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Old 06-08-08, 08:43 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 9th, '08

Since 2002


































"I don't think making people pay subscriber fees for content is sustainable." – Alan Levy


"It was completely different from what I learned in school. It's hard to believe the first time you see a different edition of history. At first I felt it's unbelievable. Then I felt angry because I was deceived for such a long time." – Shanghai IT worker


"If you believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be." – Marc John Randazza


"In the age of Internet (almost) anywhere, why be tied to a TV? [Television networks] no longer have the same viewer monopoly they had 30 years ago — why don’t they see that?" – Lorie Johnson


"It wasn’t the best quality, and I’m sure it will be better on TV, but to watch that flame go up [on the 'net] at the same time as the rest of the world was a beautiful, moving thing." – Aida Neary


"The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive." – Tracy Record



































August 9th, 2008




College Funding Bill Passed With Anti-P2P Provisions Intact
Ryan Paul

The Senate and House have voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and approved controversial new provisions that will require universities to provide students with access to commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing. The bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

These provisions have strong support from the content industry, but have been targeted with widespread criticism from the academic community and advocacy groups such as Educause. The push for mandatory filtering at universities began in 2007 when the RIAA published a list of top piracy schools and the MPAA claimed that piracy on university campuses accounts for 44 percent of the movie industry's annual losses to piracy. The group later retracted this claim when it was discovered that the numbers were grossly inflated. The RIAA followed up its top piracy school list with a litigation and propaganda campaign which included the development of a web site to handle automated settlements, but soon faced serious setbacks in court.

The MPAA also developed an Ubuntu-based software toolkit for detecting file-sharing on university networks, but was forced to discontinue distribution of the software when they were hit with a Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown notice. The MPAA had violated copyright law by failing to adhere to the General Public License under which Ubuntu is distributed.

The MPAA's high-tech anti-piracy solution

The RIAA and MPAA have vigorously lobbied for a legislative solution at both the state and federal levels. Pressure from the content industry compelled Congress to begin investigating the issue.

The lobbying efforts eventually resulted in the addition of anti-piracy provisions in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act in the House, which passed by a wide margin in February. The Senate version of this bill passed today with bipartisan support.

A statement issued by the joint House and Senate committees responsible for harmonizing the two versions of the bill explains that universities will have to begin authoring formal piracy deterrence plans. The statement also recommends several commercial anti-P2P technologies including Audible Magic's CopySense Network Appliance and Red Lambda's Integrity filtering tool.

"[The amendment includes] language requiring institutions to make available the development of plans to detect and prevent unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on the institution of higher education's information technology system," the statement says. "The Conferees have combined elements from both bills to require institutions to advise students about this issue and to certify that all institutions have plans to combat and reduce illegal peer to peer file sharing."

The MPAA hailed the bill's passage. "We work closely with leaders in the higher education community because we both have a stake in ensuring that intellectual property continues to be a strong, vibrant part of our nation's economy," said MPAA president Dan Glickman. "By including these important provisions in the Higher Education Act, Congress is sending a strong message that intellectual property is worth protecting."

The MPAA will shortly begin sending out what it describes as "campus briefing books" that contain information on the anti-piracy provisions of the new law and what schools need to do in order to be in compliance. The books will also offer hints on how to clamp down on P2P traffic and detect infringement.

There are presently no penalties for failing to comply with the requirement, but Educause and many in the academic community fear that the new provisions are a trojan horse that will open the door for Congress to add penalties in future iterations. If this happens, universities could potentially be denied funding if they don't agree to play copyright cop.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ns-intact.html





Tufts Tells Judge, We Can't Tie IP To MAC Addresses
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes

"Protesting that Tufts University's DHCP-based systems 'were not designed to facilitate forensic examinations,' but rather to ensure 'smooth operations and to manage capacity issues,' the IT Office at Tufts University has responded to the subpoena in an RIAA case, Zomba v. Does 1-11, by submitting a report to the judge explaining why it cannot cross-match IP addresses and MAC addresses, or identify users accurately. The IT office explained that the system identifies machines, not users; that some MAC addresses have multiple users; that only the Address Resolution Protocol system has even the potential to match IP addresses with MAC addresses, but that system could not do so accurately. For reasons which are unclear, the IT department then suggested that the RIAA next time send them 'notices to preserve information,' in response to which they would preserve, rather than overwrite, the DHCP data, for the RIAA's forensic benefit."
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/08/06/0224238.shtml





Green Party Condemns 'File-Sharing' Deal
Mark Watts

The Green party has condemned a deal struck by six UK internet service providers with the record industry to clamp down on illegal file sharing.

The party has warned that "draconian measures" in the government-brokered deal threaten internet access for vulnerable people.

Under the "memorandum of understanding" unveiled last week, the ISPs have agreed with the BPI, the body formerly known as the British Phonographic Industry that represents the British record industry, to collaborate on a voluntary code of practice on illegal file-sharing.

They will take part in a test to write to customers to tell them that rights holders, such as music or film companies, allege that there has been illegal file sharing on their broadband connection.

Rights holders will pass IP addresses to the ISPs, who will match them with users and send the letters to them.

The ISPs are to meet the government to draw up a code of practice on how to tackle repeat infringers, such as blocking content to certain users or limiting the download speed of their internet connection.

The BPI says that the steps are necessary to stop what amounts to theft and to enable new, legal digital music service models to "flourish", while ensuring that "creativity and copyright are respected."

Tom Chance, the Green party's intellectual property spokesman, said, "Net users everywhere should be worried by this memorandum of understanding between the BPI and the six largest ISPs in the UK. Faults exist at every level.

"The first stage gives the BPI the right to track file-sharers, and pass their details onto ISPs. That's an attack on civil liberties in itself, but the true folly of the scheme rests in what those ISPs can do next.

"Their new powers run in two halves. Initially, they merely send warning letters to suspected file-sharers. If these fail to deter them, the ISPs threaten to slow or cut off their internet connections. This is a hugely disproportionate response.

"It would not matter who had done the sharing. It would not matter if it was someone else in the building. It would not matter if your machine had been assaulted by malware and used without your knowledge. The ISPs will target suspects, which means that many people on shared internet connections will be cut off under these rules."

He said that this risks "cutting many vulnerable people off from their livelihoods and their means for engaging as a citizen."
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...aring-deal.htm





E-Mail Hacking Case Could Redefine Online Privacy
Ellen Nakashima

A federal appeals court in California is reviewing a lower court's definition of "interception" in the digital age, in a case that some legal experts say could weaken consumer privacy protections online.

The case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America, involves a hacker who in 2005 broke into a file-sharing company's server and obtained copies of company e-mails as they were being transmitted. He then e-mailed 34 pages of the documents to an MPAA executive, who paid the hacker $15,000 for the job, according to court documents.

The issue boils down to the judicial definition of an intercept in the electronic age, in which packets of data move from server to server, alighting for milliseconds before speeding onward. The ruling applies only to the 9th District, which includes California and other Western states, but could influence other courts around the country.

In August 2007, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, in the Central District of California, ruled that the alleged hacker, Rob Anderson, had not intercepted the e-mails in violation of the 1968 Wiretap Act because they were technically in storage, if only for a few instants, instead of in transmission.

"Anderson did not stop or seize any of the messages that were forwarded to him," Cooper said in her decision, which was appealed by Valence Media, a company incorporated in the Caribbean island of Nevis but whose officers live in California. "Anderson's actions did not halt the transmission of the messages to their intended recipients. As such, under well-settled case law, as well as a reading of the statute and the ordinary meaning of the word 'intercept,' Anderson's acquisitions of the e-mails did not violate the Wiretap Act."

Anderson was a former business associate of an officer for Valence Media, which developed TorrentSpy, a search engine that helped users find "torrents," or special data files on the Internet that can be used to help download free audio, software, video and text. According to court documents, Anderson configured the "copy and forward" function of Valence Media's server so that he could receive copies of company e-mail in his Google mail account. He then forwarded a subset to an MPAA executive.

The documents sent to the MPAA included financial statements and spreadsheets, according to court papers. "The information was obtained in a legal manner from a confidential informant who we believe obtained the information legally," MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman said.

Valence Media alleged that the MPAA wanted those documents to gain an advantage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company and its officers.

"The case is alarming because its implications will reach far beyond a single civil case," wrote Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Friday. If upheld, the foundation argued, "law enforcement officers could engage in the contemporaneous acquisition of e-mails just as Anderson did, without having to comply with the Wiretap Act's requirements." Those requirements are strict, including a warrant based on probable cause as well as high-level government approvals and proof alternatives would not work.

Cooper's ruling also has implications for non-government access to e-mail, wrote Bankston and University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm in EFF's brief. "Without the threat of liability under the Wiretap Act," they wrote, "Internet service providers could intercept and use the private communications of their customers, with no concern about liability" under the Stored Communications Act, which grants blanket immunity to communications service providers where they authorize the access.

Individuals could monitor others' e-mail for criminal or corporate espionage "without running afoul of the Wiretap Act," they wrote.

"It could really gut the wiretapping laws," said Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and expert on surveillance law. "The government could go to your Internet service provider and say, 'Copy all of your e-mail, but make the copy a millisecond after the email arrives,' and it would not be a wiretap."

In August, 2007, Valence Media shut down TorrentSpy access to the United States due in part to concern that U.S. law was not sufficiently protective of people's privacy, according to its attorney, Ira Rothken.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center also filed a friend-of-the-court brief Friday, arguing that Congress intended to cover the sort of e-mail acquisition Anderson engaged in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080503421.html





RIAA ‘MediaSentry’ Owner Hired by China
p2pnet

It seems somehow fitting that SafeNet, a leader in digital wrongs and owner of seriously discredited RIAA ‘private eye’ MediaSentry, has been hired by the People’s Republic of China.

SafeNet is to provide DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) for in-country live and on-demand online video footage of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, it boasts.

DRM consumer controls are meant to stop copying. However, companies in all sectors have long been abandoning it as expensive, impractical, unworkable —- and unethical.

However, in regimes such as China, whose citizens live under rigid control, DRM offers many interesting possibilities for suppression and repression.

“CCTV.com … owns exclusive rights to the broadcast of all audio and video content via online and mobile distribution channels across Mainland China and Macau,” says the company.

“CCTV has committed to protect the intellectual property of the IOC against piracy. They are following the China Broadcasting Copyright Protection standard.”

The copyright of the Olympic Games is, “too important to us as it affects the economic interest to the International Olympic Committee, the authorized broadcasting operators and the branding of the Olympic Games”.

So says CCTV.com boss Wang Wenbin.

‘Branding’ of the Olympic Games?

Aren’t they supposed to be held in the spirit of freedom and openness?

Not in China.

“We strongly believe that SafeNet’s DRM solution is reliable and could securely protect the intellectual property for the new media video and voice broadcasting,” says Wang.

But it’s really simple.

Anything which can be seen and/or heard can be copied
http://p2pnet.net/story/16645





Web Chips Away at China's Grip on Information
Ellen Lee

Just days after David Wang produced a mock newscast criticizing Taiwanese officials and uploaded the clip to Tudou, a popular video sharing site in China, it disappeared. What's surprising is not that it was censored - but that it remained online as long as it did.

His experience illustrates how the Internet is challenging China's status quo.

Blogs, forums, social networking, video sharing and other community-oriented sites - known as Web 2.0 - depend on users expressing their opinions. Meanwhile, peer-to-peer services make it easier to share information, from a bootleg copy of the latest Hollywood film to a documentary about Tiananmen Square.

The result is the chipping away of what's referred to as the Great Firewall of China, by which the government tries to control online content even as the country is lured to nurture Internet development for economic reasons.

"You could not see such things happen before in China because of the controlled media," said Isaac Mao, an Internet entrepreneur in Shanghai. Now, he said, "You can see grassroots-based technology helping people become empowered."

For instance, bloggers and citizen journalists armed with cell phones and Internet access have posted photos and videos about everything from a neighborhood traffic accident to the recent Sichuan earthquake. In some cases, they challenge government and corporate actions.

Guo Liang, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, uses this analogy to describe the Sisyphean attempts to block the flood of information on the Internet:

"If something happened in the world and there are 10 sources of information on this event, even if I block nine, you can get one. That's enough for you. You don't need the other nine resources. ... Once you get that information, you can forward that to others.

"This is the digital age," he said. "I don't think it will work to block or filter something."

Revisionist history

One 27-year-old information technology employee from Shanghai, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation, said that through the Internet, he discovered different versions of what happened during China's Cultural Revolution and World War II. A friend shared a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest that had been downloaded from an overseas file-sharing service.

"It was completely different from what I learned in school," he said. "It's hard to believe the first time you see a different edition of history. At first I felt it's unbelievable. Then I felt angry because I was deceived for such a long time."

Indeed, tech-savvy Internet users have learned how to circumvent the Chinese government's attempts to shield certain information. In online forums, they substitute certain words, such as using a character that sounds like the actual word. They use peer-to-peer services to download otherwise inaccessible information. And they use tools such as Tor, which lets them surf the Internet anonymously and visit blocked Web sites.

A strong critic

Hong Bu, better known as Keso, a popular pony-tailed blogger in his 40s in Beijing, has openly criticized the Chinese government for blocking sites and censoring content.

"It is not like I want to knock down the government or rise in rebellion against government officials," he said. "It is just a shame that there are many good tools and information that we cannot access and use."

But not all Chinese users believe that the Internet should be completely open. Some entrepreneurs and consumers challenged what they described as the foreign media's biased and overly zealous interest in the country's censorship policies. Much more information is available in China than ever, they said.

A recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that more than 80 percent of Chinese Internet users said they believe the Internet needs to be managed, with 85 percent believing the government should be responsible and 79 percent saying the Internet companies should be in control. Increasingly, the study also found, Chinese Internet users - 41 percent - believe that politics should be controlled online.

