Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 29th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I think they have got litigation in their reptilian DNA. They're afraid that their intellectual property rights will suffer the same fate that Tokyo has in many Godzilla movies." – Jonathan Handel


"They're savages. It's sad. It's terrible." – Kimberly Cribbs


"No Nana phone. Nana on computer." – Coulter Medeiros, age 2
































Tube of Plenty

I’m having a little fun with a Hewlett-Packard garage sale PC. It was built in ’01. Worked great but came with Windows ME and no re-install discs. Thought it would make a good P2P server for WASTE, BT, Soulseek etc once it had a fresh OS. Cost: $10. First thing was to put XP Pro on but wound up with a dual boot instead of a clean install. Then a moment of confidence had me F disking before checking if it could boot from CD. Too late - it couldn’t. You would not believe what it takes to get one going with floppy discs and exe downloads from MS. Everything reported corrupted - real or not - except this obscure six floppy sequence for users who happen to have an SP1 disc. I didn’t, but it took the floppies beautifully. It just stopped cold at the SP1 prompt, so last month the thing went into mothballs and I moved on.

Then this week while doing something completely different I stumbled across an old CD wallet in an empty apartment. Wouldn’t you know it, inside were two homemade SP1-Pro CD-ROMs. “How 'bout that?” says I. Was never able to get even one. Here were two. Like a genie’s bottle it was.

I can read the signs as well as the next psychic so I took the HP out of the barn and went back through the load sequence installing all six floppies, then XP, then got out the "new" SP 1 disc. Loaded it up and crossed my fingers. It took. After that it was like a regular install. Even up to SP2 (didn't want SP3). I learned it's actually easy to put XP on a box that doesn't boot from the CD drive - if the proper floppies and SP1 discs are around. Nice to know. Now you do too. Maybe that’s the reason. There’re a lot of older PCs out there that people are tossing. They must be good for something. With a little memory and a cable card they could make good DRM-free DVRs, replacing grainy video tapes with easy to share video files. BT tracker here we come.

So now I have a working paperweight. Other than possibly turning it into a Tivo I really have no idea what I’m going to do with it now that I’ve enlisted a 2005 Dell Dimension as my new P2P server, one I also found at a tag sale. It came with XP and a 2.66 processor. After adding some RAM and reinstalling the OS courtesy of discs mailed free from the factory it works great. That’s another thing. My old server was a Compaq workstation from ’99 running XP Pro at 550 MHz which in spite of its obvious anemia could go weeks before reboots. It handled WASTE meshes and torrents with ease. Lots of torrents. I used it to grab 120 gigs from Oink’s 10 day leech week during Christmas ‘06 and while that hammered my router the server itself hardly hiccupped. But it always struggled with browser loads, especially IE and FF, less so with Opera but even still not so great for torrent searches. The Dell solves the problem. Now if I want to surf in my server closet I’m good.

The only problem component is the 12x DVD burner. For some reason it won't make a CD-ROM out of a 700meg AVI file. All my other burners handle that with ease. It makes nice audio CDs but if I want to watch a download on TV with my Phillips DVD/AVI player I have to burn it to a DVD-ROM. A minor matter perhaps but something I’d like to work out eventually. Total cost: $30.

All of this small dollar box business is now possible because clock speeds have basically stopped increasing and the software industry hasn't fully exploited dual core chips. The fact that MS blew Vista and popular programs still run fine on 4 year old hardware makes it that much harder to sell people on new machines. Obviously many people don't know or care about this and unload home computers when all they need is a reinstall but they’re the fringe, even if that's one of the few things supporting the PC industry now.

For people who don't mind playing around with a few discs, or a few clicks in the case of Dells with their dead simple restores, we're now drowning in cheap machines and they're all so much better than the ones we used to buy new for much much more money. It’s a golden age, for me anyway. I mean I just paid $30 for a P4 Dell Dimension 3000. After filling it with 2 gigs of new RAM and that very fast internal reinstall I had a 3.0 GHz gonzo gizmo that cost me a ridiculous $59. This is a major shift. Until recently geezer hardware was low balled because it couldn’t run with the new kids. Now it’s devalued for little more than looks alone. Same thing with tube TVs. Now that everyone's going for paper thin HD screens they can't dump their standard sets fast enough, no matter the condition. I bought a Sony Wega 32" flat CRT last Saturday - for 75 dollars. It retailed for over a grand when new and was worth every penny. Now? Pffft. A friend and I stuffed it in the back of my wagon and hooked it up at my place. It’s 16:9 enhanced and perfect. The previous owners just wanted it out of there, mostly I think because it weighs 163 lbs. It’s the second one I bought in as many weeks.

An unrepentant tube man I happen to be. I like CRTs, their color, contrast, heat, heft and solidity, but I am going to need more room - for them, the PCs and my growing collection of decommissioned curtain-lever voting machines. In case you wondered, those big green multi-cammed monsters tip the scales at over 500 pounds. Each. But that’s another story. Maybe I’ll lease a warehouse. As long as it has a forklift I’m good.

















Happy Thanksgiving,

Jack
















November 29th, 2008




Atlantic Records Says Digital Sales Surpass CDs
Tim Arango

Since MP3s first became popular a decade ago, music industry executives have obsessed over this question: when would digital music revenue finally surpass compact disc sales?

For Atlantic Records, the label that in years past has delivered artists like Ray Charles, John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin, that time, apparently, is now.

Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones.

“We’re like a college basketball team on an 18-2 run,” said Craig Kallman, Atlantic’s chairman and chief executive.

At the Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent company, digital represented 27 percent of its American recorded-music revenue during the fourth quarter. (Warner does not break out financial data for its labels, but Atlantic said that digital sales accounted for about 51 percent of its revenue.)

With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that music sales in the United States will decline to $9.2 billion in 2013, from $10.1 billion this year. That compares with $14.6 billion in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

As a result, the hope that digital revenue will eventually compensate for declining sales of CDs — and usher in overall growth — have largely been dashed.

“It’s not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,” said John Rose, a former executive at EMI, the British music company, who is now a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.

Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. “The real question,” Mr. Rose said, “is how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?”

Ever since 1999, when the popular file-swapping service Napster was created, the music industry’s fate has been closely watched by other media companies — television, film and print publications like newspapers — whose traditional businesses are also under siege.

In virtually all these corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, has described as “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

In each of these sectors, digital remains a small piece of the business. NBC has said it expects $1 billion in digital revenue by 2009; over all, the company’s revenue last year was more than $15 billion. Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher, with publications like Sports Illustrated, People and Fortune, said that about 9 percent of its $2.2 billion revenue in the first half of this year was derived from digital. In October, The New York Times Company said that online revenue accounted for 12.4 percent of its overall revenue.

On Tuesday, the Warner Music Group reported that digital revenue for the full fiscal year rose 39 percent, to $639 million, or 18 percent of the company’s total revenue. Over all, the company topped the expectations of Wall Street analysts — who on average were forecasting a small loss, according to Reuters — by reporting a net profit of $6 million in the fourth quarter. Revenue fell 1 percent, to $854 million.

Atlantic, whose artists include the Southern rapper T. I., the rock band Death Cab for Cutie and Kid Rock, appears to be the first of the major labels to claim that most of its revenue is coming from digital sales — and it says it has done so without seeing as steep of a decline in compact disc sales as the rest of the industry.

This performance is sharply at odds with the trends in the music industry over all, where data show that sales of compact discs still account for more than two-thirds of music sales. Forrester Research does not expect digital music to reach 50 percent of the overall pie until 2011.

Analysts said they were surprised that Atlantic — with the highest overall market share in the industry this year — had such a high percentage of digital revenue.

“That’s a lot,” said David Card, a digital music analyst at Forrester Research. “That’s very high. No one is near that.”

The question, then, is whether Atlantic’s performance an outlier or a signal that the music industry is reaching a pivot point as it moves toward a new business model?

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”

In making that transition to a digital business, the music business has become immeasurably more complicated. Replacing compact disc sales are small bits of revenue from many sources: Atlantic Records’ digital sales include ring tones, ringbacks, satellite radio, iTunes sales and subscription services. At the same time, record labels — Atlantic included — are spending less money to market artists. In the pre-Internet days, said Ms. Greenwald, “we were so flush, we did everything in the name of promotion.” Among the cutbacks are less spending to produce videos and to support publicity tours when a new album is released.

“Today you have to be like Leonard Bernstein,” said Mr. Kallman, “making sure everyone is hitting the right notes at just the right millisecond. The tipping point, if you will, is when everything converges and your timing with everything is impeccable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/bu...c.html?_r=1&hp





Mo. Mom Convicted in MySpace Bullying Case
Ashley Surdin

A Missouri woman who posed as a 16-year-old boy on MySpace, wooed and rejected a troubled teenage girl who later committed suicide was found guilty Wednesday of three misdemeanor charges, but no felonies, by a federal jury.

According to published reports, the jury rejected felony charges of accessing a computer without authorization for Lori Drew, the 49-year-old mother from O'Fallon, Mo., who allegedly posed as a 16-year-old boy to harass a former friend of her daughter's. The jury did, however, find Drew guilty of three lesser misdemeanor counts.

The jurors could not reach a verdict on a count of conspiracy.

The verdict in the nationally watched cyber-bullying case comes nearly two years after the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier, referred to in court documents as "M.T.M." Meier hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom closet within an hour of being dumped by "Josh Evans," the fictitious identity that Drew assumed on the popular networking Web site.

A federal grand jury indicted Drew on four counts in May, alleging that she and others, including her daughter Sarah, then 13, and an 18-year-old assistant, registered as a member of MySpace to contact Meier and reel her into what she believed was online romance with a new boy in town. Each count carried a maximum of five years in prison, but Wednesday's lesser misdemeanor charges probably mean no jail time for Drew.

Prosecutors had alleged that Drew and Drew's employee violated MySpace's "terms of service" that prohibit users from using fraudulent registration information, obtaining personal information about juvenile members or using the service to harass, abuse or harm others.

During the five-day trial, they portrayed Drew as the mastermind behind an intentional scheme to humiliate Meier, despite knowing the girl -- once her daughter's best friend -- suffered from depression. Drew wanted to know whether Meier was spreading rumors about her daughter, prosecutors argued, and bragged about the scheme to others.

Defense attorney H. Dean Steward argued that prosecutors tried to mislead jurors into thinking the case was about murder and reminded them that it is a computer case. Specifically, he said, the question before jurors was whether Drew violated the terms-of-service agreement of MySpace -- something, he said, "nobody reads."

Wednesday's verdict underscores the difficulties of the case. Some legal experts and civil liberties groups argued that the prosecution's case would mean that millions of people who violate the terms of service at the Web sites they visit could become criminally liable. Experts also said that if violating terms of service is a crime, then the Web sites that write the agreements essentially could function as lawmakers or prosecutors.

Meier had struggled with depression since third grade, was bullied in school and had self-esteem problems, her parents Ron and Tina Meier said in a television interview a year ago. In 2006, they allowed her to open up a MySpace account under their supervision and said the messages from "Josh" were the first affectionate ones their daughter had ever received.

"He thought she was really pretty," Tina Meier said.

Four weeks into the exchanges, "Josh" broke off the relationship with Meier, her father said, sending a message that "the world would be a better place without" her. Within an hour after receiving it, Meier took her own life.

Meier's father said he logged online days later to contact "Josh," but the profile was deleted. A neighbor later told them that "Josh" was created by a mother down the street, a woman who had attended their daughter's funeral.

The resulting public outrage led state and federal prosecutors in Missouri to examine the case, but after a meeting in March 2007, "it was decided that the case should be declined for federal prosecution," according to an internal memo from the FBI's St. Louis office.

Federal prosecutors in the Los Angeles area, where MySpace's servers are, picked up the case, calling it the first of its kind in the nation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews





Web Suicide Viewed Live and Reaction Spur a Debate
Brian Stelter

For a 19-year-old community college student in Pembroke Pines, Fla., the message boards on BodyBuilding.com were a place to post messages, at least 2,300 of them, including more than one about his suicidal impulses. In a post last year, he wrote that online forums had “become like a family to me.”

“I know its kinda sad,” the student, Abraham Biggs, wrote in parenthesis, adding that he posted about his “troubles and doubts” online because he did not want to talk to anyone about them in person.

Last Wednesday, when Mr. Biggs posted a suicide note and listed the drug cocktail he intended to consume, the Web site hardly acted like a family. On BodyBuilding.com, which includes discussions of numerous topics besides bodybuilding, and on a live video Web site, Justin.tv, Mr. Biggs was “egged on” by strangers who, investigators say, encouraged him to swallow the antidepressant pills that eventually killed him.

Mr. Biggs’s case is the most recent example of a suicide that played out on the Internet. Live video of the death was shown online to scores of people, leading some viewers to cringe while others laughed. The case, which has prompted an outpouring of sympathy and second-guessing online, demonstrates the double-edged nature of online communities that millions of people flock to every day.

Online communities “are like the crowd outside the building with the guy on the ledge,” Jeffrey Cole, a professor who studies technology’s effects on society at the University of Southern California. “Sometimes there is someone who gets involved and tries to talk him down. Often the crowd chants, ‘Jump, jump.’ They can enable suicide or help prevent it.”

On blogs and forums last week, some people wondered whether Mr. Biggs had hoped that by broadcasting his suicide, he would attract attention and cause someone to intervene. Viewers eventually called the police, but only after he had lapsed into unconsciousness. The video streaming Web site, Justin.tv, said Monday that it hoped its members would be “more vigilant” in the future.

It was not the first time someone had used the Web in this way. In Arizona in 2003, a man overdosed on drugs while writing about his actions in a chat room. In Britain last year, a man hanged himself while chatting online and webcasting. In both cases, other users reportedly encouraged the individual.

Sometimes other users show support in troubling ways. In a number of well-publicized cases in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, people have formed suicide pacts on the Internet and met in person to carry out their plans.

“If somebody threatens suicide or attempts suicide, it’s never a joke,” said Joshua Perper, the chief medical examiner for Broward County, where Mr. Biggs lived. “It always requires attention. It’s basically a cry for help.”

Much of the evidence of Mr. Biggs’s suicide and the reactions of users was removed from BodyBuilding.com and Justin.tv after his death was confirmed. But according to a chronology posted by a fellow user, Mr. Biggs listed the pills he had obtained and posted a suicide note that he had copied from another Web site. He directed people to his page on Justin.tv, where anyone can plug in a webcam and stream live video onto the Internet. In a chat room adjacent to the live video, the “joking and trash talking” continued after Mr. Biggs consumed the pills and lay on his bed, according to the user, who said he tried to reach the local police from his home in India.

Several other concerned users called the police when it appeared that Mr. Biggs had stopped breathing. As officers entered the room, according to a screen capture of the incident that circulated online, 181 people were watching the video. In the chat room, users typed the acronyms for “oh my God” and “laugh out loud” before the police covered the webcam.

After his death was confirmed, words of sympathy were interspersed with complaints about Mr. Biggs’s behavior on the free-wheeling “Miscellaneous” section of BodyBuilding.com, where he frequently posted. Some users claimed that Mr. Biggs had threatened to commit suicide repeatedly in the past.

Mr. Biggs’s family has said he suffered from bipolar disorder and was being treated for depression. Telephone messages left at the home of Mr. Biggs’s father, Abraham Biggs Sr., were not returned Sunday. But in an interview with The Associated Press, the father said he was appalled by the lack of responsiveness on the part of the users and the operators.

“As a human being, you don’t watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch,” he said, before suggesting that “some kind of regulation is necessary.”

The case remains under investigation by the Pembroke Pines Police Department.

Justin.tv said in a statement, “As a result of this event we are confident that all online community members will be ever more vigilant in monitoring and protecting their fellow users in the future.”

While sites like Justin.tv will remove content they find objectionable after the fact, the content of video sites and chat rooms are largely at the control of the users.

M. David Rudd, chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech University, said the Internet did not fully live up to its potential to help with suicide prevention. “Most of what’s available via the Internet only serves to make the problem worse,” Mr. Rudd said, whether it is information about how to commit suicide or immature comments from chat room users.

Mr. Cole of the University of Southern California described the death of Alethea Gates, a teenager in New Zealand, who killed herself after using Google to read about different methods of suicide. Rather than blaming the Internet, her parents said they wished that the Google search had turned up links to suicide prevention Web sites. In effect, they wished the Web had shouted “step back from the ledge” instead of “jump.” (Many Google searches that include the word suicide include sponsored links to prevention Web sites.)

Mr. Rudd said he believed that Mr. Biggs was not seeking an audience online.

“What he was really doing was expressing his ambivalence about dying and, in an awkward manner, asking for help,” he said.

But the virtual nature of the community — distant, largely unaccountable and often seeking entertainment — was equally ambivalent. Hours after Mr. Biggs died, some of the forum users still sounded highly skeptical of the case. Others asked to see the video.

“The anonymous nature of these communities only emboldens the meanness or callousness of the people on these sites,” Mr. Cole said. “Rarely does it bring out greater compassion or consideration.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/us/25suicides.html





Grandma’s on the Computer Screen
Amy Harmon

Her grandfather wanted to play tea party, but Alexandra Geosits, 2½, insisted she had only apple juice. She held out a plastic cup, giggling as she waited to see if he would accept the substitute.

That they were a thousand miles apart, their weekly visit unfolding over computer screens in their respective homes, did not faze either one. Like many other grandchildren and grandparents who live far apart, Alex and Joe Geosits (pronounced GAY-sits), 69, have become fluent in the ways of the Web cam.

“Delicious,” Mr. Geosits exclaimed from Florida, pretending to take a sip from the cup, which remained clasped here in Alex’s small hand.

Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters.

In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives.

But at a time when millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the Web cam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there.

“We would be strangers to them if we didn’t have the Web cam,” said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who will be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City this year.

Over the last year, Ms. Pierce and her husband watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the Web cam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie’s drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.

But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. “You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them,” said Ms. Pierce, a nursing professor. “Seeing them makes you miss them more.”

Nearly half of American grandparents live more than 200 miles from at least one of their grandchildren, according to AARP. Prof. Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has found that about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that.

But many grandparents find that the Web cam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or may reject their hugs because they do not recognize them. As one Web cam evangelist wrote on her blog, www.nanascorner.com: “You’ll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming up to you, awkward moments.”

On Ms. Pierce’s most recent visit to New Jersey last month, for instance, Dylan called out the nickname he uses for her over the Web cam, “Buffy!” and jumped into her arms. “It melted my heart,” Ms. Pierce said.

Urged on by strong word of mouth from fellow grandparents, they are often the ones to buy Web cams for their grandchildren (or, technically, their own adult children, who then have to plug them in). But the youngsters, who spend much of their time playing games of pretend, may shuttle more easily between the virtual and the real.

When Gail Hecox of Park City, Utah, shows her 2-year-old granddaughter Lily her cats over the Web cam, the child often pats the space on the ottoman next to the laptop and says “meow, meow,” as though “it should be able to walk through the screen,” Ms. Hecox said.

Many grandchildren play as their grandparents watch from afar, and when Coulter Medeiros, almost 3, of Cincinnati, wants to summon his grandmother in Massachusetts, he simply points to his parents’ computer and says, “Nana on there.”

Substitutions of retrograde technology are frowned on. If Nana is at work, without the Web cam-equipped computer she bought to visit with him, Coulter’s mother, Elizabeth, sometimes puts her on speakerphone. “No Nana phone,” Coulter says. “Nana on computer.”

The adult children in a family have their own reasons for encouraging the Web cam enthusiasm of the younger and older generations. When Martha Rodenborn discovered that Elena, now 4, would sit happily in front of the computer in their Upper West Side apartment while her grandmother read her piles of picture books from Ohio, the Web cam quickly became a vehicle for remote baby-sitting.

“It was a lifesaver,” said Ms. Rodenborn, who graduated from Columbia Law School last spring.

Because the Web cam connection is free, parents often keep it on as long as a grandparent is willing to make funny faces and animal sounds.

But for adult children pressed into service as real-time documentarians, the experience can also be taxing.

After Alex Geosits’s virtual apple juice party with her grandparents on a recent Sunday, her father chased her upstairs, laptop in hand, as she went to get a favorite doll. Then he followed her around the living room as she played hide-and-seek and showed her bellybutton. Finally, it was her snack time, and he could relax.

The recent inclusion of Web cams in most laptops helps account for the 20 percent growth in video calling over the last year, said Rebecca Swensen, an analyst at the technology research firm IDC.

Internet companies are also promoting “video chat” as an enhancement to standard instant-messaging and Internet phone services. Google, for instance, which makes money from the advertisements in its popular Gmail Web-based e-mail software, introduced video capability for Gmail this month.

About 20 million people around the world have made a video call for personal communication in the last month, Ms. Swensen said. American soldiers in Iraq beam themselves home over Web cams; parents on business trips (including President-elect Barack Obama) bid goodnight to their children, face-to-onscreen-face.

But grandparents and grandchildren are already working on ways to nudge the medium a little closer to actual teleportation.

When Deborah Lafferty, 55, and her granddaughter Natalie, 2, want to hug, for instance, Natalie comes to the screen in Seattle and squeezes her own face, just as her grandmother does to her when she visits from England. Ms. Lafferty, in turn, squeezes her face. “Grammy loves you so much,” she says, echoing the phrase she uses in person.

Grandparents also use their own children as surrogates to close the tactile gap. Barbara Turner once sang her fussing newborn grandson to sleep from Ottawa, watching as her son rocked him in Indiana. She said she could almost feel the baby snuggling against her shoulder.

But last week Ms. Turner and her husband rushed to Indiana to be on hand for the birth of her second grandchild. “Some things you just can’t do over the Web cam,” she said. “You make the trip.”

Still, some veterans of the technology fear that the video cam has started to substitute, rather than supplement, actual time together. Jennifer Ray, 24, of San Antonio, and her brother persuaded their parents to get a new computer so they could all video chat with their respective toddlers on split screens from different states. Now the siblings commiserate about their mother’s unwillingness to travel.

“She still comes,” said Ms. Ray of her mother, Diane Heyman, who lives in Arizona. “But not nearly as often.”

Ms. Heyman, 49, admitted: “It’s probably true. You feel like you’re actually seeing them and interacting with them, so it eases that longing.”

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worries that ever-more-real virtual encounters (holograms may be next) could make us forget what we are missing in the case of a grandchild: the smell of a grandmother’s cooking, the warmth of an embrace. In interviews, older grandchildren who video chat with grandparents say they visit them less, feeling that they have already “seen” them.

“It’s important that we not start to equate what the technology can deliver with what we can deliver to each other without the technology,” Ms. Turkle said.

But the Web cam generation may already be recalibrating how much value to place on the sharing of real space with another person. Is it better for a grandchild to video chat twice a week and visit twice a year, or to visit four times a year? Perhaps, having built intimate relationships with them early on through the Web cam, they will choose both.

For now, when Jacob Mosier’s mother, Ginny, of Las Vegas, tells him they are going to visit Mamaw and Grumpa, in Scottsdale, Ariz., the 2-year-old runs to the computer and waits happily for it to boot up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27minicam.html?hp





"Three Strikes and You're Out" Struck Down
Glyn Moody

Wow. I was convinced that the meeting of EU culture ministers yesterday was going to end badly; I was wrong - and I take my virtual hat off to them:

EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading, instead agreeing to promote legal offers of music or films on the Internet.

The EU Culture Council pushed yesterday (20 November) for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property".

The Council conclusions also stressed the importance of "consumers' expectations in terms of access […] and diversity of the content offered online". No mention was made of a gradual response to serial downloaders of illegal cultural material, as foreseen by the French authorities.

I think this is very significant, because it indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do, and that there are serious issues to do with freedom of information at stake here that cannot simply be brushed aside as Sarkozy and his media chums wish to do.

Judging by the generally sensible tone of the meeting's conclusions, the optimist in me starts to hope that the tide is finally turning. However, I do wonder whether this saga is finished yet, or whether the Telecoms Package still has some teeth that it can bare....
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/20...ruck-down.html





Anti-Piracy Lobby Defeats European Democracy
Ernesto

An amendment designed to protect Internet users from the anti-piracy lobby has been rejected by President Sarkozy of the European Council. The rejection goes against the will of the European Parliament, where 88% of the members already voted in favor of the amendment, which was originally destined to protect file-sharers from Internet disconnection under the ‘3 strikes’ framework.

When the European Parliament accepted the amendment this September, it did so to protect the rights and freedoms of Internet users. This was much needed, as in recent years, anti-piracy lobby groups have called for tougher monitoring of Internet users and are actively working to erode their rights further.

The amendment, drafted by Guy Bono and other members of the European Parliament, was supposed to put a halt to the march of the anti-piracy lobby. However, despite the fact that is was adopted by an overwhelming majority, with 573 parliament members voting in favor with just 74 rejections, the European Council went against this democratic vote.

In September, Bono stated in a response to the vote: “You do not play with individual freedoms like that,” going on to say that the French government should review its three-strikes law. Sarkozy had other plans though, and in his position of President of the European Council, he convinced his friends this Thursday to reject the proposal.

The rejection also goes against conclusions from the EU culture ministers last week, who sided with the more balanced view of the European Commission, by encouraging copyright holders to work on offering “high quality, accessible, easy to use and consumer friendly” content online - instead of chasing pirates.

Guy Bono was appalled by the recent decision of the Council, which he referred to as “an arrangement between friends.” Not all is lost though, the amendment might pass in January or February 2009, when it will be proposed again. However, as Bono noted, this initial rejection is likely to result in a negative image of European democracy.

It seems that the lobbying efforts of the MPAA, RIAA and others have paid off, and for France and other European member states the road to a ‘three-strikes law’ for alleged pirates is now wide open again.

In France, Sarkozy will now go forward with implementing his controversial three-strikes law. We can only hope that other European countries wont follow this example. What a great demokarzy Europe has.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...ocracy-081129/





Actors Union to Seek Strike Authorization
Bob Tourtellotte

The main union representing U.S. film and television actors said on Saturday it would seek a strike authorization vote by members after federal mediation failed to break a logjam in labor talks with major Hollywood studios.

The Screen Actors Guild, which represents 120,000 performers across the United States, said in a statement on Saturday that no timeline had been set for a vote, which would give SAG leaders the go-ahead to call for a work stoppage and provide leverage in negotiations.

"Management continues to insist on terms we cannot responsibly accept on behalf of our members," SAG said in its statement. "We will now launch a full-scale education campaign in support of a strike authorization referendum."

Two major sticking points center on exactly which Internet film and TV projects would be covered by SAG contracts and how much actors should be paid for content delivered over the Web.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios, responded with a terse statement noting it reached labor agreements this year on similar issues with guilds for directors, writers and a separate performers' union.

"SAG is bizarrely asking its members to bail out the failed negotiating strategy with a strike vote -- at a time of historic economic crisis," the AMPTP statement said.

Doug Allen, SAG's national executive director and chief negotiator, characterized the AMPTP as being "stubborn."

"Members need to send a powerful message to management that they are frustrated management isn't listening to them,' he told Reuters.

Allen declined to provide details on the two days of talks that broke off early on Saturday. As for seeking a strike authorization in the current economic slump, Allen said it was exactly the right time to bargain hard for middle-income actors, most of whom do not earn lavish movie-star salaries.

"We acknowledge these are tough times, but that's why we need to address the way an actor makes a living," he said. "The economic crisis makes it even more important to get a good deal out of this."

Strike authorization would require 75 percent approval of members who cast a vote. Industry watchers think that may be tough to achieve in light of the economic slump and fatigue from a tumultuous 14-week work stoppage by the Writers Guild of America in late 2007 and 2008.

The WGA walkout idled thousands of Hollywood workers, brought prime-time TV production to a virtual halt and cost the Los Angeles economy an estimated $3 billion.

Talks between SAG and the AMPTP started earlier this year but the studios cut off negotiations June 30 after giving SAG a "final" offer only hours before the old labor deal expired. Actors have since worked without a new contract.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...4AJ8W320081122





Will Obama's Copyright Czar Help Save the Music?
Antony Bruno

From Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Wonder, plenty of musicians supported President-elect Barack Obama. Now music executives are wondering what kind of support they'll see from the Obama administration.

Soon after an inauguration that Washington, D.C., insiders are speculating could be one of the musical events of the year, Obama will officially name a copyright czar -- one of the most important decisions he'll make, as far as the music business is concerned.

That position -- officially known by the less glamorous-sounding title of intellectual property enforcement coordinator -- was created by the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, signed in mid-October. The law is aimed at coordinating the anti-piracy efforts of such disparate agencies as the Department of Justice, the Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. Trade Representative.

While more urgent positions, like Treasury Secretary, are likely to push back the decision until after Obama takes office January 30, speculation has already begun around who could -- and should -- get the job.

Music executives want a candidate with experience working with government, expertise in copyright law and -- perhaps most importantly -- appreciation for the importance of intellectual property. The name most commonly mentioned at this point is lobbyist Hal Ponder, director of government relations at the American Federation of Musicians and the former director of policy for the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees. While Ponder says that he hasn't had direct conversations with Obama's transition team, he says, "it's a job that would be very interesting."

The music industry's first choice is probably another lobbyist, Michele Ballantyne, senior VP of federal government and industry relations for the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the trade group for the major U.S. labels. She has impressive connections among Democrats: She was the general counsel for former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and a special counselor to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, who is leading Obama's transition team.

Another name in the mix is George Mason law professor Victoria Espinel, who held several positions in the U.S. Trade Representative's office. And rounding out the shortlist is a name familiar to Nashville veterans: Bill Ivey, former head of the Country Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Academy. He's currently at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but he's working with Obama's transition team on cultural agency appointments.

Whoever Obama appoints can expect scrutiny from the content and technology industries. While ostensibly a coordinating position, the copyright czar job could easily expand to include advising the president.

Naturally, the technology industry -- where Obama has many supporters -- would like someone in that role who has a more liberal definition of fair use. And Obama has also talked of creating a post for an official chief technology officer, who would presumably favor that as well.

