Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 19th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing. Due to this, I feel the current file-sharing trend is a catalyst for a true evolution in filmmaking." – Sam Bozzo




































June 19th, 2010




Vodafone in Line to Join File-Sharing Clampdown
Ronan McGreevy

VODAFONE IRELAND is in talks with the record industry to join Eircom in its “three strikes and you’re out” rule for those involved in illegal file-sharing.

The company is the second biggest internet service provider (ISP) in the State with 21 per cent of all fixed broadband connections along with a substantial mobile broadband customer base.

Between them Eircom and Vodafone provide nearly two-thirds of all household broadband connections in the Republic.

A pilot scheme to implement what Eircom also calls the “graduated response protocol” has been under way since last month and about 800 illegal file-sharers have already received a warning.

In an out-of-court settlement last year between the music industry and Eircom, the company agreed to issue three warnings to illegal file-sharers who download music through what are known as peer-to-peer networks.

After a fourth offence, they would find their broadband cut off for a year.

In a statement issued yesterday, Vodafone said it was aware of the Eircom actions and acknowledged that illegal file-sharing represents a “serious issue for the Irish music industry”.

It said it would be looking at “appropriate steps” consistent with “applicable legislation and recent judicial decisions”.

EMI Ireland chief executive Willie Kavanagh said “significant progress” had been made with Vodafone in relation to implementing a solution similar to that which Eircom is using to deter file-sharers.

Vodafone is in negotiation with the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) which represents all the major record labels.

Mr Kavanagh, who is also the chairman of Irma, said that any agreement with Vodafone would make Ireland the European leader in terms of dealing with the problem.

Mr Kavanagh confirmed that Irma has engaged former minister for justice Michael McDowell SC in its file-sharing court action against UPC which begins tomorrow in the Commercial Court.

He admitted the Irish record industry has halved in size in the last four years. It had been hoped that last year would see a “bottoming out” of the decline in record sales as a result of illegal downloading. However, record sales were down a further 12 per cent this year.

Aslan sold 11,000 copies of their latest album, but nearly three times that had been downloaded illegally, he said.

Mr Kavanagh warned that there would be no record industry in Ireland within five years unless illegal file-sharing was tackled.

In a statement, Vodafone said it was now looking at providing “easy availability of legal downloads of music” to counteract illegal file-sharing.

It is believed to be looking at a subscription model which would allow customers to both download and stream tracks for a set monthly fee.

In Spain, Vodafone has implemented a successful policy of charging €6 a month for 20 tracks, but the company insists it is too early to say what kind of model it would adapt here.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...272615990.html





ISP Attempt To Block File-Sharing Ends in Epic Failure
enigmax

In response to the country’s “3 strikes” Hadopi legislation, last week a French ISP began offering a service to block file-sharing on customer connections for ‘just’ 2 euros per month. It didn’t take long for awful vulnerabilities in the system to be found which breached not only the privacy of subscribers, but exposed them to new security threats.

France’s big, bad, scary Hadopi legislation and the systematic tracing, monitoring, reporting and disconnecting of file-sharers is all but here, so it seems there’s no better time for other companies to start making money from it.

Last week saw French ISP Orange take the opportunity to start providing a service which, at least on the surface, is designed to put the minds of subscribers at rest. For a 2 euro per month payment, Orange is offering a service which “allows you to control the activity of computers connected to your internet line, from downloading ‘illegally’ using peer-to-peer networks. You can protect up to three computers connected to the same internet line.”

The software, which is Windows-only, runs in the background and utilizes a blacklist maintained and updated by Orange. Precisely what is on that blacklist remains a secret.

“Our solution is intended primarily for parents who want to make sure their children do nothing illegal on P2P networks,” the company said in a statement to French media last week while adding that just because the software is running, it doesn’t mean that users are fully protected against legal action under Hadopi.

History tells us that whenever a company gets involved in anti-piracy action, they leave themselves open to being probed. Several anti-piracy companies and groups have seen their systems examined and even hacked over the years, and Orange is no different.
Bluetouff has documented his findings on the Orange system and they are pretty surprising.

Using WireShark to sniff the output of the software on his location network, Bluetouff was able to identify an IP address used by the software to obtain its updates.

“The software communicates with a remote server, a Java servlet actually located on the ip 195.146.235.67,” he explains.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there – except that all information is not only being transmitted in the clear but all information on that server is public (via
http://195.146.235.67/status), meaning that every user had their IP addresses exposed to the public. But it doesn’t stop there.

Whoever set up the security on the server admin panel didn’t do a very good job. The username was set to ‘admin’ and the password set to ‘admin’ too. This morning that gaping hole was still open.

TorrentFreak is informed that people have accessed the server and have discovered that it’s possible to send malware to anyone using the software which makes a bit of a joke out of Orange when it claims: “The software runs in the background to ensure your safety without disrupting the important tasks that you perform”

“People don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Astrid Girardeau from TheInternets.fr told TorrentFreak. “Because it is a new Hadopi fail. And because, Christine Albanel, the ex-Minister of Culture, is now the executive of communication, for… Orange.”
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-attempts...ailure-100614/





Stallman Says ACTA Punishes Internet Users

Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman is leading the charge against the ACTA rules proposed to curb illegal file-sharing

In a declaration published this week, Free Software Foundation (FSF) president Richard Stallman said that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) unfairly punishes suspected file-sharers and could block anti-digital rights management software.

“ACTA threatens, in a disguised way, to punish Internet users with disconnection if they are accused of sharing, and requires countries to prohibit software that can break Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), also known as digital handcuffs,” said Stallman.

A draft version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was published in April. The publication follows criticism froml freedom campaigners that the negotiations on the legislation were happening in secret. The backers of the proposed legisation claim that it is not about limiting the freedom of computer users but tackling serious cyber-crime.

Not About Harassing Consumers

“ACTA is about tackling activities pursued by criminal organisations, which frequently pose a threat to public health and safety. It is not about limiting civil liberties or harassing consumers,” a statement from the stakeholders involved in ACTA claimed in April.

But the FSF maintains that the threat to cut off suspected file-sharers still remains. “Now that some details of ACTA have been made public, we know that our previous concerns were justified,” said FSF’s operations manager John Sullivan. “We are asking the free software community to join us in speaking out against this attack on the public’s freedom, and I hope that people will not only sign the statement, but also write and publish their own specific thoughts about the issues.”

The software campaigner is calling for users to sign a petition against ACTA which can be found here. “This is a time for people to show — in as many ways as possible — that they value the freedoms ACTA threatens. The more signatures and visible support we have, the weaker ACTA will look.”

But according to the EU, the ACTA rules, as they stand, do not specify the idea of cutting off Internet users after repeated copyright infringements . “No party in the ACTA negotiation is proposing that governments should introduce a compulsory ‘3 strikes’ or ‘gradual response’ rule to fight copyright infringements and internet piracy,” the European Commission stated in April

Commenting on the draft version of the proposed rules released in April, EU trade minister Karel De Gucht reiterated that it was not about punishing the average computer user. “The text makes clear what ACTA is really about: it will provide our industry and creators with better protection in overseas markets which is essential for business to thrive. It will not have a negative impact on European citizens,“ said De Gucht.

Spying On iPods

At one time, it was believed that ACTA would allow governments to scan iPods and laptops for illegal pirated content at border points. That claim has since been rejected by lawmakers. “EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do not have the time or the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer,” the agreement’s backers claimed in a recent statement.

But the European authorities have also criticised content creators for not backing legitimate online platforms for distributing digital material. Speaking in April via a video conference with EU Telecoms and Information Society Ministers, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said that the failure of governments and content producers to agree on common standards and platforms across Europe was directly contributing to illegal file-sharing. “For the moment one could almost say that the only existing Digital Single Market for audiovisual material is the illegal one,” she said.

Indepently of the ACTA negotiations, governments are implementing anti-copyright laws. In the UK, the Digital Economy Act, designed in part to curb illegal file-sharing, was passed in the last days of the Labour government. The regulator, Ofcom, has produced draft rules designed to implement the Act, which include a version of the three strikes idea.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/st...net-users-7792





US Government Told Piracy Losses Are Exaggerated
Ben Jones

At a hearing yesterday, several experts told the US International Trade Commission that many of the estimates of piracy losses touted by the entertainment industries were inflated or misleading. Others claimed that current enforcement methods aren’t working and suggested they try something else.

The US International Trade Commission (USITC) describes itself as “an independent, quasijudicial Federal agency with broad investigative responsibilities on matters of trade”. It has been asked by the US Senate’s Finance Committee to investigate the effect of China’s ineffective intellectual property protection and enforcement on the US economy.

At a hearing on the topic yesterday, many of the witnesses were sceptical of the claims and assumptions made by the affected US industries, including the MPAA and RIAA-commissioned reports. Harvard Business School Professor Fritz Foley called the basic assumption behind the industry loss figures into doubt.

“It seems a bit crazy to me,” PC World quotes him telling the Commission on the first day of the hearing. “To assume that someone who would pay some low amount for a pirated product would be the type of customer who’d pay some amount that’s six or 10 [times] that amount for a real one.” While some companies, such as EA (at times), don’t follow this ‘a copy equals a lost sale’ system, the majority do.

“Be careful about using information the multinational [companies] provide you,” cautioned Foley. “I would imagine they have an incentive to make the losses seem very, very large.”

Professor Foley’s comments reiterate what the Government Accountability Office told US congress earlier this year. There is virtually no evidence for the claimed million dollar losses. “Lack of data hinders efforts to quantify impacts of counterfeiting and piracy,” was one of the main conclusions from their report. In fact, copyright infringements may also benefit the entertainment industries and third parties, it argued.

An Intellectual Properly law professor at Drake University had another perspective. Pointing out there are two sides to economics, Professor Peter Yu noted that companies counterfeiting products in China may employ US workers, and consume US-sourced raw materials, so it’s not a straight loss. It’s similar to how VHS tapes were not the straight loss the movie industry predicted and claimed in the late 70s and early 80s. Yu also noted that it’s useful in spreading Western ideas to China, although how well lobbying will go down is anyone’s guess.

One of the best suggestions so far, however, came from Ohio State University law professor Daniel Chow. When asked how the size of the problem can be identified and quantified, he suggested that the agency should push the affected industries for more data, presumably data that backs up their claims (there is little-to-none available at present).

Professor Chow also noted that current enforcement efforts are not working (as we have previously reported), and that companies should start thinking about the long-term. It’s advice that the industries would be wise to follow, as every past copyright conflict has, despite a short-term loss, provided massive long-term benefits and growth for the affected industries.
http://torrentfreak.com/us-governmen...erated-100616/





Sony Spent $730, 000 Lobbying US Government in 1Q
AP

Sony Corp.'s two American subsidiaries, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Electronics Inc., together spent $730,000 in the first quarter to lobby the federal government on digital piracy and other issues, according to disclosure reports.

That's down slightly from the $740,000 that Sony spent in the year-ago period, but more than the $570,000 it spent in the fourth quarter of 2009. Sony also lobbied the federal government on legislation that would pay performers and recording companies for radio airplay, according to the forms filed on April 20.

In the January-to-March period, Sony lobbied Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the office of the president and other agencies, according to the reports filed with the House clerk's office.

Joel Wiginton, former special assistant on legislative affairs to President Clinton and former counsel for Sens. Russell Feingold and Dick Durbin, is among those registered to lobby for Sony. Also registered is James Morgan, a former intern at the FCC and Justice Department.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...-Lobbying.html





Internet File-Sharing Service Is Sued by Music Publishers
Joseph Plambeck

A coalition of eight music publishers sued the file-sharing service LimeWire on Wednesday, accusing it of copyright infringement, according to the National Music Publishers’ Association, the industry group that organized the suit.

The lawsuit comes after a federal judge’s ruling last month in a similar case brought by record companies that LimeWire and its creator, Mark Gorton, were liable for copyright infringement.

David Israelite, chief executive of the publishers’ association, said his organization had decided to bring the complaint because most publishers were not represented in the record company lawsuit and they were now confident that they had a winning case. The suit says that the “knowing and deliberate infringement is massive, as is the harm.”

“We want to be at the table for any discussions about settlements,” Mr. Israelite said. “We’re looking for more than cessation of infringement, we’re looking for damages for all of the infringement done over the years.”

LimeWire, which says it is trying to start a new paid subscription model, said in a statement on Wednesday that it welcomed the publishers to the table. “Publishers are absolutely a part of that solution, and we’re hopeful that this action will serve as a catalyst to help us get to there,” the company said.

The music publishers will seek $150,000 for each song distributed on the service illegally, which could bring the total damages to hundreds of millions of dollars, just as the record companies are seeking. The record companies filed a motion this month to have the service shut down.

The publishers’ suit names Mr. Gorton, who started the service in 2000, and the company’s former chief operating officer, Greg Bildson. Mr. Bildson testified in the previous case and was removed as a named defendant.

“We may need similar cooperation” from Mr. Bildson, Mr. Israelite said.

The companies named as plaintiffs in the suit include all four of the major publishers (EMI, Sony/ATV, Universal and Warner/Chappell) along with four independents (Bug, MPL, Peermusic and the Richmond Organization). It was filed in the Southern District Court in Manhattan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/bu...ia/17lime.html





Law Firm Offers to Defend 'Hurt Locker' Sharers
Greg Sandoval

The heat is being turned up on the company representing the producers of "The Hurt Locker" as it wages a wide-ranging litigation campaign against illegal file sharing.

In Arizona, a law firm called White Berberian recently began advertising on its site that it will defend those accused of illegal file sharing by Dunlap Grubb & Weaver. That is the firm, which also goes by the name U.S. Copyright Group, that is filing lawsuits on behalf of filmmakers who claim their movies were pirated by thousands of peer-to-peer users.

In addition to the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker," Dunlap Grubb represents about a dozen movies, including "Far Cry" and "Call of the Wild 3D." The law firm has said that it will sue more than 50,000 alleged file sharers.

So far, it appears thousands of people have received settlement offers from Dunlap Grubb and many are confused about their rights. Typically, people learn about being accused of violating copyright law from their Internet service providers, which inform them that they have received a subpoena to turn over their identity to Dunlap Grubb.

The law firm usually follows up with a form letter informing the accused that someone using their Internet protocol address was illegally sharing one of the films. Dunlap Grubb then tells the accused file sharer that they can settle the case for $1,500 if they move quickly. If they wait, the firm will charge them $2,500 and if they decide to fight it out in court, Dunlap Grubb can ask for up to $150,000.

This is what White Berberian said on its Web site: "It is important for you to consult with an attorney regarding your rights and risk exposure in connection with this matter. While we cannot guarantee a particular outcome, if we cannot negotiate a settlement better than what Plaintiff offered, we will refund your money."

The Lawyers

White Berberian charges $249 to negotiate a settlement on behalf of accused file sharers. That fee will not cover any "litigation-related activities" the attorneys said on the site. Steven White, one of the two founders of the firm, stressed in an interview with CNET late Friday that he and law partner Sean Berberian won't charge any client, unless they save the client money.

He acknowledged that neither he nor Berberian are experts in intellectual-property law but said they have a good understanding of the issues. The way they see the landscape looks like this: it is in Dunlap Grubb's interest to get the cases settled as quickly as possible, and this is where White Berberian hopes it can persuade the lawyers and Voltage Pictures to negotiate.

That's fine, but what about people who claim to be innocent and refuse to settle?

White said that for people who are innocent and want to fight, he would have a "frank discussion" about the facts of their case and the cost. According to White, the first thing that people accused of copyright infringement by Dunlap Grubb should know is that the firm is probably willing to sue a few people so that they can prove to everyone that their threats about litigation are real.

"If they don't get judgments against some of their targets, the threats they make in their demand letters will ring hollow," White said. "Nobody is going to be afraid of people who haven't sued."

The problem for those accused is that most don't have "$100,000 to fight the likes of Dunlap Grubb and Voltage. He predicts that the people who will challenge them either have the money to pay for their own litigation or have the backing of an organization such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an advocacy group for tech companies and Internet users, including those accused of file sharing.

If a figure like Jammie Thomas-Rasset emerged, it could get tricky for Dunlap Weaver and Voltage, predicted White. The case of Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman accused by the music industry of illegally sharing 24 songs, has dragged on for years and has likely cost the Recording Industry Association of America millions of dollars in legal fees. "(Dunlap Weaver) can't have any losses on the books," White said. "You have to prove you're on sure legal footing, or else nobody is going to pay."

White said the reasons he and his partner are taking on these cases is that he's talked to people who "didn't know what they were doing was illegal and now find themselves in an awkward position."

The litigation campaign employed by Dunlap Grubb caught many in the file-sharing community off guard. The film industry dabbled in lawsuits only briefly years ago, and the music industry walked away from a 5-year-old campaign in December 2008. Suing people for filing sharing appeared to be a failed and forgotten strategy for copyright owners.

Dunlap Grubb brought file-sharing suits back to the forefront when Voltage Pictures, producers of "The Hurt Locker," hired the lawyers to go after people who had shared the film--many of whom obtained a copy prior to the movie's theatrical release. "The Hurt Locker" leaked to the Web five months before its debut, and presumably, this is one of the reasons why the movie grossed only $16 million in the United States.

According to Voltage's complaint, filed last month in federal court in Washington, D.C., the film's producers intend to sue 5,000 people. Since filing that suit, Dunlap Grubb has met with considerable resistance. To learn the real names of alleged file sharers, Dunlap Grubb first must obtain IP addresses of those who shared the movie and then must hand those over to the sharers' ISPs so they can match the address with an identity.

But this takes time and resources, and Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers say the volume of searches Dunlap Grubb requested is unreasonable.

Rosemary Collyer, a federal judge scheduled to hear one case featuring 4,000 defendants, appears concerned that "so many defendants from across the country" are wrapped up in a single suit, according to a story on news blog Ars Technica. Collyer, who may have been spurred to action because of complaints made about this issue by the ACLU and EFF, has given Dunlap Grubb until June 21 to explain why it should be allowed to include so many people in a single suit.

All the push-back might have prompted Dunlap Grubb to change strategy. Jon Harrison, 64, from Irving, Texas, is accused of illegally sharing the movie "Far Cry." He noticed that there were more IP addresses requested in the initial "Far Cry" suit than those included in the "Hurt Locker" complaint.

Update, 1:34 p.m. PT: Turns out that the reason there were fewer names in the "Hurt Locker" complaint was that Dunlap Grubb only included a sample of 10 IP addresses for each of the ISPs. Thanks to reader Alex for the heads-up.

Update, 2:51 p.m. PT: Added quotes from Steven White of White Berberian.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20007446-261.html





Film Director: File Sharing Only Hurts Bad Or Mediocre Films
from the good-filmmakers-are-not-afraid dept

TorrentFreak asked independent film director Sam Bozzo to comment on his experiences having his two most recent films leaked to BitTorrent. The stories in both cases were different. The first film, Blue Gold: World Water Wars was released normally, and then leaked online. The second, his documentary Hackers Wanted was shelved after internal disputes -- but has now leaked to BitTorrent. Originally it was an old cut that was leaked, but now Bozzo's "directors' cut" has been leaked, and Bozzo seems fine with it. In fact, he claims that if you make a good film, having it leaked to BitTorrent can only help. It's only bad if your film isn't very good:

“In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing. Due to this, I feel the current file-sharing trend is a catalyst for a true evolution in filmmaking...”

That's quite a statement, since so many in the movie industry disagree. But Bozzo does a good job backing it up by explaining his own experiences. In fact, he admits when he first found out that Blue Gold was available online he was "enraged and terrified I would never make my money back," because of this. But he has since changed his mind, in part because he figured out how to embrace it:

“I contacted the uploader of my film and asked she spread a message of support with the torrent, asking for donations if a viewer likes the film and explaining that was a self-financed endeavor. The result? I received many donations and emails of support from those who downloaded the film, but I furthermore believe that viewers spread the word of the film to their non-torrent-downloading friends and that DVD sales increased due to the leak. For me, the torrent leak was ultimately "free advertising", and I am the only truly independent documentary filmmaker I know making his money back this year.”

He also responds to the usual complaint from filmmakers that even if unauthorized downloads might lead to more theater attendance, it must harm DVD sales, by highlighting, yet again, how obscurity is a much bigger "threat" than "piracy":

“With "Blue Gold" already available on DVD in North America, UK, Japan, and Australia, the initial fear of a filmmaker is that each person who downloads a torrent would have instead paid to buy or rent a DVD if the torrent were not available. I feel this is false for many reasons. For an independent film like mine, most torrent users would have never heard of my film if not for the torrent. Unlike a large blockbuster film, I had no advertising money to spread the word of the film, so the torrent leak provided another outlet to hopefully create a viral campaign of word-of-mouth. The main point, though, is that this only worked because the film is a solid good film (for the target market at least), so word of mouth could only help the film.”

The next obvious question is what about all those Blockbuster films that the MPAA and Hollywood like to pretend represent the pinnacle of movie making? He notes that it's probably wrong to worry about DVD sales, because if people are watching the movies on their computer, it's probably best to compare it to a situation like Netflix's streaming service, and again, notes the value of exposure over dollars:

“In this case, I feel it is important to compare file sharing not with DVD-purchases or rental, but with streaming a film via Netflix's Watch Instantly and also with inviting friends over to watch a film in a group. In neither of these situations does a film make any money. Most are surprised to learn that Netflix pays only a fixed fee to the distributor for the number of years they may offer a film, regardless of whether that film is streamed once or a million times in that time period.

Yet anyone I know on Netflix's Watch Instantly platform, including me, is thrilled to be there. Why? The exposure. The more people who see the film, the more will likely love it and want to buy it for their collection. When you invite a group of friends to your house to watch a DVD, do you charge them? One person bought one DVD, and ten watch it free, but if the film is good, hopefully a few of them will buy a DVD for themselves, or at least spread positive word.”

And from there he makes the key point:

“Good filmmakers are not afraid to have their films seen, they fight to have them seen. They pay thousands of dollars for the "honor" of screening them for free at film festivals, so why not embrace screening them for free online with no "submission fee" required?”

As for bad films? Well, he points out those are harmed by file sharing, because the negative word of mouth gets around much faster, leading people to avoid both the theatrical and DVD releases. But, he notes, for years, Hollywood has preyed on opening day box office numbers to define what is and what is not a good film, when the reality is those numbers are a factor of marketing and advertising:

“Distributors of bad and mediocre films depend solely on a paying audience's misconception that they are paying to watch a good film, when they are not. Via mass marketing, trailers, posters, and paying high fees to star actors, distributors of bad films are betting all their money on one thing; getting as many people to pay to see the film the opening weekend in a theater before that disgruntled, unsatisfied audience tells all of their friends to avoid their bad film.

If you think logically just a second, it's ridiculous to judge a film's quality at all from the opening weekend, because nobody has seen the film yet to judge it! The opening weekend only demonstrates how much money was spent on advertising and the stars. That's it.”

Believe it or not, all that is in just the first half of the article. Bozzo goes on to make a number of additional good points about why the legacy players hate BitTorrent -- not because it's "stealing" from them, but because it's upsetting their old way of tricking people into giving them money for bad movies. It's a great read. Someone should send it to Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier, though I'm pretty sure I know how he'd respond...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...18179792.shtml





Blockbuster 4: The Same, but Worse
A. O. Scott

THE imminent arrival of actual, calendar-based summer a little more than a week from now means that movie summer has been going on for almost two months. And that means it is a perfect time to start complaining about how bad the summer movies are — even the ones that haven’t been released yet. In particular those darn sequels, a perennial easy target for those of us who persist in entertaining high hopes for summer entertainment.

Every year it’s the same, and every year it’s worse than ever. This year is surely the worst of all time, or at least since, I don’t know, 2007. Just look at the list of recent and coming movies, with all those darn numerals trailing after them: “Iron Man 2,” “Shrek 4” (whatever title DreamWorks Animation finally decided on), “Sex and the City 2,” “Toy Story 3.” Later on there will be a sequel to the audience-polarizing interspecies smackdown “Cats and Dogs” and a third installment (in 3-D, no less) in the “Step Up” dance franchise. And don’t forget “Twilight.” And “Nanny McPhee Returns.” And of course the next “Harry Potter” movie, which is coming in the fall.