Guo, the author, said in reviewing their responses that people are worried not so much about political control as they are about maintaining social stability among China's 1.3 billion people and curbing social ills such as pornography and violence.

Societal gains

Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's journalism school, said that despite the continuing game between the government and China's Internet users, the shift toward more user participation and self-expression benefits Chinese society, particularly as it becomes part of the daily fabric of life for China's young Internet users.

"It empowers people," he said. "It changes the configuration of the social structure and fabric. We've only seen the beginning."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech





If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?
Brad Stone

WANT to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?

Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.

Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: “practical obscurity.” Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.

Well, not anymore. The information on CriminalSearches.com is available to all comers. “Do you really know who people are?” the site blares in large script at the top of the page.

Databases of criminal convictions first moved online several years ago. But users of pay sites like Intelius.com and PeopleScanner.com had to enter their credit card numbers for access — often enough of an obstacle to discourage casual or improper inquiries.

According to Bryce Lane, president of PeopleFinders, the new site draws data directly from local courthouses and offers records of arrests and convictions in connection with everything from murder to minor infractions like blowing past a stop sign — at least for jurisdictions that include traffic violations in their criminal data. It also lets users view a map showing addresses and names of all those arrested or convicted of a crime in a specific neighborhood, and to place alerts that prompt e-mail when someone in their life gets busted or someone with a record moves in nearby.

“We are just trying to provide what’s already out there in an easier fashion, for free,” Mr. Lane said. “We think it’s pretty helpful to families.”

PeopleFinders, originally called Confi-Check, was founded in 1988 by Rob Miller, a former investigator for Intel. PeopleFinders has been selling records to consumers for the last decade and recently acquired a large public-records firm — Mr. Lane declines to say which one because the transaction was private — that allowed it to introduce the expanded free service.

Mr. Lane concedes that his site contains some mistakes. Every locale has its own computer system, he notes, and some are digitizing and updating records faster than others.

A quick check of the database confirms that it is indeed imperfect. Some records are incomplete, and there is often no way to distinguish between people with the same names if you don’t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).

To further test the site, I vetted some of my colleagues at The New York Times. One, who shall remain nameless, had a recent tangle with the law that the site labeled a “criminal offense,” while adding no other information. Curious, I called my colleague with the date and city of the now very public ignominy. The person was stunned to know that the infraction — a speeding ticket — was easily accessible and described as criminal.

“I went to traffic school so this wouldn’t appear on my record. I’m in shock. This blows me away,” my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. “I don’t necessarily want you all knowing that I’m a fast driver.”

PeopleFinders’ response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.

My colleague’s quandary illustrates why privacy advocates work themselves into knots about this kind of site. In the past, Congress carefully considered how the public should use criminal records. Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1997 required that employers who hire investigators to obtain criminal records from consumer reporting agencies advise prospective employees of the search in advance, and disregard some types of convictions that are older than seven years.

“I don’t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,” says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “Understanding Privacy.” “Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn’t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.”

BUT now, of course, none of the old restrictions apply. The information is available from a variety of sources, and now free. Jurors can and almost certainly will be tempted to look up criminal pasts of defendants in their cases. And employers can conduct searches themselves without hiring investigators. Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders says that employers cannot legally use the database in making hiring decisions — but there is nothing to stop them.

A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.

But the Internet entrepreneurs who are making public records accessible have little patience for the privacy worrywarts who are getting in the way of their business goals.

“I think people generally understand the 21st-century reality that this type of public information is going to be widely available,” said Nick Matzorkis, the chief executive of ZabaSearch, a search engine that provides people’s addresses and phone numbers, culled from public records. CriminalSearches.com “is another indication of the inevitability of the democratization of public information online,” Mr. Matzorkis said.

Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders concurs and compares his site to the seat belt, saying it will make everyone safer.

Of course, that is easy for them to say. According to CriminalSearches.com, they are both clean.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/te...y/03essay.html





Hail to the Twitterer
Mark Leibovich

Washington — Big surprise: a lot of smarty-pants computer types have been snickering at John McCain lately.

The self-described “Neanderthal” of the Grand Old Party (emphasis, old) has been catching flack for admitting that he is no techno-geek. He not only did not invent the Internet, he can barely use it.

“I don’t expect to set up my own blog,” he told the New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper. The Times has learned that Mr. McCain does not text, Treo or Twitter, either.

How would he possibly spend his time in the White House?

We joke, but the serious question — and one that has occupied many of the blogs and discussion groups that Mr. McCain does not partake of — is whether the computing habits of the presumptive Republican nominee should have any bearing at all on his fitness to be commander in chief.

While 73 percent of American adults use the Internet (only 35 percent 65 or older), according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s likely that many of them would rather have a president who can get Osama bin Laden than get online. And there is a common belief that says being president should be more a “vision” job than a “management” job, and that the clutter of a digital life can only distract from the Big Picture and Deep Thoughts a leader should be concerned with. In other words, would we really want a president “friending” from the Oval Office, scouring Wikipedia for information on Iran’s nuclear program or fielding e-mail from someone claiming to be “Nigerian general” seeking an American bank account for embezzled millions?

As a practical matter, probably not. Presidents can avoid using computers if they want to. That’s one of the privileges of the office. They are surrounded by a staff entrusted with keeping them plugged in, day and night.

So why have Mr. McCain’s admissions of digital illiteracy sparked such ridicule in wiseguy circles?

Computers have become something of a cultural marker — in politics and in the real world. Proficiency with them suggests a basic familiarity with the day-to-day experience of most Americans — just as ignorance to them can suggest someone is “out of touch,” or “old.”

“We’re not asking for a president to answer his own e-mail,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist who teaches at Stanford. “We’re asking for a president who understands the context of what e-mail means.”

The “user experience,” Mr. Saffo said, brings with it an implicit understanding of how the country lives, and where it might be heading. As Mr. McCain would lack this, he would also be deficient in this broader appreciation for how technology affects lives.

There will always be people who take great delight in the powerful betraying cluelessness over technology. When Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, was indicted last week on charges of filing false financial disclosures, the news was met with reminders that he once referred to the Internet as a “series of tubes.” Some mocked President Bush, too, when he referred to his using “the Google” and “the Internets.” Mr. Bush used to e-mail but gave it up when he became president because of concerns about security and a paper trail — the same things, presumably, a successor would consider.

In the rarefied context of the Oval Office, however, there can be great value in having a president who has an intuitive sense of how a technology works, said Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications entrepreneur and investor who wrote the recent book “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of how Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.”

“I don’t think it’s so much a question of what a president is doing today,” Mr. Wheeler said. “It’s a question of how responsive are you to the fact that there will be continuing technological change during your term.”

Mr. Wheeler, a supporter and fundraiser for Mr. McCain’s Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, said that Lincoln was the model of a president who embraced technology. Lincoln’s mastery of the telegraph machine not only put him well ahead of most of his constituents on the technology curve but also allowed him to speak directly to his generals and track their actions.

Lincoln gave a speech in 1860 that said the United States’ responsiveness to new technology was the chief virtue separating it from Europe. The speech begins, “All creation is a mine, and every man a miner.”

It’s no surprise that Mr. McCain — standard-bearer of the party of Lincoln — has moved to press delete on the notion that he is a Luddite.

“I do understand the importance of the computer,” Mr. McCain reassured in The San Francisco Chronicle last week. “I understand the importance of the blogs.” He said, “I am forcing myself — let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day.” But keeping up with technology “doesn’t mean that I have to e-mail people,” he said. “Now, I read e-mails.” The staff is “constantly showing them to me as the news breaks during the day.”

This was a decidedly different Mr. McCain from the one who said in South Carolina last year that it was important for leaders to communicate with bloggers, “as painful as that might be.”

Or the Mr. McCain who in an interview with Fortune magazine two years ago called himself a “Neanderthal” about computers, in contrast to his wife, Cindy, whom he called a “wizard.”

“She even does my boarding passes — people can do that now,” Mr. McCain marveled. “When we go to the movies, she gets the tickets ahead of time. It’s incredible.”

Mr. McCain’s sense of wonder evoked the episode in the early 1990s when George H. W. Bush became overly impressed upon seeing a price scanner at a supermarket check-out counter. It suggested to some people that the president, who had spent four years in the White House after spending eight years as vice president, was out of touch with the lives of average Americans.

The McCain campaign is sensitive to the notion that his limited knowledge of computing could be taken as a signal that he is blind to technology.

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” said Mark Soohoo, a McCain aide for online matters, at a conference on politics and technology. “You actually do,” interrupted Tracy Russo, a former blogger for John Edwards.

Not knowing how to use a computer could reinforce a notion that Mr. McCain subscribes to the old-way-of-thinking, said Michael Feldman, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a top aide to former Vice President Al Gore. It creates a problematic “optic” for the McCain campaign, Mr. Feldman said, especially when juxtaposed with the younger Mr. Obama, frequently photographed with BlackBerry on his belt clip.

“There’s a certain tempo to the thinking of someone who uses all kinds of new media,” said Mr. Saffo, who said he would anoint Mr. Obama, if elected, “the first cybergenic president,” just as John F. Kennedy was considered the first telegenic president.

McCain supporters point out that his ranking position on the Senate Commerce Committee has steeped him in issues important to the technology sector.

“If John McCain needs to rely on a young staffer to set up his Facebook page, then so be it,” said Ed Kutler, a Republican lobbyist and former aide to the cybersavvy former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “I can live with that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/we...leibovich.html





Facebook: Children Evade Social Websites' Age Limits
John Carvel

Nearly a quarter of children between the ages of eight and 12 are evading the age restrictions imposed by social networking sites Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, a poll of young people revealed last night.

The results suggest that more than 750,000 children are illicitly using the sites - which are supposed to be limited to teenagers and adults - potentially exposing them to risky communications with strangers.

The poll of 1,000 children was commissioned by Garlik, an online information company, which said parents are responding by secretly logging on to their children's social networking pages to detect any reckless online behaviour.

A parallel poll of 1,000 parents found 72% try to protect their children by monitoring the contacts they make online. It found 26% of parents have set up their own social networking page from which they can spy on the children's activities.

Tom Ilube, chief executive of Garlik, said: "The fact that parents feel compelled to monitor their children on this scale should send a powerful message to the big social networking sites.

"With three quarters of a million underage users in the UK, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo need to take their own age restriction policies far more seriously to help allay parents' real fears."

Facebook and Bebo set a minimum age limit of 13 for users to register online and Myspace sets the limit at 14.

The poll found children spend an average of one hour a day on social networking sites. About a quarter of eight- to 15-year-olds admitted having strangers as friends on their social networking page. A fifth claimed to have met strangers they had encountered online. Two-thirds said they posted personal information on their pages, including their school and their mobile phone number.

Ilube added: "Children are at the vanguard of the social networking phenomenon, using sites such as Facebook and Bebo in the same way other generations used the telephone. With the summer holidays upon us and kids spending hours on the internet, busy parents can't be expected to monitor their children's activities all the time."

The poll of parents found 58% said they had become more diligent than a year ago at monitoring their children's use of social networking sites, and 89% said they had spoken to their children about the dangers involved.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...rking.facebook





Craigslist Troll Gets Sued
Lou Cabron

Nearly two years ago, Jason Fortuny placed a fake sex ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman seeking casual sex, and then published the photographs of anyone who responded. Now one of his victims has filed a $75,000 lawsuit against Fortuny in U.S. District Court, and this summer (after four months of effort) finally obtained a valid address for Fortuny and issued a summons.

Two weeks ago — as the New York Times was preparing their article — Fortuny was writing an eight-page letter to the judge finally defending his "Craigslist experiment" against the legal charges, and offering his own testimony about the event. "I take it back," Fortuny wrote recently on his blog. "You might get sued if you do a Craigslist Experiment..."

But it's still very complicated.

According to the suit Fortuny "acted with actual malice to harm and deceive the individuals responding to the Craigslist ad." The suit demands a jury trial and seeks a full slate of damages — compensatory, statutory, and punitive, plus attorney's fees and costs.

"Plaintiff has suffered, and continues to suffer, harm arising from the foregoing wrongful conduct by Mr. Fortuny," the lawsuit complains, identifying the victim as John Doe and arguing that the incident affected his private life "and the manner in which he is viewed among family, friends, and colleagues."

Fortuny's prank traumatized John Doe, it argues, causing him to "suffer and continue to suffer from humiliation, embarrassment, lost opportunity of keeping his family together, and emotional distress."

John Doe is asking that Fortuny be enjoined from publishing the photo, that Fortuny destroy his copy of the photo (and sexy email), and to "cooperate in the removal...from any cached sites."

The specific charges?

Count one: Violation of copyright act
Count two: Public disclosure of private facts
Count three: Intrusion upon seclusion
Count four: Injunctive relief

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/08/...oll-gets-sued/





EFF Urges Judge to Dismiss MySpace Case
Holly Jackson

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is opposing the prosecution of a Missouri mom who allegedly created a fake MySpace account to harass a teenage neighbor, saying the prosecutors' misuse of a federal law that targets computer fraud could turn millions of Americans into criminals.

The civil liberties organization filed an amicus brief Friday, urging a Los Angeles federal judge to dismiss the indictment of Lori Drew. She was charged in May with felony conspiracy and three counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization when she violated MySpace's terms of service.

The EFF, a prominent voice in Web advocacy, said in a release Monday that "criminal charges for a 'terms of service' violation is a dramatic misapplication of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), with far-ranging consequences for American computer users." The organization adds--in theory at least--that users who don't read the terms of service on Web sites they visit would be accused of a federal crime.

The CFAA is usually used to prosecute hackers and identity thieves. But the EFF argues that citing the law for a terms of service violation would mean, for example, that anyone under the age of 18 who uses the Google search engine would face criminal charges.

