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Old 13-08-08, 07:38 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 16th, '08

Since 2002


































"With global warming and a world that's running out of oil, the last thing governments should do is add taxes on something that uses no oil and produces no carbon. A digital download is the greenest way to buy music, movies, and software, since it requires no driving to the store, no delivery vans and no plastics or packaging." – Steve DelBianco


"I was terrified that we would lose. But I thought it was the right thing to do." – Robert G. Jacobsen


"At the point where universities finally come to see they're the target of this RIAA campaign, that's the point at which they'll start arguing their own self-interest." – Charles R. Nesson


"Not only have Senator McCain and his agents plainly infringed Mr. Browne’s copyright in ’Running on Empty,’ but the federal courts have long held that the unauthorized use of a famous singer’s voice in a commercial constitutes a false endorsement and a violation of the singer’s right of publicity." – Lawrence Iser


"Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me. The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue." – Matt Nathanson


"We're funded by venture capital. They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn't feel like its headed towards a solution, [Pandora is] done." – Tim Westergren


"To say it stifles innovation is an understatement. The bill was obsolete the moment it was drafted.

The consumer marketplace is increasingly going beyond that apathy to a type of lawlessness. They'll just ignore the government because it's so irrelevant "
– Jesse Hirsh



































August 16th, 2008




uTorrent "Created By" Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

A vulnerability has been discovered in uTorrent, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the processing of ".torrent" files. This can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow by tricking the user into opening a ".torrent" file containing an overly long "created by" field.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

The vulnerability is confirmed in version 1.7.7 (build 8179). Prior versions may also be affected.
http://secunia.com/advisories/31441/




Judge Lowers Fines for Suspected File Sharer
Andre Yoskowitz

US District Judge Xavier Rodriguez has lowered the fines that were originally imposed on 16-year-old Whitney Harper by the RIAA when she was accused of illegally downloading files from the Fasttrack network used by P2P clients such as iMesh and Kazaa.

The fines were lowered from $750 per suspected song to $200 after Harper explained she did not know she was accessing copyrighted material and instead thought that she was streaming the music, somewhat like Internet Radio.

The ruling is interesting because the RIAA can charge up to $30,000 USD per every "pirated" song but usually charges around $750.

To give a background on the case, in January of last year Warner Brothers, Sony BMG, Maverick, UMG, and Arista Records sued Steve Harper after MediaSentry said that someone on Harper's computer was downloading copyrighted songs from Fasttrack. Harper had of course not downloaded any such music, but his daughter Whitney had. By December she had been added as a defendant to the suit.

She is now accused of downloading 39 copyrighted songs through Kazaa. The original MediaSentry investigation found that Whitney was sharing 544 audio files through Kazaa but after a Windows reformat, the files were effectively deleted.

Whitney now claims that she used Kazaa to listen to songs but thought the program was a streaming program like Imeem. She was unaware she was downloading the tracks or sharing them.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15072.cfm





Antipiracy Campaign Exasperates Colleges

But attempts to break with recording industry run into legal hurdles
Catherine Rampell

Talk to the chief information officer at just about any American university, and he will probably say that his institution has bent over backward to help the Recording Industry Association of America curb illegal file sharing on his campus.

He will also tell you he's angry.

On e-mail lists and in interviews, university CIO's and other information-technology professionals say their mission is getting derailed and staff time is being overloaded by copyright takedown notices, "prelitigation settlement letters," RIAA-issued subpoenas, lobbying efforts, and panicked students accused of piracy.

Now, feeling burdened and betrayed, some of those universities are quietly fighting back, resisting requests for information and trying to quash subpoenas. Those that do so, though, find that their past compliance — and the continued compliance of their peer institutions — is being held against them.

"We feel like we've been led down the garden path, and our interest in working in partnership and leading our mission as educators is now being used against us," said Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy at Cornell University.

For years the entertainment industry and higher education have considered themselves allies in the fight to curb illegal file sharing on campuses, most visibly through the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force.

Over the past year, joint-committee members from universities say tensions have grown, primarily because they feel betrayed by the industry's lobbying to force filtering technology on university networks.

"They're pressing for legislative proposals at both the federal and state level that we think are really inappropriate," said John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities and a joint-committee member. The proposals call for government policies "that would go against issues of privacy or academic openness that we think are important to maintain," he said.

Then universities saw an uptick this spring in the number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices, which require universities to track down and remove infringing content from their networks. The RIAA attributed the rise to a software upgrade. University officials say no matter the cause, the proliferation is taxing their resources and distracting them from their real jobs.

Responding to RIAA notices used to be part-time work for one person, said William C. Dougherty, assistant director for systems support at Virginia Tech. "Now he's doing it full time and has an assistant," he said. "Our attorneys are also involved on almost a daily basis, as am I."

Ways to Resist

Mr. Dougherty said that in June his office began discussing "technological and sociological approaches" to reduce the time spent responding to RIAA notices. One potential solution would be to erase network- access logs sooner so that the university could not be asked to track down alleged pirates' identities after a month had passed. Mr. Dougherty says that those records get less reliable the older they are and that he fears implicating the wrong students.

Other universities have considered similar strategies, but, like Virginia Tech, they keep data on assigned IP addresses and network access for technical and administrative functions that might be impeded by erasing records.

Some universities have opted for another route: They have stopped forwarding prelitigation settlement letters from the RIAA. The letters offer students whose IP addresses have been associated with copyright infringement the option of settling out of court for several thousand dollars rather than going to court and potentially facing much scarier penalties. Most universities agree to forward the letters to students, since the RIAA can't find out their identities without a court order.

Not forwarding the letters is controversial. On the one hand, it helps extricate universities from the RIAA's battle against music pirates and relieve some legal concerns involving the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

"Our acting as an agent or providing a direct link between the RIAA and students would be circumventing Ferpa," says Denise Stephens, vice provost for information services and chief information officer at the University of Kansas, which stopped forwarding the letters last fall.

On the other hand, not forwarding letters can anger students who feel deprived of an opportunity to settle.

When the University of Wisconsin at Madison stopped sending the letters on to students, the student newspaper objected, saying in an editorial: "Despite their misgivings about the recording industry, [the university] should step out of the picture and stop interfering with the judicial process."

A handful of universities have used legal means to try to resist RIAA demands upon their time. The RIAA's investigators can trace an alleged file sharer to an IP address, but without the Internet-service provider's help, they generally cannot identify who was assigned to that IP address. Accordingly, the RIAA must subpoena the service provider — in this case, a university — to find out who the alleged pirates are.

Universities have challenged such subpoenas in the past on jurisdictional grounds, and in recent months they have turned to a new strategy.

The University of Oregon, Marshall University, and Morehead State University all recently filed motions to quash such subpoenas by arguing that they imposed an "undue burden" upon a university.

In separate filings, the institutions said that at least some of the IP addresses flagged by the RIAA had been assigned to suites with multiple roommates. The institutions felt that turning over the names of all students assigned to those IP addresses would violate the privacy of students who weren't involved in the alleged file sharing. Therefore, the universities argued, they would need to do an expensive investigation to determine which students should be identified.

"A lot more students are going to have names given out that were not, and could not, be guilty," said Jane V. Fitzpatrick, Morehead State's general counsel. "It's not our job to investigate for these people."

The Power of Precedent

The RIAA's reply? You've already set a precedent for making it your job.

In court documents and interviews, the RIAA has argued that past compliance with the subpoenas means that they were not an "undue burden" before, so they should not be one now.

Both Morehead State's and Marshall's motions to quash the subpoenas were denied. The judges in both cases said there was no "undue burden" because investigations were not actually necessary to abide by Ferpa regulations. In the Morehead State ruling, the judge pointedly noted that "Morehead has responded, without objection, to virtually identical requests in other, similar litigation."

For now the University of Oregon's motion is pending. Oregon, unlike Marshall and Morehead, has no past subpoena compliance the RIAA can recite. Still, the RIAA highlights the fact that a fellow state institution, Portland State University, "responded to a virtually identical subpoena" without fuss.

"Indeed, hundreds of universities and dozens of commercial Internet-service providers have responded to the exact same subpoena without breadth or burden concerns," the RIAA argued in a brief.

That compliance is exactly the problem, the RIAA's critics contend.

"At the point where universities finally come to see they're the target of this RIAA campaign, that's the point at which they'll start arguing their own self-interest," says Charles R. Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He believes the RIAA is trying to wear universities down with letters and subpoenas until they give in and install filtering software, a policy precedent that the RIAA may then decide to use against commercial ISP's.

Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, says the industry is not banking on a slippery-slope strategy like the one Mr. Nesson describes and disputes accusations of bullying.

"I think that some universities feel like if they're cooperative, then we shouldn't send them so many notices because that's a burden," Mr. Sherman said. "But when our vendors detect infringement, we send out notices. That's not intending to be punitive. We really do appreciate and value the cooperation we're getting from universities, even if it hasn't been uniform across universities."

While a growing number of universities contemplate halting such cooperation, there is no stampede. Institutions that have stopped have done so independently and discreetly, eschewing attention to what otherwise seem like bold, trend-bucking actions. Morehead State's student-newspaper archives online, for example, show no coverage of the university's attempts to shield the identities of students fingered by the RIAA.

A number of other institutions emphasized that they were not trying to "make a statement" by either complying with or resisting RIAA demands. They were just doing whatever made sense for their IT departments at the time, they say.

And, says Cornell's Ms. Mitrano, industry's "attempt to get more attention may cause them to receive less attention from us."
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i49/49a00104.htm





RIAA MediaSentry in New Michigan Student Case
Jon Newton

Michigan students are determined RIAA ‘investigator’ MediaSentry is held accountable for practicing as a private eye in the state without a license.

It’s owner, SafeNet, has been hired by China’s Communist leaders to provide DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) for in-country live and on- demand online video footage of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

They must not have been aware of the company’s considerably less than sterling reputation in the West.

Central Michigan University filed a complaint against it with Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth, “at least the second such complaint in Michigan, the first having gotten the RIAA’s unlicensed investigation firm into a pickle when its lawyer, responding to the accusations, made statements directly contradicting statements he’d made a month earlier in UMG v Lindor,” said Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman recently, going on:

“The 32-page complaint cites to MediaSentry’s problems in 8 other states, including the Massachusetts cease and desist letter, and cites to MediaSentry’s own promotional materials and the RIAA’s court papers as evidence of the illegal activity.”

This means there are now at least three cases pending against MediaSentry in Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

“In addition to the Kruger case, involving Northern Michigan University, and the Central Michigan University case, there is a case that was brought by a student at the University of Michigan, Case no. 162983070 v. MediaSentry,” Beckerman says, adding:

“The Kruger case is the one in which MediaSentry’s lawyer made representations to the DLEG which directly contradicted representations he’d made to Judge Levy in UMG v. Lindor a month earlier.”
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16699





Jackson Browne Sues McCain Over Song Use

Lifelong Democrat says ad used ‘Running on Empty’ without permission

Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne is suing Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the Republican party for using his song “Running on Empty” in a recent TV commercial.

In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Browne claims McCain and the party did not obtain permission to use the song for an ad in which “Senator McCain and the Republicans mock Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama for suggesting that the country conserve gas through proper tire inflation.”

Browne, a lifelong Democrat, is seeking unspecified damages as well as a permanent injunction prohibiting the use of “Running on Empty” in any form by the McCain campaign.

“Not only have Senator McCain and his agents plainly infringed Mr. Browne’s copyright in ’Running on Empty,’ but the federal courts have long held that the unauthorized use of a famous singer’s voice in a commercial constitutes a false endorsement and a violation of the singer’s right of publicity,” Lawrence Iser, Browne lawyer, said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26207288/





Now Playing on YouTube: Clips With Ads
Brian Stelter

After years of regarding pirated video on YouTube as a threat, some major media companies are having a change of heart, treating it instead as an advertising opportunity.

In the last few months, CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate, Electronic Arts and other companies have stopped prodding YouTube to remove unauthorized clips of their movies, music videos and other content and started selling advertising against them.

CBS may be the most surprising new business partner in that its sister company, Viacom, is still pursuing its acrimonious billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against YouTube’s owner, Google.

So far, the money is minimal — ads appear on only a fraction of YouTube’s millions of videos — but the move suggests a possible thaw in the chilly standoff between the online video giant and media companies. Getting into the good graces of media entities is seen as critical to the future of YouTube, which has struggled to show appreciable revenue for video ads.

“We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission,” said Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment, which owns films like “Dirty Dancing” and the “Saw” series of horror movies.

“But we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content.” he said. “For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.”

Indeed, the YouTube users who post the content without permission will not share in the advertising revenue generated by their posts. Instead, it is split between the media companies and YouTube.

The infringing user receives an e-mail message with an ominous red banner saying “a YouTube partner made a copyright claim on one of your videos.” The e-mail message explains that the media company has “authorized the use of this content” and that viewers may see advertising on the video.

For example, a user-uploaded video for the music video for “Disturbia” by the artist Rihanna is still online, even though YouTube makes it easy to remove. The Rihanna video page was uploaded by a fan three weeks ago and has attracted 1.2 million views. It now features a prominent ad and a small disclaimer that cites the Universal Music Group as the owner.

Under pressure from media companies, YouTube introduced a technology last fall called Video ID which allowed copyright owners to compare the digital fingerprints of their videos with material on YouTube, then flag infringing material for removal.

It was widely expected, given the acrimony between the parties, that media companies would simply demand their material be taken down. But the technology offered an alternative, allowing the companies to “claim” the videos and start showing ads alongside them, creating a new revenue stream for both YouTube and the content owners.

YouTube executives say they have been surprised by the interest in the advertising option. David King, a product manager at YouTube, said in an interview that 90 percent of the copyright claims made using the identification tool remain on the site and are converted to advertising inventory. The other 10 percent are either removed from the site or tracked by the content owner.

“A year ago, I don’t think I would have dared guess that” so many videos would be converted, Mr. King said. “They want to leave it up and make money on it.”

YouTube is trying to sell other media companies on the model, but the conglomerates are apparently taking a wait-and-see approach. Time Warner and the News Corporation acknowledge testing the platform, but there is no evidence they are putting ads on user content. Companies like NBC Universal and the Walt Disney Company prefer to steer users toward their own video sites.

Viacom appreciates the technology but is not softening its legal hard line. Last fall, Viacom said it was pleased that YouTube appeared to be “stepping up to its responsibility and ending the practice of profiting from copyright infringement,” but it emphasized that the $1 billion lawsuit addressed past infringement of content. The lawsuit is in the discovery phase, with another hearing set for September. A Viacom spokesman said Friday that the company had not taken a position on Video ID.

YouTube says 13 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Many of the videos that users do not have the rights to — television scenes, music clips and, this month, Olympic highlights — are filtered before they ever appear. When infringing videos do make it online, they can be tracked using Video ID.

Electronic Arts, the video game publisher, has taken Video ID a step further, using it to encourage user submissions. In a promotion for the coming video game Spore, E.A. encouraged gamers to upload original Spore creatures they created using a software program. There were more than 100,000 submissions, and some attracted hundreds of thousands of views. E.A. used Video ID to claim the most popular user videos and share in the ad revenue on them.

In July, Lionsgate became the first movie studio to work with YouTube. “The technology is quite sophisticated and it is working well,” Mr. Marvis said.

On Google’s earnings call last month, the company’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, praised the movie studio’s strategy. “Lionsgate has the good judgment to say, rather than go and sue those customers, instead, let’s go capture that, show an ad against them and get them even more excited about our content,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Google needs other companies to follow. The company is wary of putting ads alongside videos unless the content owners have given approval. YouTube said the claiming process had more than doubled the number of videos that its 300 Video ID partners can monetize, but the total number was still small. At a conference last month, the Web site Silicon Alley Insider reported that Brian Cusack, the YouTube sales manager, said ads appeared on less than 3 percent of video pages. A YouTube spokesman would not confirm that.

Google has pushed the video site to innovate in the ad arena. Mr. Schmidt said last month: “I personally do not believe that the perfect ad product for YouTube has been invented yet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/te...gy/16tube.html





Bell Device May Become Illegal
Sarah Schmidt

Bell is promoting a new product for archiving recorded television shows that will become illegal if the government's proposed copyright legislation becomes law.

Bell began marketing its "record forever" external hard drive to accompany its expandable personal video recorder with the opening of the Olympic Games last week.

The hard drive, retailing for $199, allows customers to transfer recorded programs to save shows "forever" and free up space on their PVR.

The federal government's proposed new copyright legislation, currently being debated in Parliament, forbids this type of archiving of recorded programs to build a library of recordings.

Consumers can legally record TV shows for later viewing, but only for a limited time or "no longer than necessary in order to listen or watch the program at a more convenient time," according to Industry Canada's backgrounder.

"Here, there's an exciting consumer product at the centerpiece of a marketing campaign, but we've got legislation running counter to it," said telecommunications legal expert Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa.

"There needs to be some disclosure about the legality. The emphasis has been on the fact that you can store and archive for a lengthy period of time. The law is very clear. It simply won't let you do that."

In a statement, Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo said the company supports a "balanced approach" to copyright reform.

"The public interest and rights of consumers need to be considered and protected as the act is being amended to accommodate technological change."

And as a member of the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, "Bell believes copyright reforms should not prevent legitimate access by consumers. Reforms shouldn't prevent innovative research. And they shouldn't impede the adoption of new technologies for fair commercial use or the extension of educational opportunities."

Other coalition members include Google, Yahoo, Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus and Cogeco.

Jesse Hirsh, a Toronto-based technology expert and head of the consulting firm Openflows Networks Ltd., says this possible conflict reflects a bigger problem with the proposed copyright legislation. Bell, he said, won't be the only company running afoul of the legislation if it passes Parliament unamended.

"To say it stifles innovation is an understatement. The bill was obsolete the moment it was drafted."

More troubling, says Hirsh, is how companies, creators and consumers will view government if the copyright legislation becomes law.

"The consumer marketplace is increasingly going beyond that apathy to a type of lawlessness. They'll just ignore the government because it's so irrelevant."

When Industry Minister Jim Prentice tabled the legislation in June, he dubbed it a "made in Canada" solution to stamp out online piracy.

Only in cases where companies do not put a digital lock on their material will consumers be allowed to make a backup copy of a legally purchased CD or DVD, or transfer it to an MP3 player or another device for personal use.
http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/ne...7-c236bc175529





Pirate Bay Evades Italian Blockade

Blasts Italian fascists
John Oates

Italian ISPs are doing their best to block access to torrent site the Pirate Bay, but the Swedish site has already acted to help Italians evade the ban.

Italy's deputy prosecutor ordered ISPs to block the site late last week. But the feisty pirates quickly fought back.

The Pirate Bay recomended its Italian users switch to OpenDNS to bypass their ISP's filters or use the URL Labaia.org - which means "the bay" in Italian.

On its blog Pirate Bay said: "We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech... This time it's Italy." The blog blamed "fascist leader" Silvio Berlusconi for the shutdown and said he owns a lot of companies that Pirate Bay competes with.

Apart from bypassing the ban, Italians were also urged to contact their service providers to complain about the block.

Previous attempts to ban the site have been counter-productive, providing free publicity and actually increasing the number of people using the service.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08...ate_bay_italy/





The Pirate Bay Sees Boost in Italian Traffic Following ‘Block’
enigmax

Following the decision in Italy to block access to The Pirate Bay comes the inevitable announcement. Has the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker faded away in the face of media industry pressure? Hardly. Traffic from Italy to the ‘bay has actually increased this week and the site has jumped 10 places on Alexa in Italy.

It’s been all over the news this week. Following attempts in other countries to block access to The Pirate Bay, this week saw the Italians take their turn. Could they succeed where they had previously failed and actually force a decrease in traffic to a site they block?

Some ISPs have refused to block the site in the past but in any event, most attempts only seem to provide free advertising for the site and subsequent increases in traffic.

Unfortunately for the people at the IFPI - the driving force behind the block - the results so far aren’t what they’d hoped for. Rather like the increases in traffic experienced at HTTPShare when they tried to block that, this week has seen traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay increase too.

Brokep from The Pirate Bay has announced that while the tracker has never been “particularly big in Italy”, the recent attempted block actually seems to have done them a favor.

“Since the block we’ve increased traffic from Italy,” he says. “We gained 10 places on Alexa in Italy, and our own stats show a 5% increase in traffic from Italy (which has been quite stable before),” which is understandable considering the masses of worldwide press coverage this week, a fact not lost on brokep:

“It’s quite interesting and my guess (with background about what happened in Denmark) is that the site will gain even more attention over the coming weeks in the media and also get a lot of new visitors.”

It seems unthinkable that there could be any other result. The music and movies industries might hate The Pirate Bay with a passion but millions upon millions of regular people love them. It’s difficult to keep that level enthusiasm down.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...-block-080815/





Sharing 2999 Songs, 199 Movies Becomes ‘Safe’ in Germany
enigmax

Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.

