Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 12th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002



































"(I) listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history. Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm. Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying." – SPC Bradley Manning


"So long as there's been art, there have been artists remaking, re-imagining, rebooting and re-configuring previous creations, including their own. It's what they do. If they didn't do that, some of them wouldn't do anything." – Amy Biancolli


"I hate to buy living artists. Every day they paint stuff." – Rick Harrison



































June 12th, 2010





Does LimeWire Owe the RIAA $1.5 Trillion?
Jon Newton

If anyone has ever wondered if Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music and their RIAA have lost it, they should wonder no more.

“The corks were popping over in LaLa land”, said p2pnet in the middle of May.

That was because judge Kimba Wood had ruled LimeWire infringes copyright.

Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.

To whom? To Arista Records, Atlantic Recording, BMG Music, Capitol records, Electra Entertaiment, Interscope Records, Motown Recording, Priority Records, LaFace Records, Sony BMG (?), UMG Recordings and Warner Bros Records.

That’s one point five trillion dollars.

If you think that’s ridiculous, bear in mind the labels were once awarded almost $2 million because Jammie Thomas-Rasset allegedly downloaded 24 copyrighted songs.

That’s not all. Klaus also wants Wood to issue an order permanently shutting LimeWire down.

“As in Grokster and Aimster, Plaintiffs have been and will be irreparably harmed because Lime Wire will most likely be liable for more in damages than it will ever be able to pay”, says Klaus in a legal document going on:

“Plaintiffs seek statutory damages under the Copyright Act as a remedy for Lime Wire’s unlawful conduct. (First Amended Complaint ¶¶ 74, 87, 99). Where the defendant’s conduct is willful, the range of statutory damages runs from $750 to $150,000. See 17 U.S.C. § 504(a)(2)-(c).”

And that’s not all either.

The RIAA aka Klaus also wants LimeWire’s assets frozen.

“By this motion, Plaintiffs seek a preliminary injunction imposing an immediate freeze on all of Defendants’ assets to prevent them from any further attempts to insulate their ill-gotten gains from a future judgment. The Court has found Defendants Lime Wire LLC (’Lime Wire’), Mark Gorton (’Gorton’), and Lime Group LLC (’Lime Group’) liable for inducing infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights (and related state law claims). (May 25, 2010 Amended Opinion & Order (“Order”).) Plaintiffs will be entitled to substantial damages, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions, because of the massive infringing conduct for which these Defendants are liable.”

But as a post on Ray Beckerman’s Recording Industry vs The People says, Klaus’ efforts do little more than show “the lawyers have no clue as to the technology they seek to stop”, going on >>>

Unlike Kazaa, grokster, and napster, there is nothing that can or will be shut down. They may try to stop the distribution of the limewire client. But the client is so widespread on the internet that they have no real chance of it disappearing.

The same thing happened when AOL tried to stop the original gnutella client.

Speaking on the technology side, I think they have no idea of what they are trying to stop, this is the gnutella network. There is no server to be shut down that will kill the network like with napster and grokster. Each client is a part of the network and can function without a server in some warehouse. It will be impossible to close it down.

All clients will still function even if Limeware as a group/company ceases to exist.

Which adequately sums it up.

Apart from the fact Gorton doesn’t have a trillion, or even a billion, dollars, the RIAA’s demand is exactly like demanding an order to plug one hole in a hose chock full of holes, and that’s permanently left On.

“In the nearly two years since the parties filed their respective summary judgment motions, LimeWire has continued to be a tool of choice for rampant infringement of Plaintiffs’ works”, Klaus tells Wood, adding:

“Since July 2008, the LimeWire client software has been downloaded from the website more than 50 million times, bringing the total downloads of the client from just that one website – i.e., exclusive of downloads from Lime Wire’s own website – to more than 200 million (and counting).”

Stay tuned.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/40481





CESA: Portable Piracy Cost Game Industry $41.5 Billion
Eric Caoili

Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA) says video game piracy for portable consoles like the Nintendo DS and PSP around the world cost the gaming industry at least ¥3.816 trillion ($41.5 billion) between 2004 and 2009. Piracy in Japan alone accounted for ¥954 billion ($10.4 billion) of that amount.

In a study conducted with Tokyo University's Baba Lab, CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009.

After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market.

CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found.

The firms published other details from their investigations of the piracy sites, including its finding that the U.S. has the most servers hosting piracy sites, while China has the second most. China and the U.S. alone make up 60 percent of the total amount of servers hosting piracy sites, according to a translation of CESA's report by Andriasang.

Also mentioned in the report, which is available to download (in Japanese) from CESA's site, is that the U.S. accounted for the highest number of accesses to the piracy sites it analyzed. Japan had the second highest number of access, and China had the third highest.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...15_Billion.php





Judges Liken P2P To The Ancient Practice of Lending Books
enigmax

After raids in 2005, Spanish police arrested four people and dismantled a popular file-sharing site. The case has been dragging on ever since but now has finally been closed. Three judges decided that no offense had been committed and likened file-sharing to the ancient practice of sharing books.

Following an investigation by the authorities and audiovisual rights collecting society EGEDA and Columbia Tristar, in early 2005 Spanish police embarked on an operation aimed at shutting down popular file-sharing forum CVCDGO.com.

EGEDA complained that site allowed members to download movies located on P2P networks, sometimes which had yet to have a theatrical release. Like many file-sharing sites, CVCDGO had been financed by advertising since its 2004 launch and in its short life it allegedly received more than 11 million visits.

Conducted by the country’s Intellectual Property Crime Squad, ‘Operation CVCD’ culminated later in 2005 in raids on locations in Malaga, Seville and Madrid. There police arrested the four male operators of the site who at the time were aged between 27 and 37 years old. The servers, meanwhile, remained located in San Diego in the United States,

The legal proceedings have dragged on ever since, but now the Provincial Court of Madrid has finally closed the case, finding that no offenses had been committed.

In common with every other file-sharing case coming out of the Spanish legal system recently, the Court found that since the site did not host the actual copyright files and generated no profit directly from any infringements of copyright, the presence of advertising on the site did not constitute a crime.

In their ruling, judges Ocariz, Gutierrez and Campillo said that “..since ancient times there has been the loan or sale of books, movies, music and more. The difference now is mainly on the medium used – previously it was paper or analog media and now everything is in a digital format which allows a much faster exchange of a higher quality and also with global reach through the Internet.”

The judges noted that all this takes places between many users all at once without any of them receiving any financial reward.

Lawyer Carlos Sanchez Almeida, whose law firm defended the case, said that the decision meant that the judges were sending a clear message to the government, informing Culture Minister González Sinde that there is a “red line that should not be crossed.”

“The judges have taken a stand for freedom on the Internet,” he added.

The decision cannot be appealed.
http://torrentfreak.com/judges-liken...-books-100608/





Judge May Dismiss 4,576 of 4,577 P2P Defendants from Lawsuit
Nate Anderson

Federal judge Rosemary Collyer sits on the DC District Court, where several of the recent US Copyright Group lawsuits against alleged P2P users have been filed. A few of those lawsuits ended up on Judge Collyer's calendar, one of them filed against over 4,000 anonymous "John Does" at once.

This week, Judge Collyer issued a terse demand to the lawyers behind these cases: convince me within two weeks that jamming 4,577 people into a single lawsuit is a proper use of the court system.

A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. "MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20," wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry.

The judge's order came only days after the ACLU and EFF joined forces to file a friend of the court brief in these cases. In that brief, the civil rights groups complained about the improper "joinder" of so many defendants from across the country in a single case in a far-off DC courthouse.

According to Rule 20, which Judge Collyer referenced in her order, plaintiffs may only join defendants in a lawsuit if:

• They assert any right to relief jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and
• Any question of law or fact common to all plaintiffs will arise in the action.

But were the alleged distributions all part of the same "transaction or occurrence"? According to the ACLU and EFF, they were not, and these P2P lawsuits should be "severed" and each defendant sued individually.

"Plaintiff's joinder of more than 4,500 defendants in a single action is improper and runs the tremendous risk of creating unfairness and denying individual justice to the suit," they wrote. "Mass joinder of individuals has been disapproved by federal courts in both the RIAA cases and elsewhere."

The judge appears interested in at least debating this argument. I checked in with EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry, who worked on the brief, and she was pleased by the order.

"Of course, we don't know yet how the judge is going to rule, but this order suggests that she is taking the issue seriously," she said. "That is a very good thing; parties in any litigation should be required to follow the rules, but given the number of lawsuits (with more promised) and the thousands of individuals under threat, it's particularly crucial here."

Should the judge sever the lawsuits, each would have to be filed separately, with a separate filing fee and separate paperwork, making mass lawsuits much more difficult and expensive.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...om-lawsuit.ars





Student Fined for Bringing UCL into Disrepute with FitFinder Site
Laura Pitel

The founder of a student flirting website has been fined £300 for bringing his university into disrepute.

The FitFinder, set up last month, combines Twitter and Facebook to allow students to exchange saucy messages on campus. The site received four million hits in its first month and has rapidly expanded to universities across the country.

Rich Martell, 21, a final-year computer sciences student at University College London, has taken the site down under pressure from university authorities, who were concerned that it was distracting students from their studies. Staff claim to have been contacted by a number of other universities unhappy about FitFinder.

Mr Martell was told that failure to pay the fine would put his degree at risk. In a letter to Mr Martell seen by The Times, Ruth Siddall, the Dean of Welfare (Students), wrote: “Following the serious complaints brought to this institution regarding the contents of the site and your association with it, I find myself having to bring a charge under UCL’s Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute. Therefore I am fining you £300.”

The letter added that non-payment of the fine, which is the maximum that can be awarded by the Dean for misconduct, would result in Mr Martell’s degree results being witheld.

FitFinder has gained national attention since its launch in April for its risque content and its wildfire-like spread. The site allows students to “spot” attractive people in libraries, cafes and lecture theatres, and post a message about them on the publicly visible site in the hope of getting a response.The site has been criticised by women’s groups, who cite sexually explicit comments as evidence of its offensive tone, while supporters argue that it is nothing more than friendly banter and a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun.

Last week, after finishing his final exam, Mr Martell decided to bow to the pressure and temporarily take down the site. “I just want an assurance by UCL that my degree isn’t going to be put in jeopardy,” he told The Times. He described the university’s stance on FitFinder, which he runs with two friends, as harsh. A petition to restore the site had more than 3,700 signatures yesterday.

Mr Martell has vowed to resume the service as soon as the safety of his university degree is guaranteed and said that it was an unfair reaction to a social networking site that he sees as no different to Facebook or Twitter. “If a UCL student posted something offensive on Facebook would they hold Mark Zuckerberg [the site’s founder] responsible?” he asked.

A university spokesman said: “UCL does not approve of or condone this site. We therefore advised the student to take the site down, but he declined to do this. UCL has no jurisdiction over the site, as it is not UCL-hosted. We have, however, taken disciplinary action against the student for bringing the college into disrepute and he has been fined.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7140721.ece





Opt-Out Required to Prevent Your Yahoo! Mail Contacts From Being Used for Social Network
Kurt Opsahl

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a plan to try to leverage its Yahoo! Mail users' contacts into a social network of friends who will receive your Yahoo! Updates. Once the most visited website in the world, Yahoo! now ranks fourth worldwide, reaching about a quarter of all Internet users each day. Like Google Buzz's ill-fated launch using Gmail contacts, Yahoo! wants to jump start its social networking plans with the hundreds of millions of people who already use its email and messenger services.

While Yahoo! made some effort to avoid the worst aspects of the Facebook and Google Buzz privacy controversies, ultimately the plan conflicts with two principles of the EFF Bill of Privacy Rights for social network users. The program will begin a roll out next week, and Yahoo! users need to opt out if they do not wish to participate.

What Are Your Yahoo! Updates?

Yahoo! Updates are similar to Facebook's news feed and Twitter's tweets. For people who receive your Updates (more on that below), they will be seen on the basic Yahoo! Mail screen, in a category called “Updates” just below where email messages are displayed.

Updates will "include things like comments on message boards, songs you’ve rated, movies you’ve reviewed, articles you’ve Buzzed, photos you’ve uploaded in Flickr, questions you’ve asked or answered on Yahoo! Answers and other similar activities." If you have customized your Yahoo! homepage with apps, these apps may also generate Updates. According to Yahoo!, "Because the majority of events listed within Updates are inherently public activities, our defaults are set to allow anyone to see them."

Here’s the problem: Even though many of these events are indeed available to the public in that they can be found if searched for (often by looking in specific places), this does not necessarily mean that users want all of these activities to be pushed onto the home email screens of other users. Whether or not users will want this publicity depends on who will see the Updates.

Who Will See Your Yahoo! Updates?

You can never know the complete list of those who will receive Updates about your activities on Yahoo!. Previously, your Updates were shared with your Connections, an earlier Yahoo! effort at opt-in social networking that was not widely adopted. More recently, Yahoo! started sharing with your Yahoo! Messenger buddies. Starting next week, your Updates will get posted automatically to anyone who has you in their Yahoo! Mail address book, as opposed to, for example, the people in your address book. Thus, if someone wants to follow your Updates, they can just add you to their address book and you will not know.

What that means is that whenever your doctor, your ex, your stalker, or your plumber include your email address as a Contact in their address book, they will automatically see Updates about your activities on Yahoo!’s many, many websites whenever they log into Yahoo! Mail.

In an effort to avoid Google's gaffe in making Buzz user's email contacts public, Yahoo! Updates will not publicize who is in your address book or who has you in their address book. By publishing Updates only to people who have you as a Yahoo! Contact, rather than to those people whose addresses are in your Yahoo! Contact list, Yahoo! will avoid revealing any information about who is in your address book. This solves one privacy problem but creates another: you can’t make an informed decision about publicizing your activities because you don’t know who will see it.

The EFF Bill of Privacy Rights requires "a clear user interface that allows [users] to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used," and that "Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them." Yahoo!’s system fails to uphold these rights since it doesn’t let you know or control who is getting sent your Updates.

While implemented differently, Yahoo!’s strategy ultimately falls prey to the same underlying problem as Google Buzz: your email contact list and your social network are not the same thing, and in some cases may be quite different – and products that try to turn one into the other are doomed to hurt users. As Newsweek put it "Social networks are about sharing, and e-mail services are intensely private. Like lightning and swimming pools, they just don’t mix."

Google Buzz incited controversy because its Gmail users' contacts were a poor match for their friends. One might email with doctors, lawyers, landlord, bosses, former spouses, and the like, and yet not want to share personal photos and links with them (nor receive updates from them).

Likewise, when it comes to Yahoo! Updates, there will likely be other Yahoo! Mail users who have your email in their address book, but are not actually your friends; you may not even know them at all or you may know them only as your doctor, your child’s teacher or your car mechanic. Yet all of those Yahoo! users who happen to have your Yahoo! email address will soon be getting a constant stream of your online activity, unless you opt out. (They could also choose to block your Updates, if they do not care to see your activities).

Can You Control Who Receives Your Yahoo! Updates?

Not on a person-by-person basis. You can control what categories of content are included in your Updates stream. For example, you can choose to include your comments on Yahoo! News stories but not include the photos you post to Flickr. You will also be able to decide whether or not a particular action is published to the Update stream at all, on a per-post opt-out basis. Or you can decide to just opt-out of Updates completely. However, as noted above, there are currently no controls over who receives your Updates. As a result, Yahoo! Mail users will soon find themselves automatically opted in to a new sharing program without control over with whom they are sharing.

This opt-out program conflicts with EFF’s Bill of Privacy Rights, which provides that "When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user." These contacts were provided to Yahoo! for the purpose of email and messaging, not social networking. If Yahoo wants to use that data for a new purpose, it should only do so on an opt-in basis.

How to Opt Out of Yahoo! Updates

You must opt out if you don't want to publicize your activities with anyone who has your email address in their address book. In the wake of the Facebook privacy settings controversy, Yahoo! has made the opt-out process fairly straight forward.
Yahoo! Updates Sharing Control

To opt-out of the new program, go to http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates/ and uncheck the box next to Share My Updates. In addition, to opt out of sharing authorized by your friends, you need to go to http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/permissions, and uncheck "Allow my connections to share my information labeled 'My Connections' with third-party applications." While on this page, you should review your settings, and adjust the privacy levels as appropriate. This page also allows to to hide your profile entirely.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06...-mail-contacts





Seriously, Remakes are Nothing New
Amy Biancolli

Two big remakes are hitting the multiplex today: "The A-Team," a wide-screen treatment of NBC's cheese-puffed action series, and "The Karate Kid," a kung fu redo of the boy-meets-guru martial arts classic.

Anyone in the mood for high-brow sputtering can take this moment to complain about the plethora of superfluous remakes floating around and chronic lack of imagination at major Hollywood studios.

Go ahead, blow off some steam. Then get over it, because remakes have had a grip on various and sundry art forms since the first cave-painters (rather, the second) copied their neighbors' bison sketches back in the day. So long as there's been art, there have been artists remaking, re-imagining, rebooting and re-configuring previous creations, including their own. It's what they do. If they didn't do that, some of them wouldn't do anything.

How many of Shakespeare's three-dozen-odd plays featured original plots? Any idea? Four. That's right. Four: "The Tempest," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Love's Labour's Lost." (See http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english...e/source.html). Every now and then scholars of the Bard vociferously defend him from -- or accuse him of -- plagiarism, but I've yet to hear him slammed for hawking remakes. No one whines, nowadays, that he "rebooted" Arthur Brooke's epic poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," or that Brooke himself rebooted an earlier Italian work.

Yet plenty of people whined about Baz Luhrmann's heretical gangster retake.

Now, "The A-Team" urtext wasn't exactly Shakespeare. No argument there. Nor was it the work of the Renaissance masters, who recycled motifs from antiquity. Or Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist with the impenetrable glare, who painted herself 55 times. (Need I remind you, there is only one "A-Team" remake in the offing here. Joe Carnahan has no plans to direct another 54.)

Remakes themselves are not inherently evil. A great one, like "His Girl Friday" (a remake of "The Front Page"), brings something new and maybe provocative to the table, whether it's sexy gender crosstalk or a mashed-up POV. In publishing, think of Seth Grahame-Smith's "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" or the collected works of Gregory Maguire, whose revisionist spin on Frank Baum's Oz oeuvre took him all the way to Broadway with "Wicked." A bad remake is a drag and a waste of money. That's what obscurity is for; it will retreat and remain there, having failed to negate the unchanged, indestructible and near-immortal brilliance of the source material. If Hitchcock famously remade his own work ("The Man Who Knew Too Much," 1934, 1956), why all the anguished hand-wringing when Gus Van Sant re-shot "Psycho"? Yeah, it was awful, especially that bit with Norman amusing himself at the peephole. But as far as I know, Van Sant did not physically torch the original. It is still available on Netflix.

Over the past few years, buzz has circulated over a potential remake of "The Birds," sending star Tippi Hendren into a lather.

In interviews she called it "insulting" and complained about Hollywood's dearth of new ideas. But insulting to whom? Hitch? He might remake it himself, if he were alive. And these new ideas she's talking about -- umm, what are they, exactly?

It has to be said: Originality isn't everything. Formal trailblazing is fine and all, but there's something to be said for perfecting the old ways, too. For proof, look no further than Johann Sebastian Bach. While his son C.P.E. greatly advanced the sonata form, the genius of J.S. was breathtaking summation: His work realized, with dazzling musicianship and divine scope, all that could be done within the musical strictures of the time.

Elsewhere -- everywhere -- in the history of music, composers plucked themes and entire melodies from folk idioms and previous works. I love Aaron Copland as much as the next red-blooded American, but the next time I hear someone attribute the Shaker tune "Simple Gifts" to Copland's "Appalachian Spring," I may demand a shout-out to Elder Joseph Brackett.

In pop music, meanwhile, covers are the norm. Everyone does `em, and only a crank with a tin ear would gripe about Ray Charles or Israel Kamakawiwo'ole "remaking" Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow." On the other hand, only a crank with a tin ear wouldn't complain about the pitch-resistant punk version by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, which they had every right to record and I have every right to detest. (Sing it. In. Tune.) As it happens, all remakes are not created equal.
http://www.newstimes.com/entertainme...new-519358.php





After Long Sojourn, Silent Films Return Home
Dave Kehr

A late silent feature directed by John Ford, a short comedy directed by Mabel Normand, a period drama starring Clara Bow and a group of early one-reel westerns are among a trove of long-lost American films recently found in the New Zealand Film Archive.

Some 75 of these movies, chosen for their historical and cultural importance, are in the process of being returned to the United States under the auspices of the National Film Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit, charitable affiliate of the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board. (This writer is a member of the board, and has served on grant panels for the foundation, though none related to the current project.) Chris Finlayson, New Zealand’s minister for arts, culture and heritage, is expected to announce the discovery and the repatriation officially this week.

The films came to light early in 2009, when Brian Meacham, a preservationist for the Los Angeles archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, dropped in on colleagues at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington during a vacation.

“The conversation inevitably turned to what films we held in our collection,” recalled Steve Russell, the New Zealand archive’s manager of corporate services. “Brian was not surprisingly excited to learn the Film Archive held a number of non-New Zealand titles, primarily early nitrate films, including a substantial number of American films. We offered to compile a list of the U.S. material, and it was a short step to here.” Many foreign films remained in New Zealand after their commercial lives were over because the studios didn’t think the return shipping was worth the expense. “It’s one of the rare cases where the tyranny of distance has worked in our and the films’ favor,” Mr. Russell said.

Because of the importance of the John Ford film, “Upstream” — a backstage drama from 1927, a year that was a turning point in the development of one of America’s greatest filmmakers — it is being copied to modern safety film stock in a New Zealand laboratory, rather than risk loss or further damage in transit.

Although Ford was already famous as a director of epic westerns like “The Iron Horse” (1925) and “Three Bad Men” (1926), “Upstream” appears to be his first film reflecting the influence of the German director F. W. Murnau, who had arrived at Ford’s studio, Fox, in 1926 to begin work on his American masterpiece, “Sunrise.” From Murnau, Ford learned the use of forced perspectives and chiaroscuro lighting, techniques Ford would use to complement his own more direct, naturalistic style.

Richard Abel, a professor of film studies at the University of Michigan and an authority on early cinema, was one of the experts called in by the National Film Preservation Board to evaluate the inventory and establish priorities for films to be returned. “ ‘Upstream’ was an obvious choice,” Mr. Abel said, “and I suggested strongly that they do ‘Dolly of the Dailies’ with Mary Fuller, because there’s very little that survives of her films. But we were also looking to fill in gaps, which is why many of the early westerns were chosen.”

Internationally popular, westerns were an important export for the early American film industry, as were short comedies, with their broad physical humor that required no translation. The New Zealand collection features nine comedies, including the 1918 “Why Husbands Flirt” from the prolific producer-director Al Christie.

Among the discoveries are several films that underline the major contribution made by women to early cinema. “The Girl Stage Driver” (1914) belongs to a large subgenre that Mr. Abel has identified as “cowboy girl” pictures; “The Woman Hater” (1910) is an early vehicle for the serial queen Pearl White; and “Won in a Cupboard” (1914) is the earliest surviving film directed by Normand, the leading female star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies. The Clara Bow film “Maytime” (1923), presents the most famous flapper of the 1920s in an unusual costume role.

Getting the films, which were printed on the unstable, highly inflammable nitrate stock used until the early 1950s, to the United States hasn’t been easy. “There’s no Federal Express for nitrate out of New Zealand,” said Annette Melville, the director of the foundation. “We’re having to ship in U.N.-approved steel barrels, a little bit at a time. So far we’ve got about one third of the films, and preservation work has already begun on four titles.”

As the films arrive, they are placed in cold storage to slow further degeneration. “We’re triaging the films,” Ms. Melville said, “so we can get to the worst case ones first. About a quarter of the films are in advanced nitrate decay, and the rest have good image quality, though they are badly shrunken.”

As funds permit, the repatriated films will be distributed among the five major nitrate preservation facilities in the United States — the Library of Congress, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive and the Museum of Modern Art — where the painstaking work of reclaiming images from material slowly turning to muck will be performed.

Sony, the corporation that currently owns the Columbia library, has assumed the costs for “Mary of the Movies,” a 1923 comedy that is now the earliest Columbia feature known to survive. And 20th Century Fox, a descendant of the studio that made “Upstream,” has taken responsibility for preservation of that title. If all goes well, the restored “Upstream” will be receive its repremiere at the Academy in September.

The preserved films will be made public through archival screenings and as streaming videos on the preservation foundation’s Web site, filmpreservation.org.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/movies/07silent.html





Untangling a Ponzi Scheme With a Hollywood Twist
Nelson D. Schwartz

Visitors to the Fifth Avenue penthouse were enjoying cocktails, canapés and stunning views of Central Park on a cool May evening as a top New York jeweler laid out his wares for a rarefied group of potential buyers.

