Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 1st, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"How about a round of applause for the Lollipop Guild?" – WGA speaker


"In years past, our picketing schedule has gone, 'Picket on Mondays for two hours and then meet at a bar until the following Monday.' That’s not how we’re going to do it this time." – David Young


"We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal." – Larry Page


"There are no words to explain my rage. These people were supposed to be our friends." – Tina Meier


"One way or another she's got to pay." – Kevin Washburn


"Cultural dominatrixes." – Alexandra Wagner


"You could go a year without spotting another Zune (and, in fact, you probably just have)." – David Pogue



































December 1st, 2007





EMI Wants to Cut Funding to Trade Groups –Source
Kate Holton

British music industry major EMI wants to cut its funding to the industry's trade bodies, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Wednesday, which could deal a blow to the fight against music piracy.

The source said EMI, which was recently taken over by private equity group Terra Firma, was looking at ways to "substantially" reduce the amount it pays trade groups.

The groups, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other national associations, represent music companies and the fight against illegal piracy.

They receive funding from the four major music groups -- EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal -- and hundreds of small independent labels.

The IFPI said it believed the four majors give approximately 64 million pounds ($132.1 million) each year to itself, the RIAA and many other national associations.

The other majors were not available for comment, but a separate industry source said at least one of the major music companies is known to strongly support the associations and their work.

EMI is undergoing a strategic review after being bought by Terra Firma for 2.4 billion pounds ($4.95 billion).

Like all music groups, it has been hit hard by online piracy and falling CD sales, despite the efforts of the trade groups to combat the problem.

The IFPI said on Wednesday it was engaged in annual budget decisions and "as one would expect in this market, there is a focus on efficiencies and savings".

It declined to give any further details but added that it was also engaged in a very full agenda to promote the rights of its member record companies.

EMI, Terra Firma, the BPI and RIAA were all unavailable to comment.

Illegal file-sharing is estimated to cost the music industry billions of dollars a year in revenues. In response, the trade bodies have launched legal action and called upon Internet service providers to block the activity.

Analysts at UBS said any move to reduce the funding to trade bodies could hamper the industry's efforts to fight piracy and protect music copyright. (Reporting by Kate Holton, editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...071128?sp=true





Oregon AG Seeks to Investigate RIAA Tactics
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Turning the tables on the RIAA's attempt to subpoena information from the University of Oregon, that state's Attorney General has now filed additional papers to conduct immediate discovery into the RIAA's "data mining" techniques. These techniques include the use of unlicensed investigators, the turning over of subpoenaed information to collection agencies, and the obtaining of personal information from computers.

The AG pointed out that "Because Plaintiffs routinely obtain ex parte discovery in their John Doe infringement suits ... their factual assertions supporting their good cause argument are never challenged by an adverse party and their investigative methods remain free of scrutiny. They often settle their cases quickly before defendants obtain legal representation and begin to conduct discovery."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/11/30/1910202.shtml





RIAA Hits Top US Schools. But Not Harvard
p2pnet news

Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA targeted several Ivy League universities in its latest “initiative,” as their RIAA calls it as it continues to wreak havoc in universities up and down up and down America.

InformationWeek notes that among them are Columbia University, Duke University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Princeton, and Brown University.

But what it doesn’t note is the fact that missing, significantly, is Harvard.

Or as Ray Beckerman puts it on Recording Industry vs The People, this latest anti-college round, “targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth”

One could be forgiven for thinking Harvard is escaping victimisation because it’s co-operating by sending its students RIAA blackmail letters, as are so many other US universities.

But that’s not the case. In fact, to the contrary, “take a hike,” Charles Nesson, William F. Weld professor of law, Harvard Law School, and founder and faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director, the Berkman Center, told the Big 4’s RIAA attack dogs.

They stated:

ring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country. The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the ‘license plates’ of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.

Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process.

Meanwhile, the InformationWeek story has RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) mouthperson Jonathan Lamy declaring the attacks on American students are necessary, “given the continuing prevalence of music theft on college campuses.”

He goes on:

“This theft triggers a harmful domino effect throughout the music community - thousands of regular, working class musicians and others out of work, record stores shuttered, new bands never signed.”

In a p2pnet post, a corporate music industry worker bemoans the fact that, “some people still believe that we in the music industry are ‘fat cats’ and that it’s [a] multi-billion-dollar cartel”.

He continues, “A lot of my friends has lost their jobs in the last few years, last week another big company were shut down because they couldn’t afford to keep going. All employees in five countries were laid off.”

However, “I’m sorry that you are making below minimum wage in the industry you are working in now. Since you love music, maybe you need to find a job in another industry and spend your hobby time producing and distributing music,” says Cyberscan.

“I am willing to guarantee that you will have a more original product. In fact the product that you produce in your home will be yours, and you can use it to advertise yourself or a friend’s business. If people like your product, they will either buy it or come to see you perform. If you are not a performer, try hooking up with a garage band that produces great music. Produce good music, distribute it for free … and add a link to your website. If the product is good, you will make money. Working for a big corporation is akin to slavery.”
http://p2pnet.net/story/14106





Woman to Pay Downloading Award Herself
Joshua Freed

Jammie Thomas makes $36,000 a year but says she's not looking for a handout to pay a $222,000 judgment after a jury decided she illegally shared music online.

"I'm not going to ask for financial help," she told The Associated Press on Friday. But she added, "If it comes, I'm not going to turn it down, either."

Record labels have sued more than 26,000 people they accuse of downloading and offering music for sharing online in violation of copyright laws. Many of those people have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars.

Thomas was the first person to fight back all the way to a trial. Six major record companies accused Thomas of offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network. At trial, they focused on 24 songs and jurors decided Thursday that Thomas willfully violated the copyright on all 24. Their verdict was for damages of $9,250 per song, or $222,000.

The recording industry won two victories with that verdict.

Beyond the money, the industry added to a growing body of legal precedents holding that making copyright-protected songs available online, even without proof the songs went anywhere, infringes on the copyrights for the songs.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis was planning to instruct jurors as they began their deliberations that record companies would have to prove someone copied the songs to show copyright infringement.

But record company attorney Richard Gabriel cited cases where making songs available was found to be infringement, and Davis changed course.

Legal experts said the question isn't settled.

"Record labels don't like that because it's harder to prove," said Andrew Bridges, an attorney who has argued for the Computer & Communications Industry Association that copyright holders should have to prove the offered material is actually used.

"It's all about whether they get a free pass to impose onerous damages on people without actually having to prove a case," Bridges said.

International intellectual property treaties assume that simply making a work of art available can violate the copyright, said Jane C. Ginsburg, an intellectual law professor at Columbia Law School.

"It would be hard to see how we could be living up to our international obligations if the law were interpreted differently," she said.

Ray Beckerman, an attorney who has represented people sued by the record companies, said the companies used one case where there was a $22,500 default judgment to scare people into settling.

"Now, look at this. This is 10 times better. They can talk about this case, they can use it for frightening people," he said.

Beckerman said the damage award was disproportionate to the price of the 24 songs Thomas was accused of sharing for free. She could have bought them for 99 cents each on a legal download site, he said.

Record company lawyer Richard Gabriel argued at trial that Thomas made the songs available to millions of users on Kazaa.

The lawsuits have cost more than they've brought in. But the Recording Industry Association of America has said it wants the lawsuits to send a message that downloading music illegally is risky.

But the number of people sharing files online at any given time has risen 69 percent to almost 9.4 million since 2003, when the lawsuits began, according to BigChampagne LLC, research firm that tracks file-sharing traffic.

That suggests the publicity has had a limited effect in deterring people from swapping music online, said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.

Record companies "don't want to be on the front page battling a lot of customers," Garland said. "They want to be on the front page selling a lot of Kanye records."

Thomas denied that the Kazaa account at issue during the trial was hers. Neither side presented the computer hard drive Thomas owned in 2004 and 2005, which she allegedly use to download and offer the songs.

Thomas said Friday that people who heard about the verdict have been leaving messages on her MySpace page offering to help.

"I guess it's my Native pride," said Thomas, who is a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. "Up until this point I have not held my hand out and asked for financial assistance from anyone."

Thomas, 30, works for the Mille Lacs band coordinating a federal grant for cleaning up contaminated land. She said she doesn't have the means to pay.

"I am a single mother of two boys. I make $36,000 a year at my job," she said. "At best they could try and get a court order garnishing my wages."

Her attorney, Brian Toder, said that copyright law automatically awards court costs and attorney fees to the winning party.

Paying those too could push the total judgment against Thomas as high as a half-million dollars.

Recording Industry Association of America spokeswoman Cara Duckworth declined to comment on the group's plans for enforcing the judgment.

Thomas questioned whether the record companies will be able to enforce the verdict because she is an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs band, lives on its land and works for the band.

But Kevin Washburn, who teaches American Indian Law as a visiting associate professor at Harvard Law School, said tribal courts generally enforce judgments from other courts. And since this is a federal verdict, the tribal courts might not even have a say in enforcing the verdict.

"One way or another she's got to pay," he said.

The companies that sued Thomas were EMI Group PLC's Capitol Records Inc.; the Arista Records LLC label and its parent Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is run by Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG; Vivendi SA's UMG Inc. and its label, Interscope Records; and Warner Bros. Records Inc., which is a unit of Warner Music Group Corp.
http://www.siliconvalley.com//ci_7089665





Software Group Targets Small Business
Brian Bergstein

Michael Gaertner worried he could lose his company. A group called the Business Software Alliance had written him to claim that his 10-person architectural firm in Galveston, Texas, was using unlicensed software.

The letter demanded $67,000 - most of one year's profit - or else the BSA would seek more in court.

"It just scared the hell out of me," Gaertner said.

An analysis by The Associated Press reveals that targeting small businesses is a lucrative strategy for the Business Software Alliance, the main global copyright-enforcement watchdog for such companies as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp.

Of the $13 million that the BSA reaped in software violation settlements with North American companies last year, almost 90 percent came from small businesses, the AP found.

The BSA is well within its rights to wring expensive punishments aimed at stopping the willful, blatant software copying that undoubtedly happens in many businesses. And its leaders say they concentrate on small businesses because that's where illegitimate use of software is rampant.

But technology managers and software consultants say the picture has more shades of gray than the BSA acknowledges. Companies of all sizes say they inadvertently run afoul of licensing rules because of problems the software industry itself has created. Unable or unwilling to create technological blocks against copying, the industry has saddled its customers with complex licensing agreements that are hard to master.

In that view, the BSA amasses most of its bounties from small businesses because they have fewer technological, organizational and legal resources to avoid a run-in.

In Gaertner's case, some employees had been unable to open files with the firm's drafting software, so they worked around it by installing programs they found on their own, breaking company rules, he said. And receipts for legitimate software had been lost in the hubbub of running his company.

"It was basically just a lack of knowledge and sloppy record-keeping on my part," said Gaertner, who ended up with a settlement that cost him $40,000.

In the U.S., the largest software market, piracy rates have not budged in years. BSA critics say that is because making examples out of small businesses has little deterrent effect, since many company owners like Gaertner don't even realize they're violating copyrights.

"If they were going after actual pirates, that would be a different story, but they're going after hardworking companies," said Barbara Rembiesa, head of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers.

She founded the group to educate businesses on how to manage their software because she felt the industry wasn't doing enough of that, even as it was imposing steep penalties for noncompliance.

"If you were driving down the street and you got a speeding ticket, and there was no speed limit sign, it probably would be thrown out of court," she said.

Yet the BSA is getting more aggressive. Its CEO says software licenses aren't as difficult as many users contend. It has dropped an amnesty campaign for businesses. And this year it began dangling rewards of up to $1 million to disgruntled employees who anonymously report their bosses for using counterfeit or unlicensed software.

"The software vendors have every right to collect the license fees they're entitled to," said Tom Adolph, an attorney with Jackson Walker LLP who has defended against BSA claims. "It's the tactics of the BSA that rankle me."

The BSA was founded in 1988 to represent technology companies on many fronts, and its members also include IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. The alliance spends more than $3 million a year on lobbying, prodding Congress on such issues as patent reform and Internet security.

But the most visible element is the BSA's fight against counterfeit software and illegal copying. Not all members are part of that effort; those that are include Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Autodesk Inc., Apple Inc. and McAfee Inc.

In countries with the highest piracy rates, the BSA has pushed governments to crack down, arguing that greater respect for intellectual-property laws would stimulate investment in their economies. In July, Chinese police who cooperated with the BSA and the FBI crushed rings that had been selling an estimated $2 billion worth of pirated Microsoft and Symantec software around the world.

These steps seem to work. The percentage of software in China that was not legitimately purchased is 82 percent, but that's down from 92 percent in 2003 and 96 percent a decade ago, according to BSA-commissioned market research.

Overall, the BSA says the worldwide piracy rate is 35 percent, down from 43 percent in 1996. However, the group says that because the industry has grown in that time, software companies' annual piracy losses have quadrupled. The BSA says piracy took a $40 billion bite out of a $246 billion industry in 2006.

In the United States, where the piracy rate is a worldwide-low 21 percent, the BSA's strategy includes working with law enforcement and Web sites like eBay to stop suspiciously cheap software sales online.

Beyond hunting for dicey characters buying and selling counterfeits, the BSA also devotes significant attention to other forms of what it calls piracy by business users. The money harvested in these company-by-company crackdowns is not parceled to its members whose copyrights were infringed; the funds stay with the BSA to fuel its operations. (BSA's worldwide settlements soared 53 percent last year to $56 million.)

Plenty of cases originate when a whistleblower reports that a company is intentionally cheating - copying one program onto multiple PCs. In extreme cases, the BSA will get court approval to raid companies in search of evidence.

However, there are ways to get in trouble that do not begin with counterfeits or downloads. Companies sometimes legitimately buy software and fail to follow the letter of the licensing agreements that accompany the programs.

For example, computers often get handed down. Newer, faster machines go to employees who perform intensive technical work, and their old PCs go to colleagues with lesser needs.

Commonly an employee can transfer a copy of, say, expensive drafting software to a new machine. But many companies forget or don't realize that the software should be deleted from the old machine if the company has only one license for it - even if the receptionist who gets the hand-me-down PC never uses drafting software.

The situation is further complicated because software licenses vary greatly. Some programs can be shared on multiple computers in an organization, or used by the same person on a home and office computer.

Multiply such oversights by dozens of software programs, and suddenly a BSA audit can lead to a charge of big-time piracy.

"They call it something awful, but sometimes you grow so fast, you can't keep control of everything," said Mike Lozicki, president of MediaLab Ventures LLC of Tampa, Fla., which paid the BSA $125,000. Lozicki said 12 percent of MediaLab's software was deemed out of compliance, much of it sitting unused. "It was some really obscure stuff," he said.

The BSA enforcement director, Jenny Blank, wouldn't comment on his case.

BSA audits zing companies for software that came with used computers they bought to save money. The BSA considers software pirated if a company can't produce a receipt for it, no matter how long ago it was purchased. Software boxes or certificates of authenticity are no help, because the BSA argues the software could have been obtained from an illegitimate source.

No wonder, then, there are companies that exist mainly to help other businesses track and comply with their software licenses.

Robert Holleyman, who has headed the BSA since 1990, countered by saying a lot of companies have figured out how to get their software licenses in order.

"I don't agree with the assumption that license management is necessarily a complex task," he said. "I think that to suggest that it's impossible to do - which is not your word, but is your inference - would belie the heroic efforts of the vast majority of software users."

Yet it's safe to say the software industry has not exactly handed its customers a product that is easy to manage. That's one reason why Britain's Federation Against Software Theft - an industry group that, like the BSA, pursues scofflaw companies - has a sister division that educates companies, for a fee, on how to stay compliant.

John Lovelock, the British group's director, said that if it undertook enforcement without the education program, "it would be half of a virtuous circle. It would give us only half of a solution."

The BSA does have some software-management tools and advice on the Web. And this summer, it partnered with the federal Small Business Administration to develop and publish educational materials about software compliance.

However, software-management gurus say the BSA could be far more active in assisting companies - which are, after all, its members' customers.

"Instead of just being the software police, be the police in the sense of helping old ladies across the street," said Barbara Scott, a software consultant for Redemtech Inc. "The BSA could become more of a partner with organizations that they're hammering as well."

Rather than a helping hand, BSA targets say they feel a stinging slap.

After an audit, the BSA generally demands at least twice the retail price of software deemed out of compliance. It also seeks the "unbundled" price of software that is sold together. So if a company loaded too many copies of a $300 package of Microsoft Office, the BSA might tally the retail value of every element in the package - Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. - which totals more than $1,000, and then at least double that.

Rob Scott, an attorney with Scott & Scott LLP who specializes in defending against BSA claims, argues that by charging the unbundled rate, the alliance misrepresents U.S. copyright law, which counts product compilations as single works when it comes to assessing damages. (The BSA says Scott's reading misdefines "compilation.")

The BSA accurately points out that under copyright law, it could collect up to $150,000 per infringed work if it prevailed in a lawsuit, or $30,000 if the incident was unintentional. Neil MacBride, the group's head of legal affairs, calls the law's figures "draconian" and says that by seeking less, the BSA gives violators a break.

Another way the BSA used to rebut accusations that its copyright crackdown was all stick and no carrot was through occasional "grace periods" or "software truces." In those periods, the BSA would air ads in certain cities, reminding companies of software copyright rules and giving them 30 days to buy new licenses without penalty.

But the group no longer offers such amnesties.

"We just moved on to something different," Blank said. "You just don't do the same thing all the time or it gets old."

Lately, there's been another change in BSA tactics.

For years the group implored unhappy employees to report their companies for software piracy. "Nail Your Boss!" the ads said. But beginning in 2005, the BSA sweetened the deal by offering $50,000 rewards to whistleblowers in the U.S. It raised the limit to $200,000 last year, and now it is $1 million.

That matched the top reward of a smaller trade group, the Software and Information Industry Association, which has many of the same members, but not Microsoft. (SIIA also serves as a copyright watchdog for media companies, including The Associated Press, that want to stop their content from being misused online.)

Blank says the high reward is having its intended effect: It is bringing in more leads. However, she also says about half of all tipsters don't want any money.

It's unlikely the BSA will ever pay $1 million. The rewards have a sliding scale, with informants eligible for $1 million only if the resulting case reaps more than $15 million. The BSA's largest case, against what it called an "international media company," pulled in $3.5 million. Most informants collect closer to $5,000.

Even so, having rewards at all raises questions of whether the BSA creates a perverse incentive for employees who discover their organizations out of compliance: Should they help their bosses get squared away or try for a BSA jackpot?

Although whistleblowers aren't revealed to the target company, businesses often suspect the tipster was a technical employee - even someone who had been responsible for handling software installations.

The BSA says people who intentionally load software improperly at a company are ineligible for rewards. But it can still bring a case sparked by someone who had let the problem fester.

That dynamic, coupled with the fact that software can be hard to manage, is why BSA critics contend the organization can get cash almost anywhere it pokes.

Blank disputes that notion. She said it's not worth the BSA's time to chase "onesy, twosy random noncompliance," so it focuses on the worst offenders.

Yet in 2005, her group pursued Mediaport Entertainment Inc. of Salt Lake City, where an audit revealed two unlicensed copies of Microsoft software. Retail value: $6,500. The BSA pressed for $16,500; the sides settled for an undisclosed amount.

Blank said she didn't recall the case.

When he directed BSA enforcement from 1993 to 2005, former federal prosecutor Bob Kruger didn't make much of grumbling from BSA targets. Mainly, he says, people were rationalizing software copying they knew was wrong.

"It's never fun to be investigated or audited or charged. I think it's human nature to say, `Well, you know it's not all my fault,'" Kruger said. "I don't think BSA was ever above reproach, but I think we always tried hard to run a program we could take pride in."

In particular, Kruger's group enjoyed big gains against piracy. Even in the U.S. it was over 30 percent in the 1990s, but it fell to 22 percent in 2003, according to the BSA-commissioned research.

"People are better now than they used to be. More often, it was the case in the past that BSA would identify organizations trying to get away with something," Kruger said. "More likely these days the disputes are going to center around negligence or sloppiness. It's not across the board, but I think it's a fair general statement. And that's because BSA has been, to some degree, successful in raising awareness."

Yet the campaign no longer shows momentum. The U.S. piracy rate ticked down to 21 percent in 2004, and there it remains.

So does the BSA need a new strategy?

"I think it's a fair question: What exactly is the problem the program is tackling now, as opposed to the problem it was tackling 10 years ago?" Kruger said. "If the problem is the same, that says something about the effectiveness of the program, doesn't it?"

Holleyman acknowledged that the BSA is finding it tough to have its "voice heard for the remaining part of the marketplace where there is piracy." But he said he sees no reason to try a dramatically new approach.

Top antipiracy executives at Microsoft and Autodesk praised the BSA for keeping piracy from rising; Autodesk said its experience supports the notion that smaller businesses have the biggest compliance problems. Other alliance members declined to comment.

They may be overlooking something: BSA targets commonly say they wish they didn't have to buy anything again from the companies that unleashed the alliance on them.

In one case, a BSA raid on musical-instrument maker Ernie Ball Inc. cost the company $90,000 in a settlement. Soon after, Microsoft sent other businesses in his region a flyer offering discounts on software licenses, along with a reminder not to wind up like Ernie Ball.

Enraged, CEO Sterling Ball vowed never to use Microsoft software again, even if "we have to buy 10,000 abacuses." He shifted to open-source software, which lacks such legal entanglements because its underlying code is freely distributed.

For many businesses, open-source has seemed technically daunting or unable to match the proprietary programs seen as essential in some industries. These days, however, the march of technology might be changing that.

That's one hope of Michael Gaertner, the architect who worried his BSA encounter would crush his business. Now he wants to rid himself of the Autodesk, Microsoft and Adobe software involved in the case.

"It's not like they have really good software. It's just that it's widespread and it's commonly used," Gaertner said. "It's going to be a while, but eventually, we plan to get completely disengaged from those software vendors that participate in the BSA."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





MovieX Leeches From The BitTorrent Community
Ernesto

The private BitTorrent tracker Moviex has been setup and configured to leech from public BitTorrent users. Through some clever modifications, their tracker allows non-members to seed to the private tracker, while downloading is forbidden.

Private BitTorrent trackers are supposed to be private and for registered members only. A non-member that downloads a torrent from a private tracker will usually get a tracker connection failure in their BitTorrent client. They will not be able to download or upload any data from that torrent, rendering the torrent useless to them. This is the basis that most private trackers work upon, but not Moviex.

Lately, several people have noticed a sudden rise in torrent files being uploaded to public indexing sites like Newtorrents, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay. These uploaded torrent files contain two announce URLs, one from The Pirate Bay and a moviex.info URL that always has the same passkey present, presumably the passkey for an anonymous user.

http://www.moviex.info:2710/...3c73mdqxj31q/announce
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

To see a pirate bay tracker URL present in a torrent file is nothing out of the ordinary. So what’s special about the moviex.info URL being present in public torrents? Well, the message you get when trying to connect to the moviex.info tracker if you are not a member might give you a hint.

“Failure: access denied, leeching forbidden, you’re only allowed to seed”

Normally you would get something like: “Failure: unregistered torrent pass.” However, moviex.info allows non-members to seed files, while they are not allowed to download. This is a huge bonus for MovieX and its members. Currently, newtorrents.info provides 1000’s of downloads per day to torrent users and reportedly 50% of the available torrents on that site have the moviex.info tracker URL present, the actual percentage may even be be higher.

It is not unusual for private trackers to upload files to public sites. Most of the time this is done to advertise the tracker, so their community grows. However, we don’t see torrents like this very often, I’m not sure if they do this on purpose, but they are definitely leeching bandwidth from people who only use the public tracker. It’s a pretty nice system if you want your private tracker to gain external seeds along with faster download speeds for your members, It’s however also a very damaging method for any user who is not a member of MovieX.info as they will continually upload pieces of the torrent to users who will give very little if anything at all back.

To see exactly what this tracker configuration does and how it works watch the video below. The video shows two clear examples, one of a non seeded file and one of a seeded file using these rogue torrents, obviously for legal reasons we have renamed the torrents that I used for this demonstration (HQ download).

There is a way to prevent the leeching. If you download a torrent file from a public tracker check the tracker URL’s and remove the moviex.info announce URL if it is present. This will stop you seeding the file on that tracker and in turn not allow members of moviex.info to leech data from you. You could also try blocking their IP Address (206.53.62.206) in your IP filter if you are not a member of the MovieX community.

MovieX have taken the time to code this feature into their tracker and at the moment as far as we can tell they are the only private site exploiting this type of dirty hack to leech from external BitTorrent users. What moviex.info should do is configure their tracker not to allow external users without a passkey to connect to their tracker in any way, instead it would seem they have deliberately setup to leech as much data from the public BitTorrent community as possible and boost their own private community speeds. MovieX deny this is the case and claim these torrents to be no more than simple advertising for the site in an attempt to attract new members?
http://torrentfreak.com/moviex-leech...munity-071201/





U.S. Slump Casts Pall Over Media, Entertainment
Kenneth Li

A U.S. economic recession could hammer those media and entertainment companies that rely heavily on advertising next year, curtailing experimentation when the industry needs it most.

Just how severe the impact of a sinking U.S. housing market, global credit crunch and possible slowdown in consumer spending will be depends on many factors, including how deeply embedded a company's product are in people's homes, executives told the Reuters Media Summit in New York this week.

Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto, who downgraded the entertainment sector in September, sketched out an even bleaker view if a recession materializes.

His firm pegged the risk of recession at 45 percent and Noto said that could cause ad revenue among traditional media companies to tumble 10 percent in 2008, compared with current estimates of flat to 1 percent growth.

While nearly all media companies depend in part on ads, worst hit will likely be print media and broadcaster CBS Corp, where advertising accounts for over 70 percent of revenue.

Entertainment companies with international exposure and Internet businesses could buck the trend. Noto cited News Corp and Walt Disney Co as top performers next year, noting however that even News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch is hedging forecasts against worse conditions.

"Obviously a recession is not a good thing and will have an impact on ad spending," Peter Levinsohn, president of News Corp's Fox Interactive Media, told the summit. "In times like that advertisers tend to move more towards accountability ... We still feel pretty good about our prospects."

Media companies that make their money by selling their entertainment could have a cushion, as consumers seek diversions even in the worst of times.

Electronic Arts Chief Executive John Riccitiello pointed out that its Pogo online casual games sites had one of its best days on September 12, 2001, one day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"People were at home and they had to do something. They were probably flipping back and forth between Reuters, CNN and Pogo," he said.

Fringe At Risk

Online ad growth across the industry is expected to rise more than 20 percent this year, fueling heavy investments. But consumption of new entertainment forms is tiny compared to traditional viewing habits.

For example, video viewing on the Web from the likes of Google Inc's YouTube relative to television watching is currently about 0.01 percent, said David Sanderson, head of Bain & Co.'s global media practice.

Web search, led by Google, should weather a recession, but more novel types of advertising -- such as ads on mobile phones and commercials built into video-on-demand programming -- could be vulnerable.

"Clearly, the fringe areas would be much more impacted... the newer areas that have less of a track record in terms of their ability to have a direct marketing impact," said Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for North America at WPP Group's media-buying division GroupM.

Scanzoni said his division now expects lower U.S. ad growth for the 12 months to September 2008 of 3.7 percent to 3.8 percent, compared with a prior forecast of 4.2 percent.

Bright Spot

Gangbuster holiday sales of video games -- buoyed by titles this quarter including Activision Inc's "Guitar Hero III" and Electronic Arts Inc and Viacom Inc's "Rock Band" -- have put a new shine on the sector.

Top executives say the sector appears relatively recession-proof and is more vulnerable to industry-specific events, such as game console cycles, than economic fluctuations.

And for the first time in the current generation, sales of games for latest generation systems -- Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 -- have surpassed sales of older titles, EA's Riccitiello said.

"Most anything you can consume in your home wins at the expense of things that require travel or capital expense," he said.

Strauss Zelnick, chairman of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive Inc, warned that no sector should consider itself immune. Zelnick's career is rooted in traditional media, including stints as a former CEO of BMG Entertainment and President of 20th Century Fox.

"No entertainment business is truly counter-cyclical," he said. "People try to tell you that but it's just not the truth. Think about it -- you've just lost your home. No, you're not going to pay $50 on a video game, you're just not, even though it's Christmas time."
http://www.reuters.com/article/Media...21008520071130





Open Letter From TorrentFreak To Brein
Ernesto

The infamous anti-piracy watchdog BREIN infringed our copyright earlier this week as they used a quote from one of our articles without attribution. As a follow up to our previous article, we wrote an open letter to BREIN to educate the public about their lack of respect for the rights of people who don’t pay them millions.

Here’s what the MPAA has to say about what Brein did: “Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.”

One of our counsels has put together an open letter to BREIN to show how hypocritical they are. They don’t care about copyright, they care about money and blame pirates for the inability of their clients to adapt their business models to technological change.

Letter:

—

Dear Mr Kuik

Being vociferous exponents of the fight against copyright infringement, your organization is expected to uphold the highest possible standards where the misuse of other people’s intellectual property is concerned.

It has been brought to my attention that your organization has reproduced text from an article published by this website concerning the website SumoTorrent, without prior written consent1 and without complying with the copyright terms applicable to this publication, TorrentFreak2.

Specifically, your organization has selectively and misleadingly quoted from our publication without properly attributing the source, in contravention of the Creative Commons license3 under which this text was published. This is a contemptible infringement of our own intellectual property rights, illustrative of a gross lack of professionalism on your part.

Furthermore, you have mischievously and inaccurately attributed the source of the material stolen from ourselves as being “a pirate weblog”. This amounts to actionable libel, inasmuch that neither the owners nor the staff of this publication – a well respected and widely read source of filesharing news - have ever been accused, suspected or prosecuted, for any so-called act of piracy. We are neither sailors nor thieves of other people’s intellectual property, unlike yourselves.

Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world. Much of the material that is shared by sites targeted by yourselves such as SumoTorrent is open source, copyright has never been asserted or it is in the public domain. To presume otherwise is to add arrogance to the ignorance your organization has already exhibited.

There is, and there can never be, any legitimacy attached to your harassment5 of those who merely assist in finding the location of such copyright free material. The indiscriminate prevention of people’s enjoyment of their own property, in this case their own computers, is in direct contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights4.

Having learned that you have falsely claimed that a District Court judgment in June 2007 against a specific defendant amounted to some sort of precedent, justifying your demand that others breach data protection principles5 & 6, my expectations of your professionalism are not high.

Whilst I harbor no illusions that you will have the grace to apologize for your unwarranted breach of my own rights in these matters, this letter will serve to educate others and make public your abuse of process, your contempt for the rights of others and your outright hypocrisy.

Sincerely

TorrentFreak Counsel
legal@torrentfreak.com

http://torrentfreak.com/open-letter-...-brein-071125/





Sony Sued in Meat Loaf Logo Row
BBC

Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 30 million copies

Sony Music must pay $5m (£2.4m) to a small record company for missing its logo off Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell album, a US court has ruled.

The decision comes after a court settlement in 1998 decided Sony should include the Cleveland International logo on future copies of the record.

But Sony failed to add the logo for more than a year afterwards.

Cleveland founder Steve Popovich said: "I worked too hard for them and made them too much money to get robbed now."

Sony claimed the logo omission was a mistake that was eventually corrected.

According to court documents, Sony claimed that Mr Popovich had fabricated the logo agreement.

In an original dispute over royalties from the album, Mr Popovich and his former partners were awarded $6.7m (£3.2m) by Sony.

Bat Out of Hell, which was originally released in 1977, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, according to court records.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7108975.stm





Copyright Choices and Voices
Michael Geist

Last week, I delivered an hour-long speech on copyright to the Canadian Federation of Students (the slides are here and posted below and a podcast is here). Since the audio on the podcast version of the talk is poor, I want to reiterate my central message. In the past, I have spoken frequently about the opportunity for Canada to make its own choices on copyright reform. After highlighting the remarkable array of new developments for content creation, content sharing, and knowledge sharing, I have emphasized the need for copyright laws that look ahead, rather than behind. In particular, I have pointed to the dangers associated with anti-circumvention legislation, to the need for more flexible fair dealing, to the desirability of eliminating crown copyright, and to the benefits of open access and open licensing. I typically conclude by stating that this can be Canada's choice and that we must choose wisely.

This speech had a different conclusion, however. Sometime over the next two or three weeks, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will rise in the House of Commons and introduce copyright reform legislation. We can no longer speak of choices because those choices have already been made. There is every indication (see the Globe's latest coverage) this legislation will be a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The industry may be abandoning DRM, the evidence may show a correlation between file sharing and music purchasing, Statistics Canada may say that music industry profits are doing fine, Canadian musicians, filmmakers, and artists may warn against this copyright approach, and the reality may be that Canadian copyright law is stronger in some areas than U.S. law, yet none of that seems to matter. In the current environment and with the current Ministers, politics trumps policy.

The new Canadian legislation will likely mirror the with strong anti-circumvention legislation - far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties - and address none of the issues that concern millions of Canadians. The Conservatives promise to eliminate the private copying levy will likely be abandoned. There will be no flexible fair dealing. No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.

The government will seemingly choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a "Canadian-made" solution. Once the bill is introduced, look for the government to put it on the fast track with limited opportunity for Canadians to appear before committees considering the bill. With a Canadian DMCA imminent, what matters now are voices. It will be up to those opposed to this law to make theirs heard.

Update: Many people have asked what they can do to make their voices heard on this issue. Last year, I posted 30 Things You Can Do about anti-circumvention legislation. Many of those recommendations still apply, starting with a letter (letter, not email - no stamp required) to your Member of Parliament, the Ministers of Industry and Canadian Heritage, and the Prime Minister.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2419/125/





Swiss DMCA Coming Down -- 50,000 Signatures Needed to Unmake It
Dave

Who cares about about Swiss copyright laws? Nobody it seems, not even Swiss citizens.

On the 5th of October 2007, the Swiss law makers adopted a new law to comply with the WIPO treaties. Thanks to the entertainment lobbies, apart from criminalizing DRM circumvention devices, you can now win a one year visit in jail if you share a copyrighted file on a P2P network.

Did anybody hear about this new law ? No. Not even Swiss citizens. The media is quiet about this.

The thing is, Switzerland uses a direct democracy system, and this new law could be the subject to a federal vote if 50,000 people sign a request for it. That's called a Referendum request, and the deadline for its deposit is the 24th of January 2008. If there's no Referendum request by then, the law will become effective.

There's little doubt that if federal votes were to made today, the law would pass anyway. But at least a public debate could be created around the issue and people could react.

I'm sending you this news item because I just read your news post about Canada. It seems that in Canada some people are fighting because they're aware of the situation. Please somebody stand up and start a debate in Switzerland. Please.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/28...coming-do.html





Consumer Groups Oppose Satellite Merger
FMQB

A coalition made up of the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Free Press have sent a letter to the FCC, urging the Commission to reject the proposed merger of XM and Sirius. In the filing, the organizations reiterate their position that it is a proposed "merger to monopoly that will unleash the market power of the satellite digital radio service providers at the expense of the public." The groups also call the proposed a la carte pricing "ill-defined and deceptive" and say that "nothing in the regulatory proposal will protect artists or retailers from the exercise of market power."

The 20 page document goes into great detail in the organizations' arguments against the proposed merger, with charts and data detailing the a la carte pricing possibilities, other price structures and trends in terrestrial radio over the past 11 years. Data from the FCC is used by the coalition to prove their point that the satcasters are not in competition with terrestrial stations.

The organizations conclude that the merger would not serve the public interest, stating that "This is a merger to monopoly. That was apparent on day one and it is still apparent today after thousands of pages of comments. The would be monopolists first tried to wrap the merger in a theory of intermodal competition that could not stand scrutiny. They then shifted to an attempt to convince regulators to abandon a century of principle and practice in merger review. Finally, they produced internal data that asks the wrong questions and is contradicted by publicly available data."

They continued that the satcasters "tried to sweeten the pot with an offer of price regulation that adds little value for consumers and is riddled with uncertainties, which, given their track record they will likely exploit to the detriment of the public, and fails to address a broad range of competitive concerns beyond price. Federal regulators should reject the merger."

XM and Sirius have released a statement in which they stand by their arguments and says they are "confident the FCC and DOJ will...allow the merger to proceed by the end of the year."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=520492





F.C.C. Chief Forced to Scale Back Cable Plan
Stephen LaBaton

In the face of a lobbying blitzkrieg from cable television executives and their lobbyists, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said this evening that he had struck a compromise to salvage but scale back his agenda to regulate the industry more tightly.

The compromise was a significant though not total victory for the cable industry, whose executives and lobbyists had worked to erode support for the agenda of the chairman, Kevin J. Martin, among his fellow commissioners. Among other things, consideration of a controversial finding proposed by Mr. Martin — that the industry had grown so dominant that the agency had expanded authority to impose other regulations — would be put off for months.

But the compromise would also impose some limited new regulation on the industry. And it enabled Mr. Martin to say that he was still able to force action that he and some consumer groups maintain could help to make programming more diverse and ultimately reduce cable costs. One of the new rules, for instance, would make it significantly less expensive for independent programmers to lease access to channels.

“As a package, these are all important steps,” Mr. Martin said in an interview this evening, referring to both the cable provisions and others that he said the agency would adopt. One would extend the “do not call” registry for five years, and another would enable lower-power radio stations to get on the airwaves.

Consumer groups, who have been allies with Mr. Martin on the cable issues and began the day fearful that his agenda would go down in defeat, ended up relieved that he was able to salvage parts of it.

But cable industry lobbyists also said that they were pleased that they had been able to kill or modify much of the package.

“The bottom line is we dodged a huge bullet,” said a top industry lobbyist who declined to be identified before the commission took a formal vote.

As in the past when the commission faces difficult issues, the meeting today was repeatedly postponed to give time to the commissioners to hammer out an agreement.