Obama's list of technology gurus includes former IAC/InterActive executive Julius Genachowski, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google head of global development initiatives Sonal Shah. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a vocal advocate of radically reduced copyright restrictions, served as a technology adviser to Obama's primary campaign but hasn't held an advisory role since.

"There is some concern in the copyright community about people who have been involved in the tech side of this campaign," says Recording Academy VP of government relations Daryl Friedman. "It's probably an overblown concern. We think he will be balanced."
Of course, the content industry also has strong allies in Vice President-elect Joseph Biden -- a well-established supporter of copyright enforcement -- and Podesta, who before his stint in the Clinton White House served as chief minority counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081115/tv_nm/us_obama_4





Multiscreen Mad Men
Moderated by Jack Hitt

I. THE END OF FLOW

Jack Hitt: I read a study recently suggesting that Americans now swim through most of their day looking at some kind of screen — screens on their cellphones, on their desks, in their kitchens, everything from digital billboards on the highway and in the back of a cab to the eruption of screens in urban centers. Times Square is no longer an unusual attraction; it’s the norm. The side of a building can now be made to broadcast video. There is hardly a public space left — a bar, a gym, the dentist’s office — that hasn’t been vanquished by some kind of screen. Now, let’s say I’ve got something to sell. This multiplicity of screens would seem to be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

Benjamin Palmer: What the proliferation of screens has done is give a bazillion creators the power to publish. There are now billions of hours of content, which means new places for advertisers to latch on to — lots of content that pockets of people find interesting. But the shift you’re describing makes things more complicated for advertisers too. When the TV networks held the reins for content, all advertising had to do was buy into the public consciousness of entertainment, which was television.

Lars Bastholm: It used to be really easy for us to advertise anything because consumers had no idea what they were buying. We could basically sell them whatever we wanted. But the Internet has made everything so transparent.

Robert Rasmussen: A brand could tell people what was cool because there was less freedom of choice in media. A brand could say, “This is the latest thing, and everybody’s doing it,” and if the message was persuasive enough, you might believe it. Now you can check on that on the Internet and see whether everybody actually is doing it. Brands have become transparent, and that’s changed the tone of advertising. Now you have to try to be more authentic — even if it’s just authentically acknowledging that what you’re doing is advertising.

Bastholm: Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no prime time. There’s no such thing as must-see TV. Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back. You’re like, Why would I have somebody dictate to me what I watch when I’m used to programming for myself?

Rasmussen: So advertising is by necessity a fractured narrative. We have a story we want to tell, and we use different media channels and different touch points to tell it. We have to rely on the consumer to pull the story together.

Palmer: Marketing has actually always been very comfortable with the notion that a brand story can exist in multiple forms. Even before the Internet, advertising had to come up with a point of view that would work well in a magazine, on a sign, along the side of a bus or on TV, all at the same time. We needed to be able to tell a story that could exist in fragments, and no matter which fragments people saw and in what order they assembled them together in their head, it still added up to the same message. Now that’s happening with content, too. People are consuming all their information and their stories from multiple sources and putting the pieces together on their own, and sometimes the content is not written to hold up to that kind of fragmenting and reassembling. But advertising has actually always been made to hold up to that. So the way people put together marketing is actually the way everybody is absorbing new forms of media now.

Hitt: So you’re saying that even 10 years ago, advertising was delivering piecemeal narrative.

Rasmussen: You just didn’t realize it. Remember “Star Wars”? The bigger narrative was about the way people involved “Star Wars” in their lives: the T-shirts, all the talk about it, the fan fiction, the nicknames, the dialogue people quoted. People were willing to brand themselves with all these other elements that were outside the movie experience.

Bastholm: In those days, though, there was usually more of a brand monologue. Your brand would just spout whatever values you were trying to instill in your consumers. If it worked, great. People would talk about it around the water cooler.

Hitt: And that doesn’t work anymore?

Bastholm: Right. That process became too transparent. Now our job is to have a conversation with your consumers about whatever story it is you want to tell about the brand.

Hitt: Which companies do you think are having that dialogue successfully?

Bastholm: EA Sports, the video-game company, is a good example. On YouTube, someone posted a clip of himself playing the company’s Tiger Woods golf game. He put it up as a joke, laughing at EA Sports, because he had discovered a glitch in the programming that allowed Tiger to walk right out onto a pond next to the golf course and shoot his ball from there. So the company saw the video, and in response, it uploaded this ad to YouTube that said: “It’s not a glitch. He’s just that good.” The ad showed the real Tiger, in live action, actually walk on water and shoot a ball. That’s a great example of responding to how consumers interact with your brand.

Palmer: It used to be that companies would commission a study at great expense to find out what people thought about their product. Now you just go online and find out. It’s really scary at first. You realize there’s a whole dialogue going on outside your brand, and you can’t control it.

Bastholm: The feedback you get, though, is so much richer and more immediate than what we used to get. In focus groups, there’s always one guy who sort of steals the room, so you wind up getting his opinion and no one else’s. On YouTube, you put your ad up, and right away you can read the comments. It’s such a democracy.

Rasmussen: Online marketing is kind of like a video game that way. You can keep track of precisely how many people see your content and exactly how much they relate to it. As soon as you put it out there, you can keep score.

Bastholm: And that’s scary as well, because of the instantaneousness of it. I mean, people will call you on things in a heartbeat, and then you’re stuck with a mess that everybody is describing as such.

Hitt: Are there brands that are resisting this kind of change?

Palmer: Sure. Almost any household brand you would find under your sink or in your medicine cabinet. The macaroni-and-cheese products of our daily lives. They assume their business practices will carry on forever. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to do some bleach advertising. I wanted to do something that everybody has in their house and nobody ever talks about. I remember meeting some people from Clorox and being like, “Man, we should do some cool stuff and get people talking about bleach.” And I doggedly stayed with it for a while, but it just didn’t fit into their consciousness.

Rasmussen: It’s not just Clorox. Even brands that are doing very well are resistant to this change. They want to take advantage of all these new media channels, but they’re afraid.

Bastholm: We used to joke that advertising was “lying for a living.” We got away with that back then. We can’t anymore. And now, if we get caught in a lie, we’re in trouble.

II. FACEBOOK OVERALLS

Hitt: Let me give you a scenario. I’m the somewhat desperate C.E.O. of a company called Jack’s Overalls. We manufacture functional clothes, and in the era of corporate farming, our market is fading. My younger vice presidents are telling me that we need to try new media. So I’m turning to you: Why should I even consider these emerging media? Can’t I just spend my money on old-school, 30-second spots on prime-time television?

Bastholm: Well, we do have a ton of different new media and new ways to use them. But before we get there, I would suggest that first, you take a step backward and ask yourself, How do I make my brand relevant? Overalls are a staple of Americana, a cultural icon. The question is, How can you make overalls relevant to people today, and how can you use these different media channels to accomplish that?

Palmer: Your customers in the past have been farmers. Overalls are a commodity.

Rasmussen: Very functional. And your market is shrinking.

Palmer: So you have to create a new market. Farming may be going away, but what’s on the rise? Right now your overalls are made with special pockets and holders for farming tools. Maybe we retool them for urban farmers, as it were, and their specialized gear. You have special pockets for your iPhone and your BlackBerry, and a pocket for your headphones, another for your wallet, your subway card, your keys.

Bastholm: Let’s really take the brand into the 21st century, shall we? Why don’t we put a ShotCode on the front of every single pair of overalls. A ShotCode is like a bar code. You scan it with the camera in your cellphone. And then something comes out the other end. With bar codes, it’s a price. But with a ShotCode, it could be a song, it could be a picture, it could be a link to a Web site.

Hitt: People would come up and shoot me with a cellphone?

Bastholm: Yes, with a phone camera. So you’d be wearing a pair of overalls, and you have your own personal ShotCode on the front. The ShotCode might take people online to a new Web site you’ve selected. Or a picture you took that day or your favorite song. All of a sudden you have a uniquely personalizable pair of overalls that can say something different about you on a daily basis. You’d utilize a whole bunch of screens that we haven’t really seen used in clothes before, and this loop of screens is creating something completely unique.

Rasmussen: Maybe that’s something you do in partnership with Facebook or MySpace.

Palmer: But you don’t want to suddenly be seen as, like, this newfangled Internet overall company. If you’re talking to somebody who’s over 40, that’s going to freak them out, you know? So this becomes your special-edition ShotCode overalls. You place ads only on social networks, like MySpace or Flickr. Facebook users can buy the Facebook edition of these overalls. They come precoded with your Facebook page embedded as your ShotCode. But if you’re not a Facebook person, you’re never going to know about this unique brand.

Rasmussen: You can market 100 different kinds of overalls and sell those to different target groups.

Palmer: It’s self-selecting, actually. The more narrowly you talk to your audience through these new screens, the more people and products will gravitate toward one another. And nobody else will necessarily know or care that that’s happening. Take Vans, for instance. They do all sorts of special customized editions. Like they’ll do an Iron Maiden edition of Vans. But if you’re not into Iron Maiden, you might never see that. You see it only if you gravitate toward it through these screens.

Rasmussen: I would recommend a Web presence built around a utility that engages consumers and allows them to take your brand and own it. Maybe you give customers the ability to mix and match your overalls with other clothes. Maybe you create a widget that lets you drag your overalls and drop them onto an existing image. And the program blends the overalls with the outfit, so you can say, “Boom, that’s how it would look if I wore a pair of cord overalls with a blue jean jacket.”

Bastholm: Yeah, create a little viral engine called You Need Overalls, where you can take current events and just drag a pair of overalls onto whoever’s in the news.

Rasmussen: We could also create a small card — like a business card — with your overalls and a logo and a URL on it. The overalls are perforated and can be punched out of the card. People can then hold the cutout in front of somebody cool and take a picture with their digital camera: there’s Barack Obama wearing his jacket and a pair of overalls, giving a speech. Click, I send it in to your Web page. Maybe you have samples of these user-generated images playing on digital screens in stores, on television screens in cabs and on digital billboards.

Bastholm: My company developed this mobile application called Nike Photo ID, where you take a picture with your cellphone of anything and it sends you back a pair of sneakers in the two dominant colors in that picture. So maybe we create a site called Overall This. Send in a picture of somebody and get them back in overalls.

Rasmussen: Then you can post the images on your Web site. Create a gallery that shows how overalls can mesh with many styles, from metro to hip-hop to blue collar. People can comment and vote on their favorites.

III. FRAGMENTING KATIE

Hitt: Good news. The overalls were a big hit. In fact, I made so much money selling overalls that I bought CBS. Now I want you to help me market the “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.”

Palmer: Mistake. You should have bought “The Colbert Report.”

Rasmussen: I’m embarrassed to say that until last week, I had never watched Katie Couric in my life. So the other day I TiVoed the CBS news. And I gotta tell you, sitting in front of the TV for that long watching news was painful to me. I realized that I never get a half-hour’s worth of predigested content from one source anymore.

Palmer: I don’t even have a TV.

Bastholm: Most people no longer “watch the news.” Every morning I check the latest headlines on the BBC’s Web site. There’s a Danish newspaper that I check out every day, because that’s where I’m from, and then I look at The New York Times. I get a Twitter feed from CNN as well.

Rasmussen: I get some news online, some I grab through my phone, some through blogs. I get multiple feeds, I gather it all up. Katie Couric is an outdated product, an outdated model; it’s not really relevant to me.

Palmer: What Katie Couric is not giving us, as a mainstream evening-news anchor, is an invitation to participate. So what if we changed the format of her show? Every day she gives us a sneak preview of whom she will interview over the next week. And you can go online and post your own questions. Maybe two or three user questions end up on the evening news, and you’re like a big star if she uses your question. She says your name: “This is Robert Rasmussen’s question.” You’re totally psyched. You feel awesome. And then on the Internet we post the other 17 user questions and their answers. We put those on the Internet, so there’s actually like an hour of content. A half-hour is on TV, and the other half-hour is on the Internet. You start involving people in the conversation. You start using television as the theatrical component to the Internet. Because what TV offers that the Internet doesn’t offer is a guarantee of fame. You know that millions of people saw that bit of you on television.

Bastholm: I think there’s a bigger issue here. The problem with these established news shows is that they’re trying to be everything for everybody. And in a situation where we all specialize and go into silos and seek out what we’re interested in, that superbroad thing is going to have a really hard time working. A better brief would be to say, “Let’s ensure that Katie Couric becomes part of the stream that people dip into.” Not necessarily on TV, but in that bigger stream of news screens that we move through all day long. Cut her up into snippets and distribute her wherever it’s relevant with content that people are into. That will become the thing she’s famous for. She’ll be the one who delivers the news you want, wherever you want it — on your cellphone, on your outdoor screen, on TV.

Rasmussen: I think consumers need to be able to control their media a little bit when they deal with Katie Couric. So say you’re in a taxi and you see a little promo of Katie Couric. Maybe there’s a menu that says, “These are the topics she’s going to be talking about today.” And you can get your phone to ping you when Katie Couric is talking about something you’re interested in: “On the news tonight at 6:45 she’s going to talk about X.” Then you start to get a little bit of that dialogue going back and forth. Personally, I might listen to Katie Couric only for news about politics or sports or technology. Maybe the three things I choose will be different than if I were a Middle-American mom. So Katie herself becomes a kind of menu.

Bastholm: She also needs to change from being a persona to being a person, and that’s what digital is best at. I’d begin with a Twitter feed where she’s talking about what she’s actually doing during the day. She’d talk about all the behind-the-scenes stuff that you don’t see when she’s interviewing, say, Sarah Palin. Talking very openheartedly about how she experienced that the second after she’s done with the interview. So you kind of start to feel you know the person who’s doing the interviewing versus just the anchor posing the questions.

Palmer: So it’s like, what does Katie Couric think about sports? What does she think about politics? What does she think about pro wrestling? What does she think about human-interest stuff? What does she think about whatever? And because we’re marketing Katie Couric through numerous screens, we’re giving people more ways to interact with her. It’s just like the way we were using different screens to market overalls to different audiences. It might turn out that, in an ironic sort of way, I really love watching Katie Couric talk about soccer because she has no clue about soccer, and to me, that’s awesome. So I have a completely different relationship with her than somebody who watches her because they think that she has a really serious approach to the economy.

Hitt: How does any of this help CBS?

Bastholm: It helps CBS because you can start establishing the brand Katie Couric, and she happens to have her digital home on CBS.

Palmer: So maybe you get all Martha Stewart on Katie Couric. Maybe there’s a Katie Couric channel and KatieCouric.com. Maybe it’s not Katie Couric who works for CBS News but it’s more like Katie Couric powered by the CBS infrastructure. Like “Intel Inside.”

Rasmussen: People need to accept the brand of Katie Couric into their lives. You need them to want to spend time with Katie Couric. They’re not willing to do that right now. The more time they spend with Katie Couric, whether it’s for free or pumped out through a million channels, the better it’s going to be for CBS.

Bastholm: You can’t turn her into Walter Cronkite. That model’s dead.

Hitt: There is an interesting contrast between this fixed 6:30 p.m. news show and this idea of this fragmented narrative throughout the day that we’re going to feed Couric into: the screens in the back of the cabs, the screen in my pocket, all the other screens poking up all over town. How would that work practically?

Rasmussen: If you want to attract new viewers who might want to interact with the news, you need to locate streams of content where those viewers are. Maybe you put streams up a bit at a time, in subway stations and inside bus shelters. Maybe you buy digital posters that have streams of content. And you should think about what’s important in the geographic areas where you locate those streams, too — the bits could be relevant to what’s going on in the cities and even the different neighborhoods where the posters are located.

IV. THE DEATH OF THE MASSIVE MONEY MACHINE

Hitt: Do I really need all these new gimmicks? Why can’t I just air a 30-second ad on Super Bowl Sunday for the “CBS Evening News” and be done with it?

Palmer: The Super Bowl has become an advertising event. Everybody watches and talks about the ads. But Super Bowl ads actually don’t work in a persuasive way anymore. They work in a dancing monkey kind of way.

Bastholm: No one is saying that a Super Bowl spot won’t work. As a way to launch the conversation, why not? But you have to have lots of digital follow-up planned ahead of time.

Rasmussen: That’s the way you really create connections with a brand. If there’s a parity of products, and each competing TV network feels similar to me, but I’ve had this dialogue back and forth with one brand, then that’s the brand I want to succeed; I care about that brand.

Hitt: You care about the brand, you engage with the brand, but ultimately all you’re really doing is seeing the brand — raising name recognition — which is what used to happen in old advertising, right?

Palmer: There’s a difference. A Super Bowl ad is broadcast and everybody sees the same ad, and it comes from a single source. And so you may have a preference as to whether you liked this ad in comparison to this other ad in the block of ads that you just saw. But when you feel like you’ve discovered something on the Internet, it’s a different relationship to the brand. Say I was one of the first thousand people who saw that Cadbury gorilla ad — where he drums along to Phil Collins — and I send that out to all my friends. There’s a pride that I have in having discovered that, a connection that you actually can’t get with broadcast advertising.

Rasmussen: Think of digital as the mythical water cooler, magnified many times.

Hitt: Let’s say I take your advice and fragment Katie Couric, divide the news into a million different streams. How does this make anyone money?

Rasmussen: You can make revenue off multiple streams of content. If you’re giving somebody two minutes or three minutes of content, they’re probably willing to accept a brief ad.

Hitt: So every tidbit of content flashing at me on a screen will come monetized by some version of advertising?

Bastholm: Yes. But you have to make sure people don’t stop watching your content because there are too many ads around it. They’ve always got the option of downloading it from a torrent somewhere, ad-free. There’s a happy medium somewhere, and Hulu, the online video service, actually seems to have found it. On Hulu, you get about seven minutes of advertising per hour, which is a quid pro quo that most people seem to be willing to accept.

Hitt: But how long will that last? Digital media has essentially eliminated the bottleneck of complicated technology needed to transmit visual content, right? Just as it did in eliminating the distributors of the record labels and this newspaper. Are you all potentially presiding over the dissolution of your business, like everybody else in the media?

Rasmussen: I’ve heard that said before, that some of these big advertising agencies are managing their own demise. They’re becoming less relevant, less profitable and less necessary. Look, I’m not saying that everything we’re doing right now is perfect or that all these multiple streams are going to last forever. I think what we are saying is we’re being adaptive to the way consumers take in and interact with brands. And is that advertising or is it marketing or is it participation? Those lines are getting blurry.

Bastholm: At my company, we’re starting to redefine ourselves from being an ad agency to being an entertainment and technology company. Because that’s basically what we do; we deliver branded entertainment of various sorts through a number of different technological channels. You used to have this monolithic structure where your output was 30-second spots that cost an increasing amount of money to make, and it cost more and more money to put them on TV. That massive money machine is probably going to go away, but I think the money spent on all these different channels, at the end of the day, will probably be equal to what used to be spent on TV spots.

Palmer: I’m not sure it all equals out. I think that for people in the marketing industry, it’s objectively more difficult to get the same results or make the same amount of money as you did before.

Bastholm: Trevor Edwards, Nike’s main marketing guy, had a great quote. He said, “Nike’s not in the business of keeping media companies alive, we’re in the business of connecting with consumers.” That sums up digital pretty nicely.

Rasmussen: Clients are not saying, “Make us ads” or “Make us Web sites,” they’re saying, “Create interaction between our brand and our customers.” That’s our job now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/ma...l?ref=magazine





Repeat Business
Rob Walker

Year after year, our entertainment options proliferate: more shows on more channels, more amusements via more online venues, more diversions on our gaming consoles and mobile devices. Fluttering along in this blizzard of the new, there is the not-new, the still-with-us, the vintage, the classic . . . the old. Sitcom reruns, for instance, angle to keep entertaining us, over and over, and profitably. It is in that context that the “Seinfeld” promotional bus tour concluded in Las Vegas this weekend — a 30-city marketing gimmick for a show that went off the air a decade ago.

Except that it didn’t really go off the air, of course. In New York City it’s on five times every weekday. Nielsen Media Research tracks the cumulative audience for syndicated programming, including reruns, and among sitcom reruns, “Seinfeld” has remained in the top five such shows watched by 25-to-54-year-olds throughout its afterlife. On a recent week, it finished third, behind reruns of “Two and a Half Men” and “Family Guy,” with a viewership of about 4.9 million people.

The business of reruns can generate “mega coin,” as The Hollywood Reporter might put it, but it’s unpredictable. “Success on the network doesn’t mean success in syndication,” notes Chuck Larsen, president of October Moon Television, which consults with production companies on syndication and other matters. Some real-time hits never catch on as reruns — “Murphy Brown,” a cultural phenomenon in its heyday, is an example. Maybe that’s because there’s a difference between the way we watch prime-time shows and the way we watch reruns while doing dishes or nodding off. Maybe it’s because some shows just feel dated more quickly. Other sitcoms start strong in the rerun market but gradually fade: “Friends” surged past “Seinfeld” on the rerun charts for a time but has since retreated to lower audience levels.

With this in mind, Sony Pictures Television, which distributes “Seinfeld,” convened a meeting two years ago to figure out how to court new viewers for an old show. The resulting marketing, sales and promotion strategy was dubbed “Seinfeld: The Next Generation,” according to Robert Oswaks, president of marketing for that Sony division. The tour was its most conspicuous element: a 60-foot bus whose stops included many college campuses, to generate publicity that might attract those who were too young to have participated in the show’s first-run popularity.

Syndicated sitcoms have traditionally been pushed through on-air promos and ads in the television sections of newspapers, but as marketing the new has changed, so has marketing the old. “I don’t really think there is a precedent,” Oswaks says, for such post-mass-media tactics deployed on behalf of a mass-era rerun property. He notes that the traveling setup includes computer kiosks where you can visit the “Seinfeld” Facebook page and, as Oswaks somewhat imprecisely puts it in a video on the tour’s promotional site, “join our social profile.”

The bus’s interior has been modified into a kind of rolling Smithsonian for “Seinfeld” freaks, displaying props like the Bro/Manzier, “Fusilli Jerry,” the Assman license plate, the doll that looks like George’s mom and a replica of “the puffy shirt.” (The original puffy shirt is in the actual Smithsonian. Welcome to America.) There are show-relevant giveaways — Junior Mints, black-and-white cookies — and a replica of Monk’s Diner. And whether on campuses or at malls or sporting events, what’s easiest to imagine is the fervent believer dragging along potential converts. The bus, which Sony says was visited by an estimated 45,000 people, simply makes tangible the devotion that already exists, presenting the show about nothing as a labyrinthine text, a fully immersive narrative that’s not about nothing but about itself: totems, references, rituals. It’s a walk-in catechism.

People watch reruns, Larsen of October Moon suggests, because “we like to know what we’re going to get; we don’t like surprises.” That’s true only sometimes. If we didn’t actually crave surprises, the marketplace for novel entertainment would not be so robust as it demonstrably is. Still, we do balance that with an appetite for the entertainment equivalent of comfort food. “Seinfeld” is that very thing — and (fittingly enough) on a meta level: it’s not only an entertainment that Americans loved together, but it’s also a stand-in for the whole idea of Americans loving entertainment together. And given the way the amusement market increasingly splits us into smaller and smaller audiences, that idea has an appealing novelty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/ma...l?ref=magazine





Blockbuster to Rent Through New On-Demand Device

Blockbuster Inc. will start renting movies and television shows through a new gadget that may give consumers another reason to bypass the struggling video chain's 7,500 stores.

The new system announced Tuesday relies on a small box that connects to television sets and stores video after it's downloaded over high-speed Internet connections.

The player, made by San Jose-based 2Wire Inc., is built on the same concept as storage devices made by Apple Inc. and Vudu Inc. The devices are all meant to provide a bridge between the Internet and TVs.

Netflix Inc., a Blockbuster nemesis, has been trying to make the same leap with a video-streaming service that can be watched on TV sets through a variety of devices, including a $100 box introduced by Roku Inc. six months ago.

Blockbuster's foray into so-called "on-demand" video also pits the Dallas-based company against instant-gratification services already offered by major cable carriers like Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc.

Although the company has closed hundreds of stores in recent years, Blockbuster's expansion into on-demand shouldn't be interpreted as a condemnation of its brick-and-mortar locations, Chairman James Keyes said in an interview.

"We think the stores will remain relevant to consumers for quite some time," he said.

Blockbuster had previously been selling video downloads through Movielink, a service that it bought for $7.7 million last year. But Movielink option was primarily aimed at consumers who don't mind watching movies on personal computers or portable gadgets with small screens.

With its latest step, Blockbuster is appealing to the larger audience that prefers watching entertainment on big-screen TVS.

To help get its next downloading box into homes, Blockbuster is selling it as part of a $99 package that includes 25 on-demand rentals. After that, Blockbuster will charge at least $1.99 for each downloaded video.

The pay-per-view pricing differs from Netflix's "instant watching" service, which gives unlimited access to a library of 12,000 titles to any subscriber paying at least $8.99 per month for a DVD rental plan.

Blockbuster's on-demand service is starting out with just 2,000 selections, but Keyes promises the movies will be of more recent vintage than Netflix's instant-watching service.

"We are emphasizing quality over quantity because we think quality is most important for our customers," he said.

Blockbuster's on-demand service is starting out with recently released DVD titles such as "Get Smart, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" — none of which are available through Netflix's instant-watching channel.

Keyes also believes Blockbuster's service will provide a better-quality picture because all the video will be stored on the 2Wire box.

Netflix shows, or "streams," the video over high-speed Internet pipes without anything being saved on a piece of hardware. The clarity of a streamed video can vary depending on the speed of the Internet connection being used.

Los Gatos-based Netflix has been investing heavily in the instant-watching channel since unveiling it in early 2007. The option is getting used by more Netflix subscribers as it has become easier to connect the service to TV sets through the Roku player, DVD players and xBox 360 video game consoles made by Microsoft Corp.

Once a dominant force in home entertainment, Blockbuster has been wounded by Netflix's DVD-by-mail service, which has 8.7 million subscribers, as well as the on-demand options included in cable subscription packages.

Although its losses have been narrowing this year under Keyes' leadership, Blockbuster still hasn't been making money. The company has lost nearly $4.5 billion since 2001, including $14 million through the first nine months of this year.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/blockbuster_on_demand





Redstone Weighs Sale of Theaters
Tim Arango

In an effort to stave off the dismantling of his media empire, Sumner M. Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Viacom and CBS, recently proposed to sell his family’s 1,500-screen theater chain in an effort to restructure his large debt load.

The proposal was made in a plan submitted to his bankers, according to two people briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition they not be identified. But the proposed sale may not be enough to placate bankers, not least because no one can seem to agree on what the movie theaters are worth.

Here is what just about everyone, including those in Mr. Redstone’s inner circle, agrees on: if it gets bad enough, Mr. Redstone has indicated he would be willing to part with CBS, but not Viacom, according to three people briefed on the talks who, like the others involved, spoke on condition of anonymity.

In October, Mr. Redstone was forced to sell more than $200 million of stock in Viacom and CBS to satisfy lenders, and he has been in talks ever since to restructure $1.6 billion of bank debt backed by the value of National Amusements, the holding company that is Mr. Redstone’s vehicle for controlling Viacom and CBS.

In the popular parlor game of guessing how Mr. Redstone’s debt conundrum will be resolved that is playing out in corporate suites around the media industry, the question now is how far Mr. Redstone will go in whittling down his media empire.

Analysts, for their part, say that would not necessarily be a bad thing. The uncertainty and the worry that Mr. Redstone will be forced to unload more stock in an already shaky market have weighed on the share prices of both companies. For the year, CBS is off 78 percent, while Viacom is down 67.5 percent.

“There is definitely a Redstone discount on these assets,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Investors will say, ‘I don’t want to be involved with any of these because we don’t know what Sumner will do.’ ”

Mr. Nathanson echoed a broader concern among investors and analysts who cover Viacom and CBS: the uncertainty hovering over the companies because of the financial condition of their controlling shareholder.

“You have a private company with minimal disclosure, and it’s in negotiations with its banks,” said Mr. Nathanson. “It’s like reading the tea leaves, you can read anything into it that you want.”

A representative for Mr. Redstone declined to comment.

But how much the theater chain is worth has become one of the pressing issues in Mr. Redstone’s quest to keep the media empire he built intact. Analysts estimate it could fetch about $500 million, while privately Mr. Redstone has suggested it is worth more than $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. In addition to the theaters, in the recent plan sent to lenders Mr. Redstone also said he would sell two lesser assets that could, combined, bring in an additional $100 million.

The sharp drop in the value of CBS and Viacom shares earlier this year resulted in a breach of the debt covenants. But the dynamics of the situation seemingly change daily, and in relation to the gyrations of the stock market. On Monday, CBS shares soared more than 20 percent, and Viacom was up 7.5 percent, giving Mr. Redstone, at least temporarily, some breathing room.

In the swirl of these discussions is the question of Mr. Redstone’s personal wealth. Just three months ago, Mr. Redstone was listed by Forbes magazine as the 66th-richest American with a net worth of $5.1 billion.

But now much of his wealth — at least that which is tied to the stock prices of Viacom and CBS — has evaporated, and it is unclear if Mr. Redstone remains a billionaire because it is unclear how much money he has outside of National Amusements, other than personal holdings in Viacom and CBS that together are worth around $10 million.

Half the debt, or $800 million, comes due on Dec. 19. Mr. Redstone recently said publicly that the talks with banks had been going smoothly and that the value of the assets held by National Amusements “well exceeds its debt.”

The underlying value of those assets may be much greater than the debt, but the amount they could fetch on the market is unclear. Based on Monday’s closing prices of Viacom and CBS, the value of National Amusements’ stake in the two companies is about $1.4 billion.

Mr. Redstone owns 80 percent of National Amusements and his daughter, Shari E. Redstone, owns 20 percent. Mr. Redstone and his daughter had engaged in a lengthy public battle over control and succession issues, which have not been resolved but have since been overshadowed by the company’s debt burden.