Kenneth I. Starr tried his best to seem interested in the display, but what he really wanted was introductions. Oh look, there’s Taylor Dayne, the pop singer. Over there is Ahmad Rashad, the sportscaster and former professional football player. And come meet Michael Imperioli of “The Sopranos.”

Mr. Starr, a Manhattan business manager and investment adviser, was shopping for shining stars, not stones.

He already counted celebrities like Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard as clients, and whether it was opening night for one of Mr. Scorsese’s movies or a charity event like this one hosted by Denise Rich, the socialite and songwriter, these affairs were fertile ground for Mr. Starr.

This 2006 party was no exception. Mr. Starr made the acquaintance of Jacob Arabov, a Harry Winston for the music world. The two became fast friends, with Mr. Starr eventually persuading Mr. Arabov to invest $14 million with his firm.

That money is now gone — and Mr. Arabov is among the clients Mr. Starr is accused of defrauding in a $30 million Ponzi scheme that has become the talk of celebrities from Hollywood to the Hamptons.

As with many scams, including the much bigger one perpetrated by Bernard L. Madoff, Mr. Starr used a mix of friendship and exclusivity to lure his victims, prosecutors say. Except in this case, the targets were a who’s who of actors, directors, writers and other artists with cachet.

Whether it was entree to hot Manhattan clubs like Butter and Bungalow 8, introductions to the likes of Mr. Scorsese, or access to exclusive deals on Wall Street, Mr. Starr always seemed to know what his famous clients wanted, or at least what they wanted to hear.

He would tell Hollywood figures of his connections on Wall Street, while regaling Wall Streeters with stories of Hollywood. And whether the target was an aging heiress or an A-list actor, the routine often worked, according to interviews with current and former clients.

“He exuded confidence and ease,” said Robert Benton, who wrote the screenplay for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Superman” and other films and was a client of Mr. Starr’s.

“There was something so engaging about him.”

Mr. Starr, who is not related to the special prosecutor of the same name who investigated President Bill Clinton, seemed eager to leave behind his more mundane existence paying bills, mailing checks and preparing taxes for celebrity clients, aiming to join the exclusive world he served.

He was a fixture at movie premieres — just weeks ago, he attended the opening night party at the Four Seasons for “You Don’t Know Jack,” the HBO film starring Mr. Pacino. Jonathan Demme, the film director and another client, gave him a cameo in the movie “Philadelphia.” And Mr. Starr was a long-standing member of the board of trustees of New York University Law School.

Mr. Starr was also adept at parlaying friendships into business opportunities.

Several clients recalled that he flaunted his relationship with Pete Peterson, a founder of the Blackstone Group, an investment and advisory firm, and a prominent philanthropist, lunching with him at the Four Seasons and frequently dropping his name. Mr. Starr, in turn, invested $90 million in Blackstone funds on behalf of clients like Neil Simon and Wesley Snipes, according to a 2008 lawsuit. Mr. Peterson declined to comment.

Mr. Starr also bragged of being close to Alan C. Greenberg, the former chairman of Bear Stearns, but the two were barely acquainted, according to Mr. Greenberg.

“I had some clients that used him, but I’ve only spoken to him a few times,” Mr. Greenberg said in an interview.

Nevertheless, these wisps of Wall Street credibility were enough to convince Hollywood that Mr. Starr had powerful links to the financial world. “My impression was that he had very substantial contacts on Wall Street, with private equity firms and hedge funds,” said Bertram Fields, an entertainment lawyer who has represented Michael Jackson and the Beatles, and is an acquaintance of Mr. Starr’s.

What connections Mr. Starr does possess have been of little help since his arrest on May 27. He remains behind bars at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan, after prosecutors argued that he might flee if released on bail. A public defender appointed to represent him declined to comment.

Meanwhile, many questions about Mr. Starr’s suspected scheme are still unanswered, most notably, just how many clients might he have defrauded?

Without identifying them by name, the criminal complaint cites seven people whose money, prosecutors say, was misappropriated by Mr. Starr. Prosecutors are still trying to determine how extensive the suspected fraud was and say they expect the number of victims to multiply.

Now, the people who placed money with Mr. Starr over the years are frantically trying to determine if their accounts are in order.

“It’s all anybody is talking about in the Hamptons or California,” said Lynn Grossman, who with her husband, the actor and director Robert Balaban, was a client of Mr. Starr’s in the 1990s. “This is a handshake business, and he was the guy you went to when you didn’t want your money stolen. He was considered shrewd, not slimy.”

That began to change after a 2002 lawsuit by Sylvester Stallone accused Mr. Starr of mismanaging a failed investment in Planet Hollywood. Mr. Starr’s private life also became more tumultuous — he left his third wife in 2007 for Diane Passage, a pole dancer and former stripper at Scores, the Manhattan club.

Ms. Passage, who prosecutors say benefited from Mr. Starr’s purported fraud, certainly drew attention. But the marriage alarmed clients. “When your business manager marries a stripper, that’s a tell,” Ms. Grossman said. And although Mr. Starr continued to make appearances at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons and at Oscar parties in Los Angeles, more and more clients started to defect over the last five years.

Lauren Bacall, the actress and widow of Humphrey Bogart, fired Mr. Starr after decades with him, as did Diane Sawyer, the broadcaster, and her husband, the film director Mike Nichols. The pressure increased in April 2008, when Joan A. Stanton, who was the voice of Lois Lane in the “Adventures of Superman” on radio in the 1940s as well as an heiress to a $70 million estate, sued Mr. Starr, accusing him of fraud.

Foreshadowing the accusations he now faces, Ms. Stanton said that Mr. Starr diverted tens of millions of dollars from her fortune into risky assets he controlled, while providing her with bogus statements that masked the withdrawals. In the close-knit world of Hollywood, where clients are won and lost by word of mouth, talk of the suit quickly spread.

In January 2010, the family of Ms. Stanton, who died last year, settled with Mr. Starr, but the end of the suit coincided with an exodus of professionals from Mr. Starr’s company, including longtime associates like Arnold Herrmann and Sanford Miller. They joined a rival firm, Citrin Cooperman & Company, and took numerous clients with them, including Mr. Demme and Mr. Scorsese.

Mr. Starr’s lifestyle did not seem to change — if anything it became more lavish in the weeks leading up to his indictment. In April, he used money from clients like Rachel Mellon, an heiress to the Mellon banking fortune, and Uma Thurman, the actress, to buy a $7.5 million Upper East Side condominium with a 32-foot lap pool, according to the complaint and interviews with people familiar with the case.

Ten days later, prosecutors say, when Ms. Thurman demanded $1 million back from Mr. Starr, he returned it by siphoning it from the account of James Wiatt, a longtime friend and former head of the William Morris talent agency.

It is a testament to Mr. Starr’s charm that even some clients who stuck with him until the end and might yet turn out to be victims acknowledge a trace of sympathy. “I know what he is accused of doing,” Mr. Benton said, “but all I kept thinking is how sad it is that he’s sitting in jail.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/business/07starr.html





Special Report: Guy Hands, Citigroup and the Fight for EMI
Simon Meads and Kate Holton

One of the best ways to get inside the head of British private equity boss Guy Hands is to study what gift he gives for Christmas. For years, Hands has sent friends and business associates a book he has recently read along with a letter discussing the work. The gift is designed to be both thoughtful and thought provoking.

Last Christmas, Hands chose "The Trouble with Markets," a work by London economist Roger Bootle. "I was particularly struck by his view that financial markets are distributive by nature and provide little benefit to society, rewarding those involved in markets out of proportion to the value of their work to society," wrote Hands of the book, which is subtitled "Saving Capitalism From Itself."

"That analysis seems particularly apt in view of the quick and remarkable return of the bonus culture to the banking world. Furthermore, in my view, such high pay levels attract many of the most talented individuals in society thus removing them from more entrepreneurial, creative or leadership roles in the 'real' economy."

Cynics might laugh at the idea of Hands as a defender of the real economy. In his heyday, the outspoken financier was known as the king of British private equity. More than anyone, Hands brought to Europe the idea of using cheap debt to pump apparently miraculous returns from dowdy businesses.

Three years ago, at the height of the bubble, Hands and his group Terra Firma bought British music company EMI -- home to artists from the Beatles to Kylie -- for 4 billion pounds, loading up on debt to finance the deal. As the financial crisis tightened, the deal began to unravel. Crippled by debt and spiraling interest payments and hit by a stronger U.S. dollar (in which some of the debt is priced), Terra Firma has struggled to keep control of its prize.

The EMI deal has become a symbol for the worst excesses of the boom era private equity world. Hands himself stands as "an example of what has always been wrong with private equity," says a former colleague at Nomura, who asked not to be identified so he could speak frankly. "They rode the wave of a bull market in debt but were not humble enough to know that was what they were doing."

All That Glitters

Famously tough and a fiery-tempered negotiator, Hands, 50, seems determined to hold onto his music firm. Despite debts of 3.3 billion pounds, Terra Firma has been unwilling to give its bankers Citigroup an inch in restructuring talks.

On June 14, Terra Firma is due to stump up the 105 million pounds needed to push EMI back within the terms of its loan. Failure would put the music company in the control of Citigroup, which advised Hands on EMI and put up 2.6 billion pounds for the purchase. The relationship between Hands and his creditors has so soured over the past couple of years that Terra Firma is suing Citigroup, accusing the bank and its principal dealmaker David Wormsley of fraud. Citigroup is contesting the suit.

But if the cash injection happens -- Terra Firma seems confident it has convinced enough of its current investors to open their wallets again -- Hands will have another year to nurture his real economy company back to success. "Terra Firma is putting it all into EMI. If it blows up, they are finished. It's that binary," said an investor who sold his investment in Terra Firma in April because he didn't want the fund sinking more money into the music company. "It's a high concentration, high risk strategy."

Revolution

People who know Hands say he has always been an outsider. Singled out as a misfit at school, he was diagnosed with both dyslexia and dyspraxia, a motor learning difficulty that can affect co-ordination.

Numbers presented no such challenge. Hands could find things in a company's balance sheet that not even the company had noticed. He graduated from Oxford with a third class degree in politics and economics -- he dropped philosophy after a disagreement with a professor as to whether quantity or quality of pleasure was more important; Hands went for quantity -- and joined Goldman Sachs as a bond trader. The year was 1982 and London's markets would soon boom thanks to the 'big bang' of deregulation. By 1992, Hands was heading a new Goldman unit called Global Asset Structuring.

Securitization was still relatively unknown in Europe -- but Hands aimed to change that.

His plan was to work out ways to securitize assets in unfashionable industries such as real estate. His chance came when he joined Japanese bank Nomura, which promised him use of its large balance sheet at a low cost and with free rein to do deals. Hands dived straight in, financing everything from UK Ministry of Defense houses to train engines and carriages to high street gambling chain William Hill.

His financial wizardry was the envy of colleagues and rivals alike. Early successes were based on his ability to identify a target company's stable cash flows and then, once he had bought the firm, refinance the purchase by using securitization based on those cashflows. This was years before securitization became tainted because of its association with sub-prime lending and the credit crunch.

Nomura's principal finance group, led by Hands, also invented the concept that a bank could compete with private equity by using its own capital to buy assets.

Not all of the deals worked. Nomura's purchase of leading UK consumer goods rental firm Thorn turned bad because Hands failed to see that the rise of cheap electronic goods would kill the television and video rental business. (Luckily, Hands found another buyer -- WestLB's principal finance unit -- for Thorn before things got really bad).

There were also grumbles from his colleagues. "He never shared the juice with his team," said a former rival banker. "He tried to make every important decision. When we did business with him, I'm not sure there was any robust internal debate."

EMI

Hands had flirted with the punk scene at university. Even today, with all his wealth and establishment credentials, there's a sense that he likes nothing better than raising two fingers to convention. A streak of that punk attitude was evident in the EMI deal.

Weeks after buying the music company in May, 2007 a smug-looking Hands stood in a Cambridge University hall before a room full of equally self-satisfied media executives. Describing his plans for his new purchase, Hands said that Terra Firma, the private equity group he had set up after leaving Nomura, looked "for the worst business we can find in the most challenged sector."

He and his colleagues got "really happy if it's really, really bad," he explained. "EMI, our most recent investment, is a classic example. We're just hoping EMI is as bad as we think it is."

It was worse. Like all music companies, EMI had been hit by Internet piracy and the shift from selling physical albums in record stores to selling single tracks digitally. But EMI had other challenges as well. It was the third largest of the four music majors and had an especially weak presence in the U.S., the largest and most important market.

EMI is, in fact, two businesses. The most reliable part of the company, and most attractive to any private equity group, is music publishing. Every time a song EMI owns is played on the radio, on television or in an advert, it earns the company money. With a back catalog boasting the Beatles, Queen and Pink Floyd, EMI's publishing wing generates a stable flow of income. "It's a very, very good publishing business," said one private equity music industry expert, who previously eyed a takeover. "You would actively look to buy it."

EMI's problem was its other business: recorded music, which apart from a few high-profile acts like Robbie Williams and Radio Head was struggling badly. A generation of music lovers had become used to swapping songs for free. Sinking millions into new bands offered no guarantee of success and was increasingly risky.

EMI's financial health worsened, and in late 2006, after another in the seemingly perpetual rounds of merger talks with Warner Music collapsed, Chairman Eric Nicoli decided the company needed to find a buyer.

A consortium made up of private equity firms Apax Partners and KKR along with Credit Suisse First Boston discussed a possible buy out with EMI's board, Reuters has learned. A source familiar with the negotiations said that though the consortium liked EMI's publishing business they walked away because of the troubled recorded music division.

Permira, another private equity firm, also took a look at the business, and even tabled an indicative bid of 3.20 pounds a share. But EMI's board decided to play hard to get and knocked back the offer.

In November, 2006, according to Terra Firma's court submission in the Citigroup case, Citi's David Wormsley wrote to Hands to see if he might be interested in EMI. Hands asked to see the firm's books. But perhaps stung by Permira's cancellation of a new offer of 3.25 pounds a share, EMI refused to provide Terra Firma with the same level of due diligence and the deal died a few days before Christmas.

A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

As 2007 began, the pace of private equity deals grew ever more frenzied. In April, Terra Firma lost a battle with rival private equity firm KKR for British pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler Alliance Boots. At 11.1 billion pounds, the sale was Europe's largest ever private equity deal. Was the king of securitization losing his touch?

Hands rejoined the race for EMI. Cerberus, Fortress, and JP Morgan's private equity arm One Equity were all interested, while Warner Music had offered 2.60 pounds a share. Arriving to the sale late, Hands placed his trust in friend Wormsley and Citigroup, which had advised him on close to 20 acquisitions, refinance deals or securitizations totaling some $57 billion. On May 18, a Friday, EMI asked would-be bidders to put in binding offers by the following Monday morning.

Over the weekend, according to court documents, Wormsley continued to advise Hands to make a bid of 2.65 pounds a share despite knowing that Cerberus, the other main bidder, had pulled out of the race. Citigroup rejects this claim.

On Monday morning, EMI's board gave its blessing to the deal and Hands finally had his failing music company.

Popscene

For Christmas 2007, Hands sent his business associates copies of JK Galbraith's "The Great Crash, 1929." Speculation, wrote Galbraith in his account, comes down to the belief that it is possible to become rich without real work. "While it lasted, there was never a more agreeable way of making money," the economist noted, after describing how the wonders of leverage "struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel."

Galbraith may have been writing 50 years earlier, but he gives us a pretty good description of the crazed LBO industry during the run up to 2007. The book and letter that year provided poignant epitaphs to an era of cheap debt that the Briton himself had helped conjure.

Hands had bought EMI believing that he could securitize its publishing assets, raise 1.5 billion pounds -- around 8 or 9 times earnings -- and combine the recorded music business with that from Warner Music. Citigroup was confident Terra Firma would be able to buy both music companies, a person familiar with the negotiations told Reuters.

But securitizing the catalog -- David Bowie had done something similar in the late 1990s when he issued bonds against future revenue -- would require more creativity and perseverance than it had just a few years earlier. "By summer 2007 that trick was gone," said one former Citigroup banker. Hands "pressed on because he wanted to hang out with Mick Jagger."

As well, the recorded music division was in worse shape than Hands had anticipated. First year profits were a meager 60 million pounds, just over a third the 170 million pounds Terra Firma had projected.

The company Hands had bought was stale. "I dreaded going to see them," Paul McCartney told The Times newspaper in 2007 after finally leaving his label of four decades. "Everybody at EMI had become a part of the furniture."

Hands brought in the former BBC director-general John Birt to lead a strategic review. Birt, known for his cost cutting and unintelligible business-speak, uncovered a long list of excesses and shoddy business practices: expensive flowers, candles, and luxury apartments. Hands told staff they should stop attending parties and work harder. Artists, he said, needed to behave better. "There is no reason why we should not be more selective in whom we choose to work with," he wrote in an internal memo. "There has been a lot of talk about what labels offer to artists and to the consumer. However, there is not much talk about how artists should work with their label."

Long-standing practices such as paying a band or artist an advance were dismissed as 'fun economics' that had to end. Hands was right: the music industry is full of quirky customs and excess. But in pushing for changes, he alienated the people at the heart of the business. "He woefully misjudged what sort of business it was," a rival music publisher recently told Reuters. "He completely failed to understand the very mercurial nature of the most important people, which is the artists. And they're not employees who jump to their new bosses tune."

As successive Terra Firma executives quit or got it "in the neck," as one deal adviser puts it, global recorded music revenues continued to plummet. By early 2008, aides acting as security guards escorted Hands into a central London building so he could tell EMI staff that he was making a third of them redundant. "For a man who came from nowhere to buy a company like EMI, and then to say all that he did, he did immense damage," Brian Southall, a former EMI staffer who wrote a book about the firm recalls. "Who was he trying to impress? Was it a big balls thing? I'm better and bigger than all of you?"

Trouble

One of the problems was Hands's business style, which tended to keep colleagues in the dark about anything they weren't directly working on. Friend and fellow private equity boss Jon Moulton describes Hands as "very much the leader, who runs his firm divided down into need to know activity."

Radiohead quit the label, accusing management of acting like a "confused bull in a china shop". Robbie Williams, one of EMI's biggest artists, pondered leaving and Williams' co-manager Tim Clark said that Hands was acting like a "plantation owner" with a "vanity purchase".

"You have to understand how to manage your talent and they're not like selling a tin of baked beans," the senior executive at the rival label told Reuters.

The former banking rival blames hubris. "He got away from trying to be a finance guy to being an operations guy," the banker said. "Buying and then financing is very different from buying and trying to manage."

Don't Give Up

Despite all the problems, some analysts and industry executives believe EMI may finally be coming good. Concentrating on its core, big-selling artists such as Robbie Williams and Coldplay has paid off, while re-releases from the Beatles' back catalog have kept the registers ringing. New acts such as Tinie Tempah and Roll Deep have recently broken through; Lady Antebellum have stormed the charts in the U.S. That's lifted operating profits more than 60 percent between 2008 and 2009 to some 190 million pounds.

Hands has brought in executives from outside the industry. New chairman Charles Allen, who was known for keeping a tight lid on costs during his time at British broadcaster ITV, has looked to boost digital offerings and develop new sales methods. Even Williams's co-manager Clark has come around. "As they've become more involved they've changed some of their thinking," Clark told Reuters. "They've retained some of their better ideas and dumped some of the ones that clearly weren't ever going to work."

Ted Cohen, a Senior Vice President of EMI's digital unit until mid-2006 and now a consultant, also believes the firm is better run. "Six months ago I would not have been so bullish," he said. "But it feels better. Previously it had gone from being one of the most nimble companies to being dogged down by process. Now, going into the office it feels vibrant again."

EMI would like to bring in more young people, women and ethnic minorities. Some 20 percent of staff -- about 400 people -- earn more than 100,000 pounds a year. A figure of 10 percent would be more in keeping with the industry, though EMI would need to find around 30 million pounds to fund redundancy payouts.

Get Out Of My House

Hands's gift at the end of 2008 was a financial history of the world by British historian Niall Ferguson. "It is wrong to think (as Shakespeare's Antonio did) of all lenders of money as mere leeches, sucking the life's blood out of unfortunate debtors," Ferguson wrote. "Loan sharks may behave that way, but banks have evolved."

The frustration Hands now has toward his bankers is undisguised -- and the feeling is mutual. Citi clearly wants control of EMI so it can claw back some of its money, a London-based investment banker said. Talks broke down last autumn when Citigroup rejected a plan to cut debt by 1 billion pounds in return for a 1 billion pound equity injection from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and other investors, one source familiar with the scheme said.

A separate source familiar with negotiations said Terra Firma had rejected another proposal to swap debt in exchange for Citigroup taking a majority equity stake in EMI, though the first source denies that Citigroup ever made a properly drawn up proposal. Whatever the case, "they all could have gotten out of there," said a private equity lawyer who has dealt with litigation between buyout firms and banks and is familiar with the talks. "It's personal now and I don't think it's going away."

Then there's the suit against Citigroup. "This whole thing is a nuisance and the refuge of scoundrels. You don't sue your banker," one senior private equity figure told Reuters. Some in the industry speculate that it's a high-risk attempt by Hands to get Citigroup back to the negotiating table.

The Long And Winding Road

For a former punk, Hands has done well. He owns a home in Kent that used to belong to Sir Winston Churchill and produces wine and olive oil on a 1,700-acre estate in Tuscany. But when he's not traveling, he spends his time in self-imposed financial exile in a five-bedroom house on Guernsey, a 25-square mile island in the English Channel.

"Guy's real permanent home is at 35,000 feet in a plane," said a friend and colleague from the Nomura days.

In a court submission in the Citigroup case earlier this year, Hands said he had moved away from his wife Julia and their four children, two of whom are still at school in Kent, to shelter his income from the British taxman. He has not visited his elderly parents in England, he said, and would not do so except in case of emergency. His family makes the 35 minute plane trip to Guernsey to see him on weekends. "My residence in Guernsey is real, not a sham or a mere moniker for an otherwise unvisited location," he told the court.

Sources familiar with the talks say the company has received recent approaches for EMI's publishing business, including one from private equity firm KKR and music company BMG. Discussions on price value the business at 8 to 10 times earnings, which Hands believes is too low. And perhaps he'd prefer to hang on to his real world company -- and continue to rail at the markets and the finance men that he once embraced.

(Additional reporting by Alex Chambers, Georgina Prodhan and Quentin Webb in London and Yinka Adegoke in New York; Editing by Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65A0Q920100611





Mercantile Heroes (as Seen on TV)
Mike Hale

CROWDS are a fact of life here, oozing down the sidewalk as you try to make a right turn into your hotel or blocking your access to the $10 blackjack tables. At 10 a.m. on a recent weekday, though, things were pretty quiet — except at the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop on Las Vegas Boulevard, about a mile north of the Strip. Inside the low-slung, khaki-colored building, unremarkable save for the large “As Seen on TV” sign by the front door, so many people were milling about that it was hard to get a close look at the Rolexes, the Super Bowl rings or the Confederate currency.

They had come to this drab area near downtown Las Vegas because the Gold and Silver is the setting of “Pawn Stars,” a hit show for the History channel that has turned three generations of the Harrison family, the store’s owners, into mercantile folk heroes. In its second season, which ended in early May, “Pawn Stars” was History’s highest-rated series ever, averaging four million viewers an episode (an 82 percent increase over Season 1). In some weeks it reached five million, enough to push it into the cable Top 10.

Work was now in progress on Season 3 (it begins Monday at 10 p.m.), and suddenly the word went out to clear the spacious showroom, with its large display cases salvaged from remodeled or defunct department stores like Dillard’s, Mervyn’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. The gawkers and browsers were herded to the sidewalk so that 45-year-old Rick Harrison, the bald, stocky, self-taught history nut who has been running the store since 1986, could be filmed doing his thing: part seminar and part transaction, a cross between “Antiques Roadshow” and “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Shelby Tashlin of Las Vegas walked to the counter clutching a boxed edition of “Alice in Wonderland” containing an etching and 12 lithographs by Salvador Dalí. Ms. Tashlin’s opening thrust: the Dali prints were limited in number. Mr. Harrison’s parry: “He’s pretty well known for fudging numbers.” Mr. Harrison spoke about etching versus lithography and allowed that Dalí and Lewis Carroll were a “wonderful combination.” Then it was time for business. Ms. Tashlin wanted $10,000. Mr. Harrison asked if she had taken a little blue pill, and offered $5,000.

