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Old 20-10-10, 08:17 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 23rd, '10

Since 2002


































"We don't let the phone company provide callers with inferior service when they disapprove of the person being called or the content of the conversation – and we shouldn't allow that kind of discrimination online either." – Jay Stanley


"Netflix's streaming service has become so popular that it is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours." – Michael Liedtke



































October 23rd, 2010





ISP Entanet UK Criticises Irish Court Over Unlawful Internet P2P File Sharing
MarkJ

Communications and networking provider Entanet has waded into last week's ruling by Ireland's High Court, where copyright holders tried and failed to force a local broadband ISP (UPC) into adopting a "Three Strikes" system of warning and disconnection for customers suspected of involvement with "illegal" P2P file sharing.

Entanet’s Head of Marketing, Darren Farnden, said:

"As we have repeatedly stated, we do not in any way condone illegal file sharing and agree with the music industry that the issue needs to be tackled. However, we do not believe that termination of service and disconnection from the Internet is the appropriate way to do this or a proportionate punishment.

We also have ongoing concerns over the way in which alleged infringers are identified – by IP address – as they can be easily spoofed and hacked. Yet despite ISPs from across the globe arguing these points, the respective governments seem insistent on implementing such policies to satisfy the complaints made by the music and entertainment industries."

Indeed we too were quite surprised, and concerned, by the detail of last week's ruling in which it became quite clear that the presiding Judge, Peter Charleton, had failed to recognise the well known fallibility of using Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses as evidence to identify an infringing individual.

These serious problems, which make it almost impossible to be absolutely sure who is committing the offence itself, have repeatedly been ignored by politicians too. Disconnection cannot work while the correct identity of an infringing individual remains so difficult to ascertain with any certainty. Sadly this doesn't appear to concern those who actually make government policy.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...e-sharing.html





French ISP Vows to Appeal “Three-Strikes” Emails
Jared Moya

Free founder Xavier Niel says “we will challenge this new decree” requiring that it send warning letters to customers accused of illegal file-sharing on behalf of the govt.

The French ISP Free continues to disagree with the govt’s requirement that it send “three-strikes” warning letters to its customers as part of the “Creation and Internet” law, the controversial “three-strikes” measure to fight P2P that was formally passed last September.

It cites Article L331-25 of the Code of Intellectual Property which says that warning letters shall be submitted by the Commission for the Protection of Rights “under its seal and on its behalf, electronically and “through” ISPs.

Free says the inclusion of the word “through” meant exactly that, and that if anything the govt needs to setup a secure SMTP server within the ISP to contact its customers on their own.

After initially refusing to comply, it eventually relented after the Minister of Culture, Frederic Mitterand, lived up to his promise to issue a decree amending the Code of Intellectual Property so that it clearly states that ISPs are indeed “required to submit” warning letters to subscribers on the govt’s behalf.

The penalty for noncompliance is 1,500 euros ($2094 USD) per IP address.

Free had reportedly been preparing to challenge the decree on the grounds that the regulatory authority for electronic communications and postal services was not consulted as required by law, but that plan was apparently put on hold – at least until now.

Although Free began sending out “three-strikes” warning letters yesterday, it has announced that it plans to challenge the decree before the country’s State Council.

“We will challenge this new decree, which seems illegal,” says Xavier Niel, who created Free back in 1999. “Unlike other ISPs, we will apply the law strictly, but only the law. Our position was neither marketing or financial.”

His comments about “unlike other ISPs” are likely a swipe at ISPs like Bouygues and Numericable which have seemed all to eager to comply with govt demands, even if they aren’t spelled out in law. Perhaps the name “Free” is more apt than we think.

Though agreeing that “creators must be compensated for their work,” Niel also takes a swipe at the “Creation and Internet” law itself, arguing that it’s a “bad law that does not solve anything, which is easily circumvented and does not take into account the evolution of the form taken by piracy.”

This was exemplified earlier this year when it was reported that in the face of the new law piracy had become a “favorite sport” among French youth.

Niel predicts it will take several months before the decree is nullified. Too bad we can’t say the same for the “Creation and Internet” law.

Stay tuned.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91100/f...trikes-emails/





French Government Wins Approval Of Anti-Piracy Plan
FMQB

The French government's plan to combat music piracy has been approved by the European Union. According to Reuters, French residents who purchase a 50-Euro card to download music from subscription-based web services will only pay half the price, with the French government paying the other half.

The plan is slated to last two years, with consumers limited to one card per year. It will cost France 25 million Euros (or approximately $34.65 million) annually, based on an estimate of a million cards sold.

"We welcome initiatives ... to increase the availability of music online at a lower price for consumers and through legal distribution channels," EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement, according to Reuters. "The scheme will contribute to preserving pluralism and cultural diversity in the online music industry."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1984745




Porn Studio a Step Closer to Revealing Pirates' IDs
Greg Sandoval

Few film companies are assailing piracy with the vigor of Third World Media.

Third World Media (TMW), a porn studio headquartered north of Los Angeles, filed a lawsuit two weeks ago against 1,568 unnamed individuals, accusing them of using peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully share copies of "Miss Big Ass Brazil #4," records show.

"Each of the defendant's acts of infringement have been willful, intentional, and in disregard of...the rights of plaintiff," TWM's attorneys wrote in their filing of October 4.

The suit came just two weeks after TWM filed a similar complaint against an additional 1,243 unnamed defendants in U.S. District Court in West Virginia involving another adult film. What makes TWM's efforts noteworthy is that not only is the company filing copyright complaints against more individuals than most porn studios that are taking a similar tack, but the company is also filing claims in different courts around the country and has indicated more suits are on the way.

In the more recent complaint, filed in U.S. District for the Northern District of California, TWM included 64 pages of information containing the defendants' IP addresses, the names of their Internet service providers, and dates and times they allegedly shared the files (you can check out a sample of the information by clicking on the photos below). Ira Siegel, the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based attorney representing TWM in the California complaint, declined to comment.

The defendants are named as John Does because the studio will learn their identities after only subpoenaing records from each person's ISP. What all this comes down to is this: if you've illegally downloaded "Miss Big Ass Brazil #4," or any of TWM's other films, the studio appears to be preparing to take you to court.
Porn studio files IP addresses with court (images)

This is only the latest attempt by adult-film companies and indie film studios to take the antipiracy fight into the homes of people ripping them off and trying to conceal themselves in the Internet. Since 2008, when the music industry gave up on filing suits against individuals for sharing music illegally, litigation against individual file sharers appeared to be no longer a threat.

But the adult-film industry appears to be following the lead of Dunlap Grubb & Weaver, the Washington, D.C. law firm based that in January began filing complaints on behalf of independent film studios and began a trend of naming thousands of accused illegal file sharers as defendants in individual lawsuits.

What separates the copyright suits filed by indie film studios from those filed by pornographers, however, is that being accused of sharing pornography has the potential to be far more stigmatizing than being accused of sharing a film like "The Hurt Locker."

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for tech companies and Internet users, believes that this is the kind of veiled threat that makes these lawsuits much more like a "shakedown."

"People have a very good interest in not being sued but also in not having their name associated here if they've been wrongly accused," said Cohn, who has led EFF's opposition to the suits from Dunlap and porn studios. "The leverage to get people to pay to make it go away when what they are accused of having done, in cases of hard-core porn or gay porn, is much higher."

In the suit filed in California, all the cases of alleged illegal file sharing appear to have occurred between March and July of this year.

The defendants appear to come from across the country and are represented by a wide swath of ISPs, including all the majors: Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. In addition to a score of smaller regional players (Cablespeed Maryland, Midcontinent Communications and Alaska Communications Systems Group to name a few), are service providers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, the University of Central Florida, the University of California at Riverside, and the Tennessee Board of Regents.

Louis Svendsen, general counsel for the Tennessee Board of Regents, said in an e-mail that his office was unaware of the copyright complaint until contacted by CNET. "We are just beginning our investigation and have no comment at this time," he said.

Another way that the lawsuits from Dunlap and the porn industry may differ from previous attempts to sue individuals is that the copyright owners appear to have less accurate information, Cohn said. EFF has seen a high number of apparent false positives, according to her.

"It does appear to us that whatever investigative techniques that [some copyright owners] are using are not very good," Cohn said.

At this point at least, the adult-film industry doesn't appear to be backing down. Last month, on the same day that TWM filed its copyright suit, three other porn studios filed nearly identical suits in West Virginia federal court as well.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20019972-261.html





Viacom Hires Superstar Lawyer to Handle YouTube Appeal
Eriq Gardner

Earlier this year, Viacom suffered a major defeat at the hands of Google when a New York district court judge ruled that YouTube qualified for "safe harbor" from claims of direct and contributory copyright infringement. Viacom is determined to have better success at the appellate level.

So the company has hired Theodore Olson, one of the most esteemed appellate lawyers in the country, for the second round of this battle.

Olson was Solicitor General of the United States from 2001 to 2004. Afterwards, he rejoined the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm, where's he's argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court. His notable victories include Bush v. Gore, which paved the path to the presidency of George W. Bush, as well as Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a decision earlier this year at a federal district court in San Francisco overturning California's ban on same sex marriages.

The first job for Viacom's new lawyer will be preparing the company's appeal, which it plans to file on Dec. 3.

To that end, Viacom has already scored a small victory.

Three weeks ago, Google submitted a motion to consolidate the appeals of both Viacom and a class action of plaintiffs led by the U.K. Premier League, which was separately pursuing copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Google asked the 2nd Circuit to consolidate the briefing and argument so as to "spare the parties needless duplication of effort and make the Court's consideration of these appeals easier."

Viacom strenuously objected to the motion. It didn't mind having an appeals court consider the two appeals in tandem, but it loathed the idea that it would be forced to file just one brief in coordination with the Premier League class. Viacom argued that the move would would "prejudice" the court because of factual and legal differences in each of the cases and that the consolidation "would require Viacom to reassess strategic decisions relating to its brief and require significant negotiations and coordination with the Class."

On Monday, the 2nd Circuit confirmed that the case would be consolidated and heard in tandem, but that each of the parties would be given the opportunity to file their own briefs.

That means that on Dec. 3, expect to see no more than 14,000 words of arguments from Viacom, arguing why the district court made an error giving YouTube "safe harbor" and ignoring the video-sharing website's liability for direct infringement.

The timetable also puts 2nd Circuit oral hearings on track to be heard next summer.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blo...r-handle-31587





Debt Collectors May Join Antipiracy Fight
Greg Sandoval

First it was the lawyers. Then it was the politicians. Now debt collectors may be coming after people accused of film piracy, even before they have their day in court.

A group calling itself the Copyright Enforcement Group (CEG), which according to its Web site specializes in media rights enforcement, appears to advocate the use of debt collectors even before the courts have rendered a judgment against accused copyright violators. CNET has obtained a copy of CEG's "service contract," which specifies the terms the group offers to client copyright owners.

"In the event that the opposing parties fail to pay in full, the client grants power of attorney to and instructs the debt collection agencies and [legal office] to proceed with the further recovery and enforcement of claims for payment by means of debt collection procedures and legal proceedings."

The new tactic targets computer users accused of illegally sharing films over peer-to-peer networks who refuse to settle out-of-court with copyright owners. Most of the attorneys doing this kind of work typically take accused content pirates to court. To this point, none of the other firms have even mentioned debt collectors. But the CEG appears to be taking a more aggressive stance. The contract has been seen by other attorneys who are working for the entertainment industry and they expressed shock, questioning whether the tactic is even legal.

Who exactly is behind CEG is still unclear. Ira Siegel, a Beverly Hills-based attorney who earlier this month filed a suit against 1,568 accused file sharers, has represented the group in some legal dealings. In a phone interview with CNET, Siegel said he only participates in the lawsuits for CEG, apparently suggesting that someone else at CEG handled other business aspects. He declined to comment further. CEG did not respond to an interview request.

Clearly, there is a number of unanswered questions about CEG and the service contract. The copy of the contract obtained by CNET is heavily redacted and identities of the parties who had entered into the agreement weren't visible. Would the debt collectors be used for administrative purposes? Would the collection agencies employ heavy-handed tactics, such as using abusive language and calling at odd hours? Such practices by some in the collections industry have come under scrutiny recently by the Federal Trade Association, according to a report last month by ABC News.

The specter of debt collectors joining the downloading fray is yet another sign the movie industry is taking an increasingly tough line with accused pirates. In the last several months, attorneys from across the country have filed lawsuits accusing thousands of people of illegal file sharing. Thomas Dunlap, founder of the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver likely led the way when he filed suit against thousands of accused film pirates on behalf of indie filmmakers, including the makers of "The Hurt Locker," this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture.

Since then, much of the porn industry has embraced the idea of suing individual file sharers. Porn impresario Larry Flynt has filed suit in Texas against people who illegally shared Hustler's "This Ain't Avatar XXX." Third World Media, a maker of so-called fetish porn, has filed suits in West Virginia and California. And Vivid Entertainment, one of the best known and largest adult-film producers in the world, has hired Ken Ford, an attorney already in involved in four different copyright cases brought by pornographers. Ford told CNET Thursday. He added that he will file a suit on the studio's behalf within the next two weeks.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was sent a copy of the CEG contract by CNET on Thursday. She cautioned it wasn't entirely clear what the debt collectors would be asked to do, but she called some of the contract's wording "troubling."

"All cases which do not entail a settlement of payments in full by the party who received the warning," the contract reads, "will be handed over to debt collection agencies immediately after the [expiration] of the allotted payment period for further extra judicial recovery (debt collection)."

Translation: the line suggests that once a people accused of pirating a movie declines to settle, their case will be handed over to debt collectors. There's no mention of first winning a court judgment.

This hardball approach isn't how most attorneys representing copyright owners operate. Instead, they typically collect the Internet protocol addresses belonging to thousands of people they say illegally shared their films on P2P networks and then file suits against them in federal court.

Since at that point the lawyers only know the accused person's IP address, in the suits the defendants are listed as "John Does." To obtain the name, the copyright owners request that the court issue subpoenas to each defendant's Internet service providers. After obtaining the names, the copyright owner contacts the accused person and offers to settle, typically for between $1,000 and $2,000.

If the alleged file sharer refuses to settle, then some of the lawyers, including Dunlap and Ford, say they will name the person in a federal copyright complaint. To this point, neither of the attorneys has filed such a complaint. But those attorneys say that in such situations there is no other legal way to obtain payment. Mark Litvack, the Motion Picture Association of America's former chief legal council for antipiracy, agreed.

"You need a judgment before you can collect," Litvack said. "Otherwise you don't have a debt."

The law is very specific about when and how lenders can collect a debt, said Vincent Howard, managing partner of the Anaheim, Calif. law firm Howard-Nassiri. His firm represents clients in cases of predatory lending and violations of the Fair Debt Collections Practice Act, the law designed to eliminate abusive practices in the collection of consumer debts. He questioned the language of the CEG contract.

"It seems to me that sending in debt collectors there is premature because it assumes you have the judgment against the alleged defendant," Howard said. "But you have to prove your case in court first. These people may not have committed any violation. What would happen if this person pays and then after trial isn't found liable?"

Just the introduction of debt collectors into the antipiracy discussion adds a new worry to those who illegally share movies. In an investigative piece by ABCNews last month, the network focused on one agency employed by Bank of America that used racial slurs and foul language during calls to one African American who owed the bank $80. The man later won a $1million judgment against the collections agency.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20020495-261.html





Accused Pirates to Indie Filmmakers: Sue Us
Greg Sandoval

The independent film studios suing thousands of alleged file sharers for copyright violations may soon face their own version of Jammie Thomas-Rasset.

Attorneys representing some of the people accused of illegal file sharing told CNET yesterday that several have refused to settle with the indie studios--which is what Thomas-Rasset did when she was accused of illegal file sharing by the music industry. By taking this stance, the accused film pirates are challenging the filmmakers to take them to court.

So, that is what the studios will do, according to their attorney, Thomas Dunlap.

Dunlap is one of the founders of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, a Washington, D.C. law firm that has made news this year by overseeing the litigation campaign on behalf of the indie studios, a group that includes the makers of the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker."

Dunlap told CNET yesterday that his firm knew of several people in different parts of the country who were refusing to settle but declined to identify them. The way Dunlap goes after alleged file sharers is by first filing complaints against unnamed "Doe defendants." He subpoenas the Internet service providers of each person to obtain their name. Dunlap then withdraws the suits against the Doe defendants and refiles the claims against those who decline to settle--only this time he names them.

"Our position is we'll go to court," Dunlap told CNET. "You'll see suits in the next month in three or four jurisdictions. We knew we were going to have to do this. We told our clients that's what we would do...In the next few weeks, at a minimum, you will see three or four individuals taken to court in different states."

These cases could be pivotal to copyright owners and file sharers alike. Ever since Dunlap began filing the suits, critics wondered whether the law firm could afford to bankroll potentially drawn out and costly litigation against someone who refused to settle.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, predicted this week that serious legal challenges would drain all the profit out of litigating against individual file sharers and could discourage copyright owners from pursing lawsuits as an antipiracy strategy.

In the case of Thomas, considered by some to be the Joan of Arc of file sharing, her case has dragged on for nearly five years. The Recording Industry Association of America has won favorable decisions, but the cost of trying it dwarfs whatever amount the music labels will get out of Thomas, who works on an Indian reservation in Minnesota.

Dunlap said the cases against those who refuse to settle likely won't cost much. He plans to farm out the litigation to other law firms.

Let's make a deal

Meanwhile, the studios continue to subpoena Internet service providers for the identities of people they accuse of copyright violations and send those people settlement offers. Here's what's happening in the negotiations.

First, the vast majority of people are settling and when it comes to settlement amounts, each case is different.

As we reported in May, Dunlap offers accused file sharers for films such as "Far Cry" and "Steam Experiment," to settle for $1,500 if they act quickly. Typically, in the offer from Dunlap (a copy of which you can see here), they specify a date by which the $1,500 settlement offer will expire. The firm then informs the accused person that if he or she waits until after the due date, the price will go up to $2,500.

In the case of "The Hurt Locker," the price of settling early would be $1,900.

But one attorney said Dunlap accepted $1,000 settlement payment from an elderly person who provided a sworn statement that he or she never downloaded the movie, did not possess the movie on their hard drive, and was for whatever reason operating an unsecured Wi-Fi network.

Other attorneys confirmed that in some cases, Dunlap has accepted amounts around $1,000. Others said that some of the people who have waited until the deadline for the early settlement passes have paid near the $2,500

Dunlap acknowledged that the firm would accept different amounts based on the circumstances of each case. He also offered this: because Time Warner Cable, one of the nation's largest ISPs, had agreed to look up only a limited number of IP addresses for Dunlap per month, the costs of tracking down Time Warner Cable users went up significantly. For those Time Warner customers who are identified settlement offers were likely to be higher.

"We've had to take a hard line against some of them because of their ISP," Dunlap said. "The settlements we ask for are purely cost driven by the work we have to put in to each case."

He said costs rise when his firm is forced to pursue people who don't settle early and that it's only fair that those people pay more.

