Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 24th, '09

[JackSpratts]

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October 24th, 2009




Europe Paves Way for Three-Strikes Style ISP Disconnection Policy
MarkJ

The European Parliament appears to have surrendered to pressure from Member States by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens' right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access, such as customers being cut-off from the Internet by their ISP.

Under the original amendment 138 text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments now have legal grounds to force UK ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when "suspected" of illegal downloading).

The Amendment 138 Update Text

"Any such measures liable to restrict those fundamental rights or freedoms may only be taken in exceptional circumstances and imposed if they are necessary, appopriate and proportionate within a democratic society, and shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and with general principles of Community law, including effective judicial protection and due process.

In particular, any measures may only be adopted as a result of a prior, fair and impartial procedure ensuring inter alia that the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned be fully respected. Furthermore, the right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed."

Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net, said:

"Amendment 138 was in haste dissolved into useless legalese and soft consensus. The Parliament hurried to get rid of the safeguards of citizens' freedoms because it knew that with the imminent coming into effect of the Lisbon treaty, both institutions will soon share the legislative power in the field of judicial affairs. And the bad excuses we have heard these past few days to justify to abandon amendment 138 will then be totally obsolete. In the end, the Parliament was not brave enough to stand against the Council to defend citizens' freedoms.

Ministers of Member States, who want to be able to regulate the Net without interference from the judiciary, were rushing to kill amendment 138 and put an end to the negotiations. It is a shame that the Parliament's delegation, and especially rapporteur Catherine Trautmann, was not determined enough to use the political context to assert its authority in the European lawmaking process in order to protect European citizens. Even though it has been an interesting and constructive discussion, amendment 138 has turned, by the lack of courage of the delegation, into the emblem of the powerlessness of the Parliament."

Score 1 for Peter Mandelson.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/200...on-policy.html





France Adopts Three-Strikes Law for Piracy
Greg Sandoval

France has adopted a strong antipiracy law, one that may mean those who chronically share unauthorized movies and music online will lose Web access for up to a year.

France's top constitutional court approved a revised plan to penalize those accused multiple times of infringing intellectual property, according to a report published Thursday in The New York Times.

In the spring, the court rejected an earlier version of the law.

Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the French court's decision.

"Today's decision is an enormous victory for creators everywhere," Glickman said. "It is our hope that ISPs will fully honor their promise to cooperate and that the French government will take the necessary measures to dedicate resources to handle the enormous task ahead."

Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel at NBC Universal, said: "The French action recognizes that jobs and economic growth in creative industries are under assault by digital theft. We need a safe and secure Internet that enables consumers to access content easily but does not facilitate illegal file sharing that kills jobs in creative sectors."

Under the law, a new agency will be created that will issue termination notices to Internet service providers, and they will in turn cut off access to customers accused of piracy. But first, in cases where the agency wants to terminate service, it must first go through some kind of judicial review.

One of the ways the law was revised to gain acceptance by the French court is to require a judge to review each case before anyone's Internet access is shut down.

It's doubtful that a law like this could be adopted in the United States, at least at this point. Both the film and music industries have shied away from lobbying for a three-strikes law. But they have appealed to ISPs to voluntarily create what they refer to as a graduated-response program. This would call for the ISPs to issue warnings to chronic copyright offenders and potentially cut off service for those who refuse to comply.

There is yet another way that copyright owners could get ISPs to help in their antipiracy efforts, according to Gwen Hinze, international policy director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

She says the United States could agree to a three-strikes rule as part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, being negotiated by legislators in the United States, Japan, the European Union, among others.

In this way, U.S. copyright owners could create a law without any public debate, Hinze said. She called any such attempt "policy laundering."

ACTA members are scheduled to gather again for more talks later this year.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10381365-261.html





70% Oppose Internet Ban for Filesharers, Poll Shows
Patrick Wintour

Plans to force internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect suspected illegal downloaders have been roundly rejected in a new YouGov poll, the first time public opinion has been tested on the issue.

Nearly 70% of those surveyed said someone suspected of illegal downloading should have a right to a trial in court before restrictions on internet use were imposed. Only 16% were in favour of automatic curbs based on accusations by copyright holders such as musicians, as is proposed by the business department.

ISPs such as TalkTalk and T-Mobile complain that the government's proposals expect them to bear the costs of protecting a third party's rights. They warn that the move will not work because illegal filesharers can avoid detection by encrypting the traffic, or by hijacking someone else's IP address or using their Wi-Fi network.

Ministers have insisted that disconnection is a last option and something on which they are consulting. They are, however, facing a growing backlash, with an all-party motion urging a rethink of the policy on disconnection being led by Tom Watson, the former cabinet office minister responsible for digital inclusion.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, the organisation that commissioned the YouGov poll, called the government's plans extremist.

"This poll shows people rely on the internet, and an overwhelming majority think that access should only ever be withdrawn as the result of court action.

"Nearly a third would be much less likely to vote for a party that supports disconnection proposals.

"Clearly Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, is out of step with public opinion and should think again."

The poll also found that among younger voters, the threat of internet disconnection for online copyright infringement might be a vote-changing issue.

Meanwhile the Conservative shadow culture secretary told the Financial Times a Tory government would scrap the proposed 50p a month tax on all telephone lines, aimed at raising £150m to £175m a year to support rural broadband projects. Jeremy Hunt said it would be scrapped a "soon as possible" after the general election expected in May. He said the party was also considering reversing government plans to force the BBC to share £130m of the television licence fee with other broadcasters.

The poll found a third of UK citizens (31 %) would be much less likely to vote for a party that supported internet disconnection for infringements.

A further 13% would be a "little less likely" to vote for that party: in total, 44% would be less likely to vote for a party that supported such a policy.

Nearly three quarters (73%) said if they were disconnected, they would find their ability to use vital commercial services, such as shopping and banking, completely disrupted or fairly harmed.

When asked to choose, respondents also supported the right to a trial before punishments are imposed.

A total of 68% of respondents said that, if the Government's proposals go ahead, a court should consider the evidence before restrictions were imposed, while only 16% were in favour of automatic procedures based on accusations, as is currently proposed.

An inquiry into the issue by the all-party parliamentary communications group concluded last week that "much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available".

It added: "We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal filesharing should not be further considered."

The commons motion tabled by Watson and others calls for users to be given the right to go to court before seeing their access to the internet is ended.

Sion Simon, the minister for the internet, insists the government will not allow arbitrary disconnection.

In an article in the Birmingham Post he explained: "As a first step, where rightsholders identify unlawful activity, ISPs will be obliged to notify accountholders that their account appears to have been used to infringe copyright.

"The infringer (who may, for instance, be a child) is very often not the accountholder (perhaps a parent), who will often be quite unaware of what is happening. For many people, a letter will be all it needs to put an instant stop to the offences.

"ISPs would also be obliged to keep anonymised records of the number of times individual subscribers are identified breaking the law.

"On production of a court order, that data could be used in targeted court action by rightsholders against those responsible for the most damaging breaches of copyright."

He has stressed that only as a last resort government could require "Ofcom to demand that ISPs take technical measures against those people who repeatedly ignore the law. That could mean capping the broadband speed or filesize someone can access".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...s-internet-ban





U.K. Committee Opposes Cutting Off File-Sharers
Andre Paine

While the U.K. government has been consulting on technical measures including suspension of Internet accounts for file-sharers, a parliamentary committee has issued a report that blames the music industry for much of the file-sharing problem and opposes any policy of disconnection.

The All Party Parliamentary Communications Group (apComms) report, "Can we keep our hands off the net?," included analysis of whether ISPs should be doing more to monitor "bad" traffic on their networks. However, it found that any disconnection of file-sharers - the government has actually only spoken of "suspension" of accounts since it toughened up its proposals in August - would be "inappropriate."

In its report, apComms published a recommendation "to terminate the current policy-making process on what should be done about illegal file-sharing," and said government should re-start the process once the EU has finished negotiating its Telecoms Package. The European Parliament has been at odds with the European Council: the Parliament passed an amendment to the telecoms package in May stating that Internet access cannot be restricted "without prior ruling by the judicial authorities."

The apComms report further states that future policy "should not include the disconnection of end users, because this is not in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment," the process whereby government is further opened up to citizens via information and communication technology.

"The report concludes that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rights holders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting its act together and making popular legal alternatives available," the report states.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...99be577558adee





Court Order Required To Tackle U.K. P2P Users
Andre Paine

U.K. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has told parliamentarians that proposals to tackle illegal file-sharing will require court orders.

The government toughened up its proposals in August to include possible suspension of Internet access for file-sharers, but Bradshaw has now offered some assurances on the controversial measures.

Bradshaw told MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee that suspension "would be as a very last resort for serial and serious infringement, would be subject to a strict two-stage process."

"It wouldn't just happen on the basis of an accusation," he said at the Oct. 20 committee hearing. "Firstly there would need to be a court order for any of the technical measures."

A court order would not be needed in the majority of cases - a warning letter would be the first move under the plan - and he stressed that there would be a right of appeal.

The government is set to outline its proposals in the coming weeks.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...15e8d1029fc832





Judge Allows EMI to Personally Sue Robertson
Greg Sandoval

The copyright lawsuit filed by major recording company EMI against Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes.com, took an unexpected turn on Friday.

A U.S. District judge will allow EMI to file suit against Robertson personally--not just his company, MP3tunes, according to a copy of the judge's decision. Besides accusing MP3tunes of violating its copyright in a suit filed in November 2007, EMI also named Robertson as a defendant.

A year ago, a judge in the case threw out the copyright-infringing charges against Robertson, but on Friday, Judge William Pauley, for the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, decided to let EMI once again name Robertson as a defendant.

The reason for the switch was the new evidence provided by MP3tunes' former president. In April of 2008, Emily Richards gave a deposition. In July of this year, 10 months after she left the company, she gave another one. In the latter testimony, Richards said Robertson was making a lot of the decisions for the company and that Robertson handled "technical, product decision, and legal matters without her involvement." This, argues EMI, shows that Robertson exercised control over MP3tunes and this should allow it to bring a suit against him personally.

MP3tunes, which allows users to store their songs in a digital locker and access them from any Web-enabled device, argued that this statement was consistent with Richards' earlier testimony. The judge didn't buy it.

"From the court's review of both depositions, it is clear that Richards provided new testimony," Pauley wrote.

Robertson said on Monday afternoon that the difference between Richards first deposition and her last was that EMI paid her $10,000. An EMI spokeswoman could not be reached for comment.

In Pauley's decision, he notes that EMI agreed to compensate Richards for "documented legal fees and costs up to $10,000" as well as pay expenses for her lawyer. The judge apparently saw nothing wrong with the arrangement. Pauley however noted that Richard testified that she left the company at Robertson's request, a fact that "bears on her credibility."

The good news for Robertson, who also founded MP3.com (now owned by CNET publisher CBS Interactive) and Linspire, is that Pauley threw out one of EMI's copyright claims. EMI's other claims, however, will be allowed to proceed.

Robertson, who in the past has called EMI's attempts to sue him personally "despicable," said that EMI's attempts to go after his personal assets is the music label's newest way of discouraging technologists from developing businesses that use their content in ways they don't like.

"We want to argue the merits of the case," Robertson said. "They want to drag it out...people should be able to store their music online."

The case is scheduled to go to trial in March.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10377908-261.html





Court Orders The Pirate Bay To Delete Torrents
Ernesto

The Amsterdam court today ruled that The Pirate Bay must remove a list of copyrighted torrents from their website within three months. In addition they have to block Dutch users’ access to parts of the site where copyrighted torrent can be downloaded. If not, the three ‘operators’ will have to pay penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day.

In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court. The anti-piracy outfit won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.

Today the Amsterdam Court announced that the earlier default judgment has been nullified. That is, the three operators don’t have to block access to all Dutch users.

It was concluded that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court the site does assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

The defense had argued that not Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.

The Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works. The list is to be provided by BREIN, and is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The defendants are given three months to comply, if not, they will face penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day.

In addition to removing the torrents the defendants have to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site (across all their domains) where users can download copyrighted files. Finally, the three have to cover the costs BREIN made for the court case.

Ernst-Jan Louwers, the lawyer for the three Pirate Bay defendants told TorrentFreak that his clients are currently considering whether or not to appeal this judgment.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...rrents-091022/





Pirate Bay Appeal Postponed Till Summer 2010
Ernesto

This April, four people received harsh sentences for their involvement with The Pirate Bay. The four soon announced that they would appeal the verdict. Initially the appeal was scheduled to take place in November, but due to controversies surrounding some of the judges, the case has now been delayed till summer next year.

On April 17th, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available.’ The Court sentenced the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each.

While awaiting the appeal that was announced immediately after the verdict, The Pirate Bay continued to operate as if nothing had happened. In the background, however, both the defense and prosecution teams were preparing for the appeal which was scheduled to take place next month.

The timing of the appeal was not ideal for several of the defendants and their lawyers. They consequently tried to postpone it to a later date but this request was initially denied. However, thanks to concerns about the objectivity of some of the judges involved, the appeal has been rescheduled after all.

“I just came out of a meeting where we decided to postpone,” Appeal Court Council Ulrika Ihrfelt said this morning.

The reason for the delay are the bias accusations against two of the main judges appointed to the appeal. Both judges have ties to pro-copyright groups and last week defense lawyer Samuelsson announced that he will take the bias question to the Supreme Court. This, after his initial request failed at the Appeal Court.

Samuelsson now has to file his complaints at the Supreme Court within four weeks, and because the appeal is supposed to start close to the end of this deadline the Appeal Court decided that it was best to postpone the case.

No official date has been set for the delayed appeal but according to Ulrika Ihrfelt it will take till at least summer 2010 before the Court has time to handle the case. Until then it will be business as usual for The Pirate Bay, providing that the operators can solve all the technical problems they’ve run into during the past days.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-a...r-2010-091019/





200 Spanish File-Sharing Sites Identified
Howell Llewellyn

The names of 200 Web sites that offer links to illegal downloads in Spain are to be given to the Spanish industry ministry as the first major move in the fight against online music piracy, it was announced in Madrid today (Oct. 19) at the presentation of a report called Parasites' Business.

The joint presentation was made at a leading Madrid business school by the Coalition of Creators and Content Industries and the CoPeerRight Agency. It comes just over a week after the government announced the creation of an inter-ministerial commission to draw up legislation to combat intellectual property violations. The commission must report their conclusions by Dec/ 31.

"Spain is the only country in the world with no legal, civil or administrative measures in place to combat this problem", said Coalition president Aldo Olcese. "This is a legal desert, a piracy paradise. But now we have the first official recognition that we have a problem of grand dimensions. In response, we shall be sending the list of Web site names in the next few hours to the ministry, to facilitate the government's work with the greatest speed."

The Coalition represents the culture industry through labels' association Promusicae, collecting society SGAE, and various cinema and videogame organizations. CoPeerRight Agency says it is the premier anti-piracy investigative agency in the world. It was formed in Paris in 2003, and has had offices in Madrid and other European and Latin American cities since 2005.

CoPeer's international business manager Romina González gave advertising and other income figures based on CoPeer's research, which indicate the average illegal commercial Web site in Spain can earn €1.5 million ($2.2 million) a year.

"On average, the main commercial pirate Web sites housed in Spain declare they have some 150,000 users each, and many of them could reach 4 million unique visitors in one month", she added.

Olcese claimed that the Coalition, as "Spain's digital content industry, has been a pioneer in centering the fight against digital piracy on the regulation of these link sites, or supermarkets of piracy, instead of against the users."

He said he was "moderately satisfied" with the decision to set up a government commission, which involves eight ministries, and says the Coalition has already had its first "technical" meeting with some of the commission.

When asked by Billboard.biz what strategy the Coalition will adopt towards the commission, Olcese said "we think there is a correlation between the setting up of this commission, with the fact the Spain's assumes the six-month presidency of the European Union next January 1, and with the improved relationship between the leaders of the Spanish and U.S. governments".

Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero made his first official visit to the White House last week on Oct. 13, after six years in office. Relations with the Bush government were cool after Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq the same day that Zapatero took office. Before summer, the U.S. government criticised Spain's inaction on digital piracy.

Olcese added, "We gave the government last April our proposals to establish an official register of legal Web sites, and act against illegal sites. When we meet the commission, we shall reiterate our position."

When asked about claims by some in the industry that the piracy problem in Spain has been exaggerated, CoPeer's González said "We have investigated the issue in the US, France, Germany, the UK... our comparative data shows that the level of [illegal] downloading in Spain is impressively large."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...0b03f51fbe853a





Demonoid: An Interview With Their Ukranian Host
enigmax

Demonoid is one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the planet and, unfortunately for those interested in the site, also one of the most secretive. With the site currently out of action with little indication when it will return, there are certainly plenty of questions. An interview with Demonoid’s Ukranian host certainly proves to be of great interest.

While the admins of some of the larger public torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt are happy to give interviews, many others demonstrate a certain phobia of the media.

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-an-...n-host-091022/





MPAA: Antipiracy is Now 'Content Protection'
Greg Sandoval

The six largest Hollywood film studios are apparently dissatisfied with the way their trade group has waged war on illegal file sharing. CNET News has learned that at least three leaders of its antipiracy operations have been fired.

Among the three who were quietly ushered out of their posts at the Motion Picture Association of America three weeks ago was Greg Goeckner, the MPAA's general counsel. The others were the MPAA's director of worldwide antipiracy operations and its deputy director of Internet antipiracy. Goeckner will remain with the MPAA until the end of the year.

Other MPAA staffers were let go as part of a dramatic restructuring of the piracy-fighting operations, which included dropping the word "antipiracy" in favor of the term "content protection."

According to two sources in the film industry, the MPAA's antipiracy leadership had failed to impress studio executives, some of whom were concerned that the unit lacked aggressiveness. The reshuffling at the highest levels of the MPAA's antipiracy efforts will undoubtedly be seen as a black eye for MPAA CEO Dan Glickman.

An MPAA spokeswoman declined to comment on the firings but said that Daniel Mandil, an MPAA senior executive vice president, has been named general counsel and chief of content protection. He will oversee the association's combined legal and antipiracy efforts.

The shifts come as the sharing of movie files continues to creep toward mainstream adoption. In the past, digital copies of movies were too big to transmit easily on the Internet, but file-sharing technologies are improving, and sending large movie files is becoming easier.

Hollywood fears that the pirating of movies will become as common as the illicit sharing of music files. Studio insiders say they know that the answer isn't lawsuits but the hope is that Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, and other bandwidth providers will help them thwart file sharing at the network level. So far, though, the music and film industries have failed to get the major ISPs very involved.

As for Glickman, the whispers from studio execs for over year is that the former U.S. secretary of agriculture (under former President Bill Clinton) hasn't been very effective since taking over at the MPAA in 2004. One source said that Glickman won't make it to the end of his contract, which runs out in September 2010.

The MPAA denied an impending early departure for the executive.

"This week Dan Glickman met with several of the MPAA member company studio executives, as he often does," said Angela Martinez, an MPAA spokeswoman. "During those meetings he reconfirmed his plans to continue in his role as chairman and CEO through the remainder of his contract. They welcomed that commitment and expressed their continued confidence in him."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10376839-261.html





Achtung! Criminal Investigation Against YouTube Underway in Germany

A criminal investigation has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany, over allegations of copyright infringement, according to media reports from that country. The case started after a complaint by German music rights holders; Hamburg’s prosecutor has formally requested assistance from U.S. colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos.

It’s unclear if the investigation will ever result in an actual court case. German prosecutors routinely throw out criminal investigations against copyright infringement, leaving it up to the parties involved to pursue civil lawsuits or settle out of court. The case does, however, once again demonstrate that Viacom’s massive one billion-dollar lawsuit isn’t the only copyright dispute Google has to tackle. There are regularly lawsuits all around the globe accusing YouTube and Google as running a worldwide video platform. Indeed, at a time when fragmented rights and universal access continue to collide, not irking rights holders seems impossible.

The current investigation started as the result of a formal complaint by Hamburg-based lawyer Jens Schippmann, who represents 25 German musicians, producers and music publishers. Schippmann sued Google in civil court earlier this year, alleging that videos of his clients have been viewed more that 125 million times without any compensation. Schippmann now alleges that Google didn’t respond to requests to take down more that 8,000 videos and that his clients were denied access to the company’s Content ID Program. He also claimed that users would utilize YouTube as a kind of “covert file-sharing platform,” tagging his clients videos with keywords like “album quality” to encourage downloading.

Google strongly objected to these claims, according to a report by German IT news site Netzwelt.de. German Google spokesperson Henning Dorstewitz rejected the idea that executives or other employees of Google or YouTube were committing criminal acts of infringement. “We cooperate with thousands of rights holders across the globe,” Dorstewitz told Netzwelt.

He was undoubtedly referring to Google’s Content ID system, which is able to identity songs used in videos based on audio fingerprinting technologies, among other things. Google recently told us that more than a thousand rights holders have utilized Content ID to date, with the total number of reference files used to identify rights holders’ works now being north of a million. Content ID makes it possible to flag certain videos or songs used in videos for takedown, but rights holders can also elect to keep these videos up and instead monetize them through advertising. These decisions can be country-specific, making it possible, for example, to monetize content in the U.S. and take it down in other countries.

Content ID hasn’t stopped rights holders around the globe from crossing swords with Google. Part of the problem is that music rights are extraordinarily complicated, with many different parties owning rights to the same song based on the type of use as well as the territory. One example: Licensing talks between the German music rights group GEMA and YouTube broke down this spring. German YouTube users have not only had to go without countless videos featuring songs licensed by GEMA ever since, but they won’t be able to watch U2’s YouTube concert that will be streamed live by the site this Sunday, either.

However, the current criminal investigation wouldn’t go away even if Google and GEMA made up tomorrow. The rights holders represented by Schippmann only signed over certain rights to GEMA and instead decided to go after Google by themselves.
http://newteevee.com/2009/10/23/acht...ay-in-germany/





German Book Publishers Cool to eBook Market
Ron Miller

In a story this week by German news magazine Der Spiegel, I was surprised to learn that German book publishers are actively avoiding the eBook market, fearing it will eat into their print publishing business, instead of seeing it as an obvious new market for consumers to read their books.

eBook Market Slow to Grow in Germany

For now, the eBook market in Germany is lagging far behind the US and other countries where eBook readers are being sold. In fact, according to numbers cited in the article, 10,000 readers have been sold in Germany. Recent projections have the Kindle selling 1.2M units in the US in the 4th quarter of 2009 alone (and that's just one manufacturer). German readers bought just 65,000 eBooks in the first six months of this year compared with some estimates that have Kindle owners buying 600,000 ebooks per *week*.

This is partly due to the way that Germany regulates its publishing industry keeping book prices artificially high in an effort to protect authors, publishers and small book sellers in a highly competitive marketplace, and partly because German publishers want to keep the prices of eBooks high.

To that end, eBooks are only made available only after the paper back version of book has hit stores, and then, unlike the US where the eBook is sold for a fraction of the cost of the hard cover version, German eBooks are sold at the cost of the cheapest printed version, not exactly making it an attractive buy to the average German consumer.

Why Fear the Future

The whole approach seems rather silly to me because the eBook market represents just another way to market and sell the book. eBook Readers remain too costly for most consumers to buy their books in this fashion, and as I've written in the past, unless they come down substantially, it's likely eBooks will remain a niche market for the foreseeable future. That said, there is a market there and to ignore or to quash it, makes little sense to me. If the idea of these pricing strategies is to protect the publishing business, then it doesn't make sense to cut off a market that could contribute to the revenue stream for author and publisher alike.

Exploring the Lower Costs

Yes, eBooks cost less than their paper counterparts, but there is a corresponding lower cost of production for a digital copy. There is no printing involved, eliminating the need to run expensive presses and to roll trucks (and planes) to distribute the books to a network of book sellers around the world. This would seem to increase profit margin by eliminating a substantial part of the cost of producing the printed work, and therefore justifying the lower cost.

Regardless, eBooks aren't likely to completely eliminate the market for print any time soon. There will always be people who prefer to hold the printed work in their hands, and publishers can encourage this market by creating special print versions. For German book publishers to try and limit a market that could help publishers and writers make additional money seems to be missing a substantial opportunity, and carrying their desire to protect the industry a bit too far.
http://www.daniweb.com/news/story231190.html#





Are We Due a Wave of Book Piracy?
Finlo Rohrer

The Kindle is here. But will the arrival of Amazon's much-hyped e-book reader prompt a wave of book piracy?

The Kindle has landed. That is to say, the first Kindles are being sent out by Amazon today. Some may find their way into excited, sweaty palms by tomorrow.

It's a big moment for the e-reader. While the US has had the Kindle for a while, many will be hoping its global launch will be an "iPod moment" where the new technology becomes mainstream.

The Kindle isn't the first e-reader. Sony, Bookeen, Elonex, Samsung and iRex are also among the firms fighting to win this particular consumer technology battle. But it is backed by Amazon, perhaps the most powerful bookseller in the world.