Mr. Martin is a rare Republican appointee of President Bush who has not been afraid to impose stiff regulations where he says there are market failures. In the case of the cable industry, he has repeatedly complained about increasingly higher prices, vulgar programs and market tactics that he says discourage competition from other pay-television providers.

But in the process, he has alienated cable television executives, who have complained to senior White House officials and lawmakers in recent days that Mr. Martin has overreached. They say he has sought to change the business models of the industry’s largest players in an ill-advised effort to help the telephone companies, which have begun to challenge the cable industry by offering television service.

Mr. Martin disclosed earlier this month that the commission would issue a report that would give the agency expanded powers over the cable industry after making a formal finding that the industry had grown too dominant. But after the industry and its supporters in Congress sharply questioned the basis for the finding, Mr. Martin was unable to muster a majority of the five-member commission in support of the report.

The data originally used for the finding was based not on direct numbers from companies, but on surveys by industry analysts. Under the compromise, cable companies will have two months to submit the numbers of customers and size of their markets, which the agency could use next year to determine whether the industry had grown too large.

Mr. Martin had also proposed to make it less expensive for independent programmers to have access to cable channels, and to set up a new complaint procedure that would impose arbitration to resolve disputes between the cable operators and programmers like the NFL Network and the Hallmark Channel. But as it became clear this morning that he did not have the support that he anticipated, he abandoned the complaint procedure.

A third proposal, which would make it less expensive for independent programmers to lease access to channels, is expected to be approved as part of the compromise package, officials said. But it will not go into effect immediately, as originally planned.

Mr. Martin said he thought earlier this month that he had the support of the commission’s two Democrats for the proposals, including a finding that the industry had become so dominant that the agency had expanded jurisdiction to impose new rules. That would have given him a slim majority. Mr. Martin’s two fellow Republicans on the commission had in varying degrees publicly questioned some of the proposals, and they were expected to support the industry in opposition to them.

But the agency faced a lobbying barrage in recent days by industry executives and their executives, who complained to lawmakers and senior White House officials that Mr. Martin had overreached. And one of the Democrats, Jonathan S. Adelstein, who is up for renomination next year, began to express reservations about the proposals, even though consumer groups insisted that he had assured them of his support.

As part of the lobbying effort, top cable executives and lobbyists met last week with senior White House officials, including Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff; Allan B. Hubbard, the president’s top economic adviser; and Joel D. Kaplan, the deputy chief of staff and a longtime friend of Mr. Martin’s, two lobbyists involved in those meetings said today.

A White House spokesman did not return a call seeking comment about the meetings, or about whether any officials had contacted anyone at the commission.

Republicans in the House and Senate sent letters to Mr. Martin echoing the industry’s concerns about the cable proposals, as did senior cable television and network executives.

The proposal that drew the most fire was a finding that the industry had become so dominant that the agency should have expanded powers to impose more regulations.

The agency had been preparing to invoke this authority under the so-called 70/70 rule of the Cable Communications Act of 1984. Under that provision, the agency may adopt any rules necessary to promote “diversity of information sources” once the commission concludes that cable television is available to at least 70 percent of American households, and at least 70 percent of those households actually subscribe to a cable service.

Officials and consumer groups said that the 70/70 cable television finding would provide the legal basis for the commission to adopt rules in the coming weeks and months aimed at increasing programming and reducing rates for consumers. They include a cap that would prevent the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast, from growing.

In a recent interview, Mr. Adelstein, a commission member since 2002, said he felt that Mr. Martin was rushing a series of measures through the commission to give him political cover for his proposal to loosen other rules, in particular relaxing the rule that has prevented a media company from owning a newspaper and a broadcast or television station in the same market. Mr. Adelstein has criticized the proposed change of the newspaper-broadcast cross- ownership rule, which is set to be decided by the commission next month.

“There is a manic attempt to finish an aggressive number of controversial decisions on short notice,” Mr. Adelstein said on Sunday. “Longstanding procedures were short-circuited on issues that deserve more thoughtfulness. The reason for the push is to provide quick cover for the media consolidation agenda.”

In the face of a deeply divided commission, Mr. Martin also withdrew a proposal to encourage more minority ownership of radio and television stations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/bu...-cable.html?hp





Laugh Lines in the Hollywood Strike
Brooks Barnes

When the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America decided on Nov. 4 to strike, Hollywood wondered how hard the white-collar group would fight. The guild addressed the worry before the first pickets hit the streets.

“In years past, our picketing schedule has gone, ‘Picket on Mondays for two hours and then meet at a bar until the following Monday,’” said David Young, the union’s director, early this month. “That’s not how we’re going to do it this time.”

Studio executives rolled their eyes, but they soon blanched as well-organized pickets fanned out across Los Angeles and New York, and only grew in intensity. It turns out, many union members say, that striking in Hollywood — at least short term — is not that bad. A lot of strikers say they are enjoying networking, taping YouTube videos, organizing theme days and dreaming up placard slogans.

“The studios think we are having a horrible time out here,” said Richard Potter, a screenwriter who made “Strike Dancing,” a YouTube video showing pickets bebopping in formation to “Play That Funky Music.”

“What’s actually happening is we’re having a great time.”

The video is one of dozens on YouTube — most of them humorous, or trying to be — that are helping the union win the public relations war. A nationwide poll released on Nov. 14 by Pepperdine University found that 63 percent of Americans sided with the writers.

No one contends that writers would prefer to be walking in circles and shouting into megaphones than working. On Monday, the union and the studios will resume contract negotiations for the first time in 22 days. Writers are crossing their fingers that the studios will agree to give them a bigger cut of the proceeds from Internet reruns and that the strike will soon be over.

Still, certain perks in picketing are undeniable. For a lot of writers, picketing at a studio’s front gate is the closest brush with the movie industry’s halls of power they have ever had. They can wave to Steven Spielberg as he drives onto the lot and rub elbows with notably successful people in their field, like Steven Bochco, Tina Fey and J. J. Abrams, the creator of “Alias” and “Lost.”

Even some prominent screenwriters have been star-struck. “I didn’t know J. J. at all, except as a geeky fan,” wrote John August, the writer of the “Charlie’s Angels” movies and “Big Fish,” on his blog. In another posting, Mr. August offered to chat with screenwriting students while marching.

“Get to know some film and TV writers and talk to them about their work,” he wrote. “I was delighted to finally meet Gary Whitta,” a screenwriter and comic-book author.

There have been other attractions for striking writers. A special theme day, Picket With the Stars, drew celebrities like Ben Stiller, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ray Romano in Los Angeles. Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams turned up in New York.

To help cheer up striking members, and to keep reporters interested, the union helped organize impromptu concerts. The pop singer K. T. Tunstall performed an acoustic set outside an NBC parking lot in Burbank, Calif., while Alicia Keys headlined a rally last Tuesday that tied up sections of Hollywood Boulevard.

“Forget the strike, I’m just here to be entertained,” remarked Toni Perling, a television writer whose credits include “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” as Ms. Keys got started.

She had come to the right place. “When somebody is doing us wrong, they must go!” Ms. Keys shouted, before sitting down at a piano on the back of a truck. Several dozen writers jostled to take her picture with their camera phones.

Pickets have been well fed. The longshoremen’s union sent turkey baskets, and stars have played caterer roles. Justine Bateman brought tacos, Jay Leno chipped in doughnuts, and Jimmy Kimmel contributed burritos. Eva Longoria handed out slices of pizza.

Some union members say they are criticized no matter what they do on the picket line. At first, they drew comments about boring signs.

“People would say, ‘You people are writers — where is the creativity?’” recalled Joe Medeiros, head writer for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” Early in the strike, most pickets carried signs reading simply, “On Strike.”

Writers took note. “They Wrong, We Write” became popular, as did slogans ridiculing J. Nicholas Counter III, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios. “Nick Counter Hates Babies and Puppies” was a favorite, and Katherine Heigl, a “Grey’s Anatomy” actress, weighed in with “Nick Counter is a Wiener.”

One person mounted a typewriter on the end of a metal crutch and waved that in the air.

The seeming contradiction between the serious strike and the circus sideshow was on display at the Hollywood Boulevard rally, which drew more than 4,000 people.

Writers pumped their fists in the air, cheered speeches by union officers and shouted slogans like, “On strike, shut ’em down. Hollywood’s a union town.”

Even the Teamsters were impressed.

“Wow,” said Leo Reed, the gruff secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 399 and director of its motion picture division. “You are acting like a militant union.”

At other times, the protest more closely resembled a Halloween parade. A man in a full Spider-Man costume picketed, as did someone dressed as the Incredible Hulk. Seven elderly actors who played munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” rode by in a carriage, waving.

“How about a round of applause for the Lollipop Guild?” a union speaker said.

Roxana Brusso, an actress picketing in support of the writers, made an adjustment to her Ugg boot and shrugged. “Well, that’s Hollywood for you,” she said.

While some union-sanctioned theme days have included “Bring Your Kids” and “Performers With Disabilities,” C. Jay Cox noticed that there was no day for gay and lesbian writers. So Mr. Cox, who wrote the screenplay for the movie “Sweet Home Alabama,” organized one.

“We’ll get a chance to catch up with some old friends,” his invitation said, “oh-so-casually check out some potential new ones and make snide comments about one another’s attire.”

Silvio Horta, writer-producer of “Ugly Betty,” declared the gay-theme day “like a party at my house.” About 200 people attended, eating Pinkberry yogurt and grooving to an iPod playlist as they marched. Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” handed out fruit bars.

Not everyone in the Writers Guild of America appreciated the effort. “Every other day I get some new mass e-mail from the WGA about what ‘fun’ themed strike event is coming up,” a writer on an industry blog said. “Is this a strike or a social event?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/bu.../26strike.html





Striking Screenwriters Dismiss New Proposals
Michael Cieply

Striking screenwriters on Thursday night dismissed a new set of proposals from producers as “a massive rollback,” and called on their members to continue their walkout with fresh resolve despite a plan to continue talks on Tuesday.

In a move to end a nearly four-week-old strike by writers, Hollywood’s studios and networks — represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — earlier in the day offered a new package of proposals that includes a revised offer for payments related to movies and shows distributed via new media.

In a statement, producers said the new package, styled a “New Economic Partnership” with writers, would add $130 million to $1.3 billion already paid annually to writers.

One company executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with writers and other executives, said the word “partnership” was chosen to convey a sense that the new proposals were far-reaching, offered new approaches to issues that had separated the parties and involved “give and take” between writers and producers.

The new proposals were disclosed in a press release at the end of a Thursday bargaining session. The sides had talked for four days in an effort to conclude a nearly four-week old strike by 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East.

Writers have been demanding payments for electronic downloads many times higher than the companies initially offered, and have sought to limit promotional showings to a matter of days, at most.

In a letter to members, however, the two guilds blasted the proposal as inadequate. They said, for instance, that it would pay only $250 for a year’s re-use of an hour-long program streamed on the Web, in contrast to the $20,000 currently paid for a network re-run. They also said the new proposal did not change the company’s proposed payments for downloaded films and shows. The guilds also said the companies refused to grant them jurisdiction over original content produced for the Internet.

The continued stand-off pushed Hollywood toward a decision point in the next week or so, as writers will have to decide whether to dig in for a long strike, or return to work without a contract, perhaps to resume their walk-out next June when members of the Screen Actors Guild might join them.

At the same time, companies will rapidly see the rest of the current television season crumble, unless they make another move to meet the writers’ demands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/bu...riters.html?hp





NBC Host Carson Daly to Defy Writers Strike
Steve Gorman

NBC's after-hours star Carson Daly is poised to become the first U.S. late-night television talk show host to cross the picket lines of striking Hollywood writers.

"Last Call with Carson Daly," which immediately halted production at the outset of the screenwriters' strike three weeks ago, plans to resume taping Wednesday for new episodes that will begin airing next week, an NBC spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

No guest roster for the half-hour show, which airs daily at 1:35 a.m. Eastern time, was revealed, and it was not clear which night next week the program would return.

"He wanted to go back to support his staffers," the network spokeswoman said.

The General Electric Co.-owned network had informed the non-writing staff of Daly's show, as well as "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," that they face layoffs at the end of this week unless they returned to the airwaves.
All three programs, along with shows hosted by David Letterman and Craig Ferguson on CBS, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on cable network Comedy Central, were thrown into reruns when the Writers Guild of America launched its strike on November 5.

NBC's weekly sketch comedy show "Saturday Night Live" also was knocked out of production.

NBC said there were no immediate plans for any of its other shows to return to production, and there was no indication the late-night programs on other networks intended to do so.

Representatives of several late-night shows were reported earlier this month to be quietly discussing among themselves when it might be appropriate for their hosts to return to the air without their writing staffs.

Doing so presumably would require the late-night hosts, who generally depend on a steady stream of topical jokes and comedy bits, to work with less-scripted material, perhaps with more time devoted to interviews.

The WGA had no immediate comment on Daly's plans.

Representatives for the striking writers and the major film and TV studios resumed contract talks for a second straight day on Tuesday as Hollywood's worst labor clash in nearly 20 years stretched into its fourth week. The sides have imposed a media blackout on their meetings.

The WGA's old contract expired on November 1, and the union launched its strike four days later as talks deadlocked on the question of how much money writers should earn in "residual" fees when their work is delivered via the Internet and wireless devices like cell phones.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/indust...52150520071127





Witherspoon, Jolie Top List of High-Paid Actresses

What a difference an Oscar makes when it comes to being among Hollywood's top-paid actresses, with Reese Witherspoon named on Friday as the highest earner of them all.

Witherspoon, who won the Oscar for best actress in 2005's "Walk the Line," earns an estimated $15 million to $20 million per movie and holds top spot on The Hollywood Reporter's annual list of high-paid actresses.

Angelina Jolie, who won the supporting actress Oscar in 2000's "Girl, Interrupted," landed in the No. 2 slot.

She also reportedly earns $15 million to $20 million a movie, but was paid only $8 million in a supporting role for the recent "Beowulf," the show business newspaper said.

Witherspoon, by contrast, can easily command more than $15 million if she stars in a comedy in the vein of her "Legally Blonde" hits, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cameron Diaz, who is the voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" movies, came in the No. 3 slot with an asking price of more than $15 million.

Two more Oscar winners, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger, landed in the No. 4 and No. 5 positions with estimated asking prices of $10 million to $15 million per film.

Rounding out the top 10 were familiar faces earning over $10 million a movie. In order, they were Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster and Halle Berry.

(Reporting by Bob Tourtellotte, editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...28489620071130





Appeals Court Voids Agreement to Pay Freelancers for Work Published on the Web
Richard Pérez-Peña

A federal appeals court yesterday threw out a hard-fought agreement between publishers and freelance writers to pay the writers for electronic reproduction of their work.

In a 2-to-1 decision, an appellate panel ruled that the courts had no jurisdiction over the copyright dispute and that a lower court erred in accepting the writers’ lawsuit and approving the settlement.

People on both sides of the dispute said it was unclear what would happen next — whether the decision would be appealed, a new suit filed, or a new agreement negotiated.

“The decision is an outrage, and I hope it’s appealable to the Supreme Court,” said Gerard Colby, president of the National Writers Union, and a plaintiff.

In 2001, the United States Supreme Court ruled that digital reproduction of newspaper, magazine and other articles without the writers’ permission violated their copyrights. Publishers removed such articles from their digital archives and began requiring freelancers to explicitly cede electronic rights to their work.

But that did not resolve claims for monetary damages for the earlier violations. In Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge George B. Daniels allowed a class-action suit by writers and their organizations; without that crucial step, each writer determined to win payment would have had to sue individually.

The suit named major publishers and archive services, including the Thomson Corporation, The New York Times Company, Dow Jones & Company, the LexisNexis unit of the Reed Elsevier Group and the Tribune Company.

After years of negotiation, the companies and the writers reached a settlement in March, 2005, which the judge approved. It provided for mostly modest payments to freelancers, and capped the publishers’ payout at $18 million.

But yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan voided the settlement.

In his decision, Judge Chester J. Straub wrote that federal copyright law allows claims for damages only by writers who have registered their work with the United States Copyright Office. The vast majority of freelancers did not register, so he said the courts had no jurisdiction over their disputes, and the case should not have been approved as a class-action suit.

He noted that the defendants had themselves made similar arguments before settling and stated that they settled the case out of “the desire to achieve global peace in the publishing industry.”

The settlement had recognized the gap in standing, providing higher payments for writers who had registered their work with the copyright office. Judge Ralph K. Winter joined in the majority.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Judge John M. Walker argued that the registration requirement was a malleable procedural rule for processing a legal claim, not a strict limit on the court’s jurisdiction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/bu...copyright.html





ABC News and Facebook in Joint Effort to Bring Viewers Closer to Political Coverage
Brian Stelter

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become a full-fledged platform for communicating, sharing and advertising. ABC News is betting that it will become a platform for political coverage, as well.

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News and a new Facebook member, said. “This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”

The collaboration between ABC News and Facebook started quietly several weeks ago, with personal pages of network reporters like Rick Klein, the author of ABC’s widely read political newsletter The Note, and Sunlen Miller, who has been covering Barack Obama.

Encouraging users to interact with reporters is a significant step for a news organization like ABC News. Until recently, a viewer wanting to respond to Mr. Klein’s daily essay could only write a comment or send an e-mail message to a generic address. Now, they can send private messages directly to reporters or can post them on the reporters’ public Facebook pages. For now, while the number of comments remains relatively small, reporters engage in dialogues with viewers.

Mr. Westin and Mr. Rose said that no money changed hands in the deal. For ABC News, the collaboration puts political content on a site with 56 million active users. For Facebook, it adds an authoritative source and fresh content for the site’s political section.

Around 250 users have signed up to follow Ms. Miller, an off-air reporter, making her the most popular to date. Ms. Miller believes her popularity is tied to the strong backing for Mr. Obama among Facebook users, with 164,000 declared supporters, more than twice as many as any other candidate.

“If you’re ABC News, your content can spread virally through all these friend networks,” said Steve Outing, an interactive media columnist for Editor & Publisher magazine.

For example, Eloise Harper, another off-air reporter, used a digital camera to record a 50-second clip of flags falling down behind Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign appearance in Iowa. The clip has been viewed over 350,000 times on ABCNews.com and Facebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/technology/26abc.html





MTV to Cut Down on P2P Piracy by Offering Free South Park Downloads
Emilie Branstetter

MTV Networks, the biggest division of Viacom Inc. has announced plans to make every South Park episode available online for free as part of a plan to make the show available to a larger audience.

MTV originally based this decision from the success of providing "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" online. Since offering the "Daily Show" videos in October, viewership has been up with no obvious harm to ratings.

"One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick," was said by Judy McGrath the Chairman and Chief Executive at Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Although SouthParkStudios.com, the planned site for this venture, has not uploaded full episodes yet; it has provided clips, games, an avatar maker and other various media from the series.

With the prospect of a bigger viewership and better ratings, Viacom’s MTV Networks have mentioned placing other shows up for free online download as well. Names of the possible shows have not been mentioned, but it is nice to finally see a network starting to implement a way to work with today’s want of free content without the legal repercussions that can come along with P2P sharing.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...ark-downloads/





Dueling Guitars in Gameland: MTV and Activision Face Off
Robert Levine

The holiday season is when all the action takes place in the video game business, and this year has already pitted Microsoft’s Xbox 360 against Sony’s PlayStation 3, and sleek new software against sequels like Halo 3.

But one of the most watched rivalries is between two games that are not first-person shooters or movie tie-ins. Instead, Activision’s Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and MTV’s Rock Band put players in the role of rock musicians and allow them to play along with songs by bands like Metallica and the Who.

Both titles could be important to an industry that is trying to reach out to adults, women and anyone lacking interest in a fighting game. Like Nintendo’s Wii, the Guitar Hero games have found a receptive mainstream audience, and the earlier versions sold a total of six million copies. In its first week of release, Guitar Hero III had sales of $115 million. Rock Band was released last Tuesday.

This virtual battle of the bands will also pit a mainstay of the industry, Activision, against MTV, a unit of Viacom, a relative newcomer to the game business but one with deep roots in the music world. In the long term, both Activision and MTV believe that the genre of “rhythm games” has the potential to attract a mainstream audience unmoved by the robots and race cars that have become industry staples.

“We’ve never had anything like Guitar Hero in terms of appealing to a mass of people,” said Robert Kotick, the chairman and chief executive of Activision. “The game has been on ‘South Park,’ ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show.’ I don’t know the audience demographic for ‘Ellen,’ but it’s not your typical gamer.”

Both games use controllers shaped like musical instruments: Guitar Hero III is played with a miniature plastic version of a Gibson Les Paul with buttons where the strings would be, while Rock Band uses a toy Fender Stratocaster, a faux drum set and a microphone. The object of the games is to hit the guitar buttons or drums in time, or sing with the right phrasing and pitch, in an experience akin to karaoke.

MTV is looking for an additional benefit from Rock Band. At a time when its core demographic is spending more time with video games, the company wants to use this game as a starting point for new music and programming ventures. Rock Band and Guitar Hero both allow players using certain game systems to pay to download extra songs to play along with. Such sales would mean revenue for the beleaguered record labels.

“We thought the opportunity was wide open, and it fit into our brand and our heritage,” said Van Toffler, president of the MTV Networks Group. “It will yield a whole bunch of ancillary businesses and revenue streams.”

The rivalry between MTV and Activision is made more stark in that both Rock Band and the previous versions of Guitar Hero were developed by Harmonix Music Systems (the newest Guitar Hero was developed by another studio).

MTV purchased Harmonix in September 2006 for $175 million cash, in a deal that did not include rights to the Guitar Hero franchise. To distribute Rock Band, it signed a deal with Activision’s main competitor, Electronic Arts.

Like any battle of the bands, this one features its share of trash talk.

“MTV trying to take on Guitar Hero is like us trying to go into the music cable business,” Mr. Kotick said. One of the largest video game makers, Activision is enjoying its best year ever, because of Guitar Hero II, several successful movie tie-ins and the latest entry in the action game Call of Duty.

Both games have received positive reviews. Rock Band features more original songs instead of rerecorded versions by studio bands, but Guitar Hero III features the virtual likenesses of Slash, Tom Morello and Bret Michaels. Guitar Hero III, which is available for all the current consoles, is also less expensive, priced at about $100 with the controller. Rock Band will cost $160 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, with a PlayStation 2 version due next month.

In the next few months, analysts believe that of the two, Guitar Hero III will sell better because there will be more copies on store shelves. “Rock Band is going to do fine, but there are supply constraints,” said Michael Pachter, a game industry analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities.

When the publisher RedOctane put out the first version of Guitar Hero two years ago, it seemed remarkably fresh in an industry that has come to depend on franchises and increasingly sleek iterations of old ideas.

Unlike most games, which take in a substantial percentage of their revenue during the first week of release, sales grew over the course of a few months. By February 2006, Harmonix’s chief executive, Alex Rigopulos, knew that his company had a hit on its hands when he entered the title on YouTube and, “I saw hundreds of people playing the game,” he said.

Other companies saw the game’s potential as well. In May 2006, Activision paid $99.9 million in cash and stock to buy RedOctane, which owned the Guitar Hero franchise under the terms of its publishing deal with Harmonix. MTV bought Harmonix four months later.

Rock Band is not MTV’s first foray into games. The company has run game-related programming on several of its channels and established the MTV Games division to participate in publishing deals. It also served as a marketing partner for the previous Guitar Hero games.

But Rock Band is the first title that it will so fully integrate with the rest of its business. MTV has already featured Rock Band on “TRL,” “Real World” and “MTV News,” and VH-1 has done a “Behind the Music”-style “mockumentary” recounting the imaginary history of the Rock Band band. “We have a plan for three to five years,” Mr. Toffler said.

Its first new business will involve selling music. Players who have the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 will be able to buy extra tracks for $1.99 each, as well as full albums, including “Who’s Next” and Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Activision will also sell Guitar Hero III downloads, though only in packs of three. Both companies plan to make new content available on a regular basis.

This download market could be good news for record labels, which will be paid for the use of original songs. (Songwriters and publishers, but not labels, are paid for rerecorded versions.) Downloaded tracks are not technically considered sales, since the music serves as part of the game, but record companies and performers will still collect money according to how well they sell.

“These games allow people to discover and fall in love with music in a more impactful way,” said Paul DeGooyer, MTV’s senior vice president for home entertainment, music and games. “Part of what can happen out of this is an antidote to the disposable music era.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/te.../26guitar.html





Gluttonous Texting

For peculiar business reasons, Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages (although much of Canada has shifted away from this). This creates a stilted social dynamic whereby a friend forces you to pay $.10 (or use up a precious token msg in your plan) simply by deciding to send you something. You have no choice. There's no blocking, no opt-out. Direct to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Needless to say, this alters the culture of texting. From the getgo, Americans have been very cautious about texting. To be on the safe side, many Americans did not add texting to their plan so sending a text message was often futile because it was never clear if a text message would be received by the phone in question or just disappear into the ether. Slowly, mobile users figured out who had SMS and who didn't, but they were still super cautious about sending messages. It just felt rude, or wrong, or risky.

Teens, of course, never had this filter. They were perfectly happy to text. So much so that their parents refused to get them plans that supported it because, not surprisingly, there were all sorts of horror stories about teens who had texted up $700 phone bills. Sure enough, every family that I spoke with told me their version of the horror story and. In the U.S., we don't have pay-as-you-go so going over minutes or texts just gets added to your monthly bill. If you're not careful, that bill can get mighty costly. Unable to declare a max cost upfront, parents have been tremendously wary of teen texting simply for economic costs (although the occasional predator or cheating-in-school scare story does surface). Slowly, things have turned around, primarily with the introduction of cheap all-you-can-eat text messaging plans (and those that are so ridiculously high that it's hard to go over). Once the barrier to participation is dropped, sending and receiving text messages switches from being potentially traumatic to outright fun. What a difference those plans make in user practice. The brick leash suddenly turns into an extension of the thumb for negotiating full-time intimate communities.

I'm fascinated by how U.S. teens build intricate models of which friends are available via mobile and which aren't. Teens know who is on what plan, who can be called after 7PM, who can be called after 9PM, who can receive texts, who is over their texting for the month, etc. It's part of their mental model of their social network and knowing this is a core exchange of friendship.

Psychologically, all-you-can-eat plans change everything. Rather than having to mentally calculate the number of texts sent and received (because the phones rarely do it for you and the carriers like to make that info obscure), a floodgate of opportunities is suddenly opened. The weights are lifted and freedom reigns. The result? Zero to a thousand text messages in under a month! Those on all-you-can-eat plans go hog wild. Every mundane thought is transmitted and the phones go buzz buzz buzz. Those with restrictive plans are treated with caution, left out of the fluid communication flow and brought in for more practical or content-filled purposes (or by sig others who ignore these norms and face the ire of parents).

All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. For that matter, plans are relatively rare (while pay-as-you-go options were introduced in the U.S. relatively late and are not nearly as common as monthly plans). When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop; they just have to call to respond if they still have minutes or borrow a friend's phone. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. As the U.S. goes from 0 to all-you-can-eat in one foul swoop, American texting culture is beginning to look quite different than what exists in Europe. Whenever I walk into a T-Mobile and ask who goes over their $10/1000 text message plan, the answer is uniform: "every teenager." Rather than averaging a relatively conservative number of texts per month (like 200), gluttonous teen America is already on route to thousands of texts per month. They text like they IM, a practice mastered in middle school. Rather than sending a few messages a day, I'm seeing 20-50+. College students appear to text just as much as teens. Older users are less inclined to be so prolific, but maybe this is because they are far more accustomed to the onerous plans and never really developed a fluid texting practice while younger.

Whatever the case, it's clear by comparing European and American practices that the economics of texting play a significant role in how this practice is adopted. It's more than one's individual plan too because there's no point in texting if your friends can receive them. As we watch this play out, I can't help but wonder about the stupidity of data plan implementation. Just last week, I went with my partner to AT&T to activate his Nokia N95. He was primed to add data to his plan because of the potential for the phone, but we both nearly had a heart attack when we learned that 4MB of data would cost $10 and unlimited would cost $70. We walked away without a data plan. More and more phones are data-enabled, but only the techno-elite are going to add such ridiculously costly plans. (And what on earth can you do with only 4MB?) It's pretty clear that the carriers do not actually want you to use data. The story is even scarier in Europe with no unlimited options. Who actually wants to calculate how many MB a site might be and surf accordingly? And forget about social apps with uncontrollable data counts. There's a lot to be said about paying to not having to actually worry about it.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/arc...nous_text.html





Nocturnal P2P Transmissions Account for 95 Percent of Internet Traffic
Nate Anderson

P2P apps are popular around the globe, even in regions where Internet access speeds are low. New research from German deep packet inspection gear maker ipoque shows that in places like Eastern Europe, P2P apps can account for an astonishing 95 percent of all nighttime traffic. The survey also found that one particular peer-to-peer app, Skype, is also single-handedly responsible for 95 percent of all Internet telephony.

Ipoque gathered its data with the permission of ISPs and universities in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia between August and September of this year (we covered the preliminary numbers back in September). In all, the three petabytes of information collected show that P2P sucks up anywhere between 49 and 83 percent of all Internet traffic during the day, and can spike much higher at night.

But everyone knows that P2P use is high. One of the study's most interesting findings didn't concern the volume of traffic, but the fact the 20 percent of it is now encrypted as the "arms race" between P2P users and ISPs, content owners, and law enforcement heats up. Increased network filtering—such as that being proposed in the US by AT&T and supported by content owners—would no doubt lead to the deployment of far more potent encryption. Such a move could leave ISPs with a choice of blocking certain P2P protocols altogether, risking the wrath of those who use them legitimately, or abandoning the attempt at filtering out specific files.

As far as what's being traded, ipoque used a variety of techniques (such as looking at file extensions or parts of filenames like "XXX") to identify the sort of content being swapped on P2P networks, and it shows some fascinating regional variations.

In Southern Europe, for instance, game downloads account for 25.5 percent of P2P traffic. Movies make up 38.8 percent, while pornography is a mere 1.8 percent. In the Middle East, by contrast, games are downloaded far less (6.3 percent), but movies much more (48 percent). Porn also makes up 5 percent of the traffic.

BitTorrent is, not surprisingly, the number one protocol, but eDonkey continues to hold its own. And the number one tracker in the world? The Pirate Bay, of course.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...bandwidth.html





Press release

EFF Releases Reports and Software to Spot Interference with Internet Traffic

Technology Rights Group Addresses the Comcast Controversy

In the wake of the detection and reporting of Comcast Corporation's controversial interference with Internet traffic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast's packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs.

Separate tests in October from EFF, the Associated Press, and others showed that Comcast was forging small parcels of digital data, known as packets, in order to interfere with its subscribers' and other Internet users' ability to use file-sharing applications, like BitTorrent and Gnutella. Despite having been confronted by this evidence, Comcast continues to issue incomplete and misleading statements about their practices and their impact on its customers.

"Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves."

Protocol-specific discrimination gives ISPs a tremendous amount of power over the kinds of new applications and services that can be deployed by innovators and competitors. To the extent that practices like those employed by Comcast change the "end-to-end" architecture of the Internet, those practices jeopardize the Internet's vibrant innovation economy.

"This recent interference by Comcast in their subscribers' Internet communications is a cause for grave concern," said EFF Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "It threatens the open Internet standards and architecture that have made the network such an engine of technical and economic innovation."

In addition to an account of the results of EFF's independent testing of Comcast's packet forging activities, EFF has also issued a detailed document and software to assist other networking experts in conducting their own testing.

"If ISPs won't give their customers accurate information about their Internet traffic controls, we have to detect and document them for ourselves," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen.

For "Packet Forgery by ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair":
http://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery...comcast-affair

For "Detecting Packet Injection: A Guide to Packet Spoofing by ISPs":
http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection

For more on EFF's research into Comcast's packet monitoring:
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2007/11/28





Comcast Using Malicious Hacker Technique Against Own Customers, New Report Says
Sarah Lai Stirland

One of the nation's largest telecommunications companies is using a controversial technique to cripple certain kinds of Internet traffic traveling across its networks, says a new report from the digital rigthts group the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

"Comcast is essentially deploying against their own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers (this is doubtless how Comcast would characterize other parties that forged traffic to make it appear that it came from Comcast or its subscribers,)" write the authors of the new report. "In other words, Comcast is essentially behaving like a telephone operator that interrupts a phone conversation, impersonating the voice of one party to tell the other that this call is over, I'm hanging up."
The nine-page investigation was conducted by EFF staff technologists Peter Eckersley, Seth Schoen and senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann.

The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online.

Comcast has said that it doesn't block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.

When asked about the new report, spokesman Charlie Douglas said that the company had no comment. And he directed Wired News to a past statement issued by the company that said that the company merely delays certain kinds of peer-to-peer traffic at peak congested times, rather than blocking it.

But the investigators' report says that it is Comcast's approach to managing the traffic that is most problematic.

The authors say that Comcast is forging Internet traffic and injecting it into its customers' file-sharing applications' stream of traffic to choke their transmissions.

The effect for the end user is that they may end up thinking that it is the software that they're using that's failing, note the report's authors.

Comcast does tell customers that it retains the right to manage the traffic to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

But the EFF's investigators note that Comcast's approach is discriminatory because it targets only certain kinds of applications -- in this case, file-sharing applications. This kind of targeting undermines a fundamental ethos that has so far driven the success of innovators on the Internet -- an open system that requires no permission from anyone to experiment online, they say.

"Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly," write the authors. "By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

The report may have far-reaching consequences since it presents detailed evidence of an ISP actively interfering with its customers' traffic in an apparently arbitrary fashion.

The report says, for example, that its tests showed "no evidence that Comcast was targeting their jamming efforts at customers based on their individual consumption of bandwidth," and that there are more above-board ways of managing their traffic.

Various parties may use the report to boost their cases both against Comcast, and to push forward new rules to ensure that telecommunications companies do not discriminate online.

Both the Bush administration and telecom companies have argued that there isn't any evidence of discriminatory actions to justify such rules.

Lawmakers have re-introduced legislation on the subject this year in the Senate, and a House bill sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey is expected to be dropped before the end of the year. In addition, a complaint against Comcast over the issue has been lodged at the FCC, and a California consumer has launched a lawsuit against the cable company in the wake of the AP story.

"Certainly the FCC ought to thoroughly investigate this, and based on that investigation take the appropriate steps," said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition. "It also argues for ex ante rules that prevents this from happening in the first place."

"In some ways, the EFF's paper raises an additional set of questions -- they only looked at Comcast --- what about the other ISPs, ... what other communications are being blocked and dropped?" he asked.

Comcast has 12.4 million high-speed Internet subscribers.

Addendum: The EFF has released an accompanying white paper that provides instructions on how to detect spoofing by your ISP. I'd be interested in chatting with anyone who tries this out with some friends.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...t-using-m.html





Net Neutrality May Not Resolve Comcast vs. BitTorrent
Anne Broache

Comcast's recent efforts to throttle file transfers that use the BitTorrent protocol have led to a renewed call for Congress to enact stiff Net neutrality laws.

Pro-regulatory groups including Public Knowledge have circulated press releases saying the episode demonstrates the "need for Net neutrality legislation." A Comcast-related post on DailyKos was titled "Why we need Net neutrality." Comcast, BitTorrent, and the phrase "need Net neutrality" appear in roughly 10,000 Web pages indexed by Google.

But even some supporters of new laws--which would enact antidiscrimination regulations aimed at broadband providers--are now reluctantly conceding that the proposals that have been circulating in Congress for more than a year may not do much to stop Comcast. (The company, a cable operator and broadband provider, has been sabotaging some peer-to-peer file transfers, which dramatically slows them down, although the file tends to be delivered eventually.)

Carole Handler, a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles who has written about Net neutrality and is now in favor of such regulations, says "the language is such that there is definitely some wiggle room in both bills." Handler was referring to bills that have been considered, but not approved, by both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Harold Feld, senior vice president for the Media Access Project, which lobbies for Net neutrality laws, is also skeptical about whether Rep. Ed Markey's legislation would do much. If Comcast announced, "'We are absolutely going to prohibit peer-to-peer on our network or even manage our network so when we reach some unspecified capacity restraint, we're going to start messing with everybody's BitTorrent uploads, but it'll be totally random...' that is arguably permissible under the Markey bill," Feld said.
One reason for this is the wording of the language that the House of Representatives considered. Lawyers think of it as the network management exception: it allows a broadband provider to implement "reasonable and nondiscriminatory measures" in order to manage its network, as long as the company doesn't discriminate "between content, applications, or services offered by the provider and unaffiliated providers."

According to Comcast, reasonable network management is all it's doing. "Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise," spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice told CNET News.com. "We engage in reasonable network management to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience, and we do so consistently with FCC policy."

Fitzmaurice was referring to the Federal Communications Commission's 2005 broadband policy statement, which describes expectations that broadband providers will allow their users to view sites, run applications, and connect devices to the network as they wish. Crucially, it also contains an exception for "reasonable network management."

To make matters more complicated, most of the gray areas can be found in the earlier Markey legislation. The Senate counterpart, called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act and reintroduced in January by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is more specific. It doesn't contain broad immunity for network management, a legal shield that broadband operators argue is necessary.

It's not clear whether that potential murkiness will be resolved in a new version of the legislation, which Markey is expected to introduce during the next few weeks. An aide, who declined to be identified since the bill isn't yet final, told CNET News.com that the language--including the exception for network management--will probably not be significantly different.

When asked whether Comcast's conduct toward BitTorrent would be prohibited under the original bill, the aide said the clearest answer is "maybe." In any case, the bill's authors want to leave it up to an "expert agency," presumably the FCC, to decide whether a company's conduct in a particular situation was both "reasonable" and "nondiscriminatory," the aide said.