She politely declined and walked away still clutching “Alice in Wonderland.” “I was hoping it would go the other way, but I’m not surprised,” she would tell a reporter later. The outcome was not unusual for “Pawn Stars.” Mr. Harrison is as interested in his profit margin as he is in the history of the items he buys, and his on-camera affability rarely shades into sentimentality. “I’m perfectly honest with them,” he said in an interview in a cluttered office down a hallway from the showroom floor. “I have the means to sell this, you don’t, and I deserve a decent profit.”

The scene illustrated another truth about “Pawn Stars”: While the Gold and Silver is primarily in the pawn business, the transactions on the show are mostly straight sales. “People who pawn don’t want to be on TV,” Mr. Harrison said.

Changing the back-alley image of the pawn business was one of Mr. Harrison’s goals when he began pitching the idea of a reality show set at the Gold and Silver — a utilitarian but clean and well-lighted place — about five years ago. The picture of the pawnshop as seedy hangout for small-time crooks and desperate junkies had been reinforced by every 1970s and ’80s television cop show; even Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film “The Pawnbroker,” with Rod Steiger’s Oscar-nominated performance in the title role, was, according to Mr. Harrison, “such a negative movie.”

To make his case Mr. Harrison will talk about pawning as the oldest form of banking, with roots in Mesopotamia and Rome. He’ll expound on the surprisingly large number of American households with no bank accounts and how the 10 percent interest he charges per month must be weighed against the small sizes of the loans. And he’ll point out the ease with which he grants those loans (no credit reports) and that the collateral he holds means that they don’t need to be paid back. “I don’t sue you,” he said.

Over the years Mr. Harrison’s unusually large and successful shop had been featured in local newscasts and included in the Comedy Central show “Insomniac With Dave Attell.” Eventually he signed to do a series with HBO, but the results were not encouraging.

“They tried to do the ‘Taxicab Confessions’ thing,” Mr. Harrison said, referring to the HBO reality show in which hidden cameras record people talking dirty, and occasionally having sex, in the back seats of cabs. “The problem was there were no taxicab confessions. So we had this hideous pilot.”

After his contract with HBO expired, he was approached by the production company Leftfield Pictures with the idea of doing a show for History, one that would allow him to make use of his autodidactic mastery of a huge body of knowledge regarding the origins of both everyday and highly eccentric objects. Or, as he would put it himself, his geekiness. For 30 years, Mr. Harrison said — until the birth of his third son, who is now 7 — he could not go to sleep at night without reading for three to four hours. He hasn’t completely dropped the habit: “I literally just read a book on the history of batteries.” Mr. Harrison’s disquisitions on why Ormolu clocks are known as “death clocks” or on the importance of the thermos to the value of a “Rat Patrol” lunchbox help to earn him and his show constant comparisons with “Antiques Roadshow.” He has watched that PBS series but complained that its large cast of appraisers placed unrealistic values on the heirlooms they assessed.

“ ‘If we put this in an auction, and all the stars were aligned, and the five biggest collectors that collect this item were there,’ ” he said, giving his version of the thought process of the “Roadshow” appraisers, “ ‘and three of them just hit the lottery and they were mad at each other — it could go for this.”

“That’s what drives me nuts with that show,” he continued. “I mean, I really try and say, ‘Hey look, this is the deal.’ ”

Marsha Bemko, executive producer of “Antiques Roadshow,” said in a telephone interview that the experts her show employed were actually conservative in their estimates. “They never, ever overinflate because, No. 1, their friends are watching, and No. 2, they don’t want to be stuck by someone in the audience calling and trying to get that price.”

Meanwhile, she added, “Pawn Stars” was a show that could never appear on PBS because the Harrisons actively buy and sell, occasionally buying an item for much less than it turns out to be worth. (The experts on “Antiques Roadshow,” mostly dealers and auctioneers, are not supposed to give specific advice on buying and selling objects at the time of the appraisal.) “I watch some of these people,” she said, “and I think, ooh, ask somebody else.”

But that queasiness aside, Ms. Bemko professed to enjoy the show. “They’re very likable people,” she said.

Mr. Harrison speculated that viewers were drawn to “Pawn Stars” because it was several shows in one: in addition to education and salesmanship, it offers domestic comedy in the byplay among his father, Richard (“All the blue-hairs love him”); his son Corey, known as Big Hoss; and their employee Chumlee (real name Austin Russell), whose idiot-savant persona has made him a cult favorite. “One week it’s ‘Pimp Your Ride,’ one week it’s ‘American Choppers,’ one week it’s ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ ” Mr. Harrison said.

David McKillop, a senior vice president for programming and development at History, said that when “Pawn Stars” was pitched to him, he saw it as being “along the lines” of “Antiques Roadshow” but with some important differences: “It was the characters, the location, and the idea that we could really pump the history into this one.”

The increased attention “Pawn Stars” has brought to the Gold and Silver has been good for Mr. Harrison’s business — he estimated that sales, which average $750,000 a month, were up 20 percent to 30 percent since the series began last summer — but he did not seem entirely happy with other changes that have accompanied television success.

There was a hint of derision when he referred to the shelf space now devoted to “Pawn Stars” and Chumlee T-shirts. And walking into the crowded showroom, where middle-aged women clamored to have their pictures taken with him and middle-aged men tried to show off their superior knowledge regarding, say, samurai swords, did not appear to thrill him. “Sometimes it gets a little irritating when I have business to do,” he said, “and I get, ‘Wait, take your picture?’ Picture, picture, picture.”

He was most animated when showing visitors the storeroom where pawned items are kept until they are redeemed or placed on sale. There he could simply riff on the Atmos clocks, Bourget motorcycles and vintage sound-mixing boards as he walked by. A question about the most common items brought in for sale or pawn (which turned out to be jewelry, watches and construction tools) led to a detailed explanation of how to make a convincing fake of a $30,000 Rolex for $5,000.

Back in the showroom he surveyed a wall of paintings and prints and let his business side overtake his professorial side for a moment.

“I hate to buy living artists,” he said, shaking his head. “Every day they paint stuff.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/ar...on/06pawn.html





As Unlimited Data Plans Are Challenged, App Developers Worry
Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone

For the last two years, unlimited data plans have given app-hungry smartphone users an all-you-can-eat buffet. But will customers react to AT&T’s new, limited menu by simply eating less?

Some software developers fear they will, and if that happens, the caps on data use that AT&T has imposed could also make consumers lose their appetite for the latest innovations. Some developers worry that customers will be reluctant to download and use the most bandwidth-intensive apps and that developers will cut back on innovative new features that would push customers over the new limits.

“What created this lively app world we are in was the iPhone on one hand, and unlimited data plans on the other,” said Noam Bardin, chief executive of Waze, which offers turn-by-turn driving directions. “If people start thinking about how big a file is, or how fast an application is refreshing, that will be a huge inhibitor.”

New features on phones encourage more data use and vice versa. The next version of the iPhone, set to debut on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, will include a second, front-facing video camera, according to leaked reports. That could conceivably allow developers like Skype to offer face-to-face video calls from phones — a service that is much more data-intensive.

AT&T, the second-largest carrier in the United States after Verizon Wireless, will move to tiered pricing on Monday and will no longer offer new smartphone buyers a simple $30 plan for unlimited data use. Customers will have to estimate how much data they are likely to use on their phone, buy an appropriate plan and then make sure not to exceed their limits.

AT&T and some developers say that the new data plans could have the opposite effect and increase data usage by making it more affordable for most people.

For example, the new $25-a-month DataPro plan, $5 less than the existing unlimited plan, offers two gigabytes of data, which amounts to 10,000 e-mail messages without attachments, 4,000 Web pages, 500 photos and 200 minutes of video. It still sounds like a bountiful meal.

At the same time, however, new features of the iPhone and iPad, which run on the AT&T network, seemed designed to consume more data. They will allow multitasking so a person could play music while reading e-mail. And it won’t take much to hit the limits with video. Download an hour-long TV show to a smartphone or tablet and you’ve used 550 megabytes, or well over a quarter of your monthly allotment. Streaming a two-hour movie from Netflix consumes 300 megabytes.

Morgan Stanley estimated last year that mobile data use would be doubling each year for the next three years.

AT&T says that just 2 percent of its customers use more than two gigabytes a month and that the new data caps have been set comfortably high and will actually lower charges for most smartphone users.

“This might bring more people to mobile, because it’s going to be less expensive for the vast majority,” said Tim Westergren, founder and chief strategy officer of Pandora, the Internet radio service.

Pandora has 54 million users who listen an average 13 hours a month, but fewer than 270,000 of its customers would be constrained by the two-gigabyte plan, Mr. Westergren said.

Improved technology will drive down the cost to the carrier of delivering more data — as much as 50 percent as they move to the so-called fourth generation, called LTE. Presumably, carriers could afford to charge less as customers consume more.

Still, applications that stream high-bandwidth video and route phone calls and face-to-face video chats over the Internet could be seriously affected. Applications that constantly send a phone owner’s location — continually uploading and downloading data from the network — could also face challenges.

Bob Bowman, chief executive of MLB.com, which offers live streaming of baseball games to devices like iPhones and iPads, said he did not think his customers would rack up huge new charges, since they watch on average only seven minutes of live video at a time on the iPhone. Still, he wondered how Americans would take to the very idea of limits.

“Forcing people to become clock-watchers has never worked in America,” Mr. Bowman said. “The cable industry is living proof that people would rather pay for 300 channels they never watch rather than get metered.”

Some developers worry that people will begin to monitor and worry about their data use, taking the iPhone from their children’s hands during a car ride instead of playing another YouTube video, for example, or delaying an impulse purchase of a data-intensive app.

“That psychological component is a big question mark,” Mr. Bardin said.

One of the biggest problems, app developers say, is that people are not sure how much bandwidth they are consuming with an app. AT&T customers will be able to track their data use on the company’s Web site and receive alerts when they near their quotas, but many customers are in the dark about how much data a particular app or video uses.

“They’re going to be reluctant now because they’re going to be thinking in the back of their mind that there’s a clock ticking about how long they can play this game,” said Brad Foxhoven, chief marketing officer and a founder of Ogmento, which makes augmented-reality games for the iPhone.

Game developers have been trying to add more robust features to games to take full advantage of the iPhone, but they might scale back now, he said. “It’s going to make them second-guess how deep and intricate and involved their game is,” he said. Ogmento plans to introduce an action game this fall that it had hoped people would play for several hours or days at a time, and is now trying to figure out how to change it so it consumes less bandwidth.

Ge Wang, a founder of Smule, which makes popular musical instrument apps like Magic Piano, said developers could alert users with messages about how much bandwidth an app uses. “It’s definitely new territory thinking about this,” he said.

Video services for phones could take the largest hit in the new metered phone world, and executives at these firms are addressing the changes cautiously.

Sugar Inc., the blog network for women, has an app with videos featuring celebrity gossip and interviews. “Video for us is growing extremely fast — and it’s going to cost us and the consumer a bunch of money, because of the data going over the wire,” said Brian Sugar, chief executive and a founder of the company.

His company is already considering how to offer people lower-bandwidth video. “Back in the olden days on the Internet, you’d always have the high-bandwidth and the low-bandwidth version of your Web site,” he said. Sugar might ask users whether they want to view a high-quality video or a lower-bandwidth, more pixilated one.

Internet calling services like Skype, which route voice and video calls over the cellular data network, could also be affected. Skype executives say users of the Skype application should be able to make plenty of voice calls on the service each day without having to worry about extra fees or data overages.

Russ Shaw, a vice president at Skype, hopes that people will simply find ways around the new restrictions. “Over time, we could see consumers gravitating to the carriers that have better data capacity, and we might also see even more usage over Wi-Fi, as consumers feel pressure to keep within data constraints.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/te...gy/07data.html





An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
Tara Parker-Pope

Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?

Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?

Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

“More and more, life is resembling the chat room,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. “We’re paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle.”

We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered “often” or “always,” technology may be taking a toll on you.

In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet “addiction.”

Technology use was clearly interfering with the students’ daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it “Internet dependence.”

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.

Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.

“If you can’t forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?” Dr. Aboujaoude said. “When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?”

There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. “The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology,” Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.

Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.

The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person’s need to use the Internet “as a way of escape.”

The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland asked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.

“Texting and I.M.’ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/te...brainside.html





The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In
Julie Scelfo

WHILE waiting for an elevator at the Fair Oaks Mall near her home in Virginia recently, Janice Im, who works in early-childhood development, witnessed a troubling incident between a young boy and his mother.

The boy, who Ms. Im estimates was about 2 1/2 years old, made repeated attempts to talk to his mother, but she wouldn’t look up from her BlackBerry. “He’s like: ‘Mama? Mama? Mama?’ ” Ms. Im recalled. “And then he starts tapping her leg. And she goes: ‘Just wait a second. Just wait a second.’ ”

Finally, he was so frustrated, Ms. Im said, that “he goes, ‘Ahhh!’ and tries to bite her leg.”

Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books.

In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, “Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.”

Dr. Turkle said that she recognizes the pressure adults feel to make themselves constantly available for work, but added that she believes there is a greater force compelling them to keep checking the screen.

“There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world,” she said. “I’ve talked to children who try to get their parents to stop texting while driving and they get resistance, ‘Oh, just one, just one more quick one, honey.’ It’s like ‘one more drink.’ ”

Laura Scott Wade, the director of ethics for a national medical organization in Chicago, said that six months ago her son, Lincoln, then 3 1/2, got so tired of her promises to get off the computer in “just one more minute” that he resorted to the kind of tactic parents typically use.

“He makes me set the timer on the microwave,” Ms. Wade said. “And when it dings he’ll say, ‘Come on,’ and he’ll say, ‘Don’t bring your phone.’ ”

Not all child-development experts think smartphone and laptop use by parents is necessarily a bad thing, of course. Parents have always had to divide their attention, and researchers point out that there’s a difference between quantity and quality when it comes to conversations between parents and children.

“It sort of comes back to quality time, and distracted time is not high-quality time, whether parents are checking the newspaper or their BlackBerry,” said Frederick J. Zimmerman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Health who has studied how television can distract parents. He also noted that smartphones and laptops may enable some parents to spend more time at home, which may, in turn, result in more, rather than less, quality time overall.

There is little research on how parents’ constant use of such technology affects children, but experts say there is no question that engaged parenting — talking and explaining things to children, and responding to their questions — remains the bedrock of early childhood learning.

Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley’s landmark 1995 book, “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” shows that parents who supply a language-rich environment for their children help them develop a wide vocabulary, and that helps them learn to read.

The book connects language use at home with socioeconomic status. According to its findings, children in higher socioeconomic homes hear an average of 2,153 words an hour, whereas those in working-class households hear only about 1,251; children in the study whose parents were on welfare heard an average of 616 words an hour.

The question is: Will devices like smartphones change that? Smartphone users tend to have higher incomes; research from the Nielsen Company shows that they are twice as likely to make more than $100,000 a year than the average mobile subscriber. If increased use of technology encroaches on the time that well-to-do families spend communicating with their children, some could become the victims of successes originally thought to help them.

Dr. Hart, who is now professor emeritus at the University of Kansas Life Span Institute, said that more research is needed to find out whether the constant use of smartphones and other technology is interfering with parent-child communications. But she expressed hope that more parents would consider how their use of electronic devices might be limiting their ability to meet their children’s needs.

Part of the reason the children in affluent homes she studied developed larger vocabularies by the time they were 3 is that “parents are holding kids, the kids are on their lap while the parent is reading a book,” Dr. Hart said. “It is important for parents to know when they’re talking to kids, they’re transferring affection as well as words. When you talk to people, there’s always an implicit message, ‘I like you,’ or ‘I don’t like you.’ ”

Meredith Sinclair, a mother and blogger in Wilmette, Ill., said she had no idea how what she calls her “addiction to e-mail and social media Web sites” was bothering her children until she established an e-mail and Internet ban between 4 and 8 p.m., and her children responded with glee. “When I told them, my 12-year-old, Maxwell, was like, ‘Yes!’ ” Ms. Sinclair said.

“You can’t really do both,” she added. “If I’m at all connected, it’s too tempting. I need to make a distinct choice.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/ga...childtech.html





In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday
Ashlee Vance

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.

Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

In the years since the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, violently inveighed against the predations of technology, plenty of other more sober and sophisticated warnings have arrived. There are camps of environmentalists who decry efforts to manipulate nature, challenges from religious groups that see the Singularity as a version of “Frankenstein” in which people play at being gods, and technologists who fear a runaway artificial intelligence that subjugates humans.

A popular network television show, “Fringe,” playfully explores some of these concerns by featuring a mad scientist and a team of federal agents investigating crimes related to the Pattern — an influx of threatening events caused by out-of-control technology like computer programs that melt brains and genetically engineered chimeras that go on killing sprees.

Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs.

Of course, some people will opt for inadequacy, while others will have inadequacy thrust upon them. Critics find such scenarios unnerving because the keys to the next phase of evolution may be beyond the grasp of most people.

“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.

“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”

‘Transcendent Man’

In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit.

Throughout “Transcendent Man,” Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.

“Well, I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean,” he replies. “I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.”

Mr. Kurzweil is the writer, producer and co-director of “The Singularity Is Near,” the tale of Ramona, a virtual being he builds that gradually becomes more human, battles hordes of microscopic robots and taps the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz for legal advice and the motivational guru Tony Robbins for guidance on personal interactions.

With his glasses, receding hairline and lecturer’s ease, Mr. Kurzweil, 62, seems more professor than thespian. His films are just another facet of the Kurzweil franchise, which includes best-selling books, lucrative speaking engagements, blockbuster inventions and a line of health supplements called Ray & Terry’s (developed with the physician Terry Grossman).

Mr. Kurzweil credits a low-fat, vegetable-rich diet and regular exercise for his trim frame, and says he conquered diabetes decades ago by changing what he ate and later reprogramming his body with supplements. He currently takes about 150 pills a day and has regular intravenous procedures. He is also co-writer of a pair of health books, “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” and “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.”

Mr. Kurzweil routinely taps into early memories that explain his lifelong passion for inventing. “My parents gave me all these construction toys, and sometimes I would put things together, and they would do something cool,” he says. “I got the idea that you could change the world for the better with invention — that you could put things together in just the right way, and they would have transcendent effects.

“That was kind of the religion of my family: the power of human ideas.”

A child prodigy, he stunned television audiences in 1965, when he was 17, with a computer he had built that composed music. A couple of years later, in college, he developed a computer program that would seek the best college fit for high school students. A New York publishing house bought the company for $100,000, plus royalties.

“Most of us were going to school to get knowledge and a degree,” says Aaron Kleiner, who studied with Mr. Kurzweil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later became his business partner. “He saw school as a tool that let him do what he needed to do.”

Some of Mr. Kurzweil’s better-known inventions include the first print-scanning systems that converted text to speech and allowed the blind to read standard texts, as well as sophisticated electronic keyboards and voice-recognition software. He has made millions selling his inventions, and his companies continue developing other products, like software for securities traders and e-readers for digital publications.

He began his march toward the Singularity around 1980, when he started plotting things like the speed of chips and memory capacity inside computers and realized that some elements of information technology improved at predictable — and exponential — rates.

“With 30 linear steps, you get to 30,” he often says in speeches. “With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell.”

His fascination with exponential trends eventually led him to construct an elaborate philosophy, illustrated in charts, that provided an analytical backbone for the Singularity and other ideas that had been floating around science-fiction circles for decades.

As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to have talked about a “singularity” — an event in which the always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”

“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Mr. Vinge wrote. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

In “The Singularity Is Near,” Mr. Kurzweil posits that technological progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last century. He writes about humans trumping biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale creatures that can repair cells and by allowing their minds to tap into super-intelligent computers.

Mr. Kurzweil writes: “Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.

“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.”

The underlying premise of the Singularity responds to people’s insecurity about the speed of social and technological change in the computer era. Mr. Kurzweil posits that the computer and the Internet have changed society much faster than electricity, phones or television, and that the next great leap will occur when industries like medicine and energy start moving at the same exponential pace as I.T.

He believes that this latter stage will occur when we learn to manipulate DNA more effectively and arrange atoms and have readily available computers that surpass the human brain.

In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father’s effects — photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric’s DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.

By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.

Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil.

“I think he’s a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into the public discourse,” says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the implications of advancing technology. “But there are plenty of people that say he has hijacked the Singularity term.”

Mr. Kurzweil says that he is simply trying to put analytical clothing on the concept so that people can think more clearly about the future. And regardless of any debate about his intentions, if you’re encountering the Singularity in the business world and elsewhere today, it’s most likely his take.

Bursts of Innovation

Peter H. Diamandis, 49, is a small man with a wide, bright smile and a thick mound of dark hair. He routinely holds meetings by cellphone and can usually be found typing away on his laptop. He went to medical school to make his mother happy but has always dreamed of heading to outer space.

He is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel. At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech peppered with passion and conviction.

“My target is to live 700 years,” he declared.

The students chuckled.

“I say that seriously,” he retorted.

The NASA site, the Ames Research Center, houses an odd collection of unusual buildings, including a giant wind tunnel, a huge supercomputing center and a flight simulator facility with equipment capable throwing people 60 feet into the air.

Today, the government operates NASA Ames as a bustling, public-sector-meets-private-sector technology bazaar. Start-ups, universities and corporations have set up shop here, and Google plans to build a new campus here over the next few years that will include housing for workers.

A nondescript structure, Building 20, is the Singularity University headquarters, and most students stay in nearby apartments on the NASA land. Mr. Kurzweil set up the school with Mr. Diamandis, who, as chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, doled out $10 million in 2004 to a team that sent a private spacecraft 100 kilometers above the earth. Google has offered $30 million in rewards for an X Prize project intended to inspire a private team to send a robot to the moon. And a $10 million prize will go to the first team that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of $10,000 or less each — which, in theory, would turn an expensive, complex lab exercise into an ordinary affair.

Mr. Diamandis champions the idea that large prizes inspire rapid bursts of innovation and may pave a path to that 700-year lifetime.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of if,” he says. “I think it’s a matter of how. You and I have a decent shot, and for kids being born today, I think it will be a matter of choice.”

For the most part, Mr. Kurzweil serves as a figurehead of Singularity University, while Mr. Diamandis steers the institution. He pitches the graduate student program as a way to train young, inspired people to think exponentially and solve the world’s biggest problems — to develop projects that will “change the lives of one billion people,” as the in-house mantra goes.

Mr. Diamandis hopes that the university can create an unrivaled network of graduates and bold thinkers — a Harvard Business School for the future — who can put its ideas into action. Along with that goal, he’s considering creating a venture capital fund to help turn the university’s big ideas into big businesses. As some of their favored student creations, school leaders point to a rapid disaster alert-and-response system and a venture that lets individuals rent their cars to other people via cellphone.

Devin Fidler, a former student, is in the midst of securing funding for a company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cement-like goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to low-income areas.

Mr. Diamandis has certainly built a selective institution. More than 1,600 people applied for just 40 spots in the inaugural graduate program held last year. A second, 10-week graduate program will kick off this month with 80 students, culled from 1,200 applicants.

One incoming student, David Dalrymple, is an 18-year-old working on his doctorate from M.I.T.. He says he plans to start a research institute someday to explore artificial intelligence, medicine, space systems and energy. (He met Mr. Kurzweil at a White House dinner, and at the age of 8 accepted the offer to have Mr. Kurzweil serve as his mentor.)

During the spring executive program, about 30 people — almost all of them men — showed up for the course, which is something of a mental endurance test. Days begin at dawn with group exercise sessions. Coursework runs until about 9 p.m.; then philosophizing over wine and popcorn goes until midnight or later. A former Google chef prepares special meals — all of which are billed as “life extending” — for the executives.

The meat of the executive program is lectures, company tours and group thought exercises.

Day 4 includes test drives of Tesla Motors electric sports cars and a group genetic test, thanks to a company called deCODEme. By Day 6, people are annoyed by the BrinBot, which is interrupting lectures with its whirs and sputters. Someone tapes a pair of paper ears on it to try to humanize it. One executive sullenly declines to participate in another robot design exercise because no one in his group will consider making a sexbot.

However much the Singularity informs the environment here, a majority of the executives attending the spring course expressed less interest in living forever and more in figuring out their next business venture or where they wanted to invest.

Robin Tedder, a Scottish baron who lives in Australia and divides his time among managing a personal fortune, racing a yacht and running a vineyard, says he read about Singularity University in an investor newsletter and checked out the Web site.

“What really convinced me to pay the 15 grand was that I didn’t think it was some kind of hoax,” Mr. Tedder said in an interview after he completed the executive program. “I looked at the people involved and thought it was the real deal. In retrospect, I think it’s a very good value.”