It's hard to sit on a bus anywhere in the country these days without seeing the ubiquitous white bud headphones that signal the presence of an iPod.

And while music downloading didn't start with the arrival of Apple's player, it gave many otherwise law-abiding customers another reason.

So it is perhaps understandable that there will be more than a little trepidation in the publishing industry as the Amazon Kindle becomes available outside the US for the first time.

Brownsploitation

Even without the proliferation of the e-reader there has been piracy of authors such as JK Rowling, James Patterson and Dan Brown.

"It took three days for the latest Dan Brown to be widely available illegally," says Alicia Wise, digital consultant to the Publishers Association.

But it's also everything from expensive academic textbooks to modestly priced dictionaries.

"All different kinds of publications are being distributed [illegally] online. That drives sales away from publishers and deprives authors of their living.

"In some cases you can get very high quality counterfeit e-books and people even pay full price for them."

Of course, there is a practical obstacle to book piracy. You can become a music pirate in about five minutes. Get a CD off the shelf and rip it on to your computer. Then head to a file-sharing site. With a book it isn't so simple.

Laborious process

"It's incredibly difficult for someone in their bedroom to digitise a book and put it online," says Graeme Neill of the Bookseller magazine.

Most pirates don't type the whole thing out, but it is still laborious.

"They seem to originate from scans of print copies," says Ms Wise. "Somebody has had to sit there and scan it. Quite a lot of effort goes into creating the first pirated copy.

"Occasionally, an electronic proof file ends up being pirated.

"They often scan the copyright information which makes it easier for me to detect the infringing content."

In some markets, like China, there has been circulation of pirated books in paper. But in the traditional world of Snipcock and Tweed - Private Eye magazine's archetypal fusty book publisher - pirated e-books represent a radical new threat.

"There is definitely fear," says Neill. "They don't want to make the same mistakes the music industry did."

Like the music industry in the early days, many in the publishing industry will want to use digital rights management (DRM) safeguards embedded in content to stop copying.

Amazon says it leaves it to publishers whether they want to apply DRM. But books in its main proprietary format, .azw, cannot be transferred to other devices.

There are some who think DRM represents a blind alley for authors and publishers, and risks alienating readers. Cory Doctorow, novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, is one.

"[Anyone who believes in DRM] has never met a typist," he says.

Proscriptive measure

The ability to specify you will read a book in one way on one device is unreasonably proscriptive, Doctorow believes.

"DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn't a customer out there saying 'what I need is an electronic book that does less'.

"It's as if Borders do a deal with Ikea and say you can only read this book under an Ikea bulb and have it on Ikea shelves."

No-one in publishing is putting all their faith in DRM. Wise says that the Publishers Association liaises with counterparts and music in film, runs a portal for reporting illegal sites and aids legal action against pirates.

But Doctorow has a more radical solution for the piracy threat.

"My books are Amazon bestsellers and are given away free as downloads.

"My problem isn't piracy it's obscurity. Most people who didn't buy my book, didn't because they had never heard of me, not because they got a free book."

The model is even in use at an imprint at one of the big publishers. The Friday Project at Harpercollins exclusively gets its books from the internet, putting everyone from popular bloggers to exotic meat chefs into print.

Their biggest seller is Tom Reynolds, the pen-name of an ambulanceman responsible for the Random Acts of Reality blog.

Present for mum

"We are contractually obliged to give his electronic version away for free," says publisher Scott Pack.

"People do download it, say I love it, I'm going to buy the physical book… it will make the perfect present for my mum."

And apart from the free e-books that Mr Pack has at his imprint, the paid-for ones sell for only £2.99, less than even the cheapest Amazon e-book.

Amazon's titles will cost $11.99 (£7.37) to $13.99 (£8.60) for bestsellers and new releases in the UK. In the US the charge is only $9.99 (£6.14). Amazon explains the discrepancy by saying that Vat has to be applied on e-books in the EU - paper books are Vat-free - and that there are other additional costs.

Mr Pack acknowledges the free model works best while e-books are a relatively new concept. If in 10 years time, 70% of all books sold are e-books and the accepted price is £1.99, the publishing industry is going to be in trouble, he says.

As well as costing almost as much a paper version, when you buy an e-book you don't completely control it. Doctorow thinks Amazon committed an extraordinary public relations own goal recently when - in a twist of irony - users found that George Orwell's 1984 had been remotely deleted from their Kindles because of legal issues.

The company rapidly apologised and gave users new copies,

"They restored the books. The problem was at the bottom of the apology was the statement 'we won't do this again unless a court tells us to'.

"No retailer has ever had to promise they wouldn't come into your house and take a book away.

"Designing book readers that allow books to be deleted without their owner's decision is a design mistake."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8314092.stm





A New Electronic Reader, the Nook, Enters the Market
Motoko Rich

As widely expected, Barnes & Noble unveiled its Nook electronic reading device at a splashy news conference on Tuesday to generally positive views from the publishing community, and offered some details about its whispered-about lending capabilities.

As much as anything, publishers seemed relieved that Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, had produced a credible alternative to Amazon’s Kindle. The Nook, priced at $259, went on sale Tuesday afternoon at nook.com, at a price that matched the latest edition of the Kindle. The Nook will ship starting in late November.

Amazon currently dominates the market for electronic readers. Estimates vary, but according to the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, Amazon has sold about 945,000 units, compared with 525,000 units of the Sony Reader.

Barnes & Noble opened an e-bookstore in July, and its editions, which are available in ePub and Adobe PDF versions, can be read on a variety of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry, Macs and PCs. Barnes & Noble will continue to support those devices, as well as forthcoming e-readers from iRex and Plastic Logic.

But it is clear the company is trying to consolidate sales of e-books onto the Nook, which features a six-inch gray and white reading screen and a color touch screen control panel. In any of the chain’s 1,300 stores, consumers can download books on the Wi-Fi network. Outside the stores, consumers will access AT&T’s 3G network to download books.

One of the differentiating factors of the Nook is that customers can “lend” books to friends. But customers may lend out any given title only one time for a total of 14 days and they cannot read it on their own Nook while it is lent.

In an interview, William Lynch, president of Barnes&Noble.com, said the company would aggressively market the Nook within its bricks and mortar stores. The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons and other promotions like excerpts from forthcoming books or suggestions for new reading. While in stores, Nook owners will be able to read any e-book through streaming software.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/te...gy/21nook.html





E-Book Fans Keep Format in Spotlight
Brad Stone

The publishing industry has been under a dark cloud recently.

Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward M. Kennedy. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.

But amid the gloom, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.

Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.

“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.

Sony, maker of the Reader family of devices, says that its e-book customers, on average, download about eight books a month from its online library. That is far more than the approximately 6.7 books than the average American book buyer purchased for the entire year in 2008, according to Bowker, a publishing industry tracking firm.

The e-reader market also has a new competitor, the Nook, introduced by Barnes & Noble on Tuesday. It will sell for $259.

The book-buying numbers at Amazon and Sony may not by themselves indicate a new interest in reading. Owners of Kindles may be shifting all their book purchases to Amazon. Owners of e-book devices tend to be among the most passionate book buyers, so their behavior may not be reflective of the overall market.

Even so, fans of the reading devices suggest that the convenience of using these products, which offer a sense of control and customization that consumers have come to expect from all their media gadgets, has created a greater interest in books.

Patti Howard is among the converted. “It’s been a long time since I felt this way about books,” said Ms. Howard, a medical transcriptionist from Birmingham, Ala., who for years confined her book reading to 10 minutes before bed until she got an Amazon Kindle in August.

Ms. Howard now buys books any time she wants. She recently downloaded a fantasy novel at 2:30 a.m., immediately after finishing the previous book in a series. She reads during her snippets of daily downtime, like during the wait to pick up her 9-year-old son from school. Her new reading pace is one novel a week.

Other fans praise the benefits of e-book devices. The Kindle and Sony Reader, with their gray-and-white screens and adjustable type sizes, offer a satisfying experience with few of the distractions of other technologies.

Multiple books can also be carried in a slender device, so a reader can easily switch from Kate Morton’s “The Forgotten Garden” to Blake Bailey’s “Cheever: A Life.”

E-books can also be bought quickly and from any location, with one or two clicks on devices like the Kindle and the Nook, which use wireless networks to download books.

Brandon Watson, a researcher at Microsoft and the father of three, says he has gone from reading about a book a month to recently polishing off a book the size of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” every weekend.

He is taken by the ease of one-handed reading on the Kindle. Last month he bought the digital version of “The Bourne Identity,” even though he had the actual 500-page book in his home, because “for whatever reason, it feels cumbersome to read,” he said.

That point resonates with Candy Yates, a loan officer assistant in Newland, N.C. Ms. Yates owns a computer, a BlackBerry, and an iPod Touch and calls herself a “gadget person.” She says that paper books just feel strange to her, even though she was an avid reader as a child.

The nearest bookstore is also 30 miles away in Boone, and the collection at the local library does not interest her, she said. The Kindle cannot pick up a wireless signal in her home town, but she can plug it into her PC and buy books online.

Such testimonials do not persuade everyone. Many book publishing executives say that e-book sellers like Amazon have a strong interest in heralding a new age of reading, because they must persuade skeptical publishers that a higher sales volume of e-books will offset the eventual loss of profit if the most popular digital editions continue to be sold for $9.99. For now, sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble subsidize that price.

Some publishers are also not quite willing to accept the notion that books can make a mainstream resurgence.

“Given the fact that people now have the Internet, almost 24-hour football entertainment in the fall, tennis matches from around the world, TV shows out the wazoo, and movies, do you really believe that people are going to be reading more because they can get it on a screen?” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, owner of imprints like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press. “I don’t see the scenario.”

The music industry, which stumbled badly during its transition to digital formats, also offers lessons. E-book piracy does not yet constitute a major problem in the United States, but there are warning signs.

Shayna Englin, a political consultant in Washington who purchased a Kindle this year, also says she reads more than ever: a book a week, about three times her old pace.

But she has actually never paid for an e-book. Exploiting a loophole in Amazon’s system, Ms. Englin has linked her Kindle to the Amazon account of some nearby friends, allowing all of them to read books like “The Lost Symbol” at the same time — while paying for them only once.

“I read much more, I tend to read faster for some reason, and I read a greater variety of things,” said Ms. Englin, adding that this is nearly the same as lending a physical book to friends. “We haven’t really looked closely at Amazon’s terms of service. But I do suspect we are breaking the rules.”

Motoko Rich contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/te...y/21books.html





Internet Archive Opens 1.6 Million E-Books to Kids with OLPC Laptops
Wade Roush

All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.

Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “We’ve been working for the last year, since Nicholas invited us, to show that we can do this,” Kahle said. “We took all of the one million, six hundred thousand books and reformatted them to work with the OLPC laptop.”

The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.

The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”

Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.

The announcement came as part of a Boston Book Festival panel session on electronic books, entitled “The Future of Reading: Books Without Pages?” The session, held at the Boston Public Library, was part of a day-long celebration of books and reading funded by Boston’s State Street Bank and organized by Deborah Porter, a freelance book reviewer who is Negroponte’s significant other, according to the Boston Globe.

OLPC and the Archive have been working together for a year to get the books ready for display on the XO Laptop’s screen, which was designed to be visible in full sunlight and to use less energy than existing commercial LCD screens.

“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen ,but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that kids can search on and find those books, ane one million six hundred thousand now will be avaible to the one millions users of the One Laptop Per Child. We’re really psyched about that.”

Kahle says the Internet Archive books will be available through the reading “activity” on the XO Laptop. (Software on the laptop is organized into groups called activities pertaining to different types of creative and educational projects.) In an upcoming version of the XO’s basic software, the reading activity will also allow students to browse books from a variety of providers, Kahle says, including libraries and commercial publishers.

He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don’t provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition—so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.

“The idea is to make it so that it’s not just these closed companies with contracts between them but to make a web of books,” says Kahle. “Can we make One Laptop Per Child a participant in this open world? We are working to try to help that happen. In this first phase it’s just going to be the public domain materials.”

One criticism of the Internet Archive’s book digitization effort, which involves the use of optical character recognition software to transform images into digital text, is that the process results in numerous typographical errors. But last Monday, Kahle notes, the Internet Archive demonstrated a Wiki-like system that allows readers to instantly correct typos they find in the organization’s e-books. “This is all the advantage of openness,” Kahle says. (The demonstration was part of a larger rollout of the Internet Archive’s new Book Server project, envisioned as a centralized clearinghouse for e-book distribution that would provide publishers and libraries with an alternative to Amazon, Google, and the like.)
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/1...-olpc-laptops/





Prompted by Google Books, EU May Revise Copyright Laws
Aoife White

The European Commission said Monday it may revise copyright law to make it easier for companies like Google to scan printed books and distribute digital copies over the Internet.

Such changes would likely include ways to more easily compensate authors and publishers, possibly through a statutory license in which a company would automatically get rights to scanning and would pay royalties to a collective pool. Money from that pool would then get distributed to copyright holders.

Under Europe's current patchwork of copyright laws, rights are now managed separately in each of the European Union's 27 nations, making it difficult to seek permission to republish or digitize content, especially when the rights holder is hard to find.

The European Commission said it would start work next year, with the goal of encouraging mass-scale digitization and suggesting ways for compensating copyright holders. Any suggested changes to European law would have to be approved by EU governments and lawmakers.

The commission said the move was partly triggered by a hearing it held in September where European authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies spoke out about how they would be affected by a deal Google is negotiating in the United States.

Google has been scanning millions of books still under U.S. copyright. Under a tentative settlement with U.S. authors and publishers, that will cover all books unless the copyright holders object. A judge still needs to approve the settlement after the parties make changes to address U.S. Justice Department concerns. EU antitrust authorities are not examining it.

The European Commission, the EU executive, said that deal would create a situation where "the vast number of European works in U.S. libraries that have been digitized by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the U.S. but not in Europe itself."

EU regulators want to study this year the impact of new rules on so-called orphan works — books in which the copyright holder can't be traced or where copyright is unclear. One idea under consideration is having a manager stand in for authors who aren't represented by the existing copyright agencies that collect and distribute royalties.

EU Media Commissioner Viviane Reding said Europe "had most to offer and most to win from books digitization" as long as it can sort out the legal issues that prevent book scanning.

Worries over EU copyright are also holding back Google's efforts to scan books in European libraries.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13594025





China Authors Says Google Violated Copyrights

A group representing authors in China has accused Google of violating copyrights with its digital library, a claim that Google denies by saying the service complies with international law.

Many major publishers and authors have taken up lawsuits against Google for its digitization of their works, accusing Google of copyright infringement. Google has already digitized 10 million books.

The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) believes Google scanned thousands of books, by over 500 Chinese authors, into its digital library without their permission or compensation, said spokesman Chen Qirong.

"Whether you are a small company or big company you still need to respect the copyright of the authors," Chen said.

Google countered by saying it had received permission from over 50 Chinese publishers who allowed the U.S. search giant to digitize more than 30,000 books to be found through Internet searches and for preview.

"We believe the book search complies with international copyright law," said Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne.

Google's plan to create a massive digital library has been praised for bringing broad access to books but has also been criticized on antitrust, copyright and privacy grounds.

The fresh controversy, which made headlines in domestic Chinese media, is the latest in a string of operational problems in China for Google, which lags homegrown titan Baidu in China's search market.

In June, a Chinese official accused Google of spreading obscene content over the Internet. The comments came a day after Google.com, Gmail and other Google online services became inaccessible to many users in China.

Piracy is rampant in China where media are frequently censored over content on sensitive subjects.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Doug Young)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...59L20V20091022





'Breakthrough' on Online Music Rights in Europe for iTunes, Other Services
Aoife White

The EU's top antitrust official on Wednesday described a deal among Apple's iTunes, music companies, distributors and online licensing groups as a "great breakthrough" that would roll out more Internet music sales across Europe.

The companies and rights holders agreed at talks held Tuesday to work on EU-wide licenses that would allow online music tracks to be sold more widely in the region.

Internet music downloads in Europe lag behind those in the United States, pulling in just a fraction of revenues the record industry is losing from falling CD sales.

Part of the problem in Europe is that music rights are sold separately in each country. That has prevented Apple's iTunes from setting up a single store to service all of Europe. Instead, it has to seek licenses from each EU member state where it wishes to sell and to set up separate national stores — which have different music selections.

Kroes said participants agreed Tuesday that current licensing is "too complex and burdensome and that simpler licensing solutions are needed."

Participating in the talks were Amazon, EMI, iTunes, Nokia, Universal, PRS for Music, music rights management groups SACEM and STIM and the European consumers' organization BEUC.

The companies and groups said they would seek to add the "widest possible" portfolio of music to any European licenses.

They also vowed to "facilitate the way in which music for online use is licensed such that the market grows and consumers benefit."

They said rights owners — composers and performers — should only sign up to such licenses voluntarily, aiming to soothe worries from some artists who complain that they might lose money if an EU-wide license replaces a series of national licenses.

Kroes said the agreement "will not only help expand the market and tackle piracy, but also give consumers access to more of the music they want."

Apple told the meeting that it was considering open up more iTunes stores in EU nations next year and Amazon said was now delivering books and DVDs to all 27 EU nations — it previously did not deliver to some eastern European nations.

Kroes, who is likely to soon step down as EU competition commissioner at the end of her five-year mandate, also described as "good news" a pending deal with Microsoft to settle a lengthy antitrust battle with EU regulators.

She said she has received numerous letters from Microsoft supporters over the years, criticizing the European Commission for hounding the company that have forced her to make the case for challenging monopoly abuse.

"You need to explain tat when its such a dominant position, you can drive what's going on in the research field," she said. "When you have no competition, it's over for quite a while."

Kroes said she hoped the Microsoft settlement would mean that hundreds of millions of European consumers would get a choice of which web browser to use on their computers in the New Year. Microsoft will likely update European versions of windows with an option allowing users to choose between its own Internet Explorer and rival Web browsing software.

The competition commissioner also defended her record in asking governments to amend bank bailout programs — that have already forced Commerzbank and others to exit much commercial banking — and called on consumers to use new legal means to seek compensation from companies found guilty of price-fixing.

"Consumers and taxpayers should not be left paying the bill for mistakes they did not make," she said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Performance Royalty Bill Would Offer "Flat Fee" To Smaller Broadcasters
FMQB

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the controversial Performance Rights Act (S. 379), following in the footsteps of the House Judiciary Committee, which has already approved the similar H.R. 848 bill. According to multiple reports today, the Committee has pulled back on some of the proposed costs to smaller broadcasters.

Broadcasters that make under $50,000 a year could pay just a flat annual fee of $100, and those making under $1.25 million a year would also have a flat fee. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who heads up the Committee said, "The radio station sells advertisement time and makes money off the performer’s sound recording, but the artist does not get compensated. That is wrong and our bill corrects this injustice," according to Bloomberg.

However, the NAB has noted that 251 House lawmakers and 26 U.S. Senators have voiced their opposition to the performance royalty. And Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) is quoted by Bloomberg as saying that he thinks "it’s going to be some time before this bill comes to the floor,"

Meanwhile, AFTRA has released a statement applauding the Senate Committee's approval of the Performance Rights Act. "Today’s action by the Senate Judiciary Committee is an important step forward in our fight to establish a performance right for artists to be paid when the music they create is played over terrestrial radio," said AFTRA National President Roberta Reardon. "Songwriters and music publishers have always had this right, and the recording artists and musicians who bring songs to life deserve equal rights for their creative contributions and their work. AFTRA members salute the hard work of Chairman Leahy, Senators Feinstein and Hatch and other members of the committee on successfully shepherding this bill through the markup process in the Senate. We are extremely grateful to Chairman Conyers in the House and Representatives Issa and Berman for their continued leadership on this important legislation that will benefit thousands of AFTRA members and artists."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1549437





Comcast To Offer Certain Popular Cable TV Programs Online By End Of Year

You'll be able to watch popular cable television series such as HBO's "Entourage" and AMC's "Mad Men" on your computer by the end of the year without paying extra — as long as you're a Comcast Corp. subscriber watching at home.

Comcast will be the first cable TV operator to unlock online access to a slate of valuable cable shows and movies, aiming to replicate what's available on television through video on demand.

Time Warner Cable Inc. and others plan to follow as the pay-TV companies look to satisfy growing consumer appetite for online video while preserving subscription revenue.

Access will be carefully guarded: Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. And for now, the online viewing will be restricted to those who also get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies.

At a briefing at Comcast's Philadelphia headquarters this week, executives said cable networks such as HBO will decide how much to put online.

Some will include the current season's episodes only, while others could include archives of past seasons.

Comcast's national rollout of "On Demand Online" — the company promises to replace that with a hipper, more contemporary moniker — comes months after the cable operator announced partnerships with 24 cable TV networks and broadcasters.

The company's talks for a controlling stake in NBC Universal, which owns a third of rival site Hulu.com, is not expected to affect its online video aspirations.

Similar plans are in the works at other pay-TV operators, including Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and DirecTV Group Inc.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-c...,7030048.story





Microsoft, Dell, Spectrum Bridge Launch First Public White Spaces Network

First ever public white spaces broadband network is alive in Virginia -- like WiFi on steroids.

The first public white spaces network officially launched on Wednesday in Claudville, Virginia. It is uses sensing technology from Spectrum Bridge with software and Web cams supplied by Microsoft and PCs supplied by Dell. The project was funded the TDF Foundation.

White spaces are services that run in the unused portion of television spectrum, and have been called "WiFi on steroids" by Google founder Larry Page. The battle for white spaces has been going on for years. IT companies like Microsoft, Dell and Google lobbied in favor of opening up the spectrum for data services, particularly broadband Internet access, while those in the broadcasting industry vehemently opposed the idea, even going so far as to create a FUD advertising campaign to make consumers believe that white spaces would hurt television quality.

Almost a year ago, in November, 2008, the FCC actually did the right thing and voted to allow carriers and other vendors to deploy devices in the unlicensed white spaces spectrum at up to 100 milliwats, and up to 40 milliwats on white space spectrum adjacent to TV channels. Unlike WiFi, white spaces will support a bigger bandwidth for faster downloads over longer distances. It also is less prone to interference from walls and other obstacles.

One condition the FCC placed on would-be white spaces providers at the time is that the devices would need sensing capabilities that would automatically shut them down should they interfere with television. Devices were also to have access to a geo-location database to track them by their IP address or media-access-control address or a radio-frequency identification tag. Once the database had a fix on the device’s location, it was to be able to select the optimal white-space spectrum for the device and switch the spectrum as the device moves.

Spectrum Bridge provided the database that ensures the white spaces devices in Claudville do not cause interference with local TV signals. "The database assigns non-interfering frequencies to white spaces devices, and can adapt in real time to new TV broadcasts, as well as to other protected TV band users operating in the area," the company explains.

Dell was surprisingly quiet about its specific contribution to this white spaces network. Microsoft had original developed a prototype device that was trounced on at the time by the enemies of the idea, the National Association of Broadcasters. Tests of those early devices by the FCC were said to show that they did indeed cause the feared interference with television signals, though Microsoft said that the device tested must have been defective. A second round of tests on a new Microsoft prototype device didn't have the same problems.

A year ago, Dell released a white paper that spelled out its planned white spaces devices. Dell said then it planned to integrate white space radio chips into its laptops. Since Microsoft's contributions to this first network was software and Web cams, presumably, Dell contributed the devices themselves, in the form of white-spaces equipped PCs. (Strangely the PC maker did not issue a press release about the project.)

Microsoft's Paula Boyd, a regulatory lawyer, applauded the project in a post in Microsoft's regulatory blog, "Microsoft on the Issues." She hinted at some of the behind-the-scenes haggling that still needs to take place before white spaces devices will be a regular consumer option. She wrote:

"We commend Rep. Boucher for his leadership in promoting broadband connectivity, and applaud Spectrum Bridge for its hard work developing and installing a wireless network that uses the available TV white spaces in Claudville to enable the small, rural town’s roughly 1,000 residents to have much greater access to information and services. ... Early on, some argued that the TV white spaces could not be used for broadband services, and that any use of the spectrum would adversely impact existing users of that portion of the airwaves. ...The FCC took an important step toward this goal when it made the decision last year to allow for the use of TV white spaces for broadband connectivity. Now, the FCC is working to complete the outstanding proceedings that will set guidelines for white spaces use."

Microsoft obviously has a bigger interest in white spaces than just knowing in its heart that broadband is coming to rural communities. Microsoft Research has been developing multiple white spaces technologies and even deployed a successful white spaces network between Microsoft campuses in Redmond on October 16 ... which may have been the first live white spaces network ever. The project, dubbed Networking Over white spaces (KNOWS) consists of software defined radios, cognitive radios, and multi-radio systems.

