Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 1st, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door. That's my business. That's not what America is about." – David Mowrer


"Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do. Show me the evidence. I don’t care what a group of experts says." – Dr. James Heilman


"If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep." – News.com


"We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further." – Wayne Rosso


"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone. Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this." – Charlie Miller


"There's nothing wrong with instilling fear." – Jack Bauer



































August 1st, 2009




Lawmaker Urges Regulations for File-Sharing

A senior U.S. lawmaker said on Wednesday that it may be time for the government to regulate companies that provide online file-sharing services after a number of people managed to access FBI files, medical records and Social Security numbers.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns said during a hearing on the safety of peer-to-peer software that he was astonished at privacy breaches involving LimeWire, operated by the Lime Group.

Using LimeWire, people have been able to access FBI files, medical records, Social Security numbers and even a file containing information about a safe house location for President Barack Obama and his family, Towns said.

"As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry," Towns said. "In the last administration, the Federal Trade Commission took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the file sharing software industry. I hope the new administration is revisiting that approach."

Towns, a New York Democrat, said he plans to introduce legislation that would ban unsecure, open network, peer-to-peer software from all government and contractor computers and networks.

"For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," he said.

Towns said he also plans to meet with the new FTC chairman to request that the agency investigate whether inadequate safeguards on file sharing software such as LimeWire constitute an unfair trade practice. An FTC spokesman did not have an immediate comment.

He added that the Federal Communications Commission should examine the peer-to-peer industry. An FCC spokeswoman declined to comment.

Lime Wire founder and Chairman Mark Gorton defended his company, saying any inadvertent file-sharing has been fixed in the newest version of the software and steps have been installed to put the user more in control.

"Are we perfect? No," Gorton told the committee. "We have made enormous strides in the last few years."

"In order for a LimeWire user to change their default settings to enable document sharing, they have to click nine times and disregard three warnings," Gorton said.

Public interest groups such as Public Knowledge said the attack on peer-to-peer is phony and misdirected. Robb Topolski, chief technology consultant for Public Knowledge, said that the update to the software is a change from previous behavior driven by criticisms that the LimeWire application shared more than the user knew or intended.

"Now, it shares nothing until sharing is specifically enabled," he said. "LimeWire is perfectly safe."

Robert Boback, the head of Tiversa Inc, a private online security and intelligence firm, criticized the LimeWire software, saying corporate and government documents, as well as child pornography, can be downloaded.

Boback said that documents revealing every U.S. nuclear facility were downloaded by computers in France. He said peer-to-peer software has made it dangerously easy for snoopers to unearth extremely private information -- easier than rifling through someone's trash.

"Why go dumpster diving?" Boback said.

(Reporting by John Poirier, editing by Matthew Lewis and Carol Bishopric)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072901832.html





Report: 20 Million Illegal Downloaders Also Pay For Music
FMQB

Research company Interpret just completed a new report on the music consumption behaviors of consumers who download music illegally. Interpret’s Syndicated Research Service report, titled Illegal Downloaders: Tapping an ‘Out of the Box’ Market Segment to Drive Revenues, is based on an April 2009 consumer survey. The report reveals that while it is unlikely that illegal downloading can be completely erased, there are a number of steps the music industry can take to get illegal downloaders to pay for music. Additional findings reveal that illegal music downloaders can become assets to record labels and music content providers through unconventional means.

The study showed that illegal downloaders are voracious music consumers who also pay to experience music in a number of ways, such as buying music through their game consoles and playing music and singing games like Guitar Hero much more than their CD buying counterparts. Illegal downloaders also buy CDs more than the average consumer, but at the same time they are much more interested in individual songs.

"Illegal downloaders have been a source of frustration for the music industry for over a decade, but they are willing to pay for music," said Josh Bell, Executive Director at Interpret and lead analyst of the report. "Consumers downloading illegally want their music however they can get it, and making it available – at a cost – through alternate methods like Guitar Hero tracks, downloading to their gaming consoles or online video is the best way to mitigate their illegal behavior. When consumers can pay a dollar a song to download, it’s very difficult to get them to trade up and pay for an entire album. The music industry should replicate its strategy for CD sales by offering extra content with an album download."

Other statistics from the Illegal Downloaders report showed that a number of downloaders had used a peer-to-peer or BitTorrent site in the past three months, and 38 percent of the 64 million consumers who had downloaded a song or album in the previous three months had acquired a song through illegal means. Also, Interpret says that social networking sites are underutilized sales tools, as illegal downloaders are 50 percent more likely than CD buyers to have listened to music on a social networking site.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1423924





Music Industry Thriving In an Era of File Sharing
levicivita

ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid:

[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/...f-File-Sharing





Viral Wedding Video Gives Brown's "Forever" a Boost

When Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz asked their wedding party to turn their wedding into a party, the result was the latest YouTube hit, "JK Wedding Entrance," which featured the entire cast dancing down the aisle to Chris Brown's "Forever."

Just five days after it was posted, the video was the most-cited clip, according to Nielsen's BlogPulse, and has recently surpassed 10 million views after the "Today" show flew the Minnesota couple and their friends to New York to re-create the event outside Rockefeller Center.

The happy couple's great fun also seems to have had a halo effect for troubled singer Chris Brown, whose February assault on his girlfriend at the time, singer Rihanna, cloaked the singer in months of negative attention. Brown pleaded guilty and received five years probation and must serve 180 hours of community labor.

The wedding video now contains a link for purchase of "Forever," which, despite being released last year, is in the iTunes top 10.

Brown's own attempt at a viral video, a recently released apology video for the Rihanna "incident," which he calls "inexcusable," has been viewed more than 2 million times. BlogPulse shows that July buzz about Brown and "Forever" has reached almost as much frequency as the blog discussion that occurred around the time of the assault.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...56S17Z20090729





Judge Rejects Fair Use Defense as Tenenbaum P2P Trial Begins

Hours before the second P2P file-sharing trial in the US gets underway, the judge finally rules that defendant Joel Tenenbaum cannot claim "fair use" in the case. The proposed defense would be "so broad it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote.
Nate Anderson

There will be no fair use defense for Joel Tenenbaum at trial this week.

Everything about the Tenenbaum case has been highly unusual, and Judge Nancy Gernter's final pretrial order was no exception. Tenenbaum goes on trial in Boston today at 9:00am for sharing 30 songs on KaZaA, but the judge did not make a ruling on the fair use issue until early this morning. And what a ruling it was.

Tenenbaum has essentially admitted to the accusations during his depositions, and recording industry investigators have the hard drives from his computers. These two facts alone make the case materially different from the first US file-sharing trial, the case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset in Minnesota, where Thomas-Rasset claimed she didn't share the files in question and said that the hard drive in use at the time had been destroyed.

Tenenbaum's only real defense, then, was a plea that downloading a host of songs for his personal use qualified for a "fair use" exemption to US copyright law. Tenenbaum and his lawyer, Harvard Law's Charles Nesson, hoped to argue this case in front of a jury. Not content with discussing the statutory "four factors" laid out in the statute, they also hoped to add a few new factors of their own to the mix.

That won't happen, because Judge Gertner this morning granted the record labels' request for summary judgment on the issue of fair use. Noting that defendants only have the right to a jury trial when there are material facts in dispute, Gertner went on to point out that Tenenbaum has admitted to the activity in question and that she may therefore rule on the issue of fair use as a matter of law.

"[Tenenbaum] proposes a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote. "Indeed, the Court can discern almost no limiting principle: His rule would shield from liability any person who downloaded copyrighted songs for his or her own private enjoyment."

She then goes on to describe some situations in which a fair use claim would apply, and the response is worth quoting at length.

To be sure, this Court can envision certain circumstances in which a defendant sued for file-sharing could assert a plausible fair use defense. Indeed, an amicus brief previously filed in this consolidated action by the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School (on which Defendant's counsel was a signatory) outlined some of those circumstances—for example, the defendant who 'deleted the MP3 files after sampling them, or created MP3 files exclusively for space-shifting purposes from audio CDs they had previously purchased.' The Court can also envision a fair use defense for a defendant who shared files during a period of time before the law concerning file-sharing was clear and paid outlets were readily available.

The advent of the internet in the late 1990s threw a number of norms into disarray, offering sudden access to a wealth of digitized media and giving the veneer of privacy or anonymity to acts that had public consequences. At the beginning of this period, both law and technology were unsettled. A defendant who shared files online during this interregnum but later shifted to paid outlets once the law became clear and authorized sources available would present a strong case for fair use. It might matter, too, who the defendant shared files with—his friends, or the world—as well as how many copyrighted works, and for how long.

But the Defendant has offered no facts to suggest that he fits within these categories. He is accused of sharing hundreds of songs over a number of years, far beyond the infancy of this new technology or any legal uncertainty.

The one fact that might be in dispute is that amount of harm that Tenenbaum's file-sharing did to the record labels—though here, as everywhere else, "Tenenbaum has put no facts into evidence on which the Court could rely; his opposition briefs are not accompanied by any affidavit, expert report, deposition testimony, or other evidence of the kind described by Rule 56(e)."

Gertner concludes, "While the Court recognizes that not every unauthorized download would represent a lost sale, it seems clear that some portion of paying consumers would shift to free downloads if this activity were deemed a fair use. Based on this finding, the private purpose of this use, the substantiality and lack of transformation, and those additional factors the Court is entitled to consider, the Court holds that Tenenbaum's alleged infringement was not a fair use."

Gertner has been no fan of the labels' litigation campaign, telling industry lawyers in the past that they were "basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it."

But that hasn't stopped her from taking on Team Tenenbaum's attempt to eviscerate copyright. As Nesson wrote in his pretrial outline of the case, "the idea of imposing law on the global ocean of free bits that has flooded into cyberspace is a gross and harmful over-extension of the power of the state and authority of the law." Gertner, whatever her own feelings on these kinds of cases, sees clearly that such claims amount to abolition of copyright in the digital age and are at odds with the law as currently written.

What's shocking about her ruling isn't the content of it—other judges have ruled that wholesale copying of songs using P2P networks isn't a fair use—but the timing. Coming only hours before the trial begins, the ruling will dramatically alter the course of the trial, and it's difficult to see how Tenenbaum is going to avoid a Jammie Thomas-Rasset style damage award. Even with an award of minimum damages, Joel Tenenbaum could find himself on the hook for $22,500—and as the Thomas-Rasset trial showed, jurors aren't always content with anything like the minimum award.

Judge Gertner wants the trial wrapped up by the end of the week, and with the newly-reduced scope, should have no trouble sticking to that schedule. Stay tuned to Ars, where we will have detailed nightly updates from the courtroom.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ial-begins.ars





Defendant's Lawyer Puts on a Show in Illegal Downloading Case
Jonathan Saltzman

Charles Nesson, the flamboyant Harvard Law School professor defending a college student accused of illegally downloading and sharing music online, used an unusual prop in his opening statement today to illustrate why jurors should side with his client.

He held up a rectangular piece of plastic foam wrapped in cellophane and said it represented the compact discs that record companies sold in the millions before digital music become available online. Then he sliced the wrapper with scissors, and hundreds of tiny jigsaw pieces fell on the carpet in front of the jury.

"You have the ability to share, and this physical object" -- the 71-year-old professor paused as he snipped with the scissors -- "suddenly broke into a million bits. Here it is. Bits. Can you hold a bit in your hand? You can't ... And suddenly, you have songs being shared by millions of kids around the world."

Nesson said his client, Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old Boston University graduate student, was "a good kid" who admits using KaZaA, a peer-to-peer network, to share songs online but downloaded only because he loves music, never to make a profit. If the jury finds his client liable, Nesson said in his sometimes-rambling opening, it should impose only minimal damages.

Timothy M. Reynolds, a Boulder, Colo., lawyer representing four major record labels, said that the damages inflicted on the industry by people who download and share music for free is enormous and imperils the livelihoods of workers, ranging from sound engineers to talent scouts.

SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Records Inc., Arista Records LLC, and UMG Recordings Inc. contend that Tenenbaum downloaded and shared more than 800 songs illegally but are only focusing on 30 songs. The songs were recorded by artists that include Green Day, Aerosmith, Eminem, Linkin Park, and the Ramones.

Reynolds said Tenenbaum, a graduate student in physics, downloaded much of the music at his parents' house in Providence. When the recording industry caught him, the lawyer said, Tenenbaum blamed his friends, his sister, a foster child who had lived with his family, even burglars.

"The defendant knew what he was doing was wrong at each step of the way, but he did it anyway," Reynolds said.

Tenenbaum is one of more than 18,000 recipients of letters from the Recording Industry Association of America in recent years demanding payment for illegal file sharing. Most have settled out of court for $3,000 to $5,000. He is only the second to challenge a lawsuit by the industry in federal court in the country.

If he loses, the financial stakes could be enormous. Under federal law, the jury could award the labels from $750 to $30,000 for each copyright infringement and as much as $150,000 for each willful infringement. That means that Tenenbaum could owe $4.5 million if the jury concludes he willfully infringed the copyrights of the 30 songs.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/bre...ants_lawy.html





Oy Tenenbaum! RIAA Wins $675,000, or $22,500 Per Song

After a brief deliberation, a federal jury has ruled that PhD student Joel Tenenbaum willfully infringed on the record labels' copyrights, awarding them $675,000 in damages, $22,500 for each of the 30 songs in question. Ars reports with reaction from Tenenbaum and his attorney, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson.
Ben Sheffner

A Boston federal jury has ordered Joel Tenenbaum to pay a total of $675,000—$22,500 per song—to the major record labels for willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network. The figure is closer to the $222,000 award in the first Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial than the $1.92 million figure from the second trial.

The verdict came down at late Friday afternoon after less than three hours of deliberation.

When asked about the size verdict, Tenenbaum's attorney and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson told Ars that "it's a bankrupting award." He also felt things might have been different had they been allowed to argue Fair Use. "We were not allowed to speak to fairness," he told Ars. "I thought we had pretty damn good arguments on Fair Use."

"I'm disappointed, but not surprised, but I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," Tenenbaum told Ars after the verdict was announced. We asked him if he regrets not settling earlier on in the process. "Ask me in a couple of months," Tenenbaum replied. He also told Ars that he doesn't have the ability to pay the judgment and said that he'd be filing for bankruptcy if the award stands. Although the jury found that he willfully infringed on the copyrights in question, Tenenbaum said he was "not displeased with the jury considering how the trial went."

What about the fact that the damages could have been much worse, as high as $4.5 million? "That to me sends a message that [the jury] considered [my] side legitimately," he replied. He was also evasive when asked if he regrets downloading music for free. "That's really a loaded question," he replied. "There are so many things that could have been different."

The RIAA was pleased with the verdict. "We are grateful for the jury’s service and their recognition of the impact of illegal downloading on the music community," the RIAA said in a statement. "We appreciate that Mr. Tenenbaum finally acknowledged that artists and music companies deserve to be paid for their work. From the beginning that’s what this case has been about. We only wish he had done so sooner rather than lie about his illegal behavior."

The trial was an almost entirely one-sided affair. Plaintiffs built their case with forensic evidence collected by MediaSentry, which showed that he was sharing over 800 songs from his computer on August 10, 2004. A subsequent examination of his computer showed that Tenenbaum had used a variety of different peer-to-peer programs, from Napster to KaZaA to AudioGalaxy to iMesh, to obtain music for free, starting in 1999. And he continued to infringe, even after his father warned him in 2002 that he would get sued, even after he received a harshly-worded letter from the plaintiffs’ law firm in 2005, even after he was sued in 2007, and all the way through part of 2008.

And when he took the stand on Thursday, Tenenbaum admitted it all, including the fact that he had “lied” in his written discovery responses and at his first deposition in September 2008.

Tenenbaum’s admissions were so clear-cut, and so damning, that Judge Gertner—who had recruited Nesson to represent the formerly lawyer-less 25-year-old—took the basic issue of infringement away from the jury, determining that no reasonable jury could find for Tenenbaum on that issue. The jury of five men and five women, all white and all from the Boston suburbs, were left only to determine the issue of willfulness and damages.

Tenenbaum is only the second of approximately 18,000 individuals targeted by the labels to have gone to trial, and the second to lose. In June of this year, a Minnesota jury ordered Jammie Thomas-Rasset to pay $80,000 for infringing each of 24 songs, totaling $1.92 million. Last December, the labels announced that they were no longer initiating new cases against individual peer-to-peer users. However, they said they would see through to the end those cases already in the litigation pipeline. According to the labels’ attorneys, there remain about 100 cases pending where the defendant has filed an answer, about a dozen of which are being actively litigated in the discovery stage.

The Tenenbaum litigation was dominated by the larger-than-life personality of Tenenbaum’s counsel, Harvard Law School professor, who infuriated the plaintiffs, and at times Judge Nancy Gertner, with his unusual litigation tactics. These included making audio recordings of the attorneys and the court, and then posting the results to his blog, and publicizing internal discussions with potential expert witnesses about legal strategy. A sanctions motion against Nesson for his recording practices remains pending.

Tenenbaum’s case was dismantled piece-by-piece by a series of adverse rulings over the past several months. Judge Gertner dismissed his abuse-of-process claims against the plaintiffs and the Recording Industry Association of America; excluded four of his proposed expert witnesses and limited the scope of a fifth; and, in a coup de grace delivered less than eight hours before the start of trial, barred him from arguing fair use to the jury.

Judge Gertner previously announced that she will hold a post-trial proceeding to determine whether the size of the award violates the US Constitution’s guarantee of due process of the law. While no federal court has ever invalidated an award of copyright statutory damages as constitutionally excessive, the record labels’ litigation campaign has spurred arguments that the Supreme Court cases imposing limits on punitive damages should be extended to statutory damages, which may contain a punitive element.

Tenenbaum filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ statutory damages claim on constitutional grounds, but Judge Gertner deferred ruling on the issue unless and until there was actually a damages award handed down by the jury.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...0-per-song.ars





Pirate Bay Facing New Suit from US Film Giants
Peter Vinthagen Simpson

Disney, Universal, Warner Bros and Colombia Pictures are among more than ten major film companies behind a writ to sue for the closure of Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in Stockholm District Court.

The film companies demand that the court order The Pirate Bay to cease and desist from being accessories to the production of copies of their films and television shows, and to desist from sharing the copyrighted material on the internet.

"We’ve been forced to seek a court order demanding that they stop the spreading of these roughly 100 films and television programmes," the film giants' legal counsel in Sweden Monique Wadsted told The Local on Tuesday.

The writ, presented to the Stockholm District Court on Monday, names as the defendants Pirate Bay backers Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well Black Internet AB.

Wadsted characterized as "unusual" the apparent disregard the Pirate Bay trio has shown in the face of their conviction for copyright infringement earlier this year.

"They’ve been sentenced to prison for criminal activities but haven’t stopped carrying out those activities," Wadsted told The Local.

The injunction request centres around popular TV shows such as House, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy, as well as major films such as Die Hard, Harry Potter and the Matrix.

Official court documents reviewed by The Local include four pages of lists of film and television series titles as well as details of release dates.

The film companies require the enforcement of an injunction to prevent the defendants from continuing the activities of The Pirate Bay, "under penalty of a substantial fine".

While the companies request compensation for court costs "with an amount to be specified at a later date" no demand for compensation for copyright infringement is claimed.

Wadsted confirmed that her clients were not seeking any damages from the three defendants "at this stage", but did not rule out that an additional suit could be filed in the future.

"What matters is that the spreading of these works is stopped," she said.

Wadsted added that the US film companies which filed the suit welcomed the possibility that The Pirate Bay switch to a legal downloading service under new ownership.

According to Hans Pandeya, head of Global Gaming Factory (GGF), his company's planned purchase of The Pirate Bay is contingent on finding a way to operate the website's file sharing service in a legal manner.

"If the site becomes legal, that’s good for us. We’re not opposed to it," Wadsted explained.