But Ms. Redstone has hired her own adviser from the Blackstone Group, and her business relationship with her father could be untangled as part of the broader discussions over restructuring over the company’s debt. (Mr. Redstone recently divorced his second wife, Paula Redstone, and last year reached a deal to settle a lawsuit with his son Brent, who had filed suit arguing he was cheated out of his role in the family business.)

It now appears that National Amusements’ assets are only slightly more valuable than its $1.6 billion in debt, based on the value of National Amusements’ holdings in CBS and Viacom, and the value that analysts say the company could fetch for its other major asset — the 1,500-screen movie theater chain.

Rich Greenfield of Pali Research wrote in a report Monday that Wall Street was largely expecting that Mr. Redstone would be forced to sell more of his stock in CBS and Viacom. “While a block trade by the chairman and founder cannot be looked at as a positive, we believe investors are already assuming it will happen,” Mr. Greenfield wrote.

National Amusements’ remaining assets are four million shares in WMS Industries, a publicly traded slot machine maker, which are worth about $8.5 million; and about 80 percent of Midway Games, a video game company whose shares have dropped so low that it was recently notified by the New York Stock Exchange that it is in danger of being delisted. The Midway stake, once worth more than $700 million, is valued at about $23 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/bu...5redstone.html





Did "Lazy Sunday" Make YouTube's $1.5 Billion Sale Possible?
Nate Anderson

How did YouTube turn itself into such an essential worldwide service that Google plunked down $1.5 billion in cash and prizes to acquire the video sharing site? It depends who you ask, of course, but NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, has his own answer: the cupcake-munching white rappers of Lazy Sunday fame. In other words, NBC made it possible, but YouTube made all the money.

In this view, YouTube was a nice place for emo kids to post rants about Britney Spears, but this sort of stuff hardly made YouTube an essential visit. No, what built YouTube's brand was the flood of unauthorized commercial content sloshing around on the site a few years back—a heady time before Hulu et al. when one could reliably dig up episodes of The Simpsons, The Daily Show, or Saturday Night Live.

At a conference on the Future of Television this last week in New York, Cotton made it clear that he hasn't forgotten those early days. According to him, YouTube was vaulted into national popularity by SNL's hit "Lazy Sunday" rap about a pair of lame white guys from the Village who wanted nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon in the theater, watching The Chronicles of Narnia.

The clip that built YouTube?

The clip went viral, generating more than 7 million streams, said Cotton, all of which benefited only one party: YouTube. (NBC U had the clips pulled from the site, but only after their popularity peaked.) NBC Universal has since been careful to put clips online, but to do so in such a way that it also receives a more direct benefit from them. The recent Tina Fey clips from SNL, in which the actress and writer portrayed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to hilarious and devastating effect, have all racked up more than 10 million views each—and they do some on Hulu and NBC.com, which gains both revenue and mindshare for the network.

NBC Universal isn't the only content owner to think this way. Viacom execs have also made it clear to anyone who would listen that it was their content—most notably The Daily Show—that made YouTube a go-to destination for online video. So highly did the company think of its content that it actually sued YouTube for more than $1 billion over the infringement.

But if the big rightsholders largely view themselves as responsible for the rise of YouTube, how does the company itself see its history? Fortunately, YouTube's Kevin Yen was on a panel soon after Cotton and simply couldn't let this NBC-centric version of history go unchallenged.

When you actually go through the logs, said Yen, it turns out that you can't even spot a bump where the Lazy Sunday clip appeared.

This may be true when it comes to simple metrics about the number of streams, but it certainly won't quell debates over "influence" or "tipping points" or "national prominence." The big content owners are still convinced by the mantra "content is king," and they're not pleased to see young upstarts ascend to a throne using their work.

As for YouTube, it clearly sees the value in professionally-produced, big money content as well. The site has been anxious to strike ad deals with anyone who's willing after realizing just how hard it can be to squeeze money from unpredictable and nonprofessional user-generated content.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-possible.html





TiVo Swings to a Profit
AP

TiVo, the maker of digital video recorders, posted a profit in the third quarter, helped by a payment it received in a patent suit even as revenue declined, the company said Tuesday.

TiVo, based in Alviso, Calif., earned $100.6 million, or 98 cents a share, reversing a loss of $8.2 million, or 8 cents a share, a year earlier.

Third-quarter revenue included income of $105 million from a patent suit against Dish Network.

TiVo’s revenue fell almost 15 percent, to $64.5 million, from $75.5 million. Subscription and technology revenue, excluding hardware sales, fell 11 percent, to $51.7 million.

TiVo had 3.5 million subscriptions as of the end of October, a decline from the 3.6 million it reported in the second quarter and the 4.1 million it had a year earlier. TiVo’s chief executive, Thomas S. Rogers, said the drop in subscribers was related to competition from the satellite television company, the DirecTV Group.

TiVo reported results after the close of market trading and its shares fell slightly in after-hours trading.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/te...tivo.html?_r=1





Box-Office Pulse: Blood Lust Runs Hot
Brooks Barnes

“Twilight” took a giant bite out of the North American box office over the weekend, selling an estimated $70.6 million in tickets and proving that a wholesome love story can still turn out a huge young-adult audience.

The movie, based on the first in Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular series of vampire romance novels, was expected to deliver strong results for Summit Entertainment. A frenzy among teenage girls marked the picture’s arrival in theaters, with more than 1,000 screenings across the country selling out days in advance. The opening-weekend gross beat even bullish expectations. Box-office analysts had predicted the film would be lucky to reach $60 million because of limited appeal among male moviegoers.

“Twilight” is the story of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a sullen but sweet high-school student who falls in love with a tender vampire (Robert Pattinson) who is on a no-human-blood diet.

“As we saw the results of the first midnight showings, we figured we had a tiger by the tail,” said Richard Fay, president for domestic distribution for Summit.

In a statement Ms. Meyer said, “I don’t think any other author has had a more positive experience with the makers of her movie adaptation than I have had.”

“Twilight,” directed by Catherine Hardwicke, instantly joined one of the most exclusive clubs in Hollywood: movies that earn a profit within their first three days of domestic release. The film cost $37 million to produce and an estimated $30 million to market. And there is money still left to be counted. International ticket sales look promising — Ms. Meyer’s books have sold 17 million copies worldwide — and expectations for the DVD are huge.

Experts said “Twilight” could struggle with what movie executives call playability, or the ability to maintain box-office heat after the core fan base has moved on. Mr. Fay said he hoped strong word of mouth among mothers would keep ticket sales solid.

Summit, an upstart studio led by the co-chairmen Patrick Wachsberger and Robert G. Friedman, announced plans on Saturday to begin production of “New Moon,” an adaptation of the second of Ms. Meyer’s novels. A Summit spokesman said that it was too early to say when “New Moon” would arrive in theaters.

“Twilight” trampled the competition, most notably “Bolt,” an expensive animated film from the Walt Disney Company. That movie, featuring the voices of John Travolta and Miley Cyrus and overseen by the Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, sold a disappointing $27 million in tickets.

Disney had hoped “Bolt” would signal a clear turnaround at its storied animation department, which has labored mightily in recent years. The company says it still thinks it can eventually put “Bolt” in the win column. “Word of mouth should bode well over the Thanksgiving holiday and beyond,” said Heidi Trotta, a studio spokeswoman.

In second place, behind “Twilight,” at the box office was “Quantum of Solace,” the latest James Bond installment (from MGM and Sony Pictures). It sold $27.4 million in tickets for a new domestic total of $109.5 million. “Bolt” had to settle for third place, with “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” (DreamWorks Animation) in the fourth position with $16 million ($137.4 million). “Role Models” (Universal Pictures) rounded out the Top Five with $7.2 million ($48 million).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/movies/24box.html





Query

Has Your Company Used the services of Epagogix? If So, I'd Like to Hear About Your Experience With It.

Epagogix is a company that had a big write up in a New Yorker article a couple of years ago. Basically, they claim that they can take a screenplay or movie you've produced and, based on a number of factors, predict the potential box office of your production and suggest ways to improve its performance in the marketplace, reducing "the formula" for a movie to math. (WiR, 10/28/’06 - Jack).

The company is rather closed-mouthed about their methods, but they seem to base their conclusions on rather odd and random criteria, such as whether the hero of the film wears a hat, whether a female protagonist has blond hair, etc.

The thing is that, despite some "buzz" they got and the continued presence of their website, I've never actually read about or talked to anyone that's actually used the company's services.

So, if you've used Epagogix, I'd like to hear from you. What did they give you? A white paper with suggestions for changing your script/movie/product? What did you think of their analysis? Did you assemble any data on how effective it was?

Disclaimer: I'm working on an idea for a patent that would do something similar but with a very different approach that's based on research in psychology. So this question is aimed at digging up some research on a potential competitor. Based on what I read in the New Yorker article and elsewhere, I'm highly skeptical that their method actually works or gives meaningful data.

http://epagogix.com/

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...061016fa_fact6

http://www.thehotbutton.com/today/ho...61018_wed.html

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/mana...rowseCategory=





Cartoons Without Computers? Silly Animators!
John Anderson

THREE thousand miles from where Happy, Dopey and Doc line the walls of the Walt Disney Company’s Burbank studios, the animator Bill Plympton keeps an office in one of those south-of-Midtown Manhattan buildings full of anonymous-looking steel gray doors.

Behind them could be anything from vacuum cleaner dealerships to international drug cartels. But who cares? Clearly, more fantastic things are erupting down the hall at Mr. Plympton’s: Alien marriages. Nose hairs as long as the Nile. Dogs that dream of fire hydrants. And cinema created by pencil.

A lot of pencil.

As “Bolt” and “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” continue their occupation of movie theaters, and “Wall-E” seems destined for an animation Oscar (and perhaps even a best picture nomination), animated film is looking like one of Hollywood’s better bets for a long, happy life — and 3-D animation like the last reason for audiences to leave home at all. The computer technology behind it all can be compared to NASA. The story lines, whether about delusional dogs, neurotic lions or spin-kicking pandas, are often very similar.

But despite the kwazy-wabbit ethos that has influenced most of American animated film, an insurgent element continues to make animation for adults. Not all of it is hand drawn; some mixes live action and animation, or might be devised via Flash or PowerPoint software. Mr. Plympton, the best-known of this cadre of animators, whose films include the features “The Tune” and “I Married a Strange Person” and, more recently, the short “Hot Dog,” uses the same technique Disney used in 1936.

“I’d say it took about 25,000 drawings for ‘Idiots & Angels,’ ” he said of his most recent feature, about a bad man who sprouts wings that make him do good deeds. “I do about 100 drawings a day, which is about 10 an hour, and if I can do that times 250 or 300 days, that’s a feature film.”

It is, he said, a “zen thing.”

“You’re so focused. You don’t do e-mails or phone calls. I get up at 6, don’t shave or shower, just start drawing. It’s like a ride. I hear that novelists do this too. They’re so focused for a year or whatever that afterwards they just collapse for two or three weeks. Sleep. Or drink.”

Other artists take other tacks. Henry Selick (“Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas”) is currently going through the painstaking stop-motion process, of the type that has put into action the likes of Gumby and Wallace & Gromit. His new work, “Coraline,” is scheduled for February release.

“You want to get your hands onto it,” Mr. Selick said, when asked what motivates his use of clay models and real objects rather than the ubiquitous computer-generated imagery. “That’s what it’s about for me.”

Others, including Don Hertzfeldt, Signe Baumane and Mr. Plympton, draw everything by hand. But the subject matter wanders far beyond the perils of the putty tat: sex and regret (“A Letter to Colleen,” by Andy and Carolyn London); a fascist bird empire conquering a clockwork London (“Bathtime in Clerkenwell” and “Last Time in Clerkenwell,” by Alex Budovsky); a teenage girl petrified by pregnancy (Ms. Baumane’s “Birth”). Or the agonies of bubble wrap, as it awaits the inevitable pop (“Fantaisie in Bubblewrap,” by Arthur Metcalf).

Serious animation is not unknown in the United States, although the market situation might be comparable to that of California wine, pre-1976. “Waltz With Bashir,” the coming Sony Pictures Classics animated release about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, is as serious as film can get. “Persepolis” and “The Triplets of Belleville” were major examples of a post-Looney Tunes approach and a maturity of subject matter, if not necessarily technique. But all three are imports. To get their work seen, most animators in the United States have to move their work the other way.

Ms. Baumane arrived in New York in 1995 from Latvia and finally found a producer for her work in Italy. Her “Teat Beat of Sex” is a semi-autobiographical, quasi-philosophical 15-chapter adventure about growing up erotic. As powered by Ms. Baumane’s excitable narration, each short film could be a stand-up comedy routine, although she likes the permanence of being on film, as well as the opportunity to provoke: “I think by shocking people you expand their perceptions.”

“I get refused by a lot of animation film festivals because they don’t consider my work ‘animated,’ ” Ms. Baumane said, explaining that she will devote as few as four frames to an image, which gives a less fluid movement to the projected film. (Animated films typically use 24 frames per second.) That exclusionary attitude is the kind of thing that would probably make Mr. Hertzfeldt see red.

“I don’t know why these things have to be framed as a big dumb cage match,” said Mr. Hertzfeldt, an Oscar-nominated director who is currently touring the country with his latest short, “I Am So Proud of You,” the follow-up to his acclaimed “Everything Will Be OK.” “Hand-drawn versus computers, film versus digital. We have over 100 years now of amazing film technology to play with. I don’t know why any artists would want to throw any of their tools out of the box.

“Many people assume to that because I shoot on film and animate on paper I must be doing things the ‘hard way,’ when in fact my last four movies would have been virtually impossible to produce digitally.”

Expense and time are the little-known facts of digital animation. Mr. Plympton, who spends several hundred thousand dollars on his features, said that when he hired someone to create a digitized hotel for his movie ‘Shuteye Hotel,” “it was six months late and six months over budget.”

Mr. Hertzfeldt, who shoots his work on a rare old 35-millimeter camera, said: “A lot of people seem to assume that there is a ‘make art’ button on a computer and everything in the digital world is magical and easy. There are endless misconceptions about how these tools work and little understanding how computer animators have to slave away just as hard as traditional animators do.”

Despite the demands and hurdles, these animators keep coming back for more — particularly Mr. Plympton, who has pushed the tenacity thing to an Olympic level.

“To make an animated film every six months, to do a feature film in one year, one person, it’s never been done,” he said. “To make six feature films by myself? I don’t know if that will ever be duplicated.” He burst out laughing. “Why would it be?”

Ultimately, Mr. Hertzfeldt said, methods are irrelevant.

“The only thing that matters is what actually winds up on the big screen, not how you got it there,” he said. “You could make a cartoon in crayons about a red square that falls in unrequited love with a blue circle, and there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house if you know how to tell a story.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/movies/30ande.html





Hi-Tech Crackdown on Film Piracy
Richard Conrad

SECURITY guards equipped with night-vision goggles will patrol screenings of Australia to protect the film against internet and video pirates.

The hi-tech fightback against illegal recordings of the potential blockbuster is part of a major anti-piracy operation by Twentieth Century Fox.

Fox Australian managing director Marcos Oliveira warned would-be pirates:

- security and regular cinema staff have been trained to detect attempts to illegally record Australia .

- cinema staff have been offered $200 rewards for detecting illegal recordings.

- police will be called to arrest anyone spotted making illegal recordings.

- prosecutions would be pursued.

"We are sending security guards equipped with night-vision goggles for the first two days to the 100 most important cinemas in Australia," Mr Oliveira said.

Goggles will be given to staff at another 200 cinemas for the first week of screenings, from next Wednesday.

Mr Oliveira said the first two days were the most important, as Australia opened in the US and Canada on the same day.

"The time difference puts us almost a day ahead, so it's critical to prevent illegal recordings made here being uploaded to the internet before or around the same time as the movie opens in 3000 cinemas in the North American market," he said.

Earlier this month, police raided market traders selling illegal music, movies and video games at the Caribbean Garden Markets in Scoresby.

Meanwhile, blockbusters Happy Feet, American Gangster and Ocean's 13 are at the centre of a landmark court action over internet piracy.

Seven big Hollywood studios and Kerry Stokes' Seven Network yesterday filed a Federal Court action against internet service provider iiNet, alleging it had failed to stop its customers from pirating 68 movies.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15317,00.html





Think Godzilla's Scary? Meet His Lawyers
David Kravets

It's been 54 years since an atomic blast awakened the slumbering reptilian monster Godzilla, and the fire-breathing, fin-tailed beast has been terrorizing downtown Tokyo ever since — in more than two dozen movies, on television and in comics and cartoons.

But Godzilla is a pussycat compared to the coterie of lawyers and investigators in Los Angeles and Japan who aggressively protect the radioactive behemoth from anyone who dares to appropriate his lizardly image for profit.

Hurling hundreds of lawsuits and takedown notices like so many fireballs, Godzilla's owner — Toho Co. Ltd — has roasted Hollywood studios, automakers, toy manufacturers, rock bands, book publishers, national food chains, record labels, bloggers, wineries and just about anybody seen as capitalizing on the monster's unique features, name or theme music. When it comes to policing trademarks and enforcing copyrights in the United States, intellectual property attorneys say Tokyo-based Toho is easily a match for Walt Disney, Fox and Lucasfilm in terms of courthouse zeal.

"I think they have got litigation in their reptilian DNA," says Jonathan Handel, a Hollywood IP lawyer. "They're afraid that their intellectual property rights will suffer the same fate that Tokyo has in many Godzilla movies."

Nobody is immune. In 2002, Toho stomped on a Cabernet Sauvignon produced by Napa Valley's Adler Fels Winery. The "Cabzilla" wine — its bottle labeled with a screeching Godzilla toting a glass of red — is no longer on the market. The winery's inventory was destroyed in a legal settlement. In 2003, Toho went after Yankee Stadium vendors for hawking Godzilla wares after the Yankees picked up Japanese baseball slugger Hideki Matsui, who is nicknamed "Godzilla." And this month, the company ordered Arizona rock band Asshole Godzilla to forfeit its internet domain and stop using Godzilla in its name.

Such legal jockeying is paying huge dividends. Toho, a diversified media concern whose income stems from movie theaters, Godzilla and other films, generates millions annually licensing Godzilla music, movies, toys, posters and other tie-ins. The company reported overall profits of 6.4 billion yen, about $66 million, for the half-year period ending Aug. 31.

Douglas Masters, a Chicago attorney charged with defending the intellectual property estate of Elvis Presley, says Toho "has been very aggressive. They take a broad view of their rights."

But the rampage of litigation, real and threatened, isn't naked aggression. The company's lawyers say they're just trying to keep their flagship property from slipping into generic status. For Toho, too much unlicensed or misappropriated Godzilla could irrevocably free the monster from the protection of trademark law.

"As a trademark owner, one of the requirements is to police your mark to ensure that it does not become generic, that it does not become a common word for any fire-breathing monster," says Aaron Moss, a Toho attorney in Los Angeles. "If you don't, the trademark becomes devalued and hard to enforce."

That policing is a full time job, in part because of Godzilla's uniquely embedded place in U.S. culture. Unlike E.T., the Predator or the slimy extraterrestrial from Alien, Godzilla is often regarded by the public as community property. People don't understand or believe that the character that first appeared in a Japanese black-and-white in 1954 is a closely guarded piece of intellectual property, and rarely do suspected infringers know that Godzilla's movie music and pictures are copyrighted, and that his distinctive features and name are trademarked.

While Godzilla's onscreen friends and foes vary from film to film, in real life the U.S. court system is one of his staunchest allies.

Toho, like other intellectual property rights holders, is emboldened by its use of the power of prior restraint — the ability to block a publication's release — an exercise the U.S. Supreme Court has called "the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights."

In 1971, the U.S. government failed in its efforts to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, an internal and classified government review of the Vietnam War, from appearing in the New York Times. But in 1998, Toho stopped publisher William Morrow and Company from releasing the book Godzilla!, which included some 90 unauthorized copyright photographs.

In blocking the book's publication, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that the book would likely hurt sales of a licensed and competing book from Random House. And the court set aside Morrow's assertions that the name Godzilla, which is a combination of two Japanese words for gorilla and whale, didn't deserve protection because it did not have any real meaning.

Godzilla, U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian wrote, is "a fanciful, arbitrary word used to describe a fire-breathing, prehistoric, often-schizophrenic dinosaur. This court finds that the mark is very strong, as it requires a large amount of imagination to associate the mark Godzilla with the character it represents."

And it's not just the beast's name that enjoys the protection of the courts; it's also his distinctive looks. If you want to get a rise out of the soft-spoken Moss, ask him something like, "Isn't Godzilla just an overgrown Tyrannosaurus rex?"

"He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow," Moss says, repeating arguments Toho often makes in its lawsuits. "He's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle."

Policing Godzilla's rights, or the rights of any fictional character, has become a Sisyphean labor with the explosion of BitTorrent, video and file sharing sites, and direct-to-consumer sales in an ever expanding online world. But it's not just the underground and gray-market profiteers who've been accused of violating Godzilla's rights.

Warner Bros., for example, didn't know it needed Toho's permission to use Godzilla in a 1985 chase scene in Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The Hollywood studio paid an undisclosed amount to Toho after it was sued.

The U.S. division of Honda Motor suffered a similar fate for displaying a Godzilla float in the Rose Parade, and paid an undisclosed amount to settle a 1991 lawsuit.

"I don't know if it even occurred to them that the character was protected," says Charles Shephard, a Los Angeles attorney for Toho, whose office is adorned with a poster that says,"If you thought Godzilla was scary, wait until you meet his lawyers."

Shephard speculates, "If they used Star Wars or Simpsons characters, I guarantee you they would have sought permission. It's surprising how much this character is misused in a variety of contexts, especially by major advertisers."

In September, for example, Doctor's Associates, the owner of Subway, settled a lawsuit brought by Toho over its "Five-Dollar Foot-Long" sandwich campaign. As a result, Subway removed a seconds-long snippet in its broadcast commercial showing an animated dinosaur meandering through a downtown — in what Toho argued was a depiction of Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed

The Arizona rock band Asshole Godzilla lost its name and internet domain. "We gotta change the name of our band, because we're so scary hard that Godzilla and the people surrounding Godzilla want nothing to do with us," lead vocalist Nick Danger writes on assholegodzilla.com, which is being shuttered.

The rock band Blue Oyster Cult paid an undisclosed licensing fee to use Godzilla's copyrighted roar in its 1977 hit song, "Godzilla."

David Linabury, the operator of humor blog, Davezilla, also got an earful of Godzilla's roar. Toho said the blog's logo of an emaciated dinosaur, coupled with the suffix -zilla, went too far. A 2002 Toho cease-and-desist letter to Linabury said:

"Please be advised that your use of the Godzilla mark constitutes a trademark infringement and confuses consumers and the public into believing that your 'Godzilla' character originates from Toho, which it does not."

Linabury, of Royal Oak, Michigan, initially placed a disclaimer on his site notifying readers he was not related to Godzilla, and later abandoned the logo altogether, he says. "It was ridiculous."

Toho's Shephard defends the move against Davezilla. "There's a lot of zillas out there that use that suffix. We try to deal with them on a case-by-case basis and ask whether somebody is trying to profit from the name and a dinosaur motif."

For that reason, Toho has kept its paws off the Mozilla Foundation, freeing the Mountain View, California, nonprofit to continue using its well-known dinosaur icon in its open source software.

Godzilla, of course, isn't the only monster battling to protect its profits and name. Nintendo, the maker of videogame Donkey Kong, was sued by Universal in 1982 for trademark infringement. But the courts ruled that there was no way the public would confuse the game with King Kong.

In trademark terms, King Kong's got nothing on Godzilla. The hairy ape beast is basically an oversized gorilla, making it harder to protect as intellectual property. A toy gorilla might look like King Kong, but without a reference for scale, it also looks like the rank-and-file gorillas in the zoo or in the wild.

Experts point out that Godzilla knockoff toys can do more than financially harm Toho and its licensees. Earlier this year, Hong Kong's Toy Major Trading Co. was caught selling unauthorized Godzilla figurines through U.S. retailers, where they were marketed as the "classic Godzilla-saurus."

The rip-offs were removed from stores after testing determined they were tainted with too much lead — 60 times the legal limit.

Abusers of Godzilla's music can also succumb to a Godzilla pounding. In 2001, Toho forced Rawkus Entertainment to discontinue Pharoahe Monch's rap hit, "Simon Says," after Toho accused the rapper of sampling Godzilla theme music without permission.

As in the cinema and in real life, sometimes Godzilla's friends turn into foes.

In one of Godzilla's few U.S. courthouse losses, a federal appeals court sided with Sears, Roebuck, which marketed "bagzilla" garbage bags as "monstrously strong bags." The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in essence, said Toho's arguments were rubbish.

The court ruled that Toho's claims of infringement and trademark dilution were "implausible." Sears, the court found, "means only to make a pun."

Funny to some, but to Davezilla's Linabury, Godzilla's attack was no laughing matter. He says when he received Toho's cease-and-desist letter, "I just kinda freaked out. I didn't want to fight Godzilla."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...la-terror.html





Judge Quashes RIAA Subpoena As To 3 John Does
NewYorkCountryLawyer

In one of the RIAA's "John Doe" cases targeting Boston University students, after the University wrote to the Court saying that it could not identify three of the John Does "to a reasonable degree of technical certainty," Judge Nancy Gertner deemed the University's letter a "motion to quash, " and granted it, quashing the subpoena as to those defendants. In the very brief docket entry (PDF) containing her decision, she noted that "compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery. " There is an important lesson to be learned from this ruling: if the IT departments of the colleges and universities targeted by the RIAA would be honest, and explain to the Courts the problems with the identification and other technical issues, there is a good chance the subpoenas will be vacated. Certainly, there is now a judicial precedent for that principle. One commentator asks whether this holding "represents the death knell to some, if not all, of the RIAA's efforts to use American university staff as copyright cops."
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?.../11/25/0026201





Guns N' Roses' New Album Is Up Against a Chinese Wall

The title is a problem for authorities and even for some Shanghai fans
James T. Areddy

SHANGHAI -- The heavy metal band Guns N' Roses is roiling China's music scene. But sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll aren't the issue.

The trouble is the name of the group's latest album: "Chinese Democracy."

It has taken 17 years for the band to produce a new studio record. Now, even before it goes on sale Sunday, in a release heralded by its producers as a "historic moment in rock ' n' roll," the disc is getting the thumbs down from Chinese authorities. It's also causing anxiety among GN'R's legion of loyal fans here, who aren't sure they like what lead singer W. Axl Rose is trying to say about their country.

China's government-owned music-importing monopoly has signaled that local record distributors shouldn't bother ordering the GN'R production. Anything with "democracy" in the name is "not going to work," said an official at the China National Publications Import & Export (Group) Corp., part of the Ministry of Culture.

For fans, the response is more complicated. GN'R developed a major following in China in the late 1980s, when the young Mr. Rose was recording early hit songs like "Welcome to the Jungle." China was in the throes of its own rebellious era, and heavy metal was its protest music. GN'R's popularity soared in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Learning the band's 1991 ballad "Don't Cry" was a rite of passage for a generation of Chinese guitarists.
Chinese Democracy

Listen to a clip of the title track from GN'R's new album and, below, read some of the lyrics.

…

If they were missionaries
Real-time visionaries
Sitting in a Chinese stew
To view my disinfatuation

I know that I'm a classic case
Watch my disenchanted face
Blame it on the Falun Gong
They've seen the end and it can't hold on now.

…

When your great wall rocks blame yourself
While their arms reach up for your help
And you're out of time


"It was not only the music, the band's clothes also pushed the craze," says 30-year-old Chen Lei , one of Beijing's best-regarded rock guitarists, who cites GN'R as a primary influence.

GN'R nostalgia remains strong. A program on state-run China Central Television last year ranked "Qiang Hua" (literally, "Guns Flowers"), as the group is known in Chinese, at No. 8 on a list of top rock bands of all time.

Chinese fans eager for news on the Web about the new album sidestep censors by using coded language. Many deliberately scramble the name, typing "Chinese Democraxy" or "Chi Dem." They say they fear that typing the Chinese characters for the title will draw government scrutiny. Still, it's not much challenge to find news about the record on the Web, where even the site www.chinesedemocracy.com is a discussion of GN'R, not politics.

Some fans in China relish how the album discomfits the establishment. "Rock 'n' roll, as a weapon, is an invisible bomb," says one.

Leo Huang, a 25-year-old guitarist, just hopes it will retrace GN'R's roots. "I prefer rock 'n' roll," said the skinny 25-year-old guitarist after a recent gig with his band, the Wildcats, at a hard-rock bar below a Shanghai highway.

Yet, for some fans in this nation of 2.6 billion ears, the new album's title is an irritation. Democracy is a touchy subject in this country. Elections are limited to votes for selected village-level officials, and senior leaders are all chosen in secret within the Communist Party. Many Chinese wish for greater say in their government. But others -- including some rockers -- think too much democracy too quickly could lead to chaos, and they resent foreign efforts to push the issue.

Mr. Chen, the guitarist, says the "Chinese Democracy" album title suggests "they don't understand China well" and are "just trying to stir up publicity."

Some Chinese artists, loath to be branded as democracy campaigners, declined valuable offers to help illustrate the album. "I listened to their music when I was little," says Beijing visual artist Chen Zhuo . He was "very glad" when GN'R asked to buy rights to use his picture of Tiananmen Square rendered as an amusement park -- with Mao Zedong's head near a roller coaster. Then, Mr. Chen looked at lyrics of the album's title song and, after consulting with his lawyer and partner, declined the band's $18,000 offer. "We have to take political risks into account as artists in China," says the 30-year-old.

The new album's title track, already released as a single, begins with eerie, high-pitched noises that sound vaguely like chattering in Chinese. In the song's three verses, Mr. Rose sings of "missionaries," "visionaries" and "sitting in a Chinese stew."

The overall message is unclear, but his most provocative lines aren't. "Blame it on the Falun Gong. They've seen the end and you can't hold on now," Mr. Rose sings. It is a reference to the spiritual movement that Beijing has outlawed as an "illegal cult" and vowed to crush.