During the last few years the legal climate in Germany has become more and more weighted against file-sharers, with hundreds of thousands receiving threats of legal action. Based on information gathered by anti-p2p tracking outfits, an offense is reported which the public prosecution service is obliged to investigate due to the fact that copyright infringement is a criminal issue in Germany. The ISP of the alleged infringer would then be forced to hand over the personal details of those accused, who would then be threatened with legal action.

Very often the legal action is not carried out but the threats are used as leverage to get ‘compensation’ from the alleged infringer to hand to the rights holder. It seems that the legal system in German has had enough of this ‘abuse’ of the criminal law system for ‘civil’ monetary gain.

In an interview with Jetzt.de, prosecutors from the Nort-Rhine Westphalia area state that those sharing files for personal, non-commercial uses, will no longer be the target of a lawsuit.

Christian Solmecke, a lawyer working at lawyers Wilde & Beuger and currently defending around 500 file-sharers against the German music industry told TorrentFreak: “That means, that the music industry in Germany has no chance to find out the real address behind an IP-address at the moment,” which is clearly a major obstacle for someone looking to take legal action.

The dividing line between personal file-sharing and commercial file-sharing needs to be defined clearly under the law, and the prosecutors have gone some way in offering this definition. “The guidelines say that no investigation should be done if the damage is lower than 3000 Euros (approx $4,500),” Christian told us. “The guideline says that the damage of trading one song is 1 Euro ($1.50). That means, that you could have 2999 Files on your computer and the prosecutors will not investigate.”

The damages for a movie are being touted at 15 Euros (approx $22.00) each, so presumably anyone sharing less than 200 movies will be considered a non-commercial file-sharer and should avoid prosecution. However, the prosecutor has indicated that those sharing brand new movies still in theater cannot expect to receive the same treatment.

Christian told TorrentFreak: “This decision is very new, we do not know what consequences it will have or if all prosecutors in Germany will follow the new guidelines.” However, the German music industry is clearly unhappy, labeling the decision as “a catastrophe” and refusing to accept it.

Should this decision spread around Germany, P2P tracking outfits such as Logistep AG and the German company Digiprotect will have to look elsewhere to make up their revenue. There are indications that Digiprotect is already branching out into the UK, in a new partnership with everyone’s favorite anti-p2p lawyers, Davenport Lyons.
http://torrentfreak.com/sharing-2999...ermany-080814/





Government to Increase Online Copyright Penalty Tenfold

The Government plans to increase the maximum fine that Magistrates' Courts can award for online copyright infringement from £5,000 to £50,000.

The Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on the plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue summary fines of £50,000 for online copyright infringement.

The larger fine is proposed for commercial scale infringements, where the person involved profits from the infringement.

The plan would implement another of the recommendations of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, the 2006 report by former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers which has been the foundation of intellectual property policy since its publication.

"This consultation takes forward Gowers Review recommendation 36, which recommended matching penalties for online and physical copyright infringement by increasing sanctions for online infringements," said the UK-IPO in a statement.

A report called 'Creative Britain' published by the Government's business, culture and innovation departments earlier this year also called for an increase in the maximum fines available to Magistrates Courts for online copyright infringement.

Gowers said in his report that online commercial infringement could not be as severely punished as commercial infringement in the offline world.

"Several submissions have called for a change in the law to increase online infringement penalties to the levels of physical infringement," he said in his report. "The intention and impact of physical and online infringement are the same. Crimes committed in the online and physical world should not be subject to different sentences. Increasing the penalties for online infringement will therefore make the law more coherent."

The UK-IPO said in its consultation paper that the change in the fines available to courts would allow them to better combat commercial scale infringement.

"Our investigations concluded that introducing exceptional summary maxima fines would allow magistrates’ courts to deal effectively with copyright offences as they would be able to award fines that took account of the illegal profits made from such offences," said the paper.

The courts in Scotland and Northern Ireland operate differently from those in England and Wales, and there is no equivalent sentencing guideline system there, but the consultation suggests that those courts could still implement maximum fines.

"The court structures in Scotland and Northern Ireland differ from those in England and Wales, but exceptional statutory maxima could be introduced for summary courts in Scotland and Northern Ireland as for England and Wales," it said.

The consultation is open until 31 October.
http://www.out-law.com/page-9341





UK ISP’s New Music Service Will Pay Labels For ‘Illegal’ Downloads
Robert Andrews

One of the UK’s top ISPs is preparing to launch an unlimited music service that would see it pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customers, paidContent.org can reveal.

Playlouder MSP (music service provider), which first tried the model for itself back in 2003, said it will facilitate the service for the broadband operator, starting early next year. Co-founder Paul Sanders would not name the ISP, but a source last month told paidContent:UK Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) was holding some kind of talks with the vendor.

Now that the biggest six ISPs have pledged to reduce illegal downloading on their networks, they need commercial alternatives that will prove similarly enticing - and subscriptions offering tunes-on-tap are emerging as the front runner for consumers already plucking free music from the “celestial jukebox”.

Playlouder’s service lets users legitimately download from channels like Gnutella, BitTorrent and more - the list goes on…
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419...gal-downloads/





US Internet Speeds Won't Catch Up with Japan for 100 Years
clark

Internet speeds of users nationwide shows that the United States has not made significant improvements in deploying high-speed broadband networks in the past year, and at the if the average US Internet speed continues to improve only at the same rate it did from 2007 to 2008, the country won't catch up with Japan's current download speed for another 100 years, according findings released by the Communications Workers of America's (CWA's) Speed Matters campaign.

The report also shows that the US continues to lag behind other industrial nations and currently is ranked 15th in the percentage of residents who have broadband access.

More than 230,000 people took the campaign’s speed survey on their home computers and found that we’re not downloading or uploading much faster than a year ago.

The 2008 median real-time download speed in the U.S. is a mere 2.3 megabits per second. This represents a gain of only 0.4 mbps over last year’s median download speed. It compares to an average download speed in Japan of 63 mbps, the survey reveals.

US also trails South Korea at 49 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, France at 17 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps, and the median upload speed was just 435 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or to transmit large files such as medical records.

"We need high-speed Internet for our homes, schools, hospitals, and workplaces," the authors of the report recommend. "Speed defines what is possible on the Internet. It determines whether we will have the 21st century networks we need to create the jobs of the future, develop our economy, and support innovations in telemedicine, education, public safety, and public services to improve our lives and communities."
http://you.presscue.com/story/us-int...apan-100-years





Lawmakers Urge F.C.C. to Move Forward With ‘Free’ Plan
Nancy Gohring

The clock is ticking on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's free wireless broadband proposal, with organizations on both sides of the debate stepping up their arguments.

Two lawmakers and a company that backs the FCC's plan are among many groups that filed letters with the commission over the past couple of weeks, responding in part to T-Mobile's filing of the results of its technical laboratory test.

The FCC had expected to vote June 12 on a proposal to auction a 25MHz piece of spectrum in the 2155Mhz band and require the winner to use a specified amount of spectrum for free wireless Internet access. Although the FCC first floated the idea last September, mobile operators have asked the commission to delay the vote to give them more time to consider technical issues.

The operators say the technical requirements outlined by the FCC for the spectrum will cause interference with their existing services.

But last week, Representatives Anna Eshoo and Edward Markey suggested the operators might have other motives. "We are concerned that incumbent wireless carriers are seeking unnecessary and unprecedented testing delays to prevent new innovative competitors from entering the market," they wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

They point to tests done by the U.K.'s equivalent of the FCC that showed no substantial interference from the type of technical plan the FCC is proposing. "We are concerned that unnecessary interference testing would needlessly delay this auction and that this constitutes the very rationale to kill this effort totally. We urge you to carefully consider the existing precedent before making your determination," they wrote.

The International Telecommunication Union and other groups have also done tests, and they all come up with essentially the same results, said John Muleta, CEO of M2Z Networks, a company that backs the FCC's plan. The tests show that some interference is possible in certain, somewhat rare situations, a result that is typically considered acceptable, he said. In some countries, operators have already been allowed to offer services on the basis of those tests, he said.

He says it's ironic that T-Mobile has been a vocal opponent of the FCC's plan. In its filing last week, T-Mobile said the FCC's plan will lead to "destructive interference" to 3G services. "For consumers, the interference will be extensive, widespread, and unpredictable, significantly degrading their service," T-Mobile wrote.

Yet T-Mobile in the Czech Republic has itself already launched a comparable service using even more lax rules than those described by the FCC, said Muleta, who once served as chief of the FCC's wireless telecommunications bureau. T-Mobile offers a broadband wireless service in the Czech Republic using technology from IPWireless, a broadband wireless technology developer recently acquired by NextWave. T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Czech Republic are both operating arms of T-Mobile International.

Muleta, whose company once proposed that the FCC give it spectrum so that the company could offer a free, advertising-supported broadband service, agrees with the lawmakers that the operators are probably hoping to stave off competition.

"In essence, they're gaming the system to make rules so that a new broadband competitor doesn't appear," Muleta said. "Any new entrant, especially one that appeals to consumers because the price is disruptive, is something they want to kill or delay."

It has been nearly a year since the FCC first proposed the auction with the free component. Per a legal statute, the FCC is compelled to make a decision about a new service or technology that it proposes within one year, Muleta said. If that time frame passes, anyone has the right to ask the courts to enforce the time line, he said. By his calculations, Sept. 6 is one year from the day when the FCC first suggested the plan. "To have any relevance, they have to stick to this," he said.

Discussion or a vote on this plan is not on the tentative agenda for the FCC's next open meeting, scheduled for Aug. 22.

In addition to operators and lawmakers, the FCC plan has also drawn opponents from an unusual corner: free speech advocates. The FCC would require that the winner of the spectrum impose content filtering in an effort to prevent young people from accessing adult content on the Internet. That runs foul of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, argue 22 organizations that filed a letter with the FCC in late July.
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_85257...20063E358.html





Nationwide ‘Thunder’ Boycott in the Works
Michael Cieply

A coalition of disabilities groups is expected as early as Monday to call for a national boycott of the film “Tropic Thunder” because of what the groups consider the movie’s open ridicule of the intellectually disabled.

The film, a movie-industry spoof directed by Ben Stiller, is set for release on Wednesday by Paramount Pictures and its DreamWorks unit.

“Not only might it happen, it will happen,” Timothy P. Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, said of the expected push for a boycott. Speaking by phone, Mr. Shriver said he planned to be in Los Angeles with representatives of his group and others to picket the movie’s premiere on Monday evening in this city’s Westwood district.

A particular sore point has been the film’s repeated use of the term “retard” in referring to a character, Simple Jack, who is played by Mr. Stiller in a subplot about an actor who chases an Oscar by portraying a mindless dolt.

Mr. Shriver said that he had also begun to ask members of Congress for a resolution condemning what he called the movie’s “hate speech” and calling for stronger federal support of the intellectually disabled.

“The most disappointing thing, the most incredible thing, is that nobody caught it,” said Mr. Shriver, who, as a co-producer of the DreamWorks film “Amistad,” is no stranger to the studio. He spoke of what he described as the studio’s and the filmmakers’ blatant disregard for the disabled even as they stepped carefully around other potentially offensive references, notably in a story line that has Robert Downey Jr. playing a white actor who changes his skin color to play a black soldier.

In a statement on Sunday, Chip Sullivan, a DreamWorks spokesman, said the movie was “an R-rated comedy that satirizes Hollywood and its excesses and makes its point by featuring inappropriate and over-the-top characters in ridiculous situations.” Mr. Sullivan, in the statement, added that the film was not meant to disparage or harm people with disabilities and that DreamWorks expected to work closely with disability groups in the future. But, he said, “No changes or cuts to the film will be made.”

Formal complaints about the content of films are not uncommon, but well-coordinated boycotts are fairly rare. The groups involved said that they represented millions of members and associates. Perhaps the most striking use of the tactic involved “The Last Temptation of Christ,” released in 1988. Religious groups that considered that movie’s depiction of Jesus blasphemous called for a boycott of companies owned by MCA, whose Universal unit made the film.

DreamWorks and Paramount have shown “Tropic Thunder” in more than 250 promotional screenings around the country since April, but significant complaints came only recently, when marketing materials for the movie caught the attention of advocates for the disabled. The tag line on one mock promotional poster on a Web site, since removed, read, “Once upon a time there was a retard.”

Over the weekend an ad-hoc coalition of more than a dozen disabilities groups — including the Arc of the United States, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the American Association of People With Disabilities and others — laid the groundwork for public protests to begin Monday.

The groups refrained from formally asking that viewers boycott the movie, pending informational screenings that were scheduled for their members at eight locations around the country on Monday morning.

But representatives of the National Down Syndrome Congress saw the movie at one such screening on Friday and immediately advised fellow advocates to expect a film sufficiently offensive to justify mass action.

“I came out feeling like I had been assaulted,” said David C. Tolleson, executive director of the Down syndrome group who saw the movie.

Mr. Tolleson and Peter V. Berns, executive director of the Arc of the United States, said on Sunday that they could not recall a similar coalition of disabilities groups forming against a film. Mr. Berns noted that some people had objected to the use of the word “retarded” in “Napoleon Dynamite,” a comedy released by Fox Searchlight and Paramount’s MTV Films unit in 2004.

“But there’s really been nothing near this magnitude,” Mr. Berns said.

In earlier interviews with The New York Times, Mr. Stiller and Stacey Snider, chief executive of the DreamWorks unit, said the movie’s humor was aimed not at the disabled but at the foolishness of actors who will go to any length in advancing their careers.

After meetings and conference calls with Ms. Snider and others, the studio altered some television advertising, but declined to edit scenes from the movie.

“Tropic Thunder” is likely to be the last movie released by DreamWorks before its top executives — Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Ms. Snider — formally announce their plans to become aligned with a new company to be financed by Reliance Big Entertainment of India. The three will continue to be involved with at least a dozen films at Paramount but are expected gradually to shift their energies to the new enterprise, which will probably distribute its movies through another studio.

Mr. Shriver said that he had spoken with Ms. Snider and others at DreamWorks about “Tropic Thunder” and came away convinced that they had no plans for mitigating measures.

Their response, he said, convinced him that the time had come for his group and others to strike a far more aggressive public posture on behalf of the disabled. “The movement needs to enter the public eye and not just be talking among ourselves,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/movies/11thun.html





Wednesday is the New Friday for Movie Openings
John Horn

Between now and Labor Day, the major studios and several independent distributors are releasing more than a half-dozen new films on a Wednesday, usually considered one of the slowest days of the week for moviegoing.

Although last week's national Wednesday premieres — Sony's "Pineapple Express" and Warner Bros.' "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 '' — opened two days early in part to avoid the start of the 2008 Olympics, the midweek theatrical openings are largely designed to maximize positive buzz so the new releases can hit Friday with a full head of steam. Among smaller movies opening on Wednesdays was last week's "Bottle Shock."

"We think our movie plays really, really well," says Chris McGurk, whose Overture Films will release Don Cheadle's terrorist drama "Traitor" on Aug. 27 in order to get a jump on the Labor Day holiday. "We just believe releasing it on a Wednesday before a four-day weekend is like having a rolling sneak preview."

Says Jack Foley, the distribution chief for Focus Features, whose comedy "Hamlet 2" will move into wide release on Aug. 27: "You get a lot of positive word of mouth going into the weekend. You have two days of people validating the movie locally."

While "The Dark Knight's" summer receipts are so stunning it's not a fair predictor of any other movie's performance, the Batman sequel's midweek numbers have shown that moviegoers will flock to the multiplex on days other than the weekend.

In breaking so many box-office records (last Monday, it became the fastest film to surpass $400 million domestically, doing so in 18 days), "The Dark Knight" has sold more than $8 million in tickets every weeknight except Monday (when it grossed $6.3 million), with its earliest midweek nightly grosses topping $20 million.

Thanks in part to midweek attendance, total summer grosses are up about 1 percent from last year's vacation season, when domestic ticket sales hit a record $4.16 billion. Total summer admissions, however, are down more than 3 percent from last summer, with the higher grosses driven by an average national ticket price of $7.16, according to new data from the National Association of Theater Owners.

Some distributors say the summer's overall returns — coupled with the consistent midweek revenue — suggest that some people hurt by the struggling economy are going to the movies rather than taking off on vacations.

"It's a sign that people are not only picking movies as the weekend choice for entertainment but also in the middle of the week as well," says Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sony moved up the release of "Pineapple Express" from Friday to Wednesday for several reasons: to avoid the Olympics, separate itself by a week from this Wednesday's "Tropic Thunder" (which Paramount and DreamWorks previously moved from Friday, Aug. 15, to Wednesday, Aug. 13) and generate early heat for its R-rated stoner comedy.

Like many of the movies opening on Wednesdays, "Pineapple Express" is a crowd pleaser likely to spark enthusiastic praise from early ticket buyers. "No one would ever release a movie on a Wednesday if they didn't have a movie that really played," Blake says. "You don't want to risk the weekend if you have a movie that doesn't."

One of the hidden benefits of the Wednesday premiere is specific to risque comedies such as "Pineapple Express" and "Tropic Thunder."

"The hardest genre to market is the R-rated comedy," says Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Moore, "because you can't show the movie's funniest moments on television."

Distributors say Wednesday openings — especially late in the summer, when kids are starting to return to school — actually boost, rather than cannibalize, weekend grosses.

In deciding to release "Hamlet 2" in 100 theaters on Aug. 22 (a Friday) before taking it to 1,700 theaters on Aug. 27 (a Wednesday), Focus looked at the performance of its "Vanity Fair" in 2004 and "The Constant Gardener" in 2005, both of which opened on Wednesdays and did strong business before the weekend.

"Wednesday is not a dead day at any time of the year, frankly, because of what it can do for your film," Foley says. "You get a lot more money on the Wednesday and Thursday of that first week than what you would get on the following Wednesday and Thursday. And I would rather get as much of my money up front then let the movie play out week after week." Similarly, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" maker Warner Bros. looked at the Wednesday premieres of Disney's "The Princess Diaries 2" in August 2004 and "Freaky Friday" in August 2003 and saw that a film appealing to girls could do strong business following a midweek launch; both Disney films grossed more than $95 million domestically.

"It just makes your weekend even stronger," says Jeff Goldstein, Warners' executive vice president of domestic distribution. The first "Pants" film opened on a Wednesday as well, and while it was not a runaway hit, it sold a ton of DVDs.

For nostalgic fans of Hollywood marketing, the Wednesday premiere appears to be killing off a long-standing sales tool: the sneak preview.

In years past, studios would present special screenings of a few movies with broad audience appeal every year, usually a week or two before premieres. But because the sneaked film hadn't yet opened, the revenues for those previews were attributed to whatever film was playing in that auditorium. And now that word of mouth can spread at light speed, their timing has grown obsolete — the Wednesday opening now makes more sense.
http://www.mercurynews.com/movies/ci_10163399





Is Google a Media Company?
Miguel Helft

Type “buttermilk pancakes” into Google, and among the top three or four search results you will find a link to a detailed recipe complete with a photo of a scrumptious stack from a site called Knol, which is owned by Google.

Google envisions Knol as a place where experts can share their knowledge on a variety of topics. It hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals. But while Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages.

While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.

“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Money, of course, is very much at issue. The lower a site ranks in search results, the less traffic it receives from search engines. With a smaller audience, the site earns less money from advertising.

Although Martha Stewart’s buttermilk pancake recipe appears lower than the Knol recipe in Google’s rankings, Ms. Millard does not believe that Google unfairly favors pages from Knol. But she said that Google’s dual role as search engine and content site raises an issue of perception. “The question in people’s minds is how unbiased can Google be as it grows and grows and grows,” Ms. Millard said.

Google has always said it will never compromise the objectivity of its search results. And it says it treats Knol pages like any other pages on the Web. “When you see Knol pages rank high, they are there because they have earned their position,” said Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google.

There is little evidence that Knol has received favorable treatment. Many of the Knol pages that rank high on Google rank similarly high on Yahoo. (The Knol buttermilk pancakes? No. 4 with Yahoo search.)

Google has long insisted that it has no plans to own or create content, and that it is a friend, not a foe, of media companies. The Google search engine sends huge numbers of users to the digital doorsteps of thousands of media companies, many of which also rely on Google to place ads on their sites. “Our vision still remains to be the best conduit that we can be, connecting people between whatever their search is and the answer they are looking for,” Mr. Stricker said. “For that reason, we are not interested in owning or creating content.”

Knol is merely a tool for others to create and publish information, and once they do, Mr. Stricker said, “our job, which is to organize that information, kicks in.” Google does not own copyrights to the Knol content, and the site will not carry the Google logo, he added.

Knol is not Google’s first foray into content hosting. The company has long owned Blogger, one of the most popular blogging services. It is digitizing millions of books, which it makes available through its search service. It owns the archives of Usenet, a popular collection of online discussion forums that predates the Web. Google also carries some news stories from The Associated Press in Google News, and it publishes stock market information through Google Finance. And of course, Google owns YouTube, one of the largest media sites on the Web.

Critics say each new Google initiative in this area casts more doubt on the company’s claims that it is not a media company.

“Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case,” said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that relies on editors to create pages on a variety of subjects. “They are competing for talent, for advertisers and for users” with content sites, he said.

Knol has been called a potential rival to Wikipedia and other sites whose content spans a broad range of topics, including Mahalo and About.com, a property of The New York Times Company that uses experts it calls “guides” to write articles on a variety of topics.

Asked whether Knol posed a threat to About.com, Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times Company, said, “About.com is very well positioned in the marketplace.” Knol could also compete with many Web sites that specialize in single topics, like WebMD in medical information or the smattering of how-to, do-it-yourself or cooking information sites and other instructional sites that are proliferating online.

Some online media companies say they are unconcerned about the prospect of competing with Knol.

“Assuming that Google treats Knol just like it treats other Web sites, it is just another company out there producing content,” said Richard Rosenblatt, the chief executive of Demand Media, a fast-growing online company that owns how-to content sites like eHow and ExpertVillage.

Mr. Rosenblatt, who was the chief executive of Intermix Media, the parent of MySpace when it was sold to the News Corporation, said that if Knol became a popular Web destination, he would consider posting content from Demand Media’s sites on it. The company, like many others in the media business, posts many of its videos on YouTube.

“We have an enormous amount of traffic on YouTube,” Mr. Rosenblatt said. “It hasn’t cannibalized ExpertVillage.”

Other media companies, like WebMD, have already begun posting their content on Knol.

“We participated in Google Knol as a test, as we’ve done with other, similar offerings,” a WebMD spokeswoman, Jennifer Newman, said in an e-mail message. “We are evaluating its effectiveness in further building brand awareness for WebMD.”

Ms. Millard, the Martha Stewart executive, said she had considered posting content on Knol but decided against it. “You are continuing to build their business if you do that, versus building your own.”

Google’s growing reach into the content business could create conflicts similar to those faced by Microsoft in its dual role as a provider of an operating system that others run their software applications on and a maker of applications, Mr. Calacanis said. It is possible that with YouTube, Knol, Blogger and other company sites, Google could take 3 of the top 10 results in some searches, he added. That could alienate Web publishers that are Google’s advertising partners, even if there is no indication that Google artificially favored its sites, he said.

While Google helps drive the success of other content providers, it is clear that the company will not shy away from entering what it considers “high-value” content areas, said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

“If I am a content provider and I depend upon Google as a mechanism to drive traffic to me, should I fear that they may compete with me in the future?” Professor Yoffie asked. “The answer is absolutely, positively yes.”

Google has appeared even-handed with search queries, Professor Yoffie said. But he, too, believes that if Google further expands into content, it will meet some of the conflicts Microsoft faced more than a decade ago.

“A lot of the issues that we saw play out between Microsoft and its ecosystem in the 1990s will play out again between Google and its ecosystem,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/te.../11google.html





Former FCC Chairmen Say Strip Commission Of Indecency Power
FMQB

Three former FCC Chairmen - Newton Minow, Mark Fowler and James Quello - have requested that the Supreme Court strip the FCC of its power to regulate indecency, saying that the Commission is on a "Victorian crusade" that hurts broadcasters, viewers and the Constitution. The trio of former Chairmen argued that the Commission "has radically expanded the definition of indecency beyond its original conception; magnified the penalties for even minor, ephemeral images or objectionable language; and targeted respected television programs, movies and even noncommercial documentaries," according to Broadcasting & Cable.

The trio, joined by other former FCC commissioners and staffers such as Jerald Fritz, Henry Geller and Glen O. Robinson, filed an amicus brief in the FCC's challenge to a lower-court ruling that the Commission's indecency finding against swearing on Fox awards shows was arbitrary and capricious and a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires regulators to sufficiently justify their decisions. The Chairmen agreed that the decision violated the act, but they also said the court's work would not be done if it simply struck down the "fleeting expletives" policy, because the FCC's indecency calls in cases of nudity and non-fleeting profanity are inconsistent. Plus, the brief noted that broadcasting is no longer uniquely pervasive or accessible to children given the Internet and multichannel video.

"It is time for the Court to bring its views of the electronic media into alignment with contemporary technological and social reality," they said, according to B&C. "As former regulators, we appreciate that the FCC is in an uncomfortable position, buffeted by the turbulent passions of anxious parents and threats from excited congressmen. But that is precisely why the matter must be taken out of the agency’s hands entirely."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=831094





iPhone Hacker Says the Device 'Calls Home' to Apple, Allows Apps to be Remotely Disabled
Joshua Topolsky

According to iPhone Atlas and iPhone hacker-extraordinaire Jonathan Zdziarski, Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your device. Apparently, the new 2.x firmware contains a URL which points to a page containing a list of "unauthorized" apps -- a move which suggests that the device makes occasional contact with Apple's servers to see if anything is amiss on your phone. In Jonathan's words:

"This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down.

I discovered this doing a forensic examination of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep inside CoreLocation."


Now honestly, we don't expect the folks in Cupertino to suddenly start turning off apps that you've paid for and downloaded, but if Apple is indeed monitoring iPhones or touches (even passively) for applications it doesn't want or like, it signals a problem deeper than a company simply wanting to sign- off on software for the device. Even on platforms like Symbian -- which calls for apps to be signed and traceable -- the suggestion that a process of the OS would actively monitor, report on, and possibly deactivate your device's software is unreasonable, and clearly presents an issue that the company will have to deal with sooner or later. Oh, and Apple -- we're not going to buy the "for your security" angle, so don't even bother.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/07/i...e-allows-apps/





Federal Judge in DefCon Case Equates Speech with Hacking
Kim Zetter

Lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said a federal judge who granted a temporary restraining order on Saturday to halt a scheduled conference talk about security vulnerabilities came to "a very, very wrong conclusion." They said the judge's order constituted illegal prior restraint, which violated the speakers' First Amendment right to discuss important and legitimate academic research.

"When you discuss security issues, if you are telling the truth, that should be something protected at the core of the First Amendment," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the non-profit EFF, who was at DefCon to participate in an annual ask-the-EFF panel and to launch the organization's Coders Rights Project. "If you are truthfully telling the world about a dangerous situation, and (it is) a situation which is dangerous not because the security researcher exposes the vulnerability (but) because the person who made the product . . . made the vulnerability, (then) this should be core speech."

Opsahl was speaking at a press conference at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas on Saturday after District Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

The MBTA sought to bar three students enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa -- from presenting a talk at DefCon about vulnerabilities in magnetic stripe tickets and RFID cards that are used in the MBTA's payment system. The MBTA feared that the students planned to teach the audience how to fraudulently add credit to a payment ticket or card in order to ride the transit system for free.

Opsahl said the judge, in making his decision, misinterpreted a part of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that refers to computer intruders or hackers. Such a person is described in part in the statute as someone who "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command to a computer or computer system."

Opsahl says the judge, during the hearing, likened the students' conference presentation to transmitting code to a computer.

"The statute on its face appears to be discussing sending code or similar types of information to a computer," Opsahl said. "It does not appear to contemplate somebody who is giving a talk to humans. Nevertheless, the court . . . believed that the act of giving a presentation to a group of humans was covered by the computer fraud, computer intrusion statute. We believe this is wrong."

EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman told reporters that the decision set a very dangerous precedent.

"Basically, what the court is suggesting here is that giving a presentation involving security to other security researchers is a violation of federal law," she said. "As far as I know, this is completely unprecedented, and it has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research. . . . And we intend to fight it with everything we've got."

The students were scheduled to present their talk on Sunday about vulnerabilities in the subway's fare collection system. According to a description of the talk in a printed program given to conference attendees, the students planned to demonstrate how they reverse-engineered the mag stripe on CharlieTickets and cracked the encryption on RFID-enabled CharlieCards that are used in the Boston system. They also planned to release several open source tools that they created in the course of their research.

But the MBTA contended that disclosure of the flaws, before the MBTA had a chance to fix them, would cause irreparable harm to the transit system, particularly if it allowed someone to increase the amount of funds stored on a card or ticket and ride the transit system for free.

The MBTA filed its motion for a restraining order on Friday, August 9th, but Opsahl and Hofmann said that rather than make an immediate decision, District Judge Woodlock ordered a hearing for Saturday morning and allowed the EFF, which represented the students, to participate by telephone from San Francisco and Las Vegas, even though none of the non-profit's lawyers is licensed to practice in Massachusetts.

The court's restraining order bars the students from disclosing any information for ten days that could allow someone to defraud the transit system and ride the subway for free.

EFF lawyers and the students refused to discuss details of the now-cancelled presentation but did provide a timeline of events leading up to the MBTA's suit and also shed light on how the matter unfolded, disputing claims in the MBTA's court filings that the students had refused to give the MBTA information about the vulnerabilities they discovered.

According to MBTA's court filings, the agency first learned about the planned presentation on July 30th from an unnamed vendor, described in the only as "someone responsible for components of the MBTA's fare collection system". The next day the agency contacted MIT computer science professor Ron Rivest, the students' instructor, and told him that the FBI was investigating the issue.

"We didn't find that to be a very pleasing way to start a nice dialogue with them," Anderson said. "We got a little concerned about what was happening."

A few days later on Monday, August 4, a detective with the transit police and an FBI agent met with the MIT students, Rivest, and an MIT lawyer to discuss their concerns and inquire about the nature of the student's talk. The students say when they left that meeting they believed, due to verbal comments made to them during the meeting, that the issue had been resolved, and that the MBTA no longer had a problem with their talk. [Note: A previous story said the parties had met on August 5th, a date listed in MBTA's court filings. The students said that date was a misprint.]

The FBI's Boston office did not respond to a call asking to confirm if there is an ongoing investigation of the students, but Opsahl said as far as he knows, there is no FBI investigation.

Efforts to reach the MBTA for comment were not successful, but according to the MBTA's court filings, the students failed to respond to a request to provide the transit authority with copies of the conference presentation or with details about the vulnerabilities they found in the payment card system, and this was the reason for taking the students to court.

But the students say this isn't true.

They say the MBTA did ask for some material -- not a copy of their conference presentation -- which they provided on Friday at around 4:30 pm, which they say was around the same time the MBTA was heading to the courthouse to request the restraining order.
That material was a confidential vulnerability assessment report (.pdf) describing, in a more substantial way than the conference presentation slides do, the flaws in the MTBA payment system. The report became a public document on Saturday when the MBTA included it among other papers it submitted to the court on Saturday.

The students maintain they didn't understand that the MBTA was specifically expecting a copy of their presentation until Friday, when they learned the MBTA was filing for a restraining order.

"And at that point we declined to provide the slides until we had an opportunity to see what the complaint said," Hofmann said.

Even though the MBTA received the vulnerability assessment report at that point, the students point out, it did not withdraw the lawsuit.

But according to an MBTA systems project manager, who filed a declaration with the court, the MBTA asked specifically for materials from their presentation and concluded after receiving the report that it likely did not constitute the materials that the students were planning to present at DefCon. In an e-mail that Anderson sent with the report he wrote, "Note that we absolutely are not disclosing everything we found in this report."

The students have been criticized by some for not following the generally accepted responsible disclosure guidelines (written by former hacker Rain Forest Puppy) in which a researcher discloses vulnerabilities to a company or agency first, to give that party an opportunity to fix the problems, before disclosing the flaws publicly.

The students say they had intended to contact the MBTA a week prior to July 30th, when the transit authority was still apparently unaware of the presentation. They refused to say what occurred at that time to prompt them to want to make contact with the MBTA, but said their intent was to provide the MBTA with details that they wouldn't be discussing in their public talk. Ultimately, however, they didn't act on the impulse because Rivest, who agreed to facilitate the contact, was out of town at a conference. Shortly thereafter, the MBTA discovered the talk and contacted Rivest.

The students maintain that they never intended to teach audience members how to de-fraud the transit system, despite provocative comments they wrote in the published description of their talk.

A description of their talk that is printed in the conference program schedule begins with the sentence "Want free subway rides for life?" The line was removed from an online version of the description after the MBTA met with the students on August 4th, but the students wouldn't comment about why the change was made.

Opsahl called the provocative language "rhetoric" and said it was always the students' intention to hold back key details from their talk that would help someone attack the MBTA system.

"Please understand that, rhetoric aside, the intention was to provide an interesting and useful talk, but not one that would enable people to defraud the Massachusetts Bay Transit System," he said.

As it stands now, the next step, before the temporary restraining order expires, will be to determine whether or not it should become a preliminary injunction to extend the gag for longer, Opsahl said.

Hofmann said it's unclear right now whether the EFF will continue to represent the students if further litigation is pursued, given that they have no one on staff who can practice in Massachusetts. They will have to evaluate the situation when and if it comes up.

As for the students' 1 pm speakers' slot on Sunday, DefCon has apparently already found a replacement. Brenno de Winter, a Dutch journalist and security consultant, told reporters on Saturday that he has offered to fill in -- essentially to give the same or a similar talk about vulnerabilities with transit fare cards, thought without the focus on the Boston transit system.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-appeal-r.html





Judge Refuses to Lift Gag Order on MIT Students in Boston Subway-Hack Case

Restraining order remains in place until Aug. 19; judge requests more info from students
Jaikumar Vijayan

A federal judge in Boston today refused to lift a temporary restraining order preventing three MIT students from publicly discussing details of several security vulnerabilities that they found in the electronic ticketing system used by the city's mass transit authority.

The decision means that the gag order imposed on the students last Saturday will remain unchanged at least until Aug. 19, when U.S. District Judge George O'Toole is scheduled to hold another hearing in the case. The restraining order, which was issued in response to a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), will expire that same day unless it's extended or turned into a permanent injunction.

At today's hearing, O'Toole also asked the MIT students to submit a copy of a class paper in which they detailed the vulnerabilities that they had found, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a high-tech civil rights group that is representing the students in the case. The MBTA requested a copy of the paper in a motion that it filed, the EFF said.

In addition, O'Toole asked the three undergrads — Zack Anderson, Russell "RJ" Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — to provide copies of programming code that they included in a planned presentation to show how the MBTA's e-ticketing system could be hacked.

The San Francisco-based EFF had filed a motion in court this week asking O'Toole to lift the restraining order. A spokeswoman for the group expressed disappointment at the judge's refusal to do so and said that the EFF will now go ahead with a planned appeal of the decision to issue the gag order in the U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit.

The restraining order was handed down by another judge one day before Anderson, Ryan and Chiesa were scheduled to detail the MBTA's vulnerabilities at the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas. In its motion requesting the restraining order, the MBTA claimed that it was forced to seek the court's intervention because neither MIT nor the students had given the transit agency enough information to assess the vulnerabilities that were about to be publicly disclosed.

The MBTA said that its intention wasn't to permanently gag the students but to give itself some time to determine the validity and seriousness of the issues being raised by the students and to develop a course of action for addressing them.

In a statement sent via e-mail today, the MBTA said it was pleased that a second federal judge had upheld the restraining order, but "disappointed at the defendants' continued resistance to provide the information" requested by the agency. The MBTA added that it remains hopeful that all of the defendants will be "cooperative" as the case continues.

Although the students had to cancel their talk, the slides that they put together for the presentation were included on a CD given to Defcon attendees and thus have become publicly available.

The EFF has called the restraining order a violation of the students' First Amendment rights as well as a prior restraint on free speech. Along with the filing that requested the lifting of the order, the EFF submitted a letter in support of the students signed by 11 computer science professors and security researchers.

David Farber, a professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, was one of the people who signed the letter. He said today that the decision to issue the restraining order was a "bad, bad idea."

Based on the available information, the students appear to have notified MBTA officials about their research and even provided them with confidential information relating to the vulnerabilities, Farber said. The students also appear to have assured the MBTA in advance that their presentation wouldn't provide the level of detail needed for someone to actually exploit the vulnerabilities, he said. For the MBTA to then ask a court to gag the students was totally out of line, according to Farber.

What makes its actions even more egregious, he claimed, is the fact that the paper the students were scheduled to present had been vetted by MIT professor Ron Rivest, who Farber described as one of more respected figures in the security community.

It could be argued that the students could have worked with the MBTA to fix the issues before publicly disclosing them, Farber acknowledged. But it is unconstitutional to prevent them from speaking about their discoveries just because the MBTA felt that it wasn't given adequate notice, he contended. "In practice," Farber said, "a good middle ground is to keep the courts out of it."

But Gartner Inc. analyst John Pescatore said the MBTA wasn't given a reasonable amount of time to fix the problems or develop work-arounds for them before the aborted presentation at Defcon.

The intent of disclosing flaws should be to make software and systems more secure, "not to make headlines or sell tickets to security conferences," Pescatore said. In this case, he added, "the students went for publicity."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software
John Markoff

A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.

In a ruling Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.

The decision legitimizes the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.

It also has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.

That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.

The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.

“From a practical business perspective when big companies and their legal teams look at Creative Commons there are a number of questions,” he said. “It’s been one of the things their legal teams throw at us.”

The appeals court decision reverses a San Francisco federal court ruling over the misappropriation of a software program by a company that publishes model train hobbyist software.

The free software, or open source, community has quarreled for several years with Matthew A. Katzer, a Portland, Ore., businessman who owns Kam Industries. Previously, Mr. Katzer has sued free software developers for patent infringement and the free software community has argued that he had failed to disclose earlier technology, known as prior art, in his patent filings.

A lawyer for Mr. Katzer did not return calls asking for comment.

In March 2006, Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial software program that had taken software code from the Java Model Railroad Interface project and was redistributing the program without the credits required as part of the open-source license it was distributed under.

The decision to appeal the lower court ruling, which said that the terms of the open-source contract were overly broad, was intensely debated within the free software movement. Some open-source advocates had worried that a loss before the appeals court would have been a disaster for the community, which has grown as an economic force during the last quarter century.

“I was terrified that we would lose,” Mr. Jacobsen said. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”

There has long been a link between model train hobbyists and the free software movement. During the 1950s, for example, hobbyists who worked on the wiring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club project were informally known as “hackers,” according to “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy. The term evolved to include people who developed and programmed computers and who passionately believed that software codes should be freely shared.

Mr. Jacobsen said he believed that the court’s ruling was significant for the free software movement because it had thrived not on monetary gain but on individual credit for contributions.

“We don’t charge for this and so all we really get is credit,” he said, adding that anyone is free to use and modify the programming instructions created by his group as long as they retain the credit and distribute them with the programmer’s instructions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/te...14commons.html





Court Dismisses L'Oreal Claims Against eBay

A Belgian court on Tuesday dismissed all of the claims of cosmetics maker L'Oreal brought against eBay over the sale of fake fragrances and cosmetic products on online auction sites, eBay said in a statement.

L'Oreal started legal action in France, Belgium, Germany, Britain and Spain in September 2007, alleging the online auctioneer did not do enough to combat the sale of counterfeits.

None of the other courts have ruled on the case yet.

The Belgian court ruled that eBay was not obliged to take action to fight counterfeiting, but eBay spokeswoman Sravanthi Agrawal stressed that the company cooperated with rights owners to tackle the sale of fake goods. She added that the company clamped down on all cases of counterfeiting notified to it by the firms concerned, even though it did not have a legal obligation to do so.

L'Oreal said in a statement it would appeal against the decision.

(Reporting by Antonia van de Velde, Editing by Jan Strupczewski, Will Waterman, Richard Chang)
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200808...y-566e283.html





Tiffany Appeals eBay Counterfeiting Decision
Rachel Metz

Tiffany & Co. challenged Monday a federal ruling that largely absolved eBay Inc. of policing its auction site for counterfeit items, saying the judge was wrong to leave the primary burden to the jewelry maker.

Monday's appeal with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York extends a case that Tiffany filed against eBay in 2004 arguing that most items listed for sale on eBay as genuine Tiffany products were fakes.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Sullivan in New York ruled that trademark holders like the jewelry maker, rather than auction platforms like eBay, are responsible for policing their brands online.

In an interview, Tiffany lawyer James Swire said Monday that the judge "got several important legal issues wrong." Swire contends, for instance, that trademark law doesn't put the responsibility on Tiffany for policing its own trademark.

"The judge's entire analysis of what is Tiffany's responsibility with respect to the site versus eBay's starts from an incorrect basis," he said.

Tiffany also believes that eBay should not need that much specific information about the sale of fakes on its sites and merchants who are selling fakes in order to take action against it, Swire said.

In his ruling, Sullivan said eBay can't be held liable for trademark infringement "based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their Web sites."

EBay has removed listings when Tiffany notified it of suspected counterfeit goods, but it has refused to go further and preemptively take down suspicious listings before any such notification. Sullivan said eBay had no obligation to do so.

EBay has said it spends tens of millions each year to combat counterfeiting. It suspends and blocks users who have been found selling or are suspected of selling fake goods on the site.

It also runs a program that lets companies review listings and inform eBay of those they believe are for fake goods; eBay removes ones that participants flag. Tiffany has participated in this program.

EBay does not hold inventory and directly sell items but merely serves as a conduit for others to sell goods. Swire said the distinction should not make a difference.