"But we can't wait and see."
http://www.thelocal.se/20954/20090728/





Dutch Court Rules Pirate Bay Must Quit Netherlands
Toby Sterling

A Dutch court ruled Thursday that three men connected with The Pirate Bay Web site must block traffic between it and the Netherlands within 10 days.

The written ruling by Judge Wil Tonkens concludes that the men have control over the site and ordered them "each separately and together, to stop and keep stopped the infringements on copyright and related rights of Stichting Brein in the Netherlands," or face a charge of euro30,000 ($42,000) per day.

Stichting Brein is a Dutch-based organization funded by various copyright holder groups that brought the civil suit against The Pirate Bay.

It was not clear how the court expected the site's operators to block traffic to the site, or whether it can enforce its order if they decline or are unable to comply.

"The Pirate Bay is not a legal person who can be summoned, but a cooperative," the ruling noted.

The Pirate Bay provides an index to BitTorrent files, which can be used for trading media such as movies, music and computer games. The site has more than 20 million users globally.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/...ap6720764.html





Pirate Bay Sale Dead in the Water
Ernesto

In a few days time Global Gaming Factory is supposed to have gathered millions of dollars in funding so they can acquire The Pirate Bay. But according to Wayne Rosso, the former CEO of Grokster who was involved with GGF recently, this is unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is giving GGF a week before they cancel the deal.

tpbLast month the BitTorrent community was shaken up when GGF publicly announced that it would take over The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legal outfit. They said they would harvest computing resources from some of its users, money from others and pay off copyright holders and indeed some of the users with money from ISPs. It was an incredible plan.

GGF painted a bright future for the site and two weeks ago Wayne Rosso, ex-CEO of Grokster joined GGF in their ambitious project, hoping to close some deals with record labels and get investors excited at their plans.

However, Rosso has already quit his position, claiming GGF’s CEO Mr. Pandeya was not straightforward with him.

“We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further,” Rosso told TorrentFreak. According to Rosso he and his partners never received the payments promised to them and Mr. Pandeya made several other promises he couldn’t keep either.

“The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were,” Rosso said, adding that he feels the funding required to close the deal is not going to be raised based on the current lack of workable plans.

Not all was bad though. The support and enthusiasm of at least one record label was something he had never seen before according to Rosso. Unfortunately, it now seems that this enthusiastic response was based entirely on false promises.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current (lack of) plans,” Rosso told TorrentFreak. Besides Rosso and his partners, the people who were supposed to finance the acquisition were also misinformed.

When confronted with the news, a Pirate Bay insider said they would give GGF a week to get insurance from the investors, otherwise the deal is off. Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told us that he doesn’t know what will happen to the Pirate Bay in the future, when the deal is off the table. Time will tell.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-s...-water-090728/





BitTorrent Hydra: Anonymous Hidden Tracker Via Tor
enigmax

It’s been less than a month since many feared the BitTorrent world would collapse due to a $7.8m investment in The Pirate Bay. Since then OpenBitTorrent has come along to largely take its place, backed up by PublicBT to spread the load. Now comes Hidden Tracker, a brand new public tracker which hides itself using Tor.

There is cautious optimism that things in the BitTorrent world are looking more secure than ever before following the initially depressing news that The Pirate Bay will probably be sold off by August.

First we reported on OpenBitTorrent. Would it become a Pirate Bay replacement? Turns it out does the tracking element rather well, already tracking all of the Old Pirate Bay’s torrents.

But what if OpenBitTorrent goes up in smoke? Administrators of other torrent sites already considered that possibility when they came together to create PublicBT, a ‘pirated’ version of OpenBitTorrent. The tracker is open to all, just like OpenBitTorrent.
So if The PirateBay closed tomorrow there are already two other sites available to do the tracking, but all good things come in threes.

The brand new Hidden Tracker has a homepage that looks very similar to those sported by the trackers above. It is an open tracker, just like the other pair but this one has an added layer of security.

Most file-sharers will be at least aware of the Tor network and the fact that it provides anonymity. Most BitTorrent users should also know by now never to use Tor for file-sharing - it is painfully slow and actually ruins the network for other people.

However, Tor has a neat trick up its sleeve known as ‘hidden services‘. Tor is able to provide anonymity to servers by offering Tor clients or relays which run specially configured software. In order to hide the IP address of a service (in this case, a BitTorrent tracker), they are accessed via the special Tor .onion pseudo TLD (top level domain). The Tor network sees .onion and routes data to and from the hidden service, completely anonymously.

Hidden Tracker is operated as a Tor hidden service and ideally the user would install Tor along with their regular torrent client in order to use it - it would be essential for correct processing of its announce hyperlink;

http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion:8080/announce

However, with a helping hand from the handy Tor2Web service, it’s possible to make a modification to the above URL and use Hidden Tracker even without Tor installed. Simply replace .onion with .tor2web.com, like so;

http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com:8080/announce

The owners of Hidden Tracker say they want to make an open but secure public BitTorrent tracker for the enjoyment of everyone but find the legal attacks tiresome, hence hiding their tracker with Tor:

“To protect the identities of the people and hosting service who run and maintain this tracker, we’ve used a Tor hidden service to conceal the IP address(es) of the server(s) that run the tracker. We hope that this will help to increase the reliability of this tracker for everyone.”

The website itself can be accessed via http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion (with Tor installed) or via http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com using the web.

All we need now is a few content-agnostic Imageshack-style sites where anyone can upload torrents and the replacement of The Pirate Bay will be more or less complete.

Completely painless, wasn’t it?

Update: The admin of Hidden Tracker emailed to say that they had to change the announce URL of the tracker. The article has been updated to reflect that. Additionally, he tells us that as tor2web caches pages for longer than is desirable, it is better to use Tor along with the .onion links on ‘young’ torrents.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-h...ia-tor-090725/





So You Wanna Make it in the Music Biz? Here are the New Rules
Ariston Anderson

The music industry in general has been slow in playing catch up to the tools of new media. While record labels and publishers are still fighting to maintain ownership of their properties, there's a whole new world of new media elite who are working to find tools to empower musicians and to build a bridge between the new media and the old media.

Whether it's putting music online for free, working to build an online community, or simply starting a dialogue, the folks seeking out answers are quickly replacing the stagnant ways of old media.

I decided to check out the New Music Seminar in New York City this week to find out just how musicians are becoming empowered.

The mastermind behind the conference, Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Entertainment, started the New Music Seminar in 1980, to discuss the future of the business then.
He founded the conference to reach out to a industry that was historically resistant to change. It served as a forum for young entrepreneurs to launch their businesses and make connections, and it became a model for new conferences like South by Southwest.

Since 2000, music revenues have been steadily decreasing. By next year, for the first time ever, digital revenues are expected to exceed physical sales. By 2013, the breakdown will be 80% digital and 20% physical.

"Change will not come if we wait for a record company," said Silverman. "We are the ones we've been waiting for." The conference aims to teach artists how to make more money and less mistakes. Whether you want to be an artist, promoter, manager, or entrepreneur, here are the new rules to make it in the business:

* The future is DIY. Learn how to use affordable tools, but remember it's not all about the tools. It's about your craft. Software won't solve all of your problems.
* The best marketing is informed by art, not art that you try and inform. You can't create a viral video; that all depends on the audience. But you can create awareness.
* If you're an artist, don't borrow money. You can only maintain creative control by maintaining financial control. The opposite applies if you're on the entrepreneurial side. Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, maxed out a dozen credit cards and owed money to everyone he knew before getting his project off the ground. The best advice he ever received was from his wife: "Don't be self-conscious about being an entrepreneur."
* There are a ton of places online to sell your music: Amazon, MySpace, iTunes, and TuneCore for starters. But don't underestimate the power of giving away your music for free. Lil Wayne gave his music away for over a year before releasing his album. He worked first to build a connection with his fanbase before asking for any money.
* Fans are the new record label. The business now all depends on the relationship between an artist and their fans, most importantly the uber fans, the ones who buy all the merchandise, go to all the shows, and spread the word about their favorite bands.
* The key to staying in touch with your fans is through e-mail, the most important data you'll ever collect. Have a sign-up sheet at every show. Have your audience text their e-mails to a road manager's cell at the end of every show and promise to personally stay in touch. Then you'll have both e-mails and area codes. Build an online community by blasting out webcasts, photoshoots, interviews, and even live streaming concerts.
* Engage with fans in a meaningful way, nothing forced or fake. We the Kings launched a weekly webisode series, The Kings Carriage, that has collected over 300 million views. They sold 100,000 albums even before the music was on iTunes.
* It's dangerous for an artist to spend time on things that aren't artistic. Build a management team to take care of the tools, marketing, and technology. If you're just starting out, enlist a college music lover to build your brand.
* Sign any deal as long as it's short-term if it's going to get you noticed. Otherwise you're not going to be on the radar.
* Start local, start tribal. The best band success stories come out of a music scene. The Internet has allowed for tribes to become bigger and bigger. Connect with similar bands doing similar music and go on tour with them. Build your own scene and work to break through together.

If you missed the New York seminar, there will be another conference this year in Chicago. Check out the Web site for details. And stay tuned to WalletPop for more on new music now.
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/0...the-new-rules/





When Jay-Z Hates Your Software
Jenna Wortham

The rapper Jay-Z may have wanted to wipe out Auto-Tune, but perhaps he’s just added fuel to the digital fire.

Auto-Tune, a software package made by Antares Audio Technologies, was designed to allow engineers to correct a singer’s pitch, but with the “wrong” settings it can turn the human voice into something that sounds like a finely-tuned warbling robot. Jay-Z’s latest single, “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” rails against the overuse of the program in popular music. The video for the song, which was released a month ago, even shows a stack of Auto-Tune boxes bursting into flames.

It’s not every day that an influential celebrity takes that kind of swipe at a product — much less a piece of software. But despite Jay-Z’s best efforts, Antares says sales are up.

“The Jay-Z controversy is great,” said Marco Alpert, vice president of marketing at Antares. “We couldn’t buy P.R. like this.”

Although Mr. Alpert declined to give specifics, he did say the company had seen a boost in business amid the flurry of recent attention.

Mr. Alpert said Auto-Tune’s move from music studios to viral videos and fast food commercials had been an interesting evolution.

“I think Jay-Z said he saw Auto-Tune used in a Wendy’s commercial, and that pushed him over the edge,” he said, adding that the company was thrilled by the migration of its product into popular culture.

“We make no value judgments on how people use our product,” he said. “It’s a tool to be used by the people who buy it, and we’re happy when consumers find new uses for it.”

One of the earliest examples of Auto-Tune being used to distort a singer’s voice was on Cher’s hit “Believe” in 1998. “We really didn’t foresee that the trend would last as long as it did,” Mr. Alpert said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...-software/?hpw





Apple, Labels Work on Plan to Boost Album Sales: Report

Apple Inc and four record labels are working on a plan to increase digital sales of albums, while the computer maker is also separately developing a tablet-sized device, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Apple is working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Vivendi's Universal Music Group on the project, "Cocktail," with the sides hoping for a launch in September, the paper reported, citing unnamed sources.

The project with the record companies aims to offer interactive features with music downloads, the paper said.

Apple also hopes to offer the tablet-sized computer in time for Christmas shopping, the FT reported.

The computer will connect to the Internet like Apple's iPod Touch and its screen may be up to 10 inches diagonally, the paper reported.

The paper said book publishers have also been in talks with the computer maker about offering their services on the new device, which could compete with Amazon's Kindle.

Apple and the music companies were not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Paritosh Bansal; Editing by Christian Wiessner)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56Q03920090727





Apple Working On Digital Albums, Tablet PC: Sources
Yinka Adegoke

The major music labels are planning a new digital album format that will debut with a tablet-like personal computer from Apple Inc in September, people familiar with the plans said on Monday.

The labels are attempting to revive the multi-track album format with new software that packages songs, traditional album liner notes, music videos, and other interactive extras as part of a premium-priced package.

The music industry first proposed the idea of an enhanced album format to Apple in 2007, according to two people who said the labels have been separately working on a project code-named "CMX".

The labels, including EMI Group, Sony Corp's Sony Music Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group had planned to roll out the new album format to all digital retailers this November.

But Apple decided to design its own version of an interactive album, which is expected to be launched with its new unnamed tablet-like device this fall, the sources said.

The Apple album project has been code-named 'Cocktail' and the format is expected to work with other Apple devices like the iPhone and iPod.

Industry sources said Chief Executive Steve Jobs would likely unveil the new device at an Apple event in September.

Apple declined to comment, saying the company does not respond to rumors and speculation. News of Apple and the label's plan was first reported by the Financial Times.

The partnership between Apple and the music labels is tinged with irony as it was the technology company that effectively marked the end of the multitrack album format in 2003, when it opened up its iTunes Music Store.

In early negotiations, Jobs made the labels agree to allow customers to buy any individual track they wanted from an album, in a bid to simplify the purchase process.

But record companies are desperate to breathe new life into the album format, which was responsible for the vast majority of profits when sales were primarily in compact discs.

All music companies have seen their revenues plummet as fans who buy music online choose the 99 cent-priced track they want rather than invest in an album which is typically priced around $8 to $10.

The new interactive format, which could feature extras like interviews with the artist while making the album, would be sold at a higher price than digital albums now. Insiders said there is early evidence from current bundling experiments than fans are prepared to spend more for high quality content.

"Almost every time we've sold product with extras at a premium price it outsells the normal priced product," said one label executive who asked not to be named while the companies are still in talks.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56Q5ET20090727





Even Google Is Blocked With Apps for iPhone
Jenna Wortham

Google might power the world’s most popular search engine, but its clout goes only so far. When it comes to getting one of its applications onto the iPhone, it seems Google has to wait in line for Apple’s approval like everyone else — and face the risk of rejection.

In recent weeks, Apple turned down two applications that Google had submitted for review in hopes that they would be added to the company’s App Store, highlighting the increasingly complex relationship between the two companies.

Google said in a blog post last week that Apple had rejected an application called Google Latitude that would have allowed users to broadcast their location and see where their friends were.

“We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users,” the company said. It added that Apple had asked it to build a mobile-friendly Web version of the service instead, to “avoid confusion” with the standard map application on the iPhone, which also uses Google map data.

On Tuesday, a Google spokeswoman, Sara Jew-Lim, said that several weeks ago Apple rejected an application that would bring Google Voice service to the iPhone. Ms. Lim declined to elaborate.

Google Voice provides users free or low-cost calling, free text messaging, call routing and a universal voice mailbox. There already are applications for Google Voice on BlackBerrys and on handsets that use Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

Jennifer Bowcock, a spokeswoman for Apple, declined to comment on the matter. The news of Apple’s rejection of Google Voice was first reported by the blog TechCrunch.

Apple also rescinded its earlier approval of several applications created by third-party developers that worked with Google Voice, citing concerns that they duplicated features that come with the iPhone.

Analysts and industry experts said that the Google Voice ban may have been prompted by growing concern from AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the United States, about the potential damage the service might do to its revenue.

“What it comes down to is AT&T’s turf,” said Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at the investment firm Piper Jaffray. “It shows that contractually, Apple has agreed to keep apps that would hurt AT&T’s business out of the App Store, regardless of who developed them.”

Michael Coe, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to comment.

Calls made by Google Voice users are carried over the regular cellphone network to a special number, and are then routed over the Internet to their destination. This means they would use up minutes on AT&T customers’ plans, unlike calls made with the iPhone application for Skype, the Internet calling service. But the Skype application works only over a Wi-Fi connection in the United States, and does not allow calls over AT&T’s data network.

AT&T may see Google Voice as a bigger threat than Skype, said Jeff Pulver, chairman of the 140 Character Conference, who has long been involved in the Internet calling business.

“I don’t think people will go to their homes and have Skype as the carrier of their choice,” Mr. Pulver said. “Google, tactical and strategic as they are, may have put the fear of God into AT&T.”

The rejections of apps by Apple could dim the halo that has encircled the iPhone since it first became a lucrative platform for outside developers. The lengthy and opaque approval process required to get anything into the App Store has long been a source of frustration for iPhone developers and users alike.

Sean Kovacs, a 25-year-old programmer in Tampa, Fla., created GV Mobile, one of the Google Voice applications that was removed from the App Store. He said he was creating versions for the Palm Pre and other iPhone competitors instead. “My days of developing for the iPhone are probably done,” he said.

For now, Mr. Kovacs has elected to make his iPhone application available through Cydia, a popular repository for thousands of unauthorized iPhone applications and modifications. “I’d rather just make it available for free, instead of just not having it available to anyone,” he said.

Of course, Google is not just another iPhone app developer. Eric E. Schmidt, its chief executive, sits on Apple’s board. But Google’s Android operating system, which has not yet been widely adopted by cellphone makers, could one day threaten the iPhone.

Apple and Google “are competitors, but they cooperate on certain projects,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers. The question, Mr. Wu said, is how long that good will can hold as the companies ramp up competition in many areas, including smartphones, Web browsers, photo editing tools and online media outlets.

Saul Hansell contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/te...es/29apps.html





Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
Jason Kincaid

Earlier today we learned that Apple had begun to pull all Google Voice-enabled applications from the App Store, citing the fact that they “duplicate features that come with the iPhone”. Now comes even worse news: we’ve learned that Apple has blocked Google’s official Google Voice application itself from the App Store. In other words, Google Voice — one of the best things to happen to telephony services in a very long time — will have no presence at all on the App Store. If there’s ever been a time to be furious with Apple, now is it.

A Google Spokesperson has told us the following:

We work hard to bring Google applications to a number of mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store. We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users — for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers.

Of course, it’s not hard to guess who’s behind the restriction: our old friend AT&T. Google Voice scares the carriers. It allows users to send free SMS messages and get cheap long-distance over Google Voice’s lines. It also makes it trivial to switch to a new phone service, because everyone calls the Google Voice number anyway. Carriers have known about Google Voice for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that it began accepting new users, and there has still been some hassle associated with actually using the service. Smartphone apps like GV Mobile remove many of those hassles, which is why AT&T is keen to keep them off the iPhone (Google already has official apps available for BlackBerry and Android).

Here’s another testament to just how ridiculous this move is: GV Mobile’s developer Sean Kovacs says that the app was personally approved last April by Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing — the man who often takes the stage during Apple keynotes when Steve Jobs isn’t around. Kovacs says that Schiller called him to personally apologize for the delay in initially getting the application approved. Now, I’m sure Apple has laid out in its terms of service somewhere that you’re not allowed to mimic the iPhone’s functionality. But when you’ve got a blessing from that high up, that would seem like a pretty good indication that the application belongs in the App Store.

The thing that really bothers me about the move is that Apple is now actively stifling innovation. Google Voice is the kind of service that can actually have a positive impact on your life, and not in a frivolous, entertainment-related sense. It makes it easier to connect with people, and to manage those connections. Apple can point to the App Store’s 50,000 applications all it wants, but how many of them could truly be called groundbreaking? Are they really putting a dent in the universe?

All the more upsetting is that this comes from the company that Steve Jobs built. The company that once made record labels bow to a flat 0.99 pricing structure for years longer than they would have liked is now screwing customers because AT&T asked them to. They’re trying to limit what I can and can’t run on my mobile phone — a phone whose marketing is largely based on its extensibility.

Back when the App Store first launched there were some warnings about its walled garden approach — could developers trust Apple to maintain a fair marketplace? Until recently, Apple has managed the store in a generally benevolent, if not somewhat incompetent manner. But now things are taking a turn for the worse. From a handicapped Sling app to blocked apps from Qik and Google Voice, it’s becoming clear that Apple is doing its best to keep many of the iPhone’s most game-changing apps away from users. Palm, if you’re looking for marketing material — take note.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27...ly-atts-fault/





Shock Threat to Shut Skype
Asher Moses

eBay says it may have to shut down Skype due to a licensing dispute with the founders of the internet telephony service.

The surprise admission puts a cloud over the 40 million active daily users around the world who use Skype for business or to keep in touch with friends and far-flung relatives.

A recent study by market researcher TeleGeography found Skype carried about 8 per cent of all international voice traffic, making it the world’s largest provider of cross-border voice communications.