Like a number of other participants, Mr. Tedder is contemplating business ventures with his classmates and points to high-octane networking as the school’s major benefit.

Attendees at the spring session came from all over the globe and included John Mauldin, a best-selling author who writes an investment newsletter; Stephen Long, a research director at the Defense Department; Fernando A. de la Viesca, C.E.O. of the Argentinean investment firm TPCG Financial; Eitan Eliram, the new-media director for the prime minister’s office in Israel; and Guy Fraker, the director of trends and foresight at State Farm Insurance.

“We end up cleaning up the mess of unintended consequences,” says Mr. Fraker of his company’s work. He says it makes sense for him to gauge technological trends in case humans can one day gain new tools for averting catastrophes. For example, he’s confident that in the future people will have the ability to steer hurricanes away from populated areas.

Executives in the spring program also heard that some young people had started leaving college to set up their own synthetic biology labs on the cheap. Such people resemble computer tinkerers from a generation earlier, attendees note, except now they’re fiddling with the genetic code of organisms rather than software.

“Biology is moving outside of the traditional education sphere,” says Andrew Hessel, a former research operations manager at Amgen, during a lecture here. “The students are teaching their professors. This is happening faster than the computer evolved. These students don’t have newsletters. They have Web sites.”

Daniel T. Barry, a Singularity University professor, gives a lecture about the falling cost of robotics technology and how these types of systems are close to entering the home. Dr. Barry, a former astronaut and “Survivor” contestant with an M.D. and a Ph. D., has put his ideas into action. He has a robot at home that can take a pizza from the delivery person, pay for it and carry it into the kitchen.

“You have the robot say, ‘Take the 20 and leave the pizza on top of me,’ ” Dr. Barry says. “I get the pizza about a third of the time.”

Other lecturers talk about a coming onslaught of biomedical advances as thousands of people have their genomes decoded. Jason Bobe, who works on the Personal Genome Project, an effort backed by the Harvard Medical School to establish a huge database of genetic information, points to forecasts that a million people will have their genomes decoded by 2014.

“The machines for doing this will be in your kitchen next to the toaster,” Mr. Bobe says.

Mr. Hessel describes an even more dramatic future in which people create hybrid pets based on the body parts of different animals and tweak the genetic makeup of plants so they resemble things like chairs and tables, allowing us to grow fields of everyday objects for home and work. Mr. Hessel, like Mr. Kurzweil, thinks that people will use genetic engineering techniques to grow meat in factories rather than harvesting it from dead animals.

“I know in 10 years it will be a junior-high project to build a bacteria,” says Mr. Hessel. “This is what happens when we get control over the code of life. We are just on the cusp of that.”

Christopher deCharms, another Singularity University speaker, runs Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., that pushes the limits of brain imaging technology. He’s trying to pull information out of the brain via sensing systems, so that there can be some quantification of people’s levels of depression and pain.

“We are at the forefront today of being able to read out real information from the human brain of single individuals,” he tells the executives.

Preparing to Evolve

Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has followed Mr. Kurzweil’s work and written a science-fiction thriller, “Breakpoint,” in which a group of terrorists try to halt the advance of technology. He sees major conflicts coming as the government and citizens try to wrap their heads around technology that’s just beginning to appear.

“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. Clarke says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”

Mr. Clarke says the government has a contingency plan for just about everything — including an attack by Canada — but has yet to think through the implications of techno-philosophies like the Singularity. (If it’s any consolation, Mr. Long of the Defense Department asked a flood of questions while attending Singularity University.)

Mr. Kurzweil himself acknowledges the possibility of grim outcomes from rapidly advancing technology but prefers to think positively. “Technological evolution is a continuation of biological evolution,” he says. “That is very much a natural process.”

To prepare for any rocky transitions from our benighted present to the techno-utopia of 2030 or so, a number of people tied to the Singularity movement have begun to build what they call “an education and protection framework.”

Among them is Keith Kleiner, who joined Google in its early days and walked away as a wealthy man in 2005. During a period of personal reflection after his departure, he read “The Singularity Is Near.” He admires Mr. Kurzweil’s vision.

“What he taught me was ‘Wake up, man,’ ” Mr. Kleiner says. “Yeah, computers will get faster so you can do more things and store more data, but it’s bigger than that. It starts to permeate every industry.”

Mr. Kleiner, 32, founded a Web site, SingularityHub.com, with a writing staff that reports on radical advances in technology. He has also given $100,000 to Singularity University.

Sonia Arrison, a founder of Singularity University and the wife of one of Google’s first employees, spends her days writing a book about longevity, tentatively titled “100 Plus.” It outlines changes that people can expect as life expectancies increase, like 20-year marriages with sunset clauses.

She says the book and the university are her attempts to ready people for the inevitable.

“One day we will wake up and say, ‘Wow, we can regenerate a new liver,’ ” Ms. Arrison says. “It will happen so fast, and the role of Singularity University is to prepare people in advance.”

Despite all of the zeal behind the movement, there are those who look askance at its promises and prospects.

Jonathan Huebner, for example, is often held up as Mr. Kurzweil’s foil. A physicist who works at the Naval Air Warfare Center as a weapons designer, he, like Mr. Kurzweil, has compiled his own cathedral of graphs and lists of important inventions. He is unimpressed with the state of progress and, in 2005, published in a scientific journal a paper called “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.”

Measuring the number of innovations divided by the size of the worldwide population, Dr. Huebner contends that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873. Or, based on the number of patents in the United States weighed against the population, he found a peak around 1916. (Both Dr. Huebner and Mr. Kurzweil are occasionally teased about their faith in graphs.)

“The amount of advance in this century will not compare well at all to the last century,” Dr. Huebner says, before criticizing tenets of the Singularity. “I don’t believe that something like artificial intelligence as they describe it will ever appear.”

William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.

“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.

“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.

‘Deus ex Machina’

Last month, a biotech concern, Synthetic Genomics, announced that it had created a bacterial genome from scratch, kicking off a firestorm of discussion about the development of artificial life. J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in the human genome trade and head of Synthetic Genomics, hailed his company’s work as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

Steve Jurvetson, a director of Synthetic Genomics, is part of a group of very rich, very bright Singularity observers who end up somewhere in the middle on the philosophy’s merits — optimistic about the growing powers of technology but pessimistic about humankind’s ability to reach a point where those forces can actually be harnessed.

Mr. Jurvetson, a venture capitalist and managing director of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says the advances of companies like Synthetic Genomics give him confidence that we will witness great progress in areas like biofuels and vaccines. Still, he fears that such technology could also be used maliciously — and he has a pantry filled with products like Spam and honey in case his family has to hunker down during a viral outbreak or attack.

“Thank God we have a swimming pool,” he says, noting that it gives him a large store of potentially potable water.

Mr. Orlowksi, the journalist, sees the Singularity as a grand, tech-nerd dream in which engineers, inventors and innovators of every stripe create the greatest of all reset buttons. He says the techies “seem to want a deus ex machina to make everything right again.”

They certainly don’t want any outside interference, and are utterly confident that they will realize the Singularity on their own terms and with their own wits — all of which fits with Silicon Valley’s strong libertarian traditions. Google and Microsoft employees trailed only members of the military as the largest individual contributors to Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The Valley’s wizards also prefer to avoid any confrontation with Washington.

“Dealing with politics means having to compromise and convince people of things and form alliances with people who don’t always agree with you,” Mr. Orlowski says. “They’re not wired for that.”

Increasing Acceptance

Mr. Kurzweil is currently consulting for the Army on technology initiatives, and says he routinely talks with government and business leaders. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, appears in Mr. Kurzweil’s books and often on the back flaps with celebratory quotations.

Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Page of Google created a renewable-energy plan for the National Academy of Engineering, advising that solar power will one day soon meet all of the world’s energy needs.

Mr. Kurzweil’s 31-year-old son, Ethan, says his father has always been ahead of the curve. The family had the first flat-screen television and car phone on the block, as well as a phone that could fax photos.

“We also had this thing where you put on a hat that had sensors and it would create music to match your brain waves and help you meditate,” Ethan says. “People would come over and play with it.”

Ethan previously worked for Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. These days he’s a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. A section of the bookshelves in his office has been reserved for multiple copies of his father’s works.

“A lot of what he has predicted has happened, and it’s interesting to see what he’s been saying become more mainstream,” says Ethan, who looks very much like a younger version of his father. “He has a certain world view that he feels strongly about that he thinks is absolutely coming to pass. The data so far suggests it is. He’s incredibly thorough with his research, and I have confidence his critics haven’t thought things through on the same level.”

Indeed, Ethan says, his father is almost, well, accepted.

“He is seen as less weird now,” he says. “Much less weird.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html





Hackers Plant Viruses in Windows Smartphone Games

Hackers have planted viruses in video games for smartphones running on Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Windows operating system, according to a firm that specializes in securing mobile devices.

The games -- 3D Anti-Terrorist and PDA Poker Art -- are available on sites that provide legitimate software for mobile devices, according to John Hering, CEO of San Francisco-based security firm Lookout.

Those games are bundled with malicious software that automatically dials premium-rate telephone services in Somalia, Italy and other countries, sometimes ringing up hundreds of dollars in charges in a single month.

Those services are run by the programmers who built the tainted software, Hering said on Friday.

Victims generally do not realize they have been infected until they get their phone bill and see hundreds of dollars of unexpected charges for those premium-rate services, he said.

Hackers are increasingly targeting smartphone users as sales of the sophisticated mobile devices have soared with the success of Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPhone and Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Android operating system.

Officials with Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment. (Reporting by Jim Finkle; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0413701920100604





Poor Windows Users
Dedoimedo

Occasionally, I go through my various so-called spam email accounts, which I use for registering to all kinds of products I do not really want, I do not really need or just plain wish to test software, without bombarding my more important inboxes with tons of mails.

To cut the long story short, I came across an email sent by a security vendor, reminding me, no urging me with the liver-transplant sort of urgency, to renew my subscription to their product, lest my pixels perish. I spent a minute or two staring at the email, thinking about all the poor souls out there who do not have the comfort of being a geek and who may actually take the advertisement seriously.

And then I decided to write this article. And maybe a few people will heed it and make some good.

Here's the image

Can you spot what's wrong with this image? If you can't, let me help you.

Imagine you're a computer user ...

Who receives an email like this. Imagine you're a user who has read Dedoimedo recommendations on web and email security, so you understand all about risk, fraud, scripts, social engineering, and all that.

Let us dissect this email, step by step.

Relevance

I got this email because three years ago I downloaded the then-free version of McAfee security suite, which I used in my Design of Experiment (DoE) article. I needed a heavy anti-virus product, and McAfee fit the bill. I had it pitted against AVG, and along with two firewall products and two RAM settings, the low-high mix if you will, I had the perfect DoE with eight permutations.

Since, an age has passed and I've totally forgotten about McAfee. Then, all of a sudden, I get this email.
Red color & critical warning

Red indicates danger. Danger? How come? Why and when?

Critical

Critical Warning: Your PC is at risk, it says.

Well, first of all, my PC is at risk. It is at risk of being electrocuted, a hard disk failing, water damage, dust damage, earthquake damage, all sorts of things. But my PC may be running all sorts of operating systems, not including Windows, for instance.

If anything software related is at risk, it's the operating system and not the PC. I know that the marketing whizzes out there know that the common man can't tell the difference, but it's a misleading statement all the same.

Then, why is this a critical warning? Maybe I have other security software running? Maybe I'm a geek who knows his stuff. Maybe I'm running Linux. Maybe I'm smart. In the worst case, we have Uncertainty Principle at hand, so my PC might be risk. However, the service notification clearly states, with 100% certainty, that the PC is at risk. We do not know what risk, though.

If I only gave you the screenshot above, you could say this is a classic beginning of a classic phishing mail, intended to goad you into clicking and buying and whatever. Unfortunately, sadly, this email comes from one of the largest security companies in the world.
Fear mongering works ...

Part of the scare tactics is already evident in the first section. But now, focus on the big icon to the left:

Scare

The icon takes 20% of the advertisement real estate. It's red and frightening. It's designed to look like Windows Security Center notifications, so you get that involuntary twitch in your colon, associated with the loss of data, privacy and whatnot that come with malware infections.

And what does unprotected mean? Unprotected how? From what? My night life? My PC again? Why is it unprotected? Does it mean that if I'm using security products by rival companies, I'm unprotected?

In a way, the security vendor assumes that it is the one and only provider of related services. Running a different product with similar, possibly superior capabilities means nothing. It's a binary verdict. Either you run our stuff or you're all alone out there, naked and unprotected against the onslaught of Mongolian hordes.

It reminds me of the .NET framework installation. Not related to anything, just plain funny and totally audacious:

Thank you, I can disconnect now from the Internet. It's no longer useful now that I have the framework installed.

Confusing information

Then, there's the NatWest Recommended snippet, below the shiny icon. What the hell is NatWest? Well, googling, it turns out to be a bank. Is this merely an advertisement for a bank, within the context of another advertisement?

Security experts will tell you: use plain-text email, block scripts, block third-party images, all sorts of fancy things like that. And then, you get an email from a security company that breaches all these rules. How funny is that? It's a paradox.
Security concerns

The security message has a link that I can click and follow. I copied the link aside and examined it. Here's what it looks like:

http://strongmail1.mcafee.com/track?
t=c&mid=699842&msgid=93148&did=4500&sn=1249673815&
eid=********@yahoo.ca&uid=192576
&extra=&&&2000&&&http://uk.mcafee.com/root/campaign.asp?cid=71475

Notice the eid field, which reads eid=********@yahoo.ca. It's my actual email there. It was written there. The asterisks are mine. Never mind it's an unimportant address that I purposefully use for this kind of activities. And then notice the link: http:// ... So, my email is sent in clear-text, in unencrypted form to the security vendor server, along with tons of other numbers, all of which seem like unique identifiers.

In clear text. Sniffing may not be easy on a switched network, but it does not mean that security should be treated like a prostitute.

End result = sad

So, clueless users get an email from one of the biggest security vendor that informs them their PC is at risk. They click, they buy. Now, they are running two anti-virus products at the same time. Or worse, their credit card details have been stolen, because the security vendor advertisement looks exactly like the latest and greatest security scam.

Not only is this kind of tactics perpetuating the state of fear and the lack of knowledge among Windows users, enslaving them to the financial teat of security moguls, it actually increases the risk of their exposure to social networking tricks. If a user clicks on a security warning in a email once, they might do it twice. Only this time, the product will be called BestAntiVirus2014 or something like that.

One of these is the legitimate offer from McAfee, the other two I have no idea about. I am having trouble deciding which should be opened and read, imagine what the common user is feeling.

To sum it up, advertisements like these border on illegal. It's awful when security companies can afford such blatant misuse and abuse of trust and ignorance on behalf of computer users. This kind of thing should be banned.
Conclusion

This security offer, although legitimate and not very lucrative, has left me angry and sad. If one of the largest security vendors can afford to misuse security for its own gain, what will the average Joe do? What about some integrity, honesty?

The offer would have looked infinitely better if it just contained a coupon number and a reference to the vendor site. In plain text. Nothing more, nothing less. Instead, it looks like the very threats it is designed to protect from, it uses all the classic mistakes of dangerous mail practices, like embedded HTML and images, and it links to the vendor server using a clear-text string, which contains private information. Really sad.

Security begins with education. But education means users won't be easily impressed with scary emails and may not actually cash out money for a rather mediocre security product they don't need in the first place. Teaching people how to use their computers contrasts the primary goals of security vendors, which is to make profit.

It seems that security can only be good if it's free. Then, there's no hidden or plain agenda, no money interfering with the pure, simple goals of helping people gain intellectual independence that allows them to asset threats and risks and make wise, calculated decisions. Otherwise, the poor user stands no chance.
This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that Windows security can be enjoyed easily, with no additional financial expenses. There's SuRun for Windows XP, a mighty tool. Then, you may want to read my article on Group Policies. Windows 7 users will appreciate my first and second security tutorials. And there's always Linux.

Don't be scared. Open your mind.

Cheers.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/windows-poor.html





Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised.

It doesn't stop there. According to the data we were given by the web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network, we believe 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it's possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed. We contacted Apple for comment but have yet to hear back. We also reached out to AT&T for comment. A call to Rahm Emanuel's office at the White House has not been returned.

The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers' email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T's network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber.

AT&T closed the security hole in recent days, but the victims have been unaware, until now. For a device that has been shipping for barely two months, and in its cellular configuration for barely one, the compromise is a rattling development. The slip up appears to be AT&T's fault at the moment, and it will complicate the company's already fraught relationship with Apple.

Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads. This is particularly the case given that U.S. iPad 3G customers have no choice in mobile carriers — AT&T has an exclusive lock, at least for now. Given the lock-in and the tight coupling of the iPad with AT&T's cellular data network, Apple has a pronounced responsibility to patrol the network vendors it chooses to align and share customer data with.

But it will also likely unnerve customers thinking of buying iPads that connect to AT&T's cellular network.

It will also do so at a pivotal moment, with the iPad 3G early in its sales cycle. Brisk sales for the original wi-fi iPad had promised to turn the 3G model into a similar profit machine. But further questions about AT&T, already widely ridiculed for its bad service, are going to make people think twice about spending up to $830 and $25 per month on the iPad 3G.

Breach details: Who did it, and how

Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners ExposedThe subscriber data was obtained by a group calling itself Goatse Security. Though the group is steeped in off-the-wall, 4chan-style internet culture—its name is a reference to a famous gross-out Web picture—it has previously highlighted real security vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Safari Web browsers, and attracted media attention for finding what it said were flaws in Amazon's community ratings system.

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T's website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application. The security researchers were able to guess a large swath of ICC IDs by looking at known iPad 3G ICC IDs, some of which are shown in pictures posted by gadget enthusiasts to Flickr and other internet sites, and which can also be obtained through friendly associates who own iPads and are willing to share their information, available within the iPad "Settings" application.

To make AT&T's servers respond, the security group merely had to send an iPad-style "User agent" header in their Web request. Such headers identify users' browser types to websites.

The group wrote a PHP script to automate the harvesting of data. Since a member of the group tells us the script was shared with third-parties prior to AT&T closing the security hole, it's not known exactly whose hands the exploit fell into and what those people did with the names they obtained. A member tells us it's likely many accounts beyond the 114,000 have been compromised.

Goatse Security notified AT&T of the breach and the security hole was closed.

We were able to establish the authenticity of Goatse Security's data through two people who were listed among the 114,000 names. We sent these people the ICC ID contained in the document—and associated with the person's iPad 3G account—and asked them to verify in an iPad control panel that this was the correct ICC ID. It was.

Victims: Some big names

Then we began poring through the 114,067 entries and were stunned at the names we found. The iPad 3G, released less than two months ago, has clearly been snapped up by an elite array of early adopters.

Within the military, we saw several devices registered to the domain of DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, along with the major service branches. To wit: One affected individual was William Eldredge, who "commands the largest operational B-1 [strategic bomber] group in the U.S. Air Force."

In the media and entertainment industries, affected accounts belonged to top executives at the New York Times Company, Dow Jones, Condé Nast, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, HBO and Hearst.

Within the tech industry, accounts were compromised at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AOL, among others. In finance, accounts belonged to companies from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan to Citigroup to Morgan Stanley, along with dozens of venture capital and private equity firms.

In government, affected accounts included a GMail user who appears to be Rahm Emanuel and staffers in the Senate, House of Representatives, Department of Justice, NASA, Department of Homeland Security, FAA, FCC, and National Institute of Health, among others. Dozens of employees of the federal court system also appeared on the list.

Ramifications

There are no doubt other high-profile subscribers caught up in the security lapse, along with ordinary users who now have reason to worry that AT&T might expose more of their iPad data to hackers.

At the very least, AT&T exposed a very large and valuable cache of email addresses, VIP and otherwise. This is going to hurt the telecommunications company's already poor image with iPhone and iPad customers, and complicate its very profitable relationship with Apple. Exacerbating the situation is that AT&T has not yet notified customers of the breach, judging from the subscribers we and the security group contacted, despite being itself notified at least two days ago. It's unclear if AT&T has notified Apple of the breach.

Then there's the question of whether any damage can be done using the ICC IDs. The Goatse Security member who contacted us was concerned that recent holes discovered in the GSM cell phone standard mean that it might be possible to spoof a device on the network or even intercept traffic using the ICC ID. Two other security experts we contacted were less confident in that assessment. Mobile security consultant and Nokia veteran Emmanuel Gadaix told us that while there have been "vulnerabilities in GSM crypto discovered over the years, none of them involve the ICC ID... as far as I know, there are no vulnerability or exploit methods involving the ICC ID."

Another expert, white hat GSM hacker and University of Virginia computer science PhD Karsten Nohl, told us that while text-message and voice security in mobile phones is weak "data connections are typically well encrypted... the disclosure of the ICC-ID has no direct security consequences."

But that didn't mean he thinks AT&T is off the hook:

It's horrendous how customer data, specifically e-mail addresses, are negligently leaked by a large telco provider.

We suspect many AT&T customers will agree.

Update: The New York Times has emailed all staff suggesting they "turn off your access to the 3G network on your iPad until further notice" while the newspaper's engineers and security staff investigate the issue.

Update: AT&T sent us a statement apologizing for the breach and downplaying the impact:

"AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted."
http://gawker.com/5559346/apples-wor...owners-exposed





Mass Hack Plants Malware on Thousands of Webpages

When good sites pwn
Dan Goodin

More than 100,000 webpages, some belonging to newspapers, police departments, and other large organizations, have been hit by an attack over the past few days that redirected visitors to a website that attempted to install malware on their machines.

The mass compromise appears to have affected sites running a banner-ads module on top of Microsoft's Internet Information Services using ASP.net, said David Dede, head of malware research at Sucuri, a website monitoring firm. Intljobs.org, The Wall Street Journal's wsj.com, and tomtom.com.tw have all been hacked, in addition to The Jerusalem Post and the police department website for the UK county of Strathclyde, as El Reg has reported previously here and here.

Google searches on Tuesday indicated more than 100,000 pages were infected, Dede said, but that number had shrunk to about 7,750 at time of writing.

The sites were infected using SQL injection exploits, which allow attackers to tamper with a server's database by typing commands into search boxes and other user-input fields. The hackers used the exploit to plant iframes in the compromised sites that redirected visitors to robint.us. Malicious javascript on that site attempted to infect end users with malware dubbed Mal/Behav-290 according to anti-virus firm Sophos.

Robint.us has been disabled, thanks to a sinkholing effort carried out by volunteer security outfit Shadowserver Foundation. The action will allow Shadowserver researchers to get a complete list of compromised sites and to gather additional information about how the attack was carried out, spokesman Andre' M. Di Mino said in an email. He said the details would be published soon.

The SQL injection attacks came from Chinese IP address 121.14.154.69, Dede said. Robint.us was registered to a Dongguan Wanjian of Dongguan, China, according to whois records.

Dede said he is still trying to determine the module that is being compromised in the mass hack attack. Securi's report is here, and the NSM Junkie Blog and Cisco Systems' ScanSafe have additional details about the attacks here and here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06...ebpage_attack/





Researchers Develop “HoneyBot”, Social Engineer IRC Users Automatically

Researchers of the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) achieved a stunning – and at the same time scary – 76,1% click rate on possibly malicious links in conversations that took place on IRC using an automated social-engineering software dubbed “HoneyBot”.

Their new approach to automated social engineering (“ASE”) does not rely on artificial conversations from an AI but instead used the bot to relay messages between humans, effectively avoiding detection according to what is commonly referred to as “Turing Test” in which humans assess if they can tell apart that they are talking to a human or a computer program of sorts. Previous generations of such bots used an AI called “Artificial Intelligence Markup” to engage in conversations with a much lower success rate: Users where able to spot 80% of the bots after exchanging only 3 messages with them.

HoneyBot acts as a “Man-in-the-middle” and relays messages between two unsuspecting users which seem to have perfectly normal conversation going on:

bot → Alice: Hi!
Alice → bot: hello
bot → Carl: hello
Carl → bot: hi there, how are you?
bot → Alice: hi there, how are you?
Alice → bot: …

But that’s not all – the bot is capable of influencing the ongoing conversation by “dropping, inserting, or modifying messages” and the researchers assert that “if links (or questions) are inserted into such a conversation, they will seem to originate from a human user” and therefore the click-probability will be “higher than in artificial conversation approaches”.

The really sophisticated bot is able to determine the gender of the persons it is talking to and makes on-the-fly adjustments to all relayed messages so “Hello, i’m a guy” becomes “Hello, i’m a lady” when its gender-detection algorithm determined that the conversational partner likely is male. Insertion of links also has some level of sophistication – instead of just dumping a link into the conversation and hoping for a click, the bot has 3 options for doing so:

* Insert a random link: Along with a generic message a link is sent to the other user if they have been engaged in a conversation for a minimum number of messages

* Keywords: Reply with links to keywords such as “ASL?”

