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Old 25-06-08, 09:00 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 28th, '08

Since 2002


































"Americans can’t believe this, they think you’re making it up. It really was true. In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet." – Paul Ceruzzi


"I don’t want to paint the same painting again. I don’t want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldn’t a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?" – Andrew Stanton


"Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps. I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies." – Peter S. Appert


"Music should be shared." – Joss Stone


































June 28th, 2008




Dutch Court Rules Against Law That Allowed File Downloading

Ruling made in STOBI versus SONT case
Tom Sanders

A court in the Netherlands has ruled against an interpretation of local copyright law that allowed for downloading of copyrighted materials.

"An explanation by the minister and government, which concludes that a private copy from an illegal source should be considered to be legal, is violating [the law]," a court in the city of The Hague ruled on Wednesday.

The Netherlands currently have a unique legal situation where downloading of copyrighted materials is allowed and only uploading is forbidden. The judge now ruled that when the original source is illegal, any copies too should be considered illegal.

The Dutch justice minister in 2006 created the exception to allow for the pragmatic enforcement of copyright laws. A law similar to the U.S. Home recording act allows consumers to make copies of CDs and other media that they had legally purchased. Since it is impossible to verify if a user downloading a file was entitled to do so under the Home Recording Act, all downloading was sanctioned.

Legal experts cautioned that the consequences of the ruling have yet to be determined. In addition to a ban on downloading copyrighted materials, parties could also decide to increase copy levies on rewritable CDs and DVDs or expand such levies to other media such as hard drives and hard disk recorders.

The NVPI, a trade group representing producers and importers of audio and video materials, said it was pleased with the ruling. The organisation has always maintained that the exemption violated European rules. "I don't know many rulings where a judge is directly overruling the minister," NVPI spokesperson Wouter Rutten told Webwereld, a Dutch IDG affiliate.

The ruling is was made in a case between STOBI and SONT. STOBI represents manufacturers of rewritable media such as DVDs and CDs. SONT collects copy levies that are waged on such media to compensate artists for illegal copying. Those levies are collected by STOBI's members. The suit demanding that the levies be lowered. The judge sided with some of their arguments, prompting STOBI to predict a lowering in copy levies.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1262747976





Judge Orders Legal Fees in RIAA v Andersen
David Kravets

A federal judge is awarding Tanya Andersen, who defeated the Recording Industry Association of America's file sharing lawsuit, $108,000 in legal fees to compensate for defending herself against the RIAA.

The award, made public Wedesday by U.S. District Judge James A. Redden of Oregon, marks the second time that a target of the RIAA who beat a lawsuit was awarded attorney's fees. In August, a federal judge ordered the RIAA to pay $68,685 in litigation costs to two Oklahoma women whose case was dismissed.

Whether RIAA defendants who successfully defend such suits are automatically entitled to legal fees is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The dispute is whether judges must award fees to a prevailing party under the Copyright Act.

Judge Redden ruled that RIAA's arguments against legal fees were "misplaced."

"An award of attorney's fees to the prevailing party are 'the rule rather than the exception' under the Copyright Act, and 'should be awarded routinely,'" Redden wrote.

The RIAA dropped the case against Andersen last year after concluding her hard drive didn't contain purloined music tracks. The RIAA initially claimed a Kazaa shared directory that linked to her internet-protocol address was unlawfully distributing thousands of songs.

In response to the lawsuit against her, Andersen has countersued the RIAA in a case seeking class-action status to represent what her attorneys say is thousands of persons wrongly sued by the RIAA. That case has been dismissed three times, and its fourth try is pending.

Andersen attorney Lory Lybeck requested $300,000 and the RIAA suggested $30,000 was more appropriate. The award is upwards of $190 a hour.

The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 people for copyright infringement.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...orders-le.html





EFF Attacks Foundation of Entire RIAA Lawsuit Campaign
Nate Anderson

The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing, the EFF goes for the jugular, seeking to show that the RIAA's entire approach to file-swapping cases is flawed.

Not only does the Copyright Act not grant a "making available" right, the EFF said, but trade groups also shouldn't be allowed to claim that an actual distribution took place based solely on downloads from their own investigators. Together, this two-part theory would effectively eviscerate the RIAA's current legal campaign by making it nearly impossible for copyright holders to show that infringing distributions to the public have taken place over P2P networks.

"Making available"=="distribution"?

To tackle the first part of the equation, the so-called "making available" right, the brief makes an argument based largely on "the plain language of the Copyright Act and applicable precedents" (this was the same approach taken earlier in the week by a group of copyright scholars).

It claims that the right "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public" granted in the Copyright Act means that an actual distribution must be proven. This is a more demanding standard of evidence than simply showing a judge that copyrighted files exist in a user's shared file folder on a P2P network.

One of the key parts of this claim is that Congress showed in other laws that it could be quite clear about granting a "making available" right when it wished to do so. The fact that the Copyright Act doesn't include such language should be taken as an obvious sign that just attempting to distribute a work cannot be considered copyright infringement, said the EFF.

The EFF points to several high-profile court cases in support of its argument, including Atlantic v. Howell and London-Sire v. Doe, both of which Ars has covered in painful detail if you're curious about the backstory. Even in the recent Elektra v. Barker, which did support the idea of a "making available" right for copyright holders, the EFF notes that the judge's support was "weak."

"While the Elektra court suggested that an offer to distribute might violate the distribution right, the court hesitated to 'equat[e] this avenue of liability with the contourless "making available" right proposed by [plaintiff record companies]'," noted the EFF.

In other words, if you want to sue, you need to show that the plaintiff actually transferred the files in question.

MediaSentry=="the public"?

So RIAA investigators just have to download the file instead of peeking into a shared folder, right? Sure, it's a bit more resource intensive, but it's not big deal.

Not quite, says the EFF in its brief; downloads by MediaSentry and other investigators don't count, either.

"It is axiomatic that a copyright owner cannot infringe her own copyright," says the brief in its concluding section. "By the same token, an authorized agent acting on behalf of the copyright owner also cannot infringe any rights held by that owner. Accordingly, where the only evidence of infringing distribution consists of distributions to authorized agents of the copyright owner, that evidence cannot, by itself, establish that other, unauthorized distributions have taken place."

Clearly, the EFF knows that this argument strikes at the very heart of the current approach to suing file-sharers. "Plaintiffs may complain that they cannot overcome this evidentiary hurdle," says the brief, but it does point out that the RIAA could pursue a different strategy of suing based on the reproduction right rather than the distribution right.

Using this method, the RIAA would need to sue someone, take a look at the music on their computer, then try to convince a judge that at least some of this was reproduced without authorization or a fair use defense. The EFF suggests "examining and comparing defendants' computers and CD collections to determine which songs a defendant legally owned and, if need be, contending with the fair use claims that may arise with respect to legally owned material."

Such a method would be quite different from the one currently pursued by the music industry, it would pose plenty of problems of its own, and it would take more work than the current method. One imagines that these difficulties don't especially bother the EFF.

We've been talking all along as though the EFF was the only group involved in the brief, but three other organizations actually signed on to the filing: Public Knowledge, the US Internet Industry Association, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

The CCIA, in particular, is an interesting signatory because its membership includes AMD, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and other heavy hitters in the tech world. Many of these groups deal with copyrighted material generated by others (nearly everything Google does, for instance, involves other people's copyrights), and none of them are keen on rightsholders gaining even more leverage for lawsuits. Thus, the brief points out that the "making available" theory has already been used to sue both Google and XM Radio.

"If this outcome or allowed to stand, it would set a dangerous precedent for copyright law," said Ed Black, CCIA's boss, in a Friday statement. "Before you hold someone responsible for an offense, in this case distributing protected songs, it's probably a good idea to prove they actually committed the offense."
International law

The entire argument advanced here is controversial, though; other groups, like the Progress and Freedom Foundation, also filed briefs this week arguing that US copyright law does grant a "making available" right that is "expressly required by nine binding international agreements—two treaties and seven bilateral or multilateral Free Trade Agreements."

The brief is penned by the PFF's Thomas Sydnor, who last showed up on Ars after taking on Lawrence Lessig with what our own Julian Sanchez called a "hyperbolic and stunningly dishonest screed, remarkable less for any contribution it makes to the debate over intellectual property and more for the fact that a well-funded Washington think tank saw fit to publish it."

This time around, Sydnor's argument steers clear of the bizarre commie-baiting evinced in his last work, tending instead toward the wonky. He argues that Congress, two presidents, the Register of Copyrights, and the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office all signed off on various treaties over the years that offer a "making available" right, and all agreed that US copyright law already granted such a right.

The "Charming Betsy" principle is trotted out to argue that judges should not interpret US law in such a way as to undermine international obligations.

However the judge rules on these issues, it's clear that Minnesota will once more become a copyright hotspot. Depending on the ruling, Jammie Thomas could even get a whole new trial, and the media circus could be back in town for a second engagement. The last time around, the case generated national headlines and thong underwear; who knows what wonders a new trial might hold?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-campaign.html





MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits
David Kravets

The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

"It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement," van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

A Duluth, Minnesota, jury in October dinged Thomas $222,000 for "making available" 24 songs on the Kazaa network in the nation's first and only RIAA case to go to trial. United States District Court Judge Michael Davis instructed the 12 panelists that they need only find Thomas had an open share folder, not that anyone from the public actually copied her files.

(It is technologically infeasible to determine whether the public is copying an open share folder, although the RIAA makes its own downloads from defendants' share folders, produces screen shots and, among other things, captures an IP address. An Arizona judge ruled last month in a different case that those downloads count against a defendant, a one-of-a-kind decision being appealed on grounds that the RIAA was authorized to download its own music.)

Judge Davis suggested last month that he might have erred in giving that "making available" jury instruction, and invited briefing from the community at large. A hearing is set for August, and the judge is mulling whether to order a mistrial.

The deadline to submit briefs to the judge was Friday. Among the briefs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the United States Internet Industry Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association all jointly filed a brief, saying the law did not allow damages for "attempted" copyright infringement.

"Given the serious consequences that flow from copyright’s strict liability regime, the court should resist plaintiffs imprecations to expand that regime absent an unequivocal expression of Congressional intent," the groups wrote, noting that the language in the Copyright Act demands actual distribution to the public of protected works.

It was a similar brief in tone to the one that a group of 10 intellectual property scholars lodged earlier in the week.

But the MPAA, long an ally to the RIAA, which has sued more than 20,000 individuals for file sharing of copyrighted music, told Judge Davis that peer-to-peer users automatically should be liable for infringement.

"The only purpose for placing copyrighted works in the shared folder is, of course, to 'share,' by making those works available to countless other P2P networks," the MPAA wrote.

Other groups meeting Davis' deadline include the Intellectual Property Institute at William Mitchell College of Law and the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ays-no-pr.html





Jury Finds EliteTorrents Administrator Guity
Thomas Mennecke

EliteTorrents was one of the largest and most popular BitTorrent trackers during 2003-2005. Administrators of the site were responsible for uploading the prerelease of Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, 12 hours prior to its theatrical release. The repercussions of their actions were swift, as on May 25, 2005, the collective efforts of the MPAA, FBI, local police and US Customs forced the site off line and the administrators in custody during operation D-Elite.

Today's news from the Department of Justice announced that one of the remaining administrators, Daniel Dove, was convicted by a jury of his peers for criminal copyright infringment. His fellow administrators Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley pled guilty rather than face a jury trial.

"The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group," the Department of Justice press release states. "The evidence showed that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders."

The press release goes on say the case is the "first criminal conviction after jury trial for P2P copyright infringement." Most would agree, however, that Daniel stands in a league far removed from the overwhelming majority of file-sharers. The overall impact of this conviction breaks little new ground, as uploaders have always been the historical target of copyright enforcement. Additionally, accused P2P uploaders such as Jamie Thomas have been tried in civil court, not criminal.

Sentencing is scheduled for September of this year. He faces up to 10 years in prison, far longer than the 5 month stay of his fellow administrators.
http://www.slyck.com/story1697_Jury_...istrator_Guity





Malaysian Government Orders Torrent Sites Shutdown
enigmax

Reports are coming in that the government in Malaysia has ordered the immediate suspension of many BitTorrent trackers hosted in the country. In a shock move, the government - citing the ‘Copyright Act 1987′ - has ordered hosts to suspend servers hosting BitTorrent sites, pending an investigation. Many sites are offline.

When BitTorrent sites get into legal trouble or other pressures force a move to a new location, the speculation begins on the safest place to go.

For instance, would a site bail out of the Netherlands and move to Canada? Is Canada too dangerous now, and would a move to Sweden be more appropriate? What about moving to Ukraine-based hosting like Demonoid or further afield - China or Russia maybe? Inevitably, discussions usually involve ideas of moving sites east, to countries like Malaysia. Fairly high-tech countries like this seem an attractive proposition, particularly given their government’s track-record in failing to do much about piracy.

Given this background, BitTorrent tracker admins with their sites hosted in Malaysia were confronted by a very unpleasant surprise today. An administrator from a well known tracker contacted TorrentFreak this morning with worrying news, he told us: “Malaysia’s government suddenly forced all torrent websites to shut down today until further notice, a complete surprise to torrent admins and the offshore hosting companies in Malaysia.”

The news was given to this and other site admins, via an email from their hosting provider, which indicates the action has been ordered down from a high level. The email informs the admins that their servers have been suspended by the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, under the Copyright Act 1987. As the request came from the government, the host makes it clear they had no choice but to shut down the site. Among the affected sites are Extremebits, Rapthe, Superfundo and several others. According to sources, although torrent sites have been taken offline, other sites dealing in pirate material have also been suspended after the government decided to act on mounting copyright-related complaints.

Prominent Malaysian host Shinjiru confirmed the closures, telling TorrentFreak: “We can confirm that this is accurate. We had enforcement officers from MDTCA visiting the office to confirm the closure of BitTorrent sites hosted on our network. We will comply to all shut down instructions from the local authorities or agencies with warrants or documents.”

Update: Contrary to comments from a site admin, sources close to the situation are saying the shutdowns are limited to a small number of sites and aren’t necessarily part of a wider crackdown, despite government involvement.
http://torrentfreak.com/malaysian-go...ackout-080627/





Meshwerks Loses Copyright Appeal

Court rules Utah firm's creations are more copies than originals
Pamela Manson

Hired to create depictions of Toyota vehicles for the automotive giant's advertising campaign, a small Utah company used the relatively new technology of digital modeling.

After 80 to 100 hours of effort per vehicle, Meshwerks produced two-dimensional, wire-frame depictions that appeared three-dimensional on screen. The idea was to create a product that resembled each car or truck model as closely as possible for use on the Toyota Web site and in other media.

The resulting unadorned images, which had no color, shading nor other details, were accurate. So accurate that a federal court has ruled the depictions have no right to copyright protection.

In an opinion handed down Tuesday, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the models owe their designs to Toyota - not to the Meshwerks personnel who labored to produce the digital images but added nothing original to them.

"We think Meshwerks' models are not so much independent creations as [very good] copies of Toyota's vehicles," a three-judge panel of the Denver-based court said.

The decision was a blow to Kevin Scheidle, one of the founders of Meshwerks, a 5-year-old company based in the Washington County community of Ivins.

"A 3-year-old kid can take a photo, and it can be protected by a copyright," Scheidle said. "There's a lot more effort and time going into creating our images."

According to court records, Meshwerks was hired to assist with the digitization and modeling for Toyota's model-year 2004 campaign.

The company covered each vehicle with a grid of tape, took measurements at each intersection point and then used the figures to generate a digital image resembling a wire-frame model. Features such as wheels, headlights, door handles and the Toyota emblem had to be re-created by hand.

These products went to another company that added color, texture, lighting and animation. The models could rotate on screen and, with a few clicks of the computer mouse, an advertiser could change the color of the car and its surroundings.

Meshwerks insisted that it contracted for only a single use of its wire-frame models and filed suit claiming copyright infringement when Toyota and its advertising companies reused and redistributed the creations.

In September 2006, U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell in Salt Lake City ruled the models did not meet the originality requirement of copyright law. Meshwerks appealed, leading to the 10th Circuit decision upholding Campbell.

Despite its decision that these particular Meshwerks creations could not be copyrighted, the court noted the future looks bright for digital modeling.

"We do not doubt for an instant that the digital medium before us, like photography before it, can be employed to create vivid new expressions fully protectable in copyright," the opinion says.
http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_9630368





Copyright Law Would Turn Millions Into Criminals
Catherine Ford

There are at least 400 movies and an uncountable number of television shows on about 200 VHS tapes stored in my den. They constitute what the federal government would refer to as a "permanent library." Should the amendment to Canada's copyright law pass without change, I will apparently be branded a thief for keeping these tapes and will have made Brigitte into a criminal -- the receiver of "stolen" goods.

The woman who cleans my house, does windows, recycles the newspapers, plastic bags and cardboard, and also collects all of our old magazines, books and videotapes to donate to various groups would not be pleased to find herself on the other side of the law because I choose to give her things I no longer need, rather than tossing them in the garbage.

This is the ludicrous aspect of what started out as a serious attempt to curtail the abuse and theft of copyrighted material through the magic of new technology. Should it pass, untouched by cooler heads and brighter minds, it will make me a criminal. It will also make a percentage of Canadians into miscreants by telling them they can't record a favourite television show and keep it. Nor after watching it once, can they give it away.

I can hear the soothing voice of the federal government assuring me that it isn't out to arrest, prosecute, fine or harass retired people who have finally mastered the art of transferring the Well-Tempered Clavier onto tape without the help of their grandchildren. No, the government is out to stop the wholesale downloading and uploading of copyrighted material from the Internet. And it's serious business: a $500 fine for any infringement that isn't commercial (that's you and me), but a hefty $20,000 fine each for any attempt to circumvent, override or bypass what's known as a digital lock. In simpler terms, that's the technological way of preventing what millions of kids do each day -- download, upload and share videos, film clips, bits and pieces of songs and lyrics, probably all of it the intellectual and artistic property of someone.

This is not a new fight and this Act isn't new, either. What it is, is patchwork legislation designed to put the onus on the consumer, rather than commercial businesses involved in the marketing of music, television, film or the intellectual property of writers. It is the content licensers, rather than the artists, who will be protected. Here's what will happen: The copyright owners -- the creators -- unless they are household names, will continue to eke out a living from their art while the money will continue to flow through to those who market the product. Queen Anne knew all about that. At least her legislators did in 1710 when the Statute of Queen Anne was passed, introducing copyright to published works. Prior to that the printers had been ripping off the authors. Printers and publishers, said the act, had been taking the liberty of reproducing published works "without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writing, to their very great detriment and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families." The law was proposed "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books."

Since then, the copyright laws have been rewritten to reflect whatever modern times demanded: currently, the right of a creator to his or her own intellectual work lasts for the life of the artist plus 50 years post-mortem. No matter the modern interpretation of what constitutes intellectual property, few laws have set forth the principle that the rights of modern technology take precedence over the rights of the author and the needs of both the consumer and the competitive market. While the purported beneficiaries of the new act are those artists, the real beneficiaries will be the companies who publish, control and market such work. With the possible exception of an original piece of art, all intellectual property are copied and distributed by someone other than the creator. It is these middlemen who will profit from digital locks, regardless of the hype about copyright protection.

In his essay for the Canadian university textbook Mediascapes, Martin Laba of Simon Fraser University pinpointed the likely result of passing the proposed law. In Pirates, Peers and Popular Music, Laba writes: "Consumers have little compunction about file sharing because they have little affection or concern for an industry that pulls in very handsome profits globally and that engages in 'demonizing the record-buying public and online community' and threatens litigation as its response to peer-to-peer practices." It is prescient. Technologically adept kids won't pay attention because they don't believe they are doing anything wrong in sharing their "stuff" with friends.

Perhaps the next time federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice is back home in Calgary, he might want to have a chat with University of Calgary professor David Taras to talk about what Taras refers to as the "unintended consequences" of consuming media. While Taras surely didn't intend his phrase to apply to ill-thought-out law, it's appropriate.

Meanwhile, until the copyright police break down my door, I'm keeping my movies. And the DVDs made by a friend. And my iPod with its selection of audiobooks.
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/...8-dd16f501144d





Uncle Sam's Fingers Are All Over the Canadian Copyright Bill
Michael Geist

Last week's introduction of new federal copyright legislation ignited a firestorm with thousands of Canadians expressing genuine shock at provisions that some MPs argued would create a "police state." As opposition to the copyright bill mounts, the most commonly asked question is "Why"?

Why, given the obvious public concern with the bill stretching back to last year, did federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice plow ahead with rules that confirm many of the public's worst fears? Why did a minority government introduce a bill that appears likely to generate strong opposition from both the Liberals and NDP with limited political gain? Why did senior ministers refuse to even meet with many creator and consumer groups who have unsurprisingly voiced disappointment with the bill?

While Prentice has responded by citing the need to update Canada's copyright law in order to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties, the reality may be that those treaties have little to do with Bill C-61.

Instead, the bill, dubbed by critics as the Canadian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (after the U.S. version of the law), is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model. The U.S. pressure has intensified in recent years, particularly since there is a growing international trend toward greater copyright flexibility, with countries such as Japan, New Zealand, and Israel either implementing or considering more flexible copyright standards.

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.).

The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people, or approximately 70 per cent of the world's population.

Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important. Emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Que., last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns, but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file.

Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Ottawa refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed industry minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne, and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern. (Disclosure: I created the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group that has more than 60,000 members and played a role in this public opposition.)

In the months that followed, Prentice's next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal Cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include new consumer-focused provisions, such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award.

The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.
http://www.canada.com/topics/technol...b-2e64db78b474





Canadian Court Allows Phone Buyout to Proceed
Ian Austen

The largest leveraged buyout in history skirted a potentially crushing blow on Friday.

The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled in favor of Bell Canada and its purchasers late Friday, saying that the deal can proceed. While the ruling ends a challenge from bondholders, the $52 billion buyout still faces uncertainty over its financing and, more broadly, questions about the value of the company.

In a move that almost no one foresaw, an appeals court in Quebec, Bell’s home province, refused last month to approve the sale to a group led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and its partners, including Providence Equity Partners and Madison Dearborn Partners.

The deal was structured under a Canadian system that requires both shareholder and court approval. The appeals court, however, refused to back the deal after finding that the company had not fairly considered the interests of current bondholders. By adding about $34 billion debt to Bell, the buyout would depress the value of the company’s current debentures.

The decision surprised most corporate law specialists in Canada who generally assume that, as in the United States, directors must consider only the needs of shareholders when making decisions about takeovers.

By overturning the Quebec court, the Supreme Court has apparently endorsed that view. But because it heard Bell’s case on an accelerated basis to accommodate the buyout’s June 30 closing date, the court would not release the reasons for its decision for some time, perhaps months.

“While I feel sorry for the bondholders, the decision prevents complete obfuscation and confusion from developing,” said Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “There was a lot riding on this.”

Bell Canada said in a statement issued Friday evening that because of the unexpected legal delays, the deal would close during the third quarter rather than at the end of this month as scheduled. Richard J. Currie, the chairman, added: “We expect all parties to the transaction will honor their commitments.”

The deal was the high point of a series of private equity buyouts during the first half of last year. But the tight credit market that developed since brought the private equity buying spree to a close and might still derail the effort to take Canada’s largest telecommunications private.

“We continue to negotiate the financing documents in good faith with the sponsors and stand behind our original commitment to the transaction,” said Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Toronto-Dominion Bank.

People on both sides of the deal said earlier this month that the banks, which have been hit by higher lending costs, were demanding higher interest rates, tighter restrictions and increased protection for the banks.

Exactly where the talks now stand is unclear. Negotiations will continue this weekend.

Speaking for all the buyers, Deborah Allan of the teachers’ pension said they were “pleased with the Supreme Court decision. We’re continuing to work to complete the acquisition.”

But many analysts and others say the deal’s demise may actually be to the buyers’ benefit.

“It may be in their interest not to have this deal go through given the pricing,” said Anita Anand, an associate dean at the law school of the University of Toronto, who specializes in securities and corporate law.

The purchasers’ offer of 42.75 Canadian dollars a share was seen as high even last summer. Other groups were also vying for Bell, driving up the price.

If the bid does fail, it will hurt the teachers’ pension, at least in the short term. It is the largest Bell shareholder, holding about 6.3 percent of the company’s stock. The collapse of the buyout would probably depress Bell’s shares for some time to come.

The bondholders canceled a news conference they had scheduled to discuss the court ruling because the court did not disclose its reasoning.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/te...y/21phone.html





Bell’s Own Data Shatters P2P Red Herring
Doug Groves

About a week ago, the CRTC demanded that Bell release to the public by June 23rd information that would prove it’s claim that P2P throttling was having a negative impact on it’s network. Some, but not all, of that information has been made public. Many details are being kept from public view for ‘competitive’ reasons. Even the scant evidence released shows exactly how flimsy Bell’s case is.

One would assume that the company would release the most damaging evidence, but their claim is that over a 2 month period, 2-5% of their network links suffered some sort of congestion. They do NOT say whether that was a sustained range of fluctuation, or brief bursts of conjestion. They then pull out the old “it’s like a highway” canard.

Quote:
In revealing the details, Bell explained in an accompanying letter that “while these numbers may seem low to the average lay person, they are significant to network traffic engineers such that it is important to consider the number of congested links in the proper context.”

If only a single link in the network is congested, end users may still experience slowdowns or dropped connections, the company said, because the situation is similar to the road system — where if one major artery is backed up, all connected roads will also have problems.

“Just like a single traffic roadblock can hinder drivers going to multiple destinations that pass through the road that is blocked, a very small amount of congested links can seriously affect a large number of high-speed end-users’ traffic,” Bell said.
…as quoted from a CBC article. On a simplistic level, the ‘highway’ analogy can be helpful to the ‘lay person’, but in this case it’s shorthand for company spin that obfuscates HOW traffic works.

Since Bell has no interest in actually enlightening their customers, I’m going to take a moment to show why the analogy falls apart:

1) Data packets are the cars of the ‘highway’. They travel at 1000s of kilometres per second. If they didn’t, a person in Toronto wouldn’t get an email from his friend in Australia a second after the Australian hit send. It would be impossible for someone in Toronto to play a decent game of Call Of Duty 4 with someone from London England. Somehow people are doing it every day.

2) the ‘internet highway’ can re-route you in an instant if there’s congestion. Imagine if the 401 HWY is blocked up, and magically, a second highway appears before you, with no cars on it, and your car is automatically sent onto the new route. The ‘congestion’ Bell claims is more of a dead seagull at the side of the road than a 15 car pile-up (even if it was sustained congestion over that two month period - which they haven’t made explicit).

3) Bell is claiming that torrent traffic is the equivalent of a convoy of 18-wheelers blocking the poor little guy. As we previously reported the numbers show that gaming, web streaming, and email each hog more lanes than all torrents combined. These numbers come from Ellacoya (now a part of Arbor Networks), a traffic shaping company that Bell is invested in.

All of this, when combined with Bell’s congestion claims, should completely dis-spell the myth that P2P is crushing the internet.

The throttling issue isn’t the only thing we’ve been facing lately, with the Bill C-61 amendments to the Copyright Act having been tabled, and possibly becoming official after the summer recess. At least we have all summer to mount an opposition to said bill (I know I’m assuming everyone is opposed to it - after all I don’t think the RIAA or MPAA are reading this). That’s a whole other article though, and I’d respectfully point you to Michael Geist’s site, as he’s been doing some amazing coverage on the issue.
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=67





Bell Ordered to Publicly Prove Internet Congestion
Peter Nowak

Bell Canada Inc. has been ordered to publicly disclose information that details the level of congestion on its network in regard to a dispute over the company's internet speed-throttling practices.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Thursday told the company it has until June 23 to make public data that was marked confidential in a May 29 filing. Bell had said it needed to keep quiet the information, which details the level of internet traffic and possible congestion on its network, for competitive reasons.

In a letter sent to Bell, CRTC director general of competition, costing and tariffs Paul Godin said the need for public disclosure outweighed the company's competitive privacy concerns.

"Commission staff has determined, based on all the material before it, that no specific direct harm would likely result from disclosure, or that the public interest in disclosure outweighs any specific direct harm that might result from disclosure," he wrote.

The dispute centres on Bell's limiting of speeds of peer-to-peer internet applications such as BitTorrent. The company started throttling its own customers using these applications in November and expanded the practice to other internet service providers (ISPs) who rent portions of its network in March. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a group of 55 small ISPs affected by the move, filed a complaint in April with the CRTC charging that Bell's actions were anti-competitive.

The CRTC last month rejected CAIP's call for an immediate cease-and-desist order but launched a public probe of Bell's throttling.

Bell says it needs to limit speeds of peer-to-peer applications because they are overwhelming and congesting its network. CAIP says the company has failed to prove there is a congestion problem.

Mark Langton, a spokesman for Bell, said the company was in the process of examining the CRTC order.

"Our folks are still looking at it, but I see no issue with complying," he said.

In light of the order, the CRTC extended the deadline for public commentary on the throttling case, which has become the central issue in the debate over neutrality — or how much control ISPs have over the internet — in Canada. The regulator will now accept comments until July 3 and expects to make a ruling in late summer.

The throttling of internet applications by Bell, Rogers Communications Inc. and a few other ISPs has become a rallying point for net neutrality advocates, prompting a protest on Parliament Hill last month, a complaint with the privacy commissioner and a pair of private member's bills from MPs
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-bell.html





Virgin Media Rubbishes P2P Throttling Rumours

Secret testing denied
Chris Williams

Virgin Media has today strongly denied a charge it is running secret tests with a view to introducing new bandwidth throttling hardware to target peer to peer and Usenet downloaders.

The claim was made on Friday at Cableforum, a message board often frequented by staff and former staff of Virgin Media, or its forerunners NTL and Telewest. User "TraxData" wrote: "[Application throttling] is, as far as one is aware going to be used for both in and out of peak hours for whoever they see "fit" as a heavy user... [It] is to be deployed across the VM network fully sometime either third quarter 2008 or first quarter 2009."

He alleged deep packet inspection equipment (DPI) provided by the Israeli firm Allot is currently being used in part of the Virgin Media network to restrict Usenet downloads to 512Kbit/s.

Contacted by The Reg today, a Virgin Media spokesman described the claims as "absolute rubbish". He sent us this statement:

Our policy does not discriminate internet traffic by application and we have no plans to do so. Whilst we do use equipment from Allot within parts of our cable network, this is used to build usage metrics and does not affect customers' service in any way. It is certainly not used to do any form of packet shaping or change internet traffic priorities.

In a telephone conversation, the spokesman said the Allot equipment is installed in a part of the national cable network formerly owned by NTL.

Many ISPs use DPI hardware from companies such as Allot to prioritise or restrict HTTP, peer to peer, Usenet and other traffic. BT has deployed Ellacoya boxes in its retail broadband network. The gear's ability to peer inside data packets has also attracted attention from marketeers and fostered the embryonic ISP-level adware business being contoversially pushed by Phorm and NebuAd.

Deep packet inspection technology is particularly popular with operators who compete mostly on price, such as Tiscali. It allows them to keep a lid on their upstream bandwidth overheads, especially at peak times in the evening. Many broadband subscribers argue the opaque way ISPs use the technology to apply "fair usage policy" restrictions to internet usage is unfair.

Any move to install DPI could prove particularly problematic for Virgin Media, as it markets its broadband service as a fast, premium alternative to ADSL rivals. It instead uses the more simple tactic of throttling bandwith to its heaviest users across all protocols at set times when the cable network is likeliest to be overloaded.

Virgin Media describes this policy as "open and transparent" and publishes the details of when and how tightly bandwidth is throttled. It says this maintains decent speeds for the vast majority at busy times.

The firm's CEO Neil Berkett was widely quoted in April describing the net neutrality debate as "bollocks" and arguing that networks will have to be reconfigured to cope with increasing bandwidth demands.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06...ttling_denial/





Judge Says Limelight Ban 'Premature'

A federal judge said on Wednesday it would be premature to consider a request by Akamai Technologies Inc to permanently ban rival Limelight Networks Inc from selling services that a jury ruled infringe on an Akamai patent.

"The motion for an injunction is kind of premature," U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel said during a motion hearing in Boston.