Have the movie studios completely given up? Is originality extinct? It isn’t only the sequels that fuel such questions of course. (And the answer isn’t always no.) But the steady production of repeatable, renewable movie franchises provides both the clearest evidence of Hollywood’s fundamental cynicism, and also the best excuse to wax cynical about Hollywood.

Or does it? Of course it is absurd to deny that rampant sequelism is driven, above all, by commercial calculations. “Why did they make another Shrek movie?” one of my children asked me as we bought tickets to see it, and I suspect it was at least partly a rhetorical question. The first three made so much money that a fourth was pretty much automatic. Every few years since 2001 a new cohort of youngsters has arrived needing green ogre plush toys and other licensed Shrek merchandise to join their Buzz and Woody dolls and Spider-Man action figures.

The landscape is also littered with countless abandoned would-be franchises: “Narnia” appears to be getting a second chance, but it seems unlikely that “The Golden Compass” or “Cirque du Freak” or “Master and Commander” or the brand-new and struggling “Prince of Persia” will be so lucky.

All of these came from popular sources, which shows that success does not come automatically when best-selling novels or video games are adapted for the screen. Nevertheless it sometimes seems that every commercially ambitious movie these days, with the possible exception of certain romantic comedies, comes with built-in sequel potential.

The mercenary impulses of the culture industry always have a plausible populist basis: DreamWorks Animation and Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer and Marvel Studios and all the other serial peddlers are giving us what we want — what they know we like. And this is hardly new. The current era of big-budget, mass-market movie sequelization dates back to the 1970s, when the personal cinema of the New Hollywood spawned, almost as a byproduct, a handful of nostalgic baby-boomer adventures, horror movies and action spectaculars that eventually took over the business.

Those of us who grew up in that era remember the unfolding of the “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” “Superman” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” series, but it is easy to forget that movies like “Jaws,” “Carrie” and “The Exorcist” also spawned further episodes. And when you survey the much-maligned American cinema of the 1980s, it can be hard to find a popular movie that didn’t. There were “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard,” “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th,” “Batman” and “Rambo.” Remember all those “Police Academy” movies? Do you wish I hadn’t reminded you?

Sorry. Their persistence back there in the shadowy realms of collective memory testifies not only to the vexing ontological riddle that is Steve Guttenberg, but also — at least as profoundly — to a notable aspect of our deep human craving for narrative. Anyone who has told a child a bedtime story knows that its conclusion is met with the demand for “another one” — for the same one again, but a little bit different. Movies are far from the only medium to cater to this desire.

The current practice of presenting feature films as installments in a single story cycle recalls the old one- and two-reel serials that used to precede the main attraction in the pretelevision era of moviegoing. And it is hardly an accident that so many of the current franchises are spun from superhero comic books, which fed the youthful appetite of every generation since the Great Depression for open-ended storytelling.

Before that, there were crime novels and cowboy pulps. Back in the Victorian era there was Sherlock Holmes, a forerunner of both the 20th-century private eye and his superhero cousins. The great novels of Charles Dickens were first read in periodical cliffhanger installments. How far back should we go? Shakespeare’s continuing adventures of Prince (later King) Henry, that medieval muggle proto-Potter? It seems unlikely that Homer, whoever he was, recited the whole of the Odyssey in one sitting. Anyway, it was already a sequel to the Illiad, unless that poem was the prequel. And surely every little Greek kid wanted an Achilles action figure — Trojan horse sold separately.

To return to the modern world, there is television, a cosmos of narrative seriality in all its many shapes. There are, classically, the long and short arcs of the sitcom or the drama, the hour or half-hour that seems to occur in a vacuum, complete unto itself until the next week. There is the long, curlicued line of the soap opera, which has in the past few decades migrated from network daytime into prime time and then into the exalted realm of premium and basic cable. There are mini-series and spinoffs and, most recently and perhaps most radically, entire multiseason shows conceived as single, cyclical works.

One notable contrast, this year, between television and the movies is that a handful of TV shows actually and explicitly came to an end. “Lost” at last explained itself — or didn’t, depending on how you interpreted its conclusions; “24” ran out the clock”; and “Law & Order” just stopped.

These different forms of closure and the popular reactions to them reveal various ways of dealing with loss. The ending of every story is an intimation and an allegory of death, which is one reason the cold finish of “The Sopranos” a few years ago felt so jarring and, upon reflection, so right. The slight disappointment with the last “Lost” was inevitable, since even a spiritual summation could not compensate for the rich, mysterious pleasures of the previous years. And the grief attending the demise of “Law & Order” was akin to that attending a death from old age. Yes, it was much too soon — it always is — but what a long, full life it had been.

Some of the most popular movie franchises of the past decade — the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the Harry Potter pictures and the “Twilight” saga — benefit from and are limited by built-in closure. All of them follow book series in which each volume is at once a satisfying, rounded-off story and the segment in a bigger, grander chronicle. Ideally, each of the films in these cycles should be able both to stand alone as a cinematic experience and flow into the whole. And in practice, at least for many legions of fans, they do.

But this is not so easy to accomplish with other types of story and other kinds of source material. The exhaustion of the superhero movie — I mean both the tiredness of individual films like “Spider-Man 3” and “X-Men: The Last Stand” and the general malaise afflicting this still-bankable genre — arises precisely from the difficulty of balancing the demands of seriality with the basic requirement of pleasing this audience at this movie right now. The teasers inserted into the first “Iron Man” to suggest delights to come in subsequent chapters felt ingenious and exciting. In “Iron Man 2” such forestalling and foreshadowing was annoying, as if we were being conned into future ticket purchases rather than given our money’s worth.

That is sometimes the fate of middle movies, though more often with superheroes it is Part 2 that stands out above the others. The dutiful expository business of explaining origins has been taken care of, and the hero can suffer, fight and explore the dilemmas of his dual nature. (This has been notably true of “The Dark Knight,” and the second “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” movies,) After that, things get too busy and baroque, and after the third or fourth installment the franchise fades away until the next reboot or casting change.

And then there are sequels that seem more like epilogues or redundancies — a category that includes “Shrek Forever After” and “Sex and the City 2.” The characters in those movies have already, in previous episodes, come to rest not in death but in its comic analogy, marriage. Of course, in real life, there is more to life than happily ever after, but it’s harder to complicate or undo that state in stories. Carrie and Big will no more be torn asunder than Shrek and Fiona, so the filmmakers have confected elaborately flimsy tales playing on the unconvincing possibility that they might. Shrek develops amnesia, Carrie a mild case of the two-year-itch, but the emotional investment is gone, and the stories have gone on too long.

Of the making of sequels, though, there will be no end. We all need something to look forward to. And something to complain about. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait until next summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/movies/13scott.html





A State May Pay for a Movie, if It Likes Its Message
Michael Cieply

When Andrew van den Houten got a letter two weeks ago rejecting his request for Michigan public money to help finance his latest horror movie, “The Woman,” it came with an admonition about the state’s good name.

“This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” wrote Janet Lockwood, Michigan’s film commissioner. Ms. Lockwood particularly objected to “this extreme horror film’s subject matter, namely realistic cannibalism; the gruesome and graphically violent depictions described in the screenplay; and the explicit nature of the script.”

The easy money is not quite so easy any more.

Among the states that began underwriting film and television production with heavy subsidies over the past half-decade — 44 states had some sort of incentives by last year, 28 of them involving tax credits — at least a handful are giving new scrutiny to a question that was politely overlooked in the early excitement: What kind of films are taxpayers paying for?

Less than two years ago, Mr. van den Houten became one of the first to take advantage of Michigan’s generous subsidy, which pays for up to 42 percent of a movie’s cost, when he made “Offspring,” a cannibalism-themed horror picture that was later distributed by the Ghost House Underground direct-to-video line and has been showing on NBC Universal’s Chiller TV network.

“The Woman,” a sequel to “Offspring,” is a little less horrific, Mr. van den Houten said in an interview. “We had babies in the first movie,” he offered.

Still, “The Woman” proved too much for Ms. Lockwood. In rejecting the film for public money, she described its financing arrangements as “questionable” — a claim disputed by Mr. van den Houten, who said his Modernciné company has been careful to pay its bills and has other backing for a budget of less than $1 million. But she also invoked a provision of Michigan’s law that says movies underwritten by the state should help promote it as a tourist destination.

Whether such payments ultimately benefit a state and its economy has been the subject of ferocious debate. Some monitors of the programs contend that the supposed benefits from job creation and tourism do not make up for the monies spent. The Michigan State Senate Fiscal Agency estimates the subsidies will amount to about $132 million in the next year.

Content requirements touch a hot button in Hollywood, where filmmakers are on alert for anything that reeks of censorship.

“They’re never going to do that to a major studio film, because it would create too much of a firestorm,” said Michael Shamberg, a producer whose recent credits include “Extraordinary Measures.”

In Texas, the verdict is still out on “Machete,” a thriller from the filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, set for release by 20th Century Fox in September.

In May, Mr. Rodriguez used a mock trailer to promote the movie as a revenge story targeted at Arizona in the wake of its new anti-illegal immigrant law. Conservative bloggers and others then called on the Texas film commission to deny it support under a rule that says the state does not have to pay for projects that include “inappropriate content or content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion.”

Bob Hudgins, the film commission’s director, said he had never yet denied financing to a film under the provision — though he warned the makers of a picture about the Waco raid that they need not apply because of what Mr. Hudgins saw as inaccuracies about the event and people connected with it.

Mr. Hudgins said would reserve judgment about “Machete” until he sees it. Texas, like many states, doesn’t pay its share until after a film is finished.

“This is tough for filmmakers to understand, but this is not about their right to make the movie,” Mr. Hudgins explained. “It’s about the public investing in it.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Rodriguez, who is still finishing “Machete,” said the objections have come from people who do not know what is in the movie.

“The film is not about Texas specifically and it most certainly does not paint Texas in a negative light,” he wrote.

In Florida, a recent legislative proposal to bar a special tax credit for family entertainment from films or shows that exhibit “nontraditional family values” was dropped after it was widely criticized as seeming to exclude gay characters.

Many states, including Tennessee and Georgia, have no explicit provision regarding the tenor of films they underwrite (although no state will subsidize pornography, and many disallow incentives for commercials or certain other formats).

Still, officials in Georgia plan to memorialize an understanding that the state will not pay for a picture that is likely to be rated NC-17. “We really need to go ahead and put that in the rules,” said Bill Thompson, the deputy commissioner for the economic development department’s film, music and digital entertainment division.

Hollywood has long dealt with stringent controls on content imposed by government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency and branches of the military when they offer access, equipment or other help.

“The Pentagon’s policy is they will assist film and television if it shows the military in a positive light, and, if not, they’ll assist in changing the script to put it in a positive light,” said David L. Robb, who wrote the book “Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.”

That state governments are also tightening their approach was probably inevitable, given the financial squeeze on governments.

“Everybody’s looking at everything so much more carefully,” said Jeff Begun, a partner in the Incentives Office, a company in Santa Monica, Calif., that advises filmmakers.

Pennsylvania has not yet rejected a film for violating its stipulation that publicly supported movies should “tend to foster a positive image” of the state. But it might.

“That would only come into play if I had two applications at some moment, and only had enough funding left for one,” said Jane Saul, the director of the Pennsylvania Film Office. Pennsylvania helped underwrite “The Road,” a post-apocalyptic story that was distributed last year by the Weinstein Company, and which, like Mr. van den Houten’s new film, was rife with cannibals, child-eating and otherwise.

Ken Droz, the communications consultant for the Michigan Film Office, declined to discuss “The Woman.” But he noted that Michigan had approved 160 applications out of 320 submitted to date, after measuring each against criteria that include the potential for creating economic development.

“This is not an entitlement program,” Mr. Droz said.

Mr. van den Houten, whose company is based in New York, said his plan is to move “The Woman” to Massachusetts, where the subsidy program has no apparent strictures on extreme horror.

But he might want to hurry.

“All the states will be looking at this as they begin to tighten their belts,” said Marshall Moore, director of the Utah Film Commission. His state has unabashedly declined to fund pictures that, as Mr. Moore put it, you could not take the governor to see.

Of the others, he predicted: “They’re going to ask, why are we giving money to that movie?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/movies/15credits.html





Redbox, Paramount Reach Same Day DVD Rental Deal
Sue Zeidler

Movie kiosk operator Redbox on Tuesday said it had reached a deal to rent Paramount DVD and Blu-ray titles the same day they are available for sale and is preparing to roll out Blu-ray titles from various studios across the nation in the third quarter.

Other Hollywood movie studios have entered into deals that require Redbox to wait 28 days after a DVD or Blu-ray disc's release to offer them to its customers.

Redbox president Mitch Lowe told Reuters he expected Redbox to soon determine pricing for Blu-ray discs and roll out the high-definition format nationally. Lowe said Redbox will also unveil a digital-delivery strategy in October.

"Our standard definition movies rent for $1 a night and we are testing price points for Blu-ray of $1.50 and $1.75 a night," Lowe told Reuters.

"Over the next short period of time, we'll determine which is the right price point and will offer, nationally, Blu-rays to rent in the third quarter."

"I think we'll accelerate the adoption rate of Blu-ray by making it available," said Lowe.

Research firm In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold said while Redbox's Blu-ray pricing represented a big premium from its own standard DVD prices, it was very aggressive compared with the $4.99 to $5.99 customers spend to see high-definition films through cable and satellite pay-per-view plans.

"Some thrifty movie consumers have already reduced their subscriptions to movie channels due to Redbox," he said noting that Redbox's aggressive Blu-ray pricing could further drive consumers away from cable and satellite.

Dennis Maguire, worldwide president of Paramount Home Entertainment, said the deal with Redbox was reached following a 10-month analysis of DVD sell-through and rental performance.

"After analyzing the data from our test period we have concluded that Redbox day-and-date rental activity has had minimal impact on our DVD sales," said Maguire.

By granting Redbox the so-called day-and-date availability, Paramount said it was allowing the consumer a choice of how to consume its movies while maximizing the profitability of releases in the home entertainment window.

Other studios have accused Redbox of undercutting DVD sales by renting them for $1 a day from its 22,000 kiosks, and have threatened to withhold titles.

(Editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65F00120100616





How Much Does Movie Marketing Matter?
Larry Gerbrandt

When a movie hits big, almost no one cares what was spent; when a release fails to make opening-weekend estimates or has a 60 percent drop-off during its second week, everyone begins pointing fingers.

Consider MGM's $30 million to tub-thump "Hot Tub Time Machine," which cost about $35 million to make: First-week gross was $20 million, dropping 60 percent the following week and winding up with $50 million in domestic gross.

Or Disney's $200 million production "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," which has raked in $63 million domestically to date against a prints-and-advertising spend stateside of $75 million.

On the other hand, Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," similar in cost and marketing budget to "Prince," has grossed $334 million domestically and $1 billion worldwide.

In short, there might not be a more daunting challenge than opening a major motion picture: Create an internationally recognized brand name that lasts a lifetime, and do it in a couple of weeks with no second chances to course-correct. It's little wonder that the average P&A (prints and advertising) spend for major releases last year topped $37 million, according to Baseline Intelligence, the highest number since 2003, when the six largest studios spent an estimated average of $39.5 million on P&A in North America.

For the past seven years, domestic P&A has accounted for 34 percent-37 percent of combined production and domestic-releasing costs for movies released by the six big studios. In fact, after taking a big jump in 2003, the combined negative plus domestic P&A has hovered around the $100 million-a-film mark, with last year hitting $102.3 million, up from $87.9 million in 2008, according to Baseline Intelligence.

Looked at another way, for every dollar spent on producing a major film, the studios have been spending 51 cents-58 cents to release and market it in the United States and Canada. Assuming distributors get an average of 55 percent of domestic ticket sales, the average 2009 release had to gross $186 million to recoup production and domestic-releasing costs -- an unrealistic goal for all but a handful of titles -- which is where the international brand-building challenge kicks in.

The connection between production budgets and P&A spend is repeated at the individual studio level. Last year, Paramount had the highest average negative cost ($87.7 million) and highest P&A average ($50 million a release). Universal had the lowest average negative cost ($51.7 million) and lowest P&A ($30.4 million).

The "P" portion of prints and advertising represents less than 10 percent of the overall spend, and with digital distribution becoming more widespread it is heading downward. The actual cost of a print can vary widely depending on the volume of prints ordered, the film-release stock chosen, length of the movie and quality-control considerations. Prices can range from less than $1,000 to more than $3,000, but what the majors pay is based on volume deals cut in aggressive negotiations between high-level studio and lab executives and might include rebates from such film-stock manufacturers as Kodak and Fuji.

Through the years, there have been periodic attempts to control escalating P&A spending, which can soar to the $85 million range on big "tentpole" releases involving 4,000 screens. This includes finger-pointing at ego-driven demands by actors and directors to blanket major-city skylines with giant billboards and lavish creative campaigns.

But Nielsen Ad*Views data suggest that the overwhelming portion of the spend is on television advertising. Last year, Nielsen estimates that of the $26.5 million in media spent on the opening weekend of a 2,000- to 5,000-screen release, 80 percent went to network, cable and spot TV buys.

In contrast to just about every other product release, a movie faces a singular challenge: It must create near-instant national brand-name recognition within a span of a few days to a couple of weeks. The only way to do this, especially with a highly visual product like a film, is with a well-crafted TV spot campaign.

While overall TV viewership is at record levels, it also is increasingly fragmented across dozens of channels. Spending on network TV actually has increased, from 35 percent of opening-weekend budgets in 2006 to 41 percent last year, in addition to an increase from 26 percent to 28 percent in cable-network spend. These increases have come largely at the expense of spot TV, down from 18 percent to 11 percent, and newspapers, down from 12 percent to 9 percent, Nielsen said.

At various points along the way, especially with the ascent of social media, there have been calls to shift a larger portion of media budgets to the Internet, especially given that medium's lower ad rates, massive inventory and ability to target key demographics.

This certainly has happened with limited- and medium-release movies. Those bowing on fewer than 500 screens have seen online-media spend jump from 5 percent in 2006 to 12 percent last year; 500- to 2,000-screen releases allocated 6 percent to the Web last year, double the 3 percent mark in 2006.

Industry peer pressure and second-guessing also play a part in keeping P&A spending trending upward. "When a studio like Disney tries to rein in these costs, they are second-guessed and doubted for trying a new media mix and paradigm," says Jim Lukowitsch, product manager at Baseline Intelligence.

Web-delivered over-the-top (OTT) television might open additional opportunities for movie marketers, but at present the Internet remains a text-driven medium, and usage is so fragmented across tens of thousands of sites that it is difficult to buy in the massive tidal wave needed to create overnight brand awareness -- which is where TV outshines all other media, albeit for a premium price.

Indeed, TV spot rates are likely to rise as the economy improves and midterm elections, which could draw record TV campaign spending, further drive up spot pricing.

The big question facing movie marketers is how to deal with the declining DVD window. Conventional wisdom has been that the massive spend around the opening theatrical window could be justified by the "afterglow" effect lasting into the DVD and even PPV/VOD windows. This was further justified by steady shrinkage of the theatrical-to-DVD window, lessening the need for a second big spend to promote the home video release.

With Google TV entering the OTT fray -- all of which have movie rentals and subscriptions as core offerings -- it would be logical to see a further shift of ad spend to online.

What isn't likely to happen is a change in the need to create that initial brand awareness in the theatrical window. Although a small-budget release might bet on multiple Golden Globe and Oscar nominations to give it a promotional push, that type of strategy is simply too risky for larger-budget movies.

It might be the ultimate example of that old adage, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." With movies, it is an impression that lasts a lifetime.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65A13Q20100611





Online Video Sites Embrace Live Concert Streams
Antony Bruno

The visceral experience of attending a concert can never be fully replicated online. But live music is making its way to the Internet with increasing frequency, bringing with it new opportunities for fans, artists and rights-holders alike.

Online outlets have begun dabbling in hosting live video streams of music concerts. YouTube has done so with U2, Alicia Keys and, most recently, with performances by the Dave Matthews Band, Norah Jones and other acts at this year's Bonnaroo festival. MTV has aired live performances by such acts as the Gorillaz, Honor Society and Just Kait. Vevo, which featured a live stream in May of a concert by the National, just completed a live webcast of the FIFA World Cup Kick-Off Celebration Concert on Thursday (June 10) in South Africa. And live video sites like Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream and Big Live have formed to make a real business out of hosting live streams.

At first glance, it seems like a counterintuitive effort. The Internet, after all, is a bastion of on-demand access to entertainment content, challenging the appointment-based nature of traditional TV viewing. So why bring that same appointment-based model to an on-demand format like the Web?

According to Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff, the answer is simple: money. Vevo's model is built around creating scarcity and selling advertising against that. The first step was to create one point of access for any music videos on the Web, allowing Vevo to be the sole entity selling ads around them.

Live events are even more scarce, which Caraeff says opens the door to different types of advertising opportunities, like movie trailer premieres. These ads cost more than other Vevo ads because the sponsor is able to place advertising in the promotional run-up to the event, around the live event itself and on the archived footage made available to stream after the event. There's already huge demand from consumer brands keen on reaching the online video audience.

'Incredible Demand' from Advertisers

"A lot of the sponsors we're working with today are asking us for more live events," Caraeff says. "Did I think we would be doing this live event strategy so soon? Not exactly. I thought we'd be getting into this at the end of our first year, not in the first one or two quarters of our business. So it's something we've moved up in our road map because we see incredible demand from the advertising marketplace for more events."

Augmenting this scarcity benefit is the issue of audience engagement. Streaming music is by and large a passive activity, which is why video has emerged as the go-to model for ad-supported music online. Watching a video provides more opportunities for interacting with an audience than an audio stream.

Live-streaming services like Ustream and the just-launched Big Live are adding interactive features like chat and sharing to their sites. Big Live is a social networking site that streams live music performances, mostly by undiscovered acts, as a sort of icebreaker to stimulate discussion. Once logged on, users can see what concerts their friends are watching and choose to join the stream, enabling both private and public chats along the way that the founders hope will keep users watching the entire set. Ustream integrates Twitter feeds and Facebook updates on its site for much the same purpose.

An engaged viewer is a valuable viewer, and savvy online services can sell ads around these users, generating revenue that it shares with the artists involved. Ustream shares all ad revenue with artists 50/50. Vevo also provides participating artists with a share of the sponsorship dollars above and beyond the simple per-stream royalties.

The downside, however, is cost. It's far more expensive to stream a live video to 10,000 simultaneous viewers than it is to stream an archived video to 100,000 viewers accessing it at different times. These costs can vary widely based on how each service manages its bandwidth costs, the quality of the stream provided, server maintenance and other factors.

Ultimately, the success of this effort depends on the number of eyeballs it attracts. Vevo won't disclose how many viewers its live events have garnered, but YouTube estimated that more than 10 million tuned in to its U2 concert last year. When Shakira premiered her video "Give It Up to Me" on Ustream last November, the company says it drew about 94,000 viewers.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Musicians Hit by Brutal Summer on Concert Circuit
Ray Waddell

The concert business is facing what could be its worst summer since the mid-1990s as a slew of A-list acts ranging from the Jonas Brothers to Kings Of Leon battle slumping ticket sales.

Artists such as Christina Aguilera, the Eagles, U2 (due to Bono's back surgery), Rihanna, John Mayer, Limp Bizkit, and the Go-Go's have canceled either shows or entire tours. The female-skewing Lilith Fair has also suffered soft sales.

Rumblings of a tough year for touring began a couple of months ago, with predictions ranging from "mediocre" to "bloodbath." Two main culprits may be at fault: ticket prices and traffic. At the center of the storm is Live Nation, which controls the majority of summer touring, particularly at the amphitheater level.

Live Nation's detractors say the company pays artists unreasonably high guarantees in order to gain market share and keep its amphitheaters programed and tap into ancillary revenues like concessions, sponsorships and parking. The cost is passed on to the consumer.

Since an estimated 70% of touring traffic occurs during the warm months, it becomes tougher for acts to get the kind of promotional attention necessary, whether from the promoter's own efforts or from media coverage.

Also coming into play is the fact that many if not most Live Nation amphitheater tours are negotiated and booked out of the company's West Coast offices, without a lot of local input. An act that's worth $250,000 in Boston may be worth only $50,000 in Cleveland, which should be reflected in local ticket prices.