It's important to note that virtually everyone interviewed for this story, including Dunlap and Cohn from EFF, recommended that those accused of the copyright violations speak to an attorney before making any decisions. People who do nothing risk a default judgment and the case being turned over to collection agencies.

I'm not paying

On the issue of people wrongly accused by Dunlap's investigators, the lawyers who spoke to CNET were split. Two attorneys said that most of the people they had dealt with admitted they had illegally shared the films in question, and one noted that he'd seen several people settle before they received the demand notice from Dunlap. Eric Grimm, an attorney who had represented several people in negotiations with Dunlap, said he'd seen people who were obviously not tech savvy enough to be BitTorrent users.

"I've been contacted by several people in their 60s and 70s, often with little technical knowledge or understanding," Grimm said. "These are people who would not know how to install or use BitTorrent, even if they had heard of it in the first place. Not infrequently, there's an education process about how to secure an open wireless node, in order to protect against future lawsuits...The thing I find most discouraging is how often clients who I believe to be completely innocent decide to pay the money anyway, just because the litigation itself causes so much stress and anxiety. Fortunately, not all of them submit to the shakedown."

Many of the attorneys interviewed said that these indie-studio suits almost seemed benign compared with the copyright complaints that are on their way. The adult-film industry in recent weeks has torn out a page from Dunlap's playbook and is stepping up efforts to obtain the names of thousands of people who have allegedly downloaded porn.

Some of the lawyers said that the possibility pornographers may name people--and publicize the porn they allegedly shared online--could change the raise the stakes in the ongoing game of cat and mouse between file sharers and copyright owners.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20020260-261.html





English Heritage Organization Claiming It Holds Effective Copyright On Any And All Photos Of Stonehenge
Mike Masnick

Every so often we hear of groups or organizations taking a rather expansive view of copyright law, but English Heritage, a UK gov't-backed organization to (you guessed it) promote English heritage and manage various historical sites, may have pushed the extremes to new levels. Boing Boing has the story of how it has sent a letter to a bunch of photosharing and stock photo sites claiming that all images of Stonehenge "can not be used for any commercial interest" and that "all commercial interest to sell images must be directed to English Heritage." Of course, that's blatantly ridiculous.

One recipient of the letter, the site FotoLibra, is trying to figure out on what legal basis English Heritage is making this claim, noting that English Heritage "has been their responsibility for 27 of the monument's 4,500 year old history." Of course, just about the only thing this will probably serve to do is make people a lot less interested in visiting Stonehenge, photographing Stonehenge and getting others to go to Stonehenge.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...onehenge.shtml





Legal P2P Venture Fails

Singers wouldn't join the Choruss
Andrew Orlowski

Choruss, the ambitious attempt to bring legal music file-sharing to US colleges and into the home with the backing of the major labels, has stumbled. "I blew it," founder Jim Griffin now admits.

Choruss began as a skunkworks project within Warner Music to turn file sharing into a paid-for service. It was devised in response to universities' concerns about the waves of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) litigation targeting students. It came together in late 2007 as the RIAA's members were realising the litigation was counter-productive. Choruss had the tacit support of the biggest labels to go forth and experiment.

Griffin has long advocated a collective licensing approach to digital music - as he explained here in 2003 [1] and at length in an interview with your reporter here in 2004 [2]. When technology makes copyright enforcement difficult and/or expensive, Griffin argued, it makes sense to license the works on a collective basis - as labels and publishers do with radio stations today, for example. A fee is negotiated with broadcasters, and then distributed on a per-play basis. Rights holders would still retain the right to walk away from negotiations.

The original Napster, shuttered by music industry lawsuits, had attempted to do something similar, as former Napster attorney Chris Castle explained here [3]. The idea was to go legal, and offer file sharing as a subscription service. Griffin got the nod from the Warners at the end of 2007 to go forth and find partners for the venture. It certainly was ambitious: your reporter recalls how university alumni would eventually be offered the deal, too. The project acquired a name and a holding company - Choruss LLC. Then it all went quiet.

By last year, Choruss had been spun out from Warner Music, and had become an "umbrella" for what he described as on-campus experiments. Last June Griffin claimed that [4] "thousands" of students were signed up for these experiments. "We can soon approach ISPs with metrics in hand, not speculation," he said.

Universities make the ideal testing ground for new music experiments - but bids to use students as guinea pigs have foundered on academia's privacy requirements.

In an interview [5] with GigaOM, Griffin now admits the venture is over. Choruss had signed three of the four major labels and the moribund AudioGalaxy as client software. Griffin now blames the songwriters for failing to back Choruss. But songwriters and their publishers have collectively licensed for decades - since the death of sheet music, in fact - and unlike the labels are the keenest to embrace new music start-ups. Their reluctance to sign up to Choruss, we may conclude, was based on some deep reservations.

Why did it fail?

Collective licensing looks a quick, easy fix to the problem of file sharing. But the devil's in the detail, and the idea had plenty of critics. A blanket deal may set the price too low, so everybody loses. And while voluntary agreements create market incentives for both tech companies and rights-holders, it's hard to bring everyone to the table. Other critics denounced it as a music tax - as participation appeared to be compulsory.

More effective criticism came from inside the music business itself. Some were concerned that it undervalued the music, and it would fail to reflect the value music lovers place on the music. Others were concerned by lack of transparency. This reflected traditional suspicions between publishers and master recordings owners, with composers refusing a seat at the table.

A 2008 survey of UK consumers found strong interest in paying for P2P file sharing

Ironically, Griffin is now pursuing the same path trodden by the original Napster founders, who also failed to get licences for the service, and instead moved into infrastructure. After Napster, Shawn Fanning started Snocap, which would provide a B2B infrastructure for other Napsters, in effect, providing such services as song identification and royalty distribution. Today Griffin says he's working on a global rights database - another useful piece of infrastructure.

And he thinks government intervention, possibly in the form of a collective licence imposed from above, is the only way to bring bickering parties to the table.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10...ore/print.html





Digital Overhaul Hatched

AP hopes project will be a do-over for news media.
AP

The Associated Press is overseeing the creation of an organization to help newspapers and broadcasters make more money as more people get their news from mobile phones and other wireless devices.

The ambitious project announced yesterday signals that the AP, a 164-year-old news cooperative, hopes to play a leadership role as long-established media try to reverse several years of decline brought on by their inability to capitalize on the Internet.

AP CEO Tom Curley said the company is creating a digital-rights clearinghouse that should help the news media protect their content and generate more revenue as technology hatches new channels for distributing the news they produce.

“We’ve stood by while others invent creative, new uses for our news and reap most of the benefit,” Curley said yesterday in a speech before the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in Austin.

But the recent shift to so-called smart phones and tablet-style computers is giving the media a chance for what Ken Doctor, a newspaper industry analyst, has described as a “digital do-over.”

In creating the clearinghouse, the AP is drawing upon research that began in 2007 to establish an enforcement and payment system loosely modeled after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP collects and distributes royalties for more than 390,000 songwriters and others involved in the creation of music.

The news clearinghouse would try to negotiate licensing deals for stories, photos and video produced by participating news organizations, including the AP. News organizations would still produce and own content made available to the clearinghouse. Any payments would go to them, after subtracting administrative fees expected to be 20 percent at first.

The clearinghouse also intends to fight piracy by relying on a tracking system, called a “news registry,” that the AP began developing more than a year ago.

Besides detecting unauthorized use of content, the registry’s tagging system can provide insights about the people who are viewing content or the frequency with which a specific company or expert is mentioned in news coverage.

In hopes of avoiding antitrust issues, the AP is setting up the clearinghouse as an independent organization. An executive hasn’t been appointed to run it yet. It could be in operation by the end of the year.

Curley indicated that the clearinghouse’s biggest moneymaking opportunity is likely to be the licensing of copyright-protected content to mobile phones and an array of computer tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad and emerging competitors.

“The move to mobile ... will usher in a new golden age for the development for products, if we’re up to the challenge,” Curley said.

Newspapers desperately need to find ways to bring in more money because their main revenue source — advertising — has plunged in the past four years. Total ad revenue at U.S. newspapers is on a pace to reach about $25 billion this year, a nearly 50 percent drop from $49 billion in 2006, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Television and radio broadcasters also have been suffering financially in recent years, although not as severely as print media.
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/...rhaul-hatched/





MarkMonitor to Buy Danish Provider of Antipiracy Services
Jeremy Kirk

MarkMonitor has acquired the Danish company DtecNet, an antipiracy tracking company, the companies said Monday.

MarkMonitor offers companies ways to track how their brand is being used -- or in many cases, abused -- online. It offers alerts when people have registered Internet domain names that seek to trick people into believing they've landed on a website belonging to another brand.

MarkMonitor was already a partner with DtecNet, which specializes in detecting content under copyright that is being illegally shared on file-sharing networks such as eMule. Its software can be used to track the distribution of pre-release content, and it has an automated system to send out cease-and-desist letters.

The Irish Recorded Music Association has employed DtecNet to detect illegal file sharing by subscribers of the Irish ISP Eircom. DtecNet provides lists of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of suspected illegal file sharers.

Eircom was sued by IRMA, a trade association composed of record labels such as EMI, Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, which sought to force the ISP to install traffic-monitoring equipment. The two sides reached an out-of-court agreement whereby Eircom would suspend or cut off Internet access to those accused of file sharing up to three times.

Terms of the MarkMonitor's acquisition of DtecNet were not disclosed. DtecNet's founder and CEO, Thomas Sehested, will become a senior vice president for DtecNet's European operations. DtecNet has a development team in Denmark and an operations center in Vilnius, Lithuania.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...iracy_services





IPO Site Hit by File-Sharing Hackers
Nicole Kobie

The Intellectual Property Office is the latest victim in a series of denial of service attacks by online protesters.

The IPO took down its website on Saturday at 6pm, after coming under a DDOS attack from Operation Payback, a campaign by the Anonymous hacking group against industry bodies looking to stop file-sharing.

Most of the site's service was restored yesterday. "The website is back up but it's not completely working yet," the IPO spokesman said. "There are a few services still down."

"As part of our standard network security procedures, our main services were protected prior to the attack," the organisation said. "The website and our internal services suffered no harm."

The IPO wouldn't comment on who was behind the attack, but Operation Payback listed the agency as a target on its own website.

The group has taken down a series of sites run by copyright holders. In the UK, it targeted the Ministry of Sound and its lawyers, as well as ACS:Law, a legal firm that sent out letters demanding payment from people accused of illegally downloading content, leading to a serious data breach that's under investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/362059/i...haring-hackers





Graphic Novel Piracy on 4chan Leads to Massive Spike in Sales
Matthew Humphries

Talk to anyone fairly high up in the publishing world and chances are they will tell you piracy is killing the business and driving down revenue. But you have to ask what evidence they have for such statements? Downloads do not directly correlate to lost sales and may actually increase them if this example gets repeated.

Artist Steve Lieber probably agreed with the publishing industry a few days ago, but now he sings a different tune. The Underground graphic novel he illustrated for Image Comics was scanned and uploaded to 4chan in its entirety a few days ago. Rather than getting upset Steve joined in the conversation about his comic and offered to answer questions about it. Here’s the important part of the post he made on the 4chan thread:

“As for putting all the pages up here. What can I say? I get that this is how things go, and I’m trying to live in the same decade as everyone else. If nothing else, I’m flattered someone thought enough of the book to take the time to scan and post it.
Anyway, that’s that. If anyone has any questions about the book, post them here or ask me on twitter @steve_lieber ”

Steve describes the discussion that followed as “genuinely fascinating” but what he didn’t expect was the bump it gave to the sales of the novel. Here’s the image he posted showing exactly how engaging with the 4chan community can have a positive impact on your sales and therefore your income.

For engaging with the audience interested in his work Steve seems to have won their respect and in return many have now bought Underground out of support.

Steve is now looking into the prospect of releasing Underground in digital form via comiXology.

Matthew’s Opinion

If Steve had posted comments on the thread about how his graphic novel shouldn’t have been uploaded, or how piracy was wrong, the response would not have been pretty. But he didn’t, instead deciding to engage with users who probably wouldn’t have otherwise heard of or even seen his work.

The end result is Steve now has a few more genuine fans who may now buy his work regardless of how much it gets illegally uploaded to the web. So he effectively gave away the digital version for free which lead to more paper-based sales. Would that actually work as a model for the industry? I doubt it. Steve won the respect of the 4chan users and that’s what spurred sales not the availability of the pages in the first place.

What this does highlight, though is that anyone downloading an illegal copy of a work does have enough interest in it to take a look. Communicating with that person, or group of people, may push the initial interest into something more permanent and therefore makes it easier to convince them to spend some money in the future.
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/gr...ales-20101021/





Pirates In The Sky: Filesharers Want To Build Weather-Balloon-Hosted Download Site
Andy Greenberg

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s an anarchic, copyright infringing peer-to-peer filesharing site hosted from a high-altitude balloon.

That, at least, is the vision of some members of Pirate Party International, the intellectual-property-flouting political organization loosely tied to the Swedish peer-to-peer site the Pirate Bay and whistle-blower organization Wikileaks. Last weekend, a group of Pirate Party members on the group’s mailing list began discussing plans for a high-altitude balloon that would host a filesharing site in the sky, ideally out of the legal reach of any authorities whose intellectual property regulations could have it shut down.

“We plan to use some kind of balloon and try to keep it up in the air for as long as possible,” writes a Swedish engineer named Erik Lönroth, “Hopefully irritating the crap out of authorities in as many countries as possible.”

The spirited–if somewhat unfocused–discussion that followed included ideas for an onboard computer from open-source hardware maker Gumstix, solar panels, and a weather balloon.

Francisco George, a member of the Pirate Party’s Spanish national committee suggests reading the airborne signal with Skygrabber software, the same program used by hackers to intercept satellite Internet signals and Iraqi insurgents to hijack military drones’ video feeds. He also proposes raising money for the project with the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.

Do not, of course, start tuning your pirate satellite dishes just yet. Whether anything remotely realistic will result from the Pirate Party’s brainstorming is somewhat doubtful. Technical challenges involved in maintaining and updating the airborne site would be enormous. And the Pirate Party hasn’t even decided on some basic goals yet: Some members disdain the balloon idea and argue for a sea-based site, along the lines of the Pirate Bay’s failed attempt in 2007 to host their servers on Sealand, a former military base turned independent principality off the coast of England.

Others, including Pirate Party chairman Gregory Engels, seem to prefer the idea of a low-Earth-orbit satellite that would be harder to launch but easier to keep airborne than a slowly-deflating balloon. He points to a wiki already created in June by a German pirate party member to assemble ideas for that space-based piracy plan.

As unlikely, early-stage, and vaguely insane as the whole project may be, you have to admire the Pirate movement’s tenacity and imagination in fighting the ever-encroaching legal threats to their peer-to-peer filesharing sites, which may shut down popular sources of illegal music including the Pirate Bay and Isohunt.
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...download-site/





Inside the Lawsuit That Could Ground Deadly CIA Predator Drones
Neal Ungerleider

A new lawsuit alleges that Predator drone targeting software was pirated, and emails obtained by Fast Company suggest the CIA knew it was sub-par.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban haven't been able to bring down the CIA's Predator drones. But a new lawsuit alleging parts of their targeting software are pirated (and faulty) could.

On December 7, 2010, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle is expected to issue a decision on a complicated contract and intellectual property-related lawsuit that could ground the CIA's Predator drones.

Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), a small Boston-based software development firm, alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the "government client" seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.

IISi is seeking an injunction that would halt the use of their two toolkits by Netezza for three years. Most importantly, IISi alleges in court papers that Netezza used a "hack" version of their software with incomplete targeting functionality in response to rushed CIA deadlines. As a result, Predator drones could be missing their targets by as much as 40 feet. (The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which assists the Defense Department with combat and homeland security support, also reportedly uses the software named in the intellectual property suit.)

According to a 2009 report by the Brookings Institute, 10 or more civilians die for every terrorist killed by drone missiles--and the topic of civilian casualties due to improperly targeted (or simply reckless) drone attacks is a controversial one.

Internal emails obtained by Fast Company indicate that both IISi and Netezza were aware of serious flaws in Geospatial, as-is, at the time of the alleged intellectual property fraud. The exact term used by IISi was "far from production ready code." In two emails dated September 16, 2009, IISi CTO Rich Zimmerman complains of "problems with some very intricate floating point calculations that are causing me to fail a lot of my regression tests" and that the software was not "production ready."

A Netezza email in the public record from October 13, 2009, indicates that, shortly before the partnership went sour, president Jim Baum wanted "to help our mutual customer reach his requirements" and that he (the client) believes that the expertise on his team is prepared to deal with early release software. He has a previous generation system so he is able to compare results himself. It is obviously in our mutual best interest to meet this client's needs quickly." Copious email evidence and court records indicate that both IISi and Netezza were well aware the client was the CIA and the software was to be used in unmanned drones.

One report in the British press sums it up this way: "IISi alleges that Netezza misled the CIA by saying that it could deliver the software on its new hardware, to a tight deadline [ ... ] Netezza illegally and hastily reverse-engineered IISi's code [ ... ] Despite knowing about the miscalculations, the CIA accepted the software."

This all goes back to when Netezza and IISi were former partners in a contract to develop software that would be used, among other purposes, for unmanned drones. The relationship between Netezza and IISi soured due to alleged disagreements over the CIA's (apparently rushed) project deadlines. IISi dropped out of their work developing Predator software; Netezza continued working with the CIA on the project.

Netezza initially sued IISi over contract-related issues. IISi then prevailed on core counterclaims relating to wrongful termination and put forth IP charges against Netezza. The original complaint by Netezza's counsels put the CIA-related information into the public domain; subsequent court proceedings revealed the specific contours of the unmanned drone targeting connection.

IISi's current counterclaim claims that both the software package used by the CIA and the Netezza Spatial product were built using their intellectual property.

IBM recently announced that they intend to purchase Netezza for approximately $1.7 billion. Netezza and IISi began collaborating in 2006, when IISi began reselling a bundle of Netezza's data warehousing kit and Geospatial. Their relationship continued through several joint software developments before souring in late 2009.

According to statements made by IISi CEO Paul Davis, a favorable ruling in the injunction would revoke the CIA's license to use Geospatial. In real life terms, this would either force the CIA to ground Predator drones or to break the law in their use if the court rules in IISi's favor. It is unknown if the CIA has a third option in case of a ban on the use of IISI's toolkit.

ISi's lawyers claimed on September 7, 2010 that "Netezza secretly reverse engineered IISI's Geospatial product by, inter alia, modifying the internal installation programs of the product and using dummy programs to access its binary code [ ... ] to create what Netezza's own personnel reffered to internally as a "hack" version of Geospatial that would run, albeit very imperfectly, on Netezza's new TwinFin machine [ ... ] Netezza then delivered this "hack" version of Geospatial to a U.S. Government customer (the Central Intelligence Agency) [ ... ] According to Netezza's records, the CIA accepted this "hack" of Geospatial on October 23, 2009, and put it into operation at that time."