She said that she needs to review several other motions related to the trial first. If she rules in favor of Akamai on each of those motions, then she would consider the request for the injunction, Zobel said.

"The injunction does not come into play until everything else is done in favor of Akamai," she said.

A U.S. District Court jury in Boston had awarded Akamai $45.5 million in February after determining that Limelight's services that help speed Web traffic infringe upon Akamai's intellectual property.

Akamai subsequently sought a permanent injunction banning Limelight from selling related services. (Reporting by Jim Finkle, editing by Phil Berlowitz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssI...25770220080618





Japanese Telco Institutes Upload Caps... of 30GB... Daily
Jacqui Cheng

Bandwidth caps are coming to Japan, but not in the way to which North Americans are accustomed. OCN, operated by NTT Communications, has decided to impose a daily upload limit beginning on August 1. The limit? 30GB per day. Upstream.

According to the company, the limit is being implemented to address a "small number" of users who apparently upload far more than that on a day-to-day basis by running servers for file-sharing. Customers will get a warning upon first violation, NTT spokesperson Tei Gordon told IDG News Service today, but could be disconnected for repeat offenses.

Of course, NTT's 100Mbps fiber-optic connections make it easy to use and abuse the service. And—let's be realistic—a 30GB-per-day upload limit is plenty for even heavy P2P use. That's almost a terabyte per month of data, and those concerned over download caps shouldn't worry, though, as those will remain unlimited.

Download all the terabytes upon terabytes of data you want!

This kind of extremely generous usage cap is made possible because of Japan's fiber-centric broadband infrastructure. Here in the US, fiber installations are few and far between, leaving most of us with subpar speeds and service. It's a large reason why users who use even moderate levels of bandwidth will face very low usage caps. For example, Time Warner recently announced that it would begin capping customers' downloads in Beaumont, Texas at 40GB per month for $55. Users will be billed $1 for each additional gigabyte downloaded.

At first glance, such usage caps might seem reasonable, but they're not so attractive after you consider the growing number of important services we use that soak up lots of bandwidth. The Internet is now used to distribute software, digital high-definition video, and music. It also facilitates online gaming, video conferencing, real-time collaboration, interactive remote desktop access, file backups, and many other bandwidth-intensive activities.

Other companies are tossing around slightly more generous caps, like Comcast's possible 250GB per month limit. As we noted in his analysis of Time Warner's decision, however, ISPs who have ample bandwidth will be happy to take in customers who aren't interested in being metered. And there are some intriguing wireless broadband options on the horizon that could draw customers away from bandwidth-constrained cable companies.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...0gb-daily.html





Another Inventor Of The Internet Wants To Gag It
Gregory Sullivan

Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and -- you guessed it -- can throttle them in favor of other, more "high-priority" traffic.

At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5 percent of the Net's users are running P2P transfers taking up 80 percent of its capacity, which is dramatically limiting the available bandwidth available to everyone else. Roberts' company, Anagran, is able to detect which "flows" are P2P traffic, and reduce the bandwidth available to these communications when other users' systems want it. Roberts says that Anagran's technology even functions when P2P transfers are encrypted.

One of the products currently offered by ANAGRAN, the FR-1000 Intelligent Flow Manager has a feature set geared specifically toward shaping network traffic.

• Instant Network Congestion Relief: Adding an FR-1000 wherever network congestion occurs eliminates congestion to instantly improve application performance and service quality. Downstream routers perform better.
• High Quality of Experience for Streaming Media: When loss-susceptible traffic like IPTV and VoIP overload their capacity, packet discard creates noise, jitter, and freeze-frame in all flows. IFD selectively invokes call admission control (CAC) on specific flows only; either the lowest priority or the most recent, for sustained high quality voice and video even during periods of intense user demand.
• Bulk Data and P2P Management: Managing flow rates by service class with BTC throttles bandwidth-hungry traffic like P2P to allow all services (including P2P!) to flourish even when network links become congested.
• Powerful Traffic Inspection and Awareness: Real-time capture of all flow statistics enables inspection, logging, and analysis for all traffic in the network. Find out what is really happening in your network.
• Improved Performance: Fast Flow Technology improves trunk utilization by up to 300% while adding zero incremental delay. For the first time, bandwidth utilization is maximized without adding any latency.
• Significant Cost Savings: Bandwidth needed to connect data/content sources to the network can be reduced by 2:1-3:1. Compact, high-performance 1RU form factor saves space and lowers equipment costs. Eco-friendly low power consumption (300 watts) minimizes heat dissipation and ongoing operating costs.

According to Roberts, 80 percent of Internet traffic is generated by 5 percent of users, and that 80 percent is used for P2P filesharing. I have a feeling Mr. Roberts will finally make some money off that Internet he invented if the device works, as ISPs would love to have a way to shuffle Bittorrents of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo to the back of the queue. I also predict he will become an object of more intense detestation than anyone outside an RIAA office on the Internet he invented if his device works, and is put into general use.

There sure are a lot of people who are referred to as "Inventor of the Internet." Of course we could tell the old joke about Al Gore inventing the Internet, but of course we know he invented weather, not the Internet.
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Anot...nts_To_Gag_It/





Charter Won’t Track Customers’ Web Use
AP

Charter Communications is dropping plans to track the Web use of some high-speed Internet subscribers, citing concerns raised by customers, the company said Tuesday.

In May, Charter, which is based in St. Louis, announced a pilot program in four markets intended to produce enough information for advertisers to aim online ads at individual customers based on their viewing habits.

Charter is controlled by Paul G. Allen, a Microsoft co-founder.

Charter had planned to begin the program as early as this month in the test markets: Fort Worth; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn.

Earlier Tuesday, Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, released a letter calling on Charter to drop the plan. A Charter spokeswoman, Anita Lamont, said the decision to do so was unrelated to Mr. Blumenthal’s letter.

In a letter last month to Internet subscribers in the pilot areas, a Charter senior vice president, Joseph R. Stackhouse, wrote that they would not see more ads, just more ads relevant to each user. He promised the personal information gathered through the tracking would remain confidential.

Subscribers would have been able to opt out of the tracking, but Mr. Blumenthal and others said the opt-out provision was inadequate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/te...25charter.html





ISPs Still Considering Tracking Web Use
Peter Svensson

Although a large Internet service provider has backed away from technology that tracks subscribers' Web use in order to deliver personalized advertising, two other broadband companies said Wednesday they are still considering whether to deploy it.

Phone companies Embarq Corp. and CenturyTel Inc. have both completed trials of the same tracking system, from online advertising company NebuAd Inc., and are now considering whether to proceed.

The largest U.S. Internet provider that had been actively looking at Web tracking, Charter Communications Inc., announced Tuesday that it had canceled its planned test because customers had raised concerns.

The technology gathers data on the interests of Web surfers by looking at the sites they visit. It passes the information to online advertising companies, without revealing a surfer's identity, so they can display more relevant ads on Web sites. For instance, a surfer who visits sites about dogs might see more banner ads for dog food.

The system has been criticized by privacy advocates and legislators. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, wrote to Charter asking it to put the test on hold to give time for discussions. Markey chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

"We are not currently using behavioral targeting tools and have not decided whether to move forward with them, either through NebuAd or with any other vendor," said Debra Peterson, spokeswoman at Embarq.

The Overland Park, Kan., company is the country's ninth-largest ISP, with 1.34 million broadband lines at the end of March.

Tony Davis, the head of investor relations at CenturyTel, said it was his understanding that the reaction to Charter's proposed test had to do with cable-industry regulations that don't apply to a phone company.

"So at this point it's not affecting our thinking," Davis said.

Monroe, La.-based CenturyTel had 586,000 broadband customers at the end of the first quarter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062501950.html





Cable Ads Attacking Verizon Confuse Consumers
Peter Svensson

Avery Axel was annoyed with his cable company, Comcast, and was considering switching to Verizon's new FiOS fiber-optic TV and Internet service.

The picture on his TV would freeze now and then, and he had heard good things about FiOS. Then the 21-year-old student saw a TV commercial from Comcast that made fun of FiOS and claimed the cable TV company has a larger fiber-optic network.

"I thought to myself: Maybe I don't have to switch, because if Comcast has fiber optics now, that means that they'll be better," said Axel, who lives in Roosevelt, N.J.

But after asking around online, he found that nothing's changed about Comcast's service: It still uses coaxial cable to connect homes. It does use fiber-optic cable further away in the network, as it has for many years.

"From what everyone said ... this is kind of misleading," Axel said.

Axel had fallen for one of a series of commercials run by every major cable company that competes with Verizon's FiOS. Besides Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Charter have all run ads belittling FiOS.

The ads have a curiously similar message, emphasizing that cable networks "are" fiber-optic, even though none of the companies draw fiber all the way to the home, like Verizon does in most cases when it installs FiOS. This allows for higher Internet speeds and, according to Consumer Reports, better picture quality.

"Cable is deploying the rhetoric instead of the technology," said Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the ad was referring to the fact that the company has the largest "residential" fiber network in the nation, stretching for 125,000 miles, and noted that a freezing picture doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the network technology.

"Our ads reinforce the value and scope of our fiber network to our customers," she said, adding that the fact that Verizon uses fiber to the home makes little difference to the services it can provide. Comcast has started upgrading its network to provide FiOS-like speeds in 20 percent of its markets this year.

Comcast has also started running newspaper ads with the message: "We already have a fiber-optic network serving ALL our homes" reads one in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer.

Fiber-optic lines have been the main conduit for telecommunications since the '80s. In the late '90s, cable companies upgraded their networks to draw fiber closer to homes, which allowed them to offer broadband, video on demand and other services. The fiber lines end at neighborhood nodes, where the signal is transferred to a coaxial cable shared among as many as 500 households. The shared nature of the coaxial network and its susceptibility to electrical noise limits its capacity.

Verizon's FiOS network also shares capacity, but among fewer households, and the fiber itself has nearly unlimited data capacity.

Mike Weaver in Watauga, Texas, saw an ad from Charter Communications Inc. that talked about "advanced fiber optics," and was disappointed when he realized that the cable company isn't drawing fiber to the home. He wants the faster Internet speeds provided by FiOS, he said.

Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont said the intent behind the current ads, which say the company has been using fiber for the last 10 years, "is to reassure current Charter customers that they too have fiber optic technology bringing their homes to life."

In an ad from Time Warner Cable Inc., an enthusiastic Verizon salesman shows up at a doorstep and starts talking about "The Fiber" and makes a flourish that produces a burst of light. The homeowner holds up a bowl of cereal and retorts that "I think I'm taken care of in that department," adding that Time Warner Cable has been using fiber for over a decade. "Welcome to the program!"

Time Warner Cable got into a legal tussle with Verizon over a longer version of the ad, which Verizon saw as implying that subscribers need a satellite dish to get FiOS. Time Warner Cable is no longer running the ad, said spokesman Alex Dudley.

"Lately it seems everybody is talking fiber optics," says a suave man in Cablevision's commercial for its Optimum cable service. "The Optimum Network is fiber optic. Your phone company? Talking fiber, even though a lot of their network ... isn't."

A Cablevision spokesman did not return calls about the ad, which appears to highlight the fact that FiOS isn't available in Verizon's entire local-phone service area.

An ad for Cox Communications shows a curbside, accompanied by voiceover: "Years ago, Cox laid advanced fiber-optic cable right about here. Now the phone company wants to come along and do it too. The old phone company and its new network is about a decade behind Cox ... Thanks, but ... I don't need any more fiber."

Cox spokesman David Grabert said that ad is no longer on the air, but it is preparing a new batch of videos that "address Verizon's competitive weakness."

For its part, Verizon has taken some criticism for claiming in ads that FiOS provides "uncompressed" high-definition TV signals. All TV providers, including Verizon, provide digital TV signals that are compressed to reduce the bandwidth needed. Henson said Verizon was trying to convey that it didn't apply additional compression to the video it receives, which some cable companies do.

It's stopped running that ad, preferring instead to focus on customer testimonials about the picture quality.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080621/...e_vs_fiber_ads





Supreme Court To Hear AT&T Access Fee Appeal

A federal appeals court had ruled that AT&T was charging wholesale prices to ISPs that were too high for them to compete with AT&T in the retail market.
W. David Gardner

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear an antitrust case involving AT&T (NYSE: T) and Internet service providers, which are protesting that AT&T's access fees are too high.

AT&T and the Bush Administration had urged the high court to review the case.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had ruled against AT&T and agreed that the company's wholesale prices to the ISPs were too high for them to compete with AT&T in the retail market.

The plaintiff in the case is LinkLine Communications, which bought high-speed service from AT&T. The ISP combined the service with other services and sold the package in competition with AT&T.

Fights over access fees have dogged the U.S. telecommunications industry ever since the old AT&T was broken up more than two decades ago. One of the offshoots was SBC Communications, which then acquired what was left of the old AT&T, then a long distance company. SBC then took over the AT&T name and along the way acquired BellSouth, which had been challenging AT&T over access fee issues, too.

The access fee issue has continued to boil under the radar until last year when the Appeals Court allowed the lawsuit filed by LinkLine to move forward in federal court. The original suit had been filed against Pacific Bell -- later acquired by SBC/AT&T.
The Bush Administration's Office of U.S. Solicitor General sided with AT&T, maintaining that federal antitrust laws don't cover the LinkLine claims.

In urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit opinion, U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement said: "Such a theory of liability could not be reconciled with this cout's modern antitrust jurisprudence."

The case is Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. Linkline Communications Inc., 07-512.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=208800329





AT&T to Boost Online Content Distribution

AT&T said on Tuesday it wants to expand its business of delivering online media, moving into more direct competition with specialized content delivery companies like Akamai Technologies Inc and Limelight Networks Inc.

As more companies launch websites with video and interactive features, AT&T said it will spend nearly $70 million by the end of the year to bolster its network infrastructure across the United States, Europe and parts of Asia.

Content delivery is not entirely new to AT&T, which has customers like Forbes.com and AccuWeather.com; but it said it will start selling more of these services to help companies deliver digital media to consumers' computers and mobile phones.

AT&T also said it is creating a new business unit focusing on content delivery, and named executive Cathy Martine as the leader of that section.

The company said its strength is in its international reach and experience dealing with security issues.

AT&T shares fell 0.1 percent in morning trade to $34.35, while Akamai shares fell 1.6 percent to $34.66 and Limelight fell 0.8 percent to $3.84.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssT...34215220080624





FCC Dealt Setback in Broadband-Over-Power-Lines Push
Anne Broache

In a potential setback for fans of broadband over power lines, a federal appeals court has sided in part with amateur radio operators who challenged rules designed to speed the nascent Internet service's rollout.

When setting rules for BPL operators nearly two years ago, the Federal Communications Commission said it was trying to encourage deployment of a "third pipe" to compete with cable and DSL services, while establishing limits aimed at protecting public safety, maritime, radio-astronomy, aeronautical navigation, and amateur radio operators from harmful interference. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), which represents amateur and ham radio operators, however, promptly sued the agency, contending that the FCC's approach was insufficient to ward off interference with its radios and inconsistent with its previous rules.

On Friday, the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on Friday issued a ruling that took issue with the way the FCC arrived at its rules.

During its rulemaking process, the FCC relied on five scientific studies that measured BPL devices' radio emissions, in an attempt to determine interference risks with other users of the spectrum. Although the agency released those studies during a public comment process required by federal law, it redacted portions of them, arguing they were just "internal" communications that didn't influence its deliberations. But after reviewing the unredacted studies in private, the majority of the judges agreed with the ARRL that it was against federal administrative procedure law to keep those portions under wraps, particularly since they could called the FCC's rules into question.

"It is one thing for the Commission to give notice and make available for comment the studies on which it relied in formulating the rule while explaining its non-reliance on certain parts," D.C. Circuit Judge Judith Rogers wrote. "It is quite another thing to provide notice and an opportunity for comment on only those parts of the studies that the Commission likes best."

The court also said the FCC had not offered a "reasoned explanation" for why it rejected ARRL-submitted data that could have influenced its interference estimates and potentially reshaped its rules. The judges opted to send the rules back to the FCC with instructions to clarify those points and publicize its studies more fully, although they did not overturn the rules themselves.

The court did not side entirely with the ARRL on other key points related to the substance of the rules.

For instance, the ARRL had argued that the FCC was departing from longstanding agency precedent by refusing to require that BPL operations found to cause "harmful interference" be shut down immediately--the so-called "cease-operations" rule. The court wasn't persuaded by that argument, saying the FCC had explained adequately that there isn't ample evidence that "harmful interference" is a real risk.

Still, the court's decision could be significant if it ultimately prompts revisions to the FCC's rules, which could in turn force some BPL operators to change the way they operate or create new legal uncertainty for their operations. The FCC declined to comment on the decision Monday.

The ARRL was quick to applaud the ruling.

"It is obvious that the FCC was overzealous in its advocacy of BPL, and that resulted in a rather blatant cover-up of the technical facts surrounding its interference potential," ARRL general counsel Christopher Imlay said in a statement. "Both BPL and Amateur Radio would be better off had the FCC dealt with the interference potential in an honest and forthright manner at the outset."

The United Power Line Council, which represents the BPL industry, downplayed the significance of the ruling, saying it was largely procedural and noting that the current rules remain in effect.

"We're a little surprised that the court took issue with those two issues that it did send back, but I expect the FCC will work quickly on those and come to a conclusion soon," said Brett Kilbourne, the group's director of regulatory affairs.

According to the UPLC, there were approximately 35 BPL deployments around the United States as of last year. As of the middle of last year, there were about 5,000 U.S. BPL subscribers, according to the FCC's latest data.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9930223-7.html





Satcaster Merger Under Fire From Opponents
FMQB

After FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said over the weekend that he will back the proposed merger of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio, senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the merger plan, saying it does not provide enough opportunities for minority-owned programming. Martin said he would support the merger after XM and Sirius agreed, among other concessions, to lease four percent of their radio spectrums, or 12 channels, for programming run by minorities and women. But members of the black caucus on Capitol Hill have been arguing that the merged company should set aside five times that amount of spectrum. Short of that, caucus members have warned the Commission that they will oppose the merger.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus's working group on satellite radio, told the Washington Post that Martin's proposed compromise is "completely unacceptable." He said he and other members of the group planned to express their dissatisfaction to the CEOs of XM and Sirius in a meeting today. "We're going to close the door and have a very honest and open dialogue about the merger," Butterfield said. "If they cannot meet us on any reasonable terms, we are going to be very adamant about not approving the merger. It's not in the public interest. They are not concerned about the cost to the consumer."

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), a former Chairman of the caucus, also said he was upset about the proposed deal. "It's shocking to the conscience in this day and age, where the minority populations comprise a significant part of the satellite radio audience, that Mr. Martin would settle for what I deem to be crumbs that have fallen off the table," Cummings told the Post. "We can do much better. I am hoping that this can be revisited."

Meanwhile, the Consumer Coalition for Competition in Satellite Radio (C3SR) is also raising questions about the integrity of the FCC's decision on the matter. "This untimely announcement follows the discovery of serious legal issues raised by certain highly confidential documents that Sirius submitted to the FCC on April 10, 2008, which remain unresolved," C3SR said in a press release. "Sirius produced these materials subject to an FCC protective order to prevent public disclosure of the documents' contents. In a May 27, 2008 letter to the FCC, C3SR identified several issues raised by the highly confidential documents and asked that the FCC designate the proposed merger of XM and Sirius for hearing. C3SR also requested an FCC investigation leading to appropriate enforcement actions. In addition, Senator Brownback has called for an inquiry into this matter by the Senate Judiciary Committee. No action has been taken by the FCC."

According to Julian L. Shepard of Williams Mullen, counsel to C3SR, "The entire FCC process is now unreasonably shrouded in secrecy. Sirius and XM are trading on the secrecy of the highly confidential documents in the court of public opinion. They have refused to come forth with the facts. In public, Sirius and XM are denying the facts in the highly confidential documents, but they have not submitted any evidence to support their denial. Meanwhile, Sirius and XM are saying what they wish in private ex parte meetings with the FCC."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=751371





Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them
Bryan Gardiner

For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.

While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.

"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."

More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.

"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.

Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.

To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.

"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."

With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.

He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.

"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."

Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.

"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.

Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.

"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."

Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."
http://www.wired.com/culture/art/new...ret_satellites





The Camera That Knows Where It Is
David Pogue

“Any sufficiently advanced memory card,” Arthur C. Clarke once didn’t write, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

But if he had written it, he could have been referring to the Eye-Fi Share card. It’s a 2-gigabyte memory card ($100), compatible with most digital cameras, with a twist: it has Wi-Fi networking built in. Each time you bring your camera home to your wireless network, it transmits your photos back to the computer, automatically and wirelessly. It can also upload them to Flickr, Picasa or another online photo-gallery site, automatically and wirelessly.

What’s the point? First, you’re saved the trouble of finding and attaching your U.S.B. transfer cable. Second, you skip the multi- step hassle of manually uploading the fresh pictures to a photo-sharing site.

Finally, there’s an enormous showoff factor, both for you and for the manufacturer. How on earth did they fit Wi-Fi circuitry into a regular-size SD card, which could hide behind a postage stamp?

In any case, this week, a new model arrives with an even more amazing trick up its sleeve.

You know how your digital camera gives every photo an invisible time and date stamp? Well, the Eye-Fi Explore ($130) card invisibly stamps every photo with where you took it.

That’s right: photo geotagging has finally come to a camera near you. Noting what photo was taken where used to require either tedious manual data entry or expensive add-on gear. Now it comes cheaply and automatically.

Once on your Mac or PC, each such photo shows the city and state where it was taken. You can also click to view either a street-map view or an aerial photo, clearly showing where you were standing when you pressed the shutter button. At long last, technology has reached a point where we don’t need to write “Eiffel Tower, 1988” on the back of the print as a reminder.

Photo Web sites like Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug can display these maps, too. Certain desktop photo programs, like Photoshop Elements 6, Picasa and (for the Mac) Ovolabs Geophoto.

Now, that’s a pretty interesting trick. But finding out how it’s done is even more interesting.

No, it’s not G.P.S. Even the Eye-Fi people can’t yet shrink a G.P.S. receiver to fit the sliver of an SD card.

Instead, this card incorporates a new technology, a rival to G.P.S., called W.P.S.—Wi-Fi Positioning System. A company called Skyhook came up with it. (Skyhook’s first well-known client was Apple. The original iPhone doesn’t have actual G.P.S., but it does have Skyhook’s “locate me” feature.)



Understanding how Skyhook works requires slogging through some tech talk. But it’s fascinating, and it’s also the key to the Eye-Fi card’s strengths and limitations.

At this moment, more than 70 million Wi-Fi base stations are sitting in homes, offices and shops. Each broadcasts its own name and unique network address (called its MAC address — nothing to do with Mac computers) once a second. Although you’d need to be within 150 feet or so to actually get onto the Internet, according to Skyhook, a laptop can detect this powerful beacon signal from up to 1,500 feet away.

Metropolitan areas today are blanketed by overlapping Wi-Fi signals. At a typical Manhattan intersection, you might be in range of 20 base stations.

Skyhook’s big idea: If you could somehow correlate those beacon signals with their physical locations, you could pinpoint your own location, G.P.S.-style, but without G.P.S..

To that end, 500 full-time Skyhook employees have spent the last five years driving every road, lane and highway in every major American city —and, lately, European and Asian cities. Its equipment measures all those Wi-Fi signals leaking out of homes and stores and offices, and marries that information with the car’s G.P.S. location as it drives.

(Note: At no time does this equipment, or any iPhone or Eye-Fi card, actually connect to these base stations. They’re just reading the one-way beacon signal, which is broadcast even by password-protected base stations.)

So far, Skyhook’s database knows about 50 million hot spots—and the precise longitude and latitude of each.

And that’s it. Now any Wi-Fi gadget equipped with Skyhook’s software, like the iPhone and the new Eye-Fi card, can get a fix on its own position, accurate to around 100 feet.

As a bonus, the Skyhook system is self-healing. Suppose, for example, you’re standing on the street in Brooklyn. Your iPhone recognizes six Wi-Fi base stations around you — but one of them, according to the Skyhook database, is supposed to be in Connecticut.

Clearly, somebody moved (or moved the base station). Skyhook’s software says, “Well, the other five base stations are right where they’re supposed to be, but that sixth one looks suspicious. I’ll update my records to show that it has been moved to Brooklyn.”

Skyhook’s biggest weakness is coverage. The 50 million hot spots it knows, the company says, is enough to cover 70 percent of the populated areas in the United States and Canada, and 50 percent of Europe. But that means that the Eye-Fi card draws a blank in some of the situations when you’d most want a location fix for your photos: hiking, skiing, camping, boating or traveling abroad. These are places where you’re not likely to find any Wi-Fi signals at all.

(If that prospect bothers you, consider the $150 G.P.S. Photo Finder from ATP instead. After taking some photos, you slip your memory card into this tiny box, which stamps each picture with your current G.P.S. location. It’s more trouble than the Eye-Fi system, but at least it’s real G.P.S.)

On the other hand, Skyhook’s biggest strengths are how well it works indoors and how fast it works — one second for a fix. That makes it a perfect complement to G.P.S., which works terribly indoors, if at all, and can take up to a minute to find you.

(Indeed, the new iPhone, coming July 11, incorporates both G.P.S. and Skyhook. It even has a third location system, developed by Google, that pinpoints your location by studying your proximity to cellphone towers. That iPhone will really know where you are.)

Apart from the new geotagging feature, the new Eye-Fi card is the same as its geographically impaired predecessor, which is to say that it has the same downsides. For example, the card sends only JPEG files, not movies or RAW files. You can’t choose which photos to upload; the card always sends everything.

Two traditional Eye-Fi drawbacks, though, have been fixed. Formerly you never knew when the card was finished transmitting photos; now, Eye-Fi can send a text message to your phone when it’s safe to turn off the camera.

Nor are you limited to your own home hot spot anymore. For $15 a year, your card can use any of Wayport’s 10,000 commercial hot spots in the United States, or indeed any hot spot that’s completely open (no password, no welcome screen). The first year is free with the Explore card.



There’s a lot of great technology at play here. The Skyhook network, incomplete though it may be, is just wickedly clever — you can’t believe that it works, let alone works so well, at least in the 8,000 cities it covers.

Skyhook technology is also available in AOL Instant Messenger, so you can see where your chat buddies are; in location-based games like Plunder and AreaCode; and in software like Trapster, which lets drivers report speed traps when they see one — and then Trapster-equipped drivers following behind are warned on their cellphones. There’s even a browser toolbar that lets you try finding yourself: loki.com.

And when the Eye-Fi card’s pictures do arrive on your computer, being able to see where they were taken is more than a novelty. It’s a huge leap forward in the art and the utility of digital photography.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/te...ogue.html?8dpc





Chrysler Will Offer Wireless Internet Access in 2009 Models

The struggling automaker's announcement comes shortly before California enacts a law that requires hands-free cellphone use while driving.
Ken Bensinger

Have you ever thought rush hour on the 405 Freeway might be more bearable if you could check your e-mail, shop for a book on Amazon, place some bids on EBay and maybe even, if nobody is looking, download a little porn?

Then perhaps you should be driving a Chrysler.

The nation's third-largest automaker is set to announce Thursday that it's making wireless Internet an option on all its 2009 models. The mobile hotspot, called UConnect Web, would be the first such technology from any automaker.

Struggling Chrysler is hoping that providing motorists access to the information superhighway will set it apart from competitors and help reverse a dismal year; through May, sales are down 19.3% compared with 2007, the worst drop-off in the industry.
FOR THE RECORD:
An article in Wednesday's Section A about Chrysler offering wireless Internet connections in new cars said users of a device by Autonet Mobile get download speeds of 600 to 800 megabits per second. In fact, the speeds are 600 to 800 kilobits per second, which is about 1,000 times slower.

"It's a notion of always wanting to be connected wherever you are," said Scott Slagle, Chrysler's senior manager of global marketing strategy, who has been testing the technology since last week, allowing his daughters to surf the Web from the back seat. "There's a demand for that."

Coincidentally, Wi-Fi on wheels is being unveiled just days before new hands-free legislation goes into effect July 1 in California and Washington state. Those laws, designed to reduce accidents caused by driver distraction, prohibit talking on a cellular phone without a headset or other hands-free device.

Perhaps not surprisingly, safety advocates were less than overwhelmed by Chrysler's innovation.

"Surfing the Web is something people really don't have any business doing while they drive," said Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Assn. "It's definitely a distraction."

His and other safety groups say the only way to drive safely is without using any electronic devices, headset or no.

Chrysler says that when the car is in motion, the service is intended to be used only by passengers. The privately held company acknowledges, however, that there is no way to prevent a driver from steering with one hand and Web surfing with the other.

"We're relying on the responsibility of the consumer to follow appropriate legislation," said Keefe Leung, Chrysler's engineer for the product.

In that case, Californians tempted to Google and drive can breathe a big sigh of relief: The new laws don't proscribe use of computers or the Web, except for drivers under 18 years old. There is a different law on the books preventing the use of television screens or video screens farther forward than the rear of the front seats, but it's unclear whether that measure applies to computers browsing the Internet.

State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who authored the California laws, is trying to clarify that situation. He's introduced legislation prohibiting drivers from using any "mobile service device" (including computers) or text-messaging while driving.

"It's great to see technology advance," Simitian said. "But this raises a lot of concerns."

In Chrysler's defense, it's not the first company to offer Internet access in cars. Avis Rent A Car introduced Avis Connect in January 2007. Like UConnect Web, Avis Connect (which costs $10.95 a day) operates on the 3G network using a cellular-based signal.

The device used by Avis is also available through its manufacturer, Autonet Mobile, for $595 plus a $39 monthly subscription rate. Users get download speeds of 600 megabits to 800 megabits per second.

Avis spokesman John Barrows said the device, which is portable, is fairly popular but not in as much demand as GPS units.

"We emphasize that this is not for use by the driver while operating the vehicle," Barrows said.

Chrysler will formally roll out the technology Thursday at an event in Detroit spotlighting its 2009 lineup, which will appear in showrooms in September. The automaker did not disclose pricing, but said there would probably be a base charge for the option, plus a monthly or annual fee.

UConnect Web is an extension of the company's UConnect system, which provides Bluetooth connectivity for cellphones and MP3 player integration with the car stereo. Rival Ford provides similar services, but without Web access, in its popular Sync system.

With the added Internet connectivity, drivers and passengers will be able to get such devices as laptop computers and Nintendo Wii consoles online. As to what users can download while in the car, Chrysler's Leung said anything was fair game.

"There are no limitations in content," he said
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,1676276.story





Bangkok Offers 15,000 Free Wi-Fi Spots
AFP

The Thai capital will offer 500,000 people free Wi-Fi access starting Thursday, in a pilot project that will provide 15,000 hotspots for them to get online, Bangkok's municipal government said.

The scheme is part of the city's drive to cut back on its energy use as officials hope residents will drive less if electronic communication becomes more convenient.

The free service, which is set to last for one year in its initial phase, will offer only slow 64K connections designed mainly for checking email or sending text messages.

"Using information technology for communication with others rather than taking transportation will save energy in crisis period and for the future," Bangkok Governor Apirak Kosayodhin said in a statement.

"This kind of communication will also be cost-saving and convenient while answering a demand of the new generations."

Users will require a special card to access the hotspots. The city has been passing out the free cards in shopping malls in the run-up to the launch of the service on Thursday.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/2008062...t-214f919.html





Online Service Lets Blind Surf the Internet from Any Computer, Anywhere
Hannah Hickey

Visions of future technology don't involve being chained to a desktop machine. People move from home computers to work computers to mobile devices; public kiosks pop up in libraries, schools and hotels; and people increasingly store everything from e-mail to spreadsheets on the Web.

But for the roughly 10 million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired, using a computer has, so far, required special screen-reading software typically installed only on their own machines.

New software, called WebAnywhere, launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.

"This is for situations where someone who's blind can't use their own computer but still wants access to the Internet. At a museum, at a library, at a public kiosk, at a friend's house, at the airport," said Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. The free program and both audio and video demonstrations are at http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu.