Mr. Rose, 46, who is the only remaining original member of GN'R, is rarely interviewed and declined to comment for this article. He picked the new album's name more than a decade ago. In a 1999 television appearance, he discussed the thinking behind it.

"Well, there's a lot of Chinese democracy movements, and it's something that there's a lot of talk about, and it's something that will be nice to see. It could also just be like an ironic statement. I don't know, I just like the sound of it," Mr. Rose said.

Mr. Rose in recent years has visited Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Xian, and he worries he won't be let back in, says his assistant, Beta Lebeis. "Everything is so controlled," she says.

Chinese authorities in recent years have started letting once-controversial artists perform in the country, but they remain uncomfortable with hard rock. The Rolling Stones played their first China concerts in 2006, but only after bowing to government demands to drop certain songs, including "Brown Sugar," that were considered controversial.

Fresh barriers went up after a Shanghai concert in March by the singer Bjork, who punctuated her song "Declare Independence" with shouts of "Tibet!" Officials thought it sounded like agitation against Beijing's rule of the restive Himalayan region. In new rules issued later, they threatened to hold promoters responsible for performers who violated its laws, "including situations that harm the sovereignty of the country."

One casualty: GN'R promoters in China dropped plans for two shows this year, says Ms. Lebeis.

The Ministry of Culture forbids imports of music that violate any of 10 criteria, including music that publicizes "evil sects" or damages social morality. In reality, many songs make it into China anyway, pirated and via the Internet.

It's unclear how much exposure the new record will get. "I have to say, 'Chinese Democracy' sounds sensitive," says a Beijing radio station's programming chief who doubts it will get much air play.

The title alone makes it "impossible" to imagine the album will be released in China, says Nicreve Lee , a student in northeastern China who runs a Web site called GN'R Online (www.gnronline.cn). He says his first reaction listening to the title track was, "This is an anti-China song." But, he says, "I gradually began to understand what the song wants to say. Perhaps Axl Rose doesn't know China well, but at least he is on the right track."
—Ellen Zhu in Shanghai contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1227...ys_us_page_one





McCartney Communes With His Inner Hippie

"Electric Arguments" by the Fireman.
Jon Pareles

How does Paul McCartney, 66, follow up “Memory Almost Full,” his grand autumnal (but still chipper) statement on life and mortality? By hiding his name and conjuring one kind of heaven: the 1960s as reconstituted with 21st-century multitracking. For “Electric Arguments” he regrouped his not-so-anonymous duo the Fireman (Mr. McCartney produced by the bassist Youth), walked into the studio on 13 nonconsecutive days with no material, and finished a track at each session, playing all the instruments. (There’s also a fragment hidden at the end of the last song.) Some songs have verses and choruses, while others are just fleshed-out sketches, seeking and often finding what “Sing the Changes” calls for: “a sense of childlike wonder.”

The two Fireman albums Mr. McCartney released in 1993 and 1998 were repetition-powered instrumental outings: the first close to dance music, the second more meditative. But “Electric Arguments” is a song collection, from skewed blues-rock (“Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight,” complete with hooting harmonica and a Howlin’ Wolf impression) to gospelly skiffle (“Light From Your Lighthouse”) to East-West blends (“Lifelong Passion”) to blissed-out one-man studio jams (“Is This Love?”). The link to the ’90s Fireman is “Universal Here, Everlasting Now,” which has a synthesizer pulse amid its sliding, echoing guitars.

So now, young freak-folk indie-rockers have serious competition from actual ’60s titans like Mr. McCartney. On this album he sets loose his inner hippie — playful, tuneful, enigmatic, benevolent — in songs like “Traveling Light,” a Celtic-mode waltz in which he plinks a thumb piano, sings a lot of high oohs and whispers, “I glide on the green leaf/not asking for more.”

Although the songs took shape quickly, they’re not sparse. The arrangements metamorphose as Mr. McCartney fills them with picking, tinkling and a dizzying array of backup vocals. “Sun Is Shining” stacks up vocal harmonies like a lightheaded version of the Beach Boys. Simple mathematics would imply there are a lot of first takes, which is all the better; it’s Mr. McCartney working by instinct and impulse, concerned with nothing more than sound. “Electric Arguments” suggests that he’d happily spend his afterlife in a recording studio, knocking out a song a day for eternity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/ar...ic/24choi.html





Beatles Tracks Not Coming to iTunes Any Time Soon; McCartney: Talks at an Impasse

Sir Paul McCartney has thrown some cold water on hopes that Beatles' recordings would finally make it to iTunes, saying that negotiations with Apple Inc. have stalled.

As has happened many times before, fans of the band's music thought they might finally be ready for the digital age last month. MTVN's Harmonix games studio said it was developing a video game around Beatles' music. The game, which is not tied to Harmonix's Rock Band, is scheduled for release by Christmas 2009. And when the Beatles' label Apple Corps Ltd. settled its long-standing trademark dispute with iTunes creator Apple Inc. last February, it seemed that the main hurdle to a deal was cleared.

McCartney, who is promoting his new album, didn't shed any light as to the current hold-up. AP quoted him saying: "The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process… I really hope it will happen because I think it should."

• "It's between EMI and The Beatles" : The stumbling blocks for a Beatles iTunes rollout have more to do with EMI and Apple Corp. LTD., and not the computer company controlled by Steve Jobs, BillboardBiz reported, quoting Sir Paul from the same press conference. Sir Paul explained that EMI couldn't agree with The Beatles on the terms that should be set for iTunes and other download services. He was oblique about the exact points of contention: "They [EMI] want something we're not prepared to give them. Hey, sounds like the music business." For its part, an EMI rep told BillboardBiz that they have been "working very hard" on a deal that would bring The Beatles' tracks to iTunes to no avail. The rep added, "but we really hope that everyone can make progress soon."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/...ebeatles-apple





Apple iPhone Ad Banned Over Misleading Internet Speed Claims
Mark Sweney

A TV ad for Apple's 3G iPhone has been banned by the advertising regulator for misleading consumers over the internet capabilities of the smartphone.

The ruling marks the second time Apple has breached the advertising code for making misleading claims about the iPhone, after the Advertising Standards Authority banned TV ads for the first-generation iPhone in August.

Apple's latest TV campaign, by ad agency TBWA/London, made claims that the iPhone could access the internet, and download content, "really fast".

The ASA received 17 complaints that the ad was misleading for "exaggerating the speed of the iPhone 3G".

Apple UK said that the claims made in the ad were "relative rather than absolute in nature".

The company added that the claim was a comparison between the first-generation 2G iPhone and the new 3G version.

In its ruling, the ASA said that while the majority of consumers would be familiar with the performance of mobile phones "many might not be fully aware of the technical differences between the different types of technology".

Apple's claim that the 3G iPhone was "really fast", shown in an ad with speedy visuals of the internet being used on one of the smartphones would "lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad", the regulator said.

The ASA said the ad was misleading and should not appear again in its current form.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...6/apple-iphone





Shocking State of British Broadband Revealed
Barry Collins

The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec.

As far back as last year, telecoms regulator Ofcom was claiming "the average headline speed has doubled in a year to reach 4.6Mb/sec".

However, the ONS figures suggest that average is being heavily weighted by a small proportion of truly high-speed connections, such as the 24Mb/sec ADSL2+ broadband offered by ISPs with Local Loop Unbundled services.

More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput. That means that many more British broadband connections could well dip below the 2Mb/sec barrier when it comes to actual speeds.

A separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection. "The proportion of broadband customers unaware of their connection speeds has continued to grow - 55% were unaware of their connection speed (actual speed)," the Ofcom report claimed.

Nevertheless, the Ofcom Consumer Satisfaction report claimed that almost a fifth of broadband customers were unhappy with the speed of their connection. Incredibly, the regulator - which consistently quotes headline speeds instead of the actual speeds - blamed the press for confusing the public. "Press coverage about advertised maximum or headline speeds differing from actual speeds may have increased the confusion," the report stated.

The ONS figures also reveal that the number of fixed-line broadband connections has fallen by 0.4% from quarter to quarter.

The ONS put this down to the declining number of dial-up connections, but it seems likely that the increasingly popular mobile broadband - which isn't measured by the ONS - is also contributing to the reduction of fixed-line connections.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/239187/r...broadband.html





CRTC Ruling Not the Last Word on Net Neutrality
Michael Geist

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last week issued its much-anticipated ruling on the legality of Internet throttling, a controversial practice employed by some Internet service providers that reduces speeds for certain applications. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, which represents smaller, independent ISPs, filed a complaint with the CRTC over Bell's practices earlier this year.

The Commission denied the association's complaint, ruling that Bell treated all of its customers – both retail and wholesale – in the same throttled manner.

There is little doubt Bell comes out the winner in this round as the CRTC sided with the company on most key issues. It agreed there was network congestion due to peer-to-peer usage and Bell was therefore acting reasonably by implementing some network management techniques to address the congestion concerns. Moreover, it rejected fears that Bell's actions were motivated by a desire to undermine competition and it concluded the mere act of reducing Internet speeds does not rise to the level of controlling content (a violation of the Telecommunications Act).

While the CRTC's decision to permit Bell's throttling practices is disappointment to the association and advocates of net neutrality, the decision is not a total loss since the commission made a clear commitment to addressing the issue of net neutrality and network management in a formal proceeding in July 2009.

In fact, after Bell issued a news release claiming the decision "confirmed that network operators are in the best position to determine how to operate their networks effectively and efficiently, to allow fair and proportionate use of the Internet by all users," CRTC vice-chair Len Katz quickly responded by cautioning that "someone told me Bell put out a press release that said the commission upheld its position that network management practices are a fundamental right of theirs. That's not what we said at all."

The CRTC decision is therefore not the final word on net neutrality in Canada, but rather the first word on it. Moreover, should the commission come to the conclusion that downgrading some applications is consistent with current Canadian law, there is the likelihood of growing calls from within Parliament to change the law (New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, the author of a private member's bill on net neutrality, was quick to condemn the CRTC decision).

Indeed, it is important not to lose sight of how much has changed in the past year. In the fall of 2007, net neutrality was viewed as a fringe issue in Canada without much political traction. In the span of 12 months, there has been a major CRTC case, the Angus bill, a rally on Parliament Hill, a more vocal business community supporting net neutrality and a gradual shift of this issue into the political mainstream.

In the United States, the change has been even more dramatic – a Federal Communications Commission ruling on the throttling activities that aggressively ordered a cable provider to stop certain practices, proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress and a President-elect who has been outspoken on the need to preserve net neutrality.

In light of these developments, the net neutrality debate has shifted from whether there should rules on network management to what those rules should be. Opponents of net neutrality legislation argue the current Canadian law is sufficient to address any significant network management concerns. Yet, the CRTC seemed unable to fit the concerns associated with Internet throttling into the current prohibitions against discriminatory practices and interfering with content.

Canada is still in the early stages of addressing tough questions of what constitutes reasonable network management practices. While the slow pace of regulatory hearings is a source of frustration for many, the Commission's acknowledgement last week that it ``will try to establish the criteria to be used in the event that specific traffic management practices need to be authorized" indicates the issue is still far from settled.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/542156





Europe Nears Price Cap on Mobile Text Messaging
Kevin J. O’Brien

European Union telecommunications ministers are set to endorse on Thursday proposed price limits on cross-border text messaging and mobile Web surfing, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The International Herald Tribune.

The ministers plan to adopt almost verbatim a proposal made by the European telecommunications commissioner, Viviane Reding, the author of similar price restrictions on roaming charges for international voice calls involving cellphones.

But the ministers, meeting in Brussels, intend to reject a broader call from Ms. Reding to harmonize telecommunications costs and regulations within the 27 countries in the European Union. That proposal called for the European Commission to create a centralized regulator with the power to intervene in national telecommunications markets.

The ministers’ support for price controls on data roaming makes it a near certainty that the new restrictions will take effect July 1, after final negotiations next spring with the European Parliament. That body in 2007 overwhelmingly supported the limits on voice roaming charges.

The ministers have agreed to cap the retail charge for sending a cross-border short text message at 11 euro cents, or 14 American cents.

If the council’s position were adopted as it stands, charges for sending text messages across European borders would fall by an average of 62 percent from the current 29 euro cents, according to European Commission data. A similar percentage decline is possible in data roaming charges.

“It’s good that the council is endorsing the data caps,” said Levi Nietvelt, an economist with the European Consumers’ Organization in Brussels. “We would like to see the prices go down even further.”

Mobile operators have generally opposed the controls, arguing that the market should determine price levels.

While supporting data roaming caps, the ministers plan to send a message to the European Parliament and to Ms. Reding by opposing the attempt to allow Brussels to exert a greater influence over telecommunications pricing.

The national governments of two-thirds of member countries still own either a majority or a large stake in the former phone monopoly, which in many cases controls access to the main fixed-line network. In most European countries, the national telecommunications regulator works for the same government that owns a stake in the former phone monopoly.

Ms. Reding’s proposed regulatory overhaul, which gained support from the European Parliament, was aimed at dealing with this situation, which she considers a conflict of interest.

But the council intends to reject most elements of the regulatory package, which is also aimed at spurring cross-border competition among network operators.

Instead of supporting Ms. Reding’s call for a powerful regulator, the council plans to propose that a current advisory panel of 27 national regulators, called the European Regulators Group, be transformed into a private corporation — similar to a lobbying group — that will try to address issues of coordination.

Paul Rübig, a member of the European Parliament from Austria, who was a sponsor of the voice roaming legislation in 2007, said he was confident that Parliament and the ministers’ council would reach a compromise in the spring to create a new Europe-wide regulator.

The ministers also are opposing a plan to compel countries to ensure that their national regulators remain free of local government influence, removing the word “independent” from the text approved by the commission and Parliament. The issue has gained prominence after the prime minister of Romania twice in three years dismissed the country’s top national telecommunications regulator.

Malcolm Harbour, one of three sponsors in Parliament of the telecommunications legislation, said he was confident lawmakers would reach agreement with telecommunications ministers to pass a revised package into law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/26roam.html





How To Send Email To Any Cell Phone (for Free)
Aibek

Want to send a short email to a friend and get it delivered to his/her cell phone as SMS? If you know your friends’ phone numbers and the carrier they are on then you can easily send emails to their cell phones directly from your email program.

Here is how it works:

Most of mobile carriers offer free Email To SMS gateways which can be used to forward simple text emails to a mobile phones. And the good news, majority of those gateways are free and available to the general public.

You just need to know the number and the carrier of the recipient to start emailing them to mobile phone. Below we put together a table listing free email to SMS gateways for different carriers. You can use as quick reference both for US and international mobile numbers.

Free Email To SMS Gateways (Major US Carriers)

Carrier--------------------Email to SMS Gateway
Alltel [10-digit phone number]@message.alltel.com
Example: 1234567890@message.alltel.com
AT&T (formerly Cingular) [10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net
[10-digit phone number]@mms.att.net (MMS)
[10-digit phone number]@cingularme.com
Example: 1234567890@txt.att.net
Boost Mobile [10-digit phone number]@myboostmobile.com
Example: 1234567890@myboostmobile.com
Nextel (now Sprint Nextel) [10-digit telephone number]@messaging.nextel.com
Example: 1234567890@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint PCS (now Sprint Nextel) [10-digit phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
[10-digit phone number]@pm.sprint.com (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile [10-digit phone number]@tmomail.net
Example: 1234567890@tmomail.net
US Cellular [10-digit phone number]email.uscc.net (SMS)
[10-digit phone number]@mms.uscc.net (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@email.uscc.net
Verizon [10-digit phone number]@vtext.com
[10-digit phone number]@vzwpix.com (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile USA [10-digit phone number]@vmobl.com
Example: 1234567890@vmobl.com


Free Email To SMS Gateways (International + Smaller US)

These are all I could find from Wikipedia and other sources. If you’re aware of any other ones please share them in comments and I’ll add them to the list.

Carrier-------------------------Email to SMS Gateway
7-11 Speakout (USA GSM) number@cingularme.com
Airtel (Karnataka, India) number@airtelkk.com
Airtel Wireless (Montana, USA) number@sms.airtelmontana.com
Alaska Communications Systems number@msg.acsalaska.com
Aql number@text.aql.com
AT&T Enterprise Paging number@page.att.net
BigRedGiant Mobile Solutions number@tachyonsms.co.uk
Bell Mobility & Solo Mobile (Canada) number@txt.bell.ca
BPL Mobile (Mumbai, India) number@bplmobile.com
Cellular One (Dobson) number@mobile.celloneusa.com
Cingular (Postpaid) number@cingularme.com
Centennial Wireless number@cwemail.com
Cingular (GoPhone prepaid) number@cingularme.com (SMS)
Claro (Brasil) number@clarotorpedo.com.br
Claro (Nicaragua) number@ideasclaro-ca.com
Comcel number@comcel.com.co
Cricket number@sms.mycricket.com (SMS)
CTI number@sms.ctimovil.com.ar
Emtel (Mauritius) number@emtelworld.net
Fido (Canada) number@fido.ca
General Communications Inc. number@msg.gci.net
Globalstar (satellite) number@msg.globalstarusa.com
Helio number@myhelio.com
Illinois Valley Cellular number@ivctext.com
Iridium (satellite) number@msg.iridium.com
i wireless number.iws@iwspcs.net
Koodo Mobile (Canada) number@msg.koodomobile.com
Meteor (Ireland) number@sms.mymeteor.ie
Mero Mobile (Nepal) 977number@sms.spicenepal.com
MetroPCS number@mymetropcs.com
Movicom number@movimensaje.com.ar
Mobitel (Sri Lanka) number@sms.mobitel.lk
Movistar (Colombia) number@movistar.com.co
MTN (South Africa) number@sms.co.za
MTS (Canada) number@text.mtsmobility.com
Nextel (United States) number@messaging.nextel.com
Nextel (Argentina) TwoWay.11number@nextel.net.ar
Orange Polska (Poland) 9digit@orange.pl
Personal (Argentina) number@alertas.personal.com.ar
Plus GSM (Poland) +48number@text.plusgsm.pl
President’s Choice (Canada) number@txt.bell.ca
Qwest number@qwestmp.com
Rogers (Canada) number@pcs.rogers.com
SL Interactive (Australia) number@slinteractive.com.au
Sasktel (Canada) number@sms.sasktel.com
Setar Mobile email (Aruba) 297+number@mas.aw
Suncom number@tms.suncom.com
T-Mobile (Austria) number@sms.t-mobile.at
T-Mobile (UK) number@t-mobile.uk.net
Telus Mobility (Canada) number@msg.telus.com
Thumb Cellular number@sms.thumbcellular.com
Tigo (Formerly Ola) number@sms.tigo.com.co
Tracfone (prepaid) number@mmst5.tracfone.com
Unicel number@utext.com
Virgin Mobile (Canada) number@vmobile.ca
Vodacom (South Africa) number@voda.co.za
YCC number@sms.ycc.ru
MobiPCS (Hawaii only) number@mobipcs.net

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/email-to-sms/





Can Crowdsourcing be Used to Monitor the Internet?
Alpha Doggs

Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system.

Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems.

"You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring," said Fabián Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (He's working on the system with doctoral student David Choffne.).

Northwestern's AquaLab describes NEWS this way:

The main goal of this plugin is to reliably find problems in the network and raise alerts about them. As a user, you want to be sure that you are getting the service that you're paying for and be notified quickly about network problems, especially those that can lead to compensation for service interruption. For ISPs, this software helps to quickly localize and identify network problems so they can be fixed more rapidly and make users happy.

More than 13,000 users have installed beta NEWS code. Bustamante has a good track record with BitTorrent users, who have already gobbled up Ono, a plug-in that speeds up peer-to-peer interactions.

The researchers are building a NEWS portal for network providers as well so they can see at a glance what issues end users are reporting
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35679





Open Source Wi-Fi Service Claims Ten Million Hotspots In Network
Priya Ganapati

Connecting to free Wi-Fi can be extremely frustrating. But WeFi, a three-year old start up, says it has solved the problem.

Ten million Wi-Fi access points have been recognized and classified so far onto a map says the Fairfax, Virginia-based company.

About one million users are currently using the company's service, it claims.

Most Wi-Fi enabled devices show users a set of available connections and allow them to choose. But the process can be a bit of a hit-or-miss as users have to try on different connections to see what works best.

WeFi claims its software will automatically connect users to the best available free wireless connection. After the first user discovers and successfully connects to a previously unknown hotspot, the software maps the spot and uses the connectivity data to make it easier for future users to log on.

The network is user-generated, which means as more users join in more access points are discovered and added to the community.

To get started users have to download the free software from WeFi, which is available in PC, Symbian and Windows Mobile versions.

The WeFi directory is the largest virtual global Wi-Fi network claims the company.

Members can also map and rank open hotspots in any location. They can locate each other on the WeFi global map, send messages and share content.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/1...source-wi.html





Save The Net

The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist.

Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection - and that won't be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.

Sign the petition below:

Senator Conroy,

I don't want draconian government restrictions on the internet that will hold back the digital economy and miss the vast majority of unwanted content."

Click here to proceed





Does Your House Need a Tail?
Timothy B. Lee

Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies and mandates at the federal level for incumbents to deploy faster broadband.

Tim Wu and Derek Slater have a great new paper out that approaches the problem from a different perspective: that broadband deployments could be planned and financed not by government or private industry, but by consumers themselves. That might sound like a crazy idea at first blush, but Wu and Slater do a great job of explaining how it might work. The key idea is "condominium fiber," an arrangement in which a number of neighboring households pool their resources to install fiber to all the homes in their neighborhoods. Once constructed, each home would own its own fiber strand, while the shared costs of maintaining the "trunk" cable from the individual homes to a central switching location would be managed in the same way that condominium and homeowners' associations currently manage the shared areas of condos and gated communities. Indeed, in many cases the developer of a new condominium tower or planned community could lay fiber along with water and power lines, and the fiber would be just one of the shared resources that would be managed collectively by the homeowners.

If that sounds strange, it's important to remember that there are plenty of examples where things that were formerly rented became owned. For example, fifty years ago in the United States no one owned a telephone. The phone was owned by Ma Bell and if yours broke they'd come and install a new one. But that changed, and now people own their phones and the wiring inside their homes, with your phone company owning the cable outside the home. One way to think about Slater and Wu's "homes with tails" concept is that it's just shifting that line of demarcation again. Under their proposal, you'd own the wiring inside your home and the line from you to your broadband provider.

Why would someone want to do such a thing? The biggest advantage, from my perspective, is that it could solve the thorny problem of limited competition in the "last mile" of broadband deployment. Right now, most customers have two options for high-speed Internet access. Getting more options using the traditional, centralized investment model is going to be extremely difficult because it costs a lot to deploy new infrastructure all the way to customers' homes. But if customers "brought their own" fiber, then the barrier to entry would be much lower. New providers would simply need to bring a single strand of fiber to a neighborhood's centralized point of presence in order to offer service to all customers in that neighborhood. So it would be much easier to imagine a world in which customers had numerous options to choose from.

The challenge is solving the chicken-and-egg problem: customer owned fiber won't be attractive until there are several providers to choose from, but it doesn't make sense for new firms to enter this market until there are a significant number of neighborhoods with customer-owned fiber. Wu and Slater suggest several ways this chicken-and-egg problem might be overcome, but I think it will remain a formidable challenge. My guess is that at least at the outset, the customer-owned model will work best in new residential construction projects, where the costs of deploying fiber will be very low (because they'll already be digging trenches for power and water).

But the beauty of their model is that unlike a lot of other plans to encourage broadband deployment, this isn't an all-or-nothing choice. We don't have to convince an entire nation, state, or even city to sign onto a concept like this. All you need is a neighborhood with a few dozen early-adopting consumers and an ISP willing to serve them. Virtually every cutting-edge technology is taken up by a small number of early adopters (who pay high prices for the privilege of being the first with a new technology) before it spreads to the general public, and the same model is likely to apply to customer-owned fiber. If the concept is viable, someone will figure out how to make it work, and their example will be duplicated elsewhere. So I don't know if customer-owned fiber is the wave of the future, but I do hope that people start experimenting with it.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/200811...e_need_a_tail/





Micron Promises Supercharged 1 GB/s SSD
Wolfgang Gruener

Chip manufacturer has demonstrated what is, at least to our knowledge, the fastest solid state disk drive (SSD) demonstrated so far. A demo unit shown in a blurry YouTube video was hitting data transfer rates of 800 MB/s and can expand to apparently about 1 GB/s. The IO performance is about twice of the best performance we have seen to date.

Ok, we have not actually seen the exact numbers, since the YouTube video is too blurry, but if we believe the claims made my Micron staffers, then we might see a dramatic increase in SSD performance in the not too distant future.

Posted on Micron’s new blog, the video showcases a 2-processor, eight-core Intel Xeon PC with two SSDs The difference to your average SSD is that these drives are not connected via a PATA or SATA interface and therefore are not limited to the bandwidth limit of 300 MB/s of SATA II. Instead, the drives have PCIe interfaces and, according to Micron, include flash data management enhancements.

During the short demonstration, Micron’s Joe Jeddeloh claims that the two cards hit a data throughput of about 800 MB/s and about 150,000 to 160,000 random IOPS. He also showed a flash PCIe card that combined the two cards in one device with 16 flash channels. This card will be hitting a bandwidth of 1 GB/s and “at least 200,000 IOPS,” he said. For comparison reasons, the fastest enterprise SSDs available from big manufacturers today hit about 250 MB/s and about 30,000 IOPS.

The fastest hard drive you can buy today, WD’s Velociraptor, clocks in at about 100 MB/s.

The PCIe concept of SSDs has been shown before, most notably by Fusion IO, which hit about 100,000 IOPS about a year ago. The company recently announced a “consumer version” of its PCIe card, which will offer data throughput of 500 – 700 MB/s and about 50,000 IOPS for about $1000.

We have no idea what the Micron drive will cost, but it does not look cheap. Jeddeloh noted that the 1 GB/s drive will be available “soon”.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40359/135/





Super Micro Computer: A One-Man, or at Least One-Family, Powerhouse
Ashlee Vance

At Super Micro Computer, cartons of parts are often stacked in the parking lot, exposed to the elements. The 15-year-old computer maker has grown to 850 employees but still tracks orders the old-fashioned way, relying on sales representatives to monitor each step from assembly to shipping.

On Saturdays, a family-style lunch is served to workers as a token of thanks for workdays that can stretch to 15 hours.

And Charles Liang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, obsesses over every detail of the business, from approving the custom orders that are the company’s specialty to dictating the environmentally themed, green neckties that executives wear to customer meetings.

Despite its peculiarities, Super Micro is a thriving, publicly traded business that sells about $600 million a year of servers to the likes of eBay and Yahoo. More often than not, the company beats rivals to market by three to six months, offering the fastest, most compact, energy-efficient computers to demanding corporate and institutional customers. It has managed to post annual sales growth exceeding 20 percent in recent years, and its stock has outperformed competitors like Rackable Systems and Sun Microsystems.

Super Micro reflects the passion and quirks of Mr. Liang, an immigrant from Taiwan, who is considered so vital to the operation that the company warns investors in regulatory filings that his loss could derail the company’s business, culture and strategic direction.

“He is the person who approves and looks at everything the company is doing — every new product, marketing effort, sales effort, anything you want to do or promote,” said Scott Barlow, who was manager of American sales at Super Micro before leaving to join Salesforce.com. “He is kind of a one-man show.”

Current and former employees describe Mr. Liang with reverence that borders on the cultish. “It’s almost as if Charles wills things to happen,” said Don Clegg, a vice president. “If he says a product will be on schedule, it will be on schedule. This is not driven on fear. It’s driven on belief.”

At the heart of everything Super Micro are two principles: give customers what they want, and do it as fast as humanly possible.

Whereas rivals long ago sent key design work to Asia to take advantage of cheaper, plentiful labor, Super Micro still relies on hundreds of expensive engineers working at its San Jose headquarters. These workers are charged with grabbing the latest and greatest components from suppliers and coming up with new designs months ahead of lumbering heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

“As an individual, Charles is very aggressive and motivated,” said Patrick P. Gelsinger, Intel’s senior vice president in charge of server chips. “Every once in a while, he appears on the verge of reckless, but if you’re going up against the big guys, you have to be willing to take risks.”

The company has become the lead manufacturer that Intel uses for showcasing new products, and rivals often relabel and ship systems built by Super Micro until they can come up with their own designs that accommodate the latest chips. “They are ready to move and move quick,” Mr. Gelsinger said.

Super Micro’s quick turnaround times and sophisticated products have allowed it to grab some loyal and large customers, like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which purchases tens of thousands of servers each year.

“We’re usually trying to buy the latest and greatest stuff, and they typically have new technology first,” said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the lab. “This helps us maximize the bang for our buck.”

In order to produce gear at such a quick clip, Super Micro asks a lot of its workers. It’s quite common for employees to arrive just after 7 in morning and stay until 10 p.m., coming in on weekends as well. Mr. Liang himself regularly works seven days a week, saying “every hour is a happy hour, or least every day is a happy day.”

Mr. Liang has run the firm alongside his wife and company treasurer, Chiu-Chu Liu, known as Sara, since it started as a five-person operation in 1993.

The insular, family-run approach is typical of traditional Chinese business culture, said AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied immigrant-run businesses in Silicon Valley. “It echoes back to a very traditional Chinese business model, where you have the family-run farm,” she said. “It’s all about trust and how you save money.”

One of Super Micro’s main Taiwanese manufacturing partners, Ablecom, is run by Mr. Liang’s brother, Steve Liang. Charles Liang and his wife own close to 31 percent of Ablecom, while Steve Liang and other members of the family own close to 50 percent.

Regulatory filings show that “a substantial majority” of Ablecom’s sales come from Super Micro. And while Super Micro pays most suppliers within 81 days, it will sometimes take up to 118 days to pay Ablecom, which houses components and regularly renegotiates prices with Super Micro.

“There are some funky, inter-family ownership questions that I would prefer didn’t exist,” said Alex Kurtz, a securities analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford, though he praised the company for disclosing a fair amount about the relationship.