Testimony given by an IISi executive to the court also indicates that the Predator targeting software, as initially acquired by Netezza, was faulty. According to Zimmerman's deposition, his reaction upon finding out deadlines for their Netezza co-project for the CIA would not give enough time to fix software bugs was one of shock. According to the deposition, Zimmerman said "my reaction was one of stun, amazement that they (CIA) want to kill people with my software that doesn't work." The CTO was also nervous of any possible legal liability for IISi in case Predator missiles missed their target; in his words they would not continue participating "without some sort of terms around that indemnifies us in case that code kills people."

IISi's official statement, as provided by email, is that "the Superior Court has already ruled that Netezza's termination of IISi was wrongful and that Netezza breached the contract. Further, the Court approved a stipulation under which Netezza may not disclose to IBM any copies (including any portion thereof) of the IISi Geospatial and Extended SQL Toolkit products. We believe that Netezza's denial that it used our software is false and that it is directly contradicted by Netezza's own internal emails to CEO Jim Baum, which show clearly that Netezza "hacked" our software and delivered that hacked and defective version to the government."

So could IISi's injunction request shut down Predator drones? Hypothetically, yes. But given the tone, tenor and urgency of the CIA's counterterrorism programs abroad, it is not likely. Nonetheless, Judge Hinkle has been extremely receptive to IISi's claims. A betting man would guess that some sort of face-saving resolution involving escrow will be introduced. But in the meantime, amateur Graham Greenes everywhere can remain fascinated by how ordinary business lawsuits can end up spilling the guts on counterterrorism ops.

As of press time, Netezza has not responded to a request for comment.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1695219/c...ing-ip-lawsuit





Gates: Leaked Documents Don't Reveal Key Intel, But Risks Remain
Adam Levine

The online leak of thousands of secret military documents from the war in Afghanistan by the website WikiLeaks did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods, the Department of Defense concluded.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there is still concern Afghans named in the published documents could be retaliated against by the Taliban, though a NATO official said there has been no indication that this has happened.

The assessment, revealed in a letter from Gates to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), comes after a thorough Pentagon review of the more than 70,000 documents posted to the controversial whistle-blower site in July.

The letter, provided to CNN, was written August 16 by Gates in response to a query by the senator regarding the leak of classified information.

Gates said the review found most of the information relates to "tactical military operations."

"The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security," Gates wrote. "However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."

The defense secretary said that the published documents do contain names of some cooperating Afghans, who could face reprisal by Taliban.

But a senior NATO official in Kabul told CNN that there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.

"We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options," Gates wrote in the letter. "We are working closely with our allies to determine what risks our mission partners may face as a result of the disclosure."

Gates also said there is still the possibility of more documents being published, for which the Pentagon is preparing.

Over the summer, the Pentagon created a team of more than 100 personnel made up of mostly intelligence analysts from various branches of the Defense Department as well as the FBI, who were involved in the round-the-clock review.

WikiLeaks has approximately 15,000 more Afghanistan documents that the site is reviewing because they contain names or other sensitive information. While initially the sitefounder, Julian Assange, had vowed to publish the additional documents after redaction, there is now some question whether that will happen given the intense criticism WikiLeaks came under after Afghan names were found in the already published files.

Additionally, WikiLeaks is expected to publish as early as next week about 400,000 military documents from the Iraq war that were leaked to the site.

The leaking of the documents raised the immediate ire of military officials although soon after the posting they questioned the documents' significance. Back in July, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, said he was "appalled" by the leak but said the documents were from previous years up to 2009 and "much has changed since then."

Despite this, the military warned that the naming of Afghans was a huge concern. Wikileaks has "the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family" on their hands, Mullen said.

In addition to the document review, the military has launched a criminal investigation into the leak. Since the initial publication of the documents, military officials consider Army Pfc. Bradley Manning a prime suspect in the leak. Manning is already being held in Quantico, Virginia, charged with leaking video of an Iraq airstrike to WikiLeaks as well as removing classified information from military computers.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wik...ent/index.html





Assange Denied Swedish Residence Permit

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been denied a residence permit to stay in Sweden, according to the National Migration Board (Migrationsverket).

Assange, an Australian citizen, had applied for a residence and work permit in Sweden in August 18th in order to gain status as the legally responsible publisher of the whistle-blower website,

The whistle-blower website has a number of servers based in Sweden and the move would have afforded better protection for WikiLeaks' sources under Sweden's press freedom laws.

However, in order to secure legal responsibility as publisher in Sweden, a person must have a residence permit.

"We have made the decision to reject his application. He has received the notice today by email," Gunilla Wikström, who makes decisions on work permits for the board in Norrköping, told Aftonbladet on Monday.

The board refused to elaborate further on the details of Assange's case and the investigation is still ongoing.

"There is not much more to say than that we rejected his application," Wikström told Aftonbladet.

Asked if she could comment on the grounds for refusal, Wikström replied, "No, secrecy prevails in reference to the grounds for such a decision."

Wikström said Assange was informed of the decision both by email and regular mail. She added that she could not confirm whether he was still in the country.

Assange visited Sweden over the summer to lecture on WikiLeaks' recent publication of thousands of secret documents from the war in Afghanistan. He then also applied for a Swedish residence permit.

However, the lectures were abruptly overshadowed by media reports of rape and molestation accusations against Assange at the end of August, two days after he had applied for a residence permit. The notification sparked intense media coverage about Assange around the world.

The allegations from two women led duty prosecutor Eva Finné to issue an arrest warrant for Assange. However, head prosecutor Marianne Ny abruptly withdrew the warrant the next day and cancelled the rape charges a few days later, only to see her decision appealed and the rape case reopened by yet another prosecutor.

Assange has admitted that he had met both women in question, who according to their lawyer are both Swedish and aged between 25 and 35.

However, when asked whether he had had sex with either of the women, he refused to answer, saying it was "a private matter."

Assange is still under investigation in Sweden, but the probe did not bar him from leaving the country.

When contacted by AFP Monday, an Icelandic spokesman for Wikileaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, refused to reveal Assange's whereabouts.

His last public appearance was in London, when he spoke publicly at City University on September 30.

Wikileaks is imminently expected to release some 400,000 secret military reports on the US-led Iraq war.
http://www.thelocal.se/29684/20101018/





Every Email and Website to be Stored

Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans.
Tom Whitehead

It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.

Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state.

The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them.

It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".

Any suggestion of a central "super database" has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time.

That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism.

The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.

The move was buried in the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: "We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework.

"This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to protect the public.

"Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in every major Security Service counter#terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations.

"We will legislate to put in place the necessary regulations and safeguards to ensure that our response to this technology challenge is compatible with the Government’s approach to information storage and civil liberties."

But Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: "One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.

"Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy of law abiding Britons.”

Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: "We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.

"It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...be-stored.html





Canada Project Aims to Track Blackberry Traffic

Canadian computer scientists have launched a project to track BlackBerry traffic exiting Research In Motion's encrypted network, with a focus on countries that have sought greater access.

The United Arab Emirates said this month that it had resolved a dispute with RIM, without providing details, while a source said in August that RIM had given Saudi Arabia codes to allow authorities to track its BlackBerry Messenger service.

RIM has granted Indian authorities access to Messenger but remains locked in negotiations over access to encrypted data sent via the Waterloo, Ontario-based company's enterprise servers.

The project, called RIM Check, is being conducted by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab and Ottawa-based think tank SevDev Group.

It "is inspired by a broad need to monitor the activities of private sector actors that own and operate cyberspace," Citizen Lab said on its website. "Particularly as they come under increasing pressure to co-operate with governments on national surveillance and censorship laws, policies, and requests."

RIM typically declines comment on deals with specific countries, but says it cannot access enterprise data and will not alter the security architecture of its corporate offering.

Data traffic on handsets from rivals such as Apple and Nokia can be more easily intercepted via a network carrier.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; editing by Rob Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69K5TH20101021





Facebook Bans More Activists: This Week in Online Tyranny
Curt Hopkins

Facebook logo.pngChinese activists banned from their own Facebook accounts. ReadWriteWeb has written before about Facebook's shutting down of pages and groups devoted to boycotting corporations. We have discovered and covered a loophole, whether intended or not, that allowed bully groups to shut down pages run by people they didn't like or devoted to ideas they objected to.

Now, three activists in Hong Kong have been banned from their own page. All three administrators of a Facebook page called ". The page was devoted to stopping the development of luxury housing on endangered wetlands in Hong Kong. One admin was accused of using a false name, another of "abusing" the Add Friend button.

Facebook's influence and actions, such as attention to profane ad hominem attacks against gay men and women, are far from all bad. But they are, if you'll pardon my putting it like this, consistently inconsistent. From sudden declarations of privacy's death and hard-sell tactics to enforce cooperation with forced "openness" to backpedaling in the opposite direction -- if any of these lurching decisions follow from policy, it must be a policy of profound subtlety, because it has been impossible to anticipate.

Isn't it time for Facebook to formulate a coherent policy on these very real issues instead of continuing to play PR bumper-cars?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._this_week.php





Google Spends More Lobbying Congress
Byron Acohido

Google has disclosed that it increased its spending on lobbying in the third quarter ending Sept. 30 to $1.2 million, an 11% increase as compared to the third quarter of 2009.

The deadline for filing disclosure records with the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records was Oct. 20; the search giant appears to have filed slightly late, according to the non-profit advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.

"We're not sure exactly when Google filed, but the documents were not there when I checked shortly after midnight (ET)," says John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Inside Google Project. "But they were there when I checked this morning at 9:30."

For the first nine months of 2010, Google spent $3.92 million, approaching the $4.03 million the search giant spent wooing federal officials in all of 2009, Senate disclosure records show.

"Google has a group of well-connected lobbyists and is willing to spend freely to influence federal lawmakers and regulators," says Simpson. "They appear to be on track to spend a total of $5 million to peddle influence this year."

Much of the spending goes to recruitment and salaries for well-connected lobbyists. About a year ago, for instance, Google lured Frannie Wellings away from the staff of North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, where she was a telecom expert and Dorgan's point person on Net Neutrality.

Dorgan was and is a staunch supporter of Net Neutrality, the notion that all Web sites should be equally available to all persons. At the time of Wellings' recruitment, so was Google. But last August the search giant significantly changed its position, and joined forces with Verizon calling for new federal laws that would reshape the Internet.

Howls of protest instantly erupted from consumer advocacy groups, as we reported here. Consumer and privacy advocates say Google's change was driven by the rising popularity of Google Android smartphones, for which Verizon is a primary service provider.

Google and Verizon in this document argue for Congress to permit fees for websites under certain circumstances, exempt smartphone Internet traffic from any laws and impose restrictions on the Federal Communications Commission's role in regulating high-speed Internet traffic.

Google and Verizon stand to earn billions, and would put themselves in position to dominate the future of the Internet, if they can get Congress to heed their wishes, says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. So there is plenty for Google's lobbyists to do.
http://content.usatoday.com/communit...bby-congress/1





New ACLU Report Calls On FCC To Take Action To Protect Openness On The Internet

Protecting the Internet against content discrimination by broadband carriers is crucial to protecting First Amendment rights in the age of modern technology, the American Civil Liberties Union said today in a new report on network neutrality. In the report, "Net Neutrality 101," the ACLU urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create strong policies that prevent Internet gatekeepers from exploiting their role for private gain. The report characterizes the need for "net neutrality" as a leading free speech issue of our time.

"In this day and age, the Internet is the main way Americans exercise their free speech rights, and until now, network neutrality principles have always been respected," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Unfortunately, recent developments have opened the way for giant telecoms to begin tinkering with the open structure of the Internet, threatening its role as a forum for free speech. The FCC must take action to preserve the Internet as a free and open forum for all."

Under net neutrality principles, network owners would be barred from favoring some speech or speakers while discriminating against others. But as today's report explains, a recent court decision, combined with changing technology and business practices, have given large broadband companies that provide users with Internet access not only the incentive but also the means to interfere with users' Internet data in order to further their own interests, thereby interfering with users' free speech.

"There has been a lot of confusion around network neutrality – some of it created intentionally – so in this report we have tried to provide a clear guide to the issue and why the FCC needs to act," said Jay Stanley, policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project and primary author of the report. "Many people don't realize that we may be entering a whole new stage in the Internet's history, where the telecoms have much more power over how people use the Internet. Keeping the hands of big telecom companies off our Internet traffic is just as important as keeping the government's hands off it."

In its report, the ACLU called on the FCC to apply longstanding "common carrier" rules that would bar network owners from halting, slowing or otherwise tampering with the transfer of data to Internet users. Common carrier rules included by Congress in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 already apply to most forms of telecommunications but are not yet applied to broadband Internet service.

"We don't let the phone company provide callers with inferior service when they disapprove of the person being called or the content of the conversation – and we shouldn't allow that kind of discrimination online either," said Stanley. "Common carrier rules have been part of our legal tradition for centuries and have long been applied to infrastructures crucial to the economic development of our nation, from canals and railroads to the telegraph and telephone. These rules have already been written into the law by Congress; the FCC should apply them to broadband."
http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-tech...nness-internet





Why Won't Universal Music Let You See The 20/20 Report From 1980 About How The Music Industry Is Dying?
Mike Masnick

Here's one for the "sky is falling" folks, who insist the music industry is dying. Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy points us to an episode of the TV magazine show 20/20 all about how the music industry is in trouble... way back in 1980. What's amusing is that the story is the same. Early on, you see Joe Smith, the President of Elektra-Asylum records making a statement that might sound familiar:

"Records, you don't have to buy to hear music. There's sensational equipment out there. There's great FM radio. There's enormous amounts of music out there, without having to buy a record. Counterfeiting, home-taping, and the failure of major artists to deliver records on some kind of regular basis."

It's really funny to watch. After complaining about companies shutting down, layoffs and fights against counterfeiters, the report points out that the industry is betting on video laser discs to bring back the profits.

Now, that's only the first half of the report. I had actually opened both videos up a while ago and had them both open in browser windows, but just as I was writing up this post, I hit reload on the videos... and the second one is now being blocked due to a copyright claim from Universal Music. This is bizarre, for a variety of reasons. First, the video was definitely up and working just last week... and this is a video that was uploaded in 2006. So... um... how come, in the last week, Universal suddenly decided to block what's clearly fair use of the video? Could it be that Universal Music doesn't want you seeing a report that shows how it has overreacted historically to changes in the industry? Hopefully, the guy who uploaded it will file a counternotice...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...is-dying.shtml





Internet Becomes Weapon in Fox-Cablevision Fight
Brian Stelter

In disputes between television programmers and distributors, the new battleground is the Internet.

In its continuing contract showdown with Cablevision, the News Corporation tried to extend its blackout of the Fox Broadcasting network to Fox.com and to Hulu, the popular Web site for free TV viewing, on Saturday. Angry Cablevision customers reported being unable to watch episodes of “Glee” and “House” on Hulu.

The blackout caused shock waves because it had not been done before by a programmer. Though the shutdown was brief, the message was unmistakable: do not expect to be able to watch Fox online unless you are paying for Fox on TV.

The attempted Web blockade was leverage for Fox in its contract negotiations, but more important, it was the latest evidence that entrenched media companies hope to replicate their walled gardens in a new medium, the Internet.

Many stood up and took notice; some investors cheered the News Corporation’s action, calling it an important step for the evolving business model of television, but public interest groups and at least one lawmaker cried foul, calling it anticonsumer.

“This certainly seems to be the first shot across the bow,” said Corie Wright, the general counsel for Free Press, one of the groups that condemned the action. She asserted in an interview that “access to Fox.com and Hulu.com is completely unrelated to Fox’s relationship with Cablevision.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement on Saturday, “The tying of cable TV subscription to access to Internet fare freely available to other consumers is a very serious concern.”

The action also renewed calls for distributors like Cablevision to allow multiplatform access to TV shows, a concept often times called TV Everywhere.

Since Saturday morning, stations owned by the News Corporation have been blacked out in Cablevision’s roughly three million New York-area homes, depriving customers of sporting events and scripted hit series. There was no indication on Tuesday that the companies were anywhere close to a resolution.

In similar disputes in the past, because of the free streams on Hulu and Fox.com, customers have had an alternative way to watch scripted shows (though not sports — for the most part those games are not streamed free).

One Cablevision customer complained on Twitter that she had planned to watch a marathon of “Hell’s Kitchen” episodes on Fox.com on Saturday but was blocked from doing so.

Julie Henderson, a News Corporation spokeswoman, said the company’s actions temporarily prevented access to Fox shows on Hulu and Fox.com from the computers of Cablevision subscribers. “When we realized we were affecting non-Cablevision video subscribers, we quickly altered our position,” she said.

A Hulu spokeswoman did release a statement to All Things D, a Web site owned by the News Corporation: “Unfortunately, we were put in a position of needing to block Fox content on Hulu in order to remain neutral during contract negotiations.” Hulu refused to comment further.

But for reasons that remained unclear, the blockade did not work in all Cablevision households. Furthermore, within hours, the News Corporation realized that by blocking Cablevision subscribers’ computers it was also blocking some people who pay Cablevision for Internet only and pay competitors like DirecTV for television. Those people were “caught in the crossfire,” Ms. Wright said.

The News Corporation reinstated access in a matter of hours.

The action was hotly debated within the company, according to three people who were aware of the conversations. While some executives said it had helped in the negotiations with Cablevision, others said it had backfired because it stirred up questions about net neutrality, according to people who insisted on anonymity.

The action did not happen in a vacuum. Analysts noted that access to online video is one of the Federal Communications Commission’s top priorities as it reviews Comcast’s proposed acquisition of NBC Universal.

For several years, Fox, NBC and the other broadcast networks have been putting most of their prime-time shows on the Internet free with advertisements attached, the same way they are available over the public airwaves. The show “Lie to Me,” for instance, was blacked out in Cablevision homes on Monday night, but it was available free on Hulu by Tuesday morning. Hulu is owned by the parents of Fox, NBC and ABC, and by a private equity firm.

Also for several years, broadcasters like Fox have insisted on retransmission payments from distributors like Cablevision. There is a perceived conflict between these two decisions.

In a widely read investors’ note on Monday, Richard Greenfield, an analyst for BTIG Research, wrote of the broadcasters, “If you want to be paid like cable nets, start acting like cable nets on the Web.” In other words, stop giving away so much content online.

The blockade is potentially bad news for users of Internet TV, because it suggests that online access should be contingent upon a monthly payment to the cable or satellite TV company that also supplies Internet access. That mirrors the TV Everywhere concept, which says customers can pay once and watch anywhere — but so far that effort has focused on cable channels like ESPN and TNT, not broadcast networks like Fox and CBS.

The TV Everywhere concept is complicated, and it has been carried out slowly by distributors, causing frustration on the part of programmers like the News Corporation. But there are scattered examples of progress; on Monday, Time Warner Cable will start allowing subscribers to watch ESPN from any computer, as long as they sign in to authenticate their TV subscription.

For the News Corporation, cutting off Web programming “is just a card that you need to play,” said Jason Hirschhorn, a former executive at MTV, Sling Media, and the News Corporation’s MySpace. “I think it showed how serious Fox was about retransmission,” he added.

So far, retransmission fees have shown more potential to offset declining advertising revenue at stations than have Web streams.

In his statement about the action, Mr. Markey called on the F.C.C. to “defend Internet freedom and consumer rights.” The F.C.C. has not yet intervened in the business dispute.