The online auction powerhouse bought Skype from entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis for $US2.6 billion in 2005, but this did not include a core piece of peer-to-peer communications technology that powers the software.

eBay has since been licensing the technology from the founders’ new company, Joltid, but the pair recently decided to revoke the licensing agreement.

The matter is now the subject of a legal battle in the English High Court of Justice, with eBay trying to force Joltid to let it continue using the technology.

In a quarterly report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, eBay said in no uncertain terms that if it lost the right to use the software it would most likely have to shut Skype down.

eBay said it was working on developing ‘‘alternative software’’ to that licensed through Joltid, but this ‘‘may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive’’.

‘‘If Skype was to lose the right to use the Joltid software as the result of the litigation, and if alternative software was not available, Skype would be severely and adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible,’’ eBay wrote.

In the filing eBay also said that, even if it was successful in developing alternative software, the technical challenge of assuring backward compatibility with older versions of Skype’s technology ‘‘may be difficult to overcome’’.

This was echoed by analysts, with the Info-Tech Research Group’s Jayanth Angl telling Bloomberg that ‘‘it would be quite difficult to replace what they already have as the underlying component to their service’’.

‘‘There are a number of barriers to that, not the least of which are legal barriers,” he said.

The case is set to go to trial in June next year, which could seriously hinder eBay’s plans to spin Skype off as a separate company in a public stock offering next year.

Already, eBay has had to write down Skype on its books to $US1.7 billion, an admission that the business is not worth nearly as much as it originally paid for it. However, its revenues for the second quarter grew 25 per cent to $US170 million.

But, even though Skype has not been a major financial success, it has succeeded in becoming the dominant internet telephony service globally.

Skype has more than 480 million user accounts - almost twice as many as Facebook - and the application comes bundled with more than 50 mobile phones and even the Sony PSP.
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/...0731-e3qe.html





Hollywood Dealmaking Risks Antitrust Scrutiny
Sue Zeidler

As media giants band together to reinvent themselves in the digital age, potentially sharing everything from online video sites to DVD distribution, they have to be careful not to raise antitrust hackles.

Hollywood has long butted heads with competition regulators, dating all the way back to the 1940s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled studios had too much control over the distribution of their own content and forced them to sell movie theaters.

Dealmaking is expected to heat up in the entertainment industry as studios experiment with various ventures and partnerships to tackle tumbling DVD and advertising sales.

Some media watchers believe recent collaborations to bring TV programing to the Web -- such as Hulu.com and "TV Everywhere" -- have the potential to raise regulatory eyebrows, resurrecting the issue of "vertical integration."

"I think there's going to be more effort in entertainment to consolidate and the Justice Department will take a much more aggressive view," said Max Blecher, a top antitrust litigator with the firm of Blecher & Collins.

Media and legal experts believe entertainment companies should brace for tougher scrutiny under President Barack Obama, who as a candidate criticized the Bush administration's handling of antitrust issues overall and of media consolidation in particular.

There have not been any huge mergers in the media industry this year, but plenty of other partnerships are in the works.

Viacom Inc's (VIAb.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Paramount Studios was in early talks with News Corp's (NWSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Fox and Sony Corp's (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Sony Pictures to combine their DVD manufacturing and distribution operations to cut costs, for example.

Hulu.com, a popular free video website, boasts investment from three media conglomerates: General Electric's (GE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) NBC Universal, News Corp and Walt Disney Co (DIS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

And Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which owns the E entertainment network, and Time Warner Inc (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), home of HBO and CNN, are recruiting more content providers to their "TV Everywhere" initiative to make cable programing available online.

"Hulu's runaway success over the last year and its growing number of exclusivity agreements mean that it could see some of the added scrutiny that Mr. Obama believes is necessary in the world of media," wrote Cord Blomquist on his tech policy blog called The Technology Liberation Front.

How Much Is Too Much

Comcast and Time Warner have said they endorse a framework to bring TV content to customers online in a pro-competitive and non-exclusive manner. Yet some believe "TV Everywhere" could spark antitrust concerns.

"There are a few levels on which it could become problematic. It seems like a system designed to prevent the emergence of competitors," said themediawonk.com editor Paul Sweeting.

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

Sean Gates, an antitrust lawyer at Morrison and Foerster, said regulators may look into a project like "TV Everywhere" if it turned out to be an exclusive or dominant distribution channel.

"Sometimes other content distributors may fear an outlet such as this will become de facto exclusive, cutting them out. If those fears are founded on fact, that may be something the agencies would be interested in," he said.

But Gates, who represented studios in a Justice Department probe into on-demand video enterprise Movielink in 2001, and other lawyers, believe market dynamics and issues like piracy will play a big role in any antitrust analysis.

Movielink, a joint venture formed by five movie studios, was cleared of all antitrust suspicions by the Justice Department in 2002 and some antitrust lawyers believe the advent of online piracy played a role in the decision.

"The big concern from an antitrust perspective is whether something will hurt consumers and raise prices. But when you're competing with free, its hard to argue companies are raising prices to a point where consumers will be hurt," said Gates.

Blecher also believes changing market dynamics will factor into regulatory considerations, as entertainment can be found on big and small screens, online and offline.

"There are so many different ways to see a movie now," he said. "Do you include theaters, DVDs, movies available on TV and On Demand? That will be the key legal question."

Any industry undergoing enormous transformation, such as the one reshaping the media sector, needs to be careful of not risking antitrust ire, analysts say.

"When there's great change in an industry, antitrust enforcers have traditionally paid close attention to efforts by market incumbents to protect the status quo or steer change in a particular direction favorable to them," said David Meyer, former principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's antitrust division, now an antitrust lawyer at Morrison & Foerster.

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler, editing by Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/reute...56L6U520090722





Performance Royalty Opposition Continues To Grow
FMQB

Opposition to the controversial Performance Royalty Act for radio continues to grow among lawmakers, as four more House Representatives and three more Senators now support the Local Radio Freedom Act. The bipartisan resolution opposes the Performance Royalty and is now supported by a total of 244 House members and 23 U.S. Senators.

Reps. Bobby Rush (D-IL), John Adler (D-NJ), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Thad Cochran (R-MS) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) are the latest lawmakers to voice their opposition to the Performance Royalty.

"Liberals, moderates and conservatives are uniting in opposition to RIAA's effort to line the coffers of foreign record labels at the expense of America's free and local radio stations," said NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton. "We salute these members of Congress for recognizing the unique role played by radio broadcasters in communities across the country."

Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at their centennial convention saluting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and supporting performance royalties for musicians that would be provided under the Performance Rights Act, which they view as a civil rights bill for musicians. The NAACP favors the bill since "it only reaches big corporate radio while a specific provision protects small radio stations, including all small black-owned radio stations."
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1425630





IPhone Maker in China Is Under Fire After a Suicide
David Barboza

When a closely guarded prototype of a new Apple iPhone went missing at a huge factory here two weeks ago, an internal investigation focused on a shy, 25-year-old employee named Sun Danyong.

Mr. Sun, a college graduate working in the logistics department, denied stealing the iPhone. But he later complained to friends that he had been beaten and humiliated by the factory’s security team. On the night he was questioned, he sent an anguished text message to his girlfriend.

“Dear, I’m sorry. Go back home tomorrow,” he wrote, according to a message she later posted online. “I ran into some problems. Don’t tell my family. Don’t contact me. I’m begging you for the first time. Please do it! I’m sorry.”

Soon after, in the early-morning hours of July 16, Mr. Sun apparently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of an apartment building in what his employer, Foxconn Technology, says was a suicide.

Apple and Foxconn, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of consumer electronics and a major Apple supplier, issued statements last week expressing sorrow for the death. Foxconn said it suspended one security officer, pending a police investigation, and that the company was now considering counseling services for its employees.

The Apple statement said: “We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require that our suppliers treat all workers with dignity and respect.” The company would not comment further.

The local police bureau declined to answer questions about the case. But reports of the apparent suicide have set off a firestorm of criticism of Foxconn’s treatment of Mr. Sun, labor conditions at its factories and the pressures Apple places on suppliers to abide by the culture of secrecy that surrounds its development of new products.

The case also underscores the challenges that global companies face in trying to safeguard their designs and intellectual property in the hotly contested smartphone market, particularly here in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing center known for piracy and counterfeiting.

Apple’s popular iPhone is already widely imitated and counterfeited in China. And there are regular rumors on Chinese Web sites about new Apple prototypes leaking out of Chinese factories.

“When you outsource to a third party, you lose some control,” says Dane Chamorro, general manager in China at Control Risks, a global consulting firm. “And if you’re outsourcing to China, it’s going to be even more challenging. There’s going to be a bounty on every design.”

Labor rights groups say the worker’s death should compel Apple to improve conditions at its supplier factories in China and prevent worker abuse.

Foxconn, part of Taiwan’s Hon Hai group, has also been sharply criticized because of suspicions about unduly harsh treatment of the worker.

Foxconn, which produces electronics for some of the world’s best-known brands, like Sony and Hewlett-Packard, operates a cluster of sprawling factories in southern China. One of its Shenzhen campuses has nearly 300,000 workers.

But some labor rights activists say the company treats employees harshly, routinely violating labor laws.

In an e-mail message on Thursday, China Labor Watch, which monitors Chinese factories and is based in New York, blamed Mr. Sun’s death on “Foxconn’s inhumane and militant management system, which lacks fundamental respect for human rights.” The group said it published an in-depth study of Foxconn last year, detailing its abuses.

James Lee, general manager of China operations at Foxconn, defended the company’s labor practices in a lengthy interview on Friday, and also said the company would strive to improve management of its facilities.

“It’s very difficult for the company to defend itself against such charges,” Mr. Lee said of complaints from labor rights groups. “You’re welcome to look at how employees are treated here.”

A reporter toured two of the company’s campuses in Shenzhen on Friday, including the one where Mr. Sun worked. The campuses were so large they contained retail stores, banks, post offices and high-rise dormitories with outdoor swimming pools.

The reporter was not allowed to see manufacturing lines because the company said it had to protect trade secrets.

Outside the gates of one campus, most workers interviewed independently of the company said they were well treated. One of about 15 workers questioned admitted to being forced to work overtime above the legal limit.

In his interview, Mr. Lee, the Foxconn manager, said the company also had a duty to protect the intellectual property of its customers, and that it was honestly seeking answers to what happened to the product.

Foxconn said it still does not know what happened to the missing iPhone. The company said Mr. Sun was given 16 prototypes on July 9 or 10 to deliver to research and development, and failed to report one missing until three days later.

The company says his explanation for the missing phone did not seem credible and that he had had problems before.

“Several times he had some products missing, then he got them back,” Mr. Lee said. “We don’t know who took the product, but it was at his stop.”

In an interview with Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper last week, the security officer suspended by Foxconn denied beating Mr. Sun, saying only that he “became a little angry” and grabbed Mr. Sun’s right shoulder.

Even so, the company paid compensation to Mr. Sun’s family. It declined to say how much, but Mr. Sun’s brother cited a figure of 300,000 renminbi, or more than $44,000, and said Mr. Sun’s girlfriend was also given an Apple laptop computer.

Mr. Sun’s brother doubts he stole the prototype.

“He was honest and modest. He would never steal anything,” said Sun Danxiong, 28, his brother.

Mr. Sun grew up in a small, impoverished village in southwest Yunnan province and ranked first in his high school, his family says. He graduated from the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s top schools, before joining Foxconn about a year ago.

On Thursday, with his son Danxiong standing nearby, holding a box with Sun Danyong’s ashes, the father, Sun Yangdong, said Foxconn had treated the family well. But he said he was still in shock that his son could leap from a building because he was so gentle and tender.

Soon after, a security guard, who was joined by two men wearing Foxconn shirts, threatened to “beat up” a journalist’s translator if she persisted in asking the family questions. Foxconn officials later said the guard was not on their staff and might have been with the police bureau.

Back in Yunnan, Mr. Sun said that on the night of his brother’s death, he had e-mailed friends, angry about Foxconn’s questioning of him. In one message, Mr. Sun said he was locked up and beaten. “A Fortune 500 company even has these things,” he wrote.

On Sunday, Danxiong said some of his brother’s friends told him Mr. Sun killed himself out of anger at Foxconn. His brother said: “They told me he was extremely angry at Foxconn; they humiliated him and he wanted to resist the company, and planned to do something big.”

Chen Yang contributed research from Shanghai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/te...s/27apple.html





Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future
Sharon LaFraniere

WUBU, China — For much of his education, Xue Longlong was silently accompanied from grade to grade, school to school, by a sealed Manila envelope stamped top secret. Stuffed inside were grades, test results, evaluations by fellow students and teachers, his Communist Party application and — most important for his job prospects — proof of his 2006 college degree.

Everyone in China who has been to high school has such a file. The files are irreplaceable histories of achievement and failure, the starting point for potential employers, government officials and others judging an individual’s worth. Often keys to the future, they are locked tight in government, school or workplace cabinets to eliminate any chance they might vanish.

But two years ago, Xue Longlong’s file did vanish. So did the files of at least 10 others, all 2006 college graduates with exemplary records, all from poor families living near this gritty north-central town on the wide banks of the Yellow River.

With the Manila folders went their futures, they say.

Local officials said the files were lost when state workers moved them from the first to the second floor of a government building. But the graduates say they believe officials stole the files and sold them to underachievers seeking new identities and better job prospects — a claim bolstered by a string of similar cases across China.

Today, Mr. Xue, who had hoped to work at a state-owned oil company, sells real estate door to door, a step up from past jobs passing out leaflets and serving drinks at an Internet cafe. Wang Yong, who aspired to be a teacher or a bank officer, is unemployed. Wang Jindong, who had a shot at a job at a state chemical firm, is a construction day laborer, earning less than $10 a day.

“If you don’t have it, just forget it!” Wang Jindong, now 27, said of his file. “No matter how capable you are, they will not hire you. Their first reaction is that you are a crook.”

Perhaps no group here is more vilified and mistrusted than China’s local officials, who shoulder much of the blame for corruption within the Communist Party. The party constantly vows to rein them in; in October, President Hu Jintao said a clean party was “a matter of life and death.”

Critics contend that China’s one-party system breeds graft that only democratic reforms can check. But China’s leaders say the solution is not grass-roots checks on power, but smarter oversight and crime-fighting.

Public policy specialists say China is shifting its emphasis from headline-grabbing corruption cases to more systematic ways to hold officials accountable. The government opened an anticorruption hot line last month to encourage whistle-blowers. A few localities require that officials disclose their family assets to the party.

But in Wubu, a struggling town of 80,000 banked by steep hills and coal mines, citizens say that local officials answer to no one, and that anyone who dares challenge them is punished.

“When the central government talks about the economy and development, it sounds so great,” said Mr. Wang, the day laborer. “But at the local level, corrupt officials make all their money off of local people.”

Student files are a proven moneymaker for corrupt state workers. Four years ago, teachers in Jilin Province were caught selling two students’ files for $2,500 and $3,600; the police suspected that they intended to sell a dozen more. In May, the former head of a township government in Hunan Province admitted that he had paid more than $7,000 to steal the identity of a classmate of his daughter, so his daughter could attend college using the classmate’s records.

While not quite as important as in Communist China’s early days, when it was a powerful tool of social control, the file, called a dangan, is an absolute requirement for state employment and a means to bolster a candidate’s chances for some private-sector jobs, labor experts say. Because documents are collected over several years and signed by many people, they are virtually impossible to replicate.

So in September 2007, when one Wubu graduate sought work at a local bank and discovered that his file was gone, word spread fast. For the next two years, his parents and a group of other parents in similar straits said, they sought help at every level of the bureaucracy.

The government’s answer, they said, was to reject any inquiry, place the graduates’ parents under police surveillance and repeatedly detain them. Last February, they said, five parents trying to petition the national government were locked in an unofficial jail in Beijing for nine days.

“We are so exhausted,” said one tearful mother, Song Heping. “Our nerves are about to snap from this torture. The officials who were responsible not only have not been punished, they have been promoted.”

Wubu officials did not respond to repeated inquiries. One Chinese television journalist said they told him they had resolved the matter simply by creating new folders. But families say the folders held nothing but brief, error-riddled résumés that employers reflexively reject as fake.

The parents are uniformly poor: one father drives a three-wheel taxi, earning just 15 cents per passenger.

Xue Longlong’s parents sacrificed even more than most, in the belief that education would lead their children out of poverty. They earn just $450 a year growing dates, and live near a dirt mountain path, drinking well water and cooking over a wood fire.

Longlong, the oldest child, wore secondhand clothes and skipped meals throughout high school. When he won admission to a university in Xian, 400 miles away, his parents borrowed to cover the $1,500 in annual expenses. Initially, it seemed the bet would pay off: Longlong said he had had a chance to work at an oil company with a monthly salary of $735.

But the job evaporated with his dangan. “It was a catastrophe,” he said. Now he earns a base salary of $90 a month as a door-to-door salesman and lives in a tiny, dingy room in a Xian slum.

The woman he hoped to marry left him because her parents said he would never have a stable job. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown, and the family debt ballooned. Longlong’s father, Xue Ruzhan, said he owed more than $10,000 — more than twice what his property is worth.

“What is the point of continuing to live?” the father said. “Sometimes I want to commit suicide. These corrupt officials destroyed all our hopes.”

Including, it seems, the hopes of Longlong’s younger sister, Xiaomei, an 11th grader who once thought she would follow him to a university degree.

No more. “I want to quit,” she said during a school lunch break. “My brother graduated from college. What good did it do him?”

Zhang Jing contributed research from Wubu, China, and Yang Xiyun from Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/wo...a/27china.html





China Web Users 'Outnumber US Population'
AFP

THE number of internet users in China is now greater than the entire population of the US, after rising to 338 million by the end of June, state media reported Sunday.

China's online population, the largest in the world, rose by 40 million in the first six months of 2009, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre.

The number of broadband internet connections rose by 10 million to 93.5 million in the first half of the year, the report said.

About 95 per cent of townships were connected to broadband by early June and 92.5 per cent of villages had telephone lines that could be used for internet access, Xinhua said, citing the official data.

Rural coverage is expected to improve as the country's three telecoms operators, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom invest 280 billion yuan ($50bn) in a national 3G network over the next year, China Mobile vice president Lu Xiangdong was quoted as saying last week.

China's fast-growing online population has made the internet a forum for the country's citizens to express their opinions in a way rarely seen in the traditional, strictly government-controlled media.

The growing strength and influence of the web population has prompted concern in Beijing about potential social unrest, and the government has stepped up its control over the internet in recent years.

After rioting early this month in the capital of the restive northwest Xinjiang region, the government cut off online access to most of the area, in one of the largest known internet blackouts in China yet.

It has also blocked access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a range of other sites used for networking and sharing content.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15318,00.html





China Bans Online Games Which Glamorize Gangs

China has banned websites featuring or publicizing online games which glamorize mafia gangs, saying violators will be "severely punished," state media reported on Tuesday.

The Culture Ministry said such games "advocate obscenity, gambling, or violence," and "undermine morality and Chinese traditional culture," the official Xinhua news agency said.

"These games encourage people to deceive, loot and kill, and glorify gangsters' lives. It has a bad influence on youngsters," the report said, citing a ministry circular.

In games like "Godfather" people can play at being hitmen or gangsters, Xinhua said.

"The ministry ordered its law enforcement bodies to step up oversight and harshly punish those sites that continue to run such games," it added, without elaborating.

In the early years of Communist rule, the government almost totally extinguished mafia-like gangs, but they have made a comeback in recent decades as China relaxed its social and economic controls.

Despite their involvement in unsavory activities like human trafficking and drugs, movies and television series made in Taiwan and Hong Kong about gangs are very popular in China.

The online game industry in China is expected to grow by between 30 percent and 50 percent this year, with a sales revenue of 24 billion yuan ($3.51 billion) to 27 billion yuan, according to officials.

China has about 200 million online game players, and more than 300 million Internet users, the largest number in the world.