According to police, Drew created a fake MySpace account and posed as a teenager named "Josh Evans" to befriend and verbally attack 13-year-old Megan Meier, a former friend of Drew's daughter. It was reported that after a particularly hurtful conversation with "Josh" in October 2006, Megan committed suicide in her O'Fallon, Mo., home.

The case drew national attention after a local newspaper reported the story, but Missouri prosecutors could not prove that Drew broke any laws. Instead, charges were brought in a Los Angeles federal court, utilizing the CFAA to indict Drew for violating MySpace's terms of service.

According to those terms, users agree that: "By using the MySpace Services, you represent and warrant that all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate and you will maintain the accuracy of such information." Members also acknowledge that harassment is prohibited.

The argument now being made by the EFF was advanced by Drew's attorney in late July. He said the law being used to prosecute Drew is flawed, unconstitutionally vague, and tries to criminalize behavior committed by millions online every day. Drew faces 20 years in prison; she has pleaded not guilty.

Although the EFF is campaigning against the indictment of Drew, it nonetheless called Meier's suicide "tragic."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10006165-93.html





Fair Use Prevails Over Michael Savage's Copyright Claims
Kurt Opsahl

On Friday, a U.S. District Court granted the motion for judgment on the pleadings we and our co-counsel Tom Burke of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP filed in a copyright infringement suit brought by talk show host Michael Savage against the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Savage had sued CAIR back in December 2007, alleging that CAIR infringed the copyright in his show when it posted on its web site brief excerpts from Savage's radio program in order to criticize Savage's remarks. Savage also added a federal racketeering claim stemming from that alleged copyright infringement.

Judge Susan Illston recognized that CAIR's use of four minutes from one of Savage's two hour radio programs to criticize Savage is protected under the fair use doctrine. The Copyright Act specifically makes clear that third parties may utilize copyrighted works for purposes of commentary or criticism, as CAIR did in this case. For purposes of the motion, the Court assumed all the allegations in the complaint were true, and still found that CAIR's use of the excerpts was protected. As the Court noted:

The complaint affirmatively asserts that the purpose and character of [CAIR's] use of the limited excerpts from the radio show was to criticize publicly the anti-Muslim message of those excerpts. To comment on [Savage's] statements without reference or citation to them would not only render [CAIR's] criticism less reliable, but be unfair to [Savage]. Further, it was not unreasonable for [CAIR] to provide the actual audio excerpts, since they reaffirmed the authenticity of the criticized statements and provided the audience with the tone and manner in which [Savage] made the statements.

Savage was also unable to show any copyright damages from the criticism. As the Court noted,

plaintiff fails to allege or suggest an impact on the actual or potential sale, marketability, or demand for the original, copyrighted work. ... Plaintiff instead alleges that defendants caused him financial loss in advertising revenue. Assuming the truth of this allegation, it relates only to the economic impact on future shows, and has no impact on the market for the original, copyrighted show on October 29, 2007.

Copyright law protects the market for the the copyrighted work, but was never designed to protect the author against having to face critics, or the consequences of criticism. Even if Savage's advertisers choose to pull their ads because of a compelling critique, his free speech rights have not been violated. Savage, who has his own daily radio program with millions of listeners, remains free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, even though he is now prevented from using the legal process to silence critics.

After carefully analyzing Savage's copyright claim, the Court concluded "that the defects of plaintiff’s Second Amended Complaint will not be cured by amendment, [and therefore] plaintiff’s copyright claim is dismissed without leave to amend."

The Court also addressed Savage's racketeering claim. Finding numerous flaws in the complaint, including a failure to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Court dismissed the claim with leave to amend.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Savage's attorney Daniel Horowitz acknowledged that the opinion was "very carefully thought-out," but promised to file a revised complaint on the racketeering charges. Savage's own website, however, was soliciting donations to "Help me file an appeal."
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07...es-copyright-c





Applications Spur Carriers to Relax Grip on Cellphones
Laura M. Holson

In the first 10 days after Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone, consumers downloaded more than 25 million applications, ranging from games like Super Monkey Ball to tools like New York City subway maps. It was nothing short of revolutionary, not only because the number was so high but also because iPhone users could do it at all.

Consumers have long been frustrated with how much control carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and the like — have exerted over what they could download to their mobile phones. But in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers.

Verizon Wireless, which said in November that it would open its network to any device maker that could create a mobile phone compatible with its network, has already welcomed a few business-oriented devices. It hopes to announce new consumer phones in the coming months. When the world’s largest cellphone maker, Nokia, recently took full ownership of Symbian, which owns a popular mobile operating system, it agreed to share the software with other phone makers.

And on Monday, the LiMo Foundation, an alliance of companies promoting a rival operating system open to makers of all wireless devices, is announcing that seven new mobile phones would use that system, bringing the number to 21.

AT&T, like Verizon, has followed suit with a promise to also open its networks.

But the pressure on AT&T is also coming from another direction: Apple, its iPhone partner. AT&T has no control over the applications downloaded to the iPhones, which AT&T offers exclusively. But the proliferation of new applications and the realization that they only make cellphones more popular has convinced executives there that they need to give consumers more freedom.

The industry, of course, has selfish reasons for promoting openness. Applications spur the use of higher-priced wireless data plans and the purchase of more expensive smartphones. “What is most important for us is to have a customer sign up for a plan," said Ralph de la Vega, who is in charge of AT&T’s wireless unit. “We think we can have multiple ways to make money.”

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are already salivating over the enthusiasm for cellphone applications. Their investments in this category rose 90 percent in the first half of 2008, to $383 million, from the second half of 2007, according to Rutberg & Company, a technology research firm based in San Francisco.

Analysts and industry executives agree that Apple, a new entrant to the cellphone market, deserves credit for spurring the carriers and cellphone makers to change.

But there is something bigger at play, too. The market for smartphones, which are really handheld computers, has quickly expanded beyond business users. They have gone mainstream, with teenagers and women finding novel uses for them — texting snippets of their lives to friends or tracking friends on maps. The carriers and the handset makers realize they have to make the phones adaptable to those new customers.

“What is happening is inevitable,” said Walter Piecyk, a communications analyst at the research firm Pali Research who studies the mobile phone market. “Companies can’t really stop it. They might as well embrace it. Consumers are demanding these types of devices, which is good for everyone.”

Of course, consumers should be careful what they wish for. Already there are at least six major operating systems for cellphones — Linux, Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as those made by Microsoft, Palm and Apple. And more are coming. Google expects the first phones in its Open Handset Alliance, which will use its Google Mobile operating system, to be out this fall. Consumers may find it confusing that some applications work only for certain phones because developers do not have the time or money to adapt projects to every operating system.

Consumers will also come to realize that “open” comes with an asterisk. The word means what the carriers, handset makers and software developers want it to mean. For example, Verizon’s open system is “open” only to phones it has certified. IPhone users can download only the applications Apple has approved.

Still, many developers agree that Apple is less restrictive than AT&T or Verizon.

“While the iPhone is closed, it does have the openness characteristics, which are unique,” said Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a proponent of more open networks.

If consumers are curious about what the mobile phone of the future might look like, they have to look no farther than OpenMoko, a Taiwanese cellphone maker that began selling the Neo Freerunner in July. The Freerunner, a six-ounce phone that sells for $400 and works on the T-Mobile and AT&T networks, has a three-inch touch screen and data storage, like many other smartphones. But what makes it unusual is that technologically savvy buyers can create or download personalized programs.

“What we want to do is bring the openness of the personal computer to the phone,” said Michael Shiloh, who is in charge of developer relations at OpenMoko. “We want people to be able to play around. You can’t do that now on a mobile phone.”

For now, Neo Freerunner is not a mainstream device. But a group of archeologists, Mr. Shiloh said, have developed a program that allowed them to create maps using Global Positioning System technology that more precisely catalog finds at their archeological sites. And he envisioned a day when creative programmers could combine different tools, like Wikipedia, directories and G.P.S., to create uniquely personalized phone applications.

Mr. Shiloh said his 13-year-old daughter told him recently that she wanted to create her own mobile games. “To some extent, it may sound geeky,” Mr. Shiloh said. “But considering we have a population of people who have grown up creating their own Web pages, it’s not unfathomable.”

With independence, consumers develop a relationship not with their carrier but with the phone or the applications on the phone. Google, one of the most strident proponents of the move to openness, is certainly aware of that as it builds an operating system that could allow anyone to add applications to any phone using Google Mobile software — without going through a carrier.

“If I’m a developer, my job is to surprise and delight as many people as I can,” said Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile. “That’s hard right now because of this fragmentation. We want that to go away for very selfish reasons. We can tell people to go to Google.”

He added: “The Internet is not owned by any one company.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/te...gy/04open.html





Air Force Cracks Software, Carpet Bombs DMCA
John Timmer

Last week, a US Court of Appeals upheld a ruling on software piracy. The organization doing the piracy, however, happened to be a branch of the US government, and the decision highlights the significant limits to the application of copyright law to the government charged with enforcing it. Most significantly, perhaps, the court found that because the DMCA is written in a way that targets individual infringers, the government cannot be liable for claims made under the statute.

The backstory on the case involved, Blueport v. United States, borders on the absurd. It started when Sergeant Mark Davenport went to work in the group within the US Air Force that ran its manpower database. Finding the existing system inefficient, Davenport requested training in computer programming so that he could improve it; the request was denied. Showing the sort of personal initiative that only gets people into trouble, Davenport then taught himself the needed skills and went to work redesigning the system.

Although Davenport did his development on a personal system at home, he began to bring beta versions of his code in for testing, and eventually started distributing his improved system within his unit, giving the software a timed expiration. A demonstration to higher-ups led to a recommendation for his immediate promotion, but that was followed by demands that the code for his software be turned over to the USAF.

Davenport responded by selling his code to Blueport, which attempted to negotiate a license with the Air Force, which responded by hiring a company to hack the compiled version by deleting the code that enforced the expiration date. Blueport then sued, citing copyright law and the DMCA.

DMCA: We'll enforce it, but won't abide by it

The Court of Federal Claims that first heard the case threw it out, and the new Appellate ruling upholds that decision. The reasoning behind the decisions focuses on the US government's sovereign immunity, which the court describes thusly: "The United States, as [a] sovereign, 'is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued . . . and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court’s jurisdiction to entertain the suit.'"

In the case of copyright law, the US has given up much of its immunity, but the government retains a few noteworthy exceptions. The one most relevant to this case says that when a government employee is in a position to induce the use of the copyrighted material, "[the provision] does not provide a Government employee a right of action 'where he was in a position to order, influence, or induce use of the copyrighted work by the Government.'" Given that Davenport used his position as part of the relevant Air Force office to get his peers to use his software, the case fails this test.

But the court also addressed the DMCA claims made by Blueport, and its decision here is quite striking. "The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity," the judge wrote, "Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government." Thus, because sovereign immunity is not explicitly eliminated, and the phrasing of the statute does not mention organizations, the DMCA cannot be applied to the US government, even in cases where the more general immunity to copyright claims does not apply.

It appears that Congress took a "do as we say, not as we need to do" approach to strengthening digital copyrights.

A sad footnote to this story is that we became aware of it through the blog of copyright lawyer William Patry, only to see Patry shut down the blog late last week. Patry says that a major factor in his decision was frustration with the current state of copyright law and with the aggressive stupidity that he felt typified a number of responses to his musings on the law.

But Patry also cites the inability of many to separate his personal thoughts on copyright from those he voices through his duties as Google's Senior Copyright Counsel. Given that Google (and many other companies) offer many significant announcements through their blogs, and Patry is notable in part due to his employer, this sort of confusion seems inevitable; still, it's unfortunate that it has brought a (temporary?) end to such a learned and public voice on copyright issues.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ombs-dmca.html





FISA and Border Searches of Laptops
Steven Bellovin

There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the issue of laptop searches at borders, including a congressional hearing and a New York Times editorial. I've seen articles with advice on how to protect your data under such circumstances; generally speaking, the advice boils down to "delete what you can, encrypt the rest, hope that Customs officials don't compel production of your key, and securely clean up the deleted files". If you need sensitive information while you're traveling, the usual suggestion is to download it over a secure connection, per the EFF:

Quote:
Another option is to bring a clean laptop and get the information you need over the internet once you arrive at your destination, send your work product back, and then delete the data before returning to the United States. Historically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) generally prohibited warrantless interception of this information exchange. However, the Protect America Act amended FISA so that surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States no longer requires a warrant. Your email or telnet session can now be intercepted without a warrant. If all you are concerned about is keeping border agents from rummaging through your revealing vacation photos, you may not care. If you are dealing with trade secrets or confidential client data, an encrypted VPN is a better solution.
But is it?

When a laptop is searched, the customs agents are not looking for drugs embedded in the batteries or for whether or not the connectors have too much gold on the contacts. Rather, they're looking for information.

In that sense, it would seem to make little difference if the information is "imported" into the US via a physical laptop or via a VPN, or for that matter by a web connection. The right to search a laptop for information, then, is equivalent to the right to tap any and all international connections, without a warrant or probable cause. (More precisely, one always has a constitutional protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure; the issue is what the definition of "unreasonable" is.)

According to an analysis of the revisions to FISA, "the bill affirmatively permits electronic surveillance without any warrant for Americans' international communications when the NSA is "targeting" a foreigner or group abroad." By contrast, a border search targets a particular individual entering the country, rather than some foreign group. But if warrantless searches for information are legal, does this provide a non-statutory extension to FISA, a way to justify warrantless wiretapping beyond what FISA already permits?

It gets worse. In general, one has no right to hide contraband from customs agents when crossing the border. Is hiding imported information — that is to say, using an encrypted international connection — improper? Put another way, is using encryption on an international connection the equivalent of hiding physical objects in a false-bottomed suitcase? If so, it is saying that the government must have access to all keys, a notion that was quite thoroughly discredited (and rejected by the American public) during the debate over the Clipper chip in the 1990s.