In another statement on Saturday, Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of the public interest group Public Knowledge, said, “We need to remember that the government’s policy is that consumers should have access to lawful content online, and that policy should not be disrupted by a programming dispute.”

Ms. Wright’s prediction for the next contract dispute: “Online video is going to be used as a weapon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/bu...ia/20hulu.html





South Park Creators Apologize for Using Other Writers’ Lines
Dave Itzkoff

The creators of “South Park,” the animated Comedy Central series, apologized on Friday to the creators of a Web comedy video satirizing the summer blockbuster “Inception,” saying that they had used dialogue from a video on the Web site CollegeHumor.com.

“It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid and we just threw it together,” Matt Stone, who created “South Park” with Trey Parker, said Friday in a telephone interview. “But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.”

The Web video called “Inception Characters Don’t Understand Inception,” was written by Dan Gurewitch and David Young, and posted on CollegeHumor on Aug. 2. It is loosely modeled on a scene in “Inception” in which a team of characters is trying to transport a wounded colleague. The “South Park” episode shown on Wednesday had a similar scene that contained dialogue often similar to or identical to the CollegeHumor skit.

In the earlier skit a character says, “We need to move to the next dream level before these projections kill us”; on the “South Park,” a character says, “We need to move them all to the next dream level before the projections kill them.” In both skits, a character says, “Sometimes my thoughts of my dead wife manifest themselves as trains.”

Mr. Stone said he and Mr. Parker wanted their “South Park” episode to satirize the verbal complexity of “Inception.” “It was like, ‘Let’s parody the gobbledygook’ — because honestly, that movie — all those explanations, and explanations of explanations,” Mr. Stone said.

When Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone could not find a movie theater showing “Inception,” and were unable to get a DVD of the film (or find a watchable version on BitTorrent), they turned to other parodies of the film on the Web, and found the CollegeHumor video.

“We thought their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie,” Mr. Stone said, “and they were banging them against each other, and showing that the ‘Inception’ characters didn’t even know ‘Inception.’ That was a mistake, and it was an honest mistake.”

Mr. Gurewitch wrote on his personal blog that he and Mr. Young accepted the apology of the “South Park” creators.

“All is well,” Mr. Gurewitch wrote, “and we’re going to meet up with Matt and Trey when they’re in New York.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/bu...southpark.html





Google in Talks to Unblock Access to TV Websites
Alexei Oreskovic

Google Inc is actively negotiating with three television networks that have blocked access to their websites on Google TV, a source familiar with the matter said.

Three of the biggest U.S. television broadcasters have blocked the Web-based versions of their shows from Google's new Web TV service, throwing a wrench into the company's plans to expand from computers to the living room.

Representatives from Walt Disney Co and NBC Universal confirmed on Thursday that the companies blocked access to the broadcast TV shows available on their websites from Google TV. Disney owns ABC network and cable TV business ESPN.

News Corp's Fox is also considering blocking access to shows on its website, but a decision has not yet been made, a source familiar with the matter said.

CBS has blocked access to full-length episodes of their programs, including popular shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

CBS declined to comment.

Advertising Power

Google TV, which became available this month in the United States, allows consumers to access Web content on their television screens.

The service is built into devices from Sony Corp and Logitech International and could open new advertising opportunities for Google, which generates the bulk of its roughly $24 billion in annual revenue from Web search ads.

But Google's TV plans may be viewed as a threat by established television businesses, said Gartner analyst Van Baker.

"Everybody knows the lock that Google has on Internet traffic in terms of advertising. If you take that model and you extend it to television, suddenly Google's power becomes enormous in the advertising space and the broadcasters don't like that idea," Baker said.

Google said in a statement that its new Google TV service "enables access to all the Web content you already get today on your phone and PC, but it is ultimately the content owner's choice to restrict users from accessing their content on the platform."

Earlier this month, Google announced that HBO would offer access to hundreds of hours of its programing to existing subscribers through Google TV, and said that Turner Broadcasting has optimized some of its most popular websites, including sites for TBS, TNT and CNN, for Google TV.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, Yinka Adegoke, Jennifer Saba and Sue Zeidler; Editing by Kenneth Li, Robert MacMillan, Bernard Orr and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69K5QS20101022





Movie Studio Developers Scale Back In South Windsor
Joseph A. O'Brien Jr.

The developers of an ambitious plan for a movie studio and commercial development in town have scaled back their plans in light of a tough economy.

Craig Stevenson, an economic development consultant for the town, said Connecticut Studios has reduced the size of the studio project near Route 5 and I-291 and is delaying its commercial aspects, which included a 125-room hotel and three restaurants.

Connecticut Studios is a partnership of Halden Acquisition Group of Providence and California-based Pacifica Ventures LLC, which specializes in building sound stages for the film industry. Pacifica Ventures is the parent company of Pacifica Mesa Studios LLC, which owns Albuquerque Studios in New Mexico. Pacifica Mesa filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July after failing to keep up with payments on an $80 million loan for the Albuquerque project.

"Obviously from a public relations standpoint that is not the greatest news," said Stevenson. But he said Pacifica Mesa's financial troubles would have no direct effect on the project in Connecticut.

"They have identified all their financial sources," Stevenson said of the Connecticut project. "They are confident that they have the commitments."

South Windsor Mayor John Pelkey said the town and prospective investors have been assured that there is no financial connection between Albuquerque and Connecticut Studios that could threaten the project here. Pelkey said investors seem comfortable with a revised plan that phases in construction, rather than building the whole project at once.

"Everybody is so super careful … so super cautious," Pelkey said.

Initially, Connecticut Studios had hoped to start construction last summer on a $140.7 million project that was to include $60 million for the studio, $50 million for retail space, $18 million for a hotel, $2.7 million for restaurants and $10 million for infrastructure improvements. Connecticut Studios proposed eight sound stages in four buildings totaling 160,000 square feet, plus the hotel and restaurants.

In light of the weak economy and at the town's urging, the developer has decided to focus on the studio, Stevenson said. Connecticut Studios is now planning to build four, 21,000-square-foot sound stages in two buildings. The revised project also includes 50,000 square feet of office space, 75,000 square feet of mill and storage space and another 15,000-square-foot sound stage. A 5,000-square-foot commissary is also in the works.

"They were very ambitious," Stevenson said of the developers, who unveiled their plan in the summer of 2008. By September of that year, the economy nearly collapsed and "life in the United States changed," he said.

The developers still plan to build four sound stages, just not all at once, Stevenson said, adding that negotiations are still underway with another developer interested in building a hotel near the studio site.

Connecticut taxpayers have $15 million riding on the success of the project, Stevenson said — a $5 million loan and the remainder in the form of transferable tax credits of 20 cents on the dollar for infrastructure improvements.

The town also intends to offer the developer tax breaks, known as tax-incremental financing, that it can use to pay costs associated with infrastructure improvements needed for the project.

"It's a complicated business model," Stevenson said. "The state of Connecticut is a significant player."

Building a movie studio is not like building a store for a major retailer, where the developer knows there will be a tenant to lease the building when it's finished, Stevenson said.

"They are building a multimillion-dollar facility," Stevenson said, adding that "there are no leases for this facility. Film producers "won't make a commitment for a building that is not there."

Pelkey said he is confident the Connecticut Studios project, which will bring jobs to the local economy, will be successful.

"I feel very comfortable with it," Pelkey said.
http://www.courant.com/community/sou...,2638546.story





Eye-Popping for Art’s Sake: An Advocate for 3-D Films
Dave Itzkoff

Nearly a year after his fantasy movie “Avatar” broke box office records and opened a floodgate of big-budget 3-D features, James Cameron is still very much immersed in his budding science-fiction franchise and 3-D filmmaking.

As he prepares an extended version of “Avatar” for a home video release next month, Mr. Cameron said he had started work on a 3-D reissue of his 1997 blockbuster, “Titanic,” for a theatrical release in 2012.

And as he considers his next directing assignment — which may or may not be an “Avatar” sequel — Mr. Cameron has kept a close eye on the spread of 3-D films in Hollywood and is hardly shy about discussing which studios he thinks are doing it right and which are doing it wrong.

In a telephone interview to promote this new edition of “Avatar,” which will be released in DVD and Blu-ray formats on Nov. 16, Mr. Cameron said he was in “the early stages” of work on a 3-D version of “Titanic,” the romantic epic that won Academy Awards for best picture and best director, and was the all-time highest-grossing feature until “Avatar” knocked it from its perch.

“We’re going to bring it out in 3-D as a theatrical rerelease on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in 2012,” Mr. Cameron said. He added, “We’ve been moving very slowly to make sure that we do it right.”

Mr. Cameron, who spent more than a decade developing “Avatar,” has some expertise in gauging lengthy timetables. But he is also cautious about fulfilling the expectations of moviegoing audiences, which he says can easily distinguish movies that have been converted to 3-D hastily or poorly.

Viewers “don’t want to pay extra for something that’s not a great experience,” Mr. Cameron said. “And I think that the studios have been somewhat chastened by that.”

As an example, Mr. Cameron pointed to the 2010 remake of “Clash of the Titans,” whose studio, Warner Brothers, decided to convert the movie to 3-D after principal photography was completed. “It was just being applied like a layer, purely for profit motive,” Mr. Cameron said. “There was no artistry to it whatsoever.”

Mr. Cameron also derived a bit of schadenfreude from Warner Brothers’ recent announcement that it would not be able to prepare a 3-D conversion of its next “Harry Potter” film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” in time for an announced Nov. 19 release.

“You can’t do conversion as part of a postproduction process on a big movie,” Mr. Cameron said, “because no one is willing to insert the two or three or four months necessary to do it well.”

(Through a spokesman, Warner Brothers declined to comment.)

Mr. Cameron said that the field of enhancing existing 2-D movies with 3-D elements was emerging, and that the handful of special-effects companies that do such work “have been low-balling their bids” — underestimating the time and money it would take to complete the work — “to get a foothold in the market.”

These conversions are so painstaking to complete correctly, Mr. Cameron said, because “there’s no magic-wand software solution for this.”

He added: “It really boils down to a human, in the loop, sitting and watching a screen, saying, ‘O.K., this guy is closer than that guy, this table is in front of that chair.’ ”

For his 3-D “Titanic” rerelease, Mr. Cameron said he had approached seven companies about working on the film, testing each by asking it to convert about a minute of movie footage before he chose the best two or three efforts.

“All seven of the vendors came back with a different idea of where they thought things were, spatially,” he said. “So it’s very subjective.”

Mr. Cameron said a confluence of trends in 3-D technology — the growing number of movie theaters offering 3-D projection, the emergence of 3-D television and increased proficiency in 3-D conversions — would inevitably lead to movie studios’ scouring their film libraries for older features that could be rereleased in 3-D.

“But they’ll pick the best titles to spend that kind of money on,” he said. “If it costs you $15 million to convert a movie reasonably well, more to do it perfectly, you’re not going to do that with every film.”

There is a strong chance that Mr. Cameron will shoot his next feature in 3-D, but an “Avatar” sequel was not a fait accompli, he said.

“We still haven’t worked out our deal with 20th Century Fox,” Mr. Cameron said. He added: “It’s a big piece of business, and I’m trying to map it out as a game plan that stretches forward 10 years. And they don’t like to think that long-term.” A spokeswoman for 20th Century Fox said the studio would have no comment.

Asked about a recent report on the Web site Deadline.com that he was being sought by Sony Pictures Entertainment to direct a 3-D movie about Cleopatra, starring Angelina Jolie as that Egyptian monarch and adapted from Stacy Schiff’s book “Cleopatra: A Life,” Mr. Cameron said he had not committed to the project.

“It’s a subject that’s always fascinated me,” he said. “So, yeah, I’ve been talking to them about it, but no decisions have been made. But it sounds hot, doesn’t it? I mean, Angelina Jolie and Cleopatra? To me, that’s like a slam-dunk. Whether I wind up doing it or not, I think it’s going to be a great project.”

Reminded that a similar confidence was once expressed about a previous “Cleopatra” movie that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Mr. Cameron chuckled.

“Yeah, but you know, there were a lot of people betting against us on ‘Titanic’ as well,” he said. “That kind of stuff isn’t particularly daunting to me. The idea of 10-foot-tall blue people that were 100 percent CG, it was Smurf Planet — plenty of reasons why ‘Avatar’ wasn’t going to work either.”
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/10/20...20cameron.html





Animation in Starts and Stops, Simplified
Peter Wayner

For Stuart Bury, Jeremy Casper and Isaiah Powers, the path to a student Academy Award for their stop-motion animation cost less than $1,000, although it did require four months of often constant filming in Mr. Powers’s basement.

The animators, all of whom were students at the Kansas City Art Institute at the time, built the sets and the dolls out of found objects and material rescued from junkyards, staying up late to animate the items by shooting still images of their set and moving the objects a few millimeters before shooting again. “We had to share the room with other people who had their winter clothes down there,” said Mr. Bury.

But despite the long hours — by Mr. Bury’s estimation, “well over 80” a week — all three said that the production was much easier with the low-cost software that any aspiring filmmaker can buy — in their case, a $275 program called Dragon Stop Motion.

Their efforts paid off. The six-minute film, “Dried Up,” the story of a man’s quest to bring hope and life to a drought-ridden town, won the silver medal in animation at the 37th Student Academy Awards in 2010, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“It still comes down to a ridiculous amount of work,” said Mr. Powers. “But it’s really nice when the new computer software is so streamlined. It’s nice to work with it instead of fighting it.”

While putting together stop-action animation can still be tedious, the process is now easier than ever. The art form is familiar to anyone who has seen a Wallace and Gromit short or last year’s movies “Coraline” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

To simulate movement and expression, animators bend or twist their objects ever so slightly between shots, a painstaking process that makes it difficult to achieve consistency from frame to frame. But now, software can help remedy that, with programs that help check the alignment of the camera and the lighting of the scene while letting the animator flip between recent images to see if the items are moving realistically.

That part of the process — synchronizing the shots — was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie. “We have one really solid product, and we make it reachable for a serious college or high school student, considering the gadgets that kids have these days,” said Jamie Caliri, a stop-action film director and a founder of Dragon Stop. His co-founder and brother, Dyami, is the software programmer.

“I really enjoy putting the real tools into someone’s hands. I wouldn’t buy my kid a plastic guitar,” Jamie Caliri said. “I also use the product. That’s part of our story about how we sell it. I won an Emmy last year.” The award-winning animation in question, the title sequence of the “United States of Tara,” took six weeks to shoot after four weeks of preparation.

Software like Dragon Stop Motion is making animation even simpler. Children, adults and professionals alike can construct elaborate stories with their toys, paper goods, found objects or sculpture, and the computer organizes the images into a film. Some filmmakers are even beginning to build three-dimensional movies using special rigs.

“An animator who used to shoot six seconds a day can now shoot 20 seconds a day,” said Paul Howell, the founder and director of Stop Motion Pro, another software package.

“Young kids can make a film in their room and distribute it and have half a million people view it,” said Mr. Howell. “Very young kids can have huge audiences for their work. Not long ago, it was impossible to consider someone that young having access to an audience that large. Students of the art can find hundreds of stop-motion films on video-sharing sites like YouTube, many of which are constructed by children who are younger than 10.”

Mr. Howell also says that many schools, and even some medical centers, are using the software to tell stories because it lets children express themselves when traditional words fail them.

“It’s become the software of choice for working with autistic children,” said Mr. Howell. “They’re uncovering issues that they’re finding hard to talk about conventionally or by writing down, but they’re quite comfortable making a film about it.”

The basic version of his product, Stop Motion Pro, begins at $70, but more sophisticated editions, which offer higher definition and the ability to connect with high quality digital S.L.R. cameras, can cost up to $295. A number of other programs are on the market at prices that range from free to hundreds of dollars.

While many of the free versions are adequate for experimentation, they usually only offer a limited collection of features.

The older version of AnimatorDV from Wroblewski Multimedia, for instance, is available at no cost, whereas the newer version, AnimatorHD, comes with a free demonstration mode that shuts off some features after a minute. iStopMotion, a program for the Mac, offers a demonstration mode that works for five days.

The more sophisticated Dragon Stop Motion package includes a number of features that simplify the tasks done by a computer, allowing an animator to concentrate elsewhere. One button on the keyboard toggles between the last frame and the current image captured by the camera, a common task when an animator wants to ensure that any moving object is seen to move properly.

Other options help control and balance the lighting to ensure that the images have consistent hue and saturation, a problem that is even more of a challenge in stop-motion animation than in other types of filmmaking.

Synchronizing the sound with the images is also difficult, especially when a clay mouth must approximate the way a real mouth moves. Dragon Stop Motion manages a list of frames and plots the audio tracks with the associated sounds or phonemes, making it much simpler for an animator to adjust the size and shape of the mouths.

Other programs bundle a database of common sounds that can be added with a click. Diarmuid Brennan, the chief executive of iKITSystems, which distributes iKITMovie, created his software after his 12-year-old son became frustrated with the lack of options for adding sound to movies. The current version comes with over 2,200 sounds.

“We have 15 to 20 different types of footsteps, like walking on gravel or walking on concrete,” he said. But with a clientele of children, the library of sounds goes beyond that. “There are 20 different burp sounds” and 20 different sounds for passing gas.

His software for all 2,200 sounds is either $69, or $80 bundled with a Web camera. Mr. Brennan says that his product was originally intended for children who made movies recreationally, but he found that schools were interested in filmmaking as an educational tool. Creating an animated lesson, he says, requires diligence and a thorough understanding of the topic at hand.

“If they’re dissecting a frog, they can do it in clay and animate it,” he said. “When a child creates a project to explain something, because it’s methodical, they’ll never forget what they’re explaining.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/te.../21basics.html





Media Streamer Shootout
Christopher Null

Getting content from your computer to your television is hardly a new idea, but now that Apple has taken up the cause, everyone seems to want to get into the game.

The idea here is simple: Add a tiny box to your home-theater setup that can stream movies, music and photos across the network from PC to TV—and, for good measure, access Netflix, YouTube, Pandora and other cloud-based entertainment streaming services, too. Many of these devices include USB ports for hooking up a hard drive or thumb drive, so you can play less permanently stored video on an ad hoc basis.

We looked at three such offerings—including Apple’s latest—and found that, much to our chagrin, none of these were very compelling solutions for getting movies off your home network or for streaming media from the web. And yet, each is different in its own special, useless way.

Apple TV – Rating: 5

The good news is that the Apple TV was the best product in this roundup. The bad news is we still wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Cupertinophile who can’t live without at least one of every gadget Apple makes.

There’s no complaining about the hardware. In true Apple fashion it’s a sleek and sexy hockey puck of a device, and setup is a breeze. Of course, in keeping with Apple’s other electronics, the Apple TV is useless without iTunes on your computer unless you simply want to access media directly from the iTunes Store. And Apple would really love it if you did: The Apple TV interface is overwhelmingly dedicated to selling you content, presented as a cacophony of clickable posters in no discernible order.