It seems likely that Microsoft is interested in licensing this technology to laptop makers, Windows mobile device makers, perhaps even service providers. Beyond that, it is possible that Microsoft would add it to its own home network devices such as its specialty home-server appliances. Maybe it would even get back into the home routers game (in 2002, Microsoft sold a consumer wireless router).
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/46577





Ohio High Court Hears Online Communications Case
Julie Carr Smyth

Booksellers, video game dealers, newspaper publishers and other critics of an online child protection law encountered skepticism from state Supreme Court justices Tuesday for their free-speech arguments.

A coalition led by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has challenged laws throughout the country aimed at protecting children from online pornography and predators that they claim jeopardize protected speech among adults that might be linked to private chat rooms, listservs or e-mail.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati has asked justices to resolve two key legal questions before moving forward on the Ohio lawsuit. The questions involve what is meant by the technical terms contained in the law: "mass distribution" and "personally directed devices."

Ohio Solicitor General Ben Mizer said the state law on distributing material harmful to minors was revised in 2004 to apply only to one-on-one communications by adults knowingly targeting kids. At issue Tuesday before the court was that rewrite.

"I wouldn't let the fact that this is the Internet distort the issues and become a red herring," Mizer said. The Ohio law has prohibited the transmission of harmful materials to minors through U.S. mail since the 1970s, he noted.

The statute covers only direct communications by people who know or have reason to believe the recipient is a minor. It excludes public chat rooms and other online spots accessible by anyone but could apply to instant messages and text messages.

A pair of federal laws in the 1990s pushing decency restrictions and safety online were struck down as unconstitutional, as have been a host of similar state laws - in Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, South Carolina, Virginia and Vermont. A similar law in Utah is still pending in court.

Richard Zuckerman, an attorney for the booksellers group, said the law puts many online businesses at risk of prosecution because it is so vague. The state's arguments in defense of the law have changed several times since the first lawsuit was filed in 2002, he said.

But several of the court's justices disagreed with Zuckerman's criticism.

"It's not really the statute that's confusing here, it's the technologies," Justice Robert Cupp said.

Chris Finan, executive director of the American Booksellers Foundation, said the group is challenging the law because of fear it would have a chilling effect on online merchants.

"Booksellers shouldn't be exposed to criminal liability for posting materials on the Web that they would have on sale in their stores," he said.

Other groups joining the lawsuit are the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the Video Software Dealers Association, the Sexual Health Network, the Association of American Publishers, the Ohio Newspaper Association, the Freedom to Read Foundation and Web del sol, an online literary arts community.

Justice Paul Pfeifer hinted he could favor clarifying some points in the court's ruling, rather than simply answering yes or no to whether the Ohio attorney general has properly interpreted the two legal questions at hand.

"I understand the General Assembly was trying to protect juveniles and wanted to do it in a constitionally protected fashion," he said. "Is it our job maybe to thread that needle?"

The case will return to the 6th Circuit for further review afterthe Supreme Court rules on the two legal questions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102002965.html





Intro: So You Just Released a Game…

It’s an exciting time when you release a new game for people to enjoy. Especially one that you’ve poured your heart and money into for the past half year. You’ve toiled over and polished it as much as you can and finally it’s ready! Eagerly you submit it to the gods (i.e. Apple) and await their approval…

Finally! It’s approved and you sit back and dream of riches…

A day later, you are devastated when you realize that you are getting totally screwed over. Despite what you’ve heard from others, your game isn’t being bought but it is being played.

A Little About the Tap-Fu…

We at Neptune Interactive Inc and Smells Like Donkey, Inc. just released our latest game, called Tap-Fu, to the App store on Oct 16 2009 for a reasonable price of $3.99 USD (EDIT: it’s now $1.99). Tap-Fu is a pretty high quality title and most legit customers seem to really like it. More information about the game can be found here: http://www.neptuneii.com/tapfu/

The game has some online scoreboards where people have to manually submit scores. When they do submit scores, we also track a few pieces of information (nothing personal though):

* various score information (score, kills, style points, etc.)
* game information (map, mode, difficulty)
* App version
* OS Version
* Device ID
* Pirated Flag

The key ones that we’ll be looking at here are the Device ID and Pirated Flag.

How to be an App Pirate…

Before we get into the stats, lets just go over the process of pirating a game. After seeing the stats below, I wanted to understand the actual pirating process. To tell you the truth, I was very surprised (and concerned), at how easy it is.

Note: BTW, I’m mentioning sites here that would take an average person 5 minutes in Google to find, so please don’t get mad if it seems like I’m helping them

Note: I also wanted take some time to say that we have nothing against the Jailbreaking community – there’s some pretty cool things coming out from those developers and some of it looks like some pretty cool nerd fun.

So how easy is it to pirate? Assuming you have a Jailbroken iPhone and Cydia installed, you can simply add a new package source to download the pirating software from Hackulous. This pirating software is simply a kernel patch that bypasses Apple’s DRM system (or something like that).

When you add the package source Cydia is nice enough to give you a message warning you that what you may be doing may be morally wrong (see below). Since I was only intending to pirate our apps, I added it anyway. A quick install of the software and a reboot is all that is needed to allow your phone to run pirated software.

Once the phone is rebooted, all you have to do is download a cracked version of the app from one of the MANY places on the internet, add it to iTunes, sync, and you are done. NOTE: Surprisingly this is MUCH easier than actually buying it on iTunes!!

EDIT: As another side note, the wait time for Tap-Fu to show up on the various sites from the time of release was about 40 minutes.

Piracy Stats…

So what can we glean from our data? Well, understand that this data relies on the legitimate user or pirate submitting a high score. The app does not phone home at any time without the user explicitly telling it to. Also, we are not in any way crippling pirated versions of the App either. We’d like to also have more samples (and we will over time) so this data may be fairly “noisy”.

EDIT to clarify for Arelius@reddit: This data represents the first week of sales so it’s a pretty small sample. The game is however slowly rising up the charts (e.g. top 100 apps in Japan) so take that into account when judging the number of legitimate users.

Well, from this data we can conclude that 0% of pirates think the game is worth buying (which, by the way, is contrary to most of the forum posts we read from legit buyers).

One interesting note is that the most pirate scores are submitted for Story level, then Rounds, then survival. This is the same order that the game types show up in our menus. This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span – they quickly move on to the next game.

Moral Justification of Pirates

I thought it would be interesting to comment on some of the justification for piracy. One of the largest sites for cataloging pirated apps is Appulous and on their FAQ we can find nuggets such as this.

Appulous is a collection of links to allow iPhone and iPod touch users the ability to try out full, unlimited versions of device software before making the decision to buy it.

However, there is an impressive number of people in the community who do honestly pay developers for software they enjoy after trying it.

Having the opportunity to review the sales statistics of a well-reviewed, independently-developed game, the developer experienced a great number of installations by people using the unlimited trial — but over 99% of these installs were by people who statistically would not have purchased it regardless. A single digit of sales were lost to others who may have purchased the game, and with the trial resulting in purchases that would have otherwise not been made, the end result is strikingly positive.

Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say:

We pirate because we can

That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we’ve seen.

Future Plans

Because Apple has been fairly slow to respond to this and because piracy is becoming very commonplace, we’re predicting that developers will be taking it into their own hands to try and prevent it. Detecting a pirated app is quite simple to do so I wouldn’t blame them at all. We’re even considering doing a few things.

Probably the first thing we’ll try is popping up a message reminding people that they really should buy the game if they like it and conveniently provide links to do so. It’ll be an interesting test to do so we’ll let you know when it’s done.

Also, the move to DLC seems to be another step in the right direction to combat this. Give away the base app for free and charge for content. This forces the pirates to change their strategy significantly and it might be a while before it becomes feasible to attack this system.

Another option for multiplayer apps is to verify the app online and not allow it to connect to a match making server or something of the sort. Fair is fair and if someone isn’t paying for your app, they maybe shouldn’t be allowed to use your service.

It’s all up to the tastes of the individual developer.

Conclusions

Now that all that is said and done, are we really concerned about it? Maybe a bit. We like to think that it’s not us specifically that is losing sales to these people, it’s every developer that is losing sales to these people. The pirates have essentially removed themselves from the iTunes economy and that hurts everyone.

How much does it hurt? probably not a whole lot. There’s probably a few of these people that would have bought our game in the first place so it’s not really a big deal.

But as a developer, looking at that high scores chart, it is kind of depressing. Yet we are glad that there are plenty of paying customers out there, and we will do our best to reach them.
http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274





Beware the Reverse Brain Drain to India and China

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.

Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley’s top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn’t just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they’ll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC’s are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India.

Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina? My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters.

We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier—precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards.

What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a “better quality of life” than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock—complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better “family values” at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it’s much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element.
A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China.

When we asked what was better about the U.S. than home, 54% of Indian and 43% of Chinese said that total financial compensation for their previous U.S. positions was better than at home. Health-care benefits were also considered somewhat better in the United States by 51 percent of Chinese respondents, versus 21 percent who thought it was better in their home country. (Indian respondents were split more evenly on this).

These were a self-selected group, people who had already left. But what about the future, the immigrants presently studying at U.S. institutions of higher learning? We surveyed 1,224 foreign students from dozens of nations who are currently studying at U.S. universities or who graduated in 2008. The majority told us that they didn’t think that the U.S. was the best place for their professional careers and they planned to return home. Only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students planned to settle in the U.S.

Many students wanted to stay for a few years after graduation if given a choice—58% of Indians, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of Europeans. But they see the future being brighter back home. Only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students, and 25% of Indian students believe that the best days of the U.S. economy lie ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students believe that the best days for their home country’s economy lie ahead. National Science Foundation studies have shown that the “5 year stay rates” for Chinese and Indians science and engineering PhD’s have historically been around 92 % and 85% respectively (NSF tracks these 5 years at a time, and the vast majority stay permanently). So something has clearly changed.

For Silicon Valley, and for the U.S., this is the wrong kind of change. To some degree, these responses reflected the moribund U.S. economy and the rough job prospects facing students. With U.S. unemployment at 10%, who cares if we lose the next generation of geeks? There won’t be jobs for them for years, anyway, until the U.S. job market recovers. And sure, I know the xenophobes are going to cheer my findings. They believe that foreign workers take American jobs away.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that skilled foreign immigrants create jobs for Americans and boost our national competitiveness. More than 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups during the recent tech boom were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. Foreign-national researchers have contributed to more than 25% of our global patents, developed some of our break-through technologies, and they helped make Silicon Valley the world’s leading tech center. Foreign-born workers comprise almost a quarter of all the U.S. science and engineering workforce and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. It is very possible that some of the smart Indians who sat in the room with me holding their hand up on Columbus Day will start the next Google or Apple. Many of them will build companies which employ thousands. But the jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/17...dia-and-china/





China Expands Cyberspying in U.S., Report Says

Congressional Advisory Panel in Washington Cites Apparent Campaign by Beijing to Steal Information From American Firms
Siobhan Gorman

The Chinese government is ratcheting up its cyberspying operations against the U.S., a congressional advisory panel found, citing an example of a carefully orchestrated campaign against one U.S. company that appears to have been sponsored by Beijing.

The unnamed company was just one of several successfully penetrated by a campaign of cyberespionage, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to be released Thursday. Chinese espionage operations are "straining the U.S. capacity to respond," the report concludes.

The bipartisan commission, formed by Congress in 2000 to investigate the security implications of growing trade with China, is made up largely of former U.S. government officials in the national security field.

The commission contracted analysts at defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp. to write the report. The analysts wouldn't name the company described in the case study, describing it only as "a firm involved in high-technology development."

The report didn't provide a damage assessment and didn't say specifically who was behind the attack against the U.S. company. But it said the company's internal analysis indicated the attack originated in or came through China.

The report concluded the attack was likely supported, if not orchestrated, by the Chinese government, because of the "professional quality" of the operation and the technical nature of the stolen information, which is not easily sold by rival companies or criminal groups. The operation also targeted specific data and processed "extremely large volumes" of stolen information, the report said.

"The case study is absolutely clearly controlled and directed with a specific purpose to get at defense technology in a related group of companies," said Larry Wortzel, vice chairman of the commission and a former U.S. Army attaché in China. "There's no doubt that that's state-controlled."

Attacks like that cited in the report hew closely to a blueprint frequently used by Chinese cyberspies, who in total steal $40 billion to $50 billion in intellectual property from U.S. organizations each year, according to U.S. intelligence agency estimates provided by a person familiar with them.

"Modern-day espionage doesn't involve cloak and dagger anymore," said Tom Kellermann, a vice president at Core Security Technologies, a cybersecurity company. "It's all electronic."

China is among more than 100 countries that have the capability to conduct cyberspying operations.

The bulk of the report describes the growing ambitions of the Chinese military in cyberspace and its efforts to develop the capability to destroy adversary networks with physical and cyberattacks in the event of a crisis.

Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, criticized the commission as "a product of Cold War mentality" that was "put in place to pick China to pieces." He added: "Accusations of China conducting, or 'likely conducting' as the commission's report indicates, cyberspace attacks or espionage against the U.S. are unfounded and unwarranted."

In the highly organized cyberspy scheme that drained valuable research and development information from a U.S. company, the report said, the hackers "operated at times using a communication channel between a host with an [Internet] address located in the People's Republic of China and a server on the company's internal network."

In the months leading up to the 2007 operation, cyberspies did extensive reconnaissance, identifying which employee computer accounts they wanted to hijack and which files they wanted to steal. They obtained credentials for dozens of employee accounts, which they accessed nearly 150 times.

The cyberspies then reached into the company's networks using the same type of program help-desk administrators use to remotely access computers.

The hackers copied and transferred files to seven servers hosting the company's email system, which were capable of processing large amounts of data quickly. Once they moved the data to the email servers, the intruders renamed the stolen files to blend in with the other files on the system and compressed and encrypted the files for export.

Before exporting the data, the collection team used employee accounts to take over four desktop computers to direct the final stage of the operation.

They selected at least eight U.S. computers outside the company, including two at unidentified universities, as a drop point for the stolen data before sending it overseas. The high Internet traffic volume on university networks provides excellent cover.

The spies activated the operation on all seven servers almost simultaneously, which suggested a plan to export the data as quickly as possible. The company's computer-security team eventually detected the outflow of data, but "not before significant amounts of the company's data left the network," according to the report.

The report highlights several departments of China's military, the People's Liberation Army, responsible for components of cyberspying. Together these divisions oversee electronic spying and attack efforts, as well as research and development.

The PLA has also been creating a number of cyberwarfare militia units, which draw on civilians in the telecommunications and technology sectors, as well as academia, the report found.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125616872684400273.html





Fake Security Software in Millions of Computers: Symantec

Tens of millions of U.S. computers are loaded with scam security software that their owners may have paid for but which only makes the machines more vulnerable, according to a new Symantec report on cybercrime.

Cyberthieves are increasingly planting fake security alerts that pop up when computer users access a legitimate website. The "alert" warns them of a virus and offers security software, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee.

"Lots of times, in fact they're a conduit for attackers to take over your machine," said Vincent Weafer, Symantec's vice president for security response.

"They'll take your credit card information, any personal information you've entered there and they've got your machine," he said, referring to some rogue software's ability to rope a users' machine into a botnet, a network of machines taken over to send spam or worse.

Symantec found 250 varieties of scam security software with legitimate sounding names like Antivirus 2010 and SpywareGuard 2008, and about 43 million attempted downloads in one year but did not know how many of the attempted downloads succeeded, said Weafer.

"In terms of the number of people who potentially have this in their machines, it's tens of millions," Weafer said.

It was also impossible to tell how much cyberthieves made off with but "affiliates" acting as middlemen to convince people to download the software were believed to earn between 1 cent per download and 55 cents.

TrafficConverter.biz, which has been shut down, had boasted that its top affiliates earned as much as $332,000 a month for selling scam security software, according to Weafer.

"What surprised us was how much these guys had tied into the whole affiliated model," Weafer said. "It was more refined than we anticipated."

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Gunna Dickson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...59I0A520091019





"Evil Maid" Attacks on Encrypted Hard Drives
Bruce Schneier

Earlier this month, Joanna Rutkowska implemented the "evil maid" attack against TrueCrypt. The same kind of attack should work against any whole-disk encryption, including PGP Disk and BitLocker. Basically, the attack works like this:

Step 1: Attacker gains access to your shut-down computer and boots it from a separate volume. The attacker writes a hacked bootloader onto your system, then shuts it down.

Step 2: You boot your computer using the attacker's hacked bootloader, entering your encryption key. Once the disk is unlocked, the hacked bootloader does its mischief. It might install malware to capture the key and send it over the Internet somewhere, or store it in some location on the disk to be retrieved later, or whatever.

You can see why it's called the "evil maid" attack; a likely scenario is that you leave your encrypted computer in your hotel room when you go out to dinner, and the maid sneaks in and installs the hacked bootloader. The same maid could even sneak back the next night and erase any traces of her actions.

This attack exploits the same basic vulnerability as the "Cold Boot" attack from last year, and the "Stoned Boot" attack from earlier this year, and there's no real defense to this sort of thing. As soon as you give up physical control of your computer, all bets are off.

Similar hardware-based attacks were among the main reasons why Symantec’s CTO Mark Bregman was recently advised by "three-letter agencies in the US Government" to use separate laptop and mobile device when traveling to China, citing potential hardware-based compromise.

PGP sums it up in their blog.

No security product on the market today can protect you if the underlying computer has been compromised by malware with root level administrative privileges. That said, there exists well-understood common sense defenses against "Cold Boot," "Stoned Boot" "Evil Maid," and many other attacks yet to be named and publicized.

The defenses are basically two-factor authentication: a token you don't leave in your hotel room for the maid to find and use.

The real defense here is trusted boot, something Trusted Computing is supposed to enable. But Trusted Computing has its own problems, which is why we haven't seen anything out of Microsoft in the seven-plus years they have been working on it (I wrote this in 2002 about what they then called Palladium).

In the meantime, people who encrypt their hard drives, or partitions on their hard drives, have to realize that the encryption gives them less protection than they probably believe. It protects against someone confiscating or stealing their computer and then trying to get at the data. It does not protect against an attacker who has access to your computer over a period of time during which you use it, too.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...aid_attac.html





Nigeria's Anti Graft Police Shuts 800 Scam Websites

Nigeria's anti-corruption police said Friday they had shut down some 800 sc...

Nigeria's anti-corruption police said Friday they had shut down some 800 scam websites and busted 18 syndicates of email fraudsters in a drive to curb cyber-crime the country is notorious for.

"Over 800 fraudulent e-mail addresses have been identified and shut down," Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) boss Farida Waziri said.

"There have been 18 arrests of high profile syndicates operating cyber-crime organisations," she added.

In a statement EFCC, which has previously relied on raiding cyber cafes and complaints from the public to clampdown on the crime, said it has now adopted smart technology working in conjunction with Microsoft, to track down fraudulent emails.

When operating at full capacity, within the next six months, the scheme, dubbed "eagle claw" should be able to forewarn around a quarter of million potential victims.

Nigeria has an unenviable reputation of being the epicentre of email scammers.

In March Spanish police arrested 23 people, mainly Nigerians, suspected of running an email and letter scam thought to have defrauded over 150 people in the United States and Europe.

The gang would send out thousands letters every day to potential victims, making them believe they had access to millions of dollars in inheritance funds which they needed to invest away.

Victims were swindled of their money when asked to pay processing fees or supply their bank account details into which the funds would be transferred.

Some of fraudsters hack into private email accounts of prominent personalities and send e-mails to their contacts claiming to be stranded and asking for emergency cash.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...ow _article=1





Borderlands PC DRM Loyally Guards Street Date; Pitchford Unable to Order Stand-Down
James Ransom-Wiley

Isn't this what we all feared would happen when the machines took over? Even the boss's hands are tied in the curious case of consumers legally purchasing copies of Borderlands for PC, only to be barred from playing until the game's official street date, October 26, which is six days later than the console release. On publisher 2K Games' forums, the conspiracy theory abounds -- it's a tactic to boost console sales! -- but the obvious conclusion is that the digital rights management (DRM) technology in place to "protect" the game's release date unnecessarily punishes consumers.

Big Download contacted Randy Pitchford, president of Borderlands development studio Gearbox Software, who said, "I don't know if something can be done to unlock copies for people that somehow get a copy before the street date ... I certainly can't do anything about it." Pitchford's sympathetic, of course -- which reminds him of, ugh, Valve's Half-Life 2 DRM -- but as a developer there's not much he can do once the game's been handed over to the publisher and surrounded by unflinching DRM.

"I know how that feels," Pitchford related. "I'm sorry it's happening to customers of Borderlands, and I wish there was something I could do about it."
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/23/bo...chford-unable/





Disney Touts a Way to Ditch the DVD

Purchase of a 'Keychest' movie would allow on-demand viewing from multiple devices
Ethan Smith

Walt Disney Co. is close to unveiling technology that it says will enable entertainment companies to adapt their business models to a new reality in which consumers increasingly rely on computers and cell phones in place of DVD players and TVs.

The technology, code-named Keychest, could contribute to a shift in what it means for a consumer to own a movie or a TV show, by redefining ownership as access rights, not physical possession.

The technology would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices—from the Web, to mobile gadgets like iPhones and cable services that allow on-demand viewing. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions.

The company has been quietly demonstrating Keychest for other movie studios and technology companies in a bid to get them to sign on. It plans to unveil the technology next month.

Keychest aims to address two of the biggest hurdles blocking widespread consumer adoption of movie downloads: the difficulty of playing a movie back on devices other than a PC or laptop, and limited storage space on those computers' hard drives.

As such, Keychest could put Disney on a collision course with an initiative, known as the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, that has similar goals.

Keychest uses the same "cloud computing" logic that underlies Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, permitting users to store files and photographs on remote Internet servers and access them from anywhere, rather than keeping them on their own computers.

With Keychest, when a consumer buys a movie from a participating store, his accounts with other participating services—such as a mobile-phone provider or a video-on-demand cable service—would be updated to show the title as available for viewing. The movies wouldn't be downloaded; rather, they would reside with each particular delivery company, such as the Internet service provider, cable company or phone company.

The rollout of the new technology comes at a critical juncture for the movie industry. DVD sales, once a financial mainstay for Hollywood, have fallen as much as 25% at some studios.

The decline in DVD revenue has undermined the business model Hollywood has relied on for more than a decade. In Disney's most recent quarterly earnings report, its movie studio recorded an operating loss for the first time since 2005.

Bob Chapek, president of home entertainment at Disney Studios, says the company doesn't expect Keychest to deliver tangible financial results for five years. But he predicts that in combination with Blu-ray, digital distribution "should bring our category back up to a healthy state where we can expect growth in the future."

The company declined to name other companies that may have agreed to participate. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder, and people in the entertainment industry say it would be reasonable to infer that Apple would cooperate with such an initiative.

To be sure, other movie studios may be hesitant to put a competitor in charge of access to their content. And Keychest would allow movie studios to dictate how many devices, connected to which distribution networks, a given title can be played on. That could limit consumer choice and make the system confusing.

The competing DECE effort is being assembled by a consortium headed by Mitch Singer, the chief technology officer of Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment. DECE, announced just over a year ago, includes five major Hollywood studios, plus tech companies like Comcast Corp. and Intel Corp.

Disney and Apple have been notably absent from that group.

Disney executives concede that the Keychest and DECE have similar goals. But they argue their effort represents a more streamlined approach. Instead of designing a new set of standards and formats, as DECE is trying to do, and having participants sign on, Keychest works using a combination of digital file formats that are already common, and recognized by a wide range of existing devices.

Disney executives insist that movie studios, cable companies and Internet service providers who participate in DECE could also use the new Keychest platform. Neither DECE nor Keychest has set a date for when the service would be available.

The Keychest process is enabled by a system that generates a unique "key" when the movie is purchased, then stores that key in a repository. Other distribution services that are Keychest participants automatically query that repository and learn what movies the consumer has paid for.

Movies bought on discs, whether DVD or Blu-ray, could also generate an access key. In the case of a DVD, the user would need to manually type in a code; Blu-ray players are designed to connect to the Internet, and could send codes automatically.

In theory, even if an online entertainment company went out of business, taking down a user's entire movie library in the process, that user would still have access to the same titles via other services.

"Our vision for the future is that consumers won't have to think about where they bought [a movie], how they bought it, or when they bought it," says Mr. Chapek.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...026945222.html





Movie Kiosks are Booming, But Hollywood Studios Aren't Pleased with Low Price
Julie Wernau

It's 5 p.m. at Tony's Finer Foods on the Northwest Side and there are lines at the store's two Redboxes, where, for a buck a day, customers can rent DVDs from a vending machine.

"I kind of gave up on Blockbuster. They're too expensive -- especially now, with a baby on the way," said a visibly pregnant Jeannette Echevarria, as she returned one DVD to the refrigerator-size machine and rented another.

Fred Cuevas, browsing through 200 titles with his girlfriend, said he likes that he can get new releases. "You don't have to wait for the mailman to drop it off," he said, an apparent reference to Redbox competitor Netflix.

In the age of on-demand video, movies on your iPod and digital everything, the success of a technology as old as the Coke machine is creating quite a tizzy. In only five years, Redbox has grown from a dozen locations to what, by year's end, it says will be a 20,000-location operation.

