P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 05-12-07, 11:15 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 8th, '07

Since 2002


































"The record company doesn’t know. They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?" – Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist


"I got the mother of all pouts when I had to take the [OLPC] XO-1 back from my 9-year-old tester (my daughter). I'd say that's a stirring endorsement from the target market." – Joel Santo Domingo


"If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think." – Jim Krantz



































December 8th, 2007





DoJ Says $222,000 Damages in Capitol v. Thomas Trial Not Unconstitutional
Eric Bangeman

The US government has weighed in on the constitutionality of the $222,000 damage award in Capitol v. Thomas with a brief filed yesterday. The government suggests that the court avoid ruling on the constitutionality of the statutory damages clause of the Copyright Act. Should the court feel the need to rule on the constitutionality, it should find that the damages award does not violate the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

After a three-day trial, single mother Jammie Thomas was found to have willfully infringed on the record label's copyrights. The jury awarded the RIAA statutory damages of $9,250 per song, for a total of $222,000, out of a maximum of $150,000 per track.

Thomas quickly vowed to appeal the verdict, and when her motion of remittur was filed the following week, she asked for a ruling that the damages handed down by the jury were unconstitutionally excessive. The Copyright Act allows for statutory damages of $750 to $150,000. Thomas argued—as have other defendants—that since the labels make around 70¢ per song, even the $750 damage floor violates the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

In its reply to Thomas' motion, the RIAA argued that statutory damages need not have any relationship to actual damages. Furthermore, the group said that she had no basis to challenge the constitutionality of the damages since she had not objected to the jury instructions.

The Department of Justice agrees. "This Court may find that defendant has waived her challenge to Congress's statutory damages provision by submitting 'jury instructions and approv[ing] the verdict form that allowed the jury to consider the full range of statutory damages under the Copyright Act," the DoJ argued in its brief.

The DoJ also says that Thomas' motion ignores the fact that statutory damages are given in place of actual damages. "Statutory damages compensate those wronged in areas in which actual damages are hard to quantify in addition to providing deterrence to those inclined to commit a public wrong," argues the DoJ.

It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement. That's significant, because it shows that the DoJ is siding with the RIAA when it comes to the issue of whether making a file available for download on a P2P network constitutes distribution. It was a contentious issue during the Thomas trial, with the jury instructions originally stating that making songs available is not the same as distribution. The RIAA objected to that instruction, and in its final form, all the jury had to do was find that Thomas made the files available.

"[G]iven the findings of copyright infringement in this case, the damages awarded under the Copyright Act’s statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable,'" concludes the DoJ.

Given that Capitol v. Thomas was the first file-sharing lawsuit to go to trial and the fact that statutory damages have become a significant issue in a number of P2P lawsuits, the judge's decision in this case will be very closely watched.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...itutional.html





Judge Finds Copyright Misuse Defense Unconvincing in RIAA Lawsuit
Eric Bangeman

As the RIAA's legal campaign against file-sharers has unfolded, one of the arguments made by a number of the defendants is that record companies are guilty of copyright misuses and are therefore disqualified from enforcing them. A federal judge in New York has thrown cold water on that argument, upholding the RIAA's motion to strike P2P defendant Marie Lindor's copyright misuse defense in UMG v. Lindor.

Lindor was sued in 2005 and retained copyright attorney Ray Beckerman (whose Recording Industry vs The People blog has tracked the progress of many of the RIAA's lawsuits) as her counsel. One of her defenses was that the record labels misused their their copyrights by acting in concert with the nearly 30,000 lawsuits filed so far.

"The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have," argued Lindor.

The RIAA argued that it was free to lawfully litigate the cases as it sees fit and that copyright misuse was not a recognized affirmative defense against allegations of copyright infringement. Copyright misuse was applicable only in cases where restraint of trade is involved, argued the labels.

Judge David G. Trager agreed with the RIAA's position. "In general, copyright owners commit copyright misuse when they attempt to extend the scope of their copyrights and use them anticompetitively in violation of antitrust laws," wrote the judge in his opinion. "Collectively bringing infringement suits, however, exhibits none of the hallmarks of anticompetitive copyright pooling, and cannot be classified as such."

Judge Trager found that Lindor had failed to show "any viable anticompetitive aspects" of the RIAA's members colluding in their legal campaign. As a result, Lindor will not be able to argue copyright misuse in her lawsuit, and it's less likely that the defense will stand up to scrutiny in other cases.

UMG v. Lindor was originally expected to go to trial this year, but that's not going to happen now. Although the copyright misuse defense has apparently gone out the window, Lindor has raised a number of other arguments in her defense which should still get a hearing. Those include the constitutionality of the statutory damages sought by the RIAA, the amount of money the labels make on each download, and the RIAA's actual expenses per download.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...a-lawsuit.html





LimeWire Antitrust Claims Against RIAA Dismissed
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The antitrust counterclaims imposed by Lime Wire against the RIAA record companies have been dismissed. In a 45-page decision (pdf), the Court relied principally upon the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly that "A party's obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do." Ironically, the Twombly decision was the authority upon which the RIAA's copyright infringement complaint was dismissed in Interscope v. Rodriguez.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/04/1326204.shtml





The Pirate Bay Loses IFPI.com Domain
Thomas Mennecke

The Pirate Bay, one of the largest BitTorrent trackers, obtained the IFPI.com domain in early October of this year. The IFPI.com domain originally belonged to the industry trade group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Claiming it was the donation of an anonymous donor, The Pirate Bay quickly reworked the site, creating the International Federation of Pirate Interests. And all hell broke loose.

The Pirate Bay was able to obtain IFPI.com because of a simple reason, the IFPI forgot to renew the domain. Currently, there are hundreds, if not thousands of individuals out there at this very moment monitoring the top Internet domains, waiting for an organization to slip up. An anonymous individual managed to pick up the IFPI.com domain, and from there donated it to The Pirate Bay.

Considering The Pirate Bay and the IFPI are polar opposites with regards to the online copyright debate, an attempt to settle this amicably was in all likelihood out of the question. The IFPI filed a complaint with the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), requesting that the domain be returned to their ownership. It seems their complaint paid off, as The Pirate Bay has been ordered by WIPO to return the domain.

"For all the foregoing reasons, in accordance with Paragraphs 4(i) of the Policy and 15 of the Rules, the Panel orders that the domain name, be transferred to the Complainant."

The authority of the WIPO is far reaching. A common reaction may suggest that since The Pirate Bay has little respect for the IFPI or copyright law in general, why bother returning the domain. However the WIPO has the authority to compel the domain registrar to hand ownership back to the IFPI. As Peter Sunde, an administrator of The Pirate Bay told Slyck.com, he currently can do little about it.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1623





The Views From The Pirate Bay
Dan Simmons

The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular file-sharing websites in the world and much of the content reachable via the site is pirated. Here the founders of the site and those that keep it running talk about what they do, why they do it and how hard it is to stop them.

In times when the laws of many nations criminalise the swapping of pirated content, be it music, movies or software, the continued existence of The Pirate Bay might seem to be an anomaly.

Those behind the site say they do not fall foul of those laws because it acts as a search engine and does not directly host any of the content

Extended interview with The Pirate Bay's co-founders The IFPI's view on The Pirate Bay

But although it may not break Swedish laws that has not prevented the authorities from trying to close it down. Last year police raided the building and seized its servers.

But what the authorities did not expect were the public protests that followed.

In the main the protesters were angry about the US film industry telling their parliament what to do. They believed that senior US politicians forced their government to shut The Pirate Bay down, even though it was not doing anything illegal under Swedish law. And that really sparked public debate.

The raid happened during an election year and file-sharing became a mainstream issue - it spawned a dedicated political party that quickly became Sweden's third largest outside of parliament.

"You could argue that this is stealing," says Rick Falk Vinge, Pirate Party leader. "The point is it doesn't matter."

"If you are to enforce copyright in the digital age, where a lot of this takes place in private communications, if you are to enforce that you need to monitor all private communications, and that's not worth it to society or politically."

'Okay to copy'

Three days after The Pirate Bay was shut down it came back to life and now Sweden's pirates say they cannot be stopped.

This is partly because now The Pirate Bay servers have moved abroad. The site's controllers say that they do not even know where they are. At least one server stayed in Sweden and it is in the vaults of a bank in Stockholm, where it is hoped it will remain safe.

The re-location of the servers is all part of the cat and mouse game the site plays with police.

Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde make up half of team behind The Pirate Bay. Their weapons are standard laptops, hardwired to the net because they do not trust wireless connections.

Fredrik does all the technical stuff: the server maintenance, the upgrading, the hardware and Peter works with the media and does a bit of programming on the site.

Neither one sheds a tear for makers of movies, music and software.

Says Peter: "I think it's okay to copy. They get their money from so many places that the sales is just one small part.

"Take the latest Bond movie. What car was it? Oh, it's a BMW. His phone is a Sony Ericsson. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think they got a load of money for having those products in the movie."

Both Fredrik and Peter use their site to download content.

"I don't care," says Peter. "That's the big thing, I don't care. If I want it, I take it, 'cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it's up to me to decide.

"Why should they [take action against me]? I still go to the movies, I still spend money on the movies. Everybody does it so everybody wants to download movies. The public opinion is it should be legal."

Nor does Peter feel obliged to pay for what he is downloading.

"I do pay for it by listening to music, by bringing the music to my friends, they bring it to their friends and they go to concerts, I go to concerts," he says. "The actual product doesn't have to cost anything in order to make money."

Targeting the file-sharers

Unsurprisingly, that is not a view shared by the entertainment industry, as Jo Oliver from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry explains.

"It's just not practical to give away a creation for free," she insists. "There are people that need to be paid, who have worked on those recordings.

"Copyright is the mechanism and the law to make sure that that investment is rewarded and therefore that there will be more money to foster new artists, bring new content to the public.

"That's how it works."

For those not persuaded, legal action awaits. The UK music sharing site OiNK has recently been taken down as has the popular TV Links sharing site.

There have also been wins for the industry in France, where the president is pressing for file-sharers to be tracked and disconnected should they persist.

"We don't want The Pirate Bay to continue to operate in its current form just simply because of the damage that it's causing," says Jo Oliver.

"There is a Swedish criminal action underway. We'll see what happens in the criminal trial in Sweden next year. Hopefully that will lead to the closure of The Pirate Bay, but that remains to be seen."

The future

Rough waters may lie ahead for The Pirate Bay - but even if the legal challenge succeeds, not all are sure anything will change.

At least one national newspaper reporter thinks politicians have little appetite here to start changing Sweden's laws, just to close down the site.

"In Sweden, surprisingly many people have been file-sharing," explains Mats Carlbom, a Swedish political reporter. "And it's not only young people, obviously. Maybe over a million, maybe two million people have been file sharing.

"The politicians haven't solved the problem. That's why I think the whole issue is put on hold. They don't know how to tackle this problem."

As Swedish society ponders the way forward, Fredrik is busy shoring up defences. He is working on a new system of sharing files. He says it will be faster, more reliable, and make users harder to track.

The open source version, he says, cannot be brought up or brought down by commercial interests. They are both taking the music and film industries to court for what they claim are illegal attacks on their site. And if The Pirate Bay is outlawed they will just move abroad and run it from another country.

The ship, they claim, can no longer be sunk.

"Nobody is crying that people who used to go around selling ice to people do not have a job anymore because of the fridge," says Peter. "It would be stupid but it is the same thing.

"Technology has changed. You can't go back, there's no way to go back. And I don't think there's a will to go back."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ne/7120845.stm





Congress' Copyright Reform: Seize Computers, Boost Penalties, Spend Money
Nate Anderson

A bipartisan group of Congressmen (and one woman) yesterday introduced a major bill aimed at boosting US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them. While much of the legislation targets industrial counterfeiting and knockoff drugs, it also allows the government to seize people's computers.
"Attempted infringement" appears in new House intellectual property bill

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan) Act of 2007 has the backing of many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA).

In addition to strengthening both civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement, the big development here is the proposed creation of the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). This is a new executive branch office tasked with coordinating IP enforcement at the national and international level. To do this work internationally, the bill also authorizes US intellectual property officers to be sent to other countries in order to assist with crackdowns there. In addition, the Department of Justice gets additional funding and a new unit to help prosecute IP crimes.

The bill, which will have a committee hearing soon, is supposed to kick-start the copyright reform process talked about for so long. But copyright reform means one thing to the PRO IP sponsors and another to the consumer groups that have been advocating for it.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, said in a statement, "seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family's general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate."

In addition, she protests the increase in "already extraordinary copyright damages" and calls for damages to be linked more closely to actual harm suffered by copyright holders.

The Digital Freedom Campaign, backed by the EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Consumer Electronics Association, was more muted in its criticism, instead choosing to praise the legislation for launching a "conversation" about copyright reform. The Digital Freedom Campaign's Maura Corbett said that meaningful copyright reform "must include limits on statutory damages and the codification of the vital principles of fair use," and she hopes that PRO IP "will serve as a catalyst to larger, more meaningful reform."

Fortunately, at least some members of the Judiciary Committee are at least aware that the consumer groups have legitimate points to make. Berman, who chairs the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, announced that his subcommittee would hold a hearing next week on the issue.

"As a cosponsor, I obviously feel very strongly that we must strengthen enforcement efforts to fight piracy and counterfeiting," Berman said. "At the hearing, we will be hearing testimony from both industry experts and from labor and consumer advocates to make sure that in doing so, we don't deny appropriate access to America's intellectual property."

Who is thrilled with the bill? The MPAA, for one. MPAA head Dan Glickman, in a statement praising the new bill, said that "films left costs foreign and domestic distributors, retailers and others $18 billion a year," a significant increase from the $6 billion it allegedly costs the studios.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...end-money.html





Review

The Laptop That Could Change the World
Joel Santo Domingo

It has taken more than two years, but the One Laptop Per Child initiative has finally released its much-anticipated laptop: the OLPC XO-1.

The XO-1 costs $200 each to donate, but for a limited time — until Dec. 31, 2007 — people can avail themselves of the "Give One, Get One" promotion to give a $399 donation ($200 of which is tax-deductible).

One laptop goes to a disadvantaged child in a developing nation, while OLPC gives you another one as a thank-you gift of sorts. (Think of a PBS pledge drive, where they offer a gift to you of a DVD set for a $200 donation.)

This is certainly a different business model in this "me, me, me" holiday season: Instead of buying something for yourself, you buy technology for a child who needs it, with a fringe benefit of a gift laptop for your household.

Just be advised, this limited-time offer is the only way you'll be able to get your hands on the XO-1 for the foreseeable future. After the end of the year, people can still donate the laptops, but they won't be getting one as a gift.

The OLPC XO-1 is intriguing blend of opposites.

On the one hand it contains technology that would barely be called sufficient in today's terms (sub-500-MHz processor, only 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash storage), though that is more than enough for the ultimate recipient of the notebook, a child in a developing country who has never used a computer before.

On the other hand, it includes features found in a notebook worth $2,000 or more. It's encased in a rugged exterior that is splash-, drop-, and hot/cold-resistant.

It has an LED backlit screen; it's compatible with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi; and it also offers 802.11s "mesh networking" — a type of peer-to-peer ad hoc networking that requires zero configuration. And it uses so little power that an external hand generator or a solar panel can power the system.

That screen can pivot 180 degrees to lie flat on top of the keyboard like a tablet; in this configuration, the laptop can work in an "e-book" mode.

You can scroll text with the included game-style D-pad and function buttons, but, to save costs, the screen isn't touch-sensitive like that of a tablet PC.

It is designed so as to be usable in broad daylight. For my testing (indoors, in the labs) I used the LED backlight, which was bright enough, though it can look a bit dim when viewed from the wrong angle. The screen pivot and hinge help alleviate this problem.

If you think you're buying a full-featured laptop PC for $199 net cost, you're deluding yourself, yet for children in the target age range (6 to 12 years old), the XO-1 is as appealing as the other "most desirable object" of 2007, the Apple iPhone.

The colors are bright and friendly, the rubber-sealed keyboard is protected against splashes from beverages, and the keys are responsive.

I got the mother of all pouts when I had to take the XO-1 back from my 9-year-old tester (my daughter). I'd say that's a stirring endorsement from the target market.

The XO-1 is designed and built to work in any environment where you find children, including a one-room school with wooden desks, the dirt floor of a mud brick hut or a sunlit soybean field.

The antennas on either side of the screen double as the laptop's screen latches, so children can swing the XO-1 around its built-in handle with abandon. A drop from child height is unlikely to break the impact-resistant plastic case.

Those same antennas cover the three USB ports and headphone and microphone jacks, so all ports are protected.

The three-panel touch pad is capacitive in the center (touch-sensitive like most touch pads), while the three panels together are resistive: You can use a nonconducting stylus, even a wooden stick (the unit doesn't come with a stylus), to draw or to move the cursor.

The keyboard has a lot of new symbols on it, including a row of buttons representing the neighborhood, classroom and individual.

These buttons modify the GUI so that you see the world in general (over Wi-Fi or mesh networks), local users (if you are in a classroom environment with an OLPC XS school server) or the activities you are working on now or in the past.

So far it's up to the individual countries' respective departments of education or local organizations to get the laptops actually into students' hands.

The XO-1 really comes into its own in its intended environment, where a school's teachers and administration facilitate shared learning and communication among students.

The laptop's mesh networking helps students collaborate on music, writing and many other activities. It works rather like Bluetooth — if you can "see" the other laptops wirelessly, you can connect to them — but without all the tedious configuration that Bluetooth requires.

OLPC designed the system as a laptop because it wants students to take their computers home and engage their families in their work and play activities.

Speaking of activities, the XO-1 uses an activity metaphor instead of calling its open-source programs "applications."

The customized Fedora Linux–based interface is a more elegant implementation of Linux than the gOS we saw on the Everex gPC: Both operating systems use a taskbar at the bottom with a row of icons (à la Mac OS X), but the XO-1's interface forgoes flashy graphics with "bouncing" icons and is therefore, ultimately, more responsive and usable.

Activities like Chat, Browse (Internet), Write, Paint, and Calculate are self-explanatory.

The XO-1 has a suite of music programs called TamTam; they range from a simple beat-making and keyboard mashing toy to a fairly sophisticated music sequencer.

Applications are included to teach programming, too, ranging from the simple TurtleArt (which employs LOGO, an old-school programming language that was used to teach rudimentary programming back in the early 1980s) to the sophisticated Pippy (an interactive interpreter of Python, one of the major programming languages of the Internet, used by Google and YouTube).

There's a Record function, which can be used with the built-in camera, microphone or both to relay messages between a child's teacher and parents or to save the child's own memories.

Internet-connected children will be able to download and install additional activities from OLPC's wiki-based support site. The downloadable activities on the support site are open-source programs specifically developed for the XO-1 platform.

The XO-1's Internet Browser is a highly customized version of Mozilla Firefox. It supports Flash- and Ajax-based sites such as YouTube and Google Maps; performance is sluggish but usable.

Word-processing performance and general browsing was as fast as you'd expect on a smartphone, which is to say fast enough.

The original prototype showed an integrated hand crank to power the XO-1. Unfortunately that feature is absent from the shipping model, which comes with an AC adapter, but the XO-1 will still run off external kinetic power sources such as hand cranks or a foot-powered generators — features likely to be available on the laptops going to developing countries.

As part of its deployment for use in developing countries, the XO-1 runs on 8-to-11-volt power systems (from solar panels to hand or foot cranks to a car battery), and it does so efficiently. I measured 18 watts of power usage while the battery was charging and 6W after the battery was fully charged.

This is a far cry from the 60W to 100W usage of an energy-efficient value desktop. By comparison, the ASUS Eee PC 4G used over 23W while charging and 14W when charged.

The XO-1's LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) battery is more environmentally friendly than an NiMH or an NiCd, and it will support more than 2,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with the 800 to 1,200 you get from other battery technologies, such as lithium-ion.

Untrained personnel (older children, perhaps) can repair the XO-1 in the field: Undo four screws using just your hand, then pop open the screen bezel (all the electronics save the keyboard and the battery are in the screen).

Once the screen is open the backlight can be replaced with a $2 part, and there are extra screws in the chassis in case one is lost.

The motherboard with integrated CPU pops out in one piece and is also user-replaceable, so you can easily take two semi-working XO-1 laptops (say one with a broken screen, and another with a fried motherboard) and make one good one out of the pair.

I have to reiterate that this is a donation rather than a true-blue consumer PC, since we've come to one of the XO-1's biggest drawbacks for users: There's a 30-day replacement warranty, but once that's done, you're on your own.

You can try going to the wiki-based support site for updates and community-based help, but since OLPC isn't a consumer PC entity, you'll be expected to handle your own tech support. OLPC claims that there will be a fee-based tech support service, but that's in the future.

As part of the "Give One, Get One" promotion, donors will receive one-year subscription to T-Mobile's HotSpot Wi-Fi network, so you can use your XO-1 in Starbucks cafés and airports around the country.

Also, if you just want to donate $200 (or more) per laptop and not receive the gift XO-1, OLPC will put the entire sum toward the $200 cost per unit to supply laptops to children.

Your entire contribution in this case is 100 percent tax-deductible — depending of course on your local and federal tax laws.

Compared with its rivals, the XO-1 has the advantage of actually being available.

Intel's Classmate PC has two strikes against it: It's only a reference design (original equipment manufacturers like ASUS or Dell will still have to brand and build it), and so far it is vaporware.

The Classmate PC will have the benefit of being x86-compatible, so it will run Windows XP or various versions of Linux (the XO-1 can run only its custom version of Fedora Linux).

The $400 ASUS Eee PC is a vastly better choice for adult users because it's available now from public sources like NewEgg, and it will still be available to the public after Dec. 31, 2007; furthermore, it comes with a suite of programs that includes Google Docs and a full version of Firefox.

The philanthropic aspect of the XO-1, however, can't be denied, and the Eee PC isn't ruggedized like the XO-1.

If what you're after is an inexpensive system, there's also the option of buying a used PC on eBay or low-powered new desktop like the Everex gPC, but the XO-1 is compelling considering the target market.

Probably the biggest strike against the OLPC XO-1 (from an admittedly selfish perspective) as a consumer PC is that OLPC isn't a consumer PC company, so all over its Web site are disclaimers stating that while it will strive to get the gift PCs to you by the holidays, delivery isn't guaranteed.

What is guaranteed is that your contribution will result in a new XO-1 PC for a needy child somewhere in the world.

If this were a full-blown comparison review, I'd probably give the nod to the Eee PC for adults and the OLPC XO-1 for children, but the XO-1 isn't a consumer PC in the strict definition of the term.

For a $399 donation (50 percent tax-deductible), you'll be contributing to a charity whose goal is to get laptops into the hands of children around the world, and as a fringe benefit, you'll get the same laptop for your child as a gift.

After Jan. 1, 2008, you'll still be able to contribute to the OLPC effort monetarily, but you won't get the XO-1 as a gift for yourself or your kids.

In either case, you don't get to choose what country your charitable laptop goes to if you buy an individual unit, but if you donate 100 to 10,000 units or more, you get to choose where they go.

The OLPC XO-1 is already a game changer; that much is certain, with other laptop manufacturers and chip giants like Intel (with its Classmate PC), developing competing products.

What remains to be seen is whether either OLPC itself or its competitors can get the laptops into the hands of students worldwide. Like other game changers and version 1.0 products, mass adoption will be the key to the success of the "cheap educational laptop."

While the XO-1 is attractive and totally kid-friendly, it's ultimately up to the bureaucrats in the target countries to choose which platform to use.

Unfortunately for OLPC, lobbyists, marketing and PR agents cost money, and Intel has deep pockets. So Intel can still gain the edge, if it can get the Classmate PC laptop past the reference design and prototype stages.

I'd say this gives OLPC about 6 to 12 months to get the traction it needs to become established before the Classmate PC and its ubiquitous x86 technology catches up.

No matter who "wins" this phase of the computer wars, ultimately children in developing countries will start to be familiar and comfortable with the technology that industrialized countries enjoy.

Maybe then communication will become a dialogue, instead of a monologue directed from the rich nations to the poor. That will be something to see.

BOTTOM LINE: The XO-1 laptop by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a game-changer for disadvantaged children in developing countries. For a limited time you can benefit as well.

PROS: Uses very little energy to run. Preloaded with educational software. Wireless, with mesh networking. Flash-compatible browser preinstalled. Long-cycle LiFePO4 battery. Rugged construction. Easy to service.

CONS: Not compatible with store-bought Windows or Mac OS programs. Sluggish flash performance. Much less compelling for adults. Business model isn't consumer-oriented (shipping, customer support). You can't specify where your donated computer goes, unless you donate a lot. For experienced computer users, requires learning a new way of doing things. You must act before Dec. 31, 2007 if you want one for yourself.

COMPANY: One Laptop Per Child

SPEC DATA:

Price: $399.00
Type: Ultraportable, Value
Operating System: Fedora Core 7 Linux
Processor Name: AMD Geode LX700
Processor Speed: 433 MHz
RAM: 256 MB
Weight: 3.2 lb
Screen Size: 7.5 inches
Screen Size Type: standard
Graphics Card: Integrated
Storage Capacity: 1 GB
Networking Options: 802.11s

EDITOR RATING: Four out of five stars

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314802,00.html





One Laptop Per Child Orders Surge

Peru wants 260,000 machines; Mexican billionaire signs up
Hiawatha Bray

Despite slower-than-expected sales and tough competition from commercial rivals, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation of Cambridge is enjoying a surge of new orders.

Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who set up the foundation to provide low-cost laptops to poor schoolchildren around the globe, said in an interview yesterday that the government of Peru has signed a contract to purchase 260,000 of the $188 machines. "It was notarized five minutes ago," he said, adding that the Peruvian order will make it easier for the foundation to sign up more countries to the program. "It's momentum."

Negroponte also said Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has purchased 50,000 of the machines for distribution in his country. "He's an old friend, and he's been involved in this from the beginning," Negroponte said.

The nonprofit has designed its laptop to eventually cost less than $100 each. It hopes to persuade governments in developing countries to buy millions of the machines and hand them out free of charge as educational tools.

But foreign governments haven't placed as many orders as Negroponte expected when he launched the foundation in 2005. So OLPC has asked affluent American individuals and charitable groups to buy machines and donate them to children in poor countries. Participants in the Give One Get One program pay $400 for two of the machines - one for their own use and the other to be donated. Participants also receive a year of free wireless Internet access at hundreds of public hotspots operated by T-Mobile. A separate program, called Give Many, encourages charities to pay for hundreds or thousands of OLPC laptops.

Robert Fadel, the foundation's director of finance and operations, said both programs are paying off. Since the Give One Get One program began Nov. 12, the foundation has received about $2 million in orders every day, he said. That works out to 190,000 laptops total, with at least half donated to children in developing countries. Fadel said many customers end up donating both the computers they buy. Fadel didn't have numbers on how many machines have been sold through the Give Many system, but said the number runs into the thousands.

The surge in sales of the nonprofit's laptops comes as OLPC faces growing competition from commercial vendors of cheap laptops. Intel Corp. is pushing a rival computer called the Classmate, while Asus Computer International of Taiwan offers the Eee PC, designed for use in affluent nations such as the United States as well as in poor countries.

OLPC also has been hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit in Nigeria filed by Lagos Analysis Corp. of Natick. The suit claims the foundation stole the company's keyboard design. Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed.

The founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison. Oyegbola insists his Nigerian patent is legitimate and said he plans to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit against OLPC in an American court.

Computer industry analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland, a longtime skeptic of the OLPC plan, was impressed by the foundation's early sales. "I remain generally skeptical, but that's some good news," said Kay. "If you were a budding computer company, you'd be happy to sell 300,000 or so units in your first season."

But Kay still predicted trouble ahead for the foundation, unless it stops acting like a charity and more like a traditional computer business. "They have to survive on selling products, having satisfied customers, and having people come back for more," he said.

However, Negroponte said OLPC's nonprofit status is essential, as it enables the foundation to collaborate with leading technology companies in designing and building the laptop. He said many of the foundation's partners would not offer assistance if they viewed OLPC as a business rival rather than a charity.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn..._orders_surge/





Microsoft Wants One Laptop Per Child System to Run Windows XP
Paul McDougall

Microsoft has asked the designers of a low-cost Linux laptop intended for children in developing nations to redesign the system so it can accommodate its Windows XP operating system.

In a move sure to provoke controversy, Microsoft wants the designers of the XO laptop, available through a non-profit initiative called One Laptop Per Child, to add a port through which the storage capacity required by Windows XP can be added to the system.

The XO currently runs on a Red Hat Linux operating system. Making the laptop compatible with XP would give students in poor countries access to "tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows," said James Utzschneider, a Microsoft general manager, in a blog post Wednesday.

Utzschneider says a shrunken version of Windows XP could potentially run on 2 Gbytes of flash memory. The XO, however, can only hold 1 Gbyte. As a result, Microsoft wants the XO's designers to add a slot through which more memory can be added via a secure digital (SD) card, Utzschneider said.

"We asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 Gbytes of extra memory," Utzschneider wrote. It was not immediately clear if the OLPC has responded to Microsoft's request.

The OLPC project was launched in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The aim is to build industry support for the production of low cost laptops for poor children on the wrong side of the so-called "digital divide."

The group's first offering, the XO, runs on the Linux operating system and an Advanced Micro Devices processor and is priced at less than $200.

Last year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates chided the XO for its lack of functionality, insisting that the fact it requires a hand crank for power would make it difficult for children to use.

Microsoft's call for changes to the system that would add features but increase its price could provoke a backlash from OLPC purists who maintain that the XO must be produced at the lowest cost possible.

Microsoft's renewed interest in participating in OLPC might be viewed by skeptics as an admission that a rival offering for developing markets called Classmate -- which uses an Intel processor on Microsoft software -- has failed to catch on.

Virtually all major U.S. tech vendors are looking to emerging markets to drive the bulk of their sales growth in the 21st century, and are loathe to see rivals establish an early footprint.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it's planning "limited field trials" in January of an XO system running Windows XP.
http://itnews.com.au/News/66442,micr...indows-xp.aspx





Linux is About to Take Over the Low End of PCs
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Opinion -- Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue with a straight face that people can't get their work done on Linux-powered PCs. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, OpenSUSE, Xandros, Linspire Mint, the list goes on and on of desktop Linuxes that PC owner can use without knowing a thing about Linux's technical side. People can argue that Vista or Mac OS X is better, but when Michael Dell runs Ubuntu Linux on one of his own home systems, it can't be said that Linux isn't a real choice for anyone's desktop.

Another change occurred when Nicholas Negroponte proposed the so-called $100-laptop, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machine. He couldn't get them built for quite that price -- they cost about $200 -- but that's still remarkably cheap and they're available today.

Not long after OLPC was announced, Intel and other companies came up with their own take on an inexpensive PC: the Classmate PC. By 2007, it had become clear that you could build a laptop that was good enough to run desktop Linux for about $200.

That gave other hardware vendors an idea. If you could build a no-frills PCs that ran Linux, why not make sub-$500 computers with a bit more power and sell them to consumers? That's exactly what Asus did with its Xandros Linux-powered ASUS Eee UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC), which lists for about $400. At about the same time, Everex introduced its gOS TC2502 gPC. Available first only from Wal-Mart, these $199 desktop systems are also now also available from ZaReason, an open-source VAR.

And how are these sub $500 computers and laptops doing? Everex is building them as fast as it can and has announced that its forthcoming laptop version, the CloudBook, has already been picked up by a major U.S. reseller. At the same time, according to an unconfirmed report, ASUS is planning on selling 3.8 million Eees in its next fiscal year.

While all this has been going on, broadband Internet connectivity has become almost as easily available as cell phone coverage. It is a small town indeed where there's not some kind of free Wi-Fi available at a local coffee shop or library. You may have to pay for Wi-Fi at the airport or in your hotel, but Wi-Fi is almost always there. And, at home, well I'm living on a rural mountain overlooking a national forest and I have 3M-bps DSL coming in to my house.

Google has made billions from this simple fact. It's not just about search and ads anymore, though. Google has found that there's a big demand for its office Google Apps. And not just from home users; Capgemini, a multibillion dollar international consulting company, is using GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition) for one of its offices.

Four trends: user-friendly Linux desktops, useful under-$500 laptops and desktops, near-universal broadband, and business-ready Internet office applications. Put them together and you have a revolution.

For the last two decades, we've been buying expensive desktop operating systems on business PCs running from $1,000 to $2,000. On those systems, we've been putting pricey desktop-centric office suites like Microsoft Office. That's a lot of money, and the convergence of the above trends is about to knock it for a loop.

Here's the business case. You tell me if it's not compelling. You can buy 100 $500 PCs running a free version of Linux, hook them to a high-speed Internet connection for a $1,000 a year and use GAPE at $50 per user account per year. Finally, we'll throw in a grand for a Linux server. That's $57,000 for your equipment, your connectivity, your operating system and your applications.

Now, let's say you want to run Vista Business. First, you'll need 100 PCs that can run it. The cheapest deal I can find today for machines I'd consider adequate for Vista Business, which is to say they must have at least 2GB of RAM, is for the Dell OptiPlex 320 at $707 a PC. Of course -- unlike with Linux, which always includes an office suite, OpenOffice -- for those times when the Internet is down, you'll need to buy an office suite. If you went with Microsoft Standard 2007, with a little shopping you can get it for the upgrade price of about $200 per copy. So, on the PC side alone, we're looking at $90,700.

All done? Not quite. To get the most from Microsoft Office 2007, you really need to be operating it with a minimum of Microsoft Server 2003 ($4,994 base price plus 100 CALs (client access licenses)), Exchange 2007 ($7,399 base price plus 100 CALs) and SharePoint 2007 ($13,824 base price plus 100 standard CALS). If you're running Windows you probably already have Server, so we won't count it. Throw in another two grand for the Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 servers, and a grand for the Internet connection, and (insert sound of old-fashioned adding machine) the final total is $114,923.

So, by my calculations, all those trends have joined together to make a Linux-based small business using Google applications instead of Exchange and SharePoint cost less than half its Microsoft-based twin.

Worse still, if you're Microsoft, you can't really defend yourself. Linux desktops run just dandy on low-end, under-$500 PCs. Vista Basic, which comes the closest to being able to run on these systems, is unacceptable since it doesn't support business networking. Office 2007 also won't run worth a darn on these systems. And somehow, I can't see Microsoft optimizing its applications to work with Google Apps instead of Exchange and SharePoint.

Put it all together, and here's what I see happening. In the next few quarters, low-end Linux-based PCs are going to quickly take over the bottom rung of computing. Then, as businesses continue to get comfortable with SAAS (software as a service) and open-source software, the price benefits will start leading them toward switching to the new Linux/SAAS office model.

You'll see this really kick into gear once Vista Service Pack 1 appears and business customers start seriously looking at what it will cost to migrate to Vista. That Tiffany-level price tag will make all but the most Microsoft-centric businesses start considering the Linux/SAAS alternative.

Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html





Pout and Shout
Mireya Navarro

ALL is not well in MileyWorld.

Members of mileyworld.com, mostly preteen and young teenage girls devoted to the Disney TV show “Hannah Montana” and the show’s star, Miley Cyrus, are suing the singer’s official fan Web site for allegedly promising them first dibs on concert tickets and leaving them empty-handed.

“I really don’t want to be in the fan club anymore,” said one of the plaintiffs, Mia Piazza, a 9-year-old from Pittsburgh.

Over in the principality of Prince, subjects are also rebelling. Three fan Web sites have banded together as “Prince Fans United” to fight the music performer’s attempts to stop them from posting photos and other content related to him.

One of the sites declared: “We at prince.org will not stand for this and have joined forces with the other affected sites to tell our side of the story and stand up to what are, in our opinion, bullying tactics designed to silence freedom of speech.”

By definition, members of fan clubs are passionate, but these days they also seem cranky and some are even at war with the performers they supposedly slavishly admire. Fan clubs today are online communities that vent on Internet message boards and gripe directly to performers about everything, including song lists, merchandise and the prices and availability of tickets. And when sounding off is met by dead air, fans sue, complain to consumer protection agencies and even plot concerted action on a global scale.

"There’s all kinds of ways to be indignant," said Jerry M. Lewis, an emeritus professor of sociology at Kent State University, who studies fan behavior.

Ticket woes are a major source of anger. Average ticket prices for concerts keep rising, and many fans are priced out or forced to buy at exorbitant markups from brokers and other resellers. Last year, some Barbra Streisand fans were fuming when they learned she was staging her final concert tour — this after they had already paid steep prices for her previous, supposedly, last-ever tour in 2000. (The average ticket cost nearly $300, according to Pollstar, a concert trade magazine ).

But Streisand fans are not unique. When any hot concert tour is announced, some fans are already seething.

“The attitude is, “How am I going to get taken advantage of this time?’” said Tim McQuaid, the president of Fan Asylum, a company that manages fan clubs, ticket sales and V.I.P. packages for artists such as Maroon 5 and Whitney Houston.

Fans often join a performer’s “official” fan club for the specific benefit of having access to tickets before they go on sale to the general public. But some of the fan clubs have become suspect — serving mainly as a profit center, charging membership fees that can reach more than $100 and making even more money selling “exclusive” merchandise and other items.

Mr. McQuaid, who has been managing fan clubs since 1980, beginning with the band Journey, said when the mission shifts from an emphasis on service to one of revenue, “You’re just asking for trouble from the fan base.”

Some MileyWorld members want their membership money back. They are suing the two companies that run the club for the artist, Interactive Media Marketing and Smiley Miley, which is owned by Ms. Cyrus.

Although MileyWorld has benefits like exclusive “webisodes” of the singer backstage, contests, games and access to her “secret diary,” it was the offer “to do our best” to secure an allotment of concert tickets for members that persuaded Mia’s mother, Debbie Piazza, to let her daughter join the club for $29.95.

Ms. Piazza, 32, who works for U.S. Steel adjusting invoices, said she had joined fan sites for Kenny Chesney and Bon Jovi to buy concert tickets and was successful in both cases. But with MileyWorld, she said, she found no tickets even when she logged on to Ticketmaster at the exact time they went on sale.

In defense, Miss Cyrus’s representatives said that 70,000 of MileyWorld’s 200,000 members were able to buy tickets, and issued a public statement: “MileyWorld members had far greater access to concert tickets than the general public and other fan clubs. The claim that the vast majority of MileyWorld members were unable to obtain concert tickets is simply false. MileyWorld will vigorously defend itself from the frivolous claims in the lawsuit.”

Robert Peirce, the lawyer suing on behalf of members, said the site should have revealed the size of the membership at each concert location so that fans could have figured out their chances and made an informed decision about whether to fork over almost $30.

“I felt I was misled,” Ms. Piazza said. “All I want is my $30 back and I hope they put some kind of disclaimer so it doesn’t happen to somebody else again.”

Fans have long come together in another type of club — the free unofficial sites used to trade information about tickets and the artist. Most exist harmoniously with the official sites. But the informal sites can develop existences of their own, with members as loyal to each other as to the artist.

On their Web site, the leaders of Prince Fans United say they believe the performer is using copyright concerns to hide his real goal: “to stifle all critical commentary about Prince.”

Calls to AEG Live, the singer’s promoter, and to the Web Sheriff, the copyright enforcement company handling Prince’s cease-and-desist notices, were not returned. The fan sites, based in California and Europe, said they were negotiating a resolution and couldn’t comment on the dispute, but their message boards have not demonstrated noticeable new restraint.

As a fan wrote to prince.org: “The more I think about it, I say just drop him, remove all content, let him have his way. It’s obvious he doesn’t want us as fans anymore, so why should we want him?”

Ben Margolin, 36, a software engineering manager from Millbrae, Calif., said he became a founder of prince.org 10 years ago because “I really connected with his music.” But now the site functions more as an international social network where people discuss politics and other topics, he said.

“People stay for the community that’s evolved, the personalities and environment,” he said. “It’s a virtual hang-out.”

Andrea Baker, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University who specializes in online relationships and is studying two fan sites dedicated to the Rolling Stones, said that with communication comes the ability not only to swap intelligence but to complain collectively.

Ms. Baker said many fans are encouraged to gripe by the assumption that their favorite artists may be tuning in to their boards.

“There’s a closer connection between the fan and the performer,” she said. “Some of the assertiveness comes from their knowing they are being heard.”

Once all fans expected was an autographed picture, but now many demand blogs, MySpace pages and V.I.P access to the artist, some fan club managers say.

“Before, an artist could do a concert and disappear into the ether,” said Nathan Hubbard, the chief executive officer of Musictoday, a subsidiary of Live Nation that manages fan sites for 30 artists, including John Mayer, Celine Dion and the Rolling Stones. “Today fans expect you to be present and the connection doesn’t stop when the artist leaves the stage.”

Performers, he said, must be clear about what they will do. “If you underdeliver, the Internet gives everybody an equal voice.”

But almost anything can spark fan ire. A group of Clay Aiken fans fired off a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission last year accusing his record label of false advertising for promoting him as heterosexual. Mr. Aiken, who has faced relentless rumors that he is gay, does not talk about his sexuality. The F.T.C. has taken no action.

“People will complain about everything,” said Tim Bierman, the manager of Pearl Jam’s Ten Club, which is run in-house by the band. “We might hear a whole day’s worth of criticism about a particular shade of color for a T-shirt.”

But fan club managers say artists are aware that fan clubs are their most loyal audience and strive to reward them. The Ten Club offers members perks like an exclusive new single at Christmas.

And Ms. Baker said that despite all the griping, fans are still fans. When Keith Richards fell from a tree and was injured last year, she said, “there was an outpouring of concern” on boards. “The fans were very preoccupied with finding out every detail of what happened,” she said.

