning America" Monday. "They’re little girls that made a bad choice."

Joy Miller said her daughter, Ashley Miller, is sorry for what she did.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033366





Internet Lenders Could Prove Disruptive
Thomas Crampton

It is a little like Internet dating, but the objective is money.

A Web site based in Britain, Zopa.com, and another in the United States, Prosper.com, have started businesses that connect individuals eager to borrow money to other people willing to lend, offering both sides better interest rates than banks.

"We bring together people who have never met to lend and borrow," said Chris Larsen, co-founder and chief executive of the San Francisco-based Prosper, which has had 140,000 users since it started a year ago. "Somebody who has money should be able to loan it out and somebody looking to borrow should be able to find a lender."

Banking analysts suggest that these hyper-efficient operations, with few employees and no costly real estate, could force changes to established banks.

"As a researcher, these sites make me wonder if the core business model of financial institutions is changing," said Mark Meyer, an analyst at the Filene Research Institute, a Wisconsin-based group that studies credit unions. "We are talking about a potentially disruptive innovation in financial services."

Traditional banks acknowledge the challenge, but emphasize consumer preference for size and experience over low interest rates.

"The existence of Zopa shows that there is now healthy competition in offering consumers a wide range of choices for loans," said Brian Capon, spokesman for the British Bankers' Association, the lead trade association for banks and financial services in Britain.

"But banks," he said, "are considerably bigger and have been in the business of lending money and taking deposits for hundreds of years, so consumers need to go where they feel most comfortable."

Users register on the sites to either borrow or offer their money for loans. Operating with the oversight of the same regulators as regular financial institutions, the sites operate on a "peer- to-peer" basis, yet use classic credit checks to assess borrowers.

Both sites accept clients only from within their country of operation and face several layers of regulation. Zopa is regulated by the Financial Services Authority and the Office of Fair Trading, while Prosper is regulated by the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Trade Commission and laws in each U.S. state.

The sites earn money from fees paid by borrowers and lenders. Zopa, for example, charges borrowers a fee of 0.5 percent of the loan amount and lenders a 0.5 percent annual service fee.

The approaches of the sites differ, with Prosper allowing lenders access to more details about individual borrowers — including photographs — and Zopa emphasizing the rigor of its own borrower vetting process.

"We ask for people's rating on eBay and check what car they drive via the number plate," said James Alexander, chief executive of Zopa, which started in March 2005 and now has 130,000 registered users, of whom 30 percent are lenders. "Taken in isolation these may seem stupid, but they allow us to build up a wider view than just the normal information you give a bank for a loan."

This broad view of borrowers is, of course, aimed at maximizing the number of loans that will be repaid.

In their short span of activity, the sites have maintained very high rates of repayment. Zopa claims a 0.05 percent default rate while Prosper has not had a single default in its top two credit grades. This compares with a default rate of 0.4 percent for borrowers with perfect credit in the United States.

The combined value of all loans by the two sites — more than $30 million by Prosper and "many millions of pounds" by Zopa — are small compared to the £3 billion, or $5.8 billion, of new personal loans offered each month by traditional British banks.

But some banking analysts see their solidarity, simplicity and cost savings as something the banking industry may seek to emulate.

The sites operate under the same principles as credit unions, where individuals pool their money for borrowing and lending. But instead of customers who share the same employer, ethnicity or profession, the lending sites connect total strangers.

"If you close your eyes, the Zopa description sounds exactly like a local credit union of the 1950s," said Meyer, of the Filene Research Institute. "The difference is that the Internet brings borrowers and lenders together across great geographic distances."

Take John Etherington, who needed a loan, and Mauro Lazzara, who had some spare money.

Etherington, 54, a truck driver based in Newport, East Yorkshire, needed £2,000 to replace the double-glazed windows in his house. The banks offered interest rates above 9 percent for periods of at least five years, with hefty penalties for paying off loans early.

"The banks are not very sympathetic, even when you want to repay them early," Etherington said. "Even so, it used to be that you had no choice but to go through them."