What about a court order compelling disclosure of a key or passphrase? The legal situation is quite unclear. In in re Boucher, a judge ruled that the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination could be used to deflect a request for a passphrase. While the judge's reasoning is suspect based on the facts of this particular case, his reasoning struck me as sound. Also note that Boucher was a criminal case; the situation in a civil case is more less clear, since the protection against self-incrimination would not apply.

There's one more philosophical point to consider. Restricting the public's access to "foreign" information is antithetical to the basic principles of the First Amendment, and of Freedom of Thought. Trying to restrict access to information in this way is the moral equivalent of the practice of denying visitor visas to Communists (imagined or real) during the 1950s.

Perhaps I'm carrying my arguments too far. Perhaps the slope isn't as slippery as I've portrayed it, though Kerr seems to agree that the Constitution would permit warrantless searches of international connections. At the least, we need a clear statement of what the rules are for government access to imported information, whether carried in physically or electronically.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog...008-07-10.html
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Judge Hints at Mistrial in RIAA v. Jammie Thomas
David Kravets

The federal judge who presided over the nation's only peer-to-peer copyright-infringement trial announced from the bench here Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial.

"Certainly, I have sent a signal to both sides of where I'm headed," U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said during a 70-minute hearing in which lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America and defendant Jammie Thomas sparred over whether a jury verdict against Thomas should be overturned.

At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone. During Thomas' trial last October, Davis, on the RIAA's recommendation, instructed the jury that no such proof was necessary; if Thomas had the music in her Kazaa shared folder, where it could be downloaded, she could be found liable "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

But in May, long after Thomas had lost the trial and was dinged $222,000, Davis developed second thoughts. He wrote in an order that he may have committed a "manifest error" with that instruction. "I think I surprised everyone," Davis said at the outset of the Monday's hearing. As the hearing wrapped up, there was little evidence that the RIAA's lawyer had changed the judge's mind.

The judge's decision, which he said would be issued "hopefully before the end of September," is likely to have wide-ranging implications in the RIAA's file-sharing litigation campaign -- 20,000 lawsuits and counting. Most cases have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars without resolving the question of whether the RIAA must prove that music shared over a peer-to-peer network had actually been downloaded.

RIAA attorney Donald Verrilli Jr. urged Davis not to disturb the $222,000 judgment against Thomas for unlawfully distributing 24 songs, drawing skeptical questioning from the Clinton-appointee.

The judge said that the Copyright Act appears to outlaw only an actual transfer of copyrighted material. The law gives a rights holder the exclusive right "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending." Congress, Davis noted, has not added language supporting Verrilli's position: that actual downloading is implied by the act of putting content in a shared folder.

"Why didn't Congress do that?" the judge asked.

"There is nothing in that language that the plaintiff must demonstrate a transfer," Verrilli countered.

The primary reason the RIAA is making the argument -- a position backed by the Motion Picture Association of America -- is because it is generally not technically possible to determine whether somebody is downloading files from another's share folder on a peer-to-peer network. "The downloads are all done in secret," Verrilli argued.

"It's all done behind a veil" and "significantly diminishes the economic value of our sound recordings," he said.

Verrilli said illegal distribution is implied on Kazaa and other file sharing networks. "There's no doubt it's being done millions and millions of times," he said.

He added that if Thomas or other file sharers aren't liable for copyright infringement for using peer-to-peer applications, "the distribution right doesn't mean anything."

He pointed out the Napster case, in which the financial backers of a peer-to-peer network were liable for infringement even though there was no proof that the public downloaded songs on Napster.

Thomas, a 32-year-old Minnesota mother of two, did not attend the hearing. Her attorney, Brian Toder, told Judge Davis: "Your honor, I believe she is in labor."

Toder, in his argument, told the judge that if a mistrial was not declared, the court would be inventing "a new right of recovery."

"Would Congress really fashion a statute where a plaintiff doesn't have to prove liability?" Toder asked.

While reciting parts of the Copyright Act, which allows fines of up to $150,000 per violation, Toder said, "They have to prove every element that a statute requires."

"That is good public policy," he said.

Neither a federal appeals court nor the U.S. Supreme Court has decided the issue; and Davis' decision, either way, is certain to be appealed by the losing party. At least three other federal judges have ruled against the RIAA on this point, but those rulings were in pretrial stages and didn't summarily kill the cases.

Still, even if Judge Davis rules against the RIAA, that doesn't mean Thomas or others who challenge RIAA lawsuits would automatically win.

The reason: RIAA detectives always download some of the shared music files themselves. In the Thomas case, RIAA investigators downloaded 24 songs from the 1,702 that were in the 32-year-old woman's publicly available share folder.

In court briefs, the RIAA asked that the judge, if he finds that proof of downloading is necessary, allow the files downloaded by the RIAA's investigators to be counted as unlawful distribution. Toder, however, argued that the RIAA should not be allowed to use downloads it made from Thomas or anybody else's share folder.

Those downloads, Toder said, cannot be considered unauthorized downloads because the RIAA authorized them.

"You can't infringe your own copyright," Toder said.

The RIAA learned of Thomas' identity, and the identities of the thousands of others it has sued, by logging on to Kazaa or other file sharing systems and obtaining users' IP addresses that are accessible to anybody using the network. A case is commenced after the internet provider –- via an RIAA subpoena -- coughs up the identity of the account holder attached to an IP address.

The case is Capitol Records Inc., et. al. v. Jammie Thomas, No. 06-1497 (MJD/RLE).
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-hints-at.html





Music Industry ‘Should Embrace Illegal Websites’
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

The music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing websites, according to a study of Radiohead’s last album release that found huge numbers of people downloaded it illegally even though the band allowed fans to pay little or nothing for it.

“Rights-holders should be aware that these non-traditional venues are stubbornly entrenched, incredibly popular and will never go away,” said Eric Garland, co-author of the study, which concluded there was strong brand loyalty to controversial “torrent” and peer-to-peer services.

Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want basis last October generated enormous traffic to the band’s own website and intense speculation about how much fans had paid.

He urged record companies to study the outcome and accept that file-sharing sites were here to stay. “It’s time to stop swimming against the tide of what people want,” he said.

The study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company, found that legal downloads of In Rainbows were far exceeded by illegal torrent downloads of the album.

Almost 400,000 illegal torrent downloads were made on the first day and 2.3m in the 25 days following the album’s release, compared with a full-week’s peak of just 158,000 for the next most popular album of the period.

“The expectation among rights-holders is that, in order to create a success story, you must reduce the rate of piracy – we’ve found that is not the case,” said Mr Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, who highlighted the benefits that Radiohead received from the album’s popularity, including strong ticket sales for its concerts this year.

The findings could add impetus to rights-holders’ efforts to license digital services that are at present beyond their reach, following the pattern of the MCPS-PRS Alliance’s recent move to license YouTube, the Google-owned online video-sharing site.

“Developing new ways and finding new places to get something as opposed to nothing” was important, said Will Page, MCPS-PRS chief economist and co-author of the report.

Those new places could be peer-to-peer sites or internet service providers, he added.

Record companies should ask themselves: “What are the costs and benefits of control versus the costs and benefits of scale?” said Mr Page.

He also challenged the assumption that no other band could achieve the same benefits, saying Radiohead’s experiment had reduced the marginal cost and risk for those following their lead.

He described the launch of In Rainbows as “stunt marketing at its best”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e72884f6-6...nclick_check=1





Labels Urge Judge to Uphold Decision in 1st Piracy Trial

Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group and other record labels urged a judge to let stand the $222,000 jury verdict against Jammie Thomas, the first person to go to trial to challenge online music-piracy claims.

U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis in Duluth, Minn. said he may order a new trial if he decides jurors failed to consider whether 24 songs made available on the Internet by Thomas were downloaded by anyone other than the music industry's investigation firm, MediaSentry Inc.

Donald Verrilli, the record labels' lawyer, told Davis at a hearing Monday that dropping the October jury verdict against Thomas would set the standard too high for proving actual distribution of music in copyright-infringement cases, because Internet piracy "happens under a veil."

"It just can't be true that millions and millions of people can do what Ms. Thomas did and be free of copyright violations," Verrilli said at the hearing. "That's the same thing as saying there is no longer a right of distribution."

The jury in October told Thomas, a 31-year-old mother of two, to pay $9,250 for each of 24 songs she downloaded from the file-sharing program Kazaa. Her attorney, Brian Toder of Minneapolis, requested a new trial, arguing the fine was unconstitutionally severe. Toder also contends the jury instruction was incorrect.

"There has been no evidence provided in this trial, since Day 1, that anyone, other than MediaSentry downloaded songs," Toder said at the hearing.

Davis in May said he may have committed a "manifest error of law" by instructing jurors that simply making music files available on file-sharing networks is the same as actually distributing them to other people. Lawyers and intellectual-property rights activists on both sides of the dispute refer to the legal question as the "making-available" theory.

Part of Davis's reasoning is a ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that held an "actual dissemination of either copies or phonorecords" must take place for someone to violate copyright law.

"That's my circuit," Davis said at the hearing. "That's the case law that I have to follow."

In April, U.S. District Judge Neil Wake in Phoenix rejected the music industry's argument that Pamela and Jeffrey Howell infringed copyrights by making songs available through Kazaa, a computer program that allows for file-sharing.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...ector0805.html





Apple Holds on to U.S. Retail Music Lead
Tom Krazit

Apple is still the No. 1 music retailer in the United States, but Amazon.com's online store is coming on strong.

More U.S. music buyers are getting their music fix through iTunes than from any other source, according to data released on Tuesday by NPD Group. Earlier this year, Apple took over the top spot from Wal-Mart Stores, and it maintained that lead during the six months from January to June, NPD said.

Wal-Mart is still in second place, followed by Best Buy. Taking fourth place from Target was Amazon, whose own music store has been growing in popularity since it launched last September, perhaps in part due to its DRM-free stance.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10007088-37.html





Warner Music Trims Loss as It Shifts Focus
AP

The Warner Music Group, whose artists include Katy Perry and Madonna, reported narrower losses in the third quarter on Thursday as growth in Europe helped offset a slowdown in global music sales.

Online sales continued to rise as the company sought to shift its revenue mix away from the declining CD market and into higher-margin downloads and into deals with artists that capture new revenue streams.

Net losses narrowed to $9 million, or 6 cents a share, in the three months that ended in June, compared with $17 million, or 12 cents a share, in the same period last year. That beat analyst expectations of a loss of 18 cents a share.

Shares fell 17 cents to $8.27.

Revenue rose 5.5 percent, to $848 million, from $804 million, but sales were down 1.1 percent when adjusting for a weak dollar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/bu...=warner&st=cse





Warner Music Says Music Video Games Must Pay More

Warner Music Group Corp(WMG.N), the world's third-largest music company, said on Thursday that video game makers will need to pay more to license songs for music-based video games like "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band."

Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman drew comparisons between MTV's launch 25 years ago or Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPod launch five years ago, and today's video game companies like Activision Blizzard Inc (ATVID.O) and Harmonix, a unit of Viacom Inc (VIAb.N).

"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though their games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small"

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080701270.html





Sony Buying Bertelsmann’s Stake
AP

Bertelsmann will sell its 50-percent stake in Sony BMG to the Sony Corporation in a $1.2 billion deal, the companies announced Tuesday, giving the Japanese company full ownership of the joint venture whose roster of artists include Alicia Keys and Leona Lewis.

A statement released by the privately held Bertelsmann said the new company would be called Sony Music Entertainment and would be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sony Corporation of America. The joint venture was created in August 2004.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sony said Bertelsmann was receiving approximately $600 million in cash for a portion of its interest in Sony BMG.

Sony Corporation of America “will then purchase the remaining interest from Bertelsmann for approximately $600 million. As a result, Bertelsmann will receive approximately $900 million in value for its 50-percent stake, plus $300 million of its share of cash on Sony BMG’s balance sheet,” it said.

Bertelsmann will also take over a limited amount of selected European music catalog assets from Sony BMG, which represents about $20 million, or less than 1 percent of Sony BMG’s revenue last year.

The chief executive of Bertelsmann, Hartmut Ostrowski, said the decision was made to sell the 50-percent stake after a careful but thorough review.

“This move is consistent with our new growth strategy and will enable us to focus on our defined growth areas,” he said. “Sony has been an excellent partner, and they are the right company to take this business to the next step and ensure that it realizes its full value and potential.”

Once the deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is complete, Sony Music Entertainment will be comprised of several music labels, including Arista Records, Columbia Records, Epic Records, J Records, Jive Records, RCA Records and Zomba.

Its artists will include Celine Dion, Bruce Springsteen, Justin Timberlake and Usher.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/bu...s/06music.html





Digital Music Service Debuts in China

3-cent fee per song aims to pull listeners from free pirated tunes
AP

A U.S. distributor of independent music is offering songs for about 3 cents apiece online in China, where people have easy access to free, pirated music.

The Wawawa Music Store site opened for business Friday offering a subscription service that allows 88 MP3 downloads a month for 20 yuan - the price of a hamburger meal at a Chinese McDonald's, or about $2.93.

The cut rate is meant to raise the bar and encourage Chinese to pay for legitimate music in a country where song files from top artists are available free on sites like Baidu.com.

"Right now the bar is free," said Kevin Arnold, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance, a digital clearing house for artists who haven't signed with major record labels like Sony BMG, EMI Group, Warner Music Group or Vivendi's Universal Music Group.

"We're trying to put something out there that is a valuable offering in the selection and service at a reasonable price point and see how people react," he said.

The group will distribute more than a million recordings through Wawawa from artists such as Bob Marley & The Wailers, David Byrne and the San Francisco Symphony.

Chinese distribution partner R2G, a ringtone distributor, set up and operates the Web site.

R2G's vice president of strategy development, Mathew Daniel, said the venture is targeting Chinese music aficionados looking outside the mainstream.