Another factor cited by insiders is ill-advised touring by artists who either don't have a new album or single out, or have made the rounds too many years in a row. Without a compelling reason to go see an act, whether it's absence from the marketplace or a hot album or single, fans may be deciding to sit this one out.

Finally, there seems to be a level of skepticism from consumers toward the concert industry, much of it relating to numerous ticket add-on fees or high ticket and concession prices in general.

There are live music successes. The Coachella, Stagecoach, Jazzfest and Bonnaroo festivals all did quite well. Tours by acts like Lady GaGa, James Taylor/Carole King, and Roger Waters are performing solidly under Live Nation, as is its entire country roster of tours. Rival promoter AEG's Justin Bieber, Black Eyed Peas, Taylor Swift and Bon Jovi, are also doing sellout business.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65G0ZO20100617





Cult Rock Band Melvins Hit U.S. Chart after 26 Years

The music industry's collapse is good news for the Melvins, the defiantly uncommercial "thud-rock" band that just cracked the U.S. pop album chart for the first time in its 26-year career.

The group, whose heavy guitar riffs and mumbled vocals paved the way for fellow Seattle-area bands such as Nirvana and Soundgarden, grabbed the last spot on Billboard's Top 200 chart published Wednesday.

It achieved this feat by selling just 2,809 copies of "The Bride Screamed Murder," its 19th album. With another 2,000 units, they would have breached the top half of the chart.

Exactly five years ago, the threshold for inclusion in the Top 200 was about 5,000 copies. Since then, U.S. album sales have halved, and the industry last month suffered its slowest week since the early 1970s, according to a Billboard estimate.

While the Melvins' debut chart ranking therefore comes with an asterisk of sorts, the milestone managed to stun its members. "Top 200 what?" singer/guitarist Roger "Buzz" Osborne said via email.

The band's biggest release is 1993's "Houdini," which was partly produced by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, one of their biggest fans. It has sold about 110,000 copies. The 1996 release "Stag" posted the band's best opening week after selling almost 4,000 albums. The band has sold 538,000 albums since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking data in 1991.

Osborne and drummer Dale Crover have gone through a multitude of bass players, including one of Shirley Temple's daughters, since the band was formed in 1984. The lineup has stabilized in recent years after the Melvins expanded to a quartet by adding second drummer Coady Willis and bassist Jared Warren.

The band just began a monthlong North American club tour, with a date in New Orleans on Wednesday, and will also play the annual Bonnaroo rock festival in Tennessee this weekend.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6586UR20100610





Report: Music Sales To Turn Around In 2013
FMQB

Consumer behavior will catalyze change for the entertainment and media (E&M) industry over the next five years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ new Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2010-2014, and the report affirms that digital technology is expected to progressively increase its impact. Following a year of decline in 2009, the Outlook forecasts that global entertainment and media spending is expected to rise from $1.3 trillion to $1.7 trillion by 2014, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5 percent. The U.S. E&M market is expected to grow at 3.8 percent CAGR reaching $517 billion in 2014, up from $428 billion in 2009.

Global music sales are approaching a turning point as revenue from digital outlets continues to increase, and music sales will turn around in 2013, the report predicts. Spending on recorded music will increase to $27.9 billion in 2014, up from $26.4 billion last year. However, 2014 sales will still be 19 percent below their level in 2005. The reports also says that digital sales will overtake physical music purchases in 2011 and will rise to $17 billion in 2014. Physical sales will fall to $10.9 billion in 2014, down 66 percent from 2005, according to the report.

"The digital pace of change has proven to be even quicker than anticipated with consumers embracing new media experiences and digital downloads at often-unexpected speeds," said Ken Sharkey, U.S. leader, entertainment, media & communications practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for E&M companies to stake their position in the digital value chain. The continued fragmentation of the E&M sector will fuel greater experimentation by both established industry giants and niche players in adopting business models that include hybrid combinations of advertising and subscription approaches."

Integrating music services onto mobile phones will be a critical area of growth, said PWC, and the company pointed to new government anti-piracy programs as a means to stabilize the industry.

As for advertising, while there are signs of a rebound, spending is unlikely to return to former levels, says the PWC report. By 2014, the U.S. advertising spend is expected to still be 9 percent below its level in 2007. Advertising spending for Internet, television, radio, out-of-home and video games are expected to be larger in 2014 than in 2009, while consumer magazines, newspapers, directories and trade magazines are expected to be smaller.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1841587





Jimmy Dean, Singer, Sausage Businessman, Dies at 81; Known for 'Big Bad John' in 1961
Dena Potter

Jimmy Dean, a country music legend for his smash hit about a workingman hero, "Big Bad John," and an entrepreneur known for his sausage brand, died on Sunday. He was 81.

His wife, Donna Meade Dean, said her husband died at their Henrico County, Va., home.

She told The Associated Press that he had some health problems but was still functioning well, so his death came as a shock. She said he was eating in front of the television. She left the room for a time and came back and he was unresponsive. She said he was pronounced dead at 7:54 p.m.

"He was amazing," she said. "He had a lot of talents."

Born in 1928, Dean was raised in poverty in Plainview, Texas, and dropped out of high school after the ninth grade. He went on to a successful entertainment career in the 1950s and '60s that included the nationally televised "The Jimmy Dean Show."

In 1969, Dean went into the sausage business, starting the Jimmy Dean Meat Co. in his hometown. He sold the company to Sara Lee Corp. in 1984.

Dean lived in semiretirement with his wife, who is a songwriter and recording artist, on their 200-acre estate just outside Richmond, where he enjoyed investing, boating and watching the sun set over the James River.

In 2009 a fire gutted their home, but his Grammy for "Big Bad John," a puppet made by Muppets creator Jim Henson, a clock that had belonged to Prince Charles and Princess Diana and other valuables were saved. Lost were a collection of celebrity-autographed books, posters of Dean with Elvis Presley and other prized possessions.

Donna Meade Dean said the couple had just moved back into their reconstructed home.

With his drawled wisecracks and quick wit, Dean charmed many fans. But in both entertainment and business circles, he was also known for his tough hide. He fired bandmate Roy Clark, who went onto "Hee Haw" fame, for showing up late for gigs.

More recently, a scrap with Sara Lee led to national headlines.

The Chicago-based company let him go as spokesman in 2003, inciting Dean's wrath. He issued a statement titled "Somebody doesn't like Sara Lee," claiming he was dumped because he got old.

"The company told me that they were trying to attract the younger housewife, and they didn't think I was the one to do that," Dean told The Associated Press in January 2004. "I think it's the dumbest thing. But you know, what do I know?"

Sara Lee has said that it chose not to renew Dean's contract because the "brand was going in a new direction" that demanded a shift in marketing.

Dean grew up in a musical household. His mother showed him how to play his first chord on the piano. His father, who left the family, was a songwriter and singer. Dean taught himself to play the accordion and the harmonica.

His start in the music business came as an accordionist at a tavern near Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., where he was stationed in the 1940s. After leaving the Air Force in 1948, he fronted his band, the Texas Wildcats, and drew a strong local following through appearances on Washington-area radio.

By the early 1950s, Dean's band had its first national hit in "Bummin' Around."

"Big Bad John," which is about a coal miner who saves fellow workers when a mine roof collapses, became a big hit in 1961 and won a Grammy. The star wrote it in less than two hours.

His fame led him to a string of television shows, including "The Jimmy Dean Show" on CBS. Dean's last big TV stint was ABC's version of "The Jimmy Dean Show" from 1963 to 1966.

Dean in February was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was to be inducted in October and his wife said she thinks he was looking forward to it.

Dean became a headliner at venues like Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and became the first country star to play on the Las Vegas strip. He was the first guest host on "The Tonight Show," and also was an actor with parts in television and the movies, including the role of James Bond's ally Willard Whyte in the 1971 film "Diamonds Are Forever."

Besides his wife, Dean is survived by three children and two grandchildren, Donna Meade Dean said. Arrangements have not be made, but it will be a private service, she said.

In the late '60s, Dean entered the hog business — something he knew well. His family had butchered hogs, with the young Dean whacking them over the head with the blunt end of an ax. The Dean brothers — Jimmy and Don — ground the meat and their mother seasoned it.

The Jimmy Dean Meat Co. opened with a plant in Plainview. After six months, the company was profitable.

His fortune was estimated at $75 million in the early '90s.

Having watched other stars fritter away their fortunes, Dean said he learned to be careful with his money.

"I've seen so many people in this business that made a fortune," he told the AP. "They get old and broke and can't make any money. ... I tell you something, ... no one's going to play a benefit for Jimmy Dean."

Dean said then that he was at peace at his estate and that he had picked a spot near the river where he wanted to be buried.

"It's the sweetest piece of property in the world, we think," he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "It sure is peaceful here."

___

AP Entertainment Writer Chris Talbott in Nashville contributed to this report.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,6934591.story





JB Hi-Fi Denies iPad Upsell Reports
Lia Timson

Electronics store chain JB Hi-Fi has denied it has a nation-wide policy of selling iPads only with accessories, after shoppers began complaining in an online forum.

Complaints started on Whirlpool on Thursday when a buyer said he had been coerced by a salesman at a JB Hi-Fi store in Bondi, Sydney, to buy a screen protector or a docking station “otherwise they won’t sell me an iPad”.

Other buyers reported similar tactics at the chain’s stores at Chermside in Queensland, Osborne Park in Western Australia, and in the ACT.

Buyers complained about pressure to buy other add-ons such as covers, chargers, extended warranties and Telstra 3G SIM cards. They reported sales assistants said it was “company policy” or “Apple policy” to sell the devices only with accessories, or not at all.

Ryan, who asked his last name not be revealed, told this reporter that at the Warrawong store near Wollongong, NSW, he declined to purchase the device and was then met with the store manager who said it was “a bad policy but it was Apple’s policy and they couldn’t sell one without it”.

Ryan bought the accessory, but later lodged a complaint with JB Hi-Fi and was told by its area manager to return to the store for a refund – which he did, keeping only his iPad. He also filed a complaint with the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) as the company advertised the device at a price without mentioning the sale was conditional. The Trade Practices Act prescribes goods must be available for sale as advertised.

The company’s website last night advertised iPad models without condition, at $1 to $5 discount from Apple’s Australian website.

“When I was there, they said other mistruths, like you have to buy a Telstra SIM because the iPad is locked to Telstra,” Ryan said.

At Chermside, another Whirlpool user was told to buy a power adapter because it wasn’t included in the box.

“I said, ‘Really, well I suggest you look on (sic) the box and you will find a 10w power supply is included’,” he wrote. He then told another buyer waiting at the cash register he didn’t need the two power supplies he had been sold with his two iPad devices either.

A Canberra buyer said the same thing happened to him. He only found out there were adapters in the box when he got home.

Some forum users reported they had bought the device from JB Hi-Fi stores without mention of the “condition” or “policy”.

A Telstra spokesman confirmed last night that the carrier has no agreement in place with any reseller to push SIM cards to iPad buyers.

“The iPad is definitely not locked to Telstra and shouldn’t be sold on that basis,” he said adding Telstra has asked the store chain to look into the claims.

The practice is not sanctioned by Apple either. An Apple spokeswoman said while she could not comment on company policy, “consumers could buy iPads directly from us” without any add-ons.

Late on Friday, JB Hi-Fi’s newly installed chief executive Terry Smart told the Herald the sale tactic was not company policy “in any way shape or form”.

He said it may have been one isolated store in NSW, but admitted he was concerned there had been multiple complaints on the forum. He could not say if it was the action of a few over-zealous sales staff.

“We’ve addressed it with Warrawong and told them it’s not our policy.”

Smart said JB Hi-Fi stores would refund any device or accessory which shoppers believed had been bought under pressure.

“We will do whatever is required. We fully understand our obligations under the Trade Practices Act,’ Smart said.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/i...0612-y4kk.html





Goodbye, Unlimited and Free: What Will You Pay for iPhone, News or Hulu?
Alex Salkever

First The New York Times (NYT) decided to follow in the footsteps of The Wall Street Journal (NWS) and The Financial Times by putting up a pay wall. Then telecom giant AT&T (T) decided it would stop selling an unlimited data-usage plan for the iPhone, replacing it with a tiered pricing system that charges the heaviest users extra. Other phone companies in Europe quickly followed suit. Then word leaked out the free online video programming site Hulu.com would soon start charging users for access to its back catalog of old shows and movies.

In short order, it seems, two of the basic tenets of the early Internet Era -- free and unlimited -- are waning. For the die-hard pirate movie downloaders and YouTube fanatics, for those who would rather sever a digit than type in a credit card number to pay for online content, this will be bitter medicine. But the plain reality is, free just can't compete with paid, and unlimited can't compete with tiered.

That's a grand oversimplification, of course. Free morning tabloids aren't talking about going paid. And no one plans to install tiered pricing at health clubs. But what's clear is that the boundless growth of the Internet, the implosion of older media business models, and the impending era of hyper-connectivity and high-definition video ubiquity are contributing to massive strains on a finite set of shared resources.

Restrict Access and Put a Price on Time

Hundreds of millions of people use mobile phone networks. With mobile video, mobile TV, and true high-speed mobile broadband arriving within the past year or two, the carriers that operate those networks realized that they faced a stark choice: Reduce usage or sink untold billions of dollars into equipment and bandwidth upgrades even beyond the current and quite expensive improvements now under way.

Those telecoms already knew that users would be unwilling to pay the cost for such upgrades out of pocket. So, the only way to get data usage under control was to restrict access to the shared resource and put a price on time. AT&T's defends the move by contending that only a small percentage of its customers will pay more by switching to the new tiered plans.

The realization has now sunk in that revenues from online advertising will never rise high enough to replicate the profit margins that old media companies enjoyed during the latter half of the 20th century. The chasm is simply too wide. So, the free model for media consumption is now on the wane.

Unprofitable Delivery Costs

Like many other media companies, Hulu has figured out that it will struggle to attain mega-billion-dollar scale as long as its only revenue came from selling online ads, whose rates are far lower than traditional TV ads. The logical decision, then, is to charge for its wares. True, Hulu will still be giving away access to new shows. But its executives saw clearly that the shared resource of back-catalog video was costing more to deliver than it would likely ever earn for the company.

Welcome to the new Internet Era of the great wide paywall. And check your monthly data usage meter before you hit that download button.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/go...hulu/19512163/





U.S. Steps up Web Security Focus after iPad Breach
John Poirier

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said it would step up scrutiny of online security and privacy issues following recent security breaches involving Apple Inc's iPad and Google Inc's collection of private data by its Street View cars.

The FCC announcement on Friday comes one day after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had opened a probe into a security breach of the iPad that exposed personal information of AT&T Inc customers, including several high-ranking government officials.

The breach, first reported by the website Gawker, occurred when a group calling itself Goatse Security hacked into AT&T's iPad subscriber data, obtaining a list of email addresses that also included celebrities, chief executives and politicians.

In a blog posting, Joel Gurin, chief of the FCC's consumer and governmental affairs bureau, said the incident appeared to be a classic security breach that has happened to many companies.

"Our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is now addressing cybersecurity as a high priority," Gurin said.

The communications regulatory agency will seek to ensure that broadband networks are safe and secure, he said. "We're committed to working with all stakeholders to prevent problems like this in the future," he said.

AT&T, which has exclusive U.S. rights to carry the iPad and the popular iPhone, has acknowledged the security breach but said it has corrected the flaw and that only email addresses were exposed to hackers who identified a security weakness.

The iPad breach is just the latest incident involving privacy concerns at a high-profile company.

In May, Google said its fleet of cars responsible for photographing streets around the world had for several years accidentally collected personal information sent by consumers over wireless networks.

"Google's behavior also raises important concerns," Gurin said in the blog post. "Whether intentional or not, collecting information sent over WiFi networks clearly infringes on consumer privacy."

He said the Google incident is a reminder that "open" WiFi networks -- those that are not encrypted -- are vulnerable to cyber snooping. He urged consumers to read a wireless safety guide issued by the Federal Trade Commission.

The guide can be found here

(Reporting by John Poirier; editing by John Wallace)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Trumbull Man Stands up to AT&T
Rob Varnon

Two years, a lot of leg work and an uncle who's a lawyer helped Al Dressler restore the peace and quiet of his backyard that AT&T plucked away from him.

"These things grow to 200 feet," he said, standing next to the Silver pines planted to hide the object of his concern. "Maybe they'll envelope the box."

The box, called a VRAD cabinet, is part of the AT&T U-verse television system the Texas-based company installed here about three years ago, when it began hanging refrigerator-sized electronic component boxes from telephone poles without asking permission. Bridgeport, Stamford and Danbury ended that when the cities objected to the boxes because they're big and partially obstructed some sidewalks and roadways.

Now, AT&T must notify property owners of the placements and when an agreement with an owner can't be reached, the state Department of Utility Control reviews the case. Dressler was the first person to appeal to the DPUC and demand the box's removal. The DPUC sided with AT&T. However, AT&T was required to install a noise-dampening system and this year, after some discussion, Dressler got the two pine trees, which he had to plant himself.

"I still don't understand how this thing could get rolled out in the first place," Dressler said. He said cable companies ran fiberoptics directly to homes, but AT&T used a method that requires a large equipment box in every neighborhood. He said a number of websites, including Stopthebox.org, have popped up documenting trouble in other parts of the country. Dressler had to fight to address the noise issue and brought in a sound engineer to take measurements.

Adam Cormier, an AT&T spokesman, said "AT&T works closely with property owners to address concerns they may have regarding placement of VRAD cabinets. Consistent with DPUC directives for placement in the public right-of-way, the most important consideration is safety. In addition, after seeking the most appropriate location in a given service area, AT&T has addressed noise-abatement concerns that may be associated with certain locations, and in other locations, has provided shrubbery or other screening."

Cormier said property owners affected by the VRAD cabinets are given the name of an engineer to contact if they have issues, but they also can call 203-503-0742.

Dressler isn't so sure AT&T would have done this much if not for Dressler's uncle Tom Bucci, a lawyer with experience working with the DPUC. He said he wouldn't have gone as far as he did if he didn't have his uncle's help. So why do it at all?

"I like to sit back there in the evening and enjoy a beer," Dressler said. "It's quiet."
http://www.newstimes.com/business/ar...T-T-521054.php





Singapore Gets Wired for Speed
Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop

This island city-state, thanks to its small size and a big public investment, could soon be the first country blanketed with a fiber optic infrastructure so fast that it would enable the contents of a DVD to be downloaded in only a few seconds.

The new network is expected to give a strong boost to the growth of services like online video and Internet telephony. Pyramid Research, which analyzes the telecommunications business, expects the revenue of Singapore telecommunication operators to rise to $5.1 billion by 2014 from $3.8 billion in 2009.

The new network, stimulated by an investment of 1 billion Singapore dollars, or about $700 million, from the government, will help the country leap ahead in an international race to roll out faster broadband speeds, a competition in which several Asian countries are in leading positions.

While policy makers in many places are still debating their high-speed broadband strategies, considering, for example, whether development should be led by the public or private sector, broadband users in some parts of Asia already have access to the next generation of high-speed networks.

Japan and Hong Kong have been leading the way, with private companies already offering speeds as high as one gigabit per second, or 1,000 megabits per second — many times as fast as the 35 megabits per second required for streaming high-definition video. But these networks do not cover every home.

South Korea, one of the world’s most wired places, has also announced plans to complete a new broadband network offering one gigabit per second in all major cities by 2013.

For the development of its network, Singapore is relying on a mixture of public subsidies and private-sector participation and separating three main functions: the building of the infrastructure, the operation of the network and the provision of retail services.

OpenNet, the infrastructure builder is owned by a consortium formed by Axia of Canada and three Singaporean companies — SingTel, Singapore Press Holdings and SP Telecommunications — using existing parts of SingTel’s network. As part of the agreement, SingTel has transferred its 30 percent stake to a separately managed asset company and will reduce its stake within five years.

The infrastructure operator, which received a grant of 750 million Singapore dollars from the government, is required to have the new network operating in Singapore by the end of 2012. So far, it has laid fiber optic connections to about 30 percent of all the buildings; it is aiming for 60 percent coverage by the end of this year.

Khoong Hock Yun, an official in the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the government had seen an opportunity to introduce a next-generation fixed-line network, as well as to restructure its telecommunications sector.

“If you look at history across many developed countries, after years of liberalizing their telecom sector, the essential part of their fixed-line network is still owned substantially by the incumbent,” he said, referring to former monopoly providers like SingTel. “Those who have the physical infrastructure have a huge competitive advantage, and every service company remains dependent on the incumbent for their fixed line network needs.

“As a result, much of the pace of development, in terms of pricing and services offered, really depends on the investment decision of that incumbent and whether they want to partner with other people to create solutions they may not be prepared to offer at that point in time themselves.”

By separating the infrastructure building from the running of the network, the authority believes it can create a more competitive environment with more effective open access to downstream operators, Mr. Khoong said.

The Singaporean model draws its inspiration from several community broadband networks that can be found at the local level in countries like Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden.

“We noticed that in many of these cities that had rolled out their own network and made it open access, they had a huge growth in telecom service providers at the retail level,” Mr. Khoong said. “For small communities you have 20 to 30 retail service providers. This creates real competition.”

Nucleus Connect, which will operate the network, has announced monthly wholesale prices starting at 21 Singapore dollars for speeds of 100 megabits per second for residential connections, and Malcolm Rodrigues, general manager of commercial services at the company, said about 90 companies had expressed interest in providing a retail service. He expects about 12 companies to sign up for the services.

But analysts and market observers doubt whether new competition will really develop within the Singapore context, and whether prices of bandwidth for consumers will go down significantly for consumers as a result. Consumers now pay about 40 Singapore dollars per month for broadband access of six megabits per second, which is relatively high compared with Hong Kong, where some consumers pay about 200 Hong Kong dollars, or about 36 Singapore dollars, a month for service of one gigabit per second.

“I don’t think it’s going to introduce new competition, at least in terms of delivering the basic service,” said Bryan Wang, an analyst at Springboard Research. “It’s a very small market. It’s still going to be the same game between the main three current players — SingTel, StarHub and M1,”

He said retail service providers who were unable to offer the bundling of other services like television, mobile or fixed-line phone services, would have an uphill struggle to offer lower prices.

“There is a very limited room for new players,” Mr. Wang said. “It’s very likely the fixed broadband business will only attract those customers that need the bandwidth. A lot of consumers don’t need one Gbps, especially when you’re getting cheaper wireless broadband access.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/te...techbroad.html





Aiming at Rivals, Starbucks Will Offer Free Wi-Fi
Claire Cain Miller

Many coffee shops try to discourage people from buying a cup of coffee and then lingering for hours to use the free Internet access. Starbucks will soon encourage them to stay as long as they want.

The company said on Monday that as of July 1, its stores in the United States would offer free Wi-Fi, via AT&T, that anyone can reach with a single click. In case customers run out of distractions on the Web, Starbucks is giving them even more reason to sit and browse, offering free online articles, music, videos and local information through a partnership with Yahoo.

Starbucks has been squeezed lately by competition from both independent specialty coffee shops, which have long offered free Wi-Fi, and big chains like McDonald’s, which added it this year.

“Starbucks hit back,” said Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, a social media marketing agency, who blogs about working on the go. “They said, ‘Not only do we have free Wi-Fi, but we’re going to offer this huge raft of digital products you can get while you’re here, and you like our coffee better anyway.’ ”

Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, who made the announcement at a conference in New York, described it as a way to bridge the online world and real-world coffee outlets.

Of course, people have been bridging those worlds for years, using coffee shops as pseudo-offices by bringing their laptops and borrowing free Internet connections. But Starbucks has never offered unlimited free Internet access.

Customers who bought and registered a Starbucks card and used it in the last month have been able to use the Web for two hours, after a somewhat complicated log-in process. Cardholders who wanted to use the Web for more than two hours paid $3.99 for another two-hour session, and customers without cards who wanted to go online faced the same charge for an initial two-hour session.

Starbucks is making the change as many coffeehouses experiment with ways to cut off squatters who browse and do not spend. Some post signs asking people to continue buying food and drinks if they stay, while the more aggressive ones cover their power outlets with tape so people cannot charge their laptops.

Other coffeehouse owners say Wi-Fi detracts from the atmosphere they are trying to foster.

Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco has no Wi-Fi or power outlets for customer use. “We all have had experiences of working at cafes where the laptops just took over, and it started to feel more like a library,” said Jodi Geren, head of operations for Four Barrel. “We just really feel like it’s important for people to talk to each other.”