* Replacement link: Questions already containing links to sites such as YouTube are replaced with own links and therefore look most natural since the question was composed by a human. Also, the bot can inject probing questions to steer the conversation into a certain direction.

Trying to be as stealthy and sneaky as possible, the bot never contacts users with “administrative privileges” but replys to private messages by such, although it will never inserts links or questions into those conversations. Additionally, a random delay is used when “typing” messages to make detection even harder.

Aware that what they have created is a whole can of worms when used unethically, the researchers made sure that personally identifiable data such as eMail and IM addresses are never relayed and links sent in conversations are filtered if they’re not going to be replaced by HoneyBot.

The channels monitored by the bot where 2 dating and one generic chat channel of which neither the channels nor the network have been named in the research paper.

When talking about the ethics, the researchers conclude that they’re well within the guidelines set forth by the IRB (Institutional Review Board) based on similar researches and also got a nod from the legal department of the university. They chose to not inform users before the experiment since this would most likely have influenced the results as “users that are aware of participating in a study are likely to be more cautious than usual” and say that they “carried out the study only with users that responded to our messages and thereby accepted talking to the bot (i.e., stranger)” and emphasize that there were no “ongoing conversations intruded” by them. Also they note that all data collected “although largely anonymous” has been deleted after the “evaluation phase”.

With 3 seperate bots – a “periodic spam” bot, a private-message spam bot and a keyword spam bot – they evaluated the likelyhood of users clicking on links, the results can be seen in the below table:

Altogether, only 1.7% of the online users could be enticed into clicking a link by those 3 “classic” bot types and the bot only got to post 8 links on the Chat channel before it was banned by a channel op.

The longest conversation HoneyBot had took a staggering 2 and a half hours with 325 messages transmitted and it achieved a median chat time of “longer than 30 minutes”.

Out of the 3 possible URLs the bot has sent – broken down in IP, TinyURL and a MySpace link – TinyURL links where the most clicked about which the researchers rightfully say is counter-intuitive since “TinyURLs can hide arbitrary URLs whereas a MySpace link always leads to a profile”.

Furthermore, the MySpace links the bot sent out had to be reassembled by the user because a space character was inserted into the URL and the researchers said they’re “surprised that this reassembly has happened at all”.

It should not go unmentioned that the same type of research was conducted on Facebook where they created one male and one female profile and tried to befriend users of the opposite sex. The new friends, if successful in bootstrapping a conversation, then tried to make them click on the same links as the IRC bot. And even though 4 out of 10 people clicked them, the researchers believe that the attack could have been way more successful if they went as far as cloning profiles, befriend users from those and relay messages from cloned to authentic profiles.

As can be seen from the Facebook example, this kind of attack is not limited to IRC exclusively but can be adopted to a whole host of so-called Social-networking sites and systems.

Mitigation of these social engineering threats is not easy and there is no fast and hard measure that can prevent all of them, however raising awareness is one way to make users more alert to it and is what the researchers tried to achieve: “We hope that this paper will contribute to this process.”
http://www.irc-junkie.org/2010-06-11...automatically/





'Shady' Porn Site Practices Put Visitors at Risk
BBC

Visitors to porn sites are at serious risk of being exploited by cyber criminals, a study has suggested.

It found that many sites harboured malware or used "shady" practices to squeeze money out of their visitors.

By creating their own porn sites researchers found that many consumers were vulnerable to known bugs and loopholes.

Competition among porn sites makes the online adult industry ripe for abuse by hi-tech criminals.

"They have almost inadvertently created a whole ecosystem that's easy to abuse for cyber crime on a large scale," said Dr Gilbert Wondracek, a computer security expert from the International Secure System Lab, which led the study.

Hidden Danger

Dr Wondracek said the team embarked on the study to find out the truth of the widely held view that porn sites are dangerous to visit.

"There are studies looking at the profitability and economics of the industry but we are the first to come at it from a security and more technical point of view," he said.

Statistics suggest that approximately 12% of all websites offer pornography of one sort or another and that 70% of men under 24 browse these sites.

As a first step the researchers trawled pornographic sites to classify what they found and how the industry was structured.

The big distinction was between free sites and those that charge for access. Typically pay sites produce content they give to free sites to drum up traffic.

More than 90% of the 35,000 pornographic domains analysed in the study were free sites.

The researchers analysed the 269,000 websites hosted on the 35,000 domains to see which hosted malicious software. About 3.23% of these sites were booby-trapped with adware, spyware and viruses.

Many others used "shady" practices to keep visitors onsite. These included javascript catchers that made it hard for people to leave a page.

Others use scripts that re-direct visitors so when they click on a link they do not see the video or image they were expecting but are passed to an affiliate site.

The vast majority of sites engage in this trading of traffic or clicks, said Dr Wondracek.

"Visitors are being abused as click bots," he said.

As most sites were free, the only resource they could exploit as a revenue source was this traffic.

"It's cut-throat competition," said Dr Wondracek. "Everybody tries to get as much traffic as possible."

Finding Victims

Traffic is used in many different ways. Popular sites sell it to those looking for an audience, some is used to direct visitors to affiliates who provide content and sometimes it is used to boost rankings in search engine indexes.

It could also be a great way for hi-tech criminals to get a ready source of victims, said Dr Wondracek.

To test this idea the researchers created two adult sites of their own, populated them with free content from porn producers and spent $160 (£108) to get traffic piped to these sites.

Analysis of the 49,000 visitors sent to their sample sites showed that 20,000 were using a computer and browser combination that was vulnerable to at least one known exploit.

"As an attacker you want to make your life easier," said Dr Wondracek. "If you can have these 20,000 people come to a place instantly, why not?"

With many porn sites appearing in the top 100 most popular sites on the web this could mean that huge numbers of people are caught out when they browse for adult content.

While relatively few porn sites were infecting visitors, it is difficult to spot good from bad, he said.

"For the average user it might be hard to tell an honest porn site from a dishonest porn site until you click on something," he said.

Dr Wondracek recommended that anyone visiting porn sites keep their security software up to date and use the "safe browsing" modes found in many browsing programs.

The researchers presented their results at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security held at Harvard from 7-8 June.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10289009.stm





Olympus Stylus Tough Camera Carries Malware Infection

Olympus Japan has issued a warning to customers who have bought its Stylus Tough 6010 digital compact camera that it comes with an unexpected extra - a virus on its internal memory card.

The first thing to point out is that the camera itself is not at risk - the autorun worm being carried on its internal memory can not activate on the Stylus Tough camera, but can attempt to infect your Windows PC.

In other words, users are at risk of infecting their Windows computers with the autorun worm when they plug the device into their USB drive, a method of transmission effectively identical to the infected Samsung Wave smartphones we reported on last week.

The next thing to recognise is that not all of the Olympus Stylus Tough 6010 cameras are affected. According to the advisory from Olympus Japan, just over 1700 units are at risk - and customers can check if their camera is carrying the malware by checking their serial number via a widget on Olympus's website (sadly, it's only available in Japanese which won't be too helpful for tourists and businessmen who bought the camera while in holiday in the country).

Olympus Tough serial number

Olympus says it "humbly apologises" for the incident and that it will make every effort to improve its quality control procedures in future.

In the past, other consumer gadgets to have been infected by malware include TomTom satellite navigation devices and Apple Video iPods. Earlier this year, IBM accidentally gave away malware-infected USB sticks at a security conference.

With such a long history of incidents like this, more companies need to wake up to the need for better quality control to ensure that they don't ship virus-infected gadgets. At the same time, consumers should learn to always ensure Autorun is disabled, and scan any device for malware, before they use it on their computer.
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/201...are-infection/





Google Researcher Gives Microsoft 5 Days to Fix XP Zero-Day Bug

Other security experts question motives of hair-trigger publication
Gregg Keizer

A Google engineer today published attack code that exploits a zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP, giving hackers a new way to hijack and infect systems with malware.

But other security experts objected to the way the engineer disclosed the bug -- just five days after it was reported to Microsoft -- and said the move is more evidence of the ongoing, and increasingly public, war between the two giants.

Microsoft said it is investigating the vulnerability and would have more information on its next steps later today.

According to Tavis Ormandy, a security engineer who works for Google in Switzerland, hackers can leverage a flaw in Windows' Help and Support Center, which lets users easily access and download Microsoft help files from the Web and can be used by support technicians to launch remote support tools on a local PC.

Ormandy posted details of the vulnerability and proof-of-concept attack code to the Full Disclosure security mailing list early Thursday. "Upon successful exploitation, a remote attacker is able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the current user," Ormandy wrote.

According to Ormandy, his attack scenario works using all major browsers, including Microsoft's newest, IE8. The bug is even easier to exploit when the machine has Windows Media Player, software that's installed by default with all versions of Windows.

Ormandy also said he had come up with a way to suppress a warning prompt that Windows XP displays when the Help and Support Center is called, making the attack stealthier.

His attack is complicated, and requires several tricks, including bypassing a whitelist meant to limit the accessed help documents to legitimate support files; using a cross-site scripting vulnerability; and then executing a malicious script.

But his attack code works. Researchers at French security vendor Vulpen Security confirmed today that Ormandy's proof-of-concept works as advertised on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 machines running Internet Explorer 7 or IE8.

Switching to another browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome, is not a solution, Ormandy maintained. "Machines running [a] version of IE less than [IE]8 are, as usual, in even more trouble ... [but] choice of browser, mail client or whatever is not relevant, they are all equally vulnerable," he said.

Ormandy admitted that he reported the vulnerability to Microsoft only five days ago -- on Saturday, June 5 -- but said he decided to go public because of its severity, and because he believed Microsoft would have otherwise dismissed his analysis.

"If I had reported the ... issue without a working exploit, I would have been ignored," he said in the Full Disclosure posting.

He also slammed the concept of "responsible disclosure," a term that Microsoft and other vendors apply to bug reports that are submitted privately, giving developers time to craft a patch before the information is publicly released.

"This is another example of the problems with bug secrecy (or in PR speak, 'responsible disclosure')," Ormandy said. "Those of us who work hard to keep networks safe are forced to work in isolation without the open collaboration with our peers."

Microsoft took Ormandy to task for giving it less than a week to deal with his report. "We are especially concerned about the public disclosure of this issue given we were only notified about it by this researcher on the 5th of June," said Jerry Bryant, a group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an e-mail this morning.

Others were even blunter.

"Google can't have its cake and eat it, too," said Robert Hansen, the CEO of SecTheory. A noted security researcher -- in 2008, he and Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at WhiteHat Security, made headlines when they revealed details about browser "clickjacking" attacks -- Hansen scolded Google, Ormandy's employer, for claiming that the company abides by responsible disclosure when its security researchers do not.

"Their researchers are going off half-cocked," said Hansen, who deplored Ormandy's quick publication of the vulnerability and attack code. "It just doesn't add up."

Hansen went even further, and said a case could be made that Ormandy's fast trigger could be part of the battles between Google and Microsoft. "It sounds to me like Google was upset about the publicity over its decision to drop Windows, the 'use anything but Microsoft' thing. Google got a lot of backlash from the security community over that, because it doesn't matter what OS you use."

Earlier this month Google and Microsoft traded shots over a report that Google was urging its workers to dump Windows over security concerns. Security analysts said the charge was bogus.

"This stinks of retribution," said Hansen. "If Google really goes by responsible disclosure, they should fire Ormandy today." Hansen noted that Ormandy credited other Google security researchers for their help and linked to a Google blog on browser security in his message on Full Disclosure. "You shouldn't do that if you want to disassociate yourself from your employer."

That's impossible, argued Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. "[As a security researcher] you can't really separate your work from your employer. So you have to wonder if [Ormandy[] isn't intentionally feeding the feud between Google and Microsoft."

Like Hansen, Storms questioned Ormandy's decision to reveal his findings just five days after he reported the vulnerability to Microsoft. "You can't say in this case that the vendor was sitting on their hands, not being responsive, which is why researchers usually go public, to force [a vendor's] hand.

"This is no better than not reporting it to Microsoft," concluded Storms.

Hansen, who acknowledged that he has worked for Microsoft as a security consultant on several projects, weighed in again. "The whole thing rubbed me the wrong way," he said.

Ormandy did not respond to a request for comment on Hansen's accusations.

Others knocked Ormandy for offering up a unsanctioned fix. In his note on Full Disclosure, Ormandy recommended moves that users could take until a patch is ready, including a link to what he described as an "unofficial (temporary) hotfix."

But Secunia said the patch didn't work. "It is possible to bypass the fix implemented by the unofficial hotfix and still exploit the vulnerability," claimed the Danish vulnerability tracking firm in a blog post Thursday.

Microsoft agreed with Secunia. "The mitigations [Ormandy] presented may not be effective, so he has really put both our customers and the customers of his employer at risk," said the MSRC's Bryant.

Microsoft's next regularly-scheduled security updates will ship July 13. Storms, for one, doesn't think Microsoft will have a fix finished by then. "They probably already have all the patches for July in QA by now," said Storms. "I don't think it's feasible that they could have something ready in time."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...zero_day_ bug





How 'BT Sarah' Spies on Your Facebook Account

Secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers
Jason Lewis

Some of Britain’s biggest firms were last night accused of ‘spying’ on their customers after they admitted ‘listening in’ on disgruntled conversations on the internet.

The companies include BT, which uses specially developed software to scan for negative comments about it on websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Budget airline easyJet, mobile-phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and banks including Lloyds TSB are also monitoring social networking sites to see what is being said about them.

The firms claim there is nothing sinister about the practice, with BT insisting it is merely acting as ‘a fly on the wall’ to ‘listen and engage with our customers’.

But privacy campaigners have accused them of ‘outright spying’ while legal experts have suggested that firms making unsolicited approaches to customers could fall foul of data protection laws.

There are also fears the technique could be used to inundate customers with sales pitches and advertising, or be used by political parties.

Research published last year found that a negative review or comment by a frustrated customer on the internet can lose companies as many as 30 other customers.

A negative comment from a celebrity can be even more damaging. Earlier this year, BT was forced to act quickly after singer Lily Allen wrote on her Twitter page:

‘Anyone know who the CEO of BT is? I’d find out myself but my internet connection is so bad I can’t even Google. Such bad service, awful.’

BT is using software called Debatescape, which trawls social networking sites for keywords to identify anyone making negative comments about the company. Angry customers are then contacted by email suggesting ways BT can help to solve the problem.

The move comes as many of BT’s customers turn to the web to air their complaints because of the difficulties in getting through to its call centres.

Ironically, many of the comments on BT’s own Twitter page are written by those complaining they are not able to reach service staff.

Managers overseeing BT’s social networking operation claim ‘most of the feedback we get is positive – customers like it when we pick up on their BT-related issues without them asking directly’.

However, one disgruntled customer said he was stunned to be approached by the firm after he posted angry comments on his personal Facebook page.

The BT business customer, who has asked not be named, wrote that he thought ‘BT are just a bunch of unaccountable, business shafting, useless b*******’.

Within hours he had been contacted by someone calling themselves ‘BT Sarah’, saying: ‘I saw your post about having problems with your BT services. Is there anything I can do to help?’

The customer, who runs an online business, said: ‘I did not expect what I was saying to my friends to be seen. I have since changed my privacy settings so only my friends can access my page. What happened was quite Big Brotherish and sinister.’

It comes just two years after BT was involved in another internet privacy storm over its installation of software called Phorm, which delivers targeted advertising to internet customers. The Information Commissioner’s Office and the European Commission both voiced legal concerns about the system.

But Warren Buckley, BT’s managing director of customer services, defended the practice, saying the system has been used to help around 30,000 people.

‘The key is we are only looking at what people are talking about in public spaces,’ he said. ‘We are not picking up anything private. These are all discussions that can be seen by anyone on the web.

‘I would liken it to someone having a conversation in a pub – it’s just a very big pub. We can’t stop people saying negative things about us. What we can do is identify them and offer to address those concerns.

‘Many people we contact in this way are wowed by it. And for us it is another way to listen to what our customers are saying and to reach out to them.’

A spokesman for easyJet, which uses the internet for 97 per cent of its ticket sales, said using Twitter and Facebook was a natural extension of its online presence.

‘The initial reaction of some is that it is a bit like Big Brother watching them,’ he added. ‘They can be quite upset. But when they realise we are trying to help they are quite surprised and positive.’

A spokesman for Carphone Warehouse said: ‘We can often use this to turn a negative situation into a positive one. People complaining on the internet do it in an instant.

‘They are frustrated and use it to vent that anger. When we identify them we can often offer a solution. People we speak to are often blown away that Carphone Warehouse is listening and are overwhelmingly positive about it.’

There are continuing concerns over the level of protection given to people’s information on Facebook.

The firm came under fire last year after it introduced changes to its default privacy settings which allowed people’s personal details to be viewed by anyone from internet search engines like Google.

Simon Davies, director of human rights group Privacy International, said: ‘People venting to their friends do not suddenly expect the object of their anger to be listening in and then to butt in on their conversations. This is nothing short of outright spying.

‘The firms liken this to listening to a conversation in the pub. But it is more like listening at someone’s door with a very large glass. It may not be illegal but it is morally wrong. And it is unlikely to stop there. If the regulators decide there is nothing wrong then political parties are sure to use it, along with lobbyists and firms trying to sell us things. ’

Dr Yaman Akdeniz, a legal expert and director of online privacy group Cyber-Rights, also warned that many of the firms could be breaking data protection laws.

‘Just because I am on Facebook or Twitter does not give BT or any other company the right to contact me unsolicited,’ he said. ‘These may be public conversations but firms should not be contacting users without their consent.

'People should refuse to speak to those companies and register a complaint with the Information Commissioner.’

Liberal Democrat MP Alan Reid called for an investigation.

‘This may well be within the law, but I don’t think I would be very pleased if a firm suddenly contacted me out of the blue after I said something on the internet,’ he added.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...customers.html





Brain Scans 'Could be Used to Snoop on Thoughts'

The use of brain scanners must be regulated in order to prevent them being used to invade privacy and threaten civil liberties, a legal expert has warned.
Rebecca Smith

Researchers have concerns that brain scans - already used in some death row trials in the US - could be used by British police to determine whether a suspect is lying, or has planned a crime they have yet to commit.

Dr Burkhard Schafer, of the University of Edinburgh, will say that if left unregulated, scanners could threaten people's privacy. They could, for instance, be used by employers to test the honesty of an individual's CV or by commercial companies to analyse the subconscious preferences of their consumers.

Experts from around the world will gather at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Glasgow today (Monday) to debate the issue. Delegates, including neuroscientists, policymakers and judges, will discuss whether cutting-edge brain imaging could be exploited to read people's thoughts and preferences.

Researchers also warn that scans could reveal undiagnosed brain conditions in some individuals, causing unnecessary anxiety to them and their families, and that repeated scanning might even carry health risks.

Brain scanners - already an effective tool in diagnosing disease - are now so advanced they can be used to determine people's likes, dislikes, anxieties or fears.

When viewed through a scanner, different areas of the brain 'light up' when they function. This can be interpreted to read an individual's thoughts and determine whether, for example, a person likes or dislikes an image they are being shown.

At present there are no guidelines on how brain scanning information should be used or what protections should be in place to ensure the rights of vulnerable people.

The two-day event is part of a programme hosted and funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies. The programme organisers are the Scottish Imaging Network (SINAPSE), the Scottish Futures Forum, the Institute for Advanced Studies, Strathclyde and the University of Edinburgh.

It will include a public lecture by leading expert in law and biomedical ethics, Professor Hank Greely of Stanford University, on Monday.

Burkhard Schafer, of the SCRIPT Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology at the University of Edinburgh, said "After data mining and online profiling, brain imaging could well become the next frontier in the privacy wars. The promise to read a person's mind is beguiling, and some applications will be greatly beneficial. But a combination of exaggerated claims by commercial providers, inadequate legal regulation and the persuasive power of images bring very real dangers for us as citizens.

"The task ahead is not just to ensure that the use of brain imaging in courts or by other decision makers is scientifically sound and reliable. We also need to ensure that the law protects what is the innermost core of our privacy, our thoughts, deepest wishes and desires, from unwarranted intrusion."

Professor Joanna Wardlaw, Professor of Applied Neuroimaging at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Brain imaging has emerged at astounding speed in the last decade and it is an extremely powerful method of finding out about how the brain works. But currently, once outside the medical or scientific arena, the use of imaging is completely unregulated.

"Is it right that someone should be convicted of a serious crime, or let off, on the basis of evidence coming from brain imaging? We don't think the technology is ready for that yet, but we need an open and frank discussion to decide where we go next."

The public are also invited to take part in a survey about the ethics of brain imaging - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/neuroimagingsurvey.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/he...-thoughts.html





Govt May Record Users’ Web History, Email Data
Renai LeMay

The Federal Government has confirmed it is considering a policy requiring Australian internet providers to retain precise data on how their users are using the internet, with the potential to include information on emails sent and — reportedly — their web browsing history.

“The Attorney-General’s Department has been looking at the European Directive on Data Retention, to consider whether such a regime is appropriate within Australia’s law enforcement and security context,” a spokesperson for the department confirmed via email today. “It has consulted broadly with the telecommunications industry.”

The spokesperson’s confirmation was also contained in a report by ZDNet.com.au (which broke this story), which stated that ISP industry sources had flagged the potential for the new regime to require ISPs to record each internet address (also known as URL) that an internet user visited.

Delimiter has contacted spokespeople from major ISPs such as Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Internode and Adam Internet to ask for a response on the matter, as well as the Internet Industry Association, a group which represents the ISPs. The office Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the office of Attorney-General Robert McLelland have also been contacted for comment on the matter.

The European Directive on Data Retention (2006) requires communications providers to retain a number of categories of data relating to their users.

Broadly speaking, they must retain data necessary to trace and identify the source, destination, date, type, time and duration of communications — and even what communication equipment is being used by customers and the location of mobile transmissions.

According to the directive, where internet access is concerned, this means the ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients of email, the date and time that users logged on and off from a service, and their IP address — whether dynamic or static applied to their user ID.

For telephone conversations, this means the number from which calls were placed and the number that received the call, the owner of the telephone service and similar data such as the time and date of the call’s commencement and completion. For mobile phone numbers, geographic location data would also be included.

The EU directive requires that no data regarding the content of communications be included, however, and it has directives regarding privacy, including the fact that data would be retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication.

Any data collected is to be destroyed at the end of that period.
http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/11/g...ry-email-data/





Airport Security: Intent to Deceive?

Can the science of deception detection help to catch terrorists? Sharon Weinberger takes a close look at the evidence for it.
Sharon Weinberger

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.

Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.

George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.

It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union. But the incident has brought renewed attention to a burgeoning controversy: is it possible to know whether people are being deceptive, or planning hostile acts, just by observing them?

Some people seem to think so. At London's Heathrow Airport, for example, the UK government is deploying behaviour-detection officers in a trial modelled in part on SPOT. And in the United States, the DHS is pursuing a programme that would use sensors to look at nonverbal behaviours, and thereby spot terrorists as they walk through a corridor. The US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies have expressed interest in similar ideas.

Yet a growing number of researchers are dubious — not just about the projects themselves, but about the science on which they are based. "Simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin," noted a 2007 report1 from a committee of credibility-assessment experts who reviewed research on portal screening.

"No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent," declares a 2008 report prepared by the JASON defence advisory group. And the TSA had no business deploying SPOT across the nation's airports "without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment", stated a two-year review of the programme released on 20 May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.

In response to such concerns, the TSA has commissioned an independent study that it hopes will produce evidence to show that SPOT works, and the DHS is promising rigorous peer review of its technology programme. For critics, however, this is too little, too late.

The writing's on the face

Most credibility-assessment researchers agree that humans are demonstrably poor at face-to-face lie detection. SPOT traces its intellectual roots to the small group of researchers who disagree — perhaps the most notable being Paul Ekman, now an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. In the 1970s, Ekman co-developed the 'facial action coding system' for analysing human facial expressions, and has since turned it into a methodology for teaching people how to link those expressions to a variety of hidden emotions, including an intent to deceive. He puts particular emphasis on 'microfacial' expressions such as a tensing of the lips or the raising of the brow — movements that might last just a fraction of a second, but which might represent attempts to hide a subject's true feelings. Ekman claims that a properly trained observer using these facial cues alone can detect deception with 70% accuracy — and can raise that figure to almost 100% accuracy by also taking into account gestures and body movements. Ekman says he has taught about one thousand TSA screeners and continues to consult on the programme.