The Chinese government has closed hundreds of websites in an ongoing crackdown on online porn and "vulgar content" that in some cases has netted dissident sites.

The campaign is part of a broader tightening of the media ahead of October's 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China.

But the government backed down on a plan to require that Green Dam filter software be pre-installed on all new computers to block supposedly pornographic or other vulgar content.

($1=6.830 Yuan)

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56R18T20090728





Addiction Therapists Signing Up to World of Warcraft

Medical staff are creating their own ‘avatars’ in online fantasy games such as World of Warcraft in the hope of treating youngsters addicted to virtual worlds.
Claudine Beaumont

Experts have said that some massively multiplayer online games, in which players battle enemies for weapons and rewards, are as addictive as crack cocaine.

Dr Richard Graham, a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Centre in London, is so concerned that he plans to provide online therapy for youngsters who are spending so much time playing these games that they have lost touch with the real world.

A recent report by Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation described World of Warcraft as “more addictive than crack cocaine”. The game, which attracts almost 12 million players every month, is set in a fantasy environment, with users taking on the characters of dwarves, elves and wizards, interacting with other players throughout the virtual world.

Dr Graham said that some players were so addicted to these massively multiplayer online games that they played them for up to 16 hours a day, leading them to neglect their social lives and education.

He has called on Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, to waive or discount the costs associated with joining the game so that therapists can more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment.

“We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it’s already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn’t be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players,” said Dr Graham.

“Of course one problem we’re going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they’re probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.

“We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end.”

One solution proposed by Dr Graham is recruiting existing players to act as “peer mentors” for other users of the game. He said that internet addiction was very difficult to identify, as the isolation involved meant sufferers were often out of sight and out of mind.

“Those effected don’t exhibit the same outward warning signs as most teenage anti-social behaviour issues do because they’re in their bedrooms most of the time, seemingly out of trouble. Because of this we can’t get through to them in the traditional educational environment or intrude on their actual bedrooms, we need to turn to the internet itself to tackle these problems.”

Blizzard Entertainment was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Warcraft.html





Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet?
Noam Cohen

There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are tests with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test taker’s mind.

The Rorschach test, a series of 10 inkblot plates created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach for his book “Psychodiagnostik,” published in 1921, is clearly in the second category.

Yet in the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish. (Because the Rorschach plates were created nearly 90 years ago, they have lost their copyright protection in the United States.)

“The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way,” one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, “Just don’t pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research.”

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Psychologists have registered with Wikipedia to argue that the site is jeopardizing one of the oldest continuously used psychological assessment tests.

While the plates have appeared on other Web sites, it was not until they showed up on the popular Wikipedia site that psychologists became concerned.

“The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it,” said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather “render the results meaningless.”

To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted — tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith’s estimate — to try to link a patient’s responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research — “the normative data,” in the language of researchers — that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.

And, more fundamentally, the psychologists object whenever diagnostic tools fall into the hands of amateurs who haven’t been trained to administer them. “Our ethics code that governs the behavior of psychologists talks about maintaining test security,” Steve J. Breckler, the executive director for science at the American Psychological Association, said in an interview. “We wouldn’t be in favor of putting the plates out where anyone can get hold of them.”

Alvin G. Burstein, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wrote in an e-mail message that his preference was to have the images removed but that he did not think they would harm the psychological process.

“The process of making sense of one’s experience,” he wrote, “is gratifying. To take Rorschach’s test is to make sense of ambiguity in the context of someone who is interested in how you do that.”

Trudi Finger, a spokeswoman for Hogrefe & Huber Publishing, the German company that bought an early publisher of Hermann Rorschach’s book, said in an e-mail message last week: “We are assessing legal steps against Wikimedia,” referring to the foundation that runs the Wikipedia sites.

“It is therefore unbelievably reckless and even cynical of Wikipedia,” she said, “to on one hand point out the concerns and dangers voiced by recognized scientists and important professional associations and on the other hand — in the same article — publish the test material along with supposedly ‘expected responses.’ ”

Mike Godwin, the general counsel at Wikimedia, hardly sounded concerned, saying he “had to laugh a bit” at the legal and ethical arguments made in the statement from Hogrefe.

Hogrefe licenses a number of companies in the United States to sell the plates along with interpretative material. One such distributor, Western Psychological Services, sells the plates themselves for $110 and a larger kit for $185. Dr. Heilman, the man who originally posted the material, compared removing the plates to the Chinese government’s attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre. That is, it is mainly a dispute about control, he said.

“Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do,” Dr. Heilman said, adding that he was not impressed by the predictions of harm from those who sought to keep the Rorschach plates secret. “Show me the evidence,” he said. “I don’t care what a group of experts says.”

To illustrate his point, Dr. Heilman used the Snellen eye chart, which begins with a big letter E and is readily available on the Wikipedia site.

“If someone had previous knowledge of the eye chart,” he said, “you can go to the car people, and you could recount the chart from memory. You could get into an accident. Should we take it down from Wikipedia?”

And, Dr. Heilman added, “My dad fooled the doctor that way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/te...29inkblot.html





Oops

Eleven-Word Snippets Can Infringe Copyright, Rules ECJ

The copying and reproduction of just 11 words of a news article can be copyright infringement, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. Europe's highest court has said that a clippings service's copying could be unlawful.

Danish clippings service Infopaq was taken to court by Danish newspaper industry body Danske Dagblades Forening (DDF) over its reproduction of 11-word snippets of news for sale to clients.

The agency would scan in newspaper pages and use software to turn the image of the page into text. If pre-determined keywords that clients wanted monitored appeared in text then that word and the five words on either side of it were kept and the rest of the text thrown away.

Clients were then sent the 11 words and the details of what page of what publication on what date the words appeared as well as an indication of how far into the article the words came.

Infopaq conceded that acts of copying and reproduction took place in the process, but said that the use was legal because of exceptions in the European Union's Copyright Directive for 'transient' copying of material and lawful copying.

The ECJ said that while some parts of Infopaq's processing could be called transient, as soon as it had printed out the 11 words on to paper the copying became too permanent to qualify for the law's exception.

"The possibility cannot be ruled out at the outset that in the first two acts of reproduction at issue in those proceedings, namely the creation of [image] files and text files resulting from the conversion of [image] files, may be held to be transient as long as they are deleted automatically from the computer memory," said the ECJ ruling.

"By the last act of reproduction in the data capture process, Infopaq is making a reproduction outside the sphere of computer technology. It is printing out files containing the extracts of 11 words and thus reproduces those extracts on a paper medium," it said. "Once the reproduction has been affixed onto such a medium, it disappears only when the paper itself is destroyed."

"Since the data capture process is apparently not likely itself to destroy that medium, the deletion of that reproduction is entirely dependent on the will of the user of that process. It is not at all certain that he will want to dispose of the reproduction, which means that there is a risk that the reproduction will remain in existence for a longer period, according to the user’s needs," said the judgment.

Though the Court conceded that "words as such do not…constitute elements covered by the protection", it said that copyright law would apply to extracts even if they contained just 11 words.

"The possibility may not be ruled out that certain isolated sentences, or even certain parts of sentences in the text in question, may be suitable for conveying to the reader the originality of a publication such as a newspaper article, by communicating to that reader an element which is, in itself, the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of that article," it said. "Such sentences or parts of sentences are, therefore, liable to come within the scope of the protection provided for in Article 2(a) of that directive."

"An act occurring during a data capture process, which consists of storing an extract of a protected work comprising 11 words and printing out that extract, is such as to come within the concept of reproduction in part within the meaning of Article 2 of [the] directive," said the ruling.

The Court said that it would be up to a national court to decide whether or not a newspaper article deserved copyright protection as being "original in the sense that it is its author’s own intellectual creation", but it did say that it was "common ground" that newspaper articles did qualify as literary works and so as being protected by copyright law.

The ECJ said that Infopaq's processes, then, could not be exempted from the Copyright Directive and that if the national court ruled the articles in question to be deserving of copyright protection then there will have been an infringement.
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=10205





Amazon Faces a Fight Over Its E-Books
Brad Stone

Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell’s “1984” were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices.

Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon’s “ ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”

An apology was not enough for many people.

A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.

“As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation.

The foundation, based in Boston, is soliciting signatures from librarians, publishers and major authors and public intellectuals. This week it plans to present a petition to Amazon asking it to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles, and to reconsider its use of the software called digital rights management, or D.R.M. The software allows the company to maintain strict control over the copies of electronic books on its reader and also prevents other companies from selling material for the device.

Two years after Amazon first introduced the Kindle and lighted a fire under the e-books market, there is increasing awareness of how traditional libraries of paper and ink differ from those made of bits and bytes. The D.R.M. in Amazon’s Kindle books, backed up by license agreements with copyright holders, prevents customers from copying or reselling Kindle books — the legal right of “first sale” that is guaranteed to owners of regular books.

D.R.M. has created a new dynamic between consumers and the vendors of digital media like books and movies. People do not so much own, but rent this media. And the rental agreement can be breached by the manufacturer at any time, sometime with little or no notice.

People are also worried that the very architecture of network-connected devices like the Kindle, TiVo or iPod give tech companies unprecedented control over digital media and by extension, the free exchange of ideas.

Once upon a time, retailers sold customers a product and then walked away after the transaction. Today’s specialized devices often keep an umbilical cord to their vendor, loading updates and offering convenient ways to make purchases. These devices also limit the extent to which people can load independent software and customize their experiences.

Such tethered systems provide significant advantages to the consumer. Companies can keep their own records of what people buy and restore the content if it is inadvertently lost. Device software can be kept up to date, and vendors can track what people buy and make personalized recommendations for new material they might like.

Randal C. Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says he thinks Amazon was right to delete the improperly sold versions of “1984” and argues such systems can also allow companies to better enforce copyright laws. He notes that the harm to the Orwell book buyers was minimal, since their money was refunded after copies were deleted from their Kindles.

“Because copyright infringement was poor and lax in the offline world, it should also be that way in the online world? I don’t understand that logic,” Mr. Picker said. “The whole point of moving online is that it creates new opportunities.”

But critics say that any device capable of interfering with how its owner uses media is potentially dangerous. “I worry that systems like these tethered appliances are gifts to regulators,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the book, “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” Mr. Zittrain predicts that governments in some parts of the world will want to use it “like a line item veto for content,” removing objectionable sentences or chapters in some books.

“It could happen first in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where there isn’t as rich a First Amendment tradition and where libel suits happen much more frequently,” he said.

Whether or not people are bothered by these possibilities may in part be a function of their age, as a new generation grows up with an implicit understanding of the rules around these networked devices and learns to live with them.

“I’d like to live in a perfect world where I own this content and can do whatever I want with it,” said Justin Gawronski, a high school student whose copy of “1984” was erased by Amazon, but who recently declined when a lawyer asked him to join a class-action lawsuit over the incident. Mr. Gawronski said, “This is probably going to happen again and we just have to learn to live with it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/te.../27amazon.html





High School Student Suing Amazon After They Deleted Homework From His Kindle
Sean Fallon

Forget blaming it on the dog, thanks to Amazon students have a 21st century excuse for lost homework. When Amazon foolishly yanked 1984 from thousands of Kindles, Justin Gawronski's electronic notes for a summer assignment became useless.

Now a class action lawsuit has been filed that seeks punitive damages for those affected by the deletion as well as an injunction that forbids Amazon from improperly accessing Kindles in the future. Granted, after the fallout and subsequent Bezos apology, there probably wasn't much risk of Amazon crossing the line again. Still, I agree that they had this coming.

Again, the fact that Orwell's 1984 is at the center of all of this controversy is one of those delicious coincidences that is impossible to ignore.
http://gizmodo.com/5326724/high-scho...rom-his-kindle





Start-Up Plans to Make Journalism Pirates Pay Up
Saul Hansell

Online piracy isn’t just a problem for music companies; it hurts newspapers and magazines as well. News organizations are now trying to do something about the many Web sites that simply copy articles and paste them into their own pages.

Last week The Associated Press said it would put warnings against copyright violation on its articles and digitally track illegitimate uses. It didn’t say what it would do to violators, but it has been quick to use legal means to block reuse of its material.

A start-up called Attributor, based in Redwood City, Calif., is proposing an approach that is more carrot than stick. It has developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.

The plan faces many technical and legal hurdles. Attributor wants to take some of the ad money that would have been paid to the pirate site and give it to the copyright owner instead. To do that it needs the cooperation of big advertising networks like those run by Google and Yahoo. So far those companies have reacted coolly to the proposal.

Still, Attributor has been able to attract many major publishing companies to what it calls the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is exploring its ideas. These include The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast.

The Attributor plan “seems to me to be a way to bring order out of the chaos,” said Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media.

For now those companies have committed only to receiving data from Attributor about how widely their content is being used on Web sites that don’t pay for it. Later they will decide whether to proceed with the revenue-sharing plan.

“We’re in ‘prove it’ mode,” said Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor. “We are going to prove to them piracy is an issue and here is the scale. Then we will take that to the ad networks.”

Mr. Pitkow, a former chief executive of the news aggregation service Moreover Technologies, founded Attributor with Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive. It has raised $20 million in three rounds of venture capital.

Mr. Pitkow said a study in January of 250,000 articles from 25 publishers showed that on average, each article appeared on 11 unauthorized sites. Looking at traffic data, Attributor calculated that five times as many people read each article on pirate sites as on the site of the publisher. And it estimated that collectively the publishers were losing $250 million a year from unauthorized copying.

Those numbers seem high to many in the Internet business, including executives of some of the companies working with Attributor.

Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s senior vice president for digital media, said he didn’t believe that the company was losing much revenue this way.

“I don’t think it’s that big of a problem,” he said.

Reuters, by contrast, is very concerned. Mr. Ahearn said there was “tens of millions of dollars worth of inventory that is likely being created that we are not getting our fair share of.”

Attributor’s plan rests on the idea that most of these pirate sites depend on networks like Google’s AdSense to place ads on their pages and send them a share of the revenue. Attributor proposes to scan the Web for pages that have articles of participating publishers. It will then notify any network with ads on those pages so the network can share the revenue with the copyright owner.

Mr. Pitkow said this represented the best of all worlds: news organizations get a way to syndicate their work widely and benefit from it, small sites gain legitimate access to professional content, and the networks are able to sell ads on pages that they might otherwise have to pulls ads from if the copyright owner complained.

So far, one small ad network, AdBright, has agreed to Attributor’s model. But the larger networks appear to be wary.

Spokesmen for Yahoo and Google said they had not had a chance to review Attributor’s proposal in detail. They both noted that they were already supporting news organizations through their policies of removing ads from pages that carried unauthorized copyrighted material.

Mr. Pitkow said he believed the advertising networks would ultimately get on board in the interest of helping out struggling newspapers. But if persuasion doesn’t work, he has a threat. Publishers will start to demand that ads be removed from all the pirated pages, a time-consuming and revenue-sapping task.

“Ad networks that decide not to participate may end up receiving tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of take-down notices a day,” Mr. Pitkow said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/te...ttributor.html





Ubisoft Plans to Have Piracy Solution in Place This Year
Brian Crecente

Piracy has taken a hefty toll on Ubisoft, according to company head Yves Guillemot, but the developer and publisher say they are hard at work on a tool that should help reduce the negative impact.

"Altogether on console, the piracy is low," Guillemot said. "On the PC the piracy is quite a lot. We are working on a tool that would allow us to decrease that on the PC starting next year and probably one game this year."

Guillemot didn't say what that solution would be, but it since he talked about it as if it were a new tool and not an existing form of digital rights management, like SecuRom, it stands to reason that it may be an internal solution.

The topic of piracy came up during Ubisoft's quarterly earnings call after Guillemot pointed to it as part of the reason that their DS games haven't been selling well.

He said that piracy on Nintendo's DS is strong, though oddly not as bad on the DSi, and that the company has learned that they can reduce the impact of illegal copies of the game by including physical extras like figurines, with their titles.

The increase in piracy on the DS started in Spain, Guillemot said, where they say "sales going down at a very strong level" last year. That then seemed to move to other countries this year, increasing the most after the month of March with continued impact this summer.

"We see it coming country by country." he said. "We see when we put other things with the product (people) go and buy the game. We need to make sure that the value is better when they buy the box then when they download (the game) from the Internet."

Guillemot said that Ubisoft is working on the problem both internally and with Nintendo's help.

"Nintendo has been able to slow down piracy a lot in Japan," he said. "They are now putting pressure to make sure it decreases in many other countries. We think we will be able to solve this matter."

Ubiosoft was so concerned with piracy on the Playstation Portable they started to retreat from that platform, Guillemot said. But there are now "new ways to control piracy" on the PSP, he said, and the company is reinvesting in the platform.
http://kotaku.com/5323863/ubisoft-pl...lace-this-year





And That’s Not the Way It Is
Frank Rich

WHO exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon?

Not to take anything away from Walter Cronkite, but he beat out Henry Kissinger by only four percentage points when a 1974 Roper poll asked Americans whom they most respected. The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite ’60s and ’70s shattered the nation’s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

In death, “the most trusted man in America” has been embalmed in that most comforting of American sweeteners — nostalgia — to the point where his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten. We’ve heard much sentimental rumination on the bygone heyday of the “mainstream media,” on the cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet, and on the lack of any man who could replicate the undisputed moral authority of Uncle Walter. (Women still need not apply, apparently.) But the reason to celebrate Cronkite has little to do with any of this and least of all to do with his avuncular television persona.

What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

That’s why the past week’s debate about whether there could ever again be a father-figure anchor with Cronkite’s everyman looks and sonorous delivery is an escapist parlor game. What matters is content, not style. The real question is this: How many of those with similarly exalted perches in the news media today — and those perches, however diminished, still do exist in the multichannel digital age — will speak truth to power when the country is on the line? This journalistic responsibility cannot be outsourced to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart.

Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.

In the case of Vietnam, the anchor began as a reliable mouthpiece for the optimistic scenarios purveyed by the Johnson administration. It was the contradictions and chaos Cronkite saw in a visit to Vietnam after the Tet offensive that tardily changed his mind in 1968. Even now, right-wing bloggers who still think we could have “won” in Vietnam and are busy trashing Cronkite miss the point of what he said in his on-air editorial. He did not presume to judge the confusing outcome of Tet itself; he viewed the war as a whole (accurately) as a stalemate.

What really outraged him was more elementary than any prognostication. He saw that the American government was lying to its own people. “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” he said.

Cronkite was braver during Watergate. The Washington Post, still largely regarded as a local paper, had been on a lonely limb pursuing the scandal in the months after the break-in of June 1972. Its young reporters Woodward and Bernstein were nobodies. The leading national paper, The Times, was lagging behind and underplaying the story. The networks, the biggest news source for Americans, barely mentioned Watergate. The narrative was too complex and didn’t yield the kind of visuals that scream Good Television.

What Cronkite did on Oct. 27, 1972, was remarkable. Though CBS News had little fresh reporting of its own, it repackaged The Post’s to make it compelling TV. The Post’s logo and headlines often served as the visuals. The piece clocked in at an unprecedented 14 minutes — two-thirds of a news program running 22 minutes without commercials — and was broadcast just days before the election. As Katharine Graham, then the paper’s publisher, wrote in “Personal History,” her 1997 memoir, “CBS had taken The Post national,” giving its Watergate reporting the credibility and mass circulation that would ultimately allow it to affect the course of history.

That night the Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson yelled at Cronkite’s boss, the CBS titan William Paley, and succeeded in getting the network’s management to delay, shorten and neuter Cronkite’s second Watergate installment. But Black Rock, CBS’s corporate headquarters, could not undo the anchor’s actions any more than the White House. The Nixon administration’s dark criminality would gradually be dragged into the sunlight.

To appreciate how special Cronkite’s achievements were, consider our recent past. As the Bush administration hyped Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D. and nonexistent link to 9/11, The Times and The Post too often enabled the fictions. But at least some reporters at these papers and others elsewhere were on to the hoax — even if their findings were buried in the back pages. At the networks, Cronkite’s heirs were not even practicing journalism. They invited administration propagandists to trumpet their tales of imminent mushroom clouds with impunity.