Ladner will demonstrate the tool next week in Dallas at the National Federation of the Blind's annual convention. WebAnywhere was developed under Ladner's supervision by Jeffrey Bigham, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Free screen readers already exist, as do sophisticated commercial programs. But all must be installed on a machine before being used. This is the first accessibility tool hosted on the Web, meaning it doesn't have to be downloaded onto a computer. It processes the text on an external server and then sends the audio file to play in the user's Web browser.

"You don't have to install new software. So even if you go to a heavily locked-down computer, say at a library, you can still use it," Bigham said.

In May, Bigham was named the winner of the Accessible Technology Award for Interface Design for the Imagine Cup, a student programming contest sponsored by Microsoft Corp. The prize comes with $8,000 and a trip to Paris in early July.

For the past month WebAnywhere has been available on request. Bigham said he's received inquiries from librarians who would like to make all their machines accessible on a limited budget. He's also had interest from teachers who struggle to find the time to locate free software, get permission to install it on a school computer and then maintain the program so that a single computer is accessible to a visually impaired student. This software would make any computer in the lab instantly accessible for Internet tasks. The Web-based service also eliminates the need for local technical support: there is no software to install or update because each time a person visits the site he or she gets the latest version.

To test the software, researchers had people use the tool to do three things typically done at public machines: check e-mail, look up a bus schedule and search for a restaurant's phone number. People using WebAnywhere were able to successfully complete all three tasks, using a variety of machines and Internet connections.

Like other screen readers, WebAnywhere converts written text to an electronically generated voice. So far the system works only in English. But the source code was released a few weeks ago and a Web developer in China has expressed interest in developing a Chinese version.

The UW team plans to create updates that will allow users to change the speed at which the text is read aloud and add other popular features found in existing screen readers. The service is currently hosted on a server at the UW campus.

Bigham is also working with Benetech, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology nonprofit that distributes free electronic books, to make its collection of more than 30,000 books accessible to blind users without them having to install any screen-reading software.

He believes this could be the first of many Web-based accessibility tools.

"Traditional desktop tools such as e-mail, word processors and spreadsheets are moving to the Web," Bigham said. "Access technology, which currently runs only on the desktop, needs to follow suit."
http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=42563





'Shake-up' for Internet Proposed
Darren Waters

The net could see its biggest transformation in decades if plans to open up the address system are passed.

The net's regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net.

The move could also see the launch of .xxx, after years of wrangling.

Top level domains are currently limited to individual countries, such as .uk (UK) or .it (Italy), as well as to commerce, .com, and to institutional organisations, such as .net, or .org.

To get around the restrictions, some companies have used the current system to their own ends.

For example, the Polynesia island nation Tuvalu, has leased the use of the .tv address to many television firms.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which acts a sort of regulator for the net, as well as overseeing the domain name system, has been working towards opening up net addresses for the last three years.

The plan would also allow for the new domain names to be internationalised, and so could be written in scripts for Asian and Arabic languages.

Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, told BBC News that the proposals would result in the biggest change to the way the internet worked in decades.

"The impact of this will be different in different parts of the world. But it will allow groups, communities and business to express their identities online.

"Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have.

"It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet."

Arbitration process

Hundreds of new domain names could be created by the end of the year, rising to thousands in the future.

Icann says any string of letters can be registered as a domain, but there will be an independent arbitration process for people with grounds for objection.

The openness of the new system could pave the way for a .xxx domain name, after more than half a decade of wrangling between its backers and Icann.

The latest attempt to launch .xxx was rejected by Icann last year on the grounds that approval would put the agency into the position of a content regulator.

When asked about the possibility of a .xxx domain name, Dr Twomey repeated only that the new system would be "open to anyone".

The move could yet be blocked as the independent arbitration panel can reject domains based on "morality or public order" grounds.

Dr Twomey said Icann was still working through how much the application fee to register a domain name will be, but it is expected to be at least several thousand dollars.

'Cost recovery'

"We are doing this on a cost recovery basis. We've already spent $10m on this," he said.

Individuals will be able to register a domain based on their own name, or any other string of letters, as long as they can show a "business plan and technical capacity".

While companies will be able to secure domain names based on their intellectual property easily, some domain names could become subject to contention and a bidding war.

Dr Twomey said: "If there is a dispute, we will try and get the parties together to work it out. But if that fails there will be an auction and the domain will go to the highest bidder."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7468855.stm





The Pirate Bay Pledges ISPs to Block Sweden
Ernesto

In an response to the new wiretapping law that was introduced in Sweden this week, The Pirate Bay will ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, to protect their customers. In addition, the BitTorrent tracker will add SSL encryption to their site, and roll out a new VPN service.

Earlier this week, Swedish parliament had voted in favor of a new “wiretapping” law which invades the privacy of its citizens by allowing the government to monitor Internet traffic and phone calls, without the need for court orders.

Before the law was passed, The Pirate Bay crew spoke out against it, and now they are upping the ante. In an initial response they went out putting “wanted posters” up, of politicians who voted in favor of the law. Their next move is to ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

“Together with other people that work against this law we’ve talked about asking international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden,” Peter writes on his blog. “Yes, that’s right! We want Sweden to be banned from the Internet. The ISPs need to block Sweden in order to protect their own customers integrity since everything they do on Swedish ISPs networks will be logged and searched.”

That is not all though. In addition to these lobbying efforts The Pirate bay will also add SSL encryption to their site, and they will inform their users on how to protect their privacy. For Swedes they already have a VPN solution up and running, which they will open up to international users in the near future.

“We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law,” Peter writes. “This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption - both for your harddrives and your net traffic.”

It’s good to see that The Pirate Bay team will not give up their privacy as easy as some of the politicians. “Trust me, this war is not lost,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We will win. We have many aces up our sleeves and we’re gonna use them. No worries.”
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...sweden-080622/





SSL Encrpytion Coming to The Pirate Bay
Thomas Mennecke

Encryption and file-sharing technology have a long history together. Usenet servers, LimeWire, uTorrent, and many other applications and protocols have taken advantage of encryption technology to help give the end user an additional layer of security. In response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde has announced the tracker’s intention to offer encryption services to its users.

According to the Local, Sweden's surveillance law, which passed on Thursday of this week, allows the government to monitor all incoming and outgoing transmissions in the name of national security.

Although The Pirate Bay's lobbying efforts against the bill were unsuccessful, the tracker still has a few cards left to play. According to Sunde, The Pirate Bay will roll out an encryption option this week.

"Many people have asked me what we’re planning to do," Peter writes in his blog "- and the answer is “A lot!”. We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law. This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption - both for your hard drives and your net traffic. As some people know, we’re running a system for VPN-tunnels already and we’re going to lower the price for that as well and open it up for international users as well."

The level of protection offered likely varies on the individual's geographical location. Since The Pirate Bay isn't actually situated in Sweden, a user in the United States isn't impacted by the law. However for the concerned user living in Sweden, the new SSL feature will offer some security against the perceived threat.

Historically, BitTorrent end users have faced little in the way of legal repercussions, regardless of their association with a tracker. Despite the seizure of LokiTorrent and EliteTorrent's userbase information, the only legal action taken was against the administration. That's not to say that can't change in Sweden, however history is on the side of the user – and so is The Pirate Bay. The irony, interestingly enough, is that both The Pirate Bay and Swedish Government's intentions are in the name of security.
http://www.slyck.com/story1691_SSL_E...The_Pirate_Bay





IsoHunt adds 10.000 Free and Legal Albums
Ben Jones

Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. Adding fuel to the ’significant non-infringing use’ argument is their latest partnership, with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo.

When BitTorrent sites have come under attack by media groups and their battalions of lawyers, it’s usual for them to pull up the drawbridge and keep the site going as is, and try to get the case over with as soon as possible. The other option is to close down and hunt for a settlement, but isoHunt, like its other big-site brethren, hasn’t. Despite a legal campaign that’s now over two years old, it continues to grow and add features and functionality.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared - usually with some restrictions - and is the same license used by TorrentFreak. It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

With this is mind, isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo told TorrentFreak “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”

“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,” Kratz said. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”

Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.
http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-adds...albums-080621/





In Search of Perfect Harmony, Through Software
Anne Eisenberg

MUSICIANS who want to create note-perfect digital recordings of their performances may soon have a powerful tool to help them: a computer program designed to correct mistakes in their piano riffs or guitar accompaniments as easily as software now fixes the red eyes in digital photographs.

The new software is precise enough, for instance, to reach into an audio file and change any one of the six notes in a guitar chord without changing the sound of the other notes, said Peter Neubäcker, inventor of the program and founder of Celemony Software, the Munich company that will sell it.

The software, called Direct Note Access, will be released in the fall and cost $399.

Software can already perform its share of musical Botox with digital recordings, smoothing and correcting performances. If a vocalist recording in the studio sings off key, for example, programs from Celemony and others can nudge a note up or down digitally to get it on pitch.

But that manipulation works only with music that has a single line of notes — for instance, a solo vocal performance. The problem of editing mistakes within polyphonic music — in which more than one note sounds simultaneously, as it does in a fugue, or in songs by a barbershop quartet or a rock band — is much trickier.

Software like Direct Note Access that can edit single pitches in polyphonic music may become popular, said Brian Majeski of The Music Trades, a magazine in Englewood, N.J. Last year, consumers spent $150 million on software for computer-based recording systems, he said. Many of these customers work in professional recording studios, but a growing number edit their music on computers at home, as much recording activity during the past decade has switched from studios to living rooms.

“Recording studios have millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that people once rented and used,” he said. “Now you can buy a computer and software like this and for a few thousand dollars have more capability than the Beatles had when they did their stuff.”

Direct Note Access is designed for music recorded on many tracks, with the bass guitar on one track, for instance, and the vocalist on another. Pitch corrections can be made for all tracks, one by one.

The software may also have applications for music of the past. “If you recorded a piece with a guitar that was out of tune,” Mr. Neubäcker said, “you could now go back and fix the tuning on the recording.”

Mr. Neubäcker’s program received a round of appreciative applause when it was demonstrated for professionals at a trade show in Frankfurt this spring. People outside the world of recorded music, however, may not immediately grasp its ingenuity, said Julius O. Smith III, a professor of music and associate professor of electrical engineering at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford.

“It’s difficult to separate simultaneous sounds in a recording,” he said. “Since our brains do this all the time, it can be hard to appreciate the magnitude of the task” when it is done by computer.

The difficulty is inherent in the sounds themselves. Notes have a basic tone, or fundamental, but they can also have many overtones that intermix in polyphonic music.

Mr. Neubäcker’s program is designed to tease out this musical mix of simultaneous sound and sort it into separate sonic envelopes that can then be manipulated.

Mr. Neubäcker learned his technique of sonic sorting in part by ear, in part by algorithms. “I listened carefully,” he said, “and I also used spectrum analysis,” graphical displays of the complex blends of frequencies in each tone he analyzed.

Professor Smith said that the demonstration of the program he saw on the Internet “looked superb, truly groundbreaking.”

John Gibson, an assistant professor of composition at Indiana University in Bloomington, has also seen a demonstration on the Internet but remains skeptical.

“Sound is complicated,” he said, and devising a program that corrects pitches of single notes within polyphonic music is a daunting task. “Many people think that this is not possible. I’ll believe it once I’ve tried it out myself.”

EVEN if the program works well, its abilities may leave many professionals cold, including Adrian Carr, a Grammy-nominated recording engineer and composer in Montreal. “More and more in our recorded sound, we have an obsession with perfection,” he said. “No artist, especially classical, wants to release a recording with a wrong note. People edit so much it takes out some of the spontaneity.”

Mark Schubin of Manhattan, too, showed no interest. Mr. Schubin is the engineer in charge of live high-definition transmissions to movie theaters of Metropolitan Opera performances; in those transmissions, he said, “never, absolutely never” is a singer’s voice corrected by software.

“I just wonder how close to perfection is really desirable,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/te...y/22novel.html





Does Music Have the Power to Send Us to Sleep?

A recent experiment in Japan tested the power of music to send us into a deep slumber. Leo Lewis stayed awake to test the results.
Leo Lewis

To the casual eye, many features of everyday life seem destined to lull the Japanese to sleep: the steady rattle of a stuffy commuter train, the drone of a monotonous lecturer, the thrum of an office air-conditioner.

But the job of artificially persuading them to drift off into slumber turns out to be much more complicated. Give them pillows, blankets and bombard them with nearly three hours of drowse-inducing music and most will still be wide awake at the end of the show.

The audience at an extraordinary mass experiment in sleep-induction in Central Tokyo ten days ago is still not sure whether Dreams Kaimin - Kaimin is best translated as “good sleep” or “sound sleep” - was a success or not. It set out, under the supervision of one of Japan's most celebrated “sleep doctors”, to use the power of music to push 1,500 people into sweet oblivion. More than half simply enjoyed an entertaining night out at the theatre.

Certainly, there were plenty of people whose heads slumped on to their chins during the carefully arranged playlist of gentle classical and modern music, but then it is not uncommon to see Japanese concert-goers nodding off during Franz Ferdinand and Guns n' Roses concerts.

What has still not been established is whether the concert produced more than the natural quotient of snoozers, and whether those who did grab forty winks did so in record time. If there was one firm conclusion, said those whose shoulders became ad hoc pillows for their male neighbours, it was that a lot of men fell asleep as soon as the female vocalist began.

Two elderly men did not stir for two hours

Opening arrangements of Chopin and Tchaikovsky did not leave the audience any noticeably more heavy-headed after the first quarter of an hour. Better results were achieved a few minutes later when Aoi Teshima, the young female singer, ran through a quartet of popular Japanese numbers, Teru, Wishes, Rainbow and Rose, that sent the two elderly men on either side of me into a sleep from which they did not stir for another two hours.

Several audience members later queried the music choices. Most felt that Mary Hopkins's folk hit from the Sixties, Those Were The Days My Friend, was too interesting and popular to send them to sleep. A rendition of a well-known Japanese song by Masafumi Akikawa, the tenor soloist, was equally exhilarating. Many said they were too thrilled to hear a performance by the great Akikawa to waste the moment on slumber.

Yasuo and Yoshiko Abe, husband and wife participants in the experiment, went out of curiosity, they said, because they had never heard of a concert in which the audience was supposed to sleep. “Knowing that we were actually allowed to sleep made me relax and listen to the music without much feeling of trying to judge the quality of the performance,” Yasuo said. “In that sense, it's good. But being told that you can sleep also got me a little twisted mentally, and so I tried not to sleep.”

Selecting the right music

The brains behind Dreams Kaimin is Dr Takuro Endo, a neurologist who has made a science, and a lucrative CD business, out of selecting the right music to induce sleep. He divides it into three categories: melodies that fire the imagination; those that are calming and relaxing; and music that should, within ten minutes, slow the brain down to the point of unconsciousness. Do not, he cautions, listen to the third category when you're driving. In his limited laboratory experiments, Dr Endo honed a playlist from that third category down to a smaller collection, most of which was played to the Tokyo audience.

Japan's relationship with sleep has always been a complicated one. For instance, the Japanese appear able to sleep anywhere, at any time: low crime rates make people feel especially secure about drifting off on public transport.

But a good night's sleep has been the victim of the country's so-called economic miracle, the long phase of growth in which Japan was propelled from a post-war mess to Asia's most sparkling modern economy. Long hours and the demands of the all-consuming corporate lifestyle have come at the expense of sleep.

Now, as the economy struggles to come to terms with what it has matured into, the Japanese are decreasingly happy at the imposition of the office. Several “napping rooms” have sprung up in Tokyo's main business districts so workers can sleep in their lunch break without the shame of being seen by their colleagues.

Tastes vary According to Professor Jim Horne, the director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, music helps people to sleep because it helps them to relax. Generally, children find gentle music lulling, but in adults different music will prove relaxing for different people. CDs of music marketed on the grounds of curing insomnia will work for some, but not others, Horne says. “The secret is to find anything that gives your brain peace of mind.”

Brain music Research from the University of Toronto has suggested that a CD of your brain waves converted into music can help you to sleep. Researchers recorded people's brain waves as they fell asleep, and then converted them into sound. The research subjects listened to the recordings each night for 30 days and fell asleep three times faster than people listening to other people's brain waves.

Didgeridoos Creating music before you go to bed may also induce sleep. A 2006 study in the British Medical Journal concluded that playing a didgeridoo before bed helped people with sleep apnoea to nod off. “Blasting away on an instrument might help you to get rid of troubling emotions before you go to sleep,” Horne says.

The top ten tunes to help you drift off:

Saku, Susumu Yakota

Nocturne, Chopin

Piano Concerto no 1, Tchaikovsky

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart

Pachelbel, Canon in D

Rose, Aoi Teshima

By This River, Brian Eno

Pie Jesu, John Rutter

Albatross, Fleetwood Mac

Divertimento No. 2 in D Major, Mozart
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif...cle4178204.ece





Teen Arrested for 'Blasphemous T-Shirt'
Ben Dillaway

A GOLD Coast teenager who wore a T-shirt by English extreme metal band Cradle of Filth that reads 'Jesus is a c**t' has been charged with offensive behaviour.

Above the offensive slogan a nun is depicted masturbating.

A 16-year-old was arrested on Monday for wearing the shirt and was charged with offensive behaviour under the Summary Offences Act 2005 for public nuisance.

Senior Sergeant Arron Ottaway said the teen was walking along Hollywell Road, in Biggera Waters, when a officer saw him.

Police conducted inquiries at Australia Fair, where the teen said he bought the shirt, to find any shops selling it.

The Reverend Matt Hunt of the Helensvale Baptist Church said it was sad people spoke about the Lord in such a way.

"It's fairly common language these days to express sadness, anger or hurt," he said. "It's a degrading word to use and Jesus is anything but that. It's like calling white black."

Mr Hunt said using the Lord's name in vain was a serious sin.

"When someone comes to the point of saying Jesus is the devil or Jesus is 'expletive', the Bible does say be very careful because you're on thin ice."

Gold Coast lawyer Bill Potts said the arrest highlighted Australia's need for a Bill of Rights.

"One of the great problems with our country is that we talk about rights such as privacy and freedom of speech and the like but they are not enshrined or protected in any way as they are in America," he said.

"While there are always limits on freedom of speech, you can't incite violence or anything like that, it seems to be now more than ever that our rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression should be protected.

"A Bill of Rights which enshrines that protection is long overdue in this country."

Mr Potts said charging the teen was 'ludicrous' and brought the law into disrepute.

"A shirt might offend some and might be amusing to others," he said.

"If a person was wearing the shirt in a church or a religious rally where it was specifically intended to offend or cause disruption, then perhaps the prosecution might stand a chance.

"However, to criminalise juvenile or boorish messages is to bring the law into disrepute. The police are acting like the thought police and censors."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...rom=public_rss





School's Out for Death Metal Teacher
David Landes

A hard rocking teacher who was fired before ever setting foot in a classroom has lodged a discrimination complaint with Sweden’s Ombudsman of Justice (JO).

In early June, Emil Koverot, who goes by the stage name Yxmarder as a member of the death metal band Blodsrit (Blood Rite), had been offered and accepted a position as an aesthetics instructor at the Hammargymnasiet high school in Västervik.

Koverot’s reputation as a hard rock guitarist was well known in the community in southern Sweden.

His band even came up during his employment interview with the school’s principal Sven Torstensson.

“He thought my participation in the band was a good thing,” Koverot explained to The Local.

“There are several students at the school who are into hard rock and he thought that I’d be able to relate to them better.”

Koverot had just received his teaching degree and was looking forward to the start of classes in August.

He had even turned down other offers after being offered the job at Hammargymnasiet.

But within a week, Torstenssonhad changed his tune about the appropriateness of Koverot’s membership in Blodsrit.

“He based the dismissal on my participation in a hard rock band, something that couldn’t be accepted by other staff, or by the student’s parents,” wrote Koverot in his complaint to JO.

“The principal felt that my band was so highly immoral that he advised against me ever devoting myself to leading a classroom.”

Koverot theorizes that some of the school’s staff and parents who belong to the Pentecostalist church put pressure on Torstensson to have Koverot fired for fear that he might be a bad influence.

“It’s the same old stereotypes,” he said.

“It’s the same way people reacted to the Beatles in the 1960s.”

Attempts by The Local to reach the principal for comment were unsuccessful.

However, he defended the decision in an interview with the Västerviks Tidningen (VT) newspaper.

“The contents of the band’s lyrics conflict with the school’s values,” he told the newspaper.

Torstensson added that the decision to fire Koverot was taken after he reviewed Boldrit's lyrics together with lawyers from the Swedish Association of Regions and Local Authorities (SALAR), which has authority over Sweden's public schools.

Koverot feels the school has handled the matter inappropriately and in so doing has violated his right to freedom of expression.

“From my perspective, this is a question of democratic values. As a state authority, one of a school’s most important tasks is to protect democracy and equal treatment,” he said.

“I think it’s regrettable that the principal could pass judgment on my own beliefs and hobbies.”

Blodsrit, which was formed in 2000, has released six albums and regularly tours throughout Europe.
http://www.thelocal.se/12626/20080624/





Boutique Audio Systems: 1,000 Watts of Luxury
John R. Quain

“I’M an audio snob,” confessed Chris Ziemer, whose home stereo system included a vintage McIntosh tube amplifier, “but when I heard the Mark Levinson sound system in a friend’s Lexus S.U.V., I was impressed.”

That’s precisely the kind of reaction more luxury automakers and esoteric high-end audio companies are seeking by offering specially designed car sound systems to buyers who may not recognize names like Bowers & Wilkins and Naim Audio, but would welcome the option of having a top-notch stereo system. After all, you don’t have to be familiar with terms like timbre and sound stage to appreciate an exquisitely reproduced Mozart concerto — you just have to be able to afford it.

“It’s a chance to extend the brand to a broader customer base outside the traditional audiophile community,” said Joe Atkins, chief executive of Bowers & Wilkins.

But just as one would not order a $100 Pomerol wine with a Big Mac, optional high-end audio systems don’t always enhance particular cars. Witness the demise of the 200-watt McIntosh Audiophile Sound System that always seemed like an odd factory option in the utilitarian Subaru Outback. On the other hand, in a $50,000 luxury coupe, a four-figure stereo option doesn’t seem like an extravagance.

Among such arranged marriages, one of the first successes in the industry was the Lexus and Mark Levinson union. The audio company was well-known by audiophiles for the thundering clarity of its home systems, but increased its brand awareness through its pairing with Lexus in 2001. The top-of-the-line system that Lexus offers is the Mark Levinson Reference Surround package, which is standard in the company’s six-figure-plus LS 600h L hybrid. It’s a true 7.1 surround-sound system with 19 speakers and 450 watts of power. (And for the record, the oceans of music it generates do sound luxurious.)

But like all marriages, such a divine pairing can take years of hard work. The Danish audio stylist Bang & Olufsen, for example, spent about three years developing a car audio system for the 2005 Audi A8. The company’s engineers experimented with a variety of speaker materials, for example, and spent hundreds of hours just tuning the system to the A8’s interior.

It’s a peculiar challenge for boutique audio companies accustomed to striving for the perfect sound without regard to cost. Properly designed car stereo systems have to be precisely adjusted to a vehicle’s cabin, taking into account the sound absorption of the interior materials, reflective qualities of the glass, sound pressure levels of exterior road noise and the seating and arrangement of passengers and driver, for example. Consequently, engineers can spend hours listening to the same CD over and over again, taking sound measurements and making minute adjustments.

And while many automakers thought Bang & Olufsen’s idea to offer a $6,300 car stereo option was crazy, Tommy Boye Rasmussen, a spokesman for the audio company, said they had begun to understand the value. The first year the option was offered for the Audi A8, just 1,000 systems were expected to be sold; by the end of the first production year, 4,000 had been snapped up.

Now, many Audi models have Bang & Olufsen systems, including the Advanced Sound System in the Audi Q7, with 14 speakers, including tweeters that pop up on the dash when you turn the ignition, all supported by 1,000 watts of power.

There have been other luxury brand nuptials, including Jaguar and the British loudspeaker innovator Bowers & Wilkins. The 2009 Jaguar XF has a Bowers & Wilkins 440-watt, 14-speaker system for which even a Jaguar competitor, Aston Martin, expressed appreciation at a recent trade show.

The apogee of such exotic sound systems appearing as factory options in luxury brands may well be the 1.1-kilowatt (that’s more than 1,000 watts) Naim Audio systems, which will become an option on all Bentley Motors cars this summer. Naim spent more than two years developing the systems, said Paul Stephenson, the company’s managing director.

The work included upgrading the car’s wiring, developing powerful amplifiers that were efficient enough to work in a car and measuring the side panels of each model’s interior to prevent the doors from vibrating. Such vibrations can cause distortion and effectively turn the doors into massive speakers, contributing to sound leakage to the outside. The system’s cost has not been announced.

Naim tested 139 different speaker prototypes and created its own computer software to analyze the acoustic qualities of each car paired with different audio system designs. It literally involved engineers riding in test cars with laptops and microphones to get precise readings. Naim said the sound system can perform the sonic trick of automatically equalizing the music according to the position of the convertible top.

But can an over-the-top sound system sway a buyer to purchase a particular car? “It wouldn’t make me buy a Lexus,” Mr. Ziemer said. “But it would influence my choice between two luxury cars — if I were buying a luxury car.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/au...s/22SOUND.html





PwC: Global Music Spending To Decline Gradually By 2012
FMQB

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has released its Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2008-2012, a comprehensive prediction of spending on all types of media over the next few years. According to PwC, worldwide spending on recorded music will drop slightly every year, with a 0.6 percent annual decline predicted. Global spending will decline from last year's $33.4 billion to $32.5 billion by 2012.

Digital music sales, of course, will continue on the upswing, with PWC predicting a 20 percent annual increase in sales. By 2012, the U.S. is expected to spend $5 billion on digital music, but Asia will lead the way with $7.5 billion. Digital revenues are expected to surpass physical music sales by 2012 in the States.

Overall, PWC predicts revenue from the entertainment and media industries to grow by an average of 6.6 percent annual, hitting $2.2 trillion worldwide by 2012. The music industry was predicted to be the weakest area of the entertainment and media industries, while television is expected to be stronger than many experts have forecasted. "The oft-reported death of traditional media remains greatly exaggerated," PwC stated. http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=754891

Gap Still Wide In Digital Vs. Physical Music Sales

According to a new report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), global music sales dropped 8 percent to $19.4 billion in 2007, reaching their lowest level in at least 10 years. Physical sales of CDs and DVDs fell 13 percent to $15.9 billion. And while sales of digital downloads and ringtones rose 34 percent to $2.9 billion, the increase is still not enough to make up for the lagging physical sales.

Digital sales "are growing healthily but, crucially, not fast enough to arrest the overall decline of the market," said IFPI Chairman John Kennedy, according to Bloomberg News.

The IFPI report also shows that Internet piracy is still a major problem. There were 30 billion illegal downloads around the world in 2007, with 39 percent of teenagers in the U.S. using file-sharing networks to access music. Physical and digital piracy cost the U.S. music industry $5.3 billion, and digital piracy accounted for 70 percent of that figure, the report said.

"Even the most innovative business models are totally undermined by free music," Kennedy commented.

In an effort to help solve the problem of piracy, the IFPI said that engaging the support of Internet service providers is an industry priority, as research suggests that more than two-thirds of file-sharers would stop their activity if they received a warning note from their providers. Furthermore, the cabinet of French President Nicolas Sarkozy approved a draft bill on Wednesday to introduce new sanctions aimed at individuals who illegally download content from the Internet.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=754838





Coldplay's Sales Feats Heat Up Album Charts
Billboard

Coldplay keeps the top soil fertile on the Billboard 200, as "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends" opens with 721,000 sold.

With that U.S. splash, the British band ices the No. 1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic as it holds court for a second week on the U.K. albums chart. Coming a week after Lil Wayne joined the million-per-week club with "Tha Carter III," Coldplay's American splash invokes a few "first since" chart feats.

This marks the first time since March 2005 that the Billboard 200 was led by a 700,000-plus sum in consecutive weeks. The last occasion happened when 50 Cent's "The Massacre" sold 1.1 million in its first frame, then 771,000 in its second.

The parlay from Lil Wayne, now No. 2 with 308,000 sold, to Coldplay also represents just the second time in Nielsen SoundScan history that two different albums open north of 700,000 in back-to-back weeks. Britney Spears' "Oops! ... I Did It Again" and Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" accomplished that feat in May 2000, when they each started with million-plus weeks; 1.8 million for "LP" and 1.3 million for "Oops!"

Following a 2005 start of 737,000 for "X&Y," Coldplay also becomes the first act to field weeks of 700,000-plus copies on consecutive albums since September and the first band or group to do so since 2001.

Kanye West was the last artist to do it, when "Graduation" arrived last year with first-week sales of 957,000 after his "Late Registration" rang 860,000 in 2005. 'N Sync became the last ensemble to do so when it followed its historic 2.4 million-unit launch of "No Strings Attached" in 2000 with an opener of 1.9 million the following year for "Celebrity."

Similar to the battle of divas that happened a couple of months ago, when Mariah Carey's "E=MC2" had a bigger U.S. number while Madonna's "Hard Candy" had larger global success, with more No. 1s scored outside the United States, Coldplay has more of an impact on Billboard's Hits of the World charts than Lil Wayne did.

The band's "Viva" goes No. 1 in 18 of the global territories tracked by Billboard. With 15 of those aces notched in Europe, the set also leads the Euro Albums chart.

By contrast, Canada was the only country outside the States where Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III" went No. 1. Its highest rank outside North America was a No. 11 start in Portugal.

According to Nielsen SoundScan's Building chart, posted June 25, Coldplay will likely have the first album in 10 weeks to hold at No. 1 for more than a week, as it appears the top bow on the upcoming list will be a No. 2 or No. 3 start for Motley Crue's "Saints of Los Angeles." Carey's "E=MC2" was the last to hold the fort for multiple weeks.http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...42476320080628

Top Pop Catalog Albums for the 7/5/2008 Issue

Now Last Weeks Peak
1 11 68 1 X&Y - Coldplay (Capitol)
2 3 949 1 Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers - Bob Marley And The Wailers (Tuff Gong/Island/UMe)
3 2 28 1 I Can Only Imagine: Platinum Edition - Various Artists (INO/Time Life)
4 15 211 1 A Rush Of Blood To The Head - Coldplay (Capitol)
5 24 200 1 Parachutes - Coldplay (Nettwerk/Capitol)
6 1 763 1 Journey's Greatest Hits - Journey (Legacy/Columbia/Sony BMG)
7 4 222 1 Greatest Hits - Guns N' Roses (Geffen/IGA)
8 - 9 8 Pacific Ocean Blue: Legacy Edition - Dennis Wilson (Caribou/Epic/Legacy/Sony BMG)
9 6 252 1 Thriller 25 - Michael Jackson (Legacy/Epic/Sony BMG)
10 7 176 1 It's Time - Michael Buble (143/Reprise/Warner Bros.)
http://www.reuters.com/article/billb...35760120080627





Prince Strikes Again: Sues to Stop Norwegian Tribute Project
TDS Editors

The long arm of Prince strikes again.

One of the little man’s biggest fans ever, a Norwegian label owner and TV-star by the name of Christer Falck, head of C+C Records, thought he’d celebrate TAFKATAFKAP‘s 50th birthday by asking some 50 Norwegian artists to pick one song from Prince’s huge catalog and record their own version. The plan was to release a 5-CD box of these covers and spread them to the world in 5000 copies as a gesture of love (no-one got paid).

The 81-track, 5-CD set was released earlier this month to rave reviews in many of Norway’s numerous daily newspapers (VG, Dagbladet, Aftenposten , Dagsavsien, Morgenbladet ) and immediately entered the country’s album charts at #8 (a first for a tribute album).

Of course Christer thought he’d give the Purple One himself a copy, and got in touch to present his plan. Well, as word reached Prince via his management, he responded with a “over my dead 50-year old body”. Dagbladet, the country’s second largest daily, now reports that Prince’s lawyers have sued C+C Records and asked for all copies of the tribute to be destroyed.

The album is still listed on the label’s website and snippets of many of the tracks can be heard on this MySpace page.
http://www.thedailyswarm.com/swarm/p...ibute-project/





Joss Stone: Piracy is Brilliant, Music Should be Shared
Ernesto

They are quite rare events but on occasion, artists actually encourage fans to share their music online. Singer Joss Stone has no problem doing so at all. In fact, after a recent concert in Argentina she said that piracy is “brilliant”.