Those who bring laptops to Starbucks now average an hour of Wi-Fi use, and the company does not expect that the free access and content will make people linger longer, said Stephen Gillett, chief information officer at Starbucks and general manager of a unit called Digital Ventures, which will oversee the new offerings. He said that Starbucks purposely kept video and music clips short.

The coffee chain is catering in part to people who are out of work and need a place to perfect their résumés or do freelance jobs. In January, the company announced that same-store sales increased 4 percent after months of steady declines. Starbucks attributes the improvement, which came before consumer spending rebounded as a whole, in part to its role as an office for the unemployed.

The new partnership with Yahoo, which is called the Starbucks Digital Network, will include an online section on business and careers that will include tools for people searching for jobs or writing résumés, Mr. Gillett said.

“We expect this to be a very versatile tool for people who are using Starbucks for what we call the third place, between home and work,” he said.

Customers will also get free access to paid Web sites, like those of The Wall Street Journal and Zagat, free iTunes downloads and previews of not-yet-released movies and albums. They will see local content based on the coffee shop’s location, like news from Patch, AOL’s local news site, check-ins on Foursquare and neighborhood photos on Flickr.

For publishers and Web sites, the free content will serve as a marketing tool, Mr. Gillett said, letting customers sample things they might be willing to pay for later.

The digital network could also serve as a virtual storefront, Mr. Brogan said. He imagines Starbucks using it to sell songs and virtual goods, or to offer loyalty points for online shopping.

“If you have eight people sitting in a store for four hours on one cup of coffee, that’s not moving revenue,” he said. “However, if that same group is there for four hours on one cup of coffee and buys 14 songs, that’s sales.”

Starbucks is not disclosing the terms of its agreements with the content providers, including whether they are paying Starbucks or sharing revenue if customers make purchases, said Tamra Strentz, a spokeswoman.

Many coffeehouses, including Grounded in the West Village, a storefront one block from a Starbucks, offer free Wi-Fi to differentiate themselves from Starbucks.

“It’s definitely been an attraction,” said David Litman, the manager of Grounded. Still, he said he doubted that Wi-Fi at Starbucks would be a threat. “This is a very neighborhood place — there is a Starbucks on the next avenue, but people like to support us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/te...15starbux.html





Apple Has No Agenbite of Inwit When it Comes to Strongarming Actual Creators
Miracle Jones

Not since Amazon removed digital copies of "1984" from people's Kindles while they slept has there been such a hilarious episode in the ongoing slapstick farce "Let's See What Happens When Corporations Become Publishers."

Apple has censored a "Ulysses" comic book app -- just in time for "Bloomsday" -- because of a picture of Buck Mulligan's stately, plump cartoon penis.

Man, his penis is not even erect, nor penetrating some kind of rosy bum or willing lass. It is "Grandpa penis!" Or "jiggly lookaway locker room penis!"

Our old show fliers are much more offensive, and we used to put these up in public coffee shops:

Because this is "introspective clown penis," this is much more terrifying -- yet you really couldn't call this porn

The comic is called "Ulysses Seen" and is a comic book adaptation by Rob Berry and Josh Levitas of the first chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysess," a book which was first banned for publication in the United States like a hundred goddamn years ago.

Sarah Weinman got the scoop writing for "Daily Finance":

"While the first chapter of the book, the one now at iTunes, doesn't contain 'offensive language,' our comic does have frank nudity. Something we figured we might have to pixelate or cover with 'fig leaves,'" Berry told the comics blog Robot 6. "But Apple's policy prohibits even that. So we were forced to either scrap the idea of moving to the tablet with Apple or re-design our pages."

Conventional publishers published books that they liked and were ready to defend. The new, digital corporate publishers go for volume and want to put out the most innocuous, anodyne, and digestible products possible.

WHY IS APPLE SO AFRAID OF THE EROTIC POSSIBILITIES OF MULTITOUCH? WHAT DO THEY KNOW THAT WE DON'T KNOW?
http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=552&mode=one





The Plump Irony: Come Bloomsday, Apple Admits Mistake Over 'Ulysses' App
Michael Cavna

As literary apps go, Apple knows when to admit a wrong and replay the situation -- when, in hacker's terms, to take a Mulligan. Still, the incident is plump, if not stately, with irony.

More than 75 years after the high court ruled that James Joyce's "Ulysses" was not pornographic or obscene, the corporate judges who preside over Apple's app store deemed inappropriate some portions of the graphic novel "Ulysses 'Seen.' " But now, just in time for Bloomsday celebrations today, the company has admitted its mistake:

Apple, no longer balking at his Martello Tower nudity, will take Buck Mulligan and the rest of artist Robert Berry's "graphic" graphics. All of Berry's illustrated telling of Joyce's famed day in Dublin is now available as an iPad app.

"Silly, of course, that a company as large and as in-the-news as Apple would so completely miss this comparison," Berry tells Comic Riffs of the historic irony.

"When we were asked to remove images based upon nudity, one of my partners took the call," Berry says. "His argument that the novel already determined this stuff and won this argument 75 years ago was apparently lost on the Apple representative. Apparently the people reviewing content [then] don't have a lot of info about what they're involved in.

"It begs the simple question: Should someone who's completely unfamiliar with Joyce's novel be making decisions of how a new media adaptation might work at the app store?' "

Taking this a step further, Berry poses the question: "Who decides the way we see new content on these very exciting new devices: The artist reinterpreting them for a new and exciting venue, or the grocer or newstand seller who knows nothing about the content but talks incessantly about the kind of product they have to offer?"

Berry does think, however, that Apple has gotten a bit of a bum rap in this case, as accusations of "censorship" swirl anew. "Yes, the guidelines were restrictive and debilitating to innovative new projects," Berry tells 'Riffs, "but they never acted as a censor, never told us what we could or could not say. ... We didn't believe these were good guidelines for art, but respected their rights to sell content that met their guidelines at their own store. Apple is not a museum or a library for new content then, so much as they are a grocer."

Apple also reversed its decision on Tom Bouden's graphic novel of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," allowing it upon resubmission. Bouden's app features several panels of men kissing.

"With 'Ulysses' and "The Importance of Being Earnest,' we made a mistake," Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller tells Comic Riffs. "When [the art] of these graphic novel adaptations was brought to our attention, we called the developers and offered them the opportunity to resubmit. Both [graphic novel apps] are now in the storne with the original panel drawings."

Meantime, Berry notes: "If Joyce's book teaches us anything, it might be that art gets made by people knowing, and sometimes pushing, the known boundaries of conventional tastes."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/com...bloomsday.html





What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?
Clive Thompson



‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”) During the sparring matches, Watson received the questions as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players; to answer a question, Watson spoke in a machine-synthesized voice through a small black speaker on the game-show set. When it answered the Burj clue — “What is Dubai?” (“Jeopardy!” answers must be phrased as questions) — it sounded like a perkier cousin of the computer in the movie “WarGames” that nearly destroyed the world by trying to start a nuclear war.

This time, though, the computer was doing the right thing. Watson won $1,000 (in pretend money, anyway), pulled ahead and eventually defeated Gilmartin and Kolani soundly, winning $18,400 to their $12,000 each.

“Watson,” Crain shouted, “is our new champion!”

It was just the beginning. Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia (“This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series” — “What is ‘Blue Thunder’?”), science (“The greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles” — “What is Egypt?”) and sophisticated wordplay (“Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice” — “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?”).

By the end of the day, the seven human contestants were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made references to Skynet, the computer system in the “Terminator” movies that achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed. “My husband and I talked about what my role in this was,” Samantha Boardman, a graduate student, told me jokingly. “Was I the thing that was going to help the A.I. become aware of itself?” She had distinguished herself with her swift responses to the “Rhyme Time” puzzles in one of her games, winning nearly all of them before Watson could figure out the clues, but it didn’t help. The computer still beat her three times. In one game, she finished with no money.

“He plays to win,” Boardman said, shaking her head. “He’s really not messing around!” Like most of the contestants, she had started calling Watson “he.”

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company’s supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment — playing chess really well — didn’t translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid ’00s, the company’s top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a “grand challenge” (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need.

Question-answering seemed to be a good fit. In the last decade, question-answering systems have become increasingly important for firms dealing with mountains of documents. Legal firms, for example, need to quickly sift through case law to find a useful precedent or citation; help-desk workers often have to negotiate enormous databases of product information to find an answer for an agitated customer on the line. In situations like these, speed can often be of the essence; in the case of help desks, labor is billed by the minute, so high-tech firms with slender margins often lose their profits providing telephone support. How could I.B.M. push question-answering technology further?

When one I.B.M. executive suggested taking on “Jeopardy!” he was immediately pooh-poohed. Deep Blue was able to play chess well because the game is perfectly logical, with fairly simple rules; it can be reduced easily to math, which computers handle superbly. But the rules of language are much trickier. At the time, the very best question-answering systems — some created by software firms, some by university researchers — could sort through news articles on their own and answer questions about the content, but they understood only questions stated in very simple language (“What is the capital of Russia?”); in government-run competitions, the top systems answered correctly only about 70 percent of the time, and many were far worse. “Jeopardy!” with its witty, punning questions, seemed beyond their capabilities. What’s more, winning on “Jeopardy!” requires finding an answer in a few seconds. The top question-answering machines often spent longer, even entire minutes, doing the same thing.

“The reaction was basically, ‘No, it’s too hard, forget it, no way can you do it,’ ” David Ferrucci told me not long ago. Ferrucci, I.B.M.’s senior manager for its Semantic Analysis and Integration department, heads the Watson project, and I met him for the first time last November at I.B.M.’s lab. An artificial-intelligence researcher who has long specialized in question-answering systems, Ferrucci chafed at the slow progress in the field. A fixture in the office in the evenings and on weekends, he is witty, voluble and intense. While dining out recently, his wife asked the waiter if Ferrucci’s meal included any dairy. “Is he lactose intolerant?” the waiter inquired. “Yes,” his wife replied, “and just generally intolerable.” Ferrucci told me he was recently prescribed a mouth guard because the stress of watching Watson play had him clenching his teeth excessively.

Ferrucci was never an aficionado of “Jeopardy!” (“I’ve certainly seen it,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not a big fan.”) But he craved an ambitious goal that would impel him to break new ground, that would verge on science fiction, and this fit the bill. “The computer on ‘Star Trek’ is a question-answering machine,” he says. “It understands what you’re asking and provides just the right chunk of response that you needed. When is the computer going to get to a point where the computer knows how to talk to you? That’s my question.”

What makes language so hard for computers, Ferrucci explained, is that it’s full of “intended meaning.” When people decode what someone else is saying, we can easily unpack the many nuanced allusions and connotations in every sentence. He gave me an example in the form of a “Jeopardy!” clue: “The name of this hat is elementary, my dear contestant.” People readily detect the wordplay here — the echo of “elementary, my dear Watson,” the famous phrase associated with Sherlock Holmes — and immediately recall that the Hollywood version of Holmes sports a deerstalker hat. But for a computer, there is no simple way to identify “elementary, my dear contestant” as wordplay. Cleverly matching different keywords, and even different fragments of the sentence — which in part is how most search engines work these days — isn’t enough, either. (Type that clue into Google, and you’ll get first-page referrals to “elementary, my dear watson” but none to deerstalker hats.)

What’s more, even if a computer determines that the actual underlying question is “What sort of hat does Sherlock Holmes wear?” its data may not be stored in such a way that enables it to extract a precise answer. For years, computer scientists built question-answering systems by creating specialized databases, in which certain facts about the world were recorded and linked together. You could do this with Sherlock Holmes by building a database that includes connections between catchphrases and his hat and his violin-playing. But that database would be pretty narrow; it wouldn’t be able to answer questions about nuclear power, or fish species, or the history of France. Those would require their own hand-made databases. Pretty soon you’d face the impossible task of organizing all the information known to man — of “boiling the ocean,” as Ferrucci put it. In computer science, this is known as a “bottleneck” problem. And even if you could get past it, you might then face the issue of “brittleness”: if your database contains only facts you input manually, it breaks any time you ask it a question about something beyond that material. There’s no way to hand-write a database that would include the answer to every “Jeopardy!” clue, because the subject matter is potentially all human knowledge.

The great shift in artificial intelligence began in the last 10 years, when computer scientists began using statistics to analyze huge piles of documents, like books and news stories. They wrote algorithms that could take any subject and automatically learn what types of words are, statistically speaking, most (and least) associated with it. Using this method, you could put hundreds of articles and books and movie reviews discussing Sherlock Holmes into the computer, and it would calculate that the words “deerstalker hat” and “Professor Moriarty” and “opium” are frequently correlated with one another, but not with, say, the Super Bowl. So at that point you could present the computer with a question that didn’t mention Sherlock Holmes by name, but if the machine detected certain associated words, it could conclude that Holmes was the probable subject — and it could also identify hundreds of other concepts and words that weren’t present but that were likely to be related to Holmes, like “Baker Street” and “chemistry.”

In theory, this sort of statistical computation has been possible for decades, but it was impractical. Computers weren’t fast enough, memory wasn’t expansive enough and in any case there was no easy way to put millions of documents into a computer. All that changed in the early ’00s. Computer power became drastically cheaper, and the amount of online text exploded as millions of people wrote blogs and wikis about anything and everything; news organizations and academic journals also began putting all their works in digital format. What’s more, question-answering experts spent the previous couple of decades creating several linguistic tools that helped computers puzzle through language — like rhyming dictionaries, bulky synonym finders and “classifiers” that recognized the parts of speech.

Still, the era’s best question-answering systems remained nowhere near being able to take on “Jeopardy!” In 2006, Ferrucci tested I.B.M.’s most advanced system — it wasn’t the best in its field but near the top — by giving it 500 questions from previous shows. The results were dismal. He showed me a chart, prepared by I.B.M., of how real-life “Jeopardy!” champions perform on the TV show. They are clustered at the top in what Ferrucci calls “the winner’s cloud,” which consists of individuals who are the first to hit the buzzer about 50 percent of the time and, after having “won” the buzz, solve on average 85 to 95 percent of the clues. In contrast, the I.B.M. system languished at the bottom of the chart. It was rarely confident enough to answer a question, and when it was, it got the right answer only 15 percent of the time. Humans were fast and smart; I.B.M.’s machine was slow and dumb.

“Humans are just — boom! — they’re just plowing through this in just seconds,” Ferrucci said excitedly. “They’re getting the questions, they’re breaking them down, they’re interpreting them, they’re getting the right interpretation, they’re looking this up in their memory, they’re scoring, they’re doing all this just instantly.”

But Ferrucci argued that I.B.M. could be the one to finally play “Jeopardy!” If the firm focused its computer firepower — including its new “BlueGene” servers — on the challenge, Ferrucci could conduct experiments dozens of times faster than anyone had before, allowing him to feed more information into Watson and test new algorithms more quickly. Ferrucci was ambitious for personal reasons too: if he didn’t try this, another computer scientist might — “and then bang, you are irrelevant,” he told me.

“I had no interest spending the next five years of my life pursuing things in the small,” he said. “I wanted to push the limits.” If they could succeed at “Jeopardy!” soon after that they could bring the underlying technology to market as customizable question-answering systems. In 2007, his bosses gave him three to five years and increased his team to 15 people.

FERRUCCI’S MAIN breakthrough was not the design of any single, brilliant new technique for analyzing language. Indeed, many of the statistical techniques Watson employs were already well known by computer scientists. One important thing that makes Watson so different is its enormous speed and memory. Taking advantage of I.B.M.’s supercomputing heft, Ferrucci’s team input millions of documents into Watson to build up its knowledge base — including, he says, “books, reference material, any sort of dictionary, thesauri, folksonomies, taxonomies, encyclopedias, any kind of reference material you can imagine getting your hands on or licensing. Novels, bibles, plays.”

Watson’s speed allows it to try thousands of ways of simultaneously tackling a “Jeopardy!” clue. Most question-answering systems rely on a handful of algorithms, but Ferrucci decided this was why those systems do not work very well: no single algorithm can simulate the human ability to parse language and facts. Instead, Watson uses more than a hundred algorithms at the same time to analyze a question in different ways, generating hundreds of possible solutions. Another set of algorithms ranks these answers according to plausibility; for example, if dozens of algorithms working in different directions all arrive at the same answer, it’s more likely to be the right one. In essence, Watson thinks in probabilities. It produces not one single “right” answer, but an enormous number of possibilities, then ranks them by assessing how likely each one is to answer the question.

Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample “Jeopardy!” clue: “He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.” In the first pass, the algorithms came up with “Nixon.” To evaluate whether “Nixon” was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase — “Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974” — and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported “Nixon” as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result “Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,” a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make “Nixon” the top-ranked solution.)

Other times, Watson uses algorithms that can perform basic cross-checks against time or space to help detect which answer seems better. When the computer analyzed the clue “In 1594 he took a job as a tax collector in Andalusia,” the two most likely answers generated were “Thoreau” and “Cervantes.” Watson assessed “Thoreau” and discovered his birth year was 1817, at which point the computer ruled him out, because he wasn’t alive in 1594. “Cervantes” became the top-ranked choice.

When Watson is playing a game, Ferrucci lets the audience peek into the computer’s analysis. A monitor shows Watson’s top five answers to a question, with a bar graph beside each indicating its confidence. During one of my visits, the host read the clue “Thousands of prisoners in the Philippines re-enacted the moves of the video of this Michael Jackson hit.” On the monitor, I could see that Watson’s top pick was “Thriller,” with a confidence level of roughly 80 percent. This answer was correct, and Watson buzzed first, so it won $800. Watson’s next four choices — “Music video,” “Billie Jean,” “Smooth Criminal” and “MTV” — had only slivers for their bar graphs. It was a fascinating glimpse into the machine’s workings, because you could spy the connective thread running between the possibilities, even the wrong ones. “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” were also major hits by Michael Jackson, and “MTV” was the main venue for his videos. But it’s very likely that none of those correlated well with “Philippines.”

After a year, Watson’s performance had moved halfway up to the “winner’s cloud.” By 2008, it had edged into the cloud; on paper, anyway, it could beat some of the lesser “Jeopardy!” champions. Confident they could actually compete on TV, I.B.M. executives called up Harry Friedman, the executive producer of “Jeopardy!” and raised the possibility of putting Watson on the air.

Friedman told me he and his fellow executives were surprised: nobody had ever suggested anything like this. But they quickly accepted the challenge. “Because it’s I.B.M., we took it seriously,” Friedman said. “They had the experience with Deep Blue and the chess match that became legendary.”

WHEN THEY FIRST showed up to play Watson, many of the contestants worried that they didn’t stand a chance. Human memory is frail. In a high-stakes game like “Jeopardy!” players can panic, becoming unable to recall facts they would otherwise remember without difficulty. Watson doesn’t have this problem. It might have trouble with its analysis or be unable to logically connect a relevant piece of text to a question. But it doesn’t forget things. Plus, it has lightning-fast reactions — wouldn’t it simply beat the humans to the buzzer every time?

“We’re relying on nerves — old nerves,” Dorothy Gilmartin complained, halfway through her first game, when it seemed that Watson was winning almost every buzz.

Yet the truth is, in more than 20 games I witnessed between Watson and former “Jeopardy!” players, humans frequently beat Watson to the buzzer. Their advantage lay in the way the game is set up. On “Jeopardy!” when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.

Players use this precious interval to figure out whether or not they have enough confidence in their answers to hazard hitting the buzzer. After all, buzzing carries a risk: someone who wins the buzz on a $1,000 question but answers it incorrectly loses $1,000.

Often those six or seven seconds weren’t enough time for Watson. The humans reacted more quickly. For example, in one game an $800 clue was “In Poland, pick up some kalafjor if you crave this broccoli relative.” A human contestant jumped on the buzzer as soon as he could. Watson, meanwhile, was still processing. Its top five answers hadn’t appeared on the screen yet. When these finally came up, I could see why it took so long. Something about the question had confused the computer, and its answers came with mere slivers of confidence. The top two were “vegetable” and “cabbage”; the correct answer — “cauliflower” — was the third guess.

To avoid losing money — Watson doesn’t care about the money, obviously; winnings are simply a way for I.B.M. to see how fast and accurately its system is performing — Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level. In this regard, Watson is actually at a disadvantage, because the best “Jeopardy!” players regularly hit the buzzer as soon as it’s possible to do so, even if it’s before they’ve figured out the clue. “Jeopardy!” rules give them five seconds to answer after winning the buzz. So long as they have a good feeling in their gut, they’ll pounce on the buzzer, trusting that in those few extra seconds the answer will pop into their heads. Ferrucci told me that the best human contestants he had brought in to play against Watson were amazingly fast. “They can buzz in 10 milliseconds,” he said, sounding astonished. “Zero milliseconds!”

On the third day I watched Watson play, it did quite poorly, losing four of seven games, in one case without any winnings at all. Often Watson appeared to misunderstand the clue and offered answers so inexplicable that the audience erupted in laughter. Faced with the clue “This ‘insect’ of a gangster was a real-life hit man for Murder Incorporated in the 1930s & ’40s,” Watson responded with “James Cagney.” Up on the screen, I could see that none of its lesser choices were the correct one, “Bugsy Siegel.” Later, when asked to complete the phrase “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Ka—,” Watson offered “not in Kansas anymore,” which was incorrect, since the precise phrasing was simply “Kansas anymore,” and “Jeopardy!” is strict about phrasings. When I looked at the screen, I noticed that the answers Watson had ranked lower were pretty odd, including “Steve Porcaro,” the keyboardist for the band Toto (which made a vague sort of sense), and “Jackie Chan” (which really didn’t). In another game, Watson’s logic appeared to fall down some odd semantic rabbit hole, repeatedly giving the answer “Tommy Lee Jones” — the name of the Hollywood actor — to several clues that had nothing to do with him.

In the corner of the conference room, Ferrucci sat typing into a laptop. Whenever Watson got a question wrong, Ferrucci winced and stamped his feet in frustration, like a college-football coach watching dropped passes. “This is torture,” he added, laughing.

Seeing Watson’s errors, you can sometimes get a sense of its cognitive shortcomings. For example, in “Jeopardy!” the category heading often includes a bit of wordplay that explains how the clues are to be addressed. Watson sometimes appeared to mistakenly analyze the entire category and thus botch every clue in it. One game included the category “Stately Botanical Gardens,” which indicated that every clue would list several gardens, and the answer was the relevant state. Watson clearly didn’t grasp this; it answered “botanic garden” repeatedly. I also noticed that when Watson was faced with very short clues — ones with only a word or two — it often seemed to lose the race to the buzzer, possibly because the host read the clues so quickly that Watson didn’t have enough time to do its full calculations. The humans, in contrast, simply trusted their guts and jumped.

Ferrucci refused to talk on the record about Watson’s blind spots. He’s aware of them; indeed, his team does “error analysis” after each game, tracing how and why Watson messed up. But he is terrified that if competitors knew what types of questions Watson was bad at, they could prepare by boning up in specific areas. I.B.M. required all its sparring-match contestants to sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing their own observations on what, precisely, Watson was good and bad at. I signed no such agreement, so I was free to describe what I saw; but Ferrucci wasn’t about to make it easier for me by cataloguing Watson’s vulnerabilities.

Computer scientists I spoke to agreed that witty, allusive clues will probably be Watson’s weak point. “Retrieval of obscure Italian poets is easy — [Watson] will never forget that one,” Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, told me. “But ‘Jeopardy!’ tends to have a lot of wordplay, and that’s going to be a challenge.” Certainly on many occasions this seemed to be true. Still, at other times I was startled by Watson’s eerily humanlike ability to untangle astonishingly coy clues. During one game, a category was “All-Eddie Before & After,” indicating that the clue would hint at two different things that need to be blended together, one of which included the name “Eddie.” The $2,000 clue was “A ‘Green Acres’ star goes existential (& French) as the author of ‘The Fall.’ ” Watson nailed it perfectly: “Who is Eddie Albert Camus?”

Ultimately, Watson’s greatest edge at “Jeopardy!” probably isn’t its perfect memory or lightning speed. It is the computer’s lack of emotion. “Managing your emotions is an enormous part of doing well” on “Jeopardy!” Bob Harris, a five-time champion, told me. “Every single time I’ve ever missed a Daily Double, I always miss the next clue, because I’m still kicking myself.” Because there is only a short period before the next clue comes along, the stress can carry over. Similarly, humans can become much more intimidated by a $2,000 clue than a $200 one, because the more expensive clues are presumably written to be much harder.