Not much changed after the invasion. When Ted Koppel, then of ABC News, dared to merely recite the names of the American dead on “Nightline” a year into the war, the assault from Bush-Cheney allies, including in the broadcasting industry, was so fierce that Koppel’s peers retreated from the fray. In the months when it might have made a difference, no network television anchor of Cronkite’s prominence challenged the administration’s silver linings in Iraq as he had L.B.J.’s in Vietnam.

If anything, the spirit of another recently departed lion of the establishment — Robert Strange McNamara, born five months before Cronkite in 1916 — may live on more potently at the nexus of American power and journalism than that of the CBS anchorman.

When McNamara died this month, many recalled his status as Exhibit A of what David Halberstam labeled “the best and the brightest,” the brilliant and arrogant Kennedy-Johnson team that blundered into a quagmire. Far less was said about how McNamara, at his height, wielded that image to spin a dazzled Washington press establishment on his misplaced optimism about the war. The Washington Post’s obituary, pointedly or not, included a photo of a smiling McNamara enjoying cocktails with a powerful syndicated Post columnist (and Vietnam apologist), Joseph Alsop. The obituary also noted that McNamara served on The Post’s board — a sinecure he was awarded after he had helped send some 50,000 Americans to pointless deaths.

What Halberstam labeled the “nice genteel chumminess” between potentates like McNamara and the Beltway press establishment, though occasionally frayed by scandals like Watergate, remains intact. Just a few days before McNamara died, Politico uncovered a particularly graphic example involving The Post: an invitation to lobbyists to shell out $25,000 to $250,000 to sponsor off-the-record, nonconfrontational “salons” where they could mix with what a promotional flier called “the right people” and “alter the debate.” The “right people” being pimped were White House officials, members of Congress and The Post’s own journalists. The salons were to be held in the home of the paper’s current publisher, Katharine Graham’s granddaughter.

The Post’s ombudsman called the salons “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions,” and they were canceled. But the lofty cover charge notwithstanding, one wonders if they would have differed in substance from that long-ago cocktail party attended by McNamara and Alsop.

As no one has to remind anyone at The Times, The Post is hardly the only news organization to suffer a monumental lapse in recent years. The bigger problem is the persistence of that clubby culture Halberstam described, no matter which party is in power. The hagiography that greeted McNamara’s arrival in Washington was also showered initially on some of the best and the brightest in the Bush and Obama administrations. Some journalists even fawn over the worst and the stupidest. As e-mail released by Mark Sanford’s office revealed, David Gregory of NBC News tried to get an interview with the sleazy governor by reassuring him that “‘Meet the Press’ allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to.”

Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/opinion/26rich.html





White Supremacist Radio Host Hal Turner was an FBI Informant, as Hackers Claimed a Year Ago
Stephen C. Webster

White supremacist radio host Hal Turner was an FBI informant, his lawyer revealed in court today. The announcement is a confirmation of what hackers claimed nearly a year ago after allegedly gaining access to his e-mails.

Turner was arrested on June 24 for allegedly calling for the murder of three judges who supported the Chicago gun ban. The confession by his attorney came at a bond hearing Tuesday.

"Attorney Michael Orozco [...] said his client gave authorities information about a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama," reported the Associated Press.

However, prosecutors said they had no information about the alleged plot, but did confirm Turner had a relationship with the bureau. Attorney William Hogan told the wire service that relationship had ended "some time ago."

His recent arrest came after a complaint about an overt call for the murder of three judges.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: these Judges deserve to be killed," he wrote on his Web site, according to MSNBC. "He included their pictures, phone numbers, work address and room numbers along with a photo of the courthouse in which they work and a map of its location, the FBI says."

"We take threats to federal judges very seriously. Period,"' said Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago," the network reported.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of Turner's recent history are his dealings with the users of the popular Internet forum 4chan, among others.

In July 2008, hackers -- who may or may not be connected to 4chan -- confronted Turner on his Web site's forums and claimed they had gained access to his e-mail, uncovering a message allegedly to his FBI handler in which he takes credit for "flush[ing] out another crazy."

The message was to one shaug@fbi.gov, credited in the purported e-mail as "Haug, Stephen M.", and it told of an alleged plot to kill Democratic Senator Russ Feingold.

> Guys:
> I wrote an opinion piece on my site today in which I opine about
> 46 US Senators who I believe should be removed from office on
> July 4 for betraying their constituents and this nation.
>
> An anonymous person, posting on the outside, third-party visitor
> comments area of my web site wrote:
>
> "im going to kill senator feingold on july 4th. may thomas
> paine smile upon me and alexander hamilton bless my cause.
> praise the lord and pass the ammunition."
>
> As you are probably aware, Feingold is from Wisconsin.
>
> The posting was made today, July 1, 2007 at 4:34 PM EST from IP
> address 128.104.230.228 which comes back to the University of
> Wisconsin.
> The posting can be viewed by the general public at:
> http://www.haloscan.com/comments/hal...With46/#236927
>
> Once again, my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a
> possible crazy.
>
> Please acknowledge receipt of this warning. Of late, both of
> you have become remiss in acknowledging e-mails.
>
> HT

The message drew a rather terse response:

> Got it thanks. I think you forget that I no longer have my
> blackberry and thus no real-time link to the email. I have to be
> logged on to a server to access it. As you know, I don;t have
> one growing out of my ass...Some emails require no comment...

Allegedly, he goes on to take credit for "single-handedly" stopping President Bush's immigration legislation. He adds: "Thank God some of the Marines at the White House feed me info. You'd be shocked what they hear standing there opening doors all day."

And, to note, I say allegedly because I do not know these hackers, nor am I certain that these e-mails are real. I report it only because these e-faring rogues of the Web hit the nail on the head well before Turner's lawyer sealed the coffin.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups in the United States, emphasizes how crazy this gentleman is:

In 2006, Turner told his audience to “clean your guns, have plenty of ammunition … [and] then do what has to be done” to undocumented workers. Around the same time, he suggested that half the U.S. Congress “may have to be assassinated.” A year earlier, he suggested “drawing up lists of yeshivas,” or Jewish religious schools. He once started a website called www.killtheenemy.com for the purpose of posting photos and names of those who marched in favor of immigrant rights. Hearing that anti-racist activist Floyd Cochran was visiting Newark, N.J., last June, Turner said he had “arranged for a group of guys to physically intercept” Cochran and added that Cochran would likely “get such a beating that his next stop is going to be University Hospital.” In a July letter, Turner wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes the Intelligence Report: “If you do not change your stance soon, you will face a wrath of fury that you will never be able to defend yourself against. We have the ability to reach out and touch someone.”

Last July, Turner posted photographs of a pro-immigrant activist being taken away by an ambulance outside Turner’s North Bergen home. "Click the images below to see how I kicked the shit out of one such douchebag," he wrote.

For months, Turner was hounded by 4chan'ers who would stage "raids" on his radio show making dozens of phone calls and mimicking ethnic stereotypes or subversively making fun of his racism by burying pop culture iconography in supposedly legitimate calls.
And for a time, his Web site was besieged by denial of service attacks, cutting down significantly on the number of listeners he could reach.

Here's a clip which, though it contains some racist language, is nevertheless hysterical just for the sheer inventiveness of the prank caller:

If you did not catch that, the caller was reciting the motto of the evil Team Rocket from the Poke'mon cartoon. (You could hardly be blamed for not knowing it, but on the Internets, cultural fluency is a must.)

There's a ton more Turner raids recorded and on YouTube, but curious viewers should be warned of Turner's frequent use of rambling, profane, racist nonsense . The 'Rocket Roll' video above is actually the least offensive I found.

After so long and untold amounts of pranking and harassment, Turner quit, explaining that the "free market has not supported this show."

Then the arrest.

And now we find out, for sure, that he was an FBI informant -- out there for years, whipping the crazies up into a frenzy, drawing out the true believers ready to commit violence, then turning them over to the FBI, even though they're seemingly going along with what he was promoting.

Makes one think, is all.
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/rev...fbi-informant/





Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud
Brian Stelter

It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation.

Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal,” adding that he would not have been included in any conversations between G.E. and the News Corporation. Fox News said it would not comment.

Civility was not always the aim of Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, men who, in an industry of thin skins, are both famous for reacting to verbal pinpricks. Both host 8 p.m. programs on cable news in studios a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan.

The conservative-leaning Mr. O’Reilly has turned “The O’Reilly Factor” into a profit center for the News Corporation by blitzing his opponents and espousing his opinions unapologetically. He found his bête noire in the liberal-leaning Mr. Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” who saw in Mr. O’Reilly a regenerating target he nicknamed the “Bill-o the Clown.”

The 6-foot-4 Mr. Olbermann started sniping regularly at the also 6-foot-4 Mr. O’Reilly in late 2005, sometimes making him the subject of the “Countdown” segment, the “Worst Person in the World.” Mr. O’Reilly was also a stand-in for the perceived offenses of the top-rated Fox News.

By punching up at his higher-rated prey, Mr. Olbermann helped his own third-place cable news show. “Honestly, I should send him a check each week,” he remarked to a reporter three years ago. Fox noticed. Mr. Murdoch remarked to Esquire last year that “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly.” Mr. O’Reilly refused to mention his critic by name on the “Factor,” deeming him a “vicious smear merchant,” but he regularly blamed Mr. Zucker for “ruining a once-great brand,” NBC.

In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.

Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt.” The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers was scathing.

The messages hit nerves on both sides. Mr. Immelt remarked to MSNBC staff members last summer that he would “never forgive Rupert Murdoch” for Fox’s behavior, according to two people who were present. In private phone calls, the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, told NBC officials to end the attacks.

In February, Mr. Zucker told Newsweek what he had told Mr. Olbermann privately: “I wish it weren’t so personal.” The previous year, Mr. Murdoch said that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t be so sensitive” to the attacks lobbed by MSNBC.

Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.

But like any title fight, the final round could not end without an attempted knockout. On June 1, the day after the abortion provider George Tiller was killed in Kansas, Mr. Olbermann took to the air to cite Mr. O’Reilly’s numerous references to “Tiller, the baby killer” and to announce that he would retire his caricature of Mr. O’Reilly.

“The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air,” he said.

The next day, Mr. O’Reilly made the extraordinary claim that “federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business” and published Mr. Immelt’s e-mail address and mailing address, repeating it slowly for emphasis.

Then the attacks mostly stopped.

Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E.

The executives at both companies, it appears, were relieved. “For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side,” one employee said.

Tensions still simmer between the two networks, however, and staff members have been unwilling or unable to stop the strife altogether. This week, for instance, the Fox host Glenn Beck called Mr. Obama a racist, prompting rebukes on a number of MSNBC shows. But for now, the daily back and forth has quieted.

“They’ve won their respective constituencies,” said a former member of MSNBC’s senior staff. “They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/bu...ia/01feud.html





Lancaster, Pa., Keeps a Close Eye On Itself

A vast and growing web of security cameras monitors the city of 55,000, operated by a private group of self-appointed gatekeepers. There's been surprisingly little outcry.
Bob Drogin

This historic town, where America's founding fathers plotted during the Revolution and Milton Hershey later crafted his first chocolates, now boasts another distinction.

It may become the nation's most closely watched small city.

Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists. That's more outdoor cameras than are used by many major cities, including San Francisco and Boston.

Unlike anywhere else, cash-strapped Lancaster outsourced its surveillance to a private nonprofit group that hires civilians to tilt, pan and zoom the cameras -- and to call police if they spot suspicious activity. No government agency is directly involved.

Perhaps most surprising, the near-saturation surveillance of a community that saw four murders last year has sparked little public debate about whether the benefits for law enforcement outweigh the loss of privacy.

"Years ago, there's no way we could do this," said Keith Sadler, Lancaster's police chief. "It brings to mind Big Brother, George Orwell and '1984.' It's just funny how Americans have softened on these issues."

"No one talks about it," agreed Scott Martin, a Lancaster County commissioner who wants to expand the program. "Because people feel safer. Those who are law-abiding citizens, they don't have anything to worry about."

A few dozen people attended four community meetings held last spring to discuss what sponsors called "this exciting public safety initiative." But opposition has grown since big red bulbs, which shield the video cameras, began appearing on corner after corner.

Mary Pat Donnellon, head of Mission Research, a local software company, vowed to move if she finds one on her block. "I don't want to live like that," she said. "I'm not afraid. And I don't need to be under surveillance."

"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door," agreed David Mowrer, a laborer for a company that supplies quarry pits. "That's my business. That's not what America is about."

Hundreds of municipalities -- including Los Angeles and at least 36 other California cities -- have built or expanded camera networks since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In most cases, Department of Homeland Security grants helped cover the cost.

In the most ambitious project, New York City police announced plans several years ago to link 3,000 public and private security cameras across Lower Manhattan designed to help deter, track and detect terrorists. The network is not yet complete.

How they affect crime is open to debate. In the largest U.S. study, researchers at UC Berkeley evaluated 71 cameras that San Francisco put in high-crime areas starting in 2005. Their final report, released in December, found "no evidence" of a drop in violent crime but "substantial declines" in property crime near the cameras.

Only a few communities have said no. In February, the city council in Cambridge, Mass., voted not to use eight cameras already purchased with federal funds for fear police would improperly spy on residents. Officials in nearby Brookline are considering switching off a dozen cameras for the same reason.

Lancaster is different, and not just because it sits amid the rolling hills and rich farms of Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Laid out in 1730, the whole town is 4 square miles around a central square. Amish families still sell quilts in the nation's oldest public market, and the Wal-Mart provides a hitching post to park a horse and buggy. Tourists flock to art galleries and Colonial-era churches near a glitzy new convention center.

But poverty is double the state's average, and public school records list more than 900 children as homeless. Police blame most of last year's 3,638 felony crimes, chiefly thefts, on gangs that use Lancaster as a way station to move cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs along the Eastern Seaboard.

"It's not like we're making headlines as the worst crime-ridden city in the country," said Craig Stedman, the county's district attorney. "We have an average amount of crime for our size."

In 2001, a local crime commission concluded that cameras might make the city safer. Business owners, civic boosters and city officials formed the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, and the nonprofit organization installed its first camera downtown in 2004.

Raising money from private donors and foundations, the coalition had set up 70 cameras by last year. And the crime rate rose.

Officials explained the increase by saying cameras caught lesser offenses, such as prostitution and drunkenness, that otherwise often escape prosecution. The cameras also helped police capture and convict a murderer, and solve several other violent crimes.

Another local crime meeting last year urged an expansion of the video network, and the city and county governments agreed to share the $3-million cost with the coalition. Work crews are trying to connect 95 additional high-resolution cameras by mid-July.

"Per capita, we're the most watched city in the state, if not the entire United States," said Joseph Morales, a city councilman who is executive director of the coalition. "There are very few public streets that are not visible to our cameras."

The digital video is transmitted to a bank of flat-screen TVs at coalition headquarters, several dingy offices beside a gas company depot. A small sign hangs outside.

On a recent afternoon, camera operator Doug Winglewich sat at a console and watched several dozen incoming video feeds plus a computer linked to the county 911 dispatcher. The cameras have no audio, so he works in silence.

Each time police logged a new 911 call, he punched up the camera closest to the address, and pushed a joystick to maneuver in for a closer look.

A license plate could be read a block away, and a face even farther could be identified. After four years in the job, Winglewich said, he "can pretty much tell right away if someone's up to no good."

He called up another feed and focused on a woman sitting on the curb. "You get to know people's faces," he said. "She's been arrested for prostitution."

Moments later, he called police when he spotted a man drinking beer in trouble-prone Farnum Park. Two police officers soon appeared on the screen, and as the camera watched, issued the man a ticket for violating a local ordinance.

"Lots of times, the police find outstanding warrants and the guy winds up in jail," said Winglewich, 49, who works from a wheelchair on account of a spinal injury.

If a camera records a crime in progress, the video is given to police and prosecutors, and may be subpoenaed by defense lawyers in a criminal case. More than 300 tapes were handed over last year, records show.

Morales says he refuses all other requests. "The divorce lawyer who wants video of a husband coming out of a bar with his mistress, we won't do it," he said.

No state or federal law governs use of public cameras, so Morales is drafting ethical guidelines for the coalition's 10 staffers and dozen volunteers. Training has been "informal" until now, he said, but will be stiffened. Morales said he tries to weed out voyeurs and anyone who might use the tapes for blackmail or other illegal activity.

"We are not directly responsible to law enforcement or government at this point," he said. "So we have to be above suspicion ourselves."

Morales, 45, has a master's degree in public administration. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he grew up mostly on Army bases. He was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, he said, but turned it down. "I made a lot of bad choices," he said. "Substance abuse was part of that."

Mary Catherine Roper, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, says the coalition's role as a self-appointed, self-policed gatekeeper for blanket surveillance of an entire city is unique.

"This is the first time, the only time, I've heard of it anywhere," she said. "It is such a phenomenally bad idea that it is stunning to me."

She said the coalition structure provides no public oversight or accountability, and may be exempt from state laws governing release of public records.

"When I hear people off the street can come in and apply to watch the camera on my street, now I'm terrified," she added. "That could be my nosy neighbor, or my stalker ex-boyfriend, or a burglar stalking my home."

J. Richard Gray, Lancaster's mayor since 2005, backs the program but worries about such abuses. He is a former defense attorney, a self-described civil libertarian, and a free-spirited figure who owns 12 motorcycles.

"I keep telling [the coalition] you're on a short leash with me," Gray said. "It's one strike and you're out as far as I'm concerned."

His campaign treasurer, Larry Hinnenkamp, a tax attorney and certified public accountant, took a stronger view. He "responded with righteous indignation" when a camera was installed without prior notice by his home.

"I used to give it the finger when I walked by," Hinnenkamp said.

But Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network "a great thing." His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby.

"There's nothing wrong with instilling fear," he said.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun...-spycam-city21





Netgear and OpenDNS to Block Porn from the Cloud
Larry Magid

There are lots of Internet filtering products on the market that enable parents to block certain types of websites such as pornography, hate sites, or sites that promote alcohol or drug use. Most of these products run on PCs or Macs by sitting between the operating system and the browser and checking any requested sites to make sure they're not blocked. The products generally do a good job blocking requests from protected PCs, but most don't work with game consoles, Wi-Fi-equipped iPhones or iPod Touches, or any other device that isn't running the software.

Netgear is about to ship routers designed to simplify the process by allowing parents to block content on any device using the home's wired or wireless network.

The new routers, which will be available in early September, will be equipped with firmware that configures them to use OpenDNS' domain name server to look up the actual IP address of any site someone tries to visit. If that site isn't on the blocked list, it will be displayed. But if a parent has blocked that site, the user will instead be sent to a page that informs them that the site they tried to access is blocked.

Some existing Netgear routers can be upgraded with the new OpenDNS-compatible firmware starting August 10th.

Because the filtering takes place at the router level, it works with any device in the household that uses that router including Web-enabled game consoles and Wi-Fi mobile devices. It won't, however, work with devices that don't use the home network such as an iPhone set up to use the 3G cellular network.

Like other filtering products, parents have control over the type of content blocked and have the ability to turn it off so that it doesn't prevent mom or dad from visiting any sites. There is also a "white list" feature that allows parents to exclude any site from the blocked list. Because the blocking lists are "in the cloud," parents can configure the filter from anywhere.

Before employing any parental control system, I urge parents to think about how they will or won't fit in with your family. Consider the age of the child, the child's Web surfing habits, the types of risk your child takes, and what you plan to say to your children about the filtering product. Parents should tell their kids that they're using filters and explain why they think they're necessary. Also, parents should never rely on filters as the only way to protect children--parental involvement is still important. If you decide to use a filter, consider weaning kids from them as they enter their teenage years. Eventually, your kids will be on their own and part of a parent's job is to help a child make their own good decisions. You can't rely on filters forever.