Until then, whether Comcast would be reined in by the two existing proposals remains, literally, an academic question. University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Christopher Woo is one of the most vocal academic critics of extensive new Net neutrality regulations, which would typically be enforced by the FCC. Woo says that Comcast's conduct is "in a gray area," and it's hard to say exactly how either existing proposal would treat it. A "natural reading" of both bills, he added, is that Comcast's network management techniques would not pass muster because they're "discriminating on the basis of the application"--in this case, BitTorrent.

Another academic is more emphatic. Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu, a proponent of Net neutrality regulations, said it's clear that neither of the proposals would allow the sort of activity Comcast is engaged in. "What Comcast is doing is 'application discrimination'--they are choosing one application and treating it worse than others," he said. "Nothing in any of the Net neutrality bills allows this."

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report
http://www.news.com/Net-neutrality-m...?tag=nefd.lede





Are Mobile Torrents the First Big Trend of 2008?
Dana Blankenhorn

The first big open source trend of 2008 is already on the horizon.

Mobile Torrents.

Mobile implementations of the BitTorrent protocol are nearly certain to be part of whatever Google Android comes up with, and if not someone will have one for the open platform straightaway.

Already a Windows Torrent product is on Version 2.0, and given the video capability of the iPhone it’s clear Apple is not going to let this opportunity pass by. A Symbian Torrent program is on Version 1.3.

Torrent Reactor is listing a bunch of mobile Torrent files, not just the usual suspects of audio and video but games as well. MoveDigital has been offering metered Torrents since last year.

Savvy analysts like Eric Everson of MyMobiSafe are already writing here about the possible security implications of mobile Torrents.

I see the risk before the reward of UMTs but I (like most) am also starved for good mobile content. Mobile torrents will provide a medium for high quality third-party mobile content to enter mass market cellular users.

Sounds about right.

Getting this trend off the ground won’t be easy. The BitTorrent throttling which draws enormous objections when done on the Internet may be standard business practice at AT&T or Verizon wireless.

The latter may be available to new devices, but that doesn’t mean it’s, like, open. They still want to get paid.

My guess is Torrents will start taking off next year only through WiFi hotspots, and on a limited number of phones. But it will be a constant subject of discussion and debate throughout the year.

We’re getting our stake down early.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742





Dubai International Capital Takes Sony Stake
Kiyoshi Takenaka

Dubai International Capital, a private equity company owned by the ruler of Dubai, said it has made a "substantial investment" in Sony Corp, boosting the shares of the Japanese electronics and entertainment firm.

The value was not available, but Dubai International Capital said in July it might buy stakes of up to $1.5 billion in one or two publicly listed companies in Japan.

A $1.5 billion investment would be equivalent of a 3 percent stake in Sony, which has a market value of 5.52 trillion yen ($50.9 billion).

This is Dubai International Capital's first investment in a Japanese company.

The announcement followed a newspaper report that the Chinese government's investment arm was likely to pick up shares in Tokyo, stoking hopes that foreign investors may be stepping up investments in Japan, which briefly boosted the yen.

"I personally have not heard overseas investors making positive comments on Japanese stocks in recent months and recent years," said Kazuya Nakamura, deputy general manager at Norinchukin Zenkyoren Asset Management.

"These could be signs that (foreign investors' views on Japanese stocks) are changing."

The report by the Nikkei business daily that China's new sovereign wealth fund, which manages about $200 billion of foreign reserves, was likely to invest in Japanese stocks gave a brief boost to the yen and lifted Tokyo stocks.

Dubai International Capital did not disclose the size or timing of its Sony investment, but anyone who buys more than 5 percent of a listed company is required to report the stake to regulators within five business days.

After the announcement, Sony shares closed up 4.6 percent at 5,500 yen on Monday, outperforming the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC, which rose 1.95 percent.

"Whilst the restructuring process at Sony is well advanced, the recent successful listing of Sony Financial Holdings is evidence of management's ongoing strategy of focusing on capital efficiency and cash generation," Dubai International Capital Chief Executive Sameer Al Ansari said in a statement.

Sony, which is in the final year of its three-year turnaround plan led by Chief Executive Howard Stringer, took Sony Financial public in October in its latest step to focus on its core operations such as the consumer electronics business.

The maker of the PlayStation 3 game console and Bravia flat TVs said last month it swung to a quarterly operating profit thanks to strong sales of PCs and digital cameras and a weaker yen, and it raised its full-year forecast.

The Tokyo-based company was already owned 52.6 percent by foreign investors as of the end of September.

Other recent purchases of Dubai International Capital, which manages about $12 billion of assets, include German-based specialty alumina products company Almatis and a 9.9 percent stake in U.S. hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management.

($1=108.45 Yen)

(Additional reporting by James Cordahi in Dubai; Editing by Mike Miller)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...28183220071126





Exporting E-Waste

"American consumers unwittingly fuel toxic global trade in electronic waste with exporting e-waste," said John Bekiaris, chief executive of San Francisco-based HMR USA Inc., which collects and disposes of unwanted IT equipment from Bay Area businesses. "Anyone who's disposing of their computer equipment really needs to do a thorough inspection of the vendors they use."

The problem could get worse. Most of the 2 million tons of old electronics discarded annually by Americans goes to U.S. landfills, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. But a growing number of states are banning such waste from landfills, which could drive more waste into the recycling stream and fuel exports, activists say.

Many brokers claim they are simply exporting used equipment for reuse in poor countries. That's what happened in September, when customs officials in Hong Kong were tipped off by environmentalists and intercepted two freight containers. They cracked the containers open and found hundreds of old computer monitors and televisions discarded by Americans thousands of miles away.

China bans the import of electronic waste, so the containers were sent back to the U.S.

The company that shipped out the containers was Fortune Sky USA, a Cordova, Tenn.-based subsidiary of a Chinese company. General manager Vincent Yu said his company thought it was buying and shipping used computers, not old monitors and televisions, and is trying to get its money back.

Fortune Sky exports used computers and components to China, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Asian countries.

"There's a huge market over there for secondhand computers that we don't use anymore," Yu said. "I don't think it's going to cause any pollution. If the equipment can still be used, then that's good for everybody."

Yu refused to say where he bought the material, but Basel Action Network tracked it to a San Antonio, Texas, company that collects computers, printers and other electronics from schools and businesses.

Activists complain that most exporters don't test units to make sure they work before sending them overseas.

"Reuse is the new excuse. It's the new passport to export," said Puckett of Basel Action Network. "Other countries are facing this glut of exported used equipment under the pretext that it's all going to be reused."

At the other end at customs, the goods don't always get checked either.

"It is impossible to stop and check every single container imported into Hong Kong," said Kenneth Chan of Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department. "Smugglers may also deliberately declare their ... waste as goods."

In the first nine months of this year, Hong Kong authorities returned 85 containers of electronic junk, including 20 from the U.S.

Exporting most electronic waste isn't illegal in the United States. The U.S. does bar the export of monitors and televisions with cathode-ray tubes without permission from the importing country, but federal authorities don't have the resources to check most containers.

The EPA recognizes the problem but doesn't believe that stopping exports is the solution, said Matt Hale, who heads the agency's office of solid waste. Since most electronics are manufactured abroad, it makes sense to recycle them abroad, Hale said.

"What we need to do is work internationally to upgrade the standards (for recycling) wherever it takes place," he said.

The EPA is working with environmental groups, recyclers and electronics manufacturers to develop a system to certify companies that recycle electronics responsibly. But so far the various players have not agreed on standards and enforcement.

Many activists believe the answer lies in requiring electronics makers to take back and recycle their own products. Such laws would encourage manufacturers to make products that are easier to recycle and contain fewer dangerous chemicals, they say.

Eight states, including five this year, have passed such laws, and companies such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sony now take back their products at no charge. Some require consumers to mail in their old gear, while others have drop-off centers. HP says it also now designs its equipment with fewer toxic materials and has made it easier to recycle.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_7554829





IBM Sues Company for Selling Fake, Flammable Batteries
Nancy Gohring

IBM is suing Shentech for selling laptop batteries that catch fire and sport allegedly fake IBM logos.

The suit, filed Nov. 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, accuses Shentech of trademark infringement, false advertising, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices.

IBM says that a consumer in Ohio bought a battery from Shentech for a ThinkPad laptop. The battery overheated and caught fire, causing damage to the laptop, IBM said. The user reported the problem to Lenovo, which licenses the IBM trademark. After examining the faulty battery, IBM discovered that it was not a genuine IBM battery, the company said in the suit.

IBM then ordered 12 batteries from Shentech and found them all to be fakes, IBM said.

IBM asks the court to require Shentech to turn over all of the batteries so that IBM can destroy them. IBM also asks for all the profits that Shentech earned from the sale of the batteries. In addition, IBM wants treble damages or US$1 million per counterfeit mark per type of item sold.

The Shentech.com Web site continues to list ThinkPad batteries for sale, as well as a host of other electronic devices and components. Shentech appears to be a Web-only operation with a mailing address in Flushing, New York. It describes its secret to success as its "ability to provide cutting edge computer technology parts at bargain prices."

No one from Shentech could be reached immediately for comment.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...2;fp;16;fpid;1





For All the Rock in China
Ben Sisario

AS she would anywhere in the world, Karen O of the arty New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode onto a festival stage here last month in costume, looking like a wild, futuristic harlequin in her cape of silver wings and blue-and-green striped tights. Shouting to 10,000 mud-soaked fans who shouted her lyrics right back at her, she thanked them in gasps of Mandarin: “Xie xie ni!”

A couple of days earlier the Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli was at a gleaming new club across town. And last Sunday, Linkin Park, a group of rap-rock titans with worldwide sales of 45 million, played in Shanghai to a sold-out stadium crowd of 25,000.

They are among the latest in a growing tide of Western acts hoping to crack the vast new entertainment market of China. Once largely closed to foreign music, the country has gradually loosened restrictions and — at a time when record sales in the West continue to plunge, and new sources of revenue have become essential — emerged as a crucial territory on pop’s global map.

“China is on the tip of everybody’s tongue,” said Peter Grosslight, worldwide head of music for the William Morris Agency. “There’s 1.3 billion people there. It’s becoming a much wealthier place. How can we ignore that?”

For the Western music industry China is a mix of new challenges and familiar frustrations, with rampant piracy of CDs and a minimal touring infrastructure. And many services taken for granted elsewhere, like the collection and distribution of recording royalties, are not fully established. But despite these obstacles, the broad commercial potential makes the country an irresistible draw, with money to be made from live shows, merchandise and technologies like cellphone ring tones. Five years ago a concert by Kenny G was big news. Now Chinese cities frequently turn up on the touring itineraries for a range of acts; this year Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Avril Lavigne and Sonic Youth have all played in China, along with underground rock bands that travel by train through a network of sweaty clubs in second-tier cities.

Linkin Park has already toured in Southeast Asia, but the group was looking at its first concert in China as a particularly lucrative opportunity. “This one show could break the band wide open in a brand-new frontier,” said Michael Arfin, Linkin Park’s booking agent.

The concert grossed $750,000, Mr. Arfin said. On a per-ticket basis that is roughly equivalent to the band’s take on recent American tours.

For musicians the thrill of playing to crowds who may be seeing their first foreign band can be intoxicating. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played the Modern Sky Festival, a three-day event at Haidian Park on the west side of Beijing, the fans waited in reverential silence between songs but erupted once the music kicked in, with fists in the air and young women screaming in the front.

“It was like nothing we’ve done before,” Karen O said afterward. “From the very beginning they were hungry for us.”

But the bulk of that rapidly urbanizing, discretionary-income-wielding audience might not be terribly hungry for foreign music. Well-scrubbed pop singers from Taiwan and Hong Kong dominate the airwaves and the popular imagination, with relatively little attention paid to rock.

Rock ’n’ roll has had a short and shaky history in China. After an initial flourish in the 1980s it went underground in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. For much of the ’90s the only Western rock to reach Chinese ears came in the form of remaindered CDs from overseas distributors, and musicians were frustrated to find that their music faced too many cultural barriers to take root.

“There was ample idealism then, but we hit the rocks pretty quick,” said Kaiser Kuo, a founding member of Tang Dynasty, one of the biggest Chinese rock bands of the ’90s. “We realized that we were doomed to life on the margins.”

Chinese rock got a second life with the arrival of the Internet, which flooded the country’s youth with new music. A small but vibrant scene developed, with sometimes startlingly up-to-date reference points. This year two Chinese bands traveled to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.: Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, a ringer for the angular post-punk of Gang of Four, and Lonely China Day, which borrows from the cinematic grandeur of Sigur Ros. Of the 120 bands at Modern Sky, all but 10 or so were Chinese.

To capitalize on this emerging market, the international touring and record industries have in recent years established beachheads in China. William Morris opened a Shanghai office in 2004. This year Ticketmaster bought a majority stake in Emma Entertainment, a Chinese promoter and ticketing service that presented the Linkin Park show.

What works in China, however, can sometimes conflict with the larger goals of Western businesses. Linkin Park is among the biggest foreign bands in China, but its label, Warner Brothers, has not released its latest CD there. And despite recent tours by Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Chinese division of Universal has not released their records either.

The labels say that piracy has made the effort futile. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group, estimates that 85 percent of the CDs sold in China are counterfeit. Leong Mayseey, the federation’s regional director for Asia, says the piracy rate for downloaded songs is close to 100 percent.

When Jeff Antebi, manager of the R&B duo Gnarls Barkley, was looking over worldwide accounting statements, he was perplexed to see that the group’s song “Crazy,” a Top 10 hit around the world, registered no sales at all in China. It was a “black hole,” he said. Frustrated when the label, Warner Brothers, blamed only piracy, Mr. Antebi recently decided to open an office in China to protect his interests.

“Major record companies have two options in a place like China,” he said. “Adapt or die.”

But many Chinese labels, nimble and unencumbered by tradition, have adapted to the contaminated marketplace in ways that Western companies are struggling with. Viewing CDs as a loss leader they routinely sign groups to all-encompassing contracts that allow the label to share in revenues from touring, merchandise and endorsements.

“The Chinese music industry will be the model for the world’s music industry one day,” said Shen Lihui, the founder of Modern Sky, a small company that has released around 100 albums — most money losers, Mr. Shen said — but also has a host of auxiliary businesses, producing books, videos and Web sites.

Strolling through the festival grounds Mr. Shen, dressed in a lavender Burberry shirt and white shoes, pointed out the many corporate sponsors: Motorola, Levi’s, Diesel jeans. These deals bring in the money needed to run the event, he said, and his audience has no objection to advertising. By the main stage, which was flanked with giant Motorola-branded screens, one young man waved a big red flag that said, in a Beijing dialect, “I rock!”

For most concerts sponsorships are a necessity. Traveling expenses and the need for low ticket prices — anything higher than $6 or $7 or so is prohibitively expensive for many young Chinese — mean that many shows would lose money unless sponsors pick up the slack.

Advertisers can also lend essential brand identification to acts that have less recognition in China, said P. T. Black, a partner in Jigsaw International, a market research agency in Shanghai.

“In the U.S. an artist becomes big, and then a brand latches on to borrow their credibility,” Mr. Black said. “Here there are virtually no artists who have more credibility than the brands. Coke is a lot cooler brand than any young musician today in China.”

Many of the Western acts reaching Chinese shores operate far below the radar of multinational corporations. A decade of exploration by punk and metal groups has carved pathways through clubs in a dozen or so cities, and economical musicians — going by train because of the expense and unreliability of highway traveling — can break even on a tour.

Even little-known American bands can easily accommodate a Chinese jaunt. Last month the Birthday Boyz, a Brooklyn quartet that describes its sound as “very dire, dynamic, metallic post-hardcore” and plays tiny clubs at home, hustled through two weeks of Chinese shows.

Dodging other coach-class passengers in the aisle of a train from Changsha to Wuhan, two smog-choked inland cities with strong punk scenes, Jeff Bobula, one of the Birthday Boyz’ guitarists, described the culture shock: “The basis of touring the U.S. is, you hop in a van or car, you drive all day, you play, hopefully you sleep somewhere, and then you wake up and go to the next show. In China all the traveling you do is very public.”

Small bands can escape the notice of the Chinese government, but any band playing a gig above the club level will inevitably encounter the Ministry of Culture and its censors. Every lyric on a CD and every song planned for a live performance must be approved to obtain the necessary permits for a concert or retail release of an album. Approval can take months, and the ministry has a way of undercutting the best-laid plans of global promotional campaigns.

“Most of the rejected tracks are smash hits in the international market,” said Danny Sim, the marketing director for international repertory at Universal Music China. “Akon’s ‘Smack That’ and ‘I Wanna Love You,’ those tracks were rejected by the government. They were the first and second single from the album.”

Censorship can rear its head in less obvious ways. When Sonic Youth played Beijing in April, its hand-picked opening act, a Chinese band called Carsick Cars, was taken off the bill at the last minute. No explanation was given, but Thurston Moore, one of Sonic Youth’s guitarists, said he suspected the government had been alerted to his band’s participation in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the United States in the 1990s and was offering an oblique punishment.

“Who do you argue with?” Mr. Moore said after returning home. “You don’t. If you argue, you go to jail.”

Bands touring China face more prosaic hurdles as well. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were preparing to play at Modern Sky, their sound check took far longer than usual — “10, 12, 15 hours,” Karen O said with a groan — because the local crew’s professional standards were low.

But after the concert the band celebrated at a cavernous dance club, calling the show a success. Nick Zinner, the guitarist, said playing in China was something the band had wanted to do for years. When asked why, Mr. Zinner opened his eyes wide and looked at the crowd of well-dressed young Chinese.

“It’s the future,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/ar...ic/25sisa.html





Setting the Beat, and the Style
Ruth La Ferla

JUSTINE DELANEY speaks fashion like a native, her conversation studded with insider argot and references. She is drawn to hipster clothing brands like Preen and Comme des Garçons, and is as well acquainted with the Bauhaus aesthetic as she is with Vivienne Westwood or Siouxsie Sioux. A onetime Goth, she describes her current style as “preppy, but with a darker edge.”

Listening, you would peg her as an indie designer or, at the least, a “Project Runway” star. In fact, Justine D., as she is known to her public, is on cozier terms with a turntable than she is with a cutting table; her medium is vinyl — the kind that spins.

A high-profile D.J., she blends the sounds she loved as a teenager — strains of the Clash and British punk — with more-current fare, which she plays at private parties in New York. Like others in the growing contingent of female D.J.’s commanding the dance floor and building cults on the Web, she has an avid following. Scores of young women have picked up on her sound, and with it, her style, a graphic amalgam of black shirts with white bib tops and slinky halter dresses accessorized with tattoos and cataracts of cola-tone hair.

“I did have several female club-goers ask me, ‘How does it make you feel that everyone is dressing like you now?’” Ms. Delaney said. “‘Does it make you angry?’” Not so much. “Is someone really going to realize that I’m going for the Diane Keaton look in Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’? I doubt it,” she said briskly.

Her crowd, of course, is far too young to even catch that reference. Not that it matters. To them, Ms. Delaney is part of a formidably groovy sisterhood of well-established style-setters like Beverly Bond, Sarah Lewitinn (D.J. Ultragrrrl) and Skye Nellor in London; and younger influencers like Samantha Ronson in Los Angeles.

Yes, they are shaping their fans’ musical preferences. And to judge by the prevalence of high-waisted trousers, suspenders, cropped leather jackets, porkpie hats and fedoras on the dance floors, they are calling the tune in fashion as well.

“When you go into a club and the D.J. is wearing something, it almost gives it idol status,” said Frannie Schultz, 21, a college student from Brooklyn. Ms. Schultz, who mingles high style and low in deference to idols like Leigh Lezark of the MisShapes and Roxy Cottontail, noted that on the Lower East Side, epicenter of the downtown club scene, style is “centered around the promoters and the D.J.’s.”

“If you see a girl who is D.J.-ing, wearing a certain shirt or brand of shoes,” she said, “it makes people want to buy that item.”

A decade ago, only a handful of women, including Ms. Bond and Ms. Nellor, could claim the kind of style clout that comes with a presence in the D.J. booth.

“The barrier was high for females trying to enter an essentially male-dominated field,” said Rob Principe, a founder of Scratch Academy, a school for aspiring D.J.’s with outposts in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Today, women are less intimidated, Mr. Principe said. In 2002, when the school was established, 10 to 15 percent of applicants were women. Now that figure is closer to 40 percent.

“D.J.-dom has definitely been a boy’s club, a kind of cabal,” said Alexandra Wagner, the editor of Fader, a magazine that covers emerging music and fashion. It is a club, she noted, that women are only now penetrating in significant numbers.

“Cultural dominatrixes,” in Ms. Wagner’s phrase, they have a fashion influence that is a direct extension of their power on the stage. Unlike pop stars, who tend to be molded by production teams, the female D.J. is distinctly in charge, she observed: “The music that gets played is what she decides.” From the vantage of the dance floor, she added, “the D.J. booth is like the altar in the sky.”

“The woman who commands it can be a really powerful icon,” Ms. Wagner said.

That is not news to their fans. Their maverick stance and wizardry at the turnable have earned some performers fashion points. “A lot of these girls are just novelties,” said Alisa O’Connor, 21, of Brooklyn, alluding to the D.J. who flaunts glitter and angel wings to distract from the fact that she is playing prerecorded CDs. But “if she is a good D.J.,” Ms. O’Connor said, “I’m going to respect her for what she wears.”

Dispensing, for the most part, with stylists, the most memorable D.J’s strive for originality, setting themselves apart from competitors with looks that vary from Ms. Delaney’s Goth-tinged temptress to Ms. Ronson’s brash tomboy. Image, they argue, is essential to success.

“Today everyone is a D.J.,” said Lindsey Caldwell, a native of Atlanta who plays an amalgam of ’80s hip-hop, vintage Detroit sound and modern electronics Tuesday nights on the Lower East Side. “Just to be able to blend records is not enough anymore. You have to have a look.”

Her personal mélange, part fashion-progressive, part schoolmarm, is based on flat-soled granny boots with laces, skinny high-waist jeans, trailing scarves, the occasional Hanes T-shirt and, always, her trademark “big old glasses. They look like your science teacher’s glasses,” she said.

Like many in her cohort, Ms. Caldwell, known as D.J. Lindsey, has worked as a fashion insider. While wheeling sample racks at KCD, the fashion publicity firm, and casting models for clients like Marc Jacobs, she learned what it takes to stand out. D.J.-ing is “all about self-promotion, about getting on somebody’s photo blog,” she said. “You have to play that game. Because nobody is going to take your picture for Lastnightsparty if you look regular.”

She was referring to a popular blog that covers the late-night scene and is a measure of a D.J.’s standing. Faces turning up there may include those of Ms. Caldwell and New York personalities like Denise Kozlowski and Cyan Bonacci of VisAvis, the female D.J.’s seen spinning last week in the windows of Madewell, a youth-oriented store on Lower Broadway that is owned and operated by J. Crew.

They were enlisted, said Margo Brunell, the director of marketing for J. Crew, after being spotted on the Web. “We would look at the blogs and discover that the women who posted there were talking about fashion in one sentence and referencing to a cool D.J. they had seen in the next.”

The D.J. style is alluring to her target customer. “These women don’t necessarily like to be told what to wear,” she said.

Janessa Bautista, 28, a fashion designer in Manhattan, agreed, noting that the D.J.’s she likes dress in a manner that is unforced and inventive. “People who carry their own style are influential,” she said.

They include celebrities spinners such as Ms. Ronson, the sister of Mark Ronson, a music impresario, and the designer Charlotte Ronson, whose fashion show last fall was animated with her sister’s brand of hip-hop fused with rock ’n’ roll. Samantha Ronson’s signature look is unrehearsed, a combination of trousers worn with braces, short-sleeve tees, blazers from Dior Homme and the festoons of jewelry she piles on pell-mell.

“You don’t want to look like you went into a store, and they decided what you should wear,” she said.

You would never accuse her or her counterparts, D.J.’s like Stacy Spierer, whose stage name is Stacy Stylez, or Concetta Kirschner (a k a Princess Superstar), of catering to commercial tastes. Ms. Spierer’s twisted schoolgirl look is a funky combination of vintage cheerleader dresses, brownie uniforms or prom dresses, all liberally sprinkled with rhinestones. “Whatever I put on, it’s got to have some sparkle to it,” she said.

Ms. Kirschner, a recording artist, goes in for corsets, star-shaped mouches and shimmery eye makeup. “My look is definitely sexy,” she said, “but it’s also a bit trashy.”

“I don’t like to look too polished — for me that’s really bland,” she said, adding dismissively, “It’s good for pop stars.”

Jake Bernstein contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/fashion/29DEEJAY.html





London Transport Sacks Announcer for Spoof Messages

An official announcer for London's Underground railway system has been sacked after making spoof messages mocking American tourists, peeping Toms and sweaty commuters.

Voiceover artist Emma Clarke, 36, recorded the announcements in the same smooth tones that have warned millions of passengers to "Mind The Gap" on the London underground system also known as the "Tube" and posted them on her Web site.

The messages include:

* "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

* "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."

* "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."

* "Here we are crammed again into a sweaty Tube carriage ... If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months."

Clarke said it was "just a bit of a laugh". But Tube operator Transport for London (TfL) failed to see the funny side and dropped her, after eight years.

"London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Miss Clarke are experiencing severe delays," a TfL spokesman told the Evening Standard on Monday.

All the recordings are at: http://www.emmaclarke.com/fun/mind-t...-announcements.

(Reporting by Peter Griffiths, editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...66179520071126





After Death, Unfinished Artwork Gets a Life
Dan Levin

In the dark days and weeks after the suicide of the artist Jeremy Blake in July, his friends and colleagues were left to pick up the pieces, literally.

When he walked into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach in Queens, despondent over the suicide of his companion a week earlier, Mr. Blake was just three months away from an exhibition of his recent video art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and another show at the Manhattan gallery Kinz, Tillou & Feigen. Many wondered what would become of his unfinished work and whether it would shed any light on his life, and his death at 35.

His work in progress, “Glitterbest,” is a video portrait of the 1970s punk-music impresario Malcolm McLaren, with whom he collaborated on the piece. Having toiled on it for a year and a half, Mr. Blake left behind a completed audio track bursting with romping punk riffs, video-game blasts of intergalactic battles and clanging church bells and an impish 11-minute voice-over by Mr. McLaren.

But most of the visual presentation was unfinished. Embedded in his computer hard drive were numerous image files evoking an enchanted world populated by pirate ships, psychedelic phalluses and neon graffiti. The still frames were virtually a mere slide show, a far cry from the rich dimensionality of his previous animated, abstract work, featured in museums throughout the world and in the film “Punch-Drunk Love.”

Jonathan P. Binstock, the curator of the Corcoran exhibition, and Lance Kinz, a director of Kinz, Tillou & Feigen, decided to incorporate “Glitterbest” into their exhibitions in its incomplete state out of deference to Mr. Blake, who had approved inclusion of some of the images in the Corcoran exhibition catalog and advance announcements for the New York show. They hoped the unfinished work would give viewers insight into his creative process and provide a glimmer of what the video might have become.

“It was a way to remain true to the vision of the exhibition, and it furthers our efforts in exploring his theme of portraiture,” Mr. Binstock said of “Wild Choir,” the Corcoran show. Reflecting Mr. Blake’s most recent career focus, the exhibition presents lushly cinematic, deeply probing digital-video studies of three artists he admired.

In addition to his paean to Mr. McLaren, Mr. Blake produced homages to Ossie Clark, an influential Swinging London British fashion designer, and David Berman, an indie-rock musician and poet. In each case he used his artist-subject as a portal to explore seminal cultural moments, draping the viewer in a nonlinear fabric of color, film and sound.

“Given the terrible situation we were faced with, we thought it would be an interesting way to approach this challenge and wanted to share it with the museum audience,” said Mr. Binstock, who left the Corcoran this summer and is now senior vice president of Citigroup’s Art Advisory Service in New York. He continued to work on the exhibition after leaving the Corcoran.

But first they had to gain permission from Mr. Blake’s grieving mother and then find the correct files on his many computers, an arduous process that took weeks. Thus it was only at the end of September, less than a month before the Corcoran exhibition was to open, that they tracked down all the files.

With a deadline looming, Mr. Binstock approached a friend, David Sigal, a documentary filmmaker and videographer, to help unlock Mr. Blake’s intended arrangements. “I was concerned about the material being treated with the greatest sensitivity and the need to preserve the integrity of the artist’s work in process,” Mr. Binstock said, “and I knew I could trust David to exhaustively examine the material and do that.”

They discovered Mr. Blake’s labeled folders in Adobe Photoshop, the graphics-editing software. Each folder contained sequential picture files with titles. But within each dense file were numerous layers of the artist’s “moving painting” imagery, their intended direction and flow indecipherable. They also realized that Mr. Blake had tackled only the first five minutes, less than half of the work’s final visual component.

Armed with a copy of Mr. Blake’s hard drive and Mr. McLaren’s poetic though fairly incomprehensible narration, Mr. Sigal, 41, spent the next few weeks tinkering with the files on his laptop in his Greenwich Village apartment. He struggled to make sense of eerie scenes of World War II carnage shimmering with stars and bubbles; imperial imagery juxtaposed with psychedelic vegetables on the Moon; and mythical creatures that morphed into a swashbuckling Sid Vicious.

But the more he listened to the voice-over and scrutinized the layered images, “there were little clues and abstract lines that I would wind up understanding,” Mr. Sigal said.

He soon began to recognize phrases and words that corresponded to imagery and references from Mr. McLaren’s life growing up in postwar Britain and his time as the Sex Pistols’ flamboyant manager, a cheeky, roguish figure who personified the late 1970s.

There was also a larger theme among the layers: that of recasting a quintessentially anti-establishment figure as a hero of the British Empire for his wild creative contributions. Seizing on that concept, Mr. Sigal felt more confident in mapping out the progression of Mr. Blake’s images.

“David worked very hard, and I think successfully, to unravel the specific details of Jeremy’s organizational structure,” Mr. Binstock said.

As the weeks wore on, Mr. Sigal also felt increasingly haunted by the tumultuous lives and tragic deaths of Mr. Blake and Theresa Duncan, his companion of 12 years.

“I thought I would be able to figure out Jeremy’s life by figuring out the puzzle of ‘Glitterbest,’” Mr. Sigal said. “It was an intensely emotional time.”

Searching for answers, he turned to the Internet to learn more about the couple’s final days. There he read newspaper and blog accounts of Ms. Duncan’s setbacks as a screenwriter and the couple’s growing paranoia and conspiracy theories, some of which were detailed on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase (theresalduncan.typepad.com).

Ms. Blake killed herself on July 10 in the couple’s East Village apartment by washing down an overdose of Tylenol PM with bourbon. She left a suicide note. Mr. Blake made his way to Rockaway Beach the following week, leaving a note with his belongings in the sand.

Mr. Sigal found the accounts of their descent into paranoia harrowing and was distressed by obsessive online speculation that they had faked their deaths. “It only wound up upsetting me and making things even more confusing,” he said.

Eventually he finished piecing together the unfinished work and paced the images to last the length of the full soundtrack. The video was presented at the Corcoran exhibition’s opening event on Oct. 27 and at a memorial show on Nov. 10 at Kinz, Tillou & Feigen. (The Corcoran show runs through March 2, and the gallery show through Jan. 5.) The screenings enabled friends and visitors to grasp how Mr. Blake constructed his dense collages, layer by layer, and how he paid tribute to Mr. McLaren and his vision.

For Mr. Sigal and others, it was a bittersweet celebration of Mr. Blake’s legacy. “I found the images really beautiful,” he said. “I was sad that I was the one who wound up doing this. I wanted Jeremy to be there to complete it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/ar...gn/29blak.html





"Quiet Riot" Singer Found Dead in Las Vegas

Kevin DuBrow, lead singer of the popular 1980s heavy metal band Quiet Riot, has been found dead from unknown causes at his home in Las Vegas, authorities said on Monday.

DuBrow, 52, was found dead at about 5:20 p.m. on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Clark County Coroner's Office said. She said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death.

"I can't even find the words to say," Quiet Riot bandmate Frankie Banali said on his Web site. "Please respect my privacy as I mourn the passing and honor the memory of my dearest friend, Kevin DuBrow."

Quiet Riot, which was founded in the mid-1970s, topped the Billboard charts in 1983 with the album "Metal Health," spurred on by the massive hit single "Cum on Feel the Noize."

The band has since endured break-ups and personnel changes but released a new album in 2006 and continued to tour sporadically.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Trott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...41617420071126





Ten Things Holding Back Tech

Ever get the feeling that we aren't quite yet where we want to be? Here are 10 factors that may be holding back the world's technological development

The pace of change in IT has never been faster — or has it? After 25 years of desktop computing and 15 years of the commercial internet, there are still plenty of frustrations, pains and throwbacks in our everyday technology experience. It's great having a terabyte hard disk, but not so great trying to manage it using interfaces and tools that have barely changed from the days when 40MB was respectable.

Many factors are holding back technology. Here is a list of 10 such barriers, in no particular order. We have almost certainly missed a few, so feel free to leave your comments using the Talkback facility at the bottom of the page.

1. Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop
Windows unified the personal-computer market, and led it into the enterprise. A good thing, surely? Yes — if unity is more important than innovation, flexibility and a free market. The European Commission disagreed with that, as have courts around the world.

For most people, computing means Windows, not because they choose it but because the company's immense power in retail and business channels, together with the inertia that comes through decades of market dominance, make it a default that's hard to change.

So why does this hold back innovation? The European Commission ruled that computer users are unnecessarily used to products like Windows Media Player — applications that are mediocre just because Microsoft has no real incentive to make them better. Monopolies are anti-competitive and therefore anti-innovation. Just look at Internet Explorer's long stagnation.

Microsoft's stifling influence on new ways of thinking goes beyond applications, however. As Vista so readily proves, rehashing the same idea again and again does not make for progress. For everyone's sake, especially Microsoft itself, the company needs to learn to compete fairly again.

2. Operator lock-in
In Europe, we have only recently emerged from the dark ages of the mobile internet, as the market has forced operators to abandon the so-called "walled garden" approach. This meant that users could only access websites that had been pre-selected by their operator — the very embodiment of what net-neutrality advocates are seeking to block in the US. Of course, that debate revolves around fixed access, and is so relevant in the US because — unlike the UK — most of that country has very little choice of internet provider.

However, both situations show, or have shown, the harm that can be done to innovation when those operating the pipes of the internet decide they want control over content. Operators providing content is nothing new, nor is it a bad or surprising thing for them to do, but that provision needs to be in line with the founding principles of the internet if innovation is to flourish.

Any threat to the equality of access and provision on the internet is a bad thing for innovation, and a combination of the market and regulation is needed to hold such threats at bay.

3. Input methods
We haven't come far. Qwerty is 130 years old, and windows, icons, mice and pointers are 35. Both come from before the age of portable computing. So why are we reliant on these tired old methods for all our new form factors?

There are lots of new ideas — voice, gesture and handwriting recognition; video and infrared inputs that watch what we do with our hands and decide what it is that we want — but the mobile experience remains one of thumb-mangling, eye-straining frustration. A BlackBerry keyboard is a wonder of miniaturisation; shame the same's not true of most BlackBerry users.

Until we manage to break down the barriers erected between us and the machines back in the days before eight-bit processors, we'll be stuck back there too.

4. Battery life
All the newfangled input and display technology in the world doesn't amount to much when your handset and laptop struggle to support more than a few hours' hard usage.

Particularly on the handset side, the increase in processing power needed to support the internet and the mobile office puts huge demands on a device's battery, as do high-speed wireless data technologies like 3G — there is a good reason why the iPhone, which has to provide a reasonable simulation of the iPod's battery life, does not currently use 3G. Also, even when they refrain from exploding, the lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries used in a wide variety of electronic devices become less efficient over time. That means mobile technology will forever lag behind fixed technology.

But perhaps the greatest application for improved battery technology would be in electric cars. The concept is proven and on the street but, until it becomes possible to go as far on a charge as you would on a tank of fuel, only first adopters and urban eco-warriors will bother.

5. The mania for speed
Faster processors are great. However, there is more to computing than processor speed — a point which can be easily proven by comparing a two-year-old PC running Linux with a new PC buckling under the weight of Vista. Shrinking the manufacturing process to enable greater speed has proven essential, but it's running out of magic.

Too much R&D time and money goes into processor speed when other issues remain under-addressed. For example, could data not be handled a bit better? What about smarter ways of tagging data? The semantic web initiative runs along these sorts of lines, so where is the hardware-based equivalent?

It is all very well to be able to run the latest DX10 games on your PC, but untold mould-shattering developments lie on the other side of a concerted effort to rethink the nature of the computer. Whichever chipmaker becomes the first to think beyond speed alone will gain a whole new advantage over its competitors: smarter, not faster, will lead to both smarter and faster.

6. Intellectual property law
John Tehranian, a University of Utah law professor, has worked out that someone doing a job like his could, under US law, be committing more than 80 infringements of copyright a day — even without any P2P file-sharing shenanigans — and end up with multi-billion-dollar fines every year. Even whistling a tune in public is a multi-thousand-dollar mistake.

Intellectual property law is broken. Creativity needs protection, but the current system isn't working. Designed to encourage inventiveness and the building of ideas on ideas, it instead rewards power and influence with more power and influence. The ideal world of the intellectual property lawyer is one where nothing can move without permission; no idea can happen unless it is approved.

This is no model for a world where ideas can spread like never before and information is freer than even the most utopian could have imagined 50 years ago. A new way of thinking about information ownership is needed, and quickly.

7. Skills inequalities
Applications and technology might become more intuitive and creative if more women were involved in the industry. Diversity breeds innovation.

Technology has traditionally been terrible at attracting anyone but the technically minded. Seen by many as incredibly dull and exclusive, the industry most needs the influence of those who give it the least thought. Even the best technical process could benefit from a little humanity.

Industry is also waking up to the developing world and beginning to hear its voice. Technology has the capability of leapfrogging the biggest problems, but only if it's built to match the needs of the people it serves.

The more IT listens to and gives power to those it has traditionally excluded, the better it will be suited to solve real problems for us all.