Redbox, based in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., also is causing a stir in Hollywood, where movie industry executives are furious over the company's rent-'em-cheap-when-they're-new business model.

The two sides have exchanged harsh words, and Redbox has sued three studios in a fight over the company's effort to circumvent a long-standing distribution hierarchy.

Movies traditionally get released first in theaters, then the DVD version becomes available for sale or rental at full price, typically about $4. Finally, about 30 days
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later, the videos can be rented or seen online or on pay-per-view starting at about $2.

Redbox has been able to go its own way because its business model, without brick-and-mortar stores, is inexpensive. Everything comes out of its machines for $1, and the company, a unit of Washington state-based Coinstar Inc., says another Redbox machine goes up every hour. Each box contains about 700 DVDs.

For Hollywood, the march of the Redboxes is like a horror flick.

"If movies are devalued in this way, those who work in the movie industry will be directly harmed," the CEO of Hastings Entertainment argued in an opinion article published by trade news organization TheWrap. "Reduced industry revenues mean that fewer movies are produced--directly reducing the number of jobs available to people who work both in front of and behind the cameras."

Mitch Lowe, 56, president of Redbox Automated Retail LLC, said the company stepped in when video stores were closing and "the market was trying to push people to buy retail. We figured out an alternative, and we figured out how to develop it at the cheapest cost."

Blockbuster, which closed another 107 stores in the past fiscal year and says it plans to close 810 to 960 more stores through 2010, is copying Redbox by rolling out 2,500 kiosks by the end of this year and another 7,000 by the end of 2010, said spokesman Randy Hargrove. But Blockbuster says it will play by Hollywood's rules. Blockbuster kiosks rent videos for $1, but the company waits a month or more to stock new releases if studios request it.

Redbox has been feistier, suing moviemakers to try to force them to provide new releases at wholesale prices on the same day they are released for sale to the general public.

Industry experts say the two sides are in a standoff because although Redbox can't be prevented from charging cheap prices, the studios aren't obligated to sell.

Universal Studios Home Entertainment says there is a place for $1 movie rentals, as there is a place for $1 movie theaters--later in the movie cycle.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment claims it was willing to sell Redbox the new release DVDs at the same time as other retailers and at a similar price, generally wholesale costs $15 per DVD, $11 if they agree to destroy rather than resell them, according to Redbox.

When they didn't get the terms they wanted, Fox said, Redbox filed suit in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Universal, the first sued, denies that it essentially boycotted Redbox. A judge recently dismissed two claims against Universal. Fox and Warner Home Video have filed motions to dismiss suits against them.

When Redbox can't get new movies directly from Hollywood, Lowe dispatches 800 Redbox employees armed with corporate credit cards to buy new DVDs at places such as Target and Best Buy the day they hit shelves.

"No one thought that we would ever amount to anything, that we would go away perhaps," Lowe said.

His flap with the moviemakers harkens to the late 1970s, when he witnessed Hollywood's fight to prevent movie rental stores from entering the market.

Even with Blockbuster getting into kiosks, Bob Evans, senior research analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, said, "I think it's going to be difficult for Blockbuster to catch them, particularly because they have their own financial issues."

Still, Blockbuster remains the largest player in the rental market.

According to research firm NPD Group Inc., 19 percent of videos are rented at kiosks such as Redbox. That's a huge jump from 2 percent in the first quarter of 2007.

Netflix and other similar businesses account for 36 percent of rentals, while Blockbuster and other traditional brick-and-mortar stores still have 45 percent of the market.

Blockbuster said it believes it can remain competitive.

"Even if we might not be the first in market, we think we can be a part of it because of our brand," said Hargrove of Blockbuster.

Meanwhile, Redbox is exploring options that include downloadable videos and video game rentals, Lowe said.

"(Our customers) are telling us that they have really fallen in love with Redbox. But they're also telling us that they really want films in lots of different ways," he said.

But Lowe also said Redbox won't be jumping into anything that its consumer data--culled from biweekly surveys of 20,000 to 40,000 Redbox users--doesn't show that the consumers want.

"We're going to let the customer decide," he said.

So far, customers are not complaining.

Redbox, with sales of $388.4 million last year, is on track, analysts say, to hit $1 billion in sales in 2010.

At one point a partner in a Northern California video rental company, Lowe left in the early 1980s when he became fed up with the high overhead.

"I thought that a vending machine would be a great way to control all that," he said.

In 1984, he found partners who helped him retrofit a regular soda-vending machine into one that would vend VHS and beta tapes. He called it Video Droid -- a reference to Star Wars -- and placed three of them in grocery stores.

"People would just kind of walk by and say, 'Hmm. That's kind of interesting,' and not use it," Lowe said. Video stores were still king, and people didn't understand why they would rent a movie at a vending machine.

He eventually built 60 Video Droids, but the business fizzled.

By 2002, Lowe was working at Netflix when Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald's proposed renting DVDs in kiosks inside McDonald's restaurants.

"We thought it was kind of a crazy idea," he said.

But six months later, Lowe left Netflix, became a consultant to McDonald's and eventually teamed on the project with Coinstar, now Redbox's parent. The idea was similar to his Video Droid concept. "I hate losing," Lowe said. "I hate the fact that I failed with what I thought was a great idea."

The Redbox model works, Lowe said, because the boxes are convenient and a visible reminder at the perfect time, while the movies are reasonably priced.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_13630072





Spike Jonze’s Kanye West Film Is Leaked
Dave Itzkoff

At the start of the year, Spike Jonze recalled in a telephone interview on Thursday evening, he and the rapper Kanye West had a conversation about collaborating on a music video that would challenge them creatively and let them take a break from larger projects on their plates. By the end of that conversation they had planned something more ambitious: a short, low-budget film that could be sold and distributed on the Web.

A few months and one Internet leak later, that film, called “We Were Once a Fairytale,” has evolved into something even more than that. It offers a fictional depiction of an unlikable, antisocial Mr. West that eerily anticipates his real-life actions at an MTV awards show in September. And it has provided Mr. Jonze with a lesson in how digital distribution works (or doesn’t work), proving that not even he is immune from online piracy.

“This is the first time it’s happened to me,” Mr. Jonze said, “and it is a weird feeling, like: ‘Wait a second — I wasn’t ready to put that out! That’s mine. Uh, no, I guess it’s not mine anymore.’ ”

Mr. Jonze, whose films include “Where the Wild Things Are,” based on the Maurice Sendak children’s book, had worked with Mr. West on the 2007 video for the rapper’s song “Flashing Lights.” In February, Mr. Jonze said, they spoke about reteaming on a video for “See You in My Nightmares,” from Mr. West’s album “808s & Heartbreak.” At the time, Mr. Jonze was deep into postproduction on his “Wild Things” movie, and Mr. West was touring steadily, but they agreed that the new video should be expanded into an experimental film. Mr. Jonze then spent two days filming with Mr. West at Foxtail, a nightclub in West Hollywood, Calif.

In the film, which was planned to be sold on iTunes, Mr. West is seen behaving drunkenly at the club and acting belligerently toward other patrons. He enters a side room where he starts to have sex with a woman, passes out in flagrante, wakes up and runs to a bathroom, where he begins vomiting rose petals. There, he cuts open his stomach with a knife, setting loose a small, rodentlike demon who takes another, smaller knife from Mr. West and stabs itself in the chest.

Mr. Jonze said the 14-minute phantasmagoria was meant to illustrate the themes of loss and isolation on “808s & Heartbreak,” which Mr. West composed after his mother, Donda, died, and he broke off his engagement to his fiancée at the time, Alexis Phifer.

“We rehearsed the night before we shot, and talked about trying to get to that raw place, that sad, pathetic, drunken, lost place,” Mr. Jonze said. “I told him, the more shameless it is, the more pathetic it is, the better. He just went for it.”

Before the film could be released, Mr. West made an appearance on Sept. 13 at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he stormed the stage and took the microphone away from the country singer Taylor Swift, protesting her award for best female video. Mr. West was widely criticized after the event and has rarely performed in public since.

Then, around Sunday, “We Were Once a Fairytale” was leaked to the Internet and posted on Mr. West’s official Web site, kanyeuniversecity.com. Within a couple of days it was taken down without explanation.

Mr. Jonze said the film was accidentally leaked from the postproduction studio of a friend, and that Mr. West did not realize that it was not meant to be circulated yet. “I think he was like: ‘Oh, it’s out. I’ll link to it,’ ” Mr. Jonze said. (A representative for Mr. West declined to elaborate.)

On the Web sites still showing the film on Friday, “We Were Once a Fairytale” was viewed more than 172,369 times, according to TubeMogul, a company that tracks online viewership of videos. Adding the sites that pulled the unauthorized video, the film probably received “millions of views,” said David Burch, a marketing director at TubeMogul. “These things go fast, especially when Kanye puts them on his blog.”

Elliott Wilson, the chief executive of the hip-hop news site RapRadar.com, said the film’s rapid circulation on the Internet reflected fans’ sustained interest in Mr. West despite his occasional missteps. (On Friday a court commissioner in Los Angeles dismissed charges against Mr. West and his road manager stemming from a 2008 scuffle with photographers at an airport.) “He makes big mistakes publicly, but he’s a passionate artist, and we’re attracted to that,” Mr. Wilson said. “As long as the art is good, I think we’ll have his back.”

Mr. Jonze said Mr. West’s outburst at the MTV awards show did not change how he perceived the rapper or cause him to regret how he is depicted in the film.

“To me, I like him,” Mr. Jonze said. “I like Kanye and I care about him. This video is a side of him. Who knows? I don’t know what the reception is going to be, but I love making stuff with him. I love the guy.”

Instead, Mr. Jonze said, he was more concerned about how the leak of the film might affect its sales when it at last is officially released on Tuesday on iTunes. (A representative for Mr. Jonze said a download of the film in standard definition would cost $1.99.) Though the movie was made on the cheap (Mr. Jonze declined to say for how much exactly), it still required cameramen, editors, designers, grips and gaffers to produce — not to mention animators and puppeteers to create the rodent-demon creature, who is called Henry in the credits.

“I like the idea of trying to put it out on iTunes as an experiment in, can you make a short film yourself, put it out for sale? It’s an experiment to see if that is feasible.” But now, he said, “I don’t actually know if that makes any business sense at all, because once it’s out there, it’s out there.”

Having just completed a lengthy round of promotion for “Where the Wild Things Are,” Mr. Jonze said he was unsure of what he might do after “We Were Once a Fairytale” receives its proper release.

“I’m taking a break for a second,” he said. The catch is, he added, “I don’t know how long a second is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/movies/24jonze.html





Wild Things Roar Their Lucrative Roar
Brooks Barnes; Compiled by Rachel Lee Harris

Big movie studios are routinely faulted by cinema buffs for failing to take creative risks. So score one for Warner Brothers and the director Spike Jonze: Their haunting, arty “Where the Wild Things Are” sold an unexpectedly robust $32.5 million in tickets at North American theaters on the film’s opening weekend, according to box-office tracking services, helped by a marketing campaign that sold the PG-rated film to adults and by a strong turnout at higher-priced Imax theaters. The critically praised movie, adapted from Maurice Sendak’s children’s book and financed by Village Roadshow Pictures and Legendary Pictures, cost about $80 million to make. The thriller “Law Abiding Citizen” (Overture Films) was second with a solid $21.3 million, probably because of the drawing power of its stars, Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. “Paranormal Activity” (Paramount) continued to show strong results in limited release, taking third with about $20.2 million for a new total of about $33.7 million. The Universal Pictures comedy “Couples Retreat” was fourth in its second week with about $17.9 million ($63.3 million total). The low-budget thriller “The Stepfather” (Sony) was fifth with about $12.3 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/mo...NGSRO_BRF.html





Overseas Box Office Still Looking "Up"
Frank Segers

For the fourth time this year, the 3D animated feature "Up" claimed the No. 1 spot on the overseas circuit, bagging $27.9 million from 4,500 screens in 24 territories during the weekend.

Solid first-place openings in Italy and four medium-size markets and a decisive, front-of-the-pack second weekend in the U.K. hoisted the Pixar/Disney movie's foreign total after almost five months of offshore release to $295.8 million and $588.5 million worldwide.

The foreign tally is $119.2 million less than the companies' total foreign box office for 2007's "Ratatouille" and $14.2 million behind last year's "WALL-E." Those titles had similarly lengthy, measured international release patterns, and Disney is keen to see that "Up's" final take exceeds both.

The studio expects "Up" to overtake "WALL-E's" foreign total by week's end. Disney is banking on continued strong business in holdover markets and a run in animation-friendly Japan beginning June 5 to push "Up's" foreign tally beyond that of "Ratatouille."

Finishing second during the frame was "G-Force," another Disney title, which bagged $12.5 million from 3,255 screens in 44 markets for a total of $127.9 million. The animation title from producer Jerry Bruckheimer opened at No. 2 in France with $2.5 million from 316 situations and drew $4.2 million from 521 screens in its Germany bow.

Thanks to a muscular debut in Spain, Sony's romantic comedy "The Ugly Truth" finished third overall with $8.8 million drawn from 2,305 screens in 63 territories for a foreign total of $94.1 million.

The fourth- and fifth-ranked titles for the weekend were released by Universal, which said it crossed the $1 billion overseas box-office mark for 2009 on Saturday; the studio's year-to-date tally stands at $1.005 billion.

Universal's comedy "Couples Retreat" grossed $6.8 million from 926 screens in five territories for an early international gross of $10.8 million. The Weinstein Co./Universal's "Inglourious Basterds," a World War II drama from Quentin Tarantino, drew $6.4 million from 2,800 sites in 52 territories, pushing its international total to $166 million and worldwide take to $285 million.

The sci-fi drama "District 9" pushed its overseas gross to $77.2 million from all territories, including those handled by Sony, thanks to $5.9 million weekend take.

Dominating the French market for the past three frames is "Le petit Nicolas," a Wild Bunch Distribution release of a live-action film based on a popular French children's book. The film's No. 1 weekend tally was $4.8 million from 590 screens for a market total of $23.9 million.

Another solo-market sensation was "Agora," 20th Century Fox's pickup in Spain. The second weekend of director Alejandro Amenabar's $70 million costume drama co-starring Rachel Weisz and Max Minghella produced $4.4 million from 472 locations for a $16.3 million market gross.

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...59I12G20091019





Site Lets Investors See and Copy Experts’ Trades
Claire Cain Miller

The trouble with mutual funds is that investors can feel as though they have put their money in a black box. The 90 million Americans with money in funds know little about fees, what securities their money is invested in and who is in charge.

Daniel Carroll, who started investing when he was 15, thinks he has a way to let average investors learn about investing while experts manage the money. In 2008, he started KaChing, a Web site where 400,000 amateur and professional investors manage virtual portfolios. Others have logged on to see what the investors on the site are doing and make the same trades in their own real portfolios.

On Monday, KaChing is to add a new twist. Customers can set up brokerage accounts that automatically mirror the trades of a money manager, some of them professionals.

“The idea of an asset manager showing all his research, his holdings — it’s unheard-of,” said Mr. Carroll, now 27 and the vice president for business development at KaChing. “In the financial industry, the idea is that information is currency; they protect it with their lives.”

Individuals are desperate for advice and transparency from people who help them manage their money, and mutual funds do not provide enough, said Andy Rachleff, KaChing’s chief executive and a longtime venture capitalist who co-founded Benchmark Capital.

“The mutual fund industry is a $10 trillion industry that has seen no innovation for 25 years. The Internet has had no impact,” Mr. Rachleff said.

KaChing has attracted a roster of prominent early investors from Silicon Valley who have financed the company with $3 million. They include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; Kevin Compton of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; and Jeffrey Jordan, chief executive of OpenTable, the online reservation service.

The angel investors have also been investing their own money through KaChing during the pilot period. “The concept is great — the ability to tap into not just the wisdom of the crowd, but to be able to identify and invest with the particular geniuses in the crowd that stand out,” said Mr. Andreessen, who has invested $100,000 using the site.

Customers will be able to open a brokerage account with Interactive Brokers and link their account with their choice of investors on KaChing. KaChing charges customers a single management fee of 0.25 percent to 3 percent, set by each investor. KaChing keeps a quarter of the fee, and the investors get the rest.

Each time the investors make a trade, KaChing will automatically make the same trades for the customer. Customers can log on whenever they want to check their portfolio’s performance. They can send the investor private messages and receive alerts if the investor does something unusual. With the click of a mouse, customers can stop mirroring an investor.

KaChing rates investors on the site by giving them a score the company calls Investing IQ. The formula is modeled after one used by managers of Ivy League endowments, Mr. Rachleff said, and considers risk-adjusted returns, whether investors stick to their strategies and the quality of the research they provide to explain their ideas.

So-called genius investors are those with high scores that have at least a yearlong record on KaChing. The genius investors sign regulatory documents that they will not break the law, including “front-running” stocks, which is the illegal practice of buying or selling a security for their own account with the advance knowledge of pending orders.

KaChing monitors trades in the personal brokerage accounts of each of its model investors and their families. The site is also a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Only a dozen people have qualified as genius investors so far. They include a retired lawyer in Omaha, a student at Chapman University and the founder of a Bay Area investment firm.

For investors, KaChing is a way to make some money on the side or expand their existing business. Andrew F. Mathieson, founder of the investment firm Fairview Capital in Greenbrae, Calif., said he hoped to use KaChing to cater to people who did not meet the firm’s million-dollar minimum.

“Most investment products are sold rather than bought,” he said. “Our vision of this is it’s a product that will be bought by investors on the basis of the information we’re putting on the site.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/te...19kaching.html





What Comes After Hard Drives?

The ability to store and retrieve data is an important component of today's computers, as well as other modern electronic devices such as cell phones, video game consoles, and camcorders. Since their invention in the 1950s, magnetic-based hard disk drives (HDDs) have been the primary method of nonvolatile storage. However, researchers are currently developing several new and promising nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, but for one of them to replace HDDs within the next decade, it will be a challenge.

According to a new study, if HDDs continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100). Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs - the cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs.

In a study published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie Mellon University have investigated 13 up-and-coming NVM technologies to see whether one of them might outperform HDDs on a cost-per-TB basis in 2020. Their results showed that most technologies will probably not be competitive with HDDs or flash memories at that time, except for two potential candidates: phase change random access memory (PCRAM) and spin transfer torque random access memory (STTRAM).

As Kryder and Kim explained, PCRAM is based on the phase change properties of chalcogenide glass. With the application of heat, the glass can switch between two different states (amorphous and crystalline) to be used as a memory. With their small cell size and ability to store multiple bits per cell, PCRAMs have the potential to offer high densities and be cost-competitive with HDDs, but their biggest drawback is that they require somewhat higher power than most other technologies. PCRAMs are already beginning to be marketed by Numonyx Inc., an Intel-ST Microelectronics joint venture, and so are closer to practical realization than STTRAM.

STTRAM, which is similar to magnetic RAM, uses a spin polarized current to write data by reorienting the states of a magnetic tunnel junction between parallel and anti-parallel orientations. In their evaluation, Kryder and Kim found that STTRAMs appear to potentially offer superior power efficiency, among other advantages. If STTRAMs could be improved to store multiple bits per cell, the researchers predict that STTRAMs’ density could make them candidates for replacing flash memory and possibly HDDs.

“We were surprised to find that the study indicated that, even in 2020, hard drives were likely to be considerably less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies,” Kryder told PhysOrg.com. “It was also somewhat surprising to find that the technical potential of a technology was not necessarily well-correlated with where the industry was investing the most dollars; rather, industrial firms are tending to invest where they have the most know-how. This is not necessarily the wisest decision, but is quite understandable.”

The other NVM technologies that Kryder and Kim evaluated were ferroelectric RAM, magnetic RAM, carbon nanotube RAM, probe memory, holographic memory, copper bridge RAM, resistive RAM, racetrack memory, single electron memory, molecular memory, and polymer memory. Although these technologies offer potential, each of them still faces significant performance challenges over the next decade. Holographic memory, for example, offers high density and is inexpensive, but it currently only offers “write once, read many times” (WORM) functionality, and with its 50-year storage lifetime it may be better suited to the archival market. The researchers also pointed out the intriguing concept behind single electron memory, where information could be stored in something as small as a single electron, but they predicted that this technology likely won’t be practical until beyond 2020.

Kryder, who has previously been CTO for Seagate Technology, the world's largest hard drive maker, explained that he had been continually asked to review new technologies that were often touted as potentially replacing hard drives.

“Feedback from industrial associates has indicated that having a structured set of criteria to evaluate technologies was very useful and that the study has helped them to prioritize the technologies that they look at,” he said. “This study allowed us to identify the most promising technologies on which to work, and we are now attempting develop multi-level cell STTRAM.”
http://www.physorg.com/news175505861.html





50 Technological Advances Your Children Will Laugh At

Over the last 30 years the pace of technological change has increased so quickly that one decade’s must-have gadget becomes the next decade’s laughing stock.
Shane Richmond and Ian Douglas

You may have felt cool with your Sony Walkman as a teenager but contemporary teens can fit more music onto a device smaller than a box of matches. And they don’t have to flip the tape over halfway through an album.

There can be little doubt: yesterday’s cutting edge technology looks silly to today’s children and much of today’s technology will look silly to tomorrow’s children. Here’s a list of 50 technological advances, past and present, that will have young people asking: “you used to have to do what?!”

1. TV schedules
That week-long wait for your favourite TV programme was a familiar feature of many a childhood as little as a decade ago. These days TV schedules are less meaningful because of 'catch-up' TV channels, numerous repeats, on-demand internet TV services and, for the less law-abiding, torrent services. In future the concept of scheduling will further disintegrate as TV transforms into a primarily demand-driven service.

2. Laptops
One way or another, whether it's through smartphones, tablet computers or electronic paper, the idea of carrying around a bulky, heavy computer is going to seem odd in the not-too-distant future. "I used to have to carry a separate bag for my computer," you'll find yourself explaining to some youngster as he unfolds his e-paper, touchscreen laptop, connects it to his cloud storage database and starts watching a film.

3. Cordless phones
The phone used to be attached to the wall by a cable and, for some unknown reason, it would probably be in the hall, forcing you to sit on the stairs while you chatted. Then came the cordless phone. Isn't it great to be able to walk around the house while you're on the phone? But don't try leaving the house with your phone - it doesn't do that. Already telephone companies are providing phones that switch from the home network to the mobile network, allowing you to carry on a conversation while leaving the house. Your kids will wonder why phones were ever attached to homes, which brings us to...

4. Buildings with phone numbers
Yes, you really did have to call a building to ask whether the person you wanted to speak to was there or not. Buildings had phone numbers, not people. Now, almost everyone has a mobile phone and the concept of trying to guess where someone might be before you call them is almost entirely redundant. At some point people will probably be issued with phone numbers at birth.

5. Glasses to correct vision
Wearing glasses to correct vision problems is still a social norm but with laser eye surgery and contact lenses, it's not hard to imagine a point in the near future when they become obsolete. However, the concept of hanging lenses in front of your face has been around for centuries and is still pretty useful. Sunglasses will be around for a while and your children may start wearing glasses to take advantage of augmented reality services, for example for navigation.

6. Video and audio tape
Tape is already a thing of the past in most homes. There's no need to remember to rewind a rental video before you return it and no need to spool back and forth to hear your favourite song on an album. The language remains, however, and your children may wonder why you talk about "taping" a TV show when what you're actually doing is saving it to a hard drive on a 'personal video recorder' (PVR). Your PVR lists each programme you've saved and even lets you start watching at a specific point. If you explain to your children that you used to have to fast-forward through your video cassette to see whether you taped Only Fools and Horses before or after last week's Question Time, they'll think you're having them on.

7. Photo processing
The comedian Demetri Martin says that he loves digital cameras because they allow him "to reminisce instantly". The idea that you'd have to shoot a whole roll of film holding, if you are lucky, 36 pictures, before you can see whether any of them were any good sounds odd to the digital camera generation. Stranger still is the idea of taking your film to the chemist - after snapping three pointless shots of your cat to finish the film - and then waiting an hour while they processed them. On top of that, a quarter of your snaps would have stickers on telling you off for taking blurry pictures.

8. Watches
You spend most of your time sitting in front of a computer that shows the time in the corner of the screen. When you're at home you can see the time on your DVD player and your oven. And when you're out and about you're carrying a mobile phone that displays the time. Admit it, your watch is just a piece of jewellery now, isn't it?

9. Keyboards
Many touchscreen devices still make a clicking noise when you type on them but there's no real reason to. Modern keyboards are very quiet - nothing like the thump of old typewriters or the clacking of keyboards from the 80s. But the keyboard itself may not last much longer. They take up space, adding to the bulk of portable devices, and they suffer from being fixed: a British keyboard cannot transform into a Russian one but a touchscreen can. Though touchscreens take some getting used to for those who have learned keyboards it's unlikely that those who grow up with them will have the same problem.