By surfing the Internet, however, Etherington found Zopa, where he found a loan at 6 percent interest for three years, with no penalty for early repayment.

Getting the loan required providing Zopa with similar credit information as a bank, but approval took just four days. A bank loan would have taken weeks to clear and required several visits to the branch, Etherington said.

"Unlike the bank, I don't resent the person who loaned me the money," Etherington said. "I'm happy to pay that person, whoever it might be."

Etherington sends his loan payments to Zopa, which dispatches them to all of the lenders whose money made up the loan. Should he fail to make payments, Zopa uses similar recovery procedures to a bank, including an eventual downgrade of Etherington's consumer credit rating.

One of the people lending the money to Etherington might be Lazzara, 36, an oil engineer in Aberdeen, Scotland, who last year invested £1,000 with Zopa after reading about it in a newspaper.

"It is not just the interest I earn, but I like the idea of lending my money directly to help other people," Lazzara said.

At Zopa, lenders can select the term of the loan — from one to five years — as well as the credit rating of borrower they wish. Borrowers with a bad consumer credit rating pay more interest, but have a higher chance of default.

For all of their credit safeguards, the low lending rates could draw borrowers who do not intend to repay the loans, said Jim Bruene, editor of the Online Banking Report, a newsletter based in Seattle.

"The dirty and ugly truth is that all lending attracts scammers, even if the default rates do not yet show it," Bruene said. "Every loan business has to deal with levels of deceit."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ness/loans.php





Peer-to-Peer User Fined £3,400 in Landmark Case
Simon Aughton

A mobile phone engineer from Essex is hit with a hefty fine after ISP data is used to identify his use of peer-to-peer file sharing software.

The clampdown on peer-to-peer file sharing services and users has taken another step forward as an Essex man was fined £3,400 for illegally sharing commercial software across the net.

Derek Butterworth, a mobile phone engineer from Epping was identified as part of the Federation Against Software Theft's (FAST) Operation Tracker investigation into p2p software sharing.

FAST successfully prosecuted Butterworth, who was using a piece of illegal software that cost £35, and as a result he's been hit with court costs and fine. "The penalty was almost 100 times more than the cost of doing the right thing and buying the software in the first place", observed Senior Legal Counsel Julian Heathcote Hobbins.

FAST secured a court order last year that compelled several ISPs to reveal details of Butterworth's p2p activity. It contacted Butterworth, warning him that illegal content had been found and made available for sharing on his PC. It asked him to pay a licence fee for the software and sign an undertaking that he would not offend again. According to FAST, Butterworth failed to respond, later claiming that he had not received the FAST letter.

Butterworth was contacted on two separate occasions, and was notified in writing that illegal content had been found and made available for sharing on his PC. The letters invited him to settle, pay a licence fee and contribution to costs, and sign an undertaking that he would not commit the offence again. Butterworth did not respond.

FAST appear to have approached the case in a different, more measured way to their counterparts in the US. Firstly, most offenders there quickly settled out of court, paying a nominal fine and signing an agreement not to reoffend. Secondly, it was only after being ignored several times that FAST took things to a more serious level.

John Lovelock, director general of FAST said that it would continue to monitor and search for shared software illegally shared.

'There is an underlying notion that the internet is an anonymous cocoon, which is simply not the case,' he said. 'When you connect to the internet and access peer-to-peer networks you are identifying yourself and your details to the millions of others on that network, including us. Tracker works, and if people think they can either hide from or ignore their liabilities, then they need to think again. Misuse of software is something individuals cannot plead ignorance to. Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly.'

FAST noted that the £3,400 costs and damages payment was almost 100 times more than the £35 licence fee for the software in question.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/106554/p...mark-case.html





Please come again

RIAA Likes Piracy

So check out what the confirmation page of the RIAA's www.p2plawsuits.com site tells you when you finish paying them.



http://reviewlister.blogspot.com/200...es-piracy.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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