Super Micro has some other rough edges, too. The lack of order-tracking software forces sales representatives to spend valuable time making sure systems are built and shipped, and they often squabble over who owns particular accounts.

The company’s poor controls also contributed to its violation of a United States embargo against the sale of computer systems to Iran. In 2006, Super Micro pleaded guilty to a felony charge and paid a $150,000 fine.

“We were a new company and didn’t know every regulation,” Mr. Liang said. “Now, we are well trained and watch over this 24 hours a day.” Mr. Liang added that Super Micro was improving its order-tracking system and might consider purchasing process management software.

Despite the global economic slump, Super Micro could enjoy a sales spurt over the next few months as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices release new server processors and the company races to design machines that use them to full advantage, according to analysts.

And those green ties? At Mr. Liang’s request, sales representatives wear them to meetings as a symbol of the company’s energy-conserving hardware. Text on the ties boasts that Super Micro’s products are “earth friendly” and lead to nothing less than “better life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/te...g/24micro.html





Dell’s New Conservatism: Zero Percent Financing
Ashlee Vance

Just last week, Dell talked about turning conservative with its cash and financing programs because of the uncertain economy. Then on Wednesday, Dell began touting a zero percent financing program for large business customers. Go figure.

Software giants SAP and Microsoft were already hawking similar programs, as the technology companies try and use their cash stockpiles to make life easier on customers dealing with strained budgets and tight credit.

But Dell, even with $9 billion in cash, had been warning that it was going to be more conservative in granting credit. “We tightened our credit in general, and it has affected our ability to provide financing,” said Brian Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer, last week.

Dell’s conservatism was reflected in its third-quarter results, which showed a company cutting as many costs as possible to bolster profits while sales fell.

Along with the financing programs, Dell said Wednesday that it was slashing prices by as much as 20 percent on products like servers and laptops.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/1...ent-financing/





Andrew J. McKelvey, 74, Builder of Monster.com, Dies
Steve Lohr

Andrew J. McKelvey, a serial entrepreneur who in his early 60s jumped into Internet commerce as the executive who built Monster.com into the leading job recruitment Web site, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Christine McKelvey said.

Before his work with Monster.com, Mr. McKelvey created a company called Telephone Marketing Programs, which became the nation’s largest Yellow Pages advertising agency. Begun in 1967 in borrowed office space and with one part-time assistant, TMP Worldwide, as it was later named, grew to employ thousands of workers and handle nearly a third of the American Yellow Pages ad business.

Mr. McKelvey combined hard work, persistence and deft timing. He explained his philosophy in an interview with The New York Times four years ago. “What you do in business is, you follow your nose,” Mr. McKelvey said. “The secret of success is being in the right place at the right time.”

Mr. McKelvey followed that dictum repeatedly over the years. After graduating from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., where he also found time to run a movie theater, and serving a stint in the Army, Mr. McKelvey headed to Australia.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. McKelvey figured that Australia was a decade or so behind the United States in adopting social and consumer trends. “So my father decided to go to Australia, start a business and gain what people would now call a first-mover advantage,” his son, Stuart McKelvey, said in an interview Friday.

In Australia, Mr. McKelvey began a music jukebox business that became one of the largest such concerns in the country.

But by the early 1960s, Mr. McKelvey decided that advertising was a promising growth industry of the future, and that New York was the place to be. In 1963, he got a job as an account manager at a Madison Avenue ad agency, handling consumer products like Vaseline Hair Tonic.

Later, Mr. McKelvey moved to another agency and took over the account of a company that advertised not on television, the hot new medium of its day, but only in the Yellow Pages. He became intrigued, saw an opportunity, and started the Yellow Pages ad agency, TMP, which he built up with a steady stream of corporate acquisitions.

It was Mr. McKelvey’s foray beyond Yellow Pages into help-wanted agencies in the 1990s that introduced him to Internet commerce. Mr. McKelvey wanted to buy Adion, a Boston-area recruitment ad agency run by Jeffrey Taylor. When they met, Mr. Taylor was most excited by a little sideline, a fledgling Web site, the Monster Board.

Mr. McKelvey was skeptical at first that the Web was going to be the future of job searches, said George R. Eisele, a former board member of Monster Worldwide, the parent company, and a longtime business associate of Mr. McKelvey. But he eventually became convinced, bought Adion in 1995, and pursued the Internet strategy with a vengeance. He quickly bought Online Career Center, Monster’s larger rival at the time.

Mr. McKelvey invested heavily over the next few years, including buying Super Bowl ads that helped make Monster.com the popular first choice for online job searching.

“Once he perceived its importance, he was relentless,” Mr. Eisele recalled in an interview on Friday. “That’s why Andy McKelvey was so successful on the Internet, even though he wasn’t a technological visionary.”

In the last few years, Mr. McKelvey’s business reputation was tarnished by a stock-options investigation at Monster Worldwide. He left the company in 2006 amid questions about his role in backdating employee stock options. In a settlement earlier this year, Mr. McKelvey agreed to pay the company $8 million and give up most of his voting shares. In a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he also paid about $276,000. Mr. McKelvey, the commission noted, did not receive any backdated options himself.

Mr. McKelvey, who was married six times, is survived by two sons, Geoffrey McKelvey of Stuart, Fla., and Stuart McKelvey of Mamaroneck, N.Y.; two daughters, Christine and Amanda McKelvey, both of Manhattan; and six grandchildren.

Mr. McKelvey’s personal wealth enabled him to become an active philanthropist, setting up the McKelvey Foundation in 2000 to provide college scholarships to young men and women who show an entrepreneurial flair in high school.

Mr. McKelvey’s foundation, it seems, is intended to provide financial help to teenagers in his own image. His first entrepreneurial venture was as a 14-year-old, buying eggs from a farmer in Southern New Jersey and selling them to neighbors for a profit of 10 cents a dozen.

Mr. McKelvey’s eclectic charitable efforts mirror his personal interests and enthusiasms. For example, Mr. McKelvey, who had a lung-scarring ailment, supported the research of the physician who successfully treated him and donated $25 million to set up the Andrew J. McKelvey Lung Transplant Center at Emory University.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. McKelvey played a central role in organizing the Families of Freedom fund for college scholarships for the children of the victims. The program, which raised more than $100 million, was headed by former president Bill Clinton and former senator Bob Dole.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/te...9mckelvey.html





Tom Gish, Tenacious Kentucky Newsman, Dies at 82
AP

Tom Gish, who shined a spotlight on corruption and environmental degradation in his corner of southeastern Kentucky as publisher of The Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg for a half-century, died Friday. He was 82.

Mr. Gish and his wife, Pat, overcame floods, threats, arson and attempted suppression to deliver news in the weekly publication with the slogan, “It Screams!”

The Gishes took on previously untouched issues, including strip mining and police corruption. They endured advertising boycotts, faced violent threats and had their newspaper offices firebombed in 1974. The Gishes churned out another issue a week after the episode, with the masthead stating, “It Still Screams!”

The couple bought the Whitesburg newspaper in 1956. Their son Ben Gish is its editor.

The Gishes were recipients of the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists, among others.

Before buying the paper, Mr. Gish was a Frankfort bureau chief for United Press International. His wife formerly reported for The Lexington Leader, which later merged with The Lexington Herald to become The Lexington Herald-Leader.

In the difficult early years, Mr. Gish recalled, public officials would pass resolutions banning Mountain Eagle staff members from attending their meetings.

“It’s hard to run a weekly paper and be aggressive and know that every time you go to the grocery store, you’re going to bump into someone who may not think you’re the greatest guy at that time,” said a longtime journalist, Bill Bishop, who worked at the newspaper from 1975 to 1977. “But they were just fearless and knew their job and did it.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Gish is survived by two sons, three daughters, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild, according to The Herald-Leader.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/bu...ia/24gish.html





For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts
Jenna Wortham

It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

Anil Dash, a former blogger and current vice president at Six Apart, announced the program Nov. 14, shortly after the company made its own staff cuts. Mr. Dash fired off a blog post: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”

On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”

Brooke-Sidney Gavins, a broadcast journalism student at the University of Southern California, is hoping to be chosen to help her nascent writing career. “I understand that there may not be a ‘guaranteed’ job with a major media organization after I graduate,” Ms. Gavins said. “A lot of new journalists are going to have to build their careers more guerrilla-style by selling their stories and promoting their work all the time.”

For Johanna Neuman, a veteran White House reporter and blogger who was recently laid off by The Los Angeles Times, the program would be a chance to continue writing about politics and float book ideas in the hopes of landing a publishing deal. “I might just start putting chapters up and see who salutes,” Ms. Neuman said.

Mr. Dash says he hopes to eventually accept every applicant. “How do we do right by all these people?” he said. “That’s exactly what’s keeping me up at night.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/te...t/24apart.html





In Lean Times, Online Coupons Are Catching On
Claire Cain Miller

On the Internet, nothing travels faster than a tip on how to score a bargain. Especially in an economic downturn.

With online retail sales falling this month for the first time, Internet merchants are offering steep discounts to anyone willing to punch in a secret coupon code or visit a rebate site for a “referral” before loading up their virtual cart.

Shoppers obsessed with finding these bargains share the latest intelligence on dozens of sites with quirky names like RetailMeNot.com, FatWallet.com and the Budget Fashionista. And more consumers than ever are scanning the listings before making a purchase at their favorite Web site.

Some online shoppers are so good at this game that they almost never buy anything at full price, making them the digital era’s version of bargain hunters who used to spend hours clipping coupons to shrink their grocery bills.

Tavon Ferguson, a 25-year-old graduate student in Atlanta, became obsessed with finding online deals last spring, while planning her July wedding. She scoured the Web for coupons and got free save-the-date cards, $8 bracelets for her bridesmaids and free shipping on flash-frozen steaks for the rehearsal dinner.

“I was able to do my wedding at a price that nobody would even guess” — $6,000, all included — “because everything down from invitations to the photo album, I got for ridiculously low prices with online coupon codes,” Mrs. Ferguson said.

Her favorite sites include RetailMeNot.com, which has one of the most comprehensive lists; CouponMom.com, which includes coupons for physical stores; and CouponCode.com, which is organized by category.

Mrs. Ferguson may be more fanatical than most people, but surfing for online coupons is growing in popularity. In October, 27 million people visited a coupon site, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 33 percent from a year earlier.

“Coupons had never been a big factor online the way they are offline. This is something new,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “It’s taken pricing power away from the retailers and given it to the consumers, because the consumer is totally up to speed on what the prices are.” Retailers have mixed feelings about this shift.

Generally, companies prefer limited discounts, e-mailed to a select group of customers or sent inside packages with a purchase. When the coupons get wider exposure, retailers lose control, potentially costing them more money than they expected.

Two years ago, Sierra Trading Post, a site that sells overstock outdoor gear, sent a coupon code with 1,000 of its 50 million catalogs, expecting to generate $2,000 in sales. Instead, it led to $300,000 in sales after a customer posted it online.

“We certainly appreciated the sales, but sales with that code were at a very low margin,” said David Giacomini, director of catalog operations for the company. Sierra Trading now sends some coupons directly to Web sites and limits catalog codes to three uses.

Some retailers try to battle the coupon sites. Harry & David, a seller of fruit baskets, threatened legal action against RetailMeNot.com this spring for publishing its discounts, prompting the coupon site to steer visitors to other gift-basket companies. William Ihle, a spokesman for Harry & David, said that all of its deals were available on its own site and the coupon sites “disingenuously mislead the consumer” by posting expired or unverified discounts.

Other retailers use the coupon sites as marketing tools. For example, when Scott Kluth founded CouponCabin in 2003, he had discounts for only 180 stores, and many of them did not like it. Today, 1,300 merchants, including Dell, Target, Home Depot and Victoria’s Secret, send him discount codes — totaling about a thousand a week.

“They have seen the power of a coupon, in this economy especially, and they’re absolutely embracing us,” Mr. Kluth said.

Most of the sites list coupon codes submitted by readers and retailers. Shoppers can comment on whether the coupon worked and share tips in user forums. Some sites e-mail coupon lists to subscribers. RetailMeNot.com goes further with an add-on to the Firefox browser that alerts users when an e-commerce site they are visiting has a discount.

EbatesMany of the coupon sites are run by Web entrepreneurs who see a business opportunity in collecting online discount codes at one site. They earn a commission from the retailer when a customer makes a purchase. Sites like FatWallet.com and Ebates offer shoppers cash back on purchases if they sign in and then click through to the retailer.

But other discount aggregator sites were started by passionate shoppers eager to share their bargain-hunting wisdom. Kathryn Finney began Budget Fashionista in 2003, when she finished graduate school and found herself broke and newly interested in bargains. Now, “it’s in my blood,” she said. “I cannot physically pay full price.”

Ms. Finney’s site was originally aimed at friends and family, but it quickly developed a following that has spiked 60 percent since August to 550,000 visitors a month. “We’re gaining a whole new level of fans, who maybe weren’t budget shoppers last year,” Ms. Finney said. Her site now makes money through advertising and referral fees.

Among her coupon-scouting tips: search the name of an online store and the word “coupon” and compare the promotions, because bigger sites are often able to negotiate better offers; if you find a coupon for an offline store, call the Web site and ask it to match the price; and insist upon free shipping, even if it means calling the manager and asking for a coupon code.

Deborah Dockendorf, a power Web shopper in Chicago, has another piece of advice: if you cannot immediately find a coupon code for a specific store, just wait. “It might be two weeks, but you will have a code for it,” she said.

Even though Ms. Dockendorf lives near the department stores of Michigan Avenue and the boutiques of Oak Street, she says she does 98 percent of her shopping online — always with a discount. She recently bought six pairs of $45 Wolford opaque stockings from Saks Fifth Avenue with a 40 percent discount and free shipping. She also snagged a $400 feather bed at half off from Pacific Coast Feather Company.

“I used to feel a little embarrassed about using them, like I was one of those coupon queens at the grocery store,” she said. “But now there is not a day that goes by when a friend doesn’t e-mail me for codes, and if I don’t have one, I can find one for them soon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/te.../27coupon.html





The Network Of Everything: Personal Networks Will Have To Cope With At Least A Thousand Devices

Wireless experts believe that, by 2017, personal networks will have to cope with at least a thousand devices, like laptops, telephones, mp3 players, games, sensors and other technology. To link these devices will require a ‘Network of Everything’. It represents an astonishing challenge, but European researchers believe that they are moving towards the solution.

European researchers have just completed work on a networking project to perfect what will become known, perhaps, as the Smart Personal Network. Personal Networks, or PNs, are seen as essential for a world where many different devices must work in sync together, known as 4G (fourth generation). It will mean personalised services, low power devices with cheap, ubiquitous and broadband connectivity.

The EU-funded MAGNET Beyond project tackled all the issues surrounding PNs. MAGNET stands for ‘My personal Adaptive Global NET’ and the project further developed the concept of Personal Area Networks (PANs), first introduced in earlier PN projects PACWOMAN and MAGNET.

While the PANs link together all the devices and technology within a person’s reach, the PNs spread the networking domain transparently towards the personal devices reachable via different network infrastructures. A PN belongs to and serves a private entity, a person, a fire fighter, or eventually a car, an aeroplane.

In the future, there will be hundreds, even as many as a thousand devices in a PN. It may seem an impossible figure, but in the near future the number of personal devices will multiply enormously. One person might have dozens of sensors, monitoring vital signs like heart rate and temperature, and even the electrolytes present in perspiration. And then there are sensors and actuators in the home, including light switches, and more again in cars.

People will be able to link with TVs, stoves and spectacles, which could double as a personal TV screen, and even clothing. They will have a home gateway, to manage all their home devices, and a car gateway while driving.

A person may access remotely personal files from almost anywhere in the world as if he or she were at the office. People will be able to include others in their PN and exchange personal information, or patch into a presentation in another conference room and watch it remotely. Many of these technologies already exist, but over time, they will become more widespread and connected.

In reality, it is hard to know what kind of devices or technology might be around for sure, but one thing is certain… there will be a lot of them. Hence the World Wireless Research Forum’s (WWRF) prediction of 7 trillion devices for 7 billion people by 2017 – in other words, around a thousand devices for every man, woman and child on the planet.

“In the industry, 2017 is like slang for a future where there will be many, many more devices that people use in their day-to-day life,” explains Professor Liljana Gavrilovska, Technical Manager of the MAGNET Beyond project. “This project prepares for that future.”

Crossed-fingers

Right now, PNs usually involve fiddling around with Bluetooth settings and crossing your fingers. If it does work, users typically try to complete simple tasks by trial and error, like hunting for photos on your mobile or trying to transfer a tune from your computer to a PDA.

But in the MAGNET model, users are able to easily set up their Personal Networks with all their devices.

“We have a user-centric approach,” reveals Gavrilovska, “with the overall objective to design, develop, demonstrate and validate the concept of a flexible PN that supports resource-efficient, robust, ubiquitous personal services in a secure, heterogeneous networking environment for mobile users.”

In the MAGNET Beyond vision, the devices will be self-organising and will be able to form geographically distributed secure networks of personal devices. This vision includes a platform for a multitude of personal applications and services to support private and professional activities in an unobtrusive, but dependable and trustworthy way.

United federation of PNs

Better yet, these networks will be able to ‘federate’ with other PNs on a permanent or ad-hoc basis. Users will be able to link their PNs permanently with those of their friends and family, or temporarily with other people and companies depending on some purpose or joint interest (see photo 2). Users will be able to control precisely what devices and information other people can link with.

Four fundamental principles guided the consortium’s work: ease of use, trustworthiness, ubiquity and low cost.

“For example, the system is designed to be user friendly, with little or no training required and no need for system administrators,” Gavrilovska explains. “It will ensure security and protect privacy, and it will work everywhere, even without any additional infrastructure, but still be able to exploit any available resources, like wifi or cellphone networks, for example."

The key elements to achieving these goals were personalisation and a tailored security, privacy and trust framework, including identity and the management of credentials. Credentials establish the trustworthiness of services outside the PN.

Future-proof

“We also designed it to be a future-proof architecture, to be self-organising, self-managing and aware of the context,” Gavrilovska notes. The consortium even developed new hardware prototypes with optimised air interfaces, to ensure the MAGNET Beyond platform worked efficiently.

It was an enormous challenge, but MAGNET Beyond enjoys substantial resources, too. The consortium includes 35 companies from 16 countries on two continents. It has a budget of over €16m, with €10.3m from the EU – and that is just phase two.

Phase one, called simply MAGNET, had 32 partners in 17 countries on three continents with a budget of €17.4m (€10m from the EU).

Both phases featured many of the world’s leading corporations and research institutes, like Nokia, NEC, Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, TeliaSonera, Telefonica, CEA LETI, VTT, CSEM, France telecom, Telefonica, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Delft University of Technology, NICT, University of Surrey, Rome and Kassel, Aalborg, GET-INT, and many others.

The effort was worth it, with a vast range of innovative technologies now delivering Smart Personal Networks. Personal Networks that can be easily integrated into the future generations of wireless networks, and co-operate in the unfolding Future Internet and Internet of Things.

The MAGNET Beyond project received funding from the ICT strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1117082425.htm





H.P. Results Match Preliminary Numbers
Ashlee Vance

When Mark V. Hurd took over as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2005 and started looking at the company’s businesses, he found a neglected little unit called ProCurve that made networking gear used to connect computing systems on corporate campuses.

ProCurve had been stifled under H.P.’s former chief executive, Carleton S. Fiorina, who served on the board of Cisco Systems, the dominant player in the industry. Ms. Fiorina supported the traditional alliance between H.P. and Cisco, in which H.P. sold computers and Cisco sold network equipment to the same customers.

Mr. Hurd decided on a different approach. He championed the ProCurve business, helping nurture it from a few hundred million dollars in annual sales to about $1 billion. It is now H.P.’s second-most-profitable business and one of its fastest-growing.

Now H.P. is directly attacking Cisco in a bid to capture a larger chunk of the $20 billion market for local area network and wireless switches. “H.P. has declared war,” said Mark Fabbi, a networking analyst at the research firm Gartner. “H.P. has the potential to completely change the dynamics of the networking industry.”

Hewlett-Packard’s strategy with ProCurve — expand revenue and profit by biting into a leader’s lucrative franchise — is vintage Mark Hurd. And it offers some insights into how the company has outperformed its peers financially even as the technology industry faces a global slowdown.

On Monday, H.P., the largest maker of computers and printers, formally reported net income of $2.11 billion, or 84 cents a share, for its fiscal fourth quarter, about flat with the previous year. Revenue rose 19 percent to $33.6 billion. Laptops, compact servers and software were strong, as H.P. continued to pressure rivals like Dell and I.B.M.

Although the company did not break out figures for ProCurve, which was a tiny part of H.P.’s revenue of $118 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, Mr. Fabbi estimated the business had gross profit margins of about 50 percent — second only to the lucrative printer cartridges that are H.P.’s cash cow.

He said H.P.’s network hardware revenue had grown 40 percent over the last two quarters, cementing the company’s position as the No. 2 player in the market. H.P., based in Palo Alto, Calif., now accounts for 7 percent market share by revenue, compared with Cisco’s 77 percent.

In June, Mr. Hurd made his ambitions for ProCurve clear by selecting a senior vice president of H.P., Marius Haas, as the new chief of the networking business. Mr. Haas had spent the previous five years as the head of H.P.’s strategy and corporate development team, overseeing more than 25 mergers and acquisitions. The last deal cleared by Mr. Haas was the $13.9 billion purchase of Electronic Data Systems, a computer services giant that H.P. is using to challenge I.B.M., the leader in that business.

This month, H.P. placed the ProCurve line under its Technology Solutions Group, the $38 billion business run by an executive vice president, Ann Livermore. “This was one of our best-kept secrets for a long time,” Mr. Haas said. “Now, everybody knows about it.”

Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., declined to directly discuss H.P.’s push into its core business. Ish Limkakeng, a vice president in Cisco’s switching group, said the company “takes all competitors very seriously.”

But while Cisco plays down the changing competitive situation, customers have taken notice.

Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., has switched to H.P. as a supplier. “A lot of people in the industry say that Cisco has a certain arrogance,” said Scott Lowe, the college’s chief information officer. “With real competition in the marketplace, I think you will see there is a desire for people to get away from that arrogance.”

Some of Cisco’s strongest critics are hardware resellers. They are hoping that a muscular competitor like H.P. will place pressure on Cisco to give them more favorable sales and services terms. Although Cisco itself makes about 70 percent gross profit margins on its LAN switching gear, the resellers “can’t make any money on Cisco,” said Brad Reese, who sells refurbished Cisco equipment.

Under Ms. Fiorina, H.P. and Cisco had an unusually close partnership. H.P. actually rewarded sales representatives for selling Cisco’s network hardware without offering similar compensation for H.P.’s own products.Despite its stepchild status, the ProCurve business grew during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure. H.P. became a trusted supplier of switch equipment used by small and midsize companies, outflanking suppliers like Nortel Networks and 3Com.

Upon his arrival, Mr. Hurd changed the way H.P. sold its network hardware. Rather than being encouraged to sell Cisco products, H.P. sales representatives were rewarded for selling H.P. equipment.

“You should be assured that Mark is a very pragmatic guy and wants people incented to sell H.P.,” Mr. Haas said. “Cisco has had such a dominant position, but the doors are opening.”

Cisco continues to receive high marks for the breadth and quality of its products. Still, it has largely been able to operate in this part of the market without facing a competitor of its size or stature.

Analysts also say that H.P.’s networking plans may receive a lift from the addition of E.D.S., which assembles and manages computer systems for corporate customers and has done a lot of business with Cisco, possibly even doubling sales of its network products in less than two years.

“H.P. is a much more formidable challenger to Cisco, and it has sent an obvious message,” said Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst at UBS Securities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/te...25hewlett.html





Apple Confuses Speech with a DMCA Violation
Fred von Lohmann

Slashdot reports that Apple has sent a "cease and desist" email to bluwiki, a public wiki site, demanding the removal of postings there by those who are trying to figure out how to write software that can sync media to the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Short answer: Apple doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on.

At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on the device. Unless an application can write new data to this file, it won't be able to "sync" music or other content to an iPod. The iTunesDB file has never been encrypted and is relatively well understood. In iPods released after September 2007, however, Apple introduced a checksum hash to make it difficult for applications other than iTunes to write new data to the iTunesDB file, thereby hindering an iPod owner's ability to use alternative software (like gtkpod, Winamp, or Songbird) to manage the files on her iPod.

The original checksum hash was reverse engineered in less than 36 hours. Apple, however, has recently updated the hashing mechanism in the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Those interested in using software other than iTunes to sync files to these new iPods will need to reverse engineer the hash again. Discussions about that process were posted to the public bluwiki site. Although it doesn't appear that the authors had yet figured out the new iTunesDB hashing mechanism, Apple's lawyers nevertheless sent a nastygram to the wiki administrator, who took down the pages in question.

Here are just a few of the fatal flaws in Apple's DMCA argument.

Where's the "technology, product, service, device or device"?

The DMCA provides that:

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that ... is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner....

The information posted on the wiki appeared to be text, along with some illustrative code. Nothing that I saw on the pages I was able to review would appear to constitute a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof." In fact, the authors had apparently not yet succeeded in their reverse engineering efforts and were simply discussing Apple's code obfuscation techniques. If Apple is suggesting that the DMCA reaches people merely talking about technical protection measures, then they've got a serious First Amendment problem.

Who owns the copyrighted work?

The iTunesDB file is not authored by Apple, nor does it appear that Apple has any copyright interest in it. Instead, the iTunesDB file on every iPod is the result of the individual choices each iPod owner makes in deciding what music and other media to put on her iPod. In other words, the iTunesDB file is to iTunes as this blog post is to Safari -- when I use Safari to produce a new work, I own the copyright in the resulting file, not Apple.

So if the iTunesDB file is the copyrighted work being protected here, then the iPod owner has every right to circumvent the protection measure, since they own the copyright to the iTunesDB file on their own iPod.

Where's the access control?

The contents of the iTunesDB file is not protected at all -- any application can read it. So, as a result, the obfuscation and hashing mechanisms used by Apple to prevent people from writing to the file cannot qualify as "access controls" protected by Section 1201(a) of the DMCA.

Apple might argue that the checksum hash prevents people from preparing derivative works, which means that it's a "technological measure that effectively protects the right of a copyright owner" (as noted above, however, it's the user, not Apple, who owns any copyright in the iTunesDB file). The DMCA, however, does not prohibit circumvention of technical measures that are not access controls, although it does restrict trafficking in tools that circumvent these measures. But, as mentioned above, there are no "tools" on the bluwiki pages.

What about the reverse engineering exemption?

Apple's lawyers also appear to have overlooked the DMCA's reverse engineering exception, 17 U.S.C. 1201(f), which permits individuals to circumvent technological measures and distribute circumvention tools "for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute [copyright] infringement."

Enabling iPods to interoperate with "independently created computer programs" (like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird) is precisely what the reverse engineering exception was intended to protect.

Where's the nexus to infringement?

Finally, Apple's DMCA theory fails because any "circumvention" that might be involved here has no connection to any potential copyright infringement. Two decisions by federal courts of appeal (1, 2) have held that without a nexus to potential infringement, there is no violation of the DMCA. And here, it's hard to see how reverse engineering the iTunesDB checksum hash can lead to any infringement of the iTunesDB file -- after all, the reverse engineers presumably aren't interested in making piratical copies of the iTunesDB file. Instead, they just want to sync their iPhones and iPods using software other than iTunes. No infringement there.

Of course, without more than the bare "cease and desist" emails sent by Apple's lawyers to bluwiki, we can't know for certain what other DMCA arguments they may have had in mind. But I certainly can't see any DMCA violation here based on Apple's nastygrams thus far.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/11...dmca-violation





In Britain, Outwitting Strict Laws Against Libel
Noam Cohen

A SMALL computer file appeared on the Internet last week, purporting to list the 13,000 members of the racist, far-right British National Party. The text file contained not just the names of the party’s supporters, but their home addresses, home phone numbers and, in some cases, hobbies (including a fair sampling of model airplane and train collectors) and professions (including a few lawyers, doctors and teachers).

And all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men haven’t managed to make that list disappear.

Make no mistake, the Web sites of the large newspapers, frequent victims of strict libel laws in Britain, have done their part. Reporting on what cannot be reported is something in which the British have much more experience.

“In the U.S., the starting point is that you have the right of freedom of expression,” said James Edelman, a law professor at Oxford. “There are ways it can be curtailed, but that is the starting point. It is almost the opposite in the U.K.”

•

Raising the stakes, on Friday there was a suspected firebomb attack on a car parked outside the home of one of the people named on the list (but unnamed in the papers), though the police stressed that the connection to the party was only one line of investigation.

But so far, the only people mentioned by name in news accounts are the few controversial discoveries from the rolls — a sports-talk D.J. and a police officer; both are in danger of losing their jobs over their affiliation.

Instead, the papers have to play coy. At the Web site of The Guardian, for example, there is an interactive map showing the distribution of the membership across Britain, itemized locality by locality, but, not, say, block by block, under a note: “A court injunction prevents the distribution of the names on the B.N.P. membership leaked online.”

Jon Henley, in his first-person account on The Guardian Web site, reports: “Colleagues have pored in amazement over the records for their home towns.” And he adds that, “A university friend said she had discovered to her not-altogether-immense surprise that her parents’ next-door neighbors in Windsor were members. ‘Crusty,’ she said. ‘And very cheap sherry at Christmas.’ ”

This stance seems almost quaint in a world where the database is widely and easily available online, as the newspapers have pointed out. A host for the list is Wikileaks, a site that has become a home for orphaned material, including the e-mail messages of the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin that were stolen by a hacker who obtained the password to her Yahoo account. (Both Ms. Palin and the British National Party confirmed that the material was genuine, though the party points out that its list, stolen by a disgruntled ex-member, is more than a year old and documents interaction with the party, not necessarily membership.)

Last week, when the interest in the British National Party membership list was most frenetic, Wikileaks’s servers were overrun and inaccessible, despite 10 or so mirror sites worldwide replicating the material to lessen the traffic burden.