8. Web 2.0
Speaking of daft innovations that do little to better the lives of humanity, Web 2.0 has a lot to answer for. So the web's gone two-way. Great. But the extremes of enthusiasm shown by financiers and business people are verging on counterproductive.

Do we really need applications like Twitter? What price a poke on Facebook? Microsoft's recent purchase of a chunk of Facebook valued the social-networking company at $15bn (£7.2bn). This is a company that does not yet have a proven business plan, despite having big aspirations as a marketing hub. Two years ago, eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn and Skype — a mostly free service — is currently struggling to justify that price.

It's nice to see the vanguard cashing in. But they're not really worth their valuations or the mountains of cash they have received from venture capitalists, whose money could probably find better use in other areas of technological innovation.

With the global economy in its current, credit-crunched state, Web 2.0 runs the risk of not only taking funding away from worthier areas of research but also contributing to a downturn that may hit the tech industry particularly hard. It remains a crucial element of the way we interact through technology, but its business models need a lot of work.

9. National interests
Every country places a high value — often the highest of values — on the rule of law. So why do they insist on behaving towards each other in a state of virtual anarchy?

If we view technology as a globally collaborative effort, one of the clearest barriers to its development is that of national interests. Look at the interminable arguments in organisations like the International Telecommunication Union. Countries defend the interests of their indigenous corporations and lobby groups; the idea that these interests may be better served in the long term by ceding ground in the short is as popular as skinny-dipping in the Antarctic.

Sometimes it is hard to escape the notion that certain countries are deviating from the pack just for the sake of it, much as Napoleon and the US had horses and carriages use the right-hand side of the road for no other reason than the British used the left.

Despite the upcoming Olympics, China is still dragging its heels over the deployment of 3G because it wants to use its own home-grown standard, TD-SCDMA. Its motivations for this include avoiding payments to western patent holders, but the main driver is the fact that China has a large enough internal market to not have to worry about inconsistencies with international norms. Overall, progress is yet again slowed down.

Some national interests have an almost absurdly negative effect on international technological development. For years, the US government classified encryption technology as a munition, and had export laws that forbade the distribution to the world of chips using the RSA algorithm. The ban proved unworkable in the long term but, for a long while, it seriously held back the development of security technology around the world.

10. The current lack of global wars and/or disasters
Forget peace, love and understanding. For a real boost, technology needs war. World War II gave us radar, rockets, the jet engine and digital computing. It also gave us 50 million dead.

These days, warfare still results in misery and death, but the technological benefits are harder to appreciate. There's not much in a stealth fighter or bomb-disposal robot that helps away from the battlefield.

Let's stick to metaphorical warfare. That's something politicans are good at promoting, but bad at executing — the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" both sound good but have generated little of note, beyond copious government expenditure on ever more inventive ways to annoy their own citizens.

If we must have war, we might as well use it wisely. The biggest threats to mankind are environmental change, disease and international political and economic upheaval. Putting the nations of the world on a war footing against this terrible triad would produce a flowering of new, focused thinking and technologies — and nobody would get hurt.

Rupert Goodwins contributed to this article.
http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/article...9291080,00.htm





Top Ten Terrible Tech Products

Number 10:

Windows Vista
Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor's reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39...3700-10,00.htm





Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off
Oliver Rist

I'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista. It's not better than Vista. Leopard is Vista. And Tiger is better than both of them!

I had to be talked, wined, dined, and peer-pressured into buying my first MacBook Pro this past January. But once I plunked down the bucks for the slightly less hardware oomph per dollar than I'm used to, I was impressed by one thing: Everything. Just. Worked. Period.

Tiger just works. End of story.

But Apple marketing has the swinging pair of crabapples to actually print "Leopard Just Works" on its Web site. Hey, at least Microsoft reps have the decency to look a little abashed when you point out their product's screwups. Apple reps just glare at you like they're daring you to say something. Well, I've got something to say. Several somethings.

XP Pro pre-SP1 crashed all the time, and Microsoft owned up to it—mostly. XP Pro post-SP2 crashed once in a while, and we sighed and kept working while Microsoft looked embarrassed and yelled at someone to work faster on SP3. From the start, Vista crashed noticeably less than XP Pro with SP2; it just doesn't work with 50 percent of new software—a year after its shrink-wrapped release. Cue the sound of teeth gnashing. But I digress. Here's the point, in case any Apple reps missed it: Microsoft has delivered clear improvements in stability over time—a feat you'd think Apple might want to emulate.

Let's see, Tiger crashed—oh yeah, NEVER. Ten months and I'm installing everything from production-level Office for the Mac 2004 to 0.x releases of VLC, Seashore, and Ecto—even betas of Firefox and Parallels. Whatever my nerdy little heart desires. I've had those early apps crash, but Tiger never faltered.

A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES! And all my complaints, mirrored by online forum traffic, are the same complaints I heard about Vista when it first reared its unbaked head.

Leopard is the new Vista. All the way. And here are five examples.

Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually

Even our own reviewer, who loves Leopard, says not to upgrade until 10.5.1. And now that Apple has coughed that up, he'll probably say to wait for 10.5.2. Or .3. Now where have I heard that advice before? Oh yeah, every time I reviewed Vista.

What makes it worse is this convoluted argument that my Apple friends give me: They're more upset at Microsoft on account of it being in perpetual service pack limbo because Vista was supposed to be a ground-up redesign, whereas Leopard is really just a juicy point release. That makes zero sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, they both suck.

Vista's ground-uppedness wasn't nearly as major a landmark as I was expecting—aside from massive and continuous software and hardware incompatibilities. Leopard is touting many of the same "new" features, including the vaunted 64-bittedness. Vista took five years and lost a whole bunch of features along the way, so the fact that it's still unbaked after half a decade blows my mind.

No one is 100 percent sure how long Leopard took, since Apple whispered its name only just last year, but if it is "just a point release," then it should have been much easier to Q/A. And yet, it's still unbaked despite an ad campaign that implies it's fresh, steaming, just out of the oven, and delicious.

Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz

Then there's the new look. Vista comes out and we're all wondering, what was the big deal about window transparency? Yeah, it's great that the OS can support bigger, better video, but unless I'm seeing it as part of a game or an actual productivity app, I just don't care. Looking down to the bottom of my desktop as if I'm snorkeling in a clear blue Bahamas lagoon doesn't really do anything for me. Everyone agrees, and Vista's Aero gets nuked as just another example of Microsoft being in bed with hardware vendors, forcing all of us to run out and upgrade hardware—video cards, in this case.

Poof, here's Leopard, and the first thing the Apple folks want to show me is window transparency. Now all of a sudden that's the coolest thing ever and an obvious example of cutting-edge OS evolution. I had to check to make sure my ears were working when I heard that one.

Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface "Fixes"

Then there's how Microsoft screwed up Vista's UI, reorganizing things that didn't need to be reorganized—like the networking screens, for example. Under XP you can get to those with a single right-click on the desktop. Under Vista, it's three layers down for no good reason. Or those new Save As dialog boxes. Drunken monkeys could figure out what was going on under the XP format, but under Vista I've got users asking me for help—and this is at PC Magazine Labs!

Not to be left behind, Apple has messed up its own UI, too, but Apple did it with piles of senseless graphics enhancements. Users either have to deal with these or learn some nasty hack to kill them off. So much for ease of use.

Who's responsible for Apple's redesigned dock? I could understand a programmer thinking a mirrored dock would look great on his résumé. But I can't imagine that a UI expert looked at it and said it was more functional than Tiger's. A stupid cornflower-blue fuzzball is no replacement for Tiger's clear, dark arrow that let me know what apps I had open. I could actually see the arrow. The blue fuzzy thing just blends in with the pointless mirrored reflections of the app icons, so now I've got to squint for the same information.

Okay, Cover Flow I like, but at any normal resolution that's about as much preview capability as I need. So why add that two-clicks-down QuickLook deal? And what's with that curving Stacker thing off of docked folders? Any subfolder takes you back to Finder anyway, so why not just start there? Oh, wait, I'm forgetting about the new folder icons with the barely visible and nonintuitive subject tattoos on them. And the pièce de résistance: rounded corners on menu bars! Awesome. I have so been waiting for those!

Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking

Microsoft made a big deal out of Vista's completely redesigned TCP/IP networking stack, with a big part specifically intended to make wireless networking easier and more stable. And the OS did that fine. Only problem is, now wired networking tends to drop mysteriously every once in a while. But, hey, that's what SP1 is for, right? (Yeah, that was sarcasm.) At least Microsoft had a good reason to mess with its networking stack: XP's networking was a fiery offense against man and nature. What's Apple's excuse?

I actually don't know. Yeah, I know the OS went to full-on 64-bits, but that's no reason to mess with the networking stack. Especially since Tiger's networking just plain worked. Plug into an Apple network—you're good to go. Plug into a Windows network—you're good to go. Plug into any IP-based mixed-client network—you're good to go. Bring up a new Windows share in a mixed network, and Tiger usually sees it before the Windows client does. Did someone actually sit down and say, we've just got to improve on that?

Leopard's networking sees the physical part of the network just fine, wired or wireless. And if there's an AFP share, that pops up like a puppy for a doggie treat. But the Web abounds in complaints—plaintive cries as to why Leopard seems to ignore Windows shares, and semi-effectual fixes. Or it sees Windows shares for a little while and then in a fit of pique decides to drop them again. It's like the French waiter of networking. Oh, but who cares, Oliver? After all, it's not as if networking were in any way related to business functionality. Or that interacting peaceably with Windows is in any way required. As long as we can talk to the iPod and Apple TV we're good, right? —next: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck >

Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck

This drives me nuts. With Vista, it was SideShow. Not Sidebar, which is the annoying and semifunctional widget Microsoft copied into Vista because it just couldn't let Google and Yahoo! hog all the kudos. Sidebar is a decent example of a New Feature That Sucks, but SideShow is a great example. SideShow is that promised hardware-bundle feature that would let users scan e-mail, play music, and perform similar functions on a notebook or PDA-style Vista PC without opening or booting the computer (this requires a little screen on the notebook lid with some nav buttons). I saw a bad implementation on the much-cursed FlipStart mini PC, and there's a Dell notebook around now that has it, but on both it was essentially a non-feature.

For Leopard, the sad bundled app-as-feature is Time Machine. To hear Mac moonies tell it, this is the best thing to happen to backup since the letter b. In reality, however, it sucketh and it sucketh huge.

Okay, the screen looks like Star Wars. That's cool in an I-want-to-stay-a-virgin kind of way. But "easy to use"? Which groupie said that? Try putting a new Apple user in front of this app and see what happens. For one, you can't set up Time Machine from within Time Machine. How is that easy? You'll find some of the settings buried in System Settings and others in Time Machine. And if you want to kick off a manual backup, you've got to know to right-click on the Time Machine icon in the dock. Is Britney Spears moonlighting as Apple's UI designer?

Then there's the annoying marketing ploy showcasing how amazing it is that Time Machine takes a snapshot of the entire file system. News flash: EVERY backup app can take a snapshot of the entire file system. That would be the reason we call them "backup programs." Other backup apps simply tell you to choose which files and folders you want saved—up to and including the entire file system. Time Machine does it the other way around and says "I'm backing up everything unless you tell me otherwise." How is this better than, say, Vista's bundled backup?

In fact, Vista's backup kicks Time Machine's butt in three rather important ways: First, you can do an image-based bare-metal restore with the MS version—provided you've paid for the privilege by buying a more expensive version of Vista. (See, being able to do a bare-metal restore makes losing all that drive space that you eat by taking a full-system snapshot worthwhile.) Time Machine needs a working version of Leopard to talk to, so why am I backing up all that system stuff?

Second, Vista does block-level incremental backups to help conserve drive space and decrease backup time. With this type of backup, a previously backed-up file that's been recently changed has only the new changes saved and the rest of the file referenced. Time Machine doesn't do that at the file level. You change a file and it just snaps the whole thing again. Not such a big deal for Word docs, but for my Entourage mail database? My Fedora or Vista virtual machine files? That's a lot of data to just keep snapping away at.

So why doesn't Time Machine do block-level backups? I have no idea. Apple controls the file system. It controls the backup application. Generally, that's all you need. Maybe Apple couldn't spare the programmers working on the hugely important Star Wars core animation splash-screen project. Can't skimp on that, can we?

Third, Vista's backup works over a network. In its ads Apple blithely says that Time Machine can, too, but when you read the fine print—or try it in real life—you discover that Time Machine works with USB- or FireWire-connected drives only. Really? In 2007? When I saw that, I actually looked around to see if Ashton Kutcher was going to pop out from behind my lab bench and tell me I'd been punked.

Meanwhile, maybe I'm a boring old sys admin guy, but EMC's Retrospect worked just fine under Tiger, and some version of that app comes free with any number of networked hard drives or home NAS products. No Star Wars splash screen, though—just easy-to-navigate wizards, damn them.

Okay, I probably had a little too much coffee this morning, but Leopard really is just one big popped balloon of disappointment. Let's get it straight, however: I'm not any more against Leopard than I am against Vista. Both of them got too much wrong. I'll close with a little tidbit for that pudgy PC guy in the Apple commercials who's so sad because his users are "downgrading" to XP. Well, maybe they are—I know I did. But I'm writing this on an XP workstation right now because my Mac is busy reinstalling Tiger. Leopard can keep its glitzy crash-prone spots. I'll stick with the OS that really "just works"—for now.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223921,00.asp





For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device
Matt Richtel and Brad Stone

Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.

Consider the “hottest toys” list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on “preschool-appropriate Web sites”) and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been “a huge jump in the last 12 months” in toys that involve looking at a screen.

“The bigger toy companies don’t even call it the toy business anymore,” Mr. Silver said. “They’re in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they’re saying is, ‘We’re vying for kids’ leisure time.’ ”

Technology has been slowly permeating the toy business for a number of years, but the trend has been accelerating. On Wednesday, six of the nine best-selling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. For all of 2006, three of the top nine toys for that age group were tech-related.

The trend concerns pediatricians and educators, who say excessive screen time stifles the imagination. But more traditional toys — ones without computer monitors, U.S.B. cables and memory cards — are seen by many children as obsolete.

“If you give kids an old toy camera, they look at you like you’re crazy,” said Reyne Rice, a toy trends specialist for the Toy Industry Association. Children “are role-playing what they see in society,” she added.

That seems to be the case even when youngsters are not old enough to have any clue how to use actual gadgets.

Yunice Kotake, of San Bruno, Calif., recently purchased a Fisher-Price Knows Your Name Dora Cell Phone for her twin year-old daughters. But a few days later, she returned the play phone to a local Toys “R” Us, after she found that the girls seemed to prefer their parents’ actual phones.

“They know what a real cellphone is, and they don’t want a fake one,” Ms. Kotake said.

Inside the Toys “R” Us, the shelves near the store’s front were brimming with toys with a high-tech twist. Among them were numerous starter laptops that play educational games (and in the shape, for instance, of Barbie’s purse and Darth Vader’s helmet) and traditional board games with DVD extras. Perched prominently on one shelf was one of the country’s hottest-selling toys, the EyeClops Bionic Eye, an electronic camera for children ages 6 and up.

Standing near the front of the store, a 6-year-old named Sabrina, with a gap-tooth smile, explained that her No. 1 choice for a Christmas gift is an adult laptop.

“ ’Cause it’s cool,” she explained.

“Maybe when she’s 8,” said her mother, Amina, who declined to give her last name. She might, she said, have to yield when her daughter turns 7.

“These kids are different from the way we were,” she added.

Toy companies are eager to meet demand with products like the LeapFrog ClickStart My First Computer, which gives children ages 3 and up a keyboard to help them learn computer basics, using a TV screen as a monitor.

“Children want to emulate their parents, whether they are on the phone, using a digital camera or on their computers and online,” said Mark Randall, vice president of the toy and baby store at Amazon.com. “The toy industry now has pretty much got a product for every one of those behaviors.”

Even toys with no typical connection to technology are newly wired. A new generation of popular stuffed animals and dolls, like Webkinz, are now tied to Internet sites so that toddlers can cuddle and dress them one minute and go online to social-network the next. Among the hottest toys listed in the holiday issue of Toy Wishes magazine are Barbie Girls MP3 players and the Rubik’s Revolution, a blinking, beeping update of the Rubik’s Cube that includes six electronic games.

Wiring toys for a young audience is worrying some children’s advocates and pediatricians. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against screen time for children ages 2 and younger, and it recommends no more than one to two hours a day of quality programming on televisions or computers for older children.

Donald L. Shifrin, a pediatrician based in Seattle and the spokesman for the academy, said tech toys cannot replace imaginative play, where children create rich narratives and interact with peers or parents.

“Are we creating media use as a default for play?” Dr. Shifrin asked. “When kids want to play, will they ask, ‘Where’s the screen?’ ”

But to the toy industry, the so-called youth electronics category is a bright spot and now accounting for more than 5 percent of all toy sales. Overall toy sales have been flat at around $22 billion a year for the last five years, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

“If you’re just selling traditional toys like board games or plastic toys, you can survive but you can’t grow,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company. “This industry has to redefine what a toy is.”

Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.

Meanwhile, electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today’s bib-wearing consumers.

A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys “R” Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models.

“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they’re much less interested,” said Daniel Neal, Kajeet’s chief executive. “They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”

Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer.

Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. “We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it’s a fake,” he said.

Grace, a 1-year-old in San Francisco, however, has been going through a decidedly nontechnology phase.

Recently, playtime has involved “putting little toys and dolls into bags and zipping them up,” said her mother, Tanya, who declined to give her last name. “Wouldn’t it be great if our lives were so simple?”

Still, Tanya has put the Fun Elmo Laptop on Grace’s Christmas list. Tanya says Grace is getting the gift because she loves to sit on her mom’s lap and hit the keys and move the mouse on the family’s real computer.

“I think she just likes mimicking people,” Tanya said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...9techtoys.html





Facebook Jumps Ahead of Myspace in Traffic (Depending on Who You Believe)

This really isn’t a question of Facebook vs. MySpace. It’s a question of Alexa.com vs. Compete.com.

According to Alexa, Facebook jumped ahead of MySpace last week to technically take the #6 spot. While it hasn’t changed on the official Alexa Top 500, a close examination of the line graph comparison shows the too big dogs in social networking neck and neck on Novemeber 20 and 21. Facebook jumped ahead by a small margin after that.

Compete.com paints a completely different picture. Despite the slower updates, MySpace still have a huge lead lead in October, 2007. It shows MySpace at 65 million versus Facebook’s 24 million.

The trends over the last several months have shown both websites growing in traffic sporadically over the last year, but Facebook seems to be making bigger gains. That could change, as Facebook Beacon, their new user-data-driven advertising program, has drawn a tremendous amount of heat from users, critics, and watchdog groups since its launch this month.

This all brings up three questions:

1) Will the increase in revenue be sufficient to compensate for Facebook’s “loss of face”?

2) If Facebook succeeds, will MySpace follow with a similiar ad platform of their own? (perhaps they’ve already starting it)

3) Who’s right, Compete.com or Alexa.com, and why is there such a discrepancy?

*Bonus Question* - Does anyone really care outside of the financial driving forces behind the websites in question?

*Bonus Answer* - Probably not, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
http://socialnewswatch.com/facebook-myspace-alexa/





How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid.

Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were willing and able to -- for example -- alienate every Vietnamese speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word "Phuc" (a Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade the chatroom censors' blocks on the f-bomb.

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a benevolent dictatorship this clearly isn't one.

Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users.

The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).

But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later").

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=204203573





Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking
Louise Story and Brad Stone

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

“We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

“Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/te...gy/30face.html





In-Store Wi-Fi Is Free, but Not Commercial-Free
Lia Miller

PEOPLE who like to use their laptops, iPhones and other devices in public are always so delighted when they stumble on a wireless hot spot in an unexpected place. Will they be pleased enough to look at ads before getting their broadband fix?

AnchorFree, a company in Sunnyvale, Calif., that is two and a half years old, has introduced a service that lets merchants of any size — from a large bookstore chain to a mom-and-pop restaurant — offer free advertising-supported Wi-Fi to customers on the store premises. People who are shopping or eating in an AnchorFree location will see banner ads on their screens or short video spots or both before their browsing session.

Among the major companies that have signed up to advertise are American Express, Circuit City, Clorox, Ford, Kaiser Permanente, McDonald’s, Toyota and Major League Baseball.

Mark Smith, executive vice president for marketing and strategy at AnchorFree, said that advertisers could tailor their ads to reach people at specific locations in the network. For example, an ad for a Lexus might be shown to customers staying at a four-star hotel, but not to guests at an airport motel. “Advertisers could target airport travelers versus vehicle travelers, for instance,” he said.

Considering the growing number of hand-held devices that offer Web browsing, Mr. Smith said he viewed the Wi-Fi network as an untapped market of virtual billboards. Controlling this valuable bit of real estate, he said, gives companies “the ability for them to have their own branded relationship” with people “while they are their point of consumption.”

•

Until recently, the two most widespread options people had for using wireless broadband at public hot spots have been either paying a subscription fee to their cellphone carrier or paying a daily or hourly rate to the retailer that is host of the site. AnchorFree is one of a handful of companies offering an alternative business model, one in which the advertiser pays but the retailer and the Web surfer do not.

Businesses that traditionally offer Wi-Fi to customers — hotels, for example — can sign up with AnchorFree at no cost and collect a share of up to 50 percent of the advertising revenue. For small businesses, which might not be able to afford Wi-Fi service, AnchorFree will supply the necessary router and other technology at no cost.

The retailer can then promote its free wireless service, which could prove to be a competitive advantage. Some hotels, for instance, charge guests $10 to $15 a night for Wi-Fi access.

Mr. Smith said that AnchorFree’s technology created a “persistent messaging frame” by pushing down the Web page on a device’s screen and inserting a space for a banner ad. The space is independent of the Web pages being viewed and does not change based on where the user is surfing.

AnchorFree offers several options to retailers and advertisers. With the open network option, a retailer agrees to run any ad from the AnchorFree rotation, and in the closed network option a company with multiple locations (like a bookstore chain or hotel) can run its own advertising or other messages within that network.

Brad Agens, senior vice president for advertising sales at Gorilla Nation, a company that connects online advertisers to more than 500 Web sites, said that AnchorFree was the first network it was representing. He said that companies seeking to buy ad space online were “looking beyond the portals and the large, branded destinations, the ESPNs, the MTVs.”

•

AnchorFree is not the only company to offer an advertising network for mobile broadband. JiWire, based in San Francisco, has a similar system, though a different technological approach.

Analysts in the wireless industry say they expect that this sector will evolve and mature along with the growth of wireless Internet use.

“The real key is whether advertisers will embrace this model and drive online advertising revenue toward Wi-Fi hot spots,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer with the Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting group.

He said it was too early to evaluate whether wireless advertising would emerge as a distinct and robust market, separate from the more established realm of online advertising.

“New economic models around advertising are disruptive,” Mr. Ayvazian said. “If companies like AnchorFree can add a new layer of innovation around free broadband access, they can be disruptive again and take market share.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/bu...ia/27adco.html





Technology Identifies Invisible Intruders on Wireless LANs

System is a window into an invisible world
Sandra Rossi

Groundbreaking research undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology has led to the creation of systems that can detect invisible intruders on wireless local area networks.

QUT Information Security Institute co-researcher Dr Jason Smith said he and a colleague had invented an effective system to detect unwanted presence on wireless networks.

"Unlike a building, there are no clearly defined boundaries to wireless networks. The perimeter of a network is defined by the quality of the receiving antenna," Dr Smith said.

"Intruders can easily gain access to wireless networks by either eavesdropping on unencrypted networks or actively hijacking computer sessions when a legitimate user logged onto the network leaves the connection."

Dr Smith said the system was a window into an invisible world that let network administrators see whether unexpected or undesirable things had occurred on their networks.

"We've created a series of monitoring techniques that when used together can effectively watch for both attackers and configuration mistakes in devices on the network," he said.

"The monitor is independent of the network, yet uses information accumulated by the network. This makes the system cheap and easy for businesses to incorporate.

"The strength of the signal travelling in a wireless network and the round trip time of the signal are both monitored because they will change if an intruder enters the network.

"Separately monitoring the signal and round trip time is unreliable, but correlating them against each other makes the system accurate."

Dr Smith said when an intruder was detected a number of steps could then be taken.

"Depending on how sensitive the network is, armed security guards could be deployed, or the wireless network may be turned off. The security protection might alter to avert the intrusion or the intruder may simply be monitored to see what they get up to," he said.

"Another application is to use the monitoring to search for security vulnerabilities in devices legitimately connected to the network. When a compromising security configuration is detected, the mistake could be corrected."

Dr Smith said he created the system with PhD researcher Rupinder Gill, who was now employed by a wireless network vendor in the US to create security products.

He said the valuable commodity at greatest risk on local area networks was information.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...2;fp;16;fpid;1





DI Fellows-- EXPELLED for Plagiarism

It is one thing to correct Michael Behe (some structure guy) with zero HIV-1 research experience on HIV-1 evolution. But considering the sheer number of DI 'fellows' who are lawyers, and the fact Im just a biology student with zero experience in law... I found it rather strange that I caught something the DI lawyers evidently had no problem with:


Long Original with Narration


DI manipulation with *Narration*


----------------

Now, I have brought this to the attention of Harvard and XVIVO. I dont know what theyre going to do (theyre Harvard-- they can do whatever they want). I do know that they are not happy campers. IANAL, I am a virologist, but heres why *I* would be upset.

This isnt a case of naive copyright infringement on Dembskis part, ie "Hey! I found this cool video on YouTube, lets use it!" Though Dembski is pictured here, others have reported multiple DI 'fellows' presenting this manipulated animation. The Discovery Institute does not have a license to use this animation, so they downloaded it illegally.

Maybe they think it is 'okay' to use it anyway, because they stripped off Harvard/XVIVOs copyright and credits.

Maybe they think it is 'okay' because they gave the animation a new title ('Inner life of a cell' became 'The cell as an automated city') and an extraordinarily unprofessional new narration (alternate alternate title-- ' Big Gay Al takes a tour of a cell!'). Harvard/XVIVOs narration, all of the science, is whisked away and replaced with a 'surrealistic lilliputian realm'-- 'robots', 'manufacturing', 'circuitry', 'nano moters', 'UPS labels'. Maybe they think it is 'okay' because they turned all of Harvards science into 'MAGIC!'

Hmm. From my point of view, as a virologist and former teaching assistant, this isnt just copyright infringement. This is theft and plagiarism. Taking someone elses work without their consent, manipulating it without their consent, pretending it supports ID Creationists distorted views of reality, and presenting it as DIs work.

*shrug* The DI fellows would be EXPELLED from my university for this.
http://endogenousretrovirus.blogspot...lagiarism.html





Law Review Article on the Problems with Copyright

Excellent article by John Tehranian: "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap":

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer -- a veritable grand larcenist -- or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

The point of the article is how, simply by acting normally, all of us are technically lawbreakers many times over every day. When laws are this far outside the social norms, it's time to change them.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...view_arti.html





Tiffany and eBay in Fight Over Fakes
Katie Hafner

For years, eBay has defined itself simply as an online marketplace that links buyers and sellers.

But in a weeklong bench trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan that ended last Tuesday, lawyers for Tiffany & Company argued that the online auction house was far more than that: it is a distribution network that enables the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

If Tiffany wins its case, not only could other lawsuits follow, but eBay’s business model could be threatened because it would be difficult and extremely expensive for the company, based in San Jose, Calif., to police a site that now has 248 million registered users worldwide and approximately 102 million items for sale at any one time.

Tiffany has requested injunctive relief that would require eBay to alter its procedures to eliminate counterfeit silver Tiffany merchandise from its auctions. Judge Richard Sullivan instructed both sides to file post-trial briefs by Dec. 7.

“I will hopefully turn this around quite quickly after that,” he told the lawyers.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said eBay was not responsible for determining whether each product sold on the site was fake.

“As a marketplace, we never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site, so it would be impossible for us to solely determine the authenticity of an item,” Mr. Durzy said. “And we go above and beyond what the law requires us to do to keep counterfeits off the site.”

But in his closing argument last Tuesday, James B. Swire, the lawyer for Tiffany, told Judge Sullivan that eBay directly advertised the sale of Tiffany jewelry on its home page, and “because eBay profits from the sales generated by these and other actions,” Tiffany considers its actions direct copyright infringement.

Mr. Swire added that “there’s certainly much in the record to show that eBay is liable for contributory infringement.”

Bruce Rich, eBay’s lawyer, told the court the company had fulfilled its obligation to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods. In his closing argument, he said the law places the primary policing responsibility on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits of its products.

Of course, fakes are sold everywhere, as anyone trying to dodge the street vendors selling fake designer handbags in Times Square can attest. But the anonymity and reach of the Internet makes it perfect for selling knockoffs. And as the biggest online marketplace, eBay is the center of a new universe of counterfeit products.

“The fact that eBay has chosen to set up its business in a manner that makes it extremely difficult for it to monitor the merchandise that is sold at its auctions is not a defense,” said Geoffrey Potter, chairman of the anticounterfeiting practice at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, a New York law firm.

Mr. Potter said that if the judge found that eBay had the same duty as flea markets and traditional retail stores to not sell counterfeit products, “eBay will likely have to either stop auctioning famous luxury products or radically alter the way it does business so that it can precertify the authenticity of those products.”

“One way that eBay could do this would be to require proof that Tiffany had been paid for the items, before eBay permits an auction of multiple, identical alleged Tiffany products,” Mr. Potter said.

Mr. Potter said eBay did manage to keep other illegal items — human organs, firearms, and child pornography — off the site. “The truth of the matter is that if eBay wanted to keep counterfeit Tiffany goods off, it probably could,” he said.

When Tiffany filed its suit against eBay in 2004, it said that Tiffany employees had trolled eBay to find fake Tiffany silver jewelry and concluded that 73 percent of 186 pieces they purchased on eBay were counterfeit.

In its original complaint, Tiffany maintained that anyone selling five or more pieces of jewelry said to be Tiffany’s at a discount “is almost certainly selling counterfeit Tiffany goods.” Other makers of luxury goods have complained that sales of counterfeit items are hurting their businesses.

“Louis Vuitton believes that people avoid buying their signature bags because of all the fake ones out there,” Mr. Potter said.

In his opening statement last week, Mr. Swire, Tiffany’s lawyer, said that in 2003 Tiffany put eBay on notice about the counterfeit items and requested that the company investigate. Yet “eBay simply turned a blind eye,” Mr. Swire said.

Last Tuesday, Judge Sullivan questioned Michael J. Kowalski, Tiffany’s chairman and chief executive, about the measures Tiffany has taken to track down and prosecute the counterfeiters.

Mr. Kowalski said it had been difficult — and often fruitless — to pursue sellers who list counterfeits on eBay, as they frequently change identity.

“We simply felt that we were chasing ourselves,” he said, and “chasing phantom sites that would be taken down one day and pop up another day, and so we were in a vicious circle.”

In the end, Mr. Kowalski said, “The heart of the issue was the distribution network,” referring to eBay.

Mr. Durzy said that eBay had put in place additional anticounterfeiting measures since Tiffany filed its suit. These include closer monitoring of categories chosen most often by counterfeiters, like expensive jewelry and handbags, as well as PayPal verification requirements, selective restrictions on sales volume and limits on cross-border sales.

“We’re very pleased with the way the trial went,” Mr. Durzy said.

After each side presented closing arguments, the judge noted what he called “a fundamental disagreement with respect to what the law is here.”

Although Judge Sullivan gave little indication of how he might rule, he pointed to legal precedents that have found that if a manufacturer or distributor continues to supply a product knowing it is engaging in trademark infringement, that manufacturer or distributor is “contributorily responsible” for any harm done as a result of the deceit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/te...gy/27ebay.html





RIAA Must Divulge Expenses-Per-Download
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/11/27/0215220.shtml





A Gimmick Becomes a Real Trend
Bob Tedeschi

TWO years ago, Cyber Monday was a marketing gimmick in search of shoppers. This year, it seems to be a genuine trend that retailers have embraced.

In a survey of roughly 120 members of Shop.org, the trade group for online retailers, nearly three-quarters said they would offer discounts today for Cyber Monday, as the first Monday after Thanksgiving has become known. Shop.org said 32 percent of adults surveyed last week said they would shop online on Cyber Monday, up from 27 percent in 2006.

Among the merchants participating is HSN.com, which is giving first-time customers a discount of 15 percent.

Retailers are hoping the sales create early demand for goods, thus easing the late-season strain on the merchants’ shipping operations. It could also help them record early gains during what could be a cheerless holiday season. Analysts said ripples from the credit crisis and rising fuel costs, among other factors, could damp consumer spending.

Doug Hart, an analyst at BDO Seidman, an accounting and consulting firm, said Cyber Monday sales would account for about 12 percent of the expected $39 billion in online revenue this holiday season. That is similar to the 15 percent share of holiday sales recorded by offline retailers on the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, he said.

Some online merchants see Cyber Monday promotions as an antidote to the crowds and traffic jams of Black Friday, and are hoping this year’s online promotions attract shopping refugees.

It helps that some retailers are more aggressively promoting their discounts. Ice.com, an online jeweler, last year offered a 20 percent discount on 15 items on Cyber Monday. “We didn’t go all the way with promotions because we didn’t think it was such a great idea,” said Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president for marketing at Ice.com. “But last year, we saw huge increases in traffic and sales.”

The percentage of discounts on Ice.com will be similar to last year’s. This year, however, roughly 12,000 sites that promote Ice.com in exchange for a commission — like UPromise.com and FatWallet — are featuring Ice.com’s Cyber Monday promotion.

The sale also appears alongside those of dozens of other online retailers on CyberMonday.com, a site created by Shop.org two years ago. According to Scott Silverman, Shop.org’s executive director, 43 percent of the organization’s members joined the inaugural Cyber Monday promotion in 2005.

“Last year’s response really legitimized it,” he said.

Among this year’s promotions, 29 percent are one-day sales. Other deals are being offered in the days before and after Cyber Monday or, in some cases, the entire holiday shopping season. About one-fourth of the retailers participating are not charging customers for shipping.

•

Mr. Hart of BDO Seidman said this year’s Cyber Monday deals would culminate a series of November promotions intended to drive holiday sales sooner. Sales like Target.com’s discount on more than 60 gift items, he said, helped set the promotional tone of the month for retailers. Free shipping offers for toys sold on Walmart.com and Target.com show how jittery merchants have become since the recalls of toys made in China, he said.

Among the more aggressive entrants into the Cyber Monday fray is the recently introduced Web site of the retail chain Meijer. The site is cutting 30 percent from the price of many Global Positioning Systems, television and video items, and audio products. “Because it’s our first year out of the gate, we want people to get used to us,” said Dawn Bronkema, Meijer’s director for e-commerce marketing.

Meijer will continue offering sales after Cyber Monday, but the discount level could be smaller and the breadth of selection might not be as wide.

•

For some online merchants, the idea of Cyber Monday still rings hollow. Bill Bass, the chief executive of Fair Indigo, a seller of fair-trade apparel based in Madison, Wis., said his site would still not offer special price promotions.

“There’s something inherently dishonest about it,” he said. “If you’re giving a promotion now, you’re kind of saying you stuck it to people who bought from you when there wasn’t a promotion.”

Mr. Bass acknowledged that the policy could mean his site would lose sales to retailers that offer Cyber Monday discounts. “If you go down that path, you’re training your customers to expect promotions,” he said.

Like other retailers that rely heavily on catalogs for marketing, Fair Indigo can help encourage earlier holiday shopping by simply mailing catalogs sooner.

Mr. Gniwisch, of Ice.com, said that if nothing else, this year’s Cyber Monday success in attracting retailers shows the necessity of persistence in establishing an annual event.

“When something’s pushed down your throat continuously and the Internet becomes more part of your life, the customs of the Internet become more part of your life,” Mr. Gniwisch said. “So they finally got a holiday for the Internet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/te...gy/26ecom.html





Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday

Lowe's, Macy's, Victoria's Secret and others are hit hardest where it hurts—in the transaction times.
Evan Schuman

A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit.

But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

Many retailers count on Black Friday to turn their red ink black, but the fact that most slowdowns occurred during the transaction phase of the interactions may have reduced that salvaging effect considerably.

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said the slowdowns "impacted the product search and check-out processes—and presumably will impact online sales."

The Keynote study added that "the worst performing sites on Black Friday were showing as much as a 400 percent slowdown," which White said "will lead to consumers abandoning a product search or checkout."

Macy's, for example, saw site performance fall off from its typical 12 seconds to about 15 to 20 seconds. "But it's not happening on their homepage," White said. "It's happening when [site visitors] are actually searching the site."

Among some of the other hardest hit e-tailers were Lowe's—which saw a roughly "300 percent decrease in performance," White said. Site performance "used to be 100 percent [rapid response], but it's now fluctuating between 20 percent and 30 percent."

OfficeDepot went from 10 seconds to 25 seconds. Buy.com and Borders also suffered significant slowdowns, White said.

High-tech marketing marks Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Click here to read more.

White noted that, in general, homepage performances were good, but that delays crept in later in the purchase process, typically when the site visit moved from product description pages to either search or checkout. That is when sites move transactions to other servers and—quite often—to other sites entirely.

Indeed, some performance degradations may not be the direct fault of the retail site. But White said that major retailers can and should "put pressure on suppliers [and] partners" to optimize their own systems. He added that SLAs (service-level agreements) should include guaranteed response times during holidays and other anticipated high-traffic periods.

A site slowdown—as opposed to an outright outage—can be especially frustrating because steady—and oftentimes sharply rising—sales camouflage the problem. In the end, many executives are left wondering how many additional sales they might have made had the site responded normally.

How long is too long for a site to respond to a mouse click? That depends on the individual shopper and that shopper's patience. White cited the popular 8-second rule, but said that many factors influence how lenient shoppers will be.

Consumers may be willing to wait longer for exclusive products or information, such as the balance of their bank accounts.