10. CDs, DVDs and Minidiscs
Physical media are constantly being replaced. The path from records to eight track cartridges to cassettes to CDs to minidiscs to MP3 players is littered with defunct stereo equipment. Along the way are cul de sacs such as laser discs, digital audio tapes and HD-DVDs. They take up space, require specialist equipment and are ultimately all going to be replaced by wireless downloads to your watching or listening device. Your CD collection is already as outdated as your grandfather's library of 78s.

11. TV weather maps
Remember when weather forecasters had to stick little lightning-spurting clouds to a cardboard map? Do you think today's flash graphics, in which forecasters swoop across the country like, well, flying weather forecasters, are going to look any better in 20 years?

12. Paper-based voting
You get a slip of paper weeks before polling day. You store it somewhere safe or, if you're me, lose it entirely. Then on polling day you go to a rickety cabin in the playground of the local school, hand the card to a person with a long list and then go into a booth and tick a box. That's ripe for technological improvement, surely? Future generations will, at birth, have a voting chip implanted into their brains - right before they're given their lifelong phone numbers. (Probably.)

13. Pagers
Having your name called over the tannoy in a busy hotel or airport is undoubtedly cool. Being paged says 'I'm important'. Or perhaps 'I have a name that sounds silly when read out over a tannoy'. Either way, it's cool. But the pager - which requires someone to call a number so that a message can be sent to you to ask you to call them back - is a nonsense. Don't even try to explain it to your children. It makes no sense. Get a mobile phone and use text messages.

14. The map and compass
Maps and compasses aren't likely to disappear anytime soon. We all need to find our way to places. But the time of the paper map and physical compass has already passed. Having a map in a device, such as a mobile phone, means that it can be updated when necessary and can be made interactive by removing unnecessary elements or overlaying directions. Build the compass into the device too and you're all set.

15. Black & white film and TV
The world used to be in black and white, at least that's how it appears to children.

16. Letters
The art of letter writing was covered by Matthew Moore in his list of things being killed by the internet. However, it's not just the art but the technology of letters that has been usurped. The idea of writing something, putting it in the post, waiting for it to arrive and then waiting even longer for a reply seems bizarre in our world of always-on communications. Plane tickets, bank statements and bills are already paperless for most people.

17. Business cards
We still hand each other little pieces of card at meetings so that we can get in touch afterwards or even just remember who we met. Then we file these pieces of card or transcribe the information into a contacts book or onto a computer. Or just lose them. It's a pointless system that, we can only hope, our children will not have to go through. We can exchange data wirelessly now, you know.

18. Fax machines
Every now and again a piece of paper can't be emailed to someone and, as discussed above, the post is just too slow. So we have to dust off the fax machine in the corner. This technology dates back to the 1970s and its slightly magical properties - "it's the letter I just printed! sent over the phone! in seconds!" - were never quite trusted. Many people still phone after sending a fax to check that the magic has worked. The process involved in sending a fax thus becomes: write letter on computer; print it on headed paper; fax it; phone to check the fax has been received.

19. Email
As we've seen already, email has replaced letters and offers a pleasant alternative to the horrors of the fax machine. But don't think being email-friendly means you can escape the mockery of your juniors. Teenagers these days eschew email in favour of instant messenger for direct communication and prefer social networks for longer messages. Even that is likely to be swept away by collaboration tools such as Google Wave, which combines aspects of instant messenger, email, filesharing and the web into a real-time tool.

20. Petrol-powered vehicles
Our children may be slightly perplexed to hear that we used to pump liquid into our cars to keep them running. They may well be plugging theirs in instead. They certainly won't miss the fume-filled streets that fossil fuel-powered cars create.

21. Games consoles
Mobile phones are games consoles these days. A games console has considerably greater computing power than a phone but it's not hard to imagine a future in which the computing is done by your television or your PVR and the game is streamed from the internet, instead of being delivered on a disk. In fact, with a more powerful phone, the computing could be done in your pocket and the game streamed to the TV. Oh, and games controllers will be a thing of the past too.

22. Phone boxes
The trouble with attaching phone numbers to buildings (see item 4) is that there's no way to phone people when you're out. So we left phones lying around the country, in giant red boxes with unfeasibly heavy doors and used those instead. Whenever someone wanted to use one of these phones they had to pay, which meant needing to have change on you. And then you phoned a building a found that the person you wanted wasn't there, wasting your money and requiring you to find another phone box later so you could try again.

23. Multiple remote controls
We used to have to walk across the room to change the channel on the television. That wasn't a big problem - for ages we had only three channels anyway. But eventually we got remote controls and then we got more boxes - videos, satellite tuners and so on - and with those came more remote controls. Eventually, faced with the prospect of not being able to get into the living room because of the pile of remotes, the human race developed universal remotes that, in a rather clunky fashion, emulated multiple remotes. In future, your mobile phone will probably double as a remote for whatever it is you're trying to operate. (These mobile phones of the future are doing a lot, aren't they?)

24. Postcodes on street signs
The quaint habit of printing postcodes on street signs in Britain's major cities is surely unnecessary once we all have maps and compasses on the mobile devices that we carry around with us? (See item 14.)

25. Floppy discs
Storage media come and go (see item 10) but floppy disks were commonplace between 1969, when they first appeared in their eight-inch format, and the mid-1990s, by which time they had shrunk to three-and-a-half inches and were in a plastic, decidedly un-floppy case. Your children are bound to see them in films and will be amazed to learn that at their best, they held up to 240MB. That's roughly equivalent to an eighth of the capacity of the latest iPod Shuffle.

26. Telephone directories
Back to phones again. Having stuck one in most buildings (see item 4) and left a few in the street (see item 22) we then had the problem of how anyone would find the number they needed. So we printed every phone number we thought would be relevant into a huge book which we delivered to every household in the country. Seriously. Then people started asking to be left out of the directory, rendering them largely useless.

27. Dial-up internet access
It will seem odd to future generations that we used to turn our internet access on for short periods of the day. It's rather like turning the water on at the mains every time you want to run a bath. Part of the reason for these short bursts of web activity - during which you couldn't use your phone - was that you were charged by the minute for access. And the minutes soon added up at dial-up speeds, as anyone who has ever watched a picture appear on their screen one line at a time will confirm.

28. Wiring-up a wireless network
Remember when you wired up your house to the national grid? No? How about when you fitted a water pipe and hooked yourself up to the sewer system? No? Well you've almost certainly connected yourself to the internet by now and you've probably had a go at creating a wireless network. Just how many wires does a 'wireless' network need, anyway? In future, when the wireless cloud surrounds us, our children will marvel at our stories of routers and switches and RJ45 cables.

29. Computers in boxes
The big beige box on your desk received its death sentence with the launch of the iMac in 1998. Now, only the budget end of the desktop market and very high-powered machines need their own tower away from the monitor. As components get smaller still and more computing power is transferred to the cloud, cutting the need for local resources, the need for a box will be eliminated altogether.

30. Visiting the supermarket
Unless you really like wandering aisles filled with washing powder or shower gel be thankful for supermarket home delivery. By the time your children are grown up, all of those boring products will be ordered online and delivered to save you the trouble of going to the shop and getting them. Your supermarket will instead be a giant farmers' market filled with fresh fruit and veg, exotic meats, cakes and the kind of products you would like to spend some time browsing. Either that or it will be turned into a big Poundstretcher. Sorry.

31. Local data storage
That 512Mb of hard disk plugged into your WiFi router might look like a pretty slick piece of engineering right now but your kids, with access to unlimited amounts of super-cheap online backup for a few pennies, will wonder what all the fuss was about.

32. ‘Owning’ music, books and film
The idea of 'collections' of media has been central for as long as there have been books, films and music. But once data can be stored in the cloud and accessed by your device whenever you need it, the idea of 'owning' something starts to seem strange. If you buy more than one album per month, you might be better off putting that money into a subscription service and listening to the album you would have bought and any other album that takes your fancy. Availability and portability issues are holding these services back at the moment, along with the nagging fear that the service could just disappear, taking your 'collection' with it. It's changing fast though: your children won't collect albums, they'll have every album at their fingertips all the time.

33. Cords and cables
That spaghetti-like jumble of plastic clogging up the space behind your desk has to go. Wires are messy, difficult to plug in, always too short and prone to loose connections. Wireless data transfer, battery-powered devices and cordless charging mats will make the knot of dusty copper in every office look as dated as the Sweeney's Ford Granada.

34. 35mm cameras
Digital cameras take away the rigmarole of getting photos developed (see item 7) and they also don't require you to carry rolls of film with you and then fiddle around in the back of the camera every time you want to change a film.

35. TVs and radios that need tuning
People on television and radio still occasionally say "stay tuned" when they are really asking you not to switch off or change the channel. The phrase lost its original meaning and your children will never guess that you used to turn a tiny dial like a safe cracker in an effort to get your TV tuned to the correct channel. Not content with the fiddliness of this process, some television manufacturers supplied their sets with a tiny plastic stick that had to be inserted into the tuner so you could find your channel. If you lost your tiny stick, the entire set was rendered useless.

36. Low-res digital pics and video
Concepts like 'low bandwidth', 'limited storage space' and 'two megapixel sensor' will soon be as laughable as the 16K Ram-pack attached to the back of a ZX81. High definition cameras will be fitted as standard to mobile phones and computer screens (and spectacles, headlights and foreheads, for all we know) and YouTube's successors will deliver crystal-clear pictures with hifi-quality sound, driving the video piracy watchdogs of the future round the bend.

37. The mouse
Since 1968 our hands and fingers have been reduced to crude pointing devices, capable only of pointing to one set of co-ordinates on a screen and then stabbing at it. Multi-touch interfaces mean we can use all of our ten fingers to move, zoom, select, dismiss, manipulate and edit. Touchpads will unite the mouse and keyboard, removing one more device from our desktops.

38. Phones with aerials
There were few better ways to make yourself look important in the late 80s and early 90s than by taking a phone the size of a minibus out of your briefcase, extending an aerial six feet long and having a shouty conversation about share prices. Stockbrokers of the future will have to have shouty conversations into invisible, tiny earpieces, which at least has the virtue of making them look sillier.

39. Desktop software
Most software has now moved from disks to downloads and the next step is to remove the software from your desktop entirely. There are already online office packages that offer a full feature set without needing to be installed on your hard drive. Expect software of the future to be run entirely in the cloud - another blow to the notion of media 'ownership'.

40. ADSL
Your ADSL broadband connection might feel fast now but try downloading HD-quality video while someone else plays an online video game and a third person streams internet radio. The connection speeds of the future are already available in many parts of the world. Assuming the Government and ISPs get their act together, your kids won't be stuck with 8MB speeds in 20 years time.

41. Single-use batteries
You probably don't have very much that's battery-powered these days. Mobile phones, laptops and MP3 players mostly use rechargeable batteries. The idea that you used to have to throw batteries away and then go and buy some new ones already seems quite strange.

42. Wifi hotspots
'Gather round, children, and I'll tell you a story of mysterious areas of the country where no wireless transfer of data was possible, and only workarounds involving mobile phones and something called '"tethering" would let you check your email or look things up online. Ah, can you imagine the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that would result, or the long, dreary trudging of the streets when we had to find an invisible place where someone would charge us many pounds for a few minutes of connectivity?'

43. Fillings in teeth
It's good to know that in the near future all that business with injections, numb mouths and metal amalgams will be over and old, damaged teeth will be removed and replaced with shiny news ones, grown from stem cells to order. The last generation to know the special fear that comes with the rising whine of the drill is already brushing its own teeth.

44. Passports
You rarely have to rush back home from the airport in a taxi having forgotten to bring your retinas or thumbprints, but still we persist in carrying around little faux-leather bound pages of documents as though we're bearers of Her Majesty's seal.

45. Cheques
You probably laugh at these already, and your children will be laughing right along with you. Imagine: a booklet of pre-printed IOUs that you use instead of money. You have to write 'only' at the end of the amount for some reason, and you hand out details that would allow the recipient to set up direct debits on your account with every payment. They are secured only by your signature, which the person processing the cheque has as much chance of recognising as they have passing on the payment in less than three working (that's what they used to call monday to friday, kids) days.

46. Road signs
Universal sat-nav will mean that the local council can save money by tearing down those hulking sheets of metal at the side of the road and insisting that your car informs you that it's five miles to the town centre or that road works will be disrupting traffic until July 2035. Those same devices will also keep an eye on your speed and report your movements to the traffic police, so there will be no need for fleets of Gatso cameras either.

47. Teletext and Minitel
The funny colours, the tiny amount of text on the screen, the need to remember numerous page numbers - Teletext was a rubbish internet really, wasn't it? It's taken a while for the internet to make it to the television but your children can now watch minute-by-minute commentary of the football instead of watching a loop of latest scores on teletext.

48. Paper timetables
The trouble with transport timetables is that they tell you only what is supposed to happen. The reality is often different. These days, GPS and the internet mean that you can find out exactly where your train is right now and what time it's going to arrive at your station.

49. Recipe books
In the house of the future, intelligent appliances will mean no more head scratching over what to cook for dinner. Instead, your fridge will know exactly what food items it contains, and what meals you can make with those ingredients, while video panels embedded within the work surfaces will guide you through every stage of the cooking process.

50. Walkie talkies
Children always used to want walkie talkies. They would allow you to hear unintelligible messages from your friends, just so long as you didn't go more than a garden's-length away from each other. Nowadays children would rather have a mobile phone so that they can call any of their friends without having to give them a walkie talkie first.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-laugh-at.html





More Swedish Women Surfing the Web for Sex: Study

Surfing the web in search of sexual content is one of the ten fastest growing internet activities in Sweden – especially among women, a new study shows.

According to a survey by the Sweden-based World Internet Institute, nearly one in five Swedish web surfers – 17 percent – has gone online to visit sites with sexual content.

“It’s actually not that surprising that surfing the web for sex is increasing. Attitudes toward sex in society play a role in how honest people are, as does internet use overall – more and more services are carried out online these days,” World Internet Institute CEO Janne Elvelid told the TT news agency.

Since 2003, the percentage of Swedish internet users who have gone online to visit sex sites has increased nearly six-fold.

On the other hand, the percentage of Swedes who report visiting sexually-themed websites on a regular basis has remained steady at around 4 percent.

Not surprisingly, men under the age of 25 were found to surf the net for sex most often, with nearly one third of respondents reporting they had visited websites with sexual content. The corresponding figure for young women is only 4 percent.

Nevertheless, the study does reveal that there has been a massive increase in the number of Swedish women who admit to logging on to look for sexual content.

“Women and men have become more comparable in their internet usage,” said Elvelid.

From an international perspective, however, Swedes aren’t as hungry for sexual content as web surfers from other countries.

According to the World Internet Institute figures from 2007, only 11 percent of Swedes said they visited sexually-themed websites, the lowest percentage of all countries included in the comparison.

Figures for the UK, on the other hand, showed that 14 percent of British internet users looked for sexual material, while 29 percent of web surfers in the United States reported visiting sex sites.

The top spot went to the Czech Republic, however, where 40 percent of respondents said they surfed the web fin search of sex websites.

The survey results come from responses from 2,000 telephone interviews in which respondents were asked, “How often, if ever, do you use the internet to look at sexual material?”
http://www.thelocal.se/22788/2009102...tm_content=118





Guardians of Their Smiles
Douglas Quenqua

FOR Jessica Gwozdz, a professional photographer and mother of two, Flickr was a blessing. It allowed her to share photos of her children, Grace and Henry, with distant, tech-averse relatives for whom a username and password would have been too great an obstacle. It even allowed potential clients to freely browse her gallery.

Then a friend sent her an e-mail message with the kind of subject line no parent cares to read: “Oh no — it’s Gracie.”

The message contained a link to Orkut, a social networking site popular in Brazil. Someone had created a fake profile, using headshots of Mrs. Gwozdz’s 4-year-old daughter.

“They gave her a fake name, Melodie Cuthbert, and a relationship status that said she was interested in making friends and dating men,” Mrs. Gwozdz recalled in a recent telephone interview. Other Orkut members had given the profile a “sexy” rating of two and a half hearts.

The discovery turned out to be little more than a gut-churning prank. According to a Flickr spokeswoman, young teenage girls in Brazil were copying children’s pictures from the photo-sharing site to create “paper doll” profiles, then giving each other “sexy” ratings depending on the quality of their work.

Mrs. Gwozdz contacted Flickr and Orkut, which deleted the profiles. And Mrs. Gwozdz has now taken advantage of Flickr’s privacy settings. But to this day she occasionally gets e-mail messages to her Flickr account from strangers saying things like “family very beautiful” and “I would ask you, let me use the photos of his daughter.”

Such is the stuff of parents’ nightmares in the social networking age, when Facebook is rapidly taking the place of the baby book. Young parents are flooding photo-sharing and social networking sites — Snapfish, Twitter, YouTube, even Match.com — with images of their children dancing, singing and bathing.

Not everyone is sure that all that sharing is such a good idea. Several groups on Facebook rail against people posting children’s photos. On Parenting.com, the editor, Susan Kane, says the debate “is constantly going on.” And on blogs, school listservs and at kitchen tables, the argument flares: should young children’s photos be shared online?

Just consider these recent postings on UrbanBaby.com and Momversation.com, two discussion sites for young mothers:

“You should not have any photos of your children on the Internet at all!”

“They’re 3 years old, it’s not that big a deal.”

“If you want to post pictures of my kids online, you’d better ask me first (so I can say no!)”

“Why were they naked?”

Like other parental debates — whether to spank or when to let children travel alone — the issue tends to divide parents into two familiar camps: the vigilant and the laissez-faire. Some parents want to protect their children from what is unlikely but still tragically possible. Others say children will do best when learning to live with the realities of the Web.

Squashed in the middle are parents who impose their own haphazard rules: Only post on password-protected sites. Leave out names. Yes to Flickr, no to YouTube. And for heaven’s sake, no bathtub photos.

Parents are grappling with what is safe, and what fears are irrational. As with most debates about child safety, the risks are not as severe as many imagine. But neither is posting photos online as safe as many assume.

Elizabeth Hunter, a blogger from Arlington, Mass., frequently posts pictures of her 2-year-old daughter on her site. To her, it’s a matter of living with the reality of the Web.

“Hundreds of kids die in swimming pools every year, but we don’t shut down all the pools,” she said. “We teach kids how to swim.”

“I don’t put up pictures of her completely naked or ones that show her genitalia, obviously, but I have shown pictures of her in the bathtub,” she added. “Sure, people can probably figure out where she is and stalk her, but child abductions from strangers are such strange occurrences, really.”

Rebecca Woolf, a Los Angeles-based writer, uses her children’s real names on her site, and shows their faces. But she said in an interview, “I wouldn’t even post a picture of my son from behind if he were naked.”

It’s not always easy to know what’s the right thing to do. “I feel conflicted about it,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘Oh, you’re exploiting your kids.’ But the medium is so new, none of us know what is going to happen.”

Other parents see a case of dangerously mixed messages: How can you teach a child not to share private information if you post a picture of him wearing his baseball uniform — with the town name — as your profile photo on Facebook?

“We tell our children all the time to be careful, don’t reveal your information, don’t give your name, don’t talk to strangers,” said Jodi Garrett, a registered nurse in San Diego, Calif., who does not post pictures of her two children. “To me, a picture posted on the Internet is a big piece of information. I cringe when I see what people post.”

And even strict parents can’t always keep out the rest of the world. Kathryn Murray, a mother from the Upper East Side who asked to use her middle name instead of her first to protect her family’s privacy, said she limits pictures of her son to Picasa, a site that allows for invitation-only access. But she recently had an awkward moment when a friend told her she had posted pictures of her son on Facebook. She was considering how to ask her politely to take it down, when her friend, sensing the tension, beat her to it.

“My facial expression was enough,” she recalled.

Fueling the anxiety of parents like Ms. Murray is a doomsday scenario: a predator finds pictures of a cute child on the Internet, figures out where the child lives or goes to school and snatches him.

“It’s probably not too difficult to go through those pictures and figure out we live on the Upper East Side,” Ms. Murray said. “And then it’s ‘Oh, I’ve been to that park,’ or ‘I know that street,’ What’s to stop a pedophile from putting two and two together?”

Her fears are misplaced, experts on online safety say.

“Research shows that there is virtually no risk of pedophiles coming to get kids because they found them online,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute. While the debate makes this crime seem common, he said, all the talk is really just “techno-panic.”

Prof. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, says TV shows like the “Dateline NBC” program, “To Catch a Predator,” have falsely inflated the danger of the Internet.

“There is this characterization of pedophiles using the Internet as an L. L. Bean catalog, but this is not the way it happens,” he said. Predators are much more likely to look in chat rooms or other sites, he said, where teenagers are suggesting that they may be open to a sexual relationship.

The real danger is that a photo is appropriated and mistreated.

Gretchen White, a blogger from Westminster, Colo., discovered a young woman on MySpace passing off pictures of her baby as her own. “It turns out she had faked a pregnancy online and needed a baby to show for it,” Mrs. White said.

Suspicious friends of the young woman traced the photo back to Mrs. White’s blog and alerted her. “My initial reaction was, I’m never blogging again,” Mrs. White said, but decided instead to brand all her pictures with a watermark of her blog’s URL, an increasingly common tactic for mommy bloggers.

Rachel Sarah, author of the book “Single Mom Seeking,” recently came across a Web site for a group in California that used a picture of her and her daughter as an advertisement. They took it down at her request, but she said the experience was “unsettling.”

The possibility always exists that pedophiles are lifting such pictures, Professor Finkelhor says, but it is not something he has encountered. And, he said, it’s unlikely for a discomfiting reason: actual child pornography is so readily available that pedophiles aren’t likely to waste time cruising social networks looking for less explicit material.

Regardless of what danger may come to your children by posting pictures, there is one hazard whose existence no one can question: other parents. And their wrath could be enough to make anyone think twice before posting photos of little Charlie’s fourth birthday party.

Aaron Baar, a freelance writer from Chicago, posted a video last year of his son’s school holiday concert on YouTube, so his parents could see it.

“I put it up there and I forgot about it,” he said. But he had tagged the video with the name of the school, and one by one students started finding it.

Several months later he received an e-mail message from the mother of the child standing next to his son asking him to take it down. That parent also shared her e-mail message with the class’s other parents, touching off a small avalanche of disapproving posts on a local message board regarding Mr. Baar’s parenting skills.

“To this day I don’t feel comfortable bringing a camera to a school play,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/fa...5facebook.html





Judge Tosses Dart's Suit vs. Craigslist

A federal judge this week threw out Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's lawsuit seeking to force Craigslist to pull online ads Dart says sell sex.

U.S. District Judge John F. Grady ruled that ads offering "adult services" aren't explicitly offering sex, and Craigslist is an "intermediary," and is not "culpable for aiding and abetting" customers who "misuse their services to commit unlawful acts."

"Sheriff Dart may continue to use Craigslist's Web site to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content," Grady wrote in his ruling. "But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct."

Dart filed suit earlier this year, seeking to force the San Francisco-based site to eliminate the erotic services section that he said his officers have monitored to make hundreds of arrests for prostitution, juvenile pimping and human trafficking.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/18...list22.article





The Loin in Winter: Hefner Reflects, and Grins
Brooks Barnes

Hugh Hefner leaned back on a red loveseat, the saggy one in the study of his infamous mansion here, and interlocked his fingers behind his head. A visitor had asked — more like shouted, since he has trouble hearing — a question about mortality.

At 83, does he think about it?

In a word, no. Mr. Hefner, the legendarily libidinous founder of Playboy, the prophet of hedonism, does not believe that his denouement is at hand.

He doesn’t act like it, either. He still works full days on his magazine, flies to Europe and Las Vegas, pops Viagra, visits nightclubs with his three live-in girlfriends — each young enough to be his great-granddaughter — and is working with the producer Brian Grazer on a film.

“This is one of the very best times of my life,” he said, grinning, dressed in pajamas and slippers. “It’s even better, richer than people know.”

You want to believe him, but it is hard to ignore the realities of his business. Playboy Enterprises, hobbled by a shifting media landscape, is in need of heart paddles. On Tuesday, the magazine said it would cut the circulation numbers it guarantees to advertisers to 1.5 million, from 2.6 million. The company has lost money for seven quarters in a row.

And perhaps most shockingly, the company said earlier this year that it would consider acquisition offers, something that was believed to be unthinkable while Mr. Hefner was still alive.

Mr. Hefner knows every good party must end, having long ago bought a crypt next to Marilyn Monroe at a Los Angeles cemetery. In interviews over the years, he has talked about how life wouldn’t be worth living without Playboy. “If I sold it, my life would be over,” he has said. But he may be coming around: “I’m taking more seriously the fact that I’m not 30 years old anymore. I need to think about the continuity of the magazine.”

Love him or loathe him, no one doubts Mr. Hefner’s influence in American cultural history. As a magazine publisher, he essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class.