Even Ms. Piazza is trying to find tickets for Ms. Cyrus’s concert in Pittsburgh on Jan. 4, four days before her daughter Mia’s 10th birthday. She checks three or four times a day with Ticketmaster, hoping a corporate sponsor has released a batch of tickets. And she test-drove a car from a dealership in order to be eligible for a drawing for tickets.

Mia says the ticket snafu has not soured her on her favorite artist.

“No matter what, I’ll always be her fan,” she said. “I just love her music.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/fashion/02fans.html





As U.S. Pop Wanes Abroad, Talent Scout Looks Wide
Jeff Leeds

Leslie Feist, a former punk rocker from Calgary, Alberta, now known professionally as the indie torch singer Feist, recorded her 2004 album, “Let It Die,” in Paris. But if listeners detect any hint of French flavoring, she insisted, it is entirely imaginary.

“If I’d said, ‘Oh, I made my record in Istanbul,’ then everyone would be like, ‘We can hear the sweetened mint tea in small glass cups,’” she said. “Like, ‘We can just feel the hookah smoke running through the veins of the songs.’ People need a context to understand things through. In reality, I had no intention to stay in France. I was going to take this and go tour where it made sense.”

So it came as little surprise that Feist — whose cosmopolitan touch and offbeat voice are on display on her newest album, “The Reminder,” which many consider a contender for Grammy nominations on Thursday — drew the attention of Martin Kierszenbaum. Mr. Kierszenbaum, who is head of international operations for the record-industry heavyweight Interscope Records, signed Feist as the first artist to his own minilabel, Cherrytree Records.

Though Mr. Kierszenbaum devotes much of his energies to devising global marketing plans for big Interscope acts like Nelly Furtado and 50 Cent, with Cherrytree he has been quietly flirting with the boundaries, artistic and geographic, of mainstream pop by scouting performers from around the world and trying to establish them as stars far removed from their native countries.

In addition to Feist, for whom Cherrytree secured the domestic rights, Mr. Kierszenbaum, 40, is betting on acts including the Pipettes, a Ronettes-inspired British girl group that is percolating in Japan; and Flipsyde, a Latin-tinged rap collective from Oakland, Calif., with a hit in Germany. Next stop: Robyn, a Swedish pop singer who is making her return to the United States.

Mr. Kierszenbaum said such acts reflected his bent toward musicians who are “inside the pop tradition, but push the envelope.”

But he acknowledged that his choices also reflected a dramatic shift in global sales patterns. Though corporate-owned record labels continue to rely heavily on exports of English-speaking stars, mainly from the United States, the top sellers in many countries increasingly are albums released by homegrown acts.

Sales began shifting more than a decade ago. In 2000 roughly 68 percent of worldwide sales derived from so-called local repertory — artists working in their native country — up from 58 percent in 1991, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London. Though American stars like Beyoncé and the Red Hot Chili Peppers still connect with fans in territories around the world, the ranks and global appeal of major United States acts appear to be waning, many music executives say. In Spain, for instance, only one American album — the soundtrack to “High School Musical 2” — is in the most recent Top 10 chart.

The surge by foreign talent has arisen partly from the spread of state-of-the-art recording equipment and software, as well as the expansion of previously limited avenues for promotion. MTV, for example, has started more than 50 music-video channels customized for viewers in Europe, Asia and other regions. The decline of an American presence among acts abroad also stems from old-fashioned cultural differences: Genres that fed a domestic boom in the 1990s, including country music and certain strains of rap, do not sell as well overseas.

“There’s more of a nationalistic trend generally in all these countries — not just in music, but I think politically,” said Richard Griffiths, a former senior record-label executive who now runs the British talent management firm Modest Management. And repeated layoffs at the labels’ affiliates have weakened their ability to push acts imported from the United States. “It used to be they’d be breaking those huge artists in America, and then the word would go out, ‘You will break these around the world,’ and generally speaking, they did,” he said. “Mariah, Celine, Michael Jackson. Those days are obviously gone.”

Mr. Kierszenbaum, though, is counting on what he sees as the flip side to the trend: Emerging talent that appeals to fans in one international market can be marketed in another territory, and, potentially, the United States. “I just think that human beings aren’t that different when it comes to pop music,” he said. “I really believe that if something can resonate somewhere, it’s got a good chance of resonating elsewhere. You may have to tweak it, adapt it, change the approach, but it can work.”

The American-born son of two Argentine scientists, Mr. Kierszenbaum played in a band and a bilingual rap act, Maroon, in college, but broke into the music business 19 years ago as a clerk in the mailroom of PolyGram Music Group.

He was later hired as a publicist in the international division of A&M Records, where he worked with acts like Soundgarden and Sting, and eventually ran the department. But in 1999 layoffs swept the label after PolyGram, its parent company, was sold to the liquor giant Seagram and merged into that conglomerate’s Universal Music Group.

A handful of artists and employees, among them Mr. Kierszenbaum, were folded into Universal’s Interscope unit, which despite a roster of cutting-edge acts like Nine Inch Nails and Snoop Dogg, suffered from a lackluster international presence. So Mr. Kierszenbaum helped devise marketing strategies to export the label’s acts.

But Interscope’s chairman, Jimmy Iovine, also decided to test Mr. Kierszenbaum’s ear for new prospects and encouraged him to sign talent himself. One of his first discoveries — signed in a partnership with Universal’s Russian affiliate — was the Russian teenage girl duo t.A.T.u.

Mr. Kierszenbaum encouraged Universal’s arm in Japan to enlist a native performer to record a cover version of t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” in Japanese. That version was offered as a selection in karaoke bars — a crucial outlet for music discovery in Asia — as t.A.T.u.’s album, “200Km/H in the Wrong Lane,” was hitting record shops. The album became an international hit, selling roughly 1.7 million copies in Japan alone, he said.

Such successes prompted Mr. Iovine to agree in early 2005 to give Mr. Kierszenbaum his own imprint. “He’s eclectic,” Mr. Iovine said of Mr. Kierszenbaum’s discoveries for his label, “but most of the stuff is capable of hitting mass appeal. He’s very driven. Signing a Russian band and teaching them English? He’s picking up that lane.” So far, Feist has been Cherrytree’s biggest hit. “The Reminder,” her second album for the label, received an extra boost when a song was tapped for an iPod commercial, and has sold more than 370,000 copies domestically, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But not everything has translated. For instance, the Lovemakers, a raunchy electro-rock act from Oakland, did not attract much of an audience outside the Bay Area. The Fratellis, a Scottish rock band that released its debut album in the United States earlier this year, attracted some critical acclaim and exposure in an Apple advertisement, but topped out at a modest 129,000 copies.

In other cases, however, Mr. Kierszenbaum’s cross-continental viewpoint is showing signs of promise. There is strong buzz around Robyn, the Swedish singer who — after a short-lived pop hit in the United States a decade ago — is returning with a genre-bending album that has already topped the charts in her native country. Potential avenues for re-introducing her to American fans, Mr. Kierszenbaum said, might include featuring her as a guest vocalist on a hip-hop artist’s single.

And in Japan, the high-concept imagery of the Pipettes, who sport polka-dot outfits and retro, candy-coated melodies, has fueled brisk sales for their album, which was released there two months ago. The trio and one of its songs, “Because It’s Not Love,” are featured in a new music video, paid for by Panasonic, that doubles as a commercial.

Though the Pipettes are also trying to win fans in the United States, Mr. Kierszenbaum said he thought the trio had a better shot at connecting in Asia early on. The label has advanced money for three Pipettes tours in Japan on the theory that breaking there should come “first and easiest.”

“Nothing’s easy,” he added, “but it’s easier than trying to break the Pipettes in Iowa at the beginning. We’ve got to start a fire somewhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/ar...ic/05cher.html





Pay What You Want for This Article
Jon Pareles

SHORTLY after Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” online in October, the band misplaced its password for Max/MSP, a geek-oriented music software package that the guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, Mr. Greenwood said over a cup of tea at the venerable Randolph Hotel here. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP’s developers, Cycling ’74, for another password. “They wrote back,” Mr. Greenwood said, “‘Why don’t you pay us what you think it’s worth?’”

Well, Radiohead was asking for it. Those are the exact terms on which the band is selling the downloadable version of “In Rainbows”: Buyers can pay zero or whatever they please up to £99.99 (about $212) for the album in MP3 form. Sixteen years and seven albums into the career that has made Radiohead the most widely pondered band in rock, it is taking chances with its commerce as well as its art. For the beleaguered recording business Radiohead has put in motion the most audacious experiment in years.

Radiohead is not the first act to try what one of its managers, Chris Hufford, calls “virtual busking.” But it’s the first one that can easily fill arenas whenever it tours. “It feels good,” said Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, over a pint of hard cider at his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. “It was a way of letting everybody judge for themselves.”

Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose gambit didn’t just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the superstar free agent. After fulfilling its contract in 2003 with its last album for EMI, “Hail to the Thief,” Radiohead turned down multimillion-dollar offers for a new major-label deal, preferring to stay independent.

“It was tough to do anything else,” Mr. Yorke said during Radiohead’s first extensive interviews since the release of the album. “The worst-case scenario would have been: Sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la.”

Signing a new major-label contract “would have killed us straight off,” he added. “Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, it’s tempting to have someone say to you, ‘You will never have to worry about money ever again,’ but no matter how much money someone gives you — what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.”

The Eagles and Madonna, both with sales that dwarf Radiohead’s, also abandoned major labels in 2007, as did songwriters as influential as Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, who moved to Hear Music, the independent label partly owned by Starbucks. Meanwhile Prince has followed his own wayward path, from one-album distribution deals through major labels to giving away CDs at concerts or, lately, bound into a British Sunday paper.

The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the Internet. Of course that has been anything but sudden. Music has been bouncing around online, sold or shared, since the days of dial-up, and bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy gave away full albums online years ago. But the momentum of online music has been accelerating. Apple’s iTunes became the third-largest music retailer in the United States this year. Amazon added MP3 downloads alongside physical album sales. Hip-hop mixtapes, singled out for copyright prosecution by record labels, disappeared from stores and street corners only to thrive online, where the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam’ron and Kanye West release their latest innovations.

And Radiohead was able to draw worldwide attention to “In Rainbows” with no more promotion than a modest 24-word announcement on its Web site on Oct. 1. To the band’s glee, it could release its music almost immediately, without the months of lead time necessary to manufacture discs. Mr. Hufford said “In Rainbows” has been downloaded in places as far-flung — and largely unwired — as North Korea and Afghanistan.

On Nov. 9, as a kind of workaholic lark, Radiohead staged a free, thoroughly informal Webcast called “Thumbs Down,” with real-time performances of new songs and covers of Bjork and the Smiths, from its cluttered studio in Oxford. (Many clips are on YouTube.)

Yet Radiohead’s online choices, band members said, were among the easier decisions made during the protracted recording process of “In Rainbows.” The band and its producer, Nigel Godrich, focused on 16 songs and worked them over in the studio, on the road and in the studio again, for well over two years of torturous rearranging and rewriting.

“We kept on ripping the guts out of it all the time and starting again,” the drummer Phil Selway said in Oxford.

The band chose 10 concise, tuneful songs for the album. In them Mr. Yorke sings about displacement, disorientation, memories and moving on. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” wonders “Why should I stay here?,” imagines decomposing underwater and being eaten by worms, then concludes, “Hit the bottom and escape.”

Throughout “In Rainbows” Mr. Yorke’s lyrics can be mapped onto personal relationships, the state of the world or the state of the band.

Behind much of the album “was a sudden realization of the day-t0-day, tenuous nature of life,” Mr. Yorke said. “Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That’s all.”

The Internet had already witnessed much of the gestation of “In Rainbows,” as Radiohead tested songs in public, knowing they would be bootlegged immediately. “The first time we ever did ‘All I Need,’ boom! It was up on YouTube,” Mr. Yorke said. “I think it’s fantastic. The instant you finish something, you’re really excited about it, you’re really proud of it, you hope someone’s heard it, and then, by God, they have. It’s O.K. because it’s on a phone or a video recorder. It’s a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that’s good. At that stage that’s all you need to worry about.”

The band worried over other things. After releasing “Hail to the Thief” and touring the world, Radiohead took a year off. The members, all in their 30s, turned to raising families as they mulled over the future. Early in 2005 they began rehearsing together tentatively, although, Mr. Selway said, mentioning the word “album” was taboo for a year. They had a list of songs, most of which would appear two years later on “In Rainbows,” by September.

But as 2005 ended, Radiohead still had not regained its momentum. Mr. Yorke, a prolific songwriter, made his own album, “The Eraser,” working mostly alone with his computer and samples.

Mr. Godrich was busy recording Beck, so the band tried some sessions with Spike Stent, who had worked with Bjork, at the beginning of 2006. It was disappointed with the results. Then it decided that performing might put the songs into shape. It booked a summer tour in 2006, playing half a dozen new songs at every show. Soon, thanks to bootlegged recordings online, fans were clearly recognizing each one. After the tour Radiohead returned to the studio, only to decide that the songs weren’t ready yet.

“To be brutally honest,” the guitarist Ed O’Brien said over lunch at Shoreditch House in London, “the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death. It just didn’t happen when we got back into the studio initially.”

Once again the band began tinkering. “We have a song and we’ve got lots of different ways we can try it, but we don’t know what’s going to work, and that’s why it still sort of feels a bit weirdly amateur,” Mr. Greenwood said. “You’d think by now we’d know what’s going to work, and what’s still frustrating, or kind of encouraging in a way, is that we don’t know whether it’s going to work on a laptop or whether it has to be a piano or. ...”

He half-smiled. “It’s got so twisted,” he added. “What we’ve learned is that you can’t repeat a method that you’ve already used for a song when it did work.”

The sound of “In Rainbows” often seems straightforward, almost like a live band; it is Radiohead’s most gracefully melodic album in a decade. But Radiohead arrived at the music circuitously, and there’s often more tucked into a track than is apparent at first. “Videotape,” with lyrics about recording a happy moment in a tape to be viewed posthumously, has a tolling piano and a beat so elusive that “we spent about a year in rehearsal on that song actually all trying to agree on where the one was,” Mr. Selway said. “Each of us, over the course of a year, we’d all lose it.”

The “Reckoner” that was part of the band’s live sets sounds nothing like the “Reckoner” on the album, which includes the lyrics “in rainbows.” When the band returned from touring, it decided the song needed a second part, and then a third one; eventually it discarded the original. For “All I Need,” Mr. Greenwood said, he wanted to recapture the white noise generated by a band playing loudly in a room, when “all this chaos kicks up.” That sound never materializes in the more analytical confines of a studio. His solution was to have a string section, and his own overdubbed violas, sustaining every note of the scale, blanketing the frequencies.

Mr. Yorke worked on many of the songs in the Rose and Crown. “I sit there, on the way in, because it’s a really nice little table,” he said, pointing. “And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they’re just scraps of paper, and I’m going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don’t know yet. I’m just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn’t know.”

The band and its managers are not releasing the download’s sales figures or average price, and may never do so. “It’s our linen,” Mr. Hufford said. “We don’t want to wash it in public.” A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of worldwide downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid an average of $6.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was $2.26. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead Web site, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 percent of an album’s wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead’s advantage — not to mention the worldwide publicity.

Both Mr. Hufford and the members of Radiohead said the strategy had been a success. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Mr. Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”

“This was a solution to a series of issues,” Mr. Hufford added. “I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”

Radiohead has not abandoned the physical disc. A mail-order deluxe version of “In Rainbows” — the album and a bonus CD, two vinyl albums, artwork and a fancy package for $80 — went on sale alongside the downloaded version on Oct. 10, directly from the band’s own mail-order merchandising company, W.A.S.T.E., and was shipped to the first buyers last week.

Mr. Hufford said that he and Bryce Edge, Radiohead’s other manager, had come up with the pay-what-you-want plan during a stoned philosophical conversation about the value of music. They had initially proposed releasing only the download and the deluxe box, but the band overruled them, noting that many of its fans are neither downloaders nor elite collectors. On Jan. 1 — a day when few albums are usually released — the single-disc “In Rainbows” is due as a retail CD and vinyl LP, in joint ventures with the independent labels TBD (part of ATO Records, partly owned by Dave Matthews) in the United States and XL in most other countries.

Will Botwin, the president and chief executive of ATO Records Group, optimistically described the download as “the world’s largest listening party,” drawing attention to the album among Radiohead’s core fans. The label plans to market to a broader audience with everything from television advertisements to in-store displays. Radio stations have already been sent the bruising rocker “Bodysnatchers” — a song, Mr. Yorke said, inspired by Victorian ghost stories, “The Stepford Wives” and his own feeling of “your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else” — and the tense folk-rocker “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

The music business awaits results on how the worldwide downloads of “In Rainbows” will affect disc sales. “The record company doesn’t know,” said a grinning Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist, over tea in London. “They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?” For Radiohead, uncertainty is home turf.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/ar...ic/09pare.html





Radiohead To End In Rainbows Download
FMQB

Radiohead have announced on their "Dead Air Space" blog that the In Rainbows "it's up to you" download option will be taken down as of December 10. The band writes, "A big thank you to everyone who came and downloaded the music. It’s been the most positive thing we’ve done and we hope you shared the experience with others."

The limited edition "discbox" edition of In Rainbows will be available via the band's online store until they run out. They add that there are no plans to make any more discboxes once they are all sold. U.K. fans began receiving the expanded, deluxe sets in the mail this week.

In Rainbows will be released on CD and vinyl via TBD Records/ATO Records in the U.S. on January 1 and overseas on XL Recordings on December 31.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=526369





Press release

A PROPOSAL FOR THE MONETIZATION OF THE FILE SHARING OF MUSIC FROM THE SONGWRITERS AND RECORDING ARTISTS OF CANADA

Summary of proposal:

Most Canadians are aware that the Internet and mobile phone networks have become major sources of music. What they may not know is that songwriters and performers typically receive no compensation of any kind when their music is shared or illegally downloaded.

We believe the time has come to put in place a reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation for creators of music in regard to this popular and growing use of their work.

The plan we propose would not change or interfere with the way Canadians receive their music. No one would be sued for the online sharing of songs. On the contrary, the sharing of music on Peer-to-Peer networks and similar technologies would become perfectly legal. In addition, Music Publishers and Record Labels would be fairly compensated for the crucial role they play in supporting Canadian music creators.

Canada has given the world some of the greatest music ever produced. We believe that implementing a fair way of compensating Canada’s music creators for the online sharing of their music will usher in a new Golden Age of creativity.


DETAILS OF PROPOSAL

1. Whereas:
An estimated 1.6 billion music files are shared online in Canada each year. 1
The total number of purchased downloads in Canada was 38 million in 2005. 2
The proportion between these two is 98 to 2 – 98% shared file and 2% purchased downloads.

We Therefore Believe:
Consumers have clearly demonstrated their wish to access music by file sharing.

2. Whereas:
Virtually every song ever recorded is available through P2P file sharing 3 (more than 79 million recordings) 4
Only 3 million songs are available on legal sites. 5

We Therefore Believe:File sharing is both a revolution in music distribution and a very positive phenomenon. The volunteer efforts of millions of music fans creates a much greater choice of repertoire for consumers while allowing songs - both new and old, well known and obscure - to be heard.

All that’s needed to fulfill this revolution in distribution is a way for Creators and rights holders to be paid.


OUR PROPOSAL

3. We propose an amendment to the Copyright Act which would establish a new right: The Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing.

4. We define Music File Sharing as the sharing of a copy of a copyrighted musical work without motive of financial gain.

Since the new right is limited to activities that take place without motive of financial gain, parties who receive compensation for file sharing would not be covered by this right. Therefore, this new right is distinct from rights licensed by legal music sites like iTunes and PureTracks.

5. The new right would make it legal to share music between two or more parties, whether over Peer to Peer networks, wireless networks, email, CD, DVD, hard drives etc. Distinct from private copying, this new right would authorize the sharing of music with other individuals.

6. In exchange for this sharing of their work, Creators and rights holders would be entitled to receive a monthly license fee from each internet and wireless account in Canada.

7. We propose a licence fee of $5.00 per internet subscription, per month. Payment of this fee would remove the stigma of illegality from file sharing. In addition, it would represent excellent value to the consumer, since this fee would grant access to the majority of the world’s repertoire of music. Existing download subscription services generally charge considerably more than $5.00 per month, while offering a mere fraction of the file-sharing repertoire. 6

8. In addition, this would present a major financial improvement for the music industry. Since the license fee would be paid by all internet and wireless accounts, the amount of income generated annually could adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues, and would dramatically enhance current legal digital music income. Sales of physical product would continue to earn substantial amounts, albeit gradually decreasing. Masters would continue to be licensed to movies and television. Radio would continue to sell advertising and pay royalties on music. 7

We believe strongly that by giving Canadian music Creators a solid business model for the 21st century, this endeavor would initiate a golden era for music in Canada. Ultimately, we see this model being adopted internationally, and we are working with Creators groups around the world to effect a global system of remuneration for the sharing of music files.

9. Existing music sites like iTunes and PureTracks would continue to be licenced directly by Creators and rights holders and would continue to develop the attractive “value added” services and security features that keep them distinct from file sharing activities.

10. The collective would track internet and wireless file sharing activity on a census basis. Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. Companies who currently do this type of tracking have prepared themselves and are “waiting in the wings”. Creators and rights holders will be paid with a level of speed and accuracy never before possible.

11. CANADIAN COPYRIGHT AND LEGISLATIVE ISSUES
Regarding WIPO implementation, we are not opposed to the legal protection of Technical Protection Measures (TPM) or “digital locks”, however we believe the obvious economic benefits of the $5.00 per month model make such protection measures obsolete. Given the consumer aversion to TPM’s, we believe their use will inhibit the success of recordings in which they are embedded, and they will simply fall out of use.

We support Rights Management Information (RMI) protection since RMIs will assist in the identification of files and the attribution of rights without posing any problems for consumers.

The Songwriters and Recording Artists of Canada are in the process of consultation with the broader music industry, as well as consumer groups and Internet Service Providers, in order to gather support both in Canada and internationally for this proposal. We look forward to discussions with all concerned to make this proposal a reality that will be of great benefit to all.
http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php





Writers See Little Progress in Talks
Lynn Elber

The West Coast head of the striking writers guild is calling on producers to break ranks with the studio alliance he said is allowing "hard-liners" to obstruct negotiations.

"If any of these companies want to come forward and bargain with us individually, we think we can make a deal," Patric Verrone, head of the Writers Guild of America West, told The Associated Press on Monday while talking to picketing writers at NBC's studio in Burbank.

Verrone criticized the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios.

Talks were set to resume Tuesday after the alliance made a new proposal Thursday regarding compensation for work shown on the Internet, a central issue in negotiations. Verrone declined to provide details about the talks.

"I don't really feel like they're negotiating, and part of how they operate is the AMPTP allows bottom-line hard-liners to rule the day," Verrone said.

The alliance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The alliance's offer calls for writers to accept a flat fee of about $250 for a year's reuse of an hour-long program shown on the Internet. The guild is seeking a percentage of gross revenues for new-media distribution.

A Wall Street analyst said that if the strike continues into next year, it will begin to affect the first- and second-quarter outlooks for the TV divisions of media conglomerates.

The strike could cost CBS, ABC and Fox a combined $300 million, according to a report from Alan Gould, senior analyst with New York-based Natixis Bleichroeder. The report did not mention NBC.

Gould said he was warning clients that, given the complexity of the issues, the strike might not end quickly.

Fallout from the labor dispute has been growing. NBC had agreed to pay the staff of "The Tonight Show" for two weeks, then extended that for another two weeks before announcing layoffs Friday.

The workers will be paid at least through this week, courtesy of host Jay Leno. With Leno honoring picket lines, "Tonight" has been in reruns since the strike began Nov. 5.

He agreed to cover the salaries of about 80 non-writing staff members of the top-rated late-night talk show, an NBC executive said.

Leno will reassess the situation week by week, depending on what happens with the contract talks, said the executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person lacked authorization to comment publicly.

The comedian also gave out his Christmas checks to staff members earlier than usual. Some unidentified workers were quoted in trade publications complaining the gifts were smaller than in years past.

Dick Guttman, Leno's publicist, said the host has routinely given out millions in anniversary celebration bonuses as well as holiday gifts.

"There is a reason he's viewed as a good guy," Guttman said.

Last month, staffers with "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" on CBS were promised continued payment at least through December by Letterman, whose production company, Worldwide Pants, owns both shows. Those programs are in reruns as well.

Conan O'Brien had promised to cover the salaries of about 75 non-striking "Late Night" staffers out of his own pocket.

The only late-night show to resume production so far has been NBC's "Last Call With Carson Daly."

The NBC programs are owned by Universal Media Studios, which, like the network, is owned by General Electric Co. ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co., while Fox is a unit of News Corp.

------

Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles contributed to this report for The Associated Press.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8TABIA80.htm





Late-Night Hosts Calculate Their Losses
Bill Carter

Few of the hosts of television’s late-night entertainment shows are turning up in their offices these days, because there’s nothing for them to do.

The strike by the Writers Guild has shut down television’s favorite late-night shows, leaving the hosts to spend their days calling around to their agents and friends to check out the latest rumors — and their financial advisors to determine how much the strike is costing them.

It is not only lost income that now has to be factored into those financial assessments. For at least four of the eight hosts who have stayed off the air, the strike has become a serious financial drain, because they have stepped in to pay the salaries of their non-writing staff members, who otherwise would be laid off while the strike lasts.

David Letterman of CBS’s “Late Show” (who has to pay for two CBS shows, since his company, Worldwide Pants, also owns the “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”), Conan O’Brien of NBC’s “Late Night,” Jay Leno of NBC’s “Tonight,” and most recently Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” have all committed to pay their staff out of their own funds. At least for the moment.

Estimates of what it is costing each host range from about $150,000 a week to as high as $250,000 a week, depending on the size of the staffs.

(Two other late-night stars, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have so far been spared, because the cable network that airs their programs, Comedy Central, has picked up the tab — and the channel said this week that it would probably keep picking up the tab at least through next week.)

The financial impact on the networks that broadcast the shows has been largely muted so far. Ratings generally have been down. Among viewers 18-49 years old, Mr. Leno was down 19 per cent and Mr. O’Brien, 14 per cent but Mr. Letterman was actually up 4 per cent over the past few weeks, according to Nielsen estimates. But one show representative said CBS and NBC were both saving more than $1 million a week in costs for Mr. Leno’s and Mr. Letterman’s shows, and still were taking in significant revenue from advertisers for the repeats that have been running.

A crunch may come for the networks, the representative said, if the strike is prolonged and the shows return to diminished ratings. Then a network might have to lower ad rates for future editions of the shows.

The same show representative said that, so far, the networks have been applying only moderate pressure to get back on the air. “They understand the situation these guys are in, that they want to be good guys to both their writers and their staffs,” the representative said.

The question the hosts are struggling with is how long they can continue to stay off the air and subsidize their staffs, and what happens when they decide they can’t do it anymore.

None of the late-night hosts has yet made a move to return to the air, and according to representatives of several hosts, none is likely to do so as long as negotiations to end the strike continue.

“We all want the strike to end with good news for everybody,” one show representative said.

Those talks resumed Tuesday, but no particular movement has been reported yet by either side.

The writers went on strike on Nov. 5, after three months of negotiations failed to bridge the differences between the producers and the 12,000 writers represented by the Writers Guild West and Writers Guild East. The main stumbling block was how much writers would be compensated for their work delivered over the Internet and through other new media.

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.

The hosts are facing a dilemma that could come if the talks were to break down. The hosts, all of whom are members of the Writers Guild themselves, have made it clear that they are seriously reluctant to go against their writers, whose cause they all support. But faced with the prospect of a prolonged strike, representatives of several the late-night hosts say they would at least contemplate the wrenching decision to go back to work.

“If the talks fail, we’d consider it,” said one late-night show representative. Like all the others, the representative asked not to be identified so as not to alienate the writers, who have made it clear they will respond critically to any host who does return to the air before a settlement of the strike. “There’s obviously going to be a limit to how long the hosts can continue to pay out of their own pockets to keep their staff together,” the late-night representative said.

That limit could vary greatly from host to host. Mr. Letterman is the best paid among them, making about $35 million a year. Some of the other hosts are making single-digit millions — still a lot of money, but obviously not enough to pay out hundreds of thousands a week indefinitely, especially while the hosts themselves are going without pay during the strike. Mr. Letterman announced to his staff that his company would write checks for them at least through Jan. 7; but one company representative said that did not mean that the host would not return to the air before then.

Mr. Letterman, who originally was cited as the most likely star to lead a return to the air, given his seniority as a late-night host, is said by some of those close to him to be especially reluctant to be the first host back. In the 1988 writers’ strike Johnny Carson, then the longest-tenured host, was the first to return, and Mr. Letterman followed his lead.

“Even if one of the others breaks,” said one of Mr. Letterman’s representatives, “I don’t think Dave will go back right away.”

A different host was wavering a bit more, largely out of concern about staff members who have no stake in the strike, everyone from segment producers to office assistants. This host, who also requested anonymity so as not to offend his writers, noted that some writers for films or prime-time television shows have been allowed to perform non-writing duties during the strike, like directing or acting, without protest from the Guild. He asked why hosts who did no writing and only did interviewing would face criticism. He also said he was unhappy with the hostility that the strike had unleashed because, like most of the hosts, he counted his writers as good friends.

Two hosts of similar-style shows who have returned to the air already, Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly, have been assailed by the writers for doing so.

Ms. DeGeneres argued that her syndication contract requires her to deliver shows to the stations that have purchased it, and that she was contractually obligated to go back to work. Mr. Daly is not a Guild member, though his show employs Guild writers.

Sherry Goldman, a spokeswoman for the Writers Guild East, said of Ms. DeGeneres, who abandoned a plan to do a week of shows in New York after learning that picketers would greet her, “We kept her out of New York.”

And of Mr. Daly, Ms. Goldman said, “We think he should have supported his writers. When he went back, he was picketed and harassed.”

That is exactly the kind of treatment many of the late-night hosts expect would happen to any of them — with some reason. “I can’t say we would be happy if any of them went back,” Ms. Goldman said. “If they go back, they are going to be prolonging the strike.”

They also might have some trouble finding guests to interview. “All the publicists are telling us their stars won’t cross a picket line,” a show representative said. “It’s going to be tough booking people.”

Another show representative said the shows would have to get creative, looking to guests like book authors or fashion models and other celebrities. “I don’t think we’d get many movie stars,” the representative said.

Ms. DeGeneres has encountered some similar problems. Her recent guests have included Jenna Bush and Paris Hilton, though she has also scheduled one significant movie star, Keira Knightley. On Mr. Daly’s return show on Monday night, his lead guest was a women’s-underwear model.

But the second show representative said, “We’ll work it out if we have to.”

Timing may be a factor. In 1988, Mr. Carson, who paid staff members from his own pocket during the strike, went back on the air after five months. He was not generally vilified. Ms. Goldman said, “That was a different time.”

She applauded the late-night hosts who have seen to it that nonwriting staff members continue to be paid. “It’s lovely,” she said. “We appreciate what they’re doing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/bu...d-late.html?hp





NBC to Pay for Blocks of Programs
Bill Carter

NBC has made an ambitious deal, apparently the first of its kind, to buy a two-hour — or perhaps even three-hour — block of prime-time programming from outside producers, including Thom Beers, the creator of adventure documentary series like “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers.”

Under the plan, NBC has agreed to broadcast at least two new hours produced by Mr. Beers back to back on a single night, with many more hours possible. The terms guarantee Mr. Beers and his partners 30 hours of programs on NBC — three separate 10-episode series.

These 30 hours would come at a fraction of the cost of standard network scripted or reality programming, a factor that made the deal attractive to NBC.

The project is not related to the current strike by Hollywood writers but the background forces are somewhat similar as networks struggle to revise their financial formulas to face a future of diminishing ratings and growing uncertainties about how the Internet will figure in viewers’ choices. The programs, which are all documentary in style, would not have staff writers.

The principals in the arrangement are prominent television names, Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, both former top network programmers, who created a production company that has what is known as a “first look” deal that gives NBC the first crack at buying their productions. Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun contracted with Mr. Beers to create the shows and then went to NBC to pitch the idea of filling an entire night — or at least two-thirds of it — with real-life action.

The idea for mounting a block of shows that would play together on a night started with conversations Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun had with NBC’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, this year. The discussions centered on the way the broadcast networks have generally abandoned Saturday night, filling it with repeats because ratings on that night have been too low to sustain the high costs of original programs.

Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun suggested that a new form of lower-cost programming, perhaps as an entire three-hour block of shows. The producers were already fans of Mr. Beers’s shows. “It’s just about all I watch,” said Mr. Braun.

He declined to describe the specifics of the deal. But participants on both sides described its main elements, on condition that they not be identified because they had not been authorized to discuss specific terms. “It certainly has the potential to dramatically change the network economics of a given night,” Mr. Braun said.

In the past, networks have contracted with outside producers to assemble a slate of Saturday morning children’s programming— mostly cartoons— but networks have not commissioned outsiders previously to fill a block of prime-time programming.

The chief economic benefit of programs from Mr. Beers is that they are strikingly cheap to produce by network standards. Shows like “Ice Road Truckers” cost about well under $500,000 an hour, a modest figure next to a typical cost of about $3 million for an hourlong scripted network series. Conventional network reality shows are also much more expensive at $1.5 million to $2 million an hour. The producers will will split ownership with NBC, giving the network control of domestic rights and the producers the international rights.

After contracting with Mr. Beers to produce the shows, Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun met with NBC executives and pitched a roster of 10 potential series. The participants in the deal said that the NBC executives most involved were the two co-chairmen of the network’s entertainment division, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, both of whom were described as enthusiastic supporters of the idea. Neither would comment on the deal yesterday.

The original plan was to place the shows on Saturday night, the participants said — perhaps under an overall title, like “Saturday Night on the Edge.” But NBC declined to commit to Saturday for the shows, seeking to retain discretion on when to broadcast them. So the program block may be shown on any night — and at the moment Saturday is not the choice, one participant said. The contract commits NBC to run as at least a two-hour block, however.

NBC retained the right to cancel one or more of the linked shows if they perform below a certain ratings threshold; but it may not break up the block for any other reason — if it did, it would open the shows up to moving to another network, the participants said.

“Deadliest Catch,” which is shown on the Discovery Channel, and “Ice Road Truckers,” on the History Channel, have become among the most popular programs on cable television. The finale of “Ice Road Truckers” attracted close to 5 million viewers. Mr. Beers, a former producer at Turner Broadcasting and Paramount’s syndicated division, started his own company, Original Productions, in 1999, with a heavy emphasis on motorcycle shows and documentaries like “Plastic Surgery: Before and After” and “Ballroom Bootcamp.” The company’s signature hit was “Monster Garage,” in which a standard car was “monsterized” into another kind of machine.

The shows Mr. Beers and his partners are planning for NBC would not be ready to serve as fill-ins during the strike because they are unlikely to be seen until the third quarter of 2008. Mr. Beers uses real people in real situations in extreme locations like the Arctic. Shows set there have to be shot in warmer months, for example.

By the time the shows do get on the air, at least three of them will be finished shooting. Two will go on in the initial block with the third ready to replace any that might fall short in ratings, the participants said.

At the same time, NBC agreed to pay for several other ideas pitched by Mr. Beers to be turned into pilots. But these will be unlike any other pilots NBC makes, the participants in the deal said.

Instead of shooting hourlong pilot episodes, NBC plans to have Mr. Beers shoot 5- to 10-minute films on some topic that can then be tried out as reports on the network’s “Today” show or “Dateline” newsmagazine show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu.../03nbc.html?hp





Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape
Denise Caruso

INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.

And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.

According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.

The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs.

“What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”

A market that size provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.

Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands, for example, have both developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.

ON does not distribute any traditional TV shows. Instead, it works with professional content creators who develop original programs in HDTV. So far, it has produced hundreds of episodes for 25 programs, all of which are available at the ON Web site, as well as through iTunes and AT&T, its distribution partners. They include a dating show, produced in partnership with NBC, and a home-building show called “Mainstream Green.”

Blip Networks, based in New York, is another company working to create its own established brands, providing thousands of short-form videos from all comers. In addition to one-off documentaries like “Gotham Girls Roller Derby,” Blip’s library includes weekly news satires like “Goodnight Burbank,” which drew favorable notice from several mainstream media outlets, including USA Today and The Los Angeles Times.

Blip syndicates its programming to America Online, Yahoo, Google, iTunes, Facebook and other big Web distributors. Vuze, Joost, Blip and ON all share as much as 50 percent of their revenue with the content producers, regardless of distribution medium. “If that model existed today, writers wouldn’t be on strike,” said Mr. McClanahan.

René Pinnell, the director of “Backpack Picnic,” a popular sketch comedy show that came to ON after the troupe produced two pilots that were never shown by MTV, said the online environment is a “really good deal” for many reasons.

“The biggest one is that it allows us a tremendous amount of creative freedom we wouldn’t get in a more traditional media environment,” he said. “The investment is low for them — nowhere near the $500,000 a network will spend on one episode. They can afford to trust us.”

For its part, Hulu of Los Angeles has turned a traditional TV library into a promotional vehicle for, well, more TV. The joint venture between NBC Universal and the News Corporation offers scores of popular prime-time shows from all the major networks and channels, as well as past hits like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Because people can watch TV shows when and where they want, they can sample a lot more shows,” said Jason Kilar, chief executive of Hulu.

As a means to that end, Hulu may have persuaded the industry to relax a bit. Hulu’s player allows viewers to create short video clips from the shows they watch and put them in e-mail messages or on Web sites, including blogs, an activity that in the past has drawn nasty letters from copyright lawyers. “This is a key way that we can make sure the content finds the audience,” said Mr. Kilar.

But what happens to the television industry when the traditional way for content to find its audience becomes obsolete?

“There’s a lot of rewriting of the concept of windows in the TV network world today — the timing of when and where shows appear,” said Allen Weiner, the managing vice president for media and consumer technologies for the Gartner Group in Scottsdale, Ariz.

In the old days, after something appeared on TV, its release to other distribution channels was carefully staged — from the timing of reruns to the DVD release to when it would be available on-demand. “We’re seeing all kinds of new windows occurring, and no one knows what the magic formula will be,” he said. “A lot depends on advertiser reaction and on user behavior.”

One closely watched approach is the new online series “Quarterlife,” by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who produced “My So-Called Life.” Episodes first appear on MySpace TV, then are available the next day on Quarterlife.com, and a week later on YouTube, Facebook and Imeem. There is talk that they may even appear later on network TV — but as the last window, rather than the first.

As far as ON is concerned, Mr. McClanahan intends to put his programs in every single window he can find. Unlike other companies, ON optimizes all its shows for viewing on any video-capable device, a feature he calls “lifestyle distribution.”

That’s why he has deals with partners like iTunes and AT&T’s Television, Broadband and Wireless Services, both of which can deliver video programs to multiple devices, from plasma TVs to computer screens and cellphones.

“You can’t expect to control consumers and force them to come to prime time at 7 p.m. on a Monday night,” said Mr. McClanahan. “If the consumer wants it on their phone at 3 p.m. while they’re on the golf course, then that’s where we have to deliver it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02frame.html





YouTube Breeding Ground for Anti-Vaccination Views

Press release

As cold and flu season hits this year amid growing debate over the necessity of vaccinations, University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in related videos on YouTube.

In the first-ever study of its kind, U of T researchers Dr. Kumanan Wilson and Dr. Jennifer Keelan analyzed 153 videos about vaccination and immunization on YouTube, a popular online video-sharing site. Researchers found that more than half of the videos portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. Of those videos, a staggering 45 per cent contained messages that contradict the 2006 Canadian Immunization Guide, which provides national guidelines for immunization practices. The Canadian recommendations are similar to guidelines from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination,” says first author Keelan, an assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Public Health Sciences. “Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.”

The research team also found that videos skeptical of vaccinations – many of them highly provocative and powerful – received more views and better ratings by YouTube users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light.

“Health care professionals need to be aware that individuals critical of immunization are using YouTube to communicate their viewpoints and that patients may be obtaining information from these videos” says Wilson, senior author and an associate professor with U of T’s Department of Medicine. “YouTube users also need to be aware of this, so they can filter information from the site accordingly.”

“The findings also indicate that public health officials should consider how to effectively communicate their viewpoints through Internet video portals,” Wilson says.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ybg120507.php





Is Macrovision Bringing More Cops to Your Living Room?
Saul Hansell

Macrovision’s business is mainly about what you can’t watch and listen to. Its main products have been producing methods to prevent people from copying audio and video programs.

Today, Macrovision agreed to buy a company that has been at the center of telling you what you should watch: Gemstar TV Guide.

Dealbook has the details of the $2.8 billion deal, which was prompted in part by agitation by Citadel Investment Group, the large hedge fund run by Kenneth C. Griffin.

Citadel is a large Gemstar shareholder. The largest holder is the News Corp., which merged its TV Guide unit with Gemstar in 2000, as a way to resolve a brewing patent battle over electronic program guides on cable set top boxes.

That deal of course was a mess. The government accused Gemstar of inflating its revenue by at least $223 million. The company paid $10 million to settle the charges in 2004, and last year its former chief executive was fined $61 million dollars for his role in the affair. In the mean time, the TV Guide magazine has deteriorated and the electronic program guide business didn’t turn out to be the huge generator of advertising revenue that it had hoped.