Consumers might also be more patient with a graphic-intensive site that has images they truly want to see. Victoria's Secret, for example, experienced a huge slowdown Thursday night—from a 5-second response to a 15-second response—but White speculated that its customers might be more tolerant of delays because they're expecting a more graphic-intensive experience, and the delay is thus worth waiting through.

Predictions for retail generally suggest that 2007 will have one of the weakest years in terms of sales growth since 2002, the worst of the dot-com implosion years.

But the National Retail Federation on Sunday predicted that Monday will show a sharp increase, with "72 million consumers planning to shop online from home or at work tomorrow, up from 60.7 million in 2006 and 59.0 million in 2005." The NRF survey found that 31.9 percent of adults will shop on Cyber Monday, up 17.3 percent over last year.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2222015,00.asp





Dell Reports 26% Rise in Quarterly Earnings
Matt Richtel

Dell Inc. reported today that third-quarter net income increased 26 percent to $766 million, or 34 cents a share, on sales of $15.6 billion.

A consensus of Wall Street analysts had projected that Dell would post sales of $15.3 billion and earnings per share of 35 cents.

Shaw Wu, an industry analyst with American Technology Research, said the returns were a disappointment to investors given a 7.7 percent run-up of the stock in the last two days.

“It’s pretty solid, but expectations were higher,” Mr. Wu said.

Indeed, Dell’s shares fell sharply in after-hours trading, declining more than 10 percent.

In the same period a year earlier, the company posted sales of $14.4 billion, and net income of $601 million, or 27 cents per share.

Company executives characterized the earnings as solid, but hampered by the costs of its transition to putting more emphasis on consumers and the international market, and to selling through retail stores.

After years of selling directly to consumers, Dell will be available in 10,000 retail outlets by the end of the year, said Michael S. Dell, the company’s chairman and chief executive.

Still, even as the company forged ahead with its strategy, it continued to lose market share in the United States to its chief rival, Hewlett-Packard.

“We are generally pleased, but we expect and want to do a better job,” said Donald J. Carty, Dell’s chief financial officer. He said that “improvement in profitability was somewhat muted by costs” associated with the transformation.

Today’s earnings call with Mr. Dell, who reassumed the post of chief executive in January, was Dell’s first with analysts in 18 months. In the interim, it has been trying to resolve problems with its accounting practices, which have forced it to restate earnings. The accounting is the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dell, once the leader in the PC business, has been under a relentless assault from Hewlett-Packard. According to IDC, a market research firm, at the end of the third quarter this year, H.P. had 20 percent of worldwide shipments of PCs, surpassing Dell’s 15 percent.

A year ago, the companies were tied at around 17 percent.

The challenge for Dell has been that growth in the market for desktop computers, laptops and servers has come largely in the consumer and international market — two areas where the company has been weaker than H.P.

Dell derives about 38 percent of its sales from outside the Americas. Only about 20 percent of its business is consumer-centered, and 80 percent corporate, said Clay Sumner, an industry analyst with Friedman, Billings, Ramsey.

“We all know that Dell has to participate more in international and more on the consumer side,” he said. “The question is how much it will cost Dell to do so.”

To emphasize the consumer business, it is widely accepted that Dell needs to transform from a direct sales model — selling over the phone, Internet and through catalog — to also selling through retail.

Already, Dell has announced a handful of retail partners, including Walmart. But those partnerships can add cost, not just because Dell has to reorganize its business, but also because it has to pay the retailer a share of sales.

Investors who are bullish on Dell believe that the new strategy will bring not only growth, but expanded profit margins as well. Some skeptical investors agree sales growth is likely but are concerned that profit margins will fall.

“That is the $64,000 question,” Mr. Sumner said of the margin question.

In addition to moving into the retail business, Dell has been making more acquisitions, something it had been loath to do. Earlier this month, Dell said it would acquire EqualLogic, a data storage company, for $1.4 billion.

Despite its struggles, Dell remains a strong, profitable company with $14.6 billion in cash, Mr. Sumner noted.

“Where they are losing dramatically to H.P. is in market share, but they have begun to grow again, and few dispute they will continue to grow and at a growing rate,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...9cnd-dell.html





The Big Sleep



Graham Robb

THE new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made no secret of his antipathy to his country’s 35-hour workweek. This drastic solution to unemployment was mandated by the leftist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. The intention was to share out the available work more evenly and to allow workers to spend more time with their families. Its long-term effects on the economy are still unclear.

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy wrote of “the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation”: “What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!” On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month give a taste of the unions’ reaction to President Sarkozy’s measure.

President Sarkozy’s 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

President Sarkozy’s campaign slogan, “Work more to earn more,” would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were “abandoning themselves to dumb idleness,” instead of undertaking “some peaceful and sedentary industry.” Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year “smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping.”

Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.

In modern France, where the overheated ski stations of the Alps and the Pyrenees are busier in winter than at any other time, no one is proposing a return to the five-month year. But perhaps there are lessons to be learned from those hibernating ancestors who shared their homes with heat-producing herbivores.

In September, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Sarkozy proposed “un New Deal écologique et économique,” but without explaining how economic growth can be reconciled with conservation. If he is serious about saving the planet, and if he wants to reassure the unions that workers will still have time with their families, he should consider introducing tax incentives for hibernation. The long-term benefits of reduced energy consumption would counterbalance the economic loss. There has never been a better time to stay in bed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html

[JackSpratts]

Editorial Director Fired Over Negative Game Review?
Kyle Orland

So before we get going, we should make it clear that this post is still just a rumor and many of the facts behind it are still up in the air. That being said, word around game journalism's virtual water cooler is that Gamespot Editorial Director Jeff Gerstmann has been fired because publisher Eidos was unhappy about his negative review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

What seems in little dispute, going by forum chatter as well as multiple published sources (referencing conversations with multiple CNet employees), is that Gerstmann has indeed been fired after over ten years working at the site. We were not immediately able to confirm the firing with Gamespot or Gerstmann directly, but an e-mail sent to his Gamespot address did get returned with a "permanent failure" error. Seems pretty serious to us ... (see 7:12 AM update below)

What is in some dispute is the reason behind the firing. The current leading theory is that Eidos, a major Gamespot advertiser (just look at the current Kane&Lynch-ified front page shown above) was unhappy with Gerstmann's review of their game and brought pressure to bear on the site to remove the longstanding editor (Eidos representatives were not immediately available for comment). Gamespot's text review of the game is definitely very negative, and the 6/10 score rather low, but it's the video review of the game that really eviscerates it for "impossible to like" characters, a "lazy" script and excessive profanity, among other things. It does seem plausible that Eidos might not be too happy with either review, and that Gamespot might be willing to do anything to prevent losing such a large advertiser (notwithstanding the site's posted review guidelines, which state they have never "altered our verdict about any game due to advertiser pressure").

But there are some parts of the story that don't quite fit. For one, the review was posted on Nov. 13, yet the evidence points to Gerstmann being fired only recently. For another, it stands to reason that if Eidos was so unhappy with the review, that they would also demand it be taken down from the site, a step that has not yet been taken (though the video version doesn't seem to be actively linked on the site's Kane & Lynch videos page)? And while GameSpot's 6/10 score was low, it certainly wasn't out of the ordinary. Why would Gamespot be singled out, and why would such a senior and generally respected editor be demanded (and accepted by Gamespot) as sacrifice?

The ramifications of the story, if true, are huge. Readers should fairly expect there to be an inviolable firewall between advertising and editorial in journalism, and game journalism (yes, that includes "just reviews") is no different. While our industry has had its fair share of accusations of impropriety, nothing so far has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Giving a publisher the power to fire a senior editor is a line no outlet should be willing to cross.

We hope that everything is not as it seems here, and that there has simply been some sort of misunderstanding brought on by a game of telephone. The circumstantial evidence, however, is hard to ignore, and significant enough to make us seriously question what exactly is going on here. We'll of course be following this story as it inevitably develops over the next few days.

Update - 11:00 AM EST: The anonymous source/speculation train rolls on. Rock Paper Shotgun has posted a story citing an unnamed "very reliable source" as saying that "while Gerstmann wasn't the most popular man with the CNET owners, it was his Kane & Lynch review alone that saw him lose his job." Meanwhile, a poster at Forumopolis who claims to be directly involved with the Kane & Lynch ad campaign says that the whole thing is just a matter of bad timing. "I sincerely doubt that Eidos made Gamespot fire him," the poster writes. "CNET doesn't kowtow to its advertisers, and I've more than once seen the higher-ups turn away big advertising dollars for the sake of the company's integrity." Make of this what you will.

Update - 10:44 AM EST: Gamespot PR representative Leslie Van Every has responded to Joystiq's request for comment with ... a predictable 'no comment.' "It is CNET Networks' policy to never comment on individual employees--current or former--regarding their job status," Van Every told Joystiq. "This policy is in place out of respect for the individuals' privacy."

Update - 7:12 AM EST: Jeff has confirmed his firing to us via e-mail, but says he's "not really able to comment on the specifics of my termination." He added that he's "looking forward to getting back out there and figuring out what's next." We're still digging.

Update - 1:35 AM EST: The Kane and Lynch ads that blanketed Gamespot's front page are no longer being shown. Check out the picture above to see what the site looked at just an hour ago.
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/30/ru...and-lynch-rev/





Jack Thompson, Video Game Lawyer, Could be Disbarred
Kevin Spiess

Courts of Florida to pass judgment on Jack Thompson

Jack Thompson made a legal niche for himself by crusading against violence in video games, over the last decade. But now, the tables have turned on Mr. Thompson. He is currently involved in a court case that could possibly see his license to practive law being revoked by the Florida Bar.

The case was brought to the attentions of the Florida judiciary over "several complaints" of Mr. Thompson's "professional conduct in court cases", according to the blog gamepolitics.com. Jack Thompson tried to block the trial from continuing, and also tried counter-litigation by attempting a federal suit against the Florida Bar, but with no luck. Mr. Thompson also tried to invole the blog-writer of gamepolitics.com in that suit, but it was dismissed U.S District Court Judge Jordan.

Specifically, Mr. Thompson is to be held accountable for apparently making "making false and disparaging comments about a judge and several lawyers" (source).

Mr. Thompson contends that the Florida Bar is out to get him because of his "Christian activisim" and his "outspokenness." Mr. Thompson was quoted as sayng that "this [case] is frankly once again just the Bar going off the deep end trying to use Bar rules to limit my First Amendment activism."

Mr. Thompson has a history of trying to sue the makers of games, most famously Rockstar, for somehow causing real-world violence. Many people say that the link between game violence and real-world violence is tenous, and has not been supported by many studies.

Besides video games, Mr. Thompson also has issues with shock-jock Howard Stern, and claims to have gotten him booted of the air. And back in the early 90s, Mr. Thompson worked hard to block the success of rap group 2 Live Crew, and rapper-later-turned-actor, Ice T.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7370/





TV, Film and Game Violence Seen as a Threat

Violence depicted on television, in films and video games raises the risk of aggressive behavior in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to public health, according to a new study.

After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media, L. Rowell Huesmann, of the University of Michigan, and his colleague Brad Bushman concluded that only smoking posed a greater danger.

"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer," he said in a statement.

Smoking, a leading cause of preventable death, is linked to lung cancer and other illnesses.

Huesmann said children spend an average of three hours watching television each day and more than 60 percent of TV programs contain some violence, including 40 percent showing extreme violence.

"Children are also spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83 percent of homes with children," he added.

The findings, which are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, support earlier research which showed that children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and believe they are real are more likely to be aggressive as adults.

The results were true for both men and women.

"The research clearly shows that exposure to virtual violence increases the risk that both children and adults will behave aggressively," said Huesmann, adding it could have a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being of youngsters.

Although not every child exposed to violence in the media will become aggressive, he said it does not diminish the need for greater control on the part of parents and society of what children are exposed to in films, video games and television programs.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney,Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...61655220071128





'State Secrets' Doctrine Draws Scrutiny
Pamela Hess

Congress, courts examine Bush strategy to protect surveillance program

In federal courts and on Capitol Hill, challenges are brewing to a key legal strategy President Bush is using to protect a secret surveillance program that monitors phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.

Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine - a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.

The principle was established a half-century ago when, ruling in a wrongful-death case brought by the widows of civilians killed in a military plane crash, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's refusal to provide an accident report to the plaintiffs. The government contended releasing the document would compromise information about a secret mission and intelligence equipment.

Judicial review proposed
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits.

"We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says. "I don't think that the simple assertion of state secrets ought to be the end of the matter."

Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.

Practices among judges vary. Some accept state secrets claims outright, dismissing cases on the government's word. Others read the privileged information and decide for themselves, but almost invariably side with the government, according to legal scholars.

The draft legislation is modeled on procedures used in criminal cases that involve classified information. The Classified Information Protection Act lets judges review classified information a criminal defendant wants to use in his defense, but which could compromise national security if it were released publicly. The law allows the court to delete classified passages, substitute summaries of the information, or substitute a statement of facts that the classified information would prove.

The measure could become part of the Senate's new eavesdropping law, expected to be voted on in early December, the aides said.

State decisions
In another challenge to Bush's position on classified material, a federal judge in Virginia last week ordered the government to give trial prosecutors, defense lawyers and her clerk security clearances to review classified material in a terrorism case. Defense lawyers say the material will show the government failed to turn over evidence obtained by illegally monitoring their client's communications, and they want a new trial. The government says the information is protected by the state secrets privilege.
And in a case in Oregon, a U.S. district court judge is set to decide whether the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act trumps presidential claims of secrecy.

Adopted after the Watergate scandal, FISA dictates when the government must get permission from a secret court to monitor electronic communications inside the United States. It also allows people who believe they were spied on illegally to sue the government for damages and to request materials that would prove the surveillance. If the attorney general says disclosure would harm national security, a district court may review the classified materials privately to determine if the surveillance was illegal.

Politics of terror
That civil liability provision of FISA, however, comes up hard against the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush secretly authorized the spy agency to intercept international communications coming in and out of the United States that were believed to involve foreign terrorist organizations. It did so without going through the FISA court, claiming the Constitution and Congress' authorization for the use of military force after the terrorist attacks were all the authority the president needed to undertake the program.

Privacy and civil liberties groups say the warrantless surveillance violates FISA's prohibition on domestic surveillance without court orders. But for someone to sue the government for FISA violations, they must prove they were directly injured by the government's action. That is nearly impossible because the government will not disclose its targets or methods.

Terrorist Surveillance Program
One organization, however, believes it can demonstrate it has standing to sue because of an accidental document release in 2004. That February, the Bush administration froze the assets of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Muslim charity the United Nations Security Council alleges is associated with al-Qaida. In preparation for a legal proceeding on the terrorist designation in August, the Treasury Department inadvertently gave the foundation's lawyers and directors a top secret document dated May 24, 2004.

The document appeared to be a government summary of phone conversations it monitored between foundation lawyers and directors, according to a Washington Post reporter who received a copy from the foundation.

The FBI took the document from the Washington Post and Al Haramain in October 2004.

Fourteen months later, The New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. That is when the foundation's lawyers realized what the top secret document was: proof the organization had been targeted for warrantless electronic surveillance under TSP. They believe that proves standing, unique among plaintiffs in dozens of surveillance cases filed across the country.

The government asserts the states secrets privilege and refuses to release the document or confirm its contents. In its first crack at the case in 2006, the federal court in Oregon partially agreed. It said the document was rightfully protected by state secrets, but the foundation's lawyers could describe what they remembered about it to establish standing in their lawsuit.

The government appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which last week upheld its state secrets claim. But it did not dismiss the case. Instead, it directed the Oregon court to tackle one question it had sidestepped: whether FISA overrides the common law state secrets privilege.

Whatever the lower court decides, its decision will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court, legal experts and attorneys on the case say. The high court is unlikely to be friendly to a challenge to the state secrets doctrine. In October it unanimously declined to hear a CIA torture allegation case that the Bush administration wanted dismissed on secrecy grounds. And in 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state secrets doctrine in an espionage contract case.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21971705/





YouTube Suspends Egyptian Blog Activist's Account
Kevin Anderson

Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas has been using YouTube to expose torture in his country, but now his account has been suspended. Bloggers accuse YouTube of double standards.

YouTube has suspended the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who has been posting videos of cases of torture in his country. One of the videos he posted, of a Cairo man being beating and sexually assaulting, was credited with helping bring pressure on Egyptian authorities. That pressure led to three-year jail sentences for two of the policeman involved in the assault. Abbas has called the suspension of his YouTube account "by far the biggest blow to the anti-torture movement in Egypt", according to Amira Al Hussaini on Global Voices.

Amira has collected a good sample of reaction by Egyptian bloggers. Blogger Hossam El Hamalawy called the move by YouTube "un-bloody-believable" and said:
Wael's videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture

He predicted that activists would move the videos to other sites. The move has already started. A video showing scenes of torture in Egypt on the Global Voices post is hosted on the popular French video sharing site, DailyMotion.

But in a comment on Hamalawy's post, Mostafa Hussein said that YouTube's terms of service prevent the posting of such videos:
Well, the message from youtube is that waelabbas violated their terms of use.

This is actually true if you take a look at it. It states that content should follow the community guidelines[1]. In these community guidelines, there is this statement saying "Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it."

He suggested that activists use other sites, not just commercial sites like DailyMotion but "activist friendly" sites like IndyMedia.

Well-known Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh has called on readers of his blog to protest YouTube's decision.
These videos are the only mean to expose what happens in our police stations, without them the cry of people who were subjected to torture will go unheard.

Outside of Egypt, Stan Schroeder writing on Mashable, a site which covers social networking, questioned why Abbas' account was suspended when other videos of violence are on the site:
OK, why then can I find dozens of videos of people getting tasered by the police? If you ask me, a video of someone getting shocked with a high voltage weapon can definitely be described as graphic violence. And many will argue that the violence in such videos cannot be qualified as gratuitous. ... This is an ongoing problem with practically all sites which aggregate user-submitted content: double (or simply unclear) standards.

The question for Schroeder was whether showing police brutality qualified as 'gratuitous' violence. One of the commenters pointed out the Witness' Hub was created specifically to host videos of human rights abuses. But another commenter said that the audience at the Hub is much less than YouTube, and many of the videos on the Hub are in fact hosted elsewhere on sites like YouTube.

On the blog Mideast Youth, Esra'a from Bahrain says that this is pattern of YouTube and parent company Google giving into state pressure, saying that it recently gave into pressure from Turkish authorities.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/200...tian_blog.html





Blogger Fights for Free Speech in New Jersey

EFF defends critic from local government's heavy-handed tactics
Press release

Manalapan, NJ - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a Superior Court judge in New Jersey today to preserve the free speech rights of an anonymous blogger facing legal threats from local government officials.

The blogger, writing as "daTruthSquad" on a site hosted on Google's Blogspot service, has criticized a controversial lawsuit filed by the township of Manalapan, as well as the officials who decided to pursue the case. The township subpoenaed Google for "daTruthSquad's" identity -- as well as for any emails, blog drafts, and other information Google has about the blogger -- claiming that the defendant in the case is actually writing the posts. The defendant, however, has already sworn under penalty of perjury that he is not "daTruthSquad."

"Bloggers, as well as everyone else, have a First Amendment right to speak anonymously," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Litigants don't get a blank check to pry into the private lives of critics when they say things the litigants don't like. The fact that it is the government trying to abuse the discovery process makes this attempted invasion of privacy all the more repugnant."

In a motion to quash the subpoena filed today, EFF asked the court to block the township's attempt to uncover the identity of "daTruthSquad" and allow the blogger to continue to write about this or any other issue without being forced to identity him or herself.

"Attempts to intimidate critics into silence need to be confronted whenever and wherever they occur," said Zimmerman. "Governmental entities simply cannot be permitted to investigate critics because they dare to voice disapproval of public officials. It remains our sincere hope that the Township will abandon this intolerable legal strategy."
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2007/11/28-1





Arizona Affirms Strong Protections For Anonymous Speech Online
Corynne McSherry

An Arizona appellate court today joined a growing judicial consensus recognizing the need to protect the anonymity of online speakers from overreaching discovery requests.

Mobilisa, a Washington-based communications company, went to court last year to seek the identity of an individual who had obtained an email initially sent by company's CEO to his mistress. The individual forwarded the email to company employees. A lower court agreed to issue a subpoena requiring Doe's ISP to reveal Doe's personal information. Doe and the ISP, represented by longtime EFF cooperating attorney Charles Lee Mudd, Jr., immediately appealed. EFF and Public Citizen (with help from Arizona attorney John Flynn) filed an amicus brief in support of Doe, pointing out that strong protection for the right to engage in anonymous communication--to speak, read, listen, and associate without revealing your full identity--is fundamental to a free society. In fact, the tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius."

Concerns about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives lead many people today to choose to speak anonymously. For these individuals and the organizations that support them, secure anonymity is critical, often to their very safety, and courts should not permit the use of trumped up legal claims as an excuse to silence people who need anonymity. At the same time, people who have legitimate grievances against anonymous speakers should be able to pursue them in court. Recognizing these competing concerns, courts around the country have set up a flexible test for those seeking to unmask anonymous speakers: they require litigants who seek an anonymous speaker's identity to show that they have given notice of the attempt to the Doe (so she can protect herself), present evidence to show their case is legitimate, and shown that their need for the information outweighs Doe's right to anonymity.

We're very pleased that the Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed this test and thereby struck the right balance between the competing interests of subpoenaing parties and the anonymous speakers they seek to unmask, recognizing that once an online user's anonymity and privacy have been eviscerated, they cannot be repaired.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11...-speech-online





NBC in Pact to Use TiVo's Viewership Data: Report

General Electric Co unit NBC Universal has reached an agreement with TiVo Inc to become the first major broadcaster with the right to use the digital recorder company's research and interactive advertising products, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

The agreement will give the TV concern's networks such as NBC, Telemundo and Bravo -- as well as its NBC owned-and-operated TV stations -- access to TiVo's ratings data, the Journal said.

The deal will be announced as early as Tuesday, the Journal added.

NBC Universal is also planning to use the deal to sell advertisers TiVo products such as interactive tags, which enable a company's name to be seen even if a viewer is zapping through an ad, the Journal said.

The deal will enable NBC to offer advertisers data on the results of campaigns that use interactive tags, according to the Journal.

NBC Universal told the Journal it plans to begin using the TiVo services January 1.

Representatives of TiVo could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Justin Grant; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...44476820071127





Japanese Robot Gets More Life-Like



A pearly white robot that looks a little like E.T. boosted a man out of bed, chatted and helped prepare his breakfast with its deft hands in Tokyo on Tuesday, in a further sign robots are becoming more like their human inventors.

Twendy-One, named as a 21st century edition of a previous robot, Wendy, has soft hands and fingers that gently grip, enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand, and supple movements that respond to human touch.

It can pick up a loaf of bread without crushing it, serve toast and help lift people out of bed.

"It's the first robot in the world with this much system integration," said Shigeki Sugano, professor of mechanical engineering at Waseda University, who led the Twendy-One project (http://twendyone.com) and demonstrated the result on Tuesday.

"It's difficult to balance strength with flexibility."

The robot is a little shorter than an average Japanese woman at 1.5 m (5 ft), but heavy-set at 111 kg (245 lb). Its long arms and a face shaped like a giant squashed bean mean it resembles the alien movie character E.T.

Twendy-One has taken nearly seven years and a budget of several million dollars to pull together all the high-tech features, including the ability to speak and 241 pressure-sensors in each silicon-wrapped hand, into the soft and flexible robot.

The robot put toast on a plate and fetched ketchup from a fridge when asked, after greeting its patient for the demonstration with a robotic "good morning" and "bon appetit".

Sugano said he hoped to develop a commercially viable robot that could help the elderly and maybe work in offices by 2015 with a price tag of around $200,000.

But for now, it is still a work in progress. Twendy-One has just 15 minutes of battery life and its computer-laden back has a tendency to overheat after each use.

"The robot is so complicated that even for us, it's difficult to get it to move," Sugano said.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Jerry Norton)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scien...28581120071127





Hollywood Eyes Super-Series With "Golden Compass"
Mike Collett-White

For one Hollywood studio there is a lot riding on "The Golden Compass", the $180 million adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel "Northern Lights".

The film, based on the first part of Pullman's acclaimed "His Dark Materials" trilogy, premieres in London on Tuesday and stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and young newcomer Dakota Blue Richards in the central role of Lyra.

Laden with computerized special effects including talking polar bears, warring witches and animal "daemons" that represent each human's soul, the film aims to go where the "Lord of the Rings", "Narnia" and "Harry Potter" series have gone before.

Director and screenplay writer Chris Weitz said the fate of films two and three in the Pullman series depends on how "The Golden Compass" performs, with more money riding on the movie for New Line than even on "Lord of the Rings".

Industry estimates show that each "Rings" film cost around half the amount of money to make as "The Golden Compass".

"It's bigger than 'Lord of the Rings' in terms of its outlay," Weitz said in an interview. "And so 'The Golden Compass' becomes central to the future of the company."

Compared with "Lord of the Rings", "Harry Potter" and "Narnia", Pullman is relatively unknown, particularly in North America, making it a commercially more risky project.

"With the 'Lord of the Rings' they were so well known around the world that you could depend upon just the fandom to be this huge core demographic," Weitz told Reuters.

"So we knew that we needed to have a film that would appeal to families and children as well as to grown-ups and that meant handling some of the dark material carefully."

Religious Boycott

Even before the film's release on December 7, some conservative Christians in the United States have urged movie goers not to see it, basing their objections on Pullman's unflattering portrayal of the church, and specifically the Catholic faith.

In a storyline seen by many as an attack on religion, the church is linked with cruel experiments on children aimed at discovering the nature of sin and with attempts to suppress truths that would undermine its legitimacy and power.

Weitz rejects such criticism, although he did consciously tone down religious elements of the original story.

"Yes, it (the trilogy) deals with theology and it deals with religion, but I think it deals with it in a much more subtle way than the people who want to boycott the film are regarding it."

Kidman, who is Catholic, said she did not want to be involved in a movie that was anti-religious or anti-Catholic.

"I come from a Catholic family so that's not something that my grandmother would be very happy about, and I really don't think that that's what I'm involved in," she told a news conference.

Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy is a tough act for Weitz to follow, earning around $2.9 billion at the box office, according to movie tracking site www.boxofficemojo.com.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...62237120071127





Tape vs Disc - the New Battle
Guy Matthews

The debate about whether tape storage can compete with a disk-only back-up solution is as hot as ever. We talk to two senior pros to find where they stand on the debate as they battle with information overload in two very different sectors.

As organisations of all sorts, in the public and private sectors, struggle with growing amounts of data, much of which must be backed-up safely by law, the issue of what constitutes a secure but also economic back up strategy remains at the forefront of many IT professionals' minds.

Here we talk to two senior IT professionals in two different sectors about the role of tape and disk in the enterprise.

Richard Bates, network manager for Warwick District Council

Warwick District Council employs 20 people in its IT department, serving over 600 users, 400 of them on its main site and the rest in small, local offices.

"We've always used HP for both servers and storage," says Bates. "We made a move to networked storage five years ago with the StorageWorks MSA1000. We decided to centralise our back up onto tape at the same time. We realised that that was the way to go and moved onto an EVA 3000 array with Fibre Channel connectivity."

At the time, the authority's data storage needs were expanding hugely, says Bates, making this move not simply desirable but essential.

"We were no longer allowing users to save stuff onto their desktop, so all data was going onto our central server - for security reasons mainly," he says. "The number of photos and large documents we were storing was just growing and growing - especially once we got a document management project started which meant we were storing an image of all the post we received. The databases in use with the various departments just seemed to keep growing too."

Bates realised it was time to review his back-up strategy again when the back up window stretched all night: "It was often still going in the morning when everyone turned up for work, slowing the network down no end," he says.

Another hardware upgrade followed: "We got an EVA 5000, and kept the EVA 3000 to replicate everything on to and give us a degree of disaster recovery capability," says Bates. "We then moved the MSA1000 to a staging job in the back up process, shifting data from disk to tape."

He says the core of his back-up process is now replication between the two SAN arrays, but still backed by tape: "It's just so reliable, it's cheap, and it means I can easily take back-up data and store it off site," he says. "I keep hearing about people who've moved the back up function entirely onto disk, but I can't see any reason to. Getting rid of tape is just not an option for me at the moment. In the future? I really can't say. I'm sure we'll be using tape for a few years yet. You just feel more secure with tape. Disks do crash, don't they?"

He says future plans include moving one of the SANs to a remote office and connecting it over a wide area link: "It's obviously something that would be technically feasible right now, but it would be expensive," he says. "Although I can't justify this move at present, technology might well move on and make it possible in the future."

With no remote site in operation at present, Bates says he always has to look at what might go wrong with data and plan accordingly: "At the moment, we could lose a floor to, say, a flood, and be OK, but losing the whole building would be a true disaster."

Another possible move for the future is to virtualise all servers, he says, perhaps adopting blade technology: "Blades look good to me, or at least the HP ones I've seen. We're looking into it at the moment."

Greg Gawthorpe, technical operations team leader at CMC Markets

CMC Markets was established in 1989 as a foreign exchange market maker, and is now a global leader in online trading. It provides tailored online trading solutions for banks, brokers and financial intermediaries worldwide.

Offering access to over 3,000 instruments across 18 global markets, CMC Markets handles equities, indices, forex, commodities and treasuries, and provides a spread betting service to UK residents.

"I sat down last week with our senior infrastructure guy, and he asked me 'Is it time to move back up totally on to disk?'," says Gawthorpe. "It's a key question. We store eight or nine terabytes of data every time we do a back up, using BakBone software to manage the process, and I wouldn't call us a big organisation. We've got to keep that data safe for seven years."

Although there is now a good cost argument for disk over tape, Gawthorpe says the debate has to extend well beyond simply cost and take in practicality as well. "There's no way one disk is going to hold all that data," he says. "And if you're going to have two locations for disaster recovery purposes, that means you've got to have two lots of machines. It's just not as simple as saying I'll use this disk and replace that tape. They just aren't the same thing."

Each location must be an environment suited to housing a disk array, he says, unlike with tape where the back up location need be no more than a good, clean environment with some dust-free shelving. "Tape just sits there until I need it," he says. "It's not a machine that needs to be looked after, while giving off heat and noise. I've restored data from tape that's been there for over seven years - no problem. It's time consuming, but possible. And you can reuse the media."

Although increasingly perceived as yesterday's technology, tape technology is still developing, he says. "It certainly hasn't stood still, as tape vendors realise they need to keep up. They're not just waiting for the axe. With the huge capacities that today's tape media can hold, that's a lot of disk capacity to buy instead. It's not just about capacities though. With today's tape you can get throughput of 250Mb/sec, which is phenomenal. At the very least, it's similar to what you achieve with disk."

He says he does not anticipate a major rush to replace tape within the next few years. "I've heard rumours that there's a few organisations doing this, but I don't know of any specific examples. I've been in this game a long time, and just don't see this move happening anytime soon."

He sees tape and disk coexisting for a long while yet, with neither able to eclipse the other's key strengths. A more important debate, he says, is arguably the choice of software used to manage the process: "BakBone is the best I've used - easy and intuitive. When I come in it reports a successful back-up process, and that's all I care about."
http://www.itpro.co.uk/features/1314...ew-battle.html





Google's Gdrive (and Its Ad Potential) Raise Privacy Concerns
Wayne Ma

It’s still shrouded in secrecy, but Google’s free storage service is headed for the Web next year. Still, if the so-called Gdrive becomes as rapidly popular as the company’s e-mail service has in the past three years, what happens to your secrets? The prospect of a massive, speedy and tricked-out online hard drive already has privacy experts and illegal downloaders alike worried—especially if all that data is in the hands of a third-party giant and its cash cow to compete with Apple and Microsoft.

With the rumor mill buzzing over the virtual drive’s advertising model and storage capacity, Google isn’t commenting just yet on any plans. But the company already lets users buy extra space for its e-mail and photo services. “Each of the services has its own free bucket,” Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells PM. To start, users get more than 5 GB for Gmail and 1 GB for Picasa. Once they reach the limit, they can purchase a yearly plan, similar to Apple’s Mac accounts, to store the overflow. Google Docs, the company’s foray into online word processing and spreadsheet applications, doesn’t place strict limits on space. But “it makes sense” to eventually put it all under one roof, Freidenfelds says.

Online storage services already exist, but most are touted as remote backup solutions—and sometimes serve as virtual warehouses for hackers and copyrighted media files. Services like Omnidrive, MediaMax and Box.Net already offer some advanced features such as encryption and on-the-fly editing. But the Gdrive’s functionality is likely to launch on a much larger scale: Google could try to edge out big competitors—such as Microsoft’s Web-based photo and video offerings and its new Windows Live Skydrive—by making a one-stop shop for everything from document and photo editing to video and e-mail viewing.

But portability is the key, and the Gdrive might well be part of a larger plan to push computer use into a data cloud, untethered from individual devices. Coupled with Google’s open-source Android operating system for mobile phones, the Gdrive fits nicely with power users looking to access their files anytime, anywhere.

Keeping your data on the Web protects you from losing your files after a computer crash or physical theft, and Google takes the security and privacy of its users’ information seriously. “We have a very strong track record when it comes to protecting users’ data,” Freidenfelds says, adding that users’ trust in Web apps is “about where we were when people started realizing that their money was safer in a bank than under their mattress.” But that’s not stopping online rights advocates from raising eyebrows worldwide.

Trusting information with a third-party client can still expose you to thorny legal challenges such as a subpoena. Unlike a search warrant for your off-line hard drive, which is far more restrictive and difficult to obtain, Google could perhaps be persuaded by law enforcement to deliver up your files—without even telling you.

“Google would be wise to offer users an option to encrypt your information,” says Nimrod Kozlovski, a professor of Internet law at Tel Aviv University. “It really needs to have really detailed explanations of what the legal expectations are for storing your info.”

Physical hard drives and e-mail services already offer encryption for users via software like BitLocker for Windows Vista and PGP for e-mail. Having your own encryption key for data would make it harder for others to access—and almost useless to hackers, Kozlovski says.

Then there’s the trickier part: How does giving away storage translate into profits for Google? The company could potentially serve up contextualized ads to Gdrive users similar to its Gmail service and the Ad Words search model that made Google a giant in the first place. In this case, a computer might scan through all your files for relevant keywords, in a move that’s certain to spook privacy advocates, who tend to give Google a free pass compared with some of its competitors.

Still, Kozlovski insists, the lack of human eyes will prevent Google from being held responsible for illegal or infringing material on your hard drive. “Google will not be liable unless they have knowledge of the material on your hard drive,” he says, adding that the company isn’t obligated to actively search for illegal or copyrighted files unless users share them publicly. And even then, the potential for abuse is low, because Google can easily trace back accounts to those who sign up for them. “I don’t think it’s an attractive scenario for users to use online storage as a sharing facility,” Kozlovski says. “They would rather put it on the Web and give other people access or links to it.”

Leaving files exclusively on a virtual drive or data cloud could, eventually, usher in a new era of computing where mobile devices replace large, clunky desktops sitting in offices and homes. A virtual drive means that your cellphone, MP3 player and laptop all draw from the same data and sync with one another seamlessly. Take a photo on your camera, and it’s ready to be retrieved by your laptop to edit. Create a spreadsheet on your laptop, then add to it on your cellphone during your next train ride. The Gdrive looks like it will take a quantum leap in that direction—whether you like it or not.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...y/4234444.html





Q&A: Pamela Jones of Groklaw
Richard Hillesley

Groklaw is the blog that has made a difference. Created as a personal project by Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, in 2003, its stated purpose was to increase understanding of the law as it is applied to Linux and free software.

The Groklaw website emerged just as SCO began its legal action against IBM and the Linux community, and quickly became a focus for Linux users, programmers and legal professionals in their mission to expose, understand and demystify the issues surrounding SCO's legal action.

IT PRO spoke to the site's founder, Pamela Jones about the impact of the site, the SCO case and the role Groklaw has played in the ongoing legal case.

The SCO Group's current fate can be neatly summarised by the title of PJ's very first article on the case, back in May 2003 - "SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step." In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO's case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case, which had been hidden from public view and played a significant role in undermining SCO's claims to the ownership of Unix. Earlier this year PJ memorably compared SCO's persistence in the face of the facts to the black knight in the Monty Python film who claimed "It's only a flesh wound".

Is SCO is dead yet?

I think it's more accurate to say it's going down slow, as the old blues song puts it.

When Caldera Systems was a Linux company, (before it became the SCO Group), it's IPO was valued at a billion dollars. How did they get themselves into this mess, given it seems they knew from the beginning that their claim to the ownership of the Unix copyrights was, at the very least, dubious?

The one thing I think we don't know yet, and I try not to speculate, is why they did this. It makes no sense on its face, so I assume personally that there is some missing piece. I suspect that the missing piece is that someone wanted the case blown up in the media for as long as possible, to create a fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) cloud over Linux in the market. I don't think they thought it'd ever go to trial, and if you look at current events, they don't seem to have planned for the end game very well. I gather some have made rather a lot of money as well, in salary, bonuses, stocks, etc.

What drew you towards the free software movement?

I don't view myself as part of any movement. I just like to use Mandriva and Ubuntu and Red Hat and Knoppix. When SCO attacked Linux, I noticed things were being said that I thought were outrageous, so it made me mad enough that I thought I could contribute my skills to try to contribute back by defending where I could. It really bothered me that SCO was attacking Linus. I was sure that if there was any code in Linux that shouldn't be there, he'd never do so deliberately. His character stands in the face of any such accusation. And the code is out there for the public to view 24/7, so it makes no sense to "steal" anyone's copyrighted code and put it there. Anyway, I always wanted to contribute back something for all the enjoyment I get from the operating system these guys gave the world, but it was my first chance to actually do so, not being a programmer.

Have you learnt as much from the Groklaw process as your readers, friends and volunteers, have?