As a cultural force, however, Mr. Hefner still divides the country — 56 years after Playboy’s first issue. To his supporters, he is the great sexual liberator who helped free Americans from Puritanism and neurosis. To his detractors, including many feminists and social conservatives, he helped set in motion a revolution in sexual attitudes that have objectified and victimized countless women and promoted an immoral, whatever-feels-good approach to life.

Mr. Hefner will concede that there are dark consequences of what he helped set into motion, but said “it’s a small price to pay for personal freedom.”

“People don’t always make good decisions. The real obscenities on this planet have very little to do with sex,” he said, adding that “it’s not as romantic a time.”

Less romantic and — with instantly available pornography online and graphic sex talk, including on Mr. Hefner’s own show, “The Girls Next Door,” on TV — it’s a time that makes Playboy’s ideals seem quaint. Mr. Hefner — who uses the word “cat” to describe himself, as in, “I’m the luckiest cat on the planet” — doesn’t think much of today’s cultural landscape.

“I feel strongly that the pop culture is a thinner soup today,” he said. “It used to be a thick porridge.”

At the same time, he tries to be an active participant. While the magazine is still edited largely in Chicago, Mr. Hefner approves “every Playmate, every cover, the cartoons and the letters.” Working from a home office or his bed, where the 1970s-era Tasmanian opossum fur bedspread has been traded for a silk and velvet one, Mr. Hefner helped drive the recent decision to buy a 5,000-word excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novella, “The Original of Laura,” for a forthcoming issue.

His girlfriends recently educated him about Twitter. (“I’ll be playing gin rummy tonight” was a recent tweet.) He’s hooked on the HBO drama “True Blood.” He recently filmed a Guitar Hero commercial, holding the pipe he gave up after a suffering a small stroke in 1985. He has also suffered personal humiliations. Former live-in girlfriends, including those who have appeared on “The Girls Next Door,” have portrayed him in interviews and a book as a control freak who enforces a curfew of 9 p.m. The mansion itself has seen better days. During a July visit, the game house (the one with a room that has a mattress as flooring) smelled musty, while the bird aviary needed scrubbing. That famous grotto, with its Jacuzzis of varied depth, seemed more like a fetid zoo exhibit than a pleasure palace (although nearby shelves were stocked with enormous bottles of Johnson’s Baby Oil).

In March, with the housing market in a nosedive, he put his wife’s home, located next door to the Playboy Mansion, up for sale for $28 million. It sold in August for $18 million. Mr. Hefner, who separated from Kimberly Conrad Hefner in 1998, filed for divorce in early September; she is suing him, claiming he owes her $4 million under a prenuptial agreement and proceeds from the home’s sale.

Mr. Hefner’s retinue insists that money is not tight, but a series of actions has made it look that way. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported last year that the mansion’s staff had been cut. People can now buy tickets (up to $10,000 each) to what were once invitation-only parties, which remain a vital part of stoking the Playboy brand.

“It’s not always as exciting as people think,” said Holly Madison in an interview last summer. Ms. Madison lived with Mr. Hefner for seven years as his “No. 1 girlfriend” until she broke up with him last fall.

Richard Rosenzweig, who has worked at Playboy since 1958 and holds multiple titles, begged to differ. “This is a very aspirational place,” he said in an interview in Mr. Hefner’s dining room. “Everybody wants to come here.”

When Mr. Hefner’s relationship with Ms. Madison ended, he said he got letters from women around the world begging to move in. “They were climbing over the gates,” he said, beaming. Mr. Hefner chose three new live-in girlfriends, 23-year-old Crystal Harris and twins Kristina and Karissa Shannon, 20.

Despite his chipper attitude, Mr. Hefner clearly has legacy on his mind. Lately, he has been poring over his scrapbooks, which he has been keeping since childhood and now number over 2,000. Never-before-seen material from them — his first library card, self-drawn comic strips and pictures — will form the heart of a 3,506-page, six-volume “illustrated biography” from Taschen. Only 1,500 of the $1,300 behemoths will be sold, starting next month.

For the first time, Mr. Hefner has also given unfettered access to a documentary filmmaker, Brigitte Berman, whose recently completed “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel” made its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

And a major Hollywood biopic is speeding ahead at long last. Mr. Grazer recently met with the screenwriter Diablo Cody about the project, Mr. Hefner said. Brett Ratner (best known for the “Rush Hour” blockbusters) is lined up to direct. Robert Downey Jr. has expressed interest in playing Mr. Hefner.

“He’s an intellect of the highest order who influenced the worldwide zeitgeist in a grand way — and that influence is drastically underrated,” Mr. Grazer said.

Indeed, some of his long-time friends fret that some of the accomplishments they admire — creating a cultural icon (the Playboy Bunny), eroding racial boundaries (through the inclusion of black performers in his clubs), and supporting many feminist causes, including abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment — are getting lost.

Mr. Hefner worries about it, too. “We just literally live in a very different world and I played a part in making it that way,” he said. “Young people have no idea about that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/bu.../24hefner.html





Michael Bloomberg Now Biggest U.S. Political Spender: Report

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent more of his own money in pursuit of public office than any other individual in U.S. history, spending $85 million as of Friday on his latest reelection campaign, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Citing newly released campaign records, the Times said Bloomberg was on pace to spend between $110 and $140 million before the November 3 mayoral election. That means the self-made billionaire will have spent more than $250 million in his three bids for mayor of America's most fabled city.

In contrast, New Jersey Governor and former Goldman Sachs chairman Jon Corzine spent about $130 million in two races for governor and one for the U.S. Senate, the Times reported.

And publisher Steve Forces poured $114 million into two bids for president, it said.

Bloomberg's wealth, much of it from the Bloomberg LP media and information empire, is estimated at $16 billion. He has used it to establish what the Times called an "insurmountable financial dominance" in the race.

His opponent, William C Thompson, a Democrat, has spent just $6 million in the race. A Thompson campaign spokeswoman on Friday told the Times the mayor's spending was "obscene."

The bulk of Bloomberg's spending has gone into television, radio and Web advertising, it said.

But some of the money has trickled down to recession-hit small businesses, including Goodfellas Brick Over Pizza on Staten Island and in the Bronx. The Bloomberg campaign has so far forked over $8,892 for pizza at Goodfellas alone.

Thomson Reuters competes globally with Bloomberg in the delivery of multimedia news, data and enhanced information.
http://www.reuters.com/article/polit...59N0K420091024





Internet Advertising Appears to Begin its Comeback
Michael Liedtke

After bogging down in the recession, Internet advertising is regaining the momentum that has made it the decade's most disruptive marketing machine.

The signs of an online revival are emerging even while advertising in print and broadcasts remain in a slump that has triggered mass layoffs, pay cuts and other upheaval.

Internet advertising was just about the only bright spot in the third-quarter reports of two major newspaper publishers, Gannett and McClatchy. Meanwhile the companies still are dealing with steep declines in print ads — an imbalance most analysts predict will take years to address.

The harsh reality is that much of the advertising in long-established media, particularly in the classified sections of newspapers, will never rebound to pre-recession levels, said Lauren Rich Fine, a longtime media analyst who is now a professor at Kent State University.

That grim outlook contrasts with the fact that advertisers are increasingly allocating more of their budgets to the Web. That's where their customers are spending more of their free time. On top of that, Internet ad rates are less expensive, and the returns on online ad investments are easier to quantify.

Even when they buy time in other media, advertisers are realizing they need to be promoting their wares on the Internet too.

"You can draw a straight line from the time when people hear an ad on the radio or television to when they search for that company on the Internet," said David Karnstedt, chief executive of Efficient Frontier, which helps manage ad campaigns on search engines.

These trends will give Internet advertising 19 percent, or nearly $87 billion, of the worldwide ad market in 2013, up from just 4 percent, or about $18 billion, in 2004, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates.

That would make the Internet the third-largest marketing medium. Television is expected to remain on top, with $168 billion, or 36 percent of the global ad market, down from 35 percent in 2004. Newspapers would still be No. 2, but their $92 billion in advertising revenue is projected to account for 20 percent of the global ad market, down from 28 percent in 2004.

For now, though, some types of Internet advertising — real estate, travel and help-wanted, in particular — remain in the funk they fell into in the first half of the year, when U.S. ad revenue on the Web fell 5 percent. (That was still far better than the 12 percent to 29 percent declines suffered by U.S. newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasters.)

David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, thinks it's too early to conclude the entire Internet advertising market is on the upswing. "It's more like the patient had a 105-degree temperature and now it's down to 100 degrees," he said.

EMarketer expects Internet ad sales in the U.S. to fall by nearly 3 percent in the second half of this year, slightly less than in the first half. The research firm expects a 6 percent increase next year followed by a 7 percent gain in 2011.

The most compelling evidence for an online recovery is being made by Google, whose search engine powers an online network that has grown from $411 million in worldwide ad revenue in 2002 to more than $22 billion annually now. The company's ad revenue rose 7 percent in the third quarter, the fastest pace so far this year, and Google's executives indicated they are gearing up for even more rapid growth in the months ahead.

Google could be an anomaly because its specialty — selling ads tied to online search requests — tends to be the last thing cut from marketing budgets and the first thing to attract more money in the early stages of a recovery.

The reason: Search requests have proven to be a highly effective way to identify consumers shopping for a specific product or service. And the ads typically cost advertisers only when the links are clicked on.

For instance, a Google ad tied to a search request containing the word "shoes" currently costs about $6.80 a click, while an ad generated by a request with the term "car parts" costs just 48 cents a click. Buying ads in major newspapers or on TV can easily cost thousands of dollars with no assurance the investment will deliver customers.

Besides the Internet's lower prices, the Web's tracking technologies make it easy to measure whether a search ad campaign is yielding adequate sales to justify the expense. If their online spending isn't paying off, advertisers typically can pull the plug more quickly than in print and broadcast, which often require financial commitments that last several months.

The greater flexibility online makes it easier to gauge the mood of consumers by buying Internet search ads before ramping up spending in other areas, Fine said.

"I think a lot of (advertisers) are experimenting right now, hoping they can stimulate a little more demand," she said. "Some of this could be wishful thinking."

It might take longer to see an ad rebound at Yahoo, which runs the Internet's second-most widely used search engine. Yahoo's forte is "display advertising" — online billboards and other more visual forms of marketing.

Companies still seem reluctant to spend on those more elaborate campaigns, partly because they tend to be more expensive and not as well-aimed as search ads. The reticence is the main reason Yahoo reported its third-consecutive quarterly decline in ad sales Tuesday. Yahoo's ad revenue fell 12 percent after declining 13 percent in the first half of the year.

Even so, Yahoo isn't being hit as badly as newspaper publishers; McClatchy's print advertising, for instance, plunged 32 percent in the third quarter. Its online ad sales, on the other hand, increased 3 percent.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13602659





New York Times to Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs
Robert MacMillan

The New York Times plans to cut 100 newsroom jobs by the end of the year through buyouts and might resort to layoffs as it reels from the advertising revenue drop that is imperiling U.S. newspapers.

The news, delivered in a memo to employees by Times Executive Editor Bill Keller on Monday, comes after the newspaper's workers already took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year and a similar program last year.

"When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year," Keller wrote. "But I accept that if it's going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on."

The Times posted the news on its website. It said the paper's news department has 1,250 employees, down from 1,330 at its peak. It added that no other U.S. newspaper has more than about 750 journalists.

The Times, which plans to report its third-quarter results on Thursday, has been dealing with declines in advertising and mounting debt that have forced it to slash costs and sell assets.

The Times last week halted an effort to sell The Boston Globe after threatening earlier this year to close the paper unless big unions agreed to cost cuts. It also has been trying to sell its stake in the company that owns the Boston Red Sox professional baseball team.

Keller's memo was more blunt than previous ones obtained by Reuters.

"I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I've been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don't want to add insult to injury by spreading infection," Keller wrote.

"Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year."

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...59I4Z120091019





Times Co. Shows Loss but Beats Forecast
Richard Pérez-Peña

The New York Times Company reported a $35.6 million loss for the third quarter on Thursday, as newspaper advertising revenue fell nearly 30 percent, but it managed to beat expectations based on continued deep cost-cutting and newspaper price increases.

The company raised its estimate of 2009 expense reductions to $475 million from $450 million, and said there are signs that the drop in advertising is slowing in the fourth quarter. The news comes three days after the company announced that it would eliminate 100 positions in the newsroom of The New York Times by year’s end through buyouts and layoffs, after a similar reduction early last year.

The net loss of 25 cents a share compared with a loss of 74 cents a share in the period a year earlier. The third-quarter 2009 loss included a one-time $76.1 million charge for pension obligations at The Boston Globe. Excluding severance and special items, the company posted a gain of 16 cents a share, well ahead of the average analyst’s estimate of a 1 cent loss, compared with a 5 cent gain in the period a year earlier.

Times Company shares rose 8.6 percent in pre-market trading after the earnings announcement, to $9.50 from $8.75.

The largest segment of the company reached a watershed moment, collecting more from readers than from advertisers, in an industry where advertising traditionally outweighed circulation in revenue by at least three to one. At the company’s New York Times Media Group, which includes The Times and The International Herald Tribune, circulation revenue reached $175.2 million in the third quarter, while ad revenue dropped to $164.5 million.

The Times Company had a smaller drop in overall revenue than other major publishers have reported, on the strength of a 6.7 percent circulation revenue increase, after raising the prices of The Times and The Globe. Excluding the effects of a money-losing distribution subsidiary that closed in January, total revenue for the company fell 14.3 percent, to $570.6 million.

Ad revenue at the company’s News Media Group, which includes all of its newspapers, fell 29.6 percent compared to the period a year earlier — essentially unchanged from the 30 percent drop in the first half of the year. That compared to a 28.4 percent third-quarter decline for the publishing division of the Gannett Company, and 28.1 percent for the McClatchy Company.

“Early in the fourth quarter, print advertising trends, in comparison to the third quarter, have improved modestly, while digital advertising trends are improving significantly,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive of the Times Company.

Internet revenue declined 7.2 percent, to $78.9 million. That includes a 7.2 percent increase at the About Group, which includes About.com, and an 18.5 percent decline in digital advertising revenue at the News Media Group.

The company cut operating costs 22.4 percent, to $525.1 million. It lowered outstanding debt to $910 million, down $140 million since the start of the year.

This month, the company said it had dropped plans to sell The Globe, but it recently completed the sale of its radio station, WQXR-FM, for $45 million. It is still trying to sell its 17.75 percent stake in New England Sports Ventures, which owns the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/bu...a/23times.html





Newsday to Charge $5 Per Week for Web Access

Newsday plans to start charging $5 a week for access to its Web site in a move that could generate more revenue but risks driving away readers.

The new fees will begin next Wednesday. Those who already subscribe to the Long Island daily's print edition or to Optimum Online, the Internet access service offered by Newsday parent company Cablevision Systems Corp., will still have free access to the Web site.

Those who don't subscribe will get limited access to the Web site for free -- namely, the home page, classified ads, weather, movies, stocks, obituaries, school closings and community programs.

Cablevision, which acquired Newsday from Tribune Co. last year, indicated in February that it was contemplating Web access fees.

Newspaper publishers are increasingly considering similar moves as the industry faces an unprecedented drain on ad revenue.

Such a pay wall could push readers to abandon the newspaper's Web site for free options elsewhere. That, in turn, would drive down the amount of ad revenue the Web site can generate.

Still, the growth of online ad revenue has not kept pace with a print advertising decline that accelerated because of the recession. Many readers and advertisers are shifting to the Web, but competition there is higher and online ad rates are typically much lower than those for print.

To try holding on to readers despite the online fee, Newsday has been adding features to its Web site.

''Over the past few months, you may have noticed that newsday.com began a transformation to become a more dynamic multimedia resource,'' Newsday Publisher Terry Jimenez said in a letter to readers.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...line-Fees.html





Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets
Noah Shachtman

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”

Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.

Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security clearance.

The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”

But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,” Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...nitoring-firm/





Apple Smashes Forecasts, Shares Hit Record
Gabriel Madway

Apple Inc's profits and sales streaked past Wall Street forecasts as iPhone and Mac sales hit quarterly records, sending its shares rocketing to all-time highs on Monday.

Sales of Mac computers -- the largest single contributor to Apple's revenue -- jumped 17 percent from a year earlier to 3.05 million in the September quarter, above analysts' average estimate of about 2.8 million.

Sales of iPhones rose 7 percent to 7.4 million, just shy of Wall Street expectations of 7.5 million units. The company said it had a tough time making enough iPhones to meet demand.

"These are huge numbers tonight. Apple is probably the best growth story in tech, maybe one of the best growth stocks in the market. I bet this stock can go to $250 in six to nine months," said Jane Snorek, analyst at First American Funds.

"Usually Christmas and back-to-school are correlated and Apple usually has a gigantic Christmas quarter. This makes me think Apple will have a great Christmas.

Shares of Apple jumped 7.5 percent to above $204 in extended trading. It had closed at $189.86 on Nasdaq. The stock's record intraday high was $202.96 on December 27, 2007.

Apple's fiscal fourth quarter had marked the return of Chief Executive Steve Jobs to his offices at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. The master showman had a liver transplant while on a six-month leave of absence.

Net profit rose to $1.67 billion, or $1.82 a share, in the quarter ended September 26, from $1.14 billion, or $1.26 a share, in the year-earlier period. Analysts were expecting a profit of $1.42 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue rose 25 percent to $9.87 billion, ahead of the average Wall Street estimate of $9.2 billion.

Analysts had expected Apple to show continued resilience to the slump in consumer spending that had pummeled rivals. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's quarterly report had disappointed shareholders, sending its shares tumbling. Nokia posted a quarterly loss.

Typical Conservatism

Despite a high price point, Macs have been gaining share for years and are expected to continue to do so. According to industry tracker IDC, Apple holds 9.4 percent of the PC market in the United States.

"The number of Macs sold shows that Windows 7 has not been a threat to the Apple franchise," said Shannon Cross of Cross Research, referring to Microsoft Corp's new operating system. "These are phenomenal results. You know, it proves that even in a challenging economy people are willing to pay for what they perceive to be high quality product and a good value product."

Apple posted a gross margin of 36.6 percent, up from 34.7 percent a year ago. Wall Street had been expecting a margin of 35.5 percent.

Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said Apple also enjoyed stronger margins from higher-than-anticipated sales of its "Snow Leopard" operating system for Mac computers.

"While we knew they were gaining share in those categories -- PCs and phones -- it's still surprising to see this degree of outperformance," said Daniel Ernst, an analyst with Hudson Square Research. "But that's just part of the Apple story: they're gaining share with premium-priced products."

Apple's outlook is typically conservative, though its revenue forecast this quarter was not far off from Wall Street averages. Apple forecast current-quarter earnings of $1.70 to $1.78 a share on revenue of $11.3 billion to $11.6 billion, versus the Street's $1.91 a share on revenue of $11.4 billion.

"I like the fact that even their guidance was very good. Normally their guidance is a little tepid," said Sushil Wagle, senior vice president at J&W Seligman. "I think the stock is going to inch its way up to $250 ... slowly."

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; Writing by Edwin Chan; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...59I5CP20091019





Windows 7 - the Reg Reader Verdict

They got their copies early - what do they think?
Joe Fay

Windows 7 Microsoft takes the wraps off Windows 7 tonight, but thanks to the UK's looming postal strike Reg readers have been playing with the final, shrink-wrapped product for days.

So before you go out and spend money on the new OS and/or a new PC, you might be interested in our what ad hoc panel of real readers has to say.

First up is Gary, who says installation took a blisteringly fast 30 minutes "end-to-end from removal of shrink wrap and checking what was left in situ". And what was left in situ? Everything, apparently.

Phil, a self-confessed Linux fan, was more restrained, but after upgrading Vista on a work laptop, declared: "I'm fairly impressed really."

Installation was not as quick for him as Gary, taking over three hours. Phil doesn't mention any problems with the shrinkwrap, so we presume it was the installation process itself that slowed things up.

That said, things were similarly straightforward:

"The upgrade process gave me a list of about 5 programs to un-install," he says. "Which I did, it was some drivers, iTunes and the Google Toolbar. After that the whole thing was automatic, I just left it sitting there... At the end of it, Windows put back the drivers I removed, and I reinstalled iTunes which worked fine without any configuration, my library and apps were all there. I have to say that is about the most successful Windows upgrade I have ever personally experienced."

Once installed Phil says it just, kind of... worked.

Sure its different but not in a way that doesn't make sense. I haven't once want to drop kick it out of the Window. Well not yet anyway.

And there are still some Vista-like annoyances, as far as Phil's concerned. "It still pops up that stupid box asking for administrator rights but at least now it doesn't take about 5 seconds to dim the screen! The desktop is faster on the crippled intel chipset in my laptop. I don't feel the need for the 3rd GB of ram anymore and I think it resumes from hibernate much quicker. It still takes a while to startup, but doesn't everything these days. The update to explorer is good."

Gary was even more effusive in his comments:

fast, stable - lovely interface - very quick.

"Well Done M$ Teams! ... I have the feeling this is where they start to become serious Apple rivals as this now starts to blur the line between Snow Leopard and MS on the GUI front," he shouts.

Phil was more measured:

"Why it doesn't have virtual desktops like Linux and OS X I don't know, that is the most useful feature that it lacks. Virutal desktops is such an important feature for how I use computers now that I could live without in on a desktop machine."

In conclusion, Phil said it's "much better than Vista. Probably a good update for XP."

But before Microsoft slaps itself on the back, he adds:

I will be sticking with Linux for the most part

So, as good a response as Microsoft could reasonably wish for, we'd say, though we suspect Reg reader Neil's experience is going to be typical for many readers.

Sorry I didn’t reply sooner – not for fun reasons like installing Windows 7, but more because I don’t have a new machine to put it on yet!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10...eader_reviews/





Like Windows 7, Vista Got Good Reviews Too
Ian Sherr

As Microsoft Corp's Windows 7 release approaches, early reviews are generally positive. But so were reviews for Windows Vista just before its launch.

In the months leading up to Windows 7's release this Thursday, publications from ComputerWorld to the New York Times have written favorable assessments, praising, in particular, its increased speed and compatibility with older computers.

But Vista got high marks before its release as well, with writers back then praising a new visual design -- and glossing over quirks that later became common gripes.

"I was the editor of PC World at the time that review was done and yes, I wish in retrospect we'd held to somewhat a higher standard," said former Editor-in-Chief of PC World, Harry McCracken, who now blogs on his own site, Technologizer.

After its release in 2007, Vista -- which runs on roughly 20 percent of the world's PCs made by the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co, Acer and Dell Inc -- went on to become a roundly criticized and unpopular product, with many opting to stick to the aging Windows XP instead.

But to have read the reviews at the time, one would have thought Vista was certain to be a success.

In a 2006 review, PC World said, "All in all, Windows Vista is a great leap forward for the operating system."

While he stands by those words, writer Preston Gralla said he regretted not testing Vista on a wider variety of hardware, because many issues arose after the event, when users had had time to play with the software -- a requirement that he believes is diminished for Windows 7.

"I certainly have learned from the Vista experience to try as hard as I possibly can to try to get the kind of hardware people are using to review it on," he said.

Some were more critical -- slightly. At the conclusion of his 2007 review for Businessweek, Steve Wildstrom wrote, "Vista is a big step forward; in time, you'll want it."

Not so much anymore. "If I could go back and do it over, I would be more negative," he said.

(Reporting by Ian Sherr; Editing by Valerie Lee)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...59L0PZ20091022





Host Your Own Windows 7 Torrenting Party!



The party season has officially begun.





Yellow Journalism: Q. and A. With the Unauthorized Historian of ‘The Simpsons’
Lisa Tozzi

“The problem of writing about comedy is that it’s like trying to hold a gas,” Conan O’Brien told John Ortved during an interview for “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History” (Faber and Faber). “The tighter you squeeze, the more it dissipates.” Despite that warning – and the refusal of many key figures behind the series to cooperate with him — Mr. Ortved set out to write an inside look at the longest-running comedy series in American television history, which has just begun its 21st season. Mr. Ortved, 29, a self-described “comedy nerd,” who says he likes to laugh “more than the average person,” first pitched the idea of an oral history of the show when he was a 26-year-old editorial associate at Vanity Fair. ” ‘The Simpsons’ has been so influential that it is difficult to find a strain of television comedy that does not contain its bloodline,” Mr. Ortved says of the animated sitcom. Three years, 80 on-the-record interviews and one Vanity Fair article later, Mr. Ortved has produced a 300-page combination of juicy entertainment gossip, rich television history and notes from a disenchanted lover. Mr. Ortved recently spoke about the challenges of writing the book, Spider Pig, the show’s legacy and the possibility of a Simpsons Land theme park.

Have your own questions for Mr. Ortved? Submit them here.
Q.

Some of the biggest players in the show’s history – Matt Groening, James L. Brooks — would not talk to you for the Vanity Fair article or for the book. How big a challenge was that?
A.