"Everybody has been downloading full-length music for free but the selection is not as exhaustive as what it could be," Daniel said. "The lesser known artists - their music is still good."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_10077331





Chew on This: Hit Song Is a Gum Jingle
Ethan Smith and Julie Jargon

Sharp-eared pop-music fans may have noticed a brief reference to an old chewing-gum jingle buried in "Forever," Chris Brown's top-10 hit. "Double your pleasure/double your fun," the R&B singer croons in the chorus.

What listeners don't know -- and what Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. planned to reveal Tuesday -- is that the song is a commercial.

"Forever" is an extended version of a new Doublemint jingle written by Mr. Brown and scheduled to begin airing next month in 30-second spots for Wrigley's green-packaged chewing gum.

Mr. Brown is one of a trio of pop stars enlisted by ad agency Translation Advertising, a unit of Interpublic Group of Cos., to update the images of three of Wrigley's best-known brands.

The campaign includes spots featuring R&B singer Ne-Yo doing his own take on Big Red's "kiss a little longer" jingle. And "Dancing With the Stars" regular-turned-country-singer Julianne Hough recorded a twangy version of Juicy Fruit's "The taste is gonna move ya."

But Mr. Brown's "Forever" is the most ambitious part of the campaign. Mr. Brown was commissioned to write and sing both the pop song and a new version of the Doublemint jingle, introduced in 1960.

First, Mr. Brown updated the jingle and recorded it with hip-hop producer Polow Da Don. Then, during the same Los Angeles recording sessions in February, paid for by Wrigley, Mr. Brown added new lyrics and made a 4½-minute rendition of the tune, titled "Forever."

In April, Mr. Brown's record label, Jive, released the song to radio stations and digital download services as a single. After the song became a hit, Jive added it to his 2007 album, "Exclusive," and re-released the album in June. "Forever" reached No. 4 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart last week.

All three new Wrigley jingles are scheduled to be unveiled at a news conference Tuesday in New York, with each of them to be performed by the artist involved. Mr. Brown is slated to sing "Forever" and segue into his jingle. New television commercials and radio spots featuring the jingles and print ads showing new packaging for the gum are set to appear in August.

The campaign illustrates a deepening of the ties between pop music and advertising. Rappers frequently mention luxury products like liquor or cars in songs, and occasionally serve as paid spokesmen for the brands. And for McDonald's Corp.'s 2003 "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, the burger chain, with the aid of Translation Chief Executive Steve Stoute, enlisted Justin Timberlake to write and record a song using the slogan as its chorus. But the song was never released on one of his albums.

Tom Carrabba, executive vice president and general manager of Sony BMG's Zomba Label Group, which includes Jive, says label executives initially had qualms about releasing and promoting a song recorded at an advertiser's behest "But the song was so potent and strong. That overruled us being maybe a little hesitant," he adds.

Sony BMG is a joint venture between Bertelsmann AG of Germany and Japan's Sony Corp.

Other than the "double your pleasure" line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of "Forever," and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. "I'ma take you there, so don't be scared," Mr. Brown sings. "Double your pleasure; double your fun. It's the right one, Doublemint gum."

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener's minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, "by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture."


TASTE OF MUSIC

The background on three Wrigley's gum jingles:
• DoubleMint
1960: 'Double your pleasure' jingle first appears; gum introduced 1914
• Big Red
1979: 'Kiss a little longer' jingle first appears; gum introduced 1976
• Juicy Fruit
1983: 'Taste is gonna move ya' jingle first appears; gum introduced 1893
Source: the company

Mr. Brown said in an email that he wrote "Forever" and the related jingle in about 30 minutes each. "I actually thought it would take longer to write a jingle they would like," he wrote. "But they said it was a perfect fit after the first try."

Paul Chibe, Wrigley's vice president for North American gum marketing, declines to disclose how much Mr. Brown was paid for his role in the campaign.

Wrigley's push to update its older gum brands started earlier this year, when the company began selling them in new slim, envelope-style packages. Some of the gum was reformulated to improve its flavor and make it last longer. Juicy Fruit -- Wrigley's oldest brand, launched in 1893 -- Doublemint, Big Red, Spearmint, Winterfresh and the newer Extra line, represent around 30% of the company's U.S. gum business.

Wrigley chose Mr. Brown to develop the new Doublemint song, in part because the company's consumer research showed that African-American consumers prefer Doublemint to other gum brands. Mr. Chibe calls the move "the future of the brand."

Mr. Chibe added that the mildly suggestive lyrics have never given the company pause. "Everything he's done with 'Forever' represents the brand and it fits our brand personality for Doublemint," Mr. Chibe added.

While Wrigley has had strong sales in emerging markets, it has lost market share in the U.S., where it faces strong competition from Cadbury PLC, maker of Trident, Stride and Dentyne. Last year, the company's North American sales were flat, at $1.75 billion.

During the company's annual meeting in March, Chairman William Wrigley said he was "far from satisfied" with the company's domestic performance in 2007, though results improved in the first quarter of 2008. In April, Wrigley agreed to be acquired by Mars Inc., the closely held maker of M&Ms and Snickers, for about $23 billion.
http://www.fmqb.com/goout.asp?u=http...s_inside_today





Gary Parsons Named Sirius XM Radio Chairman
FMQB

Newly merged satcaster Sirius XM Radio told the SEC in a filing on Friday that with the July 28 merger, Sirius Chairman Joseph Clayton has exited the company and XM Chairman Gary Parsons has taken his place in the new position of Chairman of Sirius XM Radio Inc.

Clayton, along with Warren Lieberfarb and Michael McGuiness, have also resigned from the board of directors. At the same time, former members of XM's board were elected to the new board of directors, including Joan Amble, Eddy Hartenstein, Chet Huber, John Mendel, Jack Shaw, Jeff Zients and Parsons. Consequently, the number of directors on the Sirius XM board was increased from eight to 12.

Last week the satcaster announced its senior management team, which brings aboard one executive from XM, along with four from Sirius. Dara Altman, formerly of XM, was named EVP/Chief Administrative Officer, while Patrick Donnelly was named EVP/General Council. David Frear is EVP/CFO, Scott Greenstein is President of Entertainment & Sports and James Meyer becomes President of Operations.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=823594





Downed satellite

Wall Street Questions Sirius XM Radio's Future
Peter Lauria and Brian Garrity

Analysts and investors are divided over whether the creation of Sirius XM Radio is a death knell or a lifeline for the satellite radio industry.

With yesterday's closing has come the realization that Sirius XM now competes with all the audio entertainment choices that set the stage for the companies to merge in the first place, and it has put Wall Street in a dour mood.

The abundance of competition, combined with slowing net subscriber growth, has pushed shares down more than 40 percent since word of the Federal Communications Commission's approval of the deal emerged last Thursday.

"With the rapid increase in adoption of streaming media technologies and lackluster demand amongst the younger demographics, we have to wonder if after eight years of marketing the service, satellite radio has already satiated the natural demand," wrote Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Wienkes in a report.

With high-definition terrestrial radio gaining traction, new car models integrating jacks for MP3 players into audio systems and the increasing prominence of free Internet radio, competitors are beginning to see cracks in Sirius XM's business model.

"I don't think making people pay subscriber fees for content is sustainable," said BlogTalkRadio CEO Alan Levy.

Launched in the fall of 2006, Levy said BlogTalkRadio's user-generated platform, which features 3.2 million monthly listeners and 4,000 active hosts, is a "much more beneficial cost structure than terrestrial or satellite radio."

Sirius XM Chief Financial Officer David Frear dismisses Levy's tough talk by asking rhetorically, "We generated $2.3 billion in revenue for the trailing 12 months, how much did BlogTalkRadio generate? Do they have a viable business plan?"

Frear also noted that with 18.6 million subscribers, Sirius XM is not only the second-largest subscription media business behind Comcast, but its adoption rate also has outpaced that of the wireless and satellite television industries despite the multitude of competition.

Many Wall Street analysts share Frear's bullish outlook.

"From a competitive position, we believe satellite radio's dynamic content, exclusive programming, nationwide coverage, time warping abilities and commercial free product places it in a prime position to gain market share in audio entertainment," Citigroup's Tony Wible wrote in a report yesterday.

Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen thinks satellite radio becoming standard in new automobile production gives Sirius XM a sizable advantage over its competition - she projects the company's vehicle subscriber base alone will grow to 17 million by 2010.

Whether Sirius XM falls victim to its competition or prevails over it will depend largely on execution, observers said.

"Now there's an important window open to them to build traction before other technologies start to permeate the landscape," said RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank. "This is their time to make [subscribers] sticky."
http://www.fmqb.com/goout.asp?u=http...ite_122235.htm





Nobody Wants Blu-ray – Study

Consumers do not want Blu-ray, says a research firm. A consumer survey done by ABI Research revealed that over half of the 1000 respondents had 'other priorities,' to buying a Blu-ray player, saying that they had no plans to purchase one; a further 23% are likely to buy, but not until sometime in 2009. ABI Research principal analyst Steve Wilson said that there wasn't much value proposition seen in a Blu-ray player or in content "Consumers were happy to embrace standard DVD when that format arrived because the improvement in quality over VHS videotapes was dramatic. Standard DVD didn't require the purchase of a new TV either. In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.

ABI Research suggests that the bright spot for Blu-ray is the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console -- that the installed base for Blu-ray players continues to climb with increasing sales of the PS3. "While you might think gamers purchase fewer movie discs that others, we didn't see any significant evidence of that in our results," says Wilson. "PS3 console shipments will go a long way to help bring down manufacturing costs and drive down Blu-ray player prices."

Incidentally, a study done in the month of June this year showed that Blu-ray adoption had outpaced DVD adoption, due largely to the rate at which PS3 consoles were selling.

Blu-ray has won the hi-definition war against HD-DVD, it remains to be seen whether it can now win the hearts of consumers everywhere.
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/N...91814-581.html





Federal Court Green-Lights Remote Storage DVR
Larry Neumeister

In a decision sure to affect millions of cable television subscribers, a federal appeals court Monday gave a green light to Cablevision Systems Corp.'s rollout of a remote-storage digital video recorder system.

In overturning a lower court ruling that had blocked the service, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the judge wrongly concluded that Cablevision, rather than its customers, would be making copies of programs, thereby violating copyright laws.

The next-generation technology would let any cable subscriber with a digital cable box store TV shows on computer servers rather than on a hard drive in their home.

Cablevision's system was challenged by a group of Hollywood studios that claimed the remote-storage DVR service would have amounted to an unauthorized re-broadcast of their programs. A lawyer for the studios did not immediately return a call for comment.

Cablevision, in arguing that control of the recording and playback was in the hands of the consumer, had relied on a landmark 1984 Supreme Court case which found Sony Corp. did not break copyright laws by letting viewers use videotape recorders to record shows for personal use.

Craig Moffett, a senior cable analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said the ruling "sent shock waves to every corner of the media landscape" by taking the availability of DVR-like function from 25 percent ot U.S. homes to nearly 50 percent.

That means many more viewers would be taping shows and watching them at their leisure, likely skipping many commercials. The ad-zapping ability of DVR devices has broadcasters and advertisers worried that fewer people will watch commercials.

The case has been closely watched in the industry as cable companies increasingly offer digital video recording services to their customers, and Moffett said it was likely to end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In its ruling, the appeals court said it did not see much difference between the user of a VCR and the user of a DVR.

"The person who actually presses the button to make the recording supplies the necessary element of volition, not the person who manufactures, maintains, or, if distinct from the operator, owns the machine," the three-judge panel wrote.

"Cablevision more closely resembles a store proprietor who charges customers to use a photocopier on his premises, and it seems incorrect to say, without more, that such a proprietor 'makes' any copies when his machines are actually operated by his customers," it added.

Cablevision first announced plans for a remote-storage DVR in early 2006.

Tom Rutledge, Cablevision's chief operating officer, called the appeals court decision "a tremendous victory for consumers." He said it would allow the company to make DVRs available to more people, faster and less expensively than would otherwise be possible.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080401462.html





Wall Street Beat: Time to Put Off Buying LCD TVs and Displays
Dan Nystedt

The LCD panel industry is suffering from over supply and falling demand, and in this case, what's bad for Wall Street and stock prices is good for consumers.

Nobody likes to buy an expensive new LCD TV or LCD computer display and then watch as prices tumble within weeks or months of the purchase. So buyers beware, that's exactly what could happen if the LCD industry situation continues to unfold as some analysts predict.

One of the year's hottest seasons for buying new LCD TVs and desktop monitors is around the corner, mid-August through September, and analysts are nervous that people may not buy as many units as expected, which will send prices lower.

"Our recent channel checks show that the industry pendulum has swung into a 'buyer’s market' where customers are holding back orders," said Jeffrey Su, an analyst at investment banking firm Merrill Lynch, in a recent report.

One problem facing the industry is a supply gut.

"Over-shipment of large-area LCD panels in (the second quarter) due to an overly optimistic outlook for 2008 was the main factor contributing to the rapid and significant panel price reductions seen in the panel supply chain beginning in June," said DisplaySearch, in a report issued Monday.

Companies shipped 117.9 million large-sized LCD panels during the second quarter, the largest number ever shipped in a quarter, the market researcher said.

Problems with consumer demand have already cropped up in two of the world's biggest markets for LCD TVs and displays, the U.S. and China. Americans are combatting a falling housing market, rising unemployment and high gas prices, hurting demand for a number of products.

The TV market overall in China has weakened over the past few months, executives at Taiwan's two largest LCD makers said at their second quarter investors' conferences. Prices have been hurting since May, according to a JPMorgan report issued last week, and "further price cuts are needed."

That's great news for people looking for new LCD TVs and displays, though it could take a month or so for component price declines to filter through to retail store price tags.