Ekman's work has brought him cultural acclaim, ranging from a profile in bestselling book Blink — by Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine — to a fictionalized TV show based on his work, called Lie to Me. But scientists have generally given him a chillier reception. His critics argue that most of his peer-reviewed studies on microexpressions were published decades ago, and much of his more recent writing on the subject has not been peer reviewed. Ekman maintains that this publishing strategy is deliberate — that he no longer publishes all of the details of his work in the peer-reviewed literature because, he says, those papers are closely followed by scientists in countries such as Syria, Iran and China, which the United States views as a potential threat.

The data that Ekman has made available have not persuaded Charles Honts, a psychologist at Boise State University in Idaho who is an expert in the polygraph or 'lie detector'. Although he was trained on Ekman's coding system in the 1980s, Honts says, he has been unable to replicate Ekman's results on facial coding. David Raskin, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says he has had similar problems replicating Ekman's findings. "I have yet to see a comprehensive evaluation" of Ekman's work, he says.

Ekman counters that a big part of the replication problem is that polygraph experts, such as Honts and Raskin, don't follow the right protocol. "One of the things I teach is never ask a question that can be answered yes or no," Ekman says. "In a polygraph, that's the way you must ask questions." Raskin and Honts disagree with Ekman's criticism, saying that Ekman himself provided the materials and training in the facial-coding technique.

Yet another objection to Ekman's theory of deception detection is his idea of people who are naturally gifted at reading facial expressions. These "wizards", Ekman argues<bibr rid='b2 b3'/>, are proof that humans have the capability to spot deception, and that by studying those abilities, others can be taught to look for the same cues. But in a critique4 of Ekman's work, Charles Bond, a psychologist retired from Texas Christian University in Forth Worth, argues that Ekman's wizard theory has a number of flaws — perhaps the most crucial being that the most successful individuals were drawn out of a sample pool in the thousands. Rather than proving these people are human lie detectors, Bond maintains, the wizardry was merely due to random chance. "If enough people play the lottery, someone wins," says Bond.

Ekman says that Bond's criticism is a "ridiculous quibble" and that the statistics speak for themselves. The wizards' scores were based on three different tests, he says, making it impossible to assign their high success rate to chance. Bond replies that he took the three tests into account, and that doing so doesn't change his conclusion.

Leap of logic

But there is yet another problem, says Honts. Ekman's findings are "incongruent with all the rest of the data on detecting deception from observation". The human face very obviously displays emotion, says Maria Hartwig, a psychology professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But linking those displays to deception is "a leap of gargantuan dimensions not supported by scientific evidence", she says.

This point is disputed by one of Ekman's collaborators, Mark Frank, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Although Frank acknowledges that many peer-reviewed studies seem to show that people are not better than chance when it comes to picking up signs of deception, he argues that much of the research is skewed because it disproportionately involves young college students as test subjects, as opposed to police officers and others who might be older, more motivated and more experienced in detecting lies. Moreover, he says, when law-enforcement officials are tested, the stakes are often too low, and thus don't mimic a real-world setting. "I think a lot of the published material is still important, good work about human nature," says Frank. "But if you want to look at the total literature, and say, let's go apply it to counter-terrorism, it's a huge mistake."

A confounding problem is that the methodology used in SPOT, which is only partially based on Ekman's work, has never been subjected to controlled scientific tests. Nor is there much agreement as to what a fair test should entail. Controlled tests of deception detection typically involve people posing as would-be terrorists and attempting to make it through airport security. Yet Ekman calls this approach "totally bogus", because those playing the parts of 'terrorists' don't face the same stakes as a real terrorist — and so are unlikely to show the same emotions. "I'm on the record opposed to that sort of testing," he says.

But without such data, how is anyone supposed to evaluate SPOT — or its training programmes? Those programmes are "not in the public scientific domain", says Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "As a scientist, I want to see peer-reviewed journal articles, so I can look at procedures and data and know what the training procedures involve, and what the results do show."

Carl Maccario, a TSA analyst who helped to create SPOT, defends the science of the programme, saying that the agency has drawn on a number of scientists who study behavioural cues. One he mentions is David Givens, director of the nonprofit Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington. Givens published a number of scholarly articles on nonverbal communications in the 1970s and 1980s, although by his own account he is no longer involved in academic research. His more recent publications include books such as Your Body at Work: A Guide to Sight-Reading the Body Language of Business, Bosses, and Boardrooms (2010). But Givens says that he has no idea which nonverbal indicators have been selected by the TSA for use in SPOT, nor has he ever been asked by the TSA to review their choices.

In the absence of testing, Maccario points to anecdotal incidents, such as the 2008 case of Kevin Brown, a Jamaican national who was picked out by behaviour-detection officers at Orlando International Airport in Florida and arrested with what they took to be the makings of a pipe bomb. Witnesses said that Brown was rocking back and forth and acting strangely, so it is hard to say whether specialized training was needed to spot his unusual behaviour. In any case, Brown successfully claimed that the 'pipe bomb' materials were actually fuel bottles, pleaded guilty to bringing a flammable substance onto an aircraft, and was released on three years' probation.

Arrest record

The TSA does track statistics. From the SPOT programme's first phase, from January 2006 through to November 2009, according to the agency, behaviour-detection officers referred more than 232,000 people for secondary screening, which involves closer inspection of bags and testing for explosives. The agency notes that the vast majority of those subjected to that extra inspection continued on their travels with no further delays. But 1,710 were arrested, which the TSA cites as evidence for the programme's effectiveness. Critics, however, note that these statistics mean that fewer than 1% of the referrals actually lead to an arrest, and those arrests are overwhelmingly for criminal activities, such as outstanding warrants, completely unrelated to terrorism.

According to the GAO, TSA officials are unsure whether "the SPOT program has ever resulted in the arrest of anyone who is a terrorist, or who was planning to engage in terrorist-related activity". The TSA has hired an independent contractor to assess SPOT. Ekman says he has been apprised of the initial findings, and that they look promising. But the results aren't expected until next year. "It'll be monumental either way," says Maccario.

SPOT was in its first full year of operation when the DHS science and technology directorate began to look at ways to move people through the screening points faster. One was Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), which is now being funded at around US$10 million a year. The idea is to have passengers walk through a portal as sensors remotely monitor their vital signs for 'malintent': a neologism meaning the intent or desire to cause harm.

FAST operates on much the same physical principle as the century-old polygraph, which seeks to reveal lies by measuring psychophysiological responses such as respiration, cardiac rate and electrical resistance of the skin while a subject is being asked a series of questions. The FAST portal would also look at visual signals such as blink rate and body movement — and would give up the polygraph's contact sensors in favour of stand-off sensors such as thermal cameras, which can measure subtle changes in facial temperature, and BioLIDAR, a laser radar that can measure heart rate and respiration.

Most of the FAST work, particularly the sensors, is contracted out to the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, an independent, not-for-profit, research centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has the goal of producing a prototype portal next year. The project is then scheduled to enter a second phase that will remove the questioning process altogether and instead try to induce a response in the subjects by using various stimuli such as sounds or pictures, possibly of a known terrorist. "In the laboratory now, we have a success detection rate [percentage] of malintent or not malintent, in the mid-70s," says Robert Burns, the DHS programme manager for FAST. "That's significantly better than chance or what the trained people can do."

Those results have not yet been published, but Burns says that the FAST programme sets great store on peer review and publication, and that three papers are currently in the process of review. But FAST's critics maintain that the malintent theory and FAST both suffer from some of the same scientific flaws as SPOT. Flying is stressful: people worry about missing flights, they fight with their spouses and they worry about terrorism. All of these stresses heighten the emotions that would be monitored by the FAST sensors, but may have nothing to do with deception, let alone malintent. "To say that the observation is due to intent to do something wrong, illegal or cause harm, is leaping at the Moon," says Raskin.

The malintent theory underlying FAST is the creation of Daniel Martin, who is the director of research for FAST, and his wife, Jennifer Martin. Both are psychologists, and Daniel Martin, who is on the faculty of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has in the past focused primarily on the area of substance abuse. Daniel Martin says that at the time he and his wife developed the malintent theory, "there was minimal published work available that specifically tested whether physiological, behavioural, and paralinguistic cues could detect malintent in a realistic applied research study". He says that they have had to develop their own laboratory protocols to carry out those tests. Martin and his colleagues have just published what they say is the first peer-reviewed study to look specifically at the links between psychophysiological indicators and intent. The study5 looks at 40 native Arabic-speaking men and finds a connection between intent to deceive and a heart-rate variation known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

"I have not come out and said, 'We have found the answer'," Martin adds. "We are pursuing the answer, we're not sure yet. We have years yet to go."

The lack of answers has not stopped aviation-security programmes from moving forwards with deception detection. Maccario points to the UK pilot scheme, now in its first year at Heathrow Airport. He says that the programme, like SPOT, uses specially trained behaviour-detection officers, and "their initial results are very successful". Earlier this year, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity announced its own plans to study "defining, understanding, and ultimately detecting valid, reliable signatures of trust in humans". And about two years ago, the Pentagon asked JASON to look at the field.

"As we dug in, we found it was very hard to subject the research to the kinds of standard we're used to in the physical sciences," says JASON head Roy Schwitters, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, the executive summary of the JASON report, The Quest for Truth: Deception and Intent Detection, which was provided to Nature by the Pentagon, criticizes many of the allegedly successful results from deception-detection techniques as being post-hoc identifications. One problem, the study found, was that the reported success rates often included drug smugglers, warrant violators and other criminals, not covert combatants or suicide bombers who might not have the same motivations or emotional responses.

Sallie Keller, dean of engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and the head of the JASON study, said that it seemed that those involved in the field were trying to get their work peer reviewed. But doing research — even if it is properly peer reviewed — doesn't mean the technology is ready to be used in an airport. "The scientific community thinks that it is extremely important to go through the process of scientific verification, before rolling something out as a practice that people trust," she says.

Researchers involved in the field suggest a number of research avenues that could be more fruitful for counter-terrorism. Aldert Vrij, a social psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, says that structured interviews may offer the best credibility-assessment research. Nonverbal cues might play a part in this process, he says, but you need to actively interview a person. For example, his work shows that subjects were able to give more reasons for supporting an opinion that they believed than if they were acting as a devil's advocate and feigning support6. He suggests that such an approach could have helped to determine the beliefs of the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan after being taken into their confidence.

Although Israeli aviation security uses interview-intensive screening, it's not clear how practical such an interview method would be at busy airport checkpoints, which have to screen hundreds or thousands of passengers every hour. The guards would still need some way to choose who to interview, or no one would ever get on a plane. This is the seductive appeal of programmes such as SPOT and FAST.

But, to Honts, the decade since the 11 September attacks has been one of lost opportunity. Calling SPOT an "abject failure", he says that the government would have done better to invest first in basic science, experimentally establishing how people with malintent think and respond during screenings. That work, in turn, could have laid a more solid foundation for effective detection methods.

Granted, Honts says, that measured approach would have been slow, but it would have been a better investment than rushing to build hardware first, or implementing programmes before they have been tested. "We spent all this time, and all this money," he says, "and nothing has been accomplished."
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/1005...l/465412a.html





U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.
Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voice mail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”

Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”

He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the U.S.

“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?,” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir. … He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”

Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.

The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’, erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[i] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm.”

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the U.S., had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.

She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.

The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”

An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.

Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.

“I was in the military for 5 years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.

The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.

That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/





Pentagon Hunts WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange in Bid to Gag Website

Soldier Bradley Manning said to have leaked diplomatic cables to whistleblower, plus video of US troops killing Iraqis
Chris McGreal

American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.

The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad.

The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments.

The US authorities fear their release could "do serious damage to national security", said the Daily Beast, which is published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and New Yorker magazines.

Manning, 22, was arrested in Iraq last month after he was turned over to US authorities by a former hacker, Adrian Lamo, to whom he boasted of leaking the video and documents.

As an intelligence specialist in the US army, Manning had access to assessments from the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as frank diplomatic insights into Middle East governments.

In one of his messages to Lamo, obtained by Wired magazine, Manning said: "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available."

Although it is likely that WikiLeaks has broken US laws in de-encrypting the video from Baghdad and publishing secret documents, the tone of an American official who spoke to the Daily Beast sounded more desperate than threatening. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," the official said.

It is, in any case, not clear what legal measures US officials could use to stop publication of the cables. Assange has created an elaborate web of protection – with servers in several countries, notably Sweden, which has strong laws protecting whisteblowers.

WikiLeaks' response to the news that the Americans are trying to track down Assange came on Twitter. "Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly," it said.

After Manning was arrested, WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message that allegations "we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect".

Before his arrest, Manning told Lamo he was in part motivated to leak the video and documents by being ordered to look the other way in the face of injustice.

Messages from Manning, obtained by Wired, say he found that 15 Iraqis arrested by Iraqi police for printing "anti-Iraq" literature had merely put together an assessment of government corruption.

"I immediately took that information and ran to the [US army] officer to explain what was going on. He didn't want to hear any of it. He told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the [Iraqi police] in finding MORE detainees," Manning wrote.

"Everything started slipping after that. I saw things differently. I had always questioned the [way] things worked, and investigated to find the truth.

"But that was a point where I was … actively involved in something I was completely against."

The Pentagon has declined to comment on the grounds that what is in the documents is classified.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010...ntagon-manning





Cyberwar is Fiction
Robert Graham

I'm reading various articles about the Russia's proposal, with support from the UN, for a "cyberwarfare arms limitation treaty". What astounds me is that nobody seems to realize that "cyberwarfare" is a fictional story, and that "arms" in cyberspace don't exist.

"Cyberwar" and "cyberweapons" are fiction. The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace are nothing like warfare, and the tools hackers use are nothing like weapons. Putting "cyber" in front a something is just way for people to grasp technical concepts, the analogies quickly break down, and are useless when taken too far (such as a "cyber disarmament treaty"). Unfortunately, it's the clueless people who believe in these analogies that are driving national policy.

I can disable the national power grids of half the countries in the world using nothing more than an iPhone. There is no such thing as "cyberweapons". Sure, there are tools that make this easier, but it's the person using the tools, and not the tools themselves, that are important.

What makes special forces (like the Green Berets or Navy Seals) so much better than the average soldier? Is it better weapons? No, it's better training. These guys are trained to kill you with their hands, or with a knife, or with anything that's available. The same is true with hackers: all we need is some crappy computer and a network connection, and we can hack into anything. (During a "pen-test", I've had my finger on the "off" switch for an entire country's power grid from a mobile phone).

Hacking is very technical, so we use analogies to explain how it works. The thing to remember is that these are just analogies. Any conclusions you might draw from the analogies could be wrong.

For example, let's say that you want to attack a castle. You use catapults to hurl rocks at the walls, but the walls are too strong. So, you get bigger catapults to hurl bigger rocks.

But then somebody comes to you with a better idea. He has a trained dog that can sniff out secret tunnels. You send the dog out, he finds a tunnel, your soldiers sneak in, and take control of the castle.

So, the next time you attack a castle, you send the dog out to find tunnels. However, the dog comes back without finding anything. Therefore, you conclude, you need a bigger dog. The "dog" is analogous to a "catapult", and if a bigger catapult does its job better, so must a bigger dog. (I'm assuming at this point the reader understands the foolishness of this analogy, and that the size of the dog is irrelevant).

The same is true of "cyberweapons", an analogy used to describe tools like "exploits". An "exploit" is a program that you aim at another computer in order to take control of it. Most people in our military think that if an exploit doesn't work against a well-defended computer, then you need a more "powerful" exploit. This is wrong, in exactly that same way that a "bigger dog" won't help. (Like finding secret tunnels to sneak into castles, hackers find programming bugs, then exploit them to sneak into computers).

This is why the military will never understand cyberspace. Their idea of attack and defense is based on the idea of "brute force": just throw more resources at it, such as bigger bombs, more soldiers, higher tech airplanes. Defeating enemies in cyberspace is different, means outsmarting them, and the military doesn't do smart.

Moreover, the military is very goal driven. They want weapons that have a specific effect. That's not how hacking works. Hacking is opportunistic. For example, let's say that you want to attack Iran. You might give your cyberwarriors the task of taking out their radar. That's not something the cyberwarriors could do: chances are good that the exploits they have will have no effect on Iranian radar computers.

Instead, the correct thing would be to assign your cyberwarriors the task of doing anything they can, attack any Iranian computers vulnerable to the exploits they have. It's hard to predict what the outcome would be: maybe a crash of their financial markets, disruption of their military communications, or massive blackouts.

This is why a nation's army will not be involved in a true "cyberwar": hacking just doesn't fit into the military model.

It's also why China and Russia are winning a cybewar against the United States: because it's not their armies conducting the war.

Totalitarian governments, like China, Russia, or Iran, need dirty work done, but without getting caught. They need "plausible deniability". Unfortunately, this is essentially impossible: you really can't have big conspiracies without leaking information.

To fix this, these governments sponsor nationalistic youth groups, like the "Nashi" in Russia, or the "Basij" in Iran. These groups are sympathetic to the government, but not technically under control of the government. These groups love their national government, and tend to do things that government would want, without being told.

Thus, when journalists in Russia says something critical of the government, they are beaten up (or murdered) by the Nashi. The government never tells the Nashi to beat anybody up - it just happens. At most, the government will instruct police not to investigate the crimes too heavily. As a result, Russia is one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, but without a national policy to kill journalists.

The problem with these youth groups is that since they aren't being controlled by the central government, they don't always get the right results. Sometimes the wrong people are killed, or the right journalists are ignored. It's the price the government has to pay in order to keep its hands clean.

This is what happened in the "cyberattacks" against Estonia and Georgia. The attacks were carried out by nationalistic hackers working independently from the main government. The government doesn't tell these hackers what to do; they just know that in any conflict, nationalistic youths will hack their enemy. The price Russia pays for this, though, is a lot of cybercrime within the country. (Russian hackers aren't just a problem here in America, they cause a lot of problems within Russia as well).

Our own military and intelligence organizations do not believe in this. They can only believe in conspiracies run by government - they cannot deal with the fact that the attacks coming from China and Russia are not being directed by those governments. But both Russia and China understand this. This is why Russia is pushing for a "cyberspace disarmament treaty". It would only hindered American military and intelligence services, but wouldn't affect nationalistic youth groups. American has no nationalistic youth groups. Indeed, in America, such youths are more concerned about attacking our own government and corporations ("fighting the Man") than they are about fighting foreign adversaries.

The basic truth in cybersecurity is that you don't have to build products/services that outwit hackers, you only have to outwit your customers. As long as you know a tiny bit more about hacking than your customers, they will buy anything from you. I'm seeing that a lot lately, such as the recent case of Booz and Allen hyping fictional stories about the power grid in order to secure a $34-million contract from the government. Another example is the "Center for Strategic and International Studies" (CSIS). It's a lobbying organization that produced a document that has become a blueprint for cybersecurity regulation that threatens our liberties in cyberspace. This sort of cluelessness is a bigger danger to cyberspace than Russian hackers.

The military has set up a "cyber command" to coordinate all offensive/defensive operations in cyberspace. Its commander, General Keith Alexander, gave a speech at CSIS recently. I don't know what to make of it. On one hand, he said things that demonstrate cluelessness, but on the other hand, he said things that demonstrate competence with the subject. Generals tend to be geniuses, so I would be a fool to assume Gen. Alexander is clueless, so I'll have to assume he was simplifying things for a clueless audience. I'm worried nonetheless.

So, to summarize, the idea of nation states waging cyberwar with powerful cyberweapons is utter fiction. It's an analogy we might use to describe some things, but it's not what really goes on in cyberspace. The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace are nothing like warfare, and the tools hackers use are nothing like weapons. However, this fiction is what is driving national policy, and that worries me a lot. I feel this cluelessness is a bigger danger to cyberspace than foreign hackers.
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2010/0...s-fiction.html





Military Intelligence Taps Social Networking Skills
Christopher Drew

As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular.

Now a freckle-faced 25, a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan.

Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chatrooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire.

“2 poss children in fov,” the team flashed as Marines on the ground lined up an air strike, chat lingo for possible innocents within the drone’s field of view. The strike was aborted.

Another message, referring to a Taliban compound, warned: “fire coming from cmpnd.” The Marines responded by strafing the fighters, killing nine of them.

Lieutenant Christopher and her crew might be fighting on distant keypads instead of ducking bullets, but they head into battle just the same every day. They and thousands of other young Air Force analysts are showing how the Facebook generation’s skills are being exploited — and paying dividends — in America’s wars.

The Marines say the analysts, who are mostly in their early to mid-20s, paved the way for them to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan earlier this year with minimal casualties. And as the analysts quickly pass on the latest data from drones and other spy planes, they are creating the fluid connections needed to hunt small groups of fighters and other fleeting targets, military officials say.

But there can be difficulties in operating from so far away.

Late last month, military authorities in Afghanistan released a report chastising a Predator drone crew in an incident involving a helicopter attack that killed 23 civilians in February. Military officials say analysts in Florida who were monitoring the drone’s video feed cautioned two or three times in a chatroom that children were in the group, but the drone’s pilot failed to relay those warnings to the ground commander.

For the most part, though, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes.

“If you want to act quickly, you’ve got to flatten things out and engage at the lowest possible levels,” said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who runs the Air Force intelligence squadron at this base near Sacramento.

The connections have been made possible by the growing fleet of remote-controlled planes, like the Predators and Reapers, which send a steady flow of battlefield video to intelligence centers across the globe.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the military use drones to wage long-distance war against insurgents, with pilots in the United States pressing the missile-firing buttons. But as commanders in Afghanistan mass drones and U-2 spy planes over the hottest areas, the networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare.

And the mechanics are simple in this age of satellite relays. Besides viewing video feeds, the analysts scan still images and enemy conversations. As they log the information into chatrooms, the analysts carry on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol.

Marine intelligence officers say that during the Marja offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs.

“To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before,” said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who was stationed here as a liaison to the analysts.

Sergeant Smothers saw how easily the distance could melt away when an analyst, peering at images from a U-2, suddenly stuck up his hand and yelled, “Check!” — the signal for a supervisor to verify a spotting.

Sergeant Smothers said he and two Air Force officers rushed over and confirmed the existence of a roadside bomb. Nearby on a big screen map in the windowless room, they could see a Marine convoy approaching the site.

The group started sending frantic chat messages to their Marine contacts in the area.

As they watched the video feed from a drone, they could see that their messages had been heard: the convoy came to a sudden stop, 500 feet from the bomb.

“To me, this whole operation was like a template for what we should be doing in the future,” Sergeant Smothers said.

Military officials said they are planning to repeat the operation around Kandahar.

The effort is a major turnaround for the Air Force, which had been criticized for taking too long to adjust to different types of threats since 9/11. During the cold war, it focused mostly on fixed targets like Soviet bases. But commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have often complained that it is hard to get help from spy planes before insurgents slipped away.

Marine and Army officers say that that began to change as more planes were sent to Afghanistan in early 2009 and the Air Force got better at blending the various types of intelligence into a fuller picture.

And the new analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have been crucial.

While Air Force analysts were once backroom technicians, the latest generation works in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk. Large screens on the walls display the feeds from drones, and coffee and Red Bull help them get through the 12-hour shifts.

The chatrooms are no-frills boxes on a computer screen with lines of rolling text, and crew leaders keep dozens of them open at once. They may look crude compared to Facebook, but Lieutenant Christopher said they were effective in building rapport.

“When it’s not busy, I’ll be like, ‘Hey, how’s your day going?’ ” she said. “It’s not just, ‘What do you need?’ ”

There is also some old-fashioned interaction.

The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts at bases like this and is hiring 2,100 more, has sent liaisons to Afghanistan to help understand the priorities on the ground. And some analysts pick up the phone to build closer bonds with soldiers they have never seen.

Andres Morales, a senior airman, said he often talked to a 24-year-old Army lieutenant, helping his battalion find arms caches and track enemy fighters.

But after four of his fellow soldiers were killed, “he didn’t really want to talk about intelligence,” Airman Morales, 27, said. “He wanted to talk, more or less, about how life is in California, and how when he comes back, we’re going to go surfing together.”

Quentin Arnold, 22, another enlisted analyst, said he had been working so closely with the Marines that 15 to 20 had asked to be friends on Facebook. He just collected $1,500 from analysts here to send a care package, including a PlayStation 3 game system and an Xbox 360, to some Marines.

Still, three-quarters of the 350 analysts here have never been to the war zones, so a cultural divide can pop up. Several said they were a bit intimidated when Sergeant Smothers, 36, who has had five tours in Iraq, strode onto the floor here in February.