Joss Stone, who won a Grammy last year, loves music, but hates the the music industry. In a recent interview she said that - unlike herself - most artists are brainwashed by the industry, and she encouraged people to share her music.

After the show a reporter asked her what she thinks of piracy, and people who download her songs off the Internet. Her response baffled the reporter, as she simply told him: “I think it’s great…” There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, the reporter probably expected to hear something else from her. “Great?,” he said.

“Yeah, I love it. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why,” Stone continued. “Music should be shared. [...] The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share.”

“It’s ok, if one person buys it, it’s totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don’t care. I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show, and have a great time listening to the live show it’s totally cool. I don’t mind. I’m happy that they hear it.”

Stone went on to say that most artists have probably been “brainwashed” by the record labels, when they discourage their fans from downloading music. Of course, Stone is not the only artist who actually wants people to share their work. Last year rapper 50 Cent made some positive remarks about filesharing, and Nine Inch Nails takes it even further, as they upload their music onto BitTorrent sites themselves.

These artists are spot on, in fact, several studies have shown that artists actually benefit from filesharing. The more music people share, the more CDs they buy and the more concerts they visit.
http://torrentfreak.com/joss-stone-p...lliant-080625/





Recording Industry Decries AM-FM Broadcasting as 'A Form of Piracy'
David Kravets

The recording industry and U.S. radio companies have squared off for decades about whether AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels.

But now the debate is getting meaner; there's more at stake as the recording industry seeks new income avenues in the wake of wanton peer-to-peer piracy and declining CD sales in part due to the iPod and satellite radio. A U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as Thursday on a royalty measure.

On Monday, the recording industry sent the National Association of Broadcasters -- the trade group representing the $16 billion a year AM-FM broadcasting business -- a can of herring to underscore that it believes its arguments against paying royalties are a red herring. The NAB says its members should not pay royalties because AM-FM radio "promotes" the music industry.

The herring present followed another gift -- a dictionary, a bid by the recording industry to explain what it saw as the difference between fees and taxes. The NAB describes the latest royalty proposal as a tax.

And two weeks ago, the recording industry, under the umbrella group musicFIRST, sent the NAB four digital downloads: "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band; "Pay me My Money Down" by Bruce Springsteen; "Back In the U.S.S.R" by Paul McCartney and "A Change Would Do You Good" by Sheryl Crow.

Broadcasting music without payment is akin to piracy, the industry says.

"It's a form of piracy, if you will, but not in the classic sense as we think of it," said Martin Machowsky, a musicFirst spokesman. "Today we gifted them a can of herring, about their argument that they provide promotional value. We think that's a red herring. Nobody listens to the radio for the commercials."

The coalition includes the Recording Industry Association of America, Society of Singers, Rhythm & Blues Foundation, Recording Academy and others.

The argument boils down to this: Radio is making billions off the backs of recording artists and their labels; and the recording artists gain invaluable exposure because they're on the radio, so royalties should not have to be paid.

A House subcommittee is expected to approve a royalty bill perhaps as early as Thursday. The measure, HR 4789, sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-California, would move to the full House Judiciary Committee -- legislation that the National Association of Broadcasters said would cost the industry as much as $7 billion annually.

An identical proposal, S 2500, is in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rates under both proposals would be negotiated, although small and public stations would pay a flat $5,000 annually.

Internet, cable and satellite broadcasters pay royalties to all participants involved. Singers, musicians and the labels get no royalties when AM-FM radio broadcasters air their songs.

That would change under both the Senate and House proposals. Composers and songwriters, however, do get AM-FM royalties, which are set under a complicated and negotiated rate.

"If it wasn't for radio play, most of the performers wouldn't be known," said Dennis Wharton, a NAB vice president.

The group says that free airplay generates as much as $2.4 billion a year for the recording industry.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ing-indus.html





BlogTalkRadio Chats About New Funding and New Plans
Brad Stone

The pirates of radio are losing their eye-patches and going legit.

In the old creaky-wheel analog days, people who didn’t have the face, voice or political views for traditional radio turned to the slightly romantic practice of broadcasting illegally over unlicensed radio frequencies.

But today there is the more legitimate and egalitarian medium of podcasts, and a host of companies are eager to get people up and running and to make their broadcasts available on the Web.

One of those companies, BlogTalkRadio, has drawn attention of late by making it easy for the talkers to start talking with nothing more than a computer and a telephone. The New Jersey company said it just closed an initial $4.6 million round of funding led by The Kraft Group, the owners of the New England Patriots, and some ambitious plans for expansion.

BlogTalkRadio was founded in 2006 by former telecom executive Alan Levy, who demonstrated a knack for good timing in the 1990s by starting and selling his company before the walls caved in on the industry. After the bust, Mr. Levy began buying distressed telecom assets and ultimately turned some of that excess capacity into BlogTalkRadio.

The service lets anyone host a live radio talk show over the telephone or Internet, complete with live guests and callers. I gave it a try, interviewing Mr. Levy:

BlogTalkRadio splits the advertising revenue with show creators. Recent voices on BlogTalkRadio shows have included Senators John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, actor Brad Pitt and Web media mogul Arianna Huffington.

Three million listeners tuned in last month to more than 12,000 radio segments. Compared to terrestrial and satellite radio, that’s a small start, but now the start-up has a war chest. Mr. Levy said the company will use the $4.6 million to expand its offerings to companies (Sun Microsystems, Intel and the Department of Defense all have channels on the site) and to add live video to the service.

Like any good Web entrepreneur, Mr. Levy says the old way of doing things is doomed.

“What blogs have done to newspapers and magazines, I think companies like BlogTalkRadio can do to talk radio. I don’t see how they can compete in a world where there is unlimited opportunity for people to communicate, and when you bring so many people into the conversation,” he said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0.../index.html?hp





Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue
Richard Pérez-Peña

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

Analysts and newspaper executives find themselves revising their forecasts downward every few months, unable to gain a stable footing on a sinking floor. Papers have cut costs by shedding thousands of workers, eliminating some distribution routes and printing fewer, smaller pages, but profit margins continue to shrink.

Since the fall, when Media General, the owner of a major newspaper chain in the South, set its 2008 budget, “We have pulled our thinking down twice with respect to revenue,” said Marshall N. Morton, the chief executive.

Over the next few years, he predicted, “There’s got to be some assimilation,” with some major American newspapers going out of business or merging. At the corporate level, he said, “I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see combinations.”

Analysts have issued warnings about several companies’ abilities to meet their debt obligations, though the companies insist that they are at no risk of default.

Most of those companies are privately held, like the Tribune Company, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and many other papers; MediaNews Group, whose papers include The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News; and Philadelphia Media Holdings, which publishes The Inquirer and The Daily News in that city.

Some analysts also see a lesser risk in a major publicly traded chain, the McClatchy Company, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, which said last week that its ad revenue was down 15.4 percent through the first five months of the year.

The company announced plans to eliminate about 1,400 jobs, leaving it with 21 percent fewer employees than it had a year and a half ago. Some other newspaper chains had already made comparable cuts.

“It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company. Even with less severe losses, “You’re going to see structural changes: papers could drop a day or two per week, they could outsource printing.”

He said that he expected the decline in ad sales to slow, with 2008 producing a 10 percent drop for the year, but he cautioned that, like other analysts, he had not been pessimistic enough so far.

The primary long-term threat to newspapers is the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue, a trend that has been under way for more than a decade, but one that has picked up speed in the last year. Advertisers have vastly more choices online than on paper, so newspaper Web sites win only a fraction of the advertising that goes digital, and it pays much less than advertising in print.

At the same time, the Internet has drawn millions of new readers to papers, and the major ones reach far more readers than ever before.

“As long as we’ve got content, we’ve got something nobody else has,” said Mr. Morton, of Media General. The industry’s challenge, he said, is to keep expanding that audience, “proving to the advertiser that we, in fact, are the right link so that he can have his conversation with the customer through us.”

Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20 percent to 30 percent annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15 percent. The Internet still accounts for less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue.

Declining sales of printed papers and rising newsprint prices have also hurt the business.

The industry will not bottom out for another three or four years, analysts predict. The question, Mr. Appert of Goldman Sachs said, “is how far things will fall before then.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...a/23paper.html





Murdoch Fumes as Facebook Overtakes MySpace
Barry Collins

Facebook has overtaken rival social network MySpace for the first time - provoking an angry outburst from the man who paid $580m for MySpace only three years ago.

Facebook had 123m unique visitors in May, an increase of 162% on May 2007, according to the latest Comscore figures.

By contrast, MySpace drew 114.6m uniques, with visitors growing by only 5% since May 2007.

It's the first time Facebook has managed a significant lead over its chief rival, after the pair were almost level-pegging in Comscore's April figures.

The news hasn't gone down well with News Corp boss, Rupert Murdoch, whose company bought MySpace back in 2005. He claims Facebook has "done a great job of being flavour of the month the last six months of last year," but that Facebook isn't a real social network, claiming the site is "just a directory".

Murdoch has long been exasperated by the rise of Facebook. When asked last year whether sites such as MySpace were responsible for declining newspaper sales, he quipped: "I wish they were. They're all going to Facebook."

Whether Facebook can turn its success into profit is the big question. The privately-held company doesn't report financial figures, although Microsoft's 1.6% stake in the company valued it at $15 billion last year.

With $40 billion burning a hole in its pocket following the collapse of the Yahoo deal, Microsoft has been consistently linked with a takeover of Facebook, although CEO Steve Ballmer last week talked down the possibility of a deal. "People don't understand what they're talking about," he told The Financial Times. "At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/207876/m...s-myspace.html





Judge Ends Facebook’s Feud With ConnectU
Brad Stone

Facebook has finally closed the book on its long-running, multi-front legal battle with the rival college social network ConnectU — but not before a new question was raised about Facebook’s supposed $15 billion valuation.

Late Wednesday, Judge James Ware of Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., sided with Facebook, enforcing a February settlement between the companies and dismissing ConnectU’s allegations that Facebook fraudulently misrepresented the value of the stock in the settlement agreement.

The Facebook-ConnectU case, which undermined the reputation of the founder Mark Zuckerberg for ingenuity and honesty, was a publicity nightmare for the social networking site and a boon for reporters fascinated by the Palo Alto, Calif., company.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s former Harvard classmates, the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, accused Mr. Zuckerberg of stealing their idea while they were all undergraduates. The ConnectU founders fought right to the end, settling the dispute in mediation, then contesting the settlement and battling with the lawyers who had represented them in the talks.

A couple of interesting items from Judge Ware’s decision enforcing the settlement:

ConnectU was apparently upset that Facebook’s valuation is not, as media reports have widely suggested, $15 billion, the valuation at which Microsoft invested in the company last year. The judge’s ruling says that subsequent to the $15 billion valuation, “Facebook’s board of directors determined a value of the company’s shares which was different than the valuation disclosed in the press release” announcing the Microsoft investment. That diluted the settlement amount, apparently enough to give ConnectU second thoughts. The decision does not reveal Facebook’s current valuation.

Howard Winklevoss — a former professor of actuarial science at the University of Pennyslvania, father of the ConnectU twins and a ConnectU shareholder — was clearly a force behind the dispute. ConnectU tried to argue that since he did not sign the settlement, it was not valid. Judge Ware rejected that argument.

Facebook itself issued a statement last night, breathing a sigh of relief:

We are happy that Judge Ware enforced the agreement settling our dispute with the ConnectU founders. ConnectU’s founders were represented by six lawyers and a professor at Wharton Business School when they signed the settlement agreement. The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the court rejected their false allegations of fraud. Their challenge was simply a case of “buyer’s remorse,” as described by the Boston court earlier this month.

We were disappointed that we had to litigate the settlement, as we believed we were caught in the middle of a fee dispute between ConnectU’s founders and its former counsel. Nevertheless, we can now consider this chapter closed and wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck in their future endeavors.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ctu/index.html





He Said, She Said: Which Is It? Facebook Asks

Social network site Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself."

The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances.

But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.

"We've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement.

In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages.

"People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote.

Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained.

The site will now let users specify whether they are male or female on their basic membership profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves.

Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities.

"We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

The option is similar to a feature that lets members hide birthdays or the year they were born, a spokeswoman added.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...33402020080627





Children Concerned by Parents' Web Habits
Paul O'Mahony

Children in Sweden are becoming increasingly concerned by their parents' internet habits, according to a new report from Children's Rights in Society (Barnens Rätt i Samhället - BRIS).

Last year the organization dealt with 1,895 IT-related cases, up sharply on figures from the previous year. Further investigation revealed that more than 100 of the children who made contact with BRIS did so because they were in some way worried about their parent's behaviour on the internet.

Dads visiting pornographic websites represented the most common complaint, while philandering fathers were also a cause for concern.

"It seems that my dad is 'unfaithful'," wrote one 15-year-old boy.

"I read his MSN conversation log. I was just curious. And then I saw that he was talking to, like, young girls. And the disgusting part is that he's 53!

"And they talk about sex and how they're going to meet and everything. It makes me want to puke. It really makes me feel bad.

"I don't know if I should tell mum because I'm worried they'll get a divorce. Please, what should I do?"

The report also made it clear that children were not the only ones spending inordinate amounts of time in front of the computer.

One 12-year-old girl called the organization to explain that she rarely got to speak to her mum anymore. Her mother spent most of her time sitting half naked in front of the computer and posting photos of herself on the internet, the girl said.

Another girl's mother had begun devoting all her attention to a computer game.

"I know it sounds ridiculous but my mother has started playing the computer game WoW, World of Warcraft," wrote the 13-year-old.

"This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what's important to me. And when she's not at the computer she's like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing. I'm not doing so well."

While parents' web behaviour is clearly a growing problem, the majority of cases covered in the Children, BRIS and IT report related to: love and friendship (47 percent), insults, threats and assault (15 percent) and sex (10 percent).
http://www.thelocal.se/12640.html





Firefox 3 Reaches 20 Million downloads in 7 Days, Opera - 4.5 Million Downloads in 5 Days

It’s been 7 days since Firefox 3 launch and so far it was downloaded more than 20 million times, 8,290,908 downloads were in 24 hours.

What is surprising is that Opera 9.5 was downloaded more than 4.5 million times in 5 days. By comparing their market share data:

Firefox, May 08 - 18.41%
Opera, May 08 - 0.71%

and download numbers, you can see that while Firefox has 25x times more market share than Opera does, it’s only 1/4 ahead (in downloads count) which is quite surprising.
http://www.favbrowser.com/firefox-3-...ads-in-5-days/





Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as DRM-free Digital Bundles (Including EPUB)
Andrew Savikas

Update: On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David).

Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and until quite recently Safari Books Online, our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson, generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business.

But it's clear that things are changing in the ebook market (though precise numbers are proving hard to come by), so we've decided to officially announce two new e-publishing programs that have been in the works for some time:

• First, through oreilly.com we will offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price -- starting in early July. Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. That also means that although the ebooks aren't yet available, if you buy the PDF now, you'll receive the EPUB and Mobipocket versions as a free update once they're available in early July. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) will be released without any DRM, though we are exploring some custom watermarking options. With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).
• Second, O'Reilly has agreed to sell select ebooks for the Kindle through Amazon. We hope to see those ebooks available for sale through the Kindle store in the near future.

While we would have liked to make these ebooks available sooner, we felt it was important to first contribute to building some of the tools needed for other publishers to follow our lead, such as enhancements to the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets, which can now generate EPUB from DocBook XML source files.

We do intend to eventually offer as much of our catalog as possible as ebooks (some titles have rights restrictions; others are so old they present challenges from a format-conversion standpoint), but the July pilot program will be limited to a few dozen, including the titles listed below. Any of these can be purchased as a PDF right away, with the full ebook bundle provided in early July as a free update:

• iPhone: The Missing Manual
• Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
• Facebook: The Missing Manual
• Making Things Happen
• Open Sources 2.0
• The Art of Agile Development
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed

We'll announce the full list of titles when they're all available in early July.

Why just a few dozen? Besides wanting to limit this to an experimental pilot before committing resources to some not-insignificant ecommerce updates, much of our catalog relies heavily on computer code and complex tables -- two types of content that are not rendered well on most of today's ebook readers. Sure, there are some ugly hacks to make code blocks look a little better on a Kindle, but we're holding out for true monospace font support. Ditto for support of many of the special characters used in books like Unicode Explained and Fonts and Encodings. Even Adobe's Digital Editions chokes on a lot of the non-standard characters we use in many of our books (yes, it's possible to embed fonts, but many more characters should be supported out of the box). Our hope is that in the coming months, ebook readers will improve enough to make more of our titles truly usable for ebook customers. (And when there is uncertainty stemming from rendering, customers will also have the full-featured PDF in the bundle as a reference.)

Whether the future of books (and of publishing) revolves around ebooks is certainly debatable; ebooks may be just a stepping stone toward truly digital and networked reading. Until that future is more certain, we're excited to be on the frontier, and look forward to seeing other publishers follow.
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/06/selec...al-bundle.html





Nothing Sells Like Celebrity
Julie Creswell

EARLY last year, marketing executives at Totes Isotoner, a Cincinnati company that had spent the previous 30 years churning out a reliable lineup of humble umbrellas, crowded around a computer and listened to a teenage singer from Barbados named Rihanna breeze through a tune titled, appropriately, “Umbrella.”

The song, not yet released, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a stick-in-your-head hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” Totes, which hadn’t deployed celebrity endorsements since the former N.F.L. quarterback Dan Marino hawked its gloves more than a decade earlier, was smitten. “Umbrella” became a corporate rallying cry, with the song drifting through Totes’ offices at all hours.

Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas.

“Umbrella” went on to become a huge, Grammy-winning hit. And Totes, although it declines to discuss sales data, describes its relationship with Rihanna as “invaluable.” The company, which had never tried such a sweeping design shake-up before, says it now reaches younger shoppers and that traffic on its Web site — which links to Rihanna’s own site — has soared.

“We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”

But where the star ends and the product and pitch begin has grown less and less discernible in the era of the human billboard.

These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, medications, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or even mutual funds.

Nicole Kidman sashays in ads for Chanel No. 5 perfume. Eva Longoria, the bombshellette star of “Desperate Housewives,” sells L’Oréal Paris hair color. Jessica Simpson struts for a hair extension company, HairUWear, and the acne skin-care line Proactiv Solution. And Jamie Lee Curtis spoons up Dannon Activia yogurt while promoting environmentally friendly Honda cars.

Using celebrities for promotion is hardly new. Film stars in the 1940s posed for cigarette companies, and Bob Hope pitched American Express in the late 1950s. Joe Namath slipped into Hanes pantyhose in the 1970s, and Bill Cosby jiggled for Jell-O for three decades. Sports icons like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods elevated the practice, often scoring more in endorsement and licensing dollars than from their actual sports earnings.

But over the last decade, corporate brands have increasingly turned to Hollywood celebrities and musicians to sell their products. Stars showed up in nearly 14 percent of ads last year, according to Millward Brown, a marketing research agency. While that number has more than doubled in the past decade, it is off from a peak of 19 percent in 2004. (Hey, it could be more extreme: Celebrities appear in 24 percent of the ads in India and 45 percent in Taiwan.)

Starlets and aging rockers are likely to continue popping up in ads for a very simple reason: Celebrity sells. If consumers believe that a certain star or singer might actually use the product sales can take off.

“The reality is people want a piece of something they can’t be,” says Eli Portnoy, a branding strategist. “They live vicariously through the products and services that those celebrities are tied to. Years from now, our descendants may look at us and say, ‘God, these were the most gullible people who ever lived.’ “

Newer forces are also propping up the celebrity-endorsement boom. Companies, trying to align themselves ever closer to A-list stars (as well as B-listers, C-listers and reality TV pseudocelebrities) and their quicksilver fame are constantly seeking new ways to merge the already-blurry lines between the commercial and entertainment worlds.

Television programmers and music producers are particularly eager to play along as joint marketing deals offer artists new ways to reach audiences while also defraying their own marketing costs. Celebrities have also grown much more sophisticated about the structure and payouts of endorsement deals.

Last fall, the rapper-impresario Sean Combs created a 50-50 joint venture with Diageo, the spirits giant, for Mr. Combs to be the brand manager of the Ciroc vodka line. Mr. Combs says he made the profit-sharing deal only after refusing to work solely as a pitchman.

“My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to do just endorsements. I want ownership.”

In the few short years since she exploded onto the music scene, Rihanna, now 20, has been involved in about a dozen endorsement and licensing deals. Behind the scenes, her representatives say they vet every offer for two key criteria: how does it support the brand known as Rihanna, and will it help sell more albums?

Rihanna’s commercial for a lip gloss, CoverGirl Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers, opens with outtakes from her steamy “Umbrella” video, then morphs into a close-up of her wearing the lip gloss before ending with a shot of her album cover — leaving viewers possibly confused whether they just saw an ad for a lip gloss or an album. (Totes, for its part, says it cares not a whit about CoverGirl also capitalizing on “Umbrella.” The more the merrier, its executives say, because ubiquity benefits everybody in brandland.)

To be sure, marrying a brand to a celebrity has its perils. Just last month, Christian Dior yanked ads from China featuring the actress Sharon Stone after she suggested that the earthquakes that killed tens of thousands of people in China were karmic retribution for the country’s policies toward Tibet.

Yet no less an expert than the comedian Ellen DeGeneres enthusiastically embraces the endorsement whirlwind.

“It’s flattering that companies think of you and they want to work with you,” she says, adding that she is working with American Express because she liked earlier ads the company did with Jerry Seinfeld. The AmEx ads routinely appear first during her talk show.

Although she says she would consider other endorsement deals, she’s not actively looking. Besides, she says, quality counts.

“I would not feel good if I had made a deal and was making money for something that I’m not proud of and don’t have any control over,” she says. “Now watch, cut to next week and I’m endorsing five different things. Look, bread! Isn’t it great? And what goes well with bread? Mayonnaise!”

BEYONCÉ is hot. Red hot. The numbers prove it.

On the Davie Brown Index, an independent online rating system that was started two years ago to track the marketing power of celebrities, the singing sensation scores 81.31 on a 100-point scale.

The index bases its score on eight metrics, including influence and trendsetting abilities, and is used by corporate marketers to pinpoint desirable boldface names. With that score, Beyoncé is 27th among the more than 1,800 celebrities that the D.B.I. tracks. (The top five are Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Michael Jordan, Morgan Freeman and George Clooney. The presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are 9th and 25th, respectively.)

One Davie Brown category in which most celebrities appear vulnerable is trust. Celebrities are recognizable and appealing, but are often viewed with skepticism. “Trust always seems to be the lowest score among celebrities,” observes Matt Fleming, a Davie Brown account director who helps brands evaluate celebrity talent.

SO if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions? The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s.

First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane, daily activities of stars on a 24/7 basis. A voracious public eager to peek at Hollywood celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted, in turn, to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves.

The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs, Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to slap their personal brands on clothing lines, fragrances and other goods. After hip-hop impresarios narrowed the divide between popular music and blatant hucksterism, other popular musicians followed suit.

“Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” says Steve Stoute, an ad executive who has matched such celebrities and brands as Justin Timberlake and McDonald’s, Gwen Stefani and Hewlett-Packard, and Jay-Z with Reebok.

The lucre that pours in from successful endorsements, meanwhile, has convinced celebrities that it’s wise to be much more open to such deals than they once were.

“Seven years ago, the belief among celebrities was that perfume was something you did at the end of a career,” says Bernd Beetz, the chief executive of Coty. “Now it’s different and seen as a key step in the start of a career.”

In 2002, Coty released Glow by JLo, in a successful rollout; global sales peaked at $78 million worldwide in 2003 before falling to $41.4 million last year, according to Euromonitor International, which tracks sales of consumer goods.

Glow by JLo is credited with ushering in a wave of celebrity fragrances. Britney Spears, Tim McGraw, Céline Dion, Halle Berry and even the “Grey’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey have either created fragrance lines or are about to do so.

And they want you to know that they really like the products. Really.

“I wear my cologne all of the time,” says Mr. Dempsey, whose fragrance will be introduced by Avon Products in November. “This is a whole different experience and a real education for me, and it has been something that I’ve been involved with every step of the way.”

With consumers facing so many choices these days, an emotional connection with a certain celebrity may make the difference between whether a shopper’s hand stops over one product or moves on to the competition.

“As consumers, we see over 3,156 images a day. We’re just not conscious of them,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the consumer research firm NPD Group. “Our subconscious records maybe 150, and only 30 or so reach our conscious behavior. If I have a celebrity as part of that message, I just accelerated the potential for my product to reach the conscious of the consumer.”

Even savvy, skeptical consumers who understand that stars are paid to support a product may still rely on an endorsement and buy the brand anyway, says Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University.

“We’ve used our cognitive capacity to build a sophisticated informational and technological environment,” he says. But overloaded with information and stimulation, shoppers’ brains revert to a more primitive, raw association of celebrity and product, Mr. Cialdini explains.

Because a celebrity link may entice consumers, brands continue to use stars as the public face of a corporate entity (Avon hired Reese Witherspoon to be its “global ambassador”); as emissaries for new products (the luxury goods company Tod’s is using Gwyneth Paltrow to introduce a new handbag); or as fresh faces to reinvigorate an aging product (Ms. Kidman for Chanel No. 5).

After Chanel signed Ms. Kidman in 2003 to a high-end campaign, which included a mini-movie commercial shot by the film director Baz Luhrmann, global sales of Chanel’s classic perfume have jumped 30 percent, according to Euromonitor. Likewise, sales in Nike’s golf division jumped smartly after the company hired Tiger Woods as a spokesman. (Nike declined to offer specific sales data.)

Such results aren’t lost on other companies.

“Our primary goal is to tell our clients how beautifully this product is made, and to have a person like Gwyneth wear it is the perfect way to create the magic touch,” says Claudio Castiglioni, general manager of Tod’s.

Mr. Stoute says companies need help forming alliances with performers in order to reach fast-growing young Hispanic and urban markets.

“You get corporations and artists in the same room, and the conversation doesn’t align,” Mr. Stoute says. “It’s like Mars and Jupiter.”

The bigger risk for corporations, however, is spending tons of money on a celebrity and a glitzy campaign and not getting results.

Angelina Jolie doesn’t do many endorsement deals, but she did agree to one for the upscale clothier St. John Knits. Analysts say she wasn’t the right fit for St. John, which had hoped that she would revamp its conservative image. The company declined to comment on the ads.

Besides trying to carefully match a brand with a celebrity, some corporations say they also value exclusivity.

“We can’t stop them from signing other endorsements,” says Geralyn R. Breig, Avon’s global brand president, who was involved in bringing on Ms. Witherspoon last year. “But we didn’t want our spokesperson to be someone who was deal-happy.”

JEFF STRAUGHN rocks back and forth in his office chair, chugging coffee as he describes the challenge he faced three years ago when he left a Madison Avenue ad agency to join the Island Def Jam record label with a new mandate: carve out branding deals with corporations that will raise the visibility of Island Def Jam artists.

Among his first assignments: a young vocalist who had been signed to the label by Jay-Z, then Def Jam’s chief executive, and whose first album was about to be released: Rihanna.

“Here was a girl that no one was quite sure how to pronounce her name and quite a few people didn’t know where Barbados was,” he says. “But we knew we had a pop superstar here.”

What better way to drum up interest in Rihanna among teenagers than a shopping mall tour? As luck would have it, the Secret brand of Procter & Gamble was looking to introduce a new body spray and wanted to align the campaign with an emerging singer.

Secret ended up sponsoring a 12-city mall tour for Rihanna, financing various production costs and creating a MySpace site where fans could get tickets for the shows.

While her first concert attracted about 250 people, Rihanna was drawing crowds of 2,500 when the tour closed. A star — and a pitchwoman — were being born.

Mr. Straughn and Rihanna’s managers, meanwhile, actively negotiated other deals, including one with the Barbados Tourism Authority, which used portions of a video for one of Rihanna’s early songs in television ads.

Eight months after her debut album, Rihanna released a second album, whose hit song “S.O.S.” prompted a deal with Nike. Rihanna shot a separate music video for the song, singing and dancing in a high school gym in a new line of Nike fitness dance clothes.

She also did deals with J. C. Penney and Nokia, then with a juice and tea company, Fuze. Rihanna featured Fuze drinks in one of her videos, and the company put six-foot-tall displays of the singer in grocery stores.

While Rihanna was paid for some of her work, the endorsements were intended to raise her visibility, push her music — and her brand — in new ways to consumers, and perhaps save the record label some marketing expenses.

BY the time Rihanna was on the verge of releasing her third album, “Good Girl Gone Bad,” the offers for endorsement and licensing deals were flying in, Mr. Straughn says. Not all were good fits for the singer, who was trying to reach an older audience with the album.

“We said no to so many deals,” says Marc Jordan, one of her managers. “Either the fit wasn’t right — it was more about a check than extending Rihanna’s brand — or there was a disconnect between the brand and Rihanna.”

Despite the desire to reduce marketing costs, Mr. Straughn says he can’t push Rihanna or any of Def Jam’s other artists into doing endorsement deals they don’t want to do. He notes that many artists, like the Killers, don’t want to take part in any endorsement deals.

For her part, Rihanna has been a branding machine — though she says that she has grown more wary of overexposure.

“We started out trying to get everything we could and now we have to be a little more selective,” she says. “We have to hold back a little bit. It’s a good thing to have to say we can take things back a little bit.”

Last spring, she completed her deal with Totes, which was her first licensing arrangement. Meanwhile, CoverGirl, which planned a print ad and related campaigns for the singer and its Wetslicks lip gloss, was persuaded by Rihanna’s representatives to do a commercial as well.

CoverGirl executives saw a chance to connect their new product seamlessly to a megahit song.

“I knew in my gut that this was going to be a hit,” says Vince Hudson, marketing director for CoverGirl North America. “Def Jam needed to have promotion of her album, and CoverGirl wanted the product to be associated with the hot song. It was a win-win.”

As part of the promotion, CoverGirl allowed consumers to download the “Umbrella” video on its Web site and put displays in stores near its Fruit Spritzers product that allowed consumers to push a button to hear the song.

Mr. Straughn says Rihanna provides a good example of how the recording business is changing and how artists and brands can successfully wed without either feeling as if they’ve lost themselves. Rihanna, he crows, “is my single biggest success story.”

Earlier this year, P.& G. provided a glimpse into what the future of celebrity-branded advertising may look like: it’s creating a joint-venture record label with Island Def Jam.

The venture, called Tag Records, is headed up by the record producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri and will sign on new artists who, along with Mr. Dupri, will be the faces of P.& G.’s Tag body spray lines. (Aspiring artists hoping to get noticed will be able to upload their music to the Tag Web site, P.& G. says.)

“Our plan is to fully integrate and merge the music and the marketing for the new Tag body sprays that we have out there,” says Adam Weber, P.& G.’s brand manager for Tag. “This is different than the typical endorsement deal that has a start and end date. This is going to be ongoing throughout their entire career. The message becomes one and the same at some point between Tag and the artist.”

So are there any limits to what celebrities can endorse, or how far the celebrity pitch could go? Mr. Stoute briefly considers the question before jumping up and grabbing a framed front page from a newspaper.

“See that?” he asks, pointing to the picture in the center of the page, showing a General Motors S.U.V. in a metallic blue concept color that Jay-Z helped to design. “That’s Jay-Z blue! We invented a color! There are no limits. There is no such thing as too far.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/bu...a/22celeb.html





Comedic Legend George Carlin Dead at 71
AP

George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day. When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

When asked about the fallout from the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction," Carlin told the AP, "What are we, surprised?"

"On that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson's there was also a commercial about a 4-hour erection. A lot of people were saying about Janet Jackson, 'How do I explain to my kids? We're a little family, we watched it together ...' And, well, what did you say about the other thing? These are convenient targets."

Carlin was born May 12, 1937 and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Forth Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar.

Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."

Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_9671970





How the "Russert Test" Failed America
Linda Hirshman

The eulogists are right: Tim Russert was powerful. From calling Florida for Bush in 2000 to telling Al Gore to quit the contest after Election Day, to kneecapping Hillary Clinton in the debate in Philadelphia last October, Russert was a kingmaker. When he called the Democratic primary for Barack Obama last month, his fellow pundits compared it to the moment Walter Cronkite bailed on the war in Vietnam. I, for one, am looking forward to the rest of the electoral cycle without the domineering presence of NBC's electoral college of one.

It's not just that Russert abetted the Bush Administration in the Iraq War; much of the media shares that role. It's that he did damage in a wide range of contexts. There are two reasons for this: his tactics and his substance. Procedurally, there was what the Bushies actually called the "Russert Test." As they said after their candidate used an hour on Meet the Press to demonstrate his seriousness in 1999, and again in 2004, when as President he appeared on the show to stanch his fall in the polls, if you can survive an hour of Russert, you're vetted.

The biggest promoter of the Russert Test was Russert himself, as in this 2007 interview with John Elsasser of the Public Relations Society of America: "A political leader, particularly a president, can't make a tough decision unless theycan answer tough questions. So, you can always use that as an entree into the debate--a video question, but it's necessary to have follow-ups, too." And again on Sean Hannity's FOX program: "It's a TV show," Russert explained. "If you can't handle TV questions, how you gonna stand up to Iran and North Korea and the rest of the world?"

In fact, the Russert Test was exactly backwards. The better our leaders performed on Meet the Press, the worse their foreign policy seemed to be. Tough: tough. It sounds the same, right? But it's not the same. The political leaders who did the best answering Tim Russert's questions in the last seven years--Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell--are the authors of the most disastrous American foreign policy since the Vietnam War, and maybe since 1776.

The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research.

Since MTP was always looking back, the Bush Administration had a big advantage. Their new lies to Meet The Press were halfway round the world while The Daily Show was putting its boots on.

Russert's sunny manner also concealed that he was anything but a neutral journalist, advancing, somewhat covertly, the conservative trifecta: War on terror, war on women's reproductive rights, and war on Social Security.

The locus classicus of Russert's complicit support for going into Iraq is, of course, Dick Cheney's appearance on Meet the Press March 16, 2003, one week before the invasion:

RUSSERT: Many Americans and many people around the world are asking one question: Why is it acceptable for the United States to lead a military attack against a nation that has not attacked the United States? What's your answer?

There then follows an astonishing, nearly 1,000-word filibuster from the Vice President, including the key litany of assertions for the Iraq War:

CHENEY: ...where might these terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons? And Saddam Hussein becomes a prime suspect in that regard because of his past track record and because we know he has, in fact, developed these kinds of capabilities, chemical and biological weapons. We know he's used chemical weapons. We know he's reconstituted these programs since the Gulf War. We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization.

Just rereading it is enough to raise the hair on your neck, even these disastrous many years later. And what did that paragon of "tough" questioning do in response to this dirty dozen of false assertions ("we know, we know, we know") about to drive the United States into one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the Republic? He asked Cheney about the French:RUSSERT: French President Jacques Chirac said this morning, that perhaps there could be a deadline of 30 days or 60 days and he may be able to buy into that. What would be wrong for the United States to say to the world, "OK. We're going to give Saddam 30 days or 60 days and put some pressure on the French to step up and have a united front against Saddam Hussein"

Russert's inability to stay on target usually vanished, however, when the respondent espoused a liberal position. Here is Russert questioning Al Gore on (the horror) his support for abortion rights:

RUSSERT: When do you think life begins?

GORE: I favor the Roe vs. Wade approach, but let me just say, Tim, I did--

RUSSERT: Which is what? When does life begin?

GORE: Let me just say, I did change my position on the issue of federal funding and I changed it because I came to understand more from women--women think about this differently than men.

RUSSERT: But you were calling fetuses innocent human life, and now you don't believe life begins at conception. I'm just trying to find out, when do you believe life begins?

GORE: Well, look, the Roe vs. Wade decision proposes an answer to that question--

RUSSERT: Which is?

As the liberals sense a coming resurrection, they have begun to shine a light on the corrupt, decade-long conservative attack on Social Security, under the cloak of fiscal responsibility. Social Security, practically the last vestige of the New Deal left, is not going bankrupt any more than Saddam Hussein was about to go nuclear. But by far the loudest journalistic voice for this conservative attack on Social Security was Tim Russert. In this program from 2000, he manages to at once beat the drum for repealing Social Security and also use the sticks (again) on the Democratic candidate, Al Gore:

RUSSERT: If--the facts are simple: When Social Security began, Franklin Roosevelt, genius, he--the life expectancy at that point was 63. He made eligibility for Social Security 65...It was a--was a very popular program. There were 45 workers for every retiree and life expectancy was exactly that age. Now we're approaching two workers for every retiree. Life expectancy is 78 going to 85. You're going to have 80 million people on Social Security and Medicare for about a fourth of their life, for three to 20 years. Everyone knows that, and yet when you present it to Al Gore, he'll say, "No problem. I'll take the surplus and it'll pay for it." Even his own Secretary Treasury written volumes of reports--trustees reports, will say, "No, it doesn't work that way."
Everyone my age is checking their will (and their CAT scan insurance), and no one wishes a father and husband to drop dead at 58. But for many of us ordinary citizens, Tim Russert was a powerful man who mostly did harm in every way we can think of. So if it's all right with you, I think I'll turn the TV off now.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/8...d1bcc15b1e3837





Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
Brian Stelter

Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.

“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”

Ms. Logan let a sly just-kidding smile sneak through as she spoke, but her point was serious. Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.

“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”

In a telephone interview last week, Ms. Logan said the CBS News bureau in Baghdad was “drastically downsized” in the spring. The network now keeps a producer in the country, making it less of a bureau and more of an office.

Interviews with executives and correspondents at television news networks suggested that while the CBS cutbacks are the most extensive to date in Baghdad, many journalists shared varying levels of frustration about placing war stories onto newscasts. “I’ve never met a journalist who hasn’t been frustrated about getting his or her stories on the air,” said Terry McCarthy, an ABC News correspondent in Baghdad.

By telephone from Baghdad, Mr. McCarthy said he was not as busy as he was a year ago. A decline in the relative amount of violence “is taking the urgency out” of some of the coverage, he said. Still, he gets on ABC’s “World News” and other programs with stories, including one on Friday about American gains in northern Iraq.

Anita McNaught, a correspondent for the Fox News Channel, agreed. “The violence itself is not the story anymore,” she said. She counted eight reports she had filed since arriving in Baghdad six weeks ago, noting that cable news channels like Fox News and CNN have considerably more time to fill with news than the networks. CNN and Fox each have two fulltime correspondents in Iraq.

Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, who splits his time between Iraq and other countries, said he found his producers “very receptive to stories about Iraq.” He and other journalists noted that the heated presidential primary campaign put other news stories on the back burner earlier this year.

Ms. Logan said she begged for months to be embedded with a group of Navy Seals, and when she came back with the story, a CBS producer said to her, “One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform.” In the follow-up phone interview, Ms. Logan said the producer no longer worked at CBS. And in both interviews, she emphasized that many journalists at CBS News are pushing for war coverage, specifically citing Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” CBS News won a Peabody Award last week for a “60 Minutes” report about a Marine charged in the killings at Haditha.

On “The Daily Show,” Ms. Logan echoed the comments of other journalists when she said that many Americans seem uninterested in the wars now. Mr. McCarthy said that when he is in the United States, bringing up Baghdad at a dinner party “is like a conversation killer.”

Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year.

Both Ms. Logan and Mr. McCarthy noted that more coalition soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in May than in Iraq. No American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan, although CNN recently said it would open a bureau in Kabul.

“It’s terrible,” Ms. Logan said in the telephone interview. She called it a financial decision. “We can’t afford to maintain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time,” she said. “It’s so expensive and the security risks are so great that it’s prohibitive.”

Mr. Friedman said coverage of Iraq is enormously expensive, mostly due to the security risks. He said meetings with other television networks about sharing the costs of coverage have faltered for logistical reasons.

Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...logan.html?dpc





U.K. to Begin Microchipping Prisoners
David Gutierrez

The British government is developing a plan to track current and former prisoners by means of microchips implanted under the skin, drawing intense criticism from probation officers and civil rights groups.

As a way to reduce prison crowding, many British prisoners are currently released under electronic monitoring, carried out by means of an ankle bracelet that transmits signals like those used by mobile phones.

Now the Ministry of Justice is exploring the possibility of injecting prisoners in the back of the arm with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that contains information about their name, address and criminal record. Such chips, which contain a built-in antenna, could be scanned by special readers. The implantation of RFID chips in luggage, pets and livestock has become increasingly popular in recent years.

In addition to monitoring incarcerated prisoners, the ministry hopes to use the chips on those who are on probation or other conditional release. By including a satellite uplink system in the chip, police would be able to use global positioning system (GPS) technology to track subjects' exact locations at all times. According to advocates of such a measure, this could help keep sex offenders away from "forbidden" zones like schools.

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, blasted the measure as degrading to the people chipped and of no benefit to probation officers.

"Knowing where offenders like pedophiles are does not mean you know what they are doing," Fletcher said. "Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system to me."

Shami Chakrabarti of the civil rights group Liberty had even stronger words:

"If the Home Office doesn't understand why implanting a chip in someone is worse than an ankle bracelet, they don't need a human-rights lawyer; they need a common-sense bypass."
http://www.naturalnews.com/023481.html





Study: RFID Tags Can Mess Up Medical Devices
Jacob Goldstein

Radio-frequency identification — a system of using tiny tags to track all sorts of products — could be a smart way for hospitals to keep tabs on everything from surgical sponges to patient beds. Indeed, some hospitals have already started adopting the technology.

But a study out today in JAMA suggests RFID systems can cause “potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices.”

Researchers took two standard RFID systems and examined whether they interfered with 41 different medical devices. Each system comprised a tag (which attaches to the object being tracked) and a “reader” that communicates with tags.

Out of a total of 123 tests (there were multiple tests with each system on each device), there were 34 incidents of electromagnetic interference. The median distance at which the systems caused interference was 30 cm (about 12 inches).

A panel of medical specialists determined that 22 of these incidents were potentially hazardous; among other things, interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop.

The research was conducted by Dutch investigators as part of a broader project looking at using RFID to track blood and medical supplies.

In an editorial that accompanies the story, Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement says hospitals should consider internal surveillance, especially in critical care units, for problems related to electrical interference. And he suggests that regulators should weigh in on whether they need to provide safety guidance.

The findings, Berwick continues, suggest a broader lesson for health-care technology: In a system as complicated as a hospital, technical innovations are bound to have surprising results.

“Safety is not a condition, it is a process,” he writes. “It can only emerge continually in a culture that is alert, cooperative, transparent, and resilient when the unexpected happens, as it always will.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/06/...dical-devices/





I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
Bruce Schneier

It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers -- and televisions and iPods and everything else -- to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Once we go down this path -- giving one device authority over other devices -- the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?

How do we prevent this from being abused? Can a burglar, for example, enforce a "no photography" rule and prevent security cameras from working? Can the police enforce the same rule to avoid another Rodney King incident? Do the police get "superuser" devices that cannot be limited, and do they get "supercontroller" devices that can limit anything? How do we ensure that only they get them, and what do we do when the devices inevitably fall into the wrong hands?

It's comparatively easy to make this work in closed specialized systems -- OnStar, airplane avionics, military hardware -- but much more difficult in open-ended systems. If you think Microsoft's vision could possibly be securely designed, all you have to do is look at the dismal effectiveness of the various copy-protection and digital-rights-management systems we've seen over the years. That's a similar capabilities-enforcement mechanism, albeit simpler than these more general systems.

And that's the key to understanding this system. Don't be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good "manners" on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure -- or more polite.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...tymatters_0626





Degeekulator

Karolinska Study: Hormone Spray Can Help Cure Social Phobia

Swedish and British researchers have found that a nasal spray with the hormone oxytocin can relieve social phobia, also known as social anxiety disorder.

“It looks very promising. Many say that oxytocin can help those who suffer from social phobia,” said Predag Petrovic, a researcher in clinical neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, to the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Oxytocin is a hormone which is released during breast feeding, childbirth, and massage, and which strengthens the connection between individuals.

Those who suffer from social phobia often feel anxiety when meeting other people.

In the new study, which is published in the Journal of Neuroscience, trial subjects were shown images of faces, and some images were combined with a weak electric shock.

People in the group who then received a dose of oxytocin via nasal spray feel no discomfort when they were once again shown the images.
http://www.thelocal.se/12638/20080625/





SKorea Ponders Closer Watch on Web After Surge of Protests
Lim Chang-Won

After weeks of tumultuous protests inspired largely by South Korea's netizens, the country which claims to be the world's most wired society is considering new ways to monitor the Internet.

Embattled President Lee Myung-Bak highlighted both the benefits and dangers of the web when he addressed a meeting last week on the future of the Internet economy.

Lee, grappling with IT-inspired mass protests over his decision to resume US beef imports, called for the Internet to "be a space of trust".

"Otherwise, the force of the Internet could turn out to be venomous rather than beneficial," he said, noting increasing damage from computer viruses, hacking, cyber terrorism and the leak of personal information.

"In particular, spam mail sent under the guise of anonymity and the spread of falsehoods and inaccurate information are threatening even rationality and trust," said Lee, who did not mention the protests against him.

The new president, caught unaware by the wave of protests citing mad cow disease fears, plans to appoint a secretary to study online public opinion.

But he has firmly denied any intention to censor cyberspace.

The Korea Communications Commission said it would consider strengthening the identity verification system introduced last year to curb cyber bullying.

This requires users to verify their identity -- or registered nickname or pen name -- when they post comment or opinion.

Portal operators must disclose identities of cyber attackers if victims want to sue for libel or infringement of privacy.

Commission official Kim Young-Joo said cyber bulling and malicious online messages should be restricted but she ruled out excessive regulations.

"The Internet is a place for free and open debate. Excessive regulations are feared to restrict freedom of expression," she told AFP.

A report released last week showed South Korea ranked first in terms of household access to the net among members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It said 94 percent of households had Internet access compared to an average 58 percent among the 30 OECD members.

For years, the Internet has been a powerful political tool here.

Cyber protests and major candlelit protests broke out in 2002 following the death of two schoolgirls in a traffic accident involving a US military vehicle.

The campaign was helpful in securing an upset presidential election victory for Lee's liberal predecessor Roh Moo-Hyun.

Roh was suspended in 2004 after the opposition-led parliament impeached him on charges of electoral law violations and alleged corruption.

But a cyber campaign brought tens of thousands of demonstrators into the streets and helped him return to office stronger than ever.

The Internet's power was proven again this year, with Lee and conservative newspapers emerging as the target.

Critics say netizens were often inspired to protest by misleading information about the alleged dangers of mad cow disease and about government policies in general.

Users of the Korean-language version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia were banned from editing the entry on Lee because most comments were too rude.

Three major conservative newspapers have come under a well organised cyber attack for allegedly biased articles.

Organisers posted a list of companies that advertise with the papers along with their telephone numbers. Netizens were urged to boycott those companies as well as the newspapers.

Kim Min-Ki, a Soongsil University media studies professor, described some postings as akin to cyber terrorism.

"Netizens can debate and express opinion freely but they must refrain from posting malicious allegations or forcing others to follow their beliefs. This is tantamount to cyber terrorism," he told AFP.

"They must know there will be tighter cyber regulations if they go too far."

Hanyang University professor Koo Ja-Soon said that if the Internet is just a space for debate or discussion, there is no need for a watchdog.

"But if it creates rumours or facts which carry people away, it becomes media, which needs to be refuted or corrected for errors," she told the Korea Times.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/2008062...t-0de2eff.html
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Ready to Attack Obama, if Some Money Arrives
Michael Luo

A Bible verse taped to a whiteboard in Floyd Brown’s office that he uses to track his efforts to attack Senator Barack Obama reads, “That is why for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”

Mr. Brown, 47, a 6-foot-6 bear of a man is perhaps best known for his involvement with the Willie Horton television advertisement that helped sink Michael S. Dukakis’s candidacy in 1988. Mr. Brown has had much in his career to be delighted about as the source of scores of conservative assaults on Democrats that have earned him their lasting enmity.

Mr. Brown is back to his trade of bludgeoning a Democratic candidate for president, producing an innuendo-laden advertisement that is being televised this week in Michigan, albeit sparsely on cable, questioning Mr. Obama’s religious background.

The Obama campaign singled out Mr. Brown on Thursday as emblematic of the threat that independent groups on the right posed to him. On Friday, Mr. Obama, at a news conference in Jacksonville, Fla., again named Mr. Brown while defending his campaign’s rejection of public financing for the general election.

Yet if Mr. Brown’s struggles are any indication — he has so far failed to raise much money — it is not clear that Republicans will be able to repeat their successes in 2004, when independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had a significant role in undermining Senator John Kerry’s campaign.

“It’s all about reaching a tipping point,” Mr. Brown said. “Swift Boats achieved the tipping point. I was part of a team that reached the tipping point in 1988. In 1992, we didn’t reach it. We might not this time. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.”

No major independent effort to help Senator John McCain’s campaign has materialized. Although Republican operatives say something will eventually develop, alarm has spread among many, especially after Mr. Obama’s announcement on Thursday on public financing, raising the prospect that he will wield an enormous financial advantage over Mr. McCain in the fall.

Many reasons explain the absence of a serious independent effort at this point, Republican strategists said. Many wealthy donors who might be in a position to finance a 527 group, named for the Tax Code section that covers them, or a similar independent effort that is free to accept unlimited contributions are wary this time because of the legal problems that dogged many such groups after the 2004 election.

Major donors are said to be uncertain of Mr. McCain’s chances as Republicans face a decidedly unfavorable climate in the fall. Lingering, as well, is the possibility that they may anger Mr. McCain, who has a record of campaign finance reform and has in the past been critical of such groups.

Perhaps in recognition of financial realities, the McCain campaign has softened its statements on such groups, repeatedly saying it cannot be expected to “referee” them.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, said Friday that although Mr. McCain had made clear his objections to such groups, he also recognized that a number of them were poised to work on Mr. Obama’s behalf. Mr. Schmidt said Mr. McCain understood that “people who want to participate in the process because of what’s going on on the other side are going to participate in the process.”

“He’s not going to be a unilateral referee,” Mr. Schmidt added.

Frank J. Donatelli, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee, predicted that Mr. Obama’s decision not to use public financing would energize Republicans.

“We are going to be ready,” Mr. Donatelli said.

Enter Mr. Brown, who says it is his calling to tread where the campaign is unwilling to tread in finding malicious gossip on a Democratic nominee.

Several Republican strategists interviewed voiced skepticism about Mr. Brown’s chances of operating at anything other than the periphery of the general election this year, citing the amount of money needed, the difficulty of spreading a message that incites the grass roots and stricter regulation of independent groups.

“There’s a lot of people who are trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but there’s very few people who have,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist who helped organize the Swift Boat effort.

Mr. Brown conceded that his operation was in its infancy, showing $40,000 in the bank between two committees at the end of March for its first-quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission. Nevertheless, he appears to be at least mounting a serious effort that offers a glimpse at the challenges for such groups, as well as their potential.

At the heart of the effort is a Web site, ExposeObama.com, that has featured two Web advertisements, one on Mr. Obama’s record on crime and the other on his religious background.

The second spot highlights a Roman Catholic elementary school roster from Indonesia showing that Mr. Obama registered as a Muslim. The campaign said that the notation was probably made because Mr. Obama’s stepfather was nominally a Muslim but that the candidate had never been a Muslim. He is a committed Christian.

The site has helped Mr. Brown raise $100,000 in a month and a half. On Friday, after Mr. Obama’s announcement, Mr. Brown received 400 contributions, more than the usual weekly figure, totaling more than $15,000.

Mr. Brown is spreading the word about his videos through an e-mail list that he said had 2.5 million names. His goal is to produce at least one Web advertisement every two weeks, spread the word with e-mail and hope they catch on.

Mr. Brown is also using two conservative direct mail businesses to raise money, Response Dynamics and the Richard Norman Company, which ran the mail campaign for the Swift Boat effort, as well as two telemarketing businesses.

Although he said he was mostly in the testing phase with the mailings, Mr. Brown has put out 700,000 pieces and collected more than $600,000 by mail this year, a vast majority in the last two months. That period is after his last campaign finance filing.

Mr. Brown has also created a network of organizations that he can use to attack Mr. Obama, including two political action committees, the National Campaign Fund and the Legacy Committee, that are governed by strict limits on campaign donations, as well as a 527 group, Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America.

Mr. Brown’s financial limits were obvious with his most recent advertisement, questioning Mr. Obama’s religious background. He spent $5,000 to broadcast it. A cable company in the Detroit area approved it. Another kept Mr. Brown in legal limbo.

With most big-money conservative donors remaining cautious, Mr. Brown is focusing more on his political action committees. That could limit his ability to raise large sums. The maximum donation to such entities is $5,000.

Political action committees are much freer to attack candidates than 527s, which are technically limited to advocating on issues and cannot expressly call for a candidate’s election or defeat.

For conservatives hoping to repeat the Swift Boat effort, Federal Election Commission rulings after the 2004 election put such advertisements, which questioned a candidate’s character and fitness for office, off limits to 527s specifically.

Mr. Brown, a gregarious evangelical churchgoer, said that he merely enjoyed the interchange of ideas and that there was nothing personal about his attacks. He said he earned a living as an investment writer and speaker, working in politics part time.

In 1992, CBS News reported that, while trying to substantiate a rumor of a romantic affair involving Bill Clinton, Mr. Brown hounded the family of a young woman who had committed suicide. Mr. Brown insisted to the network that he had a right to be aggressive in his research.

But there are boundaries even Mr. Brown is unwilling to cross. He said many potential large donors had lost interest after he explained to them that certain harder-hitting advertisements that they favored were not possible through a 527.

His estimates of what he might be able to raise by the fall, assuming that he does not reach his imaginary “tipping point,” are in the $8 million range. That would be hardly consequential, especially in the face of the expected advertising onslaught from Mr. Obama.

Mr. Brown is hopeful, however, that major donors will step forward. “The vehicle will be there,” he said. “The talent will be there. Everything’s prepared.”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us...ics/21ads.html





Christian Novel Is Surprise Best Seller
Motoko Rich

Eckhart Tolle may have Oprah Winfrey, but “The Shack” has people like Caleb Nowak.

Mr. Nowak, a maintenance worker near Yakima, Wash., first bought a copy of “The Shack,” a slim paperback novel by an unknown author about a grieving father who meets God in the form of a jolly African-American woman, at a Borders bookstore in March. He was so taken by the story of redemption and God’s love that he promptly bought 10 more copies to give to family and friends.

“Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” Mr. Nowak said. “There’s definitely something about the book that makes people want to share it.”

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even Mr. Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

Its publisher, Windblown Media, a company that was formed expressly to publish “The Shack” in May of last year, estimates that the book has sold more than one million copies. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which usually tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has sold about 350,000 copies, although those numbers do not include sales at stores like Wal-Mart or direct sales from the publisher’s Web site, theshackbook.com, which may have accounted for an unusually large percentage of the book’s sales.

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

Sales have been fueled partly by a whiff of controversy. Some conservative Christian leaders and bloggers have attacked “The Shack” as heresy. The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, devoted most of a radio show to the book, calling it “deeply troubling” and asserting that it undermined orthodox Christianity. Others have said the book’s approach to theology is too breezy to be taken seriously.

Brad Cummings, a former pastor and the president of Windblown, said the company, which first shipped books out of his garage, spent about $300 in marketing. Word of the book ripped through the Christian blogosphere, talk radio and pulpits across the country.

“People would call back, asking for a dozen or a case,” Mr. Cummings said.

Even people initially put off by the book’s characterization of God as a black woman were won over. “I was so stunned by the presentation of Papa that I couldn’t deal with it,” said Bill Ritchie, senior pastor of an 8,000-member nondenominational church in Vancouver, Wash., who recalled putting the book down at first. He eventually finished it and told his congregation that it was “one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in years.” Since early this year, his church has been buying copies to sell to members by the caseload.

In May Hachette Book Group USA, a large mainstream publisher, entered into a partnership with Windblown to continue to publish the book. Hachette is now investing heavily to place advertisements on subways in Atlanta, Chicago and New York, as well as running television spots on the CNN airport network and other local stations.

Mr. Young, who is known as Paul, said he had written “The Shack” as a gift for his six children. The shack was a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain,” Mr. Young said in a telephone interview from the Phoenix airport on his way to a book reading.

He said he had suffered sexual abuse in New Guinea as the child of Canadian missionaries. After an extramarital affair 15 years ago, he said, he spent a decade in therapy, trying to earn back his wife’s and family’s trust.

In 2005 Mr. Young, now 53, started writing the book to show how he had healed by forging a new relationship with God. He chose to make God an African-American woman, he said, because he wanted to alter religious preconceptions. “It was just a way of saying: ‘You know what? I don’t believe that God is Gandalf with an attitude or Zeus who wants to blast you with any imperfection that you exhibit,’ ” Mr. Young said.

He gave 15 copies to his children and a few friends. When the friends wanted to send copies to other friends, Mr. Young wondered if he might have something suited for a wider audience.

He e-mailed the manuscript to another friend, Wayne Jacobsen, a former pastor and the author of Christian-themed books.

Mr. Jacobsen read the novel and immediately thought it deserved a larger following. “It brought God alive in a way that I think few books in literature ever do,” he said.

Mr. Young, Mr. Cummings and Mr. Jacobsen worked for 16 months through four rewrites. Mr. Jacobsen then showed the manuscript to several publishers, but it was rejected everywhere — both by Christian publishers, who found it too controversial, and secular publishers, who thought it was too Christian.

So Mr. Cummings, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Young invested about $15,000 of their own money to print and distribute the book. All three began sending copies to influential Christian friends, and orders started rolling into Windblown’s Web site.

Mr. Young, who with his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and lost their home of 19 years at auction, said that with proceeds from book sales, he has been able to pay several bills.

In November Jane Love, the buyer of religious books at Barnes & Noble, read “The Shack” and took a chance with a small order. As sales soared, Ms. Love increased her orders.

The book has since gone on sale at Borders, Wal-Mart and Costco. Kathryn Popoff, vice president for merchandising of adult trade books at Borders, said the book was appealing to audiences beyond Christian readers.

But some booksellers said they were not sure that non-Christian readers were interested. At Rainy Day Books, a literary independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo., Vivien Jennings, the owner, said she had sold only nine copies in four months. “The buzz never made it here,” she said. “What it tells me is that it is still pretty much restricted to the Christian audience.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/books/24shack.html





Dan Brown Tourists: Next Stop, Rome?
Elisabetta Povoledo

As Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and the rest of the cast and crew of “Angels and Demons” wrap up filming, the Dan Brown effect is on many minds here.

Mr. Brown’s last book-turned-movie, “The Da Vinci Code,” spawned hordes of tourists, toting well-thumbed novels, traipsing around France, Scotland and elsewhere to unravel its mysteries. Now Romans are wondering if the film of “Angels and Demons,” based on the 2000 predecessor to “The Da Vinci Code,” will do the same for their city.

Some hope so. Patrizia Prestipino, head of Rome’s provincial department of tourism, said, “A film like this could relaunch American tourism,” which has dropped by 6 percent this year from the same period last year (largely because of the weak dollar). The story takes place in some of the most magnificent spots in Rome, including the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo.

“For us it’s like free advertising,” Ms. Prestipino said. “I say the more films they produce in Rome, the better.” Other groups, like the Roman Catholic Church, which sees its authority as being undermined in both Brown best sellers, have been less receptive.

Requests to film on location in Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria, churches that are homes to paintings by Caravaggio, sculptures by Bernini and a chapel designed by Raphael, were refused. They are also where cardinals are murdered and mutilated in two of the more gruesome scenes in “Angels and Demons.”

“We give authorizations to productions that are compatible with religious sentiment,” said the Rev. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the Rome diocese. “With Dan Brown’s books this problem exists.”

Last week the production moved to the Royal Palace in Caserta, just north of Naples, to shoot Vatican interiors. (The Caserta location has also doubled for intergalactic palaces in two of the “Star Wars” prequels.)

“No one ever gets permission to film inside the Vatican,” Father Fibbi explained. “They didn’t even make an exception for the mini-series on the life of Pope John Paul II.”

Like “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons” stars Mr. Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of art history and religious symbology. This time he finds himself desperately trying to stop the Illuminati, a secret society hellbent on the destruction of the Vatican. (Antimatter plays a big role in their plot.)

Filming began in Rome on June 4, and has been fiercely protected. (Sony Pictures turned down requests for interviews with the production team in Rome.) The production even worked under a fake title to throw autograph-seekers off the scent.

“They billed the film as ‘Obelisk,’ but there were so many people milling about the set that it was pretty clear that it wasn’t true,” said Federico Guberti, a Roman paparazzo, who was among many staking out Piazza del Popolo when shooting began. Obelisks, as anyone who has read the book knows, play a starring role in the plot.

The release date, May 2009, may be nearly a year away, but some entrepreneurs in Rome are already benefiting from the buzz surrounding the making of the movie.

“The hype has started,” said Simone Gozzi, the director of Dark Rome tours. Mr. Gozzi said his company operated the only official tour linked to “Angels and Demons.” (“We registered the trademark in 2004,” he said.) The tour attracts an average of 600 clients a month, he said, each paying 56 euros (about $87).

Mr. Gozzi has also branched out to include what he called “incentive-building treasure hunts,” based on the book, for corporate clients. The movie, he said, can only boost business: “People already choose to come to Rome because of the book.”

Matt Kartchner, of Sacramento, Calif., said that he had two objectives in coming on holiday to Rome: “To see the Colosseum and take an ‘Angels and Demons’ tour.” On a recent morning he took that tour.

Rome experts say the film could correct some of the book’s errors. (For example, it places Santa Maria della Vittoria in the wrong piazza.) “People are constantly saying, ‘Wait a minute, in “Angels and Demons” Dan Brown says this or that,’ and we give a spiel about veracity and then explain that what risks being damaged is the image of Rome,” said Paul Bennett, the founder of Context Travel, an upscale tour operator that does not do “Angels and Demons” tours.

Alberto Artioli, the state official responsible for Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, has experienced something similar since Mr. Brown turned St. John into Mary Magdalene in “The Da Vinci Code.”

Before “The Da Vinci Code,” Mr. Artioli said, “people would ask us which of the figures is Judas; now people ask which one is the Magdalene. It’s a little discouraging to see that people take the interpretation as truth instead of a game.”

Mistakes and leaps of imagination aside, Ms. Prestipino, Rome’s tourism official, said she would like to do something for the film’s 2009 release. “It would make sense to have a promotional event where the movie was shot,” she said.

But others counter that Rome needs no advertising.

The Rev. Antonio Truda, the parish priest at Santa Maria del Popolo, marvels that anyone would come to his church just because its Chigi Chapel, decorated by Raphael and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is mentioned in a book. The church has masterpieces by Pinturicchio and Caravaggio, and an average of 2,500 people come by each day.

“I hate to be rude, but I really don’t think people come to a church like this because of ‘Angels and Demons,’ ” he said.

Father Truda may want to speak to Colin Glynn-Percy, the director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust in Midlothian, Scotland.

Before “The Da Vinci Code,” Rosslyn Chapel averaged 38,000 visitors a year; in 2006, the year the movie was released, 176,000 visitors came. Last year the number dropped to 161,000.

“It’s not in the headlines as much,” Mr. Glynn-Percy said of the book (and movie) that put the chapel on the A list of Scottish tourist attractions, alongside Loch Ness. But it’s still up there.

“When people visit Scotland and someone mentions Rosslyn, they’ll think that’s something to do with the ‘Da Vinci Code’ and come,” he said. “So the effects are continuing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/movies/24ange.html





Hollywood Braces for an Actors’ Strike
Edward Wyatt

Labor unrest continues to dominate the landscape in Hollywood, and the possibility of a strike by actors has large movie studios planning to shut down production after Monday and has television studios rushing to complete episodes of series scheduled to return in the fall or January.

Most major movie studios long ago scheduled their big projects to finish shooting by Monday, the expiration date of the contract between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Screen Actors Guild.