To combat falling prices, LCD makers such as South Korea's LG Display and Taiwan's AU Optronics have said they plan to cut back production.

The trouble is, production cutbacks in industries with multiple competitors often fail, and there's reason to believe the ploy will fail again this time: two of the biggest LCD screen makers, Samsung Electronics and Sharp, are increasing production.

During its second quarter investors' conference, Samsung, the world's largest maker of LCD panels, said it will increase its planned spending on new LCD production lines to 4.5 trillion Korean won (US$4.44 billion) this year from an earlier forecast of 3.7 trillion won.

Sharp continues to ramp up production at facilities in Mexico and Poland, it said in a statement last week.

That means prices for LCD panels will likely continue to decline in coming months, leading to more consumer bargains later this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_85257...8001FBEC6.html





'Psychic' Uri Geller Reaches Copyright Settlement
Stephanie Condon

Controversial "paranormalist" Uri Geller has settled a lawsuit claiming he misused copyright law to squelch criticism. But much like Geller's mysticism, the legitimacy of his legal dispute remains rather ambiguous--the terms of the settlement are mostly confidential.

The legal battle began when Brian Sapient, a longtime skeptic of Geller's, used footage from a NOVA documentary to create a 14-minute video on YouTube debunking Geller's powers. Geller's company, Explorogist, sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice to YouTube because some of the NOVA material--about 8 seconds--was under copyright owned by Explorogist. YouTube suspended Salient's account, making his videos unavailable for about two weeks.

Sapient and the Electronic Frontier Foundation subsequently filed suit against Geller, claiming that those 8 seconds were permissible under U.S. fair use laws. That would mean Explorogist breached the DCMA requirement that anyone filing a takedown notice must state, "under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Explorogist, in turn, filed a lawsuit of its own, arguing that the copyrighted footage was used "within a sequence of cinematographic images" that "infringed the plaintiff's copyright." EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry said the language in lawsuit filed by Explorogist was in the "UK context"--from where Explorogist is based. However, "our position was that the use in question was fair use," she said.

While most of the terms of the settlement are confidential ("It's one of those cases," McSherry said), Explorologist did agree as part of the deal to license the disputed footage under a noncommercial Creative Commons license. A monetary settlement was also reached, but McSherry could not say in favor of whom. So Sapient and others are free to decry Geller's alleged powers with those 8 seconds of video. But whether the skeptic triumphed over the paranormalist may never be known to those outside the case--at least those without otherworldly powers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10006143-38.html





Net Censorship to Cost Users
Fran Foo

INTERNET users could be forced to subsidise the federal Government's quest to censor the internet, with early estimates indicating the scheme could cost $60 million a year.

In the federal budget the Rudd Government said internet service providers would receive only a one-off subsidy towards the cost of installing the filters.

"This funding will largely occur in 2009-10, with funding in following years only for new providers," the budget papers say.

The Government has earmarked $125.8 million for a range of internet security initiatives, including the filtering program, over four years.

About $49 million of the allocation has been slated for online law enforcement, but it remains unclear how much has been set aside solely for web filtering, as the budget includes research, international collaboration and education programs.

The true cost of the filtering program is expected to be revealed after live trials are held later in the year.

In a recently concluded government trial in Hobart, several filtering products were tested in a closed, laboratory environment.

Testing perimeters were set by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's predecessor, Helen Coonan, but the current Government had to abide by them.

Compared with previous tests, the results were hailed a success by Senator Conroy, but he said it was too soon to tell who would end up footing the bill.

The merits of blocking illegal websites, especially child pornography, are well canvassed, but the scheme's business case has flown under the radar - mainly because none exists.

Instead, the Government is seeking leadership from service providers.

"The pilot will enable the Government to collect evidence on the effectiveness of filtering systems in a real-world environment, and on the potential impacts on network performance and the costs to industry," a spokesperson for Senator Conroy said.

Web filtering vendors have welcomed the results of the Hobart test, but are concerned commercial realities will rear their heads later.

Eric Krieger, whose company Secure Computing Australia sells security and web filtering products to ASX100 companies and most government agencies, said the main question for parents would be whether they would have to pay for it.

Software filters to shield families and their children from net nasties were provided by the Howard government at no charge, but uptake was abysmal.

The $85 million National Filter Scheme had 110,000 downloads for the free filters and 27,000 CD orders, according to published figures.

Mr Krieger said the Government was politically motivated to make mandatory web filtering work.

"My cynicism stems from political necessity," he said. For a small service provider with 5000 users, the fit-out for web filters would cost about $10 a user annually.

The price would be massively reduced for service providers with a larger base.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 6.14 million household internet subscribers at December 31, 2007. At a rate of $10 per user per year, the cost would be about $61.4 million.

At the top end, a service provider such as Telstra BigPond has more than 2.8 million retail broadband customers.

Small service providers have users in the hundreds or low thousands.

Australia has more than 400 service providers and Mr Krieger fears small outfits will be left in the lurch when mandatory filtering kicks in.

Other security vendors have also expressed similar concerns as they face a shrinking base, but one small service provider is unperturbed.

South Australia's Webshield says the first thing the Government must do is clearly articulate what it wants to achieve with mandatory filtering.

"Generally, things are headed in the right direction with this program but a number of questions remain unanswered," Webshield managing director Anthony Pillion said.

If each service provider had to individually purchase web filtering software, costs would be higher, Mr Pillion said.

However, if the Government bulk-purchased, costs would be lower.

Webshield already offers its 5000-plus internet users content filtering, but other service providers would have to invest in the platforms to offer the service.

"Customers already pay us to filter the web for them," he said.

"If larger service providers don't offer customised service or adopt a set-and-forget approach, we'd have a fair amount of business.

"If BigPond offers exactly what I can, my business will be in trouble.

"In business there's always a threat but I'm not concerned at this point in time.

"I'm looking at how to position my business."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Thailand Halts Grand Theft Auto Sales After Murder
Nopporn Wong-Anan

A Thai video game distributor halted sales of "Grand Theft Auto" on Monday after a teenager confessed to robbing and murdering a taxi driver while trying to recreate a scene from the controversial game.

"We are sending out requests today to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games," Sakchai Chotikachinda, sales and marketing director of New Era Interactive Media, told Reuters.

"We are also urging video game arcades to pull the games from service," Sakchai said. An 18-year-old high school student, now in custody pending further investigations and a trial, faces death by lethal injection if found guilty of robbing and killing a 54-year-old taxi driver with a knife at the weekend.

Police said the youth, an obsessive player of "Grand Theft Auto," showed no sign of mental problems during questioning and had confessed to committing the crime because of the game.

"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," chief police investigator Veeravit Pipattanasak told Reuters.

The youth, described by his parents as polite and diligent, was arrested late on Saturday after he was found trying to steer a cab backwards out of a Bangkok street with the severely wounded driver in the back seat, newspapers reported.

The suspect told police he did not mean to kill the driver, whom he had chosen as a possible victim because of his age, but that he stabbed him to death when he fought back, newspapers reported.

"Grand Theft Auto," now available in its fourth edition, has been criticized for depicting violence including beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and prostitution.

A senior official at Thailand's Culture Ministry said the murder was a wake-up call for authorities to tackle the issue of violent video games, and urged parents to pay closer attention to what their children played.

"This time-bomb has already exploded and the situation could get worse," Ladda Thangsupachai, director of the ministry's Cultural Surveillance Centre, told Reuters. "Today it is a cab driver, but tomorrow it could be a video game shop owner."

The ministry has been pushing for tougher regulation of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, including the imposition of a rating system on sales and restriction on hours that youngsters can play the games in public arcades.

A multi-million dollar lawsuit was filed in the U.S. state of Alabama against the makers and marketers of Grand Theft Auto in 2005, claiming that months of playing the game led a teenager to kill two police officers and a 911 dispatcher.

The blockbuster Grand Theft Auto games are published by Nasdaq-listed Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO.O).

(Reporting by Nopporn Wong-Anan; Editing by Ed Cropley)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080400304.html





Windows XP Still Outselling Windows Vista
Bill Lindner

While Microsoft excitedly tries to sway public opinion by touting that Windows Vista License sales top 180 Million units, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was busy smacking Microsoft down -- reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft -- casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold.

In other words, Microsoft counts a sale for Windows Vista even though the computer manufacturer actually sold Windows XP. It's kind of ironic when you realize how desperate Microsoft has become to gain public acceptance for the dying operating system. Dell and other computer manufacturers are reportedly also shipping computers 'downgraded' to Windows XP.

Microsoft has told HP they won't be able to do that after January 2009, but HP is already discussing how to push that deadline back with Microsoft. Feedback from HP customers reveals that they hadn't had the time to do full compatibility testing of all their business applications with Vista and the high time and monetary costs of rebuilding system images wasn't worth it, especially in this economy.

HP isn't the only one bursting Microsoft's bubble. Microsoft Watch recently reported on the dismal pronouncement on the state of Vista adoption among top businesses. The really bad news for Microsoft is the number of business PCs running Windows XP increased from 2007 to 2008 -- three times the increase in the percentage of PCs running Windows Vista. The majority of businesses waiting for Vista migrated to XP instead.

One recent survey shows that by the end of 2008, the majority of businesses will have 9 percent of the PCs running Vista, increasing to 28 percent in 2010. Microsoft needs to realize that Windows Vista is a lame duck and their recently unveiled $300 million ad campaign crafted to instill confidence in the flailing operating system probably won't achieve the desired results.

Granted Windows Vista isn't going to cause a computer to explode, but hardware requirements, compatibility, and the User Account Control (UAC) do absolutely nothing to help its reputation. Negative perceptions holding Vista adoption back have only gotten worse.

In a survey reportedly conducted by a systems management appliance company, 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Windows Vista and 42 percent are actually exploring Vista alternatives. 11 percent have already made the switch to Mac OS X or Linux.
http://www.infopackets.com/news/busi...dows_vista.htm





Windows Vista Security 'Rendered Useless' by Researchers
Dennis Fisher

Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system, an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks.

In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they've found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers.

By taking advantage of the way that browsers, specifically Internet Explorer, handle active scripting and .NET objects, the pair have been able to load essentially whatever content they want into a location of their choice on a user's machine.

Researchers who have read the paper that Dowd and Sotirov wrote on the techniques say their work is a major breakthrough and there is little that Microsoft can do to address the problems. The attacks themselves are not based on any new vulnerabilities in IE or Vista, but instead take advantage of Vista's fundamental architecture and the ways in which Microsoft chose to protect it.

"The genius of this is that it's completely reusable," said Dino Dai Zovi, a well-known security researcher and author. "They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over.

"What this means is that almost any vulnerability in the browser is trivially exploitable," Dai Zovi added. "A lot of exploit defenses are rendered useless by browsers. ASLR and hardware DEP are completely useless against these attacks."

Many of the defenses that Microsoft added to Vista and Windows Server 2008 are designed to stop host-based attacks. ASLR, for example, is meant to prevent attackers from predicting target memory addresses by randomly moving things such as a process's stack, heap and libraries. That technique is useful against memory-corruption attacks, but Dai Zovi said that against Dowd's and Sotirov's methods, it would be of no use.

"This stuff just takes a knife to a large part of the security mesh Microsoft built into Vista," Dai Zovi said. "If you think about the fact that .NET loads DLLs into the browser itself and then Microsoft assumes they're safe because they're .NET objects, you see that Microsoft didn't think about the idea that these could be used as stepping stones for other attacks. This is a real tour de force."

Microsoft officials have not responded to Dowd's and Sotirov's findings, but Mike Reavey, group manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said Wednesday that the company is aware of the research and is interested to see it once it becomes public.

Dai Zovi stressed that the techniques Dowd and Sotirov use do not rely on specific vulnerabilities. As a result, he said, there may soon be similar techniques applied to other platforms or environments.

"This is not insanely technical. These two guys are capable of the really low-level technical attacks, but this is simple and reusable," Dai Zovi said. "I definitely think this will get reused soon, sort of like heap spraying was."
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...324395,00.html





11 Charged in Theft of 41 Million Card Numbers
Brad Stone

The thieves focused on major national retail chains like OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, BJ’s Wholesale Club, the Sports Authority and T. J. Maxx — the discount clothes retailer that first suggested the existence of the ring early last year, when it said its systems had been breached by hackers.

Underscoring the multinational, collaborative aspect of organized crime today, three of the defendants are United States citizens, one is from Estonia, three are from Ukraine, two are from China and one is from Belarus. The name and whereabouts of the final defendant are unknown.

Federal officials said a principal organizer of the ring was Albert Gonzalez, a man from Miami who was indicted on Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Boston on charges of computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy and other charges. If convicted on all counts, Mr. Gonzalez would face life in prison.

Mr. Gonzalez and several in his cohort drove around and scanned the wireless networks of retailers to find security holes — known as “war driving,” according to prosecutors. Once the thieves identified technical weaknesses in the networks, they installed so-called sniffer programs, obtained from collaborators overseas.

Those programs tapped into the retailers’ networks for processing credit cards and intercepted customers’ PINs and debit and credit numbers that were stored there. The thieves then spirited that information away to computers in the United States, Latvia and Ukraine.

Officials say the conspirators sold credit card numbers online and imprinted other stolen numbers on the magnetic stripes of blank cards so that they could withdraw thousands of dollars from A.T.M.’s.

“Computer networks and the Internet are an indispensable part of the world economy. But even as they provide extraordinary opportunities for legitimate commerce and communication, they also provide extraordinary opportunities for criminals,” said Michael B. Mukasey, the United States attorney general, at a news conference in Boston to announce the indictments.

Mr. Gonzalez was first arrested by the Secret Service in 2003 on similar charges. He was subsequently placed on supervised pretrial release and became an informant to the agency in its campaign against organizers of ShadowCrew, a bulletin board where hackers traded stolen financial information.