If you push past the come-ons to browse your PC library, the interface works well enough, although the ridiculous remote tries its best to thwart such efforts. Movies look good and audio is crisp and clear — provided, that is, that you’ve connected to your network via Ethernet. We had nothing but trouble when using the Apple TV’s wireless connection, to the point where it frequently dropped out in the middle of streaming a song and eventually lost track of our PC’s media library altogether. You’re best advised pretending Wi-Fi isn’t even an option (which it actually isn’t on the other two devices we reviewed) and simply plugging into your router.

With a maximum resolution of 720p, movies won’t look as good — in theory — on the Apple TV as they will on other streamers (both WD and Seagate support 1080p), but the reality is that heavy compression and stutter are far bigger problems than how many pixels you’re getting. We had generally good success with Netflix and YouTube streams, but searching for content with that gum-stick remote is a nightmare.

Bottom line: This is passable technology, but hardly Apple’s finest hour.


Western Digital TV Live Plus – Rating: 4

For a much different approach to media streaming, consider WD’s Digital TV Live Plus, a squat rectangle of a device with a chunky remote that recalls the sophistication of your finer motel television set clicker.

The device’s menu recalls Sony’s XrossMediaBar, and navigating it can take some getting used to. But once you’ve figured out where things have been squirreled away, the system becomes reasonably easy to handle. The remote and the menus are snappy and responsive.

The only problem with the TV Live Plus comes with actually trying to watch or listen to media with it. Movies played from the network, from an attached hard drive or from Netflix frequently were missing the audio. And, although the TV Live Plus claims to support all the formats that the other devices here handle, it had more trouble playing back videos than the rest. Video quality was hit-and-miss. Locally-stored flicks looked fine, but our Netflix playback was the jumpiest of the bunch, with frequent skipping and freezes.

Bottom line: Again, for very limited uses, the TV Live Plus works well enough, but more often than not, its quality issues are frustrating to the point where you’ll wonder why you didn’t just spring for a Tivo.


Seagate GoFlex FreeAgent TV – Rating: 2

As tragic as the WD streamer is, it’s a positive masterpiece next to Seagate’s GoFlex FreeAgent TV, one of the least impressive consumer electronics products we’ve encountered in years.

One look at the interface and you’ll see the clear embodiment of a cheap Chinese import that’s had someone else’s name slapped on it before being rushed to market. It’s not just an affront to the eyes to look at, in actual use it’s a disaster. The FreeAgent is so sluggish that you soon adapt to it by punching buttons three times and hoping for the best — that eventually one of those presses will actually register and do something, sparing you from simply sitting there in wait. What it might do, who knows: The interface is so badly conceived that the remote features both Home and Menu buttons, and they do wildly different things.

Actual performance is dismal. Raw video quality — in terms of image clarity — was the worst of this trio, although streaming was at least less jittery than the WD. And for some reason, audio playback came through at an extremely low volume, requiring we jack up the sound on the TV.

Bottom line: The only interesting or unique aspect of the GoFlex is the front panel, which flips open to reveal a dock into which you can slide a Seagate hard drive. Of course, the drive isn’t included, and it’s only compatible with a certain model series of Seagate drives so, well, perhaps “interesting” is too strong of a word.
http://www.wired.com/reviews/2010/10...he-boxes/all/1





Netflix Suffers Big Outage as Stock Hits New Peak

Netflix subscribers cut off from video streaming on same day shareholders celebrate new high
Michael Liedtke

While Netflix shareholders celebrated Thursday, the video subscription service's customers griped about a website outage that prevented them from streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet.

The breakdown occurred just a few hours after Netflix's stock price reached a new high in an ebullient reaction to the company's third-quarter results. The report was highlighted by the addition of 1.9 million subscribers and a projected gain of at least 2.1 million more customers by year's end.

Netflix's growth is being propelled by the rising popularity of streaming video over high-speed Internet connections, but that option wasn't available to many of its nearly 17 million shareholders for several hours Thursday, based on complaints posted on people's Twitter accounts.

Netflix acknowledged the trouble in its own Twitter post at about 4:30 p.m. ET, but didn't explain what the problem was or when the service would be available again. In an update posted at about 7:15 p.m. ET, the company said video streaming was working again on most devices, but warned some people still might have difficulty getting on the website.

Other popular Internet sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and various Web-based e-mail services, also periodically break down, but those are all free. In contrast, Netflix subscribers pay an average of $12 per month for packages that include DVD-by-mail rentals and Internet video streaming.

The outage's timing was especially embarrassing for Netflix. It occurred the day after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predicted that subscribers will soon be watching more hours of video on the Internet than on DVDs, which the company delivers by mail.

Netflix has been investing heavily in licensing rights to add more video to its streaming library because it wants its subscribers to use that option more frequently to lower its postage costs and eventually boost its earnings even higher. In the July-September period, Netflix spent $115 million on video streaming rights, an 11-fold increase from the same time last year.

Thursday's outage could be an indication that Netflix will have to invest more in its data centers and other technology to ensure the streaming option remains available as subscribers try to use it more frequently.

Netflix's streaming service has become so popular that it is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours, according to Sandvine Inc., a Canadian company that supplies traffic-management equipment to Internet service providers.

Streaming by Netflix subscribers accounted for about one-fifth of that peak-time traffic, more than double the volume flowing from Google Inc.'s YouTube, Sandvine said.

Few Netflix subscribers posting about Thursday's outage seemed to be on the brink of canceling their accounts, although some customers were clearly agitated about not being able to watch what they wanted. One customer even wondered if Netflix didn't fix the problem more quickly because its employees were too busy reveling in the company's soaring market value.

Netflix shares surged $19.54, or nearly 13 percent, to close at $172.69. That's more than three times what the company's stock was worth at the end of last year.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Netfli...946704946.html





On the Call: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
AP

Netflix Inc. expects its 16.9 million subscribers to watch more video through Internet streaming than on DVD players at some point in the current quarter.

But that milestone doesn't mean Netflix is considering closing any of the 58 distribution centers that mail out more than 2 million DVDs per day.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings addressed the fate of Netflix's DVD distribution centers Wednesday in response to question on the company's third-quarter earnings call.

QUESTION: What are you doing differently in terms of distribution centers as you prepare for overall (DVD) shipments to decline? I know you are focused on automation and efficiency. But do you have broader plans on how you ultimately scale back over time?
RESPONSE: Nationwide, our DVD shipments are still growing. About 10 percent year over year. Right now, we are trying to figure out how to handle the increased load. Some day we'll have to think about the issues you referred to, but not in the near term.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...-The-Call.html





Digital Media Juggernaut OverDrive Nabs Funding From Insight Venture Partners
Robin Wauters

OverDrive, which provides infrastructure and services for the distribution of digital content such as ebooks, audiobooks, music and videos, has raised capital from PE firm Insight Venture Partners, the New York-based backer of the likes of Twitter, Chegg, Privalia, Newegg and HauteLook.

The size of the financing round remains undisclosed, but OverDrive says it concerns a “major investment” and the provision of additional resources and capital by the investment firm is subject to regulatory approval.

OverDrive was founded by President and CEO Steve Potash back in 1986, and has established partnerships with leading publishers including Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, McGraw-Hill and hundreds of others over the years.

Today, OverDrive says it operates a digital content repository and fulfillment platform for ebooks, audiobooks, music and video content for a global network of more than 11,000 retailers, libraries, schools, and other digital channels.

Its catalogs are said to encompass more than 500,000 premium copyrighted titles, including one of the world’s largest catalogs of ebooks in the open-standard EPUB format.

OverDrive says it will soon be releasing ebook appls for Android and iOS devices, all of which will display EPUB ebooks in their native format and include multimedia support.

Peter Sobiloff and Larry Handen, both managing director at Insight Venture Partners, will join OverDrive’s board of directors.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/dig...ture-partners/





News Corp Ices Alesia Digital Newsstand Plan: Source
Yinka Adegoke and Jennifer Saba

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has put on ice ambitious plans to create a subscription online newsstand, after failing to attract enough interest among other news organizations, a person familiar with the plan said.

The owner of the Times of London, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal will reassign the staff working on "Project Alesia," which aimed to charge readers for a bundle of newspaper and magazine digital content.

The source said News Corp was unable to reach a "critical mass" of publishers to support the plan.

The company declined to comment.

Project Alesia is one of several digital journalism initiatives that also includes a news product, identified internally as the Daily Planet, that is designed for tablet devices.

Alesia is said to "not be on the fast track" any longer for News Corp in New York, the source said, but it still hopes to launch the service at a later date.

The company is also considering other options, such as a sale of technology assets, according to reports.

Murdoch has been exploring new ways to charge readers for news and entertainment online, particularly on portable tablet devices such as Apple Inc's iPad, and cellphones.

In the last year News Corp has invested in start-ups like Journalism Online, a company that helps publishers charge for online access; and Skiff, an e-reader company.

Data Ownership Critical

News Corp executives pitched to U.S. publishers the idea of selling access to multiple newspapers and magazines, proposing to take a cut of subscription revenue and also controlling some of the customer data, sources said.

One publisher described the pitch as "lame." Another newspaper publisher executive said they did not take the offer seriously.

Publishers are particularly protective of their subscriber data, such as names, addresses and credit card numbers, which helps them court advertisers and market new products to existing readers.

Discussions between Apple and publishers over selling subscriptions to magazines and newspapers on the iPad have stumbled on the same issue.

With few exceptions such as News Corp's Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, owned by Pearson PLC, most newspapers and magazines are unable to sell recurring subscriptions through iTunes that would force readers to purchase single copies.

Reports of Project Alesia ending in the UK was first reported by Brand Republic on Thursday.

The reports said News Corp had pulled the project over cost concerns after investing around 20 million pounds ($31.5 million) in Alesia, with 1 million pounds planned for advertising.

News Corp had more than 100 people working on the project in London and most of them will be assigned to other projects within its News International unit, the source said.

A similar reassignment of duties is also expected for the New York team.

(Editing by Kenneth Li and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69K4XS20101022





Study Says Coal Burning in Utah Kills 202 a Year
AP

A study commissioned by Utah state agencies says air pollution kills 202 residents a year.

A group of Utah doctors is citing the report to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to factor in the environmental costs of coal-fired power in a state energy policy..

Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment wants Herbert to embrace the findings of a study commissioned — but not endorsed — by state agencies.

Utah commissioned the study with a $150,000 matching grant from the federal government.

Massachusetts-based Synapse Energy Economics Inc. itemized the health and environmental costs of Utah's reliance on coal-fired power plants.

The report says Utah should replace its most polluting coal plants with wind and solar power and find ways to conserve energy.
http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...ear-712666.php





Newspaper Report: Facebook Apps Transmitted Personal Information to Tracking Companies
AP

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that 10 popular Facebook applications have been transmitting users' personal identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.

The newspaper said Monday that the breach also includes users who set all their information to be completely private. And in some cases, it says, the apps provided access to friends' names.

A Facebook spokesman told the Journal on Sunday that the company would introduce new technology to contain the breach. It's not clear how long the breach went on.

The paper says Facebook also has taken immediate action to disable all applications that violated their terms.

Most apps are made by independent software companies, not by Facebook.
http://www.courant.com/technology/sn...,4217733.story





Finnish Firm Finds Hard-to-Detect Online Attacks
Tarmo Virki

All network security equipment, the strongest of which is used by the financial industry, is exposed to a new kind of online attack, Finnish data security vendor Stonesoft said on Monday.

Stonesoft said it has found a new threat category -- advanced evasion techniques (AETs) -- which simultaneously combine different evasions in several layers of networks, and in the process become invisible for security gear.

While evasions -- tools hackers often use to penetrate network security -- are nothing new, AETs package them in new ways to let attackers bypass most firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IPS) without being detected.

This could give them access to data on secure corporate networks and allow them to plant further attacks.

"From the point of view of cybercriminals and hackers, advanced evasion techniques work like a master key to anywhere," said Klaus Majewski, business development chief at Stonesoft.

"Current protection against advanced evasion techniques is next to zero. This is a new thing and there is no protection against it currently," Majewski said.

Security experts at ICSA Labs, part of Verizon Communications Inc, have tested the new evasions and have found the risk is real.

"In most of the cases IPSs were unable to detect the attack," said Jack Walsh, program manager for intrusion detection and prevention at ICSA Labs.

"It's unlikely that really any network security vendor is aware of such evasions."

While finding protection from a new attack might sometimes take time, security vendors can usually find it and update defenses relatively quickly.

The problem with advanced evasion techniques is not just new attacks, but that AETs can create millions of combinations from a few dozen different evasions.

Stonesoft has alerted authorities about its findings, and it thinks others have also likely found similar technologies.

"I am sure there are other research organizations studying this, but if they are on the wrong side of the law, they would not announce this. It's too good a tool to use," Majewski said.

When small-cap Stonesoft first came out on October 4 with a statement on the new threat category it had found, its shares jumped 20 percent. They have since retreated but are still up 9 percent since then.

Two weeks ago it did not unveil details of its findings.

Evasions in general have been known and used in the online world since the 1990s.

"A lot of what attackers are doing today is about evasion at various levels," said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at data security firm Imperva.

"There is substantial vigilance out there. You just cannot make plain vanilla attacks and not expect to get caught. It's a constant cat and mouse game," Shulman said.

(Editing by Michael Shields)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69H0ZS20101018





U.S. Companies Are at Risk of Spying by Their Own Workers
Christopher Drew

Huang Kexue, federal authorities say, is a new kind of spy.

For five years, Mr. Huang was a scientist at a Dow Chemical lab in Indiana, studying ways to improve insecticides. But before he was fired in 2008, Mr. Huang began sharing Dow’s secrets with Chinese researchers, authorities say, then obtained grants from a state-run foundation in China with the goal of starting a rival business there.

Now, Mr. Huang, who was born in China and is a legal United States resident, faces a rare criminal charge — that he engaged in economic espionage on China’s behalf.

Law enforcement officials say the kind of spying Mr. Huang is accused of represents a new front in the battle for a global economic edge. As China and other countries broaden their efforts to obtain Western technology, American industries beyond the traditional military and high-tech targets risk having valuable secrets exposed by their own employees, court records show.

Rather than relying on dead drops and secret directions from government handlers, the new trade in business secrets seems much more opportunistic, federal prosecutors say, and occurs in loose, underground markets throughout the world.

Prosecutors say it is difficult to prove links to a foreign government, but intelligence officials say China, Russia and Iran are among the countries pushing hardest to obtain the latest technologies.

“In the new global economy, our businesses are increasingly targets for theft,” said Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division. “In order to stay a leader in innovation, we’ve got to protect these trade secrets.”

Mr. Huang, 45, who says he is not guilty, is being prosecuted under an economic espionage provision in use for only the seventh time. Created by Congress in 1996 to address a shift toward industrial spying after the cold war, the law makes it a crime to steal business trade secrets, like software code and laboratory breakthroughs. The crime rises to espionage if the thefts are carried out to help a foreign government.

Economic espionage charges are also pending against Jin Hanjuan, a software engineer for Motorola, who was arrested with a laptop full of company documents while boarding a plane for China, prosecutors said. Over the last year, other charges involving the theft of trade secrets — a charge less serious than espionage — have been filed against former engineers from General Motors and Ford who had business ties to China. And scientists at the DuPont Company and Valspar, a Minnesota paint company, recently pleaded guilty to stealing their employer’s secrets after taking jobs in China.

In two past espionage cases involving American computer companies, defendants said they saw a chance to make money and acted on their own, knowing that the information would be valuable to Chinese companies or agencies. In several cases, Chinese government agencies or scientific institutes provided money to start businesses or research to develop the ideas; that financing is what gave rise to the espionage charges.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, appointed by Congress to study the national security issues arising from America’s economic relationship with China, said in a report last year that even in instances without direct involvement by Chinese officials, China’s government “has been a major beneficiary of technology acquired through industrial espionage.”

China has denied that its intelligence services go after American industries. China’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the subject, but spokesmen for the Chinese foundation and the university that worked with Mr. Huang said they were not aware of any espionage.

“If it’s true, we will start our own investigation into it,” said Chen Yue, a spokesman for the Natural Science Foundation of China, which gave Mr. Huang grants to conduct research there.

American officials and corporate trade groups say they fear economic spying will increase as China’s quest for Western know-how spreads from military systems to everyday commercial technologies.

After focusing for decades on low-cost assembly operations, China “feels it really needs to turn the corner and become a technology power in its own right,” said James Mulvenon, the director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington, which tracks Chinese activities for federal agencies and corporate clients.

Mr. Mulvenon said China is trying to woo back thousands of ethnic Chinese scientists who have trained or worked in the United States. “They basically roll out the red carpet for these guys,” he said.

As economic crimes become easier to commit — in some cases as simple as downloading data and pressing “Send” — security analysts say some American companies must share the blame for thefts because they do not adequately monitor employees.

At Motorola, for example, court records show that Ms. Jin, the software engineer, downloaded company documents during two sick leaves and tapped into the company’s computers from China, where, prosecutors say, she met with a company linked to the Chinese military. Ms. Jin, a naturalized United States citizen who was born in China, says she is not guilty, and is awaiting trial in Illinois.

Catching and prosecuting wrongdoers is also made difficult by the refusal of some companies to report breaches.

“When you have public companies with their stock values tied to their assets, the last thing they want the buyer of that stock to think is that their assets are compromised,” said Michael Maloof, the chief technology officer of TriGeo Network Security, a company that provides computer monitoring systems.

The first economic espionage case, filed in 2001 against a Japanese scientist, collapsed when Japan refused to extradite him. The six other cases have involved China, and the Justice Department won the first three.

In one case, two Silicon Valley engineers admitted to stealing secrets about computer chips, then arranging financing from Chinese government agencies to start business. In another case, a retired Boeing engineer was convicted after a search of his home found documents on United States military and space programs, as well as letters from Chinese aviation officials seeking the data.

The Justice Department lost a case involving two California engineers. The government focused on documents showing that the engineers were working with a venture capitalist in China to seek financing for a microchip business from China’s 863 program, which supports development of technologies with military applications.

But the men were arrested before they filed the grant application. The judge in the case concluded in May that the government had needed to prove that the men had “intended to confer a benefit” on China, “not receive a benefit from it.”

In Mr. Huang’s case, according to the indictment, he had received money from the Natural Science Foundation of China, a government organization, to conduct insecticide research.

Mr. Huang grew up in China, and has lived in the United States or Canada since 1995. While working for Dow’s farm chemicals unit, Dow AgroSciences, he also took a job as a visiting professor at a Chinese university and made eight trips to China, court records show.

Besides directing research at the university while at Dow, he later smuggled samples of a bacterial strain from Dow to China in his son’s suitcase, the authorities said.

Mr. Huang’s lawyer, Michael Donahoe, said at a recent hearing that the case was “hypothetical.” But Cynthia Ridgeway, an assistant United States attorney, said that with Dow’s Chinese patent due to expire in 2012, Mr. Huang had “the full recipe” needed to try to take its business to China.

Last week, a judge denied Mr. Huang’s request for bail. He is awaiting trial in federal custody in Indiana.

Sarah Chen contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/bu...espionage.html





Military Granted Role in Cyberattack Response
Thom Shanker

The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil.

The system would mirror that used when the military is called on in natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires. A presidential order dispatches the military forces, working under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under the new rules, the president would approve the use of the military’s expertise in computer-network warfare, and the Department of Homeland Security would direct the work.