Television studios meanwhile plan to continue taping new and returning series as long as possible, banking episodes scheduled for broadcast in the fall or the new year in case an actors’ strike interrupts production, as the strike by television and film writers did last winter.

It remains unclear whether there will be an actors’ strike at all. The first indication is expected around July 8, when members of the smaller of the two major actors’ unions, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, known as Aftra, completes a vote on whether to ratify a new contract with the producers alliance.

Roughly 44,000 of Aftra’s 70,000 members also belong to SAG, which has about 120,000 members. So the Aftra vote is being viewed as a strong indicator of whether SAG members will support a strike. SAG itself has not yet asked its members to authorize a strike in case its negotiations fail.

SAG’s leadership is lobbying Aftra members to reject the contract offer because the larger union says it does not offer enough in minimum wages for major television series roles and does not secure adequate payments for the digital use of actors’ work. SAG is also seeking new rules on product placement and an increase in allowance for gas and travel costs.

The actors’ unions have already provided exemptions to dozens of independent film projects that do not rely on the major studios for financing or distribution, allowing them to continue production in case of a strike.

Coincidentally, an aftereffect of the writers’ strike, which ended in February, is what allowed television producers to begin production earlier than usual this spring on many returning programs, thus putting them in a better position to withstand a possible short walkout by actors.

“I don’t think the writers’ strike was good for anybody,” said Teri Weinberg, an executive vice president at NBC Entertainment who oversees current programming and development. “But it did allow people like Tim Kring and his team to go back and talk about stories and bank scripts and start production earlier,” she added, referring to the creator of the NBC hit “Heroes.”

Many serialized dramas like “Heroes” and Fox’s “Prison Break” did not return to the air after the strike, allowing their writers to start working on the next season’s opening scripts back in February, when they normally would be plotting season finales.

So, on Tuesday, the “Prison Break” cast was on location at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles starting production on next season’s fourth episode; normally at this time actors might not even have seen scripts for the season opener.

Katherine Pope, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, the production arm related to the NBC broadcast network, said that this June was busier than any in the more than 10 years she had worked in television.

“The business is finally moving toward everything being on its own natural production cycle rather than being shoved into a pre-existing structure that makes no sense for a particular show,” Ms. Pope said.

She was referring partly to the annual cycle of developing new programs, filming pilot episodes and deciding whether to add the series to a network’s schedule.

That process was greatly upset this year by the writers’ strike, which gave networks little time to develop, produce and screen pilots before having to announce in May, for advertisers’ benefit, which shows were joining their fall schedules.

Until recently advertisers had been reluctant to commit to buying commercial time in new series without seeing a full-length pilot episode. This spring, however, some networks sold as much as 80 percent or 85 percent of the available time for the 2008-9 television season during the advance selling period, more than the usual 75 percent.

“This season shows that you don’t have to give advertisers full-blown pilots to sell time,” Gary Newman, co-chairman of the 20th Century Fox Television studio, said. “That enables you to get the scripts into a better place before you start shooting.”

It also gave networks more time to cast new series, something that in most years is compressed into a few weeks in the spring, when all networks are competing for the same performers.

The changes have also led to a raft of pilots for shows being produced in the late spring and early summer. ABC Studios, a production unit that, like the ABC broadcast network, is part of the Walt Disney Company, is shooting 11 pilots this summer for shows that might enter the lineup in 2009 or later.

Television production was undoubtedly hurt by the writers’ strike. According to FilmL.A., an organization that tracks permits for location filming in Los Angeles County and nearby areas, the number of days of television production in the first quarter of 2008 fell by 45 percent from a year earlier as the writers’ strike left most programs without new scripts to film.

Feature film production rose by 11 percent in the same period, as producers rushed to finish projects that had already been written.

Now, in what is traditionally the slowest quarter of the year for television production, studios are working at full throttle. At the Fox studio “Bones,” a crime drama broadcast on the Fox network, and “My Name Is Earl,” an NBC comedy, both began filming new episodes last month, much earlier than normal.

In addition “24,” the serial drama that skipped all of last year despite having shot several episodes of its seventh season, is adding a two-hour episode to start next season and is likely to have its schedule of 24 episodes completed before the first one is broadcast in January.

This assumes that the actors do not walk out or — a more remote possibility — that studios do not lock out actors to force them to reach a work agreement.

Both actors’ unions have been trotting out celebrity backers, with Aftra using Sally Field, Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin to promote endorsement of its proposed contract, and SAG planning a similar effort against the Aftra deal with Jack Nicholson, Rosanna Arquette and Holly Hunter.

The studios, meanwhile, are getting ready for the worst. “Obviously as a network we have to be prepared for that,” Ms. Weinberg of NBC said, without being more specific. “We’re incredibly hopeful an agreement will be reached. But we have a contingency plan.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/ar...on/26stri.html





Pixar Gambles on a Robot in Love
Katrina Onstad

HE is rusty, lipless, sub-literate and keeps company with garbage. Worse, he’s a “Hello, Dolly!” fan. This little robot, who goes by the name Wall-E — for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — is also the newest face (not that he has one) of Pixar.

Last year’s offering, “Ratatouille,” about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with “Wall-E,” a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn’t care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. “I never think about the audience,” he said. “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”

Mr. Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween’s frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative executive, announced the company’s $7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar “campus” in Emeryville, Calif., ride scooters and play foosball. “It’s like a film school with no teachers,” Mr. Stanton said. “Everyone actually wants you to take risks.”

Such is the Pixar brand, or anti-brand: a multibillion dollar company that acts like a nerd hobbyist in a basement. But that balancing act is even tougher to pull off as a subsidiary of Disney, a company whose very name has been turned into a neologism — Disneyfication — for a kind of bland commercial aesthetic.

Perhaps to assure the public that nothing has changed under new ownership, an early trailer for “Wall-E” plays up Pixar’s carefree mystique. The teaser, narrated by Mr. Stanton, describes a 1994 lunch, when the central Pixar players were finishing “Toy Story,” the first feature-length CG animated film. Over lunch they sketched on napkins characters that would end up in “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.”

On one napkin a lonely robot emerged. “We said: ‘What if humanity left and some little robot got left on and kept doing the same thing forever?’ ” said Mr. Stanton, who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee. “That was the saddest character I’d ever heard of.”

“Wall-E” took a back seat to another project, a film Mr. Stanton wrote and directed about a fish father looking for his son: “Finding Nemo” (2003). It went on to earn $340 million domestically and $865 million worldwide. The day after the 2004 Academy Awards, in which Mr. Stanton won the Oscar for best animated feature, he went to work on “Wall-E,” forgoing a planned six-month vacation.

“We were always frustrated that people saw CG as a genre as opposed to just a medium that could tell any kind of story,” he said. “We felt like we widened the palette with ‘Toy Story,’ but then people unconsciously put CG back in a different box: ‘Well, it’s got to be irreverent, it’s got to have A-list actors, it’s got to have talking animals.’ ”

So Mr. Stanton took “Wall-E” to a more somber, less sassy place (though there is some sass of course). The film is set in 2700 on an uninhabitable Earth, a dystopia covered in towers of garbage. Mr. Stanton drew on films from science fiction’s golden age: “1968 to ’81,” he said, with a film geek’s specificity. Software imitated the film — mostly Panavision 70 millimeter — that gave movies like “2001” and “Blade Runner” their visual sweep. Casting Sigourney Weaver in one of a handful of speaking parts is a nod to “Alien.”

Wall-E, a generic robo-janitor, contentedly compacts trash into perfect cubes, until he’s shaken up by the appearance of an egg-shaped search robot named Eve. This high-tech, piano-key-smooth egg-bot has dropped from the sky, seeking a sign of life on Earth. Wall-E, who knows about love from a video of “Hello, Dolly!,” falls hard.

“Technically there have been romances in animation,” Mr. Stanton said, but does anyone care about them? Mr. Stanton loves a rhetorical question: “Why can’t you have a love story that just completely sweeps you up? It happens in other movies, why not animation?”

In “Wall-E,” a mega-corporation called Buy n’ Large has transported Earth’s populace to luxury space ships, where the obese human race moves around in robotic loungers, drinking super-size soft drinks, placated by television and robot servants. Environmental disaster; corporate takeover; a global psychological coma: “Wall-E” starts to seem like “An Inconvenient Cartoon.” Yet Mr. Stanton dismisses talk of an allegory.

“I was writing this thing so long ago, how could I have known what’s going on now?” he said. “As it was getting finished, the environment talk started to freak me out. I don’t have much of a political bent, and the last thing I want to do is preach. I just went with things that I felt were logical for a possible future and supported the point of my story, which was the premise that irrational love defeats life’s programming, and that the most robotic beings I’ve met are us.”

And is the ubiquitous, all-powerful Buy n’ Large a sly dig at Disney Pixar’s new corporate bedfellow? With a fervent head shake no, Mr. Stanton turns company man.

“Part of the contract was: ‘You can’t touch us, you can’t change what we do,’ and that’s actually gained them such a level of respect and trust they wouldn’t have gotten if they’d tried to be Draconian.”

David A. Price, author of a company history called “The Pixar Touch,” doesn’t see the dark tone of “Wall-E” as a radical departure. “Pixar films reach whole audiences because they know how to make characters that are appealing to children and then give them adult problems,” he said.

Both Nemo and Wall-E are small, lost and vulnerable. But unlike “Finding Nemo,” with its chatterbox characters, “Wall-E” feels almost like a silent film. The first 25 to 30 minutes introduce Wall-E as a Buster Keaton-meets-E.T. figure, comically rocking and shuffling. Mr. Stanton found the key to the robot’s infant-sweet appearance at a baseball game. While he played with binoculars, Wall-E sprang into his head: binoculars on a box with treads.

“I want you to project a face on it,” he said. “I wanted to evoke the audience’s participation. You need to actually see it as a machine. I kept saying, I’m trying to make ‘R2D2: The Movie.’ ”

To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script — “Hi, I’m Wall-E” — and Mr. Burtt essentially translated the dialogue into robot, something he calls “audio puppeteering.”

“If you take sounds from the real world, we have a subconscious association with them that gives credibility to an otherwise fantastic concept,” Mr. Burtt said in a telephone interview.

The result is a film where the sound is as significant as the visual. One hears echoes of E.T.’s throat-singing (“E.T” is another Burtt film), and when Wall-E moves, the sound comes from a hand-cranked, World War II Army generator that Mr. Burtt saw in a John Wayne movie, then found on eBay.

“We all thought about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” Mr. Burtt said, “this energetic, sympathetic character who doesn’t say a whole lot. Most animation is very dialogue heavy. There’s dance, constant talking, punch lines. We used to wonder: How will we prepare the audience?”

Whether or not viewers give in to “Wall-E” is a billion-dollar question. “The box office from Pixar films hasn’t been growing since ‘Finding Nemo,’ ” Mr. Price said, speaking of the domestic box office. “Certainly ‘Cars’ and ‘Ratatouille’ were not as strong as the predecessor films.” (Even “The Incredibles,” the best performer since “Finding Nemo,” trailed it in the United States.) “If that trend were to continue with ‘Wall-E,’ there would be questions raised about the soundness of the deal. Though of course there’s always money to be made in merchandising.” The “Wall-E” robots, sheets and Crocs may turn a profit, but the alpha success still has to be the film about a mute robot.

But Mr. Stanton is measuring the film’s success in different terms.

“I’m not naïve about what’s at stake,” he said. “But I almost feel like it’s an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. I don’t want to paint the same painting again. I don’t want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldn’t a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/movies/22onst.html





Could YouTube Become Hub for Feature Films and TV Shows?
Greg Sandoval

For a long time, I've said that YouTube could become the Web's supreme ruler of short-form and long-form video should it ever offer feature films and TV shows.

The Web's top video-sharing site now appears to be preparing to make such a move. YouTube has begun experimenting with delivering longer videos than the typical 10-minute clips allowed on the site, Fortune magazine reported Wednesday. On YouTube now are several full-length documentaries and TV shows. (See one of those videos, Howard Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman, embedded below.)

The question is whether Google is making the move too late.

Long-form content would mark the latest attempt to help Google cash in on YouTube's massive audience. Two years after acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion, Google still hasn't figured out a way to profit from the site, CEO Eric Schmidt has said several times recently.

Google hasn't yet responded to my inquiries on the Fortune report.

While Schmidt has declined to detail why the company is struggling to squeeze profits from YouTube, some of the site's shortcomings as a money maker are obvious.

YouTube has become a massive video-hosting service, where people post clips of baby's first steps, a sleeping puppy, or the family picnic. Most don't attract mass audiences. Nevertheless, Google still has to pay the bandwidth costs.

Each minute, more than 10 hours of video are posted to YouTube, which "is now the majority of outbound bandwidth" for Google, Schmidt said last week in an interview with The New Yorker. "We had to retool the network."

Bandwidth costs are likely less of a worry than the advertising issues. If YouTube hasn't become a cash cow after three years as the Web's top supplier of short-form, homemade clips, perhaps its time to conclude advertisers just don't like user-generated content--or at least they don't like it enough.

Greg Sterling, an advertising and marketing analyst, said studies have shown that ad agencies remain wary of putting their brands next to user-generated content. "They don't like not knowing what they're getting," he said.

But Sterling doesn't see how offering long-form content can help YouTube. In addition dealing with advertisers who are squeamish about user-generated content, YouTube must also figure out how to advertise to an audience--regardless of the length of the video--that resents advertising on the Web.

Google has yet to discover an vehicle that can get ads in front of viewers well enough to please advertisers but not alienate viewers.

The Hulu factor, and Mark Cuban weighs in

Another challenge is that YouTube's move toward long-form video comes after many of the big content suppliers have already found other Web outlets for their material. For instance, Disney last week began showing full-length movies online, beginning with Finding Nemo.

The best example of these attempts maybe Hulu, the video portal created by NBC Universal and News Corp. The site offers popular TV shows from both founding companies as well as shows owned by other media firms, including Viacom. Critics have praised the site for delivering high-quality video and for enabling users to embed Hulu videos on other sites.

Hulu has other advantages, such as owning the rights to show all the video it offers, Mark Cuban wrote on his blog Tuesday. Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks and the cable channel HDNet, is one of YouTube's biggest critics.

He wrote that Hulu is crushing YouTube in revenue per video and revenue per user primarily because "Hulu has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site," Cuban wrote. "It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy."

YouTube doesn't have the same luxury because it can advertise only "on the small percentage of videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with" Cuban wrote.

In an e-mail on Wednesday, Cuban was also skeptical that providing long-form content could help YouTube.

"By the letter of the law, YouTube is a hosting service," Cuban said in an e-mail. "They aren't allowed to know what the content of the user uploaded videos they host are. It could be a hard core porn or the daredevil stunt-man movie that is 95-minutes long. Hulu knows exactly what they stream...I think long or short form, Hulu is a better platform to make money from."

On YouTube is copyright content that the company can't sell ads against or else risk losing its protection from lawsuits under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects hosting sites and ISPs from being held responsible for illegal acts committed by users.

That brings us to whether YouTube can acquire the rights from networks and studios that have long accused the company of failing to protect copyright.

This is where I think there will be little problem for YouTube. While it has been criticized for dragging its feet on providing filters that protect against piracy, it can provide content creators an audience of 71 million unique users worldwide every month.

If YouTube can deliver movies and TV shows in high quality, entertainment industry executives are going to want to be in front of YouTube's audience.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-99...?tag=nefd.lede





Broadcasters Want HD Digital Power Boost
FMQB

HD Radio stations are authorized by the FCC to broadcast with the power equivalent to 1 percent of a station’s analog power in order to make sure they don't interfere with analog signals. However, a group of 18 broadcasters and four radio equipment manufacturers have filed a joint request with the FCC, asking it to revise the specifications and allow HD Radio broadcasting at 10 percent of analog power. The group says the HD signals don’t go as far and have a hard time penetrating buildings, and the original standards for digital broadcasting were set at a "very conservative level" because little testing had been done at the time.

"As HD Radio technology moves further toward the mainstream, it's crucial that we continue to add new features and enhance the technology's basic capabilities," said Bob Struble, President/CEO of HD Radio developer iBiquity Digital. "Working with the broadcast industry and equipment makers, iBiquity Digital has completed extensive testing on higher-power FM HD Radio broadcasts, and the results are clear. Increasing from 1 percent to 10 percent of analog broadcast power greatly improves digital performance without meaningfully increasing interference."

One test that was conducted by CBS Radio, Clear Channel Radio, Greater Media and iBiquity found that an increase in digital FM power of up to 10 dB would significantly improve FM digital performance with "virtually no risk of adversely affecting analog compatibility."

The test program looked at Class B FM stations in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York as well as Class A stations in New Jersey, and found that the higher power level significantly increased the digital coverage area of the test stations, according to the FCC filing. For building penetration, the test program measured KROQ/Los Angeles at both authorized and elevated power levels at 10 separate locations. With the power increase, the study found building penetration equal to or better than analog performance.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=749780





Blu-ray Subjected To Japanese Copy Levy
Steve McClure

The Japanese government has added Blu-ray Discs and Blu-ray Disc recorders to the list of products subject to private-copying levies.

But copyright groups such as JASRAC and the RIAJ have expressed concern over the future of the copying-levy system, which has recently come under scrutiny due to proposals for a so-called "iPod tax."

Industry observers suggest a showdown is looming between electronics makers and copyright groups over this issue.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...385b9d9c534d7d





Xbox 360 Hack Lets Owners Play Netflix Movies
Greg Sandoval

People aren't waiting for Microsoft to announce a deal with Netflix.

Someone has already figured out how to hack the Xbox 360 video game console and enable it to play Netflix streaming movies.

At Lifehacker.com, Adam Pash writes that all anyone needs is an Xbox 360, a Windows Vista PC, a Netflix account, and a free Windows Media Center plug-in called vmcNetflix.

Here is some of what Pash says an Xbox 360 owner can do following the hack: stream Watch Now movies directly to the Media Center player; download Watch Now movies to a "Watch Later" gallery; search for movies by keyword; browse DVDs; Watch Now movies by genre; and add, remove, and move movies in your queue.

Of course, this is more functionality than the $100 Netflix Box offers. Roku has received favorable reviews for streaming movies from the Web to television sets without long delays and at a reasonable price.

Soon, a hack may be unnecessary. Rumors are that Microsoft will announce this year that it has cut a deal to deliver Netlix's Watch Now service on the Xbox.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9977171-7.html





Hidden Sex Scenes Draw Ho-Hum, Except From Lawyers
Jonathan D. Glater

Lawyers who sued the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas profess to be shocked, simply shocked, that few people who bought the game were offended by sex scenes buried in its software.

Any buyer upset about hidden sex in the violent game could file a claim under a settlement the lawyers struck with the game’s makers, Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive. Of the millions of people who bought the San Andreas version after its release in 2004, exactly 2,676 filed claims.

“Am I disappointed? Sure,” said Seth R. Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. “We can’t guess as to why now, several years later, people care or don’t care. The merits of the case were clear.”

Far bigger than the payout to plaintiffs will be the fees sought by the lawyers who brought the class action. Mr. Lesser and his colleagues at 10 other law firms have asked for more than $1.3 million — compared with less than $30,000 that Take-Two Interactive’s lawyers say it will spend to resolve the claims for $5 to $35 each (and, sometimes, a sanitized copy of the game).

“It doesn’t typically go that way,” said Mary J. Davis, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied this type of litigation. To have legal fees dwarf a settlement payout, she continued, “is sort of backwards.”

The company and the plaintiffs lawyers both point out that the company has also agreed to make an $860,000 charitable contribution.

But the legal fees have drawn an objection, from a gameplayer who just happens to be a lawyer as well. Seeking to scuttle the deal is Theodore H. Frank, who directs the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes about class actions, liability and other topics.

“There are two possibilities,” Mr. Frank said of the settlement. “Possibility one is they have a meritorious lawsuit and they’re selling out the class for attorneys’ fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly I think this is the more likely possibility, they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all.”

The case could still go to trial if the settlement is not approved by a federal judge. A hearing is scheduled before Judge Shirley Wohl Kram of Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday. But judges do not lightly set aside settlement agreements, which after all are intended to avoid costly litigation, Ms. Davis said. In reviewing such agreements, judges are supposed to ensure that the terms are reasonable, she explained, but they are not to substitute their views for those of the parties to the suit.

In documents filed on Friday, Mr. Lesser and other lawyers who brought the case argued that Mr. Frank was barred from attacking the settlement. They wrote that because Mr. Frank had said he was not offended by the scenes, he could not have a stake in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said that Take-Two would make a charitable donation to the video game industry’s ratings board under the settlement and argued that there was no way to know beforehand that so few people would apply for compensation under the settlement.

Besides, the lawyers argue, if the lawsuit had no merit, should that not make the settlement that much more impressive?

The civil lawsuit was filed after the disclosure of the sex scenes, accessible only to knowledgeable players using third-party software, sparked fulminations in Congress and great excitement online. The suit charged the company with defrauding buyers by failing to disclose the sex scenes.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board reclassified the game in 2005 for “adults only,” a designation that means the game should be played only by people 18 and older. The game’s rating led some big retailers to stop carrying it. The game had initially been rated for “mature” audiences, meaning people 17 and older.

Take-Two Interactive also settled a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission and released a version without the hidden scenes that then carried the mature rating. In court documents, a company executive said that the sex scenes were unfinished and had been edited out of the game before it was completed; they could not be seen during ordinary play but could be accessed using third-party software or hardware.

“The game was sold as something that it wasn’t,” said Mr. Lesser, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, adding that people did not want to be surprised by sexual content in video games, regardless of whether that content is difficult to view. Not surprisingly, he dismissed Mr. Frank’s criticism and said the lawsuit was justified.

“The merits of the case were clear,” Mr. Lesser said. “Otherwise it would’ve been settled a long time ago.”

Jeffrey S. Jacobson, whose firm of Debevoise & Plimpton represents Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive, was careful in his comments about the case. After all, the deal allows the company to end litigation that might otherwise cost many millions of dollars.

“The defendants always contended that this was a lawsuit that lacked merit,” Mr. Jacobson said. “We certainly wish the case had never been brought and we certainly wish we could’ve litigated it on the merits and achieved a victory,” he continued, but resolving the case this way was much less expensive.

If the case goes to trial, some interesting questions may arise about how and whether game buyers were deceived. While adults who bought the game for children said they were upset over the sex scenes that they did not know about (and had not seen), interviews conducted by lawyers showed the adults also did not know basic characteristics of the game.

For example, Brenda Stanhouse, who bought the game for her son, 15 years old at the time, said in a deposition that she did not know that a player in the game could “stomp to death innocent pedestrians.”

She also did not know that the game included prostitutes, that players could kill policemen or that “a player in the game can kill innocent pedestrians and steal money from them.”

“I’m aware that there is killing in the game,” Ms. Stanhouse said in the deposition. “I wasn’t aware of the stealing.”

Ms. Stanhouse was asked whether she would knowingly buy for her son a game that allowed him to kill police officers.

“Well, I think he does have games with violence,” Ms. Stanhouse said, adding that she would “possibly” buy such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

The exchange raises a deeper and perhaps more troubling question about the harm caused by the hidden scenes. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit clearly were more concerned about exposing their children to images of sex, but academic studies suggest that images of violence — abundant in the games — should be of greater concern.

“For some reason sex is seen as more harmful to kids than violence,” said Craig A. Anderson, distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University, who since the mid-1980s has studied the effects of playing video games on children, adolescents and college students.

“The irony is that in terms of the research literature on harmful effects of various forms of media, television, movies, video games, the research is very, very clear,” Professor Anderson said. “There are significant short-term and long-term effects of violent content.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/te.../25settle.html





Grand Theft Morals

Slossberg targets violent video games.
By the New Haven Nose

Gayle Slossberg has a problem: She wants confirmation of the rumored rape scene in Grand Theft Auto IV—but she can't reach that level of the game. The Milford, Connecticut state senator's never played GTA, but she fears it's corrupting the youth and thinks a law requiring better warning labels might be the fix. She told the Nose as much at a Capitol press conference last week.

Rewarding players who carjack and cop-kill is bad enough, but points for rape is beyond the pale. Or would be, if it were true. Nothing's certain (the Nose couldn't reach the alleged rape scene either) but four out of five gamer geeks in the blogosphere appear to agree: There is no rape scene. It's all the stuff of rumors.

Slossberg hints she'll nonetheless introduce legislation next session calling for clearer labeling of depraved video games like Grand Theft Auto. In doing so, she'll join fellow pols Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton who have pushed video game restrictions on the federal level. Still, Slossberg's a bit unsure of how the warning labels might read: "I mean what would it say? 'This game will make you a sociopath'?" Perhaps....
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=8476





California Pols Ask ISPs to Block Child Porn
Marguerite Reardon

California's governor and attorney general are asking Internet service providers to help stop the dissemination of child pornography.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. issued a press release Friday asking Internet service providers in California to follow the lead of Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in "removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels" that disseminate the illegal material.

"Protecting the safety of our children must be a top priority, not just for government, but also for businesses with the direct power to reduce the ability to conduct illegal activity," they said in a joint letter to the California Internet Service Provider Association.

Earlier this month, Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint announced an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of existing child pornography and eliminate access to user groups that distribute child pornography.

Schwarzenegger and Brown said in their letter that it's important that ISPs in California take action that is similar to the steps Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint have agreed to in New York. The Internet Service Provider Association is the largest association of Internet service providers in the country, representing more than 100 ISPs. These providers include small ISPs, as well as big ones such as AT&T and AOL.

"It is not enough for only a few Internet service providers to join the fight against online predators," the letter said. "Child pornography is not protected by the First Amendment, and distributing this material is illegal."

While no one disagrees that distributing child pornography is illegal, some civil liberty experts worry that the way in which ISPs will block access to it could limit free speech for people discussing and distributing perfectly legal content.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint have said they have no plans to actually block access to any Web sites. Instead, they plan to purge or erase any child pornography that has been cached in their servers. They also plan to limit or block access to some of their own Usenet or news groups, which can be used to disseminate this material.

For example, Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

My colleague Declan McCullagh points out in a story he wrote following the New York announcement that this tactic will most likely silence thousands of legitimate user groups that use the alt.* hierarchy for Usenet discussions.

It's not surprising that the American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to this action. Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, told CNET News.com in McCullagh's earlier article that service providers shouldn't be blocking wholesale sections of the Internet, including Usenet groups, because it could eliminate legitimate discussions. "That's taking a sledgehammer to an ant," he was quoted as saying.

Indeed, this could turn out to be a big issue as California's politicians try to push for similar action among other Internet service providers. Some large providers such as AOL stopped carrying Usenet, but AT&T still does.

AT&T said that it is already working to fight online child pornography. "AT&T has long-standing and established procedures for the removal of illegal child pornography from our servers, including servers that host newsgroups," said Marty Richter, a representative for AT&T. "Consistent with these procedures and federal and state statutes, when we receive a report of any illegal content being hosted on our servers and we have a good faith basis for concluding that the content is illegal, we will remove it."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9973966-7.html





'Mini Me' Sex Tape Peddled

The man who turned Paris Hilton into a sex tape star is now reportedly hoping to do the same for pint-sized funnyman Verne Troyer.

Footage from a sex video featuring the Austin Powers star and a former girlfriend has appeared online after a third party got hold of the tape, which was shot in the apartment Troyer shared with his ex.

Website TMZ.com, which has obtained an extract from the video, claims sex tape dealer Kevin Blatt, who brokered the deal for Hilton's One Night In Paris romp, is in negotiations to distribute the footage.
http://www.abcactionnews.com/news/lo...8-febc96667fa9





What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
Matt Richtel

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.

But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts, interests and desires of their users.

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.

Mr. Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more specific search data, including the number of searches for certain sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the company was reviewing the subpoena.

Mr. Walters is defending Clinton Raymond McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene material through a Web site based in Florida. The charges include racketeering and prostitution, but Mr. Walters said the prosecution’s case fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is obscene.

Such cases are a relative rarity this decade. In the last eight years, the Justice Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, according to Jeffrey J. Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been hundreds involving child pornography.) Prosecutions at the state level have followed a similar arc.

The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex — definitions that are based on “contemporary community standards.”

Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally. A better barometer, Mr. Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain.

“All you had to go on is what was available for public consumption, and that was a very crude tool,” Mr. Douglas said. “The prospect of having measurement of Internet traffic brings a more objective component than we’ve ever seen before.”

In a federal obscenity case heard this month, Mr. Douglas defended another Florida pornographer. In the trial, Mr. Douglas set up a computer in the courtroom and did Internet searches for sexually explicit terms to show the jury that there were millions of Web pages discussing such material. He then searched for other topics, like the University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, to demonstrate that there were not nearly as many related Web sites.

The jury was evidently not swayed, as his client was convicted on all counts.

The case Mr. Walters is defending takes the tactic to another level. Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

Mr. Walters chose Pensacola because it is the only city in the court’s jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service’s data.

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

The Google service does, however, show the relative strength of many mainstream queries in Pensacola: “Nascar,” “surfing” and “Nintendo” all beat “orgy.”

Chris Hansen, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the tactic clever and novel, but said it underscored the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences — something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information.

“That’s why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data,” he said.

One question is whether the judge in the case will admit the data as evidence; it was given only in a deposition this month. Mr. Walters said he was confident the information would be allowable given that there has been a growing reliance on such data.

Russ Edgar, the Florida state prosecutor, said he was still assessing whether he would try to block the search data’s use in court. He declined to discuss the case’s specifics, but said that the popularity of sex-related Web sites had no bearing on whether Mr. Edgar was in violation of community standards.

“How many times you do something doesn’t necessarily speak to standards and values,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/te...bscene.html?hp





Google Expands Its New York Footprint
Jennifer 8. Lee

Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke on Monday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Google in Chelsea Market in Manhattan. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, and Senator Charles E. Schumer joined hands on a large pair of scissors on Monday to cut the ribbon on Google’s new 50,000-square-foot offices in Chelsea Market, an expansion of their half-million square feet across the street on Eighth Avenue.

“We don’t have high-tech scissors?” Mr. Schumer asked, looking at the ribbon. “How about a laser?”

(Indeed, it seems as if companies could get a little creative, with something more than just ribbons, at openings. Ikea, for example, opts for log-cuttings — as it did with its new Brooklyn store recently).

Mr. Brin, whose formal title is co-founder and president of technology, joked that New York’s offices started out in 2000 from the Upper West Side apartment of Tim Armstrong, now president of North American sales and commerce.

Since then, it has expanded to 1,600 (and growing) employees in New York City, the largest Google outpost outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters. Google’s New York offices are at 111 Eighth Avenue, a stone’s throw away. Incidentally, 111 Eighth is the same building that houses Doubleclick, which made the merger between the two fairly easy, logistically.

Of Google’s staff in New York, more than a third are sales and marketing, more than a third are engineering and the remainder are in support staff (overhead).

About 300 people, essentially sales and marketing, will occupy the new offices on the second and fourth floors of Chelsea Market, a space that spans three buildings. There is an additional 25,000 square feet that has not yet been developed yet.

Whereas the conference rooms in the 111 Eighth Avenue building are named after places in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the conference rooms are named after places in New Jersey (Meadowlands, Hoboken, etc.) scribbled in a graffiti font. There is no cafeteria in Chelsea markets, but there are kitchens with snacks and lots of bottled water. They do bring packaged sandwiches and sushi (courtesy of Jimmy the Sushi Guy) over.

At the ribbon cutting at Chelsea Market, Google exhibited its trademark control-freakedness, with security guards wearing blue “Google Security” shirts policing the area, receptionists asking reporters and photographers to sign nondisclosure agreements, and making requests for no photos of white boards or computer screens.

Mr. Brin, when asked about Google’s foray into phones at the question-and-answer session, responded, “I’ve been playing with some prototypes.” He said it’s fun to program phones, and his latest application was one that was no so popular with the team because “you would throw the phone up in the air and it would measure the amount of time until you caught it.”

The theme of Google’s Chelsea offices is “urban parks” — so there is a lot of exposed brick, dirty windows (with signs saying they are left dirty on purpose), graffiti font, metal and AstroTurf-ish grass. Blackboards, complimenting white boards, allow Googlers to scribble and be creative to their hearts content (but no photos, please.)

Mostly important: During the tour of the offices, City Room asked the Google guide, do the Google Chelsea Market offices also have a Lego playground area?