The agreement announced today may be a graceful way out of a bad deal for Mr. Murdoch, but raises questions for consumers who enjoy at least some freedom in how they use audio and video services. The press release says Macrovision envisions combining its content protection systems into Gemstar’s guides as well as developing new products meant to distribute programming onto various devices.

The latter part is a trend that I find rather troubling: electronics makers choosing to police copyright disputes between Hollywood and users. Jeff Zucker gave a speech in October where he asked for help from both electronics makers and Internet providers. And today BoingBoing notes that a hard disk drive from Western Digital made for computer networks blocks music and video files because of “unverifiable media license authentication.”

I’m sure that Macrovision will argue that their merger is good for consumers because it will build technology that will help verify authorized uses of copyrighted work. And indeed there may be some value creating more sophisticated copy protection schemes than the ones we have now, such as the system that prevents people—rather imperfectly—from making any copies of DVDs.

But this is still electronic vigilantism. If my hard drive says I can’t share my own home movies, who can I appeal to? The same question may arise if my set cable top box running Gemstar software decides to no longer cooperate with my Tivo because of “unverifiable media license authentication.” These are questions I hope Macrovision will be able to answer.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...oom/index.html





Comcast - Heading the Way of the Dinosaurs
Triston McIntyre

Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don’t have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required.

The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distance back seat to Verizon’s FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage.

In rural areas or college towns, Comcast serves as the only acceptable source of both cable tv and high-speed internet. However, because no other companies like Verizon can focus resources on installing alternative services, Comcast completely neglects both good business practices and the needs its customers.

Many times speeds are so poor that many people in such areas are turning to DSL or even satellite internet to serve their needs. Comcast recognizes that too many people are being forced onto single lines, and that speeds are deplorably slow, but will not move to remedy the situation because there isn’t any direct competitor to worry about.

To make matters worse, recent research has revealed that Comcast is working diligently to deter use of any P2P platforms like Bittorrent, both by limiting uploads and by disrupting downloads directly with software from broadband management company Sandvine.

In all of this, Comcast is still charging prices indicative of a quality product with quality service. Quality service is not exemplified by having a technician coming to your house to analyze why your internet is going at sub-dialup speeds, and that technician telling you the reason the internet is slow is because there are too many people using your street’s cable line; Comcast should be increasing the bandwidth to the street sometime, but no one knows when.

Comcast just announced they would start implementing the next step in cable technology, DOCSIS 3.0, by 2008; this new technology supposedly will allow for 160 Mbps download and 120 Mbps upload speeds, according to Ars Technica. However, none of that will matter when too many customers are forced to cram onto a single cable line and suffer from speeds that could be easily surpassed by other technologies.

For a short time, Comcast will be able to sit on the customer base it has developed and sap money from customers that could receive better products at a more competitive price. But, just like AOL, once people get a taste of where technology is heading, that pile of money will deplete to nearly nothing…unless Comcast can step up, stop functioning like a monopoly, and start being competive.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...the-dinosaurs/





AT&T TOS

Network Usage

Bandwidth, disk utilization, simultaneous connections, and aggregate data downloads/uploads will be computed or determined by AT&T from time to time in developing its product and service offerings. In the event AT&T determines that an account is exceeding the relevant bandwidth, disk utilization, aggregate data download/upload limits, simultaneous connections, or reasonable session times, the account owner will generally be notified by E-mail. If the excess use continues after such notification, the owner may be requested to upgrade the type of account or to modify the activity creating the excess use, or the account may be terminated.

If excessive bandwidth, disk space utilization, simultaneous connections, aggregate data download or upload, or session length is determined to adversely affect AT&T's ability to provide service, immediate action may be taken. The account owner may be notified by e-mail as soon as practical thereafter.
http://www.att.net/csbellsouth/s/s.d...gal/tosaup.htm





MPAA Head: Content Filtering is in ISPs' Best Interests
Nate Anderson

As befits a man who has spent years in DC, the MPAA's Dan Glickman has polished his share of folksy analogies to a shine. "I used to grow popcorn, and now I sell it," he told a crowd of bankers and analysts yesterday at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York, a reference to his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Now, though, Glickman is the self-described "chief hired gun or mercenary for the [motion picture] industry," and his comments give us a window into what the movie studios are thinking. His words yesterday revealed that movie execs are thinking about one thing in particular: the technology that can be used to halt film piracy. And they expect ISPs to implement it.

Calling "protection of content from theft" the MPAA's number one issue, Glickman reiterated claims that piracy costs the studios $6 billion worldwide every year. Half the MPAA budget goes toward reducing this number, and the trade group believes that the single best way to do so is through technology. "Technology will be the key to determine how successful we will become," Glickman said.

But "technology" in isolation won't do much to help the movie business. The MPAA needs the support of those companies best in a position to implement filtering technology: ISPs. Acknowledging that the studios have often been "in tension with" the ISP community, Glickman claimed that the two groups have a much better relationship these days.

Dan Glickman

Case in point: AT&T and its publicly-stated plan to implement some sort of filtering system on its network. No technical details of such a system have yet been revealed, but the announcement has warmed the cold cockles of the MPAA's heart and has garnered support from companies like NBC Universal.

Glickman also held out the hope that filtering technology would quickly be adopted by many more ISPs. "The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected," he said, "and I think that's a great opportunity." It's not the first time he's asked ISPs to do more.
ISPs: what's in it for us?

ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high. Should such a system work, it could lower overall bandwidth usage, but whether that would make up for the cost and PR headaches of a filtering regime is unclear. It won't do much for liability issues, since ISPs are already protected under "safe harbor" provisions.

ISPs concerned with getting into the content distribution game, though, could have much to gain from pleasing the content owners. AT&T is in such a situation as it ramps up the national rollout of its U-verse IPTV system.

Glickman understands that "you will never stop piracy" because "traditional organized criminals would drool" over the margins made by pirates. But you do your best, he said, and you try to offer customers a better-quality legal product at a reasonable price (and you filter everything you can).

Will more ISPs follow the pied piping of the MPAA? Though he sounded hopeful, Glickman had nothing specific to announce.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...interests.html





US FCC Eyes Plan to Limit Cable Companies' Size
Peter Kaplan

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is moving toward resurrecting a proposal that would limit the size cable operators could reach on a nationwide basis, sources said on Friday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has enough support on the five-member commission to pass a measure that would bar cable companies from owning systems that have more than a 30-percent share of U.S. multichannel video subscribers, according to one FCC source.

Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus said in a research note that Martin is aiming for a vote on the cable ownership cap no later than the commission's next meeting on Dec. 18.

The proposal could affect merger deals among large cable operators like Comcast Corp, Charter Communications and Cablevision, Stifel Nicolaus said.

But Stifel Nicolaus said the FCC could have a difficult time defending the 30-percent cap in court. The move comes six years after a federal appeals court threw out an identical FCC rule on the grounds that the agency did not have enough evidence to justify it.

Comcast issued a statement saying there was still no justification for 30-percent ownership cap and noted that the FCC had approved merger deals among the largest telephone carriers in recent years.

"In an era of increased and intensifying competition among telephone, satellite and cable companies, the case for a cap is even weaker than when the courts rejected it six years ago," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said in a statement.

One FCC source said the idea of a cable ownership cap had been subjected to further agency study over the last six years, along with two rounds of public comments. The FCC could use that data to try to build a better case for the ownership cap, this source said. (Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/gover...42292920071130





SoundExchange Responds To New Satellite Royalty Rates
FMQB

Yesterday, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) issued an order to increase the royalty rates paid by satellite radio providers for the music they play on the air. The order covers the performance of sound recordings for the six-year period starting January 1, 2007 and ending December 31, 2012, and the new royalty rate calls for 6 percent of those gross revenues subject to the fees for 2007 and 2008, 6.5 percent for 2009, 7 percent for 2010, 7.5 percent for 2011 and 8 percent for 2012.

SoundExchange, the organization that collects and distributes royalties to artists, has offered a mixed reaction to the news. It said that while the CRB dramatically increased the royalty rate paid by XM and Sirius, the amount is still below the true value of the music. In its decision, the CRB said that the value of music to the satellite services should start at a benchmark of 13 percent of total subscriber revenue, but due to a federal law requiring that any new royalty rate avoid creating an overly “disruptive” impact on the satellite services, the CRB reduced the final number.

"This result once again highlights the inequity of a rate standard that forces creators of music to subsidize certain music services with below market rates," said John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange. "We are glad that the decision affirmed the importance of music to XM and Sirius, but disappointed that the rate standard led to a lack of full and fair compensation because of the business circumstances created by XM and Sirius."

During the proceedings with the CRB, SoundExchange lobbied for rates starting at eight percent, while the satcasters argued for a royalty rate of approximately one percent.

"While not agreeing to our rates, the CRB fully recognized that music is not free. It has value, and the people who invest in and create music deserve to be paid," said Michael Huppe, General Counsel of SoundExchange. "Though the final rate is below the actual value that music provides to these services, it nonetheless represents a significant increase over the royalties previously paid by satellite radio. As a result of this decision, recording artists and record labels are finally on the right track towards fair compensation."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=526322





A Chastened Imus Returns to Radio
Jacques Steinberg

Nearly eight months after he was fired for making a racially and sexually disparaging remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Don Imus went back on the radio at 6 a.m. today and vowed he would not say anything like that again.

He also introduced two new cast members — a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell, both of them comedians — and said they would join him in conducting “an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”

“I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me,” Mr. Imus told an audience that was listening in person at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and at home and in their cars on WABC-AM, his new radio home. “And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance.”

Still, in many ways, it felt as if the clock had been turned back before last April, when Mr. Imus said what he said and was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC, which had simulcast his program on cable television. On stage at Town Hall this morning, he was flanked on his right by his longtime news reader and sidekick, Charles McCord. Seated to his left, with a microphone conspicuously in front of him, was Bernard McGuirk, the producer whose initial reference on April 4 to the Rutgers team as “some hard-core hos” had prompted Mr. Imus to pile on by calling them “nappy-headed hos.”

The roster of announced guests was familiar to any regular Imus listener. They included Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.

And some long-time advertisers, too, came back, including the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey; NetJets, the corporate aircraft leasing company; the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and Bigelow teas. The house band was led by Levon Helm, who had played for Mr. Imus on April 12, which had wound up being his last day.

“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”

Mr. Imus wore a tan cowboy hat, a gold-colored vest under a tan barn jacket and worn boots. In his initial remarks, Mr. Imus spoke to the audience from a lone microphone positioned at center stage. At some points, he was defiant, acknowledging that the Rutgers team, which met with him the night of his firing, had found it easier to forgive him than had some of his detractors.

“We signed for five years,” he said of his contracts with Citadel Radio, the parent of WABC, as well as with RFD-TV, which will simulcast his program. “That’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”

And yet, for all his bravado, Mr. Imus acknowledged that he had been chastened and, at times, humiliated these last few months, and that he ultimately deserved his punishment.

“I think things worked out the way they should have worked out,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast.”

He added, though: “The program is not going to change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu...3cnd-imus.html





Vivendi to Acquire Control of Activision
Matt Richtel

In a deal that creates the biggest independent video game publisher in the world, Vivendi announced Sunday it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Activision.

Under the arrangement, the companies said Vivendi would pay $1.7 billion in cash and fold its games operations into Activision’s. The deal will leave Vivendi with a 68 percent share of the combined company, to be called Activision Blizzard.

The companies said the new entity would continue to trade publicly on Nasdaq. Blizzard Entertainment is the name of the most successful game studio in Vivendi’s game operations.

Under the deal, Vivendi, based in Paris, will pay $27.50 a share for Activision, a 24 percent premium over Friday’s close of $22.15.

The deal combines companies with different areas of strength in the booming video game business. Activision’s emphasis is on making games for consoles, like the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Its game franchises include the Tony Hawk skateboarding games, the Call of Duty war game series and one of the industry’s current best sellers, Guitar Hero, which allows players to strum along on a plastic guitar to tunes played on the television.

Vivendi’s strength is in online multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, which has more than nine million players worldwide.

The two companies said that their combined revenue for the 2007 calendar year would be $3.8 billion. The new entity will surpass Electronic Arts, with revenue of $3.1 billion, as the largest video game publisher in the world that is not affiliated with a console maker, like Microsoft or Nintendo. The two companies said they expected operating income for the new company of $1.1 billion, or $1.20 a share, in the 2009 calendar year and also said it would have the highest profit margins in the industry.

In the merger, expected to be completed in the first half of 2008, shares of Vivendi Games will be converted into 295.3 million new shares of Activision common stock, a transaction that values Vivendi Games at $8.1 billion. Vivendi will also buy 62.9 million newly issued shares of Activision for $1.7 billion in cash.

The two companies also said that within five business days after closing the transaction, Activision Blizzard would begin a $4 billion all-cash tender offer to purchase up to 146.5 million Activision Blizzard common shares at $27.50 a share. If the tender offer is fully subscribed, Vivendi said it would own 68 percent of Activision Blizzard on a fully diluted basis.

Despite Vivendi’s taking the larger stake in the new company, Robert A. Kotick, chief executive of Activision, will remain as chief executive of the combined companies. Bruce Hack, the chief executive of Vivendi Games, will become vice chairman and chief corporate officer and lead the merger integration as well as head finance, human resources and legal functions, the two companies said.

Even as the deal puts Activision Blizzard in the top spot in terms of revenue, the question that will face investors is whether Activision can duplicate the business model of Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts has built its business on creating numerous game franchises that deliver reliable streams of annual revenue. For instance, in its 2007 fiscal year, the company had 24 titles that sold more than a million copies each, and four games — Madden NFL 07, Need for Speed Carbon, FIFA 07, and The Sims 2 Pets — that sold more than five million copies.

It has done that, in part, by buying studios with popular games. Compared with its competitors, Electronic Arts has invested relatively heavily in the new platforms of casual and mobile games, and popular multiplayer games, industry analysts said. The investments have yet to pay off, but if they do, they could be a big boost to Electronic Arts, analysts said.

In recent years, there have been many examples of major publishers’ buying video game development studios. But the Activision Blizzard merger represents a substantially more significant deal, and one with immense stakes. The video game software industry is poised for a record year, driven by the recent introduction of the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 game consoles.

But the industry also needs companies to create hits and be able to sustain them. Mr. Kotick has said he is eager for Activision to catch Electronic Arts and become the largest video game company. “By joining forces with Vivendi Games, we will become the immediate leader in the highly profitable online games business and gain a large footprint in the rapidly growing Asian markets, including China and Korea, while maintaining our leading operating performance across North America and Europe,” Mr. Kotick said in a statement Sunday morning.

Activision, based in Santa Monica, Calif., has been an industry darling of late, in large part because of the popularity of Guitar Hero III, the latest iteration of the franchise. It was introduced on Oct. 28, and sold 1.3 million copies within seven days. Through October, Activision had three of the eight best-selling games in the United States this year, according to NPD Group, which compiles sales data.

Activision’s sales and stock have risen with the momentum. The company’s revenue for the 2007 fiscal year was $1.5 billion, a 74 percent increase from 2003. During that same period, Electronic Arts’ revenue rose 25 percent to $3.1 billion. This year, Activision’s stock is up about 28 percent to $22, while E.A.’s is up 13 percent. And since March 2003, Activision’s shares are up nearly sixfold from $3.68 (on a split-adjusted basis).

But even as Activision has been on a roll, industry analysts have questioned whether it can build the kind of library of franchises to compete with Electronic Arts. The addition of Vivendi Games gives Activision access to Vivendi’s portfolio of multiplayer games.

Mr. Kotick also said that because Vivendi owns the Universal Music Group, the transaction “will benefit Guitar Hero and further extend our sizable leadership position in music-based games.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...vision.html?hp





The Cult of Kindle
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

I’d not given Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader much chance of succeeding given the stratospheric price tag combined with DRM, but then I started reading the customer reviews for it and just realized that the Kindle has already amassed quite a considerable cult following, and this could be crucial to its success.

When I look at the Kindle I see a device that holds a lot of promise, but this has been true for every other ebook reader that’s entered the market. And history is littered with the tombstones of failed ebook readers. And for every pro feature of the Kindle (nice screen, wireless download, and good battery life) there are some serious negatives to contend with (price, DRM, Sprint network coverage). It’s also ugly. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit the peak of popularity and the only way for it to go was down.

But then I realized that the Kindle had a cult. The Cult of Kindle. A group of people willing to give it a five star rating just because someone else didn’t, willing to back up every design, engineering and marketing decision that Amazon made, willing to defend the Kindle with their last dying breath. The Kindle doesn’t cost money, it saves money. Why only buy one! That 0.75 second flash as the pages turn isn’t a downside, it gives you an opportunity to absorb the previous page and admire the Kindle’s prefection. It doesn’t harm your eyes, in fact, it fixes them. Ergonomic issues that other reviewers have bought up are dismissed by the Cult of Kindle as flaws with the reviewer, not the device. The Kindle is perfect, and the Kindle 2.0 will be a little more perfect.

When I look at the Kindle what I see is a $400 blank book. Sure, it has features that go beyond being an electronic book reader, but these are vague and lacking is specifics. Really the features of the Kindle boil down to three things - click, buy, and read, with extra emphasis on the second step. For a blank book, the price is high. I had an exchange with David Berlind over on his blog yesterday (my three comments can be found here, here and here) and when I mentioned price he tried to counter my argument this way:

But if cost is still bugging you, I can remember a lot of people laughing at the premium that Starbucks was charging for a cup of coffee.

My counter to this point is that to make use of Starbucks you don’t have to buy a $400 cup.

The DRM issue also bothers me. Well, not the DRM so much but the feeling that if this service did tank, you’d end up with a $400 paperweight and no access to the books you bought. Those who think that this can’t happen then it’s worth bearing in mind what happened to services such as Virgin Digital and Google Video. I’m always wary of the investment I have tied up in Audible.com, but at least there I didn’t have to buy a $400 reader to take advantage of the service. Remember, what DRM giveth, DRM can taketh away.

The real test for the Kindle will ultimately be the test of time. Will people who’ve bought one continue to buy books, will Amazon continue to be able to generate enough buzz to keep them selling (and drop the price), will people who’ve made an investment in books for the Kindle buy another when their first Kindle dies or becomes obsolete? Also, and crucially, will the service last? I’m sure that Amazon will be able to count on the Cult of Kindle to do their part.

Looking at the Kindle service as a whole and the areas where Amazon have got it right are areas where the company already excel at - and that’s adopting the path of least resistance to online commerce. In a single iteration Amazon has bettered what Apple have been trying to acheive for years with the iTunes store.

Would I buy one now? No. Would I buy one in a year’s time? Hmmm … maybe.

Before I close, I’ll leave you with the first act of The Future of Reading (a Play in Six Acts):

Quote:
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Thoughts?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1023





Publishers seeking web controls

News Organizations Propose Tighter Search Engine Rules
Anick Jesdanun

The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display Web sites is driving an effort launched yesterday by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access.

Currently, Google, Yahoo and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as robots.txt, which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site.

But as search engines expanded to offer services for displaying news and scanning printed books, news organizations and book publishers began to complain.

News publishers said that Google was posting their news summaries, headlines and photos without permission. Google claimed that "fair use" provisions of copyright laws applied, though it eventually settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse and agreed to pay the Associated Press without a lawsuit filed. Financial terms haven't been disclosed.

The proposed extensions, known as Automated Content Access Protocol, partly grew out of those disputes. Leading the ACAP effort were groups representing publishers of newspapers, magazines, online databases, books and journals. The AP is one of dozens of organizations that have joined ACAP.

The new rules allow a site to block indexing of individual Web pages, specific directories or the entire site, though some search engines have added their own commands.

The proposal, unveiled by a consortium of publishers at the global headquarters of the AP, seeks to have those extra commands -- and more -- apply across the board. Sites could try to limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, for instance, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a Web page.

"ACAP was born, in part at least, against a growing backdrop of mistrust," said Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers.

The current system doesn't give sites "enough flexibility to express our terms and conditions on access and use of content," said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, one of the organizations behind the proposal. "That is not surprising. It was invented in the 1990s and things move on."

Tom Curley, the AP's chief executive, said the news cooperative spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually covering the world, and that its employees risk often their lives doing so. Technologies such as ACAP, he said, are important to protect AP's original news reports from sites that distribute them without permission.

"The free riding deprives AP of economic returns on its investments," he said.

Jessica Powell, a spokesman for Google, said the company supported all efforts to bring Web sites and search engines together but needed to evaluate ACAP to ensure it can meet the needs of millions of Web sites, not just those of a single community.

"Before you go and take something entirely on board, you need to make sure it works for everyone," Powell said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112902207.html





For the 2008 Race, Google Is a Crucial Constituency
Randall Stross

LAST century, General Motors assembly plants were a regular stop on the itineraries of presidential candidates. This election cycle, Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has become a favorite destination.

Hillary Rodham Clinton made the pilgrimage in February. Then came John McCain, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and most recently, Barack Obama.

In terms of theatrical symbolism, the trip to Google is similar to the G.M. plant visit. In both cases, the visits gave the candidate the chance for a photo opportunity at the most technologically advanced edge of the economy, “signaling identification with the future,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

On a more mundane level, candidates in the pre-mass-media era were concerned with reaching as many prospective voters as possible in one place, and any large factory would do. At Google, the number of employees who can see the candidates in person is limited: the largest space at the Googleplex holds only a few hundred people.

Everyone in the 16,000-employee company can watch the event in real time over the company’s internal network in their offices scattered around the globe. But Google employees, like almost everyone else, prefer the live version. At Senator Obama’s talk last month, the atrium and overhanging balcony filled well in advance, and streams of employees poured into the building and then had to be turned away.

The politicians visiting auto plants could control what was said during the event. Today, candidates must place themselves at the tender mercies of the audience. Those who go to Google sit exposed on the stage, without the protective lectern provided in a debate, answering questions for 45 to 60 minutes. But without the escape hatch of a timekeeper’s buzzer, and as the only speaker, the candidate cannot evade uncomfortable questions. Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, for example, asked Senator Obama for his views on Iran, Pakistan, and Guantánamo — and that was a single question.

The proceedings at Google are not unremittingly serious affairs. Mr. Schmidt asked Senator McCain, “How do you determine good ways of sorting one million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” Immediately signaling that the question was asked in jest, Mr. Schmidt moved on. Six months later, Senator Obama faced the same question, but his staff had prepared him. When he replied in fluent tech-speak (“A bubble sort is the wrong way to go”), the quip brought down the house.

Among the seven visiting candidates, only Senator Obama used his Google visit to announce details of policy proposals related to technology. Until his visit, he and Senator Edwards were widely viewed among technology bloggers as the two candidates who had the strongest positions on Internet neutrality, expanded broadband access and other technology issues. With his Google visit, however, Senator Obama succeeded in drawing attention to his plans for using technology to make government more accessible and transparent with, for example, live Internet feeds of all executive branch department and agency meetings. This was old-school campaigning, organized around a company visit, done well.

Though all of the candidate sessions at Google are available on YouTube, they are not YouTube-like: they require an investment of time that, by YouTube viewer standards, is inconceivable. A 43-minute video of Senator Clinton’s Google session has been available since February and has drawn only about 54,000 “views,” which count as soon as the video is begun but leave unknown the more interesting number: completed views.

Senator Edwards’s and Senator Obama’s videos, both of which run longer than an hour, have not been up as long and have still fewer viewers. The biggest draw has turned out to be Representative Ron Paul, whose July visit has been viewed, or at least started, more than 350,000 times.

For perspective, consider the numbers that short-form videos of a less serious nature draw. Search for “Barack Obama” on YouTube and you will find that the most-viewed video is titled “I Got a Crush ... on Obama.” It lacks narrative, content and anything other than a young woman with large breasts lip-synching, but it has tallied more than four million views. The most-viewed video that turns up for a “Hillary Clinton” search is “Vote Different,” a dark parody of Apple’s “1984” commercial that portrays the senator most unflatteringly, as a giant TV image that is shattered. It is also approaching four million views.

YouTube has a separate section, “YouChoose ’08,” that gives each candidate a protected space for more serious discourse, similar to the way the broadcast networks give Sunday mornings over to civic uplift. YouChoose also provides access to last Wednesday’s CNN/YouTube debate with the Republican candidates, and the earlier one in July with the Democrats.

Professor Jamieson credits YouTube with broadening the range of questions in the debates, making them more memorable by having users submit the questions in the form of personal videos, and making everything searchable afterward. In the past, she said, “if you missed a debate, you missed it.”

The ability to select for playback any question in the debate and the candidates’ responses provides easy, precise access to the contents, sliced and diced, that was never possible before. But it also contributes to a shortening of our collective attention span.

THIS is hardly new — we’ve already come a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 for a Senate seat, which held the audience rapt, on one occasion, for three hours — then everyone dispersed for dinner and came back for the four-hour rebuttal. The contrast with the public’s attenuated attention in the age of television, which Neil Postman pointed out in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” was great. The contrast is all the greater today, with the advent of the short, nonlinear clips of YouTube.

It is easy to forget that this is YouTube’s first presidential campaign: the company was founded in only 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006. By the time the next campaign cycle rolls around in 2011, YouTube’s influence on the culture may be so complete that a 45-minute linear video of a question-answer session will seem to most people to be about 43 minutes too long.

A midcampaign trek to Google headquarters in Silicon Valley may soon seem no less quaint than one to a G.M. plant in Flint, Mich. The candidates need not seek out the cameras — from now on, the cameras will always find them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02digi.html





Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat?
Roi Carthy

New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 million conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored - IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks.

There are few IRC search engines today, and most focus on specific niches or single networks, the Company says. Nearly two decades worth of data contained on IRC servers has effectively been lost. IRSeek wants to make sure that future conversations are properly indexed and and searchable. It’s a huge untapped knowledge-base.

So if you want to see what people are saying on IRC about, say, iPhone unlocks, now you can. The most popular search terms populate a query could on the front page of the site.

The company was founded by Eran Cohen (CEO), and Ariel Berkman (CTO). Development began in mid-2006.

The company says a channel is dropped when file sharing activity is detected and private conversations are not eavesdropped in anyway. Still, some IRC users, who have a possibly unreasonable expectation of privacy, may be troubled by IRSeeK. Personal information is often revealed in IRC chats. That information is now indexed and searchable. Searches can also be conducted by IRC nicknames, and all conversations involving that nickname (or even if they were just in the room) are linked. Of course, nicknames aren’t unique and many users may choose the same nickname over time. But even so, the knowledge that everything being typed can be later found by others may have a chilling effect on users.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30...ct-on-irc-chat





YouTube Restores Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account - Minus All His Videos
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Wael Abbas, an award winning journalist who has posted videos documenting police brutality and torture in Egypt over the last 3 years, had his shut-down YouTube account restored by Google last night after a week of international pressure. The restored account, though, no longer contains any of Abbas's more than 100 videos. YouTube told media tonight that Abbas can freely upload his videos again and if satisfactory explanation of the violence is included then they will be allowed to remain on the site.

The Context

Two weeks ago Wael Abbas traveled to Washington DC to be awarded the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award along with Burmese investigative reporter May Thingyan Hein and Founders Award winner Tom Brokaw. One week later, Abbas's YouTube account was shut down by the video hosting service, citing the prohibition against "gratuitous violence."

Far from gratuitous, the videos Abbas posted were in part of his own collection and in part from cell-phone video sent to him by people around Egypt. One clip he helped publicize depicted a bus driver's being sexually assaulted by police officers and resulted in the very unusual criminal conviction of the officers. It's widely acknowledged that torture by government officials is widespread in Egypt. See also our coverage earlier this month of Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman's first of four planned years in prison for the crime of "defaming the President of Egypt." The country is one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid in the world.

YouTube's Response

A YouTube spokesperson made the following statement to Fox News tonight.
"Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas — and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site."

I wonder if an explanation posted in Arabic would meet YouTube's standards of sufficient context for users of the site to understand what's happening in the clips. None the less, links to the videos still lead to a message reading "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." As if these were ripped-off copies of the Daily Show.

Abbas has archived copies of all the videos he had uploaded, but requiring him to upload them again and breaking the URLs of all the original embeds around the web, links and viewership analytics is a low blow by YouTube. It's also another spot that will remain on the human rights record of Google, one of the world's most powerful companies and ostensible forces for free communication.

For updates, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers - where you can read daily about authoritarian efforts around the world to squash the democratizing potential of the web.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...an_account.php





Did GameSpot Commit Brand Suicide with Jeff Gerstmann Firing?

If the highly detailed rumors surrounding Jeff Gerstmann’s firing are true, then the people who run GameSpot have, by their own hand, utterly trashed a great media brand.

The Spot has long been regarded as the most professional of all the game-oriented news and review sites. It’s a personal favorite of mine, so this news makes me especially sad. When GamePolitics occasionally links to a review for a particular game, it has always been to GameSpot.

I don’t know Jeff Gerstmann, although I met him once or twice at various E3 shows. But any working journalist can summon righteous indignation over what appears to have happened here. Fired because an advertiser didn’t like your review of their crappy product?

Disgraceful, if true.

Impossible to defend.

There’s no official confirmation, of course, and that may never come. Corporate apparatchiks - like those at CNET who apparently pulled the trigger on Gerstmann - will invariably hunker down in times like these, preferring to ride out the storm behind vague press releases which pretend they are protecting their victim’s privacy. And Gerstmann may have obligated himself to keep quiet in return for some type of severance package. But the mounting unofficial evidence is so detailed that it rings true.

If there’s any legitimate damage control to be done here, CNET should do it, and quickly. Frankly, I don’t expect any.

And GamePolitics readers shouldn’t expect to see any more links to GameSpot.

UPDATE: Check out this compilation of Gerstmann news by GameSpot reader Subrosian. Penny Arcade has a great cartoon (we’re showing one panel at left) and commentary on the scandal.

This Valleywag post, citing an anonymous commenter with the screen name “gamespot” is probably the most daming information on the Gerstmann affair:

…I’m sure management wants to spin this as the G-Man being unprofessional to take away from the egg on their face… This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building…

There has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process…

When companies make games as downright contemptible as Kane and Lynch, they deserve to be called on it… everyone at GS now thinks that if they give a low score to a high-profile game, they’ll be shitcanned…

Joystiq has tracked down more commentary from past and present GameSpot staffers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/12/01/d...stmann-firing/





Eleven Questions for a Warez Site Owner

The operator of a software-piracy site takes us behind the scenes of the warez business.

You need a copy of Adobe's Photoshop or maybe the latest version of CorelDraw? Or how about downloading Beowulf or a DVD rip of American Gangster? If you know where to go, they're all available for free, at rogue sites that link to pirated software and other content--also known as "warez."

I recently interviewed a warez site operator to find out how he started the site, how he makes money, and how he justifies passing out illegal copies of practically everything under the sun.

Oh, right--you want to know how to get to this site. That was my editor's only restriction: the guy's name and his site's name need to be kept secret.

Okay, first, the obvious question: What's your payoff for running the site?

Now it's not a lot, and I mostly keep it for the community. It makes about $20/day. But before Google's AdSense banned the site, it was making $150 to $200 per day. Those were the good times.

What was the inspiration for starting your site? And has the site done what you expected it to do?

I didn't start it. I bought it from a friend for $3000. It was making about $10 per day. After I optimized the ads, it jumped to $150, so I got my investment back in one month. It was a good deal.

In your Terms of Service, you say people coming to your site cannot, "upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, rights of privacy or publicity, or other proprietary rights of any person or entity." Kind of ironic, no?

This is the standard TOS I guess. Anyway, we don't host any of the files on our servers. The files are hosted on sites like [free Web-hosting service sites].

Granted you're not hosting the files; but what would you do if someone hacked into your warez site or legitimate Web-based business and was able to drain off half your income--something that hundreds of software vendors might feel like you're doing to them?

Of course, no one would like that. However, the visitors have the choice of buying software--or getting it for free from warez sites. If they don't get it from my site they could easily get it elsewhere.

Is there any software you won't distribute via the site? If so, what's your criteria?

I don't write the posts from the site. Our members (more than 20,000) write the posts. I have a moderator that selects the best ones which appear on the front page. Since our site is visited by lots of teenagers we don't display anything that is adult related.

Members? It appears they're just registered users. Either way, I've heard the argument that you're innocent and simply a portal for others posting links to pirated software and movies. Do you really believe it? And your claim that you're protecting kids from porn takes the high ground. What about the morality of your site being a conduit for stolen software and first-run, pirated movies?

I wouldn't call the site innocent, but it's not evil either. I say this because the content posted on our site is not produced by our members, and is present on lots of other sites, too.

Also, I believe people should be able to test a product before buying it. Warez sites offer this opportunity. I'm sure many visitors bought a software application or purchased a movie after getting it from a warez site.

Again, if they don't visit our site, they'll find another--so even if we close our site, it won't stop the problem. The problem is solved only if all sources of warez are eliminated.

Your IP address shows your site is headquartered in Moscow. But I did some digging and it looks as if you live in Romania. Either way, you're probably aware that every company seeing its product available on your site would like to string you up. Aren't you worried about prosecution, even from the Russian authorities?

To tell you the truth, we receive only about one copyright complaint per month; and I remove the post with the issue. The site isn't big enough for anyone to notice. The domain is registered by a Russian friend--I live in Romania, and the site is hosted in Germany.

And you don't think Romanian or German authorities might come after you--and shut down your legit businesses as well?

No, because they first have to ask for the site to be shut down. We haven't received such a request so far.

Your ads rotate. I've seen legit-looking companies pitching auto insurance; a company boasting Steve Case, Colin Powell, and Carly Fiorina on its board; and even IBM. How do you get mainstream companies to pay for ads? I mean, do they really know what you're offering on your site?

The ads are automatically fed by the network ads we use. I don't think the advertisers actually know where their ads are displayed.

Pushing aside the ethics, my guess is many people would visit warez sites like yours if they weren't worried about spyware, viruses, and other dangers. Do you do anything to keep your site's downloads free of malware?

No. But when a bad post is displayed on the site, the members comment on it almost instantly, so the next downloader will know the issue. When someone is posting infected stuff regularly, the members contact us and we warn the author.

So people posting are on their honor, so to speak. Yet some of the ads I've spotted--from Hotbar, Zango, Zwinky, and the Starware Toolbar--might be considered by some as risky. I asked Eric L. Howes [Director of Malware Research at Sunbelt Software, makers of CounterSpy, an antispyware application] for his take on the products in the ads.

He said, "Hotbar and Zango could be called 'spyware' and Zwinky, Consumer Incentive Rewards, and the Starware Toolbar are at worst 'potentially unwanted programs' [PUPs] that often wind up on PCs where they're not really wanted. Unfortunately, the author of the blog does nothing to warn visitors of the other programs piggybacking on the stuff he's plugging--not very cool."

"Also, some of the programs the author is foisting on users violates three of the site's Terms of Service prohibited activities. As this is a warez site, presumably, the site owner himself isn't not bound by the same ethical obligations as the users of the site."

You don't display adult-related content, yet you're willing to expose those same teenagers and other visitors to the toolbars posted in the ads. Anything to say?

I can't control the content of the ads. That is the job of the ad provider.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112900171.html





Amazon and Wal-Mart Unwittingly Team Up Against DRM
David Chartier

As if DRM needed more of a hint to get its coat and leave, Amazon is set to announce a promotional giveaway of one billion MP3s during next year's Super Bowl. Billboard was first to note that this announcement signals an all-out offensive on DRM, which is made even more powerful by parallel pressures brought by Wal-Mart. In a bid for more of the digital download space, the brick-and-mortar retailer heavyweight has reportedly given an ultimatum to some of the largest record labels, including Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, to provide more of their respective music catalogs in MP3 format (that is, without DRM) next year.

While the timing of these consumer-focused drives from two separate retail giants is probably nothing more than a coincidence, the market forces that prompted them are a beacon for consumers who demand the choice they deserve. Wal-Mart has actually sold digital music for years, though it's always been wrapped in Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM which doesn't work on an iPod or even, ironically, Microsoft's own Zune. Things picked up a little when Wal-Mart's online music store ditched DRM in August for rich 256KB MP3 files, though like Amazon's MP3 store, EMI and Universal have been the only two labels with the foresight to give customers what they want. And Universal is only testing the waters.

Like Wal-Mart, Amazon's MP3 store launched in September with DRM-free tracks only from EMI and Universal, but with 20,000 indie labels along for the ride as well. Disney-owned Hollywood Records has also provided MP3s of about 40 of its artists, including Queen, Indigo Girls and Hilary Duff, to these two retailers, making it the latest in major labels to have made the leap to DRM-free pastures.

As far as Amazon's 1 Billion MP3 Giveaway next year is concerned, participation will be pretty standard, if not tedious and slightly more expensive than similar promotions in the past. Each bottle of Pepsi and some of its other brands will contain a coupon code under the bottle cap. Customers can then redeem five codes for one free download from the Amazon MP3 store. Considering that Apple's industry-leading iTunes Store has only gone as far as 100 million tracks during its own Pepsi + Super Bowl promotions, Amazon is certainly wearing an ambitious hat for its first foray into giving music away for free to promote its digital music download service. Of course, by way of quick calculation, users will have to submit a total 5 billion cap codes to get at those songs, and frankly, that's a load of codes. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 codes per US citizen.

With Amazon spreading the word next year in a big way for DRM-free media and Wal-Mart trying to knock some sense into more major labels, 2008 is already looking to be a strong year for the fight against DRM.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ainst-drm.html





Digital Developments Could be Tipping Point for MP3
Billboard

Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony BMG Music Entertainment are feeling increased pressure to follow EMI and Universal Music Group's lead in distributing music in the MP3 format, which forgoes restrictive digital rights management technology.

A yearlong download promotion planned between Pepsi and Amazon is among several developments forcing WMG and Sony to consider the format, Billboard has learned,

News of the Pepsi promotion, which is expected to be announced February 3 during the Super Bowl, coincides with Wal-Mart's ultimatum that major labels supply walmart.com with their music in MP3, sources said.

Labels said they have been watching the success of an MP3 test that Universal Music Group (UMG) began in August. The major label continues to allow the sale of 85 percent of its current catalog as MP3s. Sources said UMG is on the verge of permanently embracing that digital format. But a source close to the testing insisted that the decision is still up in the air while the company awaits conclusive results from the trial, which are due in mid-January.

Meanwhile, Disney's Hollywood Records has joined the list of major-distributed labels testing MP3 at Amazon and walmart.com. The company has supplied 30 to 40 titles from its mammoth catalog in the MP3 format. A check of those sites shows the latest albums from Atreyu and Grace Potter & the Nocturnals on the Hollywood label available in the MP3 format, though they are not available at iTunes.

EMI began selling its music in MP3 format in June. WMG and Sony BMG Music Entertainment both declined to comment, but have continued to publicly maintain their separate stances in favor of using digital rights management for downloads.

Sources said Sony BMG is considering an MP3 test. The company initially was steadfast against MP3 and wouldn't allow its independent distributor, RED Distribution, to engage in negotiations on behalf of its labels with Amazon when the merchant was trying to set up its MP3 download store. But Sony BMG management relented and let RED become involved in those negotiations. The parent company, however, refused to supply Amazon with its catalog in the MP3 format.

Pepsi Free

Pepsi's track record with download giveaways may be motivating labels. According to sources, Pepsi will feature a download promotion on the inside of 5 billion of its soda bottlecaps. Sources said Pepsi customers will need to collect five caps in order to exchange them for a download; this yields the potential for 1 billion redeemable tracks. A Pepsi spokesperson declined to comment.

Pepsi's first stab at giving away free music downloads, which was conducted in partnership with iTunes in 2004, was also promoted via a highly visible Super Bowl campaign. It resulted in 5 million people downloading free songs in the space of three months -- 5 percent of the 100 million tracks that were offered.

While the 5 million digital tracks redeemed in the campaign reportedly fell short of the 25 million target redemption rate, that was in the early days of digital distribution, when Apple was reporting selling digital tracks at a rate of 2.7 million per week.

Since then, with the widespread success of the iPod -- which is likely to be even more popular come Christmas -- digital track sales have grown by 416 percent, from the 142.6 million tracks scanned in 2004 to the 735.4 million tracks accumulated so far this year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on trends of the past few years, Billboard estimates that digital download sales could increase by another 5 million per week in 2008.

In the week after Christmas in 2006, track sales totaled 30.1 million, a 51 percent increase from the 19.9 million scanned in the corresponding week of the previous year -- which was, in turn, a 197 percent increase over the 6.7 million scans generated during the corresponding week of 2005. Digital downloads generally increase drastically after consumers receive iPods and iPod gift cards for Christmas.

In the new Pepsi promotion, sources said, Amazon will serve as the supplier for the downloads, and customers will need to visit a specific redemption store on the Amazon site to access music from participating labels. All majors have been approached about participating in the offer, but the price that Amazon is willing to pay appears to be a sticking point for some labels.

Sources said that Amazon will pay labels in the area of 40 cents per track. This compares with the 65-70 cents labels currently receive from Amazon for digital track sales and the 70 cents they get from Apple.

Regardless of which labels ultimately sign on, the Super Bowl commercials will nonetheless double as the coming-out party for Amazon's digital download site, which soft-launched September 25. Since then, without aggressively promoting its download business, Amazon has captured about a 3 percent market share of the digital download channel, Billboard estimates. The store has a 6 percent market share of all CD sales.

Wal-Mart's Wishes

Another factor driving the labels' decisions, sources said, involves mass merchant Wal-Mart alerting WMG and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format.

Wal-Mart declined comment. "It's a matter of policy that we don't publicly comment on speculation," walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said. "We know digital music is important to our customers, and we're very pleased with the recent performance and customer response to our digital music offering."