The advantage was that it was kind of a crash course in investigative journalism. It was hard, but it also weirdly worked to my advantage. It would have been wonderful to interview Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, but frankly they’ve been interviewed 50 times about “The Simpsons” over the past 20 years: What new were they going to tell me?

I mean I would be insane not to want to interview them, but not having that option, I had to start digging and the advantage there is that by them not cooperating I found tons of sources and background that I might not have found if they had cooperated.

Gasper Tringale John Ortved

Q.

Why an oral history?
A.

Even before I knew this became “unauthorized,” I knew it was a story with a lot of voices in it, and with something as contentious as a collaborative creative project, sometimes the best and most objective way to display the different sides of that story is through an oral history. Outside of that, I am a fan of the form. “Edie: American Girl” [about Edie Sedgwick] and “Please Kill Me” [a history of punk music] are two of my favorite histories, period, never mind that they are oral histories.
Q.

Who was your favorite interview?
A.

Conan O’Brien [a writer and producer from 1991-1993 ] was one of the best interviews I ever had. He speaks in perfect paragraphs — it is remarkable — and everything he says is funny. The bummer about interviewing him, is that of course I am such a little comedy nerd, I was trying to make him laugh and I did not make him laugh.
Q.

Talk a little about the “Simpsons”-Fox relationship. People often point out that it is interesting that a show that was initially criticized by the right (most notably George H. Bush during the 1992 Republican national convention) has run for so long on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network.
A.

The most telling anecdote I have is that one of the people I sat down to interview was Rupert Murdoch, and I asked him, “Rupert, how much money has ‘The Simpsons’ made for you?” And he just sat back, smiled and was like, “Let’s just say it’s a lot.”
Q.

You make a number of references in the book to the decline in quality of the show. Have you ever heard of Fox or the folks behind the show pulling the plug at some point soon?
A.

In terms of its spiral: to be fair to the writers, there’s only so much you can do with a set of characters. I mean, 20 years? I don’t know how they do it. But if they’re still trying to break ground, they should have canned it 10 years ago.

William P. O’Donnell/The New York Times John Ortved’s book, “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History.”

But I don’t see them ending it anytime soon unless it becomes unprofitable. They just opened “The Simpsons” ride at Universal Studios and I see a trend in that way. In the interviews I conducted someone compared Matt Groening to Walt Disney. “The Simpsons” is a brand at this point that is as recognizable or getting to be as recognizable as Mickey Mouse and Disney, and I don’t know why they can’t have a Simpsons Land at some point.
Q.

What did you think of the movie?
A.

It was 90 minutes of throwaway jokes. It was about as good as a very good episode in the later seasons, but I don’t think it worked. Its kind of shocking to me that that group of writers couldn’t come up with something better. I mean the final scene in the movie literally involved a ticking time bomb. I think that’s what happens at screenwriting class at the Y.

The funniest stuff involved the pig. That’s Homer at his very best: Homer becoming absorbed with something ridiculous. Whether it’s a trampoline or a pig — or sugar, there’s one where he gets involved with sugar — that stuff tends to be the best.
Q.

“The Simpsons” fought a pretty long, disappointing battle with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for a chance to be nominated for outstanding comedy series. Do you think people behind the show were upset by the “Family Guy” Emmy nomination?
A.

I find it funny. I can’t speak to what they thought of it. James L. Brooks is probably rolling his eyes, the guy has so many Oscars and Emmys, he’s probably like, “Who cares?” “The Simpsons” deserved their Emmy back in 1992 when they were the fastest, funniest thing on TV.

But any head-slapping that would had gone on over the [Family Guy] nomination would have happened 15 years ago. Now, “The Simpsons” would never stand a chance.
Q.

Who’s your favorite character?
A.

Good Lord. I mean, obviously it’s Homer, but I think that’s everyone’s favorite. There’s something about Homer that speaks to –well, men especially — but everyone. In the cannon of Western entertainment people will look back and see Homer Simpson as this perfectly malleable American stereotype.
Q.

If you had to pick one episode as your favorite, could you?
A.

It’s a paradox: If you watch your favorite one over and over, it becomes not your favorite, but the Monorail episode and the Burns bear episode is as good I think as that show ever got.
Q.

Are you one of those people who walk around quoting “The Simpsons” all the time?
A.

Yes, I would always walk around and annoy people and say “Simpsons” things to them, but I have nowhere near enough cool or comedic timing to get the line out without giggling.
Q.

Give me your three favorite lines.
A.

This is really hard. O.K., No. 1:. “Does whiskey count as beer?” - Homer (after being asked by a TV announcer, “Are you on your third beer of the evening?”)

No. 2. “That man is my exact double … that dog has a puffy tail! [Chasing the dog] Heehee. Puff!” - Homer (on seeing a man who looks as exactly the same as him, lying bloodied outside Moe’s tavern, then being distracted by a dog with a puffy tail).

No. 3. “Me fail English? That’s unpossible.” - Ralph Wiggum
Q.

How would you describe “The Simpsons” in a sentence to someone who has never heard of it?
A.

It’s a cartoon sitcom about a family and their town that better than any live-action show satirized the American way of life.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...e-simpsons/?hp





Skype In Negotiations To Acquire Gizmo5
Michael Arrington

Litigation-beleaguered Skype is in negotiations to buy peer-to-peer VoIP startup Gizmo5, say multiple sources. The price tag is said to be in the $50 million range, but the deal is far from consummated. Other potential buyers may be looking at the company as well. Gizmo5, which was founded in April 2003, has raised $6 million to date, plus an unspecified amount from founder/CEO Michael Robertson.

Skype, which is being sold from eBay to a new investor group, doesn't have control over it's core P2P technology, and that intellectual property is now the subject of two lawsuits ¿ one against Skype and one against Mike Volpi and Index Ventures, who are part of the buyout group.

That puts Skype at significant risk. Without the technology Skype can't make Skype to Skype calls, the core of its service. And those lawsuits don't appear to be close to settlement ¿ some people close to Skype saw that there is a good chance the cases will actually end up being tried in a court.

We've heard Joltid wants as much as half of Skype Unless Skype makes huge concessions to plaintiff Joltid and settle the case, they have two backup plans.

The first is to rebuild the back end themselves. The second is to acquire someone who they can plug in in lieu of Joltid. Skype is doing both.

They have an internal project called Gecko to build a SIP based P2P back end for Skype. And they're hiring like crazy. Theo Zourzouvillys, Bruce Lowekamp and Jason Fischl are just a few of the senior VoIP/SIP experts they've brought in recently to work on the Gecko project within Skype Labs.

But Gecko may not be progressing as quickly as Skype needs it to. That's where Gizmo5 comes in.

Gizmo5 is a solid Skype-like service. With just 6 million registered users, it's far from a competitive threat. But Gizmo5 is a tested, partially scaled SIP P2P VoIP system with a team of engineers that understand the issues Skype is facing.

Unlike Skype, Gizmo5 isn't able to do all calls over P2P. Server nodes are still used for NAT and Firewall traversal. But bandwidth prices have dropped substantially over the years, and the cost savings from Skype's architecture may no longer be necessary for the business to remain profitable.

More on this as it develops.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101302505.html





Nokia Sues Apple for Patent Infringement

The world's top cellphone maker Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Oyj filed a lawsuit on Thursday against smaller rival Apple, claiming the U.S. firm had infringed ten Nokia patents.

Ten patents in the case -- filed in Delaware, United States -- relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards, Nokia said.

The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Nokia said.

"By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation," Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President for Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia, said in a statement.

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares trading in the U.S. briefly dipped on the news and were 0.5 percent up at $206.04 by 1455 GMT.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/...kia-apple.html





Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal
Michael Arrington

Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new Droid Android phone yesterday. Make no mistake, this is Android's flagship product, and the first phone that will pose a significant threat to Apple's iPhone. And it will be available very soon, possibly as early as the end of this month.

MobileCrunch has been tracking the phone, which has also been called the Tao or Sholes, for some time. Just about anyone who has come in contact with the phone can't stop talking about it. And from what we hear, they have good reason.

The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It also has two key advantages over the iPhone ¿ a slide out physical keyboard, and use of the Verizon network.

Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11 based Android phones that exist today (Engadget has a great overview article on mobile CPUs).

Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface.

The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you've got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone.

And the scary thing for Apple is, it may only be a few months before something even better than the Droid comes out. With the flood of Android devices that are hitting the market, a few are bound to be hits. No wonder Google CEO Eric Schmidt is so bullish on Android right now. Things are about to get very, very interesting.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101800621.html





AT&T Lobbyist Asks Employees, Their Families and Friends to Protest Net Neutrality Rules
Cecilia Kang

AT&T's top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to all of the telecom giant's 300,000 employees on Sunday, urging them to express their concerns over a net neutrality proposal under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission. Check out his letter and comments on the Actuarian Outpost Web site.

The letter was the latest move in a lobbying frenzy days before the FCC votes on a proposal to create new net neutrality regulations. High-tech giants wrote to the agency to support the rules, while dozens of lawmakers from both parties have protested the rules as potentially dangerout to economic growth.

"We encourage you, your family and friends to join the voices telling the FCC not to regulate the Internet," Cicconi wrote in his letter. The company verified the letter.

Cicconi explained how employees could use a personal e-mail account to post comments on the FCC's net neutrality Web site to about the rules. He said the comment period had been extended until Thursday, when the agency's five commissioners are scheduled to vote on a proposal that would begin the formalization of rules.

"Those who seek to impose extreme regulations on the network are flooding the site to influence the FCC," he wrote. "It's now time for you to voice your opinion."

Cicconi has criticized FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's push to strengthen and broaden rules for how Internet service providers treat content on their networks. Cicconi said such rules should not apply to wireless networks, which have less capacity than fixed wireline networks like cable. He has said that AT&T Mobility and other mobile broadband providers should not be strapped by new rules when it comes to managing broadband traffic congestion.

In the letter, he offered several talking points.
1. Wireless consumers enjoy a many options for mobile services;
2. Competition in the wireless industry is strong;
3. AT&T and other carriers need flexibility to manage their networks;
4. Net neutrality rules could hamper a goal of the White House to bring broadband to every U.S. household;
5. If the FCC passes the new regulations, the rules should apply to more than just network operators and should also include Web content companies like search engines.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/pos...loyees_th.html





Key Players Weigh In On Net Neutrality

Most of the key online players came out for net neutrality on Monday. They wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission cheering the agency's impending Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on "policies to preserve the open Internet," scheduled to be unveiled on Thursday. Commission Chair Julius Genachowski says he wants to add two more provisions to the FCC's Internet Policy Statement: one that would require ISPs to disclose their network management practices, plus an enforcement mechanism for rule breakers.

Amen, declare the letter writers. "We believe a process that results in common sense baseline rules is critical to ensuring that the Internet remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation, and global competitiveness," they say. "We applaud your leadership in initiating a process to develop rules to ensure that the qualities that have made the Internet so successful are protected."

Signed: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; Flickr founder Caterina Fake; and the CEOs or COOs of Skype, Google, eBay, Mozilla, Vuze, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tivo, and Sony; plus a half dozen more Internet biggies.

With this statement, the dominant developers of the Web as we know it have very publicly declared their interest in the establishment of a stronger net neutrality mechanism at the FCC. "An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail," their statement concludes. "This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest startup to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity."

Great concern

But as the agency's Open Commission meeting scheduled for Thursday approaches, tremendous pressure is coming from a very different direction, and it argues that the main issue is not innovation so much as investment and jobs. So say the state Attorney Generals from Washington, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. The last states' AG is "very concerned," he wrote to the FCC, "about any new net neutrality regulations that could adversely impact the communications industry’s willingness to continue to invest and, thereby, hinder the future growth of the wireless or wireline Internet industry."

Ditto, warn a veritable army of governors, state representatives, mayors, and local Chambers of Commerce presidents who have suddenly discovered an interest in this issue. "While much progress has been made, the FCC's new focus on wireless network neutrality causes me great concern, because of the negative consequences for investment, innovation and jobs in Connecticut," wrote Tom Buzi, First Selectman of Monroe, Connecticut late last week. "More regulation means less investment—and fewer jobs."

Some of this feedback is doubtless being encouraged by the telcos, and we'll have more on that later. But interestingly, the organization that has the most direct stake in Internet job creation is sending mixed signals to the FCC on the matter. On October 15 Larry Cohen, President of the Communications Workers of America sent the FCC a letter warning that any new rules must avoid "an adverse impact on investment and job creation." But the filing also acknowledged that some carefully crafted enforcement and transparency regulations might be a good idea. CWA supported the FCC's sanctions against Comcast for BitTorrent throttling in 2008.

The FCC should frame "a proposed fifth principle protecting consumers from unreasonable discrimination," Cohen emphasized, "that includes appropriately robust carve-outs for managed networks and reasonable network management, while promoting a dynamic, open, and public Internet." But while the message from CWA's top staff acknowledges the complexity of the problem, statements coming the union's various locals are unabashedly hostile to net neutrality—check out the following, for example, from CWA Local 6201 President Denny Kramer of Dallas, Texas.

"When you talk about the proposed net neutrality regulations that you and your colleagues will consider on October 22, do you know that you put 738 of these CWA jobs and countless others in Texas at risk due to these onerous, unnecessary regulations?" Kramer's letter asks. "If our nation is to recover fully from the depths of this terrible recession, it will be because of the sweat and efforts of my brothers and sisters." He urged the FCC to "proceed with caution before implementing regulations that may take our country down a path that would reduce investments and limit jobs in an industry sector so crucial to our larger well being."

This is going to be one fun and frisky FCC proceeding. The merryrulemaking starts Thursday 10am ET at fcc.gov/live.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...ags-mayors.ars





Key U.S. Lawmaker Backs FCC on Eve of Web Rule
John Poirier and Sinead Carew

A key U.S. lawmaker threw his support behind the Federal Communications Commission's open Internet proposal, despite renewed protests from telecom companies including Verizon on Wednesday.

The endorsement from Rick Boucher, chairman of a key House committee, came on the eve of an FCC meeting on so-called net neutrality rules, which aim to keep the Web open and lessen the power of phone companies to decide the content that their customers can see.

Commenting on a policy fight that analysts expect to end in court, Boucher said he would consider legislative action if the telecoms industry challenged the proposal.

"The FCC is moving in exactly the right direction," said Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

Advocates of net neutrality such as Google, Amazon and public interest groups, say service providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast must be barred from blocking or slowing content based on how much revenue it could generate for them.

But the service providers say the increasing volume of bandwidth-hogging services, such as video, requires very careful management of both landline and wireless networks.

In a significant move late Wednesday, Verizon Wireless softened its opposition by issuing a joint policy blog statement with Google. They said they believe it is essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform.

The FCC's existing broadband principles "make clear that users are in charge of all aspects of their Internet experience -- from access to apps and content," their joint statement said. "So we think it makes sense for the commission to establish that these existing principles are enforceable, and implement them on a case-by-case basis."

The Supercomm telecom industry trade show in Chicago on Wednesday was abuzz with complaints about the proposal to forbid operators from discriminating against any legal content that third-parties want to deliver over their networks.

Verizon Communications Inc Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said the debate around the proposal is extremely troubling" and could halt progress in U.S. broadband development.

"If we can't earn a return on the investment we make in broadband, our progress will be delayed," Seidenberg said in his Supercomm keynote.

At an FCC meeting on Thursday, a slate of three Democrats and two Republicans will decide whether to formally propose the net neutrality rules, which FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski first unveiled last month.

But If the FCC's proposal is as tough as it appears to the carriers, also known as Bell operators, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King said it will most likely end up in court.

"Any ruling that moves the needle away from the Bells would fairly certainly wind up in the court fairly quickly," King said.

Boucher has been meeting with broadband providers, tech companies and public interest groups since March and hopes they can reach an agreement "in the not too distant future."

"Hopefully there will not be challenges," Boucher said. "If there are, hopefully those rules will be upheld, but that leads to other possibilities as well."

Boucher spoke with reporters after an event that highlighted the successful deployment of high-speed Internet to a rural community in his district using airwaves vacated by broadcasters that are now using digital signals.

His comments come amid a flurry of lobbying from opponents of the proposals, which are not likely to result in a final rule until the spring, after a public discussion.

Qwest Communications International Inc's senior vice president for public policy & government relations, Steve Davis, said at Supercomm that carriers are worried net neutrality rules will hurt investments in telecommunications and end up raising prices for consumers.

The phone companies, for the most part, have said they support rules to protect the openness of the Internet but they are concerned about regulations that would strip away any of their power to manage bandwidth-hogging applications that could disrupt network performance.

Earlier this year, House Energy and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman threw his support behind a net neutrality bill that was introduced by Democrats Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Anna Eshoo of California. There is no companion bill in the Senate, but North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan said earlier this year that he is considering introducing a similar bill.

"It is my hope we will be in a position to legislate at the appropriate time with regard to network neutrality," Boucher said.

He also said a comprehensive wireless modernization bill is necessary given all the developments in the wireless sector.

"At the proper time, probably next year, I'll look forward to taking that up," he added.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102102595.html





Surprise: McCain Biggest Beneficiary of Telco/ISP Lobby Money
Mark Sullivan

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is the top recipient of campaign contributions from large Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast over the past two years, according to a new report from the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. McCain has taken in a total of $894,379 (much of that money going to support his failed 2008 bid for the presidency), more than twice the amount taken by the next-largest beneficiary, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. ($341,089).

Meanwhile, McCain has emerged as the ISPs' biggest champion against new "network neutrality" rules from the Federal Communications Commission, which voted Thursday to move forward in the process to adopt such rules. Shortly after the FCC vote, McCain introduced a bill (the "Internet Freedom Act") that would block regulation of the nation's largest broadband networks.

Net neutrality rules would amount to a federal mandate that broadband providers cannot block or hinder the internet traffic of any web site or service, regardless of whether or not that site or service completes with a similar site or service offered by the ISP itself. In other words, a telco ISP could not limit bandwidth used for Skype VoIP traffic, while maximizing bandwidth available for its own VoIP service.

As Congress considers legislation that would codify net neutrality into law, cable and phone companies are hoping to cut a better deal on Capitol Hill than they are likely to get from the FCC, the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison says.

As the network neutrality issue has come to a head over the past year, due in large part to the new FCC's interest in it, telco and cable lobbyists have been flooding the offices (and coffers) of lawmakers. The Sunlight Foundation study found that some 244 members of Congress were the beneficiaries of contributions--totaling more than $9.4 million--from January 2007 to June 2009. The analysis was based on a survey of giving by eight large broadband providers and two trade associations that represent them, all which have disclosed lobbying on net neutrality issues.

The telecom interests also targeted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. ($275,275), Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Mont. ($248,999) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ($198,972).

Verizon and AT&T have been particularly active in this effort; they also were the sources of all the clustered contributions among broadband providers, with AT&T and its outside lobbyists combining to give to 110 members, followed by Comcast (105 members) and Verizon (96 members).
http://www.pcworld.com/article/17428...y_money. html





CRTC Issues Net Neutrality Rules
Peter Nowak

The CRTC unveiled its new rules Wednesday, a day ahead of its U.S. counterpart.The CRTC unveiled its new rules Wednesday, a day ahead of its U.S. counterpart.

Big telecommunications companies such as Bell and Rogers can interfere with internet traffic only as a last resort, the CRTC says. Instead, they should use "economic measures" such as new investment and usage limits to combat congestion on their networks.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Wednesday issued a new framework by which it will judge whether internet service providers are discriminating against certain kinds of traffic and content.

"Canada is the first country to develop and implement a comprehensive approach to internet traffic management practices," CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said in a statement.

"More and more, the internet is serving as the backbone for communication, commerce, governance, health, education and entertainment. Our framework will foster an environment where ISPs, application providers and users have the utmost freedom to innovate."

Under the framework, the CRTC will require ISPs to provide retail customers with 30 days' notice of any changes to network management, and wholesale customers with 60 days' notice.

The moves must be posted prominently on the ISP's website and consumers must be informed of how and when they will be affected, with a particular emphasis on how the speed of their service will change.

The CRTC is also requiring ISPs to institute economic measures to control usage such as charging "consumers rates based on how much bandwidth they use each month, or offer discounts during off-peak hours."

"These practices are the most transparent as they are clearly identified on monthly bills," the CRTC said. "With this information, consumers can compare between different internet services and match their bandwidth needs with the amount they are willing to pay. Technical means to manage traffic, such as traffic shaping, should only be employed as a last resort."

Internet providers will still be able to use network-management practices such as traffic shaping and slowing of certain applications, and limiting bandwidth usage of heavy downloaders. When implementing such a technical measure, ISPs will have to prove that:

* It is designed to address a specific purpose, such as preventing congestion.
* It is as narrowly tailored as possible to achieve its intended purpose.
* It causes as little harm as possible to the customer, application or wholesale internet provider.
* Economic measures such as download limits would not achieve the same result.

The CRTC also said it intends to review traffic management on the wireless internet at a future date. The new framework will in the meantime also apply to wireless services, it said.

Ruling provokes mixed reactions

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a consumer watchdog group, said the CRTC's framework is a big loss for internet users. The framework is not binding and leaves decisions as to whether economic or technical measures are required up to ISPs.

"It approves all of the throttling practices that ISPs currently engage in," said John Lawford, counsel for the centre. "It requires consumers to prove something funny is going on and consumers don't have the means to figure out what ISPs are doing and they don't have the resources to bring that to the commission's attention.

"There's a lot of fine-grained double-speak here. There is no requirement for any of it."

NDP digital issues spokesman Charlie Angus, who last year introduced a net neutrality private members bill to the House of Commons, also criticized the framework.

"Basically the CRTC has left the wolves in charge of the henhouse," he said in a statement. "ISPs have been given the green light to shape the traffic on the internet toward their corporate interest. This decision is a huge blow to the future competitiveness of the internet."

Tim Wu, a Canadian professor at Columbia University in New York who is often credited with originating the concept of net neutrality, said he was disappointed by the ruling. The CRTC has taken a counterproductive step by allowing network management practices such as throttling to continue.

"It's in the Canadian tradition of compromise. I would have liked to see something stronger," he said. "Canada could be taking the lead in being the country of the open internet, but it's instead leaving that to the United States... there is more leadership here in the United States to make these principles permanent to preserve the open internet than there is in Canada."

Ken Engelhart, head of regulatory affairs for Rogers, said the new framework is not necessary, but it is one the company can live with. The requirement to try economic measures followed by technical measures is one the company is already employing, he said.

"We're constantly being accused of things that we haven't done," he said. "All of the concerns and fears and anxiety are a certain amount of hysteria. CRTC is saying that, 'if you do any of these things, we'll stop you.'"

Bell also liked the decision and said it could serve as a model for net neutrality frameworks around the world.

"Bell's existing internet traffic management practices are already compliant with it. It addresses fundamental policy concerns around consumer issues in an appropriate manner, in particular regarding transparency and disclosure," said Bell spokesperson Jacqueline Michelis.

"It is a well considered framework for addressing issues in the future and gives everyone, providers and consumers alike, a much needed measure of certainty."

Jacob Glick, head of regulatory affairs for Google Canada, was measured in his read of the framework. Google has been outspoken on the need for strong net neutrality protections in both Canada and the United States.

"We're pleased that the CRTC has adopted a principle-based approach designed to protect the open internet for Canadians and preserve flexibility for ISPs," Glick said. "We hope these guidelines will be applied in a way that ensures Canadians can continue to innovate online."

Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa and prominent internet commentator, said the framework is a step in the right direction but will inevitably stir up more battles between consumers and ISPs.

"Today's CRTC decision signifies that traffic management is not a free-for-all and the days of ISPs arguing that they can do whatever they please on their networks is over," he wrote on his blog.

"That said, it also guarantees that traffic management practices such as throttling will continue and it is going to take more complaints to concretely address the issue."

What is net neutrality?

Definitions differ, but the consensus is that the internet should be free from undue interference by service providers and that content and traffic should not be discriminated against unfairly.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web: If I pay to connect to the net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

According to Google: Network neutrality is the principle that internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the internet.

According to Wikipedia: A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.

Battle started with throttling

The battle over net neutrality in Canada found it roots in late 2007, when Bell began slowing down the internet connections of customers using peer-to-peer software such as BitTorrent. Bell kicked off the fight when it extended the practice to its wholesale customers in early 2008.

Small ISPs, with support from internet heavyweights including Google and Skype, complained to the CRTC and said Bell had violated its wholesale agreements with them. Hundreds of internet users also rallied on Parliament Hill to support the small ISPs.

Bell said the throttling was necessary because a small percentage of users were causing congestion, thereby slowing down service for all customers.

The CRTC, while stating that it did not endorse Bell's actions, found that the company was not in violation of its agreements and could continue its throttling.

At the same time, the regulator launched a public review of all ISPs and their network management practices. The question at the heart of the probe conducted this summer was whether Canadian telecommunications laws are sufficient to prevent unfair discrimination of internet traffic and content, or whether new rules are needed.