Whether Watson will win when it goes on TV in a real “Jeopardy!” match depends on whom “Jeopardy!” pits against the computer. Watson will not appear as a contestant on the regular show; instead, “Jeopardy!” will hold a special match pitting Watson against one or more famous winners from the past. If the contest includes Ken Jennings — the best player in “Jeopardy!” history, who won 74 games in a row in 2004 — Watson will lose if its performance doesn’t improve. It’s pretty far up in the winner’s cloud, but it’s not yet at Jennings’s level; in the sparring matches, Watson was beaten several times by opponents who did nowhere near as well as Jennings. (Indeed, it sometimes lost to people who hadn’t placed first in their own appearances on the show.) The show’s executive producer, Harry Friedman, will not say whom it is picking to play against Watson, but he refused to let Jennings be interviewed for this story, which is suggestive.

Ferrucci says his team will continue to fine-tune Watson, but improving its performance is getting harder. “When we first started, we’d add a new algorithm and it would improve the performance by 10 percent, 15 percent,” he says. “Now it’ll be like half a percent is a good improvement.”

Ferrucci’s attitude toward winning is conflicted. I could see that he hungers to win. And losing badly on national TV might mean negative publicity for I.B.M. But Ferrucci also argued that Watson might lose merely because of bad luck. Should one of Watson’s opponents land on both Daily Doubles, for example, that player might double his or her money and vault beyond Watson’s ability to catch up, even if the computer never flubs another question.

Ultimately, Ferrucci claimed not to worry about winning or losing. He told me he’s happy that I.B.M. has simply pushed this far and produced a system that performs so well at answering questions. Even a televised flameout, he said, won’t diminish the street cred Watson will give I.B.M. in the computer-science field. “I don’t really care about ‘Jeopardy!’ ” he told me, shrugging.

I.B.M. PLANS TObegin selling versions of Watson to companies in the next year or two. John Kelly, the head of I.B.M.’s research labs, says that Watson could help decision-makers sift through enormous piles of written material in seconds. Kelly says that its speed and quality could make it part of rapid-fire decision-making, with users talking to Watson to guide their thinking process.

“I want to create a medical version of this,” he adds. “A Watson M.D., if you will.” He imagines a hospital feeding Watson every new medical paper in existence, then having it answer questions during split-second emergency-room crises. “The problem right now is the procedures, the new procedures, the new medicines, the new capability is being generated faster than physicians can absorb on the front lines and it can be deployed.” He also envisions using Watson to produce virtual call centers, where the computer would talk directly to the customer and generally be the first line of defense, because, “as you’ve seen, this thing can answer a question faster and more accurately than most human beings.”

“I want to create something that I can take into every other retail industry, in the transportation industry, you name it, the banking industry,” Kelly goes on to say. “Any place where time is critical and you need to get advanced state-of-the-art information to the front of decision-makers. Computers need to go from just being back-office calculating machines to improving the intelligence of people making decisions.” At first, a Watson system could cost several million dollars, because it needs to run on at least one $1 million I.B.M. server. But Kelly predicts that within 10 years an artificial brain like Watson could run on a much cheaper server, affordable by any small firm, and a few years after that, on a laptop.

Ted Senator, a vice president of SAIC — a high-tech firm that frequently helps design government systems — is a former “Jeopardy!” champion and has followed Watson’s development closely; in October he visited I.B.M. and played against Watson himself. (He lost.) He says that Watson-level artificial intelligence could make it significantly easier for citizens to get answers quickly from massive, ponderous bureaucracies. He points to the recent “cash for clunkers” program. He tried to participate, but when he went to the government site to see if his car qualified, he couldn’t figure it out: his model, a 1995 Saab 9000, was listed twice, each time with different mileage-per-gallon statistics. What he needed was probably buried deep inside some government database, but the bureaucrats hadn’t presented the information clearly enough. “So I gave up,” he says. This is precisely the sort of task a Watson-like artificial intelligence can assist in, he says. “You can imagine if I’m applying for health insurance, having to explain the details of my personal situation, or if I’m trying to figure out if I’m eligible for a particular tax deduction. Any place there’s massive data that surpasses the human’s ability to sort through it, and there’s a time constraint on getting an answer.”

Many experts imagine even quirkier ways that everyday life might be transformed as question-answering technology becomes more powerful and widespread. Andrew Hickl, the C.E.O. of Language Computer Corporation, which makes question-answering systems, among other things, for businesses, was recently asked by a client to make a “contradiction engine”: if you tell it a statement, it tries to find evidence on the Web that contradicts it. “It’s like, ‘I believe that Dallas is the most beautiful city in the United States,’ and I want to find all the evidence on the Web that contradicts that.” (It produced results that were only 70 percent relevant, which satisfied his client.) Hickl imagines people using this sort of tool to read through the daily news. “We could take something that Harry Reid says and immediately figure out what contradicts it. Or somebody tweets something that’s wrong, and we could automatically post a tweet saying, ‘No, actually, that’s wrong, and here’s proof.’ ”

CULTURALLY, OF COURSE, advances like Watson are bound to provoke nervous concerns too. High-tech critics have begun to wonder about the wisdom of relying on artificial-intelligence systems in the face of complex reality. Many Wall Street firms, for example, now rely on “millisecond trading” computers, which detect deviations in prices and order trades far faster than humans ever could; but these are now regarded as a possible culprit in the seemingly irrational hourlong stock-market plunge of the spring. Would doctors in an E.R. feel comfortable taking action based on a split-second factual answer from a Watson M.D.? And while service companies can clearly save money by relying more on question-answering systems, they are precisely the sort of labor-saving advance deplored by unions — and customers who crave the ability to talk to a real, intelligent human on the phone.

Some scientists, moreover, argue that Watson has serious limitations that could hamper its ability to grapple with the real world. It can analyze texts and draw basic conclusions from the facts it finds, like figuring out if one event happened later than another. But many questions we want answered require more complex forms of analysis. Last year, the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram released “Wolfram Alpha,” a question-answering engine that can do mathematical calculations about the real world. Ask it to “compare the populations of New York City and Cincinnati,” for example, and it will not only give you their populations — 8.4 million versus 333,336 — it will also create a bar graph comparing them visually and calculate their ratio (25.09 to 1) and the percentage relationship between them (New York is 2,409 percent larger). But this sort of automated calculation is only possible because Wolfram and his team spent years painstakingly hand-crafting databases in a fashion that enables a computer to perform this sort of analysis — by typing in the populations of New York and Cincinnati, for example, and tagging them both as “cities” so that the engine can compare them. This, Wolfram says, is the deep challenge of artificial intelligence: a lot of human knowledge isn’t represented in words alone, and a computer won’t learn that stuff just by encoding English language texts, as Watson does. The only way to program a computer to do this type of mathematical reasoning might be to do precisely what Ferrucci doesn’t want to do — sit down and slowly teach it about the world, one fact at a time.

“Not to take anything away from this ‘Jeopardy!’ thing, but I don’t think Watson really is answering questions — it’s not like the ‘Star Trek’ computer,” Wolfram says. (Of course, Wolfram Alpha cannot answer the sort of broad-ranging trivia questions that Watson can, either, because Wolfram didn’t design it for that purpose.) What’s more, Watson can answer only questions asking for an objectively knowable fact. It cannot produce an answer that requires judgment. It cannot offer a new, unique answer to questions like “What’s the best high-tech company to invest in?” or “When will there be peace in the Middle East?” All it will do is look for source material in its database that appears to have addressed those issues and then collate and compose a string of text that seems to be a statistically likely answer. Neither Watson nor Wolfram Alpha, in other words, comes close to replicating human wisdom.

At best, Ferrucci suspects that Watson might be simulating, in a stripped-down fashion, some of the ways that our human brains process language. Modern neuroscience has found that our brain is highly “parallel”: it uses many different parts simultaneously, harnessing billions of neurons whenever we talk or listen to words. “I’m no cognitive scientist, so this is just speculation,” Ferrucci says, but Watson’s approach — tackling a question in thousands of different ways — may succeed precisely because it mimics the same approach. Watson doesn’t come up with an answer to a question so much as make an educated guess, based on similarities to things it has been exposed to. “I have young children, you can see them guessing at the meaning of words, you can see them guessing at grammatical structure,” he notes.

This is why Watson often seemed most human not when it was performing flawlessly but when it wasn’t. Many of the human opponents found the computer most endearing when it was clearly misfiring — misinterpreting the clue, making weird mistakes, rather as we do when we’re put on the spot.

During one game, the category was, coincidentally, “I.B.M.” The questions seemed like no-brainers for the computer (for example, “Though it’s gone beyond the corporate world, I.B.M. stands for this” — “International Business Machines”). But for some reason, Watson performed poorly. It came up with answers that were wrong or in which it had little confidence. The audience, composed mostly of I.B.M. employees who had come to watch the action, seemed mesmerized by the spectacle.

Then came the final, $2,000 clue in the category: “It’s the last name of father and son Thomas Sr. and Jr., who led I.B.M. for more than 50 years.” This time the computer pounced. “Who is Watson?” it declared in its synthesized voice, and the crowd erupted in cheers. At least it knew its own name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/ma...omputer-t.html





Location Services Raise Privacy Concerns
Jesse Emspak

Location-based services are becoming more common, and the features they add to mobile devices can be useful and even fun. But they also bring concerns about privacy and safety.

Several sites take a social networking approach, such as Foursquare.com, Gowalla.com and Yelp. All three offer options where a user shares their location with friends. For example, on Foursquare one can "check in" at a favorite restaurant and voice an opinion about the food.

But the downside is that everyone who reads the posting will know the user isn't home. On top of that, some services, such as Foursquare, can be linked to Twitter feeds.

Spokespeople for both Foursquare and Gowalla maintain that the data that identifies individuals is safe, and that their systems are set up in such a way that the user has to choose with whom to share their locations and feeds with.

But one concern is that it doesn't take a sophisticated hacker to track another person's location. Earlier this year, a trio of Dutch software developers put up a site called PleaseRobMe.com. The principle was simple: pull data from Twitter and Foursquare and post the username and (self-reported) locations. And many users weren't paying attention to their privacy settings.

The site stopped broadcasting locations after only a short while. But the developers wrote on their "why" page that the point was to make people aware of the fact that they may be broadcasting a bit too much.

It isn't just voluntary broadcasting that is an issue. AT&T, for example, has a "FamilyMap" feature, that allows someone with an AT&T phone to use either a computer or other smartphone to get exact location data for the phone of a family member.

AT&T sends a text message to the person being tracked, and the company's privacy policy says the history of locations is only kept for seven days. Foursquare says it deletes data from customers after 30 days once the account is deleted, and Gowalla deletes the information immediately when the account is closed. But not every privacy policy is explicit about how long the data is kept.

Also, on some smartphone platforms, such as on the iPhone 3 OS, location data is broadcast continually, says Alissa Cooper of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"If you want to turn it off you have to reset all the preferences," she said. That isn't something many people will remember to do. Cooper added that Apple has changed this on the new iPhone platform, which asks the user if they want to broadcast location information. Google has also addressed this on Android, which has a small icon that flashes if the mobile device is being tracked via global positioning system.

While some might not care that their location is broadcast, there are cases where it has been used by stalkers. Recently in Somersworth, N.H., a woman was tracked by her abusive husband via AT&T's FamilyMap.

Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist, says there are many situations in which the location data that is kept could be misused. Many of the providers of services say in their privacy policies they will give up the data in cases where it is subpoenaed. That isn't always from law enforcement; as sometimes the data can be used in civil lawsuits such as divorce cases. "For the most part it doesn't matter - until they get hacked or a subpoena comes through the door," he said.

In addition, unless the company providing the service states specifically how long the data is kept, chances are it is forever, Eckersley says.

There's also the potential for more serious misuse. Cooper noted that writing an application that continuously broadcasts one's location from an iPhone isn't difficult to do -- especially when it is designed not to tell you that it is doing just that.

Eckersley agreed that writing the applications is not hard to do. "There's a wide range of methods. You could pick up your girlfriend's phone, install the app, which secretly posts to Foursquare," he said. Another way is to set up a false account on a social networking service, get "friended" by someone, and get the feeds they meant only to broadcast to the people listed as friends. (Often, he notes, a "friend" on Facebook or Twitter has little resemblance to the off-line meaning of the term).

"Privacy is hard to figure out," he said. "It's hard to anticipate in advance the kind of privacy you're going to need." The solution, he says, is to design applications and platforms where the maximum amount of privacy is the default. Currently most systems are designed assuming that the user wants to broadcast more, not less.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2884...y-concerns.htm





Online Ads Can Get too Close for Comfort Says New Study

Trying to have an impact in the brave new world of web advertising? You could match an ad to a web page's content - such as putting a car ad on an auto consumer website. Or, you could make it stand out with eye-catching pop-up graphics and video.

But don't waste your marketing budget putting the two strategies together. The first large-scale study looking at thousands of online ad campaigns says that in combination, these approaches make viewers feel like their privacy is being invaded - and turns them off.

"Usually more is better," says Avi Goldfarb, an associate professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, who wrote the paper with Catherine Tucker of MIT's Sloan School of Business. "If targeting works and visible ads work, you'd think visible, targeted ads would work even better - but they didn't."

The study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Marketing Science, used data from nearly 3,000 web advertising campaigns across a wide variety of product categories. It found that high-visibility ads were associated with better consumer recall, while content-linked ads led to higher consumer purchase plans. But although consumers still had good recall when the strategies were used together, their purchase intentions were worse than if the ad had not been particularly visible at all.

The effect was strongest in more private product categories - such as financial products - and among consumers who declined to offer information about their incomes when asked in an online survey. The results may explain the unexpected success of Google AdSense, says the study, which uses unobtrusive text-based ads that are tied to a webpage's content.

At $6 billion U.S. in revenue a year, Google Adsense generates more than half of the total online display market, worth about $11.2 billion.

"Our results show privacy matters in something of a subtle way in online advertising," says Goldfarb. "Sometimes privacy violations are fine, sometimes they're not."

More information: The complete study is available at: http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~agold...rusiveness.pdf
http://www.physorg.com/news195715714.html





Once Just a Site With Funny Cat Pictures, and Now a Web Empire
Jenna Wortham

Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures — and saw vast potential.

Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger, which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. His site immediately crumbled under the resulting wave of visitors.

Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it.

“It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?”

Mr. Huh has since found that the appetite for oddball Internet humor is insatiable.

Traffic to the Cheezburger blog has ballooned over the last three years, encouraging Mr. Huh to expand his unlikely Web empire to include 53 sites, all fueled by submissions from readers. In May, what is now known as the Cheezburger Network attracted a record 16 million unique visitors, according to the Web analytics firm Quantcast.

A more recent success for the company is a site called Fail Blog, which chronicles disastrous mishaps and general stupidity in photos and video. The network’s smaller sites include Daily Squee, with pictures of cute animals, and There I Fixed It, for photos of bad repair jobs.

Mr. Huh said his company, which makes most of its money from Web advertising, has been profitable since Day 1.

“Then again, it was just me and Emily in the beginning,” he said referring to his wife, who also works at the company. Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment.

As the company has grown, so have the opportunities to make money, said Todd Sawicki, the company’s chief revenue officer.

“Only 1 percent of what gets submitted goes on the Web site,” he said. “The rest we can turn into T-shirts, books and other content that the audience loves.”

This year alone, Mr. Sawicki said, the company will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales.

The company has published five books based on its blogs, one of which, a collection of the cats-with-misspelled-captions images known as Lolcats, hovered on the New York Times list of miscellaneous paperback best sellers for 13 weeks. Three more books are in production, along with a line of greeting cards and desktop calendars.

One secret to the company’s success is the way it taps into the Internet zeitgeist. It seeks clues to what is funny right now by monitoring the Web for themes bubbling up on community forums, blogs and video sites. Then it spins off new sites devoted to the latest online humor fads.

“Cheezburger figures out what’s starting to get popular and then harvests the humor from the chaff,” said Kenyatta Cheese, one of the creators of a popular Web video series called “Know Your Meme” that documents viral online phenomena, known as memes. “Things like Lolcats and Fail are easy to make, easy to spread and hit on an emotional level that crosses a lot of traditional boundaries.”

Most of the material the company posts is created by readers, who can Photoshop a funny caption onto an image or remix a popular video in minutes and submit it to one of the Cheezburger sites for consideration. The company says that each day it receives more than 18,000 submissions from readers.

Joe Olk, 28, is one of two dozen staff members who spend their days deliberating over exactly what makes something laugh-out-loud worthy.

Skimming through images on a computer monitor in the company’s spacious office in downtown Seattle, Mr. Olk paused over one photograph of a neon sign advertising services described as “Internet Massage.” “Now that is just weird,” he says with a snicker. “But also funny.” And with a click, it is posted online.

Employees do not check to see whether the person submitting content actually owns it before they put it on a company site, but they will remove it if they receive a complaint after the fact. The company says that before it puts an image into a book or calendar, it does seek permission from its creator, who might receive a free book or T-shirt.

Submissions that are funny but don’t fit into any of the current blog themes can inspire new blogs. For example, after noticing an influx of photos featuring comically bad knock-off toys and other products, the company decided there were enough to warrant a new site, which is slated to be introduced in the next week or two.

The tricky part, said Kiki Kane, 36, who oversees new site development for the network, is gauging whether an Internet trend has legs. She aims to introduce a new blog every week.

“We’re constantly monitoring the Web for new memes,” she said. “Those bits of cultural shorthand, inside jokes that you get right away just by seeing a visual image.”

Not every new site is a hit. One called Pandaganda, which collected images of pandas looking comically evil and sinister, fizzled after a few weeks, so Mr. Huh pulled the plug. “We kill about 20 percent of all the sites we start,” he said.

The idea of quickly tailoring a blog network to satisfy the fickle tastes of a Web-savvy audience, generating new sites to capitalize on a viral sensation and dropping the ones that don’t catch on, is what convinced Geoff Entress, a noted angel investor in the Seattle area, to help Mr. Huh purchase the original company.

“Being flexible and able to change as the environment changes is a huge asset to a consumer Web site,” said Mr. Entress, who has backed more than 35 local start-ups, including an online community for booklovers called Shelfari that was eventually bought by Amazon.

“The risk wasn’t that people wouldn’t like the product,” he said. “We already had the numbers showing they did. The risk was whether or not we could prove this was more than a fad.”

If the wacky cats are a fad, they are one that has had surprising staying power, as shown by a recent Cheezburger happy-hour event at Safeco Field before a Seattle Mariners game.

More than 1,000 fans turned up to listen to cat-themed songs blasted over the loudspeakers, snack on miniature cheeseburgers, slurp from plastic cups of beer and pose for pictures with Mr. Huh.

Tess Mattos, a 41-year-old knitting instructor who traveled up from Portland, Ore., for the event, said she had been a fan of the network’s flagship site for three years.

“It’s just a good, simple break from real life,” she said, adjusting the pair of sequined cat ears she was wearing. “It’s clever, but not mean-spirited.”

“People think we’re weird,” she quipped. “But have you seen the fans of ‘Twilight?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/te.../14burger.html





University of California Librarians Urge Boycott of Nature Journals
Matt Krupnick

University of California librarians are urging professors not to submit research to Nature or 66 related journals to protest a 400 percent increase in the publisher's prices.

A new contract with Nature Publishing Group would raise the university's subscription costs by more than $1 million, library and faculty leaders wrote in a letter to professors throughout the 10-campus system this week. With recent budget cuts, UC libraries simply can't handle the higher price, which would take effect in 2011, the letter said.

Boycotting the Nature group would be a huge step for a university that, according to UC estimates, has provided 5,300 articles to the 67 journals in the past six years. Nearly 640 of those articles went to Nature itself, one of the world's premier scientific journals.

"We understand that it's an important journal," said Laine Farley, executive director of UC's California Digital Library, which manages most systemwide journal subscriptions. "But we can't simply wipe out our savings on one publisher."

In a written response to the university, London-based Nature Publishing Group criticized UC's "sensationalist use of data out of context" and said the negotiations were supposed to be confidential. The pricing dispute is rooted in confusion over whether UC is one institution or many, Nature's response said.

UC has "been on a very large, unsustainable discount for many years, to the point where other subscribers ... are subsidizing them," the publisher said. Nature "stands by its position that (UC) is paying an unfair rate."

This week's volleys represented an escalation of a long-simmering battle between universities and journal publishers, who have been criticized for charging thousands of dollars for annual subscription to some publications. Many titles have been consolidated under a handful of major publishers, including Nature, making it more difficult for universities to negotiate lower prices.

Several UC professors have fought back against publishers, refusing to contribute work to highly priced journals. But a widespread boycott of one of the most prestigious journals would present a dilemma for faculty members under pressure to publish research in order to gain promotions.

The publish-or-perish structure is fundamentally unfair to professors, said Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley biology professor who refuses to publish his research group's work in Nature's journals.

"The university is forced to give away information for free and then to buy it back at a huge markup," he said. "The whole thing is just completely screwed up. The only alternative the university has is to strike back at what Nature really values."

A boycott of the Nature group would not hurt UC professors' careers, said Lawrence Pitts, the university's provost.

"The reality is that there is a number of quality publications," said Pitts, UC's chief academic officer. "Nature Publishing Group isn't the only game in town."

Some journals, recognizing that universities are struggling to afford them, have cut prices in recent years. Others have invented ways to give away their articles for free.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, makes its contributions available for free six months after publication, said its editor in chief, UC Berkeley biologist Randy Schekman.

"Nature's just being tone-deaf," said Schekman, who is considering writing an article for Nature. "They have to know that California is in a perilous financial state. They can't win this one."

By The Numbers

• Amount spent by UC for online journals: $24.3 million

• Number of Nature Publishing Group journals in UC libraries: 67

• Current average UC cost for Nature Publishing Group journals: $4,465

• 2011 cost per journal as proposed by Nature Publishing Group: $17,479

http://www.physorg.com/news195486711.html





A Failure to Communicate

In a lawsuit against Georgia State University over e-reserves, scholarly publishing faces a defining moment
Andrew Richard Albanese

While the high-profile Google settlement has captured the attention of the publishing industry at large, a contentious copyright infringement lawsuit filed in Atlanta in 2008 by academic publishers against four individuals at Georgia State University has quietly progressed. And while a New York court now considers whether to approve the sweeping Google deal, a court in Atlanta could yet deliver something that publishers expressly chose to avoid in their settlement with Google: a fair use ruling.

The case, known as Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Patton et al., involves a popular practice known as e-reserves, or electronic reserves, on college campuses and the murky contours of copyright and fair use in the digital age. But perhaps the most notable aspect of the suit is that publishers are in essence suing their very partners in the scholarly publishing enterprise (including a university librarian), something critics say represents something of a waterloo for publishing.

Georgia on Their Minds

For those unfamiliar with the practice, e-reserves takes its name from the traditional library "reserve" model, where a professor makes a limited number of physical copies of articles or a book chapter available for students. Those copies were generally subject to permission, and proper reproduction fees were paid to the publishers.

In the digital world, that's all changed. Rather than make multiple physical copies, faculty now scan or download chapters or articles, create a single copy, and place that copy on a server where students can access it (and in some cases print, download, or share). Since the practice relies on fair use (creating a single digital copy, usually from a resource already paid for, for educational purposes), permission generally isn't sought, and thus permission fees aren't paid, making the price right for students strapped by the high cost of tuition and textbooks, as well as for libraries with budgets stretched thinner every year.

Not surprisingly, e-reserves are widely used and are immensely popular. Students and instructors love the convenience, ease of use, and accessibility. They are efficient and fit with the way teachers teach and students learn in the digital age. In addition, e-reserves facilitate innovations, like distance learning and collaboration.

The problem, publishers say, is that e-reserves are unmonitored, and the practice is so varied that the system is routinely abused. In reality, the term e-reserve today represents pretty much any kind of digital course content, whether managed by the library, placed in a course management system (CMS) like Blackboard, or hosted on a personal or faculty Web site. And e-reserves also encompass the full range of course reading, from a fraction of supplemental reading to 100% of assigned works, denying publishers the reproduction fees (or sales) they'd come to rely on.