Though Wal-Mart maintains a modest 2 percent market share in the digital download arena, its market share for physical CDs is considerably larger: about 22 percent, Billboard estimates.

Finally, given the steep decline in U.S. CD sales -- so far, down 18.6 percent year to date compared with 2006 -- music executives have expressed their worries about what the new year will bring for the physical format. Switching to a digital format that is compatible with all portable devices, including the all-important iPod, could help merchants like Wal-Mart and Amazon capture some of iTunes' 70 percent market share, and perhaps boost the size of the digital marketplace.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...32743320071203





Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy
Richard Pérez-Peña

Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody’s personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.

Facebook tried last week to force the magazine 02138 to remove some unflattering documents about Mr. Zuckerberg from its Web site. But a federal judge turned down the company’s request for a court order to take down the material, according to the magazine’s lawyers.

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit charging that in 2003 and 2004, as a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea and some of the computer source code for Facebook from some fellow students. They were planning a networking site of their own and had hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help with the programming.

Their project fizzled, while Facebook made Mr. Zuckerberg a billionaire — at least on paper — at the age of 23.

02138, which refers to Harvard College’s ZIP code in Cambridge, Mass., and consists primarily of articles about Harvard and Harvard alumni, published an article last week about the genesis of Facebook and the resulting lawsuit. The piece is sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ account and questions the validity of Mr. Zuckerberg’s claims.

The article relied in part on documents submitted in the lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Boston, that were ordered sealed by the judge in the case, Douglas P. Woodlock. On its Web site, 02138 posted not only the article, but also the documents, which include Mr. Zuckerberg’s handwritten application for admission to Harvard and an excerpt from an online journal he kept as a student that contains biting comments about himself and others.

Luke O’Brien, the freelance reporter who wrote the article, said that he had done nothing wrong in obtaining the documents and that neither side in the lawsuit had improperly leaked them to him. He said he had obtained the papers in mid-September from the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which considered a part of the case, where a clerk apparently made a mistake and let him read and copy sealed documents, along with those that were still supposed to be open to the public.

“There were a whole bunch of manila envelopes taped shut, clearly sealed, and I did not open those,” he said.

Some of the pages he copied were stamped “Confidential” or “Redacted.” Bom Kim, founder and editor of 02138, which is not affiliated with the university or its alumni association, said that gave him pause.

“We cleared it with our lawyers,” he said, who said that any order sealing the documents would apply only to the parties to the lawsuit. “We did wonder if they were under seal. But since we had obtained them legally, we got clearance.”

On Thursday, Facebook asked Judge Woodlock to order 02138 to strike the documents from its Web site. Lawyers for 02138 said that late Friday, the judge, in an oral ruling, turned down the request; Facebook and its lawyer refused to confirm or deny that account. Calls to the court went unanswered.

“We filed the motions to let the court know that its orders were being violated,” Facebook said in a statement Friday. “One reason the court ordered certain documents’ protection was to prevent exactly what has happened: misusing documents and taking documents out of context to sling mud.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...3facebook.html





Poking Facebook

Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg created one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and became a paper billionaire as a result. But ongoing lawsuits suggest that Facebook's origins are murkier than Zuckerberg would like to admit. Is the man many are calling Harvard’s next Bill Gates telling the truth?
Luke O'Brien

We spent a lot of our time trying to get Mark to sort of follow up with us... He would say 'I should have something done in the next couple of weeks.'

It’s May 24, 2007, and on stage at the San Francisco Design Center, Mark Zuckerberg stares out at an audience of 800 software developers and looks terrified. Loud techno music pulses. Behind him, a slick slideshow cues up on a big screen. “Today ... together ... we’re going to start a movement,” he begins. A few seconds later, as Zuckerberg—all 5’8”, 150 pounds, and 23 years of him—launches into his presentation, his voice cracks.

The young man often hailed as the next Bill Gates is onstage to announce the latest advance in Facebook, the website he cooked up in his Kirkland House room in early 2004 that has blossomed into one of the Internet’s most-trafficked sites. Facebook allows users to create online profiles and interact with friends, and the site’s clean interface has distinguished it from more cluttered social networks such as MySpace and Friendster. Facebook users swap photos, play games, compare movie interests, plan parties, or simply “poke” hot strangers.

Once only open to students, Facebook opened its doors to the world late last year, allowing anyone to sign up. A hockey-stick graphic on the screen behind Zuckerberg shows the resulting surge in membership, from about 100,000 in June ’04 to over 24 million in May ’07. (As of November, Facebook had nearly 50 million users.) But now Facebook is going further, allowing outside developers to design programs that can work on members’ pages and reach millions of potential users. It’s a bold step that will do even more to bolster the site’s popularity.

Decked out in his geek uniform of jeans, Adidas sandals, a T-shirt, and a North Face fleece, Zuckerberg tries to convey the gravitas of the moment: “Right now, social networks are closed platforms,” he says, “and, today, we’re going to end that.”

Hands uplifted, he waits for the applause.

Mark Zuckerberg may not yet have the stage presence of, say, Steve Jobs, but give him time; he has plenty of ego and ambition, and he is quickly developing a mythology. A confluence of intelligence, naïveté, and hubris, Zuckerberg can be both brilliant and immature. A self-styled revolutionary who speaks often of “trying to make the world a more open place,” he is sometimes smug and often comes across as brash. He once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”

Zuckerberg has regularly suggested that money does not much interest him, that he only wants to “make revolutionary things.” In the past, he deflected billion-dollar Facebook suitors such as Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal reported that, during March 2006 negotiations with Yahoo executives, Zuckerberg refused to meet over a weekend because his girlfriend was in town. “When I’m hanging out with her, I tend not to be that engaged [in work],” he later said. Then again, he might just have been holding out for a better price: In late October, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook, a sum that valued the company at $15 billion. Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, a $3-billion stake.

It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg is increasingly compared to Gates, an earlier generation’s high-tech billionaire and Harvard dropout. But geek style and enormous net worth aren’t all that Zuckerberg has in common with Gates: Like the Microsoft co-founder, he has had to weather allegations that his greatest achievement is the result of ripping off the ideas of others. Now, Zuckerberg finds himself ensnared by several lawsuits, none more potentially damaging than that brought by three Harvard grads in the wake of Facebook’s 2004 launch. The recent graduates charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them, and they have spent years in court trying to prove it.

The media have mostly glossed over ConnectU Inc. v. Facebook Inc., now unfolding in a Boston courthouse. Most articles depict the case as either a cash grab or a blip on Facebook’s march to global domination. But interviews with people familiar with the lawsuit, and a close examination of court records, suggest that, at the least, the case raises troubling questions about the ethics of this new billionaire.

The plaintiffs are three Harvard grads: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin rowers currently training for the Beijing Olympics, and Divya Narendra, who since graduation has worked in finance in New York and Boston. In 2002, the three friends dreamed up an online social network called Harvard Connection (subsequently renamed ConnectU), later asking Zuckerberg to finish programming it. Instead of fulfilling his end of the bargain, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg stole their ideas and source code to build his own competing social network. “We got royally screwed,” Narendra says in a deposition.

Now this four-year “blood feud,” as one judge described it, is set to finally play out. Court-authorized forensic data experts are rifling through Zuckerberg’s computer hard drives, searching for code and evidence of intellectual property theft. If they find anything, the ConnectU group hopes to take over Facebook, asks that the site be shut down, and demands damages equal to or greater than the site’s value. If they don’t, the case will likely be tossed out.

Onstage at the developers’ conference, Zuckerberg shows no signs of being a man with the world on his shoulders. “This has been fun,” he says. “It’s working exactly as I thought it would.”

Growing up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., an affluent enclave just north of New York City, Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, showed an early interest in computer programming. Just before sixth grade, armed with his first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies, he began teaching himself how to code. At first, he struggled. “It was too hard for me, so I quit,” he said in court documents. (Zuckerberg and other participants in the lawsuit declined to be interviewed for this article.) “I guess, like, a little while after that, I started learning other [computer] languages and just making random things … I’d make games for myself that I thought were fun, just like dorky things.” In ninth grade, Zuckerberg made a computerized version of Risk, the popular board game. His version was set during the Roman Empire, a period of history that has long fascinated him; he can read and write Latin and Greek, and considered concentrating in classics at Harvard. After his junior year in high school, he attended Harvard Summer School for a three-month intensive course in ancient Greek. On Zuckerberg’s Harvard application, David Petrain, his summer-school instructor, described his pupil as a “rare combination of brilliant student and thoroughly likable human being.”

By that point, Zuckerberg had left Dobbs Ferry for Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Excelling in math and science, he threw himself into his classes. He also joined the fencing team, a sport about which he rhapsodized on his Harvard application: “[Fencing] has always proven to be the perfect medium. … I rarely find myself doing anything more enjoyable than fencing a good bout.” While a senior at Exeter, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that would play songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. Zuckerberg and D’Angelo, who is now Facebook’s chief technology officer, made it freely available online. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, Zuckerberg got his first taste of the big money in computer programming: WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others all wanted to buy Synapse; Zuckerberg later claimed that Microsoft was ready to shell out $2 million. But the two friends decided not to sell just then.

“I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” Zuckerberg would tell the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

It can be difficult to know when Zuckerberg is serious. He has a dry, mischievous sense of humor that sometimes verges on obnoxious. He did subsequently try to sell Synapse, he told the Crimson, only to find that interest had waned. But, thanks to his self-abnegating public statements, that missed opportunity has been portrayed as an act of noble volition.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg behaved like a typical college kid. He rushed Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. According to the Boston Globe, he declared an affinity for Asian women. He skipped classes and blew off homework. “It’s a good thing I can B.S. math proofs on the board in real time,” he wrote in an online journal he kept during one project.

During his freshman and sophomore years, his approach to Web design began to crystallize. “Whenever I’m about to begin a coding project, I always get sort of overwhelmed … ,” he explained in the journal. “I know I can code well, but I’m not so confident about the design and I know how important that is to the final product, so I always like to get the design out of the way first … I start with a simple design and build pages on top of that.”

A stripped-down design is, of course, one of the hallmarks of Facebook; by contrast, MySpace looks like Times Square at night. Equally important to the site’s early success, it met a need for a college-specific social network. That aspect of Facebook is also one of the main reasons Zuckerberg is being sued.

As boys, Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses were practically neighbors. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, 26, are from Greenwich, Conn., less than 20 miles from Dobbs Ferry. Aside from being smart children from well-to-do families, however, they share few similarities. The twins, Olympic crew hopefuls, are the sons of a former Wharton School professor who now works as an investment consultant. The “craggy, Neanderthal-esque” twosome, as the Crimson described them, studied economics. Where Zuckerberg is pale and thin, the Winklevoss twins are tall and fit. Their style is more prepster than geek: They once rowed a crew race while wearing button-down shirts and ties. Since their graduation in 2004, the twins have raced all over the world, recently winning gold medals at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. Their father supports their training. When Zuckerberg moved to California in the summer of 2004, by contrast, his parents paid only for his cell phone bills and health insurance.

During their junior year, the twins began sketching out the social network that they hoped would unify Harvard students. The idea came from Narendra, an applied math major from Bayside, N.Y., whom Cameron had met in freshman Spanish class; Narendra and the Winklevosses later lived together in Pforzheimer House. “The three of us were the best of friends,” Tyler would say. “Whenever any of us acted, we all trusted in the other person to act for the betterment of everybody in the group.”

In December 2002, Narendra told the Winklevosses of his vision for an online social network for college students. The Winklevosses liked the idea, and the three decided to bring it to life, naming it Harvard Connection. “It was intended to be a collection of profiles of individuals who wanted to get to know other individuals … at Harvard or abroad or outside of Harvard,” Narenda would say.

They would have to build a website, but none of the budding entrepreneurs had enough coding experience to do so. They needed programmers—which meant that they would have to share their ideas with outsiders. By November 2003, Narendra and the Winklevosses were ready to get Harvard Connection off the ground. The three friends, now seniors, had mapped out much of the site’s design and discussed how to attract users and advertisers. Their programmers—Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao—had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, and back-end coding. “All three of us were fairly excited about … the idea,” Narendra said. “I [knew] it had potential to be something that was really big and something that we could down the road make money on.” Half the network would be a dating section, where Harvard students could upload profiles. The other half would help make connections, whether to look for jobs, swap information about classes, or just hang out online. There was even a way users could connect with each other; Victor Gao called it a “handshake.”

The group planned to establish the network at Harvard, then expand to other schools. But first they had to finish the “connect” portion of the site. Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture. Instead, he asked to be compensated for hours worked and was paid about $400. The team sought an ace replacement to finish the job.

“We needed a programmer who was as committed to the overall business as we were,” Narendra said in a court statement. “We decided that the next programmer brought in should be made an equal member of the development team … [and] would receive equal financial benefit from the eventual website … ”

Zuckerberg was an easy choice. Then a sophomore computer science concentrator, he had recently gained campus notoriety by creating a website called “facemash” that flashed photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to click on the one they considered more attractive. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into school servers and copied pictures from house directories, informally known as facebooks. He suspected from the start that his program would land him in trouble. “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... ),” Zuckerberg wrote in his online journal. “But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... ”

Facemash’s questionable taste and Zuckerberg’s hacking caused a furor. The Harvard College Administration Board, the college’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board), placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior,” but his exploits caught Narendra’s eye. In early November, he e-mailed the programmer: “We’re very deep into developing a site which we would like you to be a part of and ... which we know will make some waves on campus.”

Within days, Zuckerberg was talking to the Harvard Connection team and preparing to take over programming duties from Gao. The plaintiffs say Zuckerberg was briefed on the confidential nature of the project and the plan to expand to other schools, using the site as an advertising base. According to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg was intrigued by the idea. “We were very concerned the whole time about … letting the cat out of the bag,” Cameron Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We communicated this multiple times to Mr. Zuckerberg—that it’s very important to get this to market first.” Zuckerberg’s attorneys have denied those claims. The plaintiffs also say that Zuckerberg was given a choice about the terms of his partnership. Although his attorneys have denied that any formal discussion about compensation or ownership of Harvard Connection took place, Gao claims otherwise: “I told him that [Narendra and the Winklevosses] would either pay him on a rolling basis or take him on as a partner with the possibility of taking an equal stake,” Gao told the court. “He became visibly excited. He told me that he wanted the latter option … because he thought the Harvard Connection website had the potential to reach out to a very large user base.”

Gao relayed Zuckerberg’s alleged decision to the team and handed over the keys to the Harvard Connection code. On or about November 12, according to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg began work. Ten days later, he e-mailed Gao and Narendra to tell them that the site was almost ready. “I have most of the coding done, and I think that once I get the graphics we’ll be able to launch this thing,” Zuckerberg e-mailed.

But for the next two months, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg made himself scarce. He postponed meetings, was slow to return calls and e-mails, and allegedly refused to let the team see his work. He offered a variety of explanations: His cell phone was muted, his computer science problem sets were taking up too much time, he forgot to bring his laptop charger home for Thanksgiving and his computer died. As the Harvard Connection launch date was pushed back week after week, the plaintiffs grew increasingly anxious. “We spent a lot of our time trying to get Mark to sort of follow up with us,” Narendra said. "Cameron sent him emails … We would, you know, call him and ask him, ‘Hey, what’s the latest on the website?’… He would say, ‘… I should have something done in the next couple weeks.’”

In mid-December, Narendra and the Winklevosses finally met with Zuckerberg in his dorm room. Though nothing was ever put down on paper—an oversight that would weaken their subsequent case— they claim that they again promised Zuckerberg a fair share of any future revenue. Zuckerberg allegedly confirmed his interest and assured them that the site was almost complete. On the whiteboard in his room, Cameron says, Zuckerberg had scrawled multiple lines of code under the heading “Harvard Connection.” This would be the only time the plaintiffs saw any of his work.

On January 14, 2004, the Harvard Connection team went to talk to Zuckerberg once more; Zuckerberg informed them that he was involved with another project. He did not elaborate, and the two sides did not substantively speak again.

On February 4, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook.

“None of us knew about it until we picked up the [Crimson],” Tyler Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We read this article that says ‘thefacebook’”—Zuckerberg’s original name for the site— “‘launched by Mark Zuckerberg,’ and we sort of stepped back and were like, ‘Well, that sounds like our idea …’”

Within a few days, hundreds of students had signed up for Facebook. Within two weeks, that number had swelled to 4,000; after a month, 10,000; by June, 100,000. Zuckerberg and his early teammates—Eduardo Saverin, a frat brother who was the company’s first CEO; Dustin Moskovitz, who helped with the early programming and is now a VP of engineering at Facebook; Chris Hughes, who became a Facebook spokesman; and Andrew McCollum, who helped expand the site soon after it launched—were adding schools to Facebook as quickly as they could code.

Harvard Connection never had a chance.

Success in the tech world is usually about execution, not ideas—original ideas are rare in such a competitive field—and, when Facebook launched in February 2004, the notion of an online social network was hardly novel. Friendster was thriving. A handful of rudimentary college-specific networks already existed. “Innovation often happens collaboratively,” says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at HLS. “It’s very rarely a single person coming up with a single idea who makes a breakthrough. It’s not surprising at all that some people had similar ideas.”

One of those people was Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard student, who, six months before Facebook, had created a Harvard social network called houseSYSTEM. It featured a “Universal Face Book” that allowed students to upload photos and personal information. Zuckerberg, whom Greenspan had told about the site early on, was a user, and Greenspan has since accused him of poaching ideas, in particular features that allowed members to create event reminders, access course schedules, and buy and sell textbooks.

“I don’t know if Mark copied things intentionally or it’s just the most amazing coincidence of all time, but I know he’s dishonest,” Greenspan says. “I’ve seen him lie.”

But Greenspan also points out that many elements of social networks aren’t new. “Some of these concepts are generic and existed as far back as 1997,” he says. “That’s when I first got an invitation to a social network. I was in eighth grade.” Even Zuckerberg’s high school had an online facebook. Kris Tillery, one of Zuckerberg’s Exeter classmates, created an application that allowed students to upload profile information and perform searches; it all but replaced the school’s printed student handbook. Zuckerberg, Tillery says now, is “a smart and capable programmer and businessman, and generally a good guy.” Even if the Exeter directory inspired Zuckerberg, says Tillery, that wouldn’t explain Facebook’s success.

What can, in large part, is Zuckerberg. Tales of Zuckerberg forgoing food to program through the night are near legendary. He coded facemash in a two-day, half-drunk frenzy, according to his online journal. “I haven’t really eaten all day,” he wrote. “My diet and sleeping patterns really go to shit when I have a coding project ... or when I don’t.”

Around the time that the Ad Board punished Zuckerberg for facemash, a Crimson editorial explored the possibility of an online directory with stronger privacy controls. “Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated if only the site had limited itself to students who voluntarily uploaded their own photos,” the Crimson editors argued. “A site that allows us to succumb to the guilty pleasure of judging our friends and enemies in an e-Darwinist free-for-all would be acceptable—and hilarious—so long as its targets all choose to opt themselves into the spotlight.”

This, Zuckerberg has said, was the real inspiration for Facebook. “I basically took that article ... and made a site with those exact privacy controls and that was Facebook,” Zuckerberg said in a deposition. Yet the Crimson had only suggested a site that ranked relative attractiveness.

So why did Zuckerberg bail on Harvard Connection? In court documents and press interviews, he usually cites the unwieldy source code he inherited from the site’s previous programmers. Zuckerberg has also said that he lost interest in Harvard Connection because it lacked a cohesive vision and was never intended to be more than a dating and professional site. “I’m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run,” he e-mailed Cameron Winklevoss at one point.

But it’s hard to imagine that Zuckerberg didn’t know that the site he was designing for himself was very much like the site he was supposed to be creating for the Harvard Connection team. The similarities between Facebook and the concept for Harvard Connect are abundant and obvious, and the plaintiffs have accused Zuckerberg of stealing several ideas, including: the concept of an online social network for the college community; registration with .edu e-mail addresses to encourage users to enter accurate information into their profiles; grouping users by schools, starting with Harvard and then moving on to the rest of the Ivy League and beyond, and allowing them to connect to other groups; letting users adjust privacy settings within their groups; allowing users to request connections with other users; enabling people to upload, post, and share photos, videos, and information and exchange goods such as books or personal items.

As evidence has trickled to light over the last three years, Zuckerberg’s story has changed in ways that contradict previous explanations. Immediately after Facebook launched, the plaintiffs sent Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter and filed a complaint with the Ad Board. The plaintiffs argued that Zuckerberg had violated Harvard’s honor code. Zuckerberg e-mailed a letter to the Ad Board presenting his version of events. Although the Ad Board chose not to pursue the matter, Zuckerberg’s letter, presented by the plaintiffs as evidence, raises questions about his veracity.

In his letter, Zuckerberg admits—contrary to what his attorneys would later claim—that the Harvard Connection team discussed payment with him. “[The plaintiffs] told me that if I wanted to get involved, they needed about 10 hours of programming done and there could be some pay in it for me,” Zuckerberg wrote. (In the same letter, he also asserted that he was working for free.) Although a discussion about payment could help establish an oral contract between the parties and bolster the plaintiffs’s complaint, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in the case. “Oral contracts are worth the paper they’re written on,” Palfrey says. “But it’s enough of a case that they’ve been able to get themselves in front of a judge … You can have just enough to kick open the doors of justice.”

Zuckerberg also substantiated much of what the plaintiffs have said with respect to the Harvard Connection concept. He confirmed that it was divided into dating and connecting sections, and that users could upload images and personal information and search for other people based on interests, then contact them for dates or non-romantic reasons. Most revealing is what Zuckerberg said about the connecting side of Harvard Connection: “Instead of the information being based around dating, it had a professional focus, and instead of requesting dates from people, users would request connections. I never really understand [sic] what requesting a connection would do for a user …” That admission suggests that forming platonic connections on a website—for Facebook users, perhaps the site’s most central function—was not actually Zuckerberg’s idea nor intent when he launched his site. Then again, it’s also possible that he was simply misrepresenting the ambition of the Harvard Connection site.

Aaron Greenspan, shown here in 2001: "I don't know if [Zuckerberg] copied things intentionally or it's just the most amazing coincidence of all time, but I know he's dishonest."

The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg stalled Harvard Connection while working on Facebook to gain a first-mover advantage; Zuckerberg has denied the accusation. In the Ad Board letter, he says he began work on Facebook only after his final meeting with the plaintiffs on January 14, 2004.

“I let them know that I probably wouldn’t be able to devote the kind of time I would have liked to the site, and that they should get another developer on board,” he wrote. “After that meeting I began making thefacebook … ” Zuckerberg subsequently claimed that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during exam period.

But court documents suggest that the claims Zuckerberg made to the Harvard Ad Board may be false. Zuckerberg registered the original Facebook website on January 11, and his lawyers have told the court that it was “on or about” this date that he started coding. On January 12, however—two days before meeting with the Harvard Connect group—Zuckerberg e-mailed Eduardo Saverin, saying that the site was almost complete and that they should discuss marketing strategies.

A week earlier, Zuckerberg had e-mailed Greenspan for legal advice about a new “web app.” When Greenspan inquired further, Zuckerberg became cryptic: “For now I’m trying to keep the project on the dl, so I’d rather not discuss the details,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg’s letter to the Ad Board suggests his frustration with the whole episode. “I try not to get involved with other students’ ventures since they are generally too time-consuming and don’t provide me with enough room to be creative and do my own thing,” Zuckerberg told the Ad Board. “I do, however, make an effort to use my skills to help out those who are trying to develop their own ideas for websites … Perhaps there was some confusion, and I can see why they might be upset that I released a successful website while theirs was still unfinished, but I definitely didn’t promise them anything … Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

As Facebook’s membership soared, Zuckerberg showed a gift for making sound decisions without overreaching. When the time was right, he created a “Groups” application that let users join or create groups and connect with people with similar interests. Facebook would eventually expand to high-school networks and added a photo application that let users upload pictures. By the summer of 2004, Facebook was growing so fast that Zuckerberg, who had just finished his sophomore year, headed to Palo Alto to search for investment capital and further develop the site. He took one bag of clothes. “I had a couple friends that were going to be out there for the summer who had internships,” he explained later, “I wanted to hang out with them.”

Zuckerberg enlisted several Harvard roommates and friends to help with Facebook. They rented a group house, planted tiki torches, and ran a zip-line from the roof. They also coded day and night. By the end of the summer, 250,000 people had signed up for Facebook. Zuckerberg decided to stay in California.

That summer, he also befriended Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and opened donor doors for him in Silicon Valley. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg would later force his friend to step down after Parker was arrested for cocaine possession, according to a deposition by Zuckerberg. (Parker has denied cocaine-related allegations.) But the more-seasoned tech entepreneur helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.

Harvard Connection, however, remained a Dickensian contrast in fortune. Since the launch of Facebook, the trio of seniors had been scrambling to make up lost ground. “Every second ticking was … a second lost,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Zuckerberg had turned over none of the code he claimed to have finished for Harvard Connection, so the plaintiffs contracted two Web development firms to finish their site. In May 2004, they launched their new site, renamed ConnectU, and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t very good; by then, Facebook was steamrolling everything in its path, and today, ConnectU is all but moribund. Narendra turned his attention to Wall Street, landing a job at Credit Suisse. But the Winklevoss twins kept at it. Last year, the twins testified that they had pumped some $800,000 into ConnectU. Furious at Zuckerberg, the Winklevosses even OK’d programs to “scrape” user information off Facebook, then e-mail invites to those users to join ConnectU. When Zuckerberg discovered the alleged subterfuge, he filed a lawsuit accusing ConnectU of hacking into Facebook and spamming his customer base. That litigation is ongoing.

Zuckerberg was already embroiled in still another lawsuit, filed five months earlier, this one against Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg claims that Saverin tried to hijack the company by freezing its bank account when Facebook desperately needed cash in its formative months. Zuckerberg used money his parents had saved for his college tuition to keep the company afloat. Saverin, who originally owned a third of Facebook, has counter-sued. He claims that the approximately $20,000 involved was his money—Facebook seed capital that Zuckerberg promised to match and never did. Instead, Saverin says, Zuckerberg used the money to cover personal expenses. Then, when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook and became sole director, he cut Saverin out of the power structure of the company and watered down his shares.

By chance, Saverin ran into Cameron Winklevoss in a Manhattan bar in the summer of 2004. Over the din of music and loud voices, Saverin apologized for Zuckerberg’s behavior, according to a deposition by Winklevoss.

“Sorry that he screwed you … Mark screwed [me] too,” Winklevoss recalled Saverin saying.

In September 2004, only a few weeks after that encounter, the ConnectU team filed a federal lawsuit against Zuckerberg and his early teammates, including Saverin.

Lawyers for ConnectU have successfully pushed to recover Zuckerberg’s original source code for Facebook, arguing that it will show him guilty of copyright infringement. Zuckerberg says that the code will absolve him of wrongdoing. “We know that we didn’t take anything from them,” he told the New Yorker last year. “There is really good documentation of this: our code base versus theirs. At some point, that will come out in court.”

But it has not come out in court. Zuckerberg has been on notice since September 2004 to preserve information relevant to the case, but for some time Facebook claimed they couldn’t produce a shred of source code from when Zuckerberg first began working for Harvard Connection, the original Facebook code, or even the Facebook code in October 2004, one month after the original suit was filed. Zuckerberg’s lawyers have held that nearly all the early Facebook code has disappeared, wiped from outside servers long ago or lost on missing or corrupted hard drives.

“Mr. Zuckerberg should have known better than to fail to back up the work that he allegedly performed on the Harvard Connection code,” ConnectU attorneys have argued. “It is fishy indeed, if not impossible, that the Harvard Connection code, the pre-launch thefacebook.com code, and the facemash code supposedly do not exist from launch until October 2004 …”

What evidence Facebook has turned over to ConnectU—and some memory devices once thought lost have recently surfaced—may be all that exists. The court has ruled that outside consultants can image and analyze the devices for code or other intellectual property. Their findings could be decisive.

“Computer forensics is an extraordinary science,” Palfrey says. “If they go through a legitimate ... process, you’ll get an answer.”

Whatever the legal outcome, we will probably never know what really happened in the Harvard dorms four years ago. And as Facebook mushrooms into one of the biggest databases of personal information in the world, the controversy over the site’s origins will almost certainly be overshadowed by a battle over how it protects users’ privacy. Until a better social network comes along, however, people are logging on to Facebook by the millions. It’s safe to say that Zuckerberg capitalized on the right idea at the right time. The question remains: Whose idea was it?
http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1724.html





I’m Ready to Bail on Facebook - the New Face of Evil
marc orchant

I’ve been increasingly irritated with the noise-to-signal ration Facebook creates in my life. I definitely had the “I just threw up in the back of my mouth a little” feeling during the Web 2.0 Summit Zuckerberg love-fest. And now there’s increasing evidence that Facebook Beacon, their ill-considered advertising engine (or is it their privacy invasion engine?) is potentially a new vector for so-called affiliate marketers, spammers, scammers, and other vermin to gain access to unsuspecting users. Worse, it turns out that protecting yourself from this new attack by trying to leave Facebook is no easy task.

Henry Blodgett reports that Facebook is in deep doo-doo with both the New York Times and Coca-Cola over their misrepresentations about the opt-in/opt-out nature of Beacon:

The “Beacon” fallout continues. The New York Times’ Louise Story essentially accuses Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of lying to her about Beacon’s being “opt-in.” Coca-Cola got a similar impression from the company – and, having learned the truth, is holding off on using the program. Meanwhile, Facebook’s spokesman attempts to explain to the NYT’s Louise Story what Zuckerberg really meant – and makes matters worse.

And Dare Obasanjo blows the lid on why Beacon is totally broken and almost certainly unfixable:

Anyway, back to the title of this blog post (Facebook Beacon is Unfixable). The problem with Facebook Beacon is that it is designed in a way that makes it easy for Facebook Beacon affiliates to integrate into their sites at the cost of user’s privacy. From Jay Goldman’s excellent post where he Deconstructed the Facebook Beacon Javascript we learn
Beacon from 10,000 Feet

That basically wraps up our tour of how Beacon does what it does. It’s a fairly long explanation, so here’s a quick summary:

1. The partner site page includes the beacon.js file, sets a <meta> tag with a name, and then calls Facebook.publish_action.
2. Facebook.publish_action builds a query_params object and then passes it to Facebook._send_request.
3. Facebook._send_request dynamically generates an <iframe>which loads the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php and passes the query_params. At this point, Facebook now knows about the news feed item whether you choose to publish it or not.

When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. F*ck.


Game over. This is more than enough to convince me that Facebook has more downside than upside for me. Look, I freely admit I am not the core demographic for Facebook. I’m a 50-year-old guy who’s been happily married for 25 years (and so doesn’t want to find a date or a new “special friend”), doesn’t play games, could care less about drinking games, zombie bites, and other frippery, and initially believed in the potential this framework offered.

Chatting with Tris Hussey and Sam Sethi on Twitter just now, I learn that jumping ship might not be as easy as I thought.

On Twitter, Sam Sethi says: “… just try and leave. You need to unsubscribe from every group and jump through a few more hoops,” and points here.

Facebook does allow people to ‘deactivate’ their accounts. This means that most of their information becomes invisible to other viewers, but it remains on Facebook’s servers - indefinitely.

This is handy for anyone who changes their mind and wants to rejoin. They can just type their old user name and password in, and they’ll pop straight back up on the site - it will be like they never left.

But not everyone will want to grant Facebook the right to keep all their data indefinitely when they aren’t using it for any obvious purpose. If they do want to delete it permanently, they need to go round the site and delete everything they’ve ever done.
That includes every wall post, every picture, and every group membership. For a heavy Facebook user, that could take hours. Even days. And it could violate the UK’s Data Protection Act.


Summary - leaving Facebook has been made almost impossible and proportionately harder the more you’ve participated. Sorry. That sounds pretty much like my definition of EVIL. When will these people learn that this sh*t doesn’t fly? I agree with Open Garden who says:

and thats why opensocial is a step in the right direction ..

Here’s the final proof I’m right and it’s time to nuke any trace of my casual flirtation with Facebook. Fake Steve Jobs says so (and of course he’s always right… about everything:

See this story on CNET which refers to this story from some Harvard publication. Gist is that the Harvard publication dug up some documents involved in a lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook claims it’s an invasion of Zuckerberg’s privacy and went to court trying to have the documents yanked. As CNET points out this is a little bit odd considering that in recent weeks Facebook has been bagged for publishing info about its users’ online purchases and has defended itself, claiming it has every right to share private info about its users. Oh, the Harvard article also suggested Zuckerberg is kind of a sh*tbag. No idea where they got that idea.
http://us.blognation.com/2007/12/01/...-face-of-evil/





Facebook Apologizes Over Handling of Ad Feature
Louise Story

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the social networking site Facebook, apologized to the site’s users yesterday about the way it introduced a controversial new advertising feature last month.

Facebook also introduced a way for members to entirely avoid the feature, known as Beacon, which tracks the actions of its members when they use other sites around the Internet.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s apology — in the form of a blog post on Facebook — followed weeks of criticism from members, privacy groups and advertisers.

“I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has also been meeting with advertising agencies in recent days and discussing their concerns about Beacon, according to one executive who was invited. Facebook originally presented Beacon to the advertising community as an opt-in program that its members would choose to use. It planned to sell ads alongside the messages sent to people’s friends about their purchases and activities on other sites. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola have expressed surprise that Beacon then required users to take action if they did not want the messages sent out.

“This is a bit of an example of Facebook being, as we refer to it, ‘out over your skis.’ They got a little bit ahead of themselves,” said Elizabeth Ross, president of the digital advertising agency Tribal DDB West, a part of the Omnicom Group.

Ms. Ross said advertisers did not want Facebook to push its users into a system like Beacon against their will.

But that is what happened for a few weeks after Beacon was introduced on Nov. 6. Facebook gave users two notices that it planned to broadcast their actions to their friends — one when they were on the external Web site making a purchase, and the other when they came back to Facebook. The notices were small at first, and when users ignored them, Facebook assumed they had granted permission.

After more than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition about Beacon that was set up by the political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, Facebook changed that policy last Thursday so that users who ignored the warnings were considered to have said ‘no.’ But a Facebook executive said then that the company would not offer users a universal opt-out for Beacon.

“We need to make sure we give them the ability to see what things can do for them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations at Facebook.

Although Facebook has now made the changes that MoveOn.org and others requested, some users said they felt the company had not been forthcoming with its members.

“I feel like my trust in Facebook has been violated,” said Christopher Lynn, 30, a Facebook user who also writes a blog on social media. “Facebook created this space that was a private space, where we share our experiences, and to share this data behind our backs is upsetting.”

Robert French, a communications professor at Auburn University in Alabama, has been lecturing about Beacon recently, and he said his students — nearly all Facebook users — were shocked to learn about Beacon.

Privacy groups are still working on a complaint to federal regulators about Facebook’s advertising program. In addition to Beacon, the new program includes profile pages created by advertisers and ads sent to users based on what they write about in their profiles.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Mr. Zuckerberg should have explained Facebook’s full advertising and data collection program to users yesterday.

“The user needs to decide how their information is going to be used, whether it’s going to be used for targeting at all, which advertisers have access to it and whether Facebook has the right to collect and analyze it,” he said. “Facebook is saying it is a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets; what’s not being told to users is that they are selling those secrets.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/te...6facebook.html





Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads
Louise Story

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages–despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.

They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Facebook does not allow users to sell ads on their profile pages. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told me on Nov. 6 that is because Facebook does not want people’s profile pages to become cluttered.

“We don’t want a free-for-all,” he said.

But Weblo’s chief executive Rocky Mirza says that people should be able to sell space on their pages on Facebook (and a variety of other sites like MySpace and YouTube) because they are the content creators on those sites. Facebook would have no content if not for its users, he said, which makes it different from media organizations, for example, that have content because they pay reporters.

Weblo started the service in October. In the past month the number of people using it on Facebook has grown from 200 to 1500.

“Obviously Facebook is providing the infrastructure, so they can place ads on the left side,” Mr. Mirza said. “But users should be getting paid for the time they spend on the Internet and the friends they draw to their pages.”

Facebook does allow people and companies that design widgets for use on the site to sell ads in the widget interface page, called the “canvas page.” But those widget companies cannot sell ads on the profile pages, either.

Weblo shares ad revenues with the people who let it place ads on their pages. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook allows them to carry on. Facebook clearly would not want to alienate even more users now, after its Beacon debacle over the past month.

Weblo gets to the heart of a question of ownership that will will generate more debate as more people spend more of their time looking at content created by other ordinary people. When users post reviews of restaurants on a media site, for example, should they get to share in the ad revenues generated?

Facebook has also yet to respond to my inquiry about Weblo, but I will update you when they do.

People can also sign up to run weblo ads on their pages by using a Weblo widget on the site called Internet Worth.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...ads/index.html





Small Merchants Gain Large Presence on Web
Bob Tedeschi

MOM-AND-POP retailers have helplessly stood by over the last decade as big-box merchants steamrolled over them. Online, though, small merchants are not going down without a fight.

The number of small- and medium-size retailers selling online has swelled in the last two years, from 21 percent to 32 percent, according to a survey by IDC, a consulting firm. Aided by less expensive and more sophisticated technology, stores like RealmDekor.com, CleanAirGardening.com and SitStay.com are competing with retailers as well as bigger sites like Amazon.

These businesses lack the huge marketing budgets of their bigger peers, of course, but they are unearthing cheap advertising methods that, in some cases, help them compete with million-dollar promotions.

The retailer of quirky home goods, RealmDekor.com, has experienced occasional sales increases not because of catalog shipments or television commercials, but because it formed relationships with bloggers and posted its products on new “social shopping sites” like ThisNext.com and StyleHive.com.

“People started posting about my goods and it snowballed from there,” said Lisa Mathisen, RealmDekor’s owner. “I know people think these sites are new and underground, but they’re becoming more mainstream. Even my mother checks them out to find gifts.”

Social shopping sites emerged last year as places for dedicated shoppers to exchange tips on popular items or designers. Tens of thousands of users list their raves and vie for trendsetter supremacy, while the site owners collect dollars for referring customers to retailers.

Gordon Gould, chief executive of ThisNext.com, said the site features hundreds of thousands of products, with a majority of the items coming from smaller retailers. “Social shopping sites help the smaller retailers surface their products and open people up to their specific point of view,” he said.

CleanAirGardening.com, an online retailer of environmentally friendly gardening supplies based in Dallas, recently began posting product demonstration videos on YouTube and other sites, along with links to the site. According to Lars Hundley, the company’s owner, visitors who arrive from video-sharing sites purchase goods 20 percent more often than those who come from elsewhere.

Most online shoppers are so experienced that they feel safer venturing away from Amazon to buy from lesser-known sites, said Ray Boggs, an IDC analyst. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the Web sites now built by many small merchants lack the amateurish feel of a few years ago.

Companies like Yahoo, Amazon and thousands of independent Web developers have become considerably better at building slick sites for merchants, sometimes within a few minutes, for less than $100. Yahoo Store merchants, for instance, pay $40 to $300 a month, and a commission of 0.75 percent to 1 percent on each sale. Merchants on the Amazon WebStore pay $60 monthly, along with a 7 percent commission.

Jimmy Duvall, who oversees the Yahoo Stores service for Yahoo’s small business division, said the company recently introduced a series of enhancements, intended to simplify the site-building process and improve merchandising.

For instance, Yahoo merchants can now automatically offer a shirt to match a pair of slacks a customer bought previously, or a tablecloth to complement silverware a customer placed into the shopping cart. (In retail parlance, these techniques are called cross-selling or up-selling.)

“They can do some pretty advanced merchandising now, without having to dedicate staff to picking items,” Mr. Duvall said.

In some respects, Yahoo’s cross-selling improvements are a response to Amazon’s entry into the market last year. The Amazon WebStore service began with technology that mimics Amazon.com’s recommendation feature, which displays the purchases of customers who searched for items similar to those on a given page.

In Amazon’s latest quarterly results, 32 percent of the goods sold on Amazon’s sites were offered by other merchants.

Those numbers could climb after a technology failure by Yahoo last week left its 45,000 merchants without functioning Web sites for much of the big Cyber Monday holiday shopping day. Matt Williams, who oversees the Amazon WebStore division, said his company had calls from Yahoo clients who were looking to transfer their stores quickly to his service.

Like Yahoo, Amazon helps its clients attract customers by listing its products on the site, and by helping ensure the stores appear on search engines. Such help is critical for beginners, but for more seasoned merchants hoping to reach the upper tiers of online retailing, it is not enough.

SitStay.com, an online retailer of goods for dog owners, grew steadily since its began in 1996. It now operates from a 20,000-square-foot facility in Lincoln, Neb. The owners of the 13-employee company, Darcie and Kent Krueger, invested slightly less than $100,000 in new Web site technology from I.B.M. that, starting last month, allowed them to more quickly post sales and product recommendations, among other things.

But because the new technology required SitStay to replace all of its old Web pages with new ones, search engines no longer rank the site’s products near the top of the results. Because few consumers click to the second or third page of search results, the effect was significant. Bigger merchants like Petco and Petsmart, meanwhile, can easily outbid SitStay for prominent ads.

“And more and more sites are coming out all the time, some with a lot of money they can invest in their search ads,” Mr. Krueger said. “So we’ve got everything in place to handle a lot more customers. Now, we’ve just got to find ways to bring them to us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...gy/03ecom.html





Spam’s End? Maybe, if Time Allows
John Markoff

Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap — for spam, not mice — if he has enough time to finish his project.