Wikileaks encouraged visitors to become supporters ($25 minimum for an individual and $1,280 for an organization) with the added benefit of being able “to access our subscriber priority servers for 12 months.” (After much debate, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is unrelated to Wikileaks, has not linked to the material.)

The party list was easily obtained at another site that revels in publishing secrets online, cryptome.org. The man who operates cryptome.org, John Young, wrote that as of Thursday, he had 2,000 to 3,000 downloads of the party list file. Asked if he had any limits on what personal material he would publish, Mr. Young wrote that his site focused on addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers “of public, mostly government, figures, and spies especially” — but usually not Social Security numbers.

Mr. Young argued that organizations like the British National Party often leak such material to get sympathy and show that their membership is full of regular people.

“I would guess the B.N.P. leak at 80 percent orchestrated,” he wrote. “The Brits are experts at this, perhaps the best.”

And true to that theory, the leader of the party, Nick Griffin, was quoted as saying that one good thing from the list’s being leaked was that it proved that the stereotype of his supporter as “a skinhead oik” was not true.

•

The list included some 45 names of people living in America, some described as British, some not. One of those Americans, in a telephone interview, said that he had learned about the spread of the party list through an e-mail message from Wikileaks. He said he knew the list had been stolen and was resigned to the situation on the Web: “Once the cow is out of the barn, you can’t shut the door.”

“It’s like identity theft in that I feel violated. My name and address and phone number are probably already on the Internet. But having my name associated with what could be considered a controversial organization is a different story. There is no other reason you would be calling me at this time.”

But he stressed that the list was misleading. He was not a member, he said, but a one-time contributor two years ago. “I had donated money to them because they were fighting a legal battle,” he said, noting that he only spent three hours in Britain in his life, when he was switching flights in July. “Two years ago some of their members were arrested on a freedom of speech issue. They don’t have the United States kind of freedom of speech. I don’t think it is right for someone to go to prison for expressing their political views.”

“I think I will feel better as time goes on,” he said. “I am not losing sleep over it. I am just one of 12,000 people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/te...et/24link.html





Bong Hits 4 Jesus Dude
Samantha Henig

Starting Point
When the Olympic torch passed through Juneau, Alaska, in 2002, 18-year-old Joseph Frederick saw a chance at TV airtime. His tactic: a banner reading BONG HITS 4 JESUS. Not amused, Frederick's principal confiscated the banner and suspended him for five days. He shot back something about Thomas Jefferson. She tacked on another five.

Fever Pitch
Frederick took his free-speech argument to court, with backing from the ACLU. Five years later it was before the U.S. Supreme Court, with Kenneth Starr representing the school. The court ruled that since Frederick was holding the banner at a "school-supervised" (though not on school grounds) event, the principal had a right to restrict what he said about illegal drugs—even if his message was rather nonsensical.

Present Day
Now 25, Frederick is learning Mandarin and teaching English in China. Although he is proud that he stood up for his rights, he regrets "the bad precedent set by the ruling." His case was finally settled at the state level in November, winning him $45,000 and forcing the school to hold a forum on free speech.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/170375





FCC Takes Janet Jackson Case To Supreme Court
FMQB

After the Third Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS for airing the Janet Jackson "nipplegate" incident, the FCC and the Department of Justice have asked the Supreme Court to overturn the decision. Apparently buoyed by arguments in the Fox profanity appeal in the High Court that took place on November 4 (which argued about whether the FCC may punish TV stations for one-time fleeting expletives), the FCC and DOJ filed a petition in the Jackson Super Bowl case on Wednesday.

"The FCC and [the Department of Justice] have filed a petition for certiorari in the Janet Jackson case," said Andrew Schwartzman, President of the Media Access Project, according to Multichannel News. "The petition contends that the Third Circuit failed to give sufficient deference to the findings of the FCC and asked that the petition be held in abeyance until the Fox v. FCC case is decided. The petition was filed on [Wednesday] and arrived by mail [Thursday]."

In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia rejected the FCC fine for Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" because they concluded that the FCC was arbitrary and capricious in changing a decades-old policy of not holding fleeting nudity to be indecent. The court also concluded that the Commission could not hold broadcasters "vicariously liable" for actions they did not take on their own. That means that stations could not be liable for an action they could not foresee.

However, the FCC and DOJ argue that the lower court did not give due deference to the FCC's "legitimate and rational basis for what it was doing," says Schwartzman. "The court of appeals erred in overturning the Commission's determination that CBS's broadcast of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show violated federal indecency prohibitions."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=999442





Commission Report to Weigh in on Policing of Hate Speech Online
Janice Tibbetts

OTTAWA -- The Canadian Human Rights Commission will release an independent report Monday that is expected to set the stage for a fresh round of debate over whether the organization should get out of the business of policing hate messages spread on the Internet.

The results of the six-month review come amid mounting pressure for the federal government to strip the commission's power to investigate Internet speech on grounds that it unjustly curtails free speech.

The Conservative party, at its policy convention this month, voted in favour of a resolution to eliminate the human rights commission's authority to "regulate, receive, investigate or adjudicate complaints" in the area.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, who oversees the human rights commission, voted for the resolution, opening the door for renewed calls to legislate from free-speech advocates. Thus far, the government has avoided becoming entangled in the issue.

Nicholson's press secretary, Darren Eke, suggested that the minister has no immediate plans to gut the 2001 provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which permits the body to fine or otherwise censure individuals whose Internet postings are "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."

"We look forward to receiving the report," said Eke, adding that Nicholson would like to see a replay of a motion in the last Parliament, launched by Conservative MP Rick Dykstra, for the House of Commons justice committee to study the issue and then report to Parliament.

Such a motion, however, cannot produce a law unless the government decides to go ahead with legislation based on the committee report.

"The minister would welcome a similar motion being tabled in the committee this Parliament," said Eke.

Debate over the power of the human rights commission to probe complaints of hate speech on the Internet has been festering for about one year, mainly in online blogs but with a sprinkling of coverage in the mainstream news media.

A key issue is whether the commission's mandate in the field is already outdated and restricts free speech among the mushrooming numbers of bloggers and online publications.

The investigative power over hate speech was first created more than 30 years ago to apply to telephone communications but the law was expanded in 2001 to include the Internet.

Critics contend that the human rights power, which was intended to shut down egregious dissemination of hate propaganda, is being abused with nuisance complaints that would not survive a court challenge.

Liberal MP Keith Martin has introduced a private members' motion to eliminate the commission's investigative power to police the Internet and he says he will lobby the all-party Commons justice committee to hold public hearings and submit a report that he hopes will become the basis for government legislation.

Critics, including Martin, also contend there are hate-crime laws in the Criminal Code to punish true offenders, rather than those who have merely offended rather than promoted hate.

"We have a right to be protected from hate speech but we do not have a right not to be offended," he said.

Martin introduced a similar motion in the last Parliament after the Canadian Islamic Congress and a group of Muslim law students said they were hauling Maclean's magazine before federal and provincial human rights commissions for publishing an excerpt from columnist Mark Steyn's book America Alone. The groups said the book espoused Islamic hate messages.

Amid an outcry that persisted for months, chief commissioner Jennifer Lynch announced a review last June, acknowledging that "growing public interest and continued advances in technology all point to a need to examine issues surrounding hate on the Internet."

She noted that the "rapid shift from print to electronic news," which has thrust the media under the human rights microscope, was not fully foreseen seven years ago.

The commission appointed Richard Moon, a constitutional and free speech expert at University of Windsor, to conduct the study.

However any legislative changes to strip the commission power must come from Parliament, said Philippe Dufresne, commission director of litigation.

He added Internet hate comprises only about two per cent of complaints filed with the commission, which mainly focuses on investigations involving employment and services.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weighed in on the issue last month, telling reporters on Parliament Hill that "everyone has some concerns about this."

"This is a complicated area of law, balancing what most people understand to mean by free speech with obvious desire to not have speech that would be intended to incite hatred towards particular groups or individuals."

The Catholic Civil Rights League wrote Harper late last week urging his government to follow is party's policy resolution with legislation to end the human rights commission's power to probe hate complaints.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/st...7-e95cef72d6e4





House Committee Head Rips FCC's Martin
FMQB

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), head of the Congressional subcommittee currently investigating the FCC, ripped Chairman Kevin Martin in a recent interview on C-SPAN. "The way FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has run the commission is not the way it is supposed to be run," said Stupak. Stupak is a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, the Telecommunications Subcommittee and is also chairman of the investigations and oversight subcommittee, which has been investigating the FCC for much of 2008.

Broadcasting & Cable reports that Stupak said his commission's report on the FCC is currently being wrapped up and some of Martin's key staff members have been asked to appear before the committee. Stupak said, "We're just giving some individuals who are brought up in this report, not necessarily in a favorable light, an opportunity to comment on the report."

Stupak added that he believed the FCC had not followed the "intent or spirit" of the law in recent years. "The FCC has always been one of those agencies where people think they can get a fair, impartial hearing based on the facts. Unfortunately, I don't think that has happened in the last few years."

B&C reports that the report on the FCC is expected to be released within the next two weeks. Stupak said the Commission has dragged its feet on its end of the investigation. Stupak said there had been "The constant avoiding of deadlines, the dragging of feet, the refusal to voluntarily come in to testify [on the FCC's part], and they are trying to run out the clock out on us."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=1005023





Bush Grants Pardons to 14, But No Big Names

President George W. Bush on Monday granted 14 pardons and commuted two sentences but there were no high-profile names on a list released by the Justice Department.

The pardons were given for offenses ranging from distribution of marijuana to unauthorized use of a registered pesticide, a Justice Department statement said.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the president can grant pardons and shorten sentences.

Former media baron Conrad Black is among the high-profile offenders who have requested clemency before Bush leaves office on January 20, according to Canadian media reports.

Black, a Canadian-born member of Britain's House of Lords, has been in prison since March, when he began serving a 6-1/2 year sentence for defrauding shareholders of one-time newspaper publishing giant Hollinger International Inc.

The New York Times reported that other defendants who have appealed to Bush for pardons include Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter convicted for lying about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban" captured in Afghanistan.

There is speculation in Washington that Bush might issue blanket pardons to government officials and intelligence officers who took part in counterterror programs, the newspaper said.

Former President Bill Clinton created a controversy with the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, issued on Clinton's last day in office. Rich's ex-wife was a major donor to Clinton and the Democratic Party.

(Writing by Joanne Allen; Editing by Chris Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...4AO0UC20081125





For Lobbyists, No Downturn, Just a Turnover
David Kirkpatrick

Richard Hunt, a top Republican lobbyist for the securities industry, was among the first to go, just a week after the election. Marc Racicot, the president of the American Insurance Association and former Republican Party chairman, resigned a few days later. So did Frank L. Bowman, the retired admiral and Republican-leaning chief of the nuclear energy lobby, citing “this period of dramatic change in Congress and the White House.”

All were casualties of a broad shake-up of the lobbying world set off by the Democratic ascendance in Congress and at the White House. Republican lobbyists are feeling the demand for their services plummet as struggling businesses slash their lobbying budgets, the outgoing Bush administration hemorrhages résumés, and their party retreats to its lowest ebb of power since the election of President Jimmy Carter 32 years ago.

“This is rather unique — much more difficult for Republicans than in past transitions,” said Eric Vautour, a former Reagan administration official who recruits former officials for lobbying jobs.

After eight years of the so-called K Street Project — the effort by Republican lawmakers and operatives to pressure companies, trade associations and lobbying firms to hire their fellow Republicans — the tasseled loafer is on the other foot. Companies and interest groups are competing to snap up Democrats. And scarcity has added to their value because so many well-connected Democrats are angling for jobs in the Obama administration, which has promised ethics rules that may block lobbyists from certain jobs. Meanwhile, recently passed Congressional ethics rules restrict the ability of departing Congressional staff members to lobby as well.

“The Democratic market is kind of frozen, while the Republican market is about to be engorged” with former Bush staff members, said Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm.

The starting salaries for former officials tell the story. An assistant department secretary leaving the Bush administration three years ago, with Republicans in control of the House, Senate and White House, might fetch as much $600,000 to $1 million a year in the influence business, recruiters and lobbyists said. But the same person might now expect less than half as much.

“Don’t be the last guy off the train,” said Peter Metzger, vice chairman of the recruiting firm CT Partners, recalling his advice to government officials considering other work in Washington.

But for Democrats, the bidding is fierce. Three years ago, a Democratic staff director for an important House or Senate committee might have earned about $130,000 a year on Capitol Hill, and jumped to K Street for an annual salary of about $250,000. Now, the same person might command as much as $500,000 to $800,000 a year, several recruiters said.

“There is a supply-and-demand issue with finding enough Democrats who have had senior-level positions,” said Nels Olson, of the recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International. “It is certainly a difficult time for Republicans.”

For an industry that prefers to talk about selling policy expertise and sophisticated arguments, the turnabout is a stark reminder that what clients want are personal connections. “People who need to get something done know what the price of a drink is,” Mr. Metzger said. “This may sound terribly Washington, but access trumps expertise.”

W. Henson Moore III, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana and deputy secretary in the Energy Department who recently retired as head of a trade group, put it bluntly: “Republicans are going to be to some extent almost irrelevant in the next two years.”

Many trade groups and Republican lobbying firms did not wait until the election on Nov. 4. The lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, for example, was once almost synonymous with Republican power. Its three name partners were all well-known White House officials under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush. One, Haley Barbour, went on to become Republican Party chairman and is now the governor of Mississippi.

But in the aftermath of the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections, the firm’s partners decided to shorten the name to the less evocative “BGR Group,” and started to hire more Democrats. Last month, the firm even held a fund-raiser for the Democratic campaign of Senator-elect Mark Warner of Virginia. And on Election Day, it acquired the Democratic firm of Westin Rinehart, headed by a former Clinton administration official, Morris L. Reid.

“To go bipartisan, we rebranded the business,” Ed Rogers said Friday, speaking by telephone from a business trip to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “Lobbying is like a slow-motion jury trial. First you need to find out who the jury is and then meet with each of them one by one. So the more Democratic officeholders there are, the more you need effective, smart Democrats.”

In 2005, at the apogee of Republican power, the Motion Picture Association of America recruited John Feehery from a top job with former Representative J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was then speaker of the House. But when the Democratic takeover the next year devalued Mr. Feehery’s Republican connections, he lost his defense against internal personality conflicts, people involved in the association’s lobbying say, and within weeks he was out the door.

A spokesman for the association declined to comment on the departure. So did Mr. Feehery, who now runs his own lobbying shop. But he said Republican lobbyists would always be in demand because Democrats lack the stomach to push for industry goals that go against their party, like rolling back environmental regulations.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Feehery said, “Democrats don’t like to ask for the order” — the client’s objective.

All acknowledge, however, that the current anxiety among K Street Republicans is unusually feverish because it coincides with the economic crisis. Companies and trade associations across town are cutting back on their lobbying budgets, and amid the Democratic ascent, it is the Republican lobbyists who are the most vulnerable.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, reorganizing its staffs after the merger of two industry trade groups, recently laid off dozens of people, including its top Republican lobbyist, Mr. Hunt. He had earned about $650,000 a year in salary and benefits, according to a 2005 filing with the Internal Revenue Service. (Michael Pease, a former top aide to Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Finance Committee, was hired in October to head the association’s lobbying efforts, while Mr. Hunt leases space from the association to start his own firm.)

Officials of the American Insurance Association said its president, Mr. Racicot, the former Republican Party chairman and former governor of Montana, decided to step down in part because he concluded that the declining value of his party connections no longer justified his own compensation — $1.8 million in 2006, according to filings.

“One fortunate thing for us is that a lot of our issues are not so partisan,” said Blain K. Rethmeier, a spokesman for the association. (A former Republican aide in the Senate and the White House, Mr. Rethmeier said he was “getting inundated now with résumés from people leaving the administration with the clock ticking down.”)

Mr. Bowman, who retired from the Nuclear Energy Institute, made about $1.5 million in salary and benefits in 2006, according to its filings. J. Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the institute, said the group was “looking at the opportunity of the changing landscape to plug in a new head at the top of our organization” and the search committee will be looking at Democrats.

“That would certainly, I gather, be a strength,” Mr. Peterson said.

Lobbying firms known for Democratic ties are experiencing a swift uptick in business. Mr. Podesta said his firm had signed up about a dozen new clients in the last few weeks.

“Some of them are just calling and saying, ‘We are clueless, we don’t know much about the people who run the Congress and we know even less about the people who will run the White House, so help us,’ ” he said.

His brother, John Podesta, a former Clinton administration official and founder of the Center for American Progress, is heading President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. But Tony Podesta said that only “very unsophisticated” clients would consider his firm just for that reason, noting that John Podesta will leave in a few months at the end of the transition and that the firm does not lobby him in any event.

What is more, Tony Podesta said his firm had grown fully bipartisan during the Republican ascendance, even hiring more Republicans than Democrats so far this year. “I think the market overvalues Democrats and undervalues Republicans right now,” he said.

Some have begun to wonder if elected Democrats, flush with a level of power the Republicans experienced a few years ago, would now emulate the K Street Project by encouraging corporations and trade groups to hire fellow Democrats instead of Republicans.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they do,” said Leon E. Panetta, a former Democratic representative from California and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, “because the name of the game is money, and the fact is they still largely depend on lobbyists for the money to bulk up their campaigns.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/wa...n/25lobby.html





Appeals Court Backs Warrantless Searches Abroad
Benjamin Weiser

A federal appeals court in Manhattan upheld the convictions on Monday of three Al Qaeda operatives in a ruling that bolsters the government’s power to investigate terrorism by holding that a key Constitutional protection afforded to Americans does not apply overseas.

The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holds for the first time that government agents may obtain admissible evidence against United States citizens through warrantless searches abroad.

The searches must still be reasonable, as the Constitution requires, Judge José A. Cabranes wrote, adding that the government had met that standard in its search of the home and monitoring of the telephone of one defendant, Wadih El-Hage, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, who was a naturalized American citizen living in Nairobi, Kenya.

“The Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness — but not the Warrant Clause — applies to extraterritorial searches and seizures of U.S. citizens,” the judge wrote.

Mr. El-Hage and two other defendants had appealed their convictions for participating in a terrorism conspiracy, led by Mr. bin Laden, to kill Americans around the world. The conspiracy included the 1998 bombings of two American embassies, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded thousands. They were convicted in Manhattan federal court in 2001 in the last major terrorism trial in the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The two other defendants whose convictions were upheld were Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-’Owhali and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh. A fourth defendant, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, did not appeal his conviction. The men were convicted in a federal trial in Manhattan in early 2001. All four men are serving life sentences in the so-called Super Max prison in Florence, Colo.

The ruling, joined by Judges Jon O. Newman and Wilfred Feinberg, is divided into three separate opinions, which total 178 pages.

“This criminal case presents issues of great importance, many of which are complex and novel,” Judge Cabranes wrote, noting that the case had been in the courts for a decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/ny...mbassy.html?hp





License-Plate Scanning Catching Crooks, Raising Privacy Worries
Michael Ferraresi

Officer David Callister parks his patrol car under a shady interstate overpass, angling his cameras to target a flurry of passing traffic. Then he waits.

Infrared units mounted to the front of Callister's vehicle scan the license plates of a Casa Grande firefighter, an Ohio State football fan and everyone else who drives past as he hunts for stolen vehicles.

Every plate is photographed, time-stamped, labeled on a GPS map and automatically logged into an Arizona Department of Public Safety database. An electronic voice alerts Callister to stolen vehicles within seconds after they pass, giving him the ability to make
quick arrests.

Callister is among the growing number of Arizona officers who use cameras to scan thousands of plates on a daily basis, sweeping parking lots and highways to recover stolen vehicles faster than ever before.

In the past two years, the technology has been lauded as more than a tool to thwart car thieves. DPS claims its program has the potential to intercept violent criminals and Amber Alert suspects, though lawmakers and activists raise questions about invasion of privacy for average citizens whose plates are scanned.

In a state that routinely ranks among the top five in the U.S. in auto theft, DPS scanned more than 1.6 million plates since introducing its first cameras in 2006 - leading directly to 122 felony arrests.

Callister, a DPS Border Crimes Unit officer, uses a set of the agency's 25 plate-reader cameras to track stolen vehicles south of Phoenix. He said the system supplements everyday police work, freeing him from the routine checks that used to consume his time.

"Three years ago, all I had in my car was a radio to talk to a dispatcher, and I had to wait my turn," Callister said. "If I was lucky, I could run 10 vehicles a day," he said. "Now, with the plate reader and my computer, I've had days when I've read over 8,000."

Officers in Valley cities use cameras to recover missing passenger cars. But Callister said stolen trucks seized on freeways are often linked to other border-related crimes. Dodge pickups, F-250s, Escalades and Tahoes are more commonly recovered than the Hondas or Toyotas labeled as the most-stolen vehicles in the U.S.

"That's not what's going to Mexico," Callister said. "Those are the little joy-riding vehicles."

Callister said he uses his cameras to hunt the "baddest of the bad guys" - thieves wanted in connection to the trafficking of drugs, cash and illegal immigrants. Gov. Janet Napolitano recognized him in December for using the cameras to recover 75 stolen vehicles and 140 stolen license plates in a 16-month period.

As Arizona police expand plate-reader technology, officials in California, New York and throughout Europe continue to add systems.

New York, for example, boasts hundreds of cameras on toll roads, bridges and overpasses in addition to those on state troopers' vehicles. One such camera disproved a man's alibi earlier this year, showing his true location the night a family was slaughtered at their home in 2007, leading to his eventual conviction on murder charges.

DPS and other police agencies already have proven that plate-recognition cameras solve crimes. The question is where and how Arizona will expand the technology in the future.

Impact on Arizonans

Experts believe the influx of plate-reader cameras helped reduce Arizona's high rate of auto theft, at least in part, because the systems are becoming a more common aspect of everyday police work.

The arrest of just one auto thief leads to a substantial drop in stolen vehicles because a single thief can steal several cars in a day or week, according to Phoenix police.

Investigators believe a recently adopted Arizona law that requires victims to accurately report auto theft also will continue to help the numbers fall.

Phoenix reported a 26 percent drop in auto theft since 2007. The Arizona Automobile Theft Authority, a state agency funded by insurance companies, reported that statewide thefts dropped 11.9 percent last year alone. Arizona auto-theft rates had been on a slight decline since police reported more than 56,800 vehicles stolen in 2002.

Enrique Cantu, executive director of the Arizona Automobile Theft Authority, said more Arizona cities have applied for grants through the agency with the hope of placing plate readers on local streets.

As local agencies acquire the technology, larger agencies such as DPS will continue to test the next generation of cameras. A wireless plate reader hidden in an orange construction barrel, for instance, allows an officer to monitor traffic going the opposite way from the patrol vehicle.

Victims are often grateful to see their stolen vehicles quickly returned by officers using plate-readers.

Joseph Justice, a north Phoenix resident, said his Chevy Silverado went missing in July from a Paradise Valley Mall parking lot.

"It's a hell of a feeling," the 63-year-old said. "You walk out of the mall and see your truck isn't there. You feel like you've been violated."

Justice reported his truck missing around 10 a.m. By 3 p.m., DPS found it.

Callister recovered the truck on Interstate 10 when it passed his plate reader - along with a Dodge truck that had been stolen from a Goodyear movie-theater parking lot.

Mapping motorists

U.S. plate readers were introduced as an auto-theft deterrent, but investigators talk about using the cameras to create a virtual Arizona crime map, widening the scope beyond stolen vehicles.

By logging the daily location of thousands of registered automobiles, investigators may be able to narrow down the locations of people they are looking for.

The automated technology, for instance, gives officers the ability to check the license plate of each vehicle parked outside a known drug house or note what cars were parked outside a bank before and after a heist.

In October, Callister stopped a motorist on I-10 near Casa Grande for driving too close to another vehicle. The stop led to the discovery of $175,000 in cash and raised suspicions of money laundering.

To search for the man's possible criminal associates, detectives could easily check the list of license plates on vehicles that passed before and after the man's vehicle.

Plate-readers might be a boon for investigators, but agencies such as DPS already have grappled with the possibility of public resistance from those who fear the technology threatens the civil rights of law-abiding citizens. Of the thousands of license plates scanned each day, only a small fraction of the vehicles are tied to some possible criminal activity.

DPS, working with statewide task forces, could emerge as the central agency to store the data from the scans - but the agency has yet to establish guidelines on how to use the data and how long that information would be saved.

"That's where some people might consider it an invasion of privacy," Callister said, but he downplayed the idea, saying the plates are public information seen on public streets.

"This database is just a big pile of plates and GPS locations," he said, adding that the potential to solve crimes outweighs privacy concerns. "If somebody is involved in a bank robbery, or kidnaps a kid, and they do have a plate, they can go back to see the vehicle was at a (specific) location."

Cmdr. Larry Scarber, who oversees the DPS plate-reader program, said information from the cameras is used strictly to prevent crime.

"We have to be very cautious," Scarber said of the records of vehicle locations. "Right now, we haven't gotten rid of anything."

Police leaders met recently with Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard to discuss how to manage the vast amount of data without treading on motorists' civil liberties or limiting the technology's crime-fighting potential.

Big Brother concerns

A Goddard spokeswoman said discussions about how to regulate DPS plate-reader data are ongoing.

Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said she is concerned about how police technology could outpace legal standards.

"The problem is we really have no reassurance it's going to be focused on the bad guys," Soler Meetze said.

Arizona legislators have provided little guidance on how to regulate the technology since Mesa police pioneered Arizona's first plate-readers in 2005.

State Sen. Pamela Gorman, R-Anthem, who did not return calls for comment, introduced a bill in 2007 that suggested DPS should dispose of license-plate images within 24 hours unless the data is tied to an ongoing investigation. The bill went nowhere.

State Rep. Jerry Weiers, R-Glendale, has introduced legislation to help fight license-plate fraud and is a supporter of plate scanners. He said he hears more opposition to automated enforcement technology from legislators seeking to regulate government surveillance than from constituents who want their stolen cars back.

"Big Brother - it's one more thing where people are concerned that the government is looking at you," Weiers said.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articl...theft1123.html





You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
John Markoff

HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.

Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.

The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”

For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.

“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person.”

Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.

Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”

“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.

GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.

The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.

And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.

The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.

In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.

It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.

Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.

The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.

“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.

Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.

The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.

Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.
Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.

“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at U.C.L.A.

But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.

Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.

“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.

She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.

Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.

Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.

Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.

DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.

At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.

Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.

“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”

Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/bu...30privacy.html





Tracing a Crime Suspect Through a Relative

California's familial searching policy, the most extensive in the nation, looks for genetic ties between culprits and kin. Privacy advocates and legal experts are nervous.
Maura Dolan and Jason Felch

Over nearly two decades, a serial killer has shot and strangled at least 11 people, often dumping their battered bodies in alleyways of Inglewood and Los Angeles.

Most were black women or girls, the youngest just 14. The latest was found last year, shrouded in a garbage bag.

Police have determined through DNA and other evidence that the killings were the work of a single person. But the DNA does not match any of the millions of genetic profiles of convicted criminals in law enforcement databases, and detectives have few other clues.

Now Los Angeles Police Department investigators want to search the state's DNA database again -- not for exact matches but for any profiles similar enough to belong to a parent or sibling.

The hope is that one of those family members might lead detectives to the killer.

This strategy, pioneered in Britain, is poised to become an important crime-fighting tool in the United States. The Los Angeles case will mark the first major use of California's newly approved familial searching policy, the most far-reaching in the nation.

But the idea of scrutinizing families based exclusively on their possible genetic relationship to an unknown suspect makes privacy advocates and legal experts nervous. They argue that it effectively expands criminal databases to include every offender's relatives, a potentially unconstitutional intrusion.

"There is kind of a queasiness about having the sins of your father come back to haunt you," said Stanford University law professor Hank Greely, who supports familial searching despite those concerns. "It feels like we're holding people responsible for the crimes of their family."

Because the technology isn't perfect, families with no connection to the perpetrator inevitably will be investigated, some scientists and legal experts say.

The FBI and California law enforcement officials long resisted the approach, fearful of inciting legal opposition and a public backlash. They yielded only after aggressive lobbying by prosecutors, who pointed to some dramatic successes.

In North Carolina, for instance, investigators found a partial match to genetic evidence in a murder-rape case: a man who shared 16 genetic markers with the perpetrator. He couldn't be the killer -- he'd have to match on all 26 markers of a typical DNA profile -- but he could be a relative.

Investigators learned the man had a brother who had lived near the crime scene. They obtained DNA surreptitiously through a discarded cigarette. When tests linked the brother to the crime scene evidence, he confessed.

A person who had spent 18 years behind bars for the crime was freed.

Similar stories have come from Britain, where investigators have been using more sophisticated tools. In 158 searches since 2003, relatives have led authorities to the perpetrators in 18 cases that might never have been solved otherwise, British authorities said.

In 2006, British police were stymied in their hunt for the "shoe rapist" -- a man who collected the shoes of his many rape victims as trophies. DNA left at the crime scenes did not match anyone in Britain's national database.

But a woman whose DNA was in the database because of a drunk driving arrest had a similar genetic profile. She told authorities about a brother, a South Yorkshire businessman. In a search of his business, police found dozens of stiletto heels hidden behind a trap door.

In the U.S., officials are trying to balance the technology's promise and perils, pledging to use databases to identify relatives only for serious crimes and when all other leads have been exhausted.

"If you are going to do familial searches, I think it is important to really reserve them for just the most egregious crimes where there is an ongoing threat to society," said population geneticist Dan Krane, an expert on DNA evidence at Wayne State University in Detroit. But local labs, unrestrained by state and federal policies, are already starting to expand the technology beyond that limited use.

'Database creep'

It took a dogged three-year campaign by a Colorado prosecutor to bring down the barriers to familial searching in the United States.

Denver Dist. Atty. Mitchell Morrissey began his effort in 2005, when investigators came across DNA profiles in law enforcement databases that resembled, but did not match, genetic evidence left behind by three Denver rapists.