"It is a significant enough revenue stream for publishers to be concerned about," says Sandy Thatcher, executive editor for social sciences and humanities at Penn State University Press. "The paperback and the permissions markets have eroded over time because of e-reserves and course management systems, and if you can't substitute the lost revenue, you can't publish new books."

Indeed, there has been mounting concern over e-reserve practices since the early 1990s, when publishers predicted that e-reserves could erode revenue from printed coursepacks. In 1994 publishers sought to deal with e-reserves at the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), but the issue proved so contentious that the participants could not agree on a recommendation for the final report. Since then, the threat of litigation has loomed over a number of universities concerning their e-reserves, as publishers' reproduction revenues dipped.

Allan Adler, AAP's v-p for legal and governmental affairs, has flatly denied that AAP ever threatened litigation against uni-versities over e-reserves, though he acknowledged there is a perception of "arm-twisting" out there. In 2003, AAP lawyers targeted the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, Cornell University and AAP released joint guidelines for electronic content, which Cornell officials say were in fact drafted under an implicit threat of litigation. And in January of 2008, AAP praised new accords with Syracuse, Marquette, and Hofstra universities regarding new guidelines for the use of electronic content, also, reportedly, with the stick of litigation.

These guidelines, or "best practices," have mostly satisfied publishers so far. They generally instruct those who wish to post e-reserves of some basic conditions so they can determine whether their use is fair use. For example, e-reserve readings can make up only a small portion of the total assigned readings for any one course; access is limited to students enrolled in the class; and the readings should be hosted on a secure, password-protected server and not left up from semester to semester.

Adler admits that AAP did set out to "get the attention of these institutions in a serious way" when engaging these universities to adopt e-reserve guidelines. But he insists a lawsuit was never the goal, pointing out that publishers have not been, and would not be, active in litigating copyright issues "like the music, movie, or software industries." AAP's goal, Adler said, was to bring stakeholders to simple consensus: that practices and uses that required permission in print require permission in the electronic realm as well. "We see that as black letter law in the United States," Adler says.

Thatcher, meanwhile, says that Georgia State University was among the universities AAP tried to engage in a discussion about guidelines, but that university officials "rebuffed every attempt."

Show Time

Out of patience, in April 2008, publishers sued four individuals at Georgia State University in their "official capacities." Niko Pfund, publisher of Oxford University Press, one of the named plaintiffs in the case, along with Cambridge University Press and SAGE Publications, said the plaintiffs were reticent to sue, but had little choice. "I consider this a failure of dialogue," Pfund says of the suit. "It's a shame. We've successfully come to agreements with others over the years. But Georgia State just wouldn't talk with us."

The allegations in the complaint offer some sense of just how much material is being accessed through electronic course content systems on college campuses: publishers claim that at Georgia State, more than 6,700 works were "made available through a variety of online systems and outlets" without permission, representing "systematic, widespread, and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works" for students in more than 600 courses.

On one hand, the lawsuit has certainly served as a shot across the bow of the university library community and faculties who use course management systems, and has prompted many schools to revisit their policies and procedures. But the legal case against Georgia State itself has been a complex, uphill battle for publishers from the start.

For one, as a state institution, Georgia State is immune under "state sovereign immunity," a constitutional doctrine that protects states from prosecution in federal courts—and copyright is federal law. That's why, under a specific legal exception, publishers sued individual defendants at Georgia State—including president Carl Patton, provost Ron Henry, librarian Charlene Hurt (who has since retired)—and also why the case is limited to seeking an injunction to stop Georgia State's e-reserve practices only, no damages.

It is unclear how serious settlement talks have been between the two sides. But Georgia State has fought the case strongly and appears to have put itself in position to defeat the suit. University officials have all but admitted that some of its e-reserves were not password protected in the past, but they attribute that to a vendor glitch, since repaired. And in a remarkable coincidence, just when the suit was filed, Georgia State revised—and greatly tightened—its e-reserve policy. In a court filing, Georgia State attorneys then argued that the new, conservative e-reserve policy rendered any claims about Georgia State's past conduct moot. After all, since only injunctive relief was available to the plaintiffs, why should the defendants have to fight against an injunction that to bar practices no longer in effect?

The court agreed and on June 22, 2009, in a major blow to the publishers' case, issued a protective order, limiting discovery in the case to Georgia State's "ongoing and continuous conduct." In other words, the strongest evidence—the 6,700 infringing copies cited in the complaint—were gone.

To observers, that should have paved the way for a graceful exit via a settlement. After all, both sides could now claim victory. Publishers could claim the suit succeeded in changing the liberal policies governing electronic course content at Georgia State. And Georgia State had avoided an injunction. But the case continues. In March, both sides petitioned the court for summary judgment, and a ruling could come soon. But if summary judgment isn't granted, it could very well be off to trial.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

While publishers hope for an injunction—and perhaps dream about a landmark fair use ruling in their favor—critics of the suit say victory would be hollow, only exacerbating the dysfunction that now pervades scholarly publishing and the business of higher education, especially in such difficult economic times.

"If publishers win an injunction, they would hope to get universities to pay for permissions more often," says Duke University scholarly communication officer Kevin Smith, who has blogged extensively about the case. "But the money simply isn't there. So either our choices for student readings will get narrower, or the money that previously went to collections will go to permissions. Neither of those things are good outcomes for publishing."

Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and a popular columnist for Library Journal, agrees. "Increasing students' costs by replacing e-reserves with coursepacks, print or electronic, is, frankly, a nonstarter," she wrote in a recent column about the suit. With Congress already keeping an eye on the cost of textbooks and tuition, she notes, a ruling against Georgia State that in turn makes students pay for virtually every assigned reading would be "a politically toxic" outcome. "But it's equally unlikely that cash-strapped institutions would be willing or able to subsidize the costs on behalf of students."

Thatcher, who has also written extensively on the case, says most libraries probably don't have to be so concerned with a judgment against Georgia State because the university's behavior was so "extreme." But he concedes that a judgment could force some institutions to reconsider "how aggressive" they want to be about fair use.

"Clearly, what publishers are aiming at is not allowing universities to call everything fair use and drying up any possible revenue streams from the reproduction of articles and book chapters," he says, adding that the Georgia State suit is a sad example of the "systematic dysfunction" in higher education, where schools will pay for an assistant football coach but not adequately support their libraries, faculty, or their presses, leaving publishers no choice but to fight for their revenue streams. "We're often portrayed as the bad guys, but we're asked to do a job. And yet when we ask for a fee from the rest of the university, we're told ‘no.'"

Out of the Courts

Indeed, to the uninitiated, scholarly publishing is a curious enterprise. Simplified, it works something like this: universities or the government subsidize a professor's research. The professor, who is required to publish frequently for professional advancement, gives his research to a scholarly publisher, usually for little or no money. That publisher, who adds value through editing, peer review, and production, assumes the copyright, packages, and sells the research back to the university at a markup. And those mark-ups have proven significant over time, especially as the digital age has fostered an explosion of new databases and resources.

Even with a large chunk of the sector non-profit, make no mistake: scholarly publishing is big business. In the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable report commissioned by Congress and released in January 2010, the total worldwide revenue from the journal market alone was estimated at more than $8 billion in 2008 (about $3 billion from the U.S. market alone) and employed some 110,000 people worldwide. Indeed, while trade publishing has remained flat in recent years, commercial academic publishing has been able to post significant growth.

That's because on the academic side, the digital revolution is all but over—print has been dethroned (but not banished), and digital rules—although clearly not in peace.

Whatever happens in court in the coming months, observers say the battle over e-reserves and the lawsuit at Georgia State have shown that begging for crumbs at the table of fair use is not a viable way to run a higher education system—not for publishers, who need support to cover their costs, not for faculty, who need to publish for promotion and tenure, not for the public who need a vibrant economy of ideas, and certainly not for students, who simply can't afford the escalating prices of learning materials.

"We need to be looking for new business models, and some of the arguments in the Georgia State case about how adequate the current licensing regime is suggest to me that we haven't found that model yet," Smith told PW. "Right now, the licensing model for permissions is inefficient and expensive, from staff time to hunt down who owns which rights, whether our annual campus license covers the use, whether we have CCC permission, and we often have to make quick decisions. It is an extremely cumbersome process. Yes, we need more clarity about what's fair use and when it applies, but what we really need is a more efficient system."

Curious about how a verdict against Georgia State might play out, Smith recently asked Duke's e-reserves staff to give him random examples of recent permission fees. "For the 2007 book No Caption Needed, we paid $150 for permission to make just 17% of the work available to 12 students. This amounts to over $12 per student to gain access to less than a fifth of a work that sells for $35 retail. For an older work—Dealing with Terrorism: Stick or Carrot?—we paid about $10 per student to make 21% of this $30 book available." These are not extreme examples, Smith insists. In another example, fees exceeded $1,000, more than $25 per student. "As we are asked to pay ever-increasing costs for decreasing value," he observes, "it seems that an unsustainable system is being created."

Coming up with a "more efficient system" for scholarly communication has not been easy. A debate has raged for a decade over the viability of such regimes as peer-reviewed open access publishing, institutional repositories, "self-archiving," and other campus policies that urge faculty to retain their copyrights and harness technology to make scholarship more accessible, open, usable, and reusable by the very people who create it. However, publishers have raised serious questions about the sustainability and wisdom of open access, a system that would shift the costs of publishing to authors through publication fees, while making the scholarship freely accessible to the user. For most publishers, it really doesn't matter who pays, as long as somebody covers the costs of publishing, archiving, and maintaining scholarly communication. But are governments and universities, seemingly in constant budget flux, the best agents to control access to the scholarly record? Without some profit motive, can innovation thrive?

Tough questions loom for scholarly publishing, but observers doubt that a fair use verdict in the Georgia State case will raise anything but more questions about the lack of support for teaching, learning—and publishing—in higher education. "Something is badly broken when university presses sue universities for using their materials," Fister notes. "We need to stop playing a shell game that merely shifts the costs and benefits around. It's not sustainable."
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...mmunicate.html





Frank W. Ballard, Who Trained Puppeteers at UConn, Dies at 80
Margalit Fox

Frank W. Ballard, a master puller of strings who helped bring the study of puppetry into the university curriculum and in so doing trained a generation of lively, manipulative disciples, died on June 4 in Storrs, Conn. He was 80 and lived in Storrs.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Michael said.

Considered one of the most eminent puppeteers in the country, Mr. Ballard was long associated with the University of Connecticut, which through his work became — and remains — a Mecca for puppeteers in training. He joined UConn in 1956 as a theatrical set and technical director; in 1965 he founded the university’s puppet arts program, which he directed until his retirement in 1989.

“Frank developed this program parallel to Jim Henson’s success,” Bart Roccoberton, its current director, said in an interview on Thursday. “So between the two of them, they made puppetry a very valuable tool of expression in this country.”

It is beyond rare for an institution of higher learning to grant degrees in puppetry. Connecticut is one of only a few in the world to do so, offering B.F.A., M.A. and M.F.A. degrees through the program, which is part of the dramatic arts department. Despite the program’s renown, however, its students have grown used to hearing astonished classmates ask, “You can major in that?”

They can indeed, studying all aspects of the art form, from the making and manipulation of puppets, to playwriting, set and costume design, music and movement. Today the program’s graduates, who come from all over the world, are sought-after masters who ply their trade in film, theater and television.

“The program that Frank started has contributed some of the finest puppeteers in the country for the past 30 years,” Mr. Roccoberton said. “Shows like ‘Avenue Q’ and ‘Lion King’ and ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ were either built or performed by our alumni.”

Frank Willard Ballard was born in Alton, Ill., on Dec. 7, 1929. After seeing a puppet show at 5, he became irretrievably entranced. He made his earliest puppet heads from the first material that came to hand in the family garage, which happened to be concrete. They were very small and very heavy.

From grade school through college, young Mr. Ballard ran his own puppet troupe, which included his future wife, Adah Ruth Smalley. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Shurtleff College in Alton and a master’s from the University of Illinois, he designed educational television shows for the University of Iowa before moving to UConn.

There, he and his students mounted hundreds of puppet plays. Among them were more than a dozen large-scale productions, including operatic works like Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore.” In 1980, Mr. Ballard produced a puppet version of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Though he loved marionettes best, Mr. Ballard worked with puppets of all kinds, including hand, finger and rod puppets. For shadow puppetry, he hit on the idea of using an overhead projector, a device, familiar to anyone over 40, that employs acetate transparencies and a light source to throw images onto a screen.

“Overhead projectors are something that were used in classrooms — but to use them as a way to light up shadow puppets, that was innovative,” John Bell, the director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn, said on Thursday. “And actually it’s a common kind of performance now. There’s a flat, horizontal surface — a deck — on which you place an acetate. But you can also put shadow puppets on that deck.”

The Ballard Institute and Museum houses more than 2,700 puppets, made by Mr. Ballard and others. Open to the public Fridays through Sundays, it is located, with the puppetry program, on a satellite campus in Storrs, about two miles from UConn’s main campus.

Mr. Ballard’s wife, whom he married in 1953, died this March. He is survived by two sons, Michael and David; a brother, Irwin; a sister, Alice Casner; and four grandchildren.

A past president of the Puppeteers of America, Mr. Ballard was a classicist, breathing life into time-honored materials like papier-mâché. Lately the UConn program has encompassed more avant-garde puppetry styles, including those in which any object can become dramatic fodder.

Mr. Roccoberton recalled one performance in which a student staged a drama using lettuce, a turnip, a carrot and a squash. Afterward, the principal actors were eaten.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/arts/14ballard.html





Armed Police at Merseyside School After FBI Warning
BBC

Police mounted a major operation to protect pupils at a Merseyside school after they were alerted by the FBI.

Armed police were called to St Aelred's Catholic Technology College in Newton-le-Willows on Friday after reports someone had made threats to kill there.

The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation raised the alarm after picking up a threat posted on social networking site Facebook.

A 19-year-old man was arrested and later released on bail.

More than 1,000 students, some of them taking their GCSEs, were in the Birley Street school at the time of the alert.

All entrances and exits were sealed while police investigated.

'Leaving this world'

The school said it was the FBI who raised the alarm after internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words.

It picked up a posting showing a picture of a gun being held above a scrawled note, which read "tomorrow - last day of school" and went on to mention bullies and "leaving this world".

Headteacher Edward Marr has now written to parents explaining how the situation came about.

He wrote: "Police officers attended school at 0800 am on Friday morning. They had a photograph from the internet and asked if I could identify a person on it.

"It emerged that a threat had been made against the school which had been picked up by the FBI in America and passed eventually, as the school was identified, to Merseyside Police.

"Staff at the school were able to suggest the identity of the man on the photograph and an arrest was made."

Some parents have criticised police over why their children were allowed into classes while officers were investigating a possible armed threat.

Ch Supt Chris Armitt, from Merseyside Police, denied suggestions that officers could have closed the school as soon as they were aware of the threat.

He said: "We received some information between 1am and 2am, that information was imprecise and what we had to do was clarify what the information meant and what it related to.

"Once we were able to identify that school as potentially being at risk, we took steps quickly to get with the school staff."

He added: "They were able to help us identify the possible threats that we faced and we were then able to deal with that well away from the school premises."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...e/10319053.stm





Websites Face New Crackdown in Thailand

Internet service providers will face legal action and have their licences withdrawn if they refuse to cooperate with the government to block websites deemed to be defamatory to the monarchy, the ICT minister warns.

Juti Krairiksh said yesterday the scheme is part of a new action plan to be implemented over three months.

The crackdown on defamatory websites was agreed upon by the Information and Communication Technology Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the Culture Ministry after a meeting yesterday which was arranged in a concerted effort to implement stricter measures against those who defame the monarchy.

The three ministers later signed a memorandum of understanding for the joint operation that will take place in three months.

Mr Juti said the first priority is to ask the justice minister for cooperation on security matters because the ICT Ministry has no personnel with experience in investigation and suppression.

It might be possible to establish a task force to handle the matter, he said.

The ICT Ministry's permanent secretary will chair a meeting today of the coordination committee made up of members from the three ministries.

The ministry will ask for 50 staff from the Justice Ministry with experience in information technology to work closely with 30 staff members from the ICT Ministry who keep watch on the internet and propose action when they consider it necessary.He said the 30 existing staff were unable to keep pace with the rise in online crime.

Mr Juti also said Thailand has been a target of internet crime attacks so the task force had to focus on preventing hackers from entering the country's important databases.

He had learned recently of a wager being made among computer hackers in Russia over who could take the least time to hack into the Thai government's database.

It was found the hackers needed just 17 minutes to steal important information, the minister said.

Justice Minister Pirapan Salirathavibhaga said the ministry will seek the cooperation of internet service providers in the next three months to block websites that contain articles that are defamatory to the monarchy.

Those failing to cooperate will be dealt with and have their licences withdrawn, he said.

The ministry has so far shut down 43,000 websites deemed to be defamatory to the royal institution.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/loca...-new-crackdown





In China, Labor Movement Enabled by Technology
David Barboza and Keith Bradsher

It is labor revolt by text message and video upload, underwritten by the Chinese government.

The 1,700 workers who went on strike at the Honda Lock auto parts factory here are mostly poor migrants with middle-school educations.

But they are surprisingly tech-savvy.

Hours into a strike that began last week, they started posting detailed accounts of the walkout online, spreading word not only among themselves but also to restive and striking workers elsewhere in China.

They fired off cellphone text messages urging colleagues to resist pressure from factory bosses. They logged onto a state-controlled Web site — workercn.cn — that is emerging as a digital hub of the Chinese labor movement. And armed with desktop computers, they uploaded video of Honda Lock’s security guards roughing up employees.

“We videotaped the strike with our cellphones and decided to post the video online to let other people know how unfairly we were treated,” said a 20-year-old Honda employee who asked not to be named because of the threat of retaliation.

The disgruntled workers in this southern Chinese city took their cues from earlier groups of Web-literate strikers at other Honda factories, who in mid-May set up Internet forums and made online bulletin board postings about their own battle with the Japanese automaker over wages and working conditions.

But they have also tapped into a broader communications web enabling the working class throughout China to share grievances and strategies. Some strike leaders now say they spend much of their time perusing the Web for material on China’s labor laws.

Wielding cellphones and keyboards, members of China’s emerging labor movement so far seem to be outwitting official censors in an effort to build broad support for what they say is a war against greedy corporations and their local government allies.

And it might not be possible if the Chinese government had not made a concerted effort in the last decade to shrink the country’s digital divide by lowering the cost of mobile phone and Internet service in this country — a modernization campaign that has given China the world’s biggest Internet population (400 million) and allowed even the poorest of the poor to log onto the Internet and air their labor grievances.

“This is something people haven’t paid attention to — migrant workers can organize using these technologies,” said Guobin Yang, a professor at Barnard College and author of “The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.”

“Usually we think of this kind of thing being used by middle-class youths and intellectuals,” Professor Yang said.

The Web and digital devices, analysts say, have become vehicles of social change in much the way the typewriter and mimeograph machine were the preferred media during the pro-democracy protests in Beijing in 1989 — before the government put down that movement in the June 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown that left hundreds dead.

A looming question now, in fact, is whether and when the government might seek to quash the current worker uprisings if they become too big a threat to the established social order. Already, the government has started cracking down on strike-related Web sites and deleted many of the blog posts about the strikes.

The instant messaging service QQ, which is accessible via the Web or mobile phone — and was perhaps the early favorite network of strike leaders because of its popularity among young people — was soon infiltrated by Honda Lock officials and government security agents, forcing some to move to alternative sites, strike leaders say.

“We’re not using QQ any more,” said one strike leader here. “There were company spies that got in. So now we’re using cellphones more.”

Analysts say they were smart to change.

“QQ offers no protection from eavesdropping by the Chinese authorities, and it is just as well they stopped using it,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a China specialist and fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. “QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.”

But the activists say they are getting around some of those restraints by shifting to different platforms (including a Skype-like network called YY Voice) and using code words to discuss protest gatherings.

For years, labor activists have been exposing the harsh working conditions in Chinese factories by smuggling cellphone images and video out of coastal factories and posting documents showing labor law violations on the Web. New and notable is that these formerly covert activities have become open and pervasive.

Last month, for example, when a string of puzzling suicides was reported at Foxconn Technology near here, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, there were online video postings reportedly showing security guards manhandling workers.

And several people claiming to be Foxconn workers posted their pay stubs online showing that their overtime hours exceeded the legal monthly limit. In Zhongshan, where many of the Honda Lock strikers returned to work at least temporarily on Sunday and Monday while wage negotiations continued, the workers followed a basic model established by those who went on strike last month at a Honda transmission factory in the city of Foshan.

The Foshan strike leaders organized and communicated with more than 600 workers by, among other means, setting up Internet chat rooms on QQ.

“I created one myself the night before the strike, and that had 40 people,” said Xiao Lang, one of the two Honda strike leaders in Foshan. Mr. Xiao was fired by Honda soon after leading the walkout. “We discussed all kinds of things on it,” he said of the QQ chat room, “such as when to meet, when to walk out and how much pay we want.”

Workers at other Honda factories say they followed the Foshan developments online and began considering their own actions.

The Chinese government allowed the state-run media to publish and broadcast news about the first Foshan strike. But when the strike news went viral, the government issued a notice virtually banning coverage. The workers’ own communications effort, however, never let up.

Those in this same generation of Chinese workers who are less willing to accept the wages and working conditions of their predecessors are also among China’s first digital natives. One of the strikers here in Zhongshan, who is in his early 20s, said he had been using computers since the age of 7.

He learned to upload videos to sites like Youku.com and 56.com. He reads news on Baidu.com.

He has written blog posts about the Honda Lock strike and articles on a QQ space, and said some of his comments had been picked up by the foreign news media, helping to draw even more attention to the Honda Lock strike. Meanwhile, he said, the Chinese state-run news media had ignored telephone calls he placed in hopes of drawing further coverage.

The Honda Lock workers here await the results of a government-led negotiation for higher wages and better working conditions. Even though last weekend they were offered wage increases of only 11 percent, many of the workers say they are still confident they will get a raise of as much as 50 percent — to as much as $234 a month — just as the Honda workers in Foshan did.

“This couldn’t have happened if we didn’t hear about how they were doing things in Foshan,” said the worker who has used computers since age 7. “We followed their lead. So why shouldn’t we get the same pay raise as they did?”

Bao Beibei, Chen Xiaoduan and Hilda Wang contributed research.





First, China. Next: the Great Firewall of... Australia?
Marina Kamenev

The concept of government-backed web censorship is usually associated with nations where human rights and freedom of speech are routinely curtailed. But if Canberra's plans for a mandatory Internet filter go ahead, Australia may soon become the first Western democracy to join the ranks of Iran, China and a handful of other nations where access to the Internet is restricted by the state.

Plans for a mandatory Internet filter have been a long-term subject of controversy since they were first announced by Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, in May 2008 as part of an $106 million "cybersafety plan." The plan's stated purpose is to protect children when they go online by preventing them from stumbling on illegal material like child pornography. To do this, Conroy's Ministry has recommended blacking out about 10,000 websites deemed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to be so offensive that they are categorized as 'RC,' or Refused Classification.

The government won't reveal an official list of the URLs on the current blacklist, but Conroy's office says it includes sites containing child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. "Under Australia's existing [laws] this material is not available in news agencies, it is not on library shelves, you cannot watch it on a DVD or at the cinema and it is not shown on television," Conroy's office e-mailed in a statement. But in March 2009, when a 2,395-site blacklist was leaked to Wikileaks, an online clearinghouse for anonymous submissions, it seemed confusingly broad, containing, among others, the websites of a dentist from Queensland, a pet-care facility in Queensland, and a site belonging to a school cafeteria consultant.

At the time, Conroy told the Sydney Morning Herald that any Australians involved in the leak could face criminal charges. "No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list," he said.

Since then, criticism of the proposed Internet filter has escalated. "Nobody likes it," says Scott Ludlam, a senator from the Australian Greens Party. "Everyone from the communications industry to child protection rights and online civil liberties groups think this idea is deeply flawed." Throughout 2009 GetUp!, an internet-based political activism organization, launched an advertising campaign to raise public awareness about the government's proposal. (That July, the advertisement the group made was banned from screenings on Qantas domestic flights into Canberra.) In February, Anonymous, a community of Internet users, which include hackers, shut down the Australian Parliament's web site in their second attack against the filter, which they called "Operation: Titstorm" — a reference to the sexual content that the filter will be blocking. Save the Children has questioned the efficacy of the filter in protecting children, and in March, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders listed Australia as a country that's "under surveillance" in its annual "Internet Enemies" report, which rounds up the "worst violators of freedom of expression on the Net."