An M.I.T.-trained engineer, Mr. Kirsch was frustrated by the quality of the first computer mice in 1982, so he set out to improve them by incorporating an optical sensor.

Since then he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services. He has made forays into word processing document design, accelerating the Web, and in 1997 Infoseek, his search engine company, was the third ranking company in Web search. In many ways Mr. Kirsch, who is 50 years old, has come to exemplify what distinguishes Silicon Valley — a blend of engineering skills with persistent entrepreneurship.

Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million, a success that has permitted him and his wife to become significant philanthropists in Silicon Valley by contributing more than $75 million to the United Way campaign and other causes through his foundation.

Recently he has taken on the challenge of e-mail spam. This year he founded Abaca, a company with a new approach in the crowded market for stopping junk electronic mail.

Abaca claims that it can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee. According to the result of an independent survey last February by Opus One, a computer industry consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., that would be significantly better than the results of six leading spam blockers.

Abaca has taken on a new urgency for Mr. Kirsch — during the summer, he was discovered to have a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, that is found in about 1,500 Americans every year and is considered incurable, although it can be managed beyond the five- to seven-year longevity that new patients are usually told to expect.

So far he has shown no effects from the disease, and he said he is intent on applying his engineer’s approach to the problem.

“This is harder on my wife than it is on me,” he said during a recent interview. “I just look at it as a problem. Here’s a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don’t get to solve any more problems.”

Mr. Kirsch is not the first prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to battle cancer. Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel, has survived prostate cancer. In May 1996 Mr. Grove wrote about his battle with the disease in intimate detail in a Fortune magazine cover story. More recently Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, also underwent an operation and has survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

As he has in confronting his earlier challenges, Mr. Kirsch outlined his situation and what he is doing to try to solve it in great detail on his Web home page. His approach to surviving is outlined in painstaking detail. However, it is listed as the third of his current projects, after “Eliminating spam,” and “Who would make the best president?”

In his description, he writes: “I have enough time to change the outcome and I’m going to try to do that. This is my story.”

His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is “Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years.” He writes, “My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.”

Once a registered Republican, Mr. Kirsch has moved closer to Democratic candidates and was a significant backer of Al Gore, in particular because of his environmental stance.

“He’s done a lot of fund-raising and he’s really been willing to put himself out there,” said John Shoch, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “He says what he believes in and supports political causes, and he’s not bashful about getting into the fray.”

The most visible change that he has made as a result of his cancer is the recent decision to change the financing direction of the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation, which until late last month had focused on a wide range of community philanthropic goals.

At the end of October, however, the foundation announced that in the future it would focus its financing on research associated with his cancer, which because of its rare nature receives almost no federal money.

For the moment, between weekly visits to the Stanford Medical Center, Mr. Kirsch is continuing to put much of his time into persuading the world that he has stumbled on a better way to block spam.

He has been thinking about the spam problem for a number of years and has several patents covering other approaches, but Mr. Kirsch said he had hit on the idea underlying Abaca — profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender — quite by accident.

“We were sitting around thinking of ways to obfuscate the description about how our system worked so the spammers would be misdirected,” he said. “So I came up with receiver reputation as something that might sound plausible. Then as I thought about it more and more, the more sense it made to me.”

The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.

Unlike most of its competitors, he said, Abaca’s technology does not require a training period, is language independent and is faster than many competitors because it does not scan the entire contents of a message to determine whether it is spam.

Mr. Kirsch has invested about $5 million in developing his idea, and he said he expects Abaca to reach profitability by the middle of next year.

“I have to admit it sounds innovative and novel,” said Sunil Paul, the founder of Brightmail, one of the leading providers of antispam technology, which was sold to Symantec in 1997 for $370 million.

At the same time Mr. Paul is dubious about the ability of a stand-alone antispam company in today’s computer security market. “Remember Bill Gate’s promise to rid the Internet of spam in a few years?” he said. “That was over seven years ago. Once any of these solutions scale up, though, thousands of other clever, smart people start to work on how to defeat the system.”

Mr. Kirsch insists that Abaca is unlikely to be caught soon. “Most people like me get 99.8 percent or so with the current volume of users,” he said, referring to the percentage of good e-mail he now sees using his system. “Our performance gets better as we add more users; our competitors already have scale, and we are way ahead even with just 20,000 users. When we get to scale, our performance should be nearly 100 times better than our closest competitor.”

In February, Opus One tested six antispam products on a stream of 10,000 messages during a 10-day period. Spam catch rates ranged from a high of 97.36 percent to a low of 74.10 percent. “At 99.8 percent you miss two out of 1000,” said Mr. Kirsch. “At 95 percent you miss 50 out of 1,000. So other systems give you 25 times as much spam. Who wants that? Nobody we know.”

Opus One has not yet tested the Abaca system. However, the testing group has been briefed by a representative of Abaca. “Generally, I am very skeptical of antispam techniques that get put forth with the pseudo-math that you hear from Abaca,” said Joel M. Snyder, a senior partner with Opus One. “In their case, however, the math has a face validity that’s unusual in this business. The only obvious issue with their system is that it really requires a lot of participants in order to work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te.../03kirsch.html





U.S. Plans to Screen All Who Enter, Leave Country

Personal Data Will Be Cross-Checked With Terrorism Watch Lists; Risk Profiles to Be Stored for Years
Ellen Nakashima and Spencer S. Hsu

The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years.

The details, released in a notice published yesterday in the Federal Register, open a new window on the government's broad and often controversial data-collection effort directed at American and foreign travelers, which was implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

While long known to scrutinize air travelers, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country "by automobile or on foot," the notice said.

The department intends to use a program called the Automated Targeting System, originally designed to screen shipping cargo, to store and analyze the data.

"We have been doing risk assessments of cargo and passengers coming into and out of the U.S.," DHS spokesman Jarrod Agen said. "We have the authority and the ability to do it for passengers coming by land and sea."

In practice, he said, the government has not conducted risk assessments on travelers at land crossings for logistical reasons.

"We gather, collect information that is needed to protect the borders," Agen said. "We store the information we see as pertinent to keeping Americans safe."

Civil libertarians expressed concern that risk profiling on such a scale would be intrusive and would not adequately protect citizens' privacy rights, issues similar to those that have surrounded systems profiling air passengers.

"They are assigning a suspicion level to millions of law-abiding citizens," said David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is about as Kafkaesque as you can get."

DHS officials said that by publishing the notice, they are simply providing "expanded notice and transparency" about an existing program disclosed in October 2001, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System.

But others said Congress has been unaware of the potential of the Automated Targeting System to assess non-aviation travelers.

"ATS started as a tool to prevent the entry of drugs with cargo into the U.S.," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "We are not aware of Congress specifically legislating to make this expansion possible."

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), yesterday asked Homeland Security to brief staff members on the program, Collins's spokeswoman, Jen Burita, said.

The notice comes as the department is tightening its ability to identify people at the borders. At the end of the year, for example, Homeland Security is expanding its Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, under which 32 million noncitizens entering the country annually are fingerprinted and photographed at 115 airports, 15 seaports and 154 land ports.

Stephen E. Flynn, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed doubts about the department's ability to conduct risk assessments of individuals on a wide scale.

He said customs investigators are so focused on finding drugs and weapons of mass destruction that it would be difficult to screen all individual border crossers, other than cargo-truck drivers and shipping crews.

"There is an ability in theory for government to cast a wider net," he said. "The reality of it is customs is barely able to manage the data they have."

The data-mining program stemmed from an effort in the early 1990s by customs officials to begin assessing the risk of cargo originating in certain countries and from certain shippers. Risk assessment turned more heavily to automated, computer-driven systems after the 2001 attacks.

The risk assessment is created by analysts at the National Targeting Center, a high-tech facility opened in November 2001 and now run by Customs and Border Protection.

In a round-the-clock operation, targeters match names against terrorist watch lists and a host of other data to determine whether a person's background or behavior indicates a terrorist threat, a risk to border security or the potential for illegal activity. They also assess cargo.

Each traveler assessed by the center is assigned a numeric score: The higher the score, the higher the risk. A certain number of points send the traveler back for a full interview.

The Automated Targeting System relies on government databases that include law enforcement data, shipping manifests, travel itineraries and airline passenger data, such as names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers.

The parent program, Treasury Enforcement Communications System, houses "every possible type of information from a variety of federal, state and local sources," according to a 2001 Federal Register notice.

It includes arrest records, physical descriptions and "wanted" notices. The 5.3 billion-record database was accessed 766 million times a day to process 475 million travelers, according to a 2003 Transportation Research Board study.

In yesterday's Federal Register notice, Homeland Security said it will keep people's risk profiles for up to 40 years "to cover the potentially active lifespan of individuals associated with terrorism or other criminal activities," and because "the risk assessment for individuals who are deemed low risk will be relevant if their risk profile changes in the future, for example, if terrorist associations are identified."

DHS will keep a "pointer or reference" to the underlying records that resulted in the profile.

The DHS notice specified that the Automated Targeting System does not call for any new means of collecting information but rather for the use of existing systems. The notice did not spell out what will determine whether someone is high risk.

But documents and former officials say the system relies on hundreds of "rules" to factor a score for each individual, vehicle or piece of cargo.

According to yesterday's notice, the program is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act of 1974 that allow, for instance, people to access records to determine "if the system contains a record pertaining to a particular individual" and "for the purpose of contesting the content of the record."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...av=hcmoduletmv





Kucinich on HR 1955
IndyBlog

Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said that he believes the proposed Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959) is unconstitutional.

Speaking to a crowd of supporters in New York City Nov. 29, Kucinich took several questions from the audience, including my question on why he voted against the bill. Kucinich was one of only six representatives to oppose the bill, which passed the House 404-6 on Oct. 23.

“If you understand what his bill does, it really sets the stage for further criminalization of protest,” Kucinich said. “This is the way our democracy little, by little, by little, is being stripped away from us. This bill, I believe, is a clear violation of the first amendment.”

Kucinich referred to the bill as the “thought crime bill,” when he explained in a joking fashion that, “We have freedom of speech. Thoughts, sometimes, proceed speech. There is usually a unity in thought, word and deed.”

The bill would create a National Commission, who would be charged with the task making legislative recommendations on how to prevent, disrupt and mitigate violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Many activists, scholars and civil liberties experts are worried that in order to prevent an act of “homegrown terrorism,” people who have radical or “extreme belief systems” would have to be monitored before a criminal act might occur. This, they surmise, would amount to unlawful surveillance of individuals who are critical to the Bush administration and those who hold power in the current economic and political system.

He pointed to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) of 2006 as an example of another bill that, he says, also “criminalizes dissent.” According to the bill, anyone who engages in acts of “force, violence, or threats” that would interfere or cause damage to businesses engaged in animal enterprise, could be charged with a felony. This includes acts that could cause a “loss of profits” to the business. The businesses noted in the bill include, “a commercial or academic enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products for profit, food or fiber production, agriculture, education, research, or testing; a zoo, aquarium, animal shelter, pet store, breeder, furrier, circus, or rodeo, or other lawful competitive animal event; or any fair or similar event intended to advance agricultural arts and sciences.”

Interestingly, like H.R. 1955, the AETA was also passed under the “suspension of the rules,” a provision that allows the House to quickly pass non-controversial bills. When the suspension was requested Nov. 16, 2006, only six members of the house were present for the vote. Kucinich was the only one to oppose the bill. He noted that the bill was, “written in such a way as to have a chilling effect on the exercise of the constitutional rights of protest…”
http://www.indypendent.org/2007/12/0...ch-on-hr-1955/





What Do the Cops Have on Me?

What turns up when a police officer punches your name into the computer.
Brad Flora

Drew Peterson, the former Bolingbrook, Ill., police sergeant suspected of murdering his third and fourth wives, is now also under investigation for police misconduct. New evidence suggests that Peterson used official law-enforcement databases to check up on his fourth wife and her associates before she disappeared. Peterson's attorney says it was common practice for Bolingbrook police to run checks for friends and family, and to run prank names to alleviate boredom. What can the police learn about you from these database queries?

Your name and aliases; your Social Security number; where you live; when you were born; the color of your skin and eyes; any scars, tattoos, or identifying marks; your height, vision, and gender; what kind of car you drive, whether it's a stolen vehicle, and your license and plate numbers; your traffic violation history; your local, state, and federal criminal history; and your fingerprints

Local police gather this information from five main databases. A search of records from the state registration agency (called the "Department of Motor Vehicles" in most places) yields information on your car and to whom it's registered. There's another archive of driver's license records, kept in some states by the DMV and in other states by a separate licensing agency, which has facts on where you live, your driving record, and sometimes a digital copy of your license photo. Outstanding arrest warrants will show up in a third database, and a person's criminal history can be found in either the local police records or the federally operated National Crime Information Center database, which culls from local, state, and federal files. (Some police agencies also subscribe to research tools that are available to the general public, like LexisNexis and credit reporting services.)

Access to the databases works a little differently in every agency. In general, police have unrestricted access to the DMV, driver's license, and warrant databases, as well as the local police records. In some departments, the information can be obtained via Windows-based graphical user interfaces, while other offices still use DOS-like text interfaces. Either way, it works a lot like searching for a book at the library: Officers click a shortcut on their computer desktop to open a window that will let them search by name, license number, date of birth, or Social Security number, and return all matching records.

Looking up a person's federal and state criminal history is more complicated, though this also varies from local agency to agency. In some departments, officers can query the NCIC database directly from their office computers or the mobile data computer in their squad car; in others, officers must submit a formal request to their records department and sign a statement saying it's part of an ongoing investigation—and that the record will be destroyed when the investigation is over.
http://www.slate.com/id/2179180/





C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations
Mark Mazzetti

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself” and were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss refused to comment this afternoon on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes is likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially-appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

The Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish in Friday’s paper a story about the destruction of the tapes.. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaouior to the Sept. 11 Commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

Staff members of the 9/11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the 9/11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said that the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” General Hayden said the agency had stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read

In October, federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case were forced to write a letter to the court amending those C.I.A. declarations. The letter stated that in September, the C.I.A. notified the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., that it had discovered a videotape documenting the interrogation of a detainee. After a more thorough search, the letter stated, C.I.A. officials discovered a second video tape and one audio tape.

The letter is heavily redacted and sentences stating which detainees’ interrogations the recordings document are blacked out. Signed by U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

There is no mention in the letter of the tapes C.I.A. officials destroyed last year. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer between 2002 and 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said that the videotaping was ordered after reports of unauthorized techniques as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites. He said that the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

“People know what happened, but to see it in living color would have far greater power,” the official said.

Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.
Rep. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. does not record the interrogation of detainees.

“When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said ‘What tapes?”’ he said.

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/wa...-intel.html?hp





Police Extend OiNK’s Bail Date and Returns Servers, Wiped!
Ernesto

The OiNK servers that were raided in October have been returned to OiNK’s ISP. Strangely enough all the data, and thus the evidence, has been wiped. In addition, the bail date for OiNK admin Alan Ellis, who was arrested during the raid, has today been extended until the 4th of February 2008.

The initial bail date was December 21, it is not clear what the reason for the extension is, but it is likely that the police don’t have the strong evidence they would like to have.

In fact, the police returned the servers last week, not before deleting all the “evidence” that it held. The police made images of the servers, but it is doubtful if destroying OiNK’s property, and the original evidence is even legal.

The British and the Dutch police both contributed to what they named “Operation Ark Royal”, allegedly acting upon twisted information fed to them by the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations.

Among other things, the police claimed that OiNK was a money machine, and that Alan was making hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, everyone knows that OiNK was free to use and this fact was backed up by Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

The IFPI and BPI did not only misinform the police, they also hijacked the OiNK.cd domain and displayed an ominous message indicating an investigation into the site’s users had begun. These propagandistic threats were supposed to scare former OiNK members, and they succeeded in this until OiNK reclaimed the domain.

What once was the best BitTorrent music tracker on the Internet is now gone and wont return. Although most of its members and releasing talent found a new homes by now, there is little doubt that the music industry will continue to alienate itself from their customers until they are dead and gone.

For those who want to help Alan out, there is an official OiNK legal defense fundraiser where money can be donated to cover the legal costs. If for some reason the money isn’t needed it will be donated to an animal charity. At this point it is still unclear what the charges against Alan will be, if there will be any at all.

Stay tuned.

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-bail-date-extended-071207/
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-12-07, 11:16 AM   #2
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?
Randy Kennedy

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.

Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”

When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”

But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)

Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.

But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”

“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”

Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.

“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.

But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.

He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.

Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.

He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.

“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”

He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/ar...gn/06prin.html





Work With Me, Baby



Guy Trebay

FASHION is a stepchild, in photography no less than in other areas of the culture. The reach of the imagery it produces influences everything from trash television to presidential campaigns. Yet the slick work cranked out by the fashion machine is rarely taken seriously.

Museums relegate fashion picture shows to their basements. Art galleries disdain fashion photographs as work for hire. Auction houses have historically tended to accord fashion images second-class status, sneaking a few first-rate fashion pictures into sales of photography’s certified masters. It’s not hard to fathom why friction exists between practitioners of fine art and fashion photography. For every self-styled Cindy Sherman hoping to hit it big in the gallery world, there are scores of competent but doubtless overpaid journeymen (fees of $100,000 a day are not rare for top fashion photographers) toiling in advertising’s lucrative fields.

“For a long time in the quote unquote fine arts world, fashion was a dirty word,” said Joshua Holdeman, international director of the photography department at Christie’s. “We’re far enough away from the work now,” he added, referring to the early examples from the canon, “to realize it is a valuable cultural product that belongs in the pantheon of art history.”

Signs of this seem to be everywhere. Last January, a show of pictures by five important contemporary fashion photographers was mounted at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Designating 2009 as the Year of Fashion, the International Center of Photography in New York recently announced an ambitious roster of shows celebrating the fashion image, beginning with a survey of contemporary work, moving through a retrospective of fashion images by Edward Steichen and Richard Avedon, and closing with the third I.C.P. Triennial, whose theme will be the cultural ubiquitousness of fashion imagery.

And this week, fashion photography makes its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual trade fair that is to the art world what the Coachella festival in Southern California is to indie rock. In Fashion ’07, an assembly of 20 contemporary photographers brought together by Marion de Beaupre, a curator and author, opened Dec. 2 at the Surfcomber Hotel. Part survey and part marketing trial balloon, the show also tests the premise that the traditional borders between fine and commercial art are now permeable.

“As the market becomes so broad and there are so many people who have the means to collect,” fashion pictures have been upgraded both critically and in the marketplace, Mr. Holdeman said. “The imagery is easy to approach and accessible in price,” he added, although accessible in this case may be a relative term. Prices for images by photographers like Serge Lutens, Max Vadukul and Willy Vanderperre are modest by Art Basel Miami Beach standards (generally under $10,000). But the Irving Penn platinum print a farseeing collector might have picked up at auction 10 years ago for under $8,000 would now command $350,000, Mr. Holdeman said.

A paradoxical dimension of the current lively interest in the field is that the innovative spirit and visual daring of the late ’90s — when many photographers were mining their personal lives as well as the weirder byways of pop culture, including pornography, and were also eschewing technological wizardry in favor of raw emotional response — appears to have gone into retreat.

Some in the industry point to the economy and the conservative tenor of most mainstream fashion magazines to explain this development. Some claim that a backlash against images condemned (by Bill Clinton, among others) for glorifying “heroin chic” in the mid-90s resulted in self-chastening throughout the industry.

Many note that the marquee names of the moment were already the establishment a decade ago. Where is the generation that ought by now to have supplanted stars like Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Ellen von Unwerth, Mario Testino or Nick McKnight? Who knows?

“It’s obviously a complicated issue,” said Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W magazine, perhaps the most visually daring of mainstream American fashion publications. “There are many photographers working today who have a lot to say, who have points of view, who have a voice that’s intelligent and considered,” he added. “Unfortunately within the fashion world there aren’t enough opportunities to create that meaningful work.”

True, there was a period within the last decade, said Vince Aletti, a photography critic for The New Yorker and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography, “when every time I went to look at a fashion magazine, I was psyched.” At the moment, he added, “there is not much to jump out of your seat about.”

There is little around quite as startling as the “Fight Club” pictorial that Steven Klein photographed for W, in which Brad Pitt posed covered with sweat and grime and so little else that the magazine’s caption writers were taxed. There is little that seems so controversial as Mr. Klein’s pictures of Justin Timberlake, which appeared just after 9/11, images whose borders were singed and whose pretty boy subject was shown with his nose caked in blood.

Even Mr. Klein’s pictures of a compulsive exhibitionist like Madonna, posed atop a table with her foot behind her head and her crotch thrust toward the viewer, seems to belong to another, more provocative time.

“The entirety of that Madonna sitting was very dark,” Mr. Aletti said. “And it couldn’t have been further from the classicism and clean lines of Beaton and Horst.”

Like the 20 photographers whose work is on view in Miami Beach, Mr. Klein sometimes gives the impression that he consults fashion history only rarely and cares little or nothing about clothes. This is illusion, of course, but one that Ms. de Beaupre, the curator of In Fashion ’07, said helped set terms for a new kind of photographic engagement with the business of selling garments.

With the notable exception of Steven Meisel, whose work mines an obsession with fashion’s back pages, most fashion photographers of recent years have made it clear that their concerns lie mainly in “material that has nothing to do with the history of fashion,” as Mr. Aletti said.

Enmeshed in both fashion’s past and the cultural present, Mr. Meisel exploits an unabashed affection for fashion’s surface obsession while simultaneously devising a sly form of cultural critique. “I don’t know whether a term like avant-garde works in this case,” Mr. Aletti said. “But, like a lot of people over the past few years, Meisel is really trying to do something creative and risky. He’s really pushing photography.”

Whether or not by intention, he is helping propel fashion photographs in the direction of art and in the process creating an alluring hybrid, one that sometimes supports an aesthetics of glamour and just as often parodies it. “Fashion photography now is not about fashion alone,” Ms. de Beaupre said. “The material is of interest now because there is this strong creative and personal language,” Ms. de Beaupre said, “that belongs very much to our times.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/fashion/06photo.html





At Wikipedia, Illustrators May Be Paid
Noam Cohen

The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages — just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The payments are made possible by a $20,000 donation from Philip Greenspun, who said he was moved to give the money because of his experience seeing technical books he had originally published online appear in print.

“In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’ main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”

The woman running the project for Wikipedia, Brianna Laugher, says the plan is to create a list of articles that need illustrations and then solicit the work. The first list is expected to have 50 illustrations and be completed this month. Contributors will be able to sign up for an illustration and have two weeks to submit it; if it is accepted, the illustrator will be paid $40.

“The standard payment will be $40, and depending on how it is received it could change in the future,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “I really don’t know if we will be flooded by illustrators clamoring to join, or if the general response will be one of apathy.”

While the German chapter of Wikipedia has received a grant from the government to write on sustainable development, and individuals have compensated contributors writing in underrepresented languages, the foundation has never before paid contributors. Commercial influence at Wikipedia — for example, outside advertising, which is forbidden — is always a touchy question.

Ms. Laugher said, however, that there has been little concern at discussion sites. “I think there is a difference between paying people to get the whole going versus paying people to do the parts that volunteers apparently don’t find rewarding,” she wrote. “The illustration project is definitely the latter.”

Mr. Greenspun, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hoped his grant might be the start of a larger fund at Wikipedia. He imagined payments of $5 — “I was thinking of illustrators in Romania and India” — but added, “I haven’t heard a peep from anyone since the check cleared!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...gy/03wiki.html





Simulations of Ailing Artists’ Eyes Yield New Insights on Style
Guy Gugliotta

For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history.

But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder, and colors strikingly blue, orange or brown. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw. This year, an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in The Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet’s world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots.

Although it is impossible to know how Monet wanted his canvases to look, Dr. Marmor’s research suggests that understanding physical infirmity can help assess his work. Whatever Monet intended, his eyes provided little help. “He couldn’t judge what he was seeing or see what he was painting,” Dr. Marmor said. “It is a mystery how he worked.”

Monet was not alone. France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries embraced an astonishing number of important artists who battled serious physical shortcomings — sometimes for decades. Edgar Degas, known for his paintings of nudes and ballet dancers, suffered retinal disease, probably macular degeneration, for nearly half his life. When he died in 1917, his colleague Pierre Auguste Renoir said, “It is fortunate for him ... any conceivable death is better than living the way he was.”

Renoir suffered painful rheumatoid arthritis for more than 30 years, continuing to paint as assistants inserted brushes between his gnarled fingers.

Mary Cassatt, like Monet, had cataracts. Camille Pissarro had a malfunctioning tear duct. Seizures and other nervous disorders tortured and ultimately destroyed Vincent van Gogh.

Over the years, Dr. Marmor and other scientists have studied artists for insights into physical condition’s influences on style and perception. “It made it difficult for them to judge if their art was accomplishing what they intended,” Dr. Marmor said.

For some, disease ended careers. Cataract surgery was possible in the early 1900s, but it did not always work.

“I look forward with horror to utter darkness,” Cassatt wrote in 1919, fearing that an operation on her left eye would be “as great a failure as the last one.” It was, and she stopped painting.

Renoir had his first arthritis attack in 1888, and over time his fine motor skills were compromised. For the rest of his life, arthritis progressively deformed his hands and swelled his joints. “It is so painful to see him in the morning,” wrote Julie Manet, a niece of Edouard Manet. “He does not have the strength to turn a doorknob.”

A Renoir biographer, the art historian Barbara Ehrlich White, wrote in an e-mail message: “Because of his physical disabilities,” Renoir “had to change, to become less detailed and freer. He continued to paint until the day he died, but because of his handicap, his later work could not approach the brilliance of his earlier paintings.”

For artists with eye problems, it is perhaps surprising that infirmities did not change their styles more radically. A key, some experts said, might be that although artists’ perceptions might be influenced by physical limitations, they are also informed by what the artists know and what they want to do.

“Most of us are into quick snapshots,” said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. “But the ability to translate visual memory into a different medium is another thing altogether. Monet had been painting for 50 years when he had cataracts. Of course he painted from memory. He painted from memory all his life.”

It is easy to see a stylistic contrast. On the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, a three-canvas set of Monet’s water lilies spreads across a gallery wall in dazzling homage to the artist at the height of his brilliance. Off to one side is a painting of the Japanese bridge at Giverny from the early ’20s, when Monet’s cataracts were at their worst. It is a disturbing mix of dark reds and browns, much darker than the water lilies, yet just as compelling, perhaps, in its brooding intensity.

Monet, terrified by Cassatt’s example, put off surgery, but finally had a successful operation on one eye in 1923. His last paintings before his death three years later harked to his earlier work. He also destroyed many cataract-period canvases, but it is unclear whether they surprised him. He had ruined paintings at other times in fits of pique.

Degas first noticed eye problems as a national guardsman in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, when he could not aim his rifle because of a blind spot in his right eye. By 1890, his left eye also began to deteriorate. Light dazzled him. He tried to use peripheral vision to compensate for his loss of central vision.

Dr. Marmor used computer simulations to gauge the problem. Retinal disease, unlike cataracts, does not cause major difficulties with color perception. But Degas had blurred vision, affecting his ability to perceive form and line.

An ophthalmologist in Toledo, Ohio, Dr. James G. Ravin, who has collaborated with Dr. Marmor in the past, suggested that Degas’s return to pastels and his interest in sculpture might have arisen from seeking an easier-to-control medium.

The simulations showed that the draftsmanship became less detailed and the shadowing coarsened as Degas’s sight deteriorated. Even so, Dr. Marmor said, his work would have looked smoother to him than it actually was.

An art historian and a Degas scholar who taught at Columbia, Theodore F. Reff, wrote in an e-mail interview that retinal disease was a factor in Degas’s late style. “Bitterness and growing isolation,” caused, in part, by the infirmity, may have led him “to paint and draw and sculpt more brusquely and summarily,” Mr. Reff said. But eye disease in no way compromised his art, he added. “What his draftsmanship lost in fullness of realistic description and refinement of execution, it gained in grandeur and expression.”

Pissarro, who in his last 15 years suffered chronic infection of the tear sac in his right eye, had difficulty painting outdoors, particularly in winter.

“But there is a certain element of ‘I’m not going to stop what I want to do,’” said a great-grandson of the artist, Joachim Pissarro, an art historian at Hunter College. “You don’t want to over-analyze the impact.”

Indeed, Pissarro’s late cityscapes of Rouen and Paris, regarded as masterpieces, were painted from indoors behind a window to protect his eyes.

The idea that disease and its consequences might lead an artist down fruitful paths has prompted great interest in van Gogh. His suicide at 37 followed seizures and nervous distress variously attributed to epilepsy, bipolarity, schizophrenia and substance abuse.

Dr. Marmor rejected speculation that van Gogh’s affinity for yellow in his paintings came from “yellow vision,” caused by taking digitalis to treat supposed epilepsy. “He could not have taken enough of it to have that effect,” Dr. Marmor said. “It’s too toxic. He loved yellow throughout his career.”

A biochemist at the University of Kansas, Wilfred N. Arnold, also dismissed theories that “madness” made for a better artist. Dr. Arnold has suggested that van Gogh suffered a congenital liver-centered metabolic disease, acute intermittent porphyria, that can provoke episodic derangement, depression, hallucinations, disability and abdominal distress. Between crises, van Gogh behaved normally and painted spectacularly, Dr. Arnold said, but when he had a crisis, he courted death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/04impr.html





Morning TV Veers From News to Frills
Alessandra Stanley

In a world without men, the word metal is rarely heard, but there is a lot of talk about metallics.

Morning programs like “Today” on NBC and “The View” on ABC are the modern equivalents of the old Barbizon Hotel for Women, a frilly haven where men were not allowed above the first floor — or here, after the first hour — and viewers are treated to diet tips, ambush makeovers, cancer health scares, relationship counseling and, of course, shopping.

And the fourth hour of “Today,” which was introduced this fall, has blurred the distinction between consumer news and product promotion even further. Especially now, in the Christmas holiday marketing frenzy, it is sometimes hard to tell the NBC program from those on ShopNBC or QVC.

“This is the heiress bag, this is all about beautiful metallics,” a ShopNBC hostess purred on Friday as the camera closed in on the Lisanne heiress handbag, and a price box popped up ($138 or three “value pays” of $46). “Everything is hot, hot, hot when it comes to fashion right now.”

On “Today” the same morning, a model paraded down an outdoor runway in a shiny belted overcoat. “Metallics and metallic brocade is a very, very big trend this season — you’re going to see a lot of it,” the fashion expert Stacy London said as a price box popped up on screen (metallic coat: Jones New York, $269; shoes: Kenneth Cole Reaction, $69.99).

Natalie Morales, a “Today” correspondent, added, “Again for the holidays, a little metallics goes a long way.”

Product placement is hardly a new phenomenon, and the morning shows long ago mastered the quid pro quo of daily television: Actors give interviews timed to their latest projects; authors are recruited as experts just as their books hit the stores. Oprah, Ellen and the women of “The View” specialize in audience giveaways — anything from a Dodge Caravan to a $150 gift certificate toward a Barbour wax jacket.

But the fourth hour of “Today” has tipped the balance of the program: The more newsy first hour, with the hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, and Al Roker on the weather, is front-loaded with information and interviews with public officials and, of course, with husbands of missing wives like Drew Peterson, and people who survive freak accidents (lightning bolts or nail-gun injuries). That first hour seems increasingly at odds with the long, tranquilizing estrogen stretch that follows.

It used to be that hosts who are at least nominally part of the network’s news division maintained an air of neutrality during consumer segments; now they are in on the pitch. And sometimes they just make no sense.

The week the fourth hour was introduced on “Today,” the host Hoda Kotb spoke to the program’s nutrition expert, Joy Bauer, about frugal fast-food finds. While Ms. Bauer and Ms. Kotb emphasized the importance of buying generic and store brands, the camera panned a cornucopia of top-dollar items, including Thomas’s English muffins, Uncle Ben’s rice, Quaker Oats cereal, Lean Pockets, Campbell’s soup and Kraft cheese.

The blurring of job descrip tions adds to the confusion. Ann Curry used to be on the news desk, but now straddles all aspects of the show with boundless, exhausting good cheer — not even an assignment to the remotest continent on earth, Antarctica, last month dampened her spirits. Or her unctuous solicitude for guests: “Your fans, a lot of them want to know, you know, how you have time to do this?” she asked Brad Pitt, who was on Monday’s program to talk about a post-Katrina reconstruction project for New Orleans.

As the day wears on, the men become scarce, and quieter. Mr. Lauer leaves after the second hour, but Mr. Roker gamely tags along for recipe tests, laundry tips and makeup lessons like a husband dragged through a Labor Day white sale.

Even Tiki Barber, the former New York Giants running back who was recruited earlier this year to bring some macho glamour to the show, has had to get in touch with his feminine side. He was a fashion muse on a recent episode of “Project Runway” on Bravo, a cable network owned by NBC.

He warned the designers assigned to create an outfit he could wear on television that he had a small waist but large buttocks. “I’ll wear pink sometimes, I’ll wear pastels, as long as it accents the whole outfit,” Mr. Barber said.

The morning on-air chemistry has gotten less tense with the arrival of new faces, but also less interesting. On “The View” Whoopi Goldberg has taken over for Rosie O’Donnell, who left last spring and took much of the show’s unhinged energy with her. The discussions have turned more sedate and predictable. (It doesn’t help that Wal-Mart recently began showing a 20-minute infomercial — four women chatting roguishly over coffee mugs about the merits of the chain — that looks uncannily like an episode of “The View.”)

The only frisson of excitement is provided by the occasional veiled dig at Oprah Winfrey by Ms. Goldberg. Last week, in a discussion of Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama, Ms. Goldberg mumbled about the excesses that come with too much power, likening Ms. Winfrey to the country-bred media demagogue played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s “Face in the Crowd.”

Changes on “Today” have also smoothed out some of the more interesting quirks, making the new format seem even longer than four hours. Ms. Vieira, who replaced Katie Couric more than a year ago, is pleasant but bland, and not forceful enough to dim the ascendance of Ms. Curry, who was passed over for the top co-host job but seems determined to play the role anyway.

And Ms. Curry has proved that she can cover any subject, from Darfur to diaper rash, without critical distance. (She once led a segment on the power of female friendship by asserting that there is “a lot” of medical evidence that not having long-term friends is “as risky to your health as obesity, as smoking.”)

The fourth hour of “Today” feels less like an extension of the three-hour show than a cozy Tupperware party that never ends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/ar...on/04watc.html





Governments Prepare for 'Cyber Cold War'

Security experts have warned that governments are regularly monitoring and attacking the critical national infrastructures of other nations

There has been a sea change over the past year in the amount of government-sanctioned cyber-espionage, according to some security experts. They warn that a "cyber cold war" is developing, in which governments are using technology not only for the immediate benefit of gaining intelligence from stolen data but also to probe critical national infrastructures for possible weak points that could be exploited in the event of conflict.

Countries are currently testing the water to gauge the threat and potential for damage posed by their cyber-assaults, according to the 2007 Virtual Criminology Report produced by security firm McAfee.

The use of networks of compromised computers, or botnets, for data theft and intelligence gathering has increased this year, according to Peter Sommer, an expert in information systems and innovation at the London School of Economics. "There are signs that intelligence agencies around the world are constantly probing other governments' networks, looking for strengths and weaknesses, and developing new ways to gather intelligence," said Sommer. "Government agencies are doubtless conducting research on how botnets can be turned into offensive weapons but, before launching a weapon, you need to be sure what the outcome will be — you don't want attacks to spill over to your own allies by mistake."

However, attacks are not limited to any particular countries, or by alliances between countries, according to cyberwarfare watchers. In the McAfee report, Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for research organisation the Sans Internet Storm Center, said that most countries hack each other regardless of any supposed allegiances.

Alan Paller, director of research at security training organisation the Sans Institute, concurred. "All nations are doing it to each other. I don't know of any country not doing it," he said. "If it's not for normal espionage, it's for economic espionage. It's a very broad set of countries [involved]."

Paller said attacks against the US military this year — reportedly made by China, although the Chinese have denied responsibility — resulted in the loss of large amounts of data. The data had, in part, been stolen from the NIPRNet, a US military network which is open to the internet and used for the transmission of non-classified documents.

Quoting Major General William Lord, a director of information, services and integration for the US Air Force, Paller said: "China is stealing identities and stealing sensitive terabytes of information from the NIPRNet."

While the NIPRNet itself does not carry sensitive information, Paller argued that the ultimate aim of such attacks is to "own" the opponent's computer. Probing systems for weaknesses also gives intelligence gains, he said.

As in the Cold War, it is the countries with access to the most resources that are seen to be flexing their muscles. Paller said that, while he had no data on any US attacks on rivals, both China and Russia had launched attacks this year.

"The US Department of Commerce admitted that its computers had been penetrated and had information stolen by China this summer," said Paller, who added that it was difficult to say whether it had been the government or "hybrid groups" of government and other organisations within China that had been responsible for the attack.

Mikhel Tammet, director of the Estonian communication and information technology department, said he believes forces within the Russian government may have initiated and sponsored attacks against his country's critical national infrastructure earlier this year. "It was a political campaign induced by the Russians; a political campaign designed to destroy our security and destroy our society," said Tammet. "The attacks had hierarchy and co-ordination."

While the attacks on Estonia sought to knock out parts of the country's critical national infrastructure by brute force, with both government sites and internet-banking systems targeted, most attacks against other nations are conducted by stealth.

Social-engineering attacks, in which intelligence-gathering organisations target either an individual or group of individuals, can be highly successful.

Nato analysts, quoted in the McAfee report, said that some governments are leaving themselves open to attack. "Many government offices don't even know yet that they are leaking information," said one analyst, who...

...was not named. "Attackers are using Trojan horse software targeted at specific government offices. Because they are custom-written, these Trojans are not amenable to signature detection and they can slip past antiviral technologies, so this is a big problem. Hackers have dedicated quality-assurance capabilities that they run on all of their malware to make sure that their malware doesn't get detected."

Circuitous routes are sometimes used by hackers to acquire information. According to a source close to the situation, the chief information security officer of the US Department of Commerce learned this summer that his home computer was being used to send data to computers in China. He found his family had been the victim of a spear-phishing attack, in which his child had been encouraged by an email to unwittingly download malware onto the family's home computer. Once it was compromised, the attackers used the security officer's personal computer as a tunnel into the Department of Commerce's systems.

Spear-phishing attacks — where one specific individual is targeted with a malicious URL — are very hard for governments and companies to counter, according to the Sans Institute. Senior civil servants and business executives simply do not appreciate IT departments sending them spear-phishing emails for education purposes.

"One inoculation is to provide benign versions of spear-phishing attacks, but this is hard because senior executives don't like to be fooled by IT people," said Paller. Another possible solution is to establish monitoring and forensics systems that constantly search network traffic and systems for evidence of deep penetration and persistent presence.

Systems can also be targeted through web applications, which is an area of major concern for the Sans Institute. This year, hundreds of senior federal officials and business executives visited a political thinktank website that had been compromised, allowing their computers to become infected via a cross-site scripting attack. Keystroke loggers, placed on their computers by the unknown assailants, captured their usernames and passwords when they signed into their personal bank accounts, their stock trading accounts and their employers' computers, and sent the data to computers in different countries. Bank balances were depleted, stock accounts lost money, servers inside the organisations were compromised and sensitive data was copied and sent to outsiders. Back doors were placed on some of those computers and are still there, according to the Sans Institute.

A short-term workaround for the problem of having insecure web applications is to diligently patch security software, said Paller, who indicated that IT professionals must ensure that patches are applied on users' machines. "It's absolute 100 percent patching, rather than a patch-and-hope plan. Hope is not a strategy," said Paller. "If you let users turn off security updates because they're inconvenient, their machines become a back door for everything."

Web-application firewalls can also help, while testing and patching custom-built applications is essential. "One quarter of custom-built apps have critical or bad vulnerabilities in them," said Paller. A longer-term solution would be for all organisations to insist on secure coding practices, he added.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous, permeating every level of global society, it seems cyber-espionage and cyberwarfare are set to increase dramatically. Nation states have traditionally gathered information on friends and foes from every source possible — regardless of political or trade alliances — as well as monitoring their own populations. It seems technology is providing another means to do this. Attacks on government systems and network probing can only increase.

But is it accurate to call this escalation a "cyber cold war"? Not necessarily. The Cold War was, at base, a battle of ideologies, which is seemingly at odds with the practical, hard-nosed, free-market economics currently practised by businesses in all of the world's major powers, including China.

However, those powers all still have their own agendas, as well as access to nuclear weapons, so a Dr Strangelove situation cannot be ruled out.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1...9291200,00.htm





'There is No Longer Any Privacy'
David Calder

Not so long ago, the Information Commissioner warned that we were "sleep-walking our way into a surveillance society".

At the time, a lot of people assumed he was talking about CCTV cameras.

But it's now clear he was more concerned about the amount of data held on each and every one of us which, if all brought together, would give the government an incredibly detailed view of our lives.

It was brought home all too clearly when Alistair Darling stood up in the House of Commons last month and admitted the loss of those CDs by HM Revenue and Customs.

You may have thought we had some protection from the Data Protection Act.

But Dr David Murakami Wood, a surveillance specialist from Newcastle University, believes it was out of date even before it came into force.

"It's based on a 1970s conception of computing," he explained.

"It came long before the networking of computers. You could now argue that how we exist in databases is as important as how we exist in the real world."

He edited a report on the surveillance society for the Information Commissioner. It makes quite disturbing reading, especially when you think about the plans for a national ID card.

"The National Identity Register will hold up to 50 pieces of information," he said.