“No Legos,” he said. “We do have a slide, though.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Google's Cell Phone Plans Hit Delays, Journal Says

Mobile phones under development by Google Inc and its partners face slipping delivery schedules, with the first phones not likely to arrive until late 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Google had said eight months ago that the first phones to be built under the Android partnership umbrella would come out in the second half of 2008 and commitments from various handset makers and carriers appear to support this initial commitment.

Last November, Google introduced its highly anticipated Android software system for designing mobile phone devices, in a move it promised could help the cell phone industry make the Internet work as smoothly on phones as it does on computers.

The Wall Street Journal story said the first phones were unlikely to appear until the fourth quarter, making any impact on the global mobile phone market from Android-based phones unlikely to be felt until 2009 at the earliest.

Last month, Taiwanese handset maker High Tech Computer Corp said it was on track to launch the first Android cell phone by the end of 2008, ahead of rivals.

Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA expects to deliver an Android-powered phone in the fourth quarter, but Sprint Nextel Corp will not be able to, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Amid a down day of trading for many Internet stocks, shares of Internet leader Google edged up $2.62, or 0.5 percent, to $549.05 in Nasdaq trading on Monday.

"We remain on schedule to deliver the first Android-based handset in the second half of 2008," Google spokesman Barry Schnitt told Reuters.

"We're very excited to see the momentum continuing to build behind the Android platform among carriers, handset manufacturers, developers and consumers." Android counts more than 30 partners from across the mobile phone industry.

China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier with nearly 400 million accounts, likely will have its launch delayed until late 2008 or early 2009 due to Chinese translation problems, the Journal reported, citing sources.

Android has not won broad support from big mobile-software developers, and some said it is hard to develop programs while Google makes changes as it finishes its own software, the Journal reported.

Managing the software development while giving partners the opportunity to lobby for new features takes time, the Journal quoted Google's director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, as saying. He also told the Journal: "This is where the pain happens ... We are very, very close."

(Additional reporting by Robert MacMillan in New York; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Braden Reddall)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...e-android.html





Hi-Phone Anyone? Fake Mobiles Threaten China Brands
Zhou Xin

Steve Jobs may not lose sleep over knock-off iPhones, but legitimate Chinese brands such as Ningbo Bird are fretting about fakes in the cut-throat world of low-end handset makers.

China is the world's largest market for handsets, but domestic brands such as Ningbo Bird and Amoi are struggling amid intense price competition from local rivals, including some that specialize in knock-offs, having ceded their once dominant market position to foreign brands.

"A Nokia user would not be my client, but those who use Ningbo Bird handsets are very eager to try my products," said Fu Jiangang, who owns a website that sells pirated and unregistered mobile phones.

Fu is now thinking about upgrading his Hiphone, a blatant ripoff of Apple Inc's popular iPhone which comes at a fraction of the original's price.

From four small assembly plants owned by a partner located in the southern boom-town of Shenzhen, Fu sells hundreds of handsets a month and is targeting farmers, migrant workers and other low-income users to expand his sales network.

"You can't expect a farmer earning 10,000 yuan a year to spend 5,000 yuan on a new phone," said Fu. "But the farmer also wants phones that look fancy, can take pictures and play music."

His products are competing against Ningbo Bird and a host of other domestic manufacturers such as Konka and Lenovo in the bottom third of the market.

Ningbo Bird reported a loss of 34 million yuan ($4.94 million) for the first quarter, citing fierce competition in the local market, one that it once dominated just a few years ago.

Amoi, another domestic handset maker, reported losses of 121 million yuan also in the first quarter.

Nokia now leads the Chinese market, while five foreign makers commanded almost 70 percent of the domestic mobile market, according to research firm Analysis International.

Quality Counts

In Shenzhen alone, according to official data, there are more than 600 mobile phone producers and 3,000 component providers.

Zhu Xiang, who used to run a handset plant in Shenzhen but now acts as an agent bridging overseas buyers with local producers, said the price war is "bloody".

"In 2006, I made 100 yuan from a handset," Zhu said. "In 2007, 50 yuan, and now, less than 20 yuan."

The falling barriers to entry have attracted an army of small manufacturers willing to compete on razor-thin profit margins, including factories that once produced TV remote controls and MP3 players, Fu said.

China's statistics bureau said the average price of communication devices fell almost 20 percent in May compared with a year ago, while headline consumer inflation rose 7.7 percent.

"In the last two years, we have witnessed the rise of once unknown names like K-touch and the fall of premier brands like Ningbo Bird," said Jiang Lifeng, an analyst with Beijing-based CCID consulting.

Jiang said about 170 million handsets were sold in China last year, while an estimated 70 million were pirated or unregistered.

But the rapid rise of competitors is taking its toll.

Ren Qian, a manager with Ferex Electronics, another Shenzhen mobile phone manufacturer, said many firms were already in difficulties due to rising labor and production costs.

"The profit margin is shrinking, the cost is rising, and I see many firms are dying," said Ren.

(Editing by Kirby Chien and Miral Fahmy)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33380420080623





T-Mobile Offers New Home Phone Service
Laura M. Holson

How is this for a twist: Wireless carrier T-Mobile wants to sell consumers phone service in their homes.

The company announced Wednesday that it will launch a Internet-based phone service called T-Mobile@Home later this month which it hopes will compete with landline and voice-over-Internet offerings from the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Vonage. The service will cost $10 per month, but customers must also have a T-Mobile cellphone plan (which typically start at $29.99 a month) and broadband Internet service (which typically costs $20 to $50 a month, depending on who the provider is).

The move is part of T-Mobile’s effort to extend its brand beyond wireless communications. Unlike AT&T or Verizon, which have roots as old-line phone companies, T-Mobile does not sell traditional phone service.

The offering also builds on the company’s innovative service launched a year ago that allowed its mobile phone customers to make unlimited calls over their home wireless Internet networks.

T-Mobile@Home transmits calls from the phone handset through a $50 T-Mobile router to the Internet, where voice-over-Internet-protocol technology is used to complete the call. Customers are allowed to keep their existing home phone number. At the same time, said Chief Executive Robert Dotson, they can get the same services they get from mobile phones, such as personalized ring tones.

The $10 price tag for unlimited calling is cheaper than what competitors like AT&T and Verizon, charge for wired or VOIP access. Vonage, which also sells telephone calling plans using VOIP technology, offers unlimited calling for $24.99.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ice/index.html





An Unlikely Promoter Drives Nokia’s Push in Hollywood
Laura M. Holson

Tero Ojanpera is an unlikely media entrepreneur. Mr. Ojanpera, a veteran Nokia executive, is not a fan of “American Idol,” although he says he enjoys it from time to time. And when he tried to watch a recent episode of “Hannah Montana,” one of his sons switched the channel.

But four years ago, Mr. Ojanpera and his colleagues in the research center had an epiphany: that entertainment was crucial to the future of Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone maker. Within a year, Mr. Ojanpera, who earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, was cruising the palm-tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills, meeting with technology-wary studio executives who greeted him as coolly as a producer pitching a sequel to “Ishtar.”

“They were like, ‘Is this for real?’ ” Mr. Ojanpera (pronounced oy-an-pera) recently recalled.

Indeed, it was. While once formidable competitors like Motorola struggle just to deliver their phones on time, Nokia wants to transform itself into a next-generation entertainment company. Last August, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, created Ovi, an Internet service and online music store. Its intent, analysts say, is to compete directly against Apple.

Nokia is also positioning itself as a promoter of social networking, with photo and video sharing and games for users of its cellphones. That is because Nokia predicts that in the next five years, mobile phone users will create 25 percent of the entertainment watched on so-called smartphones, like the iPhone and BlackBerries. And just as important to the company’s strategy is users who will share that entertainment.

Music will be important, too. Nokia joined with Sony BMG and the Universal Music Group, which have agreed to give consumers a year’s worth of free downloads they can keep indefinitely as long as they buy and use specific Nokia models.

And to overcome Apple’s formidable lead in delivering digital entertainment to handheld devices, Mr. Ojanpera wants to bridge the gap between musicians and filmmakers and their fans, allowing consumers to get exclusive concert video and recordings or collaborate directly with artists like the director Spike Lee, whom Nokia hired recently to oversee a mobile video sharing and social networking project.

This is unfamiliar territory for Nokia, which got its start in the mid-1800s as a paper maker. But as Mr. Ojanpera explained, companies like his have no choice. “Change is painful, but you have to figure this out in order to be successful,” said Mr. Ojanpera, who is based in White Plains. “The question is, are you willing to play by the new rules?”

The task of negotiating with self-important media moguls, though, is likely to be as tricky for Mr. Ojanpera as it was for Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, who met resistance from entertainment companies and wireless carriers unwilling to give up a measure of control.

Mr. Ojanpera is deliberate in conversation, weighing his words carefully, and he lacks the outsized personality of Mr. Jobs. In a recent interview he was reluctant to take much credit — “It is not the Finnish way,” he said — or draw attention to his fast rise up Nokia’s corporate ranks. But those who have worked with him suggest his skill is finding the middle ground in any negotiation. When jostling with the Universal Music Group to offer its catalog on Nokia phones, Mr. Ojanpera agreed to support a plan that would make it easy for musicians to get their concert videos onto mobile phones.

“Neither of us felt we had to get the better of each other,” said Lucian Grainge, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group International.

While Mr. Ojanpera may lack Mr. Jobs’s charisma, he more than makes up for it with Nokia’s global might. Nokia sells 14 mobile phones a second — tallying worldwide market share of 39 percent. That reach gives entertainment executives an enticing international platform over which to digitally distribute movies and music. The company got a head start outside the United States, where its N series of multimedia smartphones is popular. The Nokia N96, which is expected to make its debut in the United States this year, is made specifically for video and television, with high-power stereo speakers and a five-megapixel camera.

“When Nokia puts their weight behind something, they don’t need to be the first,” said Pekka Koponen, a former Nokia executive. “They can dominate the market Mr. Jobs creates for them.”

Another possible advantage for Nokia is that music companies welcome a challenger to Apple. They are wary of Apple’s growing power in digital music distribution; Apple is the top music retailer in the United States, outpacing the behemoth Wal-Mart in April.

Mr. Grainge, who negotiated the free download deal with Mr. Ojanpera, said: “To have another big global player in the mobile music business is good news. Everyone within Universal is doing what we can to make it work.”

Mr. Ojanpera was born in 1966, one of three boys, and he grew up in a small mining town in Finland. He got his first job at a Nokia research and development center where he studied radio frequencies. From his earliest days at Nokia he specialized in understanding high-speed mobile networks, the so-called third-generation, or 3G, networks that are quickly becoming the industry standard.

Before being named executive vice president for entertainment and communities in January — a job created specifically for him — Mr. Ojanpera held a number of senior management positions, including chief technology officer, chief strategy officer and head of the Nokia Research Center, where he and his colleagues studied consumer behavior and design.

But he does not perceive his lack of media experience as a hindrance. “This, to me, is about curiosity and the willingness to learn something new,” he said. “You can have really smart people, but things don’t necessarily change. The challenge is who can translate those ideas into practice.”

The future, he says, will look something like this. While consumers now can buy movie tickets, watch videos and listen to music on their phones, the process is disjointed, with no place for one-button shopping. Nokia wants to make it seamless. Want a concert ticket? Press “yes” on your keypad. Want to listen to a favorite song? Press “yes.” Watch a concert video? Buy a DVD? Read a review? Need a hotel room nearby? Post photographs to your Facebook page? Just press “yes.” “It will be that easy,” he said.

To make that happen, Mr. Ojanpera has sought the advice of artists and producers, among others, including the director Ridley Scott and David A. Stewart, half of the 1980s group the Eurythmics.

Mr. Ojanpera met Mr. Stewart more than a year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and since then they have had monthly conversations, tutorials mostly, Mr. Stewart said, on how the music business works.

“We disagree on the speed of things. I’m trying to force it faster and he, quite wisely, understands he’s in a world where things exist in a certain way,” Mr. Stewart said. “Tero’s thinking is that he’s going to change the way things work and it’s going to be better. But it takes time.”

Executives are more receptive now when Mr. Ojanpera comes calling. “There is more interest,” he said. But he too is realistic. It’s not yet like the early days of the DVD explosion, when the heads of movie studios flew on their private planes to Bentonville, Ark., to woo Wal-Mart executives. But one day, maybe it will be.

“Once we start to see them make the trek to our headquarters in White Plains,” he said, “then I know things really have changed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...a/23nokia.html





Bollywood Goes to Hollywood, Seeking Bargains
Heather Timmons

Hollywood loves to show outside investors just how the movie business really works. But some of the people behind Bollywood in India believe they have something to teach Hollywood about making movies.

Reliance Entertainment, part of an Indian conglomerate controlled by the telecommunications and finance mogul Anil Ambani, is in talks to finance Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in a new venture. The company has also recently signed production deals with several Hollywood directors like Jay Roach and Chris Columbus and stars like Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Jim Carrey.

Unlike other foreign investors who have stepped toward Hollywood — and taken some grief for their efforts — Reliance has deep experience in the film business. Mr. Ambani is a relative newcomer to the movie game, but his wife, Tina Munim, is a former Bollywood star.

Reliance Entertainment’s chairman, Amit Khanna, a Bollywood director and producer, and the company president, Rajesh Sawhney, a former newspaper group executive, have laid out ambitious plans that include creating a $10 billion entertainment company that would be one of the world’s largest. They envision nothing short of remaking Hollywood.

After several good years, entertainment companies in India are finding that they have plenty of money but not enough places to spend it.

“Although the Indian film industry is having one of its best runs ever as far as cash inflow is concerned, the fact is that the top-bracket talent is booked up for the next couple of years,” said Hetal Adesara, a founder of Business of Cinema, a Mumbai-based Web company that provides Bollywood news.

Companies like Reliance are looking to Hollywood to expand their portfolios and “create a new genre of crossover cinema” with talent from India and abroad, Ms. Adesara said.

Whether the company can change the inward-focused culture of the American movie business is an open question. Directors that have worked in both Hollywood and Bollywood say that the Indian emphasis on autonomy and innovation could have a strong impact on Hollywood.

“I have complete and total creative freedom to do what I’m doing,” said Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director of “Eklavya,” an Indian entry in the best foreign-language film category at this year’s Academy Awards. Mr. Chopra recently signed a two-movie deal with Reliance Entertainment for close to $100 million. (Mr. Chopra’s wife, Anupama Chopra, writes occasionally about film and Bollywood for the Arts section of The New York Times.)

“Could you think of a studio in the United States that would give me $100 million and give me creative freedom?” he asked. “Even if they wanted to, I don’t think they could. I don’t think the system would permit them to do it.”

For one of the Reliance projects, “Broken Horses,” an English-language film set in New Mexico, Mr. Chopra has written the script and is directing, and may even pick out the poster, he said. “This kind of thing is a director’s heaven,” he said.

But the flip side is that the recipient of this type of hands-off funding is expected to be more aware of risk than one might be with Hollywood studio money. “I’ll be far more responsible than I would with five suits telling me what to do,” he said.

Reliance Entertainment executives have promised to cut through the “bureaucracy” of Hollywood — in some ways a remarkable goal, coming from a country known for the bureaucracy of its government.

The fast-growing entertainment and media industries in India and other developing countries are attracting capital and building audiences in ways their Western counterparts have not. Revenue from India’s movie industry hit $2.2 billion in 2007, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, less than a 10th that of Hollywood. But Bollywood is expected to double in size by 2012, thanks to 13 percent annual growth, versus less than 3 percent in Hollywood.

“There are a lot of lessons emerging markets can teach the rest of the world,” said Rajesh Jain, head of media and entertainment for KPMG in India. Among his suggestions are how to use new platforms and how to lower costs.

Indian entertainment companies have embraced new channels of film distribution, like the Internet, more rapidly than their Western rivals. That’s in part because of the Indian diaspora — some 25 million people of Indian origin who live outside of India, many of whom are eager to see Bollywood films but cannot find them in the local theater.

Rajshri Group, owner of one of India’s oldest production houses, was the first to tap into those millions, with the premiere of its film “Vivah” in November 2006. Rajshri made a download of the film available at the same time it premiered in theaters in India. Thousands downloaded the film, each paying $9.99.

Rajshri now offers an online library of hundreds of Bollywood movies and Hindi songs through its own Web site, and other production companies have followed suit, although downloads bring in a tiny fraction of what big Bollywood films earn at the box office.

Still, at their roots, Hollywood and Bollywood are starkly different industries, starting with the economics. A Bollywood film costs a fraction of one from Hollywood: a small budget in India might be $200,000 to $1 million, and a big budget is $4 million or more. The largest-budget Bollywood films have barely touched the $20 million mark. As much as half of the production cost can go to fees for actors and directors.

So far, getting mainstream Hollywood stars into major roles in Bollywood movies has proved difficult. Sylvester Stallone agreed this month to appear in “Kambakkht Ishq,” a move seen in the Indian film industry as a big breakthrough. But Mr. Stallone will be making a brief appearance in the movie, playing himself, not acting in a major role. Denise Richards is being wooed for a small role in the film as well, according to Indian news reports.

The financing of Bollywood films has historically been a less-than-transparent business, with cash flowing in from organized crime and black markets. In recent years, though, public corporations have been drawn to the industry because of its rapid growth, and banks in India and beyond have been making loans.

“The industry is still in the process of going straight” as far as financing is concerned, Ms. Adesara said. She estimates that 50 to 60 percent of the money being pumped into the industry now is “legitimate,” adding that “it is going to take another couple of years for the industry to get fully transparent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...reamworks.html





The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator
Charlie Sorrel

Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' projects stealth images into the photographs of strangers, while keeping those images invisible to human eyes. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a clever hack or an obnoxious intrusion. Naturally, we had to find out more.

Yesterday, von Bismarck's device made its premature debut on the internet. Today we met him in his hometown, Berlin, to talk about the device, the thinking behind it and the inevitable deluge of e-mails from viral marketers wanting use it to smash their way further into our brains.

But first, about that name: According to von Bismarck, 'Image Fulgurator' comes from the Latin for 'lightning' (fulgur) and means 'Flash Thrower'.

First, let us make clear that von Bismarck has applied for a patent for the Fulgurator. He stressed this point. Of course, anyone with the requisite skills can make one of their own, but Julius wants to keep some degree of control over commercial use.

To see why, consider how it works. The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.

The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.

Now, imagine for a moment that an ad agency gets hold of this. You couldn't take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera. As Julius told me, "I see it as a piece of media art. It could be a dangerous attack on media. [But] if people do shit with it, I feel bad."

This is the reason for the patent, and although he doesn't have an army of lawyers behind him, Julius seems to be on top of the legal side of things. He's also moving fast. This Fulgurator is the first prototype, and the most primitive. "It works, but it's not practical," he says. "In a few years time, huge companies will use it for shit," but by then, Julius will be at the next stage. He already has more working models (which I wasn't allowed to see) which are refinements of this one.

At its simplest, the Fulgurator is a very easy hack. A hole has been cut in the back of the camera and a piece of clear, roughened acrylic put in its place. A rear tube allows the flashgun to slide in. Everything else remains intact. The slides themselves are just rolls of processed film (the pictures are snapped from Julius' computer monitor) returned to their canisters and then loaded up as if a normal film. Any image on the reel can be selected by turning the rewind crank. When you hold the Fulgurator up, you can see the subject on the acrylic screen and line it with the image on the slide. You can also focus, to ensure the final projection ends up sharp.

But the magic happens inside the flash sensor on the top. Ordinary slave flashes (which fire whenever they detect another flash going off) aren't reliable enough, so von Bismarck built his own circuitry. The original was based on the Arduino platform but has evolved into a custom-made circuit. The knobs were for tweaking the settings on the prototype, stuff which is all now taken care of by software.

Julius had ripped the guts out of the box for a newer version, so we couldn't see it in action, but we know what it does. Modern digicams flash for all kinds of reasons, such as red-eye reduction and focus assistance. What Julius' circuit does is to ignore all of these false strobes and fire only when the photo itself is taken. This is the secret sauce of the Fulgurator.

Clearly, this is a prankster's dream. But Julius thinks it has a serious side, too, which is why it looks like a gun. "It's important that people know it's not just a funny idea," he told me, "it can also do negative stuff."

It seems that the "negative stuff" consists mainly of pissing people off, like the aforementioned marketing uses. We're looking forward to seeing what the next gen hardware can do, though. Take a look at this picture:

The message is 'Fulgurated' onto a black laptop bag. Turning black to white is powerful stuff, but it's not just slogans that can be fired. Although Julius frames his nerdery in an artistic context (he's studying a German Diploma called "Digital Class" at UDK, Berlin's art school) he clearly has a soft spot for tomfoolery. In the image below, you see an image of a naked body which can be projected onto a clothed person.

The possibilities are endless, but Julius is just getting started. When I suggested that he put his own URL on the images, so victims could later check to see just what had happened to their pictures, he seemed surprised (later I learned that he does plan to include it later, to promote his own work). In fact, the whole thing has happened a little too quickly.

Yesterday's 'leak' onto the internet was intended as a place holder for an entry into Ars Electronica's Cyber Arts exhibition in September. Instead, it catapulted him into internet fame and he has already received high-priced offers for his work. If he manages to keep on top of things, this little hack could make him some big money.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/0...ive-inter.html





Oyster Hackers Roam London for Free
Matthew Sparkes

Researchers have hacked an Oyster card to get a day's free travel on the London Underground.

The Dutch researchers from Radboud University used a laptop and RFID reader to crack the algorithm used by the cards, enabling them to place credit back on it to get free access to the London Underground.

Speaking to PC Pro this morning a Transport for London spokesperson claimed that the vulnerability would not work for long because the credit balance is stored both on the Oyster card and on a central database.

"Security is the key aspect of the Oyster system and Londoners can have confidence in the security of their Oyster card and personal data," claims a

Transport for London spokesperson. We run daily tests for clones of fraudulent cards and any found would be stopped within 24 hours of being discovered. Therefore the most anyone could gain from a rogue card is one days travel."

However, the information held on the cards is only periodically synchronised to a central database, allowing the researchers a 24-hour period to use their card for free travel around the capital.

The software used by the group to achieve this will not be released, but details will be covered by a paper later this year.

The vulnerability could also theoretically affect much more than travel cards. The Oyster card system uses MIFARE chips from NXP Semiconductors, which are also used in keyless entry systems around the world. Half a billion of the RFID chips have been sold so far, along with five million readers.

"We are aware that the Dutch researchers have reverse engineered the algorithm and we are taking this issue very seriously," said a spokesperson from the company, speaking to the Times. "We've informed all of our system integrators and advised them to closely assess their systems. We're talking to the guys at Radboud University and have identified various counter measures."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/207966/o...-for-free.html





Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over Passwords
Laurie J. Flynn

Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users.

The Information Card Foundation is an effort to create a single industrywide approach to managing identity online that promises to reduce drastically the use of passwords and create a system that is less vulnerable to fraud.

“There is such a market requirement to solve this problem,” said Paul Trevithick, chairman of the new group and chief executive of Parity, an identity-protection technology company in Needham, Mass., that is developing what it calls an i-card. The foundation, which also includes Equifax, Novell, Oracle and nine industry analysts and technology leaders, will try to set open standards for the technology industry.

The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver’s license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with user IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure digital identity that is overseen by a third party. The user controls the information in a secure place and transmits only the data that is necessary to access a Web site.

In addition to simplifying online shopping, such information cards will reduce the number of phishing incidents — that is, the fraudulent use of someone’s identity to gain access to financial records, according to Robert Blakeley, a research director at the Burton Group, a consulting firm that is participating in the effort. “You don’t have to depend on a password, so there’s no phishing opportunity,” he said.

One of the biggest tasks facing the group is getting the millions of Web sites to support the new system, a process analysts estimate will take a few years.

“The technology is available today, but what is not available today is a lot of sites that will accept information cards,” Mr. Blakeley said. “The mission of the group is to assure everybody that the industry is working together and that it is not going to be a competitive battlefield.”

Michael B. Jones, Microsoft’s director of identity partnerships, said the information card system would depend on the support of Web site owners in the same way that early Web browsers like Netscape waited for the support of Web server developers. The technology will first be used on desktop systems but will eventually find its way to mobile phones and other hand-held devices, he said.

Microsoft has been working on the concept of an identity card for some time. The new organization will ensure various approaches adhere to the same standard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/te...gy/24card.html





One in Three IT Staff Snoops on Co-Workers
Georgina Prodhan

ONE in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal emails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.

US information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 per cent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role.

"All you need is access to the right passwords or privileged accounts and you're privy to everything that's going on within your company," Mark Fullbrook, Cyber-Ark's UK director, said in a statement released along with the survey results on Thursday.

"For most people, administrative passwords are a seemingly innocuous tool used by the IT department to update or amend systems. To those 'in the know' they are the keys to the kingdom," he said.

Cyber-Ark said privileged passwords get changed far less frequently than user passwords, with 30 per cent being changed every quarter and 9 per cent never changed at all, meaning that IT staff who have left an organization could still gain access.

It added that seven out of 10 companies rely on outdated and insecure methods to exchange sensitive data, with 35 per cent choosing email and 35 per cent using couriers, while 4 per cent still relied on the postal system.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...11968220080619





Spying Bosses Sack Translators

Two translators have been fired by their employer in western Sweden after management at the firm secretly spied on the employees' private internet conversations.

Tomas Hedin,who worked for Structured Consulting Sweden AB from his home in Gothenburg, was relieved of his duties following an internet chat session with a woman also employed by the company.

Management at the firm had told employees that a piece of software sent to their work computers contained a program that would update their computers. In reality, however, the company has installed a tool manufactured by SpectorSoft to keep watch over the employees' computer habits.

"They may well have seen everything we've done on the computer: every chat, every website we're visited, Facebook and our bank details. These programs can even be used to activate the web camera and the microphone. It all feels a bit like East Germany," Hedin told newspaper Göteborgs-Posten.

Shortly after one of their chat sessions, Hedin's colleague was told her services were no longer required. She was accused of trying to find ways to cheat her employer following a theoretical discussion she had with Hedin. She had also complained about her bosses.

A few days later, the company's husband and wife management team, Martin and Diana Carlsson, turned up at Hedin's home in Gothenburg.

"They had read more of the chat over the weekend and quoted some very private sections we had written to each other. It wasn't much fun," said Hedin.

The couple did not leave Hedin's home until they had reclaimed the company computer and convinced him to sign a dismissal agreement.

The company did eventually agreed to withdraw its dismissal of Hedin however following negotiations with his trade union. This enabled him to instead resign and continue receiving a salary for the duration of his notice period.

Hedin's colleague has not yet had her dismissal reviewed.

Prosecutors, police and the Data Inspection Board have differing opinions as to the legality of the surveillance of employees.

According to prosecutor Håkan Roswall the company was within its rights to install spyware on its own computers.

"As long as you own the computer you have the right to install spyware that keeps track of everything from bank transactions to web cameras," he told Göteborgs-Posten.

But Mats Björklund, a legal expert from the Data Inspection Board, countered that data protection laws made it illegal for employers to monitor workers without the staff's consent.

"Obviously one is not authorized to secretly send spyware to people," he said.
http://www.thelocal.se/12602/20080623/





What Privacy Policy?
Andy Greenberg

Want to know how well a company protects its customers' data? Don't talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.

A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

In response to a survey answered by 500 privacy and 900 marketing executives in industries ranging from health care to financial services, more than a third of marketing execs said they don't place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while 47% of privacy execs believe their companies banned the practice. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.

That disconnect may be one source of the annoying spam that plagues inboxes. Just 44% of marketers surveyed believe their organizations were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, a law that requires marketers to request permission to send email messages, disclose the messages' source and offer an opt-out function. Forty percent of marketing execs who responded weren't sure whether their companies followed the law.

In recent years, passing on sensitive data points like e-mail addresses and credit card codes to marketing partners has also been a frequent source of corporate data breaches--about 40% of all breach incidents were a result of a third party's handling of data, according to another Ponemon study, released in November 2007.

Last week, for instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission handed down a ruling against NEXT Financial Group, fining the company $125,000 for sharing customer data with brokers it hoped to recruit as clients. Last November, e-mail solicitation company Convio was breached by hackers, revealing personal information of donors to nearly 100 charities that used the service. And in 2005, data broker Choicepoint sold more than 145,000 individuals' personal data to Nigerian scammers it believed were legitimate marketers.

In another ongoing case, Ponemon founder Larry Ponemon says he is consulting with a major financial institution currently being investigated by several states' attorneys general in a major data breach attributed to an e-mail marketing partner. The company, Ponemon says, gave data from six million customer accounts to a marketing firm in Southeast Asia, where it was eventually posted to a Central Asian site dealing in black-market credit card numbers.

To be sure, the marketers who responded to Ponemon's study aren't necessarily violating their companies' own internal policies. Because of the study's low response rate--around 5%--no two conflicting responses necessarily come from any one company. But the numbers point to a general gap in perception between the two sets of employees, Larry Ponemon argues.

"The fact is, marketers are much more aggressive users of information than their privacy-focused colleagues believe," says Ponemon. "Privacy and compliance people tend to think they're more important than marketing people think they are."

Ponemon notes that despite their differences, the two groups tend to agree about the privacy value of another kind of information: their own. Ninety-three percent of marketers and 99% of privacy officers surveyed said their own privacy was "an important personal issue."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...23privacy.html





Dodd And Feingold Will Filibuster Telecom Immunity

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) released the following statement today in response to the announcement that the Senate this week will consider the compromise legislation that would reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA):

This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called 'compromise' legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President's warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

"If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans' civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called 'compromise' legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says he will support Dodd and Feingold:

"Unfortunately, the FISA compromise bill establishes a process where the likely outcome is immunity to the telecommunications carriers who participated in the President's warrantless wiretapping program. Sen. Reid remains opposed to retroactive immunity, which undermines efforts to hold the Bush Administration accountable for violating the law. Thus, he will cosponsor the amendment offered by Senators Dodd and Feingold to strip out the immunity provision, and support their efforts to strip immunity on the floor. "

Read more about Feingold's efforts to get Democrats to stand up for civil liberties here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0..._n_108963.html





We May Have Just Gotten The FISA Debate Extended
dday

(the operative word here is "may". It's entirely possible that the Senate could finish all of the bills they want to push out by Friday.)

Anyone watching C-SPAN? Senator Reid just informed his colleagues that, because of all the other bills in the queue (like the housing bill, and the Iraq supplemental), FISA may not get a vote until after the July 4 holiday recess.

This is honestly the best we can hope for with this bill. Sens. Dodd, Wyden and Feingold are ready to filibuster and gamely trying to get colleagues to do the same (Sen. Dodd's speech tonight was a bravura performance), but realistically there aren't the numbers to stop cloture. However, that could change if the delay continues. And getting this to the recess means being able to get in a lot of Senator's faces on their trips back home. In addition, there's going to be a very short window in August where a ton of must-pass bills have to get through Congress, and throwing FISA in with that mess means that anything can happen.
dday's diary :: ::

Now, after that bleak bit of hopefulness: I'm sad to report that it's only because the Senate REALLY REALLY wants to pump billions into endless war in Iraq that we have a shot to delay the deletion of the Fourth Amendment. Quite a Hobson's choice. This is more an acknowledgment from Sen. Reid that he finds the housing bill and the Iraq supplemental (which includes unemployment benefits extension and the GI Bill) to be more important than FISA, and so he's going to prioritize. I don't think it means anything more than that. Overall, the fix is still in. All we can do is keep trying to delay. Money is flowing to those who flipped on telecom immunity in the House. For the phone companies, it's a small price to pay - while liability wouldn't bankrupt them, it'd be a bigger hit than the pennies they're spending to bribe legislators.