But the most high-profile criticism of the filter has so far been from net giants Google and Yahoo. In March, Google wrote to the Australian government with concerns that the scope of the filter was too wide. The search engine also warned it may slow down search speed. "Filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia's international reputation, and it can be easily circumvented," the California company wrote in a submission to Conroy's Department of Broadband Communications and Digital Economy.

On June 6, the Australian government launched a police investigation into the activities of Google in Australia, accusing the company of collecting private information while taking photographs for their Street View Service, which offers a panoramic view of any catalogued street. In comments that he has denied were spurred by Google's complaints about his cybersafety program, Conroy has called Google's privacy policy "creepy," and described their collecting of unsecured private information as "the biggest single breach of privacy in history." Google has admitted to accidentally collecting fragments of data from unsecured wi-fi networks in its global operations.

Indeed, only a cluster of Christian groups and child safety advocates have come out as supporting the filter. In a June 5 poll conducted on the web site of the Sydney Morning Herald, 99% of the 88,645 people who responded to the survey said they were against the Internet filter. Nevertheless, Conroy told the Sun-Herald in May that the policy "will be going ahead.'' He also accused groups like GetUp! of deliberately misleading the public. 'We are still consulting on the final details of the scheme. But this policy has been approved by 85% of Australian internet service providers, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iinet.'' Iinet have since denied that it ever approved the scheme.

Many say the biggest problem with the plan is that it simply won't work. "I don¹t see the point of blocking a site that no one would have come across, and making the criminals aware of the fact they are being watched. I am much more interested in seeing the Australian Federal Police work with international law enforcement agencies in tracking the site," Ludham of the Greens Party says. Jarrod Trevathan, a technology lecturer and researcher at James Cook University, agrees. "Once people know their site is being blocked they will just open up another URL, and then the filter will have to block that URL. Eventually the blocked list will contain countless URLs which will drastically slow down the speed of the Internet." In May, ABC reported Conroy might consider, as part of his program, allowing child pornography websites to be temporarily left online to catch people maintaining or using them.

Still, it's hard to see why the government is pressing ahead with a scheme that, in the view of many, will do more harm than good. "It's like trying to ban burglaries by banning pictures of crowbars," says Geordie Guy, vice chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, a non-profit national organization that has been vehemently opposed to the filter since it's conception. "You stop burglaries the same way you stop pedophilia — by catching the perpetrators. If the government closes these websites than the [Australian Federal Police] will find it harder to track the real criminals."
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...995615,00.html





Toxic Net Filters 'Shelved Until After Election'
Asher Moses

The internet censorship policy has joined the government's list of "politically toxic subjects" and will almost certainly be shelved until after the federal election, Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam says.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - already facing a voter backlash over several perceived policy failures - is expected to call the election before the end of the year and the feeling of many in Canberra is that next week will be the last sitting week of Parliament.

Parliament is not due to sit again until August 24, leaving little time to introduce the legislation and have it debated and passed in time for the election.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has said he expects legislation to enable his internet filtering policy, which will block a secret blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australians, to be tabled in the second half of the year.
He has said delays have been due to issues working out transparency and accountability measures.

Senator Ludlam said in a phone interview that these issues were only part of the reason for the delay, saying the policy was now "on the list of politically toxic subjects that you don't in your right mind run during an election campaign".

Senator Conroy's spokeswoman has repeatedly refused to deny claims that the legislation would be shelved until after the election, saying only that she did not yet know when the election would be.

The scheme has attracted immense opposition from Senator Conroy's political opponents, the internet industry including several ISPs, Yahoo and Google, academics, lobby groups, some childrens' welfare groups including Save The Children, the US government, Reporters Without Borders and even Labor MPs.

The opposition has failed to state a definitive position on the matter since Tony Abbott took over as Opposition Leader, and his communications spokesman, Tony Smith, has refused to comment despite several requests from this website.

However, it is likely the legislation would not be passed even if it was introduced in the near future, as the Greens are committed to opposing it and several Opposition heavyweights, including Joe Hockey, have criticised the net filtering policy in speeches.

"The industry are telling them that what they are intending to do is formidably difficult - the government won't be able to draft a bill saying 'OK ISPs, you go and make this happen', because the ISPs are pushing back telling the government 'No, you tell us how you think you can make it work,'" Senator Ludlam said.

"I don't believe he will be able to get the chamber time from his colleagues [before the election] unless he's fairly sure that he's going to be able to pass it; the government at the moment don't have time to burn a couple of days of chamber time only to have it voted down.

Senator Ludlam is on the newly formed cyber-safety committee but, in the round-table meetings, "nobody brought it [the filters] up because they're dealing with issues that are front and centre as far as child safety is concerned and the filter won't help them".

One of the main issues raised by critics of the filter is that it would impose mandatory internet censorship on all Australians and would inevitably catch content many regard as innocuous. Leaked versions of the blacklist have seen a Queensland dentist, pet-care facility and school cafeteria consultancy caught up among the child porn and sexual abuse sites.

Senator Conroy argues he is just porting censorship models applied to other mediums over to the internet but the key difference with offline mediums is that citizens know what is being blocked and why. Prominent critics feel the current policy will be the thin end of the wedge, with little stopping successive governments from expanding the scope of the filters.

Labor Senator Kate Lundy has been pushing Senator Conroy to scrap the mandatory aspect of the scheme and make it opt-in. She wrote in a blog post this month that she was working to change the policy "to better achieve the policy goals of protecting children through empowering and educating parents".

She is pushing for two key amendments:

1. Protect in legislation the availability of an unfiltered, open internet service.

2. Require all internet subscribers to make an active choice as to whether they want an unfiltered, RC filtered or additionally filtered internet service (with the latter being personally customisable at any time).

Senator Lundy said although she originally discussed making the filters opt-out, "it has become clear that the community has a preference for [an] opt-in approach, rather than an opt-out compromise".

Today, Senator Lundy said: "I have received a lot of support and constructive feedback both publicly and privately about the amendments I am proposing to this policy, and I look forward to presenting the federal Labor caucus with a constructive alternative approach that upholds the principles of open government, net neutrality, and empowers parents to take responsibility for the cybersafety of children in their care."

The filtering policy has attracted international criticism and ridicule, most recently in Time magazine, which covered the policy in detail and wrote: "Australia may soon become the first Western democracy to join the ranks of Iran, China and a handful of other nations where access to the internet is restricted by the state."

It has also been the subject of several spoof videos, including one dubbed "censordyne", created by the online activist group GetUp!. Much to the group's dismay, it was banned from being shown as an ad on domestic Qantas flights into Canberra, although it got a good run online.

Today, online electronics seller Kogan Technologies released its own parody clip featuring a supposed new product developed by two alleged engineers, Con and Roy, which will provide an alternative to the government's proposed filter.

Made from "the finest 8000-thread count Egyptian cotton", the "Portector" goes "on sale" for $2999 today.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...ml?autostart=1





The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
Glenn Greenwald

On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he "boasted" in an Internet chat -- with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo -- of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and "hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records." Lamo, who holds himself out as a "journalist" and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning's detention.

On June 10, former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, writing in The Daily Beast, gave voice to anonymous "American officials" to announce that "Pentagon investigators" were trying "to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks [Julian Assange] for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security." Some news outlets used that report to declare that there was a "Pentagon manhunt" underway for Assange -- as though he's some sort of dangerous fugitive.

From the start, this whole story was quite strange for numerous reasons. In an attempt to obtain greater clarity about what really happened here, I've spent the last week reviewing everything I could related to this case and speaking with several of the key participants (including Lamo, with whom I had a one-hour interview last night that can be heard on the recorder below, and Poulsen, with whom I had a lengthy email exchange, which is published in full here). A definitive understanding of what really happened is virtually impossible to acquire, largely because almost everything that is known comes from a single, extremely untrustworthy source: Lamo himself. Compounding that is the fact that most of what came from Lamo has been filtered through a single journalist -- Poulsen -- who has a long and strange history with Lamo, who continues to possess but not disclose key evidence, and who has been only marginally transparent about what actually happened here (I say that as someone who admires Poulsen's work as Editor of Wired's Threat Level blog).

Reviewing everything that is known ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Below is my perspective on what happened here. But there is one fact to keep in mind at the outset. In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a classified report (ironically leaked to and published by WikiLeaks) which -- as the NYT put it -- placed WikiLeaks on "the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States." That Report discussed ways to destroy WikiLeaks' reputation and efficacy, and emphasized creating the impression that leaking to it is unsafe (click image to enlarge):

In other words, exactly what the U.S. Government wanted to happen in order to destroy WikiLeaks has happened here: news reports that a key WikiLeaks source has been identified and arrested, followed by announcements from anonymous government officials that there is now a worldwide "manhunt" for its Editor-in-Chief. Even though WikiLeaks did absolutely nothing (either in this case or ever) to compromise the identity of its source, isn't it easy to see how these screeching media reports -- WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat -- would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice, at least: exactly as the Pentagon Report sought to achieve? And that Pentagon Report was from 2008, before the Apache Video was released; imagine how intensified is the Pentagon's desire to destroy WikiLeaks now. Combine that with what both the NYT and Newsweek recently realized is the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, and one can't overstate the caution that's merited here before assuming one knows what happened.

* * * * *

Adrian Lamo and Kevin Poulsen have a long and strange history together. Both were convicted of felonies relating to computer hacking: Poulsen in 1994 (when he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, ironically because a friend turned government informant on him), and Lamo in 2004 for hacking into The New York Times. When the U.S. Government was investigating Lamo in 2003, they subpoenaed news agencies for any documents reflecting conversations not only with Lamo, but also with Poulsen. That's because Lamo typically sought media publicity after his hacking adventures, and almost always used Poulsen to provide that publicity.

Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. Government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News. Back in 2002, Information Week described the strange Lamo-Poulsen relationship this way: "To publicize his work, [Lamo] often tapped ex-hacker-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen as his go-between: Poulsen contacts the hacked company, alerts it to the break-in, offers Lamo's cooperation, then reports the hack on the SecurityFocus Online Web site, where he's a news editor." When Lamo hacked into the NYT, it was Poulsen who notified the newspaper's executives on Lamo's behalf, and then wrote about it afterward. Poulsen told me that the above picture was taken at a lunch the two of them had together with convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick back in 2001. When I asked Poulsen if he considers Lamo his friend, he would respond only by saying: "He's a subject and a source."

Actually, over the years, Poulsen has served more or less as Lamo's personal media voice. Back in 2000, Poulsen would quote Lamo as an expert source on hacking. That same year, Poulsen -- armed with exclusive, inside information from Lamo -- began writing about Lamo's various hacking adventures. After Lamo's conviction, Poulsen wrote about his post-detention battles with law enforcement and a leaked documentary featuring Lamo. As detailed below, Lamo is notorious in the world of hacking for being a low-level, inconsequential hacker with an insatiable need for self-promotion and media attention, and for the past decade, it has been Poulsen who satisfies that need.

On May 20 -- a month ago -- Poulsen, out of nowhere, despite Lamo's not having been in the news for years, wrote a long, detailed Wired article describing serious mental health problems Lamo was experiencing. The story Poulsen wrote goes as follows: after Lamo's backpack containing pharmaceutical products was stolen sometime in April (Lamo claims they were prescribed anti-depressants), Lamo called the police, who concluded that he was experiencing such acute psychiatric distress that they had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for three days. That 72-hour "involuntary psychiatric hold" was then extended by a court for six more days, after which he was released to his parents' home. Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed. In that article, Poulsen also summarized Lamo's extensive hacking history. Lamo told me that, while he was in the mental hospital, he called Poulsen to tell him what happened, and then told Poulsen he could write about it for a Wired article. So starved was Lamo for some media attention that he was willing to encourage Poulsen to write about his claimed psychiatric problems if it meant an article in Wired that mentioned his name.

It was just over two weeks after writing about Lamo's Asperger's, depression and hacking history that Poulsen, along with Kim Zetter, reported that PFC Manning had been detained, after, they said, he had "contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail." Lamo told me that Manning first emailed him on May 20 and, according to highly edited chat logs released by Wired, had his first online chat with Manning on May 21; in other words, Manning first contacted Lamo the very day that Poulsen's Wired article on Lamo's involuntary commitment appeared (the Wired article is time-stamped 5:46 p.m. on May 20).

Lamo, however, told me that Manning found him not from the Wired article -- which Manning never mentioned reading -- but from searching the word "WikiLeaks" on Twitter, which led him to a tweet Lamo had written that included the word "WikiLeaks." Even if Manning had really found Lamo through a Twitter search for "WikiLeaks," Lamo could not explain why Manning focused on him, rather than the thousands of other people who have also mentioned the word "WikiLeaks" on Twitter, including countless people who have done so by expressing support for WikiLeaks.

Although none of the Wired articles ever mention this, the first Lamo-Manning communications were not actually via chat. Instead, Lamo told me that Manning first sent him a series of encrypted emails which Lamo was unable to decrypt because Manning "encrypted it to an outdated PGP key of mine" [PGP is an encryption program]. After receiving this first set of emails, Lamo says he replied -- despite not knowing who these emails were from or what they were about -- by inviting the emailer to chat with him on AOL IM, and provided his screen name to do so. Lamo says that Manning thereafter sent him additional emails encrypted to his current PGP key, but that Lamo never bothered to decrypt them. Instead, Lamo claims he turned over all those Manning emails to the FBI without ever reading a single one of them. Thus, the actual initial communications between Manning and Lamo -- what preceded and led to their chat -- are completely unknown. Lamo refuses to release the emails or chats other than the small chat snippets published by Wired.

Using the chat logs between Lamo and Manning -- which Lamo provided to Poulsen -- the Wired writers speculated that the Army Private trusted Lamo because he "sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker." Poulsen and Zetter write that Manning confessed to being the leaker of the Apache attack video "very quickly in the exchange," and then proceeded to boast that, in addition, "he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables" to WikiLeaks. Very shortly after the first chat, Lamo notified federal agents of what Manning told him, proceeded to speak to Manning for the next several days while consulting with federal agents, and then learned that Manning was detained in Iraq.

* * * * *

Many of the bizarre aspects of this case, at least as conveyed by Lamo and Wired, are self-evident. Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they "could do serious damage to national security?" Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to "quickly" confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat, given the obvious ease with which that could be preserved, intercepted or otherwise surveilled? These are the actions of someone either unbelievably reckless or actually eager to be caught.

All that said, this series of events isn't completely implausible. It's possible that a 22-year-old who engaged in these kinds of significant leaks, sitting in isolation in Iraq, would have a desire to unburden himself by confessing to a stranger; the psychological compulsion to confess is not uncommon (see Crime and Punishment), nor is the desire to boast of such acts. It's possible that he would have expected someone with Lamo's hacking and "journalist" background to be sympathetic to what he did and/or to feel compelled as a journalist not to run to the Government and disclose what he learns from a source. Still, the apparent ease with which Manning quickly spilled his guts in such painstaking detail over an Internet chat concerning such serious crimes -- and then proceeded to respond to Lamo's very specific and probing interrogations over days without ever once worrying that he could not trust Lamo -- is strange in the extreme.

If one assumes that this happened as the Wired version claims, what Lamo did here is despicable. He holds himself out as an "award-winning journalist" and told Manning he was one ("I did tell him that I worked as a journalist," Lamo said). Indeed, Lamo told me (though it doesn't appear in the chat logs published by Wired) that he told Manning early on that he was a journalist and thus could offer him confidentiality for everything they discussed under California's shield law. Lamo also said he told Manning that he was an ordained minister and could treat Manning's talk as a confession, which would then compel Lamo under the law to keep their discussions confidential (early on in their chats, Manning said: "I can't believe what I'm confessing to you"). In sum, Lamo explicitly led Manning to believe he could trust him and that their discussions would be confidential -- perhaps legally required to be kept confidential -- only to then report everything Manning said to the Government.

Worse, Lamo breached his own confidentiality commitments and turned informant without having the slightest indication that Manning had done anything to harm national security. Indeed, Lamo acknowledged to me that he was incapable of identifying a single fact contained in any documents leaked by Manning that would harm national security. And Manning's capacity to leak in the future was likely non-existent given that he told Lamo right away that he was "pending discharge" for "adjustment disorder," and no longer had access to any documents (Lamo: "Why does your job afford you access?" - Manning: "because i have a workstation . . . *had*").

If one believes what the chat logs claim, Manning certainly thought he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that. And if he really is the leaker of the Apache helicopter attack video -- a video which sparked very rare and much-needed realization about the visceral truth of what our wars entail -- then he's a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg. Indeed, Ellsberg himself said the very same thing about Manning just yesterday on Democracy Now:

The fact is that what Lamo reports Manning is saying has a very familiar and persuasive ring to me. He reports Manning as having said that what he had read and what he was passing on were horrible -- evidence of horrible machinations by the US backdoor dealings throughout the Middle East and, in many cases, as he put it, almost crimes. And let me guess that -- he’s not a lawyer, but I'll guess that what looked to him like crimes are crimes, that he was putting out. We know that he put out, or at least it's very plausible that he put out, the videos that he claimed to Lamo. And that's enough to go on to get them interested in pursuing both him and the other.

And so, what it comes down, to me, is -- and I say throwing caution to the winds here -- is that what I've heard so far of Assange and Manning -- and I haven't met either of them -- is that they are two new heroes of mine.

To see why that's so, just review some of what Manning said about why he chose to leak, as reflected in the edited chat logs published by Wired:

Lamo: what's your endgame plan, then?. . .

Manning: well, it was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] - and god knows what happens now - hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms - if not, than [sic] we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens - the reaction to the video gave me immense hope; CNN's iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded - people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . - i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. war in Iraq: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been detained for distributing "insurgent" literature which, when he had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a scholarly critique against PM Maliki":

i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the 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 FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…

i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

And he explained why the thought of selling this classified information he was leaking to a foreign power never entered his mind:

Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or china, and made bank?

Lamo: why didn’t you?

Manning: because it's public data

Lamo: i mean, the cables

Manning: it belongs in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the public domain - because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge - if its out in the open… it should be a public good.

That's a whistleblower in the purest form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms." That's the person that Adrian Lamo informed on and risked sending to prison for an extremely long time.

Making Lamo's conduct even worse is that it appears he reported Manning for no reason other than a desire for some trivial media attention. Jacob Appelbaum, a well-known hacker of the Tor Project who has known Lamo for years, said that Lamo's "only concern" has always been "getting publicity for Adrian." Indeed, Lamo's modus operandi as a hacker was primitive hacking aimed at high-profile companies that he'd then use Poulsen to publicize. As Appelbaum put it: "if this situation really fell into Adrian's lap, his first and only thought would have been: how can I turn this to my advantage? He basically destroyed a 22-year-old's life in order to get his name mentioned on the Wired.com blog." [There are efforts underway to help secure very competent legal counsel for Manning, including a legal defense fund for him; assuming the facts are what the current narrative suggests, I intend to post more about that shortly].

None of Lamo's claims that he turned informant out of some grave concern for "national security" and "the lives of his fellow citizens" make any sense. Indeed, Lamo several months ago contributed $30 to WikiLeaks, which he's use to tout his support for whistle-blowing, and told me has has long considered himself on "the far left." Yet in the public statements he's made about what he did to Manning, he's incoherently invoked a slew of trite, right-wing justifications, denouncing Manning as a "traitor" and a "spy," while darkly insinuating that Manning provided classified information to a so-called "foreign national," meaning WikiLeaks' Assange. Lamo told me that any embarrassment to the U.S. Government could cause a loss of American lives, and that he believes anyone who breaks the law with leaks should be prosecuted. Yet he also claims to support WikiLeaks, which is run by that very same "foreign national" and which exists to enable illegal leaks.

Then there's the fact that, just in the last two weeks, Lamo's statements have been filled with countless contradictions of the type that suggests deliberate lying. Lamo told me, for instance, that Manning first contacted him with a series of emails, but told Yahoo! News that "Manning contacted him via AOL Instant Messenger 'out of the blue' on May 21." Lamo told Yahoo! "that he spelled out very clearly in his chats with Manning that he wasn't ... acting as a journalist," that it "was clear to Manning that he had taken his journalist hat off for the purposes of their conversation," and that "Manning refused" a confidentiality offer, but last night he said to me that he told Manning their conversations would have journalist-source confidentiality and that Manning never refused or rejected that. Just listen to the interview Lamo gave to me and make your own judgment about his veracity.

* * * * *

And what about Wired's role in all of this? Both WikiLeaks as well as various Internet commentators have suggested that Poulsen violated journalistic ethical rules by being complicit with Lamo in informing on Manning. I don't see any evidence for that. This is what Poulsen told me when I asked him about whether he participated in Lamo's informing on Manning:

Adrian reached out to me in late May to tell me a story about how he'd been contacted by an Army intelligence analyst who'd admitted to leaking 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables to a "foreign national." Adrian told me he had already reported the matter to the government, and was meeting the Army and FBI in person to pass on chat logs. He declined to provide independently verifiable details, or identify the intelligence analyst by name, because he said he considered the matter sensitive.

Several days passed before he was willing to give me the chat logs under embargo. I got them on May 27. That's when I learned Manning's name and the full details of his claims to Adrian. . . . If you're asking if I informed on Manning or anyone else, the answer is no, and the question is insulting.

At the time when Lamo was conspiring with federal agents to induce Manning into making incriminating statements, Poulsen, by his own account, was aware that this was taking place, but there's no indication he participated in any way with Lamo. What is true, though, is that Lamo gave Wired the full, unedited version of his chat logs with Manning, but Wired published only extremely edited samplings of it. This is what Poulsen told me when I asked if Lamo gave him all of the chat logs:

He did, but I don't think we'll be publishing more any time soon. The remainder is either Manning discussing personal matters that aren't clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I'm not throwing up without vetting first.

This part of Wired's conduct deserves a lot more attention. First, in his interview with me, Lamo claimed that all sorts of things took place in the discussion between him and Manning that are (a) extremely relevant to what happened, (b) have nothing to do with Manning's personal issues or sensitive national security secrets, and yet (c) are nowhere to be found in the chat logs published by Wired. That means either that Lamo is lying about what was said or Wired is concealing highly relevant aspects of their discussions. Included among that is Manning's explanation about how he found Lamo and why he contacted him, Manning's alleged claim that his "intention was to cripple the United States' foreign relations for the foreseeable future," and discussions they had about the capacity in which they were speaking.

Second, one can't help but note the irony that two hackers-turned-journalists -- Poulsen and Lamo -- are now the self-anointed guardians of America's national security, the former concealing secrets he learned as a journalist on vague national security grounds and the latter turning informant by invoking the most extreme, right-wing platitudes about "traitors" and "spies" and decrees that his actions were necessary to "save American lives."

Third, Wired should either publish all of the chat logs, or be far more diligent about withholding only those parts which truly pertain only to Manning's private and personal matters and/or which would reveal national security secrets. Or they should have a respected third party review the parts they have concealed to determine if there is any justification for that. At least if one believes Lamo's claims, there are clearly relevant parts of those chats which Wired continues to conceal.

Given Poulsen's mutually beneficial and multi-layered relationship with Lamo, they have far more than a standard journalist-source relationship. None of Poulsen's articles about the highly controversial Lamo is ever even remotely critical of him, in any sense of the word. From the start, there were countless bizarre aspects to Lamo's story which Poulsen never examined or explored, at least not when writing about any of this. I see no reason to doubt Poulsen's integrity or good faith. Still, in light of the magnitude of this story on several levels and his long relationship with Lamo, Kevin Poulsen should not be single-handedly deciding what the public is and isn't permitted to know about the Lamo-Manning interaction.