"Everything from your national insurance number to your health record to the number of penalty points on your driving licence will be stored there, even information about when you buy a mobile phone."

That mobile phone is also storing a surprising amount of information about you.

From the start of October, the mobile phone companies will have to retain data about who you were calling, when you made the call and where you were when you made it.

And that information won't just be available to the police.

'No privacy'

According to Geraint Bevan of No2ID, 650 other organisations will be able to see it as well, from the Gaming Commission to local authorities.

"This data will be logged for a year," he said, "and every minor official could be able to have access to your phone records. There's no privacy anymore."

Then there's data from CCTV systems.

There have been various estimates of how many of these there are in the UK.

But Camera Watch, the industry body set up to ensure that systems are compliant with data protection, believes it's largely educated guesswork.

The numbers range from about four million to 10 million - no-one actually knows.

On top of all this, there's the data collected on you by the private sector.

If you use a loyalty card in a shop, that information is stored to build up a picture of your preferences.

Even more is gathered when you shop online. Banks and insurance companies also gather data about you and not everyone is convinced that it's all strictly necessary.

The human rights lawyer, John Scott, is worried by the way it's monitoring our lives but acknowledges that "you can't turn back the tide of technology".

He said: "We should stop and think about where we'll be in five or 10 years time. We should be trying to stop the unthinking proliferation of surveillance systems before it's too late."

Dr Murakami Wood, however, thinks we've brought a lot of this on our own heads by "putting so much of our own personal data up on Facebook or MySpace".

He added: "It's made officials think we don't value privacy any more."

He believes it's time for the country to have a serious national debate about our surveillance society before it goes any further.

The Investigation is on Morning Extra on BBC Radio Scotland from 0850 GMT - 0930 GMT on Monday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nd/7123887.stm





Press release

ACLU Urges Vote On Senate Judiciary FISA Bill and Rejection of Telecom Immunity
Caroline Fredrickson

"This past August, Congress rushed through wiretapping legislation that allowed the government to scoop up all of our international communications without any court review, or any finding of wrong-doing. In the next several weeks the Senate is going to make a choice between two bills – the Bush Administration’s bill to make this awful law permanent, or a more moderate version that at least attempts to rein in the President’s unfettered power.

"The Administration bill basically writes August’s mistake in stone. It does nothing to protect Americans’ communications and violates the Fourth Amendment requirement that courts supervise any spying on American soil.

"The current Administration bill is even worse than the 'Protect America Act,' though, in that it gives complete immunity to the telecoms which spied on us after 9/11. The Attorney General will be able to single-handedly kill any pending case – and then gag the judge from ever publicly discussing whether the company participated in the illegal program.

"The Senate must reject the Administration proposal and insist that:

"The bill sent to the president must not let the telecoms off the hook. We still don’t know what they did. We do know, however, that the companies won’t have any incentive to follow the law in the future if they get away without having to answer to their customers about why they violated the law.

"The bill sent to the president must not allow for massive untargeted dragnets that scoop up all of our international calls and emails. Smart – and constitutional – surveillance is actually targeted at bad guys.

"American communications must be protected by individualized court orders as the Constitution demands.

"In Saturday’s radio address and yesterday’s press conference, President Bush unveiled the fearmongering campaign he’s planning to unleash on Congress – not unlike last July when his push for power and the Protect America Act began. The president seems to be gearing up to launch the same campaign of fear and misinformation he so clearly won in August. This time, Congress must reject the administration’s bag of tricks and stand up for the Constitution."
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general...s20071204.html





Post Office Drawback Cited in Dark Forecast for Netflix
Joanne L. Kaufman

When Netflix’s seven million subscribers send their DVDs back to one of the rental service’s 47 distribution centers, the discs do not represent many happy returns for the Postal Service.

According to a recent audit by the service’s Office of Inspector General, the adhesive flap that seals the Netflix mailers often jams machinery and requires sorting by hand, adding $21 million a year to the service’s labor costs. The Office of Inspector General has recommended a 17-cent surcharge on every package that requires hand sorting (not just Netflix discs).

A research note issued by Citigroup on Tuesday said 70 percent of Netflix’s return mailers must be sorted by hand. Netflix “is not specifically mentioned” by the postal audit “but is implied,” according to Citigroup. A spokesman for the post office declined to comment.

A Citigroup analyst who wrote the report, Tony Wible, said that Blockbuster’s return mailing envelopes do not cause this problem and that the issue could make a big competitive difference for the companies.

If Netflix “has to bear the full brunt of this increase (without other cost offsets), monthly operating income per paying subscriber would fall 67 percent from $1.05 to 35 cents,” Mr. Wible’s report states.

In the report, Mr. Wible reiterated his sell rating on Netflix and his buy rating on Blockbuster. “Given the magnitude of this risk,” he wrote, Netflix is most likely to “work towards resolving this issue by redesigning its mailers.”

Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said that the company has gone through 40 to 50 iterations of the mailer since Netflix started shipping DVDs a decade ago and that it was open to further adjustments.

“If the specifications of the post office were to change, we would change the mailer as necessary,” he said. The company ships 1.6 million DVDs a day and offers nine monthly subscription plans, from $4.99 to $47.99.

Far from being a drag on the post office, Netflix is a help, Mr. Swasey said. “We save them about $100 million a year,” he said. “We pick up the returns from the post office. They are not delivered to Netflix, even though we’re paying for it” by buying first-class postage for the DVDs.

“Even if there is some validity of the cost of hand sorting to the post office, it is more than made up for in the costs we’re saving the post office every year,” Mr. Swasey said.

Blockbuster, which started mail rentals over three years ago, “looked carefully at the design of our envelopes,” said Karen Raskopf, a company spokeswoman, “and we worked with the post office to make sure they could go through the machines and that the DVDs would be safe.”

Mr. Wible said in an interview that Blockbuster was edging in on Netflix: “They’ve got their store content, delivery by mail and downloaded delivery.”

Blockbuster, which has 3.1 million online subscribers and 60 million customers over all, is “offering more convenient access to media than Netflix,” Mr. Wible said. “Netflix either has to spend more on marketing or lower pricing to increase growth,” he added. “So they have these rising costs — including postage increases.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/bu...ia/06flix.html





Blu-Ray Titles Outsells HD DVD During Black Friday Week

Just after the Black Friday week sales, HD DVD was proud to put out a press release about its surge in HD DVD player sales thanks to the cut player prices, however, the Blu-ray camp is once again back with the other side of the story. Apparently, the Tracking firm Nielsen VideoScan has unveiled that 72.6% of HD disc sales were on Blu-ray disc, showing Blu-ray had an even greater market share of HD movie sales than usual according to this Home Media Magazine report.

During the Black Friday week, some retailers including Wal-Mart and Best Buy, sold HD DVD players for under $100, which helped Toshiba sell 90,000 players throughout the weekend of the sales. The player prices have since come back up, starting at around $200 again (going by Amazon.com's current lowest pricing).

Going by this DailTech report, two possibilities for the unusual Blu-ray disc sale surge during the week includes the release of the Blu-ray only titles Live Free or Die Hard, Hairspray and Ratatouille and also that the Nielsen Video does not include Wal-Mart sales. For example, if the majority of the cheap HD DVD players were sold at Wal-Mart, chances are that most of the buyers would have bought their first set of HD DVD titles along with the player at the store.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Blu-ray...iday-week.html





HD DVD’s New Feature: Watching Movies Together But Not In the Same Place
Bob Caswell

Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate itself from Blu-ray, HD DVD tech wizards will launch the HD DVD version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with a new feature called “community screening.” The movie takes advantage of the fact that all HD DVD players are equipped with an Ethernet hookup (unlike Blu-ray, which has players that do not include network connectivity). “Community screening” is a way to watch a movie simultaneously with your friends while you’re each in the comfort of your own homes. Here’s how it works:

One of you sends out an invitation to join a viewing of the movie, which then syncs your movie watching experience with your friends that accept the invitation. While watching, you and your friends can exchange chats through the remote, a computer, or cellphone. The catch of this social movie experience is that only the host will be able to play, pause, or otherwise control the movie.

Here’s a quote directly from the release site:

“Gather your own army of fellow wizards for a live community screening party. Invite other owners of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix HD DVD to simultaneously watch from their own internet-accessed players and text with your remote, PC or cellphone. When you host an invitation-only viewing, you control the film by pausing and playing the feature on everyone’s machine. You can chat live with your friends as you watch.”

So is it a gimmick or a feature? It’s hard to say at this point. But the battle between HD DVD is a heated one for sure, and it has only escalated for the holiday season. The HD DVD Promotional Group announced last week that sales of HD DVD players increased significantly because of last week’s Black Friday sales (of which I participated because of Amazon’s amazing deal, which made HD DVD at least half the price of Blu-ray). Sales over that particular weekend were apparently enough for total HD DVD players sold to come close to 1 million (they were hovering around 750,000 previously).

But the battle is far from over. The Blu-ray Disc Association had good news of its own claiming that Blu-ray is outselling HD DVD discs in Europe at a ratio of over three to one. But in the U.S., Sony’s Playstation 3 is the main reason Blu-ray has seen any success. According to Adams Media Research, 94 percent of Blu-ray players purchased in the U.S. are simply a byproduct of gamers buying the Playstation 3 (which just had a recent price cut).

The dust may need to settle after the holidays before we know which next generation DVD has taken the lead…
http://www.techconsumer.com/2007/12/...he-same-place/





The State of HD DVD

Where Blu-ray is a freight train of unrivaled weight and marketing might, backed by 13 of the world's most well known electronics and computer makers, HD DVD is a Little Engine That Could, the product of a much smaller group of collaborators that has gotten over each obstacle by simply thinking it can. Judging from early buzz, HD DVD should have been beaten long ago. Today, though, it appears healthy and gaining in momentum thanks to lower prices, less confusion about disc standards, less in-fighting among the format's supporters and a high likelihood of cheap Chinese models arriving soon. This piece answers the following questions: How in hell has the HD DVD camp lasted this long? And how will the format's backers stay competitive in the next year in the face of cheaper and more plentiful Blu-ray players?

In my recent research into the two sides of the format war, I have tried hard to steer clear of marketing mumbo jumbo on both sides, and examine real issues. As I shared in The State of Blu-ray, there's growing disarray among Blu-ray's hardware makers and confusion about hardware versions and player capabilities. HD DVD has by contrast proven to be surprisingly elegant—at the moment best demonstrated by comparing both versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There's far less confusion and potential backstabbing, but that is to be expected: There are only two household names leading the charge on the hardware side, Toshiba and Microsoft, and they are not engaged in any sort of infighting. Toshiba was one of the companies most involved with the original DVD patents, and creating HD DVD as a blue-laser extension of DVD made good business sense, though not to Sony and others who were left out of that revenue stream. Regardless of its strong roots, HD DVD is run by a smaller posse with less overall reach, so keeping things clear and tight amounts to a survival tactic.

HD DVD has three things going for it that Blu-ray doesn't:

1. Players at lower prices
There's no doubt that price is the deciding factor in an embarrassing number of consumer-electronics purchases, and HD DVD—Toshiba's players—have been priced lower than Blu-ray players from Sony, Samsung, Pioneer and others. At the beginning of November, Wal-Mart dropped the entry-level Toshiba to $99 and apparently sold around 90,000.
2. A finished spec with fully compatible players
Whereas Blu-ray bewilders me with future capability promises and current competing standards, the HD DVD spec is by contrast remarkably sound. Every player meets certain standards, and while there's no requirement for 1080p video like in Blu-ray, there is a consistent requirement of internet connectivity, dual-tuner playback and local storage, which disc makers are now using for fun—and useful—interactivity. It is also becoming typical for combo discs to be released with DVD on one side and HD DVD on the other, making them eminently more compatible. (Blu-ray can't do this.)
3. Coalition members who are not in direct competition
It's easy for the HD DVD camp to work together, since there are very few who have traditionally competed in the marketplace. Because of pricing and product positioning, Toshiba and Microsoft don't vie for the same customers at all. And as others begin to market HD DVD players of their own, they approach different customers in different ways. Of course, you could argue that competition among Blu-ray's supporters is a good thing, but it has not yet led to the holy grail of competition: discounted pricing.

Who is joining HD DVD?

Many people can name five hardware partners in the Blu-ray camp (Hint: if they start with P or S, they're in). Nobody knows who else is getting into HD DVD besides its main founders, Toshiba and Microsoft, but in fact, other HD DVD players are already starting to hit the market. Here are three key players:

• Onkyo DV-HD805 ($900): distingushing characteristics include a Silicon Optix HQV Reon VX processor for upscaling old-school DVD content, and internal support for Dolby True HD and DTS Master HD Audio for natively outputting full-resolution sound. It's certainly a tweaker's special, and only makes sense if your speakers cost much much more.
• Samsung BD-UP5000 Duo ($800): Since this upcoming device
famously has stated support for Blu-ray discs that Sony and Pioneer won't be able to play, it's easy to forget that it's also billed as a fully compliant HD DVD player. But the reviews say it's a winner in both arenas.
• Venturer SHD7000 player ($200): Who? Exactly. That's what they said about Apex Digital when it came out with the super cheap DVD player. Venturer is living up to its name as the first cheap Chinese player to infiltrate American retailers but signs say it will not be the last.

What about Microsoft?
Microsoft's role in HD DVD may seem a bit mysterious. Besides selling the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive, Microsoft helped write the HD DVD video spec, including VC-1 compression. It also licenses the HDi runtime engine, developed with Toshiba, that enables interactivity on Toshiba players and those of other licensees. HD DVD players don't have to have HDi, but at the moment, it's obviously the software with the most momentum. And software is the key to HD DVD's current successes.

Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players, rolled out first in the spring of 2006, were based on a 2.4GHz Pentium PC architecture, in other words, real hogs. The second generation players were moving on a 900MHz Celeron, and the third-generation HD-A3 has a 333MHz MIPS chip. The funny thing is, menus move quicker on the much more affordable third gen, because of Microsoft's improvements on the back end.

In a tear-down evaluation, industrial analyst iSuppli determined that the components of that first $599 Toshiba player actually cost the maker $674 before manufacturing, accessories and packaging. Though neither Microsoft nor Toshiba would acknowledge any losses, Kevin Collins, head of HD DVD promotion for Microsoft, said, "I don't know if they are losing money or breaking even," adding, "We work together to minimize cost." Jodi Sally, VP of marketing at Toshiba America Consumer Products, echoed: "All of this speculation that we're losing money is just speculation," she said. Working with Microsoft, "we've transitioned our lines three times to lower costs. I can't comment on profitability, but we have increased cost production and efficiency."

So whether you are using a Toshiba player or an Xbox 360, you are watching HD DVDs using a hardware/operating-system combo developed in large part by Microsoft. Given the fact that Microsoft isn't always known for stable and intuitive user experiences, it is even more amusing to see Blu-ray and HD DVD side by side.

Compare One Movie on Both Formats
When I compared Warner's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix discs, the Blu-ray edition in a PS3 and the HD DVD in an Xbox 360, the differences were startling. Never mind that the HD DVD has an entire online component that the Blu-ray can't yet implement, with features such as mobile downloads and user-organized live screenings. Never mind that you could watch the entire HD DVD with pop-up actor-commentary windows on screen—if Warner had implemented this in the Harry Potter Blu-ray, it would have been compatible with exactly one currently shipping Blu-ray player.

The surprising thing was, even when you compared the exact same experiences, the HD DVD behaved much better. Every so often an icon appears in the top left corner of the screen, indicating a behind-the-scenes featurette about that particular scene. On the HD DVD, you click it, watch what you want to, then click Enter again to return to the point you left off in the main movie. With the Blu-ray, the system had no way of returning you to the movie; it could only dump you in the featurette menu, where you were stuck watching more of those. Sure, these problems could be Warner's programmers, and not a format issue, but Warner is going for as similar an experience on both, and it clearly can't do everything on Blu-ray that it can on HD DVD. Just have a look at the back of each disc:

The difference is still less subtle when comparing the two editions of 300:

As I discussed previously, Blu-ray has specifications for picture-in-picture, but to date, only one Blu-ray player that has shipped, the Panasonic DMP-BD30, will be able to handle the discs when they start making their way to stores in early 2008. Except for some rumblings from Daewoo, nobody has promised an internet-connected Blu-ray player, while all HD DVD players can. (Samsung's hybrid BD-UP5000 Duo has Ethernet, but only for HD DVD.)

The Hollywood Factor
Studio support was once Blu-ray's ace in the hole—none of this technical crap matters when the movies you want to watch aren't available in a given format—but ever since Paramount and DreamWorks announced exclusive publishing on HD DVD, even Sony chairman Howard Stringer feels a bit shaken. (Fox, Disney, Sony and others are still Blu-ray stalwarts of course.) Some say there's dirty dealing afoot, specifically alleging that Microsoft and the HD DVD group paid $150 million or so to Paramount and DreamWorks to go exclusive. When Michael Bay made these bribery accusations again the other day, along with the accusation that Microsoft was using HD DVD to destabilize Blu-ray in favor of downloads, Jordi Ribas, GM of the HD DVD Group at Microsoft responded:
Microsoft provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks. Michael Bay's additional comments about our commitment to HD DVD are similarly unfounded. We have major technology investments in HD DVD...and have more than 100 staff at Microsoft dedicated to the success of HD DVD.

The China Factor
People who are looking to Hollywood to determine the fate of the format war may well be looking in the wrong place. China is where HD DVD's secret to success lies, in a blue-laser format called CH-DVD.

The not-so-secret secret is that a CH-DVD player is an HD DVD player whose laser is set at a different modulation. While you could never play an HD DVD on a CH-DVD player, it is physically more or less the same product. Manufacturing can happen side by side, using the same components such as processors and optical pick-ups.

The funny thing is, HD DVD is known to be region-free—discs from one country can play in HD DVD players from another country. Many discs available on Blu-ray in the US are available on HD DVD elsewhere, making for a higher chance of piracy or at least quasi-legal trade. In our mind, CH-DVD can be an answer to that, an anti-piracy measure coming from a root technological difference. "I guess you could call it a region control," said Collins, "but the Chinese just want to have their own format." Whether this separate-but-equal policy helps the format burgeon, or whether rampant piracy itself is a sign of a healthy format, is for us all to find out.

The upshot of CH-DVD is that, if and when the time is right, China could flood the US market with cheap HD DVD players. Meanwhile, because of this deal, the likelihood of a similar Blu-ray flood gets slimmer. The Venturer is here; keep your eyes peeled at Wal-Mart, Target and other discount big boxes for the next models.

Does the China threat faze Toshiba? It's nice being the one in the spotlight, but Toshiba is well aware that it will soon share the stage with competitors. "There's always a business for a Tier 1 brand in HD DVD players the way there is with DVD players," says Sally. Increased competition will come at the higher end, with combo players from Samsung, LG and possibly Denon, and the premium Onkyo I mentioned above. All of this is good news to Toshiba. Sally adds, "Increasing household penetration of HD DVD players is good overall for the format and for the software [movie] sales."

Black Friday Stalemate
On Black Friday 2007, both the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps released numbers saying they were the overwhelming winner. HD DVD announced it had reached 750,000 in total home penetration (including the Xbox 360 drive). Blu-ray said that it had 2.4 million homes, presumably including PS3. Microsoft argues that all Xbox 360 HD DVD drive purchasers are using them to play HD DVD movies, while not all PS3 buyers are using the game system to play Blu-ray discs. While this is obviously true, there is only unreliable guess work to determine exactly how successful the PS3's Blu-ray drive actually is.

The point is, the format war is far from over, and it's wrong to write off HD DVD now just because it has fewer major japanese manufacturing giants 100% behind it. There's still some time before this whole thing shakes out, but because of the organization and proper planning of the HD DVD camp, Blu-ray no longer looks anything like the predestined victor that it once seemed.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/the-state...dvd-330684.php





DVD Movies With an iTunes Copy: Worth More?
Saul Hansell

Richard Greenfield, the Pali Research analyst, writes this morning that he hears that the long standoff between Apple and Hollywood over movie downloads may be heading for a resolution. As of right now, Disney, of which Steve Jobs is a director and large shareholder, sells movies through the iTunes Store, and the other major studios don’t. The issue has been that the studios want to charge more money for downloads than Mr. Jobs thinks they are worth. The studios also worry about offending Wal-Mart and Target, which are by far their largest distributors. (The report is here, but requires registration to see.)

Mr. Greenfield says that at least one studio, News Corporation’s Twentieth Century Fox, is working on a deal to start selling its new releases and back titles through iTunes starting early next year. He cites two reasons for the change: Apple has relented and has agreed to a higher wholesale price for movies. Mr. Greenfield estimates that the wholesale price for a digital movie will be about $15, compared to about $18 for a DVD, which has extra bonus features (and works easily on zillions of players). Mr. Greenfield doesn’t mention it, but another force may be Amazon.com, which is selling downloads from Fox and other studios. Remember that Amazon’s entry into the MP3 business put pressure on Apple to lower the price of its unprotected downloads.

More interestingly perhaps, the studios are hoping to create “premium” versions of DVDs that include a copy of the movie that can easily be put on an iPod (and presumably a laptop with iTunes or an Apple TV). Fox has tried this already, with a version of “Die Hard 4″ that includes a digital copy. Mr. Greenfield writes that this version costs $3 or $4 more than an ordinary DVD.

My question to Bits readers, a gadget-loving bunch, is whether you would in fact pay extra for a combination of a DVD and an iTunes-ready copy. If so, how much extra?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...n-itunes-copy/





Apple Wants To Make DRM Extortion Explicit

For years, DRM critics have been arguing that the technology isn't so much about stopping piracy as it is about taking away traditional fair use privileges and then selling them back to you. I've agreed with this for a while, but I never thought I'd see a major DRM vendor admit it so candidly: Steve Jobs has apparently been pitching Hollywood studios on the idea of selling "premium" DVDs that include an iTunes-compatible version of the movie. For an extra $3 or $4, you can buy the privilege of playing your legally-purchased movie on the device of your choice—well, the Apple-manufacturered device of your choice, anyway. Only the DMCA makes this kind of extortion possible. Tools like HandBrake make it possible to convert a DVD to an iPod-compatible format without any help from Apple, but Handbrake is an illegal "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Compare that to the CD, which was developed long before the DMCA and comes without copy protection. The courts have held that "space-shifting" your CDs to a portable music device is a fair use. So you can legally import your CD collection to your iPod, or any other device, without paying a penny. But Steve Jobs apparently wants to charge you $4 for the privilege of doing the same with your DVDs.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071204/140443.shtml





Nielsen To Offer Copyright Protection System For The Web

The software would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube.
Antone Gonsalves

Nielsen, best-known for its rankings of TV programming, said Wednesday it is developing a system that would police Web sites for copyrighted material, and notify site owners and content providers when video has been posted without authorization.

Nielsen is developing the system with Digimarc, a provider of digital watermarking technology. The service, which the companies plan to start rolling out in the second quarter of next year, would tap into technology Nielson currently uses in the services it sells to advertisers and TV networks.

The system would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. Much of that content is uploaded without authorization or compensation to the content provider, which has led to tension between Internet companies and Hollywood studios. These tensions reached a peak in March when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of massive copyright infringement.

The Nielsen/Digimarc system would be offered as a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen's existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people's home to identify the programs they watch. Nielsen sells data from people's viewing habits to TV networks and advertisers.

Besides watermarking, Nielsen also tags over-the-air TV programs intercepted by 700 installations across the nation. For those programs without watermarks, Nielsen creates a digital signature based on unique patterns in the audio signal.

Nielsen's watermarks and digital signatures are stored in a database that would be used in the copyright-protection system. When a clip is posted on a Web site, the system would search for the watermark. If one doesn't exist, then the system would create a digital signature. In either case, the identifier would be compared to what's in the database to find a match. Once the program is identified, the Nielsen system could notify site operators and content providers when a clip is being shown without authorization.

While the system wouldn't automatically delete unauthorized material, Web site owners could configure their systems to take that step. "The purpose of this system is not to be a policeman on the Internet, but to provide a system where the content provider can have confidence and knowledge of where their programming is being distributed," Dave Harkness, senior VP of strategy and business development at Nielsen, told InformationWeek. "They also can develop a business relationship with the content distributor, which in this case is the Web site."

Nielsen is confident it can convince many TV producers to buy into the system, since the company already has relationships with most of these businesses. Convincing Web sites may be more difficult, since many already have some kind of copyright-protection system in place or are developing one. Google, for example, is developing a system for YouTube. In general, most sites take down unauthorized content as soon as the owners notify them.

Nielsen believes it can turn many sites into customers by offering a system that's ready to plug into their infrastructure, saving them the cost of building a copyright-protection system themselves, Harkness said. Besides generating revenue from the service, Nielson could also use it to track the use of video on the Web and sell the gathered data to advertisers.

If Nielsen launches its service it will have competitors, albeit smaller businesses. Those companies that provide services for policing the use of copyrighted content online include Audible Magic, Vobile, and BayTSP.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=204701360





Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital

Over the weekend, venture capitalist Bijan Sabet kicked off an interesting discussion by saying that he doesn't believe in noncompete agreements and suggesting, anecdotally, why he thinks that they do more harm than good. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson responded by disagreeing and suggesting that noncompetes do more good than harm. This is a topic that I've become deeply familiar with recently, for some research I've been working on. My interest in the specifics of noncompetes was kicked off by a small part of David Levine and Michele Boldrin's book Against Intellectual Monopoly, where they discuss how the lack of noncompetes helped Silicon Valley grow. This lead me to a lot of research on the topic, some of which I thought it would be worth bringing up, as the discussion has become so heated -- with almost all of it focused on anecdotal points, rather than actual research. Some of this research was for a separate project I am working on, but with so much interest in the topic, I thought it would be worth a detailed post.

Much of this discussion kicked off with AnnaLee Saxenian's 1994 book Regional Advantage that tries to understand why Silicon Valley developed into the high tech hub it is today, while Boston's Route 128 failed to follow the same path -- even though both were considered at about the same level in the 1970s. Saxenian finds that the single biggest difference in the two regions was the ability of employees to move from firm to firm in Silicon Valley. That factor, ahead of many others, caused Silicon Valley to take off, while the lack of mobility in Boston caused its tech companies to stagnate and make them unable to compete against more nimble Silicon Valley firms. Saxenian claims that the difference in mobility was simply due to "cultural" differences between the east coast and the west coast. However, the impact was massive. The frequent job changes helped speed up the process of innovation, as ideas flowed more freely, allowing ideas to quickly change and grow and build upon other ideas leading to faster and better innovation. In contrast, employees in Boston stuck with their firms. The firms grew bigger, but slowly, and new ideas didn't flow nearly as easily. There was less direct competition from firm to firm, so firms were able to rest on their laurels rather than increasing their own pace of innovation.

Ronald Gilson found this to be interesting, and followed it up with his own research suggesting that that it had much less to do with cultural reasons and much more to do with the legal differences between the two places, specifically: California does not enforce noncompetes, while Massachusetts does. Gilson looks at a few of the other possible explanations for the difference and shows how they're all lacking, leaving the difference in noncompetes as being the key difference between the two regions in terms of the flow of information and ideas leading to new innovations. He also explains the history of non-enforcement in California, showing that it was mostly an accident of history more than anything done on purpose.

The problem with all of this research was that none of it really showed how much more mobile employees were in California than elsewhere, so that job fell to some researchers from the Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research, who produced some data to back up the findings of Saxenian and Gilson in their report Job Hopping in Silicon Valley. Their data showed that, indeed, there was much greater mobility in Silicon Valley than elsewhere. Their research further backed up Gilson's suggestion that it was noncompetes that made the difference by showing that other high tech communities in California outside of Silicon Valley also showed greater job mobility -- suggesting it was a California-wide phenomenon.

Finally, to make the case even more compelling, some researchers from Harvard Business School put out some research earlier this year that not only compared the situation in Silicon Valley to Boston, but added a third natural experiment in Michigan. You see, Michigan used to not enforce noncompetes, but in 1985, Michigan inadvertently began allowing noncompetes to be enforced again. The research showed that immediately following the change, mobility of inventors in Michigan decreased noticeably, slowing the spread of certain ideas. Their research found that "The networks of small companies so crucial to Silicon Valley's growth would be less likely to develop in regions that enforce noncompetes."

Noncompetes Are The DRM Of Human Capital

In order to understand how this makes sense, just think of noncompetes as the "DRM" of human capital. Just as DRM tries to restrict the spread of content, a noncompete seeks to restrict the spread of a human's ideas for a particular industry within the labor arena. Both concepts are based on the faulty assumption that doing so "protects" the original creator or company -- but in both cases this is incorrect. What it actually does is set up an artificial barrier, limiting the overall potential of a market. It may not be easy to see that from the position of the content creator or company management (or investors). It's natural to want to "protect," but it's actually quite damaging.

We're already seeing this in the recording industry, of course. The desire to protect has actually limited the market size of other avenues for the music industry to make money. It's held back the ability to use music as a promotional good to build up the overall market for other tangible goods. In the same way, noncompetes limit the market size of the industry where those noncompetes are enforced. It holds back the ability of firms to innovate. Innovation is an ongoing process -- and the fuel of that process is the continual spread of ideas that allows multiple parties to build on those ideas, try different approaches and seek better solutions. While it may seem scary to a firm that supposedly "risks" losing some of its top employees to direct competitors, that's not necessarily the best way to look at this. What it does is force companies to keep on innovating and keep trying to come up with newer, better solutions to top those competitors. At the same time, that free flow of ideas means that the companies in the space have more fuel with which to attack the problem, rather than quarantining those ideas off in separate bins that can't be connected.

While it may seem easier to "protect" your ideas and your people, what you really end up doing is blocking off your own access to many of the ideas that you need to continue to innovate. You limit the vital mix of ideas to build not just decent products, but great products. Just as DRM has helped to destroy the record labels when competing against more nimble, more open technology -- noncompetes destroy businesses when competing against more nimble, more open technology clusters.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071204/005038.shtml





Spot the Difference

MPAA don't fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/78590.html





FCC Commissioner Michael Copps vs. "Big Media"

FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation.
Louise Witt

Michael Copps doesn't want to be called a crusader. But as one of the two Democrats on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, he's not shy about sounding biblical. He says he's "blowing a loud trumpet" for a "call to battle" to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present.

Copps is trying to defeat FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin's last-minute proposal to loosen media ownership rules, which will be voted on by Dec. 18. As it stands now, a company can't own both a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet -- a radio or TV station -- in the same market without a waiver. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Nov. 13, Martin wrote that media companies in the 20 largest markets should be allowed to own both in the same market to bolster journalism. "If we don't act to improve the health of the ... industry," he wrote, "we will see newspapers wither and die ... and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and diversity of viewpoints."

The public, however, won't have much time to express its own diverse viewpoints on Martin's proposed rules. He unveiled his plan in the Times four days after the FCC's sixth, and last, hearing of the year on media ownership. The public has only until Dec. 11 to comment on the new rules, with the FCC voting on them within the following week. The push for a quick decision prompted Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., to introduce bipartisan-sponsored legislation to halt the FCC's "fast march" toward easing media ownership rules. Why the rush? Last time the FCC proposed a relaxation of the rules in 2003, public outcry killed the plan. Copps thinks Martin wants to push them through now when voters -- and politicians -- are distracted by holiday hoopla and before the first presidential primaries and caucuses. Once everyone sobers up in January, Copps says, the issue will become a " hot potato." Copps, 67, was chief of staff to former Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and was an assistant secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration. He was sworn in as an FCC commissioner in 2001. Salon recently spoke with him by phone:

In his Op-Ed in the Times, FCC chairman Kevin Martin wrote that the loosening of the ban on cross ownership of newspaper and TV stations was "relatively minor." You have characterized these new rules as the "camel's nose in the tent." What do you mean by that?

Number one, it's not the modest proposal that he would have us believe, because I find it is riven with loopholes. For example, he says that it is only going to affect the top 20 markets. That, by the way, is 42 or 43 percent of all of our households. But point in fact, there is a major loophole that would allow companies in smaller markets, just about any market, to apply for a similar exception on the basis of meeting a few loose criteria. So what you could wind up with is newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership in many, many more markets.

And number two, I said it was the camel's nose in the tent because I think that if they get away with this one proposal with newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership, they'll come back for changes in more of the rules, like allowing more duopolies or triopolies like the ones [FCC] chairman [Michael] Powell proposed back in 2003. You might remember that his scheme, which he actually succeeded in getting through the FCC, though it was later reversed by Congress and the courts, would have allowed in some of the larger markets a company to own up to three television stations, eight radio stations, a newspaper -- which is already a monopoly in most cities -- a cable system, and even an Internet provider. I just fail to understand how that kind of control over our media enhances democracy or works to the benefit of the American people.

What do you think could be the effect of these rules on the political system?

It's bad for the political system whether you're a liberal, a conservative or a moderate, when the number of voices and diversity is diminished in our country. That's bad for our civic dialogue, if a few companies have too much control. We've witnessed a tremendous amount of consolidation already. This consolidation involves not just owning the various channels of distribution, stations and the channels, but also vertical concentration, so they control the production and the content. If you have a lock on the content and a lock on the distribution, that's a recipe, and it always has been, for a monopoly or at least an oligopoly. That's what we have in our media.

Our Communications Act is premised on the idea that we should have more localism in our programming, that we should have more diversity of content, diversity of voices, and that includes diversity of ownership and competition. We're going in exactly the wrong way. And I might point out, I've been pretty adamant that we should not vote until we do something about minority ownership and localism.

Before we vote to loosen old rules, governing media ownership, we should take proposals that have been pending for so long on how we can increase minority ownership of our media properties. We live in a country that is one-third minority right now in the United States of America. People of color own 3.26 percent of all full-power commercial television stations, so is it any wonder then that their issues are not given the kind of coverage that they may like to have? Is it any wonder that they're so characterized that when you see a news story about an African-American it's often about crime? Or when you see a news story about a Latino, it's about jumping over a fence to get into the United States? What about the many million more stories that have to do with the contributions that these groups make to the country and what's going on in their communities? And what are their issues? And this applies to women when it comes to ownership too. Diversity of voices depends on ownership. If you don't have diversity of ownership, you're not going to have diversity of voices. So it's important to the future of our country. Our future is our diversity. That's our strength. That's our opportunity going forward. Why should we have a media that doesn't reflect that?

What do you mean by "localism"?

I mean that that in the face of consolidation too much of the programming comes from the networks or comes from afar. The owners, instead of being members of the community, are often people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Too many stations aren't even inhabited by human beings. They're run by computers or by mechanical means. That's why nobody's there. Localism means that you go out and talk to people locally about the kinds of issues and programming that they want. We don't do that anymore.
Martin wants a ruling by Dec. 18. Why do you think he wants it so soon?

Well, the rush is on. I can't speak for him or his motivations, but people have said that this could be a really politically hot potato if decided next year during the campaign season. Three million Americans contacted the FCC and the Congress in 2003, when [former FCC chairman Michael Powell wanted to loosen ownership rules]. And 99.9 percent were against what Powell was doing. There is a realization that this is a grass-roots issue and that it does spark some volatility. Some folks are at least implying that they want to get this out of the way before then. Do it in mid-December, and maybe Congress is going home and maybe we'll be wrapping our holiday gifts and not paying attention to it.

Who would be the beneficiaries if these new rules take effect?

I think there would be lots of them. Most of the major newspaper chains would be looking to buy some of these very profitable broadcast outlets. Although you have to be careful that you don't fall too easily to the newspaper [companies'] claim that they're essentially a hemorrhaging industry. I think Merrill Lynch put the average return on newspapers at 17 or 18 percent. I wish I had some investments that were making 17 or 18 percent. In addition to outright transactions, there will be all kinds of swaps. I'll give you my station here for your station there, and then I'll have a newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. All of that is going to drive out a lot of smaller stations from the news business. They'll figure, "How can I compete now if they have the newspaper and television station in town? I might as well get out of this business." Oddly enough, not oddly, but interesting, a lot of those tier-four and below stations will be the ones that are going to be allowed to be sold. If women and minorities are lucky enough to own stations, that's where they are. So we're encouraging the buyouts of those stations too. We could wind up with a real loss of diversity.

What about Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation? You expressed reservations about its purchase of Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal.

I'm so disappointed in that. This is a major transaction involving a company that owns 35 television stations, studios, and so many other different things. And now they're going to take over Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal in New York City, where they already own a couple of television stations and the New York Post. The Federal Communications Commission says we don't have any jurisdiction to look at that, so we're not even going to examine that. I think that's irresponsible. They based that on some kind of precedent from the 1980s, when the commission decided in a very different media environment that USA Today was a national newspaper and not a local newspaper. I think, number one, our public interest obligations give us ample room to look at that merger. But number two, and even more importantly, we ignored the local impact that that merger has in New York City. That's squarely in our jurisdiction. I don't think anyone should be able to get away with denying that. There are hundreds of thousands of issues of the Wall Street Journal that get circulated in New York City every day. Don't tell me that doesn't have some effect on control in New York, loss of diversity and all the rest.

Do you think that the Bush administration has made it a priority to put these changes into effect before the end of his presidency?

Clearly it's a priority for Chairman Martin to get these adopted as early as he can. Now I must say, they might have gone even further if the political environment hadn't changed a year ago in Washington. If we had less congressional oversight than we're getting right now, I suspect the forces of consolidation would probably have asked for more.

Do you see yourself as being on a crusade?

That [word] is invested with religious overtones. My No. 1 priority issue at the FCC has been the media environment. I find abhorrent what some of the effects of consolidation have been upon our culture, our entertainment and our civic dialogue. I think it's important for our country to change that.

When I go around and talk to people, I say, people in this audience may have a lot of different issues that they think are the most important issue confronting America. Maybe it's the war in Iraq, or maybe it's, how do we create high-paying jobs? or how do we insure our 40 million people who don't have healthcare? how do we educate our kids? how do we pry open the doors of equal opportunity further? If those are your priorities, that's fine.

But then I say, your No. 2 issue has to be this media issue, because all those other issues you care about that I just mentioned are funneled and filtered through big media, if they're lucky enough to get in that funnel at all. They're lucky to even be covered by big media. Then they're covered with the slant of a few particular companies. And it's not so much a political slant as it is a commercial slant. It's a commercial bias of all this that I think is the problem, selling products to a particular demographic.

So you're not a crusader, but at a conference in New York earlier this month, you said you were sounding a "call to battle" and "blowing a loud trumpet."

You've got to do that if the media is not giving you coverage. You've got to rely on using your bully pulpit. There are a lot of good groups that are working on this issue. The Internet is a marvelous tool for getting this story out. And the folks on the Internet side are beginning to see that their new media is beginning to be compromised by consolidation too. A lot of content is being bought up by people who have too much control over distribution, so I think Internet outlets are getting worried about their future. This is a not a debate about yesterday's media or about something passing into history. This is about new media as much as it is about old media. If you're interested in the future of the Internet, you ought to be mightily involved in this issue over media consolidation.

Do you think there are any specific issues that will not get sufficient coverage because of media consolidation?

Issue No. 1 would be media consolidation [itself]. I can't tell you how many different cities I go into where there is a strongly consolidated environment and you read so little about media consolidation. A few years ago, I went to Phoenix, Ariz., to attend a hearing [on media consolidation]. Someone else was holding the hearing [not the FCC]. It was in the middle of the afternoon. I would guess 300 people showed up for it, but it had not been very much discussed in the local media, as you can imagine. Yet all these people showed up. I talked to some of them in the audience and asked, "How did you find out about this hearing?" And one of them said, "I heard it on the BBC." I thought that was pretty revealing with one company controlling so much of the media market. Maybe that company wasn't so keen on covering this consolidation issue. But the BBC thought it was newsworthy enough to broadcast about it. I've seen that in many other places.

I visited the editor of the editorial page of a major newspaper in this country not too many weeks ago, and we got talking about this issue. I think the person in his heart was on my side of the issue, but he said they can't cover that issue. And I said, "Oh, why not?" He said, "The publisher wouldn't let us do that. It would be against the interest of the company. I have a lot of freedom to cover what I want issue-wise on my editorial page, but I'm not going there." It wasn't almost chilling; it was downright chilling.

Why won't the FCC hold hearings on Martin's proposal?

I had asked originally for a dozen hearings or so, and he committed to six. And this was the sixth one. Interestingly enough, it sounds confusing, because we did have a hearing a couple days before in Washington on localism, because [former FCC] Chairman Powell had kind of promised that there would be six hearings on localism also. There was one of those outstanding, so they wanted to get that done too, so they could say localism hearings are done and the media ownership hearings are done. They had the localism hearing at the end of October in Washington, D.C., on relatively short notice, and then just a few days later we all packed up and had another hearing in Seattle. To me that just said we're just checking the boxes; we're in a hurry to hold these hearings.

What did we learn from Chairman Powell's attempt to allow greater media consolidation in 2003?

That citizen action in this country can still work. A lot of people think, "Oh, with so many large impersonal forces, I'm not even a cog in the wheel, so how does my voice count?" But the fact that 3 million people found out about that and contacted the FCC, which led to congressional action ... and to people taking it to court, [which] sent those rules back to the FCC, was a victory. We're back to starting all over, but at least we kept those rules from going into effect. Recent history shows that citizen action still works even in the 21st century. History shows that we go through these cycles of consolidation and reaction.

Do you think the public response now will be similar to what we saw in 2003?