"The fact of the matter is eBay has created the venue, eBay is profiting from the venue, eBay absolutely controls the venue," Swire said. "It's eBay's obligation, once it has knowledge ... to take the knowledge to investigate and stop the sale of counterfeit merchandise."

In a statement, eBay spokeswoman Catherine England said "Tiffany's decision to carry this litigation on after the District Court's decision doesn't do anything to combat counterfeiting."

The July decision was a welcome one for eBay, which had recently lost a different case stemming from counterfeit luxury goods. In June, a French court ordered eBay to pay more than $61 million to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, which complained it was hurt by sale of knockoff bags, perfume and clothes. EBay is appealing that ruling.
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419...gal-downloads/





U.S. Fails to Prosecute Internet Fraud Cases

While Web users drown in spam and fend off scams aimed at stealing their money, U.S. federal and state law enforcement authorities are doing little to resolve what has become a multi-billion-dollar problem, a think tank said on Monday.

In the 20 states that give a number for consumer complaints, there were roughly 20,000 Internet-related complaints in 2007, said the group, which surveyed officials in all 50 states but received widely varying amounts of data.

Eight states put Internet-related complaints among their top-three consumer headaches in 2007 while 24 states had some form of online fraud in their top 10 complaints, according to the Center for American Progress (CAP), which worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology.

And the complaints are not unfounded; spyware, viruses and phishing cost consumers $7.1 billion in 2007, up from $2 billion the previous year, the report said.

Phishing is using e-mail to try to fraudulently get information like passwords or credit card numbers. Spyware is software installed on a computer without the owner's consent. It can be used to monitor computer use, or take over the computer.

Paula Selis, senior counsel for the office of Washington state's attorney general, warned that crime associated with the Internet could damage online commerce. "There must be a recognition that online fraud is a huge threat," she told reporters.

Despite the large number of complaints, the group found few prosecutions of online fraud.

"It's clear ... that state attorneys general are not doing a whole lot about Internet consumer protection," Reece Rushing, CAP's director of regulatory and information policy, said at a news conference. "They haven't made it a priority. In the states that have made it a priority they've been able to win settlements."

The National Association of Attorneys General's bimonthly Cybercrime Newsletter for 2006 and 2007 mentioned just 55 prosecutions of Internet fraud, 26 related to online sales or services, 15 related to data security or identity theft and 14 involving spyware, spam or phishing.

In 2007, Washington state sued Consumer Digital Services, accusing it of promising free goods in exchange for personal information. As a result, more than 13,000 Washington state consumers were charged $14.95 on their phone bills for Internet services they did not want. Under the settlement, the money is to be refunded and the company to pay penalties and fees that could total $1 million, the report said.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Braden Reddall)
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200808...d-d1a0d5d.html





The Lessons From the Kindle’s Success
Saul Hansell

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Amazon hasn’t confirmed these numbers, but the e-commerce giant has said that of the 150,000 titles it now sells for the Kindle as well as in paper, more than 10 percent of the sales are in Kindle format.
Anecdotally, I know several people who are absolutely gaga for the Kindle. They happen to be exactly the sort of people for whom Amazon said it had designed the device: heavy readers who want an easy way to carry several books around with them. These Kindle fans are also delighted by how easy it is to shop for and download books onto the device using Amazon’s wireless store.

I think there are a few lessons from this. First you can’t underestimate the miracle that happens when you make something really easy for people. Easy means fast, better than the old way and with very few annoying disappointments and delays. The Kindle device is a better way to carry lots of books (at least for some). Shopping is easy, with very few steps. And Amazon’s relationship with publishers has created a very broad library of Kindle books. Sure, there are lots of books you can’t buy for it, but the disappointment factor is low.

The second lesson is, to quote a cliché, it takes all kinds. Steve Jobs dismissed the e-book market because “people don’t read anymore.” That may be true broadly, but there could well be a $1 billion business for Amazon serving the tiny share of people who read a lot.

It will be interesting to see what lessons Amazon takes from this. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, can be proud that he identified an audience and created an innovative product that served it. But will he feel victim to the temptation to believe that the Kindle is the only right answer and refuse to offer e-books for other devices?

I think that when it comes to the size and shape of devices, we are moving into an era where there will be many more choices that will increasingly be based on personal taste. People choose writing pads of all sorts, from big yellow legal pads to those little bound notebooks with graph paper. In the same way, we are going to have very personal choices about what sort of connected computer we want to use for communicating, reading, working and so on.

For some, the Kindle may be the ideal shape for reading books. The E-Ink screen has great battery life and can be read outside.

For others — me, for example — software to read Kindle books on an iPhone would be great. (I’ve become quite fond of reading news on my iPhone. The screen is the width of a column of type, I can hold it in one hand, and I like moving through a page by scrolling the touch screen with my thumb. The battery life, however, is worse than awful.)

Others may want to read books on laptops, BlackBerries, Chumbys and who knows what else. It would be a mistake to assume everyone wants to read the same way.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ess/index.html





In Search of Western Civilisation's Lost Classics
Luke Slattery

The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets

STORED in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world's other great book collections -- at Athens, Alexandria and Rome -- all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction.

Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples.

The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus -- a core of wood or bone to which the roll was attached -- did the true nature of the find become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat surge of the eruption. About 1800 were eventually retrieved.

A cluster of the villa's papyrus scrolls, in much the same state as they were found 250 years ago, lies in a display case in the Biblioteca Nazionale's Herculaneum reading room. The individual scrolls, which extend in some cases to 9m unrolled, look not unlike charcoaled arboreal limbs left at the bottom of a campfire. A group of six rolls, compacted by the weight of volcanic debris, has emulsified into one unsightly pile.

In a corner of the room stands a device invented in 1756 by the abbot Antonio Piaggio, a conservator of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, to unroll the papyri by suspending them from silk threads attached to their surface with a paste of fish oil. These were fixed in place by a slice of pig's bladder. Piaggio's machine, though painstakingly slow, was used successfully until the beginning of the 20th century. The room also contains a 3m length of scroll unrolled by Piaggio's machine, with 40 columns of Greek text in a rhythmic procession.

Scholars today, using multi-spectral imaging technology, are able to decipher the otherwise inscrutable surface of black ink on black fabric of the papyrus scrolls. A multinational team has assembled to transcribe the collection. But work has stalled as they await refinement of a new technique, an application of the CT scan, which will allow some of the untouched texts to be deciphered without exposing them to the risk of further damage.

When I ask to view a papyrus fragment from the vaults, a librarian pauses to absorb the request, returning my gaze a little blankly. Just as I begin to frame a withdrawal of this possibly audacious demand, she blinks, smiles amiably, and disappears down one of the library's vast corridors. She returns carrying a gun-metal tray on which a sheet of papyrus, older than many a classical fluted column and as brittle as a desiccated insect wing, has been laid out with reverential delicacy. The glitter of ink is clearly visible under the lights. But the material itself has been scorched in antiquity, then torn and tattered in an effort to prise it open.

I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental art that speaks of our relationship to the past more precisely than any intact work; it is the art of the fragment, an art that yields to us, but never surrenders.

The Villa of the Papyri is believed to have been owned by Roman statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. He was a man of wealth and refined taste. Like many members of the Roman elite of the time, Piso looked back fondly to the glories of ancient Greece. His library, written mostly in Greek, was dominated by works of the Epicurean school, which sought a salve for the troubled soul in the taming of runaway desire.

Epicurus, the creed's founder, was a fourth century BC atomist philosopher with an atheistic bent and a medicinal aim. He wanted to remedy human pain in this life rather than prepare sufferers for the next. "Nothing to fear in God," he wrote, displaying a talent for pithy distillation. "Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured."

Shortly before 300BC Epicurus withdrew his followers to a commune outside Athens, known to all as The Garden. Friendship and frugality were its guiding principles. In fact, Epicurus would regard the modern use of the adjective epicurean as a travesty of his ideals. "Plain fare gives us as much pleasure as a costly diet," he said. True pleasure for Epicurus was a "pot of cheese", though he was thought to enjoy a tipple from a wineskin.

Ancient gossip links him with a fellow communard called Mammarion (big breasts), which only shows that the sage was human.

Epicureanism takes up a radical position in the Hellenistic world, standing apart from the philosophical mainstream. When Paul addresses the Athenians, in Acts 17 of the Bible, he speaks of Epicureans and Stoics in the same breath. Christianity, naturally, set itself firmly against Epicurean materialism and its implicit atheism. But the Stoics were equally stern disputants. Epicureans, as a result, found themselves traduced by their fellow pagans and damned by the early church. The Garden, nevertheless, flourished for some eight centuries.

"Epicurus's philosophy exercised so widespread an influence that for a long time it was touch and go whether Christianity might not have to give way before it," writes Lawrence Durrell in a tone of lament.

One consequence of Christian hostility, a kind of passive resistance, is a broken tradition. Epicureanism was ignored by the monastic scribes who transferred the works of approved authors from the school of Athens, particularly Aristotle and Plato, from papyrus to parchment and vellum. Only a few letters, sayings and principles survive from the 300 scrolls attributed to Epicurus in antiquity.

A few fragments from Epicurus's lost work, On Nature, inspiration for the Roman poet Lucretius's magisterial poem, On the Nature of Things, have been unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri. But the Herculaneum scrolls are mainly the works of an Epicurean sage named Philodemus, previously known as the author of some rather racy light verse.

These finds are contributing to a revival of scholarly interest in Epicureanism, Europe's first green philosophy, at a time when the West urgently seeks advice on living with less. Epicurean counsel sounds at times like contemporary wisdom; it provides the philosophical language for an eco-friendly art of life. A few lines from Lucretius, penned at the apogee of paganism, are equally applicable in the age of the plasma screen:

But while we can't get what we want, that seems
Of all things most desirable. Once got,
We must have something else.


But there is an exquisite edge to the discovery of this Epicurean library in Herculaneum, and it is honed not so much by the knowledge of what has been found as the fear of what might be lost. An alliance of mainly British and American scholars, convinced that more texts remain to be found at the Villa of the Papyri, are calling for its urgent excavation. They cite the threat posed to the villa, which has never been completely liberated from its prison of rock, by a further eruption of Vesuvius. The volcano's bellows were heard as recently as 1998.

Richard Janko, head of classical studies at the University of Michigan, believes the Villa of the Papyri promises to yield the greatest number of new texts since the discoveries in the 16th century that nourished the High Renaissance and fashioned Western secular humanism. "This is the only place in the world where we know for certain that a Greco-Roman library was entombed in a manner that ensured its preservation," Janko says.

"There are almost certainly more books to be found there."

He points out that many of the scrolls were discovered in carrying containers arrayed in a line, as if being evacuated towards the sea.

Robert Fowler, professor of Greek and dean of arts at Bristol University, hopes that a study recently published by the local archeological superintendent's office on the future conservation of the Herculaneum site, ancient and modern, might show the way forward.

"The villa remains one of the great buildings of the ancient world and it should certainly be excavated," Fowler says. "This would be true even if we were to find no further papyri, though the likelihood that we will find them adds much to the case. The building will certainly contain many other things, and is of unique historical interest. If we know of a site that should be excavated, and we have the capacity, let us get on with it. Of all the sites in the world, this one ranks close to the top of the list for potential and historical importance."

If a significant number of lost classics are found at the Villa of the Papyri it would enlarge the cultural and intellectual tradition, and might even alter its course. Should scholars find the famous lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, the narrative spring of Umberto Eco's best-selling medieval mystery, The Name of the Rose, the discovery might shift the ground of Western aesthetics. Of Sophocles' 120 plays, only seven are known, and of these the Oedipus trilogy has embossed itself eternally on the Western imagination. The Kypria, a martial epic believed to have been Homer's source material, disappeared some time in antiquity.

All gone. Or perhaps only lost from view.

Locking horns with scholars campaigning for a complete excavation at the Villa of the Papyri is the Italian Government. Local archeological authorities are mindful of the fact that while 50m of the villa has been brought to light, a further 250m of this extraordinary palatial structure lie beneath a mass of petrified lava-mud. Above it, literally, sits the modern town of Ercolano. The villa's thorough excavation requires the exercise of benign political judgment and sophisticated urban planning, qualities in rather short supply on the Gulf of Naples.

Roman Herculaneum, named after the musclebound demigod Hercules, lay at the foot of Vesuvius on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was last seen intact on the afternoon that the volcano, which had been dormant longer than living memory, roared into life. A heat blast of about 350C killed those of the city's inhabitants who had not managed to flee: the unflinching postures of skeletons found at the beach suggest they died instantaneously, microwaved in a millisecond.

Next, from the shattered cone of Vesuvius oozed a slow-moving river of liquid fire that swallowed the town whole. The eruption lasted 18 hours.

In the silent days that followed, the lava-mud cooled into a cement skin beneath which the Villa of the Papyri, a gorgeous three-storey beachfront mansion with unimpeded sea views, slept undisturbed for 17 centuries. Pompeii, lying to the south, received a much lighter covering of volcanic matter, which is one reason excavators shifted their attention there soon after the Villa of the Payri was discovered: it was an easier get.

The dead cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii were disinterred in stages from 1710, when a French aristocrat found a marble floor aglow at the bottom of a well at Herculaneum. His shafts yielded a set of beautiful statues garbed in the finest drapery, which he promptly purloined. Four decades later the Villa of the Papyri was discovered by Swiss engineer Karl Weber, who was excavating under the patronage of the Bourbon monarchy. Weber's architectural map of the subterranean villa, drafted from the evidence of his elaborate tunnel system, has proved to be accurate within a few centimetres.

So precise were his measurements that when American billionaire J.P. Getty decided to build a mansion in California evoking the villa's memory, his architects were able to consult Weber's plans with confidence. What emerged is a structure that recreates the Villa of the Papyri at an almost neurotic level of structural precision. Recently renovated, it now serves as the Getty Antiquities Museum.

Despite its glittering reputation as one of the famed monuments of the ancient world, the villa today is an aesthetic disaster: more open-cut mine than excavation.

With a grave and ceremonial air, Giuseppe Zolfo, Herculaneum's director of conservation and restoration, unlocks a metal gate protecting the site. Tourist visits are severely restricted and for the past six months access of any kind has been banned. On one side rises a solid wall of volcanic tuff; on the other, some 20m below today's ground level, stands a small excavated section of the buried villa.

Things improve with a tighter focus. As Zolfo leads the way towards an uncovered atrium whose floors are decorated in plain black-and-white tessellated tiles, we reach a plinth on which a team of archeologists busy themselves with odds and ends.

The walls in this southwest section of the villa were mostly shorn away by the eruption. But a small vaulted chamber, or cryptoporticus, has been excavated recently. After hooking up a battery of lights, Zolfo throws a switch to illuminate frescoed walls unseen for the past two millennia: dancing in the artificial light are images of cupids and a miniature maritime landscape. Painted in Pompeian red, yellow and cobalt blue, these are of a freshness rarely seen in the dead cities themselves.

The sight of this modest, yet exciting advance into the villa's buried remains invites the obvious question: What next?

"We cannot keep going down," Zolfo says, kicking at the floor of compacted mud. "We have a big problem with the water. If we excavate here, after one month we have a metre of water."

He adds that the western end of Herculaneum, which lies 4m below the water table, is kept dry only by an extensive system of pumps.

I ask one of the site archeologists, who has followed us into the villa's newly excavated room, if he thinks more scrolls remain to be found. He lifts his shoulders, turns out his palms, and offers a crooked pout. I take this dumb show to mean "Maybe. Maybe not."

Before leaving the site I step inside one of Weber's 18th-century tunnels, venturing several metres, and many centuries, into the past. I have seen scholars of the papyri wince at the thought of Weber's men setting the carbonised scrolls alight. But such is the obdurate darkness of this gallery, which would have been some 20m below ground level in the 1750s, that they can hardly beblamed.

When I meet the archeological superintendent of the region, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, at his office in Pompeii, the curtains are partly drawn across a hard, bright Neapolitan sky. The author of several books on the region's antiquities, Guzzo is a genial man with a professorial air who speaks in heavily accented English.

"So you have seen the villa," he says, lighting a pipe, a lifted brow accenting his playful tone. "They make this cavity, this cave. It is not soclear, and they bring into view only a small part. And when they finish we have to manage the cave."

The chief impediment to further excavation, Guzzo adds, is not so much financial as political. "Our task is to preserve what is found but it is very difficult to project an entire excavation. Digging at the villa, that's a huge undertaking. We would have to change streets, demolish houses and change the lives of thousands of people in Ercolano and Portici. It is a problem for the mayors. It is a political decision in the true sense of the word."

Guzzo points out that barely half of the scrolls found at the villa have been read by scholars, and questions the motivation of those pushing for an excavation in search of antiquity's lost works. "For me they must open and read all the papyri they have had for centuries, before we look for others," he says. "If I want to eat a meal at my home I don't go to the supermarket if I have a full fridge."

He concedes, on the other hand, the strong possibility that more remains to be found in "parts of the villa where the ancient diggers don't go". And this seems to add weight to the claim by scholars such as Fowler and Janko that another wing of the library, perhaps a separate Latin collection, awaits discovery.

Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 as Allied soldiers were thrusting up the Sorrentine coast against the retreating Reich. It remains a restive, brooding presence. Scholars with a passionate concern for the Villa of the Papyri hear the ticking of the volcano's geological clock.

Guzzo, however, regards the threat with a combination of Neapolitan fatalism and incorrigible pragmatism. "Earthquakes are possible," he says. "But they are not. What can we do about nature?

"Today I think the method of archeology is not to find treasures," he concludes. "It's to solve historical problems."

Janko, not surprisingly, bridles at the likening of his scholarly impulse to the exploits of a tomb raider. "It is amazing to claim that it is treasure hunting when one asks to have the papyri excavated before Vesuvius buries them definitively," he says. "If lava flows over the site again, I doubt we will ever have access to them.

"As for the publication of all the papyri being demanded before more are excavated, might one ask that the whole of Pompeii and Herculaneum be properly published before anything more there is unearthed? It seems to me to be arrogance to deny future generations the opportunity to read more such books, just because there are at present very few classical scholars with the competence and the energy to decipher and bring out those that we do have."

Fowler stresses an obvious point that may have been overlooked: that conservation, restoration and excavation are not necessarily inconflict.

"There are, of course, serious issues about conservation and the interface with the modern city, which are not to be dismissed lightly," he says. "They are solvable. There is huge potential also for an excavation to contribute to the local economy and urban regeneration, if agreement could be reached on options."

But the path ahead, if Guzzo's account is taken at face value, lies through a thicket of southern Italian politics in which the Neapolitan mafia, or camorra, is deeply entwined.

A less cheering scenario, from the point of view of those fearing the permanent loss of Western culture's missing classics, can scarcely be imagined.

Meanwhile, scholars are confident that new technologies will allow them to make inroads into the trove of scrolls recovered from the Villa of the Papyri, most of which are stored at the Biblioteca Nazionale. As knowledge of Epicureanism deepens, a neglected and misunderstood creed is enjoying a revival.

"Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated," said the philosopher of the Garden. "For just as there is no use for a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of the body, so there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the sickness of the soul."

That sickness, in Epicurean terms, is rampant desire. If the Villa of the Papyri were to contribute nothing more to the 21st century than the taming of consumption, it might help save the planet as well as the soul.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-25132,00.html





New Magazine-Sharing Site Escapes Copyright Laws Abroad
Stephanie Condon

With its tagline, "upload. share. archive.", it may have been inevitable that the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com would face allegations of copyright infringement.

Mygazines, which announced its launch in late July, allows users to upload and share magazines. Digital copies of the magazines on the site are easy to read, and users can comment on them, leave ratings, and use articles to create their own "custom" magazines.

The site is free to join, and there are no advertisements, but that hasn't allayed concerns of magazine publishers.

Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Warner's Time division, told the AP that the publisher is looking into ways to have the site shut down.

Usually, a company encouraging its users to share copyrighted material could be held accountable for infringement. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the file-sharing site Grokster could be held liable for the copyright violations of its users, since the site took "affirmative steps to foster infringement."

There is a hitch in the case against Mygazines, however. Mygazines is registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla and hosted in Sweden, by the notorious PRQ. The Stockholm-based PRQ is owned by the founders of BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay and is known for hosting other dubious sites.

With its domain name registered abroad and its servers beyond U.S. borders as well, Mygazines seems to have slipped around the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law. Even though publishers could pursue legal action against the site for material available in the U.S., there'd be no way to get representatives for the company to court or to collect damages.

So if Time and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16,000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database.

Or, it could look across the Atlantic. It's not an impossible task: in February 2008, a Swedish prosecutor charged four men connected to Pirate Bay with conspiracy to violate copyright law; a week later, a Danish ISP was ordered to block Pirate Bay.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10...l?tag=nefd.top





I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop.
Alex Williams

REMOVING her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn, a police emergency dispatcher in Rochester. But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, the popular digital-image editing program.

Like a Stalin-era technician in the Kremlin removing all traces of an out-of-favor official from state photos, the friend erased the husband from numerous cherished pictures taken on cruises and at Caribbean cottages, where he had been standing alongside Ms. Horn, now 50, and other traveling companions.