Officials involved in drafting the rules said the goal was to ensure a rapid response to a cyberthreat while balancing concerns that civil liberties might be at risk should the military take over such domestic operations.

The rules were deemed essential because most of the government’s computer-network capabilities reside within the Pentagon — while most of the important targets are on domestic soil, whether within the government or in critical private operations like financial networks or a regional power grid.

The new approach will begin with a Department of Homeland Security team deploying to Fort Meade, Md., home to both the National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic espionage, and the military’s new Cyber Command. In exchange, a team of networking experts from the Defense Department would be assigned to the operations center at the Homeland Security Department.

The rules were detailed in a memorandum of agreement signed in late September by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, but they were not released until last week.

Robert J. Butler, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for cyber policy, said the memorandum was intended to cut through legal debates about the authority for operating domestically, and to focus on how best to respond to the threat of attack on critical computer networks.

Mr. Butler said teams of lawyers would watch for potential violations of civil liberties. “We have put protection measures in place,” he said.

The Pentagon is expected to release a full National Defense Strategy for Cyber Operations by the end of the year, to be followed by broader interagency guidance from the White House, perhaps in the form of a presidential directive, in 2011.

Congress also is weighing legislation that would update domestic law to deal with advances in computer-based surveillance and cyberwarfare.

William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, underscored the Pentagon’s “need to protect our military networks,” but said that “it’s a national challenge as well.” In an interview with Charlie Rose broadcast Monday by PBS, Mr. Lynn added: “We need to protect our critical infrastructure. We need to protect our intellectual property. And that’s a whole-of-government effort.”

During a visit last week to NATO headquarters in Brussels, Mr. Gates lobbied for new partnerships to combat computer threats, while warning that the NATO computer networks were vulnerable.

“On cybersecurity, the alliance is far behind,” Mr. Gates said. “Our vulnerabilities are well known, but our existing programs to remedy these weaknesses are inadequate.”

Mr. Gates said he was not concerned that secret intelligence shared with allies would be compromised, but he said NATO had weaknesses in its defenses for computer networks at its headquarters and throughout the shared command structure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/21cyber.html





U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping
Charlie Savage

Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.

The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that create technical obstacles to surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.

An Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the F.B.I. and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand a 1994 law requiring carriers to make sure their systems can be wiretapped. There is not yet agreement over the details, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, but they said the administration intends to submit a package to Congress next year.

To bolster their case, security agencies are citing two previously undisclosed episodes in which major carriers were stymied for weeks or even months when they tried to comply with court-approved wiretap orders in criminal or terrorism investigations, the officials said.

Albert Gidari Jr., a lawyer who represents telecommunications firms, said corporations were likely to object to increased government intervention in the design or launch of services. Such a change, he said, could have major repercussions for industry innovation, costs and competitiveness.

“The government’s answer is ‘don’t deploy the new services — wait until the government catches up,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now.”

Under the 1994 law, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, telephone and broadband companies are supposed to design their services so that they can begin conducting surveillance of a target immediately after being presented with a court order.

Officials from the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, the F.B.I. and other agencies recently began working on a draft of a proposal to strengthen and expand that law. There is not yet internal agreement over its details, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, but they said the Obama administration intended to submit a package to Congress next year.

The disclosure that the administration is seeking ways to increase pressure on carriers already subject to the 1994 law comes less than a month after The New York Times reported on a related effort: a plan to bring Internet companies that enable communications — like Gmail, Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype — under the law’s mandates for the first time, a demand that would require major changes to some services’ technical designs and business models.

The push to expand the 1994 law is the latest example of a dilemma over how to balance Internet freedom with security needs in an era of rapidly evolving — and globalized — technology. The issue has added importance because the surveillance technologies developed by the United States to hunt for terrorists and drug traffickers can be also used by repressive regimes to hunt for political dissidents.

An F.B.I. spokesman said the bureau would not comment about the telecom proposal, citing the sensitivity of internal deliberations. But last month, in response to questions about the Internet communications services proposal, Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, emphasized that the government was seeking only to prevent its surveillance power from eroding.

Starting in late 2008 and lasting into 2009, another law enforcement official said, a “major” communications carrier was unable to carry out more than 100 court wiretap orders. The initial interruptions lasted eight months, the official said, and a second lapse lasted nine days.

This year, another major carrier experienced interruptions ranging from nine days to six weeks and was unable to comply with 14 wiretap orders. Its interception system “works sporadically and typically fails when the carrier makes any upgrade to its network,” the official said.

In both cases, the F.B.I. sent engineers to help the companies fix the problems. The bureau spends about $20 million a year on such efforts.

The official declined to name the companies, saying it would be unwise to advertise which networks have problems or to risk damaging the cooperative relationships they government has with them. For similar reasons, the government has not sought to penalize carriers over wiretapping problems.

Under current law, if a carrier meets the industry-set standard for compliance — providing the content of a call or e-mail, along with identifying information like its recipient, time and location — it achieves “safe harbor” and cannot be fined. If the company fails to meet the standard, it can be fined by a judge or the Federal Communication Commission.

But in practice, law enforcement officials say, neither option is ever invoked. When problems come to light, officials are reluctant to make formal complaints against companies because their overriding goal is to work with their technicians to fix the problem.

Once a carrier’s interception capability is restored — even if it is at taxpayer expense — its service is compliant again with the 1994 law, so the issue is moot.

The F.C.C. also moves slowly, officials complain, in handling disputes over the “safe harbor” standard. For example, in 2007 the F.B.I. asked for more than a dozen changes, like adding a mandate to turn over more details about cellphone locations. The F.C.C. has still not acted on that petition.

Civil liberties groups contend that the agency has been far too willing on other occasions to expand the reach of the 1994 law.

“We think that the F.C.C. has already conceded too much to the bureau,” said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The F.B.I.’s ability to have such broad reach over technical standard-setting was never anticipated in the 1994 act.”

The Obama administration is circulating several ideas for legislation that would increase the government’s leverage over carriers, officials familiar with the deliberations say.

One proposal is to increase the likelihood that a firm pays a financial penalty over wiretapping lapses — like imposing retroactive fines after problems are fixed, or billing companies for the cost of government technicians that were brought in to help.

Another proposal would create an incentive for companies to show new systems to the F.B.I. before deployment. Under the plan, an agreement with the bureau certifying that the system is acceptable would be an alternative “safe harbor,” ensuring the firm could not be fined.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/19wiretap.html





U.S. Working with China on Intellectual Property Rights

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder meets with counterparts in China to discuss intellectual property rights enforcement
Michael Kan

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Beijing this week to discuss how China -- a hotbed for counterfeit goods and piracy -- can better coordinate its efforts with the U.S. to stop intellectual property rights violations.

On Wednesday, Holder held talks on the issue with senior Chinese officials in the country's capital, according to China's state-controlled media. Earlier in the week, the Attorney General spoke in Hong Kong, stressing the need for countries to prevent violations of intellectual property rights. Such abuses have caused businesses to lose billions at the expense of piracy, while consumers have been put at risk by unknowingly using shoddy counterfeit goods, Holder said.

"For too long, these illegal activities have been perceived as 'business as usual.' But not any more," Holder said on Monday.

Tech product manufacturers are a major victim of these intellectual property rights offenses. Piracy of music, movies and software is rampant in China, where bootleg copies can be easily found and sold on street corners.

About 79 percent of the software used on computers in China is pirated, according to a 2009 report from the Business Software Alliance and IDC. This marks a 7 percent decrease from 2005.

The commercial value of pirated software in China, at $7.5 billion, is second only to that in the U.S., where it was $8.3 billion, according to the BSA and IDC.

At the same time, more of these illegal counterfeiting activities are going online, said Christian Murck, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. Arrests have already been made of people creating virtual companies so that customers can buy counterfeit goods online. Often they will source their fake goods from manufacturers in China, but then warehouse and distribute them using middle men in different parts of the world.

"One of the things that has happened in recent years is that counterfeiting has become a globalized industry," Murck said. "There are typically multiple parties involved, so if you close down one piece, you don't necessarily disrupt the chain."

To effectively shut down these operations, cross-country efforts at strengthening global enforcement like Holder's visit to China are crucial, he added.

Coinciding with Holder's visit, China announced it will launch a new national campaign to crack down on intellectual property rights violations. The campaign will take aim at the production and distribution of pirated goods such as DVDs and software products. Violations relating to registered trademarks and patents will also be targeted. The campaign will last for half a year.

These government-backed crack-downs have been effective in the past, Murck said. But while China has stepped up its enforcement over the years, much more still needs to be done, he added.

Murck pointed to how China's limit on the number of foreign films entering the country has restricted consumers access to popular movies and essentially fueled DVD piracy. This could change if the limits were relaxed. China should also consider instituting an auditing system to ensure that all state-owned enterprises in the country use software that is licensed, he said.

"I think the penalties are still too low and the chances of being caught are too low to deter (intellectual property rights) infringement," he said of China's policies. "But we are making progress."
http://www.itworld.com/legal/124630/...roperty-rights





It’s a Mobile Nation as Cellphones and Tablets Take Hold
Nick Bilton

A new set of reports show that Americans have quickly moved beyond just accessing the Internet on desktop and laptop computers, and are now embracing a range of mobile gadgets including cellphones and e-readers.

Last Thursday, Pew Research released a report from its Internet & American Life Project showing that the cellphone is now Gadget No. 1 for Americans.

The report, which was conducted by surveying 3,001 American adults, compiled a list of the “seven key appliances of the information age.” The gadgets include cellphones, desktop and laptop computers, e-readers, MP3 players and game consoles.

Aaron Smith, a research specialist on the project, wrote in a blog post that researchers found 85 percent of Americans over the age of 18 own a mobile phone, and that a staggering 96 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 “own a cellphone of some kind.”

The survey also found that three-quarters of Americans now own a desktop or laptop computer, up from 30 to 52 percent when the same study was conducted in 2006.

Also on the rise are e-readers and tablet computers like the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle.

A report released Friday by the market research firm Gartner predicts that tablet devices used to access media will reach sales of 19.5 million units in 2010.

Gartner also predicted that sales would reach a staggering 150 million units by 2013.

In a press release, Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner research vice president, said mini notebook computers, like netbooks and inexpensive laptops, will suffer a “strong cannibalization” as the price of media tablets, which include the iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Cisco Cius, continue to drop below a $300 price point.

Finally, Forrester Research issued a report on Friday discussing the new security concerns that companies and consumers should expect as society moves into a “post-PC era.”

Andrew Jaquith, who covers security topics for Forrester, wrote in a blog post that “the number of post-PC devices such as tablets, eReaders, and Internet-capable mobile phones, will eclipse PC devices, such as desktops, laptops, and netbooks.”

Mr. Jaquith says that with the rise of these devices, companies will be forced to provide additional security for mobile computers that are used for both work and play. He also notes that security professionals will need to provide a level of control for the “increasingly chaotic environment” of mobile devices, but also “not stifle employee flexibility and innovation.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1...ets-take-hold/





Will Apple’s Culture Hurt the iPhone?
Miguel Helft

If you want a smartphone powered by Google’s Android software, you could get Motorola’s Droid 2 or its cousin, the Droid X. Then there is the Droid Incredible from HTC, the Fascinate from Samsung and the Ally from LG.

That’s just on Verizon Wireless. An additional 20 or so phones running Android are available in the United States, and there are about 90 worldwide.

But if your preference is an Apple-powered phone, you can buy — an iPhone.

That very short list explains in part why, for all its success in the phone business, Apple suddenly has a real fight on its hands.

Americans now are buying more Android phones than iPhones. If that trend continues, analysts say that in little more than a year, Android will have erased the iPhone’s once enormous lead in the high end of the smartphone market.

But this is not the first time Apple has found itself in this kind of fight, where its flagship product is under siege from a loose alliance of rivals selling dozens of competing gadgets.

In the early 1980s, the Macintosh faced an onslaught of competition from an army of PC makers whose products ran Microsoft software. The fight did not end well for Apple. In a few years, Microsoft all but sidelined Apple, and the company almost went out of business.

Can Apple, which insists on tight control of its devices, win in an intensely competitive market against rivals that are openly licensing their software to scores of companies? It faces that challenge not only in phones, but also in the market for tablet computers, where the iPad is about to take on a similar set of rivals.

“This is a really big strategic question,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein and Company. “No one knows whether openness will ultimately prevail as it did on the PC.”

Apple declined to comment on the issue.

By some measures, the competition Apple faces this time is even more formidable than it was in PCs. In addition to the Android family, Apple already competes with Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

And the iPhone will soon have one more powerful, and familiar, foe: Microsoft. That company’s well-reviewed Windows Phone 7 software will appear in as many as nine new smartphones beginning next month. Others like Nokia cannot be counted out.

The stakes are huge, as the mobile computing market could prove to be larger than the PC market ever was.

No one is counting out Apple, of course. The iPhone 4, which Apple began selling this year, has been its most successful phone introduction yet. On Monday, when the company reports financial results, it is expected to announce that it sold nearly 12 million iPhones in the quarter ending Sept. 25, according to analysts’ estimates. That would represent a 60 percent increase from a year earlier.

And with Apple expected to bring the iPhone to Verizon early next year — most likely in an attempt to slow Android’s momentum — the sales growth may well accelerate.

Among investors, there is little doubt that Apple’s strategy is the right one. The company’s stock has soared nearly 50 percent this year, and on Friday it closed at an all-time high of $314.74.

But the rise of Android has been both sudden and unexpected, and its ascent highlights some of the advantages of an open approach.

“There is much more rapid innovation taking place in an open environment,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written recent case studies on Apple. While Apple comes out with a new iPhone model once a year, slick Android phones with new features hit the market often.

That leaves little room for error at Apple. The company must continue to create hit products, as a single misstep could give Android and other rivals an opportunity to make inroads and steal market share.

Also, as the number of people with Android phones grows, Android will grow more attractive for app developers. For now, Apple’s App Store, with more than 250,000 applications, enjoys a large advantage over the Android Market, which has about 80,000. And those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Apps made for the iPhone tend to be of better quality, are more frequently downloaded and on average are more profitable for developers.

But that edge may not last, especially as many developers fret about Apple’s tight control over the App Store.

“Having a tightly controlled ecosystem, which is what Apple has, is a large short-term advantage and a large long-term disadvantage,” said Mitchell Kapor, who as founder of the Lotus Development Corporation is a veteran of the PC-versus-Mac wars, and is now an investor in app makers. “The question is, how long is the short term?”

But for all the similarities in Apple’s approaches to mobile computing and desktop computing, there are plenty of differences, and most analysts doubt that history will repeat itself.

For starters, Apple is the richest company in the technology industry. With $45.8 billion in cash, it can afford to invest heavily in research and development. Apple’s large early lead in devices and developers puts it in a much stronger position than it ever had in the PC market. And because it is one of the largest purchasers of Flash memory, which is one of the most expensive components of a smartphone, it has “enormous economies of scale,” Professor Yoffie said.

What’s more, the iPhone isn’t really fighting alone. The two other devices that run Apple’s iOS mobile software, the iPad and the iPod Touch, further strengthen the iPhone, because consumers like being able to access the content and applications they bought on iTunes and the App Store on multiple devices. Apple has sold more than 120 million iOS devices.

And while Apple’s personal computers were by and large technically superior to Microsoft-based PCs, they were also far more expensive. In the smartphone market, carriers, who play a vital role in distribution, have been willing to subsidize the iPhone so that its cost to consumers is roughly the same as that of comparable Android phones.

For now, the smartphone market is growing so rapidly that the rise of Android has not necessarily been at the expense of the iPhone. That will change as the market matures. But most experts predict that no single company or operating system will rule the mobile market like Microsoft ruled the PC.

“I don’t think we’ll be in a situation where there is one operating system,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he manages a fund that invests in applications for iOS devices. “This market will be more fragmented than the PC market.” Mr. Murphy said he expected one or two operating systems to co-exist with Apple’s.

Professor Yoffie agreed: “Apple will lose its overall leadership, but maintain a share of the market that could easily be in the 25 percent to 30 percent range.” He added: “That’s enough to sustain a very large and very profitable business.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/te...y/18apple.html





Announcing Sales Records, Jobs Vows Apple 'Will Triumph' Over Android

Apple CEO joins earnings call as iPhone, Mac set sales records in monster quarter for the company
Gregg Keizer

Apple announced on Monday that it once again had set a Mac sales record last quarter, and also broke previous records for both the iPhone and iPad.

CEO Steve Jobs, who rarely participates in earnings announcements, joined the conference call with Wall Street analysts to boast that Apple's iPhone had passed Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and to maintain that he was "confident we will triumph" over rivals running Google's Android operating system.

Overall, the company posted record revenues of $20.3 billion for the quarter -- the first time Apple has passed the $20 billion mark -- an increase of 61% over the same period last year. Profits were $4.3 billion, up 70% from the same quarter in 2009.

"Spectacular," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research.

"Every quarter seems to be a record with them," added Brian Marshall of Gleacher & Co.

In the quarter that closed Sept. 30, Apple sold 3.9 million Macs, breaking last quarter's then-record of 3.5 million machines. Mac unit sales were up 12% over 2010's second quarter and 27% over the same quarter in 2009.

Apple has set Mac sales records in four of the last five quarters.

Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones, up 98% over the same period last year, not only a record but also the first time the company sold more than 10 million iPhones in a single quarter.

It was also the first time Apple sold more iPhones than it did its less expensive iPods. iPhone revenues were about six times that of the iPod's, Apple said. The iPhone accounted for 43% of the company's total revenues for the quarter.

But the iPhone sales number could have been even larger.

"We would have been able to sell more iPhones if we had had them," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer. Apple currently has 3.3 million iPhones in inventory, enough for less than a month's sales at last quarter's pace.

Oppenheimer said that Apple wrote off $100 million to cover the costs of its free case program, which it launched in July (and shut down in September) to quell complaints from customers over dropped calls when they held the iPhone 4 in certain ways.

The iPad's second quarter of sales hit Apple's balance sheet with 4.2 million units sold, a 28% jump from the prior period.

"We have a tiger by the tail," said Jobs of the iPad.

Last quarter was also the first time that Apple sold more iPads than it sold Macs, something Jobs was quick to mention.

"iPad will clearly affect notebook computer [sales]," said Jobs, echoing industry analysts who have said that the popular tablet has cannibalized sales of both notebooks and smaller, cheaper netbooks. "I think the iPad proves that [the tablet] is not a question of if, but of when," Jobs added.

The iPad's impact on notebooks wasn't limited to Apple's rivals: Apple racked up 2.6 million notebook sales, an increase of only 17% and a far cry from the 41% boost in the prior quarter.

Meanwhile, desktop Mac sales were up 58% year-over-year, to 1.2 million, a growth rate dramatically higher than the 18% increase the prior quarter. Apple refreshed its popular iMac desktop line in August, mid-way through the past quarter.

But Gottheil saw some iPad cannibalization of Apple's notebook sales, and perhaps a shift in what people buy from the company. "I think the numbers show that for Apple's customers, there is a new way of thinking about the computing environment, where there's a large-screen iMac as the home's central computer, with MacBooks and iPads all around it," Gottheil said.