At the time, the analysts were blending data from the U-2s and the drones to watch the roads into Marja and fields where helicopters might land. But as Sergeant Smothers looked over their shoulders, encouraging them to warn the Marines about even the most tentative threats, the analysts warmed up.

“It was like the shy house cat that wouldn’t talk to you at first and now just won’t stay out of your lap,” he said.

As the operation unfolded, the analysts passed on leads that enabled the Marines to kill at least 15 insurgents planting bombs.

Lieutenant Christopher, who loves to chat on Facebook with her family in Ohio, was so exhausted from overnight shifts during that period that she skipped Facebook and went right to sleep. And sometimes, she said, she ended up dreaming about what she had just seen in the war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/te...homefront.html





Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches
Declan McCullagh

A federal judge has ruled that border agents cannot seize a traveler's laptop, keep in locked up for months, and examine it for contraband files without a warrant half a year later.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern District of California rejected the Obama administration's argument that no warrant was necessary to look through the electronic files of an American citizen who was returning home from a trip to South Korea.

"The court concludes that June search required a warrant," White ruled on June 2, referring to a search of Andrew Hanson's computer that took place a year ago. Hanson arrived San Francisco International Airport in January 2009.

The Justice Department invoked a novel argument--which White dubbed "unpersuasive"--claiming that while Hanson was able to enter the country, his laptop remained in a kind of legal limbo where the Bill of Rights did not apply. (The Fourth Amendment generally requires a warrant for searches.)

"Until merchandise has cleared customs, it may not enter the United States," assistant U.S. attorney Owen Martikan argued. "The laptop never cleared customs and was maintained in government custody until it was searched..."

This is not exactly a new dispute: two years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection announced that it reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time any laptops that are taken across the border.

Last year, the department reiterated that claim, saying laptops and electronic gadgetry can still be seized and held indefinitely. There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets.

In response, Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, introduced a bill that would require border agents to obtain a warrant or court order to hold such a device for more than 24 hours.

Customs agents say that after Hanson was randomly selected for a secondary baggage examination, he became nervous. That led Customs agent Sheryl Edwards to ask for an examination of Hanson's laptop, a digital camera with memory card, two CD-ROMs, and two DVDs.

That examination, customs agents say, showed one incriminating photograph: an adolescent girl covered with mud, standing on a beach, and not wearing any clothes. Edwards concluded that the image was illegal; Hanson was charged with transportation and possession of child pornography in September 2009. He has pleaded not guilty.

For his part, Eric Chase, an attorney representing Hanson, acknowledged that an immediate search conducted at the border without a warrant is permissible. But police perusal of a hard drive six months later definitely is not, he said when asking the court to toss out the results of the June 2009 search.

"As applied to border searches generally, agents, after taking their permissible look while at the border crossing itself, would be free to 'detain' electronic devices and conduct further examinations whenever and wherever they pleased as justified solely because their 'peek' exposed the computer's contents to law enforcement," Chase wrote.

Customs agents also searched Hanson's laptop three times in February 2009, with the first search taking place about a week after he entered the country and turning up no evidence of child pornography. The second and third searches allegedly did. White allowed the results of those searches to be used as evidence, saying they were "justified as an extended border search supported by reasonable suspicion."

A 2006 Police Blotter article reported that the Ninth Circuit, which sets precedents that are binding on San Francisco federal courts, ruled that random searches of laptops at the border without a search warrant is permissible. But the Ninth Circuit did not address what happens if the search takes place a month or half a year later.

Excerpt from court ruling:

The government argues that the February search was justified as an extended border search supported by reasonable suspicion...In contrast to a search conducted at the border, or its functional equivalent, an extended border search must be supported by "'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the search was involved in criminal activity, rather than simply mere suspicion or no suspicion." In order to determine whether the search was supported by reasonable suspicion, the court examines the totality of the circumstances, such as the time and distance elapsed, whether there was a lapse in surveillance, and the diligence of law enforcement.

Because the agents did not find contraband while the laptop was located at the border and, in light of the time and distance that elapsed before the search continued, the court concluded that the search should be analyzed as an extended border search. Given the passage of time between the January and February searches and the fact that the February search was not conduct(ed) at the border, or its functional equivalent, the court concludes that the February search should be analyzed under the extended border search doctrine and must be justified by reasonable suspicion.

When the court examines the totality of the circumstances, including Officer Edwards' description of the Image, her observations that Hanson appeared nervous, the discovery of the condoms and the male-enhancement pills, and Hanson's statement that he had been working with children, the court concludes that the government has met its burden to show the February search was supported by reasonable suspicion. Accordingly, Hanson's motion is DENIED IN PART on this basis...

The government also argues that because Officer Edwards properly seized the laptop, and because the laptop remained in law enforcement custody, she was entitled to conduct a more thorough search at a later time. However, the cases on which the government relies for this argument address the right to conduct a more thorough search of a container as a search incident to a valid arrest, another recognized exception to the warrant requirement... Hanson was not arrested on January 27, 2009, and for that reason the court finds the government's reliance on the "search incident to a valid arrest" line of cases to be inapposite. Accordingly, because the court concludes that June search required a warrant, and because it is undisputed that the search was conducted without a warrant, Hanson's motion is GRANTED IN PART on this basis.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20007315-38.html





Amazon Cloud Uses FedEx Instead of the Internet to Ship Data

Amazon cloud customers 'bypass the Internet' by shipping storage devices via airmail
Jon Brodkin

Amazon's cloud storage service has unveiled a brand new way to quickly move giant amounts of data to the cloud, one so technologically advanced that it actually allows customers to "bypass the Internet."

What is this new technology, you may ask? It's called FedEx. For large amounts of data, terabytes, it could actually take weeks to upload to Amazon's servers over the Internet. So Amazon is now letting customers put a storage device in the mail and Amazon will take care of the data transfer within its own high-speed internal network.

The new Amazon Web Services Import/Export service, which became generally available Thursday, is at once a convenient method of easing the pain caused by large data transfers and a recognition that the Internet as it stands today doesn't necessarily provide the unlimited, on-demand scalability that cloud computing providers like to promise.

"AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport," Amazon says. "AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon's high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity."

The data transfer costs $80 per physical storage device, plus $2.49 for each hour it takes to load data. The standard Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) charges also apply. Devices can be shipped to Amazon locations in Seattle, Virginia, and Dublin, Ireland.

Amazon provides an online calculator to help customers decide whether it makes financial sense to ship data via mail rather than uploading over the Internet. You plug in the number of terabytes, devices, average file size, return shipping information and other factors, and find out how much the data transfer would cost via mail compared to standard Internet uploads.

For example, transferring data from a single device containing 2TB would require 26 hours of data loading time and cost $144.74. Uploading the same amount of data over the Internet would cost $204.80. The calculator does not show how long the Internet transfer would take.

One thing to note is that Internet-based data transfers are currently free, but this temporary promotion will end on June 30. The charge of $204.80 would apply for data transfers after June 30.

Mailing storage devices to vendors is a decidedly old-school method. Customers can still send tapes and other storage boxes to disaster recovery vendors, such as Iron Mountain. But this is the first time Amazon has provided such a service, a company spokesperson said.

While AWS Import/Export is just now hitting availability, Amazon detailed three businesses that have already used the service, including Quantivo, which has been mailing its customers' data to Amazon. The Import/Export service appears to have been in beta since December.

"Ramping up a new customer involves loading months or years of historical data (many terabytes), and would require weeks of data transfer over the Internet," Quantivo CTO Paul O'Leary said in the Amazon announcement. "AWS Import/Export allows our customers to transfer their data directly to Quantivo's analytics running on Amazon Web Services. This entire process takes just a few days, and allows us to get even our largest customers up and running in less than two weeks, further increasing our value for customers."

Amazon provides a list of storage device requirements – for example, they must use file formats FAT32, ext2, ext3 or NTFS, weigh no more than 50 pounds and hold no more than 4TB. Amazon also notes that "You must ship your storage device with its power supply and interface cables. Without these we can't transfer your data and will return your device."

Amazon says customers can use any shipping company, but recommends using one that provides tracking numbers. Amazon will ship devices back to customers after data transfers are complete, but warns businesses to keep a second copy of their data internally.
"Although AWS has a number of internal controls and procedures to prevent loss, damage or disclosure of your data, AWS is not responsible for damages associated with loss or inadvertent disclosure of data; or the loss, damage, or destruction of the physical hardware," Amazon says. "You should always retain a back-up copy of your data."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...oud-fedex.html





Thousands of Anti-Terror Searches Were Illegal
BBC

Police officer Police have been criticised for their use of stop and search powers

Thousands of people across the UK might have been stopped and searched illegally, figures released by the Home Office suggest.

Powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act were used in "error" after the proper authorisations were not given.

In one example, for April 2004, the Met Police wrongly stopped 840 people.

Dozens of other examples from across the UK have been uncovered before rules were tightened in 2008.

Police Minister Nick Herbert said administrative errors were to blame and he has ordered an internal review of procedures.

The Metropolitan Police is also urgently considering what steps can be taken to contact the individuals concerned.
Extremists

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows police to stop and search someone without suspicion that an offence has occurred.

The controversial powers can be used only in specific areas on the orders of a police chief, with later approval by the home secretary.

Supporters say such powers can make it harder for extremists to carry out reconnaissance in public areas, such as near high-profile tourist attractions.

But critics, including the government's reviewer of terror legislation, Lord Carlile, say they unfairly target some ethnic groups and increase community tensions.

The Met is responsible for the vast majority of section 44 operations, many of which take place in Westminster and at major transport hubs or "iconic" tourist sites such as Buckingham Palace.

The force only discovered the April 2004 blunder after a request was made under the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year.

Officials researching stop and search authorisations found a Home Office minister had not signed within 48 hours.

Asked whether the force now faced a flood of legal actions, he said: "It is a matter for individuals to seek legal advice in relation to this issue."

The spokesman also denied the force had misled the public, saying: "The Met first became aware of the issue in April 2010 during the process of compiling data in answer to a Freedom of Information request.

"All public statements issued before that date were made in good faith and there was no intention to mislead the public."

The Met case sparked a trawl for errors across the UK.

Officials discovered 33 occasions when forces asked for a 29-day search window, even though the legislation only allows a maximum of 28 days. In two cases, forces asked for 30 days.

'Public confidence'

The Home Office has written to each of the 14 police forces concerned to alert them to the errors.

It said the forces were now in the process of assessing how many individuals were illegally stopped and searched and would "do their best to contact those involved".

Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones said: "I am very concerned by these historical administrative errors. To maintain public confidence in our counter-terrorism powers, it is absolutely crucial all those responsible for exercising them do so properly.

"I take these matters extremely seriously and have instructed the department to conduct an urgent review of current procedures to ensure that errors can be prevented in future.

"The government is already committed to undertaking a review of counter-terrorism legislation which will include the use of stop and search powers in section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. We shall make our findings known as soon as possible."

Officials at the Home Office, National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) are examining the mistakes.

The 40 flawed operations uncovered by officials include three which have previously been identified as being based on flawed paperwork.

The forces involved are: Metropolitan Police, North Yorkshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Essex, Greater Manchester, Fife, South Wales and Thames Valley.

Invalid operations linked to Sussex Police and South Wales Police have been highlighted to Parliament previously.

Acpo lead officer on stop and search, Chief Constable Craig Mackey, said: "Stop and search can work well when it is carried out with the support and understanding of the community. Used correctly, it can create a hostile environment for terrorists to operate in and help protect the public."

In January this year, the powers were ruled illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. The new coalition government has said it is reviewing their use, as part of a wider overhaul of anti-terror legislation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/politics/10283701.stm





The Provincial Lawyer Who is Helping Plot an Emirate Coup

A bloodless coup to take control of an Arab Gulf state is being plotted by an unlikely alliance that includes a powerful firm of US lobbyists and a provincial English high-street solicitor.

Peter Cathcart, a 59-year-old lawyer from Farnham, has been hired by the ousted crown prince of Ras al-Khaimah (RAK) in the United Arab Emirates to co-ordinate the plot aimed at returning him to power after seven years in exile.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that Cathcart has acted as a paid agent for Sheikh Khalid bin Saqr al-Qasimi in a multimillion-pound campaign to "undermine the current regime's standing" and to force the leadership of the UAE in Abu Dhabi, which has powerful influence over the emirate, to "make a change".

RAK is a strategically important part of the UAE, 50 miles from Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, through which 17 million barrels of oil are shipped each day. Sheikh Khalid, 66, was ousted by his father and brother as de facto leader in 2003.

The campaign alleges the regime presents an international security threat because the kingdom has become "a rogue state and gateway for Iran", allowing the shipment of weapons, including nuclear weapons parts, drugs and blood diamonds as well as military personnel and terrorists from al-Qaida and other networks.

Cathcart, a miniature steam train enthusiast and chairman of his local parish council who operates from modest offices in the outer London suburbs, cuts an unlikely figure in the plot, which involves highly paid US PR consultants, Washington lobbyists and former US-special forces strategists hired at a cost of at least $3.7m (£2.6m). They include BSKH, the lobbying firm which helped Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who opposed Saddam Hussein and was widely blamed for providing unsubstantiated evidence about weapons of mass destruction used as justification for an invasion of Iraq.

It is not suggested that Cathcart's involvement is unlawful.

The plotters have claimed the RAK regime is implicated in an alleged terror plot to blow up the world's tallest building in Dubai, and a possible Iranian attack on US participants in the America's Cup yachting race, due to take place in the emirate but later cancelled.

The campaign to return Sheikh Khalid to power comes amid international concern about Iran's nuclear programme, and the deposed sheikh's focus on links between RAK and Iran appears calculated to turn international opinion, particularly in Washington, against the family who rejected him.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, is among the US politicians including more than a dozen congressmen from whom Sheikh Khalid has sought support. In February, he made a speech in Washington in which he stated: "I am troubled that the current regime has allowed RAK to devolve into a rogue state and strategic gateway for Iran. Published reports in the Gulf region have repeatedly indicated that Iran has taken advantage of our free trade zones, using them as a transfer point to smuggle cargo, including arms, electronics, weapons parts, drugs and even humans to Africa, Europe and Asia."

His US communications team insists the claims are "well sourced", but they were rejected by the UAE embassy in London. The UAE also denied the Sheikh's claim that RAK has links to Iran's nuclear programme and that a port in RAK has in effect become an Iranian base, allowing Tehran to avoid international sanctions.

"These appear to be old, scurrilous rumours which Sheik Khalid has made on numerous occasions," a spokesman for the UAE said in a statement. "His claims are baseless and without foundation and should be seen in the context of his long-standing dispute with his family. We are surprised that these old allegations are now being rehashed once again."

Sources close to the plot believe it is now entering its endgame. Sheikh Khalid is understood to have returned to the UAE from exile in London last month and has been in Abu Dhabi meeting officials from the UAE federal government, they said.

The ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, is the UAE president and ratifies changes to the leadership of the emirates.

The plot has been under way since at least 2008, according to the documents seen by the Guardian. They show that Cathcart has overseen the disbursement of several million dollars to fund the plot and acted as an intermediary between PR consultants, lobbyists and Sheikh Khalid. Cathcart has also met congressmen in Washington DC on behalf of the sheikh and oversaw requests for new appointments to the team. On one occasion he was asked to approve win-bonuses for would-be US advisers of $250,000 per person if the sheikh returns to power.

Cathcart declined repeated requests by the Guardian to comment on his role.

Asked by the Guardian if "regime change" was a legitimate goal, the sheikh's communications team replied: "If you believe in the peace, prosperity and security of the region and in protecting US national security interests, of course. If you are pro-Iranian or believe that the questionable activities in RAK should be allowed to move forward without any concern, then you would probably not approve of our activities."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...rt-prince-coup





Times Company Objects to News-Reader App
Brad Stone

Last week I wrote about the Pulse News Reader, a popular iPad application developed by two students at the Stanford Institute of Design that collects and presents articles from Web sites of news organizations like The New York Times.

As it turns out, people on the business side of The New York Times Company saw my post and took issue with some aspects of the application.

On Monday afternoon, after Steven P. Jobs himself had highlighted Pulse in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple received a letter from a Times Company lawyer and removed Pulse from the App store.

The main problem, as the lawyer said in his letter, was that the application took pages from NYTimes.com and Boston.com, which is also owned by the Times Company, and put them in a frame within the app, with other content around the edges.

The lawyer also wrote that the app, which sells for $3.99, represented a commercialization of the company’s free RSS feeds. Both features violate the company’s terms of use for the sites, the lawyer wrote.

“We want to be clear that we are willing to work with Pulse, but only under our terms of use,” said Robert Christie, a spokesman for the Times Company.

On Tuesday afternoon the app reappeared in the App Store. When asked about the reversal, Mr. Christie said: “We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation.”

An Apple spokesman and the developers of the Pulse app did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Times Company’s objection to the commercial use of the RSS feeds raised eyebrows among tech bloggers. Software companies have been selling PC-based news reader applications for years, and there are many available for smartphones as well.

Web sites publish RSS feeds primarily for use by such programs, which allow quick browsing of updates from many sites in one place. Many people now use Web-based RSS readers like Google Reader.

The Times’s feeds include headlines and summaries of articles, with links to the full articles on NYTimes.com.

Mr. Christie said that if other commercial RSS readers were making use of Times content, they were most likely doing so under an agreement with the Times Company.

The conflict highlights the distinctions that some news organizations are trying to draw on mobile devices. Often they are publishing two versions of their content for reading on devices like the iPad: one on the open Web, and one available through an application.

The Times’s iPad application, which is free, offers a more limited selection of content than is available on its Web site.

News-reading applications like Pulse force news organizations to confront the fact that those two categories can be easily blurred, with Web content appearing within an app.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...ws-reader-app/





Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Nudges Web Publishers to App Store
Eliot Van Buskirk

One item Steve Jobs didn’t mention during his presentation at WWDC on Monday is Apple Safari 5’s prominent ad-blocking feature, which strips advertisements and other design elements from any web page that appears to be “an article,” with apparently grim implications for online publications.

“Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles,” reads Apple’s description, striking fear into the hearts of online ad sales departments. “So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.”

Most browsers can block pop-up ads one way or another, and like Safari 5, several add-ons including Readability, Instapaper and Add-Art can remove web banner advertisements, interactive ads, e-mail sign-ups and navigation bars to get at the heart of a news story, even though those elements pay the bills.

To be fair, Safari 5 users must opt to remove ads manually for each page they load if they want to use the Reader feature, by clicking a button (screenshot above). That means publishers with tasteful, uncrowded designs should see fewer of their ads removed by those users, whether they’re reading on iOS, Macintosh or Windows devices. Safari only has a small percentage of the overall web browser market, and obviously, this won’t decimate online advertising overnight.

However, Apple’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is higher — twice that of Android and second only to RIM, according to comScore’s numbers for February, the last month for which it reported smartphone market share. According to Jobs, the iPhone’s web browsing share is disproportionately large, at 58 percent.

And Safari is the default browser on the iPhone and the iPad.

(Despite a widely circulated article to the contrary, Android did not actually overtake iPhone in mobile web views in April, although Android phones outsold iPhones for the first time ever last quarter, according to Gartner Research, 3.6 million to 3 million.)

Ultimately, Apple’s ad blocker differs from the rest because the company also offers a protected alternative for web publishers — the Apple App Store — where they can publish without having their advertisements blocked.

Apple generally encourages web developers who want to offer advanced functionality to use the HTML5 standard for the web. But Apple wins when publishers develop apps specifically for its platforms and push users to those, rather than pushing them to web pages available to user’s of any device with a web browser.

Guess where publications’ ads won’t get blocked? Inside an iOS app. And if those same publishers choose to run Apple iAds within their iPhone apps, Apple wins again, earning a 40 percent cut of resulting ad revenue — a position in which no other ad blocker or web browser finds itself.

Yes, there’s Google Chrome, now that the FTC has green-lit Google’s acquisition of AdMob, but Chrome doesn’t include a prominent feature for blocking ads that appear with web articles.

It may seem like a subtle move for Apple to release a browser that removes ads from the web, and of course, nobody likes reading web pages that are drowning in ads. But when Apple owns a walled garden that offers publishers refuge from web perils like ad blockers, it also seems disingenuous of the company to make the world outside of that garden more perilous for publishers.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...s-to-app-store





Google vs. Apple
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. thinks its increasingly bitter rival Apple Inc. is trying to muscle it out of the mobile advertising competition on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The latest dispute between the Silicon Valley powerhouses centers on a proposed change that could hobble Google's ability to sell and place ads on devices running on Apple's latest mobile operating system, which comes out this month.

Omar Hamoui, the executive in charge of Google's newly acquired mobile ad service, AdMob, attacked Apple's new restrictions as a threat to competition in a blog posting Wednesday. He also warned the change would decrease the ad revenue flowing to the developers of iPhone and iPad applications, a scenario that could drive up the prices that consumers pay for the programs.

Apple didn't immediately return calls seeking comment.

Google paid $750 million to buy AdMob, partly because of AdMob's success selling ads on the iPhone. AdMob, founded in 2006, was so good at it that Apple wanted to buy the company before being trumped by Google last fall.

Apple has since set up own ad service, iAd, fueling Google's suspicion that its rival wants to monopolize the commercial messages shown on the more than 50 million iPhones and iPads that have already been sold.

Under the terms of Apple's latest operating system for those devices, critical information for distributing and analyzing ads won't be shared with services owned by makers of other mobile operating systems.

That threatens to lock out AdMob because Google's Android operating system competes with the iPhone.

That could be a major blow to AdMob, which distributed 30 percent of its ads to iPhones, iPads and iPods in April. Hamoui indicated he still hopes to persuade Apple to scrap the rule change.

On the flip side, Apple's restrictions could be an advantage for smaller, independent ad networks that would still have all the usual data needed to place ads on iPhones and iPads. But that could turn out to be a handicap for mobile advertising services seeking to be bought by a larger company such as Microsoft Corp. or Yahoo Inc.

It's unclear whether Apple will enforce the restrictions on how the ad data can be shared, said Noah Elkin, an analyst for eMarketer, a research firm.

"I think what we have here is two companies sparring for control of what is potentially a very big advertising market," Elkin said. The U.S. mobile ad market is expected to grow from about $600 million this year to more than $1.5 billion in 2013, according to eMarketer.

If Apple's rules were to create a competitive barrier, it would likely attract the attention of antitrust regulators.

After a six-month review, the Federal Trade Commission approved Google's purchase of AdMob largely because the agency believe Apple's entrance into the mobile ad market would foster adequate competition. In its approval of the AdMob deal, the FTC vowed to continue to monitor the mobile ad market for anticompetitive behavior.

The FTC declined to comment Wednesday.
http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=2579





Microsoft Hides Mystery Firefox Extension in Toolbar Update
Emil Protalinski

As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox, both without the user's permission. As you can see in the Windows Update screenshot above, Microsoft does not indicate that the update will install anything for either browser. It's also not really clear what the installed extension actually does.

To make matters worse, the update was marked "Important" instead of "Optional," which means it was more likely to be installed either automatically (if the user has Automatic Updates on) or manually when the user clicks Install (Important updates are checked by default).

The Microsoft Support page for this update, KB982217, describes the issues the update supposedly fixes: "In an Internet browser, you specify a homepage that is not a fully qualified URL. However, Windows Live Toolbar, MSN Toolbar, or Bing Bar may not categorize your homepage correctly. Therefore, the homepage reporting may be generated incorrectly for users who select the Help improve our services option when they install these toolbars."

The Bing Bar, which has replaced both the Windows Live Toolbar and the MSN toolbar, is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, which is why we assume that only these two browsers are tampered with. Still, the KB article does not mention an add-on or an extension being installed or updated.

Since we could not find any official documentation from Microsoft, we checked the actual IE add-on and Firefox extension. Unfortunately, they were not terribly helpful; all we discovered was that the IE add-on is at version 3.0.126.0, so it has been around for a while, and that the Firefox extension is at version 1.0, so it's likely it was only released now. Both seem to be installed in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Search Enhancement Pack\Search Helper\." Inside, there is a file called "SEPsearchhelperie.dll" that is responsible for the IE add-on and a "firefoxextension" folder responsible for Firefox. The update can't be uninstalled, but deleting these files works just fine.

Users started reporting this issue yesterday on the MozillaZine forums in the Firefox Support section. The Firefox users ran Windows Update and, after they restarted Firefox, they noticed that the Extensions window had opened up and was showing a new resident: Search Helper Extension. IE users likely did not notice the update because the browser does not check on launch to see if new add-ons are installed. At the time of writing, the thread in question only had 14 posts, but we verified that the extension is indeed installed:

On one of our Windows systems, we had the Windows Live Toolbar installed for Internet Explorer but not for Firefox. Nevertheless, installing this update added the add-on/extension to both browsers without telling us that it would do so. On our second system, we had the Bing Bar installed for Internet Explorer, but it was disabled. Firefox was not installed. This system already had the update in question, so we decided to install Firefox. Not only was the Bing Bar extension present upon Firefox's first launch, but so was the Search Helper Extension.