For details about the service, I spoke with OpenDNS founder & CTO David Ulevitch.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10297759-238.html





How Big is the Internet?

THE internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.

But just how big is it?

Microsoft's Bing team puts the amount of web pages at "over 1 trillion".

And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discreet web addresses.

There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.

That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.

Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep.

Bing was more generous with its estimate for those who take more time to read.

"An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information," it said.

Number of users

Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.

"Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007)," he told news.com.au.

The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million - than there were people in the US.

However InternetWorldStats.com (IWS), a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China's online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population.

"With the rates of India and China still quite low, there is ample room for growth in the coming decade," Mr Higginson said.

Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It's an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.

IWS combines data from the UN's International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.

Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.

That's just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world.

But it changes every day.

"In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage," Mr Higginson said.

"In the US, the number of people accessing the internet through mobile devices grew 74 per cent between February 2007 and February 2009."

How we size up

According to IWS, the top 5 countries with the most internet users are:

1 - China (298,000,000 users, or 22.4% of their population)
2 – US (227,190,989, or 74.7%)
3 – Japan (94,000,000, or 73.8%)
4 – India (81,000,000, or 7.1%)
5 – Brazil (67,510,400, or 34.4%)

Australia comes in at 25th, with 16,926,015 internet users.

But we zoom all the way up to 7th place if we measure what percentage of the population uses the internet – a whopping 80.6 per cent, according to IWS.

"The Australian online population has now reached maturity in terms of the number of people online and their experience using the internet," Mr Higginson said.

"Despite this fact, the rate of internet participation, Australia-wide, increased notably for the first time in several years ," he said, adding that the latest Nielsen statistics showed it had jumped 6 percentage points to 86 per cent.

However, even experts aren't keen to guess when every person in the world will be online.

"It's too hard to tell," Mr Higginson said.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/st...018992,00.html





Why Texting's A Hazard For Teens

Many developing sleep deprivation
Marissa Lang

To many parents, text messaging is an enigma, a practice their children engage in when they could just make a phone call or walk down the street to their friends' houses. It seems to be a strange but harmless means of communication.

What most don't know is that too much texting actually can be detrimental to teens' health. That's because new technologies, such as cellphones and social-networking sites, give teenagers easy access to their friends 24 hours a day.

"The more technology we develop, the more we rely on technology," said Dr. Myrza Perez, a pediatric pulmonologist at Capital Allergy & Respiratory Disease Centers in Roseville and Folsom, Calif. A specialist in sleep disorders, she says "before technology, we went to sleep when the sun went down. Now, with all these distractions, teenagers alone in their rooms stay up to extremely late hours on their cellphones and computers. Their parents have no idea."

The trend of sleep deprivation is leading to many daytime problems for teenagers, including headaches, impaired concentration, weakened immune systems, crankiness, increased use of nicotine or caffeine and hyperactive behavior often misconstrued as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

These symptoms are often interpreted by doctors as problems meriting medication, when in fact the best cure might be to turn off their cellphones at night.

Mikaela Espinoza, 17, always used to sleep with her phone at her bedside, just in case a friend called or text-messaged her in the middle of the night. Sometimes, she said, she would receive calls or messages as late as 3 a.m., and she would wake right up to call or text right back.

"Whenever I'd hear my phone ring, I would just, like, wake up and answer it," Espinoza said. "I think a whole bunch of kids text like all night long." Espinoza soon found herself suffering from near-debilitating migraine headaches throughout the day. She couldn't concentrate in school; she couldn't go out with her friends; she couldn't be herself, she said.

Her primary physician's first instinct was to check her eyes. When that yielded no solutions, he sent her in for a CAT scan. It came back clear.

"Nobody knew what was wrong with me," Espinoza said.

Eventually, Espinoza was diagnosed with a condition growing more and more common among teenagers: too much texting.

"After they realized I wasn't getting enough sleep, they told me I needed to turn off my phone or have it taken away from me at night," she said. "My mom was real mad at me."

According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-age children and adolescents need at least nine hours of sleep a night. But in a national survey conducted in 2006, only 20 percent of American teens said they get nine hours a night. Nearly half sleep less than eight hours on school nights, and 28 percent of high-school students reported falling asleep in school at least once a week.

The problem, experts estimate, has only worsened since then.

"We all have this 24/7 lifestyle, and as technologies become more prevalent, the problem just gets worse," Perez said. "They're distractions, and they lead to sleep deprivation. I feel like it's getting worse with newer technologies."

Cellphones are not the only culprits of sleep deprivation, Perez added. Video games and computers contribute to teenagers' inclination to stay up all night.

"Cellphones, computer screens and even televisions emit light rays that keep you awake," Perez said. "Light automatically stimulates the retinas. Before bed, people should turn off those devices and switch to a quieter, healthier activity, like reading."
http://www.courant.com/features/hc-t...,4522455.story





Texting Raises Crash Risk 23 Times, Study Finds
Matt Richtel

The first study of drivers texting inside their vehicles shows that the risk sharply exceeds previous estimates based on laboratory research — and far surpasses the dangers of other driving distractions.

The new study, which entailed outfitting the cabs of long-haul trucks with video cameras over 18 months, found that when the drivers texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater than when not texting.

The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which compiled the research and plans to release its findings on Tuesday, also measured the time drivers take their eyes from the road to send or receive texts.

In the moments before a crash or near crash, drivers typically spent nearly five seconds looking at their devices — enough time at typical highway speeds to cover more than the length of a football field.

Even though trucks take longer to stop and are less maneuverable than cars, the findings generally applied to all drivers, who tend to exhibit the same behaviors as the more than 100 truckers studied, the researchers said. Truckers, they said, do not appear to text more or less than typical car drivers, but they said the study did not compare use patterns that way.

Compared with other sources of driver distraction, “texting is in its own universe of risk,” said Rich Hanowski, who oversaw the study at the institute, which is affiliated with Virginia Tech.

Mr. Hanowski said the texting analysis was financed by $300,000 from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which has the mission of improving safety in trucks and buses. More broadly, the two studies yielding the results represent a significant logistical undertaking. The cost was $6 million to equip the trucks with video cameras and track them for three million miles as they hauled furniture, frozen foods and other goods across the country.

The final analysis of the data is undergoing peer review before formal publication.

Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech institute, one of the world’s largest vehicle safety research organizations, said the study’s message was clear.

“You should never do this,” he said of texting while driving. “It should be illegal.”

Thirty-six states do not ban texting while driving; 14 do, including Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey. New York legislators have sent a bill to Gov. David A. Paterson. But legislators in other states have rejected such rules, and some elected officials say they need more data to determine whether to ban the activity.

One difficulty in measuring crashes caused by texting drivers — and by drivers talking on phones — is that many police agencies do not collect this data or have not compiled long-term studies. Texting also is a relatively new phenomenon.

The issue has drawn attention after several recent highly publicized crashes caused by texting drivers, including an episode in May involving a trolley car driver in Boston who crashed while texting his girlfriend.

Over all, texting has soared. In December, phone users in the United States sent 110 billion messages, a tenfold increase in just three years, according to the cellular phone industry’s trade group, CTIA.

The results of the Virginia Tech study are buttressed by new laboratory research from the University of Utah. In a study over the last 18 months, college students using a sophisticated driving simulator showed an eight times greater crash risk when texting than when not texting.

That study, which is undergoing peer review and has been submitted for publication in The Journal for Human Factors, also found that drivers took their eyes off the road for around five seconds when texting.

David Strayer, a professor who co-wrote the University of Utah report, offered two explanations for the simulator’s showing lower risks than the Virginia study. Trucks are tougher to maneuver and stop, he noted, and the college students in his study might be somewhat better at multitasking.

But the differences in the studies are not the point, Mr. Strayer said. “You’re off the charts in both cases,” he added. “It’s crazy to be doing it.”

At Virginia Tech, researchers said they focused on texting among truckers simply because the trucking study was relatively new and thus better reflected the explosive growth of texting. But another new study from the organization is focusing on texting among so-called light-vehicle drivers, specifically teenagers.

Preliminary results from that study show risk levels for texters roughly comparable to those of the truck drivers. The formal results of the light-vehicle study should be available later this year. By comparison, several field and laboratory studies show that drivers talking on cellphones are four times more likely to cause a crash than other drivers. And a previous Virginia institute study videotaping car drivers found that they were three times more likely to crash or come close to a crash when dialing a phone and 1.3 times more likely when talking on it.

Researchers focused on distracted driving disagree about whether to place greater value on the results of such a so-called naturalistic study or laboratory studies, which allow the scientists to recreate conditions and measure individual drivers against themselves.

But, in the case of texting, laboratory and real-world researchers say the results are significant — from both scientific methodologies, texting represents a much greater risk to drivers than other distractions.

A new poll shows that many drivers know the risks of texting while driving — and do it anyway. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety plans on Tuesday to publish polling data that show that 87 percent of people consider drivers texting or e-mailing to pose a “very serious” safety threat (roughly equal to the 90 percent who consider drunken drivers a threat).

Of the 2,501 drivers surveyed this spring, 95 percent said that texting was unacceptable behavior. Yet 21 percent of drivers said they had recently texted or e-mailed while driving.

About half of drivers 16 to 24 said they had texted while driving, compared with 22 percent of drivers 35 to 44.

“It’s convenient,” said Robert Smith, 22, a recent college graduate in Windham, Me., who says he regularly texts and drives even though he recognizes that it is a serious risk. He would rather text, he said, than take time on a phone call.

“I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.”

Mr. Smith, who was not part of the AAA survey, said he was surprised by the findings in the new research about texting.

“I’m pretty sure that someday it’s going to come back to bite me,” he said of his behavior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/te...28texting.html





Senators Seek Ban on Texting While Driving
Matt Richtel

States that do not ban texting by drivers could forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in federal highway funds under legislation introduced Wednesday in the Senate.

Under the measure, states would have two years to outlaw the sending of text and e-mail messages by motorists or lose 25 percent of their highway funds each year until the money was depleted.

“Studies show this is far more dangerous than talking on a phone while driving or driving while drunk, which is astounding,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, one of four senators to introduce the proposed legislation.

Mr. Schumer said the authors were responding to recent studies that have begun to quantify the risks of texting while driving. One study released earlier this week from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that truck drivers face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash when texting than when not doing so.

Research from the University of Utah, which used a driving simulator to study the ability of motorists to multitask, found an eightfold greater risk of crashing when texting. By comparison, Utah researchers showed that drivers using a cellphone to talk face a four times greater risk of crashing, about equal to someone with a 0.08 blood alcohol level, generally the legal limit for intoxication.

Currently, texting while driving is banned in 14 states, including Alaska, California and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia. The legislature in New York recently passed such a measure and sent it to the governor for a signature.

Regulation of the roadways generally happens at the state level. But in the past the federal government has exerted pressure on the states based of the threat of withholding federal highway funds, as Congress did in 1984 to pressure states to raise the minimum drinking age to 21 years.

Mr. Schumer said that the legislation was essentially based on the drinking age law.

The Governors Highway Safety Association, a group that represents state highway safety agencies in every state, opposes texting while driving but does not support the proposed legislation.

“We oppose sanctioning states since there is not yet a proven effective method for enforcing a texting or cellphone ban,” an association spokesman, Jonathan Adkins, said.

Safety advocates said that such concerns about enforcement were raised about seat belt laws but argued that the value of such laws — even if they could not be enforced all the time — created awareness about the issue and set societal guidelines for the behavior.

The other sponsors of the Senate measure include Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Kay R. Hagan of North Carolina.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/te...istracted.html





Black Hat Researchers Find 'Free' Parking in San Francisco

Tech-savvy hackers discover San Francisco's parking meters can't discern a genuine payment card from a fake.

At Black Hat this week, security researchers say that it is pretty easy for a technically savvy hacker to make a fake payment card that gives them unlimited free parking on San Francisco's smart parking metersystem.

According to Joe Grand, owner of Grand Idea Studio, San Francisco's parking meters have no way of telling the difference between a genuine payment card and a fake. These cards can be used to pay 23,000 meters citywide.

Grand, who hadn't worked worked much with smart cards said that the work wasn't particularly hard to do. His card that simply replays the same signals used by genuine cards to the meter. Although he never actually used the card to get free parking, Grand says he was able to build a card with a balance of $999.99 -- the maximum possible -- that would never run out of funds.

"If I found this problem, chances are somebody else knows about the problem and possibly is exploiting it," he said. "That's costing all of us taxpayers money."

To figure out how the payment system worked, Grand hooked up an oscilloscope to a parking meter and monitored what happened when he used a genuine payment card. He then analyzed that data by hand, and wrote a software program that would emulate the smart card. After some trial and error, he finally figured out what his program needed to say to the meter in order to work. Then he built a card that would replay the same data, using a programmable smart card called a Silver Card.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16937...ancisco.htm l





Researchers Try to Stalk Botnets Used by Hackers
John Markoff

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., are creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of rogue programs known as botnets.

Botnets are used extensively by malicious computer hackers to steal computing power from Internet-connected computers. The hackers harness the stolen resources into a scattered but powerful computer that can be used to send spam, execute phishing scams or steal digital information. These remote-controlled “distributed computers” are difficult to observe and track.

Botnets may take over parts of tens of thousands or in some cases even millions of computers, making them among the world’s most powerful computers for some applications.

“When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyberattack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,” said Ron Minnich, a Sandia scientist who specializes in computer security. “It’s an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.”

To stalk the botnets, Mr. Minnich and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers.

The researchers said they hoped to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet in October and then gather data on how the system behaves. One of the challenges will be in tricking the botnet components into believing they are running in the open Internet.

Some botnet makers have designed their programs to detect so-called honey pots, programs that pretend to be computers that can be taken over but which instead are used to capture and observe botnet clients.

Typically, supercomputers have been designed with the goal of reaching absolute computing performance, and used for complex scientific or engineering tasks like modeling the earth’s climate, protein folding or simulating nuclear weapons explosions.

The Sandia computer, which the researchers have named MegaTux, in a reference to Tux, the penguin character that is the official mascot of the Linux operating system, is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. For example, Microsoft researchers have created a vast visualization database they call the world wide telescope.

“One of the advantages of such a system is that we can stop the simulation at any point and look for patterns,” Mr. Rudish said. “It’s one of the neat things you can do when you crash a simulation of a 747 on a supercomputer.”

In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems.

The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer used for the Sandia project has 4,480 Intel microprocessors, far fewer than the million operating systems the researchers sought to simulate. But they used “virtual machine” software technology to get each microprocessor to simultaneously run many instances of a Linux-based component called a kernel — a basic component of an operating system that manages communications between software and hardware.

Because most botnets are written for the Windows operating system, the researchers are planning to use an open source program called Wine, making it possible to run Windows-based programs without actually having the complete Windows operating system. They said they were not using Windows itself because of the licensing costs of purchasing one million copies of Windows.

Besides simulating the Internet, Keith Vanderveen, manager of scaleable computing research at Sandia, said the system would be valuable for exploring the design of future supercomputers that might have millions rather than thousands of processors. It will also be invaluable for researchers who are hoping to design new, more secure protocols for the Internet.

“We will have a test bed where we will be able to try things out at Internet scale,” he said.

The researchers said they were collaborating with military contractors who are developing the National Cyber Range, a project financed by the Pentagon that is intended to be a testing ground for defensive techniques and new weapons developed for cyberwar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28comp.html





Hacker Loses Extradition Appeal
BBC

British hacker Gary McKinnon has lost his latest High Court bid to avoid extradition to the United States.

The US wants to try the 43-year-old, from Wood Green, north London, for what it calls the biggest military computer hack of all time, in 2001 and 2002.

Mr McKinnon admits hacking, but denies it was malicious or that he caused damage costing $800,000 (£487,000).

Whether or not he can appeal to the UK Supreme Court will be decided at a later date, Lord Justice Burnton said.

He said it was a matter which should be dealt with "as expeditiously as possible".

'Lawful and proportionate'

Glasgow-born Mr McKinnon had challenged refusals by the home secretary and the director of public prosecutions (DPP) to try him in the UK.

The home secretary insists he has no power to demand the trial take place in the UK.

The DPP refused to order a UK trial, saying the bulk of the evidence was located in the US and Mr McKinnon's actions were directed against the US military infrastructure.

He had also asked the court to rule on whether his Asperger's Syndrome meant he could not be extradited to the US.

His lawyers argued extradition was "unnecessary, avoidable and disproportionate" and had not taken place in other cases.

But, in a 41-page ruling, the judges said extradition was "a lawful and proportionate response to his offending".

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes and the US has a lawful right to seek his extradition, as we do when we wish to prosecute people who break our laws.

"The court judgement has also made absolutely clear that the DPP's decision not to prosecute in the UK was the right one.

"My predecessor has already sought and received clear assurances from the US that Mr McKinnon's health and welfare needs would be met, should he be extradited.

"It is open to Mr McKinnon to seek to appeal to the House of Lords."

UFO search

Mr McKinnon faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted in the US of what prosecutors have called "the biggest military computer hack of all time".

He has always insisted he was looking for classified documents on UFOs which he believed the US authorities had suppressed.

Speaking outside the High Court, his mother, Janis Sharp, said her son - who did not attend court - had been "naive enough to admit to computer misuse without having a lawyer and without one being present".

US-UK EXTRADITION TREATY

• 2003 treaty, agreed in aftermath of 9/11 attacks
• Offence must be punishable by one year or more in jail in both countries
• US has to prove "reasonable suspicion" for extradition of a British citizen
• To extradite an American from the US, British must prove "probable cause"
• Since 2004, 56 people have been sent from the UK to the US for trial, and 26 for US to UK
• US courts have granted about 70% of UK extradition requests, while nearly 90% of US requests have been granted

"We are heartbroken. If the law says it's fair to destroy someone's life in this way then it's a bad law."

She said she feared for his health.

"He's very ill, he's got really bad chest pains, it's affected him emotionally, mentally, every way, he's terrified," she said.

Ms Sharp appealed directly to US President Obama to intervene in the case.

"Stand by us and make this world a better place, a more compassionate place," she said.

"Obama wouldn't have this. He doesn't want the first guy extradited for computer misuse to be a guy with Asperger's, a UFO guy. He wouldn't want this.

"I'm just praying, please hear us, Obama, because I know you would do the right thing," she added.

In a statement, his lawyer Karen Todner, asked: "What does it take to make this government sit up and listen to the clear public view that Gary McKinnon should not be extradited?

"The extradition treaty with America was brought in to facilitate the extradition of terrorists and it must be clear to anyone following this case that Gary McKinnon is no terrorist.

"Why aren't they stopping the extradition of a man who is clearly vulnerable and who on the accepted evidence suffers from Asperger's?

"Gary is clearly someone who is not equipped to deal with the American penal system and there is clear evidence that he will suffer a severe mental breakdown if extradited."

Mr McKinnon accessed 97 government computers belonging to organisations including the US Navy and Nasa.

In February the Crown Prosecution Service refused to bring charges against Mr McKinnon in the UK.

The decision followed a ruling last October by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to allow his extradition.

Mr McKinnon has already appealed unsuccessfully to the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights and his latest judicial reviews in the High Court are likely to be his last chance.

His lawyers say the authorities have not given proper consideration to his Asperger's Syndrome, which could have "disastrous consequences," including suicide, if he was to be extradited.

They argued he was "eccentric" rather than malicious and should be tried on lesser charges in the UK to protect his mental health.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/8177561.stm





How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World'
Andy Greenberg

If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone," Miller told Forbes. "Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."

Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.

The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they've also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google's Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages. The trick could be repeated again and again to keep the user offline, Miller says. Though Google has patched the Android flaw, this second iPhone bug also remains unpatched, he adds.

The new round of bugs aren't the first that Miller has dug up in the iPhone's code. In 2007, he became the first to remotely hijack the iPhone using a flaw in its browser. But while that vulnerability gave the attacker a similar power over the phone's functions, it required tricking the user into visiting an infected Web site to invisibly download a piece of malicious software. When Miller alerted Apple in July of that year, the company patched the vulnerability before Miller publicized the bug at the Black Hat conference the following month. ("See: Hacking the iPhone.")