Such partial matches were typically ignored by crime labs. But the similarities tantalized Morrissey. In each case, the profile shared at least half the genetic markers with that of the rapist, suggesting a possible biological relationship.

Genetic profiles represent a tiny slice of a person's genome and are used to distinguish among individuals. Though unrelated people may share a few genetic markers by chance, parents and children share half. Siblings share half on average, though the number can vary widely.

Morrissey was determined to follow up on the partial matches to the Denver rapists, but he quickly ran into roadblocks. The DNA profiles Denver had found belonged to felons in Oregon, Arizona and California. But the FBI, which controls the national DNA database system, prohibited states from sharing information about people who were not suspected of a crime.

Thomas F. Callaghan, then gatekeeper of the national DNA database, told Morrissey that disclosing information about partial matches might by viewed by the courts as "database creep," a use of the database beyond its original purpose, the prosecutor recalled.

In an interview, Callaghan said the FBI was being "cautious" and would have preferred "some kind of legal or legislative authority" before proceeding.

A lot was at stake for the FBI. The bureau had built the national database from 460,000 DNA profiles in 2000 to 2.8 million in 2005. In a few short years, the federal government would add people who had been arrested -- but not convicted -- of crimes. (Now, the database system holds more than 6 million profiles.)

The FBI feared that racing ahead to familial searching could prompt a backlash and endanger database expansion, Morrissey said.

Frustrated, Morrissey decided to go over Callaghan's head. "Your policy protects murderers and rapists," Morrissey wrote in June 2006 to Joseph DiZinno, then Callaghan's boss. One of the rape victims was "quite assertive," Morrissey warned, and might complain to the media that the FBI was blocking the investigation.

A couple of days later, Morrissey went through the pink slips of telephone messages. One was from Robert Mueller, director of the FBI.

He wanted to help.

A policy reversal

At Mueller's order, the FBI lab reversed its earlier position, adopting an interim policy that permitted states to pursue partial matches that turned up during routine database searches. Such incidental matches, however, were extremely unlikely to be useful.

The FBI software was not designed to find relatives, and a standard search accidentally eliminates more than 99.9% of relatives while often fingering people whose profiles are similar by pure chance, experts say.

Oregon and Arizona authorities agreed to cooperate with Morrissey. Additional genetic testing and investigation determined that neither of the profiles belonged to relatives of the rapists.

Undaunted, Morrissey pressed his case in California, where both Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer and his successor, Jerry Brown, initially refused to help, even with the FBI's new policy.

After being referred to Michael Chamberlain, one of the attorney general's legal advisors, Morrissey was blunt: "I explained to him clearly that was not something we were going to give up on. If the assailant raped another woman or hurt a child, I was coming straight back to California and I wasn't going to be patient."

According to a confidential memorandum Chamberlain wrote to Brown in June 2007, this was a high-stakes decision for the attorney general. Cooperating with Morrissey could prompt federal judges to shut down the entire database on constitutional grounds. Databases "designed as an investigative scalpel could be used instead as an indiscriminate investigative fishing net," he wrote in the memo, which was reviewed by The Times.

Charges of "racial profiling" also might ensue, he said, given that minorities are disproportionately represented in DNA databases. On the other hand, Chamberlain said, if the state failed to pursue a promising partial match -- to a serial killer, for example -- "lives could be lost as a direct result."

Prominent California district attorneys and Los Angeles police and sheriff's unions supported Morrissey. That got the attention of Brown, who has been considering a run for governor in two years.

In April, after several months of deliberation, the attorney general announced the most aggressive form of relative searching in the United States.

In addition to pursuing "partial matches" that come up incidentally, the state would try a more technically sophisticated approach that directly targeted relatives.

The policy also addressed concerns of the state's lawyers and scientists by including an elaborate system of safeguards, such as entering contracts with police that limit when familial searching can be used and restricting such searches to a database of convicted felons only.

In an interview, Brown said that once the safeguards were in place, the case for familial searching was compelling.

"We have 2,000 murders in California a year," said Brown. "That is a lot of killing. When you see it and see the victims and have to go to the funerals, it is pretty serious stuff."

Chasing every lead

California eventually tested the DNA from the felon Morrissey was pursuing, looking at markers on the Y chromosome to determine if he was indeed related to the rapist.

It proved to be another false lead. Some experts weren't surprised. Tracing relatives through incidental partial matches was "ridiculous" and "wasteful," said Krane, the Wayne State expert.

Morrissey said he owed it to the victims to chase every lead. He said he was confident that technology would produce a more accurate method.

Indeed, Denver investigators have already begun experimenting with software designed to identify relatives, looking for genetic profiles that share rare markers.

California's Department of Justice will use such a targeted search to identify possible relatives of the Los Angeles serial killer, authorities confirmed.

The state will create a list of possible relatives, ranked in order of genetic similarities. Then it will cull the possibilities through further genetic testing and by reviewing public records to determine ages, addresses and names of family members. The most likely leads, if any, will be passed to the LAPD.

State officials put the odds of finding the serial killer through a relative at about one in 10. It is precisely the kind of serious crime that state officials ultimately decided would justify a potential constitutional fight.

Morrissey saw the search for relatives of the Denver rapists in similar terms. "This isn't car break-ins," he told a "60 Minutes" reporter last year.

Since then, however, Denver investigators tested their new familial software by running DNA from all unsolved crimes through a local database. Such repositories, often administered by municipal law enforcement agencies, are not subject to the rules that govern state and federal databases.

Without leaving their desks, investigators used the relatives to trace a handful of suspects.

Although Morrissey said he would not oppose broader rules limiting familial searching to the most serious crimes, he did not hesitate to pursue every lead in Denver.

One case may soon yield an arrest. It began with blood left at the crime scene.

The offense: a car break-in.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...0,939345.story





Indonesia's Papua Plans to Tag AIDS Sufferers

Indonesia's Papua province is set to pass a bylaw that requires some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips in a bid to prevent them infecting others, a lawmaker said on Saturday.

Under the bylaw, which has caused uproar among human rights activists, patients who had shown "actively sexual behavior" could be implanted with a microchip to monitor their activity, lawmaker John Manangsang said.

"It's a simple technology. A signal from the microchip will track their movements and this will be received by monitoring authorities," Manangsang said.

If a patient with HIV/AIDS was found to have infected a healthy person, there would be a penalty, he said without elaborating.

The Jakarta Post newspaper on Saturday quoted Constan Karma, the head of Papua's National AIDS Commission, as saying the plan violated human rights.

The local parliament was expected to introduce the controversial legislation in Papua, which lies in Indonesia's easternmost fringe, by end of this month, Manangsang said.

The number of HIV/AIDS cases per 100,000 people in Papua is nearly 20 times the national average in Indonesia, according to a government study in 2007.

Health experts say the disease has been spreading rapidly from prostitutes to housewives in the past years.

High rates of promiscuity, rituals in some Papuan tribes where partner swapping takes place, poor education about AIDS and lack of condoms are among factors that cause the spread of the disease there.

(Writing by Karima Anjani; Editing by Ed Davies and Bill Tarrant))
http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...4AN3U620081124





Microsoft Examines Causes of ‘Cyberchondria’
John Markoff

If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor, you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria.

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

The researchers said they had undertaken the study as part of an effort to add features to Microsoft’s search service that could make it more of an adviser and less of a blind information retrieval tool.

Although the term “cyberchondria” emerged in 2000 to refer to the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online, the Microsoft study is the first systematic look at the anxieties of people doing searches related to health care, Eric Horvitz said.

Mr. Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert.

“People tend to look at just the first couple results,” Mr. Horvitz said. “If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘A.L.S.,’ that’s their launching point.”

Mr. Horvitz is a computer scientist and has a medical degree, and his fellow investigator, Ryen W. White, is a specialist in information retrieval technology.

They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

For example, there were just as many results that linked headaches with brain tumors as with caffeine withdrawal, although the chance of having a brain tumor is infinitesimally small.

The researchers said they had not intended their work to send the message that people should ignore symptoms. But their examination of search records indicated that researching particular symptoms often led quickly to anxiousness.

They found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study.

About a third of the subjects “escalated” their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said.

Of the more than 500 Microsoft employees who answered a survey on their medical search habits, more than half said that online medical queries related to a serious illness had interrupted their day-to-day activities at least once.

Mr. Horvitz said that in addition to his interest in creating a Web search tool that would give more reliable answers, the research was driven by clear memories from his medical school education of what was often referred to as “second-year syndrome” or “medical schoolitis.”

He said he remembered “sitting on a cold seat with my legs dangling off the examination table,” convinced that he was suffering from a rare and incurable skin disease.

While the doctor was out of the room, Mr. Horvitz said, he took a look at his medical chart and saw that the doctor’s notes read, “Eric is in medical school, and he has been reading a lot.”

The researchers said that Web searchers’ propensity to jump to awful conclusions was basic human behavior that has been noted by research scientists for decades.

In 1974, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman wrote a seminal paper about decisions that are based on beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events, like the outcome of an election or the future value of the dollar.

They said that people usually employ common sense rules to aid in decisions. The rules can be quite useful, but they also frequently lead to systematic errors in judgment.

The Microsoft researchers noted that reliance on the rankings of Web search results contributes a similar bias to the judgments people make about illness.

At the same time, Mr. Horvitz said he believed that the Web would evolve to offer more reliable information.

In the 1990s, Microsoft researchers built a health advisory system for pregnancy and child care. Mr. Horvitz said that in the future it would be possible to create search engines that were able to detect medical queries and offer advice that did not automatically make Web searchers fear the worst.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/te...5symptoms.html





Judge Orders Ballmer to Testify in Vista Suit
Ina Fried

A judge on Friday ruled that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will have to testify in a class action suit over the "Vista Capable" logo program that Microsoft ran ahead of the launch of Windows Vista.

Microsoft had sought to limit depositions in the case to former Windows executives Jim Allchin and Will Poole, both of whom have since left the company. However, the judge ruled against the software maker.

"The court appreciates that there are severe demands on Mr. Ballmer's time; however, a busy schedule cannot 'shield' an executive from discovery," Judge Marsha J. Pechman said in her ruling, which was posted on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web site.

The plaintiffs in the case have argued that Microsoft was misleading in labeling certain machines as Vista Capable even though they lacked the graphics power to run the operating system's more advanced features.

Ballmer will have to be deposed for no more than three hours some time within the next 30 days, Pechman ruled.

Already, the suit has proven to be a treasure trove of internal documents.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10106002-56.html





Symantec Sees Spike in Dangerous Microsoft Attacks

Symantec is warning of a 'dramatic rise' in attacks exploiting a critical Windows bug.
Robert McMillan

Symantec is warning of a sharp jump in online attacks that appear to be targeting a recently patched bug in Microsoft's Windows operating system, an analysis that some other security companies disputed Friday.

Symantec raised its Threat Con security alert level from one to two because of the attacks, with two denoting "increased alertness." But other vendors, including Arbor Networks and McAfee, said they were seeing no such activity.

The attacks spotted by Symantec target a flaw in the Windows Server Service that Microsoft says could be exploited to create a self-copying worm attack. Late last month, Microsoft took the unusual step of rushing out an emergency patch for the bug after it saw a small number of online attacks that took advantage of it.

Since then, security experts and Microsoft have said that the attacks have not been widespread, but that may now be changing, according to Symantec.

The security vendor said it had seen a "dramatic rise" in attacks targeting TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) port 445. A TCP port is a number assigned to packets of data sent over the Internet to help computers know what program should be processing the information. Web browsers, for example, typically use port 80. Port 445 is one of two ports used to connect with the Windows Server Service.

This activity "appears to be related to the exploitation" of the Windows Server bug, Symantec said in a note on its Web site.

Most firewalls block port 445, as well as the other port used by Server Service, port 139, but Symantec said Windows users should still make sure they've applied the MS08-067 patch for the bug.

Attacks on the bug had focused previously on Chinese versions of Windows, but the latest attacks target English versions, Symantec said.

Arbor Networks disputed Symantec's interpretation, saying, "we're not seeing this rise, not on TCP port 445 and not on TCP port 139. Looking over the last month we don't see this rise in MS08-067 attacks that would raise any alarms for us," in a Friday blog posting.

Both McAfee and Microsoft echoed those sentiments.

"Microsoft continues to see limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability," Microsoft said in a statement.

On the other hand, the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which monitors research and university networks, reported that it had seen a bump in port 445 activity.

Security experts say that if criminals are targeting specific networks with their attacks, it could account for the discrepancy.
http://goodgearguide.com.au/article/268492





What the Data Miners are Digging Up About You
Amanda Gefter and Tom Simonite

In today's technological world we leave electronic traces wherever we go, whether shopping online or on the high street, at work or at play. That data is the raw material for a new industry of number crunchers trying to explain and influence human behaviour, as Stephen Baker explains in his new book The Numerati.

In the book, Baker meets the maths whizzes at the bleeding edge of this new way of doing business, politics, and even matchmaking.

You might be surprised at some of the things Baker's "numerati" want to know and can already find out about you. Read on for some examples taken from the book, and click here to read our full review.

Mountains of facts

Databases know more about you than you realise. A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by knowing gender, birth date and postal zip code, 87% of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name.

Websites can collect huge amounts of data from users. Retailers, for example, can track our every click, what we buy, how much we spend, which advertisements we see - even which ones we linger over with our mouse.

Sites can easily access your entire web browser history, enabling them to try and guess your gender and other demographic information.

Some of the links that data can reveal are surprising, and profitable. Ad targeting firm Tacoda discovered that the people most likely to click on car rental ads are those that have recently read an obituary online, apparently planning their trip to a funeral.

The second largest group are romantic movie fans - they are suckers for weekend rentals perhaps trying to emulate the lovey-dovey escapes common in romantic fiction.

The business of data

Data is big business for the numerati. US firm Acxiom keeps shopping and lifestyle data on some 200 million Americans.

They know how much we paid for our house, what magazines we subscribe to, which books we buy and what vacations we take. The company purchases just about every bit of data about us that can be bought, and then sells selections of it to anyone out to target us in, say, political campaigns.

Much effort is expended finding new ways to gather data on people. A company called Umbria uses software to analyse millions of blog and forum posts every day, using sentence structure, word choice and quirks in punctuation to determine the blogger's gender, age interests and opinion. That knowledge can be a valuable tool to people launching new products, or politicians seeking votes.

Microsoft has filed patents for technology that monitors the heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, facial expressions of office workers, and even their brain waves.

The idea, the patents say, is to let managers know if workers are experiencing heightened frustration or stress. Given that the same technologies are used in lie detectors and to study human behaviour, it seems unlikely many workforces would quietly accept their boss introducing such a system.

Management by numbers

Such data makes it possible to manage workplaces more mathematically. A team at computing giant IBM is sifting through resumés and project records to assemble a profile of each worker's skills and experience.

Online calendars show how employees use their time and who they meet with. By tracking the use of cellphones, email and laptops it may even be possible to map workers' movements and social networks of each person.

The results might show that a midlevel manager is quietly leading an important group of colleagues - and that his boss is out of the loop. Maybe these two should switch jobs.

Health and safety

Number-crunching techniques can look after your home life too. At the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology in the US, researchers have computers that monitor every one of a user's interactions - every keystroke and mouse click.

The idea is that by watching a person's speed, vocabulary and sentence complexity over time it is possible to pinpoint the onset of cognitive deterioration - like dementia or Alzheimer's - long before more noticeable symptoms emerge.

The management of whole nations increasingly depends on the numerati, and not just because of their role in political campaigns.

After the 9/11 attacks, the CIA made large investments in statistical techniques to track known terrorists and even predict future ones, and has relied heavily on such techniques ever since.

One of the first pieces of software brought in was NORA, originally developed to reveal and track cheats and criminals working or staying as customers in Las Vegas casinos.
http://www.noonehastodietomorrow.com.../586?task=view





Vote! How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators.

What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin Rose, of Digg, put it succinctly: “Encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to Digg [with a Digg badge].” Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.

On the other hand, if you take the bird-shot approach, it overloads your reader with branded badge after branded badge. It turns your page into the village bicycle.

Not pretty.

Nobody seems to have solved the problem yet. Lifehacker, for instance, uses a single Digg badge on their long articles, but they also list a couple of the top social bookmarking sites on every post. Wired takes the total shotgun approach, and they own Reddit.

There has to be a better way.

If you could detect which social bookmarking sites your reader uses, on a per-reader basis, you could display only the badges they care about. But you can’t know that because the browser secures the user’s history, right?

Wrong.

I know that you visit: Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot. It’s a bit scary, I know. I’ll come back to how I know in a second. We can use this information to only display one or two badges that we know the reader uses. It solves the which-badges-to-display problem.

SocialHistory.js

Today I’m releasing SocialHistory.js, code which enables you to detect which social bookmarking sites your visitors use. Here’s an example of how to use it:

<script src="http://aza.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SocialHistory/SocialHistory.js"></script>
<script>
  user = SocialHistory();
  var visitsDigg = user.doesVisit("Digg");
  var visitsSlashdot = user.doesVisit("Slashdot");
  var listOfVisitedSites = user.visitedSites();
</script>

SocialHistory.js cannot enable you to see all of the user’s history. It has to ask, 20-questions style, if the user has been to a particular URL: It’s hit or miss. SocialHistory.js has a big list of the most popular social bookmarking sites which it checks against. To see the list of sites, you can do:

user.checkedSites()

SocialHistory.js can also check other sites. For instance, if you want to see if your reader has visited any of the blogs I write, you’d do the following:

moreSites =
  {
    "Aza": ["http://humanized.com/weblog", "http://azarask.in/blog"]
  };
user = SocialHistory( moreSites );
alert( user.doesVisit("Aza") );

How Does It Work?

How does SocialHistory.js know? By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.
Vote For Me, Where You Care

Enjoy cleaner, more aware pages. Gone are the medieval days of badge spamming!

P.S. Yes, I do feel a bit dirty for using this information leak. At least I’m using it for a modicum of good. My cleaner half raises the cup to hoping that Dave Baron can stop the leak in Firefox by vanquishing bug 147777.
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/





Inside Safari 3.2’s Anti-Phishing Features

Apple silently uses Google's Safe Browsing technology to monitor web-site connections
Staff, MacJournals.com

The release of Safari 3.2 on November 13 displayed Apple’s penchant for cryptic release notes, as the company describes all three versions as featuring “protection from fraudulent phishing Web sites.”

Let's decode that for you: Safari 3.2 offers an entirely new anti-phishing feature, enabled by default in the “Security” pane of Safari’s preferences. When you try to visit a site that’s “known” to try to attack you, Safari stops and warns you with a pseudo-dialog box (in a Web page window or tab) about it.

If the site is suspected of phishing for your personal or financial information, the text reads:

The website you are visiting has been reported as a “phishing” website. These websites are designed to trick you into disclosing personal or financial information, usually by creating a copy of a legitimate website, such as a bank.

On the other hand, if the page you’re visiting is a “known” distribution point for malware (viruses, trojan horses, other programs that can control your computer), the text reads:

The website you are visiting appears to contain malware. Malware is malicious software that may harm your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Your computer can be infected just by browsing to a site with malware, without any further action on your part.

We are unaware of any current method for an attacker to actually download and run code on your system by visiting a Web page “without any further action on your part,” but that’s always the goal of attackers, so it seems sensible to err on the side of caution.

Nothing in Apple’s ridiculously minimal release notes suggested that this feature existed. But this time, the company’s intransigence in telling you what it has changed in the software you use may have further consequences. How Safari could “know” about these phishing and malware sites raises all kinds of interesting questions. Now we can tell you with reasonable confidence how it all works—but because Apple has not done the same thing, we cannot say with certainty that it is completely private, or that Safari is not sending information about the pages you visit to a third party.

We believe that Safari 3.2 is not doing that, but only Apple can say so—and you get one guess about whether the company has bothered to do so or not. Let’s begin with how these sites are “known.”

The basic problem Phishing sites are designed to fool people into thinking they’re the real thing, so your computer doesn’t have much of a shot—on its own—of figuring out if a site that looks like eBay really is eBay. Remember, the people who designed the Internet (incorrectly) assumed that all computers on the network would be trustworthy, so the rules are pretty loose. There’s no rule that says an eBay Web page URL can’t start with a raw IP address. Even if eBay had a written policy that all of its URLs will be in an “ebay.com” domain name, your computer has no way of knowing that.

Google’s computers, however, have a better shot at deciphering such attacks. As the world’s leading search engine, Google has figured out where eBay is, and knows that a single IP address in China is probably not one of eBay’s servers. Google knows what banks, credit card providers, insurance companies, and other firms people try to find, and it therefore has a reasonable idea that if their images show up in a page in the wrong part of the world, it may be bogus. It also helps that Google has something like six umpteen-gazillion times the computing power of the entire Apollo space program. You may have eight cores, but Google is still slightly ahead of you.

About three years ago, Google Labs released the first test version of Google Safe Browsing for Firefox, an attempt to take advantage of some of this accumulated knowledge. The extension for the Firefox browser (which had then recently seen its 1.5 release) examined URLs as you visited them in Firefox, and warned you if any of them were on one of two lists that Google maintained: one for suspected phishing sites, and one for sites suspected of distributing malware.

Google and the Mozilla Foundation have long been partners, so it was no surprise when Firefox 2.0 included Google’s “Safe Browsing” technology directly in the browser. To no one’s surprise, Chrome includes it as well. We were surprised that Safari 3.2 includes the same technology, especially since Apple’s minuscule release notes did not mention the word “Google” once. But our investigation convinces us that Safari 3.2’s “protection from fraudulent phishing websites” is, in fact, Google’s Safe Browsing technology.

How it works

Even if Google has a list of malicious sites, your browser can’t check in with Google every time you visit a new page. On the technical side, it would be a drag on slow connections, and some decent percentage of the world still uses dial-up Internet access. On the personal side, it’s somewhat unconscionable to imagine that your Web browser would report every page you visit to a central authority, whether it’s one as well-known as Google or not.

The other alternative is for your browser to keep a list of malicious URLs itself, so it can compare each page you visit against the list. Such a list would need periodic updates from Google because phishers and other purveyors of malware often use compromised computers for their attacks—one computer may only be “good” for attackers for a few hours.

But that poses its own problems—if network administrators know about some of these malicious URLs, then transmitting them over the network could trigger firewall problems. On top of that, many of the URLs might have variants that also get you to the malicious page. (You can typically append a useless parameter onto any static page and get the same results; some phishers do that in their URLs to avoid simple detection.)

Google solves this problem by sending the browser a list of hashed (encoded) URLs known to be phishing sites or distributors of malware. When you first launch Safari 3.2, it connects to safebrowsing.clients.google.com and requests information on the two main blacklists that Google maintains: a list of known phishing sites, and a list of known malware sites. Google returns the list of hashed URLs to your computer in chunks, starting with the freshest information first and gradually filling in older information. The updates are in a compact format that avoids having to send the hashes over the network again, and the hashes are just prefixes of longer numbers to avoid sending huge amounts of data over the wire.

Hash prefixes aren’t hashes, so if you’re visiting a page whose URL matches a hash prefix, Safari 3.2 goes back to Google and asks for the full hash for the prefix in question. Google responds, and if the full hash matches the hash for the URL in question, Safari knows that this page is on Google’s list of malicious sites.

Safari stores all of the data from Google using folder names that are difficult to decipher. If you look in the folder at /private/var/folders/, you’ll see one or more folders with two-letter names. One of those that’s not named “zz” will contain another folder with a much longer random name. That folder contains a folder named “-Caches-“, and inside it, you’ll find a folder named “com.apple.Safari”. The full path is /private/var/folders/xx/yy/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari, where “xx” and “yy” are unique to your system.

Once you find that folder, you’ll see two files within it: Cache.db and SafeBrowsing.db. The former is indeed Safari’s cache. The latter file contains the blacklists from Google’s Safe Browsing initiative—you’ll notice that the file was most likely created right about the time you first launched Safari 3.2, and if you have the browser open, the file should have been modified within the past 30 minutes. (The November 24 issue of MWJ contains information on how you can look inside Safari’s safe browsing database and what the information you’ll find in it means.) Google’s rules do not allow clients like Safari or Firefox to warn you that a page may be malicious, even if its URL is on the list, unless the list has been updated within the past 30 minutes.

We ran a network spy on Safari 3.2 while visiting suspected phishing sites, and we saw it sending information to safebrowsing.clients.google.com just before displaying the “Suspected Phishing Site” warning. When a site’s URL matches the first part of a hash on the list, Safari 3.2 apparently asks Google for the full 256-byte hash value for that URL alone, and then compares the two—the same method that Safe Browsing uses in Firefox.
Why we’re telling you this

Networking must be transparent to earn your confidence. That’s the point behind EV SSL—verified authentication that the company you’re talking to is who they say they are. On a lower level, when you visit a page in your Web browser, you expect your computer to get the IP address from your DNS server, get the page from the Web server, and get all of the assets for the page (images, movies, and so on) from their locations as specified in the page’s source. You do not expect your browser to also tell Google, or even Apple itself, what you’re doing.

Safari is not the first browser with this feature, though. Although Safe Browsing is built into Firefox 2 and later, it was a Firefox extension before that, and later part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox as well. The Google Toolbar Privacy Notice says that, in some circumstances, Safe Browsing collects additional information from users. We know that Firefox itself does not, because the Mozilla Foundation spells out exactly what the browser’s “Phishing and Malware Protection” send to Google, with links to both the Mozilla and [Google](http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html} privacy policies.

The Apple Customer Privacy Policy says nothing about Safari sending any information to places other than the Web sites you’re visiting—but as of Safari 3.2, it does exactly that: it fetches lots of information from Google, and sends (non-identifiable) requests back to Google when you encounter a page whose URL is on one of Google’s blacklists. (Update: A Macworld reader has found a reference to Google in the Safari licensing agreement. See the MacJournals response in our comment thread for more information.)

We must point out here that this system provides, indirectly, a way for Google to estimate what pages you’re visiting. If the URL of a page you want to visit matches the hash prefix of a known malicious page, Safari 3.2 appears to send that prefix to Google and ask for the entire 256-byte hash to make sure that this really is a malicious page (and also to verify that the page hasn’t been removed from Google’s lists since Safari’s last list update). Millions and millions of URLs could produce hashes that start with the same 32 bits, but if Google gets several requests for the same value, the company could reasonably infer that people were visiting the malicious page it had tracked—and since the request from Safari to Google comes from your IP address, Google might infer data from that as well. Mozilla’s privacy policy would forbid use of that data except to improve the service, but Apple’s privacy policy does not. Neither Apple nor Google state anywhere that they would only such data to improve the phishing and malware protection features.

We also note that the Safe Browsing v2.1 protocol mentions a third list beyond the list of phishing sites and the list of malware sites: a whitelist, “representing sites that are known to be trusted.” The spec continues, “Note that this list should only be used for ‘enhanced mode’ clients that do direct lookups to Google to determine which sites are phishy. In that case, if a site is on the whitelist there is no need to send the query to Google.”

Safari 3.2’s “SafeBrowsing.db” file does not appear to contain data for Google’s whitelist, but the specification confirms that some clients can, with Google’s permission, use an “enhanced mode” that looks up each page you visit rather than maintaining the list on the client computer. This would be a serious change for Safari. If it were implemented, users would need to be told about it and how it worked, so they could make informed and intelligent decisions about whether to use this feature or not.

The compulsion to hide

And yet, we cannot conclusively tell you that it’s not implemented today, because Apple refuses to document its changes. This time, it should come back to haunt Apple. Even when phrased as friendly to Apple as we can manage, the fact remains that after installing Safari 3.2, your computer is by default downloading lots of information from Google and sending information related to sites you visit back to Google—without telling you, without Apple disclosing the methods, and without any privacy statement from Apple.

This is not how companies like Apple are expected to behave towards their customers, even if Firefox already had the same feature. Mozilla is very clear about how Firefox does this. Apple refuses to say anything about how Safari does this, and for no other reason than that the company simply thinks so little of its customers that it doesn’t feel the need to keep them informed about data Safari transmits on their behalf. For a Web browser to do things like this without explicit documentation is inexcusable.
MacJournals sent its analysis to Apple’s privacy and press relations folks on November 17 with questions about the latest consequences of the company’s continued decision to not disclose information to its customers. Neither Apple’s public relations nor privacy departments have, as of press time, responded to MWJ’s queries about this.

We’re not holding our breath.

In the meantime, from what we can tell, the anti-phishing features in Safari 3.2 looks as innocuous as it can be and still be reasonably effective. It does not send data about the pages you visit to Google unless one of the matches a hash prefix on Google’s list, and even then, it only gets the full hash value for the hash prefix in question—as far as we know. That alone might be enough for Google to do interesting things with the data, unless some unstated privacy policy prohibits it. If you have doubts, or simply don’t want to spend the network bandwidth on maintaining a 25MB database full of potentially malicious hosts, you can disable the feature in the “Security” tab of Safari 3.2’s “Preferences” window.

It would be much easier to recommend leaving it enabled if Apple believed you had a right to know when its Web browser was collecting and sending information on your behalf.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1370..._browsing.html





Ex-Philly TV Anchor Gets House Arrest For Hacking
Maryclaire Dale

A former TV newsman in Philadelphia who said he felt threatened by his co-anchor's "rising star" was sentenced Monday to six months of house arrest after hacking into her e-mail and leaking gossip that contributed to her downfall.

Larry Mendte, 51, admitted hacking into KYW-TV co-anchor Alycia Lane's e-mail hundreds of times, both before and after the city's CBS affiliate fired her in January.

"I made my job too important," Mendte said in court Monday. "In believing that I was protecting the well-being of my children and my family, I put them both in jeopardy."

He then apologized to Lane, who attended the sentencing. Lane had given a confidential victim-impact statement to the court but declined to comment after the hearing.

Mendte escaped jail time but has suffered the loss of his career and reputation, U.S. District Judge Mary A. McLaughlin noted. He must serve six months of home confinement during three years of probation and must perform 250 hours of community service and pay a $5,000 fine.