Additional testing determined that the update is only being offered to those with one of the Microsoft toolbars installed, regardless of whether they are enabled or disabled. It's unknown how many users fall into that scenario, but the toolbars often come bundled with new PCs and popular Microsoft downloads.

The worst part of this issue is that Microsoft does not seem to be aware of it: a Microsoft spokesperson simply pointed us to the aforementioned Microsoft Support page that inaccurately describes the update. We asked the company for an explanation of why the extension was installed and what it does, but have yet to receive a reply.

Mozilla responded to our inquiries regarding possible security concerns. "We're in contact with Microsoft, and are looking into it," a Mozilla spokesperson told Ars. "As far as we know at this time, there are no security implications to this add-on's background installation."
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...bar-update.ars





SCOwned: No New Trial, Novell Can Shut Down IBM Lawsuit
Ryan Paul

SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company's motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury's verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case.

SCO's campaign against the Linux operating system began in 2003 when the company claimed that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX. On the basis of that claim, SCO sued IBM and threatened litigation against hundreds of other companies that use Linux. The conflict took a major turn when Novell stepped up and said that it owned the relevant intellectual property and had never sold it to SCO, meaning that SCO did not have standing to bring any lawsuits regarding alleged infringement in the first place. This led to a lengthy battle in the courts between Novell and SCO over the ownership of the UNIX SVRX copyrights.

SCO claims that it obtained the rights from Novell in an asset purchase agreement. The actual documents that describe the terms of the agreement, however, do not include the UNIX SVRX copyrights. The copyrights are only referenced in a term sheet that was drafted during an earlier stage of the negotiations. In an initial bench trial where the agreement was reviewed, Judge Kimball ruled in Novell's favor and ordered SCO to pay Novell millions of dollars. SCO fell into bankruptcy shortly after, but continued trying to fight the ruling.

SCO eventually got a jury trial, but lost that, too. In April, the jury ruled in favor of Novell after independently concluding that SCO never received the UNIX copyrights.

In a last-ditch effort to evade defeat, SCO filed a motion contending that it was entitled to a judgment of law or a new trial because the jury's verdict was simply wrong. In order to justify tossing aside the verdict in favor of a new judgement, SCO had to demonstrate that the jury's conclusions blatantly contradicted the evidence. Judge Stewart disagreed with SCO's assessment.

"SCO argues that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law because the 'verdict cannot be squared with the overwhelming evidence and the law.' The Court respectfully disagrees," Stewart wrote in the decision. "The jury found Novell's version of facts to be more persuasive. This conclusion is well supported by the evidence. There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights."

Because the verdict was sound, Judge Stewart sees no need to grant SCO's motion for a new trial.

"The Court finds that the verdict is not clearly, decidedly, or overwhelmingly against the weight of the evidence. Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial," the ruling says. "ORDERED that SCO's Renewed Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law or, in the Alternative, for a New Trial is DENIED."

The ruling almost certainly means that SCO v. IBM will never go to trial. Without ownership of the UNIX copyrights, SCO has no legal standing to bring copyright and misuse of IP claims."The Court finds that Novell had the authority under Section 4.16(b) of the APA to direct SCO to waive its claims against these SVRX licensees, that Novell had the authority to waive such claims on SCO’s behalf, and that SCO was obligated to recognize such waivers," wrote the judge.

SCO has managed to stay alive for years despite its consistent losses in court, leading one bankruptcy judge to compare SCO's plight to Samuel Beckett's famous play Waiting for Godot. It's unlikely that the bankruptcy courts will allow SCO's charade to continue now that two judges and one jury have all concluded that SCO does not own the SVRX UNIX copyrights on which its litigation is predicated.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...bm-lawsuit.ars





Off Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blond
Alexei Barrionuevo



Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.

The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.

Yet Brazil is not the same country it was in 1994, when Gisele Bündchen, the world’s top earning model, was discovered in a tiny town not far from here. Darker-skinned women have become more prominent in Brazilian society, challenging the notions of Brazilian beauty and success that Ms. Bündchen has come to represent here and abroad.

Taís Araújo just finished a run as the first black female lead in the coveted 8 p.m. soap opera slot. Marina Silva, a former government minister born in the Amazon, is running for president. And over the past decade, the income of black Brazilians rose by about 40 percent, more than double the rate of whites, as Brazil’s booming economy helped trim the inequality gap and create a more powerful black consumer class, said Marcelo Neri, an economist in Rio de Janeiro.

Even prosecutors have waded into the debate over what Brazilian society looks like — and how it should be represented. São Paulo Fashion Week, the nation’s most important fashion event, has been forced by local prosecutors to ensure that at least 10 percent of its models are of African or indigenous descent.

Despite those shifts, more than half of Brazil’s models continue to be found here among the tiny farms of Rio Grande do Sul, a state that has only one-twentieth of the nation’s population and was colonized predominantly by Germans and Italians.

Indeed, scouts say that more than 70 percent of the country’s models come from three southern states that hardly reflect the multiethnic melting pot that is Brazil, where more than half the population is nonwhite.

On the pages of its magazines, Brazil’s beauty spectrum is clearer. Nonwhite women, including celebrities of varying body types, are interspersed with white models. But on the runways, the proving ground for models hoping to go abroad, the diversity drops off precipitously. Prosecutors investigating discrimination complaints against São Paulo Fashion Week found that only 28 of the event’s 1,128 models were black in early 2008.

The pattern creates a disconnect between what many Brazilians consider beautiful and the beauty they export overseas. While darker-skinned actresses like Juliana Paes and Camila Pitanga are considered among Brazil’s sexiest, it is Ms. Bündchen and her fellow southerners who win fame abroad.

“I was always perplexed that Brazil was never able to export a Naomi Campbell, and it is definitely not because of a lack of pretty women,” said Erika Palomino, a fashion consultant in São Paulo. “It is embarrassing.”

Some scouts have begun tepid forays to less-white parts of Brazil. One Brazilian designer, Walter Rodrigues, recently opened Rio Fashion Week with 25 models, all of them black.

But here in the south scouts still spend most of their time hunting for the next Gisele, and offer few apologies for what they say sells.

Clóvis Pessoa studies facial traits that are successful on international runways and looks for towns in the south that mirror those genes.

“If a famous top model looks German with a Russian nose, I will do a scientific study and look for cities that were colonized by Germans and Russians in the south of Brazil in order to get a similar face down here," Mr. Pessoa said.

Dilson Stein, who discovered Ms. Bündchen when she was 13, called Rio Grande do Sul a treasure trove of model-worthy girls. A year before discovering Ms. Bündchen, whose parents are of German ancestry, he found 12-year-old Alessandra Ambrosio, now famous for her Victoria’s Secret shoots.

Today, younger scouts like Mr. Chornak have taken up the mantle. With catlike quickness, he jumped from his chair and strode up behind a tall girl with a hooded sweatshirt. “Have you ever thought of being a model?” he asked a 13-year-old with light blue eyes and pimples.

The girl smiled, her metal braces glimmering.

Later, Mr. Chornak pulled up at a school where the director, Liliane Abrão Silva, showed off albums from school beauty contests. She allows scouts to visit during class breaks.

“Since I got to this school, five have left for São Paulo to become models,” she said. “The girls who do not have money to go to university will have to stay here and work in the fields.”

The next morning, Mr. Chornak studied the girls returning with red lollipops from recess. “There is nothing special here,” he declared.

At another stop, Mr. Chornak staked out a school in Paraíso do Sul (population 8,000) with the tools of his trade: business cards, camera, measuring tape and a notebook.

The bell rang and students streamed out. Mr. Chornak stopped a tall, skinny blond girl. Within seconds he was fluffing her hair and taking her measurements, directing her to pose against the wall.

Mr. Chornak also drove to Venâncio Aires, where a billboard heralded “the land of the Fantastic Girl,” alluding to a television show that featured a local girl.

At a small tobacco farm he visited Michele Meurer, a blue-eyed 16-year-old discovered while riding her bicycle to school. Timid and shy, she cried profusely the first time she went to São Paulo. The next time, she lasted six days before Mr. Chornak sent her home.

Her mother, who grew up speaking German, had never left the town until the São Paulo trip. They live in a four-room house with chickens and dogs. Michele keeps the freezer in her room for lack of space.

Mr. Chornak counsels Michele to use sunscreen while working in the fields and to watch her diet. Bursting with pride, her father enrolled her in English classes in case she went abroad.

“I want to give them a better life,” Michele said tearfully of her parents.

Recently, she went to São Paulo again, where Mr. Chornak put her in a three-bedroom apartment with 11 other girls. Two weeks before São Paulo Fashion Week, Michele packed up and left.

“I am very disappointed that Michele gave up,” Mr. Chornak said. “I invested a lot in her.”

Myrna Domit contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/wo.../08models.html





THIRD of Children Have Seen Online Porn by the Time they are 10, Shocking Study Reveals
Andrew Levy

A third of children have accessed online pornography by the time they are ten years old, a disturbing survey has revealed.

And more than eight in ten children aged 14 to 16 say they regularly access hardcore photographs and footage on their home computers, while two-thirds watch it on their mobile phones.

Yet 70 per cent admit they have never been physically intimate with someone - meaning their first experience of sex is watching often violent scenes online.

Parents appear to be unaware of the risk to their children as three-quarters of the children surveyed confirmed their families had never discussed online porn with them.

In many cases, parents are simply unable to keep up with their computer-literate kids and have no idea how to install parental internet controls or to stop their children getting around them.

Experts warned the flood of extreme sexual imagery was creating a time bomb for young people who would have problems with romantic relationships when they were older and were more likely to commit rape.

Leading sociologist Michael Flood told Psychologies magazine, which interviewed hundreds of secondary school pupils for the survey: 'There is compelling evidence that pornography has negative effects on individuals and communities.

'Porn shows sex in unrealistic ways and fails to address intimacy, love, connection or romance. It doesn't mean every young person is going out to rape somebody but it increases the likelihood.'

Sex addiction therapist John Woods warned watching porn was more addictive than drugs or alcohol.

He told a Sunday newspaper: 'The pendulum has swing too far. We are allowing abusive sexual imagery to be accessed by children.

'We need regulation but that needs people to say enough is enough and demand change.'

The NSPCC said it was 'really concerned' about the growing problem.

Spokesman Lucy Thorpe said: 'For girls and boys, porn presents an extreme sexuality that puts pressure on them to behave in a certain way and view each other in a negative light.'

Justine Roberts, of online parents' group Mumsnet, added: 'We are going to produce a generation with a terrifying idea of what sex is about.'

Psychologies recommended a range of measures to stop children watching online porn.

They included downloading sex filters - which are often available from internet service providers - onto home computers and checking your child's school has an 'e-safety' policy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...y-reveals.html





Joseph Strick, Who Worked on Risqué Films, Dies at 86
Margalit Fox

Joseph Strick, an Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter and producer known for filming the unfilmable — in particular weighty, bawdy literary works whose screen adaptations often ran afoul of censors worldwide — died on June 1 in Paris. He was 86 and had made his home in Paris since the 1970s.

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

An independent filmmaker, Mr. Strick won the Oscar for best documentary short subject in 1970 for “Interviews With My Lai Veterans,” which he wrote, produced and directed. The film featured conversations with United States Army veterans who had been present at the massacre of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968.

Mr. Strick was even better known for fiction films based on the work of dense, often risqué writers. His most renowned included adaptations of “The Balcony,” by Jean Genet; “Ulysses,” by James Joyce; and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.”

Mr. Strick’s “Balcony” (1963), which he directed and helped produce, was based on Genet’s allegorical play about a brothel. With a screenplay by Ben Maddow, it starred Shelley Winters.

His next adaptation was his most celebrated and most daunting: a screen version of “Ulysses,” Joyce’s earthy stream-of-consciousness novel about a day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. First serialized in 1918, it was banned in the United States from 1921 to 1933.

“Ulysses” was an Everest on which no filmmaker dared make an assault. Mr. Strick did, directing and helping produce the film version, whose screenplay he wrote with Fred Haines.

Though shorter than the book, the script left intact Joyce’s original language, including much of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, a ribald reverie unquotable here with the possible exception of the words “yes,” “I,” “said” and “yes.”

Reviewing the film in The New York Times in 1967, Bosley Crowther wrote, “Everything in this brilliant rendering of Mr. Joyce’s extremely complex book into the medium of motion pictures is forceful and respectable cinema art.”

The film’s success (Mr. Strick and Mr. Haines received Oscar nominations for their screenplay) did not always mollify the censors. Britain demanded 29 separate cuts, though they later backed down. In Ireland, the film was banned outright, a ban not lifted until 2000.

With “Tropic of Cancer” (1970), Mr. Strick brought to the screen Miller’s forthright tale of his escapades, overwhelmingly sexual, in 1930s Paris. The film, which Mr. Strick directed, helped produce and, with Betty Botley, wrote, starred Rip Torn as Miller.

In March 1970, Mr. Strick filed suit in federal district court, seeking to overturn the X rating awarded to the film by the Motion Picture Association of America. As he told The New York Times, “I’m hoping the suit will lead to the abolition of the entire system of classification.”

He had no such luck, losing the case in the early ’70s. “Tropic of Cancer” retained its X rating until the early 1990s, when, with many other X-rated films, it was awarded the new NC-17 rating.

Mr. Strick’s other films include “Ring of Bright Water” (1969), which he helped produce, and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1977), an adaptation of another Joyce novel, which he directed and helped produce.

Joseph Ezekiel Strick was born on July 6, 1923, in Braddock, Pa., and reared in Philadelphia. He studied physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, before enlisting in the military in World War II. During the war he served stateside as an aerial photographer for the Army Air Forces.

His first film, “Muscle Beach,” a 1948 study of California bodybuilders directed with Irving Lerner, remains a cult favorite.

Mr. Strick’s first marriage, to the former Anne Laskin, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Martine Rossignol Strick; three children from his first marriage, David, Jeremy and Betsy Strick; two children from his second marriage, Terence and Helene Strick-Marchand; a brother, Jack; a sister, Maida Gordon; and six grandchildren.

Several of Mr. Strick’s films were known for their grittiness. The most notable was “The Savage Eye” (1960), a documentary-style fiction film he wrote, produced and directed in collaboration with Mr. Maddow and Sidney Meyers. The film, whose style and subject matter — unusual for the time — attracted wide attention in the news media, starred Barbara Baxley as a divorced woman navigating the seamy underside of Los Angeles.

Mr. Strick also helped produce “Never Cry Wolf” (1983) for Walt Disney Pictures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/arts/08strick.html





Himan Brown, Developer of Radio Dramas, Dies at 99
Joseph Berger

Himan Brown, who long before there was television created immensely popular radio dramas like “The Adventures of the Thin Man” and “Dick Tracy,” employing an arsenal of beguiling sound effects that terrified or tickled the shows’ many listeners, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

His granddaughter Melina Brown confirmed the death.

Another of Mr. Brown’s creations was the radio drama “Grand Central Station,” but probably his most memorable was “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” whose ominous opening of a creaking door and menacing farewell of “pleasant dreams” became signatures not just of the show but also of the heyday of radio itself, when listeners sitting on the family sofa or curled under quilts attached their own fanciful images to the sounds coming out of a box that had no screen.

While radio dramas are now celebrated as wistful nostalgia by people in their 70s and 80s, Mr. Brown never stopped believing in the form. In 1974, when radio drama was all but extinct, he began a nightly series called CBS Radio Mystery Theater that ran until 1982 and even revived the creaking door. He continued to produce radio dramas about influential Americans into his 90s for Brooklyn College’s station.

“I am firmly convinced that nothing visual can touch audio,” Mr. Brown said in a 2003 interview, his eyes sparkling. “I don’t need 200 orchestra players doing the ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ I don’t need car chases. I don’t need mayhem. All I need to do is creak the door open, and visually your head begins to go. The magic word is imagination.”

In his prime, in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a jack-of-all-trades, once estimating that he produced or participated in over 30,000 shows. He wrote and doctored scripts, sold shows to advertisers, and directed actors like Orson Welles, Helen Hayes, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. As a teenager, he was the voice of the first Jake, Molly Goldberg’s husband, in the earliest version of the show about the Goldbergs, a homespun Jewish family in the Tremont section of the Bronx. But he also played the Italian father in another ethnic soap opera called “Little Italy.”

He became an expert in sounds that could instantly epitomize a character or a city. Foghorns and the clang of Big Ben became London. A belly laugh was a fat man.

“Grand Central Station,” an anthology show, was one of Mr. Brown’s first big hits, with its portentous opening declaring that the terminal was “the crossroads of a million private lives, a gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily.”

It was characteristic of his self-confidence that when listeners complained that the chugging sounds of a steam engine were not what you ordinarily heard at the terminal, he would reply: “You have your own Grand Central Station.”

Mr. Brown grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the son of immigrant tailors from the outskirts of Odessa in Ukraine. Yiddish was the dominant sound in his neighborhood, but also important was a violin, which his parents insisted he learn to play well. He was entranced by the idea of catching the next wave to success, and a shop teacher at Boys High School told him, “There’s a new thing now, radio.” He was told that he could hear WLW in Cincinnati with a copper wire wrapped around a Quaker Oats box.

“What a revelation that was right here in Brooklyn,” Mr. Brown said.

Having done some acting at a local synagogue dramatic club, he persuaded the young NBC station WEAF that he could read a newspaper column in a Yiddish dialect. One of his listeners was Gertrude Berg, the resourceful inventor of the Goldbergs. Within a year, and with his help packaging the show, “The Rise of the Goldbergs” started a run that with its conversion to television would last 30 years. But after six months, Mrs. Berg fired him, buying him out for $200, he said.

Mr. Brown continued to work in radio as an independent producer while attending Brooklyn College. At a time when companies financed shows and attached their names to them, he would try to sell a potential sponsor, like the Goodman’s matzo company, on an idea for a radio play and, if successful, put the show together. One result was “Bronx Marriage Bureau,” about a matchmaker.

The degree Mr. Brown received from Brooklyn Law School aided his ascent: it helped him acquire the rights to fictional characters like Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Bulldog Drummond and the Thin Man. “The Thin Man” also had a typical Brown touch: the sound of a pull on a lamp chain as the self-styled detectives Nick and Nora Charles went to bed. “It was as sexy as I could get,” he said.

As he prospered in radio, Mr. Brown became a perceptive art collector. The eight-room Central Park West apartment he shared with his first wife, Mildred Brown, and his second, Shirley Goodman, a force in the growth of the Fashion Institute of Technology, was filled with paintings by Renoir, Degas and Picasso.

Mr. Brown owned a weekend home in Stamford, Conn., where he once rented a studio out to a young writer, J. D. Salinger, who at the time was working on “Catcher in the Rye,” according to his granddaughter.

Both of Mr. Brown’s wives died before him. Besides Melina Brown, he is survived by a son, Barry K. Brown; a daughter, Hilda; another grandchild; and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Brown did not weather the shift to television. He turned “Inner Sanctum” into a syndicated TV show, but it did not last. Once characters were visible, viewers were no longer enchanted. The creaky door had lost its spell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/arts/07brown.html





The Rise And Fall Of The RIAA
Mike Masnick

We recently had a post questioning whether the RIAA's legal campaign was a success or not. It seemed like there was plenty of evidence that it has been an incredible failure. Separately, we had a post about Radiohead's Thom Yorke, suggesting that the major record labels were going out of business in a matter of months. While we felt that was a bit of an exaggeration, one of our commenters, Ccomp5950 compiled data on RIAA label sales, along with some helpful notes about what other factors were going on at the time:

Year: $ in Millions
1992: 9024
1993: 10046.6 (CD players started to get more affordable towards mid-year)
1994: 12068
1995: 12320.3
1996: 12533.8
1997: 12236.8
1998: 13723.4
1999: 14651 (Work made for hire controversy)
2000: 14404 (Napster sued into bankruptcy)
2001: 13700 (Ipod came out October 2001)
2002: 12,614.2 (Price Fixing lawsuit hits RIAA)
2003: 11,854.4 (Grokster lawsuit, "induced infringement" introduced) (Mass lawsuits by RIAA start(AKA: The education campaign))
2004: 12,345.0 [Revenue Physical / Digital] (BMG gets out of the music business, sold to Sony later on: Big 5 becomes Big 4 for RIAA)
2005: 12,296.9 [91%/9%]
2006: 11,758.2 [83.9%/16.1%]
2007: 10,370.0 [77%/23%]
2008: 8,768.4 [66%/34%] (RIAA declares it's going to stop mass lawsuits with member money problems and EMI almost bankrupt)
2009: 7,690.0 [59%/41%] (Massive layoffs hit RIAA around Febuary: Blames piracy)

Sources:
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html (statistics from 90's to 2001)
http://76.74.24.142/81128FFD-028F-28...BF16A46388.pdf (Statistics for 97 to 2007)
http://76.74.24.142/A200B8A7-6BBF-EF...2014919F78.pdf (2008-2009)

It's a great list, but I felt it could be even more powerful as a graph, so I just threw the following together, based on the info above:

RIAA Label Sales

And, that, right there, does a nice job painting a picture on the decline and fall of the RIAA and the major record labels. A few points are worth highlighting:

• If you're not familiar with the "works for hire" scandal, you can read the full background here. Basically, a Congressional staffer by the name of Mitch Glazier snuck a tiny unnoticed amendment into a much larger bill in the middle of the night -- supposedly at the request of the RIAA -- without telling anyone. It effectively changed the definition of music recordings into "works made for hire," which was really important, because it meant the RIAA labels could hang onto musicians' copyrights for much longer, avoiding termination rights that let musicians reclaim their copyrights. Just a few months later, Glazier left his low-paying Congressional staffer job for a $500,000 job with the RIAA, which I believe he still holds ten years later. Thankfully, people quickly recognized what he had done and Congress had to go back and fix Glazier's sneaky wording. However, it is worth noting that the peak of this chart is right when Glazier inserted his infamous four words.

• As we discussed last fall, now that musicians do have termination rights, they're lining up to use them and take their copyrights back from the labels. They can start getting the copyrights back in 2013. If you're looking for a date when the bottom totally falls out for the RIAA labels, that may be it. When the rights to their back catalog starts to drop out, this chart looks even worse. The RIAA won't give up easily, of course. The latest stunt they're trying to pull is to "re-record" albums, claiming that it creates a brand new copyright, that gives them another 35 years before termination rights are applicable. That is, of course, ridiculous, but the RIAA will likely try to fight it out in court for many years to extend that 2013 deadline by a few more years. Of course, all that money on legal fees could have gone to innovating, but that's just not the RIAA way.

• Note that digital music sales is not even close to being a savior. The total is still dropping rapidly.

• Of course, many have argued that the rise and fall may have a lot more to do with CD replacements of previous formats -- and this chart certainly suggests that could be an explanation. The big jump happened right when CDs became affordable, and people needed to go out and replace their vinyl and cassette (and 8-track!) collections. After a few years of that, it makes sense that the market should drop anyway.

• Once again, it's important to point out that the chart above is not the entire music industry, but a limited segment of it: the RIAA record labels, mainly comprised of the big four record labels. It doesn't take into account all of the other aspects of the music business -- nearly every single one of which has been growing during this same period. It also doesn't take into account the vast success stories of independent artists and labels doing creative business models and routing around the legacy gatekeepers.


http://techdirt.com/articles/20100611/0203309776.shtml





Eminem's "Recovery" Album Leaks Two Weeks Early

Eminem is the latest artist to fall victim to an internet leak: the rapper's upcoming "Recovery" album appeared online Monday, along with a full track list, two weeks before its July 22nd release date.

The leak comes less than a week after the online debut of the second single from the album, an unexpected collaboration with pop singer Pink called "Won't Back Down."

On Sunday, Eminem debuted the official video to first single "Not Afraid." In the dark Richard Lee-directed clip, he stands on the ledge of a roof, slowly moving closer to the edge as he raps about the troubles he's faced in his life.

Here's the track list for Eminem's "Recovery":

"Cold Wind Blows"

"Talkin' 2 Myself" with Kobe

"On Fire"

"Won't Back Down" with Pink

"W.T.P."

"Going Through Changes"

"Not Afraid"

"Seduction"

"No Love" with Lil Wayne

"Space Bound"

"Cinderella Man"

"25 to Life"

"So Bad"

"Almost Famous"

"Love the Way You Lie" with Rihanna

"You're Never Over"

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/...us-eminem.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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