The new attacks, by contrast, can strike a phone without any action on the part of the user and are virtually unpreventable while the phone is powered on, according to Miller and Mulliner's research. And unlike the earlier exploits, Apple has inexplicably left them unpatched, Miller says. "I've given them more time to patch this than I've ever given a company to patch a bug," he says.

The Windows bug he and Mulliner plan to reveal hasn't been patched either, says Miller, though he admits that he and Mulliner discovered the Windows flaw on Monday and hadn't yet alerted Microsoft to its existence.

The attack developed by Miller and Mulliner works by exploiting a missing safeguard in the phones' text messaging software that prevents code in the messages' text from overflowing into other parts of the device's memory where it can run as an executable program. The two researchers plan to demonstrate how a series of 512 SMS messages can exploit the bug, with only one of those messages actually appearing on the phone, showing a small square. (Someone could easily design the attack to show a different message or without any visible messages, Miller cautions.) The entire process of infecting an iPhone and then using the device to infect another phone on the user's contact list would take only a few minutes, Miller says.

The vulnerability of SMS to that sort of attack will likely be a hot topic at this year's Black Hat and Defcon cybersecurity confabs. Two other researchers, Zane Lackey and Luis Miras, say they plan to present other vulnerabilities in major vendors' SMS applications, though they declined to discuss which vendors or the specifics of the vulnerabilities before the companies had issued patches.

Lackey and Miras argue that SMS demands far more attention from the cybersecurity community and device vendors. "Like a lot of mobile phone software, it's been relatively unexplored in the past," Lackey told Forbes. "Only recently has there been proper debugging and development tools available. SMS exemplifies a common trend: once it was a simple technology. Now it's being used in devices far beyond its original purposes, and security is still playing catch up."

The researchers' concerns aren't merely theoretical. Finnish security firm F-Secure says it's found nearly 500 different variants of mobile phone malicious software since 2004, mostly using Bluetooth to hop between phones in close proximity. But in the last 18 months, cybercriminals have begun using text messages to send links to malicious Web sites that infect the phone with malware, says Mikko Hyppönen, an F-Secure researcher.

One seemingly-Chinese variant, known as "Sexy View" and currently targeting the Symbian operating system, is far more threatening than an iPhone attack, given that around 50% of cellphones use Symbian, Hyppönen says. "After years of the security industry wondering why we aren't seeing text message worms, it's starting to happen now," he says.

While many of those ongoing attacks are merely hacker experiments, some have used phones to text premium numbers that generate revenue for cybercriminals. "Mostly it's still about curiosity and fun, but eventually the criminal guys move in," says Hyppönen. "We're probably on the verge of that right now."

As dangerous as his iPhone attack sounds, Miller argues that it's important to expose flaws in SMS software before they can be exploited by more malicious actors. Texting applications' insecurity isn't due to the software's complexity so much as the security community's inattention and the expense of sending thousands of text messages to test a phone's security, Miller says.

"The bad news is that SMS is the perfect attack vector, but the good news is that it's probably possible to build it securely," he says. "As a researcher, I can only show [Apple] the bugs. It's up to them to fix them."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/28/hac...y-hackers.html





Apple Patches iPhone SMS Security Hole With Software Update
Brian X. Chen

Apple has released a minor software update for iPhone, patching a security flaw revealed just yesterday.

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner on Thursday revealed a memory corruption bug that could be easily exploited by crashing an iPhone with a series of invisible text messages, which would then enable a hacker to hijack the device. From thereon, a hacker could control all the functions on the iPhone — most alarmingly, he could send more text messages to hijack even more iPhones.

The researchers demonstrated the SMS security hole at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. They also demonstrated the flaw by sending an attack to crash a CNET reporter’s iPhone.

On Friday morning, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1. Available through iTunes, the update “Fixes SMS vulnerability,” according to its description.

“We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.”

Apple moved even faster than necessary to fix the problem: Miller told Wired.com it took him two and a half weeks to discover the exploit. A hacker “really smart and lucky” could take a few days to replicate the attack, but that’s unlikely because “not many people in the whole world” have these skills, he said.

“Still, it just takes one bad guy a couple of weeks, and every iPhone could be attacked,” Miller told Wired.com in a phone interview.

Nonetheless, Jonathan Zdziarski, another iPhone security researcher, said he felt Miller sensationalized the problem with this stunt. He noted that many devices have vulnerabilities “in the wild” that nobody has exploited, and it’s unlikely a hacker would’ve devoted much energy to replicating Miller’s SMS attack, because there isn’t much to gain beyond annoying iPhone users.

“Every time we find a bug it’s been there for a year or more,” Zdziarski said. “At the very least it’s been six months, maybe longer.”

Miller acknowledged that the iPhone’s SMS weakness has probably existed for years; he first discovered the flaw in iPhone OS 2.0, which launched in 2008.

“The problem has been in the phone for year, but no one’s known about it,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “Now that it’s out in the open, [Apple] can fix it.”
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/apple-patch-sms/





Researchers Find Insecure BIOS 'Rootkit' Pre-Loaded in Laptops
Ryan Naraine

A popular laptop theft-recovery service that ships on notebooks made by HP, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Gateway, Asus and Panasonic is actually a dangerous BIOS rootkit that can be hijacked and controlled by malicious hackers.

The service — called Computrace LoJack for Laptops — contains design vulnerabilities and a lack of strong authentication that can lead to “a complete and persistent compromise of an affected system,” according to Black Hat conference presentation by researchers Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies.

Computrace LoJack for Laptops, which is is pre-installed on about 60 percent of all new laptops, is a software agent that lives in the BIOS and periodically calls home to a central authority for instructions in case a laptop is stolen. The call-home mechanism allows the central authority to instruct the BIOS agent to
wipe all information as a security measure, or to track the whereabouts of
the system.

For it to be an effective theft-recover service, Ortega and Sacco explained that it has to be stealthy, must have complete control of the system and must be highly-persistent to survive a hard disk wipe or operating system reinstall.

“This is a rootkit. It might be legitimate rootkit, but it’s a dangerous rootkit,” Sacco declared. The research team stumbled upon the rootkit-like technology in the course of their work on BIOS-based malware attacks. At last year’s CanSecWest security conference, the duo demonstrate methods for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that survive reboots and reflashing attempts.

The biggest problem, Ortega explained, is that a malicious hacker can manipulate and control the call-home process. That’s because the technology uses a configuration method that contains the IP address, port and URL, all hard-coded in the Option-ROM. At first run, Sacco explained that the configuration method is copied in many places, including the registry and hard-disk inter-partition space.

The duo found that it’s trivial to search and modify the configuration, giving them the ability to point the the IP and URL to a malicious site, where un-authenticated payloads can be directed to laptop.

Because the rootkit is white-listed by anti-virus software, the malicious modifications will go unnoticed. On unsigned BIOSes, Sacco and Ortega aid modifi cation of the confi guration allows for a very persistent and dangerous form of rootkit.

The pair recommended a digital signature scheme to authenticate the call-home process.

With the help of the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) and one major laptop manufacturer, Core Security has reported the problems to Absolute Corp., the company that makes the Computrace software.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3828





Cracked Windows 7 RTM Ultimate Activated with OEM SLP Master Product Key

The crack is available in the wild, including information and components download
Marius Oiaga

In less than a week since Windows 7 was released to manufacturing, the first crack for the Ultimate edition of the latest iteration of the Windows client is already available in the wild. The Windows 7 Build 6.1.7600.16385 Ultimate crack is capable of activating the high-end SKU of the operating system indefinitely. The product key comes from the only source possible, an OEM, as original equipment manufacturers are the first and for the time being the last group to receive the gold bits of the operating system from Microsoft. Together with the RTM development milestone of Windows 7, the Redmond company has also supplied OEM partners with activation product keys, one of which was extracted from a leaked OEM image of the platform.

Reports from various forums and websites (which I will not link to because they offer the proof-of-concept of the Windows 7 RTM Ultimate crack, along with the activation product key, which is illegal) indicate that the cracked client can bypass Windows genuine Advantage validation with no problems whatsoever. A Windows 7 Ultimate OEM DVD ISO from Lenovo has reportedly made the hack possible. Leaked on a Chinese forum, complete with the download links, the ISO allowed for hackers to grab the OEM-SLP (System-Locked Preinstallation) product key as well as the OEM certificate for Windows 7 RTM Ultimate via boot.wim.

The bypass designed for Windows 7 RTM involves abusing OEM activation 2.1, and in this regard the circumventing process is nothing more than an OEM hack. Via OEM activation 2.1, namely SLP 2.1, Microsoft allows OEMs to pre-activate Windows 7 for distribution preinstalled on new computers. In this context, the activation bypass process leading to the hacked Windows 7 RTM needs to be based on a BIOS (SLIC) hack first of all.

The procedure is by no means new. Hackers have managed to crack Windows Vista much in the same manner. In fact, the Windows 7 RTM Ultimate activation crack also relies on an OEM certificate from Windows Vista in order to function. At the time of this article hackers have made available in the wild SLIC 2.1 BIN harvested from

computers on the market, as well as the genuine OEM certificate digitally signed by Microsoft, which automatically brings to the table the Private Key and the OEM Public Key as well as the OEMID (from SLIC in BIOS). Together with the leaked OEM SLP master product key Windows 7 can be hacked and the activation process bypassed. The result is a cracked copy of Windows 7 RTM Ultimate permanently activated.

It also seems that the crack is not limited to Lenovo machines. The activation process can also be circumvented on HP, Dell, and MSI computers according to reports. Because of the OEM product key, the crack is limited to the Ultimate edition of Windows 7 (useless for all other SKUs, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional), but can be used on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the operating system.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Crack...y-117838.shtml





Windows XP to Windows 7: It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

The company's decision not to support upgrades from Windows XP is a rare misstep in the Windows 7 delivery process.
Lance Ulanoff

Windows 7Microsoft's decision to leave Windows XP users behind, with no easy upgrade path to Windows 7, is, possibly, the sole mistake of an otherwise pitch-perfect product development and launch campaign.

Yes, I know there's precedent for Microsoft not helping customers upgrade from multi-generations-old operating systems. When XP shipped in October of 2001, Windows 3.1 and even Windows 95 were left behind. The exact phrasing Microsoft uses in its literature is: "No Supported Upgrade Paths." When Vista shipped in January 2007, XP had multiple paths, but Windows 2000 (and older OSs) were left out in the cold.

To clarify, Microsoft isn't abandoning these users. The company is simply making it clear that for any user running a Windows operating system older than Vista, there is "no supported upgrade path." That means, of course, that you'll need a clean install to run Windows 7. Look, our tests have shown that Windows 7 is one of the leaner Windows OSs in recent years. It can even run on sub-powered netbooks. So, it'll likely run on your older systems (within reason, of course). However, if you want to move that XP system to Win 7, you'll need to do what Microsoft is calling a "Custom install." Microsoft describes it thusly:

"A custom installation gives you the option to either completely replace your current operating system or install Windows on a specific drive or partition that you select. You can also use Custom if your computer does not have an operating system, or if you want to set up a multiboot system on your computer."

Just so you know, "…replace your current operating system…" means starting over. You'll lose settings and will need to back up all your files to storage outside that XP system. All your apps will need to be reinstalled, as well. And you may have to manage some of the hardware driver updates, too. Microsoft also is not promising that all your XP apps will work with Win 7: The company has always promised that all Vista hardware and software would.

I don't think Microsoft is being unfair here. Like I said, this is how it has always done its upgrades. On the other hand, XP followed Win 98 and Vista followed XP. Despite some initial misgivings, users came to tolerate, if not like, 98 and XP, especially once each one of them got its Service Packs and Special Editions. These upgrades made a world of difference. By the time new OSs came along, adoption was pretty much universal.

Things are different now.

For one thing, perception of Windows Vista has been almost universally bad. It became the poster child for a product that over-promised and under-delivered. Like the OSs that came before it, Vista now has its own set of Service Packs. SP2 solved most of Vista's major issues, and now, it is, in fact, a good OS. But oh, the way Vista is perceived. It's been so bad that it's kept many consumers and huge swaths of businesses away. What's more, Vista, unlike Win 7, is a resource hog that demands a powerful system to run effectively.

And then there's the netbook thing. The netbook explosion created a very unusual problem for Microsoft. An operating system that Microsoft was trying to euthanize—XP—rose from the dead and now marches among us on netbooks, with its own third Service Pack. I don't think Microsoft planned the last one, but XP remained so popular that it had to release it. Netbooks are only serving to extend its improbable run. Eight years after XP's initial release, new systems are still selling with it preinstalled. Steve Ballmer must be cursing the netbook explosion.

Interestingly, when I went to the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference where the first Win 7 beta was introduced, Microsoft executives made a special point of showing off how well Win 7 runs on a netbook. They had to know that current netbooks are running XP. So, why didn't anyone push for an upgrade path?

The point is, XP may be an old OS but it's widely used. Consumers, in particular, will be squeamish about installing a completely new OS. I think the word of mouth about Win 7 is so good—and rightly so—that users will finally want to upgrade. However, when they hear that they have to replace their operating system and, ostensibly, rebuild their relatively new PCs, they could balk.

Microsoft is also ignoring the countless businesses that stuck with XP. I hate to admit it, but I work at one of them. Sure, I'm surrounded by PCs running Vista, Win 7, and even the Mac OS, but my work PC is XP (SP2!). My IT department, like so many others, wanted nothing to do with Vista, or the headaches they assumed they'd encounter. Microsoft needs companies to feel comfortable about switching to Win 7. If they can't upgrade from the OS most are using, they'll wait, too.

Obviously, many businesses will wait anyway (I know of some firms still running Windows 2000 and earlier OSs), but this Microsoft strategy will certainly scare off many XP users who were considering an upgrade. There is a bit of good news. Microsoft's decision has left the door open for third-party tools. LapLink (remember them?), for example, has created a utility that will let any XP user upgrade to Win 7.

There are still a few months before Win 7 ships. Perhaps Microsoft can do something on its own, too. Now that Win 7 is in RTM, it's unlikely Microsoft can do anything to the code, but the company could offer its own free migration utility.

Microsoft execs will read this and remind me that this is the way it's always been done and tell me my criticisms are unfair. I'd disagree and remind them that I believe in Win 7 and am only wondering why they'd do anything to harm its chances in the marketplace.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2350740,00.asp





Booyah Wants You to Level Up, Online and Off
Jenna Wortham

Tricking out your video-game character with the biggest weaponry, the brightest enchantments and the rarest pieces of armor can be half the fun of playing the game. Keith Lee, the chief executive of Booyah, a start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., is hoping to tap into that gear lust as a way to get players hooked on the company’s new iPhone game. But to succeed in the game, players will have to put their phones down once in a while.

Booyah Society, available free in iTunes, is both a social network and a game. Players customize an avatar and record their real-life activities, like going to a music festival, taking a cooking class or eating at a new restaurant. Each moment or activity logged earns points towards achievements, which are similar to quests performed in video games “but designed for the real world,” Mr. Lee said.

“It’s the first achievement system for life,” Mr. Lee said. He likens the points that players earn for noting their achievements to “being Boy Scouts and earning badges for learning to fish and camp.”

Mr. Lee and his co-founders, Brian Morrisroe and Sam Christiansen, know a thing or two about developing addictive games. The trio are all alumni of Blizzard Entertainment, which created World of Warcraft and the Diablo series.

In total, there are 180 achievements in the game and fulfilling each one unlocks a new feature for a user’s avatar. For example, logging a trip to Japan might reward the player with a custom ninja outfit for their digital character. The application will keep track of what activities players are most interested in doing — dining out, traveling, going to concerts — and make location-based recommendations.

Mr. Lee says the company does not plan to run advertisements on the application. Instead, he says, it will pursue pairing achievements with sponsors.

For example, buying a pair of Nikes in the real world — which could be verified via a location-based component of the game — would result in an increase in points and a spiffy pair of sneakers for a player’s in-game avatar. In addition, Mr. Lee said the company was exploring opportunities like sponsored restaurant recommendations and debuting an in-game currency that would allow players to purchase accessories for their avatars.

“There’s no shortage of business models here,” he said

Mr. Lee and his partners plan to roll out features to generate revenue in a later version of the application. For now, the company is funded by a $4.5 million round of financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers as part of their $100 million fund geared toward backing iPhone applications.

Booyah Society joins other mobile applications like Foursquare that are trying to bring online social networks into the real world. But Booyah will also foster a thriving virtual community, Mr. Lee said. Eventually, players will be able to take advantage of the peer-to-peer connectivity available in the latest version of the iPhone software, allowing avatars on separate iPhones to interact with one another. In addition, Booyah Society has a world map where players can see all the activities being recorded and achievements being awarded in real time.

These features will help contribute to and reinforce the overall goal of the application, Mr. Lee said, which is to help people achieve larger goals, like living greener, and reward them in a productive way.

“You’re not just getting a sword in a video game for completing a task,” Mr. Lee said. “You’re creating a better version of yourself in real life.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...e-and-off/?hpw





Green is Good

Ever wonder why projector systems and televisions doesn't use laser illumination? It isn't for safety reasons, and it isn't for efficiency reasons—laser diodes have efficiencies ranging from 30 to 50 percent. No, the problem is green light. We have red laser diodes, and blue laser diodes turned up nearly 15 years ago. But green—where the heck is the green laser diode?

A group of Japanese researchers have answered that question: in our lab. Yes, they have the first "true green" laser diode. It doesn't work that well yet but, based on past history, expect rapid progress from here and commercial laser diodes before the end of next year.

I guess the big question is "what took them so long?" And the answer to that question is a little bit complicated. First, lets take a look at "normal" lasers. The color of light generated by a normal laser, such as the red of a helium-neon laser or the blue-green of an Argon ion laser, is not under our control. Lasers require a rather special set of conditions to be met before they will work, and, nature only satisfies these with certain material/color combinations. This was, and continues to be, an immense source of frustration to scientists.

Laser diodes, which are made using the junction between two or more semiconductor materials, are slightly different. In this case, the color of the light is determined by the energy difference between the conducting electrons and the lowest available states in the nonconducting valence band. This gap can be adjusted by combining different materials and making sandwich structures, called quantum wells.

So, you end up with complicated materials, like alloys of aluminum, indium, gallium, and arsenide, combined with careful layering. One layer might have gallium, arsenide, and aluminum, while the next will have gallium, indium, and aluminum, and so on. To adjust the gap, one changes the ratios between the different components.

In principle, one can get any color, from blue right through to the mid-infrared, by combining the appropriate semiconductor materials. But the world had to wait about 20 years for the blue laser diode and another 15 years for green, so what went wrong?
Pooling indium and other difficulties

The general problem is that certain combinations of materials don't alloy very well. For instance, blue laser diodes use a gallium nitride system, and figuring out how to get nitride to mix through the gallium evenly turned out to be quite difficult. Green, it turns out, requires a high level of indium in certain layers of the quantum well structures. Unfortunately, the indium diffuses and pools together, and that messes up the whole structure.

The other problem is that gallium nitride has a natural electric field associated with it. Good gallium nitride substrates are typically grown in such a way that this field acts on electrons passing through the quantum well structures, preventing them from losing energy and emitting light. In other words, the electric field quenches emission in the blue-green and green part of the spectrum.

The new researchers, from Semiconductor Technologies R&D Laboratories at Sumitomo Electric Industries, got around the electric field problem by changing the orientation of the gallium nitride substrate. That is a story in itself, but, briefly, they found an appropriate template that encouraged the gallium nitride to grow so that it presents a different surface to the world, one that is electrically neutral. On to this, they grew the various layers required for a green laser diode. However, what they don't tell us is how they prevented the indium from diffusing. I would guess that the orientation of the substrate somehow slows the diffusion down.

In any case, the structure worked. They report laser emission for colors between 520 and 531nm, which is pretty much dead center on the green color required for display technology.