I think more, in that I get to see all of it. I certainly know more about the business side of things than I did before, in that I knew nothing at all about Linux in the enterprise. And I've surely learned a lot about Unix. And the history of Linux and the development method. I've learned a lot about journalism too.

I don't imagine you had any idea what Groklaw would become when it started. Can you remember what you hoped from it at that time. D‎id it work out as you planned?

I didn't really plan at all. At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software. I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote. The first articles were not about SCO at all. I started covering the McDonald's "I'm fat and it's your fault" litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked.

Later, when I started to write about SCO, I did so a lot because I thought it was funny. At the time, I was experimenting with graphics and text juxtapositions, and it made me laugh. I thought it was the stupidest lawsuit in the history of the world, and I was just writing to the air.

Then, when readers showed up, and I saw the media in general was taking SCO seriously, I began to realise what could happen. That was the creative moment, when I put all the pieces together and realised that my readers knew the tech, I knew how to explain what was happening in the litigation, and they knew where to find evidence that what SCO was saying wasn't likely to prove true.

I was worried that the lawyers might not know the tech as well as we did, and my largest hope was that maybe somebody would notice what we were finding, and it might help. I had seen some court rulings that indicated to me that the judges didn't understand the tech, so they were getting things wrong. And I knew from working with lawyers that many of them are the last to grasp anything technical, so I realised that I could be a kind of bridge. I understood the tech enough to translate from the geek input for the lawyers; and I could translate the legal stuff to the tech guys, so everyone would understand what was happening. You can only get better case law if everyone understands the facts well, including the lawyers, who explain it all to the judge. My concept was that this could actually make the system work as intended, by speeding up the learning curve.

Does democracy work? Has Groklaw actually influenced the legal process, or has its role been to inform the audience? If it has, what have been your greatest triumphs?

Frank Hayes wrote once that cynicism just shows you've been paying attention. I confess I don't view humans as having many answers to big problems. People are the problem, usually. But I think we as individuals can impact our immediate surroundings by how we act and what we choose to do. In that smaller sense, Groklaw worked. It's not a democracy though. I run it very much like the Linux kernel, a meritocracy, and I get final say, because I'm the maintainer of the project. It is too soon to say what Groklaw's role has been, I think. I believe, however, that it's had an impact.

Finding the BSDi settlement agreement and getting legal permission to publish it was, without any doubt, our biggest contribution. It showed that it was never court-validated. It was just a private agreement between the parties, with no real threat to anyone else from it. I believe, based on SCO's comments, that they had intended to threaten folks based on that then-hidden agreement, and in fact they had made threatening remarks about it, IIRC, and yet after we published, nothing further ever happened on that. Anyway, SCO never presented any actual copyright infringement to shake a stick at. But at the beginning, who knew that would be the case?

We've seen Groklaw described as a "hack on the law", or more accurately, as "open source" applied to the law. Is that a fair reflection of the community that has grown up around Groklaw and the way it works? What have your helpers, friends, and contributors (the community) given to the cause?

It's accurate that it's open source applied to legal research. Actually, it's a hack on open source. You can't work on open legal research in quite the same way you can develop software, so I had to adapt. Not everything can be open, because you have to consider factors that are not in the mix in software development. I don't publish people's home addresses, for example, just out of human kindness, the Golden Rule, if you will. And there are certain types of cases I would never cover.

There has been some outrageous press coverage of Groklaw over the last few years, including personal attacks, and some more recent less than fulsome apologies for getting the facts so wrong. In the light of this, do you have any reflections on the nature of the press, 'think tanks', and consultancies in the technology industries and how they influence the technological climate?

How much corruption there is in the media/analyst world. It's part of why, though, many people now view blogs as more reliable sources of information than the mainstream press. Sad, really, because you need both, and analysts can be very helpful when they are honest and competent, and many are. There is, in the US anyway, a trend to attack people, not ideas, to try to defeat an idea by smearing someone who holds an idea you don't like. I don't see the logic there, but that's probably my geek side. Because I never responded in kind, people were able in the long view to sort out what was going on.

Technology seems to be beset with legal entanglements. Interoperability seems permanently hampered by issues of intellectual property, and as the use of free software in the developing world grows, the contradictions between the interests of the incumbent and emergent powers in this field seems to grow. If you could change a part of the law as it effects free software, what would it be?

I think software and patents need to get a divorce. They hold back innovation and hence they damage the public and do the exact opposite of what patents are supposed to be for. If you absolutely must have patents on software, then at least enforce the law that says that if you get a patent, you have to disclose fully. At the moment, there really is absolutely no way for a developer to know if what he is developing is or isn't violating someone's patent, no matter how hard he tries. So it's a trap. Any time someone wants to create trouble for you or kill you off as competition, they can. That isn't what patents are supposed to be for. Proprietary vendors may assert that they can't disclose, because then their software will be revealed. OK. But then you should rely on trade secret protection instead, not patents, because the whole point of patents was to induce inventors to reveal their inventions, so others could build on them.

What do you think the big issues of the next few years will be, affecting free software and its growth?

I see big money interests short-sightedly making moves that in my view will destroy the GPL and the FOSS development method if they succeed. They want to do to Linux what they did to Unix, only worse. I doubt they fully realise it, since their focus is on making money. But they are, in my view, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It isn't just Microsoft. There are those who proclaim they are FOSS community folks who are involved too.

What next for Groklaw?

As usual, I'm not doing a lot of planning. When I see an issue, we leap in, like the new litigation against Red Hat and Novell. We're doing prior article searching, and so far, it's looking very good. We did prior article searching on the NetApp v Sun litigation too. We'll probably do more of that. And any lawyer who wants to pick the technically skilled Groklaw members' brains is free to contact me.

We've had lawyers ask technical questions in preparation for depositions, for example. It's a resource that is available.

Is there a place for Groklaw to widen its coverage to International Standards and, more specifically, issues as they are discussed through WTO and WIPO?

Groklaw can cover whatever it needs to. We certainly do cover standards to some degree already, as in the ODF/MS OOXML matter. But to expand much more

while still doing what we already do would probably require funding, to hire people to cover the new areas. Because I don't scale, and I'm doing as much as I humanly can already.

For example, I can imagine covering more cases and more types of cases all over the world, with reporters on staff to cover legal news of interest to the FOSS community. I can't do it now, because of the scaling problem, so there are many cases I can't currently cover that I'd love to be able to do.

I'm happy with it as it is, though, but if you really thought about it, I'm sure you can see that it could be much bigger and covering a lot more stories.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/features/1415...f-groklaw.html





Novell's Motion to Lift Stay Granted!

Here is the docket entry:
232 - Filed & Entered: 11/27/2007
Opinion
Docket Text: Opinion Granting Novell's Motion for Relief from the Automatic Stay to Proceed with the Lawsuit (related document(s)[89] ) (LJS, )

233 - Filed & Entered: 11/27/2007
Order on Motion For Relief From Stay
Docket Text: Order Granting Novell's Motion For Relief From Stay to Proceed with the Lawsuit (Related Doc # [89]) Order Signed on 11/27/2007. (LJS, )

Utah, here we come!

Judge Kevin Gross writes in the first filing, the Opinion, that there is no prejudice to SCO by continuing the litigation and finishing it since the case is ready for trial and SCO has separate counsel for it, the balance of hardships favors Novell, Novell has a probability of prevailing on the merits, and the SCO v. Novell litigation is highly technical, and Utah District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball has already spent years mastering that part of the dispute, and so it makes sense to let him finish, as footnote 4 highlights:

The learned District Court issued a thorough 105-page opinion carefully analyzing the facts and law. The District Court's mastery of the facts and law pertaining to the Lawsuit is a powerfully important consideration in the Court's decision to lift the stay.

Amen. Utah was, after all, SCO's chosen forum. We have the order now too, and here is the list of what is and isn't going to be decided in Utah:
ORDERED, that pursuant to 11 U .S.C. § 362(d)(1), relief from the automatic stay is granted for cause to allow Novell to proceed with the Lawsuit at the convenience of the District Court (as defined in the Memorandum Opinion ) on the following issues: (1) the amount of the royalties to which Novell is entitled from certain SCOSource licenses that the District Court determined to be SVRX Licenses and any additional licenses that are determined to be SVRX Licenses; and (2) whether SCO had the authority to enter into licensing agreements with Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems.

ORDERED, that the automatic stay is not lifted for a determination of the imposition of a constructive trust, an issue which this Court will adjudicate if and when necessary, following the District Court’s decision in the Lawsuit.

So back SCO goes to Utah.

As is always true with bankruptcies, whatever Judge Kimball decides, then it goes back to Judge Gross to implement, but this order goes one step further, with the opinion (in this case that means the Findings of Fact, sort of the reasons why the judge orders what he orders) saying that it must come back to Judge Gross to "determine whether a constructive trust is appropriate." Money is the bankruptcy court's area, so he will get to review whatever happens in Utah, to determine what is and is not property of the estate. But he goes on to quote from a case regarding not holding an equitable interest, which is the case with SCO. He points out that "the Debtors simply cannot file a confirmable plan of reorganization until they know what liability they have to Novell." However, the stay on the constructive trust matter is not lifted. That has to be decided by the bankruptcy court, after Utah does what it does. So it's back to Utah to find out what liability SCO has to Novell. And footnote 7 shows what may have finally determined this decision, the difficulty is figuring out what SCO has to sell:

An example of Novell's dilemma, and the Court's, arose recently in the bankruptcy cases. Debtors moved to sell substantially all of their assets. Without a ruling on the Liability Issues it was unclear if the sale would adversely affect Novell's rights. Debtors subsequently withdrew the sale motion, but the problem remains.

I think that means there will be no assets sale as proposed by York until Utah is finished. And footnote 8 says that SCO already said it will appeal the Utah decision, so there may be a longer wait. I personally think there will likely be some issues going forward as to whether Judge Gross is correct in saying that no constructive trust was already established in Utah. We'll see. And he may mean not so much whether there should be one if there were no bankruptcy, but whether there should be one *now* under these circumstances, whether there should be the imposition of one, whether ordered or not. But that is what he wrote, that there was no constructive trust established and so he's not lifting the stay on that, and he'll decide that later. I expect some lawyering on that point, unless Novell decides it isn't worth bothering with. I think Judge Kimball already decided whether or not there should be a constructive trust. Here's what he wrote in his decision on August 10:
Although the court finds that Novell meets the requirements for the imposition of a constructive trust, the question of fact as to the SVRX portion of the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements precludes the court from imposing a trust for the appropriate amount.

I believe that is clearly saying that there should be a trust, but that the amount in it needed to be determined. One would have to also read the cases Judge Gross cites to form a complete picture, which I haven't yet done, but that is one issue I see. But the bankruptcy court has discretion to decided about money, and that is its area of special competence. If any bankruptcy lawyers can explain this part to us, I'd be delighted.

Here's the Fernstrom case the judge refers to. And here's the Sonnax decision [PDF]. I couldn't find a free version, but Groklaw's Steve Martin took the initiative and went to a local law library and sent me the scanned decision, so we can all read it in full. Is he not amazing? I've been trying to get the text done, but things are happening so fast in this bankruptcy, I haven't been able to finish. But at least you have the PDF. Thank you, Steve. By the way, you'll see one reference "reh'g denied" and that means there was a request in that case referenced for a rehearing, and the request was denied. Just a small detail.

So it's back to Utah they go. I'm sure SCO's lawyers can't wait to see Judge Kimball again, after all the horrible things SCO's CEO Darl McBride said about Judge Kimball to the press. It occurs to me that Judge Kimball may have missed that. So as a service to the court, here an example of what Darl said about the Honorable Judge Dale Kimball, from Todd Weiss's October 1st article in ComputerWorld, "SCO's McBride: Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated":

Behind the scenes, though, McBride said SCO's legal team has unearthed some details about Kimball's rulings that may provide a glimmer of hope for his company's ongoing fight.

"There's one little tidbit that we came across just a few days ago," he said. "Whereas the popular press has said, 'OK, this thing is now over,' there is an appeal process and the other fact is that if you look inside that appeals process and you take a microscope and look at the record of Kimball's summary judgment rulings that have gone to appeals, he gets overturned the vast majority of the time. It's nearly two-thirds of the time. That was something I was a little curious about myself.

"This apparently is a [judge] who very regularly, the majority of the time, gets [overturned] when it goes to the replay booth. That's the one sort of a news fact that's not out there today that [could] maybe temper some of this enthusiasm out there" about SCO's troubles. "He certainly has a dismal record on appeals."

So, SCO is not dead yet. Reminds me of a Dylan song lyric... "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." A number of us looked into those figures, by the way, and I couldn't duplicate the SCO findings, quite the reverse.

It's looking like this bankruptcy thing was a big mistake, a SCO strategy that could only work if they could quickly get a sale shoved through before anyone could figure out what was happening, a Hail Mary pass, and it didn't work.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...71127151556531





Press release

Lagos Analysis Corp. (LANCOR) Files Lawsuit Against Nicholas Negroponte and OLPC Association for Patent Infringement. Negroponte's OLPC Accused of Unauthorized Use of LANCOR's Multilingual Keyboard Technology Invention in XO LaptopsHighlighted Links

Lagos Analysis Corporation, a United States-based Nigerian-owned company with a subsidiary called LANCOR Management Limited, in Nigeria (LANCOR) announces today that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division holding at Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria against Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC) and its enablers in Nigeria.

The patent infringement lawsuit was filed on November 22nd, 2007 as a result of OLPC's willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops.

LANCOR is seeking substantial damages as well as a permanent injunction to prevent OLPC from continuing to unlawfully manufacture, sell, distribute or offer for sale the XO Laptop, and any other products infringing on the RD8489 and using the illegally acquired keyboard driver source codes.

LANCOR is a pioneer in the development of advanced physical multilingual keyboard technology using four shift keys and characters with combining properties to allow for direct access typing of accents, symbols and diacritical marks during regular typing. LANCOR's technology named Shift2 keyboard technology has been used to create a new class of region specific based keyboards called KONYIN Multilingual Keyboards, which are currently on sale globally. (http://www.konyin.com)

LANCOR has retained the law firm of Adedeji & Owotomo a Lagos, Nigeria-based law firm that specializes in intellectual property litigation. Both LANCOR and its legal counsel are extremely confident that LANCOR's case will be successful.

LANCOR's lawsuit alleges that OLPC purchased two KONYIN Multilingual Keyboard models (KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard and KONYIN United States Multilingual Keyboard) with the express purpose of illegally reverse engineering the source codes for use in OLPC's XO Laptops. "The willful infringement of our client's intellectual property is so blatant and self-evident in the OLPC's XO Laptops," said Solicitor Ade Adedeji, "we will have no problem establishing the facts of our client's case against OLPC in any court of law."

"LANCOR treats its intellectual property as one of the Company's most important resources," said Adé G. Oyegbola, chief executive officer of LANCOR. "This patent infringement lawsuit is another step in LANCOR's continued protection of its intellectual property. LANCOR will continue to take aggressive steps to protect its intellectual property around the world. LANCOR is also in the process of filing a similar lawsuit against OLPC in a United States Federal Court," Oyegbola, added.

About Lagos Analysis Corporation

LANCOR is a dynamic technology solutions provider using process reengineering for designs and development of both hardware and software products for end-users. LANCOR, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts and can be found on the internet at www.lancorltd.com
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=796745





Police: Teen Pulled Heists, Kept Curfew
AP

A teenager says he held up a dozen businesses in part to get "gas money" but made sure the heists wouldn't make him miss curfew or church on Sundays with his mom.

Justin T. Veal, 18, was jailed on a felony robbery charge after being arrested last week in a liquor store holdup.

He told detectives he robbed about a dozen businesses of an estimated $10,000 this year for "money to fix his car, to buy jewelry, to keep up with everyone else," Indianapolis police Sgt. Kerry Buckner said.

Veal said in an interview at the Marion County Jail that he watched the clock, making sure he finished the robberies in time to make it home before the 1:30 a.m. curfew set by his mother.

"Curfew is 1:30. Her rules, her house. Make it in by 1:30," Veal told television station WTHR Wednesday.

Police say Veal stayed close to home for several of the robberies and that while he had a weapon in each of the holdups, no one was injured.

"He didn't do a robbery on Thanksgiving and he never did a robbery on Sunday because his mother made him go to church every Sunday," Buckner said.

Veal says he was desperate for extra money.

"I had just got hired to two new jobs and really, I just needed some gas money," he said. "It was the easy way. Sometimes you never think you're going to get caught."
http://www.miamiherald.com/577/story/326126.html





A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges
Christopher Maag

Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

That an adult would plot such a cruel hoax against a 13-year-old girl has drawn outraged phone calls, e-mail messages and blog posts from around the world. Many people expressed anger because St. Charles County officials did not charge Ms. Drew with a crime.

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what Ms. Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

“Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

St. Charles County’s prosecuting attorney, Jack Banas, said he was reviewing the case to determine whether anyone could be charged with a crime. State Representative Doug Funderburk, whose district includes Dardenne Prairie, said he was looking into the feasibility of introducing legislation to tighten restrictions against online harassment and fraud.

In seventh grade, Megan Meier had tried desperately to join the popular crowd at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, only to be teased about her weight, her mother said. At the beginning of eighth grade last year, she transferred to Immaculate Conception, a nearby Catholic school. Within three months, Ms. Meier said, her daughter had a new group of friends, lost 20 pounds and joined the volleyball team.

At one time, Lori Drew’s daughter and Megan had been “joined at the hip,” said Megan’s great-aunt Vicki Dunn. But the two drifted apart, and when Megan changed schools she told the other girl that she no longer wanted to be friends, Ms. Meier said.

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter. Reached at home, Lori’s husband, Curt Drew, said only that the family had no comment.

Because Ms. Drew had taken Megan on family vacations, she knew the girl had been prescribed antidepression medication, Ms. Meier said. She also knew that Megan had a MySpace page.

Ms. Drew had told a girl across the street about the hoax, said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter, a minor.

“Lori laughed about it,” the mother said, adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

As paramedics worked to revive Megan, the neighbor who insisted on anonymity said, Lori Drew called the neighbor’s daughter and told her to “keep her mouth shut” about the MySpace page.

Six weeks later, at a meeting with the Meiers, mediated by grief counselors, the neighbor told them that “Josh” was a hoax. The Drews were not present.

“I just sat there in shock,” Mr. Meier said.

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

“I felt like such a fool,” Mr. Meier said. “I’m supposed to protect my family, and here I allowed these people to inject themselves into our lives.”

The police learned about the hoax when Ms. Drew filed a complaint about the damage to the foosball table. In the report, she stated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Megan had mentioned suicide several times, her mother said, but had never attempted it, and no one who knew her, including her doctors, felt she was suicidal.

On the advice of F.B.I. agents who did not want the Drews to learn of their investigation of the hoax, Ms. Meier said, her family said nothing publicly about the case for a year. Today, the Meier and the Drew families continue to live four houses from one another on a winding suburban street.

“There are no words to explain my rage,” Ms. Meier said. “These people were supposed to be our friends.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/us/28hoax.html





Firefighters Asked to Report People Who Express Discontent with the Government
David Edwards and Muriel Kane

It was revealed last week that firefighters are being trained to not only keep an eye out for illegal materials in the course of their duties, but even to report back any expression of discontent with the government.

A year ago, Homeland Security gave security clearances to nine New York City fire chiefs and began sharing intelligence with them. Even before that, fire department personnel were being taught "to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities" and were also "told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."

Unlike law enforcement officials, firemen can go onto private property without a warrant, not only while fighting fires but also for inspections. "It's the evolution of the fire service," said a Phoenix, AZ fire chief of his information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement.

Keith Olbermann raised the alarm about the program on his show Wednesday, noting that "if the information-sharing program works in New York, the department says it will extend it to other major metropolitan areas, unless we stop them." He then asked Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the ACLU, "This program seems to be turning [firefighters], essentially, into legally protected domestic spies, does it not?"

"That's the entire intent," German replied, noting the serious legal issues involved. "There is actually still a fourth amendment," he pointed out, "and what makes a firefighter's search reasonable is that it's done to prevent a fire. If now firefighters are going in with this secondary purpose, that end run around the fourth amendment won't work, and it's likely that they will find themselves in legal trouble."

Olbermann, however, was most strongly concerned about the implications for civil liberties. "Is what disturbs you and the ACLU the same thing that just jumped off the page for me?" he asked. "That one phrase, 'look for people who are expressing hatred of or discontent with the United States?' Discontent?"

German agreed that there are serious first amendment issues raised by the focus of the program on constitutionally-protected literature, such as books that might be considered "terrorist propaganda."

Olbermann asked in conclusion whether firefighters could be used under this program to plant evidence. German agreed that the way it is defined "really plays to people's prejudices and gives them the opportunity to do damage to someone."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Homela...stic_1129.html





Feds Cancel Amazon Customer ID Request
Ryan J. Foley

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

"The (subpoena's) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

"Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases," the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

Seattle-based Amazon said in court documents it hopes Crocker's decision will make it more difficult for prosecutors to obtain records involving book purchases.

Crocker — who unsealed documents detailing the showdown against prosecutors' wishes — said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena's law enforcement purpose.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Federal prosecutors issued the subpoena last year as part of a grand jury investigation into a former Madison official who was a prolific seller of used books on Amazon.com. They were looking for buyers who could be witnesses in the case.

The official, Robert D'Angelo, was indicted last month on fraud, money laundering and tax evasion charges. Prosecutors said he ran a used book business out of his city office and did not report the income. He has pleaded not guilty.

D'Angelo sold books through the Amazon Marketplace feature, and buyers paid Amazon, which took a commission.

The initial subpoena sought records of 24,000 transactions dating back to 1999. The company turned over many records but refused to identify the book buyers, citing their First Amendment right to keep their reading choices private.

Prosecutors later narrowed the subpoena, asking the company to identify a sample of 120 customers.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Graber dismissed First Amendment concerns in an April letter to the company. He said D'Angelo — not Amazon — was the seller and prosecutors needed proof he sold books online.

Crocker brokered a compromise in which the company would send a letter to the 24,000 customers describing the investigation and asking them to voluntarily contact prosecutors if they were interested in testifying.

Prosecutors said they obtained the customer information they needed from one of D'Angelo's computers they seized earlier in the investigation.

Crocker scolded prosecutors in July for not looking for alternatives earlier.

"If the government had been more diligent in looking for workarounds instead of baring its teeth when Amazon balked, it's probable that this entire First Amendment showdown could have been avoided," he wrote.

The company asked Crocker to unseal the records after D'Angelo was indicted last month. Crocker granted the request over the objections of federal prosecutors, who wanted them kept secret.

"Shining some sunlight on the instant dispute reassures the public that someone is watching the watchers, and that this district's federal prosecutors are part of the solution, not part of the problem," he wrote.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...R55oAD8T66FAG0





In Global Precedent, Google to Hand Over Blogger's IP Address

An anonymous blogger using Google Blogger slandered Shaarei Tikva councilmen.
Noam Sharvit

In an unprecedented move, Google Inc. has agreed to supply the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used "Google Blogger" for a blog in which he slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection. The election is being held today. So far as is known, this is the first time that Google forewent legal action in such a case.

The slandered Shaarei Tikva council members asked Google for the blogger's name. They reached a settlement with the company on the basis of an Israeli ruling on the subject. The settlement stipulates that 72 hours before a hearing on the case at the Rishon LeZion Magistrates Court, the council members would leave the blogger a message on his blog summoning him to the hearing, or else his IP address would be handed over. The notice would invite the blogger to disclose his identity, participate in the hearing, or oppose the disclosure of his identity by filing a motion as "anonymous".

For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva councilmen: local council chairman Gideon Idan, Shaarei Tikva director general Haim Blumenfeld and council member Avi Yokobovich. The blogger accused the men of criminal acts, such as pretending to be handicapped in order to receive discounts on local property taxes, receiving bribes from a contractor, and having ties to criminal gangs.

The three councilmen filed a NIS 300,000 lawsuit against the blogger, who was named "anonymous" in the statement of claim. They also asked for a court order ordering Google to disclose the blogger's IP address, which would enable the court to contact the blogger's Internet services provider and order it to disclose the blogger's identity.

Google initially said that disclosing the blogger's identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person's right to his reputation.

However, in a pre-ruling, Judge Oren Schwartz said that the blog's content raised suspicions of criminal conduct, and Google took the hint. Judge Schwartz applied the strict position of Tel Aviv District Court Judge Michal Agmon that the details of a surfer may be disclosed only if the slander was tantamount to criminal defamation.

Following Judge Schwartz's ruling, Google and the councilmen reached a settlement in their dispute. Google was represented by Adv. Keren Beer and Adv. Hagit Blaiberg of Goldfarb, Levy, Eran, Meiri & Co. /a> and the councilmen were represented by Adv. Ben Zion Adoram and Tomer Altus of Adoram & Co.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/glob...79585&fid=1725





Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy
Brad Stone

Google, the Internet company with a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced Tuesday that it intended to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.

Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal,” said Larry Page, a Google founder and president of products, “and we don’t see people talking about that as much as we would like.”

The initiative, which Google is calling RE

The company also said that Google.org, the philanthropic for-profit subsidiary that Google seeded in 2004 with three million shares of its stock, would invest in energy start-ups.

Google says its goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy — enough to power the city of San Francisco — more cheaply than coal-generated electricity. The company predicted that this can be accomplished in “years, not decades.”

For some Wall Street analysts, the most relevant question is not whether Google can save the world, but whether the company’s idealism may ultimately distract it from its core businesses of organizing the world’s information and selling online ads.

“My first reaction when I read about this was, ‘Is this a joke?’” said Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets. “I’ve written off Google’s competition as a threat to Google’s long-term market share gains. But I haven’t written off Google’s own ability to stretch too far and try to do too much. Ultimately, that is the biggest risk in the Google story.”

Robert Peck of Bear Stearns agreed that “the headlines were a little scary at first” and said investors were initially worried that this was another example of Google “trying to bite off more than they can chew.”

But Google’s stock closed up more than 1 percent Tuesday in a higher market, Mr. Peck said, when investors ”realized this is more of a Google.org initiative and backed off.”

Mr. Page, in an interview, said that failing to investigate new businesses could hurt Google more than any potential distraction. “If you look at companies that don’t do anything new,” he said, “they are guaranteed never to get bigger. They miss a lot of opportunities and they miss the next big things.”

As part of the initiative, executives at Google.org said they are working with two companies that have “promising, scalable energy technologies.” One of these, eSolar, based in Pasadena, Calif., uses thousands of small mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate steam that powers electric generators. The other, Makani Power of Alameda, Calif., is developing wind turbines that will run on powerful and generally more predictable winds at high altitudes.

In a conference call Tuesday with reporters, Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder and president of technology, said the effort was motivated in part by the company’s frustrating search for clean, cheap energy alternatives.

“It’s very hard to find options that aren’t coal-based or other dirty technologies,” he said. “We don’t feel good about being in that situation as a company. We feel hypocritical. We want to make investments happen so there will be alternatives for us to use down the road.” Both founders declined to specify what the company now spends on energy.

Idealism is hardly new at Google. In their Letter From the Founders before the company’s 2004 initial public stock offering, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin wrote: “Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”

Mr. Rohan of RBC Capital Markets said that the returns were not obvious. “The only positive byproduct of this project that would be anything other than environmental,” he said, “is that it might make Google managers and executives even prouder of the fact that they work there, and it may help retain key employees who think their goal is to do good in the world. But I’m really stretching.”

Google is only the latest Fortune 500 company to embrace green technologies. Also Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard said it would install a one-megawatt solar electric power system at its manufacturing plant in San Diego, and buy 80 gigawatt-hours of wind energy in Ireland next year. H.P. said that together, the agreements would save it around $800,000 in energy costs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/te...google.html?hp





University of Michigan Librarian Defends Google Scanning Deal
Nate Anderson

The University of Michigan's head librarian, Paul Courant, started a blog this November to talk about large-scale digitization projects. Sounds noncontroversial, right? It was, for all of one post, and then Courant defended his library's relationship with Google, saying that "the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better." Not everyone agrees.
Google Book Search adds libraries, books from University of Lausanne

Courant's basic argument is that Google will scan seven million Michigan books in less than six years, and it won't cost the university a dime. In addition, Michigan retains the books and also gets a complete copy of Google's scans, including the text that's spit out by optical character recognition software.

Left to its own devices, the university would have no chance of duplicating this feat on its own. It could also partner with other projects like the Open Content Alliance, which won't display any snippets from copyrighted works unless the publisher opts in to the program. But Courant argues that time is crucial, and Google is the company who can get the most done in the least amount of time.

"We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically," wrote Courant. "At the rate that OCA is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically."

Courant has previously served as an economics professor at the university (and was later Provost), and he says that his economic work on public goods has convinced him just how bad it would be for society if one company ended up with sole control over large swathes of cultural knowledge. But he doesn't believe that Michigan's partnership with Google Book Search will create such problems.

"Google has no such control," he writes. "After Google scans a book, they return the book to the library (like any other user), and they give us a copy of the digital file. Google is not the only entity controlling access to the collection—the University of Michigan and other partner libraries control access as well. Except we don't think of it as controlling access so much as providing it."

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia, is working on a critical book about Google, and he argues that the current book-scanning program is riddled with problems. Public institutions, he argued in a response to Courant, should not be making these sorts of deals with private companies, especially when those companies are as dominant in their fields as Google is.

He also wonders how the "library copy" retained by the library is not an "audacious infringement of copyright? It violates both the copyright holder's right to copy and right to distribute. Doesn't a university library have an obligation to explain this?"

Courant then tries to do so in a response of his own. He takes special aim at this last criticism about copyright, one that has been repeatedly leveled at Google as well. The response is worth quoting at length.

"I must say that I am troubled that the author of a very sensible book about copyright is so enthusiastic about trashing Google that he is willing to give up on the uses, notably scholarly uses, that are permitted in the higher-numbered sections of the Copyright Act," writes Courant. "As my institution's copyright lawyer says: 'FAIR USE, it's the law.' And my institution believes that when we have Google digitize our holdings we do so under the law and in order to make uses that are not only lawful, but that are completely consistent with the undergirding purpose of copyright law."

Michigan uses the scanned files in its own system, allowing patrons to search through books for keywords and to view complete pages of works no longer covered by copyright. But Michigan, like Google, does claim to respect copyright by not showing more than tiny snippets from copyrighted texts.

Vaidhyanathan remains unconvinced, and in a later post referred to Michigan's arrangement with Google as "massive corporate welfare." (Those who want to read the actual conditions of the deal can see the Michigan/Google contract online.)

This particular debate, which has been raging in various forms for the last two years, is driven in part by the tremendous sense of what's at stake. Book search projects like the one undertaken by Google have huge potential to transform public access to books and archival material, especially now that Google has broadened its program to include French-language texts and texts from India.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has also been covering the debate, notes that digitization practices and the existence (or lack thereof) of quality controls could become even more important if readers take to digital books. Products like the new Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader make that a plausible future scenario, though neither device looks likely to displace paper quite yet.

The New Yorker tried to put the whole debate in perspective a couple weeks back in a lengthy piece that looks at the history of textual production. "Google's projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it," notes Anthony Grafton. Those prophecies can be either apocalyptic or utopian, and the debate between Courant and Vaidhyanathan illustrates perfectly how two academics can look at the same data and see either the Four Horsemen or the Garden of Eden.

In the meantime, Google scans on.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ning-deal.html





Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader
Julian "rabbit" Murdoch

On Tuesday last week, to much fanfare and extreme skepticism, Amazon launched their Kindle book reader. If you went solely by invective and blog traffic, a casual observer might surmise that Amazon had been handed a monopoly on reading and thus any failure of the device was somehow a personal attack on the intelligentsia, rather than the release of a small niche-market consumer electronics device. Within hours there were hundreds of reviews on Amazon for the device, most extremely critical, yet by definition there were no devices in consumer's hands. Even a week later, the love-hate relationship seems far more fired up with invective than could possibly be justified based on what the device is, and more importantly isn't. Noted tech-wonk Robert Scoble went so far as to switch from baseline praise to mind-wrenching red-faced diatribe calling for unemployment lines at Amazon. Notable author Neil Gaiman managed to get into a well-mannered disagreement about it with large-funny-person Penn Jillette.

All this over a gizmo?

The Kindle is really a dull and simple device designed to do exactly two things: Get stuff you can read, and then make it easy to read it. And yet, all of the discussion seems to be about its digital rights management, and its industrial design.

This DRM debate is endless and in my mind somewhat pointless. The exchange between Penn Jillette and Neil Gaiman on Neil's blog is typical: Penn argues for the pointlessness of DRM and the irrelevance of the product in the face of the joys of a physical paper, Neil points out that the whole DRM thing is a red herring and that the device has substantial benefits over paper. (At the end of the day, Amazon's DRM applies only to books you actually buy - everything else works natively or with minimal hassle.)

So which is it? Sliced bread or failed better mousetrap. Rather than engage in the kind of feature dissection we technophiles live on, I thought I'd just record how this thing has actually fit into the life of my family in the last 7 days.

Day 1: Ooooh, Shiny! And small!


Jess and I take turns poking around on it, trying to figure out what it does in the corners. We get used to holding it. Our first impressions are favorable. It's incredibly light and geek-lust thin. The navigation, through a little scroll-wheel and click, is completely intuitive. The screen essentially is paper, which even in the age of Rock Band seems somehow magical. We download a handful of books and subscribe to a bunch of magazines. We take turns fondling it.

Day 2: I haven't seen it in a day, because Jess downloaded a new release in a hardcover series to which she is addicted. It's 800 pages in print form, about twice that in digital clicks.

"So how do you like it?" I ask.

"It's good. Not as good as the last one, but it made me cry about half way through. They killed off one of the main characters, so I just had to finish it and see how they ..."

"No I mean the Kindle."

She looks puzzled.

"Oh. It's fine I guess," she says, shrugging. "I didn't really think about it. It's nice you can read it with one hand instead of lifting weights with a hardcover."


Day 3 (Thanksgiving): Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It's surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it shows up as a hard drive. I drop .txt and .mobi files into the "Book" folder and they show up. I convert a handful of PDFs to .mobi files using Mobi Creator and they work perfect, Tables of Contents and all. Sweet.

Like a set of prayer beads, I take it with me to Thanksgiving dinner, and spend some time reading "The Secret Garden" to my daughter. I quickly see what Jess was talking about. After a few pages I forget I'm just reading a book. Yes, the page "flashes" briefly on page turns (a function of e-ink, not the Kindle per se). But after a few minutes, it ceases to be distracting. The only ongoing perception I have of the device itself is how nice it is not to have to hold it. Sitting curled up on the couch with my daughter, the kindle just rests on my lap, and I tap the "next page" button now and then. When I shift positions, I can just hold it lightly with my left hand by the spine of the cover, and nudge the page button with my thumb.


Day 4: I grab the kindle from my wife's nightstand. Yes, she's still dominating it. I'd bought a few books I'd been meaning to get and she's now decided they're at the top of her reading pile too. Curse Amazon and the "buy it now, get it now" book thing. I can tell it's going to be a constant battle who has Kindle rights.

I head downstairs for morning coffee. The previous night I had subscribed to a bunch of blogs, newspapers and magazines. I try browsing some blogs, and give up. While the idea of reading blogs on the Kindle is a good one, the problem is that most of the blogs I read are as much about linking to web content as they are content in their own right.

The Kindle will load the web pages most of my blogs link to. There's a rudimentary web browser. But it's less than ideal, and absolutely no substitute for a laptop, or even an iPhone. The web functionality is more an emergency backup than a true feature. This doesn't disturb me in the least - it's not supposed to be a portable browser, it's supposed to be a book.

My subscription to "Slate" and "Salon," more traditional internet magazines, is much more rewarding, and I spend an hour reading over coffee and a bagel. Again, the fact that I don't have to hold it is wonderful. It just lies flat in front of me, out of range of Bagel crumbs. Since I have it at some distance, I increase the typeface a notch, and it's comfortable to read at a distance of about 3 feet - way further away than I can read a paper, and while it shows poorly in photographs (like everythign about the Kindle) the text is, in short, gorgeous.


Day 5 AM: The Gym Test. My mom picks me up. Yes, my mom is my gym partner. Instead of my usual random magazine, I put the Kindle on the treadmill rack. Again, I'm delighted to be able to read a book without holding it. It's pretty much impossible for me to hold open a book on the treadmill normally. I'm just not coordinated enough. But lying flat in front of me, I can sweat like crazy and just tap the page once in a while.

Inspired, I crank the typeface all the way up and try actually running. Oh Joy oh Rapture Unforeseen! Yes, I can actually read a book at a full out run. I lose 20 minutes to Larry Niven's new tale of known space with my heart rate over 150. Simply impossible with a paperback, and it fills me with delight.

Day 5 PM: I spend some more time poking at the deeper features. I confirm that you can indeed listen to audio books on it just fine, and it's a miserable, but I suppose functional MP3 player. It's not going to replace your iPod, but for a little Brian Eno background music, it fits the bill. I play around with the Dictionary and the Wikipedia lookup features and they work - nothing fancy, just functional. I spend half an hour poking around the store and, like a jaded lover, discover the first big wart.

Book selection. Just as many early-adopter music services suffered from critical holes in the back catalog, so too the Amazon Kindle. I've been dying to read Into the Wild. It's not available. Thinking this might be a gaffe purely on Amazon's part, I poke around the web and discover it's not available in any eBook format, for the Sony Reader or the Kindle. Another hour shows me holes all over the library, again, not limited to Amazon, but rather limited to the whole idea of eBooks. And while Amazon accurately shows that 100 of the 112 current best-sellers are available, if you're after book 101, you're still heading to the bookstore.

That evening I just read. The Kindle disappears, and I realize how important the design of the book is, and how strongly I disagree with so many web comments about it's supposedly horrendous un-holdability. The instructions for the thing say that it's designed to be used with the cover on (even though all of the marketing shows it with the cover off). Being a weak pawn, I tend to follow directions, and I can confirm that wiith the cover on, it's extremely difficult to accidentally hit any buttons while reading, and the left hand spine becomes a natural handle. The super-matte surfaces of both the screen and the frame make it readable and un-distracting at any angle, in any light. The next page buttons on both sides make it usable in more positions than a normal book, and in no case does it ever require two hands to use.