I think it's building. Some of the candidates in the presidential election already are talking about this issue. I think that if the media did a better job of explaining that this is queued up right now -- if [Martin] really insists on going ahead with this vote on Dec. 18 -- that would spark a grass-roots movement. And in the final analysis, if we are going to move toward airwaves of, by and for the people, and a good stewardship of the airwaves, it'll be because of a grass-roots effort. That's what worked in 2003. A lot of congressmen and senators went home and went to town meetings, and people would ask them about media consolidation. They had never seen that before. It made a difference. I think that had something to do with the fact that the Senate voted so quickly to overturn and reverse what Chairman Powell was attempting to do. That's what we need now. We need to send messages to the FCC and to the White House. You asked how involved is the White House in this. I don't know 100 percent the answer to that, but [those in the White House] should know clearly that this is an issue of importance to many people.

Do you think Chairman Martin underestimated the Senate's concern about further media consolidation?

Again, you'd have to speak to him. He seems determined to do this. If I were sitting where he is and I got this kind of bipartisan pushback, where you hear not only from Byron Dorgan on the Democratic side, but Trent Lott on the Republican side, when you hear not only Bill Nelson on the Democratic side, but Olympia Snowe on the Republican side, I'd really be a little bit cautious myself. I'd be fearful of running into a buzz saw with Congress and running into a buzz saw with the American people.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist





The Spectrum Auction Secrecy Begins
Saul Hansell

A veil of mystery is about to descend over the auction of the 700-megahertz band, a useful swath of the electromagnetic spectrum that is being freed up by the move to digital television.

Today was the deadline for potential bidders to file with the Federal Communications Commission. Once they do so they become subject to strict “anticollusion” rules that in effect prohibit participants from discussing any aspect of their bidding until the auction is over. The commission is trying to prevent bidders from getting into various forms of mischief, such as maliciously bidding up prices to hurt competitors or colluding with rivals to keep prices low.

Those rules explain why Google announced Friday that it was going to bid in the auction. It can’t discuss its bidding once it filed to participate.

The rules are so sweeping, in fact, that if Echostar and AT&T each filed to bid in the auction, they would have to stop any potential discussions about AT&T buying Echostar, for example.

For those of us interested in watching this $10 billion poker game for the future of wireless communication, this will make for a lot of guessing with little official information. The next official word will be sometime at the end of December or in the middle of January, when the F.C.C. announces who has been approved to bid.

The auction will start on Jan. 24. Participants will use an Internet system to enter bids on any of 1,099 separate licenses that are being offered. The bidding will be conducted in a series of rounds, and the commission will announce the amount of the high bid for each license at the end of each round. But it will not identify the high bidder.

“We will all be speculating about it, but we won’t know what is really happening,” said Blair Levin, a technology policy analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. “Envision a football game, where you know one team has six and another team has nine, but you don’t know who has what or the story behind it.”

This process is meant to help bidders become comfortable with the market and compare alternative strategies. Experts figure it may well take two months for all the bidding to be done.

Then things really get interesting. The winning bidder will have ten days to put up 20 percent of the amount it bid. After that, it is allowed to discuss its bids publicly and negotiate with potential partners, such as losing bidders who may want to get in on the action. But it only has ten more days to make deals before it has to pay the rest of the money it bid.

How frenzied this all will be, however, is very much up in the air, as there are now only four presumed bidders on a national scale: A&T, Verizon, Google and Clearwire, a startup founded by Craig O. McCaw, the cellphone veteran.

Sprint and T-Mobile, the other two major wireless carriers in the United States, are not expected to be significant bidders in this auction. And today, the two biggest cable carriers, Comcast and Time Warner, said they had decided not to bid in the auction.

Of course, bidders could come from any corner: investor groups, foreign wireless companies, even retail names like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have been bandied about in the press. The regional phone companies, like Alltel, which are expected to use the auction to expand their networks, might get more ambitious.

There are several attractive options for bidders. Most coveted seems to be the C block, 12 regional licenses that can be combined to create a national wireless network. This is the spectrum Google is presumed to be most interested in. There is also the D block, which is one nationwide license, but it has to be shared with local police and emergency workers. The A, B, and E bands are cut up into smaller units but could be useful to a carrier with existing operations.

All this means that if there really turn out to be only four major bidders, the veil of mystery over the auction may not stay on as long, and the money raised for the Treasury may not be as much as many had expected.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...ins/index.html





The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America

These groups line up against tech interests in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country.
Mark Sullivan

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country--those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The tech issues that they're concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.--mostly off the record--to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We'll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.

1. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

Issue: Copyright and Fair Use

The Internet economy should be a boon for digital media companies and for those of us that like to buy our music and video online. It's also a very powerful way to connect with people of like mind with a view toward learning about new things to watch and listen to. Unfortunately, the content owners in the record and movie industries have mainly seen the Web as a platform for piracy, and have mainly failed to adapt their businesses to the realities of online, as one lonely industry executive recently admitted.

The record and film industries are represented in legal and policy matters by two major organizations--the RIAA and the MPAA--with some key individual companies like Warner Music Group and Disney acting on their own behalf in certain cases. The RIAA and MPAA have exercised considerable political and economic influence to push a legal and policy environment in which the content owners keep tight control of the way their content is distributed and used. "I think it's fair to say that their approach is that any innovation that they haven't signed off on is bad," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Lots of Lawsuits

Companies distributing music or video in ways the studios or labels don't approve of have quickly found themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit. There are many examples. Perhaps most famously, the RIAA sued Napster in 1999, charging the file sharing service with "contributory" copyright infringement. After losing several major court decisions, Napster (as we knew it) folded in 2002. At around the same time the RIAA sued and shut down Michael Robertson's (MP3.com) BeamIt service, which helped users to upload and store music from their CD collections in an online locker.

Earlier this year Warner Music Group filed an infringement lawsuit against the social networking site imeem, which allowed its members to post songs on their profile pages that could be streamed by other users. San Francisco-based imeem was forced to settle out of court and now can stream only songs from labels with which it has contract agreements. All other songs run for 20 seconds and then stop.

On the video side, some major copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube (sued by Viacom) and MySpace (sued by Universal) are still in progress. If these suits end badly, they could further restrict our access to online video and even endanger the video operations of YouTube and MySpace. Video copyright lawsuits are also in progress against the DivX Stage 6 and Veoh online services.

A Chilling Effect

The suits are a real threat to the next generation of bi-directional, participatory Web services that are the promise of Web 2.0. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's von Lohmann believes this year's suits against imeem and others are just "the tip of the Web 2.0 litigation iceberg."

Von Lohmann also thinks the suits may hurt legitimate companies while leaving the real content pirates untouched. "I think it's fair to say that copyright threats from entertainment industries are exerting a serious chilling effect on several companies that are trying to do the right thing, while having little impact on offshore companies that are more adventurous," von Lohmann says. "In other words, the innovation that should be fueling our economy is now fueling someone else's."

Leverage in Washington

The RIAA and MPAA have worked very hard in Washington to apply the aggressive posture they use in the courts to the policy-making arena. Their attorneys and lobbyists are constantly meeting with members of Congress and presenting their side of issues of concern (mainly copyright-related) in front of regulatory bodies like the Federal Communications (FCC). And, most would agree, they've been fairly effective at getting their way. "Their combined muscle in lobbying and inter-corporate pressure is pretty substantial," says von Lohmann says.

Both organizations have their own staffs of lobbyists in Washington, but both also contract with numerous outside lobbying firms. In 2006 alone, the RIAA reported lobbying expenses of $1.5 million, while the MPAA reported $1.8 million. The RIAA retained the services of 13 outside lobbying firms in 2006 to help make its case to lawmakers, while the MPAA used 17 outside lobbying firms.

The content owners also donate to candidates for federal office as a way of furthering their long-term agendas. For example, Time Warner gave $17 million to various candidates for federal office between 1989 and 2005, says the Center for Responsive Politics. The Walt Disney Company donated almost $9.5 million during that period.

Whether or not the RIAA's and MPAA's tactics have really helped the entertainment industry is debatable. Their legal and lobbying tactics have put real limitations on the way that we consumers are allowed to use the digital content we purchase, causing many of us to wonder if we truly own the digital content we buy. The digital rights management (DRM) software that the content owners wrap around our music and video files often prevents us from playing media on all of our devices, copying it, or owning it forever. This has stirred up a lot of resentment, even as file sharing continues to be rampant around the globe.

2. The Pharmaceutical/Biotech Industry
Represented by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA) and Patent Attorneys

Issue: Patent Reform

Over the last ten years it's become increasingly obvious that the system we have for patenting new tech ideas is broken. The number of tech patents granted by the U.S. Patent Office has gone way up over the past decade, while the quality of those patents has gone way down, most analysts agree.

A bad patent can mean one that covers too broad a swath of technology, preventing others from innovating in that area. It can also mean patents granted for ideas that are obvious--ideas that aren't really innovative, but just take the next logical step in the development cycle. When such bad patents are granted in a certain tech area, it can take away the incentive for other technologists to innovate and invest in that area. That's bad news for those of us who expect new and better tech toys every year.

Problem is, tech is not the only industry that uses the patent system to protect intellectual property. Every other industry uses it too, and some of them feel strongly that it's working just fine. Enter the pharmaceutical industry, tech's unlikely adversary in the battle over patent reform. The pharmaceutical industry (and its attorneys) might end up directly affecting the state of personal technology for you and me.

"Basically, two constituencies oppose patent reform: The biomedical industry--pharmaceutical and biotech companies--who rely on patents and want them to be as strong as possible, and patent lawyers, who are both resistant to change in general and likely fearful of how reform will affect their practices," explains Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley.

Big Pharma in Washington

The big pharmacy companies--think Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Merck--have megabucks not only to pay attorneys for patent work, but also for lobbying lawmakers to keep the system the same. Pfizer, for instance, reported $12.2 million in lobbying expenses for 2006 alone.

Much of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries' lobbying work is done by or through the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), whose members include practically all of the big pharmaceutical companies with interests in the U.S. market. PhRMA reported spending $18.1 million in lobbying expenses in 2006 (ranking it the 7th biggest lobbying organization in the U.S. for the year), most of which was used to hire the services of 42 external firms to help influence regulatory bodies and lawmakers. PhRMA has spent more than $115 million on lobbying since 1998.

Big Pharma also exerts its influence by donating to federal candidates and political parties, although the biggest money comes directly from the large pharmaceutical companies themselves, not their industry organization, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. For instance, Pfizer has donated $11.6 million to various candidates from 1989 through 2006, and Bristol-Myers Squibb gave $6.8 million to various candidates during the same period.

But, as Stanford's Lemley points out, Big Pharma isn't the only dog in the fight. Thousands of patent attorneys represented by the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) also are fighting patent reform. With the sheer number of patent grants soaring in recent years, being a patent attorney has never been more lucrative. Not only do inventors need legal help to file for patents, but there are far more legal squabbles between companies over patents than ever before; this also keeps patent attorneys' phones ringing.

Battling the Bill

This year both PhRMA and the AIPLA have been out lobbying against a new bill called The Patent Reform Act of 2007, which would change the patent rules in favor of tech interests. The bill was passed by the House in September. A Senate version of the bill was passed in committee but awaits a hearing and possibly a vote by the full Senate.

Unlike some other tech policy issues, the players involved with patent reform are not playing rhetorical games on the issue, at least not right now, says one House staffer. "You have a difference in philosophy between pharma/biotech and tech," the aide says. "Both sides are being totally forthright about what they want, but both sides have such different philosophies and they're so different in the way they use patents that it's almost irreconcilable."

3. Big Telco Companies, Industry Group USTelecom

Issue: Network Neutrality

Network neutrality principles are rules that prevent large Internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from giving one Internet company's traffic priority over another's. Up until now, the Internet has been a fairly neutral place--we have equal access to any (legal) content we choose to access. But if the big ISPs begin giving preferential treatment to the highest-paying Internet sites, they could effectively make it harder for us consumers to access some of the vast content and services on the Web. The next Google and Yahoo of tomorrow, now gestating in garages and dorm rooms across the country, likely wouldn't have the funds to buy enough bandwidth to compete with the Google, Yahoo, and other giants of today. That's bad for us, because the companies of tomorrow might simply be better.

The phone companies had at one time reserved the right to parcel out bandwidth as they saw fit, as evidenced by the words of former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre in late 2005:

"How do you think [Internet companies are] going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." And so began the network neutrality fight we know and love today."

What Smoking Gun?

But so far there's been no smoking-gun evidence that the "Internet tollbooths" Whitacre alludes to are being set up on a large scale--that major net neutrality breaches are taking place at the big ISPs. We've seen only borderline offenses like traffic Comcast's recent throttling back of BitTorrent file sharing. But Comcast may have singled out BitTorrent traffic not because it's BitTorrent traffic or because it's file sharing traffic, but because peer-to-peer traffic eats up huge amounts of bandwidth--both upstream and downstream. Still, many people believe that some type of traffic discrimination is inevitable, and that network neutrality principles must be codified into law to prevent it.

Some say that the absence of network neutrality guarantees in existing law is already hurting tech companies, and, by extension, tech consumers. "It fosters an area of uncertainty," says Art Brodsky of Washington D.C.-based public interest group Public Knowledge. "The point is you have to wonder, if you're a technologist, and you'd love to get this [service] on the Web, and if I'm competing against another company that has a sweetheart deal with the phone company and they move my packets to the back of the line, am I going to get screwed?"

The companies that own the big broadband pipes remain willing to fight hard against a law restricting their right to discriminate on their networks. A major pro-network neutrality bill cosponsored by Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Senator Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota, failed to pass last year, in part because of a massive lobbying campaign by Big Telco and it allies. The two Senators reintroduced the bill again in January, but little action has been taken on it. The phone companies have already done a lot of talking on Capital Hill to prevent passage of a net neutrality law. And, it should be said, the tech and consumer groups pushing for a law have not always stated their case clearly enough to move lawmakers and their constituents. That situation, I believe, is getting better, but a smoking gun--an obvious net neutrality breach by a large ISP--will likely be needed for Congress to pass a law.

Legions of Lobbyists

The big telcos are very influential in Washington, and rarely loose a fight over something they really want. "They've got armies of lobbyists that work for them," Public Knowledge's Brodsky says. "They've got regiments of lobbyists that are hired guns. They've got zillions of dollars to spread around town in campaign contributions and other ancillary supports."

AT&T has a large contingent of in-house lobbyists in Washington, but also farms out much of the work. AT&T reported almost $19.1 million in lobbying expenses last year, hiring 25 outside firms to do its bidding in the capital. That makes AT&T the fifth-largest lobbying spender in the U.S. for 2006, followed closely by the telcos' industry group USTelecom, which spent $18.4 million during the year. Verizon and Verizon Wireless together reported $13 million in lobbying expenses, and hired some 45 outside lobbying firms in addition to internal lobbying staff.

One interesting thing about these lobbyists is their somewhat incestuous relationship with the offices in which they lobby. Brodsky says Verizon and AT&T routinely hire lobbyists from the staffs of senators and representatives. "If you look at the lobbying forms for the companies, you'll see a lot of people that worked for very influential members of Congress and senators and things." One example is Tom Tauke, a former congressman from Iowa who now heads up Verizon's lobbying efforts in Washington. Tauke has long been an outspoken critic of network neutrality legislation.

The big phone companies also give generously to the campaigns of federal election candidates. In fact, AT&T was the 2nd largest political donor from 1989 to 2006 at almost $38 million, again according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Verizon donated $15.5 million to candidates in federal elections between 1990 and 2005.

4. Verizon, AT&T, Progress and Freedom Foundation

Issue: Broadband Penetration

Just as railroads and highways did in the past, broadband and mobile communications can dramatically increase the productivity and efficiency of the economy. The U.S. government has taken a largely deregulatory approach to the broadband ISP market, based on a belief that competition will compel large ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to sell broadband at the speeds and price points that consumers want.

But this hands-off approach is being called into question. The reason is this: Back in the 1990s the U.S. led the world in broadband penetration and speeds, but today the U.S. has fallen to 15th among the world's developed countries in terms of broadband penetration, according to data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

A study by the Communication Workers of America finds that the average download speed of Internet connections in the U.S. is 1.9 megabits per second. The cost of DSL or cable connections in the U.S. ranges from $15 to $40 per month. Meanwhile, Tokyo residents can buy a 100-mbps connection for the equivalent of $10 per month.

The phone companies and their allies didn't much like the news from the OECD, and have for months engaged in a campaign to discredit the OECD report. The phone companies also get help from a vocal little spin house called the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which holds seminars, puts out position papers on various telecommunications issues, and lobbies on these issues as well. One of the main jobs of PFF's commentators has been to espouse the efforts of the phone companies to spread broadband access, while discrediting the OECD report. My sources in Washington tell me that it's common knowledge that a sizable part of PFF's roughly $3 million annual budget comes from the big phone companies. The Supporters page at the PFF Website is a Who's Who of large telco and cable interests.

No Incentive for Growth

The OECD data notwithstanding, the phone and cable companies have had little real incentive to improve the speeds, prices, and reach of their broadband services. Today most Americans, if they have any choice of broadband providers at all, can choose service only from a cable or a telephone company ISP. Meanwhile, the FCC and the courts have consistently ruled that the cable and telephone companies are under no legal obligation to share their broadband lines with would-be competitors. Some argue that federally collected monies and tax incentives helped pay for those lines in the first place, and that the current owners of those facilities have an obligation to share them. Only real competition, not the short-term interests of shareholders, can compel ISPs in the U.S. to boost broadband speeds and lower costs to world-class levels.

The FCC doesn't help the situation by defining broadband as anything above a decidedly slow 200 kilobits per second. That low threshold allows the FCC and phone and cable companies to make some rosy claims about the state of broadband in the U.S., such as this one, proudly posted at the USTelecom site: "The total number of new high-speed lines (200 kbps in at least one direction) increased by 61% from 51.2 million at the end of 2005, to 82.5 million at the end of 2006."

The effect of slow broadband speeds and poor availability on tech is obvious. A whole generation of innovative businesses that depend on real broadband is still waiting to come into existence. For now, consumers will have to wait for new, lightning-fast information, media, and telecommunications services that could change the way we work and play.

5. Large Wireless Carriers and...
the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA); TV Broadcasters and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)

Issue: Wireless Spectrum

In 2005 Congress passed the Digital Television and Public Safety Act of 2005 (DTV Act), which mandates that the TV broadcasters convert their signals from analog to digital by February 2009. That will make available some tracts of analog wireless spectrum that are valued highly by competing Internet, telecommunications and broadcasting interests. Such spectrum is considered to be "beachfront property," partly because the signals that can be sent over it travel over long distances and can be received well indoors.

The 700-MHz War

The FCC will auction off 60 megahertz (MHz) of that spectrum within the 700 MHz band in 2008. A coalition of tech and public interest groups led by Google, called the Coalition for 4G in America, earlier this year argued hard for the FCC to apply a set of "open" standards to the entire 64-MHz chunk, so that it would support any device or any application. The FCC eventually agreed to that requirement for about half of the 64-MHz band of spectrum. Google acted at least partly out of self interest: The public Internet, whether accessed via landline or wirelessly, is Google's sole means of getting its services to the public, so of course it wants its search service to work over as many connected devices as possible.

Google and its coalition also asked the FCC to require the eventual licensee of the spectrum to share its network with competing wireless service providers. Under pressure from big wireless carriers like Verizon Wireless and Sprint, the FCC refused this last request. The wireless carriers want to be able to utilize and market that spectrum in the same way they do now--so that only certain devices work on the system in certain markets, while they remain under no obligation to share the network with other providers. The carriers accused Google and friends of simply trying to devalue the spectrum.

They also accused the Google coalition of trying to drive down the value of the spectrum to those who might build new networks on it. Here's the spin from the wireless carriers' industry group, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA): "CTIA opposes encumbering this valuable spectrum with unnecessary regulations and restrictions that place bidders on unequal footing, limit the utility of the spectrum, and ultimately drive down the value to consumers and the U.S. Treasury." CTIA says the spectrum, unencumbered, will "drive technological innovation, bring advanced wireless data services to rural America, and . . . contribute billions to the U.S. Treasury."

Google and its coalition partners believe that an "open" and nationwide wireless network using the 700-MHz band could create a third broadband pipe, an alternative to the cable or DSL lines sold by the cable and telephone companies. Of course, the big wireless incumbents are against this because they don't want the competition from a "third pipe." This is a worrisome situation, since the one person who could require that the band be open, FCC chairman Kevin Martin, has a long history of deregulatory and Big Telco-friendly rulings. Indeed, in Washington, if Big Telco really wants something, it usually gets it.

Between the Channels

After the broadcasters' transition to digital TV in 2009, the spectrum between 54 MHz and 698 MHz (between channels 2 through 51) will be used for digital television, but there will be spaces left over between the channels that could be used for other purposes. Those are called "white spaces," and the FCC is considering auctioning off licenses to that spectrum, too.

Technology companies like Microsoft are hoping to use some of that white space to connect low-power, mobile devices (such as laptops and iPhone-type PDAs). But the TV broadcasters, represented by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), have launched a large lobbying campaign against using white spaces for Internet access. The NAB, through its lobbyists and TV ads, is saying that such devices will definitely interfere with the digital TV signal, which they say would result in poor picture quality for the folks watching at home.

Most recently, the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology tested a couple of devices to see if the broadcasters' fears are reasonable. The "High Tech White Spaces Coalition" (a collection of companies that includes Google, Microsoft, Dell, and Intel) submitted a device to be tested, as did Philips Electronics.

The results were complex, and left some doubt about the tech companies' claims that the devices would not interfere. The NAB immediately seized on this as a victory, but most observers would agree that more testing is necessary to decide the issue. The FCC has made no final decision, and the jury is still out on whether white spaces can be used to improve connectivity in the U.S.

What You Can Do

The outcomes of the legal and policy fights described above will have a direct affect on the quality, price, and functionality of the technology we consumers use in the coming years. If you care about such things, there are a number of ways to put yourself in the arena. The first thing is to get informed about the tech issues being discussed locally and nationally--PCWorld.com is a good place to start for that. Once you're armed with enough information to be dangerous, you can research a little further and discover exactly where your local, state, and federal representatives stand on the tech issues you care about. If you don't like what they say, e-mail, call, or write them and ask them to explain.

The Internet has also become a powerful tool for tech advocacy, and for virtually any major tech issue, you'll find a number of informational sites. These sites typically offer up-to-date news, opinion blogs, and studies to keep you informed, as well as petitions, contact information for elected officials, and form letters to help you make your views known.

Finally, tech policy is a major plank in the platform of any local, state, and national candidate for public office nowadays. Using resources like On The Issues.org, you can learn where the candidates stand on the tech issues that affect you, before giving them your vote.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140081/article.html





AT&T Says its Wireless Network Also Open to Outside Devices
Grant Gross

But AT&T's GSM-based (Global System for Mobile Communications) network has been open to outside devices and applications for years, the company said. AT&T will start to publicize that information through salespeople at AT&T stores, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of the company's wireless business, told USA Today.

"By its nature, GSM technology is open," said Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman. "Customers could always use GSM phones not sold by AT&T on our network. We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course."

AT&T's customers can also take their handsets to other mobile service providers using GSM, with one huge exception: Apple's iPhone. AT&T will not unlock the iPhone to use on other networks, Coe said.

For other devices, "we will unlock the device when customers fulfill their contract; we will also unlock the device if the customer pays full price for the device," he said. "The iPhone, however, is an exception. The iPhone is exclusive to AT&T in the U.S."

AT&T's publicity on its open-access policies comes after competitor Verizon Wireless announced Nov. 27 it would open its wireless network to outside devices and applications by late 2008. Devices will need to be tested by Verizon before they can be activated, the company said.

The Verizon announcement came after Google launched the Open Handset Alliance, an open-development platform for mobile phones, earlier in November.

The actions of Google and Verizon didn't prompt any changes at AT&T, Coe said. "First, we did not make an announcement," he said. "Second, it's always been this way."

Customers who want to bring a GSM device to the AT&T network can purchase a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) through the company, Coe said. If the device operates in U.S. spectrum frequencies, AT&T will activate the device, he said.

AT&T also allows outside applications on its network, Coe said. "People have access to a vast array of applications today, some that are provided through AT&T, others that are not," he said in an e-mail. "We take an open approach to music, wireless operating systems, e-mail platforms, etc. We actively encourage developers to create applications and 20,000 have registered on our developer's site."

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for open-access advocate Public Knowledge, said he was taking a wait-and-see approach to the AT&T open-access policy. "So far, we only have one quote from one company executive," he said. "The theme is fine, and we approve, but would like to see more details."

But Mary Greczyn, spokeswoman for startup Frontline Wireless, called the AT&T position on open access "a huge win from a policy standpoint."

Frontline, Public Knowledge, and other groups successfully pushed for open-access requirements on part of the 700MHz spectrum band, to be auctioned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission starting in January. AT&T's move is a "reaction to what Frontline had proposed as open access in the first place," Greczyn said.

Despite open-access policies from Verizon and AT&T, Frontline believes U.S. residents will need more competition among broadband carriers, and Frontline intends to bid on 700MHz spectrum in order to build a wireless broadband network, Greczyn said.
http://wireless.itworld.com/4268/wir...06/page_1.html





A.M.D. Delays Energy-Efficient Chip Again
Laurie J. Flynn

The energy-efficient chip that Advanced Micro Devices was counting to win customers away from Intel has been delayed again, the company said yesterday.

The company confirmed that a technical irregularity has delayed widespread availability of its Barcelona chip for servers until early next year. The company had announced in September that it was beginning to ship it to customers.

Technical problems, called errata, are common during chip development, and both A.M.D. and Intel have been plagued by them at various times. The significance of this glitch — in rare instances, the chip could fail to function — has more to do with Barcelona’s further delay than with the glitch itself. The product was originally set for general availability in the middle of 2007.

“We’re continuing to ship it but only to specific customers,” said John Taylor, spokesman for A.M.D., which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. As a result, many server manufacturers have not been able to sell the products they expected based on the new chip.

At the time of Barcelona’s release in September, A.M.D. executives described the processor as one of A.M.D.’s most significant new products in several years. A.M.D.’s first quad-core processor, Barcelona features four processors on one piece of silicon, allowing faster calculating and greater energy efficiency at companies running large data centers and server farms.

After months of delays, the new processor arrived as A.M.D. was struggling to maintain its hard-earned gains from Intel, its far larger rival, and just a week after Intel announced a new version of its own chip for servers, Xeon.

A.M.D. is offering Barcelona customers a workaround that allows them to use the chip until the errata are addressed in a new version of the product in January. The problem also affected the company’s Phenom processor, a desktop version of the chip, but A.M.D.’s workaround solution for that was issued before the product shipped, Mr. Taylor said.

Nathan Brookwood, a chip analyst with Insight64, said that it was not unusual for this kind of problem to appear and that he expected the impact on Barcelona customers to be minimal compared with past errata.

“The effect on customers using the patch will be they lose some performance,” Mr. Brookwood said. “But it won’t force A.M.D. to retrench.”

Dirk Meyer, president of A.M.D., hinted at a problem during a conference call with analysts in October, saying that initial production of Barcelona had been slower than expected. But he insisted that the product would be widely available by November. Company officials said yesterday that the scope of the problem had not become evident until after that call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/te...gy/06chip.html





Toshiba's New 80GB 2.5-inch HDD for Automotive Applications Has Industry Largest*1 Storage Capacity

New products boost vibration resistance by 50 percent*2
Press release

Toshiba Corporation today announced the latest additions to its market-leading lineup of 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD) for automotive applications: an 80GB drive offering the industry's largest*1capacity, and a 40GB drive. The drives will be used in such applications as car navigation systems, and will be released in industrial and retail versions. Sample shipping of the drives has started and mass production will start in March 2008.

Toshiba's automotive HDD have earned an unrivaled reputation for environmental toughness and performance, and made the company the leader in the world automotive HDD market. With its latest drives, the company has further enhanced durability and increased data capacity, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to boost areal recording density and to raise storage capacity to 80GB (MK8050GAC and MK8050GACE), double that of Toshiba's current automotive drives*2 .

Alongside higher storage, the drives offer numerous enhancements. Lighter moving parts, a highly rigid enclosure, and the vibration resistance achieved by a highly accurate head positioning system, takes overall, vibration resistance to 29.4m/s2 (5-50Hz), a full 50% improvement over current automotive models*2. In addition, an advanced aerodynamic design for the head slider, which “floats" the head on a cushion of air, maintains the flying head at a constant distance from the disk, a refinement that brings greater reliability to data read and write in low pressure conditions at high altitude. As a result, the new drives can operate at up to 5,500m above sea level, 1,200m higher than current automotive models*2.

In addition to map data information for car navigation, the new HDD can be used in on-board entertainment systems, to store high capacity movie, digital image and music files.

Toshiba introduced its first HDD for automotive application in 2001. The company's highly durable and reliable products today command a share of approximately 85% of the global automotive HDD market*3, and cumulative shipments now stand at over 7-million units.

The new drives are fully compliant with the EU RoHS directive.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_11/pr2802.htm





Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives
sehlat writes

Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. "Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?"
Update: 12/07 03:28 GMT by Z : To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/06/2119240.shtml





T-Mobile Can Sell iPhone with Contract-German Court
Philipp Jarke

Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division can make customers who buy Apple's coveted iPhone take out a T-Mobile contract as well and may continue to offer the device with a locked SIM card, a German court ruled on Tuesday.

Rival Vodafone had obtained a temporary court injunction preventing T-Mobile from locking the iPhone's SIM card -- thus preventing it from being used on other networks -- and offering it only in combination with a T-Mobile contract.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...EB004320071204





Nokia in Free Music Pact with Universal

Nokia Oyj said on Tuesday it has agreed with the world's largest music group Universal to offer free 12-month access to Universal artists' music for buyers of Nokia's music phones.

The world's top cellphone maker said it has signed up Universal Music Group International, owned by French media giant Vivendi, for its new "Comes With Music" offering and is eyeing similar deals with other labels before the offer starts in the second half of 2008.

"We are in talks with all major labels. The response from labels has been very, very positive," said Nokia spokesman Damian Stathonikos.

Nokia said the new offering would differ from other packages on the market as consumers can keep all the music they have downloaded for free during the 12 month period.

"The financial barrier to try new music is completely removed. It fundamentally changes a lot of business logic in the music industry," Stathonikos said.

The free access to new music could hurt peer-to-peer networking while also raising pressure on Apple Inc.

Nokia moved into the navigation industry in a similar manner earlier this year, offering free map data and routing, while charging for more detailed navigation information.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...28111520071204





MySpace to Showcase Music and Sell Performance Videos
Brian Stelter

MySpace, the social networking site where people create home pages and embellish them as they would a dormitory room, plans today to start positioning itself as a top destination for buying exclusive musical performances.

In a program called Transmissions, MySpace is inviting musicians to choose a studio and select the songs they want to perform. MySpace will show and sell videos of the performance.

It could be perceived as an Internet variation of the popular series “MTV Unplugged,” but with a revenue stream built in. When musicians participate in the MTV series, their work is sometimes released as albums months or years later. On MySpace, the work will be available immediately.

“If I like what I see, I can take it with me,” said Josh Brooks, vice president for programming and content of MySpace.

For years MySpace, now owned by the News Corporation, has served as a promotional platform for artists and labels, primarily through the MySpace Music portion of the Web site. Now the company wants to provide a sales component. Unlike Apple’s iTunes music store, which charges a flat rate of 99 cents a song, MySpace will let distributors set their own prices.

“We’re enabling artists to choose how they want to distribute their music,” Mr. Brooks said.

James Blunt, a singer-songwriter whose signature hit is “You’re Beautiful,” will be the first artist to participate in Transmissions, introducing five songs, including a new single, on the site today. Mr. Blunt said he appreciated the flexibility offered by the Transmissions format.

“Sometimes we can be so dependent on radio, and yet radio is all about a three-minute, 30-second song that is beat-driven and loud,” he said. “Music is about so much more than that. Through MySpace, I can get songs heard that are any length I choose, that are any format I choose.”

MySpace’s first attempt to sell music, through a year-old partnership with a company called Snocap, has not fared well. Snocap allows bands to sell music through small online stores embedded on MySpace profiles and other Web pages, but like most attempts at creating sales models for music, the service has not been widely adopted. Snocap laid off half its employees in October.

Now MySpace is taking a different approach. For Transmissions, it will showcase the recordings and connect users to sites (like the online store for Mr. Blunt’s label) where the content can be purchased — without ever having to leave MySpace.

MySpace representatives said the financial terms for each deal would vary. In the case of Mr. Blunt, the Web site will not get a cut of the revenue.

Mr. Brooks described Transmissions as a new stage of growth for MySpace Music, which began with basic profiles of musicians and has evolved into a platform site with album exclusives, online shows and a national tour.

MySpace Music drew an average of 17.9 million unique visitors in October, making it the third-most-popular music Web site, behind Yahoo Music (22.4 million) and ArtistDirect (19.1 million). The MySpace site has had a 42 percent increase in traffic from October 2006, more than any comparable site.

Mr. Brooks said Transmissions represented the first in a series of new revenue models for music that the company planned to introduce.

“I think a lot of musicians are looking for new ways to forge ahead in the digital space,” he said, citing opportunities in the video and mobile arenas for potential expansion by MySpace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/te...04myspace.html





Tired of Corruption but Afraid of the Crackdown
Choe Sang-Hun

For Choi Hae-pyung, head of an electronics parts maker, running his business over the last year has been like steering a boat through a double storm: competition from China and the rising value of the Korean currency have squeezed his already thin profit.

But those challenges were anticipated. What Mr. Choi did not foresee was a scandal.

For weeks, the manufacturing giant Samsung, which relies on thousands of parts suppliers, like Mr. Choi’s Green C& C Tech here, has been battered by accusations of corruption. Executives were banned from leaving the country. Prosecutors raided Samsung’s offices in search of traces of a suspected slush fund that was said to exceed $217 million.

“Everyone is watching what’s going to happen to Samsung,” Mr. Choi said. “If Samsung takes a punch, we feel the shock, too. If Samsung shrinks because of the investigation and cuts its investment, smaller companies like us will shut down in droves.”

Mr. Choi’s jitters help to explain why virtually no one in this country maintains that despite the enormity of its recurring scandals, Samsung should go the way of Enron.

South Koreans have grown tired of the corrupt ways of their big businesses. But because the economy is so heavily dependent on a handful of conglomerates, and their influence so pervasive in people’s daily lives, Koreans fear that striking these behemoths too harshly may hurt their own economic well-being.

Thus it has become a pattern: a scandal rocks one of these conglomerates, known as chaebol, roughly once a year. But by the time the scandal has run its course, executives accused of bribery walk away with light punishment, usually a suspended prison term accompanied by an admonition from the judge that they would have been punished more sternly were it not for their “contribution to the economy.”

So they all go back — supposedly in remorse, sometimes after making huge donations to charities — and continue to run their companies until the next scandal.

Many in South Korea saw no compelling reason to think it would be any different this time.

“There is a lot of slapping on the wrist and embarrassing exposure, but not full prosecution,” said Tom Coyner, president of Soft Landing Korea, a management consultant. “The scary thing about this is that people generally recognize Samsung is one of the best-managed corporations in South Korea. So if that’s the case with Samsung, it makes one wonder what degree of corruption we might find elsewhere.”

In a speech to Samsung workers on Monday, Yun Jong-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, the group’s flagship company, lamented the “confusion” created by the scandal and said “there was fear among shareholders and investors that it may disrupt our management.”

This scandal is unlike any Samsung has faced because it involves a whistle-blower, a rare species in South Korea.

Over the last month, Kim Yong-chul, Samsung’s former chief in-house lawyer and a prosecutor before that, has contended that Samsung stashed away a gigantic slush fund. He said it was created with company money, hidden in dummy stock and bank accounts in the names of executives, including his own, and used to bribe politicians, prosecutors and journalists, and even to finance an art collection for the chairman’s family.

Samsung denies any wrongdoing. But for many, fear deepened that the company they have taken great pride in, an epitome of Korean export prowess, along with the embrace of global standards of corporate responsibility, is still hostage to what critics call a “culture of corruption.”

Twenty years ago, the chairman, Lee Kun-hee, 65, took over Samsung from his father, the founder, Lee Byung-chull. A recluse with a premature stoop but a visionary among chief executives, he has transformed Samsung from a cheap imitator of Japanese electronics into an empire that gives Sony, Nokia and Philips a good run for their money, marketing cellphones, computers and television sets.

Samsung held no celebration for the anniversary. In addition to the bribery scandal, there was another cloud: Mr. Lee’s ambitious plans to pass the torch to his son and heir, Jae Yong, now under the scrutiny of prosecutors and the public.

“Samsung is the spine of the economy,” said Na Seong-lin, an economist at Hanyang University in Seoul. “If it shakes, the economy shakes. If Samsung does something, it becomes the standard. But it never cast off the old vices of chaebol. It’s not free from corruption.”

Samsung is the largest of the chaebol, family-controlled conglomerates that were created during the country’s military rule as engines of its growth. They still dominate the economy here, listed in 2006 as the 13th largest in the world by the World Bank.

With 59 affiliates and 250,000 employees globally, Samsung generated sales of $160 billion in 2006, more than a fifth of the gross domestic product. Millions more, like Mr. Choi, depend on Samsung for their livelihood.

Mr. Choi’s Green C& C Tech factory is nestled on a small roadside hill in Hwasung, south of Seoul. Around it, a new bedroom community is going up, many of its apartment complexes emblazoned with a coveted brand name among home buyers: Samsung.

Inside the two-story factory, 100 workers use machines built by Samsung Techwin, another subsidiary, to make components that light up lamps behind flat-panel screens.

About 70 percent of Green C& C Tech’s 12 billion won, or $13 million, in sales last year came from parts shipped to Samsung.

Lee Ji-soon, an economist at Seoul National University, noted an overall trend toward reform of the conglomerates, but foresaw “scandals waiting to happen” as long as “companies find it hard to do business without currying favors with those with power.”

Heavy-handed bureaucrats, inconsistent prosecution, regulations based less on reality and more on momentary political considerations and a lack of legal lobbying — all this leads business executives to resort to bribery as protection, Mr. Lee and Mr. Coy ner of Soft Landing Korea said.

“No matter what problems it might have, Samsung is still the cleanest and most competitive company we can depend on in this time of economic uncertainty,” Mr. Choi said. “If we hurt Samsung too much, we will make the mistake of burning down our house to kill bedbugs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/bu...04samsung.html





A.P. to Reorganize Work and Accent Multimedia
Cate Doty

After a decade of watching newspapers and rival wire services shrink, The Associated Press, the 161-year-old news cooperative, is refitting itself to handle the 24-hour news cycle it helped create.

“You have to adjust to the marketplace,” said Jim Kennedy, The A.P.’s vice president for strategic planning. “The new generation of consumers has completely different habits.”

To feed those habits and manage the news cycle more efficiently, The A.P. will change the way it files, edits and distributes stories, opening at least four regional editing hubs as part of a plan it calls AP2.0.

It is also expanding its multimedia packages for entertainment, business and sports reports. And the company is moving toward an all-digital platform it calls the “Digital Cooperative.”

The changes, The A.P. believes, will counter what hampered some of its rivals, like Dow Jones Newswires and Reuters, which, over the last decade, have cut their staffs as revenues have fallen.

Kathleen Carroll, The A.P.’s executive editor, said the company’s responsibility was to “preserve our future, so that we can continue to provide news from remote places,” and to “rev up our journalism” to make it compelling to customers.

The idea behind the regional hubs, which mimic an overhaul of The A.P.’s foreign operations earlier in the decade, is to reduce editing gridlock at its major filing desks, including that in New York. The regional hubs will handle coverage in their areas, and the New York desk will focus on “the stories that are the tip top of the day,” Ms. Carroll said.

Mr. Kennedy said another goal was to get editors in the regional bureaus back into reporting, which would increase the amount of content, and to reduce the number of people who work on an article during a news cycle.

Some employees, however, are wondering what these changes, particularly the new regional editing hubs, will mean for them.

“People are definitely jittery,” said Tony Winton, an A.P. broadcast correspondent based in Miami and the president of the News Media Guild, which represents A.P. workers. “It’s really hard to react to everything because the details have been so thin.”

The company has assured the guild that no layoffs are planned, and Ms. Carroll said The A.P. was still evaluating staff needs in each bureau, although some employees might have to move.

“I think anybody who’s in an editing job now is probably looking at some kind of change to their work,” Ms. Carroll said.

But Mr. Winton wondered what would happen to an editor whose regular position was moved to one of the regional hubs. “I think most of our members understand The A.P. has to stay competitive. We get that,” he said. “But this sort of cone of silence we’re under isn’t helping.”

Ms. Carroll acknowledged the uncertainty. “I think what’s frustrating for some people is that the answers to some of their questions just aren’t known yet,” she said. “And journalists are skeptics.”

Although The A.P. has expanded its staff over the last few years to nearly 4,100 employees, its rivals have struggled as the newspapers and newsrooms they served have shrunk. Reuters, the London-based wire service, cut 3,000 jobs in 2003 alone. United Press International, the onetime giant that fostered the careers of Walter Cronkite and Helen Thomas, has withered to a bare-bones operation in Washington and has been controlled by a company owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, since 2000.

The A.P.’s nonprofit status means it does not have to worry about falling stock prices and testy shareholders. But like any business, it depends on income for its survival, and is looking more toward advertising for revenue, Mr. Kennedy said.

In October, the company revised its prices for premium content, like multimedia offerings. Content also includes an invisible watermark, so the company can trace an article to see if it is being used without permission.