Of course, the laser wasn't very good: it was operated in pulsed mode (all lasers operate in pulsed mode when they are first switched on). The efficiency was also shockingly bad at 0.1 percent, mostly due to the pulsed nature—if we ignore the off time, the efficiency goes up to about 20 percent. The authors observe that the electrical contacts weren't optimized, leading to high resistive losses; the laser operated at about 20V, while a normal laser diode operates between 1 and 3V.

You can guarantee that those problems will be solved pretty quickly now that the researchers know they are on the right track. Once volume production starts, prices will fall into line with red and blue laser diodes, and then the cost of projection display systems should fall dramatically. In the end, what many researchers are aiming for are hand-held projection display systems.

For those of you wondering why green laser pointers exist, here is the short answer: take an infrared diode laser, use it to power another laser that is deep into the infrared. Use an optical nonlinear crystal to double the frequency and half the wavelength of that laser. You get 530nm light and profit from a complicated little device. The overall efficiency of this process, however, is something like 6 percent.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/...splay-tech.ars





Study: Jocks Talk About Own Station During Breaks
FMQB

A new study from Alan Burns and Associates examines what DJs talk about between songs, and find that most of the time, the topic of conversation is the station itself.

"We have felt for some time that music radio has come to be dominated by talk about the station, rather than content that’s driven by a focus on the audience," said Alan Burns and Associates CEO Alan Burns. "With this analysis we set out to discover whether that opinion was accurate. Unfortunately, it is."

Burns’ staff analyzed the verbal content (excluding commercials) of a sampling of AC and CHR stations in markets 10-100, and calculated the percentage of voice breaks containing or devoted to various topics. "In a typical hour’s 14 breaks, 10 will contain station positioning, and 7 will contain contest, promotional, sales, website, and/or text program information," said Burns. "Once you get past scheduled clichés like weather and celebrity gossip, the average station in this sample had only one break per hour containing a comment designed solely to address the audience about the audience or its interests. And that’s if we define a ‘listener-focused’ break very generously."

Burns notes that "We aren’t suggesting that we stop positioning and promoting. Far from it. But music radio does need to find ways to make what we do more about the listener and the music."

Further data and statistics can be found here on burnsradio.com.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=1432335





The Two Faces of Twiggy at 59: How Airbrushing in Olay Ad Hides Truth of the Skin She's In
Richard Simpson

It recently emerged that Twiggy was again to be the face of anti-ageing cream Olay, 25 years after she first won the job to become the fresh new face of one of the biggest beauty brands.

Yet pictured in a natural state a few weeks shy of her 60th birthday, Twiggy, who is often referred to as the original supermodel, showed she does in fact age just like the rest of us.

Out on a grocery shop to her local London Marks and Spencers, a brand she also promotes, she appeared to be the age of, well, a woman of 59.

With slight jowls and only hairline wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, Twiggy does indeed look good for her age.

However she bares very little resemblance to pictures, apparently of her, recently distributed to advertise Olay, whose catchphrase is 'Love the skin you're in.'

Airbrushing expert Michelle Facey of Facey Media said the amount of work done to wizard away the signs of aging in the advert picture was 'a sham' and 'totally misleading to the customer'.

She said: 'I think they have really gone overboard. Its a sham. I did not realise she looked so different in real life.

'She always seems so youthful. What I can see from the picture is that she has plenty of age spots all over face neck and decolletage.

'I would say she has had lip filler too. I am shocked by how much airbrushing has been done. She looks like a woman in her late 20's or 30's.

'This has to be the worst airbrushing I have ever seen in terms of making someone look younger it's completely unnatural and untrue. In my opinion, it's totally misleading to the customer.'

Almost a quarter of a century after she first became the face of Olay, Twiggy has been chosen to star in its latest advertising campaign.

She has signed up for a 12-month stint as the face of Olay Definitely, the brand's anti-ageing range.

Twiggy first promoted the Olay range back in 1985, when it was known as Oil of Ulay.

She became one of the most recognised faces of the Sixties after modelling boss Nigel Davies spotted her as a 16-year-old schoolgirl called Lesley Hornby.

Her waif look, which gave her new name, was an immediate hit with the British public and within weeks she became the 'Face of 1966'.

A year later pictures of Twiggy, complete with gamine haircut, long eyelashes and Mary Quant clothes, were adorning billboards in New York.

Her enduring appeal has seen her take a central role in the highly successful Marks & Spencer advertising campaign.

Sarah Clark, spokesman for Olay Definity, would not say how much the new deal was worth, but said: 'We were thrilled to welcome Twiggy back to the brand. She is a true beauty icon who continues to be an inspiration to millions of women across the UK.'

The stunning new pictures of Twiggy were taken by Karan Kapoor, the 1980s Bollywood actor turned photographer.

In the past Twiggy has spoken of her desire to maintain a natural look as she gets older. 'I'm grateful for my lines of wisdom,' she said.

'Of course, there are days when I think: "Oh my gawd, I look a bit tired". But I can pull it together if I have to.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...-shes-in.html#





Online Dating Makes NY Top City for Singles

New York has been rated the best U.S. city for singles, bumping Atlanta out of the top spot.

The Big Apple also edged past Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C., which rounded out the top five cities in the Forbes.com survey.

Atlanta fell to No. 6, followed by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

It was the first time New York had won the title in the annual poll that assessed 40 of the largest U.S. urban areas for coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dating, nightlife and ratio of singles to the entire population in the area.

But it was online dating that pushed it to the No. 1 position because it has more people with active online dating accounts than any other city in the country.

"Wherever you live, even if it's Jacksonville, Fla., which falls dead last on our list, there's a community of singles making the best of that particular place," said Lauren Sherman, of Forbes.com.

"Whether that means embracing the great outdoors around Denver or buying the next round of tequila shots in nightlife-oriented Virginia Beach, there are plenty of other like-minded people on the prowl. And, right now, the easiest place to find them is online," she added in a statement.

Financial stresses felt by New Yorkers in the last year caused a shift in priorities, which may also have contributed to New York's success, according to Forbes.com.

Whereas New Yorkers may once have been preoccupied with earning high salaries, they appear now to be putting a greater emphasis on finding love.

Compared with past years, Cleveland, Ohio, is the biggest gainer, moving up 24 spots from 38 to 14, while Providence, Rhode Island moved up 18 spots to No. 15

Phoenix, Arizona, performed less well, falling out of the Top 10 to No. 30.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56R6OV20090728





Love in 2-D
Lisa Katayama

Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or “big brother,” a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix “tan” to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

At 37, Nisan is already balding, and his remaining hair has gone gray. “I can’t eat meat because of my diabetes,” he said, chomping on a forkful of lettuce and okra. “I’m just an unlucky guy.” As Nisan and I talked, Nemutan stared demurely at her pumpkin soup. It was a national holiday, and the restaurant was packed with young families. Several mothers gave Nemutan inquisitive looks, but the majority seemed not to notice her.

Nisan told me that not long ago he had a real girlfriend, but that she dumped him. He carries Nemutan almost everywhere he goes, though he is more self-conscious about it than he may seem at first. “Some people don’t find this funny,” he said, “and it also takes up a lot of room.” He treats her the way any decent man would treat a girlfriend — he takes her out on the weekends to sing karaoke or take purikura, photo-booth pictures imprinted on a sheet of tiny stickers. In the few hours we spent together, I watched him position her gently in the restaurant booth and later in the back seat of his car, making sure to keep her upright and not to touch her private parts. He doesn’t take her to work, but he has a backup body pillow with the same Nemutan cover inside his desk drawer in case he has to work late at his tech-support job. “She’s great for falling asleep with on an office chair.” Nisan has seven Nemutan covers in total — he buys them at Internet auctions and at fan conventions whenever he finds a good deal (he paid $70 for the original). If one gets too faded and dirty from overuse, he layers a new one over it. On the day that I first met Nisan and Nemutan, Nisan was carrying a new Nemutan cover in his bag in case she needed to look fresh for a photograph. He knows it’s weird for a grown man to be so obsessed with a video-game character, but he just can’t imagine life without Nemutan. “When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.”

Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry. Like most otaku, the majority of 2-D lovers go to work, pay rent, hang out with friends (some are even married). Unlike most otaku, though, they have real romantic feelings for their toys. The less extreme might have a hidden collection of figurines based on anime characters that they go on “dates” with during off hours. A more serious 2-D lover, like Nisan, actually believes that a lumpy pillow with a drawing of a prepubescent anime character on it is his girlfriend.

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex. One of the biggest best sellers in the country last year was “Health and Physical Education for Over Thirty,” a six-chapter, manga-illustrated guidebook that holds the reader’s hand from the first meeting to sex to marriage.

Most 2-D lovers prefer a different kind of self-help. The guru of the 2-D love movement, Toru Honda, a 40-year-old man with a boyishly round face and puppy-dog eyes, has written half a dozen books advocating the 2-D lifestyle. A few years ago, Honda, a college dropout who worked a succession of jobs at video-game companies, began to use the Internet to urge otaku to stand with pride against good-looking men and women. His site generated enough buzz to earn him a publishing contract, and in 2005 he released a book condemning what he calls “romantic capitalism.” Honda argues that romance was marketed so excessively through B-movies, soap operas and novels during Japan’s economic bubble of the ’80s that it has become a commodity and its true value has been lost; romance is so tainted with social constructs that it can be bought by only good looks and money. According to Honda, somewhere along the way, decent men like himself lost interest in the notion entirely and turned to 2-D. “Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.” Honda insists that he’s advocating not prurience but a whole new kind of romance. If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those signals while looking at an inanimate character?

Honda’s fans took his message to heart. When he admitted to watching human porn at a panel discussion in Tokyo in 2005, several hundred hard-core 2-D lovers in the audience booed with shock that their dear leader had nostalgia for the 3-D world. Later, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, Honda clarified his position, saying that he was worried 2-D love was becoming an easy way out for young otaku, who might still have a shot at success in the real world. “I’m not saying that everyone should throw away hopes of real romance right away. I am simply saying that guys like me who have gotten to a point of no return can be happy living in 2-D.”

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

“It’s enlightenment training,” Takuro Morinaga, one of Japan’s leading behavioral economists, told me. “It’s like becoming a Buddha.” According to Morinaga, every male otaku can be classified on a moe scale. “On one end, you have the normal guy, who has no interest in anime characters and only likes human women,” he explained. “The opposite end, of course, is the hard-core 2-D lover.” Morinaga, a self-described otaku, didn’t have much luck with women until he became a well-regarded economist. Now he has a wife and a private office in a fancy apartment building near ritzy Tokyo Bay. “I’m a 2 — I still like human women better,” he said, a wide grin forming. “But there are many men who are on the opposite side of the scale. I understand their feelings completely. These guys don’t want to push ahead in society; they just want to create their own little flower-bed world and live there peacefully.”

For Nisan, who would probably score an 8 or a 9 on Morinaga’s moe scale, 2-D love is a substitute for real, monogamous romance. For others, just as fanatic as he, it can be a way of having more than one girlfriend at a time. Whatever a particular 2-D lover’s bent, there is a product made for him. Moe subculture has spawned a substantial market of goods centered on the desire to live in 2-D, from virtual girlfriends to body pillows to busty desktop-size figurines to cafes with waitresses dressed up as video-game characters. Every day, 2-D lovers come from all over Japan to Tokyo’s Akihabara district just to scour specialty shops and attend fan events in search of new character girlfriends to add to their collections.

I first met Ken Okayama one brisk and unusually windy Sunday morning in February, in front of a towering business hotel adjacent to Akihabara station. A tall and rather good-looking 38-year-old man, Okayama lives with relatives and works at a rural paint-application company in western Japan. He flies to Tokyo two to three times a year for the newest anime-related paraphernalia. “We don’t get a lot of anime in the boonies,” he said as he led me through a maze of nearly identical, unnamed side streets to the Gee! Store, sandwiched between a nondescript apartment building and a row of coin-operated lockers in a narrow alley. The walls were covered with kitschy posters, pillows and paraphernalia featuring wide-eyed, multicolor-haired anime girls in frilly panties and bikini tops. “There are two things you should be mindful of when buying a body pillow,” Okayama whispered as we combed the aisles, trying not to disturb the handful of other men perusing the merchandise. “First, there’s image quality. And then you have to choose one that feels good on the skin.” Polyester, for example, is less desirable than smooth knit.

Okayama was an early adopter of 2-D. He discovered anime about two decades ago when he was new to the work force and feeling suicidal. “I was having a lot of trouble,” he told me over coffee, making a slicing gesture with his hand by his neck. That’s when he encountered Sasami, a blue-haired, 10-year-old cartoon character from the anime “Tenchi Muyo!”

She lifted him right out of his misery. “It’s hard to explain in words, but it’s a feeling similar to romance. Sasami gave me the will to keep going.” Since then, Okayama has turned to 2-D for all his emotional needs — the desire to buy new anime helped him get through a period of unemployment in 2003, and his body-pillow girlfriends, whom he dates two or three at a time, consoled him when his first real-life girlfriend dumped him in 2007.

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Okayama’s flings were unconsummated, but for others 2-D love is a full-fledged alternative sexual lifestyle. Several hours after parting with Okayama in Akihabara, I met Momo at a fan convention. Momo, who makes X-rated body-pillow covers and sells them through his one-man club, Youkouro, which translates roughly as Furnace of Child Love, was there on business. The convention was being held inside a stuffy warehouse filled with boxes of 8-by-10, pamphlet-style, home-brewed manga and swarmed with thousands of anime fetishists, mostly men. Many 2-D lovers are unsatisfied with what the market has to offer, so they custom-make their own fantasy goods and come to conventions to barter and socialize with the like-minded. We left the warehouse and made our way to a fancy shopping mall, where we sat down on a bench. Momo began to flip through a catalog of more than a dozen prints of prepubescent anime characters with giant doe eyes in erotic poses. I flinched when a 5-year-old girl and her father plopped down behind us, but if Momo felt uneasy, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he seemed giddy from the great sales he’d made. “I sold four pillow covers today,” he said proudly.

Momo, whose real name is Toru Taima, has more than 150 body-pillow covers at home. His current favorite is Karada-chan, a copper-haired sixth grader from the anime “A Direction in the Day After Tomorrow.” She’s fully clothed in the cartoon, but in Momo’s imagination and thus on his pillow cover, she appears naked, her cheeks flushed, her prepubescent nipples hidden by her forearms, her white panties rolled down to her ankles. A translucent square etched onto the pillow cover censors her hairless vagina.

Every night, Karada-chan and at least two other animated preteens, drawn with large pink nipples and exaggerated labia, share a mattress with Momo, one on each side and another on top. “They’re so cute, I can’t stand it,” he said shyly. “It’s like my favorite girl comes to marry me every night. I just can’t stop thinking about them.” When Momo talks about Karada-chan, his mousy face lights up like a kid opening Christmas presents. “Her existence to me is like daughter, younger sister and bride all put into one.” Does he have sex with her? “Yes.” Is he interested in real women? “It’s not like I’m completely uninterested. But the last girl I really liked was when I was 12 years old.”

Momo told me he never looks at child porn. He lives with his sister and his 3-year-old niece, whom he insists he has no sexual feelings for. “I am not doing anything to harm anybody,” he said adamantly. “To me, these are works of art. They’re cute girls that live in my imagination.”

Momo says he hopes that one day soon, there will be a 3-D version of Karada-chan. In March, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology unveiled a 5-foot-2, 95-pound girl robot made “for entertainment purposes,” with an anime face and human proportions. The robot girl walked, batted her eyelashes and spoke basic Japanese. Momo is hopeful and confident that, in the very near future, this technology will be marketed. “I don’t care if people understand or not,” Momo said. “I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t have any nostalgia for reality. I’m happy living in the 2-D world.”

But not all 2-D lovers, as Toru Honda recognized, are ready to cast reality aside entirely. I couldn’t help remembering what Nisan told me, Nemutan held tightly in his left arm, as we walked out of the restaurant to the parking lot. “Of course I want to get married,” he said as we drove back to West Hachioji station listening to his favorite Eurobeat CD. “But look at me. How can someone who carries this around get married? People are probably wondering what psychiatric ward I escaped from. I would think the same thing if I saw me.” He widened his eyes in self-ridicule, then, the next moment, his expression became somber. “I’m pretty conflicted inside. People say there are some otaku who don’t want to get married, but that’s not true. Some have so little confidence that they’ve just given up, but deep inside their souls, they want it just as much as anybody else.”

If he ever does find true three-dimensional love, Nisan said, he hopes that his wife will accept Nemutan for who she is: “She is my life’s work. I would be devastated if that was taken away from me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/ma...-2DLove-t.html





Prisons Ban Inmates from Having Pen Pal Ads
Jessica Gresko

In her online profile, Paula Jones says she is 42, "nonjudgmental" and likes fishing, gardening and cuddling. There's a catch, though. Jones' picture shows her in her blue Florida prison uniform. She won't be out until at least 2010.

Her listing is posted on a Web site called WriteAPrisoner.com. She's looking for a pen pal.

"If you're looking for someone genuine and true, I'm looking for you," her profile says. "I'm just a stamp away."

By posting her profile, however, Jones is breaking a rule. Florida officials have banned inmates from having the Match.com-style listings, saying prisoners just create problems for their outside-the-pen pals.

Other states—Missouri, Montana, Indiana and Pennsylvania—have similar restrictions. Now lawsuits in Florida and elsewhere say the bans are unfair and violate First Amendment rights.

"The public knows when they're writing to these people that they're prisoners," said Randall Berg Jr., a lawyer representing two pen pal groups—including Florida-based WriteAPrisoner.com—that have sued in the state. "Nobody is being duped here."

WriteAPrisoner.com president and owner Adam Lovell says the bulk of the people who use his site to write to inmates are from religious groups, military people stationed overseas and others affected by the prison. Fraud isn't as widespread as Florida corrections officials suggest, he said.

Jones, who is serving time in a women's prison north of Orlando, wrote in a letter to The Associated Press that she's not a danger to potential pen pals. She says she wants someone to write to for emotional support and to be less lonely.

"Not everyone has (ulterior) motives, lies or solicits," wrote Jones, who pleaded guilty to cocaine possession with the intent to sell. "Some of us ... even if it's very few are truly genuine and hope to meet someone good in our life."

But the Florida Department of Corrections doesn't want to take any chances. In 2003, the department changed its policy to prohibit inmates from advertising for pen pals or getting mail from pen pal groups. Inmates who continue to advertise can have privileges such as visitation or phone calls revoked.

The department made the change after receiving complaints from people who had been taken advantage of and from victims and their families who saw prisoners' ads, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger.

"We're doing it to protect the public," Plessinger said. "Inmates can have pen pals—they just can't solicit for pen pals."

Other states make similar arguments and have now drawn similar lawsuits.

In Indiana, the American Civil Liberties Union is representing prisoners protesting the state's policy, which also prevents inmates from advertising on Web sites or receiving mail from pen pal organizations.

The ACLU also says it is working on a lawsuit over Missouri's policy and investigating the policy in Montana, where inmates may not receive mail from people who identify themselves as a pen pal.

For now, some Florida inmates are ignoring the ban and listing themselves anyway. The inmates communicate with the sites by sending letters in the mail, and sometimes family members pay the fees for the sites, about $40 a year for WriteAprisoner.com and other sites.

On WriteAprisoner.com, Florida members range from a 41-year-old who tells potential pals she's a 36DD to a 28-year-old who says he has had a "bumpy lifestyle" and is on death row for a crime he didn't commit.

Then there's a man spending life in prison for first-degree murder who has found another way around the ban.

"Please note that the Florida prison system is now locking us up in confinement for placing ads for pen pals," he writes on his WriteAPrisoner.com page. "So if you respond to this ad please don't mention the profile."

———

On the Net:

Florida Department of Corrections: http://www.dc.state.fl.us/

WriteAPrisoner.com: http://writeaprisoner.com/

http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_12936332
















Until next week,

- js.



















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