But prosecutors said that Mr. Gonzalez continued his criminal activities and tried to warn one of his conspirators, Damon Patrick Toey, to ensure that Mr. Toey would not be identified or arrested in the operation against ShadowCrew. Mr. Toey was among those indicted on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

“As soon as we became aware that Mr. Gonzalez was also working with criminals and getting them information, we immediately took action,” said Mark Sullivan, director of the Secret Service.

A lawyer for Mr. Gonzalez could not be located.

To sell card numbers on the black market, the group turned to Maksym Yastremskiy of Ukraine and Aleksandr Suvorov of Estonia, who were also charged, according to prosecutors.

Mr. Yastremskiy, thought to be a major figure in the international sale of stolen credit card information, was apprehended in July 2007 on vacation in Turkey and is in prison awaiting trial on charges including credit card theft. The United States has asked Turkey to extradite him.

The indictments shed more light on the breach into the stores of TJX, the owner of T. J. Maxx. In 2005, Christopher Scott, another man who was charged, compromised wireless access points at a Marshalls in Miami and used them to download payment information from computers at TJX headquarters in Framingham, Mass., prosecutors said.

The following year, prosecutors said, the conspirators established a virtual private network connection into TJX’s payment processing server and successfully uploaded a sniffer program.

In public financial filings, TJX said it had spent around $130 million on matters related to the break-in, including legal settlements, and it expected to spend an additional $23 million in the 2009 fiscal year.

Federal officials did not have an overall tally for the amount of money stolen by the ring, but they offered some glimpses into its profitability. In the indictment against Mr. Gonzalez, federal officials asked that he be forced to forfeit more than $1.6 million, among other assets.

“These guys were obviously sophisticated and organized,” said Toby Weiss, chief executive of Application Security, a database security firm. “In this economy, we can’t have people afraid to spend.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/bu...=1&oref=slogin






Defcon: Excuse Me While I Turn Off Your Pacemaker
Dean Takahashi

The Defcon conference is the wild and woolly version of Black Hat for the unwashed masses of hackers. It always has its share of unusual hacks. The oddest so far is a collaborative academic effort where medical device security researchers have figured out how to turn off someone’s pacemaker via remote control. They previously disclosed the paper at a conference in May. But the larger point of the vulnerability of all wirelessly-controlled medical devices remains a hot topic here at the show in Las Vegas.

Let’s not have a collective heart attack, at least not yet. The people on the right side of the security fence are the ones who have figured this out so far. But this has very serious implications for the 2.6 million people who had pacemakers installed from 1990 to 2002 (the stats available from the researchers). It also presents product liability problems for the five companies that make pace makers.

Kevin Fu, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Medical Device Security Center, said that his team and researchers at the University of Washington spent two years working on the challenge. Fu presented at Black Hat while Daniel Halperin, a graduate student at the University of Washington, presented today at Defcon.

Getting access to a pacemaker wasn’t easy. Fu’s team had to analyze and understand pacemakers for which there was no available documentation. Fu asked the medical device makers, explaining his cause fully, but didn’t get any help.

William H. Maisel, a doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and Harvard Medical School, granted Fu access for the project. Fu received an old pacemaker as the doctor installed a new one in a patient. The team had to use complicated procedures to take apart the pacemaker and reverse engineer its processes. Halperin said that the devices have a built-in test mechanism which turns out to be a bug that can be exploited by hackers. There is no cryptographic key used to secure the wireless communication between the control device and the pacemaker.

A computer acts as a control mechanism for programming the pacemaker so that it can be set to deal with a patient’s particular defribrillation needs. Pacemakers administer small shocks to the heart to restore a regular heartbeat. The devices have the ability to induce a fatal shock to a heart.

Fu and Halperin said they used a cheap $1,000 system to mimic the control mechanism. It included a software radio, GNU radio software, and other electronics. They could use that to eavesdrop on private data such as the identity of the patient, the doctor, the diagnosis, and the pacemaker instructions. They figured out how to control the pacemaker with their device.

“You can induce the test mode, drain the device battery, and turn off therapies,” Halperin said.

Translation: you can kill the patient. Fu said that he didn’t try the attack on other brands of pacemakers because he just needed to prove the academic point. Halperin said, “This is something that academics can do now. We have to do something before the ability to mount attacks becomes easier.”

The disclosure at Defcon wasn’t particularly detailed, though the paper has all of the information on the hack. The crowd here is mostly male, young, with plenty of shaved heads, tattoos and long hair. The conference is a cash-only event where no pictures are allowed without consent. It draws thousands more people from a much wider net of security researchers and hackers than the more exclusive Black Hat.

Similar wireless control mechanisms are used for administering drugs to a patient or other medical devices. Clearly, the medical device companies have to start working on more secure devices. Other hackers have figured out how to induce epileptic seizures in people sensitive to light conditions. The longer I stay at the security conferences here in Las Vegas, the scarier it gets.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/08/de...our-pacemaker/





Leaks in Patch for Web Security Hole
John Markoff

Faced with the discovery of a serious flaw in the Internet’s workings, computer network administrators around the world have been rushing to fix their systems with a cobbled-together patch. Now it appears that the patch has some gaping holes.

On Friday, a Russian physicist demonstrated that the emergency fix to the basic Internet address system, known as the Domain Name System, is vulnerable and will almost certainly be exploited by criminals.

The flaw could allow Internet traffic to be secretly redirected so thieves could, for example, hijack a bank’s Web address and collect customer passwords.

In a posting on his blog, the physicist, Evgeniy Polyakov, wrote that he had fooled the software that serves as the Internet’s telephone book into returning an incorrect address in just 10 hours, using two standard desktop computers and a high-speed network link. Internet experts who reviewed the posting said the approach appeared to be effective.

The basic vulnerability of the network has become a heated controversy since Dan Kaminsky, a Seattle-based researcher at the security firm IOActive, quietly notified a number of companies that distribute Internet addressing software earlier this year.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kaminsky described the vulnerability to a packed room at a technical conference in Las Vegas. He said that it could affect not just the Web but also other services like e-mail.

The general risk of such a flaw had been known for some years within the insular Internet technical community. But in the last month security engineers have repeatedly stated that it is only a matter of time before financial organizations and others are attacked by computer criminals seeking to exploit the now-public flaw. One expert says this is happening now.

“We have already been seeing attacks in the wild for the past two weeks,” said Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization. Some of the initial attacks focused on distributing malicious software, he said, and more recently there has been evidence of so-called phishing attacks aimed at stealing personal information.

It is now almost certain that there will be an escalating number of attacks, Mr. Woodcock said. Before the patch, which has now been distributed to more than three-quarters of the affected servers in the world, it would have taken as little as one second to insert false information into the address database. Now, even with the patch, attacks will be possible in a matter of minutes or hours, he said.

Mr. Polyakov carried out his attack using two fast computers, but the same attack could be carried out more quickly. There is now an intense debate over how to find a more permanent fix for the system’s weaknesses.

“We’ve bought some time,” said Paul Mockapetris, the software engineer who devised the original D.N.S. system and is now chairman of Nominum, a firm that makes a version of the D.N.S. software that is not vulnerable to the current flaw. Mr. Mockapetris described the patch that is now being put in place as the equivalent of “playing Russian roulette with a gun that has 100 bullet chambers instead of six.”

“The point,” he said, “should be to take the gun out of people’s hands.”

The root of the problem lies in the fact that the address system, which was invented in 1983, was not meant for services like electronic banking that require strict verification of identity.

“They are relying on infrastructure that was not intended to do what people assume it does,” said Clifford Neuman, director of the Center for Computer Systems Security at the University of Southern California. “What makes this so frustrating is that no one has been listening to what we have been saying for the past 17 years.”

A number of Internet security engineers point out that if a solution is found for the deeper problem of identity and authentication on the Internet, it will go a long way toward stopping many of the identity-related crimes that are now commonplace.

Some experts are proposing an encryption-based solution known as DNSSEC. It would give Web users high confidence that the Internet address they are being sent to is correct.

So far several governments, including Sweden and Puerto Rico, have adopted DNSSEC, and the United States government is likely to deploy the system for its .gov domain this year.

“DNSSEC is not an overnight solution for the Kaminsky problem, but it’s the right solution in the long run,” said Richard Lamb, a technical expert at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit organization that oversees Internet security and stability.

Others remain skeptical that the more secure approach is practical for the wider commercial Internet, because it requires more computing power and because it would be hard to get the whole world to adopt it.

One technical expert, Daniel J. Bernstein, a University of Illinois mathematician who has also developed a version of D.N.S. that does not suffer from the current flaw, said DNSSEC “offers a surprisingly low level of security, while at the same time introducing performance and reliability problems.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/te...gy/09flaw.html





The End of the Patry Copyright Blog
Groklaw

William Patry has shuttered his blog, The Patry Copyright Blog. The archives are gone too. He tells why in a final post. It's a tragedy, nothing less.

No, no one at Google made him do it. He did it for a couple of reasons, both of which resonate with me, and I think they are important to highlight. I must warn you, it's a bit depressing. Here are the reasons:
1. The Inability or Refusal to Accept the Blog for What it is: A Personal Blog
2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

But it's in the details that the story is told.

Here's part of the first section:
While in private practice I never had the experience of people attributing my views to my firm or to my clients. I moved from private practice to Google I put a disclaimer to the effect that the views in the blog (as in the past) were strictly mine. I also set a policy, which I strictly adhered to, of never discussing cases Google was involved in, and I refrained from criticizing those with whom Google was involved in lawsuits. I did not run ads, including not using Google's AdSense program. I cannot see what more I could have done to make what was a personal blog more separate from my employer.

For the first year after joining Google, with some exceptions, people honored the personal nature of the blog, but no longer. When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: "William Patry, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel said," or "Google's top copyright lawyer said... ." There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google's behalf. And that's just those who do so because they are lazy. Others, for partisan purposes, insist on on misdescribing the blog as a Google blog, or in one case involving a think tank, darkly indicating also a la Senator Joe McCarthy, that in addition to funding from Google, there may be other sources of funding too. On Blogger, blogs are free. The blog had no funding because it doesn't cost anything, because I don't run ads, and because it was my personal blog, started before I joined Google.

On top of this there are the crazies, whom it is impossible to reason with, who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others, and preferably as many as possible. I asked myself last week after having to deal with the craziest of the crazies yet, "why subject yourself to this?" I could come up with no reason why I should: My grandfather chose to be a psychiatrist, but I chose a different professional path, one that doesn't obligate me to put up with such nonsense.

I don't know for sure what he is referencing regarding partisans, but this snip on boingboing might give us a hint. I don't think boingboing is going anywhere any time soon. Patry wrote an article in April about a whisper campaign by media giants to kill fair use. That article is gone, but the link takes you to a report about it by Cory Doctorow, so you can at least get an idea:
William Patry, the Google lawyer who formerly worked for the US Register of Copyrights, has a blog-post in which he outs a global anti-Fair-Use "whisper campaign" orchestrated by the big entertainment companies. The big media companies are trying to convince the world's governments that the USA's statutory exceptions to copyright (embodied in Fair Use) are so broad that they violate the centuries-old Berne Convention, a widely adopted copyright treaty. Berne is extremely rigid, and what's more, it's nearly impossible to update, since any amendments to it require signatures from all the governments that have signed it since the 1800s. Further, accession to Berne is a condition of many other trade agreements, so many countries are required to adopt Berne laws.

If the entertainment giants can convince the world's governments that Fair Use violates Berne, it might mean that the US will be forced by a trade court to eliminate it in favor of something far more restrictive.

I feel so sad about this decision. But I am also stunned to realize that this happens to others, not just to me, even to someone who works at one of the most successful companies in the world and has what I would view as a perfect resume. Last year, he was interviewed by K. Matthew Dames of Copycense, and the introduction explains a bit about his accomplishments:
In the area of copyright, there are few that can match William Patry’s credentials. He is the author of three copyright treatises, the most recent of which is a recently released, seven-volume, nearly 6,000 page opus entitled simply Patry on Copyright.

Patry now serves as senior copyright counsel for Google, Inc., but this appointment comes after a quarter century of work in copyright law as a professor; copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives; policy advisor to the Register of Copyrights; and attorney in private practice.

See what I mean? If you followed the link, you know that it says that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, now retired, wrote the forward, in which she discussed a number of copyright decisions, including Harper & Row, where she cited his work." If you'd like to read that decision, it's here. I count four references to Patry's book, The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law.

I had earlier believed that I was attacked and smeared because I am *not* affiliated with any company and am essentially nobody, so that folks felt free to be abusive. Now I understand that it's anyone on the other side of certain commercial interests. That would mean more than just copyright law is depressing.

Here's part of what he says about that:
This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent. I have tried various ways to leaven this state of affairs with positive postings, much like television news shows that experiment with "happy features." I have blogged about great articles others have written, or highlighted scholars who have not gotten the attention they deserve; I tried to find cases, even inconsequential ones, that I can fawn over. But after awhile, this wore thin, because the most important stories are too often ones that involve initiatives that are, in my opinion, seriously harmful to the public interest. I cannot continue to be so negative, so often. Being so negative, while deserved on the merits, gives a distorted perspective of my centrist views, and is emotionally a downer.

I hope that he will consider reposting at least some of the material he has now removed, even from Wayback. Of course, Groklaw would publish it, and I'm sure there are lots of folks with more prestigious credentials who would do the same gladly. Even if it were published anonymously, it would have value. And if he gets a second wind, perhaps in time he will start up again.

By the way, from my experience crazies don't just happen to show up. I've come to believe that sometimes large corporate interests find ways to direct negativity toward an individual they would like to stop blogging. Part of the process is to try to damage your reputation; the rest is to discourage you to a degree that you give up. I do, sadly, completely understand his decision. He's tired of dealing with it. He isn't saying that there's no hope for copyright law, just that he's more interested in doing effective work without the added unpleasantness of blogging. Of course, I have the advantage of doing Groklaw with a large group, and folks kindly write to me all the time and make donations with notes about how much they enjoy Groklaw and that they think it's important, and that definitely does help me to persist. If I was doing this all alone, I probably would have quit long ago.