Taken together, the Mac's 27% year-over-year increase in Mac sales was more than double what research firm IDC pegged last week as the global industry average of 11%, triple that of rival Gartner's more anemic 8%.

Although Apple sold over 4 million iPads in the last quarter, the number was disappointing to analysts who had pegged tablet sales as high as 5 million.

Apple, however, said that iPad supply caught up with demand last month, and that it has enough in the pipeline to handle the new iPad sales outlets Apple has announced recently, including Walmart and Verizon.

Verizon will start selling the iPad Wi-Fi later this month in its 2,000-plus stores.

In the middle of the call, Jobs spent 10 minutes or more touting that iPhone sales outnumbered those of the BlackBerry for each handset's most recent quarter, and defended Apple's iPhone ecosystem as better for consumers than Google's.

"Google wants to characterize us as closed and Android as open," said Jobs. "We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real differences between our two platforms."

He blasted what he called Android's fragmentation -- the variety of user interfaces on different makers' smartphones -- and said that Apple's model, where every iPhone has the same interface, was better for consumers and developers.

"We think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen," Jobs said. "What's best for the customer? Fragmented or integrated?"

Marshall said he thought Jobs' comments were "counterproductive," in part because they took time away from the usual Q&A portion of Apple's earnings calls when analysts, usually unsuccessfully, try to get more information out of the company's executives.

"He came across as very cocky, which he didn't need to do," said Marshall. "It was kind of ego talking."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...over_A ndroid





Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs
MG Siegler

Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy. But how was he going to respond? Well, he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet tonight. And sure enough, it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs.

Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:

Quote:
the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”
For those keeping score at home, that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android.

Well played.

Rubin has about 100 followers right now. That should skyrocket shortly.

Welcome to Twitter, Andy! I wouldn’t expect a response from Jobs, as he doesn’t use the service. But maybe Apple SVP Scott Forstall will respond instead (he has yet to tweet and still only follows Conan)?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/andy-rubin-twitter/





Ron Conway Shares Anecdotes about Early Days with Google, Napster, and Facebook Founders
Audrey Watters

"It's not lost on me that the future of innovation is in the minds of the people sitting in this room," said angel investor Ron Conway, addressing a crowd full of entrepreneurs at Startup School today. One of the 11 speakers at today's event, co-sponsored by Y Combinator and Stanford University's BASES.

Known as the premier angel investor, Conway admitted that he had fretted about what the content for today's lecture should be, but with some urging from YC's Paul Graham, Conway opted to simply tell a few stories of how he had met a number of today's strongest tech companies: Napster, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Conway started his tales with the background of his co-founding of Altos Computers in 1979, noting that in its day it was a very disruptive technology. "It was a typical startup," said Conway, but he described an investment environment that was much different from today's. Then, you had to bootstrap your company and have some level of profitability if you were going to get VC funding.

Although going public with Altos was a huge win for Conway, he argued that he defines success by having what was, at the time, the fastest growing company in America. "And that was more satisfying than getting rich."

And the message Conway repeated to the crowd at Stanford today: "You can do it too."

Napster's Shawn Fanning: Superstardom and Borrowed Suits

Conway told of a party at his house in 1999, at the top of the Internet bubble. With 40 million users at the time, Napster founder Shawn Fanning had a large crowd around him the whole time at the party. "I'm going to go talk to the two wallflowers over there, Larry and Sergey," said Conway, who told the investor that "We're going to build a big company too, but we will never be famous like Shawn."

Conway pointed out that Fanning managed to cultivate a strong brand name with Napster, and while Napster didn't survive, Fanning used that brand name to build future companies. When Napster lost its first court ruling, said Conway, Fanning showed up in a suit he'd borrowed, as he'd never worn one before.

But as Conway noted, Fanning was smart enough to know that once Napster found itself in the courts that things were probably all over. And Fanning was perceptive enough, despite his young age, to be ready to move on to his next idea and his next company.

Building a Good Service, Building a Good Brand Name, then Monetizing: Early Google

When Google was looking for its first VC round, the founders told Conway that if he could help the company secure investment from Sequoia that they'd let him invest as well. Criticizing some of the recent protestations about valuations of startups, Conway noted that the valuation of that round was $75 million - "and every one of us felt lucky to get in on it."

Conway talked about the attention that Larry and Sergei paid to learning how to become good CEOs. And he said that the important things to the founders of Google was providing a good service, making users happy, and building a good brand name. And then monetize.

Conway also related an anecdote when Sheryl Stanberg approached Conway as Google thought it was running out of money. Ten days later, Conway joked, Google changed its mind as "AdWords started working."

What The Social Network Gets Wrong about Zuckerberg

"Zuck," says Conway, "meets the definition of 'anyone can do it if they think big.'" Railing against the depiction of the early days of Facebook as chronicled in The Social Network, Conway insists that Zuckerberg was not partying all the time. Nor was he sitting in depositions five days a week, arguing with lawyers. Rather, "he was working his tail off like any good entrepreneur."

Conway argued that Zuckerberg has had a consistent vision about what Facebook is, something that isn't evident in the film. "How are you going to measure success with this thing called 'social networking'?" Conway asked Zuckerberg in an early interaction. "Because some day I am going to have 300 million users using this product," was Zuckerberg's response. Something that demonstrates the founders humility, says Conway.

The Origin and the Definition of "Founder Friendly"

"Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur," said Conway. You don't need to have a business plan or an MBA. All you need, says Conway, is a great idea.

Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.

Demonstrating how he has been known as not just an early investor but a strong ally and advocate for startups but also alluding to some of the recent "Angelgate" controversies, Conway ended by saying "entrepreneurs build companies and should be the one who are the focus of the stories" the press writes - not investors.

"Never forget it's your company," said Conway. "It's the founder's company."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._days_with.php





How Google Understands Language Like a 10-Year-Old
James Temple

Language has long been one of the most difficult challenges in artificial intelligence research, mainly because programs are based on rules, while native tongues cobbled together over hundreds of years tend to flout them.

Researchers only began to make major strides in the last 15 years or so, once they began supplementing rules with a so-called statistical approach.

Put very simply: By analyzing huge quantities of human text, initially labeled and dissected in much the manner of English class sentence diagramming, machines eventually begin to detect the patterns that define the use of language. After a certain stage of development, the algorithms can be unleashed onto raw or unstructured data, and continue to refine their understanding.

The same process has led to similarly momentous advances in language translation tools, and machine perception technologies like facial and voice recognition.

The success of this approach has been further propelled by two key developments: The sudden availability of massive amounts of digital text in the way of the Internet, and the enormous computing power available to researchers through server farms strung together across the planet.

Now when Google's computers confront a word with multiple meanings, they can rely on the same clues that humans use to understand the meaning.

Take the word "can." It might be a noun (a metal container), a verb (to put something into such a container) or a modal verb (to be able to do so). You can can something in a can.

Based on the billions of examples its algorithm has analyzed, Google knows it's highly likely that if "can" is preceded by a pronoun ("you") it's most likely the modal verb. If it's followed by an object ("something") it's most likely a verb. If it comes after an article ("a") it's most likely a metal container. (And in just about every case other than the one in the preceding paragraph, two cans in a row would probably denote a dance.)

The search engine has also begun to understand which words are synonyms for others. That's why today Google knows that a user typing the query "change memory in my laptop" would probably be interested in a string of text online that reads "install laptop RAM," even though only one word is the same. Google was incapable of a match like that as recently as three years ago.

These improvements have allowed users to increasingly express their queries using natural language, instead of breaking down their wants into three-word Boolean expressions. As consumers have caught on to this, the length of average queries has steadily grown.

Artificial intelligence isn't a silver bullet to online search, however. Google is continually tweaking its algorithms to address shortcomings, but some problems can be quite difficult to solve.

For instance, "pain killers that don't upset stomach," a fairly common query, trips up the engine because it's not great at negation. Typically, the words in a query represent things people do - not "don't" - want to find.

And sometimes probability works against the search engine: Google tends to think that Dell and Lenovo are the same thing because so many similar words show up around the names of the two computer manufacturers.

The algorithm's understanding of language "has moved from a 2-year-old infant to something close to an 8 or 10-year-old child," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, an honorific reserved for the company's top engineers. "They're still not approaching the conversations you'd have as a teenager."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...BUJ61FTF9I.DTL





Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect
Alexia Tsotsis

Tired of the endless unsolicited entreaties to “Connect via Facebook” as you surf the web? Excited for Y Connect and want to keep a clean palate beforehand? Scared about Facebook not necessarily having your best interests at heart when it comes to privacy?

In any case, Google engineer Brian Kennish, inspired by the most recent Facebook privacy and data debacles, has decided to create “Facebook Disconnect” i.e. a Google Chrome extension that obliterates all Facebook Connect functionality and all traffic from third party sites to Facebook servers if one searches the web through Chrome. (You can try it out here)

Facebook Disconnect will “presumably” prevent the sending of data back to Facebook across the one million sites that use the Facebook Connect service. So far the ones I’ve tested it on (ehem, Huffington Post) seem to be kosher as I no longer see Facebook integration.

Kennish says he created the extension to help quell his desire to delete his Facebook account and that he’s tested it out successfully across a sizable amount of previously Facebook-Connectable sites, including our own with absolutely no encouragement from Google or Facebook, despite the fact that he works for the former, “Nobody at Google asked or encouraged me to do so, or probably, even knows who I am.”
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/goo...ook-disconnec/





5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
David Wong

Picture your ideal future. OK, not your ideal future, where you're the last man on earth fighting the zombie horde, but society's ideal future: Energy is clean and limitless, goods are plentiful and machines take care of all the dirty work. So everybody's happy, right?

But in many ways, that future is already here, and it can be described in five letters:

FARTS.

I should probably explain.

#5. A Star Trek-Style Utopia is Already Here ... Sort Of

Let's talk about porn and dead babies for a moment.

If I gave you a budget of zero dollars and said, "Get me as much Internet porn as you can for that amount of money," how much porn would you come back with?

I'm thinking the answer is, "All of the porn."

Which brings me to an amusing story. In the last few decades, thousands of babies in Third World countries have died from contaminated baby formula. Wait, did I say amusing? I typed the wrong word there. Anyway, what happens is the mothers mix the baby formula with contaminated water, because sanitation is poor. So why the hell do the mothers feed their infants poison formula when they can just produce milk, for free, from their own bodies? The answer is that they do it because the manufacturer of the formula, Nestle, ran lots of ads telling them to.

If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free.

Some of you think I'm about to talk about file sharing and DRM and the evil record labels. But that's just a teaser of what's coming. The world has changed. All the rules we were trained to believe about society from birth until now are about to go out the window.

Futurists and sci-fi writers talk about a "post-scarcity" society, meaning it's like Star Trek, where matter replicators and fusion reactors have ended all shortages. On one hand, that now looks like a ridiculous pipe dream, but in a lot of areas of our life, we're already there. Think about the porn. There's more porn than air now. Literally -- air is limited, but we have machines that can convert energy into .jpegs of titties from now until the heat death of the universe. Titties are post-scarcity.

Now think about how many people you know who live in apartments or trailers barely big enough to host a game of Twister but who don't care because they spend every waking moment at home either playing World of Warcraft or surfing the Internet. They're not looking for a two-story house with a swimming pool and a white picket fence. With a $300 netbook and a $20-a-month Internet connection they can connect with friends, meet girls, get their entertainment, pursue their hobbies and stay in contact with family or co-workers. They may even work from home.

Look at how many of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs they're getting digitally:

Everything from that second tier to the capstone, they can get at a cost that rounds down to zero, if they so choose.

We Internet types are so busy haggling over video games with DRM that we're not grasping the scale of this. We're like a dog who's been cooped up behind a fence his whole life, and now a storm has knocked down the gate. The dog looks out and thinks, "Wow, out there is the front yard!"

No, Fluffy. Out there is the whole world.


#4. To Stay Afloat, Businesses Have to Pretend Unlimited Goods are Limited

Well, shit, Utopia's here! Mankind won! Let's just stop reading the article here and go celebrate!

Wait -- did you forget the thing about the baby formula?

Because this is where shit gets absurd. For instance:

Public libraries have been lending out books to people, for free, for the last 500 years or so. Publishers are OK with it because the library is paying for the book, and if it's a popular book, they'll buy multiple copies so multiple people can check it out at once. Then they'll replace those every couple of years, because if you read a book too much it falls apart at the binding.

But then the publisher invented a better book. An indestructible book called an ebook that could be read 10 billion times without ever falling apart. How much does it cost to manufacture this marvel? Not a goddamned penny. The readers have the ability to "manufacture" copies of their own, on their computer, at no cost to the publisher. It's a post-scarcity book.

So for the publishers, the next step was clear: Make the book destroy itself.

An ebook sold to a library will thus delete itself out of existence after a year, or after X number of times it had been lent out. This is a big source of controversy between publishers and public libraries, maybe because both of them know they've found the loose thread that can unravel all of society. After all:

A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?

B. Wait a second. It's just a digital file. Why not just buy one copy, and just copy and paste it for every customer who wants to read it?

C. Wait a second. Why do you need the library at all? Why can't a customer just buy a copy from the publisher and "lend" copies to all of his friends?

D. Wait a second. If no printing and binding needs to be done, why do you need the publisher? Just buy it directly from the author.

E. Waaaaait a second. Why buy it? Once the author makes one copy available, why can't everyone just grab it for free?

Stop and think about everything that just vanished there. Skyscrapers full of publishing company employees, warehouses full of books, book stores, libraries, factories full of printing presses, paper mills, all the stuff the author bought with his writing money. Gone.

To keep all that stuff up and running, the publisher is resorting to what experts call FARTS--Forced ARTificial Scarcity. Or they would call it that, if they were as awesome at naming things as I am.

Mark my words: The future will be ruled by FARTS.

Remember the debut of Sony's futuristic Matrix-style virtual world, PlayStation Home? There was a striking moment when the guys at Penny Arcade logged in and found themselves in a virtual bowling alley... standing in line. Waiting for a lane to open up. In a virtual world where the bowling alley didn't actually exist. It's all just ones and zeros on a server--the bowling lanes should be effectively infinite, but where there should have been thousands of lanes for anybody who wanted one, there was only FARTS.

#3. Arbitrary Restriction of Goods Is the Future

It works the same way with all digital goods -- from entertainment to communication to the software you use to do your job. A significant chunk of our economy runs on FARTS now. And as time goes on, more and more of what we use and rely on day to day will be enveloped by that invisible cloud.

Awesome, right? After all, you're not going to do what the Man tells you to do. You're not going to tolerate a future where corporations try to slap a price tag on readily available goods. It'd be like -- I don't know -- making a woman pay huge amounts of money for something that could be accomplished with her own bodily fluids.

That's what I thought, too. I'm savvy. I'm savvy as balls. But then I looked around my desk.

Sitting next to me is a bottle of Aquafina water. It's there because in the 1990s, both Pepsi and Coke noticed cola sales were flat, so they bought tap water -- the same stuff I have an effectively infinite supply of -- stuck it in bottles, put a picture of a mountain on the label and upped the price by 20,000 percent. Then I paid for it.

Next to the water is a green bottle of Excedrin. Sure, the generic store brand is identical right down to the molecule, but I paid twice as much for the name brand because this is Excedrin here. The Headache Medicine. It's sitting on top of a statement from the bank showing where they automatically deducted my mortgage payment... for a $5.00 "transaction fee."

And man, don't even look at my PC. I have on it a copy of Windows 7 -- a $200 full copy, because I was installing it on a new hard drive. The upgrade version is only $100, and by the way, they're the exact same product -- all the data is on both disks. The cheap one just has a thing that detects whether you have a previous version of Windows on the drive and refuses to install if you don't.

When I go to upgrade this computer, maybe I'll wind up with that new processor Intel is test-marketing, which ships with software that intentionally disables some of the chip's features. Why? Because along with it they sell a $50 "upgrade card" that does nothing but unlock the capabilities the processor had all along.

They've been training us to pay for nothing, and we're all going along with it. Tell me I won't find any FARTS at your desk.


#2. The Future Will Turn Us All Into Lars Ulrich

I picked the example with the ebooks earlier for a reason. As I mention every chance I get, I have a book on store shelves, a novel about monsters and dongs. It's in paperback now at the reasonable price of $10 or so. It took me five years to write it. But let's face it: If you want a digital copy of it for free, you can get it. The scarcity that would require you to pay money is purely a product of our collective imagination. John Dies at the End is 350 pages of FARTS.

This is the basis of that huge fight between Amazon.com and the largest book publisher about ebook prices. Nobody knows what to charge. We just kind of have to arbitrarily decide, because after the first copy, it costs nothing to make them.

Meanwhile me, my family, the bank what owns my mortgage and car loan, the IRS, the grocery store where I buy my food, all are hoping the same thing -- that you won't notice that free copies of my book are floating all around you. Soon, the whole world will be nursing the same hope.

That's what ACTA is about. This massive worldwide treaty would bring the hammer down on anyone violating intellectual property laws. Everyone on the Internet hates it because we know it 1) would have to be incredibly invasive, to the point of basically peering into everyone's hard drive at any moment for signs of contraband, and 2) is futile. It's a leaking ship trying to stay afloat by threatening the ocean with its cannons.

And for what? To protect the profits of huge corporations and record labels and freaking Activision? So Metallica's irritating anti-piracy crusader Lars Ulrich can buy a plane made of platinum instead of gold? So some hack writer can buy a monkey and train him to ride a tiny motorcycle? Fuck you!

But remember the dog and the fence. The world has changed. For everyone. I'm in the same boat as Lars Ulrich. But so are you.

Lars makes money selling his music. You make money selling your labor. At some point down the line, like his music, your skill as a human being can and will be converted to an electronic format for a fraction of the cost, rendering your skill worthless.

Work at a GameStop or some other video game store at the mall? The next consoles will download their games directly, no store needed. Work at a video store? Same thing -- Blu-ray is probably the last physical media we'll ever see. Work as a cashier? Forget self-checkout lanes taking your job -- soon they'll have RFID systems where customers can pile groceries into a cart and wheel it out the door, and sensors will bill their debit card on the fly. Work at Starbucks? What are you doing that a machine couldn't do? Work for the post office? You're just a human spambot at this point -- more than half of all mail is now unwanted junk that goes directly into the trash, because in a world with email, direct mailers are the only profitable customers the Postal Service has left.

Note that I'm intentionally listing service jobs here, because almost none of you work in manufacturing. Those jobs have already been outsourced, often to robots.

Thanks to technology, much of the labor is about to become to employers what Internet porn is to you now. Post-scarcity. And it gives them just as much of an erection.

So hate ACTA all you want, along with the MPAA and the RIAA. But you, like them, are getting paid in FARTS.


#1. Only Bullshit Will Save Civilization

And so, here we are. We're celebrating that we don't need to pay greedy corporations because technology means we can get more and more of what we want for free, but at the same time, we're moving toward an era when corporations won't need to pay us. Both of us are hoping that in the future people will, for no tangible reason, simply choose to pay. If you work at Gamestop, both you and corporate are hoping for the same thing: that people will just 1) arbitrarily choose to pay for their games, and 2) choose to get them from a human.