“In my own reality, I know that these things did happen,” Ms. Horn said. But “without him in them, I can display them. I can look at those pictures and think of the laughter we were sharing, the places we went to.”

“This new reality,” she added, “is a lot more pleasant.”

As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

As people fiddle with the photos in their scrapbooks, the tug of emotion and vanity can win out over the objective truth. And in some cases, it can even alter memories — Cousin Andy was at the wedding, right?

In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was.

“It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that,” said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole.

“What we’re doing,” Mr. Johnson said, “is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking.”

And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriend’s family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo.

Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but “this faked photograph actually created the assumption — people kind of remember him as there.”

THE impulse to record family history that is more wishful than accurate is as old as photography itself. In the 19th century, people routinely posed with personal items, like purses or scarves, that belonged to absent or dead relatives to include them, emotionally, in the frame, said Mary Warner Marien, an art history professor at Syracuse University and the author of “Photography: A Cultural History.”

In India, she said, it is a tradition to cut-and-paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs as a gesture of respect and inclusion. “Everyone understands that it’s not a trick,” she said. “That’s the nature of the photograph. It’s a Western sense of reality that what is in front of the lens has to be true.”

As recently as early in this decade, most people still recorded their family history primarily in film, photography experts said, meaning modifications were limited. Even among digital devotees, only professionals or ambitious amateurs typically would buy computer programs like Adobe Photoshop.

But now, with the professional-grade Photoshop CS3’s consumer-priced sibling, Photoshop Elements, often selling for under $100, its popularity is on the rise. Sales for the program have grown about 20 percent over the last year, said Kevin Connor, an Adobe vice president.

Similar software like GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program ) is free on the Internet. Photo kiosks in supermarkets, as well as popular photo programs like iPhoto and Picasa, can also manipulate photographs. In addition, professional retouching services, which can dramatically alter photographs, are burgeoning, often advertising on the Internet. And professional photographers will also alter reality to suit a client’s tastes.

After her father died several years ago, Theresa Newman Rolley, an accountant in Williamsport, Pa., hired Wayne Palmer, a photographic retoucher, to create a composite portrait of the two of them because she had no actual one of them together.

That photograph — of a moment that never happened — now hangs in her living room. It still brings tears to her eyes, she said.

“It’s the only picture of my dad and me together,” Ms. Rolley said, adding, “If the only reason I can get one is cropping it in, it still means the same to me.”

Such manipulations represent “a new coping mechanism for us,” said Heather Downs, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied the role photographs play in families. Idealized images , she said, can give people “a new script for dealing with problems families have always had: family members who don’t get along, divorce.”

“If you can’t have the perfect family,” she added, “at least you can Photoshop it.”

Ellen Robinson, a volunteer college trustee in Denver, commissioned Sara Frances, a local photographer, to shoot a formal family portrait to hang prominently in their new house. Working for $150 an hour, Ms. Frances changed expressions of family members and swapped the dog’s head between images. She slenderized bodies, adjusted skin tones and changed the color of several outfits to make for a more unified palette. She even straightened the collar on one son’s shirt.

“You’re spending a lot of money on these portraits,” Ms. Robinson said. “They’re supposed to last a lifetime — generations, really. So why not get a helping hand to do it right?”

Photography has always represented, to some degree, a distortion of reality, said Per Gylfe, the manager of the digital media lab at the International Center of Photography in New York. A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

“We’ve always taken photographs as proofs of events, and we probably never should have,” Mr. Gylfe said.

The motivation to craft an idealized image of oneself or one’s family is even greater in an era when the family photo album is migrating from the closet to the Internet. In addition, people are growing more accepting of fakery in photography, in part because doctored photographs — and commentary about them — are so pervasive online.

An incident last month in which the Iranian government apparently manipulated an image of a missile test to show off the size of its arsenal became blog fodder around the world.

Exposing photo fakery has become an entertainment genre of its own on the blog Photoshop Disasters, which catalogs the more obvious examples taken from magazines, newspapers, advertisements and other media.

“The entire media climate is filled with manipulation,” said Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University. Therefore, he added, “on the level of family and friends, there’s much less resistance to altering images.”

INDEED, in a world where so many images of the beautiful and famous are enhanced, ordinary people sometimes believe they need to prettify pictures of themselves just to keep pace. Keze Stroebel-Haft, 23, a retoucher for an advertising agency in San Francisco, said she uses Photoshop to remove blemishes or double chins from photos of herself she posts on MySpace and Facebook.

“It’s everywhere,” she said. “On the covers of magazines, all the beautiful women are Photoshopped, their skin is cleaned up. Everybody does it.”

But even as evolving technology gives people more power to reconstruct their personal histories, those old, unretouched photographs in their family album retain a powerful psychological value.

Alan D. Entin, a clinical psychologist in Richmond, Va., uses patients’ family photographs as raw material to inspire discussion and analysis of their roles and relationships within their family.

“They’re a record,” he said. “They have existed over time and space. They are important documents.”

To alter them is to invite self-deception, he said. “The value to accepting a photograph of yourself as you are is that you’re accepting the reality of who you are, and how you look, and accepting yourself that way, warts and all. I think the pictures you hate say as much about you as pictures you love.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/fashion/17photo.html





Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring
Brad Stone

As an international ring of thieves plundered the credit card numbers of millions of Americans, investigators struggled to figure out who was orchestrating the crimes in the United States.

When prosecutors unveiled indictments last week, they made a stunning admission: the culprit was, they said, their very own informant.

Albert Gonzalez, 27, appeared to be a reformed hacker. To avoid prison time after being arrested in 2003, he had been helping federal agents identify his former cohorts in the online underworld where credit and debit card numbers are stolen, bought and sold.

But on the sly, federal officials now say, Mr. Gonzalez was connecting with those same cohorts and continuing to ply his trade, using online pseudonyms — including “soupnazi” — that would be his undoing. As they tell it, Mr. Gonzalez had a central role in a loosely organized online crime syndicate that obtained tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from nine of the biggest retailers in the United States.

The indictments last week of 11 people involved in the group give a remarkably comprehensive picture of how the Internet is enabling new kinds of financial crimes on a vast international scale.

In interviews over the last few days, investigators detailed how they had tracked Mr. Gonzalez and other members of a ring that extended from Ukraine, where a key figure bought and sold stolen numbers over the Internet, to Estonia, where a hacker infiltrated the servers of a Dallas-based restaurant chain.

The criminals stored much of their data on computer servers in Latvia and Ukraine, and purchased blank debit and credit cards from confederates in China, which they imprinted with some of the stolen numbers for use in cash machines, investigators say.

“This was the largest hacking and theft of credit and debit card information ever successfully investigated and prosecuted within the United States,” said Craig Magaw, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s criminal investigative division. “This case shows that there are no more boundaries.”

Mr. Gonzalez’s Miami lawyer, Rene Palomino Jr., disputes the charges and says his client is merely a “kid” who lived with church- going parents before starting work as a government informant. Mr. Palomino said the indictment “represents serious and substantial legal and factual challenges for the government to prove at trial.”

The story begins five years ago in Miami, along the stretch of Route 1 called the South Dixie Highway. Starting in 2003, national retailers with outlets there, including BJ’s Wholesale Club, the Sports Authority, OfficeMax, DSW and Barnes & Noble, began falling victim to “war-drivers” — drive-by hackers who searched for holes in the security of wireless networks.

According to last week’s indictments, those hackers were Mr. Gonzalez and two Miami accomplices, Christopher Scott, 25, and Damon Patrick Toey, 23.

Investigators say the conspirators began their largest theft in July 2005, when they identified a vulnerable network at a Marshall’s department store in Miami and used it to place a so-called sniffer program on the computers of the chain’s parent company, TJX, in Framingham, Mass. The program pulled out data like credit card numbers from the network traffic.

Fifteen months later, the company, which also owns TJ Maxx stores, admitted that up to 45 million credit and debit card numbers had been exposed in the prolonged attack. It has already cost TJX more than $130 million in settlement claims with banks and afflicted customers.

The Secret Service — which is charged with combating financial fraud in addition to protecting public officials — had until that point focused its attention on the resellers of stolen card numbers.

In October 2004, the agency concluded Operation Firewall, an 18-month investigation into members of the Shadowcrew Web site, where blocks of purloined card numbers, known as dumps, were bought and sold. Twenty-eight people were arrested, and a hub of the shady underworld of “carders” — typically unemployed, technically sophisticated and highly arrogant young men — was shut down.

Assisting with that investigation was Albert Gonzalez, a Cuban-American from Miami who had been arrested in 2003 on credit card fraud charges in New Jersey and agreed to cooperate with authorities to avoid jail time. According to the Secret Service, Mr. Gonzalez helped agents surreptitiously access the Shadowcrew site and pose as interested buyers of stolen information.

“In order to infiltrate those organizations you have to be established,” Mr. Magaw said. “You cannot just get on criminal boards and start dealing with high-level players. He provided us with that ability to do that on Shadowcrew.”

In the wake of Operation Firewall — and the expanding wave of credit card theft emanating from south Florida — the Secret Service began to focus on how the members of Shadowcrew and other carders were obtaining stolen credit card data.

They focused on a ring of people, most of whom had never met in person, who were working together in cyberspace and breaking into corporate computer systems nationwide.

Secret Service agents from the San Diego field office homed in on Maksym Yastremskiy or “maksik,” 25, from the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkiv. Agents believed that he was among the largest distributors of stolen debit and credit card numbers in the world. Mr. Yastremskiy, an indictment unveiled last week in San Diego alleges, earned over $11 million plying his trade in 2004-6 alone.

In July 2007, the Secret Service learned that Mr. Yastremskiy was traveling on vacation to Turkey and the agency coordinated his arrest by the Turkish police outside a nightclub in Kemer. The Turkish police provided a copy of the hard drive from Mr. Yastremskiy’s laptop to Secret Service agents, yielding significant breakthroughs in the case.

In addition to millions of stolen credit and debit card numbers, investigators found a sniffer program similar to the one used that year to capture credit card transactions at 11 restaurants in the Dave & Buster’s chain. That attack, unlike earlier ones, was not conducted through war-driving. Instead, Aleksandr Suvorov, 24, an Estonian hacker, remotely accessed the chain’s computers by exploiting errors in the way it set up passwords, investigators say.

Agents brought the sniffer program to the Computer Emergency Response Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where experts compared it with another program found during the investigation of the earlier breach at TJX and found they were two versions of the same underlying code. Agents now knew conclusively that the same gang was responsible for both crimes.

They now had to figure out who Mr. Yastremskiy was working with in the United States. A forensic analysis of his computer yielded records of conversations over the ICQ chat network between Mr. Yastremskiy and a cohort represented only by the user number 201679996.

In short, jargon-punctuated messages, this person took credit for supplying the software used in the Dave & Buster’s attack and expressed alarm when the gang’s exploits and collaborators were being exposed by investigators.

In the end, it was a reference to a “Seinfeld” character that helped Secret Service agents untangle the mystery. Agents connected the ICQ user name to an e-mail address at a Russian-based Internet provider, soupnazi@efnet.ru, a reference to a cantankerous soup maker in the program.

Records from Mr. Gonzalez’s 2003 arrests showed he had once used that e-mail address, and confidential sources told Secret Service agents that Mr. Gonzalez still used the “soupnazi” nickname, along with another, “segvec.” Tying the bow even tighter, the mysterious ICQ chatter had referred to himself as segvec.

The agency says it immediately stopped using Mr. Gonzalez as an informant and began investigating him, in part by tracing his financial assets through online accounts. In their indictment last week, the authorities said that Mr. Gonzalez and his two Miami-based conspirators were storing millions of credit and debit card numbers on servers in Latvia and Ukraine, and imprinting some of those numbers on blank A.T.M. cards supplied by collaborators in China. They used those cards to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Government lawyers also said that Mr. Gonzalez had used his position as a Secret Service informant to warn fellow conspirators about ongoing investigations. They say he appeared to have been involved in most aspects of the ring’s operations.

Secret Service agents arrested Mr. Gonzalez on May 7 at the luxurious National Hotel in Miami Beach, where he was staying with his girlfriend and, investigators say, trying to hack into the wireless networks of nearby businesses. According to the indictment, the authorities found in the hotel room two laptops, more than $20,000 in cash and a Glock 27 firearm with ammunition, although the arrest was peaceful.

They found another computer, a hard drive and a currency counter in a one-bedroom condominium Mr. Gonzalez owned in a working-class Miami neighborhood.

Neither Mr. Gonzalez nor his parents were available for comment, though Mr. Palomino, his lawyer, said the family was shaken. “Here is the attorney general of the United States announcing the charges against your son and telling the whole world that he is looking at life in prison,” he said. “It’s shellshock.”

Mr. Gonzalez is now in jail in New York, on charges related to the Dave & Buster’s theft. His two Miami conspirators are expected to turn themselves in to the authorities in Boston soon, the Secret Service says.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is negotiating for the extradition of Mr. Yastremskiy from Turkey, where he is imprisoned. The Secret Service coordinated the arrest of Mr. Suvorov, the Estonian, at an airport in Frankfurt last March. He is now in a German jail.

Members of the financial services industry are applauding.

“We were always trying to get law enforcement to go after these guys for us,” said a payments industry executive who would speak only anonymously. “Over the last two or three years, the Secret Service has devoted lots of time to it. This at least sends a message to the criminal side that there are folks coming after you, even if you are operating outside the United States.”

Eric Dash and Tom Zeller Jr. contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/te...y/12theft.html





Dutch Police, FBI Rein in Large Botnet

Botnet created by a teenager relied totally on social engineering to spread and at one time had as many as 150,000 machines worldwide
Jeremy Kirk

The botnet created by a teenager who was arrested by Dutch police in a sting operation is most notable for its total reliance on social engineering to spread, computer security experts said Thursday.

The 19-year-old Dutch man was caught July 29 with his 16-year-old brother trying to sell a botnet to a 35-year-old Brazilian man, according to Dutch prosecutors. All were arrested by the Dutch High-Tech Crime Unit, with assistance from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As is customary in the Netherlands, Dutch police have not released the names of those arrested. Few other details, such as how authorities became cued into the case, have been released. U.S. authorities are seeking the extradition of the Brazilian man.

But experts from Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab were called on by Dutch police to write up instructions for how to remove the botnet code from infected PCs, as well as aid in the continuing investigation, said Eddy Willems, one of Kaspersky's security evangelists.

A botnet is a group of PCs that is infected with malicious code and controlled by a hacker. This particular botnet, which at one time had as many as 150,000 machines worldwide, is called "Shadow," the name bestowed on it by its creator.

The code that enabled Shadow to work was distributed on Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger instant messaging network. Victims would typically get a message from someone who appeared to be one of their contacts. The message would contain a link to another Web site, where the victim was asked to download a file.

If the file was executed on a PC, Shadow would collect other instant messaging contacts and send out more messages trying to enlarge the botnet. It appeared that Shadow was particularly successful in the Netherlands, since some messages were sent out in Dutch.

The distribution method relied entirely on victims willingly downloading the code rather than trying to exploit a software vulnerability, which could result in an infection regardless of what the user does.

It means that Internet surfers are just as susceptible to fall victim to scammy tricks. "Social engineering seems just as effective as it was 10 years ago," said Roel Schouwenberg, senior antivirus researcher.

Shadow could also download other malicious code and may have been used to download advertising software and spyware programs, Schouwenberg said. The teenager who created Shadow appears to use bits of malware code already circulating on the Internet, as well writing his own code.

The result was a fairly run-of-the-mill botnet, but one that could be considered large, Willems said. When the bust occurred, the 19-year-old was attempting to sell the botnet for €25,000 ($37,290), a price Willems said is way too high in proportion to how botnets are currently priced.

People who control a group of computers, called botnet herders, have been known to rent time to other scammers, who use the computers to send spam or conduct other malicious activity. The use of remote computers helps disguise who is actually using those machines to carry out crime.

Dutch prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/..._botnet_1.html





Hacker Granted Two-Week Stay on Extradition to the US

Gary McKinnon granted stay until August 28 by European Court of Human Rights
Rosalind Ryan and agencies

The British hacker who broke into the Pentagon's and Nasa security systems today won a two-week stay on his extradition to the US.

Gary McKinnon, 42, lost his House of Lords appeal against the extradition last month, but today he was granted a stay until August 28 by the European court of human rights.

McKinnon, dubbed "the world's most dangerous hacker" by the American authorities, faces up to 70 years in prison and his solicitors say he could even be given "enemy combatant" status, the same as that applied to terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay.
A brief statement released by McKinnon's lawyers said he had been granted "interim relief" until August 28 "for his application to be heard before the full chamber".

His application to halt his extradition will argue that his human rights would be infringed if he is sent to the US.

McKinnon argues that he cannot be granted a fair trial in the US, after American officials involved in the case allegedly told him they wanted to see him "fry".

The unemployed UFO fan hacked into 97 computers belonging to the US military shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in 2001, using the codename "Solo".

American officials claim he infiltrated systems belonging to the department of defence, the US armed forces and even Nasa - causing $700,000 (£354,000) damage and threatening national security.

McKinnon has consistently argued that he was just a "bumbling computer nerd" who caused no damage and was merely searching for evidence to prove his theories that the CIA had covered up the existence of aliens.

He has never denied that he infiltrated the military security systems, but has always maintained that he was motivated by curiosity and only managed to get into the networks because of lax security.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...acking.ukcrime





Government Proposes Email and Internet Tracking
Matthew Sparkes

The Government will store "a billion incidents of data exchange a day" as details of every text, email and browsing session in the UK are recorded under new proposals published yesterday.

The information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office.

One example of crime prevention using the data given in the consultation document is that of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency, which targets sexual abuse of children.

"The vast majority of CEOP's work is by resolution of IP addresses, e-mail addresses and increasingly mobile phone numbers.

During the period March to June 2008 CEOP identified 96 suspects (who have been arrested) and safeguarded 30 children through the use of internet related data," explains the consultation document, which goes on to explain that petty crime and even instances of self harm will be tackled using the new measures.

Another example was given in which a UK citizen had been talking in an internet chatroom about self-harming, when local police tracked down his address via his IP number and ISP and intervened to save him.

However, the information will also be made available to local councils, health authorities and other Government bodies such as Ofsted.

"The main reason for it is to assist in the investigation of crime," says a Home Office spokesperson. "Each local council can make a decision for themselves on what is the most interest to them."

The move has attracted criticism from the Conservatives, however, including Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary.

"Yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/218052/g...-tracking.html





8300 Scottish Schoolchildren to be Biometrically Fingerprinted
Mark O'Neill

A political row is erupting in Scotland after it emerged that 8,300 Scottish schoolchildren are to be biometrically fingerprinted at a cost of 20,000 pounds ($37,300) per school per year. As well as the staggering cost, angry parents are also voicing their opposition to the Big Brother privacy intrusions into their children’s lives.

It’s all part of a pilot scheme which is being tested at eight secondary schools (high schools) at East Dunbartonshire. Supporters of the scheme are citing the advantages of the fingerprinting database including class attendance monitoring, better monitoring of library book borrowing and the buying of school meals (and the end of stigma for those who receive free meals).

One government minister even went on television when I was on holiday in Scotland last week to say that a major benefit of the scheme was that when school bullying occurred, they would have the fingerprints on file to say who did what and they would then be able to track down the bully or bullies involved. I’m sorry but I just don’t personally see teachers dusting down a scene, lifting prints like a crime scene tech and matching them to ones on a database. I don’t see stressed-out over-worked teachers being that diligent - and if a bully thinks there is a chance of his or her prints being lifted, what’s to stop them wearing gloves?

Critics are predictably raising the spectre of George Orwell and 1984, asking who would be controlling the information and what would be done with it. They are also kicking up a fuss about the cost, saying this sudden influx of cash should be better spent on books and other educational materials.

If your child was to be biometrically fingerprinted at school, would you allow it? Or would you refuse, just as a matter of principle? Do you see any positive aspects to this scheme or is it all a waste of money?

If it was my child, I wouldn’t allow it. I see this as a gross intrusion of privacy. I was biometrically photographed at Heathrow Airport and for some reason it still unsettles me 6 days later. Maybe part of me wonders where that photo is being stored now? This fingerprint scheme is no different. If someone took my child’s fingerprint, where would it go? What would be done with it? To quote an oft-used phrase “a slippery slope”
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/08/...fingerprinted/





Grandmother Arrested after Refusing to Delete JetBlue Fight Video
Christopher Elliott

Marilyn Parver filmed an altercation between two passengers on a recent JetBlue flight. When she refused to delete the footage from her video camera, she says the airline threatened to blacklist her and accused her of interfering with a flight crew, which is a federal crime.

You can read the account of Parver’s flight and subsequent arrest here. And look for Parver on ABC’s Good Morning America, along with the incriminating footage.

Parver contacted me yesterday to, as she put it, “get the word out.”