And the truth is that the federal government, on a bipartisan basis, is largely indifferent to their constituent's privacy. Since 9-11 the situation has gotten far worse, but the surveillance state has been building for decades.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* No right to privacy in constitution, though search and seizure protections exist in 4th Amendment; case law on government searches has considered new technology * No comprehensive privacy law, many sectoral laws; though tort of privacy * FTC continues to give inadequate attention to privacy issues, though issued self-regulating privacy guidelines on advertising in 2007 * State-level data breach legislation has proven to be useful in identifying faults in security * REAL-ID and biometric identification programs continue to spread without adequate oversight, research, and funding structures * Extensive data-sharing programs across federal government and with private sector * Spreading use of CCTV * The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Congress approved presidential program of spying on foreign communications over U.S. networks, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.; and now considering immunity for telephone companies, while government claims secrecy, thus barring any legal action * No data retention law as yet, but equally no data protection law * World leading in border surveillance, mandating trans-border data flows * Weak protections of financial and medical privacy; plans spread for ‘rings of steel’ around cities to monitor movements of individuals * Democratic safeguards tend to be strong but new Congress and political dynamics show that immigration and terrorism continue to leave politicians scared and without principle * Lack of action on data breach legislation on the federal level while REAL-ID is still compelled upon states has shown that states can make informed decisions * Recent news regarding FBI biometric database raises particular concerns as this could lead to the largest database of biometrics around the world that is not protected by strong privacy law

So go ahead and make calls to your Senators, and they'll be tracked (by more people than you think), but we have a ruling class that has invaded your privacy more and more over the years. All for your protection, of course. The daddies in Washington want you to know they have an eye on the bad guys for you. Problem is, they think you are the bad guy.

This isn't likely to be stopped until those of us committed to civil liberties can make our political power manifest. Here's a way to work on that:

https://secure.actblue.com/contribut...ode=therometer

From the standpoint on what we can do to stop this right now, the only hope is to delay, delay, delay. Keep the calls coming and we'll see what happens.
http://dday.dailykos.com/storyonly/2...176/554/541517





Senate Delays Vote on Surveillance Bill
Pamela Hess

The Senate on Thursday put off voting on controversial electronic surveillance legislation, in spite of what appeared to be overwhelming support for the bill.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and more than a dozen other senators who oppose telecom immunity threw up procedural delays that threatened to force the Senate into a midnight or weekend session. The prospect of further delays was enough to cause Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to postpone the vote until after the weeklong July 4 vacation.

The bill provides legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap American phone and computer lines without court permission after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

It also makes it easier for the government to tap the calls and e-mails of terrorists. Its detractors contend that it does not protect Americans' privacy rights while its champions argue that it strikes the right balance between civil liberties and security. The bill passed the House with a strong majority last week.

Feingold and other critics of the legislation say civil lawsuits are the only way the country will learn the extent of the Bush administration's nearly six years of warrantless wiretapping. The surveillance took place without the permission or knowledge of the secret court Congress created 30 years ago to handle such activities.

"I hope that over the July 4th holiday, senators will take a closer look at this deeply flawed legislation and understand how it threatens the civil liberties of the American people," Feingold said in a statement. "It is possible to defend this country from terrorists while also protecting the rights and freedoms that define our nation."

The bill amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act represents a compromise. In exchange for telecom immunity, the inspectors general of the Pentagon, Justice Department and intelligence agencies will investigate the wiretapping program.

The attorney general and national intelligence director on Thursday said President Bush would veto the bill if the immunity provisions were stripped from it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062603317.html





Scientist Is Paid Millions by U.S. in Anthrax Suit
Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau

The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.

The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.

In a news conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation.

Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit, filed in 2003, accused F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials involved in the criminal investigation of the anthrax mailings of leaking information about him to the news media in violation of the Privacy Act. In order to prove their case, his lawyers took depositions from key F.B.I. investigators, senior officials and a number of reporters who had covered the investigation.

Mark Grannis, a lawyer for Dr. Hatfill, said his client was pleased with the settlement.

“The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who’s been horribly abused can go to a judge and say ‘I need your help,’ and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice,” Mr. Grannis said.

The settlement, Mr. Grannis said, “means that Steven Hatfill is finally an ex-person of interest.”

In a written statement, Mr. Grannis and Dr. Hatfill’s other lawyers said, “We can only hope that the individuals and institutions involved are sufficiently chastened by this episode to deter similar destruction of private citizens in the future — and that we will all read anonymously sourced news reports with a great deal more skepticism.”

The lawyers will take their fee out of the settlement, which will pay out $5.8 million over 20 years. The $4.6 million figure is the cost of the annuity to the government.

The settlement called new attention to the fact that nearly seven years after the toxic letters were mailed, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others, the case has not been solved.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement that the government admitted no liability but decided settlement was “in the best interest of the United States.”

“The government remains resolute in its investigation into the anthrax attacks, which killed five individuals and sickened others after lethal anthrax powder was sent through the United States mail,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.

An F.B.I. spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation “is one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement” and is currently being pursued by more than 20 agents of the F.B.I. and the Postal Inspection Service.

“Solving this case is a top priority for the F.B.I. and for the family members of the victims who were killed,” Mr. Pack said.

But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat whose district was the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the attacks, said he would press Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., for more answers about the status of the case.

“As today’s settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched from the very beginning,” Mr. Holt said. “The F.B.I. did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end.”

Dr. Hatfill subpoenaed Washington journalists to try to learn which federal officials had spoken to the news media about the case against him in possible violation of federal privacy laws.

Toni Locy, a former legal affairs reporter for USA Today who wrote several articles about the case, was held in contempt of court, facing fines of up to $5,000 a day from Judge Reggie Walton over her refusal to name her sources, and her case is pending before an appeals court. Ms. Locy said Friday that she was relieved by the developments but that it was too soon to celebrate.

“I hope this means that this ordeal is over and that I can get on with my life,” said Ms. Locy, who will begin teaching legal reporting at Washington and Lee University in the fall.

She said Dr. Hatfill’s lawyers said they no longer needed her testimony, though she had not been told whether the contempt order against her had been lifted.

The outcome differed significantly from the settlement of a similar case involving Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear scientist once suspected of espionage. In that case, five news organizations joined the government’s settlement, agreeing to pay a total of $750,000 to prevent their reporters from having to testify about their sources.

Ms. Locy said that a federal mediator had tried to get Gannett, which owns USA Today, to negotiate some type of settlement with Dr. Hatfill’s lawyers, but that it had refused

She called the result an important affirmation of journalists’ ability to use confidential sources in gathering material on important news stories. “I protected my sources, and that’s important,” she said.

Dr. Hatfill also sued The New York Times and the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, saying that columns Mr. Kristof wrote about the case had libeled him by suggesting that he might be the anthrax mailer. That lawsuit was dismissed last year, but Dr. Hatfill has appealed the dismissal.

The former Army scientist also sued Vanity Fair and the author of an article about the case in the magazine, Donald Foster, as well as Reader’s Digest, which published a condensed version. That case was settled last year on confidential terms.

Dr. Hatfill, 54, grew up in Illinois but studied medicine in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, he worked at the National Institutes of Health and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. In applying for those jobs, he claimed to have had a Ph.D. from a South African university that his lawyers later admitted he had not earned.

He did training on bioterrorism for the F.B.I., Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency and trained to be a bioweapons inspector for the United Nations, though he never began the job.

After Dr. Hatfill came under suspicion in the anthrax case in 2002, an F.B.I. surveillance team began following him everywhere, and a small motorcade sometimes trailed his car around Washington.

In May 2003, an F.B.I. surveillance car ran over Dr. Hatfill’s foot in Georgetown as he approached the car to take the driver’s picture. He was given a ticket for “walking to create a hazard” and was fined $5.

David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/wa...28hatfill.html





U.S. and Europe Near Agreement on Private Data
Charlie Savage

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.

Negotiators, who have been meeting since February 2007, have largely agreed on draft language for 12 major issues central to a “binding international agreement,” the report said. The pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa.

But the two sides are still at odds on several other matters, including whether European citizens should be able to sue the United States government over its handling of their personal data, the report said.

The report, which lays out the progress of the talks and lists the completed draft language, was jointly written by the negotiators from the United States Homeland Security, Justice and State Departments, and by their European Union counterparts. The talks grew out of two conflicts over information-sharing after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. The United States government demanded access to customer data held by airlines flying out of Europe and by a consortium, known as Swift, which tracks global bank transfers.

American investigators wanted the data so they could look for suspicious activity. But several European countries objected, citing violations of their privacy laws. Each dispute frayed diplomatic relations and required difficult negotiations to resolve.

American and European Union officials are trying to head off future confrontations “by finding common ground on privacy and by agreeing not to impose conflicting obligations on private companies,” said Stewart A. Baker, the assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, who is involved in the talks. “Globalization means that more and more companies are going to get caught between U.S. and European law,” he said.

Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said such a blanket agreement could transform international privacy law by eliminating a problem that has led to negotiations of “staggering” complexity between Europe and the United States.

“The reason it’s a big deal is that it is going to lower the whole transaction cost for the U.S. government to get information from Europe,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Most of the negotiations will already be completed. They will just be able to say, ‘Look, we provide adequate protection, so you’re required to turn it over.’ ”

But the prospect that the agreement might lower barriers to sending personal information to the United States government has alarmed some privacy rights advocates in Europe. While some praised the principles laid out in the draft text, they warned that it was difficult to tell whether the agreement would allow broad exceptions to such limits.

For example, the two sides have agreed that information that reveals race, religion, political opinion, health or “sexual life” may not be used by a government “unless domestic law provides appropriate safeguards.” But the accord does not spell out what would be considered an appropriate safeguard, suggesting that each government may decide for itself whether it is complying with the rule.

“I am very worried that once this will be adopted, it will serve as a pretext to freely share our personal data with anyone, so I want it to be very clear about exactly what it means and how it will work,” said Sophia in ’t Veld, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands who has been an outspoken advocate of privacy rights.

The Bush administration and the European Commission have not publicized their talks, but they referred to their progress in a little-noticed paragraph deep in a joint statement after a summit meeting between President Bush and European leaders in Slovenia this month.

Issued June 10, the statement declared that “the fight against transnational crime and terrorism requires the ability to share personal data for law enforcement,” and called for the creation of a “binding international agreement” to aid such transfers while also ensuring that citizens’ privacy is “fully” protected.

The negotiators are trying to agree on minimum standards to protect privacy rights, such as limiting access to the information to “authorized individuals with an identified purpose” for looking at it. If a government’s policies are “effective” in meeting all standards, any transfer of personal data to that government would be presumed lawful.

For example, European law sets up independent government agencies to police whether personal data is being used lawfully and to help citizens who are concerned about invasions of their privacy. The United States has no such independent agency. But in a concession, the Europeans have agreed that the American government’s internal oversight system may be good enough to provide accountability for how Europeans’ data is used.

About a half-dozen issues remain unresolved, the report said. One sticking point is what rights European citizens will have if the United States government violates data privacy rules or takes an adverse action against them — like denying them entry into the country or placing them on a no-fly list — based on incorrect personal information.

European law generally allows people who think the government has mishandled their personal information to file a lawsuit to seek damages and to have the data corrected or expunged. American citizens and permanent residents can generally do the same under the Privacy Act of 1974, but that statute does not extend to foreigners.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade the Europeans that other options for correcting problems are satisfactory, including asking an agency to correct any misinformation through administrative procedures. For now, the European Union is holding to the position that its citizens “require the ability to bring suit in U.S. courts specifically under the Privacy Act for an agreement to be reached on redress,” the report said.

But the Bush administration does not want to make such a concession, in part because it would require new legislation. The administration is trying to achieve an agreement that would not require Congressional action, Mr. Baker said.

David Sobel, a senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to data-privacy rights, said the administration’s depiction of the process of correcting mishandled data through agency procedures sounds “very rosy,” but the reality is that it is often impossible, even for American citizens, to win such a fight.

Officials said it remains unclear when the agreement can be completed. But there are several pressures encouraging negotiators to sprint to the finish.

Bush administration officials say they would like to resolve the problem before they leave office next January. If the agreement does not require legislative action, Mr. Bush could complete it with a signature.

European officials may have an easier time securing its approval now, before the European Union completes proposed changes. Member nations now ratify such accords, but the changes would hand ratification power to the European Parliament, which has been skeptical of American antiterrorism policies. The report says Europeans intended to wait until 2009 after the planned completion of the reforms to finish it. But the changes are now facing likely delay after Irish voters rejected them in a referendum this month.

In addition, businesses that operate on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing to make sure they are not caught between conflicting legal obligations.

“This will require compromise,” said Peter Fleischer, the global privacy counsel for Google. “It will require people to agree on a framework that balances two conflicting issues: privacy and security. But the need to develop that kind of framework is becoming more important as more data moves onto the Internet and circles across the global architecture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/wa...rivacy.html?hp





Groups to Warn Panel About Economic Effect of Seizing Laptops
Gautham Nagesh

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s practice of seizing laptop computers and other electronic devices from American travelers returning to the United States without notifying them of what will happen to the data could negatively affect the U.S. economy, according to travel and privacy analysts who are scheduled to testify before a Senate panel on Wednesday.

The hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee comes two months after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CBP officials do not need reasonable suspicion to search laptops, BlackBerrys, cell phones and other personal electronic storage devices at U.S. borders. The seizures can include downloading personal information and data from the devices. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives filed amicus briefs earlier this month asking the court to reverse the decision.

CBP’s practice places undue burdens on travelers and could have a harmful impact on the economy, said Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, who plans to testify at the hearing. “Our argument is that essentially in today’s world you carry your office with you on electronic devices such as a cell phone, laptop or BlackBerry,” Gurley said. “In the old days, if you were physically sitting in your office, you need a warrant to search it. Now basically one does not need a warrant.”

Peter Swire, a professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University who served for two years as chief counselor for privacy under President Bill Clinton, also is concerned about the privacy implications of the ruling. “Opening my suitcase at the border is not the same as opening my laptop and making a permanent record of everything in it,” he said.

Swire said he plans to tell the subcommittee how laptop border searches are similar to the failed encryption policies of the 1990s. “The government policy violates good security practices,” he said. “It asks for password and encryption keys, which people are trained to never reveal. It violates privacy, chills free speech and compromises business secrets.”

The travel association has informally studied the potential economic impact on business travelers. Gurley said lawyers carrying confidential client materials on their laptops or small business owners worried about the integrity of their business plans must make alternate arrangements such as purchasing another computer for travel and adjusting the way they transfer information.

“There is anxiety over not knowing what the rules are,” she said. “Companies are implementing costly measures. If the rules were posted, we would know how long it takes to get the information returned.”

The association is calling for CBP to conduct privacy impact assessments to reveal the number of laptops and other devices it has seized and to disclose how long the agency takes to return them to their owners if it finds no criminal activity. The association also is concerned about what happens to data that CBP downloads or copies.

“If the information will be copied, we want to know that there are safeguards in place so they are sure of the integrity of the data,” Gurley said. “That way individuals know they will get their information back and that it is still private, not potentially shared with hundreds, even if it is inadvertent.”

But travelers should not have an expectation of privacy when crossing the border, said Nathan Sales, a professor of law at George Mason University who also is scheduled to testify. He said that all information and possessions carried by individuals across the border such as documents or photo albums are fair game for search without reasonable suspicion and that the law doesn’t provide an expectation of privacy just because information is stored digitally.

“We ought to have a law that is technologically neutral,” Sales said. “The amount of privacy shouldn’t depend on the format, digital or analog.” He noted that the 11 challenges to the legality of the laptop searches were made by convicted child pornographers.

Sales agreed that the Homeland Security Department should consider adopting policies concerning the information of ordinary travelers, calling the suggestion “eminently reasonable.” He said one such policy should be destroying the information because DHS would have a difficult time justifying why it needs to keep it.

Asked last week to respond to the foundation’s and association’s amicus filings, CBP issued a statement saying that its officers “have the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public. Laptop computers and other personal electronic devices may be detained for violations of law including child pornography, intellectual property offenses, ties to terrorism, or other violations of law. CBP officers are dedicated to protecting the civil rights of all travelers. It is not CBP’s intent to subject legitimate business travelers to undue scrutiny, but to ensure the safety of the American public.”

CBP did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080624_3037.php





Laptop Searches in Airports Draw Fire at Senate Hearing
Austin Bogues

Advocacy groups and some legal experts told Congress on Wednesday that it was unreasonable for federal officials to search the laptops of United States citizens when they re-enter the country from traveling abroad.

Civil rights groups have said certain ethnic groups have been selectively profiled in the searches by Border Patrol agents and customs officials who have the authority to inspect all luggage and cargo brought into the country without obtaining warrants or having probable cause.

Companies whose employees travel overseas have also criticized the inspections, saying that the search of electronic devices could hurt their businesses.

The federal government says the searches are necessary for national security and for legal action against people who bring illegal material into the country.

“If you asked most Americans whether the government has the right to look through their luggage for contraband when they are returning from an overseas trip, they would tell you ‘yes, the government has that right,’ ” Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said Wednesday at the hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

“But,” Mr. Feingold continued, “if you asked them whether the government has a right to open their laptops, read their documents and e-mails, look at their photographs and examine the Web sites they have visited, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing, I think those same Americans would say that the government absolutely has no right to do that.”

In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Customs and Border Protection agency could conduct searches without reasonable suspicion.

In her testimony, Farhana Y. Khera, the president and executive director of Muslim Advocates, said Muslim Americans traveling abroad had often had electronic storage devices seized without apparent cause. She said several had also been questioned about their political views.

Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said the seizing of laptops could hurt people who travel overseas for business.

“In today’s wired, networked and borderless world, one’s office no longer sits within four walls or a cubicle; rather, one’s office consists of a collection of mobile electronic devices such as a laptop, a BlackBerry, PDA, and a cellphone,” Ms. Gurley said in prepared remarks.

She said the searches meant that “you may find yourself effectively locked out of your office indefinitely.”

Ms. Gurley said a concern was the lack of published regulations explaining what happened to data when it was seized and who had access to it.

Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview, “You can’t go into my home and search my computer without a warrant, but simply because I’m carrying my computer with me as I travel, you can search it.”

But Nathan A. Sales, an assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said in a statement: “The reason the home has enjoyed uniquely robust privacy protections in the Anglo-American legal tradition is because it is a sanctuary into which the owner can withdraw from the government’s watchful eye. Crossing an international border is in many ways the opposite of this kind of withdrawal.”

Mr. Feingold expressed discontent that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the customs and border agency, did not send a witness to testify. He said a written statement by Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for the agency, provided “little meaningful detail on the agency’s policies.”

Mr. Ahern’s statement said that the agency’s efforts did not infringe upon privacy and that it was important to note that the agency was “responsible for enforcing over 600 laws at the border, including those that relate to narcotics, intellectual property, child pornography and other contraband, and terrorism.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/wa...6airports.html





The Thin Laptop Wars
Brian Caulfield

The paperback edition of War & Peace, a bottle of wine, the world's smallest cat--all of these things weigh a good deal more than the Portégé R500-S5007V introduced by Toshiba last week.

The neatest trick: Unlike Apple's 3-pound MacBook Air, the 2.4-pound Toshiba includes the optical drive that the MacBook Air lacks while cramming in 128 gigabytes worth of storage, thanks to the world's largest capacity flash memory-based hard drive. All this, and it's just one hundredth of an inch thicker than the Apple.

The catch: Toshiba's new machine won't be available until the third quarter of this year, and even then it will carry a price tag that makes Apple customers look downright thrifty: $2,999.

To be sure, a new class of lightweight, cheap laptops is emerging as well. Computers such as the Asus Eee PC 900, the HP Mini-Note 2133 and the Intel Classmate PC sell for well under $500. But they also suffer from cramped keyboards, dinky screens and relatively pokey processors.

If you want it all, and you want it small, then you're going to have to pay a great deal more than $500. While notebook computer prices are falling fast, notebooks that are still able to lighten the load while packing serious computing power command a premium price.

Take the MacBook Air. In this rarefied category of ultra-thin, full-featured laptops its starting price of $1,799 is something of a bargain. But it's hard to find anything that matches the MacBook Air's style. It's thin, tapered edges are sharp enough to cut cake. Moreover, its 13.3-inch widescreen display and full-size keyboard means you won't notice you're using an ultra-light laptop until you fold it up.

If you want to get much thinner, you'll have to be very, very rich. That's where Hewlett-Packard is positioning one of its new laptops. The $2,099 Voodoo Envy 133 is just a skosh thinner than the MacBook Air. For the extra dough, however, the Voodoo Envy 133 packs plenty of extras: a carbon-fiber case, ambient sensors that adjust the display to suit the environment and a customizable finish.

(And in a sign the bragging rights on thin are hotly contested, an Apple PR rep called after this article was published to point out--quite rightly--that while the Voodoo Envy is thinner at its thickest point than the MacBook Air's thickest point, the less expensive MacBook Air remains thinner at its thinnest point than HP's offering.)

Too rich for you? Dell's M1330 offers what might be the best compromise between power, price and size. Apple's minimalist designs are in vogue, but the slick M1330 has curb appeal, too. And if you're willing to lug around just a pound more computer than the MacBook Air, you'll be able to save $800.

Plus you'll get the optical drive the MacBook Air is missing. Not a bad deal, especially considering Apple's starter MacBook will cost you another $100 for a machine that weighs more than a full pound more. It's not going to set any records for thinness or price, but laptops like this one are a big part of the reason the Round Rock, Texas-based Dell is turning in better numbers lately, and the M1330 could be a case study on how to hit a sweet spot in a fast-moving market.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...inlaptops.html





Computers in Use Pass 1 Billion Mark: Gartner

The number of personal computers in use around the world has surpassed 1 billion, with strong growth in emerging markets set to double the number of PCs by early 2014, research firm Gartner said on Monday.

Mature markets accounted for 58 percent of the first billion installed PCs, but would only account for about 30 percent of the next billion, Gartner said.

"Rapid penetration in emerging markets is being driven by the explosive expansion of broadband and wireless connectivity, the continuing fall in PC average selling prices, and the general realization that PCs are an indispensable tool for advancement," George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, said.

Gartner expects more than 180 million computers will be replaced this year, with some sold to second owners through various channels, some broken up and recycled, but many simply dumped directly into landfill.

"We estimate ... some 35 million PCs will be dumped into landfill with little or no regard for their toxic content," said Gartner analyst Meike Escherich.

"It will become an even more pressing issue, especially in emerging markets, as the number of retired PCs grows with the continuing expansion of the PC installed base," she said.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; editing by Sue Thomas)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...24525420080623





Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista
Steve Lohr

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.

Intel’s decision is certain to sting Microsoft because the two companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the earliest days of the personal computer. Indeed, the corporate duo is known as “Wintel” in the PC industry.

Could Intel change its mind? Quite possibly. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven Ballmer, has few equals as a forceful, persuasive salesman, and he and Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, meet regularly.

Word of Intel’s lukewarm response to Vista appeared Monday in The Inquirer, an irreverent London-based technology Web site.

Intel is hardly alone in its reluctance to embrace Microsoft’s latest operating system, which was available to corporate customers in November 2006 and to consumers in January 2007. Large companies routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months, you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,” said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

His Gartner colleague, Michael Silver, said that about 30 percent of corporate customers skip any given new version of Windows. But the percentage will be higher for Vista, Mr. Silver predicted. Gartner’s corporate clients that plan to skip Vista, like Intel, do not see value of this upgrade, particularly since it requires new PC hardware at the time when the economy is weak and corporate budgets are tight.

Still, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be suffering too much from the resistance to Vista by some large corporations. Microsoft says there are more than 140 million copies of Vista installed on machines worldwide. Consumers and small businesses simply get the operating system that is on a new machine when they buy a PC, and that is Vista.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft operating system engine chugs on, phasing out the old and proclaiming the new. The company reiterated this week that, despite some customer protests, it would halt shipments of the previous version of Windows, XP, to retail stores and stop most licensing of XP to PC makers next week. Microsoft also announced that the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to go on sale in January 2010.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/et-tu-intel/





Is Microsoft Better Off Without Gates?
Dan Lyons

"Change is the only constant" is a favorite cliché among technology types. But for an industry that loves to talk about change, its leading lights don't do too much of it, at least not when it comes to turning over control of their companies. Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Oracle are all run by the guys who founded them back in the 1970s and 1980s.

But soon those leaders will move on. First to go is Bill Gates, who on June 27 steps aside at Microsoft. Next, I'd wager, will be Steve Jobs, for health reasons. Jobs, 53, underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and lately has been looking frightfully gaunt. Apple PR folks claim he's fine. Problem is, Apple PR is known for having a Clintonesque relationship to the truth. If Jobs is still running Apple at year end, I'll be shocked.

Also headed for the exits will be Larry Ellison at Oracle. Ellison claims to be 63 years old but is barely aging (I secretly believe he's several hundred years old, and a vampire) and these days he seems more passionate about sailboat racing than about schlepping database software. My guess is Ellison will acquire software maker Salesforce.com and replace himself with its 43-year-old founder and chief executive Marc Benioff, a former marketing whiz at Oracle.

These looming handoffs will have mixed effects. For Apple, expect a 30% drop in the stock price on the day the news breaks, followed by a period of disarray and confusion. Apple has a strong management team. These guys (and yes, they're all guys) are smart and experienced. But Apple has recklessly avoided setting in place a succession plan. Who will take over? Timothy Cook, the chief operating officer, who ran the company when Jobs was on sick leave in 2004? Jon Ive, the head of design? Both are bright. But Steve Jobs is beyond bright. He's one of a kind. The sad truth is this: Without Jobs, Apple will never be the same.

For Microsoft the loss of Gates won't be nearly as profound. Gates narrowed his involvement at the company eight years ago when he gave the chief executive job to his college buddy and right-hand man Steve Ballmer. The reality of the last few years is that Gates has been mentally checked out, pursuing loftier goals at his foundation.

Under Ballmer, Microsoft is enduring one of the worst times in its history. The stock has been flat. Vista, the latest version of Windows, has been such a disastrous technical flop that Microsofties themselves have coined a new word for it: "Vistaster."

Ballmer's recent failed attempt to acquire Yahoo! ended up making Microsoft look even more clumsy, weak and ridiculous. Twenty years ago Microsoft's young turks loved to mock the clueless old back-slappers who ran IBM. Today upstarts see Microsoft as a sad old bully that makes lousy software.

Considering how bad things have been lately, you might almost argue that Gates' departure could be a boon, a chance for some fresh thinking. Except look who he's left in charge. Ballmer is smart and relentless, but he's no techie. And he's 52 years old. Ray Ozzie, who replaced Gates as chief software architect, is also 52. He began his career at Data General. Remember them? They vanished a decade ago. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, is 59 and also started out at Data General--in 1970. That's the year the Beatles broke up and Jimi Hendrix died. Microsoft's three top guys came of age in an era when the Internet was called the ARPANET and the personal computer had not yet been invented.

Microsoft's PR spinners point out that other key players are younger. But come on. Kevin Johnson, the guy running Microsoft's Internet efforts, is 47 years old, has been with Microsoft since 1992, has a background in sales and used to work at IBM. He also oversees Vista. Ahem. Robert Bach, president of the Xbox and Zune division, is 46 and has been at Microsoft since 1988. Stephen Elop, president of the Office applications group, is 44 and joined Microsoft this year. Kevin Turner, chief operating officer, age 43, spent 20 years at Wal-Mart.

Smart guys. Great guys. But not a pack of wild-eyed visionaries operating at Internet speed. Take a look at that photo of Gates and his crew circa 1976, looking like the Manson Family. Those are the kind of crazies who change the world.

Sure, Microsoft will participate in the Internet revolution, just as IBM played a role in the PC revolution. But IBM ultimately abandoned PCs and now chugs along on its mainframe franchise and services business. Not exciting, but not a bad business, either.

I think Microsoft will play defense from here on out. Its army of MBAs will milk the monstrous franchise around Windows and Office for all it's worth and try to cushion its decline and create a soft landing.

That's what the future looks like for Microsoft: lucrative, profitable and boring. No doubt Bill Gates realizes this. And that, I suspect, is why he's checking out.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/23/gat...l?boxes=custom





David Caminer, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 92
Douglas Martin

David Caminer, who as an employee of a legendary chain of British tea shops found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea, died June 19 in London. He was 92.

The death was announced by the Leo Computers Society, whose purpose is to keep alive the memory of LEO, the computer Mr. Caminer helped develop for J. Lyons & Company. It was the world’s first business computer, a distinction certified by Guinness World Records.

Lyons was the first company in the world to computerize its commercial operations, partly because it had so many of them: it had more than 200 teahouses in London and its suburbs, with each Lyons Corner House daily generating thousands of paper receipts and needing scores of fresh baked items.

In addition to running the tea shops, Lyons catered large events like tennis at Wimbledon and garden parties at Windsor Castle; it also operated hotels, laundries, and ice cream, candy and meat pie companies. And, of course, tea plantations.

As a result, the company required exceptionally efficient office support. So it was only natural it would look at the “electronic brains” that scientists in the United States were developing for scientific and military purposes as a way to streamline its own empire. Mr. Caminer’s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical rigor while speeding up the company’s logistics and finances many times over.

The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it “the first dedicated business machine to operate on the ‘stored program principle,’ meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program.”

“LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer,” Computer Weekly said last year.

LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.

“Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

That a food conglomerate did this seems almost incredible. New Scientist said in 2001: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

David Treisman was born on June 26, 1915, in the East End of London. His father was killed in World War I, and his mother married Felix Caminer. An avid leftist, he decided a university education was irrelevant, obituaries in the London papers said. He joined Lyons as a management trainee in 1936.

During World War II, he lost a leg in combat in Tunisia. He returned to Lyons and soon became manager of the systems analysis office. Lyons sent employees to the United States to study office automation, and American experts said they should go to the University of Cambridge, where Maurice Wilkes was developing an early computer.

Lyons made a deal to help finance Dr. Wilkes’s work in return for his help in building a computer for the company. As work on the hardware progressed, Mr. Caminer drew up a flow chart to show how the different job requirements related. The charts became the basis of the computer code.

Mr. Caminer has been called the first corporate electronic systems analyst, a designation with which Mr. Ceruzzi agreed.

The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee’s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes. Its success led Lyons to set up a computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO, the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in the first two models.

LEOs were sold to the Ford Motor Company, tobacco companies, a steel maker, South Africa, Australia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, among other buyers. When the British government chose the last LEO to handle its telephone billing system, Tony Benn, postmaster general, praised Lyons for “standing up to and beating on its own merits” the competition from overseas.

But the Lyons computer operation merged into a succession of companies, which chose to use American technology, not least for its universality. Many have compared LEO’s experience with that of the de Havilland Comet, which was the first commercial passenger jet in production but which lost out to Boeing jets.

Mr. Caminer, who was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1980 for developing a computer system for the European Common Market, had many explanations for the failure of Lyons to press its advantage. One was that it had no idea how rapidly technology would advance. Another was: “We were too often arrogant about always knowing best.”

Mr. Caminer is survived by his wife, the former Jackie Lewis, a son and two daughters. The remnants of Lyons predeceased him in 1998.

On Jan. 9, 1965, when the first LEO computer was turned off forever, The Daily Mail published an obituary. It recalled how LEO hummed, and once made a noise that sounded like a hornpipe to Prince Philip.

“Let it be remembered that throughout almost 14 years of life he worked a 24-hour shift on one dreary problem after another without complaining and spent, at the most, only a few hours off sick,” the computer’s obituary said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/te...29caminer.html





Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder.

THE honest truth is, for a comedian, even death is just a premise to make jokes about. I know this because I was on the phone with George Carlin nine days ago and we were making some death jokes. We were talking about Tim Russert and Bo Diddley and George said: “I feel safe for a while. There will probably be a break before they come after the next one. I always like to fly on an airline right after they’ve had a crash. It improves your odds.”

I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO. Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster.

You could certainly say that George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways. Every comedian does a little George. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve been standing around with some comedians and someone talks about some idea for a joke and another comedian would say, “Carlin does it.” I’ve heard it my whole career: “Carlin does it,” “Carlin already did it,” “Carlin did it eight years ago.”

And he didn’t just “do” it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

But his brilliance fathered dozens of great comedians. I personally never cared about “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” or “FM & AM.” To me, everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.

I became obsessed with him in the ’60s. As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.

I know George didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Like death, they were just more comedy premises. And it just makes me even sadder to think that when I reach my own end, whatever tumbling cataclysmic vortex of existence I’m spinning through, in that moment I will still have to think, “Carlin already did it.”

- Jerry Seinfeld

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/op...infeld.html?hp

















Until next week,

- js.



















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