“They’re very much hawks on charging for it,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “And why not? Because that’s the premise of their business. You’ve got to pay for it if you’re going to use it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu...ia/03apee.html





Study Reveals that Most Americans have False Sense of Online Security

More than half of computer users who think they are protected against online threats like spyware, viruses and hackers actually have inadequate or no online protection, according to an independent research study conducted for Verizon. Verizon's study, conducted with 545 U.S. Internet subscribers by the independent Internet research firm iTracks, contrasted participants' opinions about their level of online security against results of Verizon Security Advisor scans performed on their computers.

While 92 percent of participants thought they were safe, the scans revealed that 59 percent were actually vulnerable to a variety of online dangers. Ninety-four percent of those surveyed said they would find it helpful to be able to diagnose or check their online security status on a regular basis to make sure their PCs were safe.

The study's comparison between the real risk, as determined by the Verizon Security Advisor scan, and the participants' perceived risks showed that people are unknowingly exposing themselves to threats through bad habits such as relying on expired or old security software.

Today, nearly all new PCs come bundled with off-the-shelf security software provided as a limited-time trial or pre-paid, one-year subscription. However, at the end of the trial or full subscription period, buyers usually must renew the license and pay the vendor to continue the protection. If they don't, they may no longer receive protection or crucial updates, exposing themselves to a myriad of online threats that grow daily.

Other key findings of the study include:

• Spyware Protection: When asked how safe they felt their home PC was from spyware, 92 percent of respondents felt "safe" or "somewhat safe." In contrast, the Verizon Security Advisor scan revealed that the majority (58 percent) were "at risk" or "potential risk" from spyware infection. Nineteen percent were critically "at risk" from spyware infection.
• Virus Protection: When asked how safe they felt their home PC was from viruses, 92 percent of respondents felt "very safe" or "somewhat safe," whereas the Verizon Security Advisor scan revealed that 45 percent were "at risk" or "potential risk" from virus infection.
• Firewall Protection: Nineteen percent of respondents had their personal firewall turned off.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5658





Microsoft Wireless Keyboards Crypto Cracked

Tapping up
John Leyden

Security researchers have cracked the rudimentary encryption used in a range of popular wireless keyboards.

Bluetooth is increasingly becoming the de-facto standard for wireless communication in peripheral devices and is reckoned to be secure. But some manufacturers such as Logitech and Microsoft rely on 27 MHz radio technology which, it transpires, is anything but secure.

Using nothing more than a simple radio receiver, a soundcard and suitable software, Swiss security firm Dreamlab Technologies managed to capture and decode the radio communications between a keyboard and a PC. The attack opens the way up to all sorts of mischief including keystroke logging to capture login credentials to online banking sites or email accounts.

Dreamlab cracked the encryption key used within Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and 2000 keyboards. As most products in Microsoft's wireless range are based on the same technology other products are likely to be insecure. Max Moser and Phillipp Schrödel of Dreamlab Technologies succeeded in eavesdropping traffic from a distance of up to ten meters using a simple radio receiver. More sensitive receivers may make it possible to capture keystrokes over larger distances.

Sniffing traffic between wireless keyboards and their base stations was possible because of the weak encryption used, as explained in a white paper from Dreamlab:

To our surprise, only the actual keystroke data seems to be encrypted. The Metaflags and identifier bits aren't encrypted or obfuscated. The one byte USB Hid code is encrypted using a simple XOR mechanism with a single byte of random data generated during the association procedure.

This means that there are only 256 different key values possible per keyboard and receiver pair. We did not notice any automated key change interval and therefore assume that the encryption key stays the same until the user reassociates the keyboard. 256 key combination can be brute forced even with very slow computers today. We did not analyze the quality of the random number so far because it was not needed to successfully break the encryption.

"Wireless communication is only as secure as the encryption technology used. Due to its nature, it can be tapped with little effort," said Dreamlab's Max Moser.

Dreamlab has reported the security loophole to Microsoft. The security researchers are holding off releasing details on exactly how the hack was pulled off pending the release of a fix, which it reckons may be a difficult and drawn-out process. The security researchers have however published a video of the attack here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...rypto_cracked/





Cafe Latte Attack Steals Credentials from Wi-Fi Clients

Would you like a corporate login with that espresso?
John Leyden

Hackers have refined a new technique for breaking into Wi-Fi networks protected by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).

The so-called 'Cafe Latte' attack aims to retrieve the WEP keys from the PCs of road warriors. The approach concentrates its attack on wireless clients, as opposed to earlier attacks that cracked the key on wireless networks after sniffing a sufficient amount of traffic on a network.

"At its core, the attack uses various behavioral characteristics of the Windows wireless stack along with already known flaws in WEP," explains Vivek Ramachandran, a security researcher at AirTight Networks, who will demonstrate the approach at the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this weekend (19-21 October). "Depending upon the network configuration of the authorised network we will show that it is possible to recover the WEP key from an isolated Client within a time slot ranging between just a few minutes to a couple of hours."

The attack relies on a laptop's attempt to connect to a WEP-protected network as a means to trick it into sending thousands of WEP-encrypted ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) requests.

ARP is a network protocol that maps between a network layer address and a data link layer hardware address. ARP, for example, is used to resolve IP addresses to their corresponding Ethernet address. This is necessary because a host in an Ethernet network can only communicate with another host if it knows the MAC address.

Manipulating this process can generate a bundle of WEP-encrypted ARP traffic. This data is then analysed to extract a WEP key.

An attacker can then present his machine as a bridge to the internet towards prospective victims, inspecting their traffic and potentially installing files on compromised PCs.

The shortcomings in WEP have been known for years. In April other researchers revealed a technique that might be used to break the protocol in under two minutes, far less than needed for the Cafe Latte attack.

Despite this, WEP remains widely used in consumer, small business and retail environments. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) system replaced WEP years ago but an estimated 41 per cent of businesses continue to use WEP, Infoworld reports.

Early Wi-Fi technology fitted in retail point-of-sale terminals, and warehouses reportedly support only WEP. Hackers who obtained millions of credit card records from TJX, the giant US retailer, are thought to have used these shortcomings to break into its systems.

The Cafe Latte attack also has implications for the development of more sophisticated honeypots, according to Ramachandran and Md Sohail Ahmad, a colleague at AirTight who helped develop the approach.

"This presentation debunking the age-old myth that to crack WEP, the attacker needs to be in the RF (radio) vicinity of the authorised network," Ramachandran and Ahmad explain.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10..._wi-fi_attack/





From January

Wireless Not Worth Hacking?

Times have changed
Guy Kewney

Opinion For four years, I've been pretty clear about my personal opinions on wireless hackers. I don't worry about them. So when I say: "It's time to worry about wireless hackers," it's not just another security consultant scare story being recycled - it's because I think things have changed.

What has changed? Easy: corporate networks have changed. It's no longer as easy as it was to penetrate a corporate firewall and compromise PCs on the LAN.

By comparison, the Wireless LAN is a softer target.

Ever since the first WiFi devices went on sale, people worried about the fact that other computer users might "share" their own wireless internet. And within days of the first warnings being posted about that, consultants began whipping up business by saying: "I drove down Whitehall and I saw a hundred insecure wireless networks!" or whatever town they lived in.

I was very relaxed about it. "It's not a problem," I said. "Nobody is going to hack into your computer. What on earth would they get out of it?

When the first easy hack of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption was published, I remained relaxed. Yes, it's possible to park a van outside my house with a PC inside, and run a WEP-cracker program. After two hours or so, you will probably be able to log onto my PC network, and use my internet. So... why would you?

My logic was pretty simply explained:- There are easier ways of getting an internet connection. If the hacker is one of my neighbours, then I think it's pretty unlikely they'll do it just to get internet. After all, the sort of person who has hacking skills is, typically, the sort of person who has a higher speed connection already than mine.

Are they going to spy on my computer? Hardly. The chances of hitting pay dirt look dim. My disk is packed with photographs of my family, and if you want to see the good ones, they're on FLICKR like everybody else's pix. All you get is the dross - out of focus, camera shake. Oh, and there's the incredibly tempting treasure trove of archive material - Personal Computer World columns going way back. Yes, I can just see a hacker cracking evil knuckles over the discovery of such a rich seam... NOT.

I do recommend using WEP. It's like shutting your front door: nobody is going to pretend that a front door would stop a serious criminal with a battering ram. But it will stop your neighbours from marching in and helping themselves from your fridge. And it's frankly a nuisance if your neighbours don't realise that the hotspot they are using isn't their own. They log onto "Linksys" because you set yours up with the default identity, and then they try to print something - and it comes out on your printer. An email from Auntie Nora. Oh, boy, boy, boy...

And the alternative hacker would be someone with a van. If you had a van equipped for hacking, why would you drive all the way into my street, feed the meter, and sit outside draining your car battery, when all you get is access to some nerd's PC?

But this isn't true, not any more. I think it was true a year ago, but over the last year, intrusion detection and prevention software - and hardware - has become really very clever.

Professional hackers exist. They work for shady groups involved in organised crime, and their way of making money is to compromise ten thousand PCs around the world with a virus or a trojan, and then launch all ten thousand in a denial of service attack on some corporate web site. With ten thousand machines all pinging one web site a hundred times a second, legitimate customers are crowded out, and massive damage is done to business.

The standard scam is to target an online bookmaker. Wait till the day before a big race or a global football match, and then release your bots for half an hour. Then send the message: "Send money, or we do the same thing tomorrow."

But you need a lot of bots. Once compromised, these PCs are quite easily to spot. So, within a few day or weeks you need new ones.

And it's not as easy as it was. Corporate virus protection is good. Intrusions are quickly spotted, compromised machines easily detected. You have to find ways of getting at that soft chewy centre before they know there's an exploit in the wild, and you have to do it without triggering safeguards.

What the pro hackers are doing, I'm told, is using the corporate laptop as their target.

Two nice, easy ways to do that. Either, sit outside the corporate campus with a powerful WiFi beacon, and create a link that looks like the corporate LAN. Then wait for users to log onto you, instead of the official signal, and collect passwords.

Alternatively, wait till the owner leaves the building.

At Air Defense, they say they're seeing deliberate targeting of individual PC owners. The financial director, in his office, is a tough nut to crack. But when he takes his laptop home for the weekend, he's logging onto a domestic wireless hotspot, which has none of the sophisticated safeguards that protect it at the office. And, typically, a senior executive has not yet been trained to leave important corporate information on the office server. They have an 80 gigabyte disk! - it's full of spreadsheets and databases.

And they also say they're seeing the coffee bar being targeted. Good, old-fashioned hacking tricks like the "evil twin" and "man in the middle" hacks mean that you can behave in all respects like the official Starbucks hub, but record all the transactions. Next thing you're logged onto the corporate LAN with full user privileges. Or you've loaded a trojan onto the laptop, and you know that next time it connects to the office LAN, a brand-new virus will compromise all the office PCs.

The logic of this depends on having a new exploit, which the office anti-virus software hasn't heard about. But chances are, the mobile user hasn't connected to the office anti-virus network for a day or so, and is vulnerable.

The trend is starting to frighten corporate IT managers. They are taking simple, direct action: insisting that employees work from desktop PCs, and stop being given laptops.

If that's a large-scale trend which gathers momentum over the next twelve months, you might expect to see the PC business suffer. The margins on portable machines are noticeably better, and costs of desktop machines are absurdly low - a $500 machine is good for anybody who isn't a mad gamer.

I think, though, the opposite may happen. I think people will continue to want notebook machines at home, and if the company doesn't give them one to take home, they may buy one of their own, thus effectively doubling the nmber of computers used.

We'll see which way it goes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...eless_hacking/





House Vote on Illegal Images Sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web Sites
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

Before the House vote, which was a lopsided 409 to 2, Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) held a press conference on Capitol Hill with John Walsh, the host of America's Most Wanted and Ernie Allen, head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Allen said the legislation--called the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, or SAFE Act--will "ensure better reporting, investigation, and prosecution of those who use the Internet to distribute images of illegal child pornography."

The SAFE Act represents the latest in Congress' efforts--some of which have raised free speech and privacy concerns--to crack down on sex offenders and Internet predators. One bill introduced a year ago was even broader and would have forced Web sites and blogs to report illegal images. Another would require sex offenders to supply e-mail addresses and instant messaging user names.

Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.

Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.

This is what the SAFE Act requires: Anyone providing an "electronic communication service" or "remote computing service" to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's "CyberTipline" and (b) "make a report" to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (By the way, "electronic communications service" and "remote computing service" providers already have some reporting requirements under existing law too.)

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

Someone providing a Wi-Fi connection probably won't have to worry about the SAFE Act's additional requirement of retaining all the suspect's personal files if the illegal images are "commingled or interspersed" with other data. But that retention requirement does concern Internet service providers, which would be in a position to comply. So would e-mail service providers, including both Web-based ones and companies that offer POP or IMAP services.

"USISPA has long supported harmonized reporting of child pornography incidents to the (NCMEC). ISPs report over 30,000 incidents a year, and we work closely with NCMEC and law enforcement on the investigation," Kate Dean, head of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, said on Wednesday. "We remain concerned, however, that industry would be required to retain images of child pornography after reporting them to NCMEC. It seems like the better approach would be to require the private sector to turn over illicit images and not retain copies."

Failure to comply with the SAFE Act would result in an initial fine of up to $150,000, and fines of up to $300,000 for subsequent offenses. That's the stick. There's a carrot as well: anyone who does comply is immune from civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

There are two more points worth noting. First, the vote on the SAFE Act seems unusually rushed. It's not entirely clear that the House Democratic leadership really meant this legislation to slap new restrictions on hundreds of thousands of Americans and small businesses who offer public wireless connections. But they'll nevertheless have to abide by the new rules if senators go along with this idea (and it's been a popular one in the Senate).

The second point is that Internet providers already are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency. So there's hardly an emergency, which makes the Democrats' rush for a vote more inexplicable than usual.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-982...l?tag=nefd.top





Panorama Report on Wi-Fi was 'Misleading'
Matt Chapman

BBC complaints body rules against programme makers..

A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was "misleading", an official BBC complaints ruling has found.

Two viewers complained that Panorama exaggerated the grounds for concern and wrongly suggested that Wi-Fi installations give off higher levels of radiation.

A further complaint suggested that the programme misleadingly presented an experiment to test whether certain people were hypersensitive to such radiation.

Professor Michael Repacholi, who appeared in the programme, also complained that the scientific issues had been presented in an unbalanced way, and that the treatment of his own contribution to the programme was unfair.

The BBC ruling found that it was legitimate for Panorama to focus on the public health issues raised by Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency.

It also found that the results of an experiment on electro-sensitivity were correctly represented as inconclusive. However, the BBC report also identified a number of failings.

"The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns," the ruling said.

"This gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue."

Stewart claimed in the programme to have found evidence that low-level radiation from devices such as mobile phones and Wi-Fi could damage health, and called for a review.

The claims prompted a council body in north London to call for Wi-Fi use to be suspended in schools until an investigation had been carried out.

"I quite frankly think we are frying children's brains," said Labour councillor Emma Jones of Bruce Grove.

However, following the broadcast, a number of experts came forward to dismiss the claims.

Ben Goldacre, a doctor who runs the Bad Science website, stated that the programme makers had made melodramatic, misleading television instead of an informed documentary.

"In 28 minutes of TV you could have given a good summary of the research evidence so that people could make up their own minds. But that would not get you as many viewers," he said.

Les Hatton, a columnist on IT Week, wrote: "Many readers may be feeling that they need to wear tin-foil hats following the Panorama 'exposé' and the supposedly harmful effects on children caused by wireless networks.

"All I can say in reassurance is that this sort of mathematically dysfunctional scare-mongering drivel really makes me cross."

According to CRN, resellers reported record Wi-Fi sales in June despite the negative publicity generated by Panorama.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/66235,...isleading.aspx





Some Airlines to Offer In-Flight Internet Service
Susan Stellin

In-flight Internet access is finally taking off in the United States.

Starting next week and over the next few months, several airlines will begin taking the first steps toward offering Internet service on their planes.

On Tuesday, JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one of its aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months.

“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to see in-flight Internet access become available, but I suspect the rollout domestically will take place in a very measured way,” said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Forrester Research. “In a few years time, if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV.”

The goal is to let passengers use their laptops or smartphones to download e-mail and use the Web as they would at any wireless hotspot on the ground. Virgin America even plans to link the technology to its seat-back entertainment system, enabling passengers who are not traveling with their own hardware to send and receive messages on a flight.

While the technology could allow travelers to make phone calls over the Internet, most carriers say they currently have no plans to allow voice communications. Many travelers find the prospect of phone calls much less palatable than having a seatmate quietly browsing the Web.

“That is one of those ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ types of technologies,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “The last thing you want is to be in a crowded tube at 35,000 feet for two or three hours with some guy going on and on about his trip to Vegas.”

While companies have been promising airborne Internet service for years — the aircraft manufacturer Boeing did offer a system that was adopted by a few international carriers but is now defunct — JetBlue will be the first carrier in the United States to offer connectivity, albeit in a limited way.

During JetBlue’s initial trial, which will involve a single aircraft, passengers traveling with Wi-Fi equipped laptops will be able to access Yahoo e-mail accounts and Yahoo’s Messenger service, while those with Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerrys will be able to download their e-mail.

But if a test flight held this week is any indication of the challenges airlines and their technology partners face in trying to offer connectivity at 35,000 feet and 500 miles an hour, travelers can initially expect an experience reminiscent of the days of dial-up access — slower and more prone to glitches than a typical connection on the ground.

“Sometimes you just have to put things out there and see what happens when people try to use it,” said Nate Quigley, chief executive of LiveTV, a JetBlue subsidiary responsible for the airline’s Internet service as well as its in-flight entertainment system. “We’ll find the bugs and eventually get them worked out.”

JetBlue does not plan to charge for the service, while the other airlines and their technology partners are discussing fees of about $10 a flight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/te...06cnd-air.html





California's Testing Cracks ES&S Evoting System Wide Open
Ryan Paul

Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen established strict new standards for electronic voting machines, requiring independent code audits, Red Team security testing, and support for paper records. The Red Team testing process primarily involves subjecting the machines to review by security experts who attempt to hack the software and bypass the physical security mechanisms. Recent Red Team tests of ES&S voting machines have uncovered serious security flaws.

Previous Red Team tests commissioned by the state of California revealed significant vulnerabilities in devices sold by Diebold and Sequoia. At the time, ES&S declined to participate in the testing, citing lack of preparedness. The tests on the ES&S machines were finally conducted in October, and the results, which were recently published (PDF), show that products from ES&S are as insecure as the rest.

The first round of tests focused on the physical security of the Polling Ballot Counter (PBC), which the Red Team researchers were able to circumvent with little effort. "In the physical security testing, the wire- and tamper-proof paper seals were easily removed without damage to the seals using simple household chemicals and tools and could be replaced without detection," the report says. "Once the seals are bypassed, simple tools or easy modifications to simple tools could be used to access the computer and its components. The key lock for the Transfer Device was unlocked using a common office item without the special 'key' and the seal removed."

After bypassing the physical security of the voting machines, the Red Team researchers were able to gain direct access to all of the files on the systems, including password files. "Making a change to the BIOS to reconfigure the boot sequence allows the system to be booted up using external memory devices containing a bootable Linux copy," according to the researchers. "Once done, all the files can be accessed and potentially modified, including sensitive files such as the password file which can be cracked by openly available cracker programs. New users may be added with known passwords and used by the same attacker or other attackers later."

The Election Management System workstations were also found to be vulnerable, with critical security codes stored in files as plain text. The Red Team also discovered that the Election Loader System used unencrypted protocols to transmit election initialization data to the PBC units, which implies vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack. The Election Loader System is populated with data from an Election Distribution CD, which is generated by a special Election Converter Application. The researchers were able to break the encryption used on the generated CD to "breakdown the CD, revise the election definition, and replace the CD with a new encrypted CD with an alternate election definition." The researchers note that this tactic could be used to alter vote tallies.

ES&S is already in serious trouble in California for selling uncertified voting machines to several counties in violation of state law. The results of the Red Team test, which demonstrate beyond doubt that the security of ES&S voting machines is utterly inadequate for use in elections, make it seem unlikely that ES&S will be able to continue peddling their defective products in the state.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-machines.html





Now Online, a Guide to Detainee Treatment
Josh White

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there.

A leaked copy of a March 2004 manual of Gitmo's "Standard Operating Procedures" for Camp Delta was published yesterday by the Web site Wikileaks.org. It deals with everything a guard at Guantanamo would need to know, from how to remove detainees' clothing when they first arrive (cut it off) to what guards should do if they find a detainee's plastic foam cup with writing on it (confiscate it). Rolls of toilet paper are considered "comfort items" that can be given to detainees as rewards.

The manual also confirms previous reports about dogs being used at the facility and detainees spending time in "segregation cells," either as punishment or for intelligence gathering. The nearly 250-page document provides details about the daily operations at the facility in the days before the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal surfaced publicly. What happened at the prison in Iraq focused attention on the Guantanamo facility and its commander, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller.

Much of the manual deals with how to treat detainees, with one section discussing how to handle their personal items. If items are damaged, for example, guards are directed to punish the detainee. With regard to "linen items" such as blankets, clothing, sheets or towels, the manual says, "If a detainee tears, rips, or otherwise damages this item or makes it into a weapon or self-harm device, it will be confiscated and the detainee disciplined for damaging or destroying government property."

The manual discusses the facility's "behavior management plan" for the first two weeks after a detainee's arrival, when he has no access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or a chaplain: "The purpose of the Behavior Management Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process," the manual says. "It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator."

Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, a Guantanamo spokesman, said officials received a copy of the manual yesterday and are trying to authenticate it. Wikileaks also published a copy of the 2003 Guantanamo manual last month. Haupt said the manuals are constantly updated and that "things have changed dramatically" in the years since.

Marked "for official use only," the manual is not meant for public release but contains little if any sensitive information.

While it is of some concern that the manual has been released, Haupt said, "it's not typically considered a threat to national security. This type of unclassified information could give the enemy an edge up on how we do business so they in turn can develop their own tactics, techniques and procedures to train against us."

Developed under Miller's command, the manual is similar to the 2003 version of the same document, an electronic copy of which was left with officials at Abu Ghraib when Miller traveled there on an advisory visit in September 2003. Miller later commanded all detention facilities in Iraq as the abuse scandal was investigated in 2004.

In the 2004 manual, guards are warned not to teach the detainees songs or English phrases and not to take an active role in interrogations or to even listen to what is said during interrogations. Guards are also told not to talk about current events.

"Do not: (1) Discuss current world events or history with detainees, or within earshot of detainees, that could upset or influence detainee actions or attitudes, such as the situation in the Middle East, the destruction of the Space Shuttle, or information concerning terrorist groups or personnel."

The manual is posted at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Gitmo-sop-2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...pid=sec-nation





A to Z

Best Buy Porn Thief Inquisitions Revealed

After reading "How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves," another fired Geek Squad tech has chimed in to tell us how the internal witch hunt for porn thieves proceeded.

I had worked for Geek Squad for over a year, and Best Buy a year and a half before that and was recently let go. Back when they started scanning computers, they said they found downloaded music and movies on our machine and we were to send them the hard drives. So we boxed them up and sent them out.

A month or so later the interrogations happened. We all had our turn, and when it was mine, I walked into a room with the table pushed against the wall and two chairs in the middle of the room sitting two feet apart with nothing in between.
Our store's loss prevention manager and the district loss prevention manager was there, and I reached out to shake his hand. He shook mine, looked me in the eyes and said "I already know if you are going to tell me the truth or not," with an intimidating grip on my hand still. Then we sat down, our knees inches apart. He asked me how long I had worked there, and how many hours a week I worked, why I liked working there. He didn't really care why, he just wanted to tell me why he liked working for Best Buy. He told me, "Well, I used to be a cop, and when you're a cop everything you do is reactive, you can't really stop people from committing crimes. Here I normally get to come in and make sure processes are in place so we don't have problems. But here we have a problem, and now I have to be reactive and be a cop again."

From there he asked me all sorts of questions about why there was music on our computer and where it came from, which was mostly us backing up customer's music because they paid us to, and my coworkers and i bringing in our iPods, which was ok with all the levels of management in the store. He even made a joke about how that wasn't "SOP" (the Best Buy bible), but he knew that our store LP manager was ok with it. It was ok because they trusted us. I was asked why we had Linux isos, which made me laugh. Also, during the interview anytime I was asked a question, I don't know wasn't an acceptable answer. At one point I stopped answering him because I was just sitting there saying I don't know. Then he had me write down everything I knew about in the precinct and sign it at the bottom. The district manager told me he would read it over afterwards to make sure it was "what they needed." I filled out the paper, signed it and gave it to him. Then they told me if I talked to anyone about what happened I would be fired.

Then the interesting began. My supervisor immediately started looking for another position at one of the 3 new stores opening in our area. He got one and put in his two week notice and stopped caring about his job. Everything started falling apart, then he left so we had no supervisor. So I put in my two week notice and found another job. The thing was our supervisor didn't know anything about fixing computers. All he card about was "selling our services" to people so he would meet his budgets and then tell us techs to fix whatever the customer wrote down which more than once included "retrieve deleted files" which yes we could have done if we were allowed to use the software, but we weren't. So he left and everything got better. And I talked to my general manager about staying, and he told me he saw how I had helped being a leader once our supervisor left and he was impressed and would like to see me move up in the company. A few days later we had a new supervisor who was a really nice guy and knew his stuff about computer fixing.

Now, I know you guys know about Jonny Utah (internally Geek Squad drops the 'h' so they don't get sued). Well I despise JonnyUtah. The entire time I worked there we were given goals of a certain number of computers which were to be fixed by JonnyUtah each week. The goal was seven. Most of the time we didn't hit our JonnyUtah goals because we were able to fix all the computers we brought in ourselves without needing help. I disliked it because:

1) I didn't get to work on the customer's computer
2) Someone in another country that does not have the same privacy laws as the United States was fixing our customer's computers.
3) Anytime we asked where the JonnyUtah guys were located we were told either it was "Top Secret" or "An undisclosed cave in a mountain on a remote island." Seriously.
4) We did a much better job than Jonny ever. We had so many people bring computers back that those guys "fixed" still having problems or hardware issues that you can't really fix over a remote connection.

On October 18th, the day after my birthday I came into work early and the entire district staff (probably 6 or 7 people) were hanging out in our area where we fix computers talking to my friend who was one of the other full time techs. I went into the break room to eat my lunch and my buddy came in and told me the district guys were asking him if he would be offended if he had to go out on the floor and sell Geek Squad services instead of fixing computers, and having JonnyUtah fix more of the computers. I clocked in and five minutes later was told by my general manager that I was being let go for having music and movies and unapproved software on the computer.

So whatever I don't work there anymore, I'm not crying. But I wish people would realize that Geek Squad isn't worth what you pay. Best Buy's rules kept us from being great computer techs. They wouldn't let us use linux in the store to do data backups because that required an extra $1500 (not exaggerating) from the customer and we had to UPS the drive to California. We weren't allowed to do laptop repair in the store, even though I'm capable of handling a soldering iron to reattach people's DC power jacks. And they'll tell you this is because they are sending them to the "laptop techs" or whatever, but most of the time that stuff would come back broke anyways and customer's would yell at us. It was a horrible situation for everyone and I think shows that not everything can work on a large scale. For someone like me computer repair is easy. I could have done so much more than they expected of me and brought in so much more money for them and made customers a lot happier not having to wait two days for a guy to put his laptop on the UPS truck. But that's the thing. Geek Squad doesn't want me. They want someone who will take your money and have someone in another country actually do the work. To sell you a $59 diagnostic fee to call you the next day and say "yeah, your laptop is completely dead just like you told us, com buy a new one."

I hope people start realizing that Geek Squad is nothing more than marketing. You see the tie and the white shirt and you assume that the agent knows what they're talking about. The truth is most of them don't. There are no tests. There is very little training and that is mostly on how to sell things. In fact my old supervisor had a motto I heard him use way too often: Perception is reality.

I've enjoyed reading your site since before any of this ever happened, and although in some round about way I ended up getting fire because of an article that was posted on your site, I'll forever support you guys because it's sites like this that can make a difference (and you guys have) in how companies do their business and treat their customers.

Cheers,
Agent Zero

http://consumerist.com/consumer/leak...led-328949.php





The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Act II: The act of giving

[i]f he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong…

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

[Y]ou can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Act III: The act of lending

As you may have read in the newspapers over the past few days, we’ve been criticized by the leadership of a small, but vocal organization because we sell used books on our website. This group (which, by the way, is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out) claims that we’re damaging the book industry and authors by offering used books to our customers.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild

Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for previous versions of e-books — like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they evaporate after the loan period — and Bezos says that he’s open to the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Act IV: The act of reading

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 5

The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
Act V: The act of remembering

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3
Act VI: The act of learning

If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...ure-of-reading





Hack: Young Professor Makes Lab-on-a-Chip with Shrinky Dink and Toaster Oven
Aaron Rowe

A young professor has used her favorite childhood toy, a laser printer, and a toaster oven to make microfluidic devices - tiny computer chips with plumbing that are usually fabricated in multimillion dollar labs.

When she began working at the University of California Merced last year, Michelle Khine was eager to get started with her research, but stuck without sophisticated equipment.

In an act of desperation, she turned to Shrinky Dinks-- plastic sheets that get smaller when they are baked in a household oven.

"I am not a patient person, and being a new faculty member at a brand new university, I did not immediately have the cleanroom facilities I am accustomed to," says Khine, "And desperation is the mother of invention (or something like that). So as I was brainstorming solutions, I remembered my favorite childhood toy and decided to try it in my kitchen one night."

Khine and her team designed complicated patterns in Auto CAD, printed them onto Shrinky Dinks, and then heated the plastic toys in an inexpensive oven. As the sheets became smaller, the lines of print would bulge out. Taller and more pronounced, the miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS -- a clear, synthetic rubber.

In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Since microfluidic devices are sometimes used for biological research, the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.

Khine described her work in Lab on a Chip, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The report, which became available online this November, is completely free and surprisingly easy to understand.

"This is certainly becoming a major thrust of my research, though that was not the intention," says Khine.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...er-scienc.html





Pavarotti's Widow Seeking $44 Million from his Friends in Defamation Lawsuit
Alessandra Rizzo

Luciano Pavarotti's widow has sued two friends of the late tenor for $44 million, claiming their comments about her marriage were defamatory, her lawyer said Monday.

Nicoletta Mantovani filed the lawsuit last month after warning that speculation about the state of her marriage to Pavarotti would not be tolerated, her lawyer said.

Pavarotti died Sept. 6 of pancreatic cancer at age 71. Soon after, friends close to the tenor told Italian media that he had been unhappy in the marriage, and that Mantovani was fighting his grown daughters from an earlier marriage over his estate.
http://www.newstimes.com/entertainment/ci_7569134





Seeking Mr. and Mrs. Right for a Baby on the Way
A. O. Scott

Juno MacGuff, the title character of Jason Reitman’s new film, is 16 and pregnant, but “Juno” could not be further from the kind of hand-wringing, moralizing melodrama that such a condition might suggest. Juno, played by the poised, frighteningly talented Ellen Page, is too odd and too smart to be either a case study or the object of leering disapproval. She assesses her problem, and weighs her response to it, with disconcerting sang-froid.

It’s not that Juno treats her pregnancy as a joke, but rather that in the sardonic spirit of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, she can’t help finding humor in it. Tiny of frame and huge of belly, Juno utters wisecracks as if they were breathing exercises, referring to herself as “the cautionary whale.”

At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring — “Hello, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion,” she says when she calls a women’s health clinic — but as “Juno” follows her from pregnancy test to delivery room (and hastily retreats from the prospect of abortion), it takes on surprising delicacy and emotional depth. The snappy one-liners are a brilliant distraction, Ms. Cody’s way of clearing your throat for the lump you’re likely to find there in the movie’s last scenes.

The first time I saw “Juno,” I was shocked to find myself tearing up at the end, since I’d spent the first 15 minutes or so gnashing my teeth and checking my watch. The passive-aggressive pseudo-folk songs, the self-consciously clever dialogue, the generic, instantly mockable suburban setting — if you can find Sundance on a map, you’ll swear you’ve been here before.

But “Juno” (which played at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, not the one in Park City, Utah) respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule. And like Juno herself, the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy.

A good deal of the credit for this goes to Ms. Page, a 20-year-old Canadian who is able to seem, in the space of a single scene, mature beyond her years and disarmingly childlike. The naïveté that peeks through her flippant, wised-up facade is essential, since part of the movie’s point is that Juno is not quite as smart or as capable as she thinks she is.

It’s not simply that she has impulsive, unprotected sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), or that she decides, against the advice of parents and friends, to have the baby and give it up for adoption. These, indeed, are choices she is prepared to defend and to live with. Rather, Juno’s immaturity resides in her familiar adolescent assumption that she understands the world better than her elders do, and that she can finesse the unintended consequences of her decisions.

The grown-ups, at first, seem like familiar caricatures of adolescent-centered cinema: square, sad and clueless. But Juno’s father (J. K. Simmons) and step-mother (Allison Janney) turn out to be complicated, intelligent people, too, and not just because they are played by two of the best character actors around. Ms. Cody’s script and Mr. Reitman’s understated, observant direction allow the personalities of the characters to emerge slowly, and to change in credible and unpredictable ways.

This is especially true of Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), the baby’s potential adoptive parents. The audience’s initial impression of them, like Juno’s, is of stereotypically smug yuppies trapped in rickety conventions of heterosexual domesticity. Vanessa is uptight and materialistic, while Mark tends the guttering flame of his youthful hipness, watching cult horror movies and trading alternative-rock mix CDs with Juno.

Juno is, on the surface at least, a familiar type, surrounding herself with and expressing herself by means of kitschy consumer detritus (she calls the clinic on a hamburger phone) and pop cultural ephemera. She could be the hero of a Judd Apatow comedy (like, say, Mr. Cera, the boneless wonder of “Superbad” and a purely delightful presence here). Except, of course, that she’s female. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Ms. Cody, Mr. Reitman and Ms. Page have conspired, intentionally or not, to produce a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder and complement to “Knocked Up.” Despite what most products of the Hollywood comedy boys’ club would have you believe, it is possible to possess both a uterus and a sense of humor.

“Juno” also shares with “Knocked Up” an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine — and by the end she has earned that title — on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.

This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at “Juno.” Bring your parents, too.

“Juno” is, somewhat remarkably, rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations, obviously, but no nudity or violence and not much swearing.


JUNO

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Diablo Cody; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Mateo Messina; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick and Russell Smith; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.


WITH: Ellen Page (Juno MacGuff), Michael Cera (Paulie Bleeker), Jennifer Garner (Vanessa Loring), Jason Bateman (Mark Loring), Allison Janney (Bren MacGuff), J. K. Simmons (Mac MacGuff) and Olivia Thirlby (Leah).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/movies/05juno.html





Birmingham City Schools Will be First in Nation to Get $200 XO Laptops
Marie Leech

Birmingham city schools will be the first in the nation to receive laptop computers designed for children in third-world countries under an agreement completed over the weekend, Mayor Larry Langford announced Monday.

Langford signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops from One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit foundation whose goal is to provide every child in the world with access to technology.

"We live in a digital age, so it is important that all our children have equal access to technology and are able to integrate it into all aspects of their lives," Langford said. "We are proud that Birmingham is on its way to eliminating the so-called `digital divide' and to ensuring that our children have state-of-the-art tools for education."

Under the agreement, the city will buy 15,000 laptops for $200 each, Langford said. The $3 million deal will allow every child in grades one through eight in Birmingham city schools to receive a laptop, he said.

"Our students will have access to global thinking now," said Birmingham schools Superintendent Stan Mims. "It becomes a tipping point in the digital divide."

Langford has asked the City Council to approve $7 million for the laptops and a scholarship program that would give Birmingham students with a C average or above a scholarship to college or tech school of their choice. The City Council has not yet approved the funding.

The rugged, waterproof computers will be distributed to students on April 15, Langford said, and children will be allowed to take them home. If a computer is lost, the school system can disable it, rendering it useless, Langford said. Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year.

Kids know how:

The machine, called the XO Laptop and dubbed the "$100 laptop," was designed by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory. He set out to build a $100 laptop so every child in developing countries could have access to new channels of learning, said Jackie Lustig, spokeswoman for One Laptop Per Child.

The XO didn't make the target price and it sells for about $200, still far below the $500 price tag of most basic laptop computers in U.S. retail shops, Lustig said.

Langford said training for the computers will not be a problem, as they were designed for children to pick up on immediately.

"Get the computers, get them in the children's hands and get out of the way," he said. He brought back two demo computers from his weekend trip to Boston and said a 3-year-old went up to him at a restaurant and began teaching him to use the computer.

"Every child in this restaurant came up to me and within minutes, they were on Google surfing the Web," he said. Even though the computers are so easy to use, Langford said a consulting firm has offered to train students in all Birmingham schools.

Langford said he was asked to be the national spokesman for the program as other U.S. cities begin taking advantage of One Laptop Per Child.

Buy one, give one:

Last month only, the foundation opened sales to residents in the United States and Canada, who could buy the laptops for $399. Each purchase funded a second laptop that went to a needy child in a developing country.

The machines don't run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs, instead using a free, open-source version of GNU/Linux, with a simplified graphical interface designed for children that is called Sugar, Lustig said.

The laptop has a 500-megahertz processor and 256 megabytes of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) with 1 gigabyte of flash memory.

The laptops have Web browsers and their own Wi-Fi system, the ability to connect to the Internet wirelessly.

Some Birmingham schools already have wireless capabilities, said Claudia Williams, chief academic officer, and the system is about to begin a "major technology upgrade" with a portion of the $300 million it received from Jefferson County's one-cent-on-the-dollar sales tax increase.

"The upgrade will be no less than top-notch, and if these computers run on wireless, then that's what we'll have in our schools," she said.

The computer can be used to compose music and has programs designed to teach students all types of math, science, reading and social studies, Langford said. Each is on a "mesh network," meaning all the laptops can see each other, without any setup, even if there is no wireless connection nearby.

The mesh networking allows classmates and teachers to see what each class member is working on.

Langford said the computers are more than sufficient for Birmingham students' needs. "We're not trying to give these kids a computer that would launch a space shuttle."
http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2007/12/...ls_will_b.html





Donald Duck Is a Music Pirate, and His Nephews Too
Ernesto

The latest issue of the Donald Duck magazine in The Netherlands features Donald and his nephews as music pirates and (who else) Uncle Scrooge as the big boss of a record label threatening with fines. Has the anti-piracy lobby infiltrated the Donald Duck magazine?

The short comic presents the Dutch youngsters with a short lesson in copyright. Huey, Dewey and Lewey don’t have money for the latest “Jan Goudsmid” album, so they decide to download it (presumably with BitTorrent). They argue that they can always buy it later when they have the money. When the nephews tell this to Donald he realizes that he can make a lot of money from this by copying and selling CDs on the street.

Huey, Dewey and Lewey are shocked by Donald’s plan, and tell him it’s not fair because the CD is copyrighted. “If nobody buys CDs anymore, the record labels and artists will become beggars,” they add. Donald doesn’t listen of course and tries to make 100 copies of a CD he bought. In the end Donald’s plan is stopped by Uncle Scrooge, who warns Donald that he will have to pay a huge sum of money if he doesn’t stop the pirating (yes, it’s all about money).

… ain’t that a great message Disney is sending to the Dutch youngsters?

Several Dutch websites suspected that the anti-piracy organization BREIN was somehow behind this propagandists comic. However, the Donald Duck magazine denied the involvement of BREIN, or any other organization. Thom Roep, the head editor of the Donald Duck magazine, further apologized for the preaching tone used in the story, especially when the nephews were talking about copyright. He explained that they decided to run this story because it is a nice illustration how Huey, Dewey and Lewey outsmart their uncle once again.

It’s certainly smart to download music if you don’t have the money to buy a CD. The nephews were smart enough not to become commercial pirates, they just did it for personal use, which is not that bad according to the comic (downloading music is not illegal in the Netherlands). If BREIN really was involved, I think the nephews wouldn’t have downloaded the CD at all, they would lose their “merit patch in respecting copyright” if they did.

On top of this, I don’t think any anti-piracy organization would make Scrooge the boss of a music label, even though they know it is a pretty accurate comparison. Here is a link to the comic in Dutch.
http://torrentfreak.com/donald-duck-...pirate-071204/





Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck Summonsed to Court
From correspondents in Milan

MICKEY Mouse and Donald Duck will finally get their day in court if summons served by judicial authorities in Italy are to be believed.

In what appears to be a bizarre bureaucratic blunder, the Disney cartoon characters have been named as witnesses in the trial of a Chinese man accused of peddling counterfeit toys and decals bearing the images of the pair.

A copy of the summons obtained by Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera says Signor Topolino (Mickey Mouse) and Signor Paperino (Donald Duck) are kindly instructed to appear before the Naples Tribunal on December 7.

The summons originally compiled by officials in Naples was later reproduced by a Milan judicial office and delivered to lawyers representing the US-based Walt Disney company, owner of the trademarks for the cartoon characters.

Judicial authorities weren't immediately available for comment but Corriere della Sera suggests it's unlikely the star witnesses will show up in court. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...-1702,00.html#

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 1st, November 24th, November 17th, November 10th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call (617) 939-2340, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 22nd, '07 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 3 22-09-07 06:41 PM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 19th, '07 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 1 16-05-07 09:58 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 9th, '06 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 5 09-12-06 03:01 PM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 16th, '06 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 2 14-09-06 09:25 PM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 22nd, '06 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 1 20-07-06 03:03 PM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 02:29 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)