And no, don't give me that old line about, "If you do good work, society will always be happy to pay for it!" I live on the Internet. I've seen how that works. I've seen too many of my favorite websites go under because they were so popular that the traffic crashed the server, but PayPal fundraising drives brought in nothing but the sound of crickets. If people got paid according to the inherent value of their work as measured by the satisfaction of the consumers, Achewood wouldn't have to beg for donations.

No, a "pay what you choose" system eventually becomes charity, and we humans only hand out charity when we're in certain moods, or have extra money. It's no substitute for commerce.

But I'm not just talking about a paycheck here. Human society only exists because we need the things other humans produce. Mutual need is what made us gather and share resources and form the first villages. We need things, and we need other people to need the things we make so they'll be willing to give us the things we need. It's a cycle that has been running for thousands of years, and it's about to stop.

And so, to save society, we're going to have to rely on our old friend, the invisible force that has saved humanity again and again. It's a little thing I like to call bullshit.

Bullshit is the next growth industry. People who deal in it are going to be more valuable than surgeons -- yes, the same people who convinced us that bottled water comes from an enchanted mountain spring and made uneducated mothers believe that contaminated baby formula was a life-giving health potion. Only they can save us.

As civilization advances, these heroic protectors of FARTS will build a culture where we will pay for things we can get for nothing, based purely on a vague superstition that it makes us better people. You know, the way an Apple logo will hypnotize people into paying twice as much for a product when cheaper alternatives litter the landscape.

And if someday we do perfect cold-fusion reactors or nanotech manufacturing and everyone has 100 GB/second Wi-Fi connections downloading data into a computerized contact lens, the bullshitters will be the guardians of the Old Way, convincing you that you shouldn't use those shoes that your replicator spits out for three cents a pair. You need to buy their shoes, for $80. Because they're handmade.

Maybe they'll build the concept of "paying just to be paying" into a new morality. Or a new religion -- one based entirely around FARTS.

Well, unless we figure out something else.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18817...y-b.s._p1.html





Police Arrest 20 Women in Child Porn Raids

Swedish police on Wednesday raided a series of locations across the country, arresting 23 people on suspicion of serious child pornography offences.

Twenty of the suspects were women, said Sven-Åke Petters, a spokesperson with the Dalarna police.

"It is too early to say why that is, but it feels as if it is very unusual," he said.

The situation with such a large number of female suspects in a child pornography case is unique, according to detective inspector Björn Sellström at Sweden’s National Investigation Department (Rikskriminalen).

"This is extremely unusual. Many here are flummoxed by this and it will be very interesting to follow the case and understand the reasons," he said to TT.

According to Sellström there have been only a handful of convictions against women for child pornography crimes.

Police conducted the coordinated raids at 12 locations across the country, acting on information garnered from an ongoing investigation in Dalarna in central Sweden.

A 42-year-old man remains in custody in connection with the Dalarna investigation and an inspection of his films and pictures led police to the slew of other people and locations, according to a Dalarna police statement.

Two women in Kronoberg, aged 47 and 54-years-old, were among those arrested, with a police statement confirming that there are links to the 42-year-old man.

A further 55-year-old woman was arrested in Halmstad on suspicion of the same offence, reported Sveriges Radio (SR) Halland.

Four women were arrested in Västra Götaland - reported by SR to be in the municipalities of Ale, Mellerud, Tidaholm and Trollhättan.

The 23 suspects all had prior warrants issued for their arrest and so all of those detained in Wednesday's raids have been formerly arrested.

There remain outstanding arrest warrants for a further two suspects, one of which is reported to be in hospital, while the other has not been located.

The suspects will now be interrogated, and a number of computers and mobile telephones seized in the raid will also be examined.

"This examination and the interviews which are to be held with the suspects will then form the basis for any motions to remand," Petters said.
http://www.thelocal.se/29726/20101020/





New York Times Co. Reports 3Q Loss
AP

The New York Times Co. is reporting a smaller loss for the third quarter, dragged down by one-time expenses and another drop in print advertising revenue.

The publisher has been trying to offset declines in its traditional newspaper business with revenue from its Web operations. But a jump in online ad dollars was not enough to offset declines in print.

The company said its net loss was $4.3 million, or 3 cents per share, for the July-September quarter. That compares with a net loss of $35.6 million, or 25 cents per share, a year ago.

Excluding severance costs and accounting adjustments, it would have earned 7 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected adjusted earnings of 5 cents a share.

Revenue slipped 2.7 percent to $554.3 million, while analysts expected $560.3 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...ork-Times.html





Tribune Board Said Ready to Oust Chief Executive
David Carr and Tim Arango

The board of directors of the Tribune Company is expected to ask Tuesday for the resignation of Randy Michaels, the controversial chief executive of the company, according to a person directly involved in the matter.

The individual, who spoke on the condition of not being identified, said the board had lost confidence in the ability of Mr. Michaels to lead the troubled company.

Mr. Michaels’s resignation would follow by days the exit of another top executive at the media company, Lee Abrams, Tribune’s chief innovation officer, who resigned on Friday after sending a sexually explicit memo to the entire company.

Mr. Michaels became chief executive of Tribune in December, about two years after joining the company as an executive vice president in charge of the company’s broadcasting and interactive businesses. Prior to Tribune, Mr. Michaels had a long and lucrative career in the radio industry, having worked for Jacor Communications and Clear Channel Communications. Jacor was owned and eventually sold by Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate magnate who bought Tribune in 2007.

Tribune, which publishes The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times and operates several television stations, filed for bankruptcy in December 2008, less than a year after the company was acquired by Mr. Zell, the Chicago real estate tycoon, for $8.2 billion. After that deal, the company sold Newsday to Cablevision for more than $600 million, and the Chicago Cubs to the Ricketts family, the founders of the online brokerage Ameritrade, for more than $800 million, to pay down debt.

The company remains mired in bankruptcy court in Delaware, with legal fees now over $180 million, but it said last week it had reached a tentative deal with a group of lenders. Some major creditors remain absent from a pact that would end the company’s Chapter 11 proceedings, however.

Mr. Michaels, born Benjamin Homel, began his broadcast career as an engineer at his college radio station at the State University of New York at Fredonia in the early 1970s. In 1975, he went commercial, joining the Taft Broadcasting Company’s radio and television operations in Buffalo and taking on his disc jockey alias. In 1983, Mr. Michaels moved with Taft to Cincinnati, where the broadcasting company was based. He met Robert Lawrence, and the two broadcasters teamed up and started Seven Hills Communications, which later became Republic Broadcasting.

Jacor acquired Republic in 1986, with Mr. Michaels assuming the position as vice president of programming and co-chief operating officer. He was named president and chief operating officer after Mr. Zell acquired the company in 1993. Mr. Michaels was named chief executive three years later.

Clear Channel Communications acquired Jacor in 1999, and Mr. Michaels became Clear Channel’s division president and later, chief executive; he was pushed out in 2002, in part because of concerns over lawsuits and workplace issues.

When and if Tribune emerges from bankruptcy, it will apparently proceed with new management. Mr. Michaels, who came to the company with a broad mandate for change, alienated many of the company’s employees and some of its advertisers with a nontraditional approach, including many tactics borrowed from radio.

Under Mr. Michaels, Tribune, a formerly conservative media company, became known for rugged, profane talk from executives, long, incomprehensible memos from management, and an atmosphere that was depicted in widely published photos of a poker party in the executive offices of Tribune Towers.

After a series of negative reports, including one this month in The New York Times, along with the departure of Mr. Abrams, the board has apparently decided that new leadership is needed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/bu...19tribune.html





EMI, Terra Firma Trial Gets Underway
FMQB

The trial between Terra Firma and Citigroup over the sale of EMI got underway on Monday, as lawyers argued that the bank duped Terra Firma into buying EMI for an inflated price in 2007. Attorneys for both sides gave opening arguments in New York state Supreme Court on Monday, as David Boies, representing Terra Firma, said lender Citigroup falsely claimed that other companies were bidding on the music company when there actually was no one else in the running, according to Variety. In its legal action, filed in December, Terra Firma alleged that as a result of Citigroup's representations, it paid an inflated price of $4.9 billion for EMI. Boies added Citibank took advantage of its close relationship with its biggest customer — Terra Firma — to keep EMI as a client when the company was threatening to let another banking institution handle the transaction.

Meanwhile, Citigroup's attorney, Theodore Wells, countered that the bank was guilty of no wrongdoing and that it never deceived Terra Firma. He said the equity company wants to blame its bankers because its investment in EMI has proved to be a money-losing venture. Wells argued that in fact, one of the biggest losers in the purchase was Citi because it provided $2.5 billion for what "turned out to be a bad deal and people lost a lot of money," according to Music Week.

Terra Firma is seeking monetary damages that will be determined in the case.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1990814





Internet Users to Exceed 2 Billion this Year

The number of Internet users will surpass two billion this year, approaching a third of the world population, but developing countries need to step up access to the vital tool for economic growth, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday.

Users have doubled in the past five years, and compare with an estimated global population of 6.9 billion, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said.

Of 226 million new Internet users this year, 162 million will be from developing countries where growth rates are now higher, the ITU said in a report.

However, by the end of 2010, 71 percent of the population in developed countries will be online compared with 21 percent of people in developing countries.

The ITU said it was particularly important for developing countries to build up high-speed connections.

"Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology," said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, of Mali. "It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness."

Access varies widely by region, with 65 percent of people online in Europe, ahead of 55 percent in the Americas, compared with only 9.6 percent of the population in Africa and 21.9 percent in Asia/Pacific, the ITU said.

Access to the Internet in schools, at work and in public places is critical for developing countries, where only 13.5 percent of people have the Internet at home, against 65 percent in developed countries, it said.

A study last week by another U.N. agency showed that mobile phones were a far more important communications technology for people in the poorest developing countries than the Internet.

(Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay/ David Stamp)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





73% of Toddlers Have Digital Footprint
Carrie-Ann Skinner

Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of children under age 2 have some kind of digital footprint, such as online albums or e-mail addresses, says AVG.

Research by the security firm revealed that 37 percent of newborns have an online life from the day they are born. Furthermore, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of children have their pre-birth scans uploaded to the net by their parents.

AVG said 7 percent of children under two have an e-mail address while 5 percent have a social networking profile, both of which are created by their parents.

Seven in ten mothers surveyed said the ability to share pictures with family and friends was the motivation for posting information and photos of their children online, while 18 percent admitted to simply following their peers.

"It's a sobering thought that while a 30-year-old has an online footprint stretching back at most 10 to 15 years, the vast majority of children today have online presence by the time they are 2 years old -- a presence that will be built on throughout their whole lives," said JR Smith, CEO of AVG.

Smith said that while it's completely understandable that proud parents want to upload and share images of very young children with friends and families, they should consider two important points before uploading content to the web.

"First of all, you are creating a digital history for a human being that will follow him or her around for the rest of their life. What kind of footprint do you actually want to start for your child, and what will they think about the information you've uploaded in future?" said Smith.

"Secondly, it reinforces the need for parents to be aware of the privacy settings they have set on their social network profiles. Otherwise, you may be sharing your baby's picture not only your friends and family but with the whole online world."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20736...footprint.html





Seven Steps to Managing Your Online Reputation
David H. Freedman

A camera-store salesman recently steered me away from the compact, ultra-high-tech camera I thought I wanted. Smaller is fine, he told me, but only if it fits in your pocket — any bigger will end up hanging from your shoulder anyway, so what’s the advantage? And don’t buy based on fancy features, he added, the differences between comparable models rarely result in better pictures for amateurs. The one feature you’ll really appreciate, he said, is how the camera feels in your hand.

Simple insights, but they pointed me to a very different camera, one that I’m deliriously happy with. Not only that, it was a few hundred bucks cheaper than the one I had wanted. Maybe that’s why everyone at the five other camera stores I had been to was a lot more enthusiastic about the compact model.

That sort of no-nonsense, no-hard-sell advice is one reason the store, B&H Photo in New York, is to the cameraphile what L.L. Bean’s Freeport, Maine, store is to the outdoor crowd. Of course, if you’re not close enough to New York to make that pilgrimage, you’ll have to settle for the company’s Web site — but maybe that’s not so terrible. B&H’s online sales arm gets mostly great reviews in forums and rating sites.

Yes, you read that right — a New York camera store Web site that gets good online ratings. Anyone who has hunted for a camera online knows that’s a feat that defies the very physics of online reputation management. There are few categories of product outside of porn and Viagra that have a worse reputation than the camera-sales world, with New York-based camera stores seemingly setting the standard — to read the reviews — for apparent dishonesty and shoddy customer service.

If that were the whole problem, any dealer could look great online simply by behaving decently. As it turns out, that’s not good enough. Camera sales can be tricky and confusing, thanks to lens and accessory options, frequent model upgrades, different types of warranties, fast-churning inventories, substantial product defect rates, and more. And camera customers are notoriously finicky, impatient and emotional when it comes to making sure they get exactly what they expect to get, at the best possible price, right away. All of which can lead even scrupulous dealers to unintentionally disappoint shoppers. And shutter bugs love to vent online. That means that legitimate dealers struggle with bad ratings, too. And as many small businesses — and even some large ones — are finding out the hard way, online ratings can hit the bottom line hard.

So how does B&H keep its ratings clean? It starts with two words: Henry Posner. Mr. Posner is a former professional photographer who started handling online customer service for B&H 15 years ago and now has the title “social media coordinator.” He is a ubiquitous presence on camera-oriented forums, blogs, ratings sites, Facebook, Twitter, and wherever it is camera people share info and complain. If you Google any combination of “Henry Posner” “camera” “post” “complaint” and “B&H,” you’ll see much of his time is spent addressing perceived wrongs with B&H customers — with remarkable success, to judge by the ratings.

I called the ebullient Mr. Posner and asked him for advice for the business owner struggling to build a great online reputation. Here’s what he told me, boiled down to seven key points.

Henry Posner’s Plan for Positive Posts

1) If a customer complains, confirm, confess and correct:

“When customers go online and complain, the first thing I do is research what happened. I don’t open my mouth online until I have the facts. If the customer is right, I apologize immediately, and I ask what I can do as a gesture of my concern. I’m always willing to be generous when I’m wrong, and most customers are looking for something modest.”

2. If you’re not at fault, calmly make your case:

“I’m always honest with the customer, and that includes defending myself and the store if we’re right. I disagree 18,000 percent with the saying that the customer is always right — not in retail, he’s not. If he’s wrong, I explain why, speaking with confidence and authority but without being hostile or aggressive. There’s nothing I can say online or even by e-mail that’s just between me and the customer — I’m really talking to everyone who ends up reading or chatting about it. Even if the customer is terribly misguided or purposely malicious, I believe he deserves a cogent, mature response. If a dissatisfied customer’s emotions get the better of him, I just stop and wait for someone else who’s following the conversation out there to jump in to tell the customer to tone things down and refocus. It’s not that no one ever gets to me — I might mumble something while I’m typing, and sometimes I even jump out of my chair and blow off a little steam here. But I don’t put it out there.”

3. Go the extra mile for a trying customer, but not the extra hundred miles:

“You just can’t please everyone, you learn that here quickly. One customer will complain that our deliveries require someone to be home to sign for the package, and the next customer will thank you for it. In every business there are customers that make themselves expensive to service, someone who wants too low a price, or too much special attention. Every company has to decide what the threshold is for keeping these customers. Sometimes I have a frank conversation with a customer. I say, This is how far I can go to help you. Now, are you going to help me by compromising?”

4. Customers appreciate useful info, not blab:

“I try to give the overall impression that we’re not just a box house but an interesting place to do business with. I’ll let people know that the Met” — the Metropolitan Museum of Art — “is doing a photo contest, or Adobe is offering a free seminar. But I don’t try to fill Facebook pages with endless chatter or send something out on Twitter every 15 minutes — they’ll start seeing it as spam. The name of the game is quality of comment, not quantity. There’s a sweet spot, and if you hit it, the sales will come. I never forget that there’s a bottom line in this place, and everything I do has to eventually come back to it. If I’m going to ask for a raise here, I need to be able to say where it’s going to come from.”

5. Customers only think they know what they want:

“My job isn’t to help you buy something just because you ask for it. It’s to help you find a product that in my experience meets your wants and needs. It’s not about making the most profitable sale, it’s about leaving the customer satisfied.”

6. Keep your friends close, but your competitors closer:

“I dialog online with competitors all the time. That’s good for the industry and good for us. Manufacturers listen to us more closely about what we need when we’ve compared notes with other dealers. And we can help each other avoid some real customer traps out there. I get warnings about customers who place orders, make demands and then badmouth dealers in the worst possible way all over the place. And if I see a fellow retailer unfairly taking a lot of heat online, I’ll step in and try to help. Then I know they’ll do the same for me.”

7. Speak softly and carry a big rep:

“I can pat myself on the back online all day long, but nothing will have the impact of a good review on a ratings site. And then when a customer asks me to match someone’s very low price, sure, maybe I can come down a few dollars. But after that, I’ll just say, go ahead and Google that store’s name, let’s see what comes up. I never have to badmouth a competitor. If they’re sleazy, the word will be out on them online.”
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1...ne-reputation/





Swedish Professor Rejoices Over Laptop Thief's Memory Stick Miracle

A professor at Umeå University in northern Sweden was stunned after a thief who stole his laptop copied and returned the contents of the computer to him - on a USB memory stick.

"I am very happy," the unnamed professor told the local Västerbottens-Kuriren newspaper.

"This story makes me feel hope for humanity."

The professor, who wished to remain anonymous, is one of the most successful in his field, according to the newspaper.

Having recently had surgery, the professor could not be bothered to drop off his backpack in his apartment before first going to the laundry room.

He instead left the bag behind a door in the stairwell, thinking it would be safe for a few minutes.

But when he returned a short time later, the bag was missing, along with the computer, keys, calendar and other documents inside.

The professor was most upset by the loss of his calendar.

"It is my life. I have documented everything in it that has happened in the last 10 years and beyond," he told the newspaper.

He then called the police to report the incident and blocked the credit cards which were also in the bag.

But when he went down to the stairwell a short time later, he couldn't believe his eyes.

"The backpack was there again. With all the papers, calendar and credit cards. It was just the computer that was missing," he explained.

"Unfortunately, I have been bad at backing up my computer."

Resigned to having lost his computer, the professor was nevertheless happy to have the rest of his belongings back.

But the considerate thief had yet one more surprise in store.

About a week after the theft, the professor returned home to find an envelope containing a USB memory stick which had been taken along with the computer.

The professor was shocked to discover the thief had copied all the documents and personal files from his laptop to the memory storage device, a process which likely took hours.

All things considered, the professor is delighted at the outcome, despite the loss of his computer. He hopes, however, that other thieves can learn to be as compassionate.

"Often when people lose their computers and cameras, it is understandably not the gadget itself that is the most important. The content is often irreplaceable," he told the newspaper.

Besides the computer, the only other item that has not yet been returned is the professor's library card.

"Perhaps the thief needs to improve him or herself," the professor joked.
http://www.thelocal.se/29636/20101015/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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