Quote:
I am a 56-year-old grandmother who has never had so much as a speeding ticket. But on July 26th, I was taken by armed officers, in handcuffs, off JetBlue flight 195 for refusing to delete a video I had taken of a minor altercation between passengers over a screaming kid.

The flight crew made up a charge of interfering with the crew. My recording proves I did nothing wrong. I never even stood up. I was left with the threat that I will never be able to fly on JetBlue, that I will go on the no-fly list, and have a report written about me filed with the FAA.

I only refused to delete a legal short video. This is a complete misuse of power and what happened to me could happen to anyone.
I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t find any rules that would prohibit a paying passenger from filming the interior of a JetBlue aircraft or of any commercial plane. Parver said she phoned JetBlue later, and that a representative told her she could tape whatever she wanted.

My reading of the law — and again, I’m no expert — suggests the JetBlue flight crew overstepped its boundaries. In a big way.

I asked Parver if she would consider posting her footage to the Web so that we could see what the fuss was about. She said the JetBlue crew specifically told her they didn’t want the material posted on YouTube, which is why they were so insistent that she delete the videotape.

Instead, Parver is taking her case to ABC News, where its legal department can fend off any attack from JetBlue. I think that’s probably a smart move. YouTube might delete the footage, anyway.

This case underscores the travel industry’s sensitivity to the growing influence of social media, and particularly to viral videos. Makes me wonder how many other passengers have been asked to delete images that were not flattering to an airline.
http://www.elliott.org/blog/grandmot...e-fight-video/





I Was a Victim of the Absurd War on Terror
Dave Lindorff

I was injured thanks to the government's ridiculous airport security program last week on a US Air flight from Chicago to Philadelphia. I also saw how pointless the whole thing is, if the supposed goal is really to prevent airline hijackings.

First, my injury. Because of a silly fear that I might blow up a plane with explosives tucked into my running shoes, I, along with everyone else in the security checkpoint line at O'Hare, including two-month-old babies wearing little booties, had to doff my footwear. Clad in just socks, I tried to maneuver my way around a metal counter that held those plastic trays carrying my laptop, my shoes, my belt and change and keys, and my carry-on bag, and in the process my unprotected big toe hit a sharp piece of metal protruding from the table.

The metal sliced right under my toenail, making a painful and bloody cut into the soft tissue under the nail. Cursing and bleeding, I made my way through the metal detector, and collected my goods.

Now, inside my bag, unbeknownst to the Transportation Security Administration inspectors, was a bottle of mouthwash. It was larger than the approved 2-oz size, and it was not in an approved sealed plastic bag. But TSA inspectors looking into their video screens at the X-Ray machine didn't see it, because I made sure that it was vertical as it passed through. All they saw was a little circle of plastic. Likewise, on an earlier flight, I had made my way aboard with a Swiss Army knife. By standing it in my carry-on bag so that it would be vertical for the X-Ray, I was able to slip it through and onto the plane.

Now clearly I'm not a terrorist (though for a time, thanks to my anti-Bush, anti-war journalism, and an expose about the TSA's "no-fly" list abuses, I was on the watch list, and would get a circled "S" written on my boarding passes that ensured that I would be pulled aside to have my carry-on luggage hand searched). The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. But if I were a terrorist, I sure wouldn't try to commandeer a plane with a jackknife. I'd want something bigger. But that would be simple. One could easily carry on a 10-inch blade the same way. If one were nervous about doing that, it could be a ceramic or better, a Plexiglas blade - plenty dangerous, but invisible to X-rays and metal detectors.

For that matter, if I were into suicide bombing and wanted to manufacture a liquid explosive, why on earth would I try to do it by smuggling on two large jars of ingredients, when I could just put them in plastic baggies and carry them aboard in my pockets? Unless you happen to be singled out for special handling, nobody at the security checkpoints pats you down. They just have you walk through the metal detectors while TSA inspectors are busy patting down randomly selected elderly nuns and racially profiled people, like unfortunate Sikh men wearing turbans.

Any dedicated terrorist hijacker could figure out numerous ways to get explosives and weapons onto a plane past these security arrangements.

And that's not even counting having the weapons smuggled into an airport gate area along with all the goods that are offered for sale there, where they could be picked up after a hijacker had already cleared security. There is no way that all the newspapers, magazines, clothing, trinkets, bottles of booze and personal hygiene products, etc., are screened adequately as they are brought in each day to fill the concession stands for the day's business. First of all, one would have to open and check every bottle and box offered for sale.

If you were genuinely worried about protecting against hijackers, you would have those inspections at the entrance to each plane, not at the entrance to the terminal, and you wouldn't have all that commerce inside the security zone. Ah! But what a roar of outrage we'd hear from the business community if that lucrative business venue were eliminated!

Which brings me to the real question: Why do we have all this pointless and easily breached security, not to mention a list that contains an astonishing one million names of suspected "terrorists"?

Clearly, the security program is not about protecting the flying public, or the nation's tall buildings. That could be done much more cheaply by putting air marshals on all flights, the way they do at El Al, the Israeli airline that has never had a successful hijacking.

No, this is all about heightening the fear level of the American people, to routinize us to living in a police state.

The truth is, nobody is really interested in trying to hijack planes anymore. First of all, the "crash into buildings" tactic is dead. Pilots are now flying armed in armored cockpits that cannot be easily entered, and would not accede to a terrorist's demands any longer, knowing what happened last time. And passengers would not sit passively in a cabin takeover attempt, either. As a result, we don't have to worry about such things any longer.

The ease with which security could be breached, and the fact that it hasn't happened now for seven years, is evidence enough that nobody is even trying to do it.

So let's do away with all this time-consuming, costly, and politically motivated nonsense before I injure my other big toe.
http://www.populistamerica.com/i_was..._on_terror?rta





Hair Samples in Anthrax Case Don't Match

Strands From Mailbox in Princeton Are Not From Ivins, Investigators Say
Carrie Johnson

Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence over which researchers continue to puzzle in the case, which ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.

Authorities released sworn statements and search warrants last week at a news conference in which they asserted that Ivins was their sole suspect. But the materials have not dampened speculation about the merits of the investigative findings and the government's aggressive pursuit of Ivins, a 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher. Conspiracy theories have flourished since the 2001 attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it will call FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to appear at an oversight hearing Sept. 17, when he is likely to be asked about the strength of the government's case against Ivins. A spokeswoman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a vocal FBI critic, said he would demand more information about how authorities narrowed their search.

The House Judiciary panel, meanwhile, is negotiating to hold a separate oversight hearing in September with bureau officials, in a session that could mark the first public occasion in which Mueller faces questions about the FBI's handling of the anthrax case.

Friends and former colleagues of Ivins, who died before he could see the full array of evidence prosecutors had gathered, continue to demand information about the DNA advances that authorities say led them to a flask in Ivins's lab.

Defense lawyer Paul F. Kemp yesterday said he wonders "where Ivins could have possibly stored this anthrax without any employees seeing it, or if he took it home, why there was no trace" of the deadly spores, despite repeated FBI searches over the past two years of Ivins's car, his work locker, a safe-deposit box and his house.

Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus.

Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18.

Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...=moreheadlines





Intel Abuse: As If You Needed More Evidence
Red Wind

For all you scared, greedy, stupid, or cynical Representatives and Senators who voted for the FISA revisions last month, here’s a little something that got lost in the Friday Olympics-vs.-sex-scandal news dump:

Quote:
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.
While these cases probably didn’t fall under the direct purview of FISA/FISC (though we really have no way of knowing), it is yet another example of Bush Administration spying on journalists (Lawrence Wright, Christiane Amanpour). And, it should serve as a yet another wake-up call to lawmakers and citizens alike, reminding them that the Bush/Cheney obsession with warrantless surveillance has little to do with the legal pursuit of terrorists, and a lot more to do with the suppression of information and dissent.

The FBI now says that they have corrected the problem that led to this latest known incidence of illegal spying, but as both the New York Times and the Washington Post make clear, the Department of Justice has continued to reenact the same sorts of abuses, just under a different name. Without aggressive congressional oversight and investigation, the arrest and prosecution of lawbreakers, and a rewriting of a decade’s worth of Constitution-eroding laws, there are simply no guarantees that this sort of abuse won’t happen again—indeed, there is no real guarantee (beyond the occasional and absurd “trust me”) that the abuse has ever stopped. Be it the Patriot Act (I & II), the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, or the recent FISA capitulation, Congress has repeatedly chosen the coward’s path— synonymous with the White House’s path—rather than exercise its rights as a coequal branch of government.

I have argued in the past that if we know of illegal administration spying on journalists and other non-suspects, and we know of pre-9/11 surveillance, then we for all intents and purposes know that these are not programs designed to fight some foreign terrorists threat. I have often wanted to ask Democratic leaders if they realize that their phone calls and e-mails are being swept up in Bush Administration dragnets—and then I want to ask them if they care.

You see, while the New York Times and the Washington Post have their lawyers to turn to when they are the victims of intelligence abuse (and the lawyers have been brought in for this current case), most of us only have our elected representatives to watch out for our Constitutionally guaranteed rights. If Congressional leaders can’t be convinced of the gravity of this situation, we’re all screwed.

And that’s a gold medal scandal.
http://www.theseminal.com/2008/08/12...more-evidence/





Military Lays Out $4.4 M to Supersize Network Monitoring Technology
Layer 8

Bigger, better, faster, more are the driving themes behind the advanced network monitoring technology BBN Technologies is building for the military.

The high-tech firm got a $.4.4 million contract today from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop novel, scalable attack detection algorithms; a flexible and expandable architecture for implementing and deploying the algorithms; and an execution environment for traffic inspection and algorithm execution.

The network monitoring systems is being developed under DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program which seeks to bolt down network security in the face of cyber attacks that have grown more subtle and sophisticated. New technologies and applications provide new attack routes and have made traditional signature-based and anomaly detection-based defensive measures inadequate in both speed and sensitivity, BBN added.

To be effective in today's networks, detection algorithms must operate quickly, efficiently, and effectively in large, content-rich environments. DARPA said that because traffic volume is increasing at a faster rate than the number of hosts on the network, the computing power required to provide gateway network monitoring and defense of autonomous systems will continually grow as a fraction of the power of the monitored network. If these trends continue unabated the network will soon consume the majority of its resources solely to defend itself, DARPA said.

New approaches to network-based monitoring are sought that provide maximum coverage of the network (from the gateway down) with performance independent of the network size, DARPA said.

Some of DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program requirements include:

• Probability of detection of malicious traffic greater than 99% per attack launched
• A false alarm rate while monitoring traffic of not more than one false alarm per day.
• Support capabilities at conventional gateway line speeds of 1Gbps in Phase I of the contract, while Phase II will demonstrate the scalability of this capability at gateway line speeds of 100Gbps.

BBN earlier this year got $13 million in additional funding from DARPA to develop a system that quickly converts documents in foreign languages into English so that military personnel can react more rapidly to threats.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/30983





Cyberspace Barrage Preceded Russian Invasion of Georgia
John Markoff

Weeks before physical bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: win+love+in+Rusia.

Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded certain Georgian servers.

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. The researchers said the command and control server that directed the attack, which was based in the United States, had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

As it turns out, the July attack was only a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia.

According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war. But it will likely not be the last, said Bill Woodcock, the research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that tracks Internet traffic. He said cyberattacks are so inexpensive and easy to mount, with few fingerprints, that they will almost certainly remain a feature of modern warfare.

“It costs about 4 cents per machine,” Mr. Woodsock said. “You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to.”

Shadowserver saw the attack against Georgia spread to computers throughout the government after Russian troops invaded the Georgian province of South Ossetia on Sunday.

The Georgian government blamed Russia, but experts say that was not clear.

“Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically,” said Gadi Evron, an Israeli network security expert who assisted in pushing back a cyber attack on Estonia’s Internet infrastructure last May. “The nature of what’s going on isn’t clear.”

Mr. Nazario said the attacks appeared to be politically motivated. They were continuing on Monday against Georgian news sites, according to Mr. Nazario. “I’m watching attacks against apsny.ge and news.ge right now,” he said.

The attacks were controlled from a server based at a telecommunications firm in Moscow, he said. In contrast, the attacks last month came from a control computer that was based in the United States. That system was later disabled.

Denial of service attacks, aimed at making a Web site unreachable, began in 2001 and have been refined in terms of power and sophistication since then. They are usually performed by hundreds or thousands of commandeered personal computers, making it difficult or impossible to determine who is behind a particular attack.

The Web site of the president of Georgia was moved to an Internet operation in the United States run by a Georgian native over the weekend. The company, Tulip Systems Inc., based in Atlanta, is run by Nino Doijashvili, who was in Georgia at the time of the attack. Two Web sites, president.gov.ge and rustavi2.com, the Web site of a prominent Georgian TV station, were moved to Atlanta. Computer security executives said the new sites had also come under attack.

On Monday, Renesys executives said that most Georgian networks were unaffected, although individual Web sites might be under attack. Networks appeared and disappeared as power was cut off and restored as a result of the war, they said

A company researcher noted that Georgia was dependent on both Russia and Turkey for connections to the Internet. As a result of the interference the Georgian government began posting news dispatches to a Google- run blogging Web site, georgiamfa.blogspot.com. Separately, there were reports that Estonia was sending technical assistance to the Georgian government.

There were indications that both sides in the conflict — or sympathizers — were engaged in attacks aimed at blocking access to Web sites. On Friday, the Russian language Web site Lenta.ru reported that there had been D.D.O.S. attacks targeted at the official Web site of the government of South Ossetia as well as attacks against the RIA Novosti, a Russian news agency.

Internet researchers at Sophos, a computer security firm based in Britain, said that the National Bank of Georgia’s Web site was defaced at one point. Images of 20th century dictators as well as an image of Georgia’s president Mr. Saakashvili, were placed on the site.

Internet technical experts said that the Georgian Internet presence was relatively small compared with other former Soviet states. The country has about a quarter the number of Internet addresses as Estonia or Latvia, according to Mr. Woodcock, the research director of the Packet Clearing House.

With support from the United States, Georgia is in the process of completing a 1, 400-kilometer fiber optic network link under the Black Sea connecting its port city of Poti to Varna, Bulgaria. That connection is scheduled for completion in September.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/te...y/13cyber.html





Google: We Did Not Erase Maps of Georgia
Miguel Helft

My colleague John Markoff wrote earlier today about the barrage of cyber-attacks on Georgia’s technology infrastructure. Others have covered the story as well.

But not all stories appear to be accurate. Several reports suggest that data from Georgia and the neighboring countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan has been stripped from Google Maps. One story says that “the relevant maps went blank as soon as fighting broke out,” according to the Azerbaijan Press Agency.

Google says that’s not so. While its Web maps shows only the outlines of those three countries — without roads or even the capital cities marked — Google says that the lack of information is not new.
“Google has not made any recent change to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Google Maps,” the company said in a statement. “We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear.”

Browsing Google Maps, only a few countries appear to lack any data at all. They include small nations like Guyana and Suriname; countries that are largely close to foreigners, such as North Korea; and a few surprising ones, like South Korea and Argentina.
Interestingly, Google Earth, the company 3-D geographic visualization service, identifies many Georgian cities, and it allows users to zoom in to them close enough to see individual buildings. So Google Earth clearly has some “local data” on the countries that are blank on Google Maps.

Microsoft’s rival mapping service, Virtual Earth, pinpoints dozens on cities in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Update: In a blog post late Tuesday, Google said it never filled in the maps of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan because it wasn’t satisfied with the map data available. But after users complained that a little information is better than no information, the company said it is planning to start adding map data to countries that are currently blank.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...gia/index.html





Olympic Committee Rethinks Copyright Infringement Claim on YouTube
Stephanie Condon

The International Olympic Committee has retracted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request it sent to YouTube over a Tibetan protest video.

According to Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the IOC requested earlier this week that YouTube remove the video called "Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony." The video, posted by Students for a Free Tibet, is a montage of scenes from Tibet protests around the world. The Olympic rings are shown in the video briefly a couple times.

YouTube initially removed the video, but subsequently questioned whether the IOC could truly file a DMCA claim and asked the group to withdraw its takedown notice. The EFF also questioned the IOC on its copyright infringement claims. The IOC retracted its request, and the video was reposted. (Warning: The video, shown below, contains some graphic images.)

The IOC has been working with YouTube to provide content as well as to monitor for copyright violations.

McSherry said that such takedown requests have little to do with copyright infringement, but are instead "timed to directly interfere with the impact of a political message."

YouTube has not yet responded to a request by CNET News for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10018234-38.html





Fireworks Faked For TV
Mark Stone

Parts of the spectacular Beijing Olympics opening ceremony were faked, it has emerged.

The global television audience of more than three billion people watched in amazement as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks proceeded through the night sky from Tiananmen Square to the Bird's Nest stadium - except they were watching a computer animation.

Even the giant television screens within the stadium itself broadcast the fake images.

Stunned viewers thought they were watching the string of fireworks filmed from above by a helicopter.

But in reality they were watching a 3D graphics sequence that took almost a year to produce.

It even included a 'camera shake' to mimic the effect of filming from a helicopter.

The dupe was revealed by China's Beijing Times. Speaking to the paper, the man responsible for the animation said he was pleased with the result.

"Seeing how it worked out, it was still a bit too bright compared to the actual fireworks," Gao Xiaolong told the newspaper.

"But most of the audience thought it was filmed live - so that was mission accomplished."

The designers even added some haziness to simulate the polluted Beijing skyline.

Broadcasters around the world had no choice but to show the footage because it all came from one feed provided by Beijing Olympic Broadcasting - the organisation responsible for filming the games.

The ceremony has also been strongly criticised by architect Ai Weiwei, who helped design the Bird's Nest stadium.

Writing on his blog, Mr Ai described the ceremony as "a recycling of the rubbish of fake classical culture tradition; a sacrilegious visual garbage dump and an insult to the spirit of liberty; low class sound play that's just noise pollution".

He was directly critical of China's ruling communist party, characterising the ceremony as "a showcase of the reincarnation of the Marxist imperialism; the ultimate paragon of an all embracing culture of fascist totalitarianism; an encyclopaedia that encompasses total defeat in intellectual spirit."

Mr Ai helped design the stadium alongside Swiss architect firm, Herzog and de Meuron.

But since then, he has become an outspoken blogger against the Olympics and the Chinese regime. Unusually, he has not been censored by the authorities.

Organiser said that the footprint fireworks were there for real, but thought it unsafe to try to film them - so they recreated them instead.

Story





Not cute enough

Empty Seats, Lack of Buzz
Stephen Wilson

After the first few days of the Beijing Games, some cracks have appeared in China's perfect party—empty seats at the venues, disappointing crowds at the Olympic grounds, ticket scalping, a lack of buzz around the city and even official acknowledgment of trickery during the opening ceremony.

International Olympic Committee officials urged Beijing organizers Tuesday to let more people into the Olympic Green—the centerpiece zone of the games where most of the main venues are located—and find ways to fill up the arenas.

"We've been saying, 'You're missing a great opportunity to get more of your people in here to celebrate your games,'" said Kevan Gosper, vice chairman of the IOC's coordination commission for Beijing. "I would want to stress how important it is for the host city that the venues are seen to be full and everybody has the opportunity to enjoy the festivities."

Wang Wei, spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee, acknowledged there were not enough people in the green and organizers were encouraging more to come.

Wang said about 40,000 people passed through the area on Monday. The IOC suggested the figure should be increased to up to 200,000 daily and that organizers issue more passes to allow visitors into the green, which covers 2,856 acres (1,156 hectares) in northern Beijing.

"We have taken this up with organizers and the politicians," IOC marketing commission chairman and executive board member Gerhard Heiberg told The Associated Press. "They have promised an improvement today and further improvement tomorrow. We hope this is going to take place. We need more people to have a higher atmosphere."

Among those affected were the Olympics' global sponsors, who are each paying tens of millions of dollars to be associated with the games but have complained that few visitors have been let through to see their pavilions.

"When I went out, there was a small trickle of people walking through," U.S. IOC member Bob Ctvrtlik said. "Access is difficult and security is incredibly tight. At some venues it's surprising when there have been sellouts and you see quite a few empty seats. At the stadiums you need warm enthusiastic crowds to help create an atmosphere for athletes to perform at their best."

The situation seemed to improve throughout the day Tuesday.

"I just went to volleyball and it was absolutely rocking," Ctvrtlik said after watching the U.S.-Italy and Brazil-Serbia men's games. "It was filled. It was a great atmosphere."

Chinese organizers have boasted for months that all 6.8 million tickets had been sold.

Wang admitted that some empty seats were being filled by volunteers in yellow shirts serving as official cheerleaders.

"The responsibility lies with the local venue managers," he said. "If they find that there are not enough people, or if they find too many empty seats, they will organize some cheerleaders who are volunteers."

IOC officials said attendance is a regular problem during the first week of the Olympics and that crowds are expected to build up, especially when the track and field competition begins Friday at the 91,000- seat National Stadium.

Wang cited several factors for the empty seats—hot, humid weather and rain; no-shows among ticket- holding Olympic sponsors and officials; fans skipping preliminary-round competitions or not staying for the entire program when events last a full day.