Now, when you follow links to Patry's blog, you get this:
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog The Patry Copyright Blog does not exist.

It's our loss. However, I'd like to repeat what Patry wrote in the article about the whisper campaign and the attack on fair use, as quoted in boingboing, so that the information will continue to spread even further:
The counter-reformation movement is presently at the stage of a whispering campaign, in which ministries in countries are told that fair use (and by extension possible liberal fair dealing provisions) violate the "three-step" test. And who wants to violate the three-step after all? The appeal by counter-reformation forces to external and abstract concepts like the three-step test is a time-worn tactic: when you can't win on the merits, shift the debate elsewhere to grounds on which you think you can win. Given that few ministry officials are experts in copyright law, much less arcana like the three-step test, these appeals -- made by those who claim to be such experts -- can be effective. They shouldn't be. National governments should make policy decisions based on the merits of the proposals, free from such scare tactics. The three-step test is not a bar to a single proposal of which I am aware.

The biggest of the three-step scare tactics is that Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act is incompatible with the test. Baloney. WIPO and European copyright experts testified before the U.S. Congress during the hearings on U.S. adherence to Berne, hearings that spanned four years: 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988: there was no lack of time or opportunity to raise any concerns. Congress even went to Geneva and convened a round table discussion there on November 25 and 26, 1987 with WIPO and European copyright experts, the sole purpose of which was to determine which parts of U.S. law needed to be amended to permit Berne adherence. Not once at this round table or during four years of hearings were the words "fair use" ever raised by a foreign expert who appeared before Congress nor did any domestic witness (of whom there were many dozens) consider there to be a potential problem. (A transcript of the round table is reproduced in the House Hearings: "Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1987, Serial No. 50, 100th Congress, 1st & 2d sessions 1135- 1213(1987, 1988)). I can say from direct experience of having been involved in these efforts at the Copyright Office that I never heard a single European expert claim there was a compatibility issue with fair use.

And may I say to William Patry, from all of us who are neither crazies nor vicious partisans, that we are so sorry this happened to your life.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...80803135012312





News for the paranoid

Internet Censorship is On it's Way. The i-Patriot Act
Jeff Lombardo

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

During a group panel segment titled “2018: Life on the Net”, Lessig stated:

There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Of course, the Patriot Act is filled with all sorts of insanity about changing the way civil rights are protected, or not protected in this instance. So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.

Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.
These are clearly not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek.

The Patriot Act, as well as its lesser known follow up the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as USA Patriot Act II, have been universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. They have stripped back basic rights and handed what have been described by even the most moderate critics as “dictatorial control” over to the president and the federal government.

Many believed that the legislation was a response to the attacks of 9/11, but the reality was that the Patriot Act was prepared way in advance of 9/11 and it sat dormant, awaiting an event to justify its implementation.

In the days after the attacks it was passed in the House by a majority of 357 to 66. It passed the Senate by 98 to 1. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was even allowed to read the legislation.

Now we discover that exactly the same freedom restricting legislation has already been prepared for the cyber world.

An i-9/11, as described by Lawrence Lessig, would provide the perfect pretext to implement such restrictions in one swift motion, as well as provide the justification for relegating and eliminating specific content and information on the web.

Such an event could come in the form of a major viral attack, the hacking of a major city’s security or transport systems, or some other vital systems, or a combination of all of these things. Considering the amount of unanswered questions regarding 9/11 and all the indications that it was a covert false flag operation, it isn’t hard to imagine such an event being played out in the cyber world.

However, regardless of any i-9/11 or i-Patriot Act, there is already a coordinated effort to stem the reach and influence of the internet.

We have tirelessly warned of this general movement to restrict, censor, control and eventually completely shut down the internet as we know it, thereby killing the last real vestige of free speech in the world today and eliminating the greatest communication and information tool ever conceived.

Our governments have reams of legislation penned to put clamps on the web as we know it. Legislation such as the PRO-IP Act of 2007: H.R. 4279, that would create an IP czar at the Department of Justice and the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007: S. 522, which would create an entire ‘Intellectual Property Enforcement Network’. These are just two examples.

In addition, we have already seen how the major corporate websites and social networks are decentralizing and coming together to implement overarching identification, verification and access systems that have been described by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as “the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

Some of these major tech companies have already joined efforts in projects such as the Information Card Foundation, which has proposed the creation of a system of internet ID cards that will be required for internet access. Of course, such a system would give those involved the ability to track and control user activity much more effectively. This is just one example.

In addition, as we reported yesterday, major transportation hubs like St. Pancras International, as well as libraries, big businesses, hospitals and other public outlets that offer wi-fi Internet, are blacklisting alternative news websites and making them completely inaccessible to their users.

These precedents are merely the first indication of what is planned for the Internet over the next 5-10 years, with the traditional web becoming little more than a vast spy database that catalogues people’s every activity and bombards them with commercials, while those who comply with centralized control and regulation of content will be free to enjoy the new super-fast Internet 2.

We must speak out about this rampant move to implement strict control mechanisms on the web NOW before it is too late, before the spine of the free internet is broken and its body essentially becomes paralyzed beyond repair.
http://www.yff365.com/profiles/blog/...logPost%3A5863





How-To: Stop the RIAA/MPAA from Sniffing Your Bittorrent Traffic

If you live in the United States, France, UK, you may be thinking that getting music and movies from ThePirateBay isn't such a great idea anymore.

Well, you're wrong. By taking these easy steps, you can protect your privacy from the prying eyes of RIAA/MPAA and the gov't. The result? No one will come knocking your door, or if they do, they won't have any proof.

Important:

· Make sure you have a strong password for your login/encryption, a password like 'iruletheworld' won't do. "G7s&8bnu9#8vHU" will. If you can't remember it, write it somewhere and put it in a SAFE, HIDDEN location.

Bittorrent Clients

· Always try to use the latest version of your bittorrent client
· Use popular and acknowledged clients (uTorrent, Transmission open source)
· Force outgoing encryption, enable port randomization(optional), disable "Allow legacy connections"
· (Optional) Try to get an invite to a private bittorent tracker. Check the net for those who don't keep logs. Usually anti p2p organization focus on open and very popular trackers such as ThePirateBay.

Block unwanted IP's

· To block all connections from government, anti peer 2 peer organizations download Peer Guardian.
· Peer Guardian works by blocking all connections from blacklisted IP's known to be Government or Anti P2P. The blacklist updates frequently and is very effective.
· PeerGuardian is Open Source and works with Windows XP

Encrypt

· Enable full drive encryption if possible.
· Create a separate partition(recommended if you don't want full drive encryption) for your downloads and install True Crypt.
· True Crypt is a "free open source disk encryption utility for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux". It's easy to use, just follow the help files if you get stuck.
· If you have Windows Vista and a TPM chip, enable Bitlocker encryption ; on Mac OS X you can use FileVault

Network

· If your wireless router supports this option, create a separate SSID and set it to Open. Anyone will be able to connect and you can't be liable.
· For your general privacy enable WPA2 with TKIP security on your router, and also change the default admin password.
· If you have Dynamic IP it's a good idea to restart your router every couple of days. You get a new IP address this way.
· Avoid AT&T Internet service at all costs, they are known to work very close to the NSA and anti P2P.

http://sadgeekblog.blogspot.com/2008...fing-your.html





Yahoo to Let Users Switch Off Customized Ads
Stephanie Clifford

Yahoo announced Friday that it will allow users to turn off the customization of advertising on the pages of Yahoo.com. The opt-out option should be available at the end of August, through Yahoo’s privacy center, the company said.

Yahoo already allows users to opt out of customized ads that it serves on other companies’ pages. This tweak would stop the company from serving ads based on a user’s behavior on Yahoo’s own pages.

The company made the announcement as part of a response to a letter about privacy that was sent last week by four House members. The top congressmen at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters to 33 Internet and telecommunications companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and AOL, asking them to detail their privacy policies. The committee asked for responses by Friday.

Yahoo’s response to the House letter (below the press release, here) was somewhat predictable, but provided some interesting details about its behavioral targeting. It is experimenting with links on targeted ads that say things like “what is this” or “about this ad.” These take users to a page that explains the targeting. Opting out is not very common: in July, 75,000 users visited the opt-out page within Yahoo’s privacy pages (Yahoo said it could not estimate the total number of users who had opted out). And Yahoo said it has an internal group, the Ad Council, that reviews requests from advertisers to determine whether the topics they want to target are too sensitive — for example, if they include certain medical terms.

I’ll be writing more about the Congressional interest in online advertising for Monday’s paper.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ads/index.html





Woman Sentenced for Web Site with 'Obscene' Stories
Grant Gross

A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to five years of probation, including six months of home detention, and forfeiture of her computer after pleading guilty Thursday to obscenity charges for running a Web site that featured text stories that were sexual and violent in nature.

Karen Fletcher, 56,of Donora, Pennsylvania, owned and operated the Web site, Red Rose Stories, which featured stories describing sexual molestation and violence against children. Other stories included torture, rape and murder of children, and Fletcher sold memberships to her site, where members could get full stories, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Fletcher, using the pen name Red Rose, wrote most of the stories herself, the DOJ said. Some of the stories were available as audio files, but the site didn't include photos, according to press reports.

Fletcher reportedly was abused as a child and started the site as a form of therapy, according to news reports.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the site closed in late 2005. Some constitutional lawyers have questioned the prosecution of Fletcher, saying many pieces of popular literature have contained similar descriptions of abuse or murder.

Fletcher pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh to six counts of using an interactive computer service to distribute obscene materials. She must serve the first six months of her probation under home detention and pay a US$1,000 fine, Judge Joy Flowers Conti ruled.

Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Pennsylvania, has filed obscenity charges against several defendants.

Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on his blog.

Randazza, who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues, acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he suggested the U.S. Constitution protects fictional stories. "If you believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...e_stories.html





Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans
Brian Stelter

NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way.

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.

“The Olympics to me is a benchmark for how fast we’ve gone with technology,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm in New York, said. “Thirty months ago, no one was talking about YouTube. Now, it’s a verb.”

Two years ago, during the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, offered only two hours of live coverage on the Internet. This year, it is putting a staggering 2,200 hours online in scores of video feeds.

But NBC, which paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Olympic broadcast in the United States, intends to show some premier events like swimming live on television only to reach a wider audience and charge higher rates for advertising.

Although the numbers are not yet available, NBC’s tape-delayed version of the opening ceremonies will almost certainly be watched by more Americans than the live Internet streams. Steven J. Farella, the president and chief executive of the TargetCast TCM media agency in New York, said that “if the question is, ‘is this a big issue?’ the answer is, ‘not yet.’ ”

“Right now, people can go on the Internet to watch, but not enough will because it’s not the same experience,” he added. “People love TV and still like to get entertainment that way.” However, he added, by the Summer Games in 2012, “Olympic ad sales could be turned upside down.”

But as Internet users reaffirmed on Friday, some viewers are already willing to find some other source and watch what they want, when they want.

As dancers and acrobats whisked across the National Stadium in Beijing, anonymous users uploaded more than 100 video clips of the ceremony to YouTube, but the site, owned by Google, swiftly removed as many as it could. Similarly, some live video streams on Justin.tv, a popular source for international video, were also removed. According to International Olympic Committee guidelines, the television networks with the local rights to the Games are the only legal sources of video in each country.

But the media companies were almost always a step behind users who have a seemingly unlimited number of Web sites, especially when bloggers were sharing links to new sources. In Rhode Island, Aida Neary and a colleague huddled at her desk to watch a Brazilian television channel’s live coverage.

“It wasn’t the best quality,” Ms. Neary said of the video feed, “and I’m sure it will be better on TV, but to watch that flame go up at the same time as the rest of the world was a beautiful, moving thing.”

Most of the world’s other broadcasters with rights to the Olympics, including CBC in Canada, Televisa in Mexico, the BBC in Britain and NHK in Japan, broadcast the opening ceremonies live on television. “The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive,” remarked Tracy Record, a blogger in Seattle, who woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the opening ceremonies with her 12-year-old son on CBC.

Around the same time, American television viewers were treated to a taste on NBC’s “Today” show and regular programming on NBC’s cable sisters, MSNBC and CNBC. Parts of “Today” were taped hours in advance because Matt Lauer, who serves as co-host of the morning show, was due at the stadium to anchor the opening ceremonies with Bob Costas.

Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, said in a statement: “We have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake here, so that means we’re not public television, for better or worse.”

The International Olympic Committee is permitting networks to stream video this year because geographic blocking technology allows the companies to keep their broadband feeds within national borders. In some cases Friday, users illegally retransmitted the feeds. But in at least one case involving Germany’s ARD broadcast network, the blocking did not occur.

ARD did not direct its Olympic stream through the geographic protection provided by the European Broadcasting Union, a conglomerate of dozens of national broadcasters that acquired the rights to the Beijing Games for $443.4 million, according to a memo sent to the International Olympic Committee and obtained by The New York Times. Gina Lundby, the sports projects coordinator of Eurovision, the broadcast division of the E.B.U., wrote in the memo that the German network had been prohibited from further streaming “until this matter has been clarified and resolved.”

Lorie Johnson, an information technology worker in Little Rock, Ark., benefited from the security lapse. She watched the torch lighting from her desk at work.

“In the age of Internet (almost) anywhere, why be tied to a TV?,” Ms. Johnson wrote in an e-mail message. Television networks “no longer have the same viewer monopoly they had 30 years ago — why don’t they see that?”

Stuart Elliott, Richard Sandomir and Bill Carter contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/sp.../09nbc.html?hp
















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