He had faced up to six months in prison under sentencing guidelines.

The former "Access Hollywood" anchor described his early relationship with Lane as "flirtatious, unprofessional and improper" but said it soured after his wife, local Fox anchor Dawn Stensland, learned about it. The twice-divorced Lane, 36, vehemently denies any impropriety and has sued him for invasion of privacy and on other grounds.

The pair anchored the evening newscasts on KYW from 2004 to January, when Lane was fired after a Dec. 16 arrest in New York following a late-night scuffle with police. The charges were later dropped as part of a pretrial diversion program. She has a wrongful-termination suit pending against KYW.

Mendte leaked privileged e-mails about her criminal case to the press, and prosecutors say he is the only plausible source of damaging leaks concerning a swimsuit photo she sent a friend, married TV sports anchor Rich Eisen.

Mendte was fired in June, after the FBI searched his home and office.

"My role at the station was still being diminished when Alycia told me during an argument on the set that she (was) the rising star and that I was '50 and on my way out,'" Mendte said after his Aug. 22 plea to illegally accessing a protected computer.

"I felt I was in trouble," he continued. "My career, my future, my family's future was in trouble. And, this is where I got into more trouble _ federal trouble."

Mendte has two young children with Stensland and two older children from an earlier marriage. He earned $700,000 at KYW-TV, while Lane's salary had zoomed past his to $780,000, according to her lawyer, Paul Rosen.

The FBI began investigating Mendte in the spring, when a station employee stumbled upon a computer that was logged into Lane's private e-mail account _ nearly two months after she was fired.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112500675.html





Senator Probes Privacy Law After Obama Phone Record Breach
Stephanie Condon

In light of the recent breach of President-elect Barack Obama's cell phone records, a senator on Monday sent a letter to the Justice Department asking how many investigations or prosecutions the department has undertaken for violations of the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) sent the letter to Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant attorney general, noting that "data privacy breaches involving the sensitive phone records of ordinary Americans are occurring with greater frequency."

The Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act, which Leahy sponsored and Congress passed in 2007, prohibits telecommunications carriers from obtaining confidential phone records by accessing customer accounts through the Internet without permission. Along with information about prosecutions and investigations, the letter asks whether the department has found the law effective in protecting Americans' privacy.

Obama's cell phone records were improperly accessed earlier this month by Verizon Wireless employees who were subsequently fired.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10107271-38.html





Weaponizing MP3s

The latest anti-piracy technology is a blast
Jaya Jiwatram

If you're looking to attack a pirate ship, forget cutlasses and cannon balls. Go full speed ahead with an MP3 sonic blast. At least that's the latest method being used in sea warfare, as highlighted last week when a sonic blast was used to scare away Somali pirates from attacking a chemical tanker close to the Horn of Africa.

The weapon, which is non-lethal, is a long-range acoustic device (LRAD) connected to an MP3 player that emits targeted blasts of sound for more than a mile. A full-power beam is "excruciating" at 100 to 200 meters, and effective up to 1,000 meters. It causes permanent deafness within 50 meters. But most don't want to come that close -- in last week's case, the Somali pirates slowed down at 600 meters and stopped at about 400 meters before waving their AK-47s in the air and turning away.

Behind the technology is British private firm Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS), which uses three-man teams of ex-military personnel to ward off pirate ships that have long been a problem behind piracy woes and international trade. This week, APMSS will send out ten teams to man the Gulf of Aden, which, along with the Indian Ocean, has seen almost 100 pirate attacks this year alone.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviat...aponizing-mp3s





Red X redux

Microsoft Cleans Fake Antivirus Tool from 994,061 PCs
Emil Protalinski

The Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) is a small program Microsoft pushes out to computers on Patch Tuesday to clean out a list of malware. On this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft added scans for a malware file that masks itself as security software, and it found plenty of copies.

Win32/FakeSecSen has gone by various names, including Micro Antivirus 2009, MS Antivirus, Spyware Preventer, Vista Antivirus 2008, Advanced Antivirus, System Antivirus 2008, Ultimate Antivirus 2008, Windows Antivirus, XPert Antivirus, Power Antivirus, and Ultra Antivirus 2009. Furthermore, it is skinnable, so each of these variants has a different GUI, although the basic functionality is the same: bother users with warnings of malware until they pay up. (WiR, 11/15/08 – Jack.)

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center recently released some data on how the removal tool performed this month: FakeSecSen was removed from 994,061 machines. That number isn't the highest Microsoft has recorded before, and the number of removals depends on which malware Microsoft adds each month and how widespread it is.

The company did note, however, that for every one thousand machines in the US scanned by MSRT during the last seven days, roughly five were infected with FakeSecSen rogues. That's quite high for just one piece of malware, but things could have been much worse, according to Microsoft:

Normally each FakeSecSen installation contains one EXE, one or two DAT files, one Control Panel applet (CPL), one desktop shortcut and sometimes one uninstaller. It is interesting that only 20 percent of these removals contain executables of FakeSecSen. This indicates either the other 80 percent had at one point been infected by FakeSecSen and the threat was then manually and partially removed, or the machines were cleaned by other AV products/tools, or FakeSecSen had failed to install, etc.

Once Microsoft gets into the game of free real-time antivirus solutions, it will be worth watching how infection rates fare, instead of just taking note of cleanup numbers each month.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...94061-pcs.html





Mac OS X Targeted by Trojan and Backdoor Tool
Matthew Broersma

Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors.

The Trojan — called 'OSX.RSPlug.D' by Intego, the Mac security specialist that discovered the threat — is a variant on an older piece of malicious code but with a new installer, Intego said.

"It is a downloader, and it contacts a remote server to download the files it installs," Intego said in an advisory. "This means that, in the future, the downloader may be able to install payloads [other] than the one it currently installs."

In other respects the Trojan is similar to previous versions of RSPlug, which first surfaced in October 2007, Intego said. It installs a piece of malicious code known as DNSChanger, which routes the user's internet traffic through a malicious DNS server, leading users to phishing websites or pages displaying advertisements.

The Trojan is found on porn websites posing as a codec needed to play video files, a technique used to trick the user into downloading and installing it.

Intego said OSX.RSPlug.D has been widely confused with a separate threat publicized this week by several security firms. That threat is called OSX.TrojanKit.Malez by Intego and OSX.Lamzev.A by other vendors, including Symantec and Trend Micro.

OSX.Lamzev.A is a hacker tool designed primarily to allow attackers to install backdoors in a user's system, according to Intego. However, the company dismissed the tool as a serious threat because a potential hacker has to have physical access to a system to install the backdoor.

"Unlike true malware and Trojan horses, OSX.TrojanKit.Malez requires that a hacker already have access to a Mac in order to install the code," Intego stated.

Other antivirus vendors noted that Lamzev could be disguised as a piece of legitimate software and used to trick users into creating the backdoor themselves.

Lamzev is not related to RSPlug, despite several high-profile reports confounding the two, Intego emphasized. "This hacker tool has nothing to do with the RSPlug Trojan horse," Intego stated.

Security vendors have long warned that the Mac platform is not as secure as some users might like to believe. Apple had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-251586.html





Cyber-Attack on Defense Department Computers Raises Concerns

The 'malware' strike, thought to be from inside Russia, hit combat zone computers and the U.S. Central Command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack underscores concerns about computer warfare.
Julian E. Barnes

Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia -- an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or "malware," apparently designed specifically to target military networks.

"This one was significant; this one got our attention," said one defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing internal assessments.

Although officials are withholding many details, the attack underscores the increasing danger and potential significance of computer warfare, which defense experts say could one day be used by combatants to undermine even a militarily superior adversary.
Bush was briefed on the threat by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen also briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Military electronics experts have not pinpointed the source or motive of the attack and could not say whether the destructive program was created by an individual hacker or whether the Russian government may have had some involvement. Defense experts may never be able to answer such questions, officials said.

The defense official said the military also had not learned whether the software's designers may have been specifically targeting computers used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, suspicions of Russian involvement come at an especially delicate time because of sagging relations between Washington and Moscow and growing tension over U.S. plans to develop a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The two governments also have traded charges of regional meddling after U.S. support for democratic elections in former Soviet states and recent Russian overtures in Latin America.

U.S. officials have worried in recent years about the possibility of cyber-attacks from other countries, especially China and Russia, whether sponsored by governments of those countries or launched by individual computer experts.

An electronic attack from Russia shut down government computers in Estonia in 2007. And officials believe that a series of electronic attacks were launched against Georgia at the same time that hostilities erupted between Moscow and Tbilisi last summer. Russia has denied official involvement in the Georgia attacks.

The first indication that the Pentagon was dealing with a computer problem came last week, when officials banned the use of external computer flash drives. At the time, officials did not indicate the extent of the attack or the fact that it may have targeted defense systems or posed national security concerns.

The invasive software, known as agent.btz, has circulated among nongovernmental U.S. computers for months. But only recently has it affected the Pentagon's networks. It is not clear whether the version responsible for the cyber-intrusion of classified networks is the same as the one affecting other computer systems.

The malware is able to spread to any flash drive plugged into an infected computer. The risk of spreading the malware to other networks prompted the military to ban the drives.

Defense officials acknowledged that the worldwide ban on external drives was a drastic move. Flash drives are used constantly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many officers keep them loaded with crucial information on lanyards around their necks.

Banning their use made sharing information in the war theaters more difficult and reflected the severity of the intrusion and the threat from agent.btz, a second official said.

Officials would not describe the exact threat from agent.btz, or say whether it could shut down computers or steal information. Some computer experts have reported that agent.btz can allow an attacker to take control of a computer remotely and to take files and other information from it.

In response to the attack, the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the military's cyberspace defenses, has raised the security level for its so-called information operations condition, or "INFOCON," initiating enhanced security measures on military networks.

The growing possibility of future electronic conflicts has touched off debates among U.S. defense experts over how to train and utilize American computer warfare specialists. Some have advocated creating offensive capabilities, allowing the U.S. to develop the ability to intrude into the networks of other countries.

But most top leaders believe the U.S. emphasis in cyberspace should be on improving defenses and gathering intelligence, particularly about potential threats.

On Tuesday, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff, received a specialized briefing about the malware attack. Officers from the Air Force Network Operations Center at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana outlined their efforts to halt the spread of the malware and to protect military computers from further attack.

Schwartz, praising those efforts, said that the attack and the military's response were being closely monitored by senior military leaders.

The offending program has been cleansed from a number of military networks. But officials said they did not believe they had removed every bit of infection from all Defense Department computers.

"There are lots of people working hard to remove the threat and put in preventive measures to protect the grid," said the defense official. "We have taken a number of corrective measures, but I would be overstating it if I said we were through this."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...0,230046.story





Botnets Can Trample Most Anti-Virus Programs
John E. Dunn

A new analysis of botnets has come up with a possible reason for their prodigious ability to infect PCs -- many anti-virus programs are near to useless in blocking the binaries used to spread them.

According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts being used by botnet builders.

In a detailed blog, he describes how he uploaded a sample of 217 binaries culled from FireEye appliances in customer premises between September and November to the independent VirusTotal test website. This runs 36 anti-virus programs -- a representative sample of the security programs used by businesses and individuals -- giving researchers access to data on get statistics on how many malware binaries have already been uploaded to the site by other researchers, when they were uploaded and how many were detected by each program.

Roughly half of the binaries picked up by FireEye were unknown to VirusTotal, a result indicative of the core problem of detecting botnet malware -- speed.

Because malware often uses 'polymorphism' -- programs are constantly changed very slightly to evade binary pattern detection -- the problem of detecting and blocking malware quickly is huge. According to Staniford, this makes it important that anti-virus programs can spot malware in the first week of its use.

"The sample is likely to get discarded by the bad guys pretty soon after that," he notes.

During the first three days after initial detection by FireEye, only four in ten anti-virus programs could spot the offending code, which suggests that many bots would evade security software during attacks on real PCs in they happened during this same period.

"The conclusion is that AV works better and better on old stuff -- by the time something has been out for a couple of months, and is still in use, it's likely that 70-80 percent of products will detect it," says Staniford.

FireEye's appliances can be seen as an 'early warning' system because of the way they use behavioural analysis to spot malware in real time, in some cases days or weeks before a program has been formally identified and documented by security companies. By the time it has been spotted and a signature rolled out to anti-virus databases, however, it might already be too late.

Equally, many prominent security vendors will use similar techniques to spot malware as quickly as possible, making it surprising that so many anti-virus programs failed to spot FireEye's sample binaries. The reason might simply be the vast number of samples that appear in any given period.

What nobody doubts is the importance of botnets to the spread of malware and spam, as evidenced by the recent takedown of a US hosting company McColo, which had been accused of hosting botnet controllers. In the hours after the hoster's demise, spam levels were reported to have plummeted dramatically.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente..._programs.html





Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions Over Online Identity
Brian Stelter

Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?

The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log on to Web sites.

The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in October 2006 that said in part, “The world would be a better place without you.”

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

While the Internet’s anonymity was used in this case as a cloak to bully Megan, other users say they have perfectly good reasons to construct false identities online, if only to help protect against the theft of personal information, for example.

“It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University.

Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the possibility of being prosecuted for online misrepresentation, while remote, should worry users nonetheless.

“If this verdict stands,” Mr. Grossman said, “it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions.”

The judge in the Los Angeles case, George H. Wu, is to hear motions next month for its dismissal. Ms. Drew’s defense asserts among other things, as it did at trial, that she never read MySpace’s terms of service in detail.

“The reality, recognized by almost everyone, is that the vast majority of Internet users do not read Web site terms of service carefully or at all,” said Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Representatives of MySpace declined to make any executives available for interviews about the case. In a statement, the site said that it did not tolerate cyberbullying and would continue to work with industry experts to raise awareness of the “harm it can potentially cause.”

Mr. Hinduja, who writes for the research site CyberBullying.us, said there had been a handful of cases involving teenagers who were “driven to suicide in part because of cyberbullying by peers.” What drew the greatest attention to Megan’s death, he said, was that it involved the actions of an adult, Ms. Drew, now 49, whose daughter’s friendship with Megan had soured.

It remains easy to create a fraudulent account on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, though a witness at Ms. Drew’s trial, Jae Sung, a MySpace vice president for customer care, said “impostor profiles” were deleted when they were flagged by users or discovered by the Web site’s employees.

A number of corporations are competing to develop age verification software for Web sites. But relying on technology to confirm a user’s identity is not without drawbacks. There are legitimate reasons to hide one’s name and other information online, be it concern about identity theft or a need for comfort when asking for advice or help.

“We’ve been telling our kids to lie about ID information for a long time now,” said Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard.

Ms. Boyd said forms of digital street outreach were needed.

“There are lots of kids hurting badly online,” she said. “And guess what? They’re hurting badly offline, too. Because it’s more visible online, people are blaming technology rather than trying to solve the underlying problems of the kids that are hurting.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html





Worker Dies at Long Island Wal-Mart After Being Trampled in Black Friday Stampede
Joe Gould

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

Nassau County Police are still investigating and would not confirm the witness accounts. The Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death. Police did say there were several injuries but weren't more specific.

Jessica Keyes was among the shoppers. She told the Daily News she saw a woman knocked down just a few feet from the dying worker.

"When the paramedics came, she said 'I'm pregnant,'" Keyes said.

Paramedics treated the woman inside the store and then, according to Keys, told the woman:

"There's nothing we can do. The baby is gone."

Before police shut down the store, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the store clerk's life.

"They were working on him, but you could see he was dead, said Halcyon Alexander, 29. "People were still coming through."

Only a few stopped.

"They're savages," said shopper Kimberly Cribbs, 27. "It's sad. It's terrible."
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/...art_after.html





TV Sales Becoming Litmus Test for U.S. Economy
Matt Richtel

In a volatile year that has turned many Americans into armchair economists, here’s an important indicator to watch this holiday shopping season: how many people are lugging home big, flat-screen televisions?

The answer matters to more than just TV makers. Just as high-definition sets have become the hearth of the digital home, they are increasingly central to the fortunes of the consumer electronics industry and plenty of retailers.

And there’s reason for serious concern. While retailers are trying to use discounted TVs as a lure for shoppers, many would-be buyers continue to wait, and wait, for a magical price that is low enough to inspire a purchase. Others just have more pressing needs.

“The question is whether I buy a TV or something more important,” said David Lunsford, 62, who visited a Circuit City near here last week to shop for big-screen TVs. He would love to replace his aging rear-projection set, but he worried he needed to save money in case family members hit tough times.

“I’m a stable provider. They may turn to me,” said Mr. Lunsford, who works for the federal government.

Americans are expected to spend $28 billion this year on TVs, making them the largest segment of the $173 billion electronics industry. So far about half of American households have made the jump to flat-panel screens, which started out as status symbols but are on their way to becoming standard household appliances.

More people may choose to upgrade this year because of the national switchover to digital broadcast signals coming Feb. 17. The change, which will mostly affect people who watch over-the-air signals on older sets, has generated a good amount of consumer confusion — which could be good for sales of new sets.

TVs are also a gateway to a host of other products, like Blu-ray discs and their players, surround-sound audio systems, digital video recorders and cables.

All of these factors have led electronics stores like Circuit City and Best Buy, and even less specialized chains like Sears, Wal-Mart and Office Depot, to put TVs front and center in their advertising recently, promoting them on the cover of Sunday circulars and on the home pages of Web sites. They are offering discounts — like 42-inch TVs for less than $700 and 32-inch sets for $450 — that come on top of recent steep price declines for the sets.

For the industry, the feeling is that if retailers cannot get TVs to move, the holiday season could be a bleak one indeed. In that sense, the TV market offers a glimpse of the broader tensions this year between wary consumers on the one hand and retailers and manufacturers desperate to spur sales on the other.

“The television becomes a litmus test of the robustness of the American economy,” said Richard Doherty, an electronics industry analyst with the research firm Envisioneering. In Mr. Doherty’s consumer surveys, the early word is mixed; many consumers want a new TV, but they think that if they wait to buy, retailers will drop prices further.

There were signs on Friday that more cuts might be necessary. At two malls outside Portland, Ore., the electronics stores were the only ones that were full of shoppers. But people seemed to be gravitating toward lower-priced items like video games instead of televisions.

Mr. Doherty’s firm tracked stores in New York and California and found that for some retailers it was the slowest Black Friday of the decade. “There are lots of big-screen TVs still standing on the show floor,” he said. “This is not what was expected by retailers or manufacturers.”

Store owners may cut TV prices even further with revamped sales starting on Sunday, Mr. Doherty said.

Steven Caldero, chief operating officer of Ken Cranes, a 10-store consumer electronics chain in the Los Angeles area, painted a rosier picture.

“Our traffic has been very good,” Mr. Caldero said. “Our sales have been good. I think people went out and decided to buy something to make themselves feel better.”

In just the first two hours of operation on Friday, Ken Cranes matched about one-third of the business it did for all of Black Friday last year. But while consumers bought plenty of TVs, they shied away from purchasing complementary products like audio systems, Mr. Caldero said.

“I am not seeing as much of that as I would like to see,” he said. Consumers eyeing televisions have historically been rewarded for their patience: flat-panel prices have fallen nearly in half in the last two years.

A year ago, for example, Sony sold a 40-inch model for $1,600 that now costs $1,000, and a 32-inch model for $1,100 that now goes for $749. And Sony is one of the costlier brands. Several manufacturers are selling 32-inch TVs for $450 to $500. Mammoth TVs, those more than 50 inches, have come down too; Best Buy is offering a 52-inch Sharp for $1,299.

Beyond price drops, manufacturers and retailers are trying to spur demand with other incentives. At Circuit City, for instance, televisions get a 60-day price guarantee, whereas other products have a 30-day guarantee. Reflecting the special place held by TVs, Circuit City offers 36 months of interest-free payments on some larger sets, compared with 24 months for other products.

Many major retailers are sweetening the pot by bundling TVs with high-definition DVD players, or offering discount bundles on cables. They announced Black Friday deals weeks in advance, and some — like Best Buy — began sales events in the days before Thanksgiving, with heavy promotions on TVs.

And yet consumers remain cautious, and manufacturers are nervous.

Mr. Caldero of Ken Cranes said he had been in constant contact with electronics manufacturers, including TV makers, that were trying to gauge demand.

“I’ve had more calls from vendors in the last few weeks than I’ve had in the last three years,” he said. “They want to know what’s going on, how’s business, what’s working and what’s not.”

Just to be safe, TV makers have been shipping fewer sets — but they may not have pulled back fast enough. In the third quarter of this year, shipments to North American retailers of LCD TVs rose 21 percent from a year ago, and those of plasma TVs rose 20 percent, according to DisplaySearch, a market research firm. That is down from growth rates in the last two years that at times hit triple digits.

Paul Semenza, an analyst with DisplaySearch, said that the downturn in sales of TVs did not hit until mid-October, so despite the slowdown in shipments the retailers and manufacturers were still facing a glut of sets.

“Oversupply has just cascaded,” Mr. Semenza said.

As in other industries, that oversupply, and the uncertainty of consumer demand, has caused problems further back in the manufacturing and supply chain. In Taiwan and Korea where the LCD screens for the sets are made, prices are falling 5 to 9 percent a month, a “tremendous drop,” said Andrew Abrams, an analyst with Avian Securities, which tracks the electronics industry. Such drops, he said, suggest that retailers have far too much inventory, and he expects another round of price cuts.

The question is, who will blink first, manufacturers and retailers, or consumers?

Bruce Tripido, vice president for marketing at the TV maker Sharp, said adequate discounts were already in place.

“We’re not looking to shift gears from the offers we’ve planned,” Mr. Tripido said. “The pricing is so compelling for this holiday selling season that it’s to the point of irresistible.”

Yet resistance remains for many consumers, like Bayani Deluna Jr., 35, who stood last week at a San Francisco-area Best Buy looking longingly at a 32-inch Sony television. Mr. Deluna, who worked as a parking valet until a few weeks ago when he went on disability, is waiting for the $600 price to drop.

“If it comes down to $450, I’d buy it,” he said. “And I’m sure the price is going to come down.”

Ashlee Vance and Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/te...levisions.html





Random House to Digitize Thousands of Books
AP

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Random House's vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, says e-book sales have increased by triple digit percentages in 2008, thanks in part to Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but he declined to offer specific number. E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112400652.html





German National Library Causes Blogger Uproar
John Timmer

The explosion of online content and digital media poses a challenge for librarians, who are used to dealing with archives of physical material. Still, most libraries are learning to adapt; the US Library of Congress, for example, runs a Web Archive that it populates using a combination of crawlers to harvest content and subject specialists to select relevant material. Now, the German National Library, the Deutsche Bibliothek, is starting to gather material for its own digital archive, but its first steps have accidentally gotten the online community quite upset.

The Deutsche Bibliothek is kind enough to translate many of the documents relevant to its digital archiving program into English. The program kicked off in earnest back to 2002, when it negotiated an agreement with publishers that governed the use of their digital material by the library. That agreement stipulates that the library regards "online publications as fundamentally worthy of submission and collection." To protect the publishers, however, it stipulates that the archived material can only be accessed from within the library, and that a fee will be charged to any users that want printouts or digital copies of this material.

But it appears that the Deutsche Bibliothek is now starting to look into all the noncommercial and self-published material that is available online, and it's not necessarily going over all that smoothly. The Financial Times is reporting that the library's director says that, "at the moment, we're only collecting e-books and online dissertations but we're going to be moving into the areas of blogs and websites fairly soon."

Unfortunately, the bloggers aren't feeling honored by their inclusion. It seems that some of Germany's bloggers got ahold of a copy of the law that establishes the library as a federal institution, "having legal capacity." That legal capacity apparently allows the Deutsche Bibliothek to issue formal requests that individuals deposit materials in its archives. Should those deposits fail to take place, it is, "entitled to acquire the media works through other channels at the expense of the depositors."

But the seizing of online content is apparently the least of their worries. The law indicates that interfering with the Deutsche Bibliothek's activities is an administrative offense, one punishable by fines of up to €10,000. Fears apparently spread that the bloggers would be facing a stark choice: hand over all their past material in an archive-worthy form, or face a hefty fine.

The Financial Times' report indicates that the Deutsche Bibliothek is actually contemplating a system much closer to the Library of Congress', so bloggers shouldn't have to do anything. Still, the episode clearly indicates that laying the groundwork for these programs should include some effort to communicate with those who will ultimately be affected by them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ggressive.html





Amazon.com Tries User-Generated Public Relations
Saul Hansell

Just as Tom Sawyer got his friends to whitewash that fence, Internet companies have been delighted to offer their users the chance to perform many of the tasks they would otherwise have to hire people to do, from making videos to tattling on those who write offensive comments.

Now Amazon.com has found a way to offload to users one of the most tedious tasks of the holiday season: answering questions from reporters trying to pad Thanksgiving week newspapers and airwaves with stories about hot products to buy.

The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. (They also contribute their recommendations on a page on Amazon’s site.)

Amazon says that members of the team are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers. They are not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.”

That’s not quite the whole story.

Some team members have been flown to Seattle to conduct broadcast interviews on behalf of the company. Moreover, they have been given free products to review and keep.

The freebies are part of the Amazon Vine program the company started last year. Top reviewers get free products if they promise to write about them.

Despite the potential for conflicts of interest, the program seems to be run the way customers would want it to. Amazon says it does not weed out negative comments, and the Paper Cuts blog looked at one book and found a mix of pans and praise. Moreover, each review of a free product is identified, so users can look for any signs of bias.

So what should people make of user-generated public relations? I haven’t seen any print articles yet that quote the review team members. But their picks — which include a Wild Republic plush giant squid, a Catalina Lighting gooseneck desk lamp and a PlantSense EasyBloom plant sensor — are a lot more eclectic than the usual gift suggestions trotted out for the news media.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/1...-relations/?hp





Facebook Wins Judgment Against Spammer
AP

Facebook has a won $873 million judgment against a Canadian man who bombarded the popular online hangout with sexually explicit ''spam'' messages.

The victory, sealed with a judge's order issued last Friday, probably won't yield a windfall for privately held Facebook Inc., whose revenue this year is expected to range between $250 million to $300 million.

Court records indicate the alleged spammer, Adam Guerbuez of Montreal, has been difficult to find since Facebook sued him four months ago.

But Facebook is hoping the size of the judgment will scare off other spammers who might be tempted to target the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's audience of more than 120 million users.

''Everyone who participates constructively in Facebook should feel confident that we are fighting hard to protect you against spam and other online nuisances,'' Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, wrote Monday on the company's blog.

Efforts to reach Guerbuez for comment on Monday were unsuccessful.

The case against Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, illustrates how Internet rogues can manipulate Facebook's communications system to unleash massive marketing blitzes.

According to Facebook, Guerbuez fooled its users into providing him with their usernames and passwords. One method was the use of fake Web sites that posed as legitimate destinations.

After Guerbuez gained access to user's personal profiles, he used computer programs to send out more than 4 million messages promoting a variety of products, including marijuana and penis enlargement products, during March and April of this year, Facebook said.

''Despite the resources dedicated to spam eradication, current available technology does not permit Facebook to completely prevent the transmission of spam on its site,'' the company's lawyers wrote in the case against Guerbuez.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...k-Spammer.html





PeerMatrix Re-Brands P2P-Disruption Tech as an Ad Platform
Angela Gunn

A patent described in a WIPO filing as a "method, apparatus and system for interfering with distribution of protected content" over peer-to-peer networks is now being pitched to businesses large and small as an ad-delivery device.

The patent, filed in 2006, is held by Bernard Trest, currently president of PeerMatrix. The technology travels under the trade name of "AdMorph," and the software was announced on Saturday.

The would-be advertiser downloads a copy of the software; prepares an "ad" he wishes to distribute; and logs into LimeWire, eMule or another peer-to-peer network. An ad can be any file, even an executable, and have any name. When a user searches on, say, "Happy Birthday," the PeerMatrix software sends over a copy of the ad-file -- renamed to "Happy Birthday," or whatever the search term was.

PeerMatrix makes money from this by piggybacking onto the download and distributing additional ads along with the original. According to the company's FAQ, a paid version is in the works that will distribute only the original advertiser's content.

The PeerMatrix Web site compares the system to Google or to banner ads, and Trest says that "by opening up P2P users to advertising, we plan to become the search engine of P2P ads," though PeerMatrix ad targeting doesn't currently go much deeper than allowing would-be advertisers to focus on specific words and geographic areas. The company describes itself as having been founded in 2004 to provide advertising solutions for file-sharing networks.

That's an interesting way of putting it, since in his 2006 WIPO patent-application description, Trest opens by stating the following: "The proliferation of the Internet, and in particular of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks has resulted in widespread unauthorized distribution of content covered by copyright and other intellectual property laws." He then goes on to describe his technology as "automatically taking an interfering action in respect of the requesting device" -- that is, automatically obstructing the peer-to-peer user's download of the content she was actually seeking.

PeerMatrix's FAQ raises the question of whether its service is simply spamming, and responds, "No. PeerMatrix advertising is similar to text ads or banner ads that you find on major search engines as your ads only appear when a P2P user conducts searches."

However, keepers of peer-to-peer networks might not see it that way.

Over at TorrentFreak, blogger "Ernesto" called for developers of file-sharing applications to filter the new "spamming tool" (his words) whenever possible. He quoted an emphatic agreement by FrostWire lead developer Angel Leon, who added, "This is nothing but good old fake search results, otherwise known as spam, and it's always been in the interest of the community to remove these results."

And ad-supported MP3Rocket does exactly that, telling the watchdog site p2pnet, "MP3Rocket currently has technology to block PeerMatrix's newest AdMorph or phony video file technology."

Whatever P2P keepers think of PeerMatrix's definition of spam, though, you've got to admit that -- as the company points out -- it's all perfectly legal as far as copyright goes.

"Using P2P networks is only illegal if you use the network to distribute someone else's copyrighted material," explains the FAQ. "Since PeerMatrix distributes advertising you've created yourself, you have the right to make your ads available on P2P networks."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Peer...orm/1227571454

















Until next week,

- js.



















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