At the same time, there have also been reports of illegal ticket scalping outside venues.

"We will look into this," Wang said. "We have been implementing strict measures to prevent the scalping of tickets."

Meanwhile, it emerged that fake fireworks and lip-synching were part of Friday's spectacular opening ceremony—an extravaganza watched by a global television audience that likely surpassed 2 billion viewers.

Fireworks bursting into the shape of 29 gigantic footprints were shown trudging above the Beijing skyline to the National Stadium near the start of the ceremony. Officials confirmed that some of the footage shown to TV viewers around the world and on giant screens inside the stadium featured a computer- generated, three-dimensional image.

"It was confirmed that previously recorded footage was provided to the broadcasters for convenience and theatrical effects—as in many other big events," Wang said. "On the day of the ceremony there were actual footprints of fireworks from the south to the north of the city. However, because of the poor visibility of the night, some previously recorded footage may have been used."

In addition, the tiny, pigtailed 9-year-old girl in the red dress who sang "Ode to the Motherland" was lip- synching. The real voice belonged to a 7-year-old girl who was replaced because she was deemed not cute enough by a member of China's Politburo.

"The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen," the ceremony's chief music director, Chen Qigang, told Beijing Radio.

China's Communist Party has been eager to present a flawless Olympics to the world. The buildup to the games was embroiled in controversy over China's human rights record and air pollution in Beijing.

Since the games started, other outside factors have undercut some of the hoped-for feel-good factor, including Saturday's fatal stabbing at a tourist site of a relative of the U.S. men's volleyball coach and the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Georgia in South Ossettia. The fighting undermined the IOC's traditional call for observance of an "Olympic Truce" during the games.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_10176664





Beijing Olympics: 'Ethnic' Children Exposed as Fakes in Opening Ceremony
Richard Spencer

Another section of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony has been exposed as faked - the children supposedly representing the country's 56 ethnic groups were in fact all from the same one, the majority Han Chinese race.

The children accompanied the soldiers carrying in the national flag at the most solemn moment of the ceremony.

They were dressed in costumes associated with the country's ethnic minorities, including those from troubled areas such as Tibet and the muslim province of Xinjiang. Such displays of "national unity" are a compulsory part of any major state occasion.

But the children were all from the Han Chinese majority, which makes up more than 90 per cent of the population and is culturally and politically dominant, according to an official with the cultural troupe from which they were selected.

"I assume they think the kids were very natural looking and nice," Yuan Zhifeng, deputy director of the Galaxy Children's Art Troupe said.

The official guide to the opening ceremony said that the children did not just represent but "came from" China's ethnic groups.

"Fifty-six children from 56 Chinese ethnic groups cluster around the Chinese national flag, representing the 56 ethnic groups," it said.

This point was put to Wang Wei, executive vice-president of the Beijing organising committee at a press conference today.

"I think you are being very meticulous," he said. He said it was "traditional" to use dancers from other ethnic groups in this way.

"I would argue it is normal for dancers, performers, to be dressed in other races' clothes," he said. "I don't know exactly where these performers are from."

The initial triumph of the opening ceremony has already been clouded by revelations that the little girl who sand "Hymn to the Motherland", a patriotic Chinese anthem, was lip-synching to the pre-recorded voice of another girl who had been told she was not pretty enough to appear. The "footprint fireworks" shown on television were also pre-recorded and digitally enhanced.

The discovery that the children representing ethnic groups as diverse as Mongolians and members of the Li group from the south-western mountains were all in fact Han will hardly be noticed in China, where such practices are normal.

Nevertheless it is a sign of how sensitive ethnic relations in China are. At national Communist Party and state congresses, while the Han Chinese delegates all wear suits, carefully chosen members of ethnic minorities are told to wear traditional costume.

"Minority dances" are a regular part of state-sponsored entertainments, with performers coming from all over the country without having to belong to the relevant group.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/oth...-ceremony.html





China Defends Website Blocking

OLYMPIC Games organisers claimed on Saturday that the controversial decision to block Internet sites was taken to protect Chinese youngsters.
AFP

Asked why sites such as Free Tibet and those covering the Tiananmen Square Massacre were not accessible, Wang Wei, the vice-president of organising committee BOCOG, said: "We (BOCOG) promised free access except for a few websites that jeopardise our security and the healthy growth of our youth."

"That's an assessment made by the authorities of which sites are good and which are not good for our youth. It's like what any other country does."

IOC chief Jacques Rogge said that the were would be a review of the situation after the conclusion of the August 8-24 Games.

"The problem with Internet access should not have happened," admitted Rogge last Tuesday.

"However, the other day I was asked would I apologise and I said I would not apologise as the IOC do not run the Internet in China.

"But there will be a review of what happened when we come to audit the Games when they are over."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013044,00.html





Google Ordered to Unmask Mystery Blogger in India
Chris Snyder

Google has been instructed to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger in a defamation lawsuit filed by an Indian construction company against them, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The blogger known only as "Toxic Writer," is accused of attacking the Mumbai-based Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd. in what they are calling a “hate campaign.”

The blog was taken down, and Google’s Indian subsidiary is claiming they are not responsible for the Blogger.com service.

An angry blogger expressing his opinion anonymously online? Sounds like pretty standard fare for the Web. But the case may force Google to re-examine their business in India, and the issue raises questions about the future of free speech and anonymity online.

John Watson, associate professor at American University specializing in communication law, says this case is not unusual, considering the location.

“One of the most common places for people to sue, because they will generally win, are nations that are or have formerly been part of the British Commonwealth, where there is no First Amendment, and the law looks more toward protecting the reputation of people than protecting the free speech of speakers,” Watson told Wired.com.

“Google which is an American corporation enjoys a great deal of protection here in the United States, but in the rest of the world, it's subject to the laws of wherever these articles or communications are published,” he added.

This could potentially become an issue for bloggers bashing folks overseas, and set an example for cases regarding anonymity. On the positive side, maybe it will encourage citizen journalists to back up their posts with more researched and trustworthy information.

And the other obvious question: What did this construction company do to get this guy/girl so irked?
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/...e-ordered.html





Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress
Stephanie Clifford

Here are some things Internet users can discover about Kiyoshi Martinez, a 24-year-old man from Mokena, Ill., from some of his recent posts online. He watched “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday night, he likes the musician Lenlow and he received bottles of olive oil and vinegar for his birthday. Mr. Martinez has Facebook and LinkedIn pages, a Twitter account and a Web site that includes his résumé.

So it is surprising to learn that Mr. Martinez, an aide in the Illinois Senate, is also vigilant about his privacy online.

“I’m pretty aware of the fact that anything you do on the Internet pretty much should just be considered public,” Mr. Martinez said. While he knows that companies are collecting his data and often tracking his online habits so they can show him more relevant ads, he said, he would like to see more transparency “about what the company intends to do with your data and your information.”

“Like all privacy matters, it’s something that people need to be informed on,” Mr. Martinez said.

Those same questions of data collection and privacy policies are attracting the attention of Congress, too. There is no broad privacy legislation governing advertising on the Internet. And even some in the government admit that they do not have a clear grasp of what companies are able to do with the wealth of data now available to them.

“That is why Congress, at this point, is wanting to gather a lot more information, because no one knows,” said Steven A. Hetcher, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School. “That information is incredibly valuable; it’s the new frontier of advertising.”

Beyond the data question, there are issues of how companies should tell browsers that their information is being tracked, which area of law covers this and what — if anything — proper regulation would look like.

On Aug. 1, four top members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Cox Communications, to provide details about their privacy standards. That followed House and Senate hearings last month about privacy and behavioral targeting, in which advertisers show ads to consumers based on their travels around the Web. If an advertiser knows that Mr. Martinez watches “The Colbert Report,” for example, it might show him an ad for “The Daily Show.”

As advertisers become more sophisticated about behavioral targeting, and online privacy standards become increasingly varied, regulators and privacy advocates are becoming concerned. A few companies have taken precautionary measures to try to fend off criticism; in the last few days, for instance, both Yahoo and Google have made it easier for people to opt out of targeted ads on their sites. But that may not be enough.

“Some type of omnibus electronic privacy legislation is needed,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, “regardless of the particular technologies or companies involved.”

He and the other members of the House expect to receive responses from all of the companies by early this week. With the responses to the House letters, “we can understand exactly what each sector of the communications industry is technically capable of doing, and how they use the information once they do get access to it.”

One of the controversial new behavioral-targeting technologies is called deep packet inspection, and a company that does it — NebuAd — was a focus of the July Congressional hearings.

In NebuAd’s version of deep packet inspection, a hardware device is put into an Internet service provider’s network that can track where users are going online. NebuAd looks for categories that the user will be interested in. If the device notes that a user is browsing or searching for sites about German automobiles, it can deliver an ad about German automobiles later that day, even when the user is on a site about pets.

NebuAd’s chief executive, Bob Dykes, who testified at the hearings last month, said his company protects privacy.

“We don’t have any raw data on the identifiable individual,” Mr. Dykes said in an interview last month. “Everything is anonymous.”

He said NebuAd took several steps to ensure that the information could not be traced back to an individual or an Internet protocol address. The company avoids sensitive categories, he said; someone making a search about H.I.V., for example, would not see related ads. And NebuAd cannot gain access to secure sites.

Mr. Dykes came under scrutiny at the hearings for NebuAd’s technology and for how the company notified consumers.

The ways that some Internet service providers told consumers about their tracking were vague or too subtle, some privacy advocates and congressmen said.

NebuAd lost several customers this summer amid all the scrutiny, including CenturyTel, Charter Communications, WideOpenWest Holdings and Embarq.

“We will not be using this technology again until such time as all the privacy concerns have been addressed,” said Charles Fleckenstein, an Embarq spokesman.

Mr. Dykes said, “We are perfectly O.K. for some of our partners to wait until we have a better, more informed education of the public and folks in Washington before they resume their rollout.”

The NebuAd controversy illustrates the difficulty of regulation in online advertising, when new ways of tracking users arise regularly and companies have different ways of handling data.

The Federal Trade Commission has made some tentative steps toward standards, including a December proposal on behavioral- advertising practices. The proposal suggested that companies provide a clear notice to consumers that lets them opt out of tracking, notify consumers if the company changes the way it uses the data and use reasonable security measures. It also sought comment on several matters.

But Lydia B. Parnes, the director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has said she supports industry self-regulation, saying that it isn’t yet clear that the consumer is being harmed and that regulations might be too specific to current technologies. Laws have been made on slices of the privacy pie, including data about finances or children. But complying with various pieces of legislation is difficult, companies said.

“Compliance is becoming very complex and not very clear in terms of what applies to a new and emerging business model,” said Mike Hintze, the associate general counsel at Microsoft. “From the company’s perspective of trying to comply with these laws, we thought a comprehensive federal privacy law made a lot of sense.”

There is some industry support for a comprehensive law, but any wide-ranging law would require some legal wrangling.

“They’re raising these bigger-picture questions, and those questions are inherently intertwined not just with privacy laws, but also with contract law, computer-intrusion law, consumer-fraud law,” said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When legislators are trying to regulate in this area, they’re always caught a little bit between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “You don’t want to adopt a technology-specific standard that’s destined to fail as technology advances faster than the law can ever hope to embody. At the same time, you need to allow adequate specificity in the law to allow companies to comply with it and allow consumers to know what their rights are.”

Some advertising industry groups say self-regulation is enough. The most prominent programs are the Online Privacy Alliance and the Network Advertising Initiative. Both ask members to follow principles on notifying consumers and avoiding personally identifiable information.

Regulation is “certainly going to have unintended consequences and unintended impact,” said Mike Zaneis, the vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a coalition of online advertisers.

Some civil liberties groups disagreed.

“There’s a self-regulatory program out there which hasn’t been very effective,” said Alissa Cooper, the chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She said her organization was concerned about NebuAd’s technology. As for general federal privacy legislation, she said, the center supports it but thinks more information is needed about data-handling.

The letter from the House committee, she said, was “a really welcome development in the absence of any kind of regulation.”

“The companies don’t feel the need to explain everything they’re doing,” she said, “so a little bit of pressure from Congress or the F.T.C. can go a long way.”

As government representatives think about legislation, they are also trying to gauge how aware and concerned consumers are about online privacy. A recent study of about 1,000 Internet users asked them if they agreed with the statement that they were comfortable with advertisers’ using their browsing history to decide what ads to show them. Thirty-nine percent strongly disagreed; only 6 percent strongly agreed. The study was conducted by TNS Global, a research firm, and TRUSTe, an online privacy network.

Is privacy a concern for younger consumers, who are splashing personal details all over MySpace? The sparse data available suggest that it is. A study last year of 2,274 British adults showed that people ages 18 to 24 considered privacy tied with “avoiding hate and offense” as the most important consideration in digital technologies. For older people, privacy was second to “avoiding hate and offense.” The study was conducted by YouGov, a British research firm.

“People my age — in their 20s or in their 30s — a lot of them are very clued up on protecting privacy on the Internet,” said Ben Saxon, 23, a student in Cambridge, England. He has started a Facebook group objecting to Phorm, a NebuAd-like company that is working in Britain and is starting to court the United States market. Still, he said, “I don’t think complete privacy on the Internet is actually possible anymore.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/te...11privacy.html





Internet Firms Admit to Tracking Users' Behavior for Advertising
Ed Oswald

Responses to a congressional inquiry into targeted online advertising indicate that some companies were indeed tracking their users without first asking their consent.

In letters to the House Energy and Commerce Committee released Monday, several companies admitted to the practice. Altogether, some 33 companies were queried last August 1 about their position and actions surrounding targeted advertising.

Yahoo was the first to respond publicly, announcing last Friday that it would give its users an option to opt-out of targeted advertising across its properties.

Since then, details of other Internet firm's actions have become public. Of the big three, Google has admitted to launching a new technology that would allow it to track the behavior of its users across its affiliated sites in order to serve more relevant ads.

"Though it is not the focus of our business today, we also believe that behavioral advertising can be done in ways that are responsible and protective of consumer privacy and the security of consumers' information," it said in its letter.

Microsoft has admitted in the past that it was tracking its users, but as of Monday had not responded to the committee. Two ISPs, Knology and Cable One, admitted to using controversial technology from ad firm NebuAd, which looks at packets in an attempt to determine their content.

"Cable One does not intend to deploy commercially a technology that collects user data (even if anonymous) to deliver tailored advertising without taking several additional steps beyond what the law requires," the ISP said. Knology also stopped its use in July 2008, but did not specifically say whether or not it had permanently shelved the initiative.

About a dozen others denied that they had tracked the behavior of their users. Other than Microsoft, two other companies had failed to respond to the committee's inquiry as of Tuesday afternoon.

Copies of the responses from the companies can be found on the committee Web site.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Inte...ing/1218574700





AT&T Mulls Watching You Surf
Saul Hansell

AT&T is “carefully considering” monitoring the Web-surfing activities of customers who use its Internet service, the company said in a letter in response to an inquiry from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

While the company said it hadn’t tested such a system for monitoring display advertising viewing habits or committed to a particular technology, it expressed much more interest in the approach than the other big Internet providers who also responded to the committee’s letter.

AT&T did however promise that if it does decide to start tracking its customers online, it will “do so the right way.” In particular, the advertising system will require customers to affirmatively agree to have their surfing monitored. This sort of “opt-in” approach is preferred by privacy experts to the “opt-out” method, practiced by most ad targeting companies today, which records the behavior of anyone who doesn’t explicitly ask to not to be tracked.

The Congressional committee began looking at advertising that targets ads based on the behavior of Internet users after reports emerged that several Internet service providers, including Charter Communications, were preparing to begin selling the chronicles of of their customers’ Web-surfing activities to a company called NebuAd. It sent letters to 33 companies asking about the targeting practices.

Charter, which has since put the plans on hold, was planning to use an opt-out approach. It told the committee that 1.6 percent of those customers who were notified by mail of the NebuAd system elected not to have their Web surfing monitored.

Of the other major Internet service providers who have responded, most including Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AOL said they did not monitor the surfing behavior of their customers on sites they don’t run. Some, especially AOL, do have targeting systems in place for their own sites.

In contrast to the terse statements from the other Internet providers, AT&T’s letter, from Dorothy Attwood, the company’s senior vice president for public policy, was a spirited defense of behavioral targeting. Such a system, she wrote, “could prove quite valuable to consumers and could dramatically improve their online experiences, while at the same time protecting their privacy.”

Ms. Attwood also took a rather combative approach toward Google and other Internet advertising firms. Their targeting methods, she said, “are as effective as any technique that an I.S.P. might employ at creating specific customer profiles and enabling highly targeted advertising.” She added:

Quote:
Advertising network operators such as Google have evolved beyond merely tracking consumer Web surfing activity on sites for which they have a direct ad-serving relationship. They now have the ability to observe a user’s entire Web browsing experience at a granular level.
Indeed, the letter was quite critical of Google’s own response to the committee’s inquiry. Google deflected most of the specific questions by saying it interpreted the committee as being interested in “deep packet inspection” the technique used by Internet service providers to monitor surfing behavior of their customers. By doing so, it didn’t provide specific information on the other targeting methods it uses. AT&T challenged Google’s view:

Quote:
The responses of certain companies such as Google suggest that your inquiry is narrow and focused only on a single technology: deep-packet-inspection. We do not read the questions so narrowly. Indeed, to do so suggests that the significant policy questions posed here depend on the technology at issue. We understand your letter to be a clear inquiry into end-user/customer privacy as a whole and are responding accordingly.
I’ve written to Google and it’s comment is below will post its response when I get one.

Until now, it looked like the spotlight of public attention had substantially inhibited the interest of Internet providers in using surfing data for advertising systems. Given AT&T’s assertive stance in this letter, it will be interesting to see if the company is willing to brave what will doubtless be a loud outcry to attempt deep-packet inspection in what it defines as “the right way.”

UPDATE

Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman, sent this comment:

Quote:
We answered all of the committee’s questions thoroughly and according to what we believed it was asking. If the committee has follow up questions for any of the companies I’m sure each company will oblige. It’s not surprising that AT&T would use their response to divert attention from their own privacy practices, and to misrepresent how online advertising works. Google is proud of our privacy protections and looks forward to working with Committee in their exploration of deep packet inspection and other privacy issues.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ref=technology





Jerry Wexler, R&B Impresario, Is Dead at 91
Bruce Weber

Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940s christened black popular music with the name rhythm and blues, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died on Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Paul.

Mr. Wexler was already in his 30s when he entered the music business, but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to American music by inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.

Mr. Wexler actually didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll, at least as it evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Though he signed a British band called Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records by the likes of Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main influence came in the 1950s and ’60s as a vice president of Atlantic Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of gospel, swing and blues.

“He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music,” Jim Henke, vice president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an interview. “Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as well as a critical ear.”

Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.

“He was a bundle of contradictions,” said Tom Thurman, who produced and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. “He was incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very, very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a cerebral and creative genius.”

The title of Mr. Thurman’s documentary, “Immaculate Funk,” was Mr. Wexler’s phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy backbeat and a gospel influence. “It’s funky, it’s deep, it’s very emotional, but it’s clean,” Mr. Wexler once said.

Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ their gifts. In 1950, while he was still at Billboard, he encountered the young singer Patti Page and hummed for her a 1947 song he liked, “The Tennessee Waltz.” Her subsequent recording of it sold three million copies in eight months.

A few years later he was a partner at Atlantic, presiding over the 1954 recording session of Ray Charles’s breakout hit, “I’ve Got a Woman.” He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.

“He had an extraordinary insight into talent,” Charles, who died in 2004, said in “Immaculate Funk.”

Mr. Wexler wasn’t always a mere listener. In the mid-1960s, at a recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a backbeat in the song “In the Midnight Hour” but couldn’t explain in words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the jerk.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms. Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw sexuality, which can be heard in hits like “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood” and “Chain of Fools.”

“How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?” Pickett asked in the documentary. “But Jerry Wexler did.”

Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson River was a summer pastime.

His parents were mismatched. His father, Harry, was a Polish immigrant who spent his entire working life as a window washer. His headstrong mother, Elsa, had higher aspirations for herself and especially for Jerry, the older of her two sons: she wanted him to be writer.

Young Jerry didn’t care for school much, however; he frequented pool halls and record stores instead, and he went to Harlem jazz clubs at night. In 1936, as something of a last-ditch effort to straighten out her wayward son, Elsa Wexler enrolled him at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (known today as Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kan. There he first encountered a rural musical sensibility, and 100 or so miles away, in the lively musical scene of Kansas City, Mo., he could immerse himself in the blues.

Mr. Wexler left college after two years, joined the Army, served stateside during World War II, then returned to Kansas State and finished his degree. By 1949 he was back in New York, married and working as a cub reporter for Billboard. At the time the black popular-music charts in the magazine were gathered under the rubric Race Records.

“We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a Tuesday,” Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web site PopEntertainment.com. “One Friday the editor got us together and said, ‘Listen, let’s change this from Race Records.’ A lot of people were beginning to find it inappropriate. ‘Come back with some ideas on Tuesday.’