It is, in short, the most invisible piece of technology I can recall owning. This makes it supremely unsexy, and exactly right.

Day 6: Once again, I wake up early and grab the Kindle from my Jessica's nightstand. The Kindle falls out of the cover and bounces off the floor of the bathroom. Thankfully no damage, and looking at the drop-test video on the Amazon website, I have some hope that my good fortune isn't accidental, but it highlights another wart. The kindle isn't a book, it's a device. It can break. It can out of batteries. It can drown. While a drop into the tub hurts any book, I imagine it ruins an expensive kindle exceptionally well.

No harm done, I descend to the temple of my morning ritual. It's Sunday. So I buy the Sunday New York Times for 75 cents (a bargain for a non-subscriber). While I miss the crossword puzzle and the smell of newsprint, I still get sucked into the Magazine's discussion of Rock Band and a dozen other articles of note. It's completely satisfying.

That's my week with the Kindle.

It's been at least what I expected. Yes, it's expensive, but with Jessica chewing through dozens of hardcover books a year, my payback on $400 will be less than a year. While this cost-justification was part of my purchase-justification, I find it's the subtleties that make me really pleased with it. Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book. The simple ability to lie flat or be held comfortably with one hand means I can read for longer, more frequently and with more comfort. And grabbing a book or a newspaper on demand is enough to make any word-geek giddy.

But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day.

And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of "get it out fast." The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurb's from authors) we're great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.

But in the final analysis, the point of the thing is to be a better book. It does this very well. Everything else is just icing on the cake, which is, in this case, not a lie.
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/36063





Online Library Gives Readers Access to 1.5 Million Books

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

The project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “The Analects of Confucius,” are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books. More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world’s books.

Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have been digitized — their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text. That allows these books to be searched and, eventually, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices.

An outgrowth of Reddy’s Universal Library, the Million Book Project received $3.5 million in seed funding from the National Science Foundation and substantial in-kind contributions from hardware and software manufacturers. These funds were primarily used to purchase scanning equipment and for developing the scanning, digitization and cataloguing methods necessary for creating a large digital library.

The vast majority of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing has been performed at centers in China and India, where more than 1.1 million and 360,000 books have been scanned, respectively. The U.S., China and India provided $10 million each in cash and in-kind contributions to the project. More recently, the Library at Alexandria, Egypt, has joined the effort. Now, about 7,000 books are scanned daily by more than 1,000 workers worldwide.

“We greatly value the participation of Bibliotheca Alexandrina,” said Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and copyright lawyer. “Scholars everywhere regret the destruction of the Alexandria Library at various points in history, and we’re willing to go to great lengths to see that no such destruction is ever possible in the future. Once books are on the Internet, they become immortal.”

Protecting and preserving texts is a major goal, said Pan Yunhe, the leader of the Million Book Project in China. “Paper gets old and brittle, so books soon become so delicate that no one can read them without damaging them,” said Yunhe, the former president of Zhejiang University who is now vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. “Artwork fades. But once we have digitized texts and illustrations, we can keep them in circulation indefinitely. And by storing them at multiple sites, we can minimize the risk that they be destroyed, as occurred in Alexandria.”

“This collection of books in multiple languages opens up unparalleled opportunities to bring Indian cultural material to everyone, and offers a huge range of possibilities in natural language research,” said N. Balakrishnan, associate director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, one of the partners in the project.

“Digital libraries constitute an essential part of the future of the developing world,” said Ismail Serageldin, director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina. ”This requires that we approach conditions governing copyright, digital archiving and scientific databases with a view to creating two-tier systems of access to information that would allow access to such data from developing countries for a nominal fee or for free.”

Though the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available online for free, about half of the current collection remains under copyright. Until the permission of the copyright holders can be documented, or copyright laws are amended, only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed at no cost.

The project has surpassed one million books, but the participants are looking to expand to all countries and eventually every language. At the Third Annual International Conference on Universal Digital Library, held at Carnegie Mellon Nov. 2-4, 2007, the partners in the Million Book Project agreed to continue scanning, to enlist more centers for the scanning of rare and unique materials, and to work on governmental solutions to the problem of books which are out of print but still in copyright.
http://www.physorg.com/news115383203.html





The Pirate Bay Sued Over O.J. Simpson’s ‘Murder Confession’
enigmax

Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman who was murdered alongside Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, has joined the long line of people threatening legal action against The Pirate Bay. Goldman demands that they take down O. J Simpson’s ‘murder confession’ book, a publication to which he owns the rights.

In 2006, O.J Simpson announced he was publishing a book in which he claimed he would reveal what would’ve happened, had he really murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a frenzied 1994 knife attack. After publication and public disgust, the book was canceled, with 400,000 remaining copies being destroyed.

Although Simpson was acquitted of the double murder in a criminal trial, he was found liable for the unlawful killings in a civil action and was subsequently ordered to pay $33.5 million. However, Simpson has become an expert on finding ways not to pay this huge amount.

As a result, Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman, has been taking action to get his hands on Simpson’s assets and has recently won the rights (90% of the royalties) to Simpson’s book, entitled ‘If I Did It’. The book was renamed “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” and became a best seller.

We reported back in June that a digital version of the book had already been made available for download via The Pirate Bay. Now, according to an Associated Press report, Fred Goldman - who claims to have lost $150,000 due to this leak - filed a lawsuit Thursday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, against The Pirate Bay.

Goldman’s attorneys wasted more of their client’s money by sending letters to The Pirate Bay demanding that the “the Web site’s operators stop posting the book”. It seems they received the standard Pirate Bay response of reminding everyone that “they are not subject to the laws of the United States”, which is of course, 100% true, residing in Sweden as they do.

The Pirate Bay’s brokep told TorrentFreak: “It’s the same thing over again. People need to learn how the internet works before they try something like this. I welcome his lawsuit, since he has no case whatsoever. Maybe we should sue over taking our time and lying in the media about what we do?”

The lawsuit claims that The Pirate Bay is making an “illegal publication” of the book, with its advertisers - heavyweights such as Jamster, Target, The Wall Street Journal and Wal-Mart - collectively, according to attorney David Cook at least, providing “the wealth through advertising”.

Cook said: “Ron Goldman LLC will never be able to stop these pirates from posting that book online but they can do that in the poorhouse.”

Finishing on a threat may be customary Mr Cook, but it won’t work. Guaranteed.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-s...ession-071130/





Microsoft Challenges the iPod (Again)
David Pogue

Don’t look now, but Microsoft might finally be getting the hang of hardware.

The company’s overall track record for designing gadgets is pretty awful. Remember the Smart Display? The Spot Watch? The Ultra-Mobile PC? The original Zune?

Me neither.

But Microsoft’s new second-generation Zune music/photo/video player is a pleasure to use. It fixes a long list of things that made the original Zune such a pathetic wannabe. Best of all, the new Zune is starting to develop its own identity. The echoes of Microsoft executives saying, “It’ll be just like the iPod, only ours” aren’t quite as loud on this one.

The family includes three new models. First, there’s an 80-gigabyte hard-drive Zune ($250) whose size, design, shape and price are intended to compete with the 80-gig iPod Classic. Then there are the flash-memory-based models, which resemble last year’s iPod Nano: thin, tall slabs that hold 4 or 8 gigabytes of music, photos and videos (for $150 and $200, like the Nano). The original, 30-gig Zune is still available, too, at $200. (There are no Zune equivalents to the tiny iPod Shuffle, the wireless-Internet iPod Touch or the capacious 160-gig iPod Classic.)

Confident design steps are evident in all the new models. The back is metal like the iPod’s, but textured and therefore far less likely to show scratches and dings.

Then there’s the new control pad. You can navigate the Zune’s bright, clear, animated software by clicking the dial at any of its four compass points; select something by clicking the center; and — here’s the twist — scroll through lists by rubbing the pad’s face. Music-player companies have struggled for years to come up with a controller as good as the iPod’s click wheel; Microsoft, in Zune 2.0, has finally done it.

The sound quality is very good, especially if you use the 80-gig Zune’s included earbuds. They’re not hard disks like the iPod’s and those of the smaller Zunes; they’re soft rubber bulbs that snuggle securely into your ear canals, sealing out the outside world.

On the 80-gig model, the screen is bigger than the iPod Classic’s — but it’s the same number of pixels. As a result, the pixel grid is far more visible, giving you a screen-door effect during videos with bright scenes.

Some of the biggest Zune-iPod differences involve the Zune’s wireless feature. As on the previous Zune, you can beam songs to your friends’ Zunes, to demonstrate your superior musical taste. But beamed songs no longer self-destruct after “three days or three plays”; the time limit is gone. You have all the time you like to listen to them three times.

Unfortunately, that beaming feature will remain irrelevant as long as there’s nobody to beam songs to. You could go a year without spotting another Zune (and, in fact, you probably just have). But at least the antipiracy limitations on beamed songs is now infinitely more sensible.

Microsoft. meanwhile, has finally begun to exploit its wireless transmitter in more useful ways. The Zune can’t surf the Internet, as the iPod Touch can. But it can now synchronize its music and photos (although not videos) with those on your Windows PC over your wireless home network.

Now the value of wireless synching may not be immediately apparent. Hooking up a U.S.B. cable, the usual way to sync a music player, has never been a particularly harrowing task.

But what’s great is that you can make it automatic. You come home, you set the player in its charging dock ($50) or a speaker dock, and presto: the thing syncs as it recharges. The next time you grab your Zune, it’s charged, synched and filled with your latest tunes or your favorite podcasts.

Microsoft has also written a new Windows-only loading-dock program for the Zune. You no longer use Windows Media Player for that purpose.

That’s good, because it allowed Microsoft’s programmers to start fresh and create a streamlined, simple, spartan program dedicated to its task. Really spartan. There aren’t even any menus. (How unlike Microsoft.)

But it’s also bad, because the new program pointlessly duplicates Media Player’s functions. Now you have to learn two different programs and maintain two different libraries. (How Microsoft.)

The online Zune store is better now, too. It now lets you swap song suggestions and 30-second clips with your friends, and it finally offers podcast subscriptions. (Microsoft must absolutely hate saying the word “pod” every time it touts this feature.) And unlike Apple’s store, the Zune store offers an optional $15-a-month all-you-can download plan, although you lose your entire music library when you stop paying.

If you’re tempted to align yourself with Planet Zune rather than Planet iPod, you should ask two important questions.

First: How do I know Microsoft won’t dump me the way it dumped people the last time around?

After all, the Zune is not Microsoft’s first effort at an iPod-like universe of player, software and music store; that honor goes to the PlaysForSure format. And everybody who bought into it must be feeling just a tad rejected at this point. When it introduced the Zune, Microsoft shut down its PlaysForSure store and further development efforts. Whatever songs you bought in the PlaysForSure format won’t play on the Zune.

The second question is, How much will I miss the richness of the iPod economy?

Microsoft hasn’t had nearly as much time as Apple has had to cultivate a culture of add-ons and flourishes. So its player, its software or its store can’t rival the abilities of Apple’s.

Here are some of the iPod features that the Zune lacks: Games, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, password-protected volume limiter, graphic equalizer, notepad, auto-synched copy of your computer’s calendar and address book, and Disk Mode, which lets an iPod serve as an external drive for carrying around computer files.

If you use the Zune’s wireless features, you’ll also get much worse battery life: 19 hours of music playback on the 80-gig Zune versus 30 on the equivalent iPod. The 80-gig Zune is still thicker and chunkier than its iPod rival, too.

Above all, you may miss that thriving virtual bazaar of iPod accessories: more than 3,000 stereo docks, cases, car adapters, and so on, compared with only a handful for the Zune.

Here are some of the iTunes software features missing in the Zune’s software: Smart Playlists, which assemble groups of songs based on criteria that you specify (“80’s up-tempo songs I haven’t heard in three months”), choice of visualizers (screen-saver effects that dance to the music), closed captioning for videos and TV, Cover Flow view, and a graphic equalizer.

The Zune store is missing a lot of iPod features, too: TV shows, movies, audio books, monthly allowances and comprehensible pricing.

At the iTunes store, you pay $1 a song. But on the Zune store, you pay using Microsoft Points, which are sold in blocks of 400 ($5). Songs cost 79 to 129 points, which means 99 cents to $1.61. Suddenly, you’re a currency trader.

This absurd system serves nobody except Microsoft. First, it’s a ham-handed effort to make you lose track of how many dollars you’re actually spending. Second, you can’t just buy one song; the least you can spend is $5. And finally, you’ll inevitably waste money, since it’s unlikely that Microsoft’s various song prices will divide evenly into 400.

The bottom line: the iPod is still a more versatile, compact and beautiful machine. But the Zune has come a long way in very little time. Already, its potential audience is no longer limited to a sect of irrational Apple haters. It’s now a candidate for anyone who values its unique powers — excellent built-in FM radio, scratchproof case and wireless auto-synching — more than they value the richness and choice of the iPod universe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...h/29pogue.html





Zune a Hot Item This Holiday Season?

Something tells me the Zune will be a popular Christmas gift this holiday season. The player is currently Amazon's top-selling music player, beating out the new iPod Nano and the 80GB iPod on the "Bestsellers in Electronics" list. Could it be that we've been underestimating the Zune for far too long, or are people snapping up the first-generation Zune players due to their heavily discounted prices?

I can't blame anyone passing on the $135 4GB iPod Nano when presented with the option to buy the brown 30GB Zune for $134. I mean, you would be crazy to pass up that deal. To prove that color does matter when it comes to electronics, the sleek black 30GB Zune is currently selling for $140, while the red and pink 30GB Zunes are even more expensive at $150. What's even more perplexing is that the white Zune player is the most expensive of all first-generation players, selling for a whopping $160. But wait, there's even a new 80GB Zune player at No. 17, so it can't be all about the deep discounts, right?

A report by the Associated Press says there's a shortage of new Zune media players on the web and in retail stores. Apparently, the new 80GB Zune player has sold out everywhere, but more should be on virtual and physical shelves in the next 10 to 14 days. This buzz obviously makes Microsoft very happy, but its discounts on first-generation Zunes are making consumers extremely happy, or at least happy enough to ditch their iPod for a Wi-Fi loving Zune.

Regarding the "Bestsellers in Electronics" list, I should mention that iPods are still dominating most of the list, but it's nice to see the iPod up against some real competition. I really thought the iPod Touch was going to be a hot music player this holiday season, but so far both the 16GB and 8GB models are coming in at Nos. 6 and 7.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/21050





Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away.
Seth Mnookin

It's Monday afternoon, and Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group, is eating lunch in his private dining room at the company's Manhattan headquarters. Morris hasn't been here much in recent months, though it's hard to imagine he misses the place. For one thing, workers have been renovating the building: To reach his corner suite, you need to take an elevator to the floor above, walk down a hallway covered with plastic sheeting, and then descend a flight of stairs. For another, these are tough times for the music business. In 2006, the number of CDs sold worldwide fell 10 percent, the largest one-year drop ever — steeper than in any of the so-called Napster-era years from 2001 to 2004. Early indications suggest that 2007 will be at least as bad. The shades in the adjoining office are drawn, making the room feel a little like a crypt — albeit one outfitted with leather couches and tasteful art.

For the past several minutes, Morris has been listening to Rio Caraeff, executive VP in charge of the company's digital strategy, tell me how the sagging fortunes of the music industry highlight the need to diversify revenue streams. Caraeff explains that the company will eventually need to transition from running a product-based business to running a service-based one. He talks about ringtones, subscription services, and deals with mobile providers, stressing the need to raise the industry's "digital IQ."
Morris seems distracted. At 68, he looks every bit the prototypical New York big shot. What remains of his hair is slicked back along the sides of his head, and if his face is fleshier than it once was, the ever-probing, slightly combative intensity of his eyes hasn't dulled a bit. Morris has spent his entire life working with musicians and producers, finding and nurturing the talents that make his company a $7 billion-a-year business. It's safe to say that increasing his digital IQ and pondering a service-based business model aren't the topics that get him out of bed in the morning.

But digital strategies are important these days, and Morris has become entangled in them whether he wants to be or not. Over the past several years, he has been one of the most staunch and vocal proponents of aggressive copyright enforcement, at one point publicly blasting MP3 players as merely "repositories for stolen music." When he realized, after watching his grandson stream online clips, that portals weren't paying Universal for playing its music videos, Morris pulled the company's content off of Yahoo. Once the two sides came to terms, Morris went after YouTube and MySpace — "copyright infringers" both, as he put it. YouTube eventually agreed to a deal; a lawsuit against MySpace is ongoing. (Licensing of videos to Web sites now nets Universal more than $20million annually.) And in November 2006, Morris parlayed Microsoft's desperation to establish a true alternative to the iPod into a $1 ransom to Universal for every Zune music player sold — and that's on top of the licensing fees Microsoft pays to have Universal's songs in its Zune Marketplace online store. It's a sign of Morris' power that he is able to pressure so many players in the technology world to bend to his will.

Last summer, though, Morris seemed to change direction. After years of tightening controls on his company's content, he agreed to let Amazon.com and other online retailers sell unprotected MP3s of Universal songs. These contain none of the digital rights management software that media companies usually embed in digital files to prevent piracy. Universal wasn't the first big label to offer unprotected tracks; the EMI Group had begun selling DRM-free songs in May. But with its small market share, EMI's decision seemed unlikely to have much effect on the market. Universal, on the other hand, was setting out to change things. In particular, it hoped to end Apple's near monopoly on legal digital downloads.

Discussing Universal's various initiatives, Caraeff, an even-keeled 32-year-old in a crisply tailored suit, is explaining that it's important to be "invigorated and challenged by the opportunities of digital music." At this, Morris puts down his tuna fish on white, wipes some crumbs off his khakis, and clears his throat. I expect him to deliver an explanation of how he learned to stop worrying and love the MP3. Instead, he launches into a rant about a creature that resembles a misshapen bowling ball.

"There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo," he says in a raspy tenor. "It was in Li'l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That's what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo.

"It was only a couple of years ago that we said, What's going on here?' Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?" Morris sighs. "People never really understand what's happening to the artists. All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven't paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go," he says. "That's what happened to the record business."

Morris goes on to rail against criminal-minded college students and low-life punks who steal the music that his artists work so hard to create. He admits to being fairly ignorant about technology and insists that his job is to nurture the creative side of the business — work that's being threatened by all of this other nonsense.

So how is it that an old-school music mogul who can barely hide his indifference to technology or his contempt for the download-loving public is out front on so many digital initiatives? Clearly, it's not because he wants to improve the music experience for consumers. It's also not because he finally understands that MP3s are fundamentally changing his business, whether he likes it or not. And if he's "invigorated and challenged by the opportunities of digital music," as Caraeff puts it, that's only because he relishes a fight. In truth, his motive is simple: He wants to wring every dollar he can out of anyone who goes anywhere near his catalog. Morris has never accepted the digital world's ruling ethos that it's better to follow the smartest long-term strategy, even if it means near-term losses. As far as he's concerned, do that and someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you. Morris wants to be paid now, not in some nebulous future. And if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's use the size of his company to get his way.

The problem is that a strategy based on quick returns is unlikely to pull the music industry out of its morass. After all, it was a reluctance to look farther down the road that got the labels in trouble in the first place. But Morris is much less interested in figuring out how to make digital music work for everyone than he is in not being the Shmoo.

Today, the Big Four record companies — Universal, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI — are all enormous corporations. Together they account for nearly 90 percent of recorded music sales in the US. Not surprisingly, their CEOs tend to be career executives. Edgar Bronfman Jr., CEO of Warner Music, previously headed the Seagram Company. Rolf Schmidt-Holz, CEO of Sony BMG since 2006, used to run the German public television station WDR. Until recently, EMI was run by Eric Nicoli, who spent 19 years at United Biscuits.

Morris, on the other hand, is a bona fide music man. He started out as a songwriter, penning "Sweet Talkin' Guy," a modest hit for the Chiffons in 1966. In 1970, he launched his own label, Big Tree Records, and later produced "Smokin' in the Boy's Room," Brownsville Station's 1973 teen anthem. Morris joined Atlantic Records in 1980, where he went on to oversee the production and distribution of artists like Snoop Dogg, Tori Amos, and Hootie and the Blowfish. He became chair and CEO of Atlantic's parent company, Warner Music US, in 1994.

When Morris took over at Universal Music Group (then called MCA Music Entertainment Group) after leaving Warner in 1995, he recruited producers who shared his devotion to finding and signing great artists — guys like Jimmy Iovine, who today runs UMG's Interscope Geffen A&M Records division, and Antonio "L.A." Reid, who runs its Island Def Jam Music Group. Under Morris' leadership, Universal captured more than 30 percent of the US market; today it sells more music than Warner and EMI combined. The many labels operating under the UMG umbrella represent artists from Elton John to Eminem, Lil Wayne to Loretta Lynn, Wet Wet Wet to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Morris' ascent coincided with the rise of CDs — the biggest boon the music business has ever known. According to industry figures, from the early 1970s through the late 1980s the total number of albums (in all formats) shipped each year in the US hovered around 650 million. In 1992, CD sales reached 400 million; six years later they hit 800 million. By 2000, more than 900 million CDs were being shipped each year. Many of those were back-catalog purchases, as music fans converted to the format that seemed destined to make all others extinct.

The rise of compact discs (like the rise of cassette tapes before them) demonstrated the market appeal of flexibility and convenience. CDs weren't a hit because they had the best audio fidelity; that honor still belongs to vinyl records. Rather, they gave consumers more control over the listening experience. If you wanted to replay your favorite song (or skip a crappy one), you didn't have to bother with delicately moving a phonograph arm or engaging in a frustrating rewind-stop-play-stop-rewind tango with your tape player. Everyone came out a winner. "The record companies minted money," one major-label exec told me. "We made huge margins off CDs. We'll never have those margins again."

Easy profits ended up blinding the industry to the threat of MP3s. Throughout the '90s, a handful of insiders warned of the need to get out in front of digital music, but for the most part they were ignored. The big corporations that had snapped up record labels in the '80s and '90s continued to focus on short-term financial results, even as it become amply clear that the advantages of CDs — control, convenience, durability, flexibility — were even more pronounced with digital files. "There's this mentality of always needing to make the numbers for the next quarter," says Ted Cohen, a former exec at EMI and Warner Bros., now managing partner at the consulting firm TAG Strategic. "It kept me up at night. Some of us could see that something needed to be done, but no one wanted to do anything that wouldn't maximize profit for that quarter."

Morris was as myopic as anyone. Today, when he complains about how digital music created a completely new way of doing business, he actually sounds angry. "This business had been the same for 25 years," he says. "The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy — to make a product that anybody liked."

And that's what Morris, and everyone else, continued to focus on. "The record labels had an opportunity to create a digital ecosystem and infrastructure to sell music online, but they kept looking at the small picture instead of the big one," Cohen says. "They wouldn't let go of CDs." It was a serious blunder, considering that MP3s clearly had the potential to break the major labels' lock on distribution channels. Instead of figuring out a way to exploit the new medium, they alternated between ignoring it and launching lawsuits against the free file-sharing networks that cropped up to fill the void.

Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me." Morris' almost willful cluelessness is telling. "He wasn't prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology," says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. "He just doesn't have that kind of mind."

In spite of Morris' early resistance to digital music, in August Blender magazine ranked him fourth on its Powergeek 25, a list of what the publication calls "the rockingest nerds on the Net." Morris is the only record exec on the list, and he was placed above such digital pioneers as the founders of Last.fm, the head of technology at LimeWire, and the VP of music programming at Rhapsody.

Morris' ranking is recognition of the fact that Universal has been aggressively muscling new digital initiatives onto the market. In addition to the licensing deals with Yahoo and YouTube and the dollar-a-Zune deal with Microsoft, the company has had undeniable success in selling mastertones, high-quality ringtones made directly from the original song recordings. Akon, a Universal artist, holds the current all-time mastertone sales record at 11 million copies. 50 Cent, also with Universal, held the previous record with 10.5 million. Last year, while the largest portion of Universal's digital sales came from iTunes, the second-, third-, and fourth-biggest digital revenue generators were all cell phone companies.

Universal is also experimenting with the subscription-based plans that many — including the new cohead of Columbia Records, Rick Rubin — see as the wave of the future. The idea is to charge customers a fixed monthly fee (which could get tacked onto their cell phone, cable, or Internet bill) in return for access to unlimited music from a given label and, say, the opportunity to hear new recordings a week before their general release. Morris is currently championing a version called Total Music.

Finally, there's the company's move to sell select songs DRM-free. Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and several other online retailers are currently offering MP3 downloads of Universal recordings. Unlike those sold by the iTunes Store, the files can be duplicated at will. (They do contain a watermark, presumably so Universal can track how many end up on peer-to-peer networks.) Of all Universal's digital efforts, this is probably the most significant, as it finally delivers legitimate files in a format that works on any device or computer. "It's surprising to see Universal out in front of new initiatives," says Mike Paxton, an analyst at the market research firm In-Stat. "But I hesitate to really give them credit for being groundbreakers. They're not too forward-thinking."

Paxton's hesitation is justified. Over the years, the label has for the most part used its market power to squeeze money out of others' ideas. And its current moves — DRM-free songs and the Total Music subscription service — aren't about serving consumers, at least not principally. They're aimed at taking on Steve Jobs and, specifically, limiting the power of iTunes.

As Steven Levy writes in The Perfect Thing, his 2006 book about the iPod, when Apple was trying to start iTunes as an online music store it had trouble convincing the major labels to offer up their music. Apple managed it only after Jobs launched a charm offensive against Morris. According to Levy, a big factor in his success was Jobs' assurance that, since it was limited to Macs, iTunes could affect, at most, 5 percent of the market. (iTunes for Windows came out in 2003.)Whatever the promises, once the mighty Universal signed on, everyone else followed.

With the record companies on board, Jobs did something remarkable: He turned the labels' demand for bulletproof DRM into a way of locking up the retail end of the online market. Jobs argued that in order to make Apple's DRM software, called FairPlay, effective, it had to be proprietary — and since Jobs won't license FairPlay, tracks sold on iTunes can be played only on iPods. (Similarly, the iPod won't play DRM-encoded files purchased through other retailers.) This lack of interoperability, combined with the iPod's overwhelming dominance, gave Apple a stranglehold on the digital music marketplace. And Jobs got to be the good guy with consumers, blaming the mess on the music industry's pigheaded insistence on DRM.

When I suggest to Morris that the labels gave Jobs license to create what was in effect an Apple Walkman that played only Apple cassettes, it's Caraeff who answers. "Looking back, the best thing we could have done would have been to mandate one format," he says. So why didn't that happen? Morris is happy to field this one. "It never crossed anyone's mind!" he exclaims. "We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you're wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income."

Those cuffs get tighter every day. This year, 22 percent of all music sold in the US will move through iTunes. "If iTunes gets up to 40 or 50 percent, they'll have too much power for anyone else to enter the business," says James McQuivey, who analyzes the digital music industry for Forrester Research. If the labels want out, they have two choices: Find a way to unseat the iPod or allow iTunes' competitors to sell unprotected files that can play on Apple's ubiquitous device.

Morris is determined to do whatever it takes. In July, reports surfaced that Universal would not renew its sweeping contract with Apple. From now on, Morris said, UMG labels would selectively choose which songs (or albums or artists) were sold on iTunes, rather than granting blanket access to the entire catalog. Then, in August, he announced the plan to offer DRM-free tracks through non-Apple retailers. Finally, in October, details about Total Music started to trickle out.

Total Music is designed to unify Apple's competitors in what amounts to a coordinated attack on the iPod. The details are far from finalized, but in Morris' conception a Total Music subscription would come pre-installed on devices like the Zune, the Sony PlayStation, or a mobile phone. Universal is well aware of the difficulty of convincing consumers to pay for music subscriptions, so Morris wants the devicemakers to pony up the cash themselves, either by shelling out for a six-month introductory offer or by assuming the cost forever. This would be money well spent, Morris argues, because it would help the Microsofts of the world eat into the iPod's market share. He has already hammered out preliminary agreements with Warner and Sony BMG and has met with executives at Microsoft and several wireless carriers. If Morris is able to make Total Music a reality, he will once again have succeeded in bending the industry to his will — in this case, by using the combined catalogs of the major labels to help establish a true competitor to the iPod. After all, why buy an iPod if a Zune will give you songs for free?

Unfortunately, Total Music will almost certainly require some form of DRM, which in the end will perpetuate the interoperability problem. Morris likely doesn't care. He is more committed to Total Music — or any other plan that allows protection — than he is to a future where music can truly be played across any platform, at any time. "Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly," he says. "We need to protect the music. I know that."

The irony is that if he decides to base his plans around DRM, Morris will be missing the larger truth that has propelled his business for the past 30 years. Ultimately, it's convenience and ease of use that drive new media formats. That's why cassettes made inroads against records, why CDs killed them both, and why MP3s are well on their way to burying CDs. Morris is right when he says music is more popular than ever, but he's wrong to assume that will automatically lead to higher profits for the major labels. "Locking things up is actually good for piracy," says David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, an online retailer that sells DRM-free songs from independent labels. In other words, the more restrictions you put on your files, the more you encourage customers to turn to illegal services to get songs the way they want them.

Back in his dining room, Morris is incredulous. He's once again talking about how his job should simply be finding and breaking new acts. The problem, he says, is that "there's sympathy for the consumer, and the record industry is the Shmoo."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...5-12/mf_morris





Record Labels' Bigger Issue is Replacing CD Sales
Troy Wolverton

In the end, the long battle by the record labels against unrestricted digital music may have been little more than sound and fury signifying nothing.

At least, that's how it's starting to appear now that two of the major labels in recent months have embraced in some fashion the MP3 format, which has no copy protection. The early returns from those moves indicate they've had little impact on the industry's fortunes - for better or for worse.

Instead, the moves highlight a bigger problem. And that is how the labels are going to replace sales of CD albums, which constituted the core of their business and have plummeted in recent years.

"These are ailing businesses on their last legs," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a market research company focused on digital media. The question of copy protection on song downloads "matters a whole lot less to them than it once did."

For years, the major record labels fought a pitched battle against the MP3 format. The format doesn't allow for any copy restrictions, which made it a popular choice for songs swapped on illicit file-trading sites such as the original Napster and Morpheus.

To combat such piracy, the major labels insisted online stores that sold music had to wrap songs and albums in digital rights management (DRM) technology, which can restrict the number of copies users can make of a song or the number and types of devices it can be played on.

But online music and electronics vendors complained that such restrictions were limiting sales, in part because not all formats worked on every type of player.

In the past year, the music labels have become increasingly receptive to those arguments. In April, EMI announced it would make its entire catalog available for sale in DRM-free formats. In August, Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording company allowed the sale of a significant portion of its catalog in the MP3 format.

The labels' moves have opened up competition in the digital music space. In September, Amazon.com launched a digital music store, featuring only MP3 tracks. Meanwhile other, older digital music vendors, including iTunes and Wal-Mart's Web store, added DRM-free tracks.

Because those songs lack DRM, they can be played on just about any digital music device.

Although it's still early, DRM-free music seems to have had, at best, a slight positive benefit to the music industry.

Sales of DRM-free music to date have "outperformed" EMI's expectations, and Wal-Mart has seen its MP3 sales grow "considerably" since August, when its Web store made them available, representatives for the two companies said. However, neither they nor other labels or Web stores disclosed specific sales results.

Overall, the number of digital songs sold each week seems to have been unaffected by the launch of the major DRM-free stores since May, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital song sales - both of tracks with and without DRM - are in the same range after May as they were in the weeks before DRM-free sales started.

But that's small consolation for an industry whose wholesale revenue in the United States was down 11 percent in the first half of this year, according to IFPI, the industry's global trade group. That's on top of declines in retail sales in six out of the past seven years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Even if the effect has been questionable, some analysts think that eventually all the labels will sell DRM-free music.

"The writing on the wall, for the most part, is here for DRM," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director for Jupiter Research.

But not yet. Universal and Warner are still just experimenting with DRM-free music, and Sony BMG isn't even doing that much, analysts note.

"The marketplace will likely dictate how companies will move forward with respect to the protection of their product," said Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels.

Meanwhile, as Garland and other analysts note, the industry has a bigger problem. Consumers used to buy CDs for $10 or $15 a pop. Increasingly, they're buying songs at about $1 apiece instead. So, even if transactions continue to increase, the industry is seeing far less money each time consumers buy and it's having a difficult time making up the difference.

"They can't stick with this model with the weighted costs that they have," said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner, an industry research group.

By potentially encouraging more music sales, moving to MP3s may be one piece of the answer to the industry's problem, analysts say. But it's not the only one.

Instead, the industry's going to have to explore other ideas, including advertising-supported music, promotional relationships and subscriptions.

"There is no one silver bullet solution," Garland said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com//ci_7490437





Year-End 2007: Darknet Assumptions Still True
Fred von Lohmann

Princeton's Professor Ed Felten (full disclosure: he's an EFF board member) in a recent post on his blog reminds us that one of the core "Darknet premises" -- that DRM systems on mass media content will inevitably be broken -- continues to prove itself true. The victim this year, AACS:

We’ve been following, off and on, the steady meltdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the next-generation DVD systems. By this point, Hollywood has released four generations of AACS-encoded discs, each encrypted with different secret keys; and the popular circumvention tools can still decrypt them all. The industry is stuck on a treadmill: they change keys every ninety days, and attackers promptly reverse-engineer the new keys and carry on decrypting discs.

One thing that has changed is the nature of the attackers. In the early days, the most effective reverse engineers were individuals, communicating by email and pseudonymous form posts. Their efforts resulted in rough but workable circumvention tools. In recent months, though, circumvention has gone commercial, with Slysoft, an Antigua-based maker of DVD-reader software, taking the lead and offering more polished tools for reading and ripping AACS discs.

To many who follow DRM issues closely, this is hardly news; the regular breaking of DRM systems, followed by the steady leak of formerly-protected content into file-sharing channels, is now so common that it barely rates a mention in the tech press.

But copyright policy-makers still haven't gotten the message (hey, policy-maker: DRM does not slow piracy!!). Whether they get the message or not, this steadily mounting pile of empirical evidence continues to show that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (i.e., "thou shalt not circumvent DRM") are a failure if the goal was to impede digital infringement. At the same time, of course, the DMCA continues to be a valuable tool for rightsholders who want to use DRM to impede competition, innovation, and free speech.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11...ons-still-true





Hot Image Your PC's Hard Drive with DriveImage XML

You don't need a complicated boot CD or expensive software to create a restorable system disk image for your PC: free utility DriveImage XML can save a full, working snapshot of your Windows hard drive while you work on it. (That's hot.) When your PC crashes and burns or just slows down over time, the best insurance you can have is a mirror image of your operating system, complete with drivers, user settings, software applications, and documents in one place. A while back we covered how to partition and image your Windows hard drive using the Linux-based System Recovery Boot CD, a process that involves command line work, disk-burning, rebooting, and video driver wrangling. With DiskImage XML, imaging your PC's hard drive is a matter of a few clicks, no reboots required.

Let's check it out.

Create a New System Image

First, download DriveImage XML for free and install it as usual. You can store your system image anywhere you'd like, but I highly recommend saving it on a disk other than the one you're imaging. So if you plan to image your C: drive, purchase an external hard drive to store C:'s image, or right after you create the image, burn the files to CD or DVD. This way if your C: drive fails or breaks, you still have your image available on a separate physical disk.

When you launch DriveImage XML (DiX), click on the "Backup" button on the lower left of the screen. It will scan your PC and list all the hard drives connected to your system. To image your C: drive (most likely your system's primary, active disk), select it and click the Next button to launch DriveImage XML's backup wizard. Click Next again to set where DiX should save your image, and a few additional options, as shown.

The settings here will affect how large your image file is and how it can be restored. Here's a rundown of what each does.

• Raw mode. In "raw mode," DriveImage XML makes a sector by sector copy of your drive, including unused space. This means your image file will be the same exact size of the drive, and it can only be restored to a drive of that same exact size. For most home use situations, leave this box unchecked. (There's no sense in backing up blank disk space.)

• Split large files. If you plan to burn your disk image to CDs or DVDs, select "Split large files," which will break your image file down into smaller chunks. This way you can easily save them to smaller-sized disks later on. If "Split large files" is NOT checked, you'll get one giant image file, either as large as the disk itself or as large as the used space on the disk (depending on whether "Raw mode" is enabled.)

• Compressed. If space on your destination drive is at a premium, select the "Compressed" option to make your image file up to 40% smaller than in normal mode. Compression will slow down the imaging process, but it will help save on disk space.

• Hot Imaging Strategy. The hot part of DriveImage XML is that it can image your drive while you work but that means that files you're using while it does its thing have to be locked to be copied correctly. DiX will try two strategies: locking the drive entirely (if you're not using the computer and saving files), or using Windows' built-in Volume Shadow Services to get the last saved state of the drive. Leaving this at the default "Try Volume Locking first" is fine for home use.

Click the Next button to start creating the drive image file. Depending on the speed of your computer, and the size of your hard drive (and amount of used space), this process can take a significant amount of time. Consider starting it before you leave your computer for the evening, or during your lunch break. DriveImage XML will keep a running counter of how much time it's been copying the disk and how much time is left until it completes, as shown.

DiX isn't fast, especially if you've got a lot of data to image. On the spare PC where I ran DiX, about 12GB of used space took about 35 minutes to image. When the imaging process is complete, you'll have two types of files stored on the destination: a single .XML file (hence DriveImage XML's name), and either one or several .DAT files (depending on whether or not you selected "Split large files.") The .XML file is a list of all the files in the image. The .DAT file(s) contain the actual image data. Here's what the file listing on my external drive looks like, once my image was complete.