The review drew unprecedented interest from the public, with more than 12,000 individuals submitting comments. Consumer groups, business organizations and technology companies voiced their support for stronger rules, while large internet providers and network equipment suppliers cautioned against regulatory interference.

Neutrality gaining steam in U.S.

The CRTC 's ruling comes as its U.S. counterpart, the Federal Communications Commission, is expected to officially recommend six new net neutrality laws to Congress on Thursday.

President Barack Obama and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski are supporters of net neutrality. In Canada, opposition parties have called for net neutrality laws, but the government has been silent on the issue.

The ruling also comes as Canada has come under criticism for the state of its broadband infrastructure.

Recent studies from Harvard and Oxford universities and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that Canada rates poorly in terms of broadband speeds and prices compared to other industrialized nations.

Another study funded by the nation's biggest ISPs, however, found that Canada is a world broadband leader by every measure.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ty-ruling.html





Canada Allows Internet "Throttling" as Last Resort

Canada's main telecom regulator said on Wednesday it will let Internet service providers slow or "throttle" traffic such as file-sharing that the companies say threatens to overwhelm their networks -- but only as a last resort.

Providers such as BCE and others should first rely on "economic measures," such as limits on how much bandwidth a subscriber can use per month depending on how much they pay, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said.

That approach to managing online traffic is the most transparent because its impact turns up on monthly bills paid by customers, the CRTC said in a long-awaited ruling on the issue, which has angered many Internet users.

"Technical means to manage traffic, such as traffic shaping, should only be employed as a last resort," the CRTC said in a statement.

The common practice of "traffic shaping" is also known as "throttling." It basically involves a service provider slowing down some Web activity on its network. File swappers, for instance, often exchange large, bandwidth-intensive music or movie files.

Internet service providers have argued this chokes their networks to the detriment of other users.

BCE said in a statement that it thinks the decision is a good one and that its "existing Internet traffic management practices are already compliant with it."

Michael Hennessy, senior vice-president of regulatory and government affairs at Telus Corp, said the communications company doe not currently throttle traffic. However, it does employ some general caps on bandwidth usage.

"There are growing concerns about congestion," he said, adding the CRTC's decision is "very good and very fair", and that continued network investments and consumption-based pricing are among ways to address heavy traffic volumes.

The CRTC also said Internet service providers will have to give retail consumers at least 30 days' notice and wholesale consumers at least 60 days' notice before a change in traffic management takes effect.

(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; editing by Frank McGurty and Rob Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...59K54N20091021





Broadband Users Consume 11.4 Gbytes Per Month: Cisco Study

Vendor Surveyed More Than 20 Service Providers Worldwide
Todd Spangler

About 10% of the world's broadband subscribers generate more than 60% of all Internet traffic, with the average connection chewing up about 11.4 Gigabytes of Internet traffic per month, according to a Cisco Systems survey of more than 20 service providers.

Meanwhile, the top 1% heaviest global subscribers account more than 20% of all traffic, Cisco found.

The networking company's Visual Networking Index (VNI) Usage report represents activity during the third quarter of 2009 aggregated from cable, wireline telco, and mobile providers in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and various emerging markets.

Globally, the average broadband connection consumes about 4.3 Gbytes of video and other "visual networking applications" (such as social networking) per month. That's the equivalent of approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, according to Cisco.

Peer-to-peer traffic represented about 38% of all Internet traffic, which was a significant decrease from Cisco's earlier pilot studies that showed P2P accounting for more than half of all bandwidth used, said Doug Webster, senior director of market management in Cisco's Service Provider Group.

"There's been an assumption that peer-to-peer is taking up the majority of the traffic," Webster said. "But the relative percentage of peer-to-peer is decreasing because of the rise in other application types."

Cisco also found a common "Internet primetime," across all geographies, which spans approximately 9 p.m to 1 a.m. around the world. About 25% of global Internet traffic -- or 93.3 Mbytes per day per connection -- is generated during the Internet "primetime" period.

The company plans to provide future updates to the usage data to measure changes in overall Internet traffic patterns. The new study is separate from the company's Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology 2008-2013, which projects that IP traffic will quintuple over that five-year period.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/...co_Study.ph p





Peer-to-Peer Passé, Report Finds
Ryan Singel

Peer-to-peer file sharing has been the bogeyman of the internet, but a new report suggests it’s destined become a fear of the past — replaced by cheap streaming video.

Rising from the ashes in the early 2000s of banned services like Napster, P2P soon became demonized as an imminent threat to software industry, Hollywood and the internet’s backbone, prompting high-profile piracy trials, federal government hearings on traffic management and hand-wringing from ISPs who said torrents of illicit traffic would overwhelm the net.

But peer-to-peer file sharing is falling out of favor quickly, according a new report from Arbor Networks, a network-management firm used by more than 70 percent of the world’s top ISPs. Falling out of favor so fast that the report declares that P2P is dead to ISPs.

“Globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly,” said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist at Arbor Networks, in a preview of a paper of findings from data collected by Arbor Networks from its customers. Arbor’s Atlas net monitoring tool analyzed traffic from 110 different ISPs, on nearly 3,000 routers, for a total of 264 exabytes of traffic. An exabyte is about a billion gigabytes. The company’s insight into the net’s core is probably only rivaled by the NSA, but they aren’t ones to speak.

In fact, according to its sensors, peer-to-peer traffic still accounts for about 18 percent of all traffic. (That’s by looking at packets — by protocol, P2P fell to less than one percent of traffic, but file sharing applications mask themselves in order to evade technical blocks.)

But compare that to 2007, when peer-to-peer peaked as high as 40 percent of net traffic, according to Labovitz.

In its place? Streaming video from sites like Hulu.com and YouTube, for one. And for downloads, sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload offer simple download hosting for files of all kinds, with premium and ad-supported accounts.

The flowering of alternative ways to watch shows and movies online, many of them ad-supported, has driven people away from the downloadable, but mostly illicit loot found through places like the Pirate Bay. For instance, you can watch whole seasons of television shows at Hulu, while Netflix members can stream a huge catalog of movies for free.

By contrast, P2P downloads arrive in random chunks, making it hard to know when a download will finish — which is when it’s actually possible to start watching anything downloaded.

“P2P is a headache,” Labovitz said.

By contrast, the web’s market share of net traffic is up 10 percent from 2007, now comprising more than 50 percent of internet traffic. That’s mostly driven by progressive http: downloads like YouTube uses, but Flash and Silverlight traffic is rising as well. (E-mail remains steady at about 1.4 percent of net traffic, despite the Wall Street Journal and Wired.com’s attempt to kill it off.)

As for direct download sites? MegaUpload.com moved its hosting to Carpathia in 2007, which has since grown to handle some one percent of the net’s traffic.

The change sheds another light on the long-running battle between ISPs, customers and federal regulators. Comcast is currently suing the FCC, arguing the government had no right to tell it in August 2008 to stop blocking peer-to-peer traffic, which the company said it had to do to save its network from congestion.

In its place? A 250 GB per month cap that few have complained about.

And a lawsuit that’s now more about principle than P2P.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/p2p-dying/





Carriers Eye Pay-As-You-Go Internet

Amid government push to open networks, some see cover for pricing based on usage
Christopher Rhoads and Niraj Sheth

In the early years of the Internet, the more time people spent online, the more they paid a provider like AOL for their connection. But as customers have shifted to always-on broadband services, many Web surfers have enjoyed all-you-can-eat Internet for a flat rate.

Some cable and telecommunications providers are trying to turn back the clock and return to usage-based pricing for Internet connections. Carriers including AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. say they may have to switch amid a surge in Internet traffic as more people go online to watch videos and download movies.

Recent efforts to introduce usage-based, or metered, broadband services have met stiff resistance from consumers. But a new push by the federal government to adopt rules that would force Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, no matter how much bandwidth they take up, could give ammunition to the broadband providers that want to change how they charge for Web access, Internet experts and consumer advocates say.

"This could come down to carriers saying, 'If you don't allow us to manage our networks the way we see fit, then we will just have to cap everything,' " says Phillip Dampier, a consumer advocate focusing on technology issues in Rochester, N.Y. "They'll make it an either/or thing: give them more control over their network or expect metered broadband."

Mr. Dampier was among those who forced Time Warner Cable to shelve a metered Internet pilot program in several cities last year. The company, which had argued the plan would be a fairer way to charge for access, acknowledged it was a "debacle." It won't say if it plans to revive the trials.

Some broadband providers argue that a pay-as-you-go Internet is unavoidable. "A flat-rate, infinitely expandable service is unachievable,"Dick Lynch, chief technology officer of Verizon Communications Inc., said at a recent industry conference, referring to the industry in general. "We're going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes."

Advocates say unlimited monthly Internet service has been critical to the Internet's growth and the formation of online start-ups. Paying by the amount of Internet traffic used could damp usage and the sort of tinkering that can lead to breakthroughs, they warn.

Carriers believe it is only fair that heavy users pay more, especially since online file-sharing software, such as BitTorrent, takes up so much bandwidth.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission sanctioned Comcast Corp. for violating so-called network neutrality principles. Comcast, which is appealing the decision, had hindered the use of file-sharing software without informing customers. It argued it needed to control such usage to keep traffic flowing properly.

In Beaumont, Texas, and Reno, Nev., AT&T has been pricing Internet access based on usage. Since last year, it has let new customers choose from one of six tiers, depending on the desired speed and how much data they think they will download in a month. Existing customers can keep their old flat-rate plan, which is capped at 150 gigabytes a month

The most basic plan, which costs $19.95, offers 20 gigabytes of downloads; the most expensive, for $65, allows 150 gigabytes a month. For every gigabyte over the limit, there is a $1 fee.

"Some type of usage-based model, for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns, seems inevitable," an AT&T spokesman says. AT&T declined to provide more details on its trials.

Some cable companies have instituted monthly usage limits, though they are usually so high they affect only the heaviest users. A plan with 150 gigabytes, for example, would enable sending and receiving 75 million emails, or downloading more than 30,000 songs. The average Internet user consumes around 15 gigabytes a month, according to University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko.

Comcast earlier this year instituted a cap of 250 gigabytes a month. The company says the rule affects a very small minority of its high-usage customers. Some smaller and regional Internet service providers also charge on a metered basis, including Sunflower Broadband in Kansas. Frontier Communications Corp. last year briefly used metered pricing in Rochester before scrapping the policy in the face of protest.

"Unquestionably, the carriers erred in their initial selling of broadband with a flat rate," says Elroy Jopling, research director of Gartner Inc. "They assumed no one would use it as much as they do now, but then along came high-definition movies. They're now trying to get around that mistake."

Network neutrality deals primarily with ensuring that Internet providers don't favor any online traffic over any other. Still, Mr. Jopling and other analysts argue, the net neutrality debate might provide the carriers with an opening to argue for changing that pricing.

The FCC last month proposed strengthening the existing principles on network neutrality—turning them into more strictly enforceable rules—to ensure that carriers treat all Internet traffic equally.The idea is that as Internet providers themselves get more into the content business—as foreshadowed most recently by Comcast's overtures to acquire a majority stake in NBC Universal—they shouldn't be able to make it easier for users to access their own content than other companies' content

The agency also said it wants more transparency in how carriers manage their networks.

In announcing the proposals, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski cited Comcast's approach to BitTorrent, as well as phone companies' blocking the use of online phone services on their networks.

"With network neutrality enforced, the only other option for carrriers is to charge by the byte or to raise the flat-rate pricing," says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research. "Right now they're just deciding which one to do. Just be prepared to pay more."

When Time Warner announced last March it would expand its metered-pricing approach to other cities, including Austin and Rochester, protests erupted. Rep. Joe Messa of Rochester introduced a bill in Congress banning tiered Internet pricing plans, arguing the plan would put his city at a disadvantage for corporate investment.

Time Warner Chief Executive Glenn Britt told a conference the following month that the company erred in communicating the rollout, not in the plan itself.

"We did not handle the public relations very well and had a bit of a debacle, to he honest," Mr. Britt said at the conference. "I still think some notion of you use less and pay less, use more and pay more, will ultimately be what happens."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._sha re_digg#





Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks
Kim Zetter

A vulnerability in a Time Warner cable modem and Wi-Fi router deployed to 65,000 customers would allow a hacker to remotely access the device’s administrative menu over the internet, and potentially change the settings to intercept traffic, according to a blogger who discovered the issue.

Time Warner acknowledged the problem to Threat Level on Tuesday, and says it’s in the process of testing replacement firmware code from the router manufacturer, which it plans to push out to customers soon.

“We were aware of the problem last week and have been working on it since,” said Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley.

The vulnerability lies with Time Warner’s SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo, made by SMC. The device is one of several options Time Warner offers to customers who don’t want to install their own modem and router to use with the company’s broadband service. The device is installed with default configurations, which customers can alter only slightly through its built-in web server. The most customers can do through this page is add a list of URLs they want their router to block.

But blogger David Chen, writing at chenosaurus.com, recently discovered he could easily gain remote access to an administrative page served by the router that would allow him greater control of the device.

Chen, founder of a software startup called Pip.io, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router’s configuration file.

That file, it turned out, included the administrative login and password in cleartext. Chen investigated and found the same login and password could access the admin panels for every router in the SMC8014 series on Time Warner’s network — a grave vulnerability, given that the routers also expose their web interfaces to the public-facing internet.

time-warner-admin-panelAll of this means that a hacker who wanted to target a specific router and change its settings could access a customer’s admin panel from anywhere on the net through a web browser, log in with the master password, and then start tinkering. Among the possibilities, the intruder could alter the router’s DNS settings — for example, to redirect the customer’s browser to malicious websites — or change the Wi-Fi settings to open the user’s home network to the neighbors.

The attacker would need the router’s IP address to conduct the attack. But Chen found a dozen customer SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi routers by simply running a port scan on a subnet of 255 Time Warner IP addresses. An evil hacker could easily automate a scanning tool to sweep through Time Warner’s address space and hack every SMC8014 it finds.

“From within your own network, an intruder can eavesdrop on sensitive data being sent over the internet and even worse, they can manipulate the DNS address to point trusted sites to malicious servers to perform man-in-the-middle attacks,” Chen wrote on his blog. “Someone skilled enough can possibly even modify and install a new firmware onto the router, which can then automatically scan and infect other routers automatically.”

Chen said he contacted Time Warner’s security department four weeks ago and was told that the company was aware of the security vulnerability but “cannot do anything about it.”

He says he’s relieved to hear the company is now addressing the problem.

It’s unclear if other Time Warner customers would be affected by the same issues.

Time Warner’s Dudley says the SMC8014 modem/routers are just a small portion of the 14 million devices its customers are using.

“We are working to determine if it affects other models,” he says.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...-warner-cable/





Google, Labels Partner on Music Search: Sources
Yinka Adegoke

Google Inc is partnering with major music labels to launch a new feature to make it easier to discover, sample and buy songs on the search engine, according to two people familiar with the plan.

The recorded music industry, struggling with plunging sales and fewer media outlets to break new acts, hopes that streaming songs or clips on the world's most popular search engine will help stem the tide. Google has around 65 percent of all search queries in the United States, according to comScore.

Start-ups iLike and LaLa will facilitate the new feature, which will enable songs to be streamed on the Google page that will also include a "buy" button. This will help reduce the number of steps fans need to purchase their favorite songs or albums.

By clicking on that button, customers will be taken to a variety of different sites, including Amazon.com and Apple Inc's iTunes Music Store, where they can buy music.

Privately held LaLa and iLike, which was recently acquired by News Corp's MySpace social networking site, are set to begin the new service on October 28, said the sources, who were not permitted to speak publicly about it ahead of the launch.

The new service will involve all of the major music labels -- including Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Music.

The labels are betting that by making it easier to search for music, they can increase the size of the digital market, which is currently dominated by iTunes, with about 70 percent of download sales.

News of the service -- still to be named -- was first reported by technology blog TechCrunch. Google declined to comment.

The move to make Google's music search easier will consolidate the company's role in the industry. YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, is already a key music discovery site for fans.

Separately, Universal Music and Sony Music are partnering with YouTube to create a new music video service called Vevo, which is expected to launch in December.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Paul Thomasch, Maureen Bavdek and Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...59K49M20091021





Hot on Heels of Google, Facebook to Take First Step into Music
Brad Stone

Several reports Wednesday indicate that Google is set to roll-out a music service at an event at the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood next Wednesday. The service, we’ve confirmed from three people briefed on the details, will offer searchers a better way to find and sample music on Google - much in the same way people can get detailed financial information about a company from Google Finance.

So for example, if you search for Green Day’s song “21 Guns,” a Google page devoted to the song will offer lyrics, photos, tour dates and opportunities to sample the music from streaming services like Lala and iLike, a division of MySpace. We have also learned that more online music services, including Imeem, may be added to the Google service in the next week. No money is changing hands in these deals, a person with knowledge of the discussions said.

But Google isn’t alone in wading into the music business. Facebook, which has been toying with bringing music to the social network for at least a year, will also take its first step by integrating Lala into its popular gift store, according to a person briefed on the plans. Representatives of Facebook and Lala would not comment.

Currently, the Facebook gift store is stocked with images like birthday cakes and dogs (many illustrated by the former Apple interface designer Susan Kare, incidentally). People buy these images for a dollar — with 10-cent Facebook credits — and pass them on to their friends’ profile pages. It sounds frivolous, but its actually a big business, with the gift store widely estimated to have earned Facebook tens of millions of dollars in 2008.

Over the summer, Facebook began, in limited tests, allowing companies to add their virtual wares to the gift store, and now I’ve confirmed they are set to go live with that effort later this week. Companies like American Greetings, SomeeCards and JibJab will list their virtual goods next to Facebook’s images.

But adding songs from Lala is clearly the most interesting step. People can give friends, say, Elvis Costello’s aging ballad, “Veronica” for their 40th birthday. And Lala is the perfect partner for this. It charges 10 cents (or one Facebook credit) for a “Web song,” which can be played online in perpetuity; for full price, usually around 10 credits, the recipient of the music gift will be able to download the song and transfer it to their iPod.

Bottom line: Web users are about to have a lot more ways to find and sample music.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...tep-int-music/





Spotify vs Sky Songs: Sound Quality Blind Test
Nate Lanxon

Sky has launched a subscription-music service called Sky Songs, but its streaming-audio bit-rate is much lower than Spotify's free service. The question is, can anyone actually tell the difference? We put it to the test.

We dragged 16 people from around the CBS Interactive offices kicking and screaming into a quiet room. We gave them a pair of £500 reference-grade headphones and a high-end audio processor, and played them the same section of Michael Jackson's track Billie Jean twice -- once from Spotify, once from Sky Songs.

On paper, Sky's streaming audio quality -- at 48Kbps AAC+ -- is just a third as good as Spotify's free service -- at 160Kbps OGG Vorbis -- and just one sixth as good as Spotify's paid-for service, at 320Kbps OGG Vorbis. So the results, theoretically at least, should be cut and dried: Spotify sounds better.

There's more to sound quality than just a bit rate, of course (the type of codec used has enormous influence). We're simply testing product against product for perceived sound quality -- Spotify vs Sky Songs.

With our subjects tethered to a chair, we hit play. They weren't told which version was which, or even what to listen out for. They were simply told to choose version A or version B as sounding better.

The results

Of the 16 people tested, six people -- over a third -- thought Sky Songs ('version B') was the higher-quality audio. Conversely, ten people identified Spotify ('version A') as being the higher-quality track.

When asked, the majority of the participants choosing Spotify pointed out that instruments sounded "cleaner" at the higher bit rate. Some also noted that cymbals, hi hats and vocals in particular sounded better.

But what was unusual was the reasoning a couple of people gave for picking Sky Songs. They thought Sky's version produced better bass, and therefore was encoded at a higher bit rate. Both versions of the song were taken from the same CD, and therefore was not affected by better bass via remastering.
Things to bear in mind

Although conducted fairly, our test was still very subjective. Everybody hears 'quality' differently -- to some it's that bass sounds deeper or louder, to some it's that higher-frequency sounds are "crisper" or better defined.

Also, AAC+ and OGG Vorbis compression methods offer different advantages in terms of compression efficiency, largely because the psycho-acoustic algorithms they use are different.

But we were also testing on very high-end equipment. Many people will simply use iPod earbuds to listen to music, or bog-standard PC speakers. And through this lower-quality gear, the differences between Sky Songs and Spotify's free service could be harder to identify.
Conclusion

Whatever the reasoning, Spotify's bit rate is higher, and the majority of our participants correctly identified this. If you choose to pay for Spotify's premium service, the quality is higher still. We can only conclude, therefore, that if you're purely looking for quality of streaming audio, Spotify is still your best choice.

Update: We have added a paragraph to clarify that this is simply a casual, anecdotal comparison of two products, and not a definitive study of the benefits of AAC and OGG Vorbis compression formats. We are well aware that AAC, OGG Vorbis, MP3 or WMA files of identical bit rates will not sound the same. If this was a serious study of codec performance, we would have used 16,000 people, not 16.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic...9303980,00.htm





Soupy Sales, Pie-Splattered Comedian Who Won Hearts in Early TV Days, Dead at 83
David N. Goodman

Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, has died. He was 83.

Sales died Thursday night at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, said his former manager and longtime friend, Dave Usher. Sales had many health problems and entered the hospice last week, Usher said.

At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and '60s, Sales was one of the best-known faces in the nation, Usher said.

"If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one would have recognized him as much as Soupy," Usher said.

At the same time, Sales retained an openness to fans that turned every restaurant meal into an endless autograph-signing session, Usher said.

"He was just good to people," said Usher, a former jazz music producer who managed Sales in the 1950s and now owns Detroit-based Marine Pollution Control.

Sales began his TV career in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then moved to Detroit, where he drew a large audience on WXYZ-TV. He moved to Los Angeles in 1961.

The comic's pie-throwing schtick became his trademark, and celebrities lined up to take one on the chin alongside Sales. During the early 1960s, stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Shirley MacLaine received their just desserts side-by-side with the comedian on his television show.

"I'll probably be remembered for the pies, and that's all right," Sales said in a 1985 interview.

Sales was born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, where his was the only Jewish family in town. His parents, owners of a dry-goods store, sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. The family later moved to Huntington, West Viriginia.

His greatest success came in New York with "The Soupy Sales Show" — an ostensible children's show that had little to do with Captain Kangaroo and other kiddie fare. Sales' manic, improvisational style also attracted an older audience that responded to his envelope-pushing antics.

Sales, who was typically clad in a black sweater and oversized bow-tie, was once suspended for a week after telling his legion of tiny listeners to empty their mothers' purse and mail him all the pieces of green paper bearing pictures of the presidents.

The cast of "Saturday Night Live" later paid homage by asking their audience to send in their joints. His influence was also obvious in the Pee-Wee Herman character created by Paul Reubens.

Sales returned from the Navy after World War II and became a $20-a-week reporter at a West Virginia radio station. He jumped to a DJ gig, changed his name to Soupy Heinz and headed for Ohio.

His first pie to the face came in 1951, when the newly christened Soupy Sales was hosting a children's show in Cleveland. In Detroit, Sales' show garnered a national reputation as he honed his act — a barrage of sketches, gags and bad puns that played in the Motor City for seven years.

After moving to Los Angeles, he eventually became a fill-in host on "The Tonight Show."

He moved to New York in 1964 and debuted "The Soupy Sales Show," with co-star puppets White Fang (the meanest dog in the United States) and Black Tooth (the nicest dog in the United States). By the time his Big Apple run ended two years later, Sales had appeared on 5,370 live television programs — the most in the medium's history, he boasted. He had a pair of albums that hit the Billboard Top 10 in 1965; "Do the Mouse" sold 250,000 copies in New York alone.

Sales remained a familiar television face, first as a regular from 1968-75 on the game show "What's My Line?" and later appearing on everything from "The Mike Douglas Show" to "The Love Boat." He played himself in the 1998 movie "Holy Man," which starred Eddie Murphy.

He joined WNBC-AM as a disc jockey in 1985, a stint best remembered because Sales filled the hours between shock jocks Don Imus and Howard Stern.

Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and two sons, Hunt and Tony, a pair of musicians who backed David Bowie in the band Tin Machine.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,0,95907.story





Composer of "Addams Family" Theme Song Dies at 93

Vic Mizzy, the American film and television composer who wrote the theme song to "The Addams Family," has died at the age of 93, with his death announced on his website.

The Brooklyn-born composer, who was a studio pianist for a radio station before serving with the U.S. Navy during World War Two, had a string of hits in the 1930s and 1940s including "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time," and "With a Hey and a Hi and a Ho-Ho-Ho."

But he is best known for writing the theme tunes for the TV shows "Green Acres" and "The Addams Family" with its infamous rat-tat-tat-tat opening and punctuated with two finger snaps.

He had to sing the theme himself, overdubbing his voice several times, when the production company refused to pay for singers.

Mizzy owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, once telling a CBS interviewer: "Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."

The Los Angeles Times said Mizzy died of heart failure at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles on Saturday.

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Sugita Katyal)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...59K11T20091021

















Until next week,

- js.



















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