“There were four guys on the staff,” he continued. “One guy said this and one guy said that, and I said, ‘Rhythm and blues,’ and they said: ‘Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that.’ In the next issue, that section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race.”

His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black music. When his partner, Herb Abramson, went into the Army, Mr. Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.

Over the next decade Mr. Wexler’s drive, his sales and promotion skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company’s records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry. In the 1950s the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.

In the 1960s, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, while Mr. Wexler — though he signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, had gathered a mix of black and white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and improvisation.

Mr. Wexler brought Otis Redding and Dusty Springfield, among others, to record at Stax’s studio, which was in an old movie palace. Later, after hearing a recording Percy Sledge had made at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, he began producing records there as well, bringing singers like Pickett and Ms. Franklin to work with local musicians.

In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues” (Knopf, 1993), written with David Ritz, Mr. Wexler wrote candidly and self-critically about a personal life that he acknowledged had been intemperate, replete with adulterous liaisons and profligate drug use.

Mr. Wexler’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in High Bridge, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jean Arnold, and a daughter, Lisa Wexler of Kingston, N.Y. Another daughter, Anita, died of AIDS in 1989.

In the early 1970s Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975. (It had been bought by Warner Brothers in 1967.) After the split he worked on his own, and in 1978 he produced Bob Dylan’s album “Saved,” a celebration of the singer’s embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his first Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance, for the song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.

In the 1980s Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing album of Sinatraesque standards, “What’s New,” a project begun when she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for the first time heard the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey.

“When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done,” Ms. Ronstadt told The New York Times in 1983. She added, “One thing Jerry Wexler taught me was that if you’ve got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn’t attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant.”

Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.

“I asked him once,” said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, “ ‘What do you want written on your tombstone, Jerry?’ He said, ‘Two words: More bass.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/ar...wexler.html?hp





States Mull Digital Download Tax
FMQB

Now that e-commerce is obviously here to stay and iTunes song purchases have topped 5 billion downloads, state politicians and tax collectors have begun to levy fees on digital downloads. In 2008 alone, at least nine states have considered digital download taxes, and at least five of those states have enacted them into law, according to CNet News. Nebraska adopted a digital download tax in April, and a similar measure was implemented in Tennessee in June. Indiana, South Dakota and Utah also enacted digital download taxes this year, while lawmakers in Wisconsin and California attempted it but were unsuccessful. Massachusetts has a draft bill circulating now while Wyoming and Washington will be reviewing their download tax policies at the request of tax collectors.

Meanwhile, tech industry groups like NetChoice, which includes eBay, AOL and Yahoo as members, have been lobbying against the rise in so-called "iTaxes."

"With global warming and a world that's running out of oil, the last thing governments should do is add taxes on something that uses no oil and produces no carbon," said NetChoice executive director Steve DelBianco, according to CNet. "A digital download is the greenest way to buy music, movies, and software, since it requires no driving to the store, no delivery vans and no plastics or packaging."

While there are now 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, that tax digital downloads, a number of large states have yet to pursue this method of revenue. Susan Burns of the New York Department of Finance said her employer made clear in 2007 that it does not tax downloaded music or movies. "The sale of digital music delivered electronically to customers for download on their computers... constitutes the sale of intangible property and is not subject to sales or use tax," the department wrote in a music advisory. Burns told CNet that the policy has not changed since the advisories were issued.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=836667





Allman Band Sues Universal Over Digital Royalties

Members of The Allman Brothers Band sued UMG Recordings for more than $10 million on Monday over royalties from compact discs sales and digital downloads services such as Apple's iTunes.

The lawsuit seeks payments from the sale of some of the U.S. Southern rock group's songs recorded for its first label, Capricorn Records, from 1969 to 1980 when the band enjoyed such hits as "Jessica," "Ramblin' Man" and "Midnight Rider."

Band members Greg Allman, Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson, Butch Trucks and Dickey Betts were named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

A spokesperson for UMG Recordings, part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, was not immediately available for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, said UMG "refuses to pay Plaintiffs at the correct royalty rate for its digital exploitation of the Capricorn Masters," including from compact discs, digital downloads and ringtones.

The agreement dated back to a 1985 agreement between the band and Polygram, which Universal bought, that said the band would be paid half of profits from the sale of records by third parties such as Apple's iTunes or any other commercial usage not specified in the agreement, the lawsuit said.

It said UMG had paid only a small fraction of what the band deserved, refused to renegotiate royalties for digital downloads and ringtones and had "wanton disregard" for obligations of the agreement.

"UMG incurs practically no expenses or risks in connection with the Masters, particularly with respect to licensing other companies such as Apple to create and distribute digital downloads ... yet UMG reaps millions of dollars every year from such exploitation," the lawsuit said.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, editing by Philip Barbara)
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...40611920080811





One Man's Quest to Digitize and Publicize Rare Vinyl
Eliot Van Buskirk

Thousands of recordings that had been largely consigned to the realm of prehistory in the digital age have gained a new life, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man.

Cliff Bolling didn't realize what he was getting into when he picked up a copy of the first record he ever owned (Cliff Steward's "Aba Daba Honeymoon") and realized soon after that "there's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records."

Once that first discovery started him collecting the early singles known as 78s, he decided to dub some of them to cassette for playing in his car and sharing the music with fellow enthusiasts. That was about ten years ago.

As the digital music movement started in earnest, Bolling began digitizing his records, and posted a list of first 1,500 songs he had digitized so fellow collectors could see what kind of progress he had made. Finally, he decided to upload MP3s of every song on the list so that he could access them from anywhere, and so that curiosity seekers could find them.

As things stand now, the 57-year-old Portland, Oregon, native has uploaded 3,739 MP3s, with plenty more in the pipeline.

Even with the MP3s, Bolling's site only received 10-30 hits per day until appearing on reddit and StumbleUpon in July, reaching over 11,000 hits at its peak. "I really didn't know there were so many people in the world interested in this music," said Bolling told wired.com. "A lot of younger people go to the site, and it's amazing that they hear songs today that originally were recorded 75 years ago. It's pretty cool that people get to listen to this stuff. As far as copyrights, apparently I'm okay, because nobody's come to shut me down or anything."

But his wife had worried that recordings from the early half of last century would prove offensive to 21st century ears. Would listeners be sophisticated enough to handle once-mainstream sentiments that have since been revealed as racist or sexist? As a result, the site contains a a note that reads, "Please note that what was considered humor early in the 20th century might today be deemed offensive and politically incorrect. Some of these old songs reflect that."

Bolling explained, "My wife told me that I shouldn't put those songs on there because they're racially offensive or sexually offensive. So I asked around, and people said, 'you know, First Amendment –- (do) anything you want." Despite his wife's warnings, Bolling posted the songs with the exception of one, called "Uncle Tom," which can only be heard by contacting him. So far, he says, no one has complained.

"Everybody else seems to think 'well, put them up there -- that's the way they are,'" he said.

On the day I spoke with him, Bolling said his site received traffic from Australia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Romania, Canada, New Zealand, France and Belgium. The collection itself now transcends US borders too, encompassing vintage recordings of Arabic, Greek and Japanese music.

Like the early US recordings, many of these are fairly noisy. But to clean up the hiss and delete the pops using digital techniques would lessen the impact and appeal of hearing such old recordings played over a global network through tiny, great sounding speakers.

As for the equipment he has used for this formidable project, Bolling told us his approach was decidedly old school, in fitting fashion. "I have an old 1950s Gerard turntable that I bought at an estate sale for two and a half bucks, and it's got a GE (General Electric) VR cartridge in it, which is just excellent for playing 78s."

The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality. But as with the music's political content, Bolling said he has yet to receive a copyright-related complaint about the recordings being online. Everyone who has come across the recordings seems happy that they've reappeared, or at the very least, doesn't care one way or the other -- somewhat refreshing, in these times of copyright lawsuits and name calling.

"I get dozens of emails every day from people telling me how wonderful it is to hear this music, and people post links to my webpage on websites all over the world," Bolling told us. "It's truly amazing."

Bolling plans to upload an MP3 for each of the records listed on his site, but his quest doesn't end there. "I think there's only like 150 more (songs on the list) to go, but I've got about 2500 more records to record," said Bolling. "I've been digitizing for about five years," he said, "and it'll probably take me another 10 or 15 years to do the rest of it."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/one-mans-quest.html





Talking To 'Pirates'
Cliff 'cliffski' Harris

A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. "Why do people pirate my games?". It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question. I submitted the bog entry to slashdot and the penny arcade forums, and from there it made it to arstechnica, then digg, then bnet and probably a few other places. The response was massive. This is what I found:

Introduction

Firstly it's worth pointing out that there were LOTs of responses (and they are still coming in now), hundreds of comments on the sites listed, a ton of comments on the blog (despite it crumbling under the strain) and hundreds of emails made it through to me. I read every one of them. They were also generally very long. Few people wrote under 100 words. Some people put tolstoy to shame. It seems a lot of people have waited a long time to tell a game developer the answer to this question. Some people thought my name was chris, or that I developed Braid. But that doesn't matter :D It's worth pointing out that the original question was specific to MY games, because I already do the majority of what people complain about (free demos, easy demo hosting, digital distribution, original games, good tech support etc), but the majority of the replies were aimed at games devs in general, not me. Here is what they said:

The semi-political ones

I got a few people churning out long arguments about whether or not intellectual property is valid, and claiming that it was censorship, or fascism and other variations on this theme. I'm used to reading all this, and find it completely unconvincing, and to be honest, silly. The really interesting news was that this was a trivial proportion of the total replies.

Money

This *did* surprise me. A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating. Many were kids with no cash and lots of time to play games, but many were not. I got a lot of peoples life stories, and a ton of them were my age. Even those who didn't cite cost as their main reason almost always mentioned it at some stage. A lot of anger was directed at the retail $60 games, and console games. People in Australia were especially annoyed about higher prices there. My games were $19-23, but for a lot of people, it was claimed this was far too high. People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

Game Quality

This was a big complaint too. And this also surprised me. I have a very low opinion of most new games, especially triple A ones, but it seems I'm not alone. Although there were many and varied complaints about tech support, game stability, bugs and system requirements, it was interesting to hear so many complaints about actual game design and gameplay. Not a single person said they had felt ripped off by a game due to substandard visuals or lack of content. The consensus was that games got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues. Demos were widely considered to be too short and unrepresentative of the final product. People suspected that the full game was no better than the demo. Almost everyone had a tale of a game that was bought based on hype which turned out to be disappointing.

DRM

This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were reasonable and well put. People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.

Digital Distribution

Lots of people claimed to pirate because it was easier than going to shops. Many of them said they pirate everything that's not on Steam. Steam got a pretty universal thumbs up from everyone. I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam. For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.

Confessions

I got a few people, maybe 5% of the total, who basically said "I do it because I like free stuff and won't get caught. I'd do the same with anything if I knew I'd get away with it." This is depressing, but thankfully a small minority. I also got the occasional bit of abuse and sarcasm from hardcore pirates who have decided I am their enemy. Who would have thought that would happen? They give the other 99% of pirates a bad name, and are the reason people don't listen to pirates.


What I'm going to do about it

There was a point to all this, and it was partly to sell more (I have bills to pay!) as well as hopefully get more people to legitimately play my games. I'd be very happy if some reduction of overall piracy happened too, as I love PC gaming and the current situation is only helping to kill it off. I've thought hard about everything people have said and I have decided to change a few things about my games.

1) No more DRM

I only used DRM for one game (Democracy 2) and it's trivial. It's a one-time only internet code lookup for the full version. I've read enough otherwise honest people complain about DRM to see that its probably hurting more than it help's. I had planned on using the same system for Kudos 2, but I've changed my mind on that. I have also removed it from Democracy 2 today. I now use no DRM at all.

2) Demos

People think demos are too short. My demos *are* short, because the marketing man in me sees that you can't give away too much. I've wanted people to feel a bit annoyed when the demo cuts out, so they buy the game to keep playing. Too many people are put off by this and pirate games so they can see exactly what they are getting. I'll be making my demos much better, and longer, and will retrospectively change this when I get around to it for some of my older games. (I'm swamped with work right now)

3) Price

I think my games are priced right, and was considering charging more for Kudos 2 (which is my biggest and best ever game). I sometimes play casual games for $20 which seem to have maybe a tenth of the effort I put into mine. However, enough people out there see price as a factor to change my mind. I halved the price of Kudos 1 a few days ago, to $9.95. I'll keep an eye on how it does. I'm also strongly inclined to price Kudos 2 lower than I originally planned to.

4) Quality

My games aren't as good as they could be. Ironically, one of the things that reduces your enthusiasm to really go the extra mile in making games is the thought that thousands of ungrateful gits will swipe the whole thing on day one for nothing. It's very demoralizing. But actually talking to the pirates has revealed a huge group of people who really appreciate genuinely good games. Some of the criticisms of my games hit home. I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it. I've gone from being demoralized by pirates to actually inspired by them, and I'm working harder than ever before on making my games fun and polished.

A final note is trying to make it easier for people to buy my games. I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam. I'm always doing what I can to make buying them as quick and easy as possible.

Conclusion

So it was all very worthwhile, for me. I don't think the whole exercise will have much effect on the wider industry. Doubtless there will be more FPS games requiring mainframes to run them, more games with securom, games with no demos, or games with all glitz and no gameplay. I wish this wasn't the case, and that the devs could listen more to their potential customers, and that the pirates could listen more to the devs rather than abusing them. I don't think that's going to happen.
But I gave it a go, and I know my games will be better as a result. I'll never make millions from them, but I think now I know more about why pirates do what they do, I'll be in a better position to keep doing what I wanted, which is making games for the PC.
Thanks for reading.
http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html





Hacker Runs Blu-ray Backups From Hard Drive On PS3
x3sphere

According to internet reports, a hacker going by the alias SKFU has managed to run a Blu-ray disc backup on the PS3. Details are sketchy and the actual hack has yet to be released, but at minimum you’ll need a 60GB hard drive and original disc in order to pull this off, along with a “special” dump of the game you want to run from HDD.

The author further notes that the hack does work without issue on the latest PS3 firmware (2.42) and three games have been tested successfully thus far, one of those being Warhawk. We’ll refrain from commenting on the obvious legal implications of this hack. One thing is for sure, Sony will likely release a firmware patching the flaw as soon as possible.
http://exophase.com/ps3/hacker-runs-...n-ps3-7151.htm





U2 Tracks Leak After Bono Plays Stereo Too Loudly
enigmax

U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who wants file-sharers to be disconnected from the Internet, has something else to complain about today. Four songs from U2’s upcoming album ‘No Line On The Horizon’ have been leaked online after Bono played them too loudly on his stereo - and a fan recorded them.

There’s little file-sharers like more than news of a little payback. Ever since U2 manager Paul McGuiness suggested that people using P2P should have their connection to the Internet severed, he has elevated himself into the ranks of ‘fair game’ in file-sharing circles - and therefore ripe to be pwned. After today, he’s going to want file-sharers executed - or worse.

Proving that if media can be seen, heard or touched it can be copied, songs from U2’s forthcoming album have been leaked online. Four tracks from the album, provisionally entitled ‘No Line On The Horizon’, have appeared on the Internet. The mechanism of the release is pretty comical - Bono blasted the tracks from a stereo in his villa in the South of France so loudly, that a passer-by recognized his voice and recorded them.

Four songs have been put online including the title track, the first single from the album ‘Sexy Boots’, ‘Moment of Surrender’ and ‘For Your Love’.

There’s no doubt that these cam-quality recordings will be particularly poor, but a large section of the file-sharing U2 fans won’t care about that. They have something that they’re not supposed to have and Mr McGuiness has had a bit of egg rubbed in his face - which probably holds more value to file-sharers than a pre-release FLAC rip of the entire album….

…which will appear online too of course, probably before the scheduled November release date.
http://torrentfreak.com/new-u2-album...loudly-080816/





Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its 'Last Stand'

Pandora, other webcasters struggle under high song fees
Peter Whoriskey

Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple's iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet. The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

This week, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) is trying to broker a last-minute deal between webcasters and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies. The negotiations could reduce the per-song rate set by the federal panel last year.

The two sides appear to be far apart, however, with Berman frustrated.

"Most of the rate issues have not been resolved," Berman said. "If it doesn't get much more dramatic quickly, I will extricate myself from the process."

"We're losing money as it is," said Westergren, a former acoustic rocker. "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money."

The digital reproduction of works in print, audio and video has provoked waves of lawsuits over who should benefit from copyrighted works distributed over the Internet.

The media company Viacom sued YouTube for running clips. Record companies have sought to punish file-sharers. And in radio, the digital transformation has recharged long-standing disputes over how much performers and their record companies ought to be paid when a song gets played.

By contrast to traditional radio, which broadcast only one song at any given time, Pandora's technology allows listeners to create their own stations, through which hundreds of thousands of song are played simultaneously.

For example, if a Pandora listener expresses a preference for "Debaser" by the Pixies, Pandora will search its catalog for songs that have similar musical qualities and create a station accordingly.

Soon after its launch, Pandora drew raves and listeners. Revenue at the growing company, which is supported by venture capital investors, was slated to rise above costs for the first time in 2009, Westergren said.

Then came the decision by the Copyright Royalty Board.

"I was on the bus when I get this message on my Treo," Westergren said. "I thought, 'We're dead.' "

SoundExchange, the organization that represents performers and record companies, said it supports the higher royalties for Internet radio because musicians deserve a bigger cut of Internet radio profits.

"Our artists and copyright owners deserve to be fairly compensated for the blood and sweat that forms the core product of these businesses," said Mike Huppe, general counsel for SoundExchange.

The Copyright Royalty Board last year decided that the fee to play a music recording on Web radio should step up from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2006 to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2010.

Multiplied by the millions of songs and thousands of listeners Pandora serves, that means the company will have to pay about $17 million this year, Westergren said.

The effect may be even worse for smaller outfits. Many small webcasters have said that the royalties as determined by the copyright board would be 100 percent to 300 percent of annual revenue, said David Oxenford, a lawyer who represents some of them.

"Obviously, that's not going to work," he said.

Even more galling to webcasters is the fact that they pay more for playing a song than traditional or satellite radio, a result of patchwork regulation created as each technology emerged.

Traditional radio pays nothing in performance royalties, though SoundExchange is pressing to change that. Satellite radio pays 6 or 7 percent of revenue. And then there are webcasters, which pay per song, per listener.

Using listener figures from Arbitron for XM Satellite Radio, it is possible to estimate that the company will pay about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener.

SoundExchange officials argue that because different media have different profit margins, it is appropriate to set different royalty rates.

Moreover, they complain, Internet radio stations have done too little to make money from playing their songs.

Pandora makes advertising money only from spots placed on its Web page, not on audio ads that run between songs. Other stations are similarly struggling to persuade companies to pay for advertising in the new medium.

"We're taking this challenge very seriously," Westergren said. "When we have our board meetings, the central topic is the revenue trajectory, not how happy our users are."

He said Pandora has a 30-person ad sales operation, or about 25 percent of its workforce. The company will soon start running subtler ads similar to those on National Public Radio, too, he said.

"Something like 'The next half hour is brought to you by . . .' " he said.

Westergren and other webcasters argue that Web radio, which generally plays a far wider range of music than is offered by traditional radio, provides invaluable promotion for many independent musicians.

Matt Nathanson, a singer-songwriter who has recorded for both major and independent record labels, said he is worried that the demands placed on Internet radio could "choke" the industry before it gets its footing.

"Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me," he said. "The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue."

Westergren, seemingly wearied by the constant haggling over the issue, signaled that Pandora's investors may also be impatient for an end.

"We're funded by venture capital," he said. "They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn't feel like its headed towards a solution, we're done."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews





Peer-to-Peer Client UTorrent Fixes Serious Vulnerability
Jeremy Kirk

One of the most popular programs used by some to illegally share files under copyright has patched a serious software vulnerability.

The problem affects the P-to-P (peer-to-peer) program uTorrent as well as BitTorrent Mainline, another program based on the uTorrent code. It has been classified as "highly critical," the second most severe ranking of risk, by Secunia, a security vendor in Denmark.

Both programs use the BitTorrent protocol, which has become the most popular method of file sharing worldwide, according to iPoque, a company based in Leipzig, Germany, that specializes in traffic-management appliances for ISPs. The programs collect pieces of a particular file from other computers around the world and assemble it.

The vulnerability can be exploited if a user downloads a malicious torrent, which is a text file that coordinates the downloading of content. The problem causes a stack overflow, which can allow an attacker to upload other malicious software to a PC.

The bug was in the software for at least two years, wrote Rhys Kidd [cq], who is credited with the find and has written a short paper describing the problem.

Users should upgrade to the latest version, 1.8, which also includes support for the Internet Protocol v6, which increases the number of IP addresses available on the Internet. Utorrent will also prompt users to download the upgrade. The latest version of BitTorrent is available on its Web site.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...erability.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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