Once you've saved a system image, you can use it in three ways: to restore individual files from their saved state; to restore your PC back to the exact state it was when you saved the image, or to make an exact copy of the drive to another partition or hard drive.

Browse and Restore Individual Files

To view and copy files contained within an image to your PC, click on the Browse button on the lower left of the DriveImage XML window, and click "Load Image." Then select the .XML file for the image you saved. (Remember, every image has exactly one .XML file associated with it.) DiX will read the .XML listing and display all the files contained within the image, as shown.

Navigate the folder tree as usual, and right-click any file to view it, launch it using its associated application, or extract it (restore it to your current PC setup.) You can also right-click on an entire folder like "My Documents" and choose "Extract" (or press Ctrl+S) to copy it to your current PC setup.

Perform a Complete System Restore

If your computer's hard drive crashed entirely, you can restore it to its past state using the DiX image you created. Restoring an image to a target disk will delete everything on the disk and copy the contents of the image to it. That means you cannot restore an image to a drive you're already using (because you can't delete the contents of a disk already in use). So if you booted up your computer on your C: drive, you can't restore an image to your C: drive. You need access to the target drive as a secondary disk. There are a few ways to do this. You can install the target drive as a slave in another PC in addition to its primary boot drive, or you can buy a hard drive enclosure and connect the target as an external drive.

Either way, to restore a disk image to a drive you intend to boot from, you'll need:

1. A PC running DriveImage XML
2. The saved disk image files, whether they're on CD, DVD, on the host PC or on an external drive
3. A target drive with a partition at least the size of the drive image files. (You can use Windows built-in Disk Management console or your partition manager of choice to create a new partition to restore to.)

To start the restore process, in DriveImage XML, click on the Restore button, then click the Next button, which will launch the drive restore wizard. From there, select the .XML file associated with the image, and then select the target drive. (Remember, the target drive must be an existing partition that's the same size or larger than the image, and it must not be the active system drive.) All files will be deleted from the target drive on restore, so be double sure there's nothing there you need to save. Like the image creation process, Dix will display a progress bar and estimated time as it restores the image to the drive.

Once the image has been copied and restored onto the target drive, you'll have to make that drive the active, boot partition for your PC to start using it. Either install the disk back into your PC, or use the Disk Management Console to set the target partition as "Active" and reboot your PC. Alternately, you can create a bootable Windows CD with DriveImage XML on it. Here's more on DriveImage XML on a BartPE bootable CD.

More DiX Actions

You can also copy an entire existing partition to another blank partition without making an image at all, using DiX's Drive to Drive feature. (This could be useful to make a full copy of a data partition, for example.) Finally, you can schedule regular disk image operations using Windows Task Scheduler and Dix command line options. For more on that, in DiX's Help file, under the Feature folder, see "Task Scheduler."

Comparison to Commercial Alternatives, and Why DriveImage XML is Not Quite Time Machine for Windows

Commercial software that retails betweens $50 and $70, like Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage, do exactly what DiX does for free. However, DiX does NOT do incremental images like most commercial products and Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine does. Every time you create an image it's a full and complete backup of the disk, which means that regularly scheduled imaging can eat up hard drive space fast.

Also, DiX's image files aren't browse-able using Windows Explorer, the way Mac users can explore Time Machine's backups using the Finder. However, the developers say that DiX is not necessarily required to restore files from the images it creates. The .XML file is not proprietary and readable by any program out to do so, and the image file itself is just all your files squashed into one big .DAT file. The .XML file acts as a map to the .DAT file, and if DiX wasn't around, in theory other programs would be able to grok it pretty easily. Which is nice, but still not as transparent as Time Machine's backup files.
Video Demonstration

Finally, if you haven't had enough of DriveImageXML, here's a video tutorial on using it, posted by its makers on YouTube.
http://lifehacker.com/software/featu...xml-326086.php





Roast beasts

FBI ‘Bot Roast II: 1 Million Infected PCs, $20 Million in Losses and 8 Indictments
Layer 8

The Federal Bureau of Investigation today revealed the second phase of its Operation ‘Bot Roast’ netted eight individuals that have been indicted, pled guilty, or been sentenced for crimes related to botnet activity.

Additionally, 13 search warrants were served in the U.S. and by overseas law enforcement partners in connection with the operation, the FBI said. This ongoing effort has thus far uncovered more than $20 million in economic loss and more than one million victim computers.

The botherders identified by the FBI as part of Bot Roast II are as follows:

• Ryan Brett Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pennsylvania, was indicted on 11/01/07 by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for botnet related activity which caused a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of this investigation the FBI was able to neutralize a vast portion of the criminal botnet by disrupting the botnet’s ability to communicate with other botnets. In doing so, it reduced the risk for infected computers to facilitate further criminal activity. This investigation continues as more individuals are being sought.

• Adam Sweaney, 27, of Tacoma, Washington, pled guilty on September 24, 2007 in U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, to a one count felony violation for conspiracy fraud and related activity in connection with computers. He conspired with others to send tens of thousands of email messages during a one-year period. In addition, Sweaney surreptitiously gained control of hundreds of thousands of bot controlled computers. Sweaney would then lease the capabilities of the compromised computers to others who launched spam and DDoS attacks.

• Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida, was indicted on 11/27/07 by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Florida for his involvement in botnet related activity involving coding and adware schemes. This investigation is being conducted by the U.S. Secret Service.

• Alexander Dmitriyevich Paskalov, 38, multiple U.S. addresses, was sentenced on 10/12/2007 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida, and received 42 months in prison for his participation in a significant and complex phishing scheme that targeted a major financial institution in the Midwest and resulted in multi-million dollar losses.

• Azizbek Takhirovich Mamadjanov, 21, residing in Florida, was sentenced in June 2007 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida, to 24 months in prison for his part in the same Midwest bank phishing scheme as Paskalov. Paskalov established a bogus company and then opened accounts in the names of the bogus company. The phishing scheme in which Paskolov and Mamadjanov participated targeted other businesses and electronically transferred substantial sums of money into their bogus business accounts. Immigrations Customs Enforcement, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the Panama City Beach Police Department were active partners in this investigation.

• John Schiefer, 26, of Los Angeles, California, agreed to plead guilty on 11/8/2007 in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, to a four felony count criminal information. A well-known member of the botnet underground, Schiefer used malicious software to intercept Internet communications, steal usernames and passwords, and defraud legitimate businesses. Schiefer transferred compromised communications and usernames and passwords and also used them to fraudulently purchase goods for himself. This case was the first time in the U.S. that someone has been charged under the federal wiretap statute for conduct related to botnets.

• Gregory King, 21, of Fairfield, California, was indicted on 9/27/2007 by a federal grand jury in the Central District of California on four counts of transmission of code to cause damage to a protected computer. King allegedly conducted DDoS attacks against various companies including a web based company designed to combat phishing and malware.

• Jason Michael Downey, 24, of Dry Ridge, Kentucky, was sentenced on 10/23/2007 in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, to 12 months in prison followed by probation, restitution, and community service for operating a large botnet that conducted numerous DDoS attacks that resulted in substantial damages. Downey operated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network Rizon. Downey stated that most of the attacks he committed were on other IRC networks or on the people that operated them. Downey’s targets of DDoS often resided on shared servers which contained other customer’s data. As a result of DDoS to his target, innocent customers residing on the same physical server also fell victim to his attacks. One victim confirmed financial damages of $19,500 as a result of the DDoS attacks.

“Today, botnets are the weapon of choice of cyber criminals. They seek to conceal their criminal activities by using third party computers as vehicles for their crimes. In Bot Roast II, we see the diverse and complex nature of crimes that are being committed through the use of botnets,” said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. “Despite this enormous challenge, we will continue to be aggressive in finding those responsible for attempting to exploit unknowing Internet users.”

A botherder can gain control of computers by unleashing malicious software such as viruses, worms, or trojan horses. By executing a simple task such as opening an attachment, clicking on an advertisement, or providing personal information to a phishing site (a fraudulent site that mimics a legitimate site), an individual computer user has unintentionally allowed unauthorized access. Bot operators will then typically use these compromised computers as vehicles to facilitate other actions such as commit identity theft, launch denial of service attacks, and install keystroke loggers.

In June the Department of Justice and FBI announced Operation Bot Roast and at that time said ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22413





Sent home to mum

NZealand Questions Top Cyber Suspect
Ray Lilley

Police questioned the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said.

Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police raided the home of the 18-year-old in the North Island city of Hamilton and took him into custody along with several computers, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center.

He was later released without charge after being questioned, though police said he was still part of the investigation.

The case is part of an international crackdown on hackers who allegedly assume control of thousands of computers and amass them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets. The hackers can then use the computers to steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry computers, authorities say.

Eight people have been indicted, pleaded guilty or have been convicted since the investigation started in June. Thirteen additional warrants have been served in the U.S. and overseas in the investigation.

The FBI estimates that more than one million computers have been infected and puts the combined economic losses at more than $20 million.

The New Zealander, known by his cyber identification as ''AKILL,'' was ''head of an international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers round the world with their malicious software,'' Kleintjes told National Radio.

Kleintjes told The Associated Press the teenager, whose name was not released because he was under 18 when the alleged offenses began, was cooperating with investigators in telling them how the crime system works.

''We have seized a number of computers and are talking with him,'' he said. ''We are going for evidence and the case will develop from there. We're still in the early stages of the investigation.''

Detective Inspector Peter Devoy, the senior investigator in the case, said the youth was later released after questioning and had not been charged. Further investigation of the youth's seized computers could lead to international inquiries, he said.

Kleintjes said possible charges against the teen could involve having unauthorized access to computers and possessing computer hacking tools -- charges that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Spybot and botnet are jargon for infiltrating a group of computers and infecting them with malicious software that allows them to be used to collect information -- mainly credit card and bank account details.

Kleintjes said the New Zealander had written software that evaded normal computer spyware systems, then sold his skills to hackers.

''He is very bright and very skilled in what he's doing,'' Kleintjes said. ''He hires his services out to others.''

Earlier this month, Ryan Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pa., was indicted in the case. Authorities allege that the New Zealand suspect and Goldstein were involved in crashing a University of Pennsylvania engineering school server Feb. 23, 2006.

Officials said that the server, which typically handles about 450 daily requests for Internet downloads, instead got 70,000 requests from the account of an unsuspecting Penn student over four days. Over time, the FBI followed an electronic trail from that student's account to Goldstein's screen name, ''Digerati,'' and the New Zealand hacker.

The crash briefly shut down computers at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, but did relatively little damage, university spokesman Ron Ozio said.

Goldstein has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail while awaiting a trial set for March 10.

He faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted of the single count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud.

''We feel the charges are inflated,'' defense lawyer Ronald Levine said Thursday. ''We think this is kind of an exaggerated case.''

Goldstein did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press on his cell phone and his parents' home in Ambler. He remains enrolled at Penn, according to Ozio, who said he could not comment on possible disciplinary action.

------

AP writer Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report
http://www.adn.com/24hour/nation/sto...13240928c.html





Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere
Christopher Drew

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

The House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts.

The House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, and the original sponsor of the bill, Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, said it would require hundreds of counties with paperless machines to install backup paper trails by the presidential election next year while giving most states until 2012 to upgrade their machines further.

Critics of the machines said that some of the measures would be just stopgaps and that the California reports showed that security problems needed to be addressed more urgently.

The California reports said the scientists, acting at the state’s request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.

Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.

The reports said the investigators had created situations for each system “in which these weaknesses could be exploited to affect the correct recording, reporting and tallying of votes.”

Voting experts said the review could prompt the California secretary of state, Debra Bowen, to ban the use of some of the machines in the 2008 elections unless extra security precautions were taken and the election results were closely audited.

Matthew A. Bishop, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who led the team that tried to compromise the machines, said his group was surprised by how easy it was not only to pick the physical locks on the machines, but also to break through the software defenses meant to block intruders.

Professor Bishop said that all the machines had problems and that one of the biggest was that the manufacturers appeared to have added the security measures after the basic systems had been designed.

By contrast, he said, the best way to create strong defenses is “to build security in from the design, in Phase 1.”

The reports also said the investigators had found possible problems not only with computerized touch-screen machines, but also with optical scanning systems and broader election-management software.

Professor Bishop and state officials cautioned that the tests had not taken into account the security precautions that are increasingly found in many election offices. Limits on access to the voting systems and other countermeasures could have prevented some intrusions, Professor Bishop and the officials said.

Industry executives said that the tests had not been conducted in a realistic environment and that no machine was known to have been hacked in an election. The executives said they would present more detailed responses on Monday at a public hearing.

Ms. Bowen said yesterday that it was vital for California to have secure machines for its presidential primary in February. She said she would announce by next Friday what actions she would take.

The findings could reverberate in Washington, where the full House still has to vote on the measure and the Senate plans to take up a similar bill this year.

Concerned about security, House and Senate Democratic leaders said they wanted to require a shift to paper ballots and other backup records to increase confidence that votes would be accurately counted.

State and local officials have argued that it is too late to make many of the changes without creating chaos next year. Advocates for the blind and other disabled voters say better equipment needs to be developed to enable them to vote without help from poll workers, as federal law requires.

In trying to balance all the concerns, Mr. Hoyer and Mr. Holt decided to delay the most sweeping change, a requirement that every ballot be cast on an individual durable piece of paper, from next year to 2012.

To ensure that all machines would have some paper backup, they agreed to require hundreds of counties in 20 states to add cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen machines for 2008 and 2010. New York, which has delayed replacing its lever machines, would have to buy a new system by November 2008.

Advocates for the disabled praised the compromise. For many disabled people to vote independently, the advocates said, the touch-screen machines need to be modified to include audio files that can read back the completed ballots, while the ballot-marking devices used with the optical scanning systems have to be changed to feed ballots automatically.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, a group that helped broker the deal, said the bill offered hope for an end to “unaccountable, unverifiable and inaccessible voting.”

Mr. Holt said the measure could “keep the country from going through another election where Americans doubt the results.”

Critics say the California findings suggest that Congress should press for a quicker shift from the touch screens to optical scanning, in which voters mark paper ballots. Advocates of those systems say that the paper ballots would be less vulnerable to manipulation than the paper trails generated by the touch-screen computers and that they would hold up better for manual recounts.
http://infowars.net/articles/july200...Scientists.htm





JPL Scientists Stand Up To Government For Right To Privacy
Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Next week 28 NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientists (including William Banerdt, a project scientist on the Mars rover program) will fight for their right to privacy in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. They are fighting against Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 (HSPD-12) that President Bush issued in August 2004. Policies resulting from the directive requires all federal employees and contractors to "voluntarily" (JPL employees would be terminated immediately for non-compliance) sign a form allowing the government the right to investigate them "without limit" for two years- even if they leave government work during that time. The directive is meant to confirm the identity of all government employees and give them new high-tech badges, the JPL scientists say they have gone too far.

The Union for Concerned Scientists have submitted briefs of amicus curiae in support of the plaintiffs:

UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] is concerned that the background investigations proposed by NASA are wide-ranging, highly personal, and unwarranted in light of the unclassified and non-sensitive nature of the Plaintiffs' work. While the investigations purportedly are intended to verify the Plaintiffs' identities...in fact the subjects covered by the investigations include a host of irrelevant and personal issues, including credit history, "personality conflict," physical and mental health and sexual orientation.

The process involves supplying the government names of people who can verify where an employee has lived for each address they have lived at in the last five years. The government asks these people to fill in a bubble form about the employees psychological stability, financial integrity, drug and alcohol consumption and character. All of this is done in the name of "protect[ing] personal privacy." But the 1984-esc "Newspeak" doesn't stop there.

UPDATE: NASA says that Shana Dale did not write the alleged memo (after the jump) and that the word "badge" is used throughout the official NASA website.

The JPL group has created a non-official website that offers people more information on the issue. It includes more of the double-speak. This example is allegedly from NASA Deputy Administer Shana Dale, a lawyer and government appointee.

Refer to the new badge only as a "new ID card"
Do not use these references: PIV, PIV-I, PIV-II, smart card, badge or credential;
Do not refer to any area of this program as "rigorous";
Refer to the program as "in response to HSPD-12"; and
The badging process may be referred as "badging process";.

The website goes to point out that, "Only a lawyer could devise a 'badging process' that results in no badges being issued."

The other example is the "mandatory" JPL Rideshare Survey which has no consequence of non-compliance, while the "voluntary" HSPD-12 carries a consequence of dismissal for non-compliance. The unofficial website states:

Doug Sanders of the JPL Ethics office states that it is voluntary because the definition of "voluntary" involves a choice, and here there is a choice between terminating employment and complying with HSPD-12. By this reasoning, handing over your wallet to a mugger also would be voluntary when he offers the choice of "your money or your life.

NASA is not the only agency to miss issuing the new cards to its employees by the original October 27th, 2007 deadline. According to a New York Times piece on the cards, no agency met the deadline- or even came close. JPL employees faced losing their job if they did not complete the re-badging process by October 27th, yet the Department of Energy has issued only five of the cards to their over 100,000 employees and contractors by that date. The other agencies had similarly missed the deadline by a large margin, with some, like the Department for Homeland Security itself, which got an extension from the Office of Management and Budget to 2010.

The Federal Computer Weekly's October 31, 2007 story adds:
Dan Stormer of Hadsell and Stormer, which represents the NASA scientists, said in a statement. “This is another egregious example of the Bush administration's assault on the constitution. Our clients are exemplary employees who have spent their work lives bettering this country. This shows the court will not stand by and let this attack on the right to privacy take place. This unlawful requirement allows unknown government officials to ask all manner of questions about people's personal lives, including their personal and mental state. It is exceptionally broad and completely unnecessary.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...cientists.html





Evolution Debate Led to Ouster, Official Says
AP

The state’s director of science curriculum said she resigned this month under pressure from officials who said she had given the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design.

The Texas Education Agency put the director, Chris Comer, on 30 days’ paid administrative leave in late October, resulting in what Ms. Comer called a forced resignation.

The move came shortly after she forwarded an e-mail message announcing a presentation by Barbara Forrest, an author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse.” The book argues that creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Ms. Comer sent the message to several people and a few online communities.

Ms. Comer, who held her position for nine years, said she believed evolution politics were behind her ousting. “None of the other reasons they gave are, in and of themselves, firing offenses,” she said.

Education agency officials declined to comment Wednesday on the matter. But they explained their recommendation to fire Ms. Comer in documents obtained by The Austin American-Statesman through the Texas Public Information Act.

“Ms. Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that T.E.A. endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” the officials said.

The agency documents say that officials recommended firing Ms. Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination.

The officials said forwarding the e-mail message conflicted with her job responsibilities and violated a directive that she not communicate with anyone outside the agency regarding a pending science curriculum review.

The documents criticize Ms. Comer for giving a presentation and attending an off-site meeting without approval. It also said she had complained that “there was no real leadership at the agency.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/us/30resign.html





Court Orders Bush Administration to Disclose Telecom Lobbying Ties. What About Senators?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won another significant legal battle, as a federal judge in California yesterday ordered the Bush administration to comply with EFF's FOIA demand and disclose documents revealing its "communications with telecommunications carriers and members of Congress" regarding efforts to amend FISA and provide amnesty to telecoms. Better still, the court imposed an extremely quick deadline for release of these documents -- December 10 -- so that "the public may participate in the debate over the pending legislation on an informed basis."

Needless to say, the Bush administration raised every argument it could to avoid having to disclose this information. These disclosures will reveal -- among other things -- which telecom lobbyists and other representatives were meeting with DNI Michael McConnell in order to secure telecom amnesty, as well as which members of Congress McConnell and other Bush officials privately lobbied. As an argument of last resort, the administration even proposed disclosing these documents on December 31 so that -- as EFF pointed out -- the information would be available only after Congress passed the new FISA bill. The court rejected every administration claim as to why it should not have to disclose these records.

It is vital that this information be publicly available. The administration is eager to have Congress bestow onto this industry an extraordinary gift, whereby the entire industry becomes retroactively immunized from the consequences of its past lawbreaking. The administration's primary spokesman on this issue is DNI McConnell, who continously invokes shrill national security warnings to justify this amnesty, though it is rarely mentioned that McConnell has more extensive ties to this industry than almost any other government official.

It should go without saying that Americans have the right to know which telecom companies have had doors opened for their lobbyists and executives at the highest levels of Bush's national security apparatus in order lobby Bush officials for this legislation (and which key Senators were privately targeted by McConnell). As the judge concluded, "the public interest will be served by expedited release of the requested records because it will further the FOIA's core purpose. . . ." (p. 10).

But all of this reasoning applies with equal force to those Senators who have been so instrumental in working on behalf of telecoms to keep amnesty in the FISA bill. As Ryan Singel of Wired first noted, the key amnesty proponent in the Senate, Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, has been the beneficiary of an enormous increase in contributions from the telecom industry this year, immediately preceding his extreme efforts (in tandem with Dick Cheney) on behalf of that industry to secure amnesty.

Additionally, telecoms have engaged in a massive bipartisan lobbying campaign to target key Senators to pressure them to support telecom amnesty. For exactly the reasons the court cited in compelling disclosure by the Bush administration of this information, it would be completely unconscionable for the Senators who are working the hardest to gift this industry with amnesty to conceal from Americans the extent to which they have communicated with these companies' lobbyists.

This morning, I called several of the Senators who have thus far been most instrumental in helping the telecom industry keep amnesty in the FISA bill: Senators Rockefeller, Feinstein and Whitehouse. The latter two Senators voted against stripping amnesty out of the FISA bill in both the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee (although both of them seem now to be attempting to work on a "Specter compromise" whereby telecoms would still be granted amnesty but the federal government would take their place as defendants). By e-mail, I also contacted the office of Sen. Reid, whose actions over the next couple of weeks will be crucial, perhaps dispositive, in determining the outcome of the efforts to keep amnesty out of the Senate bill.

I asked each of them for their reaction to the court ruling and specifically:
(1) Does the Senator agree with the federal court that the Bush administration should release this information to the public so that it can be considered as part of the debate over telecom amnesty?; and

(2) Will the Senator him/herself do the same and disclose the same information -- i.e., will s/he disclose with which telecom lobbyists and executives s/he has communicated regarding the pending FISA legislation?

The reason this information is so vital is because it shines the real light on what is going on, both with this bill and more generally with how our political system functions. Led by Bush officials, amnesty proponents have been engaged in a non-stop, Cheney-style fear-mongering campaign, trying to scare Americans into believing that they will be slaughtered by Terrorists unless telecoms are immunized from lawsuits arising out of their past lawbreaking.

The reality, of course, is that these telecoms are able to exert so much influence because of their huge donations and their ability to hire the most well-connected lobbyists from both parties. It very well may be that these donations and lobbying efforts have absolutely nothing at all to do with these Senators' eagerness to work on behalf of telecom amnesty. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Of course it's possible that these Senators on their own just developed a passionate, intense belief in the noble and just cause of bestowing this industry with immunity and that such a commitment is wholly independent from lobbying and donation activities.

But at the very least, if these Senators plan on giving this enormous and extremely rare gift to this industry, the public ought to know what dealings they have with this industry and their lobbyists -- just as the court compelled the Bush administration to disclose this information (EFF's summary of the court ruling is here). I'll post responses to these inquiries as I receive them.

UPDATE: From Sen. Feinstein's spokesman, Scott Gerber:
As for the district court ruling, the court has spoken.

Senator Feinstein or her staff has met with or spoken to organizations and individuals that have requested a meeting on this issue.

This includes:

* Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other plaintiffs;

* Defendants including Verizon and AT&T;

* Privacy and civil liberties groups; and

* Representatives from the Department of Justice and the Intelligence community.

She has also reached out to legal experts for their views on alternatives to immunity, including substitution.

This is an important issue, and Senator Feinstein is interested in the views of all sides of the debate.
That's quite a lot of meetings she had. It looks as though, at least thus far, she found the pro-amnesty arguments of Verizon, AT&T and "representatives from the Department of Justice and the Intelligence community" most persuasive.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...nion/greenwald





When Networks Collide: AT&T Suddenly Doesn't Like Apple so Much.
Robert X. Cringely

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson this week said what I have been saying since last July -- that Apple and AT&T would soon introduce an iPhone that works with AT&T's faster 3G wireless data network. I said it because I had heard last summer that AT&T was already testing 3G iPhones in Florida, but the better question is why Stephenson said it and why now? For AT&T, his announcement looks, frankly, stupid.

Here's a guy who is head of the largest telephone company in America and its largest mobile phone company. He has a five-year iPhone exclusive giving AT&T the number one selling U.S. smart phone and a huge generator of primo subscribers mainly poached from other carriers. Christmas is a month away and 1-2 million Americans have been planning to give -- or hoping to get -- an iPhone. So what does the guy do? He lets it slip that next year Apple will release a faster iPhone that will make the existing model obsolete. The only impact this can have on current iPhone sales is to stop them in their tracks, unless Apple offers a free 3G upgrade, which believe me they never intended to offer and may not.

So what's up? Was it a simple slip? Or is the guy so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize that with a few words he has probably deferred -- maybe forever -- at least a million new customers worth to Wall Street at least $1 billion in market cap for his company?

I don't think Stephenson's statement was by accident and I don't think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York. He came to the turf of his "partner" and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn't really need Apple despite the iPhone's success.

It's one thing to have a private disagreement between companies but quite another to take it public in a way that costs real money.

What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T's discovery that -- as I have predicted for weeks -- Apple will be joining Google in bidding. AT&T thought its five-year "exclusive" iPhone agreement with Apple would have precluded such a bid, but that just shows how poorly Randall Stephenson understood Steve Jobs. Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.

To his credit, Stephenson took the dispute to the streets this way, showing he isn't intimidated by Jobs. It was a bold and rare response for big business and was definitely unexpected by Cupertino, which won't underestimate AT&T again.

I'm not privy to any inside details here, but there are two ways I can see Jobs rationalizing his auction position and they aren't necessarily exclusive. He could claim to intend the 700-MHz auction participation as a pure investment, just a good use for the $30+ billion Apple has squirreled away.

Nah.

Or Jobs could tell AT&T that Apple is investing solely in a DATA network for which it has no voice ambitions. Maybe all MacBooks will soon get 700-MHz access cards.

This excuse rings truer, but of course it would still be a scam on Steve's part.

It would not surprise me at all if this were the case and when the 700-MHz network is finally up and running Jobs claims astonishment that the most popular data application is Voice over IP, a direct competitor to AT&T Wireless. This may be part of the reason why Apple has been so slow approving third-party iPhone applications. Wouldn't your first application be a VoIP client?

Of course to this point Apple hasn't even said it will participate in the 700-MHz auction. Apple has said nothing at all on the subject. I said it and still believe it to be true. And I'd say Randall Stephenson's remarks this week pretty much confirm I was correct.

Now AT&T is going to have to decide whether it is worth $10+ billion to fight Apple, Google, and probable third and fourth partners by bidding, itself, for the spectrum, which it wouldn't otherwise have done.

A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services.

Yeah, right.

Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.

We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion.

The appearance of motion: it's sad, wouldn't you say, when this is what American business has come to.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...29_003521.html





Verizon Wireless Says ‘Bring Your Own’ Device
Saul Hansell

Verizon Wireless has stunned the wireless world by announcing that by sometime next year it will open its network to “any apps, any device.”

There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.” The company went on to say:

While most Verizon Wireless customers prefer the convenience of full service, the company is listening through today’s announcement to a small but growing number of customers who want another choice without full service.

Verizon Wireless had several reasons to get ahead on unbundled access. If it didn’t do so, T-Mobile or Sprint would surely have taken the lead. And the move helps attract devices that could compete against the Apple iPhone.

The timing most certainly relates to the coming 700-megahertz spectrum auction. The government is selling off frequencies that had been used by UHF television — soon to be freed by the switch to digital broadcasting — that are seen as especially useful for mobile voice and data service. Google, which has said it will bid in this auction, has called for rules that would force carriers using the spectrum to open their networks to any device. Verizon’s move today is a way to head off that sort of mandate and open up on its own terms.

Most of all, it helps tweak the spreadsheet models of future revenue so Verizon can be confident in bidding for spectrum. Simply put, the more customers it can count on–either traditional or “bring your own” device–the more comfortable it can feel paying for bandwidth.

Interestingly, Ralph de la Vega, the chief executive of AT&T Mobility, spoke about the need for spectrum in a long interview with Engadget published yesterday.

I think the auction is very key because 700MHz is premium spectrum and our wireless company runs on spectrum. That’s the lifeblood of any wireless company. … We have seen the growth of the use of data, in particular with devices like the iPhone. My take is that as more and more companies try to step up to that bar that Apple has established, they will produce maybe not exactly but very close to an Apple-compelling device that is going to drive more and more usage. And so, we have looked ahead and we probably don’t need that spectrum for several years, but we are bullish on the future of this business and what customers are going to do with these applications.

Mr. de la Vega also tried to portray AT&T as the network that gives customers the most options. “I’ve never called it open access,” he said. “I’d like to think of it as giving customers more choices about the devices and the applications that they want to run.”

With Verizon’s announcement today, AT&T and the other wireless carriers will have a lot more choices to consider.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1.../index.html?hp





Ottawa Opens Up Wireless Industry to More Competition
CBC News

The Conservative government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry.

About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada's big three providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus.

The government will also mandate roaming agreements, which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally. If a new carrier is unable to reach a "reasonable" roaming agreement with an existing provider, an outside arbitrator will be brought in, Industry Canada said.

The government is also forcing existing carriers to rent space on their cellphone towers to newcomers, again at "reasonable" rates, or risk having an arbitrator come in.

In handing down the rules, Industry Minister Jim Prentice gave potential newcomers, including Quebecor, MTS Allstream, Shaw and Eastlink, virtually everything they asked for.

Key numbers
Bell, Rogers and Telus wireless revenue: $11.8 billion (2006 data)
Cellphone subscribers in Canada: 19.3 million (Sept. 2007)

Prentice told a news conference that he agreed with their assessment that prices are too high and the wireless industry needs more competition. "Our goal at the end of the day is lower prices, better services, and more choices," he said.

Those who had been arguing for more competition were delighted with the ruling. "This is a grand slam for consumers," telecom analyst Eamon Hoey told CBC News. "It really puts a heavy knife into the oligopolic style of structure we've had in the cellular business."

Chris Peirce, chief regulatory officer of MTS Allstream, was pleased as well.

"They have really gotten their policy right and it's good to see they were able to resist the arguments" of the incumbents, he said.

But Liberal industry critic Scott Brison was not pleased. "There's no proof it will lead to lower prices," he argued, saying regulation would have been better. Brison said the auction decision will result in a $200-million windfall for the new entrants.

Lawson Hunter, executive vice-president and chief corporate officer of Bell, agreed with Brison and said the government was costing taxpayers money by subsidizing new entrants. The spectrum could go for up to 40 per cent less than what it would have if the auction were open to the highest bidder, he said.

"Basically you've sold an asset of Canada at well under market price."

He also said the auction rules were a direct reversal of the government's previous stance on the telecommunications market, which advocated deregulation and determination by market forces.

The other two major players were also disappointed by the announcement, with Telus saying that new companies are sufficiently large and have enough resources to bid in an auction without government aid.

Rogers head of regulatory affairs, Ken Engelhart, said the decision was about as bad as it could have been for the big three cellphone companies.

New entrants could launch by late 2008

The auction process is to begin on May 27, 2008, and is expected to last several weeks. Industry Canada expects new players will start up by the end of next year, at the earliest.

Attention will now turn to who the new bidders will be, with analysts expecting Quebecor, MTS, Shaw and Eastlink to enter the auction. Prentice said the amount of spectrum reserved for new entrants, or 40 megahertz, is enough to facilitate a new national carrier.

"It's reasonable to assume that will happen," he said.

Peirce said the MTS board will now have to decide on what portions of spectrum to bid on. Industry Canada stopped short of applying its set-aside rule on a national spectrum licence, which MTS had asked for, opting instead to apply the special condition only on regional licences.

Prentice said a number of regional players could, however, band together to form a new national cellphone provider.

Foreign companies, although faced with ownership restrictions, could also bid on the spectrum in partnership with a Canadian company.

The auction traces its roots to April 2005, when the Liberal government put together the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel to look at the state of the industry and the Telecommunications Act.

The panel submitted its report in March 2006 to the newly elected Conservative government and, among its broader telecommunications recommendations, suggested several changes to the wireless industry to make it more competitive.

Industry Canada, under then Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, launched a public consultation in February 2007 that incorporated some of the panel's suggestions.

The ministry asked whether special conditions should be imposed on the auction, including whether some spectrum should be set aside for potential new entrants and whether caps should be installed on how much any one company could own.

The framework also asked whether government intervention was needed in the commercial negotiation of roaming deals between cellphone carriers. Roaming agreements allow customers of one provider to connect to the network of a different provider, which allows subscribers to use their cellphones where their carrier doesn't have infrastructure.

About 90 submissions were made from various industry players, including incumbents Bell, Rogers and Telus, potential new entrants Quebecor, Shaw and MTS Allstream, the Competition Bureau and various consumer and business groups.

Dominant companies wanted free-market auction

The incumbents argued that no special rules should be imposed and that spectrum should go to the highest bidder.

The potential entrants argued that special rules were needed because the incumbents had every incentive to bid up the price of the spectrum to keep new competitors out of the market.

They also said mandated roaming deals were necessary because the incumbents had no incentive to sign reasonable agreements with newcomers. Without the ability to offer roaming onto other networks, the new entrants would have a difficult time attracting customers, they argued.

The potential new entrants cited high prices and the lack of competition between the incumbents as the reason for Canada's poor showing among developed nations in mobile phone adoption.

Canada's rank of 29th out of the 30-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was justification for the government to get involved in the otherwise unregulated wireless industry, they said.

The United States held a similar advanced wireless spectrum auction in September 2006 that netted the government $13.9 billion US. The Federal Communications Commission is holding another auction in January of spectrum that will be vacated when analogue television broadcasting is shut down in 2009.

The U.S. wireless industry is moving toward a more competitive framework, with the FCC imposing a number of open-access rules on its upcoming auction. Winners in the auction will be forced to make all cellphones, including those from rivals, work on their networks.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2007/11/28/auction.html





Connecticut AG Warns Comcast Phone Users

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said today that subscribers to Comcast's digital phone service - due to be discontinued completely today - should immediately arrange other phone service if they haven't already.

Comcast will transition its customers to its newer, Internet-based "Digital Voice Service," according to Blumenthal, and has been transitioning customers away from its old digital phone service for several months.

In mid-October, Comcast discontinued the older service but continued emergency 911 service for six weeks in case any customers were unaware of the service interruption. The extended 911 service will be terminated today.

"Consumers who received Comast Digital Phone Service that have not switched to an alternative telephone service provider should do so immediately to ensure the safety of themselves and their families," Blumenthal said in a statement today.

Comcast customers with questions should call 1-800-COMCAST, Blumenthal said.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_7571041





Global Cellphone Penetration Reaches 50 Pct

Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion -- equivalent to half the global population -- on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said.

Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.

"The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement.

"For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when," Newman said.

In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth.

The Nordic start for mobile telephony was the basis for the success stories of Finnish Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson.

Fast growth in Asian wireless markets has since helped Korean Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics as well as China's ZTE take their place among the top six cellphone vendors globally.

But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent -- where some owners have more than one phone.

"The economic difference between the more mature markets and those in developing countries is highlighted by the vast differences in operators' revenues per user," Informa said.

Hutchison Whampoa's 3 operation has an average revenue per user of just over $70 a month in Britain, while Hutchison's Sri Lankan operator counts revenues of below $3 per user.

According to the International Programs Center of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world reached 6,634,294,193 on Thursday.

At the same time 2,571,563,279 people were using the most widely used mobile technology, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), according to global trade body GSM Association.

The second largest mobile technology, CDMA, had 421.4 million users at end September.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/...yID=nL29172095





A Judge’s ‘Inexplicable Madness’ Over a Cellphone
Danny Hakim

The next time you pass through the city court system in Niagara Falls, N.Y., remember to turn your cellphone off.

Today, the Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended the removal of a judge in Niagara Falls City Court who had, what the commission’s chairman, Raoul L. Felder, called, “two hours of inexplicable madness” when a cellphone rang in his courtroom.

Specifically, on the morning of March 11, 2005, the judge, Robert M. Restaino, was presiding over a slate of domestic violence cases when he heard a phone ring in his courtroom. He told the roughly 70 people in the courtroom, according to the commission’s report, that “every single person is going to jail in this courtroom” unless the phone was turned over.

He continued: “If anybody believes I’m kidding, ask some of the folks that have been here for a while. You are all going.”

Security officers attempted to find the phone, but failed, while an officer was posted at the door.

After a brief recess, Judge Restaino returned to the bench and asked the defendant who had been standing before him when the phone rang — from the back of the room — and if he knew whose phone it was.

“No,” the defendant, Reginald Jones, said. “I was up here.”

Nonetheless, the judge scrapped plans to release Mr. Jones, set bail at $1,500 and sent him into custody. He was the first of 46 defendants to be sent into custody because of what could be called the case of the ringing cellphone.” The judge opined at length about his frustration over the phone.

“This troubles me more than any of you people can understand,” Judge Restaino said, adding: “This person, whoever he or she may be, doesn’t have a whole lot of concern. Let’s see how much concern they have when they are sitting in the back there with all the rest of you. Ultimately, when you go back there to be booked, you got to surrender what you got on you. One way or another we’re going to get our hands on something.”

One defendant, according to the report, told the judge, “This is not fair to the rest of us.” To which the judge replied, “I know it isn’t.”

Another told the judge, “This ain’t right.” The judge responded: “You’re right, it ain’t right. Ain’t right at all.”

The commission said that Judge Restaino acted “without any semblance of a lawful basis,” behaved like a “petty tyrant” and said his conduct “transcended poor judgment.”

Mr. Felder, the chairman — who is best known as a celebrity divorce lawyer — was the lone dissenter; he voted instead to censure the judge.

A judge can either accept the findings or file an appeal within 30 days.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp


















Until next week,

- js.



















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