* * * * *

The reason this story matters so much -- aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term -- is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling. Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won't repeat all of that here. Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

What makes WikiLeaks particularly threatening to the most powerful factions is that they cannot control it. Even when whistle-blowers in the past have leaked serious corruption and criminal conduct to perfectly good journalists at the nation's largest corporate media outlets, government officials could control how the information was disclosed. When the NYT learned in 2004 that the Bush administration was illegally eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, George Bush summoned the paper's Publisher and Executive Editor to the Oval Office, demanded that the story not be published, and the paper complied by sitting on it for a full year until after Bush was safely re-elected. When The Washington Post's Dana Priest learned that the CIA was maintaining a network of secret prisons -- black sites -- she honored the request of "senior U.S. officials" not to identify the countries where those prisons were located so as to not disrupt the U.S.'s ability to continue to use those countries for such projects.

Both WikiLeaks and Manning have stated that The Washington Post's David Finkel, when writing his book on Iraq two years ago, had possession of the Apache helicopter video but never released it to the public (Manning: "Washington Post sat on the video … David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here"). As Columbia Journalism Review reported, both the Post and Finkel were quite coy and evasive in addressing that claim, pointedly insisting that "the Post" had never possessed that video while refusing to say whether Finkel did. The same thing happened when, on the same day, I called Finkel to ask him about WikiLeaks' claim that they possessed but never released that video. He very curtly told me, using careful legalistic language, that "the Post never had the video," but before I could ask whether Finkel himself did, he abruptly told me he couldn't talk anymore and had nothing else to say, and then hung up on me. My inquiries to the Post were met with a pro forma response that "The Washington Post did not have the video, nor did we sit on anything," but these Journalistic Crusaders for Transparency refused to answer my question as to whether Finkel himself did.

By stark contrast, WikiLeaks isn't interested in helping governments, militaries and corporations keep secrets. They're interested in the opposite: forcing transparency on institutions which conduct the vast, vast bulk of their substantive conduct in the dark. They're not susceptible to pressure from political and corporate officials; rather, they want to hold them accountable. That's what makes WikiLeaks so uniquely threatening to elite institutions, and anyone who doubts that should simply read the 2008 Pentagon Report discussing ways to destroy it, or review the Obama administration's unprecedented and rapidly escalating war on whistle-blowers generally.

Any rational person would have to acknowledge that government secrecy in rare cases is justifiable and that it's possible for leaks of legitimate secrets to result in serious harm. I'm not aware of a single instance where any leak from WikiLeaks has done so, but it's certainly possible that, at some point, it might. But right now, the scales are tipped so far in the other direction -- toward excessive, all-consuming secrecy -- that the far greater danger comes from allowing that to fester and grow even more. It's not even a close call. Any efforts to subvert that secrecy cult are commendable in the extreme, and nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks (and their value is not confined to leaking, as they just inspired a serious effort to turn Iceland into a worldwide haven for investigative journalism and anonymous whistle-blowers).

This Manning detention -- whether it was by design or just exploited opportunistically -- is being used to depict WikiLeaks as a serious national security threat and associations with it as dangerous and subversive. Just in the last week alone, several people have expressed to me fears that supporting or otherwise enabling WikiLeaks could subject them to liability or worse. There's no reason to believe that's true, but given the powers the U.S. Government claims -- lawless detentions, renditions, assassinations even of American citizens -- that's the climate of intimidation that has been created. This latest incident is clearly being used to impede WikiLeaks' vital function of checking powerful factions and imposing transparency, and for that reason alone, this is an extremely serious case that merits substantial scrutiny, along with genuine skepticism to understand what happened.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...aks/index.html





What Will Iceland’s New Media Laws Mean for Journalists?
Jonathan Stray

The Icelandic parliament has voted unanimously to create what are intended to be the strongest media freedom laws in the world. And Iceland intends these measures to have international impact, by creating a safe haven for publishers worldwide — and their servers.

The proposal, known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, requires changes to Icelandic law to strengthen journalistic source protection, freedom of speech, and government transparency.

“The Prime Minister voted for it, and the Minister of Finance, and everybody present,” says Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who has been the proposal’s chief sponsor. Her point is that Iceland is serious about this. The country is in the mood for openness after a small group of bankers saddled it with crippling debt, and the proposal ties neatly into the country’s strategy to be prime server real-estate.

But although the legislative package sounds very encouraging from a freedom of expression point of view, it’s not clear what the practical benefits will be to organizations outside Iceland. In his analysis of the proposal, Arthur Bright of the Citizen Media Law Project has noted that, in one major test case of cross-border online libel law, “publication” was deemed to occur at the point of download — meaning that serving a controversial page from Iceland won’t keep you from getting sued in other countries. But if nothing else, it would probably prevent your servers from being forcibly shut down.

There might be other benefits too. Wikileaks says that it routes all submissions through Sweden, where investigations into the identity of an anonymous source are illegal. Wikileaks was heavily involved in drafting and promoting the Icelandic package, and whatever your opinion of their current controversies, they’ve proven remarkably immune to legal prosecution in their short history. Conceivably, other journalism organizations could gain some measure of legal protection for anonymous sources if all communications were routed through Iceland.

All of which is to say that issues of press censorship have long since passed the point of globalization. When an aggrieved party in country A can sue a publisher in country B through the courts of country C (as in these examples), press freedom must be understood — and fought for — at an international level.

“It has not only an impact here, but in changing the dialog in Europe,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir told me.

But it will be some time before the full repercussions of Iceland’s move are felt. For a start, the new laws are not yet written. Icelandic lawyer Elfa Ýir of the Ministry of Culture is leading the drafting effort, and expects to have the help of volunteer legal experts and law students. (“Iceland is still suffering from the financial meltdown,” says Birgitta Jónsdóttir.) The complex legislative changes will be passed in several parts, possibly beginning late this year.

“It should be done in about a year,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir said. “I’ll be following this very closely.”

And then it may be further years before we understand, from case law, exactly what an “offshore freedom of expression haven” means to journalists worldwide. Nonetheless, I hope to get a discussion started among the high-powered media law types at the Annenberg-Oxford Summer Institute next month, and we’ll see if we can get a more precise understanding of the practical consequences of Iceland’s move — and how journalists might use it to protect their work. If you have some insight, do drop the Lab a line.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/wha...r-journalists/





IEEE Working Group Considers Kinder, Gentler DRM
Nate Anderson

People don't like DRM in large part because it removes much of their control over things like e-books, music, and movies. Want to loan a DRMed song to a friend? You probably can't, even though sharing a physical item like a CD remains trivial.

A new IEEE working group has an ambitious plan to change this and return control over "digital personal property" to consumers. DRM's electronic tethers would be cut, but rightsholders would not need to remove all limits on sharing. Instead, digital personal property enables the same sort of private sharing that is easily possible with physical objects while still preventing worldwide mass distribution.

Living in a material world

It sounds almost futile: making digital goods "rivalrous" (after being taken, someone else is deprived of their use) when copying is the basic activity of digital devices. But the IEEE P1817 working group has a plan to do exactly this.

Engineer Paul Sweazey has been the driving force behind the idea, which we profiled a year ago when the IEEE first consented to study the idea. A few weeks ago, the idea graduated to working group status; the group will hold its first meeting July 14 in Santa Clara, California.

The "digital personal property" idea involves two major pieces: a title folder and a playkey. The title folder contains the content in question, it's encrypted, and it can be copied and passed around freely. To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device (computer, cell phone, router) or online at a playkey bank account. Controlling the playkey means that you control the media, and you truly own it, since no part of the system needs to phone home, and it imposes no restrictions on copying (except for those that arise naturally from fear of loss).

The playkey, unlike the title folder, can't be copied—but it can be moved. To give your friends and family access to the file in question, you can send them a copy but must also provide a link to the playkey. Under the DPP system, though, anyone who can access the playkey can also decide to move it to their own digital vault—in essence, anyone can take the content from you, and you would no longer have access to the media files in question if they did so.

According to the P1817 working group, this means that:

[P]roduct ownership is perpetual, and the tethers are severed that connect your purchases to their vendors. No one can restrict how you privately use or share them. However, because they are copyrighted, rightsholders retain the legal right to control public dissemination of their works. Just as a printed book can be lost if you share it publicly (i.e., with strangers), you must be careful to share only privately (i.e., with those you trust.) That's because anyone who shares either of your playkeys can take both of them and move them to his own device and his own online playkey bank! The availability and mobility of playkeys lets you electronically share, lend, borrow, give, take, donate, and resell digital property, just as you do with your physical possessions. And since playkeys remain singular, unique, and protected from counterfeiting, copyright holders know that your sharing will remain a private, non-public matter.

The entire system is predicated on the fear of loss; share with people you don't know, and at some point your playkey will probably be moved to someone else's control.

Making digital goods act like physical objects might sound like a bizarre step backward. Didn't we gain quite a lot with the shift to digital, non-rivalrous items? We certainly did, but Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.

If it sounds odd, consider that traditional DRM vendors have tried to do the same thing for more than a decade already. The digital personal property approach both removes tethers to corporate DRM servers and liberates sharing, and sounds like an effort to make DRM's basic approach palatable enough that it won't bother people.

Certainly, DRM alone has not proved enough to dissuade people from buying products, so long as it is remains out of their way most of the time; consider DVDs, Blu-ray discs, Apple's FairPlay, the Kindle's e-book DRM, console games, and Apple's App Store. If P1817 gets major support from vendors and rightsholders, it might prove acceptable to consumers, finally removing some of the ridiculous limitations on backups and format shifting that traditional DRM has eviscerated.

P1817 has a tough road ahead, and there's still something of the "cram the genie back in the bottle" to the whole approach. But those who want to make the scheme work are welcome at the group's meetings (PDF), which Sweazey sees as necessary "middle ground" in the DRM wars.

"I also understand that the Ars Technica readership leans heavily toward the 'all bits are free' direction," Sweazey noted in an e-mail, "but for us they provide a balance to the DRM defenders who think that 'the beatings should continue until morality improves.' There is a middle ground, and someone needs to enable it. We're volunteering."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...entler-drm.ars





Some Versions of Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz Contain a Backdoor
Syzop

Hi all,

This is very embarrassing...

We found out that the Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz file on our mirrors has been replaced quite a while ago with a version with a backdoor (trojan) in it.
This backdoor allows a person to execute ANY command with the privileges of the user running the ircd. The backdoor can be executed regardless of any user
restrictions (so even if you have passworded server or hub that doesn't allow any users in).

It appears the replacement of the .tar.gz occurred in November 2009 (at least on some mirrors). It seems nobody noticed it until now.

Obviously, this is a very serious issue, and we're taking precautions so this will never happen again, and if it somehow does that it will be noticed quickly.
We will also re-implement PGP/GPG signing of releases. Even though in practice (very) few people verify files, it will still be useful for those people who do.

Safe versions
==============

The Windows (SSL and non-ssl) binaries are NOT affected.

CVS is also not affected.

3.2.8 and any earlier versions are not affected.

Any Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz downloaded BEFORE November 10 2009 should be safe, but you should really double-check, see next.

How to check if you're running the backdoored version
======================================================
Two ways:

One is to check if the Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz you have is good or bad by running 'md5sum Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz' on it.
Backdoored version (BAD) is: 752e46f2d873c1679fa99de3f52a274d
Official version (GOOD) is: 7b741e94e867c0a7370553fd01506c66

The other way is to run this command in your Unreal3.2 directory:
grep DEBUG3_DOLOG_SYSTEM include/struct.h
If it outputs two lines, then you're running the backdoored/trojanized version.
If it outputs nothing, then you're safe and there's nothing to do.

What to do if you're running the backdoored version
====================================================
Obviously, you only need to do this if you checked you are indeed running the backdoored version, as mentioned above.
Otherwise there's no point in continuing, as the version on our website is (now back) the good one from April 13 2009 and nothing 'new'.

Solution:
* Re-download from http://www.unrealircd.com/
* Verify MD5 (or SHA1) checksums, see next section (!)
* Recompile and restart UnrealIRCd

The backdoor is in the core, it is not possible to 'clean' UnrealIRCd without a restart or through a module.

How to verify that the release is the official version
=======================================================
You can check by running 'md5sum Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz', it should output:
7b741e94e867c0a7370553fd01506c66 Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz

For reference, here are the md5sums for ALL proper files:
7b741e94e867c0a7370553fd01506c66 Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz
5a6941385cd04f19d9f4241e5c912d18 Unreal3.2.8.1.exe
a54eafa6861b6219f4f28451450cdbd3 Unreal3.2.8.1-SSL.exe

These are the EXACT same MD5sums as mentioned on April 13 2009 in the initial 3.2.8.1 announcement to the unreal-notify and unreal-users mailing list.
<http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=49E341E0.3000702%40vulnscan.org&forum_ name=unreal-notify>

Finally
========
Again, I would like to apologize about this security breach.
We simply did not notice, but should have.
We did not check the files on all mirrors regularly, but should have.
We did not sign releases through PGP/GPG, but should have done so.

This advisory (and updates to it, if any) is posted to:
http://www.unrealircd.com/txt/unrealsec ... 100612.txt

Hope you'll all continue to support UnrealIRCd.

http://forums.unrealircd.com/viewtopic.php?t=6562





Hackers Exploit Windows XP Zero-Day, Microsoft Confirms

Bug, revealed by Google engineer, now being used in drive-by attacks
Gregg Keizer

Hackers are now exploiting the zero-day Windows vulnerability that a Google engineer took public last week, Microsoft confirmed today.

Although Microsoft did not share details of the attack, other researchers filled in the blanks.

A compromised Web site is serving an exploit of the bug in Windows' Help and Support Center to hijack PCs running Windows XP, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at antivirus vendor Sophos. Cluley declined to identify the site, saying only that it was dedicated to open-source software.

"It's a classic drive-by attack," said Cluley, referring to an attack that infects a PC when its user simply visits a malicious or compromised site. The tactic was one of two that Microsoft said last week were the likely attack avenues. The other: Convincing users to open malicious e-mail messages.

According to Microsoft, the exploit has since been scrubbed from the hacked Web site, but it expects more to surface. "We do anticipate future exploitation given the public disclosure of full details of the issue," said Jerry Bryant. Microsoft's group manager of response communications.

The vulnerability was disclosed last Thursday by Tavis Ormandy, a security engineer who works for Google. Ormandy, who also posted proof-of-concept attack code, defended his decision to reveal the flaw only five days after reporting it to Microsoft -- a move that Microsoft and other researchers questioned.

Today, Cluley called Ormandy's action "utterly irresponsible," and in a blog post asked, "Tavis Ormandy -- are you pleased with yourself?"

The five-day stretch between the day Ormandy reported the bug to Microsoft and when he publicly disclosed the flaw stuck in Cluley's craw. "Five days isn't enough time to expect Microsoft to develop a fix, which has to be tested thoroughly to ensure it doesn't cause more problems than it intends to correct," Cluley said.

In a message on Twitter last week, Ormandy said that he released the information because Microsoft would not commit to producing a patch within 60 days. "I'm getting pretty tired of all the '5 days' hate mail. Those five days were spent trying to negotiate a fix within 60 days," Ormandy said on Saturday.

Microsoft confirmed that its security team had discussed a patch schedule with Ormandy.

"We were in the early phases of the investigation and communicated [to him] on 6/7 that we would not know what our release schedule would be until the end of the week," said Bryant. "We were surprised by the public release of details on the 9th."

Microsoft issued a security advisory on the vulnerability last Thursday that acknowledged the bug and offered up a manual workaround it said would protect users against attack. The next day, it posted a "Fix it" tool that automatically unregisters the HCP protocol handler, a move Microsoft said "would help block known attack vectors before a security update is available."

The in-the-wild attack code is very similar to the proof-of-concept that Ormandy published last week, said Cluley.

That didn't surprise another security expert. "Given the amount of detail that was released, it's a 'script kiddie' kind of exploit at this point," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.

The fact that an exploit based on Ormandy's code was published June 10 for the open-source Metasploit hacking toolkit probably was also a factor, said Storms in an instant message exchange. "No surprise at all there," he said. "There is a large community of people submitting to the Metasploit project."

Microsoft said that the current exploits work against Windows XP machines, but added that Windows Server 2003, the other OS containing the flaw, was safe for the moment. "Windows Server 2003 customers are not currently at risk from the Win Help issue based on the attack samples we have analyzed," the company's security team wrote on Twitter at 1.30 p.m. ET.

The next regularly-scheduled Microsoft security updates are to ship July 13, but the company occasionally departs from its monthly practice with so-called "out-of-band" emergency updates.

Microsoft declined to comment on whether it would now step up its patch process to produce a fix before July 13. "We continue to monitor the threat landscape and will keep customers updated via our blog at and our Twitter handle," said Bryant in an e-mail to Computerworld.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...osoft_confirms





AT&T Hacker's Home Raided, Drugs Found, Dude Detained
Vladislav Savov

Man, one day you have the whole world's ear to talk about slack network security, and the next you're in the joint. Andrew Auernheimer, Goatse Security's hacker-in-chief and a key player in the unearthing of a major security flaw exposing iPads surfing AT&T's airwaves, is today facing felony charges for possession of a variety of potent drugs. That wouldn't be such intriguing news by itself, but the discovery was made by local law enforcers who were in the process of executing an FBI search warrant. Hey, wasn't the FBI going to look into this security breach? Yes indeedy. While nobody is yet willing to identify the reasons behind this warrant, it's not illogical to surmise that Andrew's crew and their online exploits were the cause for the raid. So there you have it folks, it's the first bit of advice any publicist will give you: if you're gonna step out into the glaring light of public life, you'd better clean out your closet first.

Update: Before y'all get in an uproar about "white hacker this" and "Police State that," let's keep in mind that this Andrew Auernheimer character (a.k.a. "Weev") is one unsavory dude (not to mention a raving anti-Semite): check out this New York Times piece on Internet Trolls if you don't believe us. After all, it's not really a stretch that law enforcement might be after someone who's in possession of ecstasy, cocaine, LSD, and various other pharmaceuticals.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/16/a...dude-detained/





Apple Secretly Updates Mac Malware Protection

Apple's 10.6.4 operating system upgrade earlier this week silently updated the malware protection built into Mac OS X to protect against a backdoor Trojan horse that can allow hackers to gain remote control over your treasured iMac or MacBook.

Although there is no mention of it that we could find in Apple's release notes for Mac OS X 10.6.4, or the accompanying security bulletin, Apple has updated XProtect.plist - the rudimentary file that contains elementary signatures of a handful of Mac threats - to detect what they call HellRTS.

HellRTS, which Sophos products have been detecting as OSX/Pinhead-B since April, has been distributed by malicious hackers disguised as iPhoto, the photo application which ships on modern Mac computers.

If you did get infected by this malware then hackers would be able to send spam email from your Mac, take screenshots of what you are doing, access your files and clipboard and much more.

Unfortunately, many Mac users seem oblivious to security threats which can run on their computers. And that isn't helped when Apple issues an anti-malware security update like this by stealth, rather than informing the public what it has done. You have to wonder whether their keeping quiet about an anti-malware security update like this was for marketing reasons. "Shh! Don't tell folks that we have to protect against malware on Mac OS X!"

It seems their own employees can be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to giving users security advice. Just a few days ago I saw a former colleague of mine tweet about the poor advice about malware protection being offered in Apple retail stores.

There's a lot less malicious software for Mac computers than Windows PCs, of course, but the fact that so many Mac owners don't take security seriously enough, and haven't bothered installing an anti-virus, might mean they are a soft target for hackers in the future.

And I'm afraid that although I welcome Apple doing something to reduce the malware problem on Mac OS X, I don't consider it a replacement for real anti-virus software. Here's a video I made last year, demonstrating what Mac OS X Snow Leopard can do to stop malware, and - importantly - what it can't do to stop malware.

Apple's update to detect "HellRTS" more than doubles the size of the XProtect.plist file from 2.4k to 5.1k. There are still a lot of Mac threats it doesn't protect against.
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/201...cretly-updates





[Full-disclosure] TEHTRI-Security Released 13 0days Against Web Tools Used by Evil Attackers

From: Laurent OUDOT at TEHTRI-Security (laurent.oudottehtri-security.com)
Date: Thu Jun 17 2010 - 12:23:10 CDT

* Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Gents,

As announced in recent emails here, we have just released 13 0days and
new offensive concepts against most of the tools currently used by web
attackers, like web shells, exploit packs, etc, during our new talk at
SyScan Singapore 2010 : http://www.syscan.org/Sg/speakers.html#012

We have given new methods to counter-strike intruders with our new
exploits giving you remote shells, remote SQL injection, permanent XSS
and dangerous XSRF, against remote tools used by attackers.

It's time to have strike-back capabilities for real, and to have
alternative and innovative solutions against those security issues.

We have shown how to know, identify, exploit, neutralize or destroy
attackers using those kind of tools.

For example, we gave (some of) our 0days against known tools like Sniper
Backdoor, Eleonore Exploit Pack, Liberty Exploit Pack, Lucky Exploit
Pack, Neon Exploit Pack, Yes Exploit Pack...

This was a way to explain that you can react when you are under attack.

We hope that this will open a new way to think about IT Security
worldwide, and that it might help people sometimes.

Do not hesitate to contact TEHTRI-Security if you need technical
assistance (pentests, incident handling, source code analysis, etc) with
experts who know how work cyber conflicts for real, which is totally
different from people who have clean certifications or who just
masterize security research in labs...

Here is the list of the 13 security advisories and 0days that we just
released today.

TEHTRI-SA-2010-023 - Vuln in NEON Exploit Pack. Permanent XSS+XSRF.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-022 - Vuln in NEON Exploit Pack. SQL Injection.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-021 - Vuln in YES Exploit Pack. Remote File Disclosure.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-020 - Vuln in YES Exploit Pack. Permanent XSS+XSRF admin.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-019 - Vuln in YES Exploit Pack. Remote SQL Injection.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-018 - Vuln in LuckySploit Expl Pack. Remote control.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-017 - Vuln in Liberty Exploit Pack. Permanent XSS+XSRF.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-016 - Vuln in Liberty Exploit Pack. SQL Injection.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-015 - Vuln in Eleonore Exploit Pack. Another SQL Inject.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-014 - Vuln in Eleonore Exploit Pack. XSRF in admin panel.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-013 - Vuln in Eleonore Exploit Pack. Permanent XSS.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-012 - Vuln in Eleonore Exploit Pack. Remote SQL Inject.
TEHTRI-SA-2010-011 - Vuln in Sniper_SA Web Backdoor. Remote File Disclos

More explanations available on our web site:
http://www.tehtri-security.com/en/news.php

Do not hesitate to contact us directly if needed.

Best regards,
Take care.

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archiv...0-06/0423.html





Huge Security Flaw Makes VPNs Useless for BitTorrent
Ernesto

Millions of BitTorrent users who have chosen to hide their identities through a VPN service may not be as anonymous as they would like to be. Due to a huge security flaw, those who use IPv6 in combination with a PPTP-based VPN such as Ipredator are broadcasting information linking to their real IP-address on BitTorrent.

As pressure from anti-piracy outfits on governments to implement stricter copyright laws increases, millions of file-sharers have decided to protect their privacy by going anonymous. In Sweden alone an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are hiding their identities. Many of these use PPTP-based VPNs such as The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator or Relakks.

Thus far, these services were believed to adequately hide a user’s IP-address from people they connect to in BitTorrent swarms, but this is not always the case. At the Telecomix Cipher conference a security flaw was revealed that allows third parties to find the true IP-address of someone connected through a VPN.

The security risk is caused by a lethal combination of IPv6 and PPTP-based VPN services, which are very common. IPv6 is the Internet protocol that will succeed IPv4. The protocol is promoted by Windows 7 and Vista, among others, and most people are using it without even realizing it.

The technical details of the vulnerability, explained in this talk (see below), reveal that the true IP-address of users using IPv6 can be easily traced. Even worse, it seems that the Swedish Anti-piracy Bureau may already be using this flaw to gather data on ‘anonymous’ BitTorrent users.

The vulnerability is not limited to BitTorrent either. It can expose people who believe that they are hiding their real IP-address through nearly every connection.

In addition to this gaping hole in VPNs such as Ipredator and Relakks, the talk exposes several other weaknesses from a privacy point of view. Among other things, it is fairly easy to find MAC-addresses and computer names of people who use the same VPN.

The people who run Ipredator are aware of the issue, and TorrentFreak was informed that their users will be notified about the problem. Other VPNs using the same system may want to do the same. From our understanding of the issue, turning IPv6 off should alleviate the threat and make users fully anonymous again.
http://torrentfreak.com/huge-securit...orrent-100617/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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